If this gets going, the disgusting UN might simply fade away
Gaining ground this political season is a proposed League of Democracies designed to strengthen support for the next president's overseas agenda and ensure a global leadership role for the United States. John McCain, the virtually certain Republican presidential nominee, has endorsed the concept of a new global compact of more than 100 democratic countries to advance shared views and has discussed the idea with French and British leaders. "It could act where the U.N. fails to act," he said last month, and pressure tyrants "with or without Moscow's and Beijing's approval." McCain said the League might impose sanctions on Iran, relieve suffering in the Darfur region of Sudan and deal with environmental problems.
Barack Obama, who has a lead in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, has not taken a stand. But Anthony Lake, one of Obama's policy advisers, has spoken in favor of the idea.
Analysts at think tanks in Washington and elsewhere envision a league focused on maintaining peace and limiting U.S. military intervention, such as the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. But missing so far are specific, proposed steps to turn the idea into reality, such as where to have a headquarters, who would finance the league and how its membership would be decided. "Cooperation is an absolute essential," Ivo Daalder, a national security expert at the Brookings Institution, said Thursday at a seminar.
An originator of the idea, Daalder said it would give democracies a better opportunity to reform the United Nations. "If there had been a dialogue on Iraq there would have been more rigorous containment of Saddam Hussein," possibly averting war, said Tod Lindberg, a Hoover Institution research fellow, at the seminar held at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
But not all foreign policy experts support the proposal. Thomas Carothers, vice president for studies at Carnegie, said "the world has no appetite for a U.S.-led league and many countries do not want the U.S. going around the U.N." In fact, Carothers said, the United States cooperates often with non-democracies in its foreign policy. China's help in trying to end North Korea's nuclear weapons program is just one example, he said.
President Bush's Iraq war policy was bitterly opposed by two leading democracies, France and Germany, among others. But Bush went ahead despite their strong objections. "It is wishful thinking" that a league of democracies would any more readily approve U.S. military intervention in support of another U.S. president, Carothers said. And while "some people like Senator McCain imagine it might become a replacement for the U.N., that is not the initial intention," Carothers said in a telephone interview after the seminar.
Source
Posted by John Ray. For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. For a daily survey of Australian politics, see AUSTRALIAN POLITICS Also, don't forget your roundup of Obama news and commentary at OBAMA WATCH
Saturday, May 31, 2008
McCain puts forward a good idea
White, Western male? You're screwed.
At least, if you're unfortunate enough to live in Britain, you are. How long before the same applies in Australia and New Zealand and America?
This is from a news item reported at Gates of Vienna:
"Keith Brown, 52, collapsed and died after being knifed in the back by his next-door neighbour Habib Khan. Khan, 50, was unanimously cleared of murder but convicted of manslaughter after a jury heard that he had endured racism, threats and violence from Mr Brown and his son, Ashley Barker, also a BNP activist."
So far, disgusting but predictable, yes? Well, read on.......
A commenter has this to say:
heroyalwhyness said...
"I have good friends from Stoke on Trent and there is a bit more to the story behind Keith Brown's "collapse" -such semantics! . . .
The so-called neighbourhood dispute first started when Keith Brown's new Muslim neighbours decided to move the existing fence that divides the properties an extra two feet in the new neighbor's favor. Keith tried all he could to get the council's legal team to stop the erection of concrete posts and new fence panels off his property, but despite being advised that he was legally correct on several occasions - nothing was done.
Every morning Keith would open his curtains to see this encroachment on his own bit of land, his own personal space and, as the large Muslim family started to take pleasure in goading him about the invasion of his property, his quality of life became minimal.
The relationship between the neighbours became seriously strained and it was not long before the police were called to intervene. Amazingly, it was Keith who found himself dragged before the courts on a trumped up charge of "racism". Thankfully his West Indian neighbour appeared as a witness and described the charges as ridiculous. Eventually the case was thrown out.
Keithss eldest son was actually sent to prison for later defending his father against a further physical assault, the injustice of which hurt Keith considerably.
Last year the brakes on Keith's van were cut and he narrowly avoided a serious accident. Not long after this Keith's beloved English bull terrier was poisoned to death and his Alsatian puppy mysteriously disappeared.
Throughout this time Keith and his partner had requested to move from the area to a new council house, but despite being on the housing list for years nothing was ever done for them.
CCTV footage
In desperation Keith fitted a CCTV system to his house in order to obtain video evidence of the continued racially-motivated abuse and assaults directed towards him and his family. One such assault was indeed captured on video and burnt to DVD. Last year Stoke BNP councillor Steve Batkin requested a meeting with a local police Inspector at Sutherland Road Police Station in Longton to hand over the DVD and to complain about Muslim drug dealing in the area. The female, Asian officer refused to even take the DVD and dismissed Steve's formal complaint about the continuing assaults on Keith Brown saying that , she "knew who he was." In the minuted meeting she at least said she would look at the narcotics issue, but later informed Steve that the alleged drug-dealing was just "private hire drivers falling asleep in their cars".
The months of anguish continued for Keith, abuse, assaults and smashed windows until finally the inevitable but entirely avoidable happened. That Friday afternoon witnesses saw Keith and his neighbours in yet another flare up. Keith had just returned from picking up his three youngest children from school when he was confronted by a group of Muslim men outside HIS, house. Whilst Keith was remonstrating with these men another Muslim man crept from behind a car and plunged a large knife in his back. Keith never saw it coming, but his three young children did. Having brutally attacked Keith the gang then set about his 19-year-old son leaving him hospitalised.
As Keith lay dying in his garden, paramedics desperately tried to resuscitate him, but Keith had already slipped away, stabbed in the back by his murderer and stabbed in the back by those who should have protected him."
Words fail....
We, me, me, me and ultimately just you
Anybody wanting to get married there in future can thank these two boyfriends for shutting the place down. I suppose it was bound to happen in this politically correct world. If it wasn't the homos, then if some weirdo turned up with his daughter and demanded to get married there and the Earl refused they'd kick him in the teeth. Never mind that it would ruin it for the rest of the folks, they don't count anymore, it's only the super citizens whose rights are important now. Besides, much of society doesn't see much of a problem with homo marriage, they have to experience the consequences before they'll learn.Daily Mail - An Earl has been banned from holding weddings at his 600-year-old castle after refusing to allow a gay marriage. The Earl of Devon, Hugh Courtenay, has had the licence to hold civil ceremonies at Powderham Castle near Exeter revoked by Devon County Council. [snip] The council acted in response to a complaint from a gay couple from London who tried to book the castle for their own partnership ceremony. The case was taken up by gay pressure group Stonewall and now the Earl has been told his licence has been revoked because of discrimination. [snip]
Most of us have swallowed the belief that homosexuality is normal even though they are statistically out numbered and there is no point to their lifestyle. If the Earl had been a Muslim, all he'd have to do was rally up some jihadists and make a few threatening calls, shout Allah Akbar and I'm sure the council would have folded like a sack of excrement. That will happen one day anyway as sharia continues to spread through Eurabia, homos will find themselves facing some real persecution then. When that happens good luck guys, don't come looking for allies then, at least not from me. My money's not on you prevailing either.
You like to kick us Christians in the teeth now, make us choke down our outrage your at antics. So fend for yourselves, get your Stonewall and all that together, call the council, write a letter to your localThe gay couple whose wedding was refused by the Earl say his decision was discrimination and they are delighted at the revocation. Copyright consultant Bernard Horrocks, 40, and his partner Glenn Sontag, 35, have now booked a new ceremony elsewhere. Couples already booked for weddings this summer and autumn will not be affected because the licence will be revoked on January 1, 2009. [snip] Mr Courtenay is the 18th Earl of Devon with a title going back to 1553. He says he is a devout Christian and is acting out of faith.
Unfortunately for ME [the homos], there will be groups of WE [like radical Islamists] forming, bigger in number and more unified than any bunch of MEs [like Stonewall] you can cobble together. At first you'll be able to hold the line, but eventually the WEs [those who enforce the council's orders] will start asking themselves, why am I busting my ass to uphold the rights of whoever? There's nothing in it for ME, they'll also become drunk on their own rights and entitlements and won't care about yours, so long suckers! Then all these MEs will find out the hard way that you only have the rights you can defend or someone else is willing to defend for you.
Stools Gold
Ms Gray envisages a nightmare future where people fight for their wastewater.SEWAGE could be the new gold as water scarcity pushes up the value of recycled effluent water and fertiliser, a senior legal academic says. Janice Gray, a senior law lecturer from the University of New South Wales, said the property rights of sewage could become the legal battleground of the future.
Ms Gray said entrepreneurs were already vying for access to sewerage infrastructure and one Sydney company had even litigated to gain access to such infrastructure. "This company, Services Sydney Pty Ltd, went to the Australian Competition Tribunal to open access to sewerage infrastructure in Sydney and the Hunter region," Ms Gray said.
Turds are no longer flushed, but are proudly given our name."What was once a burden may, in fact, come to be seen as a valuable resource. Who knows, wastewater might end up being the new gold."
Next we'll hear about how primitive societies return everything to the soil and are the richer for it. But I can remember the days of night-soil carters and septic tanks and have no wish to go back. And I'm not sure how well this next idea will run with modern high-density living arrangements. Actually, I am pretty sure..."Maybe we will want to claim it as our own," Ms Gray said.
The hell, we will."Instead of giving it away free to public utilities, as we do at the moment, perhaps we will start looking at putting in our own home-based or neighbourhood-based recycling centres," she said.
Friday, May 30, 2008
Must not mention Christianity in Iraq
We read:
"The US military is investigating a marine accused of promoting Christianity in Iraq by giving coins to civilians with a Bible verse written on them in Arabic. "They have initiated an investigation into that and there is some evidence of an individual that was doing that," said Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman. The marine has been accused of distributing the coins to Iraqis as they passed through a checkpoint in Falluja, US officials said. "Where will you spend eternity?" was written on one side of the coins, according to a report from McClatchy News Service.
On the other was a Bible verse written in Arabic referring to Jesus: "For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life. John 3:16."
If true, the marine would have violated US military rules that prohibit the promotion of any religion, faith or practice. "This has our full attention," Colonel James Welsh, the US commander in western Iraq, said. "We deeply value our relationship with the local citizens and share their concerns over this serious incident."
Source
He has now been transferred.
Posted by John Ray. For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. For a daily survey of Australian politics, see AUSTRALIAN POLITICS Also, don't forget your roundup of Obama news and commentary at OBAMA WATCH
Kevin 08 - A dud round
Alan Jones [Radio 2GB] - Well, Kevin Rudd more than the Government is in real political trouble over petrol, and in particular FuelWatch. [snip] It's now clear that Kevin Rudd was warned about this by no fewer than four economic departments. About the possibility of price hikes arising from FuelWatch. Amongst the warnings in departmental language were, "the increased financial cost it would impose on service stations, especially small independent operators". The Prime Minister's own department told Cabinet, "Econometric modelling indicates that a small overall price increase can't be ruled out".
Treasury warned, "The proposed scheme will result in ongoing increased operating costs of around 4,000 dollars per annum to affected small businesses". The Finance Department advised, "Introduction of a price commitment rule may result in higher average petrol prices over time, as the option may lead to the creation of a de facto price floor." The Finance Department said the FuelWatch proposal would add 20.7 million dollars to business costs in the first year with "the impact likely to fall disproportionately on independent retailers".
So that's FuelWatch going up in a ball of flames, there's another stuff up from the Dudd government regarding the $8000 solar panels rebate. I heard a fellow on the radio who runs a business that installs the solar panels on people's roofs. Long story short, he had to expand, invest more money into and take on more staff for his business after the Howard [out of touch with climate change] government introduced the rebate. He used to get around 4-5 orders a week and just too much for himself to handle. Prior to the election the Dudd government never mentioned anything about means-testing the rebate, but now that the election is over and PM Dudd doesn't really give a toss about your vote, the rebate is means tested. So those nasty squillionaires who earn more than a 100K a year, by exploiting slave labor and forcing children to work for them for 5c an hour with no benefits obviously, won't get the rebate.The Department of Resources and Energy expressed concern, "The scheme will reduce competition and market flexibility, increase compliance costs and has more potential to increase prices". The Government's own Department of Resources and Energy said of FuelWatch, "It has the capacity to increase petrol price coordination amongst retailers". [snip] As Dennis Shanahan writes in The Australian today of Kevin Rudd, "For six months ... every decision has been put before him and he has demanded oversight of the entire Government's media relations and public image."
Dennis Shanahan writes, "Rudd has tried to make and shape every decision, causing inordinate delays, frustration and confusion. "Now," writes Dennis Shanahan, "Rudd has lost control of his Cabinet process or his senior public service, or both."
This fellow who runs this business said that most of his customers earn more than $100K a year but not into the millions, less than $180K however they need the rebate to offset some of their cost. Now they've started canceling orders and his weekly number is down to 1 or 2 a week. So the money he invested is down the crapper and the extra people he employed will soon get the boot. I hope none of them voted for PM Dudd based on his 'Your rights at work' wiffle-waffle because now it's no work and hence no rights. So much for PM Dudd's green posturing as well, signing Kyoto and all that. The business man had a meeting with that useless oxygen-thief Peter Garrett, to no avail. Moving on to the alcopops tax that was an important front on PM Dudd's glorious war on binge drinking.
The idiot health minister Nicola Roxon was still defending the stupid tax on alcopops yesterday evening. I guess technically the consumption of them has dropped, but the problem is worse. Isn't it shocking that when leftists endeavor to fix something, they somehow manage to screw it up and make it all worse, oh and waste/steal a lot of money in the process. In just six months Kevin Rudd, with his various committees, media stunts and half-baked policies has revealed himself to be a bungling dud, a dud enough of us unfortunately voted for.The Australian - SALES of alcopops plummeted by almost 40 per cent in the fortnight after last month's lightning tax hike on the drinks but any health gains have been offset by a 20 per cent jump in stronger, straight spirit sales. The first national data on sales of pre-mixed and straight spirit sales will be released today by the Distilled Spirits Industry Council of Australia as the Rudd Government continues to defend the alcopop excise increase as a way to cut binge drinking. The council's information and research manager Stephen Riden said the data made a mockery of the Government's stated aim.
"The words 'abject failure' would spring to mind," Mr Riden said. "This is an unintended consequence of the Government's decision to tax a narrow range of products. It defies common sense that people would not shift to other products." Mr Riden said one major company, which did not want to be named, had seen its bottled, full-spirit sales skyrocket: up 85per cent in the month after the April 27 excise increase compared with the same period a year earlier. Its alcopops volume declined 30 per cent.
But, but, but we have gun control!
50 shots, but, but, but we have gun control! How could this happen, I just don't understand, I thought we were living in utopia, that there was no violence after we banned guns and knives! We sang kumbaya, we marginalized the evil gun nuts and pilloried them, we turned our swords into plows so why have the gods of cowardice and appeasement forsaken us, why, oh why? I thought all those people dying over the weekends was because of natural causes and the media were just saying they were shot, stabbed, beaten, bashed, raped and robbed to spice up the news and you know, sell more papers!SMH - A school and homes were evacuated and up to 50 shots fired during a dramatic stand-off between police and a gunman in Perth today. [snip] Reporters near the scene heard up to 50 shots ring out in quick succession, and said it sounded like different guns were being used. They said police could be heard shouting as the shots continued and smoke from the gunfire could be seen rising above the roof of a nearby house.
I feel for ya Scott, I'd be "shitting" myself too if there was a criminal firing bullets in my general direction and I wasn't allowed a gun to send a few back at him. It's good that you can high-tail it out of your castle and be over the fence in a jiffy mate. You're much safer that way you know, I'm assured that if you had a gun that fellow would have kicked your door down and used his magic fingers to take your weapon off you and shoot you in the ass with it. Too bad if you're too old to run, wheel-chair bound or got a bum hip and can't make it over the back fence in a jiffy, you'll just have to take one for the team, or in this case quite a few.The resident, who wanted to be known only as Scott, said he was sitting in his loungeroom when he heard police sirens in the street and saw the gunman's car pull into his neighbour's driveway directly opposite him in Hodges St. [snip] "I looked out the window and there were cops ducking and weaving, they did not know where to go. "I didn't know where to go, I was shitting myself, he was firing out the driveway straight towards me. I was off out the back, and over the back fence in a jiffy."
Thursday, May 29, 2008
Brookes News Update
Putting the Bush boom in perspective: Speculation that the housing 'crisis' could sink the Bush economy are completely off-beam. As usual, commentators are ignoring the monetary factors, especially credit expansion, that create booms and generate housing bubbles
Safe from truth: Democrats move to silence the Pentagon: With the support of the treasonous New York Times House Democrats passed a bill that would prevent the Pentagon from publicising the good news that the allies are winning in Iraq
How interventionists drive up rents: The real enemy is not lying two-faced lefties but public ignorance of basic economic principles. If these principles were widely understood those regulations that have done so much to harm the poor by driving up rents would not have passed muster
More offshore oil drilling: The U.S. government has banned drilling in thousands of square miles off the U.S. Coast. These areas hold an estimated 115 billion barrels of oil and 633 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. This insane ban has left America's energy needs increasingly at the mercy of foreign autocrats, despots and maniacs
Left-wing racism remembered: Did you know.Martin Luther King, Jr. was a Republican? Every civil rights law, beginning in the 1860s through the 1950s and 1960s, was fought against by Democrats? Or the KKK had links to the Democratic Party? Is the Democrats' racist past is finally catching up with them?
Global warming: "These are the times that try men's souls": Despite reams and reams of scientific data and increasing numbers of real science experts denouncing the idea that mere humans can accomplish earthly changes in climate, politician after politician continue to promote policies that will cause irreparable harm to the people they seek to put them in office
Madness of a self-destructive world: Sixty years have passed since Israel won her independence. During this time Israel absorbed several millions of Jewish refugees, including 850,000 from Muslim countries. When WW2 ended, 50 million refugees were scattered across Europe. All of them have found a country where they can live and work, for themselves and their families. This experience expose as a fraud the so-called tragedy of 'Palestinian refugees'
Posted by John Ray. For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. For a daily survey of Australian politics, see AUSTRALIAN POLITICS Also, don't forget your roundup of Obama news and commentary at OBAMA WATCH
The senseless killing of our children by knives and guns has to stop
As I said the other day, more tax payers money will have to be thrown at the problem, in the past they spent 6 Billion pounds on youth crime and this is what they got. Naturally in this sophisticated, new-age world that we live in, when you try and fail over and over and over and over, you don't try something else, you just persist with the same failed ideas, go figure.Reuters UK - The government launches a 3 million pound national advertising campaign on Thursday to warn young people about the effects of knife crime amid growing fears that the issue is getting out of control. [snip] The "hard-hitting" adverts, which will be run on radio, Web sites and mobile phones, will warn youngsters about the harsh physical and emotional consequences of knife crime, the government said. The 3-million-pound campaign, to be run over the next three years, was developed and written by young people who have themselves been affected by knife crime.
Yeah because there are gangs of scumbags roaming around the streets looking for an armed teenager, just so they can take the knife off him and use it against him. Same goes for keeping a weapon in your house, if the criminal knows you have a weapon in your house, he will definitely break in, with nothing on him so that he can cleverly take your weapon from you and use it against you. Ssshhhh, don't let the secret out, they don't know they can carry their own. Just get the ones carrying them for protection to give them up, then all the stabbings and shootings will stop.A series of ads aimed at mothers, encouraging them to talk about the issue with their children, will run simultaneously. "I am in no doubt about the importance of tackling knife crime and this is even starker following recent tragic events," said Home Office Minister Vernon Coaker. "We know that many young people carry a knife because they are fearful and these adverts tell powerful stories about the dangers of going down that path. "People have got to get the message that if they carry a knife, there's more chance of it being used against them." [snip]
What a brilliant plan eh, why didn't I/you think of that. This explains the sky high crime rate in American states where people are allowed to bear arms to defend themselves. The best policy is to get a few of those 'Gun-Free' stickers and put em' all over your house, your front gate, your car and on your ass! Maybe even 'Arms are for hugging' thrown in there, something nuanced and sophisticated you know. You'll be sure to lead a long and violence-free life while those gun nuts and knife maniacs are butchered by the millions every day by their own weapons!
Yeah, screw those liberties, hold on there son, hurrying for classes are you, tough shit boyo, up against the wall and empty yer pockets boyo, I feel like searching you every day so suck it up son. You see without responsibility, you cannot have liberty, you'll have to give more and more and more until there is nothing left to give away.Home Secretary Jacqui Smith has already promised extra money to tackle gangs and youth violence, with an emphasis on extra police use of stop and search powers. That echoes a crackdown launched earlier this month by police in London. Teenagers in areas blighted by weapons, or groups suspected of carrying knives, face being searched without officers needing to have reasonable suspicion. Senior officers said it would be "in your face" policing.
Yes, every parent needs to ensure their sons and daughters are completely defenseless and just walking ducks, because you know if they were to carry a knife, it would just be taken off them and used against them. That doesn't work for the criminal scumbag carrying the knife though, only they have magic fingers, they're special. Forget teaching your children how to actually use weapons so that it'll be the scumbag with his throat slit not them. We know that'll just result in a doubling, no wait we're being emotional and hysterical here so no need for facts, make it a 600% increase in the number of stabbings! Just blood and bodies everywhere!However, critics have said that the issue requires more than tough police measures, and Metropolitan Police Commissioner Ian Blair himself has said parents needed to confront their children about carrying knives. "Every mother, father and carer has the responsibility to ensure this happens," said Angela Lawrence, from Mothers Against Violence. "The senseless killing of our children by knives and guns has to stop."
Training and education [except learning to bend over and grab ankles that is] will never work, not only will that result in an unacceptable number of scumbags biting the dirt, it'll also mean young men and women growing up free and independent of the state. A big no-no in any nanny state. There are martial arts schools dotted all over the western world teaching people how to defend themselves and we all know those nasty slimeballs are just churning out killing machine after killing machine. Just that the bastard media never reports on the sky high massacre rate of them karate & kung fu killers, funny that. A nation of useless, whining cowards is the only way.
What ails much of the west - Marxism, Multiculturalism and the decline of Christianity
The Pakistani-born bishop dated the downfall of Christianity from the 'social and sexual revolution' of the 1960s. He said Church leaders had capitulated to Marxist revolutionary thinking and quoted an academic who blames the loss of 'faith and piety among women' for the steep decline in Christian worship. Dr Nazir-Ali said the ' newfangled and insecurely founded' doctrine of multiculturalism has left immigrant communities 'segregated, living parallel lives'. Christian values of human dignity, equality and freedom could be lost as the way is left open for the advance of brands of Islam that do not respect Western values. [snip]
But he holds some views in common with the Church's other widely-heard and popular prelate, Ugandan-born Dr John Sentamu, the Archbishop of York. [snip] Last weekend he was one of just three bishops who backed a move in the Church's parliament, the General Synod, to encourage the conversion of Muslims to Christianity. [snip] Dr Nazir-Ali detailed his arguments in an article in the newly-launched political magazine Standpoint. The bishop, himself an immigrant from Pakistan in the mid-1980s, admitted that he might be thought the least qualified person to discuss British identity. But he quoted Kipling: 'What should they know of England who only England know?'
The bishop said 'something momentous' had happened in the 1960s. He quoted historians who point to a cultural revolution in which women ceased to uphold or pass on the Christian faith and to the role of Marxist revolutionaries. Dr Nazir-Ali pointed with approval to a finding that 'instead of resisting this phenomenon, liberal theologians and church leaders all but capitulated. He said: 'It has created the moral and spiritual vacuum in which we now find ourselves.' In the place of Christianity there was nothing 'except perhaps endless self-indulgence'.
The bishop said the consequences were 'the destruction of the family because of the alleged parity of different forms of life together, the loss of a father figure, especially for boys, because the role of fathers is deemed otiose, the abuse of substances (including alcohol), the loss of respect for the person leading to horrendous and mindless attacks, the increasing communications gap between generations and social classes - the list is very long.'
Another result, he said, was that immigrants had been welcomed, not on the basis of Britain's Christian heritage, to which they would be welcome to contribute, but by the 'newfangled and insecurely-founded doctrine of multiculturalism'. The bishop warned that views not founded on Christianity would not produce the same values. 'Instead of Christian virtues of humility, service and sacrifice, there may be honour, piety, the saving of face, etc'. He questioned what resources were available for an ideological battle against radical Islamism, saying 'the scramblings and scratchings around of politicians for values which would provide ammunition' were hardly adequate.
I think there is something in that for all of us....
So, there's a man crawling through the desert.
He'd decided to try his SUV in a little bit of cross-country travel, had great fun zooming over the badlands and through the sand, got lost, hit a big rock, and then he couldn't get it started again. There were no cell phone towers anywhere near, so his cell phone was useless. He had no family, his parents had died a few years before in an auto accident, and his few friends had no idea he was out here.
He stayed with the car for a day or so, but his one bottle of water ran out and he was getting thirsty. He thought maybe he knew the direction back, now that he'd paid attention to the sun and thought he'd figured out which way was north, so he decided to start walking. He figured he only had to go about 30 miles or so and he'd be back to the small town he'd gotten gas in last.
He thinks about walking at night to avoid the heat and sun, but based upon how dark it actually was the night before, and given that he has no flashlight, he's afraid that he'll break a leg or step on a rattlesnake. So, he puts on some sun block, puts the rest in his pocket for reapplication later, brings an umbrella he'd had in the back of the SUV with him to give him a little shade, pours the windshield wiper fluid into his water bottle in case he gets that desperate, brings his pocket knife in case he finds a cactus that looks like it might have water in it, and heads out in the direction he thinks is right.
He walks for the entire day. By the end of the day he's really thirsty. He's been sweating all day, and his lips are starting to crack. He's reapplied the sunblock twice, and tried to stay under the umbrella, but he still feels sunburned. The windshield wiper fluid sloshing in the bottle in his pocket is really getting tempting now. He knows that it's mainly water and some ethanol and coloring, but he also knows that they add some kind of poison to it to keep people from drinking it. He wonders what the poison is, and whether the poison would be worse than dying of thirst.
He pushes on, trying to get to that small town before dark.
By the end of the day he starts getting worried. He figures he's been walking at least 3 miles an hour, according to his watch for over 10 hours. That means that if his estimate was right that he should be close to the town. But he doesn't recognize any of this. He had to cross a dry creek bed a mile or two back, and he doesn't remember coming through it in the SUV. He figures that maybe he got his direction off just a little and that the dry creek bed was just off to one side of his path. He tells himself that he's close, and that after dark he'll start seeing the town lights over one of these hills, and that'll be all he needs.
As it gets dim enough that he starts stumbling over small rocks and things, he finds a spot and sits down to wait for full dark and the town lights.
Full dark comes before he knows it. He must have dozed off. He stands back up and turns all the way around. He sees nothing but stars.
He wakes up the next morning feeling absolutely lousy. His eyes are gummy and his mouth and nose feel like they're full of sand. He so thirsty that he can't even swallow. He barely got any sleep because it was so cold. He'd forgotten how cold it got at night in the desert and hadn't noticed it the night before because he'd been in his car.
He knows the Rule of Threes - three minutes without air, three days without water, three weeks without food - then you die. Some people can make it a little longer, in the best situations. But the desert heat and having to walk and sweat isn't the best situation to be without water. He figures, unless he finds water, this is his last day.
He rinses his mouth out with a little of the windshield wiper fluid. He waits a while after spitting that little bit out, to see if his mouth goes numb, or he feels dizzy or something. Has his mouth gone numb? Is it just in his mind? He's not sure. He'll go a little farther, and if he still doesn't find water, he'll try drinking some of the fluid.
Then he has to face his next, harder question - which way does he go from here? Does he keep walking the same way he was yesterday (assuming that he still knows which way that is), or does he try a new direction? He has no idea what to do.
Looking at the hills and dunes around him, he thinks he knows the direction he was heading before. Just going by a feeling, he points himself somewhat to the left of that, and starts walking.
As he walks, the day starts heating up. The desert, too cold just a couple of hours before, soon becomes an oven again. He sweats a little at first, and then stops. He starts getting worried at that - when you stop sweating he knows that means you're in trouble - usually right before heat stroke.
He decides that it's time to try the windshield wiper fluid. He can't wait any longer - if he passes out, he's dead. He stops in the shade of a large rock, takes the bottle out, opens it, and takes a mouthful. He slowly swallows it, making it last as long as he can. It feels so good in his dry and cracked throat that he doesn't even care about the nasty taste. He takes another mouthful, and makes it last too. Slowly, he drinks half the bottle.
He figures that since he's drinking it, he might as well drink enough to make some difference and keep himself from passing out.
He's quit worrying about the denaturing of the wiper fluid. If it kills him, it kills him - if he didn't drink it, he'd die anyway. Besides, he's pretty sure that whatever substance they denature the fluid with is just designed to make you sick - their way of keeping winos from buying cheap wiper fluid for the ethanol content. He can handle throwing up, if it comes to that.
He walks. He walks in the hot, dry, windless desert. Sand, rocks, hills, dunes, the occasional scrawny cactus or dried bush. No sign of water. Sometimes he'll see a little movement to one side or the other, but whatever moved is usually gone before he can focus his eyes on it. Probably birds, lizards, or mice. Maybe snakes, though they usually move more at night. He's careful to stay away from the movements.
After a while, he begins to stagger. He's not sure if it's fatigue, heat stroke finally catching him, or maybe he was wrong and the denaturing of the wiper fluid was worse than he thought. He tries to steady himself, and keep going.
After more walking, he comes to a large stretch of sand. This is good! He knows he passed over a stretch of sand in the SUV - he remembers doing donuts in it. Or at least he thinks he remembers it - he's getting woozy enough and tired enough that he's not sure what he remembers any more or if he's hallucinating. But he thinks he remembers it. So he heads off into it, trying to get to the other side, hoping that it gets him closer to the town.
He was heading for a town, wasn't he? He thinks he was. He isn't sure any more. He's not even sure how long he's been walking any more. Is it still morning? Or has it moved into afternoon and the sun is going down again? It must be afternoon - it seems like it's been too long since he started out.
He walks through the sand.
After a while, he comes to a big dune in the sand. This is bad. He doesn't remember any dunes when driving over the sand in his SUV. Or at least he doesn't think he remembers any. This is bad.
But, he has no other direction to go. Too late to turn back now. He figures that he'll get to the top of the dune and see if he can see anything from there that helps him find the town. He keeps going up the dune.
Halfway up, he slips in the bad footing of the sand for the second or third time, and falls to his knees. He doesn't feel like getting back up - he'll just fall down again. So, he keeps going up the dune on his hand and knees.
While crawling, if his throat weren't so dry, he'd laugh. He's finally gotten to the hackneyed image of a man lost in the desert – crawling through the sand on his hands and knees. If would be the perfect image, he imagines, if only his clothes were more ragged. The people crawling through the desert in the cartoons always had ragged clothes. But his have lasted without any rips so far. Somebody will probably find his desiccated corpse half buried in the sand years from now, and his clothes will still be in fine shape -shake the sand out, and a good wash, and they'd be wearable again. He wishes his throat were wet enough to laugh. He coughs a little instead, and it hurts.
He finally makes it to the top of the sand dune. Now that he's at the top, he struggles a little, but manages to stand up and look around. All he sees is sand. Sand, and more sand. Behind him, about a mile away, he thinks he sees the rocky ground he left to head into this sand. Ahead of him, more dunes, more sand. This isn't where he drove his SUV. This is Hell. Or close enough.
Again, he doesn't know what to do. He decides to drink the rest of the wiper fluid while figuring it out. He takes out the bottle, and is removing the cap, when he glances to the side and sees something. Something in the sand. At the bottom of the dune, off to the side, he sees something strange. It's a flat area, in the sand. He stops taking the cap of the bottle off, and tries to look closer. The area seems to be circular. And it's dark - darker than the sand. And, there seems to be something in the middle of it, but he can't tell what it is. He looks as hard as he can, and still can tell from here. He's going to have to go down there and look.
He puts the bottle back in his pocket, and starts to stumble down the dune. After a few steps, he realizes that he's in trouble - he's not going to be able to keep his balance. After a couple of more sliding, tottering steps, he falls and starts to roll down the dune. The sand it so hot when his body hits it that for a minute he thinks he's caught fire on the way down - like a movie car wreck flashing into flames as it goes over the cliff, before it ever even hits the ground. He closes his eyes and mouth, covers his face with his hands, and waits to stop rolling.
He stops, at the bottom of the dune. After a minute or two, he finds enough energy to try to sit up and get the sand out of his face and clothes. When he clears his eyes enough, he looks around to make sure that the dark spot in the sand it still there and he hadn't just imagined it.
So, seeing the large, flat, dark spot on the sand is still there, he begins to crawl towards it. He'd get up and walk towards it, but he doesn't seem to have the energy to get up and walk right now. He must be in the final stages of dehydration he figures, as he crawls. If this place in the sand doesn't have water, he'll likely never make it anywhere else. This is his last chance.
He gets closer and closer, but still can't see what's in the middle of the dark area. His eyes won't quite focus any more for some reason. And lifting his head up to look takes so much effort that he gives up trying. He just keeps crawling.
Finally, he reaches the area he'd seen from the dune. It takes him a minute of crawling on it before he realizes that he's no longer on sand - he's now crawling on some kind of dark stone. Stone with some kind of marking on it -a pattern cut into the stone. He's too tired to stand up and try to see what the pattern is - so he just keeps crawling. He crawls towards the center, where his blurry eyes still see something in the middle of the dark stone area.
His mind, detached in a strange way, notes that either his hands and knees are so burnt by the sand that they no longer feel pain, or that this dark stone, in the middle of a burning desert with a pounding, punishing sun overhead, doesn't seem to be hot. It almost feels cool. He considers lying down on the nice cool surface.
Cool, dark stone. Not a good sign. He must be hallucinating this. He's probably in the middle of a patch of sand, already lying face down and dying, and just imagining this whole thing. A desert mirage. Soon the beautiful women carrying pitchers of water will come up and start giving him a drink. Then he'll know he's gone.
He decides against laying down on the cool stone. If he's going to die here in the middle of this hallucination, he at least wants to see what's in the center before he goes. He keeps crawling.
It's the third time that he hears the voice before he realizes what he's hearing. He would swear that someone just said, "Greetings, traveler. You do not look well. Do you hear me?"
He stops crawling. He tries to look up from where he is on his hands and knees, but it's too much effort to lift his head. So he tries something different - he leans back and tries to sit up on the stone. After a few seconds, he catches his balance, avoids falling on his face, sits up, and tries to focus his eyes. Blurry. He rubs his eyes with the back of his hands and tries again. Better this time.
Yep. He can see. He's sitting in the middle of a large, flat, dark expanse of stone. Directly next to him, about three feet away, is a white post or pole about two inches in diameter and sticking up about four or five feet out of the stone, at an angle.
And wrapped around this white rod, tail with rattle on it hovering and seeming to be ready to start rattling, is what must be a fifteen foot long desert diamondback rattlesnake, looking directly at him.
He stares at the snake in shock. He doesn't have the energy to get up and run away. He doesn't even have the energy to crawl away. This is it, his final resting place. No matter what happens, he's not going to be able to move from this spot.
Well, at least dying of a bite from this monster should be quicker than dying of thirst. He'll face his end like a man. He struggles to sit up a little straighter. The snake keeps watching him. He lifts one hand and waves it in the snake's direction, feebly. The snake watches the hand for a moment, then goes back to watching the man, looking into his eyes.
Hmmm. Maybe the snake had no interest in biting him? It hadn't rattled yet -that was a good sign. Maybe he wasn't going to die of snake bite after all.
He then remembers that he'd looked up when he'd reached the center here because he thought he'd heard a voice. He was still very woozy - he was likely to pass out soon, the sun still beat down on him even though he was now on cool stone. He still didn't have anything to drink. But maybe he had actually heard a voice. This stone didn't look natural. Nor did that white post sticking up out of the stone. Someone had to have built this. Maybe they were still nearby. Maybe that was who talked to him. Maybe this snake was even their pet, and that's why it wasn't biting.
He tries to clear his throat to say, "Hello," but his throat is too dry. All that comes out is a coughing or wheezing sound. There is no way he's going to be able to talk without something to drink. He feels his pocket, and the bottle with the wiper fluid is still there. He shakily pulls the bottle out, almost losing his balance and falling on his back in the process. This isn't good. He doesn't have much time left, by his reckoning, before he passes out.
He gets the lid off of the bottle, manages to get the bottle to his lips, and pours some of the fluid into his mouth. He sloshes it around, and then swallows it. He coughs a little. His throat feels better. Maybe he can talk now.
He tries again. Ignoring the snake, he turns to look around him, hoping to spot the owner of this place, and croaks out, "Hello? Is there anyone here?"
He hears, from his side, "Greetings. What is it that you want?"
He turns his head, back towards the snake. That's where the sound had seemed to come from. The only thing he can think of is that there must be a speaker, hidden under the snake, or maybe built into that post. He decides to try asking for help.
"Please," he croaks again, suddenly feeling dizzy, "I'd love to not be thirsty any more. I've been a long time without water. Can you help me?"
Looking in the direction of the snake, hoping to see where the voice was coming from this time, he is shocked to see the snake rear back, open its mouth, and speak. He hears it say, as the dizziness overtakes him and he falls forward, face first on the stone, "Very well. Coming up."
A piercing pain shoots through his shoulder. Suddenly he is awake. He sits up and grabs his shoulder, wincing at the throbbing pain. He's momentarily disoriented as he looks around, and then he remembers – the crawl across the sand, the dark area of stone, the snake. He sees the snake, still wrapped around the tilted white post, still looking at him.
He reaches up and feels his shoulder, where it hurts. It feels slightly wet. He pulls his fingers away and looks at them - blood. He feels his shoulder again - his shirt has what feels like two holes in it – two puncture holes -they match up with the two aching spots of pain on his shoulder. He had been bitten. By the snake.
"It'll feel better in a minute." He looks up - it's the snake talking. He hadn't dreamed it. Suddenly he notices - he's not dizzy any more. And more importantly, he's not thirsty any more - at all!
"Have I died? Is this the afterlife? Why are you biting me in the afterlife?"
"Sorry about that, but I had to bite you," says the snake. "That's the way I work. It all comes through the bite. Think of it as natural medicine."
"You bit me to help me? Why aren't I thirsty any more? Did you give me a drink before you bit me? How did I drink enough while unconscious to not be thirsty any more? I haven't had a drink for over two days. Well, except for the windshield wiper fluid... hold it, how in the world does a snake talk? Are you real? Are you some sort of Disney animation?"
"No," says the snake, "I'm real. As real as you or anyone is, anyway. I didn't give you a drink. I bit you. That's how it works - it's what I do. I bite. I don't have hands to give you a drink, even if I had water just sitting around here."
The man sat stunned for a minute. Here he was, sitting in the middle of the desert on some strange stone that should be hot but wasn't, talking to a snake that could talk back and had just bitten him. And he felt better. Not great - he was still starving and exhausted, but much better - he was no longer thirsty. He had started to sweat again, but only slightly. He felt hot, in this sun, but it was starting to get lower in the sky, and the cool stone beneath him was a relief he could notice now that he was no longer dying of thirst.
"I might suggest that we take care of that methanol you now have in your system with the next request," continued the snake. "I can guess why you drank it, but I'm not sure how much you drank, or how much methanol was left in the wiper fluid. That stuff is nasty. It'll make you go blind in a day or two, if you drank enough of it."
"Ummm, n-next request?" said the man. He put his hand back on his hurting shoulder and backed away from the snake a little.
"That's the way it works. If you like, that is," explained the snake. "You get three requests. Call them wishes, if you wish." The snake grinned at his own joke, and the man drew back a little further from the show of fangs.
"But there are rules," the snake continued. "The first request is free. The second requires an agreement of secrecy. The third requires the binding of responsibility." The snake looks at the man seriously.
"By the way," the snake says suddenly, "my name is Nathan. Old Nathan, Samuel used to call me. He gave me the name. Before that, most of the Bound used to just call me 'Snake'. But that got old, and Samuel wouldn't stand for it. He said that anything that could talk needed a name. He was big into names. You can call me Nate, if you wish." Again, the snake grinned. "Sorry if I don't offer to shake, but I think you can understand - my shake sounds somewhat threatening." The snake give his rattle a little shake.
"Umm, my name is Jack," said the man, trying to absorb all of this. "Jack Samson.
"Can I ask you a question?" Jack says suddenly. "What happened to the poison... umm, in your bite. Why aren't I dying now? How did you do that? What do you mean by that's how you work?"
"That's more than one question," grins Nate. "But I'll still try to answer all of them. First, yes, you can ask me a question." The snake's grin gets wider. "Second, the poison is in you. It changed you. You now no longer need to drink. That's what you asked for. Or, well, technically, you asked to not be thirsty any more - but 'any more' is such a vague term. I decided to make it permanent - now, as long as you live, you shouldn't need to drink much at all. Your body will conserve water very efficiently. You should be able to get enough just from the food you eat - much like a creature of the desert. You've been changed.
"For the third question," Nate continues, "you are still dying. Besides the effects of that methanol in your system, you're a man - and men are mortal. In your current state, I give you no more than about another 50 years. Assuming you get out of this desert, alive, that is." Nate seemed vastly amused at his own humor, and continued his wide grin.
"As for the fourth question," Nate said, looking more serious as far as Jack could tell, as Jack was just now working on his ability to read talking-snake emotions from snake facial features, "first you have to agree to make a second request and become bound by the secrecy, or I can't tell you."
"Wait," joked Jack, "isn't this where you say you could tell me, but you'd have to kill me?"
"I thought that was implied." Nate continued to look serious.
"Ummm...yeah." Jack leaned back a little as he remembered again that he was talking to a fifteen foot poisonous reptile with a reputation for having a nasty temper. "So, what is this 'Bound by Secrecy' stuff, and can you really stop the effects of the methanol?" Jack thought for a second. "And, what do you mean methanol, anyway? I thought these days they use ethanol in wiper fluid, and just denature it?"
"They may, I don't really know," said Nate. "I haven't gotten out in a while. Maybe they do. All I know is that I smell methanol on your breath and on that bottle in your pocket. And the blue color of the liquid when you pulled it out to drink some let me guess that it was wiper fluid. I assume that they still color wiper fluid blue?"
"Yeah, they do," said Jack.
"I figured," replied Nate. "As for being bound by secrecy - with the fulfillment of your next request, you will be bound to say nothing about me, this place, or any of the information I will tell you after that, when you decide to go back out to your kind. You won't be allowed to talk about me, write about me, use sign language, charades, or even act in a way that will lead someone to guess correctly about me. You'll be bound to secrecy. Of course, I'll also ask you to promise not to give me away, and as I'm guessing that you're a man of your word, you'll never test the binding anyway, so you won't notice." Nate said the last part with utter confidence.
Jack, who had always prided himself on being a man of his word, felt a little nervous at this. "Ummm, hey, Nate, who are you? How did you know that? Are you, umm, omniscient, or something?"
Well, Jack," said Nate sadly, "I can't tell you that, unless you make the second request." Nate looked away for a minute, then looked back.
"Umm, well, ok," said Jack, "what is this about a second request? What can I ask for? Are you allowed to tell me that?"
"Sure!" said Nate, brightening. "You're allowed to ask for changes. Changes to yourself. They're like wishes, but they can only affect you. Oh, and before you ask, I can't give you immortality. Or omniscience. Or omnipresence, for that matter. Though I might be able to make you gaseous and yet remain alive, and then you could spread through the atmosphere and sort of be omnipresent. But what good would that be – you still wouldn't be omniscient and thus still could only focus on one thing at a time. Not very useful, at least in my opinion." Nate stopped when he realized that Jack was staring at him.
"Well, anyway," continued Nate, "I'd probably suggest giving you permanent good health. It would negate the methanol now in your system, you'd be immune to most poisons and diseases, and you'd tend to live a very long time, barring accident, of course. And you'll even have a tendency to recover from accidents well. It always seemed like a good choice for a request to me."
"Cure the methanol poisoning, huh?" said Jack. "And keep me healthy for a long time? Hmmm. It doesn't sound bad at that. And it has to be a request about a change to me? I can't ask to be rich, right? Because that's not really a change to me?"
"Right," nodded Nate.
"Could I ask to be a genius and permanently healthy?" Jack asked, hopefully.
"That takes two requests, Jack."
"Yeah, I figured so," said Jack. "But I could ask to be a genius? I could become the smartest scientist in the world? Or the best athlete?"
"Well, I could make you very smart," admitted Nate, "but that wouldn't necessarily make you the best scientist in the world. Or, I could make you very athletic, but it wouldn't necessarily make you the best athlete either. You've heard the saying that 99% of genius is hard work? Well, there's some truth to that. I can give you the talent, but I can't make you work hard. It all depends on what you decide to do with it."
"Hmmm," said Jack. "Ok, I think I understand. And I get a third request, after this one?"
"Maybe," said Nate, "it depends on what you decide then. There are more rules for the third request that I can only tell you about after the second request. You know how it goes." Nate looked like he'd shrug, if he had shoulders.
"Ok, well, since I'd rather not be blind in a day or two, and permanent health doesn't sound bad, then consider that my second request. Officially. Do I need to sign in blood or something?"
"No," said Nate. "Just hold out your hand. Or heel." Nate grinned. "Or whatever part you want me to bite. I have to bite you again. Like I said, that's how it works - the poison, you know," Nate said apologetically.
Jack winced a little and felt his shoulder, where the last bite was. Hey, it didn't hurt any more. Just like Nate had said. That made Jack feel better about the biting business. But still, standing still while a fifteen foot snake sunk it's fangs into you. Jack stood up. Ignoring how good it felt to be able to stand again, and the hunger starting to gnaw at his stomach, Jack tried to decide where he wanted to get bitten. Despite knowing that it wouldn't hurt for long, Jack knew that this wasn't going to be easy.
"Hey, Jack," Nate suddenly said, looking past Jack towards the dunes behind him, "is that someone else coming up over there?"
Jack spun around and looked. Who else could be out here in the middle of nowhere? And did they bring food?
Wait a minute, there was nobody over there. What was Nate...
Jack let out a bellow as he felt two fangs sink into his rear end, through his jeans!
Jack sat down carefully, favoring his more tender buttock. "I would have decided, eventually, Nate. I was just thinking about it. You didn't have to hoodwink me like that."
"I've been doing this a long time, Jack," said Nate, confidently. "You humans have a hard time sitting still and letting a snake bite you - especially one my size. And besides, admit it - it's only been a couple of minutes and it already doesn't hurt any more, does it? That's because of the health benefit with this one. I told you that you'd heal quickly now."
"Yeah, well, still," said Jack, "it's the principle of the thing. And nobody likes being bitten in the butt! Couldn't you have gotten my calf or something instead?"
"More meat in the typical human butt," replied Nate. "And less chance you accidentally kick me or move at the last second."
"Yeah, right. So, tell me all of these wonderful secrets that I now qualify to hear," answered Jack.
"Ok," said Nate. "Do you want to ask questions first, or do you want me to just start talking?"
"Just talk," said Jack. "I'll sit here and try to not think about food."
"We could go try to rustle up some food for you first, if you like," answered Nate.
"Hey! You didn't tell me you had food around here, Nate!" Jack jumped up. "What do we have? Am I in walking distance to town? Or can you magically whip up food along with your other powers?" Jack was almost shouting with excitement. His stomach had been growling for hours.
"I was thinking more like I could flush something out of its hole and bite it for you, and you could skin it and eat it. Assuming you have a knife, that is," replied Nate, with the grin that Jack was starting to get used to.
"Ugh," said Jack, sitting back down. "I think I'll pass. I can last a little longer before I get desperate enough to eat desert rat, or whatever else it is you find out here. And there's nothing to burn - I'd have to eat it raw. No thanks. Just talk."
"Ok," replied Nate, still grinning. "But I'd better hurry, before you start looking at me as food.
Nate reared back a little, looked around for a second, and then continued. "You, Jack, are sitting in the middle of the Garden of Eden."
Jack looked around at the sand and dunes and then looked back at Nate skeptically.
"Well, that's the best I can figure it, anyway, Jack," said Nate. "Stand up and look at the symbol on the rock here." Nate gestured around the dark stone they were both sitting on with his nose.
Jack stood up and looked. Carved into the stone in a bas-relief was a representation of a large tree. The angled-pole that Nate was wrapped around was coming out of the trunk of the tree, right below where the main branches left the truck to reach out across the stone. It was very well done - it looked more like a tree had been reduced to almost two dimensions and embedded in the stone than it did like a carving.
Jack walked around and looked at the details in the fading light of the setting sun. He wished he'd looked at it while the sun was higher in the sky.
Wait! The sun was setting! That meant he was going to have to spend another night out here! Arrrgh!
Jack looked out across the desert for a little bit, and then came back and stood next to Nate. "In all the excitement, I almost forgot, Nate," said Jack. "Which way is it back to town? And how far? I'm eventually going to have to head back - I'm not sure I'll be able to survive by eating raw desert critters for long. And even if I can, I'm not sure I'll want to."
"It's about 30 miles that way." Nate pointed, with the rattle on his tail this time. As far as Jack could tell, it was a direction at right angles to the way he'd been going when he was crawling here. "But that's 30 miles by the way the crow flies. It's about 40 by the way a man walks. You should be able to do it in about half a day with your improved endurance, if you head out early tomorrow, Jack."
Jack looked out the way the snake had pointed for a few seconds more, and then sat back down. It was getting dark. Not much he could do about heading out right now. And besides, Nate was just about to get to the interesting stuff. "Garden of Eden? As best as you can figure it?"
"Well, yeah, as best as I and Samuel could figure it anyway," said Nate. "He figured that the story just got a little mixed up. You know, snake, in a 'tree', offering 'temptations', making bargains. That kind stuff. But he could never quite figure out how the Hebrews found out about this spot from across the ocean. He worried about that for a while."
"Garden of Eden, huh?" said Jack. "How long have you been here, Nate?"
"No idea, really," replied Nate. "A long time. It never occurred to me to count years, until recently, and by then, of course, it was too late. But I do remember when this whole place was green, so I figure it's been thousands of years, at least."
"So, are you the snake that tempted Eve?" said Jack.
"Beats me," said Nate. "Maybe. I can't remember if the first one of your kind that I talked to was female or not, and I never got a name, but it could have been. And I suppose she could have considered my offer to grant requests a 'temptation', though I've rarely had refusals."
"Well, umm, how did you get here then? And why is that white pole stuck out of the stone there?" asked Jack.
"Dad left me here. Or, I assume it was my dad. It was another snake - much bigger than I was back then. I remember talking to him, but I don't remember if it was in a language, or just kind of understanding what he wanted. But one day, he brought me to this stone, told me about it, and asked me to do something for him. I talked it over with him for a while, then agreed. I've been here ever since.
"What is this place?" said Jack. "And what did he ask you to do?"
"Well, you see this pole here, sticking out of the stone?" Nate loosened his coils around the tilted white pole and showed Jack where it descended into the stone. The pole was tilted at about a 45 degree angle and seemed to enter the stone in an eighteen inch slot cut into the stone. Jack leaned over and looked. The slot was dark and the pole went down into it as far as Jack could see in the dim light. Jack reached out to touch the pole, but Nate was suddenly there in the way.
"You can't touch that yet, Jack," said Nate.
"Why not?" asked Jack.
"I haven't explained it to you yet," replied Nate.
"Well, it kinda looks like a lever or something," said Jack. "You'd push it that way, and it would move in the slot."
"Yep, that's what it is," replied Nate.
"What does it do?" asked Jack. "End the world?"
"Oh, no," said Nate. "Nothing that drastic. It just ends humanity. I call it 'The Lever of Doom'." For the last few words Nate had used a deeper, ringing voice. He tried to look serious for a few seconds, and then gave up and grinned.
Jack was initially startled by Nate's pronouncement, but when Nate grinned Jack laughed. "Ha! You almost had me fooled for a second there. What does it really do?"
"Oh, it really ends humanity, like I said," smirked Nate. "I just thought the voice I used was funny, didn't you?"
Nate continued to grin.
"A lever to end humanity?" asked Jack. "What in the world is that for? Why would anyone need to end humanity?"
"Well," replied Nate, "I get the idea that maybe humanity was an experiment. Or maybe the Big Guy just thought, that if humanity started going really bad, there should be a way to end it. I'm not really sure. All I know are the rules, and the guesses that Samuel and I had about why it's here. I didn't think to ask back when I started here."
"Rules? What rules?" asked Jack.
"The rules are that I can't tell anybody about it or let them touch it unless they agree to be bound to secrecy by a bite. And that only one human can be bound in that way at a time. That's it." explained Nate.
Jack looked somewhat shocked. "You mean that I could pull the lever now? You'd let me end humanity?"
"Yep," replied Nate, "if you want to." Nate looked at Jack carefully. "Do you want to, Jack?"
"Umm, no." said Jack, stepping a little further back from the lever. "Why in the world would anyone want to end humanity? It'd take a psychotic to want that! Or worse, a suicidal psychotic, because it would kill him too, wouldn't it?"
"Yep," replied Nate, "being as he'd be human too."
"Has anyone ever seriously considered it?" asked Nate. "Any of those bound to secrecy, that is?"
"Well, of course, I think they've all seriously considered it at one time or another. Being given that kind of responsibility makes you sit down and think, or so I'm told. Samuel considered it several times. He'd often get disgusted with humanity, come out here, and just hold the lever for a while. But he never pulled it. Or you wouldn't be here." Nate grinned some more.
Jack sat down, well back from the lever. He looked thoughtful and puzzled at the same time. After a bit, he said, "So this makes me the Judge of humanity? I get to decide whether they keep going or just end? Me?"
"That seems to be it," agreed Nate.
"What kind of criteria do I use to decide?" said Jack. "How do I make this decision? Am I supposed to decide if they're good? Or too many of them are bad? Or that they're going the wrong way? Is there a set of rules for that?"
"Nope," replied Nate. "You pretty much just have to decide on your own. It's up to you, however you want to decide it. I guess that you're just supposed to know."
"But what if I get mad at someone? Or some girl dumps me and I feel horrible? Couldn't I make a mistake? How do I know that I won't screw up?" protested Jack.
Nate gave his kind of snake-like shrug again. "You don't. You just have to try your best, Jack."
Jack sat there for a while, staring off into the desert that was rapidly getting dark, chewing on a fingernail.
Suddenly, Jack turned around and looked at the snake. "Nate, was Samuel the one bound to this before me?"
"Yep," replied Nate. "He was a good guy. Talked to me a lot. Taught me to read and brought me books. I think I still have a good pile of them buried in the sand around here somewhere. I still miss him. He died a few months ago."
"Sounds like a good guy," agreed Jack. "How did he handle this, when you first told him. What did he do?"
"Well," said Nate, "he sat down for a while, thought about it for a bit, and then asked me some questions, much like you're doing."
"What did he ask you, if you're allowed to tell me?" asked Jack.
"He asked me about the third request," replied Nate.
"Aha!" It was Jack's turn to grin. "And what did you tell him?"
"I told him the rules for the third request. That to get the third request you have to agree to this whole thing. That if it ever comes to the point that you really think that humanity should be ended, that you'll come here and end it. You won't avoid it, and you won't wimp out." Nate looked serious again. "And you'll be bound to do it too, Jack."
"Hmmm." Jack looked back out into the darkness for a while.
Nate watched him, waiting.
"Nate," continued Jack, quietly, eventually. "What did Samuel ask for with his third request?"
Nate sounded like he was grinning again as he replied, also quietly, "Wisdom, Jack. He asked for wisdom. As much as I could give him."
"Ok," said Jack, suddenly, standing up and facing away from Nate, "give it to me.
Nate looked at Jack's backside. "Give you what, Jack?"
"Give me that wisdom. The same stuff that Samuel asked for. If it helped him, maybe it'll help me too." Jack turned his head to look back over his shoulder at Nate. "It did help him, right?"
"He said it did," replied Nate. "But he seemed a little quieter afterward. Like he had a lot to think about."
"Well, yeah, I can see that," said Jack. "So, give it to me." Jack turned toface away from Nate again, bent over slightly and tensed up.
Nate watched Jack tense up with a little exasperation. If he bit Jack now, Jack would likely jump out of his skin and maybe hurt them both.
"You remember that you'll be bound to destroy humanity if it ever looks like it needs it, right Jack?" asked Nate, shifting position.
"Yeah, yeah, I got that," replied Jack, eyes squeezed tightly shut and body tense, not noticing the change in direction of Nate's voice.
"And," continued Nate, from his new position, "do you remember that you'll turn bright purple, and grow big horns and extra eyes?"
"Yeah, yeah... Hey, wait a minute!" said Jack, opening his eyes, straightening up and turning around. "Purple?!" He didn't see Nate there. With the moonlight Jack could see that the lever extended up from its slot in the rock without the snake wrapped around it.
Jack heard, from behind him, Nate's "Just Kidding!" right before he felt the now familiar piercing pain, this time in the other buttock.
Jack sat on the edge of the dark stone in the rapidly cooling air, his feet extending out into the sand. He stared out into the darkness, listening to the wind stir the sand, occasionally rubbing his butt where he'd been recently bitten.
Nate had left for a little while, had come back with a desert-rodent-shaped bulge somewhere in his middle, and was now wrapped back around the lever, his tongue flicking out into the desert night's air the only sign that he was still awake.
Occasionally Jack, with his toes absentmindedly digging in the sand while he thought, would ask Nate a question without turning around.
"Nate, do accidents count?"
Nate lifted his head a little bit. "What do you mean, Jack?"
Jack tilted his head back like he was looking at the stars. "You know, accidents. If I accidentally fall on the lever, without meaning to, does that still wipe out humanity?"
"Yeah, I'm pretty sure it does, Jack. I'd suggest you be careful about that if you start feeling wobbly," said Nate with some amusement.
A little later - "Does it have to be me that pulls the lever?" asked Jack.
"That's the rule, Jack. Nobody else can pull it," answered Nate.
"No," Jack shook his head, "I meant does it have to be my hand? Could I pull the lever with a rope tied around it? Or push it with a stick? Or throw a rock?"
"Yes, those should work," replied Nate. "Though I'm not sure how complicated you could get. Samuel thought about trying to build some kind of remote control for it once, but gave it up. Everything he'd build would be gone by the next sunrise, if it was touching the stone, or over it. I told him that in the past others that had been bound had tried to bury the lever so they wouldn't be tempted to pull it, but every time the stones or sand or whatever had disappeared."
"Wow," said Jack, "Cool." Jack leaned back until only his elbows kept him off of the stone and looked up into the sky.
"Nate, how long did Samuel live? One of his wishes was for health too, right?" asked Jack.
"Yes," replied Nate, "it was. He lived 167 years, Jack."
"Wow, 167 years. That's almost 140 more years I'll live if I live as long. Do you know what he died of, Nate?"
"He died of getting tired of living, Jack," Nate said, sounding somewhat sad.
Jack turned his head to look at Nate in the starlight.
Nate looked back. "Samuel knew he wasn't going to be able to stay in society. He figured that they'd eventually see him still alive and start questioning it, so he decided that he'd have to disappear after a while. He faked his death once, but changed his mind - he decided it was too early and he could stay for a little longer. He wasn't very fond of mankind, but he liked the attention. Most of the time, anyway.
"His daughter and then his wife dying almost did him in though. He didn't stay in society much longer after that. He eventually came out here to spend time talking to me and thinking about pulling the lever. A few months ago he told me he'd had enough. It was his time."
"And then he just died?" asked Jack.
Nate shook his head a little. "He made his forth request, Jack. There's only one thing you can ask for the fourth request. The last bite.
After a bit Nate continued, "He told me that he was tired, that it was his time. He reassured me that someone new would show up soon, like they always had.
After another pause, Nate finished, "Samuel's body disappeared off the stone with the sunrise."
Jack lay back down and looked at the sky, leaving Nate alone with his memories. It was a long time until Jack's breathing evened out into sleep.
Jack woke with the sunrise the next morning. He was a little chilled with the morning desert air, but overall was feeling pretty good. Well, except that his stomach was grumbling and he wasn't willing to eat raw desert rat.
So, after getting directions to town from Nate, making sure he knew how to get back, and reassuring Nate that he'd be back soon, Jack started the long walk back to town. With his new health and Nate's good directions, he made it back easily.
Jack caught a bus back to the city, and showed up for work the next day, little worse for the wear and with a story about getting lost in the desert and walking back out. Within a couple of days Jack had talked a friend with a tow truck into going back out into the desert with him to fetch the SUV. They found it after a couple of hours of searching and towed it back without incident. Jack was careful not to even look in the direction of Nate's lever, though their path back didn't come within sight of it.
Before the next weekend, Jack had gone to a couple of stores, including a book store, and had gotten his SUV back from the mechanic, with a warning to avoid any more joyriding in the desert. On Saturday, Jack headed back to see Nate.
Jack parked a little way out of the small town near Nate, loaded up his new backpack with camping gear and the things he was bringing for Nate, and then started walking. He figured that walking would leave the least trail, and he knew that while not many people camped in the desert, it wasn't unheard of, and shouldn't really raise suspicions.
Jack had brought more books for Nate - recent books, magazines, newspapers. Some things that would catch Nate up with what was happening in the world, others that were just good books to read. He spent the weekend with Nate, and then headed out again, telling Nate that he'd be back again soon, but that he had things to do first.
Over four months later Jack was back to see Nate again. This time he brought a laptop with him - a specially modified laptop. It had a solar recharger, special filters and seals to keep out the sand, a satellite link-up, and a special keyboard and joystick that Jack hoped that a fifteen-foot rattlesnake would be able to use. And, it had been hacked to not give out its location to the satellite.
After that Jack could e-mail Nate to keep in touch, but still visited him fairly regularly - at least once or twice a year.
After the first year, Jack quit his job. For some reason, with the wisdom he'd been given, and the knowledge that he could live for over 150 years, working in a nine to five job for someone else didn't seem that worthwhile any more. Jack went back to school.
Eventually, Jack started writing. Perhaps because of the wisdom, or perhaps because of his new perspective, he wrote well. People liked what he wrote, and he became well known for it. After a time, Jack bought an RV and started traveling around the country for book signings and readings.
But, he still remembered to drop by and visit Nate occasionally.
On one of the visits Nate seemed quieter than usual. Not that Nate had been a fountain of joy lately. Jack's best guess was that Nate was still missing Samuel, and though Jack had tried, he still hadn't been able to replace Samuel in Nate's eyes. Nate had been getting quieter each visit. But on this visit Nate didn't even speak when Jack walked up to the lever. He nodded at Jack, and then went back to staring into the desert. Jack, respecting Nate's silence, sat down and waited.
After a few minutes, Nate spoke. "Jack, I have someone to introduce you to."
Jack looked surprised. "Someone to introduce me to?" Jack looked around, and then looked carefully back at Nate. "This something to do with the Big Guy?
"No, no," replied Nate. "This is more personal. I want you to meet my son." Nate looked over at the nearest sand dune. "Sammy!"
Jack watched as a four foot long desert rattlesnake crawled from behind the dune and up to the stone base of the lever.
"Yo, Jack," said the new, much smaller snake.
"Yo, Sammy" replied Jack. Jack looked at Nate. "Named after Samuel, I assume?"
Nate nodded. "Jack, I've got a favor to ask you. Could you show Sammy around for me?" Nate unwrapped himself from the lever and slithered over to the edge of the stone and looked across the sands. "When Samuel first told me about the world, and brought me books and pictures, I wished that I could go see it. I wanted to see the great forests, the canyons, the cities, even the other deserts, to see if they felt and smelled the same. I want my son to have that chance - to see the world. Before he becomes bound here like I have been.
"He's seen it in pictures, over the computer that you brought me. But I hear that it's not the same. That being there is different. I want him to have that. Think you can do that for me, Jack?"
Jack nodded. This was obviously very important to Nate, so Jack didn't even joke about taking a talking rattlesnake out to see the world. "Yeah, I can do that for you, Nate. Is that all you need?" Jack could sense that was something more.
Nate looked at Sammy. Sammy looked back at Nate for a second and then said, "Oh, yeah. Ummm, I've gotta go pack. Back in a little bit Jack. Nice to meet ya!" Sammy slithered back over the dune and out of sight.
Nate watched Sammy disappear and then looked back at Jack. "Jack, this is my first son. My first offspring through all the years. You don't even want to know what it took for me to find a mate." Nate grinned to himself. "But anyway, I had a son for a reason. I'm tired. I'm ready for it to be over. I needed a replacement."
Jack considered this for a minute. "So, you're ready to come see the world, and you wanted him to watch the lever while you were gone?"
Nate shook his head. "No, Jack - you're a better guesser than that. You've already figured out - I'm bound here - there's only one way for me to leave here. And I'm ready. It's my time to die."
Jack looked more closely at Nate. He could tell Nate had thought about this - probably for quite a while. Jack had trouble imagining what it would be like to be as old as Nate, but Jack could already tell that in another hundred or two hundred years, he might be getting tired of life himself. Jack could understand Samuel's decision, and now Nate's. So, all Jack said was, "What do you want me to do?"
Nate nodded. "Thanks, Jack. I only want two things. One - show Sammy around the world - let him get his fill of it, until he's ready to come back here and take over. Two - give me the fourth request.
"I can't just decide to die, not any more than you can. I won't even die of old age like you eventually will, even though it'll be a long time from now. I need to be killed. Once Sammy is back here, ready to take over, I'll be able to die. And I need you to kill me.
"I've even thought about how. Poisons and other drugs won't work on me. And I've seen pictures of snakes that were shot - some of them live for days, so that's out too. So, I want you to bring back a sword.
Nate turned away to look back to the dune that Sammy had gone behind. "I'd say an axe, but that's somewhat undignified - putting my head on the ground or a chopping block like that. No, I like a sword. A time-honored way of going out. A dignified way to die. And, most importantly, it should work, even on me.
"You willing to do that for me, Jack?" Nate turned back to look at Jack.
"Yeah, Nate," replied Jack solemnly, "I think I can handle that."
Nate nodded. "Good!" He turned back toward the dune and shouted, "Sammy! Jack's about ready to leave!" Then quietly, "Thanks, Jack."
Jack didn't have anything to say to that, so he waited for Sammy to make it back to the lever, nodded to him, nodded a final time to Nate, and then headed into the desert with Sammy following. Over the next several years Sammy and Jack kept in touch with Nate through e-mail as they went about their adventures. They made a goal of visiting every country in the world, and did a respectable job of it. Sammy had a natural gift for languages, as Jack expected he would, and even ended up acting as a translator for Jack in a few of the countries. Jack managed to keep the talking rattlesnake hidden, even so, and by the time they were nearing the end of their tour of countries, Sammy had only been spotted a few times. While there were several people that had seen enough to startle them greatly, nobody had enough evidence to prove anything, and while a few wild rumors and storied followed Jack and Sammy around, nothing ever hit the newspapers or the public in general.
When they finished the tour of countries, Jack suggested that they try some undersea diving. They did. And spelunking. They did that too. Sammy finally drew the line at visiting Antarctica. He'd come to realize that Jack was stalling. After talking to his Dad about it over e-mail, he figured out that Jack probably didn't want to have to kill Nate. Nate told Sammy that humans could be squeamish about killing friends and acquaintances.
So, Sammy eventually put his tail down (as he didn't have a foot) and told Jack that it was time - he was ready to go back and take up his duties from his dad. Jack, delayed it a little more by insisting that they go back to Japan and buy an appropriate sword. He even stretched it a little more by getting lessons in how to use the sword. But, eventually, he'd learned as much as he was likely to without dedicating his life to it, and was definitely competent enough to take the head off of a snake. It was time to head back and see Nate.
When they got back to the US, Jack got the old RV out of storage where he and Sammy had left it after their tour of the fifty states, he loaded up Sammy and the sword, and they headed for the desert.
When they got to the small town that Jack had been trying to find those years ago when he'd met Nate, Jack was in a funk. He didn't really feel like walking all of the way out there. Not only that, but he'd forgotten to figure the travel time correctly, and it was late afternoon. They'd either have to spend the night in town and walk out tomorrow, or walk in the dark.
As Jack was afraid that if he waited one more night he might lose his resolve, he decided that he'd go ahead and drive the RV out there. It was only going to be this once, and Jack would go back and cover the tracks afterward. They ought to be able to make it out there by nightfall if they drove, and then they could get it over tonight.
Jack told Sammy to e-mail Nate that they were coming as he drove out of sight of the town on the road. They then pulled off the road and headed out into the desert.
Everything went well, until they got to the sand dunes. Jack had been nursing the RV along the whole time, over the rocks, through the creek beds, revving the engine the few times they almost got stuck. When they came to the dunes, Jack didn't really think about it, he just downshifted and headed up the first one. By the third dune, Jack started to regret that he'd decided to try driving on the sand. The RV was fishtailing and losing traction. Jack was having to work it up each dune slowly and was trying to keep from losing control each time they came over the top and slid down the other side. Sammy had come up to sit in the passenger seat, coiled up and laughing at Jack's driving.
As they came over the top of the fourth dune, the biggest one yet, Jack saw that this was the final dune - the stone, the lever, and somewhere Nate, waited below. Jack put on the brakes, but he'd gone a little too far. The RV started slipping down the other side.
Jack tried turning the wheel, but he didn't have enough traction. He pumped the brakes - no response. They started sliding down the hill, faster and faster.
Jack felt a shock go through him as he suddenly realized that they were heading for the lever. He looked down - the RV was directly on course for it. If Jack didn't do something, the RV would hit it. He was about to end humanity.
Jack steered more frantically, trying to get traction. It still wasn't working. The dune was too steep, and the sand too loose. In a split second, Jack realized that his only chance would be once he hit the stone around the lever - he should have traction on the stone for just a second before he hit the lever - he wouldn't have time to stop, but he should be able to steer away.
Jack took a better grip on the steering wheel and tried to turn the RV a little bit - every little bit would help. He'd have to time his turn just right.
The RV got to the bottom of the dune, sliding at an amazing speed in the sand. Just before they reached the stone Jack looked across it to check that they were still heading for the lever. They were. But Jack noticed something else that he hadn't seen from the top of the dune. Nate wasn't wrapped around the lever. He was off to the side of the lever, but still on the stone, waiting for them. The problem was, he was waiting on the same side of the lever that Jack had picked to steer towards to avoid the lever. The RV was already starting to drift that way a little in its mad rush across the sand and there was no way that Jack was going to be able to go around the lever to the other side.
Jack had an instant of realization. He was either going to have to hit the lever, or run over Nate. He glanced over at Sammy and saw that Sammy realized the same thing.
Jack took a firmer grip on the steering wheel as the RV ran up on the stone. Shouting to Sammy as he pulled the steering wheel, "BETTER NATE THAN LEVER," he ran over the snake.
Sorry :)
Wednesday, May 28, 2008
WHY TWO WORLD WARS WERE FOUGHT
Pat Buchanan knows his history, whatever else you might think of him, and he has just written a good summary of the revisionist arguments about the two world wars. I myself alluded briefly to such arguments on 23rd.
I am one of the many history buffs who agree that WWI was the big mistake so I agree with Buchanan there and I certainly agree with him that the peace-obsessed politics of the interwar period were the breeding ground for WWII.
Buchanan is however being wise in hindsight, something easy to do. What he seems largely unaware of is the psychology behind those two disastrous wars. WWI was NOT fought over the assassination of an Austrian archduke in Serbia. Politicians can be pretty foolish but we do our ancestors discredit to think that they were as foolish as that.
Strangely, WWI was the fruit of the long peace engineered by the "Iron Chancellor" of Prussia, Prince Otto von Bismarck. Bismarck gained great authority from the way he used both war and politics to extend the Prussian domain to the point that almost the whole of the German-speaking lands came under the sway of the Prussian crown in the form of a united Germany -- with the Prussian defeat of Napoleon III at Sedan being the clincher.
So how did Bismarck use that great authority and the pre-eminent German military machine that he controlled? If he had been a Leftist like Napoleon, he would have attempted to conquer the world. But he was a conservative so he did no such thing. Once he had attained his aim of a united Heimatland (homeland) -- i.e. a united Germany --- he used his great talents and resources to ensure that there were no more wars in Europe.
And the long peace from 1872 onwards allowed Europeans to concentrate on constructive pursuits for change -- leading to vast economic growth in most of Europe (including Russia). But the huge leap forward in science, technology and prosperity in the late 19th century led to hubris among the populations concened. They were so impressed by their own achievements that they thought they could conquer the world -- literally. And they actually did to some extent -- bringing large slices of what we would now call the Third World under their rule.
Sadly, however, communications then fell a long way short of the global village that we inhabit today and most people in the national populations concerned concluded that their great achievements were the fruit of a national genius peculiar to them. That other nations were doing about equally as well was lost sight of. It was, in short, a time of overweening national pride and they all thought that they could conquer anyone. So they were all spoiling for a fight. They thought that if they could have a war, they could conquer the other nations around them in six weeks. So after Bismarck was no longer there to restrain them, a pretext for a fight was found and the nations of Europe all marched into WWI in full confidence of a rapid national triumph. It was however reality that triumphed.
And after the colossal horror of WWI, who can blame the politicians of the interwar years for doing everything they could to run away from another war? That running away does more harm than good is however the lesson we must learn from that.
Buchanan's article stops before the events of WWII so I will stop there too. Much to be said there but some other time. I do think Churchill was right in his unswerving enmity to Nazism, however.
Posted by John Ray. For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. For a daily survey of Australian politics, see AUSTRALIAN POLITICS Also, don't forget your roundup of Obama news and commentary at OBAMA WATCH
Kevin08 - The gloves are off
The Australian - KEVIN Rudd has been accused of falsely claiming the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission's support for his planned fuel price monitoring system, despite the consumer watchdog warning it could lead to higher prices. And the Opposition labelled the Prime Minister an old-style socialist whose FuelWatch system would undermine free market principles and hurt consumers.
I'm surprised it took this long for the wheels to come off, well not really, it only took this long because the media were helping him out as much as they could. Even last night the unbiased [funny how some ABC staff become members of Kevin08's leftist ALP then] ABC was making sloppy excuses for Kevin08. Geez, Kevin08 can't even find any love from the fabled 'Arts' community now. 'Working families' are pissed off, Pensioners are pissed off and even his celebrity chums are gesturing angrily at Kevin08. Even the media are getting into him now, The Age and the SMH tearing chunks off him on their respective front pages.SMH - KEVIN RUDD'S main election strategy - to ease pressure on household budgets - has collapsed just six months into his administration with internal squabbling over petrol and the Prime Minister insisting he never pledged to lower fuel prices. [snip] But more bad news arrived when ANZ revised its inflation outlook - and factored in another two interest rate rises this year.
The Age - KEVIN Rudd's handpicked cultural advisers have confronted him over his attack on Melbourne artist Bill Henson and have warned that Henson's potential prosecution damages the nation's cultural reputation and risks "a repressive climate of hysterical condemnation". Cate Blanchett, Nobel prize-winning author J. M. Coetzee, Melbourne University Publishing head Louise Adler and writer Peter Goldsworthy are among the prominent figures whose names appear on an open letter condemning allegations that Henson "is a child pornographer".
The opposition had better make hay while the aura of Kevin07 is being shot to pieces, because the media will be barracking for Kevin Rudd when the next election rolls around. There's a lesson in there somewhere for us, there's a lesson in there for Americans too, be wary of the ones who smooth-talk about hope and change folks, new leadership and fresh ideas is what we were sold and this is what we got. Honestly though I doubt the lesson will be learned, you see there's a reason why shady, smooth-talking salesmen are still around doing business.
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
Aboriginal activist condemns Aboriginal bureaucrats
The part-Aboriginal stirrer below is both right and wrong: Right about the useless bureaucrats and wrong in thinking that there is actually something that they could do if they tried.
The implicit goal of the do-gooders is to make whites out of blacks. It is an absurdity. All sorts of policies have been tried with that as the implicit aim but nothing works, of course. I have been watching the permutations for 50 years and the least destructive policies were the ones of the missionaries of now long bygone years. They were "paternalistic" but the blacks were undoubtedly healthier and less self-destructive then. And some blacks back then DID make a fairly successful transition to mainstream white society. The coming of welfare payments was the real knell of doom for blacks, however. They have now lost their own culture without acquiring the white man's culture. They are truly lost souls and I can see no way forward for them in the present political climate -- or perhaps ever.
Meanwhile the organizations devoted to Aboriginal welfare are just providers of cushy jobs for Leftists with second-rate academic qualifications. And about all they do is sit on their behinds and suck tea.
Tackling indigenous disadvantage was being hindered because tens of thousands of people employed in the "Aboriginal industry" were simply collecting their salary and serving out time instead of tackling the hard issues, according to a leading Aboriginal academic. Queenslander Stephen Hagan made the claim in his weekend Rob Riley memorial lecture in Perth, during which he questioned whether remote communities should continue to exist or should be shut down.
Mr Hagan, a lecturer at Toowoomba's Southern Cross University, said domestic violence in communities, which had led to increasing killings of Aboriginal women in remote parts of central Australia, required "a seismic shift in attitude". "We all need to pool our collective thoughts on how we can best tackle this insidious problem afflicting our communities that has obviously been allowed to fester unchallenged by people in positions of responsibility for far too long," he said.
"This skinny latte ideology suggests that many public figures, indigenous and non-indigenous, working in the indigenous industry have taken a lighter option to heavy lifting when tackling indigenous disadvantage - safe in the knowledge that results in their field are not aspirational outcomes that governments expect to see. "So instead of being proactive in the task at hand, many sadly are simply going through the process of ensuring their adherence to their duty statement is not brought into question, while accumulating their superannuation entitlements through the passage of time. "Many simply wait their turn for a comfortable middle-management job to present itself, without a worry in the world about the plight of the most marginalised in society."
"A bit like drinking a skinny latte, thinking you're addressing a weight issue - the more you drink it, the more you believe it. "Those who fall into this category know who they are because they must number in the tens of thousands - as the problems at the grassroots level continue to escalate unabated."
Mr Hagan put to the audience that a possible answer to solving the problems of child abuse and domestic violence in rural and remote communities was to "shut them down". But he warned that most Australians would probably support the view adopted by senator Chris Evans in June 2006 that shutting down remote indigenous communities would only relocate the problems of violence and abuse. "Could it possibly be that indigenous Australians are a product of their inability to adapt, restructure and re-educate?" he asked.
Mr Hagan said he often marvelled at the way mainstream Australians openly assisted waves of immigrants from overseas "with empathetic outstretched hands". "Yet they (mainstream Australians) steadfastly brush us aside when we seek commensurate assistance for basic services," he said. "However, I do believe many of our mob are doing themselves a disservice by routinely singing the 'poor bugger me' tune, while apportioning blame to non-indigenous people for their insufferably slow progress in gaining social and economic parity."
Source
Posted by John Ray. For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. For a daily survey of Australian politics, see AUSTRALIAN POLITICS Also, don't forget your roundup of Obama news and commentary at OBAMA WATCH
‘Encouraged’ deepen their knowledge of Islam
I wonder if the translation covers the bit about his 9 yr-old wife? I wonder if the police are told that if Muslim man decides to take a young girl as his wife, then they need to look the other way? I recently heard Mark Steyn talking about the fastest population transformation in history that is happening right now in our time. Off course the left are quick to dismiss folks like Steyn as trouble makers, racists and xenophobes, nothing to see, all kumbaya, move along folks. We are told that Islam is peace and tolerance, we are told that multiculturalism is working, it's all peace and harmony, all cultures are equal and it's just a couple of angry racists stirring up trouble. But there is a disconnect between what we are told by the elites and the reality that's pretty much staring us in the face, if only we acknowledge it.Brisbane Times - Police in Amsterdam will get half the purchase price back if they buy the Koran to deepen their knowledge of Islam, a spokesman said today. A new translation had just appeared in Dutch and officers on the beat were being encouraged [MK - I think we all know when they say 'encourage', it really means do it or else!] to read this and a biography of the Prophet Mohammed, Ebe van der Land said. "These two books will make for a better understanding and knowledge of the Koran and the life of the prophet," van der Land said.
Here in the west, we have a lot of people from a lot of places around the world, people we are told will westernize when they come to live here in the west, so there is nothing to fear. This is true for a lot of them, however if there is nothing to fear because the immigrants will westernize and adapt, why are the Dutch police encouraged to 'deepen their knowledge of Islam', why are Korans being subsidized for them? Judging by the waning of Christianity in Europe, why aren't they encouraged to deepen their knowledge of Christianity? Why aren't they encouraged to deepen their knowledge of the Bhagawat Geeta, the Tanakh? Are there only Muslims and ex-Christians over in Europe now? Sounds like dhimmitude to me folks and it sure sounds like we're being deceived, lied to and sold out by those who purport to lead us.
U.S. Memorial Day
The world of blogs picks up lots of stuff that you would never read in the old media. An excellent example is a post by John Rubery who has marked Memorial Day by a tribute to the Australians who have fought alongside Americans in America's wars since 1900 -- even in Vietnam and currently now in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Australians celebrate their equivalent of Memorial Day on April 25th. And our ANZAC day is undoubtedly our most solemn national day. So it is easy for Australians to understand how Americans feel on their similar occasion. You can read what I wrote last April 25th here.
John Rubery is a "blogging friend" of mine so I think I should warn him about the Australian sense of humour if he ever comes to Australia. Australians have great fun with nicknames. There is a short stocky Australian mining magnate who is referred to even in the media as "Twiggy" (after a very thin British model of yesteryear); Redheads are commonly addressed as "Bluey" and I have even heard German immigrants with the Christian name of "Heinz" referred to as "57 varieties". So if he were ever here for long John Rubery would undoubedly be addressed by his friends as "Rubbery".
Posted by John Ray. For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. For a daily survey of Australian politics, see AUSTRALIAN POLITICS Also, don't forget your roundup of Obama news and commentary at OBAMA WATCH
ABC Indoctrinating your children
News.com.au - AN ABC website has been accused of portraying farmers and forestry workers as evil, and telling kids how much carbon they can produce before they die. The Planet Slayer website, which can be accessed via the science section on the ABC home page, also demonises people who eat meat and those involved in the nuclear industry, a Senate estimates committee heard. The site has several features including a cartoon series, Adventures of Greena, and a tool called Prof Schpinkee's Greenhouse Calculator to help kids work out their carbon footprint.
Balls! How about we show a cartoon depicting greenies and hippies as bloody morons with no brains, which isn't far from the truth and just claim it's not designed to offend and has been done in an irreverent way and I'd like to see Mr Scott suck that down. Nice to know our taxes are being put to good use by the slimeball left, it's in their nature to bite the hand that feeds after all. Never let your guard down around leftists folks, especially around your children, if they can't kill them before they're born, they'll do their best to turn them into mindless socialist morons.The calculator lets users compare their own carbon output to the "average Aussie greenhouse pig" and estimates at what age a person should die so they don't use more than their fair share of the Earth's resources. Too much carbon production causes a cartoon pig to explode, leaving behind a pool of blood. [snip] ABC managing director Mark Scott said the site was not designed to offend certain quarters of the community but to engage children in environmental issues. "The site has been developed to appeal to children and its been done in an irreverent way ... to make it engaging," Mr Scott said.
Monday, May 26, 2008
"Big Oil"
I hadn't realized, until the hearings on energy that were held this week in House and Senate committees, that the United States doesn't have any big oil companies. It's true: the largest American oil company, Exxon Mobil, is only the 14th largest in the world, and is dwarfed by the really big oil companies--all owned by foreign governments or government-sponsored monopolies--that dominate the world's oil supply.
This graph tells the story; you can barely see the American oil companies as minor players on the right side of the chart. The chart was presented to the House committee by Chevron:
With 94% of the world's oil supply locked up by foreign governments, most of which are hostile to the United States, the relatively puny American oil companies do not have access to enough crude oil to significantly affect the market and help bring prices down. Thus, Exxon Mobil, a small oil company, buys 90% of the crude oil that it refines for the U.S. market from the big players, i.e, mostly-hostile foreign governments. The price at the U.S. pump is rising because the price the big oil companies charge Exxon Mobil and the other small American companies for crude oil is going up.
This is obviously a tough situation for the American consumer. The irony is that it doesn't have to be that way. The United States--unlike, say, France--actually has vast petroleum reserves. It would be possible for American oil companies to develop those reserves, play a far bigger role in international markets, and deliver gas at the pump to American consumers at a much lower price, while creating many thousands of jobs for Americans. This would be infinitely preferable to shipping endless billions of dollars to Saudi Arabia, Russia and Venezuela.
So, why doesn't it happen? Because the Democratic Party--aided, sadly, by a handful of Republicans--deliberately keeps gas prices high and our domestic oil companies small by putting most of our reserves off limits to development. China is now drilling in the Caribbean, but our own companies are barred by law from developing large oil fields off the coasts of Florida and California. Enormous shale oil deposits in the Rocky Mountain states could go a long way toward supplying American consumers' needs, but the Democratic Congress won't allow those resources to be developed. ANWR contains vast petroleum reserves, but we don't know how vast, because Congress, not wanting the American people to know how badly its policies are hurting our economy, has made it illegal to explore and map those reserves, let alone develop them.
In short, all Americans are paying a terrible price for the Democratic Party's perverse energy policies.
Source
Posted by John Ray. For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. For a daily survey of Australian politics, see AUSTRALIAN POLITICS Also, don't forget your roundup of Obama news and commentary at OBAMA WATCH
Announcement
Haloscan has carked it, commenting is lying in pieces, sorry folks. Technicians are hard at work, as we speak.
Image thanks to Flickr.
Update - In case you didn't know it's back now, I kicked those technicians back into doing some actual work. ;)
Another family destroyed by knives
I remember a while back I was looking around on the Emerson Knives website and I happened to read some of the testimonials from happy customers, people who carry knives. Here is one example that I still remember.Daily Mail - It was a message from the depths of grief. The shattered father of stabbed Harry Potter actor Robert Knox warned: 'With knives there are no winners, only losers. 'If you are a person who carries a knife, think about the consequences and, for my son's sake, don't do it.' [snip] Both parents spoke of their last meetings with their son. In a tragic irony, Mr Knox's last words were to warn him about the dangers of being caught up in the culture of carrying a weapon,
"Hello, first off I want to say thank you for saving my life, I was jumped by a group of punks not to long ago! They had weapons and a video camera (what kind of sick people watch this stuff)!! Long story short I reached for my Combat Karambit and the Wave action pulling the blade open and the loud CLICK was a wonderful sound!!! The look on those bastards face was priceless, they had me outnumbered and out weaponed but I guess the look of someone who refuses to be a victim armed with an Emerson Knife made me a force to be reckoned with. They ran off and one of the most terrifying things that's ever happened to me ended as fast as it started. Thank you and your staff! You should all be proud of what you do!" T.B.
My condolences to the families who have lost their sons and I'm not trying to attack them, but I cannot sit back and say nothing when lives are being lost. Once again the weapon is being blamed and once again the next logical step is more laws that will only guarantee that another family will be destroyed by an attacker with a knife or a gun. You can blame the knife and the gun all you want, you can demand more laws, more jail time, more police, shed all the tears you want. We've also banned guns and knives, you can't carry either to defend yourself, we've shed tears, we've appealed as well, we've demanded tough laws.Daily Mail - Fighting back tears, he recalled: 'We had a chat about the problems of people carrying knives and steering clear of problematical little areas that you could put yourself into.' [snip] In a bleak coincidence, Rob was a member of the same Sidcup rugby club as 16-year-old altar boy Jimmy Mizen, who was murdered two weeks ago in nearby Lee, South East London. The two families liveless than six miles from each other. Last night Jimmy's parents Barry and Margaret Mizen and their eldest son Danny said they were horrified to hear another young life had been lost in a knife attack.
The police can search and confiscate without a warrant, they crack down and all that. We've had gun buy-backs and amnesties and none of us are allowed to carry a weapon to defend ourselves. But still people are getting shot and stabbed, bashed and raped, beaten and killed. As long as we blame the knife and the gun, we are only ensuring that your son, your daughter, your wife, your husband, your brother, your sister will never be allowed to carry either when the bad guy comes and he has one. Giving them a knife or a gun won't guarantee their life, but if you don't allow them to carry one, you are only stacking the odds against them. Would you rather they were T.B. or one of the others?
Sunday, May 25, 2008
Restrictions on how Australian blacks may be portrayed?
Free speech, anyone? We read:
"A lawyer this week will seek "substantial damages" for an Aboriginal woman who believes she was racially vilified in a PhD student's film. The Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission accepted a racial hatred complaint filed on behalf of May Dunne, 52, a grandmother from Boulia in central-western Queensland.
In the controversial PhD film Laughing at the Disabled: Creating Comedy that Confronts, Offends and Entertains Mrs Dunne was depicted as an intoxicated Aboriginal woman in a stereotypical manner, the complaint says. The film - renamed Laughing at the Disabled - by Queensland University of Technology PhD student Michael Noonan, showed Mrs Dunne in a hotel and cuddling a disabled man. The commission has named QUT; Mr Noonan; the Spectrum Organisation, which partly funded the film; its chief executive officer, John Hart, who helped film the footage; and Disability Services Queensland as respondents to the complaint....
Ted Watson, an advocate acting on Mrs Dunne's behalf, accused Mr Noonan and QUT of breaking all protocols for conducting research involving Aboriginal people... He said the film also breached recognised protocols for the filming of Aboriginal people.
Source
The High Court of Australia does recognize a right to free speech so I think this claim would fail if it went very far up the judicial tree.
Posted by John Ray. For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. For a daily survey of Australian politics, see AUSTRALIAN POLITICS Also, don't forget your roundup of Obama news and commentary at OBAMA WATCH
You're paying for a 12yr-old girl's sex change
Gee, aren't we taxpaying schmucks just such giving folk. I guess it's simply too much to ask the Judge, the endocrinologist, the psychiatrist, the family counsellor, the Victoria Government watchdog and the lawyer acting on the child's behalf to cough up their wages for this eh. Why should they, when they can help themselves to taxpayers money? So there you go kids, threaten a bit of 'self-harm' and you'll get your way, I want a penis or a vagina, bigger breasts even, give it to me now, or else!Courier Mail - A FAMILY court judge has allowed a 12-year-old girl to start a taxpayer-funded sex change procedure - in the face of objections from the child's own father. The girl, who cannot be named, has begun court-approved hormone treatment in the first step towards a total gender switch. Orders by the Family Court of Victoria also permit the girl to apply for a new birth certificate, passport and Medicare card in a boy's name. The application to allow the hormone treatment was lodged by the girl's mother.
An endocrinologist, a psychiatrist, a family counsellor, a Victoria Government watchdog and a lawyer acting on the child's behalf all supported the plan. Only her father, who lives interstate, opposed the proposed sex change, though he did not attend the final court hearing and could not afford [I'm sure if he had been for it, the taxpayer would have been made to pay for that] to send a lawyer on his behalf. [snip] The court was told early intervention was needed because the child was stressed and anxious at the prospect of starting her period and had threatened self-harm.
Unfortunately, poor diddums will have to wait till she/he turns 18 for the fake penis, which I take it you lot will be forking out for as well. You can hardly expect him/her to fund her own lifestyle choices you know, it's after all your fault isn't it. I wonder what will happen if at 30, he suddenly decides this whole penis thing ain't all that flash and wants to become a she again. Are we going to have to fork out for that as well, don't see why not. Well get to work now, somebody's got to pay for all this.
Saturday, May 24, 2008
The corruption of public "service"
"The Boston Globe recently reported that retirements are suddenly spiking at the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority. Why? Because a new law taking effect in 2009 slightly reduces benefits for workers who retire before age 65. The major change: As of next year, retirees will have to pay 15 percent of their health insurance premium. Current retirees get free healthcare for life. That's in addition to their pensions, of course. MBTA workers can retire with a full pension after just 23 years on the job, at which point they are perfectly free to find another government job and get right back on the public payroll.
Such double-dipping is common in the public sector, as are so many other lucrative perks that government employees take for granted and most private employees can only dream about. "The nation is dividing into two classes of workers: those who have government benefits and those who don't," USA Today noted in 2007. "The gap is accelerating in every way -- pensions, medical benefits, retirement ages." According to the Congressional Research Service, the pension collected by the average private-sector retiree is worth less than half of what a typical government retiree can expect. If you don't have your snout in the government trough, you can expect to work ever-longer hours and pay ever-higher taxes and fees to support those who do.
Those, to mention just a single example, like Michael Mulhern. He is the 40-something former MBTA general manager who "retired" in 2005, began collecting a $130,000 annual pension, then hired on as head of the MBTA retirement fund, a job that pays about $225,000 annually. Mulhern's total take: more than $350,000 a year. He is just one illustration of a huge problem growing more urgent by the day -- the staggering sums that taxpayers are shelling out for the care and feeding of avaricious public employees. In Massachusetts and nationwide, a backlash is coming.
Source
Posted by John Ray. For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. For a daily survey of Australian politics, see AUSTRALIAN POLITICS Also, don't forget your roundup of Obama news and commentary at OBAMA WATCH
'Islanders drain on economy' report under investigation
"An academic report describing Pacific Islanders as a drain on the economy is to be investigated by the Race Relations Commissioner.
...The report said Pacific Island immigrants were less productive and less likely to contribute to economic growth.
They had the highest unemployment in every age group, were less likely to start businesses, had lower rates of self-employment and were over-represented in crime statistics."
What the hell does this have to do with the Race Relations Commissioner? The report is either true--or not.
If true, then there's no case to answer. If inaccurate, it's a matter for the University to sort out.
Not very safe for academics to go against the prevailing multiculti orthodoxies these days, is it?
Friday, May 23, 2008
Has the GOP lost its mojo?
Excerpt:
This is supposed to be liberalism's year. We hear it from all sources on all points of the political spectrum. A miserable and disillusioned electorate, an energized base, an opposition both confused and demoralized - the 2008 election, we're assured, is the left's to lose.... This contention has become so widespread that it's achieved the status of a received truth, with the danger of becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. But there's one problem with it: if the American left is in such great shape, why are all their programs collapsing? ...
Iraq has set the tone. The American left intended to ride the Iraq "disaster" to victory on all fronts, giving them a lock on political power unseen since the beginning of the Reagan era. That dream ended with the success of General David Petraeus's surge strategy, which routed Al Queda in Iraq with humiliating swiftness and thoroughness. Mention of Iraq then became scarce in the media and among left-of-center politicians.
There was a flurry of excitement a few weeks ago with "failure" of the Iraqi government's effort against the Shi'ite militias in Basra and Sadr City. But it lasted only days until it became apparent that something else was going on: that government forces were in fact engaged in a "cut and reduce" strategy, in which limited objectives are taken one after the other, rather than the swift, once-and-for-all sweep characteristic of Western forces. This is a common technique in Eastern warfare (Byzantium was conquered in exactly this fashion), and one that appears to work: Moqtada al-Sadr, the chief irritant, has steadily given ground, and the recent "truce", utilizing the good offices of Iranian middlemen, was effectively dictated by the Maliki government. Iraq is one step closer to pacification, and once again unsuitable for public discussion among decent people. (The American media has consistently misread Iraqi intentions and capabilities throughout this war, discussing the government and people as if they were average Americans and events were taking place in the area around Dubuque.)
But it didn't end with Iraq. In fact, the past year has seen a general collapse of liberal programs unmatched since the 60s and one that may well be unprecedented in such a short span of time. Global Warming was one of the more successful efforts at Green propaganda over the past decade, one that has paid a number of dividends (including financial). The science underlying warming was simplistic and badly worked out, and could not be expected to prevail for any extended period (e.g., the claim that CO2 was a major driver of global temperature, when in fact such elements as solar radiation, earth's orbital variations, and water vapor are all more important).
The facts caught up with global warming last year. It became common knowledge that the earth's temperature had remained constant since 1998, a problem compounded by a sudden drop in global temperature of nearly a degree and a half Fahrenheit. Neither development was predicted by any climate researcher's model, nor could they be made to fit any accepted warming theory. The only alternative was the desperate adaption of an argument derived from a recent scientific paper released by the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences, contending that the Atlantic MultiDecadal Oscillation is holding temperatures down and will continue to do so until at least 2015. (Just in time to save the polar bears, too.) Though warming advocates will not admit it, this represents a surrender flag -- what kind of overwhelming, universal climatic determinant is overthrown by a single oceanic variation? A more convincing explanation lies in the "quiet sun" thesis -- the contention that we're moving into a lengthy period of reduced solar activity. A few more cold winters will tell the tale.
Ethanol -- in its own way an offshoot of the warming panic, ethanol represents the latest "solution" to an environmental menace. None of these have ever been made to work (past environmental problems have almost universally been solved through conventional means), and ethanol is no exception. In short form: mandates for ethanol in gasoline to fight "global warming" and ease U.S. oil imports. The percentage of corn so used grew to one-third of last year's harvest. Coming during a shift in global agricultural markets and amid several unrelated agricultural difficulties, the ethanol mandates triggered a worldwide rise in grain prices that nearly doubled the cost of food in the U.S. and, far worse, created near-famine conditions in a number of marginal nations.
The "Recession" -- like global warming, the Great Recession of 2008 is a catastrophe that has not lived up to its billing. The economy is often a winner for American liberals (somewhat mysteriously, considering their actual history of economic ineptitude). Talk of recession began last summer, in the midst of a 4.9% economic growth rate, and continued through the new year. Signs of economic distress due to loose credit policies were taken as clear evidence of the "recession's" arrival. George Soros and both Democratic candidates -- Madame Hillary in particular -- hailed it as something along the lines of the Second Coming. They were echoed by almost the entire legacy media (Particularly the AP's Jeannine Aversa, who has been awarded legendary status by NewsBusters and the Wall Street Journal's Best of the Web as the Cassandra of the third millennium. There wasn't a single dip that Aversa didn't see as a "chasm", a bad day in the market that wasn't a "nightmare", a slowdown that didn't become a "collapse". Somebody should give her a reality show.)
A classic recession was unlikely for a number of reasons: recessions are rarities during wartime. It would also be unusual for one to occur little more than five years after the last. Nor do recessions usually spring from weaknesses in a single sector. And as the year has progressed, so the specter of a full-blown recession has receded. The growth rate remains an anemic but still positive 0.6. The unemployment rate remains below average historical levels at a little over 5% The Dow Jones industrials has consistently remained in the 12,000 range, inching its way back up to 13,000.
We could go one to other, less critical ploys: the claim for mounting American unpopularity on the international scene, which doesn't look quite so compelling with the elections of Sarkozy, Merkel, and Berlusconi. Or the very public and utterly unwarranted humiliation of Colombia and its government, which, with the exposure of Democratic ally Hugo Chavez as aggressor and terror sponsor, could very easily be turned into an issue.
This is what the GOP is running against: people who want to lose a war, who are keeping alive an environmentalist scam, who (as a byproduct of that scam) have created conditions of serious hunger across the world, and who would not mind seeing a recession in the U.S., no matter how many people it hurts. How do you lose against a hand like this? You lose by throwing your cards down and collapsing under the table whining about being forced to play at all. That's what the GOP is doing -- it can't be described in any other way.....
More here
Note for Australian readers: "GOP" stands for Grand Old Party -- i.e. The Republicans. That took me a while to figure out many years ago so maybe some readers here may be similarly puzzled.
Posted by John Ray. For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. For a daily survey of Australian politics, see AUSTRALIAN POLITICS Also, don't forget your roundup of Obama news and commentary at OBAMA WATCH
Art? Pig's bum it is!
SMH - The opening night of an exhibition by the photographer Bill Henson featuring images of naked children was dramatically cancelled after police visited the Paddington gallery to investigate child pornography claims. The future of the exhibition at the Roslyn Oxley9 gallery, which featured images of a girl and a boy, aged 12 and 13 - some of which also appear on the gallery's website - is now in doubt. [snip]
Yeah sure, next it'll be children engaged in sex acts paraded around as 'Art'. In previous times, these slimeballs would be tarred and feathered before being turfed out of town. The Sydney Morning Herald is conducting a poll on it and apparently 55% of people think it's kinda OK to have pictures of naked children in a gallery and presumably on the internet. Shame on them. Incidentally the pictures were still on the gallerys website yesterday, but this morning it's not working anymore, probably can't handle all the worlds pedophiles swamping it to check out the 'art'.The gallery's owner, Roslyn Oxley, said she had been showing similar work by Henson since 1990 "and they have never offended people". Asked by Channel Seven if she would let her daughter pose for Henson, she said: "She's been in some of his shots." [snip] One artist who attended the exhibition opening, Eugenia Raskopoulos, said the cancellation was "censorship of the worst kind".
Going on 16 years of leftist criminal coddling
The bathroom walls are completely covered in graffiti and vandals have even burnt the ceiling with cigarette lighters. Benches outside the court have also been ruined, with initials and swear words carved into the wood. When NSW Premier Morris Iemma opened the complex it was praised for its state-of-the-art facilities and high-tech security.
Life for criminals, rascals, scumbags and slimeballs is always soft and better under leftists.
Thursday, May 22, 2008
Update on a real warrior
The pregnant wife of a brave Marine - whose brush with death during a gun battle with the Taliban was captured in a dramatic photo - told FOXNews.com that she feared an early trip to the delivery room when she realized the leatherneck under fire was her husband.
A Reuters photographer captured Sgt. Bee's very close shave during a May 18 firefight in the Garmsir district of Helmand Province, Afghanistan, where U.S. and British troops have mounted an offensive since April 28 against a supply route used by the Taliban to funnel insurgents and weapons along the Pakistan border.
Bobbie, expecting her first child - a boy - said her 26-year-old husband is a "poker-face guy" who "lives for the Marine Corps." She spoke with him Wednesday morning and he reassured her he was "perfectly safe."
Much was made of the photographs, which showed Sgt. Bee defending a mud wall without a helmet. Bobbie said her husband told her he was changing into fresh clothes when the company came under gunfire. "He said he turned around and did what he had to do."
I am glad he and his new family are OK. Semper Fi Sgt. Bee and keep that helmet handy.
More here
Posted by John Ray. For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. For a daily survey of Australian politics, see AUSTRALIAN POLITICS Also, don't forget your roundup of Obama news and commentary at OBAMA WATCH
Leftists 3, Children 0
Oh yeah, that pesky "need for a father" clause had to go. It trampled all over other peoples "need for a lifestyle".BRITAIN has forged landmark new rights for homosexual parents after the House of Commons unexpectedly threw out proposals that would have required fertility clinics to consider a child's "need for a father" before providing treatment.
The father's role will now be replaced by the "need for supportive parenting" and both partners recognised as parents on birth certificates when lesbian couples conceive with donated sperm, or gay men use surrogacy.
It was a bit more graphic than that. The Australian leaves out this bit:British MPs have voted to keep the time limit for abortions at 24 weeks, during the first major debate on the issue for nearly 20 years.
Following impassioned debate, the House of Commons voted by clear margins against a series of proposals to cut the time limit at which a woman can have a termination to either 22, 20, 16 or 12 weeks.
Britain has one of the highest abortion rates, and latest cutoff dates for the procedure, in the EU.
...
Nadine Dorries, a Conservative MP and former nurse who proposed the amendment to reduce the limit to 20 weeks, gave a graphic account of how she had witnessed a “botched abortion which became a live birth”.
“I knew at that moment while I stood with that little boy in my arms that one day I would have the opportunity to stand and defend babies like him because what I thought we were committing that day was murder,” she said.
Don't worry, Pro-Late-Abortion-Choice supporters. There's plenty of rationalising being done on your behalf:"As I stood and looked in that cardboard bed pan this little boy was gasping through mucus and amniotic fluid for his breath.
"I stood with him in my arms for seven minutes while he gasped for his breath and a botched abortion, which became a live birth, became a death seven minutes later."
By "alternative arrangements," she doesn't mean they'll stop seeking late term abortions but they'll travel overseas to a country with relaxed standards. Sort of like those in Britain now.But Health Minister Dawn Primarolo, backing the status quo, warned that reducing the limit could force the small number of women who seek late abortions to seek alternative arrangements.
I wouldn't suggest the debate was between ethics and science, but rather between ethics, science, and Leftists' need to feel good about themselves. In such a debate, ethics doesn't rate a chance.BRITAIN'S parliament has voted to allow the creation of human-animal embryos that some scientists say are vital to research cures for diseases but critics, including the Catholic Church, argue pervert the course of nature.
In a separate vote, parliament also decided to allow parents of children suffering serious diseases to use in-vitro fertilisation to select "saviour siblings" who can act as donors for transplants to save their sick brothers and sisters.
Parliament defeated an amendment to ban inter-species research - in which human DNA is injected into cells derived from animals - by 336 to 176 after hours of impassioned debate on ethics versus science.
Additional Info on JR's Post "You Can't Soak the Rich" (See below)
To add some additional perspective to JR's post take a look of the following graph depicting US GDP and compare it to the graph in JR's post.
Source
Notice how as the tax rate dropped GDP went up and, therefore, along with it gross tax revenues increased as well.
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
You Can't Soak the Rich
Head of research at H.C. Wainwright & Co. Economics Inc. David Ranson:
"Kurt Hauser is a San Francisco investment economist who, 15 years ago, published fresh and eye-opening data about the federal tax system. His findings imply that there are draconian constraints on the ability of tax-rate increases to generate fresh revenues. I think his discovery deserves to be called Hauser's Law, because it is as central to the economics of taxation as Boyle's Law is to the physics of gases. Yet economists and policy makers are barely aware of it.
"Like science, economics advances as verifiable patterns are recognized and codified. But economics is in a far earlier stage of evolution than physics. Unfortunately, it is often poisoned by political wishful thinking, just as medieval science was poisoned by religious doctrine. Taxation is an important example.
"The interactions among the myriad participants in a tax system are as impossible to unravel as are those of the molecules in a gas, and the effects of tax policies are speculative and highly contentious. Will increasing tax rates on the rich increase revenues, as Barack Obama hopes, or hold back the economy, as John McCain fears? Or both?
"Mr. Hauser uncovered the means to answer these questions definitively. On this page in 1993, he stated that "No matter what the tax rates have been, in postwar America tax revenues have remained at about 19.5% of GDP." What a pity that his discovery has not been more widely disseminated.....
"The data show that the tax yield has been independent of marginal tax rates over this period, but tax revenue is directly proportional to GDP. So if we want to increase tax revenue, we need to increase GDP."
Source
Posted by John Ray. For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. For a daily survey of Australian politics, see AUSTRALIAN POLITICS Also, don't forget your roundup of Obama news and commentary at OBAMA WATCH
A Rabbi & a Transsexual walk into a bar
Oh alright, the bit about them walking into a bar was just a cheap joke, moving on. If he had been a Christian or just an ordinary white fellow, I think the mad left would have hounded him out of Britain unless he repented and cleaned up after the next Mardi Gras. Maybe next time don't send Mr/Miss Sherdley around to the peaceful and tolerant Muslims, you never know what could happen. Don't forget, it's those violent Christians you have to worry about, but you can send him/her to them, just don't take your eye off them though. While I'm on the subject of peace and tolerance, get a load of those Jews, I mean what is it with this fellow, he should be more careful, walking into a knife like that!Daily Mail - But Emma Sherdley is not exactly all woman. Until a few years ago she was a married father-of-two called Andrew. She is, though, in the middle of treatment to change gender and has the legal paperwork to prove it. But that wasn't enough to satisfy one client who claimed he had been shortchanged when he booked a female instructor to teach his wife how to drive.
He phoned the Laugh 'n' Pass driving school threatening to sue after Miss Sherdley, 42, turned up for the lesson. 'You have sent me a man. Send me a proper female. How dare you send a man with a deep voice,' he told Joanne Dixon, who runs the school in West Yorkshire. The man, a Muslim from the Meadowhall district of Sheffield who has not been named, claimed the company deliberately sent a man disguised as a woman.
Like the fellow in Britain, it's funny how the Jewish Rabbi is named but his attacker who has been convicted of a serious crime is just "Sahed A." Must be to protect them from those vigilante Anglican mobs, just be grateful for the wisdom of the authorities, it's a thankless job but someone has to maintain “community cohesion” and “feelings of public reassurance” you know. Would it be too much to ask that Sahed A. be deported back to his vastly superior homeland when he's done serving his time? It's a long stretch I know, but I think it might just prevent any more clumsy Jews & Christians walking into knives, sticks, bats and into the path of speeding bullets.Deutsche Welle - A Frankfurt court jailed a German man of Afghan origin for three-and-a-half years Tuesday, May 20, after finding him guilty of a knife attack on an Orthodox rabbi in the city last year. [snip] Sahed A. shouted "Bloody Jew, I'm going to kill you," as he stabbed Zalman Gurevich in the abdomen, witnesses said.
ALP lefties fawning over a pedophile!
She and state MP Robert Coombs have written a letter urging government MP'S [yeah, do the right thing, where's the fair go, it's because of the victims that Milton is bankrupt now] to donate 100 dollars each to a fund for the family. [snip] Mr Coombs, who took Orkopoulos's seat after the 2007 election, said Orkopoulos's wife and daughter were unfortunate victims of his double life. [boohoo, so unfair] "They have had to sell their home," he told News Ltd. [It's just terribly unfair, pass the tissues]
"In the true Labor way we have rallied around to rattle the tin." [to support the family of a pedophile, nice one lefties] The club will also a fundraiser raffle night with a flat screen tv [you beauty] and a four-night stay [first prize for helping a pedophile, yay] at a Swansea hotel as prizes. But victims groups are outraged - Ken Marslew from Enough is Enough says the focus should be on securing compensation for the real victims.
And so they should be, are the Labor party holding any bake sales for the boys this scumbag raped, are they holding any raffles to try and compensate them? Anyone in the Australian Labor Party give a flying F"£% about them? These leftist snakes are probably angry at the victims for coming forward and sending their chum Milton to jail and bankrupting him in the process.
Just remember who you voted for NSW, you voted for this lot, many of them supported this slimeball during his trial, many of them rallied around him and now they're rattling the tin for him. Rest assured if it were up to them, I'm sure Milton would be out raping boys again! What a shameful, disgusting nest of sniveling slimeballs. Remember this at the next election folks, cos they sure won't.
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
Speech to American Jewish Committee by The Hon. Alexander Downer MP, on the occasion of the conferral of the Ramer Award for Excellence in Diplomacy
The speech was delivered Thursday May 1 2008 at the 102nd annual dinner of the American Jewish Committee. Mr Downer is a former Australian Foreign Minister in the Howard government. I think the speech is comparable with the excellent speech to the Knesset recently delivered by George Bush.
The speech contrasts greatly with the outpouring of dishonesty and pure venom emanating from the Leftist end of the mainstream Australian media. See here, for instance. And our public broadcaster bewailed the fact that the venom concerned was not published more widely! Yet the reporting in the article concerned is so unbalanced that it is not even good propaganda.
"It is a great honour to be presented with this award by the American Jewish community. Indeed, I feel humbled that you have chosen me to be the recipient of an award which commemorates the extra-ordinary contribution to the American Jewish community by the Ramers.
The Australian and American Jewish communities have a lot in common. In both cases Jews have found in our countries the peace and tolerance which was denied them over the centuries in Europe and the Middle East: but they have not only found freedom and tolerance in Australia and America , they have contributed mightily to our two societies.
You haven't yet elected a Jewish President whereas we have had two Jewish Governors' General, the Governor General being the de facto head of state in Australia . But in both our cases the contribution Jewish people have made to science, academia, literature the arts and business has been magnificent.
An embattled, denigrated and persecuted people has come to our shores and in finding freedom has said 'let's build this place'. It's part of what makes our societies great.
In 1918, Australians and Americans went into battle together for the first time. We've done so many times since. It was at the Battle of Le Hamel, this being the first major American military action on European soil. Those of you with a sense of history may think the Americans fought under the redoubtable General Pershing but in this their first major battle in Europe they fought under the Australian commander, General Sir John Monash. Monash by the way was Jewish - so you won't be surprised to learn we won the battle!
In many ways, Australians and Americans are the most natural of allies. Our countries were settled by peoples fleeing persecution and discrimination and who sought the opportunity to achieve prosperity away from the class based elitism of the old world. We grew to love a life of individual freedom and to place equal value on every person.
We confronted and still confront three great adversaries over the last 100 years. We fought the bloody and heartless totalitarianism of fascism and we won. We fought the intolerance, cruelty and incompetence of communism and we won. And today we fight the fanaticism and ideological insanity of Islamic extremism - and we must win that fight as well.
Islamic extremism has several manifestations. There is Al Qaeda and its Asian variant, Jemaah Islamia. There is the Iranian theocracy. There is the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan .
These people are haters and many of them are killers. They hate our open, free societies that respect men and women equally. They want to destroy democracy and equality of opportunity in Iraq , in Afghanistan , in Indonesia and in Israel . They want to destroy modernity and plunge the world back into the Middle Ages. They want Taliban-style regimes not just in Afghanistan but throughout the world, particularly the Muslim world: regimes where girls are denied schooling, where the most powerful are chosen by a few zealots not the people, where the tools of modernity are disbanded and poverty becomes endemic.
Our great countries stand in their way. This is a tough fight because we are confronting people who have no concern for human life. No act of barbarism is beyond these people. To win we need to be clear eyed. This war is not popular with everyone, it's expensive and it's costing the lives of our young men and women.
But please, I implore you, contemplate the alternative: Victory for Al Qaeda in Sunni Iraq, the return of the Taliban in Afghanistan , Hamas in total control of both Gaza and the West Bank, a Hezbollah-dominated government in Lebanon and what then? The Moslem Brotherhood taking control in Egypt, the Gulf States swept up in the euphoria of a resurgent, extremist Wahabiism. Would newly democratic Indonesia - the world's largest Islamic country succumb to extremism? Would New York again and Sydney become front line cities in the great ideological battle of our time?
And let's think about democratic, freedom-loving Israel . For those of us who live in Australia or America it is hard to conceive of life in a tiny country a fraction the size of our own, living cheek by jowl with people who want to destroy you.
It is easy for Australians, Americans and Europeans in the relative security of our homes to lecture the Israeli government to be more accommodating with its enemies, to criticise Israel for erecting a security barrier, to complain that Prime Minister Olmet won't hug a Hamas leader, to deplore Israeli attacks on rocket bases in Southern Lebanon and Gaza and Israeli attacks on Hamas terrorist leaders in Gaza and the West Bank. It's easy to lecture. But it is harder to understand.
One of the lessons of history is to understand your adversary. The West professes with genuine sincerity to believe in Israel 's right to exist within secure borders. It argues for the two state solution as the only viable option for peace in the Middle East . They are right to do so. It is the only option.
But what some in the West, including a good number of Americans and Australians, don't understand is there are many in the Middle East who don't accept the two-state solution and Israel 's right to exist as a separate State. Hamas and Hezbollah believe in the destruction of the Israeli State . That is bad enough. But behind them lies the power, the finance and the weapons of Iran . When President Ahmadinejad says he wants to wipe Israel off the face of the earth, he means it. He believes there should be no Jewish State of Israel.
Demands that Israel negotiate with those who wish to destroy it are unreasonable and worse: those demands weaken Israel 's diplomatic strength and help to undermine community support for Israel in Western countries.
Indeed I will go further: there has been a constant stream of criticism of Israel particularly from Europe and elements of the United Nations for each and every one of the defensive measures it takes. Building a security barrier is wrong, destroying terrorist bases is wrong, attacking terrorist leaders and planners is wrong, trying to stop missile attacks on villages in Northern and Southern Israel is wrong. It doesn't leave Israel with too many options.
These criticisms have been particularly vehement in much of the Western media. That has had an effect on public opinion which has become increasingly hostile to Israel. But Israel is a democracy. No Israeli leader can turn his or her back on the struggle against those who wish to destroy Israel . The world needs to respect that.
We also need to send out again and again a simple and clear message to the international community that peace in the Middle East can never come until Israelis are allowed to sleep in peace. That message needs to be transmitted not just in Europe and America. Asia needs to hear and understand that message as well.
Today, as the balance of global power shifts to the Asia Pacific region, your campaigns to ensure people understand the truth of the Middle East conflict must extend to China, Japan, India, Korea and Indonesia. Those countries are going to count for a great deal more in international fora in the future. But at present they are hearing just one side of the argument. When I have spoken about the Middle East in Asia I have felt somewhat lonely!
When I first heard last year of the destruction of a North Korean-built nuclear facility in Syria , I thought its destruction was a triumph. It was a blow for peace. What horrors would have occurred years from now if that project had survived? But the existence of this project, discovered only at a relatively late stage of development, reminds us of the immense dangers Israelis live with day by day.
Ladies and Gentlemen, these are tough times.We have to prevail over Islamic extremism. Liberal democracy has, once more, to triumph. But it won't happen by wishing and hoping: it will only happen through courage and action.
I know what your public are saying, I know there is pain at the costs both human and financial. But the true test of the statesman is to do the right thing by a troubled world, not play to a gallery.
Thank you again for this great honour: whether our political leaders are popular or not, our two great countries will always be the great beacons of hope to billions of people around the world who crave the liberties we are blessed to enjoy. And make no mistake, we stand shoulder to shoulder with the people of Israel in its struggle to secure peace and freedom".
Source
Posted by John Ray. For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. For a daily survey of Australian politics, see AUSTRALIAN POLITICS Also, don't forget your roundup of Obama news and commentary at OBAMA WATCH
The Marines have arrived!
A series of six photos show the Marine, wearing a T-shirt and fatigues but no combat helmet, ducking as insurgent gunfire tears through the top of a mud wall he's using for cover. Remarkably, the Marine escaped the gunfight without injury. “The insurgents are finding that every time they engage with the Marines, they lose,” Col. Peter Petronzio, commander of the 24th MEU, said in a statement issued May 10.
“The Marines are gaining ground every day and securing more of the routes through the district. The support we have received from our allied partners has contributed to our many successes thus far.” [snip] Troops have targeted this region on the Pakistan border that has served as a route for supplies and reinforcements for insurgents since April 28.
"Garmser is a planning, staging and logistics hub. Once lost it will mean a severe defeat for them," he told the agency. "That is why they are reinforcing with insurgents coming from other places, both north and south." Branco told the AFP that the insurgents had suffered "heavy" losses.
Geez, I sure hope they caught the marines off guard or something, otherwise what the hell was he doing without his gear on. These aren't losers and half-hearted tossbags, they're dealing with the Taliban here, these are hard bastards. They saw off them commie sumbitches back in the day, albeit with our help. Anyway, glad to hear the marines have arrived and are spreading the "love" around liberally.
So the British are helping out too eh, they should look up the Aussies too, make it a trifecta. Heck just get hold of our diggers and they can share tips and tricks, our boys have had experience with the Taliban and have been giving it back to them with compound interest recently. The cherry on top would be getting our SAS in on it too, it'll be open season on the Taliban then. Semper Fi goat humpers!
Burkas banned from Danish courts
Funny how we keep being told that this is the religion of peace and tolerance, we are told oh it's just a few extremists here and there. And they are only there because of those bastard righties who just won't sing kumbaya, there is no problem, nothing to see, true meaning of 'Jihad', move along. Yet every time something happens, diplomats are bracing and people are taping the windows. Embassies are put on alert, cops are getting the armor on, politicians are stretching their backs and preparing speeches to beg, grovel and sell out their subjects. Where does this conflicting message come from, didn't they get the memo, are we being lied to, one of life's great mysteries folks.BBC - Danish diplomats to Muslim countries are preparing themselves for another wave of anti-Danish protests after the government announced it would bar judges from wearing headscarves and similar religious or political symbols in courtrooms. Although the ban will include crucifixes, Jewish skull caps and turbans as well as headscarves, the move is seen as being largely aimed at Muslim judges.
Coming back to the subject in question, I don't see a problem with this, I'm surprised there are actually female Muslim judges in Denmark. What happened to Sharia and a woman's testimony being of lower value? Does a muslim man who appears before a female judge get to request a different one, because how dare that cur judge him! One reason I can think of to ban this veil thing is who's know if the female judge is the judge she says she is. How do we know she isn't at home watching Judge Judy while some ball-busting leftist slimeball is standing in for her. Good on the Danes, let's see if the religion of peace and tolerance will surprise us, for once.
Monday, May 19, 2008
British police: OK to be a terrorist-supporter but not OK to reform and condemn terrorism
The Muslim-loving British police get madder every day
He was the poster boy for jihadist extremism who become one of its most vocal opponents, meeting a government minister and being offered Home Office funding to support his deradicalisation work among young Muslims. But now Hassan Butt is under arrest and at the centre of a high-stakes legal battle that goes to the core of Britain's fight against terrorism.
Hassan Butt sent dozens of British Muslims to training camps in Pakistan, raised money for the Taleban and once boasted of his desire "to kill or be killed for the sake of Allah". His words and deeds in support of Islamist terrorism were reported widely between 2001 and 2004, yet he was never charged with any offence.
After the suicide attacks on London in July 2005, he embarked on a lengthy and painful reexamination of his beliefs, eventually repudiating violence and emerging as a passionate critic of the cause he once espoused. Since early 2007 Mr Butt, 28, has denounced al-Qaeda in numerous newspaper articles, in international television interviews and in debate at the Cambridge Union. However, he has been labelled a traitor to Islam by his former comrades and in April last year was stabbed in the street by two assailants.
Ten days ago, as he prepared to board a flight to Pakistan, Mr Butt was arrested - and is still detained - under the Terrorism Act. If his rejection of violence was not a sham, then Greater Manchester Police - whose investigation is being carried out independently of Counter Terrorism Command at Scotland Yard - may be about to face more than a few tough questions.
More here
Posted by John Ray. For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. For a daily survey of Australian politics, see AUSTRALIAN POLITICS Also, don't forget your roundup of Obama news and commentary at OBAMA WATCH
Pro-Abortion Expression Permitted, Pro-Life Forbidden at a major Australian University
The Student Union at Queensland University have shown themselves to be opposed to differing opinion and free speech like many other secular universities around the world. The school's Newman Society has been censored and threatened with disaffiliation from the student union because union leaders believed the group's "pro-woman" and "pro-pregnancy" campaign took a stand against abortion. The poster and leaflets, displayed on a booth outside the student caf,, did not mention abortion but featured a photograph of an eight week old child in the womb, and offered compassion and support for young women who might find themselves facing the difficult challenge of an unplanned pregnancy.
Elise Nally, third-year applied science student and Newman Society secretary, said in a report by The Australian that the union's action was totalitarian and against free speech. "I'd like to know what laws we've broken," Nally said. "The union is acting like a dictator."
Joshua Young, president of the student union, gave this explanation for the union's actions against Catholics on campus: "I know the Newman Society thinks the union is being heavy handed, but the student union voted in 1993 for free, safe abortion on demand so all women have a genuine choice when faced with unwanted pregnancy." From a student body of 30,000, a total of approximately 3,500 voted in the 1993 referendum, with about 1900 in favor of abortion rights, 1400 against, and 200 abstaining. When asked if the vote precludes other views being advocated in campus debate, Young said, "It does."
The Australian Catholic Students Association (ACSA), which represents Catholic students in schools throughout Australia, issued a statement criticizing the decision of the student union. The statement said that pro-life groups had been active at the University of Queensland for five years after the student referendum's passage in 1993 and no disciplinary action was taken against them. The ACSA argued that the referendum only established the school as a pro-choice campus, and did not require any particular viewpoint to be suppressed.
"ACSA is concerned that the use of a 15 year old referendum by the UQ Union to take disciplinary action against the Society raises serious concerns for students' freedom of speech and the implications this might have on other student groups at The University of Queensland," the statement declared.
ACSA National President Camillus O'Kane said that, "if the truth becomes something we can simply vote for, it becomes a weapon that can be used against others. This is why freedom of speech is one of the guiding principles of our society. It is a shame that this incident has occurred at one of Australia's leading universities, a place of learning where we should be able to express our views freely."
Source
Posted by John Ray. For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. For a daily survey of Australian politics, see AUSTRALIAN POLITICS Also, don't forget your roundup of Obama news and commentary at OBAMA WATCH
That's what you call xenophobia!
FOX News - Mobs rampaged through poor suburbs of Johannesburg in a frenzy of anti-foreigner violence over the weekend, killing at least seven people, injuring dozens and forcing hundreds to seek refuge at police stations. The attacks capped a week of mounting violence that started in the sprawling township of Alexandra. Angry residents there accused foreigners — many of them Zimbabweans who fled their own country's economic collapse — of taking scarce jobs and housing. [snip] "It's spreading like a wildfire and the police and the army can't control it," said Emmerson Zifo, a Zimbabwean teacher. [snip]There has been sporadic anti-foreigner violence for months, mainly aimed at stores run by Somalis accused of undercutting local storeowners, but nothing to compare with the current scale. [snip] Another person was shot dead and two more wounded in similar attacks on Saturday in Tembisa in another part of greater Johannesburg after residents went on a rampage, destroying property that belonged to foreign nationals. [snip] Eric Goemaere, the head of Medecins Sans Frontieres in South Africa, said his staff was helping to treat people with bullet wounds and back injuries from being thrown out of windows. [snip]
Edgar Gweru, from Zimbabwe, said he was robbed of cash, his passport and DVD player. He managed to escape by climbing onto his roof and hiding there until 2 a.m., but he does not know what happened to the three people sharing his accommodation. He said the gangs were combing the Cleveland suburb street by street, apartment by apartment. [snip] A crowd of dozens of stick-wielding people, many visibly drunk, sang and danced. One held a crude sign saying "hamba kwerekwere," or "foreigners, get out." One poster said "they (foreigners) steal our jobs and everything that belongs to us."
Michael Khondwane said foreigners were to blame for South Africa's drug and crime scourge. He said the ransacking of stores run by foreigners would send them "the message that they must go." About 500 people sought refuge at Cleveland police station — a pattern repeated throughout the city. Red Cross volunteers scrambled to provide them with blankets and food. Zifo said the vast majority were, like him, Zimbabwean. He said he fled Zimbabwe at the start of this year because he felt he would be victimized for taking part in a teachers' strike last year. "Even now, I would rather be in Zimbabwe," he said.
See lefties, that's what you call real xenophobia, we supposed xenophobes here in the west have nothing on these bloody savages.
Two weddings marred by savage stabbings in Lidcombe, Liverpool
"Two weddings marred by savage stabbings in Lidcombe, Liverpool
T was meant to be the happiest day of their life but for two sets of newylweds their dream weddings ended in violent nightmares.
A total of six people were stabbed at two separate wedding receptions in Sydney's south-west at the weekend, leaving two people fighting for their lives."
aah yes..nostalgia...reminds me of those violent Greek and Italian and Scottish Presbyterian weddings when I was a kid growing up in Adelaide.
Not.
Sunday, May 18, 2008
Seattle Times Editor: 'Hitler's Demands Were Not Unreasonable'
Seattle Times editorial writer Bruce Ramsey, in an effort to defend Barack Obama against President Bush's "appeasement" speech, actually ends up defending Nazi Germany, Adolf Hitler, and the Anschluss (the annexation of Austria): Bush, and His Use of `Appeasement'.
Democrats are rebuking President Bush for saying in his speech to the Knesset, here, that to "negotiate with terrorists and radicals" is "appeasement." The Democrats took it as a slap at Barack Obama. What bothers me is the continual reference to Hitler and his National Socialists, particularly the British and French accommodation at the Munich Conference of 1938.
What Hitler was demanding was not unreasonable. He wanted the German-speaking areas of Europe under German authority. He had just annexed Austria, which was German-speaking, without bloodshed. There were two more small pieces of Germanic territory: the free city of Danzig and the Sudetenland, a border area of what is now the Czech Republic.
We live in an era when you do not change national borders for these sorts of reasons. But in 1938 it was different. Germany's eastern and western borders had been redrawn 19 years before-and not to its benefit. In the democracies there was some sense of guilt with how Germany had been treated after World War I. Certainly there was a memory of the "Great War." In 2008, we have entirely forgotten World War I, and how utterly unlike any conception of "The Good War" it was. When the British let Hitler have a slice of Czechoslovakia, they were following their historical wisdom: avoid war. War produces results far more horrible than you expected. War is a bad investment. It is not glorious. Don't give anyone an excuse to start one.
Source
Our Lefty copped a lot of flak over those words and he has now revised them somewhat. As with a lot of Leftist writing, what he has said is half true. A lot of people of the prewar era DID think Hitler's demands were reasonable. To them, he was after all merely attempting to regain a small portion of the German territory that had been lost to Germany in the aftermath of WWI.
But people who thought that way were wishful thinkers. They were ignoring evidence that they did not want to see. As far back as Volume I chapter 4 of Mein Kampf, Hitler had made clear his intention to grab for Germany the territory of other nations. But people just did not want to believe that he really meant it.
Similarly today, President Ahmadinejad of Iran has made clear his intention of wiping the "tumour" of Israel off the map but again people are blocking their ears. Again they just do not want to believe it -- even though Ahmadinejad has expressed himself most forcefully on the matter. It is clear that our Leftist editor thinks it is defensible for Obama to join the blocked-ears brigade but we must all fervently hope that whoever wins next November WILL learn from history. The clearly expressed aggressive intentions of extremists DO have to be taken seriously and prepared against.
Posted by John Ray. For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. For a daily survey of Australian politics, see AUSTRALIAN POLITICS Also, don't forget your roundup of Obama news and commentary at OBAMA WATCH
B. Hussein Obama on terrorists
So B. Hussein Obama is saying that the current administration's policy is not making America any safer and he is very angry that they are saying he will appease terrorists. One could argue that a terrorist, Jew-hating organisation of slimeballs like Hamas wouldn't have endorsed B. Hussein Obama because he was going to ground them into the dirt and tear them limb from limb, but apparently that's just not valid. Then B. Hussein Obama proceeds to shoot himself in the foot.IHT - Senator Barack Obama on Friday criticized Senator John McCain, his potential rival for the presidency, and President George W. Bush for what he called "dishonest and divisive" attacks in hinting that he would appease terrorists. Obama responded strongly Friday to the comments Bush made in Israel on Thursday and to McCain's subsequent words. At a town hall meeting here, Obama said: "That's the kind of hypocrisy that we've been seeing in our foreign policy, the kind of fear-peddling, fear-mongering that has prevented us from actually making us safer."
So the current administration's policy of 'tough talk' is naive and irresponsible and will not work, so will soft talk work then? He doesn't say, only that he is not soft on terrorists and so I'm assuming, he won't soft talk to them. Maybe he has a different brand of tough talk and this rather unique brand will work, sure. It's a good thing for B. Hussein that liberals aren't very clever and blindly follow their sweet-sounding leaders. Image from Terra.comObama said McCain had a "naïve and irresponsible belief that tough talk from Washington will somehow cause Iran to give up its nuclear program and support for terrorism."
NZ society--no longer disgusted by shit?
"Paroled killer's lavish new life
He's had his first birthday cake, been showered with expensive gifts and is texting for the first time.
After six and-a-half years inside, Bailey Kurariki - the country's youngest convicted killer - is now enjoying the taste of freedom and the benefits that go with it.
Kurariki might be on home detention, but he isn't missing out on much.
Since being released a fortnight ago the 19-year-old baby-faced killer has had KFC, Burger King and pizza delivered most nights to the secret Auckland address where he's staying.
At his birthday party on the day he was released, he was presented with gifts including a $180 pair of shoes, a stereo and a PlayStation console."
Saturday, May 17, 2008
Dutch cartoonist report
We read:
"The Dutch authorities have arrested the cartoonist Gregorius Nekschot (a pseudonym. Nekschot means deathblow, litt: “shot in the back of the neck” [An interview with Nekschot here]). The judicial authorities in Amsterdam said yesterday that the cartoonist was arrested as a suspect for the criminal offense of “publishing cartoons which are discriminating for Muslims and people with dark skin.”
The cartoonist was arrested on Tuesday, while the police searched his house for “discriminating evidence.” His computer, backups, usb sticks, mobile phone and a number of drawings were confiscated.
Nekschot was released two days later but it is possible that he will be charged following a complaint in 2005 by the Dutch imam Abdul Jabbar van de Ven, an indigenous Dutchman who converted to Islam.
Source
The guy is a hero, considering the Muslim-loving Dutch authorities and the lack of protection for free speech there.
Posted by John Ray. For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. For a daily survey of Australian politics, see AUSTRALIAN POLITICS Also, don't forget your roundup of Obama news and commentary at OBAMA WATCH
When working families meets leftist ideology
Back during the election campaign, Labor was banging on about working families, working families this, working families that, everywhere you turn. Too bad if you were a couple or single or divorced, buy a whistle and start whistling. After his glorious victory PM Dudd was promising to 'govern for ALL Australians' and when his minions were questioned about who exactly is making up these 'working families', they were quick to bullsh*t us that working families covered just about everyone. Now you know why leftists can't see how gay marriage undermines the traditional family, they have no clue what the hell a family actually is.SMH - MORE than 110,000 Sydney households concentrated in the city's north, north-west and key inner suburbs will be caught by the Federal Government's new $150,000 benchmark for identifying the undeserving rich. Census figures show that one in 10 Sydney households had a gross income of more than $3000 a week in August 2006, putting them above the new income cut-off for family benefits announced in this week's budget. [snip] Salary surveys by recruitment firms and unpublished census data show that a coalminer married to a police officer, an electrician married to a primary school teacher and a power plant operator married to a paramedic would all earn more than Labor's $150,000 benchmark.
Well, the budget is out now and the leftist ideology rears it's ugly, envious head. They believe that an electrician and a teacher who earn more than $150K together are somehow nasty people, because they must be doing something devious or screwing someone over to get that $150 large. No way can it be by working every day, putting in extra hours or anything like that. No matter that they're pay more in actual tax, they are less deserving of benefits that others are entitled to. No more baby bonus for them, their children must pay for the sins of the parents. And if they want to jump onto the global warming bandwagon and install solar panels to aid PM Dudds glorious war on climate change, tough cookies, no rebate for you.
Doesn't matter that the benefits these government parasites are handing out like it's their own money are funded from the taxes paid by these people. Doesn't matter that they may have studied their asses off or work weekends and overtime to get that money. Doesn't matter that they may be suffering 'mortgage stress' that PM Dudd and his minions were waffling on about when they weren't screaming about working families. Nope, the crack addicted single mother who can't keep her legs closed and has no idea who fathered her children and the bludger chucking sickies is somehow more deserving, go figure!
One last thing, don't be surprised if your taxes go up in the long run, because when you punish people for working hard and earning extra money, they can decide to work less and so pay less tax and then the parasites you voted for will have to knock on your door to fund all those benefits they are so kindly handing out.
Immigration to Australia even higher than thought
What a puzzle! Australia has a much larger immigrant population (proportionately) than the UK or the USA but Australia at the same time has much less ethnic tension. It's only a puzzle to people with politically correct blinkers on. Australia has long had high rates of immigration but until recently almost all immigrants came from Europe and East Asia -- people who in general fit in well and peaceably with Australian life. It's not the numbers of people coming from elsewhere that is important but where they come from. Africans and Muslims from the Middle East have recently started arriving in numbers and they are already beginning to shatter Australia's ethnic calm. Many of the "refugees" recently admitted are both Muslim AND African. Heaven help us!
AUSTRALIA is undergoing an unparalleled movement of people and ethnic change through "hidden immigration", but lacks a comprehensive policy to deal with it, according to an eminent demographer. Monash University professor Andrew Markus said raw immigration numbers masked the magnitude of a demographic revolution that had produced a population where one in four residents was born overseas. At 24 per cent, the overseas-born proportion of the population is twice that of the US at 12 per cent, and three times that of England and Wales at 8 per cent, where racial tensions have flared again. "Opinion polls in England in July 2007 and March 2008 indicated that immigration and race issues are the main concern of electors," Professor Markus said.
He said that while Australians had been tolerant and migrants committed to their new home, strong political leadership was required to convince the nation of the benefits to all of high immigration to avoid a backlash. Professor Markus presented his analysis at this week's Australian Davos Connection Future Summit. "The elements of a policy to promote social cohesion within communities characterised by diversity of language and culture are well known - and difficult to implement," he said. "At present, Australia lacks full clarity of vision, coherence and consistency - while the largest movement of people in the country's history is under way."
Speaking to The Australian yesterday, Professor Markus said that although many Australians regarded the rate of immigration as high, they probably had little idea that the transformation was far bigger than they imagined. The usually quoted "headline" number of permanent arrivals - people successfully applying each year for permanent residency from overseas - rose 67 per cent between 1999 and last year, from 84,000 to 140,000. But Professor Markus said this figure failed to include on-shore "conversions" from foreigners on student or temporary work visas to permanent residence. That number rose from 15,000 in 1999 to 52,000 last year. Taking those figures into account, the annual increase in new permanent residents nearly doubled over the past nine years, from 99,000 to 192,000.
The number of permanent departures - Australians leaving the country without any immediate intention of return -- doubled from 35,000 in 1999 to 72,000 last year. Many of those departing were taking highly sought skills to more highly paid jobs overseas, Professor Markus said.
Added to an ageing population, future economic growth would require filling Australia's skills shortage largely from overseas. But the result would accelerate the pace of ethnic change, and because immigration had been skewed towards "magnet" destinations, in some areas the transition would be extraordinary, he said. "With the uneven distribution of the overseas born, this translates to 34.5 per cent of Sydney's population, 31 per cent of Melbourne's, and over 70 per cent in some urban localities," Professor Markus said.
He proposed several measures towards a national policy to make immigration work. These included challenging disadvantage in education and employment, tackling institutional discrimination, and a "consistent set of policies to be implemented at the community level to promote inter-cultural understanding, bridge building and participation".
Source
Posted by John Ray. For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. For a daily survey of Australian politics, see AUSTRALIAN POLITICS Also, don't forget your roundup of Obama news and commentary at OBAMA WATCH
Muslims who just don't understand the true meaning of 'Jihad'
Yesterday I watched a hilarious video of Mark Steyn [Hat tip Hang Right Politics] debating a couple of angry, unwilling Muslims. I managed to find it on Youtube as well, there are 5 parts, well worth the time folks. The Muslims like leftists were quite angry that Steyn was sounding the alarm about the problem of intolerance amongst, shall we say a growing minority, of Muslims. They keep insisting everywhere you turn that there isn't a problem, Islam is peaceful and it's only a few crazies, the Christians are just as terrible if not worse and that if only we'd all just shut up and sing kumbaya it would all just magically go away. No matter how many examples of jihad and violence are given, these deniers accuse us of xenophobia, Islamophobia, homophobia and arachnophobia.IHT - Authorities in France, Germany and the Netherlands on Friday detained at least 10 people suspected of helping to fund al-Qaida-linked militants with roots in Uzbekistan, officials said. [snip] The suspects' nationalities were not given but officials said they were Turkic-speaking. French police suspect they collected funds for the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, a militant group said by the United States to have close ties to al-Qaida. The senior official described the arrests as "preventative" because the funds thought to have been collected were not known to have been used to carry out terror attacks. [snip]
The Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan has been blamed for several attempted border incursions into Uzbekistan through Kyrgyzstan in 1999-2001 and bombings in both countries as well as Tajikistan — all ex-Soviet republics in predominantly Muslim Central Asia. Reputed supporters have been active in southern Kyrgyzstan recently. The movement, which had training camps in nearby Afghanistan and fought on the side of Taliban, is believed to have been set back during U.S.-led operations there. Many followers of the IMU fled to Pakistan's tribal area near the Afghan border, where its leader Tahir Yuldash last year called in a video interview for supporters to launch suicide attacks. [snip]
Oh alright I just threw the last two in because I'm cheeky, although if they could get away with it I'm sure the deniers would be happy to throw those slurs our way too. I couldn't help but think when I read the above and saw the news about terror raids in Sydney today, don't they ever get tired of getting so many examples. I also thought that from our perspective it's so easy, the jihadists make our lives so simple, we don't even have to keep a record of their activities to whip out at a moment's notice. Just browse the net and sooner rather than later, you'll stumble across another instance of, as leftists and "moderate" Muslims often lecture us, Muslims who just don't understand the true meaning of 'Jihad', sure.
A small part of me feels sorry for these deniers, so I wouldn't mind being proven wrong in these two examples listed, maybe these two could turn out to be the never-heard-of militant wing of the Anglican Church or something.
Friday, May 16, 2008
At Least It’s A Prius
But Macklin made amends by declaring, "At least it's a Prius." Well, not really.
Macklin, previously displayed her sympathetic attitude towards those people her department should be looking after when she opted to sleep on board a luxury cruiser rather than chance it in accomodation in Aurukun.
PROOF FOUND OF MAN-MADE CLIMATE CHANGE (?)
The author of the excitable article below talks of "proof" but does not say what it is. As far as one can judge, however, she is referring to this article by Edward Brook, which is itself a summary of two other studies. I looked at another note about the Brook article yesterday and pointed out the huge hole in it. To be fair, the hole is not in the Brook article itself -- which simply claims that levels of atmospheric CO2 are unusually high at the moment -- but rather in the inference that the findings reported by Brook explain global warming. They don't, as I pointed out yesterday.
There is however also a large hole in the Brook article. He takes it as read that CO2 trapped in deep cores is representative of the atmosphere of their times. There are plenty of reasons to question that -- as core-expert Prof. Jaworowski often points out and as chemist Ernst Beck has fairly conclusively proved
Scientists have been able to say with virtual certainty for the first time that the climate change observed over the past four decades is man made and not the result of natural phenomena. The research compounds the conclusion of the biggest scientific report on global warming to date, the fourth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) last year, which asserted a strong likelihood that human action was changing the climate. The new study raises the likelihood of "unnatural" causes of global warming to near certainty.
Authors of the study, published on Thursday in the peer-review journal Nature, examined a greater range of data than any other study so far. "Changes in natural systems since at least 1970 are occurring in regions of observed temperature increases, and these temperature increases at continental scales cannot be explained by natural climate variations alone," they say.
The authors, including scientists from Australia, China and the US, warn that man-made climate change is having "a significant impact on physical and biological systems globally". They found that more than 90 per cent of the data examined showed evidence that natural systems were responding to warming. Spring is coming earlier, permafrost is melting and coastal erosion is increasing under the influence of rising sea levels, while animals and birds are changing migration and reproductive patterns.
Barry Brook, director of climate change research at the University of Adelaide, said: "[We should] consider that there has been only 0.75 degree C of temperature change so far, yet the expectation for this century is four to nine times that amount. ["Expectation". What a good word! He means "prophecy". And we all know where most prophecies end up] "So these changes are only a minor portent of what is likely to come, especially if we continue on our carbon-profligate pathway."
Scientists know they may face difficulties ahead in persuading the public and politicians of the importance of tackling global warming - research published recently in Nature suggested that global temperatures were unlikely to increase in the next decade, and could even decline. Experts at Germany's Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences and the UK Met Office's Hadley Centre say natural climate variations linked to the Pacific cooling system known as La Nina, as well as a cooling phase of a system of Atlantic currents, may push temperatures down despite the effects of greenhouse gases. However, after those effects wear off in about a decade, temperatures are likely [How likely and how do we know?] to rise much more strongly as the warming effect of carbon emissions regains the upper hand in altering the climate.
Scientists fear that the expected lull might dispel any sense of urgency in tackling global warming and provide ammunition for climate change sceptics.
Source
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HIV-positive man jailed for 35 years for spitting at cop
Out here if the cop's lucky enough not to be investigated, at best a good behavior bond [for the scumbag], directions to the nearest public hospital so he can take his rightful place suckling on the taxpayers teat and perhaps some angry looks at the cop for not being a proper punching bag like he's paid to be.SMH - An HIV-positive man convicted of spitting into the eye and open mouth of a Dallas police officer has been sentenced to 35 years in prison. Willie Campbell must serve at least half that time because jurors ruled the 42-year-old used his infected saliva as a deadly weapon.
Wanna bet these rapists are Muslims?
The Press is so secretive about ethnic origins that it encourages us to speculate when no details are given. There are a lot of Muslims from Africa living at Moorooka and Salisbury is an adjoining suburb. And young Muslim males do tend to move in packs
Four men accused of raping a 14-year-old girl have been granted bail in a Brisbane court. The men - aged 30, 25, 21 and 19 - appeared in the Brisbane Magistrates Court yesterday after being charged yesterday with numerous sex offences. It's alleged the men took the teenage girl to a hotel room in Brisbane on May 3 and repeatedly assaulted her.
Each of the men - including two brothers - were allowed bail on condition they report to police five days a week and have no contact with the girl. The oldest, a 30-year-old man from Sherwood, has been charged with two counts of rape, four counts of indecent treatment of a child and one count of possessing child exploitation material. The 21-year-old man, also from Sherwood, faces two counts of rape, one count each of carnal knowledge of a child under 16 and possessing child exploitation material, and four counts of indecent treatment of a child under 16.
The 25-year-old man from Moorooka has been charged with one count each of rape and indecent treatment of a child under 16. The 19-year-old, also of Moorooka, faces three counts of rape, one count of carnal knowledge of a child under 16 and three counts of indecent treatment of a child under 16. The 25-year-old and the 19-year-old will face court again next month while the other men will reappear in July.
Source
Note: I would be particularly pleased if the speculation above is incorrect, as it might go a little way towards showing our media elites that their secrecy can have the opposite effect to that intended - i.e. it might cause minorities to be unfairly blamed
Posted by John Ray. For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. For a daily survey of Australian politics, see AUSTRALIAN POLITICS Also, don't forget your roundup of Obama news and commentary at OBAMA WATCH
Zimbabwe’s New Bank Note: Leftist Loon Mugabe Finds out That a Half Billion Dollars of Nothing is Still Nothing.
This is where unrestrained leftist economic policies leads.
ZIMBABWE has introduced a new half-a-billion dollar bank note in a bid to tackle cash shortages fed by rampant inflation, the central bank said today.
The $500,000,000 note is worth $A2.61c. Source
I couldn’t find a picture of the new bank note, but here is one from January. Notice that the money is so worthless that it come with an expiration date.
The report goes to quote the state run newspaper:
"Introducing the new 500,000,000 bearer cheque for your convenience," read a Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe full-page advert in the state daily, The Herald, displaying specimens of the new note.
The note, comes into circulation 10 days after the introduction of a quarter-of-a-billion one early this month.
This is the fourth set of high denomination notes to be issued this year, the first being in January when a 10 million dollar note was put into circulation. The next was on April 2 when a 50 million dollar note came into being before the 100 and 250 million dollar notes were introduced on May 2.
Interest has reached 165,000%, but Mugabe is still in power, still killing people, and still loved by the leftards. At this rate they probably can’t print the money fast enough to pay the printer.
Give a leftist a free hand at running the economy and this is what you'll get.
Thursday, May 15, 2008
British police try to shoot the messenger
As you will see on today's POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, the politicized British police have just been forced to eat crow.
Some British documentary makers went around British mosques undercover and filmed various Mullahs inciting violence against unbelievers. The resulting film was shown on British TV.
So what did the police do? What the Mullahs said was clearly in breach of British law against preaching violence so the police went and rounded up all the Mullahs concerned -- right? In your dreams! The cops prosecuted the film-makers instead! They said the film stirred up hatred. It was a truly Orwellian inversion of what actually happened -- that it was the Mullahs who were stirring up hatred.
Anyway the wheels of justice eventually ground down the nonsense and the police were rightly sued over their perverse actions. They have now paid a big sum in compensation and apologized for their actions.
But, amid all the furore, the Muslim hate-speech has remained protected. It appears that none of the Muslim hate-speakers recorded in the film have been prosecuted or will be prosecuted. The main aim of the police exercise -- protecting Muslims from the standards that others have to obey -- has been achieved.
Posted by John Ray. For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. For a daily survey of Australian politics, see AUSTRALIAN POLITICS Also, don't forget your roundup of Obama news and commentary at OBAMA WATCH
Australia welcoming people smugglers
And you thought the budget was just about screwing over the supposed "rich" and stay-at-home-appendages. If I'm not mistaken this Senator is the slimeball who forked over a couple of million dollars of our money for social justice in Palestine. Calling on all people smugglers, Australia is run by raving leftists now, come one come all, leaky boats, over crowded, no worries, social justice, all welcome. Those who did the right thing and followed the rules, those who have no money to pay the people smugglers, tough shit, get a whistle and start whistling, fair go only for those who can afford to pay a people smuggler. We give your certainty, certainty that -Ninemsn - About 1,000 refugees on temporary protection visas will be given permanent residency status to live in Australia, the Rudd government has announced. The government announced in the budget on Tuesday night it would abolish the controversial visa program set up by the previous Howard government to cover unauthorised arrivals to the country. [snip] Immigration Minister Chris Evans said scrapping the program would provide certainty to refugees presently subject to temporary protection. [snip]
The refugee was brought along to ensure anyone who dared to question the minister would be shamed back into their corner like the nasty, heartless, sonofabitch they really are. The Senator's party has a mandate now, we're moving on from those nasty days of "we will decide who gets to come here", get with the program morons, we're global citizens and all that now. There are global responsibilities and obligations you know, well, for you that is, not anyone else."This will mean that they will have permanent residency in Australia," he told reporters. "(They) will have the restrictions that were placed on them, during the temporary protection visa regime removed." Senator Evans was accompanied by a refugee who will benefit from the government's decision. [snip]
Ah, we're not expecting it to grow, and if it does, oh the good Senator doesn't say, let me translate, if it does grow significantly, then you can probably buy a whistle from the dollar shop and start whistling too. Don't whistle for too long though folks, somebody has to pay for all these boat people, so when you're done whistling get your working families off to work.Senator Evans said he did not expect the number of people applying for permanent residency in Australia to grow significantly. [snip]
Undercover Mosque
What a pile of leftist excrement, if certain members of the community are calling for the beheading of others and barracking for terrorist scum blowing up buses and anything else, these scumbags will do nothing because of "community cohesion", the only cohesion they're interested in is ensuring the scumbags are free to hate and incite as much as they can. "feelings of public reassurance", what the hell does this crap even mean? Don't be surprised if you find that there is an actual position for some parasite suckling on the taxpayer's teat, to oversee these "feelings of public reassurance"!Daily Mail - Channel 4 has won £100,000 from a police force that falsely accused programme makers of faking television footage. West Midlands Police will also apologise at the High Court following comments it published about a Dispatches programme entitled Undercover Mosque. A press release issued by police and the Crown Prosecution Service in August last year claimed the programme misrepresented the views of Muslim preachers and clerics recorded undercover.
Police reported Channel 4 to the TV watchdog Ofcom for "heavily editing" the words of imams to give them a more sinister meaning, citing five instances. Ofcom rejected the complaints in a decision published in November 2007. [snip] Police claimed the programme, broadcast in January 2007, undermined "community cohesion" and "feelings of public reassurance". [snip]
Can someone let the office of "feelings of public reassurance" know about this crap, last time I checked being smacked around into a Hijab at the age of 10 doesn't bode well for "feelings of public reassurance" amongst the little girls. Any ball-busting femi-nazis willing to stamp out this obvious infringement of female rights or are "feelings of public reassurance" more equal.Documentary excerpts from preachers and teachers included "Allah created the woman deficient" and "by the age of ten, it becomes an obligation on us to force her to wear hijab and if she doesn't wear hijab, we hit her". [snip]
Oh I think most of know why they did that, the lefty apologists get very upset when folks like you try to shine some light on the truth. Nothing to see, lost in translation, miscommunication, racism, not all of them, blah blah, move along or else. They don't like it when you draw the obvious conclusions, heck they don't even like you talking about it, might threaten "community cohesion" & "feelings of public reassurance" I suppose. It never occurs to them that in the long run it's actually worse for the few Muslims in western society who have no problem with us and are fleeing the savagery of their homelands. Youtube has the clips of Undercover Mosque, or your can just google it.Kevin Sutcliffe, deputy head of current affairs at Channel 4, said: "We have been very pleased to get the result. "We are accused of faking by the police and the CPS, which carries an awful lot of weight. "We had to take this course of action to show it is not true. We were completely baffled. What were they trying to achieve? "Why did they go after the programme in such a way? It seems to us a large amount of public money and time spent trying to bring us down." [snip]
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
Outrage at a carved pulpit in a Belgian church
That guy being trodden on down the bottom of the centuries-old carving above is our old friend Mohammed. You can guess the rest. Details here
I noted a similar "outrage" in Spain on Feb. 19th
Posted by John Ray. For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. For a daily survey of Australian politics, see AUSTRALIAN POLITICS Also, don't forget your roundup of Obama news and commentary at OBAMA WATCH
Islamic savages win again
St. Cloud Times - A St. Cloud State University student in a teacher-training program at Technical High School left the school in late April because he says he feared for the safety of his service dog. The school district calls it a misunderstanding, and officials there say they hoped Tyler Hurd, a 23-year-old junior from Mahtomedi who aspires to teach special education, would continue his training in the district. Hurd said a student threatened to kill his service dog named Emmitt. The black lab is trained to protect Hurd when he has seizures. [snip] The threat came from a Somali student who is Muslim, according to Hurd, St. Cloud State and school district officials.
Yeah, communicating my ass, diversity and different cultures, balls! Diversity today means bend over and appease any bloody intolerant savage that wants to start something, the only cultures that get this "growth process" [*spit*] is the religion of 7th century savagery. What these spineless twits should have done, instead of waffling about tolerance and kumbaya, is taken that ungrateful cur [the Islamic savage] out of the class, put him on a plane back to Somalia and left him there to sprawl his arrogant, intolerant ass amongst the vast splendor and obviously superior culture created by his fellow savages. That's what should have have happened and would have set a fine example for the rest of the upstart savages before they get any ideas, instead, well you know what happened. Hat tip Hang Right Politics.The Muslim faith, which is the dominant faith of Somali immigrants, forbids the touching of dogs. [snip] Things didn't go as well at Tech, Hurd said. Students there taunted his dog, and he finally felt he had to leave after he was told a student made a threat. Hurd met with Lockhart but said he did not feel comfortable continuing. Julia Espe, director of curriculum, instruction and assessment for St. Cloud school district, said the school needed to do a better job communicating. [snip] Steffens said it is important to respect different cultures and the rights of disabled students. “I think this is part of the growth process when we become more diverse," Steffens said.
Spreading the religion of peace
Yeah that sounds like their handiwork, these evil scum have a reputation of trying to kill as many people as they possibly can, man, woman, child, couldn't care less, truly the spawn of the devil. A woman and her infant babies, a pregnant woman, heck even when they're running away, these bastards would kill them without batting an eyelid, savagery and barbarity come naturally to them. We in the west must never be ignorant of them, especially when they're killing innocents elsewhere in the world. Just remember that they'd be happy to do the very same to you in your streets, give em' half the chance and they'll butcher your children like pigs.The Hindu - Terrorists struck for the first time in Jaipur triggering eight serial blasts in a span of 12 minutes on Tuesday night in crowded market areas and near a Hanuman temple in the walled city leaving at least 60 killed and 200 injured. "According to the information I have received 60 people have died and 150 have been injured," said Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje, who rushed back to the State Capital from Jodhpur. [snip]
Bangladesh-based Harkut-ul-Jehadi Islami(HuJI) is suspected to be behind the blasts that has taken the state authorities by surprise, Home Ministry sources said. Police said one explosive was defused by bomb disposal squad near the Hanuman temple. Blood was splattered at the scene of the blasts which tossed some of the victims several feet up. Preliminary investigations revealed that cycle ballbearings were used in the explosions to inflict shrapnel injuries on the victims.
Don't forget 9/11, don't forget that such an atrocity hasn't happened since then and hopefully it'll never happen again. Also remember it hasn't happened for their lack of trying or something, they're not holding back because you don't want to fight or prefer the route of appeasement, they're not holding back because of some fancy morally superior example you're setting. They're not holding back because of your superior military or something, they're not holding back because of your freedom of speech, they're holding back because they have no choice, because your sons are in their backyard.
They stick their M-16s into hornets nest and rattle it around and when they hornets are stirred up, they start shooting and keep shooting until it's time to reload and then it's on to the next nest. They are getting killed in great numbers and their ideology is being rejected by their own people. India is not in Iraq or Afghanistan, they are not occupying Bangladesh. Don't be fooled that walking away will solve the problem, those who want to cut & run won't be around when these evil bastards are in your streets rigging their bicycles and truck bombs. The barbarity and savagery will be on your doorstep and you will have to fight or die, alone.
BUDGET 2008
Australia's new centre-Left government has just brought down its first budget. Below are comments from a conservative and a left-leaning viewpoint. For a Leftist government to bring down a surplus budget (i.e. they plan to spend LESS than they raise in taxes) is rather remarkable but it is customary in Australia. The budget is quite mainstream with just a few Leftist flourishes
Budget 2008: mildly encouraging
Comment from a free-market economist below:
"The prices of food and oil are rocketing, so why are we complaining?” This is the question of the day, courtesy of pollster Gary Morgan. Morgan has a point. Australia’s principal exports include coal, natural gas and foods, not to mention iron ore and congealed electricity in the form of aluminium. Australia has the mother of all booms. Inflation is “only” 4 or 5 per cent, government coffers are overflowing with money and we can afford all sorts of experiments in helping battlers, building infrastructure, increasing spending on health and education. The clear risk is that the “mild tightening” that sums up this budget will not take enough pressure off the Reserve Bank and that interest rates will need to rise further yet.
Morgan, like Henry, is concerned that the resource boom with Australia’s current Industrial relations (IR) system is likely to encourage a surge of wage costs. The budget assumes slower growth of employment and increased workforce participation, hence greater unemployment. In “real” terms (i.e. if accurately measured) this problem will be far larger than officially estimated, especially if wage hikes increase. This will create a real problem for the Rudd government.
Like Henry, Morgan thinks governments are inefficient and government departments do not encourage productivity growth.
We’d both like to pay more tax (from higher incomes), but at a lower rate. As Art Laffer showed, that is what happens when tax rates are cut. There are mild cuts for all but those on the highest incomes - keeping the pre-election promise - and this will have mild encouraging effects on labour supply.
Last night’s budget was sold in advance as being “tough”. It is certainly tougher than the later Howard-Costello budgets, but not their first budget. Nor is it as tough as Keating’s Banana Republic budget. Henry applauds the means testing of certain benefits. Wayne Swan told Kerry O’Brien that a principal earner or family income of $150,000 was a “reasonable” cut off point for some benefits. Politically that may be the case, but one cannot reasonably say a family with such an income are battlers who deserve help from taxpayers.
Incidentally, real tax reform - which abolished lots of tax allowances - should exempt many more people than at present from lodging returns, saving transaction and compliance costs.
This budget is mildly encouraging. The risk is that the continued resource boom blows it out of the water, leaving the Reserve Bank to gather up the pieces.
Source
A surplus budget
Comment from a Left-leaning journalist with an interest in economics
THIS budget is meant to be read two ways, because it tries to have it both ways. It is a change-of-government budget in the most mundane sense of the term, because its main transaction for 2008-09 is $5.7 billion in new revenue measures and spending cuts to pay for $5.3 billion in election promises. No prizes for originality here, unless you count the absence of broken promises as something new.
What is different about this budget is the surplus. It won't go into Peter Costello's Future Fund because that fund is full. Instead, it will be divided three ways, between infrastructure, health and education investments. How and when the money will be spent will be up to the Government. This is a piggy bank like no other.
Wayne Swan has $40 billion set aside for these three policy areas. It is the sum of just two surpluses-2007-08 and 2008-09. There will be more top-ups before the next election. The Treasurer hasn't said yet what he will do with his initial war chest of $40 billion, but he has reserved the right to spend the capital as well as the fund earnings. This is where the real budget story lies, in Labor's flexibility to spend up on infrastructure for the next election and beyond.
Mr Swan is the first treasurer in history with no commonwealth debt to cover. There is no borrowing to pay off, or public service super liability to meet. Just a surplus that has to be returned to voters at some point. This is, indeed, a revolution. Labor has the luxury of thinking long-term because the budget it inherited from the Coalition allows it to.
The budget cuts are not as grand as they seem. The simplest way to unpack the numbers is to see where the budget would have been if Labor wanted to break every one of its election promises apart from the tax cuts. The figure is a surplus $19.7 billion for 2008-09, which, incidentally, is a surplus that would have met Kevin Rudd's January target of 1.5 per cent of gross domestic product.
But Labor implemented every promise because it could. The bill for staying sweet with voters was $5.3 billion in 2008-09. This was offset by $5.7 billion in new savings. A further $1.6 billion in savings had already been flagged at the last election, bringing the total cuts to $7.3 billion. Now subtract the savings of $7.3 billion from the promises of $5.3 billion and you have a $2 billion addition to the surplus, to $21.7 billion. If this looks like small beer, it is. The real budget headline was the $40 billion that Labor has set aside for itself.
Source
Posted by John Ray. For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. For a daily survey of Australian politics, see AUSTRALIAN POLITICS Also, don't forget your roundup of Obama news and commentary at OBAMA WATCH
Get worried when lefties make "real progress"
All well and good Olmert, however there is that niggling issue of who exactly the Palestinian Authority is representing, last time I checked, them Palis had voted for Hamas not the PA, so under whose authority are they negotiating. Hamas are one of the scumbags who're lobbing rockets every single day in the direction of Israel hoping to kill as many Jews as they can. Has any progress been made with them, will the rockets stop, are they going to hand Gilad Schalit over or does he fall into the 'not all areas' part of this "real progress"? See for yourself.JPost - Hours before the arrival of US President George W. Bush, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said Tuesday evening that "real progress" has been achieved in the negotiations with the Palestinian Authority, and that "understandings and agreements have been reached on important matters, although not on all issues." [snip] "There is some real progress, and some important understandings have been reached in important areas, though not in all areas," he said.
Sounds like they're just as mad and filled with hate as usual. In all honesty, if I were an Israeli and from the past actions of this Olmert slimeball, I'd be worried when he makes 'progress' with your enemies. Their idea of 'progress' is not exactly what most folks would call progress, just ask the Israelis still dodging Kassams every day and wondering if this will be their last bus or last cafe. When Olmert says he's made "real progress", you really have to wonder, what has this fellow handed over to these slimeballs?JPost - "Palestine will be liberated and not one meter of its land will be missing," Hamas leader Mahmoud Zahar declared on Tuesday. [snip] "Allah's promise will be fulfilled," he said. "Victory is on its way." [snip] Meanwhile, he and other Hamas leaders rejected Israel's demand that IDF Cpl. Gilad Schalit, abducted inside Israel on the Gaza border on June 25, 2006, be part of a truce deal.
NZ under the socialists is becoming a laughing-stock:
Except that Kiwi workers won't be laughing....
"This is today's Editorial in The Wall Street Journal
Kiwi Climatology
Global-warming alarmists tend to understate the true costs of cutting greenhouse gas emissions. So give credit to New Zealanders, who seem poised to give the rest of us a real-life illustration of those costs.
This month Wellington is debating a cap-and-trade scheme to meet its Kyoto Protocol targets. Because New Zealand is already a low carbon dioxide emitter, the bulk of its emissions come from agricultural sources, such as, well, sheep. So the Government is proposing to implement caps not only on carbon dioxide from industry but also methane and nitrous oxide from farms. If passed, the Kiwi plan would be the broadest cap-and-trade programme to date.
As in smaller schemes in the U.S. and EU, the government would cap the country's emissions at a level allowable under Kyoto, and then distribute tradeable credits to businesses and farmers. Low emitters could sell excess credits, while high emitters could buy credits to cover their "extra" emissions. Under Kyoto, New Zealand committed to reduce its emissions to 1990 levels, in effect a 30% reduction from expected emissions in 2012.
Meeting those targets will be hard. New Zealand already uses a wide range of hydropower and renewable energy to cut carbon dioxide use. For the agricultural gases, new kinds of fertilizers might help, but only to a point. For the rest of the cuts, farmers will have to persuade cows and sheep to emit less - or have fewer cows and sheep.
The cost for farmers and industry alike, is likely to be prohibitive. The New Zealand Institute of Economic Research, and independent consulting firm, recently estimated that the government's plan would result in 22,000 job losses by 2012, or 1% of total employment. That translates into NZ$4.6 billion annually in lost GDP, or a NZ$3,000 cut in each household's annual spending.
This analysis assumes that as greenhouse gas fees make Kiwi industry less competitive globally, business and jobs will move overseas. The government disputes this conclusion, mainly because its own analyses assume [do they???] New Zealanders will be willing to take lower wages. That's debatable to say the least.
That aside, give the Kiwis credit for honesty. Having signed up to Kyoto they're actually talking about shouldering the costs of meeting their commitments. Whether or not they end up regretting it, other countries will now have a chance to see what the anticarbon crusade does to an economy."
From The Hive
(bold mine)
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
In defense of 'Big Oil'
Excerpt:
With gas prices topping four dollars a gallon in some regions of the country, now may not be the best time to say something positive about "big oil," but here goes anyway. Where is it written that the cost for a product or service should be frozen in place and in time, never to rise again, or to rise at a pace commensurate with our incomes? People who think this way know little to nothing about supply and demand and less than nothing about the profit motive. That's because at least three generations have been raised on the notion of entitlement, and when one feels entitled to something, one believes someone else should pay.
Senate Democrats last week sought to ingratiate themselves with voters, while doing nothing to produce more energy, with a familiar attack on "big oil." They want to repeal $17 billion in tax breaks for the oil companies over 10 years and on top of that impose a windfall profit tax on companies that don't invest in new energy sources. This is political expediency at its worst.
Peter Robertson, vice chairman of Chevron, told me it's a myth that oil companies are not investing in new energy sources. He says last year alone, Chevron spent $20 billion exploring new sources of energy.
Robertson said President Bush's trip this week to Saudi Arabia is "highly embarrassing" because he is "calling on the Saudis to produce more oil when we are not doing it ourselves." The last refinery built in America was in 1976. Tighter government regulations are the main reason. That's how unserious we are about our energy "crisis." Robertson said there would be plenty of oil available to the United States if the oil companies were allowed to get it: "Eighty-five percent of offshore oil is off-limits." Responding to objections to offshore drilling by environmentalists and their allies in Congress, Robertson noted that some of the strongest pro-environment nations in Europe -- he mentions Denmark, Norway, the United Kingdom -- lease offshore locations for oil exploration. The technology has become so good, he said, that during Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, "one thousand offshore wells were destroyed (in the Gulf of Mexico), but not one leaked." Australia, he said, has allowed offshore drilling for 40 years without any environmental damage.
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Posted by John Ray. For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. For a daily survey of Australian politics, see AUSTRALIAN POLITICS Also, don't forget your roundup of Obama news and commentary at OBAMA WATCH
Britain's tough gun & knife laws at work
That's the way it goes when you ban guns, knives and ban ordinary law-abiding people from defending themselves with weapons. The criminals are the ones with the guns, knives and whatever else they feel like carrying. The criminals are the ones with the guns, knives and whatever else they feel like carrying. The victims have nothing and the sheeple are reduced to a nation of cowards, screaming and fleeing at the first sign of trouble and later telling us how ‘unbelievable’ it all is.Daily Mail - A man in his twenties was stabbed to death in front of horrified crowds on Britain's most famous shopping street yesterday. The 22-year-old was killed after leaving a McDonald's restaurant in Oxford Street, central London, at around 4.45pm. Terrified witnesses ran screaming from the scene as the man was stabbed with a 4in-long flick knife. One witness claimed his attackers first stabbed him and then slit his throat.
They dropped the bloodied blade on the pavement before running away. [snip] One witness, who did not want to be named, said: "I just heard the screaming and then saw a couple of black guys run past us." [snip] "First they stabbed him and then lunged back at him and slashed his throat. I can't believe someone would do this in broad daylight. [snip]
Incidentally this story reported in the SMH didn't mention anything about the "black guys" running past, I suppose they didn't want to ruffle any multicultural feathers. My initial suspicions were towards the followers of the world's most peaceful religion, you know, those angry Anglicans!
Wake the hell up people, why is it shocking and unbelievable, when you elect politicians who take away your guns and right to bear arms and you do nothing, that sends a crystal clear message. That you generally don't have the will to defend your own liberty and you now have no means to do so as well. 68 people have been killed by other people with guns and knives in London, I mean how many more need to die before the stupidity of gun & knife control is finally ditched, 1000, 10000, 100000?The killing follows the death of 16-year-old Jimmy Mizen in Lee, South-East London, on Saturday. He was the 13th teenager to be murdered in London this year. On Sunday, two youths were wounded in a double stabbing in Holloway, North London, and 68 young people under 25 have been killed with guns or knives since the start of the year.
I remember the other week, some fool was whining about the crime situation in some part of Australia, they said something to the effect, oh my godless, it's becoming like Chicago. We live in the internet age moron, it ain't that hard, just google it and you'll see Chicago has strict gun control, the same thing that we have and shock-horror, we're becoming like Chicago, you'd think people would be able to put two and two together, but apparently it's all to complex for some of us.
Coming back to this case, if they do catch the scumbags who did this, consider it an anomaly if they get more than 10 years in jail. Off course it'll be dressed up as life in jail, you will rot you evil miscreants, a lonely cage for you till the bitter end and all that. The sentence in reality will just be 15 years max, maybe 10 with good behaviour and if they happen to be illegal immigrants, they won't be deported because of human rights and the judge misplaced his plastic spine again. Justice and Liberty, the joke's on you.
Monday, May 12, 2008
Some facts in search of a moral
My personal life is uneventful -- which is how I like it. So it's only occasionally that I find something worth noting on my personal blog. Something I noted there recently, however, sparked a train of thought. I noted how many Presbyterians there are in Korea: about 20% of the South Korean population, if I remember rightly. Yet Korea was never one of the many British colonies. India, on the other hand, was dominated by the British for centuries yet Christianity of any kind is rare there. Most Indian Christians in fact have mixed ancestry -- Anglo-Indians.
And then there is Fiji. The British presence in Fiji happened with a large degree of consent from the native Fijians -- via their traditional chiefs. Queen Victoria was simply recognized as the chief of chiefs. And Fijians to this day recognize Queen Elizabeth as their queen. And there are so many Fijians in the British army that their has been talk of putting a cap on their numbers. So what religion are the Fijians? They are almost all Methodists, and Methodists of the old school at that.
I am sure there is a moral there but I am not certain of exactly what it is yet.
And then there is another old British/Australian custom that probably prevails in America too: A sort of defiant custom. I think the most amusing example occurs in David Niven's autobiography. When he was about to graduate from Sandhurst, he was asked what regiment he would like to join. He put down: "Anything but the HLI". The Highland Light Infantry wear trews (tartan trousers) and Niven did not like that image at all. He was of course immediately posted to the HLI.
Another example of it occurred when the father of a friend of mine inadvertedly spoke with some satisfaction of his expense account. He was of course immediately told that he had to take us to dinner at a good restaurant on it -- which he was in fact glad to do, though it clearly was not an example of a work expense.
So is there an underlying principle or moral there too? I suspect that there is. An attack on hubris, maybe?
Posted by John Ray. For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. For a daily survey of Australian politics, see AUSTRALIAN POLITICS Also, don't forget your roundup of Obama news and commentary at OBAMA WATCH
Kevin07's fine print
That's the nice way of saying that Kevin07 is a lying slimeball. In fairness though Kevin08 can say, well that was 2007, it's 2008 now suckers. And technically he is right, a bit like the slimy used car salesman who claims that piece of crap you just bought is covered by a warranty but fails to mention that only certain bits and pieces are covered. See below, he wrote the letter in 2007 and perhaps he was talking about 2007, just decided not to say ONLY, the fine print if you will.
Emphasis is mine, I'm sure Kevin08 when hearing about all this whining over wheaties for brekkie in Brissie is thinking, [*snigger*] amateurs! So what this means is that when the evil, nasty corporations are stripped of their members, they'll cut costs by cutting employees. I mean if your customer base gets slashed then why keep all the staff. I guess those workers weren't part of the ALPs famous 'working families'. The electorate will have to decide whether PM Rudd lied or was just being sneaky or for that matter, had no clue what the hell the treasurer was putting together and vice versa.But, on November 20 last year, Mr Rudd wrote to the Australian Health Insurance Association promising: "Both my Shadow Minister for Health, Nicola Roxon and I have made clear on many occasions this year that Federal Labor is committed to retaining the existing private health insurance rebates, including the 30 per cent general rebate and 35 and 40 per cent rebates for older Australians. [snip] Now the industry is reeling from Mr Swan's announcement, which could strip them of millions of members.
On a side note though, I personally don't like this extra levy on those who earn more money. In principle, it's supposed to be free healthcare paid for by our taxes, so why do some have to pay more than others, it's not like those who pay the levy are bumped to the front of the queue at the public hospital or something. To me it's saying that someone like me who works extra hours and makes extra money on the side by working, not stealing, has to pay an extra tax.
Meanwhile the slob down the road or in the next suburb who barely works 9 to 5, when he's not chucking sickies that is, and spends his spare time and cash at the pub assaulting his liver doesn't have to. It says to me that I have to pay an extra tax because I'm somehow less deserving than the slob.
Just on this, I'm not sure that those who have private health insurance will be ditching it for the public system. I certainly won't because I've heard what the public system is like and have been through it myself. Perhaps those thinking about it can learn from the experience of someone who actually believes in socialized medicine.
Sunday, May 11, 2008
ISRAEL AT 60
Israel's 60th anniversary has produced some wonderful essays in honour of that heroic people but the most down to earth was in my view written by Prof. Barry Rubin -- a man who has converted his love of Israel into an unceasing verbal war against all those in the media who misrepresent Israel. I reproduce an excerpt below. The whole thing, of course, is a must-read for all of us who support Israel
As part of the sixtieth anniversary celebration, Israelis are choosing their national bird but they have long since picked the national sport: self-criticism. The great Israeli humorist Ephraim Kishon described his own arrival in the country shortly after independence by joking that as the ship approached the coast it became very hot and we began criticizing the government over the weather. Daily Israel, every conceivable failing (real or imagined) is relentlessly dissected. The negative is usually highlighted, though afterward people feel optimistic at having been able to vent their pessimism. One day walking down the street I ran into a friend.
"How's everything?" he asked. "Great," I answered. "How can you say that!" he exclaimed. "Don't you read the newspapers?" This characteristic has a positive effect, by inspiring a ceaseless effort to make things better. In dictatorships and places ruled by extremist ideologies, the stifling of this process has been one of the main reasons for their failings.
I know our society could have been, and could be today, far better. Don't get me started on the teacher's strike or the low calibre of politicians. The president and prime minister have rightly both faced charges of malfeasance. One cannot help but think that if so much effort didn't have to go into self-defence, the country would be within shouting distance of utopia.
Still, when annual quality of life polls are taken, the positive scores from Israelis are into the 90th percentile. Moreover, although Israel faces very real threats, its security situation is better than the great majority of those sixty years. While there is full, formal peace with only Egypt and Jordan, most Arab states-except for Syria-have in practice made the material, as opposed to verbal, pursuit of the conflict, a low priority.
It's true that the old comradeship of decades ago has declined, as have the institutions created to build the state. As in other countries, privatization has replaced statism. I can remember when a telephone installation took a month. Now it takes a day. Television stations have gone from a single choice to dozens. The national airport has been upgraded from a place barely fit for a small provincial town to a large, thoroughly modern complex. This tiny state of now seven million people is a world leader in science, medicine, and hi-tech among other things, yet still has some of the globe's best-tasting fruit and vegetables as well as internationally exported flowers.
And nothing more symbolizes Israeli daily life than the driver behind you setting off his horn to beat the speed of light from the changing traffic signal. Yet civility, too, is creeping in gradually. With all of its problems-at times because of its problems-it is a great place to live.
Oh yes we are human beings, a fact that often seems forgotten in the hate-filled propaganda that pervades too many institutions, the slanderous misrepresentation of latest fact and longer-term history which is heard far too much. A friend told me today that he was seriously informed on an international television broadcast that former prime minister Ariel Sharon drank a glass of Palestinian blood every day.
It's often explained that criticism of Israel is not antisemitism as such but increasingly the extreme, crazed attacks precisely duplicate that hateful standpoint. More important is this: historic antisemitism's claims and assumptions have simply been adapted to Israel; the word "Zionism" simply substituted for "Judaism" and "Israel" for "Jews." We are the only people in the world continually called on to apologize because we survived, even after 85 percent of European Jews were murdered and about 90 percent of Middle Eastern Jews were expelled or had to flee the countries where they were born.
In contrast to the false accusations, we will be delighted to agree, cooperate, and celebrate the establishment of a Palestinian Arab state willing to live in peace alongside Israel. Unfortunately, that prospect seems distant. Equally unfortunately, that movement's Islamist and much of its nationalist leadership prefers to continue the conflict-and intensify their own, and our, people's suffering--rather than accept anything less than Israel, in the words of Iran's president, being wiped off the map.
A thousand years ago, Chasdai Ibn Shaprut wrote from Spain: "Dishonoured and humiliated by our dispersion, we have to listen in silence to those who say: `every nation has its own land and you alone possess not even the shadow of a country on this earth.'" But if there really was a place, Shaprut said, "where harassed Israel can rule itself, where it is subject to nobody.I would not hesitate to forsake all honours, resign my high office.and travel over mountains and plains, over land and water," to reach it. Well, now it exists and will keep on doing so, very probably long after seemingly more established states or at least societies vanish in its neighborhood or elsewhere.
Nahum Lenkin, one of my few relatives who escaped with his life from wartime Poland, wrote how his parents there often "went without food" to pay for the town's Zionist school where he and others could be prepared "to one day go as pioneers to Eretz Israel." Virtually all that town's survivors, and their children, live in Israel.
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Posted by John Ray. For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. For a daily survey of Australian politics, see AUSTRALIAN POLITICS Also, don't forget your roundup of Obama news and commentary at OBAMA WATCH
New leadership, same old socialist slimeballs
Yeah baby, yeah, finally the proletariat get to stick it to the filthy bourgeoisie, all hail the glorious new leadership and fresh 'new' taxing ideas. First was the tax on the alcopops and now this, it's coming baby, these slimeballs are just getting started.News.com.au - Treasurer Wayne Swan has confirmed that his Budget on Tuesday will include a provision to lift the tax on luxury cars above $57,000 from 25 per cent to 30 per cent, affecting 105,000 car purchases a year.
Because let's face it, all those bastards who can afford those $57K plus fancy gas-guzzlers didn't get the money to buy them through years of hard work did they Swannie, not holding two or 3 jobs or anything, we all know those filthy bastards did something nasty to get that money.Mr Swan defended the rise, saying he needed to find savings following years of unsustainable spending by the Howard government. "We don't think it is unreasonable for people who have done well in recent years from government decisions in terms of top-end tax cuts - just pay a little more for a luxury car,'' Mr Swan said.
Yeah, we all know it was Howard who gave them the money, taxes are government money you know, you curs should be grateful for the coming taxcuts and stop whining about how hard you work. It's high time someone made those rich bastards pay their fair share, they've been getting free money from the Howard cabal for years now. And don't think it's only the millionaires who'll be catching it, which ever way you look at it, with leftist scum in power, you'll pay one way or another."We think it is only fair that people who can afford these cars make a small contribution in that savings effort.''
Well folks, there you have it, there was the great big sorry, fresh ideas, kyoto, the great big wankfest and eventually what it boils down to is that you've just elected a couple of high-taxing socialist slimeballs. Well shock-horror eh. If you're still confused, let me spell it out for you, fair go is for the parasites and losers, not you who work hard. Things like working extra, getting a second job and all that is no longer encouraged.Federal Chamber of Automotive Industries chief executive Andrew McKellar agreed and said motorists already paid enough tax on new cars. "They pay GST, they pay stamp duty, they pay registration and they pay tax on the fuel they put in their cars,'' Mr McKellar said. "This tax increase is really an unnecessary burden on all motorists and it will be reflected throughout the market.''
Off course it'll never be official policy but if you have half a brain you'll see that the harder you work and the more money you make the more you'll pay in tax with lefties running the joint. And even if you're happy to do that and save your money and one day decide to treat yourself to something nice, to reward yourself, you'll first have to pay another tax, on top of the ones you're already paying. That's FRESH ideas for you.
Saturday, May 10, 2008
Buried Prejudice: The Bigot in Your Brain
Deep within our subconscious, all of us harbor biases that we consciously abhor. And the worst part is: we act on them
The heading and subheading above are from a recent article in that well-known Greenie publication, "Scientific American". I also reproduce the first part of the article concerned below. The article seems to be aimed towards making us less prejudiced towards outgroups. But the article exists in a reality vacuum. It totally ignores realities such as the incredibly high rate of violent crime among blacks and also ignores most of the research on impression-formation and stereotyping. It is largely a rehash of some well-known work by Banerji and Richeson that I have commented on some time ago.
The "amazing" thing that the researchers found was that whites (and some blacks) are more wary of blacks than they are of whites -- no matter how you measure or detect that. Such a finding would, however, surely surprise only a psychologist. If blacks REALLY ARE more dangerous to others, it is merely psychological good function to be more wary of them than of others. And I don't think even Leftists attempt to deny the high rate of black crime. So to call such perfectly proper wariness in people "bigotry" is itself bigoted. Bigotry is judging people according to a fixed and wrong set of preconceptions and it seems to me that that is exactly how psychologists are judging others when they refer to perfectly normal and adaptive behaviour as bigotry.
The one thing that the research literature on stereotyping shows most clearly is that the "stereotypes" people have in their heads are not usually (Except, perhaps in the case of psychologists) rigid or imprisoning but are highly flexible and responsive to the realities that people encounter (See for instance here and here). That fact fully explains all the behaviour that the psychologists described below view as "bigotry". If blacks change, the perceptions and expectations of them will change -- but I am not holding my breath.
Fortunately, the same literature tells us that once we get to know a particular person as an individual, the importance of the stereotype recedes rapidly -- so that the particular person will then in general be treated as we find him/her, regardless of any expectations we have about the group to which he/she belongs. A rather amusing example of that which I once came across was a white neo-Nazi whose best friend was a very dark-skinned Bengali. And there was another guy who could not stand "Chinks" (East Asians) but who was happily married to one. And Wilhelm Marr, the man who in 1879 invented the term "antisemitism" (he thought it was a good thing), was actually married to a Jewish lady! Psychologists have traditionally seen such behaviour as perverse but a good knowledge of the impression-formation research would have told them that it is normal."There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life," Jesse Jackson once told an audience, "than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery-then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved."
Jackson's remark illustrates a basic fact of our social existence, one that even a committed black civil-rights leader cannot escape: ideas that we may not endorse-for example, that a black stranger might harm us but a white one probably would not-can nonetheless lodge themselves in our minds and, without our permission or awareness, color our perceptions, expectations and judgments.
Using a variety of sophisticated methods, psychologists have established that people unwittingly hold an astounding assortment of stereotypical beliefs and attitudes about social groups: black and white, female and male, elderly and young, gay and straight, fat and thin. Although these implicit biases inhabit us all, we vary in the particulars, depending on our own group membership, our conscious desire to avoid bias and the contours of our everyday environments. For instance, about two thirds of whites have an implicit preference for whites over blacks, whereas blacks show no average preference for one race over the other.
Such bias is far more prevalent than the more overt, or explicit, prejudice that we associate with, say, the Ku Klux Klan or the Nazis. That is emphatically not to say that explicit prejudice and discrimination have evaporated nor that they are of lesser importance than implicit bias. According to a 2005 federal report, almost 200,000 hate crimes-84 percent of them violent-occur in the U.S. every year.
The persistence of explicit bias in contemporary culture has led some critics to maintain that implicit bias is of secondary concern. But hundreds of studies of implicit bias show that its effects can be equally insidious. Most social psychologists believe that certain scenarios can automatically activate implicit stereotypes and attitudes, which then can affect our perceptions, judgments and behavior. "The data on that are incontrovertible," concludes psychologist Russell H. Fazio of Ohio State University.
Now researchers are probing deeper. They want to know: Where exactly do such biases come from? How much do they influence our outward behavior? And if stereotypes and prejudiced attitudes are burned into our psyches, can learning more about them help to tell each of us how to override them?
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A Gulf in Giving: Oil-Rich States Starve the World Food Program
" United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and his top lieutenants on Monday are convening the first meeting of the U.N.’s Task Force on the Global Food Crisis. Ban says it will “study the root causes of the crisis,” and propose solutions for “coordinated global action” at a summit of world leaders in June.
Ban might want to consider convincing the oil-rich nations of the Middle East to provide more than the near-invisible amount of money they currently give to the World Food Program (WFP), the U.N.’s food-giving arm, which is charged with alleviating the food crisis.
WFP internal documents show that the major oil producing nations of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) gives almost nothing to the food organization, even as skyrocketing oil prices and swollen oil revenues contribute to the very crisis that the U.N. claims could soon add 100 million more people to the world’s starving masses.
The overwhelming bulk of the burden in feeding the world’s starving poor remains with the United States and a small group of other predominately Western nations, a situation that the WFP has done little so far to change, even as it has asked for another $775 million in donations to ease the crisis.
Donor listings on WFP’s website show that this year, as in every year since 1999, the U.S. is far and away the biggest aid provider to WFP. Since 2001, U.S. donations to the food agency have averaged more than $1.16 billion annually — or more than five times as much as the next biggest donor, the European Commission."
H/T to Frenemy
The sickness that ails the left
For Che Guevara, the lovin’ never stops. He must be the most adored totalitarian thug/murderer in the world. The 80th anniversary of his birth is upon us, and Andres Zerneri, a sculptor in Guevara’s native Argentina, is doing something about it. He has asked people worldwide to contribute “bronze keys, kitchenware, and old instruments for a statue” commemorating Guevara. (We quote from a Bloomberg report.) So far, some 15,000 people have contributed more than three tons of this material. About those “old instruments,” we wonder: Do they include instruments of torture?
fat socialist reveals his true colours:
NZ's Dominion Post newspaper carried an opinion piece by one Chris Trotter on the subject of climate change, titled "the Moral Equivalent of War":
A quote:
"...the fight against global warming must become the moral equivalent of war. The threat we face is much greater than the threat posed to the world by Hitler....indeed the argument is strong for an all party coalition dedicated to bringing us through the crisis. Nor can there be the slightest suggestion that anything other than full equality of sacrifice constitutes the guiding principle of our climate change policies. And most importantly, we must learn to recognise the nay-sayers, the special pleaders, the not-in-my-backyarders, and the climate change deniers for the Quislings that they are and treat them accordingly."
(bold mine) H/T Lindsay Mitchell
frightening stuff--never mind the science, just get on board with the fashionable ideology or suffer the consequences. One gets the impression that this dishonest bastard would be perfectly happy to see "climate change deniers" forced to wear a red triangle when out in public...or should that be a yellow star? The mindset is the same, after all.
Friday, May 09, 2008
Support for US attack on Iran grows in Middle East
The potentially transforming events in the 2008 campaign are matters of war and peace. Both may be in play between now and November, in ways that add extra volatility to the presidential race. Let's start with war: The United States is already fighting two of them, in Iraq and Afghanistan. But judging from recent statements by administration officials, there is also a small, but growing, chance of conflict with Iran.
The administration is signaling the Iranians that they need to stop supplying and training Shiite militias in Iraq -- or run the risk of U.S. retaliation. The Maliki government in Baghdad, worried about the danger of escalation, is passing this message to Tehran, but so far the only consequence has been that the Iranians have broken off talks in Baghdad that were aimed at stabilizing the situation.
Saber rattling from the Bush White House may seem almost routine, but pay attention to the comment last week by Adm. Michael G. Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. "Iran is not going away. We need to be strong and really in the deterrent mode, to not be very predictable."
The risk of a U.S.-Iranian confrontation is growing in part because Saudi Arabia and other U.S. allies in the Middle East are so eager for it. "Behind closed doors, we are praying that the Iranians will make a mistake so that you will have a reason to attack," one Saudi told me this week. Another prominent Arab official said he hopes the United States will strike Iranian training camps just over the border from Iraq.
How would a U.S.-Iran confrontation play out in the campaign? Obviously, that depends on how you read the American political mood. Usually, we assume that the nation rallies around the party of war, but that's less certain in this case. America is war-weary, and it mistrusts President Bush. So a military skirmish with Iran might backfire, adding to public dissent -- much as happened with the Nixon administration's attack on Viet Cong sanctuaries in Cambodia in 1970.
Adding to the combustible mix is Hillary Clinton's hawkish position on Iran, which has support from the center-right of the party even if she drops out. Her rhetorical threat to "totally obliterate" Iran if it launched a nuclear attack against Israel was sharper than anything that has come out of the Bush White House. The anti-Iran stance from centrist Democrats blunts John McCain's appeal as the tough-guy candidate. But it complicates the Democrats' argument for withdrawing U.S. troops rapidly from Iraq, since the main beneficiary of such a move would be Tehran.
Source
Posted by John Ray. For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. For a daily survey of Australian politics, see AUSTRALIAN POLITICS Also, don't forget your roundup of Obama news and commentary at OBAMA WATCH
Life under gun control
This is the reality for stalking victims under a nation with strict gun control laws, if some slimeball decides to take an unhealthy interest in you and doesn't really care whether you feel the same way then you're pretty much hung out to dry. If you know that the fellow is a violent slimeball and is capable of violence, all you can do is tell the cops, go to court and get that worthless AVO (apprehended violence order), then you start whistling for some actual protection. Apparently she is much safer this way.Daily Telegraph - A man who allegedly shot his former girlfriend at Star City Casino had been convicted of stalking her four years ago, a court has heard. Todd William Devaney, 37, was not brought up from the cells below Central Local Court this morning as he faced five charges arising from yesterday's alleged shooting in Pyrmont, including attempted murder and maliciously inflicting grievous bodily harm. [snip]
Court paperwork revealed the alleged victim of yesterday's shooting was Holly Graham, a fitness instructor at the Star City Casino's gym, who Devaney had previous been found guilty of stalking in 2004. She had taken out an apprehended violence order against him at the time. [snip] Documents tendered to the court stated Devaney had a string of convictions for firearms offences, stalking and armed robbery dating back more than a decade.
You will never be allowed to legally own a firearm to defend yourself when he comes looking for you, like this woman. The longer it takes for him to come after you, the lesser your chances of getting the state, no matter how well-meaning, to protect you. As you can see, the justice system failed this woman, the cops failed her, the gun control laws failed her. The only saving grace was the Lord made this fellow a crap shot, so she wasn't fatally shot and killed, she got lucky. Thank you gun grabbers.
Do-gooders reject controlled spending for blacks
Drinking their welfare payments rather than spending it on other needs is common among blacks so the Feds are instituting a type of food stamps program in an attempt to change that. Unlikely that it will change much -- but the do-gooder idea of more jobs for social workers would certainly change nothing at all. But trying to get blacks to behave like middle-class whites is pissing into the wind anyway. I used to run a boarding house in a bottom-rung area (Ipswich) and few of my tenants worked. I noted that lots of whites there had a big piss-up on the welfare "payday", only to be left scratching for the rest of the fortnight. I made a point of putting my hand out for rent every "payday". I guess the government is trying to do something similar
The Australian Council of Social Service (ACOSS) says the Rudd Government's proposed welfare debit card is not the best way to help struggling families. The Federal Government has confirmed a new electronic national welfare card will be included in next week's Budget. The debit card will contain a portion of a family's welfare payment which can only be spent on necessities like food and clothing.
Federal Indigenous Affairs Minister Jenny Macklin says the card will be issued from July in certain Northern Territory Aboriginal communities and will eventually be used for some non-Indigenous welfare recipients across Australia. The scheme is an attempt to encourage people to spend their welfare payments on food and clothing, rather than on drugs and alcohol.
But ACOSS President Lyn Hatfield Dodds says the card will not work. "ACOSS doesn't believe that quarantining payments is the best way forward," she said. "We would prefer to see Government investing in the supports and services that families need. "Quarantining at best will keep those families in a holding pattern, but it will not build their capacity or capability to make different choices and move out of crisis. "It is really an issue where there are families with low parenting capacity - families with histories of alcohol and drug abuse and gambling addiction," she added.
Opposition families spokesman Tony Abbott says the card will not work because it will become an administrative nightmare. Mr Abbott says the problem will be getting the states to hand over private information about which children are at risk, and therefore which parents should be targeted. "I think they could end up spending hundreds of millions of dollars on this new card technology and find that it is essentially redundant because the states won't give them the information," he said. "A much better system would be for an across the board quarantine of, say, 50 per cent of these payments."
But Minister for Human Services Joe Ludwig says the new scheme will help businesses as well as families. Senator Ludwig says the previous NT store card system excluded small businesses from taking part in the scheme. "It does help local business, it helps them participate in the income management scheme, it will increase the competition and it'll also give families greater choice," he said. "We really need to start dealing with all those issues in a very thoughtful, serious, respectful way, to come alongside families and help them move out of crisis."
Source
Posted by John Ray. For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. For a daily survey of Australian politics, see AUSTRALIAN POLITICS Also, don't forget your roundup of Obama news and commentary at OBAMA WATCH
Thursday, May 08, 2008
Conservatives are happier because they are less angry
That seems to be the conclusion to be drawn from the report of a piece of psychological research below. But that conclusion must of course be interpreted to make conservatives look bad. So the assumption is injected that they SHOULD be angry! No argument is offered to say why. I will probably say more about this when the actual academic journal article underlying the report below comes online. One of the authors, John Jost, has however previously been shown as having some strange ideas about how to define conservatism so I expect further idiocy and bias in his measure of "rationalization". There is already an extended comment on the study up at STACLU
Individuals with conservative ideologies are happier than liberal-leaners, and new research pinpoints the reason: Conservatives rationalize social and economic inequalities. Regardless of marital status, income or church attendance, right-wing individuals reported greater life satisfaction and well-being than left-wingers, the new study found. Conservatives also scored highest on measures of rationalization, which gauge a person's tendency to justify, or explain away, inequalities.
The rationalization measure included statements such as: "It is not really that big a problem if some people have more of a chance in life than others," and "This country would be better off if we worried less about how equal people are." To justify economic inequalities, a person could support the idea of meritocracy, in which people supposedly move up their economic status in society based on hard work and good performance. In that way, one's social class attainment, whether upper, middle or lower, would be perceived as totally fair and justified.
If your beliefs don't justify gaps in status, you could be left frustrated and disheartened, according to the researchers, Jaime Napier and John Jost of New York University. They conducted a U.S.-centric survey and a more internationally focused one to arrive at the findings. "Our research suggests that inequality takes a greater psychological toll on liberals than on conservatives," the researchers write in the June issue of the journal Psychological Science, "apparently because liberals lack ideological rationalizations that would help them frame inequality in a positive (or at least neutral) light."
The results support and further explain a Pew Research Center survey from 2006, in which 47 percent of conservative Republicans in the U.S. described themselves as "very happy," while only 28 percent of liberal Democrats indicated such cheer. The same rationalizing phenomena could apply to personal situations as well.
"There is no reason to think that the effects we have identified here are unique to economic forms of inequality," the researchers write. "Research suggests that highly egalitarian women are less happy in their marriages compared with their more traditional counterparts, apparently because they are more troubled by disparities in domestic labor."
Source
Posted by John Ray. For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. For a daily survey of Australian politics, see AUSTRALIAN POLITICS Also, don't forget your roundup of Obama news and commentary at OBAMA WATCH
Somebody call a pollie!
Oh my godless, you mean there are bad people out there with mean, nasty guns, I thought everyone handed in their guns and was dealing with their violent urges by sitting in the lotus position and humming quietly. Somebody call a pollie, pen an angry letter to your local member, get them to pass tough new laws and call passionate press conferences condemning violence and weapons, that'll do the trick and take all those nasties off the streets.SMH - Police have arrested a man suspected of shooting a Star City casino worker this afternoon, briefly holding up a visit to the area by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd. The 25-year-old woman, who is understood to be a fitness instructor, was shot three times in the stomach and hip in the gym on level five of the Pyrmont complex in Sydney this afternoon. The man was carrying three guns, one an automatic pistol, said Inspector Lee.
Can somebody check whether Mr Rudd's security staff carry any nasty guns, after all 'working families' aren't allowed to carry any weapons to protect themselves in Australia so why should Mr Rudd be protected with violent, nasty, evil guns. Besides we know our gun control laws are working, so why would Mr Rudd need the protection of a gun? Sure we have the odd shooting, that woman who just copped the hot lead this afternoon will just have to take one for the team. I mean you don't want to end up like America do you, where tens of thousands are being shot dead every day by those terrible rampaging guns, do you. You're much safer for being defenseless people, just believe I tell you.The incident caused Mr Rudd's security staff to briefly delay his arrival at Fairfax Media's new headquarters at One Darling Island, near the casino. Mr Rudd was officially opening the new media complex today.
Time to reap the metrosexual seed you have sown
Daily Mail - And now, after all these years of our efforts to "retrain" men, up to and including ridiculing them, what have we really achieved? We have achieved a generation of women who still earn, as a national average, only 70 per cent of men's wages, and who still do five hours of housework to every measly hour's contribution from the man of the house. Yet we have also achieved a new generation of men who, worrying signs suggest, are turning into a bunch of sissies. So well done, ladies.
Take a look at your handiwork now. Appearance has become an obsession to men. What we started when we gave them their first style magazine is now a massively profitable publishing industry. Sales of male cosmetics are at an all-time high and women are being elbowed out of the queue for cosmetic surgery by lads desperate to have their chins tightened, their eye-bags removed or that vital breast reduction to get rid of their "man boobs".
Well, since it took a decade or two to remove mens' testicles, I suppose it'll take another decade or two to give it back to them. In reality though I think it will take longer since most of the ball-busting feminists aren't really that interested in handing men back their balls. So to the ball-busting women out there, get used to the feelings, headaches and tears ladies and perhaps you can be more careful what you wish for next time.We begged them to weep; to show us their "feminine side". Now we're awash with Paul Gascoigne moments, enhancing nothing more than the share value of Kleenex, as the slightest hint of pressure induces collapse into girly tears, leaving us to pick up the pieces of their problems as well as our own. And worse is on the way. The latest casualty of our well-meaning efforts, research says, is a huge decline in male libido.
It's not that they can't have sex (we've got Viagra for that). No, it's that they won't have sex. Not interested. Can't be bothered. One Relate counsellor, Nina Bryant, says that when she started 18 years ago, it was rare for a man to admit to a lack of interest in sex. "Now," she says, "it makes about a third of my case-load."
On a side note, you know the old 'what women want' chestnut. So women pushed and cajoled men into becoming women and then when they became like women, women are still not happy, but that's what women said they wanted but apparently they didn't really mean what they said. Sorry ladies, how the hell are men supposed to know what women want when it appears women don't even know themselves?