Under Labor, elites will remain irrelevant
(29 Feb 08) “....It happened sooner than expected. The so-called progressive Left has given Prime Minister Kevin Rudd his riding instructions...... One hates to be the bearer of bad news, but the left-wing letter writers are destined for disappointment..... The wish list reads like letters to Santa.....If nothing else, hope springs eternal. And you can understand the excitement of these “leading Australian thinkers”.... Under Howard, these sophisticates lost their elevated status. They were relegated to talking to one another via their books, whipping themselves up into a frenzy over the Howard era. With the conservatives out of power and Labor back in, they are hoping for a return to normal programming where elites are treated as people who must know better than your average Joe Schmo what Joe wants.....” Under Labor, elites will remain irrelevant , Janet Albrechtsen, The Australian “...They appear to be hankering for a messiah. If not a Gough Whitlam, then at least another Paul Keating, who as prime minister enjoyed the accolades of elite attention. The price was electoral oblivion, as Keating learned that their agenda was anathema to the wider electorate. If Rudd is as politically astute as last year's election suggests, he will learn those lessons by choosing to emulate Howard's conversation with the Australian people over Keating's embrace of sophisticated elites..... Their desire for passion - read emotion - tends to unhinge their ability to reason. Brimming with passion and imagination, their prescriptions are often divorced from realistic, sensible outcomes.....Eventually, however, when the disenchantment of their continued irrelevance sets in, the Left will rise up. This is why the culture wars are far from over.....Their hatred of the former PM was so much more intense because he was the driver of fundamental change. That Howard dragged Labor to the centre only heightens their pain....”.
Forget Global Warming: Welcome to the new Ice Age
(28 Feb 08) “.....Snow cover over North America and much of Siberia, Mongolia and China is greater than at any time since 1966. The U.S. National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) reported that many American cities and towns suffered record cold temperatures in January and early February. According to the NCDC, the average temperature in January "was -0.3 F cooler than the 1901-2000 (20th century) average."... In just the first two weeks of February, Toronto received 70 cm of snow, smashing the record of 66.6 cm for the entire month set back in the pre-SUV, pre-Kyoto, pre-carbon footprint days of 1950. And remember the Arctic Sea ice? The ice we were told so hysterically last fall had melted to its "lowest levels on record? Never mind that those records only date back as far as 1972 and that there is anthropological and geological evidence of much greater melts in the past.,,,The ice is back.....” Forget Global Warming: Welcome to the new Ice Age , Lorne Gunter, National Post “.... Gilles Langis, a senior forecaster with the Canadian Ice Service in Ottawa, says the Arctic winter has been so severe the ice has not only recovered, it is actually 10 to 20 cm thicker in many places than at this time last year. And it's not just anecdotal evidence that is piling up against the climate-change dogma..... We missed what was right in front of our eyes," says Prof. Russell. It's not ice melt but rather wind circulation that drives ocean currents northward from the tropics. Climate models until now have not properly accounted for the wind's effects on ocean circulation, so researchers have compensated by over-emphasizing the role of manmade warming on polar ice melt....Kenneth Tapping of our own National Research Council, who oversees a giant radio telescope focused on the sun, is convinced we are in for a long period of severely cold weather if sunspot activity does not pick up soon.The last time the sun was this inactive, Earth suffered the Little Ice Age that lasted about five centuries and ended in 1850. Crops failed through killer frosts and drought. Famine, plague and war were widespread. Harbours froze, so did rivers, and trade ceased....”.
(27 Feb 08) Baby it's cold outside by Clarice Feldman - American Thinker
"I don't know how much life is left in the global warming/aka climate change hoax, but this should -- if widely known -- help nail the first part of the coffin lid down on it:
Over the past year, anecdotal evidence for a cooling planet has exploded. China has its coldest winter in 100 years. Baghdad sees its first snow in all recorded history. North America has the most snowcover in 50 years , with places like Wisconsin the highest since record-keeping began. Record levels of Antarctic sea ice, record cold in Minnesota , Texas, Florida, Mexico, Australia , Iran, Greece , South Africa, Greenland, Argentina, Chile -- the list goes on and on. .....No more than anecdotal evidence, to be sure. But now, that evidence has been supplanted by hard scientific fact. All four major global temperature tracking outlets (Hadley, NASA's GISS, UAH, RSS) have released updated data. All show that over the past year, global temperatures have dropped precipitously........A compiled list of all the sources can be seen here . The total amount of cooling ranges from 0.65C up to 0.75C -- a value large enough to wipe out nearly all the warming recorded over the past 100 years. All in one year's time. For all four sources, it's the single fastest temperature change ever recorded, either up or down. "
Iran introduces law that imposes death penalty on converts
(25 Feb 08) “....Legislation has been brought by the government of President Mahmoud Amadinejad before the Iranian Majlis that would mandate the death penalty for apostates from Islam. The law's reach would be worldwide, the legislation says.... The legislation used the word “Hadd -- meaning that it explicitly sets death as a fixed punishment that cannot be changed, reduced or annulled. In the past, the death penalty has been handed down, and also carried out, in apostasy cases, but it has never before been set down in law,” the Institute's president, Joseph Grieboski said......The proposed Iranian law would enshrine the mandatory death penalty into the country's civil code for men. Women apostates would be imprisoned.....” Iran introduces law that imposes death penalty on converts Religious Intelligence.co.UK “....Two types of apostasy are set down in the legislation: parental and innate. Innate apostates are those whose parents were Muslim, declared themselves as Muslim as an adult and then leave the faith. Parental apostates are those whose parents were non-Muslims, who had become Muslims as adults, and then left the faith...... In December 2004, the Prince of Wales convened a meeting of Muslim and Christian leaders at Clarence House to address the death penalty for converts. The Bishops of London and Rochester, the Archbishop of Kaduna, Nigeria, an Orthodox bishop and the director of the Barnabas Fund met with representatives of the London-based Al-Khoei Foundation, the Islamic Society of Britain, and Dr Zaki Badawi of the Muslim College in London. Prince Charles' efforts proved unsuccessful however as the Muslim delegation said non-Muslims should not speak publicly about apostasy laws.....”
(25 Feb 08) “....Westerners opposed to the application of the Islamic law (the Shari‘a) watch with dismay as it goes from strength to strength in their countries – harems increasingly accepted, a church leader endorsing Islamic law, a judge referring to the Koran, clandestine Muslim courts meting out justice. What can be done to stop the progress of this medieval legal system so deeply at odds with modern life, one that oppresses women and turns non-Muslims into second-class citizens? A first step is for Westerners to mount a united front against the Shari‘a. Facing near-unanimous hostility, Islamists back down....” Resisting Islamic Law , Daniel Pipes “...For one example, note the retreat last week by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) in a dispute concerning guide dogs used by the blind.....I have collected fifteen such cases on my weblog, at " Muslim Taxi Drivers vs. Seeing-Eye Dogs ": five from the United States (New Orleans, Cincinnati, Milwaukee, Brooksville, Fl.; Everett, Wash.); four from Canada (Vancouver, twice in Edmonton, Fort McMurray, Alberta); three from the United Kingdom (Cambridge, twice in London); two from Australia (Melbourne, Sydney); and one from Norway (Oslo).....when the police and the courts are called in, the legal rights of the blind to their basic needs and their dignity almost always trump the Muslim dislike for dogs. The Muslim proprietor or driver invariably finds himself admonished, fined, re-educated, warned, or even jailed. The judge who found a cabby's behavior to be "a total disgrace" spoke for many.CAIR, realizing that its approach had failed in the courts of both law and of public opinion, suddenly and nimbly switched sides..... CAIR's capitulation contains an important lesson: When Westerners broadly agree on rejecting a specific Islamic law or tradition and unite against it, Western Islamists must adjust to the majority's will. Guide dogs for the blind represent just one of many such consensus issues; others tend to involve women.... If Westerners stick together, the Shari‘a is doomed. If we do not, we are doomed....”
(24 Feb 08) “....In the last few days, we've been reminded yet again that Europe's radical secularism, atheism, socialism, multiculturalism, childlessness, and aging population make a fascinating but unstable mix — a lovely, fragile orchid in a thinly protected greenhouse....Kosovo has just declared its independence from Serbia, and what follows could be nightmarish.... Recently Turkey's prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, speaking on German soil, told cheering Turkish workers and Germans of Turkish ancestry that assimilation is “a crime against humanity”.... The American press passed over Erdogan's broadside, but it was a revolutionary, nationalist appeal to German residents of Turkish backgrounds,.... Meanwhile Norway is about to request 100,000 Turkish guest workers for its cash-rich but labor-poor economy..... The British press claims that Muslim immigrants committed over 17,000 acts of “honor” violence in Britain last year.....Iran just warned Denmark to silence its newspapers, which once again are republishing caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed..... How do all these diverse narratives and agendas add up? The vaunted European multicultural, multilateral, utopian and pacifist worldview is now on its own and thus will get hammered as never before in the unrelenting forge of history. Very soon there will be no more George W. Bush to dump on, hide behind, and blame for the widening cracks in the Atlantic alliance....” Why Europe is in deep doo doo, Victor Davis Hanson“.....Consider Kosovo again....Russia and Serbia together have the military wherewithal to invade it tomorrow — Serbia by land, Russia by air — and end its breakaway experiment....consider our dilemma. Why would we intervene abroad in a third war when our allies have lectured us ad nauseam about the amorality of military intercession, have shown little interest in fighting jihadism in Afghanistan or Iraq, and have made clear that they want very little to do with the United States? And after 9/11, why would the United States rush to the aid of a Muslim country....The more labor that a secular, increasingly sterile European populace imports, the more social problems will accrue from unassimilated Muslim immigrants who like the economy and freedom of the West but are reluctant to relax any of their own religious and cultural views to participate fully in the postmodern society of their hosts.....Europe is also anti-American, and now in a world of Ahmadinejihads, Putins, Chinese communist apparatchiks, and thuggish Latin American strongmen, it has more or less alienated the only reliable and capable resource it might have drawn on — the goodwill of the United States.....Our response to this Euro-neuroticism?We are weary and tired of it. As our ancestors out West used to sing, “Yippy ti yi yo, get along little dogies, It's all your misfortune and none of my own…”
Satellite shoot-down is a clear warning to Iran
(24 Feb 08) “....Wednesday night's SM-3 shoot-down of a US spy satellite tumbling out of its orbit was a magnificent success for anti-missile defence. It meant hitting a bullet with a bullet, with only a ten-second time window for the shot. The hit was kinetic, meaning that there was no conventional warhead to explode.....The SM-3 was travelling at 17,000 miles per hour when it hit the spy sat. The target was "cold," so that heat-seeking sensors designed to locate hot missiles were not even used..... this fast, off-the-shelf demonstration of US technical prowess was really a direct shot across the bows of Iran -- and also North Korea. Why? Because the Russians and Chinese have had ICBMs for decades and never used them....” Satellite shoot-down is a clear warning to Iran , American Thinker “....They respond to the balance of terror in a rational way. But Iran and North Korea are constantly threatening us, unpredictable, and often crazy-sounding.....” Hizbullah" means "party of Allah," and that refers to the whole Khomeini cult, not just its Lebanese lapdog. So "radiation therapy" from the Party of Allah has a pretty clear meaning..... this is a crucial time to demonstrate to the rogues that the West can defend itself..... Once we get laser weapons mounted on aircraft, we will have even faster and more flexible defenses. That technology is not far away ..... this is an historic moment for the good guys. For the first time since Stalin exploded an atom bomb in 1949 there is a working defense against nuke-bearing missiles and planes.....”
(22 Feb 08) “....Kosovo was a medieval Christian Serbian state until the middle ages. many churches and monasteries were built in the period. The enevitable encroachment of Islam reared it's ugly head and Kosovo was conquered by the Ottomans in 1455....Over the coming centuries control of Kosovo was passed between Muslim Albanians and Christian Serbs on a regular basis. At the beginning of the 20th century the Serbian reconquest of Kosovo was described as retribution for the 1389 Battle of Kosovo.....During the fascist occupation of Kosovo by Albanians, until August 1941 alone, over 10,000 Serbs were killed and between 80,000 and 100,000 Serbs were expelled, while roughly the same number of Albanians from Albania were brought to settle in these Serbian lands.....Having looked at the history it clearly follows a familiar pattern. Originally a Christian country, conquered by the ever expanding Islamic “Religion of Peace”, legitimately re-conquered by the Christian Serbs and then conquered again by the mass immigration of Albanians. Sounds familiar doesn't it?....” Beware Cuckoos In The Nest , Ray Boyd “....It gets worse. The ethnic Albanians having moved to Kosovo, presumably for a better life, then demanded the country as their own. When the Christian Serbs objected NATO bombed them into submission. Now the interlopers have their way, independence from Serbia....The clear moral of this story is that Islam cannot co-exist peacefully alongside any other culture. There is no example in the world that I can think of where they do. It is deliberate on the part of Muslims to create conflict and tension wherever they are, whenever they are immigrants....I can understand why the Serbs are angry at the surrender of their country to Islam after many centuries of history. The Serbs admittedly committed atrocities against the Kosovans in the 1990's and NATO bombed them in order to protect them.....we do need to remember that the Albanian Kosovans were waging war against the Serbs at the time and committing equally atrocious violence against the Serb population in what was a classic Muslim tactic of stirring up resentment in the Kuffar population......Where next? Denmark, Sweden, Netherlands? Capitulation in Kosovo has created a dangerous precedent wherever there are Muslim cuckoos in the nest.
(22 Feb 08) “...The breakup of the distinct nations of the former Yugoslavia was a good thing. But splitting Serbia from its Kosovo province goes beyond that. It's trouble, not just for the Balkans, but for the rest of the world. ..... Many Kosovars celebrated wildly after winning an independence vote. But not all. Serbian Kosovars blanched at the loss of their ancient homeland, (known as the cradle of Serbia), to ethnic Muslim Albanians who had moved in, started a guerrilla war and, with the weekend balloting, finally took over..... Kosovo has just 2 million people. Sure, some microstates, such as Singapore and Panama, make it. But more often, the story is like East Timor's, a nonviable state in turmoil since its 1999 independence. With a GDP per capita of $250, 50% unemployment and half the population under 16, the odds against Kosovo are long.....” New Pandoran Box , Business Investor's Daily “.....Canada has reason to worry about Quebec. Russia, China and Iraq fear breakaway regions, too. Meanwhile, Macedonia and Montenegro, which have ethnic Albanian populations, now fear a precedent for parts of their territory to be pulled into a greater Albania. ....The West has lost credibility by breaking its promise to Serbia. Terrorists will take note.... Alliances are weakened. As the U.S. and dominant nations of the EU push through Kosovo statehood, the nearby nations of Poland, Hungary, Romania, Greece and Israel oppose it. This not only splits the EU with its eastern members. It separates the U.S. from its New Europe allies — not the least of which is Serbia, a country that allied itself to the West in two world wars....Russia's appetite for payback is whetted. Unlike smaller nations, Russia has a global reach and engages in tit for tat....”
Does Balkanisation beckon anew?
(21 Feb 08) “.... When the Great War comes, said old Bismarck, it will come out of "some damn fool thing in the Balkans ”.
"On June 28, 1914, Gavrilo Princip shot the archduke and heir to the Austrian throne, Franz Ferdinand, in Sarajevo, setting in motion the train of events that led to the first world war...... In the spring 1999, the United States bombed Serbia for 78 days to force its army out of that nation's cradle province of Kosovo. The Serbs were fighting Albanian separatists of the Kosovo Liberation Army, or KLA. And we had no more right to bomb Belgrade than the Royal Navy would have had to bombard New York in our Civil War. We bombed Serbia, we were told, to stop the genocide in Kosovo. But there was no genocide. This was propaganda.....Albanians did flee in the tens of thousands during the war. But since that war's end, the Serbs of Kosovo have seen their churches and monasteries smashed and vandalized and have been ethnically cleansed in the scores of thousands from their ancestral province....” Does Balkanisation beckon anew? Pat Buchanan , WorldNet Daily “....In the exodus, they have lost everything..... By intervening in a civil war to aid the secession of an ancient province, to create a new nation that has never before existed and, to erect it along ethnic, religious and tribal lines, we have established a dangerous precedent. Muslim and Albanian extremists are already talking of a Greater Albania, consisting of Albania, Kosovo and the Albanian-Muslim sectors of Serbia, Montenegro and Macedonia.... The U.S. war on Serbia was unconstitutional, unjust and unwise. Congress never authorized it. Serbia, an ally in two world wars, had never attacked us. We made an enemy of the Serbs, and alienated Russia, to create a second Muslim state in the Balkans..... And the clamor for ethnic self-rule has only begun to be heard.... Rumania has refused to recognize the new Republic of Kosovo, for the best of reasons..... Abkhazia and South Ossetia, two provinces that have broken away from Georgia, are invoking the Kosovo precedent to demand recognition as independent nations. As our NATO expansionists are anxious to bring Georgia into NATO, here is yet another occasion for a potential Washington-Moscow clash. Spain, too, opposed the severing of Kosovo from Serbia, as Madrid faces similar demands from Basque and Catalan separatists...Russia is high among those most threatened by the serial Balkanization we may have just reignited in the Balkans....”
(19 Feb 08) “....British intellectual life has long harbored a strain of militantly self-satisfied foolishness, and the present archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, is a perfect exemplar of the tendency. In an interview with the BBC on February 7, the archbishop said that it “seems unavoidable” that some aspects of sharia, or Islamic law, would be adopted in Britain: unavoidable, presumably, in the sense in which omertà seems unavoidable in the island of Sicily....Rarely does philosophical inanity dovetail so neatly into total ignorance of concrete social realities: it is as though the archbishop were the product of the coupling of Goldilocks and Neville Chamberlain .....” Accommodating Islamic Law ? Theodore Dalrymple, City Journal “....Those more charitably inclined point out that the archbishop is an erudite man, a professor of theology who reads in eight languages and who was addressing a highly sophisticated audience, employing nuanced, subtle, caveat-laden arguments..... Charity is a virtue, of course, but so is clarity: and it is the latter virtue that the archbishop so signally lacks. He assumes that the benevolence of his manner will disguise the weakness of his thought, and that his opacity will be mistaken for profundity..... There is only one word for a society in which such discourse can pass for intellectual subtlety and sophistication, and lead to career advancement: decadent....”
Royal United Services Institute
(19 Feb 08) “.....The world-renowned Royal United Services Institute has delivered an unprecedented attack on the Government's security policy. It warns that a failure to "lay down the line" to immigrant populations is undermining the fight against domestic extremism. It condemns the country's "fragmented" national identity and obsession with multiculturalism..... it accuses ministers of a "piecemeal and erratic response" to urgent threats to the nation and of starving the armed forces of cash to the point of "chronic disrepair". The security think tank, which has unrivalled contact with senior political and military figures, urges ministers to abandon "flabby and bogus strategic thinking" and to make the defence of the realm the "first duty of Government"..... Laws making it a crime to possess extremist jihadi propaganda and literature could now have to be re-written and dozens more prosecutions could collapse after senior judges ruled that police and prosecutors must prove to juries that terror suspects not only possessed potentially dangerous material but were intent on using it in an attack....The Appeal Court ruling was the latest instance of counter-terrorist laws being defeated or watered down by senior judges....” Obsession with multiculturalism makes Britain a soft touch for Terrorists, Daily Mail “....The study calls for a radical shake-up of government to take away oversight of security and defence from "the arena of short-term party politics" - in the same way that interest rates are now set independently of politicians. "The United Kingdom presents itself as a target, as a fragmenting, post-Christian society, increasingly divided about interpretations of its history, about its national aims, its values and in its political identity,"..... By contrast those who refuse to integrate into British society have a "firm self-image". "This is a problem worsened by the lack of leadership from the majority which in misplaced deference to "multiculturalism" failed to lay down the line to immigrant communities, thus undercutting those within them trying to fight extremism. "We look like a soft touch. We are indeed a soft touch, from within and without.".....Tory security spokesman Baroness Neville-Jones said: "This report sends a powerful message to Government that leadership is badly lacking at a time of significant threat to our country. Conservatives agree that multiculturalism has been a disaster for national cohesion and has increased our vulnerability to the terrorist threat."
Sorry to spoil the party with some hard reality
(16 Feb 08) It's worth noting the Australian Governments priorities at work:
Monday February 11 th was the day of an assassination attempt on the President and the Prime Minister of East Timor. This was 48 hours prior to the National Apology over the so called “Stolen Children”. President Jose Ramo-Horta is being treated in Darwin Hospital. The Australian Prime Minister and Government commit more troops and police to East Timor plus a Prime Ministerial visit over night and on the ground within 72 hours and in doing so, over fly the very same territory (and the Darwin hospital) that are in desperate need of that very same, “boots on the ground” commitment and attention in the Northern Territory...
" Tonight there will be children who will be subjected to unspeakable acts; who will see their parents or relatives with whatever form of substance abuse; who will actually live in the most deprived and depraved circumstances; who will put their heads down on concrete floors not having bathed for days, if not weeks; with lice and scabies; who will get rat bites tonight. All in Australia, all at a time when we are celebrating in our nation's capital a new beginning." ..... At times on Wednesday night it could have been Aboriginal leader Noel Pearson speaking. Pearson supported the intervention last year when he said: "The people who are nay-saying are people whose children sleep safely at night.".... "How can it be in a country where it is against the law in every state and territory not to have your children at school every day without a reason that we allow thousands of children - not only Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander, but there are a lot of them - never to see the inside of a school room?....” Sorry to spoil the party with some hard reality , John Lyons, The Australia "....I can take you tonight to houses I can guarantee you that you would not allow a pet to live in because the RSPCA would go in and charge the owners and the owners would be on A Current Affair tomorrow night." ....NT police had said permits stopped "baddies" coming in; "well why then do 45 of our 45 Aboriginal communities have sexual predators in them?"...Some of those on the lawns of Parliament House for the apology "meant well" but were often ignorant, he said. ..."They think of indigenous people living in central Australia or in Arnhem Land or anywhere in the top end as somehow living a lifestyle of a noble savage, living off the land ... the reality is these people are dying of diabetes because of an inadequate diet, they are dying of malnutrition because their parents don't feed them adequately, they have diseases which have been eradicated everywhere else.".... One of the causes of today's blight, Brough argued, could be sheeted back to Gough Whitlam. An old stockman had said to him: "It was Gough, you know ... sit down money, it destroyed our people."
(14 Feb 08) “...Last October, I participated in a debate in London, hosted by Intelligence Squared, to consider the motion, “We should not be reluctant to assert the superiority of Western values.” Muslim intellectual Tariq Ramadan, among others, spoke against the motion; I spoke in favor, focusing on the vast disparities in freedom, human rights, and tolerance between Western and Islamic societies. ... The great ideas of the West—rationalism, self-criticism, the disinterested search for truth, the separation of church and state, the rule of law and equality under the law, freedom of thought and expression, human rights, and liberal democracy—are superior to any others devised by humankind. ... The West recognizes and defends the rights of the individual: we are free to think what we want, to read what we want, to practice our religion, to live lives of our choosing. .... In many non-Western countries, especially Islamic ones, citizens are not free to read what they wish. In Saudi Arabia, Muslims are not free to convert to Christianity, and Christians are not free to practice their faith—clear violations of Article 18 of the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights. ....” Why the West is Best , Ibn Warraq, City Journal “.... The edifice of modern science and scientific method is one of Western man's greatest gifts to the world. The West has given us not only nearly every scientific discovery of the last 500 years—from electricity to computers—but also, thanks to its humanitarian impulses, the Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International. The West provides the bulk of aid to beleaguered Darfur; Islamic countries are conspicuous by their lack of assistance..... other parts of the world recognize Western superiority. When other societies such as South Korea and Japan have adopted Western political principles, their citizens have flourished.....As Ayatollah Khomeini once famously said, there are no jokes in Islam. The West is able to look at its foibles and laugh, to make fun of its fundamental principles: but there is no equivalent as yet to Monty Python's Life of Brian in Islam....”
(11 Feb 08) This was Kevin Rudd's big promise before the election just two months ago: "And I say again, I have a plan for the future." But now hear Kevin Rudd this week. "The Rudd Government will convene an Australia 2020 Summit . . . to help shape a long term strategy for the nation's future." Pardon? If Rudd already had a plan in his pocket in December, why does he now need to invite 1000 experts and activists to a summit in April to help him draw up a new one? Either the Prime Minister lied before the election, or he mysteriously lost his plan just after it. Either way, here's a stunt that confirms Rudd truly is addicted to spin over substance, and has only one real policy: to control...... Who will Rudd copy when Howard is gone?" I asked last October, and now we know. Rudd will get 1000 people to come up in April and do his homework, the way Howard once did all on his mighty lonesome....he's managed to hide that frantic inactivity so far by making grand symbolic gestures of the big, clanging kind that thrill journalists, but don't get the ships loaded or the factories built....With no plan to do things real, it's no wonder this summit appealed to Rudd.... Do you really think 1000 of our "best and brightest" will in just two days of fast talking tell Rudd and his whip-smart ministers stuff they didn't already know, or couldn't learn with a phone call or a Googling if they were remotely interested?....” Charge of the bright brigade , Andrew Bolt. Herald Sun “....What Rudd wants are the kind of people who by their nods, as much as their know-how, will allow him to claim that whatever he winds up doing has the backing of our smartest people....this summit isn't about nutting out new ideas. There are far more efficient ways of doing that than asking 1000 people you know already to sit in a hall for two days while one at a time speaks and the rest listen. I'm sure Rudd has three other aims entirely..... First, he's buying time while he works out the plan he swore he already had... Rudd's second aim is to spread the blame, and muffle the critics...... read this paragraph in The Australian, written by journalists briefed carefully by Rudd's spinners, and learn the Prime Minister's third and most important aim: "Mr Rudd's political advisers believe his summit will set the tone for his Government, by presenting him as a leader who encourages people and organisations to put forward ideas and make a case for them. The summit is designed to convey the impression of a government that thinks beyond the short-term cycle of elections." .....That's right. This summit is just about "presenting" Rudd, and giving you an "impression". It's just a piece of political theatre designed not to give Rudd ideas, but you an image....”
Don't let the facts spoil the day
(10 Feb 08) Keith Windschuttle's The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume Two will be published later this year .
“….The problem with the Bringing Them Home report is not its logic, but its facts. As regards NSW, the story of the Stolen Generations was largely formed in 1981 by the historian Peter Read, then of the Australian National University (now at the University of Sydney). Read's work had an enormous influence on Aboriginal communities by saying institutionalised children had not been failed by alcoholic parents who neglected to provide them with food and shelter. It was all the work of the white man, of faceless white bureaucrats who wanted to eliminate the Aborigines. Bringing Them Home did no original research of its own in NSW. Instead, it relied upon Read's writings….” Don't let the facts spoil the day , Keith Windschuttle, The Australian “…It quoted verbatim his claim that the files on individual children removed by the Aborigines Protection Board confirmed his case: "Some managers cut a long story short when they came to that part of the committal notice 'Reason for board taking control of the child'. They simply wrote 'for being Aboriginal'." If it's pretended this was commonplace, however, it is a serious misrepresentation. In a debate with Read last year at the History Teachers Association's annual conference, I asked him how many files bore those words. He confessed to the audience there were only two. When I investigated the same batch of 800 files in the NSW archives, I found there was only one. Its words were "Being an Aboriginal". There were two others with the single word "Aboriginal".
Jihad Jills reveal the naive face of fundamentalism
(10 Feb 08) “....Why is it that gods of various denominations hand out dubious instructions to the most feeble-minded? I once interviewed a bewildered, wide-eyed pig farmer who had just performed an exorcism on his wife. Under apparent instruction "from God", he and a couple of church friends tied down the woman with considerable force. When I asked how God delivered the instructions to help rid his possessed wife of demons the farmer told me there had been phone calls. God apparently called someone else, who passed on the messages.....Ever since, I've found myself bristling whenever I hear someone suggest they are doing what "God told them" to do. Perhaps that's why my lunatic-alarm rang while watching the ABC documentary Jihad Sheilas....The message was unequivocal: all unclad women are destined to burn in Hell. With such nonsense, Raisa set the film's tone. But there were plenty more jaw-dropping moments to come.....How and why two women born and educated in rural NSW could embrace radical Islam with such a vengeance that they both now espouse hatred of Australians, praise Osama bin Laden and appear to support violent jihad against Westerners, is the confounding and troubling question left hanging....” Jihad Jills reveal the naive face of fundamentalism , Virginia Haussegger, Canberra Times “...Both women appear convinced they are being persecuted by over-zealous Australian authorities. Yet it seems that playing the role of the oppressed victim feeds their hunger for a central purpose...."The West are [sic] invading our lands, killing our people," she explains. But what's that? Whose land and whose people?.... What happened to these women? Both were brought up and educated in Australia: a liberal democracy that places high value on tolerance, compassion and equality. Although proudly secular, Australia is also proud of its diversity, including its religious diversity....Listening to both Rabiah and Raisa, one gets a strong sense that being one of the "oppressed" provides succour to their cause. To that end, Raisa praises Osama bin Laden for "waking Muslims up to the oppression they were under but didn't realise".
(10 Feb 08) “…The most bizarre aspect of the Archbishop of Canterbury's extraordinary declaration today of abject religious and cultural surrender to Islam was the extreme lengths to which he went to avoid precisely the furore which has now erupted — and then proceeded dramatically to depart from his own strategy….. This incendiary proposition was nevertheless expressed in the lecture in language so convoluted and ambiguous — ‘nuanced' is, I think, the current expression of choice — that many in the audience admitted they didn't have a clue what on earth he was actually saying. ... His argument was quite extraordinarily muddled, absurd and wrong. The European Court of Human Rights has said that sharia law is not compatible with democracy. Dr Williams himself accepts its principles are pre-modern and oppressive. ... On World at One, he said: “An approach to law which simply said - there's one law for everybody - I think that's a bit of a danger.” The implications of this are simply staggering....” The Archbishop's Speech , Melanie Phillips, The Spectator “...One law for all is the very basis of legal and social justice and is the glue that binds a society together. Law is the expression of a society's cultural identity. .... To enable people to chop and choose between two jurisdictions would destroy the unitary nature of British society and fragment the country. But does Dr Williams even understand what he himself has said? ... Dr Williams appears to believe that English law would somehow absorb sharia. In fact, it would be absorbed by it for the simple reason that sharia brooks no alternative authority . .... The rules of our society have always been entirely clear: one law for all. The only challenge to that has come from those Muslims who want to destroy that foundational precept and along with it British culture and western society. And now the head of the Anglican church has joined them in wanting to tear up the rules governing the position of minorities which have been perfectly clear ever since the Enlightenment. ... Is this really the way the history of a nation, which has for the last thousand years fought off invasion and defended its independence and the liberty it created for the world, finally ends — with the head of its established church on his knees before terror?
(9 Feb 08) These are the seven questions Patrol Officers in the Northern Territory had satisfy themselves with, and sign off on before removing a child. It's difficult if not impossible to reconcile such questions and considerations with the "criminal intent" that under pins the motive of theft or "stealing". Tests to be applied in considering whether or not a part Aboriginal child should be taken from an Aboriginal mother on a settlement or pastoral property. 25th August 1959 (from and article published in the Bulletin July 1 st , 1997- by Damien Murphy).
(9 Feb 08) “....It would have been unlike Samuel P. Huntington to say “I told you so” after 9/11. He is too austere and serious a man, with a legendary career as arguably the most influential and original political scientist of the last half century — always swimming against the current of prevailing opinion. In the 1990s, first in an article in the magazine Foreign Affairs, then in a book published in 1996 under the title “The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order,”....Huntington's cartography was drawn with a sharp pencil. It was “The West and the Rest”: the West standing alone, and eight civilizations dividing the rest....Those 19 young Arabs who struck America on 9/11 were to give Huntington more of history's compliance than he could ever have imagined. He had written of a “youth bulge” unsettling Muslim societies, and young Arabs and Muslims were now the shock-troops of a new radicalism. Their rise had overwhelmed the order in their homelands and had spilled into non-Muslim societies....Rather than Westernizing their societies, Islamic lands had developed a powerful consensus in favor of Islamizing modernity.... It is not pretty at the frontiers between societies with dwindling populations — Western Europe being one example, Russia another — and those with young people making claims on the world.....” The Clash , by Fouad Ajami, The New York Times “....Huntington saw this gathering storm. Those young people of the densely populated North African states who have been risking all for a journey across the Strait of Gibraltar walk right out of his pages.... Huntington had the integrity and the foresight to see the falseness of a borderless world, a world without differences. (He is one of two great intellectual figures who peered into the heart of things and were not taken in by globalism's conceit, Bernard Lewis being the other.).... They flee the burning grounds of Islam, but carry the fire with them. They are “nowhere men,” children of the frontier between Islam and the West, belonging to neither..... More ominously perhaps, there ran through Huntington's pages an anxiety about the will and the coherence of the West.... Islam will remain Islam, he worried, but it is “dubious” whether the West will remain true to itself and its mission. Clearly, commerce has not delivered us out of history's passions, the World Wide Web has not cast aside blood and kin and faith. It is no fault of Samuel Huntington's that we have not heeded his darker, and possibly truer, vision....”
A deafening silence that betrays our values
(4 Feb 08) “....Four weeks ago, the Bishop of Rochester, Michael Nazir-Ali, expressed on these pages his concern at the lack of integration into British society of some Muslim communities living here. He has since received an enormous amount of support from private individuals for his remarks - as well as death threats from fanatics who said they would kill him unless he stopped criticising the religion of Islam (something which he insisted he was not doing).... The most striking aspect of the response to his article, however, has not been that bigoted and offensive reaction from a small number: it has been the almost complete silence from the Government on the issues he raised. Despite recent claims by ministers that they want to revise the policy of multiculturalism, and that they wish for a vigorous national debate on what should replace it, their reaction to this - and indeed to all other attempts to generate debate - has been deafening silence....” A deafening silence that betrays our values , UK Telegraph “....The official reluctance to confront those issues acts far more effectively than death threats to suppress their discussion.....An investigation by the Centre for Social Cohesion has established that whole communities have been involved in suppressing their female members' wholly legitimate desire to marry whom they choose, to follow careers of their own, and to dress and live according to their own will, rather than at the command of a male relative. No one in Government could possibly endorse the cruel denial of elementary freedoms to women..... The brutal coercion of women has been aided and abetted by Government policy, and thus by the ministers who make and implement it.... And yet what do we actually get from the Government? So far, a failure to tackle cultures that endorse the brutal oppression of women. As we also report today, the Government has just taken the dismally retrograde step of recognising polygamy: men with more than one wife will be able to claim benefits for each additional spouse. How this can be squared with the Government's rhetoric of commitment to women's rights is beyond us: it is a quite clear incitement to the humiliating and blatantly unjust practice of allowing men, but only men, to take more than one spouse....”
Multiple Wives will mean Multiple Benefits
(2 Feb 08) Cultural sensitivity and barking mad political correctness.
“....Husbands with multiple wives have been given the go-ahead to claim extra welfare benefits following a year-long Government review.... Even though bigamy is a crime in Britain, the decision by ministers means that polygamous marriages can now be recognised formally by the state, so long as the weddings took place in countries where the arrangement is legal..... The outcome will chiefly benefit Muslim men with more than one wife, as is permitted under Islamic law.... The decision has been condemned by the Tories, who accused the Government of offering preferential treatment to a particular group, and of setting a precedent that would lead to demands for further changes in British law...... In Britain, bigamy is punishable by up to seven years in prison.....Islamic law permits men to have up to four wives at any one time.... Multiple Wives will mean Multiple Benefits , Telegraph.co.uk “...officials have identified a potential loophole by which a man can divorce his wife under British law while continuing to live with her as his spouse under Islamic law, and obtain a spouse visa for a foreign woman who he can legally marry.... Chris Grayling, the shadow work and pensions secretary, said that the decision was "completely unjustifiable". "You are not allowed to have multiple marriages in the UK, so to have a situation where the benefits system is treating people in different ways is totally unacceptable and will serve to undermine confidence in the system. "This sets a precedent that will lead to more demands for the culture of other countries to be reflected in UK law and the benefits system."
(2 Feb 08) It seems that Obama is not all that he seems..
“.....he is a mesmerising political orator who offers a magic elixir that somehow contains both stimulants and sedatives: that we need not worry about the present or future, because we can look forward to a new dawn of hope and reassurance in the safe hands of President Obama. Exactly how and why this would happen is not clear, but it is heady and exciting stuff. I suspect that the longer the relationship continues, however, the more Obama's many faults and shortcomings as a presidential candidate will emerge.... He is not the fresh-faced young idealist the media like to portray, but a hard-headed 46-year-old lawyer whose monumental drive and political calculations make the Clintons seem like a pair of amateurs. The media and electorate may have fallen in love with him spontaneously, but Obama has been carefully plotting his strategy to seduce them for decades.... Even dedicated political operators such as the Clintons, for example, did not publish self-promoting memoirs at the age of 33 - but that is exactly what Obama did.... I was not surprised to read in his introduction to the reissued edition of "selective lapses of memory" and "the temptation to colour events in ways favourable to the writer"........I'll provide two brief examples of how Obama did just that. He wrote movingly of a turning point in his life when, as a nine-year-old, he read in Life magazine of a "black man who had tried to peel off his skin". But the Chicago Tribune - it and the Chicago Sun-Times being honourable exceptions to the media quiescence I have described - reported that "no such Life issue exists", and an exhaustive search of similar magazines failed to find any article remotely similar to the one Obama had described.....” Obama Unmasked , Andrew Stephen, New Statesman “....The Obama media machine, too, obligingly enabled television crews this month to interview Obama's very elderly Kenyan "grandmother"; the only problem was that the woman in rural Kenya was not Obama's grandmother, but the alleged foster mother of Obama's father.....Part of Obama's contrived sainthood is an undertaking that he will not take funds from lobbyists or political action committees. But, like the Clintons and just about any other American politician, he has assiduously done just that. According to the Washington Post , Hillary Clinton has so far raised $78,615,215 and Obama $78,915,507;.... but the two Chicago newspapers are much more interested in Obama's close 17-year friendship with Antoin "Tony" Rezko, a long-time Obama donor and property developer awaiting trial on charges of attempted extortion, money laundering and fraud. A low-income housing project received more than $14m from taxpayers while Obama was a state senator, but he consistently denied that he had done any favours for Rezko....That was until the Chicago Sun-Times unearthed two letters Obama wrote to state officials in 1998 urging them to grant extra funds for Rezko's project. Democrats and Republicans alike in Chicago, too, are intrigued by the question of why Obama paid $1.65m for a mansion in the city's south side in 2005 - $300,000 less than the asking price - on the very same day Rezko's wife happened to buy the house next door for the asking price......”
Muslim Death Threats For Anglican Bishop
(2 Feb 08) “....Dr Michael Nazir-Ali, the 58-year old Bishop of Rochester, made headlines following his statements on January 6 this year, that extremist Muslims had turned parts of Britain into "no-go" areas for non-Muslims. These comments were made in the Sunday Telegraph , in a piece he wrote.... Dr Nazir-Ali's comments about "no-go areas" for non-Muslims were widely reported in Britain and the United States . The words were condemned by the Muslim Council of Britain .... It is true that gang culture has created areas where it is unsafe for some to tread, and there are Muslim gangs whose violence forces blacks, Sikhs and non-Muslims to feel intimidated. Despite criticism from Muslim "representatives", the Bishop's comments were endorsed by Trevor Phillips, the chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission....Now, news from the Times states that the Bishop of Rochester and his family are under police protection. This has happened as he has been subjected to death threats. These came in the form of phone calls, saying he would not "live long" if he continued to criticize Islam....” Muslim Death Threats For Anglican Bishop , Giraldus Cambrensis in Western Resistance “...His father had converted out of Islam, and until age 20 Michael Nazir-Ali was brought up as a Catholic in Pakistan . He then converted to the Anglican faith. When he became ordinated as a bishop aged 35, he was the youngest to have done so. He is the only south Asian bishop in the Anglican church... the fact that his comments have led to death threats indicate that there are some Muslims who actively silence any opposition through fear and intimidation. If public figures are made to live in fear, how are those who live near the Muslim "no-go areas" such as parts of Tower Hamlets, Bradford, Birmingham , Walsall and other areas supposed to feel? After the murder of Theo van Gogh on November 2, 2004, a message was sent to the West. That message was a message that sought to intimidate and silence anyone who criticizes or even questions Islam.....”
Young Alcoholic Faces Death Penalty
(2 Feb 08) “.....A young Iranian man is facing execution after a court judged him a 'hardened and incorrigible drinker," Iranian daily Etemad Melli reported. A section of Tehran's criminal court is currently deciding whether the 22-year-old man, known as Mohsen, should be executed. Mohsen was arrested after allegedly being caught for the fourth time in possession of alcohol and in a state of drunkenness. He has already been sentenced to a flogging....” Young Alcoholic Faces Death Penalty , Adnkronos International “....Article 179 of Iran's penal code punishes with the death sentence anyone caught drinking alcohol more than three times....”
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