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TALLRITE BLOG
You can write to me at
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“Ill-informed and
objectionable”;
“You poisonous, bigoted, ignorant, verbose little wa*ker.” (except I'm not little - 1.97m) Reader comments |
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March 2010 |
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ISSUE #204 - 28th March 2010 [391+2127=2518]
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Abortion as Genocidal Sexism and Racism Certain terms in our politically correct age are so toxic that they can be used only in carefully pre-ordained contexts and never must any hint of opposition be expressed. Two of the most poisonous are racism and sexism, and each of these words carries its own special interpretation. Under no circumstances must you convey the slightest support of either concept in any way whatsoever; you may not even evince an ever so slightly nuanced interpretation that might differ from the official script. The racism script says that - regardless of justification - a white must never express anything negative about a non-white, nor take any action which might be seen to have the potential to disadvantage a non-white vs a white. Of course the reverse does not apply. Non-whites can disparage whites all they want - like the US Supreme Court's newest judge Sonia Sotomeyer, a Latina - and nobody bats an eye as it is “impossible” for a non-white person to be racist. (Forget that throughout Africa and Asia the shade of your skin is the single greatest determinant of your status as perceived by others - the less dark the better.) With sexism the story is similar. Only men, that is, white men, can be sexists, and they must never say anything remotely negative about women nor disadvantage them in any respect.
The defining issue in the nexus of sexism and racism is abortion. If you oppose abortion you are most certainly sexist because you are denying women rights over their own body, and most probably racist as well because more non-whites than whites seek abortions. US Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein of California succinctly expresses the politically correct attitude: “Is [abortion] morally correct? Yes, I believe it is morally right ... to use tax dollars from pro-life Americans to cover insurance plans that cover abortion.” Abortion is so morally right that taxes should pay for it (a view that will have delighted the American president). Yet if there is one issue which almost oppresses and kills more females and non-whites than any other it is that self-same abortion. Consider ... Anti-Female Sexism In the past I have written about the unintended consequence of China's one-child policy, introduced in 1979 by Mao's tyrannical successor Deng Xiaoping: if you are allowed only one child and you are Chinese, that child has to be a boy. Only a boy will carry on your name and only a boy can be relied upon to take care of you in your old age, since daughters will have to care for their in-laws. Thus female foetuses and live baby daughters in China have been killed in and out of the womb in their tens of millions, to the extent that by 2020 China will have 24 million excess males of marriageable age. This translates to 24 million (or more) girls killed in order to achieve this imbalance, the great majority apparently aborted. If selective slaughter of female infants is not sexist I can't think what is.
So a “woman's right to choose” an abortion turns out in practice to be “a woman's right to choose” the elimination of women. The sexism is profound. Anti-Black Racism In the US, abortions are carried out overwhelmingly on the poorer people in society, and these are overwhelmingly black. Indeed, there has long been a preponderance of abortion clinics deliberately located in rundown black neighbourhoods.
Such statistics are the justification of the provocative billboard below, the source of much irritation on the part of the pro-choice lobby -
and this one
and this
There is a black genocide going on, and that is something that is as racist as you can get. As Dr Johnny Hunter, a leading black anti-abortion campaigner bitterly remarks,
Yet the abortion industry and those who defend it would be the last to consider themselves racist lynchers who far exceed (by a factor in the tens of thousands) even the dizzy standards set by the Ku Klux Klan. Anti-Female Anti-Black Genocide Forget for a moment about the intrinsic (im)morality of an individual abortion. Large-scale availability of abortion has turned out to be both sexist and racist in the extreme, and this is nothing at all to do with white males. Any proponent of abortion is, ultimately, promoting the genocide
That's what Adolf Hitler tried to achieve against Jews, gypsies and the disabled. It's about as wicked as you can get.
While we're on racism, it's enough to make you want to join the British National Party, if only to spite Britain's Orwellian “Commission for Equality and Human Rights” and its hare-brained accomplices in the judiciary. The Commission had the BNP prosecuted for alleged racism in its constitution, specifically its exclusion of minorities from membership. The BNP was found guilty and told it could not recruit new members until its constitution had been de-racialised by making membership open to all, a process that took several months. As intended, the moratorium on lucrative new memberships was a serious blow to its efforts to fight Britain's coming general election; nevertheless the BNP re-wrote a new constitution, ratified it via an EGM and presented it to the court for approval. Still not good enough, because it requires new members to subscribe to the BNP's principles, two of which state:
So although anyone, including minorities, can now join the BNP, the judge ruled that it is in effect “racist” to expect minorities to accept these clauses. So the ludicrous outcome is that the BNP have now made another constitutional change that no longer requires would-be new member to accept the clauses. In other words you join a club whose central rules and philosophy you are specifically not required to observe - surely Groucho Marx would have had something to say about that. This curious contortion has however allowed the membership moratorium to be lifted. So to summarise, to declare that you want to stem and reverse immigration and to legally restore through negotiation and consent an indigenous majority in your own country is now in today's Britain a racist aspiration and therefore unacceptable, indeed illegal. I wonder how a prohibition to promote your own people and culture would go down in, say Japan, Korea, Russia, Saudi Arabia. According to the judge's ruling, no-one in Britain has any further right to his/her own country: it belongs to whoever manages legally or otherwise to waltz in through the ever-porous borders and claim it. Meantime, following from - and doubtless the result of - its travails with the human rights commission and associated publicity, the BNP has been enjoying a stampede of new members and their subscriptions. Then there is the £10 T-shirt with a quotation deemed so “offensive” (read: racist) that its wearer, Reg Bates who is a parliamentary candidate no less, was excluded from a course run by the UK's National Health Service.
The words constitute Article 51 of the Magna Carta, the founding document of the jurisprudence of the entire Anglophone world, from New Zealand to Singapore to India to Britain to North America. Nevertheless, the state-run NHS by its action has ruled that the heretofore much denigrated Bad King John (1167-1216 AD), whom we now must recognize to have been exquisitely multi-cultural and politically correct in his demand for continued regal hegemony, should never have agreed to sign the perverted document that those racist indigenous British aristocrats pushed in front of him way back in 1215. Interestingly, it's not considered in the least bit racist when white women, seeking egg-donations (or purchases) for implantation, routinely screen the donors to check they are of the desired race, upbringing and education (white, middle-class, graduate, good-looking). Surely this invidious practice, like the BNP's racist constitution, also deserves to catch the malign eye of the human rights commission. But, as has happened with the BNP, it would likely only increase interest the, er, donations.
It is always interesting to watch the debate flow and ebb about the desire in Ireland for reunification with Northern Ireland. Until the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, it was a Constitutional imperative - the South claimed sovereignty over the North. That was dropped via a referendum, to be replaced after the GFA by a new Article 3.1:
I remember how the ratification of the GFA was greeted with much euphoria and talk about brotherly love between the people of both jurisdictions. In the South, discourse was dominated by a belief that what was good for Northern Ireland was ipso facto good for all of Ireland. In a poll conducted last January for Slugger O'Toole, a clear majority (55%) of Irish adults agreed that
So much for the rhetoric. What of the reality? This was recently revealed by two words: Shannon and shopping. Shannon The first dose of reality came in 2007 when Aer Lingus decided for economic reasons to relocate a few Heathrow flights from Shannon to Belfast. Strikes, demonstrations and disruption immediately ensued, as people from the Shannon area and indeed the rest of the country protested the loss of jobs, of easy access to London and of prestige. Columnists ranted, letters splattered across newspapers, TV debates wailed in despair. This was a grievous affront on the integrity and honour of of the nation, and the Government must intervene to prevent it from coming to pass. No-one was rejoicing that our poor downtrodden brothers in supposedly decrepit Northern Ireland would get a leg-up when those jobs, access and prestige popped up in lower-cost Belfast. Aer Lingus went ahead with the move despite the protests, and ever since has been contributing a bit more to the North's GDP. Northern Ireland would instantly implode were it not for the massive subvention of £6-7 billion it has long received every year from the British Exchequer. (Though snce Wales and Scotland also get handouts it means only England actually pays for them - all of them, like Daddy handing out pocket money.) Surely any measure, such as the arrival of Aer Lingus, that
should be welcomed by anyone who proclaims concern about the Northerners' overall wellbeing, dignity and, well, adulthood. Shopping Not long after, the world economies came to grief. Different countries took different counter-measures, but Gordon Brown, Britain's Prime Mentalist (as Guido Fawkes likes to call him), decided to emulate Robert Mugabe by wrecking the currency though printing more of it. But instead of calling it Mugabeconomics, he invented an equally ugly term, quantitative easing, to achieve a similar result. It took only a year for some 25% of the wealth and income of every man, woman and child to be effectively confiscated when sterling dropped by this amount against the other major currencies.
The drop from €1.47 to €1.11 represents the 25% devaluation mentioned Oh, sure, in the short term dramatic devaluation boosts exports and saves some jobs. But it's an illusory benefit because it also puts up the price of imports, and domestic goods which compete with imports, and pretty much everything else in a globalised world. This is inflation unleashed, and the 25% confiscation of wealth is manifested to ordinary people in terms of their deiminshed buying power and wealth, hence reduced consumption, hence jobs destroyed. Higher inflation is now working its insidious way into the British economy. In Ireland, however, the collapse of sterling created a bonanza for anyone who drove across the border to the sterling area of Northern Ireland to shop using their newly enhanced €uros. So across the people drove, in hordes, including thousands of civil servants on strike over pay cuts. These migrant bargain-hunters clogged the roads and shopping malls of Newry and other border towns. To the latters' surprise, they experienced a welcome boom when the rest of the UK and Ireland were suffering from deep recession. Did the richer people of the South welcome the unexpected injection of wealth into the struggling Northern economy, one with a GDP of £16,188 per head (or about €20,000) compared to $42,200 (or about €28,000) in the South? Were the Southerners - richer by 40% - magnanimous towards the windfall of their Northern brethren? Were they hell! They were furious. The radio talk shows exploded with indignation. The newspapers fulminated in near-apoplexy. How dare people drive North for bargains, and deprive Southern shopkeepers of revenue and the Finance Minister of VAT receipts. Indeed, that very Minister and even the Tánaiste (deputy prime minister) declared shopping in Newry to be “unpatriotic”. I heard no-one suggest that Southern tradespeople need to push down their own costs to remain competitive. Love-free Rivers So are Irishmen and Irishwomen in the South the slightest bit interested in unifying with those in the North? Pshaw! In word only. In deed, never. Recent events, such as the two described, have illustrated an unacknowledged and awkward truth: there is no river of love flowing northward (doubtless nor southward either). Gerard O'Neill of Turbulence Ahead has a different view: he thinks unification will happen possibly in the mid teens, but more likely in the 2020s.
A cowboy named Bud was overseeing his herd in a remote mountainous pasture in California when suddenly a brand-new BMW 7-Series advanced toward him out of a cloud of dust. The driver, a young man in a Brioni suit, Gucci shoes, RayBan sunglasses and YSL tie, leaned out the window and asked the cowboy, “If I tell you exactly how many cows and calves you have in your herd, Will you give me a calf?” Bud looks at the man, obviously a yuppie, then looks at his peacefully grazing herd and calmly answers, “Sure, Why not?” The yuppie parks his car, whips out his Dell notebook computer, connects it to his Cingular RAZR V3 cell phone, and surfs to a NASA page on the Internet, where he calls up a GPS satellite to get an exact fix on his location which he then feeds to another NASA satellite that scans the area in an ultra-high-resolution photo. The young man then opens the digital photo in Adobe Photoshop and exports it to an image processing facility in Hamburg, Germany. Within seconds, he receives an email on his Palm Pilot that the image has been processed and the data stored. He then accesses an MS-SQL database through an ODBC-connected Excel spreadsheet with email on his Blackberry and, after a few minutes, receives a response. Finally, he prints out a full-colour, 150-page report on his hi-tech, miniaturized HP LaserJet printer, turns to the cowboy and says, “You have exactly 1,586 cows and calves”. “That’s right. Well, I guess you can take one of my calves”, says Bud. He watches the young man select one of the animals and looks on with amusement as the young man stuffs it into the trunk of his car. Then Bud says to the young man, “If I can tell you exactly what your business is, will you give me back my calf?” The young man thinks about it for a second and then says, “Okay, why not?” “You’re a Democratic Congressman for the US Government,” says Bud. “Wow! That’s correct,” says the yuppie, “but how did you guess that?” “No guessing required,” answered the cowboy. “You showed up here even though nobody called you; you want to get paid for an answer I already knew, to a question I never asked. You used millions of dollars worth of equipment trying to show me how much smarter than me you are; and you don’t know a thing about how working people make a living - or about cows, for that matter.” “Whadya mean?”
“This is a herd of sheep .... “Now give me back my dog.” Hat tip: Barry O'Neill
Issue 204’s Comments to Cyberspace Four assorted comments this time.
- - - - C A N A D A - - - - Quote: “We have a great respect for freedom of expression in Canada ... our domestic laws, both provincial and federal, delineate freedom of expression ... Canadian law puts reasonable limits on the freedom of expression. For example, promoting hatred against any identifiable group would not only be considered inappropriate, but could in fact lead to criminal charges”
François Houle, Provost of the University of Ottawa,
Whether or not incited by M Houle,
A day of shame for the university and for its
miserable Provost, - - - - - U S - - - - - Quote: “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of the controversy.”
US Speaker Nancy Pelosi urges Democrats
This is much the basis on which
Quote: “To the extent that the [President's annual] State of the Union [address] has degenerated into the status of a political pep rally, I'm not sure why we [the Supreme Court judges] are there.”
US Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts expresses disquiet
Justice Roberts makes the point that protocol demands This is a serious rebuke to the neophyte president. - - - - - I S R A E L - - - - - Quote: “The Palestinians and the nations of the Middle East will be rid of a bad omen once Israel is annihilated. Israel, a foreign presence and a Western prodigy in the region, has reached the end of its road.”
Iran's
“president” Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad,
Now if only he had the means to carry it out - - - - G L O B A L W A R M I N G - - - - -
Quote: “There has been a very large, organized campaign to
try to convince people that global warming
Good ole Al Gore, still on the global
warm-mongering warpath,
It is interesting that global
warm-mongers
But, hey, that's what we've long been saying about them!
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ISSUE #203 - 7th March 2010 [356+1054=1410]
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Married Biological Parents and Children Prompted by an article, “Want to protect children? Then promote marriage” by David Quinn, director of the Iona Institute, I unearthed a recent report to the US Congress entitled “Fourth National Incidence Study of Child Abuse and Neglect”, by the US Department of Health and Human Services. NIS-4, as it's known, is 455 pages long, so I do not pretend I read every word, but I did go through quite a bit of it (so you don't have to). I wanted to evaluate whether to add it to a webpage of references that I maintain which provides documentary support for the statement, “Married Biological Parents Are Better for Children”. Self-evident as it may seem, this sentence is however hotly contested by people who advocate less conventional parenting arrangements, including gay marriage. A surprising such advocate is the UK's probable prime minister, David Cameron, despite his on-off waffle about supporting conventional marriage by providing tax relief for married couples. In a
set-piece speech on 28 February to his
Conservative Party
Spring Forum in Brighton (much lauded because he delivered it noteless without
two Obama teleprompters or even a
Palin hand), he told the story of a man who had impregnated his
unemployed girlfriend. He was outraged that the couple couldn't
cohabit and raise their child together without the woman losing Such public approval of unmarried parenthood is, from a child welfare viewpoint, a deeply malevolent position from such a prominent politician - or indeed anyone. It's also very hypocritical, considering he has commendably given his own children the best chance in life by marrying and living with their mother. Why is he so eager to deny this opportunity to other defenceless children? Anyway, about 150 pages into NIS-4, you come across this absolutely stunning chart, which makes the very point acutely -
Tellingly, the report comments that
This illustrates a simple choice, really. You are either
One or the other. You can't be both. Naturally, since by comparison with freedom for adults, the welfare of children is irrelevant (unless white Catholic priests are doing the abusing), nearly everyone in our brave new world of “diversity” opts for the former. There is little merit in shedding crocodiles tears about children having been abused by priests or relatives or institutions in their childhood, unless we are equally angry at the deliberate choice of parents to raise their children outside of wedlock. Of course there is only one reason that couples cohabit when they could marry. It is that one or both want to keep the back door open so that they can escape from the relationship at any time. Kids' wellbeing? To hell with it.
In each case, there was the puerile, utopian view among the EU élite that once these countries had passed through the respective sceptred portals, their problems would magically disappear with the liberal sprinkling of copious quantities of EU citizens' money like some miraculous fairy dust. Well they didn't; they're still there. Greece's fiscal profligacy is on the verge of bringing the €uro crashing down around everyone's shoulders. As Thomas Mayer, the chief economist of Deutsche Bank, warned last week: “If the Greece situation is handled badly, the Eurozone could break down.” Italy is nearly as bad. Though there has been sporadic improvement, Romania and Bulgaria are still mired in corruption and gangsterism, while thousands of their orphans, disabled and other unfortunate people still languish in ghastly conditions in what are euphemistically referred to as “care homes” and “psychiatric wards”. And the thing is - thanks to their membership of the €uro/EU - these are no longer national problems confined to the countries that created them. They have become problems of the other 23 countries of the European Union. Nevertheless, “ho, hum, whatever; let's now do the same kind of thing again” seems to be the Brusselarians' attitude as they prepare to welcome Iceland into the EU. Iceland owes Britain and the Netherlands over €5 billion due to the collapse of its Icesave savings scheme and the fact that the two creditor countries compensated 400,000 of their nationals for lost deposits of this amount. Those depositors greatly outnumber Iceland's own 307,000 citizens. Repaying the Brits and Cloggies thus amounts to a debt overhang of €16,000 per Icelander man, woman and child, which in a referendum they have just, with a majority of 93%, decided (unsurprisingly) not to honour. Like the Italian, Greek, Bulgarian and Romanian problems, the Icelandic one will not be made to vanish simply by subsuming Iceland into the EU. Quite the contrary. Like those others, it will then become the EU's problem and ultimately it will be the non-Icelandic EU citizens - like me - who are forced to pay (though not the bankrupt Italians and Greeks, obviously). What madness is this? There is no imperative or advantage whatsoever to shoehorn faraway Iceland - which like Turkey is not even part of a geographic Europe - into the EU. How dare the van Rompuy cabal expose the EU in such a cavalier fashion to Iceland's sovereign debts. When Icelanders have paid them off they can join; not before.
Phantasmagorical Green Investments Last week I attended the annual lecture of the Engineering Graduates Association at my Alma Mater, University College Dublin. It was presented by the Chief Executive of Ireland's state-owned Electricity Supply Board, Pádraig McManus, who graduated from UCD just a few years after I did. The ESB is Ireland's principal supplier and distributor of electricity. Titled “ESB Strategy 2020 - An Engineering Perspective”, the lecture in fact embodied the company's vision up to 2035. It was quite an eye-opener, as the ESB's chosen future direction is entirely predicated on anthropogenic global warming, AGW, and hence on an imperative to achieve a carbon neutral future by 2035, almost regardless of cost. “Carbon neutral” doesn't mean no carbon, it apparently means a drastic reduction in emissions from burning hydrocarbons, while somehow offsetting (tree planting in the Amazon?) any that might nonetheless be released into the atmosphere. ESB power generation will be decarbonised by a huge switch to, principally, wind and tidal power, supported by hydro power storage systems centred around artificial elevated lakes that would drive turbines, and by electric power stored in the millions of batteries in people's electric cars that we'll all be forced to buy. Smart grids will optimise power distribution across the country, possibly integrated into the UK's grid if not mainland Europe's.
But a centrepiece of Mr McManus's is to build a CCS (carbon capture and storage) power station by 2020, ie a fossil-fuel plant whose carbon dioxide emissions are compressed and pumped into permanent subterranean storage (such as abandoned coal or gas fields). The CCS part is a massively expensive undertaking which provides no revenue whatsoever. To support its ambitious green programmes, the ESB intends to pour untold money into researching and developing all of the necessary and unproven green technologies mentioned above. One slide showed the ESB spending €20 billion on renewables and a further €200 bn on so-called “ecoinvestments”. This is a company which in 2008 had an asset base of €8.2 bn, revenues of €5.0 bn, a net profit of €276 million and 5,534 employees. These are respectable numbers for a medium sized and successful company, but completely out of kilter with investment plans of €200+ bn. Yet the CEO provided no indication of where such vast sums are supposed to come from - presumably, like any parastatal, by mugging beleaguered taxpayers. To me, the green investment plans are utterly wild, bizarre and phantasmagorical. But it gets worse. At the start of his lecture, Mr McManus firmly assured his audience, like a latter day Al Gore, that “everybody now accepts AGW” (OK, when he heard me muttering in the back row he did concede there was the “odd” denier). As one such oddity, in the Q&A session I asked him whether, in the event that AGW theory nevertheless collapsed - and there was already evidence (from faked hockey stick graphs to leaked e-mails to dropping temperatures to unmelted glaciers) that it might - did the ESB have a Plan B? In other words, should the AGW justification disappear for making green investment decisions that are fundamentally uneconomic, what then? To my astonishment, he had no coherent answer. The best he could manage was that the 2020 CCS power station could be cancelled (subtext - I'll be long retired by then, so who cares). I am left with the opinion that the senior management of the ESB is deeply unserious if not grossly incompetent, and that the Board seems no better. I am also astonished that the CEO seems blithely unaware that futures may change and that proper companies make plans that consider more than one scenario, especially when it is so radical. Let's hope that AGW unravels as quickly as possible before the ESB and other similarly foolish organizations sink too much of other peoples' cash into ridiculous money-destroying ventures. Meanwhile, of course, if you have a bright, green idea or product to protect us all from non-existent AGW, go at once to such companies and milk their bloated AGW budgets for all you can, because the “good” times will not last. Actually, the ESB might be Now that's real, not phantasmagorical, greenery
No this isn't about Uma Thurman or Kill Bill. The only carnivorous plant I ever heard of was the Venus Flytrap. Wrong. There are dozens of them around the world, such as this Sarracenia hybrid, with its promise of sparkling nectar and a rim that looks like a prime landing pad but is slippery and lethal. The bee has just slid into the sweet liquid and instead of eating lunch has become it. View the National Geographic's whole gallery of fourteen deadly, carnivorous beauties, stunningly photographed.
Issue 203’s Comments to Cyberspace Four comments; plenty of variety.
- - - - - C U B A - - - - - Quote: “The murder [of dissident Orlando Zapata Tamayo] by the tyrant Fidel Castro and his cowardly jailers will never be forgotten.”
Florida Congressman Lincoln Diaz-Balart,
In 2003, Amnesty International declared - - - - - N E T H E R L A N D S - - - - - Quote: “We are going to conquer the entire country. The leftist elite still believes in multiculturalism, coddling criminals, a European super-state and high taxes, but the rest of the Netherlands thinks differently. That silent majority now has a voice.”
Geert Wilders,
leader of the Partij voor de Vrijheid His
essential point is that if you want to live in the Netherlands,
This is so frightening for the entrenched establishment,
As did
Nobel literature laureate Winston Churchill In the Britain's House of Lords last week, he had the temerity to say,
“There
are many moderate Muslims, - - - - - EU - - - - - Quote: “You have the charisma of a damp rag and the appearance of a low-grade bank clerk ... Who are you? I'd never heard of you, nobody in Europe had ever heard of you ... Who voted for you? ... You come from Belgium which is pretty much a non-country. You have no legitimacy in this job ... and the sooner you're put out to grass the better.”
EU Parliamentarian Nigel Farage welcomes (Mark Steyn picked up on my tip-off to him.) - - - - - U K - - - - - Quote: The decision to invade Iraq in 2003 “was the right decision made for the right reasons.”
It galls me, but I agree with and support
Gordon Brown Quote: “You can't say that Islam is a religion of peace, because Islam does not mean peace. Islam means submission. So the Muslim is one who submits. There is a place for violence in Islam. There is a place for jihad in Islam.”
Ahmed Choudry,
a leading Muslim radical
in UK, He and Geert Wilders are singing from the same (Koranic) hymn sheet. Quote: “I think Jesus was a compassionate, super-intelligent gay man who understood human problems.” Elton John (the atheist) bravely claims Jesus as one of his own. But as Mark Steyn asks, “Any thoughts on Mohammed, Elt?” - - - - - I R E L A N D - - - - - Quote: “The weakening of faith in Ireland has been a significant contributing factor in the phenomenon of the sexual abuse of minors.”
Pope Benedict XVI seems curiously to think Quote: “I am frankly amazed that the Taoiseach should seek to retain in Cabinet a man who wilfully committed perjury. If this happened in the neighbouring jurisdiction, a Cabinet minister wouldn't last until the end of the day.”
Eamon Gilmore, leader of Ireland's Labour Party, A recording showed that he had indeed made such an allegation.
The Minister had apologised, So perjury's seemed to be OK in Ireland, if you're a Minister. But he was forced out the next day. Quote (minute 6:20): “No, I certainly am not [going to ring Michael O'Leary of Ryanair].”
Mary Coughlan, Ireland's Tanaiste (deputy prime
minister)
He is always rude about the government and
Ms Coughlan is
another example, talked about in
my last blog, Quote: “I am looking forward very much to ... receiving an Egyptian assessment of the current situation in Gaza, about which I have consistently made known my strong concerns regarding the continued unacceptable blockade imposed against that territory.”
Foreign Affairs Micheál Martin,
He is to make a visit to Egypt during which
He fails to see the irony of claiming - - - - - D U B A I - - - - - Quote: “Dubai claims Irish passports used in killing of Hamas chief.” Headline in the Irish Times on 16 February. I had no idea they were so lethal.
Britain's Israeli Embassy, in playful mood,
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What madness is
possessing our EU overlords, ever
stronger since the Lisbon ratification? They actually want to
welcome Iceland into the EU! Now I know that Icelanders are white
Christians who speak good English, but does not the word 
Beautiful
but Deadly
Now, for a little [Light Relief]
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What I've recently
But it's not
entirely honest in its subtle pro-Palestinian bias, and therefore needs
to be read in conjunction with an antidote, such as See detailed review +++++
BP's ambitious CEO John Browne expanded it through adventurous acquisitions, aggressive offshore exploration, and relentless cost-reduction that trumped everything else, even safety and long-term technical sustainability. Thus mistakes accumulated, leading to terrifying and deadly accidents in refineries, pipelines and offshore operations, and business disaster in Russia. The Macondo blowout was but an inevitable outcome of a BP culture that had become poisonous and incompetent. However the book is gravely compromised by a litany of over 40 technical and stupid errors that display the author's ignorance and carelessness. It would be better to wait for the second (properly edited) edition before buying. As for BP, only a wholesale rebuilding of a new, professional, ethical culture will prevent further such tragedies and the eventual destruction of a once mighty corporation with a long and generally honourable history. Note: I wrote
my own reports on Macondo +++++
A horrific account of:
More details on my blog here. +++++
After recounting a childhood of convention and simple pleasures in working-class Aberdeen, Mr Urquhart is conscripted within days of Chamberlain declaring war on Germany in 1939. From then until the Japanese are deservedly nuked into surrendering six years later, Mr Urquhart’s tale is one of first discomfort but then following the fall of Singapore of ever-increasing, unmitigated horror. After a wretched journey Eastward, he finds himself part of Singapore’s big but useless garrison. Taken prisoner when Singapore falls in 1941, he is, successively,
Chronically ill, distraught and traumatised on return to Aberdeen yet disdained by the British Army, he slowly reconstructs a life. Only in his late 80s is he able finally to recount his dreadful experiences in this unputdownable book. There are very few first-person eye-witness accounts of the the horrors of Japanese brutality during WW2. As such this book is an invaluable historical document. +++++
This is a rattling good tale of the web of corruption within which the American president and his cronies operate. It's written by blogger Michele Malkin who, because she's both a woman and half-Asian, is curiously immune to the charges of racism and sexism this book would provoke if written by a typical Republican WASP. With 75 page of notes to back up - in best blogger tradition - every shocking and in most cases money-grubbing allegation, she excoriates one Obama crony after another, starting with the incumbent himself and his equally tricky wife. Joe Biden, Rahm Emmanuel, Valerie Jarett, Tim Geithner, Lawrence Summers, Steven Rattner, both Clintons, Chris Dodd: they all star as crooks in this venomous but credible book. ACORN, Mr Obama's favourite community organising outfit, is also exposed for the crooked vote-rigging machine it is. +++++
It is really just a collation of amusing little tales about surprising human (and occasionally animal) behaviour and situations. For example:
The book has no real message other than don't be surprised how humans sometimes behave and try to look for simple rather than complex solutions. And with a final anecdote (monkeys, cash and sex), the book suddenly just stops dead in its tracks. Weird. ++++++
It's chapters are organised around provocative questions such as
It's central thesis is that economic development continues to be impeded in different countries for different historical reasons, even when the original rationale for those impediments no longer obtains. For instance:
The author writes in a very chatty, light-hearted matter which makes the book easy to digest. However it would benefit from a few charts to illustrate some of the many quantitative points put forward, as well as sub-chaptering every few pages to provide natural break-points for the reader. +++++
The author was a member of Britain's V Force, a forerunner of the SAS. Its remit was to harass Japanese lines of command, patrol their occupied territory, carryout sabotage and provide intelligence, with the overall objective of keeping the enemy out of India. Irwin is admirably yet brutally frank, in his descriptions of deathly battles with the Japs, his execution of a prisoner, dodging falling bags of rice dropped by the RAF, or collapsing in floods of tears through accumulated stress, fear and loneliness. He also provides some fascinating insights into the mentality of Japanese soldiery and why it failed against the flexibility and devolved authority of the British. The book amounts to a very human and exhilarating tale. Oh, and Irwin describes the death in 1943 of his colleague my uncle, Major PF Brennan. +++++ Other books here |
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After
48
crackling, compelling, captivating games, the new World Champions are,
deservedly,
England get the Silver,
No-one can argue with
Over the competition, |
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