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The Coackroaches and the Flashlight

Kofi Annan has been characterized as a well meaning but weak Unocrat. This has been more so since he brokered the 2008 Kenyan election accord that restored peace amongst ethnic riots and tribal cleansing that almost plunged the country into civil war.

Annan was presented in mid-2008 with the Waki Report into the tribal violence that has never been made public and certainly implicates some of Kenya's highest politicians. Part of the peace deal was that unless kenya successfully prosecuted in open court the named suspects, Annan would hand the list over to the International Criminal Court for action. It seemed he never would as Annan patiently accepted one Kenyan delaying tactic after another.

Naturally neither President Kibanki nor Prime Minister Odinga ever had, along with the entire ruling elite, the least intention of prosecuting anyone, as both their political parties' high rankers are undoubtedly involved.

Absurd delaying suggestions emanated from Kenya's rulers over the last year, as they failed again and again to set up any prosecution mechanism. The best was a suggestion to Annan that the suspects would never be publicly named, even if prosecuted, until proven guilty in secret courts - an event as likely as wildebeeste in the famed Mara game reserve growing wings. The Kenyans bickered,prevaricated, visited Annan over and again in Geneva and tried every trick in their ingenious battery of cover up, learned through 40 years of post-independence impunity.. All to no avail.

Yesterday, Annan dropped a bombshell. In a letter made public, he literally told Kenya's ethnic leaders he was "calling your bluff" and handed the envelope containing the Waki list of names to the ICC's chief prosecutor. The absolute panic in the ranks of the Kenyan polical elite has since been akin to the scurry of cockroaches when the lights are switched on.

Torture,Bush and the Facts

It turns out that thousands of US military members and NATO soldiers have been routinely waterboarded, kept in cramped conditions, subjected to sleep deprivation, kept in the cold, played loud music to endlessly and every other technique now widely being trumpeted in the world media is "torture", admittedly inflicted during Bush's time on some top Al Qaeda members, like 911 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, by the CIA in 2001-2006.


The reason is that all the methods that are so-called "Bush torture" are actually used to train US and NATO troops to resist interrogation when captured.

In light of these facts, should NATO and US officers, including many generals and others, who devised and ordered waterboarding and more of their own soldiers for the past 30 years, be investigated and tried for "torture"?

After all, sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. And if they should not be investigated, why should Bush or any of his officials be subject to retrospective prosecution for the same techniques applied to confessed terrorists and mass murderers- including those who killed the Kenyans in the 1998 embassy bombings?

If US and NATO officers are not to be prosecuted en masse for "waterborading", "sleep depriving" and so on thousands of troops, it can only be because (a) we would hold such techniques are not "real" torture but merely harshness (b) the techniques the US used on it's own soldiers really are torture, but were used in training for a "good end" -- i.e.not to cause pain for pain's sake.

If we argue (a): the techniques are "harmless" or merely "harsh interrogation", why is it called 'torture' when US citizens do it to non-Americans but not, as in the NATO/US Army training, to each other?

If hold to (b): why was the CIA "waterboarding" of Sheik Khalid Mohammed, which had him confessing to a plot to bomb Los Angeles and the arrest of the attack cell, not a "good end"?

Welcome To Hotel California

It sure is an odd place. Miss California, who was leading the Miss USA contest, lost last night because of a "controversial" (according to all the big media), "shocking" etc answer to a question. A pro gay activist and judge asked her what she thought of gay marriage. Her dignified answer was that some people believed in same sex and others opposite sex and whilst she meant no offense she believed in opposite sex marriage and that is how she was raised.

The gay activist judge later called her a "bitch" and a "c*nt" in public and said her remark cost her the title.

The fact that a judge at the contest is not considered "controversial" for ruining Miss California's title chances due to her polite remarks and calling her a "bitch" and "c*nt" after the TV programme is interesting.

The eventual winner was Miss North Carolina who was asked about the US financial bailouts for her question. She said she was opposed to the bailouts and the Federal and Presidential policy of bailout financially, even in a time of crisis. The media neither called this "controversial" nor remarked at all on it.

Most voters in California just rejected gay marriage in a referendum, most Americans do not approve it and neither (piblicly) does President Obama. Wheras most Americans voted for Democrats in the last election and for President Obama and he, the Senate and Congress have called financial bailouts vital and neccessery.

When you can figure out what Miss California said about gay marriage that was "controversial" or "shocking" and what Miss North Carolina said about bailouts that the media found non-controversial, you may figure out the immense bitterness social conservatives or the religious feel towards the big media in the USA that supposedly represents "unbiased" news.

America, Through A Glass, Darkly

Peggy Noonan's commentary in the Wall Street Journal on Obama's Domestic Agenda provoked much opinion and my reply was published in the Opinion letters, where it received many positive comments. Noonan seems surprised at the 'grandiosity' of what Obama is undertaking. Herewith what I wrote:


"The directions Obama's domestic agenda takes, and his grandiose ideas to fundamentally alter the American relation between citizen and government from a quasi-libertarian ( "classical liberal") to a European ( "social democratic") one, have always been crystal clear for many years to anyone who bothered to look beyond the celebrity style superficiality of his attractive persona. Or to those who delved behind Obama's disarming happy-talk during the primary and presidential campaigns.

Obama-ism is a simple three legged stool comprising Alternative Energy, Education and Healthcare. There is nothing to suggest he will abandon the first, even were a new Ice Age to emerge (as it might) because it is the revenue generator. By loading America with the omniscient tax-and-expense of costly, unproven alternative energy, Obama pays in large measure for the other two prongs of his plan.

The most basic lesson of economics, that it is wasteful to subsidize one thing to be cheap by making another dear, is something Obama, an otherwise attractive and clever man, shows no sign of swallowing.

In all of this new American social construction, the government will be the lumber provider, carpenter, store owner and salesman. In other words, energy, education and health are to be nationalized, in essence and de facto. That none of this is shown to work any better, or indeed worse in the long run, than risk-reward private enterprise seems not important to Obama.

For Obama is a social egalitarian. and was largely raised in the international anti-American gruppenthink of the extpatriate intelligensia. The collective "fairness" to all Americans (perhaps even non-Americans) and of groups and classes of citizens real of contrived, is more important to him than the classical rights of individuals - rights upon which the nation was found ed.

Did the American people want this? Probably not - but with a supine applauding media and a mood of economic despair to exploit, there is every chance they will get it. Obama seems unworried that his grandiosity will saddle Americans with more public debt in a few years than the Republic has accumulated since 1776. To be indebted to your government to Obama's mind one begins to darkly glimpse, is perhaps desirable.

That the opposite intention was in the minds of those who framed the Constitution is an inconvenience not to be discussed.

To the obvious calculation that Medicare and Social Security will be bankrupted in Obama's daughters prime or there will no money left to fund the Healthcare and Federal education without raising taxation to European levels, the President seems equally unruffled.

For Euramericans like Obama, the new social contract is basically this: the private person must be indebted, financially and morally, to government. Government's prime obligation in return to the citizen is continued displays of public virtue via engineered "egalitarianism". The debt is real, the egalitarianism is fake - but the public, like in 1984, never figure out this simple trick. Thus the Democrats are fated to slowly become Jacobins - indeed some already are.

Though China will be the world Superpower perhaps in 2050, as predicted, Obama-ism merely hastens America along the declining European path of "soft" power, with soft citizens taking neither risk nor reward nor responsibility.

It is hardly what the Founding fathers had in mind, but with a citizenry addicted to easiness and pleasure, all of de Tocqueville's warnings about the consequences of "beneficial" government may sadly come true."

Pissing About with Pirates

Despite hugely increased naval presence in the area, the Somali pirates continue to make a mockery of the world's sea powers as see today's BBC story.

Nothing will change until Obama takes the very unlikely step ( for him) of doing a "Barbary pirates" on the Somalis. In US history, when north African pirates caused havoc to US and other shipping around 1820, the navy invaded and sacked the home ports of the pirates. That shut down the notorious Barbary pirates pretty quick and one suspects it is the only medicine the Somalis will ever understand. Besides, it is the only sound military tactic - hit them at home.

Somali pirates seize more vessels

More than 130 pirates attacks were reported in 2008

Somali pirates have seized a British-owned cargo ship and a Taiwanese ship, maritime officials say, after capturing three other vessels over the weekend.

Obama the Obsequious

Are the people surrounding President Obama clueless, or could -not -care -less? Who is in charge of Obama's protocol? It would seem on his recent trip to Europe, Obama became the first American President in memory to bow to a potentate ,when he stooped before the autocrat, King Abdalla, despite it is a rigorous rule of protocol that American Presidents never bow to Kings or Queens.

When Obama met the far more important Queen Elizabeth, a democratic monarch, he did not bow.

One could also not fail to note that Obama never missed an opportunity to "apologize" for America's imagined wrongs as a preface to nearly every meeting he had on his recent European trip. In this he is following up his first TV interview after the Presidency, when he apologized to the Iranian theocrats on Al-Arabiya TV.

Even when proposing the elimination of nuclear weapons in Prague, Obama had to apologize for America being the "only nation to have used" them, something which imposed a "moral duty "on the USA to lead in their elimination, he said. Did he know the historical facts?

True, the US used two atomic bombs to end Word War 2. Yet recent historical research shows that Japan had prepared submarines with aircraft on board, and was awaiting from Germany the clandestine transfer of nuclear material (the Nazi submarine carrying it surrendered en route to Japan in May, but the Japanese never knew this) so that a "dirty bomb" attack could be conducted on San Francisco. The proposed date was just a few days after Japan actually surrendered!

This is besides the fact the US and allies never knew the correct position of Germany's wartime research into atomic weapons, which Hitler fully intended to acquire. Therefore, as they saw it, they were in a deadly race, with the fate of the world in the balance - as indeed it was. Hitler already possessed in the V2 the means to deliver atomic weapons on London, and was working on the V4 ICBM which could have reached New York - again with a "dirty bomb" plutonium weapon. Had the war run another 6 months, the outcome might well have been ghastly.

It is a wonder that the USA grasped the full need to develop atomic weapons rapidly in the face of deadly enemies who were looking for the same, and to use them to end the war with far less human loss of life (on both sides) than a mainland invasion of Japan. This also had the intended purpose of halting Stalin from annexing much of Northern China and possible Stalinist ground offensives in Europe.

Obama has nothing to apologize for and his obsequiousness is unbecoming. However, reading his books, it is obvious Obama was an early and strong believer in 'conventional wisdom' anti-Americanism and blaming many of the ills of the world on the US. To the lesser extent that may be true Obama could be refreshingly honest, but it is not the way it's seen by the myriad of loathsome enemies the West faces.

Barack's Baptism

Today Barack Obama is going to receive his first full secret briefing from US intelligence agencies on the threats his administration faces, as ABC News notes here. Many have said that within days of these briefings, past Presidents seem to have aged quite a few years.

President Obama is going to painfully discover that no matter even when the US has been right,just,fair and generous, there still exist a myriad of vicious enemies of freedom trying to destroy the USA.

The reaction from Iran today to his TV offer of "extending a hand" was calumny, bile, anger and insolent demands the US "apologise" for "past crimes", just one component of the hatred some regimes perpetually have for the USA - which Obama will find all his sweet words and charisma cannot change.

Obama will wake up to the painful realization that the USA cannot just be "liked", it also needs to be respected and fear of power is one ( vital) component of respect that he has never acknowledged.

Speak softly and carry a big stick, Barry as a former US President once said. You are going need it sooner rather than later.

After this briefing, Obama will change a lot of his mind about George W Bush, if he acknowledges it or not.

Summing It Up

I think summarizes the USA for the next four years better than one thousand words might!

Palin's Troopergate!

The just released Alaska probe is only damaging to Sarah Palin because the media, including the BBC, have been waiting to spin it against her. The BBC quotes investigator Blanchflower only in part, the first of only two "findings", one of which is negative to Palin and contradicted in the second.

Why was their report not headed "Palin acted lawfully and properly", instead of "Palin abused power"?

Blanchflower disagrees with himself in the same report, second finding, quote:

"Governor Palin's firing of Commissioner Monegan was a proper and lawful exercise of her constitutional and statutory authority to hire and fire executive branch department heads."

How can "lawful and proper" suddenly become "abuse"? Is it not Mr. Blanchflower that needs investigating over such contradiction?

The BBC has also chosen not to mention the investigation is not a criminal one, and has been conducted by partisan Alaskan Democrats who appointed Blanhflower and has as much low weight as any other inter party mud-slinging. Instead it will be spun into Watergate Two by the media.

If the BBC had read any of the report, how could they so fail to report the glaring contradiction of the second finding? Perhaps they will read it now.

And why is the BBC calling this item "Troopergate"? That itself is a spin. The trooper Palin wanted dismissed admitted he taser gunned her own 10 year old nephew, which was cruel, dangerous, even potentially fatal and could be prima facie child abuse, admitted he poached wildlife but denied being drunk on patrol or threatening to kill members of the Palin family. Quite a list.

How about "Tasergate", or would that raise questions that would not lead to anti-Palin conclusions?

Why I Hate Sarah Palin!

The second debate was awful and boring. I wonder who will watch the next? Obama remains a person I would like to believe in but with under two years in the Senate and a very nondescript (even buried) record, I tend to think of him as a celebrity media candidate with charm, looks , a good brain, fine articulation and great oratory...but as to who he really is and represents?

He remains a cypher , even to the British Ambassador in the US who briefed Gordon Brown. Unless you never grew up from 60's, Obama looks like a weirdly contemporary retro-radical, pushing for Main Street. I wish it were not so, for the guy has true talent aplenty to burn.

As the most left wing US candidate of all time ( not that this does not please some) I cannot see how the massive expansion of government/spending/entitlement his kind always invokes would help the USA, broke as it is, ..but politics goes in cycles and the Dems certainly have the pendulum.

Thatcher/Reagans's idea to deregulate prudently so the deserving and thrifty could better become house owners degenerated 10 years on into cajoling the undeserving, indigent and un-creditworthy into bad loans . Greed on Wall Street? Politicians passing the buck..after all this was not triggered by anything other than the artificial housing boom of the past 15+ years, fed by "politically correct credit" which Fannie and Freddie re-cycled in an act of fiscal criminality, all over the world. It was a scam, a house of cards - nothing more or less.

Is it reasonable that bankers, who depend upon their jobs by not losing money, would give away absurd loans from "greed"? Why were bankers in our father's time not similarly "greedy"? Or were they allowed back then to judge their loans on their merits? Those who swallow the "greed" red herring will get choked by the nasty bones that are the facts. For it is not Lehman Bros etc ( greedy though some in these businesses were) who caused this crisis. It was improvident lending, sanctioned by Congress and encouraged by them since 1977 but paced faster every year.

We are not in a "corporate salary crisis" or a "commodities boom crisis" and the only "greed crisis" exists in the minds of Congress trying to palm off their duplicity on frightened voters - the mother and father of our problem is real estate and "subprime" at that, and so it is named.

Of course, lending to everyone for political reasons ("affirmative lending" would be a good term) put huge pressure on the natural supply and demand chain of housing, forcing up prices even more in the 90's and current decade. In a phrase, it was a pyramid scheme that would collapse ( as was warned by some fiscal conservatives many times).

After a period of anti-American gloating so typical of the superior moral beings that are Europeans, I see the chickens have come home to roost there too.

Again, the problem is not one of deregulation but too much regulation in the critical housing market, replacing the decentralised prudence and decisions of the traditional banker with a command-style regulation from politicians/pressure groups to loan to any and everybody.

This was accompanied ,at least in the USA, by actual fines and penalties, all in the name of egalitarianism and helping social mascot groups ( the unemployed, illegal immigrants, racial minorities regardless of median income, drug addicts, people with bad credit rating, trailer trash etc). Why? It seems charitable on the surface, but in the end it was to buy votes. In the 1990's the process accelerated.

Indeed, by 2005 a full 19% of the massive loans backed by Fannie and Freddie that year were "subprime" ( i.e. loans a banker would not make without threats or cover from politicians, or both). Hence the absurdity of random tele-callers offering loans to every bum in Europe and the USA, to fullfil, like little communist workers, their "quotas" of "non-discriminatory" loans to please Congress and courts. I do not say there were no other factors to the current crisis outside of the sub-prime, and one cannot blame the uncreditworthy for taking the chance for what they saw as a better life. Yet only the sub-prime problem could have triggered the uncontrollable meltdown that started some months ago, as house prices steadily dropped for the first time in over a decade.

It was a huge bonfire of the vanities in which we are all burned. I agree with the 60% of Americans who would, as polled yesterday, not return a single member of Congress to power in Nov if it was their call. But it's not. Congress has rigged their choices as well.

All of this is why I hate Sarah Palin. She was in Alaska, has never spent a minute in Congress and is the only one of the four candidates who has zero blame for this mess. Indeed, while Washington was bankrupting the USA, she put Alaska into the black and got an 85% approval rating from both parties. Bi-partisanship in action, I suppose. She is the only candidate to have never accepted a dime from Fannie and Freddie. Obama grabbed $125 thousand and even McCain took a modest $15 thou. Sarah is the dimwit serial -breeding hick who is not fit to lead America, or so I am told.

Sarah Palin, Warmonger!

ABC's notoriously condescending interview with Sarah Palin by the Charlie Gibson has fuelled immense media spin when Palin pointed out, quite correctly, that were a country a member of NATO and it was invaded by Russia, the treaty obligates members to defend it, even if that "perhaps" meant war. This is the exact nature of the NATO treaty, but ABC would never have you think that.

Of course the interview was censored by ABC who cut important portions from it. The entire unedited interview is now available here. Listen to what ABC cut out of the interview, and make your own mind up about Palin-The-Warmonger the left and the Democrafts are frantically spinning this week:

PALIN: What I think is that smaller democratic countries that are invaded by a larger power is something for us to be vigilant against. We have got to be cognizant of what the consequences are if a larger power is able to take over smaller democratic countries.

And we have got to be vigilant. We have got to show the support, in this case, for Georgia. The support that we can show is economic sanctions perhaps against Russia, if this is what it leads to.

It doesn’t have to lead to war and it doesn’t have to lead, as I said, to a Cold War, but economic sanctions, diplomatic pressure, again, counting on our allies to help us do that in this mission of keeping our eye on Russia and Putin and some of his desire to control and to control much more than smaller democratic countries.

His mission, if it is to control energy supplies, also, coming from and through Russia, that’s a dangerous position for our world to be in, if we were to allow that to happen.

The treatment of Sarah Palin by the media must stand as the most despicable hit-job undertaken on a Presidential candidate by the mainstream media in recent times. The chances are it will backfire splendidly in their faces - the American people are not fools.

That Race Card - A Joker

Kelley’s misleading article “Race card could hurt Obama” and the comically vicious abuse of John McCain repeated by Mutuma Mathiu (Sunday Nation 14 Sept) go beyond the understandable desire most Kenyans have to see Obama win the US Presidency. The media have a duty to inform but the blatant partisanship on display is likely to leave Kenyans none the wiser if Obama, whose campaign is faltering, does not make it.

There is no evidence whatsoever that McCain’s campaign has made any derogatory remarks about Obama’s race. Like him or not, McCain is acknowledged even by his enemies as a true American hero, and a veteran maverick politician of considerable personal honour. Are all the voters in Central Province tribalists because they never voted for Mr. Odinga? Are the Germans racist because they have not a single non-white senior cabinet minister and the same for most Western European countries? Are the people of Nyanza ethnicists because they refused to vote for Mr. Kibaki? What nonsense – yet Americans are threatened with being branded “racists” if they do not elect Mr. Obama. This is plain anti-American bigotry, holding Americans to standards that are not even asked of others. Perhaps Mr. Kelley can inform us if Kenyans vote, on the whole, for tribal personalities or for parties?

Mr. Kelly was better served informing Kenyans of various facts of American politics: that the USA historically votes for Republican presidents most of the time, that there are almost equal numbers of Republican and Democrat party members who vote for their party above all, that Obama made a huge blunder in not taking Hilary Clinton as his running mate and that he is, however brilliant, fresh and eloquent , the most inexperienced person to ever run for US President, against a veteran Republican who has cunningly chosen a woman running mate.

If Kenyans do not vote based upon whoever Ugandans or Chinamen might like to see in State House, why should Americans take the least notice of what foreigners want? Obama is not standing for President of the World, which he might win – first he has to convince US voters.

Some 87% of US voters are non-black. Obama could never have got where he is on their paltry votes. True as Mr. Kelley states, only a few black Republicans attended their convention – most vote Democratic since 1945 and they are free to have that choice. President Bush put more blacks into positions of power than any President to date, as see Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice, to name two. The idea the Republicans are against blacks is a smear.

As for Mr. Mathiu gleeful reprinting of McCain’s convention speech as basically being delivered by a senile, out of touch old fool addressing a despicable bunch of cronies ( who only happen to represent about 0% of American voters!) he should keep it up if he wants Obama to lose. Americans reading it might feel so insulted as to vote for McCain.

Borking Sarah Palin

Oxford English Dictionary 2002 Edition: people who Bork others "usually [do so] with the aim of preventing [a person's] appointment to public office."

There is no doubt that the serially biased US mainstream media are determined to bork McCain's VP pick, Sarah Palin. As is well known, the left's fierce devotion to free speech only applies to groupthinkers. Those who exhibit thoughtcrimes outside of the leftist narrative that the MSM obligingly controls and steers will be borked. The last person who suffered this shameful treatment was black Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas.

Feminist Florynce Kennedy.....on the importance of defeating the nomination of Clarence Thomas to the U.S. Supreme Court, said, "We're going to bork him. We're going to kill him politically. . . . This little creep, where did he come from?"

So far all the MSM have to run with is the idea that Palin is at fault for the attempted firing of her former brother-in-law from the Alaska police. What mileage the media hopes to get out of this is severly dented by the well documented facts: Palin's brother in law tastered an 11 year old boy, broke state hunting regulations and was caught driving drunk on duty. He also is on his fourth marriage.

Thus The Guardian runs the "investigation" smear in a recent edition, conveniently failing to note exactly just what sort of character Sarah Palin's former brother-in-law actually is. I doubt Mr and Mrs. Average American will do anything except pat Palin on the back.

More laughable is that the MSM, who play softball with regard to any investigations into their democratic pets (the John Edwards no-story being the most glaring latest example), have gone into a frenzied hits against Palin but simultaneously spread the lie that it is Republicans who are the "attack dog" party and the "smear artists".

So successful are the media in producing newspeak terminology that they have managed to get "swiftboating" into the language as "the false accusation of someone for political purposes". Yet the famous anti-Kerry "Swiftboat" political ads of 2004 were never challenged as to the facts they spoke of. If anything, the word should stand for "accurate accusation."

Will Palin survive the cloud of smears the left has inundated her with? I have my doubts. McCain is too well known as a war-hero and patriot to try that on him, but it's open season on moose hunting mamas and she will be lucky to survive. However the latest Rasmussen poll showing 51% of Americans think she is being picked on also indicate that blow back from a fed up electorate could easily scorch the Democrats.

Barack and Biden's Blood

Post Convention Update:

Blood on the floor and it's Barack and Biden's: more people watched Sarah Palin's speech than St. Barry's. More people watched the RNC convention than Mubarak's styrofoam faux-Nuremburg rally. In fact more people watched John McMelanoma on his final night than ever before in US convention history. MSM scrambling to spin these ratings.

People turning on the media generally for the cloud of smears and lies they emitted when their anointed Obamus the First suddenly faced the shock-gasp-horror of the Esquimo inbreeding, caribou eating, wilderness trash that is Sarah Palin.................and her genetically challenged family.

Obama will now trot out a lot of chisel faced wimmin and members of the US Female Welders and Hardhats Lesbian Coalition to counter the moose -murdering serial mama from Sticksville.

Media fuming: their breathless declaration that Britol Palin is pregnant actually backfired - they thought it would annoy Republicans and the religious. That's because the mean fire-and-brimstone image they have of such people is entirely the creature of their own liberal 0.5 child-per-couple fantasies. The right on the other hand loves babies (Baracky: an unwanted pregnancy would be "a punishment" any of his daughters should abort if it happened).

They especially love those who don't chuck 'em down the hospital chute - or in Baracky's case, he was the only member of the Illinois legislature to vote to allow born-alive late abortions to die without medical care. Media love, Palin 40.

The Reps have so much red meat between their teeth now that the Barracuda (Palin's nickname) can't digest it all. The next event in about 10 days is Sarah, the pitbull with lipstick vs. bloviating Joe Biden, one of the least accomplished hacks to occupy the Senate for the past 36 years and renowned for his large foot-in-mouth once he gets going. On the other hand as the eternal chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, he knows where Canada is ( and probably Krygystan) whilst Sarah Stickshick is still looking up Washington DC on the map.

Key moment of that debate? When Biden runs into Sarah with the "experience" line and the Pitbull sweetly points out that The O-nointed One not only has less executive experience than her, but that Biden himself is on public record stating Obama is not qualified by experience to be President over John McCain. Ouch, ow...gasp...........

You've Come A Long Way, Baby

"Where is it written that only senators are qualified to become President?... Or where is it written that mere representatives aren’t qualified, like Geraldine Ferraro of Queens?... Where is it written that governors and mayors, like Dianne Feinstein of San Francisco, are too local, too provincial?... Presidential candidates have always chosen their running mates for reasons of practical demography, not idealized democracy…. What a splendid system, we say to ourselves, that takes little-known men, tests them in high office and permits them to grow into statesmen.... Why shouldn’t a little-known woman have the same opportunity to grow?."

New York Times, 1984, on Geraldine Ferraro as Vice Presidential nominee

Three front page stories on the pregnant Bristol Palin.

New York Times, 2008

Never A Wiser Statement

"Government´s view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidise it." - Ronald Reagan

For The Price of A Movie

Breathless post.......................

Half--Muslim mixed race child with zero experience knocks out America's biggest political family in primaries. Takes on on "tortured for two thousand days" war hero maverick/serial melanomist, who was written off 2 years ago, in a tight 2008 Presidential race.

After the Obamessiah takes an early lead, maverick John McMelanoma fires back at Democratic identity politics via a secret weapon: unknown 44 year old Alaskan beauty Queen VP pick Sarah Palin who hunts, fishes, flies planes, shoots bears and knows how to prepare a mean mooseburger.

Beauty Queen Sarah at once accused by lefty media of having faked her Down Syndrome 5 month old baby's birth and claims baby shown to media is her daughter's. Press holds breath as is soon revealed actually the Beauty Queen's 17 year old daughter is pregnant, by a schoolmate whose Facebook descrip reads "redneck" who "is not looking forward to having children".

Lefty media start piranha hunt and smell blood until St. Barracky (own mother at time of birth: 18 years) steps in and calls it off.

Meanwhile, Beauty Queen's husband revealed as a world class "snowmobile racer" who votes Democrat! Works in a "World Deadliest Catch"-type fishing boat. Lefty press dig hard and find he has a Driving-Under-Influence arrest 20 years ago. Bloggers point out St. Barracky also admitted in public to using cocaine 20 years ago. Public chuffles.

Obamessiah campaign, reeling from sneak Alaskan attack (McMelanoma was a Navy pilot in Vietnam days) blast Miss Alaska for "lack of experience", producing extreme hilarity as even the most dim witted voter notices that applies to the Obamessiah himself. Only he is running for Prez and she isn't!.

Meanwhile a hurricane bears down on New Orleans and will it be another Katrina? Is it an act of God to strike down the evil Republican Bushitler/McMelanoma cabal once and for all, during their convention? Or an act of the Devil to wipe the media focus from Emperor Obamus' temple gathering just 48 hours before?

Who cares? How much would you have to pay for this stuff in a movie theatre? Who could possibly make it up? How utterly boring the rest of world politics seems.

God I love America!

The Unseen Victory

One of the most significant events post-911 has passed almost without notice by US and world media: the roundup of 1000 Al Qaeda suspects in Mosul Iraq, representing the final annihilation of Al Qaeda in Iraq.

At least the UK's Times has an article on this pounding of what once looked like an unbeatable terrorist force. Of course the same leftist media who parroted that " one can never win against terrorism by military force" now have nothing to say: their anti-American mascot Bin Laden lives in a cave in Waziristan, two thirds of his cadre of leaders is dead or captured and the branch in Iraq, the standard bearers for what Bin Laden called the most important fight against America, has been totally routed and the leadership killed.

Rugby Tri-Nations Time!

Huge rugby weekend on Saturday when the world's premier rugby test, the Tri-Nations series, kicks off with a volcanic encounter between the Springboks and All Blacks in New Zealand's Dunedin "House of Pain" stadium.

Bok/Black match-ups have an intensity all of their own in world rugby and for nigh on 100 years and this one is no different with the World Champ South Africans desperate to prove their superiority against a New Zealand side that feels bitterly cheated of the same title in 2007. They are focused with X-ray intensity on penetrating and destroying the Boks 12 match unbeaten run. Bragging rights, the inside track to the Tri-Nations '08 trophy and the IRB No 1 ranking are all on the line.

SA's first non-white coach, Pieter de Villiers, has chosen a very good side with many excellent players of colour. The full set of new laws will be on display for the first time too, meaning each side will be stretched to the full limit of their speed and endurance in the machine-gun rapidity of the experimental rule changes. However, scrum advantage plays an enhanced role under the new laws and this is where de Villiers may have erred. The All Blacks have a powerful scrum and a very destructive front row that pulverized England in two recent Tests - yet de Villiers, who paired his best front row with BJ Botha and exciting new black prop Beast Mtwarira against Wales three weeks ago has inexplicably left Botha at home.

Perhaps there is politics at play here, with de Villers having to field, by some rumored unwritten agreement with the SA sports authorities, a high number of "coloured" players - or perhaps he has just made a mistake. You simply must get parity, if not go-forward, at scrum time under the new laws, since the defenders have to stand 5 yrads behind the scrum which gives the attackers a big advantage. I can't see de Villiers possible combinations of Steenkamp/Van Der Linde and young first-timers Mujati/Mtwarira doing this in Dunedin against the best, when they failed to manage the front-foot against lesser opposition in recent weeks.

The Boks best card will be the lineout combination of world class locks Victor Matfield and Bakkies "Pickup Truck" Botha whose work in this department is simply brilliant. Therefore, expect magical All Black no 10 Dan Carter to do everything to avoid lineouts while his classy backline of Nonu, Leon McDonald, Sivivatu and possibly Conrad Black (if chosen) try to run the Springboks ragged with fast play from side to side of the pitch.

With Captain Ritchie McCaw out of action, the Bok backrow should shade the All Blacks led by Rodney So'ialo but de Villiers may opt for Luke Watson instead of his hardest combo of Burger,Juan Smith and a resurgent Big Joe Van Niekerk at no 8. In fact, de Villers has so many quality backrowers he is probably spoiled to get this vital balance perfect. New Zealand may not match up here, giving the Boks a real chance at the vital breakdown ball - and a win.

He would be wise to suit up 5 forwards and only two backs on his bench, since in runners Pienaar and Steyn he has two backs who can cover every backline combination. Since two of his loose forward bench, Spies and Kankowski, are as explosive and fast as backs in their own right, this could give the real edge. But, as I write,one is unsure of who de Villers will actually pick.

Every Kiwi is dangerous, but Maa Nonu especially so at No 12 and with the clever Conrad Black at 13, the Boks likely pairing of John de Villers and Adi Jacobs are going to have their hands very full indeed, let alone with the brilliance of McDonald and Sivivatu. The new coach wants to play an expansive game but will the Bok no 12 and 13 get the space and time to deliver their clever touches? It must be in doubt. Again, the Boks will likely play JJ Pietersen on one wing, yet he is a shadow of his 2007 form when de Villers might have moved incumbent, on-form fullback Conrad Jantjes to the wing and played the always reliable Percy Montgomery at fullback, even given he is 34 years young but still playing near his very best. This mega-Test will come down to how clever each coach is with his final line-up and if amything de Villers has more options than Graham Henry for once - and more chances thus to get it wrong.

My head gives this match to the All Blacks on home soil and by about 7 points but it will be a close run affair and certainly is the most awaited clash for years. My heart goes to the Boks who can certainly win and have the best chance against New Zealand at home for many seasons - but certainly is a word that almost always comes undone against a fired up bunch of All Blacks on home winter soil. Have your smelling salts and blood pressure guage to hand when you switch this one on.

Court Of Fools

Reading the impassioned and often wrong comments following this link on the Supreme Court Boumedienne decision led me to the following response:

"It is sad to read here people speculating as to why the Bush admin neither wanted the captured terrorists to be treated as Prisoners of War under Geneva Conventions, not executed summarily as the laws of war and Geneva would have allowed. Many seem baffled by this. The answer is surely, that POWS cannot, under Geneva, be interrogated beyond "name,rank,serial number". And if they are summarily executed on or close to the battlefield they would neither be interrogated to give information. They would be dead. If the asymetrical war against international WMD seeking terrorists is not to be conducted by the shadows, the questioners, the isolation of the suspected, by harsh and secret methods, just who will conduct it? The San Francisco circuit of judges? The FBI? How about the UN? Wait, let's call on the ICC in the Hague.

The Bush admin did the world a huge service by trying to act on what waffling bodies like the UN have been paralysed over for decades - the treatment of terrorists and "unlawful combatants" or the new breed of mega-terrorists. It is indeed Bush's brilliance, not his detriment, that he realized the old Geneva Rules were useless in the face of a conspiracy so vast as Al Qaeda. If international terrorism had not been stopped cold by America's aggression post 911, the EU and others would probably be asking George Bush for the Gitmo blueprints long ago.

For those as naive as Obama,who trumpet how civilian courts dealt with the 1993 WT bombings, one has only to ask: just how effective were those civilian trials in stopping attacks on the USA and US citizens? Not at all, if we go by the Africa Embassy bombings, the USS Cole and of course the whole run in to 9/11.

Contrast the Bush approach when, with every fanatic in the world supposedly desperate to attack the American heartland, not a single attack has taken place. rather, the terrorists have been constrained, or sucked into killing fields like Iraq and slaughtered, so that Osama now hides in a Waziristan cave and most of his deputies are dead or in Gitmo. This, we are told ,is a failure. The blind sheik rotting in a New York jail after the 1993 attacks who gave us no information on the holocaust of Americans that was to come, is one learns, a success.

If America's standing in the world is low, it is largely because of the dismal and disloyal role of media, American included, in not explaining what is patently explainable: that WMD seeking mega-terrorists do not fall whatsoever under any of the protected categories of combatants under the Geneva Conventions and Rules and Conventions of War. According to the Geneva Conventions, they are war criminals and subject to summary justice.

With the terrifying possibilities of nuclear and bio-terrorism around us, which our enemies have assured us over and again they will use the minute they can obtain the weapons, to give foreign terrorists superior access to US justice than Nazi Werewolf partisans, foreign spy saboteurs in the Revolutionary War, German saboteurs on US soil in WW2 and a host of other examples including captured Barbary pirates if we go so far back, is an act of unbelievable stupidity and nothing more than a Supreme Court supremely out of touch with reality."

When Hydrogen Equals C02

Honda makes first hydrogen cars

The FCX Clarity emits none of the gases responsible for global warming

The Japanese car manufacturer Honda has begun the first ever commercial production of a hydrogen fuel-cell powered vehicle.

The medium-sized four-seater, called the FCX Clarity, runs on hydrogen and electricity, emitting only water vapour.

Honda claims the vehicle offers three times better fuel efficiency than a traditional, gasoline-powered car.

As someone who totally supports the use of cleaner energy, regardless of global warming debates, this is good news. However the thorn in the rose, and what is not widely understood, is that hydrogen does not occur on earth in gas form. It can only be manufactured by using energy, and a lot of it at that. The cheapest and best way to crack hydrogen from water would be by using nuclear power, otherwise it would have to be done by fossil fuels, making the net saving in carbon emissions very minimal.

Once more, like so many "green products" this turns out to be a PR gimmick more than something we shall all be driving in 5 years, or perhapos even 50.

The Mainstreaming of Terror

Today I read excerpts of the worst decision I have ever seen from the US Supreme Court, the Boumedienne case which, under Justice Kennedy, gives enemy terrorists of the USA the rights to habeus corpus in domestic courts for the first time in our history, supposedly because (among other reasons) the war against terror has gone on a very long time!

This is unheard of in any Common Law jurisprudence and goes against well established earlier Supreme Court cases and precedent concerning aliens making war on the united States. It is a stunning blow against the US military and the safety of Americans, and a ghastly mainstreaming of terrorists , and by extension even foreign armed forces, into the heart of US civilian courts.

There is a far finer take on this terrible decision here at the NRO which makes sobering reading. My jaw dropped and my heart ached as I read this mystical extension of the US Constitution to cover those who have plotted and executed attacks upon us from foreign countries where they were captured. As Justice Scalia said in dissent, the decision, " sets our military commanders the impossible task of proving to a civilian court, under whatever standards this Court devises in the future, that evidence supports the confinement of each and every enemy prisoner."

As has been said, no great power is ever defeated from without, without first defeating itself from within. As for Justice Kennedy, I never thought I would say this about a Supreme Court member, but the only remedy is his impeachment, which sadly will never happen.

Rugby Hots Up

Wales vs Springboks, 2nd Test: This should be a no-brainer. The Boks have players with names like "The Beast" (photo above) and "Pickup Truck". The Welsh are all called Jones and after their 43-17 hiding I expect them to be better than last week, for a while and then fade badly in the second half. When they see the Springbok bench they will start looking for their airline tickets - it's awesome. Moderate Bok win.

Oz vs Micks (in Australia): An interesting one, Robbie Dean's first match as Australia coach and he has already, as a good Canterbury Kiwi, been moaning at the soft Aussie forwards. Ireland's are anything but and this could be the best and most even match of the weekend, especially with the super pass of veteran Peter Stringer to serve Ronan O Gara who has got over his bout of RWC "going Irish" ( booze and women) that made him so pathetic in november. Oz to win but close?

All-Blacks v England (in NZ): I don't see the ABs at their best at the moment and they too are grappling with player turnover, but they could put out the coach's grandma and her dog and still beat this depleted and experimental English XV in their sleep. England hope to play an "expansive" game against the All Blacks but the only expansion will be to the Kiwis side of the scoreline. England cannot, by temperament, upbringing, bloodline, genes, training, tradition or ability play an "expansive" game so why don't they give up ttalking and just try to grind the Kiwis down as per ususal? A big score.

The Teflon Messiah

It is often said that Ronald Regan was able to ensure that no political problem or scandal ever stuck to him - hence the moniker of the "Teflon President". Barack Obama seems set to raise slipperyness to such heights that it will make Ronnie seem like the Velcro Prez. It helps to have the media running interference for you and consigning lots of otherwise juicy stories to the fabled MSM memory hole.

A short while after hiring James Johnson as the chief of his Veep vetting panel, suddenly Obama claims today that, he had never actually worked for him. This is in the vein of Pastor Wright and multiple fraudster Tony Rezko, who contrived to get Obama a $250,000 house for about a quarter of the value. In both cases, Saint Baracky claimed these, along with the ranting Rev. Pfhelger, "were not the people he knew" despite he knew one of them for 20 years.

There is also the case of the once fired Austan Goolsbee who "never really" worked for Obama either when he was caught lying about NAFTA briefings he had with Canadian officials, who has now just been re-instated to Obama's team as a top economic policy adviser. The MSM has adroitly dodged Obama's very friendly links to domestic left-wing terrorists Bill Ayers and the charming Bernadette Dorn, once on the FBI's Top Ten Most Wanted list.

Obama "never knew them very well" either, despite being neighbours and having cozy political parties with Bill, last seen in public a few years ago dancing on an American flag and stating his complete non repentance for attempting to bomb the Pentagon.

Obama has railed against the corporate greed of slippery sub-prime mortgage bankers. It seems then odd that on his Democratic fund raising staff he has people directly linked to banks like Continental Finance and many others of the worst type of subprime sharks.

Surely the real reason James Johnson, who never worked for Obama despite being appointed by him, suddenly resigned is the Wall Street Journal expose of how Johnson did not disclose the friendly loans he got from Countrywide ( another sub-prime shark) to Fannie Mae, of which Johnson was CEO. At the same time, Fannie Mae was buying Countrywide’s rotten sub-prime loans.

Presumably Obama would say, "This is not the story I read".

If Obama Was Republican

Hat Tip: Peoplescube.com

Eating Climate Propaganda

A good example of the unsubstantiated claims of global warming hysterics is found at the very well read BBC News. What looks like a straight news piece "Clashes at Nairobi Food Protest" includes at the end the mandatory, and totally unsubstantiated, "climate change" mantra so beloved of the soft-left social controllers that totally dominate the BBC.

"World population growth, increased food consumption in emerging economies such as China, climate change and increased land being given over for biofuel production are all having an impact on the price of food." says Aunty Beeb.

Of course,there is little evidence that "climate change" a.k.a. "weather" is responsible. The excellent page on Wikipedia here does note "climate change" as one of the debatable reasons for food shortages, but assigns it last on the list and in the follow up data, provides almost no evidence for the assertion, even in the exhaustive footnotes and quoted scientific papers.

The Beeb of course has it has as number 3 in their list, that also includes the beloved leftist Malthusianism , "world population growth" is the primary cause. Translation? Abort the little brown buggers and we will be fine.

What the Beeb does not have in their list are factors like: the effect of the anti-free market OPEC cartel on oil and fertilizer prices, the frantic resistance to GMO foods displayed by the grossly overweight European Union populations and their blackmail of developing countries that want to employ GMO crops, the anti-capitalist subsidizing of food prices in especially the EU but also the USA, the role of anti-democratic misgovernment in Asia ( North Korea) and Africa (Kenya included) in producing artificial famines and other factors.

Wikipedia notes quite correctly that "Systemic causes for the world-wide food price increase continue to be the subject of debate." but not amongst the leftists at the BBC, where the matter is cut and dried. Wikipedia experts say:

"Initial causes of the late 2006 price spikes included unseasonable droughts in grain producing nations and rising oil prices. Oil prices further heightened the costs of fertilizers, food transport, and industrial agriculture. Other causes may be the increasing use of biofuels in developed countries (see also Food vs fuel),^[1] and an increasing demand for a more varied diet (especially meat) across the expanding middle-class populations of Asia.^[2][3] These factors, coupled with falling world food stockpiles have all contributed to the dramatic world-wide rise in food prices.^[4] Longterm causes remain a topic of debate. These may include structural changes in trade and agricultural production, agricultural price supports and subsidies in developed nations, diversions of food commodities to high input foods and fuel, commodity market speculation, and climate change."

One factor for sure is the lunatic insistence of the climate dogmatists on bio-fuel production. Whereas the production of bio-diesel in arid climates using the jojoba plant would, for example, be of enormous benefit to poor countries in Africa, instead we have the world's rain forests being cut down ( with a huge loss of bio-diversity) to plant palm oil or large food areas being put over to corn based ethanol, as just one example of the unintended effects of the climate control freaks agitprop.

A conservative perspective starts with the idea that perfect human socio-political or economic institutions are impossible, and that something like "global warming" will always involve trade-offs and systemic solutions, many of which will be imperfect and flawed, and always subject to continuous review and adjustment based on human priorities and freedoms. This is absolutly not what the Beeb wants to hear or broadcast.

The Pit Beckons

I often write with tongue firmly in cheek, with an eye to the satirical. After all, my childhood hero was Swift. Sometimes things are not a laughing matter, however.

Yet yesterdays decisions by the UK parliament to allow human-animal hybrid embryos, to allow the breeding of "saviour siblings" simply to provide donor matches, to do away with any "right to a father" by those who use insemination or fertility clinics and to stick with killing 6 month old babies in late abortions has made me deeply ashamed of my citizenship in that country.

The founder of the left, Rousseau, was the first to demand the destruction of the family - he even gave away his only child for adoption for "political reasons" and broke his wife's heart for life. He was a monster. The left has continued openly, quietly or even surreptitiously to believe in the next 250 years that we can only have "new humans" when the family, as we know it, is pulverised and remade in a political image.

We truly enter a brave new world of Frankenstein creations with Britain's new legislation.

Anyone who has worked with fatherless children would see that encouraging society to raise the same is utterly irresponsible and costly. Indeed it is the left's own social studies that show those with two stable parents do better in every measure than those from single parent families - social policy cannot guarantee that, but it should aim for it. Breakthroughs last year mean that any human cells can now be used for creating stem-cells and the need for using human embryos no longer exists. The idea of breeding simply to provide spare parts for another human needs no comment. Finally, advances in medicine mean premature children born at 6 months are quite viable and many thousands are today growing into healthy adults, making abortion at 6 months nothing less than infanticide, unless one wishes to argue a 6 month old is just a "fetus" which to me seems utterly unsupported by science or evidence.

Countries like Britain wonder why their core is rapidly being overwhelmed by brown immigrants with a strong sense of family life and spiritual belief and who detest the "values" of their hosts on many levels. Hurry up, is all one can say.

Obamamania Pt 4

A remarkable piece by respected veteran black political scientist and left wing activist Prof Adolf Reed Jr in The Progressive, which is hardly my normal reading, takes issue with the vacuous nature of Obamania and, from a leftist perspective, the shammery and hollowness of his aspirations. Excerpt:

I’ve never been an Obama supporter. I’ve known him since the very beginning of his political career, which was his campaign for the seat in my state senate district in Chicago. He struck me then as a vacuous opportunist, a good performer with an ear for how to make white liberals like him. I argued at the time that his fundamental political center of gravity, beneath an empty rhetoric of hope and change and new directions, is neoliberal.

Read the whole thing.

This is an extraordinarily prescient piece that, coming as it does from someone who is a black leftist, all the more likely to be true. It is fascinating that both right wing commentators and Mr. Reed seem to say almost the same things about the Obamessiah and therefore they are both right or both wrong. I happen to believe the former more likely.

Let Them Eat Strawberries

It's an odd time when millionaire greenies in the developed world hit out a semi-starving Africans in the name of climate change. Celebrity chef Gordon Ramasay wants his namesake, the Fat Controller, to arrange legislation to ban all out of season foods in UK, a move that would devastate hundreds of thousands of workers in developing countries.

"I don’t want to see asparagus on in the middle of December. I don’t want to see strawberries from Kenya in the middle of March. I want to see it home grown."

Perhaps in a few hundred square miles worth of ecologically friendly heated winter greenhouses?

A much better suggestion would be to close down British agriculture totally so that Ramsay and his fellow New Labour trendies can use the country for what they really want anyway: a vast picnic site where entertaining yokels will doff their hats and tug their forelocks as they watch Gordon and his pals rock up in his Ferrari ( great choice of green car, except it's red and has 12 cylinders) to eat Kiwi Fruit and Foie Gras canapes all washed down with a 1968 Le Mernot de Petites Villages.

"He says it would cut carbon emissions as less food would be imported and also lead to improved standards of cooking. "

Yes, the Brits can't wait to go back to a traditional winter dish of pureed parsnips with a slice of deep fried blood pudding. These people are simply hilarious.

Blogging Laos

A splendid day. First a trip to Laos across the immense, lazy Mekong River. Laos an expected and excellent time warp , with super cute Laoettes. all in their tribal costumes of black sarongs with silk borders, French colonial buildings and almost no ATMs. The local currency is the "kip", worth 1/270th of the Thai money and 1/8000th of a dollar. People accept it like you are offering them used toilet paper. Capitalism rocks.

I get to ride vile Tuk-Tuks that keep breaking down ( it took a relay to get me back to the bridge later on). Am interviwed by a Uni student on his "English Languarge" (as the check sheet says) practise assignment - complete amazement from this hardened travel warrior that there is no come-on or rip-off. His Task? " Interwiev One Forgneir in One Day".

Usual and expected Communist poverty - spot a Merc 230 SL obviously driven by the relative of a Politburo member. Who else could possibly afford one in Laos?

Stop in at the East-West Restaurant for lunch to discover Sri Lankan lady owner and her quasi-European partner ( all the white folks in this part of the world are so utterly wasted by Indo-China you can't tell their ages or nationalities - suffice to say they are always florid, perspiring, unkempt and more than a little mad) going through the wringer with a People's Workers Party of Laos grande dame. For a Lao she is enormous, well over 5 ft 8, with a beehive hairdo, pancake make-up and an assortment of Party insignia. Am not quite sure what a Sri Lankan is doing running a resto this far up the Mekong, but through the interpreter I can here her pleading ,
" But this man my husband he is not allowed to verking here", as she unfolds endless permits and documents.

The Laoettes are so utterly sweet. I fall in love every time I talk to one. I simply have not met any women like this in 20 years. They seem not from another planet but an entirely different galaxy.

Back to Nong Khai in the late afternoon of my final day. I attend the "Western Cowboy Club" where acres of Thaiboppers jump up and down to the bizarre strains of a Thai rock band, whilst waiters with bowties dump huge ice-cubes into your beer.

To Brendan's Place for the mandatory drunken local Irish publican's visit. I bump into Teak Pete, the pony-tailed ex Vietnam vet who has lived here since 1970. We have a great chat and afterwards I end up across the road (I should point out Nong Khai is a very conservative city with zero of Bangkok's glittering nightlife) at "Nongs Place." In this tiny pub I fall into animated conversation with a public school educated Burmese lad and Mark, a raving drunk who spent 6 years in the 4th Batallion, Kings African Rifles based in Jinja, Uganda.

Meanwhile Dao, a singularly worn out ladyboy, attaches herself to me with the subtltey of a giant squid in feeding mode. After a full discussion of the Greek influence on Afghan architecture, the U.S. Marine and Japanese army casualty rates on Saipan and if Speke the Nile explorer was undone by spending a month in the Queen Mother of Buganda's school for sex slaves, Dao unwinds herself to retire rebuffed and the rest of us stagger off to our hotels.

It's taken two weeks. This is why I came here, this is why I return. I honestly wonder if I should be leaving tomorrow and feel vaguely sad.

P R of China,perfect fascists?

An interesting debate kicked of by Far Eastern Economic Review where Michael Leeden asks if we are not witnessing a mature fascist state in existance?

Mr.Leeden is immediatly accused of heing brutally unfair, a hegemon and more. Furious reaction from Asiaphiles are all noted in the responses, but here is my own reaction to their mostly angry comments.

"This hurt response is mostly by people who think that "fascism" is a general insult and not a political situation with certain clear features.

These include hypernationalism (with or without various filters of racial purity), private enterprise rigidly controlled by the state (privatized socialism) and severe abscence of, and hostility to, democracy. One might also add the worship of a mythical and deeply "wronged" past which, if allowed to bloom anew, would prove the superiority that has always been inherent in the genius of the people in question. Looks like China, sounds like China, tastes like China, though of course I may be wrong.

Miss Nguyen needs to be asked, if China possessed democratic insitutions, would the Chinese people allow the forms of abuse they are hidden from at present in Tibet, in the Chinese non-response to the Burma cyclone, Dafur and other events where even the humanitarian instinct is masked in the obsessive need to make primary the national interest, as seen by the ruling clique?

If the answer is yes, they would allow these abuses, then we surely do not understand "Asians" ( whoever those are in that broad canvas) as Ms. Nguyen means them and I am not sure that, on those terms, one would want to.

However I believe that is not the case and giants like China, when they have broad access to denocratic rights, will be forced by their masses to act differently to the loud drum of their current nationalist frenzy."

Obamamania Continues

Four years ago, Evan Thomas of Newsweek famously said:

Let’s talk a little media bias here. The media, I think, wants Kerry to win… They’re going to portray Kerry and Edwards as being young and dynamic and optimistic and there’s going to be this glow about them… that’s going to be worth maybe 15 points.

The attempts to polish the absurd flawed rhinestone that was John Kerry famously failed, but the media is wetting itself at the prospect of helping Obama win the 2008 Presidential race. McCain, once their hero when he seemed to be the anti-Bush in the 2000 primaries, is already being recast as an old, out-of-touch warmonger who is clueless on the economy. Every point McCain tries to make will be relentlessly skewered whilst St.Barry is given a completely free pass. If Kerry and the lizard-like Edwards were given a "glow" in 2004, expect Obama to receive the 1 gigawatt halo effect.

The hidden subtext is already emerging: criticism of Obama is...whisper whisper....racism! Personally, I would have given a black candidate my vote all other things being equal. For their history, they need an extra shake of the dice and had Colin Powell run in 1992, he would have had mine, and everyone else's.

If Obama were a green man from the galaxy, he would never get my vote for many good reasons: he would be the most inexperienced US President in 100 years and is Jimmy Carter re-born, a quasi-religious figure who promises to talk to our enemies and ignore our friends. His international trade policies could set the world economy back "decades", and that is New Labour's Peter Mandelson talking over in Europe, no less. He firmly believes that judges should be left-wing and pre-empt democracy by making new laws from the bench, not interpreting the ones the people we elect actually draft and thinks anything that a citizen can do, government should tax you more to do it better themselves.

He has consorted with homegrown terrorists like Ayers and Dorn, the crackpot Rev Wright and the convicted racketeer Tony Rezko, for all his talk of "new politics" and his wife is an moaner who whines about how hard life is on $500,000 a year and thinks that "they" have always been out to get her and Obama. Who are "they"? Presumably the same typical Americans who arranged for her to get affirmed placements in Americaa's top universities as a black women from a modest background - the shamelessness of "them".

Obama would be the most left-wing President ever elected, a template of the radical "victimolgy" concept of modern identity politics. For all that he remains a supremely gifted and talented young man and perhaps the most perfect politician of the last 50 years - if oratory, sharpness and style over substance is everything, and maybe in 2008, it is.

He will probably win, for not only does he have the media breathlessly behind him (Oh, the new stories, the spins, the angles, the Big Narrative! How their sales will soar.) but Americans have come to believe that their economy is in a severe recession ( it isn't yet), everyone hates them ( they do, and that won't change unless the USA is prepared to give away the store and the keys to the safe) and that unconditional talks with our enemies will make everything fine again. In this, Obama resembles Chamberlain more than Churchill, Carter more than Reagan and blind wishful thinking over reality. Roll on 2012.

Roosting Chicken Pie

Therewith a hastily published note from Rightspeak in todays N.Y. Times comments section. This is in regard to the uproar that's breaking in the blogs about Clinton's new remarks that she has the majority support "among the hard working voters of America, the white voters" and a furious bust up live between two MSN hacks (Brazile and Begala) who comment for the Democrat's softball network, CNN:

I love all this. If any party has built 4 decades of power grabs and policies around low grade identity politics, it’s the Democrats. The Democrats have tried to divide Americans into an eternally splitting series of groups, each of whom “are what we say we are” and no more questions please. Feminists, hispanics, blacks, native Americans, immigrants, gays,straights, trans-gendered and so on.

Now it’s all coming home to roost as if the Rev Wright was not enough. Please give the Republicans some credit. You were told the Clinton’s were a pair of political lizards 15 or more years ago. How you cheered them on breathlessly. Your own identity politics, the cheapest route to power, has come back to bite you hard and I’m opening another beer!

The Truther Fairy

Despite every evidence to the contrary, people who have nothing in common except a lazy mind or a streak of the paranoid continue to believe in "9/11 Conspiracy" theories. Someone who might know is Al-Queda No 2 Ayman Al-Zawahiri who speaks here on the BBC. Ayman is a little upset at Iran's President Mr. Armouredinnerjacket for joining the "truther" ranks that are illuminated by such intellectual giants as Hollywoord film stars and Euro Members of Parliament - not to mention 70% of Frenchmen. Says The Beeb;

"Al-Qaeda's deputy leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, has blamed Iran for spreading the theory that Israel was behind the 11 September 2001 attacks.

In an audio tape posted on the internet, Zawahiri insisted al-Qaeda had carried out the attacks on the US. He accused Iran, and its Hezbollah allies, of trying to discredit Osama Bin Laden's network."

Come on Ayman, even though you planned 9/11, get with the programme, dammit. Everyone knows it was Booooooosh and the Joooooos.

The Reform of the Snail

Shiraz Maher has hopeful views on Muslim conversions to other religions in his BBC piece here. His thoughts are progressive and show a slight healing of potential rifts between Muslims and Christians, but also point out the problem.

No two Muslims seem to agree what the Koran and Hadiths actually say. Another problem is, we simply don't know what language Muslim prophet Mohammed actually spoke. Archaic Arabic is almost impossible to recover, even by scholars.

Attitudinal change towards Muslim conversion, led by Imams or Mullahs, will have to take precedence over Muslim text, in that case. It will be a very long, slow process since the finality of "the word" in Islam is taken to an extreme not seen in most of Christianity for centuries. Islam also lacks a central authority and indeed since Mohammed's death has interminably warred within itself, something Christians avoided for almost 1500 years.

Indeed, only a decoupling of Islam from Sharia, as has happened in Turkey, will reform Islam enough to permit freedom of conversion, and as this story illustrates, even that is on shaky ground. Some Turks who convert are threatened with death or indeed murdered and this is after 80 years of a decoupled secular state in Turkey.

Getting Obama Wrong

Gitaru Warigi has a succinct analysis of the security problems raised by the Mungiki movement in Kenya but a fettered view of US politics at the end of his otherwise useful piece in Nairobi' Sunday Nation. Warigi sees Obama's nomination by the Democrats and his success subsequently again John McCain as a matter of race. My response to him by letter:

"Whilst your analysis of the Mungiki situation (SN 20th April) was superb, your dissection of the Obama nomination in the USA was crippled by a narrow perspective.

Contrary to popular fantasy, Americans are open to a non-white President though admittedly a minority are not. Colin Powell would have waltzed to victory in 1992 had he accepted the Republican nomination, but for personal reasons he refused.

Perhaps the overwhelming ethnicity of Kenya politics makes it hard for some to see that objections to an Obama candidacy or Presidency stem not primarily from his race, but from his electability. He is fervent left-winger in a country that is centrist or right of centre politically.

By contrast McCain is a moderate Republican, even a maverick, with a strong populist streak endearing to independant voters. It is these who decide Presidential elections and not the strident minority of Democratic or Republican activists in primaries.

I agree Obama will probably win the Democratic nomination. The Democrats are utterly unelectable in the USA without their usual 90% black support - despite up till the 19040's Blacks solidly voted for the Republicans, the party of Lincoln. That turn-around is another story. You are right that Democratic Party bigwigs will commit suicide politically to deny Obama the nomination, but their objections again have nothing to do with their "whiteness" - but Obama's ideology and thus electability.

To beat McCain, Obama will be scrutinised like never before and his inexperience and extreme left-wing ( in American terms) Senate record could well cost him the final prize - but not first and foremost, as you imagine. his race. Democrats, Republicans, PNO, ODM, New Labour or what-have-you possess one characteristic - a desire to win regardless of candidate."

Kenya Airways and the US Elections.

On the face of it, there would seem to be zero relationship between the state of Kenya Airways and the US Presidential race in which the Democrats seem poised to mount a very serious challenge to regain the White House. In this contest, there is no doubt that 95% of black American votes will go to Barack Obama should he be nominated or around 85% to Hillary Clinton should she squeak by.

This has been the black American tradition since around 1940. Previously blacks, most especially those in the South, voted Republican. Most people would be surprised to know that Martin Luther King was one. That's because most people, and almost no Kenyans, have any idea that the Democratic Party in the USA was the party of the slave owners and fought for segregation after the US Civil War right up until the late 1960's. Kenyans are amazed to hear that the Democratic Party supported the Klu Klux Klan and denied blacks all voting rights for 100 years after the end of slavery. They would almost fall over if they learned all the southern state Governors in the time of the great 60's civil rights crusade were Democrats. Yet African-Americans now vote against the Republicans, the party of Abraham Lincoln?

The explanation is the Democratic Party was split between southern and northern in the USA with the south following a racist brand and the north a non-racial type of Democratic Party politics. Most blacks lived prior to 1940 in the south but the Great Depression forced millions to migrate to northern cities in the 1930's where the northern Democratic Party was in control gave them welfare and other forms of assistance they had never seen in their lives under the southern Democrats. Thus black Americans switched allegiance from the Republicans to the Democrats and have kept that allegiance, besides a rare 10% Republicans like King, ever since.

Voting for the Democratic Party has not helped black Americans so much as destroyed large parts of their former independence, thrift, marriage rates and hard work ethic. From the hard bigotry of the southern Democrat , black Americans ran into the soft bigotry of the northern variety. This "kindness" allows for very low expectations of black Americans. They were the subject of endless handouts in welfare, socially ruinous policies that paid them more for having illegitimate children than for marrying, and affirmative action that allowed blacks to have high placement for lower achievement than others academically and professionally.

All of these Democratic Party practises seem to be "progressive" but have a message: "You are not to be held to high expectations because of the past". This is not very far from a hidden message of, "You are not to be held to high expectations because you can't reach them" - hence the soft bigotry.

Politically the Democrats have used every trick in the book to block welfare reform, to prevent the faith based help of the older African-American society, to offer school choices to inner-city parents and replace affirmative discrimination with helping raise the educational standards of black Americans so they can be independent of welfare.

What has this got to do with Kenya Airways? Here is a black run company with under 0.05% expatriates in the work force that was privatised a decade ago when it was a shoddy Government run corporation. Consistently it beats the profit records and service standards of other African airlines, including South African Airlines which has a very high percentage of "white" employees. It is voted often as the best airline in Africa and as a preferred carrier to European ones like British Airways or Air France.

Kenya Airways works to the high expectations of strict international airline standards, not a low expectation that Africans need extra help or are otherwise incapable of running an airline. Instead of being in confrontation with non-African airlines the way black Americans are in confrontation with the entire range of Republican values (self reliance, non-affirmative, small government, anti-welfare), it partners with a major European airline and shares ideas and expertise.

This story is repeated with black Kenyan hotel management as another example. Our large tourism industry meets international standards, not the local standards of small hotels. Consequently, Kenyan hotel managers can be found in Dubai, Europe, Asia and America running hotels and often 5 star ones of exacting international quality. But what if promotions in our local hotel industry, which is the springboard to an international career, met only Kenyan standards which are lower than international?

It remains a tragedy for black Americans not that they should ever vote Republican en masse, but that the Democrats, while offering to help them have actually added to the low esteem and dependency culture that prevents many of them, racism aside, from prospering. If the split between the parties in the black American community was more 60/40 or 55/54 as in most other communities in the USA it would mean a healthy internal debate and dynamic between the endless dependency of affirmative welfare the Democrats offer and the non-affirmative conservative social and economic values of the Republicans.

That would be good for all of America and especially African-Americans. There seems to be no sign either Democratic candidate in 2008 is willing to shift an inch away from the failed past the way Kenyan Airways did.

Losing Her Grip

Harvard University has allowed sexual segregation at it's gymnasia and public Islamic calls to prayer from the Harvard Yard. Many are disturbed and some outraged, but there will always be blind liberals to spring to to the defense of conservative Islam. Thus Ruth Marcus in the Washington Post labours like Obama over Pastor Wright to make moral equivalence between her private Jewishness and someone else's hijab-wearing public segregation mentality. According to her, those objecting need to "get a grip".

She writes, "Muslim women who enroll at Harvard and turn up in hijabs at its gyms reflect a strand of Islam that society ought to encourage". What a breathtaking repudiation of the Enlightenment. Muslim women enrolling without hijabs, and showing they are the same as the rest of students not in nun's habits, 18th century Jewish Orthodox peasant woman's dresses, Hindu temple saris or chastity belts - all outward signs of a primacy of religion over secularism - would be an encouragement.

Just like Obama's glaring error in equating his grandmother's private worries to Pastor Wright's public utterances, she fails to see any difference between what all religious people may think in private (as she says, that their creed is the best or true one) and the preaching of Islam's "superiority" in a public place, Harvard Yard. Marcus cannot see her Orthodox relatives personal refusal to shake her female hand as not the same as a secular gymnasium being publicly out of bounds to males - or a loudspeaker blaring "Allah Akbar" in a public square.

It is Marcus that needs to "get a grip" and not those exercised by creeping religious separatism, since the steady advance of "soft" sharia in the form of seemingly innocent setting aside of sexually segregated gymnasia times, for example, is merely the precursor of the demands of hard sharia to come. This is the precise experience of Europe and having allowed the erosion of their values by giving in to "soft" sharia, they find themselves singularly unable to prevent the advance of the hard version. As the cretinous prelate Dr. Rowen Williams of Canterbury recently showed, they may have no alternative but to advance it.

Her article is one more example of the suicide of the Western intelligensia when, having so long fought for sexual equity (let us imagine the response if Christian men at Harvard had made the same request as the hijab-wearing women), they are quite willing to sacrifice the gains and benefits for a one sided "tolerance" of intolerant religious sexism.

Obama - Mixed Race, Mixed Message

In many ways Obama's big speech on race was courageous, novel and forthright in a way political speeches rarely are, but his failure to denounce Pastor Wright fully is revealing. The first time we have heard him talk openly about the white half of his family, he managed to throw his grandmother under the bus for her occasional remarks, whilst refusing the denounce Wright for his frequent ones. One has to imagine what would be the reaction were he a white person on the conservative side and running for President whilst taking spiritual nourishment from someone like Pastor Wright, with the racism reversed.

It strains credulity that Obama was for 20 years able to have the most intimate mentoring by Wright and not absorb his “Hate America” and the dollops of crypto-marxist “Black Liberation Theology” doled out at his church. Indeed, it could be thought that it is precisely this hard-left, hate America, down-with-capitalism and collectivist underpinning of Wright's version of religion that actually brought the atheistic, but highly political, Obama into church in the first place. Obama argues such talk is common in black American churches but if it is as wrong and totally repugnant as his speech claims, it seems not to have bothered him till the other day.

Of course, to get elected on a Democratic party ticket where there is a big black urban vote, as Obama had to in Illinois, you simply have to spout such anti-American, anti-white nonsense, or at least give it a nod and a wink or you won't get the vote. So is it cynical realism that made Obama join an "Afrocentric" church that spews race-hustler talk every Sunday? It would be a sad mark on his hopeful and fresh character were that the case.

Are Americans going to be happy with a President and First Lady who have lapped up angry anti-American and occasionally racist comments for years in the same pew? Michelle Obama, Ivy League super-grad on top tier salary and black, has never had anything to be proud of in America except Barry in 2008 - as she told the press recently. Not even the silver spoon she fed herself with to now.

It needs to be asked, if in his speech he says he “never” agreed with many of pastor Wright’s virulent, racist ideas ( one that white people “invented” HIV to decimate blacks - straight out the Nation of Islam hatebook), his visits to dictatorships like Libya with Farrakhan and other anti-American baggage, why then did he stay in the church for 20 years, bathe his children in Wright's ideas that says now he thinks totally wrong, yet not find another church?

He is trying to be too clever by half, damming his pastor with faint praise for the “causes” of Wrights rants, whilst offering collectivist and class solutions ( the “poor whites” bit of his speech) and all straight out of the soft-left catechism.

I admire his eloquence and a certain amount of courage he displays but dislike his faint heartedness and his sidestepping of an issue if he truly wants to get all Americans and not just the Democratic echo-chamber on his side, he will have to do better. Obama is an exceptional politician that only America, the sole truly revolutionary country that has ever worked, could produce. However America's success is due not to it's collectivism but it's individuality, nor to a statist political philosophy but the breath of freedom that inspired it's founders.

Nothing changes from Obama being an inexperienced but highly gifted young politician bathed and imbued with the standard ideas of the American left, ideas which only a fraction of Americans embrace. Republicans and independent voters want race to cease to be an issue and remind themselves that the Democratic party once stood for slave owners and Southern whites-only politicians and has always been the party to play the "race card". We shall see, perhaps Obama is America's destiny, in which case nothing can stand in his way but I remain unconvinced.

More Boomer BS Bites The Dust

My generation, the notorious, narcissistic and flaky "baby boomers" are of course the authors of beatnikery, hippiedom, Che Guevara worship, the 60's, the "New Left" and many other feats of social and intellectual tomfoolery. Never has a generation less deserved the fruits of the sacrifices of our predecessors, the magnificent "Greatest Generation" of World War II veterans. Another of our highlights was the "sexual revolution"...well, one can't say that one has been entirely dull now that I think of it.

However it's been a rigorous dogma of most boomers that somehow abortion is good for you and always preferable to the "unwanted" pregnancy. International folklore wisdom thinks this is nonsense, but what do those ignorant savages in the Third World know? Then there is this from The Times Online

"Women may be at risk of mental health breakdowns if they have abortions, a medical royal college has warned. The Royal College of Psychiatrists says women should not be allowed to have an abortion until they are counselled on the possible risk to their mental health.

This overturns the consensus that has stood for decades that the risk to mental health of continuing with an unwanted pregnancy outweighs the risks of living with the possible regrets of having an abortion....................

The controversy intensified earlier this year when an inquest in Cornwall heard that a talented artist hanged herself because she was overcome with grief after aborting her twins. Emma Beck, 30, left a note saying: “Living is hell for me. I should never have had an abortion. I see now I would have been a good mum. I want to be with my babies; they need me, no one else does.”

Kenya After The Clashes (1)

Donald Kipkorir’s articles are always entertaining and thought provoking but his “After the grand coalition” (March 1^st) makes an uneven case for fragmenting Kenya into tribal enclaves as an act of “positive ethnicity”. Such positivism can only come from that which unites people of all cultures and races, not that which narrowly divides them.

One of his proposed tribal regions is the Kalenjin-Maasai -Turkana , a putative “Nilotic” jimbo.* Yet these tribes have historical enmity. Do Sudanic origins long ago make them suddenly compatible? Why not include the Luo in this “Nilotic” micro-state? Other proposals, like for a coastal “Mji-Kenda” state ignore the complication with numerous WaSwahili and Kenyan Arabs, the former slave owners.

North Easterners do not consider themselves one people, despite joint Cushitic origins and languages. Would “forcing” them into an instant micro-state really be better than prodding them, with all other Kenyans, firmly in the direction of Kenya first, tribe second?

And where can one find a place for the Kisii, Samburu, Taita and other large tribes? If they are not to have their own “micro-states” then they must be thrown in as perpetual minorities among larger groups. Where will all this dividing up start, or end?

The example Mr.Kipkorir gives of Germany is misleading. True Germany is federal, but the German tribes were historically and linguistically one people divided by regional differences or religion. They cannot be compared to the diverse and radically differing Kenyan ethnic groups.

Those who emphasize “ethnic diversity” rarely point out that federations, like the USA and Germany, are expressly designed to unify previously sovereign people by making them free to live, work and open business in any part of the federation. If the Kenya tribal proponents wish this, why bother with the expense and complexity of tribal regions? We already have this freedom in Kenya’s current law.

One would be happy to see a Kenya Federation where any Kenyan can work and live, own property and act in politics as they wish, all enforced by the Army and a Kenya version of the FBI. Try preventing a Californian from opening a business in New York and see how fast George W. Bush sends the Federal Marshals to lock you up. This is not what most “ethnic diversity” advocates have in mind but the opposite, namely perpetual superior empowerment of one group, based on where it was geographically circa 1898.

The unity of Kenya may not be a perfect solution, but excessive regionalization could lead to more negative tribalism. There are few signs enough people understand devolution except as a tribal “winner-takes-all” game, as post-election events have sadly shown. This is a trend Mr. Kipkorir probably deplores but is nonetheless a logical consequence of this ideology.

*jimbo - a region or province

You Can't Make This Stuff Up #321

According to The Times of the UK:

The BBC funded a paintballing trip for men later accused of Islamic terrorism and failed to pass on information about the 21/7 bombers to police, a court was told yesterday.

Mohammed Hamid, who is charged with overseeing a two-year radicalisation programme to prepare London-based Muslim youths for jihad, was described as a “cockney comic” by a BBC producer.

Mr Hamid denies providing weapons training, five charges of soliciting murder and three of providing training for terrorism. The other men deny a series of charges related to training.It becomes downright bizarre, as if someone was trying to parody the perfect genteel, clueless BBC leftist twit-of-the-year. The Times reports on the BBC producer, Phil Rees, take on Hamid, the terrorist trainer:

He said: “I think he had a comic touch and he represented a strand within British Muslims. I took it as more like a rather Steptoe and Son figure rather than seriously persuasive. I saw him as a kind of Cockney comic.” Mr Rees, who now works for the Arabic TV station al-Jazeera, gave Mr Hamid a signed copy of his book "Dining With Terrorists".

Hollywood Drops Bombs

Very good news that Hollywood's latest bout of nasty anti-American, pro-terrorist movies are totally bombing at the box office.

Brian dePalma's "Redacted" which naturally won rave reviews and awards from the chatterati, Hollywood flakes and Euro-wimps (standing ovation at the Cannes Film Festival, Gold Medals in Venice etc) is typical. It cost $5 million and depicts US soldiers as thugs and beasts - it's wildly anti-troops ( whilst pretending to "support them") theme has so far , after weeks of major release and publicity, brought just just $23,000 total box office. It's delightful to learn the scumbag producers of this shit-flick have lost 99.5% of the millions they spent slandering those who defend their right to show offensive garbage.

On the other hand, "Outside The Wire", a hand made documentary by an ex-Marine depicting an hour of true footage and stories by vets cost $35,000 and has made back $27,000. It's only available on DVD via the internet but it's managed to out gross the hugely advertised multi-theatre showing of "Redacted".

Also bombing at the box office are "Rendition", "Lions for Lambs" (Redford and Streep no less) and "Valley of Elah" - all on the same theme of USA= Al Qaeda and what's the difference between a US soldier and a terrorist ( basic answer, none). These have collectively lost the Hollywood set tens of millions of dollars.

When I was in the angry 60's Bob Dylan had a wonderful line in one of his best songs that sums it all up: "Something is happening, but you don't know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?" It seems the majority of America does know but Mr. Jones is stuck in Los Angeles.

Euro Arrogance

In a chilling display of the elitism that drives European politics, Giscard d’Estaing, author of the EU constitution that was roundly rejected by French and Dutch voters (and would have been by the British) has claimed the new EU reform treaty the EU leaders have slipped through the back door of Euro politics is exactly the same thing. The fact that he can baldly state this when centre right parties are crying 'foul' over the new treaty and demanding a people's vote on it, shows the cocky insulation he feels from the reality of democracy. He can bypass in having bypassed the popular will and brag of it. Read the whole frightening interview here.

Americans, apart from Europhiles who make up segments of the Democratic Party, have long viewed European politics as an Old Boys club , as tight and tangled as the rotten aristocracies it replaced. For all of Europe’s scoffing over the rare American political dynasty like the Kennedy or Bush family, politics of the elite is the norm in Europe. Whilst Europeans laugh at the Schwartzenegger phenomenon of a Hollywood star rising to governor and never stopped deriding Ronald Regan, they forget that it is virtually impossible to get elected in Europe unless one is an insider – Sarkozy being the first modest crack in this edifice.

True to form, d’Estaing states to the BBC with breathtaking arrogance that cosmetic changes were made to the EU reform treaty to "head off any threat of referenda" and that the drafters have made the new document "a catalogue of amendments" that is impenetrable for the public. So much for the voter. Such is the traditional contempt of Europe’s rulers, from kings to dictators to democrats, for the people.

Mullahs Meet Modern Medcicine

Pretty sad story here about Muslim clerics in Nigeria who opposed the use of a polio vaccine campaign because they claimed the drug was designed to "sterilize" them. This ended up with too few children being vaccinated, which can cause the virus to reappear, as it did killing many and spreading to neighboring countries.

What happens when modern medicine meets the medieval mind, in the form of the gross ignorance so many mullahs display? The results are tragic.

"Convincing the Nigerians to take even more of this vaccine will be a tough sell," said Dr. Samuel Katz, an infectious diseases specialist at Duke University and co-inventor of the measles vaccine.

Fiji Orders It's Priorities

Hmm, our friends in the MSM never seem to get the right end of so many stories. Here the BBC misses the point totally. How can Fijians gather in large raucous crowds, get drunk, stay out late and party when their beloved rugby team has made it to the quarter finals of the Rugby World Cup and play the Springboks on Sunday? There is one way:

Last Updated: Friday, 5 October 2007, 07:41 GMT 08:41 UK

Fiji to lift state of emergency

Fiji's military-led government says it will lift the state of emergency it imposed last month when deposed PM Laisenia Qarase re-entered politics. A military spokesman said that the measures would end on Saturday because there was no threat to the nation.

BBC Goes N-Word

As if any proof were needed, the BBC takes on openly leftist vocabulary for a description of an Australian immigration policy. Misleadingly headlined "Africa Refugee Ban", the piece by Nick Bryant in Sydney states the dreaded "N" word as if it is a plain fact:

"Certainly, there is a nativistic streak in parts of the Australian electorate."

Most Third World countries try to restrict immigration from each other and from the North. Try getting a work permit from the Immigration Department of Kenya, let alone becoming a citizen, even after 30 years of residence. Many countries, like the UAE, forbid people not born of native parents to ever become citizens. In Dubai that precludes any of the over 1 million "guest workers" or their children from ever gaining a Dubai passport.

Would the BBC ever use the word "nativist" against these sorts of policies? That would be upsetting politically correct lexicon. Calling non-white people anything to do with "native" is strictly paeleolithic, racist and colonial. The correct left-think term for anything to do with "natives" is the self-authenticating "indigenous". Except of course for Australians.

Chili Terrorism

Also from the BBC:

"A pot of burning chilli sparked fears of a biological terror attack in central London.

Firefighters wearing protective breathing apparatus were called to D'Arblay Street, Soho, after reports of noxious smoke filling the air.

Police closed off three roads and evacuated homes following the alert.

Specialist crews broke down the door to the Thai Cottage restaurant at 1900 BST on Monday where they discovered the source - a 9lb pot of chillies."

Chili Power

A chemical from chilli peppers may be able to kill pain without affecting touch or movement, according to a BBC report.

This might in theory mean a woman in labour could have an epidural without losing the ability to move her legs, or the sensation of her baby being born.

Conventional local anaesthetics affect all nerve cells.

But the researchers Harvard team, writing in Nature, said that with capsaicin, the chilli chemical, they can target just pain receptors.

However, a UK expert said it might be difficult to inject it safely.

Certainly the idea of 5 cc of Tabasco shot into your ham sounds excruciating.

Socialism vs Monks

Lost in all the MSM stories about the protests aimed at bringing down the Burma regime is that the junta oppressing the sad Burmese people is a socialist one. I wonder how the left wing media can easily handle the fact that it is the "reactionary" force of religion, led by Bhuddist monks, that threatens to collapse a "progressive" regime. Not much different to Poland, come to think of it.

That's easy, just airbrush out the nuances. Thus the Guardian reports on "the ruling junta" and "the ruling generals " who resort to "repressive measures". Yes, just like that. They have no ideology, they are just a "military regime ".

Meanwhile the gormless cowards at CNN continue to cringe and call Burma "Mynyamar", the name those "generals" coined for it. Not even the image of the lovely,brave and serene Aung Yang Soo Kyi, one of the few Nobel Peace Prize winners to actually deserve that debased accolade who calls it Burma, of course, can change that.

Global Gobbledegook

More signs of just how confusing and contradictory the "certainty" science behind much of the global warming hype is, the BBC reports:

Amazonian forest 'more resilient'

The Modis instrument scans the Earth's surface every eight days

The Amazon rainforest may be more resistant to rising temperatures than has been believed.

Researchers found that during the 2005 drought, many parts of the rainforest "greened", apparently growing faster.

Mugabe Drags On

"Comrade Bob" continues with the fascism that has ruined one of Africa's brightest countries and regional African leaders continue to give him standing ovations at conferences but the end is very near for this ruinous fool. The price controls imposed on all forms of Zimbabwean industry are, if the evidence of 5000% inflation is not enough, the final attempts to prevent a societal implosion that would sweep him away. Yet given Africans' notorious passivity, partly borne out of a fear of the brutality of African governance, don't expect to see Harare's version of the storming of the Bastille on your TV screen any time soon.

A quarter of the population has fled and the country has obviously sunk to levels that were not even approached in the times of white supremacy. Actually a lot of older Zimbabweans are probably wondering why they bothered to fight Ian Smith & Co at all. Still, Comrade Bob has plenty of supporters in Africa showing that taking self-destructive actions against white people ( even if their are your own citizens) is far more important to many Africans and their leaders than anything else they might do. One would have thought that Aminism in Uganda might have taught some lessons to the continent, but it appears not enough.

Borat At The Rugby World Cup

Questions will soon be asked at this Rugby World Cup why Europeans pay fortunes to watch gelled up, pampered professional superstars prance around the pitch like show ponies when Georgia nearly caused the biggest rugby upset in history by going down 14-10 to 5th ranked rugby superpower Ireland.

With just 8 rugby pitches in their entire country, the East European unknowns arrived on the pitch looking like stubble-faced Borats on steroids. Only the Irish did not end up laughing. Possessing bewildering names like Dimitri Kalasnikavili and Kav Dzernevshu and wearing what looked like rolled up bicyle shorts only a handful of Georgians were professionals, and those all play in the French 2nd Division. The rest were amateurs.

To say mighty Ireland were lucky to win this so-called mismatch does not tell half the story. Georgia missed four drop goals by inches and had a winning try held up in-goal. They scored a stunning intercept taken at full sprint, made double the number of tackles to the Irish, took 66% of the territory and close to 70% possession and laid a twenty minute last ditch seige on the Irish line when they went through more than sixty phases of possession. If they lost it was only because they lacked a few finishing touches that should come as second nature to any professional team. This was one of the most thrilling matches of this or any other World Cup and the entire stadium of 35,000 were on their feet chanting "Georgia, Georgia".

They played a style of old fashioned forward rugby not seen for perhaps 20 years, meeting head on the pampered professionals that are amongst Europe's highest paid and biggest stars. And they shattered those pretensions. So far did this game smack of today versus yesterday that Georgia did not bother to go off the pitch at half time. The Irish led 7-3 and hustled off to be attended to by a doctor, three masseurs, two sports paramedics, a nutritionist, a statistician, three coaches and no doubt Father O Reilly, for they were in need of prayers. The Georgians stood on the pitch munching apples and discussing what to do next.

The surreal moments did not end after the final whistle, as seasoned sports broadcasters spluttered and ran out of adjectives to explain what they were witnessing. When winger Georgi (what else?) Shikinin, looking uncanilly like Mr. Bean, was presented with the International Rugby Board's "Man Of The Match" trophy after the game, he spilt a toothy,shy grin, waved at the camera and said cheerily,"Firstly thanks you, I want..like.... I means... I am wanting wish hello to my mummy and nice sister also all my familly.Hello". It was as priceless as it was perfect.

On a serious note, the IRB has mooted plans to kick out tiny rugby nations like Georgia, Namibia and others from future RWC events and restrict the tournament to 16 "super teams". Yet to many fans and even more commentators, the performances of a number of the unsung nations bring into question just what is happening in Europe when the Big Six of the North have so far played mostly abysmal rugby against countries one cannot locate on a rugby atlas. The minor league teams have gained the hearts of everyone.

The only sides to give any thrills to the audience besides the small nations ( as anyone who saw the breathtaking 35-34 win of Fiji over Japan can attest) have been the mighty southern Tri-Nations teams of the Springboks, Wallabies and All-Blacks, assisted by fellow Southerners Argentina. They are actually playing rugby. Established Europe has played rubbish. The IRB should think of ways to cut the salaries of the Six Nations teams and donate the proceeds to the Rugby Unions of Georgia, Portugal, Fiji, Namibia, Tonga, the USA and a few others if they have any idea at all of how to grow the global game.

RWC Shockers

It's hard to read too much from the preliminary games of the RWC which tend to feature minnows vs giants, but the question has to be asked: what on earth has happened to European rugby?

From four years ago, when the gap between Northern and Southern hemisphere rugby had closed to a crack, European teams seem to stare at a with a chasm of class between them and South Africa, New Zealand and Australia.

Starting with the shock of southerners Argentina beating fancied France in the opening RWC game, one watches amazed as rugby powers struggle and stutter against nations that are the equivalent of a Third Division soccer side.

England ground out a 28-10 win over the USA that flattered. The USA outplayed them in the second half. Tiny Namibia with a few thousand players shocked mighty 5th ranked Ireland, holding them to a 37-17 win helped by a blatantly wrong referee's decision. Lowly Canada led Wales at half-time before finally succumbing and debutants Portugul made Scotland labour to win.

Contrast this to the Southern nations. The Australians demolished Japan 90-3, Italy were thumped by the All-Blacks by more than 40 points and Samoa crashed to South Africa's Springboks 52-7. All these wins were classy, error free and decisive. Samoa and Italy are also IRB Top Ten ranked nations unlike the small fry who made Europe's best creak and clank towards the try line like rusty old tractors.

Rugby World Cup 2007

I've just watched the defiantly quaint Springbok send-off gala in Jo-burg, complete with gold trimmed Boy's Own blazers and every squad member wearing his tasseled cap. It was a relief from the Gaygear soccer uniforms they and others will don post Sept 7th. Thoughts naturally turn to who might win the RWC 2007? The town of Paarl on South Africa is not large, which is why you have never heard of it. They have two main schools there, Paarl Gymnasie and Paarl High. I watched as the two school teams slugged it out on Supersport TV. The crowd was merely twenty thousand. If passionate addiction to rugby would bring home the trophy, surely the Springboks would carry it off easily.

I am not sure that will happen. The build-up of the Wallabies and All-Blacks has been enveloped in a dark cloak of secrecy and we know next to nothing of their post Tri-Nations XVs. Ireland, who promised so much, appear woeful and exposed for depth, Wales are a shambles, Scotland awful and the less said about England the better.

The team that has impressed most is home ground France and by the length of a punt at that. Their tough build-up of two games against England and one with Wales were easily won. Everything about them looks complete, polished and even easy. More ominously, they appear complete for the sort of European pitches the Australians and South Africans in particular are not used to. As for depth they have been able to put out close to 45 different players without their pulse rate rising above 72 bpm. Formidable and frightening Frogs would be an apt moniker.

Naturally the Brazil of rugby, the All-Blacks, remains firm favorites. Just like Brazil, they sometimes fail to deliver, are prone to choking and can fall apart. They have problems at centre unless Mauger is fully fit and their line-out does not impress any more than No 10 Dan Carter's 2007 form. They however do possess a great backrow, superb strikers like Rokokoko and perhaps overlooked , the finest bench of impact players of all. Their ability to double the game's tempo in the second half is incomparable. Thus they will be finalists if the rounds go according to form but may have peaked in 2006 when they needed to do so this RWC year.

Their opponents, if they reach the final, are likely to be the Springboks or the French and I tend to think the latter. South Africa has the best scum half in the world (Du Preez), the most lethal winger (Habana), a massive, skilled presence in the second row and, at least until wonder boy Pierre Spies developed embolisms, a backrow of exceptional lethality with Burger and Juan Smith. Their build-up and lack of racial interference from politicians has been smooth and unexpected. What counts against them is a fade-out tendency in the last quarter and an inability to punch attacking holes with their backs. They can poach intercept tries, in this they are masters. Yet with the defensive styles employed in RWC ties, snatch-and-grab opportunities may not be there for them. Will they get past England? Probably. Will they pip the French on a home ground semi? I think not, but unlike the 2003 Boks, they are well capable of beating any team and going all the way. One more problem is that since “nobody has ever met a nice South African”, the refs tend to single them out for decisions in the 50/50 phases.

England retains a formidable pack but outside one J.Wilkinson seem impotent and clueless in the backline. If they don't get by the Boks who seem to freeze whenever they face England, then a dumping in the quarter-finals is their likely fate. To win the World Cup you need world class players. In 2003 they had perhaps four. This year, Wilkinson included, they have none.

With no European nation save France likely putting a hand up, Argentina remain dark horses who could upset any team, starting with France in the opening RWC match on Sept 7th. However, the Argentina team is not as good as it was a year or two ago and the momentum towards the Pumas XV becoming a Top 5 ranked rugby nation has slowed.

Australia has a veteran team and is renowned for their clever and even sly rugby. With George Gregan as the most capped rugby international of all time, his sublime partnership with fly half Stephen Larkham plus the skills of centre Matt Giteau and fullback Chris Latham, Australia will be the equal of anyone. Masters of gamesmanship, sledging and referee tweaking, nobody should underestimate the Australian ability to dominate a match psychologically, even one they otherwise deserve to lose. Their biggest block to a final spot will probably be a semi against the All Blacks but they, like South Africa, have no fear at all of the favorites and could easily swing the upset of the tournament.

Figures Lie, Liars Figure

We are all told endlessly in the media that the USA is a violent and crime ridden society, compared to peaceful Europe. No wonder America remains the overwhelming choice of Kenyans seeking emigration, when we look at the real figures as opposed to media hype.

Here are Interpol 2001 crime statistics (rate per 100,000):

• 4161 - US
• 7736 - Germany
• 6941 - France
• 9927 - England and Wales

Thus the US has a substantially lower crime rate than the major European countries!

Here are the Interpol 1995 crime statistics (rate per 100,000):

• 5278 - US
• 8179 - Germany
• 6316 - France
• 7206 - England & Wales

Hence the trend in the US is towards a lower crime rate, while the trend in Europe (except Germany) is towards an increasing crime rate.

Even the USA's higher homicide rate has been dropping dramatically.

However, the homicide rates have been dropping dramatically :

Homicide Rate/100,000 by Date in US:

• 1980 - 10.2
• 2000 - 5.5

Flower Power!

The Kenya flower and horticulture industry, long the main forex earner and biggest employer of single women with children in Kenya, continues it's fightback against global-warming Gorons of the "better dead than fed" school. These have tried to have Kenya's exports to UK banned under various absurd "carbon footprint" claims. These aim at the vital airfreight links between Kenya and Europe.

The Standard reports the Kenya Flower Council initiative here:

Kenya has launched a new campaign to protect its UK market against attempts to block its products over environmental concerns.

Horticultural industry players have launched the ‘Grown Under the Sun’ campaign to inform British consumers about the development benefits associated with sourcing fresh produce from Kenya.

Kenya has in the recent past faced major battles to protect its EU market following campaigns by supermarkets in the UK to block its products over environmental concerns.

It seems absurd that wealthy first world consumers have to learn of the obvious benefits of Third World people providing them with flowers and vegetables, when the near collapse of the WTO talks over Western subsidies that work against poor farmers are common knowledge.

At the same time, Kenya is looking forward to the first of it's fuel efficient Boeing 787 Dreamliners for Kenya Airways so that we can benefit from direct flights between Kenya and the USA. This would be a hiuge boost to our tourism and horticulture industries. Right on cue, up popped another Goron on the BBC from the "Environment and Aviation Group" or like sounding busybody to lecture us that environmentalists fear the Dreamliner will make flying more "attractive". Oh yes, the world is going to fly less in future. Let's all bicycle to New York.

Thicko

The biggest Sicko in Michael Moore’s new movie is fat Mike himself who gives lots of aid and comfort to propagandists. Moore has the bright idea of flying some 911 survivors with health problems to Cuba so they can get “better” treatment than in the USA. No doubt Cuba’s Ministry of Health spared nothing to put one over on the yanquis, including their special show clinics for party members and foreigners only.

Real photos of genuine Cubans hospitals show a different story.

Moore uses all his usual tricks of faux documentary, insert shots and context bending to try and get Americans to buy the idea that their health system should be like the socialized ones of Canada, Britain, Europe and perhaps Cuba.

Of course Canadian and British health systems are collapsing and all the horror stories of US care exist there in spades. Ah, but those countries are not doing health care for profit , so the fact you wait 18 months for a hip operation in UK while doctors and hospital administrators form an elite, rich upper class of Britons is very moral, don’tcha know?

As for the vaunted Cuban health model why should anyone swallow statistics from an unfree society where these can never be checked or questioned?

Every statistic of communists except the count of prisoners in gulags and the numbers of annual executions are propaganda We know after communism's collapse that they lied about food production, educational standards, children’s health, personal wealth, technology, the environment, in fact the lot. Anyone who has visited Cuba will tell you that waiters whisper requests for asprin, paracetamol and sticky plasters. Health care in Cuba is free, if only there were any drugs.

Cuba also has a higher literacy rate than the USA, trumpets Castro. This one I do believe. Marxist dictatorships have high literacy rates is not so individuals can broaden their minds and improve their personal situations. It’s so everyone can read the propaganda. Mass literacy is part of the repressive groupthink modus of Marxism. What is the point of having 100% literacy if all you can read is The Collected Longer Speeches of Comrade Kim Jong Il?

Cuba also claims an exceptionally low HIV rate. This one is also true. Homosexuality in Cuba is a jail offense and thousands are imprisoned. The Cubans stole the drug patents of Western manufacturers early on in the pandemic. The hard drug trade is export only and controlled by Communists for benefit of the party so narcotics are not around to facilitate infection. Finally anyone HIV positive in Cuba is first locked up in quarantine and then registered and followed by the authorities, restricted socially and forced to take ARVs.

There is a daily ration of food in Cuba that has to be believed as well. The only problem is the calorific and nutritional value of the average Cuban ration (if he can even find it) is lower today than that of slaves in 1842.

The Food Ration in 1842 for slaves in Cuba:
meat, chicken, fish-- 8 oz
Rice-- 4 oz
Starches-- 16 oz
Beans-- 4 oz

Castro Gov. Ration since 1962:
meat, chicken, fish-- 2 oz.
Rice-- 3 oz
Starches-- 6.5 oz
Beans-- 1 oz.

Regrettably Michael Moore has no plans to do one of his tear jerking "documentaries" on this subject or any other which is not cornerstoned in anti-Americanism and fear of capitalism.

France Revolves

First Germany and now France have swung centre-right. Not because they want to but they simply must become more "anglo-saxon" in their socio-economic outlook in order to survive as competitive nations. Being dragged to a more "American" future explains the strident anti-Americanism that emanates from Europe. The more Europe is forced to abandon it's crust of statism, the more it kicks and screams at successful America. It's rather like a political fit of infantilism.

Europe's flagstone nations all share a conceit that there exists an more mature, wise and compassionate template of human social order and this is to be found, by some inexplicable and mysterious process, in the roots of European centre-left politics. These of course are merely a modern extention of traditional European statism, hardly a force for social effervescence. The French have finally hit the wall and elected Sarkozy over the predicatable boilerplate socialist, Royal.

Sarkozy is nothing if not a novelty in the chummy world of eltitist Europolitics. He never attended the ENA ( Ecoles Nationales) schools where 90% of France's hegemonic elite are groomed for power and control. His refreshing response to being elected is to spend the week in a period of reflection before he takes up the job.

Despite French anti-Americanism, France and the USA share many similarities and one is their strong sense of assimilationism. Thus American's are able to elect an immigrant as governor of California and the French the offspring of a Hungarian immigrant, Sarkozy, as President. It is unthinkable to see the same happening in any other European country, where a more primitive sense of blood politics is the norm.

Although Sarkozy will diminish strident anti-Americanism (Brits should note this is an extension of traditional antipathy toward "les rosbifs" and thus a backhanded compliment), he will not be a panacea. French national debt, as computed by some, will soon reach the levels of the late Ottoman Empire and presumably confirm France's place as the new Sick Man of Europe. This is the fate Sarkozy, and a belated French electorate, desperatly wishes to avoid and it raises hope in European political realism. France's electorate, like Britain's when faced with Thatcher's hard choices in 1979, finally realise the old game is up. The only problem is they are almost 25 years too late. The parient is comatose and is recovery truly possible?

I watched in amazement the French Presidential debate, where 10 minutes was spent arguing wether one should work a full 35 hours a week only or have the option to add an extra hour. Only in the fantasy world of Euroland could one expect such an exchange. An excellent longer article on France's sclerosis by Michael Gurfinkiel is to be found here.

What is ironic is just as America's recent foes in Europe all turn centre-right, America prepares for a leftward swing with the election of the Democrats. Their welcome of Sarkozy has been tepid to say the least. The influential far-left arm of the Dems, which represnts perhaps 30% of their total numbers, is already ranting on about the election of "Sarkozy the fascist". The left wing of the Democratic party is always more comfortable with communist dictators than democratic reformers.

The War Against Something or Other

The British government has abandoned the phrase of a 'war on terror.' It's so Tony, so old fashioned. New Labour is famous being a party of Newspeak and the cherished leftist belief that by language manipulation you can change a core of human or social behaviour.

Orwell made clear Newspeak's basic theory: if something cannot be said, then it cannot be thought, and if it cannot be thought, it could never be done. If you can manipulate the meaning of words, then you can control the thoughts and actions of others.

Such manipulations by the left range from the gross, as in a North Korean radio broadcast to the subtle, as in the utterances of rising New Labour apparatchik Hilary Benn, son of famed loony-tune radical Tony Benn. To Benn the Younger, a phrase like "War on Terror" is doubleplusungood.

In a recent speech that shows the next generation of New Labour thinking, Benn informs us that if we use terms like "war on terror" we will aggrandize terrorists. Being careful to avoid the "I" word, Benn tells us the current state of world terrorism is not a war or struggle, just most individuals in the world "against",

a small number of loose, shifting and disparate groups who have relatively little in common apart from their identification with others who share their distorted view of the world and their idea of being part of something bigger.

What these groups want is to force their individual and narrow values on others, without dialogue, without debate, through violence. And by letting them feel part of something bigger, we give them strength

Though some might see contradiction between the “disparate” groups with “shared" views, Benn postulates that by invoking a ‘war on terror’, we are actually strengthening terrorists. He does not explain how you combat people who will not debate or indulge in dialogue and only use violence. Presumably, once you have “a majority of people against loose, disparate groups” instead of a “war on terror”, the problem will ameliorate..

No doubt, this airbrushing will impact on the “disparate groups” self-esteem, that other beloved Newspeak creation of the left. In this thinking, you don’t have to have achievements or character as a person or group. You must simply believe you are an achiever and have others tell you so, even when you are a total tosspot or wastrel. If this fatuity were true then the reverse holds. Once Islamic terrorists are no longer told they are part of a big worldwide movement, their morale will crumble.

This is like the theory of modern nursery school teachers: if a child does not start every day yelling , “I’m good, I’m clever, I’m meeeeeeee…..” in assembly, they will suffer irreversible socio-psychic harm for life.

You can read all of Benn’s ramblings here. Meanwhile it is comforting to know that Osama Bin Laden in his cave, Hizbollah in their bunkers and Islamic terrorists cells everywhere are discussing surrender or disbandment as they realise they are merely “disparate groups” with “little in common” facing the mighty majority of the world’s people who are armed with “values and ideas”.

With the EU having banned all thoughtcrime phrases like "Islamic terror" and "jihad" from official discourse, and with rampaging Muslims from Sweden to Belgium to Paris now called "youths", the Australians are not to be left out. During the Cronulla riots in 2006 , police were not able to issue bulletins describing Middle Easterners as other than "youths" with a "mullet hairstyle". Where I come from a mullet is something you eat.

Benn's terminology joins this honourable list of descriptors that have so enriched our language. We await the future headline: ' Youthful disparate groups of fish blow up the House of Commons".

ANOTHER CRICKET WORLD CUP SHOCK

LATEST CRICKET RESULT: Iran 896-0 (Ahmedinejad 498 n.o), England 2-10 (Bliar 1,Beckett 1)

England slumped to a disastrous shock defeat at the hands of newcomers Iran, with their new star A.Ahamedinejad scoring a world record for one day cricket of 498 not out, which included 80 boundries (status disputed).

England was not helped by the defection of their entire team, less Blair and Beckett, to the Iranian side. England's start player Faye Turney found the going difficult as she tried to bowl in a full length chador-shemeez and was the first to give up and go over to Ahamedinejad's rampant side.

It is rumoured this is Englands gratest humiliation since they were beaten by one J. Ceasar;s team in 256 B.C.

ITerrorists Use Poison Gas - MSM Yawns

The BBC reports that Iraqi terrorists are using a banned chemical weapon from WW1, Chlorine gas. This it seems only "concerns" them and the rest of the MSM are silent. Can we imagine the outrage if the coalition even released a whiff of Mustard gas, Phosgene and other WW1 horrors? Chlorine gas kills or maims by burning victims lungs. A whole truckload was found wired to go and obviously more is on the way.

Seemingly MSM and The Beeb's bland reporters can't be bothered to look up Wikipedia here.

What's worse is it's use against civilians in Baghdad. Just imagine if they got ahold of Sarin!

Obamania Part 1

Now that Barack Obama has finally announced his precocious candidacy for the US Presidency, sections of the Kenya media will be agog with every development. Many Kenyans understandably have pride in his Kenyan connection via his father but will probably make the mistake of analysing his prospects through the usual lenses employed in local politics. These are always firmly fixed on identity obsessions (i.e. tribalism). Thus Kenyan commentators are already fixating on race identity, gloomily wondering if Americans will ever elect a "black" President.

They will miss the fact that Americans by and large are keen to vote for a black President which would, they hope, finally put the bear of race into a long and perhaps terminal hibernation. What many can't differentiate is that being "black" is not sufficient on it's own. Policies in the USA, unlike simple identity poltics in Kenya, actually count. Colin Powell might well have won the Presidency but that does not mean Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson would. The same holds for Obama, who leans far left of the political spectrum when most Americans are moderate or even centre-right. Americans are not at all against a "black" candidate - the question is, which one and is it a figure like Obama?

Obama may also have a harder time capturing the African-American vote than his formidable rivals like Hilary Clinton. He is not actually a "black" candidate at all, unless one accepts the basic racism inherent in the idea that a white woman can always give birth to a black child, but a black woman can never give birth to white one. Blacks in America appear upset that Obama has had a privileged childhood, exotic and international and not at all one that took in the historical sufferings of African-Americans, as they see it.

How does this likeable young man position himself? He cannot move towards the centre of US political ideas, as that is already occupied firmly by Clinton and other Democratic prospects. To do so would fatally undermine his credibility, as he would find it impossible to explain away his leftist positions on everything from Iraq to healthcare. The possibility will be that he ends up the candidate of the moonbat left, the liberal media and Hollywood elites- already Stephen Spielberg has jumped ship to raise money for him. This is hardly a base which will carry him to the Presidency unless the US veers so far left as to cause the greatest shift in modern political history. That is not going to happen.

Is he ready for prime time? His tasteless jibes at Australia's John Howard, where he attacked and ridiculed a staunch ally of the USA shows in the very infancy of his run that he seems determined to appease America's enemies and insult it's best friends. Asking Australia to "ginny up" and provide a further 20,000 troops to Iraq is just the first error to show his absolute inexperience, beyond a couple of years as a junior Senator. It's early days yet, but the chances are Obama will discover that Americans would be much happier voting for a non-white candidate who shows reliable centrism or even mildly rightist policy ideas than the narrow voter base he is obviously reaching for.

Yankee Come Home

Confirmation about something many suspected and which our blatantly anti-American big media has hardly commented on: the BBC undertook a worldwide sample of some 29,000 respondents showing Kenyans have the highest positive view of the USA of any country surveyed, a stunning 70% rating.

Compare this to the miserly 16% of Germans who believe the USA has a mainly positive role in the world. The Germans got magnanimity after World War II in the Marshall Plan, and an underwriting for the cost of their defence against communism, allowing them to concentrate on becoming rich and peaceful, thanks to America. Despite the unspeakable atrocities the Germans visited on the world with their war, less than 20 of it’s worst leaders were hung as war criminals. Forgive and rebuild was the watchword. As we say in Kiswahili, asante ya punda ni teke; the thanks of a donkey are kicks.

Here in Kenya, our local newspapers also own TV and radio outlets. The biggest is the Nation Group comprising daily papers, the business tabloid The East African and broadcast media. It’s owned by Muslims, albeit the moderate Aga Khan Foundation. The Standard Group undersells it considerably, and both exhibit unrelenting anti-Americanism from the editors downwards.

Kenyans are bombarded with stories written by Islamists, tranzis and anti-democrats. In the Standard last year, a column on the “only hope” for Iraq was, wait for it, to have the UN reinstate Saddam. Jihadi journalist Salim Lone informs readers in The Daily Nation that “hardly anyone” believes in Islamist plots to blow up airliners and that these are “inventions of Bush and Blair”. The recent collapse of the Somali Islamists (fervently wished for by Kenyans) was greeted with serious media alarm, followed by derision directed at the USA.

This is the normal journalistic meal served up to Kenyan readers, a country where Christians are the overwhelming majority and print is still king. The blogosphere has hardly any readers at all. All the more surprising then that Kenyans have weathered this propaganda effort and still favour the USA.

Gunship Hash Fry-Up

The January 13^th issue of The East African editorializes; “US Makes A Hash Of It Again” referring to Somalia. Claiming the "US adventure is Somali is going off the rails, raising fears of another Iraq being enacted right here in East Africa", it minimizes the Islamist support o'f Eritrean and foreign mercenaries, the long history of Somali-Ethiopian wars, the massive influx of arms into Mogadishu from mischievous countries and Kenya’s own interests in eradicating terrorists. It’s all Uncle Sam’s blunder, again.

Facts are abandoned. There are no reports, as the editor would have it, of “US fighter jets” or “Blackhawk helicopters” operating in Somalia. There was a solitary AC-130 gunship that could have done many favours if it had eradicated the Al-Qaeda cell leaders. Their attacks killed hundreds and wounded thousands in Kenya. This nearly bankrupted our tourist industry and entire economy twice. There are a few Special Forces boots on the ground and these, plus the British SAS , have been welcomed by all parties except the Islamists and their allies and dupes in the Kenyan media.

Also, since it does not fit The East African’s favoured anti-American narrative, the paper fails no mention the ICU attacked Baidoa and the TNG on December 16^th despite endless international warnings and thus sealed their own fate.

The US has publicly stated it is willing to work with non-Al Qaeda Islami c Courts Unionparties in Somalia – a big shift in policy. It strongly backs an AU force and stays as much in the background as possible – unlike for example Eritrea or Al-Qaeda itself, which called for global terrorists to come to the ICU’s aid. The US has kept it’s military footprint very small. No doubt most regional countries would like to see the irredentist ICU dismantled. Moderate Somalis in Hargeisha and Puntland are whooping with delight.

Rather than “hashing” the job, it is more likely the US has learned valuable past lessons and kept the problem at arm’s length. One is not sure why The East African would want to inflame jihadi passions by asserting otherwise.

Somalia is both an inter-African and regional failure. America is justifiably interested in the capture or death of a limited group of Al-Qaeda terrorists. The US left Somali alone for a dozen years after “Blackhawk Down”. During this time did Africans solve their own problems? Did the EU or UN come to rescue the country? Not at all.

The result was the ICU and more civil war, with the possibility of an Afghanistan- in Africa. This was intolerable to all in Kenya except a handful of Islamists and their mouthpieces like jihadi supporter Salim Lone of The Daily Nation. In truth there is no simple solution in Somalia and making people believe that the American bogeyman is behind all the woe implies it will vanish should the US ignore Somalia for another decade. Nothing could be further from the truth.

A week after this "editorial", which reads more like a shill for the ICU, the moderate leader of the ICU surrendered peacefully to Kenyan authorities and was reported headed for Nairobi for talks with US State Department officials. The real question is, why do Kenyans have to read over and again these hopelessly biased and innacurate anti-American rants, in the guise of "editorials"?

A Massacre Of The Guilty

Is it useful for Kenyan authorities detain 6 suspected Kenyan Islamists allegedly fighting in Somalia ? If they had on them cell-phones with recorded messages to Osama Bin Laden, Idd cards signed by Al-Qaeda leader Al Zwahiri, notebooks detailing intimate conversations between themselves and terrorists in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq and details of suspected targets worldwide, there is nothing whatsoever, besides letting them go, that Kenyan authorities could do. This is because Kenya refuses, in a weird mixture of misplaced nationalism, incoherent anti-Americanism among it's elites and naked Muslim vote-buying in an election year, to pass anti-terrorist legislation.

Every terrorism suspect that has been brought to court since 2001 has been freed. The record of Kenya, a nominally Christian country, in convicting jihadi terrorists is actually worse than most Muslim nations. The former Moi government used to hand over terrorists to the USA and seek the active assistance of American law agencies like the FBI. The chances of the Kibaki government doing the same seems nil. Strident anti-American/pro-terrorist propaganda is staple fare of many in Kenya's news media and readers are delivered daily barrages of articles that are strongly sympathetic to the terrorist world viewpoint. Al-Jazeera is being given a license to operate it's TV programming in Kenya. Kenya is the only nation in the world to have suffered repeated and devastating terrorist attacks without passing a single piece of anti-terrorist law. The majority of Kenyans desire such laws, but the elite and pressure groups have so far resisted passing any.

An entire Muslim network ( or fifth column) of street demonstrators, mullahs, preachers and "activists " has sprung up to denounce any proposed anti-terror laws, to demand the disbandment of the Kenya Police Terrorism Unit and rail against the USA/Israel at every opportunity. Coupled with the notorious corruption of the Kenya Police and Immigration officers, it is no wonder the Islamists in Somalia have made a dash for the Kenyan border. There is little assurance that dozens will not, and have not already, slipped into the country. The only thing in their way seems to the the AC-130 gunships and special ops forces the US bases in nearby Djibouti.

Todays news of the death of 1998 Embassy bombing mastermind Fazul Mohammed who also plotted the 2002 Kikambala Hotel attack in Malindi and simultaneous attempt to bring down an Israeli airliner at the airport will be more than welcome to the staggering number of Kenyan victims of Al-Qaeda and their relatives. Over 200 Kenyans have been murdered by Al-Qaeda and a shocking 5000 injured, often ghastly lacerations from flying glass after bombings.

The Ethiopians, Somali government and US forces have driven the Al-Qaeda remnants to a no-win penninsula of isolated headlands and rocky islets around Ras Komboni in south Somlia. It is rare for the US to get Al-Qaeda in it's sights in such a hopeless position. Worse for the Islamists, they are cut-off from their bleating supporters in the world media, though the "they are killing only civilians" reports are naturally being circulated. There is every indication the US forces are going to kill or capture all Al-Qaeda trapped on Ras Komboni. The entire event is a complete humiliation of the jihadi juggernaut that claimed such invincibility. Maybe Kenya won't need those anti-terrorist laws at all after a few more days of gunships, Predators and special forces operations.

Preparing The New Kristallnacht

Jimmy Carter is arguably the worst President ever elected in US history. While the MSM, Euro-paranoids and others rant on about George Bush and "fudamentalist Christians" taking over the USA, it's worth remembering that Carter is something of a hardline Christian from the Deep South himself. Presumably because he's a Democrat however, he gets a free media ride. That's why the sinister side to this failed man hardly gets examined. Many Southern Christians basically fall into two camps: those who are anti-Semitic (Jews as Christ-killers etc) and those who, for their own odd scriptural reasons, support the existence of the state of Israel.

Carter's racist new book “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid” shows him firmly to be in the "Jews -Are-Evil" camp of Christian fundamentalists. Who does Carter most remind one of? A creep like Yusuf "Cat Stevens" Islam who, in a perfectly reasonable and calm voice, can spew out hatred and venom, smiling all the time. Even the liberal media cannot spare Carter. His book has been condemned as “moronic” (Slate), “anti-historical” (The Washington Post)and “laughable” (San Francisco Chronicle).

Carter is of course doing nothing more than many of the worst sort of Christians have done for almost two millennia: demonizing Jews and dehumanising them, to prepare them for killing or persecution. I wonder what it sounds like to the average Israeli, with his memories of the combined pogroms of Europe, this constant stream of racist propaganda directed at his tiny minority? The slow, steady preparation of justification for a new Kristallnacht.

One hears it in the assertions of the left and Arab nationalists who subscribe to the nonsense that the "key to peace in the Middle East is solving the Palestine problem". What they are promising is the illusion of peace, with Israel as the scarifical lamb. If only Israel ceased to exist we would all live in peace and be happy and prosperous. Anyone who believes this of the Middle East is easily duped.

Those who cannot spot the similarity to this racist nonsense and Hitler's assertion that Germany (and Europe) could only achieve the levels of Utopia when cleansed of Jewish "control" needs to think deeply indeed.

It's not enough that Jews be compared to South African racists. When asked whether he believed that Israel’s “persecution” of Palestinians was “[e]ven worse . . . than a place like Rwanda,” Carter answered, “Yes. I think — yes.” ... Thus this disgraceful man, who Americans threw out of office in revulsion, prepares the ancient ghost of debased Christianity: the Jew-devil, the Evil One, the Scapegoat. It is part of a pattern that has been going on in Europe too for a good while.

Many now take it as axiomatic that Israel is the key (or rather obstacle) to all problems in the Arab world - even to Shiites and Sunnis slaughtering each other in Baghdad. World opinion is being softened up for a new Kistallnact and anyone with a Christian heritage should look very hard, with the largest moral magnifying glass they can find, at this latest round of Jew-baiting from the "deeply CXhristian" Jummy carter

Kenyan Athlete Finally Loses

It's hard to feel sympathy for either side in this story:

Authorities have revoked the Bahraini citizenship of a Kenyan-born athlete who ran in an Israeli marathon, the nation's athletic union said Saturday.

Bahraini runner Mushir Salem Jawher competed and won the Tiberias Marathon in Israel on Thursday, ending the race in just over 2 hours and 13 minutes.

Gulf Arab states are all over Kenya getting Christian athletes to defect for huge sums of money, so as to build their athletics programs. And what is so wrong with that, given Kenya has a surplus of runners and high poverty levels? What is wrong is that the Gulf states make the Kenyans abandon their Christian religion and convert to Islam. They are also required to adopt fully Arab names.

Now imagine the outcry if, say, the talented Sudanese basketball players coming to the USA were required to give up their names and convert to Christianity. However as usual it's one rule for the West and another for everyone else.

EU Issues Shock Christophobia Report

The EU nomenklatura is at it again with a new report that claims a rise in "Islamophobia" in Europe. However the Brussels mob have yet to issue any report on rising "Christophobia" in Europe by Muslim immigrants, evidence for which is more than just a matter of feelings or perceptions.

The very solid grounds for rising Christophobia in Europe includes multiple suicide bombings in London last summer, increasing calls for Sharia law, the small matter of the Danish Mohammed cartoons and wordwide bloody riots that ensued, let alone numerous thwarted plots involving dozens of Islamic terrorists. The latter extended to countries which had become anti-US in their foreign policy, such as Spain, Germany and France. Even Sweden experienced riots.

Fear of Islamic violence caused the cancellation of many arts events in 2006, including a performance of Mozart in his homeland. A French Jew was tortured to death in Paris for no other reason than his religion.

Meanwhile, Muslims in Europe threatened to kill the Pope, behead homosexuals and declare Muslim "no-go" areas in various European cities. Honour killings, often involving cross-religious love relationships, increased.

The same EU politicians that issued the "Islamophobia" report are the ones who in 2004 supressed an EU report of rising anti-Semitic attacks because it named young Muslim Europeans as the chief perpetrators.

Obama and the M Word

Reading the thoughts of Joshua Marshall on Talking Points regarding some Republican bottom-feeders already going on about Barack Obama's middle name being "Hussein" leads to some thoughts on his ability to ever get elected President and what the Muslim world would think of this?

Obama's late Kenyan father was a nominal Muslim, hence his Kenyan name of Mbarak Hussein Obama. His mother is an American Christian. Obama himself is an observant and fervent Christian and brought up that way.

My understanding of sharia is that all children born between a Muslim father and non-Muslim mother are considered Muslims automatically, regardless of whatever religion the actually observe and to deny this makes them potential apostates - which can carry severe sanction, including death, in the eyes of very many traditional Muslims. This does not hold,however, if a Muslim woman marries a Jew or Christian. It only applies to the male sire.

This question is going to come up if Obama ever makes a run for President: what is the Muslim world going to make of his candidacy? Chances are he will be considered a Muslim candidate, which will look fine in say, Saudi Arabia but not look neccesarily the same in the USA. Vocal and radical claims that Obama is either a Muslim or worse, an apostate worthy of death, are bound to issue from the Muslim world.

The impact on Obama as a candidate is likely to be fatal. Not only would various bonehead elements in the GOP and electorate generally try to stir this issue, but so will the Muslim press. Al-Jazeera's take is to be imagined. The potentially bitter cat-calls of racism,Islamophobia , mullahs propounding on Koranic sharia and all the rest are bound to command media attention, and this in a candidate who is meant to bring novel freshness to the political scene.

I don't know if Obama's staff see this one coming, but it's certainly on my radar and will have a fascinating life of it's own sooner rather than later. People may see Obama as the new Kennedy, but JFK's "Catholic" problem was nothing compared to what might be on the horizon.

A Tale of Two Bad Guys

I confess I had not read the Washington Post's excellent editorial on the death of Pinochet when I got to wondering about the following political poser:

Pinochet's 1973 coup against a communist take-over of Chile had 3000 killed (on both sides) and over 10,000 detentions. Yet it turned Chile into South Americas most successful economy to this day. He resigned in 1988 after 15 years in power when he lost a referendum on his rule. Chile is now South America's healthiest democracy. Everywhere he went in later life, he was hounded by human rights activists and judges. Would Chile be in the same place today if the communist coup had succeeded?

Castro's 1959 coup against an odious Cuban right-wing dictator resulted in 17,000 killed and a gulag of over 150,000 prisoners. Cuba developed a complete basket-case economy, which remains to this day. Three million have fled. Everywhere, even internationally, he gets standing ovations and mass adulation from the media. Castro has never had a referendum on his rule and will only resign in his coffin. The country remains a totalitarian state. Would Cuba be in the same place today if Castro had resigned in 1974?

Xmas Shorts

On Barack Obama, "Black" hope: As pointed out in the National Review in April, 2000, "the United States is the only country in the world in which a white woman can give birth to a black baby but a black woman cannot give birth to a white baby."

Those Stupid Republicans: Incoming Democratic chairman of the U.S. House Intelligence Committee Silvestre Reyes doesn’t know the difference between Sunnis and Shi’ites. Or what Hezbollah is.

Those Stupid Republicans, Part II: Trent Lott, the veteran Republican senator from Mississippi, said only last September that “It’s hard for Americans, all of us, including me, to understand what’s wrong with these people.”

“Why do they kill people of other religions because of religion?” wondered Lott, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, after a meeting with Bush.

“Why do they hate the Israelis and despise their right to exist? Why do they hate each other? Why do Sunnis kill Shiites? How do they tell the difference?

“They all look the same to me,” Lott said.

Gay Taliban?

One of the things the MSM never brings to our notice is the well known fact that the Taliban are bi-sexual, if not exactly gay. Bi-sexuality has deep roots in Afghanistan for reasons that may have to do with with it's conquest by Alexander the Great and subsequent long period as a Greek colony. It is widely accepted that the Macedonians and other ancient Greeks, including the Spartans, were bi-sexual. In some cases, bi-sexual lovers fought and lived together and this practise was common, if not the military norm. Even as far back as Homer, we have Achilles and his lover. However all Greek warriors were also expected to maintain a heterosexual family with wife and kids, rather like today's Taliban do.

In the early part of the Afghan campaign, a British daily reported that a Northern Afghan warlord was particularly pleased the British Royal Marines were replacing American troops in his sector as they were, he said, "far more handsome to look at". In case this sounds like a fantasy, a new copy of the Taliban Rules and Code of Conduct has been obtained and translated by a Swiss specialist, exclusively published in the Swiss journal Die Weltwoche. Here is Rule 19,obviously aimed at something more than the US Army's "Don't ask, don't tell" policy:

"Mujahideen are not allowed to take young boys with no facial hair onto the battlefield or into their private quarters."

Somalia Cooks Up Trouble

The reports of 3 suicide car bombs detonated in the Somali town of Baidoa bring a new and ominous escalation in the growing threat of Islamism in Eastern Africa. Though fanatically brave and careless of their lives in battle, Somalis have never been known as methodical suicide jihadis. Newswire suggestions than non-Somalis were captured at the site indicate Al-Qaeda involvement. As is usual with Somalia, the situation is endlessly opaque and confusing, with the ICU going so far as to invite the USA to officially visit Mogadishu for talks!

Kenya is a non-aggressive nation, known for the excellent professionalism of it's armed peacekeepers in Bosnia, Sierra Leone and elsewhere with a foreign policy that stresses regional dialogue and agreed solutions. Kenya has been instrumental in helping end the genocidal Southern Sudan conflict, among many. For years Kenya coaxed the quarrelsome and boisterous Somalis into forming their Provisional Government. All that work is undone by the advance of the shadowy, sinister Islamic Courts Union forces.

The Guardian and other leftist MSM outlets repeat the clueless canard that somehow, when the US gave cash to non- ICU warlords in a futile attempt to stem the ICU takeover of Mogadisu last summer, this "exacerbated" the Islamist advance. Such thinking blames America-as-usual, forgetting that the groundwork of trained forces, superior weapons, advanced tactics and foreign cadres of the ICU took months, if not years, of careful planning. The blame game also ignores the most likely cause of the Islamist assault: it coincided with and would plainly forestall, the final establishment of the internationally backed, African Union approved Provisional Somali Government.

While ideologues look to their bogeyman in the USA, others note that Islamism in Somalia could revive the murderous regional violence of the 1960's and 70's when Somali nationalists tried to take over territory in Kenya and Ethiopia. These have large ethnic Somali minorities. There are uncomfortable signs that "Greater Somalia" is longed for by some of the ICU top leadership. It's hard to see how the ICU will not eventually go for the racial expansion of Somalia, which would have disastrous repercussions in Kenya's north east, heavily populated by native and refugee Somalis. Throw in the ICU acting as proxies for Eritrea, Ethiopia's belligerent refusal, backed by a huge army, to countenance Islamist takeover, Iranian mischief, Al-Qaeda elements, mystery arms flights into Mogadishu, new suicide bombers and one has a cauldron of bitter ingredients that could scald an entire region.

Kenya meanwhile tries to play the peaceful middleman, desperate to avoid being caught in any situation that would demand it abandon perceived neutrality in face of a need to balance acute national interests. It's something Kenya diplomats are very skilled at, but for how much longer before somthing lights the fire and the Somali pot finally boils into open regional conflict?

Koffi's Klimate Kalamity

One of my biggest problems with the climate change doomsayers is that they try and couch global warming in terms of morality, when actually it's all about money. Environmentalism is becoming the new moral touchstone. Anyone who questions that the developing world is being made to suffer disproportionate devastation by greedy rich nations spewing carbon into the atmosphere is looked upon about as badly as someone who grabs a megaphone and starts hollering the "n" word in public.

Yet green is the new colour prejudice, whereby everyone who is not a shade of Ireland is an ignorant,selfish,dangerous and wicked person.

Morality is a subject that is endlessly relative: one man's probity is another's perversion. However money is something that, at least since the collapse of Marxism, we can all more or less agree upon. It's hard to argue that more government equals less economic growth, that free markets trump closed ones, that wealth must be generated before it can be shared and so on. Except when it comes to global climate change and environmentalism.

Ron Bailey asks the excellent question: Is global warming worse than what governments might try to do about it? If the UN joins in, as with the recently concluded Nairobi UN Conference on climate change, we should pause. When Kofi Annan delivers yet another one of his passive aggressive lectures along the lines of "the debate is over, we are all going to die and rich people are the cause of that", then global warming should give over to global worrying.

He has the UK government's Stern Review to back him, showing how little,supposedly, it will take of world GDP to stabilize greenhouse emissions over the next 100 years. Only 1% per annum to avoid the ecological apocalypse that awaits us all! It all sounds so reasonable. However most developing countries cannot gain GDP increase over their population growth.

Kenya has hardly managed more than 1.5% annual growth in GDP vs +3.5% population increase for two decades. Imagine Kenya sustains 4% GDP growth over the next 20 years. Adding 1% cost of "environmental management" actually will mean that Kenya will remain considerably poorer two decades hence than it is now, on paper at least.

Yet poor countries maintain, not unreasonably, than they cannot affcord any cut in their already precarious GDP growth, so the green management costs would have to be borne by the developed world. This will put the actual cost to developed countries at something more like 2-3% of their annual GDP. However, various developed countries like many in Europe and Japan for years, have managed less that 2% GDP increase per annum. What sounds reasonable suddenly becomes politically impossible.

These are the sort of sobering facts that should enlighten the climate change debate, not as at present a cross between a scientific Inquisition and a morality play.

The realm of climate change and the infamous Kyoto Protocol abound in similar perversities. For example, Kyoto gives rich countries carbon credits for preserving forests which soak up carbon dioxide, but no incentive whatsoever for developing countries to do the same. That helps account for the incineration of the tropical forests in Indonesia,Malasia and Borneo which are, you guessed it, adding to global warming.

Ron Bailey asks if the hundreds of trillions of dollars that the Stern Report "modest proposal" actually means in GDP terms was put to use on building wealth and technology, what would be the result? Arguably that poor countries could grow richer and therefore afford to handle the results of global warming (the way Holland manages rising sea levels with an economy worth only $500 billion a year).

Unlike what Kofi Annan says when using the UN Climate Change Conference as a moral wedge for more power us by the United Nations, the debate is far from over. It is in fact just beginning.

IFAW's Eurocentric Conservation

I welcome "Lynn" who comments on my "Wildlife Woes" blog:

'I was surprised to read your misrepresentation of IFAW as an organization of "extremist weirdness." You clearly are unaware of IFAW's unusually moderate approach to issues of wildlife and habitat protection. The truth is that IFAW is NOT against all consumptive use of animals, nor opposed to scientific research. It is IFAW's position on a number of highly complex issues, however, that consumption and science must be sustainable.'

The trouble is, for IFAW consumptive use is always "unsustainable", at least in Africa. For a useful overview of these issues, other scientists have opposing and valid points.

However, "Lynn" has not answered why IFAW continues to block, by any means fair or foul, all attempts to re-introduce limited sports hunting into Kenya? This would benefit marginal wildlife areas that cannot compete for tourist dollars, yet have, as local people see it, a problem with "useless" wild animals that the Kenya government protects by law, but does nothing to protect them from.

It is obscene for foreign conservationists to insist on hugely expensive, Eurocentric conservation programmes like "elephant contraception" and "helicopter herding" of animals, whose budgets run into millions of Kenya shillings, when peasants could build entire primary schools and clinics from the licensed proceeds of a few hundred animals shot on a "Campfires"

IFAW does promote many interesting conservation programmes world-wide,but it's insistance on non-consumption (perhaps not yet of chickens and beef), it's absolute stand against controlled sport-hunting (itself recognised by the WWF and IUCN/WCU as a conservation tool if properly used) certainly qualify it for "weirdness".

As a 3rd generation tourist professional who lives in Africa, I see the dwindling wildlife numbers outside and inside National Parks. I know the attitudes of local tribes to the wildlife they do not own, but the government and conservationists mysteriously do. And I also know that it is common knowledge in Kenya conservation and tourism circles that IFAW spends immense efforts and cash in ensuring any attempts to introduce even the most modest type community sports hunting programme. This would as effectively control animal numbers and profit local people.pilot scheme of sustainable sports hunting are blocked time and again. This is patronizing, racist and arrogant.

For just one example of a World Wildlife Fund successful community hunting programme of immense benefit to local people, "Lynn" should go here.

IFAW opposes sports-hunting and even government culling in Africa. The results are devastating in some areas, for example Kruger National Park in South Africa which has a superbly monitored culling programme = now elephant overpopulation is wrecking Kruger. Contraception for elephants, at perhaps $5000 cost per animal, while next door to the park Africans die of AIDS and poverty, is something IFAW would no doubt support. A humane bullet costs about $1 and better yet, sports-hunting would actually pay African villagers about $5000 per elephant.

Why does one of the largest and most respected conservation bodies , the World Conservation Union (formerly IUCN), deny IFAW membership? I think we know.

More Climate Emissions

Nairobi is hosting the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, which is meant to be looking into about a post-Kyoto Protocol world and what is to be done about it. Already the meeting has been an enormous success on two fronts. Foreign activists managed to rent members of Kenya's colourful tribes, in some cases probable pre-literate ones and parade them around with "Wanted, George Bush The Toxic Texan" placards. This will guarantee more fauxphoto opportunities for the MSM. Next, every news media in Kenya and internationally has been able to spin stories about Bush "renouncing Kyoto" to stoke anti-Americanism.

Of course, it was Bill Clinton who shelved the Kyoto Protocol in 1999, before Bush was even elected, after the US senate voted 95-0 that they would never ratify it. True, Clinton, in a typically showbiz gesture, signed an intent of the Kyoto Protocol in Rio in 1998. Democratic senator Byrd, from Clinton's own party, co-sponsored the motion in the senate.

The good news is that China will surpass the USA as the world's largest emitter of CO2 sometime in 2009. Will anyone in the world media notice?

There is no doubt that climate change has been damaging Africa's human viability for the past 14,000 years of inter-glacial warming, and also no contention that such warming has quickened and will have a devastating effect on marginal Africa. The grand irony is that African countries are queuing up to sell all the CO2 laden oil and mineral products they can to China, who will soon be polluting them out of existence.

African environmentalists might be doing wise things like insisting that any energy and minerals sold to China as raw materials be subject to verifiable lower CO2 emissions. Instead most of them are too busy blaming America.

No wonder the US senate resolution that passed so resoundingly in 1999 repudiating the Kyoto Protocol said it:

"would not ratify the Protocol unless rapidly developing countries such as China were included in its requirements to reduce greenhouse gases. The Clinton Administration announced it would not send the treaty to the Senate for ratification."

Meanwhile The Guardian, haven of America-bashing, announces that the oh-so-Green Europeans have totally failed to meet their Kyoto obligations. We can say one thing for George Bush, he sure gets around.

Wildlife Woes

More evidence that foreign wildlife extremists completely control Kenya's policies came today as Vice President Moody Awori sang loudly from the International Fund for Animal Welfare song-book. He was inaugurating a wildlife fence partly funded by IFAW in north Kenya.

IFAW, who have not been allowed to join major bodies like the IUCN/World Conservation Union due to their extremist weirdness, are completely against any consumptive use of animals, including scientific culling. The "F" in IFAW stands for "fund", and the huge financial clout of these urban eco-huggers means they can buy their way to influence in many countries. Kenya is the foremost of those and IFAW pays journalists and politicians to support it's ideology,some say.

Thanks to IFAW, elephants are now devastating South Africa's Kruger National Park again. IFAW forced a ban on the successful Kruger culling programme. Bowing to IFAW, Awori announced Kenya will not re-introduce sport hunting. Thus we remain the sole major wildlife destination in Africa without a regulated sport hunting industry.

The reasons Awori gave are pure IFAW-speak. Sport hunting is "elitist" ( yet exclusive luxury tourism in Kenya is not) he said. It cannot "benefit the local community" (dozens of studies in Africa say exactly the opposite). Sport hunting will make controlling "bushmeat trades" more difficult (those wealthy hunters come here to eat mouldy old bull buffalo meat). It would be "difficult to control" (investors earning a good return from sports hunting just can't wait to exterminate all their animal capital). And more.

The oddest idea expressed was when Awori said allowing animals to "regulate themselves" as in former times was the best way and would help the environment in a time of climate change.

Kenya's animals are being "regulated" to alarmingly low levels by unremitting poaching and bushmeat trade , undertaken by those who have zero personal or community incentive to preserve animals on private or communal land. A regulated hunting industry is one of the ways of combating such wildlife attrition. Though IFAW does some useful projects in conservation, their hidden agenda is to stop all consumptive use of animals, regardless of consequences to local people.

Respectable conservationsists know this, but IFAW is more renowned, some say, for buying their way to the top of the policy ladder in traditional African fashion.

Gibberish Generator

Ever tried to figure out what modern "scholars" actually mean in their post-modern, deconstructed theses and studies? Are you going for an senior NGO job or looking forward to possible employment in the social services? Perhaps you have a Modern Literature exam looming and are short of the correct trendy ideas?

A superb Postmodern Generator is available, free and just a mouse click away. Now you will be able to construct essay after essay of meaningless post-modern jargon based on the warped ideas of whacko French mental masturbators like Jaques Derrida and the immortal Foucalt, heirs to the great intellectual tradition that includes the Marquis de Sade and Rousseau.

Just visit the Postmodern Generator and every time you refresh the screen, a new and densly brilliant essay, featuring the most up-to-date leftist thinking, is prepared; original, pioneering and exceptionally penetrative.

Unnatural Adoptions (Part 2)

Typical of comments which do not support my post on the Maddona adoption is an anonymous one:

It is shameful that so many people (i.e Rightspeak) are condeming celebrities who find the kindness in their heart to save a child from a life a hell!!! It would be far worse for these celebrities to travel to the war and aids striken countries and not leave with a child."

This adoption bypassed Malawi laws, as the link in my post highlights, and brought much protest from Malawi adoption agencies and authorities. The father felt "powerless" to stop the adoption by someone so "rich and famous".

Here is my point - that celebrities spending great sums of money to arrange these adoptions (which also bring huge publicity to themselves) could as easily helped many hundreds of similar children by donating money to institutions and charities in Africa, rather than "power-adopting" a single child.

It seems many are ignorant of the fact that that most celebrities do nearly everything for publicity and career boosts. It's all part of a carefully choreographed "media process".

There are celebs and rich people who adopt children, or who even better donate to help Africans, like this boy`s father, take care of their own children and orphans. Some of them never seek any publicity for it and go through the normal channels of adoption. Madonna is not in that category, and which African would like a child to be brought up by someone who is, in African cultural terms, blasphemous and sexually weird? African children are not commodities to be bought for PR reasons.

A Different Guide

This is a dose of welcome humour in the developmenet debate, thanks to African Christian blog Two & Two Makes 5.

Unnatural Adoptions

Although there are thousands of genuine families who adopt and raise African children in the West, the sad story of Madonna's disgusting power-adoption of a young Malawian boy is about as stomach-churning a story as one can get.

Madonna could have spent equivalent money on funding thousands of AIDS orphans through infancy and primary school for the same cost as her celebrity adoption. However, that would not have brought her headlines and publicity. The poor Malawian boy will also be exposed to the weird lifestyles of Hollywood and pop stars. Surely life in Malawi is far less cruel ? No wonder his father looks so glum.

Sometimes the leftist "entertainagensia's" actions towards Africa are shameful. Malawaians and Africans generally should stop this child-theft by weirdo showbiz types and insist instead Madonna and her ilk spend money on NGO child projects.

Compulsive Conversion

Members of the Religion of Peace are fond of quoting to us Mohammed’s Koranic statement ( actually only part of a heavily qualified sentence), "There is no compulsion in religion".

Quite how this squares with the forced conversion to Islam, under pain of death, of Fox newsmen Steve Sentani and Olaf Wiig, would be an interesting debate with your local mullah. However, not a single Muslim religious figure worldwide has so far condemned the "conversion." Debate on this subject down at the mosque is, it seems, out.

According to the New York Times, the men were "unharmed" by their ordeal. However, in the West if a junior school teacher shouts at a pupil for spitballing little Miss Goody Twoshoes at the next desk, said teacher will probably be forced to undergo "counselling" for "harming" little Dennis the Menace with "verbal violence". If the same teacher held a knife at Dennis' throat and made him do pee-pee on an image of the Virgin Mary while reciting, "I renounce Jesus and all his works", that presumably would be, in NYT-speak, "unharmful".

Here’s another hot news story you maybe missed last week: " Two Muslim detainees released from Guantanamo Bay detention, Ali Shabazzi and Mohammed Yusuf, related how their US military captors forced them to convert to Christianity at gunpoint. Said Yusuf, "They would have killed us if we did not convert." How far would the MSM and the mullahs run with that particular football?

The great Mark Steyn perhaps has the last word on this subject:

"Did you see that video of the two Fox journalists announcing they'd converted to Islam? The larger problem, it seems to me, is that much of the rest of the Western media have also converted to Islam, and there seems to be no way to get them to convert back to journalism."

Proportional Nonsense

Few calls by UN officials, European appeasers and various anti-Israeli elements are as empty of substance as the repeated carping for the IDF to show a "proportional reponse" in Lebanese hostilities towards the terrorist organization Hizbollah. We will not go into the fact that Hizbollah violates the Geneva Conventions in it's very structure, designed as it is to attack from and hide amongst civilians.

Hizbollah's main backer's, Syria and Iran have between them a population of 82 million. There are only some 5.25 million Jews in Israel liable for military service. As of today the casualty figures in the Southern Lebabnon war are 51 Israelis and some 450 Lebanese. This includes civilians on both sides. The ratio of Israelis killed is thus about 1:9 vs Lebanese, wheras the population ratio of the two countries that created and support Hizbollah, Iran and Syria, and who both wish Israel to be "wiped off the map", is some 15.75 to one Israeli.

Working on polls the MSM always tell us are "reliable", we also know that some 80% of the over 150 million Arabs in the Middle East do not accept the existance of Israel and wish to see it eliminated. Presumably these also back Hizbollah. In this case the ratio of populations soars, by simple math, to almost 30:1. If the casualty figures were 1530 Lebanese to 51 Israelis, then we would be approaching a truer proportional response by Israel to it's enemies. Rather, the figures to date show the amazing restraint and skill of the IDF ,with far more casualties "proportionally".

Looking at the number of sworn ememies of Israel that surround it in Arab countries and Iran we get some 230 million people who wish to eliminate 5.25 million Jews. If the IDF was inflicting "proportional casualties" based on this ratio, today's dead and wounded would have to reach 2117 dead Lebanese/Hizbollah to every 51 Israelis killed.

The dim and biased mainstream media have never recognised the call for "proportional response" for what it is, an idea that would suit Israel's enemies very well. A strictly "proportional response" in this case would rapidly see Israel depopulated and overrun in any conflict with Arab states.

Som(me)bre

Today is the 90th anniversary of the Battle of the Somme. The British Army lost 60,000 casualties in the first 12 hours of fighting. 20,000 dead and 40,000 wounded, the greatest loss in their history. More poignantly, many of the volonteer army had joined in 'buddy' outfits, according to their trades. You had regiments of bakers, companies of miners and so on, often all from the same close knit towns and villages. They were mown down by the Germans, like grass before a scythe.

When deaths in Iraq of coalition troops do not equal the amount of accidental deaths in the US armed forces in a year, we have to remind ourselves of what our grandfathers and great grandfathers went through in a few hours.

The Best Policy Is No Policy

This bleak assessement on Somalia by J. Peter Pham, director of the Nelson Institute for International and Public Affairs at James Madison University and an academic fellow of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies:

After they make short shift of Somalia’s shambolic government—notwithstanding the last ditch attempt at the U.N. this week to shore it up with the appointment of a new International Contact Group—the (Islamic Courts) Union will turn its attention to destabilizing (neighbouring) Somaliland, whose democratically elected, secular government has already been declared anathema by the Union’s chief ideologist, Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, the al Qaeda-linked head of al-Ittihad. (This month alone, the Somaliland government has intercepted two major arms shipments destined for Union-aligned jihadis from well-wishers in Arabia.) Then the Union will turn on Ethiopia and Kenya, both countries with large ethnic Somali populations with significant pockets of jihadi infiltration.

Can the US do much about this potential situation? Nearly anything the US does in Somalia, covert or overt, will be used to blame and discredit it regionally with moderate, important countries like Kenya. Already this is the media reaction locally. It is basically misplaced criticism, but it sells in the global anti-American market.

The US should rather rely on the natural ability of Somalis to implode and their penchant for pissing off everyone who happens to be their neighbour. This the Islamic Courts militia will surely do, sooner or later.

Meanwhile it should support openly the efforts of the regional AU group (IGAD) and the UN/European contact groups that are trying to build ( how I hate the word!) an "inclusive" solution.

I doubt they will succeed, but if then the Jihadis anger enough neighbours and clans, the US can use covert means, with proxy allies, to keep Somalia tied up in endless clan warfare, which traditionally renders them strategically harmless.

If an agressive, expansionist Jihadi state did emerge via the Islamic Courts, you would be surprised how quickly the US would be asked for help by various currently lukewarm "allies" like Kenya and Ethiopia.

I dont think Somalia seriously threatens any shipping lanes and is a poor choice for terrorist hideouts. The region is not vital to world energy or security, but due to large minorities of Somalis in Kenya and Ethiopia, plus Islamic ambitions to destabilize the Horn of Africa, the last thing the US should have is a searchlights-and-trumpets prescence, which will then be used by Islamists to rally a regional cause.

Tread softly, carry a big stick, shut up and keep one's eyes open. That's about it for US policy now.

UN: Some Kenyans Are More Kenyan

Despite being the oldest group of humans yet researched by New Zealand's Massey University DNA project Kenya's Turkana people are not, according to the United Nations, 'indigenous'. Having some 35,000 years of history won't quite qualify one for favoured treatment by the UN's new Human Rights Council. Yet if you arrived in Kenya 500 years ago, you will get General Assembly recognition and special 'rights'.

This is the useful conclusion of the UN's newest body. Gone from the disbanded old Human Rights Commission are champions of humanity like Saddam's Iraq ( which once chaired it),Syria and Zimbabwe. In are new champions of humanity like Cuba, Saudi Arabia, China and Russia.

Saudi Arabia is busy modernizing it's image and industry with oil-boom cash. The kingdom just exported a batch of Hand Amputation Machines to Nigeria's sharia Kano State.

Meanhile the new UN Rights Council has the urgent task of sending to the General Assembly a 'vital' bill guaranteeing the rights of 'indigenous peoples'.

To most people, 'indigenous' has the simple meaning of people who were the original inhabitants of a land. Thus in Africa the Bushmen, Pygmies, Baka, Berbers and other groups are rightly nominated in the UN list of indigenes. However it also pays to be colourful, exotic and live next to the world's greatest wildlife parks, even if you are Tribesman-Come-Lately.

Thus Mjikenda and related Swahili Kenyans, who have lived around Mombasa for at least a millenium, are not indigenous enough. They don't wear lion's manes, red-ochre and wave long spears, but rather shapeless, white cotton tunics called kanzu.

Maybe Kenya's Agikuyu who arrived there around 1100 AD are indigenous? If you've been checking out the fate of the 35,000 year old Turkana, you will know this answer. The fact that we have have 1 million year old ancestor hominid sites at Lake Turkana, where live the You-know-who tribe , still won't swing it for those "non-natives".

They drink an awful lot of coffee in the corridors of the UN - what else is there to do in Diploland? Like Legoland it's a place where only fantasies take shape. This leads to reading lots of coffee-table books. There have been more big glossy books written about Kenya's Maasai people (arrived in Kenya around 1450 AD via Chad and Sudan)than any other East African tribe. No surprise then that the only people in Kenya who qualify for 'indigenous', in the UN's report, are the Maasai. There is talking turkey. Then there is talking Turkana, and the Unocrats have the balance right.

How the Kenya Government will vote when the Human Rights Council bill reaches the General Assembly, nobody knows. Hopefully it will be in favour of a bill which declares 90% of their own Kenyans 'foreigners'. Kenyans of Maasai origin are good, normal citizens and frankly need no special affirmation compared to any other inhabitants.

Stand by for waves of professional Masaai activists clad in beads and shukas claiming back the whole country they once ruthlessly conquered from the 'pre-indigenous' people who were inconveniently in Kenya before them. One of the special UN rights for the 'indigenous' is naturally land. That's material enough for 56 more books, 3 mini-series and "Maasai, The Movie!".

Somalia's Endless Sorrows

The recent victories by the Somali Islamic Courts militia over various "Anti-Terrorist Alliance" warlords, supposedly funded by the USA, may seem a small story in these days of Iran, Al-Zarquawi and such. However, it has the potential to become a very large issue in the global war on terror, for Kenya regionally and for Al-Qaeda. The BBC has an excellent primer on the situation here.

East African countries have reacted by making the losing warlords persona non grata, calling for their trial at the ICC, freezing assets and other measures, led by Kenya. This they may later come to regret, if the Islamic Courts militia harden their stance to implementing a Sharia style "Taliban" state on Kenya's borders - a move that could have devastating consequences. It could easily extend to Kenya's north eastern tribes demanding a similar Sharia sytem in Kenya itself. However, in face of the Islamic Courts winning hand, there seems little to do for Kenya but offer them a cautious welcome and see what's next.

There is no doubt the Islamic Courts militia are sheltering a Al-Qaeda members, including one involved in the vicious East African embassy bombings of 1998. The Islamic Courts militia have certainly received training from outside Somalia. The defeated warlords might have remained a card in the deck to temper the courts and could re-emerge in Somalia's chaotic snakepit of clan politics.

On the other hand Kenya via the Inter-Governmental Authority on Development has employed immense time and effort to get the provisional Somali government off the ground, and the fractured,fractious body actually has set up in the town of Baidoa - but the capital Mogadishu is held by the Islamic Courts and the Somali government has no armed forces at all. If anything the warlords alliance was their "armed force". The Islamic Courts militia could crush the provisional government in a day. Ominously, the Islamic Courts have rejected a Somali government idea for African peacekeepers.

All the more reason to heed the 1858 "Compedium of African Geography", when that vintage book said that the inhabitants of the Somali coast are "violent, boisterous and turblulent" and "best left well alone".

Beeb Boob

It's nice that even the BBC corrects it's bias now and then. Regarding the open distortion of the "Hadji Girl" U.S. Marine song I said to BBC Newsonline:

"Kill Iraqis Marine Song" by Adam Brookes Updated 21:53 GMT 13/06/06 contains a crucial omission. Nowhere does it state the Marines song is about insurgents killing children (not Marines) and Marines trying to save the children and kill the insurgents.

In fact it gives the complete opposite "hint" that it is the Marines who are killing children and enjoying it. Seeing the song ( as I have) shows very clearly the Marines are singing about killing hostage taking/human shield type of insurgents.

Is this not a totally crucial piece of information? Why the omission that makes the story seem biased?"

Rightspeak was surprised and delighted to receive the following reply from the BBC:

"Thank you for your comments. We accept that our initial story was deficient and should have made it much clearer what the killing in the song lyrics referred to. We revised the story in the light of this. We subsequently did an updated story to include the marine's apology, which spelt out much more clearly the thrust of the song.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/5081930.stm

But you made a fair criticism about our first story. We do aim to cover stories as objectively and accurately as possible."

Kind regards
BBC News website

Red-Faced Ken

Elsewhere in the blog is noted the low-life Mayor of London, "Red" Ken Livingstone, and his lavish welcome of anti-semitic, suicide-bomber blessing "moderate" sheik Yousuf Al-Qaradhawi in 2005. Such is the quality of public life in UK that creatures like Livingstone and George Galloway thrive in politics. The left apparently sees no disconnect between the anti-feminism,anti-sexuality,anti-democracy and anti-free speech of radical Islam and itself.

However, the left is not about "equality", "human rights" and "inclusion" but about a ruthless, self-righteous elite who hope to seize power and hold it through social coercion, in the name of a mythical and abstract "collective good". Therefore anything anti-American or anti-Western, however disgusting, is preferred in all circumstances. This is the real reason for the love affair between the radical left and radical Islam, which operates exactly the same way.

Even Red Ken might be taken aback by Qaradhawi's latest remarks, courtesy of the wonderful MEMRI service:

Yousuf Al-Qaradhawi: Kerry who ran against Bush, was supported by homosexuals and nudists. But it was Bush who won [the elections], because he is Christian, right-wing, tenacious, and unyielding. In other words, the religious overcame the perverted. So we cannot blame all Americans and Westerners.

Interviewer: How should a homosexual or a lesbian be punished? We mentioned the story of the people of Sodom and how Allah punished them, but how should someone who commits this abomination be punished today?

Yousuf Al-Qaradhawi: The schools of thought disagree about the punishment..... Some say we should throw them from a high place, like God did with the people of Sodom. Some say we should burn them, and so on. There is disagreement. The important thing is to treat this act as a crime."

This is the sheik who Livingstone said was "just like" Pope John Paul II.

Crazed White Christians

Imagine a pair of Christian fundamentalists went around the East Coast of the USA, sniping and shooting dead ten non-white American Muslims. At their trial,notebooks and texts show where they had written how Jesus Christ inspired them to kill "black devils" and how other figures like Hitler were drawn in portrait, labelled "A Good Leader". Would you be hearing about this from the MSM and the left from now until.....hell froze over?

There is such a sensational case, but you will hardly hear details about it because it involves a pair of Muslim influenced killersshooting what they called "white devils" on behalf of one "Allah". These are the Beltway Killers who terrorized the Eastern USA a while back. The leader was John Muhammed and his acolyte Lee Malvo. Ample evidence was produced at the trial of the religious nature of the serial killings, including notebooks and other writings. Bin Laden was featured heavility in Malvo's notebooks as a "Good Muslim". Malvo confessed to Islamic indoctrination from Muhammed who repeatedly talked of "shooting white devils" at a level of six victims a day, if possible.

Going by stories on the BBC, AP and other agencies there is no mention whatsoever of any link with Islam in the John Muhammed case. Even minor media like the Richmond Times Dispatch of Virginia where the shooting occurred merely mention "indoctrination", without using any further description of what kind. The 'Religion of Peace' is unmentioned.

One victim of the shootings who survived still does not understand. He tells the Richmond newspaper,

"I never expected to understand 'why' they were doing what they did -- it's not socially rational behavior -- but I did find a sense of closure in hearing 'what' they were doing."

Even by Koranic standards, it was not religiously rational, but that religious impulse was the fire that stoked the killings.

Visiting Another World

Just returned from another of my pleasurable visits to Madagascar, a country that ranks much further down the poverty list to Kenya. It's a strange and beguiling place; Africa is so close, so many people seem African in looks (then again, many seem Polynesian) but it is not like Africa, or anywhere else. Some interesting contrasts to mainland Africa were:

* There appear to be no slums and the average Malagasy owns a house,most of them sturdy if traditional.

* Despite the obvious poverty, crime and especially violent crime, is a paltry fraction of Kenya's level.

* Many people openly state they wish they had been colonized by the British, not the French, when you say you are from Nairobi.

* The matatus are amazingly organized, with pre-booked seats for up-country travel(!), little offices for each company and no touts whatsoever.

* The women are beautiful and polyglot in novel ways, not that Kenyans lack beauty. The Malagasy generally are discreet and quiet - but not in the South.

* The dead are venerated, and regularly dug up and re-buried after a prolonged party. In Madagascar, the dead are more important than the living!

* There are almost no sects and tent churches, everyone attends a mainstream church.

The Last Word

From an interview today broadcast on UKs' Channel 4, Ms. Ayaan Ali Hirsi hits the nail and the truth squarely on the head:

Interviewer: "Some say that you have gained notoriety because you say what Westerners want you to say about Islam."

Ms. Ali: "On the contrary, I say what the Westerners do not want to hear about Islam. They do not want to confront (the reality of) what I say."

Perfect!

Dutch Courage

It seems Dutch MP Ayaan Ali Hirsi may not be moving to the USA any time soon, after witch-hunting Dutch immigration Minister Rita Verdonk was ordered by Parliament to hold back on cancelling Hirsi's Dutch citizenship.

The tale is more revealing of the culture wars in America than anything else. The American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think thank, welcomed Hirsi should she move countries. That is, American conservatives were willing to embrace a Third World black female who stands for religious tolerance and for women's rights, especially within Islam.

Contrast this to the leftist administrators of the USA's famed Yale University. Despite voiciferous objection, they granted a university place to high-school educated Ramtullah Hashemi. He is the former unrepentant official spokesman for the fanatical, misogynist Taliban 'government' of Afghanistan. Hashemi routinely defended stoning women to death for adultery and banning them from going to school or even from selling bread.

Thinkers say that the left long ago lost the battle of the mind in the West. Some even say the Western left is willing to appease the forces of intolerance, the way the intellectual classes of Europe fawned before fascism and Stalinism in the 1930's. Go figure.

Warmonger Fascist Bush Is.....Vindicated?

The gravest charge against George W. Bush is that he took the Coalition into war with Iraq in 2003, fully knowing Iraq had disposed of all it's WMD. However, now that volumes of captured documents from Iraq are becoming translated, it's clear that Saddam wanted to maintain to his own military, neighbouring countries, Iraq itself and the USA the belief that he had WMD until as late as December 2002.

An excellent article in the Christian Science Monitor reveals Saddam thought that the WMD he did possess in the 1991 Gulf War were the only things that kept the Coalition from toppling him then - and these would do so again in Gulf War II. He also needed to instill fear into the rebellious Shiites and Kurds he had previously gassed and terrorized, keep Iran guessing and maintain morale amongst his generals.

Saddam sent allies such as the Yemenis in 2002 to inform Dick Cheney that Iraq would retaliate with WMD if attacked, reinforcing belief that he possessed them. Vice President Tariq Aziz stated his generals were "stunned" and lost morale when he informed them in December 2002 that he actually had none and was bluffing. George Bush was not.

These documents of the innermost workings of Saddam's regime show that Bush made an error, but that he was right in saying every major intelligence agency in the world thought Saddam still had WMD and there was no reason to believe otherwise. Saddam wanted it that way.

Hold Her Down, You Zulu Warrior!

What is it about South African politicos that makes them turn into moonbats when it comes to HIV/AIDS? First we had the bizarro President, Thabo Mbeki, inviting all the AIDS cranks and wingding thinkers to conferences. There they doubted the existance of any virus. Mbeki thus enraged Nelson Mandela and became a laughing stock amongst African scientists.

Now disgraced ex-VP Jacob Zuma, on trial for rape, not only admits he had sex with an HIV positive woman whose status he knew of, but that he afterwards "took a shower" because that way the risk of AIDS was "very low".

The fact is that Zuma, a Zulu from a non-circumcising tribe, has a 6 to 8 fold higher chance of catching AIDS in any case. That the Vice President of a quasi-modern nation can propagate "unsafe sex followed by a shower" almost defies belief. This statement has undone years of work by safe-sex campaigners all over Southern Africa.

How should Zuma know his exceptional risk staus. Well, from a French medical study that confirmed beyond doubt that non-circumcised African males like Zuma are at extreme HIV risk. Where was this landmark study done? South Africa.

Geeks, The New Cultural Icons

Interesting to see a typical European approach to American electronic innovation. Having failed to come up with products that anyone would want to buy, let alone decent music, (French pop is ear-destroying rubbish), the French have decided to punish the world’s coolest company, Apple. So a digital format for encoding songs is “online culture”? I wonder what the geeks in Silicone Valley who thought up the iPod think of that?

France's Lower House of Parliament passed a law on Tuesday that could challenge Apple Computer's dominance of the online digital music market by making it open its iTunes store to portable music players other than its iPods.

"These clauses, which we hope will be taken up by other countries, notably at the European level, should prevent the emergence of a monopoly in the supply of online culture," Richard Cazenave and Bernard Carayon, National Assembly deputies from the ruling UMP party, said in a statement on Tuesday.

The US take on this?

"The vote today by French lawmakers is a direct attack on Apple's ability to design its own products and on the company's intellectual property rights, which will have a chilling effect on future innovation," said Jim Prendergast, the executive director of Americans for Technology Leadership.

"Apple could immediately pull its iTunes product from France, giving consumers less choice when it comes to popular digital music," he added.

If only they would. Then the French could listen eternally to Edith Piaf on bulky CD players.

Peace Activist = War Dupe?

After months of captivity, American Christian Peace Team “peace activist” Tom Fox, to use the MSM’s curious wording, has been found tortured and shot in Iraq. Fox was a man of firm convictions, knowing full well the likely dangers he and his fellow team members faced when they entered Iraq:

“If Jesus and Gandhi are right, then I am asked to risk my life, and if I lose it to be as forgiving as they were when murdered by the forces of Satan.”

Of course, Mohammed was neither Jesus nor Ghandi, but a man who led dozens of raids, sieges and attacks on other Arabs and Jews, and countenanced execution and assassination, even of surrendered prisoners, as a matter of course. Occasionally he and fellow Muslims took the wives of men killed captives as their own.

Who says so? Islamophobes? Christian right –wingers? Well, no. All this is taken from the most sacred Islamic Hadiths and the Koran itself. Any resemblance between Ghandi, Jesus and Mohammed is purely co-incidental.

Not wishing to disparage the memory of Tom Fox, are his ilk “peace activists” at all? Or could they more likely be called “war dupes”? Fox’s CPT group is exceptionally anti-American, anti-Israeli and pro-Muslim. They denounced the Coalition in Iraq, blamed all the violence on Bush and Blair and previously joined Palestinians in other anti-Israeli “peace activist” tours of the Middle East.

When newspapers published the Mohammed cartoons, even in captivity Fox and his fellow CPT members issued statements denouncing the abuse of their “gracious Muslim brothers”, as they stood over him with AK-47’s and throat-knives. The "apologies" were not, in this case, coerced but rather volontary.

Fox reminds one of fellow U.S. “peace activist” Rachel Corrie, crushed to death by an Israeli bulldozer. Rachel’s “peace” was relentless verbal, intellectual and propaganda assault by her group on one sides only – the Jews. After her death, radical Palestinian elements readily admitted they used people like Corrie as part of their “war activism”. So much for Ms. Corrie’s deluded pacifism.

From his quote about Jesus and Ghandi, Fox obviously had something of the traditional Christian martyr about him. Sadly, the Swords of Righteousness group who took him captive had the Islamic “shahid” concept of martyrdom, which is not the same. Christian martyrs have always been non-violent, as was Christ himself. Their suffering was persuasive in shaming the Romans and other persecutors into conversion. The Islamic “shahid” is just as likely to be violent, as was Muhammad. He can, after recent fatwa, even be a suicide bomber or homicide pilot. His violence is likely to be persuasive in intimidating others to convert to Islam.

The murder of Fox by Islamists was no doubt proceeded by all the “letter of the law” Koranic injunctions. As Fox was a person of the “kitab” ( Bible) they were not allowed to kill him right away. They had to offer him a chance to pay “jizya” (a tax on Christians and Jews) and “feel himself subdued” (Koran). If that failed, they had to offer him the chance of conversion to Islam,or death (Koran,Hadiths). Maybe Fox chose death – the actions of a brave, principled and sadly misguided man.

Martyrdom is meant to move us morally, as a spectacle, a narrative and a religious act. As Martin Roth points out, Stephen, the first Christian martyr, prayed for those who killed him, as Christ did for his killers when he was on the cross. Anyone who can't tell the difference between these theologies and those of jihad shahids is a theological imbecile....or a secularist. If it comes to choosing between Tom Fox and a shahid, I think we know which way most of the world wishes to go.

Burnout

Kenya is in the world media for all the wrong reasons, following the government's astounding raid on the Standard newspaper and KTN television. Masked policemen, rumours of "Russian" or "Bosnian" mercenaries, wholesale confiscation of computers, sabotaging equipment, burning piles of newspapers and an amazing admission by Kenya's hitherto respected police chief Hussein Ali that he neither knew about nor sanctioned the operation have left Kenyans and foreigners deeply disturbed. Citing "state security", the raids were sparked by reports that leading oppositionist Kalonzo Musyoka had secretly met President Mwai Kibaki. Such secret meetings in Kenya are so well-established that citizens are never surprised about them. The idea that schmoozing in State House between supposed "rivals" is a matter of "state security" has convinced nobody.

What is new is that in the relatively liberal state of media in Kenya, the internet was able to disseminate CCTV pictures of the mysterious raiders at work - something unthinkable a decade ago. Kenya is soon to pass the kind of puerile "freedom of the press" that used to give rise to media copy like this:

' Sources state that the perpetrator of the deed is a well known local tycoon from the area. However some say he could have been acting on orders from a higher authority.'

The burned out veteran generation of Kenya politicians are more and more like failing men, grasping feebly at a power which is passing to a younger generation, one that simply will not put up with "Big Man" politics any longer. The current government is like a rotting ship, the crew of which keep kicking new holes in the hull, as they sink. Few expect it to pass more months without a vote of no confidence - despite our bloated, hyena-like Members of Parliament, who have no wish to give up their enormous salaries and privileges for the hustle of a campaign.

Tutu Frootie

Having a sane voice in the old anti-apartheid struggle does not make you qualified to comment on other matters, except sometimes as an ass. Enter, braying, one Archbishop Desmond Tutu. The prattling prelate attended a UN conference on Danish cartoons in Qatar and said the following:

He lamented the negative stereotyping of Muslims and wondered why North Ireland's Protestants and Catholics, the Oklahoma City bombers or even the Nazis had never been labeled ''Christian terrorists.''

The IRA in Ireland are Marxists using religion as a Leninist 'front'. They have never been a Catholic religious movement. Secondly no Christian priest or minister encourages, blesses and sanctions bombings in Ireland - unlike the thousands of Muslim clerics who support such (and worse) worldwide. The Oklahoma bombers were agnostics bombing in the name of a non-religious ideology and the Nazis were materialists who openly despised religion.

Torquemada In A Turban

Post war children grew up listening to the stories of the appeasement of Europe towards fascism in the 1930's. Never could we experience how free thinking people then really felt, as they saw the dark clouds gathering. Now we can, thanks to religious fanatics who use Islam's name.

We also never really appreciated the vile pandering to fascism, in between bouts of dubious indignation, that many the Western left indulged in then, ending infamously in the 1939 The Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact. But now we can, seeing the contemporary left dance their grotesque piroutte with forces utterly destructive to everything we hold progressive. Do these useful idiots not know that radical Islam detests them the most? That they will be the first to feel the reality of creeping sharia?

"God Bless America" is a phrase they readily sneer at. "God Bless Hitler", carried by a Muslim, they cannot comment on. As a German newspaper wrote, "We can't really know what this sign is means". Indeed, Homo Occidentalis seems to have lost all ability to think when confronted with Torquemada in a turban.

Let us for a minute imagine a meeting of minds with the Mullahs. Let us, together with our witless MSM media, push with them the point that what has really offended Muslims is "images" of Mohammed, which are supposedly "forbidden" and especially derogatory ones. Let us propose a truce. The West will no longer publish any images of Mohammed - even flattering ones as Shias often do. Instead, we will vigorously, in every media, attack, criticise, evaluate, question and deny (if we wish to) his role as a prophet, a passage to God or even as a holy man, in the spirit of open religious discourse. Now ask yoursef, what will be the reaction of the Mullahs? We all know this answer.

After hundreds of years of enlightenment,science and liberalism, the West now stands apparently on the brink of negating the very fibre of it's free civilization, to return us to a dark age when bad religion, the more intolerant and ignorant the more effective, will rule our lives again, like an Islamic Inquisition. We sleep-walk to our doom,led by our Chamberlainesque elites. For "Peace In Our Time", think "Religious Peace In Our Time"...... and keep on walking.

Cartoonmania

Muslims all over the world are protesting, smashing, shooting, cursing, attacking and threatening everyone from Danes to kaffirs (unbelievers)  generally  regarding  mild cartoons, by Western satirical standards, of Mohammed published in an obscure Danish newspaper.  

Muslims would never  print cartoons of Jews or Christians in any way derogatory whatsoever. Which is why the renowned Arab newspaper Al-Quds published this, just one example of Muslim newspapers showing what not to publish and whom not to insult.

As we know, Islam is the religion of peace, tolerance and brotherhood. Anyone who does know know this is subject to prosecution under Section 121.(2) of the new British ‘Racial and Religious Hatred Act,  2006'.

Having read the Gospels and Epistles and then the Koran, I have to say that ‘Christianity’ and ‘ Muhometanism’ ( to use the quaint expression of former times) are, as CNN or any other liberal newsorg will tell you, really just one and the same. For example, we all remember in the Gospels the many lines that resemble these  from the Koran, with the chapter and verse in brackets:

Non-believers are: the “worst of created beings” (98:6), are “miscreants” (2:99, 24:55), are the worst beasts in Allah’s sight (8:22, 8:55); (Christians and/or Jews are) turned into “apes and/or pigs” (2:65-66, 5:58-60, 7:166); (idolaters are) unclean (9:28); “evil” is upon them (16:27), evil (2:91, 2:99); “wicked” (80:42, 9:125); the “wrong-doers” (42:45, 2:254, 5:45); evil-doers (42:44); they have no good in them (8:23); are “guilty” for disbelieving (45:31, 83:29); on the side of Satan and are fighting for him (4:76-77); of the party of Satan (58:19); Allah assigns them devils for protecting friends (7:27); they choose devils for protecting friends (7:30); are partisan against Allah (25:55); “enemy” and “perverted” (63:4); disgraced lives (22:9); hypocrites (4:61); have a “diseased heart” (2:10, 9:125); are ill (84:20); deaf, dumb, and blind, and have no sense (2:171); deaf and dumb and in darkness, Allah sends them astray (6:39); have no sense (5:103); a folk who do not understand (9:127); their fathers were unintelligent and had no knowledge or guidance (2:170, 5:104); are “a folk without intelligence”/ “most ignorant” (8:65, 6:111); losers who are deceived by Allah (2:6), and deceived by Satan (4:60); liars/they lie (2:10, 9:42, 16:39, 16:105, 59:11) “losers” (7:179); foolish and liars (7:66), liars and losers (58:18-19), in false pride and schism (38:2), the lowest of the low (95:4-6).

What to do about such people? The Koran and Hadith (epistles), like the Gospels, tells us repeatedly to kill, behead, crush, burn, fight, treat harshly, rape, tax, place in ghettos and so on all the above categories of wicked persons.  The Sermon on the Mount and the preaching from Mecca are really identical. Jesus Christ, as did Mohammed, led numerous wars, fought 36 offensive battles, supervised a number of massacres including that of beheading 800 Jews, married the women of those he had executed and had a 9 year old wife. All religions are equally the same and cannot be criticised. So saith the Book of Multiculturalism 2:36

George W. Chirac,Warmonger

They say that Europe eventually follows everything America does, but only  later. Who ever thought we would hear this? (Hat tip: the excellent Eurosoc).

In his speech, Mr. Chirac bluntly declared, "In numerous countries, radical ideas are spreading, advocating a confrontation of civilizations."  As a French official put it,  "This is more than a clash of civilizations. It is a cancer within our country that if unchecked will destroy all of France."

Chirac continued,

"The leaders of states who use terrorist methods against us, as well as those who consider using in one way or another weapons of mass destruction, must understand that they would expose themselves to a firm and appropriate response on our part,"  referring to France’s nuclear capability.

No Free Speech Please, We’re British

The gravest threat to free speech is contained in the republished Racial and Religious Hatred Bill. The Blair government is ignoring the wisdom of the House of Lords, who insisted that only speech containing threats of violence ( in effect, verbal assault) should be so covered. The British government have re-introduced the previous broad clauses with different language.

If Parliament passes this bill in the forthcoming vote, one hopes British people will engage in massive civil disobedience and that the Lords will once again rescue the populace from this corrupt legislation.  Excellent rebuttals of this legislation are all over the Internet, for example  Ecclesia’s site here. As usual, Blair won’t listen.

Indeed the only group openly campaigning for this bill are  some fundamentalist  Muslims, especially ones who wish to  use future litigation against other communities to silence  the ancient British rights to praise, ridicule, attack, support or take the absolute micky out of anyone, as they see fit. Indeed cynics are right that it is simply pandering to extreme Muslims to offset Labour’s woes over Iraq involvement.

The right to offend by free speech is also the right to confront power, to ridicule it and mock it. Why should religious power be exempted from this?

In seeking to sanitize all possibility of offense from religious commentary, the Government is abusing human rights in Britain, and will cause enmity between communities, rather than foster tolerance. British Christians, the secular and particularly writers and artists in Britain are  against this bill.

Why indeed should we stop with religious or racial hatred acts? Why not make all forms of offense "hate crimes", including against  the obese, the thin, people from Essex, French farmers, the rural or for that matter, politicians, who seem intent to undo the fundamental right of everyone in Britain to take the piss out of anyone they choose?

The spectre of British police being used a ideological or theological thought-crime investigators is so repellant and orwellian what we must seriously wonder if a free society is possible when the right to offend
the powerful or the established is taken away from the people. And this by those elected to guard our very freedoms.

UPDATE: Due to intense pressure, the worst parts of this  bill were happily defeated on 1st February, only the second defeat in the House of Commons in the Blair government reign.  Regrettably the ‘thoughtcrime’ of ‘hatred’ in various other forms was still included.  

Skinny Dipping

Wonderful news for Kenya’s tourist industry – the US navy has intercepted a Somali pirate ship, fired across it’s bows  and detained 10 ‘skinnies’, the US forces nickname for Somali gunmen. They also freed 16 Indian crewmen the pirates had captured. Sailors aboard the dhow told the US  Navy that pirates hijacked the vessel six days ago near Mogadishu and  then used it to stage  attacks on merchant ships.

It was not long ago that our tours industry suffered a major blow when these same Somali  pirates attacked an American cruise ship on it’s way to  Mombasa.  Naturally everyone in Kenya is relieved and I doubt we will be hearing the usual  anti-American chatter from our  biased news media.

My Compedium of