GayandRight

My name is Fred and I am a gay conservative living in Ottawa. This blog supports limited government, the right of the State of Israel to live in peace and security, and tries to expose the threat to us all from cultural relativism, post-modernism, and radical Islam. I am also the founder of the Free Thinking Film Society in Ottawa (www.freethinkingfilms.com)

Friday, October 31, 2008

Death threats and violence at muslim art exhibit in London.....

Here we go again....
Muslim artist, Sarah Maple has been criticized in the past for how she depicts her religion in her work, but her latest exhibition in London has triggered a new wave of intimidation, death threats and even violence.

Since putting the 23-year-old’s exhibit on display on Oct. 16, SaLon gallery in Notting Hill has received a string of violent emails and phone calls about the artist and her family, according to the British Broadcasting Company.

Maple’s exhibit is filled with controversial self-portraits of the artist wearing a headscarf posing in provocative ways, the BBC reported. In one painting she also bares a breast.

But gallery owners believe it was a painting of the artist in a headscarf holding a pig that triggered the violence, according to the BBC.

Ejaz Aslam of the Muslim Cultural Center told the BBC, the contrast of those two images is “highly offensive” to Muslims.

Maple told the network, “I just want to make valid points about East and West cultures and whether we can combine the two successfully.”

The gallery itself was also targeted when woman wearing a burka threatened gallery workers earlier this week, and again when the glass front of the gallery was smashed on Tuesday, the London Telegraph reported. SaLon has since enlisted 24-hour police protection.

Alaskan glaciers grow.....

You won't see this in the mainstream press....
A bitterly cold Alaskan summer has had surprising results. For the first time in the area's recorded history, area glaciers have begun to expand, rather than shrink. Summer temperatures, which were some 3 degrees below average, allowed record levels of winter snow to remain much longer, leading to the increase in glacial mass.

"In mid-June, I was surprised to see snow still at sea level in Prince William Sound", said glaciologist Bruce Molnia. "In general, the weather this summer was the worst I have seen in at least 20 years".

"On the Juneau Icefield, there was still 20 feet of new snow on the surface [in] late July. At Bering Glacier, a landslide I am studying [did] not become snow free until early August."

Molnia, who works for the US Geological Survey, said it's been a "long time" since area glaciers have seen a positive mass balance -- an increase in the total amount of ice they contain.

T. Boone Pickens cuts back...

I hope this means we won't see more of his stupid TV commercials...
The multibillion dollar project to build the world's biggest wind farm in Texas has been delayed because of the fall-out from the credit crunch and the drop in the price of natural gas, it emerged today.

T Boone Pickens, a renowned Texan oilman who is raising the capital for the wind farm, told a US television station today that the twofold problem was slowing down his ambitious plan. Pickens, who made a fortune from the oil industry but has been converted to renewable energy as a means of ending US dependence on foreign oil, announced the original plan for the wind farm last year and construction was supposed to start in 2010.

"I think it is all going to be put off because we have got the credit crunch, one, but, two, natural gas prices [are down], so you are going to price wind off natural gas power and right now natural gas is so cheap there will be no new wind deals until natural gas price gets back up," he said. Natural gas prices are hovering around $6.80 per million British thermal unit (BTUs) down almost 50% since July.

Over the same time period, Pickens's hedge fund BP Capital has lost $2bn — or 60% of its value — since peaking in June. And according to a Wall Street Journal report, investors are bailing out.

Another contradiction in global warming theory.....

But, nobody in the mainstream press will notice....
Scientists at MIT have recorded a nearly simultaneous world-wide increase in methane levels. This is the first increase in ten years, and what baffles science is that this data contradicts theories stating man is the primary source of increase for this greenhouse gas. It takes about one full year for gases generated in the highly industrial northern hemisphere to cycle through and reach the southern hemisphere. However, since all worldwide levels rose simultaneously throughout the same year, it is now believed this may be part of a natural cycle in mother nature - and not the direct result of man's contributions.

Thursday, October 30, 2008

Durban II set to be another Israel hate-fest...

And the NDP actually want Canada to attend the event...
Earlier this month, a UN committee stacked with dictatorships (Libya, Iran, Cuba, etc.) produced a provisional blueprint for the Spring, 2009 "Durban Review Conference," an international confab organized to promote the "Programme of Action" that came out of the original, disastrous 2001 World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa.

Since Durban I has become a byword for anti-Semitism and anti-Western extremism, the forthcoming Durban II confab is widely expected to be a farce (Canada and Israel have already announced they won't be attending). And so relatively few pundits seem to have bothered wading through the UN's characteristically turgid pre-conference planning documentation.

But faced with a slow news day, I decided to take a crack.

Four hours later, I don't recommend the exercise. The five-part "Draft Outcome Document" contains 88 pages and 646 provisions. Most of it consists of boilerplate repetition of the same small handful of themes (encapsulated well in this UN Watch report): (1) Racism is everywhere, (2) The fault for this lies with the West, because of its "genocidal" legacy of slavery and colonization, (3) "Islamophobia" and discrimination against "people of African descent" are especially prevalent and pernicious, and (4) Israel is a blight upon nations (Paragraphs 114-117 of Section 1, for instance, are dedicated exclusively to bashing the Jewish state. No other country comes in for singling out in the whole document). In many cases, whole paragraphs are repeated several times over (such as a lengthy Jimmy Carteresque screed about Israel promoting "a new kind of apartheid").

China won't curb its CO2 emissions....

Well, I guess they would if we paid them....
China issued a major policy on climate change Wednesday, acknowledging its own growing contribution to the problem and its increased vulnerability to a warming planet, but arguing that rich nations should pay poorer countries for the giant costs of cleaning up.

"Based on information we have at hand, our emission level is roughly the same as that of the United States," Xie Zhenhua, a deputy chief in charge of climate change policy at the National Development and Reform Commission, China's top economic policy-making body, said at a news conference. But "whether our emissions are higher than the United States is not what really matters," he added.

Instead, Chinese officials argue that the real issue is who will foot the bill for the costly cleanup. Mr. Xie said "developed countries should, at least, contribute 0.7% of their GDP" to help fund poorer countries fight global warming. The figure represents a possible opening for future climate-change negotiations, as China envisions some sort of global climate tax.

The 44-page report comes ahead of an international conference on climate change next month in Beijing, organized by the U.N. and the Chinese government to help promote the exchange of green technologies. It details what steps China has taken to ease pollution, and the costs to its agriculture and environment from rising temperatures.

Even more crucial will be a meeting in December in Poland to start negotiations over what to do after the U.N.-backed Kyoto Protocol on climate change expires in 2012. Under the Kyoto Protocol, developing nations, such as India and China, were exempt from limits on greenhouse-gas emissions. Some rich countries, such as the U.S., which didn't join the treaty, said excluding poor countries basically added an unfair burden to rich nations while allowing poorer countries to keep polluting.

China argues that because rich countries had contributed the bulk of greenhouse gasses during their industrialization, they should foot the bill for cleaning up. But when Kyoto was first negotiated, scientists had greatly underestimated the speed with which China's economy would grow.

Now, by some estimates, China has already matched or surpassed U.S. levels of greenhouse gasses as its economy works in overdrive, burning more coal, producing more steel and pouring more cement than any other country. Increasingly, scientists fear that failing to limit China's and India's greenhouse gasses could wipe out any gains made in the developed economies.

Malaysia jails bloggers....

Yes, they've decided to go after the really dangerous people in society....
The Malaysian government has applied its Internal Security Act (ISA) several times in recent weeks in order to protect citizens from the imminent threat of . . . bloggers. That’s right. The sixty-some jihadi militants, foreign agents and ethnic “rabble-rousers” locked away without prospect of trial in the country’s infamous Kamunting Detention Center were joined recently by a handful of minor opposition figures working the Internet fringe of Malaysian politics.

By definition, arbitrary arrest precludes any clear articulation of what legal offenses detainees may have committed. We are thus left to construe allegations of criminal activity based upon accusations made by various government spokespersons or politically affiliated groups.

Political blogger Raja Petra Kamarudin, already facing formal defamation charges for vilifying senior politicians, was detained under the ISA in September. Government leaders apparently judged Kamarudin a danger to society as a result of a blog post in which he rather indelicately argued that hypocrisy among Malaysia’s Muslim leadership is the root cause of moral decrepitude in the country. Although Islamist opposition figures have made such claims for years, Raja Petra’s statements, taken out of context, can easily be interpreted as criticism of Muslims in general rather than simply a rant against Malaysia’s current Muslim leaders. Government functionaries in charge of Islamic affairs took exception to a number of Raja Petra’s views including his assertion that “only Muslims talk about their religion non-stop while going against everything their religion stands for.” In the days preceding his arrest four government religious bodies filed complaints with the police alleging that the writer “insulted Malays, Muslims and Islam.”

Meanwhile, Teresa Kok, an opposition parliamentarian and Internet pamphleteer from Kuala Lumpur’s Seputeh district, was held for seven days under the ISA in September. Ms. Kok has built a successful political career around her image as an antagonist of Malaysia’s ruling patriarchy. She blends a knack for pop polemics with a commitment to serious human rights causes. In addition to her responsibilities to her constituency, she has lobbied Asean leaders to support the Burmese democracy movement and has urged the Malaysian government to broaden protection for the predominately Muslim Rohingya refugees fleeing the Burmese military state. It is thus surprising that religion was again used as a pretext for Ms. Kok’s detention. The self-described “Sassy MP” was allegedly detained for the subversive act of petitioning a local mosque to reduce the volume of its loudspeakers—an allegation Ms. Kok vehemently denies.

Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Some mighty cold weather in Florida....

And, we just got 15 cm. of snow here in Ottawa....
Sanibel residents and visitors were scrambling on Wednesday morning to dig their winter woolies out of storage a bit earlier than they expected, when they awoke to a chilly shocker: Temperatures on the island had plummeted overnight into the 40s.

“I think it’s terrible!” exclaimed winter resident Peggy Hupfeldt as she exited Bailey’s General Store around 8 a.m. clutching a steaming cup of coffee. “I’ve never seen it this cold in October.”

7-Up distributor Donny Ford said he didn’t find the blast of arctic air uncomfortable in the least. “I don’t think it’s cold at all,” he said as he entered Bailey’s wearing nothing heavier than a short-sleeved polo shirt.

The City of Sanibel’s official weather consultant Dave Roberts declared Sanibel’s low temperature to be 49 degrees early Wednesday morning. At Southwest Florida International Airport, the official record-breaking low temperature of 45 degrees was recorded at 5 a.m.

“It was the coldest Oct. 28th since 1892,” said Roberts.

Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Nothing like a good stoning....

Hey, nobody does stonings like the Islamists...
Somali Islamists have stoned to death a woman accused of adultery in the first such public killing by the militants for about two years, witnesses said.

The 23-year-old woman was placed in a hole up to her neck for the execution late on Monday in front of hundreds of people in a square of the southern port of Kismayu, which the Islamist insurgents captured in August.

Stones were hurled at her head, and she was brought out of the hole three times to see if she had died.

When a relative and others surged forward, guards opened fire, killing a child, the witnesses said.

"A woman in green veil and black mask was brought in a car as we waited to watch the merciless act of stoning," one local resident, Abdullahi Aden, told Reuters.
"We were told she submitted herself to be punished, yet we could see her screaming as she was forcefully bound, legs and hands. A relative of hers ran towards her, but the Islamists opened fire and killed a child."

The Islamists last carried out public executions when they ruled Mogadishu and most of south Somalia for half of 2006. Allied Ethiopian and Somali government forces toppled them at the end of that year, but they have waged an Iraq-style guerrilla campaign since then, gradually taking territory back.

As when they ruled Mogadishu in 2006, the Islamists now controlling the Kismayu area are again providing much-needed security, but also imposing fundamentalist practices such as banning entertainment seen as anti-Islamic.

Relatives of the woman executed in Kismayu, whom they named as Asha Ibrahim Dhuhulow, were furious.

"The stoning was totally irreligious and illogical," said her sister, who asked not to be named. "Islam does not execute a woman for adultery unless four witnesses and the man with whom she committed sex are brought forward publicly."

Sunday, October 26, 2008

Wind Power is Just Smoke....

The British are being suckered....
Even in these dark times, it is still possible to be shocked when our Prime Minister personally endorses a flagrant perversion of the truth. Last year, for example, many of us felt outraged when Gordon Brown pretended that the Lisbon Treaty was somehow totally different from the EU Constitution, in order to wriggle out of his party's manifesto promise of a referendum. Last week Mr Brown in effect did it again when he endorsed the deception at the heart of his Government's wildly exaggerated claims about the benefits of using wind to make electricity.

In a video for the British Wind Energy Association, the industry's chief lobby group, Mr Brown claimed: "We are now getting 3 gigawatts of our electricity capacity from wind power, enough to power more than 1.5 million homes."

This deliberately perpetuates the central confidence trick practised by the wind industry, by confusing "capacity" with the actual amount of electricity wind produces. In fact, as the Government's own figures show, wind turbines generate on average only 27 to 28 per cent, barely a quarter, of their "capacity".

In other words, far from producing those "3 gigawatts", the 2,000 turbines already built actually contributed - again on official figures - an average of only 694 megawatts (MW) last year, less than the output of a single medium-size conventional power station. Far from producing "enough to power more than 1.5 million homes", it is enough to power barely a sixth of that number, representing only 1.3 per cent of all the electricity we use. Yet for this we have already blighted thousands of square miles of countryside, at a cost of billions of pounds.

Indeed, at the same BWEA-sponsored event, Mike O'Brien, energy minister, went on to perpetuate the second confidence trick practised by both Government and industry, which is to conceal the fact that all this is only made possible by the huge hidden subsidy given to wind energy through the Renewables Obligation. This compels electricity companies to pay way over the odds for the power generated by wind turbines, a burden passed on to us all in our electricity bills.

Mr O'Brien claimed that the cost of electricity generated by offshore wind turbines would drop by 8 per cent, failing to explain that it would then be raised by 50 per cent through the hidden subsidy. He then soared even further into make-believe by saying that he was "assessing plans" to build a further 25GW-worth of offshore turbines by 2020, "enough electricity for every home in the country".

Mr O'Brien must know that there is not the remotest chance that we could build the 10,000 monster turbines needed to achieve this, at a rate of more than two a day, when it takes weeks to instal each vast machine. At present, of the giant barges needed for the work, there is only one in the world. Even if it were possible, the construction costs alone, on current figures, would be anything up to £100 billion - the price of 37 nuclear power stations, capable of producing nearly 10 times as much electricity - while the subsidies alone would add £6 billiion a year more, or 25 per cent, to our electricity bills.

Why do our ministers think they can get away with talking such nonsense?

Friday, October 24, 2008

Crackdown on Gays in Bahrain....

Sounds like they are getting lax in Bahrain!
The new session of Parliament in the Gulf state of Bahrain began this week with calls for a crackdown on gays.

Al Menbar MP Shaikh Mohammed Khalid Mohammed wants the government to begin a number of initiatives designed to rid the country of gay people.

"We have homosexual rates on the rise, with such people working in flower shops, massage parlours or barber's salons," he said.

"Sluts walk around residential neighbourhoods untouched."

In April Parliament demanded that the Interior Ministry stop granting any residence permits to foreign homosexuals.

Bahrain is known as one of the more tolerant Muslim nations in the Middle East, and has recently undergone a period of political liberalisation.

However, homosexuality remains a crime, and the government has periodically deported expatriates because of their sexual orientation.

Bahrain only held its first elections in 2002, and since then politicians have mainly addressed themselves to "moral" issues such as banning female mannequins from shop windows and tackling the widespread problem of "sorcery."

The bicameral parliament is dominated by Shia and Sunni Islamist parties.

Homosexuality has been considered illegal in Bahrain since 1956 when, as part of the British Empire, it was given the Indian Penal Code.

Homosexuals can be given up to 10 years in prison though this is rarely put into practice.

In 2002 the government deported 2,000 allegedly gay Filipino workers for homosexual activity and prostitution.

AqsaTube - the latest films from Hamas....

Yay....we can now see the latest suicide bomber films...
An Israeli intelligence think-tank and a Hamas video Web site seem to be playing a game of cat-and-mouse with each other.

Last week the Intelligence Terrorism Information Center, a Ramat Hasharon-based research center closely associated with Israel's Shin Bet and Military Intelligence, released a report detailing the establishment by Hamas of AqsaTube, a video-sharing web platform closely modeled on the popular YouTube, but filled with videos praising suicide martyrdom and showing how to build bombs and carry out attacks.

Following publication of the story in The Jerusalem Post, Google removed its AdSense program from the Hamas Web site, and one day later, AqsaTube's French Internet Service Provider OVH took the Islamist site off-line.

But on Wednesday, AqsaTube was back up, bigger and more brazen than before.

The Hamas site obtained a new service provider, a new logo, brand new videos and some new ads. The graphic design of the site underwent a number of changes. The original logo, whose color was almost identical with that of YouTube, was now yellow and gray and bore its name in Arabic and a picture of the Aksa Mosque. The site was still registered to Abu Nasser Skandar, from Dubai.

On Thursday, the ITIC released its second report on AqsaTube, detailing its return and all its new features. In a carefully calculated move, the ITIC, in its report, highlighted a video on AqsaTube praising deceased Chechen terrorist Kuttab.

Thursday, October 23, 2008

Planet Obsession Latest New Mental Illness....

Sounds like we'll need a huge government program to treat these people....
Do you feel anxious when you see a television set left on standby? Does the sight of a plastic bottle haphazardly tossed into a paper-only recycling bin make you feel nauseous? Are you consumed with rage when someone has left an empty room and not switched off the light?

Have you recently found yourself overcome with a desire to spit on your car-driving friends and family? When a loved one tells you that he is flying off for some winter sun, do you feel like bludgeoning him over the head with a blunt instrument until he appears no longer to be breathing?

If so, don't worry! You are probably suffering from "carborexia", Or "energy anorexia". Psychiatrists in America have identified a new mental illness that threatens the very fabric of society: an obsession with saving the planet. Some people are so addicted to cutting their carbon emissions that they seem to have gone quite mad.

Take, for example, Sharon Astyk, who makes her four children sleep in a huddle so she doesn't have to turn on the heating (if she was that concerned about the planet, perhaps she could have stopped reproducing after baby number two).

Or Jay Matsueda, who waters his lawn with his own urine so that he doesn't have to flush the loo; he says that it was his ex-girlfriend's choice of gas-guzzling car, rather than his habit of weeing on the grass, that led to the break-down of their relationship.

China's CO2 Emissions to Double....

There can be no significant reduction in world-wide CO2 emissions with China moving on its current path...
China's greenhouse gas pollution could double or more in two decades says a new Chinese state think-tank study that casts stark light on the industrial giant's role in stoking global warming.

Beijing has not released recent official data on greenhouse gas from the nation's fast-growing use of coal, oil and gas. Researchers abroad estimate China's carbon dioxide emissions now easily outstrip that of the United States, long the biggest emitter.

But in a break with official reticence, researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and other major state-run institutes have concluded that, without dramatic counter-steps, their nation's emissions will tower over all others' much sooner and higher than an earlier government forecast indicated.

The projected leap in emissions underscores the pressures that China will face in looming climate change negotiations, and the immense challenges it will face in meeting any commitments.

By 2020, China's burning of fossil fuels could annually emit carbon dioxide equal in mass to 2.5 billion metric tonnes of pure carbon and up to 2.9 billion tonnes, depending on varying scenarios for development and technology, the new report states. By 2030, those annual emissions may reach 3.1 billion tonnes a year and up to 4.0 billion tonnes.

That compares with global carbon emissions of about 8.5 billion tonnes in 2007. Emissions are also often estimated in tonnes of Co2, which weighs 3.67 times as much as carbon alone.

Muslims block gay issues at the UN.....

The Muslim countries always play such a constructive role...
The Organisation of the Islamic Conference has secured a deal in which they will withdraw their opposition to a Brazilian gay NGO gaining accredited status at the UN in return for a ban on gay, lesbian or transgender issues being discussed.

The deal was struck with the Brazilian Government. It will allow a Brazilian organisation - Associação Brasileira de Gays, Lésbicas, Bissexuais, Travestis e Transexuais (ABGLT) - to attend a conferences hosted by the UN’s ECOSOC (the agency tasked with ”encouraging universal respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms”) as long as it is agreed that the agenda will be limited to racial and religious discrimination. Homophobia and persecution of sexual minorities must not, by the terms of the agreement, be mentioned.

Some observers have reacted with alarm since the deal logically negates the purpose of any LGBT representation at the UN - which is to advocate for respect for the human rights of gay people.

Brazil has long been a champion of LGBT representation at the UN, introducing in 2003 a resolution on ‘Human rights and sexual orientation’ - the so-called “Brazilian Resolution“. However, securing the gagged participation of ABGLT under these terms may be too much of a compromise.

Almost all Islamic countries criminalise gay people and the only countries in the world that impose the death penalty for homosexuality are Islamic. What the OIC has achieved is silencing any criticism of the most barbaric offenders against LGBT people. Securing the ABGLT’s limited participation at this cost is actually a defeat, not a victory.

Wednesday, October 22, 2008

Drug ring in Columbia with Hezbollah ties...

This one was smashed, but how involved are Hezbollah in the South American drug trade???
Colombian authorities said on Tuesday they broke up a drug and money-laundering ring in an international operation that included the capture of three people suspected of shipping funds to Hezbollah guerrillas.

More than 100 suspects were arrested in Colombia and overseas on charges they trafficked drugs and laundered cash for Colombia's Norte del Valle cartel and for outlawed paramilitaries in a network that stretched from South America to Asia, the attorney's general office said.

"The criminal organisation used routes through Venezuela, Panama, Guatemala, Middle East and Europe, bringing in cash from the sale of these substances," the statement said.

Among those arrested in Colombia were three people suspected of coordinating drug smuggling to send some of their profits to groups such as Hezbollah, the office said.

Those suspects -- Chekry Mahmoud Harb, Ali Mohamad Abdul Rahim and Zacaria Hussein Harb -- used front companies to send drug cash overseas, it said without providing further details.

Renwables aren't being renewed....

Economic hard times for renewable energy...
For all the support that the presidential candidates are expressing for renewable energy, alternative energies like wind and solar are facing big new challenges because of the credit freeze and the plunge in oil and natural gas prices.

Shares of alternative energy companies have fallen even more sharply than the rest of the stock market in recent months. The struggles of financial institutions are raising fears that investment capital for big renewable energy projects is likely to get tighter.

Advocates are concerned that if the prices for oil and gas keep falling, the incentive for utilities and consumers to buy expensive renewable energy will shrink. That is what happened in the 1980s when a decade of advances for alternative energy collapsed amid falling prices for conventional fuels.

“Everyone is in shock about what the new world is going to be,” said V. John White, executive director of the Center for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Technology, a California advocacy group. “Surely, renewable energy projects and new technologies are at risk because of their capital intensity.”

Senator Barack Obama and Senator John McCain both promise ambitious programs to develop various kinds of alternative energy to combat global warming and achieve energy independence.

Mr. Obama talks of creating five million new jobs in renewable energy and nearly tripling the percentage of the nation’s electricity supplied by renewables by 2025. Mr. McCain has run television advertisements showing wind turbines and has pledged to make the United States the “leader in a new international green economy.”

But after years of rapid growth, the sudden headwinds facing renewables point to slowing momentum and greater dependence on government subsidies, mandates and research financing, at a time when Washington is overloaded with economic problems.

John Woolard, chief executive officer of BrightSource Energy, a solar company, said he believed the long-term future for renewables remained promising, though “right now we are looking at tumultuous and unpredictable capital markets.”

Venture capital financing for some advanced solar projects and for experimental biofuels, like ethanol made from plant wastes, is drying up, according to analysts who track investment flows.

At least two wind energy companies have had to delay projects in recent days because of trouble raising capital. Several corn ethanol projects have been delayed for lack of financing in Iowa and Oklahoma since last month, and one plant operator in Ohio filed for bankruptcy protection last week.

Tesla Motors, the maker of battery-powered cars, recently announced it had been forced to delay production of its all-electric Model S sedan, close two offices and lay off workers.

Tuesday, October 21, 2008

6 navy ships protects Britain's shores...

They know about all the air flights into and out of the UK...but not boats...
Lord West was giving evidence as the committee investigates Britain's defences against terrorism.

The minister also disclosed his concerns about the monitoring of Britain's coastline by the Royal Navy and other authorities.

There are only six navy ships permanently assigned to patrol the 11,000 miles of the British coast, the committee heard.

Lord West, a former admiral, said that there is no way for the UK authorities to track every vessel entering British waters.

"We are not able to monitor all traffic in our waters. It is not what I would call, ultimately, satisfactory," he said.

"When you look into the sky, generally, we pretty well know what is moving. We don't know that around our waters.

"I think it would be quite a good thing to have a very good picture of what is moving around our coast."

James Arbuthnot, the Tory chair of the defence committee, said he was listening the minister's answers "with increasing horror."

20-year-old Jewish man assaulted in Amsterdam....

And, the police kicked him out of the police station....this is the translation through FoxLingo..
A 20 person whose birthday it is orthodoxe Jewish man Saturday in the buurt of the Olympiaplein in Amsterdam-Zuid have been insulted and have been maltreated heavily.

he director of Centre information and documentation Israel (CIDI), Ronny Naftaniel, have confirmed the event compared with elsevier.nl. He speaks of a seriously anti-Semitic incident.

The victim, recognizable as a Jew because of keppel on its head, Saturday afternoon by to own says two Moroccan looking forward to boys for cancer Jew was insulted. Then the victim what was their problem, he asked by the pair was pursued and in each other geslagen. Also after he had fallen already on the ground they continued kick in on him.

The boy wants do vervolgens declaration at police force in Amsterdam Buitenveldert, but these were refused. Then the victim at us knocked we let us be exactly busy with a overval as a result of which were no agents present on the office there, a spokesman of the police force says against elsevier.nl.

Monday, October 20, 2008

Did Iran attempt to use a dirty bomb against Israel???

I can't find any original sources for this story.....comments???
On August 21st, 2008, the MV Iran Deyant, 44,458 dead weight bulk carrier was heading towards the Suez Canal. As it was passing the Horn of Africa, about 80 miles southeast of al-Makalla in Yemen, the ship was surrounded by speedboats filled with members of a gang of Somalian pirates who grab suitable commercial ships and hold them and their cargos and crews for ransom. The captain was defenseless against the 40 pirates armed with AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenades blocking his passage. He had little choice other than to turn his ship over to them. What the pirates were not banking on, however, was that this was no ordinary ship.

The MV Iran Deyanat is owned and operated by the Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Lines (IRISL) - a state-owned company run by the Iranian military that was sanctioned by the U.S. Department of the Treasury on September 10, shortly after the ship’s hijacking.

According to the U.S. Government, the company regularly falsifies shipping documents in order to hide the identity of end users, uses generic terms to describe shipments to avoid the attention of shipping authorities, and employs the use of cover entities to circumvent United Nations sanctions to facilitate weapons proliferation for the Iranian Ministry of Defense. The MV Iran Deyanat departed Nanjing, China, July 28, and, according to its manifest, planned to sail to Rotterdam, where it would offload 42,500 tons of iron ore and “industrial products” purchased by an unidentified “ German client”. The ship has a crew of 29 men, including a Pakistani captain, an Iranian engineer, 13 other Iranians, 3 Indians, 2 Filipinos, and 10 Eastern Europeans, stated to be Albanians.

The MV Iran Deyanat was brought to Eyl, a sleepy fishing village in northeastern Somalia, and was secured by a larger gang of pirates - 50 onboard and 50 onshore. The Somali pirates attempted to inspect the ship’s seven cargo containers but the containers were locked. The crew claimed that they did not have the “access codes” and could not open them. Pirates have stated they were unable to open the hold without causing extensive damage to the ship, and threatened to blow it up. The Iranian ship’s captain and the engineer were contacted by cell phone and demanded to disclose the actual nature of the mysterious “powdered cargo” but the captain and his officers were very evasive. Initially they said that the cargo contained “crude oil” but then claimed it contained “minerals.” Following this initial rebuff, the pirates broke open one of the containers and discovered it to be filled with packets of what they said was “a powdery fine sandy soil” ….

Within a period of three days, those pirates who had boarded the ship and opened the cargo container with its gritty sand-like contents, all developed strange health complications, to include serious skin burns and loss of hair. And within two weeks, sixteen of the pirates subsequently died, either on the ship or on shore.

Although American intelligence and government sources are maintaining a strictly observed silence, the same does not apply to the Russians and so it is that we learn the real story of the MV Iran Deyanat. She was an enormous floating dirty bomb, intended to detonate after exiting the Suez Canal at the eastern end of the Mediterranean and in proximity to the coastal cities of Israel. The entire cargo of radioactive sand, obtained by Iran from China (the latter buys desperately needed oil from the former) and sealed in containers which, when the charges on the ship are set off after the crew took to the boats, will be blasted high into the air where prevailing winds will push the highly dangerous and radioactive cloud ashore.

No warming since 1995....

Here's a view of global warming from Finland...
It has been widely discussed if the satellite-derived global temperature measurements that show only little warming should be more reliable than the temperatures obtained on the ground that show more warming. But after 1995 both sources show about the same, (see graphs below drawn from Hadley-data (ground) and satellite data (NASA)).

A good reason to start a diagram from 1995 is that since that year no big (cooling) volcano eruptions have disturbed the temperature trend. Contrary to common belief, there has been no or little global warming since 1995 and this is shown by two completely independent datasets.

The curves look very normal and it seems probable that the natural recovery from the little ice age has went on without any significant decelerations or accelerations caused by human activity.

It is impossible to say what is going to happen in the future. But so far, real measurements give no ground for concern about a catastrophic future warming.

New Coal Plants in Germany.....

...means they won't be able to meet their CO2 emissions targets...
Building new coal-power plants in Germany means the country will miss government targets to cut carbon-dioxide emissions, the environmental ministry said, countering earlier claims by Environment Minister Sigmar Gabriel.

Wind blows into trouble in the UK.....

The UK won't be able to meet its renewables targets...
A major threat to Britain's ambitions for renewable energy will emerge this week when wind industry leaders admit that targets set for 2020 are looking increasingly unrealistic.

They will use a high-profile conference in London to warn Gordon Brown that there is little chance of achieving the government's goal - of wind generating one third of all UK electricity within 12 years - without a huge injection of public money.

It comes as an Observer investigation reveals that planning delays, long delivery times, escalating costs, 10-year hold-ups in connection to the national grid and technical problems in building offshore windfarms all threaten to derail Brown's ambitions. The result could be electricity shortages by 2020, failure to meet climate change and energy targets and possible hefty fines from Europe.

The developments will come as a blow to the government. Last week Ed Miliband, the new minister for climate change, said Britain would increase its target for reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 from 60 to 80 per cent.

Brown will tell delegates at the annual conference of the British Wind Energy Association (BWEA) this week that the UK industry is now a world leader. But others will claim that there is a severe shortage of engineers and companies are reviewing their commitments to wind energy because of spiralling costs. Britain is legally committed to generating 15 per cent of all energy from renewables by 2020. This means that wind power, which presently contributes about 4 per cent of UK electricity, must expand to generate 36 per cent within 12 years.

New studies warn of looming financial and supply problems. Last week the Carbon Trust, a government agency, warned that the steep rise in the price of building offshore farms could undermine the whole project. 'Currently the risk/return balance for offshore wind is not sufficiently attractive, and regulatory barriers would delay delivery well beyond 2020,' it said.

Tom Delay, the Trust's chief executive, added: 'Industry costs have become very, very expensive, and both government and companies need to work hard to tackle this. Without urgent action, there is a risk that little additional offshore wind power will be built by 2020.'

Cambridge Energy Research Associates says that Britain should expect a 20 per cent increase in offshore wind capital costs over the next few years on top of the 50 per cent increase in the past three years.

Sunday, October 19, 2008

Will the Dutch cave in on this mosque???

I bet the Dutch will give in and let this proceed....
Turkish mosque organisation Milli Gorus has started construction of the controversial Wester mosque in Amsterdam without permission. About 100 Muslims symbolically drove the first pile into the ground.

Milli Gorus does not have the necessary documentation for the construction. The Turkish organisation is involved in a long-running dispute about this with government organisation Stadgenoot. This is the Amsterdam housing corporation (formerly called Het Oosten) which co-financed and developed the project.

Stadgenoot does not believe the mosque will be built quickly. "We have not understood Milli Gorus any more for some time. They just engage in mud-slinging, and now they say all of a sudden that they are beginning construction, though this is absolutely not allowed. I think that they want to make a symbolic statement," said a spokesman.

There has been wrangling over the mosque for years. This began shortly after a symbolic first brick was laid by the then Justice Minister Piet Hein Donner. He called the project a "symbol of integration" - but this statement rapidly turned out to be untenable.

Milli Gorus withdrew from a contract in which it was specified that the mosque would proclaim a moderate Islamic message. Subsequently, various media reported that the leadership of the present, smaller mosque that wants to base itself in the Wester mosque was perpetrating fraud running into millions with fictitious Islamic investment funds. The Public Prosecutor's Office (OM) however found no evidence.

Still, Amsterdam Mayor Job Cohen could not do otherwise than halt the construction. Stadgenoot has since withdrawn from the mosque project and is only building the offices and housing that were part of the project - not the mosque.

Because a new, unknown investor was found, construction can after all begin, according to Milli Gorus. It say sStadgenoot is withholding documents that make the construction legally impossible.

But Stadgenoot says these documents do not exist at all. "Milli Gorus simply does not have its affairs in order, and is trying to blame this on us." The Turkish organisation is however threatening a court case "if Stadgenoot does not hand over the documents."

The mosque is intended to be one of the biggest in Europe. The style is Ottoman, with high minarets and a large central dome. Mayor Cohen has repeatedly said he hopes the mosque can eventually be built after all.

Saturday, October 18, 2008

Climate craziness continues....

Christopher Booker continues to lead the field in reporting on the silliness of the global warming crowd...
Ed Miliband, our new Energy and Climate Change Secretary, has committed Britain, at this moment of financial meltdown, to an 80 per cent reduction of “carbon emissions” by 2050 – which must go down as the most fatuous utterance ever made by a British Cabinet minister (immediately supported by the Tory shadow spokesman).

The only way this goal could be achieved would be to shut down almost the whole of our economy.

A slightly firmer grasp on reality prevails in those countries, led by Poland and Italy, which were last week in Brussels urging the EU to moderate its plans to reduce carbon emissions, on the grounds that this was not the moment to be piling onto Europe’s economies costs amounting to trillions of euros.

But Gordon Brown, alongside the Commission President, José Manuel Barroso, was at the forefront of those insisting that the EU must stick to its guns.

Brussels’s only concession came from the Environment Commissioner, Stavros Dimas, who said he would increase from 35 per cent to just over 50 per cent the amount of “carbon credits” which European industry would be allowed to buy from the developing world under the UN’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM).

In other words, for the right to continue emitting CO2 in Europe, firms would be permitted to pay hundreds of billions of euros to China, India and elsewhere.

The net result would be to impose astronomic costs on those firms, such as electricity suppliers, which cannot move their operations outside Europe (costs to be passed on to their customers) with little or no effect on emissions.

Just how crazy this system is already becoming was illustrated by a programme broadcast by the BBC World Service last June (and reported here) which highlighted several examples of the CDM in action.

A small Indian chemical firm, for instance, already receives up to $60 million a year for eliminating emissions of CFC greenhouse gases from its process.

A company spokesman admitted that it would have eliminated the CFCs anyway.

The $500 million it is due to receive over the next 10 years is just a free gift, to achieve nothing.

So this insanity gathers way on every side, creating fortunes for the “carbon traders” who broker the deals, all in the name of preventing global temperatures rising.

Yet for several years now, while greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise, temperatures have ceased to rise, and even fallen, making a nonsense of all those computer models that predicted that one must rise with the other.

Will Kingston teach the truth about Islamic History????

October is Islamic History Month.....but will people be taught the truth???
WHEREAS Canada's national cultural heritage is the sum total of the way Canadians from every background identify and express themselves; and,

WHEREAS Islamic civilization and heritage belongs not only to Muslim Canadians, but to all Canadians; and,

WHEREAS for more than 1000 years, Muslims made significant contributions to the well-being of humanity in numerous fields of endeavour; and,

WHEREAS Canadians of the Islamic faith are vital contributors to the fabric of Canadian society; and,

WHEREAS the histories of Canadians of the Islamic faith contribute to the enrichment of Canadian history; and,

WHEREAS Islamic History Month Canada is an unprecedented made-in-Canada educational and cultural project, both novel and much-needed; and,

WHEREAS Islamic History Month Canada is a month in which Canadian Muslims celebrate their civilizations and heritage, and their many contributions to the arts, sciences, architecture, humanities, music, spirituality, and every human knowledge, as well as their links with other cultures; and,
How about the continuing Jihad? The hatred of Jews? The hatred of Gays? The horrible treatment of women? How about Muslim contributions to the science of suicide bombings? Their hatred of Israel? Their ejection of over 800,000 Jews from Muslim countries? Will any of this be taught?

Obama for President...

Christopher Hitchens endorses Obama and I agree. I have been stunned by McCain's performances at the debates. But, what most enraged me is not Sarah Palin - but the fact that McCain chose her without really knowing her.
On "the issues" in these closing weeks, there really isn't a very sharp or highly noticeable distinction to be made between the two nominees, and their "debates" have been cramped and boring affairs as a result. But the difference in character and temperament has become plainer by the day, and there is no decent way of avoiding the fact. Last week's so-called town-hall event showed Sen. John McCain to be someone suffering from an increasingly obvious and embarrassing deficit, both cognitive and physical. And the only public events that have so far featured his absurd choice of running mate have shown her to be a deceiving and unscrupulous woman utterly unversed in any of the needful political discourses but easily trained to utter preposterous lies and to appeal to the basest element of her audience. McCain occasionally remembers to stress matters like honor and to disown innuendoes and slanders, but this only makes him look both more senile and more cynical, since it cannot (can it?) be other than his wish and design that he has engaged a deputy who does the innuendoes and slanders for him.

Child porn and terrorism....

An interesting link...
It is thought Islamist extremists are concealing messages in digital images and audio, video or other files.

Police are now investigating the link between terrorists and paedophilia in an attempt to unravel the system.

It could lead to the training of child welfare experts to identify signs of terrorist involvement as they monitor pornographic websites.

The move follows the discovery of sex abuse material during investigations into a number of advanced suspected plots.

It is not clear yet whether the terrorists chose child pornography because of a personal interest or merely because it represents a useful medium for disseminating information.

Security officials have been puzzled at the use of such offensive material by people claiming to be devoted to the teachings of Islam.

"It shows that these people are very confused. Here they are hating Western decadence but actually making use of it and finding that they enjoy this stuff," a source told the Times.

British police were first alerted to the link in 2006 when they investigated the possible terror links of a former Mujahideen fighter who preached at a London mosque. They discovered computerised images of child abuse.

Five years earlier an investigation of a mosque run by an al-Qaeda recruiter in Milan found child pornography that police believe contained encoded messages.

Baroness Neville-Jones, Conservative security spokesman and former chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, said: "The information about a possible link between extremism and child pornography potentially provides useful insight into three things: the methods that extremists use to communicate; the methods they use to target vulnerable people in society; and the techniques they seek to use to conceal their online activities."

Thursday, October 16, 2008

The Greenhouse Gasbags....

Bjorn Lomborg gets it right once again...
HAVE you noticed how environmental campaigners almost inevitably say that not only is global warming happening and bad, but also that what we are seeing is even worse than expected?

This is odd, because any reasonable understanding of how science proceeds would expect that, as we refine our knowledge, we find that things are sometimes worse and sometimes better than we expected, and that the most likely distribution would be about 50-50. Environmental campaigners, however, almost invariably see it as 100-0.

If we are regularly being surprised in just one direction, if our models get blindsided by an ever-worsening reality, that does not bode well for our scientific approach.

Indeed, one can argue that if the models constantly get something wrong, it is probably because the models are wrong. And if we cannot trust our models, we cannot know what policy action to take if we want to make a difference.

Yet if new facts constantly show us that the consequences of climate change are getting worse and worse, high-minded arguments about the scientific method might not carry much weight. Certainly, this seems to be the prevailing bet in the spin on global warming. It is, again, worse than we thought and, despite our failing models, we will gamble on knowing just what to do: cut CO2 emissions dramatically.

But it is simply not correct that climate data are systematically worse than expected; in many respects, they are spot on, or even better than expected. That we hear otherwise is an indication of the media's addiction to worst-case stories, but that makes a poor foundation for smart policies.

The most obvious point about global warming is that the planet is heating up. It has warmed about 1C over the past century and is predicted by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to warm between 1.6C and 3.8C this century, mainly owing to increased CO2.

An average of all 38 available standard runs from the IPCC shows that models expect a temperature increase in this decade of about 0.2C.

But this is not at all what we have seen. And this is true for all surface temperature measures and even more so for both satellite measures. Temperatures in this decade have not been worse than expected; in fact, they have not even been increasing. They have actually decreased by between 0.01C and 0.1C a year.

On the most important indicator of global warming, temperature development, we ought to hear that the data are actually much better than expected.

Likewise, and arguably much more significantly, the heat content of the world's oceans has been dropping for the past four years where we have measurements. Whereas energy in terms of temperature can disappear relatively easily from the light atmosphere, it is unclear where the heat from global warming should have gone, and certainly this is again much better than expected.

We hear constantly about how the Arctic sea ice is disappearing faster than expected, and this is true. But most serious scientists also allow that global warming is only part of the explanation. Another part is that the so-called Arctic oscillation of wind patterns over the Arctic Ocean is in a state that it does not allow build-up of old ice but immediately flushes most ice into the North Atlantic.

More important, we rarely hear that the Antarctic sea ice is not only not declining but is above average for the past year. IPCC models would expect declining sea ice in both hemispheres but, whereas the Arctic is doing worse than expected, Antarctica is doing better.

Wednesday, October 15, 2008

Are the Islamists taking over the NDP???

David B. Harris is a Canadian lawyer, Director of INSIGNIS Strategic Research Inc's International and Terrorist Intelligence Program, and former Chief of Strategic Planning of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS).
But it was Pakistan-born pro-Palestinian socialist author, Tarek Fatah, founder of the Muslim Canadian Congress, who put a discernible chill through the assembly. A former senior official and candidate of the New Democratic Party (NDP), he declared that the NDP was the target of an Islamist takeover bid. This campaign was having success, he warned, and risked suborning the federalist party with the third largest number of seats in Canada's House of Commons.

Fatah highlighted the case of Dr. Samira Laouni, the NDP's veiled Moroccan-Canadian fundamentalist candidate for the Montreal constituency of Bourassa. A Canadian Islamic Congress Quebec operative, she had recently organized a visit to the city by British Taliban-apologist Yvonne Ridley. That event caused upset in Quebec, especially when it emerged that the federal NDP's Quebec "lieutenant," Thomas Mulcair, had rolled into the hardcore CIC session, yet continued to support Laouni despite her outlook. And all this came on top of the resignation of Laouni's Muslim campaign manager, when he was fixed with authorship of a published poem that contrasted the purity of veiled Muslim women with – as journalist Barbara Kay captured it – his idea of non-Muslim Quebec women as "promiscuous drunks."

But, according to Fatah, all this was only part of his concern about his former party. The 17-year veteran of the NDP, looked back with dismay on the Party's apparent unraveling by radicalism, and took careful aim:

"But slowly, I saw the Party open its doors to Islamists – first under [former NDP leader] Alexa McDonough, when supporters of Hamas and Hezbollah managed to join her personal legislative staff; and later, under [current leader] Jack Layton, when the doors were flung open. One Hezbollah supporter even managed to become the Ontario NDP's vice president."

Fatah claimed that "in the last NDP leadership campaign, I was witness to an attempt by a group of wealthy Islamists, to back one Member of Parliament for the leadership, with the stated objective of controlling the Party." He spoke of "six or seven" business people "who were advised that, of all the parties in Canada, the NDP was the easiest to take over and make to serve the Islamist agenda."

Fatah asserts that he "was present when this meeting took place," and would be prepared to "point out the people" who raised about $100,000 for the Islamist leadership campaign. The author of Chasing a Mirage and now a supporter of the Liberal Party, said he "informed Jack Layton of the scheme" including the radicals' attempts to portray Layton as "pro-Israel."

"But," Fatah added, "by 2006, I had come to the conclusion that the Party was up for grabs, and noticed a countrywide recruitment in the NDP by pro-Hamas and pro-Hezbollah activists," and withdrew from the NDP. "Today, the NDP is running Islamist candidates and its discourse is dominated by support of terror suspects in the guise of a defense of human rights."

Fatah expressed particular concern about certain Muslim NDP candidates' waging of a "relentless campaign to portray Canada as essentially anti-Muslim, and to instill a sense of forced victimhood among Muslim youth." He took to task one such candidate – a lawyer – for reportedly proclaiming that the judge who recently convicted the first of the alleged "Toronto 18" terrorists, did so because of anti-Muslim bias.

Iran makes it illegal to convert from Islam....

But, women are spared the death penalty - more sexism from the mullahs...
A month ago, the Iranian parliament voted in favour of a draft bill, entitled "Islamic Penal Code", which would codify the death penalty for any male Iranian who leaves his Islamic faith. Women would get life imprisonment. The majority in favour of the new law was overwhelming: 196 votes for, with just seven against.

Imposing the death penalty for changing religion blatantly violates one of the most fundamental of all human rights. The right to freedom of religion is enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and in the European Convention of Human Rights. It is even enshrined as Article 23 of Iran's own constitution, which states that no one may be molested simply for his beliefs.

And yet few politicians or clerics in Iran see any contradiction between a law mandating the death penalty for changing religion and Iran's constitution. There has been no public protest in Iran against it.

The horrible Jesse Jackson...

I've always hated him...let's hope he's just plain wrong about this...
The New York Post reported Tuesday that the Rev. Jesse Jackson said the United States will rid itself of years of "Zionist" control under an administration headed by Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama.

The daily quoted the veteran civil rights leader on Tuesday as having said that although "Zionists who have controlled American policy for decades" remain strong, they will lose a much of their clout when Obama enters the White House.

Speaking at the first World Policy Forum event in Evian, France, Jackson promised "fundamental changes" in U.S. foreign policy. He said the most important change would occur in the Middle East, where "decades of putting Israel's interests first" would end.

Jackson said that Obama "wants an aggressive and dynamic diplomacy." He went on to criticize the Bush administration's handling of Middle East diplomacy, telling the Post, "Bush was so afraid of a snafu and of upsetting Israel that he gave the whole thing a miss. Barack will change that," because, as long as the Palestinians haven't seen justice, the Middle East will "remain a source of danger to us all."

Friday, October 10, 2008

Will the EU abandon its' climate commitments???

Their track record is poor, so this wouldn't be surprising....
Leaders of EU countries plan to use the global financial crisis as an excuse to renege on climate change commitments, according to sources close to energy negotiations in Brussels.

Could you imagine the Iranians treating an Israeli???

Israel does this all the time....
A 12-year-old Iranian boy suffering from brain cancer is scheduled to arrive in Israel on Friday for emergency surgery.

The boy, who already underwent surgery in Tehran, was later admitted to a Turkish hospital, but his Ankara physicians soon discovered their facility lacked the technological and medical expertise needed to properly treat him.

The Turkish doctors suggested the family seek medical assistance in Israel, and so they did, through Israeli liaison Jacob Levin.

"I contacted and met with Dr. Feldman and Prof. Shapira from (the Chaim Sheba Medical Center at) Tel Hashomer, and after they looked over the case file they agreed to treat the boy if we could secure his arrival to Israel," Levin told Yedioth Ahronoth.

"Once I had their consent, I contacted all the relevant government bureaus, so we would be given permission to fly him in," he added.

The Palestinians hone another skill...

They're mastering rockets, suicide bombs, and tunnel-making...everything needed for the 21st century....
Gaza's smugglers are going legit: Owners of the scores of tunnels running under the Gaza-Egypt border have registered with the Hamas authorities, pledged to pay workers' compensation and hooked up their operations to the electricity network.

The once clandestine business has come out into the open. In one place, dozens of large tents, each marking a tunnel work site, were pitched just yards from an Egyptian watchtower beyond the border wall.

With the Gaza Strip's borders virtually sealed by Israel and Egypt for the past 16 months, the tunnels — some 200, by conservative estimate — are among the territory's main lifelines and are seen as vital for keeping the Islamic militant Hamas in power.

"The tunnels have become the main source of commodities in Gaza, and every day the closure continues, the importance of the tunnels increases as well," said Gaza economist Omar Shaaban.

The underground imports — from refrigerators, food and clothes to fuel and anti-tank rockets — help to keep Gaza's economy afloat. But Israel says they are also building up Hamas' arsenal.

Wednesday, October 08, 2008

Iran unveils (no pun intended) women-only car....

Will it come with an automatic veiling system???
Iran has announced it intends to manufacture a car designed especially for women, the British newspaper The Guardian reported on Tuesday.

The car will be equipped with accessories that in male-dominated Iran are considered feminine, like an automatic gearbox, parking aid devices, a satellite navigation system and an easy-to-use jack.

The car will be available in soft and "feminine" colors, and its interior design will be compatible with women's taste. It will also be equipped with an audiovisual system for children. Iran Khodro, the manufacturer said the first model will be released next June, ahead of the Iranian women's day.

A company executive said the decision to launch the model was a result of the growing number of female drivers in the country, and was based on a study that researched their needs and preferences.

He said that women's needs are different from men's, and that the most important thing for them is that the car will be comfortable and easy to use.

Last year, Iran's Islamic authorities passed a bill promoting the production of a bicycle especially designed for women, that will conceal the rider's legs and upper body. Iranian women are advised to refrain from cycling, in order to preserve their modesty, and are banned from riding motorcycles, except as passengers.

A woman-only taxi service is operating in major Iranian cities, and male and female passengers are segregated on buses and the Tehran underground system.

Geert Wilders Speech...

Here is his speech in New York from September 25th...
Dear friends,

Thank you very much for inviting me. Great to be at the Four Seasons. I come from a country that has one season only: a rainy season that starts January 1st and ends December 31st. When we have three sunny days in a row, the government declares a national emergency. So Four Seasons, that's new to me.

It's great to be in New York. When I see the skyscrapers and office buildings, I think of what Ayn Rand said: "The sky over New York and the will of man made visible." Of course, without the Dutch you would have been nowhere, still figuring out how to buy this island from the Indians. But we are glad we did it for you. And, frankly, you did a far better job than we possibly could have done.

I come to America with a mission. All is not well in the Old World. There is a tremendous danger looming, and it is very difficult to be optimistic. We might be in the final stages of the Islamization of Europe. This is not only a clear and present danger to the future of Europe itself; it is a threat to America and the sheer survival of the West. The danger I see looming is the scenario of America as the last man standing. The United States as the last bastion of Western civilization, facing an Islamic Europe. In a generation or two, the US will ask itself: who lost Europe? Patriots from around Europe risk their lives every day to prevent precisely this scenario form becoming a reality.

My short lecture consists of 4 parts: first, I will describe the situation on the ground in Europe. Then, I will say a few things about Islam. Thirdly, if you are still here, I will talk a little bit about the movie you just saw. To close I will tell you about a meeting in Jerusalem.

The Europe you know is changing. You have probably seen the landmarks: the Eiffel Tower, Trafalgar Square, Rome's ancient buildings and maybe the canals of Amsterdam. They are still there. And they still look very much the same as they did a hundred years ago.

But in all of these cities, sometimes a few blocks away from your tourist destination, there is another world, a world very few visitors see – and one that does not appear in your tourist guidebook. It is the world of the parallel society created by Muslim mass-migration.

All throughout Europe a new reality is rising: entire Muslim neighbourhoods where very few indigenous people reside or are even seen. And if they are, they might regret it. This goes for the police as well. It's the world of head scarves, where women walk around in figureless tents, with baby strollers and a group of children. Their husbands, or slaveholders if you prefer, walk three steps ahead. Mosques stand on many street corners. The shops have signs you and I cannot read. You will be hard-pressed to find any economic activity. These are Muslim ghettos controlled by religious fanatics. These are Muslim neighbourhoods, and they are mushrooming in every city across Europe. These are the building-blocks for territorial control of increasingly larger portions of Europe, street by street, neighbourhood by neighbourhood, city by city.

There are now thousands of mosques throughout Europe. With larger congregations than there are in churches. And in every European city there are plans to build super-mosques that will dwarf every church in the region. Clearly, the signal is: we rule.

Many European cities are already one-quarter Muslim: just take Amsterdam, Marseille and Malmo in Sweden. In many cities the majority of the under-18 population is Muslim. Paris is now surrounded by a ring of Muslim neighbourhoods. Mohammed is the most popular name among boys in many cities. In some elementary schools in Amsterdam the farm can no longer be mentioned, because that would also mean mentioning the pig, and that would be an insult to Muslims. Many state schools in Belgium and Denmark only serve halal food to all pupils. In once-tolerant Amsterdam gays are beaten up almost exclusively by Muslims. Non-Muslim women routinely hear "whore, whore." Satellite dishes are not pointed to local TV stations, but to stations in the country of origin. In France, school teachers are advised to avoid authors deemed offensive to Muslims, including Voltaire and Diderot; the same is increasingly true of Darwin. The history of the Holocaust can, in many cases, no longer be taught because of Muslim sensitivity. In England, Sharia courts are now officially part of the British legal system. Many neighbourhoods in France are no-go areas for women without head scarves. Last week, a man almost died after being beaten up by Muslims in Brussels, because he was drinking during the Ramadan. Jews are fleeing France in record numbers, on the run for the worst wave of anti-Semitism since World War II. French is now commonly spoken on the streets of Tel Aviv and Netanya, Israel. I could go on forever with stories like this. Stories about Islamization.

A total of fifty-four million Muslims now live in Europe. San Diego University recently calculated that a staggering 25 percent of the population in Europe will be Muslim just 12 years from now. Bernhard Lewis has predicted a Muslim majority by the end of this century.

Now these are just numbers. And the numbers would not be threatening if the Muslim-immigrants had a strong desire to assimilate. But there are few signs of that. The Pew Research Center reported that half of French Muslims see their loyalty to Islam as greater than their loyalty to France. One-third of French Muslims do not object to suicide attacks. The British Centre for Social Cohesion reported that one-third of British Muslim students are in favour of a worldwide caliphate. A Dutch study reported that half of Dutch Muslims admit they "understand" the 9/11 attacks.

Muslims demand what they call “respect.” And this is how we give them respect. Our elites are willing to give in – to give up. In my own country we have gone from calls by one cabinet member to turn Muslim holidays into official state holidays, to statements by another cabinet member, that Islam is part of Dutch culture, to an affirmation by the Christian-Democratic attorney general that he is willing to accept Sharia in the Netherlands if there is a Muslim majority. We have cabinet members with passports from Morocco and Turkey.

Muslim demands are supported by unlawful behaviour, ranging from petty crimes and random violence – for example, against ambulance workers and bus drivers, to small-scale riots. Paris has seen its uprising in the low-income suburbs, the banlieus. Some prefer to see these as isolated incidents, but I call it a Muslim Intifada. I call the perpetrators "settlers," because that is what they are. They do not come to integrate into our societies; they come to integrate our society into their Dar-al-Islam. Therefore, they are settlers.

Much of this street violence I mention is directed exclusively against non-Muslims, forcing many native people to leave their neighborhoods, their cities, their countries.

Politicians shy away from taking a stand against this creeping Sharia. They believe in the equality of all cultures. Moreover, on a mundane level, Muslims are now a swing vote not to be ignored.

Our many problems with Islam cannot be explained by poverty, repression or the European colonial past, as the Left claims. Nor does it have anything to do with Palestinians or American troops in Iraq. The problem is Islam itself.

Allow me to give you a brief Islam 101. The first thing you need to know about Islam is the importance of the book of the Quran. The Quran is Allah's personal word, revealed by an angel to Mohammed, the prophet. This is where the trouble starts. Every word in the Quran is Allah's word and therefore not open to discussion or interpretation. It is valid for every Muslim and for all times. Therefore, there is no such a thing as moderate Islam. Sure, there are a lot of moderate Muslims. But a moderate Islam is non-existent.

The Quran calls for hatred, violence, submission, murder, and terrorism. The Quran calls for Muslims to kill non-Muslims, to terrorize non-Muslims and to fulfil their duty to wage war: violent jihad. Jihad is a duty for every Muslim; Islam is to rule the world – by the sword. The Quran is clearly anti-Semitic, describing Jews as monkeys and pigs.

The second thing you need to know is the importance of Mohammed, the prophet. His behaviour is an example to all Muslims and cannot be criticized. Now, if Mohammed had been a man of peace, let us say like Ghandi and Mother Theresa wrapped in one, there would be no problem. But Mohammed was a warlord, a mass murderer, a paedophile, and had several marriages – at the same time. Islamic tradition tells us how he fought in battles, how he had his enemies murdered and even had prisoners of war executed. Mohammed himself slaughtered the Jewish tribe of Banu Qurayza. He advised on matters of slavery, but never advised to liberate slaves. Islam has no other morality than the advancement of Islam. If it is good for Islam, it is good. If it is bad for Islam, it is bad. There is no gray area or other side.

Quran as Allah's own word and Mohammed as the perfect man are the two most important facets of Islam. Let no one fool you about Islam being a religion. Sure, it has a god, and a here-after, and 72 virgins. But in its essence, Islam is a political ideology. It is a system that lays down detailed rules for society and the life of every person. Islam wants to dictate every aspect of life. Islam means “submission.” Islam is not compatible with freedom and democracy, because what it strives for is Sharia. If you want to compare Islam to anything, compare it to Communism or national-socialism, these are all totalitarian ideologies.

This is what you need to know about Islam, in order to understand what is going on in Europe. For millions of Muslims, the Quran and the live of Mohammed are not 14 centuries old, but are an everyday reality, an ideal, that guides every aspect of their lives. Now you know why Winston Churchill called Islam "the most retrograde force in the world," and why he compared Mein Kampf to the Quran.

Which brings me to my movie, “Fitna.” I am a lawmaker, and not a movie maker. But I felt I had the moral duty to educate about Islam. The duty to make clear that the Quran stands at the heart of what some people call terrorism, but is in reality jihad. I wanted to show that the problems of Islam are at the core of Islam, and do not belong to its fringes.

Now, from the day the plan for my movie was made public, it caused quite a stir, in the Netherlands and throughout Europe. First, there was a political storm, with government leaders across the continent in sheer panic. The Netherlands was put under a heightened terror alert, because of possible attacks or a revolt by our Muslim population. The Dutch branch of the Islamic organisation Hizb ut-Tahrir declared that the Netherlands was due for an attack.

Internationally, there was a series of incidents. The Taliban threatened to organize additional attacks against Dutch troops in Afghanistan, and a website linked to Al Qaeda published the message that I ought to be killed, while various muftis in the Middle East stated that I would be responsible for all the bloodshed after the screening of the movie. In Afghanistan and Pakistan, the Dutch flag was burned on several occasions. Dolls representing me were also burned. The Indonesian President announced that I will never be admitted into Indonesia again, while the UN Secretary General and the European Union issued cowardly statements in the same vein as those made by the Dutch Government. I could go on and on. It was an absolute disgrace, a sell-out.

A plethora of legal troubles also followed, and have not ended yet. Currently the state of Jordan is litigating against me. Only last week there were renewed security agency reports about a heightened terror alert for the Netherlands because of “Fitna.”

Now, I would like to say a few things about Israel, because, very soon, we will get together in its capital. The best way for a politician in Europe to lose votes is to say something positive about Israel. The public has wholeheartedly accepted the Palestinian narrative, and sees Israel as the aggressor. I, however, will continue to speak up for Israel. I see defending Israel as a matter of principle. I have lived in this country and visited it dozens of times. I support Israel. First, because it is the Jewish homeland after two thousand years of exile up to and including Auschwitz, second because it is a democracy, and third because Israel is our first line of defense.

Samuel Huntington writes it so aptly: "Islam has bloody borders." Israel is located precisely on that border. This tiny country is situated on the fault line of jihad, frustrating Islam's territorial advance. Israel is facing the front lines of jihad, like Kashmir, Kosovo, the Philippines, Southern Thailand, Darfur in Sudan, Lebanon, and Aceh in Indonesia. Israel is simply in the way. The same way West-Berlin was during the Cold War.

The war against Israel is not a war against Israel. It is a war against the West. It is jihad. Israel is simply receiving the blows that are meant for all of us. If there would have been no Israel, Islamic imperialism would have found other venues to release its energy and its desire for conquest. Thanks to Israeli parents who send their children to the army and lay awake at night, parents in Europe and America can sleep well and dream, unaware of the dangers looming.

Many in Europe argue in favor of abandoning Israel in order to address the grievances of our Muslim minorities. But if Israel were, God forbid, to go down, it would not bring any solace to the West. It would not mean our Muslim minorities would all of a sudden change their behaviour, and accept our values. On the contrary, the end of Israel would give enormous encouragement to the forces of Islam. They would, and rightly so, see the demise of Israel as proof that the West is weak, and doomed. The end of Israel would not mean the end of our problems with Islam, but only the beginning. It would mean the start of the final battle for world domination. If they can get Israel, they can get everything. Therefore, it is not that the West has a stake in Israel. It is Israel.

It is very difficult to be an optimist in the face of the growing Islamization of Europe. All the tides are against us. On all fronts we are losing. Demographically the momentum is with Islam. Muslim immigration is even a source of pride within ruling liberal parties. Academia, the arts, the media, trade unions, the churches, the business world, the entire political establishment have all converted to the suicidal theory of multiculturalism. So-called journalists volunteer to label any and all critics of Islamization as “right-wing extremists” or “racists.” The entire establishment has sided with our enemy. Leftists, liberals and Christian-Democrats are now all in bed with Islam.

This is the most painful thing to see: the betrayal by our elites. At this moment in Europe's history, our elites are supposed to lead us, to stand up for centuries of civilization – to defend our heritage. To honour our eternal Judeo-Christian values that made Europe what it is today. But there are very few signs of hope to be seen at the governmental level. Sarkozy, Merkel, Brown, Berlusconi; in private, they probably know how grave the situation is. But when the little red light goes on, they stare into the camera and tell us that Islam is a religion of peace, and we should all try to get along nicely and sing Kumbaya. They willingly participate in, what President Reagan so aptly called: “the betrayal of our past, the squandering of our freedom.”

If there is hope in Europe, it comes from the people, not from the elites. Change can only come from a grass-roots level. It has to come from the citizens themselves. Yet these patriots will have to take on the entire political, legal and media establishment.

Over the past years there have been some small, but encouraging, signs of a rebirth of the original European spirit. Maybe the elites turn their backs on freedom, the public does not. In my country, the Netherlands, 60 percent of the population now sees the mass immigration of Muslims as the number one policy mistake since World War II. And another 60 percent sees Islam as the biggest threat to our national identity. I don't think the public opinion in Holland is very different from other European countries.

Patriotic parties that oppose jihad are growing, against all odds. My own party debuted two years ago, with five percent of the vote. Now it stands at ten percent in the polls. The same is true of all similarly-minded parties in Europe. They are gaining a foothold in the political arena, one voter at a time.

Now, for the first time, these patriotic parties will come together and exchange experiences. It may be the start of something big, something that might change the map of Europe for decades to come. It might also be Europe's last chance.

This December a conference will take place in Jerusalem. Thanks to Professor Aryeh Eldad, a member of Knesset, we will be able to watch “Fitna” in the Knesset building and discuss the jihad. We are organizing this event in Israel to emphasize the fact that we are all in the same boat together, and that Israel is part of our common heritage. Those attending will be a select audience. No racist organizations will be allowed. And we will only admit parties that are solidly democratic.

This conference will be the start of an Alliance of European patriots. This Alliance will serve as the backbone for all organizations and political parties that oppose jihad and Islamization. For this Alliance I seek your support.

This endeavor may be crucial to America and to the West. America may hold fast to the dream that, thanks to its location, it is safe from jihad and Sharia. But seven years ago to the day, there was still smoke rising from ground zero, following the attacks that forever shattered that dream. Yet there is a danger even greater than terrorist attacks, the scenario of America as the last man standing. The lights may go out in Europe faster than you can imagine. An Islamic Europe means a Europe without freedom and democracy, an economic wasteland, an intellectual nightmare, and a loss of military might for America - as its allies will turn into enemies, enemies with atomic bombs. With an Islamic Europe, it would be up to America alone to preserve the heritage of Rome, Athens and Jerusalem.

Dear friends, liberty is the most precious of gifts. My generation never had to fight for this freedom; it was offered to us on a silver platter by people who fought for it with their lives. All throughout Europe American cemeteries remind us of the young boys who never made it home, and whose memory we cherish. My generation does not own this freedom; we are merely its custodians. We can only hand over this hard won liberty to Europe's children in the same state in which it was offered to us. We cannot strike a deal with mullahs and imams. Future generations would never forgive us. We cannot squander our liberties. We simply do not have the right to do so.

This is not the first time our civilization is under threat. We have seen dangers before. We have been betrayed by our elites before. They have sided with our enemies before. And yet, then, freedom prevailed.

These are not times in which to take lessons from appeasement, capitulation, giving away, giving up or giving in. These are not times in which to draw lessons from Mr. Chamberlain. These are times calling us to draw lessons from Mr. Churchill and the words he spoke in 1942:

"Never give in, never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy."

France's Nuclear Power Now Looks Smart.....

The UK is in for some rough times....
British companies are being forced to pay over four times more for their electricity this winter than competitors in France and in excess of 70 per cent more than in Germany.

The discrepancy will increase concerns that Britain's crumbling power infrastructure is a growing threat to the country's competitiveness and comes as Ofgem today announces its report into competition in the energy market.

Wholesale power prices in the UK have soared because of a squeeze in generating capacity, which is expected to leave an unusually thin margin of spare supply next month.

On Friday, the forward price of power for November reached more than £130 per megawatt hour. In France, it was about €40 (£31) per megawatt hour, according to Spectron, a supplier of energy market data. In Germany, the price stood at around €97 per megawatt hour.

Is the EU headed for a power disaster???

Let's not fall into the same trap they are falling into...
The future of coal-fired power generation in Europe was called into question yesterday after a European Parliament committee backed new laws that would force power companies to pay for all of their carbon dioxide emissions from 2013.

The decision, which could cost the power industry €30 billion (£23 billion) a year and trigger a steep rise in electricity bills, represents a huge boost for Europe’s renewable energy industry. It also casts fresh doubt over the likelihood of a £1.5 billion coal-fired power plant being built at Kingsnorth, Kent, by E.ON, the German power group.

In addition, it flies in the face of British government policy. Last month, John Hutton, the former business secretary, told the Labour Party conference that “no coal . . . equals no lights. No power. No future.”

Chris Davies, an MEP who backed the legislation, said that the decision by the European Parliament’s environment committee “effectively prevents the building of new coal-fired power plants from 2015 unless equipped with CCS [carbon capture and storage technology]”. The new rules require final approval from the European Parliament and EU countries. If granted, they will transform the economics of burning coal to generate electricity.

The propaganda of global warming....

Nigel Calder used to be the editor of the New Scientist in the UK....
One big lie about climate change is that man-made global warming is proven scientifically. Not so. On the contrary, any objective physicist would say that the evidence is strongly against it. The very mechanism for the supposed greenhouse warming, reinforced by that extra CO2, requires tropical air temperatures to rise faster at high altitudes (6 miles above the ground) than they do lower down. Weather balloons that routinely carry thermometers to those heights and beyond have shown no such trend over recent decades.

That negative result was an important element of what I had in mind when remarking, in my comment last Monday, that the scientific evidence is far stronger for a rival explanation of climate change. It's the discovery that the Sun controls the cosmic rays that help to make the Earth's clouds. The supporting observations and experiments are explained in simple terms by Dr Henrik Svensmark and me in our book The Chilling Stars.

The biggest lie of all, breathtaking in its audacity, is the insistence that mankind's misbehaviour means that global warming is getting worse. The measurements for August 2008 are just in, and they confirm the world is distinctly cooler this year than last. It's fair enough to argue about whether the Earth's temperature has stopped rising, or merely paused, or gone into reverse. But the key fact is that, despite that indisputable increase of CO2 in the air, the Earth is no warmer now than it was 12 years ago.

Tuesday, October 07, 2008

I thought it was us!

Hamas confirmed what I thought - the Jews are behind the global financial crisis.....
The Palestinian militant group Hamas on Tuesday accused a "Jewish Lobby" in the United States of fomenting the global financial crisis.

The crisis was the result of "bad administrative and financial management and a bad banking system put into place and controlled by the Jewish lobby," Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhum said in a statement.

Barhum said that despite approving a bailout plan of $700 billion dollars, the U.S. government was ignoring the role of "the Jewish lobby that put the U.S. banking and financial sector into place."

This lobby, said Barhum, "controls the U.S. elections and defines the foreign policy of any new administration in a manner that allows it to retain control of the American government and economy."

Cold September in Ireland...

Just one data point - but they had their coldest September in 14 years...
Most of the country suffered the coldest September in 14 years, forecasters revealed. In its monthly summary Met Eireann said the temperature never rose above 20 Celsius anywhere - the first such occurrence in more than 30 years.

Average monthly air temperatures were around half a degree below normal at some southern weather stations and it was the coolest September since 1994 almost everywhere. Forecasters said they were unable to predict the weather over the winter months but the Met Office in Britain claimed temperatures are likely to be above normal over much of Europe, although not as mild as last year.

Barbara Kay's great idea....

Make November False Allegation Awareness Month...
Domestic Violence Awareness Month was first observed in October, 1987 and is celebrated on the first Monday in October. That's today, October 6. Fittingly enough, this morning's Globe and Mail carries an editorial on the sometimes tragic effects when innocent men are charged with false allegations of sexual abuse.

The editorial recounts the story of a young father who was savagely beaten to death with a baseball bat by a young man who took the word of two girls, aged 13 and 15, when they claimed the victim had "touched them inappropriately." The girls had lied and clearly incited their male "protector" to violence, but they were not charged with any crime. Nor was an 18-year old woman who accompanied the murderer and presumably, at the very least, approved of his actions. Perhaps she even egged him on. She was only charged with "breaking and entering." The editorial indignantly concludes that "the authorities need to punish" those whose false accusation are at the root of such incidents.

The Globe editorialists' indignation suggests a certain naiveté about the prevalence of this practice. They would profit from spending a few days in family court, where, in the interest of tipping custody battles in their own interest, women's false allegations of domestic violence and sexual abuse of children against their former partners are so rife - and virtually never punished - that it is apparently the best-kept secret crime in the western world. Oh, perhaps these men are not beaten up with baseball bats, but they do lose their homes, their children, often their jobs and friends, spend time in jail, are rarely given the benefit of the doubt - and many of them kill themselves from despair.

In 2000, it was reported that the FBI's DNA testing over a three year period had exonerated more than 30% of their 4,000-plus sexual assault suspects. Going further back, in the FBI's Behavioural Science Unit's 1983 study of False Allegations, a total of 220 out of 556 rape investigations - 40% - turned out to be false. Over a quarter turned out to be actual hoaxes (remember the infamous Tawana Brawley, who at 15 falsely accused a number of white men of a marathon three-day gang rape, some of them police officers? At least she got successfully sued for defamation, but that was small potatoes for the havoc she wreaked in those men's lives). About 4,000 allegations of rape a year are levelled in Manhattan. About half never happened. Police officials in New Zealand state that 64% of rape reports are false.

Monday, October 06, 2008

More scare-mongering....

Of course, the solution can only be to end CO2 emissions....
Conservationists have taken the first detailed look at the world's mammals in more than a decade, and the news isn't good.

"Our results paint a bleak picture of the global status of mammals worldwide," the team led by Jan Schipper of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature in Gland, Switzerland, concluded.

"We estimate that one in four species is threatened with extinction and that the population of one in two is declining," the researchers said in a report to be published Friday in the journal Science. The findings were being released Monday at the IUCN meeting in Barcelona, Spain.

"I think the bottom line is, what kind of a world do you want to leave for your children," Andrew Smith, a professor in the Arizona State University School of Life Sciences, said in a telephone interview.

Europe confused about global warming....

Lorrie Goldsteing is right - politicians should not use Europe as an example of how to 'fight' global warming....
How many times in this election have you heard a "green" party leader -- say Elizabeth May, Stephane Dion or Jack Layton argue: It's time Canada followed Europe's example in fighting global warming?

But what "example" do they mean?

It would be helpful if they would tell Canadians, whose votes they're seeking Oct. 14, about what's really going on in Europe with regard to attempts there to reduce carbon emissions.

For starters, how about referencing the article "A changed climate" in the Oct. 2 edition of The Economist?

Among other things, it reveals:

- The 27-member European Union's proclamation of 18 months ago "to save the world from climate change" is in huge trouble, with many countries in danger of missing their Kyoto targets and soaring energy prices hammering their economies.

- German Chancellor Angela Merkel, once regarded as Europe's "green champion," "today ... sounds like a lobbyist for German business, listing the industries that must be shielded from the full costs of her (climate) package."

- Indeed, notes the Guardian, "the heroic mood" of the EU last year is long gone while "almost every country has found reasons why the climate change promises may be impossible to meet in their current form."

Ireland wants special protection for its farming industry. Poland and several other former Soviet satellites are worried they may have to import natural gas from Russia to meet their EU targets, especially in light of Russia's war with Georgia.