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)

Tuesday, September 30, 2008

Gobal warming has stalled...

Since 2001, temperatures are declining...
Recent studies by the Hadley Climate Research Center (UK), the Japan Meteorological Agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the University of East Anglia (UK) and the University of Alabama Huntsville show clearly that the rising trend of global average temperature stopped in 2000-2001. Further, NASA data shows that warming in the southern hemisphere has stopped, and that ocean temperatures also have stopped rising.

Monday, September 29, 2008

The far right wins in Austria....

As Melanie Phillips points out, if mainstream parties won't fight Islamism, then the fascists will be the ones who will do so....
The awful thing is that, as the far-right advances and social disorder increases – as it will -- muddled liberals and malign leftists will blame these political and social calamities on ‘the far right’. As a result, the steady encroachment of Islamism will proceed apace -- and anyone who objects will also be demonised as ‘the far right’. The rise of the neo-Nazis will thus turn the defence of democracy toxic. There is therefore a danger that the only people who will be fighting the Islamic fascists and in defence of the nation against the supranational supremacists will be the fascists.

If this truly frightful outcome is to be avoided, it is imperative that social democratic politicians in Britain and Europe wake up from their trance and realise just what it is they have to defend, and against whom.

CO2 increases 3% in 2007....

No surprise. We have been saying for a long time that CO2 emissions will continue to go up. This is largely being driven by China and India.
The world pumped up its pollution of the chief man-made global warming gas last year, setting a course that could push beyond leading scientists' projected worst-case scenario, international researchers said Thursday.

The new numbers, called "scary" by some, were a surprise because scientists thought an economic downturn would slow energy use. Instead, carbon dioxide output jumped 3 percent from 2006 to 2007.

The pollution leader was China, followed by the United States, which past data show is the leader in emissions per person in carbon dioxide output. And while several developed countries slightly cut their CO2 output in 2007, the United States churned out more.

Still, it was large increases in China, India and other developing countries that spurred the growth of carbon dioxide pollution to a record high of 9.34 billion tons of carbon (8.47 billion metric tons). Figures released by science agencies in the United States, Great Britain and Australia show that China's added emissions accounted for more than half of the worldwide increase. China passed the United States as the No. 1 carbon dioxide polluter in 2006.
I hate it when they refer to CO2 as pollution. It isn't.

Ahh.....the Gulf Stream is here to stay....

Another environmental 'scare' is now over....
The Gulf Stream, that almost mythical flow of warm seas that makes Norway and a few other Nordic countries liveable, isn't about to disappear any time soon. New research contradicts earlier theories that it might.

Climate researchers have re-examined studies that indicated the Gulf Stream was weakening. It's long been a source of warmer seas flowing north through the Atlantic, and it also sends colder waters south.

The Gulf Stream flows roughly from the east coast of South America, around the Gulf of Mexico and across the Atlantic, where it heads north, east of Ireland, over towards Norway and around Iceland, before heading due south again.

The Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI) reports that several observations in recent years suggested the circulation of the Gulf Stream had weakened, possibly because of global warming. Studies, the institute noted, had suggested that the flow of cold water south was down by half.

A group of researchers from Denmark, the Faeroe Islands, Germany and Norway thus started paying closer attention to the Gulf Stream, and now they're releasing conclusions that can leave climate researchers breathing a sigh of relief.

"It hasn't only been possible to show that the currents instead have maintained a surprisingly constant strength during the last 50 years, but we can also point out where earlier signs of weakness were misleading," said Steffen M Olsen of DMI.

Islamists work with pirates....

We need an international effort to stop pirating off the coast of Somalia...
Islamist extremists prepared last night to unload rocket-propelled grenades and anti-aircraft guns from a Ukrainian freighter seized by Somali pirates even as foreign warships surrounded the vessel.

A US destroyer and submarine from an international taskforce set up to patrol the Gulf of Aden and Indian Ocean and two European-flagged ships were reported to be tracking the freighter that had anchored off the southern Somali coast.

The ship's captain contacted media outlets by satellite phone to say that one of his crew had died during the hostage drama.

The pirates were demanding a $20 million (£10.8 million) ransom for the release of the MV Faina, its 20 surviving crew and cargo of weapons, which include 33 Russian tanks. It was seized on Thursday as it neared the Kenyan port of Mombasa.

“The Islamists have sent pick-ups from Mogadishu to go and collect the gear,” said an analyst with a network of Somali informers. “There's not much they can do with the tanks — they can't get them off — but the rest of the weapons they are trying to move ashore.”

Somalia's insurgents have made a series of impressive gains in recent weeks. They now control the port city of Kismayo and have armed and equipped pirate gangs as part of a campaign to control the seas.

Saturday, September 27, 2008

Mother kills two sons....and only gets six years....

Could you imagine if the father had killed the two sons???
The 27-year-old woman, who smothered her first son when she was a youth and cannot be named, will serve one year in jail after a Superior court judge credited her with serving five years in pretrial custody. She faced a maximum of seven years in custody.

The conviction marks the first time in Canadian history a woman has been convicted of killing more than one of her children at different times.

The woman has two remaining children and while in custody expressed the desire for more children.

Justice Cas Herold today said he found the woman's desire for more children astonishing and lamented that he could not prevent her from again becoming pregnant.

The deaths of the two babies -- one, in 1998, who was seven weeks old, the other, who was nine weeks old, four years later -- was attributed to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome until the woman confessed her crimes to police in early 2005.

Iranians mock the holocaust...

The muslim world is turning Ramadan into an anti-Israel hatefest...
Iranian protesters chanted "Death to Israel" as a group of Islamist students unveiled a book mocking the Holocaust in an annual Al-Quds Day rally on Friday, the French news agency AFP reported.

Day of Al-Quds, the Arabic term for Jerusalem, is marked by Shiite Muslims on the last Friday of the holy month of Ramadan to show support for the Palestinians and emphasize the importance of Jerusalem to the Muslims.

The book "Holocaust", published by members of the Islamist Basij militia, features dozens of cartoons and sarcastic commentary. Iran's Education Minister Alireza Ali-Ahmadi was present in the capital's Palestine Square for the presentation of the book.

According to the news agency, the cover shows a Jew with a crooked nose and dressed in traditional garb drawing outlines of dead bodies on the ground.

Inside, bearded Jews are shown leaving and re-entering a gas chamber with a counter that reads the number 5,999,999.

Friday, September 26, 2008

Even US textbooks aren't good....

Now, I wish someone would study Canadian textbooks...
American elementary and high school textbooks contain many "gross misrepresentations" of Judaism, Christianity and Israel, according to a book-length study released this week by the San Francisco-based Institute for Jewish and Community Research.

"It is shocking to discover that history and geography textbooks widely used in America's elementary and secondary classrooms contain some of the very same inaccuracies about Christianity, Judaism and the Middle East as those [used] in Iran," the IJCR said in a summary of the findings of the five-year study.

In examining the 28 most widely-used history, geography and social studies textbooks in America, researchers Dr. Gary Tobin and Dennis Ybarra found some 500 instances of "errors, inaccuracies and even propaganda" on these issues. Tens of millions of schoolchildren in all 50 states use the textbooks, according to Tobin.

Among the "outrageous misrepresentations" the study found was "a denial of the Jewish roots of Jesus," as when the textbook The World relates that "Christianity was started by a young Palestinian named Jesus."

"Textbooks include negative stereotypes of Jews, Judaism and Israel," the authors write. "For example, textbooks tend to discredit the ties between Jews and the land of Israel."

According to Tobin, "you're much more likely to learn about Jewish terrorism before the founding of Israel [in the textbooks] than about terrorism against Israel since that time.

Among the claims made about Israel in some of the textbooks are that Arab countries never initiated wars against Israel, Arab nations desire peace while Israel does not and that it was Israel that placed Palestinians in refugee camps in Arab lands, not Arab governments. No mention whatsoever was found relating to the hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees from Arab countries who were forced out after the establishment of Israel.

In their treatment of Judaism, too, the textbooks showed a negative bias, according to the study. They often expressed a view that "Jews and Judaism are legalistic," and that "Jews care only about the letter of the law and ignore its spirit," the study found. The Jewish God is presented as "stern and warlike," and not compassionate, as is highlighted in other religions. In some instances, Jews are charged with deicide in the killing of Jesus.

The study also found that 18 textbooks used "unscholarly and disparaging 'Old Testament' terminology for the Jewish scriptures when discussing the origins of Judaism."

The study compared language used in describing Jewish and Christian belief with that describing Muslim belief. "The textbooks tend to be critical of Jews and Israel, disrespectful about Christianity, and rather than represent Islam in an objective way, tend to glorify it," says Ybarra.

"Textbook publishers often defer completely to Muslim groups for their content [on Islam] because they want to be sensitive to Muslim concerns," he explained. "So they write that Mohammed is a prophet of God, without the qualifier you should have in a public school that shows you're teaching about religion, rather than teaching religion."

One example among the many cited in the study is in World History: Continuity and Change, in which a glossary entry on the Ten Commandments describes them as "Moral laws Moses claimed to have received from the Hebrew God Yahweh on Mount Sinai."

The same glossary describes the Koran as a "Holy Book of Islam containing revelations received by Muhammad from God" - without a conditional qualifier.

"Islam is treated with a devotional tone in some textbooks, less detached and analytical than it ought to be," the study finds. "Muslim beliefs are described in several instances as fact, without any clear qualifier such as 'Muslims believe... .'

"No religion should be presented in history textbooks as absolute truth, either on its own or compared to any other, or they all should be."

Thursday, September 25, 2008

Muslims attack gays in Bosnia...

Protesters were shouting, "Kill the Gays"...
At least eight people have been injured in clashes during the opening ceremony of Bosnia's first gay festival in the capital Sarajevo, police have said.

They said dozens of men attacked participants of the festival in front of the city's Academy of Fine Arts.

A foreigner and journalists were reportedly among the injured.

Homosexuality is very much a taboo issue in Bosnia and organisers of the Queer Festival have received death threats, correspondents say.

Anti-gay protesters attacked the festival participants as they were leaving the opening ceremony in central Sarajevo on Wednesday evening.

Many demonstrators chanted "Kill the Gays!" and "Allahu Akbar!" (God is Great).

This is one stupid priest.....

Imagine - hugging Ahmadinjad.....
Israeli ambassador to the United Nations Gabriela Shalev on Thursday called the President of the UN General Assembly Miguel d'Escoto Brockmann an "Israel hater" for having hugged Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a vocal enemy of Israel.

Brockmann has incurred the wrath of the Israeli delegation before, when in his first speech as the president of the international body he said that "the greatest case failure of the United Nations is the lack of a Palestinian state."

Shalev voiced her outrage in an interview on Thursday, condemning Brockmann's gesture at the end of Ahmadinejad's address at the opening of the 63rd General Assembly on Tuesday, which was aggressive and anti-Israel.

Brockmann, a 75-year-old Catholic priest, was scheduled to dine alongside Ahmadinejad in a meal marking the end the Ramadan fast, organized by five American religious groups.

Tuesday, September 23, 2008

Another gay person condemned to death in Iran...

Yes, as Ahmadinejad gets prime time coverage...another gay is condemned to death...
Nemat Safavi, arrested almost three years ago at the age of 16, has been condemned to death by a court in Ardebil, in the northwest Iranian Azerbaijan region.

Nemat has not killed anyone, stolen anything or even carried out any political activism.

Nemat has been accused of having homosexual relations.While that was not stated during the court case, he was accused of "sexual relations that were not admitted".

Shame on Larry King...

Why on earth did he agree to interview Ahmadinejad??? It was disgusting to see King shake his hand at the end...

At least there's some courage in Europe....

Since the larger parties won't fight Islamization, it's left to the smaller parties...
Of the parties dedicated to resisting Islamization that I examined in Europe last summer, the most promising range from the sizeable Vlaams Belang in Belgium to the tiny Sweden Democrats, and include the Lega Nord in Italy, the Party for Freedom of Geert Wilders in Holland, the Danish People's Party, the Swiss People's Party and the Austrian Freedom Party. Such parties are unknown here, or ignored. Worse, they are shunned. Why? I believe it's because their respective political opponents the leftist media and governing establishments that are increasingly dependent on Islamic support, by the way have successfully slandered these parties as "extremists," "racists," "fascists" and "Nazis." Is advocating freedom of speech "extreme" or "fascist"? Is opposing Islam's law, which knows no race, "racist"? Is supporting Israel (which these parties do far more than other European parties) "Nazi"? The outrageously empty epithets of the Islamo-socialist left seem calculated to stop thought cold and trigger a massive rejection reflex. In this way, resistance becomes anathema, and Islamic law, unchecked, spreads across Europe.

Does that sound "Islamophobic"? You bet. How can anyone who values freedom of conscience, equality before the law and other such Western jewels not have a healthy fear of Islamic law, which values none of these things? Incredibly, this is an emotion that is supposed to be suppressed and, in Europe, on pain of prosecution. Indeed, because Filip Dewinter admitted to such "Islamophobia" in an interview, his party, the Vlaams Belang, has been taken to court in Belgium on charges of racism, and, if convicted, will be effectively shut down through defunding by the government.

That hasn't stopped Dewinter, who, in accepting an award at a memorial event dedicated to Oriana Fallaci in Florence, last week, said: "Islamophobia is not merely a phenomenon of unparalleled fear, but it is the duty of every one who wants to safeguard Europe's future. Europe means Rome, Greece, Enlightenment and Judeo-Christian roots. Europe is a continent of castles and cathedrals, not of mosques and minarets." Of course, even as Dewinter admits to fearing the Islamization of Europe, he and his colleagues act with exceptional political and physical bravery in rallying voters against it. This coming weekend, he joins several other politicians on the Sharia-fighting right in Europe among them two other men I interviewed, Mario Borghezio of Lega Nord, which is part of Italy's ruling coalition, and Heinz-Christian Strache of Austria's Freedom Party, which is expected to become part of Austria's ruling coalition after elections this month in Cologne, Germany. In that ancient cathedral city, where the city council recently approved the construction of a long-controversial mega-mosque, these men will address a rally against European Islamization. (Contrary to initial reports, Jean-Marie Le Pen will not be at the demonstration.) The Sharia-fighters expect 1,500 demonstrators. Police expect 40,000 counter-demonstrators.

These are frightening odds a metaphor, perhaps, for Europe's chances of staving off Islamic law. Who lost Europe? If it does happen, we certainly won't be able to say we weren't warned.

Monday, September 22, 2008

Great to be a snowboarder in Europe....

Some resorts haven't even closed for the summer....
With skiing and snowboarding continuing at a few European ski areas all year round, it is difficult to know when last winter ends and this winter begins. But some glacier resorts that closed in the Spring or Summer re-open in September and stay open right through to next Spring 2009, so September seems the best candidate for the month of the year in which to declare the new ski season 2008-9 officially underway!

Fortunately, mother nature is playing ball too, with snow in the Alps last weekend. Although it is not yet open, www.Skiinfo.com reported that Val d’Isere received 9cm (just under four inches) of fresh snow at the weekend with more forecast later this week, building up their base ready for the season. It was a similar story across many other ski areas and www.Skiinfo.com works in partnership with the resorts to deliver the latest conditions several times daily.

Elizabeth May throws a Pajama Party...

What fun...May is easy to impress...
Perhaps most impressive of all was the crowd in Kamloops. The rally was advertised as a pajama party, featuring hot chocolate and snacks. The candidate, Donovan Cavers, appeared in his housecoat to celebrate the Green train’s arrival.

The latest on Sharia Law in the UK....

Sharia courts are making headway in the UK.....
There are only seven basic plots in literature. One of them, surely, must be “cry wolf”. Last week, a variation on the “cry wolf” story emerged which, in its long-term impact, threatens to be far more dangerous to Western civilisation than any banking collapse.

Reports emerged that Sharia had been enshrined in English law. According to one newspaper: “Five Sharia courts have been set up in London, Birmingham, Bradford and Manchester and Nuneaton, Warwickshire. The Government has quietly sanctioned that their rulings are enforceable with the full power of the judicial system, through the county courts or High Court.”

Cue outrage and condemnation. But Muslim organisations dismissed the story as nonsense. And they were backed by the Government. As the Ministry of Justice and Department for Business, Enterprise & Regulatory Reform put it in a joint statement: “Sharia law is not part of the law of England and Wales and the Government has no intention of making any change that would conflict with British laws and values.”

So can we all breathe easily again? If only. Sharia may not be enshrined in English law, but the real impact of Sharia is just as worrying.

If two parties agree to be bound by an arbitrator - a Sharia court, for instance - that is their business. But what if community pressure forces their acceptance? In one recent inheritance dispute Sharia judges gave the sons twice as much as the daughters. In English law, the shares would have been equal. We do not know what pressures were put on the women to accept the ruling. Peer pressure can be overpowering. And the very point of Western freedoms is to protect people against such unjust pressures.

But arbitration over property disputes is one thing; assault, however, is a matter for the criminal law. Yet Sharia courts have dealt with at least six cases of domestic violence in which they simply ordered the assailants to take anger management classes and to talk to community elders. The female victims then withdrew the complaints they had made to the police. They were thus forced to accept the primacy of an unjust religious law over the law of the land. And if you believe that the victims were not coerced by peer pressure into withdrawing their complaints, then you also believe in flying pigs.

The IAEA is useless....

They don't know what the hell is going on in Iran....
The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency warned Monday that he cannot guarantee that Iran is not running a secret nuclear program, comments that appeared to reflect a high level of frustration with stonewalling of his investigators.

Saturday, September 20, 2008

BBC tries to shore up human-induced global warming...

Of course, an honest show is beyond their means...
As informed questioning of the global warming orthodoxy rises on all sides, the BBC's three-part series Climate Wars, ending tonight, bears all the marks of a carefully planned counter-attack.

BBC science producers were apoplectic at the attention given last year to Martin Durkin's Channel 4 documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle, featuring a galaxy of the world's more sceptical climate scientists. This is their riposte.

Last week, against a range of far-flung locations from Greenland to California, the presenter, Dr Iain Stewart, tackled three of the main arguments of Durkin's film.

In each case the technique was the same. After caricaturing the sceptics' point, with soundbite clips that did not allow them to develop their scientific argument, he then asserted that they had somehow been discredited.

For example, doubts had been raised over the reliability of satellite temperature records which do not show the same degree of warming as surface readings. Dr Roy Spencer, who designed Nasa's satellite system for measuring temperatures, was allowed to admit that a flaw had been found in the system.

But his interview ended before he could explain that, when the flaw was discovered in 1998, it was immediately corrected (although it made little difference to the results).

Likewise, there is a growing case for a correlation between global temperatures and solar activity. Dr Stewart accused Durkin's programme of cutting off a graph which illustrated this at a point when the data failed to support the thesis. Then he did exactly the same himself, not extending his own graph to 2008 in a way that would reinforce the thesis.

Most hilarious of all, however, was a long sequence in which Stewart defended the notorious "hockey stick" graph, which purports to show that temperatures have recently shot up to their highest level on record.

The BBC had a huge blow-up of this "iconic" graph carted triumphantly round London, from Big Ben to Buckingham Palace, as if it were proof that the warming alarmists are right.

There was no hint that the "hockey stick" is among the most completely discredited artefacts in the history of science, not least thanks to the devastating critique by Steve McIntyre, which showed that the graph's creators had an algorithm in their programme which could produce a hockey-stick shape whatever data were fed into it.

There was scarcely a frame of this clever exercise which did not distort or obscure some vital fact. Yet the "impartial" BBC is sending out this farrago of convenient untruths to schools, ensuring that the "march of the lie" continues.

Singing 'Kumbaya' at the UN....

Another useless session begins at the UN....
The new president of this year's assembly (not to be confused with Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon) is Father Miguel D'Escoto, Nicaragua's former foreign minister. In his opening address, he called for the U.N.'s democratization and a dedication to the "dispossessed of the world." He added, that the problems must be solved in a spirit of global brotherhood and sisterhood. He later told correspondents "it sounds like something from songs or poetry but it is the only way out of a quagmire of insane selfishness." Everyone had to take steps to bring the Earth back from the brink.

Seemingly promoting the happy spirit of peace, harmony and all-round political 'Kumbaya' for the General Assembly session, Father Miguel, a Maryknoll priest known as a proponent of the Catholic "liberation theology," offered a litany of rambling philosophical ideas for a reformed and more effective U.N. to help both the world's poor, confront climate change, and to democratize the powerful fifteen member Security Council. Fine, but what about addressing human rights issues in Burma, Cuba, or Zimbabwe? Not a word, but perhaps we should play the soundtrack of Kumbaya!

It was sadly telling when in a press conference, Father Miguel, an avuncular but dedicated Sandinista, returned to form. When questioned as to whether he considered the recent Russian military invasion of Georgia as aggression, D'Escoto professed not to hear or understand the question, but then said "there were irregularities being committed all over the place such as the war in Iraq." When pressed on the point, he slyly stated that Georgia's invasion of South Ossetia was certainly aggression!

Friday, September 19, 2008

What's going on here????

Sounds like an interesting story, no??
A Somali-American leader said on Tuesday that 150 Muslims have lost their jobs at a Nebraska meatpacking plant that has been embroiled in a prayer dispute.

The Muslim workers have been asking to be allowed to pray at sunset.

Mohamed Rage with the Omaha Somali-American Community Organization said 80 workers were thrown out after an altercation late Thursday. He said when they tried to return for their shift Friday, they were fired, along with 70 others.

But union president Dan Hoppes said 60 to 80 people quit Thursday, although he didn't know what happened Friday.

Thursday, September 18, 2008

Another theory of global warming....

Not CO2, not the Sun, but the tug and pull of the planets and the sun...
Willie Soon, a climate scientist based in Massachusetts, agrees that natural forces are largely responsible for driving climate change on Earth, but he has some reservations about the cosmic ray theory. Instead, he sees a mix of astronomical influences that include the sun and other heavenly bodies.

“It’s a beautiful idea and I’m open-minded about it, but in the end I don’t think cosmic rays are the ultimate answer,” he said. “For me what works is to look at the powerful phenomenon attached to how the earth goes around the sun. Very slight changes [in the orbit] can lead to changes in the seasons.”

Soon credits a mathematician named Milutin Milankovic from Yugoslavia (now Serbia) who formulated the “orbital theory of climate change” back during the World War II era for offering up an explanation that remains salient and relevant to this day.

“So the way this theory works, we do not look at the energy of the sun itself,” Soon said. “Instead we look at the way our earth is being pulled and tugged by bigger planets, including the sun and the most massive gas giants. This is how our orbit is changing. Seasons can be changed slightly and yet significantly by orbits being pulled and tucked.”

From this larger astronomical perspective it also is possible to measure warming and cooling cycles that impact Earth’s nearby neighbors, most notably Mars, Soon suggested.

There is data going all the way back to 1976 that show Mars has also experienced global warming. The Martian ice cap has been melting during the same time period that human-caused emissions have been identified as the culprit behind global warming on Earth, he said.

Soon acknowledges that the astronomical data is limited and that more research is required. Even so, for the moment, it is difficult to disprove the idea that heavenly influences are largely responsible for the warming trends over the past few decades, he added.

Don't worry about the permafrost....

Now, it appears that the permafrost won't be thawing....
One of the potential consequences of a warmer world, according to scientists who study such things, is the deep thawing of the permafrost. Thawing could release huge quantities of carbon into the atmosphere, as vegetation, bones and other organic material, long locked up in the deep freezer that is the permafrost, decompose.

But a study published in Science suggests that the impact of warming on the permafrost may not be as bad as forecast. The evidence comes in the form of a wedge of ancient ice found at an old mining site in the Yukon in Canada.

Ice wedges form in permafrost when the ground cracks because of cold, and spring meltwater seeps in and freezes. Over hundreds of years, the wedge builds up, like an in-ground icicle.

Duane G. Froese of the University of Alberta, the lead author of the study, said ice wedges could provide clues to the long-term stability of the permafrost. The problem is figuring out how old they are.

In this case, the top of the wedge was a couple of yards deep in the permafrost, and the researchers found volcanic ash on its top surface. By dating the ash (which presumably came from eruptions in what is now southeastern Alaska), Dr. Froese and his colleagues were able to say how long the ice has been there: about 740,000 years. Because the ash had to have been deposited after the wedge formed, that’s “very clear proof,” Dr. Froese said, that the ice is at least that old.

That means the ice survived through several warming periods, including the last major one, 120,000 years ago. “The general view is that everything would have melted out back then,” Dr. Froese said. The new finding suggests that wasn’t the case, and that models of future melting need to be rethought.

Is Tutu nuts???

He thinks the world doesn't criticize Israel.....
South African Nobel Peace laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu on Thursday accused the West of complicity in Palestinian suffering by its silence, suggesting it did not want to criticize Israel because of the Holocaust.

Tutu spoke after delivering a report to the United Nations about Israel's deadly shelling of the town of Beit Hanun in Gaza in November 2006, which he said may constitute a war crime.

He criticized the international community for failing to speak out against the suffering in Gaza, home to 1.5 million Palestinians, under an Israeli blockade.
"This silence begets complicity," he told the UN Human Rights Council.

Tutu later told a news conference: "I think the West, quite rightly, is feeling contrite, penitent, for its awful connivance with the Holocaust."

"The penance is being paid by the Palestinians. I just hope again that ordinary citizens in the West will wake up and say 'we refuse to be part of this'," he said.

The Greens want us to fail in Afghanistan....

Have you read the Green Party Platform???
In Afghanistan, shift from the NATO mission to one led by the UN.
Gee, could you imagine??? First, the UN wouldn't touch it....but who would do the fighting if it did???

The real war in Pakistan....

A terrific Hitchens article on Pakistan...
One of the most creditable (and neglected) foreign policy shifts of the Bush administration after September11 was away from our dangerous regional dependence on the untrustworthy and ramshackle Pakistan and towards a much more generous rapprochement with India, the world's other great federal, democratic and multi-ethnic state.

Recent accounts of murderous violence in main cities of two of our allies, India and Afghanistan, make it appear overwhelmingly probable that the bombs were not the work of local or home-grown insurgents but were orchestrated by agents of the Pakistani ISI. This is a fantastically unacceptable state of affairs that needs to be given its right name: state-sponsored terrorism.

Meanwhile, and on Pakistani soil and under the noses of its army and the ISI, the city of Quetta and the so-called Federally Administered Tribal Areas are becoming the incubating ground of a reorganised and protected al-Qa'ida.

Barack Obama has been, if anything, the more militant of the two US presidential candidates in stressing the danger here and the need to act without too much sentiment about our so-called Islamabad ally. He began using this rhetoric when it was much simpler to counterpose the so-called good war in Afghanistan with the bad one in Iraq.

Never mind that now; he is committed in advance to a serious projection of American power into the heartland of our deadliest enemy.

And that, I think, is another reason so many people are reluctant to employ truthful descriptions for the emerging Afghanistan-Pakistan confrontation: American liberals can't quite face the fact that if their man does win in November, and if he has meant a single serious word he has said, it means more war, and more bitter and protracted war at that, not less.

Wednesday, September 17, 2008

Best solution on global warming - do nothing!

Grandiose schemes to fix global warming won't do the trick - a great column from Bjorn Lomborg.
One commonly repeated argument for doing something about climate change sounds compelling, but turns out to be almost fraudulent. It is based on comparing the cost of action with the cost of inaction, and almost every major politician in the world uses it.

The president of the European commission, José Manuel Barroso, for example, used this argument when he presented the European Union's proposal to tackle climate change earlier this year. The EU promised to cut its carbon emissions by 20% by 2020, at a cost that the commission's own estimates put at about 0.5% of GDP, or roughly €60bn per year. This is obviously a hefty price tag – at least a 50% increase in the total cost of the EU – and it will likely be much higher (the commission has previously estimated the cost to be double its current estimate).

But Barroso's punchline was that "the cost is low compared to the high price of inaction". In fact, he forecasted that the price of doing nothing "could even approach 20% of GDP". (Never mind that this cost estimate is probably wildly overestimated – most models show about 3% damages.)

So there you have it. Of course, politicians should be willing to spend 0.5% of GDP to avoid a 20% cost of GDP. This sounds eminently sensible – until you realise that Barroso is comparing two entirely different issues.

The 0.5%-of-GDP expense will reduce emissions ever so slightly (if everyone in the EU actually fulfills their requirements for the rest of the century, global emissions will fall by about 4%). This would reduce the temperature increase expected by the end of the century by just five-hundredths of a degree Celsius. Thus, the EU's immensely ambitious programme will not stop or even significantly impact global warming.

In other words, if Barroso fears costs of 20% of GDP in the year 2100, the 0.5% payment every year of this century will do virtually nothing to change that cost. We would still have to pay by the end of the century, only now we would also have made ourselves poorer in the 90 years preceding it.

Tuesday, September 16, 2008

Sharia Law in the UK????

The UK is lost....
ISLAMIC law has been officially adopted in Britain, with sharia courts given powers to rule on Muslim civil cases.

The government has quietly sanctioned the powers for sharia judges to rule on cases ranging from divorce and financial disputes to those involving domestic violence.

Rulings issued by a network of five sharia courts are enforceable with the full power of the judicial system, through the county courts or High Court.

Previously, the rulings of sharia courts in Britain could not be enforced, and depended on voluntary compliance among Muslims.

It has now emerged that sharia courts with these powers have been set up in London, Birmingham, Bradford and Manchester with the network’s headquarters in Nuneaton, Warwickshire. Two more courts are being planned for Glasgow and Edinburgh.

Sheikh Faiz-ul-Aqtab Siddiqi, whose Muslim Arbitration Tribunal runs the courts, said he had taken advantage of a clause in the Arbitration Act 1996.

Under the act, the sharia courts are classified as arbitration tribunals. The rulings of arbitration tribunals are binding in law, provided that both parties in the dispute agree to give it the power to rule on their case.

Siddiqi said: “We realised that under the Arbitration Act we can make rulings which can be enforced by county and high courts. The act allows disputes to be resolved using alternatives like tribunals. This method is called alternative dispute resolution, which for Muslims is what the sharia courts are.”

The Latest on Iran's Nukes....

They're reconfiguring their missiles for a nuclear warhead...
The UN nuclear monitoring agency on Tuesday shared intelligence purporting to show that Iran tried to refit its main long-distance missile to carry a nuclear payload, according to diplomats who attended the meeting.

Responding to the presentation to the 35-nation board of the International Atomic Energy Agency, a senior US envoy said the information was compelling evidence of such work by the Islamic Republic. But his Iranian counterpart said the material shown was fabricated.

Other diplomats, who demanded anonymity because they were not authorized to comment on the closed meeting's details, described the information presented as something in-between the American and Iranian standpoints.

The briefing focused on an IAEA report circulated to the board members Monday that said Teheran stonewalled agency efforts to follow up on the alleged weapons program. The report also confirmed that Tehran was expanding its uranium enrichment activities - which can make either nuclear fuel or warhead payloads - despite three sets of UN Security Council sanctions.

Mickey Mouse gets the death sentence....

Maybe the International Court of Justice will detain him for trial...
Sheikh Muhammad Munajid claimed the mouse is "one of Satan's soldiers" and makes everything it touches impure.

But he warned that depictions of the creature in cartoons such as Tom and Jerry, and Disney's Mickey Mouse, had taught children that it was in fact loveable.

The cleric, a former diplomat at the Saudi embassy in Washington DC, said that under Sharia, both household mice and their cartoon counterparts must be killed.

Mr Munajid was asked to give Islam's teaching on mice during a religious affairs programme broadcast on al-Majd TV, an Arab television network.

According to a translation prepared by the Middle East Media Research Institute, an American press monitoring service, he said: "The mouse is one of Satan's soldiers and is steered by him.

"If a mouse falls into a pot of food – if the food is solid, you should chuck out the mouse and the food touching it, and if it is liquid – you should chuck out the whole thing, because the mouse is impure.

"According to Islamic law, the mouse is a repulsive, corrupting creature. How do you think children view mice today – after Tom and Jerry?

"Even creatures that are repulsive by nature, by logic, and according to Islamic law have become wonderful and are loved by children. Even mice.

"Mickey Mouse has become an awesome character, even though according to Islamic law, Mickey Mouse should be killed in all cases."

Sunday, September 14, 2008

Wow...being a Hamas prisoner is fun!!!

They really know how to celebrate birthdays...
Kidnapped IDF soldier Gilad Schalit is not only alive and well, but is being treated to annual birthday parties which include "cake, candles, and music," a report published by The Sunday Times quoted a leader of the Gaza-based Doghmush clan as saying.

I guess this warning is not for Al-Jazeera.....

No, they wouldn't show immoral content....
A top Saudi judicial official said on Sunday that owners of satellite TV networks that air "immoral content" should be prosecuted, punished and then given the death penalty if punishments don't deter them from "corrupting people."

Sheik Saleh al-Lihedan, the chief of the kingdom's highest tribunal, sought to explain an edict broadcast last week in which he said it is permissible to kill the owners of satellite TV networks that broadcast indecent programs.

Greens keep Africans poor....


Environmentalists actually love poverty, no???

Western do-gooders are impoverishing Africa by promoting traditional farming at the expense of modern scientific agriculture, according to Britain's former chief scientist.

Anti-science attitudes among aid agencies, poverty campaigners and green activists are denying the continent access to technology that could improve millions of lives, Professor Sir David King will say today.

Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) from Europe and America are turning African countries against sophisticated farming methods, including GM crops, in favour of indigenous and organic approaches that cannot deliver the continent's much needed “green revolution”, he believes.

Speaking before a keynote lecture tonight to the British Association for the Advancement of Science, of which he is president, Sir David said that the slow pace of African development was linked directly to Western influence. “I'm going to suggest, and I believe this very strongly, that a big part has been played in the impoverishment of that continent by the focus on nontechnological agricultural techniques, on techniques of farming that pertain to the history of that continent rather than techniques that pertain to modern technological capability. Why has that continent not joined Asia in the big green revolutions that have taken place over the past few decades? The suffering within that continent, I believe, is largely driven by attitudes developed in the West which are somewhat anti-science, anti-technology - attitudes that lead towards organic farming, for example, attitudes that lead against the use of genetic technology for crops that could deal with increased salinity in the water, that can deal with flooding for rice crops, that can deal with drought resistance.”

Wind farms suck.....

I guess that's the best way to put it...
Excessive subsidies make them an expensive and inefficient way of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, a study by the Renewable Energy Foundation (REF) think-tank says.

The report comes amid mounting disquiet over the number of wind farms planned for Britain.

Energy companies want to erect more than 3,000 turbines over the next five years, leading to fears that hundreds of acres of rural landscape will be blighted.

Critics insist that wind energy is too inefficient to replace the creaking network of fossil fuel power stations. Even with modern turbines, wind farms are unable to operate at full capacity because of the unreliable nature of Britain's wind.

The industry admits that for up to 30 per cent of the time, turbines are idle because wind speeds are either too low to turn the blades, or too high, risking damage to the machines.

Without any suitable method of storing the excess power produced when winds are blowing but electricity use is low, many turbines also have to be turned off for fear of overloading the grid.

The report says that wind farms are unprofitable and rely on hefty subsidies that ultimately come from consumers in the form of rising energy prices. This cost comes on top of increases in gas and electricity prices caused by the high price of oil. They risk leaving the poorest members of society struggling to heat their homes.

Climage change gets ridiculous...

Christopher Booker covers some of the recent stories about global warming....
Recent events have seen the scare campaign over global warming descend to the level of a Monty Python sketch.

Much publicity was given, for instance, to Lewis Gordon Pugh, who set out to paddle a kayak to the Pole to demonstrate the vanishing of the Arctic ice. At 80.5 degrees north, still 600 miles short of his goal, he met with ice so thick that he and his fossil-fuelled support ship had to turn back.

But this did not prevent him receiving a congratulatory call from Gordon Brown, nor boasting that he had travelled "further north than anyone has kayaked so far".

It took the admirable Watts Up With That blog, run by the American meteorologist Anthony Watts, to point out that in 1893 the Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen found the Arctic so ice-free that he was able to kayak above 82 degrees north, 100 miles nearer the Pole than our hapless campaigner against "unprecedented global warming".
There's more fun stuff in his article...

Saturday, September 13, 2008

An outrageous judgement in the UK....

The UK court bought Greenpeace's arguments....
Whatever you may think of the anti-nuclear environmental group Greenpeace, the collapse of the case against its activists for causing criminal damage to a coal-fired power station at Kingsnorth in Kent is embarrassing to the Brown Government, for it leaves it looking, well, browner than ever.

Six activists admitted trying to shut down the station and painting "Gordon" down the chimney in a protest at EON's plans to build an even bigger coal-fired station next door.

But a jury of nine bought the activists' argument, supported in person by James Hansen, the US climate scientist and director of Nasa, that Greenpeace were legally justified because they were trying to prevent climate change causing greater damage to property around the world.

The jury, in other words, took at face value pronouncements by ministers such as Hilary Benn, David Miliband, and Gordon Brown himself, and by Sir David King, the former chief scientist, that that global warming is with us and that the proliferation of coal-fired plants in China, at a rate of two a day, risks dangerous climate change. Proliferation of coal fired plants in China is damaging, but not apparently proliferation in Britain.

Just have more babies....

The key to the muslims taking over the UK....
Muslim hate fanatics plan to take over Britain by having more babies and forcing a population explosion, it has been revealed.

The swollen Muslim population would be enough to conquer Britain from inside, they claim.

Fanatics told a meeting of young Muslims on the anniversary of the 9/11 atrocity, that it would then be easy to impose Sharia law on the population, the Sun newspaper reported.

Speaking at a meeting in London, Anjem Choudarry, right-hand man of exiled preacher Omar Bakri Mohammed, said: "It may be by pure conversion that Britain will become an Islamic state. We may never need to conquer it from the outside."

Friday, September 12, 2008

Gas supplies are going up....

Forget peak oil...have a look at the new developments in gas....
In the oil patch, they are calling it the "shale sweepstakes"—a fevered rush to purchase drilling rights to natural gas that lies deep in deposits of shale rock. Output from these fields has been on a rocket ride for the past four years. It is the reason why natural gas production overall in the U.S. is expected to jump 9% in 2008, after nearly a decade of no growth.

This is good news for consumers who'll be turning up their gas furnaces this winter. Natural gas prices have fallen 50%—much steeper than oil—in the past two months, to a recent $7 per 1,000 cubic feet. All the new shale development could keep a lid on natural gas prices for years to come. The oil companies, says Ed Siefert, president of market researcher RigData, "are all spending money like drunken sailors."

The shale business has gotten so big that some of the earlier players are starting to cash out, and the major oil companies are diving in. On Sept. 2, BP (BP) announced it was buying a 25% interest in Chesapeake Energy's (CHK) shale fields in Arkansas for $1.9 billion. A month earlier the company paid $1.7 billion for Chesapeake's Oklahoma shale properties. On Aug. 28, Royal Dutch Shell (RDSA) closed on the $5.7 billion acquisition of Duvernay Oil, which holds similar prospects in Canada.

The latest on Iran's development of nuclear weapons....

I like the use of the term 'missing'.....
Nuclear experts responsible for monitoring Iran's nuclear programme have discovered that enough enriched uranium, which if processed to weapons grade level could be used to make up to six atom bombs, has disappeared from the main production facility at Isfahan.

American spy satellites have identified a number of suspicious sites, which the Iranians have not declared to nuclear inspectors, that intelligence officials believe are being used for covert research.

Thursday, September 11, 2008

Never Forget!

Wednesday, September 10, 2008

Speculation drew up oil prices...

Very interesting.....but how do you keep speculators out of the market???
Speculation by large investors — and not supply and demand for oil — were a primary reason for the surge in oil prices during the first half of the year and the more recent price declines, an independent study concluded Wednesday.

The report by Masters Capital Management said investors poured $60 billion into oil futures markets during the first five months of the year as oil prices soared from $95 a barrel in January to $145 a barrel by July.

Since then, these investors have withdrawn $39 billion from those markets as prices have retreated dramatically, the report said. Oil traded at about $102 a barrel Wednesday on the New York Mercantile Exchange.

"We have clear evidence the fund flow pushed prices up and the fund flow pushed prices down," said Michael Masters of Masters Capital Management, calling the amount of money moving into oil futures markets by large institutional investors in the early part of the year "way off the scale."

Masters said its analysis shows investors "began a massive stampede for the exits" on July 15 and that this caused the price decline.

"These large financial players have become the primary source of the dramatic and damaging volatility seen in oil prices," concluded the report.

What some Malays think...

He was rebuked for his comment about the Chinese...but did they mind the anti-semitism???
A senior official will be punished for his racist outburst warning Malaysia's ethnic Chinese minority not to become greedy for political and economic power, the prime minister said Tuesday.

Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi said the leaders of Malaysia's 14-party ruling coalition unanimously rejected Ahmad Ismail's remarks and that they "want swift and firm action to be taken" against him.

Ahmad, a district chief in the United Malays National Organization ruling party, claimed that the Malay majority was losing patience with minorities, particularly ethnic Chinese politicians.

"I urge the Chinese not to become like the Jewish in America, where it is not enough that they control the economy, but they also want to dominate politics," Ahmad told a news conference late Monday in northern Penang state.

"Consider this a warning from the Malays," Ahmad said. "The patience of the Malays has a limit. Do not push us against the wall, for we will be forced to turn back and push the Chinese for our own survival."

Just where are Jack Layton's New Jobs???

I love it when political leaders talk about thousands of new sustainable job....but, is it real...
Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama has a great twofer pitch: "green jobs." It sounds like a winner. In one fell swoop he can promise to end unemployment and fix and save the planet from climate change.

Or so he says.

"I'll invest $150 billion over the next decade in affordable, renewable sources of energy -- wind power and solar power and the next generation of biofuels; an investment that will lead to new industries and five million new jobs that pay well and can't ever be outsourced," he told the Democratic National Convention (http://tinyurl.com/64szf7).

Wow. Five million new jobs. All that work building windmills and creating biofuels are the "green jobs" that will come into existence when wise government creates the industries that will produce the energy and vehicles that will make fossil fuels obsolete.

Politicians always promise that their programs will create jobs. It's used to justify building palatial sports stadiums for wealthy team owners. Alaska Rep. Don Young claimed the infamous "bridge to nowhere" would create jobs (http://tinyurl.com/6jq623). The fallacy is the same in every case: Even if the program creates jobs building bridges or windmills, it necessarily prevents other jobs from being created. This is because government spending merely diverts money from private projects to government projects.

Governments create no wealth. They only move it around while taking a cut for their trouble. So any jobs created over here come at the expense of jobs that would have been created over there. Overlooking this fact is known as the broken-window fallacy (http://tinyurl.com/ydasa2). The French economist Frederic Bastiat pointed out that a broken shop window will create work for a glassmaker, but that work comes only at the expense of the cook or tailor the shopkeeper would have patronized if he didn't have to replace the window.

Creating jobs is not difficult for government officials. Pharaohs created thousands of jobs by building pyramids. Our government could create jobs by paying people to dig holes and then fill them up. Would actual wealth be created? Of course not. It would be destroyed. It's like arguing the hurricanes create jobs. After all, the destruction is followed by rebuilding. But does anyone seriously believe that replacing destroyed buildings creates wealth?

Tuesday, September 09, 2008

Couldn't they go naked???

Boy, the UN knows how to fight climate change....
The United Nations has been attempting to cut global warming by raising the summertime temperature inside its New York headquarters and forcing occupants to wear lighter clothes.

A month-long experiment approved by the secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, to raise the thermostat throughout much of the building from 72 to 77 degrees was so successful that it may become a more long-term policy, said the UN.

Diplomatic dress codes were relaxed as many male staff got rid of their jackets and ties, and women chose sleeveless outfits. Temperatures in the often windowless conference rooms, where most of the negotiating goes on were set slightly lower at 75 degrees.

The Hatred of the CBC.....

Look at the vitriol just oozing from this comment...
I assume John McCain chose Sarah Palin as his vice-presidential partner in a fit of pique because the Republican money men refused to let him have the stuffed male shirt he really wanted. She added nothing to the ticket that the Republicans didn't already have sewn up, the white trash vote, the demographic that sullies America's name inside and outside its borders yet has such a curious appeal for the right.

So why do it?

It's possible that Republican men, sexual inadequates that they are, really believe that women will vote for a woman just because she's a woman. They're unfamiliar with our true natures. Do they think vaginas call out to each other in the jungle night? I mean, I know men have their secret meetings at which they pledge to do manly things, like being irresponsible with their semen and postponing household repairs with glue and used matches. Guys will be guys, obviously.
And, it just gets worse!

More exciting news from Jack Layton!

Oh, yes, a great way to start the day - a breakfast event!

And, here's a huge flash:
En route to some newspaper and radio interviews in Regina.

Skepticism from the UK Environment Minister...

This is great - some official skepticism...
First of all can I make it clear I accept that we are experiencing climate change. Indeed climate change has been a feature of the history of our planet. The most modern history of the earth shows that these changes occur in regular cycles. From 200BC to 600AD we had what was known as the Roman warming when grapes grew in the open as far north as Scotland. The Dark Ages between 600 and 900AD was a cold period. Then came the Mediaeval warming period from 900 to 1300AD followed by the Little Ice Age between 1300 to 1850 AD when the Thames regularly froze over and fairs were held on the ice. From 1850 to 1940 we had another period of warming followed by a period of cooling from 1940 to 1975. When I was at school, scientists were confidently predicting that we were entering another ice age. From 1976 we have experienced gradual warming again. Significantly the most progressive and prosperous periods in world history were during the periods of global warming.
We have never clearly understood the causes of these changes and despite what some environmentalists say there is no scientific consensus around the causes. Some claim that recent climate change is due to CO2 production from industrialisation, our energy use, our love affair with the car and foreign holidays by jet airplane. The difficulty with this explanation is that climate change occurred even when we did not have the increase on CO2 emissions experience in the last 200 years. Another difficulty they have is that the increase in CO2 occurs after the increase in temperatures.

Other scientists have produced research based on analysis of ice cores, and study of changes in the sun's radiance which they claim proves that the changes in Earth's climate are primarily caused by solar activity. Readers may ask what the relevance of such a scientific debate is to them and given the esoteric nature of the subject may dismiss it as nothing to do with them. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact the reason why environmentalists have a fit of apoplexy when their claim that the scientific jury is still out on the cause of climate change is that there are massive implications for policy depending on which view you take.

To date governments across the world seem to have caved in to the demands of well-placed environmental lobby groups and the political hysteria they have generated and have introduced a wide range of measures to reduce CO2 emissions in an attempt to stop climate change. These measures are already impacting on our pockets every day through the imposition of so-called green taxes, price increases and regulations. We pay more for petrol because the Greens have persuaded the government to make it dearer so we buy less. Road tax on cars over seven years old is set to soar to £450 per year and my department estimates that over 100,000 drivers in Northern Ireland will be affected. The reason for the tax is that these cars produce too much CO2. We pay more for electricity for the same reason. Already the climate change levy and the demand that more power is generated from wind have sent electricity bills soaring.

We are already losing jobs to China and India as the government seeks to chase away industries which produce CO2 in order to achieve our Kyoto target on CO2 reductions. The irony is that the CO2 is simply produced in a different part of the world where the governments have decided not to sign up to the international agreement on emissions. So our adherence to the green political correctness damages our economy while doing nothing to deal with the perceived problem.

These are the consequences of a policy which ascribes to the view that climate change is man-made. If climate change is indeed caused by changes in solar activity then clearly the billions of pounds currently spent on reducing CO2 is being wasted because they will have no impact on what happens to the world's climate. The changes are beyond our control and resources should be used to adapt to the consequences of climate change rather than King Canute style vainly trying to stop it.

Power cuts are coming to the UK.....

Do we have enough power coming on-stream in Ontario???
Britain is “quite simply running out of power” and blackouts are almost inevitable within the next few years.

This is the stark warning from the head of an energy think-tank who believes power cuts could be serious enough to spark civil disorder.

Campbell Dunford of the respected Renewable Energy Foundation said: “It’s almost too late to do anything about it. Nothing will stop us having to pay very high prices for power in future.

“If we pull our finger out now we can limit blackouts but it’s going to be pretty grim whatever happens.”

Gordon Brown pledged last week to end Britain’s reliance on the “dictatorship of oil” but Mr Dunford believes the Prime Minister’s new interest in the security of energy supplies may have come too late.

Only last Thursday, National Grid issued an urgent call for power after a series of power station breakdowns. Suppliers were asked to bring all their available generating capacity online, including costly oil-fired stations.

In May, hundreds of thousands of people in Cleveland, Cheshire, Lincolnshire and London suffered blackouts when seven power stations were closed.

The electricity industry estimates it needs to spend £100billion on new stations to ensure supplies.

The “retirement” of a string of nuclear and coal-fired power stations will see 37 per cent of the UK’s generation disappear by 2015, partly because of EU environmental directives.

The BBC and Self-Censorship...

The BBC cancels a docu-drama about the 7/7 bombers...
The London Bombers works so well because it's a family drama about intergenerational conflict as well as an account of the largest massacre in Britain since Lockerbie. The BBC captures the claustrophobic milieu of bodybuilding and vigilantism into which the men retreat. The bomb-making in a tiny terraced house becomes a male-bonding ritual in which the members of a cult of death squash each other's doubts.

"How can we keep Muslims off the Tube that day?" asks Abdullah Jamal, the fourth bomber. "They'll go straight to paradise," answers Sidique. "It is quadaa [fate] that they're there. And if it is Allah's wish... [pause ] We need more acetone."

SO PSYCHOLOGICALLY convincing is the portrayal of macho loyalty and the lure of barbarism that viewers can understand how these men turn into mass murderers. Except that they can't and won't understand, because the BBC will not give them the opportunity to understand. This is a review of a drama that was never made.

The reporters convinced the families of three of the four bombers to cooperate. By the end, they agreed that the BBC's account of their sons and brothers' lives and deaths was accurate. Cafolla submitted five versions of the script. He was working up to a final draft when the BBC abandoned the project. The official reason is that the drama didn't make the grade. The script is circulating in samizdat form, which is how it reached Standpoint, and every writer and director who has read it disagrees. As do the journalists. They say that BBC managers did not tell them they were stopping production because their work was substandard but because it was "Islamophobic."

Eh? The defining characteristic of Islamophobic prejudice is the belief that all Muslims are potential terrorists, and yet here, apparently, is the BBC seconding that motion by arguing that a dramatic examination of terrorism would be offensive to all Muslims.

It makes no sense until you understand the moral contortions of the postmodern liberal establishment. In the past few years, the Foreign Office, the Home Office, the West Midlands Police, the liberal press, the Liberal Democrats, the Metropolitan Police, the Crown Prosecution Service, the lord chief justice and the archbishop of Canterbury have either supported ultra-reactionary doctrines or made libelous accusations against the critics of radical Islam. All have sought to prove their liberal tolerance by supporting the most illiberal and intolerant wing of British Islam, and by blocking out the voices of its Muslim and non-Muslim critics as they do it.

Monday, September 08, 2008

Qais Ghanem - the Green Party Poet...

Yes, besides being a 9/11 truther....Ghanem is a poet!

Here's his poem, called Guantanamo:
Come stay with me little cockroach
Do not run away as I approach
I mean no harm or any reproach
On your little space I won’t encroach

You leave the crack in that damp wall
Of my little cell which I would call
Guantanamo’s darkest hell hole
Every evening for your short stroll

The 9/11 Truther running for the Greens in Ottawa....

Yes, Mr. Qais Ghanem, is a fucking 9/11 truther.....here's a small section his blog entry on Afghanistan.....
Here is a list of questions that need answers:
Why was the FBI investigation of hijackers shut down?
Why were military response stand down orders issued?
Why were distracting war games set up on 9/11 of all days?
Why did building 7, not attacked at all, collapse like controlled demolition?
Earlier this week, he called for the unil

The latest from Jack Layton!

Gee, this is exciting...I'm addicted to his every move!
We're on our way to Regina, after starting the day in Calgary, a news conference in Fort Smith and an event in Vancouver. Long day!

How's this for a fatwa???

The latest from Morocco....
"A nine-year-old girl has the same sexual capacities like a woman of twenty and over". Thus reads a fatwa issued by Skeikh Mohamed Ibn Abderrahmane Al-Maghraoui, according to Moroccan daily 'Aujourd'hui Le Maroc'.

Hallelullah....the Greens will eliminate poverty....

Thank you Elizabeth May! She issued a press release today that the Greens will eliminate poverty...

Here's the headline:
Green Party will eliminate poverty and promote local food
And, how will they do that??? Just pay people!
“To eliminate poverty and hunger, the Green Party would look at introducing a Guaranteed Livable Income for Canadians.
Gee, it's so easy!

Taliban Jack 'takes it to the tar sands'....

What exactly is he taking???? This is from the must-read Jack Layton blog!
We’re taking it to the tar sands – it’s time big polluters paid their share.
But, hold onto your pants...there's more.....
We're in Fort Smith after flying over the Tar Sands in Fort McMurray, where we saw the devastation caused by the exploitation.
Here's a man who would shut down the biggest money-maker we have....

And, the Greens have an important blog...

Yes, how can you pass up the opportunity to read what the Greens are up to???

Here's today's entry:
A flurry of activity. Some signs up. A photo shoot with the media, meeting with volunteers, final edits on fundraising letter, campaign material and web site and getting a campaign office.
Tomorrow is a full day at my regular job and then back at campaigning tomorrow evening.
I don't think I will be putting down salsa and chili sauce this fall.

Valerie Powell
Simcoe North
Shadow Cabinet Seniors Critic
Exciting to be a Green, no???

Jack Layton, the Twit, is using Twitter....

Great news....now you can keep up to date on Jack's updates on your phone....

And, here's his first important message:
The campaign is on - a great start. Great to see so many people out.
Yes, a very important message from a very important person!

Sunday, September 07, 2008

Enough with the fucking 'change'.....

Now, Layton is running as the candidate of change...
NDP Leader Jack Layton kicked off the election campaign in Ottawa before a cheering crowd gathered across the river from Parliament Hill.

Taking a page out of the U.S. election race where "change" has become a political mantra this year, Layton repeatedly promised voters his party is "working for change."
Of course, nobody wants his kind of change - thank God!

Another traditional marriage....and honor killing....

These things happen every week, no?
A 17-year-old Pakistani girl forced to marry a 45-year-old when she was only nine was reportedly killed by her parents, according to the Weekend Australian.

The murder has intensified despair among human rights workers in Pakistan over a recent spate of "honor killings," in which two women and three teenage school girls were buried alive in Baluchistan Province because they wanted to marry the men of their choice.

Saira Nusrat Bibi was successfully fighting a legal battle to have her marriage annulled. As she left court in the Punjabi city of Sahiwal, she was surrounded by a group of men reportedly sent by her parents, and shot in front of police, The Australian reported.

The Baluchistan case was worsened by an attempt by a member of the country's national parliament, Senator Israr Ullah Zehri, to defend it, telling colleagues that "these are centuries-old traditions and I will continue to defend them,” The Australian reports.

This makes me want to eat a hamburger....

Leave it to the UN - telling people to eat less meat to fight global warming....
People should have one meat-free day a week if they want to make a personal and effective sacrifice that would help tackle climate change, the world's leading authority on global warming has told The Observer

Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which last year earned a joint share of the Nobel Peace Prize, said that people should then go on to reduce their meat consumption even further.

An anti-semitic beating in Paris....

Right in the heart of the Jewish area of Paris....
Three Jewish councilors from the Bnei Akiva youth movement were attacked not far from the organization's central branch in Paris on Saturday afternoon. The boys, aged between 17 and 18, had just finished the Sabbath minha prayer when they were attacked by a group of Muslims, the head of Bnei Akiva's French desk, Binyamin Tuati, told The Jerusalem Post on Sunday.

According to a press statement released by World Bnei Akiva spokesman Tzvika Klein, the youths were initially approached by a group of three Muslims and African immigrants who began to hurl chestnuts in their direction. When one of the councilors complained, the assailants began yelling out anti-Semitic remarks. Between 10 to a dozen other attackers wearing knuckle dusters joined the original three and began beating up the Jewish group until police arrived at the scene.

The youths, Dan Nebet, Kevin Bitan and David Buaziz, had all been released from hospital by Sunday afternoon and sported several wounds from their attack including a broken nose, a broken jaw and stitches. According to Tuati, the victims' families filed a complaint with local police that had responded by opening an investigation into the incident, which has already been recognized as an anti-Semitic attack by local authorities. So far, three suspects have been identified by police.

The movement is now concerned over the fact that the incident occurred in an area central to the French capital's Bnei Akiva members at the 19th Quarter in Paris. The area, said Tuati, is close to a school and is visited by roughly 150 children every Shabbat. The incident marks the second anti-Semitic attack in the area of the Bnei Akiva branch in the last two months.

Saturday, September 06, 2008

And, some good news....

Hey, sometimes I report on good news....
Months of attacks by unmanned US predator aircraft have caused carnage among the middle ranks of terrorist leaders in the lawless lands along the border with Afghanistan, where al-Qa'eda remains dangerous despite suffering a serious defeat in Iraq.

Their victims have included experienced Arab leaders and, it is now thought, Adam Gadahn, a former heavy-metal fan and so-called "killer computer nerd" originally from California. Nothing has been heard from him for months, leading intelligence experts to conclude that he may be dead.

Mr Gadahn has been credited with helping transform al-Qa'eda's al-Sahab propaganda wing into a slick operation which communicates in fluent English and produces professional quality DVDs, including one for Osama bin Laden last year.

But he may have fallen victim to an expanded programme of predator assassinations which in the last year has targeted and killed many of al-Qa'eda's military commanders, terrorist trainers and facilitators.

Jihadists around the world will be watching as closely as intelligence officials this week to see whether Mr Gadahn - also known as Azzam al-Ameriki - produces a new video message to mark September 11, as he has done every year since 2003.

If there is no message it will be taken as near certain confirmation that he is dead – killed either in a strike by Hellfire missiles, or perhaps by jihadi colleagues who have grown jealous of his success.

Mr Gadahn is now thought to have been killed in an attack launched from a remotely piloted aircraft in January which killed al-Qaeda's then military commander, Abu Laith al-Libi, in Mir Ali, Waziristan.

This man is dangerous....

James Hansen is dangerous and wants to take us back to the 11th century.....
Two events in recent days shed light on a battle at the heart of government over what threatens to be as serious a crisis as Britain has ever faced.

The first was at Maidstone Crown Court, where six Greenpeace activists face charges of criminal damage at Kingsnorth power station. In protest at a plan by E.On to build a 1,600 megawatt coal-fired plant on the site, the demonstrators had tried to paint the slogan "Gordon bin it" on a 630-foot chimney. They were interrupted by a court injunction after painting the Prime Minister's Christian name, which it then cost E.On £35,000 to remove.

What elevated this case into more than just a local incident was the presence, as Greenpeace's chief witness, of Al Gore's friend James Hansen, head of Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who has done more than any other scientist in the past 20 years to promote alarm over global warming.

Greenpeace's case is that its members had a "lawful excuse" to damage the power station because they were only seeking to prevent it causing much greater damage through rising sea levels and extinctions brought about by climate change.

Mr Hansen told the court that the new power station alone would be responsible for the extinction of "400 species".

It might seem odd that a senior US public official should fly the Atlantic to support the defendants in a criminal trial, but Mr Hansen regards it as a test case in the campaign by greens on both sides of the Atlantic to close down all coal-fired power stations in the next 20 years.

Muslim lawyers don't have to stand in Dutch Courts...

FoxLingo does the translation here....how on earth could the court allow this???
the moslimfundamentalist and lawyer Mohammed Enait must stand up no longer as the judges the room come in. Enait state that stand up in fight is with its belief. The court in Rotterdam has given him right, communicates to NRC trade booklet Friday.

Yet another reason not to support the Greens...

This week, they had to fire an anti-semitic candidate in BC...now, a horribly anti-Israel candidate in Ottawa.....why can't they stick to the environment???
Green Party Leader Elizabeth May is affirming her support for an Ottawa-area Green Party candidate accused of “Israel bashing,” just one day after citing anti-Semitism as grounds for rejecting one of her B.C. candidates.

Qais Ghanem, a Yemeni-born physician with a strong interest in the Middle East, has stirred debate among his fellow Greens on the party's online discussion forum. The Greens' Ottawa-South candidate has aligned himself with three other Green candidates to form what they call the “Ottawa Group of Four.” They are pushing the party to approve a resolution called “Palestine” that “calls upon Israel to end its forty-year occupation of all Arab lands without preconditions.”

When some in the discussion forum suggested Dr. Ghanem's comments were one-sidedly anti-Israel, the Green candidate fired back. “I do not have to record the opposite point of view to every quotation I dig up, for the sake of so-called ‘balance,'” he wrote on Aug. 17. “The Israeli point of view is voiced non-stop by the North American media which is controlled by a small oligarchy.”

Palestinan Authority cancels tolerant TV series....

The public is not ready for TV shows that call for the co-existence with Israel...that would be way too radical....
They said some scenes were found offensive to the general Palestinian public and therefore could not be aired on Palestine TV, an official and nationalist institution.

Among others, certain scenes failed to show the Israeli occupation in a negative enough light, they charged. The officials mentioned one scene in which a Palestinian gives a flower to Israeli soldiers at an army checkpoint in the West Bank.

I'd say Fuck Off....

Gee, how surprising, Israel to be billed for war that Hezbollah started....
The United Nations will require Israel to pay Lebanon nearly $1 billion for environmental damages caused during the 2006 Second Lebanon War, the Lebanese newspaper Al-Akhbar reported on Saturday.

The paper said that UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon will put the motion on the table of the Security Council later this month.

Muslim propaganda on Dutch Television....

Like many public broadcasters, they can't deal with the truth...so, you have to make things up...
Public broadcaster NPS is producing a new television programme with the objective of giving the Dutch population a positive view of Muslims and other minority groups.

The title of the feel-good show is Dichtbij Nederland (Close to the Netherlands). It will be a light news and infotainment programme aimed at young Moroccans, Turks, Surinamese and Antilleans, which gives a picture of life in their parents' countries.

The NPS hopes that the programme "will generate more positive ideas about new population groups in the Netherlands and their countries of origin" and "draw more attention to social cohesion and increasing mutual understanding." The NPS refers to this as a "unique and large-scale media project that aims to create shared experiences".

If everything runs according to plan, Dichtbij Nederland will be shown on the Nederland 1 channel from January. It is not yet known who will present the show.

NPS was criticised during the past week because of a live programme about the American elections, in which the presenters praised Barack Obama for four days in an extremely biased manner from the Democratic Convention in Denver. NOS chief editor Hans Laroes lashed out fiercely at the NPS and pointed out that the two public broadcasters should not be confused.

Norway to reserve academic posts for women....

Resorting to discrimination to make things equal is just wrong...
Minister for Research and Higher Education, Tora Aasland, is willing to break European rules by reintroducing academic positions reserved for women.

Aasland confirmed that next year's national budget will contain money earmarked academic posts reserved for women, during an annual lecture at the University of Oslo.

She pointed out that women still have far to go before they can compete on equal terms with men in academia, particularly in science and technology subjects.

Friday, September 05, 2008

Is this going to come to Canada....

8-year-old environmental enforcers???
The youngsters are among almost 5,000 residents who in some cases are being offered £500 rewards if they provide evidence of minor infractions.

One in six councils contacted by the Telegraph said they had signed up teams of "environment volunteers" who are being encouraged to photograph or video neighbours guilty of dog fouling, littering or "bin crimes".

The "covert human intelligence sources", as some local authorities describe them, are also being asked to pass on the names of neighbours they believe to be responsible, or take down their number-plates.

Ealing Council in West London said: "There are hundreds of Junior Streetwatchers, aged 8-10 years old, who are trained to identify and report enviro-crime issues such as graffiti and fly-tipping."

Harlow Council in Essex said: "We currently have 25 Street Scene Champions who work with the council. They are all aged between 11 to 14. They are encouraged to report the aftermath of enviro-crimes such as vandalism to bus shelters, graffiti, abandoned vehicles, fly-tipping etc. They do this via telephone or email direct to the council."

A raging religious debate....

Only in Saudi Arabia - can muslims have birthday parties???

When Hala al-Masaad invited her girlfriends over to celebrate her 18th birthday with cake and juice, the high school student was stepping into an unusual public debate. Is celebrating birthdays un-Islamic?

Saudi Arabia's most senior Muslim cleric recently denounced birthday parties as an unwanted foreign influence, but another prominent cleric declared they were OK.

That has left al-Masaad with mixed feelings about her low-key celebration last month. She loves birthday parties because they make her feel she has "moved from one stage of life to another."

"But I sometimes feel I'm doing something haram," she said sheepishly, using the Arabic word for banned.

The Saudi ban on birthdays is in line with the strict interpretation of Islam followed by the conservative Wahhabi sect dominant in the kingdom. All Christian celebrations — and even most Muslim feasts celebrated elsewhere in the Islamic world — are prohibited as alien customs.

Sea level rise predictions exaggerated...

Why am I not surprised????
Al Gore's Oscar-winning environmental documentary exaggerated the likely effects of global warming on sea levels, a new study shows.

The film, An Inconvenient Truth, suggested that the sea would rise up to 20ft "in the near future" as the ice in Greenland or Western Antarctica melts.

Other documentaries have picture Britain deluged with water, showing the House of Commons submerged.

However, while some mainstream predictions project sea levels 2 to 4 meters higher by 2100, a new study published today in Science concludes that a rise in sea level between 0.8 and 2 meters is much more likely.

While scientists agree that sea levels rose by six inches over the course of the 20th century, estimates of future rises remain hazy, mostly because there are many uncertainties, from the lack of data on what ice sheets did in the past to predict how they will react to warming, insufficient long-term satellite data to unpick the effects of natural climate change from that caused by man and a spottiness in the degree to which places such as Antarctica have warmed.

Prof Tad Pfeffer at University of Colorado in Boulder, Dr Joel Harper at University of Montana and Dr Shad O'Neel at Scripps Institute of Oceanography, La Jolla, reached these conclusions after studying the ice and water being discharged from Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets.

"We simply don't understand the physics of ice dynamics well enough to make accurate model predictions," says Dr Harper. "There are just too many uncertainties. So what we did is flip the problem on its head."

Unlike most past studies that try to add up the individual sources of ice and water discharge from the glaciers into the sea, their experiment calculated how much ice and water lost from Greenland and Antarctica that it would take for the world's seas to raise two meters.

Then they calculated how fast contributing glaciers would need to move in order to dump that much ice into the sea.

Their findings show that predictions of a two meter rise in sea level by 2100 would require significantly faster ice velocities from Greenland and Antarctica than has ever been reported before.

The truth about wind power...

Thursday, September 04, 2008

When data protection goes too far....

Gee, whatever happened to common sense???
Staff at Marks & Spencer insisted that Jacob Hunter-Lamb give consent for his mother to act on his behalf before they would resolve the problem.

The problems arose after Jacob was given the costume as a birthday present, bought online, only for him to realise it had come without Superman's yellow belt.

Debbie Lamb, 33, of Lincoln, said: "The whole thing was just so bizarre.

"They said because of data protection they had to speak to the recipient of the costume.

"He had to tell them the address and then give them permission to speak to me. We laughed about it, but I felt really undermined."

The playsuit had been ordered online by Jacob's aunt and addressed to him. When he noticed the costume did not have the yellow belt, he told his mother who rang the store to get a replacement.

Mrs Lamb said: "I called to see if I could send it back or if they could send the belt, but they asked if they could speak to who the package was for.

"I said: 'Yes, that's not a problem – but he's only seven.' They told me they would need to speak to someone even if they were as young as four."

And, the inefficiency of solar panels....

Both solar and wind power just aren't economical....
SOLAR PANELS are one of the least cost-effective ways of combating climate change and will take 100 years to pay back their installation costs, the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (Rics) warned yesterday.

In a new guide on energy efficiency, Rics said that roof panels for heating water and generating power are unlikely to save enough from bills to make them financially viable in a householder's lifetime. In the case of solar panels to heat water for baths and showers, the institution estimates the payback time from money saved from electricity and gas bills will take more than 100 years - and up to 166 years in the worst case.

Photovoltaic (PV) panels for power - and domestic, mast-mounted wind turbines -will take between 50 and 100 years to pay back.

Given that the devices have a maximum lifetime of 30 years, they are never likely to recoup the 3,000 to 20,000 cost of their installation, according to Rics' building cost information service. Instead, it suggested people wanting to cut fuel bills should insulate lofts and cavity walls, install efficient light bulbs and seal windows.

Does Wind Power lead to poverty????

The EU's insane drive for wind power may lead many people into poverty...
Half a million people could be pushed into fuel poverty by the UK's drive for wind power, the government's former chief scientific adviser has said.

Sir David King said: "If we overdo wind we are going to put up the price of electricity and that means more people will fall into the fuel poverty trap."

The UK has signed up to an EU agreement for 20% of power to come from renewable sources by 2020.

Professor King told the BBC EU leaders did not understand their own targets.

One of Tony Blair's last acts as Prime Minister was to sign up to an EU target to have 20% of Europe's energy from renewable sources by 2020.

The UK currently generates around 2% of its electricity from wind power but to meet the EU's target the government estimates this will have to increase to around 35% by the end of the next decade.

It will also lead to price rises, the government thinks around 10% for electricity and closer to 20% for gas.

Professor King who who served as chief scientific adviser from 2000 to 2007, told BBC Radio 4's The Investigation that the government is placing too much emphasis on wind power to reach the target and this would mean more people suffering from fuel poverty.

Wednesday, September 03, 2008

Terror in Canada???


Reports of a terrorist cell in Toronto...


The alert level has been raised for Israelis in Canada after it was discovered that a terror cell was following and carrying out surveillance on El Al crews staying in a hotel in Toronto, Channel 2 reported Wednesday.

The cell was arrested and El Al changed the guidelines issued to its employees.

The security establishment said that the cell appeared to be planning an attack on the Israelis and that the terrorists apparently belonged to Hizbullah.

On Tuesday, Defense Minister Ehud Barak said that in recent weeks, several kidnapping plots against Israelis abroad had been thwarted.

Tuesday, September 02, 2008

Undercover Mosque: The Return


You can find the whole show on YouTube.

Monday, September 01, 2008

In support of traditional marriage....

Here's another brave politician standing up for traditional marriage!
Israr Ullah Zehri, who represents Baluchistan province, told a stunned parliament that northwestern tribesman had done nothing wrong in first shooting the women and then dumping them in a ditch.

"These are centuries-old traditions, and I will continue to defend them," he said.

"Only those who indulge in immoral acts should be afraid."

The women, three of whom were teenagers and whose "crime" was that they wished to choose who to marry, were still breathing as mud and stones were shovelled over their bodies, according to Human Rights Watch.

The three girls, thought to be aged between 16 and 18, were kidnapped by a group of men from their Umrani tribe and murdered in Baba Kot, a remote village in Jafferabad district.

According to some reports, Baluchistan government vehicles were used to abduct the girls, and the killing was overseen by a tribal chief who is the brother of a provincial minister from the ruling Pakistan People's Party.

Some accounts said that two older relatives had tried to intervene, but they too were shot and buried alive with the teenagers.

Why are politicians so scared???

If they cannot take on forced marriages....then how about honour killings???
Ann Cryer said politicians in areas with high Muslim populations, many of which are Labour heartlands, should be at the forefront of the campaign to stop young couples being made to wed against their will by their families.

But she claimed that some politicians are afraid to speak out on the issue in case they alienate Muslim voters. The forced marriage unit at the Foreign Office deals with an estimated 300 cases every year, most of them involving teenage girls from Pakistani or Bangladeshi families.