Gay rights at the UN? ha ha

Just in case any of you were still in the thrall of the UN with the promised Nirvana of Human Rights, you might want to read this story.

Islamic (in)tolerance trumps Gay Rights.

How long do you think before the advances in Women's Rights are slowly rolled back...you know, so as not to offend certain countries.

E-shopping you can believe in

Would you trust an online e-commerce site that had knowingly disabled all anti-fraud mechanisms on their credit card payment processing? How about if it turned out they had re-written or bypassed any anti-fraud payment processing checks?

Would you trust the CEO of that organisation if he/she was willing to keep using the money and the system even after the story made it to the press?

What if that person was running for public office? Say, president of the United States?

A less nuanced approach to the story:

• Mark Steyn
• A credit card expert

A little more on that Iranian dirty-bomb-ship

Whilst I fully subscribe to the idea that the media suppresses certain stories if it does not meet the accepted narrative, I find it hard to believe that international news agencies (as opposed to US) are that in the tank for the Chosen One to not report this.

http://www.scoopthis.org/2008/10/iran-dirty-bomb-plot-thwarted-days-away-from-execution-no-media-coverage-for-2-months-and-counting/

However it is a little strange that it hasn't quite got into the mainstream media yet. I can't really say why, but hope that suddenly the "backchannels" to Mad Jad's regime are getting flooded by the international community going "tut-tut. Mahmoud, you REALLY can't do this kind of crap"

However I'm not holding my breath....

Agent of Change? Or Unreformed Socialist?

(source: http://townhall.com/cartoons/cartoonist/MichaelRamirez/2008/10/9)

Unless you've been living in Tasmania, you may have noticed that the US presidential election is weeks away. And the sheer volume of media coverage on Sarah Palin should give you cause for concern.

The more someone tells me I have to believe something, the less inclined I am to believe it. My current denial of man-made global warming is as a direct result of being bombarded with messages since I was about 5 that we (and by we, I mean the West and it's offspring, capitalism) are entirely responsible for all environmental degradation since the dinosaurs.

The 24/7 media "investigations" into every minute aspect of Sarah Palin's life is raising a constant source of non-scandals that is keeping the mainstream media way too busy to look into the real scandals of their chosen presidential candidate.

If you recognise even two of the names in the cartoon above, then clearly you're getting your news from sources other than the papers. If John McCain had been associated with any of those characters, he would have been publicly crucified and hung out to dry (and rightly so I might add).

However, instead of trying to work out what actually triggered the current financial crisis and the consequent USD$700 billion government bailout, (and exactly how much a particular presidential candidate had in causing it) we are treated to some real hard-hitting scoops on the cost of Sarah Palin's wardrobe.

The media bias in this election has got to such a stage that there is now an increasing. amount. of. journos. (registered Democrats some of them) that are horrified that among other things, instead of investigating Obama's ties with unrepentant domestic terrorists, they are going after a private citizen Joe the Plumber who had the temerity to ask the Chosen One a question.

In this media saturated modern age, perception is everything and that is exactly what the Obama campaign is counting on. The possibility that the next US president could be a fully committed socialist is astounding in the fact that there appears to be absolutely zero interest by the media in investigating it.



Links
Mark Steyn (as the last loyal right-wingnut pundit) on the current state of the campaign:
http://www.ocregister.com/articles/obama-most-one-2205757-world-people

"We are a guerrilla organization. We are communist women and men, underground in the United States for more than four years. We are deeply affected by the historic events of our time in the struggle against U.S. imperialism.
Our intention is to disrupt the empire, to incapacitate it, to put pressure on the cracks, to make it hard to carry out its bloody functioning against the people of the world, to join the world struggle, to attack from the inside. "
Bill Ayers manifesto: http://www.zombietime.com/prairie_fire/

Government Computers used to dig dirt on Joe:
http://www.dispatch.com/live/content/local_news/stories/2008/10/24/joe.html?sid=101

Taliban Summer Camps of Fun

(picture source)

Just in case you had forgotten exactly why we are in Afghanistan:

"It was like a factory that had been recruiting nine to 12-year-old boys, and turning them into suicide bombers,"

Note: these are the same ideological compadres of that treasonous-creep-cum-Guantanemo-martyr David Hicks.

And these are our heroes that we send there to stop these monsters.

"Suffering from serious upper-body wounds, the soldier struggled on to the front of his SAS long range patrol vehicle and, under heavy fire, used a rope to attach himself firmly between the vehicle's bull bar and radiator.
Once he was secured, and there was no chance he would fall off if he fainted, he picked up his DM-4 assault rifle and resumed firing at the enemy during a two-hour fighting withdrawal."

Audie Murphy would be proud...

Give or take 20 million years....

Well well well, geologists (of all people) are now saying the Arctic Ice "may have formed 20million years earlier".

Well, blow me down with that global warming wind. 20 million years?? That will surely !@# up EVERY. SINGLE. CALCULATION. that The Warming fanatics have made and bashing us over the head with.

And if they don't have to, one should really ask, what kind of confidence level can you have in the maths if they are still valid when they can ignore the goalposts changing by 20 million years? Remember the all the hysterical ninnies telling us that their predictions are so accurate that they can predict the seas rising in the next 100 years.

I'm sure Al Gore, Prof. Garnaut, K.Rudd, The Age and the New York Times, the IPCC, the UN, Santa Freakin' Claus will now republish all their findings with this taken into account.... no? really? you mean, we should just take their consensus driven view and just sacrifice our economies wholesale to chase this carbon emitting pipe dream so that we, in the words of the Nobel Laureates Al Gore's biopic An Inconvenient Truth, "reduce our carbon emissions to zero"??!?!?!

Excuse me while I go outside and burn a few tyres.....

Friday afternoon

Time for a Friday afternoon cow...

Kev's not all bad...

A good piece in The Australian re: Kev's stance on Iran.

At least his strategy on Iran is pretty sound... Now if only we could get him to stop the Russkies getting all that that uranium...

Pirates as unwilling heroes?

If you do a stupid thing for all the wrong reasons, but the consequences of your actions prevent a much greater tragedy, are you a hero?

Here I posted about the MV Iran Denayat and how the Somali pirates that had hijacked the ship were all succumbing to a 'weird' affliction that had all the symptoms of radiation poisoning.

These are the facts as we know them:

the MV Iran Denayat (source)

• The tanker MV Iran Denayat is a tanker registered with the Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Lines (IRISL)
• IRISL is an Iranian state-owned company
• August 21, 2008 Somali pirate speedboats hijacked the MV Iran Denayat around the Gulf of Aden, on it's way to the Suez Canal and according to it's shipping manifest carrying a cargo of "42,500 tons of iron ore and "industrial products" purchased by a German client" to be unloaded in Rotterdam.
• "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." (link)
• IRISL was designated by the US Government on 10 September, 2008 for nuclear "Proliferation Activities"
  









Radioactive Tangent: The difference between a nuclear bomb and a "dirty bomb" is that the former actually creates a nuclear explosion, and the latter uses conventional explosives to spread radioactive material.



It is now alleged that the ship was never going to go to Rotterdam. Apparently it was going to moor somewhere in the Mediterranean, off the coast of Israel, and blow up as one huge, ship sized dirty bomb just in time for the jewish holiday of Yom Kippur, spreading radioactive sand all across Israel and anyhwere else the wind conditions would have carried it. The sand is clearly lethal as our pirate friends have discovered, so any doubt as to the intentions of the ship's crew should be dissolving like sand in the wind.

Otherwise, what other possible use could you have for shipping poisonous (radioactive?) sand halfway across the world?


Link:
IRGC inc

Sh*t Box

Introducing "The Amazing Shit Box"

(via davidthompson)

A powerful Dame

From this story in The Age on Sunday 19th October:

"A FORMER head of Britain's security service, MI5, yesterday described the response to the September 11, 2001, attacks on the US as a "huge overreaction""

I would argue that a "huge overreaction" would have been the appearance of a mushroom cloud over a city (or cities), and anything else responding to a direct attack on a countries soil is, well, up for debate.

She goes further to say that:

"the invasion of Iraq influenced young men in Britain who turned to terrorism"

Ah yes, that old chestnut. Root causes, blah blah blah. Remember kiddies, once the Obamamessiah takes the whitehouse, this silly thing call "Islamic Terrorism" will just disappear, having exposed itself to be just a right-wing conspiracy operation under the evil supernatural powers of Bush, Blair and Howard.

The actual article appears to cherry pick statements by Dame Stella so I'm not 100% convinced she is in fact against the "war on terror" rhetoric that the paper makes out to be, but a quick Google shows that the first female director of one Britains super secret organisations, is really not media shy in the slightest.

In fact, she's bringing out a spy novel, and has no problem doing many interviews, some of which are really hard hitting:

"With her pastel pink jacket and a demure single strand of pearls, Rimington might look like a typical society matron in Masterpiece Theater"

So as much as I should defer to the opinion of someone who ran an intelligence agency, which clearly The Guardian and The Age would like us to listen to, it's a bit hard for me to take seriously someone who has to face down religious fanatics daily and protect the West doing puff-piece interviews wearing a "pastel pink jacket and a demure single strand of pearls".

At the very least she should be wearing a dark colour business suit....

Those pesky pirates

And now they're getting mercenaries to help clean up the seas.

Arrr...T'is a hard time to be a pirate right now....

A history lesson

I haven't written too much on the US election, not because I haven't been following it but more my underwhelming cynicism on who America choses as the next leader of the "free world".

Most of my peers seem to be in the Obama camp, to the point where at a dinner recently, a close acquaintance mentioned something about the brand of Obama's walkman, musical choice, or some such inane 'fact' about the (potential) next US president.

Since when did knowing the brand of anything of a US presidential nominee uses, confer any sort of suitability to run the biggest economy in the world???Who cares if Obama eats the same brand of baked beans as me??!?!

This is a dude who will potentially have to sit down with the following characters and negotiate:

Vladimir Putin	Hu Jintao	Mahmoud Ahmanadinejad	Kim Jong-Il
(president of USSR Russia, ex-KGB, loves fishing, judo, the great outdoors and the odd extremely bloody territorial conflict. Also has a lot of nukes, not entirely sure where all of them are...)	(president of China, with a 1.3billion population and a proud 3,000 year history of which about 100 years have been spent opposing the US in almost everyway possible)	(president of Iran, desperately trying to acquire offensive nuclear capability, believer in the resurrection of the 12th Imam, who's return will mean the end of days)	(semi-retarded son of previous leader of Nth Korea, currently starving his population as he spends too much money trying to spread North Korean missile and nuclear technology across the world)

Some history:

Jimmy Carter was the American President from 1977-1981. In November 1979, some "students" took the 52 people hostage in the American embassy in Tehran and kept them hostage all the way through to the day before Pres. Jimmy left office in 1981 (coincidence? ya think?). There are rumours that Ahmadinejad was one of the hostage takers. Now tell me he isn't just itching to smack the US in the face again..

What does this have to do with Obama? This:

"The lesson of being strong in defending interests and combating enemies has not quite been learned. Today, the opposite is the mainstream prescription for success and the United States may be about to elect a president whose world view parallels the way Carter worked."

From the Obama campaign website (viewed on 11th October, 2008):

"Making clear that he planned to talk to Iran without preconditions, Mr. Obama emphasized further that "changes in behavior" by Iran could possibly be rewarded with membership in the World Trade Organization, other economic benefits and security guarantees."

Oooooooh Membership in the WTO, what an awesome carrot as inducement away from "wiping Israel off the map". Because all the previous dealings with Iran have been so...fruitful.

There is sooo much wrong with the political positions (and acquaintances) of Obama that are being glossed over in the media. What I see in the world is Gen X and Ys desperate for salvation from the 'sins' of Bush, thus putting all their goodwill, media organisations, and votes behind a man who stands for...what exactly?

Just don't be surprised if he does get elected that his actual politics will come to the fore, and then, Space Monkey help us all.....

Afterword:
Pootie really is a black belt in Judo....

Extraditing Speech

Re: this

This is not a good thing. Raiding a plane, arresting, and then extraditing someone on the basis of online expressions of view (now 3 years old) is an unfortunate picture of the future.

That his views were reprehensible, wrong and stupid is beside the point. Some European countries have laws against Holocaust denial, and paradoxically, laws against the expression of certain points of view do not protect free speech, they endanger it. The argument goes if only there was "more" limits to free speech, then the Nazis could not have come to power and the Holocaust would have never happened.

The Nazis did not need to suppress free speech, because when they were elected, they inherited a whole bunch of laws that the previous (Weimar republic) government had passed in relation to restraining free speech:

"The uncomfortable fact is that the Nazis didn’t invent the apparatus of power or culture of repression in Germany, they merely took control of, and perfected, an apparatus and culture that had already been created and used by “liberals” to combat extremism."

The fact that Mr Toben can be extradited from the UK to Germany under an EU arrest warrant should concern everyone. Today it is Holocaust denial; tomorrow, it could be "insulting religion" or "denying the Space Monkey", or "quoting an imam".

Free speech is perhaps the most important right we have inherited. The idea that that a transnational body can make and enforce speech codes is a grave concern to anyone that has ever expressed a point of view.

What is missing?

From this article.

Other than the childs' parents or guardians? (That, in itself, regrettably, is a hint.)

Seriously Racist

Actual headline from the BBC site: Australia racism 'still serious'

Curious as to why a UK based news agency thought this was news, I thought I wonder exactly "who" is going to be the focus of this 'racism'. I mean we said "Sorry" to the Indigenous Australians, and whilst not enacting any policies to improve their standard of living, but hey, at least we apologised. And remember kids, these days it's way more important to be seen to be doing the right thing, than actually doing it.

"The group most often singled out as "not belonging" in Australia was Muslims or people from the Middle East, Professor Dunn told reporters on the weekend."

What a surprise! It's of course the turbanophobia (or was that hijabophobia?) raising it's ugly head. Two things kinda scream at me from this:

1. At what point in time are new immigrants considered integrated? Pizza, like it or hate it, ran for 5 seasons on SBS TV, where the principal characters were Lebanese. And no TV show runs for 5 seasons if there's no audience, even on SBS. Are we allowed to consider the Lebanese characters depicted as "integrated"? Is Lebanon in the Middle East?

"Pizza" cast photo, 2005. Spot the evil racist whiteys....

2. The scare quotes around "not belonging". Exactly how that is defined or measured is mercifully absent from the rest of the article, but you can be sure that white Australians are to blame. And could this "not belonging" be a factor of said immigrants attitudes to Australians rather than the other way around?

The good Professor then continues:

""They stand out at the moment as the group that people would be most concerned about. There [are] stronger levels of social distance or fear of Islam or concern about Islam than of any other group at the moment," said Mr Dunn, a professor of human geography and urban studies."

Why would that be? Of all the immigrant groups coming into Australia, why would there be a fear of Islam?
And why the qualifier "at the moment"? Is that just in case all Australians cease to be hijabophobic overnight, and then you can pull another ethnic/cultural group out of your hat and go HA! You're still Racist, Australia!!

The BBC and pretty much every news agency will never lack for the Professor Dunn's of this world who have no problem using their academic kudos (yes I know it's just Humanities, but to the media that's still Academia) to push forward the pre-conceived narrative that only white people have the capacity to be racist, and if they don't accept everything in toto of the new immigrant culture up to and including the immigrants death wish for the current citizens, then they will be labelled the ever so scary and cruel moniker of "Racist".