Archive for November 2008

The Indian government and news media have claimed that British-born Islamists are amongst the terrorists who have struck in Mumbai, leaving at least 130 dead and hundreds wounded.

Indian news channel NDTV reported that “British citizens of Pakistani origin” were among the attackers.

Indian Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee has publicly blamed elements in Pakistan for the series of co-ordinated attacks.

“According to preliminary information, some elements in Pakistan are responsible,” he said.

It was the first time the Indian government had specifically named Pakistan as having a role in the attacks. Officials had previously talked of the militant gunmen coming from “outside the country.”

Vilasrao Deshmukh, the chief minister of Mumbai, was reported to have said that two British-born Pakistanis were among eight gunmen seized by Indian commandos who stormed buildings to free hostages.
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Barack Obama and George W. Bush seem to have come away from their study of the Great Depression with similar conclusions:

To wit: After the Crash of 1929, the Federal Reserve did not move fast enough to save the banks and inject cash into the economy. Second, the New Deal, far from being wastrel deficit spending, was not bold enough. So it was that America wallowed in depression for a decade until the unbridled spending and mammoth deficits of World War II pulled us out.

Bush and Obama seem determined not to make the same mistake.

We are all Keynesians now.

Thus, we have the $700 billion Bush bank bailout, the $700 billion “stimulus package” Obama wants by inauguration to “jolt this economy back into shape” and the $800 billion fund Hank Paulson created to get consumers borrowing and buying again.

These come on top of Bush $455 billion deficit, the $29 billion bailout of Bear Stearns, the $105 billion in pork to grease the $700 billion bailout, the $100 billion to $200 billion to keep Fannie and Freddie afloat, the $140-billion-and-counting for AIG, the $25 billion for the greening of GM, Ford and Chrysler, the $25 billion more to save the Big Three and the $20 billion for CitiGroup.

Now much of this overlaps, and some will be retrieved. But we are still staring at a deficit that could approach $2 trillion.

How would this stack up historically?
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PREDICTIONS are often more useful for what they say about the predictor’s state of mind than for what they tell you about the future. That’s certainly the case with the US National Intelligence Council’s latest peer into the crystal ball — Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World — neatly timed to coincide with president-elect Barack Obama’s transition to the White House.

The report, the fourth in a five-yearly series, has a decidedly chastened tone as it sets out in broad strokes the US intelligence community’s latest consensus on what the world will look like 16 years hence.

The previous edition spoke confidently of the US “remaining the single most powerful actor, economically, technologically, militarily” in 2020. Doubt has now crept in: America will be “less dominant” in 2025, with the likely implication that “shrinking economic and military capabilities may force the US into a difficult set of trade-offs between domestic versus foreign policy priorities”.
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The festive season has come early this year - well for the robbers it has. For the rest of us there isn’t a great deal to celebrate.

Here, long-suffering South Africans call the annual spike in robbery “Christmas Shopping”. This year the stockings of criminals are overflowing and it is not even December.

Against a background of political turmoil, after a bitter split in the ruling African National Congress (ANC), the number of house break-ins, robberies and muggings is even higher than usual.

Unfortunately, I’ve had first-hand experience of the Christmas rush, SA-style. This year, among the most sought-after “gifts” are laptops - something of a professional necessity for a journalist.

My first one went about a month ago when thieves took advantage of our neighbours’ lax security - lax by this country’s standards that is. They have high walls and powerful spotlights, but had chosen not to put spikes or electric fences on the top. Young and perhaps naive, they have even forgone external beams linked to an alarm system.

This is child’s play for the young bargain-hunters. With a skip and a jump they were over, and the Africa office of The Times, separated from the garden by a low wall, must have looked like a rich kid’s Christmas tree - stuffed with laptop, satellite and mobile phones, cameras and all sorts of digital goodies.
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The time was June 2000. Scientists with the Celera Genomics Corporation, in conjunction with the international Human Genome Project, announced that they had successfully derived the entire sequence of the human genome. Furthermore, they noted that humans share 99.9% of their genetic code with one another. This discovery served as the platform for the medical community to declare that there was no genetic foundation for the notion of race, and we were all just human beings.

The problem with this assertion is that the human genome is comprised of over 3 billion base pairs. Therefore, a 0.1% difference between individuals amounts to 3 million base pairs. A mutation in a single base pair can mean the difference between having a disease and not having a disease, as in the case of thalassemia, cystic fibrosis, muscular dystrophy, or hemophilia. One can easily see that 3 million is far from insignificant in terms of differentiating who we are. If nuclear families are closely related genetically, and are more prone to certain diseases, why wouldn’t groups of people with common ancestral lines share this same propensity?
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The San Diego Minutemen has pulled two Latino lawmakers into its legal clash with the California Department of Transportation, alleging they were part of a conspiracy to keep the anti-illegal immigration group out of the state’s Adopt-A-Highway cleanup program.

Federal Judge William Hayes approved the Minutemen’s request Monday to add Assemblyman Joe Coto, D-San Jose, and state Sen. Gilbert Cedillo, D-Los Angeles, as defendants in the free-speech lawsuit.

The Minutemen also will be allowed to seek punitive damages, Hayes said in a written order.

Coto and Cedillo are leaders of the state Latino Legislative Caucus. They did not return calls Tuesday.

The Minutemen sued Caltrans and its top officials in February after the agency revoked its permit to pick up trash along a two-mile stretch of Interstate 5, near the U.S. Border Patrol’s San Clemente checkpoint.

OTTAWA - The Carleton University Students’ Association has voted to drop a cystic fibrosis charity as the beneficiary of its annual Shinearama fundraiser, supporting a motion that argued the disease is not “inclusive” enough.

Cystic fibrosis “has been recently revealed to only affect white people, and primarily men” said the motion read Monday night to student councillors, who voted almost unanimously in favour of it. The decision caused heated reaction and left at least one member of council calling for a new vote.

Every year near the beginning of fall classes, during university orientation for new arrivals, students fan out across the city and seek donations from passersby. According to the motion, “all orientees and volunteers should feel like their fundraising efforts will serve their (sic) diverse communities.”

Nick Bergamini, a third-year journalism student on the student council, said he was the only elected councillor present to vote against the motion. The decision is an example of campus political correctness gone too far, he said.

In yet another example of the anti-white racism which permeates the Labour/Tory created multicultural society, white teachers have once again been blamed for non-white academic failure.

This time it is the turn of Professor Heidi Safia Mirza, from the Institute of Education, who has blamed white teachers for “having certain expectations of different ethnic groups, and the pressures of race-based tables have caused a ‘sifting and sorting of pupils into tiers and streams by perceived ability.’

“The patterns are often racialised, with black children locked into the lower streams,” Professor Mirza claimed.

“Teachers’ expectations had always been at the core of theories about the self-fulfilling prophecy of how educational underachievement operates in a cycle of low expectations followed by low pupil outcomes.”
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You just had to know this was going to come up, sooner rather than later — objections to children re-enacting the basic historical details of Thanksgiving. Click here to watch the story.

A 20-year tradition has come to an end. Kindergartners at Condit and Mountain View elementary schools in Claremont, California, will no longer be dressing up and visiting one another for their Thanksgiving feast. This year, the Mountain View children would have dressed as Native Americans and walked to Condit, whose students would have dressed as Pilgrims.

Michelle Raheja, an English professor at UC Riverside who specializes in Native American literature, believes dressing up as Native American Indians is demeaning. “I’m sure you can appreciate the inappropriateness of asking children to dress up like slaves (and kind slave masters), or Jews (and friendly Nazis), or members of any other racial minority group who has struggled in our nation’s history.”

It was Raheja who met with her daughter’s teachers and school officials that lead to the canceling of the costumed feast. School officials capitulated, predictable, given the PC nature of the objections, and they did it quickly.

Jennifer Tilton, an assistant professor of race and ethnic studies at the University of Redlands and a Claremont parent who opposes the costumes joined Raheja with some of her own PC verbiage: “Its always a good thing to think about, critically, how we teach kids, even from very young ages, the message we want them to learn, and the respect for the diversity of the American experiences.”
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Opposition members from Alice Springs and Katherine told parliament last night there is a rise of violent crime, and that’s resulting in a corrosion of race relations because people are blaming other races for the problems.

The member for the Alice Springs-based seat of Braitling Adam Giles says some business owners are sleeping in their shops at night with baseball bats and others are fed up and are moving interstate.

He wants the five Central Australian MLAs to form a committee to address anti-social behaviour and improve race relations.
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