Archive for June 2009

June 24, 2009 – The U.S. Census Bureau has released data over several recent days that highlight to staggering boom in the senior citizen population in the world and nation. In the U.S., the senior citizen population appears to be headed to a 40 percent increase in the next five years. The world’s 65-and-older population is projected to triple by midcentury, from 516 million in 2009 to 1.53 billion in 2050.

In contrast, the world population under 15 is expected to increase by only 6 percent during the same period, from 1.83 billion to 1.93 billion.

In the U.S., the population 65 and older will more than double by 2050, rising from 39 million today to 89 million. While children are projected to still outnumber the older population worldwide in 2050, the under 15 population in the United States is expected to fall below the older population by that date, increasing from 62 million today to 85 million.

These figures come from the world population estimates and projections released today through the Census Bureau’s International Data Base. This latest update includes projections by age, including people 100 and older, for 227 countries and areas.
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The “affirmative-action bake sale,” at which the Bucknell University Conservatives Club charged different prices depending on a customer’s race, was shut down by the administration in April. But it didn’t end there.

Bucknell president Brian C. Mitchell has received about 100 letters, e-mails, and phone calls protesting the administration’s response.

A Philadelphia-based national free-speech group this month blasted the school in a news release that began, “Student rights are under assault at Bucknell University. . . .”

{snip}

At Bucknell, the dispute runs even deeper. The conservative club has had conflicts with the administration for years.

In March, the club complained that the administration shut down another of its activities—passing out anti-stimulus handbills that blared “The Socialist State of America” on the front with President Obama’s face. On the back, the fake dollar bills read: “Obama’s stimulus plan makes your money as worthless as Monopoly money.”

That incident and the bake sale prompted the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) to get involved.

“We want everyone around Bucknell to know that Bucknell is not a place that respects students’ rights,” said FIRE’s Adam Kissel.

{snip}

Bucknell officials said that the school’s reactions to the bake sale and the handbill handouts were not an issue of free speech, but rather of campus “safety and fairness.”

Students did not have the required prior permission to hand out the handbills at the cafeteria entrance, the school said. Permission is required to prevent cross-scheduling and allow management to prepare for “possible reactions” to the events, “including for the safety of those involved,” Bucknell’s general counsel, Wayne Bromfield, wrote in a response to FIRE dated June 11.

And the bake sale was “discriminatory,” Bromfield wrote.

“If students wish to engage other students in related discussions, there are opportunities for doing so that do not require us to sanction disparate treatment of our students, faculty, staff or visitors based on ethnic, racial, gender, religious, or other demographic distinctions,” he wrote.
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CHARLESTON - The West Virginia Supreme Court has overturned a ruling by the state Human Rights Commission, which awarded a man money because a co-worker uttered a racial epithet at him.

In a unanimous opinion filed Monday, the court said Victor T. Peoples, who is black, incited a heated exchange between him and a white co-worker on a job site in 2004.

The court ruled that in order for Peoples to prove he was subjected to a hostile work environment through racial discrimination, he had to show that the discriminatory conduct was unwelcome.

The court also said that Peoples failed to show that his employers, Sue J. Erps and William G. Erps, doing business as Improvements Unlimited, fired him in retaliation for reporting the comment made by the co-worker.

In 2007, the commission awarded Peoples a total of $32,898 in damages, including lost wages, interest and incidental damages for humiliation.
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Victoria Station, London. Look around this 150-year-old rail station and you can see the rise and fall, and rise and now again decline of the British nation.

Victoria Station

Victoria Station is just a few blocks from Buckingham Palace and was for many decades the connecting station with the “Continent” (Europe) and the greater world, much like the large international airports of the present day.

The kings and queens of England would greet the various European royals and other heads of state at Victoria Station.

Most of the parts of the station that were built in the late 19th century are still there - the great steel trusses and the Victorian brickwork. In its time, it was state-of-the-art, befitting what was the superpower of its day. After World War I, the station slowly was allowed to decay, as was the British economy.

Beginning with the Thatcher reforms, England had a quarter-century run as the fastest-growing major economy in Europe, but still slower than that of the United States. Yet the basic structure of Victoria Station was only partially renovated during the good years, even though rail privatization and sleek new trains began to reinvigorate rail travel.
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Evil, racist rightwingers—i.e., colleagues of mine—have been saying terrible things about Federal Court of Appeals judge and Supreme Court nominee, Sonia Sotomayor, whose Senate confirmation hearings begin on July 13.

But Judge Sotomayor has ardent defenders—most prominently, Democratic Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau. Morgenthau hired Sotomayor to her first, formative, professional job, as a prosecutor in his office in 1979, before she had even graduated from Yale Law School. She stayed there until 1984.

“Barack Obama” and the MSM apparently believe that Morgenthau, regularly described as “legendary“ and “iconic”, can make the damning evidence against Sotomayor, and logic itself, disappear. He has placed apologias for her in the Wall Street Journal and New York’s Daily News. For example:

“No sooner had President Obama announced his nomination of Court of Appeals Judge Sonia Sotomayor than conservative partisans began calling for her defeat. These so-called pundits have pronounced her a ‘radical,’ an ‘activist,’ part of the ‘far left,’ an ‘affirmative action case’ and, most astoundingly, a ‘racist.’ We were not long left in suspense as to whether this administration’s judicial nominees can expect to be vetted with objectivity and due civility….

“To be sure, she is in favor of civil rights, in the sense that she believes there should be fair treatment for all. But that is, of course, the law. And she understands poverty, and does seem willing to accept government action that provides a safety net to the poor. But that is not exactly ‘radical.’

“Most importantly, I am astonished that she has been disparaged as an ‘affirmative action’ beneficiary. Whatever position one takes on affirmative action, it is simply unreasonable, if not racist, so to impugn this individual. She may be a woman, and she may be a Latina. But Sonia Sotomayor possesses an abundance of wisdom, intelligence, collegiality and good character. Sotomayor is where she is today because of her talent. Those who insinuate otherwise don’t know her, or simply paint her as they do for political reasons having nothing to do with the truth.” [Those labeling Sonia Sotomayor a radical don't know her at all by Robert Morgenthau, Daily News, May 28th, 2009.]

In fact, of course, Sonia Sotomayor has said of herself, “I am a product of affirmative action. I am the perfect affirmative action baby.”

So who is Robert Morgenthau and what does his “legendary” and “iconic” tenure as Manhattan District Attorney say about Sotomayor’s likely conduct on the court?

He was born into incredible privilege. His father Henry was FDR’s Secretary of the Treasury, author of the notorious “Morgenthau Plan” under which Germany would have been partitioned and deindustrialized after World War II. He was first elected Manhattan DA in 1974, just after the departure, after two ruinous terms, of aristocratic liberal Mayor John V. Lindsay. Morgenthau picked up Lindsay’s baton. He turns 90 on July 31 and will retire at the end of 2010
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PHOENIX — An Arizona woman recruited as many as 136 people to pose as college students and defraud the government out of nearly $540,000 in student aid money, federal prosecutors said on Wednesday.

Trenda Lynne Halton, 37, of Peoria, was arrested Wednesday on charges of conspiracy, mail fraud, financial aid fraud and making false statements.

Halton and 64 people she allegedly recruited to take out loans or grants have been charged, according to indictments unsealed on Wednesday. The alleged fake students were issued arrest warrants or summons to appear in court, prosecutors said.

Halton is accused of creating fake documents and helping people enroll in online classes at Rio Salado Community College in Tempe over a 15 month period beginning in July 2006. It is unclear if she has an attorney.
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Political and religious symbols will be banned in the public schools of Antwerp from the next school term. According to the school principals religious symbols clash with the principles of equality and the freedom of choice for students.

“We have noticed that certain students have started feeling less comfortable over the past few years,” says school principal Karin Heremans. “We have the impression that some students are under social pressure to conform and wear religious symbols.”

The decision to ban religious symbols from the public schools has drawn criticism from the immigrant community. The public schools have many students of different ethnic backgrounds. “This is an emotional decision but the students are at the centre of the discussion. It is a decision that is in the interest of the students.”

Some schools already had a ban on wearing religious symbols.
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Within our nation there are a group of people who it is permitted, indeed almost politically correct, to despise. They are a group whom our trendiest and our most popular comedians mock, to the cheers of a modern multicultural audience and who are spoken of with contempt by politicians and social commentators.

That group is the section of the young white British working class, from sink estates and those depressing corners of the dependency culture once promoted by those same politicians who now condemn them. The one ethnic group who we are allowed to call (white) trash.

They are a group of people without a voice to speak for them, and who’s own voices are only ever heard in auditorium designed to deride them. They appear as criminals on the peripheries of gritty cop shows, in documentaries about urban decay and social dependency, their words edited deliberately to make them seem more moronic and brutal even than they are, and on that other platform designed to present human failure as entertainment, the daytime TV Talk show.

They are the cannon fodder of “Tricia” and the infamous Jeremy Kyle show, that slightly more cruel British version of US TV’s Jerry Springer, where observing broken lives become a blood sport, and where inadequate and broken people are metaphorically eviscerated, to amuse viewers and make them feel superior.
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The other parties representing Britain in the European Parliament suffer from “endemic treason” and are the implacable enemies of everything pertaining to the maintenance of British identity, said Mr Andrew Brons, British National Party Member of the European Parliament for Yorkshire and Humberside.

Addressing the BNP’s victory rally in Blackpool this afternoon, Mr Brons also dismissed the UKIP party as “civic nationalists” who were equally worthless for the salvation of Britain.

“UKIP likes to pretend they are nationalists, but they are just civic nationalists who want Britain to be independent but do not care who actually lives here,” Mr Brons said to applause.

“It is like someone saying that they are for the family, but not caring who the family is,” he said.

“As for the other parties in Brussels, they all suffer from endemic treason and are implacably opposed to all British traditions, identity and politics.

“One of the reasons they are overreacting to the BNP’s election successes is that they understand the full potential that the BNP vote has,” he continued.

“The BNP won three county councillors, but in a large number of other places we came second and in many other areas the BNP vote increased dramatically. The old parties know and understand our potential, and because they are control freaks, they cannot bear the thought of their real enemies gaining any sort of power.”
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Ward Connerly, former University of California regent, has an article, “Study, Study, Study — A Bad Career Move” in the June 2, 2009, edition of Minding the Campus that should raise any decent American’s level of disgust for what’s routinely practiced at most of our universities.

Mr. Connerly tells of a conversation he had with a high-ranking UC administrator about a proposal that the administrator was developing to increase campus diversity.

Connerly asked the administrator why he considered it important to tinker with admissions instead of just letting the chips fall where they may. His response was that unless the university took steps to “guide” admissions decisions, the UC campuses would be dominated by Asians.

When Connerly asked, “What would be wrong with that?”, the UC administrator told him that Asians are “too dull — they study, study, study.” Then he said to Connerly, “If you ever say I said this, I will have to deny it.”

Connerly did not reveal the administrator’s name. It would not have done any good because it’s part of a diversity vision shared by most college administrators.

With the enactment of California’s Proposition 209 in 1996, outlawing racial discrimination in college admissions, Asian enrollment at UC campuses has skyrocketed. The UC Berkeley student body is 42% Asian students; UC Irvine 55%; UC Riverside 43%; and UCLA 38%. Asian student enrollment on all nine UC campuses is over 40%. That’s in a state where the Asian population is about 13%.
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