Wild weather, storms to lash NSW as residents battle bushfire on Queensland's Fraser Coast

Telegraph (Australia)

"Lifesavers seek protection from the wind and rain at Bondi Beach today, traditionally a popular destinations for tourists and locals alike to celebrate Christmas Day." ED: Not always like the image of OZ we see here....

Another bright day in multicultural Sydney

Andrew Bolt,Herald Sun (Australia)
"A news roundup from today’s Sydney Morning Herald, giving another bracing insight into the success of our immigration program. ..... It’s a question many south-west Sydney communities are grappling with as the gang founded by the murderer Bassam Hamzy attempts to flex its muscles in Sydney again. ...... With shootings and gun crime reaching fever pitch, the group’s insignia of two crossed AK47 machine guns has appeared at crime scenes with increasing regularity. .....In October, Yehya Amoud was shot dead as he and a friend, Bassam Hijazi, sat on Greenacre Road in an expensive Mercedes that bore the number plate ‘’B F L’’. And in August, a 16-year-old boy was shot in the leg in a driveway scrawled with ‘’Brothers 4 Life’’ graffiti. .......The Lakemba Mosque had posted the religious ruling or ‘fatwa’ on its Facebook page on Saturday morning, warning followers it was a “sin” to even wish people a Merry Christmas."
Shot man refuses to assist police (Telegraph,Australia)- "The attack follows a number of shootings in western Sydney in recent weeks and six shooting murders in the area since August."

This Australian sued because she claimed to be Aboriginal and some disagreed...... she won.

"Identifying as Aboriginal but light skinned, Bindi Cole started creating works around the issue of identity.  ......
Conservative columnist Andrew Bolt wrote a column accusing Bindi of choosing to identify as Aboriginal in order to give herself 'political and career clout'.
Bindi and several others named in the column brought a class action against Andrew Bolt and won, with the court finding he had breached the racial discrimination act."

Aboriginal woman, Tasmania,photo taken 1866.

This very articulate Aboriginal - Dallas - on his blog Black Steam Train makes some interesting observations about "white identifiers" :

Insight - that Aboriginality show

'Once upon a time, the paler activists were an asset to the Aboriginal cause.  Now, they have become a liability.  Sprouting bullshit such as 'our white skin is a result of the rape of the colonisers', they are no longer laughable and tolerable in small doses - they are promoting a view of life that just continues to perpetuate the victim mentality and does their cause no favours...." (view full article here)

and here....

Conflict of interest? Only for the whites...

'The original promise of the Aboriginal Heritage Act of 2006 was to allow Aboriginal people to be involved in preserving their heritage and culture, to provide protection to our most sacred sites.  The reality is, in most cases, it has done completely the opposite." 
(view full article here)

Gillard’s Budget promise exposed for the con it always was

Andrew Bolt,Herald Sun (Australia)
"Many pro-Gillard commentators will now try to praise Gillard for being “responsible” by abandoning her surplus promise with the economy “unexpectedly” brittle. In fact she should be condemned for breaking yet another false promise - one that gave her cover for spending too much for too long. Gillard has been not just dishonest but reckless and must pay. Else what are political promises ever to mean? A final warning. There will be many apologists now saying there is little difference between a small surplus and a small deficit anyway, so what’s the big deal? The deal is this:
 - a broken promise
 - a promise that excused huge deficits in previous years.
 - a failure to deliver a surplus even when the economy was growing well and commodity prices were at record highs.
 - the removal now of one last brake on Labor’s spending, with many commentators and special interests demanding a deficit blowout. (If Gillard can be forgiven, say, a $3 billion deficit now, why not round that out to $5 billion and cram in a few more election bribes?
 I fear a Rubicon has been crossed. If China falters now, we are in terrible trouble.

Ed: Like Blair/Brown New Labour UK government, the Rudd/Gillard Labor Australian government has racked up colossal debt during a time of plenty for others to pay off.

Australia you are so totally gay

Telegraph
"I mean "gay", of course, in the offensive, playground, politically incorrect sense of the word. As in: "Your Dad's car is totally gay." Or: "That shark was so gay he didn't even manage to take your whole leg off." This is the kind of usage that would you have you arrested in Australia these days, such is the gag-making political correctness of the land they once called the Lucky Country but which now ought more properly to be named the Haringey of the Southern Hemisphere.
When I tell this to people who've never been to Oz they are usually surprised. Australia, they imagine, is a rugged, no-nonsense place where the men all look a bit like Crocodile Dundee (or, at least, the late Steve Irwin), and where their idea of a chat-up line to the Sheilas on Bondi beach is "Hey Sheila. Do you want a ****?" (to which they'll add, if Sheila is reluctant: "Well would you mind just lying there while I have one?")
But it's just not true. Australia handed in its testicles to the progressives long ago."
Now Read this: Do not try writing this at home (Andrew Bolt,Herald Sun Australia)

Is Blair Bonkers ?

Tony Blair: immigration has been good for Britain (Telegraph)
" Mr Blair has been repeatedly criticised after his Government issued official predictions forecasting that 13,000 people would move to Britain after immigration controls were lifted from Eastern Europe in 2004. Hundreds of thousands of Eastern Europeans subsequently relocated to this country putting pressure on schools and other public services. However, the former Prime Minister also refused to accept that this policy had been misguided. .......“Talk of leaving [the EU] is dangerous, immensely damaging to Britain’s long-term interests,” he said. “I think the UK has an opportunity to play a part in shaping the new Europe and it should seize it. And we should neither have an empty chair nor empty gestures.”
ED: Hummm.... yes!

Alien nation: The new census reveals a Britain that would be unrecognisable even to our grandparents

Daily Mail
"London is rapidly becoming a separate nation, as different from England as Scotland or Wales are, with indigenous British people now in a minority, in some areas a very small minority indeed, and incidentally with extremes of wealth and poverty not known since Edwardian times."

How Blair conned the Tory Party into selling its soul

Daily Mail
"Unfashionable and unpopular though it is, I have always admired Mr Blair. I disagreed with almost all he did. But I never doubted that, after Mrs Thatcher, he was the most adept politician of modern times.
One of his skills lay in sowing confusion and doubt among his opponents, wrong-footing them and driving them to panic. I had hoped the Tories at the time were intelligent enough to see his game for what it really was. But I was wrong. ......Ever since, the party has been obsessed by attempting to de-toxify its image — but in the process has come perilously close to losing its soul. The legacy can be seen in numerous policies today. The Government wastes nearly £10 billion a year on overseas aid because it wants to combat the Left-wing notion that being Conservative can be synonymous with being racist. It ring-fences money in a wasteful and over-managed National Health Service because to cut even a penny would, it has decided, signify an attack on the ‘vulnerable’. It squanders money on useless wind-farms because to rely on non-renewable energy would suggest Conservatives want to destroy the planet."

Would Leveson care to comment?

Catallaxy Files (Australia)
"The political response: In a phone call to the editor of this newspaper, [Director of Communications for UK Prime Minister David Cameron] Craig Oliver indicated that the article may be poorly timed as “she [Maria Miller] is looking at Leveson at the moment.” The comments came less than 24 hours after an adviser to the Culture Secretary telephoned a reporter working on an article about Mrs Miller’s expense claims to “flag up” the minister’s role in implementing new press rules. … [Craig Oliver] then raised the fact that Mrs Miller was leading the Government’s response to the Leveson Report which recommended statutory press regulation. .....
The Daily Telegraph has decided to disclose details of the private conversations amid widespread concern about the potential dangers of politicians being given a role in overseeing the regulation of the press. Funnily enough Leveson seems to have denied that this was ever his intention in the clips I posted this morning."

Immigration and Labour’s unforgivable betrayal of the British people

Daily Mail
"Whatever the explanation, it is certain that Labour acted in a way that was contrary to the wishes of most of the population, whose concerns grew year by year as unchecked immigration, particularly in London and the South-East, put ever greater pressure on housing, land, schools, hospital care and other services. This was a kind of betrayal — a betrayal of ordinary people by the ruling class. And also by the media class. For with one or two honourable exceptions such as the Mail, newspapers did not question government policy. As for the BBC, it treated moderate critics of mass immigration almost as though they were racist. When during the 2005 general election the then Tory leader, Michael Howard, expressed misgivings about the high level of immigration — while emphasising that he was in no way a racist — he was habitually treated by the BBC as an extremist. I recall one interview by a sneering Jeremy Paxman, who attempted to paint him in the darkest colours. .......But be in no doubt that a historic change took place in the first decade of this century that will transform Britain for ever. Without the people being consulted, without any debate, without even the Labour government admitting what was going on, there was a quiet, yet seismic revolution. There can be no going back. I believe Labour had a choice. I believe it could have controlled immigration, as it once said it wanted to do. I believe that is what most British people of every origin wanted. Labour politicians behaved with monumental arrogance and presumptuousness, and with no regard for democracy. It was as though Britain was their country, not the country of the people who happen to live here."

Royal hoax DJs accused of 'playing dumb'

Stuff NZ
" The Australian radio DJs linked to the death of the British nurse Jacintha Saldanha had been trained "not to air any prank calls without permission" and are now "playing dumb", a source from besieged Sydney station 2Day FM claims. The claim appears to contradict interviews given by DJs Michael Christian and Mel Greig where they said they were not aware of the approval process for prank calls. The source said all 2Day FM presenters, producers and content managers were compelled to undergo "decency and standards" training every six months, in compliance with a ruling from the industry watchdog. The training sessions, run by 2Day FM's in-house lawyer Tania Petsinis, include the specific instruction "not to air prank calls unless they get the subject's permission ... if there is doubt about a prank call, there is a clear chain of command in management that we have to escalate the call through".

Yes, immigration can bring huge benefits. But on this scale and at this speed, it's too much to cope with

Daily Mail
"But the mass immigration that has been taking place in Britain over the past decade has dramatically changed the cultural make-up of this country. If immigration occurs gradually — as it did in Britain on and off for centuries — then immigrant communities feel the need to integrate. Over time they become essential, indeed defining, parts of the life of the country. But immigration on the scale revealed in the new census is a recipe not for integration, but fracture. It spells the end of our unified national way of life. With immigration continuing at this rate, the British way of life becomes simply one option in a set of lifestyle choices — something you might adopt if you care to, but only in the way you might take up yoga or swimming."

'British whites' are the minority in London for the first time as census shows number of UK immigrants has jumped by 3million in 10 years

Daily Mail
"Just 44.9% of Londoners are White British, according to census data - 7.5million residents of England and Wales were foreign-born in 2011 - Census data reveal just 59% now call themselves Christian as a quarter say they have no religion and 5% are Muslim - Less than 90% of country is white for the first time ever"

The Chancellor's medicine may be harsh. But Ed Balls would be economic poison

Daily Mail
"A few weeks ago I happened to meet Balls’s boss, Ed Miliband, in a TV studio. He said: ‘You don’t seem very impressed with what the Government is doing. Shouldn’t you be joining us?’ I responded that on the day he stands up and says: ‘I apologise humbly to the British people for the fact that the last Labour government, of which I was a member, wrecked the economy and squandered all our money,’ I might start to think about it. Miliband lapsed into silence, and on that note we parted.
......For his part, Ed Balls offers a far larger and more dangerous deceit: the scandalous pretence that we can sustain the lifestyle which he and Gordon Brown told the British people they could have, without earning the means to pay for it. If Balls ever had to practise his political principles as a businessman, his deceitful prospectus would be exposed as a Ponzi-style scheme that would earn him a stiff prison sentence for fraud. More seriously, if ever again he is allowed to get his hands on the Treasury tiller, any chance of restoring this country to solvency will vanish up the chimney. Every time we voters get frustrated by David Cameron or George Osborne, we must remind ourselves of the lurking Balls menace."

Britain is going bust

Terry Smith
"Far from moderating this recklessness, the Labour government got in on the act, increasing public spending by 42%, in real terms, between 1996-97 and 2006-07. Then, when the imaginary – borrowed - growth of the pre-2008 period fell away, government, professing itself just as bemused as almost everyone else, slumped into a larger deficit than any other major economy, and started racking up stupendous amounts of public debt.
This process has left Britain in a hole, but hardly anyone has stopped digging. Needless to say, debt continues to escalate, and the current government has been criticised by many for “cuts” which actually left real public spending higher in 2011-12 (£696bn) than it was in 2008-09 (£673bn), let alone 2000-01 (£498bn). "

A case of lies, damn lies and our rocketing national debt

CityAM
"GO on, take the quiz. You know you can’t wait, so here goes. Which of these statements do you believe to be most accurate: a) the coalition is planning to cut the national debt by £600bn between 2010 and 2015; b) it is planning neither to reduce or decrease it; or c) the coalition is planning to increase the national debt by around £600bn. The obvious, undeniable answer, as readers of this fine newspaper will all know, is c)."

Why I, as a British Muslim woman, want the burkha banned from our streets

Daily Mail
"Thanks to fundamentalist Muslims and 'hate' preachers working in Britain, the veiling of women is suddenly all-pervasive and promoted as a basic religious right. We are led to believe that we must live with this in the name of 'tolerance'.
And yet, as a British Muslim woman, I abhor the practice and am calling on the Government to follow the lead of French President Nicolas Sarkozy and ban the burkha in our country. The veil is simply a tool of oppression which is being used to alienate and control women under the guise of religious freedom. .....I have read the Koran. Nowhere in the Koran does it state that a woman's face and body must be covered in a layer of heavy black cloth. Instead, Muslim women should dress modestly, covering their arms and legs. Many of my adult British Muslim friends cover their heads with a headscarf - and I have no problem with that. The burkha is an entirely different matter. It is an imported Saudi Arabian tradition, and the growing number of women veiling their faces in Britain is a sign of creeping radicalisation, which is not just regressive, it is oppressive and downright dangerous. The burkha is an extreme practice. It is never right for a woman to hide behind a veil and shut herself off from people in the community. But it is particularly wrong in Britain, where it is alien to the mainstream culture for someone to walk around wearing a mask."

Mining crunch hits profits – rate cut expected

Financial Review (Australia)
"Reserve Bank governor Glenn ­Stevens and the Reserve Bank board are scrambling to kick-start growth amid signs the resources investment boom will start to taper off next year. One of the Reserve Bank’s worries is that exports are being hit by the strong dollar, which is being held up by purchases from central banks even as local interest rates have been cut. A group of influential academic and business economists acting as a “shadow” central bank board said the economy wasn’t in such bad shape and urged Mr Stevens to hold his nerve. But the latest data suggests the economy could fall into a deep slump during the 2013 election year unless housing construction, manufacturing and consumer spending pick up. “At the moment it looks like the non-mining economy is expanding at less than 1 per cent per annum and that’s where 85 per cent of the economy is and 97 per cent of the work,” Goldman Sachs Australia chief economist Tim Toohey said. “If you’ve got mining rolling down, and clearly the government is not going to add much to employment, the big driver has to be the non-mining side of the economy.”

Mining boom over. Nothing to show. Harder times ahead

Andrew Bolt, Herald Sun (Australia)
"I repeat: the crisis we face is that the mining boom is over with nothing to replace it. And what on earth did we do with all that easy money? What trash did we buy? What surpluses squander? "
.....Mr Morse says China’s growth will slow from 10.5pc to 5.5pc by 2020 - Credit Suisse thinks it could be as low as 4pc, and the US Conference Board 3.7pc - but the crucial twist is that appetite for resources will wane as the Politburo calls time on history’s greatest building boom in history and opts instead for a modern, sleek, consumer and service-driven economy..."

'This is as bad as a world war': Bank of England boss's grim view of financial crisis which has left a debt 'that will be paid by our grandchildren'

Daily Mail
"Andrew Haldane: People 'had every reason' to feel 'deeply upset and angry'- George Osborne to admit bringing public finances back to order will take longer than expected - He has to find more than £23bn through further cuts and tax rises by 2017 Institute of Fiscal Studies said era of austerity could last until 2018"

Why did none of the Aborigines there notice the Aboriginal song was a con?

Andrew Bolt, Herald Sun (Australia)
"....After the film, Wadi took to the stage, having been introduced as a Pintjantjatjara man from Mutitjulu. He addressed the audience, answering questions about his culture before singing a song “in language”, a performance that brought some in the audience to the verge of tears...
In August this year, Wadi appeared in Sydney’s Downing Centre District Court, charged with 30 counts of fraud. Only this time, Wadi wasn’t Wadi, son of an “Aboriginal magic man” from Uluru; he was Dallas Gwilliam from Neutral Bay in Sydney. As soon became apparent, Gwilliam, who is 40, was not Aboriginal and had never served in the military. As part of the case against him, DPP lawyer Steve Higgins accused Gwilliam of having constructed “an elaborate web of lies”, a statement which, though true, seems dismally inadequate. Gwilliam’s con was ever-evolving and wildly improvisatory, a 20-year jazz solo of A-grade bullshit in which he had posed not only as Aboriginal royalty and a special forces veteran, but as a Shaolin monk, seeded tennis player, telco millionaire, martial arts expert, UN peacekeeper and Chinese racing-car driver."

The new police commissioners appointing their friends as deputies - on up to £68,000 a year

Daily Mail
" New unelected jobs are being created even though police and crime commissioners (PCCs) already have offices full of staff
Many have handed them to friends and political allies
Use of taxpayers’ money to put PCC's 'mates in cushy jobs' will damage public confidence, expert warns"

Report: Obama in Hawaii as Nation Goes Over the Cliff

WHD
"The Hawaii Reporter estimates that the total cost of the vacation to Hawaii and federal taxpayers, including funding for travel, staff and protection, is at least $4 million. Obama’s vacations are more expensive than those of previous presidents because of the huge costs to fly Air Foce One and an accompanying cargo plane for nine hours or so to Hawaii."

George Osborne’s £37bn QE cash grab won’t help him, says Mervyn King

Telegraph
"The Governor of the Bank of England has warned the Chancellor that his £37bn cash grab on the proceeds of the Bank’s money-printing offers him no way to bolster the UK’s finances."
----------------------------------
George Osborne bags £35bn windfall from QE The Chancellor has bagged a £35bn windfall that will reduce public borrowing by reclaiming the surplus cash sitting in the Bank of England's £375bn quantitative easing programme.

Ukip fostering row: parents demand resignations

Telegraph
" The couple said they felt "slandered and besmirched" after social workers took the ethnic minority children away because they were members of the UK Independence Party. The husband said: "They should be considering their positions. These are people on incredible salaries who are paid to make responsible decisions but they can't do it. "It's completely baffling that they just can't put their hands up. They say this is a complex case but we don't agree. It's very simple."

Del Boy Blair peddles immigration myths

Telegraph
" The myth peddled by Blair’s acolytes – that high levels of immigration generated significant economic benefits for the existing UK population – was demolished in 2008 by a House of Lords select committee. It concluded: “We do not support the general claims that net immigration is indispensable to fill labour and skills shortages. Such claims are analytically weak and provide insufficient reason for promoting net immigration.” Reinforcing this point, the government’s Migration Advisory Committee recently confirmed that immigrants do “displace” some British workers – ie, take their jobs, most likely those at the bottom end of the pay ladder. Embarrassed by indisputable evidence that Blair’s immigration wheeze (about 80 per cent of first-generation immigrants vote Labour) had “costs as well as benefits”, Ed Miliband now accepts that his party overlooked those who were being squeezed and was too quick to tell them to “like it or lump it”. Overcoming Blair’s legacy is tougher than it seems, however, as we saw last week when a Labour council removed children from a home in Rotherham simply because the foster parents were members of Ukip. It is the mindset of Animal Farm: “All Immigration Good. All Opposition Bad”.

It’s not this family who are bigots — it’s the multicultural thought police

Daily Mail
"The story sounds just too idiotic and outrageous to be true. A Rotherham couple, by all accounts exemplary foster parents for nearly seven years, took on two children and a baby in an emergency placement. Eight weeks later, social workers came and took the children away — despite the fact that they were thriving — on the grounds that because the couple belonged to the UK Independence Party this was not ‘the right cultural match’. Astonishingly, the official in charge is still unrepentant. Joyce Thacker, the council’s director of children and young people’s services, has said that the children, who were from ‘EU migrant backgrounds’, had been removed to protect their ‘cultural and ethnic needs’ from UKIP’s ‘strong views’ and apparent ‘opposition to multiculturalism’. .......In the early Nineties, I unearthed what, it is no exaggeration to say, was a climate of totalitarianism in social-work training. Anti-racist zealots had captured the social workers’ training body, and built into the social-work diploma the explicit assumption that society was fundamentally racist and oppressive. What followed was an utterly chilling degree of intimidation and thought control. Blameless social work students were forced in tears to ‘confess’ to their own racism; some failed to qualify unless they identified racist attitudes even where none existed. These and other politically correct dogma, and the requirement to enforce them, remain stamped into social-work culture like the name of Blackpool in a stick of rock. ......As a result, the needs of vulnerable children and other social-work clients have been junked in favour of the overriding requirement to impose an ideological view of the world in which minorities can do no wrong while the majority can do no right. Over the years, this has given rise to one horror story after another. Twelve years ago, an eight-year-old Ivorian child, Victoria Climbié, was tortured and murdered by her guardians under the noses of social workers who believed such behaviour had to be respected as part of African culture. In the early Nineties, Islington council was revealed to have ignored the systematic sexual abuse and prostitution of children in its care because it was terrified of being called racist or homophobic if it disciplined black or gay staff perpetrating such crimes."

Egypt's Morsi grants himself sweeping new powers

ABC (Australia)
"Mr Morsi has decreed that all decisions he has made since coming into office, and all decisions he will make until a new constitution is passed, will not be subject to appeal or review by any court. He has also ordered that no court can dissolve the Islamist-dominated constituent assembly which is now drafting a new constitution. .....Nobel laureate and former UN atomic energy agency chief Mohamed El Baradei lashed out at the declaration, which would effectively put the president above judicial oversight. "Morsi today usurped all state powers and appointed himself Egypt's new pharaoh. A major blow to the revolution that could have dire consequences," El Baradei wrote on his Twitter account."
ED: A new Dictator is born..... to no surprise

Barack Obama blunders again on the world stage

Telegraph
"It is only two weeks since his re-election, and his second term remains two months away, but Barack Obama is already blundering again on the world stage, with the kind of gaffes that would have been plastered on the front page of The New York Times if they had been committed by George W. Bush when he was in the White House. Obama's first term was littered with foreign policy gaffes, and there is every chance the second term will be more of the same. On his trip to Asia this week, President Obama struggled to pronounce the name of Aung San Suu Kyi, the most prominent human rights activist in the world."

Obama in Australia

Labor will go the Obama way: smear big, woo small
" Labor figures, including members of Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s personal staff, have been given access to parts of the successful Obama campaign’s inner workings and plan to adapt them for Australia. Ms Gillard’s unusually close rapport with Mr Obama has resulted in her senior political strategist, John McTernan, linking up with the Obama camp’s lead pollster, Joel Benenson… Labor officials believe they can learn a lot from the Obama campaign team. Sophisticated databases allowed the campaign team to identify individual voters’ concerns and target them with direct messages. This is being credited as a major factor behind the coalition of women, blacks and Hispanics who carried the election for Mr Obama… "

Obama campaign's investment in data crunching paid off

LA Times
"No other presidential campaign has so completely embraced this science. The campaign hired a team that topped out at 54 people and invested undisclosed millions in the effort. Analytics helped the campaign efficiently recruit volunteers, buy ads, tailor emails and mailers, raise money, dispatch surrogates — and, most importantly, scour the swing states for hard-to-find voters most likely to support the president. .....Another campaign official, who asked not to be named because he was not authorized to speak for the campaign, put it this way: "It's about turning over control to some nerds. And more than any other year, campaign leadership really took that leap of faith."
For campaign professionals, that is a major leap. Politics long has been ruled by truisms, conventional wisdom and intuition, with millions spent based on a murky mix of polling and focus groups. The shift to data-driven decision-making has been gradual and steady — becoming increasingly sophisticated as political parties amass more information about individual voters through traditional means, such as polls, and new ones, such as data mining.
The Obama campaign has made the transition over two elections. In this one, it employed analytics in a far more systematic and thorough way, officials said. But the work was a closely guarded secret. Officials denied requests for interviews with the analytics experts, and when journalists visited Obama headquarters, the team was ordered to shut the Cave door."

Officials pilfer Zimbabwe diamond billions

Stuff NZ
"ABOUT $US2 billion ($A1.9 billion) worth of diamonds have been siphoned out of Zimbabwe in the past four years by a network of government ministers and military officials aligned with President Robert Mugabe, an Ottawa-based global watchdog says."

Why President Obama Was Reelected

Bullion by Post(Zero Hedge) "Obama’s winning tactic was to do what any respectable man does when he wishes to have something; he bought it. From cell phones and contraceptives to food stamps and unemployment benefits, the Obama administration kept the money flowing to ensure a steady turnout on Election Day. The coup de grâce was painting his opponent as a second coming of Dickens’ Scrooge that was ready to cut the voters from their trust funds. .......Economist Thomas DiLorenzo sums up the key to Obama’s victory in this pungent bit of fine wisdom:
Every time Romney made one of his “let’s get the economy going again” speeches extolling the virtues of hard work he terrified the millions of welfare bums and parasites and motivated them more than ever to stand in line for hours to vote for Santa Claus Obama, their “savior” from having to work for a living. (It’s always the low opportunity cost class that has the “luxury” of spending half a day or more standing in a line).
With Obama’s reelection comes the onward march of American society’s degeneration into that of the lazy, bitter masses forever on the lookout to loot a hapless minority still trying to make an honest living. The coming brave new world will be filled to the brim with self-righteous individuals eager to shuffle around the Earth’s gifts to achieve some kind of equality. In the process, none of them will produce a lick of good outside of satisfying their own disturbed need to dominate. It will be rule of the inept over the capable. Barack Obama will lead the way. He will be replaced in four years with someone that follows the same doctrine. The collective age of the country will continue to collapse till it reaches just shy of an unclothed infant wailing for succor. Except it will be grown men doing the crying and no one around to feed him because the sensible among us has already left."

Eric Holder 'knew of David Petraeus affair'

Telegraph
"The crisis over General David Petraeus's resignation reached President Barack Obama's cabinet for the first time on Monday as it was alleged that the US attorney general knew about the affair for months but kept it secret until the day of the American election."

Obama cover-up claim over CIA chief's affair: Was the relationship discovered by FBI months ago, but hushed up due to election?

Daily Mail
"The FBI began an investigation in February after discovering the 60-year-old’s computer had been accessed by someone else - believed to be his 40-year-old mistress Paula Broadwell - prompting fears of a major security breach. This led to the discovery of hundreds of explicit emails including one referring to ‘sex under a desk.' ......A source said last night: ‘The real question is, what did the President know, and when?’ Frances Townsend, a former senior US government security official and now a member of the CIA Advisory Committee, said: ‘Whenever the FBI opens an investigation of a senior official they have to make notification of that, especially if there is an intelligence concern. 'It is hard to believe the White House did not know about this prior to the election.’

EU: funding crisis as talks collapse

Telegraph
" MEPs led a walk-out of three-way talks in which the European Commission and European Parliament were attempting to secure billions of pounds in extra funding for this year and next year from national governments, claiming there was a cash shortfall. MEPs quit the talks at the attempt to secure a total of £13.8 billion in spending this year and next, a move fiercely opposed by the British Government. Ministers have formed an alliance with other EU nations including Germany, the Netherlands and France to block the demands."

UK exit costly... for the EU

The Commentator
"Yesterday saw the German chancellor Angela Merkel take dinner with David Cameron with a plea for continued co-operation and membership of the European Union. With the latest trade figures it is easy to see why. The one thing that always puzzles me about the debate surrounding continued membership of the EU is that it is always couched in terms of cost to us in the UK."

America has become an Old World country

Telegraph
"So Europe got the American president it wanted – the one who would present no threat to its own delusions. The United States is now officially one of us: an Old World country complete with class hatred, ethnic Balkanisation, bourgeois guilt and a paternalist ruling elite. And it is locked into the same death spiral of high public spending and self-defeating wealth redistribution as we are. Welcome to the future, and the beginning of what may turn out to be the terminal decline of the West. .....The saddest development is the one that is most counter-intuitive. Mr Obama – who famously ran in 2008 as the post-racial candidate – has polarised the nation racially in a way that it has not been for half a century, reversing what had been the progressive trend toward real social integration and colour blindness in American political life."

Obama has led US to £338bn bill - and to the edge of a financial abyss

Daily Mail
"The plan is that $136 billion (£85.5 billion) in cuts – 0.8 per cent of GDP – will come in at the same time as $532 billion of tax increases, taking a total of $668 billion out of the deficit, or four per cent of GDP. The cuts include defence and unemployment benefits; the tax rises reverse all the Bush-era tax cuts, and will hit the middle classes. They will also hit employers by increasing payroll taxes. The programme will be anti-growth and anti-enterprise, but Republicans claim that it is the only option, given the Administration’s refusal to address the deficit, and the country’s colossal debt, in other ways. It is the main reason why the euphoria of the first Obama victory in 2008 has not been repeated and why the stock market slid south when it was realised four more years of Obama were being served up. Corporate America especially is in despair. For them, there is no end in sight for over-regulation, debt and financial incontinence: and the Chinese, especially, are in their rear-view mirrors, coming up fast. This is a deeply divided country: divided not between Democrats and Republicans, or even liberals and conservatives, but, it seems, between givers and takers."

Playing dirty’s the best lesson Dave can learn from Obama

Daily Mail
"British politicians often visit America to try to learn from successful presidential election campaigns. Indeed, there is much that David Cameron can draw from this week’s victory of his ‘friend’, Barack Obama. There are two reasons why Mr Obama persuaded voters to give him a second term despite the abject failure of his first four years in the White House. One was that he cynically assembled and manipulated a coalition of minorities, and of people who are worried how minorities struggle in society, and convinced them that he would protect their interests. The other was a campaign, waged through a compliant media, which vilified and smeared his opponent, Mitt Romney. .......And the final lesson from Obama’s victory, by the way, is that there is no sense in waiting until near polling day to go negative. As with all poison, the sooner it is dripped into the system, the sooner it begins to work."

The Edge of the Abyss The default setting of American society is ever more liberal and statist.

National Review
"If you add up the total debt — state, local, the works — every man, woman, and child in this country owes 200 grand (which is rather more than the average Greek does). Every American family owes about three-quarters of a million bucks, or about the budget deficit of Liechtenstein, which has the highest GDP per capita in the world. Which means that HRH Prince Hans-Adam II can afford it rather more easily than Bud and Cindy at 27b Elm Street. In 2009, the Democrats became the first government in the history of the planet to establish annual trillion-dollar deficits as a permanent feature of life. Before the end of Obama’s second term, the federal debt alone will hit $20 trillion. That ought to have been the central fact of this election — that Americans are the brokest brokey-broke losers who ever lived, and it’s time to do something about it."

Sifting Through the Wreckage Yes, Virginia, things changed.

National Review
"Obamacare, the governmental takeover of one-sixth of the U.S. economy, is now set in legislative concrete, and the progressive campaign to turn ever-larger numbers of citizens into wards of the state has been given a tremendous boost — with electoral consequences as far as the eye can see.
A war in the Middle East is now almost certain, and sooner rather than later; as if the previous three and a half years of fecklessness were not enough, the cast of mind manifest in the administration’s abdication of responsibility in Benghazi will have likely convinced a critical mass of the Israeli leadership that they have no choice but to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities in self-defense. The economic chaos resulting from military conflict in the Persian Gulf (and beyond) will further deepen the European fiscal crisis while making an already weak American economic recovery even more anemic.
The children and grandchildren of November 6’s voters have been condemned to bear the burden of what is certainly an unpayable mountain of debt, and may be an unserviceable amount of debt, which in either case will be an enormous drag on the economy, even as it mortgages America’s strategic options in Asia to the holders of U.S. government bonds in Beijing."

Why Mitt Romney Lost

Newsmax
"The "morning after" will bring the expected explanations and after-game quarterbacking. Still, it is important that the GOP understand why we lost this one in hopes of future victory. ....As I said, it is easy to blame Sandy and Christie for Romney's loss. I won't. Sure they hurt Romney. But he lost for other reasons. Sandy and Christie's double-dealing can be compared to bad turbulence that any experienced jet pilot should expect on a long mission. The turbulence may be rough, but it is nothing more than a passing episode for a good pilot with a smart flight plan. On to why our pilot Mitt Romney and his plan were so flawed."

How did he do it?

Catallaxy Files
"Barack Obama, although having the iciest and coldest of personalities, is noted for his likeability. He is a man of the far far left but is praised as a centralist. He is a divider but has risen to the presidency as someone who can bring the country together. He has had a succession of failed policies with not a success to be found yet people believe he has the answers to the country’s problems and this is so even though he did not propose a single initiative during the whole campaign. He defeated Mitt Romney by blaming George Bush for overseeing the briefest of recessions which ended in 2009 yet has received astonishingly little blame for overseeing by far the worst recovery in post-War history which is not in spite of but because of the policies he pursued. He talks about the need to balance the budget while adding five trillion dollars of debt in four years with more to come.
So how did he do it? How did he win re-election. It is a conundrum being widely discussed because Mitt Romney did fairly represent the great traditions of the Republican Party. So far as policy is concerned, in most of the ways that count, there would not be a dime’s worth of difference between Romney and Ronald Reagan. And yet he lost and in the end it wasn’t close."

The 47% majority

Quadrant Online (Australia)
"A bit of an early post mortem on the American election but we have to start somewhere. Possibly the most crucial determinant of the result is that the American voting population is now inhabited in very large numbers by those who believe the world owes them a living and that someone else having more than they do is in itself a wrong that needs to be righted. There is, however, more to it than that. ........And it has been clear from the start that the media have understood exactly how bad Obama has been because they have known with precision exactly what parts of what Obama has done or said that have required their cover. Obama has had to lie over Benghazi and so they have covered for him to the maximum extent they could. Obama tells producers "you didn't build that" and the media runs dead with the quote so that it never really becomes as significant as it ought to be. They know exactly how dreadful Obama has been, and cannot even manufacture a greater good, that their lies and distortions have protected the community from having to do without, had Obama lost the election in spite of every service they rendered in defence of his reputation and image.
We are in dangerous times. Obama and Gillard are two of a kind. Empty of ability, proven failures at everything they have tried to achieve, but nevertheless able to command majorities in the legislative systems of our two nations. But the American election is the one that will matter most and whose outcome will resonate far into the future in ways that are incalculable. Re-electing Obama has endangered our way of life and may even make it unsustainable. Electing Mitt Romney would have given at least the possibility of putting us back on a more stable path. It is an option that has now been closed forever. It is the alternative future that, because of the election, will never be allowed to happen."

End of quantitative easing will stop mad monetary recycling

CityAM
"IT is time for George Osborne to start worrying. The Chancellor will be the biggest loser from the Bank of England’s right and proper decision to halt quantitative easing, at least for the time being. The biggest problem with QE – apart from its increasing lack of impact and the pain inflicted upon savers and pensioners – is that it has blurred to a dangerous extent monetary and fiscal policy."

Politics of identity and the dividing of America

Andrew Bolt,Herald Sun (Australia)
"BARACK Obama should not have been re-elected President. That he was tells us elections are now decided less by heads than hearts. Is America better off after four years already of Obama? More Americans - 7.9 per cent - are unemployed. The country is even deeper in debt, now totalling a frightening $16 trillion. Obama’s foreign policy has left America, if anything, weaker. Obama, who four years ago promised such a transformative presidency that “this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal”, has plainly failed. Yet he’s back in the White House, and Republican Mitt Romney, the successful businessman and governor is not. Worse for the US, he’s back with the same deadlock in Congress - Democrats controlling the Senate, Republicans the House - and a smaller mandate. What the hell happened? In a victory this narrow almost anything can be said to have made the difference: Superstorm Sandy blowing away Romney’s momentum, the blame-Bush hangover or whatever cause you want to push. But Obama should have been swept away so comprehensively as to make such if-buts pointless. Bigger shifts help him, signalling the rise of a new kind of politics that could leave the US weaker, and us, too. This election confirms the suspicion that the politics of seeming is trumping that of achieving. That what counts most in politicians is how voters “identify” with them, rather than what they do. It also suggests that a culture of entitlement is eating at a culture of achievement."

New dawn? This looks more like a new dusk..

Daily Mail
"Washington observers speak of the incompetence of the Obama administration – not just its ability to waste money, but also to target funds so badly. There is very little to show for the $787billion fiscal stimulus of 2009. A fraction of it could have been used to create serious sea defences around New York and New Jersey, to avoid the devastation of last week’s storm, for example. ....And as America subsides into a welfarist, subsidy culture, so will its paranoia about China – already running at near-hysterical levels in some manufacturing regions – grow. America increasingly fears China both as an economic and a military titan – the two components of being a superpower. Defence cuts in America are inevitable once the borrowing binge brings serious damage to the economy – as it will by mid-term, if not before – and that will increase the nation’s sense of vulnerability towards the Chinese. And America’s intractable unemployment problem – it was 8 per cent when President Obama assumed office and is 7.9 per cent now – is increasingly perceived as the result of a highly disciplined and well-trained workforce in China that systematically undercuts over-regulated American business."

Windows 8 belongs on older PCs like a fish needs a bicycle

ZedNET
"Metro, no matter what Microsoft wants to call it, remains a usability nightmare on a conventional PC. It may or may not be as awful on a touch tablet—I haven't tried that so I don't know—but I do know it's annoying as heck on my non-touch enabled PCs. The desktop, no matter what Microsoft may want, still works best with a Windows, Icons, Menu, Pointer (WIMP) interface, not Metro's big, klutzy tiles. .....If you want something better than Windows, go with desktop Linux, a cloud-based Linux desktop like Google's Chrome OS, or a Mac. Heck, try an iPad. Just don't waste your time with Windows 8."

Jim Messina: The man behind Obama's campaign

Stuff.nz
" He was once described as "the most powerful person in Washington you've never heard of". While Barack Obama delivered a rousing victory speech in Chicago, it was his campaign manager Jim Messina who many were crediting as developing the strategy that kept the US President in the White House for another four years. The 42-year-old has never lost a campaign since he managed his first race in 1993, when he was still a politics undergraduate."

President Barack Obama facing fiscal cliff as stock markets fall

Telegraph
" The president faces an urgent challenge to prevent the gridlock that scarred his first term as fears grew that politicians will fail to cut a deal to stop the economy falling over a 'fiscal cliff'. More than $600bn (£380bn) of tax rises and cuts in government spending are due in early January. Failure to avoid the cliff will plunge the world's largest economy back into a slump and disrupt the global economy's still fragile global recovery."

America Embraces Socialism

E.M.Smith
"America has embraced “Third Way” progressive / socialist policies. It has selected for re-election a president who embraces them, and endorsed his application of them. (Effective nationalization of 1/6 of the economy via “Obamacare” and the Central Planning of the medical industry. Effective partial nationalization of the banks and auto industries via an ‘avoidance of bankruptcy’ process. Etc.) This has implications, and it can not be ignored."

The calm before the storm

Catallaxy Files
"Will Romney win Ohio? Will he win other states instead or as well? Pennsylvania, Michigan and Minnesota are now trending Romney and there is no McCain state from 2008 that even hints at going Obama."

MUST SEE YOUTUBE: Superstorm Sandy, 1 week since Sandy, New concerns for victims

Climate Realists
"Superstorm Sandy, 1 week since Sandy, New concerns for victims. American Red Cross president on relief efforts. Still massive power outages exist, shortage on gasoline, while leaving people in need of basic supplies. The victims do not want to be forgotten as they try to rebuild their lives back to normal. More than 100 people were killed in the Hurricane. More than 10K people are still living in shelters."

The Romney Tsunami…And Again Obama Turns Into The Hope-To-Despair President

NoTricksZone
"Things are just going like clockwork for Romney. It’s increasingly clear the Democrats are propping up a knocked-out feather-weight fighter, insisting he’s still conscious when in fact he’s out cold. Romney’s momentum continues and now looks unstoppable. Expect it to carry through election day. The Democrats are more demoralized than ever."

Affairs with his Secretary, incompetence, amateur boxing... how John Prescott defies political gravity

independent
"Six years ago, it emerged that while Deputy Prime Minister he had been engaging in sexual acts with his diary secretary Tracey Temple not just in his state-funded apartments in Admiralty Arch, but even in his office, where Ms Temple gave him the full Lewinsky under the gaze of a portrait of Oliver Cromwell. It's not necessary to be a feminist to believe that Prescott was using his position of power for his own sexual gratification, and exploiting the vulnerability of a much younger employee. This, by the way, was the same man who at the 1996 Labour Party conference derided the then Transport Minister Steven Norris for his sexual adventurism and went on: "This Tory Government have the audacity to talk about morality. For too many Tories, morality means not getting caught."

Sardine can Britain: What life will be like in 2050 when experts predict the population will have exploded to 80million

Daily Mail
"The population of Britain will rocket to nearly 80 million by 2050 — an increase of a third — according to an authoritative new projection by the Population Reference Bureau. It’s a chilling prospect and has sparked renewed debate about mass immigration. Last week, the Economist magazine called the Tories’ attempts to limit immigration their ‘barmiest policy’, and complained Britain ‘has, in effect, installed a “keep out” sign over the white cliffs of Dover’. But is it wrong to want tighter controls over our borders? Here, a leading historian imagines what life could be like 38 years from now . . . "

Don't believe the austerity hype

ASI
"..Er…what austerity? This graph, compiled by Veronique de Rugy of the Mercatus Centre, shows that UK public expenditure has been growing at a pretty solid pace, even in real, inflation-adjusted terms. If you or I were in debt as deep as the government's, we would aim to cut our spending and reduce it. But the government continues to increase its spending, and continues to borrow and add to its debt to finance it. Indeed, the Treasury expects that UK government debt will increase three times, from around £581bn in 2008 when the present crisis hit, to £1,500bn in 2015/16 which is as far ahead as the Treasury forecasts.
Public expenditure is, of course, notoriously difficult to cut. It involves making politically difficult and unpopular decisions. And indeed, during difficult times there are more people drawing unemployment and other social benefits, which are a very large part of the UK government budget. George Osborne's hope was that he could finesse things by hoping that the growth of people's incomes would outpace the growth of public expenditure, so that the relative burden of public spending would diminish, and less borrowing would be required. But given the general economic malaise in Western economies, and the disarray in the euro area in particular, our customers are not buying much more, even at the cheaper prices made possible by the downward slide in the value of the pound."

Nobel Peace Prize: "the anti-European Shitstorm"

Dr Richard North
"With a headline like that from Die Zeit, the story is irresistible. Writer Ludwig Green refers to a prediction that there would be at least 500 comments within two days, with 99 percent negative."

It's got a collapsing currency and rioting on the streets but the European Union wins the Nobel PEACE Prize

Daily Mail
"The past 12 months have also seen Brussels help to push aside the democratically elected governments in Greece and Italy, and widespread civil unrest and rioting. This week saw Greek citizens dressed as Nazis burn swastika flags to protest at a visit to Athens by German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Last night former Chancellor Lord Lamont ridiculed the decision, saying: 'Today's decision seems preposterous and absurd. 'It would require a heart of stone not to die of laughter. It is the most ridiculous decision since the committee gave the peace prize to Barack Obama when he had been US President for two minutes.'

Gaffe-prone Mitt Romney defied the odds and wiped the floor with the President in the first TV debate. So was this the night Obama lost the White House?

Daily Mail
"And as Republican campaigners yesterday rubbed their hands with glee, and their Democrat opponents rubbed their eyes in disbelief, early opinion polls suggested voters agree with the verdict of the political professionals. Incredible as it sounds, Mr Romney, a politician dismissed all along as unengaging, gaffe-prone and robotic, wiped the floor with one of the greatest orators of his generation. And in a one-on-one debate of all things."

Hypocrite who dare not tell voters the truth

Daily Mail
"Which was the more offensive aspect of Ed Balls’s speech to the Labour conference yesterday: his intellectually dishonest prescription for curing the woes of the British economy, or his hypocritical refusal to acknowledge his part in causing them? Mr Balls had – or claimed he had – a masterplan for growth. The State stands to make £3billion to £4billion when the rights to operate the fourth generation of mobile phone services are auctioned, and Mr Balls promised to use the money to build 100,000 affordable homes and give first-time buyers a stamp duty holiday. This promise typified the hypocrisy of Mr Balls’s speech. He wouldn’t, in all probability, become Chancellor until long after the proceeds from the 4G sale have been deployed by George Osborne.
.....The bitter irony is that, privately, Labour insiders say Messrs Miliband and Balls recognise the need to be ‘disciplined’ about spending should they win power. They cannot say this now, apparently, because it would run counter to their hollow but relentless argument that the Coalition’s so-called austerity policies are far too severe."

A German's View on Islam

A German's View on Islam - worth reading This is by far the best explanation of the Muslim terrorist situation I have ever read. His references to past history are accurate and clear. Not long, easy to understand, and well worth the read. The author of this email is Dr. Emanuel Tanya, a well-known and well-respected psychiatrist. A man, whose family was German aristocracy prior to World War II, owned a number of large industries and estates. When asked how many German people were true Nazis, the answer he gave can guide our attitude toward fanaticism.

'Very few people were true Nazis,' he said, 'but many enjoyed the return of German pride, and many more were too busy to care. I was one of those who just thought the Nazis were a bunch of fools. So, the majority just sat back and let it all happen. Then, before we knew it, they owned us, and we had lost control, and the end of the world had come. My family lost everything. I ended up in a concentration camp and the Allies destroyed my factories.'

We are told again and again by 'experts' and 'talking heads' that Islam is the religion of peace and that the vast majority of Muslims just want to live in peace. Although this unqualified assertion may be true, it is entirely irrelevant. It is meaningless fluff, meant to make us feel better, and meant to somehow diminish the spectre of fanatics rampaging across the globe in the name of Islam.

The fact is that the fanatics rule Islam at this moment in history. It is the fanatics who march. It is the fanatics who wage any one of 50 shooting wars worldwide. It is the fanatics who systematically slaughter Christian or tribal groups throughout Africa and are gradually taking over the entire continent in an Islamic wave. It is the fanatics who bomb, behead, murder, or honour-kill. It is the fanatics who take over mosque after mosque. It is the fanatics who zealously spread the stoning and hanging of rape victims and homosexuals. It is the fanatics who teach their young to kill and to become suicide bombers.

The hard, quantifiable fact is that the peaceful majority, the 'silent majority,' is cowed and extraneous. Communist Russia was comprised of Russians who just wanted to live in peace, yet the Russian Communists were responsible for the murder of about 20 million people. The peaceful majority were irrelevant.. China's huge population was peaceful as well, but Chinese Communists managed to kill a staggering 70 million people.

The average Japanese individual prior to World War II was not a warmongering sadist. Yet, Japan murdered and slaughtered its way across South East Asia in an orgy of killing that included the systematic murder of 12 million Chinese civilians; most killed by sword, shovel, and bayonet.

And who can forget Rwanda, which collapsed into butchery. Could it not be said that the majority of Rwandans were 'peace loving'?

Attributed to Dr. Emanuel Tanya 

History lessons are often incredibly simple and blunt, yet for all our powers of reason, we often miss the most basic and uncomplicated of points: Peace-loving Muslims have been made irrelevant by their silence. Peace-loving Muslims will become our enemy if they don't speak up, because like my friend fromGermany , they will awaken one day and find that the fanatics own them, and the end of their world will have begun..

Peace-loving Germans, Japanese, Chinese, Russians, Rwandans, Serbs, Afghans, Iraqis, Palestinians, Somalis, Nigerians, Algerians, and many others have died because the peaceful majority did not speak up until it was too late. As for us who watch it all unfold, we must pay attention to the only group that counts--the fanatics who threaten our way of life.     

Lastly, anyone who doubts that the issue is serious and just deletes this email without sending it on, is contributing to the passiveness that allows the problems to expand. So, extend yourself a bit and send this on and on and on! Let us hope that thousands, world-wide, read this and think about it, and send it on - before it's too late.

Now Islamic prayers have been introduced into Toronto and other public schools in Ontario, and, yes, in Ottawa too while the Lord's Prayer was removed (due to being so offensive?) The Islamic way may be peaceful for the time being in our country until the fanatics move in. And we are silent.......

ED: there have been some comments (not published here) that attribute this article to someone else, but that does not detract from the message which remains relevant.  Original article here

 

 

British still giving hundreds of millions of pounds in aid to wealthy countries

Telegraph
" Countries including China, Russia, Brazil, Iceland and Barbados are benefiting from funds intended to help the world’s poorest, despite a pledge for it to go only to the neediest. Among the schemes being paid for are a Turkish television channel, a scheme promoting tourism in Iceland’s national park, and a hotel training waiters in the tourist destination of Barbados. The situation was described by one MP as “farcical” last night. The Government is now under pressure to reform aid spending - and to axe a commitment to increase it at a time when every other area of government bar the NHS is due to be cut."
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Britain pays hundreds of millions of pounds in aid to some of the world's richest countries including China and Barbados in a move MPs say is 'farcical' Half the European 'development aid' budget goes to middle and higher-income nations Coalition pledged that money would be targeted only at the most needy (Daily Mail)

Why I’m uninstalling Windows 8

PCgamesN
"As a cruel trick on myself, about a month ago I installed Windows 8 on my main PC to see what it was like. The answer is: abysmal. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that Windows 8 is the worst computing experience I’ve ever had. As a desktop operating system, it’s annoying, frustrating, irritating, and baffling to use. I’ve tried on many occasions to explain exactly why it’s so awful to use day-to-day, and most of the time, smoke starts pouring out of my ears. I thought it would be better to get down exactly what the issues are and why you should avoid it. ....Windows 8 comes out in just under two months - it’ll be available from October 16th. You should not buy it."

Media shocked, shocked to hear Romney state the truth

Catallaxy Files
" The really shocking thing is that the laughably cartoonish spin put on these remarks by the far-left Mother Jones website is accepted as the obviously correct position by the US mainstream media (but not necessarily by the American public, which does not see life through the same warped prism – another fact the US media would find too shocking to believe).
This is the same media, let’s not forget, which effectively put Obama into the White House in the first place by systematically refusing to publish the overwhelming evidence of his extremist background, friends and attitudes, not to mention the glaring untruths, evasions and unprecedented lacunae in what was published about him. As a result America elected its first far-left, anti-west, Black Power fellow-traveller to the White House – thanks in large measure to the American mainstream media, which today is similarly intent on airbrushing his disastrous record out of the picture and instead demonising his opponent.
Romney has not one opponent in this presidential election, but two: Barack Obama and the American media which carries his bags for him."

Armada of international naval power massing in the Gulf as Israel prepares an Iran strike

Telegraph
"In preparation for any pre-emptive or retaliatory action by Iran, warships from more than 25 countries, including the United States, Britain, France, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, will today begin an annual 12-day exercise."

Islam: where is Martin Luther?

Catallaxy Files
"Islam is a religion which has enslaved millions of its followers, who have been condemned to poor living standards, poor education and short life expectancy. Its women are treated as second class citizens. It denies freedom to its people, and hence they cannot enjoy economic and political freedom.
The teachings of Islam encourage its believers to sedition and treason as they strive for a Caliphate – this is fundamentally inconsistent with a Western democracy and its separation of state and religion. .....Islam is in dire need of this reformation. It is not for people of this world to decide whether the Prophet has been insulted, or indeed whether he cares that he has been insulted. It is not for people of this world to threaten death to those who do not follow the doctrine of Islam. Until all under Islam eschew violence and embrace a life of trust and ethical behaviour while tolerating the way other people decide to live we will continue to have the threat of terror hanging over us all. This reformation of Islam is urgently required and must, above all, recognise that Islam has no place in State business. .."

Lord Ashcroft tells Coalition to 'turn off the golden taps and stop flooding the developing world with our money'

Telegraph
"“At a time when libraries are being closed and people with disabilities face benefit cuts, there is growing fury over giving away ever-increasing sums to foreigners. “Despite the downturn, your department’s budget is the only one still soaring, set to grow 50 per cent during the term of the Coalition from £7.8billion in 2010 to £11.5billion by 2015."

Bungling Baroness Ashton is considered 'a joke' by foreign governments, say worried senior diplomats

Telegraph
"Her chief weakness as a diplomat is the same quality which has helped her become the second best paid female politician on earth despite never winning an election. Ashton is naturally conciliatory. In a bureaucracy, this has proved a great advantage, allowing her to rise without trace. In a diplomatic role it has proved deeply unhelpful. She has been unable to bully concessions out of foreign governments or major European nations who jealously guard their national interests abroad. .....One foreign policy analyst based in Qatar delivered an ever more withering assessment last week: She is considered to be a joke out here. The whole department is. They do not take the EU seriously as a diplomatic entity and would rather speak with the national governments."

Why I think Romney will win

Catallaxy Files
"In the meantime I still believe Romney will win and this is why. Over the past four years there is not a single person who did not vote for Obama last time who will vote for him this time. He has not gained a single vote in the past four years and lost many. If Obama can win from here, the media-freeloader-Democrat complex will have become too difficult to dislodge. Waiting for utter catastrophe is not a strategy."

Here’s an easy spending cut

John Redwood
"The Uk government is being asked to approve Euro 1033 billion to be spent by the EU between 2014 and 2020. We have a veto on such a proposal. I would like to see us use it. The EU wishes to spend Euro 386.9bn on the Common Agricultural policy. That’s the one where Mr Blair told us he had negotiated a right to reform it, in the interests of a better deal for EU taxpayers and food buyers. Now seems like a good time to demand delivery. ....."

$16 Trillion!

E M Smith
"Fox News says we just rolled over $16 Trillion Debt for the USA, though this Dept Clock says said it’s just a bit more to go: ........Short form? China is having an economic slowdown. Why? Lack of sales into Europe. Even Germany has had a rollover in auto sales as China has slowed down buying BMWs and Mercedes. So the German Miracle is no longer ‘net flush cash’ to bail out the PIIGS, who are auguring in at great speed… The USA is trying to decide “Socialism or Revolution, decisions decisions” and is just doing ‘kick the can’ at ever higher frequency, and expecting China to loan us $1 Trillion a year more indefinitely. China has slowed / stopped the net buying of Treasuries (see above note about economic slowdown and lack of sales…) so isn’t available to be that spark plug just right now… which means that the European Central Bank and The Fed are both buying all the debt they can. Which is fine, except that it isn’t actually real productivity backed money that is handed over to the PIIGS and US CongRats. Given the basic mantra of Economics: “Who, makes What, for Whom”, that means it is only ‘redistribution’ and not going to create new wealth. Redistribution from the taxpayers and anyone with wages / cash income, into the pockets of the Government Employees (who as we all know have been just SO stellar about creating new net wealth… /sarcoff;> ) So the proposed “solution”? Print more money to hand to the government in exchange for more IOUs… while chasing real productivity out of the country and driving it out of existence with more heavy handed Government Mandates. Repeat until dead."

We should tune in to the Romney and Ryan show

Telegraph
"When Romney and Ryan offer their arguments to the American people, they are, of course, at an advantage over almost any British or European politician. Contrary to what many know-nothing British observers seem to think, the message coming out of Tampa was not Tea Party extremism. It was just a reassertion of the basic values of American political culture: self-determination, individual aspiration and genuine community, as opposed to belief in the state as the fount of all social virtue. Romney caught this rather nicely in his acceptance speech, with the comment that the US was built on the idea of “a system that is dedicated to creating tomorrow’s prosperity rather than trying to redistribute today’s.” Or as Marco Rubio put it in his speech, Obama is “trying ideas that people came to America to get away from”.

One in four babies delivered in England and Wales hospitals are to foreign-born mothers - and this is where they all come from

Daily Mail
"Most came from Poland, India and Pakistan with a total of 184,000 children born in these circumstances in NHS hospitals
The overall 25.5% rate revealed today is the highest since records began in 1969
In London in 2011 56.7% of new mums were originally from outside the UK Newham in London has a rate of 77%, the lowest levels were in the north-east of England
Net migration is still at more than 200,000, official figures show, much higher than the Government's 2015 target of under 100,000

Fox News Outs The Navy SEAL Who Wrote An Anonymous Book On The Bin Laden Raid

BI
"Fox News obtained and released the identity of the author of the controversial new book "No Easy Day: The Firsthand Account of the Mission That Killed Osama Bin Laden," due to come out on the anniversary of 9/11."

Australian dollar flying high, but for how long?

ABC
"I see clear signs that the investment pipeline in Australia is starting to weaken and the peak for resource company capital expenditure could be seen some time in 2013. I see signs that rates may need to be cut further in Australia. I see some promising signs that Europe is finally getting on top of the issues it faces. I see signs that demand for the Australian dollar may be becoming sated.
A story I like to tell about this demand for the Australian dollar surrounds the Japanese household and a character I have followed for many years now, Mrs Watanabe. She is the holder of the Japanese purse strings, she represents the Japanese housewives who deal in foreign exchange. Mrs Watanabe is the one that calls the shots on the incredible wealth held within the Japanese household. She is the one that buys and sell financial assets. She is the one often that moves financial markets in Tokyo. What is often not fully appreciated is the sheer size of the purse she controls. According to BoJ data, the Japanese household has an incredible ¥1575tn of financial assets ($AU19tn) with 49 per cent of this sitting in currency and deposits earning close to zero interest. What Mrs Watanabe does with this money moves markets."

Obama 'cancelled missions to kill bin Laden THREE TIMES after getting cold feet - until Hillary Clinton stepped in', claims explosive new book

Daily Mail
"Barack Obama cancelled three operations to kill Osama bin Laden before finally going ahead with the mission at the insistence of Hillary Clinton, according to a new book. The explosive allegation is contained in an expose by journalist Rich Miniter, who argues that the White House’s carefully-crafted narrative of Obama as a decisive leader who dispatched the al-Qaeda leader despite the doubts of advisers is a myth. Leading from Behind: The Reluctant President and the Advisors Who Decide for Him will be published on Tuesday."

Forget QE, what the UK needs is a better transport system

Telegraph
" These three tailwinds – easy money, cheap imports and strong confidence – are no longer available to support growth in Western economies. We cannot wish these conditions back into place. Nor is it sustainable to create a new set of tailwinds based on continual injections of monetary and fiscal stimulus.
It was right to loosen monetary policy and allow public deficits to rise in the depths of the financial crisis in 2008-9. But public finances now need to be put on a more sustainable footing. And when interest rates have already been reduced to rock-bottom levels, additional injections of money through quantitative easing (QE) are likely to have little impact and may even be counter-productive.
To support growth in the current climate, we need to develop a new set of supply-side policies, aimed at helping our economy adjust to the “new normal” world. These policies should focus on improving the underlying competitiveness of our economy by relieving burdens on business, removing barriers to job creation, investing in skills and an efficient transport infrastructure and making the UK an attractive location for investment. That helps to ensure the UK is well-placed to tap into the areas of opportunity in the world economy – such as the continued rapid development of Asia and other emerging market economies and the possibilities created by new technology."

The case against Europe: MEP Daniel Hannan reveals the disturbing contempt for democracy at the heart of the EU

Daily Mail
"Over 13 years as an MEP, Daniel Hannan has witnessed first hand how Brussels works. Now he has written a forensic analysis of why it’s rotten to the core. His devastating critique should be required reading for every politician."

Insight - that Aboriginality show

The Black Steam Train
"What I did witness was an amazing display. I watched young, white identifiers roundly proclaim their connection to, and knowledge of, their 'culture', then turn around not five minutes later and abuse Aboriginal culture by speaking over an Elder. I don't know what this mystical 'culture' is that these identifiers are on about, but if they were hoping to display an innate understanding of Aboriginal culture that night, then they missed the mark by a mile.
Once upon a time, the paler activists were an asset to the Aboriginal cause. Now, they have become a liability. Sprouting bullshit such as 'our white skin is a result of the rape of the colonisers', they are no longer laughable and tolerable in small doses - they are promoting a view of life that just continues to perpetuate the victim mentality and does their cause no favours. When you point out to them that their identifying side of the family have continued to choose to marry white people willingly for longer than their living lifetime, and not as part of some forced assimilation program, you will be met with astonishment or indignation. They don't like the facts getting in the way of a good catchphrase, and it is this sort of lazy indignation that has to go."

“This is about taking union money”

Quadrant Online (Australia)
"As a matter of public importance, we provide here the transcript of Alan Jones’ 15-minute interview on Sydney Radio 2GB on Friday August 10 with Michael Smith on the four-year relationship of Julia Gillard with Bruce Wilson, who allegedly misappropriated union funds. This follows a previous interview of Smith by Jones on July 20. Both transcripts are by Tony Thomas."

£5bn a year saved, £4bn a week borrowed

Christopher Booker,Telegraph
" It was rash of Francis Maude, described in one report as “the Cabinet minister in charge of savings”, to boast that the Government has “slashed a staggering £5.5 billion” off our public spending in a year. What Mr Maude didn’t tell us, of course, any more than does the “cuts”-obsessed BBC, is that in recent months the Government has been having to borrow up to £4.5 billion every week just to cover its ever-rising deficit. If our “minister in charge of saving” could save £5.5 billion a week instead of a year, he might have something to boast about, and we might believe that his Government was actually getting spending under control. But as yet there is no more sign of that happening than there is of the BBC telling us that we are now having to borrow up to £180 a week for every household in the land."

Deepening Euro crisis could force Britain out of the EU for ever, says leading investment bank

Daily Mail
"But many analysts and businesses believe Britain would benefit from leaving the EU and forging new partnerships with emerging economies around the world such as Asia, the Americas and Africa. Others favour a looser relationship with Brussels. ‘A referendum on the UK’s membership of the EU seems to be becoming a more realistic prospect,’ said Vicky Redwood, chief UK economist at consultancy Capital Economics. ‘We think that concerns about the economic disruption if the UK were to leave are overdone. In fact, the economy could end up better off.’ The Nomura report - part of its ‘Issues which keep me awake at night’ series - dubbed a British exit from the EU ‘Brixit’. It was written by London-based analyst Alastair Newton, an-ex British diplomat and former head of Mr Blair’s G7 team."

It starts: first Asian bank mulls British exit from the EU

Telegraph
"So we have a new term: BRIXIT. Japan's biggest bank Nomura has issued an 11-page study evaluating the likelihood that the UK will leave the European Union entirely or partly. Events could accelerate as soon as this autumn if eurozone woes force the Government to commit to a firm date for a BRIXIT referendum."

Google paid just £6million in taxes in Britain despite raking in £395million in revenue

Daily Mail
"Despite bringing in a huge £395 million in UK revenue last year, internet giant Google only paid back £6 million in tax to the Government, it was revealed today. The search company's tax affairs are again under the spotlight after its executive chairman Eric Schmidt admitted they 'could pay more tax' in Britain but do not have to. It is understood Google has managed to reduce its tax burden by funneling its turnover through Ireland, allowing them to pay corporation tax at a rate of 12.5% rather than the 20% in the UK. According to documents filed with Companies House, in total it handed over £6.09 million in corporation tax to the Treasury in that period. But it is an improvement on 2010, when the company only paid £935,000 of tax and had until this year only paid tax totalling £8 million since 2004. Mr Schmidt has previously poked fun at UK tax laws, adding that that's why Google 'love Britain'.

London 2012: This shameless bid to promote Brand Beckham

Daily Mail
"On the very day we were celebrating our first gold medals, with Helen Glover and Heather Stanning rowing so courageously and Bradley Wiggins cycling into the history books, a sporting has-been was busy trying to hog the limelight with a stunt as tacky as it was cynical. Step forward, David Beckham. Never mind that he wasn’t even good enough to be selected for Team GB. Three giant posters of him posing in his undies were projected on to the white cliffs of Dover, apparently to welcome Olympic visitors arriving in Britain.I’m afraid, for my money, our ‘Olympic ambassador’ is a vain, vacuous and greedy expat egotist who cheated on his wife and now makes millions from promoting underwear. Contrast him to our real sporting heroes — men and women who make little money but have spent years selflessly and modestly training for the pride of their country. ....Most British athletes this week have asked what they can do for their country. Shamelessly, Beckham seems only to be asking what his country can do for him."

ECB should prepare for the end of the eurozone as we know it

IEA
" Commenting on Mario Draghi's statements on the euro, Philip Booth, Editorial and Programme Director at the Institute of Economic Affairs, said:



 “The ECB is burying its head in the sand in the latest pledges to support the euro. Instead, it should be contemplating the orderly end of the euro as a single currency across the eurozone and - where necessary - an orderly default on EU government debt.

 
"The head of the ECB has said that he will do 'whatever it takes' within the ECB's mandate to preserve the euro and that high yields on some government bonds were 'unacceptable'. The ECB appears to want to effectively underwrite the government debt of highly indebted nations by printing money. This policy can only succeed in its own terms if the action is substantial enough to create enormous inflation in the indebted countries. If this happens, the euro as a sound, non-inflationary currency is dead and bond yields throughout the eurozone will be on the rise again."

How London became the money-laundering capital of the world

IFO
"There is a world of difference between having rules which are meant to be obeyed, and doing everything within one’s power to avoid providing any meaningful form of compliance with the rules. The purpose of the regulations is to make it as difficult as possible for people who have acquired their money illicitly, anywhere in the world, to find a safe haven in the international banking system. So there are rules and regulations which impose a burden on banks and financial institutions requiring them to ensure that before they accept money from a client, that they have a clear picture of its provenance, that they know as much as possible about their clients, their businesses, the sources of their funds, and if they have held high political office, to make sufficient enquiries to ensure that the monies being deposited are not in fact the proceeds of international aid payments which have been stolen from the country’s Treasury. These rules are routinely flouted by the financial institutions."

Cheapskate Beckhams...

Victoria Beckham attempts to get iPad replaced for free after Brooklyn breaks £600 Apple tablet (Daily Mail)
"With their millions, it’s hard to imagine the Beckhams quibbling over the cost of anything. But when Brooklyn, 13, smashed his iPad, his fashion designer mum was not keen to fork out £600 for a replacement. Victoria, 38, took Brooklyn to Covent Garden’s Apple Store last week and allegedly made it clear she would not be fishing out her credit card. ‘Victoria explained her son had smashed his iPad and wanted another one,’ reveals a spy. ‘But there seemed to be no question of her paying for it. In fact, it was made quite clear she expected a freebie’. And what Posh wants, Posh gets."
ED: They have form on this... 'only the little people pay'

Christians Flee from Radical Rebels in Syria

SPIEGEL ONLINE
"Thousands of Syrians are fleeing into neighboring Lebanon -- not entirely due to fear of the Assad regime. The country's minority Christian population is suffering under attacks waged by rebel troops. In the Beqaa Valley in eastern Lebanon, Christian families are finding temporary refuge, but they are still terrified. ....Soon, an outright campaign against the Christians in Qusayr took shape. "They sermonized on Fridays in the mosques that it was a sacred duty to drive us away," she says. "We were constantly accused of working for the regime. And Christians had to pay bribes to the jihadists repeatedly in order to avoid getting killed." Grandmother Leila made the sign of the cross. "Anyone who believes in this cross suffers," she says. ......Jawhar, a Lebanese national and commander with the terrorist group Fatah al Islam, died that day in the Syrian city. An explosives expert, Jawhar had been in Qusayr to teach rebels how to build bombs and accidentally blew himself up while trying to assemble one. Until his death, Jawhar had been the most wanted man in Lebanon, where he is implicated in the deaths of 200 people. Lebanese authorities confirmed his death in Syria. The fact that the rebels had worked together with a man like Jawhar fomented fears after his death that the ranks of insurgents are increasingly becoming infiltrated by international terrorists."

Conflict of interest? Only for the whites...

The Black Steam Train
"If you've read any of my previous posts, you'll know he's the pale fellow on the left. A man of many talents, Mick is an Aboriginal Elder, Traditional Owner, Business Owner and also holds several important positions the Indigenous Industry. He is on the Board at Mt Buller, the Board of Native Title Services Victoria (NTSV), and a Council Member of the Victorian Aboriginal Heritage Council (VAHC). Not bad for a man who didn't find out he had Aboriginal heritage until he was 25. ..... Mick has claimed often and with great passion about his strong connection to country and has spoken emotionally about the dispossession of his ancestors from their 'cultural home'. Surprisingly, it is a place he today, chooses not to live. Instead, you will find him living in Gippsland, far away from his 'stolen land'. ......Don't be fooled by the Message Stick in his hand. Like most Fauxborigines, he's using it wrong and paying it no respect. It is in his hand not for some deeper spiritual or cultural reason, but, as a prop to fool unwitting watchers into believing this guy knows his stuff. Cultural credibility that he manufactured in his own workshop, no doubt.....Note also the Possum Skin Cloak draped across his knee. While happy to crap on about the patterns on the cloak, Mick is not so forthcoming in this particular interview about the ancient techniques used to create such a piece of art. ....See how easy it is to spin a little cultural bullshit? All you have to do is waffle. I like how Mick waffles. Most Fauxborigines, when talking about their heritage or culture, will often resort to this very same trick. They talk in circles, often spending an inordinate amount of time describing small, inconsequential things. Like a shield they once saw, or an Elder they spoke to. Often, they'll use a small smattering of an Aboriginal language they've revived in a windowless room in a University to punctuate their speech with more credibility. It is quite an art form, but ultimately, they do horrendous damage to a culture they have no right to speak of."