God Loves The Onion

Bill Of Rights Pared Down To A Manageable Six

What the Chinese Media has to say about the Torch that Everyone is Trying to Extinguish

Here’s how the Chinese Communist Party’s English version of the People’s Daily is portraying American calls for some type of action on the Beijing Olympics in response to recent turmoil in Tibet:

“ According to some U.S. media reports, Pelosi said in March that what happened in Tibet is a challenge to the conscience of the world. But people have to ask who is posing this challenge. The truth is, normal life was resumed in Lhasa after the Chinese government took appropriate actions according to law. More than 100 countries in the world have expressed their understanding of and support to Chinese government’s actions, an indication that the international community sides with China on the issue.”

Notice the appeal to the “international community.” The Chinese government is very adept at appealing at the median voter amongst the world’s nations. Proposals that seek to deploy American or European soft power to change Chinese behavior - such as Sen. Clinton’s call on President to boycott the opening ceremonies of the Olympics -have a really high hurdle to overcome as long as China can appeal to such a broad global coalition of nations that care a lot about sovereignty and have not been persuaded about the West’s focus on democracy and human rights.

HT: AS
From elvaliente.wordpress.com

The Olympics, since well before Hitler displayed Nazism to the world in '36, has always been political. Suggesting that it has ever been or could be otherwise is disingenuous. Personally, I am in favor of a boycott. It would be nice to shoot a volley across Peking's ever growing bow. The ironic bit is that China was one of the 64 countries that boycotted the Moscow Olympics of 1980.

I thought Anne Applebaum put it very well here where she argues thatL

The Olympics are the perfect place for a protest

The Duchess of Bedford and One Woman Who Travelled On It.

The Duchess of Bedford, called "the most bombed ship still afloat", was a very lucky ship. During World War II, she sank a U-boat, damaged another, was shot at and bombed on a number of occassions, and once struck an iceberg without sustaining damage.

From here.

Met a woman last night who sailed as a war bride to Halifax from Southampton on the Duchess of Bedford just a few days after Germany surrendered on May 7th 1945. They still had to travel in convoy formation as not all the German U-Boats had been informed that the war was over. With a round bottom, and no stabilizers so as to travel as fast as possible, her abiding memory was of being sea sick. I didn't ask her age, but her great grandson is 14. The past lives on.

As it was a CP ship, I believe my grandfather would have traveled on it as well.

And its Bayerische Motoren Werke and Mercedes-Benz Calling For Mosley's Head?

The great thing about this is not just that this Mosley is the son of the infamous Oswald Mosley, but that it is BMW and Mercedes (along with Toyota) calling for Mosley's head. Mosley paid for his services. BMW and Mercedes used slave labor during the war. I am not saying their isn't something offensive about a grown man impersonating a Camp Guard, but it seems to me far less offensive than BMW and Mercedes waiting until most of the surviving slave labourers had died before even admitting that they might have employed some unpaid help. I don't know the story behind Toyota but it would surprise me if things were that much different different. Who's next, IG Farben?

The Reserve Bank of Zimbawe Releases a $50,000,000 Note

Here's a Z$5 from 2001. And no, I haven't done the math.

Every Once in a While You Miss a Comment on Your Blog: Dominic Touting his Underwear

In answer to all the fuss caused by Jeremy Paxman'...In answer to all the fuss caused by Jeremy Paxman's comments to M&S's Stuart Rose concerning his gusset anxiety around the lack of support and quality of their underwear and the job that they do for him, I would like to make the point that you generally get what you pay for in this world. This has always been the case and remains one of lifes golden rules. If you pay peanuts then... etc.

I, as joint owner of Sunspel, would challenge anyone to trial a pair of our underwear and not agree that they have recieved the most comfortable underwear you can get. We have been making underwear in Long Eaton, Derbyshire for the last 150 years and therefore know a thing or two about it. We have made it for all sorts including Johnny Depp, Liam Gallagher, Anthony Hopkins, Daniel Craig as James Bond, Levis 501's Nick Kamen, even Cyril Smith and Prince Charles.

It is not a simple thing to get right, however years of experience gives our designers a unique, almost boffin-like insight into the essentials of fit and fabric quality. Sunspel's unique fabrics have been created for softness, lightness and strength - all 100% long staple Egyptian cotton.

To back up this claim if you follow the link http://www.sunspel.com and use the voucher code paxo-challenge, we will offer you a 50% discount on any of the underwear or t-shirts we sell, including all those made for Casino Royale - try it out and see for yourself what Paxo is missing.Dominic

Hitchens to Sullivan: "Oh, well, don't be such a lesbian. Get on with it."

Transcript here. Hat tip, AS himself.

Weird Blog: Terrorists Evolve. Threats Evolve. Security Must Stay Ahead. You Play A Part

Found this weird blog today from The Transportation Security Administration with a .gov domain name no less. Here's a rather all too representative quote:

As a result of the bag search, a variety of suspicious items were found. (Since the FBI is leading the investigation, we're not saying exactly what these items are although there is speculation in the press and on the web). The individual was taken into custody by Orlando Police and the FBI is now questioning him. If you’ve been watching the news, you’ve probably seen the bomb squad removing the passenger's clothing curbside to ensure he did not pose a threat.

What's the point here. Is this a blog to show that the TSA is on the case or to inform would be terrorists how to better avoid detection? Oh for the days of Mr. Reid the shoe bomber and his pack of matches.

It's Good to Know that They Are Still Building Vehicles in Flint

The latest news from Michael Moore's Flint, Michigan.

It Had to Happen Sometime: Blogging Takes Casualties

From the NYT

Two weeks ago in North Lauderdale, Fla., funeral services were held for Russell Shaw, a prolific blogger on technology subjects who died at 60 of a heart attack. In December, another tech blogger, Marc Orchant, died at 50 of a massive coronary. A third, Om Malik, 41, survived a heart attack in December.

The truth is stranger than fiction.

Some Stuff You Can't Make Up: Mugable Demands a Recount When There has Yet to be a Count

HARARE, Zimbabwe (AP) — President Robert Mugabe's ruling party demanded a vote recount and a further delay in the release of presidential election results, the state Sunday Mail newspaper reported, prompting outrage from the opposition party.

...

"How do you have a vote recount for a result that has not been announced? That is ridiculous," said opposition spokesman Nelson Chamisa.

Another great moment in Democracy.

Quote of the Day: We Are Not Iceland with Trees. Iceland has Excellent Governance and Clever Policies. We Have Trees

--Dan Gardner in The Ottawa Citizen

HT: M2 at Mock Turtle

Your Toronto District School Board in Action; Notice the Spelling

Dear Parents,

This week began with a discussion about Earth Hour. Although every student in our class participated in Earth Hour, we learned through the Toronto Star, that Stephen Harper did not so we decided to write him a letter (which we all signed). Our letter will be mailed to Stephen Harper today and Tara Parker and myself are also going to combine our class letters and send a copy to the Toronto Star. Below the grade one news is a copy of our letter - out of the mouths of babes!

Spelling words for this week are: that, there, coming, work, playing

Nancy O'Foole

Nancy O'Foole's Grade One Class

March 31, 2008

Dear Steven Carper,

Mr. Prime Minister, we feel Earth Hour was very important to our future. Everyone in our school turned off the lights, computers, and anyhting else that is electrical on Friday from 2 p.m. - 3 p.m.. We also recognized Earth Hour with our families on Saturday night. We are sad to learn that you did not do the same. As the leader of our country, we feel that you should be setting the example, not grade ones! We hope that you will recognize the next Earth Hour because this is important to our country and to our world.

Thank you and we hope to receive a letter in return.

From,
Tegan Julia S. Michelle Olivia Sean David Perry Ella Kaden Daniel
Parker Callum Jack Julia H. Luke Imran Fiona Gracie Charlotte Claudia

Names changed to protect the guilty.

Al Qaeda’s No. 2 States that AQ Does Not Kill Innocent People : With Logic Like This....

Al Qaeda’s No. 2 Defends Attacks
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

CAIRO (AP) — A speaker on an audiotape identified as Ayman al-Zawahri, the chief deputy to Osama bin Laden, has rejected criticism of attacks by Al Qaeda’s followers that have killed thousands of people, maintaining that Al Qaeda does not kill innocent people.

The comment came during a 90-minute audio response, issued Wednesday, that was described as the first installment of answers to the more than 900 questions submitted on extremist Internet sites by Al Qaeda’s supporters, critics and journalists in December.

“We haven’t killed the innocents, not in Baghdad, nor in Morocco, nor in Algeria nor anywhere else,” the speaker identified as Mr. Zawahri said, according to a transcript posted on Web sites linked to Al Qaeda.

“If there is any innocent who was killed in the mujahedeen’s operations, then it was either an unintentional error or out of necessity,” he said.

PS The bump on Mr. Zawahri's forehead is a mark of religious dedication, a testament to bumping his head 5 times a day on the prayer mat.

Fun For a Girl and a Boy

Found here.

HT: P @ AS

Woo hoo; Now Cubans can legally have cell phones. Toasters are still, however, illegal

Yes. The US Trade Embargo is a sick anachronism. But so too is the regime.

From: Ninetymilesaway

Yes, boys and girls, your ordinary citizen can now ante up to the check-in at any hotel establishment on the island of Cuba, as long as he or she has the money to pay in hard currency. Ah, there's the rub.

A cursory search reveals at least one hotel in Varadero where a weekend stay costs about 120 dollars. Do a little simple math. Convert it to CUC's and then divide it by the average monthly salary of a average Cuban. Soon you realize that a weekend in Varadero would cost the equivalent of 5 and a half months complete take home pay. Now say you make 35 thousand a year, it would be like paying about 10 thousand dollars for your weekend.

...

If you look at the "reforms" that have made the latest splash in the media, they all have one thing in common. Cell phones, computers, appliances (except for the lowly toaster, they'll have to wait 'til 2010 for them), they are the appurtenances of modern life, the must haves of the global consumer society. Your average American hears, "Cubans will be allowed to buy microwaves," and immediately pictures them in addition to the Kraftmaid kitchen with the Kitchen Aid appliances, not as a replacement for the lone hot plate with the grease of twenty years and the fraying cord, the cost of which must be paid out for years. So to the uninformed, the impression made is that Cuba is joining the 21st century.

Now Cubans may be isolated, but they have a sense of how the other half lives. All they have to do is look at the tourists, the party apparatchiks, and the State stores, or look to their exiled kin. And in part, they realize how little likelihood there is that they will be able to afford these luxuries the rest of the world takes for granted. As usual with the regime, appearance is all.

Still among the banned, however, are the rights of free assembly, free speech, free elections. Call me a skeptic, but I'm looking for one tell, and that is the release of the political prisoners. The day that Dr. Oscar Biscet walks out of whatever hell hole they've transferred him to a free man; then I will believe change is truly on the way. Until then, I fear I have misjudged Raul, who may very well have been the brains behind keeping the throne all these many years.

And as Canadians are always wont to tell you: they have great literacy and more doctors per square mile or some such tripe. Well, they do have great literacy, but there's little to read. And Fidel (who now wears a shell suit) sold off many of his doctors to Chavez for US$27 a barrel Venezuelan oil. There is also the little medical issue plaguing the Cuban medical system: antiquated equipment and an acute shortage of drugs. Oh yeah, that's America's fault....

Addendum: Spoke with a Cuban Graduate Student (in Divinity no less) at Trinity College about the toasters. His comments were. Practically everyone he knows in Cuba already has a cell phone, albeit registered in a foreigner's name, and that Cuba is not ready for toasters as there is not enough electricity on the Island to support them. However, unlike the Dominincan Republic, they have no longer have the nightly blackouts that those toaster wielding Dominicans do.

Excellent Idea: Why Not Just Buy Out Mugabe (It would certainly be cheaper and might set a decent precedent for other dictators looking for an out).

Beautiful isn't it?

As the Zimbabwean electoral soap opera continues to unfurl, I am led more and more to wonder why "we" (Western governments and IFIs) don't simply buy out corrupt dictators? The World Bank has loaned a lot of money to Zimbabwe, all of it seemingly wasted judging by current conditions there. From the Bank's Zimbabwe page:

Between 1980, when Zimbabwe joined the Bretton Woods Institutions, and 2000 when the country fell behind in its payments on World Bank loans, the Bank funded a total of 33 projects worth US$1.6 billion. Bank support concentrated on infrastructure, agriculture, health support, and community and local government programs, financed from both International Development Association (IDA) Credits (42%) available to low-income countries, and International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) loans (58%) available to middle-income countries. Zimbabwe’s arrears to the World Bank were estimated at US$521 million as of September 13, 2007. The arrears to the IMF stood at US$134 million at end-July 2007 and to the AfdB at US$359 million as of end-April 2007.

So why not "buy the rascals out"? Go to Mugabe in 2002 and offer him $500 million cash to go live in Canada. Is it that his expected profits from being in power are too large for us to afford the buyout? Is it because of moral hazard? Is it because of the moral outrage such a scheme would create?

Or is it because if the institutions of the country don't change, the new president will simply become the next Mugabe?

From Kids Prefer Cheese

I will say that this election has become that much more interesting. Mugabe, who often compared himself to Hitler as someone fighting for the rights of his people with the use of the white landowners as scapegoats, looks increasingly like he will jump. I don't know much about the opposition, but they certainly can't be any worse. It's a wonderful thing, cameras and democracy.

Good To See Old Habits Die Hard

Many Americans assume that China's internet users are both aware of and unhappy about their government's oversight and control of the internet. But in a new survey, most Chinese say they approve of internet control and management, especially when it comes from their government.

According to findings from the fourth and most recent of a series of surveys about internet use in China from 2000 to 2007,1 over 80% of respondents say they think the internet should be managed or controlled, and in 2007, almost 85% say they think the government should be responsible for doing it.

HT: AS
Original story here.

Isn't There Something Inherently Self-Negating or Even Oxymornic in Letting Ex-Behind the Curtain Countries Join Nato?

Harper Doesn't Seem to Think So.

PRIME MINISTER HARPER BACKS UKRAINE’S PROGRESS TOWARD NATO MEMBERSHIP

April 2, 2008
Bucharest

Prime Minister Stephen Harper today expressed Canada’s strong support for Ukraine to move towards membership in the NATO alliance.

“Ukraine has made great progress on democratization and in opening up its economy in recent years,” the Prime Minister said. “The country is on a path to a better future for its people, and I call upon our NATO partners to agree that we should keep Ukraine moving forward toward full membership in the alliance.”

...

The Prime Minister also indicated that Canada would join any NATO consensus to admit the Republic of Georgia to NATO’s Membership Action Plan.

Damn I Wish I Could Write Like This: Hitch on Hilary

(This concentration camp, Jasenovac,was set up by the Ustaša of Croatia in 1941, but you get the picture.)

The Tall Tale of Tuzla
Hillary Clinton's Bosnian misadventure should disqualify her from the presidency, but the airport landing is the least of it.
By Christopher Hitchens

The punishment visited on Sen. Hillary Clinton for her flagrant, hysterical, repetitive, pathological lying about her visit to Bosnia should be much heavier than it has yet been and should be exacted for much more than just the lying itself. There are two kinds of deliberate and premeditated deceit, commonly known as suggestio falsi and suppressio veri. (Neither of them is covered by the additionally lying claim of having "misspoken.") The first involves what seems to be most obvious in the present case: the putting forward of a bogus or misleading account of events. But the second, and often the more serious, means that the liar in question has also attempted to bury or to obscure something that actually is true. Let us examine how Sen. Clinton has managed to commit both of these offenses to veracity and decency and how in doing so she has rivaled, if not indeed surpassed, the disbarred and perjured hack who is her husband and tutor.

I remember disembarking at the Sarajevo airport in the summer of 1992 after an agonizing flight on a U.N. relief plane that had had to "corkscrew" its downward approach in order to avoid Serbian flak and ground fire. As I hunched over to scuttle the distance to the terminal, a mortar shell fell as close to me as I ever want any mortar shell to fall. The vicious noise it made is with me still. And so is the shock I felt at seeing a civilized and multicultural European city bombarded round the clock by an ethno-religious militia under the command of fascistic barbarians. I didn't like the Clinton candidacy even then, but I have to report that many Bosnians were enthused by Bill Clinton's pledge, during that ghastly summer, to abandon the hypocritical and sordid neutrality of the George H.W. Bush/James Baker regime and to come to the defense of the victims of ethnic cleansing.

I am recalling these two things for a reason. First, and even though I admit that I did once later misidentify a building in Sarajevo from a set of photographs, I can tell you for an absolute certainty that it would be quite impossible to imagine that one had undergone that experience at the airport if one actually had not. Yet Sen. Clinton, given repeated chances to modify her absurd claim to have operated under fire while in the company of her then-16-year-old daughter and a USO entertainment troupe, kept up a stone-faced and self-loving insistence that, yes, she had exposed herself to sniper fire in the cause of gaining moral credit and, perhaps to be banked for the future, national-security "experience." This must mean either a) that she lies without conscience or reflection; or b) that she is subject to fantasies of an illusory past; or c) both of the above. Any of the foregoing would constitute a disqualification for the presidency of the United States.

Yet this is only to underline the YouTube version of events and the farcical or stupid or Howard Wolfson (take your pick) aspects of the story. But here is the historical rather than personal aspect, which is what you should keep your eye on. Note the date of Sen. Clinton's visit to Tuzla. She went there in March 1996. By that time, the critical and tragic phase of the Bosnia war was effectively over, as was the greater part of her husband's first term. What had happened in the interim? In particular, what had happened to the 1992 promise, four years earlier, that genocide in Bosnia would be opposed by a Clinton administration?

In the event, President Bill Clinton had not found it convenient to keep this promise. Let me quote from Sally Bedell Smith's admirable book on the happy couple, For Love of Politics:

Taking the advice of Al Gore and National Security Advisor Tony Lake, Bill agreed to a proposal to bomb Serbian military positions while helping the Muslims acquire weapons to defend themselves—the fulfillment of a pledge he had made during the 1992 campaign. But instead of pushing European leaders, he directed Secretary of State Warren Christopher merely to consult with them. When they balked at the plan, Bill quickly retreated, creating a "perception of drift." The key factor in Bill's policy reversal was Hillary, who was said to have "deep misgivings" and viewed the situation as "a Vietnam that would compromise health-care reform." The United States took no further action in Bosnia, and the "ethnic cleansing" by the Serbs was to continue for four more years, resulting in the deaths of more than 250,000 people.

I can personally witness to the truth of this, too. I can remember, first, one of the Clintons' closest personal advisers—Sidney Blumenthal—referring with acid contempt to Warren Christopher as "a blend of Pontius Pilate with Ichabod Crane." I can remember, second, a meeting with Clinton's then-Secretary of Defense Les Aspin at the British Embassy. When I challenged him on the sellout of the Bosnians, he drew me aside and told me that he had asked the White House for permission to land his own plane at Sarajevo airport, if only as a gesture of reassurance that the United States had not forgotten its commitments. The response from the happy couple was unambiguous: He was to do no such thing, lest it distract attention from the first lady's health care "initiative."

It's hardly necessary for me to point out that the United States did not receive national health care in return for its acquiescence in the murder of tens of thousands of European civilians. But perhaps that is the least of it. Were I to be asked if Sen. Clinton has ever lost any sleep over those heaps of casualties, I have the distinct feeling that I could guess the answer. She has no tears for anyone but herself. In the end, and over her strenuous objections, the United States and its allies did rescue our honor and did put an end to Slobodan Milosevic and his state-supported terrorism. Yet instead of preserving a polite reticence about this, or at least an appropriate reserve, Sen. Clinton now has the obscene urge to claim the raped and slaughtered people of Bosnia as if their misery and death were somehow to be credited to her account! Words begin to fail one at this point. Is there no such thing as shame? Is there no decency at last? Let the memory of the truth, and the exposure of the lie, at least make us resolve that no Clinton ever sees the inside of the White House again.