ELSEWHERE

Whoopee! "Australia has abandoned a major international measure aimed at cutting greenhouse gas emissions, arguing that it is unlikely to come into effect and creates no incentive for industry to reduce such emissions"

Record Cold Freezes Northeastern States. That pesky global warming again!

An understandable wish: "An American Airlines commuter flight was diverted after a passenger passed a note to the crew demanding to be taken to Australia"

Those good old generous taxpayers again: "FORKLIFT drivers, nurses, engineers, teachers, clerks, information technology workers and architects are among the 292 "displaced" public servants costing taxpayers more than $17 million a year. They each earn an average of $61,000 a year despite having no official duties".

Those impartial librarians: "Ann Sparanese, a member of the governing Council of the American Library Association, has written a letter to the Voice criticizing my columns about Fidel Castro's prison sentences of 20 and more years for 75 Cuban dissenters, including 10 independent librarians. ... At an upcoming midwinter meeting in San Diego, from January 9 to 14, the ALA plans to decide whether it will indeed live up to its principles and finally support the locked-up independent librarians in Cuba. It has refused so far."

Unbelievable. Airline pilots still not armed: "They fly by the Capitol, but the bureaucrats won't trust pilots with guns.... "

"If American democracy is finally done in, the perpetrators will unlikely be Hitlerian figures whose strutting authoritarianism is plain to see, but a collection of well-meaning, schoolmarm-like activists who aim to restrict our freedoms for our own supposed good.

Worth remembering: GWB won the presidency without a majority of the popular vote but so did JFK. No Democrat outrage about that, though!

More conservative than GWB? "In his first speech to California's Legislature, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Tuesday touted March ballot measures aimed at solving the state's budget problems and demanded an overhaul of worker compensation laws to cut employers' costs and create more jobs. Schwarzenegger warned that painful spending cuts are coming as he outlined his agenda for 2004 in the annual 'state of the state' speech in Sacramento."

I guess I know why this is: Under US Army rule, Baghdad has a lower per capita murder rate than most US big cities. That reminds me of something else: I believe that whilst Australian troops were in Vietnam in the 60's they had a lower death-rate there than they did whilst back in Australia. One of my Army friends of that time was a case in point. He came back from Vietnam safe and sound only to die in a car accident in Australia. I am still saddened by the loss of Lt. Michael Joseph James Gillespie ("Mick") but it was drunk-driving that killed him, not the Viet Cong. I cannot imagine how his family must have felt at the loss of such a splendid young man in his prime of life. I hope their faith helped them.

Sowell: The BBC confuses neutrality with objectivity: "Objectivity refers to an honest seeking of the truth, whatever that truth may turn out to be and regardless of what its implications might be. Neutrality refers to a preconceived "balance," which subordinates the truth to this preconception". Sowell gives as an example historian Robert Conquest who objectively reported the famines and other horrors of the Soviet era -- but who was constantly accused by the Left of "bias" because of it. But we all now know that Conquest was right.

I have just put up a lot of Chris Brand's recent posts here. He has a big coverage of the cancellation by the BBC of a popular TV show because the presenter once made anti-Arab remarks. And the Arabs are gloating about it too.

Arlene Peck notes that millions of illegal Hispanic immigrants are now to be welcomed into the USA and hopes that a few million Palestinians can come too. She is sure they would be happier in the USA than in Israel.

The Wicked one has recent posts on diet fraud and sexual abstinence!

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