EXHIBITIONISTS GET MORE THAN THEY BARGAIN FOR

Lots of people like this news item:

"When 35 Greenpeace protesters stormed the International Petroleum Exchange (IPE) yesterday they had planned the operation in great detail. What they were not prepared for was the post-prandial aggression of oil traders who kicked and punched them back on to the pavement. "We bit off more than we could chew. They were just Cockney barrow boy spivs. Total thugs," one protester said, rubbing his bruised skull. "I've never seen anyone less amenable to listening to our point of view." Another said: "I took on a Texan Swat team at Esso last year and they were angels compared with this lot." Behind him, on the balcony of the pub opposite the IPE, a bleary-eyed trader, pint in hand, yelled: "Sod off, Swampy."

Greenpeace had hoped to paralyse oil trading at the exchange in the City near Tower Bridge on the day that the Kyoto Protocol came into force. "The Kyoto Protocol has modest aims to improve the climate and we need huge aims," a spokesman said. Protesters conceded that mounting the operation after lunch may not have been the best plan. "The violence was instant," Jon Beresford, 39, an electrical engineer from Nottingham, said. "They grabbed us and started kicking and punching. Then when we were on the floor they tried to push huge filing cabinets on top of us to crush us." When a trader left the building shortly before 2pm, using a security swipe card, a protester dropped some coins on the floor and, as he bent down to pick them up, put his boot in the door to keep it open.

Two minutes later, three Greenpeace vans pulled up and another 30 protesters leapt out and were let in by the others. They made their way to the trading floor, blowing whistles and sounding fog horns, encountering little resistance from security guards. Rape alarms were tied to helium balloons to float to the ceiling and create noise out of reach. The IPE conducts "open outcry" trading where deals are shouted across the pit. By making so much noise, the protesters hoped to paralyse trading. But they were set upon by traders, most of whom were under the age of 25. "They were kicking and punching men and women indiscriminately," a photographer said. "It was really ugly, but Greenpeace did not fight back." Mr Beresford said: "They followed the guys into the lobby and kept kicking and punching them there. They literally kicked them on to the pavement."

More here

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ELSEWHERE

Greenie restrictions on new housing come home to roost "A new report Wednesday fueled concerns that the high cost of doing business in Los Angeles and much of California puts the region at a serious disadvantage in trying to compete for high-tech businesses against less-expensive Western and Midwestern cities.... "The harsh reality is your state is suffering today not only from a corporate exodus but intellectual capacity (too). Some of your best and brightest college graduates cannot afford to live here; that's a huge problem," said John Boyd, whose company's report is based on information from corporate executives."

Islamic gratitude to GWB? "The Islamic Prophet Muhammad's original choice of a successor, Ali, was a Shiia whose claims were never recognized by the early leaders of the Islam. Ironically, it is the "infidel" Bush who had made it possible to restore legitimate Shiite rule to Iraq. And it is the "evangelical" Bush who has finally made more legitimate the incoherent war at home and abroad by pushing for democratic reforms in Iraq even when the silent goals of the war remain geo-strategic"

Israel betrayed by its own politicians: "As a courageous refusenik in the Soviet Union, Natan Sharansky became a hero to free people everywhere — nowhere more so than in Israel, the country to which he yearned to emigrate. His fight for human rights cost him nine years in the KGB’s dungeons, and when, in February 1986, he finally arrived in the land of his forefathers, it was to an ecstatic welcome by thousands of cheering Israelis.... But if Sharansky’s thinking carries great weight in America, in his adopted homeland it carries none at all. ‘‘I understand that in the Soviet Union your ideas were important,’’ Israel’s current prime minister, Ariel Sharon, told him last year, ‘‘but unfortunately they have no place in the Middle East.’’ No place, in other words, for the idea that peace between Israel and the Palestinians depends not on unilateral Israeli concessions but on the transformation of the Palestinian Authority. No place for the idea that freedom and democracy can have the same power in the West Bank and Gaza that they had in Japan and Germany after World War II. No place for the idea that Palestinian terror and violence will never cease until Palestinian dictatorship and repression cease".

Farmed robbery: "In his newly-released federal budget President George W. Bush promises to reduce farm subsidies. Predictably, on the day the budget was made public there were well-choreographed 'protests' by all the usual suspects, mostly millionaire corporate farmers camped out at the Mayflower or Four Seasons hotels in Washington, D.C. for a few days. The 'protesters' made it on to the evening news in their latest attempt to dupe the American public into believing that they were not really the millionaire owners of large corporate farms, but lowly dust bowl families just trying to make ends meet and feed their families."

EU arrogance faltering: "Probably it's a bit too much to say, on the eve of President George W. Bush's fence-mending trip to Europe next week, that a specter is haunting Europe, but let's say it anyway: A specter is haunting Europe and it is the possibility, after the elections in Iraq, that perhaps Bush is less of a dangerous bungler than so many Europeans previously believed him to be.... Certainly there has been no seismic alteration of the European view. Yet there are at least some strong anecdotal signs that Europeans are struggling with the difficult proposition that there might even be in the Bush doctrine of messianic democracy a dollop of what the other President Bush famously called "the vision thing.".... . ."The pictures of the people voting, even though it's hard to say it was worth two years of war, psychologically it was a turning point," Hassner said.... "

Tim Worstall spells out well the inconvenient fact (for Leftists) that the bigger the government gets the more they have to tax the poor. There are just not enough taxable rich people to go around once the State gets beyond a certain size.

An amusing email from a feminist moonbat accusing the Los Angeles Times of not printing enough stuff written by women. But what got her really charged was one particular story they DID print -- you guessed it -- by a woman! -- as the L.A. Times editor subsequently pointed out.

My latest posting on MarxWords shows that he thought Jews looked ugly. My latest posting on "A scripture blog" looks at Isaiah 9:6 -- "And his name will be called "Wonderful Counseller, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace"

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and LEFTISTS AS ELITISTS. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

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That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the 2004 Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist"

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