INDONESIA

These are the charming people immediately to Australia's North

Muslim Indonesians rival Pol Pot and the Nazis: "The Indonesian military used starvation as a weapon to exterminate the [Christian] East Timorese, according to a UN report documenting the deaths of as many as 180,000 civilians at the hands of the occupying forces. The 2500-page report, obtained by The Australian, has been suppressed for months by the East Timorese Government and will infuriate Indonesia, which has punished only a handful of soldiers for the murders, assaults and rapes that occurred during its 24 years of occupation. Napalm and chemical weapons, which poisoned the food and water supply, were used by Indonesian soldiers against the East Timorese in the brutal invasion and annexation of the half-island to Australia's north, according to the Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation report... It documents a litany of massacres, thousands of summary executions of civilians and the torture of 8500 East Timorese - with horrific details of public beheadings, the mutilation of genitalia, the burying and burning alive of victims, use of cigarettes to burn victims and also ears and genitals being lopped off to display to families.... The deaths amounted to almost a third of East Timor's pre-invasion population .... The Indonesian security forces "consciously decided to use starvation of East Timorese civilians as a weapon of war", the report says... "The violations were committed in execution of a systematic plan approved, conducted and controlled by Indonesian military commanders at the highest level." ... The commission carefully notes that many of the Indonesian military officers who played key roles in the occupation have since been promoted and details their ascension in the military."

Indonesians tyrannizing Melanesians right now : "More than 40 West Papuan asylum-seekers who fled the troubled Indonesian province in a large outrigger canoe six days ago landed on a remote beach in far north Queensland yesterday.... The 25m traditional dugout canoe was fitted with an outboard motor and was flying the outlawed West Papuan flag. "Save West Papua people souls from genocide, intimidation and terorist from military government of Indonesia," read a crudely worded banner on the boat. "We West Papua need freedom, peace, love and justice in our home." ... Faced with increasing political tension in West Papua and the overwhelming strength of the Indonesian military, Ms Byrne said the asylum-seekers fled the troubled province rather than risk being jailed and tortured for their knowledge of government affairs.... The asylum-seekers are believed to include Herman Wanggai, a student leader from West Papua who had spent time in prison for treason, his wife and their three-year-old twins. [See my earlier post here for background on the plight of the Papuans]

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ELSEWHERE

Thatcher's legacy squandered by Blair: "Perceptions about the "state of the nation" tend to change only gradually. In the 1980s the belief that Britain was doomed to decline lingered for some time after the Thatcher reforms had paved the road to economic recovery. Labour, by contrast, has benefited from revived national confidence that Britain had rediscovered the secrets of market-led success. That confidence appears increasingly misplaced.... Public sector productivity is deplorably low, so that the larger the public payroll, the worse Britain's overall economy performs. In every year since Labour came to power, British output per hour, which had previously been showing relative improvement, has fallen further behind that of the United States. This year's productivity gain is expected to be a mere 0.9 per cent, equal to that of Germany, well behind France (1.4 per cent), and half the rate in the US (1.8 per cent) and Japan (1.9 per cent)... The past eight years have seen a marked "continental drift" in Britain. Taxes here are now higher than in Germany for the first time in a generation. According to the OECD, which is as objective as any institution, British state spending will swallow a bigger slice of national wealth next year than the famously profligate German welfare state".

Socialist tax laws could drive big British companies overseas: "The Times has learnt that at least one FTSE 100 company is investigating domiciling itself outside the UK following an 18-month crackdown by Revenue & Customs on tax avoidance. Other companies are so angry at the clampdown on previously accepted business practices that they are refusing to co-operate with Revenue's attempts to understand corporate tax planning. Guy Brannan, head of tax at Linklaters, the City law firm, said that the relocation plans of a number of companies were at a "pretty advanced stage". Mr Brannan said: "The Government's attitude is becoming counter-productive. If companies do not have to be headquartered in the UK and a large proportion of their business is elsewhere, they are investigating moving outside the UK." The Netherlands, Ireland and Luxembourg were popular alternatives to Britain, he said.... Last November Ian McCafferty, the CBI's chief economic adviser, attacked the Treasury's anti-avoidance campaign. "These measures are effectively a covert means of extending the tax base to raise revenue while circumventing previously accepted tax principle and practice," he said."

A richly deserved penalty: "A California court sentenced a couple to nine years in prison for planting a fingertip in a bowl of chilli to swindle a Wendy's fast-food restaurant. A judge in Santa Clara Superior Court sentenced Anna Ayala and her husband Jaime Plascencia to nine years' imprisonment for their role in the Wendy's scam, which caused a sharp fall in sales at the third-largest US burger chain.... Ayala, 39, a Las Vegas resident, initially claimed she found the piece of finger after buying the bowl of chilli last March. She hired a lawyer and complained publicly about the experience, attracting wide attention to the seemingly bizarre incident... Wendy's International, based in Dublin, Ohio, paid a $US100,000 ($133,000) reward for information to help establish the source of the fingertip. Company officials said it took Wendy's months to recover from the bad publicity and lost millions of dollars in sales because of the incident. At one point it gave away free ice-cream to try to lure customers back into its San Jose area restaurants."

Keith Burgess Jackson has finally given up on Hillary Clinton. He now calls her a "harpy". She certainly is a nasty piece of goods. Let's hope she gets the Donk nomination for Prez in 2008. She will be her own worst enemy.

I am delighted to report that the posts on Tongue Tied by Scott and myself are helping to educate America's young people in a way that the official education system would never do. A U.S. college English student has just sent me a copy of an essay that she handed in as part of her coursework. The essay was inspired by what she read on Tongue Tied. It is some evidence that the mind-control attempted by the Left-dominated U.S. educational system will never completely succeed. I have reproduced the essay here

Chris Brand has just done a new lot of posts to update us on the news about on race and IQ. See here

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here).

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Practically all policies advocated by the Left create poverty. Leftists get the government to waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so load the burden of providing most useful goods and services onto fewer and fewer people. So fewer useful goods and services are produced to go around. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that they can feel good by patronizing and "helping" them. So they do their best to create as many poor people as possible.

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" (Nationalsozialistisch)

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