Confirmed: Australian leader invited to Royal wedding, but not the Obamas

This will burn Mrs. Obama up. Sarko and Carla won't be very happy either

Invites to April's royal wedding are in the mail - first-class of course - and while the gold-embossed, thick white cards have started to arrive in Europe, at least two Australians still eagerly await the postie's visit. Prime Minister Julia Gillard and her partner Tim Mathieson are on the official guest list of 1900 for the April 29 Westminster Abbey wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton.

Although the list hasn't been released publicly by the palace, a spokesman for Ms Gillard on Sunday confirmed that Australia's prime minister and Mr Mathieson are awaiting their invitation. "The Prime Minister looks forward to receiving and responding to the formal invitation," he said. Governor-General Quentin Bryce will also receive an invitation, according to media reports, as one of several Commonwealth governors-general on the guest list.

Forty international crowned heads have been personally invited by the Queen to attend the wedding, including the Emperor of Japan, the King of Malaysia, the King of Thailand, the King of Jordan, the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi, and the Sultan of Brunei, London's The Mail newspaper reported yesterday. However, US President Barack Obama and French Prime Minister Nicolas Sarkozy are understood not to have been invited, the paper added.

More than 1000 of the guests will be friends of the prince, 28, and his princess-to-be, 29, and will stretch to celebrities including David and Victoria Beckham. The prince has also invited around 80 guests linked to organisations for which he is either patron or president, including the UK Football Association, Centrepoint (the homelessness charity for which his mother was patron), and wildlife conservation group, the Tusk Trust.

The gilt-edged invitations, stamped with a gold "EIIR", which begin "The Lord Chamberlain is commanded by The Queen to invite ..." were sent out on last week.

Some guests will attend only the 11am ceremony, while 600 have been invited to a lunchtime reception at Buckingham Palace, before a more intimate family and friends affair - dinner for 300 - at the palace, for which a separate invitation will be issued.

The invitation asks that men wear "uniform, morning coat or lounge suit" to the ceremony.

More HERE

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March of the Medical Marxists

I'm just like everybody else. For months I listened to and watched "town meetings", originally cobbled together in the home districts of senators and representatives, simply and transparently for the purpose of rubberstamping Barack Obama's obsessive Marxist lust (an obsessive lust he shares with Hillary Clinton and many another tired, threadbare old collectivist) to nationalize an institution that they refer to as "healthcare".

Somehow, astonishingly, those town meetings didn't go quite the way our elected representatives (and I use both terms loosely) had expected they would. People showed up by the tens of thousands to deliver a message the politicians didn't want to hear, and it quickly became clear that a vast majority of individuals in this country don't want the government to have anything to do with where, how, or from whom they get medical attention or anything else, a message that the other side ignored, causing an historically unpreceented electoral upset.

It would seem even more astonishing if observers and commentators on both sides of the issue recalled that public speaking and personal confrontation invariably show up on surveys as items that the average individual fears more than death. The citizens who spoke out had to overcome both fears to face the politicians and tell them where to get off. Frankly, I didn't know we still had it in us, as a people.

And yet—because the politicians invariably pay less attention to historians than they do to politically trendy scientists, and even less attention to the voters who placed them in office and pay their salaries—despite widespread vocal opposition, despite a century of embarrassing miserable failure, despite immeasurable human suffering and conspicuously needless death everywhere else on this glorified mudball, like it or not, America is going to try medicine socialist style.

"But why would anybody want to do an idiotic thing like that?" I pretend to hear you asking. Well, partly because there's mountains of cash—uncountable trillions, potentially—and job security in it for properly-connected accomplices to this gangster government who can afford to fly themselves and their families somewhere else for medical treatment. Somewhere that doesn't have medicine socialist style.

Let's stop saying "socialized medicine". Let's be more specific. Let's be more accurate. Let's be more precise. Let's be more truthful. Let's call the thing exactly what it is.

What is it? Well, back when she was Queen, Hillary Clinton wanted to jail you for paying your doctor privately. That's right, part of her marvelously "humane" healthcare plan was to have you kidnapped by uniformed thugs if you made your own arrangements with a physician. If we'd made her Empress, she assured us, you wouldn't be allowed to work—when the flaming hell did we start needing goverment permission to work?—if you couldn't produce documents proving you were legally insured.

Obamacare, of course, will be completely different. It will be the warmly beloved IRS who leans on those miscreants who are willfully non-compliant.

So let's not call it socialized medicine. Instead, let's call it beat-you-up-and-kill-you-if-you-won't-go-along, coercive medicine. (Although how anybody can call it "medicine"—if they beat you up and kill you if you won't go along—I haven't quite figured out. And apparently neither have they.) Let's agree to call it medicalized Marxism.

For decades I had been saying that there's huge and terrible anger simmering just below the surface of American life. Year after year, decade after decade, century after century, the Productive Class have labored to supply everything necessary and good in our society—from diesel fuel to lemon meringue pie, from the wheels that take us from one place to another, to our homes where we find refuge and comfort—only to have the rewards of their labor snatched away by rapacious parasites intent on controlling every moment and aspect of their lives.

Yet it is the same Productive Class who are the first to be blamed—by elements of a Non-Productive Class that couldn't tell a cotter pin from cottage cheese—for everything, real and imagined, that is said to be wrong with that society, from bad taste in color, cars, and clothing, to acid rain, air pollution, depleted ozone, and global warming.

To the average politician, newspaper columnist, hairsprayed TV commentator, or Hollywood airhead, suburbia is a kind of despicable, disgusting, fetid swamp to be crawled out of, rather than as close to Utopia as humankind has ever come, the locus of all the wishes, hopes, and aspirations of a people whose only wish is to be left the hell alone.

And all these idiots—congressthings and others of the so-called "dominant culture" who believe they own us—can think of is how to suppress that anger for another year, another decade, another century. They desperately want to deny that their opposition is significant and serious. They want to dismiss it as stupidity, right-wing racism, and childish ingratitude. Or the result of having attended all the wrong schools. It never occurs to them to consider what that anger might really be about, or that it might be justified. They simply want it managed. It's probably too late for that, but they'll be the last to know.

As I've also been saying for more than 40 years, as frequently and loudly as I can, America's Productive Class has always been compelled to suffer for its excessive—and suicidally self-destructive—politeness. Perhaps that era is at long last ending.

I've listened to conservative talk radio every day since Barack Obama was elected, not just to Rush Limbaugh, but some of the others, as well. Along the way, I've noticed one element astonishingly absent from their arguments against Obama and his Marxist cohorts trying to regiment medical practice—and, through that, everything else—in America. That element is individualism.

The arguments I hear from them are utilitarian and collectivist in character: socialized medicine is bad for the economy; socialized medicine is bad for society; socialized medicine is bad for families; socialized medicine is bad for doctors and nurses; socialized medicine is bad for small business; socialized medicine is bad for hypothetical Grandma in her steam punk iron lung, and for poor old Cousin Wilbur, whose intellectual elevator never quite made it to the top of the building.

I guess it shouldn't surprise me. Thanks to Robert LeFevre, I've been calling conservatives by their proper name—right-wing socialists—for decades. But it does surprise me, and makes me a bit sad.

The first mistake that they make (and they always make it) is that they accept the enemy's premises and vocabulary, giving up half the battle before it's even fought. It is not "socialized medicine" that we're up against here—to many a misguided individual, ignorant of history, that makes it sound kind of warm and fuzzy—but government control, through brute force and the threat of brute force, of those ultimately personal, private acts of seeking and delivering medical attention.

Your doctor often knows things about you that you wouldn't want anybody else—possibly including your own family—to know. But for nasty, perverted reasons all their own, having mostly to do with their psychopathological desire to control every aspect of everybody's life, the Obamas, Reids, and Pelosis of this world are eager to stick their noses in your intimate orifices and learn everything your doctor knows about you. As a human being, you are entitled to more privacy than that.

But mostly, as many pundits have been saying, it's about power at the lowest, minutest zit-squeezing level conceivable. It might be difficult for a normal individual to understand why somebody would yearn for complete control over every aspect of another human being's life, but there you are: sooner or later, a lens behind every bathroom mirror.

Make no mistake about it, this heartfelt yearning for absolute control is psychosexual in character, and about as sick and perverted as it can be. Every stuttering, broken-voiced pencil-neck who ever got turned down by a cute cheerleader, every pimply-faced fat girl who ever imagined she was being laughed at by the captain and his whole football team, these are the mental midgets and moral cripples who are looking forward, from under the rocks they currently inhabit, to ruling us tomorrow. You've seen plenty of their species already, down at the Department of Motor Vehicles. Get ready to see a lot more of them.

All political jargon to one side, however, medicalized Marxism is unsatisfactory if for no other reason than this: I don't want it. It violates my unalienable individual, civil, Constitutional, and human rights.

Medicalized Marxism is wrong because it forces me to do what I don't want to do. It keeps me from doing what I do want to do. It imposes duties on me that I don't want imposed. It denies me (and you, and everybody else, too) the uncountable advantages of acts of capitalism between consenting adults.

There's nothing wrong with medicine that can be fixed by "single payer" healthcare and I don't know anyone I respect who wants it. Let's make a better start, calling it by its right name: compulsory, collectivist, going-through-the-motions medicine. I've seen how it "works" in other countries, and in the US military. It is an evil and deceptive program the real objective of which is to give very bad people complete, minute control over every moment and detail of our lives.

They want to live their lives through ours, beginning with the splendid and absolutely limitless excuses that medical Marxism provides.

Believe me, I grew up with it in the American military, and I've seen it in full flower in England, as well. It isn't about providing you with services, it's about denying you services, since that's the cheesy little thrill that is all many bureaucrats ever get out of life. People want power over the lives of others not because they believe themselves uniquely capable of directing those lives, but because they know they're incapable of directing their own lives and find it easier in this culture to try directing the lives of others, instead.

More HERE

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ELSEWHERE

Are the Wisconsin protests backfiring?: "Protests in Wisconsin over public sector compensation cuts have been the big story this week. Over at The Daily Caller, I explain why some of the tactics that union members and supporters are using are actually backfiring. The teacher sickout is classic bad PR. The parents who have to find and pay for last-minute daycare are now less likely to side with teachers’ unions, not more"

Excuse notes from docs at protests draw scrutiny: "Doctors who wrote medical notes over the weekend excusing protesters at the Wisconsin Capitol from work are getting slammed with angry phone calls and profane e-mails from people telling them they deserve to be thrown in jail, one doctor said Sunday. The physicians wore lab coats Saturday as they stood on a street corner and offered medical notes to the tens of thousands of protesters who paraded past them."

Business bans TSA agents — will more follow?: "KC McLawson works for a cafe near Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, and since the body-scan and patdown controversy last November, her boss has taken extraordinary measures to ensure the TSA knows of his displeasure. 'We have posted signs on our doors basically saying that they aren’t allowed to come into our business,' she says. 'We have the right to refuse service to anyone.'”

Denmark: Court rules against hippie enclave: "The Danish government yesterday won a legal battle against a freewheeling neighborhood that has remained largely self-governing since its creation by hippie squatters four decades ago. ... The decision ends a six-year legal standoff and means the government can go ahead with plans to 'normalize' the neighborhood and tear down scores of ramshackle homes built at the site without permits."

The truth about housing prices: "The idea that economic recovery can’t happen unless our housing prices return to pre-recession levels makes no sense. First, as the chart below shows, for most of American history housing prices grew at a relatively slow rate. It was only in the last 15 years that prices exploded. The factors behind this sudden change are a mixed bag of government policies that encouraged homeownership and cheap interest rates and a willingness by banks to lend to people who could only realistically afford to pay if housing prices doubled every two years."

A “right” to healthcare requires force: "The notion of a 'right to healthcare' is the boldest and most fundamental claim offered in defense of the new federal healthcare law. Indeed, Obamacare should be judged by whether it is consistent with the protection of rights. If the law cannot pass that test, the debate should end –- and it must be repealed as an unjust means of striving to satisfy other social, economic or political agendas."

There is a new lot of postings by Chris Brand just up -- on his usual vastly "incorrect" themes of race, genes, IQ etc.

My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (In full: http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray). For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

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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" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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