Cold Mountain

Cold Mountain

I've been gone for awhile. But I'm baaaaack now. Merry Christmas.

Colin Powell Resigns

I guess we all knew this was coming. I think it was time , too. Powell did his absolute best, most of the time, to serve the President and hold onto his principles as well. The probelem was that those principles were forged by a military career which taught him that no soldier ever got criticized for avoiding casualties. Powell's worldview was forged by by Vietnam, when after all the blood and smoke were cleared, Hollywood, the media and academia turned on the military with savage libels and blatant dishonesty. Though there is plenty of blame to go around, Powell's excessive caution in Gulf War was the biggest factor in leaving in leaving Saddam Hussein in power the first time.

Bring on Condi rice.

Arafat, Rot In Hell.

Not many evil thugs get to die in peacefully in bed the way Arafat did. The list of his crimes will reach from here to hell, so he can start at the bottom reviewing them all. Let's leave aside the vicious murders, hijacking and assorted mayhem and thuggery for the moment.

The fact that this low rent gangster stalked the great halls of Europe, the Carter White House and the United Nations like an elder statesman when he should have been in the deepest hole that civilization could dig says much about those places. The fact that he lined his pockets like every other third world satrap while posing as some kind of martyr says much about the political sensibilities of Arabs.

The fact that his closest associates spent the last week in gay Paris dickering with his high-living wife, Suha, over just how now much they had to pay her to pull the plug on his quivering corpse says much about the French.

And now, let us reckon with CNN.

It's all been said, it's all worth saying again. No one, no one in the history of the American presidency has ever dominated the popular vote like George W. Bush did on Tuesday. On the matters that really count: national security and cultural security, there are no deep divisions.

The Federal Election Commission should look long and hard at CNN. The failure to call Virginia and the Carolinas early in the election, and later the refusal to call Iowa, New Mexico and most impotantly Ohio, when the mathematics were inescapable, were a gross and probably illegal attempt to influence voters. Wolf Blitzer was practically screaming for the Democrats to send in the lawyers. The so-called exit polls were even more blatantly and deliberately trumped up. Thanks to the pajamahadeen and the talk-radio warriors, the fraud neven had a chance of succeeding.

Now a word about John Kerry. He would have been a lousy President. But I will give him credit for peering into the abyss of lawsuits and taking a step back. Well done, John.

Beginning of the End

They should have called South Carolina for Bush by now...why haven't they? Indiana and Virginia will also fall to Bush within the hour. Ohio is in play...which is not good news.

Knife to a Gunfight

David Frum is about to debate Michael Moore on BBC World. Should be interesting. A smarmy. cynical Hollywood hypocrite with a reputation for deep dishonesty vs. a Reagan Whitehouse speechwriter.

Well Said

See NZ Pundit on the US election. Wish I'd said that.

The Guardian's Freudian Slip Apology

The Guardian sort of, kind of apologised in a Clintonian-Ratherian way.

"The final sentence of a column in The Guide on Saturday caused offence to some readers. The Guardian associates itself with the following statement from the writer. "Charlie Brooker apologises for any offence caused by his comments relating to President Bush in his TV column, Screen Burn. The views expressed in this column are not those of the Guardian. Although flippant and tasteless, his closing comments were intended as an ironic joke, not as a call to action - an intention he believed regular readers of his humorous column would understand. He deplores violence of any kind."

Maybe they meant "disassociates"

An ironic joke, huh, Charlie? Why don't you try making a few ironic jokes about bombs or hijacking next time you're in the check-in line at Heathrow, or better yet, Kennedy.

What a moron.

The Guardian Calls for Bush's Assassination

Bush hatred among the foaming-mouth left has reached its logical end with Guardian "writer" Charlie Brooker's fatwa against President Bush.

That right, a columnist in a serious, if somewhat deluded publication, one that has editors and sub-editors and other people whose job is control the rantings of its more feverish employees, has called for the murder of the President of the United States. We're all used to the sweating screeds against Bush, but murder is normally limited to pet media in Tehran and Damascus. This is far beyond the pale.

It's time for a boycott of Guardian advertisers.

And lets hope that a couple of serious gentlemen from the Secret Service and their friends at Scotland Yard pay a call on Mr. Brooks. It's a crime in both the United States and Britain to call for the assassination of public figure or to incite to murder.

The Golden Handshake

Ackbar over at New Zealand Pundit has this on the Tamihere kiss goodbye. The Waipeirera Trust will pay IRD their pound of flesh. remember folks, that was once your money. So let me get this straight, the Government collects taxes which they hand over as treaty settlement dosh, which various iwi shovel back at politicians--earned or not. If we did that, it would be illegal.

Well, that should certainly do it.

Now I know for certain that Kerry is not man who is firmly grounded in reality as most of us understand it. He's asked Al Gore to campaign for him in Florida. Now whose stupid idea was this? Karl Rove's? Gore is a delusional bi-polar, a switch with only two settings: crushing, drool inducing, pedant or gibbering paranoid wildman. Gore reminds me of those old East European royals forever plotting to regain the throne of Lower Blowmevia

What is with Kerry? I never thought he was much except an old lefty blowhard, but I can't figure out who keeps giving him lame advice. Could be Karl Rove, that Evil Genius; could be Bubba throwing a spanner into the works to give Hilary a clear shot in 2008; could be Ter-ay-za "Let Them Get a Real Job" .

Bush must be chortling in his sleep over this.

John Tamihere

Cold Mountain
Poor old John Tamihere, he was a bit of a blowhard, but you had to like the guy, kind of like Winston Peters with attitude. Unfortunately, he forgot that Nanny doesn't like Maori with attitude who look they might stray off the Labour plantation, especially if they stray in a government car. Nanny saves up secrets and she'll tell them if you make her angry.

OK, he took the money after he said he wouldn't, but that's not the first time a politician said something on the hustings and then did something else, right Nanny? Further, it looks like he earned it.

I hope he joins the Maori Party and kicks Labour's smug ass in a byelection.

PC Idiocy Watch

Things like this make me wish that were somebody authorised to take officious, supercilious bueaucrats out of their cubicles and administer stern warnings, followed by a sound beating. Can this wanker possibly be serious? I'm afraid so, and that ladies and gentlemen, is why I am a refugee from the land of my birth. Recent visitors, I beg you, tell me is everybody in the United States this precious?

Granted Washington state is very near the great center of PC lalaland. But banning Halloween because it's offensive to Wiccans? What is a Wiccan anyway? And don't send me any self important crap about how it's serious business.

Circling the Drain

As the Kedwards campaign begins the final slog of its journey to oblivion, David Brooks explains why. Read the whole thing, but this pretty well sums it up:

But there is a deeper assumption, which has marred Democratic politics for
years. Some Democrats have been unable to face the reality that people have
been voting for Republicans because they agree with them. So these Democrats
have invented the comforting theory that they've been losing because they
are too virtuous for the country.

I said a long time ago that W was easily beatable given a credible Democratic candidate I don't know who that would be, but there must be some Democrat out there somewhere who doesn't feel compelled to take policy advice from Scotch soaked old dinosaurs like Kennedy or airheaded Hollywood types. There's lots of noise coming from Greenpeace or NOW or Moveon.org or the teachers' unions or the Hobbit Vegans Against Bad Thoughts, but the fact is there aren't enough of them to elect the party's candidate. Clinton understood that. He took their money, squeezed a little ass, then tacked right and beat Bob Dole like a red headed stepchild.....badda-bing, into the White House.

A lot of conservatives are not happy with Bush's domestic agenda, but whether one is so-called neocon, or a paleocon, or an angry white male, or gun toting, Bible banging redneck, or a Wall Street suit, national security at the moment trumps all all domestic issues. One can debate whether that should or not be so, but there it is.

Read Roy Jenkin's biography of Churchill. Nobody liked him, nobody liked what was happening domestically, but the UK needed a wartime leader and the opposition failed to offer a credible one. As soon as the war was won, Winston was out out on his ass.

I suppose finally I return to my case that the active core of the Democratic Party is far to the left of the electorate's consensus, and more importantly, the Party doesn't even realise it. I put this down to the self-referential relationship between the party and the coastal media. They just don't listen anyone who says they might be wrong.

Anti-Americanism in Europe

This article by Carol Gould was sent to me by a friend. It set in motion a chain of thought which ended in, "Why in the name of God should Americans give a tinker's dam about Europe?"

Most Americans would to be too polite to point out that it was exactly this kind of moral cowardice, political blindness; cheap, gutless racism and unthinking slavishness to prejudice that let the real Nazis walk all over Europe like a toilet floor.

Most Americans would to too polite to remind the moral geldings of old Europe of the repeated gross failures of their political arrangements, or the extreme debt in blood and treasure they owe to the United States.

Most Americans, outside of Berkeley or Ann Arbor anyway, wouldn't conclude that the entire continent has been releived of its critical faculties by French hucksters like Jacques Derrida.

Most Americans wouldn't think to suggest to that we should offer residence to every Jewish man, woman, and child between Lisbon and Moscow so that old Europe can get with becoming a society of old white socialists and teenage Muslim radicals.


Most Americans, but not me.

Wanted: Sleazebag Trial Lawyer. Contact Kerry for Prez

It may be time to let John Kerry sink into self-parody and drown and move on to more important things...like hammering John Edwards for the fraud and the liar that he is. Charles Krauthammer doe a pretty good job of showing Edwards up for a trailer trash shyster. What next, is he going promise to raise the dead?

Neighbours: Type A and Type B

Whether you live in a large apartment complex, a suburb, or even a farming area, you know that there two types of neighbours. When Type A neighbours ring your doorbell unexpectedly, you invite them in, open a bottle of wine or make some coffee, and sincerely hope they can stay for dinner. When Type B neighbours drop over, you turn off the lights, remain very quiet and sincerely hope they go away. When I heard about John Edwards and his wife making snide cracks about Dick Cheney's daughter, it hit me. The Edwardses and the Kerrys are Type B and the Bushes and Cheneys are Type A.

Kerry is just clueless and Ter-ay-za is just obnoxious, but John Edwards is repulsive.

The man is the very epitome of an ambulance chasing trial lawyer..he'll say anything to win. It wasn't just the stuff about Mary Cheney, but that business about how the lame will walk again if Kerry is elected was sickening.

Senator Yellowstain

US Senator Mark Dayton, Democrat of Minnesota, fears that terrorists will target his Washington DC office building between now and the inauguration....so he's closing the office and packing back to his home in the Canada-like state of Minnesota. Don't forget to close the cellar door after you.

Coward.

The Aussies

Heartfelt congratulations to the Australians, who have proved once again that they are firmly with civilisation and against barbarism, that they will not fail or falter in the face of danger. On the second anniversary of the Bali bombing, and in the shadow of al-Qaeda's gross attempt to influence their election with the Embassy bomb in Jakarta, the Australian people have proved what they're made of. Unlike the cowards in Manila and Madrid, or the carping appeasers in Berlin and Paris, the Australians stand tall.

And where is New Zealand?

Two Years On

Cold Mountain

It is 2 years today since the capering and grinning emissaries of Hell blew up that nightclub in Bali. 2 years on and still the Australians stand on the side of civilization. God bless Australia.

It Does Get Better.

Here in the former Politically Correct Republic of Christchurch, the voters threw out the lefty city council with the weekend's beer bottles. The headline in the Press was predictably, "Voters Reject Left and Right Options". Nonsense, the voters threw out almost the entire Christchurch 2021 slate, stalking horses for Labour and the Greens. Head Commissar, oops, Mayor Garry Moore, managed to hold on though.

And what were they mad about? Garbage bags.

It behooves us all to pay more attention to the portents of small events.

Can It Get Any Get Any Better?

I don't think I've had a better Sunday morning since that Christmas in Cambodia...oops, wrong story. Anyway, opening the newspaper to see John Howard re-elected, Mark Latham with that kangaroo-in-the-headlights look, millions of Afghanis turning out to vote, and the cherry on top of my Sunday.......Jacques Derrida gone straight to Hell....metaphorically speaking of course.

ACT

What is it with the Christchurch Press and ACT? Has Rodney Hide somehow offended folks in our fair city? I was at the ACT regional conference last week and I saw a bunch of people, suits and jeans-wearers alike, who are seriously tired of handing over more than a third of their income to Helengrad to hand out on Labour's little vote buying schemes. Rodney wound up the crowd with a humorous, have-to-laugh-to-keep-from-crying, speech on how Nanny Helen and and her little helpers have a solution to everybody's problems--just hand over more money to Nanny, and she'll help you spend it on the right things. Catherine Judd, what a woman, made the assembled press look small and small-minded. Deborah Coddington gave an excellent speech on the NCEA. (Saint) Roger Douglas rallied the faithful.

Keep Don Brash honest....give your party vote to ACT.

This Has Got to Be a Joke

The National Front couldn't invent this in their wildest goose-stepping dreams.Under this theory we could all be paying Ngati Bludgeu a dollar for every breath of air we take, every step we make on New Zealand soil, and every drink of water (or anything made with water, unless of course we use Perrier). Do we get a refund when we piss or exhale? I've had about enough of this and I suspect most Maori have as well, first it was the electromagnetic spectrum, now airspace. Call me reactionary, but maybe the government should consider deducting from any treaty settlement the costs of the infrastructure, judicial system and medical care that are a result of European settlement. Is there some good reason why New Zealanders are required to reject 2000 years of western civilisation for a dying Stone Age culture?

If this is true......

Drudge has a very strange report that Kerry may have been using a crib sheet at the debate in violation of the agreed terms. Kerry, with his back to the audience and most cameras, pulled something out of his jacket pocket and placed it on the podium just before the start. The strange thing was the non-answer that Drudge got from the Kerry team. Instead of just saying that it was a pen, or comb, or a nose hair trimmer or his lucky CIA decoder ring, the flak just said, "Kerry didn't cheat."

Kerry Convicted.

There was a lame science fiction novel a few years back about the world in ecological collapse, one of those Green wet dreams. There was a very interesting thread running through an otherwise stupid book though. It involved people called "convictors" who could use sophisticated software and linguistic analysis to develop a true portrait of public figure. What appeared on a kind of proto-Internet was a picture of the real person with all the perversions and prejudices right up there in living color. Mark Steyn does something similar to JFK, Mark II, here.

Squeegee This, Loser

Finally, the police are doing something to squash this business. Anyone who lived in an urban area in the US in the late 70's or early 80's will remember vagrants congregating at every traffic light extorting payment for not smearing your windscreen with a greasy rag. These guys were one of the worst features of US urban life, right up there with graffiti, aggressive panhandlers and street crime. If the cops want to pretend for PC reasons that it's for the bums' own safety (if I'm driving, it could well be), that's fine. Just do not let this nonsense get started in New Zealand.

Call for Sheik Khalil

How does Hamas keep recruiting "spiritual leaders" when the Israelis keep sending them to commune with the spirits? The car bomb was a nice touch of irony and more likely a wake-up call for Boy Assad than an attempt to decapitate Hamas. Is that fool in some kind of race with the Iranians to see who can attract the most flaming metal onto their heads?

What's wrong with this picture?

Child murderer Anthony Roma should stay in jail for at least the next three years the Parole Board has ruled.

Roma was last year released on parole from a life sentence for the April 1991 murder of seven-year-old Simon Reaney, but was recalled after being arrested for committing an indecent act in a Manukau shopping centre in January.

As well as killing Simon, Roma tried to kill his brother and father. Mr and Mrs Reaney unsuccessfully challenged his release on parole last year.

The above from the New Zealand Herald today. This freak killed a seven year old child, tried to kill two other people and hears voices telling him to commit murder. The Parole Board, summoning all its spongy backbone and flea-like intelligence has decided he could go free in 2007. Little Simon Reaney on the other hand will never see the light of day again.

Yes you're sorry, and......

Dan Rather and CBS issue what may be the lamest apology since Cinton. They were "misled"? A major news organisation with essentially unlimited research capability is "misled" by a paranoid using one PC and his local Kinko's? Spare us, please. Why not just change your name to Pravda and drop any pretense of professionalism and integrity.

Where is the word forgery? Oops, must have been an editing mistake.

As Tim Blair notes, 60 Minutes must be approached by hordes of fraudulent tipsters every year, why did this one make it through? Because tis is the one they wanted to be true, that's why. Rather and Heyward must go.

We can thank Dan for one thing. He stepped on Kerry's oxygen hose justas the campaign was dying. Maybe it was a mercy killing.

Say Goodnight, Dan.

Drudge and the NYT are both reporting that CBS is about to swallow hard and confess that they were at best dumb as a fencepost and at worst, unprofessional and perhaps criminally complicit in a fraud. The First Amendment doesn't protect criminal activity.

Who's the Dummy?

When Dan Rather and CBS President Andrew Heyward finally get the ax, maybe they'll move down to Florida and join Howell Raines and Jayson Blair at the Home for Unwanted Hacks. They could play bridge together except they'd all cheat

Cry Havoc and Unleash the Blogs of War-against CBS

Jim Geraghty from Kerry Spot has a well-mapped out strategy for conducting asymmetric warfare against CBS and Dancing Dan, and by extension against the rest of the overpaid hacks in the MSM. Read the whole thing, and pass on the link, but generally it calls for attacking CBS's weak points at its local affiliates, other CBS employees who don't live up in the Danosphere and other MSMs who may be a little concerned that their whole profession is starting to look like a cheap circus.

Prison Dole

This could be more lucrative than selling drugs or smashing ATM machines. Maybe it's a plot by the Government to get the Mongrel Mob out of the crime business and onto a benefit. Maybe they'll even vote Labour.

There's also the little matter of the NZH's wording. Note the Herald's bloodless description of Sam Te Hei's crime:

One is Te Hei's brother, Sam, also a Mongrel Mob member, who was convicted in 1987 of kicking a 16-year-old girl to death with his steel-capped boots after she refused sex.

How about this instead:

Gangster Sam Te Hei was convicted in 1987 after he stomped a child to death with steel-capped boots when she resisted being raped.

Bill Burkett

It looks like this is the source of the Bush memos, one seriously deranged individual with MS Word and a fax at Kinko's. This is not a man who is familiar with reality as we know it. Burkett apparently believes in all seriousness that W wants to make himself king. And so passes a once great network. Edward R. Murrow is spinning, spinning.

Who Says Crime Doesn't Pay?

The High Court awards for criminals are blood in the water for shyster, ambulance-chasing lawyers. Look at this:

"In the September 2 decision, Christopher Taunoa, who is serving a life sentence for the 1996 murder of Sanson publican Keith Lynch, was awarded $55,000, aggravated robber Alistair Robinson got $40,000, Lesley Tofts $25,000, Mathew Kidman $8000 and Steven Gunbie $2000."

That's bad enough, but the lawyers will get hundreds of thousands. That's your money folks.

So which is it?

"Mr. Klein dismissed the bloggers who are raising questions about the authenticity of the memos: "You couldn't have a starker contrast between the multiple layers of check and balances [at '60 Minutes'] and a guy sitting in his living room in his pajamas writing." quoted by John Fund at Opinion Journal.

I'll have you know that I blog in my underwear, never in pyjamas. Anyway, my brown shirt is at the laundry.

I am Al, hear me roar.

Just when I thought Al Gore couldn't get any weirder, he goes and outdoes himself. Is this a joke?

Is there anybody out there who still thinks this wacko should have been president? The thought gives me night sweats, makes black dogs howl at the moon, and sends strong men screaming into the nearest pub.

I did like the "digital brown shirts" line though. That's you and me he's talking about there. It does have a nice ring to it. the brown shirts versus the brown shorts.

Mark Helprin Speaks

Helprin doesn't often publish in the mainstream media anymore, but when he does he should be read and his words heeded. I think he's a little overly pessimistic in this case, but not by much. The West must, officially I mean, name the enemy--radical Islam--and make plain that sedition will be prosecuted. ANd then the war must be taken to Riyadh, Damascus, or anywhere else. By all means necessary, as people used to say in a time of more moral clarity.

Can the Kerry Campaign Get Any More Incompetent?

Drudge is all over this. I can't decide which is the more pathetic, that Dan Rather and CBS want Bush to lose so badly that they were suckered by an obvious forgery or that the DNC apparently dumped it on CBS knowing it was fake, or least highly suspect. The worm is turning so fast that the DNC is even trying to spin it that the Republicans deliberately gave the DNC forged documents to embarass them. This would be funny if it weren't so sad. I'm almost embarrassed for them. They could have nominated Joe Lieberman, but no, thay had to go for another Massachusetts loser. Attention Democrats: for the sake of the country, please, please trust me on this: John Kennedy is dead and he's not coming back.

Forgery?

If this is true, Kerry can quit now. I'm sure CBS will do the right thing, aren't you? This will likely turn out to be just another example of the bicoastal media's willful credulousness on anything anti-Bush. I looked at a PDF version of the document, and it looks odd to me. The military orders that I've seen have all sorts of identifying data on them and are usually highly detailed as to when, where and how the recipient is to report.

Before we take too much comfort in that double digit lead, lt us remember that the demons who dwell deep in the worm gnawed crevices of James Carville's brain are working overtime on little schemes just like this one.

Say goodnight, John

John Kerry is going down, he's going down like McGovern and Dukakis and Mondale because like them he really and truly believes that the New York Times, the faculty club at Ann Arbor, and the population of Marin County will carry the day. Wrong. Wrong and stupid.
All those folks in the flyover states really go and vote, and they're really going to vote for W.

Kerry meanwhile takes deathbed advice from Bubba, who sensibly urges him to shut up about Viet Nam. Message to John: almost no one buys the war hero story and even fewer people want to hear it again. Problem is that Kerry has nothing else to talk about. Oh, well. May be he can inherit the Teddy Kennedy role of senior aging, Chivas-addicted loser from Massachusetts. Mark Steyn has more.

Nanny Watch

Nanny Helen has an idea. We're all taking way too many hot showers, so let's make solar hot water heating compulsory. Now how long do you think it will take to amortise the cost of a solar hot water system? I bet those folks on the West Coast will be very happy.

The Brave Warriors of Islam

The Sydney Morning Herald has the horrible details.

"When children fainted from lack of sleep, food and water, their masked and camouflaged captors simply sneered. In the intolerable heat of the gym, adults implored children to drink their own urine."

And this:
"Pandemonium broke out and captive children and parents fled for their lives. From the rooftops the terrorists fired into their backs."

And when they encountered people who could shoot back, they ran like rats.
"Of the 32 killed, only eight died in the grounds of the school, the rest being hunted through the suburbs of the town. Three were in custody and two remained on the run."


Payback is on the way.
"For some North Ossetians, grief had turned to anger. "Fathers will bury their children, and after 40 days [the Orthodox Christian mourning period] they will take up weapons and seek revenge," said Alan Kargiyev, 20, a university student in the regional capital Vladikavkaz."

Cry

If you don't believe in evil, read this.

Silence of the Blogs

The massacre of the innocents in Russia was of such depravity, that even the hardened cynics of blogdom have been silenced. There truly are no words. Perhaps Cotton Mather or John Wesley could summon the righteous anger, or Martin Luther King the high eloquence, needed. But now, there is just silence.

May God bless their little souls.

And may God damn their killers to the deepest Hell.

Janis Karpinski and the Wages of PC

Poor Janis. She wanted to be a general but doesn't want take responsibility for her command. General Karpinski by all accounts was at best a mediocre officer and rose to her rank and position solely on PC promotions. It just wouldn't do to be cutting one of the few high ranking female officers, even she is a dimbulb. This is where Lynndie England might have wound up if she'd had an education.

The Army figured she couldn't do much damage as head of the military police, but then the war came along and the MP's became reponsible for Abu Ghraib, and now this loser has done more damage to the war effort than the Republican Guard.

Russia

If this doesn't settle it, nothing will, and we will have the world we deserve. Heads up France, Russia, Spain, and all other past and future members of the Axis of Weasels. Nothing can save you...not appeasement, not abstention, not surrender. I don't know how the Islamofascists can make it plainer. There are two and only two choices: fight or die.

Something tells me that the Russians won't be overly concerened about process when payback time comes.

France

Do forgive me a little schadenfreude as the failure of the French appeasement policy comes home to Paris. Two French journalists kidnapped and in Iraq by Islamofascist murderers, and probably destined to get their heads sawn off live on al-Jazeera. And over what? French support for the Allies in Iraq? That vote for the war in the UN? All those French troops in Iraq and Afghanistan? Mais non. It's all about headscarves.

Do you get it now, Jacques? These people have no demands. They cannot be appeased.

Kerry Really Is Al Gore

It's kind of creepy really. Al invented the Internet, Kerry spent Christmas in Cambodia. Al inspired Love Story, Kerry has the Flying Dog Story. Al had his Blackberry, Kerry has his lucky CIA hat.

Hate Speech

What on earth can Georgina Beyer and her ilk have in mind with hate speech laws. There are already quite strict laws on making threats, inciting to riot, sedition, libel, slander, defamation and perjury. That pretty much covers the possible range of injury that you can do to a person or to the state by speech alone. Is there some heretofore undiscovered right not get one's feelings hurt (poor thing) or to avoid comment on one's actions, opinions or life style (watch out, that works two ways), or is it just to shut up people whose opinions they don't like.

NZ's Own John Kerry

At least this guy had the sense of shame to resign when he was found out after making a bogus claim to have served in Vietnam. Oh wait, that was Cambodia that Kerry lied about. Hey, what's a border among friends.

Is Kerry Just Gore on Prozac

Nothing against Prozac mind you. I think selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors are fine things and the world could use more of them, especially if placed in the coffee at the Democratic National Committee, Labour HQ, or Margaret Wilson's whiskey.

Now that old John can't remember on Wednesday what he said on Monday, much less the details of that Christmas in Cambodia (I too once spent a Christmas eve thinking I was in Cambodia, so I have a certain amount of sympathy for Johnny's situation), maybe he'll play it straight from now on. Then again, playing it straight didn't work for Al either. The man just spoke too much nonsense too often.

Mark Steyn has a good take on this in the Telegraph. Reminds me of all those morons who thought Al Gore was an intellectual and Bush was a, well, moron. It was all too convenient to forget that Al(pha) was the college dropout--from theology of all things-- while Bush got the MBA.

Talking About Asking For It

This seems like a very good way to end up in the same dozen or so unmarked graves as the late Osama bin Hasbeen. The Irraddiated...oops, that's Iranian, government should be looking for ways to imitate Boy Assad by keeping the hell out of sight. Instead they're just begging Bush to open up a big ole can of "W" brand Texas whoopass and serve it up hot to every Ayatollah, mullah, sub-mullah, ubergrupenmullah and assorted unshaven thug in Tehran.

All Is Not Lost

I was thunderstruck this week in my law class when a dreadlocked, bejeaned woman whom I had taken for a rampant Greenie held forth with a perfectly reasonable and well-informed critique of the gloom mongering and mumbo-jumbo floating around about climate change. She is now a Goddess in my eyes and I shall refrain henceforth from judging books by their covers.

Saturday Night

Trying to stay awake long enough to watch the Blacks take down the Yarpies in their own backyard. With Carlos Spencer and his swollen head out and Mehrtens in, it might even happen.

From The Academic Peanut Section

A few of the weeks better comments and, er, contributions to the class. Context: graduate level course in the law department of a major NZ university, subject: economic dislocations in the former Soviet Union:

" I mean just look at Russia, things are just so much worse there since McDonald's came in."

Only Christian forbearance saved this stupid cow from being unmasked as a cretin. Seventy years of a Communist police state has nothing to with it of course, nor today's corrupt rule by the KGB hardman Putin and his gang of former apparatchiks. Nor the fact that at any given moment a substantial portion of Russia's working age population are either drunk, working as hookers in Japan or standing in line for a visa to the Republic of Anywherebuthere.

Academia

Having descended from Cold Mountain to partake of the knowledge available at one of Godzone's finer tertiary institutions, I am dismayed to find that Tim Blair, Conrad, Jonah, Sully and the rest of the VRWC have been absolutely correct in their reaming of the academy. It's all there folks:contempt for science, left wing cant presented as common knowledge, cynicism as a substitute for critical thinking, astounding ignorance of the world, spoiled whinging instead of research, editorialising instead of debate. We have a lot of work to do, fellow conspirators, to arms!

Missing Posts

Some of my best work has vanished into cyberspace, evaporated into the ether, gone like the moa. Damn. Oh well, we'll start again.

That Took Awhile

I've been physically relocating back to Godzone from Taiwan.

Taking It Home III

"Package for Mr. Rantisi". Another Hamas thug takes an Israeli missile up the poop chute. Talk about going after your root causes.

Did I say fight to the death?

It looks like coming face to face with a band of well armed and extremely grim Marines has a salutary effect on even the hairiest "insurgent". According to this dispatch from Reuterville, Shiite thug Moqtada al-Sadr has said that if other Shiite leaders ask nicely, he'll consider ending what's left of his mob uprising and agree not to be crushed like an insect by the Big Green Shithammer.

Burnt Japanese, not.

It's looking more and more like this at least started out as some kind of hoax by a trio of dim lefties. If that's the case, it would serve them right if the "captors" got carried away. Tim Blair has more, as do several others.

Barbarians III

The savages responsible for this are far beyond the pale of civilisation. This description from AP News of the "brave warriors of Islam" needs no elaboration.

"Armed with assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades, the kidnappers shouted "Allahu akbar" - God is great - in the video and held knives to the throats of the Japanese, who screamed and whimpered in terror.

Associated Press Television News obtained a copy of the full video, in which four masked men point knives and swords at the blindfolded captives as they lie on the floor of a room with concrete walls.

At one point, a gunman holds a knife to the throat of one of the men, whose blindfold has been removed; his eyes widen in panic and he struggles to try to get free. The woman screams and weeps."

Let's see how brave you are when a Marine puts an RPG up your ass.

A society that encourages and celebrates this kind of barbarism deserves no better than to be on the receiving end of a war without mercy. Does this "culture" also have a place in a multi-cultural society?

Lies and Damned Lies

My dog has a better grasp of statistics than this. There is no way six months of looking at a population this size tells you anything of significance about whether a smoking ban was responsible for a reported reduction in heart attacks. If passive smoking takes decades to produce negative effects, how in hell did a ban reverse this in six months? There's no information about other changes people might have made, no information about enforcement, there's no information here period. How about some numbers on how many people froze to death while smoking outside?

Note well, I don't smoke. I don't like the smell of smoke. But health Nazis aren't allowed on Cold Mountain and this reeks of nanny-state propaganda.

Barbarians in Fallujah

Peggy Noonan in the online Wall Street Journal is her usual eloquent self on the subject of the Barbarian Wars. Here's a quote, but read the whole thing.

"The world is used to bad news and always has been, but now and then there occurs something so brutal, so outside the normal limits of what used to be called man's inhumanity to man, that you have to look away. Then you force yourself to look and see and only one thought is possible: This must stop now. You wonder, how can we do it? And your mind says, immediately: Whatever it takes.

What they did in Fallujah, Iraq, yesterday was such an event. The ambush, grenading, shooting and killing of four American civilians, the setting of their SUVs on fire and the brutalization of their corpses was savage, primitive, unacceptable. The terrible glee of the young men in the crowds, and the sadism they evinced, reminds us of the special power of the ignorant to impede the good. The pictures that television appropriately mostly did not show and the Internet inevitably mostly did were horrifying in a way that was reminiscent of the first still pictures of the Trade Center victims of 9/11. It was like seeing people in business suits falling through the air again. It was as if someone pointed a camera at evil and actually caught it in the act.

The Americans who were murdered were, according to the wires, working for a security company, a North Carolina-based subcontractor hired by the U.S. government, among other things, to guard convoys.

The convoys carried food. They carried it to Fallujah."

It takes generations to civilize barbarian peoples, in the meantime they have to be restrained, by any means necessary.

Barbarians

Is this not sufficient to convince even the most ideology addled multi-culturalist that we are dealing with savages? Keep in mind that the barbarians who perpetrated this said they did it in the name of Islam. Have we not seen enough to know that this is the rule rather than the exception, that this is what lies just below the surface in Muslim society?

Taiwan

Conrad is usually pretty sane, but I think his recent posts on Taiwan and the KMT are need a little distance. I mean "the KMT is a bigger threat to Taiwan's democracy than China"? Really? Must be all those KMT missiles.

I agree that the Lien/Soong crowd are in black helicopter land with their wacko assassination conspiracy charges, but I do think they might well have won the election, albeit by an even smaller margin than Chen apparently did.

What Chen should be asking himself is how his personal credibility came to be so low that half the population believes he's capable of faking an assassination attempt and tampering with ballots. Something is deeply wrong here.

Taking It Home II

The Israelis have once again reached out and touched someone. Sheik Yassin the "spiritual leader" and capo of the terrorist organization Hamas can now get a little first hand advice from the spirits.

Taiwan President Shot

Taiwan's President Chen Shui-bian and Vice President, Lu Hsiu-lien have both been shot while campaigning in the DPP heartland of Tainan in southern Taiwan. Conspiracy theories immediately beagn piling up like a grassy knoll. Surprisingly, most of them did not point fingers at the opposition Pan Blue team of the KMT and the People First Party. Rather echoes rumbling up to Cold Mountain were that Chen's people pulled this themselves as a desperation attempt to win tomorrow's election. Never mind the absurdity of that, there remain the hard facts that that Chen's DPP is far too disorganised and loose-lipped to even attempt a decent conspiracy.

The danger here is that hotheads in the Chen camp could spread rumours of KMT and/or Beijing involvement, leading to some potentially very ugly confrontations, especially in the soutrhern part of the island.

I vote to blame the French.

Guangzhou

Just came back from a business trip to Guangzhou (Canton to all you dinosaur Sinologists), the Paris of the Pearl River Delta, Goat City, probably the ugliest city in China, and that's saying something. Nonetheless I did have two fond memories of the place, one being the tall double gin & tonics made by Ricky at the bar of the White Swan Hotel and the other being happy hour at the long bar of the China Hotel. Many is the time my comrades and I slurped down G&T's while watching bloated dead pigs float by on the Pearl River and trying forget the 200 odd drooling, illiterate peasants we had to talk to that day. Sadly, Ricky has gone onto better things and been replaced by, you guessed it, a drooling illiterate peasant. After expalining the difference between tonic and Sprite for 11th time, my patience, already maintained only by generous doses of Prozac and Jameson's, snapped. I stalked out to a taxi without paying the bar bill and sped away to the China Hotel. Top of the escalator, left, then right, Noooooooooooo. The bar is GONE, replaced by a lingerie shop specialising in selling sleazy polyester knickers to the hookers from the Hard Rock Cafe downstairs. The place is probably run by a descendent of whatever cynical bastard introduced bras to China in the first place. See Conrad on this issue.

Spain

ETA? al-Qaeda? It doesn't really matter does it, the bloody results are the same.

Common Sense

We live in such a airheaded PC fog that any whiff of commonsense arrives like a cool breeze. All the more so when it comes from an unexpected quarter, the US Congress. The House of Representatives has voted to bar lawsuits against restaurants
by people who are too stupid to know that deep fried megaburgers are fattening and who are too lazy move their lardasses off the sofa and exercise. The link is here.

"Honest Judge, if I'd known those Triple Cheese Bomb Burgers were going to give me a butt the size of Montana, I'd have ordered the salad."

Latest from Helengrad

All you businessmen, entrepreneurs, investors, the lot of you, can just blow off to Fiji for the rest of the year. The Prime Minister will be deciding which industries are winners
from now on, and she doesn't need any advice from the likes of you. And the new winner is....ENVIRONMENTAL ENGINEERING. Aren't we surprised?

Read the article. Lots of talk of plans, programmes, policies, strategies, task forces, but not a word about making money. That isn't thought to be necessary and presumably will come from taxing Mr. and Mrs. Kiwi a bit more and then a bit more on top of that. I love it. Even the Chinese don't try and pick "winning industries" anymore. Helen says she's off to India as well, but she likely has more in common with Fidel Castro.

At some point, probably just about 24 hours after the US and the Eurozone start raising interest rates, money will flow out of this country like a rip tide and Labour's economic folly will stand revealed in all its Muldoonian glory. Of course by then, it will take a generation to undo the damage.

Prisoners and Prisoners of War

On Cold Mountain we support the war seeing it as we do as a battle for the survival of western civilisation, the current bulwark of which is the United States. We're also constitutionalists though and this storycertainly made us stop mid-ale and ponder. Should enemy alien prisoners, as distinct from prisoners of war, be denied habeas corpus. This is an important question because, if the answer is yea, then is there any class of non-citizens who cannot be declared enemies and treated similarly? If the answer is nay, the how does the United States, or any country, protect it's citizens from a determined, yet non-military, lethal threat?

The United States has long and rightly refused to subject its citizens to the jurisdiction of an International Criminal Court, fearing political prosecutions. Is what's happening at Guantanamo really any different from Belgian judges going around issuing arrest orders for whatever foreigner offends those refined Euro-sensibilities? Well, no. Not logically anyway.

We have thought from the outset that Bush should have asked Congress for a proper declaration of war, and not just some fuzzy authorisation. That would have nicely clarified the status of all concerned: prisoners of war, enemy aliens, combatants and Americans who choose to take up arms against their country.

As it is, we now think that a distinction should be made between those captured as combatants, on or off the battlefield, and those arrested as part of the terror infrastructure. The former are POW's, and international law and practice are well established on the rights of the prisoners and on the rights and obligations of the detaining power.

Captured terrorists off the battlefield should be held where they're captured until such information as they have is surrendered at which point they can either be tried by the courts where they're captured (fancy your chances before an Iraqi court these days?) or in the United States, where, like it or not, they are entitled to the protection of the Constitution.

Goodbye Pappy.

Pappy went to meet his Maker on Thursday in his sleep and with nothing to fear from that encounter. May it be so for me.

Even a stopped clock is right twice a day

You read it here first, see our October 28 post.

I'm a dyed in the wool free trader, and I almost never agree with Rod Donald about anything, but he's right about this. An economy as small as New Zealand's would quickly be drowned by an FTA with China. When Ricardo talked about comparative advantage, he saw large wealthy economies and small poor ones, not vice versa. China's comparative advantage is poverty, I don't think we can match that with clean and green.