The Pot & The Kettle: Vodafone & Telecom

I read somewhere last year that some wag had said ...all New Zealanders hate Telecom and there's nothing they hate worse than the thought of giving them any more money for anything else. Add Vodafone to the list. When is the government going to open the mobile and broadband markets in this country and cut these gougers off at the knees.

The New Zealand consumer is getting raped by these people (Sky TV is another offender, but that's a tale for another day). We have the most expensive and worst broadband and mobile service on the planet because of the Vodacom duopoly.

Boycott the iPhone (which is no prize either...I've got one, I know). If you have to buy it, get it off the Internet or have a mate bring you one from Singapore or Europe.

Obama's "Communication" Problem

I'm not entirely sure what's going on with Odumbo. Is it that: 1) He just says whatever his advisors put in front of him without asking whether it blatantly contradicts something he said earlier or is plain stupid. 2) He's a liar on the order of the Clintons. 3) He just doesn't have any strong opinions about anything nor any sort of intellectual framework to his thinking. 4) He has early-onset Alzheimer's.

A) If it's #1, then it's back to Jimmy Carter and the White House Amateur Hour. The man is just too feckless and inexperienced to be President. Added to a political tin ear for anything outside the African-American/egghead/Malibu opinion universe, we have a man who is not ready for prime time. Give him a few gray hairs and rich(er) wife and we have John Kerry redux.

B) If it's #2, do we really want to go through another four or eight years of wondering whether the President's worldview has any relationship at all with objective reality? Big O's lies are of a different sort than Clinton's. Bubba tried to lawyer his way out of the truth without getting caught telling direct falsehoods. He wasn't very good at it, but he tried. BHO on the other hand is more the post-modernist. His words mean just what he intends them to mean and nothing else. Look at his Smear Fighting page and his explanation of the flag pin controversy. Essentially, he just says it never happened.

C) If it's number 3, see A) above.

D) If it's number 4, maybe he'll put me on his web site.

Complete Intellectual Collapse

The insanity of the Bush administration's so-called Korea policy has reached the point of, as John Bolton so aptly put it, "total intellectual collapse. North Korea handed over to the Chinese a piece of paper that might has well have been a hold-up note. They admitted to all the stuff we already know about and don't really care about and completely left out any mention of the plutonium bombs and uranium enrichment program. Anyone with eyes or ears has long known that the State Department prefers any deal to no deal, but there is now the real possibility that history will one day judge Christopher Hill, Condoleeza Rice and the President to have been complicit in the destruction of an American or Japanese city by a North Korean nuclear weapon.

Here's Hill before the agreement:"This idea that we would ignore the most contentious items and take them up later is ridiculous. I don’t believe in ‘carve outs’ and even if I did (which I don’t) how in the world would this work in practical terms? Do you really think we could make concessions on the basis of an incomplete declaration, then somehow we would be able to return to the contentious issues AFTER – AFTER!!!??? — giving away all our leverage? Why? I can tell you this stupidity has never been under consideration by anyone who is part of the process or truly close to the process."

In the event of course, the "declaration" did leave out all of the "most contentious" problems. Here's Hill after the agreement:“you’re looking at a partially finished product here and we’ve got to finish the job.” “Obviously, we would like to deal with things in one fell swoop, but sometimes,” Hill told an audience at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington on July 1, “you have to kind of do things on an incremental basis… I would draw your attention to the fact that a year ago they were producing plutonium and not only are they not producing plutonium, but they can’t produce plutonium because the thing is disabled.” That's hardly the point. They may or may not be able to produce plutonium now, but they already enough for at least one and maybe as many as a dozen low yield bombs. They're also continuing to enrich uranium. That was omitted from the declaration--just an oversight, I'm sure.

There are only two possibilities here. Either Hill is a liar on the order of Bill Clinton, or he was completely duped by Rice and the President. In either case he should resign.

Go Surfers.

Every now and again I'm reminded that there is justice in the world. In Malibu, surfers go all Jack Bauer on the scum of journalism. Here's the link.

Warmenists vs The Poor, III

I thought I remembered this story from the London Times awhile back. It seems that if you're rich enough, you can assuage your guilt over your carbon crimes by sending a poor Indian peasant from the 21st Century back to the tecnhnology of the Bronze Age.

As the Times story (from 2007) puts it:
"Somewhere in the Indian countryside, a farmer is about to repay Mr Cameron’s debt to the planet. Climate Care’s latest enterprise is to provide “treadle pumps” to poor rural families so they can get water on to their land without using diesel power. The pumps are worked by stepping on pedals. If a peasant treads for two hours a day, it will take at least three years to offset the CO2 from Mr Cameron’s return flight to India"

So once that treadle pump is in place, who you do think is going to provide the muscle power? No, not Big Al Gore, although he could use the exercise. It will be the children who will in all liklihood be taken out of school to do the work.

Climate Care, an arm of JP Morgan's environmental markets group is the benevolent gang behind the scheme to let Third World peasants do the heavy lifting so green robed hypocrites can keep flying around to conferences.

Weird-O.

Does anyone else find this just a little creepy?

Warmenists vs. The Poor, II

As I noted yesterday, the direct diversion of food crops into biofuel production and the change in cultivation from plants for food to plants for fuel will inevitably decrease the amount of food available in the market, raise prices and push the marginal poor right over into starvation. This Wall Street Journal story from Japan is an apt example. The farmer is being subsidized to grow a variety of rice suitable for conversion into ethanol instead of the food rice he used to grow. This wouldn't happen without subsidies. I don't know how ecofanatics sleep at night. Maybe they'll send some starvation offsets to Manila or Jakarta.

Fitna

Hmmm. I just watched Geert Wilder's film on Islam, Fitna. (It's posted at Pat Dollard's site.) I deliberately waited 3 months to watch it, as distance lends detachment. I see absolutely nothing controversial about this at all. Islamic fascism in its own words. Wilder's comments are a few seconds at the very end. Yeah, yeah, I know. You can take snippets of various extreme Christian preachers or ultra-Zionist rabbis and make a similar flick about Christianity or Judaism.

The difference of course is that the rest of Islam is either too cowed to disown the freaks in their midst, too ignorant to know how sick they are, or they understand perfectly what's going on and agree with it. Christians and Jews on the other hand generally fall all over themselves disowning anybody who's the slightest bit non-PC. Even Odumbo threw his own pastor to the mob when Jeremiah's opinions got a little too weird for the punters.

Warmenists vs. The Poor Part I

As anyone in an undergraduate economics class could tell you the fuel market and food markets were essentially separate. Rises in oil price had only an indirect marginal effect on the price of food through fuel and fertilizer costs. Climate fanatics however have suceeded in linking the two directly by enlisting Big Agriculture and Big Government in forcing biofuel mandates on the world. Not only are food crops like palm oil and soybeans now diverted directly to fuel production, agricultural land is diverted to the production of fuel crops rather than food crops. If you're growing corn for ethanol, you plant high sugar varieties, if you're growing for food, you want high protein. Less wheat, more corn, and so on. None of this could have happened without the perverse incentives of government subsidies. Congratulations for joining at the hip two groups who couldn't care less about the poor--climate fundmentalists and agribusiness.
When even the BBC gets it, it should be obvious to everyone.

Warmenists Finally Go Around the Bend

This can't be parodied. This man is to all appearances serious about putting climate realists on trial. Junk science is what should be a crime. On the positive side, this kind of madness usually means that a trend has run its course. But does this wacko have a security clearance?

Just When I Was About to Go Home

Just when I was considering abandoning this blog, Barack Obama and his whining wife get the Democratic nomination. If he gets elected, we are doomed. He's a tool of the Soros hypocrites and the PC brigade, he associates with racists and terrorists, and, I have to say, in a colorblind society, he wouldn't have gotten the nomination. As the few readers who visit know, I have no brief for Billary. But if she had gotten 90% of the white vote the way BO got 90% of the black vote, the cries of racism would still be echoing. If John McCain's pastor had said what Jeremiah Wright said, McCain could go home now.

He has a complete pass from the media, no one is going to go looking under the slimey rocks of Chicago politics, no one calls him on his contradictions and his airy-fairy pronouncements. Soooo, to arms. Let us deconstruct BO and his nonsense and send him to McGovernland.

A Tear in the Fabric

Some events are big enough to rend the global zeitgeist. Some are immediately obvious like the Holocaust, some, like 9/11 only become apparent because of the later effects. What they have in common is that such events somehow change the matrix in which we all live. That little chill you felt, the momentary flickering of your monitor, the noise on your iPod that wasn't there before, the weird dreams you keep having. Something has changed.

I think the Sichuan earthquake is such an event. Look at Wen Jiabao. You don't get to where he is by having a soft heart, but the worry on his face is real. He knows, and you can bet they know all over China, that soon enough the grief and fear will turn to anger. On a day not far off, 80 million people in Sichuan will start looking for someone to blame. They won't rail at God..this is an atheist society. They will look at the only source of power in the land...the Party...and they will want some answers.

Democracy for all: except when it's inconvenient for Washington.

Secretary of State Rice repeats the same tired, mendacious and hypocritical line on Taiwan that successive administrations, their lips planted firmly on Beijing's ass, have trotted out for 30 years. Taiwan wants UN membership. China in it's annual display of truculent revanchism, says no. Washington, in its annual display of spineless pandering says that Taiwan should not hold a referendum on the issue. Let's see, on the one side we have a free market democracy with an unbroken record of friendship for the United States, the freest press in Asia, and a strategically important geographic position. On the other hand we have a one party Communist police state with an unbroken history of hostility to American interests, a state engaged in aggressive espionage, a nuclear weapons buildup and economic warfare. So which side does Washington come down on? American policy toward Taiwan is a disgrace.

Hillary the Nutcracker...Not Funny (Yuk,yuk)

Some people have no sense of humour at all.

Hillary the Nutcracker

This may go down as one of the great political campaign souvenirs of all time. Move over "I Like Ike" buttons,

Hillary's Summer Job

Does anyone believe this? I'm sure my fellow bloggers in the VRWC will be all over this. You just know she's lying.

"Middle class in her youth, Hillary Rodham was already on a promising track when she spent the summer of 1969 working her way across Alaska. The year before, her commencement speech at Wellesley College in defense of war protesters was such a hit she was featured in Life magazine.

In Alaska, she washed dishes in Mount McKinley National Park, the better of two brief menial jobs that financed her travels. "My worst job was sliming fish in a fish cannery in Valdez," she said without hesitation.

The Democratic New York senator elaborated on this in her memoirs: standing in bloody water in knee-high boots on a pier removing salmon guts with a spoon; supervisors yelling when she didn't slime fast enough; switching to the packing line where she reported spoiled fish to the boss, who soon fired her."

Mohammad the Bear

Out at Shelley's Bay, I've run out of livestock to name after Mohammed. Maybe I'll start on the plant life. Mohammed the Manuka has a nice ring to it.

Why We Still Have Kings.

Because the King can tell a pig-eyed moron of a military dictator to shut the fuck up, that's why. The last king of Egypt once said, "At the end of the world, there will still be five kings...the king of spades, the king of clubs, the king of hearts, the king of diamonds, and the king of England. To that list, I add, or perhaps substitute, the king of Spain. Unlike the degenerate Windsors, the Bourbons seem to have maintained some dignity. Perhaps it was the long years of fascism, but somehow the Spanish royal house has retained its...majesty. Can anyone imagine Charles telling Boy Assad or Robert Mugabe to shut up? Long live Juan Carlos el Rey de Espana por gracia del Dios. Perhaps it's time to begin a quiet search for a surviving heir of the Stuarts or the Plantagenets.

Europe wakes, but too late?

In Switzerland of all places, Europe begins to awake to the nature of Islam as an expressly political enterprise. Facile distinctions between "political Islam" and "Islamofascism" and "moderate Islam" are exposed as useless. I'm reminded of the academics of the 60s and 70s who kept trying to parse the difference between Castroism, Maoism and Stalinism. There is no such thing as separation of mosque and state, there is no non-political Islam. Indeed, Islam admits of no politics..all human relations are religious, there is no difference to be found between ideology and religion. There are no doubt Muslims who would have it otherwise, but they speak out on pain of apostasy and death. Sarkozy knows it, Blair knows it, Howard knows it, and the Swiss know it. Read about it here.

Hillary's Tattered Veil

Hillary Clinton's performance (and that's the right word for it) in the debate (and that's not the right word) between Democrat Party candidates reveals two important things.
1. Any of the likely Republican candidates will beat her in the general election like a red-headed step-child. This is related both to Hillary's personal failings and weaknesses and to the Democrat's institutional blindness. Taking last things first, it seems clear to everybody except the Dems themselves that running against George Bush isn't working. Memo to Howard Dean: Bush isn't running this time.
Next, the Party is far to the left of the electorate and are thus on track to another Nixon/McGovern scale defeat. They should change their name to the Lemming Party.

2. Hillary's fading aura has lasted this long only because her rivals are so feckless (Obama), dishonest (Edwards), stupid (Richardson) or weird (Kucinich) that they make Hillary look resolute, upright, brilliant and normal by comparison. Unfortunately, she is none of those things and it's becoming increasingly obvious to the public that she's none of those things. She can't give a straight answer to any question because she has no principles at all. Bill could pull that off with a grin and a little triangulation because he's a political genius. Hillary has neither Bill's political skills nor his intelligence and it shows. All she has is his donor list and his briefing book. That may be adequate to see off the likes of Odumbo, the sleazy ambulance chaser Edwards and the space cadet Kucinich, but Giuliani, McCain, Thompson or even Huckabee would eat her alive and spit out the bones.

3. None of her Demo rivals have called her on her long and dishonest career. From a make-work job at the Rose Law firm, to the 100 fold cattle futures deal, to Whitewater, to covering up Bill's sex addiction, to James Riady, Johnny Chung and Norman Hsu, from taking illegal campaign contributions to taking the White House furniture, Hillary's life is one of deep and pervasive mendacity and sleaze.

When the campaign goes to the southern states, all the Republicans have to do is replay that old Nightline interview where she talks about staying at home and baking cookies, her voice sliding into a parody of a Southern accent and dripping with contempt.

Come November, there'll be only two candidates and even the New York Times won't be able to hold its nose then.