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 Sadly, Ricky has gone onto better things and been replaced by, you guessed it, a drooling illiterate peasant.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.

Pappy

I'm in an airline lounge at LAX 18 hours into a 25 hour trip back to Arkansas to see my grandfather before he dies. His name is Rufus Elton Cassidy, but we call him Pappy. He's 96 years old. He grew up in Arkansas before the depression. He told me once that all he remembered of his mother was that she "got the cancer" when he was 6 years old, and they took her away in mule-drawn wagon and he never saw her again. In 96 years on this earth he never had a credit card, never borrowed money, only took an airplane once, never drank coffee, tea, or alcohol. It wasn't a religious thing, there was just no money for that sort of thing when Pappy was young. He became a boilermaker and a union man during The War and he travelled all around the south putting the hearts in great buildings. I remember when I was a little boy he would come home in his hard hat. He must have been tired, but loved us so, it never showed. He went to the Hazel Street Baptist Church every Sunday. He never went to school, taught himself to read and write and do arithmatic and only ever read the Bible, his Sunday School lesson and the Arkansas Gazette. He was married to the same woman for 60 years, and he was never the same after she died. He gave up driving at the age of 83. Last Christmas, he could still lift my 8 year old son over his head, just like he used to do with me. Now he can't stand up. He's tired and he wants to be with my grandmother.


I love you Pappy.

Merry Christmas

That's right, Merry Christmas. None of that denatured Season's Greetings crap. On this Christmas Day, as we survey the terrain from Cold Mountain, we are appalled at the religious bigotry that has taken over swaths of my ancestral homeland. Quite so, you say, how beastly Americans are to those poor Muslims. WRONG. Wrong and stupid.

I'm talking about the subtle bigotry and outright discrimination against Christians in the United States. From shysters imposing anti-Christian litmus tests on potential jurors, to the Ten Commandments forcibly removed from a courthouse, to store clerks required to use the grotesque "Happy Holidays" as a greeting, to the disappearance of Nativity scenes from village commons and shopping malls, Christians in America today find themselves belittled and their beliefs treated with contempt. The cheap cynicism that passes for a world view in the salons of the left requires no wisdom, no reflection, no introspection; nothing more than a bit of low cunning and a college freshman's vocabulary. It's a poor substitute for either reason or faith. Can it be that the acid contempt the left show for Christians comes from the little peeks they take into their own empty souls in the dark night? Can it be that under the slick post-modern banter, they have measured themselves against a man like Pope John Paul and found themselves badly lacking? Can it be that I give them too much credit and that all their words are really just echoes of empty minds and empty hearts?

This Christmas let us think of the Pope, whose back is now bent with the literal weight of the world and remember that he once marshaled the moral authority of the Church and the reflected power of the risen Christ to smash the locks on the gates of Hell on earth. Let us also think of Ronald Reagan, whose unshakable faith in America's destiny brought down the walls as surely as did Joshua's horn. Let us pray that we see their like among us again soon.

And Now Will They Learn....

Islamist mass murder in Turkey, Iraq, and in the heart of the beast itself. Have any of the bleeding left done their math? al-Qaeda and the Baathist rump have killed a lot more Muslims this month than the Israeli military. Meanwhile people who can't spell globalisation (or with a "z" for our American friends) or find Baghdad on a map of Baghdad are demonstrating their seriousness of purpose by wearing funny costumes and milling about in the streets of London.

No one is immune, no one. Got that? The Islamofascists cannot be reasoned with, bribed, appeased, or appealed to as brothers in the faith or fellow human beings. They can only be defeated by force of arms. It must be done and it will be done.

Aaaarrrrrgggghhhhhh

They choked, they panicked, they fumbled, they flipped, they did everything but play rugby. Well, maybe it will at least bring the government down. The amount of crap I'll have to take from my Aussie colleagues is terrifying to contemplate.

Michael Howard

The NRO has an excellent little piece on the new Tory leader. Can the New Zealand centre right find someone like this. The cerebral Don Brash will need someone like Michael Howard to appeal to "middle New Zealand".

A Near Run Thing

Don't be fooled by the final score against Wales yesterday. The Welshmen were ferocious on the attack and defended the try lines like their lives depended on it. Only the All Blacks' better conditioning saved the day when the dragon began to tire in the second half. Look out, England.

Not to tell Brother Mitchell how to suck eggs, but if his men play that way against the yarpies, the Blacks are going down.

What a game.

Say Good Night, Ian..........

You read it here first. The Tory caucus has sent the hapless Ian Duncan Smith to the bench. The Guardian has the account.

And IDS goes the way of Bill English

It seems that the global centre right (AKA The Vast Right Wing Conspiracy) may finally be getting on top of its game. The smart money says that the British Tories will shortly show Ian Duncan Smith the door. This editorial in the Telegraph is an early epitaph if ever I saw one. These are early days, but some better generalship could make a real difference in the culture wars.

Here's a quote from the Telegraph that could just as easily apply to National:

"The need to mount an effective opposition to a government vulnerable on a host of fronts before the next election requires a leader with the unqualified backing of his party. The divisive and anonymous back-bench whining that has so characterised the past few weeks must not be allowed to hamper the Tory policy platform any longer."

Go to it.

"The Government is slowly destroying New Zealand....."

The above from Don Brash who finally has knocked the hapless Bill English off his bar stool. He's correct, of course, but a few specific examples would have been nice.

How about the deliberate and systematic alienation of New Zealanders from all authority other than Nanny State? The family, the schools, the Crown, the churches, the workplace...in Labour's view all mere impediments to self esteem. How about the expansion of no-questions-asked benefit payments, in reality just thinly disguised vote-buying as Labour seeks to create an underclass constituency permanently dependent on the largess of the state? How about the abandonment of 4,000 years of Western civilisation in favour of a dying Stone Age culture? How about the deliberate dilution of New Zealand's national character into some kind of fuzzy multi-cultural milieu?

Say Goodnight, Bill

As much as I'd like to sit down with Bill English over a pint or three, or have him as a next door neighbor, he was a miserable failure as party leader and should have stepped down after leading the Nats down to defeat in the last election.

If a leader is not to be judged by the size of his party's caucus, or at least by its standing in the polls, then how should he be judged? It's not at all certain that Don Brash will do any better, but Mr. English failed to present any kind of plausible strategy for returning his party to power.

On the face of it, Labour should be an easy target. The breathtaking arrogance, the profound and obvious contempt for democracy, the transparent attempts to divide the nation by race and class, Margaret Wilson's judicial coup d'etat, Michael Cullen's rapacious tax policies, and the cheap anti-Americanism all fly in the face of New Zealanders' common sense and decency. Why has National failed to take the verbal fight to Helen Clark every day, why has it allowed the hypocrisy of the left to go unanswered?

A leader must be found on the center-right who can stop the Red Green Axis in it's anti-democratic tracks. Before it's too late.....