I just finished watching CTV news, and a segment that was busy playing up problems for refugees arriving in Texas.
Rightwingsparkle is volunteering at the Houston Astrodome. Her report is far more hopeful;

The whole thing was, of course, heartwrenching. People were packed cot to cot and with their supplies next to them. The really hard thing to see were the children. So small and with so little to keep them busy. The citizens and Churches of Houston came through in a BIG way and there was plenty of food, water, and clothes for everyone. The only thing I really had to dig for were toys. I plan to bring a bunch tomorrow. That seemed to be the only real need that wasn’t being meet. There were also plenty of volunteers.
As you might imagine I wanted to hear what it was like being in the Superdome. One teenage girl told me that it was terrifying when the shooting started. “It was the gangs,” she said. Her mother said, “The people found the guy who was shooting and beat his ass and his ass needed beating.” I found over and over again that people were as disgusted with the behavior of the thugs as the rest of us. I asked them if they were angry at the government. Not one I spoke to said they were. They were angry at the people who behaved badly. They were angry at the thugs with guns. They were angry with the people who threw trash everywhere and went to bathroom in public places.
In other words, they were mad at the right people, unlike our friends on the left.

There’s more – and you won’t get any of it from CNN.

Kathy Shaidle;

When I worked for United Way, some group was always coming up with a new “solution” to the problem of Jamaican/Somali violence. Each brilliant new innovative program featured: a) basketball, b) rap music or c) basketball & rap music.
Yep, just what these kids need: more false hopes about making it big in ball, and more immersion in degraded black pop culture!
And this is a cultural problem. US blacks make up 8% of the population, but commit almost half the violent crime [We don’t keep race based stats up here]. Black kids from upper class families score lower on standardized tests than white lower class kids. Being a “baby momma” is now a badge of honour, (and I still love Fantasia, ok?) not something to be ashamed of and discouraged.
Blaming this stuff on “slavery” is like a Canadian kid of Irish descent saying he dropped out of school because of the Orange Lodge and the Potato Famine.
Earlier this year, a 26-year-old black mother of four was shot at a club at 3 in the morning. What is a 26-year-old doing with four kids, and why is at a speakeasy when decent people are home in bed?

She quotes Kateland on the “elephants in the room”;

Let me tell you a fact of life living in black community in the downtown east side of the inner city. There are a multitude of programs for youth to keep them off the streets. There are probably more community centers and not-for-profit programs run in this area than in any other part of the city. They are all easily accessible to all youths � even for those whose families are on welfare or have very limited financial means. Guess what? The children, on a whole, don�t show up. To participate and take advantage of any of these programs requires a certain amount of discipline to show up every Monday or Wednesday or Friday or Sunday and that is what these children lack because their families are so fractured and their parents have failed in their first duties to their children.”

But be warned – whether discussing cultural and parental failure at the root of black gang warfare in Toronto or aboriginal gang violence in Western Canada, lancing the purulent��pachyderm will rouse the wrath of the parasite class that fattens both ego and wallet in a victimization industry fueled by blaming everyone but.

Nick Cohen is a author, a columnist for The Observer, The New Statesman and has written for The Guardian. He explains how he came to realize he was looking at the world “through the wrong end of the telescope”;

Terror and Liberalism is an essay rather than a history and its arguments come from the almost forgotten tradition of the anti-totalitarian left. Its central point is that Islamism and Baathism are continuations of Nazism and communism, not only in their fine points – founders of the Muslim Brotherhood and Baath Party were admirers of Hitler and Franco – but in their fundamentals. Once again we had the promise of earthly paradise, but now the paradise wouldn’t be the paradise of unexploited labour or the paradise of an Aryan Europe, but the paradise of the early days of the prophet or a reunified Arab nation, pure and free. Once again there were great leaders who were semi-divine as they led the faithful into cosmic struggles. And once again their programmes were insane.
[…]
To see the old process at work, one only has to look at how a large chunk of the world’s liberal opinion has got itself into the position where it can’t support Iraqi and Afghan liberals, socialists and feminists. You think the worst thing in the world is the developed countries because they brought the First World War, which to be fair is a charge worth making, or globalisation and McDonalds, which to be fair is a charge that is infantile. You are confronted with totalitarian movements, which are worse, and your first thought is to blame them on the West. Your second is to make excuses for them. Your third is to betray your comrades. Your fourth is to go up to the totalitarian movements and shake them by the hand.

The rest is here

The whole issue reminds me of the morning my 2 1/2 year old daughter kept holding her toast out where the dog could get it. After repeated warnings he was going to take, she still was in utter shock when he finally did. Draw your own parallels. – Reg

Billy: Dad, what’s a separatist?
Dad: Son, I dreaded the day this conversation would come. Well -those are people that come from Quebec. They love our country and just want to belong. They are largely misunderstood. We have to do everything we can to make sure they feel welcome-like running advertising programs in their “belle province” that promote unity; or appointing one of their own as the Governor General.
Billy: Quebec? Johnny O’Malley said they came from Alberta.
Dad: Oh. Those ones. You don’t want no part o’ that.
Billy: Why?
Dad: Because they are intolerant, Christian bigots who tend to discriminate against homosexuals, unions and domestic animals. They also believe Hooters have good wings.

heh.

Jeff Goldstein quotes a Times item that indicates London suicide bomber Shehzad Tanweer was motivated by a “need for violent retaliation over US abuse of Muslim prisoners in Guantanamo Bay”;

I hope the next time George Galloway or Ken Livingstone feel compelled to preach about “root causes,’ they’re willing to look at themselves in the mirror. And by themselves I mean themselves–not some symbollic representative of the phantom white and wealthy capitalist/imperialist oppressor class.
The same goes for the Democrats here who have spent months and months decrying and sensationalizing the “torture” at Guantanamo that, it so happens, didn’t take place.

Read the rest

[T]he bloodbaths of the last century were made far easier by the labelling of opposition to them as incitement, propaganda and promotion. This enabled evil regimes to jail or execute those who might have stood up to their actions.
Hitler was able to get away with his Holocaust, and Mao, Stalin, Amin and others with theirs, because they had first silenced their opponents by declaring their thoughts too dangerous to be spoken in public.
Any arbitrary power given to governments or courts today to shield good people from bad thoughts will one day be used by governments and courts to protect bad thoughts from good people.

I’ll go a step further than Lorne Gunter – the insidious crawl of what is euphamistically termed “political correctness” is taking on troubling aspects of history repeating itself, this time cloaked in a seductive charade of post-modern “tolerance”. It is anything but.
Suppression of criticism has intrenched itself in our legal systems, most notably through the back door of the extra-legal and left-loaded Human Rights Commissions. Appointed courts are replacing parliamentary debate with judicial decree while engaging in an orgy of publication bans.
A government, with the complicity of an enabling media, has seeded the astonishingly dangerous belief that elections are such an expensive and troublesome ordeal that it is preferable to allow a party under investigation for corruption, that has lost the confidence of parliament, to remain in control of the treasury, the legal system, and the military.
The “elections are unpleasant” message is becoming so pervasive that one left-wing MP recently argued that poll results should stand in lieu of calling a by-election to fill a vacant seat.
A sitting minority government has successfully established precedent by refusing to recognize its own fall from loss of confidence. The office of the Prime MInister is now so powerful as to be legitimately compared to a dictatorship. The machinery is in place. The only ingredient missing to complete the cycle of history is a charismatic leader from the hard “politically correct” left, with the power of a majority.

Lileks.

A timely post at Burkean Canuck, revisiting the words of Alexander Solzhenitsyn at the Harvard Commencement Address, June 8, 1978.

To defend oneself, one must also be ready to die; there is little such readiness in a society raised in the cult of material well-being. Nothing is left, then, but concessions, attempts to gain time and betrayal.

Hatred has fallen on hard times. When questioning the sexual orientation of a horse is considered a hate crime, you know that times are tough. Hate speech, hate crimes, “don’t be a hater�” Well, at the risk of being sent before the PC tribunal and then lined up against the multicultural wall to be shot with environmentally sensitive all-natural bullets, I’d like to rant a little bit about hate.

In the unlikely event that you’ve managed to stumble in here while you and your fookin’ Boosh effigy wait for the droogies to come pick you up;

Africa is a hard place to help. I had a letter from a reader the other day who works with a small Canadian charity in West Africa. They bought a 14-year-old SUV for 1,500 Canadian dollars to ferry food and supplies to the school they run in a rural village. Customs officials are demanding a payment of $8,000 before they’ll release it.
There are thousands of incidents like that all over Africa every day of the week. Yet, throughout the weekend’s events, Dave Gilmour and Co were too busy Rocking Against Bush to spare a few moments to Boogie Against Bureaucracy or Caterwaul Against Corruption or Ululate Against Usurpation. Instead, Madonna urged the people to “start a revolution”. Like Africa hasn’t had enough of those these past 40 years?

It’s another good one.
Read also – this Spiegel interview with Kenyan economist James Shikwati, who states bluntly that Western aid must be ended if Africa is to solve its problems.
h/t Canuckistan Chronicles

Charmaine Yoest is live blogging the G8 summit in Scotland.

Two things are abundantly clear in traveling with Richard Branson and the ONE campaign activists: first, they know they have to address the corruption question; and two, their responses to the question are pro forma because they view the issue of corruption (despite protestations to the contrary) as being somewhat peripheral.
[…]
…this level of rioting when the summit doesn’t even begin until Wednesday doesn’t bode well for this city. Pictures on the local news of children sobbing in the streets are heart-breaking.
Riding into the city on the bus this afternoon, we passed a Starbucks with enormous glass windows in the downtown area, and Greg Beals, a globe-trotting journalist on assignment here with NY Newsday, predicted it would be smashed by week’s end . . .

Related: It doesn’t always pay to be nice.

Right Wing News interviews the incomparable Mark Steyn. Via email, it covers “a number of topics including Steyn’s syndication in the US, Israel, the future of Europe and Nato, Christianity in Europe, Iraq, illegal immigration, and the American left’s view of foreign policy.”
All that and yours truly’s “sharp headlines, one-line squibs, and nifty asides”.
After spending three hours working in the rain getting ready for this trip, that certainly brightened my day.

Revisiting this post from the weekend, this comment from “Joe” merits attention.

Re acid rain in China. As a resident of Guangzhou, I can confirm that it stings like crazy if it gets into your eyes. The Southern China landscape now is nothing more than a hot, hazy, pollution-filled, area full of factories and brothels.
Re the nationalist side of China, I’ve witnessed the rise of this during the last 12 years and, yes, it has already surpassed the nationalism of what we read was evident in pre-war Germany, Italy, Japan etc.
The “us” and “them” mentality(i.e. we Chinese and you foreigners led by America) is staggering in China. And the expectation that China will directly challenge the US one day isn’t debated over here, it’s seen as an inevitable fact.
The govt here encourages a victim mentality complex and a sense of aggrieved history among the population (as in the recent anti-Japan riots) as well as teching all schoolchildren that The Middle Kingdom ruled the world for millenia before, several hundred years ago, the industrialised west stole it’s technology like gunpowder etc. and usurped China’s rightful place in the world. China incurred a HUGE loss of face and now China has started on the road to re-claiming it’s rightful place in the world. Conflict with the US/allies is inevitable and welcome as it will be the herald of a new era of unrivalled dominance for China.
Also, don’t expect China to start lobbing missiles anytime soon, it’s not her style. Sun Zu’s 36 Directives on waging war are almost all concerned with deception (1 spy is worth more than 1,000 soldiers, sometimes a war can be lost before it has even began etc.). Therefore, China will work behind the scenes, quietly, not attracting attention, undermining economies, cyber-war, propaganda war, building spy networks and maybe 10,000 other things that none of us here could even guess at.
I’m not saying we should all run to our nuclear shelters just yet but if anyone believes all that talk about China’s peaceful rise and how China will never seek hegemony or use aggression against others, then they are a fool.
Thanks to Simon at simonworld.mu.nu for linking this article in his Daily Linklets.

Oriana Fallaci faces jail. In her mid-70s, stricken with a cancer that, for the moment, permits only the consumption of liquids–so yes, we drank champagne in the course of a three-hour interview–one of the most renowned journalists of the modern era has been indicted by a judge in her native Italy under provisions of the Italian Penal Code which proscribe the “vilipendio,” or “vilification,” of “any religion admitted by the state.”
In her case, the religion deemed vilified is Islam, and the vilification was perpetrated, apparently, in a book she wrote last year–and which has sold many more than a million copies all over Europe–called “The Force of Reason.” Its astringent thesis is that the Old Continent is on the verge of becoming a dominion of Islam, and that the people of the West have surrendered themselves fecklessly to the “sons of Allah.” So in a nutshell, Oriana Fallaci faces up to two years’ imprisonment for her beliefs–which is one reason why she has chosen to stay put in New York. Let us give thanks for the First Amendment.

Listen.

Because Jim dropped by the house today to fix the carb on my RD.

Now, we have another burgeoning explosion of motorcycle popularity. This time, it is the ol’ Baby Boomers (those from whom I and fellow Xers come from) reliving the excitement they lived through just before the tide rolled back and the revolution stopped turning, before Nixon, embargoes, Disco, Greed and Reaganomics killed what the youth had envisioned. Now, having made their money and sold their souls, the Rich Urban Biker rides the land. I love to ride, and the fact anyone rides generally improves my view of them, but I find the breed leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
They are not me.
I ride because of the Outlaw heritage of my XX’s two-wheeled forefathers. I ride because I love the rush of stretching the throttle cables all the way, dumping fuel down four 42 mm carbs into a monster motor. I ride because I know the bike might just prefer to kill me, after all. I ride to spite the guys in minivans that look at the bike longingly at lights. I ride because I think I actually like challenging the cages on the highway- am I invincible? I ride because mom doesn’t like motorcycles, and bad girls do. I ride because speed does not always kill, it usually thrills. I ride because it makes me feel free. I ride because when I ride, I don’t think about work at all. I ride because Everyman doesn’t. I ride because you can smell the diesel, the cowshit, the foliage, the dead skunk and the fields of wildflowers. I ride for those drastic temperature changes you feel riding through hills. I ride because I know I might get hurt. I ride because I may just not be able to ride tomorrow.
And yes, sometime I ride damn fast, Sometimes I don’t, and I putt around, but yes, most of the time, I may seem on a mission. I don’t believe speed is Evil. I don’t begrudge others when they want to go faster than me, though I might just try to keep up. I love wheelies- they just feel cool. I am not actually really that good at them- there are a lot of people that are much better. But I want to do them anyway. I’ve done stoppies as well, though not often. I’ve burned tires to the cords in burnouts.
I try to bring a good deal of “irresponsible” fun to my own life and others. I know the risks, I accept the consequences, and I remember the caveats. I have crashed. I will crash again.
I’ll still ride the way I like, remembering ol Bob on the first Harleys. Remembering GI Joe just back from saving the world and wanting to just ride. Remembering the Hells Angels and the fact that, in the end, they just wanted to ride. Remembering what I was like as a kid, pedaling my BMX bike and dreaming of riding a motorcycle.
In the end, I ride because it’s fun. And They don’t like it.

More from the best motorcycle writer who’s never been published – most of which appeared first as posts to a Honda CBR motorcycle list;
Porsche emasculation
7.23 lives. Phuzzy verbosity
Phuzzy drops his helmet
A tribute to Joe
Phuzzy’s highspeed ride
The WORLD PHAMOUS PHUZZY GUIDES

Seven other things you can’t say in Canada.
Here’s another:
“The deportation of Ernst Zundel did more damage to human rights in Canada than all his writings combined.”

A great post by one of my favourite guest bloggers.

But the real question is how both China and India, nuclear and arming, will translate their newfound economic clout and cash into a geopolitical role. If internal politics and protocols are any barometer of foreign policy, it should be an interesting show. We mostly welcome the new India – nuclear, law-abiding, and English-speaking – onto the world stage. It deserves a permanent seat on the Security Council and a close alliance with the United States.
China, however, is a very different story – a soon-to-be grasping Soviet Union-like superpower without any pretense of Marxist egalitarianism. Despite massive cash reserves and ongoing trade surpluses, it violates almost every international commercial protocol from copyright law to patents. It won’t discuss Tibet, and it uses staged domestic unrest to send warnings to Taiwan and Japan that their regional options will increasingly be limited by Beijing.
China could rein in Kim Jong Il tomorrow. But it derives psychological satisfaction from watching Pyongyang’s nuclear roguery stymie Japan and the United States. China’s foreign policy in the Middle East, Central and South America, and Southeast Asia is governed by realpolitik of the 19th-century American stripe, without much concern for the type of government or the very means necessary to supply its insatiable hunger for resources. The government that killed 50 million of its own has not really been repudiated and its present successor follows the same old practice of jailing dissidents and stamping out freedom. When and how its hyper-capitalist economy will mandate the end of a Communist directorate is not known.
The world has been recently flooded with media accounts that U.S. soldiers may have dropped or at least gotten wet a few Korans. Guantanamo, we are told, is like the Soviet gulag – the death camp of millions. Americans are routinely pilloried abroad because they liberated Iraq, poured billions into the reconstruction, and jumpstarted democracy there – but were unable to do so without force and the loss of civilian life.
This hysteria that the world’s hyper-power must be perfect or it is no good is in dire contrast to the treatment given to China. Yet Pavlovian anti-Americanism may soon begin to die down as the Chinese increasingly flex their muscles on the global stage and the world learns better their methods of operation.
So far they have been given a pass on three grounds: the old Third World romance accorded to Mao’s Marxist legacy; the Chinese role as a counterweight to the envied power of the United States; and the silent admission that the Chinese, unlike the Americans, are a little crazy and thus unpredictable in their response to moral lecturing. Americans apologize and scurry about when an EU or U.N. official remonstrates; in contrast, a Chinese functionary is apt to talk about sending off a missile or two if they don’t shut up.

RTWT

Has AdScam got you all heated up? Going ape over the Grewal Tapes? What you need is a nice, cold, glass of home-brewed iced tea.

Ingredients:

1 gallon (4 litres) of cold water
5 orange pekoe tea bags
1/2 cup (125 ml) lemon juice
1 cup (250 ml) sugar

Directions:

Find a one gallon container (an old glass pickle jar works just fine) and fill it with one gallon of water and add the five tea bags. Put the lid on the jar and place it out in direct sunlight for ten hours where it can cook like Scott Brison during Question Period.

Once the tea has brewed, add the lemon juice and sugar. Chill and serve.

Partisan modifications:

Liberals: Double the sugar if you’re serving it to someone else. Gotta sweeten ’em up if they’re gonna vote for you, right?

Conservatives: Double the lemon juice to one cup so that it’s extra sour in keeping with your party’s dour reputation.

Greens: Substitute green tea for orange pekoe, raw organic sugar for the white granulated crud, and make sure the lemon juice is fresh squeezed from an organic lemon. Don’t forget to compost the tea bags and lemon rinds afterwards or David Suzuki will show up on your doorstep and give you a Wet Willie.

Dippers: Card carrying NDP members are welcome to modify the recipe however they see fit so long as they remember to shoplift all the ingredients. Remember, you’re doing your patriotic duty by sticking it to the Capitalist Oppressors.

Bloc Heads: Paul Martin says we can’t consort with separatists, so no tea for you. Bugger off and go be ‘distinct’ somewhere else.