The government of Hungary voted to cut income taxes Monday to pull itself out of recession, and America’s media for the most part ignored it.
At the same time, German chancellor Angela Merkel is pushing for lower taxes to help her nation’s economy, and our press have similarly been less than enthusiastic about sharing the news.
The news the media suppress tell even more about their agenda than the news they report.
Seven states cross the 50% mark overall as of our current estimates, but the generation gap is huge. If policy were set by state-by-state majorities of those 65 or older, none would allow same-sex marriage. If policy were set by those under 30, only 12 states would not allow-same-sex marriage.
Over the coming days a curiously revealing event will be taking place in Copenhagen. Top of the agenda at a meeting of the Polar Bear Specialist Group (set up under the International Union for the Conservation of Nature/Species Survival Commission) will be the need to produce a suitably scary report on how polar bears are being threatened with extinction by man-made global warming.
This is one of a steady drizzle of events planned to stoke up alarm in the run-up to the UN’s major conference on climate change in Copenhagen next December. But one of the world’s leading experts on polar bears has been told to stay away from this week’s meeting, specifically because his views on global warming do not accord with those of the rest of the group.
Dr Mitchell Taylor has been researching the status and management of polar bears in Canada and around the Arctic Circle for 30 years, as both an academic and a government employee. More than once since 2006 he has made headlines by insisting that polar bear numbers, far from decreasing, are much higher than they were 30 years ago. Of the 19 different bear populations, almost all are increasing or at optimum levels, only two have for local reasons modestly declined.
Dr Taylor agrees that the Arctic has been warming over the last 30 years. But he ascribes this not to rising levels of CO2 – as is dictated by the computer models of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and believed by his PBSG colleagues – but to currents bringing warm water into the Arctic from the Pacific and the effect of winds blowing in from the Bering Sea.
Dr Taylor had obtained funding to attend this week’s meeting of the PBSG, but this was voted down by its members because of his views on global warming. The chairman, Dr Andy Derocher, a former university pupil of Dr Taylor’s, frankly explained in an email (which I was not sent by Dr Taylor) that his rejection had nothing to do with his undoubted expertise on polar bears: “it was the position you’ve taken on global warming that brought opposition”.
Dr Taylor was told that his views running “counter to human-induced climate change are extremely unhelpful”. His signing of the Manhattan Declaration – a statement by 500 scientists that the causes of climate change are not CO2 but natural, such as changes in the radiation of the sun and ocean currents – was “inconsistent with the position taken by the PBSG”.
Perhaps the most worrying set of statistics for the Church of England is the decline in baptisms. Out of every 1,000 live births in England in 2006/7 only 128 were baptised as Anglicans.
The figure rises by a small amount if adult baptism and thanksgiving services are included but it is hard to see the Church of England being able to justify its position as the established church on the basis of these numbers.
By way of contrast, out of every 1,000 live births in England in 1900, 609 were baptised in the Church of England. Figures for church marriages show an equally catastrophic decline.
His bizarre vision for the future shows how desperate things are:
We are going to have to invent a new civil religion. Already the process has begun with the observance of Holocaust Day and increasing focus on Human Rights as providing a shared basis for morality.
An “increasing focus on Human Rights” is a convenient thing: it takes the focus away from the government trampling on the people’s real rights – to own firearms, to defend themselves and their homes from criminals, to exercise free speech, and now, it seems, to be judged by a jury of peers, too. If the U.K.’s established church sees potential for a new religion in this, then it’s no wonder that Brits are turning away from it.
This video was put together for people to watch while riding the elevators in a New York City hotel, and it uses more than 400 existing video clips. You’ll recognize Arnold Schwarzenegger.
If a corrupt politician’s party affiliation is not mentioned in a seventeen-paragraph-long report, even liberals know it’s not Republican. I can’t believe CNN doesn’t realise it - I guess there are things they simply can’t force themselves to do.
One has to wonder how much Conyers’s husband, U.S. Rep. John Conyers of the same unmentionable party, knew about his wife’s extra income source.
Nissan doesn’t see a big-enough market for gas-electric hybrids, so it is jumping right to the next stage – fully electric cars. Sales of EVs “with a very reasonable price” in Japan and the U.S. will begin after April 2010, after which Nissan wants to mass-produce them globally in 2012.
Sarychev Peak volcano eruption photographed from the International Space Station 220 miles above a remote Russian island in the North Pacific (click the image to enlarge)
The L.A. Timesreports that the King of Pop has died at age 50:
Pop star Michael Jackson was pronounced dead by doctors this afternoon after arriving at a hospital in a deep coma, city and law enforcement sources told The Times.
I still remember reports that Jackson wanted to live to be 150.
There will be no great comeback now. Rest in peace, Michael.
The main reason why this should be done is obvious: putting a burkha on a woman in a Western country ensures that she will never integrate into society and fulfil any dreams she has about her life other than being a housewife – or, rather, house slave. Ms. Khan names another one:
Shockingly, the Dickensian bone disease rickets has reemerged in the British Muslim community because women are not getting enough vital vitamin D from sunlight because they are being consigned to life under a shroud.
If some Christian custom was endangering the health of women, I don’t think the British government would hesitate for a second to ban it.
Ms. Khan ends with a question for British Muslims:
My message to those Muslims who want to live in a Talibanised society, and turn their face against Britain, is this: ‘If you don’t like living here and don’t want to integrate, then what the hell are you doing here? Why don’t you just go and live in an Islamic country?’
Because they feel they do, I guess. They’ve transformed entire British cities into “Muslim communities”, with no-go zones for non-Muslims, and the rest of the country bends over backwards to “accommodate” their every wish even before they wish it. Why would they ever leave for some other Islamic country?
