FREE SPEECH TAKES A DIVE

It looks like Australia is now as bad as Britain when it comes to forbidding free speech. An Australian conservative Senator gave a private interview in which he spoke disparagingly but not unreasonably or abusively of Australian blacks so was yesterday found guilty in the Federal Court of breaching the Racial Discrimination Act -- at a cost to him of $10,000. Maybe I will be in the firing-line myself now for reporting it. There is no doubt that Leftists are deadly enemies of our liberties.

See also Alex Robson for more details.


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FREEDOM OF RELIGION

Church schools in the Australian State of Queensland have just had a narrow escape. The Labor Party government in Queensland was about to pass a law that would have forbidden them from rejecting gays as teachers in their schools. An escape clause for church schools (but not other schools) was built in at the last moment after some heavy lobbying. I suspect that a lot of conservative Roman Catholic Labor union leaders burnt the Queensland Premier's ear about the issue. Australia has a lot of Roman Catholic schools.

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AMERICAN MILITIA VERSUS ISLAMIC MILITANTS

Ed Mick has just put up a great post comparing the way that the press writes about Islamic militants and the way it writes about the American militia movement.

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FREE TRADE VISION REGAINED

Good news about the freeing up of world trade:

The Bush administration will seek to kick-start global trade liberalisation by announcing a plan to scrap all tariffs on industrial and consumer goods by 2015.
The White House plans to submit a proposal to the World Trade Organisation to eliminate $US18 billion ($32 billion) in annual tariffs, a move also seen as an American attempt to regain some credibility on the free trade issue after several recent protectionist moves. Administration officials were reported overnight as saying the plan was to "turn every corner store into a duty-free shop".

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LETTER NOT BY BIN LADEN

The alleged recent letter by Bin Laden stressing that it is mainly the existence of Israel that makes him hate the West does not to me sound authentic. Just about Bin Laden's favourite word is "crusader". He likes to fantasize that Israel is just a continuation of the old Christian crusades into the Holy Land back in the 12th century. Yet that word does not appear at all in the recent "letter". I think it just a hoax by some Palestinian.

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NAUGHTY RADIATION!

The poor old Greenies! They can't take a trick! So many of their causes turn out to be absolute nonsense. Greenies have always been able to scare people with talk about what a HORROR nuclear radiation is and how no cost is too much for us to avoid even tiny amounts of it. Forget that there are large variations in earth's natural background radiation and that the people who live in "hotspots" (such as the inhabitants of the ancient and distinguished Scottish city of Aberdeen) are perfectly healthy by normal standards and forget that the incidence of abnormal births around Chernobyl has been no higher than usual after their reactor explosion. No. That is not the worst of it. There is now lots of evidence that low doses of radiation are actually BENEFICIAL!

Practically ever since radiation was invented, it has been used therapeutically, sometimes with remarkably good results. And in Germany to this day the government health service will PAY you to go and have a nice little radiation bath. Such treatments fell out of favour after the bombing of Hiroshima and the discovery of antibiotics but the fact that about half of those Hiroshima citizens who survived the immediate effects of the Hiroshima bombing are STILL ALIVE and that those who have died did so at a fairly normal age should make even a Greenie think. If being in the middle of a nuclear war is not all that bad for you as long as you escape a direct hit, why are we worrying about radiation at all?

The survival of Hiroshima has long been known, however. It is no radiation wasteland. I once owned a very reliable little 1984 Mazda car that was made there. The absolutely astounding and very little known feature about Hiroshima, though, is that those who lived on the outskirts of the city at the time of the bombing have actually had LESS illness than normal. And that finding is no one-off or isolated coincidence. There is now a huge mass of evidence about the therapeutic benefit of low-dose radiation that gets lost amid all the Greenie hysteria.

There is a heap of scientific links on the subject here but a Google search using just the term "hormesis" will turn up many more. "Hormesis" refers to the stimulatory (beneficial) effect that is observed for many poisons when they are administered in low does. It is the theoretical basis for homoepathic medicine -- which the "alternative" crowd love!

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