Update from a reader in Denmark -- in response to my post about today's Royal wedding and the award of the "Order of the Elephant" to the Princess-to-be:

"This is the highest order Denmark can dish out, she will join a small brotherhood of other mainly slim recipients, like Nicolae Ceausescu... NB: Breaking news on three channels, Mary dropped her hat!!!!! I can't wait for the endless repeats..."



FROM BROOKES NEWS

Beijing makes its move in Latin America Beijing has been using Cuba's Fidel Castro as a means to subvert South America and Central America while President Bush has been waging war against terrorism.
Former diplomat savages Howard and Bush over the liberation of Iraq Richard Woolcott, a retired Australian diplomat, savaged Howard and Bush for liberating the Iraqi people from the sadistic Saddam Hussein. This brilliant diplomat now argues that only the UN can save the Iraqi people from "catastrophe".
Kerry's Vietnam mates claim he is unfit to be President 189 of Kerry's fellow veterans supported an open letter stating that he was not fit to be president. As expected, the mainstream media gave it a miss.
US trade deficits and foreign debt: problems or symptoms? The size of the U.S. deficit is causing alarm among some commentators who are using it to draw attention to America's foreign debt. But are trade deficits and foreign debt real problems or is something else at work?
Austrian economics and privatisation Socialists cannot grasp the benefits of privatization because they don't understand the nature of markets. It's not enough to empirically show that privatization has generated benefits. One must explain why free markets produce these results: this is where Austrian economics has been exceptionally successful.
Costs don't determine telecommunication prices It is what consumers pay for the final product that determines the prices of inputs. Therefore the view that prices must reflect costs is utterly fallacious.

Details here

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ELSEWHERE

Amusing: Australian Mary Donaldson is about to become a Princess of Denmark. In honour of the occasion, the Danes have just awarded her the "Order of the Elephant". A dubious honour? I thought she was quite slim myself.

Rather Biased has comprehensive comments on the refusal by CBS News and other mainstream media to broadcast pictures of Islamic barbarism (Berg's beheading) even though they featured pictures of American military police treating terrorist prisoners roughly. As one commenter said: "One of the few similarities between this war and Viet Nam is the consistently anti-American coverage the public is being fed by the media". Jeff Jacoby's latest column sums it up well too.

I am indebted to Brian Micklethwait (post of 6th) for pointing out that the British Left (the Whigs) of Napoleon's days so admired Napoleon that they had a lifelong hatred of the man who defeated him -- The Duke of Wellington of Waterloo fame. The Leftist love for its country's enemies goes back a long way. They are enemies of their country themselves so it is not really surprising.

For some reason the BBC recently got the idiosyncratic conservative Peter Hitchens to make a TV program critical of Nelson Mandela. Perhaps they thought it would discredit conservatism to see a conservative criticizing a saint. What they got from Hitchens included some pretty silly stuff (saying Mandela was "too Thatcherite" and blaming him for not stopping AIDS!) but the BBC has still felt the need to present a more leftist view of Mandela here. It is amusing that the BBC says that Left-liberal pressure was the reason for the abandonment of apartheid whereas Hitchens says the reason was an excess of foreign debt. There is really only one reason for the end of Apartheid -- the courage and decency of President F.W. de Klerk, the head of the apartheid regime, who voluntarily gave up power. The foreign debt issue is a red-herring. South Africa could easily have repudiated its debt. South American countries do it all the time with no adverse consequences to themselves.

Most readers have probably heard by now about how the Christians of GWB's home town (Midland, Texas) are helping to bring peace between Muslims and Christians in Sudan. Here is an extended account of it.

An interesting article here on the one Anglican diocese in the Western world that has overflowing congregations. The Sydney diocese rejects both High Church traditionalism and modern "anything-goes" Anglicanism. Yet in their strong and forthright evangelical Protestantism their beliefs are very much like those expressed in the Church of England's own "39 Articles" of 1571. New Testament Christianity still has the great power it has always had -- something far beyond the ken of the wafflers and play-actors in "modern" churches.

How 'well meaning multiculturalism' frustrates Australians of immigrant origin: "From playground confusion to strangers' interrogation, not having blonde hair and blue eyes has proven to be a difficult reality. It's not that I ever complained. My siblings and I never got sunburnt at school swimming carnivals. We always had the largest number of friends and family attending annual award ceremonies and we always had the most interesting packed lunch.

The Kerry-Kennedy court: "Thus, in November, the voters will determine far more than who lives in the White House. They will determine, indirectly, who sits in the nine seats on bench of the highest court in the land. It's a choice between judicial restraint and judicial activism. It's a choice between what is actually written in the Constitution and what an unelected judge believes should be written there."

Carnival of the Vanities is still going strong with the latest edition here.

For more postings, see GREENIE WATCH and POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH. Mirror sites here and here

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The Left have always wanted more spent on welfare and made "Fascism" a swear-word. President Bush deposed a brutal Fascist dictator and sponsored a big expansion of welfare. But instead of being admired by the Left, he is hated with a passion. What does that tell you about the Left? It tells you that they have no principles at all: That everything they have ever claimed to stand for is fake.

All politicians seek power but conservatives bring with them some concern for the welfare of their country. Leftists bring only their hate-filled Stalinist hearts and their pretend compassion. Voters, unfortunately, often believe the compassion is genuine

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