Sunday, August 26, 2007

The Racist EU

What fun! That old British stirrer, Gerald Hartup, has scored a hit. Hartup regularly draws attention to Leftists violating their own regulations

The European Commission is to remove the comic "What me a racist?" from its Europa website following a complaint from civil liberties group Liberty and Law taken up on its behalf by the Commission for Racial Equality [CRE].

The glossy A4 comic produced in 1998 to combat racism was published in all the official European Union languages. It was "designed for teachers to use when addressing the subject of racism with young people" and has been on its website since 2001.

Liberty and Law complained about the offensive racial caricatures of the black characters portrayed, reminiscent of the treatment given to Africans in Herg,'s 1931 book Tintin in the Congo.

The CRE made rapid progress with the Commission for Employment, Social Affairs and Equal Opportunities. On 21 August the CRE told Liberty and Law that the Commission underlined to them that it was "not their intention to be offensive to any group or individual and are looking into the matter". Just a few hours later Commissioner Spidla's spokesperson asked the Communications Directorate General to remove the comic from its website.

Source. The comics concerned are at the moment still up here.

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"Prisons are worth every penny"

Post below lifted from Surber. See the original for links

Norwegian officials estimate that after sentencing, 20 percent of Norway's criminals don't bother to show up for prison. That is because until very recently it was not against the law in Norway to skip out of prison. Norway's legislature recently changed that law, but prison officials haven't gotten around to implementing the law. This makes me wonder about the 80 percent of Norway's convicted criminals who do show up for prison. Are they really that stupid?

Not surprisingly, Norway's crime rate is double that of the United States. In 2006, Norway had 86.3 crimes reported for every 1,000 people, according to Statistics Norway. In the United States, reported crimes were 39.8 per 1,000 people, according to the FBI. The violent crime rates are similar: 5.5 per 1,000 people in Norway, 4.7 per 1,000 people in the United States.

No, for violent crime, one has to head north to Canada, where there are 9.5 violent crimes for every 1,000 people. That figure is down 5 percent from 1996. The numbers are from Statistics Canada. That's double the violent crime rate in the United States.

Anyone who is surprised has not been paying attention. We are told that the United States leads the world in its prison population. This may be true. Roughly 1/2 of 1 percent of Americans are in prison. The upside is that is nearly 1.4 million robbers, muggers, killers and rapists who are not out robbing, mugging, killing and raping.

A certain percentage of inmates are in prison for drug offenses. One estimate is over 20 percent. But drug offenders are mainly dealers who are serving time in federal prison. Getting into Mount Olive usually requires more than smoking a joint or two....

The state of West Virginia spends about $100 million on prisons. That is about 2.5 percent of the state's $4 billion general revenue budget. The prisons are worth every penny. Prisons keep more children from being molested. Prisons keep more people from being killed. Prisons keep more drunken drivers off the road. Some say the nation is becoming a "prison state." I grew up in a high crime area in Cleveland where no one ventured out after dark. That's a prison state. The choice is this: Either have a high incarceration rate or have a high crime rate. Norway and Canada have made their choice. America has made hers.

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ELSEWHERE

Iraqi terrorists caught along Mexico border: "President Bush's top intelligence aide has confirmed that Iraqi terrorists have been captured coming into the United States from Mexico. The confirmation comes from National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell, who talked about the situation in an interview with the El Paso Times recently. "Coming up through the Mexican border is a path," McConnell said. "Now, are they doing it in great numbers? No, because we're finding them and we're identifying them and we've got watch lists and we're keeping them at bay." But, he said, "There are numerous situations where people are alive today because we caught them (terrorists)."

Humans not just "big-brained apes," : "In discussions on animal intelligence, it's fashionable to play up animals' smarts and their similarities to humans. And many studies provide fodder for such thinking. But a new study, reassessing much past research, offers a different perspective: it argues that key humananimal differences are often overlooked. Humans are more than just "bigbrained apes," as Charles Darwin called them in 1871, wrote the author, psychologist David Premack. Premack didn't challenge the findings of past studies. But he argued that they often focus on animalhuman similaritiesstriking us repeatedly with examples of how animals are "so like us"while glossing over the vast realms of activity where they're really quite unlike us. That leads to the false idea that animals have humanlike abilities, he said. Only since the late 1990s has research challenged that notion, by revealing microscopic features unique to human brains, Premack wrote. These studies have found "enhanced wiring, and forms of connectivity among nerve cells not found in any animal." One such finding, he added, involved a newfound type of neuron, or brain cell, that's far more numerous and larger in humans than in any of their ape relatives.

TV losing out -- good for bloggers: "Time spent on the internet is set to surpass time spent watching TV in the average American household, according to the results of an IBM survey released Wednesday. Overall, 19% of respondents said they spend six or more hours a day on the Internet, versus 9% for TV. More telling, 60% reported that they spend one to four hours using the Internet, versus 66% who spend the time watching TV. Of course, the time spent on the Internet includes growing consumption of online video, according to the global survey of about 2,000 respondents (including 885 Americans) conducted in April-June of this year. Globally, 67% of consumers say they watch video on the Internet, or would like to do so.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here or here or here

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"Why should the German be interested in the liberation of the Jew, if the Jew is not interested in the liberation of the German?... We recognize in Judaism, therefore, a general anti-social element of the present time... In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.... Indeed, in North America, the practical domination of Judaism over the Christian world has achieved as its unambiguous and normal expression that the preaching of the Gospel itself and the Christian ministry have become articles of trade... Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist". Who said that? Hitler? No. It was Karl Marx. See also here and here and here.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialistisch) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party".

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