Genocide in Zimbabwe?

Read this from Gateway Pundit:

Please stop ignoring and denying what's happening. Would you like to be protected from the truth and then if we are eliminated how would you feel? Surely you would say "if only we knew how bad it really was we could have helped in some way". I know we chose to stay here and so we "deserve" what's coming to us. For now we ourselves, have food, shelter, a little fuel and a bit of money for the next meal - but what is going to happen next? Will they start on our houses? All property is going to belong to the State now. We no longer have SW radio which told us everything that was happening because the government jammed it out of existence - we don't have any reporters, and no one is allowed to photograph. If we had reporters here they would have an absolute field day. Even the pro government Herald has written that people are shocked, stunned, bewildered and blown mindless by the wanton destruction of everyone's homes which are supposed to be "illegal", but which a huge percentage of them actually do have licenses for.

Please - have some compassion and HELP by sending out this report so that something can be DONE! Please pray for us!

Cloudburst Mumbai

Cloudburst Mumbai is a group blog which is covering the monsoon floods in India.

Racial profiling

The news that police will target particular ethnic groups has been getting a lot of attention around the blogosphere today. While civil libertarians will be uncomfortable with this, it is the only rational approach to the threat of suicide bombers. To divert precious police resources into targeting the rest of the population would be criminal at a time like this.

The government is unfortunately now caught in a bit of a dilemma. They are now going to have to explain why racial profiling is acceptable where terrorism is concerned but is beyond the pale for other crimes.

This is disgusting

Survey reported in the Herald today.

SEVEN in 10 of Scotland's hidden unemployed would not take a job if offered one, government figures have revealed. The Labour Force Survey for 2004 found that 69.9% of those classed as economically inactive did not want to work, compared with 66.3% in 2003

This is what Labour party supporters are in favour of.

Must read

Laban Tall seems to have found his way to the Pub Philosopher at about the same time as me tonight. In the comments there is a link to a very important review of community relations in Bradford just before the riots there a few years back. It was written by the council's race relations officer and paints a disturbing picture of how the asian community's attitude to the host country has changed in the second and third generations.

Immigrants come to a country expecting to change their lifestyles. They can and often do maintain key elements of their culture for generations, particularly their religion, but in many ways they adopt the dominant culture in such aspects as work, dress, leisure, housing and family composition. Colonists do not, they come into a country to displace the existing culture and establish their own. Colonists impose their language and customs. Once these facets are established, further incomers become immigrants accepting the society they enter.

From colonist to immigrant is the dominant pattern historically, however, this process seems to be thrown into reverse in Bradford.

Laban has written a very good precis of the report. Read the whole thing.

Maybe it's terrorism only if you blow up licence fee payers

As was widely noted on the blogosphere, the BBC has now made it clear that the 7/7 attacks in London were in fact "terrorism".

Knowing that the T word is not banned on its bulletins we should now be able to get a better idea of what constitutes terrorism in the minds of the liberal elite that consitute the ranks of our national broadcaster.

The insurgents/militants around the Moslem world have been giving the BBC plenty of opportunity to demonstrate their understanding of the word.

First off, Baghdad lorry bomb targets police. No mention of terrorists here. This was apparently the actions of some "insurgents".

Meanwhile in Egypt, there was a multiple suicide bombing. We can be fairly sure that the BBC feels the T word is inappropriate here as they dont use it (except when quoting condemnation by various politicians) in any of the three articles to date. There are bombers, and militants, but no terrorists.

Those who follow such things will know that the BBC doesn't feel that blowing up Israeli bars and so on counts as terrorism. This policy is borne out by today's report on the shooting of a husband and wife in soon to be evacuated Gaza. Israelis killed in Gaza shooting. Once again it appears to have been those pesky militants - certainly not any terrorists involved.

Now the implications of Michael Grade's statement on the use of the T word are that we are all none the wiser. Apparently blowing up London tube trains is definitely terrorism. Blowing up Iraqis or Egyptians isn't. Shooting Israelis isn't. It's very hard to see what reasonable policy could explain the differences here, and I hope that someone at the BBC (and preferably Mr Grade) could let us know the thinking. To the outsider like me it looks as though the policy is that terrorists blow up British people while militants and insurgents blow up foreigners, a position that doesn't strike me as very politically correct and not one that is likely to endear the Beeb to its World Service audience.

Joking apart, if, behind it all, the BBC is worrying about its World Service audience then in adopting the approach to the T- word that they have, they must have made the assumption that there are more people in the world who want them to take a non-judgemental view of terrorism as compared to those who don't. If they're right, it tells us something pretty frightening about the world. Whether they're right or wrong it tells us something is very wrong with the BBC.

Land of the nearly free

Here is a good post from a new Scottish blog called Land of the nearly free. It appears that Scotland is being run by a bunch of teachers and social workers, a fact that explains a great deal about the state of the Scottish economy. Here in the frozen north, the ever-expanding state is beginning to make the former communist dictatorships of the Eastern bloc look like dens of capitalist excess.

What amazes me is that absolutely nobody I know in Scotland seems to either know or care a jot about it. I'm not sure if it is more amazing that the English don't seem to have noticed that they are paying for this socialist cornucopia.

One can't help but feel that eventually someone south of the border will notice and try to do something about it. It will interesting to see if the Scots still have the balls to make a go of their own economy or if the entrepreneurial urge is now completely gone.

Work to do

Lots of work on at the moment I'm afraid. In the meantime why not go here and vote in Yahoo's poll of what TB (who my kids refer to as Tony Bleuugh) should do with his presidency of the EU. The "Get Britain out of it" option looks good to me.

Via Snafu at Not Proud of Britain

What's a blogger

I occasionally visit the Online Parliamentarian blog, whose author is trying to get accreditation to the Scottish Parliament. It was depressingly predictable to hear that a senior media officer at the parliament was not only unwilling to recommend accreditation but didn't even know what a blog was!

It does strike me that this is strongly suggestive that the officer concerned is not actually competent to do their job when the biggest development in media in the last 25 years (if not longer) is a mystery to them. Anyway, readers may like to go over and cheer Mr Online up - he sounds a bit fed up.