Tuesday Post

From Russia, with birthday greetings.


Happy birthday, Walter Koening!


Mais oui! France bans full veils in public:

The French parliament passed a law Tuesday prohibiting wearing a full-face veil in public, meaning a ban will come into force early next year if it is not overturned by senior judges.

The Senate passed the bill by 246 votes to one and, having already cleared the lower house in July, the bill will now be reviewed by the Constitutional Council, which has a month to confirm its legality.

The text makes no mention of Islam, but President Nicolas Sarkozy’s government promoted the law as a means to protect women from being forced to wear Muslim full-face veils such as the burqa or the niqab.

Once in force, the law provides for a six-month period of “education” to explain to women already wearing a face veil that they face arrest and a fine if they continue to do so in any public space.

A woman who chooses to defy the ban will receive a fine of US$195 or a course of citizenship lessons. A man who forces a woman to go veiled will be fined and serve a jail term.

“This is not about security or religion, but respecting our republican principles,” Justice Minister Michele Alliot-Marie declared before the vote.

“France, land of secularism, guarantees respect for all religions (but) hiding the face under a face-covering veil is against public social order, whether it is forced or voluntary,” she said.

This is progressive. Why should a woman be forced to hide her identity? Why would a woman flaunt a total disregard for another country's rules and customs? I've always the so-called voluntary wearing of these horrid garments (if not forced) was to express a total contempt for Western values. No more thumbing one's ridiculous medieval cultural retardation at the West. At least not so much in France.


Related:

Most Canadians agree with a proposed Quebec law that would refuse all government services to women wearing the niqab or burka, an Angus Reid poll has found.

Ninety-five per cent of Quebecers support the proposed law, which would bar the face veil from government offices, schools and other publicly funded institutions, said the poll, conducted for The Gazette and released yesterday.

In the rest of Canada, three out of four people agreed with Bill 94, which was tabled on Wednesday by the government of Jean Charest. The bill would require all public-sector employees to have their faces uncovered, as well as any citizen using government services, such as someone applying for a medicare card.

If I can't wear a mask while entering a bank, wear spectacles for a passport photo or not have all my toiletries thrown out before I board an airplane, then no one can proceed to live a public life covered. How absurd that this should even have been a discussion.

Horror of horrors!

Canada should introduce health-care user fees and allow the private sector to have a bigger role in delivering medicine as health-care spending increasingly becomes an anchor around the neck of the economy, the OECD sharply warns in its latest survey of the Canadian economy.

The Canadian government has taken choice out of healthcare, charged the taxpayer up the wazoo for it and now faces a demographic death spiral (yes, I'm afraid it is racist and unrealistic to expect immigrants to pay the taxes we won't pay and have the children we won't have. Wrap your heads around it.) Who is going to foot the thirty billion dollar bill it will take by 2014 to fund healthcare?



What? The hell?

The Obama administration will soon notify Congress of an arms package for Saudi Arabia worth up to US$60-billion, a potentially record-breaking deal that may help counter Iran's growing regional muscle. A senior U.S. defence official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said yesterday he expected the Saudis to initially commit to US$30-billion in purchases, but that could double. The package would include 84 new F-15 fighter jets and upgrades to another 70 of them. The regional buildup comes amid deepening international concern about Iran's moves to bolter its military capability, including nuclear work the West believes is aimed at developing atomic bombs.

If you want evidence that Obama is not only a fool but a reckless monster, look no further than this. The Saudis- who fund terrorism, by the way- have infinite scads of cash from oil. Let them fund and wage their own war against the Iranians.



Oh, by the way, lazy hack TV writers, stop spitting out scripts that involve complex arcane American plots in which big oil companies hide behind the scenes and try to kill or wage war in oil-producing Third World states, especially in the light of domestic oil production (like Alberta or Alaska). It's total pig crap.



Sorry. Had to get that off my chest.




Look to your own house:

The woman who’s taste-tested every flavor of ice cream from Maine to Spain is out dictating gastronomical edicts to the National Restaurant Association. With the help of Cass Sunstein, the First Lady of BBQ has decided to “nudge” Americans towards what she thinks kids should be eating because, God knows, parents and restaurateurs haven’t a clue.

The same woman who ordered hot fudge sundaes while eating her way across the North and Southeast of America is now “plead[ing] with restaurants to take a little butter or cream out of their dishes, use low fat milk and provide apple slices or carrots as a default side dish on the kids' menu.” One can’t help but wonder whether Sasha would have agreed to being prodded toward carrot-flavored frozen skim milk in lieu of the “melon and raspberry” ice cream concoction Mom purchased for her on the notorious Spanish “private mother-daughter” trip.

Part time nutritionist, full time First Lady Michelle believes restaurants need to “rethink the food they offer and reformulate their menus to help combat childhood obesity.” Wonder if Michelle felt led to speak to the chef at Stewsman’s Lobster Pound, in Bar Harbor, Maine, about revising the menu. It was at the “Pound” that Michelle and Barry scarfed cholesterol-laden crustaceans while the girls devoured baskets of shrimp, which the menu described as “locally netted …cooked up crispy with Cole slaw, French fries and tartar sauce.

As much as it appalls my sweet-teeth to see lazy parenting and the corpulent results it bears, it's not my business and it is hardly the business of one whose own kids indulge in the occasional ice cream (or children's book). Just saying.



I just like the "shadow shogun" meme. It sounds like a cool movie:

Ichiro Ozawa may become Japan's next prime minister today -- the third this year. Blunt, gruff, intimidating and opinionated--he recently said Americans were "simple-minded" and declared flatly, "I don't like British people"--Mr. Ozawa is the ultimate insider, a "shadow shogun" who has been making deals in political backrooms for 41 years.

He is nicknamed "The Destroyer" because he was responsible for wrecking three political parties in two decades. Yet he remains one of Japan's most effective political strategists and his supporters regard him as the "god of elections."

The son of a powerful politician in the long-ruling Liberal Democratic party (LDP), which dominated Japan's post-war politics, Mr. Ozawa broke with the party 17 years ago and, after making and breaking several opposition groupings, almost single-handedly organized the coalition that finally ended 50 years of LDP rule in August last year.

Now, the 68-year-old power broker is moving to seize control of the new government by challenging Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan for the leadership of the ruling Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ).

In a fiercely fought 2½-week-long party election, Mr. Ozawa has vowed to restore stability and end the drift in Japanese politics. He has promised to revitalize the country's sluggish economy through stimulus spending and said he wants to wrestle the real power of government away from Japan's bureaucrats and give it back to the country's politicians.

What a fickle country Japan is! I'd worry more about its declining population, North Korea and its greedy owner, China, and the fact that their economic policies haven't been effective than switching leaders like socks.

Scratch a "greenie", find a racist:

Immigration is a contentious issue in America, so much so that even seemingly inseparable interest groups find themselves divided. Currently members of the environmental movement, while not in a dispute of Montague/Capulet proportions, are torn between their liberal allegiance and empirical evidence.

According to the Center for Immigration Studies, it is estimated that immigrants to the United States have more children than native born Americans and produce about four times more carbon than they would in their country of origin.

In 2009, Philip Cafaro and Winthrop Staples III published a report which examined the detrimental environmental effects of immigration to the United States, specifically the vast increase in population. “At the current level of 1.5 million immigrants per year, America’s population of 306 million is set to increase to over 700 million people by 2100,” they wrote, indicating that an increase in population would be more of a strain on the ecosystem. “Conversely, scaling back immigration to 200,000 per year would greatly reduce America’s population growth, according to studies by the U.S. Census Bureau.”

“Obviously, we haven’t figured out how to create a sustainable society with 300 million inhabitants. It’s not plausible to think we will be able to do so with two or three times as many people,” the report continued, before concluding, “Americans must choose between allowing continued high levels of immigration and creating a sustainable society.”

If anthropogenic global warming and sustainability are among the central pillars of environmentalism, one would think there would be unanimous opposition to open borders in the environmental community, but the situation is more complex.

Roy Beck, executive director of NumbersUSA, explained that as a key part of the liberal community, many environmentalists –who understand that immigration harms the environment — are afraid to take a stand against it because it is not politically correct to do so and it will upset the liberal political establishment.

“You speak to these national environmental leaders off the record and you see all of them realize this, there is not one who doesn’t recognize how important population is to this environmental discussion,” Beck told The Daily Caller. “They know it. But they are fearful of creating interruption and dissension within their own ranks.”

Many environmentalist groups have their hands tied to do or say anything against prevailing immigration talking points due to their alliances with groups supporting immigration reform and a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants in the United States. “None of the national environmental groups want to be the first ones to stick their heads out in this cause,” Beck said. “There is an entire network set up to stifle conversation by calling groups that speak out ‘racist,’ or ‘xenophobic,’ etc. Nobody wants to step out on their own…It shows just how much ideology, political correctness, and fear controls these people.”

How the heads of these green-bots must explode. They have to support illegal immigration because they hate George Bush but their unfounded environmental theories on race and its effect on the ecosystem demand that illegal immigrants must be pushed out. What to do? What to do?

If you are looking for a really pricey cheese sandwich, look no further.