Anti Obama author deported from Keeeee-nya. (Not Kennnn-ya, sorry.)

How very, very interesting, and also convenient.

Small asteroid to hit Sudan (good)…hope it hits sodding Government House and not some poor-people.

David Davis

Might f*** some sense into that government of its. Tipped off by Samizdata just now, I am looking for real footage if possible….perhaps someone has some:-

Libertarians ought not only to be unhappy that this object has only just been spotted, er, like yesterday, but that private space research and exploration is still so costly. We already know that we can’t trust governments to get off their arses and devote the right sort of time and energy to this problem. Instead of forcing people like banks to spend so much thought and effort to getting round financial regulations and government-engineered-market-destruction, could they not just pack up and bog off, so that money can be lent to entrepreneurs who might find a solution?

Barack Obama: more hero-worship and idolatry.

David Davis

Update: 05.11.08. he’s been elected. We’ll have to make the best of it I guess. the next four years will be what the ancient Chinese would have called “interesting times”.

Here’s our earlier Obama stuff today if you missed it….

I must be living in the Stone Age – this has had about 10-gazillion-grillion views and I have only just found it…lovely little girl, so exquisitely shaggable: what a waste. Hope she’s really a conservative but is wisely not telling:-

This is supposed to be a “European” song….doesn’t sound like it to me…it somehow doesn’t, er, quite…fit…into what I’d call the Western Canon of Music:-

What a ridiculous prat he is being made out to be. Have to do my bit for America I suppose.

Do you think parents ought to be able to spank their children, or not?

David Davis

UPDATE: this poll has only been added to this post on 16th November 2008. Wish i’d done it before.

There’s yet another boring go at this nonsense in “parliament”. but some bit of machinery called “Sir” “William” “Utting”, pssibly another robodroid from Pol-Pottistan, which has got accidentally recorded as a human being via good prostheses having been applied, thinks otherwise:-

A recent opinion poll showed that seven out of 10 parents in this country admit to smacking their children – and would oppose a law banning physical punishment.

Sir William Utting, spokesman for the Children are Unbeatable Alliance, said: “This is one of those principled reforms on which politicians must make a stand whatever the pollsters might say.

“It is about being serious about equality and about the human rights of the child. The law must send the clear message that hitting children is as unacceptable as hitting anyone else.”

The problem about young anatomically-modern-hominids (Homo Sapiens and so forth) is that their pups are born and would continue to be, if not trained, functionally unsocialised. We could probably date the need to do something drastic with the little evil buggers as being about the time that “language” came into being. In order to be able to bring about not only post-capitalist liberal civilisations with technology and reason, but also even pre-capitalist barbarian ones (like what is vehemently proposed by some authorities) we need to be able to spank sense into our children.

Don’t get us wrong. We’re not suggesting that we will have to, or want the power to, spank other people’s children (not yet! Mr “Nobody” is currently suggesting it!) – although if socialism continues to triumph, then this measure will have to be agreed and will have to come – we only want to be allowed to spamk our own children for now. This is not “political correctness gone mad”, yet.

And….Sir William….. are the rights of a child REALLY the same as the rights of an adult? I don’t think so, do you? Think about it…….

Good old chap, grand old man. (Humorous writer too, not like lefties at all.)

My boy, the Libertarian Alliance’s Youtube-video-reasearch-officer, loves his books.

Here’s what he says just now – it’s worth repeating in full:-

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Death’s homework

I’ve been diagnosed with cancer – a treatable kind, but still I’m ruminating on God and mortality

All comments (31)

• PJ O’Rourke
• The Guardian,
• Tuesday October 7 2008
• Article history

I looked death in the face. All right, I didn’t. I glimpsed him in a crowd. I’ve been diagnosed with cancer, of a very treatable kind. I’m told I have a 95% chance of survival. Come to think of it, as a drinking, smoking, saturated-fat hound, my chance of survival has been improved by cancer.

I still cursed God, as we all do when we get bad news and pain. Not even the most faith-impaired among us shouts: “Damn quantum mechanics!”, “damn organic chemistry!”, or “damn chaos and coincidence!”

I believe in God. God created the world. Obviously pain had to be included in God’s plan. Otherwise we’d never learn that our actions have consequences. Our cave-person ancestors, finding fire warm, would conclude that curling up to sleep in the middle of the flames would be even warmer. Cave bears would dine on roast ancestor, and we’d never get any bad news and pain because we wouldn’t be here.

But God, Sir, in Your manner of teaching us about life’s consequential nature, isn’t death a bit … um … extreme, pedagogically speaking? I know the lesson we’re studying is difficult. But dying is more homework than I was counting on. Also, it kind of messes up my vacation planning. Can we talk after class? Maybe if I did something for extra credit?

Why can’t death – if we must have it – be always glorious, as in The Iliad? Of course death continues to be so, sometimes, with heroes in Fallujah and Kandahar. But nowadays, death more often comes drooling on the toilet seat in the nursing home, or bleeding under the crushed roof of a teen-driven SUV, or breathless in a deluxe hotel suite filled with empty drug bottles and a minor public figure whose celebrity expiration date has passed.

I have, of all the inglorious things, a malignant haemorrhoid. What colour bracelet does one wear for that? And what slogan is apropos? Perhaps it can be embroidered around the ruffle on a cover for my embarrassing little doughnut buttocks pillow.

Furthermore, I am a logical, sensible, pragmatic Republican, and my diagnosis came just weeks after Teddy Kennedy’s. That he should have cancer of the brain, and I should have cancer of the ass … well, I’ll say a rosary for him and hope he has a laugh at me. After all, what would I do, ask God for a more dignified cancer? Pancreatic? Liver? Lung? No doubt death is one of those mysterious ways in which God famously works. Except, on consideration, death isn’t mysterious. Do we really want everyone to be around for ever? I’m thinking about my own family, specifically a certain stepfather I had as a kid.

Then there’s the matter of our debt to death for life as we know it. I believe in God. I also believe in evolution. If death weren’t around to “finalise” the Darwinian process, we’d all still be amoebas. We’d eat by surrounding pizzas with our belly flab and have sex by lying on railroad tracks waiting for a train to split us into significant others.

I consider evolution to be more than a scientific theory. I think it’s a call to God. God created a free universe. He could have created any kind of universe He wanted. But a universe without freedom would have been static and meaningless – the taxpayer-funded-art-in-public-places universe.

Rather, God created a universe full of cosmic whatchmajiggers and subatomic whosits free to interact. And interact they did, becoming matter and organic matter and organic matter that replicated itself and life. And that life was free, as amoral as my cancer cells.

Life forms could exercise freedom to an idiotic extent, growing uncontrolled, thoughtless and greedy to the point that they killed the source of their own fool existence. But, with the help of death, matter began to learn right from wrong – how to save itself and its ilk, how to nurture, how to love (or, anyway, how to build a Facebook page), and how to know God and His rules.

Death is so important that God visited death upon His own son, thereby helping us learn right from wrong well enough that we may escape death for ever and live eternally in God’s grace. (Although this option is not usually open to reporters.)

I’m not promising that the Pope will back me up about all of the above. But it’s the best I can do by my poor lights about the subject of mortality and free will.

Thus, the next time I glimpse death … well, I’m not going over and introducing myself. I’m not giving the grim reaper fist daps. But I’ll remind myself to try, at least, to thank God for death. And then I’ll thank God, with all my heart, for whiskey.

• PJ O’Rourke is a correspondent for the Weekly Standard and the Atlantic

© Los Angeles Times

Words now banned by The Guardian … good name for a newspaper out of “1984″

David Davis

From last week’s Spectator:-

According to Rod Liddle, these are some of the words and phrases banned by the Guardian:

active homosexual; career women; Third World; blacks; Asians; Australasia; Bangalore; primitive African tribes; crippled; in a wheelchair; hare lip; ethnic minorities; handicapped; spinster; committed suicide; gypsies; Bombay; illegitimate daughter; air hostess; Siamese twins; Calcutta; deaf ears; illegal asylum seeker; province of Northern Ireland; grandmother; bachelor.

Full article:

http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-magazine/features/2189336/part_3/why-has-the-word-grandmother-been-banned-by-the-guardian.thtml

What’s an “Obama Youth” video, and why does it sound like the Hitler-Jugend?

(AND) Here’s our later post about him…..enjoy the lot below first!

David Davis

Pasted below is what I have just found. Obviously the one I wanted has been pulled, but it may turn up somewhere else:-

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‘Obama Youth’ video emerges on YouTube

A teacher has been suspended after filming an “Obama Youth” group marching and chanting slogans while dressed in military uniforms.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/uselection2008/barackobama/3150657/Obama-Youth-video-emerges-on-YouTube.html

By Jon Swaine
Last Updated: 10:23AM BST 07 Oct 2008

Critics of the video said it was improper to make children support politicians Photo: YouTube

Is this just manly"PT", or.....

Authorities at the Urban Community Leadership Academy in Kansas City, Missouri took action after a video of the pupils, who are thought to be aged 14 and 15, emerged on YouTube.

The video, which was titled “Obama Youth – Junior Fraternity Regiment”, has since been removed, but copies have been re-posted.

It shows 10 teenage boys marching into a classroom, making gestures with their arms and reciting “alpha, omega”.

After coming to a halt, each in turn shouts a personal mantra associating their personal goals with Mr Obama.

The first says: “Because of Obama, I aspire to be the next doctor”; the next, “Because of Obama, I aspire to be the next lawyer”.

Each then shouts Mr Obama’s campaign slogan: “Yes we can”, before carrying out a drill combining the recital of slogans and aggressive physical gestures. The boys then each recite a different benefit of Mr Obama’s healthcare plan.

Joyce McGautha, the school’s superintendent, told US media that the school did not approve of the video. She said that the teacher, who has not been named in anticipation of legal action, was suspended, and that further drill activities were stopped.

YouTube viewers were quick to criticise Mr Obama’s campaign for the video’s content, and to compare it to 20th century political youth movements.

One wrote: “This should scare the hell out of any freedom loving American. The Democrats, their accomplices in the media and the schools, are producing the next generation of Hitler Youth. Welcome to the People’s Socialist Republic of America.”

The video’s emergence comes soon after that of Sing for Change, a clip in which 22 children between 5 and 12 were seen singing a song praising the Democratic presidential candidate. Critics said it was improper to make children support politicians.

Here are some of the videos that have not been pulled yet:-

I don’t go quite as positively for the “socialist realism” art-theme on the start of this one:-

I think I’ve found the original one talked about….either it’s very badly acted, or else it’s a wind-up, and we’ve all been had!…

I don’t find it very convincing, and the guys’ hearts are clearly not in the thing. But the question remains, that unless it’s clever republican stunt, who put them up to it?