Doctors without scruples
By MICHAEL FREUND:
For despite its virtuous profile, and its professed impartiality free of a political agenda, the group has a decidedly dubious track-record vis-à-vis the Jewish state.
The latest example of this was on display in recent weeks in a remote part of Africa, when a team of five Israeli specialists flew to the Congolese city of Uvira to treat 50 villagers who had been severely burned in a devastating fire that claimed more than 230 lives. Working around the clock, they treated the wounded, trained Congolese doctors in performing skin grafts and donated a ton of medical equipment to local medical facilities.
And yet, incredibly enough, these angels of compassion received a distinctly cold reception from MSF volunteers working in the area, who seemed to go out of their way to demonstrate their displeasure at having to work in the vicinity of Israelis.
As Haaretz reported (July 18), the Israeli medical staff “got the distinct impression that the volunteers did not wish to be around them.”
The treatment meted out to the Israelis was such that it left Dr. Eyal Winkler, deputy director of plastic and reconstructive surgery at the Sheba Medical Center, in a state of disbelief. “This is the reality today,” he said. “Doctors from international aid organizations treat a delegation of volunteer Israeli doctors to Congo as though we were occupiers.”
[...]
UTTERLY DISGUSTING. MSF should be ashamed of itself and apologise immediately.
The fix was in JournoList e-mails reveal how the liberal media shaped the 2008 election
By JONATHAN STRONG:
In 2007, when Washington Post blogger Ezra Klein founded JournoList, an online gathering place for several hundred liberal journalists, academics and political activists, he imagined a discussion group that would connect young writers to top sources.
But in the heat of a bitter presidential campaign in 2008, the list’s discussions veered into collusion and coordination at key political moments, documents revealed this week by The Daily Caller show.
In a key episode, JournoList members openly plotted to bury attention on then-candidate Barack Obama’s controversial pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. The Washington Independent’s Spencer Ackerman, for instance, suggested an effective tactic to distract from the issue would be to pick one of Obama’s critics, “Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists.”
Conservative critics of Washington’s journalistic establishment have long charged the media with a striking liberal bias. But those critics have also said the problem was mostly unintentional, the result of a press corps made up mostly of Democratic-leaning scribes.
Yet JournoList’s discussions show an influential left-wing faction of the media participating in a far more intentional sort of liberal bias.
[...]
‘a purported scientist unwilling to stand behind his data or conclusions’
Michael “Hockey Stick” Mann hides atop the climate change ivory tower
US ‘preferred’ compassionate release of Lockerbie bomber
TELEGRAPH [UK]:
Scotland’s First Minister Alex Salmond said today that while America ”didn’t want” Abdelbaset al-Megrahi to be released, they would rather see him freed on account of his terminal cancer, than under the prisoner transfer agreement between the UK and Libya.
Megrahi is the only person convicted of the 1988 bombing in which 270 people were killed.
He was released in August last year after doctors said he was dying of prostate cancer and had three months to live – prompting fury in the US.
Last week, President Barack Obama told a White House press conference that the US had been ”surprised, disappointed and angry” about Megrahi being released.
[...]
The Census: A letter to CBC
The following is a letter written by a TBK reader to the CBC:
Dear CBC:
Decades ago, as P.E.T. [Pierre Trudeau - ed.] launched his great society-sic-he once famously said that the state has no place in the bedrooms of the nation, or words to that effect.
And neither has the state any business asking how many bedrooms we have.About three hundred and fifty years ago, many people in England were opposed to the idea of personal income tax in principle, holding that the disclosure of income was a threat to personal liberty and an unwarranted intrusion into private matters. So the greedy monarch sought a window tax instead. A sneaky income tax by any other name, enforced by the window surveyors.
And so it is today. The state, ever growing, ever intrusive, uses its near unassailable power to badger, cajole, threaten and imprison those who oppose the national census, a device which has no purpose but to facilitate the distribution of income to the favoured clients of the state.
When I was born, the government was scarcely aware of my existence. I had a birth certificate issued, and later a passport. Local authorities noticed my passage through school, but nobody dared ask me if I was a shirt lifter, my marital status, or the size of my income, at least not in a census.
I do not need or should have to justify my desire for privacy. The claim that all census data is private is irrelevant. I am not a subject of the state and neither should I face the threat of confiscation of my property or imprisonment for refusing to comply.
Among those famously opposed to the intrusive state was John Stuart Mill, who set forth principles of individual liberty, among others, in his work, Principles of Political Economy. Influential as he still is, it seems that his words are blindly ignored by the usual suspects, the meedja, the CBC, academics, the public service, and even worse, private business and charities who opine that without the collection of reams of data about each and every individual in the land that somehow society will fail. Utter hogwash. What they mean is that their fiefdoms and private businesses will have to shift for themselves.
Without resistance to the collection of data, it will only be a matter of time before any jumped-up jack-ass will be empowered to ask, “your papers.”
Who cares that the head of the government statistic’s department has resigned in protest over the abolition of the compulsory long census form? Well, I suppose the empire builders in government departments do, the corporate welfare bums (CBC), private enterprise, and any number of ivory tower residents who appear to contribute very little in exchange for their large salaries, perks and pensions and of course the snivelling, whining Left who are not only afraid of an independent free thinking society not beholden to the state, but that anybody would think they know better than they, the establishment elites.
Less government is good. The state is not, as the Liberals and hangers-on believe, a force for good. Look at the awful mess the state has made, left our grandchildren and beyond indebted to the tune of hundreds of billions as the government “does good.” Well, that is one interpretation. Another is politicians buying votes with other people’s money-viz Ruby Dhalla.
No, government does not know best. Never did.
On the bright side the U.S. and the U.K. are starting to listen to the people. Both are considering abolishing their census completely.
I vote!!!!! I vote, I vote.
Dave
Five Minutes With Andrew Breitbart
Matt Lewis:
Q: Ann Coulter was on Fox recently, saying you were “set up,” meaning that someone intentionally provided you with a selectively edited copy of Shirley Sherrod’s speech. Were you taken advantage of?
A: I don’t believe that I was set up. [The person who provided the video clip of Sherrod's NAACP speech] contacted me back in early April and sent me a DVD, but it didn’t transfer properly. . . . I never followed up on it, but I had it in the back of my mind that [Sherrod's comments at the NAACP] occurred. So I contacted him [the video source] after two or three days of the mainstream media’s colluding with the NAACP [which passed a resolution condemning racist elements within the Tea Party], giving wall-to-wall coverage, negatively branding the Tea Party as racist. I got the tape in two excerpts that were sent to me, because I couldn’t wait to get this story. I knew from past experience that I had a news cycle to get this out.
Q: You say you couldn’t wait to get this story out. Was it your past experience challenging the allegations that someone at a D.C. Tea Party rally used a racial epithet that informed your decision?
A: I couldn’t get any mainstream media to cover that story [Breitbart's offer of $100,000], even though they played up the ‘N word’ allegation. And so, given that we were in day seven of this successful propaganda campaign asking the question, ‘Is the Tea Party racist?’ — and because the standard they set was that someone in an audience expressing a racist thought — like at the Tea Party it was often based merely on an infiltrator holding a [offensive or racist] sign — the [Sherrod] video was evidence. You had people in the audience abiding by her discriminating against a white farmer — clapping and agreeing. That is a [liberal organizer [Saul] Alinsky standard — hold the opposition to the standard that they set.
Q: How does the Shirley Sherrod story relate to the JournoList story where liberal journalist Spencer Ackerman suggested deflecting attention from the Reverend Wright story, which was hurting Obama, by wrongly accusing a prominent conservative of being a racist?
A: That collusion to slander by Ackerman — and the sin of omission of the other 400 people on the list — to abide by that calculated evil — shows that we have a tremendous problem in journalism today — and then they come and ask me about my tactics. I’m trying to end JournoList collusion that goes well beyond the [listserve's founder] Washington Post’s Ezra Klein’s 400 friends and collaborators, and that includes Politico and Bloomberg. Where are they firing people? Where are the questions about this monumental act of journalistic fraud? Where are the mass firings?
[...]
Don’t be misled by superficial looks at Canada’s crime statistics
By LORRIE GOLDSTEIN, Toronto Sun:
In reality, Statistics Canada’s 2009 crime stats show the same thing they’ve shown for years — our crime rate remains stubbornly, alarmingly high.
Indeed, Canada’s crime rate in 2009 was 131% higher than in 1962, when comparable stats first started being kept. Yes, you read that right.
In 1962, there were 2,771 reported crimes per 100,000 population. In 2009, 6,406 per 100,000.
As for the sub-category of violent crime, the one that most concerns people, Statistics Canada this year didn’t provide the 2009 rate in a way we can compare to 1962. (It’s now compiling all the statistics differently.)
I’ve asked Statistics Canada for that figure, and, obligingly, they’re working on it.
But I can tell you Canada’s violent crime rate in 2008 was 321% higher than in 1962 — 932 reported crimes per 100,000 population, compared to 221 per 100,000.
While the 2009 violent crime rate will be slightly lower, it will still, essentially, be triple the 1962 rate.
Clearly, we have an ongoing, serious, crime problem.
But there’s more.
[...]
The evil temptation of numbers
By David Warren, The Ottawa Citizen:
[...]
Lies, damned lies, and statistics — all are used to advance the various “progressive” agendas — and when the progressive types squeal like pigs that Harper is taking something away from them, I can’t help smiling to myself.
Decision in favour of washed out RCMP cadet who has made a career out of crying racism must be overturned
Ezra Levant:
In 1999, an immigrant from Iran named Ali Tahmourpour enrolled in the RCMP’s police academy, but washed out after just 12 weeks.
When Tahmourpour got the bad news, he had a breakdown. His classmates escorted him to the infirmary twice because he was “vomiting, shaking, hyperventilating and was incoherent.”
An RCMP psychologist declared him to be a suicide risk. Three of his fellow cadets testified, “they would be afraid to work with him in the field.” A note was put on his file: Unlike other wash-outs, Tahmourpour would not be allowed to reapply as a student.
Others might have moved on, but not Tahmourpour. He cried racism. And he ran to the Canadian Human Rights Commission, claiming the RCMP violated his “human right” to become a cop.
[...]
Desperate days for the warmists
By Christopher Booker:
Ever more risibly desperate become the efforts of the believers in global warming to hold the line for their religion, after the battering it was given last winter by all those scandals surrounding the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
One familiar technique they use is to attribute to global warming almost any unusual weather event anywhere in the world. Last week, for instance, it was reported that Russia has recently been experiencing its hottest temperatures and longest drought for 130 years. The head of the Russian branch of WWF, the environmental pressure group, was inevitably quick to cite this as evidence of climate change, claiming that in future “such climate abnormalities will only become more frequent”. He didn’t explain what might have caused the similar hot weather 130 years ago.
[...]
Christians Speak Up: Holocaust Survivors Find their Voices
By Peggy Shapiro:
They were both teenage Holocaust survivors who experienced the anti-Semitism of the church even before the Nazis entered their hometowns in Poland. The two eighty-three-year-old women, both named Mania, both short with carefully coiffed blond hair, were in the audience with over 4,000 Christian Zionists at the opening plenary of Christians United for Israel (CUFI) Summit on July 20. Seven pastors spoke, and the two women listened with incredulity to words which defied everything they had ever experienced.
[...]
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