Thirty years ago and still good. Counts for something eh?
From the same period, John Cale with Dead or Alive.
Rock with balls. Thank you John D. for getting me to know this song back in 81!
Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition.
MFBB.
"Nigeria is an example of a country on the cusp of becoming Islamic: its population is now about 50% Muslim. As a result, it is subject to continuous low-level internecine warfare, punctuated by occasional flare-ups into massive violence, such as the Christmas Day bombings that killed dozens of people.
Yet Nigeria is not a true nation. It is not a homogeneous ethnic and cultural entity, but simply a patchwork relic of British colonialism. If it had formed naturally, it would consist of at least two states: a northern one (mostly Muslim) and a southern one (mostly non-Muslim).
The devout Muslims of northern Nigeria, as represented by the terrorist group Boko Haram (“Western education is a sin”), are now trying to create a de facto sharia state in their portion of the country. That’s what the Christmas Day bombings were about. And now the follow-up is an effort to drive the Christians out of the north and into the south.
Here’s the story from Asia News:
Boko Haram Gives Three Day Ultimatum to the Christians to Flee Northern Nigeria
The “Nigerian Taliban” also advise Muslims in the south to return to the north because they risk being killed by soldiers. Thousands of Christians fleeing. The bishops reject the sectarian drift of the conflict and ask for more security, but also no retaliation.
Lagos (AsiaNews / Agencies) - Christians in northern Nigeria have three days to leave the area before a series of attacks against them: This is the ultimatum set by the radical Islamic sect Boko Haram, which has claimed responsibility for the massacres that took place Christmas day in 12 sites across the states of Yobe and Borno (northeast), Niger (West), Plateau (central Nigeria). The killings have claimed the lives of over 40 people and already thousands of Christians are fleeing in terror.
The ultimatum comes a few days after the decision by President Goodluck Jonathan (a Christian) to declare a state of emergency for the areas attacked, with the deployment of armed soldiers.
It’s interesting that Boko Haram consider it necessary to advise Muslims to flee the south of Nigeria and move north:


Europe is in the midst of a fiscal crisis caused by too much government spending, yet many of the continent’s politicians want the European Central Bank to purchase the dodgy debt of reckless welfare states such as Spain, Italy, Greece, and Portugal in order to prop up these big government policies.
So it’s especially noteworthy that economists at the European Central Bank have just produced a study showing that government spending is unambiguously harmful to economic performance. Here is a brief description of the key findings.
…we analyse a wide set of 108 countries composed of both developed and emerging and developing countries, using a long time span running from 1970-2008, and employing different proxies for government size… Our results show a significant negative effect of the size of government on growth. …Interestingly, government consumption is consistently detrimental to output growth irrespective of the country sample considered (OECD, emerging and developing countries).
There are two very interesting takeaways from this new research. First, the evidence shows that the problem is government spending, and that problem exists regardless of whether the budget is financed by taxes or borrowing. Unfortunately, too many supposedly conservative policy makers fail to grasp this key distinction and mistakenly focus on the symptom (deficits) rather than the underlying disease (big government).
The second key takeaway is that Europe’s corrupt political elite is engaging in a classic case of Mitchell’s Law, which is when one bad government policy is used to justify another bad government policy. In this case, they undermined prosperity by recklessly increasing the burden of government spending, and they’re now using the resulting fiscal crisis as an excuse to promote inflationary monetary policy by the European Central Bank.
The ECB study, by contrast, shows that the only good answer is to reduce the burden of the public sector. Moreover, the research also has a discussion of the growth-maximizing size of government.
… economic progress is limited when government is zero percent of the economy (absence of rule of law, property rights, etc.), but also when it is closer to 100 percent (the law of diminishing returns operates in addition to, e.g., increased taxation required to finance the government’s growing burden – which has adverse effects on human economic behaviour, namely on consumption decisions).







“A kind Providence has placed in our breasts a hatred of the unjust and cruel, in order that we may preserve ourselves from cruelty and injustice. They who bear cruelty, are accomplices in it. The pretended gentleness which excludes that charitable rancour, produces an indifference which is half an approbation. They never will love where they ought to love, who do not hate where they ought to hate.”

"Imagine it’s 1621 in Plymouth and, instead of the Pilgrims and the Indians gathering for the First Thanksgiving, it’s conservatives and liberals. They are sitting down to share their harvests happily and express gratitude for survival.
Yeah, right.
In truth, they’d be fighting over who brought more and who ate more. Those who didn’t get a drumstick would shatter the idyllic scene with shrieking charges of “Turkey Inequality” and wails for “my fair share.”
I jest to make a point. The point being that, 390 years after the first symbol of gratitude created by Europeans on this continent, Americans are locked in a bitter conflict of ingratitude. The tug-of-war over the turkey wishbone is now a polarizing class struggle.
The dividing line is the loaded phrase “income inequality.” It’s all about who eats and who pays.
On one level, income inequality is real, and growing. Yet as a bedrock and urgent political issue, it’s pure hokum, cooked up in the socialist faculty lounges and the back rooms where the government unions pull the strings of puppet pols. The aim is to hijack emotions and grow the government pie so favored voters get a bigger slice.
It has surprisingly wide appeal. People from the vagabonds playing drums in Zuccotti Park to the billionaire mayor of New York who rousted them, Michael Bloomberg, say income inequality is a big problem..."
"Having given up on the meaning of America, which is about expanding opportunity and liberty for everyone, income equalizers are pitting Americans against each other in a fight certain to make losers of us all."

RESOUNDING VICTORY FOR SPANISH CONSERVATIVES.
"This Sunday, November 20, the Spanish Conservative Party (PP) was the resounding victor in Spain's parliamentary elections. This much was clear after counting 75% of the votes. The PP claimed victory.
Mariano Rajoy's People's Party beat PM José Luis Zapatero's Socialist Party with utmost ease and can count on an absolute majority in Parliament.
After counting 75 per cent of the votes the PP could sign up 187 seats in the 350-seat Spanish House of Commons, the biggest score the party ever obtained. The socialists won 109 seats and have admitted their defeat.
The continuing high unemployment in Spain and the gloomy economic forecast in the country led many Spaniards in the voting booths to end Zapatero's premiership, which lasted almost eight years.
Rajoy and his PP now face the difficult task to turn around the Spanish economy and at the same time decrease the budget deficit by enhancing taxes and force through austerity measures."
..."I don't "stand with the 99%," and certainly not downwind of them. But I'm all for their "occupation" continuing on its merry way. It usefully clarifies the stakes. At first glance, an alliance of anarchists and government might appear to be somewhat paradoxical. But the formal convergence in Oakland makes explicit the movement's aims: They're anarchists for statism, wild free-spirited youth demanding more and more total government control of every aspect of life – just so long as it respects the fundamental human right to sloth. What's happening in Oakland is a logical exercise in class solidarity: the government class enthusiastically backing the breakdown of civil order is making common cause with the leisured varsity class, the thuggish union class and the criminal class in order to stick it to what's left of the beleaguered productive class. It's a grand alliance of all those societal interests that wish to enjoy in perpetuity a lifestyle they are not willing to earn. Only the criminal class is reasonably upfront about this. The rest – the lifetime legislators, the unions defending lavish and unsustainable benefits, the "scholars" whiling away a somnolent half-decade at Complacency U – are obliged to dress it up a little with some hooey about "social justice" and whatnot.
But that's all it takes to get the media and modish if insecure corporate entities to string along. Whole Foods can probably pull it off. So can Ben & Jerry's, the wholly owned subsidiary of the Anglo-Dutch corporation UniLever that nevertheless successfully passes itself off as some sort of tie-dyed Vermont hippie commune. But a chain of stores that sells shirts, ties, the garb of the corporate lackey, has a tougher sell. The class that gets up in the morning, pulls on its lousy Men's Wearhouse get-up and trudges off to work has to pay for all the other classes, and the strain is beginning to tell.
Let it be said that the "occupiers" are right on the banks: They shouldn't have been bailed out. America has one of the most dysfunctional banking systems in the civilized world, and most of its allegedly indispensable institutions should have been allowed to fail. But the Occupy Oakland types have no serious response, other than the overthrow of capitalism and its replacement by government-funded inertia.
America is seizing up before our eyes: The decrepit airports, the underwater property market, the education racket, the hyper-regulated business environment. Yet, curiously, the best example of this sclerosis is the alleged "revolutionary" movement itself. It's the voice of youth, yet everything about it is cobwebbed. It's more like an open-mike karaoke night of a revolution than the real thing. I don't mean just the placards with the same old portable quotes by Lenin et al, but also, say, the photograph in Forbes of Rachel, a 20-year-old "unemployed cosmetologist" with remarkably uncosmetological complexion, dressed in pink hair and nose ring as if it's London, 1977, and she's killing time at Camden Lock before the Pistols gig. Except that that's three-and-a-half decades ago, so it would be like the Sex Pistols dressing like the Andrews Sisters. Are America's revolting youth so totally pathetically moribund they can't even invent their own hideous fashion statements? Last weekend, the nonagenarian Commie Pete Seeger was wheeled out at Zuccotti Park to serenade the oppressed masses with "If I Had A Hammer." As it happens, I do have a hammer. Pace Mr. Seeger, they're not that difficult to acquire, even in a recession. But, if I took it to Zuccotti Park, I doubt very much anyone would know how to use it, or be able to muster the energy to do so.
At heart, Oakland's occupiers and worthless political class want more of the same fix that has made America the Brokest Nation in History: They expect to live as beneficiaries of a prosperous Western society without making any contribution to the productivity necessary to sustain it. This is the "idealism" that the media are happy to sentimentalize, and that enough poseurs among the corporate executives are happy to indulge – at least until the window smashing starts. To "occupy" Oakland or anywhere else, you have to have something to put in there. Yet the most striking feature of OWS is its hollowness. And in a strange way the emptiness of its threats may be a more telling indictment of a fin de civilization West than a more coherent protest movement could ever have mounted.
©MARK STEYN

Charlie Hebdo Offices Firebombed After It Joked About The Prophet Muhammad (Pictures) Puff Ho (hat tip Paulo)
The Paris office of the satirical French Magazine Charlie Hebdo has been firebombed and its website has been hacked. It follows the announcement that the magazine would be 'guest edited' by the Prophet Muhammad.
It has been reported that the office was gutted by fire at around 1:00am Paris time, but there were no injuries.
Patrick Pelloux, a witness to the attack, told the AFP news agency that a molotov cocktail was thrown through the window.
"Everything was destroyed," he said.
According to the Associated Press the director of the magazine said “the material damages are large”.
On Tuesday the magazine said that the Prophet Muhammad would be editing the magazine in "honour" of Islam's role in this year's uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and other Islamic countries.
"In order fittingly to celebrate the Islamist Ennahda's win in Tunisia and the NTC (National Transitional Council) president's promise that sharia would be the main source of law in Libya, Charlie Hebdo asked Muhammad to be guest editor," the editorial team said in a statement.
On Wednesday morning the magazine's website had also apparently been hacked by an Islamist group.
There have been several cases in Europe of cartoonists, journalists and publishers being threatened or attacked after depicting cartoons and pictures of the religious figure.
Charlie Hebdo was taken to court in 2007 by two Muslim groups for reprinting those cartoons, but the suit was thrown out.
