Saturday, December 27, 2008

DESMOND TUTU IS A FOOKING SCHTOOPID IDIOT.

Some exerpts from an November WaPo article by South Africa's mentally/dentally challenged Archbishop Desmond Tutu on the occasion of Obama's victory:


desmondtutu
When war began, first in Afghanistan and not long after in Iraq, we read allegations of prisoner abuse at Bagram air base in Afghanistan and of rendition to countries notorious for practicing torture. We saw the horrific images from Abu Ghraib and learned of gruesome acts performed in the name of gathering information. Sometimes the torture itself was couched in the government's euphemisms -- calling waterboarding an "interrogation technique."... To the outgoing administration's record on torture we must add a string of other policies that have damaged the standing of the United States in the world: its hostility to the Kyoto Protocol on greenhouse gases; its refusal to assent to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, establishing the ICC's role in prosecuting war crimes; its restrictions on the use of U.S. funding to fight AIDS; and the arrogant unilateralism it has employed in declaring to be enemies any countries it deemed "against us" because they were not "for us."






Oh yeah f*cking *sshole? Sorry you blistering old fool. The war did not begin in Afghanistan nor in Iraq. It began in New York, on 9/11. May I also draw your attention to the fact that your revered Kyoto Protocol is a sham and that over the period 1990-2004 greenshouse gas emission by China and India - signatories to the Protocol - actually rose by 47 and 55% respectively (compared to the US's 15.8%)? As for "the horrific images from Abu Ghraib", how about this?


plaasmoorde



One of the 1,600 murder victims, the overwhelming majority of them white, in over 10,700 attacks by blacks on white-owned South African farms since 1994. Now, one has to be very cautious by suggesting a link between these horrible murders (plaasmoorde in Afrikaans) and the ANC-dominated government, but it is a fact that the sheer brutality aimed specifically at white farmers is starkly reminiscent of the Zimbabwean example whereby the government, with disastrous results, deliberately let loose gangs of thugs on its white farmers as part of its "land reform programme". The official aim of the SA government is to transfer one third of white-owned farmland to black farmers by 2014. The friendly ties between the Zimbabwean and South African governments are well known, and the ANC has always been a hotbed of radical murderous terrorists. Isn't it entirely plausible that radical ANC elements in the SA government, with the silent approval of the "decent" cadres, have been simply applying Mugabes tactics to scare and chase away the Boers in order to facilitate South African "redistribution"? A telling ANC slogan was "Kill the Boer, Kill the Farmer" by Peter Mokaba, an ANC youth leader later turned Deputy Minister for Environmentalism and Tourism (he was also an AIDS denialist, ironically he died a couple of years back from that same disease). And then there is of course the example set by that old commie hag of a Nelson Mandela himself, caught here on tape advocating the murder of whites:





There's a gigantic body of evidence there hinting very strongly at involvement of ANC elements and even South African Police in the "plaasmoorde". Tutu must be aware of this.

But even the scandalous dismissal of the horrible murders on white farmers as random acts of murder by the SA government and important black personages like Tutu is trumped by the sheer negligence and denial with which that government treats the country's greatest peril: the AIDS endemic. Here are some conservative (?) estimates on the prevalence of HIV in the New South Africa:

National estimates based on all surveys

Based on a wide range of data, including the household and antenatal studies, UNAIDS/WHO in July 2008 published an estimate of 18.1% prevalence in those aged 15-49 years old at the end of 2007. Their high and low estimates are 15.4% and 20.9% respectively. According to their own estimate of total population (which is another contentious issue), this implies that around 5.7 million South Africans were living with HIV at the end of 2007, including 280,000 children under 15 years old.

The ASSA2003 model produces a similar estimate of 5.4 million people living with HIV in mid-2006, or around 11% of the total population. It predicts that the number will exceed 6 million by 2015, by which time around 5.4 million South Africans will have died of AIDS.


Of course, the picture is no different in the rest of black Africa, but South Africa presents an especially grave case, even more so in light of the position of relative prosperity vis-à-vis other African countries that white rule has given the nation. But of course, what can you expect if for years on end ANC thugs can produce no one better than a Manto Tshabalala-Msimang for Health Minister, whose recipe in 2006 against AIDS was... eating garlic and beetroot. It took the departure of Thabo Mbeki as SA President for Tshabalala-Msimang to disappear from the scene... in September 2008.

Along the way of Africa's plight something happened though, in 2003. That was the year PEPFAR was launched. PEPFAR stands for the "President's Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief" and involved a $15 billion commitment over five years (2003–2008) from President Bush to fight the global HIV/AIDS pandemic, with an almost exclusive focus on African countries. PEPFAR initially aimed to give antiretroviral treatment (ART) to 2 million HIV-infected people in the worst affected areas, to prevent 7 million new cases, and to provide care for 10 million people (the "2-7-10 goals") by 2010. PEPFAR was a very effective initiative, increasing the number of Africans receiving ART from 50,000 in 2003 to 1.1 million by March 2007 and an estimated 1.4 million by early 2008, at about the time that Michelle Obama deemed this accomplishment as yet another US feat she, as a African American, could not be proud of. Even though 1.4 million is still small compared to the roughly 33 million HIV/AIDS sufferers worldwide, it's not exaggerated to state that PEPFAR is one of the most successful medical/humanitarian programs of the past decades.


anti_retroviral


Actually, by early 2008 he money spent was rather 18 billion dollars, 3 billion up from the original goal of 15. But you wouldn't know that from the MSM. Nor would you know from them that, as PEPFAR I expired earlier this year, President Bush had a PEPFAR II in the scaffolds:


pepfar(HealthNewsDigest.com) - WASHINGTON - AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF), hailed President Bush for signing legislation to re-authorize PEPFAR (the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief). The measure, which was signed in a formal signing ceremony earlier today in Washington, increases funding for the successful global AIDS program from $15 billion up to $48 billion over the next five years. As a result, PEPFAR, which is likely to be among the President’s most successful and lasting legacies, will save five to seven million lives over the next five years.

“Passage of this historic legislation is a crucial turning point in the battle to control AIDS around the world,” said Michael Weinstein, President, AIDS Healthcare Foundation, which provides medical care and services to more than 79,000 individuals in 20 countries worldwide. ”Over the past several months, AHF worked diligently to persuade legislators to restore PEPFAR’s priority on treatment. We take our hats off to everyone who helped ensure that this lifesaving global AIDS bill became a reality.”


It was all to no avail.

On November 9, 2008, Desmond Tutu was allowed to write in the Washington Post:

Today Africans walk taller than they did a week ago -- just as they did when Nelson Mandela became South Africa's first black president in 1994. Not only Africans, but people everywhere who have been the victims of discrimination at the hands of white Westerners, have a new pride in who they are. If a dark-skinned person can become the leader of the world's most powerful nation, what is to stop children everywhere from aiming for the stars? The fact that Obama's Kenyan grandfather was a convert to Islam may -- shamefully -- have been controversial in parts of the United States, but elsewhere in the world, Obama's multi-faith heritage is an inspiration.

And the president-elect has one additional key quality: He is not George W. Bush.


Someone tell this... f*cking fool, asshat superdeluxe, ignorant dimwit, overrated fourteenth rank "bishop", blistering idiot with long overdue porridge for brains... THAT IF MILLIONS OF AFRICANS ARE TODAY WALKING TALLER THAN THEY DID FIVE YEARS AGO... IT IS BECAUSE OF GEORGE W. BUSH!!!


bushlaura



In Flanders, we have a saying: "Ondank is 's werelds loon" - Ingratitude is the world's reward.

It most certainly is.


MFBB.

Wednesday, December 24, 2008

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

federicoBarocci_Nativity1597


The Nativity by Federico Barocci (1597). Currently on display in the Prado Museum in Madrid, Spain.


DowneastBlog wishes all its readers of good will a Merry Christmas!!!


MFBB.

Sunday, December 21, 2008

THE OBAMA PRESIDENCY: CHRONICLE OF A DEPRESSION FORETOLD.

Regular reader and commenter Mark, who is no longer from Colorado and now prefers to go by the moniker of Spiral, tirelessly provides us with excellent, insightful links. One of the latest caught my eye. It's a WSJ article by Andrew Wilson, titled "Thatcher wouldn't have gone wobbly on Detroit." Especially at a time when the Messiah seems to succeed in selling everyone the phantasmagoria pipe dream of the benefits of a trillion dollar injection to ward off the US's economic woes, I thought I might just share it. Thanks Mark!


The incoming administration is talking about spending hundreds of billions on public works with the hope of creating some jobs, but remember: 93.3% of Americans, though shaken, already have jobs. So what to do?

The government must do something, and something fairly big, to jump-start the economy, an economist friend told me. His point was that the private sector is too shell-shocked to climb out of the hole it is now in, and government needs to take the lead. He also quoted the old shibboleth among economists -- the "fallacy of composition" -- which argues that what might be a good course of action for an individual can lead to disaster if widely adopted by members of the larger group. In this case, disaster could be the result if there was too strong a preference for savings over consumption.

thatcher1I disagree with this whole line of thought. It reminds me of the open letter that 364 economists addressed to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in 1981, condemning her for daring to cut public borrowing in the midst of a recession, which was contrary to the Keynesian orthodoxy at the time. They did not accept Mrs. Thatcher's reasoning that too much public-sector borrowing and government-directed investment could only crowd out private-sector borrowing and risk-taking.

They also implicitly rejected Mrs. Thatcher's strongly held belief that both governments and individuals must be guided by fundamental rules of common sense and frugality, in good times and bad. The economists described her thinking on this score as naive. Mrs. Thatcher spurned the collective wisdom of the 364 economists, seeing their advice as just more of the same failed interventionist policy prescriptions which the country had followed for over three decades. When she came to power in May 1979, the British economy, by every measure, was in worse shape than the U.S. economy is today. Inflation was out of control. Unemployment was high and rising rapidly. Job creation had been at a total standstill for almost a decade and a half...

... President-elect Barack Obama has said that he expects things to get worse before they get better. If the experience of the first Thatcher administration is anything to go by, that will certainly be the case. For one thing, some "hidden unemployment," as Mrs. Thatcher called it, will be flushed out into the open. This will be the case with the expected closure of the Big Three's "job banks," which pay almost full wages and benefits to several thousand auto workers for doing nothing.

With the elimination of much higher levels of "over-manning" in parts of British industry that were heavily unionized and subsidized, unemployment doubled to 12% in Mrs. Thatcher's first three years in office. Yet by sticking to her policies of lightened regulation, reduced trade barriers, privatization of a raft of publicly owned companies, reduced taxation, and the adoption of laws to prevent abuses of union power, Mrs. Thatcher achieved something few if any of today's economists have begun to consider. She achieved a genuine, productivity-led recovery that transformed Britain from perennial basket case into the Europe's most improved and vibrant economy.

U.S. policy makers and professional economists should study her example in order to turn this time of crisis into useful and enduring change. As she herself said, "Economics is too important just to be left to the economists."



I seem to detect an imho rather illogical line of thought there where Mr. Wilson writes: "President-elect Barack Obama has said that he expects things to get worse before they get better. If the experience of the first Thatcher administration is anything to go by, that will certainly be the case.", because it implies that Mr. Obama is going to do what Mrs. Thatcher did. This, of course, he won't do, since it is clear for everyone but the deaf and blind that the president-elect is hell bent on treating the US to a New Deal v2.0. Because Mr. Wilson rightly concludes by pointing out the merits of the Thatcher method, I assume it was just a lapsus of his. Let us sum up Thatcher's key measures, as noted by Wilson:

* lightened regulation
* reduced trade barriers
* privatization of a raft of publicly owned companies
* reduced taxation
* the adoption of laws to prevent abuses of union power

Let us now see how Obama's proposals measure up to Thatcher's success recipe

* Obama has promised more regulation
* Obama stance on NAFTA varies between lukewarm enthusiasm and closet hostility
* Obama's plans for "federal oversight" of the Big Three reeks almost like a desire to nationalize an important part of US carmakers
* Under Obama, the Bush tax cuts will expire, and the top two tax rates will likely to return to 36 and 39.6 percent. That's just for starters
* Obama wants to make the "Employee Free Choice Act" the "Law of the Land".

Don't know how it is with you, but I can't find anything Thatcherite in Obama's to do list. To top it all off, he has promised to embark on a public infrastructure project "unseen since the fifties". Good luck with that. He should know that keynesianism does not work, but I'm not making myself any illusions anymore. During a 60 Minutes appearance in November, Obama heaped praise on a book dealing with FDR. Over at Instapundit, a commenter named Greg Gransden wrote:

I watched it, too. I would have been more reassured if the FDR book Obama says he’s been reading was Amity Shlaes’ “The Forgotten Man,” which painstakingly demonstrates how Roosevelt’s economic policies helped to prolong and worsen the Great Depression.

Unfortunately, the book Obama’s been reading actually lavishes praise on FDR’s economic management in the early months of his presidency - which seems to me precisely the wrong lesson to take away from that period.


With Glenn Reynolds, I might say: "Indeed".


forgottenman


Barack Hussein Obama. Machinist of the Perfect Economic Trainwreck, barreling toward you. Don't say you haven't been warned.


MFBB.