Monday, November 22, 2010
Appeasement Wasn't in JFK's Vocabulary
Sunday, November 21, 2010
The REAL "Stolen Generation''
The journey, which lasted at least two days, continued by another bus and then by boat. Once in the countryside, the couple transferred Zhou to a older woman. He remembers, ''She didn't seem happy. Maybe it was an issue of price. So we took a three-wheeled cart to another farm and then another. In the end they took me to my new family.'' Zhou was repeatedly told by his new family, a large farming clan in Fujian, that life would have been much worse had he never been sold to them. But he was treated more like Cinderella than part of this large family. Eventually they treated him better and he grew to like them.
It's important to remember that the late 1980's were an unsettling period for China. The economic reforms that had began a decade earlier had opened up huge opportunities - not just for law abiding citizens. The Chinese penchant for corruption also began to rise, and organized crime, beaten back by relentless social controls, grew once again. Because of a new freedom of movement, gangs found it easier to take children from one place and sell them in another. There have been many crackdowns in the past, but the authorities are cracking down much harder and in the last 18 months have arrested 15,000 people, with ringleaders sentenced to death. They were selling children for up to $6000 each. However, the scourge continues as 2,093 cases were already reported in the first seven months of this year.
To control population growth, in 1979 the government launched the One-Child Policy, which prevented most families from having multiple offspring. A traditional preference for male children, meanwhile, persisted in many areas. For these moderately prosperous citizens buying a child is an investment to ensure they are taken care of in old age. These factors contributed to the springing up of syndicates that traded not only in children but also in young women, who were sold into marriage in rural areas short on eligible brides.
Tackling the aftermath, however, can be even harder than cracking the trafficking gangs. Despite a new official effort to reunite families with their lost children, it's mostly volunteers that shoulder much of the work. And while the, mostly indifferent, public is slowly becoming aware of the extent of the human trafficking, the implications of having tens of thousands of children wrenched from their families are only now emerging as those who went missing in the 1980's reach adulthood. Some were kidnapped at such a young age that they will never have any recollection of their birth family. The police have recently launched a website called ''Baby Searching for Home,'' which publicizes the details of the rescued children to help grieving parents identify them. The authorities confirm any possible matches through DNA tests. So far 813 children have been reunited with their families through this program, unfortunately the now 27 year old Zhou wasn't one of them.
The Way I See It....this is a true story of human tragedy, a real "Stolen Generation" rather then the phony one foisted on the Australian people. This manufactured guilt-trip instigated by anti-religious, leftest historians (which I exposed in my previous posting on the subject) to malign the good intentions of those missionaries working in difficult conditions with half-caste children in dire circumstances. Zhou's story is emblematic of a country in the throes of rapid change, torn between tradition and modernity, challenge and opportunity, morality and corruption. Hopefully there is a good end in sight.
Wednesday, November 17, 2010
Absurd Vaccine Marketing of Gardasil
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
Watermelons Invade Norfolk Island
So you think I was exaggerating when I said global warming is just the latest cause of the "closet totalitarian"? Then pay close attention to an experiment the Warmists are about to inflict on the people of Norfolk Island (an Australian external territory). BE WARNED! What's being trialled there with $390,000 0f Gillard Government money may, if it works, be spread to the mainland, say the researchers. Which means those Watermelons might be coming to a "patch" near you.
The Plan.....and no, I'm not joking...is to put Norfolk Islanders on rations to fight both global warming and obesity. Funded by the Australian Research Council and approved by the Socialist Left Science Minister Kim Carr, researchers from the Southern Cross University will give each island "volunteer" a Carbon Card. Every time they buy petrol, electricity or an air flight, they will have carbon units deducted from the fixed allowance on their card. More units will be lost each time they buy fatty foods, take-away meals or produce flown in from a long way away.
Now get this! If at the end of each year they have carbon units left over, they can sell them. If they've blown their allocation, they must buy more. BUT...each year, the number of carbon units in this market will be cut, causing their price to soar and thus the price of extra food, power and petrol to rise -- because the idea is to cut greenhouse gases and make Norfolk Islanders trim, taut and terrifically moral. Really! Conservatives well aware of human fallibility will immediately spot the obvious flaw in this latest scheme of the Left (read neo-commies) to remake humanity. They've forgotten that Karl Marx and his ilk are on the ash-heap of history.
The Flaw is this: what happens when people run out of their carbon rations and can"t afford the extra units they need to buy more fuel, power and even food? This was the question Andrew Bolt of the Sun Herald Newspaper put to Garry Egger, head of this draconian experiment and professor at SCU. His response was astonishing and revealing, because this basic question, which so exposes the teeth of the totalitarian, would have been one you'd think he'd long wrestled with. After all, his personal carbon rationing idea is not new, it's been kicking around for years by the bullies infesting the global warming faith and the Left. But the key question has still not been answered. "What if people don't want to live your dream? What if they rebel or merely fail you?"
Egger: In the first year you are just warned. Later, if you overspend you've got to buy the Units that are cashed in.
Andrew: If you put this on the mainland and you were really strict about it (because you people think the world was warming very dangerously) and someone exceeded their rations, one would presume that you would make some food, for example, too expensive for them to buy.
Egger: That's right, so if you got a fatty unhealthy food that is imported, which takes a lot of carbon to produce, then the price would go up.
Andrew: What happens to a very irresponsible fat family and they've blown their carbon budget and you've made their food terribly expensive? What about the kids? They go to breakfast and they've got one baked bean each?
Egger: Again, they will get money back from learning to do the right thing!
The Way I See It....with that unemotional comment, you have an insight into a key failing of so many grand schemes of the Left to improve resistant humans or build for them someone else's idea of the perfect society. These schemes so often are too perfect for the flawed humans they supposedly serve. It's the humans who must adapt to their system and not the other way around. Which is where they see some force is required, some democracy sacrificed.
What a buzz for the "closet" totalitarian then, to bully other people "for their own good"...in this case to "Save the Planet"! When the case is so just, which planet-saver could let some contemptible fatty stand in their way, begging for carbon units to feed their chubby children?
Need an illustration of the seriousness of what I'm talking about? Professor Egger himself plans to jet off to Cancun, Mexico, the end of this month to boast to a U.N Global Warming Conference how he persuaded Norfolk Islanders to ration just such joy flights for themselves. THIS IS YOUR FUTURE coming right at you folks! It's best you realise this is no longer a joke.