Recently in Global News Category
ConservativeHome's Platform: Bernard Jenkin MP: The bomb that was meant to kill Margaret Thatcher
25 years ago: Remembering the IRA terrorist attack on the Conservative Party conference in Brighton
ConservativeHome's Platform: Maurice Saatchi: These are our values
A distillation of conservative policy values, in honor of the 35th anniversary of the Centre for Policy Studies, founded by Margaret Thatcher and Keith Joseph.
"It is wrong that the majority of people in Britain are financially beholden to the State. This makes the State the master; the complicated tax and benefit system the chief instrument of its power.
"A paternalist government, based on the benevolence of a ruler who treats his subjects as dependent children, is the greatest conceivable despotism and destroys all freedom."
CentreRight: The Queen costs us each a mere 69p a year - and she wants all MPs to know it
Turns out that it's cheaper to be ruled by a monarch than a messiah.
Ace takes a Times headline about Obama's visit to troops in Iraq and uses it to lead into a fascinating and valuable analysis of perspective bias in the media. (Note how I made Ace the active subject of that sentence, rather than a passive responder to the headline.)
iowahawk: This Post Brought to You By the Green Movement
No satire this time. It's about the death of a Togolese boy that iowahawk sponsored for five years through Childreach: "Bakouma was one of approximately one million people who died of malaria last year. Almost all of them were like him: poor, young, and African. And almost all of those deaths could have been prevented through vaccines, insecticide-treated netting, and (gasp) DDT spraying.... [A]1996 DDT ban in South Africa, pushed by environmental groups, led to a malaria epidemic with over 60,000 cases reported in 2000. After DDT spraying resumed in 2001, infections dropped 80% in one year. Facing a mounting death toll across Africa the World Heath Organization and USAID have recently lent support to IRS using DDT, but its adoption continues to be opposed by environmental extremists relying on shoddy science and fearmongering."
Column One: The 'realist' fantasy | Columnists | Jerusalem Post
Why do foreign policy 'realists' insist on ignoring the very real threats voiced by the leaders of rogue states? "On Tuesday, Hamas legislators marked the Christmas season by passing a Shari'a criminal code for the Palestinian Authority. Among other things, it legalizes crucifixion. Hamas's endorsement of nailing enemies of Islam to crosses came at the same time it renewed its jihad. Here, too, Hamas wanted to make sure that Christians didn't feel neglected as its fighters launched missiles at Jewish day care centers and schools. So on Wednesday, Hamas lobbed a mortar shell at the Erez crossing point into Israel just as a group of Gazan Christians were standing on line waiting to travel to Bethlehem for Christmas.... This week North Korea's official news agency threatened to destroy South Korea in a 'sea of fire,' and 'reduce everything treacherous and anti-reunification to debris and build an independent, reunified country on it,' if any country dares to attack its nuclear installations."
Kausfiles : Sanitizing Mumbai?
Mickey Kaus on coverage of the Bombay terrorist attacks and the local constabulary's failures to respond to the attacks: "I'm used to a sort of Liebling-like hierarchy of news sources, with twitterers and bloggers being fastest, but maybe less reliable, while the grand institutions of the MSM weigh in later with more comprehensive and accurate accounts. But that's not what is happening with this Mumbai story. The 'fast' sources are telling you what happened. The 'slow' MSM sources are using their extra time to sanitize what's happened, to build euphemistic assumptions into their very reporting of the events themselves...."
London Banker: Systemic Risk, Contagion and Trade Finance - Back to the Bad Old Days
"The recent 93 percent collapse of the obscure Baltic Dry Index - an index of the cost of chartering bulk cargo vessels for goods like ore, cotton, grain or similar dry tonnage - has caused a bit of a stir among the financial cognoscenti. What is less discussed amidst the alarm is the reason for the collapse of the index - the collapse of trade credit based on the venerable letter of credit....
"The combination of the global interbank lending freeze with the collapse of the speculative, leveraged commodity price bubble have undermined both the confidence of banks in the ability of a far-flung peer bank to pay an obligation when due and confidence in the value of the dry cargo as security for the credit if liquidated on default. The result is that those with goods to export and those with goods to import, no matter how worthy and well capitalised, are left standing quayside without bank finance for trade....
"If cargo trade stops, a whole lot of supply chain disruption starts. If the ore doesn't go to the refinery, there is no plate steel. If the plate steel doesn't get shipped, there is nothing to fabricate into components. If there are no components, there is nothing to assemble in the factory. If the factory closes the assembly line, there are no finished goods. If there are no finished goods, there is nothing to restock the shelves of the shops. If there is nothing in the shops, the consumers don't buy. If the consumers don't buy, there is no Christmas."
(Via Crunchy Con.)
Giving Thanks to Those Who Serve - Kathryn Jean Lopez - The Corner on National Review Online
President Bush speaks to the 101st Airborne, the 160th Night Stalkers, and the Green Berets at Ft. Campbell, and reviews their record of achievements in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The Spectator: Melanie Phillips: Is America Really Going to Do This?
"...on the big picture, [McCain] gets it. He will defend America and the free world whereas Obama will undermine them and aid their enemies. Here's why. McCain believes in protecting and defending America as it is. Obama tells the world he is ashamed of America and wants to change it into something else.... McCain understands that an Islamic war of conquest is being waged on a number of diverse fronts which all have to be seen in relation to each other. For Obama, however, the real source of evil in the world is America. The evil represented by Iran and the Islamic jihadists is apparently all America's fault."
