Jump White People May 2, 2008
Posted by Webmaster in Hate Crimes.comments closed
Drawn by elementary school students in Brooklyn. What’s more disturbing is that, in the several hundred words that the New York Daily News found in its heart to use for this story, that not one of them was “hate,” “enmity,” or anything alluding to that concept, and to the truth of this graffiti. Much less any pontification from the member of the Paranoia-Industrial Complex based in New York City, or its competitor in Montgomery, Alabama.
Zimbabwe’s Loss is Nigeria’s Gain May 2, 2008
Posted by Webmaster in Africa.comments closed
Why couldn’t they be America’s gain?
White Zimbabweans bring change to Nigeria
Shonga, Nigeria - Musa Mogadi says he is better off since “the whites” came. He’s got a new job, learned new farming skills, and he can chat on a mobile phone while zipping around the countryside on a motorbike.
Three years ago, Mr. Mogadi got by as a subsistence farmer. But he now earns a regular wage as a supervisor on one of this town’s new commercial farms.
He’s applied skills he learned from some of the two dozen white Zimbabwean farmers who moved to Nigeria in 2005, after being kicked off their land by President Robert Mugabe and later attracted by large parcels of land on offer under 25-year leases and commitments of support from the Nigerian government.
Production on his farm is now up.
“We are starting to use fertilizers,” says Mogadi, explaining that he was encouraged to buy fertilizer after seeing yield benefits on the commercial farm. He’s also started planting his maize in a more compact formation, like the Zimbabweans, increasing production from each field planted.
Before the Zimbabweans arrived, there was no mobile phone network in the area and so no reason to have a mobile phone. Now he and most of the other workers have snazzy cellphones, and many have bought motorbikes imported from China, often with a loan from their employer.
In the future, when the national power network reaches the Shonga farms, Mogadi is looking forward to having electricity in his home and village for the first time.
Kenny Oyewo, who works as a farm manager, thinks the lessons being learned in Shonga should be exported across Nigeria.
The trouble is, even if it helps Nigerians, as the whites become more prosperous and influential, the racial hate and jealousy of them will also increase, which will lead to a Mugabe-like figure running Nigeria.
Australia’s John Lott May 2, 2008
Posted by Webmaster in 2nd Amendment & CCW, Australia and New Zealand.comments closed
Time:
Australia’s Gun Laws: Little Effect
On the afternoon of April 28, 1996, Martin Bryant snapped. A striking figure with his long blond hair and milky skin, he had just eaten lunch at a cafÉ within the historic site of Port Arthur, a former prison in Australia’s island state of Tasmania. Described later by his sentencing judge as a “pathetic social misfit,” the 28-year-old then reached into his sports bag and, in the manner that others might pull out a sweater, withdrew two military-style semi-automatic rifles, which he used over the next eight horrifying minutes to kill 35 people - men, women and children - in what remains Australia’s worst mass murder.
Sharing the shock of his people, the newly elected Prime Minister, John Howard - just two months into his 11-and-a-half years in power - seized the chance to overhaul Australia’s gun laws, trampling all opposition to make them among the strictest in the developed world. “I hate guns,” he said at the time. “One of the things I don’t admire about America is their slavish love of guns . . . We do not want the American disease imported into Australia.” Howard argued the tougher laws would make Australia safer. But 12 years on, new research suggests the government response to Port Arthur was a waste of public money and has made no difference to the country’s gun-related death rates.
Though he’d acquired them illegally, Bryant used guns at Port Arthur that were lawful in Tasmania at the time. Howard argued there was no reason civilians should be allowed to own assault weapons - and under the 1996 National Firearms Agreement (NFA) these were all but banned. At huge cost, the government bought from their owners some 650,000 of the newly prohibited guns, which police destroyed. It also implemented mandatory gun licenses and registration of all firearms, helping to restrict to 5% of the population the number of Australian adults who owned or used guns last year, down from 7% in 1996.
But these changes have done nothing to reduce gun-related deaths, according to Samara McPhedran, a University of Sydney academic and coauthor of a soon-to-be-published paper that reviews a selection of previous studies on the effects of the 1996 legislation. The conclusions of these studies were “all over the place,” says McPhedran. But by pulling back and looking purely at the statistics, the answer “is there in black and white,” she says. “The hypothesis that the removal of a large number of firearms owned by civilians [would lead to fewer gun-related deaths] is not borne out by the evidence.”
A big reason for this is that Australia, like America, is importing a lot of something else. And like their American counterparts, words on paper mean nothing to them.
As a matter of history, Australia has always been anti-gun as a matter of tendency, both before and after 1996. The reason is that Australia started as a penal colony, and one would no sooner want prisoners living in a penal colony to have guns than prisoners in real prisons to have guns. In contrast, British gun control enforcement, among many other things, sparked the American independence movement. Also, Australia’s indigenous population never put up a fight, unlike America’s, so guns weren’t needed to subdue the continent.
