"Historians, world leaders and assorted pundits with Yankee bashing in mind have long cultivated the idea that America is a violent place. Not so, says Gallup, which released a report yesterday revealing that the nation is not necessarily Dodge City: The impact of crime is lower in the U.S. than in Britain, and in many cases Canada. "The U.S. is often seen from abroad as a relatively lawless society, with murders and gun-related crimes aplenty. But a series of Gallup surveys in Great Britain, Canada and the U.S. suggest the image is somewhat distorted," noted David W. Moore of the Gallup News Service.
It's close, but the United States emerged as the least crime-ridden. In three polls of 3,025 persons -- about 1,000 in each country -- 32 percent of the Americans said they or someone in their households had been a victim of crime of some type within the previous year. Among Canadians, the figure was 33 percent; among Britons, 36 percent. About 71 percent of both Canadians and Britons, compared with 67 percent of Americans, said there had been more crime in their respective countries in the previous 12 months.
Gallup also asked respondents whether they had been mugged, assaulted or had property stolen, among five other unpleasant experiences. Overall, Britain proved the most dangerous, with a quarter of the respondents reporting that they or a family member had been a victim of crime. Canada and the United States were tied at 21 percent. On specific crimes, 22 percent of the British reported their home, car or property had been vandalized. The figure was 17 percent among Canadians and 15 percent among Americans."
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Is this the last word on the cartoon Jihad? If not, it should be. Bill Kristol, writing in "The Weekly Standard", says that the "anguish" caused by the Danish cartoons is phony -- and he says it very sarcastically. I have an idea that this might be the first time the cartoons have been reproduced in an American newspaper too.
I have just put up here an English translation of the latest article -- "Rejsende i islam" -- from Denmark on the cartoons issue. The article is from the now "infamous" Jyllands Posten itself. It gives a fairly detailed account of how the uproar was provoked by Denmark's Imams -- with enthusiastic help from peak Muslim bodies in Arab countries.
Islamofascists not primarily religious: "We were in a London mosque, discussing the sermons the sheik delivers at Friday congregations. I had asked why God almost never featured in (or, at best, got a cameo role) in sermons that focused almost exclusively on political issues. For the sheik, what mattered was "the sufferings of our brethren under occupation." In other words: In our Islam, we don't do God - we do Palestine, Kashmir and Iraq! Here we have a religion without a theology, a secular wolf disguised as a religious lamb. How did this neo-Islam - a political movement masquerading as religion - come into being, and how can those who know little about Islam distinguish it from the mainstream of the faith?"
A British biologist on the genetics of the male/female difference: "Some have a dream that, one fine day, there will be equal numbers of men and women in all jobs, including those in scientific research. But I think this dream is Utopian; it assumes that if all doors were opened and all discrimination ended, the different sexes would be professionally indistinguishable. The dream is sustained by a cult of political correctness that ignores the facts of life—and thrives only because the human mind likes to bury experience as it builds beliefs. Here I will argue, as others have many times before, that men and women are born different.
Whites to be a minority in London in only 4 years time: "Whites will be an ethnic minority in Britain by the end of the century. Analysis of official figures indicate that, at current fertility rates and levels of immigration, there will be more non-whites than whites by 2100. It would be the first time in history that a major indigenous population has voluntarily become a minority, rather than through war, famine or disease. Whites will be a minority in London by 2010. In the early 1950s there were only a few tens of thousands of non-whites in the UK. By 1991 that had risen to 3 million - 6 per cent of the population. The population of ethnic minorities has been growing at between 2 and 4 per cent a year. Net immigration has been running at record levels, with 185,000 newcomers last year".
Why are the Oscars and Hollywood no longer relevant?: "It is hard to come up with a more appropriate sentiment for a media and entertainment culture that ignores the murder of Theo Van Gogh and the ongoing intimidation of the Danes even as it prepares to honor the following: Moral equivalency in the war against terror (Munich); Racial tension (Crash); A deeply flawed writer (Capote); the wholesale breaking of marriage vows (Brokeback Mountain); And, let's have one more round of applause for ourselves, another retelling of the McCarthy hearings that fails to note the communist threat was real (Good Night and Good Luck)".
A French Leftist says American Leftists are empty-headed: "Nothing made a more lasting impression during my journey through America than the semi-comatose state in which I found the American left.... But at the end of the day, my progressive friends, you may coin ideas in whichever way you like. The fact is: You do have a Right. This Right, in large part thanks to its neoconservative battalion, has brought about an ideological transformation that is both substantial and striking. And the fact is that nothing remotely like it has taken shape on the other side--to the contrary, through the looking glass of the American "left" lies a desert of sorts, a deafening silence, a cosmic ideological void... "
There is a good article here about the sad state of modern Britain. Some of the things he says are a bit over the top but most of it is pretty right -- the low standards of service and civility, the tax-driven high prices, the crowding, the Kafka-esque idea of what constitutes justice etc.
There is an interesting site called Watching America which translates foreign news about the U.S., to enable Americans (and all English speakers) to read what is being written about them and their country throughout the world. Much of the content is available nowhere else in English.
For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here).
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Practically all policies advocated by the Left create poverty. Leftists get the government to waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so load the burden of providing most useful goods and services onto fewer and fewer people. So fewer useful goods and services are produced to go around. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that they can feel good by patronizing and "helping" them. So they do their best to create as many poor people as possible.
The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialistisch)
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