How long are we going to pretend ....

... that snow is so rare in this country that we cannot possibly be expected to cope with it? It happens every year in most parts and most years in every part of the country. And yet each time roads become unpassable, schools are closed, transport breaks down. One good thing: those pesky teenagers who are taking time out of their studies again today to carry posters given to them by the Socialist Worker party members will find life very hard. I suspect fewer will turn up and many will run home to mummy earlier.

Kareem thanks his supporters

The Egyptian blogger Kareem, whose fate this blog and EUReferendum has followed, thanks his supporters across the world. Others, too, need our support. We are in a privileged position and should use that to help those who are not.

"Keynesian economics is wrong"

Another video from those talented people in the Center for Freedom and Prosperity. It is economic growth, they say, that causes consumer spending not the other way round. Makes sense to me.

Outrageous! This must stop!

By this I mean the people of Switzerland insisting that they must have some say in major policy decisions. Outrageous! How very dare they? This is, as some readers must have worked out, about the latest referendum in Switzerland in which 52.9 per cent voted for automatic expulsion of foreign criminals from the country and 47.1 per cent voted against. Of the 26 cantons only 6 voted against. So, the people of Switzerland have spoken and is there an outrage!

AFP reports

Switzerland was slammed as the "black sheep" of Europe on Monday after voters endorsed a far-right push to automatically expel foreign residents convicted of certain crimes.

Slammed by whom, precisely? Well there is the Austrian news website, which accused the Swiss of voting against foreigners. Well, no, not exactly. The Swiss have no intention of deporting foreigners who live and work in their country. They do not, however, seem to like foreigners who go to their country and commit serious crimes. Shocking of them, I know, and against international law, according to the Sueddeutsche Zeitung. Really? International law says you must tolerate anyone and everyone who happens to want to commit murder or large-scale robbery or rape in your country?

The EU, according to the same AFP article, is fulminating. This is going against bilateral agreements that ensure freedom of movement. For criminals? I don't recall that right in the Treaties and is the EU not the organization that is insisting on every tighter Europe-wide controls to fight international crime? Ah yes, but the Swiss are interested in their own country. That is their great sin.

French newspapers are apparently in shock. As well they might be. France, after all, deports people swiftly and quietly without bothering to ask anyone about it or bothering to find out whether they had committed any crimes.

Not only the EU is fulminating but, as EUObserver points out

Human rights groups slammed the result, with Amnesty International saying the approval of this plan represents a ''dark day for human rights in Switzerland.''

The European Network Against Racism (ENAR), a Brussels-based umbrella organisation, said the vote is the "result of a xenophobic and discriminatory campaign launched by the populist Swiss People's Party, making dangerous amalgams between immigration and criminality."

A "second-class" category of Swiss residents will emerge, ENAR warns, which would be a "clear breach of the fundamental human rights principle of equality before the law."

The group also noted it was not clear where the limit would be set - first, second or even third or fourth generation immigrants.

Of course, third or fourth generation immigrants are not exactly immigrants but that, presumably, will be clarified in the legislation that has to follow the referendum. In the meantime, let us for a moment consider what all these tranzis are saying. They are calling on the Swiss government to ignore the people's vote in the name of some nebulous concept of international human rights. They are also saying that it is one's inalienable human right to go to another country and commit serious crimes there. Really?

As Alex Singleton says in his blog in the Daily Telegraph:

Amnesty’s reasoning is that deportations could cause convicts to be sent back to countries where they could face persecution. But this is a ridiculous argument: no one is forcing visitors to Switzerland to commit offences. If people don’t want to be sent back home, why don’t they just desist from rape, robbery, murder and fraud?

Obviously because even to make such a suggestion is to infringe their human rights.

Then there is the question of taxation. The Swiss do insist on having a say on that, as well.

Meanwhile, a proposal to impose a minimum tax on Switzerland's wealthiest citizens, which was also put for vote on Sunday, was rejected with 58.5 percent.

"The bad mood hits foreigners but not the rich," ran the headline in Der Bund of Bern. The Yes to the People's Party initiative showed that "questions of Swiss identity and culture, triggered by rapidly growing social change and migration, bother Swiss people like virtually nothing else."

As I suspected and as the Reuters Factbox explains the vote about taxation has to do with the cantons jealously protecting their rights to set taxation and to compete for those foreigners who come to the country with good intentions, i.e. to make money by undercutting each other's tax rates.

Need I say it? I am shocked, shocked.

Let them go bankrupt

Well, OK, Michael Barone is talking about states like California but his arguments can be applies, mutatis mutandis, to other political entities.

Each to their own

Phyllis Chesler describes an encounter:

I recently spoke at length about Islamic gender and religious apartheid in the Arab and non-Arab Muslim world. This was, perhaps, the first time that anyone had ever focused on this subject at this distinguished Ivy League university.

I described both the level of poverty and illiteracy in the Arab and Muslim world and the absence of a free press, independent judiciary, human rights, and of the increasingly savage persecution of women, infidels, dissidents and homosexuals; about the prisons teeming with thousands of Muslim political prisoners who had been kidnapped and were now being tortured for “thought crimes.”

I described a culture in which women were arrested, whipped, gang-raped, and then either hung or stoned to death for alleging rape or for daring to leave dangerously abusive husbands; a culture that has spawned death-eating terrorists who have exposed Muslim and Arab civilians to permanent, bloody danger; and about how these cunning, brazen jihadists have now expanded their global reach and unleashed their bombs and suicide killers against the entire world.

I argued that, in effect, the demonization of Israel by the media, by governments, international bodies, human rights organizations, and university professors allowed the world to self-righteously bypass, minimize, avoid, utterly disappear Muslim-on-Muslim and Muslim-on-infidel tyranny and torture. Scapegoating Israel is what focuses attention away from the larger suffering in the Middle East and in the Muslim world in general.

And then a young, well-spoken, earnest, curly-headed college student asked this question: “You are talking about diverting attention away from the real issues, right? But, if we focus on the absence of freedom or the absence of women’s rights in the Middle East won’t that divert our attention away from the Settlement issue?”

One can, of course, argue about those Settlements but it is perplexing that a reasonably intelligent (one assumes) and well-meaning young man should consider the issue to be more important that the absence of freedom and the absence of women's rights in the Middle East. Yet he is not alone either in not ever bothering to hear that side of the story or in dismissing it as soon as he has heard it. I can only suppose that deep in his heart this young man (and many others like him) do not think such matters are of any importance when it applies to Arabs or Iranians (who, as it happens, do not mind being called Persians). Because they are not like us, see?

Sums it all up

From Roger Simon's column on Pajamas Media:

The criminality of self-righteous WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange aside, the State Department or other government nincompoops who authored the leaked documents and emails calling Sarkozy a “naked emperor,” etc., deserve to be terminated for extreme doofuss-ness. These days, a school child knows that what you write digitally is forever indelible.

If you have something nasty to say, do it over the water cooler or at a cocktail party, where you can deny you ever said it. Even write it down, if you must, on the back of a business card or scrap of note paper. They can be burned or flushed down the toilet. But for heaven’s sake don’t type it into a computer. There are no shredders for emails and Word docs. Are these people nitwits or do they have the impulse control of a two year old?

Absolutely right. Not that it matters. There seems very little in those leaks that a number of people with expertise had not worked out already though they might not have known the exact vocabulary used. Read the whole piece.