All your banks are belong to him;

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez on Thursday threatened to nationalize the country’s banks and largest steel producer, accusing them of unscrupulous practices.
“Private banks have to give priority to financing the industrial sectors of Venezuela at low cost,” Chavez said. “If banks don’t agree with this, it’s better that they go, that they turn over the banks to me, that we nationalize them and get all the banks to work for the development of the country and not to speculate and produce huge profits.”
It was not clear if Chavez was only referring to Venezuelan banks like Mercantil Servicios Financieros CA and Banco Provincial SA, or if he was also aiming the threat at major international banks with subsidiaries in the country, such as Citigroup Inc. (C) and Spanish banks Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria SA (BBV) and Banco Santander Central Hispano SA. (STD)
Chavez also warned the government could take over steel producer Sidor, which is majority controlled by Luxembourg-based Ternium SA. (TX) Shares of Ternium fell 3.9 percent to $26.15 in U.S. trading after Chavez’s comments.

Telegraph;

Two Libyans found to pose a danger to national security are likely to be released on bail next week after a court ruled that they could not be sent back to their own country. Siac, the special anti-terrorist court, said it was “quite satisfied” that one of the men, an Islamic extremist identified as “AS”, would resume terrorist violence when he was able. The other, “DD”, was also unlikely to modify his behaviour, Siac added. A map in a car at his home had marks on footpaths under a flight path to Birmingham Airport.
But the court found a “real risk” that the two men could be tortured or ill-treated in breach of the European Human Rights Convention if they were deported, despite an agreement with Libya signed in 2005. Siac warned that if they were put on trial there was also a risk of their being denied a fair hearing.
The court’s finding, that it would be unlawful for John Reid, the Home Secretary, to send the men back to Libya is a major setback. They are likely to be freed within days after Siac granted them bail in principle, pending an appplication by the Home Secretary for permission to appeal. Mr Reid’s lawyers had opposed bail on the grounds the Libyans would abscond if let out of Long Lartin maximum security prison, where they have been under immigration detention. However, Mr Justice Mitting, the Siac chairman, said keeping them in detention after they had won their appeal would be on the ‘cusp of legality’.

Is there any doubt that Canadian courts – with the enthusiastic backing of the Liberals and NDP – would treat such a case here any differently?

In the 1970s, perhaps a few million illegals resided in the United States, and their unassimilated presence went largely unnoticed. Most Americans felt that the formidable powers of integration and popular culture would continue to incorporate any distinctive ethnic enclave, as they had so successfully done with the past generations that arrived en masse from Europe, Asia, and Latin America. But when more than 10 million fled Mexico in little over a decade—the great majority poor, without English, job skills, a high school education, and legality—entire apartheid communities in the American Southwest began springing up.
During the heyday of multiculturalism and political correctness in the 1980s, the response of us, the hosts, to this novel challenge was not to insist upon the traditional assimilation of the newcomer but rather to accommodate the illegal alien with official Spanish-language documents, bilingual education, and ethnic boosterism in our media, politics, and education. These responses only encouraged more illegals to come, on the guarantee that their material life could be better and yet their culture unchanged in the United States. We now see the results. Los Angeles is today the second-largest Mexican city in the world; one out of every ten Mexican nationals resides in the United States, the vast majority illegally.
[…]
In my own experience, the slow progress made in rural California since the 1950s of my youth—in which the county inspected our farm’s rural dwellings, eliminated the once-ubiquitous rural outhouse, shut down substandard housing, and fined violators in hopes of providing a uniform humane standard of residence for all rural residents—has been abandoned in just a few years of laissez-faire policy toward illegal aliens. My own neighborhood is reverting to conditions common about 1950, but with the insult of far higher tax rates added to the injury of nonexistent enforcement of once-comprehensive statutes. The government’s attitude at all levels is to punish the dutiful citizen’s misdemeanors while ignoring the alien’s felony, on the logic that the former will at least comply while the latter either cannot or will not.
Fairness about who is allowed into the United States is another issue that reflects class divides—especially when almost 70 percent of all immigrants, legal and illegal, arrive from Mexico alone. Asians, for example, are puzzled as to why their relatives wait years for official approval to enter the United States, while Mexican nationals come across the border illegally, counting on serial amnesties to obtain citizenship.
These class divisions cut both ways, and they help explain the anomaly of the Wall Street Journal op-ed page mandarins echoing the arguments of the elite Chicano studies professors. Both tend to ridicule the far less affluent Minutemen and English-only activists, in part because they do not experience firsthand the problems associated with illegal immigration but instead find millions of aliens grist for their own contrasting agendas. Indeed, every time an alien crosses the border legally, fluent in English and with a high school diploma, the La Raza industry and the corporate farm or construction company alike most likely lose a constituent.
[…]
[T]his spring Americans witnessed millions of illegal aliens who not only were unapologetic about their illegal status but were demanding that their hosts accommodate their own political grievances, from providing driver’s licenses to full amnesty. The largest demonstrations—held on May Day, with thousands of protesters waving Mexican flags and bearing placards depicting the communist insurrectionist Che Guevara—only confirmed to most Americans that illegal immigration was out of control and beginning to become politicized along the lines of Latin American radicalism. I chronicled in Mexifornia the anomaly of angry protesters waving the flag of the country they vehemently did not wish to return to, but now the evening news beamed these images to millions. In short, the radical socialism of Latin America, seething in the angry millions who flocked to support Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, Bolivia’s Evo Morales, and Mexico’s Andrés López Obrador, had now seemingly been imported into our own largest cities.

Read the whole thing.
Previous: : A Global Village fortifies.

It’s time to take a sledgehammer to the ancient art of Egypt.

““Does destroying this create a more just society? Hit delete it and all is well?”

And to think we sent Canadian soldiers to Afghanistan to fight the Taliban.

Cjunk;

My children go through “Bad-Guy-With-Gun” drills at their school … this is a school full of age 14 to 19 boys and girls in the prime of their lives … and more than 30% or these are fit, strong, and athletic kids … and smart to boot. Now consider the drill:
* Close door to classroom
* Stay quiet
* Hide under or behind desk
* Stay away from windows and doors

Mark Steyn – “… at Yale, the dean of student affairs, Betty Trachtenberg, reacted to the Virginia Tech murders by taking decisive action: She banned all stage weapons from plays performed on campus. After protests from the drama department, she modified her decisive action to “permit the use of obviously fake weapons” such as plastic swords.”
More here – “Mom, I’ve run the Columbine scenario a million times in my head.”

If you enjoyed taking this poll, try the one at CTV.
On a somewhat related topic, I find this to be entertaining, too.

Daily Mail;

Polygamous husbands settling in Britain with multiple wives can claim extra benefits for their “harems” even though bigamy is a crime in the UK, it has emerged.
Opposition MPs are demanding an urgent change in the law, claiming that the Government is recognising and rewarding a custom which has no legal status and which is “alien” to this country’s cultural traditions.
Officials said yesterday a review was now under way into whether the state should continue to pay out income support, jobseeker’s allowance and housing and council tax benefits to ‘extra’ spouses.
Islamic law allows a man to take up to four wives, providing he can provide for them fairly and equally. But British law only ever recognises one spouse, while bigamy is punishable by up to seven years in jail.
However, if a husband and his wives arrive and settle in Britain having wed in a country where polygamy is legal, then the UK benefits system recognises his extra wives as dependents and pays them accordingly.
The Department of Work and Pensions admitted yesterday it had no figures on how many families are claiming for multiple wives.

It has “no figures”? Don’t they know who they’re issuing cheques to?

A DWP official insisted the rules did not “reward” polygamy, as second wives receive less in benefits than single women. A single person can claim just under £60 per week in jobseeker’s allowance, while couples receive up to £92.80, but each ‘additional spouse’ in a polygamous marriage receives an extra £33.65.

Oh. Looks like they do.

The booming economy may make elective surgery and luxury vehicles affordable for the upper-middle class, but the Venezuelans who are amassing the immense fortunes are the Boliburguesa, or the members of President Chávez’s inner circle. (The name refers to the president’s leftist Bolivarian revolution and the bourgeoisie.) Boliburgueses had constructed mega-mansions in the most storied Caracas neighborhoods and bought spanking new jets. A journalist friend who shadowed one of Chávez’s closest allies was chauffeured around in a bulletproof BMW, flanked by Korean bodyguards who can allegedly brain a would-be assailant with a butter knife at a distance of 20 meters. “It was like something out of Goldfinger,” my colleague said, still somewhat incredulous.

A glimpse into the socialist paradise of Hugo Chavez.
(link fixed)

Be all the politically correct EU allows you to be;

It turns out we didn’t entirely scrub the stain out the Krauts. We just turned them into PC racists. There is something pathetic, when the once mighty and feared Wehrmacht, now the declawed and idle Bundewehr, is reduced to swearing in English about imagined enemies they will never encounter … except maybe around the American bases that have protected them for the last 60-odd years … unlike the actual enemies they are ignoring at their own doorstep.

Video here. Language warning.

It’s a pyramid scheme…

Fonte observes that elite institutions in western culture from the national council of churches to the UN and it’s plethora of NGOs are embarked upon an active path to destroy the concept of the sovereign nation state and it’s empowered individual and displace the influenece of the elected governments of these separate sovereign states with regional or global regulatory bureaucracies. He also observed that for some unknown reason all the governments in these sovereign western free nation-states seem on a self destructive course in being determined to deliver themselves up to this weakened national sovereignty and transnational governance.
[…]
Communism, or more accurately centralized socialism, is not a movement of the down-trodden masses but of the economic elite….the natural extension of this is global socialism which the “Tranzies” promote. If one understands that socialism is NOT a share the wealth plan but a politically actuated plan to consolidate power and control a nation’s wealth, then the paradox of super rich men promoting global socialism (or transnational progressivism) becomes no paradox at all. Instead it becomes logical, even the perfect tool for wealthy power-seeking megalomaniacs.

Great post. Read it all.
h/t

Pieter Dorsman on the latest trend to emerge from the great Dutch social experiment;

As opposed to “Give me your tired, your poor” many jurisdictions in the new world have discovered that the disgruntled Dutch are anything but tired and poor. They’re young, affluent, well-educated, entrepreneurial, fluent in English and smart enough to have figured that the time has come to get out as the future can no longer be found at home.
The numbers corroborate this trend. In the first nine months of last year a record number of Dutch packed their bags with some 100,000 leaving the country, an increase of 12% on the previous year. For this year another increase is expected and, according to some research bureaus the overall attitudes about leaving are changing as well.
This year some 32% are seriously considering a move as opposed to 26% last year according to the ‘Emigration Monitor’. What is even more revealing is that the 20 to 30 age group constitutes the largest group of leavers, a trend that got further momentum when one polling group figured out that about half of the nation’s adolescents would, given the chance, prefer to pack up and go. Last year’s number confirm that the Dutch are experiencing the largest net outflow of people since the post-war emigration boom of the 1950s and the remarkable attitude shifts will ensure that this trend will persist in the years to come.

And the people’s army of Hugo Chavez claims another victory in the noble struggle towards a progressive utopia.

Another great moment in socialism for Tony Blair’s Labour Party;

Checks will be made on all children to identify potential criminals under a further extension of the “surveillance state” announced by Tony Blair today.
A Downing Street review of law and order policy also called for greater use of sophisticated CCTV, an expanded DNA database and “instant justice” powers for police.
The review is intended to chart a course ahead for the next 10 years by focusing more “on the offender, not the offence.”
Most crime is committed by a small number of prolific offenders who could be identified almost from birth, ministers believe. After 10 years concentrating on tougher sentences, the review paper said it wanted to tackle the “underlying causes..through better targetting.”
Vulnerable children and those at risk will be identified by “trigger” factors such as parents in jail or on drugs. They will be subject to personalised measures, including home visits from specialist practitioners. But the Government says the net should be cast as widely as possible “to prevent criminality developing.”
It proposes to “establish universal checks throughout a child’s development to help service providers to identify those most at risk of offending.” The document added: “These checks should piggyback on existing contact points such as the transition to secondary schools.”
The plan will be be backed up by a new database for all children due to be up and running by 2008. It will contain basic information identifying the child and its parents and will have a “facility for practitioners to indicate to others that they have information to share, are taking action, or have undertaken an assessment, in relation to a child.”

That is, if they haven’t already apprehended them under the Improper School Lunch Contents Act.

New York Times;

Polygamy in America, outlawed in every state but rarely prosecuted, has long been associated with Mormon splinter groups out West, not immigrants in New York. But a fatal fire in a row house in the Bronx on March 7 revealed its presence here, in a world very different from the suburban Utah setting of “Big Love,” the HBO series about polygamists next door.
The city’s mourning for the dead — a woman and nine children in two families from Mali — has been followed by a hushed double take at the domestic arrangements described by relatives: Moussa Magassa, the Mali-born American citizen who owned the house and was the father of five children who perished, had two wives in the home, on different floors. Both survived.

February 17, 2007;

“One hopes the bulldozer manufacturers aren’t foolish enough to pull out. The Venezuela mass grave industry is poised for explosive growth.”

March 18, 2007;

Of all the startling measures announced by President Hugo Chávez this year, from the nationalization of major utilities to threats of imprisonment for violators of price controls, none have baffled economists quite like his venture into monetary reform.
First, Mr. Chávez said the authorities would remove three zeroes from the denomination of the currency, the bolívar. Then he said the new bolívar, worth 1,000 old bolívars, would be renamed the “bolívar fuerte,” or strong bolívar.
Finally, at the behest of Mr. Chávez, the central bank said this week that it would reintroduce a 12.5-cent coin, a symbol of Venezuela’s prosperity in the 1960s and 1970s before freewheeling oil booms ended in abrupt devaluations, after three decades out of circulation.
Mr. Chávez champions these ideas, which will take effect in January, as ways to combat inflation, which in recent weeks crept up to 20 percent, the highest in Latin America. Officials blame “hoarders” for shortages of basic goods and price increases for food on the black market. Mr. Chávez says the renaming and redenominating the currency will instill confidence in it.
[…]
Inflation has been climbing rapidly since January when a sharp decline in the black-market value of the bolívar pushed up prices of imported goods. Since Mr. Chávez moved to nationalize major telephone and electricity companies in January, Venezuelans have rushed to take money out of the country, currency traders say. That exodus has caused the bolívar to weaken by about 20 percent to a level of 4,000 to the dollar on the black market, placing it among the world’s worst performing currencies this year.
The decisions to rename the currency and reintroduce the unusual coin, known here as the locha, a term thought to derive from an anachronistic practice of dividing monetary units into eighths, have dumbfounded many Venezuelans. More than a third of the country’s population of 26 million is under age 18, with no memory of the coin, which stopped circulating in the 1970s.

According to sources, Mr. Chavez will be meeting with officials from
Zimbabwe to seek advice on how best to accelerate Venezuela’s economic growth.
h/t

“It now takes approximately 85 million Zimbabwean dollars for a family of five to live each month.

Another shining moment in that giant human experiment called “socialism”.
More at Austin Bay.

What will Canada look like?

Well, let me answer it for you. If the immigrants are largely from China, the country will look like China. If from Central and South America it will look like Mexico. If from the Middle East, it will look like Saudi Arabia.
Already Richmond, BC doesn’t look like BC, just like Toronto doesn’t look like it’s in Ontario.

She leaves out Gay Pride Week….

Does anyone really think Toronto will still have Veteran’s Day celebrations and an opera house and a Hockey Hall of Fame, etc in 20 years time, those things being very WASPy institutions?
Do you think your nurse will speak English fluently and if not, how will this affect your care? Will the guy behind the store counter understand what you’re asking for? Will the mechanic understand when you explain what’s wrong with your car? How will the Asian disdain for manual labour effect the number of tradesmen or even bus drivers? How much will the Jamaican disdain for higher education cost me in welfare checks and prison guards?

An open letter from an American immigrant;

You may have noticed certain unlovely tendencies that recently have been becoming increasingly prominent in the immigrant population. Almost every day someone from our midst comes up with new demands and then grumbles when these are not met. In addition to requesting benefits of various kinds, many repudiate their host culture and insist that natives conform to their ways. There are even those who refuse to learn the English language and then chide their hosts for not accommodating their linguistic peculiarities. When they meet with resistance or difficulties they protest and complain, tossing about the charges of cultural insensitivity, discrimination or worse.
It is safe to say that this ungracious attitude would not be tolerated anywhere else in the world. That it has been in America is due to the matchless amity of her people who try their best to satisfy the desires of their guests. But as criticisms and complaints grow more and more unreasonable, the situation is reaching the point of becoming intolerable.
Being an immigrant myself let me say something that needs to be said, but which Americans – the genial hosts that they are – are reluctant to do: If you do not like it here, you should seriously think about going back to where you came from.
[…]
This is a land of immigrants who responded to this country’s goodness with industriousness and faithfulness. They gave of their sweat and life to build this wondrous thing called America. They strove and labored and struggled uncomplainingly, even though their lives were far more difficult than yours or mine are today. Let us, then, each carry our burden with good cheer and resolve. To be sure, life won’t always be easy. It rarely is, and if truth be told, human existence is arduous no matter where you live. But for honest and hard-working people nowhere is life more rewarding than in America.

I think our work is done here.

Queen’s is Canadian lead on international team addressing obesity in Mexican children
A new federal government initiative that partners Canadian researchers with researchers in the developing world is investing up to $1.6 million in collaborative research aimed at reducing obesity in Mexican children.
Queen’s collaborators led by Kinesiology and Health Studies researcher, Peter Katzmarzyk, and researchers from the University of Guadalajara in Mexico will address childhood obesity and healthy body weights in Mexico. This multi-disciplinary research will inform the development of programs and policies aimed at combating obesity as it relates to under-nutrition in Mexico and in other developing countries that are beginning to experience similar problems.
“Canada is a world leader in the field of obesity research, and this represents a valuable opportunity for us to share our knowledge and experience with a country that is beginning to experience problems similar to those we’ve already been through,” says Dr. Katzmarzyk.

Queens University – the blogger’s gift that keeps on giving.