Make a Difference
Just found this quote, and thought it was worth sharing.
We cannot absolutely prove that those are in error who tell us that society has reached a turning point, that we have seen our best days. But so said all before us, and with just as much apparent reason … On what principle is it that, when we see nothing but improvement behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us?
Thomas Babington Macaulay.
We have a bit of a mouse plague on Kangaroo Island at the moment.
I caught four last night – three with traditional traps, and one by hurling the cat in its general direction.
But after reading this story from the New York Times, I have been expecting an unwelcome knock on the door:
The trouble began, Theresa Smith said, shortly after she bought a hamster for her 9-year-old son. A few months later, the hamster, Princess Stephanie, was playing in its exercise ball on the floor of their apartment in Bushwick, Brooklyn, when an older son, who is 25, flew into a rage.
“He kicked it deliberately, the ball flew across the room, the hamster flew out of the ball, and it died,” Ms. Smith said. After he had calmed down, the older son felt terrible, she said.
“He was very remorseful,” Ms. Smith said. “He bought my son three more hamsters.”
This act of contrition, however, only angered Ms. Smith’s daughter Monique, Theresa Smith said. Monique picked up the biggest of the three hamsters, Sweetie, “took it out of the cage, and she slammed it on the floor,” Theresa Smith said. “It died on impact.”
This was on June 7, 2010. Tuesday night at 7, after a nine-month hunt for a suspect they described as evasive and uncooperative, law enforcement agents from the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals arrested Monique Smith, 19, along Knickerbocker Avenue in Bushwick.
She was charged with aggravated cruelty to animals — a felony that carries a sentence of up to two years in prison — along with two misdemeanors, torturing animals and endangering the welfare of a child.
A nine month hunt. By ‘law enforcement agents.’ For someone who killed a rodent. Quickly and painlessly.
Clearly, gratuitous hamster killing is not something to be encouraged. But a nine month hunt ending a in a felony charge and possible two year jail sentence?
Monique and her brother have some issues, but so do the ‘law enforcement agents.’ And theirs are a lot more worrying.
I guess most people have noticed that pharmacies seem to be expanding the range of their stock to include jewelry, perfume, lollies, etc.
It seems redundant, but if it works for them, why not?
But the core of their business is health related products, and most fundamentally, the dispensing of prescription medications.
Pharmacists are well trained, and have a high degree of credibility. Not unreasonably, they take advantage of this, and their advertising suggests that one good reason to buy goods from a pharmacy that could be bought elsewhere is the quality of advice available.
But Choice Magazine has pointed out that a large number of pharmacies also sell products which do not do what they say they will. These include anti-snor rings, herbal weight loss programmes, plastic ‘power’ bracelets and homeopathic remedies.
Pharmacists should know better. Offering this kind of quackery is a betrayal of their customers’ trust.
“There is an onus on pharmacies to sell products that work and for pharmacists to stand by the safety and effectiveness of products in their store,” said CHOICE spokeswoman Ingrid Just.
“Pharmacists hold a four year specialist degree in chemistry, and consumers rely on their expert advice.”
The sale of non-pharmaceutical products was not an issue, she said, where items for sale did not have a therapeutic of health claim attached to them.
“But when it comes to health products, they should stick to selling ones that are safe, effective and supported by scientific and clinical evidence,” Ms Just said.
The CHOICE probe also asked pharmacists about the efficacy of certain products and some offered “insightful, medically sound advice when asked.” Others were “indifferent or who gave advice on quack products with no scientific or medical basis”.
Ms Just said the problem was consumers could find themselves out of pocket, and with no relief for the problem they are seeking help for.
“When products don’t work the consumer may not only have wasted their money, they may have also delayed the opportunity to seek more appropriate treatment,” she said.
The Pharmacy Guild of Australia agrees.
That’s reassuring.
“Pharmacists take their professional responsibilities very seriously,” a guild spokesman told AAP.
Except that Choice has just found that a significant number of them don’t, at least to the extent of being willing to offer scientific sounding advice on products which have no value whatever.
“The guild agrees with CHOICE’s recommendation that the best course of action is to speak to the pharmacist about any new or novel product you’re considering, and ask for further information.”
No, the best course of action is for the Pharmacy Guild to advise its members that stocking quack products, no matter how profitable, damages the reputation and standing of all pharmacists.
And even more importantly, potentially damages the health of consumers who rely on their advice.
According to news.com.au:
Being born black in Australia is as much of a health risk as being a regular smoker or drastically overweight.
Many of us start planning a Friday night pub session, with alcohol, cigarettes and junk food… your lifestyle choices take years off your own life. And here is a sobering thought – Indigenous Australians face a similarly shortened life span even from birth.
What nonsense. Being aboriginal does not automatically make you unhealthy or shorten your lifespan.
The news.com story has an interactive thingy (which I couldn’t get to work) which purports to show how much fatty food and alcohol you would need to consume, and how many cigarettes you would need to smoke, to reduce your lifespan to that of the ‘average’ indigenous person.
They have unwittingly hit the nail on the head. It is not being born black, white or purple that makes you unhealthy. It is your lifestyle choices.
Incidentally, this is another argument against socialised medicine (in addition to inefficiency of service provision and the massive additional cost of the bureaucracy required to administer it). That is, as long as people know that someone else will pay if they get sick, there is less incentive to make positive choices about food, alcohol, smoking, exercise, etc.
Indigenous Australians are not less healthy because of the colour of their skin. Like everyone else, their health depends largely on the choices they make.
To suggest that this must be somone else’s fault, and therefore someone else’s responsibilty to fix, is effectively to claim that indigenous people are not able to make responsible choices about their own lives. That is racism.
It is also to condemn them to continuing, paralysing, victimhood.
At the moment, of course, many do not make responsible choices.
But the answer is not to pat them on the head and say ‘Oh dear, it’s all our fault, let us fix it for you.’
Nor is it to continue to spend vast amounts of money trying to repair damage already caused by those lifestyle choices:
COAG calculates $40,228 is spent on indigenous people per head of population compared with $18,351 for non-indigenous Australians.
That cost is for total services provided, not just health services. No one would mind this expenditure if it was making a difference. But it is not.
Nor is clear what can be done.
The welfare management system that applies to vulnerable people in the Northern Territory ensures that up to 50% of welfare payments is quarantined – set aside for use on essentials like food and clothing.
It is possible to get off the scheme by demonstrating you can manage your own affairs responsibly. More than 75% of the people who have been able to do this are white.
Social Justice Commissioner Mick Gooda says this shows the scheme is racist. Withdrawing or managing people’s benefits is ‘punishment’. What he says is needed is rewards, incentives, for people to send their children to school, to behave in ways that will help them stay healthy.
But for heaven’s sake. If people need to be promised rewards before they will send their children to school or stop using the grocery money on alcohol and gambling, then no government programme, and no amount of government spending, is going to affect health or educational outcomes.
Indigenous Australians taking responsibilty for their own choices will make a difference. Until that happens, nothing else will.
Oooh…!
That big scary Mr Garnaut has a big scary splash in the Daily Telegraph claiming that rising seas and increasing incidence of extreme weather events mean that Sydney will be swamped by the sea every year instead of every 100 years.
What is really scary (for Garnaut and Gillard) is that of 38 comments on that story as at time of writing, not one is supportive of Garnaut and the Carbon Tax.
Here are just a few:
Thanks Professor, for your thoughts. I accept without question your ‘global warming’, whoops sorry, I meant ‘climate change’ warnings. As soon as we introduce the carbon dioxide tax (on the air we breathe!) I am sure the oceans will take head and not inundate us any more!!!
Interesting report, from what is undoubtedly the Gillard government’s stooge, no science or data to back up the claims, yelling from the roof top that disaster is upon us unless we act now, confirming the Looney Lefts view on climate change and Labour calls Tony Abbott a fear merchant. I suspect we have a Chicken Little in our midst
Hell we are about to be flooded and the one of the biggest polluters America hasnt signed up to reduce emissions. Damn that, Julia was just over there giving speaches and she forgot to tell them.
Oh Puurrlleeese, enough already. The carbon tax is starting to bite into Labor’s stocks so in rides the White Knight (Professor Garnaut) on his White steed to save the day. The climate is going to change as long as we (the world) keep chopping down trees that breathe in Carbon Dioxide and breathe out Oxygen. So start talking honestly instead of this big Con of just trying to get more money off us.
And even if it were true, the carbon tax would not save us. The nonsense coming from these people just gets louder, shriller, and more bizarre…
Exactly.
As I noted a few days ago, the only way a carbon price can have any affect on CO2 output is by reducing the use of fossil fuels.
It does this by making the use of those fuels more expensive. This increases the cost of electricity, of water (especially if that water come from a desalination plant), of manufacturing and mining, production of agricultural goods, transport and travel. A carbon tax increases the cost of everything, because everything in our economy depends on fossil fuels.
When the cost of production goes up, the price of the items produced goes up. People buy less, production goes down.
This is what the Prime Minister said would happen:
“It has price impacts. It’s meant to, that’s the whole point,” Ms Gillard said. “If you put a price on something, then people will use less of it.”
But now Simon Crean says money taken from CO2 emitting companies (ie, any company that produces anything) will be fed back into the economy in the form of compensation to consumers:
“The cost to the families will be compensated,” Mr Crean told ABC radio this morning.
“We have made that clear. We will ensure that the compensation is totally adequate. We will return all of the monies raised to people through the tax mechanism.”
So there won’t be price impacts, so people won’t be using less of anything, so there will be no reduction in CO2 output.
So what is the point? What is the Gillard government trying to achieve?
Ms Gillard also warned that Australia would miss out on new green jobs and be left behind the rest of the world if it did not create a “low carbon economy”.
But a paper released a few days ago by Verso Research confirms what other studies have shown – that every ‘green’ job created costs four jobs somewhere else.
The Verso study finds that after the annual diversion of some 330 million British pounds from the rest of the U.K. economy, the result has been the destruction of 3.7 jobs for every “green” job created.
The study concludes that the “policy to promote renewable energy in the U.K. has an opportunity cost of 10,000 direct jobs in 2009-10 and 1,200 jobs in Scotland.” So British taxpayers, as is the case here in the U.S., are being forced to subsidize a net loss of jobs in a struggling economy.
This is the grand plan: a huge bureaucracy to manage a tax to reduce carbon output that won’t reduce carbon output, and a green job scheme that will cause higher unemployment.
US Department of Justice statistics show that although they constitute only 1% of America’s population, Muslims have been responsible for 186 of 228 terror cases investigated since 9/11.
The Tamil Tigers and Columbian FARC are next with 32 cases between them.
And, no, of course we shouldn’t blame all Muslims for this. And we don’t. Despite scare stories about Islamophobia, Jews in the US are ten times more likely to be the victims of a hate crime than Muslims.
Why are Muslims in America and Australia so over-represented in terror related offences?
It is a question I would have thought moderate Muslims were as anxious to answer as the rest of us.
Yet the response to Republican Peter King’s investigation of the extent of radicalisation of American Muslims and the response of the Muslim community to this radicalisation has been protest rallies and personal attacks including death threats.
A little more from Rick Moran at Frontpagemag.com:
Why this has developed into such a wildly controversial matter says more about those who are threatening, smearing, and hysterically criticizing King than it does about radical Islam. When the left allies itself with extremist groups like the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) in order to wave the flag of political correctness in America’s face, you realize that the problem is bigger than simply rooting out extremism. The exaggerated, over-the-top, self-righteous posturing coming from media outlets like The New York Times bespeaks a refusal to face up to the challenge of radical Islam in America and how to combat it.
And if we’re not prepared to address the threat of extremism in our own country, how can we possibly fight it overseas?
Leftists and their Muslim grievance-monger allies are deliberately seeking to block efforts to discover the extent of the problem of terrorism by viciously attacking the New York congressman. They are opposing King in the name of some misguided belief that because terrorism comes from a specific religious group, we must blind ourselves to the danger, else we would be guilty of “bigotry.”
Canadian blogger Publius questions the priorities of government spending.
While refusing treatment for a 35 year old mother of two with cancer (cost $40,000), Canada manages to find $42,000 to fund extra classes in French for a dyslexic tax collector.
Here’s part of what he has to say:
These two stories are eloquent expressions – for those still paying attention – of the nature of modern Canada. Bilingualism in its current form, especially as it relates to employment policies in the federal government, is a continual act of appeasement toward Quebecois nationalism. Rather than being an attempt to promote a more bilingual Canada – which is an impracticality – official bilingualism was instead a covert form of pro-Francophone affirmative action.
Yet so central has this policy of appeasement become to our government that nothing is thought of paying a small fortune to educate a dyslexic paper shuffler in French. There is, of course, no practical reason for training this bureaucrat in another language. Unless we are to believe there is a shortage of Francophone tax collectors in Canada.
The myth of national unity through appeasement contrasts with the myth of socialized health care. We are told that a system of socialized medicine is more compassionate than private alternatives. There is nothing in the story of Jill Anzarut that suggests compassion. There is also no such thing as socialized health care. It is a polite euphemism for monopolistic and bureaucratic health care. The Medicare Cult’s defenders argue that the alternative to government care is a heartless free market, interested only in penny pinching and profit making. Does not, however, the actions of the Ministry of Health sound exactly like the caricature of a heartless corporate penny pincher?
In a free market Jill Anzarut would have had the choice to buy private health care insurance that provided coverage for the treatment being sought. Instead she – and the other twelve million residents of Ontario – have no choice in what OHIP will or will not cover.
On Monday March 7th Tim Blair alerted his readers to the work of blogger Alene Composta.
Andrew Bolt picked up the story the following day.
Alene’s writings were a mixture of demented rantings about current political debates, meditations on her state of mental health, and personal attacks on people who disagreed with her.
So naturally she was immediately invited by the ABC’s Unleashed editor Jonathon Green to write a guest post for ABC online. After less than a day, that post was removed from the ABC website. It is still viewable through Google’s cache.
Alene’s article is a wildly paranoid take on Sean Nicholl’s story in the Sydney Morning Herald about a single New South Wales Liberal (conservative) Party member’s description of the coming NSW election day as ‘moose day.’
Right from the start there was speculation on Tim Blair’s blog that Alene Composta was a hoax.
Yesterday Gavin Atkins noted that a commenter on Tim’s blog had found that Alene Composta’s publicity photo actually came from another blog with very few posts. The subject of the blog is Wartrol, a purported treatment for genital warts. It belongs to someone called Marian Roldans.
There really is a treatment called Wartrol. War troll? It sounds like Crikey and the ABC already. Also, it’s homeopathic so it doesn’t have any active ingredients, or do anything useful. Another similarity.
At very least, Alene Composta’s photo is a fake. Or Marian’s is. Or both. I suspect the latter.
Alene Composta is one of the best thought-out and most amusing hoaxes for a long time.
Alene is a Dutch name, incidentally, related to ‘alleen’ – ‘alone.’ It could also be Celtic, in which case it means a revealing light.
Roldans? Well, there is a basque story called Roldan’s Bugle-horn, which tells of a terrifying adventure and a horn which when blown causes rocks to break and mountains to catch fire.
And Composta? How did the ABC fall for that? She might as well have been called Ophelia Bullshit.
So, a Dutch name, manure, bugle-horns and genital warts? More than fairly played by Tim and Andrew, and well done!
Update:
JF Beck points out that Alene Composta is an anagram of ‘moose placenta.’
This just gets better and better.
Just a few things.
1. I note that Channel Ten newsreader Ron Wilson is under attack for suggesting that some parts of the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras were an exploitation of sexual imagery, and crossed the line between colourful and disgusting.
I wouldn’t have thought Ron’s questions were all that controversial. The Mardi Gras is deliberately provocative. It provokes by using openly sexual imagery, and by mocking anyone who may be offended by this, or who holds different views about human sexuality or the public display of sexuality.
Ron’s two ‘offensive’ questions came in the context of eight minutes of positive coverage of the Mardi Gras. But this seems to be one of those subjects where there is zero tolerance for diversity of opinion. You can be a supporter of gay rights (as Ron is) but any questioning whatever, of anything, ist verboten. Ron has been forced to apologise.
The outraged demand for an apology is the behaviour of spoilt teenagers, not responsible adults. And given that Mardi Gras participants take it as their right to offend and belittle anyone who disagrees with them, it is also monumentally hypocritical.
2. People tend to believe in global warming when it is warm, and to be sceptical when it is cold. So lots more people in the Northern hemisphere should be coming over to the side of evidence and reason right about now.
3. I thought this was amusing:
How Does Solar Power Work?
From Mitchieville, whose motto is “Think globally, act locally, and demand handouts.”
4. 40 Days for Life runs through Lent – from the 9th of March to the 17th of April.
Being pro-life means being committed to the value of all human life – people are people, and valuable, even if they look different, or are smaller, or less intelligent, or less aware. If a society abandons this insight in relation to the unborn, it will soon abandon it in relation to others.
Mardi Gras means fat (or big) Tuesday. It is the day before Lent.
It is also called Shrove Tuesday because it is a day to be shriven, that is, to confess your sins and ask for absolution so you can enter into the season of Lent with a clear mind and heart, and the determination never again to do anything contrary to the will of God. Mardi Gras because Christians fast during Lent, and luxury foods like eggs and meat are to be finished off on that day – even if there is plenty. So it is a day both to reflect and to feast.
Tonight is the Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras in Sydney. It’s the Saturday night before Shrove Tuesday, not Shrove Tuesday itself. But this has to be just about the most egregious appropriation of a religious festival in human history.
Christians may find the Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras offensive. I certainly find some aspects offensive. The sisters of perpetual indulgence, for example, a group of self-obsessed morons who mercilessly belittle and abuse the group, Roman Catholic nuns, who do more on the ground work to relieve AIDS suffering than any other.
But Christians being offended doesn’t matter. We will go out of our way not to be offensive in return. We certainly won’t subject those who offend us to physical violence.
If the gay and lesbian population really want to make a stand for what they perceive as their rights, why not hold this festival at a time or in a place when it is confronting to a culture that regards them as less than human, which decrees that gays and lesbians should be hanged, stoned or beheaded?
How about the Ramadan Gay and Lesbian Festival? Held in Lakemba?
No?
A clear majority of Australians, including me, believe that gays and lesbians should be treated equally under the law. Not subject to sanctions, and able to register long-standing partnerships for tax or pension or bequest purposes.
But where the heck do they get the idea that a clear majority of Australians believe two men or two women should be able to marry one another?
Marriage is a lifelong union between one man and one woman. Nothing anyone says is going to change that. And nothing anyone says is going to change the fact that most Australians believe the law should reflect what marriage really is, not whatever passing trends claim it should be.
And no, you can’t marry your pet dolphin.
Well, bickering mums really.
Bonds Baby Search, an online competition to find babies and toddlers suitable to model Bonds brand of babywear, has been rocked by the discovery that not all babies, and not all parents, are cute and cuddly.
Some parents don’t think that some other parents’ babies are all that attractive. This is apparently not allowed. All the babies are gorgeous, even the ugly ones. And no one is allowed to say otherwise.
But why would you enter your baby in a competition where the whole point is that people make judgements about your baby’s appearance, if you are going to get distressed when people make judgements about your baby’s appearance?
And then there’s the race row. Oh dear. A race row.
Actually, of over 50,000 entries and half a million visits to the site, one person (one, 1, uno, a single person) left a mildly racist remark about an asian looking baby – ‘Bonds Australia, not Asia.’
You might think if you had a baby competition in Malaysia, to find a baby to represent a Malaysian brand, that it was quite appropriate that the baby be ethnically Malaysian.
But that is not the way we do things in Australia. And rightly.
Everyone who comes to Australia legally is as much an Australian as anyone else. Any baby in Australia is an Australian baby. It is wrong to suggest otherwise.
But this was one comment, from one person, out of over half a million visitors.
That is not a race row.
I noted last August that people seemed to be confused about how much carbon dioxide there was in the atmosphere. Some people thought that CO2 made up half of all the gasses in the atmosphere.
One of Jo Nova’s readers recently asked 100 people questions about the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, and came up with similar results.
The actual amount is about 380 parts per million. Or 0.038%. Or not quite four one hundredths of one percent.
Human contribution to this total is about 3%. No one knows for certain because there is no way of telling human produced CO2 from natural CO2.
In the past there have been much larger natural variations in CO2 levels without any human input.
For example, when many modern green plants developed in the Cretaceous period, CO2 was aprroximately three times its current level. Coral reefs evolved and thrived during the Mesozoic Period, when atmospheric CO2 levels stayed above 1,000 parts per million for 150 million years and exceeded 2,000 parts per million for several million years, compared with 380 ppm now. Any influence of human activity is minor compared with past natural changes.
But we know that human use of fossil fuels does contribute something to current CO2 levels. Calculations (necessarily very approximate) of the amount of CO2 produced by all human activity as a proportion of what we think we know at the moment of the normal natural carbon cycle, gives a figure of about 3%.
So the influence of human CO2 production on atmospheric gasses is about 0.038 x 3% = 0.00114%
Australia’s share of human produced CO2 is 1.5%.
So Australia’s share of the impact of human CO2 production on atmospheric gasses is 0.038 x 3% x 1.5% = 0.0000171%
The Greens/Gillard plan to tax CO2 is intended to increase prices and reduce production so that CO2 output is reduced by 5%.
So the anticipated change to atmospheric gas composition if this plan is successful is 0.038% x 3% x 1.5% x 5%, or 0.000000855%
Australia’s Carbon Tax will change atmospheric gas composition by less than one molecule in 100 million.
Even on the most exuberant alarmist guesses about the impact of CO2 on climate change, the impact of Australia’s Carbon Tax on climate change will be zero. Nothing.
Just to be clear, the only way a CO2 tax can reduce CO2 output is by making corporations and people change their behaviour. It does this by increasing the cost of energy so that energy usage is reduced.
Increasing the cost of energy means more expensive production and therefore reduced production. It means travel and transport are more expensive. This means everything from food to electricity to sleeping bags to tractors, will cost more.
The cost to selected major corporations is already estimated to be over $10 billion. These costs will be passed on to ordinary Australians in the form of price increases. When other companies and costs are factored in, it is likely that the total cost of the Carbon Tax will be well over $25 billion per year.
This is about $1,250 for every Australian. Or $5,000 for every household. To achieve nothing.
Again, $100 per week cost to the average household, to achieve nothing.
Human CO2 production is growing at approximately 3% per year. Australia’s CO2 output is 1.5% of the total. Even if Australia instantly stopped all CO2 output – that is, if we stopped producing anything, driving anywhere, turned off every appliance and all the lights and stopped breathing – the world would have caught up in just six months time.
An Australian Carbon Tax will have no impact on climate whatever.
The only possible reality based argument for the introduction of a carbon tax in Australia is that of leadership. For this argument to hold water, you have to believe the following things:
If even one of those points is refuted, the whole argument fails.
Jamie Larcombe was a quiet, decent young man from a hardworking and honest family.
He lived on Kangaroo Island, as I do.
Jamie was a sapper (military engineer and infantryman) in the Australian army. He was killed by insurgents in Afghanistan on February 19th. He was 21 years old.
1,000 people attended his funeral in Kingscote on Friday.
Jamie was known and well liked for his openness, sense of humour and commitment to his community through sport and as a CFS (Country Fire Service) volunteer.
There is a sense of loss in the whole KI community. There is also thankfulness for Jamie’s courage, and for his willingness to undertake duties for his country which were demanding and dangerous.
Prime Minister Gillard said that in honouring Sapper Larcombe she honoured all engineers for their critical work.
“Jamie Larcombe knew why he was in Afghanistan and he did not resile from the job. Australian forces were working under a United Nations mandate, taking the fight to the insurgents, to assist with building governance and capacity, and of course to train the Afghan national army. Jamie Larcombe died doing these three things.
Sapper Larcombe’s loss was not in vain. We best offer his sacrifice by maintaining our resolve and backing his mates as they continue to do the job until the job is done.”
She is right.
Jamie believed in what he was doing. If we believe in it too, then we must not falter in our resolve to continue to help the people of Afghanistan build a safe and stable society.
There is a long way to go.
The Karzai government is duplicitous, lazy and corrupt. The South and East of Afghanistan are still largely controlled by the Taliban, and Western forces struggle to gain the confidence and trust of the local Pashtun people.
But despite the difficulties, there has been extraordinary progress over the last ten years.
According to the World Bank, in 2000 Afghanistan was in the lowest percentile in all six key areas of governance the bank tracks: accountability, rule of law, control of corruption, government effectiveness, regulatory quality, and political stability.
Average income was less than 50c per day, making Afghans amongst the poorest people in the world. Infrastructure, never good to begin with, had collapsed. Roads were not maintained, medical care and educational facilities were almost inoperative.
Only a third of Afghans were able to read or write, and few girls were enrolled in any form of schooling. Over the previous twenty years, as many as fifty percent of Afghans had been killed, wounded or displaced. Less than one fifth of the population had access to clean water.
After the UN (in reality the US and a few key allies like Britain and Australia) intervened following the 9/11 attacks, life for ordinary Afghans began to improve dramatically.
In October 2004 the country held its first ever presidential election. In September 2005, the first parliamentary election since 1973.
GDP increased by 29% in 2002, and averaged 14% growth per year from then to 2009.
By 2008 children were being immunised against diptheria, pertussis (whooping cough) and tetanus at a higher rate than anywhere else in South Asia, and at rates comparable to Western democracies.
School enrolments went from 1 million in 2001 to nearly six million in 2008, and the proportion of female students rose from 2% to nearly 40%.
Roads were repaired, and hospitals opened. Most Afghans now have access to sanitation and clean water.
All of this, the most dramatic growth and improvement in any state and economy since Europe’s post World War 2 recovery, has been a result of the courage and commitment of ordinary men and women like Jamie Larcombe.
Rest in peace, Jamie. And thanks.
Let’s be clear about this. Most Muslims are decent people.
That does not mean there is no problem with Islam.
Consider some of the brutal attacks carried out in the name of Islam over the last few days. These are not crimes which just happened to be committed by Muslims.
Christians, Hindus and Buddhists commit crimes. These were crimes perpetrated by people who claimed that these acts were justified or commanded by their faith – that they were following the example of Muhammed:
2nd March 2011 (Islamabad, Pakistan) – Taliban gunmen kill Shahbaz Bhatti, the only Christian in Pakistan’s cabinet.
2nd March 2011 (Frankfurt, Germany) – Two US airmen are killed and two civilians wounded when Arif Uka, a 21 year old islamist, fires into a bus.
1st March 2011(Mardan, Pakistan) – Nineteen are injured when the Taliban throw a grenade into a girl’s school.
1st March 2011 (Bara, Pakistan) – Islamic militants behead a civilian and dump his head and torso in separate areas.
1st March 2011 (Miranshah, Pakistan) – Four villagers are abducted and executed in captivity by Sunni fundamentalists.
28th Feb 2011 (Srinagar, India) – An engineer and father of three dies from shrapnel injuries suffered from an Islamist grenade attack at a market.
28th Feb 2011 (Baramulla, India) – A shopkeeper is murdered by Mujahideen gunmen.
28th Feb 2011 (Dabwak, Nigeria) – A Christian mother and four of her children are slaughtered in their home by Muslim militants.
27th Feb 2011 (Landi Kotal, Pakistan) – A tribal elder is abducted and murdered by suspected Lashkar-e-Islam.
27th Feb 2011(Pattani, Thailand) – A 54-year-old salesman is shot to death by Muslim militants.
And in the latest ‘nearly’ scare, on March 1st islamic militant Rajib Karim was found guilty of plotting to blow up a BA passenger jet. Karim had moved to the UK from Bangladesh in 2006.
He was “committed to an extreme jihadist and religious cause” and was “determined to seek martyrdom”, jurors were told.
These are examples from just the last few days.
If Christians started behaving this way, and saying they were doing so in the name of Jesus, I, and every Christian leader in the known world, would be saying as loudly and clearly as we could that such actions were repulsive and utterly incompatible with Christianity.
But Muslim leaders, even those who claim to be moderate, do not do this – or at least, not clearly and consistently.
Watch this video from France:
OK, so that’s France. This is Australia:
So tell us please, Mr Wilkie, how does being concerned about this make someone a racist?
© 2024 Qohel