How racist are you? Very or just a  bit?  Not racist at all? Yeah, right… Take the test - link.

Your Score: 75
Average reaction time:
Black Armed:594.88ms
Black Unarmed:667.28ms
White Armed:603ms
White Unarmed:644.36ms

Or just shoot everybody.

Spotter

Four Right Wing Wackos

Offended?

War Web 2.0. fools the newish old media…

CAN’T see the strings:

Spotter

Alex Massie on why a friend became a Tory:

I grew up in a Tory-hating family in Thatcher’s Britain. In those divided times, we were definitely not “one of us” - Mum was a teacher, Dad brought up the kids and we lived in a council house. In fact, the shocked response of my family on this wall has been a relief, because it means they are still speaking to me!

I joined the Labour party at university in 1997 - think Spice Girls, Austin Powers, black-and-white photography - and campaigned enthusiastically for Labour in the May landslide. I became Chair of my university Labour club, secretary of the local branch in Leeds, got active with the Young Fabians and Young Labour. I looked forward to the progressive consensus and hoped that - in the words of the slogan - economic progress and social justice would go hand-in-hand. On so many issues I cared about, the Conservatives were on the wrong side: Bank of England independence, the minimum wage, devolution, abolishing section 28, higher spending on health and education.

After I left Leeds in 1999, I got a bit of a shock. Now in the workplace, I experienced some of the negative effects of government policy first-hand. Working on diversity for a multinational, I saw how official family-friendliness was undermining the business case for flexible work and actually hurting families. Running charity projects in Scotland, I saw how welfare spending was being wasted on a merry-go-round of short-term programmes. Setting up a small business, I experienced the burden of paperwork and tax which prevented us from growing and employing more people. The gap between rhetoric and reality was enormous.

By 2005, I knew I was in the wrong party. The war on terror was being used as an excuse for relentlessly attacking our freedoms. An obsession with top-down targets was distorting public services but costing taxpayers more. Headlines, personalities and electoral strategy were all that was driving policy. After a long period of angst I finally left.

I hate political inactivity - in fact, I think it’s immoral. But in the last four years, nothing has happened to make me reconsider. Labour has revealed its true colours: it is an authoritarian, high-spending, command-and-control party. Under Brown, it has even distanced itself from its few achievements, for example, watering down the Academies programme which has given such remarkable opportunities to kids in the inner-cities.

How many others?

The “oldest hatred” lives, from Gaza to Florida.

You would have to be very hardhearted not to weep at the sight of dead Palestinian children, but you would also have to accord a measure of blame to the Hamas officials who choose to use grade schools as launch pads for Israeli-bound rockets, and to the U.N. refugee agency that turns a blind eye to it. And, even if you don’t deplore Fatah and Hamas for marinating their infants in a sick death cult in which martyrdom in the course of Jew-killing is the greatest goal to which a citizen can aspire, any fair-minded visitor to the West Bank or Gaza in the decade and a half in which the “Palestinian Authority” has exercised sovereign powers roughly equivalent to those of the nascent Irish Free State in 1922 would have to concede that the Palestinian “nationalist movement” has a profound shortage of nationalists interested in running a nation, or indeed capable of doing so. There is fault on both sides, of course, and Israel has few good long-term options. But, if this was a conventional ethno-nationalist dispute, it would have been over long ago.

So, as I said, forget Gaza. And, instead, ponder the reaction to Gaza in Scandinavia, France, the United Kingdom, Canada, and golly, even Florida. As the delegitimization of Israel has metastasized, we are assured that criticism of the Jewish state is not the same as anti-Semitism. We are further assured that anti-Zionism is not the same as anti-Semitism, which is a wee bit more of a stretch.

Only Israel attracts an intellectually respectable movement querying its very existence. For the purposes of comparison, let’s take a state that came into existence at the exact same time as the Zionist Entity, and involved far bloodier population displacements. I happen to think the creation of Pakistan was the greatest failure of post-war British imperial policy. But the fact is that Pakistan exists, and if I were to launch a movement of anti-Pakism it would get pretty short shrift.

Hatred.

Global Cooling:

MIGHT this explain the BBC’s bias towards Iran-backed (?) Hamas, the porno kings? Iain Dale:

I see the BBC has started a new TV channel aimed at Iran called BBC Persia. It has an annual budget of £15 million and will employ 140 staff. Yes, you read that right. The Iranians have reacted angrily and banned it from having a bureau in Tehran. The hypocrisy is breathtaking, when you consider it owns Press TV which freely broadcasts from London.

Press Tee Vee…

British Hack Ridley Takes On Arabic Media

Laughing At George Galloway

OBAMA four years after:

Yeah, he makes it that far!

The ultimate tool for Curbing Greenhouse Emissions...

THE weather…

CRANMER looks at how the language of the Left and politicised Islam denies the Holocaust but thinks, well, it would be a good idea:

Well, that scuppers Cranmer’s plan. Just as the time was becoming ripe for the world’s most respected theologian – who understands both Judaism and political Islam – to undertake some religio-political mediation between Israel’s opposing factions, Cardinal Renato Martino goes and puts his feet in it. He condemned the the use of violence by both Israel and Hamas – as though they were immorally equivalent – and, as a consequence, relations between the Vatican and Israel – which have ever been fragile – have become a little strained.

The Cardinal is President of the Vatican’s Council for Justice and Peace, and is described as a ‘senior aide’ to Pope Benedict XVI. As far as the media is therefore concerned, the Vatican has spoken…

The term ‘concentration camp’ is so irrevocably fused with ‘Nazi’ that the mention of one evokes the spectre of the other… The irony is that the ‘Nazi’ label could be more legitimately applied to Hezbollah, Hamas or the government of Iran.

The Cardinal could not say that Israel is behaving like the Nazis, but the inference is clear: Ehud Olmert’s Israel is behaving like Adolf Hitler’s Germany: the IDF are Nazis.

And the Pope cannot be best pleased with this. As one who has visited concentration camps, and, as a member of Hitler Youth, had first-hand experience of life under the Nazis, he would know that the comparisons are fatuous.

Holocaust. Nazi. How long before the nutters talk of Israel’s final solution?

THE atheist bus - Appleyard:

It’s troubling - so many things are - that the first atheist ‘thought’ on Radio 4 is to be delivered by the woman who created the Atheist Bus Campaign - which was, of course, the Agnostic Bus Campaign. It is still more troubling that she is photographed sprawled on the grass with a bare midriff and a ‘take me now’ look. This can only lead to an arms race. The Chief Rabbi will be photographed on a sofa in a pair of fetching silk boxers. And my pal Rowan - well, you get the picture(s).

Elizabeth Dole Is Run Over By The Atheist Bus
Atheist Bus Quote Of The Day
Atheist Bus Campaign Says Enjoy Life
All Aboard Probably The World’s Best Atheist Crowdsourcing Bus

FEAR is the overriding Jewish emotion for Jews not living in the US. Daniel Finkelstein explains:

The origin of the state of Israel is not religion or nationalism, it is the experience of oppression and murder, the fear of total annihilation and the bitter conclusion that world opinion could not be relied upon to protect the Jews.

Israel was the idea of a journalist. Theodor Herzl was the Paris correspondent of the Neue Freie Presse when he witnessed anti-Semitic rioting against the Jewish army captain Alfred Dreyfus who had been falsely accused of espionage. Herzl was then among the small corps of journalists who in 1895 witnessed the famous ceremony of disgrace in which Dreyfus was stripped of his epaulettes.

The experience led Herzl to abandon his belief in assimilation. He became convinced that Jews would only be safe if they had their own national home. Herzl became the first leader of modern Zionism. For many years many Jews resisted Herzl’s conclusion. My grandfather was among them. But the experience of Jews all over the world in the first half of the 20th century - not just in Europe but in the Middle East too - rather bore out Herzl.

Is fear the basis for sound decision making?

There Are Two Kinds of Libertarians… those who think you can divide all libertarians into two types, and those who don’t.