spinbadz own

Luckily for us, most people aren't on the front lines in Iraq. Hundreds of US (and some coalition) soldiers have died brutal deaths over there.

Spared direct involvement, the Iraq war only exists for the vast majority of people on television screens, in newspapers and on the Internet.

So if the war is portrayed by significant media institutions with relentless negative bias, that is a most serious offence not only against the ordinary citizen but also against the brave young men and women fighting the war.

If the war is portrayed at home as unjust, it will inevitably affect the morale and performance of troops at the front.

It will also raise the morale of the enemy, who in the interconnected global vollage that is the world in 2004 are not only fully aware of public machinations in the western world but geared to exploit them. This we can see in the recent events in Spain, in the evidence of bribe money to western figures paid by Saddam Hussein's regime and, we might infer, in the recent upscaling of attacks on US soldiers coinciding as it does with events in an election year in the US.

The 9/11 attacks were clearly themselves icily calculated media events.

Yet, the qualitatively low level of anti-Bush and anti-US sloganeering has been exposed to astoundingly little critical analysis. The current spate of rioting is said by it's Shi'ite leader to be be an action of "resistance" to US "occupation", even though the US is trying to build an independent democracy and fully intends to leave Iraq as soon as possible, and even though such rioting can only prolong death and conflict.

For the US to succeed in its intention is the only moral and correct option for all concerned and most especially the poor people of Iraq, yet opponents of the Bush administration are focusing their attention to besmirching every historical and current aspect of their government's efforts.

So Ted Kennedy's recent and aggressive remonstrations are granted wide media coverage, with nary a reference to that Senator's own dubious credibility. Internet travelers can see at Newsmax.com a reminderof the various unsavoury incidents that have ruined Senator Kennedy's own presidential ambitions - most significantly the night he left young campaign worker Mary Jo Kopechne to die in his crashed Oldsmobile underneath Edgartown Bridge in July 1969 after a night of drinking and partying, then swam himself to safety and tried to get his cousin Joe Garghan to say he was behind the wheel.

But such references are not made by the television networks highlighting his attacks on the war. All three US networks will this Thursday broadcast live National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice's testimony before the commission investigating the Sept. 11 2001 attacks. We can assume that the networks might draw motivation from the fact that the White House had initially insisted that Rice's testimony be private before bowing to political pressure from both Republicans and Democrats that she speak publicly.

We have already seen that even though the man at the centre of the inquiry, Clinton appointee and CBS partner Richard Clarke, is vitually devoid of credibility his criticisms of President Bush have been feasted on by the media.

The current situation is indeed, as the President recently said, a stringent test of US resolve in Iraq. Most hope that the US will survive the test, and that hope is what people want to see reflected in the media's portrayal of the war. But it has not been, and if Bush succeeds and is re-elected, many in the electorate will certainly glean emotional satisfaction from any appropriate consequences dealt upon those who so unconscionably and readily betrayed the trust of the public in its fourth estate.




The Looming Islamization of Europe

Daniel Pipes, Jerusalem Post, May 11, 2004


'Europe becomes more and more a province of Islam, a colony of Islam." So declares Oriana Fallaci in her new book, La Forza della Ragione ("The Force of Reason"). And the famed Italian journalist is right: Christianity's ancient stronghold of Europe is rapidly giving way to Islam. Two factors mainly contribute to this world-shaking development:

The hollowing out of Christianity. Europe is increasingly a post-Christian society, one with a diminishing connection to its tradition or its historic values. The number of believing, observant Christians has collapsed in the past two generations to the point that some observers call Europe the "new dark continent."

Already, analysts estimate Britain's mosques host more worshipers each week than does the Church of England.

An anemic birthrate. Indigenous Europeans are dying out. Sustaining a population requires each woman on average to bear 2.1 children; in the European Union, the overall rate is one-third short, at 1.5 per woman, and falling.

One study finds that should current population trends continue and immigration cease, today's population of 375 million could decline to 275 million by 2075. To keep its working population even, the EU needs 1.6 million immigrants a year; to sustain the present workers-to-retirees ratio requires an astonishing 13.5 million immigrants annually.

Into the void are coming Islam and Muslims. As Christianity falters, Islam is robust, assertive, and ambitious. As Europeans under-reproduce at advanced ages, Muslims do so in large numbers while young.

Some 5% of the EU, or nearly 20 million persons, presently identify themselves as Muslims; should current trends continue that number will reach 10% by 2020. If non-Muslims flee the new Islamic order, as seems likely, the continent could be majority-Muslim within decades.

When that happens, grand cathedrals will appear as vestiges of a prior civilization – at least until a Saudi-style regime transforms them into mosques or a Taliban-like regime blows them up. The great national cultures – Italian, French, English, and others – will likely wither, replaced by a new transnational Muslim identity that merges North African, Turkish, subcontinental, and other elements.

This prediction is hardly new. In 1968, British politician Enoch Powell gave his famed "rivers of blood" speech in which he warned that in allowing excessive immigration the United Kingdom was "heaping up its own funeral pyre." (Those words stalled a hitherto promising career.) In 1973, the French writer Jean Raspail published Camp of the Saints, a novel that portrays Europe falling to massive, uncontrolled immigration from the Indian subcontinent.

The peaceable transformation of a region from one major civilization to another, now underway, has no precedent in human history, making it easy to ignore such voices.

There is still a chance for the transformation not to play itself out, but the prospects diminish with time. Here are several possible ways it might be stopped:

Changes in Europe that lead to a resurgence of Christian faith, an increase in childbearing, or the cultural assimilation of immigrants; such developments can theoretically occur, but what would cause them is hard to imagine.

Muslim modernization: For reasons no one has quite figured out (education of women? abortion on demand? adults too self-absorbed to have children?), modernity leads to a drastic reduction in the birthrate. Also, were the Muslim world to modernize, the attraction of moving to Europe would diminish.

Immigration from other sources. Latin Americans, being Christian, would more or less permit Europe to keep its historic identity. Hindus and Chinese would increase the diversity of cultures, making it less likely that Islam would dominate.

Current trends suggest Islamization will happen, for Europeans seem to find it too strenuous to have children, stop illegal immigration, or even diversify their sources of immigrants. Instead, they prefer to settle unhappily into civilizational senility.

Europe has simultaneously reached unprecedented heights of prosperity and peacefulness – and shown a unique inability to sustain itself (one demographer, Wolfgang Lutz, notes that "Negative momentum has not been experienced on a large scale in world history").

Is it inevitable that the most brilliantly successful society will also be the first in danger of collapse due to a lack of cultural confidence and offspring?

Ironically, creating a hugely desirable place to live would also seem to be a recipe for suicide. The human comedy continues.






"From Japan, we don't sell cheap products anymore."

With global demand surging for ultra-up-market gadgets, a broad variety of local companies making new investments on Japanese soil, including Sharp and Canon Inc., are posting record profits

For fiscal 2003, which ended last week, Japan's Nikkei 225 stock index jumped 46.9 percent, the fourth-largest increase since World War II.

Exports to China soared 33.2 percent to $62.5 billion in 2003.

Cellular phone production alone jumped 28.8 percent in 2003, contributing 7.2 percent of Japan's overall increase in industrial production. Digital camera production jumped 48.4 percent, adding 4.7 percent to industrial output, according to government statistics.

To date, the largest market for flat-screen TVs has been Japan itself ... In the United States, experts said, the price for flat-screen TVs will need to come down substantially before they become common in American homes.

Because only about 2 percent of TV owners worldwide have flat-screen TVs, the market is ripe.



(Speaking of upscale Japanese gadgets, check out the Toyota Prius.