30 Nov 2005

Hot-Air Emission

Mark Steyn reports that the USA, who did not sign the amateurish Kyoto climate “treaty”, is way ahead of  that darling of the politically correct world, Canada in meeting emission goals. America’s have declined compared to Canada’s which have gone up, (along with those  most of the other Kyoto signatories).  The USA recorded an absolute decline of 0.8% from 1990 levels, the Kyoto benchmark. Most countries failed totally. For example, according to CNN:

“Canada is up there with Spain, Ireland, Greece and five other nations as having the biggest increases in gas emissions. According to the United Nations, Spain is the worst, with a nearly 42 percent increase in emissions between 1990 and 2003; Canada stands at 24 percent and the United States experienced an increase of 13 percent.“
Comments Steyn:

“As you'll recall, in a typically "pig-headed and blinkered" (The Independent) act that could lead to the entire planet becoming "uninhabitable" (Michael Meacher), "Polluter Bush" (Daily Express), "this ignorant, short-sighted and blinkered politician" (Friends of the Earth), rejected the Kyoto treaty. Yet somehow the "Toxic Texan" (everybody) has managed to outperform Canada on almost every measure of eco-virtue.

How did that happen? Actually, it's not difficult. Signing Kyoto is nothing to do with reducing "global warming" so much as advertising one's transnational moral virtue. America could reduce its greenhouse-gas emissions by 87 per cent and Canada could increase them by 673 per cent and the latter would still be a "good citizen of the world" (in the Prime Minister's phrase) while "Polluter Bush" would still be in the dog house, albeit a solar-powered one.”

26 Nov 2005

Stir-Fry Endangered Species

As if Kenya's wildlife "gift" of 175 animals to some "zoo" in Thailand was not bad enough, while the Thais browse our animals by sight, they can also browse endangered species in the Night Safari Wildlife Park restaurant. No, it's not snacking on a little zebra at the Carnivore in Nairobi. The menu at this establishment fully conforms to the oriental theory of wildlife conservation: if you can't eat it with chopsticks, eat it anyway.

Thus diners can tuck into tiger, elephant and lion meat, among others. There happen to be only about 4000 tigers in the world and they are critically endangered. Lions are headed that way. If you eat an elephant in Kenya, Kenya Wildlife Service wardens will give you a serving of hot AK-47 sauce to accompany it.

As a ex-professional hunter's son, I am totally for controlled licensing hunting or licensed utilization of our animals. Yet Kibaki shot down the Wildlife Amendment Bill 2005 after Parliament passed it, only to give the Prime Minister of Thailand animals for his zoo. We were meant to be getting tourists from Thailand, not letting them a chance see our animals for 5 Bhat at home, and then eat them? All in all, it is yet another sign of the disconnect between our Cabinet and ordinary Kenyan desires.

The reason we don't have a proper hunting tourism policy in Kenya is because of sinister NGO's like IFAW (International Fund For Animal Welfare). These seem to have enough money to influence KWS and certain politicians, it is rumoured. IFAW contain a strong component of vegan wildlife hippies and Animals Rights loonies. They are well described as " a thorn in the side of the sustainable use movement."

Interestingly, the respected IUCN (International Union for the Conservation of Nature) refused to accept IFAW as a member.

Starship Bush


It's been apparant for some time that many in the world suffer a new psychiatric condition known as "BDS" - Bush Derangement Syndrome, in which any and everything has been blamed on GWB. Even the BBC wondered if he did not cause the Asian Tsunami.

Now a former Canadian defense minister informs us the GWB is about to take on aliens. This story would be a joke were it not true.

Paul Helleyer told a conference:
"The United States military are preparing weapons which could be used against the aliens, and they could get us into an intergalactic war without us ever having any warning. He stated, "The Bush administration has finally agreed to let the military build a forward base on the moon, which will put them in a better position to keep track of the goings and comings of the visitors from space, and to shoot at them, if they so decide."
Hellyer’s speech ended with a standing ovation. He said,
"The time has come to lift the veil of secrecy, and let the truth emerge, so there can be a real and informed debate, about one of the most important problems facing our planet today."
Certainly...........

23 Nov 2005

Out of the Pot & Into the Fire

Kenyans once again demonstrated their immense maturity in the peaceful voting against the Draft Consitutuion on November 21st which resulted in a clear, but not overwhelming, defeat (53% to 47%) for the government. Outside of South Africa, it's hard to think of a populace as dedicated to peaceful voting as Kenyans - a credit to the continent.

Yet the rejection of the Draft ushers in prolonged political instability and an even worse spectre. The hare-brained older "Bomas Draft" with 5, count 'em, levels of elected government plus an upper chamber and "upper and lower limits on the amount of land" one can own. Considering that with just one layer of elected government our MPs have practically bankrupted Kenya, the wisdom of the "Bomas Draft" becomes so questionable as to render one terminally depressed.

The opposition "Orange" group seems to be firm believers in the "big government, small citizens" theory of left wing politics. The idea that Kenyans are people who need a small hard working government that concentrates on making use of valuable African social conservatism and the immense entreprenurial spirit of Kenyans generally, seems to occcur to no leader whatsoever.

On a strata of 15% middle class citizens, the Bomas Draft seeks to bring about social(ist) utopia via government doing more of what they have failed to do since independance in 1963.

15 Nov 2005

The $20 Million Comma

With just a week to go to the national referendum of the new Constitution, Kenya has already had a near dozen deaths and countless violent skirmishes between the "No" and "Yes" camps.

The proposed constitution has a mixure of good and bad proposals. Sadly, it was drafted mostly by social activists and lawyers - a combination as incomprehensible as that of the French revolutionary consititution, when journalists and lawyers got together. We all know that result.

The second problem is that it is almost impossible to amend. It's a complex, tediously long and often contradictory document that will need exactly that. In trying to please everyone, the 2005 Draft has ended up fatally confusing the slim principles of national guidance that a consitution should be, with the fat layers of shifting,flexible laws that Parliaments should produce. If lawyers can't agree on it at this stage, what hope has the ordinary citizen to grasp it tomorrow?

The famed US constitution, considered the world's most perfect model, is but a few pages long, of scant clauses and sections. In reality these have required an average of one amendment for every 15 years of it's long existance.

One must shudder to think at the future revisions neccessary in the 290 chapters and over 1000 sub-sections of dense double-legalese that is the huge 2005 Kenya draft.

To change even a comma after voting day will require a petition of a million signatures, as verified by the Electoral Commission, 66% of the new "District Assemblies" which are set to number over 70, followed by 66% of all MPs, who may double from there present number (nobody knows or can tell from the draft).

And that's just to get the change onto a ballot! The whole process then has to pass a full national referendum, just like the one that has killed many people and cost millions of dollars to date.

This blind rigidity is the single most compelling reason why the new constitution may fail to pass. It will require dozens of future and immediate amendments; none are practically or cheaply possible.

The elitist lawyers, social activists, foreign-funded NGOs, ivory-towered professors, political retreads and professional nit pickers who wrote this document have feathered themselves a very fine nest - or else filled for each other a barrel full of the choicest pork. The taxpayers of Kenya will be funding their endless squabbling over this monstrously complex document for the next century - if our economy can survive that long.

Pity poor Kenya, 134th on the list of rich countries, having it's ordinary citizens pay for this immense edifice of much more government, on a per capita income of a few hundred dollars per annum and declining steadily.

Since most Kenyans agree on the need to entrench anti-corruption, land reform, freedom of information, citizenship amendments, environmental protection, reduced Presidential powers and the rights of people as outlined in some sensible sections of the draft document, it should be easy to muster 65% of MPs to rapidly amend the old Consitution in these progressive ways. That is only possible if the electorate throws out the bloated draft on November 21st.

6 Nov 2005

Strangling The Internet

The Third World, Eurocrats and the U.N. look ready to continue an increasingly acrimonious battle for "control" over the Internet with America. The USA "owns" the Internet, having invented it as a military tool in the 70's and then given it away to scientists and universities when it was no longer needed by the US armed forces. From thence it spread to the private sector.

An American committee (The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) controls the domain name system (the .com,.og,.co.ke and so forth) and access to the master codes for the naming system.

In fact the USA has done a magnificent job of not "controlling" at all the Internet it rightfully invented. Hundreds of millions of people worldwide have free internet mail accounts with US firms, as just one example.

The US Corporation owning the domain name system charges a few dollars only for anyone,anywhere to register a domain. The Internet is an incredible resource of free information, good and bad, accessible to everyone everywhere.....Well almost.

The ICANN "controls" nothing in the form of Net content, be it pornography or healthcare tips, dissertations on microbiology or the sale of fake Rolex watches. However, governments can block internet content they do not like,if they wish.

A Kenyan visiting Dubai cannot log on to a perfectly decent dating website like AfroIntroductions. A little sign pops up saying that such sites are not allowed as "contrary to the moral and religious principles of the United Arab Emirates". Dating is censored in many Muslim countries.

Similarly, looking up "Tianamen Square 1989" on Google in Communist China will get you nowhere, since the communists do not want debate on the role of the party in massacring hundreds of pro-democracy students in that famous incident. The Chinese government blocks that and millions of other sites as it fears the internet will allow it's people access to free expression, one thing Communists dislike a great deal. After all, truth is a light against dark political minds.

As far as the US is concerned, the Internet and it's domains are like a form of electronic paper. We don't prosecute papermakers because someone prints a lie, a racial hatred pamphlet, a fake advertisement or a call to jihad. We do not shut down the inkmakers factory because someone prints leaflets we don't like, though we may choose to prosecute the writer of such. The US thus does not seek to control access to the internet, leaving it to others to do that, if they wish, at national or parental level. That makes sense to me.

Typical of the complaints of control-minded Third World and European elites about the wonderful,crazy,free world of the internet are these comments from Kenyan journalist Wairagala Wakabi in the East African newspaper:
"the ICANN lacks any power to affect the broad range of public policy issues associated with the Internet".
In other words, ICANN does not adopt an ideological position. He quotes the Panos London agency worrying whether the
"Internet governance system should address the question of controlling undesirable content - pornography,hate content,crime".


The "solution" proposed is to put control of the domain system in the hands of the UN, with a committee of "multi-country and multi-stakeholder" governors. Translation? Putting unelected U.N. bureaucrats and Brussels-based officials in charge of "controlling" who can say what,where on the Net. That will be soon followed by taxing the Internet by governments and thus drive up it's costs.

Let's see. The U.N. was unable to prevent a massacre in Rwanda, could not stop Serbs killing 5,000 Muslims in Sebrenicza and can't control Saddam's Oil-For-Food scandals, but they are going to do just fine deciding what the 7 billion citizens of earth can and cannot do with the Internet? The Eurocrats are screwing the 3rd World with farm subsides and can't prevent mass religious violence in Europe, as we are now witnessing, but they are going to "control" hate content on the Internet? Dozens of non-democracies and petty tyrants in governments all over the world like Iran, Equatorial Guinea and Zimbabwe should be given a say in what you can and cannot read internationally and not just in their own miserable countries?

US "control" over the Internet, which as we see is no control at all, seems completely wonderful compared to those sorry ideas. The Internet is the last and only way people of the world can communicate in freedom. It is supremely subversive of established order and "perceived truth". The US has utterly rejected the proposals of the UN and others to hand it over to an "international committee" and they should be totally supported by the global citizenry.

Instead, the US will be propangandized into being the "villain" in this matter by Ministers of Information and their allies worldwide. I have a better idea. If the UN and others are unhappy with the Internet as it stands, then they should go start their own that they control, and see how many people worldwide log on. That's freedom.

PARIS BURNING

Robert Spencer at Frontpage has an arrow aimed at the heart of the French riots, now in their 10th day.

".....the Paris riots demonstrate on a large scale the abject failure of the multiculturalist philosophy that disparate groups can coexist within a nation without any idea that they must share at least some basic values. The French are paying the price today for blithely assuming that France could absorb a population holding values vastly different from that of the host population, without negative consequences for either."

Of course, reading the international media and watching the MSM TV, it's almost impossible to hear the work "Muslim" in the descriptions of the riots. Intead the riots are just happening on their own, it seems or are due to "race". You have to feel sorry for the European left, they have no words to describe what their policies have created.