Time To Short Nokia

Turns out Finland doesn’t have free speech. Since that’s the engine of innovation and growth, Finns are headed back to reindeer herding.

Gates of Vienna reports:

Last Friday the Finnish TV network YLE published the following brief news item:

A blogger in Finland has been fined for writing offensive material about Africans.

A court sentenced the 30-year old Espoo resident to a fine for inciting racial hatred. It found that the man’s writings on the Internet constituted illegal propaganda.

The judgment ruled that the man slandered Africans by comparing them to animals. In his defense, the man said that laws governing freedom of speech protected his right to express his opinion.

Inciting racial hatred — hets mot folkgrupp in the Swedish version — is the catchall offense used in Finland to suppress politically incorrect speech.

Consider how modern economies would fare without free speech:

– Suppliers would suppress negative consumer reviews, so free markets would collapse.

– Governments would suppress aggrieved voters, so democracy and hence capitalism would be replaced by Fear State collectivism.

– Scientific criticism would be silenced, so growth of scientific knowledge would stall.

– Without the freedom to dissent from perceived state abuses, people would take up arms.

So without free speech you get what Finland was until 18 years ago – an impoverished communist hellhole.

Shame to see it revert.

Oh Look, A Shab’wak!

McCain is a lesser evil than racist Obama or fantasist Clinton. But he’s a warmist, so although he’ll probably keep Americans safe, he’ll impoverish them with carbon taxes.

McCain shares the warmist obsession with the poles – in 2004 he pontificated (my ellipsis):

…Mr. McCain said yesterday that the evidence (for AGW), which he called alarming, was clearer than ever…

Particularly disturbing, he went on, is the rapid pace of warming.

“The Inuit language for 10,000 years never had a word for robin,” he said, “and now there are robins all over their villages.”

Imagine the poor Eskimos screaming “Argh, swarms of filthy whateverthey’recalleds”!

But they don’t because (my ellipsis):

(A well known ornithologist ) refers to an earlier compilation of Eskimo names for birds, “The most complete list of Eskimo bird names for this part of Alaska so far published” that can be found in the book My Life with the Eskimo by V. Stefansson published in 1913.

As it so happens, the contents of this book are accessible through Amazon.com. If you visit the link http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/1417923954# , and enter the search term “robin” and read the contents of page 493, you will see a description of where robins have been sighted in the Canadian Arctic prior…to 1913, including along the far northern coast.

Accompanying these location descriptions are the word for ‘robin’ in several other Eskimo tongues, including (phonetically) “Kre-ku-ak’tu-yok” (Mackenzie Eskimo) and “Shab’wak” (Alaskan Eskimo).

Fortunately, McCain’s age ensures he’ll only be able to tank the economy for a single term.

And Alaskan Eskimos can survive his reign by harpooning their plentiful robins.

Free Speech, UN Style

The UN, unsurprisingly, thinks free speech is bad if it offends murderers – presumably because about half of its member nations are run by murderers.

Benjamin Franklin observed that stopping inflammatory speech might sometimes be a good thing, but that unfortunately no human being could be trusted with this authority. Hence the Frirst amendment.

The publication of the Fitna movie provides a textbook example.

Here’s how Islamist censors reacted to Liveleak’s hosting the video:

Following threats to our staff of a very serious nature, and some ill informed reports from certain corners of the British media that could directly lead to the harm of some of our staff, Liveleak.com has been left with no other choice but to remove Fitna from our servers.

This is a sad day for freedom of speech on the net but we have to place the safety and well being of our staff above all else. We would like to thank the thousands of people, from all backgrounds and religions, who gave us their support. They realised LiveLeak.com is a vehicle for many opinions and not just for the support of one.

Perhaps there is still hope that this situation may produce a discussion that could benefit and educate all of us as to how we can accept one anothers culture.

We stood for what we believe in, the ability to be heard, but in the end the price was too high.

The UN head, appropriately named Mr Ban stands shoulder to shoulder with the Islamists:

“There is no justification for hate speech or incitement to violence,” Ban said in a statement. “The right of free expression is not at stake here.”…”Freedom must always be accompanied by social responsibility,” Ban said.

“We must also recognize that the real fault line is not between Muslim and Western societies, as some would have us believe, but between small minorities of extremists, on different sides, with a vested interest in stirring hostility and conflict,” Ban said.

Of course there’s no Western “small minority” that saws captives heads off, flies planes into buildings, executes apostates, bombs trains, threatens critics with death, and brutalizes women.

There’s just one: Islamists.

Aided and abetted in their depravity by Mr Ban and his like.

The Lesson of Fitna

Fitna is at LGF here (censored) and here and here.

The short movie presents Muslims with unpleasant home truths.

Wilders shows, in horrible detail, how the Koran supports sociopathic behavior by its adherents – torture, murder, Antisemitism, and the oppression of women and non-Muslims.

He challenges Muslims to break the link between their religion and such barbarism.

If Muslim immigrants in western societies don’t reform, their hosts will turn on their tormentors.

Reform will be tough for Muslims, and we wish them well with their struggle.

There isn’t much time though.

UPDATE: March 29, 10 PM GMT. Proving Wilders’ point, the headhackers shut down the original site for the movie, I’ve added an alternative.

Warmists Edge To Exits

The Warmist Decline and Fall proceeds apace – the “scientific consensus” is now quite exploded, and the EU is retreating with its continental members’ traditional alacrity.

The vanished consensus:

Fear of anthropogenic “global warming” can adversely affect patients’ well-being.

Accordingly, the state of the scientific consensus about climate change was studied by a review of the 539 papers on “global climate change” found on the Web of Science database from January 2004 to mid-February 2007, updating research by Oreskes (2004), who had reported that between 1993 and 2003 none of 928 scientific papers on “global climate change” had rejected the consensus that more than half of the warming of the past 50 years was likely to have been anthropogenic.

In the present review, 31 papers (6% of the sample) explicitly or implicitly reject the consensus.

Though Oreskes said that 75% of the papers in her sample endorsed the consensus, fewer than half now endorse it. Only 6% do so explicitly.

Only one paper refers to “catastrophic” climate change, but without offering evidence.

There appears to be little evidence in the learned journals to justify the climate-change alarm that now harms patients.

Hopefully, Warmists now face billion dollar law suits from the people they made ill.

Meanwhile, back in Brussels:

A year ago they were brimming with selfless idealism. They agreed to make deep cuts in carbon emissions (by a fifth from 1990 levels by 2020), even if other rich countries did not follow.

The signal was clear: Europe will start saving the planet now, even if the selfish Americans (not to mention the Chinese and Indians) are not ready. Bigger cuts were promised if other countries joined in, prompting much self-congratulatory talk about the EU’s “leading role”.

That was then. A year on, with the world economy looking wobblier, the March summit was a less uplifting affair. Leaders from countries with powerful heavy-industry lobbies called for explicit measures to “protect” European firms in case talks on a global climate-change deal failed (and left the Europeans pushing ahead with tough curbs on their own).

In a move that would make an American divorce lawyer proud, Germany, France, Austria, Italy and the Czech Republic all asked the EU to plan for failure, insisting that defensive measures must be agreed before climate-change talks in Copenhagen at the end of 2009.

The Brit government in particular has been busily taxing cars based on their CO2 emissions. Since the last 8 tears of rising CO2 and flat temperatures prove CO2 is not causing warming, that leaves it in a tricky position.

It’ll be fun to watch the end game.

Flat Tops And Corsairs

Is how a legendary head of Motorola’s cellphone business once described his strategy to beat the Japanese.

Generations of managers later, Moto has thrown in the towel.

Let’s hope this creative destruction brings back the guys with the killer instinct.

PS Here’s a Corsair paying its respects to the Japanese in Okinawa:

The Hard-To-Kill American Military

The baleful effect of the biased war reporting of our MSM is only part of the story – American fighters sell their lives dearly, and that’s been true for decades.

A comment on our earlier post points to these statistics:

To date, we have killed over 20,700 of those who sought to engage us in combat. These are not civilians, women or children. These are people with weapons in their hands, bombs in their cars, and murder in their eyes. Our troops have defended themselves and 20,700 of those who would have killed them have been killed.

In 2008 alone we have lost about 80 Americans and killed over 550 enemies.

Excluding accidents, for the entire Iraq war about 7 enemy fighters have died to kill each US soldier, marine, flier or sailor.

In the 1945 battle for Iwo Jima, 3 Japanese died killing each US fighter: 6,821 US soldiers and marines died, but in return:

Of the 21,000 Japanese soldiers present at the beginning of the battle, over 20,000 were killed and only 216 taken prisoner.

Battles are not decided by body counts, but no enemy can afford a loss rate of 7 to 1 indefinitely.

As al Qaeda has discovered.

Europe’s Relative Poverty

The weakness of the US$ against the Euro doesn’t change fundamentals – Europeans are still much poorer than Americans.

Here’s the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development:

Living standards in Europe are one-third lower than in the US – a gap that is as wide as it was in the 1970s.

The OECD thinks Europeans are poor because of unreformed labor and product markets, but that’s only part of the story.

In my experience the main difference is psychological – European businesses (mine included) tend to be pessimistic and risk-averse, whereas American businesses tend to be the reverse. Thus Europeans invented the Precautionary Principle:

The February 2, 2000 European Commission Communication on the Precautionary Principle notes: “The precautionary principle applies where scientific evidence is insufficient, inconclusive or uncertain and preliminary scientific evaluation indicates that there are reasonable grounds for concern that the potentially dangerous effects on the environment, human, animal or plant health may be inconsistent with the high level of protection chosen by the EU”.

American optimism and risk taking can lead to great failures – Enron for example – but many more successes, such as my pet hate Google.

Unfortunately, mind-sets are much harder to change than laws, so Europe is set to stay relatively poor.

How The MSM Kills Our Soldiers

As AP rejoices at the US military deaths in Iraq reaching 4,000, a study indicates that some of these deaths are AP’s doing.

AP’s Grim Milestone:

BAGHDAD (AP) – The overall U.S. death toll in Iraq rose to 4,000 after four soldiers were killed in a roadside bombing in Baghdad, a grim milestone that is likely to fuel calls for the withdrawal of American forces as the war enters its sixth year.

That’s likely to embolden the terrorists to kill more Americans:

Periods of intense news media coverage in the United States of criticism about the war, or of polling about public opinion on the conflict, are followed by a small but quantifiable increases in the number of attacks on civilians and U.S. forces in Iraq, according to a study by Radha Iyengar, a Robert Wood Johnson Scholar in health policy research at Harvard and Jonathan Monten of the Belfer Center at the university’s Kennedy School of Government.

The increase in attacks is more pronounced in areas of Iraq that have better access to international news media, the authors conclude in a report titled “Is There an ‘Emboldenment’ Effect? Evidence from the Insurgency in Iraq.”

However correlation doesn’t imply causation without some plausible physical explanation, and in this case there is one that’s as old as battle  – humans who turn their backs on the enemy in a fight greatly increase the latter’s aggression level.

That’s why disciplined troops win against hordes – they stand their ground.

Here’s John Keegan on the Battle of Waterloo:

Wellington, asked by Halkett at a particularly critical moment that “his brigade, which had lost two thirds, should be relieved for a short time” sent the message “Tell him what he asks is impossible: he and I, and every other Englishman on the field must die on the spot we now occupy”.

The French Grand Army, in spite of greater numbers and great courage, did not stand its ground.

So it lost, just as the 16,000 or so creeps in our MSM want us to.

Network Solution’s Easter Egg For Islamism

Network Solutions, the oldest domain name registration company, has marked Easter by censoring one of its customers for potentially being beastly to Islamists. We should thank them for exposing this vulnerability – then deep six them.

This story is hat tip LGF.

The censoree is the Dutch MP Geert Wilders, who is planning to post a 15 minute video that apparently suggests Islamists are prone to oppression of their women and kids, and killing the rest of us.

Wilders’ site is registered with and (I think) hosted by Network Solutions and you can see it here. As at 16:23 GMT, it says:

This site has been suspended while Network Solutions is investigating whether the site’s content is in violation of the Network Solutions Acceptable Use Policy. Network Solutions has received a number of complaints regarding this site that are under investigation.

That’s a reminder that the Internet is a very fragile vehicle for free speech, since terrorists can infiltrate, bribe, or cow the people we pay to register and host our domains.

There’s some safety in numbers – it’s harder for them to shut down a multi-user service such as WordPress or Blogspot. But not impossible.

Here’s a good suggestion from an LGF commenter (comment #67):

If Wilders wants to distribute the film on the net, then he is going to have to pack it up and stick it up on hosting sites like rapidshare and torrent the thing and let people spread it for him sub rosa.

As an alternate route, I’ve asked Network Solutions to tell me how I can transfer out the domains I have with them to a free-er speech nation (maybe Australia), and will report their reply.

UPDATE 1 – March 24: Network Solutions hosts the official Hizbollah site http://www.hizbollah.org

This from some excellent sleuthing by Flanders Fields – if you want to verify it, go the Network Solutions, select the Domain Names tab, click WHOIS Search, then enter hizbollah.org. You’ll see:

Registrant:
Hizbollah
ATTN: HIZBOLLAH.ORG
c/o Network Solutions
Herndon,
VA 20172-0447

Administrative Contact
….
x97ex6ej4wg@networksolutionsprivateregistration.com
ATTN: HIZBOLLAH.ORG
c/o Network Solutions
P.O. Box 447
Herndon,
VA 20172-0447

Technical Contact
Network Solutions, LLC.
customerservice@networksolutions.com13861 Sunrise Valley Drive
Herndon,
VA 20171
US

Now:

Six countries, including the United States and the United Kingdom, officially list Hezbollah, or its external security arm, as a terrorist organization…

Whereas Geert Wilders is a democratically elected Member of Parliament for the Netherlands, the staunch NATO member fighting alongside us in Afghanistan.

So Network Solutions has designated itself to be an arm of a terrorist organization.

UPDATE 2 – March 24: Here’s the terror enablers illiterate reply to my email asking how how I pull my domains off them.

Thank you for contacting Network Solutions. We are committed to creating the best customer experience possible. One of the first ways we can demonstrate our commitment to this goal is to quickly and efficiently handle your recent request.

With regard to your concern, please be advised our Corporate Department is already tasked to handle the issue surrounding the domain name FITNATHEMOVIE.COM.

So Network Solutions is not only a terror-enabler, it splits infinitives.