This BBC report just made my day. Bill Gates is “’struggling to concentrate’, ‘not a natural leader’, ’struggling to keep control of a confusing world’ and ‘an unstable man who is feeling under enormous pressure.’”

Given the murder of that family in New England, this sort of report is disturbing.

Any number of places are reporting that SBC is planning on buying AT&T. Makes me feel rather sad. AT&T has done good things and bad things like any other corporation, but it really is, as the NYTimes states, an icon that is now disappearing.

Why in the world do non-citizens have the full range of constitutional rights? See this BBC report, this AP News report, or others.

Oliver North quoted an Iraqi governor who in just a couple sentences captured the transforming power that women hold: “Women voting will change everything. No woman who carries a child for nine months wants that child to grow up to be a suicide terrorist. They want the politicians to give their children something to live for, not die for — and we will have to do it.”¹ Women, who safe-guard life in its earliest moments, have the power to shape society like no other. Beyond moments such as this quote refers to, I am reminded of the homily I heard at St. Veronica’s last week. Guys are very simple; we want to be in relationship with a girl. And, for the right girl, we’ll do anything in our power, and some things we would have thought impossible, to keep her in our lives. This gives girls an unique chance to influence the world. They get to set a standard for the men in their lives, for the men they choose to date, the man they choose to marry, the children they raise. Men are of course not absolved of responsibility, it is a poor man indeed who does not exceed common expectations for morality, decency, honor in today’s society, but it is women who define what is “exceptional” and what is “expected.” God help our girls to set high standards once again.

1)North, Oliver. “Of bombs, bullets and ballots” January 28, 2005

In Germany prostitution is legal. Not only legal, it is a “normal,” tax paying industry which has access to official databases of job seekers. Yes, the scum who run such things can call you up if they like the sound of your resume and try to get you to work for them. Now Germany is also in quite a fix because it is a welfare state. And in trying to get a handle on that, it has decided that if you are out of work for more than a year, and you turn down a job offer, you can have your welfare benefits cut. How does this relate? Some scumbag offers you a job as a prostitute, you turn him down, now all of a sudden you don’t get welfare. Now, I’m against welfare in general and in principle, but in the presence of a welfare state, with its high taxes, people are hard pressed to fund private/religious social services. Add into the mix Germany’s ever increasing atheist populations (well, its Muslim population is probably increasing faster, but outside of that), and you have a situation that is worse than welfare: you have women being forced into prostitution by the state. Lovely. See this telegraph.co.uk article for documentation of this outrage.

William brought this article to my attention. I’d heard about this guy’s research from other places, and it really doesn’t surprise me. Like most (good) work from an economist, this conforms to the “it makes sense once you say it” rule. This article has more detail than the one I had seen, and I find the fact that it was sent to me significant, the research in question is more noteworthy than I had originally thought. It appears there is a chance that this will not be ignored.

Michelle Malkin writes about some of the effects of Europe’s burgeoning Muslim population. Mostly consisting of quotes from other works, this is a good introduction for those who think that Muslims will assimilate into their host cultures.