Kitty Says Moo

You think the Euro-Nannies are bad? The Australian Government, looking out for citizens, is now regulating breast size in porn:

The Australian Classification Board (ACB) is now banning depictions of small-breasted women in adult publications and films. They banned mainstream pornography from showing women with A-cup breasts, apparently on the grounds that they encourage paedophilia, and in spite of the fact this is a normal breast size for many adult women. Presumably small breasted women taking photographs of themselves will now be guilty of creating simulated child pornography, to say nothing of the message this sends to women with modestly sized chests or those who favour them. Australia has also banned pornographic depictions of female ejaculation, a normal orgasmic sexual response in many women, with censors branding it as ‘abhorrent.’”

The Board has also started to ban depictions of small-breasted women in adult publications and films. This is in response to a campaign led by Kids Free 2 B Kids and promoted by Barnaby Joyce and Guy Barnett in Senate Estimates late last year. Mainstream companies such as Larry Flint’s Hustler produce some of the publications that have been banned. These companies are regulated by the FBI to ensure that only adult performers are featured in their publications. “We are starting to see depictions of women in their late 20s being banned because they have an A cup size”, she said. “It may be an unintended consequence of the Senator’s actions but they are largely responsible for the sharp increase in breast size in Australian adult magazines of late”.

Around 25 years ago the Chinese government started putting strict limits on how many children a couple could have. Couples- particularly in poorer regions- reacted by doing more sex determination tests and aborting females, since they wouldn’t be able to contribute as much financially to the family as would male children. And so, as you might expect, China now has a shortage of women, with perhaps 30 million more men than women of marriageable age. This in turn has led to increased social instability and an great rise in the kidnapping of women to be wives- more than 42,000 kidnapped women and young girls have been freed by Chinese police, and they’re probably only scratching the surface.

You would think that the rest of the world would have learned from this example. But then,. you probably didn’t account for all those utopian thinkers now being employed by Western governments, as the Times notes:

COUPLES who have more than two children are being “irresponsible” by creating an unbearable burden on the environment, the government’s green adviser has warned.

Jonathon Porritt, who chairs the government’s Sustainable Development Commission, says curbing population growth through contraception and abortion must be at the heart of policies to fight global warming. He says political leaders and green campaigners should stop dodging the issue of environmental harm caused by an expanding population.

A report by the commission, to be published next month, will say that governments must reduce population growth through better family planning.

Yet another academic who didn’t read Brave New World. Or perhaps he did, in which case I expect a lot worse coming down the pike soon.

I was discussing an interesting new book on Nazi Germany this morning with some friends over coffee- it was published in Germany in 2005, and caused a rather big stir. The book is “Hitler’s Beneficiaries”, by Gotz Aly, and it presents a very different view from that currently in vogue.

The original explanation for the Nazi state, found in books like A. J. Ayer’s “The Course of German History”, was that it was a natural outgrowth of German militarism and obedience to authority. The modern interpretation , much preferred as it absolves the Germans of moral responsibility, is that the Germans were victims, too, of a fascistic elite; this can be found in the writings of Gunter Grass (who only recently discovered that he was a Nazi).

Aly’s book presents a very different view: That the Germans were very willing participants, because they profited financially from the Nazi war machine. Hitler set up what many today would consider an idea welfare state- free education through university, free medical care, child care, guaranteed jobs, and so forth. In fact, the average German saw little of the sacrifice and privation that most Brits and Americans suffered through WWII.

The problem was that the state couldn’t afford this without plundering and enslaving as many non-Aryans as possible to pay for their largess. The average German was more than happy to see Jewish owned businesses liquidated (along with their owners) and Poles and Russians put in slave labor camps if it meant a subsidized vacation.

After this discussion, a young guy who works at the coffeehouse said to me, “You seem to know a lot of stuff. How can I educate myself about politics and current events?”

That struck me as a very good question, and I thought about it a while before answering. I think my answer could be distilled down to the following:

1. Read history, and lots of it. There really is nothing new under the sun when it comes to politics. The same battles being fought today in Congress were being argued by the ancient Greeks.
2. Read arguments for positions you disagree with. Don’t just listen to people who reinforce your own beliefs.
3. Constantly challenge your own opinions, and ask yourself if they really reflect your core beliefs. Ask yourself if you can apply the underlying principles implied by your belief in another context, and still agree with the outcome.
4. Don’t adopt a set of beliefs just because your social group holds them. I think that’s probably the most common justification for most peoples’ political opinions.
5. Don’t view the world in simple terms, where everything and everyone is either all good or all evil. Realize that your opponent may have values you agree with. And accept that someone who holds views diametrically opposed to yours may be just as moral as you- or more so- and simply has a different opinion of the best solution to a problem. And even someone you believe has reprehensible ideas in one area may say something worthwhile in another.
6. Live long enough to see real change in the world, and to see whether your expectations were actually born out by history.

..and if I was, I suppose I’d be guilty of ethnic profiling or something:

WARSAW (Reuters) – Poland’s 1,200 troops assigned to NATO forces in Afghanistan will not achieve full combat readiness for up to several weeks due to stolen vehicle keys, the defense ministry said Thursday.

Why Western culture triumphed:

LUCKNOW (Reuters) – Lawyers tied a young man to a tree and beat him outside a court in India for refusing to marry one of their relatives, an official said on Wednesday.

And why its days may be numbered:

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) – A Dutch broadcaster will air a show this week in which a terminally ill woman selects a recipient for her kidneys from three contestants, despite government calls for the programme to be scrapped.

And finally, another of the benefits of state-sponsored medical care:

BEIJING (Reuters) – A Chinese woman’s 64-year-old headache has ended after doctors removed a bullet that relatives said lodged in her skull when Japanese soldiers shot her during World War Two, state media reported on Monday.

Sure, the waiting lines a re a bit long, but they did a fine job when they got around to it.

LONDON (Reuters) – A large English cheddar cheese has become a star of the Internet, attracting more than 1 million viewers to sit and stare at it as it slowly ripens.

First placed in front of a webcam in late December, the Westcombe cheddar from West Country Farmhouse Cheesemakers leaped to public attention in early February and has since attracted viewers from 119 countries.

“The hits went over 1 million this morning. It has been a real challenge keeping the cheese up and running with all the interest it has generated,” a spokesman for the company running the website, www.cheddarvision.tv, said Wednesday.

The Boston Globe reports that Burlington, Vermont’s city owned cable TV system has decided to carry the English language version of Al-Jazheera TV:

“We were certainly squeamish about it at first, given its reputation in the United States,” said Tim Nulty, director of Burlington Telecom. “But if you look at it, it looks like BBC. I think it’s more mainstream and more objective than CNN.”

My first reaction was to laugh out loud- but the more I thought about it, the less silly that sounded.

Here in the United States, we’re free to eat just about any bannana we please; the FDA doesn’t set any standards on this. I don’t mean to frighten you-, but the public service nature of this blog compells me to point out that such laxity leaves us open to the danger of eating abnormally crooked bannanas!

Our cousins in the common market are protected from such dangers, viz.:

Commission Regulation (EC) 2257/94 states that bananas must be “free from malformation or abnormal curvature”. In the case of “Extra class” bananas, there is no wiggle room, but Class 1 bananas can have “slight defects of shape”, and Class 2 bananas can have full-on “defects of shape”.

Unfortunately the comissioners leave it up to the enforcement divison to define “abnormal curvature”- curious, as in the case of cucumbers (Commission Regulation (EEC) No 1677/88) Class I and “Extra class” cucumbers are allowed a bend of 10mm per 10cm of length, and Class II cucumbers can bend up to 20mm per 10cm of length. (This is why so many young Europeans dream of a fullfilling lifelong career as cucumber inspectors.) But woe to the unwary European who finds him or herself in possesion of an illegal bannana when the German BSP (Bannana-Sturm-Poletzi) come crashing through the door.

Here in the US we can only study our more advanced neighbors, and learn from their example.

Once more the French lecture us on how to run a progressive society:

From Macworld:

The French Constitutional Council has approved a law that criminalizes the filming or broadcasting of acts of violence by people other than professional journalists. The law could lead to the imprisonment of eyewitnesses who film acts of police violence, or operators of Web sites publishing the images, one French civil liberties group warned on Tuesday.

The council chose an unfortunate anniversary to publish its decision approving the law, which came exactly 16 years after Los Angeles police officers beating Rodney King were filmed by amateur videographer George Holliday on the night of March 3, 1991.

And once more they reaffirm the words of Tom Wolfe: “Facism is forever descending on America, but it always manages to land in Europe.”

Once again, progressive European culture points the way for the rest of us:

LONDON (Reuters) – Chelsea warned their fans on Friday against throwing celery during matches, saying it was a criminal offence and that anyone caught lobbing the popular salad vegetable could be banned.

Of course, we still have much to teach them about throwing octopus on the ice during Stanley Cup playoffs.