And it's ugly, too!

I love stuff like this:

A cool if not quite cold wind is blowing over the ballyhooed environmental benefits of a big shift to wind power.

A group of Canadian and U.S. scientists reported Tuesday that computer simulations show that a large-scale use of wind farms to generate electrical power could create a significant temperature change over Earth's land masses.

The fetish for wind power is one of the most bizarre I've seen on the left. They won't let an occasional mobile phone tower disturb their precious view-scapes, but they have a hardon for vast, ugly, bird-shredding fan farms.

The Madness of Queen Margo

Um, not that she's the brightest star in the Fairfax firmament, but couldn't Margo Kingston have at least managed to use the spacebar properly all the way through her latest three-dozen word "commentary" in Webdiary?

Artist Robert Bosler has written extensively for Webdiary on Mark Latham. His pre-election painting of Howard is discussed in False Prophet. For my thoughts on the Left/Right divide in the context of the Iraq war debate, see Couldwe start again,please?

Come on Down!

Andrew Sullivan, when not running around in circles shrieking "omigodomigodomigod" every time something doesn't go right in Iraq, can make some damn good points.

One of them is here, where he calls for a flat tax for the U.S. and U.K.

Might I add Australia to the list? Goomba-goom just fell back into the world of regularly-paid employment, and all of a sudden realized he was paying more every fortnight in tax than he was in rent.

Someone should campaign on the slogan, The country that invented the flat white deserves a flat tax.

Or something like that.

But what do I know? I'm just a special-ed right-winger!

Old Dirty, Decaying, Lifeless Bastard

When Goomba-Goom saw the headline, Ol' Dirty Bastard dead in the Herald, he figured the Fairfax crew had just finally come to terms with the loss of their beloved Yasser Arafat.

Not for the first time, Goomba Goom was wrong:

Rapper Ol' Dirty Bastard, whose criminal lifestyle and strange behaviour overshadowed his work as one of the founding members of rap collective Wu-Tang Clan, has collapsed and died in New York, his record label said.

The artist, whose real name was Russell Jones, was found on Saturday in a recording studio complaining of chest pains, a source told Reuters.

Paramedics were called but were unable to save him.

A spokeswoman said the cause of death was unknown.

Amazingly, it wasn't in a drive-by. Meanwhile, we learn that

In the hip-hop genre, where many performers attract the attention of the law and most spare no expense flaunting their extravagant lifestyles, Jones was in a class of his own.

Jones, who was in his mid 30s, fathered 13 children, according to Blender magazine.

His other stage names included Dirt McGirt and Big Baby Jesus, the latter moniker inspired by his belief that "I always been Jesus".

Hey, at least he didn't say he was bigger than Jesus.

An interesting, ahem, slant on a story

Over at Blair's place, much sport is being made over Niall Cook's parting of ways with his employer. This inspired Goomba Goom to go over and have a look at the Cookie Monster's site, a pleasure not indulged in since the great "ignorant, slitty-eyed, slimy little Landcruiser-driving vietnamese prick" (sic) scandal of last February.

And guess what? Niall still won't be winning any awards from the Queensland Asian-Australian Friendship Society.

Here's Niall in a recent post on Japanese whaling (you'll have to scroll down; only his pals are allowed to permalink):

The next you'll hear is that we're worried about the impending extinction of dolphin & porpoise species. What?!! No Whales?!! Nup. The Nips 'researched' them all.

Nips? What the hell is this, a 1961 Dean Martin show at the Sands? Does Cook hum the little koolie ding-ding-ding-ding-ding-ding-ding-dong-ding theme music of old every time a Chinese person appears on his TV?

UPDATE: Is it me, or is Niall just a furrier, fatter incarnation of Pat Reynolds?

French Letters

File this under too much information:

Lee Whitnum, a former girlfriend of Senator Kerry, has written a semi-autobiographical novel in which her fictional alter ego, Nikki Matthews, has an on-off affair with a dashing Massachusetts senator - a Democrat whom she says is modelled on Senator Kerry.

Matthews, a Harvard graduate, describes her politician lover as a "caveman" in the bedroom who would whisper sweet nothings to her in French - a language Senator Kerry speaks fluently. He also has a home on Beacon Hill, Boston, as does the senator.

In another part of Hedge Fund Mistress, Matthews tells a friend about a particularly wild encounter over dinner with her political paramour, Senator Jim Hoyt.

"We were sitting at one end of the long dining room table and suddenly we were feeding each other and kissing, and all over each other, and undressing each other and plates were falling on the floor, food was everywhere, you know, our usual combustible frenzy, and then he carried me to the bedroom," she writes.

Is Green the New Red?

Well, that didn't take long. It was only a matter of hours after George Cardinal Pell made headlines -- quite properly, I think -- for suggesting that Islam could be the Communism of the 21st Century before the Islamapologists shot back.

Not surprisingly, the results were laughable and pretty short of the mark, especially as they came from local polygamist Keysar Trad, who said Communism and Islam had nothing in common because one was godless and one was, well, god-full. Nice try, but not as big a whopper as when Trad told the Herald that "Islam's holy book, the Koran, had a strong emphasis on the democratic process, with one passage recommending people consult over all their affairs."

Forget the fact that people are always getting told off for bringing up all those pesky kuffar-hating, Jew-murder-inciting passages that litter the Koran. If Islam is such a democracy-infused religion, than why is it that once Iraq holds elections in January, it will still be possible to count the number of Islamic democracies on one hand?

That's all from here -- have a great weekend. Goomba-Goom is playing Goomba-GOLF!

St. Yasser the Great Watch

This shouldn't surprise, but it takes an amazing five paragraphs of blather about Arafat's embodiment of the Palestinian people's hopes and dreams before the New York Times manages to get around to a few inconvenient facts:

At the beginning, in the 1960’s, he pioneered what became known as “television terrorism” air piracy and other forms of mayhem staged for maximum propaganda value. Among the more startling deeds he ordered was the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, Germany. In 1986, a group linked to Mr. Arafat but apparently acting independently seized the Achille Lauro cruise ship, shot Leon Klinghoffer, a 69-year-old American Jew, and pushed him overboard in his wheelchair.

Makes him sound like a misunderstood little imp, doesn't it?

For a bit of balance, click here.

Hooray!

Yasser Arafat was officially pronounced dead today.

Palestinian Cabinet minister Saeb Erekat announced that the 75-year-old Palestinian president had died after spending his final days in a coma at a French military hospital outside Paris.

Don't let the gates of hell hit ya on the way in!

How Could They Tell?

Headline of the day:

Arafat's Brain Working Partially

GOOMBA-GOOM!

Meow Mix

What's it take to get a "peace prize" these days? Not much in the way of peacefulness, certainly.

Sydney has made headlines recently by handing out gongs for dovishness to the likes of terrorist sympathizers like Peter Jennings' old flame Hanan Ashrawi and Arundhati Roy.

Now Mikhail Gorbachev's foundation has named Cat Stevens a "Man of Peace", despite his documented support of every loony fatwa to come down the pike since Salman Rushdie was sentenced to death.

Considering what Gorby's people have been going through lately at the hands of Chechen Islamofascists, isn't this in kinda bad taste?

UPDATE: More on Cat's calumny here.

Boomba Boom, Pt. 2

Meanwhile, the Netherlands -- one of Goomba Goom's favorite places on Earth -- is the scene of a massive anti-terror action in the Hague. Apparently even the airspace is closed.

Great to see the Dutch authorities finally getting wise and putting the smack-down on the Islamists. As one wiser than I notes, "Nothing breeds that sort of freelance violence [mosque burnings, etc.] like the perception that the duly constituted authorities aren't willing to protect the citizenry. People in the United States didn't doubt that; people in the Netherlands have had reason to."

Though I'm still not convinced those terribly racist, intolerant Dutch are behind all the anti-Islamic activity.

Freedom Isn't Free

In Australia, you can't go to university without being slugged with a few hundred bucks worth of fees every term.

The problem is, those fees don't go to pay for your education; they pay for a bunch of cultural studies majors to whine about the government and get jobs as members of the perpetually aggrieved:

It is ironic that student unions, whose activist members are never slow to vandalise a HECS-funded university building in their campaign to reduce student fees, charge the only compulsory upfront fees that HECS students face at university. These fees, up to $500 a year, confront poorer students with a daunting financial obstacle. But the use of the funds is the real disgrace.

Take the example of Melbourne University Student Union, operating under the Victorian model. Student politicians argue that abolishing compulsory fees would destroy the rich tapestry of student life by bankrupting student clubs and societies. Yet, out of $7 million collected in student fees, the union spends about $100,000 on student clubs, and about $3 million on administration.

Read the whole thing if lefty campus nonsense interests you.

But What About Our Dental Plans?

In today's inbox, one of the silliest-yet e-mails from an anti-war, anti-Bush mate:

To the citizens of the United States of America,

In the light of your failure to elect a decent President of the USA, we hereby give notice of the revocation of your independence, effective today. Her Sovereign Majesty Queen Elizabeth II will resume monarchial duties over all states, commonwealths and other territories.

Except Utah, which she does not fancy.

Your new prime minister (The Right Honourable Tony Blair, MP for the 97.85% of you who have until now been unaware that there is a world outside your borders) will appoint a minister for America without the need for further elections...

And so on and so forth.

Fine with me; whoever wrote this seems not to realize that all he'd do is swap out one pro-war leader for another, with the knock-on effect of cheering Andrew Sullivan up.

And us special-ed right-wingers are supposed to be dumb...

Boomba Boom!

I spent enough time at university fighting the culture wars to know a set-up when I see one. For a hypothetical example, imagine the head of a school's English Department has been exposed as nothing but a sex-obsessed fraud and intellectual failure who hides behind post-modern language so dense it woud make a David Foster Wallace re-write of the tax code look like the crisp, clipped prose of James Ellroy. One can bet dollars to donuts that within days one of the good professor's sympathisers will write an unkind, very un-P.C. word on his classroom's chalkboard and anonymously report the incident to the campus media, in the hope of turning people against all those right-wing nasties who want to keep Shakespeare in the curriculum.

So when I read that a Dutch Islamic school was blown up a week after Theo van Gogh was slaughtered in Amsterdam for exposing some unpleasant truths about the religion of peace, I couldn't help thinking it was a set-up. While the UPI, quoting the BBC, spins the attack as "another in a recent series of anti-Muslim acts," color this special-ed kid unimpressed.

Think about it: Here we have a minority group that all of a sudden needs some big-time sympathy and get its victim status off double-secret probation. And, oh yeah, just happens to have a lot of explosives lying around...

Goomba Goom!

The cartoon that started it all, everybody....I give you Ted Rall's opus, "Goomba Goom!"