Immodestly dressed women cause earthquakes, Iranian cleric

Did one make the earth move for him?

A senior Iranian cleric says women who wear revealing clothing and behave promiscuously are to blame for earthquakes. 

Iran is one of the world’s most earthquake-prone countries, and the cleric’s unusual explanation for why the earth shakes follows a prediction by the president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, that a quake is certain to hit Tehran and that many of its 12 million inhabitants should relocate. 

“Many women who do not dress modestly ... lead young men astray, corrupt their chastity and spread adultery in society, which increases earthquakes,” Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi told Iranian media. 

“What can we do to avoid being buried under the rubble?” Sedighi asked during a prayer sermon last week. “There is no other solution but to take refuge in religion and to adapt our lives to Islam’s moral codes.”

Some of these people make Todd Akin look sane.

H/t Breitbart 

Here is a little something for them:

UKIP wins big in UK local government elections

UKIP leader, Nigel Farage looks a happy man here, with good reason.  His party have been big winners in the British local government elections.  UKIP is a strongly libertarian party.

With the count not yet completed, they have won at least 42 seats and have come second in around two hundred others.  The gained second place in two by elections with 28% and 24% of the vote.

Here is UKIP’s report: 

The overnight story of the county council elections has seen UKIP on course to taking well over a million votes across the country. 

Earlier today, UKIP had taken 43 seats already. Not even a quarter of all results have yet been declared yet we have already surpassed the prediction of political pundits that we would take 40! 

UKIP has taken a staggering 16 seats on Lincolnshire County Council. With just a few seats left to declare, it is almost certain that we have denied the Conservatives an overall majority on that Council and we will no doubt become the ‘official opposition’.

 

Elsewhere, Hampshire saw UKIP take 10 seats and in Essex, the Party took nine seats – tied with the Lib Dems and Labour. Other wins included a District Council by-election, and seats in Surrey, Dorset and Gloucestershire.

 

Where UKIP and Labour both stood, we have outpolled them – taking three votes to every two that Labour take on average. That 3:2 ratio also holds where UKIP and the Liberal Democrats both stand.

 

Where we are standing, we are taking an average of 26.2% of the vote meaning we will take more than 1 million votes – more than we took at the entire General Election in 2010!  We might even reach 1.5 million.

 

Where we stood in 2009 and 2013, our vote has gone up by 14.5% on average so far.  And in addition to the 43 seats that we have won, we have another 200 second-place finishes.

The big losers were the conservatives who lost 66 seats, and the Liberal Democrats, (no relation of ours) who have lost 16 of their seats.

In the South Shields by election UKIP came second, beating the Conservatives by a 2 to 1 margin.  The Lib Dems came in 7th behind the British National Party who beat them 2-1 and they only narrowly beating 'Howling Laud Hope' (Right) of the Monster Raving Loony Party.  This result puts them down into real joke territory.

Tea Party more powerful than we realised

Image: Lisa Benson 

Harry Reid has claimed that the Tea Party is a powerful group of anarchists who are driving the agenda in the United States for a number of years.

This seems to be at variance with previous statements by the Democrats, Republican establishment, and the media, all of whom have predicting the imminent demise, or serious loss of support for the movement.  Harry though, seems to think that not only do they drive the country but that they somehow manage to hide their ‘violent tendencies:’ 

… “We have a situation where this country has been driven by the Tea Party for the last number of years. When I was in school, I studied government, and I learned about the anarchists,” Reid said. “Now, they were different than the Tea Party because they were violent. But they were anarchists because they did not believe in government in any level and they acknowledged it. The Tea Party kind of hides that.”This week, speaking on “The Rusty Humphries Show,” Reid doubled down on his remarks.“I believe that, my experience with the Tea Party is that they are against government in any form. They throw monkey wrenches into the government,” he said. “It’s evident. We can’t get things done. They don’t want anything to happen in government. We pass laws. They fight funding the laws we pass. They don’t want government to work. I want it to work.”Meanwhile, Tea Party adherents and libertarian-leaning Republicans like Senators Rand Paul of Kentucky and Ted Cruz of Texas continue to gain supporters throughout the Nation who recognize them as something different from the two-Party status quo.Reid’s condemnation of the Tea Party, combined with recent criticisms of small-government junior legislators by the likes of Republican bureaucratic dinosaurs such as Senators John McCain (Ariz.) and Lindsey Graham (S.C.), should do nothing but make Tea Party lawmakers more appealing to an American public that has been repeatedly screwed by the old guard of both major political parties.

That takes us here in Oz to the 70s where the libertarian Progress Party was formed on principles of limited government, fiscal responsibility, and social tolerance.  Back then; it was the policy of the Liberals and Nationals to accuse the opposition of being either communists or fellow travellers.

When we came on the scene, a new adjective had to be found to describe a party that believed that the government was too big, bloated, inefficient, interfering, and supported free market capitalism.  They couldn’t believe their luck when they began the tedious job of going through the dictionary, (No Google back then) and didn’t have to go past A.

Abbott helps Gillard poison his chalice

Cartoon: By Bill Leak 

In supporting a ‘modest’ 33% increase in the Medicare Levy, Tony Abbott has either forgotten the sage words of former Treasurer Peter Costello, or didn’t listen:

"The easiest spending cut you'll ever make is the new spending you don't go into because you're not taking anything away from anybody.”

With the budget in a perpetual black hole scenario ever since Labor took power, and a national debt predicted to be in the order of $300 billion by the time Labor is voted out in September, Gillard has proposed two more big spending initiatives to suck more sustenance out of the economy.  The first is the Gonski Education overhaul or spendathon, and the second is the National Disability Insurance scheme.

Both involve the expenditure of tens of billions of dollars recurrently into the future, and both require substantial funding from the states as well when most are struggling to pare down the debts left after years of Labor state governments.

Some of the left leaning commentators are hyping them in terms of being Gillard’s effort to leave some sort of legacy for the future.  The reality is more likely to be an effort to buy votes in a desperate last gasp, and to saddle the opposition with huge unaffordable commitments when it comes to power after the election.

Even without these schemes, Abbott is going to need to make some really tough decisions if his government is going to achieve a balanced budget in anything like the near future.  While he will have the sort of majority he needs to make such decisions, he will be saddled with the same problem as Queensland Premier Campbell Newman has.

A fair proportion of his majority will be members who only win their seats because of a massive ground swell of anti Labor sentiment.  These will be people who know deep down that they are one term members but hope to swim against the tide of inevitability by trying to avoid being part of tough decisions.

The Liberal Party should not be backing more spending at any time, let alone spending that they will have to pick up the tab for in just over four months.  The first priority of an Abbott government will have to be pulling the economy out of its downward spiral by chopping the current unsustainable spending. 

If the budget can be brought into surplus, there may be room to assist the disadvantaged short of a Rolls Royce scheme.  Education can probably be addressed with an overhaul of the way in which current funding is spent.  There has been substantial increases in the education budget over recent years to no avail, so it seems clear that additional spending is not the answer. 

Nigel Farage, at Sovereign Man Workshop

The following clip is doing the rounds from the event. Nigel Farage, on stage with Ron Paul, libertarian economist and 2010 Republican US Senate candidate Peter Schiff, and multi-millionaire "adventure capitalist" Jim Rogers at the Sovereign Man: Offshore Tactics Workshop in Santiago, Chile.Regrettably for such a gathering of minds, there seems to be little video coming out:

 H/t Libertarian Republican

Armed robbery epic fail

A popular video is doing the rounds on how not to conduct an armed robbery. It is not certain when this one went up, but the incident was five days ago and the video has over two million hits:

The intended victim certainly either has a set of big ones, has a bit of training, or both. Gun control advocates will probably adopt three lines of attack here:

• It shows a gun is not needed for self defense; 
• It shows how easily a gun can be taken away and used against you, and; 
• The intended victim ended up possessing a firearm without a background check. 

Gillard’s analogy; or Economics by Dummies

The Prime Minister has come up with an economics lesson for all of us with her “Economic to Per Capita Reform Agenda,” in which she attempts to exonerate the government from its woeful record on the economy. 

In it, we learn that the problem is not that the government has spent too much, but that there is a revenue shortfall.  To anyone reading much political news from America, this argument will seem vaguely familiar.

For those she refers to in the speech as “economic simpletons and sloganeers,” she has come up with a charming analogy explaining slowly, and in simple terms for us Labor’s idea of home economics, to show why we shouldn’t cut spending. 

In the analogy, we meet wage earner, John, employed in the same job throughout the last 20 years.  During the latter part of the Howard years, his boss gives him big bonuses that he knows wont last.  The boss stops the bonuses but promises a 5% wage rise each year on which he bases his financial plans.  He is then told he won’t get the increases for the next few years but his income will get back up after that to where he was promised it would be.

Then Julia explains: 

What is John’s rational reaction? 

To respond to this temporary loss of income by selling his home and car, dropping his private health insurance, replacing every second evening meal with two-minute noodles. 

Of course not. 

A rational response would be to make some responsible savings, to engage in some moderate borrowing, to get through to the time of higher income with his family and lifestyle intact and then to use the higher income to pay off the extra borrowing undertaken in the lean years.

It is reasonable to assume that ‘John’ works in the Treasury Department not to figure out that with the breach of every promise the boss makes, the latest one will most likely not be honored.  It would be great to be a fly on the wall when he meets with his bank manager and tells him that in spite of the history of broken promises, this time it is real and he just needs a loan to finance his lifestyle, until the boss’s latest promise comes to fruition.

He really must work in Treasury; only a central banker would consider such a proposition rational.

It is hoped that nobody follows Gillard’s advice here, but at least it gives us some concept of Labor thinking.