In 2003 a leader of a Swedish gay rights group, Susanna Gustafsson, decided to “have a pash” with her girlfriend in a Stockholm restaurant. The restaurant owner asked them to leave.

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John Ray recently contributed an article which claimed that in 1981 only 35% of the Australian population were of British origin.

As I mentioned in the comments, I find such a statistic difficult to believe, simply on the basis of my own everyday observations. Furthermore, the statistic needs to be taken seriously because if it were true it would undermine the idea that Australia once had its own distinctive Anglo-Australian (or Anglo-Celtic Australian) identity.

So I googled. I came up with two excellent articles, both from the kind of official sources which I think would satisfy John’s request for citations.

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This Telegraph article, Labour’s immigration policy? Lots more of it by Alasdair Palmer, is indicative of a problem affecting all political commentary on the topic of immigration: nobody will say the real reason why mass immigration is happening.

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Tim Gillin has drawn my attention to this service, Migration Dialogue, and its subscription newsletter, Migration News.  Both are run by Philip Martin, Department of Agricultural Economics, University of California, Davis, California and tend, therefore, to have an agricultural focus.  The newsletter is free of charge in electronic form.  Reporting is politically neutral, insomuch as anything can be said to be so.  Which at least leaves us something to do!

When most people think of slavery they probably have an image of a white slave owner and a black slave. This is the picture of slavery we have been given through countless books, films and TV shows.

It’s an image which fits in well with left-wing theories that white men have established a dominant power structure which oppresses other races, and that therefore white society is morally illegitimate and must be deconstructed.

Up to now, the main argument against such a left-wing view has been that it was actually white men who ended the slave trade. This is a good and effective argument, but it now appears that much more ought to have been said against the left-wing view.

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I heard about the shooting on the radio on Friday morning. A man had been gunned down in his Melbourne home during the night.

In today’s paper we get the full story. The victim was a man by the name of Jafar Heshmaty. He had left his native Iran, worked illegally in Greece, bought a Greek passport and then flown to Melbourne in 1989.

In Melbourne he was put in detention while his claim for refugee status was fought in the courts. He received support from the Baptist Church which organised protests and a Christian community sponsorship for him.

But after three years the High Court ruled against him because of doubts about his real identity. So he sought and received asylum in America instead.

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“They indulge in all sorts of violent activities - killing, rape, extortion, theft,” said Emmanuel Chege, a 24 year-old botany student at Ambrose Ali university in the town of Ekpoma ...

“It’s all about supremacy and in a war that’s when the killing starts,” said Mr Chege.

From a Telegraph article War of the black magic cults brings death to Nigeria’s universities.

Perhaps culture war on campus isn’t that bad after all.

My thanks go to Michael R for a link to a Lew Rockwell article written last month by Ira Katz.  Michael wanted in particular to point out a quote in the article by Ortega y Gasset from his classic of 1930, The Revolt of the Masses.

It is not that one ought not to do just what one pleases; it is simply that one cannot do other than what each of us has to do, has to be.  The only way out is to refuse to do what has to be done, but this does not set us free to do something else just because it pleases us.  In this matter we only posses a negative freedom of will.

Without commandments, obliging us to live after a certain fashion, our existence is that of the “unemployed”.  This is the terrible spiritual situation in which the best youth of the world finds itself today.  By dint of feeling itself free, exempt from restrictions, it feels itself empty.  An “unemployed” existence is a worse negation of life than death itself.  Because to live means to have something definite to do – a mission to fulfill – and in the measure in which we avoid setting our life to something, we make it empty.

This was Katz’s opening shot in a bid to reconcile libertarianism and Conservatism, somewhat akin to Frank Meyer’s Fusionism of the 1950’s and 60’s.

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