Spanish King Tells Chavez to “Shut Up”

SANTIAGO, Chile (AP) – The king of Spain told Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez to “shut up” Saturday during a heated exchange at a summit of leaders from Latin America, Spain and Portugal.

Chavez, who called President Bush the “devil” on the floor of the United Nations last year, triggered the exchange by repeatedly referring to former Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar as a “fascist.”

Aznar, a conservative who was an ally of Bush as prime minister, “is a fascist,” Chavez said in a speech at the Ibero-American summit in Santiago, Chile. “Fascists are not human. A snake is more human.”

Spain’s current socialist prime minister, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, responded during his own allotted time by urging Chavez to be more diplomatic in his words and respect other leaders despite political differences.

“Former President Aznar was democratically elected by the Spanish people and was a legitimate representative of the Spanish people,” he said, eliciting applause from the gathered heads of state.

Chavez repeatedly tried to interrupt, but his microphone was off.

Spanish King Juan Carlos, seated next to Zapatero, angrily turned to Chavez and said, “Why don’t you shut up?”

The Venezuelan leader did not immediately respond, but later used time ceded to him by his close ally Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega to answer Zapatero’s speech.

“I do not offend by telling the truth,” he said. “The Venezuelan government reserves the right to respond to any aggression, anywhere, in any space and in any manner.”

I am relieved to see world leaders (at least outside of the UN and US Congress) finally standing up to extremist rhetoric.

Somebody should get Mini-Me a dictionary: FASCISM

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Of all poetry dedicated to WWI, this one gets to me unfailingly.

SimplyJews

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I understand now that I have missed some finer things in my high school education. I had some wild moments, but never that wild, it appears:

A teenage schoolboy was pulled around his classroom on a lead and spanked by a stripper after a birthday surprise blunder

The pupil’s mum had ordered an agency to give her son a “surprise” on his 16th birthday – and the teacher had even agreed to film the prank.

But it all went wrong when the unnamed company sent a stripper dressed as a policewoman instead of a “gorillagram” – in what it called a booking error.

There are more saucy details in the article, if you wish…

But the most interesting detail is related to the aftermath of the “incident”: the police was not involved, instead the school authorities took the investigation upon themselves.

Yeah… no comments.

Hat tip: AI

SimplyJews

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It takes a lot for Leftists to acknowledge reality. Evidence about the importance of genetics in human differentiation has been plentiful for over a century but it seems to have taken advances in the decoding of DNA to have forced Leftist recognition of that. Repeated findings of IQ-related genes appear to be too much even for Leftists to ignore. Some excerpts from the latest NYT article on the subject below. The article is filled with hokey terror about what ordinary Americans might do if told the truth of the matter but, given history, I have a lot more confidence in what ordinary Americans might do than I have in what Leftists will do —given the untold millions that Leftists have slaughtered worldwide in the last 100 years. Leftist arrogance about what people should be told is pithily condemned by KBJ.

Anyway, having an article in the NYT on the subject should help spread awareness of the facts more widely than would otherwise have been the case. Maybe even my outspoken comments on the facts of the matter might come to be seen as “mainstream” one day. I doubt that I will live to see it, though. Most of what I say about IQ has been fairly orthodox for some years in the academic journals of psychology but there is a big gap between what you can safely say in a scientific journal and what you can say to the general public. Fellow scientists can be trusted. “The people” cannot be. That is why wise Leftist shepherds are needed to guide “the people”. That they usually in fact guide the people to poverty and disaster cannot be mentioned too often, however.

When scientists first decoded the human genome in 2000, they were quick to portray it as proof of humankinds remarkable similarity. The DNA of any two people, they emphasized, is at least 99 percent identical. But new research is exploring the remaining fraction to explain differences between people of different continental origins.

Scientists, for instance, have recently identified small changes in DNA that account for the pale skin of Europeans, the tendency of Asians to sweat less and West Africans resistance to certain diseases.

At the same time, genetic information is slipping out of the laboratory and into everyday life, carrying with it the inescapable message that people of different races have different DNA. Ancestry tests tell customers what percentage of their genes are from Asia, Europe, Africa and the Americas. The heart-disease drug BiDil is marketed exclusively to African-Americans, who seem genetically predisposed to respond to it. Jews are offered prenatal tests for genetic disorders rarely found in other ethnic groups.

Such developments are providing some of the first tangible benefits of the genetic revolution. Yet some social critics fear they may also be giving long-discredited racial prejudices a new potency. The notion that race is more than skin deep, they fear, could undermine principles of equal treatment and opportunity that have relied on the presumption that we are all fundamentally equal. We are living through an era of the ascendance of biology, and we have to be very careful, said Henry Louis Gates Jr., director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University. We will all be walking a fine line between using biology and allowing it to be abused.

Certain superficial traits like skin pigmentation have long been presumed to be genetic. But the ability to pinpoint their DNA source makes the link between genes and race more palpable. And on mainstream blogs, in college classrooms and among the growing community of ancestry test-takers, it is prompting the question of whether more profound differences may also be attributed to DNA.

Nonscientists are already beginning to stitch together highly speculative conclusions about the historically charged subject of race and intelligence from the new biological data. Last month, a blogger in Manhattan described a recently published study that linked several snippets of DNA to high I.Q. An online genetic database used by medical researchers, he told readers, showed that two of the snippets were found more often in Europeans and Asians than in Africans.

There are clear differences between people of different continental ancestries, said Marcus W. Feldman, a professor of biological sciences at Stanford University. Its not there yet for things like I.Q., but I can see it coming. And it has the potential to spark a new era of racism if we do not start explaining it better.

Ive spent the last 10 years of my life researching how much genetic variability there is between populations, said Dr. David Altshuler, director of the Program in Medical and Population Genetics at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Mass. But living in America, it is so clear that the economic and social and educational differences have so much more influence than genes. People just somehow fixate on genetics, even if the influence is very small.

Regardless of any such genetic variation, it is our moral duty to treat all as equal before God and before the law, Perry Clark, 44, wrote on a New York Times blog. It is not necessary, argued Dr. Clark, a retired neonatologist in Leawood, Kan., who is white, to maintain the pretense that inborn racial differences do not exist. When was the last time a nonblack sprinter won the Olympic 100 meters? he asked. To say that such differences arent real, Dr. Clark later said in an interview, is to stick your head in the sand and go blah blah blah blah blah until the band marches by.

Source

Prof. Altschuler’s claim above that the influence of genes is very small is misleading. It is true that the influence of genes ON SOME THINGS is very small but the influence of genes on other things (such as IQ and educational achievement) is large.

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I am alright but still in hospital, There are complications that were trouble and rather nasty. I hope to be out soon. Thanks to all of you who have sent kind words. Thanks to all my contributors as well.

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Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,

Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.

Gas! Gas! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime . . .
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.

—Wilfred Owen, 8 October 1917 – March, 1918

the blog québécois

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