blake

seeing as blacks make up roughly half of all US homicide victims as well as perpetrators, then it doesn't mean all that much, does it. It might mean something if blacks were 50% of the perpetrators but only 20% of the victims, but they're not. The numbers of black perpetrators, and black homicide victims, are about the same. also only in about 40% of all US homicides are the backgrounds of both the victim and the perpetrators known at all. The rest, 60% of all homicides, the backgrounds of both perpetrator and victim is not known.

oh dear. You haven't got a clue have you. Compelling people to speak English in school was a feature for years, and imposed. Not only was Welsh not on the curriculum in Welsh schools, but children would be punished for speaking Welsh, their first language, and the language they used at home, even in the playground, at school. That went on for decades. It only stopped quite recently, maybe from about 50 years ago. imperialists always do it. They impose a foreign language on people. The Communist Russians did it in Latvia and Ukraine. Guess what. Latvians and Ukranians didn't like it when some dick tried to get them to speak Russian, when they would rather speak their own language. Why should the Welsh, or Irish be any different.

very easily. We all of us, eat insects all the time. Probably a kilo or two of insects, over the course of the average lifetime and even if you are not Thai.

it is not a contradiction. Of course I don't care if food is halal. I don't care if food is kosher either. Why should I care. I'm neither Muslim or Jewish. The only people that are concerned if food is halal or kosher, are Muslims and Jews. Nobody else cares. if you cannot see that it is just plain wrong for one minority culinary convention, like halal, to be favoured over a different culinary convention, like kosher, then there is something wrong with you. Just why, exactly, is halal so special, when there are legions of other minorities that also have their culinary conventions? even in Malaysia, which is 60% Muslim, people are not compelled to sell halal food if they don't want to, and neither should they be. It would be totally outrageous if they were. of course they might voluntarily want to sell halal food, on the basis that it would likely better their sales, but if they don't want to sell halal food, they should not be compelled to. Chinese Malaysian restaurants might be halal, and put up certificates that say so, just like Chinese restaurants in Israel put up kosher certificates. But Chinese restaurants in Malaysia might not be halal. They might just put a sign up saying 'we serve no pork' which is in practice caimed at Muslim customers. or they might do none of those. They might be not halal, AND serve pork, and not be bothered, about having a lot of Muslim customers. What is wrong with that. It's their choice. Plenty of non-Muslim customers DO want to eat pork, and in fact with some of them, that is why they are in a Malaysian Chinese restaurant in the first place.

I don't think that, at all. I personally couldn't care less, as a consumer, if a meal is halal or not. I'm not a Muslim, so it is nothing to do with me. If I was a Muslim, then i might care about it. But as a non-Muslim, then I couldn't care less. if I'm flying Etihad to UAE and I get served a halal meal, I don't think twice about it. Similarly, if I'm flying El-Al to Israel, and I get served a kosher meal, I don't think twice about that either. Why should I care. It's nothing to do with me in either case. but if I was selling food, there is no way I should be compulsory required to ensure I supplied halal food, just to cater to some Muslims, anymore than I should be compulsory required to sell kosher food, just to cater to some Jews. It is not as if all Muslims and Jews always eat halal or kosher anyway. Many of them observe the freedom not to eat according to those conventions if they don't want to. Why stress halal above all the other minority culinary conventions? Why should one particular minority culinary convention, halal, be favoured over another one?

Irish and Scottish Gaelic are practically non-existent compared to Welsh anyway, which is easily the most flourishing Gaelic language, and by an absolutely massive margin too. my mother is from south Wales, everybody round there can speak English with no exceptions however she did have an uncle from Gwynedd, about whom it was said in family lore, that he could not speak English. Whether he could speak English, and just wouldn't or refused to, or whether he really didn't know how to speak English at all, I don't know. whether it is possible for somebody from one of the predominately Welsh speaking counties to go through their lives without speaking English hardly at all, and who may have gone rusty to the point that they just can't hold a conversation in English anymore, like almost nobody remembers their GSCE French, I am pretty sure that is probably true.

they just want to bash the United States, for being racist just because it is the richest and most powerful country in the world. all they want to do, is bash the USA. They don't care about blacks at all. If they did, they would care about the appalling racism in other countries with black minorities. Brazil today is like the USA was in the 1960s. There is almost nobody in prominent positions, like politicians, or editors of newspapers, anybody like that, who is black. Close to 50% of the people out on the street are black or at least partly mixed-race, but switch on the television, and you hardly ever see a black face. It's about 10%. The USA used to be like that, you never saw anything black on the TV, but not any more. they feign this solidarity about black 'oppression', when they don't actually care about blacks at all. All they want to do, for reasons best known to themselves, is use blacks as like a stick to bash the USA with, even though it is totally obvious that blacks do much better, have gone much further, and have made more progress through the society and penetrated some of the very top jobs, in the USA than they have in any comparable country by miles.

you're a kookball, buddy. The US has now quite a long tradition of elected black representatives and which totally outclasses any other similar country that has a black minority. Initially, a lot of them only got there because mostly other black people voted for them, plus a few others, but that has now changed. What is happening now is that a great many white people are willing to vote for a black mayor, or a black congressman, when 50 years ago, they just weren't. The US without a doubt is far less racist than it used to be.

the USA has got to be a lot less racist than it used to be. Otherwise, it wouldn't be the only country in the world with a white majority, but also quite numerous black minority, that regularly has seen black people in the very highest jobs from the president to high-ranking cabinet members, to governors of states, and mayors of large cities, which are very prominent and important political positions. No other country even comes close.

the point stands. When it comes to the the actual achievement of black people in the culture, the USA is head and shoulders above everyone else, and miles ahead of all the other white majority countries. even if a black man hadn't been comfortably been elected president twice, the USA would STILL be miles ahead. just look at how few black people have ever got anywhere or done anything in any of the Latin American countries with minority black populations similar to the USA and with a similar historic experience of slavery, like Brazil, Columbia, Dominican Republic and Cuba. You never, ever see anybody black from those countries in the top political jobs, but which has become increasingly commonplace in the USA in the past few decades.

"You don't need to have visited the US to know that there's a problem with racism there." nobody is saying there isn't, but just compare the situation in the USA with other American countries with substantial black populations, like Brazil and Cuba. When did you ever see a black face in and around the Castros and the top communist Cuban brass. Blacks have never got anywhere near prominent positions in Cuba, despite all the commie drumbeating about 'equality' and 'justice' even though blacks are around the same proportion of the population in Cuba, as they are in the USA. As far as I'm aware, nobody black has even got so far to be as much as a state or provincial governor, or a supreme court judge in Brazil, never mind president of the whole country. The only black Brazilians, you have ever seen, are football players, or musicians/entertainers. None of them are ever politicians, judges, bankers or people in high profile and visible public positions like Obama, or Condoleeza Rice. there is still remnants of racial problems in the USA, but it is also obvious, that in the USA, more blacks have done better, and gone further, and more of them have achieved prominent positions in society, than in any of the other white majority countries in the world - by a mile.

one of my favourite lines in the movies is when Jack Nicholson, playing Eugene O'Neill in 'Reds' - a superb movie by the way - upbraids the Louise Bryant character by telling her all the working man wants, is not to get lectured about what is good for them for these self-styled 'intellectuals', but just to get enough money together so as he doesn't have to work anymore. Joe the Plumber just wants to win the lottery today in 2018 just like Joe the Plumber did 100 years ago. They aren't particularly interested in social justice at all.

after 1945 and Labour's great initial win, disillusionment among working class people set in really rather quickly. after that great start, Labour started losing working class voters back in the 1950s, and they have not really come back. Today Labour only do really well in cities among educated elites and especially public sector workers. They do badly in small towns, and even worse in rural areas. Labour's problem is that most people not only put up with, but they LIKE capitalism. Labour only ever won elections really convincingly, and by large margins, in the Blair era, when they were trusted more on the economy, because people didn't think they were these waster socialists. That was what the voters tended to think Labour were in all the other elections, which Labour either lost decisively, or won only narrowly.

complete garbage. The United States of America, is probably the very LEAST racist country on earth considering its huge size and its incredible historic diversity. the civil war happened 150 years ago, but at least they had the decency to fight it. wake me up, if any other American country, like Brazil, ever did the same. Brazil did not abolish slavery until 1888, miles behind the United States. The US was late abolishing slavery, but not all that late.

the United States have also elected a black president, numerous supreme court judges, state governors, city mayors, and numerous high-profile, readily accepted, and well-loved, in the overall society, cultural-type people are black. you really need to stop, going on about KKK and such, anymore. It just makes you look like an ignorant fool.

are you a Muslim? if you are not, then why should you care, if a meal is halal or not. If you are not a Muslim, it doesn't concern you - any more than if you were served a kosher meal, and you were not Jewish. What has it got to do with you, whether a meal happens to be halal, or kosher, if you are neither Muslim, or Jewish? Why should you care, one way or the other?

some of the packets are radically extreme, and they have not western, but only Chinese numerals. So an unsuspecting westerner, has no clue, how long you are supposed to simmer the sauce for.

you can buy these in Chinese shops in the UK but there is no English language, like instructions as to what you are supposed to do with the foodstuff, on the packet at all. It's all in Chinese. is this legal?

yes you were. You were trying to make out, totally falsely, that Saddam's Iraq was an ally of the USA, when they just weren't an ally of the USA at all, apart from a very brief period when the USA came to Iraq's aid when it looked like Iran might win the 1981-88 war, a war in which Henry Kissinger famously said about the pair of them, 'I hope they both lose'. Baa'thism was a Pan-Arab leftist nationalist ideology, and Saddam's regime, like Assad Snr's in Syria, was primarily backed by the Sovet Union, not the USA, who did not even have a single person in the country for nearly 20 years until 1983. The Soviets supplied Iraq with the massive majority of Iraq's weaponry, much much more than anybody else.

this is NOT about immigrants from Poland or Polynesia or Pakistan. It is about indigenous British and Irish people who can't speak English. I'm talking about British or Irish people who can trace their ancestry back to the archipelago for generations, but who cannot hold a proper conversation, or write a longish, legible letter in the English language. Not because they don't want to. But because they literally can't. obviously their 'first' languages are going to be almost all Celtic/Gaelic of various forms. Mostly Welsh but also Scottish or Irish. how many are there?

Fisk knows more than you and Fisk has at least used the word 'prescursors' with regard to some of the materials Iraq was able to get hold of for their chemical weapons program, but even he has been rather economical with the facts of the matter in that Indy article which I have now read. The USA only inadvertently assisted Iraq with their aquisition of chemical weapons in the 1980s, and not only that, but so did a lot of other countries, from Singapore, France, the UK, and in particular, Germany. The United States was not particularly 'best pals' with Saddam's or Baa'thist Iraq at all as you are trying to make out. They shored Iraq up for a very short while, when it looked like they might lose the war with Iran, from 1983 onwards. but before that the USA did not have any diplomatic relations at all with Iraq for 16 years from 1967, not even an embassy or consulate in Iraq and no diplomatic representation at all. don't try to muddy waters and make out that Baa'thist Iraq was a USA-backed entity, when at this time, both Baa'thist Iraq and Syria also, were not USA backed at all, far from it, but Soviet-backed client states. nearly 90% of Saddam's weaponry that the Iraq military used in the 1990-91 Desert Storm war were Russian or Chinese. Almost none of it, less than 1%, came from the USA.

obviously not the sharpest pencil in the box, are you. The road traffic fatality rate in the UK has more than halved in the past 40 years and it is now at almost the very lowest level, that it is anywhere in the world. British roads are safer, and fewer per capita people are killed on them than they are in countries like Germany, Japan, and Norway, countries that you might think of as being safer and where it is less risky for people. Only Sweden, of all the world's 200-odd countries, and that is a very big field, and only by a tiny little bit, beats the UK. There is a lot of reasons why UK roads are among the very safest, anywhere in the world. But quite a lot of the reason is because people tend to drive at lower speeds, and most especially, don't any longer speed so much in the totally ridiculous and inappropriate places the way that they used to.

complete and utter garbage. Saddam's chemical weapons that were used against Kurdish civilians and Iranian soldiers in the Iran-Iraq war were definitely NOT 'supplied', as if they were given to Iraq ready-made, by the USA at all. That is an outright, bald-faced lie, that I would have thought, even Fisk knows better than to repeat (although I wasn't able to read the Indy link). Saddam got his chemical weapons in the 1980s cobbled together from a multitude of sources, and the United States probably wasn't even in the top five. There were quite a lot of them. But Germany, the undisputed historic leader in chemical warfare technology, probably helped Iraq the most with Iraq's chemical weaponry back in those days.

in China yes. People can sell an ice lolly with picture of Kim Kadashian on the front, no problem no comeback. Nobody will care, unless the picture has her tits figured too prominently. The Chinese might intervene then because it is a domestic moral issue, but when it's just some westerner that objects to having their likeness used to boost another capitalist's profits, they'll just laugh at you.

it was kind of an innocent age, really. Powell was making a kind of ham-fisted clumsy attempt to become Tory party leader except nobody knew how to do it, including Powell, because there was no fixed way of challenging a Tory party leader back then. What the whole business showed, is that Powell despite his formidable intellect and superb debating ability, wasn't in actual fact a very good politician at all. He messed it all up. Heath won the 1970 election convincingly and miraculously, and it was all over for Powell after that.