The world is focusing more and more on the activities of state sponsored Chinese hackers, but it seems hacking is endemic in China.

Name a target anywhere in China, an official at a state-owned company boasted recently, and his crack staff will break into that person’s computer, download the contents of the hard drive, record the keystrokes and monitor cellphone communications, too.

Pitches like that, from a salesman for Nanjing Xhunter Software, were not uncommon at a crowded trade show this month that brought together Chinese law enforcement officials and entrepreneurs eager to win government contracts for police equipment and services.

“We can physically locate anyone who spreads a rumor on the Internet,” said the salesman, whose company’s services include monitoring online postings and pinpointing who has been saying what about whom.  Read more »

The equivalent of our Family First organisation is the ACL (Australian Christian Lobby), they are as intolerant and silly as Family First with their opposition to gay marriage.

Imagine being the child of Lyle Shelton. It must be awful to be brought up among bigotry and intolerance. Imagine what it does to your sense of yourself and of the world around you. I just hope those kids are OK, because, in an ideal world, you wouldn’t let those sorts of people be parents. There really ought to be a law.

Too harsh? You’re probably right. I’ll just tell that to my son, who, by dint of his parents, is unwittingly subjected to this kind of infantile, puerile and facile rubbish every day of his precious life.

Lyle Shelton’s Australian Christian Lobby had this to say in a statement following Kevin Rudd’s repositioning on the subject of same-sex marriage: ”The prime minister who rightly gave an apology to the stolen generation has sadly not thought through the fact that [Mr Rudd's] new position on redefining marriage will create another.”

Pardon? Creating another generation of stolen children? Are the Christians going to come in, again, and steal our kids? Hello? Is anyone home? Breathtaking in its stupidity, overwhelming in its tastelessness.  Read more »

The Australian taxpayer must be wondering today just exactly what their AUD$34 million of federal funding for Ford earlier in the year got them. Billions of dollars more has been poured into the industry that is now almost dead.

About $10 billion over seven years. That’s how much has been pumped into the car industry by federal and state governments.

But has it been a case of throwing good money after bad, especially after Ford Australia’s announcement today that it was going to halt its local manufacturing operations in 2016?

Ford Australia president Bob Graziano said for every $1 the governments gave to his company, it returned $6 back to the economy. But at the same time, he said the firm’s cost structures in Australia were uncompetitive.

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Mark Steyn blogs about the massive IRS scandal that is engulfing the Obama administration:

Left-wing groups had their 501(c)(4) applications approved in weeks, right-wing groups were delayed for months and years and ordered to cough up everything from donor lists to Facebook posts, and those right-wing groups that were approved had their IRS files leaked to left-wing groups like ProPublica. The agency’s commissioner, a slippery weasel called Steven Miller, conceded before Congress that this was “horrible customer service” — which it was in the sense that your call is important to him and may be monitored by George Soros for quality control.

This hasn’t yet made news here, but the scandal is growing.

A civil “civil service” requires small government. Once government is ensnared in every aspect of life a bureaucracy grows increasingly capricious. The U.S. tax code ought to be an abomination to any free society, but the American people have become reconciled to it because of a complex web of so-called exemptions that massively empower the vast shadow state of the permanent bureaucracy. Under a simple tax system, your income is a legitimate tax issue. Under the IRS,everything is a legitimate tax issue: The books you read, the friends you recommend them to. There are no correct answers, only approved answers. Drew Ryun applied for permanent non-profit status for a group called “Media Trackers” in July 2011. Fifteen months later, he’d heard nothing. So he applied again under the eco-friendly name of “Greenhouse Solutions,” and was approved in three weeks.

That is telling. Someone must have ordered such a pogrom against centre-right organisations.

The president and the IRS commissioner are unable to name any individual who took the decision to target only conservative groups. It just kinda sorta happened, and, once it had, it growed like Topsy. But the lady who headed that office, Sarah Hall Ingram, is now in charge of the IRS office for Obamacare. Many countries around the world have introduced government health systems since 1945, but, as I wrote here last year, “only in America does ‘health’ ‘care’ ‘reform’ begin with the hiring of 16,500 new IRS agents tasked with determining whether your insurance policy merits a fine.” So now not only are your books and Facebook posts legitimate tax issues but so is your hernia, and your prostate, and your erectile dysfunction. Next time round, the IRS will be able to leak your incontinence pads to George Soros.

Pure coincidence I am sure.

Big Government is erecting a panopticon state — one that sees everything, and regulates everything. It’s great “customer service,” except that you can never get out of the store..

Proverbs 24

¹⁴In the same way, wisdom is sweet to your soul. If you find it, you will have a bright future, and your hopes will not be cut short.

via csmonitor.com

The first Victoria Cross was awarded to a 20 year old Ships Mate, for picking up a live shell that landed on the deck and throwing it overboard. He was promoted on the spot, rose to the rank of Rear Admiral and married the Captains daughter. (source)

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