Safe Haven

In 2008, Nebraska decriminalized child abandonment. The move was part of a "safe haven" law designed to address increased rates of infanticide in the state. Like other safe-haven laws, parents in Nebraska who felt unprepared to care for their babies could drop them off in a designated location without fear of arrest and prosecution. But legislators made a major logistical error: They failed to implement an age limitation for dropped-off children.

Within just weeks of the law passing, parents started dropping off their kids. But here's the rub: None of them were infants. A couple of months in, 36 children had been left in state hospitals and police stations. Twenty-two of the children were over 13 years old. A 51-year-old grandmother dropped off a 12-year-old boy. One father dropped off his entire family -- nine children from ages one to 17. Others drove from neighboring states to drop off their children once they heard that they could abandon them without repercussion.

...

On November 21, 2008, the last day that the safe haven law was in effect for children of all ages, a mother from Yolo County, California, drove over 1,200 miles to the Kimball County Hospital in Nebraska where she left her 14-year-old son.

Jessica Valenti in The Atlantic

Bait

I love the bait-and-switch of this angry opinion piece in The Age: lure in the crypto-bigots with what appears to be the start of a standard "I condemn your failure to condemn" rant at "lefties" and Muslims, nailed in place with a nostalgic flourish of that idiotic neologism "Islamo-fascist", and then, before they know it, hammer them with a strident recounting of the relevant history and geopolitics, the imperialist meddling, support for ethno-national colonialism, and actual succouring of said "Islamo-fascism" when acceptably cosy to Western interests, that got us into this appalling blood-midden in the first place.

It is dangerous for so-called "lefties" to shy away from calling it what it is. Islamo-Fascism... it is also time for the mainstream Muslim world to be much more visible and active in opposing these violent extremists within their communities...

...delusional triumphalism of Western capitalism ...US and its allies armed, trained and supported Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda ...Taliban today continues to be trained, financed and supported by forces within the Pakistan security and military establishment ...humiliation of Palestinian people ...Israel was also happy to secretly fund and encourage the terrorist organisation, Hamas ...invasion and destruction of Iraq ...the West's eagerness to destroy the largely secular Gaddafi regime ...West's support for violent opposition to the Assad regime ... financial, ideological/religious and military support from the West's key allies in the Middle East, the brutal Islamo-Fascist regimes of Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

Gosh. It's just a pity he didn't find time to mention Erdogan.

Alongside

Hey, remember how last year the government was allowed to block release of papers about the invasion of East Timor because it might upset our neighbours at a time of "significant tensions between the governments of Australia and Indonesia"? Well, apparently we're doing this now:




Note, as usual, the careful phrasing: "in support of the newly federated state of Malaysia" is as polite about timing as it is about avoiding mention of the British empire.

The associated poster about the Malayan Emergency refers to Australia fighting "alongside British forces against communist terrorists in Malaya." Remember the good old days, when just saying "communists" would have been sufficient?

For granted

Fairfax's resident crypto-bigot, noted hydrologist Paul Sheehan, emits his weekly mephitis:

For several years, the Canadian author Mark Steyn has been starkly pessimistic* about Europe. He recently travelled to Europe to see what the immigration influx looked like. He began in Sweden, the most generous country to immigrants in Europe, and had barely arrived when he had an encounter, described on his website on September 29:

"I was looking forward to sitting back and enjoying the peace and quiet of Scandinavian First Class. But, just as I took my seat and settled in, a gaggle of 'refugees' swarmed in, young bearded men and a smaller number of covered women, the lads shooing away those first-class ticket holders not as nimble in securing their seats...

"They seemed to take it for granted that asylum in Europe should come with complimentary first-class travel ... The conductor gave a shrug, the great universal shorthand for there's-nothing-I-can do."

Oh, I don't know, Mark; he could have kicked you in the nads, you narcissistic, entitled, hatemongering pillock.

It apparently didn't occur to Steyn that the scare quotes around refugees rather draws attention to the possibility that said allegedly pushy Mussulmen could have been Swedish citizens, or, you know, tourists.

* This would be a tactfully uninformative description of Steyn's ongoing concern that the effete Eurotrash are being outbred by the swarthy interlopers in their midst. Sheehan's talent for decorous omission is always impressive - almost as impressive as his expertise as an impresario for charlatans - although here he does not surpass his career best: "He [Jeremiah Wright] has preached that the US Government invented AIDS as a weapon to use against blacks, among other slanders." [My ital.] "Other slanders", you'll recall, included allegations that the US government was involved in the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, had lied about the Gulf of Tonkin incident, and had dropped nuclear weapons on a couple of cities in Japan at some point.