Beware of redheads bearing gifts

When Timothy Garton Ash is done speaking, I wonder if there is a single dry seat left in the house.

Yet another thing Canadians and Europeans have in common is an obsession with the United States, and with distinguishing themselves from it, often by crude stereotyping. A Canadian writer observes that his compatriots "love to yell about how modest we are". Just like today's Europeans. Canadians and Europeans enjoy wallowing in a sense of moral superiority towards the imperial hyperpower, while doing rather little to improve the world outside their borders.

His latest opinion column in the Guardian otherwise defies this compelling criticism exactly: he plausts mush about the construction of a democratic future worldwide based on the social principals of Canada – because it has does so much in the past to try to reject the U.S. actions.
He also believes that there is a grand social model of integration that Europeans can learn from in order to deal with one another, based on the fact that Canadians of European origin get along well with one another.

With its carefully balanced federal model, securing the rights of a multicultural society in a bilingual framework, it has unique constitutional experience to offer the many multi-ethnic countries around the world that are struggling to avoid a fledgling democracy becoming a tyranny of the majority - and hence a catalyst for renewed ethnic conflict. Why not share this experience, in a distinctive Canadian version of democracy promotion? Or do we think the promotion of democracy should be left entirely to the Bush administration, while we sit on the sidelines and jeer?

So, in this respect at least, I return from Toronto wishing Canadians would be just a little less European. But then, in this respect, I also wish Europeans would be a little less Canadian.

Imagine that – isolating it to just white people in Canada who are much less of a sample of the world’s immigrant origins as the United States, and as such less philosophical, religious, and lifestyle diversity.

Yet this impotence is self-imposed. The potential power - military, economic and soft - of the established liberal democracies outside the US is enormous. The three largest sets are the democracies of Europe, most but not all gathered in the EU; the Anglosphere/Commonwealth democracies, including Australia, New Zealand, Canada (intersecting with the Francosphere), South Africa and India (the world's largest democracy); and the Hispanosphere and Lusosphere democracies of Latin America. Between us, we have a combined GDP much larger than that of the US, as well as natural resources and specific strengths that the hyperpower cannot match. Instead of sitting round like a bunch of poor cousins, complaining all the time about the behaviour of the rich American uncle, we should be thinking what we ourselves can do to make a difference beyond our shores.

Hoping that this model can actually do for the EU what the EU wont do for itself seems almost as desperate still. Canada rests far more closely on the side of the U.S. in the narrow cultural difference scale between the Atlantic Coasts. At 1/14th the population of the EU, only a portion of Canada that Ash assumes is enamored with the culture of welfare state dependency would care to become an exemplar and emotional prop to a EUvian model. The idea, after all is that he’s looking for affirmation of the efficacy of Europe failed and unsustainable socialist leaning model.

But it would be hard to argue with a straight face that Canada is in Europe. Moreover, with some 85% of its exports going to the United States, and so many of its business, energy and human links running north-south across the border, Canada is increasingly integrated into the US economy. The price the EU demands for opening its internal borders to new members is that they should tighten up their external border with non-EU neighbours. That would be a tall order for Canada, along the longest frontier on earth, with the most powerful neighbour on earth.

Canada has one of it’s feet in the American relationship, and one on the ground of the Brittish Commonwealth. Ash should rather consider that the Canadian reluctance to lean less on the American leg might have something to do with the values he thinks are inherent and bubbling over in the ties they have with the British Commonwealth. They do, after all have a favored trading and migrating scheme that rivals that of the FTAA Agreement, but have much less of a reason to act on them. There is the lack of dynamism, the presence of dictators, and the manipulators of government for business that they’re trying to kill off at home.

Imagining that there can be a fabulous “non-American Anglosphere + Europe” to form a network to export pluralism (first to the EU and then) to the larger world is quite rich. One wonders where the impulse for this hope comes from when the very same chatteratti thought the notion naïve and oppressive only a few years ago. Nation-building was, after all, one of the many “sins of the Bush” that the bruised inner children of the European left had on their list.
It also defies logic that Indians who have firmly rejected the European social model for the market growth model as a method of poverty elimination would really want to play along. The south Asian immigrants to the US and Canada are largely happy and tend to appreciate their autonomy from the statist economic model in the new world.
On the other hand one finds a different set of maneuvers in the UK. Interfaith and intercultural intervention and other bits of cultural pandering aren’t so much more widespread because of the open-ness of the society, but because life is so much more limiting that cultural palliative care is so badly needed.

I do believe that there is such a thing as a coherent model emerging from the Anglosphere of the US, Canada, Australia, and India because they are the more dynamic and less socialistic parts of the English speaking world. They are outgoing, robust, and energetically concerned with the future of freedom. The dead wood in this scenario are the English speakers who take an isolated, communitarian, socialistic approach such as New Zealand, South Africa, Ireland, and to a lesser degree from it’s position of great-grandfather, the UK.

We support international organisations. We love multilateralism and abhor unilateralism. We tend to think that men and women should be able to live more or less as they please with whomever they please, irrespective of gender and sexual orientation. We pride ourselves on our diversity. Check, check, check. Welcome to Canada.

in other words, he supports a bunch of social pieties that have failed to produce humanistic outcomes, the moral fiber to not hate those who don’t look like you, and the pandering to narrow political interests. Surely only a cloud or two under Plato’s playground.

The race for the contribution of the Anglosphere to global life isn’t about to start with the qualifiers, it’s already afoot, and the mixed-up cosmopolitans of the chattering class failed to hear the starting pistol generations ago.

Not very Smart at all if you need two

Euro-nomics strikes again in the form of the money-losing Smart Car. For 5 years there’s been a push to export them to the United States, but the punters aren’t buying it:

"It's really ugly," said Liz Viccora, 20, of Long Island, New York. "I like environmentally friendly cars, but this looks like a go-cart or one of those things security guards drive at the mall."
[ . . . ]
And while some drivers say a Smart would be easier to maneuver in cities where traffic is heavy and street parking scarce, parking would not necessarily cost any less.

"There's no incentive for those cars. Everyone pays the same rate," said Craig Chin, a spokesman for New York City's Department of Transportation.

I’m reminded of the time I saw two East German Trabants hit one another in a head on collision. It looked more or less like paper flying. It made me realize that people were getting trapped in a flaming twisted wreckage of combustibles for want of a small amount or relative mass and fuel efficiency. Especially when virtually all cars consume the same amount of the same commodity when they’re idling, and that unlike public transportation, isn’t running when you aren’t using it.

Mangy fleabag shot for an actual reason

First people are terrified enough by a bear on the loose that a continent of hunters is mobilized into action, when they could have gotten rid of the fleabag in one weekend by flying in 3 hung over Quebecers.

The moment a bear is shot, they act like the it was their little buddy who couldn’t catch a break. Here’s a little something they can build a ‘cycle of violence’ argument on: bears mauling people, and the occasional do-gooding dumbshit.

Isn’t she just the most cuddly thing you ever saw?

That moose calf in the video probably weighs twice as much as the hiker who complained about the Euro-über-bärchen that was shot, and isn’t as likely to be a herbivore as Herr Twit.

Perpetually puckered Greenies – you have to hang a pork-chop around their neck just to get a bear to play with them...

All the news that’s fit for the BBC to ignore.

France Inter reports that the Israeli soldier captured on Sunday by Palestinian elements is a French national. Both on air and in print, the BBC still omits that fact about Corporal Gilad Shalit. If they think it irrelevant they should also consider the newsworthy fact that France’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs has taken an interest in the matter, which might possibly lead to their engagement in negotiating for Cpl. Shalit’s release.

We confirm that Mr. Guilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier captured Sunday morning near the Gaza Strip who was born in Israel also has French nationality, his father being French.
Our embassy in Tel-Aviv and our consulate are mobilized to address the matter. We are in contact with all the parties concerned to help obtain the release of Mr. Guilad Shalit.

- a declaration of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs released by the French Embassy to Israel.

I suspect that unlike RFI who has managed to stick to reporting a straight fact, the news mules on the BBC editing floor can’t find an angle that consistently fits their “stance” on the news. The BBC’s pattern of behavior has shown us that having to find a ‘side’ to take has frequently gotten in the way of reporting events factually and in a manner that leaves the viewer or listener to form their own view of its’ meaning.

When you're reporting honestly, the other side of arrogance is called dilligence.

I’m not sayin’, I’m just sayin’

Is Nicolas Sarkozy the reincarnation of Man Ray?

Entirely a good thing.

Dadaisme

On Japanese instructional TV you can learn just enough English to identify the mugger with the bra on his head. Failing that, do some light aerobics.

I’m waiting for the next chapter when they explain the phrase “hook a brutha up!”

Via Jewlicious.

Glory to the cadre for obtaining telephones

The BBC’s Have Your Say program today had as its’ guest author Jung Chang to discuss China’s recent past and her latest book. While discussing the cultural revolution, the harm it did, and the like, western lefties called in to pshaw! that it wasn’t all THAT bad. She was not amused.

Jung Chang finally tries to put into context for these idiots who were trying to grant an exemption to any Communist’s with a absence moral judgment. She asked rhetorically why Mao’s corpse is still available for worship, why his portrait is still in Tiananmin Square, while Hitler’s portrait appears nowhere in Berlin. It would be an apt comparison if there were any lefties out there who haven’t exhausted every Hitler comparison already, such as Bush, Sharon, the postman, the neighbor’s noisy dog, parking tickets, and so on...

The fuse is lit!

Aucun document

Surprised?

Birkenau comparisons surely forthcoming

Gitmo has 460 prisoners, a figure the press holds back for fear of eliciting a “so what” when put in perspective. Le Monde’s intellectual gulag has a circulation of 400 000 and dwindling. Despite the difference in scale, they inspire similar fears:

Journalists Philippe Cohen and Pierre Pean say the paper has become a "modern-day Pravda" run in a "climate of fear" by an unscrupulous triumvirate.

Albeit Gitmo scares murderous malcontents, and Le Monde goes for the socially low-hanging fruit by scaring it’s readers.

The wings are clad in an esoteric alloy an ordinary engineer would call "unobtainium"

P.J. O’Rourke on the A380:

Two months to the day after the A380 first became airborne, Peter and I were at Airbus headquarters, in Toulouse, France, in the A380 systems-testing facility. The building is as blank-walled as the Kaaba and much larger.

The fuse is lit!

The Mata Hari New York Times

I guess when the left said that they wanted a “smarter” form of anti-terrorism involving aggressive use of intelligence operations in lieu of military force, what they meant was ‘please, don’t do anything at all to protect civil populations against terrorist organizations.” Andrew McCarthy:

The effort, which the government calls the “Terrorist Finance Tracking Program” (TFTP), is entirely legal. There are no conceivable constitutional violations involved. The Supreme Court held in United States v. Miller (1976) that there is no right to privacy in financial-transaction information maintained by third parties. Here, moreover, the focus is narrowed to suspected international terrorists, not Americans, and the financial transactions implicated are international, not domestic. This is not data mining, and it does not involve fishing expeditions into the financial affairs of American citizens. Indeed, few Americans even have information that is captured by the program — though there would be nothing legally offensive even if they did.

And unlike the last vital program the New York Times compromised — the National Security Agency’s Terrorist Surveillance Program, which the same reporters, James Risen and Eric Lichtblau, exposed last December — there is not even a facially plausible concern that the TFTP violates statutory law. The provisions germane here (mainly, the Right to Financial Privacy Act that Congress enacted in 1978 in reaction to Miller) do not even apply to the nerve center at issue, the Society of Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication.

The New York Times has done it again. They have published enough about methods, people, and operations to compromise them, and to deter anyone from cooperating with the US Government because their identities would be blown by cretinous scribblers who are fighting their own little Jihad against what they have obviously always believed are expendable human lives – anyone they don’t understand in their own society.

And their “poodles” are on it like white on rice.

The fuse is lit!

Subliminal Economics

Bankruptcy in the age of SoDoKo and the dismal science that dares not speak its’ name.

The obvious, graciously omitted

Le Vieux Continent copiera-t-il les vins du Nouveau Monde?

(Will Old Europe copy the wines of the New World?)

From astute reader Michael, who noted that in a Reuters article discussing the state of the wine business in Europe the New World mentioned had some curious omissions. Apart from Mentioning Chile and Australia, they did see any need to hurt anyone’s tender feelings by naming names.


Note too when it’s acceptable to use any sort of warrior speak vocabulary in EUtopia:

Brussels embarks on conquest to recover wine markets

You go out there and git ‘em, champ!

The fuse is lit!

Transnational Soul Train

Rebranding themselves like a tobacco company with a scarred reputation, the European Commission has come up with some great ideas. We’re talking real Jeffersonian stuff, here:

These are some of the colorful ideas for reconnecting with disgruntled EU folk in a Commission document obtained by the news agency. Others include a new EU logo and theme tune, a Commissioners' Day and a kitsch pop extravaganza modeled on the Eurovision Song Contest. "We want to show the EU can dance," the report says, according to Reuters. An anonymous, presumably British, official is quoted as saying the aim is to make the Union "more punter-friendly" and to "show that the EU can be fun." Diplomats from some new member states are not so keen on the idea. "They feel people are being forced to dance and sing, like they were by the communists," said one.

Useful nationbuilding skills, indeed - but what will restore their former dignity as adult humans?

The fuse is lit!

That's right, Roger. No thought control.

Trying to sustain a wheezing career, Roger Waters of the former Pink Floyd has shaken the cobwebs out on Israelis trying to protect themselves from Palestinian snipers, by spray painting on ‘the ApartheidNaziZionistWall,’ 95 percent of which is actually a fence.

Wall? Fence? Getit? Hu-huh-he-huh!

Much like Hamas, Waters made a living helping adolescents channel their darkest, most suicidal thoughts. Unlike the Berlin Wall whose ‘hu-huh!’ allusion in The Wall provided him with a meal ticket purpose is to keep people OUT – not IN.
If there ever was a ‘yeah, whatever’ aura to another washed-up entertainment figure trying to say something they find meaningful about the Israelis protecting themselves from snipers and infiltrating bombers, this is it – the reason world traveling entertainers are coming to Israel this summer after years of staying away is because it’s safer now. The ‘ApartheidNaziZionistWall’ appears to be doing a fine job of protecting Waters and all the other little darlings who always seem to know better than anyone else about how we mere plebes and proles should comport ourselves.

A look again at the solipsism of Pink Floyd’s “The Wall” tells you everything you need to know about what’s behind this stunt – the movie was ginned up by Waters about himself, and wallowing in his lost years in an emotional wilderness caused and conducted only by him. It’s the perfect example of what presently passes for the arts in large part at the moment: self-absorption with no real point other than a self-therapeutic display which the artist expects us to pay for solely because of their ceremonial position and title of artist.

"I've seen pictures of it, I've heard a lot about it but without being here you can't imagine how extraordinarily oppressive it is and how sad it is to see these people coming through these little holes," he added. "It's craziness."

He’s right – it is horrific that people are trying to get through in order to kill the likes of Waters. Does he ask himself why they’re coming through at all? For their freedom from the misery created by the Palistinians in the West Bank, maybe? Probably not, since he cant imagine that it keeps people OUT, not IN, and that it might be there for reasons he might just understand:

«Roger Waters was inspired to create the album during a 1977 concert tour for Animals, dubbed Pink Floyd — In the Flesh. In Montreal, a fan's disruptive behaviour resulted in Waters spitting in the fan's face. Waters was immediately disgusted with himself, and his alienation from his fans urged him to build a wall between himself and the audience, an idea which later evolved into the album»

Roger, imagine that that fan had a bomb belt packed with metal flechettes like hooks, screws, ball bearings, and other objects that the fence doesn’t welcome. Imagine he had a firearm that “society’s betters” in Britain have banned.

The purpose of the fence is to disengage the Israelis from the Palestinians – to prevent fighting by limiting contact. The likes of Waters don’t have the depth to understand that the Palestinian terror militants don’t want the fence so that they can continue to pick off Israeli civilians. It DOES form a border – one between reasoned though and barbarism. It permits Israel to have a boundary that lets Hamas, the PFLP, and Fatah to imagine an Israel not violently thrown into the sea, and the fact that Waters feels safe enough to travel to Israel is proof of that.


Were the misapplied and cryptic allusions to Orwell's Animal Farm, that great work that Waters was trying to ride the coat-tails of in "Animals" entirely lost on him? When every detached celeb (who knows what to say to be heard) parrots the same line, there are reasons to complain about thought control.

The celebrity set has indeed become a class – they have evolved into the Pigs in Orwell’s Animal Farm – trying to convince us of their commonality to their paying customers while showing that they are more equal than others.

The fuse is lit!

Giving them a reactor? Why didn’t I think of that?

A former U.S. diplomat who was deeply involved in North Korea policy said the Bush administration's approach toward the isolated communist state has been a failure that left Pyongyang to pursue its nuclear and missile programs.

The headline only makes sense when you realize that Straub was part of Clinton’s failed policy on North Korea which envisioned giving them a reactor in exchange for them saying out loud that they’d play nice – which they didn’t. It is, incidentally, the same thing the EU3 tried to do with Iran – offer them “sweets and nuts”.

One fundamental failure of Bush's approach was the tendency to raise tensions and make South Korea nervous by stating that "all options" were the table, a phrase underscoring U.S. intentions to use force against North Korea if necessary, he said.

It needs to be noted that Straub was not deeply involved in anything that succeeded.

The fuse is lit!

The curious sustainability of bad ideas

Some things inspire popular culture, others infect it, or are infected by it.

I think I have found the object of reference and goal that Greens can use for their future utopia:

The survivors of war, overpopulation, and pollution are living in a great domed city, sealed away from the forgotten outside world. Here, in an ecologically balanced world, mankind lives only for pleasure, freed by the servo-mechanism which provides everything,

The pivotal situation with the domed city is that all people have only 30 years to live. This is enforced by a life-clock embedded in the left palms of all newborns (who are bred, not born). A series of colours then indicates one's status, as does the clothing one wears.

But all would otherwise not be perfect. Humans need crises to feel anguished and involved. Bleakness is, after all, the new gold standard of art, beauty, and thruth:

Not only was the world headed for catastrophe, but there was little that could be done to avoid it. Some parts of the world might see some minor and temporary recovery, but "a minimum of ten million people, most of them children, will starve to death during each year of the 1970s. But this is a mere handful compared to the numbers that will be starving before the end of the century"

Which, of course has to be revised and postponed by the advocates of this sad truth so that it would hopefully come true some day.

The consequences are already clear - Earth is under mounting stress from human activities, with its climate changing and its ecosystems failing. But recognition that we must act urgently to preserve our natural habitat has been undermined by persistent failure to admit the multiplier effect of human numbers. Without policies to reduce world population, efforts to save our environment cannot succeed. With smaller populations, living in greater harmony with nature, our horizons may stretch far into the future.

However the science inspired by fiction causes further fiction to accepted as science:

Social pressures on both men and women to marry and have children must be removed. If society were convinced of the need for low birth rates, no doubt the stigma that has customarily been assigned to singles and childless couples would soon disappear.

Compulsory control of family size is an unpleasant idea to many, but the alternatives may be much worse. Some governments practice involuntary population control, these usually being the poorer, less educated, overpopulated countries. Most times these countries use vasectomies on all fathers of three or more children, or a program of sterilizing women after their second or third child.

Stunningly, none of the of the fearful theories bandied about can explain our continued existence as a species – our already present sustainability, if you will, and provides insight into the whacky world of the do-gooder and their theories.

Never mind the jihadist trying to kill you now, we have naturally occurring atomized carbon to sequester!

The fuse is lit!

Quiz time for lefty

Guess who these folks might be:

[One] was previously a registered nurse. Two others in my company had IQ's over 150 and were members of Mensa. Two more were had law degrees. Several were published authors and poets.

Their answer is usually the officially pitiable and those structurally oppressed for the public moral vanity, but sorry Spanky, as usual you’re wrong.The fuse is lit!

In common cause with the enlightened European left

Walks like a duck, quacks like a duck...

Every recipe in the Socialist cookbook starts with “First you steal two chickens”

Non-reportage noted

Biased BBC asks why the coverage of this story was so limited.

Ayatollah's grandson calls for US overthrow of Iran

"My grandfather's revolution has devoured its children and has strayed from its course," he told Al-Arabiya, an Arabic-language television station. "I lived through the revolution and it called for freedom and democracy - but it has persecuted its leaders."

It’s simple: it doesn’t fit the media’s script of parading that they seek a diversity of opinion when they prefer that it didn’t challenge their staff’s view of the world.

The fuse is lit!

The root cause, if there ever was one, has been found

Writing for the Washington Post’s Editorial page of Monday 16 June 20006, Robert Kagan surprises Post readers with this and provides us with examples of the “depth” (not!) of the incessant nagging:

I recently took part in a panel discussion in London about civil conflict and "failed states" around the world, centered on the interesting work of the British economist Paul Collier. The panelists included the son of a famous African liberation-leader-turned-dictator, the former leader of a South American guerrilla group, a Pakistani journalist, a U.N. official and the head of a nongovernmental humanitarian organization. Naturally, our reasoned and learned discussion quickly transmogrified into an extended round-robin denunciation of American foreign policy.

The panelists focused instead on a long list of grievances against the United States stretching back over six decades. There was much discussion of the "colonial legacy" and "neo-colonialism," especially in the Middle East and Africa. And even though the colonies in question had been ruled by Europeans...

As for "failed states" and civil conflict, several panelists agreed that they were always and everywhere the fault of the United States. The African insisted that Bosnia and Kosovo were destroyed by American military interventions, not by Slobodan Milosevic, and that Somalia was a failed state because of American policy. The Pakistani insisted the United States was to blame for Afghanistan's descent into anarchy in the 1990s. The former guerrilla leader insisted that most if not all problems in the Western Hemisphere were the product of over a century of American imperialism.

When someone pointed out that the young boys fighting in African tribal and ethnic wars could hardly be fighting against American "imperialism," the African dictator's son insisted they were indeed. When the head of the NGO paused from gnashing his teeth at American policy to suggest that perhaps the United States was not to blame for the genocide in Rwanda, the African dictator's son argued that it was, because it had failed to intervene. The United States was to blame both for the suffering it caused and the suffering it did not alleviate.

If we refrained from action out of fear that others around the world would be angry with us, then we would never act. And count on it: They'd blame us for that, too.

I’m going to leave it at that. It’s safe to say that the panel was made up of the ‘cream of the crop’ of the ‘world’ public opinion that so many people idolize as meaningful. What seems more evident is that there is a emotional avoidance principal at play that is the root cause of much of the passive-aggression that some try to call policy. I really have to wonder though, if those poor folk who are kept miserable by the elite represented by the panel really agree with them, or are just bobbing their heads to get that sack of rice they were promised.

The fuse is lit!

Plantu actually thinks Americans could care less

Plantu actually thinks Americans could care less

One couldn’t get more arrogant.


Al Jazeera sur Seine:

The image of Airbus in the United States has been tarnished in the past few weeks, while that of Boeing is gilded anew. The two manufacturers have devoted themselves to a merciless commercial war using the active economic diplomacy of their governments. But their conflict is also exposed in the media. Boeing underwent a long series of criticisms in the press because several chairmen were unable to keep up sale. Today, the wind turned, and it’s Airbus which becomes the critic’s target.

The A380 is the subject of attacks over its fuel consumption, its weight, and its excessive size.

It can only about ‘image’ when you’re trying to convince yourself that it isn’t about making good planes that sell well. Chirac arranges state visits just to sell planes. Bush doesn’t seem to have time for that kind of thing. As for Boeing being ‘gilded’, one wonders if this writer has ever been to the United States. Americans aren’t nationalistic about companies, and we don’t rely on corporate sales figures to provide us with self esteem.

The fuse is lit!

Leftist unwittingly compares himself to terrorist

They see incapable of imagining that anything that happens in the world isn’t about them. Here’s a real gem from the Grauniad’s loony echo chamber:

The war against terror is a war against domestic political opposition, not against terrorists. If it were against terrorists, we would have a national-unity type government doing all we need to do against real terrorists with broad consensus. Think WW II and FDR.

Not Bush -- that's not what this war is about at all. Successes such as Zarqawi's death, however significant or not -- we don't know yet -- are a signal to the likes of Rove and the rightwing radio wreckers who plague us to pile on big time: "Democrats would cut and run" and therefore could never have gotten Zarqawi. (Of course, they never would have been so stupid as to get us into the current mess. In fact, NO other president would have.)
The goal of the war on terror is to finish off democrats and other nonconformists asap. Al Qaida can do what they want. In fact, another real attack would enable Bush and co. to further consolidate power.

- Posted by nohero on June 15, 2006 02:44 AM

Links not by the original commentator on the Graun.

The fuse is lit!

The Choice of a New Generation (of the delusional)

The fuse is lit!

The times, they are a changing

15 June 2006 -

As an overall picture, time has been an element in affecting negatively the forces of the occupying countries, due to the losses they sustain economically in human lives, which are increasing with time. However, here in Iraq, time is now beginning to be of service to the American forces and harmful to the resistance

- From a document found in Abu Musa al Zarkawi’s cache after his defeat. It was release by the Iraqi government.

25 December 2004 -

On Christmas Day former Senator and former presidential candidate George McGovern wrote a letter to the editor of the Los Angeles Times (and probably many other papers) calling for an American surrender in Iraq.

- David Horowitz on former U.S. Senator George McGovern’s call for the U.S. to “surrender” in Iraq.

Again, I ask, surrender to whom?

McGovern carelessly called for an American retreat from Iraq before a government could even be established. It was such a bad assertion, that even then that the left had to turn on its’ famous noise machine to get some credibility back, and still keep up its’ ‘fight’.

Also doing the service of emboldening the argument of the U.S.’ opponents in the war on terror, one year before Zarkawi’s admission Jude Wanniski writing his monthly article in al Jazeera, tried to whitewash McGovern’s taciturn demand that the United States should make a show of weakness and insincerity:

Former Senator George McGovern, who ran unsuccessfully for president in 1972 as the Democratic nominee in opposition to the Vietnam war, last week proposed a solution tied to the president's position that the US would only stay as long as it took to train Iraqis to maintain order by themselves.

[ ... ]

They [ the critics of the Administration] argue that a fixed timetable for a complete withdrawal would change the behavior of the insurgents and lead to a more favorable outcome.

Sure pal, sure.the fuse is lit!

“American” a Euro codeword for overbearing

Wholely unnecessary, but what the hell - anything to prop up a tender ego, I guess. Note too that Telegraph Alex cartoonist’s notion of NOT USING the Airphone in the headrest in front of you seems just too difficult for a mere mortal to resist. Better to do the non-overbearing European thing, and ban it, eh?



I’m touched that he didn’t try to childishly call him “Billy-Bob” or some other pathetic caricature, but tell me, fellow cretinous American overlords of workplace terror – how many “Cyruses” do you know?

Oh – I forgot, you can’t say that. They’re supposed to be more personally assured, more skillful, lucid, and whatever else than we pre-cambrian Americans, the great idiots and evil geniuses of the world.

Remind me to never mention a British client I’ve had who couldn’t stay focused on the non-personal or the job for more than eight minutes, and who was one of the only near-illiterates whom (as he said) was highly regarded by his peers. Oh yeah, and then there was the stereotypical state of his oral hygiene, and his glowing ‘personality’ which couldn’t even be parodied. His only saving grace was that his education and credentials were falsely assumed to speak for themselves.

I could go on, but I won’t.

The fuse is lit!

They’re wiz-kids, I tell ya...

Le Monde uses as it’s cover story a news item from September of last year for this weekend’s magazine cover story.

I guess recycling really does work, and I also suppose they are catching up – they have yet to report that Castro is a dictator.

The fuse is lit!

Bloated and Insatiable American Unions, Euro Mobocracy... Same Thing

Courtesy of El Gato (the hamster is thrown in for free):

At a recent UAW meeting, UAW chief Ron Gettelfinger spoke about the need for the union to deal with the auto makers. He talked about the dreadful state of Ford and GM and how they are both losing jobs. UAW jobs.

"But it's going to take more than what we can do at the bargaining table. There are failed [political] strategies that have failed to protect our jobs."

Making it more difficult to get rid of workers makes it less likely the workers will be hired in the first place. There's a whole country that's tried this. It's called France.

CAIR, BBC, etal incapable of identifying irony

Tell me if you think the promotion of this story (which is 3 months old) isn’t nicely timed, and that this Marine’s song to entertain his friends doesn’t have anything to do with trying to cope with the predilections of the press when they’re trying to do their jobs.

The video of the song in question

Posted on the YouTube website, the video shows a man in uniform strumming a guitar while singing about killing Iraqis, as others laugh and cheer.

What the BBC left out is the part of the Marine’s joke about the men of the family showing off their AK-47s, which is probably closer to the truth than a Marine killing civilians.

They are simply incapable of understanding why troops would joke because the newsies live insulated lives like that Orwell found repugnant in the Gadflies of his time:

We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.

Besides, anyone want to grade this for tastefulness? Nothing offensive there worth mentioning!



One makes a joke, the other raps about “takin’ over” and slaughtering people waving a scimitar around instead of an Ibanez with a fuzzy pickup. Morally equivalent, surely.

“Shocked Rerporters,” not what they’re covering, are now news. Alert the media!

Speaking truth to power the powerless

Guantanamo bay [prison] must be closed!...

...Especially during the war on terror.

I’ll do anything to end AmeriKKKan oppression!

I’ve changed my spots! No more of this “WAR” stuff! I reject your “WARS” for “people” and “democracy”!!!

Get ANGRY people!
No more mamby-pamby “tolerance” of “people” and their species-apartheid! Down with Caterpillar!the fuse is lit!

The last bearded hero?

al Queda will have even further difficulty creating a hero for their potential supporters to look up to now that Zarkawi is dead. The fact that the illiterate, murdering brute was the best they could do at the time is telling as well.

The very real benefit of putting that thug out of commission also has a symbolic power not just in Iraq where he was trying to turn opposition between Shiites and Sunnis into a civil war, but doesn’t do much for Jihad’s appeal anywhere else. What took place is the real and unemotional removal of a symbol.

Contrast that with western leftist shaking their little fists and stamping their feet in an attempt to construct negative symbols of anyone trying to oppose terror out of thin air, and has encountered difficulties in using that to make anything significant happen as a result.

As is the norm with the unaccountable agitators of the left, they tried and will continue to try to play at the public’s fears and emotions just as a terrorist would, and preyed on the youngest and dimmest like cowards always have, taking their verbal fight to those they think won’t retaliate. Talking in circles doesn’t require much of a physical or intellectual investment. True to that, the mendicants have benefited very little from it, and found a public exhausted by them. In large part, Michael Moore bin-forgotten.

Move over Ché, your days of t-shirt fame are over

In the spirit of el asesino


the fuse is lit!

He who is without sin will cast the first gin bottle

Dick “Dick” Marty’s obvious emotional stability leaves civilization only three options. His evident brilliance in repeating a bundle of uncorroborated slams on the US government and the various European states who want their thugs back leave the White House embarrassed and with a rather chapped tukhus. As such they may:

1. In the spirit of all good conservation measures, if any terror conspirators were transported from or through Council of Europe paradises, they should be released into the wild where they were found.
2. The US should stop cooperating with Council of Europe states in this matter of taking these schmucks off of their hands, and perhaps even avail them with small arms manufactured in Dick’s beloved Switzerland under Social Security mental disability program. Surely that would prove therapeutic to the little darlings.
3.Police in those states should deliver any further conspirators and collaborators to terror directly to Marty’s home where their freedom can be assured. I doubt that they’ll raid his bar.
4. Return them to their nations of origin where their safety will be assured.

So many choices. That notwithstanding, the it’s hard to question the solidity of a report that buries this little gem deep in the middle:

There is no formal evidence at this stage of the existence of secret CIA detention centres in Poland, Romania or other Council of Europe member states, even though serious indications continue to exist and grow stronger. Nevertheless, it is clear that an unspecified number of persons, deemed to be members or accomplices of terrorist movements, were arbitrarily and unlawfully arrested and/or detained and transported under the supervision of services acting in the name, or on behalf, of the American authorities. These incidents took place in airports and in European airspace, and were made possible either by seriously negligent monitoring or by the more or less active participation of one or more government departments of Council of Europe member states.

The fuse is lit!

The commie orgasmatron

a.k.a. back breaking labor:

In an attempt to reduce personal relationships to social functions, Soviet literature has always kept silent on the subject of sex. A family has been considered the primary cell of society, where good workers and citizens are fashioned, or as a factory producing the happy generations of the future. The only sexual motifs to be found in many Soviet classics are those implanted in scenes of labor.

In Boris Gorbatov's novel Donbass, the coal miner Victor Abrosimov descends into the mine in order to experience the piercing enjoyment of drilling:

He got down on his knees before the wall of coal and switched on his hammer. A familiar tremor of joy rolled over his hands and then embraced all his body... His dream came true and the body of coal lay before him submissively as the miner was free to let himself go. The solid wall of untouched black forest moved excitingly close to him, enticing and luring him. Suddenly Viktor Abrosimov felt his muscles fill with daring, previously unknown force, his heart was consumed with bold courage, and he believed that he would be able to do everything, to overcome everything, and to achieve everything this night.

This is why it’s impossible to take seriously the fantasy communism of university students, 23 percent of a certain large European state which should know better, or even actual graduates. It’s forgotten legacy is the emotional enslavement as well as the physical. The truism that there will eventually be nothing left to distribute includes happiness and material comfort.

…when the individual controls his own property, he can dispense it or overcome it, in order to achieve self-transcendence and reach the heights of self-perfection. When nothing of one's own is available or even imaginable, then the process works backwards, and the individual descends to the realm of self-abasement, experienced as an inability to control even oneself. The path from one's own thing leads to one's own soul, but from a thing not one's own, the path leads to someone else's soul, to the soul of a robot that slams its sledge or wedge into whatever object is placed before it. In Russia, we say that this kind of person works as if he has been "wound up" (kak zavedennyi).

Such labor is a convenient way of blinding oneself, satisfying a maniacal need to do something, to be occupied; it is a formula for self-depletion. The individual is not in control, but in thrall to the devil of labor who instructs him: "smash, slash, chop" or "fry, shred, season." The more physically debilitating the work, the easier it is to forget yourself in it, to chase away importunate thoughts of death, to kill exhausting blocks of time. Labor becomes a wonderful means of self-abnegation, the truest desire of a despairing soul. Through intercourse with an object our tormenting humanity is forgotten.

The fuse is lit!

Sacrificed at the alter of deep ecology

Want to know what makes leftist squeal with joy?

Talking about the death of their political opponents, straw-men (or straw-women), or otherwise. They can’t fathom doing anything meaningful about murderous tyrant like Saddaam Hussein or Basher Assad, but will practically spunk in their shorts over the notion of one certain Baroness’ death which they find a vulgar joy in:

Do they know something they're not telling us?
I've got the champagne on ice.

- Posted by evahopeful on June 5, 2006 03:27 PM.

never will so much champagne be swilled by the working classes (of a certain age of course)

- Posted by Stujam on June 5, 2006 03:31 PM.

”Working classes” indeed. Do they really think that there were that many people who don't work who could have voted Thatcher in? How can they pretend to maintain that lie when their candidates lost?

I think more likely we’re talking about people of “a certain age” who were the least likely to have ever swung a hammer or broke a sweat in the commission of earning a paycheck. We’re talking about people who still believe in ‘class’, or at least the type one can use as a political weapon of you can keep people poor enough to keep voting for the left that ran the UK into the ground in the decades previous to Thatcher.

To begin with these clowns think that a state funeral would be “optional”, simply because they are the wisest, most lucid, undisputable perfect keepers of the universe, and they can deny a basic act of state to a political opponent. Is it any wonder that they love dictators?

Get there before they ghost edit it. The first 6 pages are linked below:




She's no longer Prime Minister, and no longer shows an interest in policy, and they want her dead. How very, very humane of them.

Commie freakfest

Supplies parachuted in to a French garrison.

"Now is the time for all good men to be shiftless"

Socialist revisionism

Preying on those unaware of history, a UK Socialist house organ which seeks donations because they aren’t supported by fat cats and millionaires” [billionaires] - is trying to add embellishments to the muck dredged out of the past.

There were three positions within the labour movement in the 1930s. These were firstly pacifism, secondly support for the League of Nations and “collective security”, which came to dominate Labour Party policy, and thirdly anti-imperialism.

Implying a link between fascism and anyone they’d like to tar, they point out that their grandparents’ opposition to British Fascist Sir Oswald Mosley was based in a desire to support pacifism.

Nonsense. Oswald Mosley, a man enamored with a united Europe, wasn’t just a supporter of the fascism of the Nazis (who were socialists,) he WAS A PACIFIST and an isolationist who opposed the defense of the permitting people to exercise their free will, just as the modern far-left do in the Arab world, and with anyone prepared to dismember the society predicated on the inviolability of their own right to speech.

They both fetishize dictators and public violence. As with Nazism, they favored the primacy of the state in all facets of life, favor the establishment of a pervasive welfare state, and dilution of the family’s position as the basis of social organization.

To understand the cognitive dissonance and confusion they have with the world, just observe the great contortions they go through to convince people that there is still a battle with imperialism out there when there are no empires left. The only one that they can identify holds elections every two years for legislators who can scupper the government and every four years for a president.

The difference is that Socialists try to hide their penchance for violence and admiration for a commanding and tyrannical government model under a veneer of “demanding peace” under the banner of a clenched fist – one they seem only to swing at their fellow citizens knowing that there are no socialistic consequences in doing so. It’s a leftist preoccupation that continues today without realizing that they feel perfectly comfortable making the opposite point when it comes to past history:

Britain’s hypocritical non-intervention policy starved the Spanish republic of weapons as Hitler and Mussolini armed Franco.

An action they would exempt Saddaam Hussein, Basher Assad, the PFLP, and Hamas from in a New York minute.the fuse is lit!

Truer now more than ever

Lefty ideology creates a hostile work environment

As well as a hostile living environment, according to Michael Phillips – oracle of The Gods of Commerce.

The Lefties have banned chain stores in North Beach and much of the city. There is no logic behind it, their arguments fail after one sentence replies, but they don’t think or learn. (Lefty two-digit-IQ ideology: ‘Starbucks kills local coffee shops’…obvious rebuttal: ’Since Starbucks came to San Francisco the number of coffee shops has increased five fold.’)

But you can’t say that because it doesn’t fit the extremely narrow frame of reference that this generation about which Phillips says:

I often describe San Francisco as a 92 year old once beautiful woman who spends two hours a day putting on her make-up. When she was young she was a commie and has never paid any attention to the world. She hates children and learns everything she knows from her hair dresser and manicurist.

The fuse is lit!

Perhaps they’re trying to piss someone off?

This current issue of the Hamas weekly has a cartoon of a Palestinian child urinating on the Statue of Liberty, which is holding a book labelled "Democracy". This expression of utter disdain for the US and its democracy follows other recent slurs in the PA media. For example, the West was condemned in March at a Palestinian rally:
"for many years of trying to penetrate Islamic youth with dubious things such as the ideas of democracy."
[Al Hayat Al Jadida, March 4, 2006]

the fuse is lit!