“It is the Syrians, however, who feed Mr. Jumblatt's anxieties.”

"At first they said they wanted to create a buffer zone of 20 kilometers to put in an international force. But what does that mean when Hezbollah can fire rockets over your back? Now there is a new formula: the demilitarization of the South."

The Beirut Daily Star’s opinion editor and Reason Magazine contributing editor Michael Young writes of his recent interview with Lebanese Druze leader and Progressive Socialist Parliamentarian Walid Jumblatt.

There is a strong desire for retribution in the Shiite community. Quite a few politicians, including Mr. Jumblatt, have implied that Hezbollah's abduction of two Israelis soldiers was irresponsible, which many of the group's faithful deem to be a stab in the back. This prompted Mr. Nasrallah to declare, ominously, in an Al Jazeera interview last week: "If we succeed in achieving the victory . . . we will never forget all those who supported us. . . . As for those who sinned against us . . . those who let us down, and those who conspired against us . . . this will be left for a day to settle accounts. We might be tolerant with them and we might not."

What does Mr. Jumblatt think of that threat, obviously directed against him and his political comrades? "Nasrallah was talking in the name of the Syrian regime. He thinks he's a demigod. Like [Iran's President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad he's waiting for the 12th Imam, the Mehdi. This aspect of Shiite religious mobilization can be frightening."

Hizballah, he says, must be disarmed. These are hard words to say right now. No Arab leader, let alone the Lebanese government held hostage in the grips of Hizballah can openly criticize them in this “resistance” that they’ve initiated at the expense of the population.

Mr. Jumblatt is dubious. "Rice didn't clarify how the international force would deploy. As I've told the Americans: As long as Syria can send weapons to Hezbollah, there will be no change in the situation. Not with this regime in Damascus. We need a force that can cover all of Lebanon, like in Kosovo. Monitor the Syrian border, then talk."

If Hezbollah refuses to disarm (and it does), "then we enter a phase of all-out war, endless war, with the possibility that this will weaken the Lebanese state. Let us also remember that the Syrians a few days ago promised the Americans they would help them fight al Qaeda. This was, in fact, a backhanded warning that Syria could use al Qaeda to kill innocents in Lebanon."

In it he stands steadfast in the longstanding Druze tradition of finding a way to coexist in a cold peace at the very least, and protecting itself as a minority surrounded by otherwise hostile factions. The first leader of Lebanon prior to the post-Ottoman age, as well as a passionate guarantor of the protection of the Christians was a Druze Emir without who there may not be a notion of a Lebanon that lives to this day.

Having recently both called the men of the south “our brothers” and as we see in an interview with Al-Arabiya Television (20 July) [video courtesy of MEMRI] he walks a tenuous and complicated line in the duplicitous world of Lebanese politics. In it he criticizes Hizballah leader Hassan Nasrallah of the obvious: he committed a nation to war. Jumblatt states clearly that he finds their handler and go-between Syria complicit. It needs to be understood that his relationship with Syria is a bitter and detailed as any in the region. His leadership of the Druze community began with the murder of his own father which was directed by Hafez Assad in 1977.

Unlike virtually every faction in the Lebanese zeitgeist, Jumblatt is certainly no-body’s fool. As for why Hizballah would do this now, one doesn’t need to be a cynic to see that they have to lose when people are free to function without having the rug pulled out from under them.the fuse is lit!

How you get to Qana: Why did this image need to be smuggled out?

Dressed in civilian clothing so they can quickly disappear, the militants carrying automatic assault rifles and ride in on trucks mounted with cannon.

The photographs, from the Christian area of Wadi Chahrour in the east of Beirut, were taken by a visiting journalist and smuggled out by a friend.

The fuse is lit!

How you get to Qana: Hezbollah waging war in suburbia

The Melbourne man who smuggled the shots out of Beirut and did not wish to be named said he was less than 400m from the block when it was obliterated.

"Hezbollah came in to launch their rockets, then within minutes the area was blasted by Israeli jets," he said.

"Until the Hezbollah fighters arrived, it had not been touched by the Israelis. Then it was totally devastated.

The fuse is lit!

How you get to Qana: Cowards operating among civilians.

Mr Egeland blasted Hezbollah as "cowards" for operating among civilians.

"When I was in Lebanon, in the Hezbollah heartland, I said Hezbollah must stop this cowardly blending in among women and children," he said.

The fuse is lit!

In love with entropy

Fine. You disappear first. I'll be right behind you, I swear.

The fuse is lit!

Europa Europa

Olmert depicted as a prison guard.

Note that this was published on 10 July – before the cross-border kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers by Hizballah, but after Hizballah started its’ artillery campaign.

Forget the ideology for a second and think about how this reflects on the critic.

The fuse is lit!

Plantu-ganda

Trying to make a religious war with a weak, delirious US is the culprit, and Christianity the hurtful party when Jihad is at war with the civilized world. I expect nothing less from such a complete dissembler and abject idiot.

As if Europe (represented by his mild mannered, humble, suit wearing “Mister Happy Blob”) really could:

« ... What if we declared once and for all the separation of church and state in the region forever? »

The fuse is lit!

What, no cognitive dissonance yet?

A look at the map, even the ones carried by Le Monde on their web site can’t get their writers to dispose of their illusions that calling and hoping for a fake peace will ease the worried moon-children of the European commune.

UNIFIL’s area of responsibility corresponds exactly to the area of operation Hizballah has control over.

In rehab, they call that enablement. Even if the UN ever did grow enough of a spine to say something the “peace camp” would wish that they nary mention it at all for fear of their precious vision.

Nonetheless, things on the ground seem quite different. There are Lebanese who have no illusion of who’s really oppressing them:

The mixed village population on the Israeli units path of advance, Druzes, Shiites, Sunnis and Christians, provides a useful shield for Hizballah fighters. They take full advantage of the directives to Israeli ground forces not to touch Druze and Christian villages. By long Lebanese tradition, the Druzes shut their village doors to Shiites, while the Christians accommodate them because they don’t know how long Israeli forces will be around to protect them against the Hizballah.

Similarly the usual ire the children of the corn have for the Lebanese Christians will be confused by what they see as alliances, and the locals see as a moral issue and one of protection against a jihadist organization intent on killing them based on their religion.

The IDF found that certain local elements, which once cooperated with Israel forces during their 24-year occupation of South Lebanon until the May 2000 withdrawal, were still willing to be helpful. Their assistance shortened the Bint Jubeil operation and made its completion possible barring scattered gunfire early Tuesday, July 25.

What I’ve even heard western adult leftist say openly on several occasions is that the fact that there are still Arab Christian alive is hindering “the peace”. After I point out the obvious inhumanity of the though, and the fact that it’s none of their business, and rather sick to want other to die so that they can maintain their narrow and simplistic view of the region, I tell them to go fuck themselves. On one occasion I casually handed a fork to the listener in the bar a fork. As a convenience, of course.

The fuse is lit!

There’s just no substitute for theft

European emotional blackmailers grab the nettle and advance their careers by abusing themselves in dramatic, public ways.

No, we aren’t talking about ingénue would-be supermodels, we’re talking “just plain folks” parasitically asking what their country can do for them:

For two months the van was parked outside the Packard Bell computer factory in Angers, western France. Inside were three former employees on hunger strike: Tony Berthelot, Bruno Mouillé and Betty Bergeon.

The trio said they were subsisting on fruit juice and water in protest at the way Packard Bell had handled their voluntary redundancies, claiming they had not received adequate support in the search for other work.»

Copycats, alas no. I think we see evidence of the Stockholm syndrome at work here whenever the state or public give in.

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Greer not entitled to ”represent her community” either.

Lefty Britain: their lives have become a never ending contest to apologize, a stampede to be first at the tut-tut stone. The soft bigotry of low expectations has mutated into an overt bigotry of expecting skin color or origin to establish the behavior of the new gangmasters: the gutmenschen of the culture of concern.

Of flawed attempts at social engineering:

Germaine Greer fuelled the campaigners' fires earlier this week when she granted them "the moral right to keep the film-makers out". She confirmed their belief that Ali - as the daughter of a white British mother and a father from Dhaka - was not entitled to represent their community, and did so with all the casual racism of a white author. To say that local residents have the right to be upset about their portrayal in the media is one thing; to say that anyone representing a "community" has the right to hinder the free speech of writers and film companies and enflame considerable tension, is quite another. There is no basis for it in philosophy or law, and it is no foundation for a healthy pluralistic society. Besides, it's absurd to say that Monica Ali can't tell this story because she's not sufficiently one of them. Who hands out licences to multicultural storytellers? Not Germaine Greer, surely.

Indeed she doesn’t. These “betters” making one pronouncement or another about public life don’t seem to realize their own tyranny. Moreover, decades of their “moral leadership” have reduced their admirers to a state of stupidity as we can see in this question:

Is it better to memorialise the dead - or to get on with living our own lives?

Connoisseurs of human life and being are otherwise uniformly aware that this is how we say goodbye to those we love, miss, and admire. It’s how we go on.

The author should note that we will not be memorials to the depth of their reasoning.

The fuse is lit!

Real pretty mouth you got there, boy...

Why are they trying so hard to look like Dumb Donald anyway?

The fuse is lit!

The outstretched Talon of lurrrve

They’re trying to look like they’re preaching “dialog” with the U.S., but beyond the peddling of business ventures, all there really is that constitutes a “bridge” is what it usually is. The disinct pattern can be easily detect here on their rather lame blog that has a overdesigned “professionally” look, and a theme.

Not enough clues? It has nearly nothing to do with the EU when you consider the author’s interest. When being Europeans amounts to so little that it only amounts to “not being American”, then there really is an existential identity vacuum that they have to attend to before they show so much “concern” for the U.S.

Oddly enough, the author’s own blog is hosted at Rice University in Texas.

U.S.A.

“Concern”. They always like to use the word “concern”.

Thanks.

The fuse is lit!

Separated at birth?

The fuse is lit!

"Seules des négociations pacifiques permettront de sortir des crises"

The commo-trotsko-aracho-fantacist daily L’Humanité’s latest headline:

”Only peaceful negotiations permit the ending of crises”

As if they ever have - since negotiation almost always occurs either at a stalemate or immediately following the vanquishment of one side.

Wrong, bunky. The only reason to call for a halt right now is to make sure the Iranians and Syrians can make sure that no political equilibrium develops, and therefore no real prospect of peace (cold or otherwise.)

That being, the situation which prevails in Lebanon is different from that in Palestine, even if the Israeli war machine strikes in both countries. We are people under occupation, Israel exerts a control on our ground, sea, and air borders, whereas Lebanon is an independent State.

The article, an interview with Mahmoud Abbas leaves the impression that he’s feeling forgotten by the nit-wit press this week, and perhaps relieved by that too. But the line of questioning makes attempts at linkage of the Hamas and Hizballah issues, which Abbas distances himself from.

L’Humanité need not ask anyway since any sane Lebanese person wouldn’t want their fate tied to that of the Palestinians anyway, regardless of the special love they have for them.

Abbas went on to try to disown the problems in Gaza with the south of Lebanon answering perfunctually the entirely expected perfunctual questions, in spite of what must have felt like a great moment of intellectual convergence to L’Humanité’s moron-on-the-spot. Maybe he, she, or he/she felt a great wallop of pyramid power hitting them right in the bong, and gave them plenty of that good juju that lets one connect things no-one ever has before, and for reasons completely unknown.

Has anyone suggested a “two state solution” for Lebanon yet? It is, after all, a big part of the Euro-leftie vocabulary at this point...

The fuse is lit!

No coke, only pepsi

Thanks to an alert reader, we find this precious gem of insight on the life of the fevered minds who are building nuclear weapons in Iran:

“Pepsi stands for “Pay Each Penny to Save Israel”, viewers in the Islamic republic have been warned in an oft-repeated three-minute infomercial on state television, prompted by Israel’s ongoing assault against the Palestinian territories and Lebanon.

“Zionists are the biggest shareholders in the soft drinks industry, and each year they make billions of dollars for their colonialist aims,” consumers with a thirst for fizz have been told.

Never mind that Pepsi was formulated by a pharmacist in the solidly protestant sleepy town of New Bern, North Carolina in 1893 where one was about as likely to meet anyone who heard of Zionism as an Iranian at the time.

No matter to our “peace loving friends” in medieval-stan who need to realize that one is a Zionist when one moves to Israel to find fellowship with Israelis – a difficult task to accomplish outside of Israel or in New Bern, North Carolina for that matter.

Would the clowns seeking to educate us out of our common sense please stop rattling on about the harmlessness of Jihad or the mythical tolerance of dhimmitude?

The fuse is lit!

Thanks for the GTip

G-Mailers: ever notice that line at the top that seems like a cross between fortune cookie wisdom and a NYT ticker tape? Click the image to see one of their recycling tips.

The fuse is lit!

Walao! Ya allah!?!

Haven’t you had E-nough! ?!?

The fuse is lit!

Compassion is so inconvenient

Be a good old fellow and die. It’s cramping Pancho’s style.



“You don’t have the right to give up during a heat wave!”

Beards and sandals are the new brown(shirt)

Newsflash to the wooly-headed: anyone proposing negotiation with Hizballah needs to realize that it would just undermine the Lebanese government.

Even the Arabs think it idiotic and are keeping their eye on the man behind the curtain.

Speaking of wooly don’t these clown who are incapable of seeing anything other war crimes and racism in everything need to realize that they virtually all the foreign evacuees should be called Lebanese holders of foreign passports?

With a stunning lack of self-awareness, they can’t quite imagine that Hizballah’s killing of civilians also constitutes a war-crime.the fuse is lit!

Pity Lebanon

Writes Fouad Ajami:

A cleric by the name of Hassan Nasrallah, at the helm of the Hezbollah movement, handed Lebanon a calamity right as the summer tourist season had begun. Beirut had dug its way out of the rubble of a long war: Nasrallah plunged it into a new season of loss and ruin. He presented the country with a fait accompli: the "gift" of two Israeli soldiers kidnapped across an international frontier. Nasrallah never let the Lebanese government in on his venture. He was giddy with triumphalism and defiance when this crisis began. And men and women cooped up in the destitution of the Shiite districts of Beirut were sent out into the streets to celebrate Hezbollah's latest deed.

And what he was actually trying to accomplish with the artillery barrage into northern Israel, and the nabbing of border soldiers is beyond me.

Nasrallah's brazen deed was, in the man's calculus, an invitation to an exchange of prisoners. Now, the man who triggered this crisis stands exposed as an Iranian proxy, doing the bidding of Tehran and Damascus. He had confidently asserted that "sources" in Israel had confided to Hezbollah that Israel's government would not strike into Lebanon because Hezbollah held northern Israel hostage to its rockets, and that the demand within Israel for an exchange of prisoners would force Ehud Olmert's hand.

What people in Europe and America who enamored with “resistance” for it’s own sake need to watch closely right now: people don’t like you. You don’t understand anyone but your own kind. The type just as enamored with your fake subversion who surn children into soldiers and start wars with morally dubious reasons, and whose goals are as transparently repugnant as what terrorist openly state.

In his cocoon, Nasrallah did not accurately judge the temper of his own country to begin with. No less a figure than the hereditary leader of the Druze community, Walid Jumblatt, was quick to break with Hezbollah, and to read this crisis as it really is. "We had been trying for months," he said, "to spring our country out of the Syrian-Iranian trap, and here we are forcibly pushed into that trap again." In this two-front war--Hamas's in the Palestinian territories and Hezbollah's in Lebanon--Mr. Jumblatt saw the fine hand of the Syrian regime attempting to retrieve its dominion in Lebanon, and to forestall the international investigations of its reign of terror in that country.

A terror engineered from abroad using a minority entity to force itself of the larger population. Charmingly close to the rise of the worst of the Alawi into power in Syria which was yet to end and propagates chaos to snuff any inspiration to the healthy option of pluralism. This is the darkest corner of the Ba’athist soul.

But Nasrallah was in the end just the Lebanese face of Hezbollah. Those who know the workings of the movement with intimacy believe that operational control is in the hands of Iranian agents, that Hezbollah is fully subservient to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. The hope that Hezbollah would "go Lebanese," and "go local," was thus set aside. At any rate, Nasrallah and his lieutenants did not trust the new Lebanon to make the ample room that a country at war--and within the orbit of Syria--had hitherto made for them in the time of disorder.

Pity Lebanon and hope that someone out there can “Make Nasrallah History”.

The fuse is lit!

So, Mr. ContracTOR...

How’s your hammer hanging?

“Once a light bulb broke and the glass part was still in its socket,” Ms. Slater said. “I didn’t know how to get it out and I asked my husband and he said, ‘I don’t do light bulbs. Go hire somebody.’ That would never happen with Drew.”

The New York Times, when they aren’t trying to look obsessed with the plight of the poor and oppressed, seem openly obsessed with the flakiness of the well-to-do who live in the “enlightened” ghettos.

Autocrats never accept responsibility for the misery of their people

This is for all the filthy apologists of Ba'athist thinking, and those simpletons who think they can create peace in the Near East by killing and scaring off the minorities of the region (the Christians, Jews, Druze, progressives), and especially for anyone who has ever carried a sign saying “Bush/ Blair/ Howard are the real terrorists!”

Michel Aoun gives us the skinny and an object lesson. It's an oldie but a goodie, and it still applies to the present age where the Western Left thinks that terror will end when it's renamed and ignored:

Lebanon was the first victim of modern terrorism. Its recent history presents the West with a stark lesson about the consequences of falling prey to terrorists. At the end of the 1960s, Lebanon, a multicultural society, began to absorb the shocks of the conflict between East and West. In the early 1980s it found itself at the frontlines of a worldwide confrontation with Islamic fundamentalists.

It is undeniable that terrorists come from countries ruled by autocratic regimes with no respect for human rights or basic freedoms. Autocrats, whether theocrats or dictators, accept no responsibility for the misery of their people. Instead, they artfully shift responsibility to political opponents whose liquidation then becomes justified, or to external enemies to whom the peoples_ hostility is deflected. Thus, these regimes not only harbor terrorists, they use terrorism as a key instrument of their foreign policy, as blackmail. Terrorism is inseparable from these regimes, which are the factories of terrorism. The eradication of terrorism must by necessity include their ouster.

Only democratic regimes with free economies and respect for human rights and basic freedoms can provide individuals the opportunity for positive self-fulfillment, free from hatred and violence. Free economies cannot thrive under repressive political systems, nor under justice systems subservient to rulers instead of the rule of law. Democracy cannot survive in the same environment as schools that call for the annihilation of others. It is no longer sufficient to denounce the crime and arrest and punish the criminal. We must close the schools that are teaching the criminals.

Read it all here, and see how history has repeated itself. A proxy element of Syria initiates an attack in Israelis that they can’t let lie because it continues, and like the MacArthur’s paradox in the Korean War, knows that to attack the REAL aggressor (Syria in this case) is a risk “lucid” politicians worldwide (given to endless amelioration of the sort that keeps wars alive) cannot stomach.

Eyes wide shut

Time to open them up wide.

What makes this global war different from the First and Second World Wars is that there are tens of thousands of combatants who actually want to die, and in the process kill as many non-believers as possible. As the bombs, missiles and rockets have been exploding in Lebanon, Israel and Gaza, medievalists who are key drivers in this cultural struggle have been ecstatic.

Savoir boire?

L’Express harbors elitism and condescension not just for America, but the people in their midst that they consider hapless oafs.

« The French planted Robusta [coffee variety] in their former colonies and developed a taste for the worst coffee in the world. “To give them arabica is like offering foie gras with the people accustomed to liverwurst”, sighs Abdurahman Mahdi. This Paris based trader of Ethiopian extraction acts as a middleman for his brother who is an exporter in Addis-Ababa noted that our conversion to a taste for better things is slow to come. »

L’Express goes on to trash Starbucks, of course, even if it is converting people to develop a tase for better things like better quality coffee, a polite, comfortable, smoke-free environment to enjoy it in, and free wi-fi pour les internauts.
Odd that they’d neglect to mention that Arabica too is considered crap pedestrian by those who have a developed taste for coffee.

Remember to lock up the livesock too

« Dieudonné est atteint d'une maladie très grave : la parano du Juif »,

Said his former comedy partner Gad Elmaleh:

Montreal - “Dieudonné has a serious disease: the paranoia about Jews. It is a diagnosable psychiatric condition. What proves it is that he’s sure that a draft film project of his about Black people was shot down by Zionists forces.”

Fire in the sky

When the target missile was destroyed, sending a brilliant white, mushroom-like cloud into the dark sky, the crowd began to applaud and cheer wildly.

" We smashed it," several people cheered as the rainbow colored contrail gave way to the cotton ball cloud of destruction above.»

This is the kind of thing the national and international press mentions only when it's failed.

As a result of this selective reporting, even they don't know off hand how
far along anti-missile defense is, as long as Dr. No knows. Hey, at least he has exquisite comic timing.

- With thanks to Brian S.

Internecine violence, purges, vengeance, and bloodletting

Today the French celebrate Bastille Day. That is, only those who care about the notion of an autonomous nation-state.

Have fun storming the castle!

Party on, but don’t contribute to the cycle of violence.

Eat Your Heart Out, Michael Mann

Ever wonder what it’s like to be the rocket?



Video courtesy of NASA.

Europe reduces criticism of Israel (for a week and a half)

I’m sure it won’t last with all the Dr. Strangelovian twitching they’ve been up to for 30 years.
I guess that after the usual diplomatic flitting about they finally realized that what they did to Jörg Haider (drumming him out) is what the Israelis are doing to Hamas. Other than the fact that they’re both moonbats, the difference between them is that Hamas are dangerous killers, and Jörg is a tosser.

The fuse is lit!

Unspinable

Another dodgy socialist politician get a ‘get out of jail free’ card.

A former French prime minister [Cresson] has been officially criticised by the EU's top court for appointing her dentist as a top aide to the European Commission.

It found that Ms Cresson had appointed her dentist, Rene Berthelot, to the post of "visiting scientist" in order to allow him to act as a personal adviser.

However, the court said Mr Berthelot did not undertake any of the activities associated with his official job title - as an expert on AIDS - and was even too old to hold the post.

Unschpinbar, dude.

The fuse is lit!

Monday morning cultural quarterbacks

PARIS (Reuters) – the organization S.O.S Racisme required of the international Federation of football (FIFA) an investigation into the circumstances which surrounded expulsion of the leader of French play Zinedine Zidane for a blow of head, at the time of the finale of World of football against Italy.

“According to several well informed sources, it would seem that the Italian player Marco Materazzi called Zinedine Zidane a “dirty terrorist””, the organization wrote in an official statement. “If this assumption is confirmed, the Italian player would thus be guilty of a racist matter”, it added. “Whereas the whole of World Cup was dedicated to the fight against racism (...), we ask that FIFA show itself to be the greatest example of that declaration.”

To begin with, terrorists are not a “race”.

Secondly – as bad as trash talk is, it’s sure isn’t the worst thing that’s been said on a field.

Thirdly – one kind of trash talk isn’t any worse than any other kind of trash talk. If someone thinks it ‘racial,’ that doesn’t mean the headbutt was any less worthy of a red card. If someone has had a racial comment made to them, it’s not like it suddenly makes you a foot shorter and completely helpless.

Fourthly – that greaseball that grabbed Zidane had it coming.

The fuse is lit!

Green like me.

Okay. I give. How can anyone fail to see that Global Warming isn’t a huge issue. I see the scientific consensus now. 17000 scientists can’t be wrong.

The fuse is lit!

Sixty million Frenchmen Can’t Be Wrong

As in NEVER. So stop asking, okay?

It’s not just Americans that many French have a problem with, it even with the world’s Francophones. It just isn’t cool to mention it in a social environment where only an American run civil prison where about a dozen rapist and murderers were illegally abused can be called another Auschwitz.

An alt-media paper The Montral Mirror’s Chris Barry interviews the authors of an “ethnographic analysis” of French society by Montreal based journalists Jean-Benoît Nadeau and Julie Barlow:

Montreal Mirror: I’ve yet to meet a Frenchman who didn’t look down his nose at the Québécois—usually accusing them of being unsophisticated.

[...]

Jean-Benoît Nadeau: In France it’s impolite to ask someone from out of nowhere their name or what they do in life. Which is a very standard conversation starter here, the lowest common denominator of conversation. The French don’t value the lowest common denominator.
JB: They definitely don’t like being asked what they do for a living.
Montreal Mirror: Maybe because half the population is living off the state.

[...]

Montreal Mirror: But getting to the truly important issues, how come those bloody Parisians won’t pick up after their dogs?

Julie Barlow: Because the thought doesn’t even cross their minds. Partly because the whole French system doesn’t rely on civic initiative. The government picks up after the dogs. It’s as simple as that. The French couldn’t imagine it being any other way.

What’s true at first blush about a socialistic society is that behind the good intentions to restore the dignity of a few badly off, they create a atmosphere of dependency that takes virtually everyone’s self-respect away. To one degree or another, when you think of bellicose popular cultures and optimistic ones, that “degree or another” is the degree of their collectivism leeching off of each society.

- h/t to astute reader Val.

Channeling the dead for affirmation

What would Mother Gaia Ché do?

Che Guevara's last night alive relived on NY stage

Well, no not really his last night – what lefties desperate to have their world view go unchallenged and undebated wish it was like:

After writing "The Motorcycle Diaries" screenplay, Jose Rivera felt he had more to say about Ernesto "Che" Guevara, so he wrote a play he says shows the Latin American revolutionary would have had plenty to say about the war in Iraq.

Certainly he would have plenty to say. He was himself a mass murderer that aspired to grow to the scale of Saddam Hussein, and he would probably have defended to death Saddam’s capacity to murder innocents In Iraq and abroad who were inconvenient to him.

Che was always asking those questions and criticizing U.S. imperialistic impulses all over the world," he said.

Because he wanted to do the same, only with mock ‘popular will’ which wished to use mobocracy instead of democracy, and to use it to enslave people and make them all equally controllable instead of allowing them to realize their desires ifor their own lives n their own way.


Now imagine defending to no end a set of views spinning around events by a murderer from 40 years ago. Imagine that remodeling the immoral nature of them into something else is ones’ life work. Think for a moment how weak an intellect one has to have to continue that charade, and try to see the entire world through the prism or what ultimately was little more than a KGB funded operation to get other people to unwittingly do their killing for them.

Now imagine that this is the core belief of your weltanschauung, and this is what you get:

"My daughter wore a Che T-shirt to school and she was criticized by one of the teachers saying 'He's a terrorist,' and 'Why would you glorify a terrorist?'," Rivera said, adding that he does not expect to take the new play to Miami.

That’s because he WAS a terrorist, and he was proud of it. He saw it as ‘cleansing’ and necessary to build a new world order that’s alien to human nature and virtually every form of human morality.

They wanted to break it to break people, to modify and control them. Others think that they still can, trying to convince people that an ideology that imprisons free thinkers and contrarians will “give them a voice” that no one is denying them in democracy to begin with. The voice they want is in fact the reverse – the silencing of others’ voices, just as Ché with his capricious murders, Saddam with his poison gas attacks, and even down to Obrador trying to take by intimidation what he couldn’t win in the ballot box by calling mobs out into the streets.

Kudos though to Rivera’s kid’s teacher that didn’t tow the party line of the ‘hand that rocks the cradle’ collectivist vision that had to virtually give up on pushing it on intellectually developed adults who know better.

Comment is free Talk is cheap

Commenting on an article which is provocative by UK standards in the Telegraph, we find some interesting comments between the invasion of the drive-by shooters.

“Isn't American hatred the barely disguised hatred of an ideal, namely capitalism? The left loathe the triumph of this ideology over their own bankrupt collectivism.

This is what they will never forgive America: for embodying an ideal that has trumped their own impoverished, failed and delinquent creed.”

“The critics of US policy are a funny, mixed-up bunch. One minute they say, "focus on the present, not on the past", and the next they say, "what about Granada, Somalia, Vietnam?"

One minute they say, "America is a bully", and the next they say, "why didn't you do anything about the dictatorships in Africa?"

One minute they say, "Bush is a simpleton", and the next they say, "Bush is the greatest criminal mastermind the world has ever seen!"

The hate directed at the US is quite clearly a re-direction of the self-hatred that most Europeans feel for themselves and their neighbours.

Our politicians stand for nothing, so we hate the American politicians who have a vision.

Our armed forces are pitiful, so we hate the most powerful armed force on the planet.

Our global cultural significance is in continual decline, so we hate a culture on the ascendance.

Our economies are stagnant, so we hate the fast-growing wealth of America, and blame "big business".

Our nations have lost faith in God and in hope and optimism, so we hate America, a land which still believes.

The hatred of America is the single biggest case of lack of self-esteem I have ever encountered. Stop being so pathetically self-centred and self-loathing! Maybe then you'll stop feeling as though you have to blame the nation that is so obviously doing a bit better than you are.

Oh, and by the way, I am solidly British and quite secure, thank you very much.”

Now compare the range of opinion at the Telegraph, often accused of being the poodle of the intolerant fascistic BushChimpyHitlerBurton, with the tender and thoughtful Guardian, where every day is the triumphal May Day march taking pride in the glorious struggle against da man - whoever he may be that day, but always having an American accent:

The truth is the symbiotic relationship between bin Laden and Bush. they need eachother to buttress their own power and relevance: ...According to Suskind’s book, CIA analysts had spent years “parsing each expressed word of the al-Qaeda leader and his deputy, [Ayman] Zawahiri. What they’d learned over nearly a decade is that bin-Laden speaks only for strategic reasons. … “Their [the CIA’s] assessments, at day’s end, are a distillate of the kind of secret, internal conversations that the American public [was] not sanctioned to hear: strategic analysis. Today’s conclusion: bin-Laden’s message was clearly designed to assist the President’s reelection.

even if the president can’t be re-elected – unless you’ve aready convinced yourself that the’s “a dictator”. Lost in the Graun’s endless flow of spittle, the occasional reminder of how they’re talking-talking-talking themselves into an illusion:

I'm trying to remember how many CIF articles are currently about the US. Yet no writer is talking about the US I live in: Outside the Northeast and LA, and not easily written off as redneck land. I live in a small city (about 500K) with a significant immigrant population (mostly Hispanic and Thai). We have our share of flag-wavers (and an oddly named "Patriot's Corner" from which they can wave their flags). About half the people I know vote Republican, and about half Democrat. The local economy is going well, Madame Mayor is well-respected and liked, and you can still get affordable housing on the water.

I suspect that this is closer to the real America than the Guardian columnists know.

I know that they don’t know, judging by this spurious nonsense:

The reason for the difference in mentality is that Europeans rely on a broader range of media to get their news.”

Broad indeed: BBC, The Guardian, Indymedia... you know, the substantive middle ground...

It’s as it every day is like nursing a Wednesday morning hangover

Excessive dependence from outside markets puts everything in jeopardy.

The euro zone occasionally enjoys an uptick in growth by piggybacking on strong global trade. But the good days never last; there has been no real boom since the dotcom days at the end of the last decade. The sorry reality is that what is celebrated as a great year for European economic progress would be decried as a catastrophic near-recession in America.

The saying goes that when the US sneezes, the rest of the world gets a cold. Meant as a slight on the US’ lack of responsibility for the care of others before itself, one wonders where this parasitic notion will lead. The saying is, after all, decades old. Don’t you think it’s time export based European economies built a little bit of an immunity and stop making the US entirely responsible for their well being?
They are, in that sense, still a little like underdeveloped economies dependant on wealth coming from abroad rather than developing markets and spending power from within.

All we hear is radio goo-goo, radio ga-ga.

Via Biased BBC: Get a load of this guy banging his spoon on his high-chair – a BBC presenter ranted on about wanting George Bush to rot in hell.

The Radio Ulster host was presenting his morning show yesterday - July 4, US Independence Day - when he said it was also the American President's birthday.

After telling his listeners Mr. Bush had just turned 60, he added: "May I say I hope you rot in hell".

Ironically, the popular presenter and Belfast Telegraph columnist got the birth date wrong - the current President celebrates his birthday tomorrow, July 6.

One Radio Ulster listener, who contacted the Belfast Telegraph, said: "I couldn't believe what I was hearing, especially on Independence Day."

It fits neatly into a business program interview I heard yesterday on the BBC World Service discussing credit cards, where the guests were complaining about Americans and their personal debt. One American activist type who clearly hasn’t lived in the US in ages said of credit cards: that is was “about the times”. That you had Ronald Reagan encouraging it with a phrase about “a shining White House on the hill” – that possessions turned into the goal of the good life, blah, blah, blah

Newsflash, Spanky – it was “a shining city on the hill”, and he was talking about the disposition of the American public spirit, not the private accumulation of anything. That a population working with a common goal can make a good society. It was largely about the elevation of the poor out of their hardship.

Of that vision, Reagan said in his farewell speech from the White House:

And how stands the city on this winter night? More prosperous, more secure, and happier than it was eight years ago. But more than that; after 200 years, two centuries, she still stands strong and true on the granite ridge, and her glow has held steady no matter what storm. And she's still a beacon, still a magnet for all who must have freedom, for all the pilgrims from all the lost places who are hurtling through the darkness, toward home.

The phrase, made it into the media discussion loop. Therefore haters HAD to try to denigrate it and anything he said to cover for an absence of valid ideas that could inspire people to disagree with Reagan. Just as his sincere and touching manner of letters writing belies the decade long unceasing charge that Reagan was illiterate, the vulgarity of the left reveals that they have no interest in a good and just society. It caused the same hostility to be turned back on them, and showed them to be unreasonable, intolerant, uncouth, and unworthy to lead well.

We see the same thing again from the one-note-Johnnies of the left – frequently abusing their positions in academia or otherwise. No notion of a good society that people can work toward, just some adoration of their favorite pieties and Rube Goldberg government management of peoples’ lives. “Lifestyle concepts” do not make a philosophy – they are little more than a bribe to yet another faction of the population that they had cleft away into captive emotional isolation. What has never suited the type was to have the room to imagine a “Shining city on the hill,” or anything else outside the narrow frame of what remains little more than a variant on the failed Marxist class struggle theory.

One place where they’re still trying to sell it is back on the BBC’s airwaves. A quick survey of their news operation’s coverage of elections in Mexico has proved out that they aren’t just picking sides, but trying to project non-existent imagery on the two candidates, just as our friend with the “shining White House on the Hill” has. From Biased BBC again, and their commenters we get to play a game of who using BBC clues to identify the conservative:

One of the most popular politicians in Mexico ... It ended in a triumph for him ... As mayor of Mexico City, he won respect as much for his reputation for honesty, a gruelling work schedule and his humble lifestyle as for his ambitious public works and social programmes targeting the poor and disadvantaged ... He often draws on his humble origins - growing up in a village of 600 in Tabasco State, the son of a store owner... recognition of indigenous people's rights, scholarships for the handicapped and improving healthcare and education ... He says he will pay for social spending, higher pensions and wages by wiping out corruption, cutting down on government waste and cracking down on tax evasion

A Harvard educated lawyer, [he], is favoured by the business community. He has run a negative campaign.

One gets a platform presentation, the other is described by the ugly gruntwork of electioneering, imagery, and they go one to present any skeletons have in his closet.

Thay are, by the way, BOTH “career politicians” – but since that’s a seemingly bad thing, only one of them is identified as such.

It simply never ends.

The fuse is lit!

Birds of a feather

Klan Gets Permit for Gettysburg Protest

GETTYSBURG, Pa. -- The National Park Service has granted the Ku Klux Klan's request to hold a rally and protest the Iraq war at the Civil War battlefield where Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address.

One set of authoritarian symps to coincide with another:

US Anti-War Protesters to Launch Fast

The list of anticipated fasters includes anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan, mother of an American serviceman killed in Iraq, and Michael Berg, the father of an American citizen who was captured by insurgents in Iraq and later beheaded.

Several members of Congress are expected to take part, as well as a British and a Canadian lawmaker. Actors Danny Glover, Sean Penn and Susan Sarandon, as well as country musician Willie Nelson, are among a long list of celebrities.

"For some of us, it is an open-ended fast, meaning we are not sure how long we will go, but we are determined to go as long as our bodies allow us to," said Medea Benjamin, who helped organize the event, called "Troops Home Fast."

They have been reduced to resorted fakery, misrepresentation, and personal abuse to now demanding actions that will lead to certain failure to prove their point... “Troops home fast” indeed – pull them out before any success for the US initiative in the region becomes apparent to the public outside of Iraq and the rest of the Near East. When will they finally get thattrying to talk it down can’t make a thing true.

The fuse is lit!

For the neo-hippy naïf with the Hershey squirts

The fuse is lit!

They hate us, they might hate us not. They hate us…

Most of the time I couldn’t care less. Sometimes I get a laugh out of it. Either way, a great many Europeans resemble an obsessed and desperate stalker whose loins burn for America one sick way or another. While some pollster can take the temperature of the brainwashed, other writers in the same paper can try to disabuse them of said delusion.

Andrew Stuttaford in NRO’s “The Corner”, Richard North and Helen Szamuely writing in the EU Referendum blog, and others have covered the matter nicely.
I all remind me of an example of how the allergy of this anti-Americanism constructed in the press can lay itself out on people. Waiting for a car ferry to cross the channel a British woman was at first flirting with me, and at one point said after a little while:

“You’re American!” as if I didn’t know.
“I am” – I am, you see.
“You don’t get much holiday. I don’t much like that”
“I get all the ‘holiday’ I want, I only get paid for three weeks of it.”
“But that’s not nice.” - henh? Nice?
“You just have to plan for it, ya know – save up a little, set up your projects… some people prefer the extra money.”
“They shouldn’t do that. I don’t think many people know how to do that.”
“I supervise 17 people, and they all know how to do that just fine”

She went on to another subject of cultural complain. She begged for one retort after another. She needed more of this “why is the sky blue” conversation the accidental representative of the great demon of her life - Americur.

Hoping that the damn gate would finally open, after 20 minutes of being part of her gruesome self-entertainment, I told her to stop being so damn rude. “I’m AmeriCAN, not AmeriCA,” I finally said. “If you have so many complaints about American life, email the White House.”
She seemed shocked when I asked her if she wanted the same kind of interrogation. “No, of course not” as if I was being too touchy to be the generic punching bag of her life’s disappointments. She seemed sort of shocked at the notion that I was a human with a persona, and not the straw man of my nationality. It often takes a poke in the ego to realize that this kind of crap from a complete stranger might be nosy, misdirected, and unwelcome.
Maybe I just have that kind of face, but when in the UK I get this treatment about 2-6 times a day.
People who expect a stranger to take part in their imaginary mental arguments like that need to see a shrink or maybe get a pet. When going through such drills I picture that someday they might finally notice the sewer of envy and unimaginativeness they’re living in.

She’s right in one way. People sold on the life’s lowest common denominator, the state’s safety net as a means of planning your life don’t know how to do much of anything other than game the rest of society for their own well being. In a laissez-faire environment, one trades for one’s wants. It costs something because it isn’t yours’ - one doesn’t bilk they neighbor with guilt to seek the trappings that often come with the pursuit of happiness.

It also makes me wonder why I meet all of their serious go-getters in the New York and Washington, where many of them carry around the same index cards, although they yellow more quickly when they start living here and seeing for themselves that it isn’t the Hieronymus Bosch scene they were hoping it would be.

One of Rodney Dangerfield’s throw-away lines was “Want to feel tall? Hang out with short people.” It seems that the European MSM is pre-occupied with finding those short people and failing that, inventing them on their own and selling it to an unquestioning public.

A day late and a € short

Fraser Nelson, political editor of the UK based journal “The Business” writes in the current edition about the United States approach of CO2 somehow yielding better results than the economies with the most similarity to it who were signatories to the Kyoto Accord.

His conclusion? US beats Europe over CO2 control

The United States has frozen its carbon dioxide emissions at a time when signatories of the Kyoto Protocol are conceding that they cannot meet their own targets, according to official figures released last week.

While the American economy grew by 3.5% last year, more than twice the European average, its fossil fuel emissions were up by only 0.1% – with no growth in road pollution and a drop in aircraft emissions.

[...]

Since 1997, when the Kyoto Protocol was first signed, the US has now made more progress in reducing its per capita fossil fuel emissions than the UK, France, Spain, Finland, Sweden and Japan – even before its economic growth is considered.

The extent to which they yell and scream about the United States as a failure, a “wild west” where business always gets its’ way is laughable and a sort of point of their pride when followed by the recitations about what they are doing theoretically for the environement. Like most of it, it’s a long rapsheet of treaties that have been signed and ignored, and an endless, constantly growing alphabet soup of organizations, talking shops, and fig-leaf operations.

Quite simply, engineering can’t be executed in words if deeds are ill founded and based on PR, or done to get the public to get into the habit of never questioning a new regulation or measure. Moreover, without development and advancement, the entire exercise is worthless. The means of doing that is to be scientifically and industrially dynamic, not binding the people behind it to be limited by the forcing them to parrot the politically correct saws and pay homage to notions and precepts.

The way to accomplish it is to first establish what the real problems are, and then give them goals and issues to chip away at – not force on them a political purity test to see if they deserve to be Borked with the Lomborg treatment.

Although President George Bush pulled out of the Kyoto Protocol in 2001, after a bipartisan vote in Congress, America has made substantially more progress than its European counterparts, which are still signed up to reach its targets.

[...]

David Miliband, UK Environment Secretary, acknowledged last week that the government is “off track” in meeting its own target of reducing emissions by 20% under the 1990 baseline set by Kyoto. It has met the 10% target.

Spanish carbon emissions were 48% above the 1990 base in 2004, more then treble the 15% limit of its Kyoto target. Portugal, Greece and Ireland – also Kyoto signatories – all have emissions at least 20% higher

Of the 30 industrialised countries which signed Kyoto, 17 were exceeding their targets at the time the last count was taken, in 2004. Japan pledged itself to a 6% drop in its 1990 emissions levels, yet has so far experienced a 7% rise.

The notion sold by the environmental movement about how business can “coexist” with their goals has in every case proven to be a sales gimmick. Give industries goals without acutely micromanaging them or the message and they can come through for you. The very idea of imposing control over private businesses, long a predilection with the western left’s socialist sensibility defies every theories applied to learning, invention, or even the arts.
Nonetheless they will cheerfully forment suspicion, and apply the same controls to people whose work they little understand or fear for the “symbolic nature” that they hold for them, such as the energy business, manufacturing, agricultural science, water treatment, etc... in short, any sector producing economically and personally critical commodities which they think no-one will need if they just “imagine another world”.

The fuse is lit!

Greenie micromanagement for thee, but not for me

So sayeth one European after another. Someday they might finally admit that it’s ineffectual to try to control nature when man’s emissions are meaningless compared to the fluctuation in the sun’s output.

The fuse is lit!

The regrettable appearance of free speech false consciousness in Bolivia

The divine likeness of our harmless and cuddly animal mascot has been moltested:

Bomb damages sculpture of Ché in Bolivia

La Paz, Jun 30 (EFE).- A small bomb partially destroyed a bronze bust of iconic guerrilla Ernesto "Che" Guevara on the ground floor of a labor federation in the west-central Bolivian city of Oruro.

Chapeau to Jim H.

the fuse is lit!

Trade in euphemisms is hot, hot, hot!

Another glorious example of the “peaceful use of nuclear energy” by two nations awash in oil to discuss that “energy” they need soooo badly! Ja, Natürlich!

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez plans to visit North Korea, Iran, and Vietnam in late July, Germany’s DPA news agency reported on June 30, citing an announcement by Venezuela’s foreign ministry.

The Iranian ambassador to Venezuela, Ahmad Sobhani, said, “The two nations will discuss an exchange of peaceful use of nuclear energy technology.”

NYT, Making National Defense History

You Win Some, You Lose Some

Austrian EU presidency fails to defend a policy that induces mass starvation.the fuse is lit!

Not too SWIFT

European banks and governments “collude” with the US on anti-terror intelligence efforts.

The European Central Bank and the Bank of England were aware that customers' payment data were being transferred to US authorities, according to a document obtained by Belgium's Le Soir newspaper.

A consortium known as SWIFT, which manages the "Swift" codes for international payments, tried in vain to get permission from the Frankfurt and London banks to hand payment data to Washington, but the banks did not subsequently tell the government of Belgium - where SWIFT is based - that data was being transferred to the US.

And the European media and some elites aren’t just puzzled by the need for it, but are trying to humiliate western civilization into making terror something it may not defend itself against – even in secret.the fuse is lit!

The Grauniad’s Kryptonite

I have never seen to many tortured, anti-American metaphors in a single Guardian item.

'Probably the most heterosexual movie I've ever made. Really'
The irony of his being an illegal "alien" is not lost on anyone,

If America's wars at home and abroad have imbued Superman Returns with something of a home court advantage,

Flawed assumptions forgetting the malaise of (Saint) Jimmy Carter, and working the entirely unrelated into a movie review:

Never has American public morale been so low. More than 2,500 US soldiers have died in Iraq, and support for the war is waning as fast as that for the least popular president in decades.

With the immigration debate front and centre of the country's war at home,...

There was similar speculation surrounding the X-Men films: the term "mutant", it was often posited, was a metaphor for "gay".

One wonders of the anonymous has ever been to the U.S., or is relying rather on the heap of daily euro-lefty slags that have grown into unverified, unquestioned forgone conclusions about the United States.

Dread Pirate Europa

One way in which Europe is growing into failed states: a lack of respect for property rights.

In an online marketplace, where music file sharing had become commonplace and which was so anarchic that it threatened to derail the entire recorded music industry, Apple almost single-handedly developed the legal music downloads market and put everything back on track. Consumers may not like paying for music but unfortunately for them their favourite bands have to eat. Apple, to its credit, understood the issue and created the 99c single track download.

For some reason, Apple's dominance, even though it was won fairly in a highly competitive market, makes European regulators nervous. First the Scandinavians and now the French want to force Apple to open up its iTunes store to portable music players other than iPod. In other words, they're telling Apple that it can no longer keep its own proprietary technology if it wants to do business in their countries. For some reason, the governments of these countries believe they have the right to commandeer technology that was paid for and developed in the laboratories of a publicly owned enterprise in the US. Is it any wonder, that Apple refers to these countries' efforts as state-sponsored piracy?

Though this is one issue, it reflects a pattern of treatment of foreign intellectusl property which will eventually extend to its’ own people. It’s actually about individual rights, or the lack thereof.