Now Brought To You In Brilliant Technocolor

BBC Chairman Michael Grade quits for ITV. His problem, apparently, is that he has a pulse.

During the two years of his captivity he was forced to listen for month after month to the vapid prattle of Tessa Jowell, the Culture Secretary.

[ ... ]

He was never by temperament a BBC dignitary – a slow, pompous, self-righteous bureaucrat, ready to devote untold hours of his existence to negotiating with the Government about the licence fee.

Licence fee... sheesh. Why does it always feel like it’s 1978 there?

Serving Her Constituents

Going to where her voters are, the would-be French president Ségolène Royal considers traveling to the Middle East, but refuses to show up at the conference of a social organization of French Jews.

Spooking the Bloodsuckers

Now be a good little zombie and pay your taxes.

Lou Minatti Is Not Dead

Not only is he not dead, he’s “lunchblooging” and heckling morons out house-hunting.The Fuse is Lit (No Pasaran!)

Now Appearing on Appeasement TV

Robert Redeker tells M6 that he’s moved and has had to sell his home. The risk to him is permanent in nuance-land:

Redeker wrote, "As in the Cold War, where violence and intimidation were the methods used by an ideology hell bent on hegemony, so today Islam tries to put its leaden mantel all over the world. Benedict XVI's cruel experience is testimony to this. Nowadays, as in those times, the West has to be called the 'Free World' in comparison to the Muslim world; likewise, the enemies of the 'Free World,' the zealous bureaucrats of the Koran's vision, who swarm in the very center of the 'Free World,' should be called by their true name."

In reaction to Redeker's column, Egypt banned Le Figaro and Redeker received numerous death threats. His address and maps to his home were published on al-Qaida-linked Web sites and he was forced to leave his job, and flee for his life. While Redeker e-mailed a colleague that French police have set free the man they know was behind the threats to his life, Redeker recently described his plight to a friend in the following fashion, "There is no safe place for me, I have to beg, two evenings here, two evenings there... I am under the constant protection of the police. I must cancel all scheduled conferences."

In the mean time, the predicted numbness over the Socialist Party is setting in. The issue at hand posed to these folks is “would you vote for Ségolène Royal (reduced to a single name, much like Prince) because she’s a woman?” Well... we’re talking about the sort of things that Europeans fret over. By looking for something painless to fret over they don’t think they’ve wasted their vote, so the comfortable thing is taken seriously and they feel ‘hooked in’. Yes, many people indeed would vote for someone just because they’re female.
For many, the concept of equality amounts to silly, feel-good acts of that sort.

The balance of the babble is about the environment, geared perfectly to play into the hands of the left in a positive, yet impoverishing way. Like Prince, sooner or later all populist politicians will become little more than a glyph.

Meanwhile, a bit of publicized personal controversy changes the election equation for the moment. Economic liberal candidate Philippe de Villiers’ son has accused his brother of raping and molesting him as a child.

Quoted in Nouvel Obs:

The facts of the case go back fifteen years when both boys were minors. The two brothers faced an investigating magistrate last Thursday who also compel an investigation of the credibility of the younger brother, the author of a complaint dated October 30 against his older brother. An expert for the court determined that the plaintiff’s complaint was “credible”.
Under investigation for rape, Guillaume de Villiers was placed in custody. He is married and the father of three.
“It is my son who is being investigated. He had been the target an undercover investigation for several months over giving me confidential documents for my book “The Mosques of Roissy” to be precise”

Though it’s really to soon to say that this will knock the best-known figure of his Mouvement pour la France party out of the race for good, it doesn’t help. It would, however, split the votes he would otherwise take from the UMP. I suspect that people with a genuine interest in individual freedom, less government micromanagement of people’s lives, and lower taxation, would not be readily attracted to a traditionally nativist, tariff and trade-barrier oriented party like Le Pen’s FN.

So it goes.The Fuse is Lit (No Pasaran!)

A day in the life

Of the modern European state.

Much in the Way Dogs Mark Their Territory

From an alert reader: this photo was taken in the passage between lines 6 and 12 Metro Pasteur.

Said our correspondent:

I have no idea whether those responsible are muslims who wish to mark the territory, or non-muslims who wish to make a point about the realities in present day France.

Apparently a poster promoting an upcoming Cliff Richard concert suffered the same fate. We expect most people will find this to be less of a problem were it not for the internecine nature of the vanadism.

Carbonisée

If you can’t beat them, bring them down to your level of mediocrity with yet another universe-healing tax.

French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin said Monday he would push with European partners for a carbon tax on industrial goods from countries that ignore the Kyoto Protocol.

"That is a thoroughly silly proposal and utterly out of touch with reality," Howard told reporters.

"Mind you, (Villepin) does come from a country that is known for imposing high trade barriers against other countries like Australia."

The Fuse is Lit (No Pasaran!)

Devolution and Control

If capitalism and democracy espouses one another, driving in the reverse on the right to do what you will with ones’ property and earnings itself can erase freedoms. Hugo Chavez is beginning to impose a military style “scrip” economy on civil society, making currency into a kind of neighborhood food-stamp that expire, and useless outside of your own ghetto. What this accomplishes is to make financial self-improvement impossible through savings anything. Your future is dependant entirely on the state, and all outcome is the same, even if the effort people put in is not. What it certainly does is create an entire society which is dependant on the specific constructs and ideology of an absolutist Marxist inspired regime.

Its’ only purpose is to control people by controlling anything that they can accomplish independent of the state. It is as bad as China’s cultural revolution, in that it guarantees that individual potential is limited, individual ingenuity is made irrelevant, and that all people are eventually made equally poor, their lives are all made equally harsh for no reason whatsoever.

The lack of development in the USSR and Eastern Europe under the decades of communism compared to that of Western Europe and North America are proof that it also guarantees to eventually make the poor worse off, distract people about the causes, and have no real way to exit the hardships of poverty.

Fausta has MUCH more on this, from Daniel in Venezuela.

It has to be assumed that Chavez knows full well what he’s doing to Venezuelans. If they want to become a militaristic antagonist with the United States in its’ sights, it’s hard to say that this doesn’t make Chavez’ reduce Venezuela into an irrelevant byproduct of an evil ideology, but it does what the American idea detests more than anything else – it willfully limits human freedom, constructs poverty and hardship, and reduces people to a dictator’s cattle.

There’s no need for anyone feeling threatened by Chavez to send them back to the dark ages, el Jefe will carry millions of people there on his own. Is George Soros paying attention? Your tacit support for this man looks like you’d like to see the only self-made men in the future to be another “charismatic” dictator covered in fake medals.

”I have a theory.”

The Atlantic Review calls our attention to a piece by Jeff Gedmin, who, surrounded, finds himself wondering about the happiness Europeans have at the results of the US midterm elections. He tells is through his experiences, or rather episodes of witnessing the random and irreverent indignation that we’re all used to.

Several years ago, I helped convene a conference in Prague in parallel to a NATO summit going on at the same time. On the last evening of the summit, Czech president Václav Havel kindly invited our conference participants to attend a state dinner at Prague Castle. Chirac, Blair, Schröder, all the leaders from NATO countries were there. So was President Bush. One of our participants was a Gore adviser, who went up to the president at dinner and introduced himself. The president recognized this fellow, greeted him warmly and, turning on a dime, said to the French president standing nearby, "Hey, Jacques, I want to introduce you to a friend of mine." The president then took a short walk with this Democratic adviser, asking along the way about advice for new exercise equipment for the White House. In the end, my Democratic colleague was charmed by the warmth and down-to-earth quality of his encounter with the commander in chief.

If I tell a group of Americans this story, they tend to be impressed. Love him or hate him, the story suggests that Bush is a real mensch. If I tell this story to Europeans, and I've done so several times, they either look disgusted (as in--"how unsophisticated, how unstatesmanlike!") or their faces go blank because they don't quite understand the anecdote. And so my simple theory: Bush's greatest sin in the eyes of Europeans is that he is too American.

I can confirm that there is a widespread arrogance, completely unaware of itself that thinks it reasonable to expect an American to do his best to not be American. It goes unquestioned, and would never be expected of Mugabe or a Belrusian in love with his own despotism.

The usual overraught Euro-anger gives way to the perfunctory pointless end-zone dance, a shot in the foot, and adulation at the diminishment of people acting in their general interest.

I recall a friendly dinner party in Bonn while Ronald Reagan was president. As?I usual, I was on the defensive. The other guests were piling on--"Reagan is a cowboy, a warmonger, an idiot-actor"--when suddenly a German guest decided he had heard enough. "Hey, let's not get carried away," he said "and condemn all Americans just because of this cretin in the White House." I'd like to say these over-the-top opinions reflected only the company I was keeping, but these sentiments were pretty mainstream at the time. So I had to laugh when the German media later eulogized Reagan as the man who helped bring down the Berlin Wall.

The ire shows often to be about the idealism.

George W. Bush is the full package of everything that makes Europe squirm. He is undiluted Americanism. He is anti-elitism. He's religion and piety. He's morality and muscle. He's patriotism and self-confidence. He is rather like that dreaded American animal, the "neoconservative."
[...]
An Austrian editor once explained to me that transatlantic tensions often resulted from the fact that the United States has double standards, "while we," he added, "have none."

It’s always about the idealism. I don’t think Gedmin goes far enough. I remember the same conversations taking place about another US president – a man with a boy’s name. Jimmy Carter.

The very lack of idealism is repeatedly projected by them on the rest of the world. Just to let you know, from virtually everywhere it looks a lot more like a widespread personal problem, and not a theory of any kind. It’s more worthy of counseling than self-administered amphetamines.

Were It Not For One Man, We May Well Be Far Less Free To Choose

There are some public figures whose obituaries can be written years in advance. Milton Friedman was not one of them.

Arguably the greatest economist of the 20th century, he won his Nobel Prize 30 years ago. His classic "Capitalism and Freedom" was published 44 years ago. He died yesterday at the age of 94, but as the op-ed running nearby attests, he was active in writing about, thinking about and explaining how economics affects our world until the end.

The Wall Street Journal

The New York Times quoted the president in his obituary today that Friedman:

"He has used a brilliant mind to advance a moral vision -- the vision of a society where men and women are free, free to choose, but where government is not as free to override their decisions," President Bush said in 2002. "That vision has changed America, and it is changing the world."

But they neglected to mention his most meaning work – the turning of the tide away from a failed Keynsian economic model, and his proving quite plainly that a military draft was completely unnecessary.

As the United States went, so did much of the western world after the proof presented itself.

In every way, his life work was the advancement of human freedom. He noted that there indeed IS a strong relationship between capitalism and freedom, saying quite plainly that
If this seems facile to some, remember that in the world of academia, one still has to struggle with explaining the most basic things from square one to advocate ideas. Quite plainly that means having to incessantly fun a gauntlet of basic questions peppering every moment’s work shot out by advocates of obviously failed economic ideas such as advocates of Keynes, miscellaneous Marxists, and those generally distrustful of people doing what they want with their own lives.

Keynes believed that government intervention could avert depressions. Friedman, quite rightly, was a sceptic. One can easily see countless examples of government intervention not only not being able to avert or end depressions though intervention, but that intervention can cause them as we see with protectionism, and extend them, such as was the case with the Great Depression of the 1930’s in the United States.

He noted quite frequently that the relationship between freedom and capitalism was proving itself out on a steady course for the better for all of humanity. Over the course of the past 50 years, the number of people living under command political systems and command economies was dwindling as free economy spread. Regardless of the occasional aberration where a free economy was allowed to function in an environment where political freedom was limited, (such as was the case of Yugoslavia under Communism, and today with the likes of Burma, China, and shortly with Libya, Syria, and countless others) that an evolution toward political freedom took place, almost always without bloodshed.

Just as importantly when you look at the social and political motivations of postwar Europe, poverty declined rapidly. In some cases, eventually getting it wrong by overtaxation and intervention, and others like Switzerland, South Korea and Japan getting is as right as one could. There too, as monetarism advocated the use of currency supply as an instrument to do this – as the United States went, so did much of the world, and with it an exit from global poverty the likes of which have never been seen.

It is one of the only cases of a theory alleviating human poverty. It accomplished with no pain what Communism couldn’t accomplish through 6 decades of force, dispossession, and violence.

His life’s work, the endeavor to construct an environment of liberty was a great success for which humanity should be grateful. He is clearly on par with Burke, Jefferson, and others who saw the instinct for authority and control for what it is: little more than a disease of a few individuals’ minds who are driven by fear of what people could become, and not what they have shown that they do.

Moreover he was a public figure who was without the narcissism found with many advocates who present their ardency for change as a matter of themselves. He was a true man in full beginning his career in a time of tyrannies such as Marxism, which would find themselves rendered to the dustbin of history aided there by the work of a man a mere 5 foot 2.

Striking their way right back down the food chain

Someone seems has found the perfect way to build a sustainable, carbon neutral economy. Or not.

Affluenza

Growl!

The Fuse is Lit! (No Pasaran)

Partners and Flunkies

Thank a leftist:



Guardian and Indy laud Blair’s new ‘partnerships’ with Syria and Iran. Telegraph notes that Iran might be grooming a successor flunky to pick up where bin Laden (who is probably near death) has dropped off. This time though, he really does become Iran’s bitch.

With a network of suicidal zombies around the world, one can only hope that the splody-dopes don’t become Iran’s long range nuclear delivery system.

“Next, the UN abolished the medieval warm period”

They did, however miscarry the science for what they felt was a higher, more noble, and entirely wrong cause. Why? To feel good about doing something in the fashion that they were trained to believe, easily summarized as the broad but rarely explained concept called “Solidarity”. What it amounts to is no different in application as it was when it was flogged hither and fro by the Communists: it is the making of all people the same in sentiment, not finding a way for people of differing views to amicably arrive at the best course of action.

To accomplish this solidarity, basically you have to lie to people at first, and once you have them, you have to cut off their freedom to disagree with you. As far as the greenies are concerned, we are still somewhere at the last stage of the first phase. Christopher Monckton writing in The Telegraph sums it up:

So to the scare. First, the UN implies that carbon dioxide ended the last four ice ages. It displays two 450,000-year graphs: a sawtooth curve of temperature and a sawtooth of airborne CO2 that's scaled to look similar. Usually, similar curves are superimposed for comparison. The UN didn't do that. If it had, the truth would have shown: the changes in temperature preceded the changes in CO2 levels.

Next, the UN abolished the medieval warm period (the global warming at the end of the First Millennium AD). In 1995, David Deming, a geoscientist at the University of Oklahoma, had written an article reconstructing 150 years of North American temperatures from borehole data. He later wrote: "With the publication of the article in Science, I gained significant credibility in the community of scientists working on climate change. They thought I was one of them, someone who would pervert science in the service of social and political causes. One of them let his guard down. A major person working in the area of climate change and global warming sent me an astonishing email that said: 'We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period.' "

So they did. The UN's second assessment report, in 1996, showed a 1,000-year graph demonstrating that temperature in the Middle Ages was warmer than today. But the 2001 report contained a new graph showing no medieval warm period. It wrongly concluded that the 20th century was the warmest for 1,000 years.

So they did indeed. The non-science went into overdrive for what was presumed to be for a cause immutable to criticism because it is impirically drawn – possibly the first time leftist could believe that they were involved in a cutting-edge matter of hard science. Their method: flog it as a cause – have a concert, start another exploitable political faction, do anything... anything at all except look at the data. And when you need some supporting data, then invent it to do what science has sought through time to avoid: create maximum emotional reaction in order to banish any question, any depth or detail as just what it is we should do, and forbid any genuine doubt.

Here's how they did it:

• They gave one technique for reconstructing pre-thermometer temperature 390 times more weight than any other (but didn't say so).
• The technique they overweighted was one which the UN's 1996 report had said was unsafe: measurement of tree-rings from bristlecone pines. Tree-rings are wider in warmer years, but pine-rings are also wider when there's more carbon dioxide in the air: it's plant food. This carbon dioxide fertilisation distorts the calculations.
• They said they had included 24 data sets going back to 1400. Without saying so, they left out the set showing the medieval warm period, tucking it into a folder marked "Censored Data".
• They used a computer model to draw the graph from the data, but scientists later found that the model almost always drew hockey-sticks even if they fed in random, electronic "red noise".

It all has the air of Pol Pot insisting that irrigation canals flow uphill. That we should all be coerced into a grand endeavor and course of action based on this sort of manipulation of real data stains all science with the reputation of the witchcraft they find so immediately critical to their attempt to tell us that these narrow-minded green are here to “save us from ourselves”.

Bull. They’re using humiliation (how DARE you eat that!) to construct a form of widespread guilt which will place them on a mural above the alter in the church of the unquestioning intellect.

Sami Solanki, a solar physicist, says that in the past half-century the sun has been warmer, for longer, than at any time in at least the past 11,400 years, contributing a base forcing equivalent to a quarter of the past century's warming. That's before adding climate feedbacks.

The UN expresses its heat-energy forcings in watts per square metre per second. It estimates that the sun caused just 0.3 watts of forcing since 1750. Begin in 1900 to match the temperature start-date, and the base solar forcing more than doubles to 0.7 watts. Multiply by 2.7, which the Royal Society suggests is the UN's current factor for climate feedbacks, and you get 1.9 watts – more than six times the UN's figure.

The entire 20th-century warming from all sources was below 2 watts. The sun could have caused just about all of it.

Next, the UN slashed the natural greenhouse effect by 40 per cent from 33C in the climate-physics textbooks to 20C, making the man-made additions appear bigger.

But don’t mention the war...

- H/T to Kevin. Thanks, Ace.

I think it’s safe to assume that he’s out of love with the place

Maurice G. Dantec:

There is no strict definition of France, France is what it becomes. It had origins: the Roman-Celtic-Germanic hybrid civilization, thanks to the operative “disjunction” of Christianity. It had a destiny: the creation of Holy Imperial Europe. It had a history: the treason against its own holy mission, its poor wretch demolished vis-a-vis the English power (without mentioning being routed by Nazi panzers), the invention of nationalism/ liberalism/ socialism, its’ many collaborations with the totalitarianism of the moment.

It has one definition at present: its imminent dissolution in the euro-Islamic bathtub, and a “future”: that is to say an unprecedented crisis of social policy which one can only politely call “civil war”.

Is that the Future?!

The Fuse is Lit! (No Pasaran)

Signal sent

Jihadists receive message. Subversives in Europe also emboldened.

The European press’s reiteration of the themes of “catastrophe” and “humiliation” in its reporting of the war in Iraq may interest American voters, who may have been impatient but might not have realized they were voting to legitimize the humiliation of the US military. No doubt it will fascinate American soldiers even more, many of whom may not even be aware that they have been humiliated.

He goes on to imply what it could portend – that the Euro-press he watches may start to believe that policy will come out of the presses claims, and not necessarily those of the part of the electorate that brought the Democrats to a majority on the legislature.

The media-mantras of “catastrophe,” “humiliation” and “rising violence” can easily take hold among those who quite rightly feel that 3000 American lives is a huge sacrifice — but forget that 3000 lives were lost in just the first 3½ hours of the first day of the Battle of the Somme during the first World War. In covering Israel’s recent campaign in Lebanon, European journalists demanded “proportionality” in the Israelis’ response to terrorists’ rocket attacks. They might make do with a little of the stuff themselves when it comes to measuring the “catastrophe,” the “humiliation” and the “rising violence” in Iraq.

Let’s remember how often the public in the Near East gets it cues and its’ affirmation from the “aging children” of the West. The irony of that “victory” is the signal it sends. Melanie Philips:

the most likely outcome of these mid-term elections is another major terror attack on America. Whatever the smart analysis of the likely shape of domestic American politics over the next two years, America has now signalled a faltering of resolve; and that’s the cue for a redoubled Islamist attack.

Don’t forget to thank a leftist, especially the isolationist types so wrapped up in their own issues, that they don’t think anyone on earth is watching. They will shortly make this out to be a “gift” and a “sacrifice”, and look to their 6 years without absolute power as a sort of dieing for our sins.The Fuse is Lit! (No Pasaran)

Whipped in more ways than one

Ikea has an interesting take on things using French society’s culture of complaint to float an advertising theme.

”France is tired. France is worn out. France is at the end of its rope.
The solution? - new beds of course!

Do something about it! 'React'.

The same way they haven’t react to things like civil unrest and a women getting burned alive. Why not throw a few umlauts and first-names in there for good measure while you’re at it?

What? No more « Diebolding » ?

Sudden change of climate not declared catastrophic. Not only do the “Cosmic ray” fantasies spontaneously evaporate like issue of the hole in the ozone layer, but so does the never-ending voting machine fetish of the left:

History was made this week! For the first time in four election cycles, Democrats are not attacking the Diebold Corp. the day after the election, accusing it of rigging its voting machines. I guess Diebold has finally been vindicated.

So the left won the House and also Nicaragua. They've had a good week. At least they don't have their finger on the atom bomb yet.

The left’s approach to this whole thing has been similar to trying to “own the means of production”, except that the means is overraught angerm and the product is election outcomes.

The Sentiment Defense Shield

One can only hope that Iran agrees.

While during the Cold War there may have been a case for maintaining a nuclear deterrent, today the Trident missile system is a hugely expensive anachronism. In the words of the Labour MP, Joan Ruddock: "The question is, how we best achieve our own security? It has to be through global co-operation over climate change---which is a greater threat than any conflict." Much the same argument applies to France's deterrent.

George Irvin

Such Complete Morons

They’ll never get it.

”...Who was Adam Smith, and does he deserve to be on our banknotes?...”

from Pravda The Independent

Positive Images of the United States Temporarily Okay in EUtopia

Maybe for a few days, but not for long.



As if they’d actually be any less hateful to the US anyway.

Guess what: they never are, no matter what happens. Imagine the silliness of the American left to think that they can get a positive (a completely useless) stroke from “the Continent” is completely misguided.

Typical Leftist Vandalism

This is what people who are basically uncivilized do during elections.when they have no ideas, at least none compelling enough to believe in. the fuse is lit!

News Roundup: Interplanetary Relations at an All Time Low

It’s a beautiful world we live in

- Unaware that a society trampled on for a generation needs to cathartically put evil behind them to move forward, Douste-Blazy opposes the death penalty for mass murdering deposed dictator Saddam Hussein. Even while Nuri Al Maliki is on a state visit to Paris. Who are they going to stick in the tent next, Phil?

Hey Man, Pass the Album

- Here’s a brave seeker of the truth: a Belgian nutball thinks that cosmic ray balloting is guiding elections – all in favor of well, the ideology of candidates that cosmic rays seem to be able to differentiate:

Perhaps how the cosmic ray which effected the memory of one of the electronic ballot boxes in Schaerbeek, this cosmic ray will make it possible to sensitize deputies who have already won the electronic vote count!

I wonder what’s boiling his bongwater. Everyone knows that cosmic rays, and all of nature under Darwin’s creation votes for the left!


Membership has privileges. Like Vandalism and Stuff.

- Last but not least, the French government (if you can call them that,) has obstructed NATO in constructing a defense against large scale acts of terror. Good work. Your new name in the caves of Waziristan is now “Target no. 1” Hey, and have a nice day.

Plans to boost Nato's co- operation with countries such as Australia and Japan in an effort to forge a partnership against terrorism have been blocked by France.

The moves were to have been at the centre of a summit of the alliance's leaders to be held in Riga this month. Nato officials now accept that only a loosely worded pledge to increase contacts with partners in Asia and Australasia will be included in the communiqué, which will be agreed by President George Bush and other leaders in the Latvian capital.

The French opposition comes as a blow to the US, which spearheaded the proposal and which would like to see regular Nato "forums" with countries such as Australia, New Zealand, Japan and South Korea. But while the idea won support from traditional allies of Washington such as the UK, France has made it clear that it opposes a move it sees as part of a campaign to extend US influence.

They naturally prefer to extend the influence of bloodthirsty Jihadists of course, because they have some idea that only the US can chafe French pride.

That this could cost a great many lives, possibly even among the supernatural French citizenry who are shielded by a force-field of sentimental thoughts, doesn’t seem to matter.

Silent Running

European style media, I suppose, is for running bad news, but not the bad news that you really need to know about to do something about the bad trends behind that bad news.

Vandals that numbered a hundred or more attacked passengers on the no. 4 and no. 12 Metro lines between Marcadet-Poissonniers and Château Rouge, stations. They stripped passengers of their valuables such as handbags, mp3 players, cell phones, etc.

Except, quite ironically, at two tabloid format local papers called Le Parisien and Aujourd’hui that have a familiar air about them in that they resemble the New York Post and New York’s Daily News to a degree, and are less likely to pull their punches.

1% sounds like nothing, right? Right!?!

It seems that the unquestionably holy UN's own report on the cost of the greenie agenda shows that The Stern Report deceptively underestimates the cost at 1% of GDP.

But what is an annual cost of 1% of GDP anyway? GDP is a gage of what the whole of the economy looks like after the taxman has taken his cut.
Simply put, among the advanced economies on the world 1% of GDP is the same value as about half of yearly economic growth. Have you seen a handful of houses built in your neighborhood? Let's say there are 10. They are an expression of the growth in the GDP value of property. The same addle-brained morons who would support the greenies’ devolution of humanity would be the first ones end up living rough on the streets.

Under the proposed strictures of the Stern Report’s recommendations there would only have been five. That's just in housing. Imagine anything else that you've seen changed, made new, or improved are not immune. Take all of that, and cut it in half.

Now imagine that the entire thing is made to look small to make the concept of committing to it more palatable. Imagine that the real cost is twice that, consuming ALL growth, devouring the incentive to do anything better, more efficiently or renew it in any way.

Since it creates growth or grows income, all of it will have to be taxes at 100% to absolve the guilt of people who bought into something they don't understand, sold to them by a by a bunch of rotten crypto-Marxists.

If anyone takes one percent of GDP year after year, and in the process offsets any benefit whatsoever of economic growth, it wont take long for that economy to contract to the point where the absolute sum amounting to 1% would need to be 2% to maintain the same sum. It is a measure that will make the global economy contract, create pollution and misery generating poverty, while accomplishing nothing for the environment.

Sound all so very humanistic, concerned, lucid, etc., etc., doesn’t it?

NYT Nukes Its’ Own Argument

and it unwittingly endorses the toppling Saddam.

While an alliance of Arab States, Russia, France, Germany, and the generalized Angry left were trying to stall the United States in the year before the toppling of Saddam Hussein, the Bush Administration seems to have adapted from the Asian business model the concept of just in time bombing.

Trying to use it as a cudgel and an October surprise, the New York Times reports that in 2002, the Baathist regime was as little as one year away from having a working nuke. The odd thing is that this attempt to fault the Bush Administration underlines the fact that the NYT spent the last 3 years attempting to convince the public by underreporting relevant information and running endless speculative tales of doubt, that there were no WMDs, no programmes, etc. They might as well try to suggest that the Bush Administration concocted the letters W, M, and D for just that purpose, and their zombie readership would buy it.

To wit, release the blogs!

That notwithstanding they are actively publishing information of tremendous use to violent opponents of the United States, much as they did by publicizing the people and methods behind the United States’ communications and financial transfer intelligence efforts. This time they’re helping out insurgents figure out how to more easily kill coalition troops.

Those engaged in warfare are always seeking any edge, however slight, which may give them the advantage. Unfortunately some in the media are all to willing to display the coalition family jewels for all to see.

Graphic courtesy of the New York Times.

One might say that this isn’t treason, seeing that once the weakness of American body armor are known that word can get around – well, no. Cells in an insurgent network protect themselves by isolating themselves from one another. Their entrepot of information is the media, more to the point the overachieving western press and the bloodthirsty nature of the left-leaning people who run it.

Where their adolescent dreams of “sticking it to the man” comes from has been a matter of much speculation, but I’d guess it’s a close relative of the fear and excess rumination that comes from passivity and fear about the world. Since it’s a scary place, it has to be controlled forcefully by some wise entity that appeals to one. Judgment in every thing needs to be left up to such experts, down to the last detail, but always as it relates to oneself, ones’ pleasures, ones’ image, and the like – to the point of invention. An example can be found here where the writer asks:

Will there come a day when we can eat lots of high-calorie, fatty foods and offset the health damage by taking a natural substance found in red wine?

Wine exists. Fatty foods exist. Why not try it out and get back to us. No such beast. The outcome must be known.

Just as the left looks back at ”good” wars that they say they could get behind, saying that the morality of fighting the Nazis and Japanese Empire were clear, they’re hiding a lie. They like it because these wars are over, and they know the outcome.

Their absolute fear and unceasing lamentation of the future is what brings them to find any and all rhetoric possible to try to make any concurring change stop right away at all costs. It’s what would cause the likes of those who write for the New York Times to criticize the fullness of an effort they did everything they could to diminish.

Another Unwitting Admission by the Press

That journalism is used an instrument to try to alter reality by altering perceptions.

Law Through The Looking Glass

The finding by the court against media watcher Philippe Karsenty and in favor of France 2 over their handling of the Al-Dura gin-up signals on simple thing to John Rosenthal:

...the court's judgment is largely devoted to citing opinions hostile to the Shahaf/Mena hypothesis and calling into doubt the credibility and "seriousness" of the Mena and its collaborators, who -- despite their plurality -- are stylized into the "sole source" of Karsenty's claims. The court thereby manages to evade the primary evidence upon which the controversy -- though not the court's judgment -- in fact hinges: namely, the video evidence. The ultimate "source" of this evidence is not, of course, the Mena. It is France2, with crucial supporting evidence being provided by the rushes of the other news organizations.

As for Enderlin, France 2’s “star reporter” in the near east, a kind of character with the stature and the stuffing of Robert Fisk:

The litigious texts concern France2's famous and by many accounts -- not only Philippe Karsenty's -- infamous news report of Sept. 30, 2000, apparently showing a defenseless Palestinian boy being shot dead in a hail of Israeli fire. This is at least how viewers would have been led to interpret the scene by the voice-over of Enderlin:

Three PM. Everything has begun to degenerate near the Netzarim settlement in the Gaza Strip. The Palestinians have fired with live ammunition. The Israelis respond. Ambulance teams, journalists and simple passers-by are caught in the cross-fire. Here Jamal and his son Mohammed are the target of fire coming from the Israeli position.

All of which turned out to be dead wrong and maliciously staged to the extent that stage management by ringers working for France 2 created the conditions which led to the death of a child.

One can’t but help to sense that JayBean, a delightful blogger has. It is one of little surprise and great disappointment.

Most of her speech was ad hominem; it had to do with who Enderlin is, not with refuting anything that had been said in court against him. Her stance: how can they say these horrible things about a man so great? One must make a serious investigation before saying something against such a renowned journalist!

She cites a well known story which could very well be the court’s transcription:

If any one of them can explain it, said Alice, (she had grown so large in the last few minutes that she wasn't a bit afraid of interrupting him,) I'll give him sixpence. I don't believe there's an atom of meaning in it.

The jury all wrote down on their slates, She doesn't believe there's an atom of meaning in it, but none of them attempted to explain the paper.

Where Inaction Has Becomes a Virtue

...”Hold tight, the sociologists are on the way!”...

Blogger Scoops MSM, MSM Steals Story

Check out the timestamps the little pikers left behind.



Note too the acute lack of interest in the subject. A Vicar's self immolation produced only three entries.

Cartoonists All For That Holocaust That They'd Rather Deny

Here it is the moment you;ve surely been waiting for with bated breath:

Carlos Latuff from Brazil and A Chard from France jointly won the second prize of £4,000 (€6,000) and Iran’s Shahram Rezai received £2,500 for third place.

”Causes” discussed:

Masoud Shojai, head of the country's "Iran Cartoon" association and the fair organiser, said that "we staged this fair to explore the limits of freedom Westerners believe in".

It seems that the western reaction is offensive to him because it has been pronounced by tolerance and an inadequate amount of violence and outrage.

While some ignore the limits of truthfulness in criticism, others go all the way, and simply invent their own:

“The bad news,” investigative reporter Seymour Hersh told a Montreal audience last Wednesday, “is that there are 816 days left in the reign of King George II of America.”

“In Washington, you can’t expect any rationality. I don’t know if he’s in Iraq because God told him to, because his father didn’t do it, or because it’s the next step in his 12-step Alcoholics Anonymous program,” he said.

Nonetheless, he took the opportunity to trash the US while in Canada to get outraged over things truthful as well:

”...The military is going to do what the President wants,”

I suppose he’d prefer a banana republic where the military does whatever the military wants.

Political Dada

An anti-Communist group wanted to hold a public display to remind people of the horrors of Communism on the 50th anniversary of the crushing of dissent in Hungary, and, quite naturally for France not only is it suppressed by the CRS riot cops, but a crowd of goofy anarchists are permitted (nay, induced) to “counter” it with more of the usual pro-Palestinian rubbish, as if they need any more support than they’ve already gotten.

If that isn’t a fish trying to ride a bicycle, I don’t know what is. To make some sense of it, remember that anything involving the fevered imagination of the incongruous Marxist-Pro-jihadist alliance is the gaping hole of suck which hosts both of those suicidal world views called Bobigny.

From Le Point, a typical day of court testimony that lets one know just how comfortable the two factions are to each other:

On the docket since Monday are three young people have appeared before the court for the rapes of a young woman and a homosexual man with acts of cruelty and tortures. They risk perpetuity. “What was the name of your previous victim?” asks the chief judge Odile Mondineu-Hederer, who become famous for conducting deliberations in the appeal cases of Outreau. “I don’t remember any more, I got over it”, said Hasid, 24 years, already sentenced to eleven years for the rape of someone who he forgot the first name of. Then he remembered: “It was Céline, she was a minor. ”

Fifteen days later, Hasid said that in a hotel of Saint-Ouen. With its two accomplices, Aymeric, 24 years old, and Mourad, 28 years old, they attacked a young homosexual pedestrian. Seven hours of beating and repeated rapes. The victim also had his genitals and buttocks sprayed with something toxic, and was sodomized with the bottle. To finish, its attackers tagged his back with the names of their ghettos, « Franc-Moisin », « Clos Saint-Lazare », before penetrating his anus one last time. No explanation was given.

The only things these two unlikely tribes (thugs who admire Jihad and Lifestyle-groups admired by the radical left) have in common are a set of causes akin to a death-wish. I guess that’s enough.

Happy Rübengeisterschnitzen!

Please to observe Hermann

Isn’t the Next Step to Organize the Workers?

...because the goal of the average French student is to have a guaranteed job for life.

From Le Figaro:

According to the trade union SUD-Student, some 40.000 students prostitute themselves, in particular via the Internet and in “hostess” bars.

So much so, that the “fake student” routine is the hottest sales gimmick going at the moment. It seems nothing, and I mean nothing gets by even Le Figaro without a Neo-Com spin to it though:

A consequence of the impoverishment of students, it’s also of the growing vision of a consumerist society, the phenomenon is largely overlooked by social services and universities. In fact, no study was undertaken on the subject. Only the trade union SUD-Student dared present any statistics.

Others hardly seem like students at all, seeking the image of youth and an explanation for their “bumpsen für Euros” other than being on the “Blutarsky Plan”. Basically, these hos are “students” in the same way 37 year old rioters are “youths.”

Seven years with a “summer job”

In fact, the money is more than enough of a draw. Emma, 36 years old, is now married and a mother in the North. The young woman was a prostitute for seven years, each summer in Brussels. Then a student at the school of veterinary surgeon, she though well of her “summer job”. “In two months, I earned my money for the year. More than I would have made working at McDo[nald’s]. I’m not saying that it is easy money, but I had the pride of earning it without robbing anybody”, she says today.

Is that to say that all students are into some form of crime or another? Just how is it that this entrepreneur finds those awful, American-seeming capitalists at McDo such bad employers? Oh well. At least she took some pride in her work.

- With thanks to Kevin