Love in the Age of Chop-Chop

- thanks to reader Grouik

The Fuse is Lit (No Pasaran!)

Are you Ready to Become Amish?

Asks Gene Miller:

This week will see the storm clouds grow, the doomsday clock move forward, tipping points reached, mass hysteria, as well as dogs and cats living together, all due to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issuing another report on global warming (aka 'climate change' for those who are not sure and want to hedge their bets). The report will be trumpeted by those in the Malthusian and Luddite echo chambers of the radical environmental movement as their own religious version of the 'end times', great ... knock yourself out. This particular collective being by and large part of the 'do as I say, not as I do' crowd. A more apt slogan for the economic and lifestyle changes they want to force upon everyone else would be, ' I am not ready to become Amish, but you are!'. But I digress.

Fighting their way back down the food chain. Well done.The Fuse is Lit (No Pasaran!)

Parody? Really?

- by way of Hervé (PBUH)

The Fuse is Lit (No Pasaran!)

Only In Pancho’s Moist Underoos

"Last Try" by Pancho

... “ Trust Me! Don’t miss out on this opportunity! ” ...

(“Dead” US Army “for sale”)

And now for something completely different

Weekend Roundup

« Les États-Unis: maîtres du jeu mondial pour le pire... Et le meilleur »

I hate to admit it, but I really have a hard time reading this trash while sober or even in a timely manner for that matter. Every day should be a Saturday anyway.

In Le Figaro the long suffering Ted Stanger disabuses the reader that France 24 is seen as anything other than still-born in the US, but with a anti-US dig to keep his cred. I have to correct Stanger here: France 24 has no impression in the US because no-one has paid any attention to it.

By creating France 24, Jacques Chirac was guided by the Gaullist idea that information needs to serve the national interest. In view of that, Americans have seen the new network as dead-on-arrival. That the French want to present their view of the world is a legitimate desire. Vive France24, to but those who look to it to find an alliance of anti-Americanism and anti-globalization, they would just shrug their shoulders across the atlantic. On our side [of the pond] it's seen more as a political instrument than a news network. Don't forget that after rightly rejecting pro-war politics in 2003, Chirac was desperate to find strategic allies and turned to Germany, Russia, the third world, and even that politically fictional francophonie.

Nearly 4 years later the rejection of the Iraqi campaign exposes a foundation as fragile as the one found after rejecting the [EU] constitution under the weight of domestic politics. Paris is still as isolated as Bush, and France 24 won't change that.

Locked up in the attic of the back pages Dominique Dhombres blows the cover off of " national interest" in Le Monde as an object of indecision and guilt, but still doesn't seem sure why he's doing it, asking us to "pray for peace" in a post-Christian society. Good luck with all that. I doubt we'll be seeing many candles being lit.

On the cover and below the fold, Le Monde finally notices a devastated Mogadishu now that those probable-Neo-con-lovin' Etheopians have stepped in – at least they make mention of a decade of lawless chaos, but it took a US air-raid in the south to get it onto their radar. I guess those groovy Abyssinians have just dropped off the French list of the officially pitiable oppressed that otherwise get an Albanian a glare reserved for bums and panhandlers.

From our bulging "are you f'in kidding me?" file:

Worst of all is a cartoon as implausible as Bill Clinton's trope of blackness: " Bravitude Royale". Obviously pumping Ségolène's minor statement about China while posing as the Michelin man, the minor bout of verbal "bravitude" is meant to jump the train of the actual Tiananmin Square protestor who defiantly challenged a column of tanks. Verbal bravery is the best you'll ever get from someone who will stick her neck out, provided that it's a momentary crane to pander the "human rights" voter and is eventually rendered illegible of insignificant to the snubbed. Sounds mighty damn brave, doesn't it?

Now for a moment of light comedy: LM features union shakedown artist Bernard Thibault is shown demonstrating necktie-tie-ing skills poorer than a comic Abe Vigoda character.The Fuse is Lit (No Pasaran!)

Consequences Shielded from View at All Costs

Corbusier has a word or two for that growing lumpenproletariat, the impressionable and forgetful part of western society that takes the impressions left for a biased media at its’ word:

From our perspective of a society that takes for granted the prevailing rule of law and basks in limitless freedom to express oneself and make as much money as we endeavour, there is little difference between one dictator responsible for killing a few thousand of his countrymen for the sake of permanent political stability, rule of law and prosperity for his country and another totalitarian ruler who exterminated several hundred thousands of his own subjects for the sake of sowing permanent tribal division, economic degradation and political anarchy. Jeanne Kirkpatrick pointed to this difference, and urged that American foreign policy acknowledge it. But due to the extraordinary circumstance of growing up in a country where one hasn't experienced any degree of authoritarian rule for more than 230 years, many Americans are naive to the fact that most of the populations of the world are subject regimes that are far more invasive and deterministic in one's individual life than we can imagine.

If the left wants to sneak into the background an inescapable sense that “Iraq=Vietnam” than they need to complete the picture:

Two more days passed, everybody got weaker, no one moved or said a word! It was so quiet and peaceful! Suddenly, a man screamed : - I see a boat over there!... Like magic, we energetically got up and looked to where he pointed his finger. We saw a boat! Everybody was so grateful, we used all kinds of cloth, towel, t-shirt to wave and scream. The boat seemed like approaching us closer and closer but when we saw it clearly, we started to be afraid because there was a fishing boat with more than a dozen mean looking men, dark skin, carrying weapons and speaking Thai language strongly.
When that boat was next to ours, they signaled us to get on their boat, the little boat was empty. Some of them jumped on it starting to search our luggages, they took everything they liked! When they finished searching, we were returned back to our boat and they left.

The social justice types duping civilization can be so proud.The Fuse is Lit (No Pasaran!)

Midnight at the Full Moon Saloon

It seems that each of these conspiracy theory peddling clowns, like one who won’t stop sending us rambling, frothing emails from his home in the Keebler Elf tree, seems to ramble and fronth in their own special way.

Those 9-11 attacks? It was all about data centers!

The plane banked attacking the World Trade Center, and adding another hair-brained theory to hundreds of others, some drooling freak is convinced that amateur pilots yelling allah hu akhbar! were capable of counting floors in a split second and controlling the aircraft with laser precision. To which I say: have you ever seen how most Saudi men drive?

It must have been the menacing color of the battery racks...

These units were bolted to the raised floor which stood about 3 feet above the reinforced 81st floor. Beneath the raised floor ran the cables and power supply that connected the army of batteries. IT techies had to get down on all fours and crawl around beneath the raised floor to connect cables.

"The whole floor was batteries," he said, "huge battery-looking things." They were "all black" and "solid, very heavy" things that had been brought in during the night. They had been put in place during the summer prior to 9/11, he said.

As an Architect I’ve worked on plenty of office designs and test-fits and several data centers. Battery rooms are usually full of batteries. Construction work is nearly always done at night if it effects another floor or produces an excess of noise with adjacent spaces occupied. There’s also the matter of “mysterious” structural work, which if the author had even a marginal clue how heavy data center UPS batteries are. Stacked 2 tiers high you quickly get to a 600 pounds per square foot (29 kPa) load. Office space is normally designed for 100-150 psf (5-7 kPa), depending on whether or not it’s identified as an area where a file or book library can occur. No matter – that anyone would need to perform any structural work to make up the difference, right? RIGHT?
They also need 1 cfm of ventilation directly to the great outdoors since they give off small quantities of chlorine and hydrogen gas when they start to fail. No work needed THERE either, surely...
As to the last point, why doesn’t he “investigate” how it might be possible that they were brought up AFTER 9-11? Hm?

Simpler still, why doesn’t the guy just say that the evil architect of everything he doesn’t like Dick Cheney, was flying both planes that day. PERSONALLY! Sure beats the theory which he had bit of a hard time with: that on 20 floors large flower pots surreptitiously containing thermite were situated in the same general location near the elevators. They must have been places there “mysteriously” by people posing as office cleaners. I mean, what kind of Wall Street offices hire cleaning companies?!?

How about this theory: al-Queda terrorist did it. After all, bin Laden eventually started bragging about it. Not enough complicity with America, I guess. For that eventuality, one must claim that the US “created” him, in exactly the same way they “created” Saddam Hussein, Tojo, Vlad the Impaler, and Alexander the Great.

I mean what REALLY happened can keep changing, can’t it?

Ironically, the Protestors Can Leave Cuba

Unlike the Cubans, these wankers don’t need to risk it on an innertube:

A dozen American peace activists, including Cindy Sheehan, marched to the security fence around the US military enclave in eastern Cuba chanting "Guantanamo prison, place of shame, no more torture in our name."

Fine. Feel free do it in MY name if you have to. The Fascist Fishwife can join her peaced-out pacifistic kindred spirits and just stay in Castro’s “paradise” for all I care.

As for her fellow travelers, make a note of the fake photo montage and how many times the word “probably” appears in this feeble parody, all anticipating hopes of finding the very worst of their “real enemy” – their fellow citizens from a country where it’s still bad form and at last check unlawful to target unsuspecting civilians just to get your jollies. Behold, their chachas at Reuters prattling on about Sheehan and Medea Benjamin “defying” the travel ban on Cuba under the heading of “crisis” while neglecting to mention the Cuban “travel ban” on Cubans that thousands have died defying.

Apparently, that’s not a crisis.The Fuse is Lit (No Pasaran!)

Panderstan

The M.O. of those who feel themselves superior in their enlightenment is normally expressed in berating a straw man. Had I kept a journal of number of unsolicited lectures, attempted proviked one-sided arguments, mumbled backhand comments, and the like that I’ve heard about the US over the years (and decades before 9-11,) it would read like a prison psychiatrist’s case book.

Without irony L’État has published a 65 page guide on how to not bear down on a foreigner’s neck for things one would like associated with their nation. The rub is that it involves Chinese visitors to France.

PARIS: Here is a French government tip on how best to do business with the Chinese: Do not mention Tibet, Taiwan or the Tiananmen Square crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators.

The advice, offered in a new guide co-produced by France's Tourism Ministry and its tourism promotion agency, has provoked sharp criticism from human rights and free Tibet campaigners.

The 65-page guide, "Chinese tourists: How best to welcome them?" is designed to help French businesses tap into the boom in Chinese tourism by offering an array of do's and don'ts.

Do put out soy sauce and chili paste so Chinese tourists can spice up French dishes, "which they can find bland," says the guide that Tourism Minister Leon Bertrand launched last month.

What if they were at Tiananmin square, were Tiawanese, or a member of Falun Gong? Where’s the guide to pandering to them?

Frothing, dissembled nonsense about an amalgamation of gripes involving a connection between the Warren Commission Report, Climate Change®™©, Gitmo, Cuban Cigars, SUV’s, Alcoholism on the Reservation, rubbish rural ways combined with an ignorance of nature, Le ‘Amboorger, and Georges Boooch, are, quite naturally, naturally exempt, even though your garden variety Parisian wouldn’t know one tree from a lamp-post, and can’t conceive of anyone not living like them unless they’re among the ‘picturesque’ oppressed that they imagine want to be colonized all over again with terms like ‘social justice’ and ‘same-sex-marriage’.

A spokeswoman for France's League of Human and Citizens' Rights, Elisabeth Alles, called the guide's political tip "completely scandalous." Marcelle Roux, head of the campaign group France Tibet, called it "shameful."

The guide's cover bears the logos of the French tourism promotion agency — Maison de la France — and of the Ministry of Transport, Equipment, Tourism and of the Sea, with the slogan of the French republic, "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity."

Franck Paillard, vice director of communication for Maison de la France, defended the guide's political tip, but acknowledged that the aim was to avoid subjects that could anger Chinese visitors.

As usual, some League of n’import quoi berating people as a matter of course is just the usual background noise. It’s the idea of leaving a tourist alone is the motive behind the pamphlet. If it wouldn’t meet with a torrent ot fake public denial, they’d likely try to get the village smurfs to be marginally civilized to Les Anglo-Saxons, whoever the hell they are.

As for the motives behind the booklet, they are entirely economic, and about twenty years too late. The free-market thinkers of the world have developed a kinship with the Chinese aspiring for freedom and prosperity years ago. As for the throwbacks left among them, well, you can keep ‘em.

- With thanks for the tip from Jeorg.