How Green is thy Zombie

Before and after: George just couldn’t help himself.



If British readers can be trained to believe that it was 40º C anywhere in the UK last week, they can believe anything.

Airtight in the Presidential Dacha

Is it a stunt to hold on to the Greenie vote? A sexist rumor? Toying with the one-track minds? Who can tell.

Still Waiting for the De-Nazification of Lefty Slander

Conservatives as Nazis: the Non-Argument of Last Resort

The derangement syndrome seems perpetual, and Plantu has been warming up for SDS for about three. Woop-dee-doo, I say – what do you expect from a society where this kind of grand-parental behaviour is normal enough to figure into the public mind:

"I'll miss Chirac in the same way you'd miss your granddad who used to nick the cash you left in the kitchen," says Le Monde's cartoonist Plantu.

That unwittingly bizarre reflection about Chirac just might be finest paean of the man ever written.

A Tried and True Election Tactic: Lie

First of all, to accuse your opponent of “apologizing” to America for the torrent of hatred that’s been a part of their lives for decades, you first have to actually have an apology, but there wasn’t one.

Ségolène Royal, the Socialist candidate in the French presidential election on May 6, accused Nicolas Sarkozy, her conservative opponent, on Wednesday of having “apologized” to President Bush for France’s decision not to back the United States militarily in Iraq.

Mr. Sarkozy’s campaign team called her words “lies.”

“I am not for a Europe that aligns with the U.S.,” Ms. Royal said on France 2 television. “I have never been, and will never, go apologize to President Bush for the position of France on the issue of refusing to send our troops to Iraq.”

The interviewer noted that Mr. Sarkozy’s official position was that he had supported President Jacques Chirac’s opposition to the war and to French participation in military operations in Iraq.

“Yes, well, listen,” Ms. Royal responded. “He still did this.”

Let’s look at this in a clearer light: Royal is indulging the egos of potential voters by assuming that French people venting to other French people about the US would somehow matter to the US when in reality the US merely ignored the French stance on Iraq, or any of the other flavor-of-the-week screaming in the pediatrician’s office.

Just what part of the chicken in she trying to stroke? The one that assumed that the bleating of a needy European public that navel-gazed over a decade of open warfare in Balkans would matter to anyone in the world.

America acting alone, not giving Europeans who sheltered terrorism the right of refusal over its’ actions, as some sort of sin? If Ségolène Royal imagines that “Europe” should not align with the US, who’s the lone wolf here? With who would they prefer an alignment? Those paragons of human rights in the Africa, the Arab world, Russia, or China?

Seriously. Who ARE these imaginary allies of theirs’? Who are these mystery societies that share their sensitivity and world view? When have they ever demonstrated this sooper-dooper über-greatness they keep assuming undergirds their actions?

They can’t because none of it is real.

An Odd Outpost in Search of Some Meaning

Puzzled?

Lately Americans have had to recognize the power of Europe - often for its bite. It was Old Europe that sniped about the war in Iraq, while regulators in Brussels have derailed U.S. mega-mergers and taken on Microsoft.

Even if you can call any of their reconstructed protectionism “real”, there is a simple explanation for the temporary lack of malaise they’re experiencing in the greyer parts of “old Europe.” It isn’t their money, technology, or effort that’s driving that particular train:

The recent earnings boom of European companies has to an extent been "made in America." Texas last year ranked as the top state for European investment; the $55.3 billion that European companies invested in the state exceeded combined U.S. investment in Japan and China. The top investor? France.

The operative word here is slow when it comes to dealing with the objects of their fears, in this case, the unemployed.

A multitude of business issues are also slow in being resolved. For example, it took four years to clinch a new aviation treaty, global warming is dividing the United States and the EU, and European regulators often act unilaterally in setting standards that have global influence.

Other matters, though are taken care of tous de suite when the all-important slowness to address your fears is concerned:

Brussels officials have confirmed the existence of a classified handbook which offers "non-offensive" phrases to use when announcing anti-terrorist operations or dealing with terrorist attacks.

Banned terms are said to include "jihad", "Islamic" or "fundamentalist".

The word "jihad" is to be avoided altogether, according to some sources, because for Muslims the word can mean a personal struggle to live a moral life.

One alternative, suggested publicly last year, is for the term "Islamic terrorism" to be replaced by "terrorists who abusively invoke Islam".

As true as the story’s title is, those wanting the “European street” to ignore transnational terror in “abusively invoke Islam” by trying to put beyond discussion the terrorism itself.

Good luck with all that, and make sure you convince yourself to avoid all other aspects of modernity at all costs otherwise:

A stream of doctors, complementary practitioners and Chinese herbalists all failed to alleviate any of her symptoms or come up with a diagnosis.
Instead, she found an answer on Google - through websites such as electrosensitivity.org.uk.
All her symptoms seemed to match those of people who believe they are allergic to modern life.

An Odd Outpost in Search of Some Meaning

Puzzled?

Lately Americans have had to recognize the power of Europe - often for its bite. It was Old Europe that sniped about the war in Iraq, while regulators in Brussels have derailed U.S. mega-mergers and taken on Microsoft.

Even if you can call any of their reconstructed protectionism “real”, there is a simple explanation for the temporary lack of malaise they’re experiencing in the greyer parts of “old Europe.” It isn’t their money, technology, or effort that’s driving that particular train:

The recent earnings boom of European companies has to an extent been "made in America." Texas last year ranked as the top state for European investment; the $55.3 billion that European companies invested in the state exceeded combined U.S. investment in Japan and China. The top investor? France.

The operative word here is slow when it comes to dealing with the objects of their fears, in this case, the unemployed.

A multitude of business issues are also slow in being resolved. For example, it took four years to clinch a new aviation treaty, global warming is dividing the United States and the EU, and European regulators often act unilaterally in setting standards that have global influence.

Other matters, though are taken care of tous de suite when the all-important slowness to address your fears is concerned:

Brussels officials have confirmed the existence of a classified handbook which offers "non-offensive" phrases to use when announcing anti-terrorist operations or dealing with terrorist attacks.

Banned terms are said to include "jihad", "Islamic" or "fundamentalist".

The word "jihad" is to be avoided altogether, according to some sources, because for Muslims the word can mean a personal struggle to live a moral life.

One alternative, suggested publicly last year, is for the term "Islamic terrorism" to be replaced by "terrorists who abusively invoke Islam".

As true as the story’s title is, those wanting the “European street” to ignore transnational terror in “abusively invoke Islam” by trying to put beyond discussion the terrorism itself.

Good luck with all that, and make sure you convince yourself to avoid all other aspects of modernity at all costs otherwise:

A stream of doctors, complementary practitioners and Chinese herbalists all failed to alleviate any of her symptoms or come up with a diagnosis.
Instead, she found an answer on Google - through websites such as electrosensitivity.org.uk.
All her symptoms seemed to match those of people who believe they are allergic to modern life.

Call them the Solana Battalion

So long as there is an audience to be pandered to, in the interest of posing an air of open-ness and debate, the EU mandates that all mouths shall speak out of both sides:

In an effort to cut the numbers of illegal migrants arriving to Europe by sea, EU interior ministers have given the green light to setting up a rapidly deployable force of border guards which would assist countries facing an immigration emergency.

Is it different when they aren’t Mexican or Palestinian?

Demonstrating “Against Violence”

With RPGs, of course.
Trained to mouth the words - Reuters:

Palestinians attend a demonstration against violence in Gaza April 23, 2007.

Still Shaking Their Tiny Fists in the Air

Gramscian lie-ing redefined as “heroism””:

Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the German Green MEP and hero of Paris's student protests in May 1968, said a leftwing campaign would be "hopeless" for Ms Royal. He held crucial talks in the early hours of yesterday morning at the Socialist party headquarters to convince Ms Royal, whose campaign has been a mixture of leftwing economic policy and conservative social values, to move away from the traditional left. He told the Guardian: "If she tries to play it on the traditionally socialist card, she will lose, because France has veered right."

This is as close as they ever get to admitting that decades of Socialist ideas have been a failure – which is to say that people still aren’t “ready” for it and a are unwilling to be as “brave” as this warm, caring “man of the people” who’s just trying to defend free speech or something:

A man accused of threatening a Nevada Republican Party official with a rifle was arrested Tuesday in a vehicle in which police found swords, knives, a shotgun, shells and a flare gun, authorities said.

Zachary Moyle, executive director of the state GOP, told The Associated Press on Tuesday that Kramer invited him to look at something in the trunk of his Mercedes before pulling out a rifle, pointing it at his face and warning that he would be back if President Bush vetoed an emergency war spending bill being considered by Congress.

Another Great Bové-an Success

I’m lovin’ it.

Pouting. Bewildered. Standing Akimbo.

Green Party a big loser on “Earth Day.”

Extra: One hour after Le Monde called it 29,8% for Sarko versus 25,6% for Ségo, TF2 calls it 30,4% for Sarko to Ségo’s 25,0%. It’s also worth noting that 26,1% of the vote, nearly as many as the leading candidate, went to freaky, hopeless fantasy candidates.

The Greens of Wrath

What is Earth Day really all about? Virtually nothing but greed and fantasy determinism. While some miss the entire point of the strife of the 20th century to respect the autonomy of the individual, they try to recreate “creating the new man” arguments, others are just playing at your emotions to pick your pocket. Appealing to good-old fashion group hatred, a company selling shoes used this layout in a recent fake “magazine” mailer curiously named “The Stool Pigeon.”

Their faithful customers will be forgiven for not knowing that this company which presumes to be all about environmentalism, proximity of production, and all of the fetishes now though of as some sort of virtue, their SEC filing tells another story about this peddler of expensive shoes pretending to be “all Santa Barbara” (California), mailing out of Arizona, and trying to seem Hawaii surfin’ cool:

Simple.

Simple is our moderately priced “anti-brand,” serving the needs of a youthful, irreverent consumer base seeking the comfort of athletic footwear but the styling of more traditional, understated, _back-to-basics_ footwear. Simple was launched in the early 1990’s and has been recently revised to focus on its successful legacy categories, including sandals, clogs and casual athletic footwear. Simple enables us to leverage our core footwear design and production competencies in channels of distribution not served by Teva or UGG.

Our independent manufacturers are located outside the U.S., where we are subject to the risks of international commerce.

All of our third party manufacturers are in the Far East, Australia and New Zealand, with the vast majority of production performed by four manufacturers in China.

In other words they are a subsidiary of one of those vaunted “corporations!” engaging in “globalization!” which will give $5 with every pair sold to yet another outfit of self-proclaimed do-gooders called StopGlobalWarming.org for purposes they refuse to state.

Earth Day is an “anti-brand” for a lot of things, virtually all of them discredited, including planned societies and economies where industry, consumption, and daily common behavior is regulated,

It is an “anti-brand” for the vehicle with which people can hate the success of others and displace their own individual failures, inabilities to realize personal success using science and reason,

It is an “anti-brand” for discredited notions of radicalism which lost all hope of being accepted as anything other than a violent ideology imposed on an unwilling majority by an adolescent minority who are acting out emotions of envy and hatred on others, using as a pretense their efforts at your “salvation”. Heaven knows, you’ve been naughty, and as long as you can be placed in a subservient position, someone who is otherwise a personal failure by any normal metrics will chide you.

Somehow, Mr. and Ms. Inhabitant of earth, you aren’t just their enemy, but you MUST do what they tell you, and you MUST support them at the same time. If you aren’t already suspicious, you should be.

Starting Off His Audience with a Joke

Javier Solana, the EU’s rotating minister of everything in every transnational organization, criticized US policy as it related to the US-Mexico border, saying:

A wall that separates one country from another is not something that I like or that the European Union members like.

Apparently there must be some other European union out there he must be talking about, because the one we have to pretend is a real and mature entity seems in an panicked state to send naval vessels to islands to keep Africans out of the south, permits all but the smuggling of women for prostitution at its’ border to the east, and dispairs at having no structured borders at the north.

But other than that, they can’t see why another nation which spent half a century protecting Europe’s borders, would have the temerity to demark its’ own.

Mr. Solana did, after all, have a Mexican audience to pander to. What use this has to him, one can only speculate.

Same Old, Same Old

My anti-Americanism has become almost uncontrollable. It has possessed me, like a disease. It rises up in my throat like acid reflux, that fashionable American sickness.

- Margaret Drabble

I hate its bogus two-party system, its one-size-fits-all culture, and its income gap. I could go on for pages but I'll sum up with this: I hate America for being a hypocritical white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.

- Counterpunch writer ”Mickey Z.”

I have a suggestion for clarifying our consciousness: learn to hate the rich. Hate, yes. You can dress up the language and call it rage. But, hate is a concept underrated. Everyone does it, but no one wants to admit it, usually hating the wrong person. Hate is the opposite of love. Do you love the rich? Like the rich? If not, than maybe you can learn to hate the rich. I don't mean shame the rich in order to get money out of their guilt, as has been a long practice on the left and among non-profits. I mean NOT taking money from the rich, isolate the rich, make them build tall walls around their estates and corporate headquarters as the people force the rich to do in Latin America.

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, CounterPunch

You had everything you wanted. Your Mercedes wasn't enough, you brats. Your golden necklaces weren't enough, you snobs. Your trust fund wasn't enough. Your vodka and Cognac weren't enough. All your debaucheries weren't enough. Those weren't enough to fulfill your hedonistic needs. You had everything.

- Mass murderer Cho Seung-Hui

National Dogpile

Time is dwindling. Read up. 40% of all voters, more than any one candidate has committed to them, have yet to decide, and for obvious reasons. Generally, they stink.

5 of them are in the category of orbiting Pluto, ranging from Fantasy trotkyite, new-com, watermelon Marxist, a fake-peasant anarchist, and a hunter to a geriatric fascist. Add to that a “centrist” who looks suspiciously like Judd Hirsch. In the civilized world this would be readily identified as a failure.

Good luck with all that, but remember: don’t bend over to pick up the soap.

Gentle Europe

Where a fascist political punter can find flaws in admitting to any sort of inhumanity, even 60 year later.

Jean-Marie Le Pen "regrets" that President Jacques Chirac acknowledged the French government's responsibility for deporting French Jews during the Holocaust. In an interview published Sunday in Le Parisian, the extreme right-wing candidate in France’s presidential elections said, "Chirac was the only president to do it. Not even [Francois] Mitterrand did it."

Nonetheless, one thing is clear, the public shows itself to be even more uncouth, not to mention vulgar and violent.

"In two countries - France and Norway - chief rabbis are calling on Jews not to step outside with Jewish symbols on their person," said Prof. Dina Porat, who edited the report along with Stauber.

[ ... ]

The breakdown of anti-Semitic incidents worldwide is heavily tilted toward Western Europe, which witnessed 54% of them, followed by North America - whose Jewish population is over five times the size of Western Europe's - with just 17% and the former Soviet Union with 13%.

To translate that into simpler terms, the risk to the individual is nearly 16 times higher in western Europe than in North America.

Fractured Fairy Tales

Boris and Natasha are steel trying to make beeg trabul bor crazy Moose and Squirrel. Elsewhere, Russia’s high quality journalism covers more meaningful matters.

- Tip of the lid to George.

Islamist Porn Snuff Film to be Released Shortly

A Jihadist Palestinian militia claims to have killed BBC Gaza reporter Alan Johnston. Apparently they can’t control themselves. Those who claim to have killed him say Britain is somehow responsible, inspite of the fact that they kidnapped him, (or appropriated him from a ringer,) and claim to have murdered him.

"The whole world knows of our just cause in demanding the release of our prisoners, who are waiting under the fire of the occupation," the statement began. "Our demand was that all of those who are responsible for the journalist... release our prisoners who are being held in the prisons of the occupation," it continued.

Despite the fact that these groups are notorious liars about their claims, they may have actually taken his life. Either way, it’s your fault.

Islamist porn to follow:

"We will disseminate a video in which we show his killing soon to the media outlets," the statement said.

In closing, it captured the limit of the depth of their moral underpinning:

Allah is great, for it is either victory or martyrdom," it concluded.

Who’s next?

- H/T to Avary.

“Reporting News” Not Part of Their Agenda

In a bid to squelch any scrutiny on their bias and motive, the press tend to armor themselves with claims of their own political detachment. When caught out many claim that the selectiveness of their reporting has a “social role.”

Nonsense. Most of the European press are little more than political hit-men.

By a vote of 66 to 54, the annual delegate's meeting of Britain's largest trade union for journalists called for "a boycott of Israeli goods similar to those boycotts in the struggles against apartheid South Africa led by trade unions, and [for] the [Trades Union Congress] to demand sanctions be imposed on Israel by the British government."

Some of the union's 40,000 members decried its "trendy lefty" agenda. Other motions before the four-day meeting in Birmingham, which ends Sunday, included condemnations of the US detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and support for Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez.

Yet only “some” noticed that the press had an agenda. Given the divine illumination you can feel coming off of their own Code of Conduct, the very notion that it sould even get as far as showing any kind of evidence of the presence an agenda means that they are long past the point of just seeking out flaws, they are in a catastrophic state of failure as a profession.

A journalist shall at all times defend the principle of the freedom of the press and other media in relation to the collection of information and the expression of comment and criticism. He/she shall strive to eliminate distortion, news suppression and censorship.

[...]

A journalist shall strive to ensure that the information he/she disseminates is fair and accurate, avoid the expression of comment and conjecture as established fact and falsification by distortion, selection or misrepresentation.

[...]

No journalist shall knowingly cause or allow the publication or broadcast of a photograph that has been manipulated unless that photograph is clearly labelled as such. Manipulation does not include normal dodging, burning, colour balancing, spotting, contrast adjustment, cropping and obvious masking for legal or safety reasons.

They are simply hopeless.

They Expect You to Love Them Because They Hate You

”Not gay enough” 80’s bubble-gum pop washup George Michael has put John Lennon’s piano on tour of sites “of violence”, with a curious selectivity: it’s reported that it will be tour locations in the US such as Ford’s Theater (where Lincoln was shot), the site of the Kennedy assassination, and so forth as a warm-up to set the groundwork for a collection of locations leftist cite appropriate as politically “theirs” for the purpose of imposing guilt for past events to draw attention to their political views.
The organizers have a full and precise schedule in the US, but have only made a vague reference to events in Europe – as if to imply that nothing violent ever happened there.

No word on whether or not this inanimate object that some would try to imbue with meaning will be touring the Communist Gulags, the killing woods of Poland, Daniel Ortega’s prisons where 25,000 people are estimated to have been killed in less than 2 years, the Armenian Turkey, Castro’s mass killings and imprisonments, the Nazis’ concentration camps, or any location in China, Cambodia, Vietnam, or the train-yards of France, Belgium, The Netherlands Switzerland, Austria, and Italy where people were packed into boxcars to be sent to their death.

Apparently, none of that is wrong enough for people who these hostile passive-aggressive types who call themselves “pacifists.” They will ignore hundreds of millions of deaths at the hands of leftist ideologies for those that they’ve appropriated as somehow being uniquely wicked because they are American, such as 3,445 lynchings of black people over 87 years.

The fact that Americans have made a genuine effort in the past half a century to redress its’ own social errors is what gives cause to the likes of these “pacifists” to blame her even further because the goal is not the making of a less violent world, it is use of their own complaints as a instrument for the rest of us to “imagine there’s no religion” which would surely puzzle Rev. Martin Luther King, and the genuine figures in the advancement of Civil Rights whose reputations they want to rob society of to describe themselves with.

Theirs’ is an act of taking the path of least resistance to anyone calling them on their underhanded motives.

Why do they get to vote at all?

As we’ve learned before, where prisoners can vote, they vote for the left for one simple reason: it’s in their interest and they get to join the cult of victimhood, each with a special place in the hierarchy of guilttripping and pity-sseking, which, they say, will somehow make us all more equal.

The presidential election from behind bars

At Nanterre prison, most of the prisoners are very young and come from the cities [suburban high-rise ghettos], display a kind of disillusionment and depoliticization. Out of 850, 22 will vote by proxy.

After all, why not add voters who are more likely to advocate negative measures on society? It’s not like civilization has a future or anything!

Coming Soon: a Novelty Called “the Telephone!”

Fake peasant alert

Zéro: « José, si tu es élu, ça sera qui, ta politique internationale ?

Bové: « En tous cas, ça ne sera sûrement pas un politique d’alignement sur les Etats-Unis. Pour moi, la France, elle doit d’abord faire respecter le droit des peoples.

Zéro: “José, if you’re elected, what will be your international policy.”

Bové: “In any event it won’t involve a political agreement with the United States. To me France must above all respect the rights of the peoples.”

People are largely immune to noticing the same stale anachronistic trash the rest of the world moved on from 50 years ago, not knowing the difference between the individual (the person) and a politically manipulable lumpenproletariat these crackpots are fond of calling “peoples” and the “the people.” Wow. There’s a winning concept to dealing with complex issues and affairs: parade your feelings around for the empathy and votes of equally naïve luddites.

And that pretty much sums it up. While the other candidates simply made a platform statement (with variable degrees of interest,) Bové’s involved a overexposed TV comedian (who as a kind of nagging political fishwife,) and interviews with a bunch of old hippies and people the viewer are supposed to think look like the unemployed, if you can get over the fact that they can afford better clothes than the average voter.



Others still, have yet to enter the 20th century.
Dead enders in every way.

Of course peace and love also means the usual tacit violent threats of fist-pumping too, which the Marxists and Trotskyites who couldn’t agree to come up with one candidate and ended up with six will be forgiven for having forgotten.

The Land that Time Forgot

Welcome to the lad where it’s always 1923:

the field of 12 presidential hopefuls contains six candidates to the left of the Socialist Royal, including “three Trotskyists [and] a Communist.” You know a country is serious about Marxism when there are so many Marxist candidates that the Trotskyists are listed separately from the garden-variety Communists.

But these fine distinctions are apparently still taken seriously on the far left. The World Socialist Web Site, for example, published a broadside against Olivier Besancenot, the presidential candidate of the Revolutionary Communist League. Accusing him of denying Marxism by publicly disassociating himself from Trotsky, the website quoted Besancenot as voicing tolerance for different strands of communism “such as libertarianism and syndicalism.”

It’s certainly touching to see that French presidential candidates are so inclusive, embracing everything from communist libertarianism to communist syndicalism. Amazingly, that’s not even the full extent of the anti-capitalist choices on the French ballot. Voters can also choose Jose Bove, a sheep farmer and anti-globalization crusader. Candidate Bove preaches ''an electoral insurrection against economic liberalism'' and ''a social, feminist, democratic, anti-racist and ecological revolution'' -- a program rarely advocated outside American university classrooms.

But the most puzzling anachronism about the pre-cambrian European left is the absolute lack of attention to their own world view. For example, it’s perfectly okay to refer to a female candidate in the most condescending sounding and entirely maternal terms:

Royal's bedside manner leaves the French voters cold

A word here, a handshake there, a smile everywhere. This is what Mme Royal is supposed to be good at: retail politics; bringing the aloof, ruling classes of France closer to real people and real issues.

That is the theory. In truth, Mme Royal is not particularly good at it. She is not a natural, I-feel-your-pain, bear-hug politician like a Jacques Chirac or a Bill Clinton. There is something stiff about her, something almost haughty, like an old-fashioned hospital matron doing her rounds.

"I tried to talk to her but she just smiled and walked on," said Louise, 43, a nursing assistant."I do like her, or I want to like her, but I just don't know. I am just not quite sure who she really is."

Ruling classes? Are they kidding? Never. They’ve been using the same barbaric terms for a century, and in the hothouse free from reality will continue to.

And It’s All Your Fault.

Now turn out your pockets to these bums.



Regarding the strikes at a Citroën pland, L’Humanité features “championship” striking

“Several hundred workmen rebelled against low wages. An increase in their purchasing power is at the center of the conflict which will weigh in at the ballot box”

Freedom is Worth More than their Power

E-nough! has found some curious graffiti on the campaign posters of the nagging poodles of Marxism.

Motto: “Our lives are worth more than their profits!”
Graffiti, succinct rebuttal: 100 million killed.

Pointless. Newsless. Meaningless.

And contextually nonsensical. But it doesn’t matter.



Published in Al-Jazeera Sur Seine nonetheless.

Mahmood’s “Gift”

And the only way you can use the word “gift” is in the original German. To put into context what “shnuggums” is up to, I leave you to the brutally honest characterization of Ahmedinejad’s treatment by the peaceniks and the press by the charming and talented Ex-Blond:

Have a nice day.

Walking Down the Corridor is Not an Option

One wonders, who’s holding back vital information which could undermine people’s liberties? AmeriKKKa again? No. MEP’s want to know what their own negotiators are up to, so they have to go somewhere where dissent isn’t stifled!

MEPs are hoping that a meeting with members of the US Congress in Washington, DC, next week (17 April) will reveal details of how negotiations are progressing on the transfer of European citizens’ data for counter-terrorism purposes.

“I hope the trip will be useful in helping get some overview. We might get information on what is happening on the EU-US dialogue. Our [US] counterparts might be better informed,”

Elsewhere with all the detachment of a small, compartmented mind, Europol is proving a dictum without anyone’s help:

Brussels is keen to extend the agency's mandate to criminal issues that are not strictly related to organised crime and give the organisation greater access to various data on people under investigation, prompting concerns that privacy protection laws could be violated.

"These proposals give Europol a carte blanche to collect whatever information it wants, regardless of its relevance," said UK conservative MEP Syed Kammal in a statement.

European Terrorists, Unlike Europeans, are Multiplying like Rabbits

All that tolerance and understanding must be starting to kick in.

Almost 500 terrorist attacks were reportedly carried out in 11 member states last year with separatists and nationalists in the Basque region of Spain and on the French island of Corsica responsible for most of the attacks.

Just a Spoonful of Sugar...

...makes the hatefulness go down...

Let's face it: even the most confident and stylish among us knows that some considerable proportion of French people we encounter are sizing us up by sizing us up. Other countries produce fat people too, but the association of America with obesity is not only — and unfortunately — statistically a truism but an image of which the French media just can't get enough. It's hard to find a story about French obesity rates in the French press that doesn't at some point raise the frightening possibility of French people looking one day like: Americans.

Speaking of going down, (or not), I always knew Le Pen was a wanker. Oh – sorry. That’s that extra special sooper-dooper quirky and sophisticates of politics that no-one’s ever allowed to criticize. I don’t know about you, but I start getting a little edgy when I hear any kind of European use the word “genetics,” especially the fat ones.

The Way of the Quero

The creation of Europeana is "for France and Europe an important challenge and a great ambition to the service of spreading knowledge, cultural diversity, keeping the value of languages and the information that is the base of our shared identity,"

They still don’t get it. All leaving it to a government could do is to create a monoculture.

US Internet search giant Google triggered an international race to build an online library when it announced plans in December 2004 to digitise books and documents from a handful of big libraries.

US Internet and software giants Yahoo, Microsoft and Amazon soon announced separate plans while France, angry that private companies took the lead, instead pushed for the creation of a public digital library.

Lame attempts to nationalize the people all culture continue. The fact that private interests in Europe aren’t doing anything like this is a sign of the diminishing interest that comes with the suffocating effect of government trying to personify, if not entirely dominate the life, history, and management of all life.

Translation of Erik’s post: « Il n'y a pas de médias qui traitent l'information correctement sur les Etats-Unis »

From ¡No Pasarán!: Il n'y a pas de médias qui traitent l'information correctement sur les Etats-Unis : “None of the Media [in France] Describes Anything About America Accurately”

So said Nicolas Lecaussin to France-Etats-Unis's Carine Martinez.

Don’t forget that we are the only country to have published a review devoted entirely to anti-Americanism called Empire. Another example is a publication handed out for free in the subway called “Practical Voyage”, which is supposed to give travel advice. The lead article was an anti-American item about the biometric passports there by blaming Americans for not wanting to give us to get passports to go over there when everyone knows the passports were held up by the national printing trade unions which refused to lose their monopoly on of printing passports.
None of the media describes anything about America accurately. Two months ago in Le Figaro an article compared Guantanamo to a Gulag. It is an insult to the victims of the Gulags, if one had compared it to Auschwitz, I think that it would be an insult to its’ victims.
The Gulag was an extermination and concentration camp, where million of people died by being exterminated, massacred, from hunger, and cold in the depths of Siberia. When one sees an article in Le Figaro making this comparison, one can only wonder just how dishonesty of our journalists are.

- Crossposted on
¡No Pasarán!

Flashback 2003

“Shoving democracy down people’s throats”


Oh! The horror of regime change!

Their Last Remaining Clue has Already PCS’ed

In Europe, reality is always away on TDY:

The Air Force and Navy, in an undeclared competition to use the first Rafale against the Taleban, are deploying the new French multi-role fighter at the same time, with its new ground attack capability (F2 standard.) Having left France last week, three Air Force Rafales have been based in Tajikistan since Monday [12 March]. They were due to make their first flight yesterday. Three more have joined the aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle via Djibouti.

This deployment is something of an event for both forces. It is indeed the Rafale's real baptism of fire, since these aircraft will be used in ground attack missions, whereas hitherto they have been used only for surveillance over Afghanistan. "At the operational level, the aircraft's multi-role capability permits a leap forward," Air Force Chief General Stephane Abrial explained.

So, I guess that as long as there’s a product coming to market to demonstrate, use of aerial bombing is perfectly okay.

To deploy the new fighter in Afghanistan it was necessary to pursue a crash programme, since the possibility of delivering laser-guided bombs was not initially envisaged.

In other words, they could only have been envisioning the indiscriminate use of unguided gravity weapons when they designed this thing for ground support. This brings us to our delusional, slanderous scribble of the day:


Elsewhere:

It is not the beginning of a withdrawal, but just seems like one. The French contingent in Cote d'Ivoire is to be reduced by 500 men during the coming weeks, from some 3,000 troops to 3,000
[figures as received].

Maybe they’ve been breeding while they were there.

When in Doubt, Start “Diebolding”

Maybe they think the machines will read their minds and suck out their souls. They also seem somewhat convinced of their own overraught accusations of others:

But with election day less than three weeks away, opposition to the electronic voting machines has grown, in part because a small percentage of them are made by the same American company whose machines were involved in a bitterly disputed Congressional election in Florida last November.

These machines... you know that their don’t just count votes, they, they, know the ideology of some electrons, and not others... and their cosmic rays are poisoning us!

Behold the NYT’s “frightened” looking French voters

“We have doubts about the reliability of these machines,” Gilles Savary, a spokesman for Ségolène Royal, the Socialist Party candidate, said in an interview. “I don’t want to lecture America. But we don’t want France to fall into the same Kafkaesque balloting as happened in the United States.”

Bullshit, when have the likes of this guy NOT lectured America? The only thing that was Kafkaesque about it to leftists was that they lost, and like 2000 and 2004 were caught stuffing ballot boxes, and then accused others of stealing elections.

In Bed With Evil

Fret all you like.

The status quo is based on an EU policy paper dating back to 1996 which says that "the objective of the EU in its relations with Cuba is to encourage a process of transition to pluralist democracy and respect for human rights" but despite its tough wording the old EU model has done little to strengthen pro-democracy opposition groups.

But since 1996 the best they’ve managed is to attempt to conceal from view engagement endeavors with the Cubans using EU and member state monies and private arranged efforts. Imprisoning dissidents? Don’t ask, don’t tell!

But Spain, supported by Greece and Cyprus, wants Berlin to shelve the new EU paper despite its softly-softly approach. Madrid says any EU policy shift in mid-2007 could damage prospects of a "new era" in Cuba-EU relations, with the opening created by the fragile health of 80-year old leader Fidel Castro and upcoming elections in March 2008.

Aside from the wishful thinking that an election in Cuba could matter, one has to point out the obvious – even a “softly-softly” approach to the advancement of human freedom and the alleviation of poverty and misery is more than the ideologues in Madrid can bear. Quite simply, without a veneer of fake radicalism, it’s inadequate.

Alas, off in the distance, can’t one hear the thundering clamor for a “human rights Europe”?

"The visit of the Spanish minister of foreign affairs to Cuba is driven by bilateral economic interests," People in Need analyst Kristina Prunerova said, predicting that Mr Moratinos will not meet any real dissidents on the trip but that Havana might release a handful of political prisoners to help Madrid "sell" its policy back in Brussels.

Or is that the desperate sound of begging?

- Crossposted on
¡No Pasarán!

But That IS their History

André Glucksmann points out how action can speak for themselves:

The protagonists of this shady entanglement include not only heads of the military industrial complex (like Gergorin, who worked at Lagardere, EADS, Airbus and Ariane), top figures at the foreign ministry (Villepin) and secret service spies (General Rondot), they also include members of the government's geopolitical think-tank CAP, which works out diplomatic and strategic initiatives of the Elysee, for example France's "Arab" and "African" policies, and its support for Milosevic and Saddam Hussein in their heydays. This heterogeneous black cabinet which prefers to avoid publications and media attention, quietly gathers together post-communist intellectuals and post-Gaullist elite-bureaucrats under the banner of a respectable anti-Americanism, open to both left-wing anti-imperialists and right-wing sovereigntists: Regis Debray and Emmanuel Todd are esteemed advisers.

This endearing family presides - without either undue modesty or parliamentary control - over the worldly destinies of France. A country with a mere hundredth of the world's inhabitants has worked its way up to be the planet's third-biggest arms dealer. Cock-a-doodle-doo! In a demonstration of "soft power" and universal moral sovereignty, Dominique de Villepin's famous speech at the UN in 2003 revealed to the four billion people of the world, in Jacques Chirac's words, that France was still France. The Paris-Moscow axis pursues its objectives to the detriment of Europe of the 25; arms and patents are delivered to China to the detriment of the Atlantic Alliance: all this raises our camarilla far above the classic, measured anti-Americanism from De Gaulle to Mitterrand which in times of danger (be it the Cuba Crisis or the question of the Russian SS20 missiles) always came home to the fold of Euro-American democracies. Today, all of that is history. Down with "hyper power"!

- Crossposted on
¡No Pasarán!

Medievalism is the New Black

Andrei Markovits, writing in the Huffington Post (of all places) notes:

As I argue in my recently published book, Uncouth Nation: Why Europe Dislikes America, anti-Americanism precedes the misdeeds of the Bush administration and will remain largely intact even when - God willing - we will see this eight-year-long nightmare end on January 20, 2009 with the inauguration of a Democrat as our new president. Anti-Americanism has become a welcome currency in Europe and for Europeans.

Even to the mature ones who can’t seem to countenance conservatives find decades of demeaning anti-American propaganda in evidence. Nonetheless an entirely typical witch-burning peasant of the new, deeply superstitious progressives pops up like Dr. Strangelove’s arm:

It may be because GW Bush has murdered half a million people.

Attributing it in the only way they know how, to ill humors spread somehow with a time machine from 2007 to 1968.

Wow. Impressive.

Who's Your Daddy?

Kiss His Puckered Starfish, Get Gas

It’s all about oil. Again.

Freedom: Not In Their Name

Amir Taheri:

Iraq's parties of the Left were shocked when the new Socialist government in Spain decided to withdraw from the U.S.-led coalition in 2004. "We had hoped that with a party of the Left in power in Madrid we would get more support against the Islamofascists, not a withdrawal," says Aziz al-Haj, the veteran Iraqi communist leader.

Elsewhere, on leftists being unable to conceal their hatred of civilization, one can easilt see that

While Chomsky and Moore see the United States as "an evil power," many leftists in the Middle East see it as a force for good that ended the tyranny of the Taliban in Afghanistan, dismantled the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq and forced the Syrians out of Lebanon after 30 years of occupation.

"In our region, the United States has become a force for the good," says Jumblatt, who recently met President Bush at the White House for a surprise meeting.

"I was sitting there and I thought...

Which step comes after denial? Joschka Fischer has the answer:

Relating a recent incident where a former Indian foreign minister came to lecture at Princeton and said that the 21st century will see three superpowers – India, China and the US – Mr. Fischer said "I was sitting there and I thought, 'why the hell is nobody in Europe realizing what is going on!'"

Welcome to their world – one where their own population and press are so dissembled that they can’t figure out what’s fishy about state mandated Molotov cocktails.

The Golden Age of Dada

“Work, but at what price” is the topic on today’s Ripostes on the deeply irresponsible France 5. Adding to the cluelessness of this display of stupidity is that the guests are all selling books on the subject, when they know full well that property is theft!

How to develop a personal identity without working? Is all better than unemployment? The government announced loudly that unemployment fell to 8,4%, but does one have to take these figures seriously?

In truth, does one really have to do away with the 35 hour workweek, and reform the fair labor standards act to put France’s hourly workweek on par with the rest of the world? Or does one rather have to further protect the workers in their guarantees as the CGT proposes to have a social security for the job?

Other questions: is it necessary to set wages so that work pays more than being unemployed? How do you employ the greatest number of people without the anguish of terrible competition, and not devouring us with stress or even suicides which occur one per day at work?

Old Serge should open the show by welcoming the other 99% of humanity to the hall of mirrors.

Of course all the other channels in a culture which, no better than the most backward corner of Absurdistan is still dominated by state-run output. As such what better way could you find to blot the violent domestic gang warfare out of the public’s mind than to barely report it, and toss up a penetrating investigation of the violent gangs in... California!