Beneath the Bluster: Europeans Want America to Stay in Iraq

Beyond the eternal confidence in it’s own superior wisdom and humanism, the European public will march, whine, berate any passer-by, and buy anything that says “America out of Iraq”... or “America out of ___”... for that matter.

The reality of the “love of stability” lies elsewhere. It’s provided to you courtesy of none other than Georges Boosh. A Berlin based think-tank found European analysts who think that unlike America’s angry left, and Europe’s adolescent-level thinking mush middle, that the US must stay in Iraq. For Europe’s sake.

Against Troop Withdrawal

While the American public and policy debate revolves largely around exit strategies and “redeployment,” there is apparent consensus among European policy analysts that American troops should remain in Iraq for the foreseeable future. In contrast to both European media opinion and the prevailing views of American liberals, our respondents supported sustained troop levels. Many consider the announcement of a timetable for withdrawal to be counter-productive and even outright dangerous, saying that lack of American involvement would drive Iraq into further chaos.

They are, however, no less distracted by the press’ blame and dwell approach to affairs in Iraq:

Dr. Reidar Visser, a research fellow at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs who also runs the Iraq website Historiae, observed that the “main problem [with the current strategy] is the heavy emphasis on security instead of creative political initiatives to encourage national reconciliation.”

As if that wasn’t really happening. Besides, the stock international functionalry-types’ thinking might not think of the approach being taken in Iraq: letting the Iraqis call as much of the tune of political control as possible. “Creative” solutions from abroad would be just that, and of all Saddam’s problems, the biggest one was that he was a dictator. It gave him the means to suppress, kill, declare random wars, meddle in the affairs of numerous Arab states, and so on.

The Never Ending Spin Cycle

The real “pistelero” is the one you can’t fire.




Le Monde lays out 14 days in poop-stain Hugo Chavez’ life (as a budding greater dictator than he already is,) and fails to mention that the independent press is being pushed out in Venezuela. Funny thing for the “independent paper” to do without so much as a hint of perfunctory ‘solidarlty’ for their brothers in ink. The start with a description of his ongoing activity of fully occupying the media space, and then indulge it even more.

Someone Please Ask the Promoters of the Guy Moquet Cult

Why is it the same kind of people who always oppose wars that are meant to end dictatorial rule and mass murder?

The new RSL became the British affiliate of the newly formed Fourth International. They maintained the Militant Labour League as an united front for those members who were involved in Labor Party entryism and published The Militant.
The position of the WIL was swiftly vindicated when the Revolutionary Socialist Party left, most of the leadership joining the Independent Labour Party while younger members joined the Workers International League (WIL).
The group adopted a defeatist policy during World War II, which they modelled on Lenins Revolutionary defeatist tactics of the 1914-18 war but which was seen by their rivals in the WIL as being pacifist, and had some initial successes when the Shop Assistants' Union (later USDAW) adopted their position in 1940. This led the Labour Party to ban the Militant Labour League. In addition, the group became increasingly inactive as many younger members were conscripted into the British Army.
More importantly the group's position opposing the war became a major cause of factional strife both within the group and between it and the WIL. Three major positions developed which help to explicate the ensuing factional divisions outlined below. Firstly a Left Fraction formed which opposed the war on a basis all other factions described as pacifist. Secondly the leadership faction around D D Harber held a position that opposed the Proletarian Military Policy (PMP) of the WIL and was described by its opponents as semi-pacifist. Finally the WIL and tendencies leaving the RSL at different times adhered to the aforementioned PMP.

How is it that it reads like the minutes of a British Trade Union Congress meeting from the 70s, or any event in the present day where Code Pink is involved. Some things never change.

In the Mean time, I’m still waiting for Europeans to treat home-grown Jihadist that way they treat their home-grown neo-Nazis.

More Like “Giving It TO The People”

A Swedish doctor who was fired from his job in Norway for using a controversial 'anal massage' technique to cure various kinds of pain has resurfaced in Denmark where he has been working at a psychiatric ward in a Copenhagen hospital.

Funny, isn’t it, that the more you see any nation or society socializing things out of the public realm and into the hands of the government, the more it’s rationed? The other thing you see is people turning to “alternative” and non-scientific solutions, and hiring on marginal services and loony practitioners due to that very same overvaluing of the thing they’ve just “given to the people”?

"Problematic doctors have been given free rein in Europe. We are currently working hard to change this situation," she added.

In April last year a council in the Nord-Tröndelag area of Norway dismissed the doctor after only two weeks, when they realized that he was the same man who hit the headlines a year earlier when another local authority fired him.

The man described his dismissal in Norway as part of a witch-hunt against him,

Alas, pity him, you brutes! He’s got poop chutes to violate in the interest of mental hygiene.

The Norwegian counterpart to HSAN also had cause to warn the man after he told Swedish jokes to a group of Norwegians who were mourning a death.

The man said at the time that he considered himself misunderstood.

"I have a personality disorder, or rather a syndrome, a form of Aspergers. Just like Bill Gates or Einstein, for example," he told Aftonbladet.

Oppressed, in need of sympathy, and, according to himself:brilliant!

"I have made it impossible for myself within the healthcare sector because I behave childishly sometimes. I am different, but cleverer."

I’ll wishg you all one simple thing: be well.

You’re Right, They Aren’t. Even Though You’d Like Them To Be.

From Sight and Sound:

Frankfurter Rundschau 21.09.2007

Arno Widmann reflects on the 116 newly discovered photos showing Auschwitz SS guards at rest on display at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in New York: "These aren't Abu Ghraib photos. The Auschwitz staff didn't photograph each other lashing out at the inmates, or while they were being murdered. Perhaps such photos will yet appear. But these images are even more horrible. Here we come close to the perpetrators. And with them, their deeds. The Abu Ghraib photos show us what people are capable of. The Auschwitz photos show nothing, they give us a sense of what we are capable of. In front of them we start to think about the circumstances that make murderers of neighbours."

Let’s set aside the disingenuousness of the statement and test the comparison’s trying to be made here: 1.6 million people were killed at Auschwitz, while no-one was killed at Abu Greib since the days of Saddam Hussein.

Ant the people in the pictures Arno “Winkler” Widmann is talking about appear to be enjoying themselves in a manner beneath the humanity of anyone who would be aware of what’s going in. With great Euro-élan, they once again make it look effortless. While being entirely unaware of how little change has been seen in the temperament and excitability of the garden variety European, the matter of the 150 million dead resulting from the European concepts of Marxism, Fascism, and other evolved forms of dictatorship and Fin De Ciècle public madness is blotted out of the mind, having never passed the unaware and unhealed soul.

So indeed, those fetishising the 3 weeks and 20-odd criminals abused at Abu-Greib very much need to put on a happy face while the comparisons flow, if they need that to diminish their confusion. To reiterate: we KNOW ABOUT THIS because the Army BUSTED THEY PEOPLE THAT DID IT. On the other hand, the German government and a large part of the society willfully constructed the concentration camps and protected their knowledge of them for as long as possible.

Even to this day there are people engaging in verbal contortions to convince others that Auschwitz was A-O-TAY.

Want a really apt comparison? Compare the European denial and willful ignorance of the abuse that minorities face in the radical, socialist-arab-nationalist, and areas where religious law dominates people – with the contented look on the faces of the photographed cited in Frankfurter Rundschau.

Really want to know what horrors people are capable of? No need to cite 3 weeks in an Iraqi Prison. One merely need look at European history within living memory, and in their desperate and paranoiac need to accuse others of something when it took them millennia to open up their borders even to one another across a patchwork of miniscule fortresses of “culture” on their own patch.

Tales From New Havana

By all means, Fidel. Send Chavez more doctores:

CARACAS (Reuters) - A Venezuelan man who had been declared dead woke up in the morgue in excruciating pain after medical examiners began their autopsy.

Meanwhile, back on the moldy sofa at “we want failed Marxism in America HQ”, this, or anything Wal-Mart does better than any other large employer of common-skilled labor does, just won’t do:

Wal-Mart said it would give each employee or family that signs up for coverage a grant of $100 to $500 to defray health expenses while charging premiums as low as $5 a month. It will eliminate expensive hospital deductibles and make 2,400 generic drugs available to employees for $4 a prescription — about 1,000 more than it sells to customers at that price.
Wal-Mart Watch, a group long critical of the company, said yesterday that “these plans are still unaffordable due to low wages or inaccessible due to waiting periods.”

In other words, they monthly cost is less than a patient’s co-pay would be in blessed EUtopia. Of course that isn’t enough though. Gee kids, lookit... capitalism works.

- H/T to Georges

Lefty’s Usual Cannibalism

One poor loser to another: Ségolène Royal said that if she was Joan of Arc, then she was burned at the stake. Rue 89 aims it at Lionel Jospin who called her the candidate least likely to succeed which isn’t quite true. She came ahead of the band of Marxist Bozos, Neo-fascists, a hunter’s party, the neo-druid José Bové, and Bay-roo who appears not to believe in anything.

To boot, on Monday Royal called Jospin a racist and a sexist. Watch out for that magic wand, Casper.

It’s all there – it’s more or less the minor features found in the shadows of the U.S. presidential election of 1984: baiting with religious imagery, white people accusing each other of racism and sexism... twenty 3 years later. Now if their minds would only catch up with the idea that Communism failed 20 years ago, they might get somewhere. For now we can enjoy the cage match.

Sneering Their Way to Good Mental Health

Never mind the boozy mid-day meal on the way to being rude to co-workers, or the divinity of “slow food” argument (not the practice) which we're supposed to believe is a “movement”. Charles Bremner finds that they just KNOW what every last American is like. A ministry of Tourism brochure distributed to retaurants in time for the Rugby World Cup indicated that:

With all foreigners, French restaurateurs are advised to explain when a dish comes from offal or includes meat with blood still visible. "Americans like their meat de-animalised," it says. "Its origin with a living animal must not be visible. Offal dishes, frogs' legs and snails disgust them.

As these dishes disgust most of the French, but that's beside the point. Pretending that their perpetually bland diets are noble and challenging, would they know what to do with a serving of Rocky Mountain Oysters? Methinks not.

Americans spend all day eating -- ingesting food on 20 different occasions -- and they are obsessed with not getting fat, the Ministry tells the restaurateurs.
But it advises them to forget their clichés about Americans being devoted to hamburgers and French fries. "American tourists in France come from a high social level and they like to visit and tour regions that are rich with history. They are very open and enthusiastic people who appreciate conviviality and personalised service."

Okay – got it! We'de like to hate the Americans we meet, but they aren't as bad as we hope, but take heart! The REAL ones are much, MUCH WORSE!

How France3 “Celebrated” 9/11

A correspondent writes:

This is at least the third airing of this documentary. Based on a book, one airing I remember in particular was around the D-Day anniversary of 2005, when the MSM emphasized the brotherhood of French and German veterans, how the allied bombed French cities,... this was after the commemoration of the Provence landing, when no mention was made of the “Anglo-saxons”, only of the North Africans who Liberated France.

The TV guide notes:

”The Hidden Face of the Liberators” - (rerun) A documentary by Patrick Cabouat. According to ciminologist Robert J. Lilly, liberators who were meant to liberate Europe from Nazism raped or killed French, British, and German citizens in 1944 and 45. The recent opening of legal archives permitted us to see something that would otherwise remain a secret.

Our view: this documentary is a poignant testimony of the acts of atrocities of soldier welcomed as liberators.

- with thanks to Kevin

Crowd Demands: “Let the Genocide Really Begin!”

Thousands of protesters marched through the streets of Washington today, from near the White House to the Capitol, where they staged a "die-in" to demonstrate their fervent opposition to the war in Iraq.

- WaPo

Organisers said 100,000 people attended Saturday's protest, but police did not confirm the figure.

- Al Jazeera

The recent “Die-In” in Washington, DC which was staged by the likes of Code Pink and International (I don’t have an) A.N.S.W.E.R. is just a dress rehearsal for the genocide that come if the U.S. does what they wish and abandon the Iraqi people.

At least it will resolve that demand, and they can go back to the “you break it, you bought it” argument which will last them for years after a withdrawal, because it will allow them to demand something else that just as insoluble. So just like the boat people, and Pol Pot’s body count, it doesn’t matter how many will have to die to prop up the loony left’s world view.

As for the “hundred thousand” protestors that newspapers far and wide, but certainly not local are referring to, I have to ask: “thousands of WHAT ?” They barely stopped traffic around the Capitol.

In the mean time, I think this sport has potential as a really crowd-pleasing new Olympic event.

Leftist Solutions and “Constructive Engagement”

One argument after another, one “but why one place and not another” after another, one demand to talk with your enemies from a position of weakness after another: that’s what the emotionally insulated global left, the ones stuck somewhere between the denialists of the “Truther” movement and those with some common sense would say.

But with whom and how? There are an abundance of precedents that showed that French, German, and Italian leniency with the Red terrorists of the 70’s and 80’s didn’t do anything other that lower the threshold of decency, and allowed the RAF, Red Brigades, the Bader-Meinhof types and their sympathists in the street deepen and widen their connections with Mideast terror and the intelligence operations of the Communist block.

However, most everything is forgiven when it comes to lefty violence, because even the natives let themselves believe the fairy-tale villain narrative about capitalism.

That it provided cover for murderers and people who wanted to tear western society apart didn’t seem to matter a great deal.

Now, almost two decades later, German police, prosecutors and other security officials have focused on a new suspect: the East German secret police, known as the Stasi. Long fodder for spy novelists like John le Carré, the shadowy Stasi controlled every aspect of East German life through imprisonment, intimidation and the use of informants -- even placing a spy at one point in the office of West German Chancellor Willy Brandt.
According to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, the murders of Mr. Herrhausen and others attributed to the Red Army Faction bear striking resemblance to methods and tactics pioneered by a special unit of the Stasi. The unit reported to Stasi boss Erich Mielke and actively sought in the waning years of the communist regime to imitate the Red Army Faction to mask their own attacks against prominent people in Western Germany and destabilize the country.

It’s relevance to today? It’s the cookbook that the Syrians have been operating under for a decade as the Libyans did before they were contained, and on a much larger scale, how the Iranians have been operating in large parts of the near-east.

Police acknowledge that part of the reason for their focus on possible Stasi involvement was that all other leads had dried up. But they say they also knew that over the years the Stasi had worked with and given explosives to other terrorists, including "Carlos the Jackal" and the Basque group ETA in Spain. And in 2001 to 2003, an undercover police officer met with a man who claimed he had been a killer for the Stasi operating in Western Germany, although police were never able to tie him to specific murders.

When a bomb goes off in Beirut, or in a western city for that matter, and there is no evidence, you don’t just need to ask yourself where the technology, techniques, and money came from, but wonder why they nebulously show signs of being somewhat attributable to “a few people,” “just a cell,” or “a few malcontents,” and not imagine that there aren’t state actors involved in it somehow.

Worse still, when the people who want to combat terror with talk, or police-work, or by negotiating silently by sending signals through the leniency of the defenders, what are they really doing that hasn’t been done before and failed? All it does is prove to an enemy that not only would our magnanimity offer them new opportunities, but prove to the potential victim that in a Politically Correct War on Terror, that the blood of the innocent is cheap.

Unlike the chants of the pot-banging idiots (no different than the 68ers,) that truly is the state letting it happen on purpose (LIHOP), and creating a climate of fear.

“Socialist Glory” or “Soylent Green” ?

Any way you shake it, it isn't just belittling, it doesn't work.

Of course, guess what's to blame? Just watch.

- from E-nough

I Prefer Constructionism

Lit Twits can keep their Constructivism. They’re only in love with it because they so completely useless that they can’t swing a hammer. Instead they try to philosophize it into motion.

Here’s how it works: to seem like they’re both doing something, and doing something new, academics often rob phrases and concepts from people who really do something, and appropriate everything but their meaning.

Forget about writing about what you know until you know something. In the mean time, stop talking in circles and get a job.

Like a Kapucha to Protect the Reader From Reality

Why the imperial portraiture? Because in their hearts, most Europeans see governments and leadership in a totalitarian context, and they seem to admire it.

That Americans see the world differently that this doesn’t seem to register, which is why reporting events as poorly as they do worse than not reporting them at all.



Le Monde can spin all they like. The Patreus report has absolutely nothing to do with them, other than the fact that terrorist who are kept busy in near east are not likely to show up in the magical land of Schengen begging for welfare and pity.

On the Monitoring of Enemy Transmissions

Stephen Pollard writing in The Times (London) describes perfectly the tone and demeanor that the BBC reserves for the United States. Meet Matt “Stir” Frei:

On Monday afternoon I watched General David Petraeus testify before Congress. I listened as he went through the facts of the military action in Iraq. I learnt as he outlined the improvements brought about in recent months.

But it wasn’t until I heard Frei’s take on General Petraeus’s words that I realised what had really been going on. The BBC Washington correspondent told us that he had listened “very carefully” – as opposed to his usual half-cocked approach, perhaps? – and gleaned what was actually being said: “Having tried to resist the fragmentation, the creeping partition, ethnic cleansing, the White House now seems to have bowed to that.”

Forget the reams of pages and the hours of testimony about military strategy and dealing with terrorists. The real story of the general’s report is that the White House is to start ethnically cleansing Iraqis.

I heard the same reporting and felt the same buzz, but this is the thing: as skeptical as I am of the BBC’s coverage of news in the U.S. is, I’ve grown used to expecting nothing else. It is typical, unremarkable, and for all the irresponsible invention of conclusions and selectivity, I find it pointless to get angry. Through the water torture of repetition of hypocrisy, I no longer notice it. Surely those not looking closely at the UK’s state broadcaster’s coverage of the U.S. would not need to take a gulp of the kool-aid. They have been given it daily in an eyedropper from birth.

One should not be surprised by Frei’s warped take. His reports from Washington drip with condescension towards Americans and, most of all, Republicans. He recently called the contest for the Republican nomination – a race that is rather more intriguing than usual – a “panic-stricken hunt”. Given his penchant for such creative contempt for the people among whom he lives, it’s no wonder that he has been nicknamed Stir Frei.

Awful as Frei may be, he fits the BBC’s editorial agenda perfectly. The lead report on Monday’s Ten O’Clock News, by the corporation’s world affairs editor, John Simpson, went two minutes without mentioning anything said by General Petraeus, offering instead clips of opponents of the war attacking the report. Simpson then sneered that President Bush cares not a jot what is actually happening in Iraq, caring only how US voters perceive it.

Indeed the irony is that what this once dependable and venerable news organization does is no longer the coverage of news at all. They do not report the news for the sake of making information available, they do much, MUCH less. They simply follow up with further coverage, rewrites, and tales retold to them through the press releases of ‘pressure groups’ and the like to cover the doings of a short list of issues.

Even at that, it is an ideologically driven exercise in the manner of Gramsci: by the eyedropper, until the viewers and listeners themselves can be selectively employed to produce for them a levee-break of the stuff and no cost to them.

So yesterday’s Victoria Derbyshire phone-in on BBC 5 Live was par for the course. The question of the day was: “Do you believe the Americans? Are things improving in Iraq?” For the first half-hour, every single caller informed us that Petraeus was lying about military progress. And don’t think the airing of such biased calls was anything other than an editorial decision. I called in to suggest that it was unlikely that the entire US military high command was engaged in a conspiracy to lie to the world. And was I put on air? Of course not.

- neer-do’ well and man about
town Stephen Pollard’s marathon
blogging can be found at stephenpollard.net

March of the Totalitarian Elves

While some frothing conspiracy theory lovers try to argue that French TV didn't show the WTC 9/11 attacks, others can't cite them often enough. Either way, don't they think that there's such a thing as cable TV or satellite, or heaven forbid, people in France may actually watch the non-french channels found on it?

Well, as Thierry Meyssan revealed it (The Pentagate), when transponder are cut, it automatically triggers an alert in control towers and jets are scrambled to see what is happening.

No they don't. Not before 9/11, and necessarily since. Not that truth ever got in a “truther's” way.

French Cable Channel “Celebrates” 9-11

Somewhere in between the porn reality shows, deadly animal handling, cop car-chase shows, ghost-hunting shows, and other sundry signposts in the highly evolved humanism of the land of the cultural obsession, cable channel “Planète No Limit” did the really thoughtful and warmhearted thing on September 11th, and gave Thierry Meyssan a platform in a “Documentary” on 9-11, right after a warm and sentimental showing of “Loose Change 2” from what is becoming a successful franchise in the spirit of the “Holloween” series, but with the seriousness and moral weight of “Porkys”.

What makes it slightly less preposterous, and at the same time more, is the treatment of the event as a drama:

The same correspondent recalls that last year, its’ parent channel, the leading French documentary channel Planète Loose Change on 9-11 as well. Planète appears to be a subsidiary of Canal +

Based on a best-seller, and of those of the same type published with success in Germany, our reporters carry out their investigation. The effects of these books are devastating. In Germany for example, a person on five believes that the American government itself is implied in the attacks.

In Germany, they meet Thierry Meyssan’s editor, Pierre Krebs, also president of a far-right pagan sect, the Thule Union. In Egypt, a persistent rumor starts: that four thousand Jews which worked in the towers were advised not to go to work the day of the attacks. Also in Egypt as the program’s creators collect astonishing testimony from Montasser Al Zayad a lawyer for the jihad and a friend of al-Queda’s second in command, which definitively blows the cover off of all the theories of the plot.

- Hat-tip to Kevin (who seems to be able to watch this stuff w/o gagging.

BBC C4 “Celebrates” 9-11

Al-Dura Affair: Enderlin Still Weaseling

The Blogs Extreme-Center and the Augean Stables continue to monitor the al-Dura affair, more to the point – monitoring the very typical “social management” of the deliberate lie’s effect on the reputation of a public institution.

To Patrick de Carolis, France2 Television
France2: Release the Secret Muhammad al Durah Tapes!

People around the world who depend on the media for reliability, accuracy, and transparency in reporting, demand that France2 release the unedited video tapes (”rushes”) that its Palestinian cameraman, Talal abu Rahmah, sent them on September 30 and October 1, 2000 from Gaza.
On September 30, 2000, your Middle East correspondent Charles Enderlin, broadcast a story about Muhammad al-Durah, a 12-year old Palestinian boy. Using the footage and the testimony from his cameraman, Talal abu Rahmah, Enderlin reported that Israeli soldiers had targeted and killed the boy. That allegation of deliberate murder spread instantaneously around the world.

Click here to sign the petition.The Fuse is Lit (No Pasaran!)

You’ve Learned the European Way Well, Grasshopper

Any possible blowback for the Wolfowitz witch-hunt has been otherwise buried in the Lame-stream Media.

In April, World Bank Managing Director Graeme Wheeler earned his 15 minutes of media fame when he publicly called on Paul Wolfowitz to resign for "the fantastic damage [Mr. Wolfowitz had done] to the bank's reputation and effectiveness." Mr. Wheeler may yet see those words turned against him.

Mr. Wheeler is among the bank employees behind a bureaucratic putsch against Suzanne Rich Folsom, the director of the bank's antigraft unit

He must be so proud.The Fuse is Lit (No Pasaran!)

Hatred is its’ Own Reason

That is... when you’re a leftist

There they were, the determined self-flagellators, flooding the talkback radio lines moaning about what they saw as Australia's and Prime Minister Howard's misplaced but slavish devotion to the US and President Bush.

What's wrong with us, they whimpered, wailing even more when the President said America had no better friend than Australia. They whined about the inconvenience of roadblocks caused by the presidential motorcade: did he really need that many gas-guzzlers? they griped

But for all people of that ilk, the world is static, dictators can mean well, time is something that long ago stood still.The Fuse is Lit (No Pasaran!)

What’s A Scribbler To Do When Events Don’t Match His World View?

In reporting the foiled terror attacks in Germany, an AP hack implies that even though the targets were centered on US citizens in Germany, with the obvious intention of scaring the German public into placing distance between itself and the US (Zapatero style) through the use of terror, that deposing Saddam Hussein is somehow behind it.

Germany, which did not send troops to Iraq, has been spared terrorist attacks such as the mass transit bombings in Madrid and London - although its involvement in the attempt to stabilize Afghanistan has led to fears it might be targeted.

Why use Europe for this? Apart from the fact that Zapatero’s actions have conclusively proved to the drooling fanatical observer that they are pushovers and readily manipulated, but that they also have a kind of inability to lead an idea domestically as well. In short they are the softest of soft targets from top to bottom.

I suppose al-Qaida have spiritual time machines in the AP writer’s mind, since the US involvement in Iraq must surely have had a lot to do with this kind of thing in 1999, and long since forgotten since the rump of the European public found the US as an enemy instead of the savages trying to bomb their people, cities, and public institutions.

Serguei’s Vane Fantasies about the World

”... It’s so unusual to see you here ...”
“... I feel a bit like I’m at home ...”

1. Implying that Bush has not come to Iraq often enough
2. Implying that the US is some kind of military regime (which he would LOVE if it involved south American leftists,) and that being surrounded by soldiers is “like home.”
3. That the soldiers have to string together a busted flag staff
4. That there are nothing but US soldiers in Iraq.
5. That they are faceless to the point of being inhuman.

I could go on, but why bother when Serguei through his actions proves himself to be no better than the filthy illiterate savages that are being tacitly supported in a Hizballah-loving “celebration” of 9/11.

Learned to Feel Guilty When Caught

Meet a PhD who just “couldn’t seem to realize” an abundance of things over the course of 3 years that your average high school drop-out could dope out in half an hour:

Despite having worked on South Africa's secret apartheid-era nuclear programme in the 1980s, when he was approached in 2000 by a nuclear industry contact about manufacturing a "compact pipework system" for an unnamed client, he'd said he hadn't batted an eyelid.

The client had paid him a handsome fee of 1 million euros (1.3 million dollars) to find a company in South Africa to manufacture the system.
On examining the plans Wisser and his employee Swiss-born engineer Daniel Geiges realized the drawings were for a uranium enrichment plant, but it never occurred to him that it could be for use in a nuclear weapons programme, Wisser previously claimed.

An old friend and fellow engineer with experience in the nuclear industry, Johan Meyer, of Tradefin Engineering near Johannesburg, was the recipient of the contract.
Wisser repeatedly claimed he did not suspect he was abetting Libya's nuclear programme until mid-2003 and that he believed he was working for Pakistan's nuclear energy programme.

The penny still did not drop when two Libyan engineers arrived in South Africa to inspect the plant in 2002.

Even after "the realization dawned" - when Johan Meyer received a payment from Libya in 2003 - Wisser did not immediately intervene to pull the plug on the plant.
It was only when Italian and US authorities intercepted a ship carrying parts for Libya's nuclear programme off the coast of Italy in October 2003, exposing Moamer Gaddafi's then atomic ambitions, that he gave the order to destroy it.

These are not disillusioned post-Glasnost Russians with doctorates driving cabs, these are Grade A European Science Sluts.

What do you get for this serious a threat to world peace? Three years at home wearing an ankle bracelet.

Minimum Wage, Minimum Effort

Wage-parity freaks are running a race to the bottom:

Luxembourg, which has by far the highest per capita income in the EU, also has the highest minimum wage. But the country also has the highest percentage of workers having to live on that minimum wage. In some other countries which do have minimum wages, they mark little more than a lower ceiling of workers' payment, with just around 1% of the workforce being on minimum wage.

It might be twice as high, but 11 times as many French workers are stuck at the minimum wage as they are in the U.S. Hint: when you try to divert attention from the lack of growth by discussing abstractions of relative purchasing power vs. income, you’re missing the fact that one never hears of economists getting stoked about the future poverty reducing potential of “Purchasing Power Parity” when there is little in the way basic growth. This is the detritus of decades of micromanagement.

"Ever since the introduction of the 35-hour week, we've heard discussion about purchasing power, not about salaries," Sarkozy said — rebuffing the business leaders' frequent retort that purchasing power is mostly an old union chestnut to justify demands for pay hikes. "Explaining there's no problem of purchasing power in France is trying to pull the public's leg...

- Shukran to überchav Georges who has the
stomach to dig through the confusion at Euractiv.com.

The Chocolate-makers Should Try Making More Chocolate

Much like the myth that socialism alleviates poverty, after hearing for years about how working less makes Europeans more productive, the lid gets blown off by those nettlesome facts. Le Figaro reported today:

Les Américains meilleurs travailleurs Les Etats-Unis se maintiennent à la tête de la productivité mondiale, creusant l'écart avec les autres pays développés, alors que l'Asie de l'est a doublé en dix ans sa production par travailleur, a indiqué le Bureau international du travail (BIT) dans un rapport.

Americans are the Best Workers Widening the gap with other developed countries, the United States [economy] remains the world’s most productive, while workers in the Asian Rim doubled their productivity in ten years – so indicated a report by the International Labour Organization (ILO).

I’m sure we’ll get a tirade about the wrongness of reporting that, or how the editors of Le Figaro are secretly Americans who just “look out for their own”. Dude – none of you are “our own”.

Katrina Hypocrisy to the Tenth Power

Like lefties’ erstwhile cause celèbre of post-Katrina New Orleans (not post-Katrina Mobile, Alabama, mind you), many Greeks tend to wallow in conspiracy theories and blame incessantly at the top of their voices.

But that’s where the similarities end. Within 48 hours there were more helicopters in the New Orleans’ airspace than could safely operate in civilian airspace. After months of forest fires in Greece, the EU finally shows up for some PR and to toss some of their subjects a pittance, so long as it’s highly visible. That’s because they’re better people than you and me.

The Antidote to Euro-Lethargy

So Howard Husock quotes one reader in the Wall Street’s Journal’s Opinion Journal Taste Commentary:

It has been 24 years since I last moved, but in the decade before that I had ten different addresses. The ability to move and to adapt to a new adventure is a function of personal ambition and a willingness to pursue new adventures. It often accompanies youth and fundamental personal change such as having children and getting married. I have acquaintances who are so place-bound that they voluntarily impose a ceiling on themselves which traps them in a world of low incomes and narrow social contacts. Staying home limits our range of choices and is almost an un-American habit. I prefer to throw in with Horace Greeley and "Go west, young man."

- Thanky-thanky to Valerie