29 November 2007

An Interesting Phenomenon

Call it learned helplessness or what you will. I find it rather quizzical that some European journalist on one hand have no difficulty abetting a lie, but elsewhere are afraid to report at all, lest their press credentials come under threat.

the EU summit, the Portuguese Union, CGTP-Intersindical, organised the biggest demonstration in Lisbon in 20 years.

Under the slogan "For a social Europe – Employment with rights" up to 200,000 people gathered to oppose what they believe to be a "neo-liberal" EU reform treaty, which more or less equals the rejected EU constitution.

The funny - or alarming - thing is the fact, that these 200,000 people managed to demonstrate almost unnoticed without being mentioned by the media.
...and a rather dim media at that. While falling over themselves to see a soldier shot in Afghanistan, in their own venal and corrupt environment, they sit around hoping for a press release that carefully crafted enough to sound “juicy”.
To be fair, we have to consider the question that the event might have not been communicated properly by its organisers. But there were hundreds of journalist sitting in the EU summit's press centre.

Normally this means "sit and wait". Waiting for the press conferences of the presidency and the national briefings, waiting for some insider information from a high ranking civil servant floating down from Olympus to enlighten the masses.
Maybe they never thought to go outside and find their own news instead of sitting around the press pen bitching about the filter coffee.

Neglected in the Name of Po-Mo Style Compassion

Actu: Nous sommes désolés mais nous n'avons pas trouvé d'information récente au sujet de Anne-Lorraine Schmitt.
A 23 year old woman is murdered on the RER D line, and the only place one can find the news is in the blogosphere. It hasn’t even risen to the level that the regional papers (other than La Croix’s website) find worthy enough to pick up the Reuters wire story.
A few hours after the death of Mouhsin and Lakamy, Anne-Lorraine, a 23-year old journalism student, was attacked in a suburban train. Her body was discovered in an empty carriage when the train entered its terminus at Creil, also in the Val d’Oise province. The girl was covered in blood and had over thirty stab wounds in the chest and face. She was still alive but died shortly afterwards.
Brussels Journal’s Thomas Landon also notes the emotional impoverishment of the priorities of the press:
The news of the deaths of Mouhsin and Lakamy became world news, dominating today’s media in France and abroad. Anne-Lorraine’s death is a mere footnote, a “faits divers” in France, a non-event abroad.
Galliawatch translates Bernard Antony who says quite directly:
The racist scum of this civil war shows no emotion over the murder of Anne-Lorraine.

Anne-Lorraine, a young Frenchwoman, a young Christian woman, was murdered while heroically resisting the monster who was attempting to rape her. This murder did not trigger a single riot. And yet, at the very least, the early release of criminals ought to result in demonstrations in front of the Ministry of Justice.
After all, the bien pensent have already used the ubiquitously taught notion of class struggle theory to pre-identify who may or may not fall into the hierarchy of victimhood. The only way this woman could be publicly wept over with the crocodile tears of the blab-orati would be if she was a victim of a “aboriginal” Frenchman without a criminal record or a psychiatric problem. More primitively still, In the context of who is the perp and who is the victim, the actual consequences of the harm are dusted under the rug by these “lucid” adherents to “social dialogue”.
"Les marches silencieuses ne suffisent pas"
Duh.
If one is stupud enough to believe that anti-social rioters and rapists would attend candlelight vigils or be moved by them, you might also wonder why these thugs’ past is “inescapable” and their neighborhoods are trashed. Owning up to ones’ flaws requires a capacity and strength to have some moral judgment and IS the means of escape. Just keep pretending that right-and-wrong are too simple an element to figure into this sort of behavior if you want to chain them to their flaws and misery.

Their own riotous behavior IS the problem, not the symptom. That “social thinkers” desperately defending the ideology of the Modèle Social urge the civilized to reward violent behavior with special programs and subsidies doesn’t seems to ring any bells about why after decades of trying, it just doesn’t work.

Calling In and Airstrike on a Saturday Night

Antoine di Zazzo, identified by AFP as "one of the biggest Taser representatives" outside the United States, said his company is "developing a mini-flying saucer like drone which could also fire Taser stun rounds on criminal suspects or rioting crowds.
The roadblock obviously is that because it’s been used in the US and Canada, that the UN determined that it is a form of torture. Otherwise they’d be abusing themselves to the sound of Nicholai Tesla’s words, zapping “youts”, and going on smugly about the superiority of their export numbers.

And in the national interest, of course, the AFP’s notion of fair journalism lives on: some German guy uses Chinese prisoners remains are used to make art, a flying taser is seen uncritically, but the same lot lose their continence over Gitmo.
What I don't get is that AFP put the flying saucer thing at the end of the freakin' story about TASER! What the heck!? Are stun-gun equipped flying saucers just sort of ho-hum in France? This should have been a huge headline with pictures of children running for their lives, as the evil alien-looking TASER saucers attack.
This shouldn’t be confused with the culture’s more normal sounding loopiness preoccupied with the “Bush Junta”.

Still Pimping their Favorite Murderer While their Own Concepts Show their Failure

It should come as no surprise that while the most over-published image around (probably because it’s copyright can’t be enforced) can be found on every cut-rate junk stand in Paris, that the stone age L’Humanité tries to render their favorite stiff to resemble an image of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

No doubt they will find a few chumps to buy their “special edition” even if they find themselves repeating the same nonsense that others have been giving away for free for 4 decades.



I still find myself asking, what makes L’Humanité any different than a non German speaking vender at the base of the abandoned seeming decrepit concrete hulk of the former-east-German Fernsehturm? In short, nothing. Like the DDR itself, memories of which were always in poorest of color images, the adoration of the Ché today has the same inapplicability. In an inability to admit to any flaw or find anything else that’s substantive, a few idiots keep hanging on to an ideology that has killed up to 100 million people as if they were some far-flung chapter of the flat-earth society.

Which brings us to L’Humanité’s outrageous stretch of the day. The only article they have posted so far on the periodic cultural inflammation emerging this time from F.C. Villiers-le-Bel is that it’s just another “embarrassment” - presumably to “their cause”.
Anyway, the news of the tragedy spread like wildfire in this neighborhood which is deemed "sensitive". Pendant près de six heures, les échauffourées se sont multipliées dimanche soir entre plusieurs dizaines de jeunes et les forces de l’ordre, mobilisées en nombre. For nearly six hours on Sunday evening the skirmishes spread between several dozen youths and the police mobilized in numbers. Abribus fracassés, voitures incendiées et retournées sur le dos, caillassages, tirs de pistolet à grenaille… Un policier local n’en revient toujours pas : « C’était Beyrouth, plus chaud encore qu’en 2005. » Le poste de police de Villiers-le-Bel, fermé la nuit, sera incendié, et celui d’Arnouville, une commune limitrophe, saccagé et pillé. Bus shelters destroyed, cars burned and flipped over, vandalism, gun shots fired… A local policeman said: "It was Beirut, even hotter than 2005." The police station in Villiers-le-Bel closed at night, was lit as was that of an adjacent municipality, Arnouville, which was ransacked and looted.
Indeed, on “Hudna-days” these places slightly resemble Beirut if you can ignore the fact that Beirut never saw this penchance for mugging, fighting, or personal crime, that the Lebanese are friendlier, and are twice as likely to actually have a job as the residents of these edge cities whose creation were once thought of a great victory of the Stalin emulating left when Architecture tried to sell itself as a therapeutic delivery system for a Government’s “love” of the “proletariat”.

blog.libero.it/putans nopasaran.blog-libre.net nopasaran.samizdat.net www.nopasaran.es/


27 November 2007

BBC defends Chester the Molester

It’s as close to Mom and Apple Pie as the BBC thinking gets: a peasant girl in a developing country is raped and political Feminists parachute in with the BBC on hand to help “make a difference”.

"BRADSHAW: Defeat, this time, for the Cardinal. For many in Nicaragua Rosa's parents have become heroes, an ordinary couple defying the church and making a stand for women's rights. Others in Nicaragua are also defying the ban on abortion."
Journalists galvanizing the public to a cause, pat-on-back, etc., etc.

Too bad the BBC kept quiet the fact that one of these peasant-like ordinary people/heroes, infallible in their almost Evo-Morales-like imagery, caused this problem by molesting his own daughter.
Unfortunately for the BBC's portrayal of Rosa's father, Francisco Fletes Sanchez, as the pro-choice hero, it now turns out that he was in fact the man who raped her. He has been convicted and sentenced to 30 years in prison for his crimes. He was in fact on the run at the time, having escaped from Costa Rica to Nicaragua.
Somewhere In their herpetic minds they might be able to come clean by blaming the patriarchy, but they would have to imagine that their favorite flavor of class-struggling peasant might be subject to the same morality as the average human.

So you think dey wanna hit dat shit?

blog.libero.it/putans nopasaran.blog-libre.net nopasaran.samizdat.net www.nopasaran.es/

Yo, €

It’s the Euro, Stupid.

While the European press talk in circles about a falling dollar, in fact dwelling all of their near term fears for mass unemployment (what with all of those burly men with lunchpails and cloth caps that they’re picturing) and such in that narrative they’re missing the obvious. People can’t buy their overpriced rubbish because of the dollar. People won’t travel to EUtopia because of the dollar, etc., etc., etc.

Looking in isolation at any major currency against the Euro, this dyspeptic twaddle speaks to a more basic issue: the Euro currency is just reflecting the low productivity of the economies in the Euro-harem. Labor and materials cost more, the stoppages are greater, and the cost of greenwashing their every act undermines the efficiency of making or moving anything. As a consequence it places these goods and services further out of reach of the blessed poor whom they allegedly care more about than J. H. Christ and everyone else on earth.

One fake intellect even links tangentially the weak dollar to (you guessed it) both Iraq and the Vietnam War.


You ain’t seen nothing like the mighty €



¥ aside, here’s the holy and divine € against the £ and $



And In $£ aggregate against the €


Except for the dependably prescient, they won’t discuss the over-valuation of the Euro, of course, and how it’s killing their middle income earners. Now bow before the €, and don’t accuse them of understanding capitalism, and don’t get in the way of EUvians badgering the rest of civilization about their crass, inequitable, bourgeois mercantile savoir faire, and counterrevolutionary avarice...

It Should Fit Right In


Colonel Muammar Gaddafi of Libya has flummoxed presidential protocol service with a request that a Bedouin tent be erected in central Paris where he can entertain guests during a visit to France next month.

Libyan officials have told their French counterparts that he wants the tent put up in the grounds of the Hôtel Marigny, the 19th-century Parisian state residence used to house important foreign visitors.

Yet Another Hideous American Military Provocation

USS Essex and the USS Kearsarge were underway before the winds settled down. In the meantime at least 1200 European helicopters are still on station protecting Luxembourg from alien invasion.

The American people through the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) pledged to make available more than $10 million of Food for Peace assistance for the relief and immediate recovery efforts for the Cyclone Sidr response in Bangladesh.
Of course beneath the Katrina-esque concerned silence, the BBC managed to discount the immediate U.S. funding to $2 million, but so be it. At least they managed to blame Climate Change before it even made landfall, and we all know what a tremendous service repeating that one more time is to all those people clinging to trees.

Apparently, the right kind of military provocation was found. Two days after Essex and Kearsarge were dispatched:
EU pledges 6.5 million euros in aid to Bangladesh cyclone victims
And if their green sensibilities will permit them to be seen getting some aid there themselves, they would be in business.

24 November 2007

And Nietzsche is Still Dead

Like the “Roe Effect”, it’s a sentiment that could only last one generation:

"Having children is selfish," the now-35-year-old says.

A vegetarian by age 15, Vernelli met her husband at an animal rights demo; on the morning of her sterilization, he gave her a "Congratulations" card.

Each new child, she says, "uses more food, more water, more land, more fossil fuels, more trees and produces more rubbish, more pollution, more greenhouse gases, and adds to the problem of over-population."

What a depressing take on the value of human life. But it was echoed by another eco-crazed couple profiled by the Mail.

Sarah Irving, a 31-year-old green magazine editor, and Mark Hudson, a 37-year-old health care worker, reminisced about how, "after a year of dating, we started talking about sterilization."
Suspicions of laziness and attention-getting behavior aside, this notion isn’t just impossible to have an aspirationally-minded Indian or Chinese citizen to invalidate with the loving acceptance of making a new life, it’s anti-human. It’s a perverse termination of a tangible and real life for an inanimate other form of life. The thought itself is the abstraction that places a thinking being with those of plants that doesn’t. Like animals, they are driven alone by their genes to reproduce and consume. Only humans can act with will, and decide when it’s time to reproduce
just enough
to match their resources.

Animals, on the other hand, will eat and breed until their surroundings can no longer provide them with enough nourishment and shelter, and then test their own extinction. It’s something they’ve been doing long before the Prius, the bicycle, or the human found a use for the opposed thumb.

Who, in the end, is it better for the earth’s surface to have as a dominant environmental actor?
But beyond the comical absurdity of frequent-flying foes of fossil fuels is a vastly more important point: Man is more than a consumer of food and a producer of waste.

The late economist Julian Simon, that prophetic debunker of Malthusian overpopulation theory, proved that people are no drain on our precious planet's natural resources. Rather, they are the solution to scarcities, thanks to the increasing ingenuity of successive generations.
Not so in the view of the essencial environmentalist. To them consumers of food and a producers of waste really IS all we are. It really undermines any warm platitude they might spit out about “worrying about the next generation”.
Maybe we should thank her.

23 November 2007

Please, Squire, just a Farthing!

Rebuilding dystopia, what with all that "diversity", "social justice" an under-development provides you:

"It's all about sustainable development and bringing some humanity back to today's monotonous, machine-driven jobs," Stephane de Veyrac, from the French National Stud Organisation, said at this week's annual conference of French mayors.
Hey, Greenies! Whether it makes any sense or not, you’re going BACK to the Dickensian future!
French towns worried about fuel prices, pollution and striking transport workers need look no further than the horse.
Horses are a possible alternative for vehicles such as school buses and refuse trucks, say groups eager to pick up on global concerns about eco-friendly transport.

De Veyrac's group says it is the first in France to offer consulting on a wide range of horse-powered vehicles that could also haul bottles and aid street sweeping.
It doesn’t matter that mechanization was a response to the needs of a populated planet which would otherwise live miserably without the productivity and efficiency of those new fangled things like “the horseless carriage”, or that the inefficiencies of using animal power were tearing the environment apart...
"It is a serious alternative -- horses are already in use in over 70 towns as replacements for gasoline- and diesel-powered service vehicles," said de Veyrac, pointing to the 'Hippoville' prototype parked in the exhibition hall.
Behold, the march of progress! Or is that the only kind of response you can have to having a gun put to your head by city dwelling environmental crackpot lit majors who can’t add up to 6,5 billion (people)? I can’t tell anymore.

21 November 2007

Vati’s Armee

Check out where the helicopters for Darfur aren’t:

THEY are on the front line of the war on terror, but German pilots facing the Taliban are insisting they stop at tea time every day to comply with health and safety regulations.

The helicopter pilots, who provide medical back-up to Nato ground troops, set off for their base by mid-afternoon so they can be grounded by sundown.
Related:
- Continentally unable to compete with DHL
- Unilateralism: the US’ Only Option
One Norwegian cavalry officer, who was engaged in a day-long fight with more than 40 Taliban near Jari Siya in Badghis, said: “It’s hopeless. We were attacking the bad guys, then [at] three or four o’clock, the helicopters are leaving.

“We had to go back to base. We should have had Norwegian helicopters. At least they can fly at night.”

Abandoned by their western allies, the 600 men from the Afghan army’s 209 Corps were forced to retreat until a convoy of American Humvees arrived the next day to reinforce them.
The title might have a “German-bashing” tone, but it’s completely deserved.

Speaking of Darfur, another veteran of UNIFIL is having a hard time marshalling any support from other Europeans – even though the Darfur operation hasn’t yet been awarded the Scarlet Letter of “Imperialist War for Chimpy W. Hitlerburton” by the usual perceptive geniuses who are always eager prove their originality:
Asked whether the Darfur spillover mission could proceed without these aircraft, O'Dea said, "In short — no."

He specified Germany and Italy as two countries with "ample military resources, and so far they haven't made any contribution to this particular mission."

The German government declined to comment Tuesday. Last month, German Defense Minister Franz Josef Jung said his country was willing to provide only "political support."

The Foreign Ministry in Rome confirmed no troops would be sent to Chad and indicated no comment would be made in response to O'Dea. But the Italian Foreign Ministry pointed out that Italy is the leading contributor to the U.N. force in Lebanon and has troops in Afghanistan and the Balkans.

O'Dea spoke out a day after a briefing in Brussels from Lt. Gen. Pat Cash, the Irish general commanding the EU force.

"The mission won't be deployed unless the force commander is absolutely certain he has the required air support to make it successful," O'Dea said.
Appearing to be the only person in the room who understands something, O’Dea said:
"The carnage in Darfur coupled with the multiple conflicts in the border areas between Darfur, Chad and the Central African Republic has scarred the lives of countless thousands of innocent men, women and children. It will be our job to help and protect them," O'Dea said.

20 November 2007

Where’s Al?

Skiing, it was said a year ago, would permanently become a thing of the past or involve some kind of Astro-turf. This declaration was made presciently by the all knowing, all caring, predictive neo-scientific sort that the rest of us are forced to pretend are serious. What’s funnier is these are the same people who think skiing is bad for soil erosion, or as the case is with these folks – always something else, its’ inverse, obverse, and itself.

As far as early indicators go, ski resorts are to industry what frogs are to the animal kingdom - both are among the first to suffer from environmental changes. It doesn’t take a lot of looking to discover a great deal of concern from ski resort investors and management all over.
It also doesn’t take much to realize that they are under an unceasing attack of people who in spite of a habit of exaggerating are also humorless, unoriginal, and yet talk too much.

Like Al Gore. More to the point where’s Al Gore’s Gulfstream when you need it?
Austrian resorts have received a thick blanket of snow this week, allowing 26 resorts to begin their season early this weekend.

Many of the resorts are small, and able to react to events quickly. But big resorts like Obergurgl, Mayrhofen and Sallbach are also planning to open this weekend, two or three weeks ahead of schedule. Zell am Zee opens tomorrow.

The big falls have been repeated in parts of France and Switzerland, where Verbier is now scheduled to open on Saturday. Norway’s largest resort, Trysil opened today and will be followed by Hemsedal tomorrow and Geilo on Saturday.
I guess all that praying-to-Gaia, heavy taxation, PR stunts, installing recycling trash cans all over Europe that no-one ever seems to use have by themselves, through the force of good intentions and worrying people to death about doom – dropped the air temperature.

Richard North writing at his EU Referendum blog has a bead on the pattern whose only root-cause argument is one of journalistic laziness and narcissism.
So it is with global warming. The media drops its "bombshells" like well-formed turds on the pavement and then moves on, leaving others to clear up the mess behind them. Decades down the line, when the world doesn't come to an end, when the fears and the alarms prove groundless, there will be another scare in the making – or several more – and no one will want to know.
And we’re somehow supposed to not question or criticize the media that does this, whie they as a rather narrowly draw self-selected class tch-tch the mere-mortals and slobs who DO question them, using their spare time to backcheck the research of Journos who don’t look into something that they get paid to do.

Where’s Al?

Skiing, it was said a year ago, would permanently become a thing of the past or involve some kind of Astro-turf. This declaration was made presciently by the all knowing, all caring, predictive neo-scientific sort that the rest of us are forced to pretend are serious. What’s funnier is these are the same people who think skiing is bad for soil erosion, or as the case is with these folks – always something else, its’ inverse, obverse, and itself.

As far as early indicators go, ski resorts are to industry what frogs are to the animal kingdom - both are among the first to suffer from environmental changes. It doesn’t take a lot of looking to discover a great deal of concern from ski resort investors and management all over.
It also doesn’t take much to realize that they are under an unceasing attack of people who in spite of a habit of exaggerating are also humorless, unoriginal, and yet talk too much.

Like Al Gore. More to the point where’s Al Gore’s Gulfstream when you need it?
Austrian resorts have received a thick blanket of snow this week, allowing 26 resorts to begin their season early this weekend.

Many of the resorts are small, and able to react to events quickly. But big resorts like Obergurgl, Mayrhofen and Sallbach are also planning to open this weekend, two or three weeks ahead of schedule. Zell am Zee opens tomorrow.

The big falls have been repeated in parts of France and Switzerland, where Verbier is now scheduled to open on Saturday. Norway’s largest resort, Trysil opened today and will be followed by Hemsedal tomorrow and Geilo on Saturday.
I guess all that praying-to-Gaia, heavy taxation, PR stunts, installing recycling trash cans all over Europe that no-one ever seems to use have by themselves, through the force of good intentions and worrying people to death about doom – dropped the air temperature.

Richard North writing at his EU Referendum blog has a bead on the pattern whose only root-cause argument is one of journalistic laziness and narcissism.
So it is with global warming. The media drops its "bombshells" like well-formed turds on the pavement and then moves on, leaving others to clear up the mess behind them. Decades down the line, when the world doesn't come to an end, when the fears and the alarms prove groundless, there will be another scare in the making – or several more – and no one will want to know.
And we’re somehow supposed to not question or criticize the media that does this, whie they as a rather narrowly draw self-selected class tch-tch the mere-mortals and slobs who DO question them, using their spare time to backcheck the research of Journos who don’t look into something that they get paid to do.

Bartender! One Rijksuniversiteit Groningen over here!

Since Art Buchwald is dead, we now bring you Jules Crittenden’s Thanksgiving for Europeans who are so wrapped around the axle that they spend more time peevishly hating anything that they can remotely relate to America than grooming themselves.

I was just discussing some of our quaint customs in an email exchange with my Dutch pal Michael van der Galien.  He’s in an American Studies program in Rotterdam or Amsterdam or some other dam place,* so I suggested he get a bunch of his clog-wearing dike-plugging buddies to stage a real American Thanksgiving. Sort of like World War II GI re-enacting or cowboy dressup, both popular among the Euros.  

Because, you know, even though they like to give us a hard time, they actually love us and want to be like us. So here’s the deal. 

Everyone has to dress like an American .. oversized football jerseys or tank-tops with baggy shorts and Nikes or Velcro sandals. High school football hero crewcut or blow-dired 1970a disco hair. Chinos and polo shirts and a new boy’s regular if you want to be more formal. Or wear your oversized baseball hat sideways and pants half off your ass. Oversized is pretty much the key to everything, unless you’re going the American nerd route, in which can everything must be symbolically too tight. Everyone’s going to need an American name. Earl’s the best one. Just call everyone Earl. Everyone has to act like an American … kind of clumsy and stupid, knocking things over … talk like an American … loud braying, with a lot of bragging and guffawing … use American table manners … pig-with-a-stick, mouth-open-while-chewing preferred. Ostentatious grace invoking the name of Jesus required. Some kind of family fight. I’d suggest a contentious abortion debate over dinner ending with gunplay.
Just as long as you use European weapons, which in spite of being an inanimate object which is innately bad in the same way a Prius is innately good, are superior weapons. The best in the world. Better than yours’, as long as you aren’t asking.

A Rather Unlikely Group to be Arguing About “Enlargement”

The EU doesn’t have helicopter deficit disorder, it needs to grow a nutsack.

"It's frankly embarrassing that when European nations - with almost two million men and women under arms - are only able, at a stretch, to deploy around 100,000 at any one time", Mr Miliband said during a speech at the College of Europe in the Belgian city of Bruges on Thursday.

"European countries have around 1,200 transport helicopters, yet only 35 are deployed in Afghanistan. And EU member states haven't provided any helicopters in Darfur despite the desperate need there", he went on.
Even though it seems useless, I imagine he went on further.

Hostile Work Environment In Need of Protective Measures Found

Just where ARE those do-gooders?

Grayson Perry, the Turner Prize-winning artist who is perhaps better known to the general public for his extravagant cross-dressing, has admitted that he censors himself when it comes to matters relating to Islam.

Speaking at a meeting organised by the Art Fund, Perry said that it was simple fear which stopped him from addressing Islam in his work. 'I don't want my throat cut', he said.

19 November 2007

Celebrating Open Sewers and Industrial Pollution



For the "glory of the people”

Desperate Measures for Desperate people Desperately Need to “Save” Something-or Other

Apparently the normally single-minded Red Ken of of two minds, based on whatever hack Journo is standing in front of him. Mr. Croydonian hizzelf notes of him saying one thing:

As to Livingstone, he goes that wee bit further and comments "I would be quite happy to ban under size models throughout the entire fashion world.“ A lot of the women on catwalks look disturbing. The idea that anything about this is attractive is just bizarre". And how do you look to them?
Displaying all the great intellectual consistency of someone trying to please anyone standing in front of them, his likeminded crackheaded fellow travelers will also go along with any obvious cause du jour, no matter how over-zealous the cutsie-poo seeming disaster of a idea it is. This is the kind of thing that gets you those “backs whole-heartedly, sincerely, and with gravity” kind of quotes even from a dour Scottish Marxist who would change his ideology weekly and in the finest of monarchical traditions was not elected to his position by the Proletariat, Cadres, or even the Great People’s Commisariat for Enlightenment.
The British government is planning to build a series of "eco-towns" that are not only environmentally friendly but designed to fight obesity as well.

As part of the latest push to deal with climate change, Prime Minister Gordon Brown earlier this year announced that he wanted to see ten new "eco-towns" built throughout Britain by 2020.
Which would kill several birds with one stone, or if you prefer blunt several daggers of the mind with one bad policy (since the birds and stones are precious and holy). Not to mention kill off the traditional “eco-city” with new development of “eco-cities”, ban those emaciated obese young women, and convince his arrogant self that he’s “saved” something or other – even if with bulldozers and cranes which for political purposes will temporarily be called green in spite of mandatory never ending homage to Rachel Corrie.
Johnson said that these towns would have cycling lanes and parks accessible to everyone. Children would be encouraged to play more sports, eat less junk food and would be regularly weighed at school.
And marched off to mass gymnastics shortly therafter in a sign of how the children freely support the never-ending revolution and accept being weighed in like either military enlistees or a new, ecologically inspired plan to divert protein out of the waste stream.

But this form of determinism is nothing new. Most lefty do-gooders are willing to commit blood and treasure on any ego-massaging idea that involves taking away anything they feel was ill gotten, like the earnings of people who have the temerity to work. Notably those all-knowing Swedes fond of believing that they’re mission on this earth is to “save” something or other:
”Gender inequality is one of the main reasons for poverty in a world where 99 percent of the world’s total wealth is owned by men and where 90 percent of the total incomes globally are earned by men.”

Where does the above quote come from? To begin with, it is of course as wrong as it can get. In a country such as the UK women own more wealth than men. And more than two percent of global wealth is owned by the British. So even in that one single country, women own more than one percent of the world’s total wealth. Are we to assume that women’s ownership in all other countries is negative?

The quote is of course nothing more than a modern myth spread among left-wing gender feminists. But where did this quote actually come from? Young radical social democrats in Skåne? Leftist college students in Örebro Campus? In fact, the quote is actually from the Swedish aid agency SIDA.

In a recently published report, Fredrik Segerfeldt at think-tank Timbro looks at policy documents published by SIDA. Segerfeldt concludes that the aid agency does not have a realistic world view, relying on ideology rather than facts and logic.

For example, SIDA concludes that the poor countries have had little gain from increased international trade and increases in global investments. The reality is however that economic development amongst the poor countries, based very much on the above factors and economic liberalization, has meant that the number of people living on less than a dollar a day has been reduced by some 500 million since 1981.

Furthermore, SIDA explicitly claims that they view poverty as a relative rather than absolute term. This basically socialist view of poverty implies that North Korea would be less poor than South Korea, as long as incomes were distributed equally among the inhabitants of North Korea. The fact that those living in North Korea would still be extremely poor in terms of material wellbeing compared to their southern neighbours has little relevance in this slanted perspective.
Cause they’re all about “making a difference” no matter what it is. To clear up that bit of lunacy, one need go no further than find 100 words or less from Thomas Sowell.
I would be scared to death to "make a difference" in the way pilots fly airliners or brain surgeons operate. Any difference I might make could be fatal to many people.
Making a difference makes sense only if you are convinced that you have mastered the subject at hand to the point where any difference you might make would be for the better.
Very few people have mastered anything that well beyond their own limited circle of knowledge. Even fewer seem to think far enough ahead to consider that question. Yet hardly a day goes by without news of some uninformed busybodies on one crusade or another.
To the world’s emotionally needy self-appointed do-gooders those words alone are a sort of high Colonic that one would hope could free their Chi of their chillingly harmful impulses and contradictions like engaging in neo-communist “new city for the new man” construction, and banning obese/emaciated runway models who can’t possibly possess more than 1% of the earth’s wealth.

lefty Loves Lefty

18 November 2007

Skul Daze

Some protestors are far-left agitators acting in solidarity with the trade unions who are striking against pension reform; others are fantasists, calling on the French for another "May 1968" and "an end to capitalism." But some fear that President Nicolas Sarkozy's plans to improve France's higher education system will mean the appearance of "US-style" universities.

What do the French have to fear from this?
(As if there's something wrong with the most successful University system in the world .) EUROSOC concludes:
There is a problem with French universities. It is that they are not universities, in the understood sense of the term.

And this does not entirely mean an 'Anglo-Saxon' sense of the term. According to research by the Jiao Tong University in Shanghai, not a single French university makes it into the world's top 40 universities. Naturally, the French fiercely dispute the league table produced by the Chinese each year, which gives the top places to well-endowed American and prestigious British colleges
Which is the entire point behind the reform scheme. It's also how you end up with a reaction like this:
there is a much more profound and serious problem you did not touch upon concerning the French university system: the total impunity for professors, et al. French departments are like a mafia family or a medieval clan comprised of the director and his vassals, and no matter what lack of ethics on a personal or professional level, they are untouchable.

For all their lovely talk on guaranteeing higher education for all, I'd like to see the French come up with a shred of integrity to start reforming the foul internal contamination of their system concerning those very people who are supposed to serve students and higher learning.

17 November 2007

In Spite of (A) Plenty of Money and (B) a Large Mouth

The EU is unable to arrange putting A where B is. Probably for want of complete paperwork which can’t be clearly read due to blood stains.

The EU gets outdone by the likes of DHL.

If you want to see the future of the European Union and understand the reality of its vainglorious ambitions, look to the present. In particular, look to the wearily predictable fracas over the supply of helicopters for the humanitarian mission in Chad, intended to relieve the suffering of the peoples of Darfur.

This is an issue on which EU member states are in the frame, in an area within the French sphere of influence and one which is crying out for urgent, practical action.

Yet, as the Associated Press tells us, the launch of the Eus peacekeeping could (yet again) be delayed, while the force commander Gen. Henri Bentegeat waits for firm commitments on the supply of vital helicopters.

All the man wants is a meagre dozen transport helicopters, which are absolutely essential to the mission as force multipliers to move peacekeepers quickly along the vast, sparsely populated borderlands west of Darfur.
And people will die for want of a continent of peaced-out blathering buffoons who can’t come up with a mere dozen military and a dozen transport helicopters.

Alert reader Joe Strummer points out: “I foresee EU looking eastwards for possible solutions After all, since the EU has relied on a A.U. and then a UN paint job and troops from Rwanda, Nigeria, Cameroon, a variety of African nations, Thailand, Nepal and Norway to relieve their guilt, perhaps it’s time to extend the tired old saw about Europeans to include peacekeeping and supplying relief with “with an accordion

That Famous Continental Quivering Lower Lip

Seen on Charles Bremner’s delightful blog:



”Owned by a Trotskyite, a Maoist, a Socialist and a Sarkozist without ever changing hands.”
This amusing advertisement from the French division of Volkswagen could not be better timed. Trotskyite and other far left students have shut down about a third of France's universities this week, many of them dreaming of overturning the "Facho-Sarko" regime.
So the “Mai 68” generation isn’t just dead, it seems that people are finally realizing that it’s symbolism was also incredibly fake:
Though the WV Microbus of the flower power hippy years was really a US phenomenon, the advert is a wink at France's 1968 generation. Many of those students who worshipped Leon Trotsky and Chairman Mao matured into Socialists in their 30s. They moved fruther right over the years and voted for Nicolas Sarkozy last spring.
And in an incredible coup of once again thelling themselves how far they are ahead of the curve, it only comes 27 years after the “Reagan Democrats” phenomemon.

Cultural Omnivores with Indigestion

Funny, you would think a society that rattles on endlessly about foreign racism might actually try to conceal some of their own. Much in the way they criticize something as random as their healthcare. Truth be told, the charming and talented Amy reminds one of the fact that the garden variety European city seem to persistently remain crud and graffiti encrusted pits:

I've been here nearly two years now but have yet to receive my Carte Vitale (yeah, put that in your movie, Michael Moore!). Because I'm able to see doctors on Fred's card and hate doing paperwork and reading instructions, I could have gone on like this forever. As a condition of my new employment, however, I had to produce a card or at least an attestation that I was in the process of getting one. I received the attestation and my card was supposed to arrive the following month. Instead I received a notice that France is introducing new cards that require a photo I.D. The other night, the only night I had on make-up, I finally mustered the energy to take the photo. We arrived at the Saint Michel station photo booth a few minutes early before meeting a friend for dinner. I stepped in the booth and was ready to go. Luckily, Fred is more astute than me and said “if you use this booth that will be in the photo”. I focused on my reflection and turned around to examine the giant penis and scrotum scribbled on the plastic backdrop. I tried standing up, rearranging the seat, having Fred hold up my coat as a back drop, all to no avail. I considered just taking the photo with my head perfectly framed by male genitalia. Certainly a giant penis growing out of my ear would convince a doctor that I was worthy of medical attention.
Either that or a recording contract and some movie options.

16 November 2007

A Nation Exploding With Happiness



Looks like that EUvian “high quality of life through forcable modesty” schtick is working like a charm. Happy-happy-joy-joy is breaking out all over the precious place, liebschen.

15 November 2007

The Right Attitude

If you want to make permanent as much poverty and misery as possible.




“Luttons Plus Pours Gagner Plus” “Struggle” more to get more [which also means ‘earn’ more to the natives in the la-la of socialist glory.]


In their grand celebration of benefits that they could only get through actual market forces generating enough revenue for them, of international competition making for they the new standard-bearing (such as with the 40 hour work-week), these guys have more riot-fever than brains.

They show an image from they mythified “lutte” with a description of the extorted benefit. They also lovingly flashed images of the great car-b-que of ’06. I’m sure they’re still searching for the words to describe what that did for them.

Bo-nus...

Behold a few of the fellow travelers on the pilgrimage to Euro-topian promised land of Bolivian peasant life: one Rue 89 “commenter” is nearly sure that the film “American Gangster” is an accurate description of daily life in the U.S. That’s right. All 302 million Americans, even the ones he thinks are ignorant for farming their field somewhere outside ‘eek-veele.’
enfin c'est l'amerique actuelle dans toute sa splendeur et son reve irresistible...
euh, je vais de ce doigt le telech...ercher
[sic]

You will also note that he plans on downloading it unlawfully, rather than paying royalties to his proletarian bretheren in the Screen Actors’ Guild [union].

There’s also this unsurprising little ditty from a commenter who says she’s a “Psychological researcher” writing in reference to a degrading stunt we referred to here.
Kouchner, à la demande de Sarkozy, a également poussé sa chansonnette dans l'avion qui amenait ce petit monde vers les USA...
"ce petit monde vers les USA..." ???
Let's see. USA 302 million people, 4,6% of the world populaiton. United part of Europe: 452 million, 6,9% of the world populaiton. People murdered by Europe and it's ideas (Communism, Fascism, Socialism, etal): uncountable, but certainly > 150 million. Number dead in the former Yugoslavia while Europe was daydreaming about peace breaking out spontaneously... 102 000 in Bosnia alone not to mention 3 more conflicts that rose to the level of war.

Yes. Sing. Go ahead. Sing together. Sing louder. You won't be able to hear this hypocrisy about making world peace by closing your eyes and wishing really hard.

"Petit monde" my ass. If Europeans were part of that "petit monde" you're imagining, they would have either corrupt governments, insurgents, or gangsters making nearly every feature of thier lives small and miserable.
"ce petit monde vers les USA..." ??? - how cute. Of course with volunteers as stupid as the garden variety European lefty, there won’t be any need to test it on animals.

Truthy Heights

Looks like the world will need new and interesting EUphemisms for European notions of journalism. John Rosenthal reports further on just how Reporters Without Borders is singing for their dinner.

A heading on the Web page for the RSF index promising "Evaluation by region" gives one hope for finding something more to chew on. The heading is followed by links for "Americas," "Asia," "Africa," "Europe" and "Middle East." Anyone clicking on those links, however, will discover that they lead to exactly the same 1373-word press release, with merely the subtitles changed! A more brazen expression of RSF's disinterest in providing a detailed justification for its rankings would hardly be possible.

In addition to the press release, RSF provides a brief note on "How the index was compiled" -- pompously titled a "methodological note" in the French version. The note is barely 400 words long. It begins: "The Reporters Without Borders index measures the state of press freedom in the world. It reflects the degree of freedom that journalists and news organisations enjoy in each country. . . ." Consisting almost exclusively of such bland assurances, the note contains virtually nothing that would merit the description of a "methodology." The only relevant piece of information one learns from RSF's "methodological note," is that RSF's rankings are supposed to be based on the responses to a questionnaire sent out by RSF "to its network of 130 correspondents around the world, and to journalists, researchers, jurists and human rights activists." Just how these responses are supposed to have been converted into the numerical "score" that determines the rank of each country in the index, we are not told.
In effect, it’s an opinion poll on the like-minded, and like-funded sort. It has nothing to do with incidents of press harassment itself, and were one to look for information as to just what it is that the judicial bodies of nations targeted in this report need to work on, leaves far too much to the imagination. Nothing is cited.

John goes nation by nation using RSF’s own standards of what press freedom is to demonstrate that the outcome is clearly tilted in the favor of the European nation states that fund RSF
The first 19 places in the RSF index are occupied by small, mostly European, countries whose excellent "performance" is unlikely to be begrudged by any of the larger global powers that battle it out for legitimacy and influence on the world stage: "consensus" candidates, so to say.

The first major power to appear in the ranking is Germany in 20th place -- some 28 places in front of the United States. In the six years that RSF has published its Press Freedom Index, Germany has never ranked below 23rd and it has always been ranked first among the EU "big three" powers (Germany, France and the United Kingdom) and well above all other major world powers: most notably, the United States. During this same period, both investigative journalists and media commentators have been subjected to a degree of interference and harassment by organs of the German state that would be unthinkable in the United States. The numerous episodes of press harassment and interference have included spying on journalists, police raids on editorial offices, and criminal investigations. Virtually any of these cases, had they occurred in the United States, would undoubtedly have been enduring front page stories -- not only in the newspapers of reference in the United States itself, but also in Germany and the rest of Europe -- and led to a (further) precipitous decline in the United States' ranking in the RSF Press Freedom Index.

In April of this year, the German television news magazine Panorama reported that the German intelligence service, the BND, and the German Federal Office for Criminal Investigation, or BKA, had mounted a joint surveillance operation against journalists of the German news weekly Focus between 2002 and 2004. Focus has been the venue of numerous explosive revelations on German intelligence operations: notably in connection with the Iraq War and Germany's highly ambiguous stance toward the American-led "War on Terror." It came out in 2005 that the BND had pursued spying operations against Focus reporter Josef Hufelschulte and the freelance journalist and intelligence expert Erich Schmidt-Eenboom starting in the mid-1990s.
Also afoot today: a finding is expected on the France2-Enderlin case concerning the staged coverage of the death of a Palestinian child.
Today — November 14 — the public will finally be able to view the 27 minutes of raw footage of the death of Mohammed Al Dura and determine whether or not it was a fake. Or will they?

[ ... ]

France 2 refused to hand over the original film but a court order last month by the French court of appeals forces the station to air the 27 minutes of raw footage--which actually consists of staged scenes of Palestinians pretending to be shot, according to the few journalists who previously saw it.

But just when we thought the truth would finally be revealed, France 2 is backtracking again. Enderlin now is telling Jerusalem Post, there were never 27 minutes of raw footage
What else did you expect?

Today Schengen, Tomorrow ‘Ze Vurld



In someone’s mind, Europe has grown to include all of Turkey, half of the ‘Stans’ and all of Asian Russia. Ew-key. Plan on telling those people in Siberia that?

14 November 2007

Unilateralism: the US’ Only Option

Given that engaging any foe out there with Limp Larry is rather worthless. Stuart Koehl has more:

one of the most common complaints made against the Bush administration's war policies is it's alleged "unilateralism," an unwillingness to bring in our allies or fight as a coalition. This view overlooks the participation of many countries alongside U.S. forces in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Granted, these are often small countries, with proportionally small contingents, but they are there, they share the risk, and sometimes they spill their blood as well.
And repeat and repeat and repeat they will. Most of it comes from Europe for this simple reason: outside of the UK and France, they hardly have any forces with whom to express some magical non-unilateralism.
How can this be, when Western Europe has an economy as large as that of the United States, and a combined military establishment of more than 1.7 million troops? Well, as shown in British defense analyst Julian Lindley-French's highly perceptive study for the Bertelsmann Foundation, this impressive force is largely hollow: "There are 1.7 million Europeans in uniform, but only 170,000 soldiers, of which 40-50,000 could be used for robust combat operations at any one time." Lindley-French notes that a large proportion of those 40-50,000 combat-ready troops are either incapable of overseas deployment or already committed to various missions (and thus unavailable for deployment elsewhere). The net deployable combat-effective force generated by Europe may be as low as 25-30,000 men, the majority of which are resident in the British and French military.
It seems to having nothing to do with an air of ‘pacisfism’ at all. The cause is neglect and ineptitude.
Today, all of Europe (excluding Russia) has a GDP of $16.17 trillion and spends only about $314 billion on defense--1.93 percent of combined GDP. In contrast, the United States has a GDP of $13.16 trillion, and spends $534 billon--4.06 percent--on defense. The global average for defense spending is 2.0 percent of GDP. Clearly, Europe has not been spending as much as it should on defense, being in effect a "free rider" benefiting from the security provided by the U.S. forces whose activities it regularly criticizes.

Bad as this is, the situation is worse than it appears, because of the fragmentation and duplication of European defense spending. While in the United States it is considered scandalous that the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines have duplicative research and development (R&D), procurement, and logistic systems, in Europe every country has its own national defense policy supporting redundant R&D, procurement, command, administrative, and logistic establishments. Thus, for example, though Europe spends only about half of what the U.S. does on procurement, and only about a quarter as much on R&D, each European dollar spent buys a lot less capability, as a result of which, the pace of force modernization is much slower than it should be.

This is not helped by Europe maintaining a large and aging force structure intended to fight the Warsaw Pact on the North German Plain. Germany, France, Italy--all have hundreds of tanks, armored personnel carriers, and artillery pieces of very limited utility in an age of low-intensity expeditionary warfare.
AKA “Peacekeeping,” the one thing they seem to be able to fawn and blubber over, publicly admire, and would like to think “sets Europe apart” from the 5,6 billion mere plebeians that make up the rest of humanity.

Nonetheless, in they begged America not to ‘go it alone’
For many critics of U.S. "unilateralism," there is an implicit assumption that the lack of allied participation in ongoing military efforts is due mainly to U.S. policies and the unfavorable European response to them. This begs the question of whether our European allies would be able to do much more than they are doing now, let alone respond to any unforeseen contingencies in the future, even if they were inclined to do so. The answer, to those who have examined the present state of the European defense establishment, increasingly seems to be "no": European armed forces are neither structured, nor equipped, nor trained to play a meaningful role in the scenarios most likely to challenge the security of the civilized world in the coming decades.
So they will stick to doing what they do best when they aren’t twiddling their thumbs as massacres in Rwanda, Sudan, the former Yugoslavia, and countless other places in their neighborhood were going on: being critics.

13 November 2007

World-beating Euro-technology



Still, ripped off.

They’re Too Stupid For Sarcasm



Never mind the commie cruelty. Apparently these idiots think they can find a few zit-faced adolescents that believe their claim that Saudi Arabia, Brazil, Argentina, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, and the like are “part of the third world.”

10 November 2007

Pfft! Snxpthhhhh!

But can Europe become a superpower? And should Americans care?
Asks Soeren Kern.
No and yes.

The biggest barrier to European superpowerdom is that European elites refuse to bring their postmodern fantasies about the illegitimacy of military “hard power” into line with the way the rest of the world interprets reality. Indeed, after years of overselling the efficacy of diplomatic and economic “soft power” as the elixir for the world’s problems, Europeans have been losing, not gaining, international influence.

Three years of European “soft power” diplomacy have not persuaded Iran to abandon what even the most cynical Europeans say is a clandestine nuclear-weapons program. If anything, Iran has been emboldened by European equivocation. At the same time, China and Russia, expert practitioners of the game of power politics, continue to pursue aggressive trade and energy policies vis-à-vis Europe with obvious impunity. Meanwhile, most Europeans admit that their peacekeeping performance in Afghanistan and Lebanon has been downright pathetic, even embarrassing in the case of Spain.

So why do Europeans continue to assail American “hard power” as bad for the world, when their own “soft power” consistently fails to make the grade?
Actually, the US has been waiting for decades for the Euro-entities (other than the UK and Dutch largely) that have mutated into the EU cartel to actually build up some power to back up what is otherwise non-statecraft and join the non-dictatorial, not-cretinous minority on this earth in an effort to stand up for the occasional nicety like human decency for once.

I mean, it isn’t like ‘Europe’ can depend on Fiji and Bangladesh to man every peacekeeping effort out there for them.

This Week’s Final Solution

Call it “art” and vest your hopes in a new and better Dystopia

No one enjoys arguing more than Parisians. Indeed, there is even a case to be made that the history of the city - from the French Revolution of 1789 to riots in the suburbs of November 2005, via the Commune of 1870 and the student revolt of May 1968 - is no more than one long argument. This is, after all, the city where sitting at cafe tables, smoking fags, drinking coffee or booze, and planning to destroy 'society as we know it' was first invented and then made into an art form. I first came here in the Eighties and fell in love immediately with the famous Parisian culture of la contestation (basically an intellectual French justification for having a belting row, usually accompanied by drink) and I have been here on and off ever since, writing books on the city and its people, teaching French (mainly Parisian) literature and always enjoying my immersion into a world where - from the Glorious Revolution to the recent riots - intellectual violence is never that far away from the real thing.
As such, one loony lefty writer has proposed to salve his personal queasiness with the successfully argumentative ”inclusive” multi-culti reprobates by deleting from the most illustrative of European cities the notion of its’ remaining Euro-ness.

As a “cure”.
How to ensure that Europe's beautiful old cities remain vibrant cultural and economic centres for the third millennium? It's a puzzle that has intrigued politicians for years.
One far-left Spanish novelist who lived in Paris has come up with a novel approach to the challenge: "De-Europeanise" the French capital, throwing its portes open to a new generation of immigrants (mostly from Africa) who will "destroy" Paris in order to recreate it for the 21st century.

Gina Cobb is my Hero(ine)

She asks a simple question I’ve also always wondered about: why do the left keep scrounging for a “class struggle anger thing” that people who own their homes and two cars can buy into?

Here’s the crisis: if the poor keep disappearing like this, how will Socialists be able to justify their own existence?

08 November 2007

“Only in AmeriKKKa EUtopia

Life is just a meaningless coincidence… result of long process of evolution and many several factors, causes and effects. However, life is also something that an individual wants and determines it to be. And I’m the dictator and god of my own life. And me, I have chosen my way. I am prepared to fight and die for my cause. I, as a natural selector, will eliminate all who I see unfit, disgraces of human race and failures of natural selection.

- Murderer Pekka-Eric Auvinen

Seven teenagers were killed when an 18-year-old student went on a rampage at his school in southern Finland after announcing the bloodbath with a posting on the internet site YouTube.
The murderer, named by police as Pekka-Eric Auvinen, then shot himself in the head and died in hospital last night. He killed eight people, including his headteacher, after moving from classroom to classroom and spraying them with gunfire at the secondary he attended in Tuusula, a small town north of Helsinki.
When there is some sort of public violence, especially in schools, the BBC bolts into action pre-empting the schedules of their call-in programs to talk about it endlessly and in circles. Not so with the latest outburst in Finland, a nation any traveler who’s been to a bar or club there can tell you is populated with an unusual number of violent alcoholics.

Almost nowhere is the fact that the shooter yelled “Revolution. Smash everything”, nor will his anti-religious diatribe typical of leftist thought ever be identified as such:
"I cannot say that I am of the same race as this miserable, selfish human race. No!

"I have evolved a step higher. I am prepared to fight and die for my cause ... I, as a natural selector, will eliminate all who I see unfit, disgraces of human race and failures of natural selection."
Find me a Conservative critic of revolving door abortion who will say that, and I might reconsider the thesis. Notably, predictably, and consistent with his impulse:
We know from our mass media that he was misanthropic, disliked the direction society was headed, and felt himself drawn to extremes to break through the fog of delusion in which most people move. For example, he admired extreme leftist and extreme rightist leaders alike4 and called himself a "social darwinist" and admired "natural selection." (He may have confused "social darwinism," or the theory that linear competitive systems like capitalism and academia produce humanity's best, with Darwinism applied to society.)
So like so many emotionally helpless “do-gooders” he attacks anything representing a pillar of traditional society. The only difference between his hatefulness and idiocy and that those that make a living off of it, is that he is better armed.

But “gentle” humanistic mainstream Euro-bigot, where this multiple murder is being characterized as “American” take the cake:
Hah, idiots like that really get on my nerves. While we are on the subject idiots why not rant some about usa as well? Let me start it off with a few quotes.
“america is a Nation with a mission - and that mission comes from our most basic beliefs. We have no desire to dominate, no ambitions of empire. Our aim is a democratic peace - a peace founded upon the dignity and rights of every man and woman.”
george W. Bush
He goes on, but apparently, Pekka-Eric Auvinen’s evil act is somehow all about oil.

Auvinen and that blogger seem to share the same, characteristically misguided determinism, but one of them was better armed. In reality, he’s reported to have had heros in the fashion of something a little more home-grown to the continent whose cultures and ideas have killed hundreds of millions in the last century alone:
Investigators did not specify the motives, but several media indicated that the young man was fascinated by weapons and violence. On several occasions he expressed his admiration for Hitler and Stalin. "He comes from a normal family, with both parents and a brother." He had no problem at school," the source added. The student, who had celebrated his 18th birthday in June, was studying philosophy and history in the final year of high school.
So by the standards of the previous blogger cited, far to “enlightened” to be American.

03 November 2007

Maybe I’m Hung Up or Something

But this is just plain bewildering, and smacks slightly of “taking food from a child”, if not slightly like cannibalism by proxy.

Founded in 1947, the Cosma dairy has managed to find the richness of a tradition ancestral Ardennes farm practice which has been hitherto forgotten. Indeed, le Petit Singly, the only cheese made from the milk of women, has long remained in the shadow of more specialized cheeses made from ordinary cow, goat, or sheep’s milk.
I particularly like the fact that they’re putting women on the level of cattle. That should go over with a bang over at underwater cave headquarters of Code Pink. It goes well with the whole “Ah, those grand artisanal traditions! How we love the land” blather which is ubiquitous in French marketing. Then again, the way birth rates are going in Europe, they don’t seem to need it for much else.

02 November 2007

This Is What Peacekeeping Sometimes Requires



Shelf you delusions.


- via Melanie Morgan

01 November 2007

I LOL'd ‘til I Cried

The mainstream thinking of a nation of quasi-intellectual hooligans is laid bear: the mainstream left are fairly sure that anyone criticizing the murder attempt on a political activist (who doesn’t tow the PC line) makes the mainstream left journos who happen to report it is a neo-con in the pocket of Uncle Sam. To them it seems that Rue89 isn’t extreme and doctrinaire enough, and thus gets thrown off of the ideological island.

Proof positive to these deterministic inheritors of the continent’s natural facism: one of the zombies at Rue89.com even wrote an article critical of Hugo Chavez, therefore they too must be the enemy.

I gues it’s "égalité et reconciliation" for me, but not for thee...

In a nation of people in such dire need of “thrills” vicariously demonstrated to them passively through print and TV, what do you expect? Somewhere along the way “I think therefore I am” became “I talk therefore I am.” Behold its bounty.