Le Salon Beige brings us us this status report on the decay and deorbiting of the that society of well educated "great thinkers":

A reader tells us of a visit to the Basilica of the Kings of France with his children, he was surprised by a book there titled "Journey of Discovery for young people"

On the one hand, on page 8 we find it says, "Dagobert, the first king buried in Saint-Denis." The first sentence of paragraph is "A contemporary of Muhammad, Dagobert is the king of the Franks from 629 to 639." On the other hand, on page 9, in a paragraph titled "Question", the first sentence is: "In the Bible it says that the angel Gabriel, the same people who brought the Koran to Mohammed, came one day announce to Mary, betrothed to Joseph, that she would soon have a son named Jesus. "

The booklet does not (yet) end with "a long, long time ago, the mosque in Saint-Denis was the Basilica of the kings of France."

Forgiven For Simply Being Human

Not in London, Milan, or Paris. Surprisingly, only in New York

The Inexplicably Huge Conspiracy Will Not Be Televised

It's all plain for those interested in "open democracy" to see...

Hey, No Anxiety There!

There are times when I sit alone on my balcony by moonlight and gaze out over the fir trees toward the pastures, shrouded in mist and lost in the silence of a village forfeit in time, and I wonder if this is the world in which I was meant to be born.

From a self-absorbed, fevered Jew hating, American hating self-isolating mountain man to gangs of violent skanks, Eutopia's great “investment in people” is really paying off.

But even the most hardened officers were stunned as they arrived at the scene. The participants in what has become known as the battle of Chelles bus station were all girls aged between 14 and 17.

The Times of India calls this (toungue in cheek?) “The New French Revolution”

A recent battle at a Chelles bus station highlights the problem seen throughout French cities, Sunday Times reported. When police learnt that rival gangs were planning a showdown in Chelles, east of Paris, they prepared for the sort of violence that has become routine in France's troubled suburbs.

And with a society where that's increasingly normal, the likes of the “truth seeker” doesn't see any need to rethink his pet criticisms Europeans have of the rest of that world that they just don't understand. It's amazing that these culture-wide obsessions could go on for a century without more people noticing it and discussing it, especially in those superior “self-actualized” societies.

An Obscenity of Reasoning

"Those who want to destroy the common agricultural policy don't believe in Europe. There is no reason to leave the field open for our American friends, U.S. farmers," said Sarkozy.

Lou Minatti points out a flaw in buried deep in the foolish rationale of behind which European subsidies in general and French subsidies in particular. That is, that the US as the standard big bad wolf of all things rationalized to be digestible and acceptable to the European listener:

"They don't do it for us, why should we do it for them?"
Population of France: 64.5 million.
Agricultural subsidies: $58.5 billion/year
French annual agricultural subsidy per capita: $906.98

Population of the US: 301 million
Agricultural subsidies: $7-8 billion/year
US annual agricultural subsidy per capita: $26.58

The weenie being hidden here being not just a severe manipulation of the way farm business is treated, but to the tune of $2.47 per person per day, shows it to be a de-facto nationalized economic sector. Underlying this crop cult is that it’s also the third (if not the sixth or seventh) third rail of political discussion in France, and in the perfunctory statements on the subject get their perfunctory straw man of America attached to it as if it was strategic, as if it was 1958, and as if they were Soviets. They feel completely at ease making an equivalency comparison when their intervention is 34 times greater than that of the US.

Socialists and Pavlov’s Dog

DownEastBlog turns its’ gaze at Belgian socialist dingleberry Dirk Van der Maelen and his ilk. He’d like to see the US negotiate with the Taliban and al-Qaeda (as if there were a command structure that could commit their ‘cells’ to anything,) and thinks that sending a mere four Belgian fighter-bombers to Afghanistan is too much.

Remember, these were the Europeans who wanted more than anything to be involved, and not have the United States ‘go it alone’, and aver now that no war is winnable, unless you take into account their desire for the Taliban and al-Qaeda to win their wars.

"Now that George W. Bush sees the end of his term, he realizes all the more that he will enter history as the president who lost two wars (Iraq and Afghanistan). Hoping that American troop reinforcements can turn the tide in a lost cause, the US are pushing for more. But do we really want to go to Afghanistan to save the honour of Bush?

...

Therefore we plead to open the debate and, e.g., think about a bigger role for the UN. A greater UN-mandate directed at development and stabilization, reinforcement of the institutions... that is what the country needs. No poodle wagging his tail running after Bush without a thought, in the process wasting money which harms purchasing power or, worse, endangers the lives of soldiers and/or citizens."

He goes on to conflate the miserable 1.3% of their GNP that goes to the military, and mainly to pensions loaded into it at that, as the straw that’s breaking the Belgian camel’s back. Never mind the social boondoggles and near world record taxes... their budget deficit is George Bush’s fault. I wonder if anyone cares to remind him that two decades before Bush entered office, their dept was 2-1/2 times that same GNP, a proportion of debt to output five times greater than that of the United States.



Actually, they seem to be adapting pretty nicely.

Make no mistake about it, by channeling their hatred of the realities of conflict in the world at America, their desire to see express pacifism is a lie hiding behind a tacit desire to see the west suffer attack.

And now they are dead wrong in opposing the dispatching of a mere flight of four fighter bombers to Afghanistan to be deployed against islamic extremists of the worst possible kind - who just days ago blew up 80 marketgoers in the worst carnage since the country was liberated in 2001.

What do our moral betters from the SP.a propose then, apart from getting the UN involved? Well, as you probably know by now, Messrs. Claes, Vandenhove, Vandelanotte and Van der Maelen, to name but a few, are the co-authors of a pact between Belgium's so-called democratic parties to never talk or form coalitions with the Vlaams Belang, Flanders' only truly conservative party. This situation is called the so-called cordon sanitaire. With regards to the Taliban, however, the gentlemen propose to hold talks with the "moderate ones" among them.

They consider the ¼ strength battalion they have doing what amounts to traffic control at the airport a huge sacrifice and support by the socialist, and yet the Belgian government wanting to commit four measly aircraft and crews is supposed to bring the rest of the world to tears for their commitment to global security.

DownEast concludes:

I get it. For socialists, talks with the VB are haram. Talks with the Taliban however are halal. You know what talks I prefer? I can't wait till those four F-16's start pounding Dirk Van der Maelens preferred speaking partners.

He can also ask them just how it is that his conversation and friendship could have averted 9-11 too. Vanderhofe encapsulates the ignorance of that world view perfectly.

If the government decides to commit our country and our soldiers to such a dangerous, lost war, it is only logical that this decision is explained as quickly as possible in Parliament. In addition, because of this engagement, Belgium will become more than ever the target of terrorist attacks."

Eastern Exposure

The New York Crank mourns the probable withering away of a town in Ohio that was host to non-conformism due to its’ proximity to a college. I wouldn’t be as pessimistic as he is. I’ve run across quite a few towns that fit the bill, many of whom don’t have a student population but remain slightly warped. They are different in the sense that they’re blue collar and slightly warped, but the warpees feel far less compelled to write novels about their buds who live in the hallucination down the street (it’s the third yurt on the right, in fact, but don’t let the cat out...)

Our Lady of Perpetual Forgetfulness

Saint Hedwig’s Catholic Church in Mitte district of Berlin, part of the former East Berlin

Under Erich Honecker’s Communist regime, the faithful in the DDR had to be brave to attend services. I vividly remember these defiant souls filling it on Sundays having to contend with the fact that at high Mass 4 men, (plainclothes cops,) sat in the back row of the church with cameras. Even though they were there to intimidate worshippers and gather anything they thought useful to use as blackmail, they would even stand and kneel when they should have.

Impetuous young man that I was, I made a point one Sunday of sitting right in front of two of them who were sitting side by side, and decided to NOT kneel to make it hard to get a good shot in, and remained standing during communion to obstruct (for once) their picture taking. After hearing from them something that almost seemed like a mumble, I took my laissez-passez out of my front pocket and put it in my back pocket so that they could see part of it sticking out.

Fast forward to the present day: adjacent to two buildings undergoing renovation, and undergoing some renovation itself, the church is wrapped in a car ad. Even without the legacy that makes St. Hedwig’s a sort of monument to at least two of the four freedoms, I wonder, dear readers, if you think it’s appropriate to temporarily turn the narthex into a billboard, or if going through a few months of tastelessness is acceptable. It’s worth noting that in Germany churches receive state support from a steuer that tax-payers can opt in to by indicating their membership in a church and a willingness to support the fund. It’s then not that likely that the screened ad on the tarp was needed for unavoidable financial reasons.

Send Lawyers, Guns, and €uros

Much of EUtopia is a developmental backwater that can’t but help wag it’s finger at the world over some imaginary virtues that they pretend to report. Among them is some notion that they have no gun crime. As if to say that human nature was somehow different on their patch, and that they’re immune to theft, jealousy, hatred, and greed, they’ll joyously sneer at the US when they objectively know how much worse it is in Brazil, Venezuela, or even Russia and large parts of eastern Europe.

It’s what makes this kind of report add some cognitive dissonance to the way some are enamored with their precious little state religion of social protection:

A Beretta? A Taurus? In Brussels the number of weapons in circulation have tripled in five years! The prices!

Oh boy!

In Brussels, a clean, never used handgun sells for € 500 to € 2,000 for the most popular gauges. The Kalashnikov goes for 2,000 to € 2,500. Heavy weaponry (the basic type RPG-2 rocket launcher) can be ordered from € 3,000 to 3,500.

And a Beretta handgun, probably a 9mm is selling for € 2,000. A real rip-off if you tell me. Something only a criminal can afford. The honest people will likely have to opt for a cheap Brazilian Taurus, but then again, no American should talk. Most of our handguns come from European manufacturers anyway. The very same manufacturers are virtually barred from selling their own product in their own countries. But Hey, who are we to viciously make european employees redundant...

Without giving an address nor explain everything in detail, note that the process is already extremely convenient. The activity has always been closely connected with prostitution.

Which was legalized in order to “make safer”. In the land of superior social management and intervention, I though there was no need to be concerned with street crime? Which makes you wonder why prostitution had to be decriminalized to begin with.

A good place to start for those who want an illegal firearm is the Brussels railway stations of [the shabby] Gare du Nord and [newly rebuilt] Gare Midi. We saw yesterday many weapons stashed behind concrete slabs and false ceilings, in a search with the police.

They confirmed that they aren’t just sought out by crooks anymore.

Gee! I wonder why a non-criminal would need such a firearm?

I Guess They Just Don’t See the Same ‘Entertainment Factor’ That I do

Check out the basic idiocy of this idea. Better still, try to tease out of this if the author is actually saying anything at all:

A common theme in the two studies is to situate regionalisation at the “meso” or intermediate level between domestic imperatives and the exigencies of globalisation. It is by teasing out the interplay between these three levels that the authors of these two nuanced and detailed studies provide an innovative contribution to our understanding. In doing so, they provide us with further keys to understanding the role of the European Union as an international actor in relation to other regions.

Dial-A-Blog, Numéro Indigo?

Peering into the EU political blogsphere, one can’t help but find an in-genuine feature or some sad absurdity when you look closely at a great many of them. While there are some really good and original ones out there, almost any of the blogs found looking for a substantive discussion on political, budgetary, economic, “macro-level” social issues, and international relations, one finds the type of blog funded by commissions, commission or government funded institutions, and so forth. I can’t help but ask where the enthusiasm is if it requires a committee, a grant, and a dance on the fine line between a government outreach website, and something trying very hard to look creative and genuine only to seem academic.

Outcome?: one hell of a sedative, and in most cases less traffic than gonzo blogs like this one which is funded by nothing, isn’t networked to much of anything, let alone anything official, and doesn’t require interns, employees, or anything else. It’s as though they never heard of the invisible hand.

Some absurdly appear to be about the EU, but are little more that a compilation of news feeds about the UN. While most of these are in fact supposed to operate as a dialogue mechanism for think-tanks and journals, it looks like something did because it was suggested a blog was something a respectable operation could not do without, over some sort of social anxiety one had to do – not seeming to have wanted to do.

Nothing could be further from the truth. If the fabulous brainiacs involved in a think-tank end up being characterized by a depressing looking thing that captures less interest than a monthly newsletter, I don’t see what good it does. Oddly enough it’s the authors and operators themselves, who are probably interns or the least-senior employees that provide for far more provocative and interesting reading on their own blogs – which is to say that this is not the kind of thing one can program and buy in the way so many European social and development efforts are engineered, while others still have parenthetical relationships to semi-publicly funded entities, press operations, but have distinctly political goals.

In the EU there isn’t much of a ‘line’ left between the roles of those speaking on behalf of government, private political players, universities, and the individuals who write for them. One already sees that most anyone under 25 can’t understand their distinct state roles, and just why separation produces its’ own transparency.

It won’t be long for that sort of society to assume everything they hear or read comes from the same ‘giant it’ whose motives will be so entirely opaque that people will give up on asking what their motives and intentions are. Something like Oceania, here we come...

Speaking Truth to Impotence

A recent Wall Street Journal Europe’s editorial reflects on the wet noodle of European non-nationhood when anything, and I mean ANYTHING comes up.

The European Union got a chance to redeem itself for a big sin of the previous decade and show its vaunted "common foreign policy" in action. We'd like to report it didn't blow it. Alas, we can't.

The occasion was Kosovo's declaration of independence on Sunday. A unified EU stance might have started to make good, at last, on Jacques Poos's infamous 1991 declaration that "the hour of Europe has dawned." Soon after, the EU broke up over Yugoslavia, which collapsed in a series of wars that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives. The U.S. had to step in to save the EU and the Balkans.

This week seemed like déjà vu all over again, fortunately without the blood. Spain opened the EU meeting on Kosovo by proclaiming that the U.N. protectorate's declaration did "not respect international law." The ruling Socialists were apparently enraged that the Kosovars didn't have the decency to wait to claim their sovereignty until Spain held national elections next month.

Kosovo is precisely that sort of ‘anything’ that, being in their front yard might just require some sort of attention, which the über-mega-sooper-dooper-nation of superior everything-ness managed to treat like it barely deserved a press release written by a flunky who’s expertise isn’t even in waste management.

In the meantime, the Greeks again threaten to torpedo the EU's grand designs for the Balkans all over a name for its northern neighbor, which Athens insists must be called Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, or the Orwellian FYROM. Unless the Macedonians stand down, Athens will veto its EU and NATO membership. The U.S. and most EU countries recognize Macedonia by its chosen name. A U.N. mediator yesterday put forward new proposals to settle this absurd and costly 17-year-old dispute.

So let there be no illusions. About the only thing that's "common" about the EU's foreign policy is its sheer pettiness, absence of strategic vision and unwillingness to back up grand claims to global leadership with resources or political will.

Say what you will about the Greeks... after all, other Europeans will when they try to waive this embarrassment off in a way that seems socially acceptable, even as they tch-tch the rest of the world’s terrible addiction to nationality and such.

Meanwhile back in Manhattan, Kissinger, the left’s original hate-puppet and singin’-n’-dancin’ prince of darkness, sums up the risk to humanity that Europe is encouraging if not then becoming:

Kissinger: The major events in European history were conducted by nation-states which developed over several hundred years. There was never a question in the mind of European populations that the state was authorized to ask for sacrifices and that the citizens had a duty to carry it out. Now the structure of the nation-state has been given up to some considerable extent in Europe. And the capacity of governments to ask for sacrifices has diminished correspondingly.

SPIEGEL: Thirty years ago, you asked for one phone number that could be used to call Europe.

Kissinger: ... and it happened. The problem now is: Nation-states have not just given up part of their sovereignty to the European Union but also part of their vision for their own future. Their future is now tied to the European Union, and the EU has not yet achieved a vision and loyalty comparable to the nation-state. So, there is a vacuum between Europe's past and Europe's future.

I would just call them emotionally needy bozos aspiring to globally be the Pookie Adams character in ‘The Sterile Cuckoo’, but I’m not selling books like Dr. K. is, and frankly, I though Pookie was talented and kind of cute in a psychotic kind of way.

Kissinger: I think Angela Merkel, like any leader, has to think of her re-election. I have high regard for her. But I do not know many Europeans who would deny that the victory of radical Islam in Baghdad, Beirut or Saudi Arabia would have huge consequences for the West. However, they are not willing to fight to prevent it.

SPIEGEL: For example in Afghanistan. Does NATO need more German troops in the southern part of the country?

Kissinger: I think it is obvious that the United States cannot permanently do all the fighting for Western interests by itself. So, two conclusions are possible: Either there are no Western interests in the region and we don't fight. Or there are vital Western interests in the region and we have to fight. That means we need more German and NATO troops in Afghanistan. What I am not comfortable with is that some NATO members send troops primarily for non-combat missions. That cannot be a healthy situation in the long term.

Meanwhile the old goat of latter-day ‘realpolitik’ speaks. Too bad he doesn’t make any sense.

Dear Americans... What can the world expect from you? Twelve questions for the candidates – By Helmut Schmidt

Where he lost me was in the ‘nuanced’ part of his spoken disposition – the one where he believes that Europe both needs to be taken seriously, if not outright obeyed, and the Europe that is still somehow a ward of U.S.

Europe’s faith in the United States may be shaken, yet we wish to maintain the transatlantic partnership. We want to be able to love America again but we have become skeptical, because for the past 10 years, Washington has turned to us only when it has needed troops or money.

Which the US did after the bellowing calls from across the Atlantic that the US shouldn’t leave them out or go it alone. As for the troops and money, the loudest boors in Europe never managed to actually provide either in any manner that wasn’t a symbolic pittance played to their ignorant audiences at home.

All the same, we Europeans are well aware of our own weaknesses. Although we work together in regulating our funicular railways and the depth of water pools in our zoos, a “common foreign policy” in the European Union still exists in theory only. That is why we hope the new president will lead rationally and multilaterally – not least because we are convinced of America’s vitality.

Yet another “Daddy drinks because you cry” sort of sales pitch, and you can hardly hear the violins.

Speaking Truth to Impotence

A recent Wall Street Journal Europe’s editorial reflects on the wet noodle of European non-nationhood when anything, and I mean ANYTHING comes up.

The European Union got a chance to redeem itself for a big sin of the previous decade and show its vaunted "common foreign policy" in action. We'd like to report it didn't blow it. Alas, we can't.

The occasion was Kosovo's declaration of independence on Sunday. A unified EU stance might have started to make good, at last, on Jacques Poos's infamous 1991 declaration that "the hour of Europe has dawned." Soon after, the EU broke up over Yugoslavia, which collapsed in a series of wars that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives. The U.S. had to step in to save the EU and the Balkans.

This week seemed like déjà vu all over again, fortunately without the blood. Spain opened the EU meeting on Kosovo by proclaiming that the U.N. protectorate's declaration did "not respect international law." The ruling Socialists were apparently enraged that the Kosovars didn't have the decency to wait to claim their sovereignty until Spain held national elections next month.

Kosovo is precisely that sort of ‘anything’ that, being in their front yard might just require some sort of attention, which the über-mega-sooper-dooper-nation of superior everything-ness managed to treat like it barely deserved a press release written by a flunky who’s expertise isn’t even in waste management.

In the meantime, the Greeks again threaten to torpedo the EU's grand designs for the Balkans all over a name for its northern neighbor, which Athens insists must be called Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, or the Orwellian FYROM. Unless the Macedonians stand down, Athens will veto its EU and NATO membership. The U.S. and most EU countries recognize Macedonia by its chosen name. A U.N. mediator yesterday put forward new proposals to settle this absurd and costly 17-year-old dispute.

So let there be no illusions. About the only thing that's "common" about the EU's foreign policy is its sheer pettiness, absence of strategic vision and unwillingness to back up grand claims to global leadership with resources or political will.

Say what you will about the Greeks... after all, other Europeans will when they try to waive this embarrassment off in a way that seems socially acceptable, even as they tch-tch the rest of the world’s terrible addiction to nationality and such.

Meanwhile back in Manhattan, Kissinger, the left’s original hate-puppet and singin’-n’-dancin’ prince of darkness, sums up the risk to humanity that Europe is encouraging if not then becoming:

Kissinger: The major events in European history were conducted by nation-states which developed over several hundred years. There was never a question in the mind of European populations that the state was authorized to ask for sacrifices and that the citizens had a duty to carry it out. Now the structure of the nation-state has been given up to some considerable extent in Europe. And the capacity of governments to ask for sacrifices has diminished correspondingly.

SPIEGEL: Thirty years ago, you asked for one phone number that could be used to call Europe.

Kissinger: ... and it happened. The problem now is: Nation-states have not just given up part of their sovereignty to the European Union but also part of their vision for their own future. Their future is now tied to the European Union, and the EU has not yet achieved a vision and loyalty comparable to the nation-state. So, there is a vacuum between Europe's past and Europe's future.

I would just call them emotionally needy bozos aspiring to globally be the Pookie Adams character in ‘The Sterile Cuckoo’, but I’m not selling books like Dr. K. is, and frankly, I though Pookie was talented and kind of cute in a psychotic kind of way.

Kissinger: I think Angela Merkel, like any leader, has to think of her re-election. I have high regard for her. But I do not know many Europeans who would deny that the victory of radical Islam in Baghdad, Beirut or Saudi Arabia would have huge consequences for the West. However, they are not willing to fight to prevent it.

SPIEGEL: For example in Afghanistan. Does NATO need more German troops in the southern part of the country?

Kissinger: I think it is obvious that the United States cannot permanently do all the fighting for Western interests by itself. So, two conclusions are possible: Either there are no Western interests in the region and we don't fight. Or there are vital Western interests in the region and we have to fight. That means we need more German and NATO troops in Afghanistan. What I am not comfortable with is that some NATO members send troops primarily for non-combat missions. That cannot be a healthy situation in the long term.

Meanwhile the old goat of latter-day ‘realpolitik’ speaks. Too bad he doesn’t make any sense.

Dear Americans... What can the world expect from you? Twelve questions for the candidates – By Helmut Schmidt

Where he lost me was in the ‘nuanced’ part of his spoken disposition – the one where he believes that Europe both needs to be taken seriously, if not outright obeyed, and the Europe that is still somehow a ward of U.S.

Europe’s faith in the United States may be shaken, yet we wish to maintain the transatlantic partnership. We want to be able to love America again but we have become skeptical, because for the past 10 years, Washington has turned to us only when it has needed troops or money.

Which the US did after the bellowing calls from across the Atlantic that the US shouldn’t leave them out or go it alone. As for the troops and money, the loudest boors in Europe never managed to actually provide either in any manner that wasn’t a symbolic pittance played to their ignorant audiences at home.

All the same, we Europeans are well aware of our own weaknesses. Although we work together in regulating our funicular railways and the depth of water pools in our zoos, a “common foreign policy” in the European Union still exists in theory only. That is why we hope the new president will lead rationally and multilaterally – not least because we are convinced of America’s vitality.

Yet another “Daddy drinks because you cry” sort of sales pitch, and you can hardly hear the violins.

Europeans Healing the World Through Taxation, Episode № 268

Christine Lagarde told LCI television that Sarkozy had asked the new IMF chief, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, a Frenchman, to consider a tax that would affect oil companies worldwide.

The French want a “Global Tax”, as if there was a ‘global government’ to collect it for them. The goal, of course is to force the rest of humanity to hobble its’ economy as much as they’re hobbling theirs’, and to maintain a ‘competitive advantage’ in the world marketplace, they need the worlds’ help – to do this the rest of humanity has to go along with another bit of foolish (and poverty creating) European moral vanity.

Environmentalists and others in France have long floated the idea of taxing French oil giant Total, whose record-breaking profits they regard as reprehensible. The company, France's biggest by market value, reported Wednesday that net profit was up by 62 percent in the fourth quarter of 2007 to 3.6 billion euros ($5.23 billion).

Lagarde said the French government was pushing for a global tax so that not only Total -- the world's fourth-largest oil and gas company -- would be penalized.

Note how the grand and glorious industrial work that made Europe into a parking lot is shunted aside. The old arguments about trade barriers being a human virtue, are replaced by the fake concern city dwellers have for the environment is neatly folded into the idea that PROFITS are reprehensible.

If they only knew that energy is already one of the most taxed things out there that you can’t drink or smoke.

Bafflingly Poor Math for a Doctor

Kouchner is becoming quite a buffoon.

French foreign minister Bernard Kouchner was in Gaza yesterday and made a total jerk of himself. Kouchner told reporters that Israel shouldn't inspect trucks from Gaza because 'not all of them are carrying bombs.'

Maybe they should stop scanning luggage at Charles De Gaulle too, since not all of the bags can’t contain bombs too.

So it’s no surprise that when the matter of a Kosovar declaration of independence came up, that the EUtopian complained that this decision ‘was not made in Europe’ and of being soundly ignored by none other than the Kosovars themselves. Kouchner himself was left with the only choice of ‘wishing them luck’, as if he really had to be heard on the matter.

Look, they’re either involved, or they aren’t. If they want to spend another three decades convincing themselves that they matter by triangulating and getting in the way of ‘the adults’, then so be it. They’ll be taken with all the due seriousness that it merits – which is to say the limited respect of nations who have to due to some limited economic dependence on them.

You can ignore them as readily as these flummoxed commenters, who don’t quite realize that if Castro’s regime melts down, the US will have to build a real elective democracy, and real health and education systems there, and make it safe for the pillow biters that Castro’s western fans think are uner the big tent, but fail to notice their repression in “socially just” Cuba.

After all, not all, but only some of them might be jailed for their views, beliefs, or lifestyle.

They Could Tell She was Getting into it when She Dropped Her Crisps

They should have been double bagging it anyway.

Six different men won Internet auctions to have sex with the woman in April and May last year. They were only known to her by their online names, a spokesman for a court in the southwestern city of Stuttgart said Wednesday.

"The woman wanted to discover which one of the men had made her pregnant," the spokesman said. "So she needed their contact details. Of course, if they're not willing to go along with the gene test, she'll have to take them to court."

At least it wasn’t a Dutch auction, which goes to the lowest bid that the seller can tolerate.

Actually, this could prove to be an interesting social metric. Rising or falling prices can tell you just how bad these guys need to pay for it, and thus if their overall likability is becoming more or less desiccated in any given year. As for her, well... we can only see if she prices above or below average. Either way, in the lawsuit we see the politics of entitlement colliding into the flower of entitlement politics.

Old Fascism or the New Left?

Which is which?

The non-dom is to our age what Loadsamoney was to the 1980s. Where the grotesque comic representation of Margaret Thatcher's government was a wad-waving oaf, the equivalent caricature of the esprit Brown would be all Bentley and Cipriani (the hedge funds' favourite nosherie, in west London). He would be a tax-avoiding plutocrat who does billion-dollar deals from an office in Mayfair and occasionally loans his paintings to the Tate. But these mind-bogglingly wealthy non-doms - who live and work here but keep most of their assets offshore, out of the grasping hands of the taxman - are a cartoon come to real, gilded life. They are among the dramatis personae of my new book: I have been lunching them for years as a central responsibility of my day job as a business editor - but since it's at the BBC, when they're out with me they have to experience how the other 99.9% of us live.

Labor Front Leader Dr. Robert Ley began a speaking tour of German industrial areas to explain the "revolution" to the workers. Before he left Berlin he published in the Goebbels newsorgan Der Angriff words that could easily have originated in Moscow: "Money rules the world, but National Socialism does not acknowledge the rule of money. . . . The Führer said, 'I am perhaps the only head of a State who does not even have a bank account.' The National Socialist State leadership has not only destroyed plutocracy in Germany and allotted to money its proper role in economy, it also has freed the workers from the exploiters' fetters. The National Socialist economic order has freed itself, not only from the fetters of money in our land, but—and that is decisive—from the fetters of international money rule."

Okay, so I made it easy, but you’ll probably appreciate the pervasiveness of the ideas they share in common, and the fact that today’s “rebels” and “humanists” still think that the Nazis weren’t leftist, who just like them, were as in love with ‘the people’ as they are.

- Thanky thanky to Baghdad George

Flaming Twisted Wreckage V5.0

Alluding to the S & M Club of traditional European notions of governance, one legislator from the former east of Germany reveals the pervasiveness of the programming of the age. It’s where lefty comes from.

Politicians from across the political spectrum are demanding that Christel Wegner, a member of the German Communist Party -- but in parliament as an add-on to the Left Party list -- resign her newly won post. The reason? Just a few weeks into her job, she said on television that the dreaded East German secret police -- the Stasi -- was useful to protect the state from "reactionary forces" and that the Berlin Wall was built to keep West Germans out of East Germany.

But at least it was a society that would see to the peoples’ needs:

"I think that when one builds a new societal form," she said in reference to the Stasi, "then one needs such an organ because one has to protect oneself from other forces, reactionary forces, that look for opportunities to weaken a state from the inside." She went on to say that "the construction of the Wall was, in any case, a measure taken to prevent West Germans from continuing to come into East Germany."

Of course these are the same people who try to convince you that AmeriKKa is an agent of state oppression, run by a shadow government and Dick Cheney, who on 9/11 flew all 4 planes himself, and, and, and, eats babies, and is out to take their oil, and, and, and...

If they really want the personal to be the political, is doesn’t boil down to much more that a desire to extending their loony and inhumane opinions on people who aren’t them. What people do in the privacy of their homes certainly isn’t anyone else’s business, unless, that is, they want a state apparatus holding them down and feeding them the delusion that this makes them ‘freer’ than the rest of humanity, and want the rest of us to share in their ‘fun’.

Don’t Start Feeding the Squirrels

Via Rightgrrrl, we find Kate McMillan writing in Canada’s National Post wondering who we as a species learned to be such a bunch of pansies.

By "famine", I do not mean those 24-hour fruit-juice-sipping adventures in group narcissism devoted to curing the problems of that continent-wide parade of dysfunction known as "Africa." No, what I have in mind is a proper food shortage of the depth and duration that drives the creative homemaker to taste test the wallpaper glue, while contemplating which of the $3,000 Labradoodles goes first into the stew pot.

"Dig deep, darling. The pup's at the bottom."

A taste of deprivation could restore the word "crisis" to its original definition, resurrect "endurance" and "stoicism" from the vocabulary dustbin, along with the long-lost distinction between "threat" and "nuisance."

It would push back the powerful "if it saves one child" lobby, along with their toboggan helmet police, school lunch analysts, anti-bullying program directors, and playground equipment removal teams. They'd be forced to shelve plans to open the family car to random search by health department inspectors with tobacco-detecting dogs. They'd return to tending their own needs and wants, instead of regulating away those of everyone else.

A half million 20-somethings would emerge from their parents' basements, if only to search for food.

In the mean time, they might occasionally come up to find rolling papers and Doritos, but don’t bet on it, unless they major in do-gooderism something a beauty pageant contestant would say they want to do when they “grow up”.

Someday they Might even Resort to Democracy

Having never been any good at Engineering lately, the twitter-ati of the UK tries social engineering. It doesn’t say much for the state of democracy when people want to forcably impose racial quotas on “elected” officials in an effort to take away political choice from 99% of the population (humans) to pander to an elite amounting to 1% of the population who have such a low view of the public, that they don’t think anyone else can see past their own naïve view of people as easily compartmented tribes and factions.

More to the point is the sporting joy that elite of Islington exiles take in evoking a reaction of a few people in order to characterize something negative about the 92.4% of the population that’s Caucasian, and make the 2.4% of the population which is black, and the 5.2% that’s Asian feel to them like their helpless political wards who would otherwise be incapable of having among them a range of political views.

For that matter, the tiny, but morally repugnant elite that imagines that pluralism is so utterly disposable to a degree that you can limit who can run to begin with. The fact that they already have party lists shoved down their throats is sad enough.

There has to be some sort of distraction that the good people of Britain, the real Benetton ad crowd can offer these clueless “social overlords” that will make them believe that they’re indispensible to humanity, but keep them in the corner where that can’t do that much harm. I sort of though that this is what Radio 4 and “eco-tourism” were for, but apparently it’s a case of “today Parliament, tomorrow your last shred of liberty”.

Operation Black Vote, which conducted the research, recommends all-minority shortlists are used for four consecutive elections, in a bid to help BME candidates "get past go".

Report author Simon Wolley said: "The change in the law is not a sledgehammer to crack a nut; it's not forcing parties to use all-black shortlists.

Except when it is. If the same bullying meets the standard used to MEPs that don’t fit the dominant paradigm, or to call any number of things “constructing a climate of urgency”, then why not this?

Note the creative use of the word “we”. I don’t think they mean the public at large.

"But unless we take positive action measures we are not going to have a representative democracy for more than 75 years. It's not that we don't have [Barack] Obamas, but we don't have the mechanisms for them to see the light of day."

We have a Barack Obama precisely because we DO have a democracy, and DON’T compromise it as badly as they propose by force and coercion.

Making stupidity sound banal, one of it’s proponents managed this bit of brilliance too:

"The creation of ethnic-minority shortlists will undoubtedly see more ethnic minorities taking up seats in Parliament, which will mean a Parliament that mirrors the society it represents," he argued.

His Race Relations (Election Candidates) Bill would be a voluntary measure for parties to adopt in some seats but would remove legal obstacles surrounding the discrimination, as Labour had to do when its all-women shortlists were found to be illegal.

Note that “election candidates” has to remain in ellipses.

Flaming Twisted Wreckage, V4.0

The social awards is for abundant fertility and record motherhood, worthy of a farm based fatherland. The citizens seem increasingly like the angriest sort of the southern republics. Maybe the fevered anger is about counter-revolutionaries sabotaging tractor production, and the great national rutabaga harvest.

No, it’s not the CCCP we’re talking about...

Flaming Twisted Wreckage, V3.0

Since Bush hasn’t said a single negative thing about any of the candidates, Pancho felt compelled to make something up.

Flaming Twisted Wreckage, V2.0

And I thought all they were good for was laying cable.

Flaming Twisted Wreckage

Look at all that AMERICAN poverty. See? Right there! And there! And, and, and, there! No! don’t look here! Look here!

Their House is a Museum When People Come to See Them

They really are a scree-um...:

Over the past decade, the region has pushed away more economic development than the average French region, and the trend is accelerating.

No capital region in the world loses has lost jobs as Paris has. Blinded by its brilliant past, badly governed, fragmented in his selfishness, it’s anemic and failing to register strongly in the global competition of cities in the twenty-first century.

Not to be confused with that lucid “knowing better about things”, here we find a testimony to the idea of a mealy-mouthed formed of socialism which intends to equalize the appreciative masses – trading steady, equitable growth for, say, most of your liberties. Sure seems to be working wonders, eh?

The economic decline of Ile-de-France was expected to be the main topic of municipal elections next March. But "the elected officials in the region were all put in line," according to Lawrence Davezies.

Among the bobos, those privileged citizens of Paris, "they are happy that the mayor attends more to them than the health of the local economy." Read the list of "projects" of the candidates for mayor: kindergartens, cleaner busses and trains, getting exercise, safety… a quick approval process for a museum town.

He’s a Whiz, I tell ya!

...and I mean that sarcastically. Der Speigel’s one and only Marc Pitzge along with back-up place kicker Gabor Steingart deserves some sort of award for the vapidness of these brilliant titles:

“A TITANIC MOOD IN THE CLINTON CAMP” and his running column on the democratic nomination race called with great originality: “WEST WING”. Ooh! Alert the media!

In other words, they, or whoever it is that edits their trash back in the heimat knows about as much about the US as someone living in Germany who loafs around watching too much TV. But there’s more! Not satisfied by merely beating off to the latest hate-filled Ted Rall comic? Just get a load (smirk!) of the brilliant insight in this sub-heading:

"Where's the Beef?"

I don’t know. Have you cleaned your ears lately? And the buffoons actually want us to believe that a few of the Americans in Berlin think they’re “in exile”. Look: the Burmese living in Berlin are in exile. The Kurds in Berlin USED to be in exile. Der Speigel’s hyperbole should be deported to someplace where they really aren’t capable of tolerance and learn better, like, say, in one part or another of the holy continent of Europe and all of it’s peevish preoccupations and obsessions. Such as they are.

Actually, they’re from Uranus

The New York Times Sunday book reviews can be a rather cute thing sometimes. Especially when there’s a “disturbance in the force” that one of the apparachiks of the house organ of the empire of Sneer-opia thinks they need to neutralize the existence of any notion that doesn’t conform to their world view. The usual routine for them to find among the cadres, one with a pencil and a penchance to occasionally comb their hair, to take one for the team.

What I’m referring to, obviously, is Geoffrey Wheatcroft’s attempt to make James J. Sheehan’s “Where have all the Soldiers Gone, The Transformation of Modern Europe” to stop hurting his ears.

It is titled “Europeans are From Venus.” Oh, goodness me! What a wit!

The amusing thing about this train-wreck of his is that it does such an awful job of even understanding its own examples and sources. Citing Robert Kagan’s use of the term “Europeans are from Venus” from “Of Paradise and Power” in his title gives you the sense that there was some grand change in world view over the past century that ties the shrinking capacity of European nation-states to be a global agent for change and arbiter in conflicts, and the reflexive passivity that makes the continent’s Stepford children march against virtually any moving object. They are two entirely different subjects, but to the great minds of the Euro-yack-itopia they are because they both happen to involve soldiers, and, like, guns ‘n stuff, as opposed to the conflicts addressed in any of the theses. In fact at that level of unfamiliar ignorance, you could plausibly tie gravity and sunlight to his arguments.

This outpouring of popular feeling against war no doubt confirmed Kagan in his view that those “Europeans from Venus” are now incapable of the use of military force that still comes naturally to Americans, and that it was “time to stop pretending that Europeans and Americans share a common view of the world, or even that they occupy the same world.”

As if conflicts over which Americans have debated, taken issue on, supported or opposed, is somehow so easy to compartment in the “Venusian” mind really is easy for us. The first error is the bigoted one that you can attribute to his entire social orbit which permits him to believe that 302 million people are sufficiently similar to one another, and conform to his cartoonish view to say that without the editors laughing him to the impotent beehive of a continent whose gross neglect of human suffering he’s trying to salve.

However that may be, it’s a surely astonishing fact that no European war has been fought for more than 60 years, at least outside the ruins of Yugoslavia. Western Europe has become politically and socially demilitarized to a degree once unimaginable; after so many centuries of bloody conflict, Europeans don’t want to study war no more. In his scintillating tour d’horizon — and de force — Sheehan suggests that such obsolescence of war is specifically “the product of Europe’s distinctive history in the 20th century,” and he argues that it has created a new kind of European state along with “a dramatically new international system within Europe.”

Which is only possible if you’ve been so violent, so disruptive to humanity that your wars and ideas have killed hundreds of millions of people, that there is a need to be vanquished. This notion that they made this peace, fully born from the beneficence of their hearts is a dangerous delusion.

Which you can correct within five minutes radio listening. Of late, from that great blissful continent of EUtopia, whose dwindling number of children find themselves dancing about the maypole (both of them), we find one of many emerging forces bereft of any compelling moral framework. Not just the inability of the EU itself to embrace pluralism, but more to the point a frustrate Russia in fear of being in it’s last throws as a place with any form of social harmony and future. Never mind the age at which the men are die-ing by their own behavior, as telling as it is, just listen to the reanimated older nature of the Voice of Russia, which kicks off it’s broadcast with news of state visits as if the clock has turned back to 1977, and that whatever civil society there is outside of government is some of the art and sports that isn’t managed by a ministry.

Wheatcroft, in the cherry picking of examples about marching protestors is missing the pattern in European nature of marching armies as they remain, and the reasons they always have. To buy this line of shit so frequently parroted from the right side of the pond, you have to dissociate WHY some militaries are used. Even his citations in support of the “different, better people” argument make this quite obvious:

In late 1991, at the insistence of the German government (itself egged on, one might add, by Serb-bashing right-wing columnists in papers like The Frankfurter Allgemeine), the European Union recognized the sovereignty of Slovenia and Croatia, and then Bosnia, crucially and disastrously before the nationality questions in those territories had been resolved. This encouraged a competitive round of territorial acquisition and ethnic expulsion and “intensified the predatory war being fought by Serbs and Croatians against Bosnia.”
It was of course ludicrous as well as hubristic for Jacques Poos, foreign minister of Luxembourg, to say at this juncture that “the hour of Europe has dawned,” but trans-Atlantic denunciations of European weakness were also misplaced. When the tub-thumpers of Capitol Hill and the op-ed pages were asked 15 years ago what kind of military intervention in the Balkans they had in mind, it turned out to mean American air cover while the Western Europeans provided the P.B.I., as the British Army used to say, the poor bloody infantry, a division of labor that had little appeal in Europe.

Actually, it turned out (four times over) to require both Americans in the air, on the ground, and in the larger part of the reconstruction effort in EUtopia’s back yard.

One can talk about European soft power against American hard power, but the point is made better by Sheehan in the peroration to this excellent book. The birth of the Bolshevik regime — and then of Fascist and National Socialist regimes — was a direct consequence of the “intense violence” then poisoning Europe. The astonishingly peaceful collapse of Communism rather more than 70 years later reflected in turn “the decline of violence that, by the 1980s, had transformed international and domestic politics throughout Europe”: a change for the better if ever there was one. To put it another way, soccer is not only England’s and Europe’s gift to all mankind. It really is a better game.

Peace, you see, is being so vigilant on your passivity, that brutal hangovers of the state-fetishizing socialism can engage in genocide without any fear of intervention, mere hundreds of kilometers from the rotting boulevards where millions marched against the deposing of Saddam Hussein.

That surely must be something to be proud of. The only way to be so proud is to pasteurize the mind of the questions “why” and “when” to the reasons war is often unavoidable when the ugly memories or war are, in fact, inadequate to dissuade internecine violence and genocide from this continent that supposedly “remembers” war and brutality.

As for “whose game it is” is really the key to understanding a critic like Wheatcroft. It’s made obvious by spuriously throwing in an old quote from Evelyn Waugh:

It isn’t necessary to agree with Evelyn Waugh writing to his friend Graham Greene — “Of course the Americans are cowards. They are almost all the descendants of wretches who deserted their legitimate monarchs for fear of military service” — to see clearly that the United States isn’t a warlike country at all. In many ways it has always been more deeply peaceable in its instincts than ever Europe was.
And is the civilianization of Europe such a bad thing? Although there has been much grumbling about the Bundeswehr’s inadequate contribution in Afghanistan, some of us cannot see it as an occasion for pure regret if the Germans have changed character so drastically.

Because it isn’t about peace, the protection of innocents, or anything else – it’s about Europeans no longer “owning the game”. My sense is that if Europeans had a game, frankly ANYTHING that would work to even take a chip out of the abuse vulnerable people worldwide have to suffer, Americans would be more that happy to let them have their little never ending end-zone dance. But they have to actually do something to demonstrate that they can actually do something to support their self-flattery with fact.
And they might want to abandon their schitophrenic relationship with themselves as both a special class of humans and a mass of pitiable, emotionally vulnerable peace lovers in need to having their precious little feelings protected. Oh, and their class hatred at some point in the next century too, if they can, but I wouldn’t hold my breath – because somewhere in their S&M game of not being able to figure out if everyone in an over-or-under class, and the insistence of proletarian-seeming sameness of outcome, they’ll continue to forget as they’ve had so often before in their history – the people that get killed when they think they “know their game”. This time it might be a deterministic attempt to tax the carbon out of the atmosphere, or anti-globalize our way to impoverishing billions in Asia and Africa, but any way you shake it, the ugliness that comes out of the hubris that they can’t seem to develop in their breathtaking enlightenment will emerge to do more harm again.

Like one fellow I had to listen to last night who told me, imagining that everyone MUST agree with him, that there was something evil and calculating about George Bush spreading democracy, all you have to do is ask them when did promoting democracy and pluralism suddenly become so evil? Simple: when the people your childish hatred compels you to oppose do something you can’t bring yourself to admit is positive, and when your own world view completely failed to succeed in its’ own attempt to promote human freedom.

Much in the way that foolish old coot was willing to dispose of human dignity to make his point about his own notion of the defense of human dignity, so will the European social brain trust. Of course the humans themselves need not apply.

Not Exactly Being All That You Can Be

Clarsonimus points out that the Bundesregierung has managed to used the Bundeswehr to be really
Bundes-evasive:

When asked by a reporter what the other 250,000 troops in the German military are doing back home at the moment and if it might not maybe be possible to dig up one or two hundred of them with guns and ammunition and everything who might not sort of perhaps consider kind of like coming down south to fight for a week or two tops pretty please, the angered spokesman said “We’re doing everything we can, I say. Not everything we should or even could, but can. Three letters here; c, a, and n. Got that? I can’t stress the word can enough.”

Which is to say: this is the time in the Bundeswehr when we dance. More to the point: you may not pet my monkey, or molest his skull for that matter.

Get a freaking Bundes-heart, will ya?

No Matter, They Don’t Really Have a Constitution Anyway

How is that Lefty do-gooders manage to be so willing to dispose of pluralism? Chief chin-scratcher of the former Church of England believes that some features of Sharia law are inevitable in the UK.

Dr Rowan Williams, symbolic head of the world's 70 million Anglicans, argued that other religions enjoyed tolerance of their own laws and called for "constructive accommodation" with Islamic practice in areas such as marital disputes.

First of all, when did 3% of the British population get the leverage to impose laws on others, when no other Muslims in reasonable, democratic societies outside of majority Islamic nations seem to need it?

He stressed that such practice should not take precedence over an individual’s rights as a citizen.

Take any man who says that, and just put him in a dress. Since when in the sphere of lefty-do-gooder culture did anything considered a ‘right’ (a list of which includes all of life’s needs, except for civilization, as we find in this case) not take the place of anyone else’s faith? Where does that ”so just don’t have an abortion” argument fit into tacitly or openly promoting a canon legal system in the civil code?

Thirdly, when did the Church of England lose so much of its leverage as a social entity that it feels compelled to resign itself to tribal factions getting their own laws?

Asked if the adoption of Sharia law was necessary for community cohesion, Dr Williams told the BBC: "It seems unavoidable and, as a matter of fact, certain conditions of Sharia are already recognised in our society and under our law, so it is not as if we are bringing in an alien and rival system."

Of COURSE it’s alien and rival – it’s an imposition on civil society to enforce imposed religious laws! Hello! McFly! Remember the enlightenment? I’ll bet not.

Whereas Almighty God hath created the mind free; that all attempts to influence it by temporal punishment or burthens, or by civil incapacitations, tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness, and are a departure from the plan of the Holy author of our religion, who being Lord both of body and mind, yet chose not to propagate it by coercions on either, as was his Almighty power to do . . .

- Thos. Jefferson, 1786

222 years ago, in that “great before” when promoters of Islam want you to believe that any society they now feel humiliated by was somehow “inferior” to them then.

Rip off Artist

It looks like the Mr. Der Stürmer Zeichner has either been inspired by ¡No Pasarán!, or managed a original thought for once. Westminster with Mickey (- the Ché) Ears tied to a story about surveillance. Of course the allegations aren’t about law but good taste, since the UK has no legal limitations on wiretapping.

For more on Steve Bell, our favorite hate-mongering anachronism, click here, for his illuminating and charming little scribbles which are obviously intended to promote understanding between the peoples of the USSR and her Marxist-Leninist comrades and have nothing to do with the sort of repetitive derision associated with coercive socialism such as that found in Orwell’s Oceania described in 1984, or even Aldous Huxley’s blissed out dictatorship in Brave New World.

Media Martyrdom Operation

The TF3 idiot on « Ce Soir Ou Jamais ! » interviewing Tariq Ramadan demonstrated the usual European bigotry, in thinking that politics is somehow genetic or hereditary. As if the world would really be able to sit still that long for these simpletons to understand it. It’s absurd. All he has to do is actually read what Ramadan actually says when he isn’t stroking your chicken.

From World Politics Review:

It has often been pointed out that Tariq Ramadan is the grandson of Hassan Al-Banna: the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, the pivotal organization in the history of Islamic fundamentalism. And it has at least just as often been pointed out that this should not matter, since, after all, no one chooses their parents and grandparents. In a debate with Tariq Ramadan on the French public television channel France 3 last Wednesday, the Franco-Tunisian author Abdelwahab Meddeb posed what is the real question in this connection: Is Tariq Ramadan faithful to the legacy of his grandfather's ideas?

The show runs on the tagline « L’actualité vur par la culture » (“the news seen through the prism of culture, and not as implied “the way the culture sees news”), which is basically how the French preSS sees everything anyway, because you can pretty much bend it any way you like.

Bent over by Brussels

It looks like the EUvian love-parade is starting out by visit the member-states
paper mills.

The Confederation of European Paper Industries (CEPI) said the trading scheme will take £750m out of the European paper industry, effectively wiping out its annual profits.

Next thing you know, the cadres will be hanging banners saying “Property Is Theft”.

I Have a Study That I did Proving that I’m an Umbrella

Really. Never mind the pretense of good intentions, and look at how the spin is spun. It starts with this:

The US Trails Behind on Humanitarian Aid

Scary, hunh? Sure sounds that way. It was the derived conclusion found in a study of what’s called the “Humanitarian Response Index” done by an outfit called “Development Assistance Research Associates” which places the US at number 16.

It turns out that DARA is a Spanish government spin-off that gets its’ funds from the same “look at me, I giving this poor waif a cracker” operations doing something contractual and functional for them like management and working up studies. They are: The Spanish Government, The EU, The UN.

Now, take a look at what that “Humanitarian Response Index” registers. One would think that it has something to do directly with feeding, clothing, protecting, providing medical care... think again:

The established categories and their respective weights in the Index are as follows:
1. Responding to humanitarian needs (30%)
2. Integrating relief and development (20%)
3. Working with humanitarian partners (20%)
4. Implementing international guiding principles (15%)
5. Promoting learning and accountability (15%)

They gage MANAGEMENT, not AID. If they did, they would have to innumerate the heartlessness of most the people listed in their hall ‘o fame.

In other words, the services that DARA offers under contract using nebulous immeasurable indexes like “promoting” something and “partnering”. Stupider still they list among donating nations transnational bodies like the European Commission that aggregate member states’ activities which are also listed. It’s part of the same old gang-bang: Europeans may list themselves individually to pad it with names, and as the EC or EU to pad the scale. It’s no different that the occasional comparison of the population and economy of California to that of France, except in one way: we do it for fun. Americans don’t build news stories and statistical benchmarks that are supposed to be taken seriously. In fact most frequently, the references are used in the context of light entertainment and comedy. Would any EU member state care to compare itself to a US state, knowing that it only represents PART of a nation that they terminally fixated on? Not likely.

Then they dress it us as actually being the aid that they make a living off of managing. Nice trick. Better still the goal in any event is to win a beauty contest of apparent compassion, not with those needing aid, but the public and the repugnant elite at home that think that this sort of index reflects on their own generosity as a society.

But if you want to take the actual rankings seriously, one finds that the greatest difference is still WITHIN the Euro-pantheon of eternal goodness tells you a great deal more about what’s going on. In any event, there is a 18% difference in the indexed score of the 5 low-population European states with everyone below them. The difference between the large states are far more telling. Averaging the UK, France, Germany, Spain, and Italy who in aggregate have a larger population that the US, and also represent the overwhelming majority of the scale of Europe’s people places them greatly below the US. But somehow you still get:

The US Trails Behind on Humanitarian Aid

Yes. Yes. Of course. Tossed in among the other items studied with the same depth in the newspaper... Look here Karl-Heinz, a sale at karstadt!

Only if we can Carpet-Bomb Your Cities Twice

After months of glorifying Obama, European media have tried to portray his losses to New York Senator Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire and Nevada as part of an elaborate conspiracy to keep a black man from becoming the 44th president of the United States.

Brussels Journal has a Obamarama Euro-press roundup which proves again how naïve the scribblers of the continent really are, thinking that they can somehow wish an American candidate into office, even if they don’t know why.

The way Americans conduct their elections is still none of the business of Europeans, no matted how much they rationalize to the contrary. The very notion that they even suggest this to themselves tells you just how unfamiliar they are with the concept of national sovereignty and what makes a society’s pluralism legitimate.

The Obamarama is also looking a little Obamaphobic, considering what the lazy speed-bumps of the European press which is so reflexively critical of any event that happens in the US, even if they previously seemed to want it. Most of all, they would temporarily (for maybe a week or two) lose the fig leaf behind which they would hide their irrational hatred, as:

The [European] Left, which likes to attribute to the United States an imperialist foreign policy and discrimination against blacks and Hispanics, is not as happy about the rise of Obama as one would expect. On sending the message that they are ready to elect an African American, a part of American society is exhibiting an attitude much less prejudiced than is commonly attributed to this country.

In other words, they REALLY need someone to hate for fear of noticing their own prejudice, weakness, their patronizing concept of race as a personality feature, and frankly, the only reason they really have to think that their deluded world view even matters.

What do you expect from people who want to internationalize courts for no clear reason, and undermine a law body’s legitimacy as a feature of something that a society agrees to put on itself? After all, why would they objected to Serbs wanting to try Milosevic under Serbian law? To “Internationalize” the joy of frying him under laws decoupled from those he harmed in the nation that he harmed them in?

In the mean time, the doochie continues to be passed by the left hand side:

In an 800-word rant titled ‘American Primary System Fails to Impress Europeans’, Deutsche Welle implies that if Germans cannot help Americans vote Obama into office, then the US political system itself must be flawed. DW asserts that American democracy is “atavistic. It’s outdated. It doesn’t really reflect democracy in a modern sense.” The story goes on to say that America would be better off if it adopted a parliamentary system, just like the one in (surprise, surprise) Germany.