Someone’s Next Imagined Injustice

I don't think the Syrians "reacted" well.




al Jazeera sur Seine would be silent were it not to report the matter on the basis of an “American accusation” that Damascus and Pyongyang had a nuclear weapons pact.

“Wild Wild West?”

A 700m long train convoy was attacked in the northern district of Marseille by an organized gang who had seized the contents of several cars.

The theft took place Thursday at nightfall in St. Louis in the 15th arrondissement of the city, reported the newspaper La Provence on Saturday, which was confirmed by police.
They stacked wooden ties and metal barriers on the track to force the train to come to a stop.

After lecture after lecture about the superiority of a society where socialistic intervention is pervasive and there’s a law for every occasion and human activity, the facts show quite the opposite: a social failure in “good” parts of town expressed mostly by hoodlums and thug wannabees and a quagmire of crime. Of one University:

Crime figures are through the roof, and they’re taking place in front of the academic buildings of the Mirail where attacks on students for their phones and their laptops have continued to multiply. Between January and early April, around 40 complaints have been made as we wrote on April 9th. Today, nearly a month later, about 70 female students filed assault complaints. "Our presence there has often been decried" we are told the police reports recorded them saying. The degree of larceny has grown overwhelmingly, and the major public university and governments are facing a serious security problem.

Specifically, police have recorded 63 assaults between December 18th and April 15th. This outbreak has yet to let up. Despite the lull due of the academic holidays, a young man was beaten on Tuesday. His attackers had stolen his guitar and his mobile phone.

Beaten and Insulted

The majority of these crimes take place in broad daylight between noon and 7 p.m. between the entrance to the university and the subway, and they are especially violent: "I received a punch on the left ear. My laptop is dropped and my glasses were broken, reported a student of 25 who for one week, came to the university with friends for fear of threats. A teacher was also punched, thrown to the ground and insulted during the assault. Result: fifteen days of temporary closure for forensic investigation.

Of course in a “gun-free” paradise, passivated by government social action, one can hardly imagine anything of the sort, right?

"I saw a girl being attacked by two boys who had beaten her to snatch her laptop. Many witnesses were at the scene but nobody did a thing", said one student letters.

I guess this is what believers in the “managed” social contract do in the face of adversity.

The Implausible Arrogance of the European Mind

Plantu’s fevered mind comes leaking out all over the place: depicting Clinton as a sub-human idiot, and for absolutely no reason, throwing in his pet peeve about Sarkozy-as-vampire. Cap it off with his lie about his symbol of French society as youthful, positive, and innocent: “I don’t know why, but I’ve got a crush on Obama”

“If the French voted in the U.S. presidential election, Barack Obama would win with flying colors. A very distinguished French Committee supporting Barack Obama brings together personalities such as Pierre Bergé, Yamina Benguigui or Olivier Duhamel, but also members of the right such as Axel Poniatowski. The charismatic Obama is a dream come true for blacks as well as whites.”

If, for a moment this was true, Hillary Clinton would not have near parity with Barack Obama, and John McCain would have parity with both. This is all part of the French delusion that they have more to say about things they think they understand than anyone else – that notion that something MUST have the imprint of their blab-arati to be true. This is patently false.

In large part Americans grew well past the notion of the factional “dreams of blacks, or even whites”. Not only have the overwhelming majority not seen ourselves in that simplistic a matter, we are also something incomprehensible to the unknown writer of that blurb: we are not French. They can’t possibly believe that they can take what boils down to as the primitive dynamics of their own civic life, and imagine that the same is true everywhere else.

Who are they to say that some plastic wrapped “charismatic” figure with capped teeth is “our dream come true” as though we were some sort of zombie-proletariat population like most PS supporters prove in their actions to be.

”This is not all: among Americans living in France, the Senator from Illinois is preferred by more than 70% of Democrat supporters, who have considered the chances of Hillary’s campaign”

To the simplest point: no. You DO NOT vote here. You do NOT get to stamp your feet at the foreign coverage of riots as bad PR and imagine that the US may not have an election without the approval of a intellectual class that hasn’t had anything substantive to say for four decades.

Desperately Seeking Approval

Citi puts a little money into French films. As if the making of films was some sort of national project of that person-nation-thing that they think they imagine, many tend to believe this to be affirmation of something “superior” about the French [fill in the blank] industry, no matter how small the potatoes really are, and in a real economy €150 million amounts to 3 or 4 film productions.

THE DEVIL IN THE DETAILS

The 150 million euros announced for France remain modest compared with similar investments to the USA – as the size of the European market and the stock market crisis obliges. "Only high-quality projects to be funded," said Yann Le Quellec. But that’s okay, we are here to stay." The company intends to popularize a way of financing which has the advantage of relieving the producer of the painstaking work of seeking funding. It could reduce some adverse effects associated with the French production system, as the increasing financial partners who, on big films, deprives many of their revenue.

Maybe their mothers never told them that it was only a movie.

My word! How DARE they also invest in the US! With the usual inability to understand the notion free will on the part of an investor. More to the point if that investment is so meager, and the French film production system, complete with subsidies and boards demands that producers break even, why is the free market film production methodology so thoroughly demonized in Europe when the subject comes up?

Stroking Their Own Chickens

With their ignorance of history common to those who think themselves some sort of wise, lesson giving, übermenchen, al Jazeera sur Seine caricatures President George W, Bush, a civilian, as “George W. Patton”. I’m sure they think they’re very witty, but they’re also very stupid. Patton lost 4000 men a week after the Normandy landing up until the liberation of Paris so that Leclerc could appear to have heroically liberated Paris single handed. You see, all the United States really did was bring swing dancing and chewing gum.

When Americans see this kind of thing, even most Democrats, not only do they take the culture that spews it even less seriously, it needs no motivation at all to detest it.

A New Kind of Brownshirt

Being a poser is a way of life when you’re in politics. If you don’t have a platform or opposable thumbs, much of it involves either scaring people or trying to convince them that you walk on water.

John Rosenthal introduces us to a German politician who backtracked after saying that Germany shouldn’t discriminate against Iraqi non-Christians in awarding asylum. The logic is goes something like this: symbolically, giving asylum to a minority of people being targeted for matters of upbringing or conscience makes you prejudiced, especially in the eyes of the people targeting them. Better to open the policy to anyone, and let Ba’athists into your country.

Herta Däubler-Gmelin, you probably won’t recall, is the same woman in September 2002 who compared George Bush to Adolf Hitler. Apparently this is enough to get you appointed to the Bundestag’s Human Rights Committee, having resigned her post of Minister of Justice after the Hitler gaffe only to find that she has a whole new bunch of fans.

Her father deported 70 000 Slovak Jews to Nazi camps.

It’s all very amusing when you consider the confusion Europeans carry around with them. She is an SPD member who has to share space with people who are as wildly Anti-American as the far left and the far right, yet when you corner them, they all have their strange pet theories about America, Jews, minorities, etc. à la Front Nationale, don’t have a very stern notion of what individual freedom is, don’t necessarily understand that there’s anything suicidal about the redistribution policies of the left, or the roles of the unbridled mega-corps of European industry that are as protected from competition from within as they are from abroad.

In Germany, however, the spring and summer months of 2002 would mark the return of a virulent anti-Americanism into the mainstream of German political discourse, as Schröder made a novel sort of "preemptive" opposition to military intervention in Iraq into the centerpiece of his re-election campaign. Däubler-Gmelin made her remarks at a campaign event only days before the elections and the -- at the time merely hypothetical -- prospect of a war against Iraq was again the theme. Bush wanted to use a war "to divert attention from domestic problems," Däubler-Gmelin suggested, just as "Adolf Nazi" had once done.

The chancellor would offer his American counterpart an ambiguous "apology" for his minister's comparison. Significantly, however, he rejected calls for her resignation. Indeed, on the very day of the elections, government spokesman Uwe-Karsten Heye went to the trouble of dismissing reports of her impending resignation as "pure speculation" (ddp, Sept. 22, 2002). The election results would secure victory for Schröder by a razor-thin margin. Shortly after their announcement, Däubler-Gmelin brought the controversy to a close by informing the chancellor that she was not available to form part of the new government.

Which is funny, considering that the history past that she’s so keen to dissociate herself from also happens to be politically useful. Odder still is that those Ba’athists who will likely flee to Germany under her policy revision will recall where their movement has its’ origins: in Hitler’s SA that her father was a “jurist” in.

Just who is it here tangling with evil? The people whose president she compared to Hitler or the parties to mass murder under Saddam that political correctness is manipulating her into helping?

A note to anyone who isn’t convinced that this subject remains touchy: her Wikipaedia page describes her father, the political instrument behind the exportation of people to death camps as merely “a Nazi diplomat and the mayor of Tubingen”.

Don’t Let the Door Hit Your Puckered Starfish on the Way Out

Never before, however, have we seen an entire political area vanish

Wrote Corriere della Sera

In the stunned eyes of the Rainbow people, the night was made even blacker by the triumph of Silvio Berlusconi, the impressive gains of the Northern League and the hard-to-refute claim of its secretary, Umberto Bossi: “The workers have voted for the Northern League”. Pause for effect: “The workers don’t vote for the Left any more. The Northern League is the new workers’ party”.

When they get stunned, they will likely follow the old script, and call this “Americanization” which by some miracle of illogic had not a single American involved, and on a continent where a cultural cleansing campaign to diminish the United States has been taking place for 40 years.

For the first time in history since the fall of the Fascist dictatorship, Italy’s parliament will not have a single “red” sitting on its benches […] The truth is that this tetchy, daydreaming, belligerently pacifist Left, which in recent years has said no to high speed trains, wind power, peace mission, pension reform and almost everything else, has lost on all fronts. […] As the Left glumly folds away its flags, Silvio Berlusconi, Gianfranco Fini and above all Umberto Bossi smile triumphantly in the background among the celebrating workers that the Left can no longer reach.

Inasmuch as they defined that history of political tumult, and that Berlusconi has been the first leader of the Republic to complete a term, it isn’t much of a surprise. On average, Italy has had an annual change of government called through overblown rhetoric, anger, corruption, and all the attendant lunacy of party-parliamentary politics.

You see, the parties have historically only addressed what they though the population wanted. The public votes for the party, the party forms the election lists and the governments... all is the party, not the individual. As such the notion of the individual’s reputation, integrity, etc., pale in importance to that of the parties’ internal jello-fights.

That hideous ‘cartel’ view of power, a sort of palliative on the way to creeping tyranny, is in fact that only home-made contribution European politics has made to democracy since the beginnings of an individuals’ rights before the law were founded in the Magna Carta.

- Via Brussels Journal

Zinn’s Army

The high-spirited rhetoric seemed to me fuelled more by hatred of parents and teachers than by plans for the future.

writes Robert Fulford in Canada’s National Post as he reflects on the buffoonery of the 68ers that still try to strangle the good sense out of the world to this day.

All protests were against institutions in the West, none against Mao or the Soviets. It seemed that an entire generation had turned political. No one guessed that they would lose their ideology as quickly as they had acquired it.

Which reflects on the lack of depth behind the confused kids who then, like today are willing to look for evidence of evil under every American Flag, Menorah, or timecard.

When 1968 ended and things calmed down, much of what had happened seemed silly, a mass exercise in self-congratulation. Last week Tom Stoppard, the Czech-born playwright, said he didn't like 1968 much at the time (he was 31) and finds it embarrassing and repulsive in retrospect. "I loved the music and the dressing up but I couldn't take to the dialogue: a reductive argot of comrade-jargon and bogus wisdom derived from misunderstood eastern religions," words close to those he gives a character in his play, Rock 'n' Roll, which begins in 1968. His recent article in The Sunday Times of London carried the headline, "The year of the posturing rebel."

Deprogramming the Young Victims of the Cult

Stars and Stripes reported on the horror of what the dean of the South Korean Military Academy encountered when peering into the ignorance of the freshman class.

When the Korea Military Academy asked its incoming cadets in 2004 to name South Korea’s main enemy, they were shocked at the answer: 34 percent said the United States while only 33 percent said North Korea.

As in... their neighbors to the north who have been building short-range missiles and developing nukes. While lefty critics evasively insist that the RoK is not the DPRK’s target, they miss the point that the RoK is the DPRK’s only interest in the world, and seem more than willing to threaten Japan and the US in pursuit of controlling that interest.

The academy’s then-superintendent, retired Lt. Gen. Kim Choong-bae, was so concerned about the survey results he cut the cadets’ boot camp from six weeks to four.

During the two extra weeks, cadets attended classes on South Korean history to learn how the country got its independence, what happened during the Korean War, and the role the United States played in the war.

Teachers told them about the U.S. Military Academy at West Point class of 1950, whose cadets graduated less than a month before the start of the Korean War. Nearly 50 of those cadets were killed.

“The [KMA] cadets were shocked. They said, ‘We didn’t know that,’” Kim said.

But HOW could this be?????

The cadets told academy officials they had leftist teachers in middle and high school who told them the United States was trying to dominate South Korea.

“The young cadets were kind of victims of the wrong education. They were kind of indoctrinated by the wrong education, the wrong textbooks,” Kim said. “Youngsters have no idea what was the Korean War, what was the contribution by the United States. They’ve been educated with a different perspective for the past 10 years.”

Not that this is anything but predictable. Whatever their faults... teaching bald-faced lies to students, etc., they need to be cherished, go unchallenged, and lauded because it’s for the children. After all they’re just compelled to do this by the grand human imperative for peace, love, redistribution of misery, the pasteurizing of individuals into powerless tools of the state... You know, all that “liberation” that the leftists of the world are known for.

And all because they care about you. Now here’s your dog treat.

Kim said the anti-Americanism of four to six years ago has died down, but many South Koreans still believe North Korea wants to use its nuclear capabilities against the United States or Japan, not South Korea.

Some favor reuniting with North Korea so the South can have access to those capabilities, he said.

We Listen To This Trash So You Don’t Have To

Today on the ever quietly smarmy Radio Netherlands there was a segment on that baaad, baaad US government’s baaad, baaad boycott on the 1980 Moscow Olympic games. Left to your imagination was the divine pursuit of the Tibetan cause and the present confused popular call to boycott the Beijing games, or at the very least the opening ceremony. This was left for the listener to piece together on their own because, as we all know, this just can’t be made openly complicated or difficult without embarrassing the listener with the idea that the dynamics of one boycott which CAN be looked down on would be compared to one that one simply SHOULDN’T.

The once boycotted athlete did make a fine point: there might be some interaction between politics and athletics, and at the outset he thought the cause of finding a non-violent way to send the CCCP a message was laudable, that it did nothing to remove the Red Army from Afghanistan. Tacit message: the boycott just amounted to so many empty words.

One name that went unmentioned when discussing that dastardly US Gubmint boycott, that thing so evil that it still deserves abuse, was that of the President who though it to be a non-violent but tough move: that of Jimmy Carter, the only US president who kept a boy’s name in adulthood.

His name did come up in the usual haze of progressive warmth when his recent meeting with Hamas’ head in Damascus came up. Don’t forget that it took 9 years of back-channel negotiation with the IRA to come to the table. That Hamas is nowhere near the point that there is anything to talk to them about, and that this whole play is to the aged hippies in the western audience seems to go un-mentioned. In fact in the sphere of the left-dominated “free” press, this kind of thing MUST either go unmentioned or in roundabout terms that bruise the feelings of the journo who might still in the back of their mind, think that they still need to write it.

Flunky finds his Stiffy

State media meets chemical media:

Patrick Binet, director of TF1 International, who is also responsible for distributing broadcast rights group, was taken into custody after the discovery of the body of a dead man at his home in the 11e arrondissement of Paris.

According to Le Point, police reportedly discovered the body of a naked man at the home of Patrick Binet, of rue de la Folie Méricourt in the 11e arrondissement, on Wednesday night.
Patrick Binet was held into custody all day Thursday at the 2nd division Police Station of the judicial police (2e DPJ). As of this writing he’s still incarcerated and his interrogation continues, as is the third man present that night at the home of the patron saint [appointed director] of TF1 International.

According to AFP, the first elements leave think of a "fine party" which would have degenerated, perhaps because of drug use, evidence of which have been discovered during the search of Binet’s home.
Indeed, a drug overdose due to the consumption of GHB, better known as “rape drug” could be the cause of death of the man in his forties.
"I do not know the all the facts of the matter. I have nothing to say at this time," said TF1 director general Nuncio Paolini to lepoint.fr.

- Shukran to Kubert

As if their Love or Hatred Mattered More than Anyone Elses’

A Discussion on Anti-Americanism is to be found at the EU Referendum blog and forum, and it’s getting quite rich:

As an American resident in the UK, I find that most of the 'anti-Americanism' stems from the very solipsism of which Americans are most often accused: a profoundly rooted assumption in Britain that the European approach to existence is the absolute best, world without end, amen. That Americans are accused of triumphalism and an assumption that THEIR way of life is the best becomes somewhat ironic in this light.

Quite often, I hear remarks along these lines: 'why don't you Americans [all 300 million, presumably] act more like ______?'

Prescient. Do please join in if you wish, and here as well.

- Chapeau to Strummin’ Joe

Russia to EU

Grow up, thumbsuckers – and stop talking in circles already.

An Impenetrable Miasma

Be gone, foul spot.

Lack of transparency, including refusal of information, continues to top the list of EU institutions' sins against citizens, the European ombudsman said on Tuesday (15 April).

According to a fresh report, ombudsman Nikiforos Diamandouros received 3,211 new complaints in 2007 - compared to 3,830 in 2006 - with German citizens (16 percent), Spain (11 percent), France (eight percent) and Poland (seven percent) registering the most complaints.

The overwhelming majority of cases - 413, amounting to 64 percent of the total - were targeted against the European Commission.

”Targeted against?”

Some 28 percent of complaints fall into a 'lack of transparency' rubric, with Mr Diamandouros saying this fact should provide "an opportunity for EU institutions and bodies to demonstrate their willingness to be as open and accountable as possible".

An opportunity which, if a millennium of precedence cultural traditions are held to, will be ignored and then quietly killed off. Nonetheless then, as always, begins the journalistic cover and excuse-making.

Absolute transparency diminishes privacy, while absolute privacy undermines transparency, the ombudsman said, calling on EU institutions to strike the right balance.

Sure thing, Sparky. Whatever. Never mind the percs for now. Keep an eye on the political Percodan they’re trying to hand out.

The Euro-dictum: If it ain’t Bolted Down, It’s Yours’

It’s not for a lack of self-esteem, it’s that incredible lack of esteem they have for others. TF1 thinks their production is worth something, but just what value is seems to be what they can’t grasp. As an entity of the state, the only way to know would be to see what the market thinks of their radio and television output were they free to choose it on their own.

For that, there are the visible figures of how many of their clips are downloaded, such as one can discover by posting them on sites such as Youtube, Dailymotion, or LiveLeak. TF1’s stuff represents an amount so small that it’s nearly immeasurable.

So, just what is that statistically meaningless slice of Youtube’s traffic worth? TF1 thinks that’s 10 times the total amount of Youtube’s earnings. Normal people call that usury.

On Wednesday the newspaper Les Echos reported on its website that TF1 attacked the video sharing website YouTube.com in court. Un porte-parole de la chaîne de télévision a refusé de commenter cette informatiA spokesman for the television studio refused to comment on this information.

Le quotidien cite un porte-parole de YouTube selon lequel la plainte a été reçue il ya quelques jours en Californie, ajoutant que l'affaire serait néanmoins jugée en France, par le tribunal de grande instance de ParisThe newspaper quoted a spokesman for YouTube that the complaint was received a few days ago in California, adding that the case would be tried in France in the Tribunal de Grande Instance de Paris.

The video sharing site sometimes broadcasts content from television, without agreement on copyrights.

Selon Les Echos, les dommages et intérêts demandés par TF1 à YouTube, contrôlé par le géant américain Google, s'élèveraient à 100 millions d'eurAccording to Les Echos, the damages sought by TF1 from YouTube, controlled by the American giant Google, would amount to €100 million. "Dans le cas de YouTube, le montant des dommages demandés par la Une s'élève à 100 millions d'euros, soit dix fois plus que le chiffre d'affaires 2006 (de YouTube) qui atteignait 10,6 millions de dollars", peut-on lire sur le site du journal. "In the case of YouTube, the amount of damages sought stands at €100 million, or ten times more than [YouTube’s] turnover in 2006, which stood at 10.6 million dollars".

Les Echos ajoutent qu'une autre plainte contre le site dailymotion.com a été déposée en France en décembre.Les Echos added that another complaint against the site dailymotion.com was filed in France in December. Le montant des dommages et intérêts demandés dans ce dossier atteindrait 39,7 millions d'euros. The amount of damages sought in this case would reach 39.7 million.

That’s 944% of YouTube’s 2006 earnings and 90% of DailyMotion’s 2006 gross receipts for something which could only garner more interest from the exposure, is aired publicly, is posted by people who pay the TV tax to begin with for people who are not very likely to live outside France where that same television tax is levied.

This, in spite of the fact that TF1 smothering-parent France TV (previously known as RTF), and “official user” promoting itself at Dailymotion has an inherent near-monopoly over content and delivery in France and a major stake in other European markets built on that former absolute monopoly. Now they’re demanding their “rights”.

Get it? Peace, love, and making the state created cartels work “for the people.” Got that. People?

- H/T à Erik

Looking for some of that Good Old-fashioned Communism?

Well, here it is!



So just where ARE those “Truthers” when you find a real false flag operation?

Nothing Says “Racist” Like Thinking Yourself an Expert in Ethnology

A genocide that had no meaning outside of itself seems to have been benefited from the 'nuanced' support of a government that fancies itself an expert in cultures. 'Experts' so fixated on being world-beater in a field of study for its' own sake that they can't imagine people not being tribally motivated Stepford children

This month marks the 14th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide, which is commonly considered to have begun on April 6, 1994. One aspect of the genocide that has received little attention in English-language media is the close relations that existed between the French military and the armed forces of the "Hutu Power" Rwandan government. In collaboration with the pro-government Interahamwe militias, Rwandan army officials are held to have been largely responsible for organizing the massacres perpetrated against the Tutsi civilian population and moderate Hutu from April to July 1994. The massacres are estimated to have claimed some 800,000 lives.

In fact that same preoccupation with the idea that placed 'professional ethnologist' Michèle Alliot-Marie to the head of the defense ministry. It's the same motive behind the inability to imagine that there are any sort of universal human values, autonomous thought, or points of moral reference. It's s sign of an even simpler sort of 'cultural ethnology': the disease of thinking you own culture is so adept at the manipulation of 'culture' that it finds it hard to account for free thinking at all.

What you’re Hearing is the Howl of the Disempowered

Curious, on a continent where there are laws like France’s Article 49.3, and a treaty of the fate of the sovereignty of their national governments isn’t put to a vote, that these very people give themselves reason after reason to be fearful and start howling about not being able to manipulate the United States Presidential election. Perhaps it’s this very perversion of the legitimacy of their own democracies that gives them the breathing room to have impassioned opinions about the state of the state at all, because with US elections one is more likely to feel that they actually matter in a way that their own don’t.

Indeed, there can be no doubt that a President Obama would represent the most dramatic conceivable break with George W. Bush and the widespread European perception that America has turned into a trigger-happy rogue state run by a fundamentalist Christian nut job. In electing a young black politician with a Muslim father, Americans would do something that is pretty much unthinkable in any country in Europe, where politics are traditionally dominated by a white old boy's club (notable exceptions like German chancellor Angela Merkel notwithstanding). In this context, however, Europeans must not forget that Obama (despite having a very Europe-savvy foreign policy team) is not known to be an Atlanticist.

Now if they’ll only come to find some reason to have a similar faith in their own access to a reasonable form of pluralism, they might stop helplessly trying to poison our elections in the way they’ve succeeded to manipulate the political life of societies over which they have actual influence such as those of sub-Saharan Africa.

Euro-thumpers need to stop putting lipstick on a pig. The standing of solid democracy is as vacuous as the public understanding of it, and yet so many of them feel qualified and compelled to think that they want to have a hand in ours’ at the expense of the very notion on sovereignty.

In contrast the bombastic overblown popcorn rhetoric of the Constitution of the European Union is routinely debauched by a largely self-perpetuating oligarchy which mouths the mantras of democracy and transparency but which behind closed doors subverts that very same democracy. And given the deliberate obscurity and bloated nature of its language, no citizen of the Union will find himself inclined to use the Constitution as a touchstone for anything: he is, given its sheer size and weight, more likely to use it as a door-stop.

In Reality, they’re no less tyrannized by their governments as they were in the 20th century. What we’re hearing is the howl of the disempowered yearning for their own civic life to be meaningful, and they only way they know how to express that need is in the resentment of a straw man of their own making.

What we’re Hearing is the Howl of the Disempowered

Curious, on a continent where there are laws like France’s Article 49.3, and a treaty of the fate of the sovereignty of their national governments isn’t put to a vote, that these very people give themselves reason after reason to be fearful and start howling about not being able to manipulate the United States Presidential election. Perhaps it’s this very perversion of the legitimacy of their own democracies that gives them the breathing room to have impassioned opinions about the state of the state at all, because with US elections one is more likely to feel that they actually matter in a way that their own don’t.

Indeed, there can be no doubt that a President Obama would represent the most dramatic conceivable break with George W. Bush and the widespread European perception that America has turned into a trigger-happy rogue state run by a fundamentalist Christian nut job. In electing a young black politician with a Muslim father, Americans would do something that is pretty much unthinkable in any country in Europe, where politics are traditionally dominated by a white old boy's club (notable exceptions like German chancellor Angela Merkel notwithstanding). In this context, however, Europeans must not forget that Obama (despite having a very Europe-savvy foreign policy team) is not known to be an Atlanticist.

Now if they’ll only come to find some reason to have a similar faith in their own access to a reasonable form of pluralism, they might stop helplessly trying to poison our elections in the way they’ve succeeded to manipulate the political life of societies over which they have actual influence such as those of sub-Saharan Africa.

Euro-thumpers need to stop putting lipstick on a pig. The standing of solid democracy is as vacuous as the public understanding of it, and yet so many of them feel qualified and compelled to think that they want to have a hand in ours’ at the expense of the very notion on sovereignty.

In contrast the bombastic overblown popcorn rhetoric of the Constitution of the European Union is routinely debauched by a largely self-perpetuating oligarchy which mouths the mantras of democracy and transparency but which behind closed doors subverts that very same democracy. And given the deliberate obscurity and bloated nature of its language, no citizen of the Union will find himself inclined to use the Constitution as a touchstone for anything: he is, given its sheer size and weight, more likely to use it as a door-stop.

In Reality, they’re no less tyrannized by their governments as they were in the 20th century. What we’re hearing is the howl of the disempowered yearning for their own civic life to be meaningful, and they only way they know how to express that need is in the resentment of a straw man of their own making.

Typical Lefty Bigot

Doesn’t Plantu Makes Everyone Gag, Though?

Gagwatch:

The attempt to organise a boycott (via) of Danish products in Saudi Arabia is still rumbling on and Hatim Misfir, a government official in the country, has trotted out the old canard about freedom of press and expression being okay as long as no-one uses it.

Last week, French cartoonist Plantu appeared to endorse this position, expressing concern over renewed tensions between the West and the Islamic world after the republication of the cartoons.

Of course he’s all about tolerance, so long as he’s completely intolerant of the branch of civilization that tolerates him. His intellectual limits are obvious:

After the 2006 controversy, he had launched the initiative "Cartooning for peace" with caricaturists from around the world to promote tolerance and mutual understanding between cultures.

his isn’t a philosophical position, it’s a payoff and an exchange. While he has friends cartooning in the Arab world, their fate isn’t the matter at hand what Euro-lefties wring their hands about getting their own societies to hold some people to a different standards as others. No, what compels them to this is a sort of bigotry that makes them unable to distinguish between Arabs and Islamists. In particular those Islamists who wouldn’t tolerate his cartoons for a moment.

Displaced Anger: Pushing Their Cynicism on Kids

Apparently, their onwn inaction is the fault of others. Brits complaining about a lack of home-grown childrens’ programming decide that teaching their kids to hate Americans is the way to go. As if. They prefer pillow-biters anyway.

You’re Kidding, Right?

Europe’s Obama-zombies – once you teach them one word, they can’t get it out of their heads. It will even make them back an Italian guy named ‘Walter’ that they can’t even vote for. Besides: just who is it they think they’re convincing one another to vote for when Veltroni is pimped in the Guardian and Obama is relentlessly shoved down the throats of BBC viewers?

Let’s not forget about the Communists that Collaborated with Hitler

Let’s also not forget their little friends.

Over-simplified yet Baffling

To make a meaningless life even less interesting, France has introduced new signs for those who like life too-ordered, oddly categorized, and simplistic.

The Love that Dare not Speak its Name

By omission, Propagandastaffel is still “liberating” people
from a fact-based baseline reference of reality.



Elsewhere reality sets in and past grave miscalculation get abandoned.

Which is it THIS Week?

Le Monde’s daily lecture to humanity: In the hypocritical world of Al-Jazeera sur Seine’s editorial environment, memories may be as short-lives as their principals. Once upon a time they showed little concern if not lauded the strong, new (economically motivated) French connection with China. Not shortly after that, they showed only the socially necessary perfunctory distaste for the Police’s removal of Falun Gong activists from the streets of Paris during a visit by visit by Chinese President Hu Jintao, and later during a visit by PM Wen Jiabao. Now they give themselves the latest vehicle with which to pander to the public cause of showing displeasure at what red China did half a century ago in Tibet.

They just wish they were one of the cool kids, I guess

Which Saloperie is That Exactly?

To most Europeans, it’s the socially approved kind.

Like the French, Their Maoists don’t Seem to Understand Maoism

When people with a completely failed world view admire you, you know you’re onto something:

Nepal: Maoists want a Republic la française"

- Thanks to the devilish Damian

Buffoons

Le Monde, in it’s usual sophistication will slag Iraq as America’s 49th state, but forget about Hawaii and Alaska.



Never mind just how badly France’s former colonies are floundering in misery, often also in violence, and characterized in paranoia, but the nations the US has occupied in the past aren’t. In fact Germany, Japan, and Korea make the sneering miscreants at Le Monde own precious homeland look like a third world backwater.

Squirrel Trebuchet

The Sport of Kings

How Cute

Lefties demand violent regime change in China, but think nuclear-tipped Iranian warmongering is o-tay, if they aren’t a reason to call any stand-down of the western values of individual and human rights to a dictator or miscreant as “constructive engagement”.

Who wants to live like an Andean Peasant?

European leftists, that’s who! Property? Bad. Wealth? Bad. Being able to take a risk for your own well being? Bad. What better time to call in economist Hernando de Soto who has spent a lifetime studying poverty to disabuse at least a few Parisians who wouldn’t know a subsistence farm if they saw one of their aspirations to peasantry.

Les clés du développement par Hernando de Soto

le mardi 8 avril à 19h30
dans le Grand Auditorium d'Entreprises Générales de France – BTP
9 rue La Pérouse, paris XVIème
Métro Kleber

Where’s your Nondenominational Godhead Figure Now?

Europeans DO HAVE an established religion. They just won’t mention it. It’s the Death Cult of Political Correctness.

News Hacks Fire up the Tardis for Gaia

Let's say you went to J-School because you “wanted to make a difference”. Let's say that you're so invested in the narrative that you think your poop don't stink. Let's say you're so invested in the “ah!!! the world is ending! Narrative that you start to believe in time travel.

Data from the UK and US indicate that the earth's temperature peaked either in 1998 or 2005. They can't tell.

"La Nina is part of what we call 'variability'. There has always been and there will always be cooler and warmer years, but what is important for climate change is that the trend is up; the climate on average is warming even if there is a temporary cooling because of La Nina."

The 2007-08 La Nina, that is. But don't judge a cooling trend following 1998 or 2005 by anything else.

No Risk Too Small

President Bush pushed for the eventual inclusion of Georgia and Ukraine into NATO. It was a long bet, but an excellent opening move to eliminate the pervasive risks that these nations are under. Considerably lower is the risk brought on by the nations who scuppered their accession. France and Germany, who have always been willing to find a nice bit of heroic looking symbolism, felt that an anticipatory provocation that would ultimately come to nothing to them was still too much anxiety for them to bear.

The meeting here culminated a three-day NATO summit that saw the 26-nation alliance admit the Balkan states of Albania and Croatia but refuse to put the former Soviet republics of Ukraine and Georgia on the path to membership in the face of vigorous Russian opposition. Putin, who has threatened to target missiles at the two countries if they join NATO, had made clear he would cancel his trip here if the alliance gave them so-called membership action plans.

Instead, Putin surprised his hosts by showing up uninvited at the NATO leaders' formal dinner Thursday night, once again catching the Western alliance off guard. French President Nicolas Sarkozy had said earlier that day that "we're not afraid of Putin," but Eastern European members fretted that the alliance had essentially capitulated to the Kremlin by deferring talk of Ukrainian and Georgian membership.

Nonetheless, the US wasn’t willing to cower with them under the sofa in the parlor of human development. What Bush couldn’t get, he still managed to impress on the Putin himself. It is, after all, Russia by virtue of its’ power and size that has to continue developing its’ civil society into a durable democracy.

The United States, with Nato's backing, is keen to gain Mr Putin's support for a missile defence system which is to include a radar facility in the Czech Republic - now formally agreed - and a site with ten interceptor missiles in Poland. Negotiations are still continuing with Warsaw. Nato leaders yesterday gave their backing for the Czech and Polish components of America's missile defence plan, and decided to contribute towards expanding the network to cover other parts of Europe that are at present excluded from the proposed protective umbrella, such as Turkey and the Balkans.

Although the Russian leader has spoken out against Washington's missile defence plan, claiming it will undermine the deterrent credibility of Russia's nuclear arsenal, he appears now to be more open about a possible co-operative approach. American officials have suggested, after lengthy negotiations with their Russian counterparts, that Mr. Putin is moving towards a more conciliatory position, provided he receives cast-iron assurances that the system is not in anyway a threat to Russia's stability and deterrence posture.

In the end this they move will slow down the path to a better, freer life to Ukrainians and Georgians, and will convince Vladimir Vladimirovich that the genuine pluralism and democracy that keeps societies from creeping into a state of tyranny and aggressiveness can be slowed, stalled, or even abandoned, even in the early days of their own matriculation into a nation that can truly tolerate individual rights.

The real long-term goal that the EU-2 or 3 (whatever it is this week) who can’t seem to wrap their heads around is to deeply engage Russia into the western alliance, and the carrot and stick are the way to negotiating inclusion from a strong position by inviting them into the geographic realm concurrent with the western idea. Appeasing their insincere verbal bravado by putting boundaries on their sphere of direct influence that are beyond their borders actually does more to cut them OUT then bring them IN because it gives them an outer boundary to see as the limits of their empire.
However, as one of the three main legs of the western alliance, there need be no empirial thinking or tone. Should the EU even grow enough of a spine to be a responsible state instead of a kind of ‘lifestyle cartel’ it can continue to be the entrepot of that alliance which represents the only real capacity at influence they have in a serious crisis. While they’re having this model handed to them at little cost, they still seem to be putting preconditions on it, even as they’re trying to figure out if their Union and its’ members would even be willing to engage in real (and not symbolic) statesmanship at all.

For all things NATO as they relate to the Europeans for whom it’s meant to defend anyway, head over to Atlantic Review.

Like a Bum who Thinks he’s Napoleon

Hyperpedant: Failure in Afghanistan emboldens those attacking the stability of European society from within it’s borders, and yet continental Europe is carrying around the delusion of their own statecraft while trying to do it all on the cheap by imposing on the rest of the world. The disposition of their defense posture of this body of 450 million people is that it’s willing to let it all wrests on the commitment 32 million Canadians.

Nato leaders yesterday reaffirmed their "firm and shared long-term commitment" to fighting the war in Afghanistan, but it was agreed some member countries could demonstrate that commitment by just sending money or equipment.

Attempts at a summit in Bucharest to expand the alliance eastwards were set back, meanwhile. Membership for Macedonia was postponed because of Greek objections, while Georgia and Ukraine were told they would have to wait at least eight months before they even embarked on the preparations for membership, largely out of concerns over Russia's reaction.

To be what they think they are they need to be at the front the line. Nonetheless, the Socialist in France who are typical of this parasitic world view are trying to sandbag it in favor of nothing, promoting as a ‘competing vision’ more of the usual atmospheric philosophizing to lend to their inaction an appearance of action.

On the other hand, former Socialist candidate in 2007 elections Segolene Royal launched a savage attack against Sarkozy decision of increasing French troop numbers in Afghan territory.

Whatever you think of America’s course of action in these matters, it’s hilarious to think that even these socialists believe that an objective threat can be countered with a subjective thought that that isn’t even directed at the threat anyway. As was the case with the Balkans, it may be that the only thing the real world can do is hand them broom when the hard work is over, say that it wrecked their Saturday night, and let them complain about being left to sweep up after the “detrius of the warmongers” who eliminated a threat to their well being.

Thank the American Left

Their gift to the French (left, right and ‘center’) was a cookbook narrative they could follow without critical thinking: Sarko Derangement Syndrome. Charles Bremner:

But there is another way of looking at “Psycho Sarko”. The neurosis may not be on the President's side, but with the French and their mania with him. For months Super-Sarko has dominated conversation. The psychiatrists say their patients bring him up as soon as they hit the couch, so they have coined a new term - “acute Sarkozis”. This means being obsessed by the phenomenon of the President - le personnage mythologique - rather than the real man. From there it is only a small step to seeing that France may not know its President as well as it thinks.

Add to it the usual self-distractions of fake issues and causes, the talking in circles, and the imagining that these things make one a public intellectual and the ‘globalization’ of the worst features of these buffoons on both sides of the puddle is complete. It’s just a matter of time before they call it “American cultural imperialism.”



As if wester money was behind China’s action in 1950, or that the € existed in 1950, and that heroic Serguie cared one wit about it then, or anything like it today...

For Heavens’ Sake, Please Don’t Publish Any More of them!

The only thing more repellant than a European political type would be finding out what it is that gets his rocks off.

Have you kept your 'garden’ in shape?

60 year old Ilkka Kanerva [pictured here seeming to have gastric difficulty], would otherwise have been scheduled to be ignored were he not a conservative.

New Boss Same as the Old Boss

A man running a veggie stand in what was used to be the repressive east meet the new morally repugnant elite that look like nothing more than a better dressed version of the Stasi roaming around in what was the still depressing but least dumpy part of the ‘former’ East Berlin:

He is part of the silent trek of labour nomads who make their way to Prenzlauer Berg early every morning to supply the Germans with fruit and vegetables, flowers and wine. From the prefab housing estates in the east come the Vietnamese, from former West Berlin the Turks; their arrival goes largely unnoticed. "People here sleep long," says Uygur with a thin smile. Around nine they start appearing at his tram stop, gripping takeaway coffees. The women so beautiful! The men sporting well-groomed designer stubble, not unshaven for lack of time like our shopkeeper. Uygur says they are probably as old as he is, but they seem like children to him. So carefree. So chubby-cheeked. And so uncompromising. They scrutinise his fruit and ask, "Where do these bananas come from? Are they organic?" And when he says "Fresh from the wholesale market" they put them back. Everything is so different in Prenzlauer Berg. Disappointment churns in the pit of Yunus Uygur's stomach, and in his mind a question has grown: Can good people be bad too?

Yes Yunus, they certainly can. Don’t worry. They’re working on their own extinction.

Prenzlauer Berg is plainly not what it thinks it is, not even regarding its much-celebrated fertility. Here only 35 children are born each year per 1,000 women aged between 15 and 45; that is less than in Wilmersdorf

To put this in context, Wilmersdorf has been looked down upon as a place populated by retirees and people who do something for a living, but they really aren’t the ones who really need a little extra fiber.

A Demain À Deux Mains

Simplistic Europeans luuuuurve Obama, just as long as they have no idea who he is or if he even has a platform.

BHL: why don’t the two of you just get a room.

"I swore to myself – and documented this promise in a chapter of my book 'American Vertigo' (review) – that I would never forget the image, when he entered the scene at exactly 23 hours, with his light, dance-like step and the wondrous face of this brown American appeared in the stage lights – an imaginary twin of the illegitimate child of Thomas Jefferson. (...) Is he the first black to understand that it makes more sense to play with seduction than guilt? The first to decide not to be the accusation against America but rather the promise of its new chance?"

Calling him a “white negro” would be perfectly normal on the great, lesson-giving continent of wisdom, but in the United States, we would see that kind of atmospheric racism for what it really is whether someone wants it that way or not: treating a man like an inanimate object because of his appearance. Bringing the point home are comments on the blog asking if Barack Obama is “black enough” laced with the usual obsession with Jews that follows Bernard-Henri Levy around everywhere he writes.

The best thing to do is ignore European culture for about 50 years and see if it actually evolves into something that can relate to the human condition.

Ah Those Loving, Peaceful, Inclusive Europeans

Bigoted hypocrites... And they think we should be looking up to them for some reason.