Bull Connor and Stalin Worship

1968. Uttering the number nearly provokes spontaneous orgasms among aging leftists and the adolescents they still manage to guilt trip into buying their line. Prior to its revision it was marked more by leftist brutality than anything else. The restoration of an equitable civil society thereafter was due largely to the right.

When the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968, there were no mass demonstrations in London. Why was that? Can anyone around at the time enlighten me on that worrying issue?

But Hey! Who's counting when they're assigning blame, lionizing the FARC or the Sindero Luminoso, or playing with their Ché dolls? The unfortunate reality was this:

Wait a minute -- 1968 was a pretty good year out here in the Mid-West.

Stock markets were at record highs - corn and wheat prices were going through the roof. Gas was 29 cents a gallon, pickup-trucks were made with wrought iron undercarriages and you can buy a six-pack of beer for only a $1.36

Aside from a bunch of dancing, drugged "flower children" all over the place and them commie-pinko-hippies on the East and West coast supporting charlie and Uncle Ho ... 1968 was a very good year.

Our Effete, Sophisticated Friends, Part 289

Just what is it that Egyptian civil servants do all day?

SPONtaneous Stupidity

Speigel Online’s English Edition could not wait to call the US Embassy, the product of the usual European process of asking everyone and their pet Beagle what you’re allowed to do with your property, “banal”. This brings me to arrive to one conclusion: bite me, you hypocrites.

O.M. Ungers’ demonstrably banal play on Italian Fasci styling was built in DC without objection, and obviously without taking any advice judging by its’ present condition. The dim-witted German habit (which just barely works in the climate of northern Germany) of applying a thin, polymer-modified Portland cement plaster was over crappy masonry work doesn’t work in the challenging climate of the mid-Atlantic, where you need some actual technical ability, not just a condescending attitude, anal-retention problems, and looking good in a lab-coat.

The plaster is trapping condensate coming through the joints, and it’s visible on the entire surface of the façade. It looks like neglected concrete block garage that hasn’t been painted in 23 years.

The notion of doing a basic study on which way the vapor is travelling in winter and summer, a basic exercise that every architect can do in his sleep, would have beneath the man’s firm which is, after all from a nation populated entirely by experts.

It is also, by the way, a hideous and tragically dull. You’ll note how few photos of any size are available of the thing.

Deutsche Popkultur

The schlock is artistic, in its’ own forgetful way.

Utterly un-Yekish economist and comic actor Ben Stein, seen here recently in an airport sporting a suit and those whacky roller-skating Vans would probably not find it as amusing as we find him.

So, Which Candidate Actually RESISTED Marxist Indoctrination

“It seems that Senator Obama's Old party was called the New Party. The party was a Marxist Political coalition. This was not a guilt by association thing. Senator Obama sought out their nomination. He was successful in obtaining that endorsement, and he used a number of New Party volunteers as campaign workers.”

How to Lie in One Easy Step

Big ego stroking headline: Europe's Rich-Poor Gap Smaller Than America's - But only if you can compare Alabama to Alabama, but Portugal to the entire EU, and ignore the sum-total of what it means to be poor in Europe versus America..

However, the gap between the rich and poor in Portugal, Poland, Lithuania and Latvia is greater than that in the United States, according to the commission report.

The report shows that those most at risk of falling into poverty in the EU are single parents, the retired, the unemployed and families with only one income.

So how about comparing Tirana to Vienna? Can we go there too? As you can see, the fetishizing of national league tables, cherry-picked data, and the like which have no bearing on personal behavior, are used to explain away personal behavior.

But who’s counting? What they’re fishing for isn’t a way of understanding the state of life at the lower end of the ladder in order to improve it, they’re trying to wax their dolphins.

Well, it Makes Sense to me...

If your goal is to force conformity on people, and you admire killing people for your own pleasure, concentrating power in a violent, unelected elite, and enslaving, impoverishing, and propagandizing the public into unquestioning fealty, then yes, that might well be the case.

What am I on about? Some hack writer with absolutely no perspective on life asks the question: Ché Guevara and Sean Penn: same battle?

The exact number of Che’s Cuban victims has not been verified, but include people he personally executed and those put to death under his orders. Che’s biographers consistently report that he sent thousands to the firing squad. Over 4,000 deaths are documented to have taken place in Cuba, mostly firing squad execution, in the first three years after Fidel Castro’s takeover (1959-1962). Che Guevara was one of the regime’s chief executioners during this period and is said to have acknowledged ordering "several thousand" executions. All took place without affording the victims fair trials and due process of law.

Not Yet Sufficiently Abused to Satisfaction

To understand the violent peak in passivity and inaction, all one need do is look at just what it is that the apparently bookish natives find of literary and/or philosophical value. To sum it up, it sounds more of less like that there MUST be something wrong with the world that MUST be specifically insoluble in any tenable way so that reflection remains mildly painful. It is to remind one of ones’ ability to look like you’re suffering in thought, and that it should be as easy to find as graphitti and broken bottles on the streets of the planet’s continent of Elysium.

Glänta is out to find various missing links, seeking them in short prose, long poems, and essays, treating subjects and objects such as archaeopteryxes, the Higgs particle, borderlands, the physiology of giraffes, Tiktaaliks, the cypher nought and its role in roulette, and colleagues at work.

Conceptualist writer Pär Thörn picked quotes from the blog of a Swedish website for employers and managers, using them as material for a prose-collage with a wailing tone, lamenting over the entire scale of any imaginable misbehaviour on the job and revealing a desperate forlornness: "Could someone please give me a tip on what to 'do'?"

Do? When the improbabilities are endless? Why?

Further to the self-referential hell that European culture lives in, Clarsonimus has made a curious observation:

Extremely high number of young Germans not suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder

“We really can’t explain why this is,”

It seems the answer is right here. Blame the oppressive state that isn’t oppressive enough.

Why did they refuse to hand a blank cheque to the state monopoly on the use of force? And why did they want to pit the counter-violence of the downtrodden against oppressive state force?

Did the radical Left have a psychological defect, as some critics think today? Were they fetishists of violence, existentialist dreamers for whom the use of guns and explosives promised an intoxicating intensification of experience?

In other words, in a culture of ubiquitous pointing and suspicion, internal violence for the sake of pacifism is okay, literary lamentation may take the form of minor workplace grumblings, and there isn’t enough trauma worthy of a novel (but not hospital treatment) to go around.

Let me though, put it more simply: life is so boring and managed that they have to cut themselves to feel anything, and the struggles some find in life are too common to be worth reflecting on. It’s the rare, concocted, top-shelf invented suffering that fetches the best price.

The New Tranzi Internationale of Solidarity

The European Left has reduced itself to alliances with any violent dope peddling thugs that call themselves 'revolutionaries".

Left-wing Colombian FARC rebels had contacts with leftist groups in Germany, according to data on a laptop belonging to slain commander Raul Reyes, German magazine Der Spiegel reported on Sunday.

Reyes, the number two commander in the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), was killed on March 1 in a raid by Colombian forces just inside Ecuador.

Emails on his laptop show that in January 2005 he sent his son to Germany in a secret mission, Der Spiegel said in an article to be published Monday.

There his son met with members of the German communist party and with far-left politician Wolfgang Gehrcke, who offered to press the European Parliament to take the FARC off its list of terrorist organizations.

“It was a very positive meeting,” Der Spiegel quotes an email found on Reyes’s laptop. “We were able to substantiate several points to reactivate solidarity with the struggle of the Colombian people.”

- with thanks to the chanming and talented Elizabetta

Because the Dopes Don’t Know how to do Anything Else, That’s Why

At a loss for words in the face of an entire world that you don’t understand? Well then fire up the part organ!

The moronic institutional Marxism of a good part of the French population reveals its real motives. E-nough translates:

What is sorely missed, is a revolutionary Communist party embedded in entreprises that can defy the trade-union bureaucracies and the party reformists who made us resume work all too quickly.

As if in this post 1930s world, this could really translate anywhere.

European Hatred of America as ‘the Other’ is Still an Act of Forgetting

On the ignoring of poverty in Europe, the very being of the US plays an important role.

I want to understand the whole picture. Is Europe better than the US to the extent that we want to believe? I start to hunt for books and research findings, trawl library catalogues and the Internet, but come up with amazingly little. The pile on my desk does grow, admittedly, but relevant content is sparse. If I had looked for American research on poverty in the US, I would have been drowning in information.

Sweden’s Arena Magazine editor Per Wirtén discusses the means by which the Euvian identity has attempted to construct itself without being engineered by however many attempts to make institutes, venues, and eventes that few visit, and magazines, journals, and blogs that no-one really reads. Where the warm glow is felt knowing telling oneself just how wonder the example before you – i.e. Sicko, repeating the images from the wake of hurricane Katrina, and the like, the way of not knowing and not wanting to know hasn’t changed in a century.

In the autumn of 2005, New Orleans was submerged after hurricane Katrina breached the levees. It was the city's poorest quarters that suffered the greatest devastation. The authorities' arrogance and inability to react shocked the rest of the world. Europe offered the US emergency relief; in Paris, intellectuals wondered how the country could afford to wage war in Baghdad but not to protect its own people; and Swedish premier Göran Persson declared that a catastrophe of such a kind would be unthinkable in European welfare states. Exactly two years later, Greece was in flames. The Greek state was just as ineffectual as the American state had been after Katrina. Help from the EU was slow to arrive; people died and villages were left in ruins. Of course, questions were asked in the European media, but the criticism came nowhere near the wave of indignation that was directed at the US after the New Orleans disaster. Yet Greece's position in the EU as one its most corrupt, unequal and poorest member states is not unlike that of Louisiana in the US.

Perhaps the storm of criticism of the Greek government failed to materialise because it would risk shattering the self-image Europeans have been keen to create since the 1990s. In terms of the politics of identity, the magnet that binds together the EU more than any other is that of being an alternative to the US. Europe is more peaceable, more enlightened and civilised, more democratic, more egalitarian and without any real problems of poverty, more soft power than hard power, saying yes to market economy but no to market society. The identity construct of the Union rests not on culture and ethnicity, but on the idea of not being the US. Europe sees itself as an anti-America.

In this context, criticism of conditions in America assumes particular significance. It works like a television screen in the living room. Europe soaks up anything critical of the US: books, news items, documentaries and feature films. Our eyes are drawn to the moving pictures. But this seems to mean that we stop seeing our own living room.

Nonetheless, many of the poor are overlooked with a view to comparisons of their own society and a superior alternative to some sort of elsewhere that’s hard to reconcile.

The average income in Spain is sixty per cent of that in Germany. Roughly the same disparity, incidentally, as that between white and black Americans. If comparisons are drawn with low-wage countries like Romania and Portugal, the disparity becomes greater than any in America.

Otherwise the critics of America, presumably until they can find a reason to blame some externality for this problem, banish facing the problem in favor of some comfortable proof of something to themselves that can only be statistically supported by the very same banishment of interest in the problem. After all, if few notice, it musn’t really be happening.

Symbolic Fighting

It is unclear why the Germans were sent after the Baghlan Bomber but there are more and more Taliban insurgents pouring into the nine provinces the Germans command.

Although it is quite clear why the Taliban are pouring into the German AO:

A top Taliban commander in Afghanistan with links to the killers of several British Army soldiers has escaped from German special forces because they were not authorised to kill him.

The fiasco highlights the absurd role played by the German military in the country which is known to other combat nations as "the bridge builders" because Berlin will not let them fire shots in any situation other than in self-defence.

German special forces had an important Taliban commander in their sights in Afghanistan but he escaped as the Germans were not authorised to use lethal force.

Which is a curious thing to have to do – risk your neck by being forced to live-trap key Taliban people when they know that Berlin’s orders are completely misplaced. If they want the Afghans on their side, they need to eliminate the Taliban leadership such as the one thy had in their sights who killed 79 people at the opening of a sugar plant, and 12 at a school.

"The Krauts are allowing the most dangerous people to get away and are in the process increasing the danger for the Afghans and for all foreign forces here," one an incredulous British officer at ISAF headquarters told Spiegel.

Acidland and the Terror Cell

Amnesia about social pyromania and malicious intent, as anyone who has lived there knows the Germany’s public intellectuals to hold, is reported on by World Politics Review’s John Rosenthal. So resistant to believing that there is anything threatening about the world out there that can’t be satisfied with a public rant about the US Arms Lobby or a new regulation and tax, they appear to have been flummoxed by a series of attacks brewed up from within. Not long ago, the news that a Lebanese immigrant to Germany tried to plant a bomb on a public train. Then the notion that other world views don’t think like they do, and that there might be asymmetrical reprisal on the Bundeswehr, it seems had to be banished from the mind.

I think the media are thinking far too little of the German public if they think that they have to be protected from the news. Far too little. This is a population that, not too long ago, had to accept the sort of personal hardships that come with reconstruction and the usual ways of a notion of the state as so eager to regulate people for fear of believing that they haven’t done their job properly.

The Islamic Jihad Union (IJU), the Taliban-affiliated Jihadist group that took responsibility for the attack, claimed a more massive death toll: some 60 dead in both the explosion itself and a follow-on attack by Taliban forces. In a Turkish-language statement posted in the internet, the IJU also identified the bomber: "This operation was successfully carried out by the brave Cüneyt Ciftci from Germany, who has traded in his life of luxury for paradise" (source: Focus). The text was accompanied by photos of a smiling Ciftci brandishing a pistol and sitting behind the wheel of vehicle.

And what did the American public learn about all this from American [N.B.: the German public as well] news organizations? A Factiva database search turns up a single sparse 280 word AP dispatch tentatively noting that German authorities were "checking" whether the German-born Ciftci might possibly be "linked" to the bombing. Instead, Americans were left to glean whatever more substantial information they could from the English-language website of the German weekly Der Spiegel. While Der Spiegel's March 15 article likewise studiously avoided treating Ciftci's responsibility for the attack as given, it nonetheless conceded that it was "likely": thus prompting the authors to pronounce Ciftci -- in all probability -- "the first suicide bomber from Germany." In light of the fact that Mohammad Atta and two of the three other pilots in the 9/11 attacks also lived in Germany, and indeed plotted the attacks there, the formula gives serious cause to pause. Der Spiegel dramatically described Ciftci's presumptive involvement as "Berlin's Worst Nightmare": as if the Hamburg Cell's leading role in the 9/11 attacks had not already been an even worse one or as if "Berlin" was suffering from collective amnesia and no longer remembered -- or wanted to remember -- the major German connection to 9/11.

C’mon, get happy.

But alas, hope springs eternal:

Following the emergence of the [“martyrdom”] video, Der Spiegel and the rest of the German media largely abandoned their hopeful expressions of doubt about Ciftci's responsibility. "The first perpetrator of a suicide attack from Germany," the weekly Stern now called Ciftci -- displaying the same startling obliviousness to the German role in the 9/11 attacks as Der Spiegel had previously. But when interviewed by ZDF television, Jörg Ziercke, chief of Germany's Federal Bureau of Criminal Investigations (BKA), continued to insist that he could not confirm that Ciftci had been the bomber. "We don't have the corpse," Ziercke said, "We have to undertake an identification of the corpse." As anyone who watches the massive explosion documented in the video will be able to appreciate, there is not likely to be much of Ciftci left to facilitate this identification.

For the Love of Anagrams and Batteries

European Union becomes Inane Euro No Up

Vibrators are the reason 35-year-old Heinrich Brueggemann is standing on the stage in the conference room of a Hamburg hotel, holding a pink specimen in his right hand. His tone is that of an engineer: to the point and businesslike. "Today's woman," he says, "wants to know what she's inserting into her body."

Which is a relief, because I always used to wonder about them before.

in the end, many feel that sex is totally exciting for everyone else, just not for them. Dildo-maker Brueggemann believes that this impression has nothing to do with reality in German bedrooms. "Our real needs are much more banal."

His top-selling vibrator is called "Paulchen" ("Little Paul"). It looks a little like a toy caterpillar, with a bulbous nose and funny little eyes. It seems that even vibrator buyers -- likely the more liberal-minded women -- prefer all things cute.

Euro-logic 101

Legal



Illegal

Any questions?

As if he’s Never Thought his Neighbors were “Frednecks”...

In the mean time, Superfrenchie, a resident of suburban Washington DC, can’t, in his zealous pursuit of pity, figure out the difference between a nationality and a race. He seems to find greater enlightenment in a nation where, unless propagandized and suppressed, sports fans ‘monkey chant’.

The French and racism - This brings us to another observation. The French people of European descent, with the exception of those descended from recent intra-European immigration (mainly from Italy, Spain, Poland), have no practical experience of racism from the receiving end. Here, I must mention the recent formulation of “anti-white racism”, but just to say that it’s both an epiphenomenon and irrelevant to the issue at hand. This absence of personal experience regarding racism explains why stereotypes against black people are so handy for the French who discuss racism. More clearly: French experience as emitters of racism toward black people is used as a reference to understand the feelings elicited by French bashing. This might offend some people, but it’s not rocket science. We always use the known to figure out the unknown.

Which is puzzling when you’re atmospherically accusing people largely of European origin of ‘racism’, when in fact, they were pelted all of their lives with reasons to think that European arts, culture, style, etc., were to be admired. In fact, those non-Europeans who don’t see the incessant imposition of the message about “see, we’re übermenschen because of our [opinions of our own lifestyles/inanimate products we’re selling you/opinions of you.]”

Any nominally skilled speaker of the English language would allege bigotry, not racism, but even at that, it can hardly be called bigotry when most of them have come to this conclusion through interpersonal experience, often going back decades of pedantic repetition.

SF’s insane assertion comes from an even longer history of prejudice that he should not be under any illusions about. The Republic’s policy on the handing of race is sound and highly principled. Many in the public, even the ‘educated’ babbling away in the ‘society of debate’ leave a great deal to be desired. Not just in the fundamentally monolithic nature of taking up outlying opinions, but within a bracket, for the sake of attention-seeking, but the underlying cultural habit of seeing nations as predictable entities comprising something-like-race and the treatment of their opinions of it with all the seriousness of a international sports league table.

Quite simply, that practice is a primitive thing for adults to engage in, yet those who do believe that they are illuminating us with their opinions based largely on an assumed image of a people-cum-race they like to opine about as a undifferentiated whole called “America”, or in the public’s gentle, infallible wisdom as ”les Ricains” or “les Amerloqs”, among other things as if their nation-state fixation wasn’t itself a form of bigotry with which they would like to write on your forehead.

That’s Sure to Wow the Chads off of ‘em in Florida

Young Gazan proto-rocketeers say “GObama!”

It is important to know what kinds of people you want to call. Ibrahim and his friends, were calling random numbers in the US. Calling Democratic party members would have been more effective, though of course they did not have access to this information. Still, if you know the person that you want to call - the office of a political leader, for example - then international online phone-banking is a great (and so far under-used) tactic.

- Vielen Dank für die Blumen, Strummin’ Joe

Bolton on the Left’s Delusion Craving to find Humanity in Jihadists

Negotiation is not a policy. It is a technique.

Says H.E. John Bolton of Obama’s notion that acquiescing to Ahmedinejad will make him nice. All it will do is happen too soom, and force America to negotiate from a position of weakness. The outcome will be good PR and bad for the future, merely postponing a conflict with the Iranians so hell bent on imposing themselves on others.

A pacifist, it was once said, is someone who believes that if you throw a hungry lion a steak, that he’ll become a vegetarian. Given that among out many drive-by commentators here, we know that their affection isn’t for peaceful discussions with Iran, Hamas, and Hizballah – it’s the erasure of American involvement on the world. A funny position to hold when the Arab world is divided but frequently in favor of America, and Europe is generally not divided, otherwise disinterested, and their public prefers to see a supine US at whatever cost it comes to them.

Bolton continues:

Like all human activity, negotiation has costs and benefits. If only benefits were involved, then it would be hard to quarrel with the “what can we lose?” mantra one hears so often. In fact, the costs and potential downsides are real, and not to be ignored.
When the U.S. negotiates with “terrorists and radicals,” it gives them legitimacy, a precious and tangible political asset. Thus, even Mr. Obama criticized former President Jimmy Carter for his recent meetings with Hamas leaders. Meeting with leaders of state sponsors of terrorism such as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or Kim Jong Il is also a mistake. State sponsors use others as surrogates, but they are just as much terrorists as those who actually carry out the dastardly acts. Legitimacy and international acceptability are qualities terrorists crave, and should therefore not be conferred casually, if at all.
Moreover, negotiations – especially those “without precondition” as Mr. Obama has specifically advocated – consume time, another precious asset that terrorists and rogue leaders prize. Here, President Bush’s reference to Hitler was particularly apt: While the diplomats of European democracies played with their umbrellas, the Nazis were rearming and expanding their industrial power.

The industrial power, in this case is the building of the means to decimate populations in the west, and the non-conformists within. Not exactly the thing you want to see when you’re “giving peace a chance”.

- from the WSJ via James Tiberius Crittenden

It’s also worth noting at this point that Sarkozy may be playing using talks as a gambit on a much smaller scale with Hamas:

U.S.-brokered peace talks between Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert have made little tangible progress, and few observers expect them to reach a deal by the end of the year as planned.

Kouchner played down the talks between France and Hamas.

"They are not relations. They are contacts," he said.

But they will be, and it may well be part of something larger that stands a chance. Again, it’s WHAT you’re talking about, not just bringing home to your eternally baleful voting block some atmospheric notion that talking itself is a goal.

And to Think That They Bought all of Chávez’ Crap about Wanting “Peace”

From the Feuilletons (of Freaks)

Cited by big-media blog Sight and Sign from the Frankfurter Rundschau

For Austrian writer Franzobel, Josef Frizl is not an un-typical Austrian ("even the threats about gassing his victims if they tried to escape don't come from just anywhere")

Um. Kind of a blatant generalization there, but keep going.

and warns about demonising him.

Woah. Hold it right there Chief.

"The more perverse and bestial Fritzl is made out to be, the more normal he appears. He did the shopping, took the rubbish out, bought clothes, paid the electricity bills. He kept his second family like pets, cared for them and even loved them in his way. The more inhuman he is made to look (he has a bit of Saddam Hussein about him) the more ordinary, quotidian his obsessions about control and security seem – which only makes the whole thing more terrifying."

Oh, forshame! Hide him, and the resort of those frightful things about human nature and hide them sofort! So, never mind what he did. His crime was to remind us just how capable these open-minded, “flexible” thinkers are to doing the same thing.

Why doesn’t THAT surprise me as not being that blatant a generalization.

No War for Oil?

Coordinated global action, my ass! The burden of feeding the world’s pool has been borne by the productive, wealthy west for as long as there has been a way to deliver aid. Nonetheless:

This year, the U.S. had contributed $362.7 million to WFP just through May 4, according to the website. That figure does not include another $250 million above the planned yearly contribution that was promised by President George W. Bush in the wake of WFP’s April warning that a “silent tsunami” of rising food costs would add dramatically to the world population living in hunger. Nor does it include another $770 million in food aid that President Bush has asked Congress to provide as soon as possible.

On the other hand, Saudi Arabia, with oil revenues last year of $164 billion, does not even appear on the website donor list for 2008.

As for not being generous, one pervasive feature of the Arab character that rarely sees much daylight is a kind of hatred of the poor and those who are bad off for their “common” nature and lack of success that’s associated with natural inferiority.

The only other major oil exporter who made the WFP list of 2008 donors was the United Arab Emirates, which kicked in $50,000. UAE oil revenues in 2007 were $63 billion.

By contrast, the poverty-stricken African republic of Burkina Faso is listed as donating more than $600,000, and Bangladesh, perennial home of many of the world’s hungriest people, is listed as donating nearly $5.8 million.

The high present cost of food, increasingly inaccessible to the poorest of the world is largely that way BECAUSE of the high cost of transporting food from where it’s produced efficiently and in abundance to where it isn’t, not to mention the fact that fuel is one of the biggest inputs in food production to begin with.

Forget biofuel. Even though the output of biofuels has doubled in 5 years, the trend in the price of grain has tracked upward with the cost of petroleum move for move, tick for tick, doubling in 15 months, benefitting fake humanists like Chavez, faux social victims like the Gulf Arabs, and the champion of domestic economic ineptitude, Ahmedinejad.

Building Peace and Harmony through Multi- Inter- Mono- Omni-Intercultural Dialogue

Developing understanding and respect for other cultures in the Netherlands, the parents appear to have had their bubble of idealism burst.

A primary school in Amsterdam wished to provide its pupils with an understanding for other cultures. But during a visit to a mosque, the children were told they were dogs.

With a view to developing understanding and respect for other cultures among children, primary school De Horizon regularly organises outings to various religious organisations. The chairman of the El Mouchidine mosque told the children from group 7 (aged 10) and their chaperones however that non-Muslims are dogs.

Hey, give peace a chance, will ya, folks?

In a letter to the children's parents, the school expresses its regret at the incident: "We are shocked that during the guided tour, the mosque's chairman told the children and chaperoning parents that non believers were dogs. We consider this statement as unacceptable since we allow our children to partake in this project to develop respect for freedom of religious choice"

Bush!

Theatrics Forgotten

TRANS-ATLANTIC TENSIONS: Europe Divided Over US Missile Defense Plan

Washington’s plans to build a missile defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic have cast a shadow over US relations with Europe. Will German Chancellor Angela Merkel feel compelled to distance herself from US President George Bush?

[snip]

Instead Stoiber argued that the sensitive issue of "Europe’s security architecture” should be discussed in the three-party committee of Berlin’s ruling coalition, which consists of the conservative CDU and CSU along with the center-left Social Democrats (SPD). Stoiber felt it was important that the SPD were finally included in discussions about "Germany's strategic positioning in foreign and security policy." Merkel agreed, meaning that top members of the government and the leadership of the various factions of the coalition will soon meet for strategy discussions.

Only took 14 months to mutate into

In the essay, Schockenhoff argues for Germany to take steps to better protect itself from the threat of a nuclear attack from rogue states, saying it must support "a missile defense shield over Europe."

Meanwhile, he added, Germany needs to be prepared for "further deployments of the German armed forces that last longer -- from stabilizing peace to forcing peace," he wrote.

So Does that Mean I Can I Vote in Your Failed State?

Forget the Europeans, I’m still waiting for anyone in the Arab world to elect a minority or a woman to anything, let alone not feel compelled to make them second rate citizens.

Stiff Cerebellum Upper Lip

EUROSOC discovers just what it is that the Guardian finds a hideous, unjust degree of impoverishment that, frankly, YOU’RE supposed to DO SMETHING ABOUT, dammit!

"With inflation soaring, property prices sky high, wages relatively static, labour markets gridlocked and sluggish or slowing economies, (the Guardian's interviewees) are among tens of millions of Europeans raised to expect that their degrees and diplomas will assure them a relatively high quality of life who are now realising that the world has changed. The disappointment is a shock with big political, social, cultural, even demographic consequences," the newspaper reports.

But here’s the weasel in the woodpile:

On the face of it, they have our sympathy, but the Guardian holds the violins: One thirty year old Roman student lives in a flat his parents bought for him, while a 24 year old working as a stagaire in a Paris publishing house spends her weekends in her parents' country house by the sea in Brittany - an experience she claims will "leave a bitter taste in her mouth."

There are probably American EURSOC readers, possibly the sons and daughters of impoverished immigrants, who are reading this and spitting their morning coffee.

Awwww... It looks like SOMEBODY needs a HUG.

It's difficult to get worked up about their plight. Presumably our French publisher stands to inherit the country pile when her parents die, as well as their city home. Perhaps this inheritance will help her to buy a flat in Paris, where property prices have skyrocketed in the past decade. Even modest family apartments in the 20th arrondisement where our publishing stagaire lives can cost over 400,000 euros; choose a less gritty neighbourhood and the price can double.

This has certainly hit those who work in the cultural world and those at the modest end of state employment, such as schoolteachers. But state employees can balance their sometimes meagre incomes against the free childcare they enjoy as fonctionnaires, plus France's enviable education and health coverage. Pensions are better than those in the private sector, too.

Despite these complaints, around 80 percent of schoolchildren claim they want to grow up to work for the state. One understands the appeal of a guaranteed job for life in uncertain times, but there simply isn't enough money in the state's coffers to ensure these people enjoy the same standard of living as their parents.

As if that ever mattered to the people demanding “social justice” for themselves.

Stiff Cerebellum Upper Lip

EUROSOC discovers just what it is that the Guardian finds a hideous, unjust degree of impoverishment that, frankly, YOU’RE supposed to DO SMETHING ABOUT, dammit!

"With inflation soaring, property prices sky high, wages relatively static, labour markets gridlocked and sluggish or slowing economies, (the Guardian's interviewees) are among tens of millions of Europeans raised to expect that their degrees and diplomas will assure them a relatively high quality of life who are now realising that the world has changed. The disappointment is a shock with big political, social, cultural, even demographic consequences," the newspaper reports.

But here’s the weasel in the woodpile:

On the face of it, they have our sympathy, but the Guardian holds the violins: One thirty year old Roman student lives in a flat his parents bought for him, while a 24 year old working as a stagaire in a Paris publishing house spends her weekends in her parents' country house by the sea in Brittany - an experience she claims will "leave a bitter taste in her mouth."

There are probably American EURSOC readers, possibly the sons and daughters of impoverished immigrants, who are reading this and spitting their morning coffee.

Awwww... It looks like SOMEBODY needs a HUG.

It's difficult to get worked up about their plight. Presumably our French publisher stands to inherit the country pile when her parents die, as well as their city home. Perhaps this inheritance will help her to buy a flat in Paris, where property prices have skyrocketed in the past decade. Even modest family apartments in the 20th arrondisement where our publishing stagaire lives can cost over 400,000 euros; choose a less gritty neighbourhood and the price can double.

This has certainly hit those who work in the cultural world and those at the modest end of state employment, such as schoolteachers. But state employees can balance their sometimes meagre incomes against the free childcare they enjoy as fonctionnaires, plus France's enviable education and health coverage. Pensions are better than those in the private sector, too.

Despite these complaints, around 80 percent of schoolchildren claim they want to grow up to work for the state. One understands the appeal of a guaranteed job for life in uncertain times, but there simply isn't enough money in the state's coffers to ensure these people enjoy the same standard of living as their parents.

As if that ever mattered to the people demanding “social justice” for themselves.

Run, Human Shield! Run!

Armed Hezbollah militants warded off members of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) last month when the peacekeepers discovered a truck carrying weapons and ammunition belonging to the Lebanon-based guerilla group.

How, pray tell, did they find this out?

The incident was referred to briefly in a semi-yearly report submitted to the UN Security Council

[snip]

"This serious violation of the UN resolution raises concerns," the report said.

The incident was not reported in the media at the time of its occurrence.

Nonetheless, Hizballah’s position is straightforward: bang their spoons on their high-chairs and insist on how unfair it is that they couldn’t occupy territory that they agreed not to occupy. The Norwegian Blue Parrot of media fairness reports:

Hezbollah accuses the United Nations of being biased after the UN head called the movement 'a challenge for Lebanon's sovereignty'.

UN Chief Ban Ki-moon claimed in a statement on Wednesday that "Hezbollah's maintenance of a paramilitary capacity poses a key challenge to the (Lebanon) government's monopoly on the legitimate use of force."

No shit, Sherlock. The hilarious thing about Hizballah, is that after calling the statement unfair on the basis of their right to be a paramilitary antagonist to the government, they also go to plan B and C, insisting...

The report "is limited to information emanating from an enemy party

and if that’s not enough...

lacks credibility and accuracy

which would make its’ “unfairness” sort of meaningless, unless it was entirely accurate, even if they did conceal it from the press (embarrassing as it was) and bury it in a report released 3 months later... They are, after all, in the midst of crazies bringing some bad juju upon the purple helmeted gladiators, they are now being threatened by al-Qaida, who are also threatening the Lebanese for good measure. They also think you're a dillwed. Tell ya what, Doctor Zawahiri – you hack... In the spirit of the buzz in the air, I also threaten you – but otherwise am not going to “express concerns” about you.

Hide the Livestock

No, really. I mean it.

Gramscian Sleeper Cell

And to think it only took Spiegel 40 years to notice:

Germany's domestic intelligence agency has warned of "extremist structures" within the Left Party. A new report lists a number of left-wing extremist factions within the party, including the Communist Platform, the Marxist Forum and a pro-Cuba group.

As if decades of the Red Brigade, the RAF, the Bader-Meinhof Gang, and a variety of stooges that the KGB didn’t even have to keep bankrolling after a while wasn’t enough to show them what these “revolutionaries” want “revolution” and that peace, to them, is just another word for nothing left to lose, nothing to gain, and no actual self.

The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution is responsible for monitoring political extremism in Germany. Among its main focuses are far-right extremists, far-left extremists, Islamist terrorists and the Scientology organization. According to the agency's 2006 annual report -- the most recent available -- there are around 31,000 left-wing extremists in Germany, of whom around 6,000 are prepared to use violence to achieve their ends.

After all, for all of their airy rhetoric, if you can find it, they are even more authoritarian than the absurdly misdirected people who monitor them by law. Trapped somewhere in the last century and taught one campaign du jour after another filled with loony allegations and false arguments, they reinforce the ideas that limit liberties that they purport to find lacking everywhere around them.

Peer into their Diseased Minds

A Steaming Pile of Global Warming

Funny, don’t you think, that “radicals” and their causes that they promote as “humanistic" can’t ever seem to account for science or human nature?

The average temperature in April 2008 was 51.0 F. This was -1.0 F cooler than the 1901-2000 (20th century) average, the 29th coolest April in 114 years. The temperature trend for the period of record (1895 to present) is 0.1 degrees Fahrenheit per decade.

Sorry, Being Needy and Childish Doesn’t Count

BBC kept £100,000 of Children In Need cash for itself.

Otherwise, they’re doing some WAY timely journalism, and still flogging on air worldwide an online archive of the 1968 Mi Lai tapes over which an Officer was court-martialed - in a willful stoking of hatred. Is it time for the VoA to run the movie Exodus 24 sur 7 so that humanity can reflect on the “humanity” of the British past?

Eurostar Ad finds the European Messiah

Who said they were “post-religious”? They believe in deifying mass-murdering leftist revolutionaries!

Les Gros Titres de la preSSe Française

Pancho is angry that the entire society isn’t a monolithic lumpenproletariat that follows him around.

Elsewhere: running out of any analogs and ideas, some French quack calls for more flatulence as a “May 1968” of the large intestine. After all, isn’t the European way to tax it “for the good of society” and call it a universal health plan.

Our Effete, Sophisticated Friends, Part 288

That superior education system has trained an class of supermen of eye-hand coordination: these guys can use a computer and play with their meat-whistles at the same time.

Our Effete, Sophisticated Friends, Part 287

Seeking out the nation known worldwide for its culture.

Broadly Interpreting Fault and Cause

Expat Yank Robert Tuminello reports on the over-extension and outright inversion of the usual atmospheric accusations leveled against anything American on the BBC.

Leaving no notion of sovereignty intact and thinking that there exists somewhere a “a big book of International Law “ that all the children are forced to live by, quite unsurprisingly, some hack has construed the ability anyone in the world has to level stifling, abusive, libel charges in the UK freedom of speech.

Why so cranked up?

Governor Paterson signed legislation yesterday that will allow New York writers to go to local courts to seek legal protection if they are sued for libel in foreign countries.

The law was proposed in response to a defamation judgment that a Saudi financier secured in Britain against a journalist in New York, Rachel Ehrenfeld. The new law bars New York courts from enforcing the libel judgments of foreign countries that have fewer free speech protections than America…

I assume the writer thinks this, because in the US, you can’t use the court to gag anyone who writes anything about you without examining the veracity of the libel. According to the BBC, this inability to snuff others, by some miracle, has been renamed “laws governing freedom of speech in the US” as if there was none. This about a country that has a Constitution and a Bill of Rights, from the position of someone in the UK where there are no explicitly outlined rights, and the “Constitution” amounts to what normal people call a “state of mind” and not tangible legal writ in the way anyone living in civilization would understand it. I’ll draw you a picture: by “fewer free speech protections” in this case, they mean the UK not Saudi Arabia.

The only thing that BBC parasite sees worth protecting here isn’t free speech – quite the opposite – the scribbler’s noble cause is a meal-ticket for lawyers that leads to an imposition of limits on speech abroad. In fact this very much matches Europeans notions of what trans-nationalism is: their mountain of administrative rules imposed on others, robbing others’ freedoms from below either for their notion of “your own good”, their managed-society Jinna, or money.

Our Effete, Sophisticated Friends, Part 286

Another continental fetishist with the love-jones

Trying to Beat the Other Crackpots to the Punch

Al Gore continues his Assault on Reason”:

Using tragedy to advance an agenda has been a strategy for many global warming activists, and it was just a matter of time before someone found a way to tie the recent Myanmar cyclone to global warming.

Former Vice President Al Gore in an interview on NPR’s May 6 “Fresh Air” broadcast did just that. He was interviewed by “Fresh Air” host Terry Gross about the release of his book, “The Assault on Reason,” in paperback.

“And as we’re talking today, Terry, the death count in Myanmar from the cyclone that hit there yesterday has been rising from 15,000 to way on up there to much higher numbers now being speculated,” Gore said. “And last year a catastrophic storm from last fall hit Bangladesh. The year before, the strongest cyclone in more than 50 years hit China – and we’re seeing consequences that scientists have long predicted might be associated with continued global warming.”

Apparently, thousands of dead mean little more to Gore that an opportunity to peddle the pet theory that has earned him a bundle and distracted much of science away from doing actual science.

Our Effete, Sophisticated Friends, Part 285

As if he understood economics to begin with.


This little act of Plantu’s affection must be more of that nuanced cartooning for peace that we have to keep hearing about.

Immoderate Americans Prone to Extremism!

Jerks to the left, Idiots to the right.

In Germany, there’s almost no way to sing “stuck in the middle with you” because apart from the veneer, you’d be alone. Clarsonimus reports on the former East German Stasi-leute’s cold, moist, tonsil-hockey with the deep (blood) red PDS party, advocating an inversion of their very own history: an obligatory political “art exhibit” comparing the very same Berlin Wall where the Stasi’s mitarbeitern shot people who tried to leave for freedom with the Israel separation wall that keeps snipers out.

A better comparison would be the wall Egypt put on it’s border to Gaza, whose purpose is to keep Gazans from seeking a better life. But, hey – what does that matter. It’s only the essential meaning being lost in the lefty meme-factory.

Elsewhere a partisan of the wildly anti-American NDP, a nationalist party that succeed the Reichspartei or “Empirial Party” made a goose-step lovin’ sieg heil to a Jewish journalist. I’m sure it wasn’t a tangential editorial comment, he was just doing some tai chi or something, surely.

A regional court in Erding, outside of Munich, found that Horst Mahler had broken the law when he greeted journalist Michel Friedman with the words, "Heil Hitler, Herr Friedman."

Friedman, who had previously served as the vice president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, met Mahler in an airport hotel in October 2007 to speak with him for the German edition of Vanity Fair.

It’s a party that attracts asslicking skinheads much in the same way that the PDS attracts people willing to employ their equally pre-cambrian ethical non-compass to burn things down for “peace”. Germans think of them as the conservatives that they aren’t because of the headcracking that they like to get into with the very reds they share 99% of their ideas on society and government with, which are all authoritarian in the “loving” socialism and good old-fashioned zombie-like worship of one sort of dead idol or another. More than anything else though, is their common love of jew-hating, and a choice of one or two ways to hate immigrants: to see them as either helpless children that one should contemptfully coddle or a hideous horde that one should contemptfully detest. I’m sure they both have stock anti-racism speeches at hand when the subject of America comes up.

Otherwise there’s still the grand old European pass-time: defiling graves. It’s a healthy way to blow off some steam and takes the edge off when you’re Jonesing for some necrophilia.

Bush!

Our Effete, Sophisticated Friends, Part 284

Steve Bell needs to heal his inner European



Forever chained to their roots: to many a wise lesson-giver, your flaws and world view are genetic.

Our Effete, Sophisticated Friends, Part 283

After 1600 years of jew-hunting, isn’t it time they threw in the towel?

Our Effete, Sophisticated Friends, Part 282

Such grace. Such charm.

Sorry, But “your Kun-Fu is no good!!!”

Sorry people. Takuan Seiyo at Brussels Journal says you’re hosed.

...we hypothesized that the European civilization, both in the mother continent and in its diaspora, is pursuing a path of gradual self-obliteration for reasons rooted in a deep, collective psychosis.

Instead, the West has constructed a "false self." The false self is a psychoanalytic concept: a process whereby an individual who has received a profound narcissistic wound constructs a false self that allows him to pretend to be what he would have liked to be (3). So, in remorse over the distant past – whether the 30-Years-War or the Great War, slavery or colonialism, Habsburg, Himmler or Hiroshima – Western elites are building a new model of society.

This society-in-development is designed to exclude war and violence. All its people are equal and no one is allowed to discriminate. Actually, there is no longer "its people," as all of humanity is its people and "diversity" is its mantra. Gender and race are discredited concepts, not parameters of a physical reality. Racism, sexism and homophobia are capital crimes, but mass murderers are excused on account of addiction to candy or the "racism" of their victims. All social typology and taxonomy – the dreaded "stereotypes" – are outlawed, except "whitey," "fascist" and "the rich." "Nation" and "Christian" are bad words leading to censure. The ethnic expression and solidarity of people of European origin is to be suppressed; those of other ethnicities, promoted.

The low shall be high and the high shall be low. The deviant, the alien and the alienated, the parasitic and the criminal shall be high. The normal, the homegrown and well adjusted, the productive and the law-abiding shall be low.

His advise? Heal your inner European:

Asked whether the dog has Buddha's nature, the Oriental sage lifts his leg to urinate on the questioner. And he will do so within a split second from the posing of the question. To arrive at this answer it will have taken him twenty years of shutting down the chatter of his mind, to align with his True Nature through arduous meditation.

The Western sage, facing the same question but having devoted his twenty years to acquiring a PhD in the hermeneutics of Jacques Lacan as applied to the transgender community's anal anxiety, will spend a year researching canine physiology and behavior, and another year reading scholarly works on Buddhism published in German, French and English since 1860. He will then write a book deconstructing the dog as a genetically programmed biological computer designed as a receptacle for the white man's proclivity for domination and exploitation.

The book will be published by a major imprint. It will receive glowing reviews in the New York Times, the Guardian and Le Monde. Herr Professor Doctor will be interviewed by BBC International and CNN. Soon the book will be on the college curriculum compulsory reading list throughout the Euroculture zone: from Sydney, Australia to Salzburg, Austria. Poisoning the minds of current voters and future leaders with the intellectual equivalent of Herr Professor's enema. Moreover, the European Parliament, quoting this book on the dais, will enact 168 new pet regulations, leading, eventually, to banning dog ownership altogether across the European Union.

Human Consensus-Based Weather Undermined by Actual Weather

But don’t stop panicking, there’s always hopelessness:

The Earth's temperature may stay roughly the same for a decade, as natural climate cycles enter a cooling phase, scientists have predicted.

[snip]

However, temperatures will again be rising quickly by about 2020, they say.

Someone ought to “do something.”

“Imagine the payoff of knowing with some certainty what the next 10 years hold in terms of temperature and precipitation”

- H/T to Georgos

Ici Londres

UK-wide Brown rogered like Major by David Cameron. In London, the BBC and Izvestya have for the past 8 hours saying a race that gave the Tories a near 20 point bust nationwide “too close to call” in London. In spite of the fact, bookies have been paying out on Bets for Boris for 12 hours.

Boris Johnson appears to be the winner, while the neocom hopes remain for Red Ken, a man building a Marion Barry like grip on the general vote by funding random “community groups” with municipal funds, and engaging in foreign policy without Whitehall remit (i.e. Palestinian “Peace” conferences and making fuel deals with Hugo Chavez).

The real question is, will Ken Livingstone demand a Al Gore/Robert Mugabe style recount?

If Something in Their Lives Actually Mattered, They’d Think About What They Say

Just like when budding poop-stain Hugo Chavez claims every six months that the CIA is trying to kill him, some Europeans know exactly when to work the built-up mass of self-delusion, and wave that magic wand:

Lucinda Creighton, a spokeswoman for Ireland's largest opposition party, Fine Gael, says in a Web posting that "U.S. foreign policy has traditionally been opposed to EU integration."

"The U.S. supports the EU as an economic bloc but nothing more. The idea of a politically strong EU, acting as a check or counterbalance on the U.S. does not sit well with our trans-Atlantic friends," says the spokeswoman, a member of Ireland's Parliament.

Such deep thoughts: this is by some magic of European electioneering rhetoric, the same America that has been trying to give them a way to “have their moment”, and yet now we’re supposed to be threatened by their “hyperpuissance”. You wish.

The US has had to deal with this lunacy for more than a decade – one moment they’re a cartel with 26 votes in some global talking shop operation that they stack with their people, the next minute they’re poor helpless little countries that need protection, leadership, and guidance, and the moment after that, they’re the über-wise and all-knowing largest economy in the world reaching into the Crisco jar to start up another solo palm-party with their delusions that they invented everything positive in the world when the difficulty the US has with them is just a proxy for the way Europeans treat the rest of the world.

Lucinda, try this idea on for a moment: your fate is yours’, as are your successes and failures. If the United States is the bone caught in your throat, it doesn’t make that fixation at fault for your fixation.

It’s Probably a Lifestyle Issue

Hilarious – they have a blog which is nicely funded by a lefty grant-sucking operation, and a passel of graduate students and interns to blog for them. Behold the lefty-europe of ideas, which gets an average daily hit-count of 59 visitors. (That’s up from 37 only 6 months ago). So help out your hardworking bartenders and waitresses, people!

On the tips of their tongues today: Europe and China – Emerging Rivals or Partners? Economic competitors certainly, and sure to be rivals most of the time based on the fact that their economies are incompatible, and have wildly different notions of their “social” future. A great many Europeans long for and are trying to recreate what the Chinese seem to be trying to get rid of to eliminate poverty. Of the two spheres, the Chinese are clearly more flexible in their world views, making China the candidate most likely among the two to eventually embrace some form of Democracy.

Elsewhere they ask themselves a question that’s been answered about a decade ago: Europe - A Break with American Strategy? Of course. As we see with the Darfur expeditionary coalition since they started wringing their hands in 2004, if it requires any form of action or leadership, count ‘em out. You’ll be sure to find them taking bold action to craft a perfect press release and organizing a bold, bold symposium.

Divisions are appearing across the Atlantic between NATO allies on both the prosecution and validity of the ‘global war on terrorism’ and on related issues ranging from Russia to the Middle East, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and on NATO itself. Some American commentators are calling this an ‘existential crisis’ for NATO. Professor Haseler presented a paper arguing that the time for Europe to pursue a strategy based on its own interests and assessments has arrived.

Non-European NATO has been waiting for them to “have their moment” since the mid 80’s, and this is how they plan to carry it out – by rationalizing some form of inaction that can be 1) sound smart, 2) compel action by the United States in the benefit of their security, 3) provide them with some sort of emotional blackmail for a few weeks, and 4) make protecting downtown Munich look heroic. To do this they’ll have to try to find a way to talk to the Taliban or a purposefully headless beast called al-Qaeda that are both just too simplistic to negotiate with.