Stop the World, They Want to Get off: European Critics of America Seek a Way Out

NRC Handelsblad International Relations Correspondent Juurd Eijsvoogel reports on a “A Dutch Offer to Obama.”

From feeble minds come strange rationalizations which become the basis necessary to support things that they’ve previously said and done. European critics of anything American became fixated by Gitmo, and as such found in the detainees themselves a form of fairytale hero.

America will soon have a president who has promised to close Guantanamo -- but there are all kinds of practical risks associated with it. For example, there are dozens of prisoners who, as far as Washington is concerned, can go free, but they may be tortured, or worse, in their own country. Where can they go?

To the Netherlands, for example, suggested Lower House member Hans van Baalen (VVD--Dutch People's Party for Freedom and Democracy) last year, and to other NATO member countries. There was no support for the idea. Not from other members of Parliament, not from the Government, and not from the allies.

Correction: the US will have ANOTHER President that has promised to close down the Guantanamo Bay detention facility.

Until last week. On the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Portugal offered to accept a number of innocent prisoners who have been locked up without trial. And, at the same time, Lisbon called upon other E.U. countries to do the same. A deep silence then descended upon the European capitals.

The offer to take the detainees has been made for years. The problem now, as then, is that the governments in these “highly enlightened” states don’t want them, often not even wanting their own nationals.

This concerns not only the 50 to 60 innocent prisoners who can not be repatriated. There is also a group of around one hundred Yemenis who probably will soon be returned to their own country, to a rehabilitation program for Jihadists.

It all sounds magnanimous until you realize what it is that they are and aren’t willing to do: they’ll take the ones that they can parade as innocent, but still demand the release of the guilty ones, and insist that they are the United States’ responsibility, that their actions are the United States’ responsibility, and not the responsibility of the guilty themselves.

It will not be easy to return people to a society -- people who have been held prisoners for years, while innocent, under such appalling conditions. But if they are given the opportunity to request refugee status here, they will finally have the prospect for a new future, in a country that - more than, for example, Albania - has experience in the reception, counseling and treatment of refugees who have suffered serious psychological trauma.

Isn’t it brave of the Europeans to have spared these detainees the possibility of trauma by not taking detainees? Taken in the light “Watching America” is placing it in, isn’t that just another cruel follow-up to the years of lecturing being turned into a festival of self-congratulation?

Once the Obama administration is in place, it is likely that Washington will quickly come to the European allies with a request for help with receiving Guantanamo prisoners. Then refusing this will be difficult. By letting it be known in advance that the innocent prisoners, as well as Washington, can count on us, we not only help the detainees and Obama, but also ourselves.

Which is to say that in order to avoid making good on their demands, complaints, and on their word, they’ll take them, as long as they (first) can all be declared harmless, and (further) only take the few among them that really are harmless. That way, the US can continue to bear criticism for protecting the populations of crowded European cities from harm, and giving the populations of crowded European vindication from their parasitism at least cost, demonstrated to themselves a fake degree of involvement in the security of populations (the genuinely innocent) by inverting the concept to guilt and innocence, and getting that “activist feeling” by pushing for the release of killers and abetters of jihadi violence, as though they themselves aren’t “little Eichmanns” for giving aid and comfort to those that DO pull the trigger. It gives them maximum domestic PR at least cost.


The bold emphasis was mine. The word “innocent” appears in the article 5 times. “Danger” appears once (and in the context of the Chinese suppression of the Uigers at that, not in reference to the danger to civilians anywhere in the world).

The word “guilt” does not appear at all. It has the same evasiveness that the early stage of fixation of Iran had with Israel, and it starts with the revision of terms, and the construction of a far-away figure to blame in a desperate effort to distract a population into some organized purpose benefiting a social elite of some sort.

What if these critics were offered clearer choices in this matter (that they have no stake in anyway): 1) shooting irregular combatants on sight in the field as the Geneva Convention virtually proscribes, 2) not detaining combatants at all, 3) hiring non-state entities, not in uniform as the terrorists are, to do our fighting for us as a proxy, disposing the coalition of all responsibility for anyone’s fate, or 4) (their inferred solution) bringing those who want to kill your population INTO your country and freeing them.

Jihadists do not wear uniforms, but are a force organized under an ideology. The critics (“Watchers”) of America in any form that provides a vehicle for their hatefulness, insist on forcing the defenders against terrorism to operate on a different standard based on rules and not the implication of those rules.

The Jihadists are, in fact, being used by the critics’ as proxy army to embolden the image they have of themselves in an imaginary opera where they cast themselves as the moderators between the civilization and its’ enemies, while carefully casting America as an moral equivalent to the enemy. It’s only about casting themselves, somehow as relevant figures which they aren’t. They are empowering evil, and still can’t tell the difference between proponents of peaceful pluralism possible with enlightenment philosophy and a violent movement exploiting religious doctrine to impose an autocratic theocracy on the rest of humanity.

Juurd Eijsvoogel writing in the NRC Handesblad isn’t really “watching America”. He is watching the tendencies and temperament his own society through a haze of confusion which requires the demonization of the fake image of antithesis of themselves that Europeans have constructed. This entire bit of theater is about them, not us, and the effort put to manipulating America. By clearly airing statements (that they’re loath to back up anyway) as open support for Obama, and not America or even their own security, they make this quite plain.

Let’s review this again for those can’t get the years of wailing and complaint out of their melons: critics declaring some kind victory in this are not liberating anyone, nor are they facing the matter of dealing with the guilty or even their own wild demands - they are reciting the same dilemma facing the United States that has been present since 2002 as if they’ve solved it, one which the US alone has to tend to for the sake of these writers, not doers or entitled to protection from terrorism.

A Majority Desperately Seeking Affirmation

The implication is quite clear, and indicative of sophisticated continental thought: direct election and perhaps democracy itself has to be suspended for the sake of “diversity”:

Immigrant mayors are thinly spread in Europe. There are a number of mayors and lord mayors in Britain with an ethnic minority background but they have largely a ceremonial role. In Germany there is a village with an engineer from India as mayor. In Belgium the socialist politician Emir Kir, who is of Turkish descent, may become mayor of Sint-Joost-Ten-Node. But countries like Sweden and Norway, which have welcomed immigrants for years, have no immigrant mayors.

France is a modest exception. Of the roughly 36,000 local councils, around ten have a mayor of immigrant descent. Most of these are villages of a few hundred souls. The most important is the left-wing politician Eddy Aït, with Berber parents and openly homosexual, who has been mayor of the Parisian suburb of Yvelines-sous-Poissy (population 14,000) since March 2008.

"France's singular position has to do with the fact that its mayors are directly elected," says Laure Michon, who researches the political representation of immigrants at Amsterdam University. "Half of the councils have fewer than 3,000 inhabitants and it's easier to become mayor on the basis of a personal network."

But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t time for self-congratulation, while the nutty ideas can be heard between their teeth. That a village of 100 inhabitants where there are virtually no “non-aboriginals” need to find one somewhere to keep up appearances, with the obvious obsession with race is something worth trumping the vote, just as it was two decades ago with the idea that there need to be “elected quotas” of women.

Rotterdam's new mayor, Ahmed Aboutaleb, illustrates the Netherlands' forward position when it comes to the participation of immigrants in politics.

It is almost impossible to overestimate the symbolic value of Ahmed Aboutaleb's career: born in Morocco, moved to the Netherlands as an adolescent, local councillor in Amsterdam, junior minister and, from January 5, mayor of the country's second biggest city Rotterdam (population 583,000).

All that is quite impressive – until you consider that it’s roughly mimicking a pattern that took place in American cities on a larger scale half a century ago, and in a prior wave with immigrants from the Mediterranean nearly a century ago.

"His [Aboutaleb's] position speaks to the imagination," says Andreas Wüst, political researcher at Mannheim University in Germany. "He has to be an example to many immigrants, and not just in the Netherlands."

Or rather the LACK of imagination of people trying to peddle irrelevant genetic attributes as a “Change and Hope” agenda, bypassing entirely the idea of political platforms, and a sort of desperate search to keep up with the idea of “finding their Obama” for its’ own sake.

Let’s be frank: most immigrants to Europe are more family oriented and are better disposed to a anti-syndication, anti-socialistic, non-intervetionist view of economy and society, and yet the press will search high and low for the few that can be radicalized to the left, and act as a de facto gatekeeper to their ability to make their electibility understood. Nothing nothing could be further from the idea of free, open, and participatory governance than the unspoken social agenda of the talking heads who only seem to be looking for new servile ‘friends’ to give them the feeling that their activism has a purpose in the world, and sating their feeling of being needed.

Otherwise, all you really need to do is show these boffins some other ‘victims’ to convince them of their benighted advocacy is indispensable to civilization. I wonder if it dawns on them that immigrants will perceive that the mushy middle-minded find a comparative equality of interest in house-pets as they have with them.

Silent Night, Holy Night

All is chaos, All is alight.

More unrest in Malmö suburb

The unrest began in Oxie, a suburb south-west of central Malmö, when a skip began burning soon after 7.30pm on Monday evening. Police confirmed that security guards and passers-by were shot at with fireworks and several more fires were started.

The Christmas tree on the main square in Oxie was one of the targets and local resident Bo Persson expressed concern over recent developments.

"It has been awful lately. They should really ban fireworks.

But this trouble in paradise goes quietly unexplained, despite a great quantity of complete sentences ‘n stuff.

The streets of Malmö’s Rosengård district were relatively calm on Friday evening, as the hundreds of youth who rioted earlier in the week refrained from engaging in renewed clashes with police.

Just stuff, y’know!? Done by just some local youths.

The troubles began as a quiet protest linked to the recent closure of an Islamic cultural centre in Rosengård that housed a mosque, but have spread to become a general expression of discontent among disadvantaged youths.

The police "think they can appease us by joking with us, but they hassle us all the time, they arrest us for nothing and then they're surprised that we fight back," Ahmed Baccar, a 20-year-old unemployed Palestinian with a shaved head, told AFP.

"And they hit 11- and 12-year-old kids, set their dogs on us like they did yesterday, and then you want us to like them," said his friend Rached El Ali, an 18-year-old Palestinian.

We are either on the far edge of the implausible, or see a great hearts-and-minds campaign at work. Either way, what could bear mention by virtue of unavoidable fact in 20-December article had to be obscured on the 30th when the town’s Christmas tree was reported torched, what with the torching of a Christmas tree reminding Swedes how vulnerable their post-modern Jinna is to mall punk Jihad.

As long as “wisdom” dictates that reality need be discussed in the manner of the Soviet era popular criticism found in circumloquatious songs and jokes, Americans can expect a new age of wellness to be declared for no particular reason or cause.

All the campaign talk of the Great Depression, a Vietnam-like war, and our shredded Constitution will now thankfully subside as the Obama administration assumes office and solves problems with conciliation, dialogue, and multilateral wisdom, rather than shrillness, unilateralism, preemption, and my-way-or-the-highway dogmatism. We will hear that, by historical levels, unemployment is still not that bad, that GDP growth is not historically all that low, and that deficits, inflation, interest rates, and housing starts are all within manageable parameters. "Depression" will transmogrify into "recession" which in turn by July will be a "downturn" and by year next an "upswing" on its way to boom times.

Now that we finally have that “compliant press” that the anti-Bush “peace camp” said was meming us into a police state, can’t you just see us becoming numbed by the same kinds of painful omission that makes one not seek out the “root cause” of Palestinian quasi-muslim youts’ faith-based torching a Christmas tree and then claiming that it’s just based on police trying to quell their “right” to use 11 and 12 year old kids in a riot.

Prone to exaggeration, they know that there will be some sympathy to be had in accusing the police of giving mere helpless children a wood shampoo, and that the aborigines will quietly accept that they somehow deserve having whatever remaining symbols of their culture they have left defiled around advent, and that just like claiming that their political opponents are “shredding the constitution”, it will come at no cost. The personae are more alike then they are different.

No Need to Explain. Not Later. Not Ever.

When it comes to business and economics, most journalist keep hitting the stupid juice:

10. Capitalism is dead or dying.
9. Gas at $4-a-gallon, blame the oil companies.
8. Fannie’s failure
7. Barack Obama sends stocks soaring, but not sinking.
6. Alternative energy: All gain, no pain
5. The economy has a fever and the only prescription is more bailouts.
4. Attack of the Killer Tomatoes
3. Oil prices will skyrocket to $200 a barrel, gas to $15.
2. Welcome to 1929: Great Depression II
1. America needs a new, New Deal.

Business and Media takes on each myth. The common thread is that each one was propagated by someone with little experience or knowledge of the subject of their pronouncements, and had an ideological agenda.

The miracle is that they never have hangovers that would cause them to question the assault of invented assumtions they seed the mind of the public with. Lefty political charlatans are no different. They just whack back another one, and keep flying the friendly skies.

He [Sen. McConnell] asked if Democrats would allow increased deep-sea exploration if the price of gas reached a national average of $10.00. Democrats objected.

Forgive me for finding joy is in the name of that post.

Today in History

21-27 December 1968



Today is the 40th Anniversary of the de-orbitting of the Apollo 8 Mission to orbit the moon. In a year filled with chaotic public events, it provoked many to see the place of humanity in the universe differently.

Because It’s so Easy to Fill Empty Little Heads with Evil

5 minutes pour Hitler, 5 minutes pour les juifs is the logic behind the stunt. Perhaps it’s out of a desire to destroy the conventions that they had some anxiety about in youth, or out of simple weakness, this bright lot feel a need to provide an “alternative message” to Queen Elizabeth’s Christmas address on UK's Channel 4. The Queen reflects on the year past and looks to give the listener a thought on the temperament of the year to come, but all the empty heads of the chattering class see is a bible thumper who must be “balanced out”.

To do that, 4 has a “alternative address” set for Christmas day. Despite the tortured logic, they present their hero in that exercise. The message is to be given by the most unlikely friend of the shallow agnostics and feelies of the world, an orthodox muslim, none other than Mahmoud Ahmedinejad. A new honorary citizen of the UK, I suppose, and hero to those inclined toward “progress” and building a bridge to 1939.

As if there was really some need to “balance” Christmas, a celebration held dear to Christians worldwide, as though the “alternative” to that day didn’t already exist. In fact there are 364 “alternative” days to Christmas, and no other days of religious obligation to any other religion for which those who promote themselves as wise and reasonable, thoughtful and fair, seek an “alternative”.

The fiery Iranian leader, who has angered Western countries with his sharp comments on Israel, nuclear power, and the role of the United States in the world, will be delivering the Alternative Christmas Message on Britain's Channel 4.

The network, which calls the event a "traditional alternative to The Queen's Christmas Day broadcast," issued the preliminary text.

Behold, that’s their religion. Not Ahmedinejad’s, but that of the casual, thoughtless left. The symbolic trappings of what they think are ‘human understanding’ is to offer a platform to the leader of the most illiberal government since that of the Taliban. The “fiery” part is something they all can identify with and aspire to, I suppose. All you have to do is throw a cheap phrase about something like ‘the oppressed’ for whom AJad is more than willing to create many more of, and you have their ear.

President Ahmadinejad's address will focus on spiritual messages of seasonal
goodwill, but also contains an attack on "bullying, ill-tempered and
expansionist powers".

The speech is being promoted as an alternative to the Queen's traditional 3pm speech, but will be broadcast at 7.15pm.

Sure. That’s what Christmas is all about to these folks looking for “alternatives” to something they don’t get involved in anyway - earthly things, power struggles, fiery calls to evaporate their enemies, etcetera, etcetera.

The countervailing response is just as simple: seek an “alternative” to anything and everything these ‘men without chests’ hold dear. And they will fall for it, even after they tut-tut in the face of people pointing out the obvious. Since hating happy, normal people makes them feel smart, that too will be brushed off as a perfunctory thing that they needed to quiet the ‘intolerant’ slack-jawed peasants of this world that they must suffer on their way to the march to support their favorite “oppressed peoples” of the week.

It’s really simple: repeat, repeat, repeat, until we find ourselves wishing each other a “merry whatever.”

Today I was wished a “Happy Holidays” [sic] by someone. I relpied: ”Oh, really? What holiday is that, exactly?” We eventually got past a dim stare and a pregnant pause to a mention of Christmas on Christmas eve, on with the relief that they were “allowed” to wish it. Allowed, as if in this fine state society is in now that we congratulate ourselves for ‘liberating’ ourselves from anything fake we can invent, we are convinced that Christmas may not be mentioned at Christmas.

Remove all doubt as to just what it is that the Fuehrer of Iran is promoting: advertizing for islam on the airwaves of ‘the infidel’ on the day that matters most to those his proponents call ‘cross worshippers’, and to exploit the moment to construct the doubt necessary for his adarice for personal power.

"All the problems that have bedevilled humanity throughout the ages came about because humanity followed an evil path and disregarded the message of the Prophets.

"Now as human society faces a myriad of problems and a succession of complex crises, the root causes can be found in humanity's rejection of that message, in particular the indifference of some governments and powers towards the teachings of the divine Prophets, especially those of Jesus Christ."

Will the luvvies who seek an “alternative” to Christmas for Christmas day be quick to find their virtues in his intentions? No. They don’t have to, because they already found it long ago, and gave the likes of Ahmedinejad the tools and platform to learn it from them. But for a moment, they might make an exception and actually not quickly look down and away at the mention of Jesus.

It’s for the Children!

Along with all the usual lefty self-promotion about a new day, the evils of anyone who doesn’t agree with them, the love of children, blah-blah-blah, and the usual implausible claims and platitudes. These are the winds of hope and change coming to Washington:

A member of John Kerry's "band of brothers" pleads guilty to possessing child porn.

Remember Wade Sanders? He was one of the "band of brothers"--Swift Boat veterans who supported John Kerry's presidential campaign and appeared onstage at the 2004 Democratic National Convention before Kerry's "reporting for duty" speech.

On the campaign trail, Sanders was one of Kerry's nastiest surrogates. In August 2004, he likened the president to a "trapped animal." In September, he compared Karl Rove and Swift Boat Veterans for Truth chief John O'Neill to Josef Goebbels. He repeatedly referred to the president and his men as "chicken hawks," an especially nasty term because it is slang for a child molester as well as a derisive term for a nonveteran who favors a strong defense.

So much love and caring for humanity there, what with the left having that monopoly over it that they always seem to claim. If you haven’t heard more about the Sanders’ story to date, it’s because the press coverage has been limited largely to providing cover to a fellow traveler, and vessel for any other sort emotions as complex as a shoe-throwing.

Sanders, who also served as a deputy assistant Navy secretary during the Clinton administration, continued his anti-Bush campaign even after Kerry's defeat. In a December 2004 op-ed for the San Diego Union-Tribune, he lectured the president on "the heavy responsibility of command"

As opposed to Sanders’ inability to grasp the responsibility of actually being a man.

What Progressives Mean when They Want you to Rage Against the Machine

Why is it that the strange little world of leftism always look like the last days of Rome?

The probable appointment of Caroline Kennedy, the 51-year-old daughter of former President John Kennedy, to fill Secretary-of-State nominee Hillary Clinton's New York Senate seat is both laughable and yet a parable for our bankrupt times.

Consider aristocratic entitlement. Ms. Kennedy apparently spends a great deal of her time divided between her Park Avenue Upper-East-Side Manhattan townhouse and her hereditary estate on Martha's Vineyard. She has had no real experience with the ordinary lives of New Yorkers, either a few dozen blocks away in Harlem (despite a sudden ad hoc lunch last week with the Rev. Sharpton at a soul food diner) or the state's rural towns to the north.

Hope and Change alert!

Ms. Kennedy is about as undiverse as one could imagine. She was educated at exclusively private schools among those of her like race and class. Her financial security is due to either inheritance or marriage; there is no evidence of a self-employed stellar legal or business career. But there is plenty of evidence that Ms. Kennedy reflects the current Democratic Party's obsession with celebrity and Hollywood-like imagery--as we see from the recent politicking of everyone from Oprah to Sean Penn, the Senate run of comedian Al Franken, and the messianic cult that surrounds Barack Obama, from his vero possumus Latin seal to his mass rallies with Greek temple backdrops.

Meat, Glorious Meat

Try wearing this when you’re out on that date with the lecturesome vegetarian. Bust open the peevish little world of always being irate about others’ behavior! You know they want it!

Meet the Pretenders

Strange as it is, there are two men claiming the throne of France. I’ve even met a pair of bloggers whose subject of discussion is the advancement of the idea that some royal family should be reinstated. My sense is that a frustration with the loony state of public discussion and public policy is what compels them, but on the other hand – compared to the shallowness of European political thought, it isn’t that bad an option.

"Maybe one day the monarchy will be restored in France," said Prince Jean as he strolled around the gardens of the Palais Royal in central Paris. "The prince can't just sit back and wait. He must make his mark."

Europe has many families descended from old monarchies. But most are happy just to enjoy the social status their backgrounds confer.

Which is a lot like being a trade union rep or being in one of the syndicated industries that have whole lines of business inefficiently stitched-up.

Prince Jean does his best to live like a king.

He has no official status and little public recognition, and he has to work for a living. He has been a financial consultant, and he now works full time promoting French heritage.

But he still carries out a program of "royal" engagements, aided by a staff of 30. He tours France 10 times a year, meeting mayors and visiting factories, where he says people see him as a reminder of French history. He also makes an annual overseas visit. He has discussed foreign policy with Vatican officials, has performed a tribal dance with Houma Native Americans in Louisiana, and traveled to the North Pole to raise awareness of climate change.

As kings will do, I suppose, when they aren’t encouraging the oxidation of ferrous metals into the atmosphere.

Prince Jean says he is a modern royal, and he cultivates an appropriately modest, varied lifestyle. He rides around Paris on a rusty bicycle, and his favorite movie is "Beverly Hills Cop II." In his spare time, he enjoys hunting, windsurfing and collecting ornamental knives. If aides address him as "Your Royal Highness," he tells them: "Just call me 'Prince Jean.'"

This is the funny part though: voting with their feet, the public shows an unstated fondness for symbolic leadership, happy to let another anti-meritocracy in the form of a never-changing cadre run things. There is also a taste for hearing excessive drama in the stating of positions in the sense that a radical sounding idea leaves an impression that progress of some kind – that mythical gentle and magical age some carry around different ideas around in their heads about, is just around the corner – if we could only just imagine it. Hope and change, in the style of a mass of imagined members of an underclass cramped into a rotting gilded shanty.

Nonetheless as fashion would dictate, these two “houses” manage to squabble.

Rival Claim

The current Bourbon pretender to the French throne is Prince Louis Alphonse Duke of Anjou, who lives in Venezuela. His adviser, Jacques De Bauffremont-Courtenay, Duke of Bauffremont, declined requests for an interview with Prince Louis, but said that this lineage gave his man the best claim to the French throne.

He said that in addition to the Orléans' less-direct lineage, they had helped trigger the French Revolution by hoarding a shipment of grain sent from the U.S. in 1788. The grain was intended to relieve a famine, and a year later the starving peasants revolted.

Something they continue to do to this day. To quote Mel Brooks’ finest opus: “the peasants are revolting!” “Yeah. They stink on ice.”

The very fact that a society that avers socialistic taglines and vocabulary, but still names “Lord Mayors” and clings has a symbolic shield for every village, reveals a cognitive dissonance. It either that or a strange desire to have it both ways, or as we are more likely to find evidence of: a desire to believe in notions of equality, but being so wanting to cling to a protector and so untrusting of peoples’ choices that you conclude that a iron fist is a comfort. It’s like finding a warm-fuzzy in licking the boot that kicks you.

But the thing that is repelled against by the appeal to the notion of reinstating monarchies, the seeming chaos in society, is the same reaction that the thugs on the barricades and the skinheads in the back alleys find as pretext to act. And yet it’s that action that motivates others still to say the kids ain’t alright – which of course

they aren’t.

Every Three Days a Cemetary Get Vandalized

"Abject", "scandalous", "deeply shocking": the political class has strongly condemned the desecration whose cemetery Notre-Dame-de-Lorette (Pas-de-Calais) was the target on the night from Sunday to Yesterday, for the third time in less than twenty months. More than 500 grave markers of Muslims and a dozen Jewish graves have been vandalized. Swastikas and various messages insulting Islam and the Minister of Justice Rachida Dati have been tagged in black paint. At the mention of these acts, perpetrated on the day of Eid el-Kebir, Nicolas Sarkozy denounced a "repulsive racism."

The desecration took place between rounds of a gendarmerie patrol at around 1:45 a.m. and the arrival of a veteran at 8 a.m. The Secretary of State for Veterans Affairs, Jean-Marie Bockel, announced the installation of eight cameras around the Muslim section of the cemetary.

Last September, a dozen skinheads had been arrested after the desecration of 148 headstones.

”Classes” fending off violence by “classes”. A ubiquitous state where far and wide gangs are obsessed with race and class.

Of course the “progressives” quietly hope for a new Robbespierre to lead them to deliverance of social sameness with a regime of life-controlling regulations no different than an iron fist, and the neo-fascists look for the same warmth of being treated to the socialism of being treated like a boarding school student.

Centuries have passed, and the pretentions remains the same. Centuries have passed, and a great many Europeans still confuse responsibility with authoritarian power. It looks almost like it's that disssonance and frustration that still drives people to take shelter in the strange and hostile ideologies of neo-marxism and neo-fascism, and others to take comfort in recreating the distant past which yearns for a similar result: one where in a strange way there is no resentment for others' success or good fortune because all us peasants are equally miserable, or that an elite can justify it's power based on their thinking themselves indispensible.

They Had to Hang a Pork Chop Around His Neck to get the Dog to Play with Him

The EU has stopped funding to “5-6” western-balkans news operations that they were paying to cover their circus in Brussels. Bra-vo, and all that, but the question really is: why would they need to pay anyone to cover them to begin with?

Until the end of 2006, the European Commission supported all TV correspondents coming from EU candidate states. This was first a scheme first applied to the correspondents of 12 countries that are now part of the EU.
Then it was our turn in the “Western Balkans”. This technical aid consisted of cameras, editing studios and a chance to send our stories via satellite. The first 12 beneficiaries of the scheme were happy to receive this aid until the day they entered the EU. Croatia, Albania, Macedonia, Montenegro, Bosnia, Kosovo and Serbia were to follow. Back in 2003, the EU gave these countries a clear perspective of eventual membership, right?But almost two years ago, the European Commission reorganized the budget in order to redirect the money earmarked for “media support”. They cash was top be redirected towards civil society, they said. So, money that once went on media support is now going to go directly to the countries for the purposes of staging workshops, seminars and similar activities, including sporadic help for several TV broadcasts. This initiative is fine, but what about the correspondents, the people that are at the centre of happenings? Who better than us can directly and instantaneously inform people about political events concerning our countries?

The simple answer is to start media support of civil societies, whatever the hell that chilling, ademocratic sounding thing is – as opposed to proving so be so uninteresting or so unable to market virally that you have to put cash out on the street.

I find odd though, that the title of the blog reporting on this is called “shooting the messenger”, as though it’s perfectly normal for a government entity to pay journalists, and a sign of harshness when they stop paying them.

Elsewhere, demanding students ask: What am I? Chopped liver? Frankly, yes. Yes you are.

Don't these Little Lefties Know that ‘Hate is not a Family Value’?

Drug addles ‘young militants’ hunt Jews in Mumbai.

Drug addles ‘young militants’ hunt Jews in Berlin.

Last Wednesday, hundreds, if not thousands, of students ostensibly protesting poor conditions in German schools stormed the main building of Berlin’s historic Humboldt University: smashing windows, occupying seminar rooms, strewing rolls of toilet paper in the lobby and courtyard, and even setting at least one fire. Most astonishingly, the protesters also laid waste to an exhibit in the entry hall of the building devoted to the Nazi persecution of the Jews. The exhibit was titled “Betrayed and Sold: Jewish Businesses in Berlin 1933-1945.” According to reports on the German news site Spiegel-Online and in the popular German tabloid Bild, virtually all the poster boards making up the exhibit were damaged and, as photo evidence shows, some were fully ripped in two. Eyewitnesses cited by Spiegel-Online say that the rioters who destroyed the exhibit were adolescents around thirteen years old.

Interviewed by Spiegel-Online, a researcher at the university reported that when he informed rioters that the university had visitors from Israel and asked “What will they think?” one young man responded “F*ck Israel!” [Scheiß Israel] and proceeded to attack him. Reacting to suggestions that the students may not have realized what the subject of the exhibit was, police chief Peter-Michael Haeberer told Bild: “Leaving aside the fact that university employees and other witnesses pointed it out to them, even a dyslexic could not have failed to recognize that it was an exhibit about the persecution of the Jews. The perpetrators knew exactly what they were doing.”

All in the name of liberating something or other, of course.



“fighting the system”, and demanding the “ Demokratisierung der Schulen“

The incident occurred merely three days after Chancellor Angela Merkel and other German dignitaries solemnly commemorated the 70th anniversary of the infamous Kristallnacht pogroms, during which thousands of Jewish-owned shops and synagogues were destroyed throughout Germany.

As with the riots in Greece, there is an unrepresented degree of organization to this, with the adolescent ragers at Indymedia playing a hidden role. In Berlin, it even gets richer. Looking desperately for something to trash, a group engaging in Fagan-like organizing of students as young as 13 posts stickers around the city calling for “school strikes” over just about anything they believe the world should give them for free, including jobs – this of course, without being able to square that claim with the demand that capitalism disappear. As we’ve seen before over and over, these things go down a lot easier if you know nothing about the world, and have even less life experience than your average 17 year old.

High School Musical

You probably already know what a watermelon is. Look it up in the dictionary, and you should find Daniel Cohn-Bendit’s face should be there. High among his priorities are the silencing people who don’t agree with him, and trying to relive his childhood (which was actually quixotic by European standards) of abetting fugitive terrorists.

His latest tantrum was a passive-aggressive sit-down protest in front of Czech president Vaclav Havel’s person, presumably because he exists, and hasn’t drunk from the same cup as Cohn-Bendit, a leftist flunky for any revolutionary notion that a 15 year old is unsophisticated enough to embrace.

He then moved on to the Lisbon Treaty. "I don't care about your opinions on it," he said. If the Czech Parliament approves the treaty in February, he demanded, "Will you respect the will of the representatives of the people?"

Which is exactly where the problem lies. It’s the ‘representatives of the people’ of other EU member states that the people who voted in the Netherlands, France, and Ireland when they were voting on referenda themselves, sans non-representative representation voted in by people other than them.

He then reprimanded the president for his recent meeting in Ireland with Declan Ganley, the millionaire leader of the "No" campaign in the Irish referendum, claiming that it was improper for Klaus to have talked to someone whose "finances come from problematic sources".

Visibly taken aback by this onslaught, Klaus observed: "I must say that no one has talked to me in such a style and tone in the past six years. You are not on the barricades in Paris here. I thought that such manners ended for us 19 years ago" (ie when Communism fell). When Klaus suggested to Hans-Gert Pöttering, the president of the EU Parliament, that perhaps it was time for someone else to take the floor, Pöttering replied that "anyone from the members of the Parliament can ask you what he likes", and invited Cohn-Bendit to continue.

"This is incredible', said Klaus.

The post-vote attacks on Declan Ganley have really been rather hilarious, and egged on and caused by many in the press as well. They included things like complaining that he’s made his money ‘in business’, accused without basis in fact of taking money from the CIA (while ironically neglecting to mention that the US government has been begging Europeans to get their act together as a group,) and nicknaming him ‘The Mysterious Mr. No’ when he’s made his position on matters as plain as day. This kind of smear that the attention-seeking left likes to pull, and an inability to absorb any new idea since 1917 despite their love of “la provoc” that’s all too typical and stale.

Elsewhere: the german pulisher with a near monopoly, Bertelsmann, is trying to dictate to the incoming US president America's terms of surrender to them. Since they effectively bought-off Senetor Obama, the stunt might just work.

The Washington, DC-based Bertelsmann Foundation presented its Trans-Atlantic Briefing Book for the Obama administration on Thursday, 13 November 2008 in the US capital. The Briefing Book is a policy blueprint that offers strategies for foreign-policy cooperation between Europeans and the new American leadership during their first consultations in early 2009.

The Bertelsmann Foundation, the only non-partisan pan-European think tank in Washington, DC, wrote its Briefing Book from a distinctly European perspective. The Book describes the go and the no-go areas of major foreign-policy issues. It realistically considers the shortcomings of the European institutions and EU member-states. The Briefing Book highlights the numerous fields of trans-Atlantic cooperation and focuses on the viewpoints of Brussels, London, Paris and Berlin.

They might just manage to Talibanize us after all.

Again, is this some sort of end-run telling us that they are "speaking for the representatives of the people"?

Here, Wear this Millstone Around Your Neck...

Green jobs>  My ass!  Europeans don't want a cleaner world, they want to make the rest of teh world as miserable as they are.

This is certainly a new tune for the Europeans, who have lectured Americans for more than a decade to sign Kyoto because the planet is in peril. Their happy talk of a painless 20% reduction in emissions by 2020 has been mugged by reality. Carbon emission regulations come at a high price in lost jobs and lost competitiveness.
 
No wonder, then, that the Europeans are delighted over the pledges by the incoming Obama Administration and Democrats in Congress to adopt similar legislation to tax U.S. industries. The EU members may differ on their own limits. But they all agree that the U.S. should "show leadership" by committing to meet the same target they're setting for themselves -- reducing emissions by 20% to 30% below 1990 levels by 2020. Never mind that most European countries aren't close to meeting their Kyoto goals, and in all likelihood will fall short of any new targets. The point is to impose those same burdens on the Yanks.
 
China and India, two of the globe's biggest carbon emitters, have even called Mr. Obama's goals for combating climate change "inadequate" and have advised the U.S. to speed up its time table for carbon reductions. And why not? They would be first in line to gobble up the jobs and production lines that the U.S. would lose if energy costs rise sharply in America.

THEN maybe will the sneering NGOs start treating humans and their effort as aomething other than an 'energy equivalent'?  Don't bet on it.

AmeriKKKa is Just Such Soul-Crushing Place...

According to one Briton sharing his experience with others of his move to the US, the country isn’t the abyss of cannibalism and grindingly medieval as the European branch of the 40millionpeoplewithouthealthinsurance! reciting robots of recycled recorded complaint would have you believe:

After all the trials described previously with our move to the USA, an obvious question is "Was the move worth it?"
The short answer is a definite "Yes". Even though we found the move to the USA a big challenge, we know we made the right choice overall.
Relocating was definitely a good move for us:

- The quality of life here in Redmond is vastly better than we had in London.
- The scenery and beauty of the area is just phenomenal.
- Crime and violence are low here.
- Medical treatment is phenomenally better if your employer has a good healthcare plan.
- The kids have integrated well into the school system and are enjoying all the activities like sports and recreation that is available to them.
- We moved from a 1100 sq foot house in London to a 3800 sq feet house in Redmond, in a vastly better location, and for about the same price!

Overall, we have grown as a family and individually from the relocation experience, and I would recommend it to anyone if they get the chance.

Oh, the horror! Bring that emergency supply of hope and change right away so that this sort of thing never happens again! This narrative may not be!

Underwhelming

The European Union has launched its mission to strengthen the rule of law in Kosovo, after months of delay.  
 
Nearly 2,000 officials are taking over police, justice and customs duties from United Nations staff.  
 
Serbia rejected Kosovo's declaration of independence in February and still regards Kosovo as one of its provinces, but it has accepted the new EU mission.  
The UN will leave Kosovo after more than a decade in charge, retaining only a small political role.

After making a big point some time ago about the EU in Kosovo, the EU is making a big deal about ‘taking over the operation’ from the UN.  It has to be said that the same people who are effectively the government of Kosovo will be changing hats for this new effort to ‘take over the operation’again in a bid to do something slightly less parasitic looking than the year before.  From the BBC:

Eulex is the EU's biggest-ever mission and will operate across all of Kosovo. The 1,900 international officials will be supported by about 1,100 local staff.

Yup.  That’s it. Their ‘biggest ever mission’ is IN Europe and is composed of only 3000 people, more than a third of which are local hires, all to somehow make good on decades of cultural babble on what Casper should be doing for the world.  Oh, what a grand day as they continue to not ever find a way out of that quagmire they’ve been in, albeit looking like they’re passing around by re-re-redeclaring it an mission of some other alphabet soup operation: OECD, EU, UN, NATO, CoE, or who knows what next. 
 
A simpler point needs to be made: while the UN have been there since 1999, and realistically outside organizations have been there longer given the interventions in the region, they really have no way out.  All the while the region has been rotting in the EU’s back yard, and the EU decided to try to take as least visible a role as it could for more than a decade.  These are the people who we’re told are lighting the way to sunshine, lollipops, and peace for the world.  
 
 On the other hand, Iraq has been administered by Iraqis for some time.  I can’t help wondering if the real goal of those that idealize ‘internationalism’ is anything more than self-flattery. 
 
To begin with UNMIK after celebrating an 18 month anniversary of being a “renerwed commitment’ amounted to:

UNMIK budget for the fiscal year 2007/08 US$210,676,800.00 (Budget for the fiscal year 
2006/2007 amounts to US$217,962,000. The budget for the fiscal year 2005/06 (until 30 June 
2006): US$239,889,800.) 
UN Staff: (Police not included): International 462, National 1892, UNV’s 125. (as of Jan. ‘08) 
OSCE: A total of 999 staff. 283 International and 716 Local staff (as of 2007)

4194 personnel, 2608 of which are local hires.  How this is a “Kosavarizing” of the activity or with apparently fewer people a “renewed commitment” is, I suppose, a matter of being able to imagine a better world.

The Low Performing Intellectual

Euro-mind Tomas Kavaliauskas writes in Eurozine about the same Euro-fables that caused mass protest and long, widespread wars over the centuries: class-warfare, class-hatred, and that strange hatred of authority that seems to find a place in its’ heart for things that can only be accomplished through totalitarianism. 
 
As usual, they have to get around to limiting human freedom.

The capitalist order implies that the ultimate objective of citizens is to be consumers. Yet consumerism grounded in indebtedness means financial dependence as opposed to democratic freedom

Prattle on about something you don’t understand, pretend social philosophy needs municipal control, pretend that you’re the one to do it, and people call you an intellectual.  Here, our brave gladiator wanting to toy with all our lives manages to describe the only option anti-capitalists can cite as capitalism, and goes through the necessary ‘talking in circles’ to tell us that in fact it was the capitalist societies where social control is at its’ greatest.

According to Foucault, the individual, whose life and activities are restricted by the social order, is constantly examined and classified; this facilitates identification. This process, obviously political, is especially important in contemporary megapolises. The practical and political interest of every state is to control and discipline its citizens in order to secure the successful functioning of its political and economic systems. Moreover, control and discipline help preserve the consumerist order.

I’m sorry, but what history of Europe exactly did you have to exclude from view to arrive at this point?  It’s the poorer, economically dysfunctional societies that permitted tyrannies to calcify permanently. 
 
I’d really like to know where he got the idea that the freedom to make a living in the way you want is the same as programmed consumption or is an all-occupying philosophy of those who live in it.  I’d also really like to know his notion of a viable alternative.  Invariably, the ‘alter-monde’ involves less control over ones’ life and less of a connection between what you do and the conditions you can live in. 
 
I’d also like to know where this nostalgia for Gothic life of communist authoritarian leftism comes from.  Under the only other ‘alter-monde’  to democratic-socialism/socialism Europe has know in living memory has been a system based entirely on consumption – one that not only based itself on the need to ration and construct a destructive level of human conformity, but didn’t even succeed a providing for the population materially.

It would be naïve to assume that prosumers can choose identity. It is ascribed to them by default. Today, one is even born with it. Such is the order of the capitalist system, when individuals are free to choose professions but not the status of the producer and the consumer. Indeed, if Europe or the USA saw the emergence within their boundaries of a state that refused to participate in this global system and instead effected a Rousseauesque return to nature, and if the ideology of this state were based on principles other than production and consumption, contemporary western morality grounded in the maximization of economic growth would simply collapse. This would mean that an "advanced" country chooses "backwardness". What is seen as inevitable in Africa would, in Europe or the USA, be regarded as a choice and thus become a challenge to the ideology, ethics, politics, economics, and culture of utilitarian efficiency.

This can only be true if all people are in fact just like the worst example of constructed negative architypes you see on TV, and that people are not capable of anything else.  How he and his fellow travelers evaded this fate is stunning when you see just how willing they seem to be to parrot ideas no-one with a shred of healthy scepticism would accept.  The poor in Africa cannot passively ‘choose’ to have a European quality of life, and the very idea that these choices can be made sort of undermines the idea that a bogeyman is forcibly ascribing anything to the rest of us. 
 
To think that we choose our identities rather than develop them as individuals tells one just how little the likes of Tomas Kavaliauskas knows about people to begin with, and how trapped he is in the illusions necessary to maintain the adolescent view of class-warfare into adulthood.  That arbitrariness with which others’ philosophies, even ones that they aren’t familiar with are judged and describes must be the prerequisite to be called a European intellectual these days. 
 
I would pity him if he could admit that his identity was something that developed under a number of influences, (perhaps even things he perceived as traumas) through the course of actually living and wasn’t something he chose one day or was assigned.

Protecting that Vital Strategic Cheese Production

The cascade effect telegraphing through the whole of the economy, the mass layoffs, the agony. Despite the cost SOMEBODY should do something... Italians discover government cheese:

Italian consumers seem to support the cheese bailout, which also includes a purchase of 100,000 wheels of another grating variety, Grana Padano. The operation will cost €50 million.

To pay for the parmigiano wheels, the Italian government is dipping into a special European Union fund meant to help feed needy people.

Emphasis mine.

The Times, they are a Flailing

Like the hoax that could set Belgians running to rationalize and the bombing that brought down a Spanish government, the fact that Europeans don’t want to be a nation with responsibilities, but rather a power vacuum magically held in high regard for their image of themselves, it’s an apparent function of character. That sort of character is the product of a million silly ideas about what one thinks human nature COULD do if you could will it away, one that can no longer use the excuse of what it thinks is its’ own experience, and will only be purged from our lower GI tract when the ‘68ers become too old to care about the sound of their own voices.

In the process of discussing India’s options following the Mumbai attacks, Barry Rubin has a point that while painful to hear is the obvious codex of our modern age:

The problem here is that the international community is not exactly courageous. There are those who sympathize with the terrorists, those who apologize for the terrorists, and those who are afraid of the terrorists.

What is truly frightening is how much the world is afraid of the terrorists. An example: In 2006 the Israel-Hizballah war ended with a UN ceasefire resolution. The UN, meaning more than 180 countries, pledged to patrol southern Lebanon and keep Hizballah forces from returning there. It also promised to help stop arms smuggling from Iran and Syria to Hizballah. In fact, after two years the UN armed soldiers in Lebanon have done nothing. Hizballah has returned and rearmed. What happened? Hizballah, and Syria, hinted that if the UN forces did their job they would be attacked. The entire world surrendered to Hizballah.

And to think that it was those very nailbiters that decided that they had to step in just so somebody else doesn’t do something about the way the Iran-Syria-Hizballah complex has ravaged Lebanon’s future and “regional stability” – that very nebulous and impossible that thing the Europeans keep pretending is itself a virtue worthy of permanently accepting tyrannies to maintain.

Indeed we may even have to wait until the real stupidest generation has permanently stopped talking about itself to see a change.

Lethargy as Lifestyle

Potential candidates who can’t be bothered to run. Potential bloggers who can’t seem to make themselves notice what is or isn’t going on. Welcome to the human warehouse that is EUtopia.

We know we have got it wrong when our senior European politicians prefer to serve in the non-elected commission, or even in national government, rather than in the currently anodyne European Parliament, even though that body is (theoretically at least) the second most important legislature in the world.

A people leaders are loath to actually trust, and a people unmoved by the tediousness of those in political life. It’s a perfect storm – a kind of ghetto mental complex on a continental scale.

Why should we need to "boost interest and participation in" the European elections at all? Why do we fear that turnout in some countries will be so low as to threaten the democratic legitimacy of those elected?

It is because politics in Europe and debate in Europe has simply become so stultified and dull, extinguished by the well-meaning and ordered hand of bureaucracy.

Politics was always about people and will always be about people, because ultimately we place our trust and our judgement in people.

While always willing to get jumping mad at someone an ocean away, and seem to want to chisel Senator Obama’s head onto Mount Rushmore before he’s even taken office, the lecturesome ways of these great Euro-minds seems to wander off when the subject at hand is their own behavior, initiative, or demonstrative value to civilization.

George Bush? They have a “lesson” for us about George Bush! Barack Obama? They’re all ”for” Barack Obama for a plentitude of recorded reasons they’re willing to recite verbatim. Themselves? Themselves? Hello... Is there anyone in there?

Mark Mazower, author of Dark Continent: Europe’s 20th Century, and other interesting criticisms that look into the heart or heartlessness of the Ur-European notes evidence of this retrograde nature and social lethargy – all the while imagining that their passivated actions are equal to the endless complex of sneering at others over mushy, irrelevant “good to do” notions things one tries to call virtues:

It is not so long ago that Austria’s rightwingers used to campaign on the slogan: “Vienna must not become Chicago”. They were not the only Europeans to become more xenophobic with the end of the cold war. But they were perhaps the only ones to link their detestation of the new immigrants from the Middle East and eastern Europe to hoary images of race riots and organised crime drawn from America’s bad old days.

Now that an African-American from Chicago is set to become president in Washington, not everyone in Vienna is happy. In an extraordinary on-air outburst, Klaus Emmerich, the veteran Austrian television pundit, declared: “I would not want the western world to be directed by a black man.” When invited to retract, Mr Emmerich stood by what he had said, adding that “blacks aren’t as politically civilised” and pouring fuel on to the fire by hinting that Mr Obama’s “rhetorical brilliance” and ability in organising a movement made him comparable to infamous demagogues from the past. America’s choice, Mr Emmerich concluded, was as misplaced as a Turk becoming the next chancellor of Austria.

His comments were greeted by a storm of criticism, just as Italian premier Silvio Berlusconi’s “joke” about Mr Obama’s “sun tan” had been: two elderly men betraying their generational prejudices, one might think. Yet the underlying problem goes deeper. A comment such as Mr Emmerich’s would be political suicide in the US; in Austria it earned little more than a slap on the wrist. How is it that while both places have their fair share of racism, one finds such contrasting public and political responses?

I guess there’s no place like Utopia.

Declaring Year Zero

Words associated with Christianity and British history taken out of children's dictionary

Even if you imagine that there are specific social and philosophical goals to removing words from a dictionary associated with national historic or Christianity, one would be hard pressed to believe that there is a valid reason that it can be imposed on the general population.

Oxford University Press has removed words like "aisle", "bishop", "chapel", "empire" and "monarch" from its Junior Dictionary and replaced them with words like "blog", "broadband" and "celebrity". Dozens of words related to the countryside have also been culled.

The publisher claims the changes have been made to reflect the fact that Britain is a modern, multicultural, multifaith society.

But academics and head teachers said that the changes to the 10,000 word Junior Dictionary could mean that children lose touch with Britain's heritage.

"We have a certain Christian narrative which has given meaning to us over the last 2,000 years. To say it is all relative and replaceable is questionable," said Professor Alan Smithers, the director of the centre for education and employment at Buckingham University.

Supider still, it doesn’t have to have anything to do with the narrative of Britsh history at all. What is it exactly that these revisionists are trying to say? That there was no history of the UK before the 20th century and that Christianity never existed? That a simple conduit of information (broadband) is in itself comparable to a religious and philosophical framework?

It’s all evidence of a real loss of the narrative long past us now. One that can’t distinguish (inm this case) between objects and concepts. It isn’t even up to the storyboard mechanism of the cave paintings, and quite frankly the only way to dispose of all notions of our philosophical heritage, one would have to insure a standard of stupidity to enable it.

Words taken out:

Carol, cracker, holly, ivy, mistletoe

Dwarf, elf, goblin

Abbey, aisle, altar, bishop, chapel, christen, disciple, minister, monastery, monk, nun, nunnery, parish, pew, psalm, pulpit, saint, sin, devil, vicar

Coronation, duchess, duke, emperor, empire, monarch, decade

adder, ass, beaver, boar, budgerigar, bullock, cheetah, colt, corgi, cygnet, doe, drake, ferret, gerbil, goldfish, guinea pig, hamster, heron, herring, kingfisher, lark, leopard, lobster, magpie, minnow, mussel, newt, otter, ox, oyster, panther, pelican, piglet, plaice, poodle, porcupine, porpoise, raven, spaniel, starling, stoat, stork, terrapin, thrush, weasel, wren.

Acorn, allotment, almond, apricot, ash, bacon, beech, beetroot, blackberry, blacksmith, bloom, bluebell, bramble, bran, bray, bridle, brook, buttercup, canary, canter, carnation, catkin, cauliflower, chestnut, clover, conker, county, cowslip, crocus, dandelion, diesel, fern, fungus, gooseberry, gorse, hazel, hazelnut, heather, holly, horse chestnut, ivy, lavender, leek, liquorice, manger, marzipan, melon, minnow, mint, nectar, nectarine, oats, pansy, parsnip, pasture, poppy, porridge, poultry, primrose, prune, radish, rhubarb, sheaf, spinach, sycamore, tulip, turnip, vine, violet, walnut, willow

Even with the pummeling of eco-cation the kidlets are getting as a kind of ‘original sin’ burden they aren’t permitted to get past, plant names for things that are ubiquitous to the point of being invasive in Britain (such as mint) are being removed.

This isn’t a case of someone trying to build a brave new world or a ‘Logan’s Run’ society. It’s a expression of the sad lack of perspective of a generation incapable of placing itself anywhere in history without looking for the gaps it wish it didn’t have to face. In the US, I would think that they would want to leave the work ‘cracker’ in, just. Y’know, for the sake of indoctrination and all...

Elsewhere: hope is dangled in front of western women otherwise unable to form durable human relationships well into adulthood

Have a nice day.

Dispatch from Utopia

Berlin - chaotic freedom-hating leftists counter-protest against authoritarian freedom-hating leftists. As usual, the natives don’t quite get the narrative of just what it is they’re protesting against: the mere existence of people who don’t agree with them.

From pacifist arms exporters the implausible delights of whining for its’ own sake, Observing Hermann continues to watch them following the script.

Humans: They Ain’t What they Used to be

In a fit of grinding out the last bits of ancient régime along with the dignity of the people still alive who built it, the East German seat of government is done being demolished. Funny – in spite of the near leveling of the city, a number of Nazi structures were left standing – but that may have been a case of sterner folk understanding that without evidence of history one is doomed to repeat it.

‘Smell ya later’

Then again, those folk ain’t what they used to be. The normally trashy Berliner Kurier known for dimwitted social taunts and page 3 bippy shots reports that Ikea has found most men in this post-touchy-feely-education age unable to assemble furniture, what after decades of being berated for being male:

The world is out of whack. You could also say the screws and pilot-holes too, because the head of Ikea in Germany shocked the world of men. She claims: Women do a better job assembling their furniture!

Petra Hesser (50), German boss of the Swedish furniture chain has to study their drawers. These men did a bad job with "Pax," "Billy" and so forth. Hesser: "Men never look at the instructions and have the most trouble because they always think they can figure it out. This is empirical evidence." On the other hand, women were very different: They begin studying the structure of the manufacturer’s instructions and then proceed systematically. Hesser: "The woman sets out first by properly sort all the screws. All the men throw a pile and then afterwards what is missing."

All it really means is that there is something so deeply irrational about the connections in the furniture, that trying to assemble it with known skills after making an observation of it employing reason and physical basics useless.

But I’ll leave it at that, along with your anthropomorphically named chair named ‘Sven’ or something. Upon last check, I was unable to converse with a lamp or any other inanimate object with the same élan as the statistical majority of women, nor did I feel any need to use junk as a substitute to human contact.

Gold Medals for a Global Committment to Issue Press Releases

The generic global buzz of the week a few weeks back was piracy off of the Somali coast, but it wasn’t that long ago that it was rapidly becoming a non-story. The International Maratime Bureau reported in 2007 that piracy in the Indian Ocean and East Africa fell to its’ lowest point in years. At the time, it was the US Navy active on the grey waters and the US which pushed for an effective reporting technology.

“We are like a beat cop conducting maritime interception operations either by radio queries or flag verification boarding, or pattern recognition,” he said. “We also pressurize the maritime environment to deny international terrorists its use as a venue for attack or transport of personnel, weapons, or other material”.

Thereafter, it was handed over to NATO, which in part meant that parties other than the US were taking the point. Then it went downhill, after any sort of success by European forces got a great deal of publicity.

Now, that failure, carefully leaving out the performance of any NATO member state Navies, we have the generic global story of the week to find in the generic global headlines and tut-tut over our oatmeal in the morning.

"Our participation in the Somalia project is an important one," said David Miliband, the British Foreign Secretary. "This is obviously a very challenging project but one that European leaders are approaching with real humility as well as determination."

Which is where they get a platform for some sort of future and present grandstanding, in spite of the fact that the Indians were unwilling to screw around as the EU attempts to “make history” as it has in Darfur since their 2004 commitment to quickly deliver a rapid-reaction force to the area, one over which they continue to obfuscate over.

Speaking of bobbing platforms in the sea or otherwise, the wind-up toy that are the Grauniad’s writers come up with a real salve – not for the piracy problem, but [http://thylacosmilus.blogspot.com/2008/11/idealism-vs-reality.html] their feelings. Peter Lehr somehow managed to convince himself that

“A western armada is not the way to sink Somalia’s pirates…”

Indeed. Buoyancy is drowning. Freedom is slavery. Etcetera, etcetera… Now that the Armada of cutsie poo social concrens is finally on its' way, the promotes have met their match: Somali pirates with a skill at manipulating the European sensitivity for the environment, or rather showing a skill at making Pavlov's dog drool on cue:

The EU fleet also faces the problem of strong support for the pirates amongst coastal communities who hail them as heroes, defending Somali fishermen against poachers from foreign nations, including Spain and France.

"The presence of European war ships will undermine the Somalis' ability to protect their natural resources from illegal fishing," said Mohamed Said, a pirate leader whose group has held the Saudi super-tanker Sirius Star for ransom since 15 November.

"Many of the polluters of Somalia's waters, those who dump toxic waste, are Europeans. This force will contribute to giving them unimpeded access to our waters," he told AFP.

As if Somali pirates were protecting any resources at all to begin with. Further, the Europeans having hamstrung themselves out of being able to act on any sort of common sense need to do something that might require shots to be fires have also managed to find a way to outsource their dispensing of bad news and expactiation-reduction messages:

According to UNOSAT, a UN-affiliated agency that analyses satellite data, the recent increase in naval vessels has done little to deter pirates, only forcing them to concentrate their attacks in specific areas.

"You would need at least 100 naval ships in the area to make a decisive impact, but this is impossible," Jean Duval, a maritime expert with French private maritime security outfit Secopex told the French news agency.

And why is that? Because even if in reality they did only need 10 ships and a nfew aircraft, a way would be found to explain why it couldn't be done, letting snarling dogs bite - just so long as the image of themselves can remain good, that the poor societies around them still pretend to look up to them, and that no action would be required on their part to maintain a good image of themselves as responsible - so long as it comes at no cost of their need to act on the values they try to look like they're promoting.

Think about it: they are making a big deal out of commiting to go where they've already been and failed, and at the same time trying to find a way to make a future failure forgivable and un-noteworthy. It's pathological.

Battle for Life: We Must Defeat the Earth Cult Movement

This is a lesson in how the Earth Cult Movement has begun the process to destroy the prosperous countries and put all of us at risk.  The ECM objects to genetically modified food which enables farmers to produce more crop but apparantly spreading industrial waste on farm land is ok.  It appears to be a blatant attempt to make us all into Zimbabwe where not even cholera free water is available, the former bread basket of southern Africa, hence cutting short the lives and slowing down the spread of the worst creatures on earth, humans.

Video Link: EU/ECM Destroy UK

What do you get when you cross a Political Unitarian and a Suicidal Fundamentalist Pacifist?

Belgian society, that’s what:

Last week, a couple of Belgian television networks received a video with masked Arabs claiming to speak on behalf of al-Qaeda. The men threatened attacks in Belgium if the country does not pull its tiny military contingent from Afghanistan. The video quickly turned out not to come from al-Qaeda but to be a compilation of existing al-Qaeda tapes. It was the work either of people attempting a sick joke or of potentially dangerous amateurs from the local Muslim community trying to mimic the big boys.

The reaction of the Belgian media was telling, however. Rather than exposing the video as a hoax and stating that, if the threats were genuine, the country should not grovel to terrorists, De Standaard, Belgium’s leading allegedly center-right newspaper, opened a public debate about the question whether Belgium should withdraw its troops from Afghanistan. Fortunately, the government has not responded affirmatively or Belgium would be the first country to give in to threats from jokers or Muslim kids who seek media attention with an amateur movie made on their pc.

It is to be feared, however, that if there ever is a major terror attack in Belgium the Belgians, whose country hosts the headquarters of both NATO and the EU, will react like the Spaniards did after the 2005 Madrid attacks: by painting their hands white and surrendering.

Yes, you read that right. A hoax was enough to trigger that.

The Only Committment Missing is “Reporting the News”

Hold on to you Grundgesetz, Peeps

German courts have found a way to extend the great warm-fuzzy of compassion to aggressive men incarcerated together.

The Federal Constitutional Court said the plaintiff was right in challenging a prison policy which allowed only female inmates to spend 25 euros (£21) of their own money on cosmetic and skin care products each month.

"Although the interest in cosmetics may be more widespread or frequently stronger among women than among men, it is not a biologically determined interest among women," the court ruled.

"Members of one sex cannot be denied their wellness choices simply because they are more typically found among the opposite sex."

It's just what they need in the crowbar hotel. Better smelling trany prison bitches.

Methane - Hold it or pay the tax

Global warmers want us to believe that methane must be controlled to slow the pace of global warming. The EPA is considering a tax on methane release by cows and other farm animals. Now we learn that climate scientists have found a new source of methane production; and Al Gore said the debate was over; silly. Of course this new source doesn't affect their estimates since they have an extremely high range (30 - 100 million tonnes). What else don't they know?

If all wet meadow tundras release a similar methane burst, the authors estimate, a previously unanticipated 4 million tonnes of the gas may be emitted each winter. That amount would not effect established estimates that Arctic wetlands release 30 million to 100 million tonnes of the gas annually. But the finding, reported this week in Nature1, fills a formerly puzzling gap.

Next we'll have a tax for human produced methane. The EPA can rate different types of foods and tax them based on their contribution to methane production.

Articles:
Methane bursts from frozen tundra
Farmers think cow tax plan stinks

Election Monitors, Training Program in Civic Fairness Needed

What? Someone finally noticed? How can this be twisted to mean "George Bush shredded the constitution?

Belgium 'placed on democracy watch list'

The global champions of cultural fascism have turned to sneering on themselves: Belgium has banned three elected mayors from office for speaking French.

The COE has demanded that the mayors be immediately appointed and called for a review of Belgium's linguistic laws that have been used by Flemish nationalists to ban the use of the French language in municipalities around Brussels, home to the EU.

Good luck with all that.