A Complex of Small Minds and Lame Excuses

If we could only have another one of those Abba Eban style studies on the European mind, we could see just how simplistic and flawed the general reasoning is: a “modern” Paris Imam says that the Gaza conflict makes it hard for him to talk to French Jews, because he “differentiates them from Israelis?” No. Certainly not. The palpably lame Christian Science Monitor thinks it has to find a moral equivalency argument of its’ own to merely report the story saying:

Esther Benbassa, chair of Jewish studies at the Sorbonne in Paris, says one effect of the Gaza bombing already visible is "to remove the taboo of the Holocaust" in common speech, both among Arabs and ordinary French. "I don't agree that Gaza and the Holocaust can be compared, but I note a willingness to do so. I understand that, even if I don't agree with it. It's something new."

All those “venomous Jews” eh? As if opening up their mouths to incessantly apologize for something that they themselves haven’t done to people whose victimhood is limited to being offended that something is happening to SOME PEOPLE they want to identify with and not others.

But never mind that, these are the great minds of the conversational, intellectual society that Parisians continually claim to be. Their tender sensibilities and humanism require a tap-dance to even mention the fact that the French to compare the Israelis retuning fire at people who fire rockets at them as a Holocaust.

This doesn’t come as a novelty. That meme has been bouncing around in the Arab mind for the past 40 years when the Holocaust could no longer be plausibly denied. It is, however only been 20 years since this madness has dominated the majority of Europeans, who should know something of the Pagroms, Holocaust, etal., and reveals the ethnological bigotry and simplistic reasoning widespread in the population: that the nationalities, or more to the point their image of the nationalities forms comparisons by way of involvement. Jews figured as the biggest group of victims of the Holocaust, therefore the feel like you sound smart, one must find an inversion by which one can point a finger in the air at false surprise. “Those Jews” (as if the survivors of Auschwitz and Birkenau were the ones returning fire today) must be at fault as they are magically connected because they fit into the same simple category that that average european can understand: the tribal pigeon hole.

"Solidarity with Palestinians has at its roots a feeling of disenfranchisement in France," says Ms. Benbassa. "Migrants from North Africa are astounded to find that when something happens to Jews it is treated with great importance in the media, but when something happens to Arabs or blacks, it is not."

As though this was anyone’s fault but that of the paranoiac society that they live in, “in the heart of Europe”.

What Would “the World” to without the US as a Distant, All-Purpose Scapegoat?

What they say:

"In Europe, we have a social-market economy," European Commission President José Manuel Barroso said in an interview. "We have universal health care, a more generous system of social security, a general principle of almost free university education. And we want to keep that."
For years, Europe's more-regulated model of capitalism has been maligned by many economists as a study in second-rate market economics. Now, as world leaders seek a way out of the crisis -- and aim to avoid repeating it -- U.S.-style capitalism is under siege and the European model is getting another look.

What it means:

German unemployment rose almost twice as much as forecast in January as an economic slump sparked by the global financial crisis spread to industries from cars to software.

The number of people out of work rose by 56,000 in seasonally adjusted terms to 3.27 million, the Nuremberg-based Federal Labor Agency said today. Economists forecast an increase of 30,000, according to the median of 33 estimates in a Bloomberg News survey. The adjusted jobless rate rose to 7.8 percent from 7.7 percent. In unadjusted terms, the number of jobless increased by 387,000.

“We’ve reached the turning point on the labor market,” Rainer Guntermann, an economist at Dresdner Kleinwort in Frankfurt, said in an interview. “Sooner or later, we’ll see major restructuring programs and job cuts.”

That’s the ‘socially aware’ forecast of the ‘socially advanced’ economy. Can the population afford to be any more ‘aware’ of their superiority to their own “just please don’t call it a market economy” market economy? Or the “we’ll keep touting our nonexistent social collectivism?”

But Thursday's Davos discussions also brought reminders of the Continent's structural vulnerabilities. "I don't think everyone wants to take responsibility for everyone else's problems," Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt said during a panel on European economic governance. "In that sense, we are still nation-states ... and I think that will not change in the short term."

Just don’t say it, please... after all isn’t it that American invention, “the blind pursuit of profits” that has cause every ill in the world? We all know that the Chinese and Russian don’t pursue profits! Why? Because our delusions about them say so!

government leaders decided not to make new investments in a number of US companies that sought China's capital. China's pullback from Fannie and Freddie debt helped push up rates on US mortgages last year just as Washington was seeking to revive the US housing market.

Mr Wen said the crisis had posed "severe challenges" for China and that it needed 8 per cent growth this year to maintain social stability while the International Monetary Fund predicted 6.7 per cent for this year. The Chinese leader called for faster reform of international financial institutions and for a "new world order" for the economy.

So they poured fuel on the fire by investing in US mortgages, triggered the economic crisis by spiking the demand in energy and commodities to sell goods to the world using previously sound credt, and not they want a “new world order” that will guarantee them 8 percent growth in GDP.

Oh, and it isn’t “their capitalism” that’s at fault. It’s someone else’s. Yeah right.

Burning down the House

Yet again the French are on strike. This time, among the usual collection of everybody striking over their own petty demands that they expect the rest of society to attend to for them, is the over-arching theme of this economy wrecking event – they are striking against the global economy.

The best I can gather from interviewed agonists and such is that in large part people are mad at the French government’s intervention to prop up the banks and major industries, something the blithering idiots are usually all for. Normally, a trend away from socialistic dirigisme would be a good thing for the overall potential of a healthy economy, but these protestors, including the bolshy CGT, Reds, etal., are protesting that the largesse of the state is being directed at the economy at all and not limited to relieving them of the cost of social free-riding.

Even the employees of the Euronext stock exchange are marching. Just what is it that they think the ‘social compact’ is supposed to do for their racket that the rest of the people in their same union won’t protest?

Never letting a crisis go to waste, the left are ready to exploit your misery for the sake of their power-grab, and opportunity to wreck the economy for good with methods borrowed from the largely agrarian 1930s. As per the Boy wonder Olivier Besancenot:

Olivier Besancenot, the young leader of France’s extreme left is hoping Thursday’s strike will be the first step towards another French revolution as the recession bites and protests multiply across Europe’s second largest economy.
“We want the established powers to be blown apart,”

As usual, the thing they don’t get when they are pretending to care about the larger society is that they don’t – they want someone to cover their individual wants and needs, and can’t get past the fact that sooner or later there is no-one else left to tax, and that the pitiful little sums that ARE broadly redistributed reflect that ugly fact. Irrationally, they demand some more, demand anyone who makes a shade more than them pay higher taxes, and slows the process of productive wealth generation (the only thing one CAN tax) even further. Grim a bunch as they are, relatively speaking, they are still the leisure class. What the public sector workers are accomplishing by striking is beyond me.

They are even dumber than the American far-left.

Only a small part of the dialog seems to have anything to do with aiding those who were made unemployed or are facing hardships related to being out of work or unemployable for one reason or another.

If you can get though the unfocussed clamor of broad, universal complaints, it is in effectas though they are protesting the unrelenting persistence of gravity, and think the government, the collective, or anyone other than they themselves – can somehow reverse it.

There ain’t no cure for gravity, people.

Don’t Forget to Hide

The irony of risk adversity in Europe is that a mere threat on the internet can both scare the bejeezus out of the public, stir governments to do whatever they can to be taking no action to stop it, and immediately prompt a public display of self-abuse. As is some anonymous outfit called “Islamic Jihad Union” will be more deferential as a result or that there is anyone among them that one could negotiate with in a way that will assure anyone of anything.

The Belgian stiffie has re-emerged in Germany, again.

The German public television station first reported on the video, which is being attributed to Islamic Jihad Union, a radical group active in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

In the video, which features details of dead children and injured people, six men threaten violence against Germany.

"We have a few surprise packages prepared this year," the men reportedly say. "Allies of the occupation powers must always reckon with our attacks."

Germany currently has 3,600 troops in Afghanistan as part of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in that country.

The video also made reference to the latest conflict between Israelis and Palestinians and to German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

"For 10 days the world has watched as Muslims in the Gaza Strip have been massacred," the men in the video reportedly say. "Where is the US? Where is Mrs. Merkel and her cabinet?"

In case you’re wondering, the al-Qaida flavor of Jihad had not started fixating on Israel until well after 9-11, and it’s purpose was merely to prop up its’ waning popularity. Then, as now, and potentially into the future, the aversion therapy the Americas put them on has done on “the Arab/Muslim/irate crowd” street what appeasement has never done: caused the angry to stop and think of the real consequences of the casual, decades long call for the blood of Jews, Americans, Europeans, Gays, Secularists, Pluralists, etc., etc., the straw men they had built up in the societies they live in.

Which is to say that this is the first time in the more savage corners of that broad collection of subcultures we misidentify as the “Muslim World” the “Arab World”, etal., that the concept of coexistence and compassion have had to be grappled with. You can thank George Bush for that.

Europe Loves Gitmo

Indeed they do love it. Without it, how could their politicians keep feigning to have meaningful, strident opinions that they can fill the airtime with and by which try to seem relevant.

Now it’s okay. Now it isn’t. Now they want them, now they don’t.

Barack Obama has signed an executive order to close the GuantánamoBay detention center – among other things, in response to a barrage of “international” criticism of the center and of the Bush administration’s policies toward its inmates. But – believe it or not – in February 2002, the EU Parliament passed a resolution approving of the Bush administration’s policies and explicitly stating that the Guantánamo inmates do not qualify for Geneva Convention protections.

It’s the same old passive-aggressive fear and loathing in Europe. Once upon a time, they were all for Gitmo because it gave them a way of not having to take their “one-time residents” “nationals” and “citizens” who were ready to murder their way to paradise, now after years of publicly telling their populations that they then wanted it to end, they were privately telling Washington that they wouldn’t take the detritus of war on splodey-dopes.

Now the stalling tactic is different: they aver that they want “the innocent ones” whoever they are, and they want the US to declare them the innocent ones, so that they don’t have to put their money where their fat fotzen are and blanketly declare the innocence of Gitmo “alumni” themselves.

BRUSSELS, Belgium (AP) — European Union leaders said Monday they were willing to take in prisoners being released from the U.S. detention camp at Guantanamo Bay — but stressed that American authorities must show ex-inmates pose no security threat before they can be resettled.

Foreign ministers from the 27-nation bloc discussed the fate of up to 60 Guantanamo inmates who, if freed, cannot be returned to their homelands because they would face abuse, imprisonment or death. The prisoners come from Azerbaijan, Algeria, Afghanistan, Chad, China, Saudi Arabia and Yemen.

The EU's foreign and security chief, Javier Solana, said Europeans wanted to help on humanitarian grounds.

But he said no EU state could act until President Barack Obama's administration gets its Guantanamo case files in order and can demonstrate that prisoners do not pose credible security risks.

Let’s face it: those remaining are the ones who either have a much worst fate going to any of the countries that will take them, or they really are a threat.

So, which is it? Apart from the fact that the entire conversation they’re having is with their “imaginary friend in Washington”:

Finland's foreign minister, Alexander Stubb, said Guantanamo inmates would become eligible for resettlement only once they passed through U.S. scrutiny and courts and were granted official status as political refugees.

"Then, we'll have to have a look at that individually," said Stubb, who also is chairman of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. "If there are people who are not tried and are let free, but they can't go back to their own countries, I think we in Europe should take our responsibility."

But Stubb emphasized the widespread view that the U.S. administration was not yet in position to clear any terror suspects.

"We are jumping the gun here a little bit, because the Americans haven't given us an offer or required us to take anyone on board," Stubb said.

C'est comme ça

Leftist, as usual, are trying to criminally prosecute people for disagree with their world view.

Michigan Rep. John Conyers, Democratic chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, on Monday issued a subpoena to Mr. Rove, seeking his appearance at a deposition Feb. 2. Mr. Conyers wants the former aide to President George W. Bush to answer questions on the Justice Department's firings of U.S. attorneys in 2006, among other matters.

[ ... ]

"Change has come to Washington, and I hope Karl Rove is ready for it," Mr. Conyers said.

If the rhetoric sounds familiar, just rip a page out of history: a 1967 East German “documentary” interviewing US Air Force pilots and Navy aviators downed over North Vietnam. The only difference is that even Conyers isn’t capable of matching the false rhetoric of an East German propagandist, as mendacious as it really was.

Interviewer: Lieutenant, you are experiencing in practice an example of socialist humanity. The President of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh, has stated that the people here are capable of differentiating between real criminals in the background, who hold the decisive positions of government, and their tools who carry out their plans by dropping bombs and firing rockets. You are enjoying here more or less the advantages of this socialist concept which does not absolve you of guilt or minimize your actions, but does differentiate in each case between the initiators of a policy and their mere tools.

So let’s be frank. The goal of that Kangaroo court questioning was the same as Conyers’.

Peter Hitchens marks just such a signpost on the way: the left would like to revive memories of the “great society” while they turn us into a latter day Yemen.

Anyone would think we had just elected a hip, skinny and youthful replacement for God, with a plan to modernise Heaven and Hell , or that at the very least John Lennon had come back from the dead.

The swooning frenzy over the choice of Barack Obama as President of the United States must be one of the most absurd waves of self-deception and swirling fantasy ever to sweep through an advanced civilisation. At least Mandela-worship, its nearest equivalent, is focused on a man who actually did something.
I really don't see how the Obama devotees can ever in future mock the Moonies, the Scientologists or people who claim to have been abducted in flying saucers.

[ ... ]

Just look at his sermon by the shores of Lake Michigan. He really did talk about a new dawn, and a timeless creed, (which was yes, we can!). He proclaimed that change has come. He revealed that, despite having edited the Harvard Law Review, he doesn't know what enormity means. He reached depths of oratorical drivel never even plumbed by our own Mr Blair, burbling about putting our hands on the arc of history (or was it the ark of history?) and bending it once more toward the hope of a better day (Don't try this at home).

To wit:

The United States, having for the most part a deeply conservative people, had until now just about stood out against many of the mistakes which have ruined so much of the rest of the world.
Suspicious of welfare addiction, feeble justice and high taxes, totally committed to preserving its own national sovereignty, unabashedly Christian in a world part secular and part Muslim, suspicious of the Great Global Warming panic, it was unique.

Even the “economic recovery plan” and the idea that international relations will make your citizens personally liked abroad has a familiar sounding ring to it:

There has been many a confirmation of our firm conviction that the internal development of socialism necessitates an objective growth of the possibilities and requirements of international cooperation between the fraternal countries. The results attained by each individual country will be all the better, the more comprehensive use is made of the chances offered by internationalist cooperation. For this reason the GDR pursues an active policy of intensified dovetailing between the economies of the GDR and the USSR and of deepening socialist economic integration.

Major projects such as the joint power grid, participation in the construction of a natural gas pipeline, the GDR's modern power stations and the ESER data processing system are the outcome of this policy. Nowadays there is no task of major importance which the GDR does not tackle in fraternal cooperation with the USSR. Suffice it to mention the efforts made to ensure the raw materials and energy base or to master promising spheres of scientific and technological progress such as microelectronics. At the same time, the wide range of ties between the GDR's combines and scientific institutions and their partners in the fraternal socialist countries is becoming even more ramified. Economic efficiency and also the personal experience of friendship and internationalism, that leaves its impression throughout a lifetime, are the result of this cooperation in training, research and production ...

It will be one of our vital concerns in the years to come, together with the Soviet Union and the other states of the socialist community, to achieve scientific and technological advances that embody top standards, to harness them for the people's well-being, which will also help strengthen the economic positions of socialism in the world. The good results obtained encourage us in our intention to tackle projects of even greater dimension with optimism and consistency.

Really, there IS no place like utopia.

The 2008 Election was as Historic as Vintage Machine Politics

They outspent the Republican by 2 to 1, they had as a gift an economic downturn which works naturally against the incumbent party, they had nearly the entire press in bed with them, more than willing to provide support to any slander that Obama supports could gin up.

They had nearly every corner of pop culture, anyone who could get in front of a camera gunning for them. They fired up as much fuelling of hate, demonization, “rapid reaction forces” sent to Alaska to dig up dirt, as much class-warfare as they could stoke, along the lines of Kanye West alleging that anyone he disagrees with hates black people. Money and support were pouring in from abroad and accepted unlawfully. Credit card fraud schemes added to their coffers.

All the stops came out, and they only got 52.9% of the popular vote. All of that, a billion dollars spent by the Obama campaign and others acting in its’ interest, slave labor provided by unions and just the right kind of municipal works who get election day off and benefit personally by voting for the left, and they only tipped the balance in favor of a logo-branded man running on little more than repeating the name of an emotion by what is actually a tiny margin compared to the amount of leverage of the public used.

You would think that with all of that firepower a result more akin to the victories declared for Castro and Saddam Hussein’s regular “elections”, almost always announced with great pride and little objection by our caring defenders of “social justice” to be in the area of 99%.

By every objective measure the Obama campaign was a miserable failure. His election victory is nothing to really be proud of. That said, I’m not that worried about President Obama himself because he really doesn’t appear to believe in anything, but he’s got to dance with the ones that brung ‘em.

Populism Ran out of Reality a Long Time Ago

Many Europeans, in a roundabout and vague way see Barack Obama as some sort of Civil Rights Leader®™, because something in their limited frame of understanding tells them that it somehow should be that way. Whatever. It’s not like they’ll ever lay off of the stupid juice.

Think Locally, Act Feebly

Global Village Idiots: Zapatero’s Socialist industry minister, Miguel Sebastián is resorting to good old fashioned European nativism, urging Spaniards to “shop patriotically”, as if they were cloth-cap wearing, lunch-pail toting old-fashioned factory worker reds who occasionally show up to work sober.

Mr Sebastián then did some simple calculations. Consumption was expected to fall by €7bn ($9bn, £6.6bn) this year, causing the loss of 120,000 jobs. If each Spaniard introduced the “Spain factor” into their shopping and purchased just €150 of Spanish-made suits or toys instead of foreign goods, then those jobs would be preserved.

That should do wonders for exports, and says quite a bit about the thought behind the call: when it doesn’t work, trade restrictions, even those within Europe, would have to be put in place to make the theory support the sentiment.

Between all the tribalism, small-thinking, and ego propping delusions, that benighted “globally thinking Europe” forming an “ever closer union” is looking more like a sitcom based on Orwell’s “Animal Farm.”

Good luck with all that.

The Left’s Conditional Love of Society

VDH asks “whither the shredding?”

If you are a civil libertarian, if you are in the ACLU or a law professor, or a liberal in good standing who swore that George Bush from Texas, with strut and twang and mangled vocabulary, destroyed your liberties with FISA, with the Patriot Act, and with Iraq, then please extend that outrage to Barack Obama, for whom all such shredding of the Constitution suddenly has become merely complex and problematic rather than fascistic. Please list, cite, name just one instance from 2002-8 in which you lost your freedom, or you were censored on the library internet, or you were followed around by the FBI, or your letter to the editor earned a wiretap, or even one instance of the loss of any freedom under Bush—and if so, just one example of how the election of Obama has once again restored your lost liberty. Nothing in the abstract, please—something concrete, an example both real and personal.

Did you notice how the Constitution suddenly just unshredded itself? That wiretapping is just A1-OK and that no-one is unhinged, stamping their little feet, and holding their breath? Could have something to do with fantasies of being able to wiretap republicans… all in the interest of “social justice” of course.

In a major August 2008 decision released yesterday in redacted form, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, the FISA appellate panel, affirmed the government's Constitutional authority to collect national-security intelligence without judicial approval. The case was not made public before yesterday, and its details remain classified.

Somewhere along the way we “un-apocalypsed”. How and why did that change so quickly?

For all the political hysteria and media dishonesty about George W. Bush "spying on Americans," this fight was never about anything other than staging an ideological raid on the President's war powers. Barack Obama ought to be thankful that the FISA court has knocked the bottom out of this gambit, just in time for him to take office.

The MSM are Lttle more that a Propaganda Operation

This, from a friend:

Headlines On This Date 4 Years Ago:

"Republicans spending $42 million on inauguration while troops die in unarmored Humvees"
"Bush extravagance exceeds any reason during tough economic times"
"Fat cats get their $42 million inauguration party, ordinary Americans get the shaft"

Annnnnnnnnd.......

Headlines Today:

"Historic Obama Inauguration will cost only .....$120 million"
"Obama spends $120 million on inauguration; America needs a big party"
"To everyman Obama shows America how to celebrate"
"Citibank executives contribute $8 million to Obama Inauguration" (after their bail out).

The Left Current Bleat is, in Essence “Stop the Recovery”

Animal Ability to Judge Character

What did the pooch know that Le Monde could never figure out?

Left-leaning Mushy, Middle-mindedness is a Political Creed Founded of Stereotypes and Slander

David Frum, writing in Canada’s National Post comments on some B-actress’ infantile ramblings employing universal morality as a way of saying people don’t agree with her are somehow lesser people. It goes along with the dimness that a logo-branded presidency would appeal to.

It is telling just how it is that kind of thought attempts to divide people along the lines of who they are, not what they do, or of the content of their character while advertising some “unifying” magic that they’d like to think they have some sort of franchise over: seem European? Good. Spout leftist sayings: good. Seem “Canadian-ish”: good. – all this in spite of the reality of the individual, as if one could extend this to ur-Europeans Hitler and King Leopold, or to ur-lefties Stalin, Erich Honecker, etal.

It's almost a psychological rule: The more you espouse "compassion" in your politics, the more likely you are to be selfish in your personal behaviour.

How often do we hear the generosity of Europe contrasted to the "savage individualism" of the United States? Yet Americans give vastly more to charity: per person, more than twice as much as the Spanish, more than three times as much as the French, seven times as much as the Germans and 14 times as much as the Italians.

Despite working an average of 400 hours more per year than their European counterparts, Americans are 15 percentage points more likely to volunteer their time than the Dutch, 21 points more likely to volunteer than the Swiss and 32 points more likely to volunteer than Germans. (Indeed, 80% of Germans never volunteer their time for any cause at all.)

If we must have stereotypes, let's at least have accurate ones. Not only are conservatives sexier than liberals -- they are kinder too.

Why would anyone need to continue to make this point? Simple: the pedantry of the left who promote themselves as having a monopoly on wisdom, compassion, caring, and anything else that might garner the love of strangers continues to not bear out as speciousness, as they employ their stated compassion as a weapon against those who don’t agree with them – to brand them with some sort of logo.

The Change in Washington’s Culture is Obvious

“A New Birth of Freedom,” you say? “Renewing America’s Promise?” How cute. They get to sound all sweet and bubbly while kicking the other half of the population in the shins about somehow taking away people’s freedoms and breaking society’s compact. Underhanded invective - it’s so like the left to try to make it all sound so mom-and-apple-pie.

I wonder if these whiny dookie digging elves had a hopey-changey tag phrase too.

Free-riding Freddy

As did the Irish commander of the Darfur and Chad expedition did, British defense secretary John Hutton points out that Europe’s money isn’t where its’ mouth is in Afghanistan.

"There should be no-one in NATO who believes that all that is needed is a bit of soft power, a bit of nice warm words for the Afghan government. That is not going to beat Al-Qaeda and the Taliban," Hutton said in a press conference in London ahead of a keynote speech later.

"We need a full complement of effective forces and we don't have those in theatre at the moment."

Without naming specific countries who he wanted to do more, Hutton added that it was not fair to expect the Americans to do all the "heavy lifting."

"We are going to have to do more, all of us in ISAF need to understand that, if we want this mission to be successful," Hutton said.

The point has been made often enough before by authorities in European NATO member states. There too, virtually nothing became of the complaints. Even Nicolas Sarkozy, someone who actually gets the problem, could only commit another 600 troops and get away with it politically, while the US has scheduled a surge of 30,000 troops to oppose what is expected to be a post-winter assault by the Taliban and al Queda to take large parts of territory out of the hands of the Afghan government. Those 600 French troops, as professional as they are, still represent a relative commitment by population of 1/10th of the force the United States is.

The problem is quite simply that the public in European societies aren’t ever convinced that there is much of anything worth defending, correcting, or fighting for. It’s why so many are willing to resort to calling for any other instrument (talks, dropping aid in the zone, placation of one form or another) because at the moment the question comes up, it doesn’t sound openly like the language of evasion.

It doesn’t ever seem to be a matter of dealing with an issue like supporting Afghanistan’s nascent pluralism, but of dealing with what someone is asking of them.

In his speech Hutton was set to accuse other European countries of "freeloading" on the back of US and British military commitments in Afghanistan, according to the Daily Telegraph and Financial Times.

Speaking to reporters, Hutton added: "We've got to step up to the plate, everyone in NATO's got to do that and the point of my remarks later on today will be to say it is not honest, credible or I think sustainable for us constantly to say, 'well the Americans can do it all.'

"That isn't an alliance, that's one-way traffic. That's not good enough."

And if a statement like that, like so many we’ve heard before, moves the issue an inch in one direction or another, it would be a miracle. Just when it is that the European public at large is moved to act on any of their famous empathy for those suffering and for the concept of defending the freedoms and human rights remains to be seen.

Surely they already get the fact that for America, unilateralism is still the only option, but other than the likes of John Hutton, the issue is one of managing the “social awkwardness” of continuing to milk America’s capacity to commit.

For the Europeans though, that complex is actually a lot closer to home. In their back yard, in fact:

That NATO cannot work effectively with the European Union - particularly in Kosovo and Afghanistan - is incomprehensible to me. I do not disregard national concerns about the lack of formal agreements for contact between EU and NATO missions. But I do not accept that our armed forces should suffer the consequences. Nor that we should be hampered in addressing shared security concerns.

To contextualize just how close something has to be to barely matter to them, Kosovo directly abuts the border of an EU member state, Pristina is 243 km from Thessaloniki, and yet not only was an American intervention required, 10% of the personnel there are American. The EU’s outward disposition and structure, as well as that of any bilateral effort by more than one EU member state at present is such that it can literally do nothing relevant for itself by itself.

The public seems unconcerned.

March of the Sycophants

It looks like political wash-up Ségolène Royal said she would turn up in Washington DC for the inauguration. Le Parisien:

Ségolène Royal announced on Monday in Poitiers that she's going to Washington to attend the inauguration ceremony that will install Barack Obama as the 44th U.S. president on Tuesday 20 January at the White House. « I will visit the United States to attend the inauguration ceremony of Barack Obama.»

« I will leave on Saturday (January 17) and return the following Thursday,» said Ségolène Royal, on the sidelines of the wishes to the press, the regional council.

It will stay within « a family » and "has no program even arrested. But it should meet with the team of economists of the new U.S. president, she said. « When I look at what Barack Obama on preparing the plan to relaunch his country, I see at the forefront of this plan: education, training, innovation, the environment, the key levers to overcome the crisis, » said the President of the region. Issues that we offer in that area, those things we believe in , these are the real tools of a new development model, » she concluded.

Gee, thanks, but I though it was “the Danish model” you were trying to peddle in France, if memory serves.

Never mind that it sounds like she wasn’t invited and was gate crashing, just get a look at the foregone conclusions swimming around in the vocabulary and conception of leadership as power: it’s “his” country, he’s “relaunching” it, Obama is being “installed” of all things. The tools of the “new model” you see, are a bunch of things that we’re instructed to worry about, and fight “the man” – whoever it is we’re told is “the man”.

Their Very Own Savages

Paris: thugs toss molotov cocktails at a Synagogue and a Jewish run business as though they were the IDF points out the extreme stupidity of what civilization is dealing with here. You can imagine their fellow travellers screaming false accusations as they have since 12 September 2001, that by virtue of their being from the near east or muslim or anything else they can dine on, that they're bing "treated like terrorists", all the while not discussing just how non-existent their rights would be in the Taliban's paradise.

Here the sypathizers of such a view are, those that will forever parade themselves as victims of a non-specific miasma, yet assert all manner of anger to look all butch for their bitches, destroying Jewish-owned businesses and a synagogue displaying the arrogance and thoughtlessness that they accuse others of harboring.

And this "movement" "merely protesting" and "showing solidarity" with the civilians (never mentioning those that aren't...) we are told is so broad and inclusive that Zapatero need not explain why he marched in one which was coordinated with other protests where children are marched along covered in fake blood. This from the left that claims to have a monopoly on caring for children.

Finally, a think tank in Europe has called it what it really is: child abuse. My translation below.

PRESS RELEASE

The ESISC interviewed the General Delegate for Childrens' Rights and the presidents of the Democratic Party of Belgium on the using of children in Gaza Solidarity Marches.

Claude Moniquet and Genovefa Etienne, president and vice president of the ESISC, wrote on Monday 12 January 2009 to Mr. Bernard YOUR Delegate General for Children's Rights in the French Community of Belgium, Mr. Elio di Rupo , chairman of the PS, Mrs Joëlle Milquet, president of HRC, Mr Didier Reynders, president of the Movement reformer and Isabelle Durant and Jean-Michel JAVAUX, ECOLO presidents to ask them to take a position on the exploitation of children in demonstrations of solidarity with Gaza.

11 January 2009, in fact, an important demonstration of solidarity with the Palestinian People was held in Brussels. It is to this day one of the major events of its kind held in Europe in recent weeks.

It is also the one that gave rise to the most shocking exploitation of children:

- From the start of the event, dozens of children were grouped at the top of event, supervised by adults and forced to repeat slogans it was clear to some of them they do not understand.

- Some children carried banners and placards containing explicit calls to hatred, while others waved the flags of terrorist organizations such as Hezbollah.

- The order of the event has allowed a group of children put fire to an Israeli flag and then walked to the cries of "Allah hu Akhbar."

- In the final event, the children were forced to lie on the ground to run a macabre "die in" to symbolize child victims of Gaza.

The ESISC questioned the compatibility of this manipulation of children with Articles 19 and 29 (paragraphs B and C) of the International Convention on the Rights of the Child and, more generally, with the values of democracy such as Belgium.

Part in parcel to all of this is the sort of violent ideas and trained-in intolerant hatred they will be exposed to. Again: from people who rationalize that they are the vicitms of intolerance, Mark Steyn has this to report from Montreal:

"Les Juifs sont nos chiens"

... or "The Jews are our dogs": The enthusiastic chant on the streets of Montreal, along with cries of "Hezbollah! Nasrallah!"

It's easy to think all this stuff is just about the Jew troublemakers, and who cares about them, right? But the thuggery on display in western cities is meant to intimidate not the despised Jew dogs but a more general audience — and it seems to be doing the job.

As though THEY were being put upon with respect to their religion. Further, he quotes the French Interior Minister illustrating plainly the inability of the "authorities" to make a plausible argument for keeping the abuse and mendacity in these protests under control.

Interior Minister Michele Alliot-Marie said France has faced a "very clear increase" in anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim attacks since Israel started an offensive against the militant group Hamas in Gaza on Dec. 27.

Would it be too much for a French reporter to ask Mme Alliot-Marie to provide an example of an "anti-Muslim attack" since December 27th? None seems to have been reported in the French press, unlike the daily attacks on synagogues, kosher butchers, schools, and individual Jews in Paris, Toulouse, Bordeaux, etc. So the Interior Minister would appear to be promoting a wholly false equivalence.

In the absence of any deep understanding of justice and morality, all there IS to resort to is "equivlence" - especially when you're too fearful of verbal abuse and reprisal yourself, which is the currency that the Jihadist world view deals in.

What chants supporting Hizballah have to do with symapthy for the suffering civilians of Gaza (combattants always seem to go unmentioned), is only clear on the level of those most easily led, suggested to, and abused themselves, as though they too were children programmed early on in life and initiated into a faith in somethign they can't see another side of. But wait. They're just that.

Relativism meets Absolutism

From the local edition of Italy's La Repibblica we find a portrait of primitive communication and anger more akin to pre-renaissance Bologna than anything else:

In front of the symbol of Christianity so dear to Bologna, the Basilica di San Petronio, almost two thousand Muslims pray in an unreal silence interrupted only by the imam and the responses of the prostate faithful. These are the five, in Piazza Maggiore and the verses echo the prayer of the Maghreb (sunset) and then that of the dead "for the martyrs of Gaza." Before, during the short march started from the Piazza del Nettuno, chanting against Bush and Olmert, amid a scene of desperation to express anger against the Israeli bombardment which is bringing the Gaza Strip to its’ knees. Some protesters burned a flag emblazoned with the Star of David and then stepped on the ashen remains. Among the marchers were many Palestinians, Egyptians, and Moroccans who also came from Modena and Ferrara to lead the procession with dozens and dozens of children covered in red paint to symbolize their "brothers" killed by Israeli bombs.

"Free Palestine", "from Bologna to Gaza, resistance resistance", "God is with Gaza," as a slogan scanned litany while the demonstrators estimated at little more than five hundred people paraded around the town. The initiative, which was coordinated with demonstration in other cities in Italy, have joined some Bolognese groups (Crash and TPO), the Rdb-Cub and several members of the Communist Refoundation, as the team leader Roberto Sconciaforni. Atop a pickup truck moved slowly through the crowd, a boy raised a burning Israeli flag, the demonstrators shouted and waved, holding posters with pictures of dead and wounded Palestinians.

The vice president of the center of Islamic culture in Bologna, Daniele Parracino, sought to prevent the act to be carried out. "This is not the way to react” he said, if it’s a visceral reaction and not a thoughtful one. What we like is the sensitivity of many Italians who are supporting us, and who care about the right of everyone to live in peace."

Many Muslims were wearing kefiahs, and someone in the front row threw a shoe, recalling the act of and Iraqi journalist who threw his at U.S. President Bush. In front of the Prefecture, many lay on the pavement to symbolize the deads in Gaza. Other waved sheets of paper with the Star of David accompanied by the swastika, the Nazi symbol. Soon after, Parracino burst into tears when the news arrived of the bombing of a mosque. Not long thereafter all the protesters came to pray.

It's no wonder Parracino was concerned that people would see the emotionalism, chants, and flag-burning. The successful overtaking of the locals' minds require that they not be reminded of the kind of savage anger that leads to firing rocket propelled artillary at Israeli civilians. They might even get to the point where they realize, somehow, with no thanks to the press, that the Israeli reaction is in fact a reaction. They might speculate that some action might have taken place to cause a reaction, and that these protesters are just calling for a cease-fire only on the part of the Israelis.

In turns, they see conflict as though it should be a game of darts, where it's simply disproportional for one party to have more darts than the other. Otherwise when it's convenient a world of schoolhouse rules id imagined, and appeals to "social justice" is employed in the rationalization that a uniformed and militaristic Hamas should be able to shell civilians across its' borders.

Batty Britain

An octopus-shaped UFO was reported flying through the air hours before a wind turbine was destroyed in mysterious circumstances.

It's time for a nation wide house-to-house search - to check their freezers for human heads.

UFO enthusiasts have described the incident as potentially one of the most significant encounters in years, and have called for the damaged parts to be tested to uncover the cause of the collision.

A more down-to-earth theory is that the turbine was damaged due to the build up of ice on the blades

Europe’s Gitmo Problem

French Navy dumps pirates on Puntland in violation of the European Court of Human Rights dictum that it is unlawful for an EU member state to engage in any kind of rendition that could expose a suspect, guilty or not, to the possibility of the death penalty.

Germans, on the other hand, are refusing to prosecute under international piracy laws unless German property is involved. This is more-or-less a precedent to not enforce the law of the sea and a sort of tacit deal-making measure with pirates without the need of any form of negotiation. It gives them free reign to pillage vessels in any area of the sea patrolled by German forces so long as they agree to leave German merchant vessels, or presumably ships travelling from Hamburg (which likely carry German property) alone.

So much for that globally involved “I’ve stopped cowering from life in this corner” thing where they were feeling all butch. For Deutschland, it’s the law of the sea for me, but not for thee. At the end of the day, the most important feature of European life is being servile in the face of ugliness so long as nobody notices this and makes you feel embarrassed after your social ideas kill another 150 million people. Do, please avert your gaze, for there are facts to be manipulated, twisted, or ignored

There is only one way to solve this problem: the EU clearly needs a Camp Delta at a Gitmo. I suggest that they do this at the French Military Base in nearby Djibouti, which has the advantage of not being in the EU and has a host government unwilling to challenge the French about their presence and practices. One where Europeans under the guise of being civil libertarians will not abuse broad-ranging laws to make a cottage industry out of freeing criminals. Since the problem effects international trade, the unstated underlying motive will fit hand-in-glove with anti-globalization initiatives seeking to promote an “altermondialiste/alternative world” where crime and violence that’s emotionally satisfying to 16-22 year olds is encouraged, and people will have to perform dental work on themselves.

So let’s review this again, shall we?: some Europeans are already saying that they won’t prosecute, they may not engage in rendition, even to states that don’t use allow for a death penalty, whatever pirates they pick up will be Gitmo-ized into “innocence”, they can’t be shot on site, and they certainly wouldn’t want to let them enter heaven on earth, even if just to be tried.

Do tell, what options do they have left?

Coping Mechanism Type Rationalizations Likely to Follow Shortly

Sooner or later, someone will call torching cars a form of emotional release, politically meaningful, or even a form of noteworthy expression as a means of accepting hideous destrictiveness as normative or at least understandable. Fausta is up in the skybox covering the play-by-play:

A few unruly kids light up some Roman candles and everyone takes it in stride

Un-hunh.

In a country where car-burning isn't a common symptom of socioeconomic unrest, news of so many automobiles being torched would be alarming - if not a sign of brewing insurrection. In France, however, word of the destruction that accompanied the evening the French call Saint-Sylvestre was met with a mix of Gaulic shrugs and low-grade peevishness.

In revealing the figures on Thursday, French Interior Minister Michele Alliot-Marie acknowledged that the tally of car-burnings had indeed increased over the previous year. Yet Alliot-Marie also said the enormous fleet of now carbonized vehicles shouldn't darken a New Year's Eve that was "unanimously considered mostly calm." Alliot-Marie also stressed that - in contrast to recent years - the first night of 2009 saw "no damage to public or private buildings."

Except for the fact that it IS becoming normal.

Nearly 43,000 cars were torched in France over the whole of 2007 - an average of almost 118 per day.

I say we just start calling every male on the street in France who’s below the age of 30 a flamer.

Solyent Green is Swedes!

It’s Birkenau-equse only kinda greenie-happy style.

Is this Swedish town that's routing heat from its crematorium to local homes morbid or brilliant? Let's just call them brilliantly morbid.

The town of Halmstad came up with the idea when trying to curb the amount of smoke emitted from the crematorium.

It was when we were discussing all these environmental issues that we started thinking about the energy that is used in the cremations and realised that instead of all that heat just going up into the air, we could make use of it somehow. It was just rising into the skies for nothing," said Lennart Andersson, the director of the cemetery in the town of Halmstad.

Actually it’s jacket heat, and not smoke that they’re really capturing here, but let’s play along with the only kind of engineering that lit-majors can partially grasp...

It’s the end of the day, only symbolically more hopeless and weak, and the logical conclusion of a life of peevish lecturing about some ideological "objets trouvees". One could almost see how it could be called a moment of glory, and call to arms of the movement championed by a aging, childess, dead continent without a future hoping for one last relevant act – one that amounts to heating some stranger’s apartment for a few hours in a nation with high GDP per capita.

But there must be something deeper in it to lure the caring, committed type expressing their terminal wishes. It reminds me of Joseph Cotton's last scene in Soylent Green: he accepts his death and “reprocessing” so long as fleeting images of an idealized (and harmless) natural world is paraded before him to salve his willful suicide in his last moments on this earth. Similarly, at least the ideologues can make themselves useful, if all they think they really amount to is aspiring to becoming a sort of eco-shaheed without murdering anyone.

The world of Soylent Green is a dystopia much as the one painted for us by environmentalists of our world. It must be hard to face the notion that it really isn’t as despairingly bad as ones’ personal campaign philosophy requires a belief in, so maybe this is a way they can finally end their pain.

Another Success for Belgian Diversity Initiatives

Via Dinah Lord, we find out about Jew hunting in Belgium. The hit list even included BHL.

Jewish-French philosopher Bernard Henri-Levy was listed by a Belgium-based Islamist group as a target for assassination alongside other leading Jewish personalities in Europe, the Belgian daily La Derniere Heure reported earlier this week.

The planned assassination was apparently thwarted after group leader Abdelkader Belliraj, a Belgian of Moroccan ascent, was arrested last February in Morocco, the newspaper reported. Belgian authorities found the list during a raid on homes of local Muslim community members last November, according to the report.

Considering all the whacked-out “they control the world” crap coming out of the fevered minds of the enlightened continent’s university students and other inquiring minds, one would hardly need to parse the group leaders’ motives. Nonetheless, that fine, socially involved son of Belgium has links to al Queda, and like any respectable European “social justice” activist pushing for vernichtung, he squeals the most dramatic accusation he thinks will draw sympathy, and that he himself must be handled with civilized standards while advocating some abysmal medievalism be imposed on everyone else. From his home in Belgium, he was operating a terror network in Morocco, and trying to live a low-rent style Ernst Blofeld lifestyle:

The Moroccan-born Belgian had quite a resume: accused terrorist kingpin, assassin, gangster, double agent and hotelier. He visited from Belgium now and then to oversee the hotel, a three-star inn with a sidewalk cafe where men sip tea and watch a parade of whining scooters, dusty taxis, sunburned tourists and veiled Berber women.

Among other things, this psycho-puppy is accused of plotting to knock off “M6,” (King Mohammed VI of Morocco.)

In total Belliraj has confessed to involvement in six murder cases in the years 1988-1989, among them the murder of an aging homosexual who had made a proposal that Belliraj believed dishonored his manhood, and a Belgian grocer who was mistakenly identified as a Jew, on a mission for Abu Nidal. On missions for the Iranians he allegedly committed three more murders: of a Saudi imam and a librarian at the Great Mosque in Brussels, and a driver at the Saudi Arabian Embassy.

For the sake of sensitivity, they should permit him a traditional, culturally appropriate death for a jihadist - a Yemeni execution. It’s only fair, after all.