A Town Hall Meeting Held by the Citizens of Beautiful Downtown Nowhere

At the G-20 Summit, purporting to about (showing) themselves to be deeply concerned about us, their data points, economists will be doing what they do best. Hitting the sauce and seeking the affirmation of the usual activist-types.. You’ve seen the type. Their groupie-like academic travels as a means to having a world-travelling lifestyle usually enjoyed by people who are successful and productive.

The main stimulus to the world economy forthcoming from the G-20 this week will be the stimulus to the wine industry, especially in France. An untold amount of fine wines will be consumed by preening and grand-standing world leaders admiring and lecturing one another without ever getting to the heart of economic problems.

Otherwise, very little of real import will be accomplished.

But they will all feel so “international”. Pfft. Get a job.

Otherwise the usual teenage girl dramas will continue as a way of convincing the world that certain nations remain relevant. Hint: it’s a nation or culture where the term “former glory” is a thrown around frequently. They are threatening to take their football and go home.

So why the threat? Sarkozy's chest-beating is clearly aimed at a domestic audience.

Big deal. So they call it the “G 19” which is a meaningless attempt to make everyone but the other 6 of the G-7 feel warm and fuzzy at a meaningless travelling circus of an international meeting. The only deference to “expressing an air of modesty” is to hold the meeting in London and not some place like Davos.

Outside, of course, people who have never presented any alternative to the things they purport to want to smash (that is to say anything their parents found important, as well as capitalism,) will be stamping their feet, displaying their usual impotent rage, and showing that they have no alternative to it other than advocating miscellaneous features of Marxism. The protesters have always and still know nothing of its’ soul-sucking qualities, but will have one thing in common with the other jet-set groupies inside. They are trying to convince someone of the relevance of THEIR fatuous exercises – the idea that their affection for their cause makes them personally virtuous, exceptional, and intelligent – but in this case are employing the same culture of complaint that so many empty heads have employed over the decades.

It’s Funny How Easy it is to Forget Some Things

While reading an old essay by Orwell in which he defends the reputation of P. G. Wodehouse, something struck me. Not what he wrote about Wodehouse, but about the left’s historic sales-job. It is one that we’re enduring to this day:

It is nonsense to talk of “Fascist tendencies” in his books. There are no post-1918 tendencies at all. Throughout his work there is a certain uneasy awareness of the problem of class distinctions, and scattered through it at various dates there are ignorant though not unfriendly references to Socialism. In THE HEART OF A GOOF (1926) there is a rather silly story about a Russian novelist, which seems to have
been inspired by the factional struggle then raging in the U.S.S.R. But the references in it to the Soviet system are entirely frivolous and, considering the date, not markedly hostile. That is about the extent of Wodehouse’s political consciousness, so far as it is discoverable from his writings.

The controversy surrounding Wodehouse goes back to the Second World War. He was incarcerated by the Nazis upon their “liberation” of Vichy France. To get out of jail early, he agreed to do 4 radio broadcasts for the Nazis.

Nowhere, so far as I know, does he so much as use the word “Fascism” or “Nazism.” In left-wing circles, indeed in “enlightened” circles of any kind, to broadcast on the Nazi radio, to have any truck with the Nazis whatever, would have seemed just as shocking an action before the war as during it. But that is a habit of mind that had been developed during nearly a decade of ideological struggle against Fascism.

Which then and now still compares favorably to the appeasement that sent millions into the clutches of fascism, in any case. But never mind that – there is a fellow countryman to demonize.

Does that sound familiar?

The bulk of the British people, one ought to remember, remained antethetic to that struggle until late into 1940. Abyssinia, Spain, China, Austria, Czechoslovakia — the long series of crimes and aggressions had simply slid past their consciousness or were dimly noted as quarrels occurring among foreigners and “not our business.”

One can gauge the general ignorance from the fact that the ordinary Englishman thought of “Fascism” as an exclusively Italian thing and was bewildered when the
same word was applied to Germany. And there is nothing in Wodehouse’s writings to suggest that he was better informed, or more interested in politics, than the general run of his readers.

For those of you not familiar with Wodehouse’s wit, I beg you to give the old bird a chance. After all, he made fun of the idle rich without, by some magic, fall in the vulgar habit found so often in the UK to demonize and detest – only to find themselves reinforcing those concepts of class that they to this day pretend to be on a Jihad to “smash”.

And yet these demons forever trouble them.

‚ Ausweis Bitte ! '

All leftist love affairs end up in the same place – in dictatorships, ones that slowly expand the control of central government (in the stated interest of the people and social justice,) and erase the human right to individual liberty. Like boiling a frog, they do it in steps. It took the East Germans less than a decade to substantially dismantle freedom of expression, the economy, and individuals’ freedom, as well as confiscate all productive property, even that held by the poor.

Venezuelan Military Takes Control of Transportation Hubs

Critics say the move is designed to expand President Hugo Chavez's power and weaken his opponents.
Opposition gubernatorial and mayoral candidates made gains in November elections, taking a number of key seats including leadership of the capital city, Caracas.

Same old, same old rhetoric employed, abusing the public’s em0otions:

Mr. Chavez was quoted by the AFP news service as saying he was reunifying the motherland, which he said was in pieces.
The Venezuelan president has warned that state governors who challenge the new law might be arrested.

Joseph Kennedy is quite proud, I’m sure.

Incompetence and Parasitism

In Europe it’s called looking out for numero uno, and doing it rather miserably. The UK’s Evening Standard cites James Surowiecki’s article in the New Yorker that points out the the EU member states are the collective ‘big government that couldn’t’.

Just as Sarko and Merkel may have been congratulating themselves, Surowiecki delivers the sting in the tail.

"They’re also probably counting on the fact that, even as they sit tight, their economies will get a boost from the American and Chinese stimulus packages. The thing about government spending is that it “leaks”: a good chunk of our stimulus package will buy other countries’ goods. So Europeans can avoid getting too deeply into debt and still reap some of the benefits of our borrowing.

It’s not that they won’t do a debt-heaping stimulus package for same reasons, surely that’s what they’ve been already doing be way of dirigisme, de-facto state industries, and subsidies anyway for ages. They simply can’t find that many institutions to take up their dept, and are mortally afraid of the GDP-multiples of their existing borrowing, not to mention that in Europe, more than anywhere else, commercial bonds could scupper them in a way that will make the banks look like a safe investment.

Germans are Seeking Less Stimulus

Rip off the sales-pitch and the veneer of hip, sexy, edgy, and ”with it” Europe, and you’ll find it vacuous, limp, and sagging:

Hoping for more success, many women are driven from the clubs to the kerbs to sell their bodies on their own terms.

An increasing number of men on a tight budget are also picking up prostitutes on street corners rather than in pricey brothels or "Eros Centres."

Some places have been forced to shut their doors and in January, sex-shop owners and porn producers pushed for state aid, taking their lead from the crisis-hit auto and banking industries.

Erotic trade federation official Uwe Kaltenberg, said that "economic aid would be judicious."

When a society believes in virtually nothing, it’s not surprising that after the personal because the political, people human flesh becomes little more than a commodity anyway. They’re as cheerless, blasé, and mechanical as ever. Put your heart into it chacha!

Never Mind the Cannibalism

It seems that His Excellency, Her Majesty’s grand mucky-muck in Pyongyang is more than just a twit. He is at the point where he can’t tell the difference between autocracy and pluralism. Via Iain Dale we meet what may be the stupidest man to ever nest in government – he is the exception that manages to prove the rule in the Peter Principle.

In a manner that would have George Orwell spinning in his grave, Hughes describes election day in the totalitarian state as if it were a festival of democracy. Forget the Axis of Evil, forget labour camps, secret police, a nation nearly reduced to starvation only a few years ago. No, it's a veritable Butlins here in the DPRK.

The weather was "warm and sunny for the elections of the 12th Supreme People's Assembly", Hughes gushes.

You might wonder just what it is that the embassy staff in Pyongyang are there for, other than processing papers for non-existent trade and all of those free-wheeling NorKs needing visas to blighty. Odds on, they’re doing absolutely nothing – they are if anything a space-holder for what might someday become a nation with who the rest of the world would want to deal.

“Permanent Revolution” of our Ignorant Elite

The fantasy held by leftist elitists in the west seems to remain as it ever was: accelerate downward mobility for everyone and doom humanity to starvation and failure for whatever variety of excuses are popular at any given moment. It used to be totalitarianism veiled in the demand for universal human sameness, now it’s a 19th century aesthetic fantasy about agriculture.

Paul Roberts is another writer who finds much to admire in Cuba. His book The End of Food (2008) is a paean to the banishing of the evil tractor and the awful fertilizer, the wonderful diversity, the docile oxen chewing their cud, the peasants happily hoeing as peasants ought to do. Roberts quotes McKibben to the effect that this concentration on labor-intensive agriculture is a wee bit more possible in a police state than it would be elsewhere. After all, Cuba had lots of excess labor and the ability to move it where it was needed without too many scruples.

Peasants are supposed to be peasants and struggle, after all, and we should all be coerced, if not forced into being peasants. That way we can all die by the dim light of the permanent revolution.

Sustainable, largely organic, community-based, and healthy food production in post-Soviet Cuba is offered by critics of "industrial agriculture" as an example of the sort of system that we should aspire to in the United States. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of Soviet subsidies for Cuba's sugar industry in the early 1990s, a near famine forced Cubans to radically change what they consumed and the manner in which it was produced. By 1993, per capita calorie consumption in Cuba had been cut by a third from the Soviet-subsidized level.

That’s for one simple reason, the same one that makes the bong-jockeys in universities believe that under communism there was plenty: there wasn’t. What there was, was a system disposed to producing the gravest environmental disaster zone in history: an agricultural and industrial environment where the value of all things was arbitrary because there was no real market to determine how to deal with the impact of creating goods, the costs of inputs and resources, and the like. Contributing, of course, is the unexamined leftist fantasy of government control of production combined with government regulation of safety practices. Call it an externality and that inherent feature of the human spirit is corrected for! If government is inherently good, then by magical the armies of people hired into it will be nothing but selfless. If “the new man” was supposed to correct for all of that greed stuff, why did generations of Communism not produce a single new man if it placed so much value of him?

Step number one will be to force the entire population between the ages of 14 and 74 to join the Future Farmers of America.

“Permanent Revolution” of our Ignorant Elite

The fantasy held by leftist elitists in the west seems to remain as it ever was: accelerate downward mobility for everyone and doom humanity to starvation and failure for whatever variety of excuses are popular at any given moment. It used to be totalitarianism veiled in the demand for universal human sameness, now it’s a 19th century aesthetic fantasy about agriculture.

Paul Roberts is another writer who finds much to admire in Cuba. His book The End of Food (2008) is a paean to the banishing of the evil tractor and the awful fertilizer, the wonderful diversity, the docile oxen chewing their cud, the peasants happily hoeing as peasants ought to do. Roberts quotes McKibben to the effect that this concentration on labor-intensive agriculture is a wee bit more possible in a police state than it would be elsewhere. After all, Cuba had lots of excess labor and the ability to move it where it was needed without too many scruples.

Peasants are supposed to be peasants and struggle, after all, and we should all be coerced, if not forced into being peasants. That way we can all die by the dim light of the permanent revolution.

Sustainable, largely organic, community-based, and healthy food production in post-Soviet Cuba is offered by critics of "industrial agriculture" as an example of the sort of system that we should aspire to in the United States. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of Soviet subsidies for Cuba's sugar industry in the early 1990s, a near famine forced Cubans to radically change what they consumed and the manner in which it was produced. By 1993, per capita calorie consumption in Cuba had been cut by a third from the Soviet-subsidized level.

That’s for one simple reason, the same one that makes the bong-jockeys in universities believe that under communism there was plenty: there wasn’t. What there was, was a system disposed to producing the gravest environmental disaster zone in history: an agricultural and industrial environment where the value of all things was arbitrary because there was no real market to determine how to deal with the impact of creating goods, the costs of inputs and resources, and the like. Contributing, of course, is the unexamined leftist fantasy of government control of production combined with government regulation of safety practices. Call it an externality and that inherent feature of the human spirit is corrected for! If government is inherently good, then by magical the armies of people hired into it will be nothing but selfless. If “the new man” was supposed to correct for all of that greed stuff, why did generations of Communism not produce a single new man if it placed so much value of him?

Step number one will be to force the entire population between the ages of 14 and 74 to join the Future Farmers of America.

More Gallic Brilliance

’Recovery’ is sounding worse and worse as an option for the future of Dirigime, SA:

SANDOUVILLE, France -- Renault SA's factory in this Normandy town is one of the car maker's most unproductive in the world. Yet it has no choice but to keep the assembly line running.

The “justice” part of that one in the great inspired continental minds, is that mass layoffs are not permitted, but operations making the most losses may not be shut down, and the cost of gross alteration is seen as prohibitive with that boot on ones’ neck as well.

Related: the great creative intellects of the Universities, those shining lights and leaders of the future are defining their own justice. Those crazy kids call it “autoréduction”, or instant discount – known by thieves everywhere as the five finger special it’s the new euphemism for rationalized shoplifting. Presumed to be about some Robin Hood tale, the most popular items are electronics, and we all know how the hungry waifs of the welfare state need a USB thumb drive.

The Carrefour in Rennes was invaded yesterday by some 300 students, who invited customers to take their items free of charge, the value of the goods stolen is estimated at €10.000, as reported today by Ouest-France.fr.

"The value is so high because young people were stealing things like DVD players, USB thumb drives, mobile phones, and alcohol," repoerted Ouest-France.fr. The national executive of the Carrefour group has decided to file a complaint against [their organization].

Stragely enough, one heroic tale of liberation actually involved groceries – one report indicating that...

Their carts are chock full of wonderful food: salmon, foie gras, but also pasta, oil and potatoes. They justified their refusal to pay, as reported by Le Parisien:

"It's an automatic requisition which is just in these times of crisis and also allows us to celebrate this percarious New Year’s Eve with dignity."

The place in question is a Monoprix in the Marais district of Paris on Saint-Antoine near Metro Saint-Paul this past December. The groceries (alimentation) section is in the basement. One can only wonder if these brave, generous, and caring college punks availed themselves of the use of the elevator to transport their new-found dignity home. After all, “libre” is far more likely to mean “not in use” than free – in any relevant sense of the word. So by extension the old saw that “if it ain’t bolted down, it’s yours’” has now been redefined to include the stuff on store shelves, and is all part of that drive for social justice.

They sure are hope of man, the leaders of the future, and all that, aren’t they?

They’ve grown up in a society that puts a premium on blurring the lines between institutionalized theft and an honest living, much as they really don’t blink at the notion of corporate welfare, price-fixing, and the creative creation of shortages and living by economic falsehoods.

From another location assumed to be a depriver of goods due to wanting you to exchange cash for their wares. How dare they.

The EU is UA, and Looking to the Nascent AU

Too little too late, and otherwise useless. Now the glorious “EUFOR” deployment in Chad is dumping it on the lap of someone else under the aegis of the UN, which sounds a lot better than giving it over to the put-upon low-budget armies of the developing world as they are so fond of doing, except for the Irish and Poles in this case who actually get it. At least European gets to pretend that they ”made a difference” after one year - and can now ceremonially transferring their power largely to themselves and changing hats for no clear reason that the Janjaweed would care about in the least.

Newcomers include African, Asian and European countries alike, namely from Ghana, Nepal, Norway and Togo.

Click here for a EU funded Euranet radio report which managed to not gloss over the futility of the endeavor, but manages to forget that the Europeans kept saying that they were going to be the cavalry to the rescue, but stalled what they insisted was a necessary, life-saving deployment for 4 years. It must have been America’s fault. Now there’s hardly a soul to protect.

Of course now that they’re bailing out, they have no problem using one of their exclusive transnational proxy instruments to poke the Khartoum government in the eye. Now that the useless stunt of issuing an International Criminal Court “warrant” for the Sudanese leader’s arrest will come at little cost to their image now that the royal blue flags are swapped out for a seasonal baby blue, but possibly at great cost to those populations being hunted down in Sudan.

Secretly hating humanity starts with hating one another.

The EU, at best, has a kind of camaraderie akin to the Stockholm syndrome more than anything else. If it wasn’t the common hatred of others, particularly Americans and people who are ethnically too different looking, the only thing that keeps them together is a fear of people from the 3rd world will realize that there is no reason to admire them for no reason other than their nationality. The fact is that despite decades of peace (guaranteed to them by the outside world), a huge number of Europeans have loony prejudices about other Europeans that would make the Hatfields and McCoys Hutus and Tutsis look thoughtful and gentle. It’s a centuries-long portrait in fear and loathing if there ever was one, and it’s at the root of everything they call “culture”.


In a follow-up to the article we link above, the author at the Daily Candor had this to add after the obvious backlash of “how dare you” hatemail oured in:

There were a handful of people who didn’t hesitate to tell me that I was completely ignorant and was completely in the dark about Europeans. They were vastly outnumbered by those who agreed with me completely.

I was amused by those who confirmed exactly those national stereotypes I had written about

Of course there’s always this old favorite guide to doping out the colors this season.

Le Monde’s Best Chance is a Model for Failure

Unlike the local and regional papers, the national French newspapers are spiraling into a freefall much as many others are worldwide, only worse because the general-interest national papers are so few in number.

French papers should, some pundits say, be more serious, achieve worldwide recognition, and above all have more content (the weekend edition of Libération, one of the three main French newspapers, is only 40 pages, a far cry from the two-kilo Sunday edition of the LA Times). But since these papers are facing crisis too, French papers and their critics in dire need of a new model. Alain Minc, a former Le Monde director and now a close adviser of Nicolas Sarkozy, long maintained that if French newspapers were failing it was because of their lack of resemblance to the New York Times.

You read that right. More like that smoldering heap, the NYT.

Le Monde, Libération and Le Figaro have between them made 200 people redundant in the past three years. Libération, which has been operating at a loss for several years, is being put in an awkward situation by an employee who is refusing to accept redundancy. L'Humanité, the communist daily paper, is closer to collapse than it has ever been.

Sarkozy recently organised a general meeting for the press to share his vision of what the papers should do and issue a pronouncement. This much-vaunted reform essentially consists of giving the established daily newspapers more subsidies in the years to come – which could only have the effect of postponing their collapse. He has, for instance, announced an increase in presidential advertising in the press and has granted papers certain tax exemptions. The rather more dramatic move to give every 18-year-old in the country a one-year subscription to a daily paper (to encourage them to appreciate the press) is perhaps the only measure that might have a longer term effect.

It must be hard for the natives to appreciate the extremism in these decisions: an employee who insists that they cannot be let go, shaking the plausibility of the press by putting it on the government payroll, and giving it away to 18 year olds like the advertisers handed out in public transit that have a scant few items and a weather map. This “once grand” industry – a cultural institution or sorts is at the end of its’ rope and can’t move forward along the lines of even the French language press in Canada. The problem starts with a paucity of content, and an expensive cover price, but the racketeering quality of the state of distribution means that newspapers can’t be sold in vending boxes, in grocery stores, or anyone other than the Tabac newsstands and some bookstores just to avoid strikes and service shut-downs by those that have always distributed and sold them. If anything, they are being killed by socialism.

Meanwhile, back in the department of your fungible freedoms...

If the BBC learns generosity, it can become untouchable

To survive the recession, the corporation must place itself at the centre of an unselfish cultural network

Meanwhile in the UK, even the news branches of the electronic media are being subtly consolidated in all but name only. BBC and ITV already share from the same talent pool and predispositions, now they’re to share regional facilities. Owing to the obvious fact that subsidy-drawing people and the unsubsidized will be sharing space in the same newsrooms, the obvious next move will be a merging of budgets and expenses. Using inferences too secondary and unrelated to be real, lefty parasite Jackie Ashley (whose headline is quoted above) thinks that this move is otay for all manner of emotional reasons but blithe to any notion of what effect this could have on the freedom of the press.

Yet this BBC-ITV link is big news. I trained at the BBC, but I spent many years working for ITN and Channel 4 news. I wouldn't quite say we hated the BBC, but we were vigorous and aggressive rivals who thought we were better in almost every way - sharper, faster and much less stuffy. Even at local level the new partnership will feel uneasy for a lot of journalists, and it is unclear how well it will work.

and now you can kiss that goodbye. A job down memory lane reminds me just how frequently it was that the communists of the Soviet era invoked the “efficiency” argument when faced with any discussion of the excessive concentration of powers in any area or the benefits of plurality of opinion, and it was as awkward and clumsy in tone as Ashley’s argument.

There are Good Reasons to Want Carville to Fail Too

It seems that James Carville for reasons his fellow mental captives will call forgivable, seems to have repeatedly hoped President Bush would fail. This makes him no different than any other one of the left’s many punters and Tourette’s Syndrome suffers over the 8 years they criticized as the dreaded dark era of Bush where the peasant’s wells were poisoned and their children gored for the pleasure of anyone who didn’t agree with them.

Having met Carville man in a Virginia coffee shop several times, I found it to be like trying to converse with a chicken, even if about banal matters. The man just HAS to try to get you to repeat his opinion back to you, and the one thing that I’m sure drove him off for good was me just reading the paper and not offering to entertain him. To me, he seemed no different than the attention-seeking losers and drunks who tumble into non-chain coffee places in the hope of faking some sort of social life employing the strangers who don’t quite know them yet.

Moreover, he tries to use so many colloquial images, characters whom he seems to try to step into, that to take his nature in person and try o square it with his manner in from of the media, he seems patently fake. He is NOT folksy. He is not a forceful bundle of elfin energy, charm, or the constructive, engaged sort that is associated with provincial American life or “regional cool”. He is by no means more rotten than your average politico, but he isn’t who he wants you to think he is. One can’t expect much from a political advisor, professional traveler, and symposium attender, but to say that he’s some belvedere of decency in comparison to Rush Limbaugh is an impossible stretch.

That aside, his highly self-absorbed and vicious outward nature described in this report doesn’t surprise me, much as the fake outrage directed at Rush by the left over his one mention that he wanted Obama’s policies to fail.

On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, just minutes before learning of the terrorist attacks on America, Democratic strategist James Carville was hoping for President Bush to fail, telling a group of Washington reporters: "I certainly hope he doesn't succeed."

Carville was joined by Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg, who seemed encouraged by a survey he had just completed that revealed public misgivings about the newly minted president.

"We rush into these focus groups with these doubts that people have about him, and I'm wanting them to turn against him," Greenberg admitted.

The pollster added with a chuckle of disbelief: "They don't want him to fail. I mean, they think it matters if the president of the United States fails."

Minutes later, as news of the terrorist attacks reached the hotel conference room where the Democrats were having breakfast with the reporters, Carville announced: "Disregard everything we just said! This changes everything!"

Rally around the nation, and all that! At least for now when it has to look that way...

I want the White House’s policies to fail too, because they are bad for the country. Every last cute-sounding euphemism they have for an initiative is meant to enlarge the role of government and increase it’s control over the individual’s life and choices. Having lived behind the iron curtain, I am familiar enough with the sentiment and where that tendency can lead a society. Impirically, there is no reason to support Obama’s policies, even if you agree with his world view, or even just like him, there is no reason to believe that anyone can berate and browbeat you into wanting those policies to succeed. None. No-one with a mind should feel compelled to agree with something they have reservations about for the reasons that the left are trying to give you to.

That omission stands in stark contrast to the feeding frenzy that ensued when radio host Rush Limbaugh recently said he wanted President Obama to fail. The press devoted wall-to-wall coverage to the remark, suggesting that Limbaugh and, by extension, conservative Republicans, were unpatriotic.

If your only reason to cite your attachment to the society you live in, and to be protective of it, is to employ some political stunt or jam some racketeering-like budget through, then you are certainly not patriotic, and show no affection for the society you live in at all. Zero. Zip. The population knows this, but Democratic operators like Carville don’t. At best they know how to fake an accent, and wax on about high-school memories, but it’s deeply arrogant to believe that these setups are taken at their face value as much as Al Gore who grew up in Washington’s Mayflower Hotel is “through and through” a good neighbor from Tennessee.

Then again, I suppose there are many in that steamy world who really are afraid that if they will actually show themselves for who they are, that they won’t be liked.

But You Still Can’t Say it

Barack Obama’s economic ideas are perfectly in line with that of European Socialist, who have made a practice of mortgaging the future for the present for decades and enabled more elitist cronyism than Louis XVI. But don’t call him a socialist, you big meanie!

You’ll Just Have to Understand, That’s All.

A multiple target terror attack has been foiled in the Netherlands.

Seven people have been arrested in the Netherlands on suspicion of planning a terror attack on an Ikea furniture store and a number of shops near the Ajax stadium in the capital Amsterdam.

It might have something to do with that distant and vapid sense of style, the silly kids’ names given to the inanimate objects sold at Ikea, or the “hypocritically cheap” batteries and lightbulb-lectures, or what with all the featureless forms and sag-prone bookcases, but I doubt it.

In the course of Thursday morning, the Ikea store and a number of other shops in the area were evacuated. The shops are on Arena Boulevard, named after Ajax's Arena football stadium which is nearby.

The shops and the Heineken Music Hall remained closed all day on Thursday

One of suspects picked up and later released was connected with people of interest the Madrid train bombings. Inasmuch as it’s the Netherlands we’re talking about, debate, debate, and yet more debate will turn to profiling, and that should keep people sufficiently busy and too distracted to consider the harm that could have been done by the attack.

The motive, beyond scaring Europeans from inside their own safe little cocoon, seems even stupider than that considering Ajax’s team nickname:

Instead, Ajax Amsterdam is struggling to stamp out the bizarre tradition by which its most devoted fans call themselves "Jews", even tattooing themselves with Stars of David and waving Israeli flags, although they are not Jewish and know little of Judaism.

The dispute has escalated into the latest test case for Dutch tolerance

Although one can only wonder why it is that the natives’ “tolerance” itself is a problem when you’re dealing with people who are disturbed by Ajax fans calling themselves “Superjoden”, or “Super Jews” while they are statistically about as likely to be Jews as Netherlands’ immigrants from Morocco. The name, apparently, is enough to make the aboriginals a target for death and destruction.

It used to give rise to a rather strange form of “side taking”, but fans of their opponents, even the ones that nickname themselves “the SS” probably didn’t go so far as to terrorize the public with attempts at mass murder.

Oddly enough, the social habits of the garden variety European, sports fans included, besides infecting the stupidest terrorists on earth, seems to lack “nuance”.

More recently, the issue has become a significant social problem in that in an increasingly bizarre and racist way, opposing supporters specifically use anti-semitism to express their antipathy towards Ajax. This is expressed in chants such as Hamas, Hamas/Jews into the gas (Hamas, hamas, joden aan het gas) or producing hissing sounds that imitate the flow of gas.

The irony is that had the bombers been successful, while they would subject the innocent to their death penalty, the guilty themselves would never have to hear that hissing sound.

Don’t Look All Surprised Now

I’m sure he’s saying: We are the change we’ve been looking for.” Whatever the hell that is supposed to mean.

Turnout Sunday was 99.98 percent, with all voters backing the sole candidate running in their constituency, the official Korean Central News Agency reported.

A Nation of Morons

What better way to degrade a “historic” US presidency by linking Obama with fried chicken?

To employ cheapness of thought similar to that of this Germany-based company and virtually all European critics of anything assocated with American, we’d like to point out that their plant happens to be situated 198 km from Bergen-Belsen, and 120 km from Westerbork, NL where there was no fried chicken to be found.

By the way, the same company sells horse spunk, presumably at the same address.

Have a nice day.

When They Color the Story, and When they Don’t. A Primer.

Depends on where the story takes place. With thanks to commenter Jan, we discover the art of political water torture. A sociopath in Germany kills 10 in a school, and it elicits sadness. A sociopath in the USA kills 9 and it prompts a condescending trope.

Just who is it who’s employing innocent victims to prove to themselves something about their own opinions? The same culture that always does: the germans are said to be shot, the Americans are “killed in a murderous folly”. The usual reaction, as ever, is for people to tell themselves that “at least we’re better than those Americans”.

The dead were not sought for comment, and I don’t think their parents and loved ones would take any pleasure in the lives of the victims being used in that way. But in the land of kindness and social leveling, they seem especially eager not to think that way.

When they are considered actual victims, the reports try to play it straight.

It was reported Wednesday that At least ten people were killed Wednesday morning in a shooting at a school near Stuttgart (in southwest Germany).

Eight of those killed were shot in the school, and two outside, according to the newspaper. Authorities evacuated the school and warned motorists traveling in the area.

In reality, it was 16, even though each story cited the same local sources.

However the intellectual necrophilia creeps out when under the influence of attitude, not one person in specific societies is considered a victim.

Murder in the United States: he killed nine people and committed suicide.

It was in Samson, in southern Alabama, that he took his first victims. He entered in three different homes in the city and killed six adults and a child, before returning by car to the nearby town of Geneva.

On the road, he killed two more.

Then the crazy killer fled into a business, Reliable Metal, where he was surrounded by police.

It seems Germans can’t be called crazy. THAT would wrong, since we don’t know if he was an abused child, or just though he was sticking it to the man or something. Unlike someone who reminds them of Mad Max or Nicholas Cage in Raising Arizona, someone who kills that many European children might need to be understood.



I guess they call this “news you can use”

It isn’t about being American either, but it helps. It’s about conforming to a simplistic, trained in concept of who may be a victim and who may not by dint of the image their culture has, and it’s all expressed in the ‘tude. Compare this report to this silence. Surely the Guardian reading types are reserving their comments until an appropriate rationalization minimizing the wrongness of the behavior of their fellow travelers can be constructed. THAT is far more important to them that the straight reporting of events, especially when you see the victims of thoughtless hatred characterized this way:

The Royal Anglian Regiment, known as the ¬Poachers, paraded through Luton town centre at midday yesterday.

The protesters, dressed in Islamic clothing, were initially kept away from the marching soldiers and union flag-waving locals by police. They shouted abuse and waved placards with slogans including "Anglian soldiers: cowards, killers, extremists" and "British government, terrorist government". Later the protesters had to be protected by the police

But they were only “dressed that way.” It’s not like you can deduce their opinions or establish what propaganda they’ve been fed, and by whom. After all, they needed to be protected themselves, and the occasion is good to bring out the worst possible sounding nickname of their target, calling them the “Poachers”. I mean think about the animals in Blighty’s verdant (if not paved over) pastures, will ya!?!

The Sick European Relationship with Power

Amazingly, this came from a Bertelsmann mock-blog of all places – one called “Sight and Sign” which normally lauds all things “culturally” European except for the occasional New Yorker or Vanity Fair article to try to give it a “global” look.

The broadcaster ZDF has co-financed the 60th birthday celebrations for the Minister President of Rheinland-Palatinate, Kurt Beck, who was also the chairman of ZDF's board of directors for many years. The blog Achse des Guten (axis of good) quotes a letter from ZDF to a viewer who had asked for more information: "Originally, ZDF had considered honouring the longstanding chair of its board of directors with a special event that would give the executive management, the members of the ZDF supervisory board, as well as the staff the opportunity to show their reverence for Kurt Beck. The minister president made it clear that personal gifts were not desired and that the expenditure for the reception should be kept within acceptable proportions. For that reason, the government of Rheinland-Palatinate and ZDF agreed to host an event together. Indeed ZDF is essentially funneling its limited contribution to this event into technical-organisational support as well as a cash contribution."

A local politician on the take, the need to “revere” his somehow, putting him on the board of one of Germany’s most influential broadcasting outfits... sure. Sounds fair that is, if you’re the type that likes to lick the boot that kicks you.

(And what form did their reverence take? Did they kiss his ring?)

Historically speaking, if that is European culture you’re talking about, then the answer would be yes.

French Court Gives Jihadists Foot-soldiers their own “Cultural Exception”

John Rosenthal reports:

Last Tuesday, a Parisian appeals court overturned the convictions of five former Guantanamo inmates who had been found guilty on terrorist conspiracy charges in 2007. The development should give pause to wonder not only about the wisdom of plans to transfer Guantanamo inmates to European countries, but more fundamentally about the very idea of treating the “disposition” of Guantanamo inmates as an issue for civilian courts, whether in the US or abroad. The five French Gitmo detainees were repatriated to France in 2004 and 2005. They were tried and convicted on charges of belonging to a “criminal association formed for the purpose of undertaking a terrorist act.” The definition of this crime in French law is exceptionally broad. Not only does it permit what are, in effect, preventive detentions, but a suspect may be convicted by virtue of merely having had “regular contact” [relations habituelles] with one or more other persons who form part of such a terrorist enterprise.

And apparently that’s the favor they say they’re going to do for America, after telling us that they’ve councilled us on the wrongness of defending ourselves. They find a court that will release terrorists into the population, and we’re considered unwise and more dangerous.

The five former Gitmo detainees, however, did not merely have casual contact with members of a terror group. All five have admitted to receiving military training in Al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan. They were taken prisoner in the Afghan-Pakistani border region in late 2001, while fleeing the Battle of Tora-Bora

But somehow in the diseased minds of “the peace camp”, this doesn’t make them prisoners of war.



Leftist protesting nonsensically for the western liberal world to disarm itself outside a military equipment trade fair on 11-Sept-2001, while the attacks were taking place.

Lesson to the Left: You Actually Have to Win Wars to Turn Guns into Plowshares

Isn’t this the kind of Nanny State Mother-Hen crap that the left is supposed to love?

An increasing number of Iraqi detainees are refusing to leave detention centres despite being eligible for release because they want to complete studies begun behind bars, a US general said on Sunday.

"In the last three or four months we have begun seeing detainees asking to stay in detention, usually to complete their studies," Major General Douglas Stone told a news conference in Baghdad.

The US military offers a wide range of educational programmes to the 23,000 or so detainees -- adults and juveniles -- being held at its two detention facilities, Camp Cropper near Baghdad's international airport and Camp Bucca near the southern port city of Basra.

Some parents of juvenile detainees, too, have asked that their children remain behind bars so they can continue their schooling, said Stone, the commanding general for US detainee operations in Iraq.

I wonder where this is supposed to fit into that “no blood for oil” chanting and the 1970’s retread jargon about never deploying the military because it takes from the mouths of American babies and funds from schools? Or how it sits with that “only creating more enemies” taunt to get civilization to off itself?

Maybe They Really Are the Ones They’ve Been Waiting For

“We worked hard to get the right Russian word,” Mrs. Clinton said, handing the button to Mr. Lavrov. “Do you think we got it?”

“You got it wrong,” he replied, explaining that the Americans had come up with the Russian word for overcharged.

The Obama Administration is proving itself to be composed of incompetent amateurs. Not only can’t they figure out simple diplomatic protocol, the gestures of exchanging appropriate gift that predate the Caesars, they can’t seem to find a Russian translator. More to the point, their executive types even try using lame, cooked-up PR analogies in international relations: “resetting” this and that with bodies like the Kremlin or Damascus who simply don’t budge – ever, let alone “reset” relations.

Loony nonsequitors about we being the ones we have been waiting for aside, just what is it that they CAN do if the answer is the equally cryptic “yes we can”? Write advertizing taglines? Write haiku on Twitter?

The donkeys really don’t seem to have a clue as to what they’re doing, but keep in mind that if you report news for a living, you aren’t permitted to say that, or even point out the hypocrisy of their election tirades for that matter.

The New Puritanism

Gordon Brown most polluting EU leader. That said, Boeings are impied to be at fault.

Not unlike the songs of lider-praise that open and close the north Korean broadcast day, an unrelated requisite recitation of moral purity is tossed in at the end of the wire piece:

The EU sees itself as the world leader on environmental issues, and the bloc's member states last December reaffirmed their commitment to cut carbon emissions and improve energy efficiency by 20 percent, both by 2020, in a bid to fight global warming.

It need not be said that one must state this wherever possible because the programming is so deep that one need not write such a rule. George Romero would recognize this behavior right away. It can also be found here in this item where the matter of Europeans stiffing the 3rd world with the bill to “act on the climate change” that they’re employing transnational bodies to force them to do.

At the same time, many of those reductions committed to by the EU will not really be performed domestically, as a large chunk of the 20 or 30 percent will come from so-called carbon offsets - essentially where wealthy countries pay poorer ones to make their carbon cuts for them.

What will be especially funny is when they run out of deprived populations to project their non-existent crises on.

EUtopia at a Glance

It might have something to do with building ridiculous expectations of men or being just plain insufferable, but it seems that a majority of young German men would forego their hoochie mamas for broadband and Rosey palm and her five sisters.

And Their National Sport is Impotent Rage

It’s par for the course at Libération PropagandaStaffel. Conservative politicians get death-threats, and most of the commenters on Libé’s site cheer. Some of them buy into the constructed myth that since being a citizen “requires” one to praise Sarko and is not permitted to criticize him, and that the kook sending the threatening letters is “resisting”. Never mind the fact that they man foaming at the mouth in the comments has somehow, magically, escaped the imaginary thought-police of his fevered brow.

But it doesn’t really sound like he’s much of a whacko, not compared to most of the flock... The rambling letters apparently blames the recipients, all of them UMP officeholders and appointees, of enacting fascist policies and all are festooned with bad spelling and grammar. In other words, they were written by a garden variety French leftist.

Among other threats, the letters say: 'You think you have control of your lives, well no, your lives and your families' lives are in our hands.'

It was not clear whether the author was making any specific demand or defending any stated cause.

Of course not! What with that fetish for control of any and all affairs, the perp appears to be promoting the radical left’s social policy, and mirroring their love of violence, so long as their political opponents, families, neighbors, pets, anyone who agrees with them, and their pets are the victims.

Maybe Some of Them Find Enforcement Erotic

Long famous for having a law for every occasion, Germans start toying with genetic cataloging and profiling. The jack-booted thugs are coming after your Aunt Lucille’s incontinent Pomeranian! Have they no shame?!?

Threatening to Evaporate into that Great Transnational Nothingness

Isn’t it funny? Europeans are the single group of people worldwide most interested in outsourcing their security and justice to the UN of the ICC in the name of consensus, cohesion, and global sameness. They also have a penchance for preferring excessive central control for no good reason over Federalism, and yet have no meaningful EU institutions with any sort of government powers.

Europe may now be "whole and free" after the collapse of communism. But the European Union is not a country, and the deep global contraction is stimulating nationalism, not consensus.

With uncertain leadership and few powerful collective institutions, the union is struggling with the strains this economic crisis has inevitably produced among 27 different countries with different economic histories. The traditional concept of "solidarity," of one for all, is being undermined by protectionist pressures from political leaders with national constituencies and agendas.

Just when you thought that you couldn’t understand they’re trying to do by building a transnational super-duper-über-state, they proved themselves to be especially unremarkable and simplistic. They’re even repeating the centuries-old practice of selling each other up the river for a nickel.

Within the larger European Union, fissures are growing between older members and newer ones, especially those that lived under the stifling yoke of Soviet socialism only 20 years ago. Some countries of Central Europe, like the Czech Republic and Poland, are doing relatively well. Others, like Hungary, Romania and the Baltic states, are in a state of near-meltdown. But only two newer members - tiny Slovenia and Slovakia - are protected by being inside the euro zone, and there was little support Sunday for changing the rules to allow more to join quickly.

Rumsfeld’s flippant comment about old and new Europe seem as correct no as it did then, and does the traditional fear new Europe has for being, once again, thrown into the Bear’s mouth in the hope that it will make him a vegetarian.

The natives would care,but they’re too busy trying to re-terraform that moonscape of theirs for mother Gaia.

Last year, a spate of brutal, unsolved "rabbit murders" left 40 bunnies near the city of Dortmund dead.

That’s not just a crime against cuteness and “nature” as it’s understood by people who have no natural environment left, it’s practically a serial crime spree. Let’s hope that helplessness and despair don’t take root, and that they can convince themselves that this is all just another perfectly acceptable cow-like mutilation by aliens. Then again, they might be able to take away from this one of those ‘Like Lions for Lambs” harangues that will clue them in on the need for an east-west détante within the EU:

In an echo of the city's old cold war split, the Tagesspiegel daily wrote Monday that hares in the eastern side of the once divided city are now competing with rabbits for food in the western side.

Some Posts...

...just seem to write themselves.