Oh, THAT New Media!!!

Maybe it isn’t news because it isn’t a pretzel.

From our bulging “imagine if this happened to Bush” file: Obama bumps his head in public. It is NOT considered a news item by aggregators, even when it’s on the wires.

Bush chokes on a pretzel in private six years ago: 110,000 hits from frothing loons wanking off about it in the hateful glee of those raised in a barn.

World’s Stupidest Anti-Capitalist

As if there were any other type...

Anticipating the revolutionary wave of people agreeing with them, roving bands of masked anti-capitalist paranoiacs roved the streets of DC in and around last weekend’s IMF leaders’ meeting.

As they are wont to do, they destroy property, something they believe should be the “peoples’“ property, but like whatever. They chose to vandalize a pair of ATM machines, even though the proletariat trying to withdraw from ‘the man’ the pittance of their blood, sweat, and tears. Oddly enough they hit up Amalgamated Bank, a.k.a. “Labor’s Bank” or as the banking choice of the non-profit political profiteers of the activism racket, which statistically makes it the favorite bank of the Suffering Sisters of Sappho.

Even the special must suffer to make a perfect society, where everything is free. It’s the part about what growing your own organic food would do to the collective farm that I still can’t get.

Variable Morality

Or as much of Europe thinks when it isn’t telling itself it knows better, the value of an innocent life is based entirely on which political tribe you are perceived to belong to. From the Deutsche Welle story on the trial of the gang that kidnapped, brutally tortured, and then murdered Ilan Halimi because he was a Jew, we find a kind of racial defense hiding inside a racial defense:

Some claim they didn't know what they were doing

For the rest of the gang, hostility towards Jews is not believed to be a factor in them taking part in the horrendous crime.
"My client had no idea who had been kidnapped," said Didier Seban, the lawyer for one of Halimi's abductors. "It had no bearing on him. His involvement was stupid, he's very easy to influence, Fofana called him the 'little one'."

In other words, not only is was his murder founded entirely on his heritage, so must go the argument of the defense. Is the gang and its’ ringleader to be less guilty because they didn’t account for Hilami’s Jewishness? In the simplistic world of European public morality, that’s often the case, and it has a purpose: to resent that imagined protected category at the same time.

So the press reports like so many other features of public though is little more than a cultural covering action to allay the obvious observations that people would otherwise have to make of themselves.

But let’s not forget the society we’re talking about. A news search engine lists 422 stories following the trial in France, where the crime took place, not even twice as much outside of France. It’s a strong indication that in France people really don’t want to be reminded of the affair. The “progressive” Rue89, the stated protectors of the human race, has run 9 hits, all but 3 wire pieces and one an irrelevant reader comment about homophobia which read like light entertainment gossip columns for neo-fascists. The other two only cite his name, but rattle on about LePen and Dieudonné. On the other hand, the front page of their portal seems obsessed with another “cultural covering action” – trying to diminish the sympathy anyone would have for the center-right government’s Rashida Dati – implying that the high-tech lynching she’s been going through, (that it isn’t), a piece on the year old Cadaver Exhibit that we were supposed to assumed scandalized everyone but them, and an interview with Jacque Tati.

Truly biting and up to the minute stuff for the socially aware and politically active political novacane for lefties .



Living La Vida Tribu’Ka

Untimely and Inaccurate

That $400 000 000 per year paragon of journalistic virtue, the BBC World Service, long considered THE reliable and evenhanded source of information for those living in third world chaos (both in old blighty and the 3rd world itself), has finally found a reason to report on the 29th of April a story about retrograde and childish anti-capitalism protests in PFrance that the unctuous Guardian reported on the 25th of JANUARY.

GIGO, babyr! Government IN, Government OUT. Of course they carried without question the protester’s biggest point that food costs a lot because supermarkets are MAKING A PROFIT. Competition doesn’t drive prices down, especially in a syndicalist hell like l’hexagone, but instead of taking it out on the slightly loony left, the really loony left think that merchants will feel obliged to stay in business if they lose money.

It’s the same old Groundhog Day buzz. Decade after decade the BASICS of supply and demand have to be repeated not just to the kids, but to their smelly old hippy grandparents. Don’t forget that this is the country where the term ‘property is theft’ originated.

The Fuse is Lit! (No Pasaran)

Climb any Mountain, Abuse any Euphemism

The declaration of the Latin-American Idiots: “Capitalism 'threatens life on the planet'”

Of course, they still have to “pay they bills” too:

The legitimate struggle against drug trafficking and organized crime, and any other form of the so-called “new threats” must not be used as an excuse to undertake actions of interference and intervention against our countries.

I think we can call the new phenomenon Narco-communistic-charismatic-totalitarianism, something that is meant by every measure intended to benefit no-one but that equality loving totalitarian himself and his equality loving cronies. Because it’s all about equality, ‘n stuff.

Nobody Learned from Communism

It’s not just the European cultural habit of licking the boot that kicks you, the continued condensed stupidity of statism continues.

The statist system remained in place for a mere 45 years. Yet within just a few years, East Germany became a backward, hungry, incompetent, lazy third-world society and remained that way for the entire 45 years. When liberated from the statist shackles, East Germans remained disproportionately lazy, incompetent, third-worlders, sentimental for the old statist disaster.

And it seems for those of a leftist sensibility that they still haven’t learned the lesson. I’m sure it’s obscured by the idea that under socialism, there is “something for nothing” for everyone.

Got Flicks?

Another great moment in cinema that I can’t live without.

As Gore is to Biden

New Ice Age Threat – 15 January, 1969


As we’ve grown to know, it’s one big splisgy-splash fearfest, then as now

“and it would be accompanied by a flood of biblical proportions that would drown the world’s biggest cities.”

Happy Eco-Genocide Day

Richard North, on his new and improved blog-thingy shows us a case of the global network of “betters”, or as others have put it “pearls before swine”:

Irena Sendler was arrested and badly tortured by the Gestapo though her organization managed to save her from being executed. Subsequently, she lived in hiding but is said to have gone on helping Jewish children. After the war she tried to reunite some of the children with their families most of whom had been exterminated.

Needless to say she was then persecuted by the Polish Communist government for being close to the Home Army, whose members were put on show trial, and to the "bourgeois" Polish government in exile that had been betrayed by the Western allies.

But, like everything promoted by those trying to construct a political movement to love them for their mere opinions, someone who really saved lives matters less than a theoretical object of their lionization.

When that gasbag and failed politician Al Gore received his Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 for a documentary that even he admitted was based on false premises (ah but you have to shock people!) one of the other candidates was Irena Sendler, a Polish Roman Catholic nurse who had saved around 2,500 Jewish children and infants, placing them with Catholic families. The latter then courageously brought them up as their own.

Like the subtle media expansion of the religious holiday Earth Day into Earth Week as close as possible to Holy Week, we find what appears to be falling on the lines to an attempt of the dispossession of faith with an unrelated object of worship.

To all of you extremists who are now attempting a conversion of de facto desire to turn civilization into a peasantry living by the whims of agriculture into a de jure underclass, I recommend you try taking a cab as far as the hack will take you away from your bubble and try dry camping.

Try your environmentalism on your own, not the standard kind that is expressed as engaging in some symbolism yourself, but forcing others to take the kinds of actions that suit the ideas that salve your empty souls. This is the sort of thing I’m talking about, and it’s a minor feature of the constellation of green Eichmanns “something for nothing”: a private organization called USGBC, or Unites States Green Building Council.

They aren’t elected or appointed, USGBC review and gatekeeping is slowly becoming a legally mandatory requirement for the design and construction of commercial and civil property, and soon also dwellings, and they’re gaining the right of refusal over what people can do with their property. To boot they require payment for review in a process that has no appeal structure outside of the same organization.

I lived for 4 years in East Germany under totalitarian Marxism. The only excuse the DDR ever used was that the force and coercion was necessary for the good of man. The East Germans even called things people had to go and do (like harvesting crops outside of your job) coercively and forcibly in it’s early days as “voluntary”. To me this complex of having extra-legal requirements sounds like a version of the same thing in its’ early days.

If it really mattered, the measures you have to take under a LEED, the USGBC metrication method by which they can grade if you’ve pleased them, would simply be building code requirements. Not only that, they may deny the efforts you make to a point in certification for no cause, and there is no authority to appeal to, even though there are cities that have made their process a requirement under the law.

They are the greenie-movement equivalent of a paramilitary death squad with some roundabout protection of their powers under the law. Look closely and you’ll find much of the environmental movement having these powers over the population.

The forcable kind, but without the blood on their hands – the kind of power they like, the kind that says that you, not they, have to sacrifice your well being for the good of man. In this case, it comes at the cost of your money and effort when you try to put a roof over your head. For them, as most of the LEED cadre are in the compliance consulting business, they materially benefit from your pain, and don’t have to live with the shame of anyone even suggesting that there is a conflict of interest in that. Probably because those being made to comply are tacitly cast as the wealthy, venal, enemy in need of taking, and they’re the patricians forcing them to do things for the good of man

Eating Brains Just Ain’t What it Used to be

Recycling the last years’ “Zombie Company” narrative, a article in the EU Observer unwittingly tells us just how perceptually limited EUtopia’s range of choices are when it comes to understanding the market economy.

An influential Brussels-based think-tank says "zombie" companies – enterprises badly in need of structural reform but kept alive by state subsidies – risk hampering EU growth levels once the economic crisis comes to an end.

"They stifle economic growth, while preventing reallocation of resources to sectors with higher growth potential," say authors Jean Pisani-Ferry and Bruno van Pottelsberghe of Bruegel in a publication released last week.

"There will always be a political temptation to rescue particularly large industrial companies using government funds."

Further:

"This is unlikely to deliver the innovation boost that was called for in the EU's Lisbon strategy."

One is left to wonder if they get the fact that having a politically driven, government engineered thing like a “Lisbon Strategy” is just that? – a stifling government manipulation of markets. After all, the really scary thing about zombies is that they AREN’T thinking for themselves, and a larger, absolute power made them that way.

Thom: If you could change one thing about the world, what would it be?

Janeane: That’s unanswerable.

Thom: What’s the most annoying thing in the world?

Janeane: That is just too numerous to mention.

Speaking of Zombies, former talent Jeneane Garofalo, like all good little fascists, is forming genetic theories about those she disagrees with. Next step is obviously using calipers to measure crania far and wide, and then forming from that a political philosophy.

Their limbic brain, we’ve discussed this before, the limbic brain inside a right-winger or a Republican or a conservative or your average white power activist, the limbic brain is much larger in their headspace than in a reasonable person and it’s pushing against the frontal lobe.

And one may NOT call this bigotry or prejudice of any sort, of course, because a leftist said it.

Chicken of the Sea

Any resemblance they have to a €10 whore is purely accidental.

The fishermen have blocked the ports of Boulogne, Calais and Dunkirk to protest EU fishing quotas, notably of cod and sole in the English Channel and the North Sea. They say that the quotas are too low and that small-scale fishing is dying while fish stocks are robust.

The French minister however has refused to touch the quotas, despite the offer of compensation.

It seems that there is more than one way to exploit the bounty of the waters, and these guys just hit on a way of doing it without getting wet.

After all, who can blame them. Governments that do so much to regulate trades and industries shouldn’t necessarily expect the high regard in which they hold themselves be shared by the subjects over which they rule.

The Pause that Refreshes

For a fan of great old movies, every day is a good day to look back at the artists that made it as good as if was. Here’s one of my favorites – the fabulous and funny Jean Arthur. She had a good a sense of comic timing as she had a tremendous personal reserve.

Later called “the star that nobody knew,” she seemed to detest publicity.

Arthur "retired" when her contract with Columbia Pictures expired in 1944. She reportedly ran through the studio's streets, shouting "I'm free, I'm free!"

If that isn’t great comic timing, I don’t know what is. She later went on to appear in Alan Ladd’s Shane as well as Billy Wilder’s “A Foreign Affair”.

They Still Look Backward to me

The new heights of present-day weirdness are not that different that the heights of warped left authoritarian weirdness of old. Case in point: the 19th Socialist Utopian Edward Bellamy was as obsessed with state control and socialist control over the lives of individuals as he was in love with war for no reason, and using nationalist sentiment to enlarge the power of central government, NOT the actual cohesion of a free society.

It [Bellamy’s book “Looking Backward”] was the third largest bestseller of its time. It appears by title in many of the major Marxist writings of the day. "Nationalist Clubs" sprang up in the USA and worldwide for touting the book's ideas. It was tranlsated into every major language including German, Russian and Chinese. It even influenced socialists in the countries of the socialist Wholecaust (of which the Holocaust was a part): 65 million dead under the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics; 49 million under the Peoples' Republic of China; 21 million under the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSGWP).

Edward influenced his cousin Francis Bellamy, famous for the Pledge of Allegiance, created for promoting their dogma in government schools. The Bellamys admired the military and they wanted the entire economy to ape the military. They called their dogma "military socialism" and "Christian Socialism" and they wanted government to take over all schools and create the "industrial army" from children to spread the Bellamy vision. Francis' early pledge was the origin of the straight-arm salute of the NSGWP, as discovered by the historian Dr. Rex Curry, author of "Pledge of Allegiance Secrets." Shocking photos are on the web.

And to think that the book itself was a fantasy “alternate history” novel of the US in the year 2000 being a Socialist paradise. Does “patriotic taxation’ sound familiar now? Doesn’t it seem to fit better into the historical context of one of its’ ideological cousins, Fascism? Didn’t it seem to transit those great ‘nationalist’ borders though transnational relationships that didn’t seem to want borders for itself as Socialism and Fascism did?

That 19th century idealism sounds an awful lot like the tortured arguments about equalization by destroying wealth and success, or the obsession with executive pay. In fact it sounds like the trained imprint, no less meaningless, no more plausible as to why we need it, and with no more depth, no matter how hard they try now as then:

"I would give a great deal for just one glimpse of the Boston of your day," replied Dr. Leete. "No doubt, as you imply, the cities of that period were rather shabby affairs. If you had the taste to make them splendid, which I would not be so rude as to question, the general poverty resulting from your extraordinary industrial system would not have given you the means. Moreover, the excessive individualism which then prevailed was inconsistent with much public spirit. What little wealth you had seems almost wholly to have been lavished in private luxury. Nowadays, on the contrary, there is no destination of the surplus wealth so popular as the adornment of the city, which all enjoy in equal degree."

The sad thing is that he authored the United States pledge of allegiance.

The irony is that the brutal anonymity with which man was held under past tyrannies is the same as the one promoted by the socialist of old, as well as in the present day as ‘humane’, and the ahuman haters that call themselves ‘progressive’ say this is as much as legacy we have as the enlightenment. Maybe, but so are monarchies, and we no longer see any use for that legacy other as an object lesson of what NOT to do.

Luckily there is a thing called American exceptionalism, one applied to itself and well moderated by those that the likes “social theorists” like Bellamy detested.

Edward's book Equality (1897) shows his disdain for individuality and differences and his desire to make everyone the same. The book did not equal its prequel in success.

Funny thing about academics when they let their guard down. They forget that they aren’t supposed to be on a first name basis with their idols.

What should you name as the most prominent feature of the labor troubles of your day?"

"Why, the strikes, of course," I replied.

"Exactly; but what made the strikes so formidable?"

"The great labor organizations."

"And what was the motive of these great organizations?"

"The workmen claimed they had to organize to get their rights from the big corporations," I replied.

"That is just it," said Dr. Leete; "the organization of labor and the strikes were an effect, merely, of the concentration of capital in greater masses than had ever been known before.

And so the left’s “rhetoric” if you can actually call it that sound suspiciously like it’s been plagiarized, unaware of its’ failed foundations or the fact that it’s largest real-life test, the Communist states degenerated into failure by their precepts, and not by it not going “far enough’ or being “pure enough”.

So in the mean time we can look forward to people today who are ignorant of both history and human nature trying to refashion the way these ideas are implemented. The problem is that the ideas, the phrases, and even the voodoo dolls that they want to take joy sticking pins into - are the same.

Still Making Beeg Trouble for Crazy Moose and Squirrel

From the world’s weirdest police blotter, we discover that it’s no wonder the local males emigrate or drink themselves to death:

The robber, a 32-year-old man identified by Life.ru as "Viktor," burst into the salon at around 5 p.m. waving a pistol and ordered all of the stylists and clients to hit the floor and toss him their money.

At this point, 28-year-old Olga, whom Life.ru describes as a "delicate" girl trained in martial arts, was apparently still standing when she offered to hand over her cash. But when Viktor tried to accept her contribution, Olga surprised him with a quick punch to the chest, knocking the wind out of him before she flipped him to the ground.

Olga proceeded to tie Viktor up with a hair-dryer cord, gagged him and dragged him into a storage room.

Curiously, Life.ru reports, Olga instructed the others to keep working, telling them that the police would soon arrive.

With that same pluck that this region has to offer, what with it having turned out Georgy Zhukov and all, we then discover more about her delicate ways:

She tied him to the radiator with handcuffs covered in frilly pink fabric, gave him some Viagra and had her way with him several times over the next 48 hours. When she finally let him go on the evening of March 16, Viktor had been "squeezed like a lemon,"

Choice pickins, indeed. She had to pay for it too.

"What a jerk," Life.ru quoted her as saying. "Yeah, there were a few times. But I bought him new jeans, gave him food and drink, and gave him 1,000 rubles when he left."

The following day, Olga filed a complaint with police, asking that Viktor be charged in the salon robbery.

It’s no wonder the smart women leave too, many finding being trafficked to Saudi Arabia as “entertainment” a preferable option to having these folks as your neighbors.

First, he went to the hospital to have his injured genitals treated; then he went to police and filed a complaint asking that Olga be brought up on criminal charges for committing "actions of a sexual nature" that left him with injured sexual organs, according to a copy of the complaint posted on Life.ru.

Olga was apparently incensed when she learned of the complaint. She had, after all, even tried to be nice to her purported captive.

She FED him, after all. I guess she’d have to if she needed it THAT bad.

- a tip of the Yshanka to Tim Bleeeah

And Now we Take a Strange Kind of Solace

At Least Billy Carter Wasn’t a Sexual Predator

Of course to the media, silence is golden. Unless your name is Palin.

‘Tis and Age-Old Question, Ducky

Where do I get one of these?

Elsewhere, the Frogman wonders if they make a bigger model for polar bears and manic depressive instruments of the German welfare state.

¡No Pasarán! (sie werden nicht durchkommen)

Teabag the Left

Plantu wants to go Bareback on the Pope

In the spirit of parsing any phrase in favor of emitting any pointless smartass comment to make one sound clued-in, but it brings me back to his parzadox: the one where he insists that SOMEONE ELSE is forcing someone to agree with any view of the world he disagrees with through repetition and exclusion of any alternate viewpoint. Pure Plantu Projection.

The Fantasy: How They See Themselves

Staged PR photo, issued by the European Commission

Essencially, the European Commission took credit for aid given by member states, whether it had anything to do with the Commission or not. But as always, the smug must find something over which to scratch their chins in concern:

"We just recently had figures from a study which we commissioned talking about the cost of non-Europe – bad coordination among donors, bad coordination of our rules. The cost of not having Europe is quite amazing, horrifying according to the initial figures of that study," commissioner Michel said.

In other words, they were guilty of not being European in some way. Besides, this whole “meeting and exceeding of targets” dog and pony show is old hat.

Aid output, that new measure of individual virtue – which is to say taking making an involuntary act of ‘donation’ out of the taxpayers’ money – has dropped.

Could they care less? Yes. They care less. Especially when all your selfless acts are forced on you.

The EU claims it has already met its 2006 target but today's report, which was compiled by more than 1,800 NGOs across Europe, argues that once inflated aid is taken away, genuine aid actually fell far short of the target, only reaching 0.31 per cent. If the current trend continues poor countries will have received €50bn (£34bn) less from Europe by 2010 than they have been promised.

Four countries, Spain, Portugal, Greece and Italy, failed to even reach their promised 2006 targets in the first place. Italy remained the smallest contributor of foreign aid in Europe despite being a G8 member.

As if that what the G8 was even for to begin with.

Misoverestimating

The Doofus of the day is a cartoonist.



Buried deep in so many European minds is a frothing paranoid psychotic who’s sure the world is after them, among other evidence of just how addled the human mind can get and still appear to function. In this case Belgium based German language doodler Ben Heine has clearly been making too much of light entertainment, and has cast the POTUS in his image of a cop engaging in some “good kind of police brutality” on the road to creating a special kind of paradise for European cartoonists. It really doesn’t say much for his view of black people, cops, or Americans, all of which appear to be nothing more than predictable puppets to him: a mile wide and an inch deep.

In the spirit of freeing Tibet with pointless little stickers for decades on end to no effect, his tagline of his life is the delusion that “peace begins with a smile.” Since that kind of passivity has never succeeded once in human history, his failure to see this means that he wins the booby prize.

Are we to Admire their every “Esthetic Achievement”?

One can only wonder what a French author/singer/dancer/man-about-town über-cineaste might possibly mean by “let those who never go to Bavaria speak of romance” in a movie quietly trying to revise the reasons for ending World War II in its’ own perceptually tilted “I hide my lunacy behind my art” kind of way.

Elsewhere, those parroting the same old “red flag/brown shirt” statement of being are working their way up from the bottom by starting in TV. Instead of Jews, they’ve added some variety in their obsessive, self-absorbed lives by getting worked up about KFC.

Le gouvernement américain adore “sous-traiter” ses sales combines par des sociétés “privées”. Comme en Iraq, comme partout. Kentucky Fried Chicken: antenne du Département d’Etat de mémère Clinton ?

As usual, it’s attributed to be a shadowy branch of the State Department and the CIA, and somehow involve capitalism (which otherwise doesn't exist anywhere else, somehow,) and is after them alone. Them - as individuals, just like the shark in Jaws 4 where "this time it's personal". Somehow, I guess this means that they feel like someone cares about them or something.

Cela dit pour ce cas precis, il y a une solution: expulsons KFC hors de france
YANKEE GO HOME!

Same old, same old. Really - get a nap. It might make you feel better.

Lucidity Watch

Berlin, 13 September 2001.

Goehler: “The historian against the psychologist…”

Benz: “They are, after all, also…”

And before Benz can finish his sentence, Goehler shouts:

“They are also phallic! I forgot to say that!” – whereupon uproarious laughter in the amphitheatre completes the humoristic ejaculatio praecox.

A gathering of German intellectuals react. Like disappointed radical feminists of a decade or two earlier. John Rosenthal translates Henryk Broder’s report.

The woman responds that they don’t have to be: “I’m not at all for killing people. But children are starving all over the world and I know where the people are to be found who are responsible for that.” The audience apparently knows too and shows its approval with applause.

So an evening of shared, whipped-up anger at “the house of world cultures” turned out, as everything would in any context the Berlin citizenry would think intellectual, to realistically be less enlightening as a random conversation at the International House of Pancakes.

It ALWAYS comes out smelling and sounding the same. The paucity of reason, facts, and diversity of thought never EVER change. Not now, not 20 years ago, and not likely any time in the distant future. As usual, naming something “the House of World Cultures” is a mask for the single most predictable feature of “iintellectual” European life – the only world culture they have any interest in is a narrow but influential part of their own sub-culture, and any of its’ temporary or ongoing obsessions.

Want to Wreck your Kids’ Lives? Become a Green, Socialist, or Trotskyite

Thanks, once again to our friend the Croydonian – smiter of fools and brigands, for finding another case of political exploitation of every feature of life in that “culture of debate and discussion”.

A scarcely less credible 29% of primary school pupils are finding it all too much too, by their parents reckoning.

Alas there is no comprehensive breakdown of the figures by age cohort, but the figures jump around when measured by region or political allegiance. 36% of Green and Socialist parents judge their offspring stressed, while 19% of Gaullists do. 44% of South Westerners think their children stressed compared to 19% in the eastern Parisian basin, however that is defined.

And what is piling on the pressure? Leading responses are exams and testing - 39%, fear for the future - 31%, a system unsuited to his/her needs - 30%.

Which is to say that being alive is their problem – (the parents’, that is.)

As good little post-modern zombies, the one fact that can’t be grasped, even by the parents is that they’re kids. They only people that can really “stress them out” are their parents and the political paedophiles trying to employ them as a heart-rending data point that, heaven forfend, might be used for something.