Birds of a Feather

In an feverish attempt to find any kind of new public support he can, Bin Laden rants about Global Warming.

He blamed Western industrialized nations for hunger, desertification and floods across the globe, and called for "drastic solutions" to global warming, and "not solutions that partially reduce the effect of climate change."

Bin Laden has mentioned climate change and global warning in past messages, but the latest tape was his first dedicated to the topic. The speech, which included almost no religious rhetoric, could be an attempt by the terror leader to give his message an appeal beyond Islamic militants.

As in: fantasy Anarchists, Greenies, George Monboit, etc., through whose silence about Jihadist megalomania and religious suprematism, he seems to appeal to anyway.

Obviously the message is meant to point out beyond the Muslim Arab world given the incredibly low regard Arab societies largely have for not littering or even so much as using a trashcan if it isn’t to keep your own property clean.

Look, We were just Balancing their Humours

Funny how the normally enraged, all feverishly sweaty from rumor-laden accusations of Israel organ theft in Gaza, an old European blood-libel schtick that never seems to go away, are not even taking notice of involuntary Organ harvesting in Europe.

Marty is investigating claims that former KLA members were involved with the trafficking of organs harvested from imprisoned Serbs during the Kosovo conflict in 1999.

Marty’s visit is “secret and his agenda was not publicized”, reports say.

Also in Priština, EULEX spokesman Christophe Lamfalussy confirmed that Marty is in Kosovo and that we will be meeting with EULEX officials and officials of other organizations.

Will all KLA members who are non-muslims, or don’t go into a fit of mindless rage when they hear the word “Zion” please raised your hand. Anyone? Bueller?

The Council of Europe has sent Swiss investigative super gumshoe Dick “Dick” Marty to Kosovo in secret in the interest of transparency, and with no PR concerns.

After all, only the great Satan and the little Satan could possibly ever be involved in organ harvesting.

Here's your Coat, Here's your Hat. What's your Hurry?

Germans are all, like “Nein, aber ja, oder sowas!“ about their deployment in Afghanistan.

Very peculiar, this German Haltung (position) about sending more troops to Afghanistan.

Wait for it! There’s a punchline.

Can’t Stand Your Own?

With a purponderence of eastern Europeans, Romanian prostitutes dominate. And don’t think that there aren’t too many weedy westerners who aren’t into that kind of thing.

Taking care of business has never been so foreign to western Europeans.

In most western countries, such as Denmark (65%), Finland (69%), Germany (65%), Greece (73%), Italy (90%), Spain (90%), Austria (78%), Belgium (60%), France (61%) and the Netherlands (60%), the vast majority of prostitutes are migrants.

But in economic terms, at least they’re keeping all the sex in the family:

The figures stand in contrast to 2006 when Russia and Ukraine topped the league table.

Why is EVerything a ‘league table’ with these mooks?

La Jalousie et la Haine

Another day, another conflated myth that the rest of the world isn’t playing along with: Le Figaro fuels the obsession with the American intervention in Haiti somehow being about the French. While the crazies are taken at their word, most of the reader comments at this point are calling the bluff to a writer practicing a quiet bigotry of low expectations.

There are over 150 000 dead whose relatives are still suffering. The country is devastated.

But French media are stunned by the small U.S. presence. Small, because this presence, even if it doubled, would still not enough to secure the country. (The others such as France will not send more, which is criminal).

This article is about phantom international diplomats, to hide the fact that it is the journalist doing the talking.

While they were talking NEEDLESSLY of the U.S. presence in Haiti, a presence requested by the Haitians, we do not speak of Haitians’ dead, suffering relatives of the dead, and survivors suffering with poverty. It's despicable.

And this journalist ends by insulting the Haitians. Nobody is forcing Haitians to accept anything from anyone.

Stop your indirect racism. The Haitians have ANY power over Haiti they want to pursue.

And typical to Euro-think, they seem surprised when Haitians tell them that they want to rebuild, and can’t seem to make a distinction between the national notion of Haiti (presumably saying something), and Haitians telling them something. It comes from a “Risk game board mentality” about the world, spiked with the nationhood rhetoric that brackets their little world.

What comes out the other end of this beast is the commentary of armchair revolutionaries along with the basic, common sense of those who seem rather able to get the gyst of those with an accusatory tone. In the conversation which turned to a fear that Haitians rebuilding their own country after the earthquake, the typical argumentative hostility turned to corruption with the idea that Haitians can’t be trusted.

We should recolonize them first, because the independence already recognized and established since 1804 isn’t to be taken very seriously.

Strange that the commenter can’t seem to remember the basis of the Haitian rebellion, the half-century of usury that they had to pay thereafter, or from whom it was they were seeking their independence.

In light of the need to see things work, the hatred of the ‘take charge’ Americans yielded to the resignation that it should just be a de facto American protectorate for a while, because even the American military force was just a drop in the bucket in a nation of almost 10 million people.

About French aid - this will be a blow to the U.S. and a chance for France, which offers aid and its’ fellowship

It sounds oddly like they are fighting a cold war, taking up the goals of the now defunct Soviet Union, perfectly willing to use Haitians as a tool to... wait for it... render a blow to America – in particular an America that doesn’t seek to take notice of this attitude projected toward them, and discounts it as a fantastic raving no different than some other lunacy last week.

Case in point, these comments are passionless and eclipsed enormously by another article drawing the reader attention: a short item about how the US is a magnet of many people’s conspiratorial ire.

Festooned with the canned 9-11 Truther rhetoric, you can take a kind of sick pleasure in the consistent ease of replication that the subject gets, decade after decade, year after year.

Of course these arguments are credible! Besides, now everyone (except the journalists of Figaro) knows that the U.S. knew about Pearl Harbor and let it happen. We also know that they have carried out coups in South America. We also know that they have funded and armed bin Laden and the Taliban against the USSR. All this we know, it’s PROVEN. So when the towers fall at the speed of free fall, when you can not find any airplane wreckage in the Pentagon and the FBI confiscated all the pictures, when the official version does not even mention the tower 7 and well one wonders, because we are not sheep! And in any case anti-conspiracy "that support the official account are suckers because the official theory is that a PLOT was planned in the caves of Afghanistan.

Ah, stock rhetoric – a comfort food for the feeble-minded and those with an (aptly named) Napoleon complex. After all, we all know that the Soviets weren’t doing anything in South America to cause revolts, that any other events that take place, that don’t fit the conspiratorial idea that picking anything that seems related to fit into a ‘cause and effect’ model of how reality should work CAN’T be perturbed by real events.

Much as the effect continues with the stranger among the French and Venezuela over aid to victims in Haiti, so it seems to work with “Truther” logic, that hits the wall when something needs to actually be done – when some course of action has to take place, and when consequences and responsibilities for ones’ own actions or even assertions come into play.

Then, what you were more than willing to castigate as “occupation”, suddenly seems okay, because the fantasy is perturbed again by reality. Even raving lunatics who still go on about some theory about the attack on Pearl Harbor two generations ago eventually get mugged by reality.

There seems to be no end to the Scientific Quackery of Greens

It’s change you can believe in... in fact all it IS is a belief:

The claim by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), that global warming is already affecting the severity and frequency of global disasters, has since become embedded in political and public debate. It was central to discussions at last month's Copenhagen climate summit, including a demand by developing countries for compensation of $100 billion (£62 billion) from the rich nations blamed for creating the most emissions.

Ed Miliband, the energy and climate change minister, has suggested British and overseas floods — such as those in Bangladesh in 2007 — could be linked to global warming. Barack Obama, the US president, said last autumn: "More powerful storms and floods threaten every continent."

In the wake of the non-meltdown of the Himalayan icecaps that display a meltdown in the practice of ‘activist-science’, we find further truthy-truthiness:

It based the claims on an unpublished report that had not been subjected to routine scientific scrutiny — and ignored warnings from scientific advisers that the evidence supporting the link too weak. The report's own authors later withdrew the claim because they felt the evidence was not strong enough.

That it would cost $100 billion or some part of $100 billion matters little to those who insist that ‘we have to do something!’ and shove it through in a manner reminiscent of Genghis Khan. In fact we don’t, especially when another $100 billion will not be able to be found to do something real, and founded on, at the very least, something founded partially in fact if that’s at all possible.

It’s urban myth as science, not to mention the fact that it feeds the racketeering.

The IPCC had warned that climate change was likely to melt most of the Himalayan glaciers by 2035 -- an idea considered ludicrous by most glaciologists. Last week, a humbled IPCC retracted that claim and corrected its report.

However, the same bogus claim has been cited in grant applications for TERI. One of them, announced earlier this month, resulted in the $US500,000 grant from Carnegie. An extract from the grant application published on Carnegie's website said: "The Himalaya glaciers, vital to more than a dozen major rivers that sustain hundreds of millions of people in South Asia, are melting and receding at a dangerous rate.

"One authoritative study reported that most of the glaciers in the region `will vanish within 40 years as a result of global warming, resulting in widespread water shortages'."

The Carnegie money was specifically given to aid research into "the potential security and humanitarian impact on the region" as the glaciers began to disappear. Dr Pachauri has since acknowledged that this threat, if it exists, will take centuries to have any serious effect.

It’s telling that to the political environmentalists who are actually seeking a revolutionary seizure of the control people can have over their fate, that this standard is adequate: i.e. the incorporation in whole of a WWF article into the IPCC report asserting that, unlike previous assumptions, the Amazon go from forest to savannah the next time you look at them, and that Jesus will strangle a puppy if mankind doesn’t ‘at least do something. Veracity of the source?

The two expert authors of the WWF report so casually cited by the IPCC as part of its, ahem, “robust” “peer-reviewed” process weren’t even Amazon specialists. One, Dr PF Moore, is a policy analyst.

Yeah, but he’s, like, a Doctor, ya know?

And the lead author Andy Rowell is a freelance journalist (for the Guardian, natch) and green activist.

Activist with a private line into print, scientist... repeat that often enough, and you’ll be expected to believe it.

And the Meme Goes on

Dissipating even in the usual quarters, ”Occupation fever” is still all the rage at Le Monde. It’s grown obsessive enough that Sarkozy is being accused of giving in to the imaginary dialogue French sentiment thinks it’s having with “Barak”

Mr Sarkozy puts the emphasis on the international conference he wants to call, even if the U.S. Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, who wants to work step by step, openly thought the idea premature. M. Sarkozy avait annoncé au début du drame qu'il se rendrait en Haïti "dans quelques semaines" . Mr Sarkozy had announced earlier that he would address Haiti "in a few weeks".

Presumably to appear to be doing a great deal by “calling a conference”, even if you’re trying to look like you’re being caring and generous on the evidence of other peoples’ resources.Les liens historiques entre la France et Haïti ne figurent pas en haut de la liste des priorités de Barack Obama .

But following closely is the most absurdly arrogant thing I’ve ever heard:

The historical ties between France and Haiti are not top of the priority list of Barack Obama. Le président américain est peu tourné vers l'Europe. The U.S. president is not facing Europe. Il a fait d'Haïti une cause du continent américain. He has made Haiti an issue of the American continent. Sans être mauvaise, sa relation personnelle avec M. Sarkozy n'est pas excellente. While not bad, his personal relationship with Mr. Sarkozy is not excellent. Mardi, une source gouvernementale brésilienne déclarait à l'AFP que Barack Obama avait suggéré au président brésilien Lula da Silva que les Etats-Unis, le Brésil et le Canada assument "le leadership de la coordination des donateurs" . On Tuesday, a Brazilian government source told AFP that Barack Obama had suggested to the Brazilian President Lula da Silva that the United States, Brazil and Canada assume "the leadership of donor coordination. Pas un mot sur la France. Not a word about France.

Tailoring policy to the historical ties between Haiti and France, especially when the relationship was that of operating is as a slave colony, are assumed to be an American responsibility in the middle of dealing with a humanitarian crisis.

Apparently, the only way to make the crocodile tears go away, is for the US to help Haiti less so as to alleviate the misery of the Élysee on the pretext of constructing maximum PR Kumbaya. If they feel that so strongly about their connection with Haiti, why don’t they put that energy into helping Haiti instead of baiting the United States? Simple: the French public has thought rarely of and cared little for Haiti normally, except as a tourist destination where part of the entertainment involves getting a giggle out of the Creole language. The ties aren’t that strong, even with the sure-to-be forthcoming declaration that “we’re all Haitian”.

The Le Monde reader commentary, on the other hand, ranges from kind to feral to foggy, with blatherings of the sort that reflects on opinions and outburst as their assumed basis in fact.

Still, it’s strange that even the Haitians are very afraid of this American influence, especially since it seems that Americans are more preoccupied with putting their men to distributing water and food. Go to the U.S. sites and you'll see.

How DARE they undermine these people by making them dependant on their food and water! And look at that website! They’re claiming to NOT be doing what we say they are!

However it should come as no surprise to see that in large part the sacrifices nations make to aid those in need are seen as nothing more than a great game, one that needs to be one for no reason other than megalomaniacal fantasies of world domination that too many Europeans harbor with no explanation of purpose. They just want to tap Mami because they want to tell themselves that they can.

There’s only one option to act big and to live up to the Americans diplomatically and operationally: Europe. No offense to adherents of the "Grande Nation", but this requires compromise. Otherwise we choose to stay pure, independent and go unheard.

Who knew that the tragedy of the Haitians could ever be all about them! So much so, that outsourcing their inaction to the other Europeans becomes an option - with the hope that it will make them fit the strange obsession found widely that they should be some kind of masters of the universe.

It has absolutely nothing to do with wanting to make an effort to be effective and helpful in the world, it is clearly a fascination with having power over others, such as it was with the notion of a French rider on a German Horse, thinking that the horse would willingly by ridden.

Much in the way a portrait becomes a mirror, it explains the clinging to the obsessions they have about American capacity to act being malevolent. That invective is symptom of the accuser’s world view. That they can align with the opinions of unworkable notions of “world peace” is nearly irrelevant. The objective is not bearing responsibility or the satisfaction of putting an effort into doing what you can for the sake of the world, it’s to seek the thrill of having some kind of power over people who don’t look or sound like you.

Maintaining their Gross National Moral Vanity

"Clinton found it possible to go to Haiti, and I think that the European Union has to be there on the spot. Not just in the sidelines."

- Daniel Cohn-Bendit, identifying the
value Haitian misery has the Europe

Despite Joyandet’s “constructive” criticism and implausible image recovery effort, the reflexive complainers are given to complain that the Americans aiding in the operation of the airfield at Port-au-Prince are “killing people” by cruelly forcing to pause the landing of 2 aircraft from Mexico, 1 from Argentina, and 1 from France, it has, in fact, been forced to land grandstanders of every sort who are jamming the very limited capacity of the field with “inspection visit” photo ops.

Those drawing away the air field’s capacity have included this quickly found sample:

EU international policy Manchurian candidate Baroness Ashton, who was rushed there to lend “visibility” to the EU.

French ‘International Cooperation’ Minister Alain “go with you gut accusartion” Joyandet himself, who returned on 16-January to the nation popular among the French as a tourist destination.

Unintelligible über-twit John Conyers, D-Michigan, on 15-January, quicker than the aftershocks, presumably finding facts that 12000 civil servants and troops cannot find without his stunning skills.

EU's development commissioner, Karel De Gucht, despite the fact that there is nothing there to develop yet, other than potential rioting, and a need to maintain appearance of involvement, jammed tarmac notwithstanding.

Ban Ki Moon, parachuted in despite having 9000 UN personnel in place even prior to the quake. Many of whom were rescued by the 82nd Airborne, and other fixations of “occupation” narrative.

A Lebanese Foreign Minister guy who somehow got there in time to “receive a Lebanese delegation” bringing aid, but only for their own nationals and those of Lebanese heritage.

Jamaica's football Captain Horace Burrell representing FIFA.

Etcetera, and so forth with the critical fact finding disaster tourism that couldn’t possibly be getting in the way of aid flying in.

Haiti by the Numbers: Governments’ Aid

Having quickly swept through the data as the UN has provided it as of Tuesday, the 19th, the extent to which EU member states are rendering aid to Haitians should give the rather predictable European critics of the US pause.

EU member state governments: $119,895,596, or $0.27 per head of population, or 49.36% of that of the US government with $163,905,019, or $0.54 per capita. This does not include American aid in kind which was last indicated to be in the area of 12000 civilian and military personnel, and rising rapidly, nor does it include the material support of feeding stations, field hospitals, aviation support, ships, helicopters, or heavy and light equipment.

The unfunded commitments, which history tells us we are likely to never see once Anderson Cooper stops trying to show off his pecs, are as follows:

EU member state governments: $89,016,697
The United States government: $150,000

I guess it all Depends on What the Meaning of “Already is” is

Pursuant to the familiar Eurolandish “crowding out” effect of member states in International fora and GONGOs, with multiple seats representing member states speaking to the EU, Luxembourg’s Jean-Claude Juncker proposed that the EU join the G20:

Mr Juncker also said the European Commission was set to formally propose that the eurogroup become a member of the Group of 20 major economies and that a small secretariat of "four to five" civil servants would be set up in the Council of Ministers building in Brussels to prepare the currency club's monthly meetings.

Which is an interesting request, given that the EU already is, adding one more fat head that the three they already have in the form of representation of Germany, the UK, and France.

This isn’t mania. It’s a willful desire to punch above their weight with the assistance of those they’re punching.

Somehow, the displacement of the G8 by the G20 was also positive for the EU, at least for two reasons. First, Brussels is officially the 20th member of the G20, while it was only the 9th member of the G8. To many, this might only be a symbolic nuance, as in both cases the EU has the same "rights" and "obligations" as the other members minus the right to chair and host summits and therefore no capacity to fully shape the agenda.

But in international politics, rhetoric and the choice of words are never innocent. This means that the G20 is arguably a recognition of the "emerging" or "global power" status of the EU in international affairs as much as that of China, India or Brazil.

As an emerging state, are they looking for people to come show their children how to brush their teeth? Dig wells? Train their peasants in basic agricultural practices?

One of the key challenges of this decade will be to see how the West, and more specifically how the EU will deal with this rising multipolarity. Indeed, it is in the interest of the EU – not to say a matter of survival – to promote an international order based on systemic and rule-based multilateralism because the EU is simply unable to play realpolitik with other global players.

However, not all forms of multilateralism are favourable to the EU. For instance, the formation of ad hoc bilateral or multilateral alliances could potentially be damaging to Europe. A G-2 between China and America, for example, would slowly but inevitably make the US lean towards Asia, and render Europe increasingly irrelevant.

Perhaps they haven’t been paying attention for 20 years. The US already leans towards Asia and has to drag Europe around like a millstone around its’ neck... No, what would be beneficial to humanity is to cease, for perfunctory procedural reasons, continue over-representing Europe by counting each member state + the EU when their scale doesn’t justify it having ‘the entity’ holding 28 representatives for every ONE Indian, Chinese, Brazilian, Russian, or American delegate or vote. If they DO want some form of fantasy ‘singular global democratic order’, why then does the rest of humanity have to live by the “1/28th rule” when all they seem to use it for is self-aggrandizing rulemaking gang rape?

Look at it in Essence

Last night, Bay Staters spoke for Americans when they pushed back against Revolutionary Crypto-Socialism, especially the Trotskyite-style chaos that Obama’s entourage have used to get us here.

Now the left can go back to forming grassy knoll theories about why they aren’t taken seriously, even by Democrats in a state like Massachusetts.

People are sick of having policy shoved down their throat, only to be mocked, patronized, and told that it’s good for them.

Strictly Speaking Stalin was also the Man of Steel

In the familiar form of the colloquial character, Superman isn’t, per se, either a raving Socialist with Maoist tendencies, nor a degradingly bad south Asian film production.



It’s a bird! No, it’s a plane! No! They’re doing that ‘changing a lightbulb’ dance!

It’s actually hard to be sarcastic with some of this stuff. Besides, I always preferred those ‘change the lightbulb’ dance moves.

The Usual Drip-feed of Back-handed Hatefulness Starts Again in Europe

I suspect that is has more to do with a unconscious maintaining of unsupportable illusions about self regard, wanting, more than anything, that they have a larger place in the world than they really do anything to deserve.

“Cooperation Minister” Alain Joyandet, a post only needed where one trying to repair generalized dysfunction, implied rather childishly that because they couldn’t wedge a French aircraft carrying a field hospital in right away, that the US military was “occupying Haiti”. This, of course fires up the usual nonsense you hear about some Europeans’ favorite straw man. So much so that the subtext does not need to be signaled to the public immune to the evidence of just WHO is supplying the bulk of assistance to Haiti and WHERE THEY COME FROM.

Clearly slamming the US with their inability to take, what is in effect, a cow-patch and magically give it the capacity of O’Hare.

Given that I heard today from CNBC's London business news operation an innumeration of who's gone into Haiti, mentioning EU and US GOVERNMENT donation PLEDGES, and that there are 9000 "UN aid workers" and 2000 Marines "on the way". No mention was made of those funny grey aircraft and ships from some unknown nation, or those 6500 men and women in green with US flags on their right shoulders from –gee, some unidentified nation- or the fact that the vast majority of aid is being provided by independent American charities and the US and Canadian militaries.

Also unmentioned the myriad of other national governments, militaries, and aid organizations that have poured in, even if the efforts are comparitively symbolic, the luvvies are usually fond of trying to mention something like the one aircraft of aid that thug autocrat Hugo Chavez sent -first-.

To correct CNBC London: far more than the 200 Marines mentioned are on the way, and the 6500 or the 7000 “UN troops” mentioned yesterday by Ban Ki Moon are American, “helmetized” to the omission of their origin in the press. Let’s hope that they can improve the image of the U.N. Peacekeeper

As to the attribution made to the United states, I didn't know that being there and not being there was concurrently possible.

I am also never surprised by the emotionalized crypto-political exploitation that props up in 'humanist circles' when Americans are being forthcoming, and their favored proxies and vessels of their inert hopes are failing miserably to do as is wished by their egos.

Amusingly we find a French poster at the Puffington Host who leaps to find in the usual fog of unrelated accusation about how “the US did nothing in Bosnia” and the Asian Tsunami disaster, sour grapes about France-bashing, as though there was no cause for it in the pleasure so many Europeans have shown to be taking in Joyandet’s comment.

As is usual with the likes of these folks, their interest in humanity is self-declared, the desire to respect the autonomy of cultures comes right out the next time you pull the ring on the doll’s back, and finally you have the statement “I’m a big fan of American politics” implying that they know a great deal about American society – more than Americans, should they ever try to explain it to her:

The US army is a lot about image, and posturing (see hollywood movies) but they lack of a good intelligence division.

See? It’s all right there in the MOVIES! Everything you ever wanted to know, (or want to assume is true)! See! See! Not only that, anything I happen to think is also about anything and everything else a fevered mind can relate to it!

We were right about Irak, our forces ar doing great in Somalia, our secret services has every terror plot dismantled here in France (and believe me we are at risk). Why? Because they do not brag, they do not posture and the get the job done.

They do NOT get the job done, and if the line above was not bragging of the “but I... I... THINK my imaginary American foil brags to my hateful satisfaction!”, do please clear up WHAT it’s meant to imply.

Further we find the near mechanical display of “let’s make this work one way” nonsense, where a “diverse” humanity is expected through the derision of people who name themselves “ImissKitten,” to think monolithically about life.

I'm a US political junkie, and I'm amazed by Americans poor judgment sometimes, but I respect you.
So stay classy.

She clearly does NOT respect people that she believes are so two-dimensional compared to herself that they are little different than characters in emotionally loaded characters in film fiction.

Let’s get this back into perspective. Many of the comments at the Grauniad, UK’s Telegraph, and Le Monde, imply that it’s a dispute or disagreement such and such is having with the U.S. It isn’t. It is the usual raft of cheap accusations aimed at the United States by armchair critics at the expense of the suffering.

Humanity is Expected to play a Role for the Sake of the European Ego

”US Imposing it’s leadership”



The vision is ALWAYS about passive-aggressive hostility, even in a humanitarian crisis. Always, employing the ‘poor little me’ routine familiar to child psychology therapists treating emotional manipulative behaviour.

‘Global Warming’ Research no Differnt that Aryan Science

The world’s ‘best and brightest’ were to provide political leaders with the best science possible. The problem is that once it goes into the patronage mill of global NGOs and activists, what you get is the worst advise possible from social engineers with ulterior motives.

Two years ago the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a benchmark report that was claimed to incorporate the latest and most detailed research into the impact of global warming. A central claim was the world's glaciers were melting so fast that those in the Himalayas could vanish by 2035.

That this wild, unsupported allegation was previously obfuscated with the off-hand apologia that what they really meant was the year 2350 says more about the year zero authoritarianism hiding behind the friendly sounding ‘oopsie! My bad!’ that pops up every time anyone so much as scratches the surface of the allegations that mankind can somehow hack the climate into either destruction or has the leverage to alter it in the way these crackpots think.

In the past few days the scientists behind the warning have admitted that it was based on a news story in the New Scientist, a popular science journal, published eight years before the IPCC's 2007 report.

If these hypocrites want us to live like the Amish, they should probably abide by their example of having a low opinion of liars.

It has also emerged that the New Scientist report was itself based on a short telephone interview with Syed Hasnain, a little-known Indian scientist then based at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi.

Hasnain has since admitted that the claim was "speculation" and was not supported by any formal research.

- 1999: spaghetti thrown at wall, allegation repeated in 2003 and 2005 by IPCC and WWF in the process or providing political leaders with the best science possible.
- 21 December 2009: claim debunked
9 January 2010: called ‘voodoo science’ in a slow, implausible covering action by IPCC Chairman Rajendra Pachauri, Lord High Executioner of the carbon cult.

I Always Knew that they were into Greek

Berlin's international Green Week fair is a showcase for agricultural produce from around the world. Yet few products from developing countries make it to the EU due to high import tariffs and strict standards.

Right after you get the weekly lecture on how marvelously humane and global they are, and some teenager or middle aged kook gives you their fair-trade pitch, Europeans go right back to making the world’s poor grab their ankles and take some more of Europe’s precious artisanal terroirism.

Issa Ouedraogo from Ghana has as a dream.

[ ... ]

Neighboring African countries as well as Europe could become a lucrative market for Ouedaogo and other small farmers in developing countries. But the high import taxes charged by the EU pose a major impediment to international trade.

Which would be fine if they didn’t get so caught up objectifying third world peasant farmers as pitiable victims and just buy their goods.

Critics have been arguing that the tariff policy exploits developing countries as suppliers of cheap, unprocessed food products without giving them a fair chance on the European market.

Oh! Just think of all of those horrible Food Miles!

And now for something completely different:

It Takes a Village

...to turn a garden variety musicologist into a mass murderer.

During World War II, the famous German musicologist Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht belonged to the Feldgendarmerie division 683, which committed horrific murders on the Crimean peninsular [sp.]

You’ll likely not fail to note the “social cohesion measure” required to defeat the natural morality of formerly capable independent thinkers:

Various units were assigned to the operation. The process, which was at once collective and based on the division of labour, and in which all positions were in constant rotation, was obviously intended to vindicate the perpetrators. Feelings of individual guilt and responsibility could potentially be made to disappear within a large collective of perpetrators.

How About this for a Trip through the Wayback Machine ?

Although I’m still trying to wrap my brain around this strange German fetish.

The Return of the Reeperbahn Donkey Show

As opposed to them wanting to see them published well in advance:

CIA Had Secret Plan to Kidnap German-Syrian Suspect in Hamburg

Behind the usual wooden SPONglish journalism, we discover that all they are doing it parroting a Vanity Fair article founded on merely thinking about it:

The CIA official said, “That would have been absolutely impossible in a country like Germany.”

But a CIA agent who was active in Germany at the time admitted to the magazine that the US secret services had considered kidnapping suspected al-Qaida activists in Germany and that this had been weighed up for Darkazanli.

Considered, you see, is more than enough for the bright lights of the press to tacitly root for an al Queda victory by rallying around a man wanted in Spain as well as the US, who took refuge in Germany. Unmentioned in the piece was that Darkazanli was linked to the Hamburg cell as a financier.

Shortly after the supposed assassination plot was made public, Christoph Ahlhaus, the interior minister of the city-state of Hamburg and a member of the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU), called upon the German government to demand an explanation from Washington. As a result, parliament's domestic affairs committee and the parliamentary control committee, which is in charge of monitoring Germany's intelligence services, will look at the accusations, as will the public prosecutor's office in Hamburg.

While that’s a long way to go on a mere press report, this business of Germany protecting terrorists from reprisal for their actions has a familiar ring to it. The DDR trained and sheltered Abu Daoud, planner of the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre who headed a group calling itself Black September. In reality they were Fatah men operating under the orders of Yassir Arafat.

The same goes for Abu Nidal, and the Libyan agents who carried out the Lockerbie - Pan Am 103 bombing and the La Belle Disco bombing and attempted to murder a US Diplomat posted to the DDR, even credentialling the terrorists as Diplomats.

Providing cover for the sake of a misplaced ideological grumbling is nothing new.

Teheran’s Willing Idiots Work for ZDF

This past summer, however, the German public television network ZDF shook up the seasonal television doldrums with a sensational three-part documentary titled simply The Bomb. Broadcast over three evenings in late July and early August, it was hosted (and co-written) by ZDF's star primetime news anchor, the ever dour Claus Kleber. The tone of the 132-minute documentary is downright apocalyptic, promising nothing less than the "end of the world" if the nuclear issue is not tackled swiftly. To emphasize the urgency, each episode begins with a countdown recited by small children from around the world and interspersed with images of missiles and jet-fighters and mushroom clouds--and then a control panel switch being turned to "launch."

Writing in the Weekly Standard, John Rosenthal covers the oh-ho-hum manner in which blame and wishful hatred are bandied about in Europe. A ZDF “reporter” asks leading questions to the wife of nuke-monster A. Q. Khan, so that she can pedantically repeat the question “so just who was it that has actually used a nuclear weapon?”

The purpose, is to convince them that the launch is NOT on them, and that whoever does harm the precious bubble of illusions they live in, that it’s really the fault of the United States. After all, the warm, amniotic fluid in that bubble is so comforting that it justifies the lies on tells oneself.


Like everything ginned up in that kind of environment, it only works for them when it’s freed of both context and reason: Hiroshima is mentioned without Nan Jing, or the cost to the Japanese people and Americans of not forcing a Japanese surrender with the 2 atomic weapons dropped on Japan.


Rosenthal:

For the overriding message of The Bomb is that the nuclear threat is not constituted by Iran, North Korea, and other potential rogue possessors of nuclear weapons, but by the established nuclear powers and first and foremost by the United States. According to the odd sort of nuclear theology proposed by the film, it is the United States that committed the original sin by developing the first nuclear weapons, and the current risk of proliferation is merely the consequence of America's transgression.

The viewer gets a first hint of this tenet barely two minutes into the film. Kleber is touring New York harbor with a police patrol boat assigned to protect the city from potential nuclear terror attacks. "The consequences of the Manhattan Project, the construction of the first bomb, come back to haunt its inventors--as a weapon of terror," Kleber intones.

The consequences of the Manhattan Project? It is as if the Manhattan Project occurred in a vacuum rather than in the midst of the Second World War, with America racing to beat Nazi Germany to the bomb

ZDF’s purpose is to repeat the cheap, passive-aggression that has been a mainstay of politicized “journalism” in Europe for the past 20 years, whatever the cost or consequences are to the capacity of Europe’s population to judge the risk of an expansive, desperate, violent, Iranian government armed with nukes.

ZDF’s Kleber, with the stubbornness of an unruly child, can’t help but fantasize about an imaginary history where the Genie, could somehow, through the force of his delusions, go back into the bottle, and that wishing REALLY hard will change the tactical stance of the Iranians and the jihadist network. Like all elementary illusions, it requires a kind of taking sides which inevitable demands that he believe that a new and peaceful world comes to those that give in to the wishes of those who mean to kill them. The Japanese Empire need to have been held up as a harmless distraction. The Soviets need to be thought of as having wanted nothing to do with the rest of the world.
Bear in mind that Germany is and was the sort of place where as an American youngster, I would get people yelling at me and my sort of similar age about the Vietnam war or HiroshimaNagasakiBiteBiteBite which had ended when I was 8, as though I had something to do with it. It was a perfectly normal reaction, one that convinced the antagonist that they were not just on the side of the humane, but “politically aware” to shout down those who won’t do anything about that exercise of hatred.

You really need to do a lot to buy into it, and not caused by Kleber’s position, but has been long accepted as a given among many Germans. All Kleber does is pander to it, and inadvertently reinforce it with what he is surely telling himself is “challenging,” heartfelt, and “daring” rapportage. In reality, all it is, is the overpouring of emotionalized rhetoric posing as reason.

"For his nuclear program, Ahmadinejad can always play the national card," Kleber says over images of the Iranian president reviewing a military parade: "This is to say, the memory that Iraq invaded Iran"--and then after a dramatic pause--"with American help." The "with American help" is tossed out without any substantiation or explanation. The viewer is given no idea in what the alleged American help is supposed to have consisted. What we do know, however, is that the Iranians themselves received American help: the covert arms shipments at the heart of the Iran-contra scandal. The film makes no mention of this fact.

As if the bits and pieces of that past that matter rather selectively to Kleber will be what is driving Ahmedinejad.

Talk about ‘fighting the last war’ – Kleber and the many tear-swollen psychophants that think like him are still marching in a 50 year old protest, trying to kick a familiar strawman, and doing all the other pathetic things one looks back on after things that they could never imagine go badly wrong at the expense of those they are pretending to heroically ‘protect’.

Notes on Propaganda

New EU Foreign ministry grand poobah, and former CND flunky campaigner Catherine Ashton, we are told was “getting tough” everyplace where it counts. Who’s getting the wood shampoo from the EU?

The EU's new foreign relations chief, Catherine Ashton, was hard on Iran but cautious on Israel and Russia in a lively hearing with MEPs on Monday (11 January).

Except she wasn’t getting tough with who she was “getting tough” with.

The three-hour-long event at the European Parliament in Brussels kicked off a series of 26 hearings with commission nominees that is to culminate in a plenary vote later this month on the new EU executive as a whole.

It’s different when you have to tell that to Medvedev Putin or Ahmedinejad, and not a plenary session of plenary sessionists summitting to plan a summit, to take place definitely some time in the indefinite future.

It is to be noted that this EU-3 “tough talk” routine with Iran has been going on for almost a decade, buying Iran enough time and cover to keep on truckin’!

And with Offices Equipped with 'Central Bong"

Proof enough for the French, I suppose. The success of marketing the idea of the nation beyond all plausibility goes on unfettered.

'The French love little window boxes filled with flowers, tidy gardens, pretty sidewalk cafes, and clean streets. Cities are well tended and with little crime.'

To punctuate the silliness of this survey, of the top 25 ranked nations, only 4 aren’t in Fortress Europe. Published by an Ireland based puffy travel magazine, this is by, for and of Europe’s image of self.

One also wonders what USA or Canada they’re looking at, given their breadth and variety, given that 12 of “nations” listed have a population less than that of Metro New York.



The other thing they “love” as much as tidy streets and window boxes, two things that have a museum-like air of rarity in every French city I’ve been to, is to make any attempt possible to compare their high culture to others’ low culture.

Prudence's new Dictatorship

The French parliament has written into law a broad, unenforceable piece of legislation rigged up entirely for gal-Queda type feminists specifically outlawing mental abuse in marriage (interspecies or otherwise) in the same way that ‘hate crimes’ work – wherein one kind of murder victim is somehow more special than some other kind of murder victim on grounds of some sort of ‘social justice’ status.

There have long been laws against physical abuse of spouses, but France has gone a significant step further and criminalized “psychological violence” between men and women.

The law, which will apply to couples both married and unmarried who cohabit, was promulgated to coincide with the United Nations’ 10th International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women and will take effect within six months.

The irony is that this announcement stuff, and shove a law through stuff is seen domestically as a way of practicing über-skilled Machiavellian foreign policy, even if the whole worldly, caring-looking “behold my poop stinks not” thing is internationally forgotten by next 10:27 tomorrow morning. It’s a euro win-win when there are even minutes of that touchy-feely satisfaction that comes with passing a new social measure, followed by decades of joy taken in circumventing it later.

Surely making the entire law subjective is the recently publish finding by French psychologist Maryse Vaillant who is pandering to the complex of calling the rest of humanity prudish under some rationalization or another.

At their wedding in 1983, when the mayor began reciting the vows of "fidelity, aid and support", she said Mr Besson commented: "Fidelity, no."

Miss Brunel, although "humiliated", convinced the shocked mayor it was a joke. He was, she claims, unfaithful for five years before their marriage and 25 years afterwards, adding: "I can't say I wasn't warned."

Mr Besson has been dubbed "the Traitor" by the opposition Socialists whom he deserted to join President Nicolas Sarkozy's cabinet. He left his wife soon after for a woman "almost as young as our eldest daughter" and who "oozed narcissism from every pore of her pretty skin", according to his ex-wife.

Mr Besson described her book as "shameless". She hit back, saying: "What's shameless is the way you've treated me for 30 years."

Years. Abuse. She’s got a case there under the new law, I would say. Nonetheless in the vacuum of “gee that sounds nice for this week’s afticle”, some ‘sex guru’ quack writer has called the acceptance of philandering ‘pragmatic’.

Elsewhere, NPR’s America audience, which often seems to be made up what seems entirely of family therapist types of one kind or another, likely see in it another meal ticket.

If Psychological Abuse In Couples Is Criminalized, Treatment Will Be Key

Don’t worry, folks – if the history of lefty nanny state measures is anything to go by, the definition of ‘abuse’ will be expanded to make this whole thing into another legal or financial instrument, fashioning the whole thing into a venal burden on the former family’s earnings and savings, and surely infantilize another couple of million citizens.

Success is easier to achieve in counseling for psychological abuse, Stosny says, than in cases of physical abuse. With physical abuse, he says, there's often "traumatic bonding" between the parties.

Sometimes, with some life-experience, and the taking of ones’ own life seriously, the bonding isn’t traumatic. Can you write up a law to cover that?

In a report from the appropriately named Eleanor Beardsley, it’s all, as always about those special isolated cases, and never, ever, open to a future of the kind of abuse that will actually make people stop taking abuse seriously. In the land of pretend-bombast where men often pretend to be given to abusiveness as a way of exerting their adulthood (something ‘Anglo-Saxons’ are much less prone to,) how many days will it take to hear a bunch of these guys saying “well then keep it physical!”

Billard rejects critics who say the new law would allow couples to be hauled in for having an argument. She says it must be proved that the abuse is repeated and done with the intention of destroying the victim's dignity.

Which also brings to mind the ‘therapeutic stance’ of accepting that BDSM is okay if can intimidate your partner into consent? It is, after all, all about metal abuse and conditioning. Or is it prudish to otherwise believe that THAT kind of abuse must, for reasons of being socially non-judgmental, be held aside as a special, edgy and hip legal class? I mean, just when was it that the all-knowing therapeutic do-gooder left dragged us back to the Victorian age where the population had social strictures that a social elite could avoid?

Their Own Private Idaho

At yet another fake, loony, long desiccated transnational meal-ticket so loved by Euro-polity we make an interesting discovery. The OSCE (Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe) will be chaired by rotating head-cheese of the cheese board, Kasakhstan.

Human Rights Watch, another one of those things loved by Euro-polity, find the place to have an atmosphere of quiet repression. Quiet repression and self-important international bureaucracies – it’s a continental wet dream if there ever was one.

Slated to become the OSCE chairman in 2010, Kazakhstan will join the leading trio in 2009 already. It follows that it has just under a year to launch certain changes indicating that the Kazakh leadership means to keep its promises to Europe. As it turned out at the meeting in Brussels, however, the EU is upset by Kazakhstan's idleness these last two months or so. Kajegeldin informed Ferrero-Waldner that everything actually depends on President Nursultan Nazarbayev who only has to make his will known to have the tame parliament adopt all necessary amendments to the acting legislation.

So, as you see, a “tame parliament” is to be considered a good thing by Bruxellois trying to ram something through, not before they are forced to deal with post-soviet backwater public politics, but before they are embarrass themselves.

Kazakhstan's forthcoming chairmanship in the OSCE scheduled for 2010 compels Europe to focus attention on this Eurasian country, vast and rich in natural resources. Former (1994 to 1997) Prime Minister Akejan Kajegeldin, 55, remains one of the prime sources of data on Kazakhstan for European leaders. Kajegeldin aspired for presidency in the late 1990s, joined the Kazakh opposition, and found himself promptly sentenced to a decade behind the bars (in absentia).

Forget pandering for natural gas to Russians who like playing with the tap for fun and profit, this show is even better. Going hat in hand to a president for life for some kind of special access, only to get kicked in the head by the Russians lider maximo again.

I May Change the Low Opinion I Have of Frozen Drinks

Rev it, baby.

Flight to Freedom Noted

When they aren’t generally howling about American “shredding the constitution” the proclivities of those societies that wallow in that kind of criticism of America is almost too predictable to be believed.

Former Portuguese air force officer and professor Vasco de Castro sees in his Portugal a corruption so pervasive that he names his critique of it "Tudo em Família" or “All in the Family.”

So corrupt, in fact, that he didn’t feel comfortable publishing in on the continent:

That’s why, many people, if not all the people, will wonder why this book is being published in the USA and by an American publisher, when it’s written in Portuguese, about Portugal’s social-political matters and obviously addressed to a Portuguese speaking audience?

Although this unreal situation could also lead to a confusing answer, the explanation is in fact quite simple and understandable: censorship in Portugal is a common procedure to silence criticisms that aren’t based in speculations or general accusations which do not identify anyone in particular, as frequently done by the media in general. Indeed, even if Portuguese law condemns today any form of censorship, it’s a known fact that censorship still exists, although by less frontal means and ways than those used during Salazar’s dictatorship.

Ask any responsible and honest publisher and they will tell you how it’s almost impossible to survive in this poor and still illiterate country, without the contracts with sponsored government institutions, the cultural subsidies, etc.

As sad as it is, it would matter little to the larger world were it not for the way a patronage culture of censorship and corruption could not readily find itself at the center of a budding political power that is the EU, one given to lauding it’s implausible and unproven infallibility in so many for a where it stacks the deck with its’ numerous now-statelets maintained on the thin logic that the member states remain sovereign when it suits them.

Unfortunately the events related in this book did not take place in USA, where a judge who is found guilty of a crime is judged and punished as any other citizen.

No, in Portugal, to even think possible that a former President could be subjected to an investigation for so serious an accusation as diamond trafficking - as a Minister of Angola charged M. Mário Soares - is almost as unimaginable as to realize that President Clinton risked impeachment, just because he lied about his own and private sex life.

Something we are still told is a prudish reaction and “no big deal”, when it was about the core of all flaws that make trusted elected leaders into untrusted “overseers”... lie-ing to the public and to institutions of justice, as if those things that could be thought to be small crimes were not crimes at all. The principal of right and wrong is in jeopardy.

Kapitalizm is Krool!

It’s socially unjust, and must be stopped in our lifetime – so we can be free to be slaves of the state.

Sounding More Soviet by the Minute

Despite rapidly running out of capitols to name pompous, unrealistic declarations after, the EU is running headlong into a theatrical form of central planning philosophy that I like to call “mining the scrapheap of history” in an attempt to look like their doing something definite about the public’s economic malaise woes.

The next few months will be decisive for the European Union's future economic health, with the bloc set to agree a new 10-year economic plan in a bid to leave the recent recession behind, and chart a fresh course towards steady growth and job creation.

and the paean to the
Rubber chicken internal summitry circuit MUST go on:

Memory of the EU's current economic plan - the Lisbon Strategy, due to expire in 2010 - is also likely to influence EU leaders as they prepare to discuss its successor at a number of European summits over the next six months under the Spanish EU presidency.

If 5 year plans never worked, how is a 10 year plan supposed to work? By giving one even more time to create a few months of diminished expectations before the whole PR exercise is forgotten?

Unaknowleged, even while admitting to the failure of the Lisbon Strategy to “make the union the most competitive knowledge-based economy in the world", is that innovation takes place when governments are not staring at private innovators, tapping their toes, fondling their mobiles, and checking their watches.

Human Extinction Program Going Just Swimmingly in EUtopia

I guess having a preponderance of the world’s skanks will ultimately reduce the continental carbon footprint by making preserving the species little to no fun when half the population reduces itself to becoming cheerless, disinterested, booze-addled mere breeding stock.

So mate, ‘ow dga know she ‘ad a orgasm?

She dropped her crisps.

Keep on Truckin’ Schnitzeling

Remember: Jesus saves. Moses invests.

The Theme is Quite Simple

The idea of one British journalist to make a Rubik's cube with all the potential candidates for the top jobs was picked up not only by Mr Reinfeldt, who held up the cube in front of photographers at the 19 November summit, but also by the Swedish press team who interviewed Erno Rubik, the Hungarian inventor of the toy.

Much as we find with the strange newsy-news that the a communist era toy has come to say something about the governance of the EU, it should be understood in its’ basic form for what EU politics is: a very fake set of issues that one is compelled to make a very face set of choices on. Such as who’s on first:

The problem with ‘our’ new president and foreign minister is not that they are nobodies, but that they are unelected, unaccountable nobodies.

Which might comfort leaders across the continent, but has the frightening side-effect of having surprised no one. They are used to this sort of thing where someone up above feigns to know better and care, and directs society below. It is the very opposite of the grassroots participatory society, and it isn’t just familiar, it’s widely held to be “all for the best” in the same manner that “scientific socialism” was.

Take for example the ‘broadmindedness’ assumed to be a part of this suggestion. It doesn’t stay that way very long. As the logical extension of another obsession that the population is sold on, one that Mr. Malthus is alive and well, hating humanity, and everything it does, we are expected to fall into line. Again.

When you go out shopping for your Christmas dinner on December 23, 2020, you will probably opt for grasshoppers, instead of shrimp. You will toss your tried and true turkey in favour of a real delicacy: juicy dragonfly larvae and beetle caviar. This is 2020 after all, and insects are the most environmentally friendly and varied source of animal protein available.

Sadly, what is assumed to be the easy part is the altering of the population and its’ desires.

If insects are to be effectively marketed as human grub, they will first need to rehabilitated in the public mind. Their current reputation as dirty, nasty creatures that are to be avoided at all costs can only be changed if society learns more about the cleanliness and beneficial properties of insects.

And since we’re already trained to fall into line, what does it matter? It’s no different than the lack of uproar over who’s opaquely appointed to be ‘the people’s choice’. The pattern has already been illustrated on the People’s Cube.

¡No Pasarán! (sie werden nicht durchkommen)