Peace Out!

Except it's not supposed to Sound like „ Ausweis Bitte ! ”

In a society that seems to have more rules than any other, with new rules every day, with more peevish and impossible to enforce rules at that, does anyone in the do-gooding community really think anybody actually follows these rules, let alone themselves?

Good news for jobseekers who like to brag about their drinking exploits on Facebook: A new law in Germany will stop bosses from checking out potential hires on social networking sites. They will, however, still be allowed to google applicants.

Well, now that’s a relief. If I see an interviewee walking down the street, will I also be required to avert my gaze as well?

Quit "Lementing" and Do Something

In an interview with EurActiv, Georgieva lamented that - unlike the US - the EU's humanitarian efforts in the aftermath of the recent floods in Pakistan have barely been visible in TV and press coverage of the disaster.

- Kristalina Georgieva,
EU Commissioner for Humanitarian Aid

Chapeau to the Open Europe blog.

Europa 1920, Europa 2010

Still Chasing the same straw men - that is, anything that reminds them of figures of authority as they think they understood them to be: military figures, business, and faith. A whole century of evidence, and they’re repeating the same infantile rants: make me free, feed me too, but give us authoritarian order, so long as it’s the type that suits my views.

On the Basic Concept of "The Revolt of the Masses"

Luís Afonso Assumpção, a mechanical engineer in Porto, and part time sage looks at those that call themselves “radical” in this world, and finds no radical novelty in their thinking, that there is something about them that has never changed, and that there is something akin to a personalization of drama in their actions , but also a consistent laziness and incapacity to deal with life’s challenges.

The Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset wrote in the first half of the twentieth century (before the Second World War!) A fundamental study to understand what we call "modernity", or a personal description-my-"the intellectual decay as counterpoint to the material and scientific progress. "

It’s called "The Revolt of the Masses"
The edition I have in hand (Portuguese), on page 80 summarizes the fundamental thinking of the brilliant Spanish:

"Everything that follows (note: in the book) is a consequence or corollary of this radical structure could be summarized thus: the world organized by the nineteenth century, to automatically produce a new man, give him a formidable appetites, powerful tools of all kinds to meet them: economic, physical (hygiene, health, better than any time before), civil and technical (the tremendous rise in practical efficiency that the average man lacked in the past) . After introducing him all these powers in the nineteenth century but abandoned him at the same, the average man following his natural character, ended up looking inward. Thus, we find ourselves with a mass stronger that of any other time, but, unlike the traditional, tightly closed in and incapable of dealing with anything or anyone else - in short, restless. The things continue like this, Each day you will notice more across Europe - and, as a reflection in the world - that the masses are unable to leave and drive in any direction.

During difficult times that approach for our continent, it is possible that, seized by suddenly anxiety, we enough good will to deal with pressing matters in the direction of modesty.

But this willingness will fail because because the texture of the radical’s soul is inward and brooding. Because they lack the will and the instincts to deal with real problems in front of them, so they won’t. They will want to follow someone, but will not. They will want to hear other opinions, only to discover that they are deaf. "

In short, the reason they seem like losers, and always have, is because those who call themselves “radicals” are, especially when they do it from a position of attention seeking and do it in the same robotic way so many others have.

Not their kind of Trannies

In a “heroic” act of trashing a crop, activist types trashed about 70 vines of transgenic GM grape vines at the Agricultural Research station in Colmar overnight. Once again, they are behind the curve in l’hexagon, and it wasn’t even a commercial crop.

Police and gendarmes arrived promptly on the spot where about 70 men sat around the fields still holding reapers in the enclosure to 7:00.

"We acted in a non-violent manner, and openly. The publicly funded GMOs test crops are carried out in open fields and we do not want that, "said Olivier Florent.

INRA, which was not yet reached by early Sunday morning, was the site of the September 2009 sacking of 70 GMO vines that institute was conducting tests on since 2005.

Sod off, Swampy!

Olivier Florent, referred to here in the news item as a “voluntary reaper”, as though he was just helping out during the harvest season, is in fact a Green Party MEP candidate, and is a spokes-being for “Vaucluse sans OGM,” and organization that is trying to sign up towns to be GM-free zones, total dismantling of nuclear power generation, etc. You know the type. Always generous in wasting others’ human energy.

Implied to be a concerned local, he is in fact from Cavillion (Aix-en-Provence), a town 660 km from Colmar.

Reporting from the HQ of the Office of the Propagation of the Faith

As if you couldn’t predict what opinions Spiegel would cherry-pick as being a “unanimity” of opinion in the German press without even knowing what the issue is, we find a strange dichotomous set of articles on their website appearing simultaneously.

On one hand, they honor Sir Winston Churchill for defying a dictator.

A Man Who Loved Danger and Sought Out Adventure

Churchill had killed people in battle as a young man, but he was not particularly struck by the experience. "Nothing in history was ever settled except by wars," the bellicose Churchill believed. He loved danger and sought out adventure. Even when he was in his sixties, as prime minister, he would stand on the roof of a government building in London during German air raids to observe the murderous spectacle from above, while his cabinet ministers fled into the bomb shelters.

And it was good... On the other we find vilification of George Bush for defying a dictator. They start channeling Benno Ohnesorg again, and any other dead flunky that can prop up their argument.

The left-leaning Die Tageszeitung writes:

"The Anglo-American war in Iraq and the subsequent occupation was a severe breach of international law. The collected justifications by the Bush and Blair governments for the war were lies from the beginning. A later attempted justification was the deposing of Saddam Hussein, a dictator who the West and the Soviet Union had backed in the late 70s and armed for his war against the Islamic revolutionary regime in neigboring [sic] Iran."

Indeed...

Hitler berated his rival as a "lunatic," "paralytic" and "world arsonist." Churchill shot back, calling Hitler a "wicked man," the "monstrous product of former wrongs and shame" and said that "Europe will not yield itself to Hitler's gospel of hatred." It soon became clear that the loser in this duel would pay with his life.

Much as the German press did of President George Bush, but then again, who’s to make comparison, other than, say, unceasing irrelevant ones to the Vietnam War, which in any event was a proxy war with the Chinese that the press at that time refused to see.

But we all know that they’re too sophisticated, too intelligent, too worldly to make that sort of shallow comparison.

Putin must be Wondering: how many Divisions do “the Concerned” Have?

With apologies to Stalin and Pope Pius XII, or something, because former professional protestor Catherine Ashton is the one forced to provide the amusing and impotent expressions of “concern” these days.

Ashton 'concerned' by Russian missiles in Abkhazia

I’ll bet you are. I realize that you’re all misunderstood geniuses, but what exactly is it that are you going to do about it?

Gittin' Hisself some Wood

“It’s a human rights issue”

Is it not Beautifully Bleak?

THIS photo collection and this book’s website may be the best collection summarizing a sense of a style and time that I’ve seen so far. Discount the weather, the ubiquitous Berlin graffiti, and the effects of time on these buildings, and the futurist’s-optimism inherent in the outlook from which they were built seem to radiate off of the precast concrete and Portland cement plaster that most of them are garbed in.

Despite that, as much of this work is found today, one gets the sense that you find yourself in a modern form of a bleak, abandoned ancient ruin: on the set, perhaps of A Clockwork Orange.

A Glimpse into the Fever Swamp of Common European Thinking

As you know, they are having forest fires in Russia. As you might expect, the “real truth©™” is “some other thing” that makes those “in the know” feel that they have some special wisdom that the ugly mass of morons that they imagine their fellow man to be. It always seems to be dispensed by what one can only describe as a modern day soothsayer-charlatan:

As Muscovites suffer record high temperatures this summer, a Russian political scientist has claimed the United States may be using climate-change weapons to alter the temperatures and crop yields of Russia and other Central Asian countries.

In a recent article, Andrei Areshev, deputy director of the Strategic Culture Foundation, wrote, "At the moment, climate weapons may be reaching their target capacity and may be used to provoke droughts, erase crops, and induce various anomalous phenomena in certain countries."

The second recurring features required for this kind of thing (that never seems to go away,) is that those that buy into it think that natural phenomena CAN’T be natural, because they are somehow personalized. The proof of this being that it is happening to them.

The primary recurring feature is ignorance.

But Russia isn't the only country suffering form a heat wave this summer. Indeed, the United States is also experiencing record temperatures. On July 24, temperatures in Washington, D.C., hit 37.7 degrees, and local weather services issued heat warnings for the first time this summer.

Areshev agrees that it is also hot in the United States, but notes that the United States is significantly farther south than Russia, meaning that such high temperatures are not so surprising there.

Statistics be damned! Some mysterious, evil Ernst Stavro Blofeld type controls the universe, and the weather at that, and has it IN FOR HIM! Possibly because he (at least believes) that he matters THAT MUCH! It’s the perfect, virtue-less circle.

Think Green and Fuzzy

Even the proponents must get it at this point… it must say something to them when they finally realize that any initiative they believe to be socially positive must necessarily start with not juts the government, but the highest, most centralized part of the government sucking some more capital out of the economy.

Case in point. It could be dateline anywhere, and has little to do with the real value of the necessity being taxed.

Meanwhile “green” levies, that account for around half the average bill, are expected to increase to fund Government energy efficiency schemes and a new wave of “clean” power stations.

ALREADY half. You capiche?

He said: “For every 1% increase in prices, another 40,000 households find themselves in fuel poverty. The Government and suppliers must do more.”

At which time they then need a handwringing politio or Quangonista saying that something must be done for them, and proposes some measure managed at the top of government that will suck more capital out of the economy.

Because it’s for the children, you heartless cretins. Didn’t you know that children are the future? Hate is NOT a family value, etc., etc. Here, make some of your own:

The only “Impending Catastrophe” is in their Spiderman Underoos

We have long ago heard about the swindle that permitted Germany to use the collapse of the industries of the DDR as a crutch in the fake carbon-emission sainthood contest, but the extent to which it was employed by the rest of Europe is stunning. They managed to rig up a situation where they were under roughly the same, if not better obligations in the arena of new-chastity, than underdeveloped countries.

On closer inspection, Germany thus got off with what is in fact a remarkably light emissions reduction “burden.” Thanks to the sharing of the German emissions windfall, other members of the EU-15 were let off the hook altogether.

For instance, France. In his victory speech in May 2007, president-elect Nicolas Sarkozy lectured the United States on the fight against “global warming.” “A great nation like the United States has the obligation not to obstruct the struggle against global warming,” Sarkozy intoned, “but, on the contrary, should take the lead in this combat, since what is at stake is the fate of all humanity.” It was easy for him to say. Many commentators have noted that France covers by far the greater part of its electricity needs with nuclear power and hence has only a limited dependence on fossil fuels. Less well known, however, is the fact that under the EU “bubble” arrangement France has no obligation to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions at all. It is only supposed to hold them steady at 1990 levels.

Using any cheap “exceptionalism” as a scarlet letter against the erst of civilization is nothing new to Europeans. After all, this helpless, pitiful giant needs some source of pride. Why not then, after all, invent a myth about your superiority? What? They’ve never don’t that before?

All told, seven of the 15 EU member states forming part of the EU “bubble” have no emissions reduction requirement. Five members of this group are indeed permitted to increase their emissions. Greece, for example, is permitted to increase its emissions by 25 percent; Portugal by 27 percent. According to the European Environmental Agency’s 2009 report on “Greenhouse gas emission trends,” of the eight EU-15 members that accepted reduction tar-gets, only Germany and the U.K. are on track to meet them.

Strangely enough it was convenient to identify themselves in the victimhood affirming tomes that they’re familiar with the cast themselves as a set of loose, unconnected, near third-world countries. It sort of makes the otherwise vile sounding bravado about being the big, huge, superpower, wave o’ the future sort of silly – after all, it’s an equally pathetic and implausible notion.

As for the 12 current EU member states that were still just candidates for EU membership at the time of Kyoto’s adoption, these countries got even better deals. Cyprus and Malta were simply left out of Annex I. The other countries, all of them “post-Communist” Eastern European states, were assigned reduction targets of either 6 percent or 8 percent. But they were classified as “Economies in Transition” and as such permitted to opt for a year other than 1990 as their base year or to use the average over a period of years.
The choice of 1990 was already sufficiently advantageous for many of these countries, but, unsurprisingly, some of them opted to employ a base year or period upstream of 1990 when their still Communist-era industries were pumping out the maximum amount of CO2. It is thus likewise no surprise that almost all of these countries will meet their targets without any difficulty. Miceal O’Ronain has calculated that by the end of 1998, Romania’s CO2 emissions, for example, had fallen by a whopping 56 percent from its emissions levels in its Kyoto base year of 1989. This means that Romania’s nominal “obligation” to reduce emissions by 8 percent was in reality a license to increase them by more than 100 percent.

Yeah, yeah, clean and green, how dare you drive an SUV, blah, blah, blah.

What we are talking about here are nations – whole nations employing the emotionally manipulative tricks of teenagers and trying to call that “a brave, bold step”, a near Jesus-like sacrifice for the future of humanity for which they should be thanked, if not prayed to. In fact what they are is summed up best in the false premise behind their scheme at COP15: they want the rest of the world to hang a millstone around their neck so that they can seem more competitive, AND saintly, AND to sell you their expensive, ineffectual rubbish like windmills and solar panels.

You exist to be used, but they care, dontcha know. They care more than you.

Űbernomics?

"Superman is wearing black, red and gold this year, Germany's national colors," said Carsten Brzeski, an economist at ING Group in Brussels

While market and economy watchers looked at the rise in German, French, and Italian GDP as a momentary consequence of currency fluctuation.

When was the last time the New York Times front page featured a headline with the words "German Surge"? I bet never since WWII.

Maybe they just like to imagine themselves in tights, or the point where they will imagine the implausible and illogical to stroke their own chickens:

In annualized terms, the German economy expanded about 9 percent in the second quarter, said Andreas Scheuerle, an economist at Dekabank in Frankfurt. That puts it on a footing with emerging markets like China and India.

Don't get wrapped around the axle, Axel. This isn't about German workers' souls, Keynsian government Astroglide, or any other over-emotionalized inference.

The data came with a few clues as to what it can tell us about the near term: to the same variant as with GDP growth, France and Italy also did well to a lesser degree, commensurate with their growth in exports. In other words, the champions of Q2 in order were Germany, Italy, and then France.

It's backward looking, and correlates to the 2 months following the Euro bottoming out at $1,18 which discounted anything exporters are able to sell, and we know where the exporters are.

While we find that again the gap between German and Greek and Irish bond rates widening, an indicator of low confidence, we may find another bifurcated outcome. If the net effect will be another soft spot for the Euro, the exporters will be busy again, and the entire eurozone population will have lost purchasing power again.

The rather small amount of that growth being attributed to domestic consumption follows toward the end of Q2, with worker activity higher and a rising Euro.

Some in Europe can’t but help and find signs of their inherent human superiority in a one-time / one quarter currency induced bump. It’s a silly thing to do when there are people seriously talking about an economically lost generation:

"Europe fears for its lost generation," the Czech daily Hospodářské noviny declares, leading with the claim that the level of youth unemployment is now the highest since the second world war. A report by the confirms that five million young Europeans were without work in 2009, with Spain the worst hit, with 40% of young people jobless, followed by the Baltic states

Obviously looking to take it out on ‘the Man”, the UK’s Independent asks:

"Who would want to be 18 today?" it asks, when even those who get into college are likely to emerge into a depressed job market weighed down with debt.

It’s the usual dichotomy of wavering between megalomania and imaginary humiliations and the like.

We ‘R da World... We ‘R da Children...

Do you want to know what a pitiful, helpless giant looks like?

Pierre Lellouche, France's minister for EU affairs, has said that the EU should have a crisis response force to deal with emergencies such as Russia's wildfires.

In an interview with Le Figaro published today (10 August), Lellouche said: “At European level it would be good to have real mutual assistance capabilities in the case of emergencies”. Lellouche said that he had stressed to European partners the importance of pooling assets to create a European emergency force after the earthquake in Haiti.

Where the plea to not look impotent, and put the blue patch on the rescuers’ shoulders was also not heard.

They make this call, of course, any time anything visually regrettable comes across their television screens, and nothing ever happens. A few of them do seem to get a kick out of wringing their hands.

And to think that this is the sort of image that they’re looking for, if not trying to convince humanity that they ALREADY have: N-n-nooo! No guns or anything like that! No, we’re your fairy godmother. We’re there for the hard work of hearing people thank us, and being loved.

The Forbidden East

Well, not really. The west was what was forbidden to the easterners. The East was forbidding.

“In 1979/80 my family took part in the biggest espionage scandal that the former country of East-Germany saw in its entire 50 years of existence”

- Thomas Wagner, “If It Had Not Been for 15 Minutes”

Mr. Wagner’s story is a tense and fascinating one, and paints an honest, well rounded, and compelling portrait of the DDR that’s rarely found in the English language. Having livbed there myself (as a lucky foreigner who could leave,) I can attest to that.

Elephant Maoism

Tuskers of the World, Unite!

Passing the Political Dutchie by the Left Hand Side

Intellectually speaking, they are indeed in a room with the blinds drawn for their comfort.

There was one thing you couldn't do at HempCon: Smoke pot. The director of the event asked the city for permission to set up a self-medication tent inside but they city said no. So any smoking -- cigarette or otherwise -- couldn't take place closer than 25 feet from the convention hall.

”Self medicating”. That’s interesting. Just don’t try to “medicate” yourself with tobacco in Baghdad on the bay, though.

San Francisco, which was at the vanguard of the anti-smoking movement more than a decade ago when it became one of the first American cities to bar people from lighting up in the workplace, now is poised to enact much tougher restrictions on smoking in public places.

Smokers no longer would be allowed to puff away near the doors, vents and operable windows of any building - restaurants, shops, offices and housing complexes.

Elsewhere... bongs in the news: head shops, like the rest of the culture of those who like to get f*cked up, are using libertarian arguments when they’re convenient. I wonder where they stand on de-socializing the cost of medical care? Because once announce that “what you do with your body is up to you”, you should not expect anyone else to pay the cost of fixing it.

Seriously. Choose one: what you’re calling you freedom, or other peoples’ Doritos, Yoo Hoo, and their rules.

The Portrait of a Douchebag as a Young Man

Or rather a description of Daniel Cohn-Bendit during the May 1968 “your money or your life” revolution, to be more accurate.

What was unique about the Sorbonne, to which Cohn-Bendit had referred, what made it the model of the entire revolt, was its refusal of all leadership. People normally fear revolutions, on any scale, not necessarily because they fear disorder (for, in fact, disorder is often exhilarating), but because they fear the severity of a new order which succeeds the abandon. On the reverse side of the wild card that is revolution lurks the constant threat of dictatorship. In the French movement, which was directed specifically against an authoritarian regime, the participants were not about to allow another system to install itself where the previous one had cruelly reigned.

Except for the fact that so many of them joined hard left, revolutionary parties that look to authoritarian notions and leaders such as Lenin, Mao, and a man many of them could not bring themselves to really criticize: Stalin.

The walls of the Sorbonne, for so long deaf and dumb to the problems of the emerging consumer society, now rebounded with Marx and Lenin, Freud and Che Guevara, offering some lessons of their own: IT IS FORBIDDEN TO FORBID. ALL POWER TO THE IMAGINATION. ANSWER EXAMS WITH QUESTIONS. WE WANT A WORLD, NEW AND ORIGINAL. WE REFUSE A WORLD WHERE THE ASSURANCE OF NOT DYING FROM HUNGER IS EXCHANGED FOR THE RISK OF DYING FROM BOREDOM.

A curious thing for advocates of a welfare state parasitically drawing from the entrails of its former prosperity in tacitly state-run industries. Try as they will to characterize anything these louts thought to ‘libertarian’ in nature is as big a lie as the one the Warsaw Pact leaders used to tell: that THEY were the real democracies, and that their citizens were the ones who were truly free.

It looks like Decades of Astroglide have gotten them Nowhere

It’s the common market that isn’t.

For a large part of European societies, workforce immigration means lower wages, loss of work by fellow citizens, and creates a welfare burden. And yet Europe remains an area of very low worker mobility. Only 2.3 percent of Europeans live in a country other than the country of their ethnicity. Any significant change in this regard would require coordinating insurance systems or worker rights, transferring pension privileges, as well as fully recognising foreign professional qualifications.

Not to mention non-iteroperable medical coverage, the lack of integration despite the scale of intermarriage, etc.

It also can’t write:

Although you can you the same wall tiles, cheeses, shoes or cars all over the EU, the ‘common market’ remains common chiefly on paper.

They do share a common delusion, though:

There is no hiding the fact that the common market creates, temporarily at least, winners and losers, and that member states try various ways to support the latter through welfare policy. But income redistribution will not eliminate tensions between market integration and social goals.

No, but success and growth can. Remember what THAT was like?

That’s Okay, they Don't REALLY Use that Room Anyway...

I love the “nothing to see here” reporting. A ceiling in the Supreme Soviet has fallen again.

Part of a false ceiling in the Jacques Delors building in Brussels - shared by the European Union's Committee of the Regions and the Economic and Social Committee - fell down over the weekend, according to a statement issued by the two institutions.

Parts of a false ceiling in an atrium on the fifth floor of the building on Rue Belliard collapsed during the night between Saturday and Sunday (7-8 August). No-one was hurt.

Let me reiterate: this is not normal. A trained Chimpanzee can figure out how to hang a ceiling.

The atrium is used occasionally for exhibitions and receptions and also by staff going from the Jacques Delors building to the Bertha Von Suttner building.

Should we do as so many of them would, and launch into a tirade of theorizing what this stands for? How it somehow tells a story of decayed character? Warmongering? Something momentarily like the omens of primitives looking at the world and seeing some meaning in, say Hurricane Katrina?

Of COURSE we can’t. That’s reserved for those retrograde, subhuman Americans!

Part of a false ceiling in the hemicycle in the European Parliament's Louise Weiss building in Strasbourg collapsed in August 2008. Two plenary sessions scheduled to be held in Strasbourg in September were moved to Brussels while repair work and safety checks were carried out. The hemicycle was reopened for use in October following repairs costing an estimated €8 million.

8 million Eurozlotys, when all they needed was a small crew of drywall mechanics and a scaffold. It’s efficiency at its’ best when your normal contracting practice is to hire your cousin Gégé who hangs wallpaper on the side.

I Think They Left in the Working Title

I can't tell. I just can't tell.... is it Filme Noir wierndess, no budget, or a Senior year thesis from the Art School of the Blind? Starring the abundant Jayne Mansfield, the trailer to the 1964 barker: When Stranger Meet! "Dog Eat Dog".

"It's simply awful"
- the critics.

A Fine, Fine Read

Page for page, Ian McEwan’s The Innocents is as gripping as anything you’ll find. Set in Berlin during the Cold War, its story revolves around a murder so vivid in its description that I had to shut the book and steel myself to continue. The infamous American spy tunnel figures prominently in the tale as well.

Despite the usual European treatment of Americans as passive and two dimensional, as if they’re simply furniture, the story is an excellent one.

Reflecting on the Light Musical Comedy that was Communism

No, not really. The seminal idea is still struggling to find its egg, but there are new postings up at The Near Distant Ago. I’m still holding out for Cosmonaut Hero week

The Old New Schlamperei: a 20th Anniversary

I’m trying to remember the rough dates that the transition took place, but it was fairly rapid as far as “social change goes”. The shift was gross and ultimately sweeping, and while it looked like nothing at first, before we knew it, femininity was undercut and popular culture wanted girls to be boys.

It took another ten years, but the popular culture in the form of the lowbrow fashion press reinstated womanhood as a way of constructing attention-seeking irony: it was more or less hitched to the concept of being a happy slut.

Reflecting on the Light Musical Comedy that was Communism

No, not really. The seminal idea is still struggling to find its egg, but there are new posting up at The Near Distant Ago. I’m still holding out for Cosmonaut Hero week

Amid the Pity Fest...

...and the wringing of hands over the nuclear detonation at Hiroshima 65 years ago today is a forgotten lesson - the real lesson: that the society that those now-old once children victims of the a-bomb at Hiroshima committed their nation to total war IN SPITE of their children.

The lectures to an "aggressive America" and the pity will go on, for sure. All the while the denials of Japanese atrocities will continue with Pamyat-like passion for the lies that feel good:

"When [the Allied Powers] opened the so-called Tokyo war-crimes tribunal [after World War II], they needed evidence that Japan committed greater atrocities [than the Tokyo air raids and use of atomic bombs], so they made up the so-called Nanjing Massacre, which was completely unfounded," declares Mr. Kase, chair of the Committee for the Examination of the Facts about Nanjing.

Futher, those who drag on, using this date as an point in time to take an "initiative for peace" forget WHY the bomb was dropped, and what its' awful alternatives are. Forgotten too is that Mutually assured destruction was the only possible method of maintaining peace in a world of people as short-sighted as them.

Begone Foul Spot!

I write like
Kurt Vonnegut

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

I doth doubt, I must say. (Musn’t one?) If you’re up for a little recreational literary frotteur, drop some original text off at ”I write like...” style analyzer, and let the fun begin. It’s like a passing scene with Bob Newhart’s whacky neighbor, or, say, Carleton you Doorman in the tragic-comedy of blogging. After all, my writing style has become an homage to a strange, pervy idol of socially awkward teenagers.

Oddly enough, it identified Douglas Adams from roughly a 100 word excerpt from “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” but mistook a short rip from Mein Kampf for Edgar Allen Poe. The first chapter of The Communist Manifesto was identified to be styled after the manner of H. P. Lovecraft, a master of weird fiction who died in 1937. Marx and Engels, I take it are correctly attributed as authors of a made up tale of horror and scientific fiction.

It’s a puzzlement, but you can get your jollies off of it for about 93 seconds or so.

Can I Redesign the Seats?

You are what you eat. Then you’ll drive what you et.

Better Red than Fed

At the heart of the Bailadila Hills in central India lie 1.1 billion tons of raw ore so pure and plentiful that half a century after miners first hacked at it with pickaxes, it remains the richest, and one of the largest, iron deposits on the planet.

Enter the spoiler.

Yet on this quiet June day, cobwebs hang on rusted pipes in the all-but-abandoned facility, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its September 2010 issue. Caretakers prepare to switch truck-size rock crushers out of their coma, rousing the machines for five minutes a month to ensure they still work.

Maoist rebels from the surrounding Dandakaranya forest armed with guns and explosives -- and some wielding axes and bows and arrows -- attacked the facility four times in little more than a year, officials at the now-mothballed plant say. They burned 54 trucks waiting at factory gates in April 2008 and damaged part of the slurry pipeline, the world’s second longest, in June 2009. Essar idled the plant that month.

One constant of the universe seems to be that Marxist-Leninist-Maoist-whatevers seem to enjoy their destructive revolutionary fervor more than their any affection that they have for “the proletariat”. In fact “the good of the people” seems more like a distant, ignorable abstraction to them more than they are to those of any other belief system.

Maoist-related violence killed a record 998 people last year as assaults on economic targets reached an all-time high, according to Ministry of Home Affairs data.

A Mumbai-bound train derailed in May, killing at least 146 people, after what police suspect was sabotage by a Maoist group. More than 200 security officers died in attacks in the first six months of 2010.

More specious still, for them to say that they were “sucked into the conflict” blithely ignores the fact that the Maoists are the ones who created it.

Much as they carry on the lie of “wanting to give the landless land”, they must sport a rather broad shit-eating grin when it comes to that idea that given confiscation, collectivization, and nationalization, everyone will be landless – and become a (fixed, unchanging) wage slave of the monopoly help by the state. It is the very essence of the empirialism that they pretend to, and pretend to call their foe.

How, for example, with their passion for heavy industry and such, are they to “redistribute” ore? This goes unsaid, even though there might be some terroristic vision that it’s better for all to remain poor than for one person, some owners, some engineers, etc., to succeed.

Invoking the usual laundry list of supposed virtues, they include things like “social justice”, exhibiting an ignorance of the singular distinction of Maoism to the rest of the Red rationalizations: Mao didn’t believe in it. He believed that the state had to be personified by the strongman controlling it, so that the people could, undistracted, go on with the business of constructing his autocratic empire on the footing of equally distributed misery.
More ignorant still is the emphasis the Indian Maoist place on social tribalism, as though this protecting of ones’ own was plausibly permissible in a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist vision. It more resembles the ironic place leftist feminism tries to occupy in that respect than any rigorously reasoned form of the classical leftist serfdom models of proletariat-based arguments.

These ignorant oafs don’t even know their own suicidal belief system. It’s personified by this elitist tripe of thinking that:

“The Indian revolution must take the road of relying on the peasants, establishing base areas in the countryside, persisting in protracted armed struggle and using the countryside to encircle and finally capture the cities,” the Communist mouthpiece said on July 5, 1967.

The vision holds that the only purpose the hardworking have is not to their own lives and well being, but to the power of the revolution’s elite. They damned-well BETTER love the people! It’s YOUR struggle, and THEIR revolution!

Feeling Spunky, Are Ya?

It’s summertime, and it seems that love is in the air.

Baaaaak, bk-bk-bk...

How’s that “soft power” thing working for ya?

Iran has warned European Union states of "dire consequences" because of their decision to impose tighter sanctions on Tehran over its nuclear program.

"Undoubtedly, such a confrontational approach may leave dire consequences in the relations between the Islamic Republic of Iran and the European Union," Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki said in a letter to EU foreign ministers obtained by Reuters on Wednesday.

The EU's decision "will definitely cause far greater losses for the European Union itself rather than for the Islamic Republic of Iran as this is amply demonstrated in all previous statistics," said the letter,

Actually, it’s more like E.D. than Soft Power©™®, but who’s counting?

The EU’s response? Sanctions, until the Iranians agree to come back to the take and jerk them around for another 5 years, when even then it seemed a little too far-gone and pedantic:

EU foreign affairs chief Catherine Ashton welcomed Iran's offer of a return to negotiations but said she wanted to see the details before commenting further.

Turkey and Brazil agreed a nuclear fuel swap deal with Tehran days before the U.N. agreed more sanctions in mid-June, but this did not stop the major powers -- the United States, Britain, France, Germany, China and Russia -- from pushing ahead with a stringent, fourth round of restrictions on Iran.

The European Union said on Monday that the aim of its latest sanctions was to get Iran to return to negotiations over its uranium enrichment programme, possibly by the end of the year.

That’ll fix their wagon once and for all! At least until some European government decides that they have to peddle more of their rubbish to Iran, and the whole thing will end there.

"Fate leads the willing and drags along the unwilling."

- from Lucius Annaeus Seneca’s letters, Epistulae ad Lucilium

Artless Celebrity Theft 101

Lady Gaga Protests Arizona's SB 1070 Bill

After all, she knows where her candy comes from:

Lady Gaga Reveals She Does "Cocaine"

Which is interesting, because she’ll blow lines, but not dick, because being paranoid is more creativity promoting than doing her moaning off stage.

Lady Gaga avoids having sex for fear someone could steal her 'creativity'

Just how does she define ‘creativity’? Her act is a mash up of the early 90’s faux glam “I’m self-absorbed, heard me roar” phase of American womanhood, which featured forgettable club music and kept the drum machine on life support for waaaay too long. After all, here she is looking more or less like Kim Wilde did 20 years ago. She also seems to have stolen her buzz my mugging Vivien Goldman’s The Flying Lizards, circa 1984. Someone, please find the “creativity” here, before another celeb is declared “controversial” for political parroting what the shallowest of the media gaggle is in complete agreement with to begin with.

Menschenfresser Madness ISO SWF and Crunchy Bits

A sick(er) twist on disaster tourism saw people pursuing their fascination with cannibalism.

Sometimes the situation turns out to be very funny. Vladislav Anikeev, a man from the Russian city of Tula, has always dreamt to visit a cannibal tribe. And one day his dream came true. He went to Kalimantan, Indonesia, to the place where scull hunters live. The group of tourists finally found themselves in the village inhabited by cannibals.

The locals willingly told the details of their inhumane craft and shared their secrets and technology of scull processing and showed how to do it. The hospitable aboriginals even offered to buy some souvenirs made of their enemies.

Some Russians, however, have made it into a “staycation”, reflecting the optimism of their culture.

Six young Russians who declared themselves to be Satanists have been handed jail sentences of up to 20 years for ritually killing and then dismembering four teenagers in a forest.

The six, who were all teenagers at the time of the crime, reportedly also ate the body parts of their victims in a wooded area outside the city of Yaroslavl north-east of Moscow.

Chalk it up to artful eccentricity if you must. In a world absent a moral rudder, the strangeness of such a vile transgression could just as well be received by an unsatisfying shrug. Let’s face it: if, all things being equal, all things really ARE equal, what kind of appeal does cannibal kink have? Anthropological curiosity? Adolescent “shock art” esthetics?

They stabbed the victims and then dismembered their bodies and cooked and ate some body parts, Komsomolskaya Pravda reported.

The four minors received the maximum possible sentence for murder, 10 years, a prosecutor, Tatyana Rachinskaya, said after the sentencing.

Oh those crazy kids! They’re just showing what ebullient optimism and joy they see around them!

Hey, Man, Pass the Album...

This is the third study of this kind: 2006, 2008, 2010. Denmark is number one in each. Blah, blah, blah. Thank you Chamber of Commerce.

It's a Danish study. What do you think it's going to say? Zimbabwe is numero uno?

I also want to know how Turkmenistan came in at no. 18, ahead of Luxembourg and the UAE. Turkmenistan is still a functioning dictatorship, only recently gotten rid of a dictator who:

“spent his 21 years in power building Turkmenistan into one of the world's most isolated regimes while imposing his mark on the gas-rich Central Asian state.
He styled himself Turkmenbashi, or "Father of all the Turkmen", and spent giant sums building sumptuous memorials to his own wisdom, including a 75-metre-tall (246 feet) tower in central Ashgabat whose summit is a statue of himself.”.

Happy, happy.

Elsewhere in Denmark happy-happy-land:

"A note on happiness:

Danes may well be the most contented people around but, as someone recently said, true happiness is not measurable and having low expectations met doesn’t really count. It might also be pointed out that answering survey questions about how happy one is as a Dane doesn’t rule out the possibility that one might tell fibs for fear that say, Sweden, will pip you in the happiness rankings. Remember, happiness is a patriotic duty: keep on grinning.

A note on eco-friendliness:

Often touted as the greenest society in the world, Denmark also produces more trash per person than any other EU country and is more reliant on coal power than China. Want to recycle that plastic bottle or eat a vegetarian meal in this eco haven? Good luck. Still, moves are afoot to take the country in the right direction and its pioneering use of wind power, as well as the army of cyclists, are something to be proud of."

Damn those wily Swedes!



What’s more telling about happiness, though, might be where the those self-identified “happiest national populations” rank in global suicide rates:

43 – Denmark
14 – Finland
39 - Norway
29 – Sweden
54 – Netherlands
55 - Costa Rica
28 - New Zealand
37 - Canada
69 - Israel
45 - Australia
17 - Switzerland
71 - Panama
75 - Brazil
41 - United States
15 - Belgium
66 - UK
78 - Mexico
53 – Turkmenistan

It’s also telling that the first 8 nations mentioned on the list have a population that roughly adds up to number 9.

It seems to be that there are three strong determinants to not being suicidal, and therefore not being very unhappy, statistically speaking:

1. Being a Jew: of all the Jewish countries (Israel and the republic of west Baltimore), things are lookin’ good for ya.
2. Being Catholic: Except for Poland, the Catholic majority countries are at the bottom of the list of people most likely to kill themselves.
3. Not being European helps too: 16 of the top 25 nations known for their high suicide rates are in Europe.

Conclusion: there is a continent, whose population is preoccupied with self-lionizing, where optimistic feeling about the future are so great, that committing suicide is more widely considered evidence of happiness than anywhere else on earth. Barring that, then simply telling oneself one is happier than the rest of the earth will do.

From the Literary Treasury of Our Times

Print is Dead.

- Egon Spengler (Harold Ramis), 1984, “Ghostbusters”