For Reference: English Language Government External Service Radio Stations

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Radio station	Country	Format		Notes
Deutsche Welle	Germany	WMA RAM	48 Kbps 64 Kbps
Radio Netherlands	Netherlands	RAM WMA	32 Kbps 32 Kbps
Polskie Radio dla zagranicy	Poland	WMA	64 Kbps	Various languages
Radio Romania International 1	Romania	WMA	64 Kbps	Various languages
Radio Romania International 3	Romania	WMA	64 Kbps	Various languages
Voice of Russia Ch.2	Russia	.m3u	64 Kbps	English service
Radio Ukraine International	Ukraine	WMA	128 Kbps	Ukrainian, English, German
BBC World Service	United Kingdom	RAM WMA PLS	32 Kbps 32 Kbps 24 Kbps
ABC Radio	Australia	Flash	Flash
Radio New Zealand	New Zealand	WMA	32 kbps
China Radio International	China	WMA	64 kbps
Radio Taiwan International	Rep. of China	RAM WMA	32 kbps 32 kbps	Podcast
KBS World Radio	Korea	WMA	CH1/64k	In 11 languages
Voice of America Music mix News now	USA	WMA WMA	32 kbps 32 kbps
NHK	Japan	Mp3 Mp3	Newscast TV audio
Radio Habana Cuba	Cuba	WMA	20 kbps	Spanish, English
Other: TV Links
International TV online			HTML links	Iinks not verified
News TV online			HTML links	Iinks not verified

They’re All into Greek

Much as Greek protesters opposed austerity of any sort, and in fact wanted MORE benefits, despite the fact that there is no-one left to suck dry to pay for them, protesters will be descending on Brussels demanding to expropriate more from the grandchildren they won’t have:

Tens of thousands of demonstrators poured into Brussels, hoping to swell into a 100,000-strong march on European Union institutions later in the day and reinforce the impact of Spain’s first nationwide strike in eight years.

All the actions sought to protest the budget-slashing, tax-hiking, pension-cutting austerity plans of European governments seeking to control their debt.

In an ironic twist, the march in Brussels comes just as the EU Commission is proposing to punish member states that have run up deficits to fund social programs in a time of high unemployment across the continent. The proposal, backed by Germany, is running into opposition from France, which wants politicians to decide on sanctions, not rigid rules alone.

“It is a bizarre time for the European Commission to be proposing a regime of punishment,” said John Monks, general secretary of the European Trade Union Confederation, which is organizing the Brussels march.

“How is that going to make the situation better? It is going to make it worse,” Monks said in an interview with Associated Press Television News.

A fact rapidly disproved by Germany’s relatively low unemployment rate and the fact that they actually have some GDP growth.

Of course this only happens when you bet your entire future on the government’s social policies.

Elsewhere in the land of Greek wisdom and savoire vivre:

Nu EU

Will certainly be exempting the pupils from quizzes on their bloviating lectures on tolerance and human rights if they let in their potential diversity hire:

Minority Sect Protests New Mandatory Islam Classes: The Turkish Alevi federation announced that the Alevi students will not attend religion classes if their protest on October 9 does not change government policy. Fevzi Gumus, chairman of Pir Sultan Abdal Cultural Association, says: “There are several verdicts of the European Human Rights Court stating no one can be forced to attend religion classes.” However, the AKP government is reluctant to release a decree saying Alevi students are free not to attend the classes.

The EU, a global force for good!

Then there’s this great act of Turkish inclusiveness and trust that will surely go over like a turd in the European punchbowl:

Alcohol raids shut down art gala

But a note on the moral weight and effectiveness of the EU... you KNOW that they are humanity’s conscience, and what with all of that soft power buzzing in your ear, the rayonnement is sure to bring the socialist new man into his happy place.

European Union Critical of Turkey Crackdown on Press Freedom

Nice job working that peashooter, Scooter. The Turkish government is actually proselytizing to unwilling religious minorities (who are not Muslim enough for them), and ignoring your impotent complaints. And to think that pulling them into the EU is someone’s idea of a gesture that will save your population from some kind of latter day version of Moorish and Ottoman beheadings and Danegold tributes.

WORK that paper! WORK it! You’re almost there!

Like, Way!

Co-op shopping, off-smelling wheat germ in yellowish plastic eating wierdos beware: Syd and Om are coming!


Elsewhere: Greenpeace are Saudi Arabia’s servile flunkies.

Saudi Arabia knows it can’t lobby against Canada, their chief competitor. That would cause a backlash, and increase demand for our oil by consumers. But Saudi Arabia doesn’t have to say a word, with groups like Greenpeace out and about. They’ll do all the oilsands-bashing for them.

Greenpeace is good at bashing oil — but only in very safe countries. They’ve never had a protest, or even a press conference, in Riyadh or Tehran.

Look Important

If I could rename the “International” Geneva-based institutions anything, I would call it the “Fake-Crisis Emergency Management Center”

If you're Reading this Blog...

...someone should check your freezer for human heads.

Zip it! I’m Sayin’ a Sooth, Here!

This Fall in America, It will be the Tea Party Movement versus the Cocktail Party Movement.

Absence Makes the Heart Grow Fonder...

...of somebody else. Michael Philips points out a problem with American expats: they’re a huge source of anti-American invective. A funny thing for people too detached to still genuinely understand the place and the people that they’re generalizing about.

I remember 40 continuous years of idle expat discussions, cocktail parties and dinner parties where Americans are the first and most vocal to express hate for Nixon, Reagan, George W. Bush, Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh.. the list is endless and the patois is pure hate-America Liberalism.

It’s also noteworthy that virtually NONE of the sort Expat one hears spewing (out of a presumed need to be liked by strangers,) is involved in some productive job – it’s always the case of an intern for an NGO with a social goal, or a student, of a political type, but one rarely finds this with someone working full time in Finance, Engineering, Science, or even teaching.

Eye of Pickled Newt

Or some-such. Actually, I think that thing on the left is part ibex and part squid.

Another Successful European “Get Tough on Iran” Exercise

It’s all political exhibitionism, all the time.

“Reports indicate Germany’s exports to Iran have reached near the two-billion Euros mark in the first half of 2010.”

I guess they can eventually tout the superior qualities of being superiorly irradiated, and that it makes them a glowing light for the rest of the world to follow in stupefied awe.



How about the type flying a ballistic trajectory in your direction?

Do Indulge me, would You?

I'll admit to a weakness: old movies, and British films in particular. While my faves date from 1940 to 1955, I thought it would be interesting to present this rare gem. This adaptation of H. G. Welles' "Things to Come" also presents a portrait of the experimental art and design of the era in which it was made. After all, it needed 'futurism', so they let loose.

From 1936, here is "Things to Come":

“Something for Nothing” Watch

Just as the mindless outburst of university students in California demanding unlimited subsidies of something they will be the only beneficiaries of, the swirl of non-intellectualism surrounding “the Bologna Process” is no different.

However one does need to distinguish between the Bologna documents, the praxis of the Bologna Process, and the political use of the label "Bologna" in the national context. The introduction of the two-tiered degree as planned in Austria results most significantly in a hierarchization of university education that cannot immediately be inferred from the Bologna Declaration. The planned BA courses basically follow the logic of higher education as provided by a technical college – job-oriented, mid-level, applied – in new, modulated form.

But the logic of the protests don’t differentiate. Past efforts in the UK to merge the Polytechnik and University systems were treated with similar bloviating, but oddly enough they fell along the same strange lines of those interested in constructing evenness, equality, yadda yadda, not wanting to be though of in the same area of interest with those pursuing practical interests, even if they required more rigeur, let alone those in trade schools.

Again, the Protests for an “Egalitarian” Model were Dominated by Elitism

And an “Identity” elitism, by way of the heritage and provenance of the subject of study at that.

On one hand, the evils of the “two tier system” which could preserve the higher reaches of areas of studie that are not in applied fields are protested against on grounds of inequality, but so is the “commercialization” that would enable it. So what exactly is a lit department to do? Protest against the preservation of its’ own field?

Of course! The goal is to object!

Because it happened in the benighted center of the universe, it needed to be called “a process” and named after yet another city, but what it amounts to is that governments are looking for a way to get out of the business of paying the full ride for university educations that amounts to a subsidy to the few.

At the time of writing, universities throughout Europe and the US are being occupied. In Austria, the protests that started at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna have spread throughout the country and students and teachers are expressing their solidarity with the international strike in higher education. Among the issues being criticized by the protest movement are restrictions on access, the under-funding of universities, the demotion of university education to mere schooling and the introduction of tuition fees. Also among the protesters' concerns are the European university reforms and the way they have been propagated and implemented at the national level over the last decade. The protests have made clear the contradictions between the national and the supranational goals of the university reforms.

What they are protesting is the fix, but who’s really keeping track or footnoting. The idea of invoking an anachronism like “Die Uni Brennt!” seems to have little to do with the students themselves, but rather a sentimentalism of a much older and more disinvolved group of people: those getting weepy about the good old days of trying to dismantle anything functional in civilization.

As to the students, all they really want is to come up with a reason to have access to resources confiscated for others, and pulled out all of the stops. The scare tactics included the non-sensical: literature will die, education will be commoditized (as if it was an ethereal gossamer of no defined shape or meaning now,) and that fewer students could study. This, rather nonsensicly, was identified with a specter of evil identified with “Americanization”, where somehow more people have the chance to study, and actually go further with it from even a modest entry point on that holy “academic” scale.

The feebleness of it all is hard to avoid:

It is still the case that all protesters are judged by the idealized benchmark of the '68ers, often solely in order to point out differences. Mouse click is thus compared to street fighting, "recreational strikes" to social critique, hedonism to political motivation – ultimately doing justice to none. Many of these misunderstandings can be explained by the way in which the respective movements were structured, internally and externally. The iconography of the '68ers was marked by spectacular one-off protests and provocative displays – from the performances of the Vienna activists, to the naked photographs of the Kommune 1, to the sit-in demonstrations. In the latest university protests, things have been turned inside out – partly consciously, in the name of transparency (setting up and maintaining the live web-stream from the Audimax) and partly as a side effect of the relatively widespread use among students of platforms such as Facebook, StudiVZ and Twitter. The result is that the material from which conclusions can be drawn about the occupiers is not only considerably broader, but also extends further into the trivia of participants' daily lives, beyond the "performance" of the protest. After all, it seems improbable that partying after the day's protest was first conceived of in the Audimax – it is just that in '68, only those who were actually there could share in the post-protest beer. Today's journalists, by contrast – even, or especially, those suspicious of "flashmob voodoo" – do not necessarily have to be at the actual site of an occupation. Thanks to "lifecasting" (the constant transmission of events through the course of the day) they have been able to follow the debates, look up pictures on Flickr and Twitter, and even get hold of participants to interview.

Which underlines not just the fakeness of it all, but the lack of sincerity that it’s “performed” with.

It’s that Time of Year Again

Oktoberfest is not for your après ski digestif types.

“Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life, son”

- Dean Wormer

A Portrait in Cognitive Dissonance

It will be a hard day for some on the benighted continent to get through. The vessel of their political hopes, Fidel Castro has urged the character idolized for his “Russell the Lovemuscle” approach to the Great Satan™ and the Little Satan™, Ahmedinejad, to stop using the foaming blather of his delusions as an intelligence report.

Castro reportedly said "the Iranian government must understand the consequences of anti-Semitic theology" while urging Ahmadinejad "to abandon Holocaust denial and refrain from slandering Jews."

Minds all over Bobo –town must be imploding.

The reporter asked him if he would be prepared to say that to the Iranian president and Castro responded: “I am saying this so you can communicate it.

That’ll leave a mark.

Lessons in Libertarianism

I'll admit to a weakness: old movies, and British films in particular. While my faves date from 1940 to 1955, I thought it would be interesting to present this rare gem. This adaptation of H. G. Welles' "Things to Come" also presents a portrait of the experimental art and design of the era in which it was made. After all, it needed 'futurism', so they let loose.

From 1936, here is "Things to Come":

The Pause that Depresses

Have you ever wondered what to give people who think they’re funny/witty/intelligent? At least on the college sophomore level - when they’re unaware of how tedious they really are?.

BSP8R, Doofus

The passive-aggressive “pacifist”left has lost its’ hobgoblin and its’ imaginary foil: the German CDU-led government has decided to end conscription and rely on a an all-volunteer force. Not only does thin out the ranks of the thoughtless buffoons that a soldier in harm’s way need no longer depend on with his life, takes the Mickey out of the endless blathering rhetoric of the German far left’s argument that “our children” (whom they can’t seem to stop hating,) are cannon fodder for whatever war that comes along.

While compulsory service will be abolished, the alternative Berlin daily wonders aloud if this is truly "a triumph for the pacifist left". Its answer is a firm nein: "On the contrary, when Germany is called on to take part in a war more than 1,000 km away, (the army) doesn't need a horde of fresh recruits, but rather teams of specialists in security and modern weaponry".

Funny that with all the “hey, I play fist-person-shooter games too” talk of robocops with sooper-dooper death ray weapons, that they can’t even imagine what the social dynamics of an all-volunteer force are.

Never mind the fact that their deployments since 1945 have been limited to police duty in the former Yugoslavia and Afghanistan, unless you count the DDR’s “advisors” to the Sandinistas and to South Yemen.



For two generations, the only group of people that have benefitted more from the spilling of other people’s blood and treasure have been Kim Jong Il’s cronies, and Swiss bankers. It’s time that the war-obsessed anti-defense suicide cult in Germany did the halts Maul! and get real for once.

In the mean time, Die Welt reports that:

"The nostalgic invocation of the usefulness of conscription could no longer stand up to the facts: When fewer than 7,000 out of a total of 250,000 soldiers are available for missions abroad; when just 14 percent of young men are drafted; when even the majority within the military itself supports reform -- in such a case, renewal is unavoidable."

(Translation by Spiegel Online.) The protesting types are angry armies even exist, so it comes as no surprise that they wouldn’t “support the (conscription of) troops” so long as they remain in an ineffectual state. Some Conservatives, on the other hand, have always seen it as a means toward social cohesion, and to keep otherwise feral youts under control long enough for them to get a grip on their warm and charming personalities. Either way, they cannot afford it, or are unwilling to go on as they have in an embarrassingly low state of readiness.

Basque Terrorists! The Light Musical Comedy!

Compare and Contrast:

David Lynch’s The Elephant Man and implausible Basque terrorists They can't be serious, because they aren't, even though they're basically vanquished.



I’m still waiting for the continent’s cultural commentators and the fashion writers to chime in.

Headline Bingo

Jerusalem Post: IDF foils attempted terror attack at Gaza border fence

INN: IDF Kills Two in Firefight with Gaza Terror Infiltrators

AP: Hamas: Israeli strike in Gaza kills 3 Palestinians

The right omissions seem to be what makes the right journalist.

= Thanky thanky, to Shy Guy

Heeb-Hating Surrender Monkeys

Jacob finds this interesting piece on Europe’s “Jewish problem,” as in “Europeans and their problem with Jews,” as in “What’s your problem”...

In short, the answer is jealousy.

Actually I prefer to call it penis envy.

Of Dictators and Cuckoo Clocks

The city of Trier, spitting distance from the border with Luxembourg, a nation once thoroughly sodomized by Germans, has after 75+ years finally taken away Adolf Hitler’s honorary citizenship.

Believe it or not, some 4000 German cities gave the dictator honorary citizenship between 1933 and 1945.

The official observer of Hermann observes (quite frequently) something that hints that last century’s denazification program either was not entirely successful, or got that famous flaccid hand wave and “Ja, Ja!” gesticulation:

How many gave him honorary citizenship after 1945 is unclear.

Great Travel Ideas

For fans of the gloriously miserable, why not head out to Siberia to see the world's largest head of Lenin?



It only takes 5 days by train out of Moscow, after all.

Off to a Great Start for the 27th Time

It sure says al lot for their gentility, work ethic, noblesse, and whatever the hell it is that they keep implying makes them think that they have an exclusive concession on civilization.

MEPs were threatened with a fine (later backed down from in only the way they could) if those Ministers of European Parliament did not attend European Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso's “State of the Union” speech.

"The parliament's bureau looked at the matter and we agreed that we need to beef up MEPs' presence during debate. But we felt we need a bit more time to mull over the various possibilities," Mr Buzek said Tuesday morning.

The original proposal agreed by the assembly's political groups late last week envisioned three electronic checks over the three hour slot and a small fine for MEPs whose absence was registered twice.

I suppose that’s some kind of bid to make it look like this is serious bidness we’re talking about here. And to think that it was the last good weekend to get a little golf in.

Joseph Daul, president of the largest group, the centre-right EPP, was careful to emphasize he was not present at the meeting last week when the preliminary decision was made but suggested "we should take another look at this."

The proposal, the first time that something has ever been concretely suggested, follows years of poor plenary attendance by the 736 deputies during speeches - a phenomenon reserved not only for EU commissioners but also for visiting dignitaries.

The little penalty kerfuffle has resulted in Mr Buzek making a personal plea - and putting his authority on the line - that MEPs should be present for Mr Barroso's speech, which is likely to focus on the problems facing the EU and outline some solutions.

"I would like to launch a personal request to all of you to be present" said Mr Buzek, referring to the importance of the "image of this House worldwide."

Voting with their feet, lope that they are, says quite a bit about their image at home, let alone trying to make it seem better “worldwide”.

As if the world was watching to begin with. Elsewhere in the world of this dark art or political self-legitimation, we learn that his speech was “jam-packed with initiatives and gestures”.

Communist Family Values

Surely you jest.

This has got to be the most insidious commie plot yet, or even ever. The German Communist Party in Essen (yes, it actually still exists) handed out pens to six-year-old kids that can project erotic images of women on walls and, well, I dunno, all over. And like, they even did it by accident.

Un hunh. Right. Whatever you say. I guess training the young to objectify women as nothing more that fuck toys is all part of that “social cohesion” agenda.

Goodthink-math

AKA buffoonery:

Shortening working time by 1% reduces the environmental impact by 0.8%, according to research carried out by Jörgen Larsson at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden.

"This indicates that reduced work time would limit energy use," he said.

So a decaying level of output yields progressively less greenie messianic style salvation the deeper into the back-breaking middle ages that you delve. This is uncritically accepted as a public good, on precisely that basis, despite the fact that the greater your “décroissance” or “dismantling” of civilization, the less the environmental benefit.

Moreover, encouraging poverty has been redefined as something like a virtue:

Larsson argued that shorter working time helps to combat climate change in two ways. It reduces the energy use of individuals while changing their consumption patterns by limiting their income.

Knock yourself out, Spanky – but the hilarious experiments in societal crash-testing don’t stop there:

Shorter hours are also seen as key to getting to grips with rocketing unemployment figures triggered by the economic crisis. In the US, 11 million new jobs will have to be created to return to pre-crash levels, Schor pointed out, adding that the euro zone has not escaped the crisis either.

She argued that the standard approach of creating jobs by increasing GDP growth rate is not working and no stimulus is forthcoming amid political austerity measures. Moreover, the required increase in energy use would not be acceptable due to the ensuing greenhouse gas emissions, she said.

"We need to reduce the rate of GDP growth or we won't be able to reach climate targets," she said. "The other way to think about it is that we're pulling some of this demand out of the system."

Eveidently the critic isn’t very familiar with the fact that poorer societies are FAR more polluted, FAR unhealthier, and have demonstrated environmental improvements through... wait for it... development and GDP growth. What these twits DO measure isn’t environmentally meaningful at all as a metric: CO2.

Growing vegetables, generating renewable energy or manufacturing goods in small laboratories are just a few examples of how people and communities can provide for themselves or spark the emergence of a new green business sector, the researcher argued.

Which is the coded way of saying that she’d prefer to see a retrograde, agricultural society that takes centuries to find minor medical advancements and dooms all of the “little people” to endless backbreaking work.

Have you ever wondered why it is that the only kind of energy these clowns are willing to use liberally is other peoples’ physical effort? The very purpose of development is to IMPROVE human life by reducing dangerous labor and lengthening lives. What these idiots seek OBJECTIVELY is to reverse that through coercion, and later on by force of legal compulsion.

This would be justifiable as people would not be getting lower incomes - instead simply receiving some or all of their productivity gains in free time instead of higher salaries, Schor explained. "People are far less attached emotionally to income they haven't yet gotten than to income they have," she added.

Actually, they get very attached to things taken away from them by compulsion, by the force of a government authority, or by the brutal laws of regimes pretending to be a nanny state “caring for you” by making your personal decision for you.

What they are doing it trying to make “the new man” who need not be made to act by use of force because they have been well programmed to be pliant and servile under the direction of social engineers. It’s the failed and destructive philosophical model of early 20th Europe on parade again, and it’s going after a public that they deem so worthless, that they can’t be let to think for themselves. Here’s one that clearly doesn’t, and he’s all green, and all lefty. It's the surprisingly "normal" garden-variety nature of the demands of a man who took hostages at the Discovery Channel building in teh Washington, DC suburb of Silver Spring, MD:

2. All programs on Discovery Health-TLC must stop encouraging the birth of any more parasitic human infants and the false heroics behind those actions. In those programs' places, programs encouraging human sterilization and infertility must be pushed. All former pro-birth programs must now push in the direction of stopping human birth, not encouraging it.

3. All programs promoting War and the technology behind those must cease. There is no sense in advertising weapons of mass-destruction anymore. Instead, talk about ways to disassemble civilization and concentrate the message in finding SOLUTIONS to solving global military mechanized conflict. Again, solutions solutions instead of just repeating the same old wars with newer weapons. Also, keep out the fraudulent peace movements. They are liars and fakes and had no real intention of ending the wars. ALL OF THEM ARE FAKE! On one hand, they claim they want the wars to end, on the other, they are demanding the human population increase. World War II had 2 Billion humans and after that war, the people decided that tripling the population would assure peace. WTF??? STUPIDITY! MORE HUMANS EQUALS MORE WAR!

Got that? More of that great math, “décroisance” and state coerced eugenics in there too, just like the unnamed “Economic researcher” cited in the Euraktiv item.

9. Develop shows that will correct and dismantle the dangerous US world economy. Find solutions for their disasterous Ponzi-Casino economy before they take the world to another nuclear war.

10. Stop all shows glorifying human birthing on all your channels and on TLC. Stop Future Weapons shows or replace the dialogue condemning the people behind these developments so that the shows become exposes rather than advertisements of Arms sales and development!

11. You're also going to find solutions for unemployment and housing. All these unemployed people makes me think the US is headed toward more war

Same damned thing.

Carbeque Country

AKA Hamburg, in spite of a culture festooned with “peace movements” and one forever pointing out their civilized, socially democratic nature to any gullible type who will listen:

One rrrrrrockin’ weekend

From the Fevered Leftist Mind

Universal solidarity is demanded for no actual reason. The proletariat must march in unison for no plausible cause.

We are now, however, all expected to boink alike.

After the Berlin Wall came tumbling down in 1989, salacious minds wondered how many, how quickly, how often, and just how Easterners would fall into bed with Westerners.

Ingrid Sharp, a senior lecturer in German at the University of Leeds, pored through newspapers and academic papers in search of something related to the answer. She published her findings in a 2004 issue of the Journal of the History of Sexuality.

Sharp focused on a single question: "What happened to GDR [German Democratic Republic] sexuality when it was confronted with the sexual mores of West Germany?" "The answer," she writes, "appears to have been an explosion of discourse surrounding sex."

As if they have any great legacy to write about to begin with.

So it really isn’t about intimacy, the mating rituals of those natives, or even mere rutting. It’s about an academic being surprised by the absence of a body of scholarly obsession with people having sex, and a strange expectation for every academic on earth, even in the Marxist-Leninist DDR, to pedantically pursue the same stale heap of subjects.

The report ends with a deflating comment from journalist Regine Sylvester, who tried to sum up both her own experience and that of the entire nation. The supposed "sex boom" that happened right after unification, Sylvester opined, "did not turn the Federal Republic into a noisily copulating society, nor did the official taboos turn the old GDR into an ascetic one."

Which sort of wraps up the value of the 19,347th pointless dissertation on that which is merely natural, and none of the neighbors’ (let alone some PhD doofus’) business.

- Link shamelessly ripped off from Observing Hermann

The Leisure Class is Revolting

Yeah, they stink on ice!

- Mel Brooks, “History of the World”

---
It’s sort of like Atlas Shrugged (which has yet to be translated into French), except in this case, it’s the icy hand of the CGT you feel up your ass, and not the government’s. This time, the strikes revolve around a stopgap measure to –temporariy- keep the state pension system from hemorrhaging, by hiking the retirement age from 60 to a soul-crushing 62.

So the answer they come up with is to punish the rest of society, particularly people who make less than the comrades of the CGT do with transit slowdowns, and a few days of wrecking the GDP that they’re trying to seize more of. The real question is: how many years did you put in?



So wedded to the idea of making the rest of society cover all of your personal costs, even for Union zombies making a lot more than they’re worth to begin with, the idea of anyone doing anything themselves draws disparagement and confusion. Save for your OWN damned retirement, and you can retire whenever it makes sense for you. Pay yourself first, douchebag.

In every other part of the world (outside of North Korea and Cuba), it’s only the indigent that depend entirely on the state when they retire. How it is that people who come out of what is touted as “the best education system in the world”, but can’t add, is beyond me.

Every Last one of them is a Neglected Genius, I'm sure

It’s everything you need to know about the German exception:

“While America’s super-rich congratulate themselves on donating billions to charity, the rest of the country is worse off than ever.”

PS: The word “Obama” cannot be found in this article.

As if all Americans were expected to somehow be easily categorized as the same, with neither accents, distinctions in income, or anything else. I know, I know... we’re a puzzle, aren’t we?

It isn’t really “concern”, it actually more of a case of Schadenfreude + worries that the people who traditionally buoy their economy by buying their overpriced rubbish, just might buy less of their overpriced rubbish. Since the usual tack of theirs’ is to take joy in repeating over and over, for ALL of the decades that I’ve been alive, that the American dream is finally dead!!!, it’s ridiculous to take seriously, even for a moment, anyone in Spiegel being “concerned” about Americans. The only time any of Americans’ dream weren’t dead, is when they would bloviate endlessly about its “dark side”, or for some other European-life-affirming disparagement. We struggle foolishly to achieve it, but it’s dark, evil, and doesn’t exist, unless it’s at the expense of the pure-hearted, innocent inhabitants of the Smurf village, like themselves. We’re just that stupid for wanting to improve our well being, as if no-one else does anything like it themselves.

From the article, one which anticipated non-existent resentment to Bill Gates for being so generous to assuming that “the recovery” has been actually taking place from the moment Obama took office:

Many Americans are beginning to realize that for them, the American Dream has been more of a nightmare of late. They face a bitter reality of fewer and fewer jobs, decades of stagnating wages and dramatic increases in inequality. Only in recent months, as the economy has grown but jobs have not returned, as profits have returned but poverty figures have risen by the week, the country seems to have recognized that it is struggling with a deep-seated, structural crisis that has been building for years. As the Washington Post writes, the financial crisis was merely the final turning -- for the worse.

And that’s just part of it, dwelling on opinions made on some kind of opinion data, and the like, citing noted data-donkeys like Ariana Huffington, and a variety of editorialist who cite the situation of the long-term unemployed as being “not seen since World War II”, while forgetting the late 70s and ignoring the full employment of World War II. In essence, this fool cites facts based on “this or that opinion writer/journalist said it was a fact.”

Don’t you think that, regardless of bad news being real, but even that being mangled by -bad journalism- is a sign of an even deeper, less fact indicated malaise? A crisis of the soul? An unknownable unknown? Or, in short, the Spiegel writer’s lazy ass standards?

What the non-journo opinion writer can’t quite square (or admit to,) is that the recession didn’t really get bad until get bad, and unemployment didn’t really rise until Obama stepped in bewildering businesses with his “help” by adding to their mandates, tacitly threatening de facto nationalization of one sector of activity after another, etc., etc.

Thanks for nothing, you ignorant oaf. Didn’t you realize that all those people (almost all of them European,) who though they were “giving us lessons” in how to do this their way just like to hear the sound of their own voices declaring that they’re right?

In short, Thomas Schultz, and the rest of the writers of the European media: you loved Mr. Obama so much and wanted to see him elected... why don’t you take him home with you and put him in charge?