A Formerly Sane Nation Finally Coming Around, Sort of

The Netherlands:

Researchers want driving under the influence of drugs to be made illegal.

The world champions of moral compartmentation seem to be emerging from their haze and are finally becoming slightly aware. While drunk driving has been unlawful in the Netherlands for some time, driving under the influence of pills or grass hasn’t been.

While the number of deaths resulting from drunk driving has decreased from 30 to 20 percent in the past ten years in the Netherlands, there are more fatalities from the combination of alcohol and drugs.

But don’t get too hopeful if you find yourself having to drive through the magical forest – this is just a trial balloon. Since the use of narcotics is about all that most narrow-minded Europeans can perceive to be a right and the essence of freedom, it will surely be challenged.

Situational awareness now, even through that purple haze, as before, has always seemed to be a low priority there.

Don’t Give them One Red-Eye Abe Lincoln

The plan, which would aim to build a "firebreak" around the indebted eurozone countries, emerged at the IMF annual meeting in Washington where global leaders united to demand urgent action from European politicians.

They should have just called it the “EMF” to begin with. The rest of the developed world will be made to pay for Europe’s addiction to welfare.

The head of the IMF has warned that its $384bn (£248bn) war chest designed as an emergency bail-out fund is inadequate to deliver the scale of the support required by troubled states.

Just a reminder: the EU is the single richest nation-state entity on earth, and yet it’s the Europeans who have used the IMF more than any other region on earth in the history of the institution.

Now you know why they push this “we’re so globally minded” trash.

Greenies Hate Poor Asthmatics

Those tiny little somewhat affordable, over the counter inhalers will be banned because they contain minute amounts of critically useful CFCs. Apparently this tiny amount is still deemed an unforgivable hazard to the ozone layer.

But the switch to a greener inhaler will cost consumers more. Epinephrine inhalers are available via online retailers for around $20, whereas the alternatives, which contain the drug albuterol, range from $30 to $60.

They must be so proud.

You Can Say All of This. Really. You Can. It’s Actually Allowed.

Freedom means you can tell the world to bug off. It means that you can tell them that you don’t like their taxes, their “public-private partnerships,” their attempts to rig industries they like, attempt to Unionize the unwilling, and their social coercion, not to mention their attempts to construct a political monoculture.

If the present leadership’s idea of freedom doesn't include the freedom to tell them to be disagreed with without their media cheerleaders and outsourced social complex being put to work on it, then they don’t really believe in human freedom, and are just using the vocabulary they think merely common buzzwords in middle America as a prop to hide their authoritarian impulses.

If Mr. Obama really is all of America’s President, then he needs to respect and understand those who respectfully disagree with him. There appears to be no evidence that he and the subculture around him are capable of that.

Unity, If it Means Anything, Means we are Reduced to Gesticulation

And to think we missed this festive occasion:

The first European Day of Languages, celebrated in 45 countries, was held in 2001 at the initiative of the Council of Europe. It aims to raise public awareness of the languages used in Europe, to promote cultural and linguistic diversity and to encourage people to learn languages.

45 countries, my friend! I’m sure those Rwandans and Mauritians were all for that first European Day of Languages, if it commanded a small fee.

"The benefits of speaking a language other than your native tongue are easy to see. Whether you're working abroad in Germany, studying in France or on holiday in Cyprus, it's a huge advantage to be able to communicate directly with the local population. Languages broaden the mind, open up new horizons and will increase your employability," said Commissioner Vassiliou.

I doubt that there will be much change of mind-broadening going on. After all, how does a Greek intelligibly tell a German “cough up your milk money poutsokefalo!”

Put 'em in a Dress, Already

Added to a pipe of things to ignore, get wrong, and undermine the meaning of, housing has been made a “human right” in France and the notion is gathering legal steam in the EU as well, especially when it comes to highly stationary crop-wrecking and park-trashing squatters euphemistically called “travellers”. Of course the idea of having to limit some people’s rights over their own property and earnings to dispense that “right” selectively doesn’t appear on their monomaniacal radar.

So if that’s the case, what can one make of this ? :

Italian parents bring in lawyers to evict 41-year-old stay at home son

An exasperated Italian couple has resorted to legal help to kick their 41-year-old son out of the house, in the latest case to highlight the phenomenon of Italy's stay-at-home "bamboccioni" or mummy's boys.

Aren’t his “rights” being violated?

"He has a good job but he continues to live at home and wants his clothes washed and ironed and his meals cooked for him. He never wants to leave." The couple took their case to the association after reading that it had experience in dealing with dozens of similar cases.

Which I suppose also makes these “adults” an abused “class”.

After the report was released, a cabinet minister came up with a drastic solution to the problem, proposing legislation which would make it compulsory for teenagers to leave home once they reached adulthood.

Oddly enough, since it all about how you raise them, these parents only have themselves to blame.

Renato Brunetta, the minister in charge of streamlining the country's bureaucracy, admitted that in his youth he too was a "bamboccioni", which translates as "big baby", and that his mother made his bed for him until he was 30.

I guess this is what you devolve into when ‘the personal becomes the political’. So how’s that working for ya?

The Joy of Prose

Andrew Ferguson is an evil genius.

On Tom Friedman:

As a writer, Mr. Friedman is best known for his galloping assaults on Strunk and White's Rule No. 9: "Do Not Affect a Breezy Manner." "The World Is Flat" & Co. were cyclones of breeziness, mixing metaphors by the dozens and whipping up slang and clichés and jokey catchphrases of the author's own invention. (The flattened world was just the beginning.) The breeziness would accelerate into great gusts of rhetoric about "an America we could be . . . an America we once were . . . an America we can be again," as though the author were poking fun at a slightly drunk Ted Sorensen.

May his volcanic island secretly pen many submarines.

The slovenliness of our language, George Orwell wrote, makes it easier to have foolish thoughts, and while Mr. Friedman's language has been tidied up a bit, the thinking remains what it has always been.

What’s Mine is Mine, and What’s Yours’ is Mine

‘Free’, ‘open’, and especially ‘transparent’ are the buzzwords that have been shaping the platform of the Pirate movement since it first took shape five years ago in Sweden as a party born out of the struggle against existing copyright laws.

Only in Europe could you guarantee that this mutates into hypocrisy: meet the world’s neediest “Libertarians”

The emphatic concept of freedom put forward by the Pirate Party appears throughout all society to be more realisable than the hair-gel-and-tie-liberalism of the FDP.

The party principles and the electoral programme of the Berlin Pirate Party, including points such as free public transport and the right to an unconditional basic income.

In other words, “freedom” in Europe means “Free Stuff” from other people.

This is their brain trust. They think copyrights on music are a form of oppression.

Someone PLEASE tell them that there is no such thing as an “Entitlement Libertarian”.

The Obscene Tragi-Comedy of Progressive Mathematics

I'm sure you've seen the endless drip of announcements and adulations. They give away Free cash money for free to put super-duper, earth transforming solar panels on you roof:

City, federal incentives make installing a solar panel a zero dollar investment

To whom, exactly is it of no cost?

So, if I understand this, $18,000 in tax money (coming from renters, for example) is going into putting in 4100 watts of capacity, which is sufficient to run a vacuum cleaner and a coffee pot when the sun is shining. Watts=amps x volts, so it's 37 amps, or one or two circuits in a household panel.

That part of somebody's electric bill probably amounts to $250 a year, at most. The return in the government's "investment" comes in 72 years, assuming that the panels don't get damaged in a hail storm within 5 years.

More importantly, knowing that there is a subsidy for it, what's the panel manufacturer has no incentive to keep his price down. Knowing that the $18k were being given away out there, they'd most likely ADD at least $9000 of that back into their price.

Since the average income earner's median income produces about $5000 in tax revenue a year, putting 4.1 kw of solar panels on one person's house is equal to the entire annual federal tax revenue generated by more than 3 people, and that's assuming the government does absolutely nothing for them, including using a border crossing, an interstate highway, or calling a government agency with a question.

And who is this lucky chap who chose what was behind curtain number 3? The man mentioned in the article is one Peter Bahor, an Environmental Protection Specialist at the EPA, whose income is subsidized up to 100%, and 140% considering retirement and other benefits. He has a highly scientific degree, a Bachelor of Arts in Urban Studies specializing in "Community and Social Planning", as if we were living in a managed, collective society. Apparently this qualified one to do science as an Environmental Protection Specialist. Variably, he is listed as a specialist in dealing with clean water, and issues related to the use of concrete in construction. In other words, his job is (or has been) to frustrate the price-viability of construction, a sector of industry which is presently near death, and one which accounts for virtually all of the extraordinary unemployment facing Americans right now since the beginning of 2009.

Oddly enough, reflecting on life in East Germany, one had this sort of state managed and collectivized society, all of which meant to see people as production units and socially and politically compliant fixtures. They also had a quietly disliked class of people who, through connection and position were receiving benefits that they weren't paying for. To think we left that behind for all of this.


It's absolutely hilarious when I think about it, because it would be cheaper to pay the man's entire electric bill for approximately 10 years.

Next time you look at your pay stub, take a good look at it, America. Add your FICA, state, and local taxes, and add them up. Don't include the withholding for Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Take $18,000 and divide it by that sum. That's how many pay periods you will be working to pay off Bahor's solar panels.

Remember, you might think it's your income, but it's somebody else's irrelevant fun house.

Decent onto Medievalism Assured

British progressives go from merely promoting their ideas through coercion to banning unapproved thoughts.

Football fans who make offensive chants about wind turbines could face stiff jail sentences under plans by the government and the Football Association to 'get tough' with climate change deniers.

Get tough? By not letting them have opinions? The cowardice and intolerance of progressives is blinding.

You Can Lead Them to the Enlightenment, But You Can't Make Them Think

With thanks to the razzzzberry we discover what a bunch of hopeless dopey vapidity the UN encourages. Ban Ki Moon, speaking in the Solomon Islands:

Your very existence is threatened. Therefore the UN shares your concerns very much. Climate change is the greatest threat to the livelihood, security and wellbeing of the people of Solomon Islands and the pacific region.

With this, he panders to the Brahmins elsewhere as he lectures these people who have just emerged from a civil war, that their highest priority is a fake transnational racket to turn them into dependent ghetto-dweller types.

...you are on the front line of climate change. I am here to sound aloud to the international community your concerns...

which would be interesting if it actually WERE their primary concern at the moment.

But in the absence of having to deal with anything real, the bottom feeders of the international woe-and-pity racket prefer a fake crisis that was custom made to be more useful to them.

Salvadore Allende, Martyr of the International Left, was a Totalitarian Ass

The man hits all of the usual "how many millions must die to make a perfect world" talking points in crazy-leftist land:

Allende, who killed himself in 1973 during a coup which saw General Augusto Pinochet depose him, is accused of having "stifled the media".
The book adds that he started "a project of socialist doctrination in schools and almost installed a law of sterilisation, inspired by a Nazi law" aimed at reducing genetic illnesses.

All of this coming from a book by Brazilian journalists Leandro Narloch and Duda Teixeira, who wrote it with the impulse of trying to get more people to look at parts of history that have been turfed over for the sake of political ideology.

It claims that Simon Bolivar, the hero of Latin America's independence wars, was scared that blacks and indigenous Indians would seize power and that Salvador Allende, the Marxist Chilean president of the 1970s, considered a Nazi-inspired policy of sterilisation.

True to form for the humanist "heroes of the working man", Eva Peron is reported as well to have lasciviously coveted items taken by Nazis from Jews, as if it were some prize wrested from an enemy.

The Invisible Hand Falls for the Joy Buzzer Again

Market Soars Following Latest "China Bails Out Europe" Rumor: Expected Rumor Half Life - 15 Minutes

Sez Zero Hedge:

Ok seriously, enough with this bullshit, please.

How many times can the idiotic market keep falling for the same old rumor over and over and over again?

You'd be surprised how often, and how desperate a financial industry locked in a trap with amateurish small governments will fall for it, hoping above hope.

That said, this is at least the 4th time that China has "bailed out" Europe in 2011.

Dogooderism reaches its' Logical Conclusion

So what if they meant well. They're morons.

The guns being bought back from the streets weren't 9 mm handguns or Glocks. Instead, they were Nerf guns or toy pistols.

More importantly, victory was declared. And all without a single shot fired.

Lane said the five-hour gun buyback was expected to take about 100 toy guns from young people.
"We've got to be willing to exchange everything and anything to get guns off the street," he added.

Irony Ignored by Noble Minds

A vessel looking for proof that your use of a lawnmower causes baaaad juju and other manmade disasters such as global warning gets stuck in the ice.

Elsewhere: lots of global warming due this winter in the land of the superior, enlightened, know-it-all types. Remember climate isn't weather and vice versa.

Killed by Government Love

I blame Global Warming:

Meltdown for the country's estimated 5,000 ice cream vans started with the rise of the domestic freezer in the Fifties but has been compounded more recently by new EU rules introducing lower emission limits. These mean that many older ice cream vans face costly conversions or face being taken off the road.

In London, meanwhile, tighter emissions standards will come into force from January next year. Some ice cream vans will be able to fit a filter, but the charge for those that don't will be £100 a day.

So rather logically, taxing things will "save the world", "heal the earth" and part the seas, dontcha know. So what if you have to take happiness away from kids - you're already traumatizing them anyway!

It’s as Entertaining as Watching a Bear Peddling a Unicycle

When the lights went out across Europe:

As of 1 September, conventional light bulbs of more than 40 watts will be taken off the market. In the countries of the Arctic Circle, it’s a step into the dark that’s being badly received.

Actually it’s more like watching a bear peddling a unicycle without any background music in a basement full of smug Art Scene wannabees.

Next will be vacuum cleaners, fans, coffee makers, hair dryers.

Every time you use a coffee maker, Gaia strangles a puppy.

Reporting Data on Things That Have Yet to Happen

The apocalypse brigade continues to onanisticly fools itself:

RATES of mental illnesses including depression and post-traumatic stress will increase as a result of climate change, a report to be released today says.
The paper, prepared for the Climate Institute, says loss of social cohesion in the wake of severe weather events related to climate change could be linked to increased rates of anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress and substance abuse.
As many as one in five people reported ''emotional injury, stress and despair'' in the wake of these events.

...in the past tense. Honest of them isn’t it?

The conclusion?

Mental illness rise linked to climate

Surely. But isn’t everything?

The report also looks at mental health in the aftermath of major weather events possibly linked to climate change.

It shows that one in 10 primary school children reported symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder in the wake of cyclone Larry in 2006. More than one in 10 reported symptoms more than three months after the cyclone.

Which is weather, despite the fact that we are told that weather is not climate. Sometimes.

Our Chinese Future

Xie's family asked why Xie would choose to severely mutilate so much of his body in a suicide attempt.

Forget about that special massage with happy ending:

Anti-corruption official found dead with 11 knife wounds, police declare it a suicide

Enjoy your “post-American-century, folks!

It was suggested that Xie's suicide was possibly related to work issues, stemming from his failure to be promoted to the standing committee at his office.

And remember: Daddy drinks because you cry!

It’s Hard Work, but Somebody has to do it

It’s a side effect of France’s one psychosis policy.

Chinese women come home super sluts after studying in France, according to an associate judicial professor lecturing his class.

Because the Poor Still aren’t Hiring

Thank God that someone on the continent permanently blighted with envy and class-hatred is saying it.

In Portuguese daily Público professor and political scientist João Carlos Espada criticises the notion of levying an extraordinary tax on the super-rich. “Taxes are not the primary source of improving the living conditions of the majority. The wealth of Europe and the West – which even today is worthy of the admiration of the rest of the world – was not the product of redistribution of wealth from the rich to the poor through taxes. It was the product of the creation of wealth in a climate of economic freedom, generally associated with low taxation, swift justice and, above all, the absence of barriers to the entry of new competitors”.

Espada argues that “the best contribution of the rich to the common good lies in ensuring that goods or services are being produced in a way that is most affordable to the greatest number of people; it consists of guaranteeing that this good or service is not artificially protected from competition and that it is chosen willingly by those who consume it”. Espada believes that this is the factor that was the great “social elevator” in Europe and the West that enabled successive generations of ordinary people to afford goods and products that previous generations never dreamed of having.

As you can expect with apostacy, the article was deleted.

Doing Business the Leftist Way

I guess with all of that “most ethical congress” transparency stuff on their minds, they forgot to hide their graft and cronyism.

Since Regina Dugan became the director of Darpa, the Pentagon’s top research division has signed millions of dollars’ worth of contracts with her family firm, which in turn owes her at least a quarter-million dollars. It’s an arrangement that has raised eyebrows in the research community, and has now drawn the attention of the Defense Department’s internal auditors and investigators.

She was a program manager at DARPA from 1996-2000 when Clinton was in office. She then founded RedXDefense, the recipient of the contracts in question in 2005.

Her strength was not in engineering as is so firmly touted, but rather in the business of gaming tax money:

The company allowed Dugan to dig into a range of business activities -- she worked on developing relationships, fundraising, legal and financial work, as well as marketing.

Even if Handguns were Banned, they would still find a way to Shoot Us in the Foot

Russians of virtually every sort seem to get along rather nicely with America’s left – for the simple reason that they like to promote the same, convenient “Hate America” causes and campaigns.

Experts are looking for a reason behind Tuesday afternoon’s unlikely 5.8 magnitude earthquake that shook people up and down the East Coast, and some are saying that a recent rise in fracking could be the culprit.

Hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” is the man-made splintering of underground rocks to expedite the exploiting of natural resources. It’s become a widespread phenomenon since its introduction in 2004, and though the practice can help increase supplies of oil and gas without reaching out internationally for imports, the result it can have on the geological make-up of the Earth can be ravaging. Now some experts say the rise in fracking could be to blame for yesterday’s quake.

So long as it denies employment, prosperity, or self-sufficiency to Americans, they both agree that it must be opposed. Alas, why, you ask?


The irony is that the American Left probably don’t understand WHY Russian might want American to not extract fuel that they might otherwise import. Russia is basically little more than a Banana Republic of petroleum at this point, and RT is a sort of occasionally “not completely unhinged-seeming” house organ. The more rabid and impractical your environmentalism, the better it is for sales, if not to Americans, that to others who reduce the supply of energy on the market through their demand.

The left’s hatred of their own societies has made them into permanent and predictable suckers. In effect, they shill for polluting de-facto dictatorships.