The Pigs Got Him!

Penguin no. 337, a Humbolt (known as Flash to his friends) who busted out of the Zoo in Tokyo 82 days ago by scaling a 13 foot high wall, has been apprehended.

Officials’ greatest fear is that he would turn into Pengzilla out there, and, you know, attack the island or something.

The Guardian reports that video footage has shown the penguin "frolicking," and apparently in good health, in a different part of Tokyo Bay

Despite your eternal optimism, I’m sorry to hear you were finally nailed, little Dude. I hope you can bust out of the crowbar hotel again really soon.

You’re Doing Fine, Baden-Württemberg, Baden-Württemberg, OK

Rereading this is starting to make my stomach hurt.

Observes Hermann. Not me, though. He discusses his view of the magnitude of the cash-pile that German savers and investors are sitting on. While this is in sharp contrast to the state of personal finance south of the Alps, that's still alright by me.

Because they see the Euro trending into devaluation for some period of time, it actually bodes well for the New York Exchanges at first (buying US stocks is a way of swapping your savings out into another currency,) as well as an eventual round of bargain-hunting on the European exchanges after a pullback of, say, 8-10%

This despite the nudnik flight to safety behavior of the bulk of German investors when the risks to them are readily managable:

the punch line is that they seem to have invested most of it at those awful horrible dreadful banks they like to despise so much (they make big banks even bigger, you might say). Investments in real estate haven’t even been calculated here, by the way.

One of the pressing problems with all economies, even the German economy, is that a large amount of money has been pulled out of markets, and has still not gone back in. This starves companies that hire, build plant, or otherwise invest, of operating capital.

One certainty is that when the fear DOES go away, stock prices (and volumes) will rapidly rise in a large, one-time Oklahoma-landrush style event.

After all there has been an awful lot of money worldwide that has been held back since 2009 despite the enthusiastic chatter about emerging markets and notions of Chinese economic infallibility. People have watched their retirement accounts fall and eke back something, but are likely exactly where they were 4 years ago. There's anxiety about this having cost/lost time in the scale of years that they will have to keep working beyond the age that they had once anticipated.

Before you discount this is a bad way of looking at what the German investor MIGHT do, make a note of their taciturn ways that define the Sparkultur that makes them look like “the 1%”. It always adopts behavior practiced abroad for some length of time as a part of sticking with what’s tried and true, even if it’s goofy.

Going “all in” on solar panels at a northern latitude where the sun might shine for a few days every other August is a sign of this. The shared-delusion makes perfect sense to them because they keep hearing that people out there in the big, wide world think it matters, so it must be the thing a schlauer Kopf needs to do – and do it Sofort, once it is recognized.
So it isn’t quite mad to think that sooner or later, they’ll be making large withdrawals from the 1st National Bank of Sealy Posturepedic at some point in the cycle we see now. It might foretell a trend which is also true of all of the OECD societies – more popularly among those that are emerging from recession in reasonable shape than the rest, but a likely trend across the board in an effort by the great mass of individual to (if nothing else,) get personal retirement plans back on track without the rest of society’s ideas.

Europeans being “forced” to retire at 68-70? Forget the Social contract as a discussion point - the economy has made that decision for us. This holds true despite the knuckleheads frequently found marching in the streets of French cities on a seasonal basis trying to circumvent the plain fact that there just isn’t enough money to provide for all their comforts on the backs of the taxpayers whom they outnumber by "making a debate" out of it.

The New Europe is Actually the Old Normal Europe

Title: "A run on the banks: Greeks gather together their liquid assets"

Stereotypical Greek man: "... Quick!, hide this under the mattress!"

Elitist Piffle and the Modern Do-Gooder

An environmental “eco-district" built on "brownfield" land on the French side of the border with Switzerland 15 klicks from Genera aims to attract wealthy and indingnantly green Swissies.

More than 1000 people will be able to move into the low-energy apartments, which have green roofs and photovoltaic panels. The city will include a pedestrian town square and a “green corridor,” of walkways, planted with 750 trees. Price per square meter: 4000 euros, which is very reasonable. There will be a percentage of social housing as well.

The sad fact is that it will displace the people who live there: occasionally productive lower income folks who actually materially do something for a living, and therefore commit the sin of sometimes consuming fuel.

The materialistic bourgeois competition between the proletariat (who now vote FN) and the aesthetitian-new-socialist-man types can therefore be easily characterized in the narrative of the day’s class struggle dialectic:

“There’s a race for housing, which is a source of imbalance, both socially and ecologically,” Claude Barbier concludes.

So the modest and picturesque peasants may stay, so long as they move into the allotted percentage of “social housing”. How very empowering.

Further to Pointless Devotions

Any informed person’s first thought is to want to ask: “what austerity?”, but you have to remember that we’re talking about the true black helicopter crowd.

By this, I mean Germans doing generally better than virtually anyone else on earth that isn’t standing on a desert full of oil protesting the very existence of financial system, thinking that nanny’s teat could still provide after its’ post-revolutionary elimination.

Pointlessly Devoted to You

Some of which live in a past held in some sentimental regard by people who can’t count. This is particularly true of European Syndicalists and Socialists, such as propping up dead industries to pay back those who voted for you, such as steelmaking for that old-fashioned “butch men in cloth caps” feeling of haing a “Great Leap Forward”. They include ideas to make them sound modern like looking serious about the economy by starting a new ministry, such as a ministre du Redressement productif, which translated roughly as ”Ministry of Production Recovery”.

Not only is the idea that the government can spoonfeed prosperity to a thankful lumpenproletariat idiotic and impossible, but the name of this new little sub-empire makes no sense in any language.

This doesn’t seem to bother people who want to look like they are doing something, especially what they really don’t have anything in their ideological toolbox that will work.

Oh you Little Shnickelfritz, how Could Anyone Stay Mad at YOU?!?

The current foreign minister, Laurent Fabius, is responsible for French EU policy. In 2005, he and his crew tried to suffocate the EU treaty in its crib on the pretext that it required fiscal restraint inimical to Socialist (non-)economics.

Now they’re parroting the latest sculpted mendacity about “growth vs. austerity”, when there hasn’t been any austerity to peak of, and assumes that economic growth can only be initiated by government spending.

Then there’s the “30% pay cut” that Hollande and his Ministers are taking in symbolic self-debasement before they tax-and-spend, ending up with large personal empires at their disposal when they’re deposed. On the other hand, the idea of, say, reducing government by 30% to stimulate growth would never occur to them in a million years.

As I said: now you’ve got your socialists, see. So what you’re going to get is a lot of fake issues and generalized bedlam as light entertainment.

Reality Bites

The Thing that’s Been Obvious All Along

Many of the Europeans who ‘supported’ candidate Obama are disappointed because he didn’t get the dictatorial powers that they thought existed as part of their delusions about United States.

Observing Hermann summarizes:

President Obama just can’t turn out to be an ineffective loser. No he can’t. We are the world and we won’t accept it. We elected him, after all. Along with America too, of course.

I’ll ask the question I asked several people on 2008 US presidential election night in Berlin: “what state do you vote in?” It turns out that the voted in the state of ignorance and willful blindness, not to mention their unique brand of unwitting racial bigotry.

Crime’s Down, and Yet the Prisons are Filled with Coupon Clippers!

One of the benefits of a helpless, rapidly aging society, is the silliness of its’ crimes and the comic relief it offers. Trashy Berlin rag Berliner Kurier seems to be able to pick up the story where anti-gun laws have left off:

Two unknowns surprised [shop staff] last night shortly after closing time at a grocery store in Tempelhof by men who had apparently waited until 10 p.m. in the customer toilets of the business in the Germania Street. They threatened the four members of staff with a gun and a machete until 10:10. They fled then through a window in the direction of Felix Street after the cash was handed over to them.

Elsewhere:

First a Thief, and then an Aide in Marienchaussee, Berlin

A robber who attempted to snatch a woman’s purse had a sudden change of heart. Around 11:20 p.m., a stranger approached a 58 year old in a parking lot in Marienfelderchaussee and ripped at her handbag. After the woman held onto her bag and was thrown, the man apologized to her, helped her back on her feet and then fled without any loot. The woman suffered a concussion and was treated at a clinic. The Criminal Investigation Directorate has taken over the investigation.

I hope that the tale maintains you feelings of “guilt” being ironic and unclear.

The Impulse of Population Control is to Control the Whole of the Population

Malthus’s argument that human population growth invariably leads to famine and poverty is plainly at odds with the historical evidence, which shows global living standards rising with population growth, it nonetheless persisted and even gained strength among intellectuals and political leaders in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Its most pernicious manifestation in recent decades has been the doctrine of population control, famously advocated by ecologist Paul Ehrlich, whose bestselling 1968 antihumanist tract The Population Bomb has served as the bible of neo-Malthusianism. In this book, Ehrlich warned of overpopulation and advocated that the American government adopt stringent population control measures, both domestically and for the Third World countries that received American foreign aid. (Ehrlich, it should be noted, is the mentor of and frequent collaborator with John Holdren, President Obama’s science advisor.)

Reading through this chilling look into the minds of leftist social engineers leaves no doubt that they have picked up where the Nazis left off.

Babies born in China in spite of the one-child policy are declared “black children” and have no right to food, health care, or education. If female, they are frequently killed, either at birth, or if apprehended later, at orphanages where they are gathered. Shown above is Mei Ming, a two-year-old girl tied to a chair in a “dying room.” The bucket below her is to catch her urine and feces as she dies over the next several days from starvation and neglect.

It pains me to think that it’s even possible for people to be that cruel today, founding it on nothing more than a misguided and evil ideology that they convince themselves is “for humanity”. It’s hideous to think that they imagine that there is any kind of compassion in the practice.

Women who defied these injunctions were taken and sterilized by force. Babies would be aborted right through the ninth month of pregnancy, with many crying as they were being stabbed to death at the moment of birth. Those women who fled to try to save their children were hunted, and if they could not be caught, their houses were torn down and their parents thrown in prison, there to linger until a ransom of 20,000 yuan — about three years’ income for a peasant — was paid for their release. Babies born to such fugitives were declared to be “black children,” illegal non-persons in the eyes of the state, without any right to employment, public schooling, health care, or reproduction.

Pray for them.

In every generation, they found a pretext. Their excuse today is “Climate Change”.

Pity me, for I am in Charge

I can think of no greater evidence of the blinding arrogance of the leading lights of the left than this quote:

No leader can be too far ahead of his followers.

- Eleanor Roosevelt

No consider for a moment the outlook of her present day admirers.

The Cartoon is Hilarious in Retrospect

Ah, a damsel with a fortress Europe on her head. Like a cherished children’s book, there is such hopefulness to be found in this pile of Plantu dating from 1998:

” ... Let’s hope no-one sticks anything in the spokes ... ”

You might want to make a note that the worry-laden crown looking on is a distressed looking Helmut Kohl with a sapling coming out of the top of his head.

It’s a Sign

In fact it’s prof that the entire issue is not real, and it starts with political beggars throwing out unsupported facts.

Women are far more likely than men to die in natural disasters, so they can also be expected to suffer more from the effects of climate change.

Which is the usual way of saying “subsidize something I want, or I’ll stamp my feet.” It also comes with anomalous, convenient examples being used to imply that whatever sentiment they hold magically becomes scientific fact:

Today, on the other hand, the challenge of climate change and that of justice and equality for women are intrinsically linked. We can't propose efficient and innovative solutions if we don't widen our field of vision.

And what do they want? Subsidized intercontinental travel, of course – and not by balloon or foot:

The report proposes concrete measures aimed at including more women in Europe's climate diplomacy such as a quota for a minimum of 40% women in delegations. We should also encourage a greater opening of technical, political and financial bodies. In addition we ask that during the evaluation phase or launch of projects data is systematically collected and broken down by sex.

Not to mention, the opportunity for them to be allowed to financially strangulate whatever fashionable non-issue there is out there.

Concider the reasoning: in an environment where they ALREADY get head-of-the-line treatment to enter the sciences (but don’t to the degree men do,) they want more help, and yet these impoverished victims of non-study also want more of a say in technically based solutions.

You capiche?

Today is the 1st of May

It is a day once broadly understood as being a day to celebrate the end of the winter doldrums and the coming of a green and fertile season. It has always been a day reserved for the joy of children.

That is, until it was coopted by selfish, leftist grown-ups and turned into a Commie-Douchebag-palooza.