Real, Living Socialism!

Likely nostalgic for some image of the 19th Century, blowhard Arnaud Montebourg (who once called for the formation of 6th republic,) France’s industry minister declared how proud he is of the nationalization of a failed steel plant, saying “the whole world is doing it”, and calling it a “modern solution”. He returned into his shag carpeted van shortly thereafter. The owner of the plants’ comments? Eat me. They only ended up with it because it was bankrupt in the first place. It’s dragging a multi-national maker of the productive world’s feedstock down.

For not making their outlandish delusion about economics feasible, they “hate” you, and their politician can’t wait to shoot themselves in the foot to pander to the even more irrational constituents of the department where the failed mill is located.

Lakshmi Mittal is a household name in France now but not for the right reasons. Ever since he took over Europe's Arcelor in 2006, Mittal hasn't been able to shed his image as the big-bad mega-rich Indian who came to France to lay off workers and drive French steel industry to ruin.

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The recent Mittal row in France is over ArcelorMittal closing two furnaces that employed 629 workers at Florange in eastern France. The furnaces were temporarily closed for nearly 14 months but Mittal said on October 1 that the closure will be permanent, citing difficulties affecting the French and European economies.

This is what you end up with, when you see society as an extension of the state.

Every Time you Turn the Heat on, Jesus Kills a Puppy.

Dependable as they are, the world’s climate samurai can always be depended upon to make a “gutsy call” whether the skies are grey or blue, finding the most inhumane, anti-poor, and anti-human things to say in a struggling people’s moment of need.

As Hurricane Sandy prepared to strike the Northeast, climate scientists from alarmist and skeptical camps alike reported the storm had little if anything to do with global warming. Martin Hoerling, who chairs the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA’s) climate variability research program, and who oversees NOAA’s Climate Scene Investigators, observed, “neither the frequency of tropical or extratropical cyclones over the North Atlantic are projected to appreciably change due to climate change, nor have there been indications of a change in their statistical behavior over this region in recent decades.”

However, let’s say you’re a Global Warming thumper, with nothing to gain other than tenure and title that you imagine people take seriously. Atlantic storm Sandy strikes densely populated cities in an otherwise hurricane-poor year, and what conclusion does your “scientific” mind come to?

Got that? Global warming models project no appreciable change in North Atlantic storm behavior, yet global warming alarmists now say global warming caused Hurricane Sandy.

So what you’re saying is that you’re going to do the right thing, and in the midst of human loss, you’re going to urge government and civil society to redirect resources much needed to deal with the consequences of “that thing you’re so heroically worried about” to your politically fetish, even if it requires changing the apocalyptic hellfire and brimstone schtick to be revised to suit your political needs.

With a backdrop containing the words, “The New Normal?” NBC News aired a video claiming, “Most scientists have no doubt of the overall cause” of Hurricane Sandy. To emphasize this false narrative, the video claims, “Even some politicians agree.” Got it? EVEN some politicians agree! In other words, if any of you anti-science deniers buy into what NOAA climate scientist Martin Hoerling reports, here’s a big slice of Democrat New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo saying global warming IS to blame.

Aren’t you feeling a lot more comforted knowing that, in order “to protect people” who can’t afford to move away from low-lying areas, those folks will be expected to start depending on super-costly “renewables” for their heating and electricity from now on?

It’s completely immoral, but they’re convinced of the rightness of their convictions.

Otherwise, don’t worry, kids rationalizations are on the way!

It should rely on mandatory rules and use the fight against climate change as a tool for job creation. The President may thus avoid futile battles in Congress and convince rank and file citizens that fighting against climate will improve their lot.

And it will solve all ills, this thing where you pull money out of the economy and force people to depend on less productive means to achieve higher output in the next five-year-plan:

Raising US fuel prices to present European levels will induce US citizens to use cars, trucks and planes a bit less lavishly, while accelerating the necessary switch to hybrid and electric engines and to public transport in the densely populated regions.

By the same token, it will help the federal government balance its chronic budget deficit and introduce overdue “green taxation” to offset environmental costs.

This, despite adding environmental costs. It should pay the deficit off, because we know that government is allowed to not just count revenue twice, but we all know that raising taxes always enlarges the tax base, right?

Remember, they’re here to help you, to lower the seas, and heal the earth. Just don’t use any heat or transportation if you’ve been washed out by a storm and you’re wet and cold.

A Thought for the Millennia

While Obama supporter Sandra Fluke bellowed “save us, Trojan man” like so many others seeking their rent, we only have our nation’s least humble folk to blame:

“Do not blame Caesar, blame the people of Rome who have so enthusiastically acclaimed and adored him and rejoiced in their loss of freedom and danced in his path and gave him triumphal processions. Blame the people who hail him when he speaks in the Forum of the ‘new, wonderful, good society’ which shall now be Rome’s"

- Marcus Tullius Cicero who minces words even less here:

“A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear.”

In other news, we find fools to suffer. Young women propagandized by leftists were convinced that they would have to hoard tampons if Mitt Romney was elected.

A Thought or two on Socialistic Crypto-Command Economics

A French commenter on Ambrose Evans-Pritchard’s article noting how regrettable Hollande’s handling of the French economy describes the mistakes Socialists make over and over to a tee.

Canute thought he commanded the waves; French socialists think they can command the economy as if it were a performing seal. As usual, that theory is proving defective in practice.

True dat, but the crime is how they got there. Once the government spends 55% of GDP, and channels the use of yet more of it, it’s capacity to do the right things, once they learn what they are, are severely constrained. In other words, they overdid the lovin’, to the point where they are walking funny, and end up with a new form of ED which will remain uncurable for generations.

Hollande and his schoolteacher-turned-prime minister Ayrault have simply dusted off the playbook of 19th century economic theory that was such a disaster for Mitterrand and his schoolteacher-turned-prime minister Mauroy.

(It's the tragedy of French socialism that it is dominated by schoolteachers who've never read anyone further to the Right than Marx; also, of course, a tragedy for the nation.)

Why the allusions to personal violation? It’s brought to mind by the thought of one of France’s great Socialist scions taking his liberty with the ideas he and the left were espousing, despite the obvious harm it does to those it’s meant to help.

A Parisian pundit remarked the other day that the Parti socialiste spent 10 years in opposition jeering at conservative governments but hadn't given a moment's thought to what it would do when it regained power, other than look after its own.

This turns out to be true.

So he really is “M. Normale”. Normal for a Socialist in politics, that is, and not unlike Barack Obama’s attempts at a short-hand interventionist economic model as well, exemplified by a the doomed notion of being a Green Venture Capital organ. It eroded into the social failings of his branch of the International Socialist Guild: into cronyism.

Here the American left were hoping for a rock star, they got a featherbedding city councilman trying economic stunts that leftist academia have touted in its’ echo-chamber for decades. In France they sought someone normal to refashion the indulgent image of Socialism, and they got a pedantic and awkward city councilman trying economic stunts that leftist academia have touted in its’ echo-chamber for decades.

I suppose it takes teachers, living largely as they do in a simplified, closed-loop economic system themselves, with its’ “single-payer” simplification of everything, to try to apply this to the rest of society. The problem is that the private sector doesn’t have anyone else’s pocket to pick to make up the difference between income and payroll.

The outcome, surprising no-one, is failure.

Media Flunky Update

From his childish and degrading propaganda perch, Chris Matthews insists that Rush Limbaugh reminds him of the 'Guy From Deliverance', or more accurately the oaf who forcibly sodomized the character in Ned Beatty’s role in the film, itself a hateful and prejudicial depiction of rural folk considered de rigeur of our cultural betters.

I suppose Matthews thinks of this as thoughtful political rhetoric, despite the fact that he reminds anyone with half a clue of Roger Herren’s character Rusty from Myra Breckenridge getting a pegging from Raquel Welch’s character, Myra:


Matthews, it seems has hit his creative limit, having used the one analogy he can remember fondly, just once too often:

Matthews previously smeared Ann Coulter's audience as straight out of Deliverance.

How he gets there, outside of obviously exhibiting a vivid interest in spelunking, mush as many other leftist seem to, remains unclear.

Perhaps from the position of their phony, self-constructed imaginings of others, they think this is supposed to shock conservatives. It doesn’t. It just makes them more familiar with what appears to be a stunning uniformity of thought on the part of the left. More to the point, the awkward allusions to obscenity, (this revealing of a persistent theme in their conversational culture,) serves only to shove away the few happy, normal, reasonable, and decent people that still support the left.

So my advice to Chris Matthews is simple at this point: don’t skimp on the Crisco back there, Pookie.

Sorry, we’re no Longer Shocked

Artists whose interests received a boost with the €12 million renovation of a museum and art center are advancing an unintelligible protest against cuts to subsidies of their craft which no-one deems worth paying for of their own volition.



Behold, the vividness of their righteous anger!
The artful solution? Break into a privately owned property and complain about the local government’s policies, as though the house was the government’s to do with as the otherwise subsidized scions of culture wish.

“Now they don’t have enough money to do any interesting exhibitions,” Lag told EUobserver from New York, where he is pursuing a master’s degree in curatorial studies.

That curator’s appeal to state seizure came from the New York that it requires airfare to get to.

Once inside the abandoned building, Lag changed the locks on the door and began work on an art exhibition, he said, “to let the neighbours know what is happening, to make people in the world know what is happening in Spain.”

I’m not sure if the neighbors care, but I am sure that the scene in Alicante, Spain isn’t relevant enough for “the world,” pre-occupied with its’ own affairs to care either.

I’ll say it again: if “culture” is depending entirely on public funding (which a small elite, and not the public has a hand in delegating,) then that form of expression can be fairly assumed to already be dead beyond redemption, and waiting for some form of genuine and unmanaged innovation (which is tangible to someone,) to replace it.

Are uncreative artists creating universal hatred for great art?

Yes. The arts, at least the arts promoted by “arts establishment” are sterile, and the genuinely creative are paying the price for what Paglia accurately calls the art mafia’s “delusional sense of entitlement” fed by the use of governmental powers to choose what’s funded.