¡No Gritaron!

Naked Ramblers in the News

2012-02-19T17:40:00.000Z

While this is an issue the editorial Quango here at ¡No Pasarán! visits from time to time, I did not realize that it’s not so much about scaring dog walkers, but rather gathering statistics.

The committed naturist kept score of the number of positive reactions versus adverse reactions he received on his naked tea-time stroll at Otley Chevin in Leeds on October 2 last year.

What’s particularly funny is that the reporter is trying to give this guy’s strange, empty life of polling those people in that other world who wear garments, the air of someone reasonable who has something to say.

''I saw her turning around, I could tell she was upset about something.''

Aren’t you glad that in this crass, career-obsessed world, that there are Europeans willing to face the big issues of the day? ...and do it with such dignity and aplomb?

Do they Realize that this Involves Genetic Modification?

2012-02-18T17:39:00.000Z

They tried to give us “the new man,” and it failed. Now they’re working on “the new cow.”

Scientists from across Europe are gathering in Aberdeen this week to draw up a programme of research aimed at mitigating some of the causes of climate change, as well as benefiting rural communities and addressing global food security.

The € 7.7 million, four-year project is a partnership between 11 European organisations, and will be coordinated by Professor John Wallace of the Rowett Institute of Nutrition and Health at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, UK.

The demand for livestock products is growing, and the health of the farming industry is vital to the sustainability of rural communities. Farm animals are however significant contributors to the emission of the ‘greenhouse gas’ methane, but there is still much uncertainty around how this happens.

Professor Wallace explains the aims of the collaboration as follows: “Ruminomics aims to increase the efficiency – and decrease the environmental footprint – of the farming of ruminant livestock, and to significantly advance current knowledge in this sector.

“The project will exploit state-of-the-art technologies to understand how ruminant gastrointestinal microbial ecosystems – called microbiomes – are controlled by the host animal, and by their diet, and how this impacts on greenhouse gas emissions, efficiency and product quality.

Evidently the methane-producing capacity of German beer has yet to be exploited as “untapped potential”.

Ship of Tools Adrift at Sea and Longing to be Heard

2012-02-17T17:58:00.000Z

This man is indicative of why Europeans generally don’t get the global economic crisis, or Europe’s own debt crisis. There has been so much babble, spin, and talking in circles, that he doesn’t realize that there was much of a “French-German Axis” to begin with. It was the case that the two conferred because they were the only large economies remaining who were marginally serious about dealing with the EU’s issues within the EU.

One may think that in these difficult times, the renewed Franco-German axis is a good thing. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Today, it is the “total collaboration” between Merkel and Sarkozy that is driving Europe into the catastrophe.

Really? What’s the alternative? Who’s coming forward? You guessed it: no-one.

In fact the other large economies in the Eurozone as well as the small ones, when they aren’t begging special deals of one kind or another from France and Germany, have become inept enough to believe that they could just punt for some kind of politically CYA freebies from the IMF and Washington, and somehow remain a union.

Sarkozy’s opponent François Hollande has become the lone challenger to Mrs. Merkel. “Socialists live in Europe” he has declared and he has vowed to re-negotiate the fiscal pact by which Merkel hopes to germanify Europe. This fact explains why the German Chancellor has thrown her weight behind Sarkozy, the conservative candidate; even if her foreign minister was quick to point out that party support was not in the interest of the German state. It will be harder for Merkel to dominate a socialist government in France than a weakened Sarkozy.

And no, the entire world, let alone the western Europeans, do not believe that everything that happens is a form of palace intrigue. Nor are the charged exchanges between the Europeans genuinely serious for the outside world or even the rest of Europe for that matter.

Where does that leave France and Germany? National identities have a long shelf-life. Fois gras and Schweinshaxe will not disappear; nor will the different models of organising the welfare state. What is needed is a new political consensus that allows citizens to assume responsibility for their common affairs, and both France and Germany can contribute to making it happen.

Which is being expressed HOW exactly? What is being proposed or volunteered in the hinterland other than pot-banging, destroying property, and rioting? Zip.

The dramatization and personalization of the whole thing gives me a sense that those who indulge in it have such a shaky understanding of economies and markets, that it appears to be a defensive act – one meant to let one hear the sound of ones’ own voice and pretend to have a grip on things. It’s no wonder most of it comes from either leftists who wish private markets didn’t exist (possibly out of an inability to understand why prices can’t be controlled and fixed), and the neo-fascist “far-right”, the one with leftist platitudes when it can come up with economic pronouncements, one of which was this pointless pearl free of the burden of prescience or even tolerance for his fellow Europastani tribesmen:

Is Germany a normal country?

...and other rude assumptions made just before uttering the obvious about the political behavior of national government heads. Remember, that kind of callous crap is supposed to offer the already intelligent an even more-super-special insight.

Typical of the high quality and informative commentary in the continent available these past 4 years, it even pretends that you haven’t heard the pathetic theories based on one nation or another’s “national persona” which even among Europeans inevitably devolves into a Russ Meyer style German she bitches, cartoon Italians playing the accordion, and a beret-clad lout canoeing a unfiltered cloc that’s stuck to his lower lip representing the citizens of the republic.

Where does that leave France and Germany? National identities have a long shelf-life. Fois gras and Schweinshaxe will not disappear; nor will the different models of organising the welfare state.

As opposed to, say, a saucisson or Eisbein, which a twit unfamiliar of whom he speaks might pretend to know, if they can’t find a real sporting of real lifestyle analogy that post-dates the 19th century.

So beware the idea that you can understand economics by trying to force it through the cheesecloth of politics or culture, especially the politics and culture or what you THINK YOU KNOW. After all, through the fog and muck, there is a little voice saying to all of us something we don’t want to hear: you’re all broke, you filthy moochers.

A Portrait of European Sophistication

2012-02-16T13:59:00.000Z

AKA: A Sad Tale of Ill-Timed and Awkward Smarminess

Unlike Americans, a great many Europeans who should know better are prone to leaping to compare present day Germans to the Nazis. That is, when they weren’t quietly wishing that they had “finished the job,” that is.

Bernd Ulrich wrote in Hamburg’s Die Zeit:

At a book reading in Portugal the sensible East German writer Ingo Schulze was even asked if the Germans intended to take with the euro what they had failed to take with their panzers, i.e. become the masters of the continent. From Greece we can hear the same sort of remarks every day, often put more dramatically.

Elsewhere the reproach is dressed up with more gentility, when for example Germany’s current austerity policy is compared with that of Reich Chancellor Brüning, whose successor was Adolf Hitler. Frequently, too, German’s “special path” is brought up, as when the Merkel government fails to print as much money as the others are demanding. The so-often quoted “special path” ends where, historically? In Auschwitz, of course. Thus is the circle closed.

And that’s just a normal daily tidbit from the paper, so you can imagine what chatter among bar patrons and neighbors to whom Euro-Ur-man regularly grumbles recreationally with must be like.

It does not take long, really, to work out the riddle of why the Nazi comparisons are being flung about so thick and fast. It’s because for the first time since 1945 Germany is back at full strength, not because it wanted to be, but because the European debt crisis has left it the economically strongest and politically most powerful country in Europe. German interests now reach deeply into the internal affairs of other states.

In other words, like the United States they are through the underperformance, negligence, and dependency of others, the only entity left among their allies with enough power to be begged, or beggared as the case seems to be.

Ulrich recognizes the need for realism, not just in outlook by Europeans in vaunted “national imagery,” but in simple understanding of other humans:

What should we do now? Ask the others to quit this Nazi crap, to please insult us Germans in every imaginable way but that one? Yes, that could be done. The Germans could also admit that they want to be loved, much more than the French or the British, who already love themselves very well indeed. However, the Germans cannot deny themselves out of the sheer need for love, if only because the others would despise us even more.

It’s a silly thing to have to waste time on to repair the public regard of Germany when those who need to learn the lesson are broke, saddled with delusions about economics, and pusillanimously paralyzed by their own envy-laden forms of national cultural identity.

The ‘Cultural Superiority’ Parent Trap

2012-02-15T13:59:00.000Z

Much has been made lately of an article by Pamela Druckerman on claims of the “superiority” of French parents, and it’s hard to make inferences of that kind without plainly telling the reader that the statement was founded on the writer’s limited observation of a few isolated days with the sort of French families that she would have as friends and acquaintances, and is also very much the case of an American who only seems to know Americans like herself:

Soon it became clear to me that quietly and en masse, French parents were achieving outcomes that created a whole different atmosphere for family life. When American families visited our home, the parents usually spent much of the visit refereeing their kids' spats, helping their toddlers do laps around the kitchen island, or getting down on the floor to build Lego villages. When French friends visited, by contrast, the grownups had coffee and the children played happily by themselves.

If I might add an opinion here based on observation – a lot of it – Druckerman’s thesis is completely specious. Parents in any society are broadly varied in their ability, and that’s reflected in children’s behavior. What the writer observes are small piece of things that are present everywhere in the world. I can tell you quitter plainly that there is no shortage of trashy parents, indifferent parents, confused parents, over-active parents, meddlesome parents, good parents, and utterly helpless parents in France or anywhere else.

Druckerman’s assumption is reminiscent of a 1972 comment by Ney York film critic Pauline Kael, where she is reputed to have wondered aloud how Richard Nixon could have won since no one she knew voted for him. Yet while armed with that received wisdom, Richard Nixon won.

A French-American friend wrote me with a rather different view:

I have taught French schoolchildren, teens and young adults.

The 9 - 13 year olds were hell. Complete and total hell. Not that each individual on his/her own was not, in general, a nice enough kid. But as a group, trying to teach them was a major effort and discipline was THE problem.

The 1 - 3 year olds were fine because they were in an English-language group all day with English-language educators and, so, we ran a tight ship, so to speak. When we walked across the hall to the French-language group, it was like walking into a zoo. The noise was unbearable. And the educators were standing around drinking coffee and chatting amongst themselves and just letting the kids behave that way. The German-language group was similar to our group but even quieter.

The older students I taught, when they had been to Catholic schools, were fairly well-behaved. The ones from public schools were not.

So the fact Druckerman decries that non-French children don’t behave like painter’s subject should be taken for what it’s worth: shallow intercultural babble dressed up as yet more meddlesome unsolicited advice offered to parents of young kids.

Un Message Pour Les Toujours Courageux Pédés-Bloggeurs Franchouilles

2012-02-14T13:46:00.000Z

Contrary to popular received wisdom among intelligent Europeans, we do not fire weapons in the air while barefoot, wearing bib overalls at night.

German Science Finally Escaping the Plantation

2012-02-13T13:41:00.000Z

Dirk Maxeiner is a long-time blogger and all-around evil genius who has spent years doing the hard work of shining the light of reality on the sad world of Gleichhaltung, or common feeling in Germany. In the present day and age, much of that Gleichhaltung comes in the form of commonly held delusions borrowed from abroad, or things that empirically challenged people just wish was true:

More and more each day, the academic structure that was built around the dogma of global warming, reminds me of a corrugated metal shed, one that shudders and wobbles at every turn. That said, it constantly needs shoring and having holes in the roof patched up. Yet with each gust of wind, someone from the Potsdam Institute has to brave the cold and patch another hole.

Meanwhile, what we have to show for it is a sort of climate favela, ugly and almost always leaking. It’s charming that we have to hear that the current bitter cold have their cause in global warming. Ten years ago, you still could have prophesied that there would be no more cold winter, now they know exactly why they still aren’t. The findings are supposed to become real in hindsight. That is, if the theory and computer models absolutely do not fit the reality, they are not rejected, but subsequently adapted to the fit the trend. That’s how it goes with scientific socialism [Ed.: consensus]. Yu can also call it anti-science.

With the recent turn of direction taken by a senior one-time apocalypse-monger, and a general skepticism about once-favored foregone conclusions, the charlatans of Klimaschutz are being held to some of their claims, even in Germany.

How Charming! They’re Even Wearing Shoes for Us!

2012-02-12T13:41:00.000Z

Western civilization is afflicted with a horrible condition. It is one that debilitates the mind, poisoning international relations, enfeebling whole nations to anguish, wasted tears, hands chapped from self-flagellating wringing. Daniel Hannan can tell you all about it.

Congratulations to Rahul Bedi for putting into words what we all half-suspected: India neither needs nor wants UK aid. Such grants are outdated and patronising, he says, and encourage corruption. Indeed, Indians have 'become so contemptuous of Britain’s contribution that they accept it merely to avoid causing the Coalition embarrassment'. Ouch! Indians are a courteous people and Mr Bedi is perhaps too discreet to play his trump card: India's economic prospects are healthier than Britain's.

I call it the bedwetting of the morally vain. The nations at risk of this affliction are the donors, not the recipients, who seem uniquely unaware that the recipients suspect that the erstwhile missionaries of better-ness want to be called “B’wana”, and make them wear native garb for them, but parrot back stories about their good old days in Uni together.

Still, it's worth standing back and considering the big picture. We are borrowing money we don't have to send it to a country less indebted than our own. That country doesn't want it, but accepts it as a favour to us. The money encourages corruption without reducing poverty. Our relations are damaged in consequence.

2012-02-11T13:38:00.000Z

The Single Issue Overshadowing the US Presidential Election at a Glance

The President believes that the Government creates success and that private enterprise creates poverty. This makes his goals no different than that of a Marxist-Leninist, and makes his opponents the calm, caring, mild voice of common sense.

Even More Illiberal and Expansionist

2012-02-10T15:11:00.000Z

Let’s not forget about that other #European union.

The document was signed by the leaders of the Russian Federation, Belarus, and Kazakhstan. Only the ignorant will be less than impressed.

And it wasn’t just about “Kampuchean-Yemeni Solidarity” like the bad old days.

The Eurasian Union is part of an integration process leading to the Common Economic Space. Russian President Dmitry Medvedev likens it to a train. Think of it as a new European Union with Russia in the driver’s seat, picking up new passengers as it happily motors along.

Western Europe’s clout on world affairs is fading. My sad analysis is that the EU’s economy will soon implode like that of the old Soviet Bloc. Its people’s poverty and austerity will resemble that of communist Romania or Albania.

While the “implosion” fantasies are bogus, the notion of going through a transition phase of mediocrity and dependence isn’t. The EU being the world’s locus of high finance or “big-wind” in the form of being perpetual UN conference hosts will not pay the bills. The fact that we are talking about two R&D deserts doesn’t really figure into things either when you consider who it is that has the natural resources.

The harsh fact is that thanks to years of political ineptitude, the European Union has nothing left to offer the world. It is an also-ran.

I don’t see a sauve qui peut threshold being crossed in the future, but rather a creeping awareness that comes in the form of independent treaties and partnerships that critics will characterize as being rather too “British“ or “Hungarian” for their happy, loving family.

Is New Age Fluff Another Form of Naziism?

2012-02-09T15:10:00.000Z

You bet, Cha Ca, only a lot more buffoonish, historically ignorant, and almost as morally bereft.

The article quotes fillum maker David Lynch’s blindingly bad, but banal in its’ predictability:

"What do you mean by this concept of invincibility," asked an onlooker from the audience, made up mainly of film students with a smattering of meditation devotees. "An invincible Germany is a Germany that's invincible," replied a Delphic Schiffgens, who was dressed in a long white robe and gold crown. Adolf Hitler wanted that too!," shouted out one man. "Yes," countered Schiffgens. "But unfortunately he didn't succeed."

You Can Check Out Any Time You Like, But You Can Never Leave

2012-02-08T13:51:00.000Z

With no exit mechanism, and no substantive federalism, or a unifying idea, Francis Fukuyama decribes why the EU empire-building project is more or less like the Hotel California

in a sense, there is a deeper failure at the European level, a failure in European identity. That is to say, there was never a successful attempt to create a European sense of identity and a European sense of citizenship that would define the obligations, responsibilities, duties and rights that Europeans have to one another beyond simply the wording of the different treaties that were signed. The EU in many respects was created as a technocratic exercise done for purposes of economic efficiency. What we can see now is that economic and post-national values are not enough to get people to buy into this community. So wealthy Germans feel a sense of noblesse oblige towards poorer Germans; this social solidarity is the basis of the German welfare state. But they do not feel similar obligations towards the Greeks,whom they regard as being poor disciplined, very non-German in their general approach to fiscal matters.
So there is no solidarity in that broader European sense. I think for various reasons Europe is stumbling toward a short-term solution to this crisis. But I do not think that any form of deepening at this point is a viable project unless someone pays more attention to identity and is able to answer the question in a more substantive sense of what it means to be a European. Not just in a negative sense that we don’t want conflict and old nationalisms and war, but what it means in terms of positive values.

Kulture Korner: the Yé-yé girl

2012-02-07T16:24:00.000Z

Sylvie Vartan’s 1967 Japanese TV Ad

A fun fact: Vartan was married to France’s no. 1 Elvis impersonator, Johnny Hallyday.

Price Discovery and the Economics of Reality

2012-02-06T13:34:00.000Z

#Occupy Cathouse!

Following a progressive clampdown by French police, Le Temps reports that hookers are flocking to Geneva in droves.

Though most agree that the prostitution market in Geneva is booming, the local police vice unit is not concerned, saying that the increase will eventually level off. "In the 1980s, Geneva prostitutes were already complaining about competition from German prostitutes," says Michel Félix, a member of Aspasie, an association that has been protecting the rights of prostitutes for 30 years. "Then other nationalities started arriving – it works in cycles."

Which might possibly give then more of a sense of how supply and demand works than their Johns who are probably representing the finance industry well.

Lisa angrily accuses the media of hyping up the Swiss Eldorado’s huge salaries, thus attracting throngs of girls lured by easy money. Girls can indeed bring in 15,000 to 20,000 Swiss francs (12,000 to 17,000 euros) a month. But rates are actually comparable to those in the other European capitals. As the Gclub puts it: "Customers will usually pay 150 to 300 Swiss francs (120 to 250 euros) in high-class places, but 25 to 40 euros to turn a trick in the street -- that’s really slashing prices."

The economic nationalism, labor competition, and nativism are rife. It’s busting out all over, in fact:

Lisa, who runs Venusia, a legal and regulated house of prostitution in Geneva, has just about had enough. "France is trying to get rid of its prostitutes by sending them abroad. So they come here," she says. "We’re sick and tired of this situation."

Protectionism is rearing its’ ugly head in an industry critical to Europe, my friends, and something must be done.

I recommend the conventional European solution: a syndicat that you have to bribe your way in to despite a lack of “talent”, and, of course, unionization. Organize the workers and shut the place down!!! Death to the bosses!!!

A Moment for Morbid Poesie

2012-02-05T16:08:00.000Z

When I am dead, I hope it may be said:
His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.

Belloc, Hilaire (1870 - 1953)

Daz right, bitches!

A Hard Working Poet Never Takes a Break

2012-02-04T16:08:00.000Z

I'm tired of love; I'm still more tired of rhyme;
But money gives me pleasure all the time.

Belloc, Hilaire (1870 - 1953)

Word up.

Defining Deviancy Downward

2012-02-03T16:07:00.000Z

"The abandonment of the reproductive function is the common feature of all perversions. We actually describe a sexual activity as perverse if it has given up the aim of reproduction and pursues the attainment of pleasure as an aim independent of it. So, as you will see, the breach and turning point in the development of sexual life lies in becoming subordinate to the purpose of reproduction. Everything that happens before this turn of events and equally everything that disregards it and that aims solely at obtaining pleasure is given the uncomplimentary name of 'perverse' and as such is proscribed."

- Sigmund Freud, Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse

In other news, other varied forms of assplay or watersports will have come at a price:

Europe's demographics also aren't on the side of growth. Populations across the developed world are graying, but Europe's low productivity growth means that its future labor shortfall will be especially acute. It doesn't help that Europeans draw social security benefits earlier and more easily than their developed-world peers.

The (Anti-) Capitalism of Fools

2012-02-02T19:30:00.000Z

An editorial in Denmark’s Jyllands-Posten displays an undercurrent common to Europeans who are just as nominally supportive of authoritarianism inducing central planning economics, more likely in a form of nicey-nicey seeming government management of enterprise, and are also nominally supportive of free markets.

Oddly enough, the odd reasoning behind the quivering lips are visible even behind the centrist positions typically held by Jyllands-Posten:

The gap between rich and poor increased. The global financial crisis has shown that we have to rethink a capitalist model, which meant that financial institutions without the necessary checks could throw first USA and then Europe into a deep crisis that it can take decades to fix the economy up.

We’re all familiar with what this bemoans, and how it can never be salved outside of assigning every working person with the same income and benefits, something even Marxist-Leninism couldn’t achieve – so why even bother saying it if it wasn’t part of the usual atmospherics – no different than saying hello when you picking up a telephone?

It gets worse.

It is an economic crisis that has also become a political crisis because it is about lack of leadership. It is now so deep that it has started to weaken democracy.

No, being skeptical about or dissatisfied with your elected officials doesn’t weaken democracy, it gives you a reason to not vote for them again and embolden democracy by using it and letting it operate.

The crisis of capitalism in the West certainly raises many issues in Asia, whose interventionist economic model so often been criticized by the West but whose economies are nevertheless going ahead. The western model has taught them that the economic downturn has gruesome consequences and that one should be cautious in liberalizing the economy too much. So it's safer to have the state on track with the adjustments, such as the banking sector, as the U.S. and Europe lacked.

Sure, you say that now, but could you live in that kind of ‘company store’ society? Not likely.

Worse still is a total forgetting of who Nick Leeson was, and under whose laws he operated under, and .

The crisis of capitalism in the West certainly raises many issues in Asia, whose interventionist economic model so often been criticized by the West but whose economies are nevertheless going ahead. The western model has taught them that the economic downturn has gruesome consequences and that one should be cautious in liberalizing the economy too much. So it's safer to have the state on track with the adjustments, such as the banking sector, as the U.S. and Europe lacked.

Which oddly enough is that same ‘pirate capitalism’ that made Hong Kong’s economy grow and robustly resist a state of aggression that Havana can only dream of whining about.

Worried about democracy? Then stop alluding to the value of the Asia’s crypto-authoritarian factory states. The pointless bedwetting must stop.

The French Cultural Exception Explained

2012-02-01T19:30:00.000Z

It’s an exemption from the shackles of reason and truth-telling. It’s purpose is to fit whatever uninformed view of reality that you have – because there is simply no way you can’t be right.

What’s all that about? You ask... An Elle blogger, like a typical higher-being of the continent decided that all African-Americans could and should be defined by the three or four African-Americans that she’s familiar with in passing.

In an blog post titled “Black Fashion Power,” writer Nathalie Dolivo managed to insult American blacks as a whole while offering left-handed compliments to the First Lady Michelle Obama for taking on the Jackie O role in a “jazzy” way.

The writer imagines that the Obamas are the first to bring true style to African-Americans.

See, there you go. She did her national duty by defining nearly 37 million people she has no knowledge of outside of the doctored appearances found in photographs and videos, and there you have it.

And throw in some of that Jazz stuff too while you’re at it, it still being the hip thing with the kids, you see, at least in the minds of those Europeans who we are told simply know everything there is to be known.

I was reminded of this again just a few weeks ago when a Parisian in a bar was inquiring about the south as if the world that they lived in was straight out of ‘Mississippi Burning’. The man’s age, mature nature, and outward air of intelligence almost made me confuse him with someone with a shred of decency and intelligence. While willing to be ignorant of a culture, he was more than willing to have an opinion about who he thought were the good-guys and bad-guys in it.

Becoming Mortimer Snerd

2012-01-31T15:38:00.000Z

You remember Hee Haw! Don’t you? In the same spirit as “Russia Today”, Kremlin TV is giving global identity thief Julian Assange his own TV show.

RT television stepped forward Wednesday to say it will be broadcasting the show, a series of 10 interviews with what it described as "key political players, thinkers and revolutionaries - figures who in the author's opinion will be shaping the political agenda of tomorrow."

The names of the guests are still to be disclosed.

And now for the “no shinola, Sherlock” statement of the century, fitting in with the grand theme of Assange’s linear existence:

RT, which also broadcasts in Spanish and Arabic on its cable networks, often takes a critical stance on U.S. policy.

Possibly because RT, a channel no-one is willing to pay to watch, is an obscuritarian near-complete FSB propaganda operation that Assange, the presumed hater of secrecy finds himself hitching his fate to: an operation propped up by people who keep secret files on people for a living.

Otherwise how do you think they can afford to buy capacity on 25 different satellite transponders without any real advertising? We’d follow the money, but Assange’s choice of venue is as opaque as the drinking water was in east Berlin.

Certainly intended to either propagandize TO Americans if not ABOUT Americans, it least it stands the chance of being less unwatchable as European television.

"We're proud to host Julian Assange's new project," editor in chief Margarita Simonyan said in the statement. "RT has rallied a global audience of open-minded people who don't take things around them for granted."

No, they prefer getting their received wisdom from an illiberal paranoid crypto-police state reminiscent of the days of Moscow Central.

On the Left and Religion

2012-01-30T15:37:00.000Z

I find a disturbing similarity in the outlook of the political and institutional “lights” of our age, and a memorandum on how religion should be maligned written by Gorky to Stalin.

We need to know the "fathers of the church," the apologists of Christianity, especially indispensable to the study of the history of Catholicism, the most powerful and intellectual church organization whose political significance is quite clear. We need to know the history of church schisms, heresies, the Inquisition, the "religious" wars, etc. Every quotation by a believer is easily countered with dozens of theological quotations which contradict it.

We cannot do without an edition of the "Bible" with critical commentaries from the Tubingen school and books on criticism of biblical texts, which could bring a very useful "confusion into the minds" of believers.

It also brings to mind Howard Zinn’s efforts to rewrite history and work it into the curriculum of the American public school systems.

For this reason, there should be courses set up at the Communist Academy which would not only treat the history of religion, and mainly the history of the Christian church, i.e., the study of church history as politics.

Even the willfully constructed ‘soft touch’ when it comes to managing the news and the minds of youth:

By strongly emphasizing facts of a negative nature, we open ourselves up to our enemies, providing them an enormous amount of material, which they in turn very aptly use against us, compromising our party and our leadership in the eyes of Europe's proletariat, compromising the very principle of the dictatorship of the working class, because the proletariat of Europe and America feeds on the bourgeois newspapers for the most part—and for this reason it cannot grasp our country's cultural-
revolutionary progress, our successes and achievements in industrialization, the enthusiasm of our working masses, and of their influence on the impoverished peasantry.

The imperative to destroy faith by those who want control over a people is clear:

Our youth is very poorly informed on questions of this nature. The "tendency" toward a religious disposition is very noticeable--a natural result of developing individualism. At this time, as always, the young are in a hurry to find "the definitive answer."

Which is why those who like the idea of controlling a society feel such a strong need to manipulate education and the spinning of news. They know that a society left to make its’ own choices simply wouldn’t guarantee them the power over others that they seek.

An Unreconstructed Kremlin

2012-01-29T15:37:00.000Z

The mental leap to freedom is hard for those programmed into the ideology of the revolutionary left.

“When I was a teenager growing up in Chicago, I went through the standard teenage rebellion,” Bill Browder told me one afternoon in the Hermitage office in London, during the first of several conversations I had with him in 2011. “But instead of growing my hair long and joining a rock band, coming from my specific family, I decided I was going to become a capitalist. There was nothing that would piss off my family more than that.”

Bill Browder is CEO of Hermitage Capital Management, and...

was the largest capitalist in Eastern Europe for a while, but he’s now known as an international justice crusader. In the past two years, he has singlehandedly waged an intercontinental lobbying campaign to get Western governments to pass a suite of sanctions and travel restrictions on Russian officials involved in the conspiracy to arrest, torture, and murder Browder’s thirty-seven-year-old Moscow-based attorney, Sergei Magnitsky, who had uncovered a $230 million tax fraud pegged to companies that had been expropriated by Russian officials.

If you have not heard or read about Magnitsky’s rectitude, bravery, and suffering, I urge you to right away.

The Never-ending Game of Diplomatic Slap and Tickle Continues

2012-01-28T18:15:00.000Z

EU ministers agree new bail-out fund, criticise Greece

But the tentative agreement to have non-meetings continues:

A deal on the final wording of the fiscal treaty has not been achieved yet. Participation of non-euro leaders in eurozone summits remains an open issue that will have to be agreed by EU leaders when they meet on 30 January, he added.

It does sound better this way, though:

Typische Deutsche Schlamperei

2012-01-27T15:36:00.000Z

One in five Germans are unaware of Auschwitz.

The poll comes ahead of the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by Soviet troops on January 27, 1945, which Germany has marked since 1996 with official memorial ceremonies for Holocaust victims.

In other news of the no-duh!

According to a report by independent experts commissioned by the German parliament and published earlier this week, about one in five Germans is latently anti-Semitic.

And as long as it doesn’t get in the way of making money, Germans are not likely to even care. It makes the received wisdom behind their anti-semitism all that more special.

Against it Before they Were for it

2012-01-26T17:59:00.000Z

The EU will this week outline an overhaul of its 17-year- old data-protection policies addressing online advertising and social-networking sites. The bill, which includes stricter sanctions and will equip national data-protection authorities with powers to levy administrative sanctions and fines, will “become a trademark people recognize and trust worldwide,” Reding said at a conference in Munich yesterday.

Anticipating an opportunity to pander, the EU’s trinity (the perpetually promoting rarely elected Commissars Kroes, Malmström and Reding) become the faces of a new privacy rule, despite a uniform continental history of ignoring your privacy. And they also should have made the announcement in Berlin:

Since 2008, the Berlin police has collected data on 4.2 million mobile phone connections, reports German daily Tageszeitung. Most of the data has been collected in order to capture those who have set fire to luxury cars, a phenomenon that has been rampant in the German capital for the last five years. In 410 data requests by the judiciary to mobile phone operators, the police were able to identify the names and home addresses of people located near a burning car. "The only problem is they never identified any suspects," the paper notes.

Elsewhere, they’re promoting their presumed monopoly on human rights as happy hoo-hah in an initiative that duplicates what the CIA managed years ago.

EU Vice President Kroes appoints the discredited Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg to run it.

Kroes defends her pick of zu Guttenberg in her blog post, saying that she's looking for "talent, not saints." Fair enough. On the other point, I think that the irony of the battle over access benefits us more than the IP interests, as well, but I certainly understand people who are stunned and spluttering.

”Access” of “Intellectual Property”. In other words, if it’s not bolted down, and it comes from abroad, it’s yours, and it spills an interesting shade of ochre on zu Guttenberg street cred as an academic plagiarist.

Alas, the Fickle Ways of Pols in Need of a Handjob from the Masses

2012-01-24T19:05:00.001Z

September 23, 2010:

The European parliament pressed on Wednesday for a crackdown on film and music piracy on the Internet, raising fears among online rights groups that a new law will soon follow.

January 20, 2011:

Digital Agenda Commissioner Neelie Kroes has joined the throng of high-profile opponents to the controversial US internet legislation Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). In a message on her Twitter feed, Kroes said: "glad tide is turning on SOPA: don't need bad legislation when should be safeguarding benefits of open net".

It’s nothing new: the cultural mucki-mucks of the continent’s zeitgeist, even former Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes: they’ve always like the idea of legalizing the theft of other people’s IP, as long as it isn’t European.

The Zombies Among Us

2012-01-23T18:45:00.000Z

A dull, “housekeeping” style article presumably penned by DSK spouse and enabler Anne Sinclair rouses “bravos” from the HuffPo.fr readership, which plainly shows how empty their heads are.

In any case, our space, one that brings together the team that chose to devote to this project: to create The Huffington Post in France, was welcomed today to bring his modest stone to the plurality of information.

The Huffington Post has, for seven years, to blow on the U.S. press in line with an air of freedom, controversies, "conversations", a word dear to Americans, which means first exchange of ideas, discussions, debates. Arianna Huffington, founder of what became the first news site in the United States brings its expertise, experience, its platform, its technological tools. The other stakeholders, the Le Monde group and New Independent Publishing also give us the chance to have this French adventure.

This is all in French society today, and nourishes the columns of prestigious journals and news sites developing in front of us.

To those who say that sometimes shrinks, we want to answer that, together with our colleagues is also an obsession, we will expand the space, provide places of expression to those who do not have easy access.

We’ll ignore her moronic Kim-Jong-Il-esque claims about Ariana’s technological insight, and not even wonder why banal congratulations of other media babblers would provoke wooden (almost fake sounding) sounding huzzahs being heard from the party membership.

Rather, let’s do the typical French Blab-erati thing and try to infer whatever specious meaning we want - or one that strokes a passive-aggressive ego whose childish missives are read by no-one, and say with complete certainty that she is into pegging DSK.

That’s usually all it takes to get onto a French daytime talk show that has a epilepsy provoking set and a host who thinks they’re a political expert.

All of this comes on the heels of the launch (after the totally ignored prior launch) of a French edition of the Huffington Post, headed by Anne Sinclair. What she has in common with Ariana Huffington is rather Stepford child like. Neither of these two members of the 0.0001% earned their billions, pretend to be for the masses, steal wire pieces, got their momentum from other equally pointless fellow travelers, and bully writers into working for them for free.

“U.S. Americans”

2012-01-23T18:16:00.000Z

The term is as absurd as “États-Unien” (FR: “United-statesian”), and I hear it more and more.
My simple retort to the pinheaded who argue to me that they have the right to define the terms by which we Americans describe ourselves is to enlighten a lower being and ask how many other nations that have the word “America” in their name.

In ignorance, the answer nearly without fail is “all of the nations in the Americas.” I then ask them to name them.

The only nation other than the Unites States of America that has the word America in its’ name isn’t in the Americas: it’s American Samoa.

Remember, because they are inherently higher beings whose egos generally cannot bear even the most discreet bit of correction or presicion, you must insist that they’re right in order to make them go away or give you your measly €0,14 in change at the register.

États-Unien » est parfois préféré à « américain » afin de différencier les États-Unis du Canada et du Mexique.

No it isn’t.

A Love that Dare not Speak His Name

2012-01-22T20:13:00.000Z

Bruce Brawer on “Urinegate”:

Anti-Americanism is, of course, as European as Apfelstrudel

He goes on to detail implausibly stupid Norwegian attempts at comparing US troops to, you guessed it, the Nazis:

Still, it wasn’t until I ran across an article the other day in the Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet that I realized European anti-Americanism, thanks to Urinegate, is once again in full bloom. The article, written by somebody named Asbjørn Svarstad, begins by noting that the American soldiers who filmed themselves urinating on dead Taliban members may not be the first GIs to have behaved in such a manner. “American commandos who were dropped over Snåsa [in northern Norway] toward the end of World War II,” writes Asbjørn Svarstad, “are suspected of having displayed the same kind of contempt for their enemies.”

The main character in Svarstad’s story is none other than William Colby, who would later become head of the CIA but who back in 1945 was a 24-year-old major in charge of the Norwegian Special Operation Group (NORSO) under the command of the OSS. NORSO, which sounds rather like Brad Pitt’s unit in Inglourious Basterds, consisted of Norwegian-Americans and Norwegians who were operating behind enemy lines on a mission called Operation RYPE. On May 2, 1945, Colby’s men, who were stationed at a farm called Gjevsjøen, were discovered by five German soldiers, whom they quickly dispatched. According to Svarstad, local Norwegians – and here’s the meat of the story – later claimed that they were then invited by the Americans to urinate on the Germans’ corpses.

One of Svarstad’s sources is Norwegian journalist Ola Flyum, whom he describes as an authority on how northern Norway experienced World War II. Flyum’s verdict on the NORSO episode is as follows: “This kind of behavior says a great deal about the way in which the Americans conducted themselves. The Norwegians were shaken. Such a culture was unknown to them. I see many reasons to examine whether this was a war crime.”

Yes, you read that right. The local Norwegians had lived for five years under the Nazis, who had come to subdue and tyrannize them, to execute troublemakers and cart Jews off to their deaths. But, if Flyum is to be believed, the real trauma for these folks was being invited by their American liberators to relieve themselves on the bodies of their oppressors

It’s also worth noting that this blog gets a great number of its’ hits from the European continent from image searches, having posted a few pictures of Hitler in various articles, we have become enlightened to a larger European public, not just those we meet having a “nuanced” view of the murderous Charlie Chaplin impersonator.

So it comes as a shock to us that those same anti-Americans also use him their silent hero as a stick to beat people with. The posted articles’ comments he cites are even more masturbatory:

A couple of readers cited the Allied bombing of Dresden as proof that America and the western Allies were at least as bad as the Nazis; one recalled having “seen videos from WWII of P51 planes mowing down German farmers in May 1945.” Several readers insisted that it wasn’t the Western Allies that whupped the Nazis and freed Norway, but the Soviets: “America would have been a**-f***ed in a one-on-one against Nazi Germany.”

And in a unsurprising turn among leftists, we find elitism, racism, cultural condescention, and fictional assumptions about their straw-man, one no different than the type the Nazis cultivated in “The Eternal Jew”:

A running theme was that American soldiers are, as one reader put it, “typical American white trash.” Indeed, the words “white trash” recurred frequently. Left-wing readers who undoubtedly pride themselves on their purported respect for people (especially the underprivileged) of all races and religions, and who fret about the human rights of even the most loathsome members of the species (such as Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden), were quick to deride American GIs as poor, dumb – and, indeed, barely human – hicks: “There’s no doubt that white trash from the US…have lukewarm attitudes toward morality. Without the local minister and sheriff they fumble around, unwashed and drunk, and rape, kill, and film their crimes. They’re garbage.”

I only point this out because it is banal and typical of any bar-room on the continent, and because it seems to be the only public evidence of Europe’s cultural legacy, having otherwise abandoned any virtues not connected with the kind of enforcement of public morality that the state would dispense.

What then is the result of all of that helpless grasping for proof of their being right in their attitudes? A strange, nearly erotic affection for Nazis.

Don’t Mention Les Talibanlieusardes

2012-01-20T13:48:00.001Z

Reality being insufficient for their perennial hatred and demonization, French academics turn to fiction, turning to the lecturesome US crime series “The Wire” which another scholar plainly calls a vehicle to convey a political message

I suppose the point is to throw red meat at their own delusions and find some contrivance of "social realism” that feeds their prejudices that the whole of the United States (apart from those who are too well off are a slum.

To delve into the topic of social inequality in the United States, a French university has turned to a slice of American popular culture: the HBO series The Wire.

The critically acclaimed show, created by former journalist David Simon, had previously been the subject of a course at Harvard, but now will be used by students at Paris' University Nanterre La Défense to look in on American social ills from the outside.

From January 13 to June 1, several seminars will take place within the walls of the university, the latest tribute to the gritty realism of a series depicting the largely African-American, crime-plagued neighborhoods of Baltimore. The course will focus on subjects such as the American city, the representation of African Americans and the role of institutions as they are depicted in The Wire.

So they turn to ‘political art’. How cute. Never mind the fact that most French people who ask about life in America still think that it’s 1958 in the American south, most of them also seem to condescendingly want to believe by extension that dramas like “The Wire” represent all urban America, and all African Americans.

As if these things weren’t universal enough to make them realize that they are no better, while their strange fantasies about American society continue: they play at detesting it, and pretend that they need to prove they’ve got a “street cred” in that same “fake thug” fantasy world that their own pop culture is assuming American cities to be.

Nanterre c’est west side yo. Pour faire un « The Wire » en France faudrait surtout trouver un journaliste qui limite pas ses enquêtes à son compte twitter.

A Non-Linear European Reads the Newspaper

2012-01-19T17:38:00.000Z

Affordable energy = growth. Expensive energy = impoverishment for the poor and middle income and no growth. “Renewables” = bogus moral vanity of the non-productive, non-producing, and detached.

The truth is that Italy wastes its subsidies and uses the costliest sources. Nuclear energy was mothballed before the power stations were fully depreciated, bringing forward billion-euro decommissioning costs by decades. In 1992, Italy adopted the CIP 6 measures, which for assimilated energy – gas treated as a renewable source – will end up adding €20 billion in incentives to bills over its 15 or 20-year lifespan. In 2007, energy watchdog chair Alessandro Ortis managed to put a €600 million cut in place by interpreting the avoided fuel cost’s tariff component very strictly. But this only lasted two years until the Council of State upheld appeals from the big groups that had cornered all the public resources. Compensatory price hikes loom.

In 2012, aid for renewables gets into full stride. Some €160-170 billion is budgeted from 2005 to 2034, much of it concentrated in this decade. It’s a huge burden on household energy bills without even creating a national manufacturing base for the sector,

Alan’s Parsing Project

2012-01-18T19:05:00.000Z

Manning the ideological ramparts: behold yet another douchebag who doesn’t get that Nazis and Neo-nazis are actually leftists.

The Rest of the Time the Bien Pensants are Enamored with Jew Killers

2012-01-17T19:05:00.000Z

Europeans nearly universally support Hamas and Fatah, but then they get cranked about this? Especially given the all-too-common graffiti found at a highly visible passageway near Les Halles in Paris, not painted-over for at least two years.

"SS canonised," leads Tageszeitung, with a front-page photo of the leader of the Nazi organisation, Heinrich Himmler, on a visit to SS volunteers in Estonia in October 1943.

The Berlin daily is referring to a bill that the Estonian Minister of Defence is hoping to have adopted in March. According to the text, all those who took part in the fight against the Soviet Union during the Second World War will be granted the status of “freedom fighters,” which includes Estonian members of the SS

The most amusing part is the sudden shock that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” might apply to their ugly past.

Smell You Later

2012-01-17T13:48:00.001Z

The smart ones are booking ass as quick as they can.

Economic distress is driving tens of thousands of skilled professionals from Europe, and many are being lured to thriving former European colonies in Latin America and Africa, reversing well-worn migration patterns. Asia and Australia, as well as the U.S. and Canada, are absorbing others leaving the troubled euro zone.

In fact monarchs are reduced to begging:

King Juan Carlos highlighted Spain's losses with a poignant remark while handing out scholarships to young Spaniards for postgraduate study abroad.

"I sincerely hope and wish that when your time comes to return home there will be more jobs for you and that you can stay here," he told the 121 assembled winners in March. "We really need you in Spain."

In the meantime the enterprising aren’t fighting their way into EUtopia either.

At the same time, an influx of Third World immigrants whose labor helped fuel Europe's growth over the past decade is subsiding. Hundreds of thousands of them, including some white-collar professionals, have been returning home.

Those of you With a Taste for the Morbid Will Enjoy These Clips

2012-01-16T18:59:00.000Z

WASHINGTON -

All Metrobuses are now equipped with drivecam systems, which capture these types of incidents. When WTOP asked for drivecam videos from August and September, we received 134 near-collision videos, along with dozens showing collisions, traffic violations and even pedestrian accidents.

I Never Ask for an Explanation of Past Positions

2012-01-15T18:20:00.000Z

Especially when it comes to the basic practice of European humiliation politics:

Germany and Italy undermine French bid for financial tax

German and Italian leaders at a meeting in Berlin said they would only back a financial transactions tax at the level of the EU-27, not just the eurozone-17, dampening France's campaign for the levy. Merkel said her earlier comment on Monday backing a eurozone-17 tax was a "personal opinion" only.

So if we use the EUvian attitude toward Britain as an example, aren’t Germany and Italy “isolating themselves”? Seriously, where are the comparisons to the sinking of the Titanic here?

Arm aber Hässlich

2012-01-14T17:52:00.000Z

63% of working Spanish households are now living off of €1000 per month.

To get to the end of the month on this kind of money in your pocket is a Herculean task. Many families are counting the cents closely before they head out to shop. For thousands of Spaniards today, buying something has become an act of renunciation.

That’s a hard fact, one which I wish on no one, but a hard fact that makes this argument about non-rising lower-tier America look especially foolish. It also takes the mickey out of the endless grinding griping about the WalMart-ization of America, and the Americanization of Europe since 63% of Spaniards now appear to be needing their sources of WalMart-ization and hideous Americanization to subsist with any dignity:

Against this harsh backdrop, the low-cost shopping phenomenon is flourishing, and it does not look set to die out any time soon. Quite to the contrary, it's becoming a more and more prominent feature of society and its economy. Restaurants, travel, cars, insurance, electronics, real estate, leisure, clothing, food: nothing seems to escape the pull of low-cost shopping.

The question, though, is whether low-cost shopping will still be around once the crisis has passed. Is it a structural or temporary strategy? How will the consumer have changed by then? Will he or she be more rational, less impulsive? Dare we assume that the search for the lowest price has become a new way of life?

Dare we not ask pointless questions about the survival skills of people and second guess individuals? Sit on your extra-special world-beating super-duper everything and spin – Spaniards are getting by without the luxury-aspirant subtext of the new Europe.

In the meantime, the low-cost concept is spreading fast and wide. “The consumer has gone from looking for what I call a 'superior functionality' to looking for the 'good enough functionality', which is cheaper. In other words, why should I buy a car with all the extras if I don't really need them?”

As with everything, unless it’s Europeans talking about Europeans, all European discussion of the state of the economy takes the form of either economically illiterate and emotionalized fits of kicking the victim, or using the usual straw men as a point of reference. That much-lauded compassion comes last.

But I digress. Let’s go back to those folks that should be thanking Sam Walton:

In any case, at bottom this phenomenon conveys a sense of urgency and need. As paradoxical as it sounds, it also conveys a desire to keep up one's standard of living and to go on enjoying a product or a simple luxury.

Otherwise They Hate You, America

2012-01-13T17:52:00.000Z

The US’ rebalancing of military forces away from Europe and into the Asia-Pacific region is causing consternation in the land of the rich yet needy and helpless. Helsinki lawyer Ralf Grahn summarizes:

While both sides want to maintain the NATO alliance, this long expected move leaves European leaders naked with regard to the state of EU foreign, security and defence policy, especially their inability to even begin the construction of a common European defence.

Since a press statements on every mishap in the world seems to be the extent of EU foreign policy, perhaps the high representative Catherine Ashton could crank out a few lines to let the heads of state or government continue sleeping on the job

This, only being the befinning of the third decade that ”United Europeans” have said that they might get around to something substantive in the interest of their own defense and deterrence that the US has been supplying them.

Why the Greeks are Quintessentially European

2012-01-12T13:50:00.000Z

They put pederasty and welfare over the fate of the genuinely disabled, the future, and the debt passed on to their children:

The National Confederation of Disabled People called the action "incomprehensible," and said pedophiles are now awarded a higher government disability pay than some people who have received organ transplants.

The Labor Ministry said categories added to the expanded list - that also includes pyromaniacs, compulsive gamblers, fetishists and sadomasochists - were included for purposes of medical assessment and used as a gauge for allocating financial assistance.

So is this is the slow food-esque “quality of life” thing we get a finger wagged at us about, or the compassion and humanism thing we get a finger wagged at us about?

The new list gives pyromaniacs and pedophiles disability pay up to 35 percent, compared to 80 percent for heart transplant recipients.

"It's really not serious to grant Peeping Toms a 20-30 percent disability rate, and 10 percent to diabetics, who have insulin shots four or five times a day," said Vardakastanis.

Greece has been fighting to avoid bankruptcy since 2009. Public spending on health and welfare programs has been sharply cut under austerity measures imposed as a condition for receiving emergency loans from the International Monetary Fund and other countries using the euro currency.

So it seems that compassion and humanism®©™ come in state approved percentages of last years’ income. Who knew?

The Quadrennial Retelling of the Same Old Stories

2012-01-11T18:23:00.000Z

Well know globally for their lack of curiosity for anything other than ego-reinforcing rationalizations, European critics of the US (who detest the US anyway) are whining that using European society and a point of comparison with the US is “European bashing”.

What they conveniently ignore is that American Dream is not what it used to be. (Neither is the European Dream of an ever closer union, but that's another story).

Yes, it’s ALWAYS another story when you don’t want to tell the story.

In fact, it arrives to the usual level of stupidity Spiegel readers are familiar with, to the extent that one example is enough evidence to call it a trend, or perhaps a scourge. In fact to the extent that they start to make things up:

Europe is socialist, bloated and a threat to the global economy. That appears to be the message from the ongoing presidential campaign in the US. Republicans in particular have discovered Europe as a convenient punching bag -- and have even begun accusing each other of being too "European."

That message, also happening to be identical to many Europeans’ criticism of European society, but that’s not the point. Even as German growth is expected to be the strongest in Europe in 2012, and expected to top out at 1%, expect more of this, as well as the ritual retelling of the “American dream is dead”, for which there are vivid examples in the German press dating back to 1954.

Chock this up to “Freedom Fries” syndrome, a one-week story in the US which has reached its’ first decade of smug anger in the precious and benighted continent.

To back it up, an unrelated sneer has to be tangentially attached: an article in the NYT which selectively looks at a variety of unexplained studies to say that the US, where the poor live in comforts many middle income Europeans don’t have, and is the focus of criticism of “Americans being too well off” in turns, that Americans are less upwardly mobile than Europeans.

How, exactly? The same old saw: income disparity, the statistical tool of propagandists for more than a century. For example: how long a period is the trends mapped in multiple unexplained “studies” sampling? Are we being shown a delta founded on the 2008 contraction as the centerpiece? Is aggregate improvement in the state of what “bottom fifth” actually means being taken into account?

How, in our inexorable downward mobility spiral, can we also be criticized for also using too many resources, especially in a broad way across the income spectrum? How is it that we allow our unwashed and uneducated “lower 5th” or people like them, out of the country to find out that they are the boors so broadly offensive to Europeans as ignorant tourists? HOW doesn’t matter.

I’m not sure it even matters to the local reseller of meme X this week, given the notion of what they think “equal opportunity” means:

If equal opportunity is essential to freedom, then freedom is under attack!

So many misused truisms, so little time. Equal Opportunity, for one thing is assumed to mean Equal Outcome, an entirely Marxist jerking point, and one that Marxist-Leninism did a particularly bad job of actually achieving. This actually ADDS credence to the Americans are from Mars, Europeans are from the Politburo argument more than anything else.
And who knew that the lack of forced redistribution of wealth was critical in protecting freedom from attack, when freedom, and rights of all sorts can’t be redistributed, aren’t based in getting resources from others in society that aren’t earned, and are inherently equal before the “liberators from the shackles of common sense” like the author of “If equal opportunity is essential to freedom, then freedom is under attack!” can manage a go at them.

In fact the notion that one can shun Americans into using European society as a point of reference is, if anything, an attempt to obfuscate a curtailment of freedom.

But that doesn’t matter, because the ~~guy behind that organ grinder~~ author, like one European critic too many, is more interested in irrational point-scoring that the content of people’s arguments. That paragraph two has nothing to do with paragraph one outside of an old assumption having nothing to do with wither source is irrelevant.

The Narrative Couldn’t Get any More Lame

2012-01-10T14:05:00.001Z

After the Washington Post finally stopped sitting on the Solyndra “theft by greenist compassion” scandal, they manage a rather ludicrous and emotive revision.

David Burge:
« There you have it. In the Post's sob story narrative, the problem is not that a politically-connected network of donors devised a con to loot taxpayers of a half billion dollars; to the contrary, it's that the government negligently allowed the Solyndra scam to collapse, thereby depriving Ms. Sterio of her "clean-energy job." And, by implication, it continues to "betray" her by not creating another clean-energy job for her elsewhere. »
In fact it’s worthy of the weeper-style use of stage theater by FDR’s crypto-Communists covering for the confusing and useless policies of the time – which, as now, did little more than scare the economy’s real driving forces from wanting to even get out of bed. I’m reminded of the cause of all of this chaos which gives those selling green power and magic carpets an opportunity at mischief by Roosevelt himself quoted in Amity Schlaes’ “The Forgotten Man”:
« The main tasks Roosevelt assigned himself were simple. The first was that there be a broad sweep of activity; Americans must know Washington was doing something. If there were contradictions between experiments and within them, well, that did not matter. Partly this came out of the restlessness of the invalid; Roosevelt had risen politically but he still could not stand unaided. But partly it came out of a grandeur of spirit. “Do I contradict myself?” Roosevelt seemed to be asking, as Walt Whitman had. “Very well then, I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes.” »
All encompassing! To the point of near-infalabilty and super-human intelligence and ability no less than that mocked by Frank Flemming epic poem about another dissembler:
« If Obama is not listening to you, you can sleep soundly at night knowing your concerns are stupid. »

- from “Obama: The Greatest President in the History of Everything”, (Frank J. Fleming)

And the Progressive beat goes on. Even in the case of enabled and rationalized graft, their echo-chamber of protectors permits no questioning.

The Return of ShadyRAT

2012-01-09T21:01:00.000Z

Remember that endless whinging by people using the EU venue to complain about onerous US data security criteria? Remember the endless hammering on and on about SWIFT and information required of travelers invading the precious, immutable, eternally superior privacy and online identities of Europeans?

Well, ask your beloved activists and miscellaneous Wikileaks and Anonymous loving people who are into “revealing hidden truths” about this sort of “truth” telling.

A number of people working for the EU institutions have had their emails, passwords and credit card details hacked and released to the general public over the Christmas break.

A partial list was recently published online by Anonymous, a loose network of cyber activists campaigning against the so-called 'New World Order'.

Among the victims are administrators and officials at the European Commission, Eurojust (an EU body fighting organised crime), the European External Action Service, the European Parliament and Brussels-based think-tank the European Policy Centre (EPC).

That’s right! It’s that same pacifism brigade again. Their target? Their ever expanding Pantheon of imaginary hate puppets along the lines of Bu$hChimpHitlerBurton fetishisms, which now seems to include the EU and anyone else old enough to tie their shoe laces.

All together, some 850,000 confidential details were released when Anonymous hacked into the Texas-based Stratfor Global Intelligence security firm.

Stratfor is a widely used private security research company. About 75,000 of its paying subscribers also had their credit card details disclosed, including some working for the EU institutions.

The leaked database has 19,000 email addresses ending in the .mil domain of the US military according to the Guardian newspaper. The list also included 242 Nato staff members.

Peace out, peeps, because the blame goes back to where it always does: elsewhere. Apparently it’s American lobbying the administrative issues that caused this breech!

The entire operation could cast a long shadow over intense US lobbying against a leaked draft proposal for a Data Protection Regulation from the European Commission this past December.

Among the US complaints are the European Commission's views on data breach requirements, which they consider as "overly" severe and could undermine corporate data security practices.

"It is interesting to note that the US document tends to oppose specific proposals, such as the notification deadline and fines, in support of the vague issues such as not distracting businesses from improving corporate data security practices,"

Little Stickers and Platitudes Insufficient

2011-12-26T18:41:00.000Z

Dateline Tibet: Just when nobody could possibly need Chinese investment in shabby Eurozone bonds, the Dalai Lama is asking Catherine Ashton to keep asking China for EU diplomats to visit Tibet.

Zhu on Monday accused Western governments of funding the Dalai Lama's India-based movement to weaken China for strategic reasons.

He called the Dalai Lama a "savage" who gets young monks to set themselves on fire to provoke anti-Chinese feeling. He added that Chinese intelligence has evidence the head-in-exile of the Kirti monastery in Tibet, Kirti Rinpoche, organised three of the 12 recent self-immolations.

Regime change in China!, they demanded!

"Should the Chinese side reject the request, the EU could issue a strong statement of deep concern and raise the issue at international fora, such as the United Nations Human Rights Council."

To which the response will surely be “keep asking”, or “keep asking and...”

But China's man in charge of Tibet, vice-minister Zhu Weiqun, at a rare meeting with press in Brussels also on Monday, ruled out the possibility.

"China is an independent country and we have the full capacity to handle problems on our territory. So under no circumstances will we allow foreign fact-finding missions into the Tibetan autonomous region ... I don't believe that the interference of any foreign force could achieve anything constructive. Indeed it could very well lead to an escalation of the crisis and to wars," he told this website.

Berlinski on America

2011-12-25T18:41:00.000Z

Her message works well with those who have known nothing but irrational criticism for it, and anything and everything about it. You know the type. The ones at home and worldwide who emit a Pavlovian response to any subject eliciting a through on the United States. If you’re lucky, you might get some partially rephrased variation on the canned argument that you will hear used again a block away wherever you happen to find yourself.

Berlinski:

America is like no other place on earth. For all the talk of pessimism, recession, decline and fall, this remains--so clearly!--a country of mad, nutty, innocence and optimism; it is a place where everything works; it is a place where every man feels in the depth of his soul that he is the equal of every other man, and it is a country so free, in so many ways, that I doubt I will ever be able to convince anyone who hasn't seen it with his own eyes that this kind of freedom really exists.

That’s the quality of life thing like no other – the one that relates to life itself. It’s normally accompanied by a tut-tutting retort related to anything the critic thinks their nation does well, such as high-speed trains. Trains being a suitable retort to someone, somewhere being happy about the feeling that they have in the depth of their soul which the critic for no particular reason feels a need to retort. I hear engineering can do that for ya.

She does have words with something in the US that doesn’t work, though:

And this brings me to the First Law of Journalism. For some reason, American journalism's just not working. I figure we'll solve this problem; that's what we do. But as of now, it's broken. Exhibit A: Time Magazine's US Story of the Year. The Occupy Wall Street Protests Spread. Well, here I am on Wall Street, or very close to it, anyway, and if this is someone's idea of the top story--or even a major story--he's crazy as an outhouse rat. The top story? In a year, say, in which the United States, for the first time in 62 years, has become a net energy exporter?

So here's my advice. You know what you hear in the news? If you haven't seen it with your own eyes, don't believe it. And don't worry so much about America, it will probably be fine.

It’s worth noting some of the characteristic features of this non-operative piece of gear: its willfully developed its’ disingenuousness through a political ideology that has specific motives and largely looks to two general areas for affirmation: within its own ideological echo chamber, and to specific societies outside of the US that are conspicuously hostile to any outlook that hints at the curtailment of the power of the state or the crowding out of the individuals’ opinion by socially favored castes and ideologies.

But the most astonishing thing about America is this. I know full well that I can go on television, with millions of people watching, and say anything I please about the American government--anything--and even if for some malignant reason I feel like saying something false, gratuitously insulting, bad for the stock market, ruinous to a politician's happy marriage, or frankly seditious, I can just say it, and when I walk out of the studio, whatever I said will be between me and my conscience. It won't even occur to me that I may have exposed myself to an unpleasant risk of a pre-dawn police raid and a show trial. Possibly I'll get a few indignant e-mails.

The color coded-public-conveniences, the high-speed trains, and the stylized buzz of generic modernity are nice, but that isn’t the least bit meaningful where the dominant theme of the information set and public intellectuals is that of the demonizer or the bully.

The stylized buzz of generic modernity does not actually indicate that you’re in civilization.

2011-12-24T18:17:00.000Z

There was no room at the inn for Mary. Just as would happen today, the innkeeper didn’t announce, “Folks, we have a woman among us who is about to have a child, let’s a couple of families combine rooms so she can have a bed! Let us keep vigil! Let us fast, then feast!”

Just as would happen today, the other guests didn’t rise up and say, “O blessed night, O holy night that God has sent this woman among us.” They gave her a cursory glance, saw she was poor, said, “Oh – too bad,” and sent her to the barn.

Just as today, the clerk at the chain motel would say, “Sorry, fifty-nine dollars plus tax,” and the rest of us would likely watch Mary trail back to her broken-down van as we go on snacking, texting, and scrolling through our Dish listings.

And yet in our better moments, we carry our little prayer around with us as Mary carried Christ. Like Mary, we’re in solidarity with all the poor, all those in exile, all who are powerless, frightened, weak. Like Jesus in today’s Gospel, we rejoice that the kingdom is revealed to the childlike. And just as back then, that prayer moves the world. Just as back then, that prayer is seen by the stars.

Reflection based on
Luke 10: 21-24 by Heather King

For Fans of the Deliciously Grim

2011-12-23T18:41:00.000Z

No-one told the operators that the USSR ever really went away.

Then somebody took pictures, recorded audio, and mashed up a remix out of the scraps left behind by a paranoid and repressive state.

Keep Thinking, Butch

2011-12-22T18:41:00.000Z

Thanks to ~~Libération~~ Propagandastaffel, we discover that movements and theories are invented by the leftists and postmodern freaks that describe those theories to other leftists and postmodern freaks like Libé

We are indebted to Michel Foucault for identifying, in his January 1979 Collège de France lecture (The birth of bio-politics), the originality of this school of liberalism, which makes constitutional regulation and judges the levers and principle guarantors of the construction of a political order founded on a strict respect for economic freedom and free competition.

Bio-politics. Whatever, Spanky. On planet earth, we call this mental masturbation. What they’re calling “Liberalism” was identified long before 1979.

To that end, they desperately try to understand the world around them that they’ve been ignoring for decades, the dead secular Gods of nationalist-socialist mythology are being dredged up in this case to explain Angela Merkel’s views on European economics. It’s as if using big names mean that they know enough to appear to be correcting her. After all, she’s though to have all the money that these finger-wagging ~~marvels~~ ignorant jokers want hidden under her bed or something.

Why would they then not resort to this tortured explanation of the lack of EU level legal empowerment of the ECB in the way the US Federal Reserve can act. Hence, they go hat-in-hand to Berlin, and the illiterates at Libé think this is some sort of dark art for reasons that their dyspeptic leftist frustrations with the lack of dictatorial control in their favor can’t digest.

Her direction has once again confirmed the precarious status of political legitimacy in the European Union: the credibility of the euro cannot be safeguarded by apolitical measures alone.

Further to the sick penchant to claim by identification, other miscellaneous vilified historical characters are used. This is meant to lend some veneer of accuracy and intelligence to the specious practice of thinking that you’ve just named things for the first time because you didn’t think they existed before, at least not in the low-altitude the left orbits in.

This is not a Bismarckian policy, as Arnaud Montebourg has so awkardly asserted, but one that is based on one of the most well-established schools of liberal thought, “ordoliberalism”, which emerged between the wars in Germany and was popularised in the postwar period as “the social market economy” by the influential Christian-Democrat Ludwig Erhard, who was Minister of Economics from 1949 to 1963 and Federal Chancellor from 1963 to 1966.

Otto von Bismark could not be reached for comment.

Why Maximize Employment when you can Maximize Welfare ?

2011-12-21T18:40:00.000Z

In addition to Krugmann’s suggestion that the tax rate on “the wealthy”, whichever half or third of earners he thinks that is, should be 70%, the figure is derived by the suggestion that this will “maximize welfare” for the lower and middle class.

Obsessiveness about non-existent social castes and class aside, the correct term is Low/ Middle/ High INCOME. Like this bunghole apologist for State-Command-Economics, it’s rather obvious that the identification is one they’re so fluid in, that they forgot that they’re supposed to hide their pointless society impoverishing agitprop.

Europeans would Tax Your Wiener

2011-12-20T18:47:00.000Z

That’s right kids - no link, no frankfurter, no banger, no bockwurst or merguez for that matter... is safe, not to mention homemade bake-sale items too. The Svenska Dagbladet reports that the EU Commission has ordered Sweden to levy a 25% VAT on concessions at amateur sporting events. This includes the table a few parents set up at their kids’ intermural and local sport club games.

We're not talking about professional businesses here but about thousands of people who do unpaid work for their children and others. The people's representatives in the EU - the European Parliament - have realised that and supported the exemption by 521 to 50 votes. The Commission however, with its non-elected bureaucrats, is now demanding that what belongs to Caesar must be rendered unto Caesar. To comply with this demand the small clubs will have to become bureaucratised. It's no overstatement to say that the position of the treasurer - already a thankless task - will be harder to fill than ever.

Ironically, even Swedes get that this is micromanagement.

Arrogantly Saving the Planet with Bumper Stickers

2011-12-19T15:46:00.000Z

Selfishly mounted on NON-ELECTRIC VEHICLES for that matter!

Recreational Ideology 101

2011-12-18T15:46:00.000Z

When can the ideology of the mal-informed and those detached from the reality of the modern society’s logistic become stupid and dangerous? Anytime with Global Warming “awareness raising” is involved, or for that matter when any kind of “awareness raising” is going on for leftists’ fake crices.

A school in Britain turned off the heat on the coldest day of the year to “save the planet”:

Pagan gods traditionally required human sacrifices – preferably of children – and a West Country academy school appears to be leading the way. To give pupils a lesson in "sustainability" they'll never forget, headmaster Rob Benzie of Ansford Academy in Castle Cary, Somerset, ordered a "No Power Day ... as an experiment to see if we can lower our carbon footprint".
It took place in December as temperatures plummeted to 1°C, and ~~pupils~~ students were permitted to cheat death by wearing as many jumpers as they could muster. All survived. Predictably, reactionary parents branded it as "barbaric" – ignoring the vital "awareness raising" potential of the experiment. An innovative game in Australia even advised children when they should pop off to help save the Earth Goddess.

The stunt is so stupid, 101010-esque, and loony, that one would think it appropriate to say that the Headmaster “was in the pay of big oil!” (Objective proof not required.)

Of course none of that wasting teaching time on a fake issue means that our educational betters have any idea what they’re doing. Apparently this is the sort of thing they “readically” get up to when they want to reduce womynkind’s carbon footprint.

Hot water for the essential staff tea and coffee was boiled in the quad over a charcoal burner, baked potatoes and burgers were cooked over a charcoal barbecue. Students will have learned a valuable lesson – that we should not take the power we use for granted, and if nothing else that we should be careful with what we use and reduce our consumption as much as we possibly can in order to best preserve the world's resources.

Stop all human activity now!, I say! We need to put on our capes and SAVE the PLANET (from something or other.)

WWM-SRD ?

2011-12-17T15:01:00.000Z

~~Libération~~ Propagandastaffel has it dear wrong when it takes Europe’s idiotic effort to solve an Economic problem with the carcass of European states’ diplomatic structure with one another inder the theme of: “economics doing politics”, and points it’s impotent rage at politicians who live in the Eurozone politcal-straightjacket they went along with being unable to simply dictate that they are solvent and gin up wealth to redistribute.

"Executive, legislative and judiciary - the economic crisis has done away with this old structure. The last three years with all their ups and downs and breakneck tempo show how obsolete this basic order has become. Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel announce with satisfaction and with great pomp their projects for Europe? Several hours later a rating agency ridicules them and sweeps them from the table by placing the Eurozone under negative credit watch. The founding structure of democracy has now been replaced by a new and brutal economic power. With nothing to counterbalance or even regulate it, it now controls the others and dictates its own laws."

Because courts and national leaders are the ones who are supposed to define rates of interests on bonds, you see – this despite the fact that even the ECB had to postpone a bond auction because there wasn’t enough interest, and the underwriters were left holding the bag.

Note that they don’t take issue with anything real and think the whole thing has to do with Sarkozy and Merkel’s re-election prospects. In other words, anything that happens in the world has nothing to do with the bloated, near command economy they persistently plump for, but rather for whatever the thoroughly misnamed Libération editor and Stepford-child head-bobber feels and want the truth to be.

As if the world was their oyster, and it’s size of the kind of oyster you pick up in a month that doesn’t end in an “R”.

Another persistent theme has been the downgrade S&P of numerous banks worldwide. Apparently they believe that economics is driven by political stances, and so would I if I was as consistently economically illiterate and prone to delusion as they are. S&P, they assume is to be demonized for “practicing politics”, as if their ratings analysts care.

Propagandastaffel position is irresponsible and much less informative than even their own blogs that cover business, markets, and the economy. It isn’t just linear, ignorant, insular, and small-minded, but meant to feed their easy-chair fantasies of being able to inflame a mob against the state. Those days are over. There is no bright hammer-and-sickle to the east that they can point to mendaciously as an example of “how things whould be done”.

The sum of all fears when you’re a leftist living in the prewar days of Soviet Marxist-Leninism?

Never were the report of strengths and weaknesses more apparent, but never has political power seemed so helpless. The presidential campaign will hide the main issue of the political turmoil and the impossibility of any effective political action: three years that have passed have shown that firefighters ran after the fires, always late. Commentators will focus on the beauty of movement and skill of diplomatic compromise. While everything will be played today and tomorrow, in managing the social consequences of the crisis.

As if the French left, let alone what they imagine would be the actions of a President Ségolène Royal would have done anything about it the way Zapatero VERY bravely did showing leadership in Spain, even against his own supporters populist bleatings.

What Libé wants is this crisis to not go to any sort of political waste.

Hey, Living isn’t Everything when it Comes to, um, Living...

2011-12-16T14:14:00.000Z

Economic power is not the only criterion for global power. What matters is how political systems respond to new crises. And from this perspective, the EU is still in with a chance, writes Dutch historian Dirk-Jan van Baar. Excerpts.

Writes Dirk-Jan van Baar in de Volkskrant, ignoring THE LAST TWO YEARS OF EUROPEAN FISCAL CHAOS AND LACK OF LEADERSHIP.

Add to this rthe oft-used argument that political power is not the only criterion for global power and that military power is not the only criterion for global power, and you get the perfect rationalization for 500 million of the world’s richest people free-riding on the backs of the rest of humanity.

Again.

Taking passivity and inaction to a higher, more noble and superior plane, he goes on with a predictable related theme of somehow comparing Europe to the US, for which there is no rational basis to do so in this context:

The American president is behaving accordingly : he thinks America must get its own economic house in order before embarking on further foreign interventions. If even the most powerful man in the world thinks that Washington has taken on too much, then one can tend to agree with historian Paul Kennedy (who wrote on the theme in his 1987 work The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers) that America is suffering from imperial overstretch.

The search for analogues and examples, I suppose, must go on.

Save the Date

2011-12-15T14:14:00.000Z

Act of Valor will be released in U.S. cinemas on 17 FEB 2011

From the Ongoing Chronicles of Weird European Pederasty

2011-12-14T18:11:00.000Z

And it’s from one of those enlightened societies again:

A 62-year-old man from Drammen in southern Norway has received a 7-year jail sentence after he was found guilty of sexually abusing his two young daughters.

Kid, if you don’t want to ride in the van, don’t take the candy. Otherwise it’s back to an enlightened solution in that enlightened society: no real punitive consequences.

He denied committing the offences and told the court the older girl’s claims were financially motivated.

The district court, however, found the accounts of both girls to be credible and ordered their father to pay each of them non-pecuniary damages of 200,000 kroner ($33,600).

Elsewhere: real consequences await those commiting the grave crime of trying to introduce supply to demand.

A Russian smuggler is detained for transporting underage butter across state lines.

Last Friday, customs officers stopped a Russian at the Norwegian-Swedish border and seized 90 kilos of butter stashed in his car.

Why is this such a severe social disturbance of the placid nation proud of it’s orderly ways, laws, solidarity, and nicely concealed child molestation?

Norway has a butter monopolist called “Tine” that is deliberately protected from foreign competitors by government-imposed import tariffs.

Some Germans are off to the (Master) Races

2011-12-14T14:29:00.000Z

Ricochet.com editor Claire Berlinski thinks it’s time we took the “neo-“ mask off of Germany’s the “neo-nazis”:

Unlike many who are keen to deny the danger of right-wing extremism in Europe, proposing instead that we focus our alarm upon the menace posed to liberal democracy by Islamic extremists, I'm a dual-direction Cassandra. Europe does indeed have a dangerous ultra-right, and by "ultra-right," I do not mean dutiful Anglicans and devout proponents of market deregulation, I mean Nazis. Call them neo-Nazis or new Nazis if you like, but when they start killing immigrants in the name of racial purity, I see no need for that qualifier.

The so-called National Socialist Underground killed nine immigrants (eight of them Turkish, one Greek). They avoided detection for years because the police were looking in the wrong direction.

Having about two years ago on crowded Berlin U-Bahn train heard a loud drunk retort a guy trying to since silence him by yelling out “Heil Hitler!”, I saw that the stigma that I’ve known my whole life for Nazi sayings and symbols, had worn off with a good part of the general population.

She also notes the subtlety with which many Europeans argue. While it isn’t the dark ages, ideological differences and disagreements are quite frequently met with threats of personal violence, as though the ego were more precious that life itself.

especially given that Third Reich imagery and dramaturgy doesn't sound all that innocent. Comments like these--"Claire Berlinski is just a paranoid little Jew"--were among the more printable. In fact, the Nazis sent me more hate mail than the Islamists and the communists.

To note an old joke which I’ve heard used for both Arabs and Israelis: How does a [ _____ ] commit suicide? He jumps from his ego to his IQ. The same seems to be true of those reviving Europe’s native (and nativist) social practices, as a reaction to a complex world that they think is cheating them out of the hopes they had for themselves.

Rammstein’s popularity may have softened German society’s stigma for Nazism, which is likely what they intended by this subculture as the soft beginnings of de-denazification. Either way, it’s a misshapen and simplistic view of the world that’s no better than violent Islamism to which Nazism is historically linked.

It also comes at the worst time in western society: when liberty itself must be defended with broad-mindedness, joie de vivre, strength, but most of all with living examples of liberty’s healthy and robust vision of a good society itself. Neo-nazis wooing the weak-minded and callow have no place in a good society and may be more of an indication to the principles of a good society being neglected.

Of the treatment the issue has been given, Berlinski characterizes it without much doubt:

The word for that is "denial." Men who look like Nazis, call themselves Nazis, blow up Jewish cemeteries and kill Turkish shopkeepers are not little boys playing cowboys and Indians. They're Nazis.

This problem will get worse.

Just where does all of this fall on a scale? Well, not so fast, there cowboy – it’s really doesn’t, not when you listen carefully past what a PC Gutmensch says, and get at what they worry about. The oddly bespeckled smart-asses of politically correct pleasantries are not that different than these Nazis when you take their stridency, narrowness, and simplistic view of civilization into account. It’s even hard to say that they are the opposite sides of the same coin.

Germany’s New Morgenthau Plan

2011-12-13T14:31:00.000Z

Two Norwegian owned gas-fired power plants in northern Germany, critical to complementing the nation’s planned wind power capacity when the winds aren’t blowing, will be shut down. Because they’re operating at 20% capacity, they are not economical. The result of the shutting down of these two massive plants will be that the power will simply go out when the wind isn’t blowing hard enough.

Financial Times Deutschland reported:

"We will possibly need to make more power intervention," [Ed.: subsidies] said a spokeswoman for network operator Tennet. Of the failure of the two gas-fired power plants in the north: "If it were up to southern Germany, the situation would be difficult." Because of high wind power capacity in the North German Plain, the gas-fired power plants are seldom used, found Tzschoppe’s closure plan report. The two plants combined generate nearly 1,000 megawatts of power - almost as much as a nuclear power plant. Best run in operation 1000 to 2000 hours per year, they have been running only a few hundred hours.

Plans on track to deindustrialize? Yes. In more ways than one, we finally get to see the structured enfeeblement of an advanced society in action.

The Federal Network Agency has not scheduled a closing date of the Statkraft plants. After last week’s submitted monitoring report, the Authority expects to terminate in addition to about 3,000 megawatts of nuclear power plants are coal power from the grid in 2013, but no gas-fired power plants. Power shortages threaten the network, especially in southern Germany.

And now for the ugly truth: business defined by political goals fail.

But in the face of high gas costs and relatively low electricity prices were to achieve even with new gas-fired power plants currently barely adequate margins indicated Tzschoppe.

And what it all boils down to is the money that isn’t there, which “to save the planet” will become a cost that they will have to drop on the foot of a public that doesn’t have much of a choice in where their power comes from.

The price of electricity would have to reach reach 85 to 90 euros per megawatt hour in order to justify investments in new gas-fired power plants - about 50 percent more than it costs now.

The exhausted and angry postwar allies couldn’t have done any better.

Der Doppelte Kotau

2011-12-12T13:31:00.000Z

TAKI’S MAGAZINE takes a look into the absurd world of European politics through the lens of German self-regard.

I can tell you that it seems to have always been guilt and shame based, exceedingly simplistic, and reminiscent of chattering and political classes who rarely contact reality.

It ain’t pretty.

Perhaps the most comical argument for bailing out Greece has come from Merkel’s CDU Labor Minister and outspoken feminist Ursula von der Leyen, who has been vocal in her support for “helping the Greeks get back on their feet.” In a recent appearance on a weekend talk show hosted by TV celebrity Günther Jauch, Ms. von der Leyen went after those who criticize Greece’s spending habits and bloated state bureaucracy. According to van der Leyen, such a captious judgment does not take into account the close resemblance between the “Greeks at the present hour and the Germans in 1945, when we were a battered people.” To the Labor Minister, assisting the Greeks seems the proper thing to do. It is “like the CARE-packages that the Americans sent us after the War.”

Remember the asinine prejudice about German policy and motives having something to do with a disappointingly false reputation for kinkiness? Well here’s it’s flip side: the equally asinine need to ameliorate the no-longer-existent harm caused by an imaginary “national personality attribute” by sufferers of the cult of leftist victim theory who so believe in that the notion of class warfare can have a “national personality”, that they see it all within the prism of their own Stockholm Syndrome.

This last comparison borders on the lunatic, except when a German politician is trying to be “nice.” Then it simply reflects the dominant national culture. Perhaps the Germans should insist on a fundamental right which the Americans once exercised: to carpet with bombs an enemy country and then hang its leaders as war criminals. Once having done this, the Germans could get on with the good stuff, such as providing those they’ve mercilessly “battered” with chocolate bars and sewing kits. Like other German politicians, von der Leyen is accustomed to the double kowtow (der doppelte Kotau), which involves simultaneously sucking up to the Yankees and non-German Europeans. Whereas Germans were once feared for lunging at their neighbors’ necks, now they’re delighted to be at everyone’s feet.

After all if the European public, and particularly German society, is good at one thing, it’s licking the boot that kicks you. This comes well after one is conditioned into the old misguided belief that the state is the only vehicle of relief, scholarship, and humanism itself.

Recognized by some is the malleability of governance theory to the convenience of leaders avoiding verbal confrontation within the EU tribe. It’s consequences are themselves frequently absurd and remind one of the forehead-slap-worthy hijinks of the UN. The difference being that states regularly ignore the suggestions and dictates of the “singular world body”:

Presumably the banks, which made loans to the Greeks at the German government’s urging, will have to be saved as a first step to dealing with Greek insolvency. An article in the relatively right-wing Preußische Allgemeine Zeitung explains a ridiculous situation: The Germans have the same representation in the EU Council as Cyprus and Malta combined, yet they contribute 28% of the organization’s available capital as opposed to the 0.3% given by Cyprus and Malta. Germans are watching their earnings decline while paying for other countries’ insolvency, yet they seem determined to make their problem even worse. Although Germans gripe about the bailout, the vast majority support leftist parties that will give away even more of their money to foreign governments. German voters snub and even despise parties such as the Republikaner which oppose the bailouts.

All of whom are wrong in their own way, considering that they are an economic area as dependant on exports as they are consumption, and find themselves competing with Burmese indentured labor and a Chinese workforce laboring under Pinkerton gang-pressers, but have upward labor cost pressure priced in an inflated currency. If growth is your only way out of this pickle, even the fiscal hawks have a few more realities to embrace, and they sure as hell don’t involve reputations for national kinkiness and images of the not-yet-brought-low beating their fellow Europeans into servile callowness.

The Attack of that Sinister Dark Lord Electrolux

2011-12-11T23:28:00.000Z

May 10th: the Ringhals nuclear reactor near Gothernburg, Sweden has a fire event. From the greenie hysteria (which included a spontaneous light-mural being painted by that famous artist known as “Greenpeace”) that ensued sounded like they hoped for, or either thought they had a Chernobyl on their hands.

The shut-down cost hundreds of millions of Kroner.

At Sweden's largest nuclear plant Ringhals power plant 60 km south of Gothenburg, says all four reactors now quiet. Cause: There is, according to utility company Vattenfall found "undesirable objects" found in emergency shutdown system for reactors 2 and 4. Reactor 1 stopped operation on Sunday for - like the other three - being subjected to a thorough review of the safety systems.

"Before any of the reactors are allowed to start again, Ringhals AB systematically examine all checks of safety and security features, and explain the outcome of the review of the Radiation Safety Office," writes Swedish control body.

Well, little missy, the culprit has been located.

The reactor was barbarously savaged by a vacuum cleaner that was plugged in, got wet during a pressure test, and caught fire. Details are sparse. For obvious security reasons, they won’t say if it was one of those Dyson jobbies that looks like it belongs in an “Art of Noise” video.

I’m sure they didn’t need all of those pesky Kroner anyway.

The Field of Psychiatry could Preoccupy itself for Decades with these Jokers

2011-12-10T18:14:00.000Z

The Europeans are a sort of Jonathan Winters wandering the global barnyard: they offer comic relief, but have something tragically disturbing about them.

In this case, the underlying assumptions behind this cartoon by Patrick Chapatte: the hapless, innocent Euro-elves, victims of circumstance and anything else that they had no hand in, being talked down to by a towering white American man vaguely reminiscent of the elder George Bush. Ordered around in their innocent, childlike state, they are of course, victims of bullying or something.

... "Things will get better if Europe learns to speak with one voice."
... "HELP!"

A Question:

2011-12-09T16:32:00.000Z

Why isn’t “water cannon” considered a form of protected speech?

The Vainglory of the Self-Appointed Humanists

2011-12-08T16:30:00.000Z

From the same school of thought that’s tried to “Free Tibet” with little stickers, advocating regime change in China, and notably NOT in Iraq: Amnesty International, an organization loved by many a naïve college student which has never once freed anyone thinks that “there’s an app for that”.

Is Amnesty being serious? Someone who wanted to mock the weird combination of laziness and narcissism that seems to motor many Amnesty campaigns could have made the exact same ad, as a way of saying: "Amnesty is so out of touch it seriously thinks you can change the world with an iPhone." Such clicktivism, where morally upstanding Westerners are invited to free downtrodden Third Worlders in the spare three seconds they get between tweeting about their new trainers and saying "LOL!!!" on Facebook, makes the old Amnesty modus operandi of writing and posting tear-drenched letters to evil foreign dictators seem like hard labour in comparison.

What Brendan O’Niell is describing is persistent the hobgoglin of the small mind – and it thinks a rubber wristband or a “Free Tibet” sticker will actually “Free Tibet.”

Permanent Pre-Pubescence

2011-12-07T16:30:00.000Z

All of our problems today come from trying to maintain an unsustainable form of social economy, and yet the moaners want more of what they think other people have.

Instead they resort to tortured logic:

In practice, liberalisation and austerity are making matters far worse. In Greece, Ireland and Portugal, adjustment packages imposed from the outside but with the collusion of domestic governments have resulted in sharp falls in economic activity, large rises in unemployment and painful social dislocation. Government deficits have risen.

Work by Research on Money and Finance and others has shown that the build-up of debt in peripheral economies was not the result of government profligacy. The fundamental cause has been diverging competitiveness between the economies of the periphery and those of the core, above all Germany. By heavily repressing the wages of its own workers, Germany ensured that there was no chance for peripheral economies to compete, locked as they were into monetary union and unable to devalue their currencies.

So if you don’t buy the line that it’s all the fault of people trying to take the giveaway monster, then at least blame Germans for “repression,”

AKA harmonizing their wages with the rest of the zone.

This divergence of competitiveness resulted in entrenched structural imbalances between core and periphery, leading to surpluses for Germany and deficits for others. These deficits in peripheral countries were matched by borrowing abroad resulting in accumulation of private and public debt. When the sub-prime crisis struck, public deficits soared as private liabilities were taken onto government books, tax revenues fell and social security payments rose.

Which is another way of trying to say that governments borrowed more because there was no income left to tax. This may be the first time any main-line European brain has thought of this concept. Too bad that the conclusion drawn isn’t the obvious one: that spending is too high. In fact the though is being used to prop up an even stranger and less plausible argument: that wages and prices should be fixed after the fashion of wartime America and corroded Marxist-Leninism, and that German wages should be structurally fixed higher for similarly simplistic social effects.

So if the European states are all hunters, without also mentioning the Dutch, the Germans should (for the sake of equality of outcome) set out unarmed. Nonetheless in the interest of public self-pity, even those they employ should imagine that they are Bambi in this scene.

As always, even the “austerity” of curtailing middle-class welfare by trying to get a grip on public service pensions, staff size, and the like is characterized as a political fascism:

As the eurozone crisis worsens, proposals to resolve it are becoming increasingly authoritarian. Two in particular are now widely advocated by commentators across the political spectrum. First, that technocratic governments should be installed to carry out necessary reforms in stricken economies. Second, that in the short-term the European Central Bank could halt the crisis, if only Germany could be persuaded to drop its opposition.

Hilariously, the Bundesbank’s only real position is to not lend for the sake of public spending, but only debt restructuring.

This, of course, cannot stand. There’s a political cadre to fund, and votes to buy at a tense, critical time. The really funny part is that the same Germany that it is imagined could be compelled to go naked in order to clothe her neighbors is now a straw-man synonymous with “the bosses”, like the purposely misunderstood “1%” of the Occupy Wall Street complex of economic illiteracy, demonization and ignorance.

How far do you get saying “you’re just plain evil because of who you are – now buy me lunch and give me your shoes” ?

Just Thinking Inside the Box, Here...

2011-12-06T16:29:00.000Z

I’ve got an idea... let’s deindustrialize and impoverish western civilization on an unproven theory so that we can try to drop the worlds mean temperature by 0.6 degrees!

Money Chasing Too Few Instruments, and the Senile Continent

2011-12-05T18:14:00.000Z

Spengler’s take is direct and plausible. While Europeans enjoy blaming the US financial crisis for their woes, one wonders why they were invested in it to begin with? It’s simple:

The aging pensioners of Europe and Asia must find young people to pay interest into their pensions, and they do not have enough young people at home. Germans aged 15 to 24, on the threshold of family formation, comprise only 12% of the country's population today and will fall to only 8% by 2030. But one-fifth of Germans now are on the threshold of retirement and half will be there by mid-century.

There’s an echo of what the “occupists” don’t get as well. If they’re young and mad, and don’t want to tell themselves just who it is who have the wealth they want to take, why don’t they just come out and say “eat the old” instead of “eat the rich”? Well, aside from it not being as politically useful, they only understand the red leftist recreational fisting chants that have been trained into them.

The monster is not the financial system, crooked and stupid as it may have been. The monster is the burgeoning horde of pensioners in Germany and other industrial countries. It is easy to change the financial system. The central banks can assemble on any Tuesday morning and announce tougher lending standards. But it is impossible to fix the financial problems that arise from Europe's senescence. Thanks to the one-child policy, moreover, China has a relatively young population that is aging faster than any other, and China's appetite for savings vastly exceeds what its own financial market can offer.

There is nothing complicated about finance. It is based on old people lending to young people. Young people invest in homes and businesses; aging people save to acquire assets on which to retire. The new generation supports the old one, and retirement systems simply apportion rights to income between the generations. Never before in human history, though, has a new generation simply failed to appear.

Tax rthe old? Sure – you try saying that, #OWS spuds!

The world kept shipping capital to the United States over the past 10 years, however, because it had nowhere else to go. The financial markets, in turn, found ways to persuade Americans to borrow more and more money. If there weren't enough young Americans to borrow money on a sound basis, the banks arranged for a smaller number of Americans to borrow more money on an unsound basis. That is why subprime, interest-only, no-money-down and other mortgages waxed great in bank portfolios.

America's financial market could not produce enough pork chops, so the Europeans bought Spam and scrapple. America's rating agencies assured them that derivatives created from subprime mortgages, second-lien mortgages and other dubious parts of the pig were the equivalent of pork chops, and foreign investors wolfed them down.

#Europeans Call in the B52!

2011-12-04T13:41:00.000Z

If you take the traditional definition of terror to mean that a minute coterie cause doubt, indecision, confusion, and a lack of knowing what to do, the past two years of European economic dithering, fake summiteering, and public announcements have amounted to a form of economic terrorism. In fact all it has always been about has been the Europeans unwillingness to do anything for one another, and childishly hoping other people’s resources will save them from themselves.

Whenever Europe can't make its mind up the United States is called in, Fernando Sobral complains in the business paper Jornal de Negócios:

"Europeans are always criticising how culturally backwards the US is, but when the moment of truth arrives they adore Uncle Sam. ...

Now the time has come to ask for help, however it's not General Custer's cavalry we need but some of those B52 bombers to drop dollar parcels on Europe. A Europe that is unable to persuade the ECB to fork out the money it needs. The Fed has no qualms like puritanical Europe. ... It puts money into circulation without getting nightmares about inflation. The fed has the 'hard power' the ECB lacks. The ECB is increasingly a bank with plastic money, that can be moulded to suit Germany's wishes.

Those who say Germany's hands are tied because of its constitution should bear in mind that when Helmut Kohl pushed ahead with German reunification he didn't spend too much time looking at the accounts. His political impetus carried the economy along with it. Europe is different: it's afraid of its own shadow and still dancing on a volcano."

- Fernando Sobral, writing in Jornal de Negócios (Portugal)

Their problems stem largely from the problem of imagining what the state can do to compensate for a population that largely prefers to try a to see how little it can do to get more out of society than it puts into it. The effect of wanting the state to tend to all and sundry, whether they have any need or not, has been that despite seizing half the GNP in an array of tax streams governments needed to borrow unsustainable amounts of money to serve it’s constituencies: the public sector feeding off of the population, and a large portion of the population expecting too much from others (whom they imagine can afford it and don’t mind.)

Now, through the IMF they seek more resources for their palliative care from abroad, in particular from a United States that has its’ own garden to tend right now. America’s only motivation to play along is to try and stop the chill on the neck of the global economy (and thus her own) caused by #Europe’s entrenched begging masses in need of more government cheese.

Arrogantly, they assume that they can actually call in that air strike. Expect complaints at the terms for having the slightest doubts in their ability to make good, and carping about what little will be asked for in return.

I Want Mo Free Stuff!

2011-12-03T18:14:00.000Z

Greater Berlin is a Federal State in Germany. Due to recent elections and what must now seem like a bad headache, few of its’ legislators are from the “Pirate Party”. Having published their platform, I can say that it’s typically European, despite their onetime oevre as a sort of tech-fixated quasi-Libertarians, they are neither quasi- nor libertarian. Their platform can be summarized in two phrases:

I Want Mo Free Stuff!
...and...
I’m going to demand things that already exist!

The rest of it involves institutionalized theft of intellectual property rights, and a distinct lack of awareness that no-one washes a rental car.

For those of You Wanting to Join the “Meter High” Club

2011-12-02T18:13:00.000Z

Not brave enough for the “Mile High Club”? Go through your very own pre-flight checklist, and in the perfect place to distribute disease worldwide by using the SleepBox™©.

It might even inspire an art movement, not to mention low humor having something to do with Doctor Who. As an additional “revenue center”, in major European cities as well as San Francisco, a conveniently located vending machine will be offering ruminating pastoral livestock for short term rentals. You know, just to express sympathy for the Greeks.

So have a blast, chicharonne.

Nothing Says Euro-Governance like...

2011-12-01T14:21:00.000Z

...good old fashioned operant conditioning.

Of Chumps, Attention Seekers, and Morons

2011-11-30T16:19:00.000Z

And just to up the ante, they’ll challenge the world to join them in a plan to drop the mean global temperature by 28,5°C by next week!

But emerging economies such as Brazil and India have joined rich nations in not wishing to start talks on such a deal before 2015, angering small island states and other countries immediately threatened by climate change. According to the Italian business daily, the UN summit “does not seem to have a chance of producing a binding international treaty. Those who have rowed against it, like the US, will be pleased. But for Europe, this is a triple somersault.”:

No, it’s not a triple summersault, it’s a stunt and a joke, one European governments know that they will never have to make good on, because no society really can, or would, or gain anything by it.

Despite that, they know what’s its always far better to demand regime change over a fake crisis rather than a real one.

Thirdly, because the brave European commitment to cut emissions by 20 per cent by 2020 could sideline it in a fight which is meaningful only if shared by all the planet. But which also requires billions in public spending which do not go well with the regime of fiscal discipline [practised in] these modern times.

Waiting for Europe’s Ugly Head to Pop Out into the Open

2011-11-29T16:18:00.000Z

Multi-Cultural Tolerance Alert

China is looking to buy EU factories and railways instead of wobbly government bonds as prices fall amid the eurozone crisis.

Minister of commerce Chen Deming articulated the strategy at a business congress in China on Monday (28 November).

"Next year, we will send a delegation for promoting trade and investment to the European countries ... Some European countries are facing a debt crisis and hope to convert their assets to cash and would like foreign capital to acquire their enterprises. We will be closely watching and pushing forward the process," he said.

I can’t wait for the real, nativistic fun and cheap, base cultural slander to begin:

Speaking to the Sina Finance news agency, he hit out at what he called European "prejudice ... like the view that state-owned enterprises represent your country, that whatever your background is you're a military business."

"You can come and buy a house, and you can emigrate here and bring your riches with you, or you can buy my luxury goods, but if you want to touch my natural resources, then I'm sorry, I won't let you."

Along with the expected prejudice, in a silent way the slander has already started with the idea that Chinese investors would simply had over their money as directed, when in fact...

For their part, Chinese analysts predict the spending spree will not begin until prices hit rock bottom.

The Superior Lifestyle and Joie de Vivre is More than Apparent

2011-11-28T15:23:00.000Z

Today’s media jumble ask the eternal question: who actually wants to live with Germans to begin with ?

Want to know why day to day crime and event reporting in Europeastan reads like “the news of the weird”? Because in large part that’s about all most of the people living in their society amount to at this point.

Leftist hat the Pope for existing, and for just being so darn papal all the time. So we find things like this “Piss Christ” redux by other means in the form of petty legalistic niggling from people who think human free is limited to having something to do with free and legal recreational narcotics.

Johannes Christian Sundermann, a lawyer from Unna in North Rhine Westphalia, filed a legal complaint against the German-born pope formerly known as Joseph Ratzinger for not wearing his seat belt on several occasions “for more than one hour at a time,” according to a report in the Westfälischen Rundschau newspaper.

Because leftism these days is all about acting like something crawled up your hoagie and died, pretending that your attention seeking dog-whistle cues are about “public safety” and anything else that might make people believe that you want to share in man’s future.

Sundermann represents a Dortmund man. As evidence the two are offering YouTube videos and are also calling the Archbishop of Freiburg, the chairman of Germany’s Bishops Conference and Winfried Kretschmann, the Green Party politician who heads the state government in Baden-Württemberg.

The lawyer, a member of the socialist Left party, took on the case after several other attorneys rejected it. Both Sundermann and his client are no longer members of the Catholic Church.

But we’re forgetting about the broadly held understanding of the meaning of the word laissez faire as well.

A new study shows roughly half of all physically disabled women in Germany have been sexually abused during their youth. Women are also subjected to widespread physical abuse, according to the study.

After all, what’s an open attitude about sexuality good for if you can’t exploit the weak for your emotionally barren jollies while claiming to be a superhuman advanced being, what is it good for anyway?

A man charged with raping his daughter nearly 500 times and fathering three children by her during a 34-year reign of domestic terror told a German court on Monday the sex had been consensual.

So there it is – your choices are plain to see: you can sue the Pope with the hope that Catholicism and personal faith cease to exist while forgetting about the real harm done by those who never had a moral compass installed, or you can go with the old fashioned leftism of the past, and try calling them “the far right”.

“We have people in our programmes who have had weapons training themselves,” said Koch. “They were trained in western Germany, in Lower Saxony, by neo-Nazis who used to be mercenaries, for instance in the former Yugoslavia. Some were part of European training networks and got training in France or Belgium.”

The training takes place in remote country areas, sometimes privately owned, and sometimes rented for the purpose, either in an afternoon or over several days. “They often look for isolated wooded areas,” said Koch.

And outside of that, and the unceasing calls for Revolutionary Violence™ from the far left, they’re a thoughtful, pacifist, and peaceful society that just doesn’t want to get tangled up in that weird, incomprehensible, icky world out there so that they can get back to the business of talking up their society-improving role in advancing the human condition spending all day working on their self-awareness.

“About 9,980,000 results”

2011-11-26T18:39:00.000Z

Summit value? Not about results.

”First Pirate MEP: We expect party to grow”

2011-11-25T18:29:00.000Z

Thus spake Christian Engström, Swedish Pirate Party MEP, to which I am inclined to agree. Since their platform either has pointless platitiudes, and otherwise promises to make free the kind of things that “I have yet to grow up” Urban dwellers in their 20s and 30s do to amuse themselves in privacy, they surely will take off. They’re a sort of NAMBLA for gamers and people who download music without paying for it.

Nothing sells in EUtopia like legalizing theft - in this case of intellectual property. Imagine the future. Campaigners will use allusions to Angry Birds as a allusions in speeches. The less real the stakes, the more likely it will be to sell like hotcakes.

After all, we all know that when a government gives away something for free, people take care of it, and don’t abuse or over-use it. That’s why the Berlin Senate Piraten platform included the idea that all transit should be free of charge.

So hats off to this stunningly delusional bunch – they are the only “entitlement libertarians” that I’ve ever had the pleasure of seeing taken seriously.

Ignore the Absurd European Definitions of “the Right”

2011-11-24T18:28:00.000Z

In the wake of the Charlie Hebdo Molotov cocktail attack, an attempt is being made to consolidate (or rather discount) the obvious about leftist cheer-led violence with their own sick ideological prejudices, a handful of critics in the benighted continent are attempting to understand.

Binding it up with their other bugaboos, they go on to pointlessly expound about the guilt of their fellow citizens whom they refuse to understand with a centuries-old example, as if the right today was guilty of the imagined horrors that they still use as a straw man.

But the larger picture looks more alarming. Nobody has yet claimed responsibility for the attack, but it would not be far-fetched to assume that it is linked to the publication of the special issue published by Charia Hebdo on the day the attack took place. The incident therefore constitutes a radical resurgence of the religious curtailment of free speech - in the midst of one of the very cradles of freedom of expression. It was in Paris that free speech was first established as a fundamental legal fact in the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man - after a protracted and bitter decade-long struggle between the radical Enlightenment on the one hand and the Catholic Church and French Absolutism on the other - a history rife with burning books, which prefigured the burning piles of Charlie Hebdo copies on Tuesday night.

Give them more undeserved attention, and some pregnant silence, and it would become George Bush’s fault or something... anything but the left’s example and educational involvement in the interest of mindless revolutionary violence worldwide... anything.

It is, of course, America’s fault because an American mentioned something useful in this crass campaigning:

On the international scene, the internet versions of many leading European newspapers feature the photograph of Charlie's editor holding up the front page of the magazine with the drawing of the prophet saying "100 lashes, if you do not die from laughter!" before the sooty ruins of its premises. But not a single English or American news media ran the image, as far as a quick net survey shows. At the same time, new threats against Libération are trying to force the daily to stop protecting Charlie. Slowly and steadily, the poison of the extreme religious right is spreading in democratic societies, shrinking the space of free speech and criticism day by day. The strange and unsavoury cocktail of death threats, bombings and arson with whining and whimpering - topped off by defeatist intellectuals talking about "sensibilities" - is slowly eating away at the heart of open societies.

Got that? There are things about this sad, indicative, but minor event that the were supposed to say, and in some specific fashion too.

So somehow these lefty cover artists suddenly forget the interference they ran for virtually anyone willing to murder westerners over the past decade, and in their brilliance FINALLY figured out who’s at fault: the same and only people they can ever find at fault – the domestic political opponents they are so thoroughly obsessed with.

In fact even citing the regrettable stupid piece by Time Magazine’s Bruce Crumley as some sort of negligent disrespect of their divine nature of journalists, so long as they are leftists is another rabbit they’re chasing. Crumly’s motives are patently based in the illiterate chant of the multi-culturalists and founded in the political ritual of trying to heap abuse on the right for taking Islamist religious violence seriously.

Remember the “what did we do to deserve this” crowd heard on September 12th, 2001 ? Well here they are trying to make their fundamental moral ignorance in the interest of their own cultural war the fault of the conventional part of civilization that they live in.

Amazingly, we are somehow, again, supposed to care because they still rebelliously resent their parents. Too bad they can’t keep up the trick long enough to show their hand:

But it is contentious, at very least, to assume that the supposedly Islamist attack is fuelled by the "offense of Muslim sensibilities". A much more obvious reason for fundamentalists to exert religious pressure against the satirical characterisation of their faith is that such joking may, in fact, be detrimental to them by helping to delegitimise their extreme political aims. Satire famously played an important role in the long process through which European societies emancipated themselves from religious dominance over centuries and finally forced Christianity to give in to enlightened principles and liberties

In other words, the bedwetting leftist intelligentia is once again exploiting terror. Much like the leftist Hitler, who saw religion as a barrier to dictatorial power much as the leftist tyrannies of the Soviet sphere did, all is now explained away as “far right extremism”

...simply because that is the only phrase they know.

The Barbarians are Behind the Gates

2011-11-23T15:36:00.001Z

As one might expect:

U.S. money market funds, which are key providers of liquidity to banks and have been pulling back from the euro zone since May, cut their exposure to European banks by a further 9 percent in October, according to ratings agency Fitch.

But here is the interesting part on their counterparties’ fate. The ECB is curtailing bond sales to European banks. This is the precise opposite of what one does to bolster the banks, and seems somewhat fishy. Do they want banks to increase their appetite for Member-State bonds that the ECB are being coy about backing up through repurchases?

The ECB's weekly, limit-free handout of funding underscored the widespread problems, with 178 banks requesting 247 billion euros, the highest amount since mid-2009.

Despite that, they say that the ECB ‘floodgates are open’.

Not quite it looks like they’re holding back for what they suspect will be the worse to come.

"The reality is it's hard to see investors get any confidence (before the end of the year), as the sovereign crisis is out of control. Confidence has disappeared from the banks as they are a conduit for the sovereigns," a senior debt market banker said.

The strangest part of the story is that it reacting to what have been announced to be to repurchasing and bailout rules so far: bondholders, those banks bullied into putting depositors’ money into buying BAD sovereign debt have been told that in a ‘haircut’ scenario, that they will be paid AFTER governments holding other governments’ debt.

Now imagine the scenario: the public gets 50 cents on the Euro for their government bonds, and this send whatever liquid assets still inside Fortress Europe abroad. Recession looks more like influenza than a short case of the sniffles.

THEN the ECB will have put governments into a position where recapitalization of the banks that have had their depositors’ funds lost to bad government debt have to then pay for the socialization as well.

And to think that until just a few weeks ago, Trichet was aimlessly fighting non-existent inflation and beavering away on his price-stability mandate.

The world will catch this cold, all because of European governments’ social “largesse” and “generosity” that put marooned them in this cycle of borrowing. The reaction of the economically illiterate European population will be, as usual “Gimme-gimme-gimme! Me-me-me!” and unable to think anything up for themselves, pick up the work “bankseters” as a fixation for their blame. What they need to do is turn their attention to governments who sang “I’m just a girl who can’t say no” who spent those staggering borrowed sums despite collecting more than half of all GDP in taxes.

Now that population who has been paying for those punitive taxes and had their banks used as “an additional revenue stream” will have the restoration of the system thrust upon them too. It seems that there has never been a better time to be on the dole.

Lefty Attempts Blogging, Fails to Amuse

2011-11-23T14:28:00.000Z

Typical of the Cultural Sensitivity of those most prone to criticize America, we find this mook sums up hoe Europeans treat one another fairly nicely: cultural prejudice, veneer-thin assumptions, feeble cultural slander, childishly making fun of accents, and a universal inability to differentiate an individual from the fake reputation attributed to their nationality. Hell, he might even think that Solesnkniks would be amused by him.

Our 'Trusted Allies' go to their Usual Place to Explain the World’s Complexity

2011-11-22T14:26:00.001Z

By demonizing anything that seems foreign. As if they fart daisies.

France’s fiscal behavior makes their bonds a bad prospect, not Moody’s mentioning it.

Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places

2011-11-21T13:42:00.000Z

One amazing feature of the modern nanny state, especially the sort that recuse themselves from anything that matters, is that people become bored, silly, and stupid.

Thanks to a reader, we discover this warped Canadian chick who tapes food to herself in the hope of having raccoons, already gorged on residential waste, flatter her orally.

7 If you’re really coon smitten and want to go the extra mile for your soon-to-be new best friends, find a fishmonger who will sell or give you a bag of discarded fish stewing in their own putrid juices (the raccoon equivalent of foie gras topped with caviar). Voilà! In a matter of seconds you will be up to your genitals in raccoons.

8 While you’re at it, why not get creative and be fulfilled by encouraging a little coonilingus? If you find one that doesn’t mind the broccoli, consider it a keeper.

Be Proud, Digitalistas! The Grass is Always Browner Next Door!

2011-11-20T13:31:00.000Z

Adulating in the French internet media is an odd thing. It came late, and arrived awkawardly, yet it’s stellar compared to the Internet-Journalism fare of all of its’ neighbors apart from Britain. Never mind the fact that the list is largely headed by knock-offs of the paragons of pandering in America, Slate and Huffington Post.

The strangest thing about the issue, is that it’s being delved into this month by a double-antithesis of the nouveaux médias is coming straight from a dead-tree outfit whose mainstay has always been covering the one-way, non-interactive boob tube.

In that light, expect a domestic version of Mad Men in about 5-7 years.

“Europe Needs Enemies”

2011-11-19T18:33:00.000Z

In an entirely roundabout and subconscious manner, Prague’s Hospodářské Noviny newspaper explains the purpose of Europeans’ outlook toward Americans: because Europeans seek unity and high personal regard by imagining that they have enemies. It also helps that those enemies won’t actually do anything about that enmity, and otherwise just ignore that atmospheric hatred, especially when they are in a pinch.

This crisis of having nothing to hate is downright existential:

So long as Europeans do not feel a sufficient sense of belonging, the French and Germans will be able to go on negotiating coordinated taxes or changes to the Lisbon Treaty. In the long run, though, this kind of united Europe is doomed to disappear all the same.

Since many of them regard any form of national pride as jingoism, and they’re willing to let each other drown economically, “the enemy without” appears to be their source, (and possibly their sole source,) of unity and pride in the circle jerk of stars.

Nothing illustrates that childishness like thinking that “pride in Europe” is in fact anything other than nationalism too:

In a global economy, one has to lay aside old national and ideological categories. A stronger European identity, which could be the basis for restoring the prosperity of the peoples of the old continent, could be created by tighter restrictions on a quite different class of people: politicians who are unable or unwilling to look beyond the horizon of a term in office, who speak a language remote from the everyday lives of ordinary Europeans, who are unwilling to resign even while dragging their countries towards the brink of bankruptcy...

not to mention that it also make a tidy argument for suspending elections, very much after the fashion of Canadian fake-crisis promoter Naomi Klein, who James Delingpole calls out to be the tyranny promoter that she is.

The “Europe needs toothless frenemies” screed is no less of a reality-evading useful bit of catnip.

National identity has all too often been shaped by a variety of traumas, as societies were brought together by a sense of shared fate. European identity, Professor Řezník believes, needs a deep, thorough-going crisis, in order to test its own viability.

So the instead of people making valiant sacrifices for the good of society, people have to be made a sacrifice for the good of society. Got it.

That’s sharp thinking Perfesser, bus hardly new despite being incredibly European. Let’s test that theory by making professional political philosophers destitute, and start from there. After all, I think you ran out of Jews, Gypsies, and whatever Foreign laborers are around to use as a unifying instrument a long time ago. I’m not being cute. That was precisely the purpose of that form of hatred then, and in it’s distinctly less plausible form the reason now: to serve in the absence of a unifying, positive social principle.

Europe: Where the Most Obvious Slander Counts as Hard-Hitting News

2011-11-18T17:38:00.000Z

If you can’t process the fact that nothing has changed in Italy, outside of trading in an elected government that has actually balanced its’ budget for unelelected technocrats, then Plantu will satisfy your need to remain igonarant.

Owing to the “masonic” nature that every enlightened European knows about and the Bunga-bunga slant of a Conservative politician, a feigned horror strangely forgotten about with great lights of the left, Plantu’s economic illiteracy is laid bare.

Because in his Gaullic brilliance and subtlety, he is just too ~~prescient~~ stupid to understand anything other than his obsession with sexualized normally child-like figures, and finding straw-man to blame as an explanation to anything that has ever happened in the world... If we borrowed and spent too much, well, it must be bacause Goldman Sachs made us do it.

c'est comme ça.

All the News that's Fit for a Ouija Board

2011-11-16T17:53:00.000Z

Le Monde attempts to find an explanation to what will certainly be made punching bag and demon:

Mario Monti, Lucas Papademos and Mario Draghi have something in common: they have all worked for the American investment bank.

Okay, that may be true, but is it all that matters? I mean, would anything else matter to the conspiratorially minded? Roche goes on to say that...

According to its detractors, the European network of influence woven by American bank Goldman Sachs (GS) functions like a freemasonry. To diverse degrees, the new European Central Bank President, Mario Draghi, the newly designated Prime Minister of Italy, Mario Monti, and the freshly appointed Greek Prime Minister Lucas Papademos are totemic figures in this carefully constructed web.

But the ZOG-obsessed of the world might also want to note that they also all got PhDs from MIT. That’s like, so, almost “skull and bones!”

As to why these guys have their jobs and the old jokers don’t, the obvious will be sure to be overlooked.

Serious and competent, they weigh up the pros and cons and study all of the documents before giving an opinion. They have a fondness for economics, but these luminaries who enter into the temple only after a long and meticulous recruitment process prefer to remain discreet.
Collectively they form an entity that is part pressure group, part fraternal association for the collection of information, and part mutual aid network. They are the craftsmen, masters and grandmasters whose mission is "to spread the truth acquired in the lodge to the rest of the world."

Ergo, would it not be a safe assumption that Goldman Sachs might, occasionally, either hire of make a competent employee? Or is that too much for the world’s fevered minds to digest, preferring their news to hint at Freemasonry?

Earth Flatulence Control Watch

2011-11-15T16:43:00.000Z

Spittle emitting carbonation obsessed critics of America need to get a life.

You won't find me worried about "green, aware" Europe's nocturnal emmissions, just it's blatant arrogance in who they single out for criticism for things they fail miserably at.

The chart corellates with one very obvious thing. American use of domestic natural gas accomplishes a gread deal more than the fussbudgets' phoney idea that the only future possible is with their wind generators or solar panels installed, of all places, an part of the world as gloomy and dim as the north of Europe.

Lefty Loves the Extortion Racket

2011-11-14T17:56:00.000Z

Sunny feels harassed by Herman Cain

They’ll Find out that Belt-tightening has Nothing to do with S & M

2011-11-13T17:55:00.000Z

In a land where people don’t have any disposable income thanks to taxes and “syndicalist” consumer price bloating, any form of reality bites.

Budget cuts that might once have sent French people marching into the streets look set to pass in silence as anxiety about debt and deficits, long non-issues in free-spending France, loom large in voters' minds ahead of a presidential election.

And you can always expect the usual teenager-like passive-aggression:

Yet the response has been muted, and early signs are that little outcry is to be expected. Labor unions issued statements denouncing the new round of cuts as unwarranted austerity. But they are vague about any plans to respond with protests.

Actually he said you All Suck

2011-11-12T17:24:00.000Z

Not just the EU:

Using language recalling German tabloid depictions of "lazy Greeks", the chairman of China's sovereign wealth fund has said the EU as a whole suffers from "sloth" and "indolence."

Ah! No! It’s that slow food sort of quality of life thing, not parasitism and indolence!

"If you look at the troubles which have happened in European countries, this is purely because of the troubles of a worn-out welfare society. I think [the EU's] welfare laws are outdated. The labour laws induce sloth, indolence. The incentive system is totally out of sink," he said.

After much consternation about whether or not the self-appointed Gods of the universe would “let” those un-classy go-go-all-business Chinese use their CIC to buy ECB bonds, Jin asked the real question:

Our people would ask: 'Hey. Are you sure we can get a fair return on our investment?'"

Of course not. That’s why the market isn’t buying. It’s why the yield on the Greek 2 year is nearly 100%, which is more than what any loan shark will take on risk.

Do you really think the Chinese what to lend money to an entity inhabited by people generally sympathetic to revolutionary Communism who might nationalize their assets?

Europe: a Helpless, Pitiful Elf

2011-11-11T15:33:00.000Z

When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. On the other hand, you can’t solve decades of complex economic problems with diplomacy.

That task has become even more tricky after European leaders failed to get any firm commitments to invest from cash-rich countries like China or Brazil at a summit of the Group of 20 leading economies in France last week.

“This current financial turbulence is really eroding the foundations of economic growth and employment in Europe,” European Union Monetary Affairs Commissioner Olli Rehn told the European Parliament before the finance ministers’ meeting. “So the first thing to do in the current situation is to stop the rot.”

Desperate times demand desperate measures, not to mention desperate statements like this one:

FILLON SAYS HE HAS CONFIDENCE IN `WHATEVER ITALIAN GOVERNMENT'

In His Very Own Saintly Words, Part VI

2011-11-10T17:10:00.000Z

"Given the prevailing lack of discipline, it would have been impossible to use Congolese machine-gunners to defend the base from air attack: they did not know how to handle their weapons and did not want to learn,"

- Ernesto "Che" Guevara

In His Very Own Saintly Words, Part III

2011-11-09T17:10:00.000Z

"Mexicans are a band of illiterate Indians."

- Ernesto "Che" Guevara

In His Very Own Saintly Words, Part II

2011-11-08T17:10:00.000Z

"The Negro is indolent and lazy, and spends his money on frivolities, whereas the European is forward-looking, organized and intelligent."

- Ernesto "Che" Guevara

In His Very Own Saintly Words, Part I

2011-11-07T17:10:00.001Z

"We're going to do for blacks exactly what blacks did for the revolution. By which I mean: nothing."

- Ernesto "Che" Guevara

Relax. Don’t Do it.

2011-11-03T14:44:00.000Z

For the Frivolous, Postmodern Foodie Types in your Life

They’re sure to get excited for new ideas, such as Meals with spunk.

Semen is not only nutritious, but it also has a wonderful texture and amazing cooking properties. Like fine wine and cheeses, the taste of semen is complex and dynamic. Semen is inexpensive to produce and is commonly available in many, if not most, homes and restaurants. Despite all of these positive qualities, semen remains neglected as a food. This book hopes to change that. Once you overcome any initial hesitation, you will be surprised to learn how wonderful semen is in the kitchen. Semen is an exciting ingredient that can give every dish you make an interesting twist.

Sure. Whatever. This is precisely the kind of goofy trend that becomes ‘all the rage’ for 3 days in Europe’s major cities. It’s accompanied with similar explanations of healing properties and bogus claims of life extention.

Then again, why does that remind me of this kind of thing?

How Unamerican is #OWS, you Ask?

2011-11-02T14:44:00.001Z

"The utopian schemes of leveling and a community of goods are as visionary and impracticable as those which vest all property in the Crown, are arbitrary, despotic, and, in our government, unconstitutional."

- Samuel Adams, Letter to Dennys De Berdt, Massachusetts
agent in London (January 12, 1768)

Can you Please Fix my Prolapsed Rectum ?

2011-11-02T14:01:00.000Z

Beware: Broke nations contemplating further socializing their medical sectors. And by that I mean YOU, America.

The Greeks are broke. They would socialize and unionize crime if there was a way to do it. Now they are turning to NGOs to cover their medical needs, much as nations beset by pandemics, endemic poverty, and natural disasters do.

Europeans and Westerners in general are accustomed to being asked to donate money to emergency aid NGOs to tackle medical humanitarian crises in Africa, Asia and other parts of the developing world where governments are too unwilling, poor or incapable to be able to help their own citizens.

It is unheard of for aid groups such as Medecins Sans Frontieres or Medicins du Monde to have to take over the role of providing basic medical services from normal state or private providers in a Western country.

No worries. Since they are in demographic decline like much of Europe’s Club Med, it shouldn’t be a problem for too long.

He Must Have Desperately Needed Something to be Mad About

2011-11-01T14:00:00.000Z

So much so, that he’s willing to impoverish and bankrupt civilization to gets that rah-rah feeling that he had when he was young, and thought that he has something to say to the world that it didn’t already know.

Below you’ll find an interesting retort to a cause of the week zombie who is so worried about “climate change” that, well, he won’t ask himself these rather obvious questions:

Make your scientific case for imminent Catastrophic Climate Disaster. The science is settled and irrefutable. It is urgent we must implement comprehensive regulatory reform to reduce CO2 emissions to avoid climate catastrophe.
1) In this century please list the catastrophic climate events in North America that will be aberrations to what has occurred in the past 100 years? Please be specific (range estimate is fine) as to the event, scope, region, and timing. How are these disasters outside what we have observed and experienced in the previous century?

2) Please provide the scientific data that substantiates that public policy to control CO2 will in fact reverse climate change? Please quantify this reversal from current trends.

3) Please make the scientific case that man cannot effectively adapt to changing weather patterns just as he has done in previous centuries without the help of extravagant public policy to regulate the climate?

4) Please make the scientific case that catastrophic global warming and climate disaster must be a higher priority than entitlement reform, economic prosperity, balancing the budget, reducing sovereign debt, jobs, etc., etc.? Why is mitigating catastrophic climate change such an urgent and high priority?

5) How much sleep have you lost in the past year worrying about climate disaster? Please compare this to your worry over retirement and career security? If you are not losing any sleep over climate doomsday then why should I?

6) What is the ideal standard climate for North America? Is this a static state that we must achieve? How much does climate change over geologic time naturally?

7) Please provide the % of climate change this century that is natural vs. human-caused?
The science is settled. The science is irrefutable. There is nothing to debate. We must act now or else disaster is imminent. It is urgent we do so. Therefore, the answers to these questions are obvious.

”Catastrophic warmists” are turning out to be more of a parody of reason and compassion than anything else.

Starve the Beast

2011-10-31T14:00:00.001Z

It’s actually rather hard to find out who “the people” are:

One of the paradoxes of the French industrial relations system is that despite its low rate of unionisation, close to 8 per cent, it has a very high rate of collective bargaining coverage, close to 98 per cent. There are two major reasons for this: the extension of collective bargaining agreements by the Ministry of Labour and the legal form of union recognition according to which each of the five confederations CGT, FO, CFDT, CFTC and CGC were recognised by the government in 1966 as ‘representative’ at the national level and were therefore entitled to sign collective agreements at any level. Union pluralism has increased since, with the appearance of new confederations of ‘autonomous’ unions, namely UNSA and Solidaires.

Got it? By way of the state, designating an minute elite that represent 8% of the employed, Government is used as a tool to multiply that power to impose their rules not just on 98% of the employed who have no way to get in on that conversation, but the rest of society.

Europeans call this majority rule representing the united masses, somehow imagining the fate of the characters in Germinal. This “minority as majority,” something the radical clique who have coopted the Democratic Party in the us can’t wait to foist on what little healthy parts there are of the US economy.

Legislation adopted in 2008 introduced new criteria for determining whether a union is representative and therefore allowed to participate in collective bargaining at national, industry and company level. The new law requires a union to win at least 10 per cent of the votes at the workplace level, 8 per cent of the votes at industry level and 8 per cent of votes at national ‘inter-professional’ level to be considered representative. The new legislation will only come fully into effect at national and industry level in 2013.

Rules, rules, rules. In fact it’s a coil that wants rule over others. The point of “controversy” is that the lay will require 30% affirmation to have a mandate over 100% of the workers. And the “organization,” that selected sliver representing 8% of those employed by the private sector, still gets a right of refusal over a rebellion among the 49% of that 8%

In order to be valid, collective bargaining agreements at industry level currently need to be unopposed from a majority of representative union organisation. From 2013, it will only be valid if it has been signed by unions with at least a 30 per cent support in the industry, based on works council and similar elections, and if it is not opposed by unions with majority (more than 50 per cent) support. These rules have already started taking effect at the company level where elections under the new rules have taken place.

As for now, they’ll find a way to live off of the carrion of free market invention, but how long could that possibly last?

Why is it that Leftists think that Government should be in the Venture Capital Business?

2011-10-29T15:32:00.000Z

If business is challenging when entrepreneurs make decisions for sound business reasons, it’s doomed when politicians become involved, because they make decisions for political reasons. Politicians like to pay off big campaign contributors by steering government contracts their way, regardless of how dubious the campaign contributors might be as business executives.

For one thing, they are sad attempts to prove their bad economic theories, for another:

politicians expect that those who receive government funding will help their re-election campaigns. No surprise that many businesses have chief executives best known for their ability to find a place at the public trough, rather than boosting sales in free markets.

Government attempts to pick winners are most likely to increase the amount of money lost betting on losers. This is because with the power to tax, subsidize and mandate, politicians are able to pour money into unprofitable projects that private investors would never touch voluntarily.

Very simply, to quote Iowahawk (after a fashion,) if you don’t want to be drugged and forcibly sodimized in the van, don’t take the candy.

True, in a “Aren’t I Just so Witty Sort of Way

2011-10-28T14:31:00.000Z

“A politician is someone who gets in front of a mob and tries to call it a parade.”

- unknown

Leadership is Lacking

2011-10-27T17:03:00.000Z

The Europe needs to get some head:

The latest summit in Brussels marked a turning point in the euro crisis that has been raging for two years now. For the first time, the denial of Europe’s leaders about the true gravity of the situation seems to finally be lifting.

That’s a strange sort of solace to take. What they have done is wait too long for too long.

Much like their vaunted celebration of their unity, one-ness, etcetera, born largely out of the fact that it only took a millennium of murdering on another to get there, the idea that they would call this week’s events a breakthrough is somewhere between bizarre and a sad attempt at positive spin.

I mean, try to find the rah-rah, we are one unity in this:

The report of “Troika” inspectors from the International Monetary Fund, the EU Commission, and the European Central Bank reads like a horror story. It also calls into question all of the previous attempts to rescue the euro.

It makes one sentimental for endless general strikes the good old days of Italian governments lasting about 4 months. Oh. Wait a minute.

Still worried about revanchist “each man for himself” nationalism, are we?