Where ARE they Now, Really?

David Bowie has released a song, breaking a 10 year absence. It is a reflection on his time in the past in West-Berlin. It will draw mockery, but David Bowie asks good questions, and stakes his hopes on the person, their soul, and their love. He seems to be thinking about the Germany of today, not the Vergangenheit that he has been living in for many years, trying to provoke some reflection.

Real, Living Socialism!

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

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

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

[ ... ]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Thought for the Millennia

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

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

- Marcus Tullius Cicero who minces words even less here:

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

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

A Thought or two on Socialistic Crypto-Command Economics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This turns out to be true.

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

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

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

The outcome, surprising no-one, is failure.

Media Flunky Update

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

Sorry, we’re no Longer Shocked

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

Are uncreative artists creating universal hatred for great art?

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

Please! Please ! A Toothless, Shoeless America is Begging you to Tell us What to Think!

Where do a great many Europeans get their information about big issues in the US? From pointless shills like these who think Tina Fey is a political mover and shaker. Take comfort in the fact that the ill-informed are doing a bang-up job educating people who don’t vote in the US anyway, but can’t help thinking that they’re authorities on US society, nonetheless.

Outside of the expats whose actual attachment to the US is not very firm, it’s hard to see that the word “partisan” even applies. In fact the outlook detectable from it is only a slight improvement over the average German, who, when thinking about America seems unnaturally obsessed with the Cuban missile crisis, those “fake” moon landings, and that “stolen” Florida election. Either way, it’s a comfortable old-hat full of hate.

Stunningly, these bloggers are no better at seeing outside their bubble as the European public offered even less contextually relevant information from the media. So they shouldn’t expound on what they no longer understand, but they seem to anyway.

What’s odd about their vacuous effort, is that the authors didn’t just waste their money on a domain name and bandwidth, but include two guys who make a living appearing journalistic, and yet another who is a PR flunky for the World Economic Forum. This is how they ‘inform’ readers hungry for information on the US election – as it is this “election information site” is made up of little more than hot-linked info-graphics, jokey, self-pleasuring leftist position rants in German to those not eligible to vote in the US anyway, and graphics like this:

I’m sure the readers of Gutmenschdorf feel witty laughing along.

Where’s you Cape? I don’t See your Cape?

The Boy Who Cried Warming is an independent film featuring scientists taking the mickey out of the zealots who “want to save us from Global Warming.”

When America’s 4th Estate Becomes America’s 5th Column

The voice behind the camera od an ABC News crew covering the Republican National Convention is heard saying:

They are happy to have a party while black people are drowning.

This despite the fact that not one soul had yet to drown from a hurricane Isaac that has yet to reach the continental US, and the pigmentation of that imaginary friend of theirs’, a leftist human political prop has yet to be established.

It is followed by someone else laughing. Their penetrating commentary started at the very beginning of the clip:


The fact that the Democrats’ proxies, with braying idiocy, vuvuzelas, and a readily discernible aroma otherwise reserved for those who actually labor, are unperturbed by “black people drowning” to an even greater degree goes unmentioned.

Humans as a Useful Political Cudgel

Whe he’s not abusing the church and the papacy, he uses it as a political beratement device against those whose politics he finds distasteful. In light of the past weeks’ and Sunday’s news of the breaking up of Roma camps in France, even removing them from buildings where they were squatting, we can look at one of Plantu’s political cartoons from August of 2010 in a different light.

So much for Socialists’ beloved droit au logement. After all, that’s only for vote-buying purposes.
All the Roma were to Socialist political supports was a useful political prop, yet one that they wouldn’t even go out of their way to be photographed with.

A Though for the Day

"The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance."

- John Philpot Curran, 1790

We Want to get, like, Totally Decarbonized, Man

Europe's resistance to shale gas could boost renewables

We are cheerfully told that blindingly expensive and unreliable “resistance” will get a big boost in Europe because Europe has rejected the idea that shale gas is any sort of option their élite green mafia will countenance.

Unless carbon capture and storage can be developed on a commercial scale, that means gas as a fuel has a limited future and should not be invested in too heavily, environmental campaigners say.

They are especially against shale gas, whose environmental credentials are questioned in Europe.

Of course it will get “a boost.” All other, cheaper, more productive, and non-impoverishing forms of energy are being held hostage by taxing any form of energy commensurate with unapproved thoughts, not to mention their energetic potential.
They also demand a public enthusiasm for it as well – akin to the vigorous marching in a May Day Parade.

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) say this is good news for renewables. "When shale is removed from the market, renewables gain more ground," they wrote in a report earlier this year.

Really? You don’t say?

And given that no market can function unmolested in yet another disastrous utopia building effort:

"We need natural gas as a transition fuel. However, we don't need such a huge amount of gas and certainly not cheap gas, because that would kick out not just coal, but also renewables," Greenpeace renewable energy director Sven Teske said.

It seems that quotes from Greenpeace is all it takes to turn something into ‘news’. Oddly enough, even a small amount of reporting on the subject undermines the argument, and reips the mask off of those making the case too.

Investment in renewable energy rose by 5% to a record €208 billion worldwide in 2011, but that growth depended to a large degree on government subsidies.

If subsidies are cut, the risk for Europe is that cheap coal - not gas - could dominate the market and carbon emissions carry on rising.
Most utilities in Europe cannot earn a profit from their electricity if it is generated from gas at today's prices, because gas - in contrast to cheap US gas - is too expensive, and coal and carbon emissions certificates are relatively cheap.

And yet the product is taxed to subsidize politically vain forms of energy to, you know, make it seem “profitable,” as if that alone made its’ cost to society neutral.

Chided by our Tubercular Lesson-Givers

Stuck in a never-ending monotone of being prone to both endless mockery of the non-French, and self-congratulation, the likes of the French left, cultural Marxists to a tee, have managed to bleat out a good one:

La bise, un rituel « so chic » qui déroute les Américains

or:

The kiss, a "chic" ritual that disturbs the Americans

It refers to the practice of greeting one another with a kiss on each cheek. So far as I can tell, they picked this up from Arabs of the eastern Mediterranean who somehow manage to be both homophobic and pan-sexual at the same time.

We’re “uppity” or “posh” for imitating the ”bizou-bizou” habit when we do, but bow to honor their ways at the same time. The same is never true of hundreds of millions of their fellow Europeans, such as the British, Germans, all of the Scandinavians, virtually every eastern European, Austrians, and a fair number of Spaniards, the Swiss, and the French themselves who do not instinctively greet those with a kiss whom they might only know in passing.

Non-kees-kess type, for than matter, include anyone else with an eye for hygiene, and those who would rather not be pick-pocketed by someone whose name they might know.

The sad thing is that the Rue89 writer actually takes a mention of it in the New York Times to mean that it’s a “debate”, as if their cultural practices were actually globally relevant. Strangely enoough, no-one makes a point of the near universal ambient ill-regard inhabiting their society, to the point that even the preferred term used for another form of affection is an imported one: « le hug » replacing the fact that nary a soul cares about anyone else enough to use the phrase « je t’embrace » anymore.

Wherein we Ask a Nation: Where Did the Love Go ?

The Dooming of the Modern Mind

Intellectual Hygiene and Its Enemies
Among them Gore Vidal

Victor David Hanson, not one to speak ill of the dead, manages to say what anyone who has ever had to endure a panel discussion or television appearance with Gore Vidal has felt:

Vidal said he was nauseated by American imperialism and gloated over our decline, but his real pique was that the mannered East Coast snobbishness that he loved to shock had given way to a socially mobile, no-holds-barred popular culture that did not so much ignore his world of blue-blood repartee, but had no clue that it had ever existed. He liked being hated; he hated being irrelevant.

Upon meeting him as a young man, Hanson notes an affliction from which every presumed made-for-TV intellectual in Europe still suffers from:

Vidal certainly had an instinct for saying outrageous things with such erudite authority that we yokels found him fascinating rather than repulsive. As I remember (it has been 48 years since that evening), Vidal spoke for about 30 minutes, but then he wowed the crowd to a standing ovation in the question-and-answer period (his forte), as he advocated the legalization of drugs and prostitution and went on rants about “small town” values.

Pooping the nest come naturally to this type. More to the point, their rather sad imitators, agitators of the political left, have also contracted a rather regrettable trope from them, one which they try to conceal on the election circuit: hating happy, normal people makes them feel smart.

The Wisdom of our Elders

A little old lady walking with a cane asked the pilot as she disembarked the plane after a rough landing:
"Sir, do you mind if I ask you a question?"
"Why, no Ma'am," said the pilot. "What is it?"
"Did we land, or were we shot down?"

Our thoughtful, Caring Left

The near-winner of the presidential candidacy of the American Green Party was persistent in her obsession with my rectum, better known in their alternate universe as the mangina. How very presidential of someone who finds that one-time Cuban IDG trained Weathermen consulting the president not sufficiently
"target="_blank">radical enough to earn their support of the Democratic Party.

Before they Used ‘em, They Abused ‘em

A part of the bourgeoisie wants to redress social grievances in order to assure the maintenance of bourgeois society.

Included in it are economists, philanthropists, humanitarians, do-gooders for the working classes, charity organisers, animal welfare enthusiasts, temperance union workers, two-a-penny reformers of multifarious kinds.

— Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party

Tanking Humanity Every other Generation

It’s just what they do.

European banks had bad loans on their books worth the hardly imaginable sum of €1,050 billion by the end of 2011, Pricewaterhouse Coopers (PwC) calculations presented in Frankfurt on Wednesday showed. Liabilities not repaid on time was almost nine percent larger than in 2010, PwC said.