No, not the corrupted Jihadist notion of one, the kind that chooses to actively murder others because of who they represent to him, even if the use of the word has infected the rest of the Arab world and now most of the perceptual boundaries of the European left.

Piotr Stanczak did not exhibit the slightest hint of hesitation when the Pakistani Taliban asked him to choose between execution and conversion to Islam.

Whether the Polish geologist acted out of pride or religious conviction, he decided to pay through his blood to save his faith, a choice that bewildered his killers and keep them talking about him with respect after his murder.

Stanczak, 42, was kidnapped September 28 on his way to survey for oil exploration in Attock district, of Pakistan's eastern province of Punjab. The kidnappers also killed his driver and two guards.

Late Polish engineer Piotr Stanczak is a martyr, a man who died holding on to his convictions, even though dispensing of them would be easy.

The description of a martyr given by the pagan historian Ammianus Marcellinus (XXII, xvii), shows that by the middle of the fourth century the title was everywhere reserved to those who had actually suffered death for their faith.

|

It has been interesting to watch the Dutch slowly chip away at the statist/governmentalist mindset when it comes to that smoking ban. It is unfortunate that one has to take mini-steps in restoring individual rights and individual liberties, but if the result in the end is the same, so be it:

|

It pays for those things we want?

Licence payers fund BBC chief's £8m pension

Two BBC bosses have racked up the biggest pensions in the public sector, together worth more than £14m.

Mark Byford, 51, the deputy director general, is to receive a pension of at least £229,500 a year from a pot valued at almost £8m. This could rise to more than £10m if he works at the BBC until the age of 60.

Alan Yentob, 62, the arts presenter and creative director of the BBC, has accumulated a pension worth £6.3m, giving an annual retirement income of £216,667 for the rest of his life, according to new research.

|

Weekends are good for quiz time:

1) If you are a woman, where would you live to find the most happiness:
A) Saudi Arabia
B) Germany

2) If you are a parent, where would you live to find the most happiness in raising your children?
A) Bangladesh
B) France

3) If you are an entrepreneur, where would you live to find the most happiness in running your business:
A) Venezuela
B) Netherlands

If you answered anything other than (A) above, well you must not have the nuance and/or lucidity to understand this year's Happy Planet Index. For a much more trenchant critique of the HPI check out Tim Worstall, of course.

Btw, the US scored #114 out of 143 (Just edging out Nigeria but light years behind the happiness powerhouses of Moldova and the Congo).

|

Some societies are just better at mental masturbation

|

|

|

Oh really?

Homeowners across the country are challenging their property tax bills in droves as the value of their homes drop, threatening local governments with another big drain on their budgets.

"It's worthy of a Dickens story," said Gus Kramer, the assessor in Contra Costa County, Calif., outside San Francisco. "These people are desperate. They know their home's gone down in value. They've watched their neighborhoods being boarded up. They literally stand in there and say: 'When can I have my refund check? I need to feed my family. I need to pay my electric bill.' "

Let's yell it out time and again....

|

|

Taking a break from lionizing themselves for either thinking they have a serious position in the world, to lionizing themselves for never taking a position on anything of mortal importance. We find a kind of lost capability to even just do anything at all.

If another crisis hits eastern Europe in the summer, the US is likely to respond faster than the European Union.

What we’re talking about here, is that central governments will be too understaffed to even do the ‘feigned shock’ routine that European now think of a having international policy positions.

When the people who run the western world go on holiday, bad things happen in eastern Europe. Last August Russia invaded Georgia. Over Christmas its gas spat with Ukraine left millions of European consumers shivering (at least from nerves, if not real cold). Easter (on the western Christian calendar) brought protests against ballot-rigging in Moldova.
What the coming summer may bring as new upsets can only be guessed at. Another war in Georgia is always possible. Crimea remains a flammable mixture of incompatible military and ethnic interests. The Kremlin's relations with the once-docile regime in Minsk are uncommonly icy. Your columnist will be keeping his BlackBerry fully charged and close by the poolside.

Somebody please tell this idiot that the EU-3 do not ‘run the western world’. If they can’t even support a problem within the EU that happens to their east, where do they get the idea that they do anything substantive in the interest of ‘the western world’ when they can barely manage the ugly business of securing their own interests?

An insightful new paper by the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR), a think-tank, shows how the EU is complacently frittering away its advantages and losing out to Russia in the countries of the new Eastern Partnership – Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine. On paper, the EU's position should be invincible. For five of these countries (Belarus is the exception), it is a bigger trading partner than Russia is. That is a big shift from the days when the Kremlin dominated the ex-Soviet economic space. The EU's freedom and prosperity gives it a lot of soft power too: even a distant prospect of membership counts for a lot more than the tangled embrace of Kremlin-run projects such as the still embryonic Eurasian Economic Community or the Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO). Belarus has flounced away from an important CSTO summit meeting amid a bitter row about new Russian barriers to its food exports.

Yet the Eastern Partnership is faring poorly. Launched by the crippled Czech presidency at the Prague summit, the new programme is struggling to make an impact. From the big EU countries, only German Chancellor Angela Merkel bothered to show up at its birth. And Germany was among the countries that insisted that the most vital ingredient in the package – liberalisation of visas – was diluted almost to the point of meaninglessness.

In case you were not about to ask, the ‘eastern partnership’ is basically an internal matter of the EU which seems to be fizzling under natural apathy, while the Russians doing one of those make-believe organization things that ends up with an acronym, a large staff of unproductive people with PhDs, and a large building – that thing that Europeans are so good at, seem to be able to manage it fairly well. They might even be able to pretend that it’s a UN agency for the management of something internal.

Either way, what we’re looking at is an inability to even demonstrate an awareness of where there are borders between dimwitted prestige projects and operating a government, about meets-and-greets and diplomacy, or much of anything else. They’ve been feeding themselves a diet of so much speciousness, conferences with names of cities that result in implausible declarations named after cities, and press-releases as a salve to the problem of no-one being in to pick up the damn phone.

Besides that, what is it exactly that they’ve been calling “taking action” lately anyway? Floating a canned press release containing the phrase “deeply concerned”? A trained chimpanzee could manage that routine.

Look if “another crisis hits eastern Europe,” the EU, which is to say Western Europe would let Eastern Europe hang, and they know it. It isn’t a sense of obligation that will change that, it will be a sense of individual humiliation or Russian threats of sphere-expansion that might get the EU’s “boldest and brightest” to so much as cut their vacation short.

|

Take this hypothetical: imagine that Barack Obama announced that he was going to hold a referendum on legalizing a third term for himself. Imagine that even his attorney general, Eric Holder, advised him that it was illegal. Imagine that the Supreme Court ruled that holding the referendum was unconstitutional. In spite of that, let's imagine that Obama coerced the FEC into holding the referendum anyway. Then - let's further imagine -- we found out that Venezuelan strongman Chávez (who has pulled off a similar power grab in his own country) was financing the referendum. What should the Joint Chiefs do in such a case? And if they removed Obama from office, would they be destroying the Constitution or preserving it?

That is the question asked by Pamela Geller on American Thinker (gracias para Larwyn). Oliver North has more.

This is exactly what has occurred in Honduras, to a tee. …

Obama is on the same side as Chávez, Ortega and the Castro brothers.

And the irony is thick. In a press conference on June 23, Obama said: "I've made it clear that the United States respects the sovereignty of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and is not interfering with Iran's affairs." He never called upon the Iranian mullahs to "respect democratic norms." On the contrary, he ostentatiously refuses to "meddle" in Iran, where individuals are courageously risking life and limb for the idea of free elections. Brutal Islamic nazis are crushing dissent, and Obama talks about "lively debate." Former Iranian President Mohammad Khatami spoke out Thursday against what he called a "velvet coup against the people and democracy." Obama has sided with that coup, while in Honduras, Obama and the whores at the United Nations have no qualms about interfering to back a Chávez proxy. On Tuesday, U.N. General Assembly piled on, condemning the "coup" in Honduras and demanding that Zelaya be returned to office. It passed - by acclamation - a resolution calling upon all member states not to recognize the new government.

|

Elle’s website reports:

Yesterday[Ed.: 30-June] , a 29 year old woman was sprayed with a corrosive product in a sensitive suburb of Grenoble. It was "probably acid," police said. Burned on the lip and hand, the young woman of North African origin was at home during the attack. The doorbell rang and when she opened the door, "a man had thrown the liquid at her. The attacker fled before he could be identified. According to preliminary results of the investigation, jealousy could be the cause of this aggression. The victim was rushed to hospital in Grenoble.

”sensitive suburb” is code for the rat-traps that are devolving into the battlefield of a one-sided religious war. But who are we to judge this attacker’s act if it was motivated by culture or if it’s a 3rd world practice that’s supposed to have something to do with how village hicks worship. Obviously Unitarians are to blame.

|

A single mega-colony of ants has colonised much of the world, scientists have discovered.

Argentine ants living in vast numbers across Europe, the US and Japan belong to the same inter-related colony, and will refuse to fight one another.

The colony may be the largest of its type ever known for any insect species, and could rival humans in the scale of its world domination.

|

Sometime readers of NP will recall that in the past we asked several times what would happen to those TARP funds (and any extra made on the deals) once the repayments began.

Congressman Barney Frank offers a clue which fits in with what we thought might happen:

When President Obama announced on June 9 that some financial institutions would be allowed to repay Troubled Asset Relief Program dollars, he said the massively expensive TARP bailout had made money for the federal government. "It is worth noting that in the first round of repayments from these [TARP recipients], the government has actually turned a profit," the president said. Indeed, TARP supporters have long held out the hope that the program might be profitable.

But now Rep. Barney Frank, the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, has come up with a proposal to spend any TARP profits before they can be returned to the taxpayers. Last Friday, Frank introduced the "TARP for Main Street Act of 2009," a bill that would take profits from the program and immediately redirect them toward housing proposals favored by Frank and some fellow Democrats.

As we mused in early April:

One can easily imagine a scenario under which the banks get the screws put to them so tightly that they will not only subscribe to the terms above but also the creation of some new, and permanent, set of governmental programmes which dole out the repaid TARP funds, or a big enough portion of them, for all kinds of social re-engineering programmes. The governmentalist mindset will think, "We created this new money, why waste it by simply closing out the TARP programme?"

The banks of course will line up squealing with praise for these new programmes and the need to use these repaid TARP funds for the "better social good". And why wouldn't they line up to do so, they will have repaid the TARP funds and removed the government substantially off their backs. The fact that some new social re-engineering programmes have been created and foisted onto the tax-payer in perpetuity makes no difference to the banks, they got rid of their problem.

We continue to watch but appreciate Congressman Frank for starting the process which may confirm our fears.

|

A YOUNG schoolboy was “converted” to Islam on the streets of Birmingham by a radical Muslim preacher, the Sunday Mercury can reveal.

The bewildered-looking 11 year-old, who gives his name as Sean, was filmed repeating Arabic chants and swearing allegiance to Allah.

The white schoolboy is prompted throughout by controversial cleric Anjem Choudary, a follower of exiled hate-preacher Omar Bakri Mohammed.

One can only wonder where both radical and not-so-radical Islam’s hate – hate relationship with the world comes from, especially when it comes to the sick business of exploiting the young. It seems different for boys than it is for girls, but it’s still founded upon a kind of coercion and exploitation, knowing that from the scared and the innocently young, the hateful and manipulative will go unchallenged. As with paedophiles, they get a feeling of control over another living being that cannot evade that headlock of submission.

Muslim countries in the Middle East and north-central Africa lead the world in human trafficking, according to a new U.S. State Department report. Of the 17 countries that were given the "Tier 3" listing reserved for the worst offenders, nine were Muslim countries or countries with a large Muslim population from these two regions. Tier 3 countries are defined as those “whose governments do not fully comply with the minimum standards" of the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008 and "are not making significant efforts to do so.”

Is it rare? Is it merely a rural phenomenon? Can one be convinced to call it a feature of native culture that has to be respected as so many of the west’s theoretical expects on culture (but not civilization) would have you know? Of course not.

Amir Taheri on the other hand doesn’t wonder at all. They are not alone in taking joy of others’ pain:

Foucault was not alone among Western leftists to be seduced by Khomeinism. Some of the historic figures of the May 1968 student revolts in Europe visited Iran during these troubled days to see their fantasy revolution take shape in a Third World country. Like impotent voyeurs, they watched the tragedy imposed on Iran by a revolution they could only dream of in their own countries.

And for the thinnest of reasons too, the same reason it’s impolite in EUtopia to dwell too much – too much being in any way that would make a real impression – on the real state of being of those exploited for the pleasure of a fantasy-revolutionary or an equally mal-adjusted people who enjoy taking advantage of those they’ve made servile.

For Western return-ticket revolutionaries, watching the Iranian tragedy was-and for some, still is-a way of obtaining vicarious pleasure without a price in pain. Just as quite a few Western pedophiles travel to Third World nations to gratify the bestial tastes they cannot easily indulge at home, aging European and American revolutionaries flocked to Iran to see a revolution such as they no longer hoped to see in their own countries, and they tried hard to describe it as a "people's revolution."

And for those in western Europe too simplistic to look past the first explanation they’re handed, the use of terminology might sound familiar:

In a single incident in August 1978, over four hundred people were burned alive at Cinema Rex in Abadan, set on fire by one of the commandos that Foucault had admired. The commando had blocked the emergency exits from the outside and destroyed firefighting equipment to make sure that a maximum number of people would die. The Supreme Guide of the revolution, Khomeini, dismissed the incident as "a sign of the rage of our youth."

So don’t be surprised if the consequences we see someday are largely the same.

|

What If George W. Bush had made a joke at the expense of the Special Olympics, would you have approved?

asks the Free Republic (merci à Hervé).

If George W. Bush had given Gordon Brown a set of inexpensive and incorrectly formatted DVDs, when Gordon Brown had given him a thoughtful and historically significant gift, would you have approved?

If George W. Bush had given the Queen of England an iPod containing videos of his speeches, would you have thought this embarrassingly narcissistic and tacky?

If George W. Bush had bowed to the King of Saudi Arabia, would you have approved?

If George W. Bush had visited Austria and made reference to the non-existent "Austrian language," would you have brushed it off as a minor slip?

If George W. Bush had filled his cabinet and circle of advisers with people who cannot seem to keep current on their income taxes, would you have approved?

If George W. Bush had been so Spanish illiterate as to refer to “Cinco de Cuatro” in front of the Mexican ambassador when it was the Fifth of May (Cinco de Mayo), and continued to flub it when he tried again, would you have winced in embarrassment?

If George W. Bush had misspelled the word advice would you have hammered him for it for years like Dan Quayle and potato as “proof” of what a dunce he is?

If George W. Bush had burned 9,000 gallons of jet fuel to go plant a single tree on “Earth Day”, would you have concluded he’s a hypocrite?

If George W. Bush’s administration had okayed Air Force One flying low over millions of people followed by a jet fighter in downtown Manhattan causing widespread panic, would you have wondered whether they actually “get” what happened on 9-11?

If George W. Bush had been the first President to need a teleprompter installed to be able to get through a press conference, would you have laughed and said this is more proof of how he is inept he is on his own and is really controlled by smarter men behind the scenes?

If George W. Bush had failed to send relief aid to flood victims throughout the Midwest with more people killed or made homeless than in New Orleans, would you want it made into a major ongoing political issue with claims of racism and incompetence?

If George W. Bush had ordered the firing of the CEO of a major corporation, even though he had no constitutional authority to do so, would you have approved?

If George W. Bush had proposed to double the national debt, which had taken more than two centuries to accumulate, in one year, would you have approved?

If George W. Bush had then proposed to double the debt again within 10 years, would you have approved?

So, tell me again, what is it about Obama that makes him so brilliant and impressive? Can't think of anything? Don't worry. He's done all this in 10 weeks — so you'll have three years and nine-and-a-half months to come up with an answer.

|

Reality is a concept often eschewed by those pushing the various "end of the world now" types of environmentalism. Fortunately for the rest of us, reality seems to be the basis for this study directed by Dr. Gabriel Calzada Álvarez:

Optimistically treating European Commission partially funded data1, we find that for every renewable energy job that the State manages to finance, Spain’s experience cited by President Obama as a model reveals with high confidence, by two different methods, that the U.S. should expect a loss of at least 2.2 jobs on average, or about 9 jobs lost for every 4 created, to which we have to add those jobs that non-subsidized investments with the same resources would have created.

Therefore, while it is not possible to directly translate Spain’s experience with exactitude to claim that the U.S. would lose at least 6.6 million to 11 million jobs, as a direct consequence were it to actually create 3 to 5 million "green jobs" as promised (in addition to the jobs lost due to the opportunity cost of private capital employed in renewable energy), the study clearly reveals the tendency that the U.S. should expect such an outcome.

Despite its hyper-aggressive (expensive and extensive) "green jobs" policies it appears that Spain likely has created a surprisingly low number of jobs, twothirds of which came in construction, fabrication and installation, one quarter in administrative positions, marketing and projects engineering, and just one out of ten jobs has been created at the more permanent level of actual operation and maintenance of the renewable sources of electricity.

This came at great financial cost as well as cost in terms of jobs destroyed elsewhere in the economy.

The study calculates that since 2000 Spain spent €571,138 to create each "green job", including subsidies of more than €1 million per wind industry job.

The study calculates that the programs creating those jobs also resulted in the destruction of nearly 110,500 jobs elsewhere in the economy, or 2.2 jobs destroyed for every "green job" created.

Do note, these are just some of the highlights. One wonders what will be in tatters first for producing such a reality-based study, the Dr's funding or their reputation.

h/t and deep bow to EU Referendum

|

|

Dousing all skepticism in the interest of nationalism, which at this points merely amounts to peddling their goods, we find some interesting ironies in the Yemenia Airlines post-crash rear-guard action. Even the Times’ Charles Bremner doesn’t seem immune to the repetition.

The Yemenia Airbus that came down yesterday off the Comoros islands, killing 152 aboard, had nothing to do with the problems that ended Flight 447. The plane was a relatively old (19 years) A310 that was in poor condition and which had been banned from French air space in 2007.

That point is being hammered by the French media today.

Okay, that makes sense.

The Yemeni plane was a first-generation Airbus, a relatively simple aircraft. These do not have the computerised, fly-by-wire system that Airbus has used since the 1980s and which is under suspicion in Air France flight 447

Emphasis mine.

The plane was a relatively old (19 years) A310 that was in poor condition and which had been banned from French air space in 2007.

Which is to say that depending on the month of completion, it was fabricated in 1989 or 1990, years after one would understand ‘fly-by-wire’ to have come into use.

Were the aircraft or the passengers of a less fashionable culture of origin, make no doubt about it that the flinching instinct to look for, say “the missile that no one saw” would be whipped out in a cold minute, otherwise the press will accept that because it’s a product of their countrymen and government, to accept that their products are perfectly fabulous, had they only replaced it when the French government (that also has a hand in selling them) said so.

That an airline executive would take that urging to replace it with a grain of salt is actually somewhat understandable, knowing that a big, fat dogpile of dirigisme might be behind the ‘warning’, which would partially mask a genuine safety bulletin.

As for a press corps that selectively doesn’t ask questions when they think their neighbors’ job or national prestige is at stake, well, heal thyself assmonkey, and spare us your never-ending supply of evasive theories about America.

|

It seems to be a quite simple question, yet an answer is never given. So, we try again:

|

As he points to the urbane élites in Europe whose outstanding health care bureaucracies are a model for America's clueless and greedy capitalists, Barack Obama will be happy to know that in Paris, according to an official study reported on by Cécile Prieur of Le Monde, 25% of doctors refuse to treat poor patients.

And why is that, pray tell? The primary reason announced is being fed up with (get ready to be shocked — shocked, I tell you)… administrative red tape!

La première raison invoquée est la lourdeur administrative et la "paperasse" qu'impliquerait la prise en charge des patients CMU [couverture maladie universelle] : ces derniers ne payant pas leur consultation, le remboursement du médecin s'effectue par l'assurance-maladie, ce qui peut prendre du temps si le praticien n'est pas informatisé.

…Mais la principale raison du refus reste financière : les patients CMU ne pouvant se voir infliger un dépassement d'honoraires, les prendre en charge constitue un manque à gagner pour les médecins…

L'étude souligne ainsi qu'avant d'accorder un rendez-vous, certains praticiens opèrent "un tri en fonction de ceux qui seraient des "bons pauvres" ou des "mauvais pauvres". D'autres tentent de renvoyer les patients CMU à l'hôpital public : avec l'idée qu'il s'agit là d'un lieu pour les plus défavorisés, les cabinets de ville étant réservés aux "autres patients"."

Needless to say, the news of the report, reports Cécile Prieur, is but leading to more laws, i.e, to more… red tape…

While French readers are scandalized — bemoaning the capitalist system à l'américaine (naturally!) — a number of doctors bring their testimony, including one Michel D:

…spécialiste en fin de carrière, j'ai refusé d'être informatisé. Ayant pris en charge des patients bénéficiaires de la CMU, j'attends le paiement de la sécurité sociale DEPUIS PLUS DE 2 MOIS ! C'est la SANCTION de la sécu. En 30 ans, le tarif sécu d'un spécialiste secteur 1 a diminué d'un tiers : le tarif horaire du psychiatre moins cher que le plombier, le coiffeur, le garagiste ... après 10 ans d'étude, une vie de formation continue et une vingtaine d'années d'analyse !!! Scandale !

|

Why wouldn’t Obama panic at the sight of a Congress and Supreme Court removing a left wing Socialist President who violated the Constitution in pushing to make himself el-presidente for life, by violating term limits?

asks Daniel Greenfield in the Canadian Free Press (merci à RV).

Today Manuel “ALBA” Zelaya. Tomorrow it could be Barry “Hussein” Obama. And Barry knows better than anyone else the full catalog of lies, crimes and scandals brewing beneath his regime. Obama’s rise to power has been part of an American hemisphere trend that covers the likes of Chavez, Zelaya, Correa, Silva and even the return of Kerry’s old buddy, Ortega, to power in Nicaragua. What all of them have in common with Obama is a left wing socialist agenda that ignores the rule of law. An attack against Zelaya, could in Obama’s mind be seen an attack against him equally.

…Meet Obama, the bright young Senator with a phony biography geared to playing up his biracial angst for the college campuses. Who promised his leftist volunteers an end to rendition, detentions, eavesdropping and a whole bundle of other things, only to pull a bait and switch on them.

After all tools like that come in handy, even if they’re less likely to be used against Muslim terrorists, than they are against Tea Party protesters.

Meet Barack Obama, the man who was going to bring an end to the American coercion of other countries. No more would the White House tell the rest of the world what to do. Except of course to dictate where Jews can live in Israel, how the Honduran judiciary can operate and who can head the Muslim community in Greece.

Of course Obama has drawn the line somewhere. He has drawn the line against standing up to Ahmadinejad, Chavez or any Socialist or Muslim tyrant. Instead Obama has browbeaten America’s democratic allies, in support of Muslim and Socialist tyrannies. You can read that as Obama putting his own political and religious loyalties ahead of America’s interests. Or you can read it as the act of a craven coward who hopes to sacrifice America’s remaining allies in order to win over America’s enemies.

…Obama has been compared to JFK, but what he represents is no profile in courage, but a profile in cowardice. A liar and a manipulator who serves his own ends first and his host country’s, last. Who proclaims, Ask not what I can do for your country, Ask what your country can do for me. And above all else, a craven coward.

|

|

Le Monde reported on the 26 June:

Swedish police accused officers of the Swedish Migration of being infiltrated by left-wing extremist groups.

As if that was a shock. Of course the very idea that people who fancy themselves as revolutionaries of the adolescent sort that would “smash the system” even if it was their own, isn’t endemic to Sweden, but largely true of people with emotional problems and those who pretended to be well-adjusted when they were children.

According to police intelligence services (SÄPO), these "infiltrators", linked to left wing groups like AFA (Antifascist Action) or Revolutionär Fronten ( "revolutionary front"), arrange to complicate or even block the work of police officers who carry out evictions, and in some cases, help asylum seekers to flee.

The REALLY FUNNY thing is that the other kind of stupid “revolutionaries” just ripped their mask off. You know the one – the one that hid the racism and selfishness. The one that says “I got mine, now buzz off”.

For the past 14 months Undocumented Migrants have occupied the premises of the CGT Labor Exchange on rue Charlot in Paris (II). They were ordered to leave the premises by Wednesday 24 June under the double pressure of the law and the CGT, which has tried to remove them while police remained outside according to sources.
Before the "impasse" in discussions with the occupants for several months, the CGT had mobilized to Paris in the morning "dozens" of militants to dislodge them, according to the union.

The ball-busting union thugs that have traditionally supported any unlawful resident in the interest of their egos is now seeing them as competition for jobs, which is precisely the opposite of the position that they traditionally held against blue-collar conservatives, and something they tried to cast as nationalist nativism.

According to the National Commission for the Coordination of the Undocumented, "a hundred thugs from the security service of the CGT who were wearing balaclavas and armed with iron bars, sticks, and tear gas, penetrated to within 11.30 in the Exchange ( ...) but were repulsed by those present, including women and children to throw them out. "More than 60 came out shouting. It was really impressive," said Rodolphe Netti, president of SOS support to undocumented migrants. Questioned by nouvelobs.com, Bernadette Citot, Spokesperson for CGT Paris, said that "unions have first asked the occupants to vacate the premises peacefully. That a third did. Those who remained were then rocked everything that fell under the hand in court. Violence followed on the outside, and that's when the police intervened. "

Turns out that they will admit that all it is, is economics if it requires a sacrifice from them. The sit-in set pulls a Bull Conner on the poor, waifish lot we’re supposed to believe that THEY are.

What do you expect when it’s the union that has the Pinkertons, even if they get pasted by a bunch of lightly armed illegal aliens (including women and children).

|

...it must be time for an update on how we are all going to die.

89 months before Gaia unleashes her wrath.

|

That Gawain points to an article which we have heard before. One wonders how this collection of stories will play out, pattern-wise:

UKIP points to Europe's recommendation that suggests a new definition of an enclosed or indoor areas where smoking should be banned.

These would "include any space covered by a roof or enclosed by one or more walls or sides, regardless of the type of material used for the roof, wall or sides, and regardless of whether the structure is permanent or temporary”.

UKIP MEP Godfrey Bloom said: “Enough is enough. Today six pubs will close in the UK. Part of our culture is under threat and today is the time to say enough is enough. These jumped up puritanical dictators must be told where to get off.

Yesterday health minister Lord Darzi said there are no plans to extend the smoking ban to outdoor public places in the UK, following a question from crossbench peer Lord Laird.

So, how to explain this out of officialdom:

The European Union says it wants its member states to ban smoking in enclosed public places, on public transportation and in workplaces by 2012.

EU Health Commissioner Androulla Vassiliou says smoking and secondhand smoking cause serious health and economic problems for Europeans who increasingly prefer smoke-free environments.

If the statist template holds, the pattern should follow some version of this:

Step 1) denied as originating from the EU;
Step 2) introduced as a non-binding EU feel-good measure only affecting four Romanian pubs located in Outer Suceava - no worries you see;
Step 3) buried in some piece of EU-wide binding legislation dealing with 'child health';
Step 4) 'discovered' during implementation, after the fact and amid claims from member state legislatures that "there is nothing we can do"; and,
Step 5) denied as originating from the EU*

That should be a close approximation. One thing from the first article does grate:

Robert Humphreys, secretary of the All-Party Parliamentary Beer Group, stressed that this was a non-binding recommendation, and said it was probably aimed at other member states without smoking bans.

Industry does itself no favours when slavishly kow-towing to governmentalism. This particular ban will be on them before they know it, then what? By always going-along-to-get-along, industry refuses to rock the boat and in the end sinks their own ship by not putting up a fight agains the encroachment of that bigger governmental hand in purely private affairs.

*Legislation passed but ignored in France and Belgium

|

What does the (real-life) governor of Alaska have to do with the jungles of Africa, you might ask, especially in the context of a fictional character? That is the question to ask regarding a state museum, Jacques Chirac's Musée des Arts Premiers (or Quai Branly), which is holding an exhibit on the most enduring character of Edgar Rice Burroughs, entitled Tarzan! ou Rousseau chez les Waziri (18th-century-type subtitle added just to give it a higher pseudo-cultural touch).

Well, it just so happens that the exhibit features a (French) Tarzan magazine (it looks like a Sunday strip, but it is really four Rex Maxon dailies from the 1940s, subsequently colored and brought upon the same magazine cover page) before and after a number of panels were censored by the French. Fair enough. But then read the accompanying museum caption…

After speaking tongue-in-cheek of "the associations of Puritan America" putting an end to "that horror" — a nude sequence in Tarzan and His Mate (1934) — it continues with censorship of the French Tarzan comic of 1947:

The French control commission, invested as much by the Catholic associations as by the do-gooders of the French Communist Party, will bring about the banning of [the magazine] Tarzan.

So far, so good. But look what comes then, in the final sentence: an entirely gratuitous, an entirely caricatural, and an entirely erroneous slap at jungle inhabitant Sarah Palin!

It would seem that a certain Sarah Palin is carrying on the fight…

|

Next up, rifling through your pockets for loose change:

Some states faced with sinking tax collections and rising debt are going after unused gift cards that bolster their revenue.

South Carolina is considering legislation that would give the state the right to collect unclaimed gift-card credit. A similar measure in Texas to allow the collection of unused credit even from cards that have no expiration date passed that state's House this spring and stalled in the Senate. Texas already collects unused gift cards with expiration dates.

Since the recession began, states have been aggressively tapping so-called abandoned property -- anything from gift cards to dormant bank accounts and safety-deposit boxes. About half the states collect unused gift cards after a period of two to five years.

|

Looking for a new mix of Zoloft, German “culture” types try to gin-up comparisons between the Guantanamo Bay detention center with Auschwitz and the German system of concentration camps.

The American novelist and essayist Louis Begley was in Frankfurt’s Old Opera House earlier this month to promote the German edition of his new book Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters. The English edition is first scheduled for release in late August. Oddly enough, however, a German translation has already been published. The German edition bears a different title: The Dreyfus Affair: Devil’s Island, Guantánamo, a Historical Nightmare [Der Fall Dreyfus: Teufelsinsel, Guantánamo, Alptraum der Geschichte].
The German title is not only grammatically puzzling. Why the emphasis on Dreyfus’s place of imprisonment — an incidental feature of the Dreyfus Affair? And what is the “historical nightmare”? And what does Guantánamo have to do with it? An article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) on Begley’s Frankfurt appearance makes somewhat clearer the significance of these associations. Referring to the book, FAZ author Edo Reents writes:
Relentlessly and with a pressing intensity, Begley lists the anti-Semitic incidents that took place in France during and after the Dreyfus Affair. He then moves from this to the American Islamophobia of the Bush government, which, inasmuch as it illegally imprisoned and tortured people, essentially behaved no differently than the National Socialists.

Why, you ask? Stupidity, a strange thing to think you would find in the sneering “culture” set. However, if you knew much of anything about Germany’s public dialog, you wouldn’t be surprised to find this sort of intellectually insulated narrowness at all.

The comparison is obviously ludicrous. And yet there it is, presented with great solemnity in the Arts and Culture [Feuilleton] section of Germany’s most prestigious daily. Of course, on Reents’s account, it is not Reents himself who is drawing the comparison, but rather Begley, who is not only American, but, as Reents takes pains to remind us, also an American Jew.

So identity, that bugaboo of Euro-thought that has thrust their wars an misery on the rest of humanity for centuries, is somehow supposed to explain everything. I guess it DOS take a near Borg-like feeling about your own self and culture to believe that somehow it’s your GENES that somehow define all your motives and thoughts. Failing that, you can try calling it “culture”, but it doesn’t go very far in explaining their own horrifying past should anyone ever point it out.

If “that’s just what a. [ you name it, fill in the blank ] or b. [ Americans ] or c. [ Jews ] “just do,” would it not be safe to say that Europeans are going to bring humanity to the brink of self-destruction yet again, because it’s imporinted on them? Of course not, but if enough of them keep that “culture” just means things like cuisine or any number of other things they don’t do natively anymore, like raise their children, what then will become of the real thing? To which I mean civilization ?

Probably nothing.

The passage is remarkable in that it weaves together two of the favorite idées fixes that have occupied Germany’s chattering classes in recent years; the famous “Bush=Hitler” meme and the notion that “Islamophobia” is, in effect, the new form of anti-Semitism.

Which would be amusing if we started calling things like the wars in the former Yugoslavia as a “war against Orthodox Christians”. The difference is quite simple. Self-serving morons can invent all manner of externalized theories about people when they’re covering Pygmies in the section 3 of the newspaper as though they are an animal species, but doesn’t look good when the mindlessness of that kind of generalization is applied to them.

|

After the speeches of Nicolas Sarkozy, Gordon Brown, Stephen Harper, and Barack Obama commemorating the 65th anniversary of the D-Day landings at the Military Cemetery of Omaha Beach next to Normandy's Colleville-sur-Mer on June 5, 2009, planes from the air forces of France, Britain, and the United States (in that order) shoot by overhead, with one American pilot breaking formation to fly straight up, vertically, into the sky…

|

While people are getting cranked about the goings on in Honduras, they managed to consistently overlooked that it isn’t a military putsch. The Honduran military was acting on the direction of the highest court of Honduras.

Barack Obama, on the other hand, the great respecter of sovereignty is in full ”don’t look now, but I’m acting like a leftist” mode by trying to override Honduran self-determination in a useless bid to be liked by Hugo Chavez. In a fit of extra-legalism and reactionary false-consciousness, similar methods are being proffered by abusive dictatorial regimes.

Not to be outdone, Sarkozy is demanding an equally overbearing act of telling the Israeli Prime Minister to remove his Foreign Minister from office.

And to think that these people are trying to make humanistic argument for the removal of the Taliban.

|

In the New Criterion, Mark Steyn reviews Paul Anthony Rahe’s “Soft Despotism, Democracy's Drift: Montesquieu, Rousseau, Tocqueville, and the Modern Prospect” noting that though the advent of enlightenment ideas open humanity to a great many breakthroughs and possibilities. It finally boils down to the fact of Benjamin Franklin’s warning that a Republic is a fine thing if you can keep it.

Ah, but I wonder if those early settlers would recognize the people, and their assumptions about the role of government. Mr. Levin’s listener was trying to articulate something profound but elusive. It’s not something you can sell the film rights for —there are no aliens vaporizing the White House, as in Independence Day; no God- zilla rampaging down Fifth Avenue and hurling the Empire State Building into the East River. No bangs, just the whimper of the same old same old civilizational ennui, as it gradually dawns that Admiral Yamamoto’s sleeping giant may be merely a supersized version of Monty Python’s dead parrot.

Paul A. Rahe’s new book on the subject is called Soft Despotism, Democracy’s Drift, which nicely captures how soothing and beguiling the process is.[1] Today, the animating principles of the American idea are entirely absent from public discourse. To the new Administration, American exceptionalism means an exceptional effort to harness an exceptionally big government in the cause of exceptionally massive spending. The can-do spirit means Ty’Sheoma Bethea can do with some government money: A high-school student in Dillon, South Carolina, Miss Bethea wrote to the President to ask him to do something about the peeling paint in her classroom. He read the letter out approvingly in a televised address to Congress. Imagine if Miss Bethea gets her way, and the national bureaucracy in Washington becomes responsible for grade- school paint jobs from Maine to Hawaii. What size of government would be required for such a project? And is it compatible with a constitutional republic?

The trick to devolving any society into that of a oafish welfare state is to make sure that no-one asks that question, no-one wonders who’s authority something really belongs under, and no-one sees past the benefit they can take from the rest of society. In short, it’s how you decimate the self-selected American model in favor of one imposed on us in an underhanded manner from without.
It’s way was one where one does not permit the citizen to consult citizen. The idea is to pretend that government has consulted the citizen when it really hasn’t.

“It does not tyrannize, it gets in the way.” The all-pervasive micro-regulatory state “enervates,” but nicely, gradually, so after a while you don’t even notice. And in exchange for liberty it offers security: the “right” to health care; the “right” to housing; the “right” to a job—although who needs that once you’ve got all the others? The proposed European Constitution extends the laundry list: the constitutional right to clean water and environmental protection. Every right you could ever want, except the right to be free from undue intrusions by the state. M. Giscard d’Estaing, the former French president and chairman of the European constitutional convention, told me at the time that he had bought a copy of the U.S. Constitution at a bookstore in Washington and carried it around with him in his pocket. Try doing that with his Euro-constitution, and you’ll be walking with a limp after ten minutes and calling for a sedan chair after twenty: As Professor Rahe notes, it’s 450 pages long. And, when your “constitution” is that big, imagine how swollen the attendant bureaucracy and regulation is. The author points out that, in France, “80 per cent of the legislation passed by the National Assembly in Paris originates in Brussels”—that is, at the European Union’s civil service. Who drafts it? Who approves it? Who do you call to complain? Who do you run against and in what election? And where do you go to escape it?

Nonetheless, I wouldn’t fear too much of a “progressive” retort to Rahe’s survey of our philosophical heritage. Not only are there too many large words in it, there are too many big, uncorruptable ideas that are to clear and meaningful to be bogged down with the emotionalized detritus of the class warfare politics that bear little resemblance to what the label promises: take up the banner of the left and you will find yourself with the same oppression as the worst sorts of monarchy. Fall for the pretend-concern about people, and you will find yourself without rights as an individual.

Thus, Tocqueville’s great insight—that what prevents the “state popular” from declining into a “state despotic” is the strength of the intermediary institutions between the sovereign and the individual. The French revolution abolished everything and subordinated all institutions to the rule of central authority. The New World was more fortunate: “The principle and lifeblood of American liberty” was, according to Tocqueville, municipal independence. “With the state government, they had limited contact; with the national government, they had almost none,” writes Professor Rahe:

In New England, their world was the township; in the South, it was the county; and elsewhere it was one or the other or both… . Self-government was the liberty that they had fought the War of Independence to retain, and this was a liberty that in considerable measure Americans in the age of Andrew Jackson still enjoyed.

The strange thing is that this model of a liberation movement is precisely the opposite of what even revolutionary liberation movements appear to want even today. If they aren’t misrepresenting those goals, they’re demonstrating just how little they understand liberty to begin with. It all seems to comes down to trying to rename you avarice for centralizing power in an all-powerful state, as liberation. It’s as hideous and anti-intellectual an inversion as you’ll ever find.

|

Well, that's not exactly what one of the numerous "experts" said on the iTélé television channel during the non-stop discussions of Michael Jackson's life, career, and legacy, but it came pretty close… (In any case, it's interesting that the co-author of The History of Rock Music seems unaware of the likes of Diana Ross, Prince, James Brown, Ray Charles, Chuck Berry, Nat King Cole, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Paul Robeson, etc, etc, etc…)

What François Jouffa, co-author of Histoire du rock, said exactly on Friday while discussing the skin bleaching that Michael Jackson allegedly kept undergoing (along with his multiple facelifts) is that: now that Barack Obama is president and that an African-American is finally in the White House, were Michael Jackson young today, he would not need to (suggestion: an inescapable necessity in the United States, professionally as well as psychologically) change his face in order to blend in with the majority of the American population…

|

A bit of unsolicited advice to any budding aid professionals out there: when it comes to efforts aimed at reducing the suffering associated with true poverty, never assume the goal is to actually reduce the suffering associated with true poverty:

Efforts to make newer and more costly vaccines widely available to the poorest in Africa are being hampered by a long-standing system that makes vaccines affordable to middle-income Latin American countries.

The revolving fund, which began in 1979, negotiates substantial discounts with manufacturers on prices in richer countries, offering in exchange significant volumes, predictable demand and funding.

However, it includes a clause demanding that the vaccines are made available at the "lowest possible price" charged anywhere in the world, making it impossible for producers to propose still lower prices to poorer countries.

No doubt that meetings will be held and powerpoints will be delivered....

|

After Véronique Courjault's "escape" with eight years behind bars for killing three newborns (her own) over a period of four years — which amounts to less than three years per murder — Pascal-Henri Keller mentions an (ahem) interesting theory in Le Monde that psychiatrists have developed.

For a woman to become a mother, says the Poitiers teacher in psychopathology, she must talk about motherhood; unless the content of a pregnant woman's belly has been named by her as a child, it can remain, in her mind, no more than a simple body growth. (The subtitle of the article in the dead tree version is Un enfant n'existe que s'il est nommé — A child exists only if he as been identified.) A human being alone has the responsibility of naming her descendant so that he may live. Without a word accompanying the pregnancy, the child may die, simply because, psychically, he never existed for anybody.

…pour qu'une femme devienne mère, il lui faut en parler. L'unanimité de ces experts a quelque chose de solennel : ils affirment que, à défaut d'être nommé, le contenu d'un ventre de femme enceinte peut demeurer, pour elle, une simple excroissance corporelle. Pas un enfant à naître. S'il en était besoin, cette découverte pourrait, à elle seule, répondre à la question posée par le titre du livre récent d'Yves Christen L'animal est-il une personne ? (Flammarion, 538 p., 24 euros). La réponse est non. Seul, l'être humain détient cette responsabilité effarante : nommer sa descendance pour qu'elle vive. Sans parole accompagnant sa gestation, le petit d'homme peut mourir, simplement de n'avoir jamais existé psychiquement pour personne.

|

|

James Glanz has an article on geothermal energy and how its "potential as a clean energy source has raised huge hopes, [with] its advocates [believing] it could put a significant dent in American dependence on fossil fuels — potentially supplying roughly 15 percent of the nation’s electricity by 2030." Well, it would seem that there is a drawback or two (not that, of course, creating artificial earthquakes and endangering people matters much in the glorious fight to fight against the evils of oil and save the planet).

Markus O. Häring, a former oilman, was a hero in [Basel, a Swiss city of medieval cathedrals and intense environmental passion,] three years ago, all because he had drilled a hole three miles deep near the corner of Neuhaus Street and Shafer Lane. …

He was prospecting for a vast source of clean, renewable energy that seemed straight out of a Jules Verne novel: the heat simmering within the earth’s bedrock. All seemed to be going well — until Dec. 8, 2006, when the project set off an earthquake, shaking and damaging buildings and terrifying many…

Hastily shut down, Mr. Häring’s project was soon forgotten by nearly everyone outside Switzerland. As early as this week, though, an American start-up company, AltaRock Energy, will begin using nearly the same method to drill deep into ground laced with fault lines in an area two hours’ drive north of San Francisco.

Residents of the region, which straddles Lake and Sonoma Counties, have already been protesting swarms of smaller earthquakes set off by a less geologically invasive set of energy projects there. AltaRock officials said that they chose the spot in part because the history of mostly small quakes reassured them that the risks were limited. … AltaRock maintains that it will steer clear of large faults and that it can operate safely.

But in a report on seismic impact that AltaRock was required to file, the company failed to mention that the Basel program was shut down because of the earthquake it caused. AltaRock claimed it was uncertain that the project had caused the quake, even though Swiss government seismologists and officials on the Basel project agreed that it did. Nor did AltaRock mention the thousands of smaller earthquakes induced by the Basel project that continued for months after it shut down.

The California project is the first of dozens that could be operating in the United States in the next several years, driven by a push to cut emissions of heat-trapping gases and the Obama administration’s support for renewable energy.

|

Seems as though über taxaholic Richard Murphy is getting a bit of his own medicine:

|

There certainly won't be any screaming headlines and gnashing of teeth as a result of the other Telegraaf's version of expense account fiddling by the political class in Holland:

Porn movies, mortgages and dog food. In Britain, the often outrageous expenses claimed by members of parliament have caused a huge scandal, led to several top resignations and seriously undermined public trust in British politicians.

In the Netherlands so far, a pair of sunglasses, a rented tuxedo and a ticket for a play about dementia are among the most exorbitant expenses uncovered in an investigation by the newspaper De Telegraaf.

Oh to have such boring politicos.

|

Regarding the scandals surrounding Republican Sen. John Ensign of Nevada and South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford, it's time to remember the words of the Republican Party's very first president.

Abraham Lincoln liked to quote a Kentucky acquaintance of his:

It's been my experience that folks who have no vices have generally very few virtues

|

|

An open wiki for NP readers.

One word sticks out when reading/hearing/discussing issues of the day with our betters, concern.

There is always some variant of "concern" attached to why the individual must surrender their liberties for the betterment of the collective we. A touching, yet nauseating, trait amongst the more learned classes which seek to snuff out the individual in favour of the "people".

Use the comment section and list some of your favourite "concerns".

Regrettably concerned
Urgently concerned
Highly concerned

Other?

|

Further to the point of having no respect for any election that doesn’t provide them with the same status as a soft dictatorship loved by “the masses”, the European socialists continue to demand a right to be obeyed:

Socialists and Greens in the European Parliament have expressed anger at what they say is the "indecent haste" with which governments are trying to get European Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso reappointed for a second term.

Martin Schulz, head of the group, said EU leaders' decision on Thursday (18 June) to politically endorse Mr Barroso was a "political, legal and institutional outrage."

Which is his way of saying “I know we lost, but submit to us anyway!”

Daniel Cohn-Bendit, leader of the Greens, accused member states of "steam-rolling tactics" over the issue.

Dude: first off, put down the bong, and second of all, you lost. That means you aren’t in charge.

Voters? Remember them? Get it?

|

An easy one.

The original:

Regulators in Europe want better privacy protection by Facebook Inc., Twitter and similar social networks, fearing information about people could be misused.

The translation:

On-line social networking is a growth industry. How can we find some way to control and/or milk euros out of these companies? We can use the old "concerned over privacy concerns" double-speak as the tried and true killer app entrée.

|

Filed under, "discussions with everyday Belgians":

Everyone in my mother's village (located in Wallonia) is out of a job and receiving benefits. All along working on the side tax-free .... and I have to pay for this with my taxes!

Yes my dear, that is what we have been talking about all these years. Eventually the other guy's money does indeed run out.

|

There is no right to a free lunch. There is no right to common sense:

|

For the first time in years, said one of those attending [the NATO Parliamentary Assembly in Oslo in May], Denis MacShane, a Labor member of Parliament and a former minister of state for Europe in the British government, no Europeans got their heads banged “for not dying and refusing to pull their weight.”

This prompts John Vinocur to ask:

Could that be, he was asked, because the war in Afghanistan was now fully, nonblushingly America’s, even Obama’s?

“Right on the button,” Mr. MacShane said. “The tactics and materiel and commanding general are changing. The emphasis is on special operations. The Americans just don’t need it anymore, this other long battle persuading the Germans, Spanish and Italians to get out and fight.”

Another official, from Continental Europe, requesting anonymity, said he considered the circumstances ones that brush the quasi-historical: in his view, the United States has de facto abandoned the idea of asking Europe to go to war while the administration re-Americanizes the conflict in Afghanistan.

… Pierre Lellouche, who is special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan for President Nicolas Sarkozy of France and who is a former president of NATO’s Parliamentary Assembly, has offered a very critical view of the International Security Assistance Force.

In “L’allié Indocile,” his book about France’s return to NATO’s operational command, he writes that the system for allied engagement in Afghanistan gave individual participant countries “the freedom not to fight and not to make war.”

According to Mr. Lellouche, these countries’ caveats — like fliers’ being restricted from medical evacuation missions after dark, or trainers’ being barred from accompanying their Afghan trainees into combat zones — has meant a “striking” division of labor between the soldiers who are “‘bureaucrats’ forbidden to leave their bases and bunkers” and the “combatants” (think of the British, Canadians, Dutch, Danes and French among the non-Americans).

Mr. Gates and Mr. Obama — the president seemed concerned about these circumstances during his election campaign — now appear to have rationalized them.

I was told by a Brussels diplomat that Vice President Joseph Biden actually informed NATO representatives in February that their countries were not going to be asked for what they couldn’t deliver.

It was, in substance, a free pass away from the front.

… After the president’s trip to a NATO summit in April, a participant close to the U.S. military wondered aloud at a symposium on European-American cooperation if “military-to-military relations are being undermined by the distinction between those who fight and those who don’t?”

For sure, the military missions in support of civilian development and training are central to restoring order in Afghanistan. And indeed America’s experience in Iraq and greater technical capabilities were elements prompting the administration to seize control of the war effort. But a system with high- and low-risk armies legitimizes a caricature of a NATO future split into boom-boom for the Americans and handing out bonbons for the Europeans.

|

Dj’ever Wonder?....

Ever wonder just why it is that the names of many of these pan-European-Parliament-funkadelic political parties sound so much like third world terrorist “liberation” organizations.

A Federation of Euro-harmony filled by ultra-nationalist xenophobes is almost too droll a jest. My favourite of these new national parties is Ataka, which is a Bulgarian word meaning—oh, go on, take a wild guess. That’s right: “Attack.” What a splendidly butch name. The Attack party was formed from last year’s merger of the Bulgarian National Patriotic Party, the Union of Patriotic Forces and the National Movement for the Salvation of the Fatherland, and in nothing flat managed to get 13 per cent of the vote.

Like Attack, many of these lively additions to the political scene favour party emblems that slyly evoke swastikas while bending the prongs in different directions just enough to maintain deniability. Other than that, they don’t have a lot in common with their colleagues in the no-bloc bloc. I don’t just mean in the sense that the leader of the Slovak National Party said a couple of years back, “Let’s all get in tanks and go and flatten Budapest,” which presumably is not a policy position the Hungarian nationalists in Jobbik would endorse. But there are broader differences, too. The SNP is antipathetic to homosexuals, whereas Krisztina Morvai, the attractive blonde Jobbik member just elected to the Euro-parliament, is a former winner of the Freddie Mercury Prize for raising AIDS awareness. I can’t be the only political analyst who wishes that, instead of a victory speech last Sunday, Doktor Morvai had stood on the table in black tights and bellowed out, “We Are The Champions.”

Like our chums at Canada’s “human rights” commissions, Doktor Morvai is a “human rights” activist—and, indeed, a former delegate to the UN Women’s Rights Committee. One thing a woman has a right to is an uncircumcised penis. In the course of her successful election campaign, the good doctor told Hungarian Jews to “go back to playing with their tiny little circumcised tails.” I don’t know what Krisztina has against circumcised penises, but it’s probably not her pelvis.

Obviously cultural sensitivity is their strong suit, and given that you don’t have to come from the often ethically nebulous former east to tout your ideas as “human rights”, we’re sure to see a pan-European culture emerge from this, their common “humanity”, which has always and still is, little more than something that someone finally found a big and serious-sounding word for: ethnic cleansing.

Either way, the names of these freaky love-collectives reminds me of the array of set-ups that would claim responsibility if a bomb went off in west Beirut in 1977. What they have in common is that they’re made up on the fly, and are only there to conceal identities, and seek public attention.



You’ve come a long way, baby!

Either way, the results are in, and the cultural sophisticates of the political class have made their mark: you can choose things that either sound like badly armed revolutionary movements trapped in a jungle somewhere, or socialist “ugly, toothless, inebriated mob” exploitation outfits from a century ago.

|

Instrumental in changing the mind of the Kirghistan government and keeping its Manas outpost in American hands, according to Le Monde's Natalie Nougayrède, was France.

Mais un acteur relativement inattendu a aussi joué un rôle. La France menait, en effet, ces derniers jours, une mission de bons offices en Asie centrale. L'émissaire spécial de Nicolas Sarkozy pour l'Afghanistan et le Pakistan, Pierre Lellouche, qui effectue une tournée dans la région, s'était entretenu dimanche avec le président kirghize. Les consultations étaient également étroites avec le représentant spécial de M. Obama pour l'"AfPak", Richard Holbrooke.

Les Kirghizes semblaient sensibles à une implication européenne. La France est, pour sa part, concernée au premier chef par le sort de Manas, puisqu'elle entretient depuis 2001 sur cette base un détachement (33 militaires aujourd'hui) chargé d'assurer les opérations d'un avion ravitailleur C-135 soutenant l'ensemble des bombardiers et des appareils de renseignements survolant en permanence le théâtre des opérations en Afghanistan.

|