(Woof to Valerie)

|

The Kindle e-book reader is to plunder Europe by the end of the month, and the Kindle Edition of ¡No Pasarán! will be there to enjoy the view. That is to say: we are who we’ve been waiting for.

|

|

As Europe remembers the shame of the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact of 1939 and the Munich agreement of 1938, and as it prepares to celebrate the fall of the Berlin wall and the iron curtain in 1989, one question arises in our minds: Have we learned the lessons of history? Put another way, are we able to avoid repeating the mistakes that cast such a dark shadow over the 20th century?

A dozen European luminaries, several of them leaders from the former Soviet block (Vaclav Havel, Valdas Adamkus, Mart Laar, Vytautas Landsbergis, Otto de Habsbourg, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Timothy Garton Ash, André Glucksmann, Mark Leonard, Bernard-Henri Lévy, Adam Michnik, and Josep Ramoneda), sign an article in Le Monde called Le test géorgien, un nouveau Munich ? Is the Georgian Test a New Munich? they councel action from the the European Union, which, they remind us, "was built against the temptation of Munich and the iron curtain."

In order for the … historic commemorations to be meaningful both for Europe's collective identity and for its future, we urge the EU's 27 democratic leaders to define a proactive strategy to help Georgia peacefully regain its territorial integrity and obtain the withdrawal of Russian forces illegally stationed on Georgian soil.

…a big power will always find or engineer a pretext to invade a neighbour whose independence it resents. We should remember that Hitler accused the Poles of commencing hostilities in 1939, just as Stalin pinned the blame on the Finns when he invaded their country in 1940. Similarly, in the case of Georgia and Russia, the critical question is to determine which country invaded the other, rather than which soldier shot the first bullet.

As Le Monde's readers castigate the article, one of them writes:

Beaucoup d’européens et de français défendaient l’idée que l’annexion des Sudètes était conforme au droit des peuples à disposer d’eux-mêmes…Effectivement, la situation présente énormément de similitudes avec la situation en 39/39: L’europe libérale de l’ouest ne veut pas se battre pour de lointains alliés et est adepte d’idéologies américano/anglo-phobes qui amènent les foules à soutenir hier l’Allemagne nazie et/ou URSS et aujourd’hui Poutine.

Beaucoup de lecteurs du Monde ne réalisent pas une chose fondamentale concernant les pays de l’ex Europe de l’est:ils se sont toujours méfiés de la Russie expansionniste et se méfient de l’Europe de l’ouest qui les a trop souvent abandonnés aux ambitions impérialistes et totalitaires de la Russie.Cette sensibilité explique leur attachement à l’OTAN. On doit les écouter et oublier nos réflexes pro-cocos/pro-soviets/anti-US si nous voulons construire l’Europe politique et militaire avec ces Etats.

|

Angry men on tractors protest global commodities markets. As if they could be controlled. Much as before.

|

(Merci à Valerie)

|

While a photo selection in Le Monde denigrates the demonstrations protesting against the Apologizer-in-Chief as nothing but one "big circus" of "anti-Obamas", the daily's New York correspondant, Sylvain Cypel, refers to Chicago's Olympic defeat as Obama's first failure.

Lorsque, lundi dernier, Barack Obama avait opté pour le déplacement à Copenhague, de nombreux élus républicains avaient fustigé un président qui abandonne son pays pour une vétille au moment où tant d'urgences sont à régler. Hier soir, les mêmes venaient sur Fox se gausser de son échec, "une défaite de l'Amérique". Sale journée.

|

The Gary Glitter of the (court) circuit appears to be firing on all corrupt, lefty thrusters: patronage, rationalizing deviancy down, reserving corporal punishment for pleasure, coerced anal sex worthy of a lauded European film director. You name it.

Just think of it as giving time off for ‘good behavior.’ The defense, of course, will be seeking ‘social justice’

a civil rights organisation, has said that Mr Thomas is being prosecuted because of his race.

Moreover, just because prisoners were being abused, even though we all know that they’re all innocent due to society’s unjust ways, one may not be judgmental:

If someone has a sexual fetish that involves beating young males without their pants up and that is sexually stimulating to them, then for them that's a thing of value.

To whom exactly?

|

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded this year to three American scientists who solved a problem of cell biology with deep relevance to cancer and aging. The three will receive equal shares of a prize worth around $1.4 million.

|

No doubt, a million “cultural theories” will abound...



Success, my friends, has a secret ingredient. A sort of overlooked special sauce, if you will. It’s called cleaning your shop and the bathrooms, and it’s why Americans have managed to succeed in the business of street food.

|

Shock/horror:

Irish government: There will be no third referendum

|

They're still going after Lance Armstrong.

For reasons good or ill, this time the French are targeting the Union Cycliste Internationale (the UCI or International Cycling Union is in charge of controlling the cyclists for illegal substances), which they claim favored Armstrong and Alberto Contador's Astana team, among others by giving team members 45 minutes' advance notice of the upcoming test (when none, obviously, should be given)…

Offhand, there may be truth to some of the accusations, but it does seem that a government agency wants/wanted, as usual, to meddle and that it — l'Agence française de lutte contre le dopage (AFLD) — is miffed for its "escorts" being denied access by the UCI to the testing places…

Update: Pat Patterson adds some needed perspective:

Any drug that a cyclist is taking now that is popular will not magically disappear in 45 minutes. In some cases the residue of the byproducts of these drugs can last up to weeks not minutes. They are simply trying to imply that this 45 minutes is critical when it is not.

But The Tour is a private race that is not part of any of the other administrative groups but AFLD is quite anxious to take over the tour and has tried this tactic before.

|

|

Who is anybody to judge Mackenzie Phillips and Papa John? (danke zu Ben).

And with awareness will come acceptance. Supportive bumperstickers, marriage equality, an end to outbreeder sex-police targeting inbreeders, campus "safe spaces," incest pride marches, and corporate sensitivity training will be the signs that the campaign from out of the closets and into the streets has made headway. When all this is accomplished, our world will be transformed from one in which the incestophobes who now hatefully condemn incest without fear of repercussion will be reduced through social pressure to criticism of the most oblique and satirical sort.

|

The graphic chosen says it all:

Morales, Castro, and Chavez lionized by Europeans wanting to oppress a populace vicariously through others.

The EU, which is the leading donor of development assistance to Latin America, also hopes to set up a new financial instrument to leverage millions of euros to bank-roll energy infrastructure, environmental projects and combat poverty.

Oddly enough it’s the Europeans are the ones looking for energy. South and Central America have plenty of it. Money too. This is obviously a kind of bribe to stave off the continent’s Leftists penchant for nationalization, making it look rather like a sign of love and concern, as if governments really could love and be concerned.

They refer to themselves as the "biggest doners" to Latin America, but as usual it reveals little more than an obsession with statism. European government aid to governments for the model of program is greater than anyone else's, but as development aid goes, it's a pittance and an insult compared to the aggrandisement they find in it. In this case, they get to aggregate individual European governments into the EU to look big, and aggregate the varied societies in Latin America to make it look braod, as if there was a generic Latin America which is uniformly poor - for the purposes of the sympathies they may appear to have for the European generic image of peasants.

In reality, private doners, largely American improve the lives of others in many part of Latin America to a far greater degree than even Latin American governments do. What this looks like, is a sale and purchase of access to mineral rights, preferably through an absolutist who can inforce that franchise as long as the money keeps flowing. After all, Total had decades of experience operating that way on the African continent.

|

Thanks to the absence of George W. Bush from the Oval office, America — and Chicago — get all kinds of respect these days (all links in Danish)..

Plus: Contrary to what Obama thinks of himself, former IOC member Kai Holm said (prior to the Rio win), Chicago showed nothing if not disrespect by having Obama show up, business-like, out of the blue and think the One's very presence could influence the outcome of the 2016 Olympic Games city vote (by contrast, Holm says, when London was chosen for 2012, Tony Blair had spent three days of lobbying and talking to all kinds of people, right and left…)

|

"I don't believe that the world's present population is sustainable if there are more than three years like [the year we had two years ago] in a row."

Time Magazine comes with a timely warning of "extremely serious, if not catastrophic" climate change (merci à Harrison Colter who perceptively points out that it "seems foolish … not to heed calls to solve the problem").

As they review the bizarre and unpredictable weather pattern of the past several years, a growing number of scientists are beginning to suspect that many seemingly contradictory meteorological fluctuations are actually part of a global climatic upheaval.

…Whatever the cause of the cooling trend, its effects could be extremely serious, if not catastrophic. Scientists figure that only a 1% decrease in the amount of sunlight hitting the earth's surface could tip the climatic balance, and cool the planet enough to send it sliding down the road to another ice age within only a few hundred years.

Update: According to Jerome R. Corsi, back then (in the 1970s and 1980s), global warming — the artificial type attributable to mankind — was something to be… welcomed and… desired, even… actively worked for!

In their 1970s textbook, "Ecoscience: Population, Resources and Environment," last revised in 1977, [future White House science czar John] Holdren together with co-authors Paul and Anne Ehrlich argued on page 687 that "a man-made warming trend might cancel out a natural cooling trend."

Update: Newsweek picks up the good work…

|

Drunken man in fur hat carrying rifle and bumping into trees make newspaper.

|

Newspaper headline: Tragedy in the United States
American soldier: It's horrible! I must go home!

Michael Jackson's death was another opportunity for Le Monde's Plantu to make caricatural, derogatory remarks about Americans and the U.S. Army.

Well, of course: forget about the horrors of the Saddam Hussein years, forget about Saddam's killing fields (forget, especially, about Saddam's foreign abettors, Monsieur Plantu), forget about all the rebuilding done thanks to the army of the United States, forget how far Iraq has come, and (last but not least) make a caricature of the situation in Iraq, where all is — still — nothing but desolation, all of which is — bien sûr — the lone fault of the United States army and America itself…

|

Man about town Mark Steyn dissects Yale University Press’ self-censoring of depictions of both Mo and the Mo-toons, even in what will be a forgotten academic publications. Mimicking the numb intellectual monoculture of the European “intelligentia”, the reasons are Grade A venality.

notwithstanding the damage done by Euro-Canadian appeasers, an American institution has now effortlessly outpaced them. Having commissioned a book on the subject, Yale University Press has decided that it will appear without any illustration of said subject matter. The author is not a scaremongering blowhard like Ezra and me but a respected Brandeis University professor, Jytte Klausen. Insofar as I understand the thesis of The Cartoons That Shook The World, Professor Klausen argues that the crisis was artificially whipped up for political purposes and that, therefore, one should draw no broader conclusions about Muslim culture and its relationship with the west.

Which gives the benefit of the doubt to the symbolic ‘victims’. Sorry. Not good enough for the grand Troika of Victimhood!

The official explanation was the threat of violence. Not any actual violence, and, as it turns out, not even any actual threats. After Roger Kimball poked around a bit, it emerged that the decision to ban both the Danes and Dore was driven not by editors or publishers at YUP but by the very biggest bigwigs of the University itself. The experts were contacted by “the Office of the President”, no less. On its face, the decision to gut its own reputation for editorial and scholarly integrity seems to owe less to unspecified fears of jihadist nuts blowing up a university bookstore than to a cooler calculation of its strategic interests, including (so Mr Kimball suggests) continued access to wealthy Muslim benefactors.

It’s all about the bling-bling, baby!

In Denmark and other countries, craven accommodationists can at least plead that they have incendiary majority-Muslim suburbs with 50 per cent youth unemployment. That’s not true of New Haven, where the honchos seem to be using fear of violence as a cover for the appetites of their endowment. In other words, they’re merely posing as contemptible Euroweenies. Which, when you think about it, is even more contemptible.

In 2006, during the original cartoon jihad, a Muslim demonstrator in Toronto spelled it out: “We won’t stop the protests until the world obeys Islamic law.”

Alas double secret probation!



All of those willing to cede New Haven to the Umma, raise your hands. I thought as much. Put them down now. You’re freaking me out.

|