From the all-knowing, all-caring brigades:

According to sources in security circles, an 80-page pamphlet entitled "Prisma" ("prism") has recently been circulating in the far-left scene. The anonymous publication includes tips for carrying out terrorist attacks and acts of sabotage, and includes instructions for constructing various kinds of bombs with time fuses and special grappling hooks which can be used to stop trains. The book also describes techniques for sawing down power poles and has several chapters devoted to investigative methods used by the police, describing in detail how urban guerrillas can cover their tracks and shake off tails.

Berlin public prosecutors have already launched an investigation into the pamphlet, which is circulating mainly in the far-left scene in Hamburg, Berlin and the state of Lower Saxony. German security agencies are concerned that the manual could further increase the -- already high -- propensity of young radicals to carry out violent attacks. The document encourages extremists to commit crimes "with a hitherto unknown level of meticulousness and professionalism," says Hans-Werner Wargel, head of the Lower Saxony branch of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Germany's domestic intelligence service.

Shock, horror, wash, rinse, repeat

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Feel free to follow my paesano David on his travels in east and southeast Asia, featuring everything from Yaks to people to sites to pets.

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And while we're on the subject of rock legends on this commemorative day, take a look at the Gene Simmons Military Tribute (thanks to Mark)…

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The story of D-Day.

Read Ted Nugent's take on D-Day (thanks to Stu, whose "father landed on Omaha Beach, one of the few to make it off the beach physically unscathed (…) only to be horribly wounded in the Battle of the Bulge"):

Omaha Beach was literally red with American blood. But more landing boats full of young men from the Greatest Generation kept coming. And coming. The warriors would not be denied, their spirit unstoppable.

The Greatest Generation secured Omaha Beach on June 6, 1944 and from that very beach, covered in the blood of Americans heroes, began the assault that would literally save the world. Roughly one year later, the Nazi war machine would smolder in ruins, defeated by warriors dedicated to good over evil.

You probably won't read or hear much in the papers about the 66th anniversary of D-Day. Those of us who refuse to forget believe this epic day should be a front-page story in all newspapers, Internet news websites, television broadcasts, and certainly detailed in American schools, until the end of time. June 6, 1944 is that important.

See also the Gene Simmons Military Tribute…

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Brussels sets out plans to regulate credit rating agencies

Okay. Got it. So what exactly does that mean, and why?

Credit rating agencies have attracted strong criticism for failing to identify the risk attached to certain financial products such as mortgage-backed securities in the US at the start of the financial crisis.

or...

More recently they have been blamed for exacerbating market turmoil in the eurozone, with Standard and Poor's downgrading of Greek bonds in April sending the country's borrowing costs skyward, ultimately leading Athens to call for a bail-out.

In other words, take your pick, just don’t say anything that might clarify the real state of affairs to an investor, if it doesn’t benefit us.

"Is it normal to have only three relevant actors on such a sensitive issue where there is a great possibility of conflict of interest?" he said, referring to the US-based Fitch, Moody's and Standard & Poor's agencies. "Is it normal that all of them come from the same country?"

Yes, it IS normal, based solely on the fact that there aren’t that many rating agencies willing to spend the time on it, or European companies willing to be ‘rated’ in the first place.

"It seems to me only reasonable that there should be a contribution from the financial sector for the common good," he [Mr. Barroso] said,

That is, besides employing people who are themselves overtaxed, and efficiently producing goods and services.

Besides, who do they really think will be paying the financial services taxes anyway? Savers and investors can check the line-items at the bottom of your statement if you can’t figure than out.

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Author may ban Hebrew editions of his work that is, if he’s ever actually had any.

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I got this in the mail (gracias, Allie). It was allegedly written by a Mexican who is now a naturalized US Citizen, and whether true or not, it's a pretty good explanation of the illegal immigration issue.

If you had tickets to a sports event, concert, Disneyland, or for an airline flight, and when you got to your assigned seat you found someone else was in that seat, what would you do? You would call for a person in charge of ticket checking and have the person in your seat removed. You would properly be asked to show your ticket, and you would gladly and proudly do so, for you have bought and paid for that seat. The person in your seat would also be asked for a ticket, which they would not be able to produce.. They would be called "gate crashers" and they would properly be removed.

Now in this huge stadium called the USA we have had millions of gate crashers. We have been asking security to check for tickets and remove the gate crashers. We have been asking security to have better controls in checking at the door. We have asked security to lock the back doors. Security has failed us. They are still looking the other way. They are afraid to ask to see the tickets. Many people say there is unlimited seating, and whether there is or not, no one should be allowed in for free while the rest of us pay full price!

In "section AZ", of "Stadium USA", we have had enough of the failures of Security. We have decided to do our own ticket checking, and properly remove those who do not have tickets. Now it seems very strange to me that so many people in the other 49 "sections", and even many in our own "section" do not want tickets checked, or even to be asked to show their ticket! Even the head of Security is chastising us, while not doing his own job which he has sworn to do.

My own ticket has been bought and paid for, so I am proudly going to show it when asked to do so. I have a right to my seat, and I want the gate crashers to be asked to show their tickets too. The only reason that I can imagine anyone objecting to being asked for their ticket is that they are in favor of gate crashing, and all of the illegal activities that go with it, such as drug smuggling, gang wars, murder, human smuggling for profit, and many more illegal and inhumane acts that we are trying to prevent with our new legislation. Is that what I am hearing from all of the protesters such as Phoenix Mayor Gordon, US Rep. Grijalva, even President Obama? If you are not in favor of showing tickets (proof of citizenship, passport, green card, or other legal document) when asked, as I would do proudly, then you must be condoning those illegal activities.

Written by a US Citizen, Globe, Arizona…

This makes perfect sense to me. What do you think?

Since Obama has never shown his ticket I guess he feels obligated to not ask others to show theirs.

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It’s painfully obvious that the “Gaza Peace Flotilla’s” only purpose is to open up a conduit to Hamas for weapons. And in the spirit of their usual outbursts that they’re selectively-neutral, pro-nonviolence, and all about peace (which is to say, a propagandized teenager’s understanding of peace), the Irish government is propping up the Kabuki theater thus:

As an Irish ship carrying humanitarian aid continues to sail for Gaza, Ireland has found itself hurled to the forefront of tensions between Israel and the European Union.

On Wednesday (2 June), the Irish government warned Israel for a second time to let the boat, whose passengers count among their number five Irish nationals, including a former UN deputy secretary general and a Northern Irish Nobel peace prize laureate, carry on to its destination and deliver its cargo without hindrance.

The Irish Taoiseach, or prime minister, Brian Cowen said that the ship, which he described as Irish-owned, should be allowed to complete its mission, telling the country's parliament that Dublin has been in close contact with the boat

The press is ignorantly playing along too:

the MV Rachel Corrie, named after an American university student and peace activist who was killed by an Israeli army bulldozer while attempting to prevent the demolition of a Palestinian home in 2003.

Which must be what the kids these days are calling a tunnel to smuggle weapons used to kill civilians.

Given Teheran’s support of Hamas and Hizballah, it could even be that these shallow ‘pacifists’ are even stupid enough to believe that it will ingratiate them to Iran, and possibly dull their tacit threats.

Doubtful. Even amateur students of history should know better:

Since I first went to Berchtesgaden more than 20,0000 letters and telegrams have come to No. 10, Downing Street. Of course, I have been able to look at a tiny fraction of them, but I have seen enough to know that the people who wrote did not feel that they had such a cause for which to fight, if they were asked to go to war in order that the Sudeten Germans might not join the Reich. That is how they are feeling. That is my answer to those who say that we should have told Germany weeks ago that, if her army crossed the border of Czechoslovakia, we should be at war with her. We had no treaty obligations and no legal obligations to Czechoslovakia and if we had said that, we feel that we should have received no support from the people of this country. . .

- Neville Chamberlain, In Search of Peace (1939)

In other words, the “illegal war” argument. Can’t violate ‘international law’ can we? Even if we don’t say what that means or mention that there is no ‘big book of international law’ and a ‘big, God-like, stick-wielding constable to enforce it. Besides, how was invading Czechoslovakia any more ‘legal’ than stopping the invasion?

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The day after a British taxi driver shot 12 people dead in a rampage through Cumbria, a man in Brussels shoots two people dead — a judge and a clerk of the court (both female), no less — in a Brussels building — the Belgian capital's courthouse, no less.

The [Derrick Bird] incident echoed the massacres in Hungerford in 1987 and Dunblane in 1996, both of which led to tighter firearms legislation. Theresa May, the Home Secretary, is expected to address gun control issues when she makes a statement to the Commons today.

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Like the Jenin ‘massacre’, calling the raid on the passive-aggressive flotilla ‘piracy’, a ‘crime against humanity’, and other overblown phrases that have lost all their force, we find that hatred now directed at anyone discussing it as well.

The Pavlovian Politically Correct Responses ain’t what they used to be. Melanie Philips, known to be one of those people who doesn’t fetishize ‘Palestina’, and follows actual events there received these charming and witty bonne mots:

What a disgrace to humanity the zionists have proven to be. I am of the firm opinion that Hitler was right in the assessment of the Jewish people. The protestors deaths have not been in vain as the support for Gaza & Palestine has reached all communities all over the world. It will only be a matter of time before they obtain their freedom.

As if they are denied their freedoms by the Israelis.

Have the honesty to let people know you are Jewish when you are voicing an opinion on TV. I understand why you are so ashamed.Its time the Jewish Sate of Israel was abolished. Have your religion but no state.

Which is the basic problem, no? Detached, hateful Europeans thinking that they have the right of refusal over what people can believe and whether or not they can exist.

All in the name of ‘peace’ you know, and Hamas taxing or stealing the aid given by gullible outsiders.

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…the message of Geert Wilders, head of the anti-immigrant Freedom Party and Labor’s ideal boogeyman, has become an increasingly broken record for the electorate, with his poll scores running well under the projections of a few months ago

comments John Vinocur, regarding the upcoming elections in the Netherlands. But perhaps that is not as bad as it sounds at first. Indeed,

Every Dutch party, Labor included, now holds positions concerning immigrants’ obligations to Dutch society that might have been called fascistic by the left a decade earlier.

…the focus of the Netherlands and its voters has become adapting.

Their polling response is striking. The Liberal Party is the Dutch political formation most at ease with capitalism and the markets. It is neither statist nor moralistic about financial market regulation in the manner of most of Continental Europe’s leadership. Its prime ministerial candidate, Mark Rutte, is a former Unilever executive. Indeed, the party’s trademarks are both its pragmatism and its being a target for its rivals’ accusations of heartlessness.

…Early this decade, the Dutch were also the first Europeans to call into question a conventional premise that integration of Muslim immigrants could be accomplished through multiculturalism without specific rules for conforming to Dutch law and tradition. The issue is no longer a taboo here or elsewhere in Europe.

…[Mr. Rutte] wants to make €20 billion, or $25 billion, in immediate cuts in the Dutch budget, to stop social security payments to newcomers living in the Netherlands for less than 10 years, and, while supervising markets closely, to avoid characterizing them as immoral and destructive machines.

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Straight from the burro’s mouth: It was thrown out there for political reasons, but is true nonetheless: there is no such thing as a “boom from a green economy,” when the entire, feeble exercise goes nowhere after four decades of exceptions, giveaways, and subsidies.

the truth about Spain’s “green jobs” boondoggle, which happens to be the one naively cited by President Obama no less than eight times as his model for the United States. It is now out there as a bust, a costly disaster that has come undone in Spain to the point that even the Socialists admit it, with the media now in full pursuit.

While it’s being thrown out there to cut off demands for more intervention in a time where austerity is needed, it seems to scrape away the crust of wishful thinking and outright fabrications that make up the larger part of Leftist economic thinking.

La Gaceta boldly exposes the failure of the Spanish renewable policy and how Obama has been following it. The headline screams: “Spain admits that the green economy as sold to Obama is a disaster.”

Elsewhere: it’s not polite to say that something other than the hole in the ozone layer, er, the greenhouse effect, um - no, greenhouse gasses, or rather, global warming, er, climate change is at fault, but June really should tell Ward not to be too hard on the beaver.

"The greatest enemy of the flood defenses is an animal called the beaver. Beavers live all along levees on the Vistula River and cause a lot of damage to them," Jerzy Miller said.

According to the Polish government, roughly 20,000 beavers inhabit Poland’s rivers, and are a protected species. Beavers were endangered in the 1950s, but have since rebounded because of a successful breeding program.

Thanks for the sh*t sandwich, Swampy.

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Sumfin’ fer nufin’, and if grows on trees.

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