As lefty would say: who's paying you?

Another "irate moderate": get a load of this guy banging his spoon on his highchair. He feels perfectly comfortable slapping anyone who won't rebut him because they would turn the other cheek. A sort of Jesus-freak, he actually uses religion as a form of negative identification. Arch-evil Floridian Katherine Harris is one, anyone who would fit into his “Jesustan” fantasy dystopia is one. In short, anyone who doesn’t Do their "religious duty" to support his earthly political fetishes is one.
That should get him in good stead with the religious left.

A vision of a loving, inclusive, and diverse communion if there ever was one, even though I can’t imagine any flavor of Western theology that makes any of those things more important than The Cardinal Virtues that are dusted under the rug by them. After all, why live your stated beliefs when you can cook up comparisons between Christians and the Taliban?

Very creative. Very novel. We've never seen anyone make THAT shocking link before! Snxpffff!!!

Now you’re cooking with Crisco

It’s actually only a crisis when they ban drilling oil. Nonetheless:

If everyone [in France] knows who Monsanto is, we have Jose Bové to thank. The madman who along with his friends attacked transgenic development that Monsanto is a pioneer in, will have much more to worry about. A lot more.

Says Patrick Garcia at car-crazy Caradisiac’s blog.

The energy crisis hitting our tanks reveals the value of biofuels. When they say Bio, they mean Ethanol - and that means corn. To optimize the output of the plant, considered otherwise a poor source for Ethanol, Monsanto put its engineers to the task of making a' hybrid' corn which, surprise, surprise, would produce more ethanol with the same land area under cultivation.

... Jose should be pleased.

That remains to be seen, even if “petrocollapse” eventually effects bicycle production in the next five-year plan. Comrades should learn to suffer a little and adapt until the hunter-gatherer society can be restored. the fuse is lit!

Chocolate soldiers

More like blowhard fudgepackers. Perhaps that long planned for European 60,000 man rapid reaction force went down the same memory hole as the late great (yet eerily side-splitting) Lisbon Statement.

Bedpan Brigade

Now that they have sprung into action, Zeropeans announce a 3 month wait for getting 6900 troops to Lebanon.

BBC finally discovers political bias in the media

In another shameless fit of overreach, the BBC finds atmospheric political bias in the Italian media to be akin to “chloroforming” of a sheepish and docile populace.
Prodi wants that to change, favoring an arrangement like the BBC’s where disagreement with the left in any substantive way is made tacitly impossible in spite of the fact that virtually all the big-name journalists in Italy are leftists anyway. I suppose what they want is an arrangement where a company like Gruppo Mediaset (not state funded) which is to the right of the (tax funded) RAI can even exist if it has a substantial audience.

I guess they’re trying to wait out the interalia until the second coming of glorious socialism makes political freedom unnecessary, or something, but either way they seem no longer able to make a distinction between private and state funded media, or the difference in their obligations and limits.

Note: I truncated the fluff out of the original 9 minute report down to 5m:44s.

Indeed, the report trumpets the selected interview subjects that find it “urgent” that Italian media be completely and entirely overhauled to enrich people with documentaries and dramas, to pave the way for the elevation of the public mind. In other words – people are mindless slobs until they’re reprogrammed to be good little leftists.

This segment ran on the BBC World Service and is unlikely to have run in the UK itself since it would have had to go into a repeat cycle while the World Service is carried by the toxically biased Radio 4 as their overnight programming. In other words, they can conceal from the population that they do a disservice to in the same fashion that they criticize others.

Funny that. BBC feels perfectly free to criticize news and entertainment programming which has a generally atmospheric (but often overt) political bias in Italy - when they have been doing the same themselves in the UK, and doing it on the back of anyone who owns a television by forcing them to pay a tax on it to fund their £3 billion per year media operation which functions as a virtual monopoly.
Did a producer’s eyebrow even go up when the reporter edited in a comparison of Berlusconi to Mussolini? Imagine hearing a similar liberty taken with the left – let’s say, between the bright lights of the British left with Stalin or Hitler, people with who they share ideology or proactive and coercive collectivism.

Would that have been let through, I wonder?

Not a Single German Soldier Was Involved in the Attack on Pearl Harbour

Is the programme's subject too boring for journalists to cover?

The lefty europress is back on the Wadi.

The BBC World Service's mid-day [Wednesday-24-AUG-2006 7.41GMT] "Business Daily" programme segment ran a report on an old Canadian bugaboo about selling water. This in a nation that has seen silly fits about this for 50 years, generally by people looking over their shoulders for UFOs.

Global warming = Melting glaciers = (somehow) "Only the people who can afford buying water can have it!!!" and that access to it is a “human right”.

Well, it certainly is a good thing, and it is a natural right if you can see the sky. Having it delivered to you is not necessarily a right, especially when such things have a hard to attribute responsibility tied to that right. Any good discussion of a phenomenon called 'the tragedy of the commons' is a good place to start trying to understand it. That lack of seriousness concerning individual property that leftists so love has caused denuding of range lands, the lack of care people have for nature, and among other things as an example, the felling of nearly every last tree in Iceland by people idealized in this century as living 'close to the land'.

Canada, with 0,6% of the world’s population has a fifth of this flavor of the world’s “rights”. Available to them is 40 times the world average access to fresh water, and judging by the complaint that they should dam off their rivers that flow south, want to withhold that “right” from others.

Quite... Per capita, Canadians use more fresh water than Americans, and four times as much as the average Swede. The fact that they have to spend so much to manage it's runoff and overabundance in nearly every part of Canada means it's more of a pollutant than a precious commodity.

Concern was tenderly shown by the BBC's evangelist in the field, Linda Duffin about those who don't have enough water. There was no-one there to ask her: okay, I'm with ya. We'll send some right away.

Where's the pipe? They can make Africa as wet as old blighty AND stop the complaints of the concerned, who after all, found a nice way to think that there's a good reason to believe that Canadian Provinical water companies couldn't fatten their otherwise subsidized budgets by selling this pollutant to American for cash.

“I don’t think [selling it] it’s such a good idea for the simple fact that someday we may need to buy it from somebody else some day”

– said one dimwitted BBC interviewee.

Who is that nation that has a fifth of the world’s fresh water going to buy it from, and how are they going to get it to Canada? Normally, when Canadian Liberals want to avoid using a certain nation’s name, they use the term “our friends to the south.” Maybe these Libs and NDPers are thinking of someone in Mexico they hope to find a friend in.

As for global warming (not to be confused with climate change, the mortal sin of not recycling, or other "impure thoughts") being responsible - there are no de-desertified parts of the righteous Dominion. The state of water flow and wet area has not changed in centuries. This certainly doesn't square with what all the superior minds of left-land already know - that global warming officially began the day ChimpyMcHitlerBurton "Georges" W. Bush was spawned by the previous cause of all wrong in the Universe. The story would almost certainly run much differently under Pax Clintonia, especially when there's an election on.

And the BBC would stand there and take it seriously to report on in with a straight face. Why, I wonder?

Well, the way the BBC formula goes, it's always in the wrap-up. It's about those dastardly Americans with handlebar moustaches and top hats "taking" their water. Much in the way evil AmeriKKKa " takes their oil" and “takes their lumber" at least when they aren’t screaming about limiting its’ sales with tariffs. The money in the transaction, I suppose, is a mere trifle that they only take out of politeness since it only matters to Americans.

To the point, one wonders how it is that there could be a BBC that runs business programmes that are barely ever about business - and likewise a Reporting Religion programme that only covers topic non-believers think are about religion. One wonders in an environmentally aware world how it is that this is seen to be "sustainable" when the natural selection of the free-market would otherwise thin the herd of the otherwise weakest beasts of the media.

Don’t let your kids go back to school looking shabby

My understanding is that dead revolutionaries are “the new black”.
(Sold without pit-stains. You have to do that yourself.)

Preserving the future

A capucha for your vote?:

Vacationers visiting France's beaches are getting some unusual promotional goodies - such as condoms stamped with the logo of the ruling conservative political party.

The Conservatives seem to trying to either project a party image by passing out party hats, or they’re inducing a kind of Roe Effect, their opponents seem to have given up and have settled into the middle age silliness of new-age goofiness and “sensotopia”:

The Socialist Party, the main leftist party in France, sells its goodies at an online store. For a sweet-smelling candle, the caption reads: "Keep the flame of socialism burning at home and at the office."

Herein we find another type of population control: the tried and true house-fire.

I’m waiting with bated breath to find out what the Communists hand out. I imagine that there’ll be heads of cabbage (red) and manual tools with which to dig potatoes in the grand and glorious future, or perhaps those air-drop emergency food rations that the population will need after they implement a five-year plan.

If it bleeds (the US' image) it leads

If it casts the US in a bad light, Le Monde will run it without questioning the detail, context, or meaning. The “independent” newspaper pimps the case of one Josh Wolf:

REPORTERS WITHOUT BORDERS “DISMAYED”
In an official statement, the organization Reporters Without Borders (RSF) says it’s “dismayed” in a press release on Wednesday: “To send to prison this journalist because he protected his source is at the same time a serious violation of the freedom of the press”. “Journalists are neither of the auxiliaries of the justice system nor of the police force”.

What they are referring to are the shield laws to protect journalists and their sources. What the court seeks is video edited out of this vlogger’s coverage of an Anarchist rally where property was damaged by some punk, not a human source. Wolf is protecting a criminal, not a source, story, or an act of political expression. After all, if I called murder ‘performance art’ could I get away with it as such?

For the sake of Le Monde’s readers, this is where it might have some interest to them:

Last year, Judith Miller spent 85 days in prison because she refused to reveal her source in the matter of Valerie Plame, a CIA agent whose identity was revealed by unspecified persons in charge at the White House.

This said blithely unaware that there is only one person in charge in the White House, to which the usual pack of zombies will say "yeah, KKKarl Rove" prior to laughing like aging fried potheads, drooling, and being rewarded with a liver snack.

Wednesday’s Hot Air has got it all.

Peasants with pitchforks retaliate against a morally repugnant elite

Angry French fishermen in their vessels (or wessels as Chekov would say) have ‘laid siege’ to the Rainbow Warrior. The Greenpeace vessel is on a mission to “highlight the alleged over-fishing of red tuna.”

Rainbow Warrior is being pursued for over-fishing public sympathy and poor color sense.

The fuse is lit!

Cannes Film Festival at the Forefront of the Fight Against Lies, Deceit, and Injustice

"[Un film] contraire à l'esprit même du festival"

— Robert Favre Le Bret, délégué
général du Festival de Cannes, 1956

"[Il eût été] souverainement inconvenant de présenter un tel document dans l'atmosphère de festivité internationale qui est celle des rencontres internationales de Cannes"

— Maurice Lemaire, secrétaire d'Etat
à l'industrie et au commerce, 1956

Isn't it a truism that the Cannes film festival likes nothing better than to screen (and to reward) movies that take a stand and are courageous in opposing the powers that be?

A couple of years ago, we got Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 911. This year the winner is The Wind that Shakes the Barley, the critique of the Iraq war via the Irish revolution by Ken Loach who, in a memorable acceptance speech, managed to bash George W Bush and the war in Iraq to lots of applause and ear-to-ear smiles.

Well, it ain't always so. When the target is America, then all and well. But when France is in the sights — even indirectly — the film is censored and removed from competition. Then we are suddenly told that that kind of film is not in the spirit of Cannes and that that type of documents does not fit in with the atmosphere of international festivities that belong in a film festival like France's.

What is ironic, Jacques Mandelbaum points out, is that Alain Resnais's Nuit et Brouillard was not even meant to be a blistering attack on any French institution; the theme of French collaboration was entirely secondary, even involuntary, in a film about the horrors of Nazi Concentration Camps.

"For motives of political opportunity", wrote former concentration camp detainee Alain Cayrol to the Monde at the time, France "tears out the pages of history that do not suit it, she prevents witnesses from speaking".

Just as Stanley Kubrick's 1957 Paths of Glory would remain banned from France for decades, another Resnais film, Les Statues Meurent Aussi, remained banned from 1953 to 1964.

Moreover, more than political sensitivity was the issue in 1956. As is so often the case with European moralizers, commercial interests were involved (see a long and full list in La Bannière Étalée). People involved voiced fears as to whether the presence of the movie might entail "trade reprisals" from France's first and foremost trade partners: the Germans. (Although the film was taken out of competition, the German delegation to the festival nonetheless walked out in a sign of protest.)

In a double irony regarding the hush-up surrounding Night and Fog, the 1956 Palme d'Or went to Jacques-Yves Cousteau's …Le Monde du Silence.

It happened in another era? What a convenient excuse. How many motion pictures castigating France (or French policies) has the state-sponsored film festival shown since then?

Not a whole hell of a lot…

But : not to worry. As Mandelbaum tells us, this no longer holds true for a festival "that was then the vassal of the imperatives of international diplomacy".

In any case, we are still waiting for films like Buried in the Sand to be shown at the independent Cannes film festival, not to mention in France as a whole.

Those of us who pretend to believe that all this happened at a certain time and in a certain place, and those who refuse to see, who do not hear the cry to the end of time.

Proud to be "Étatsunien", are ya?

C'est pas permis!

Not a newsflash: French leftists use the USA as an ego prop.

In the middle of another fake “débat” about how the United States cretinously dares to be different when it comes to time off, came this bit of nonsense typical of the usual spurious trash.

Antoine: Ne dites pas "américain"

N'appelez pas "américains" les habitants des Etat-Unis d'Amérique. C'est une façon de confisquer le mot pour un seul pays de cet immense continent. Un bolivien, un canadien sont des américains aussi. Il faut trouver autre chose. Je propose (mais j'attend de meilleures propositions) étasunien.
Mardi 22 Août 2006 - 13:57

Do not call the inhabitants of United States of America “American”. It is a way of confiscating the word for only one country of this immense continent. Bolivians, Canadians are American too. Another thing: I propose calling them (but I await better ideas) Unitedstatesian.

As usual the imposition of their imprint on other cultures doesn’t dawn on Propagandastaffel readers as being inconsistent with their endless leftist pieties about respect. True to form George Bush always becomes “Georges” Bush, and this man likely wasn’t born with an accent-aigue in his name. As always we see the attribution “Etatsuniens” in lieu of “Américains”, regardless of what we call ourselves. Try that in Africa.

I wonder then why is it that Bolivian and Canadians refer to us as Americans?

Inconceivable to critics of that sort is that the US predated the establishment of Bolivia and Canada as independent nations, and that Simon Bolivar for who Bolivia was names was inspired by the United States and detested the enslaving Europeans. In fact the brutality of the dictatorial French “Republican” regime in Mexico caused Texas to separate after barely a decade of union because of their Napoleonic constitutional instinctual brutality to the common man that the American world view sees as free. While the Europeans were selling their populations a fake bill of goods about the primacy of the individual, Americans were reading Burke and working to make it happen. Bolivar saw that quite plainly, and no amount of revision can hide Europe’s paranoia about human free will – then or now.

One wonders - how many nations have the name “America” in them, anyway?

The United States of America
American Samoa

Again, the arrogance of thinking that their fake respect for others is exempt, and that their wisdom is somehow indispensable to others is predictable from this dank lot that looks down on the rest of the world so much. Don’t Bolivians and Canadians deserve to have the self respect of calling themselves Bolivian and Canadian, or do they need to play along to pander to the self-important Euro-übermensch leftists?

Back to their “débat” driven by a story for which there is no actual news event, it’s impossible for a society that produces 30% less output per capita to be 5% more productive. The only reason to claim such a thing and use the US as a point of reference is because of a fixation with the US, and not the state of the French economy, unless you’re rationalizing something to buoy yourself emotionally.
The reason some Americans work more hours is because we can if we want, and we do because we have a growing population and are optimistic about the future. Libération’s band of commenter pendejos probably needs to find an object of hatred and condescension to prop up their fragile sensibilities having failed at so much personally.

What IS galling is the presumption by the EU "patriots" (if you can even call them that) to call the EU "Europe" when it hardy encompass all of Europe, and is far from a natural outcome of all inhabiting the same continent. The bickering between them offers more than a hint of this. Shouldn't those populations who have rejected becoming a Union Local not be offended?

Oh, it must be those hysterical Americans again

Reuters, UK - US plane turned back to Dutch airport
ABC News - US plane turned back to Amsterdam
Hemscott, UK - Northwest Airlines plane returns to Amsterdam


The plane was headed for India. Only the headlines originating in India and a handful of other headlines mentioned its’ destination. Apparently the fact that it is a U.S. carrier is more important than the potential victims onboard or enroute, or that fact that Dutch police grew suspicious of people who boarded at Schipol after takeoff.

One-stop child exploitation

Photo credit: One of Tex's readers at Wacking Daythe fuse is lit!

France's Role and Policy Decisions Are Defended by …George W Bush

Mal préparés, la plupart des commentateurs ont vécu la décision française comme une reculade. Il n'en fallait pas plus pour rouvrir la boîte aux clichés et ranimer l'image du Français couard et prompt à la retraite.

It's the world turned upside down, writes Corine Lesnes as she reports that the Bush administration is raising its voice to defend France with regards to Lebanon.

What really transpires here is how caricaturally the French view the Americans. As far as boxes of clichés are concerned, maybe they are somewhat more than simpletonistic France-bashers whose (rare) rise above the fray is worth noticing. Here is another theory. Maybe the Americans are not so stupid as you would like to think, and maybe the anger about France should not be so rapidly dismissed as nothing but a "box of clichés".

Culture sold to the lowest bidder.

Souvenir vendu dans les rues de Paristan.the fuse is lit!

All News channel amuses itself by abusing itself

You would think that with the complacency that Sweden has grown to be associated with, that no-one would notice.

Middle Eastern Revolutions?

Christian Isely has a thought for Hunter S Thompson's Las Vegas as he continues his series of series of dispatches from Baghdad.

Baghdad Despatch # 25
Baghdad — March 8, 2005

Middle Eastern Revolutions?

I have returned to Baghdad from my last trip out of country. This time I went to Paris, France to meet up with my parents who I had not seen since I left for this adventure almost a year ago. We spent a great deal of time seeing the sites and catching up. By the time I left to come back to work, I was reaffirmed in my commitment to our great effort
here.

It is quite strange but when I stepped foot back on the Palace grounds, I felt like I was home. Over the last year, this place has been the closest thing I have to one.

However, this time I did not return to work for Louis Berger. This time, I returned as a contractor to the US State Department. I am now working in a totally different branch of the reconstruction effort, private sector development under the Iraqi Reconstruction Management Office. My job is to help Iraq develop a viable, transparent, and open equities market. Most of my attention will be on supporting the Iraqi Stock Exchange which started trading last summer. I will help to automate their trading systems. Additionally, I will be tasked with helping the Iraqi Securities Commission (the Iraqi version of the Securities and Exchange Commission; it oversees the Iraqi Stock Exchange and all matters relating to the securities industry) begin to fulfill its mandate. They must be empowered to enforce market regulations in order to build both domestic and international faith in the burgeoning Iraqi capital markets.

My other tasks involve picking up any other slack in the office regarding our small business loan program, micro-finance, and any other financial programs where I can add value. I am very excited. After all, most of my professional experience to date has been in the realm of financial markets.

In general, the atmosphere around the Green Zone is optimistic. As I wrote in my last e-mail, I believe the elections in January were a tremendous milestone and headway is being made. However, as one can see in the news today, progress is not just occurring in Iraq. I feel like the hard work we have committed ourselves to and performed in the face of great adversity is finally starting to pay off. Great changes are occurring around us and I have been a part of it. I wouldn't trade the last 10 months for anything.

The Great Wave

I wrote the following on my way back to Baghdad as I was staying in Amman and watching the Cedar Revolution run its course in Lebanon:

The American writer, Hunter S Thompson, the founder of so called "Gonzo" journalism, took his own life last week. In the spirit of pondering his passing and being blown away by the events I was witnessing on Arab satellite television in the restaurants of Amman, my thoughts kept returning to his writings and one line kept coming back to mind.

There was no point in fighting — on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark — the place where the wave finally broke and rolled back. ("Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," 1971)

Despite the fact that he was referring to the American counter-culture of the 1960's and its eventual "high-water mark", I cannot help but place similar words in a totally different context, the wave that is currently enveloping the Middle East right before our eyes. Iraqi politicians are now hashing out politics like in any other parliamentary system. Palestinians have embraced elections and seem to be moving toward not only democracy but possible peace with Israel and an independent state. And now, in the past couple of weeks, we are watching people take to the streets in Lebanon to protest foreign occupation and a puppet government. How far will this wave roll on? Will it ever stop and roll back?

And of course, one cannot but help ponder what inspiration the Lebanese have drawn from their counterparts in Ukraine. Has the Orange Revolution paved the way for the Cedar Revolution by showing again to the world that tyranny can be fought by peaceful means?

What is the common denominator for these three possibly emerging democracies in Iraq, Lebanon, and Palestine? Oddly enough, they are the only countries in the Arab world (except perhaps for the Western Sahara) that are occupied by a foreign power.

So how does the combination of sovereignty and democracy keep up the momentum? It probably begins with legitimacy. By the fact that any coherent movements are taking shape, they have legitimacy on their side since they are by definition, movements toward sovereignty. The Iraqi government now possesses an unprecedented degree of legitimacy since it represents the majority of the population and seeks to create a thriving and independent Iraq.

The US and Israel could never totally isolate Arafat because the one thing he did possess was legitimacy both among his own people and the international community. Now that he is out of the way, a new democratic Palestinian government can take shape because it seems to be inheriting Arafat's mantle of legitimacy.

The Lebanese government has never possessed any real degree of legitimacy due to its general weakness and reliance on Syria. What next? If these movements result in democratic governments because they possess legitimacy, how can it spread to other Middle Eastern regimes?

Judging by the behavior of the "Great Powers" and the "International Community", the current undemocratic regimes actually possess tremendous legitimacy. Interestingly enough, it is on the domestic front where public opinion sways toward labeling these regimes as puppets of the US, Israel, and other foreign powers. Will people take to the streets in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Syria, after watching their Arab brethren achieve greater political freedoms? It must have been strange to watch Iraqis cast their ballots on Al Jazeera or even in person at the Iraqi Embassy in Damascus.

Strangely enough, the emergence of Al Jazeera in recent years may have in part laid the necessary foundation to keep the emerging democrats aware of each other and what is being accomplished in other parts of the Arab world. For instance, I have seen that Al Jazeera has been covering the demonstrations in Beirut and I did catch one quote from another cable news program of a demonstrator claiming he was inspired by events in Ukraine.

The question then becomes, why should we be surprised? After all did this not happen in Eastern Europe in 1989? Actually, what is particularly striking about today's wave of democratization is that every case of it is so spectacularly different from the others. The case of Georgia and Ukraine are perhaps similar with regard to the waning influence of Russia but the three cases in the Middle East are so fundamentally different. The Iraqis are gaining greater political power and independence with the enthusiastic backing of the Americans. The Palestinians are pushing ahead even during the struggle for peace with Israel despite some opponents who condone violence. And now Syria seems to be giving into Lebanese and international pressure to end the occupation of Lebanon.

But will the momentum continue? To what lengths will the insurgents go to defeat emerging democracy in Iraq? How will Hezbollah react to a proposed Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon? And how far will the US go to support Iraqis in their bid for freedom and democracy? How much support will the US give to an emerging and democratic Palestinian state? And what will the US do if Lebanon were to remain under Syrian domination or slip back into civil war? Also, how will other states react, including Iran?

So now the question is not whether a wave of democratization is engulfing this region, but whether five years from now gazing out my window of the Sheraton in downtown Amman, I will be able to see where the wave finally broke and rolled back.

St. George’s Anglican Church Update

But for now I want to share another success story. As I wrote in one of my previous dispatches, my friend Ryan had organized a fund-raising effort for an embattled Anglican church here in Baghdad. I know that some of my readers have contributed to this effort so I wanted to bring those interested up to date. A generator has been installed along with protective barricades to deter attacks by car bombs. Thank you to all those you made this possible!

"Middle path" seekers lusting for peace and sober moderacy

The Daily Mail reports on a rally attended by 8000 people. The BBC doesn’t, even though they’ve been more than willing to report on “protests” of 60 people when it fits the producers’ smashingly narrow world view, but not when “the ___ street” displays its’ sincere bloodlust.

Photo: irate moderates.

He said: "The greatest act of martyrdom is standing up for what is true and just. Martyrs are those who stand up and stand up in defiance of George Bush and Tony Blair. You stand up to them and you say desist. Stop this injustice. Stop this oppression."
Dr Tamimi claimed the war on terrorism was a war on Islam. "We are Muslims in Europe, not European Muslims," he added.

So this member of the peace-camp’s mashed potato circuit thinks terror is comparing – nay committing – Islam and terror to be one in the same. How very brave of him to speak so definitively for others. He’s also avering fairly firmly that no Muslim can be a European as well. Non-citizens can still be deported, can they not?

"Being fair and just means finding the middle path. The middle path is not rubbing shoulders with Tony Blair and George Bush."
The crowd erupted with cheering and applause when he said that Israel had been defeated by Hezbollah.

Two small points. Israel is still there, and the cutesy-poo “middle path” he seeks collides somewhat with his splodey-dope call to arms – those suicide murders vulgarly reinterpreted to be called “martyrdom”.

The fuse is lit!

Typical leftist racism.

While making the usual pedantic and perfunctory accusation of racism, Plantu dresses up black people in a racist mocking characterization that hasn’t been seen on the U.S. (or in any other of the civilized countries) since the 1920’s.

It’s typical of the condescending Stepin Fetchit attitude the left has for people anyway, seeing them not as individuals, but as members of factions for them to either demonize or exploit at the polls, turning thinking adults into their politically useful idiots, and treating them like children.

An agreement based on what now appear to have been insincere pledges that European troops would dominate the U.N. force

The French promise a military force and Condi falls for it

headlines the Wall Street Journal.

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert bought into the agreement based on what now appear to have been insincere pledges that European troops would dominate the U.N. force. Meanwhile, U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan is displaying his trademark even-handedness by denouncing Israel for trying to enforce the arms embargo while staying silent on the failure of everyone else to enforce it.

Israel can and will defend itself. The person who should really be furious here is Secretary of State Rice. She midwifed this cease-fire in the name of Lebanese democracy and as a way to use diplomacy, and the U.N., to tame Hezbollah and frustrate its patrons. She also believed French promises, so it'd be good to know if she now feels she was lied to. If this U.N. exercise turns out to be as feckless as it increasingly appears, U.S. credibility will also be a loser.

“Newspaper”

Able was I ‘ere I cried Uncle

Melanie Phillips wraps up the vestiges of a formerly coherent and thoughtful culture that used to have some depth, while over at the Guardian’s web of froth, between the 1000th spitting allegation of “poodlism” and warning us of the evils of religion which they typically characterize all of it being fundamentalism (but only if you’re Christian or Hindu), we find a self-obsessed aging child compelled with new-age stagnancy trying to impose religion as a solution to the world’s problems:

The power of forgetting
The Daoist ideal of 'sitting quietly' could help us break the cycle of escalating violence
Karen Armstrong

Je t’enmerde pas, dear reader.

We cannot all be poets and mystics, but we now face unprecedented dangers, and need to be creative as never before. This means that we must "forget" old ideas that cannot speak to our present situation. The policies of the cold war, which was between nations and empires, cannot be effective when the enemy is within. An American rabbi told me that, in his view, the ideal response to the atrocities of September 11 would have been for the US president to declare a traditional 40-day period of mourning and to do nothing until the horrifying new reality had been fully accepted and understood.

I think by ‘understood’ she means ‘passively resigned to’, but that’s beside the point. The notion of a larger society's welfare is meaningless to someone so obsessed with their own feelings, taking up a faith so out of line with ones' own culture, that any concoction would do just as well.

Among the comments to her fine opus there is indeed proof that the British left without a point of reference or forthought will apply their usual angry nonsense to any averse situation. They are amok:

Rowthorn - August 19, 2006 03:12 PM:

Didn't the Taliban blow up some giant Buddha's that had been sitting very quietly for many hundred years.

Leapyear - August 19, 2006 03:33 PM:
Yes, statues were blown up. This did not lead to escalating violence.

September 11th was not an escalation of violence. How could that be? After all Bush let it happen um... planned it um... caused it um... used remote control Boeings um... well something. Either way it has to be the fault of the projection of the average Guardian readers’ mind, surely.

Getting back to Phillips' piece we can note the irony of this act of ‘not being still’ and one cannot help but wonder not what’s going through the perpetrators’ minds, but through Armstrong’s.

But the argument that foreign policy is the cause of the threat to Britain — a claim trotted out by a wide spectrum of people — is itself idiotic beyond measure. As Reid said, there was an al Qaeda plot in Birmingham to blow up Britain back in 2000 — before 9/11, let alone the war in Iraq. Similarly, jihadi attacks on the U.S. began 22 years before 9/11 with the Iran embassy hostage crisis in 1979, followed by two decades of further attacks.

Whole ‘lotta meditation going on, yes?

What Karen Armstrong IS displaying is the beginning of awareness, but absent the ability to comprehend the notion that something must be realistically done with an evil which cannot be reasoned with, she resorts to the very limited tools available to her: adequately assuaging her own fear, which is also all about her, and not about the problem and effects of terror. The option left to her with such a limited understanding of human nature is to find a line of reason to hide behind – something useless in the meatspace of the physical world.

The fuse is lit!

... and 200 150 equals thousands

War is Peace
Freedom is Slavery
Ignorance is Strength

But truth is stranger than fiction. How contemporary French has turned into a real life Continental European version of Newspeak.

Press not bearing much fruit

Ion Miha Pacepa, Nicolae Ceauşescu’s chief spook noted in his 1987 book “Red Horizons: Chronicles of a Communist Spy Chief” that Arafat was light in his loafers. A proclivity the al-Aqsa “martyrs” surely would have appreciated. Their behaivior might temper the thrills of the Peace/violent revolt “Palestina” kids in Eutopia.

"I just called the microphone monitoring center to ask about the 'Fedayee,'" Arafat's code name, explained Munteaunu. "After the meeting with the Comrade, he went directly to the guest house and had dinner. At this very moment, the 'Fedayee' is in his bedroom making love to his bodyguard. The one I knew was his latest lover. He's playing tiger again. The officer monitoring his microphones connected me live with the bedroom, and the squawling almost broke my eardrums. Arafat was roaring like a tiger, and his lover yelping like a hyena."

Munteaunu continued: "I've never before seen so much cleverness, blood and filth all together in one man."

And this cold-war cold-blooded intelligence chief, who may have even been parenthetically involved with a plot to kill the Pope, found him repellant:

"The report was indeed an incredible account of fanaticism, of devotion to his cause, of tangled oriental political maneuvers, of lies, of embezzled PLO funds deposited in Swiss banks, and of homosexual relationships, beginning with his teacher when he was a teen-ager and ending with his current bodyguards. After reading the report, I felt a compulsion to take a shower whenever I had been kissed by Arafat, or even just shaken his hand."

The collusion of the western press along with the Arab press about the nature and circumstances of his death and yawningly typical – much like this nearly buried feature about the meaning of individual freedom in an Islamic state like the one Hizballah is trying to impose on an inwardly and outwardly secular Lebanon: Iranian Police Destroying Satellite Dishes in Tehran - possibly to curb the local gentry’s enthusiasm and keep from busting out the scotch?

Not likely.

The fuse is lit!

The biggest problem we have in America when it comes to defeating terrorism

You may remember the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) sued when the NYPD instituted random bag searches on the subway. Yet a sign at the NYCLU building warned that the organization had the right to search the bags of all people entering there. Hypocritical? You make the call.

No wonder they despise Bill O'Reilly when he has insights like the one called "Profile in sanity".

The biggest problem we have in America when it comes to defeating terrorism is that some of us live in the real world and some of us live in a theoretical zone where all problems could be solved if only we just talked things over with those who want to kill us. For those people, actions like profiling, unilateral military campaigns and tough interrogation methods are simply too drastic. These Americans believe aggressive terror countermeasures actually encourage violence against us and create more willing terror killers.

Looking back, the actions of Presidents Clinton and Bush in his first year pretty much ignored the growing terror threat from the Muslim world. Little aggressive action was taken against al Qaeda when it blew up our embassies in Africa and attacked our warship off the coast of Yemen.

There was no airline profiling going on when 19 Muslim killers boarded three airliners on 9/11, all with one-way tickets to hell. Had we been wiser then, 3,000 Americans might be alive today.

Public service announcement

Never forget the importance of composting.(No, lefty - he's isn't just 'chilling out'.)