Only in the “Holy Land” of Europe

...is using the same, stale excuses for 37 years to cover for your hatefulness considered fresh and new. Of course since America is controlled by greedy atheistic corporations, bible-belt tub-thumpers, and those evil Jooooz (since in the minds of Guardian readers, there are no other Americans), as opposed to the Illuminati, Masons, those evil Jooooz, we can actually call it a centuries old European obsession with finding a bugbear and pantomime villain.

From the same fever-swamp:

Are you crazy! It's not just the foreign policy. Americans hearts are black with evil. That's why we don't like them.

So at the same time we’re powerless as a population, but all thoroughly responsible for American Foreign Policy – all at the same time. That’s one fantastic trick.

“Daddy Drinks Because You Cry”

Only in La-La land can terrorizing your children with fear be considered a virtue. After all, we all know how much an 8 year old can impact the output of CO2, what with all that irresponsible joy-riding they do and such.

Half of young children are anxious about the effects of global warming, often losing sleep because of their concern, according to a new report today.

What’s paralyzingly stupid, is that the author chooses not to notice that the kids are being propagandized out of their childhood joy - again, as if it’s perfectly sensible to channel your fears, politics, and obsessions on them.

Are you doing enough?

One in seven of those questioned by supermarket giant Somerfield said their own parents were not doing enough to improve the environment.

Children learn abstract concepts like this sort of fear from adults, and increasingly adults who are not their parent(s), only parrot them back to adults, increasingly their parent(s) for affirmation. Anyone unaware of this is either a post-modern idiot, doesn't have contact with kids, or couldn’t care less about them. In general, wanting to use them to reinforce your world view leads to them being little more than a mal-adjusted outcome of an experiment for the selfish.

The most feared consequences of global warming included poor health, the possible submergence of entire countries and the welfare of animals.

I guess that every time you turn the lights on, Jesus kills a puppy.

"While many adults may look the other way, this study should show that global warming is not only hurting the children of the future, it's affecting the welfare of kids now.

Now, just who is it hurting those children’s feelings?

Taking to Fascism Like a Fish to Water

In Europe again:

PARIS, Feb. 19 — European governments are preparing legislation to require companies to keep detailed data about people’s Internet and phone use that goes beyond what the countries will be required to do under a European Union directive.

In Germany, a proposal from the Ministry of Justice would essentially prohibit using false information to create an e-mail account, making the standard Internet practice of creating accounts with pseudonyms illegal.

[ ... ]

A draft law in the Netherlands would likewise go further than the European Union requires, in this case by requiring phone companies to save records of a caller’s precise location during an entire mobile phone conversation.

Now let’s try so square that with the complaints of people banging their spoons on their high-chairs that the US Government tasked the NSA analyze patterns in who terror suspects are calling on the phone.

I think I hear crickets.

- with thanks to Joe “Tiberius” Strummer

Leftist Feeding Frenzy

It’s nearly over, but oh, what fun! They didn’t realize that grown-ups were watching.

José Bové Must be Drooling

It’s all so continental. Canal+ runs a comic parody of Brokeback Mountain (their kind of good Americans) where the sheep are taken to an amusement park, ride a rollercoaster and the sheep-herder falls for a sheep. The sheep falls off the ride... The sheep-herder weeps over the sheep at the hospital. Cute and silly, but like the gender-bent "vachibou”, is a slightly sick way to entertain the kids.

Ain’t love grand?

- Muchas gracia to Val and her
delightfully nutty sense of humor.

The difference between a liberal and a leftist

The easiest way to tell the difference between a liberal and a leftist is that a liberal cheers against his country only when a Republican is in the White House, while a leftist cheers against his country all of the time

writes Benjamin Duffy of the University of Massachusetts.

Simply change the party in power, and liberals will change their minds on just about everything. Leftists on the other hand, are a lot more consistent. They're consistently wrong, venomous, anti-American and misguided, but at least they're consistent.

A Few That Get It

Imagine a world where the European Left went unchecked, and the moronic protesters in the “European Street” had their way. The obsession has arrived at it’s natural conclusion. Even many Europeans feel threatened by the disease of anti-American hatred.

Russian Thugs? Well, Now That’s Okay!

...The Americans are making us build an anti-missile defense!...

True only if you call a plain threat by Putin to attack an ABM site an anti-missile system. The notion of siting an ABM defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic (similar to the one that proudly and famously defended Moscou), is to defend Europe, and defend the US from Iranian, Pakistani, Russian, or n'importe qui rope-a-dope and double whammy.

The two-fer in this case is to blackmail North America by threatening Europe. A Europe not slavishly defended by the US gives in. Alliance ended, and n'importe qui exacts their economic and political terms over a thin-skinned western Europe. To boot, Polonia and Czechia are on the flight-path to the East Coast. No brainer then, eh? Nope. Not to Pancho who has no problem taking sides, and has no difficulty giving EUtopia over to a threat if he can have feel Euphoric about the prospect of New York, Toronto, or n'importe qui being vaporized.

Were the system only intended to defent the US, it would only be deployed in Maine and Alaska, in which care Pancho would point out some theory about an insular, but selfish America which as always is "damed if it do, and damned if it don't."

Were We to Use European Post-Katrina-esque Logic

We would tut-tut, imagine ourselves uncharacteristically faithful for the first time in our lives, and say that the Gods must be angry.

- with thanks to George,
who is still a smartass.

Even If THEY Think It's Kitsch, It's Still The Saddest Thing I've Ever Seen...

More here, unfortunately, including some good old fashioned anti-tourist bigotry too.

”Why don’t the bastards spend their money and leave!?!”

Les Lumières ont tendance à s'éteindre par ici

Pascal Bruckner blasts multiculturalism back to the stone age in a devastating essay (français / English).

Papon conserve sa médaille

Et puis, Mitterand avait bien sa Francisque. Deux personnalités de Vichy Fwance médaillées.

Blanc bonnet et bonnet blanc

The press can spin this by stressing the fact that Le Pen said it, but the fact is that Le Pen was only expressing a typically French point of view which is shared
across the political spectrum here -- from the extreme Left to the extreme Right.

Happy Birthday to We

Three years ago, ¡No Pasarán! started with a story reflecting on what remains a bugaboo and greenie strawman called VOCs , Dieudonné, who is still a fascist crackpot, and some dude with the hutzpah to name himself W.
imploring himself to hang loose and let the therapetic coolness enter the vertebrae.

Being a tad worried about my reputation [over at the blog Merde in France] I have decided to not write any controversial posts on this blog. Therefore, I will commentate on France's current events with all the psychotic calm and serenity of a Palestinian father who explains that he can't wait for his two surviving sons to become martyrs. How's that?

Sounds great. If anything changes on the blighty continent. we'll let you know.

High Density Mendacity in Marker and Ink

One minute, she’s a sweet, little middle aged milf “girl” in her 50s, the French Social Model is bad, and the Danish one (involving heaps of free-market economics by French Stalinistic standards), and the next minute, she’s a “raging” representation of Marianne, the embodiment and keeper of the state, culture, and the advertized good they say they do for humanity.

With all the contorting, and abandonment of their sacred cows, I’d say they’re desperate to get any candidate that might have ever used the word “Comrade” to neutralize whatever objective reality survived the press’ cognitive sterilization. It’s telling – they’re willing to pull out the magic wand of gender, a candidate's (nonexistent) political innocence, and the childish smears of a “happy-face/miserable face” comparison. And to think she started at the top when someone made a few phone calls on Royal's behalf to Mitterand.

The “independent” newspaper of record - balanced, nuanced, thoughtful, always seem to resort to their old Kärcher. You big, mean man! How could you say anything critical of a politico if she’s female and a lefty?!? I'll cry "rape!"

Funny word that, “Kärcher”... The name of a company that makes cleaning equipment, the French use it to describe anyone overbearing, intolerant, or aggressive. Itself a verbal blunderbuss with a menacingly teutonic-sounding name, it relies on their natural bigotry to impress you with the fact that’s just a freaking pressure-washer marketed by freaky power ranger models which appear to be adults, and employing some typically European quasi-S&M chic, vinyl body-suits, and names for products like “powerslave” that brings Gustav, Jean, und Ute to their happy place.

Coo-Coo for Coco Puffs

George Monboit points out in plain sight what no-one has been able to contend with in private. Conspiracy nuts are making the left look bad. In fact they make all of humanity look bad, and they are beginning to characterize a whole ideology of the left. They are the "black helicopter crowd", only 1000 times more numerous, and they fell off their barstools a long time ago.

The obvious corollorary to the belief that the Bush administration is all-powerful is that the rest of us are completely powerless. In fact it seems to me that the purpose of the "9/11 truth movement" is to be powerless. The omnipotence of the Bush regime is the coward's fantasy, an excuse for inaction used by those who don't have the stomach to engage in real political fights.

Let me give you an example. The column I wrote about Loose Change two weeks ago generated 777 posts on the Guardian Comment is Free website, which is almost a record. Most of them were furious. The response from a producer of the film, published last week, attracted 467. On the same day the Guardian published my article about a genuine, demonstrable conspiracy: a spy network feeding confidential information from an arms control campaign to Britain's biggest weapons manufacturer, BAE Systems. It drew 60 responses. The members of the 9/11 cult weren't interested. If they had been, they might have had to do something. The great virtue of a fake conspiracy is that it calls on you to do nothing.

The 9/11 conspiracy theories are a displacement activity. A displacement activity is something you do because you feel incapable of doing what you ought to do. A squirrel sees a larger squirrel stealing its horde of nuts. Instead of attacking its rival, it sinks its teeth into a tree and starts ripping it to pieces. Faced with the mountainous challenge of the real issues we must confront, the chickens in the "truth" movement focus instead on a fairytale, knowing that nothing they do or say will count, knowing that because the perpetrators don't exist, they can't fight back. They demonstrate their courage by repeatedly bayoneting a scarecrow.

Much as I disagree with the left, we all need them. The world needs to have a dialogue that challenges us to discover just what it is we advocate and why. A counterpoint keeps an individual from falling in love with his own ideas and his own image. In other words as frothing-mad as Monboit can get about the US, for example, he’s intelligent enough not to let himself be convince into comforting fantasies that prop-up his world view.

Just watch them. Watch them attack, even Monboit, whom even crackposts like to use as a generator of factual crutches. The swarming behavior of these loutish attacks isn’t consistent with any form of skepticism of a “scholar for truth.” It’s the exact opposite, and because they go so far to engineer a truth which is neither leading to their conclusions on its’ own, they invent it. Plainly, it’s evil.
It might seem cute when it involves a wish-seeking “UFO community”, but to concoct conspiracies in an effort to convince yourself of superior insight that an ignorant universe simply can’t grasp?

Can we say sociopath, kids?

Tales from the Human Warehouse

The entire society seem to suffer from the social complex of the ghetto.

The European Commission's annual report on "social protection and social inclusion" also found 10 percent of people living in households without anybody working as well as wide discrepancies between life expectancies between EU member states.

It’s not so much that ther circumstances are the cause of this mediocrity, but the symptom. The problem is that they imagined – have always imagined – that life could be engineered, at least the life of the non-elite.

It requires a low view of human nature to believe anything that powerless and disjointed can be made good, if not anything other than lifeless. They are, of course better than you and me, and we know this because they say so.

- With thanks to the studious and scholarly Arf

A fate worse than death

Having your passing analysed, Derrida style, by French pseudo-intellectual journalmists.

An Obsessive Impulse, Acted Out Even to Their Detriment

Compare and contract: “deep” European style news analysis which amounts to a recitation of old facts which an equally peevish American newspaper and magazine are willing to repeat. It has neither an outline, theory, or conclusion, and the reader comments display the same pedantry.

That fact ordinary citizens of European liberal democracies feel more threatened by America than Iran (or Putin’s Russia) is not just because of a lapse of judgment that can easily be dismissed. It is cause for alarm.

I don’t think nutty opinions and a zeitgeist are any reason for the US to structure international policy. Historically the reasons haven’t mattered to the anonymous street-corner critics of Europe. One year it’s staring down at the American “Health Craze”, the next year, we’re all obese. It never ends, and European public opinion certainly isn’t a meaningful guide to achieving anything – even things that (like maintaining pressure during the end of the cold war) result in a benefit to those critics themselves.

But all of it comes at a price, as we see in this item by a former Brazilian diplomat who quit in protest over the harm being done by the obsession of anti-Americanism by Brazilians on Brazil’s standing in the world and choices she makes. H. E. Roberto Abdenur made his feelings about this new infantilism known, and has paid a price:

According to reports in the Brazilian press, the ex-ambassador has been snubbed since openly criticizing Brazil's decision to recognize China as a market economy. Amorim gave him a chance to recant but Abdenur preferred to maintain his principles. The old friendship is gone now.

"There is a very strong ideological element present in Brazil's foreign policy," Abdenur told Veja. "The South-South idea as the dominant axis shows a backward anti-Americanism. This has been showing inside the Itamaraty (the Foreign Ministry) in several ways. There has been an indoctrination.

"Veteran diplomats, not only the young ones, have been forced to read some texts when they arrive or leave Brasília. Books with this ideological posture's bias. This is something irksome. You don't need a dean of discipline at the Itamaraty."

According to the retired ambassador his ex colleagues in the Foreign Ministry feel that Brazilian diplomats nowadays only get promoted when they are attuned with certain political and ideological line and not due to their capacity or skills. He also charges that there is no respect for plurality of opinions.

Now, like in a medieval show-trial of witchcraft, one must “recant.”

The Crushing Stupidity of Crowds

It takes some of that fantastic magical thinking to try to plausibly say that Maoism, or any other mutation of Marxism is “green” or ever was. They were the biggest polluters that ever were, completely against anything non-standard or biologically diverse, and were the lovely sort who tried to force people into a mono-culture using as their tools good old fashioned lefty “re-education” camps, mass-starvation, and repression.

And yet, and yet, there is a large subculture of zombies out there who think that red-makes-green. It might, but only in the way Arbeit macht frei, and there’s no-one left out there to pollute the world with their horrible dependence on oxygen. Despite all the facts, despite reason, they still believe that the environment would somehow be better when more people are farming smallholdings, and being less productive – which is defined by the amount of activity, including energy, chemical, and human that it takes to produce anything.

They continue to believe this trash because they are a cult. They are offered the grand, redemptive perfection of a future bucolic existence that would require them to spend they shortened lives in backbreaking work in the fields, even though the adherents are almost entirely urban, young, and employed for 35 hours a week if they have work at all. They are scared with a Armageddon story, but not SO MUCH or SO MEANINGFUL an Armageddon story that you cant repeat it to them incessantly to keep them hooked in. They are fed a steady repetition of the exact same “it’s worse than we thought” story every 2 to 3 weeks. The world-view sold to them is meant to reinterpret modernity, just as a cult tries to keep adherents well programmed by destroying their understanding of the outside world.

The buzzword is "decroissance" or dismantling of the sustained civilization we live in for one sustainable at a miserable level. They literally want to dismantle the product of active human effort of the sort that feeds, heats, employs, inspires, and entertains civilization. They don't want to be the only ones to pack up and leave town to live a third world existence, they want everyone else to as well. Granted, going back to a subsitence level would make "happy valley" a crowded place, which is why virtually all of humanity doesn't actually do this anymore by choice, so I guess 95% of us will just have to die for their sustained happiness.

They want to impose this on people by taking development away. Living in a developed socity would no longer be a choice you could make, because they would have it dismantled, presumable by people with some mechanical skills that aren't exactly agrarian in nature. I suppose they will compensate us all their concept of an sustainable afterlife.

To the hardcore greens the human world is irredeemably cruel, and there is no method such as reason, limits, or force that can deal with it, so one must make a paralyzingly large set of rules for all of those scary people. Capitalism, the individual act of creating something of value, is of course, very, very bad – but occasionally and regrettably seen as sufferable, but not normal, and only temporary – as if the notion of a entirely ruled and managed society and world is somehow normal, good, or fit for adults. It isn’t.

In turns there is affirmation, scares, engagement, and opportunities for public displays of redemption. “Greens” are nothing more than a cult. Your life really doesn’t matter to them – regardless what they say. All captured assassins who are sociopaths pretend they’re destroying someone or something in the interest of the common man. They wat your attention, and they want to believe that they died for your sins.

Even stranger is the link right under this image, offering comebacks to people who offend members of the crop cult greens. It includes comebacks like: “so you think material gain is economic development?”

True, but only when you’re wrong. China will surpass the US in the carbon emissions in 2009, but it’s economy is smaller. Will these Greens bring themselves to march against China or India? Certainly not. It doesn’t fit their simplistic script of class-struggle theory replacing reason and action, which is something they as a group are less likely to be capable of. Think back - these people were not the kids in school that excelled at math, they were the kids who did well at Sociology, and it was probably because they were looking for answers to personal questions that would otherwise require them to fess-up to family or friends without a written theory to fall back on. So too the imagined ills of society, and an imagined end to life itself. They came looking for answers, and they left as evangelists, kool-aid in had and ready to (once again) starve China to see if their theory is sustainable.

Pacifism, Brotherly Love, and Hypocrisy

Another great moment in Euro-double think: Austria defended the sale of 50 caliber sniper rifles to Iran (which has nothing to do with the insurgents in Iraq, natürlich!).

American troops have recovered more than 100 "Steyr .50 HS" rifles in Iraq, part of an Austrian consignment of 800 such weapons delivered to Iran over American protests that they could be given to insurgents, the Daily Telegraph reported.

The Austrian government approved the sale of the rifles, made by precision weapons maker Steyr Mannlicher GmbH, after it concluded in 2004 that they would be used to fight narcotics smugglers.

They called the sale “unimpeachable” – whatever that was supposed to mean in this context.

Imagine, if you will anyone actually believing that any of this fine Austro-Iranian weaponry would actually be used in close-quarters work like drug interdiction and not an infantry setting or channeled directly to their mass-murdering “partners is peace” to pick off coalition troops and their armored equipment.

As usual, European industry and society has whored itself just to make a few bucks. How much of their strange little lives is spent trying to rationalize this stuff and consolidate it with what they like to think their societies hold up as virtues.