Saturday, July 14, 2007

For My Money, There Are Two Kinds of Men That Walk the Earth

Men of action; and all others (thanks to Valerie)…


Randolph C White (a different sort of intellectual with different sorts of theories) continues:
[Regarding] the best and the brightest that we have in this country … that unique band of brotherhood that is the infantrymen … Their moral clarity won't allow them to sit back and let someone else provide the blanket of freedom that we here today cherish and so many others take for granted. …

Your head will not be filled with the empty theory of those who in actuality know very little, because they lack the intestinal fortitude to commit to anything that requires risk. I'm speaking of the snide arrogant sort who spends the day blaming America for every wrong in the world before going home to sleep at night under that blanket of freedom provided by better men. Better men just like you…

Thump, thump, thump...

Via American Digest, we meet a typical propagandized European who can’t quite consolidate the media plonk he’s been digesting and the facts: prattling on and on about the environment, he forgets that without America, there might never have been a movement for clean air and clean water.

What I do mind is that Americans are setting a bad example for everyone else; as a small example the streets of Britain are filled with grotesquely large 4x4s. I am quite sure the fashion comes from across the pond. As another, the Chinese might well ask why they should restrict their economic growth when America already uses many times more fuel than they do - and they'd be right.
Thump, thump, thump... No Londoner has ever thought for himself then. Eh? Is the critic’s assumption that they’re incapable of ti?
What I do mind is various American corporations not only trying to foist their Frankenstein food on us, but trying to make it impossible for us to tell that they are doing it - did you know that Monsanto are claiming in various court cases that labelling of food containing GM soya is against free trade treaties?
Thump, thump, thump... Whatever you do, don’t mind the omnipresence of that Europe, Inc., that chosen champion that gets subsidies, putsches, and industrial espionage services from the all caring, all fair emotional crutch called the bloated, overbearing state.
As for the last paragraph - well, personally, I don't dive a damn whether Americans kill themselves through gross overeating and under-exercising, filling their food with chemicals for short-term profit or turning their cities' air into poison gas - not to mention handing terrorists billions of dollars to kill Americans (and others) with.
Thump, thump, thump... Pay no notice to the man behind the curtain, the one that continues to coddle any dictator with natural resources which can provide an economic advantage, or for that matter, seven centuries of it.

More curious still is that the commenter misuses the moniker “Fletcher Christian”, try to make himself out to be a dashing rebellious hero who was in fact a thin-skinned, emotional pedophile.

Too tall, too short. Too fit, too fat. Too this, too that, and so on. Is it any wonder that the quickest way for a European to make someone detest hin is merely to call attention to their received wisdom.

Friday, July 13, 2007

Stalin II

There is a misperception that [Ernesto "Che" Guevara] was a free spirit. He had cold Stalinist personality. He used to sign his early correspondence "Stalin II." He said early on that he saw the solution to all the world's problems behind (the) Iron Curtain. But this was not some hippie dippie Marxist, Guevara said in speech in 1962 that he regarded the very spirit of rebellion as anti-revolutionary. Figure that out, he said individualism must disappear in Cuba. If you tried to do your own thing under his regime you wound up in a prison camp.
Humberto Fontova researched the man behind the image, exploring why pop culture seems so enamored of Che Guevara. Speaking to dozens of Cubans who knew and fought with Guevara (1928-1967), Fontova pieced together a very different picture of Guevara for his book.
He had an arrogant nature. I interviewed people who visited him and tried to save their sons from firing squad executions without trial. He liked to toy with them. He liked to pick up the phone in front of weeping mothers and bark out, "Execute the Fernandez boy right now!"

He was clinically a sadist. Fidel, you could call a psychopath. Murders didn't affect him one way or another. For him, it was a utilitarian slaughter to consolidate his one-man rule.

Che, from all the people I talked to, relished the slaughter. He had a section of a wall knocked out of his second story office so he could watch his beloved firing squads at work.

…Alan Colmes of "Hannity and Colmes" once asked me, "Why are these stories coming out now as opposed to 20 years ago? All of a sudden, you discover all this horrible information on Che."

I said, "No, Alan, people have been talking about this since 1959, but it never made it past the mainstream media filter." That monopoly is over, so our side can tell its story to middle America. I like to think this book is an example of that.

Whinging Your Way to Utopia


If this Tintin story is as racist as the “campaigners” allege, and it is so grossly offensive to the general public, why then, hasn’t that a lack of demand pulled it off of the shelf? It was published in 1931 – after Marx’s Das Kapital, but before Mein Kampf which are also still on the shelf and have been exceedingly more harmful to civilization than a old-timey Belgian comic book.

An official British racism watchdog recommended on Wednesday that bookshops across the country remove copies of a comic book which tells the tale of fictional Belgian hero Tintin's adventures in the Congo.
Britain's Commission for Racial Equality (CRE) recommended that "Tintin in the Congo" be removed from shelves after it received a complaint from a member of the public who had seen it in a branch of the Borders chain of book stores.
To understand the meddlesome mindset of folks of the ‘campaigning’ ilk, the fact that it could go unpurchased or ignored would not enter their minds. While banning a comic book gives them the Tipper Gore air, Mein Kampf and Das Kapital would be defended as something use as a barometer of europe's history.

The same is true for all of three, whatever it is someone wants to ban. Besides, all three of these tomes seem to get scooped up by bipeds under 17 anyway.

(h/t to Ikonos.)

I still wonder how could ONE complaining customer be heard if certain well placed political outfits weren't willing to make something of it, and appealing to an already popular cause? In the pedantic world of contemporary advocacy the whole story can harldy be seen as some kind of brave challenge against a sea of iniquity, since one can hardly imagine any significant number of people in the western world in the past 20 years actually being for racism. Why too was Borders was targeted and not, say, an exclusively British bookseller? Probably because it would appear to come too close to home.

Thursday, July 12, 2007

A game we have all played for nearly fifty years whose only winners have been corrupt governments and the international development industry

Aid can alleviate immediate misery and that is why we love it. Charity is a profoundly human response to all those images that pull on our heartstrings. But all evidence points to the maddening conclusion that, in the long run, aid not only has no positive effect on economic growth, it may even undermine it.
Discussing the TED conference, Jennifer Brea describes "a game we have all played for nearly fifty years whose only winners have been corrupt governments and the international development industry" (thanks to Ashbrook's Joseph Knippenberg).
Andrew Mwenda, an outspoken Ugandan journalist who was jailed last year for criticizing President Museveni, lambasted the Western world's "international cocktail of good intentions" for robbing Africa of its future. After all, what country has ever gotten rich from aid? What Africa needs is investment.

…Here's a radical idea: if we really want to help, why not ask Africans, not their governments, how they perceive the challenges before them, the dreams they have for the future, and the resources they think they need to realize them?

Instead, we let a well-intentioned Irish rock star, a Jewish-American economist, and their Hollywood cohort become the voice and face of Africa.

And in the process, the story of the other Africa, the Africa that is dynamic, creative, and wants to work as a partner and the leader of its own future, is being drowned out by the clarion cry of the anti-poverty glitterati–and our own appetites for gripping, salacious headlines of war, poverty, and grief.

Now Clinton, There Was a President/an American We Respected!

It's all (its only) about Bush!! (Merci to Hervé)
Jacques Chirac renversé sur sa chaise, la tête en arrière, à ronfler bruyamment. La scène paraît surréaliste, mais d'après Alastair Campbell, l'ancien chef de la communication de Tony Blair, elle se serait bel et bien produite lors d'une réunion dans le cadre du G8 en juillet 2000. La scène se passe à Tokyo. Le secrétaire américain au Trésor, Larry Summers, monte à la tribune. Le public ne lui est pas acquis d'avance : Bill Clinton est retardé par des négociations, le chancelier allemand Gerhard Schroeder se désintéresse de la réunion, Tony Blair estime que c'est "la réunion la plus inutile" à laquelle il n'a jamais assisté. Quant au président français, il est arrivé le dernier.

Le secrétaire américaine au Trésor se lance alors dans un discours fleuve. C'est alors que la scène se produit : "Chirac s'est renversé sur sa chaise, la tête en arrière, il a ronflé bruyamment, puis après quelques minutes il a poussé un grognement sonore selon Tony Blair et il a crié 'trop long, trop long' en anglais pendant que Summers n'arrêtait pas de parler", raconte Alastair Campbell, dans ses mémoires. La salle est choquée, à commencer par Tony Blair qui "a dit qu'il n'avait jamais vu une manifestation aussi impressionnante d'impolitesse et d'anti-américanisme", se souvient Alastair Campbell [emphasis mine].
More examples of nothing-but-the-deepest-respect-for-Americans/ for-presidents-other-than-Bush (such as Clinton) can be found in my book.
… quand Javier Solana leva son verre en décembre 1996 pour porter un toast à Warren Christopher, qui assistait à son dernier déjeuner au QG de l’Otan (il faisait ses adieux à la politique en tant que ministre des affaires étrangères de Bill Clinton), le ministre des affaires étrangères français... se leva et quitta la pièce. La place de Hervé de Charrette fut prise par l’ambassadeur français à l’Otan, lequel ambassadeur (Gérard Errara) tourna le dos aux personnalités présentes pendant la durée du toast pour parler avec un assistant. Imagine-t’on la réaction si un ministre étranger — américain, de surcroît ! — avait traité un Français de la même manière ? Les Français, des plus hautes instances au dernier des citoyens, n’en croiraient pas leurs yeux et secoueraient leur tête de dégoût devant un tel manque de savoir-vivre.

C’est un épisode parmi d’autres qui montre que, contrairement à la légende qu’on veut véhiculer aujourd’hui, les relation avec l’Amérique de Clinton n’étaient pas au plus beau (sauf quand le président démocrate s’alignait sur la position française, bien sûr).

Wednesday, July 11, 2007

But the Chipmunk on the Right Isn’t Even Bald!?!


While rose worshipping fascists accuse the media of being in the pocket of the right, the media run yet another apologetic documentary about François Mitterand. Yet another one that would eventually make the lumpenproletariat believe that Premier Chernyenko was an Olympic athlete.

‘Ey! What’s Not To Love Dere Anyway?

Can anyone tell me why making fun of separatists is so much fun? I mean, it isn’t like they don’t want to get paid to hate the rest of humanity anyway.

Tuesday, July 10, 2007

BBC: The Little Revisionists That Could



Quality time with Papa. How cute.

Yup. Everything We Do is all about YOU, Man!

Goofy comments about the recent roll-out of the Boeing 787 were sure to pop up out of no-where as they always do, even in “classy” publications like the Nouvel Observateur.

quel bel oiseau mécanique, sans nul doute les commerciaux de Boeing ont fait du lobbying à merveille pour atteindre pareil chiffre en vente!

Il est beau de voir la technologie au service de l'homme, les américains nous donnent une belle image de leur esprit de créativité, mais ecornée par bien des crimes.....
translation:
what a beautiful bird, without any doubt the marketing types at Boeing did some serious lobbying to reach similar sales figures! It’s great to see technology being put to the service of man. Americans give us a beautiful indication of their creative spirit, but it’s chipped away at by many crimes.....
Biiiiig
circle! Industry, crimes against humanity... all the same thing because the American is an idea – one idea, one so many of these fabulous continental intellects try to fit in a single, very small box. One of their imagining.

The typical take by those socialized out of their common sense is that a business like Boeing’s shouldn’t primarily be about business, but that when it does succeed, it must have been lobbying. Talk about projection!
That someone would imagine (as so many Euro-brainiacs do) that every part of America somehow coordinates to say something to them and them alone is a rather typical recurring feature of the America Derangement Syndrome that we get so many laughs at here at ¡ No Pasarán! Nearly as much as the amusement the people who say that stuff give us. You know we’re always looking for that gold medalist in the crackpot Olympics.

- Merci buckets to Michael
for the heads-up..

Otherwise Returning to the Middle Ages

In Quebecistan, it’s always 1938. It really isn’t much of a surprise when you imagine just how much the province that has done so much to guilt trip and bilk the Anglophones that they have a hate-hate relationship with has grown into a complex of Cultural Nationalism and Socialism. So much so, they might as well try a beer hall putsch, and then seek compensation from Ottawa.

Brussels Journal Reports:

Some three weeks ago, in close succession, anti-Semitic cartoons – at least two of which appeared to have been borrowed from Der Sturmer – were published on the editorial pages of three mainstream newspapers in the Canadian province of Quebec. The cartoons concerned the meeting between Mario Dumont, the leader of Quebec’s opposition party, the Action Democratique du Quebec, with fundraisers who had traditionally supported Quebec’s Liberal Party – the party currently in power. Some of the fundraisers were Jewish businessmen.
That some of them are Jewish is more than enough to stoke these primitives who have in the past and up to the present day, have used their own “cultural exception” be a fig leaf for their bigotry, racism, and tradition of corrupt political political blackmail.



Soldier, diplomat, and statesmanlike Governor General Georges-Phil Vanier would be in tears.

Monday, July 09, 2007

The MSM article suggests the local population is against an American base "when in fact the situation is quite the opposite"

The article about the protests surrounding the expansion of the U.S. Army garrison on the military airfield (Neighbors of U.S. Army in Italy reach their limit, July 4) caught my attention
writes Christian Braham, an American citizen who has lived for over 30 years in Vicenza, Italy (his father is a former U.S. Army officer and his mother is Italian), to the International Herald Tribune.
I was dismayed by the tone of the article because it suggests that the entire local population is against the building of the new base when in fact the situation is quite the opposite.

The base is one of the region's largest employers. Had it shut down, hundreds of Italians would have lost their jobs. The economic impact of this garrison is huge; and most locals are aware of this. The majority of Italians see this as an opportunity for increased jobs, contracts and everything else that goes with this kind of project.
Indeed, while the IHT version of a previous NYT article (by Peter Kiefer) saw nothing wrong with generalizing to all the nation's citizens (Italians protest expansion of U.S. base), it is only towards the end of the more recent piece that we learn that "the protesters are not representative of this city of 114,000", and even then, this information (needless to say) has to be "nuanced" by the fact that it is the opinion of one person and that, the opinion of someone on the right (one Enrico Hüllweck who is Vicenza's center-right mayor).

Sunday, July 08, 2007

Uninsured in America

And loving it.



Any way you shake it, it beats Canuckistan.