So Does that Mean I Can I Vote in Your Failed State?

Forget the Europeans, I’m still waiting for anyone in the Arab world to elect a minority or a woman to anything, let alone not feel compelled to make them second rate citizens.

Stiff Cerebellum Upper Lip

EUROSOC discovers just what it is that the Guardian finds a hideous, unjust degree of impoverishment that, frankly, YOU’RE supposed to DO SMETHING ABOUT, dammit!

"With inflation soaring, property prices sky high, wages relatively static, labour markets gridlocked and sluggish or slowing economies, (the Guardian's interviewees) are among tens of millions of Europeans raised to expect that their degrees and diplomas will assure them a relatively high quality of life who are now realising that the world has changed. The disappointment is a shock with big political, social, cultural, even demographic consequences," the newspaper reports.

But here’s the weasel in the woodpile:

On the face of it, they have our sympathy, but the Guardian holds the violins: One thirty year old Roman student lives in a flat his parents bought for him, while a 24 year old working as a stagaire in a Paris publishing house spends her weekends in her parents' country house by the sea in Brittany - an experience she claims will "leave a bitter taste in her mouth."

There are probably American EURSOC readers, possibly the sons and daughters of impoverished immigrants, who are reading this and spitting their morning coffee.

Awwww... It looks like SOMEBODY needs a HUG.

It's difficult to get worked up about their plight. Presumably our French publisher stands to inherit the country pile when her parents die, as well as their city home. Perhaps this inheritance will help her to buy a flat in Paris, where property prices have skyrocketed in the past decade. Even modest family apartments in the 20th arrondisement where our publishing stagaire lives can cost over 400,000 euros; choose a less gritty neighbourhood and the price can double.

This has certainly hit those who work in the cultural world and those at the modest end of state employment, such as schoolteachers. But state employees can balance their sometimes meagre incomes against the free childcare they enjoy as fonctionnaires, plus France's enviable education and health coverage. Pensions are better than those in the private sector, too.

Despite these complaints, around 80 percent of schoolchildren claim they want to grow up to work for the state. One understands the appeal of a guaranteed job for life in uncertain times, but there simply isn't enough money in the state's coffers to ensure these people enjoy the same standard of living as their parents.

As if that ever mattered to the people demanding “social justice” for themselves.

Run, Human Shield! Run!

Armed Hezbollah militants warded off members of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) last month when the peacekeepers discovered a truck carrying weapons and ammunition belonging to the Lebanon-based guerilla group.

How, pray tell, did they find this out?

The incident was referred to briefly in a semi-yearly report submitted to the UN Security Council

[snip]

"This serious violation of the UN resolution raises concerns," the report said.

The incident was not reported in the media at the time of its occurrence.

Nonetheless, Hizballah’s position is straightforward: bang their spoons on their high-chairs and insist on how unfair it is that they couldn’t occupy territory that they agreed not to occupy. The Norwegian Blue Parrot of media fairness reports:

Hezbollah accuses the United Nations of being biased after the UN head called the movement 'a challenge for Lebanon's sovereignty'.

UN Chief Ban Ki-moon claimed in a statement on Wednesday that "Hezbollah's maintenance of a paramilitary capacity poses a key challenge to the (Lebanon) government's monopoly on the legitimate use of force."

No shit, Sherlock. The hilarious thing about Hizballah, is that after calling the statement unfair on the basis of their right to be a paramilitary antagonist to the government, they also go to plan B and C, insisting...

The report "is limited to information emanating from an enemy party

and if that’s not enough...

lacks credibility and accuracy

which would make its’ “unfairness” sort of meaningless, unless it was entirely accurate, even if they did conceal it from the press (embarrassing as it was) and bury it in a report released 3 months later... They are, after all, in the midst of crazies bringing some bad juju upon the purple helmeted gladiators, they are now being threatened by al-Qaida, who are also threatening the Lebanese for good measure. They also think you're a dillwed. Tell ya what, Doctor Zawahiri – you hack... In the spirit of the buzz in the air, I also threaten you – but otherwise am not going to “express concerns” about you.

Our Effete, Sophisticated Friends, Part 288

That superior education system has trained an class of supermen of eye-hand coordination: these guys can use a computer and play with their meat-whistles at the same time.

Hide the Livestock

No, really. I mean it.

Gramscian Sleeper Cell

And to think it only took Spiegel 40 years to notice:

Germany's domestic intelligence agency has warned of "extremist structures" within the Left Party. A new report lists a number of left-wing extremist factions within the party, including the Communist Platform, the Marxist Forum and a pro-Cuba group.

As if decades of the Red Brigade, the RAF, the Bader-Meinhof Gang, and a variety of stooges that the KGB didn’t even have to keep bankrolling after a while wasn’t enough to show them what these “revolutionaries” want “revolution” and that peace, to them, is just another word for nothing left to lose, nothing to gain, and no actual self.

The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution is responsible for monitoring political extremism in Germany. Among its main focuses are far-right extremists, far-left extremists, Islamist terrorists and the Scientology organization. According to the agency's 2006 annual report -- the most recent available -- there are around 31,000 left-wing extremists in Germany, of whom around 6,000 are prepared to use violence to achieve their ends.

After all, for all of their airy rhetoric, if you can find it, they are even more authoritarian than the absurdly misdirected people who monitor them by law. Trapped somewhere in the last century and taught one campaign du jour after another filled with loony allegations and false arguments, they reinforce the ideas that limit liberties that they've been trained to find lacking everywhere around them.

Peer into their Diseased Minds

A Steaming Pile of Global Warming

Funny, don’t you think, that “radicals” and their causes that they promote as “humanistic" can’t ever seem to account for science or human nature?

The average temperature in April 2008 was 51.0 F. This was -1.0 F cooler than the 1901-2000 (20th century) average, the 29th coolest April in 114 years. The temperature trend for the period of record (1895 to present) is 0.1 degrees Fahrenheit per decade.

Our Effete, Sophisticated Friends, Part 287

Seeking out the nation known worldwide for its culture.

Broadly Interpreting Fault and Cause

Expat Yank Robert Tuminello reports on the over-extension and outright inversion of the usual atmospheric accusations leveled against anything American on the BBC.

Leaving no notion of sovereignty intact and thinking that there exists somewhere a “a big book of International Law “ that all the children are forced to live by, quite unsurprisingly, some hack has construed the ability anyone in the world has to level stifling, abusive, libel charges in the UK freedom of speech.

Why so cranked up?

Governor Paterson signed legislation yesterday that will allow New York writers to go to local courts to seek legal protection if they are sued for libel in foreign countries.

The law was proposed in response to a defamation judgment that a Saudi financier secured in Britain against a journalist in New York, Rachel Ehrenfeld. The new law bars New York courts from enforcing the libel judgments of foreign countries that have fewer free speech protections than America…

I assume the writer thinks this, because in the US, you can’t use the court to gag anyone who writes anything about you without examining the veracity of the libel. According to the BBC, this inability to snuff others, by some miracle, has been renamed “laws governing freedom of speech in the US” as if there was none. This about a country that has a Constitution and a Bill of Rights, from the position of someone in the UK where there are no explicitly outlined rights, and the “Constitution” amounts to what normal people call a “state of mind” and not tangible legal writ in the way anyone living in civilization would understand it. I’ll draw you a picture: by “fewer free speech protections” in this case, they mean the UK not Saudi Arabia.

The only thing that BBC parasite sees worth protecting here isn’t free speech – quite the opposite – the scribbler’s noble cause is a meal-ticket for lawyers that leads to an imposition of limits on speech abroad. In fact this very much matches Europeans notions of what trans-nationalism is: their mountain of administrative rules imposed on others, robbing others’ freedoms from below either for their notion of “your own good”, their managed-society Jinna, or money.

Another European Demagogue Revels in His Anti-Americanism

Le réalisateur d'Arizona Dream, qui vécut ce tournage aux Etats-Unis comme un cauchemar, cultive l'antiglobalisation et un antiaméricanisme forcenés.

Emir Kusturica, whose favorite target is the United States "et son industrie cinématographique qu'il honnit" and who refers to Americans as "rats", has created his own village in Serbia, writes Christophe Châtelot.

Küstendorf a pourtant un petit air de Disneyland ethno-serbe. "A la limite du kitsch", glisse un visiteur.

Our Effete, Sophisticated Friends, Part 286

Another continental fetishist with the love-jones

Les Gros Titres de la preSSe Française

Pancho is angry that the entire society isn’t a monolithic lumpenproletariat that follows him around.

Elsewhere: running out of any analogs and ideas, some French quack calls for more flatulence as a “May 1968” of the large intestine. After all, isn’t the European way to tax it “for the good of society” and call it a universal health plan.