Our Effete, Sophisticated Friends, Part 289

Just what is it that Egyptian civil servants do all day?

Deutsche Popkultur

The schlock is artistic, in its’ own forgetful way.

Utterly un-Yekish economist and comic actor Ben Stein, seen here recently in an airport sporting a suit and those whacky roller-skating Vans would probably not find it as amusing as we find him.

La BAF's Cavemen Raid Greenpeace's HQ in Paris

This week, la BAF launched a commando raid on Greenpeace's headquarters in Paris, replete with prehistoric yells and modern-day satire…

Les Arriératus à l'assault du siège de Greenpeace
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SPONtaneous Stupidity

Speigel Online’s English Edition could not wait to call the US Embassy, the product of the usual European process of asking everyone and their pet Beagle what you’re allowed to do with your property, “banal”. This brings me to arrive to one conclusion: bite me, you hypocrites.

O.M. Ungers’ demonstrably banal play on Italian Fasci styling was built in DC without objection, and obviously without taking any advice judging by its’ present condition. The dim-witted German habit (which just barely works in the climate of northern Germany) of applying a thin, polymer-modified Portland cement plaster was over crappy masonry work doesn’t work in the challenging climate of the mid-Atlantic, where you need some actual technical ability, not just a condescending attitude, anal-retention problems, and looking good in a lab-coat.

The plaster is trapping condensate coming through the joints, and it’s visible on the entire surface of the façade. It looks like neglected concrete block garage that hasn’t been painted in 23 years.

The notion of doing a basic study on which way the vapor is travelling in winter and summer, a basic exercise that every architect can do in his sleep, would have beneath the man’s firm which is, after all from a nation populated entirely by experts.

It is also, by the way, a hideous and tragically dull. You’ll note how few photos of any size are available of the thing.

Gallic Logic

Your town has a train station.
The train station has three tracks.
What do you choose to call them?

Track 1, Track 2, and Track 3, right?
(Or, alternatively, Track A, Track B, and Track C…)

Indeed, a traveler (French or otherwise) running to catch his train and throwing a (quick) look at the schedule in the main train station would expect to be able to quickly calculate where to go, i.e., whether his train is one, two, or three tracks away, with Track 1 (or Track A) being — needless to say — the first one built and thus the closest…

Not in places like Toulon or Saint Raphaël.
In the latter town, the first railway line is Track 1.
The second railway line is Track… A!
And the third railway line is Track 2!

Except that (just to make things a bit simpler) they go backwards: the main track (the one closest to the main part of the station) is not 1 but… 2, the second is A, and the third (the one furthest away) is 1.

(PS: Did we mention that the SNCF is run by the government?…)

Bull Connor and Stalin Worship

1968. Uttering the number nearly provokes spontaneous orgasms among aging leftists and the adolescents they still manage to guilt trip into buying their line. Prior to its revision it was marked more by leftist brutality than anything else. The restoration of an equitable civil society thereafter was due largely to the right.

When the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968, there were no mass demonstrations in London. Why was that? Can anyone around at the time enlighten me on that worrying issue?

But Hey! Who's counting when they're assigning blame, lionizing the FARC or the Sindero Luminoso, or playing with their Ché dolls? The unfortunate reality was this:

Wait a minute -- 1968 was a pretty good year out here in the Mid-West.

Stock markets were at record highs - corn and wheat prices were going through the roof. Gas was 29 cents a gallon, pickup-trucks were made with wrought iron undercarriages and you can buy a six-pack of beer for only a $1.36

Aside from a bunch of dancing, drugged "flower children" all over the place and them commie-pinko-hippies on the East and West coast supporting charlie and Uncle Ho ... 1968 was a very good year.

Cannes Memories

The bad (although hardly surprising) news from Cannes (above, Saint Tropez's La Voile Rouge on a Croisette beach) is that Karl Zéro (or someone like him) is back… (Between Karl and Oliver Stone's new project, W seems to be in good (?) hands…)

"Oh God, let zem 'URRY UP, nom de #$%$^@&!!" (aka: The Can in Cannes)

Behind the glitter of Cannes (and, more generally, of France?) is sometimes a very different reality: the fact that the town's train station seems to have (as this circling — and very stressed — gent was finding out) only two toilets — not two bathrooms, two toilets! (Later, he let out a sigh as he leaned against the blue column before resuming his nervous circling…)

What a long strange trip it's been

It's José Bové looking for his chemical toilet.

Seriously unhinged

European radical pacifists are very dangerous people.

Because the Dopes Don’t Know how to do Anything Else, That’s Why

At a loss for words in the face of an entire world that you don’t understand? Well then fire up the part organ!

The moronic institutional Marxism of a good part of the French population reveals its real motives. E-nough translates:

What is sorely missed, is a revolutionary Communist party embedded in entreprises that can defy the trade-union bureaucracies and the party reformists who made us resume work all too quickly.

As if in this post 1930s world, this could really translate anywhere.

The New Tranzi Internationale of Solidarity

The European Left has reduced itself to alliances with any violent dope peddling thugs that call themselves 'revolutionaries".

Left-wing Colombian FARC rebels had contacts with leftist groups in Germany, according to data on a laptop belonging to slain commander Raul Reyes, German magazine Der Spiegel reported on Sunday.

Reyes, the number two commander in the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), was killed on March 1 in a raid by Colombian forces just inside Ecuador.

Emails on his laptop show that in January 2005 he sent his son to Germany in a secret mission, Der Spiegel said in an article to be published Monday.

There his son met with members of the German communist party and with far-left politician Wolfgang Gehrcke, who offered to press the European Parliament to take the FARC off its list of terrorist organizations.

“It was a very positive meeting,” Der Spiegel quotes an email found on Reyes’s laptop. “We were able to substantiate several points to reactivate solidarity with the struggle of the Colombian people.”

- with thanks to the chanming and talented Elizabetta

Not Yet Sufficiently Abused to Satisfaction

To understand the violent peak in passivity and inaction, all one need do is look at just what it is that the apparently bookish natives find of literary and/or philosophical value. To sum it up, it sounds more of less like that there MUST be something wrong with the world that MUST be specifically insoluble in any tenable way so that reflection remains mildly painful. It is to remind one of ones’ ability to look like you’re suffering in thought, and that it should be as easy to find as graphitti and broken bottles on the streets of the planet’s continent of Elysium.

Glänta is out to find various missing links, seeking them in short prose, long poems, and essays, treating subjects and objects such as archaeopteryxes, the Higgs particle, borderlands, the physiology of giraffes, Tiktaaliks, the cypher nought and its role in roulette, and colleagues at work.

Conceptualist writer Pär Thörn picked quotes from the blog of a Swedish website for employers and managers, using them as material for a prose-collage with a wailing tone, lamenting over the entire scale of any imaginable misbehaviour on the job and revealing a desperate forlornness: "Could someone please give me a tip on what to 'do'?"

Do? When the improbabilities are endless? Why?

Further to the self-referential hell that European culture lives in, Clarsonimus has made a curious observation:

Extremely high number of young Germans not suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder

“We really can’t explain why this is,”

It seems the answer is right here. Blame the oppressive state that isn’t oppressive enough.

Why did they refuse to hand a blank cheque to the state monopoly on the use of force? And why did they want to pit the counter-violence of the downtrodden against oppressive state force?

Did the radical Left have a psychological defect, as some critics think today? Were they fetishists of violence, existentialist dreamers for whom the use of guns and explosives promised an intoxicating intensification of experience?

In other words, in a culture of ubiquitous pointing and suspicion, internal violence for the sake of pacifism is okay, literary lamentation may take the form of minor workplace grumblings, and there isn’t enough trauma worthy of a novel (but not hospital treatment) to go around.

Let me though, put it more simply: life is so boring and managed that they have to cut themselves to feel anything, and the struggles some find in life are too common to be worth reflecting on. It’s the rare, concocted, top-shelf invented suffering that fetches the best price.

Get down on it

Baisodrome.

When the French were told to "get down on it", they got down.

Purple Helmets of Peace Molesting Children in Côte d’Ivoire

Not really breaking news, as we know, but a brand new round of information on the gentle ministrations of the casques bleu is popping up all over he place:

A 13-year-old girl described to the BBC how 10 UN peacekeepers gang-raped her in a field near her Ivory Coast home, and left her bleeding, trembling and vomiting on the ground.

No action has been taken against the soldiers

BBC World Service is not naming nations. Beside the general opinion that the sensitivities of their own editors matters more than reporting news with the notion that certain types of truthful reportage would be going too far, it might have something to do with the fact that there are so many nations thought of of as model states involved including Europeans, and because the UN are all about Human Rights®© of the saintly downtrodden all the time... or at least their own saintly appearing to be.

Well, it Makes Sense to me...

If your goal is to force conformity on people, and you admire killing people for your own pleasure, concentrating power in a violent, unelected elite, and enslaving, impoverishing, and propagandizing the public into unquestioning fealty, then yes, that might well be the case.

What am I on about? Some hack writer with absolutely no perspective on life asks the question: Ché Guevara and Sean Penn: same battle?

The exact number of Che’s Cuban victims has not been verified, but include people he personally executed and those put to death under his orders. Che’s biographers consistently report that he sent thousands to the firing squad. Over 4,000 deaths are documented to have taken place in Cuba, mostly firing squad execution, in the first three years after Fidel Castro’s takeover (1959-1962). Che Guevara was one of the regime’s chief executioners during this period and is said to have acknowledged ordering "several thousand" executions. All took place without affording the victims fair trials and due process of law.

More Proof of Historic Friendship from the French

In a book review of former CGT head Georges Séguy's autobiography, Michel Noblecourt notes a revelation, that is the true thoughts of a French prime minister and president (in an era before Bush):

cette confidence [que lui fit] Georges Pompidou, avant les négociations de Grenelle, selon laquelle il préférerait "être simple fonctionnaire d'un gouvernement communiste que premier ministre d'une France dominée par les Américains".

Georges Pompidou would rather be a simple civil servant in a communist government than prime minister in a France dominated by Americans? Not a France generally foreign-dominated, mind you, but — specifically — dominated by the Yanks. This reveals not only some things about the supposedly eternal Franco-American friendship, it also gives an idea of how, in contrast to their attitude towards the Americans, the communists and their dictatorships are seen with benign eyes in France. (But no, this can in no way be construed as either surrender or appeasement; perish the thought!)

One is tempted to ask how the Hungarians, the Estonians, the Czechs, and the Poles would feel about a VIP's comment regarding the benefits of having communist governments versus the horrendous bad luck of being dominated by those horrible Americans. It is true that resisting is easier to do in a democracy and with a democratic superpower at one's side than in a communist-dominated government or in a pact dominated by the Kremlin…