Intolerant Europe at a Glance

Again, and again, and again - the mighty braintrust can't even get past it's medieval concept of race and culture, even when they're out looking rage out with irrational invective. When they have a bone to pick with Israelis, they wan't to smash heads, only they try smashing European, not Israeli heads.

PARIS: Signs are mounting that the conflict in Gaza is starting to spill over into violence in Europe's towns and cities, with assaults against Jews and arson attacks on Jewish congregations in France, Sweden and Britain.

Assailants rammed a burning car into the gates of a synagogue in Toulouse, in southwest France, on Monday night.

Seriously, are they winners or what? And this is just the "polite" type of reporting that can be dressed up and trotted out: the stuff on the various Indymedia type sites and all of their bots are trotting out the no longer plausible superlative again.

What Is the Difference Between a Democracy and a Republic?

The Wimp provides the answer…

Hit the Button and Go Vote for the Best European Blog of the Year

Yo! You!

If/When you have time, why not?

Why not go vote (once every 24 hours from each computer you have access to until Monday, January 12th at 22h00 GMT) for the best blog in continental Europe? Mercy buckets.

Zoroastrologicalclimatology

Remember a few years back when the oceanic "conveyor belt" (which helps deliver seasonal temperatures to various parts of the Atlantic) "stopped" working? Remember how everyone was going to die within 15 minutes or so after the "news" broke? Remember how it was all blamed on man-made global warming (née, cooling - née, climate change - née, insert newest newest bogeyman here)?

Any updates of late?

One of the "pumps" contributing to the ocean's global circulation suddenly switched on again last winter for the first time this decade, scientists reported Tuesday (Dec. 23) in Nature Geoscience. The finding surprised scientists, who had been wondering if global warming was inhibiting the pump-which, in turn, would cause other far-reaching climate changes.

Gosh (emphasis mine):

“The obvious question is, why?” wrote Våge, Pickart, and colleagues. Investigating that question, the researchers turned up a myriad of interrelated factors that may have caused Labrador and Irminger Seas water to resume sinking. The complexity of the process makes it difficult to predict future changes in ocean circulation and climate, concluded the research team, which included Virginie Thierry ( Laboratoire de Physique des Océans ), Gilles Reverdin ( Laboratoire d'Océanographie Dynamique et de Climatologie ), Craig M. Lee ( University of Washington ), Brian Petrie ( Bedford Institute of Oceanography ), Tom A. Agnew and Amy Wong ( Meteorological Service of Canada ), and Mads H. Ribergaard ( Danish Meteorological Institute ).

Of course the reason given back in the day for the stoppage of this system was man-made global warming. The reason for the re-start of the very same system now? Natch, man-made global warming:

The scientists noted “that the increased liquid and frozen freshwater flux into the Labrador Sea was probably tied to the large export of sea ice from the Arctic Ocean that contributed to the record minimum in sea-ice extent observed in the summer of 2007. Ironically, this disappearance of Arctic sea ice, which has been linked to global warming, may have helped trigger the return of deep wintertime [water sinking] to the North Atlantic.”

All sides covered, all angles played, all future funding available.

Sarah Palin on the Media's Double Standards

John Ziegler interviews Sarah Palin about the media's double standards…

Tolerant Europe at a Glance

Other than hating someone, I'm not sure much else will get them out of bed. But wait, it get's better: the negative views held of Americans by Europeans is the same. In fact the European nymphomania for hating others is within the same range and has the same 10-15 point delta revealing the inverse relationships.

- Americans, relative to the Europeans polled give as much slack to Europeans as they do to those identified as Muslims and Jews.

- Muslims and Jews are more likely to feel comfortable with Americans as they are with Europeans by about the same margin.

- Europeans, on the other hand, are rather more likely (and more uniformly likely by age and level of education) to have equally negative views of Americans, Muslims, and Jews.

A surly lot all around. and rather unlikely to extend to other nationalities and cultures the same concideration afforded to them.

We'd Like to Thank the Academy...

You can vote once every 24 hours from each computer you have access to until Monday, January 12th at 22h00 GMT (that's 11 p.m. in Berlin, 5 p.m. in Boston, 2 p.m. in Vancouver)



So far a Czech shrink is ahead of us, managing to use some kind of Bohemian firewall evading trickery. Will you stand for that?

Europe’s Gitmo Problem

French Navy dumps pirates on Puntland in violation of the European Court of Human Rights dictum that it is unlawful for an EU member state to engage in any kind of rendition that could expose a suspect, guilty or not, to the possibility of the death penalty.

Germans, on the other hand, are refusing to prosecute under international piracy laws unless German property is involved. This is more-or-less a precedent to not enforce the law of the sea and a sort of tacit deal-making measure with pirates without the need of any form of negotiation. It gives them free reign to pillage vessels in any area of the sea patrolled by German forces so long as they agree to leave German merchant vessels, or presumably ships travelling from Hamburg (which likely carry German property) alone.

So much for that globally involved “I’ve stopped cowering from life in this corner” thing where they were feeling all butch. For Deutschland, it’s the law of the sea for me, but not for thee. At the end of the day, the most important feature of European life is being servile in the face of ugliness so long as nobody notices this and makes you feel embarrassed after your social ideas kill another 150 million people. Do, please avert your gaze, for there are facts to be manipulated, twisted, or ignored

There is only one way to solve this problem: the EU clearly needs a Camp Delta at a Gitmo. I suggest that they do this at the French Military Base in nearby Djibouti, which has the advantage of not being in the EU and has a host government unwilling to challenge the French about their presence and practices. One where Europeans under the guise of being civil libertarians will not abuse broad-ranging laws to make a cottage industry out of freeing criminals. Since the problem effects international trade, the unstated underlying motive will fit hand-in-glove with anti-globalization initiatives seeking to promote an “altermondialiste/alternative world” where crime and violence that’s emotionally satisfying to 16-22 year olds is encouraged, and people will have to perform dental work on themselves.

So let’s review this again, shall we?: some Europeans are already saying that they won’t prosecute, they may not engage in rendition, even to states that don’t use allow for a death penalty, whatever pirates they pick up will be Gitmo-ized into “innocence”, they can’t be shot on site, and they certainly wouldn’t want to let them enter heaven on earth, even if just to be tried.

Do tell, what options do they have left?

“We’re from the Government, and We’re Here to End Your Marriage”

Read excerpts from Stephen Baskerville's article…

“We’re from the Government, and We’re Here to End Your Marriage”

G. K. Chesterton once observed that the family serves as the principal check on government power, and he suggested that someday the family and the state would confront one another

writes Stephen Baskerville in Touchstone Magazine (read excerpts from his book, Taken Into Custody: The War Against Fathers, Marriage, and the Family).

That day has arrived.

Chesterton was writing about divorce, and despite extensive public attention to almost every other threat to the family, divorce remains the most direct and serious. Michael McManus of Marriage Savers writes that “divorce is a far more grievous blow to marriage than today’s challenge by gays.”

Most Americans would be deeply shocked if they knew what goes on today under the name of divorce. Indeed, many are devastated to discover that they can be forced into divorce by procedures entirely beyond their control. Divorce licenses unprecedented government intrusion into family life, including the power to sunder families, seize children, loot family wealth, and incarcerate parents without trial. Comprised of family courts and vast, federally funded social services bureaucracies that wield what amount to police powers, the divorce machinery has become the most predatory and repressive sector of government ever created in the United States and is today’s greatest threat to constitutional freedom.

… Contrary to common assumptions, divorce today seldom involves two people mutually deciding to part ways. According to Frank Furstenberg and Andrew Cherlin in Divided Families, 80 percent of divorces are unilateral, that is, over the objection of one spouse. Patricia Morgan of London’s Civitas think tank reports that in over half of divorces, there was no recollection of major conflict before the separation.

Under “no-fault,” or what some call “unilateral,” divorce—a legal regime that expunged all considerations of justice from the procedure—divorce becomes a sudden power grab by one spouse, assisted by an army of judicial hangers-on who reward belligerence and profit from the ensuing litigation: judges, lawyers, psychotherapists, counselors, mediators, custody evaluators, social workers, and more.

If marriage is not wholly a private affair, as today’s marriage advocates insist, involuntary divorce by its nature requires constant government supervision over family life. Far more than marriage, divorce mobilizes and expands government power. Marriage creates a private household, which may or may not necessitate signing some legal documents. Divorce dissolves a private household, usually against the wishes of one spouse. It inevitably involves state functionaries—including police and jails—to enforce the divorce and the post-marriage order.

Almost invariably, the involuntarily divorced spouse will want and expect to continue enjoying the protections and prerogatives of private life: the right to live in the common home, to possess the common property, or—most vexing of all—to parent the common children. These claims must be terminated, using the penal system if necessary.

Onerous Implications

Few stopped to consider the implications of laws that shifted the breakup of private households from a voluntary to an involuntary process. Unilateral divorce inescapably involves government agents forcibly removing legally innocent people from their homes, seizing their property, and separating them from their children. It inherently abrogates not only the inviolability of marriage but the very concept of private life.

By far the most serious consequences involve children, who have become the principal weapons of the divorce machinery. Invariably the first action of a divorce court, once a divorce is filed, is to separate the children from one of their parents, usually the father. Until this happens, no one in the machinery acquires any power or earnings. The first principle and first action of divorce court therefore: Remove the father.

Family court judges’ contempt for both fathers and constitutional rights was openly expressed by New Jersey municipal court judge Richard Russell: “Your job is not to become concerned about the constitutional rights of the man that you’re violating,” he told his colleagues at a judges’ training seminar in 1994. “Throw him out on the street. . . . We don’t have to worry about the rights.”

Generated Hysteria

…Why do we hear almost nothing about this? Aside from media that sympathize with the divorce revolution, the multi-billion-dollar divorce industry also commands a huge government-funded propaganda machine that has distorted our view of what is happening.

The growth of the divorce machinery during the 1970s and 1980s did not follow but preceded (in other words, it generated) a series of hysterias against parents—especially fathers—so hideous and inflammatory that no one, left or right, dared question them or defend those accused: child abuse and molestation, wife-beating, and nonpayment of “child support.” Each of these hysterias has been propagated largely by feminists, bar associations, and social work bureaucracies, whose federal funding is generously shared with state and local law-enforcement officials.

The parent on the receiving end of such accusations—even in the absence of any formal charge, evidence, or conviction—not only loses his children summarily and often permanently; he also finds himself abandoned by friends and family members, parishioners and pastors, co-workers and employers (and he may well lose his job)—all terrified to be associated with an accused “pedophile,” “batterer,” or “deadbeat dad.”

It is not clear that these nefarious figures are other than bogeymen created by divorce interests, well aware that not only the public generally but conservatives and family advocates in particular are a soft touch when it comes to anything concerning irresponsible behavior or sexual perversion.

…It is also largely credulity and fear that leads Congress by overwhelming majorities to appropriate billions for anti-family programs in response to these hysterias. The massive federal funds devoted to domestic violence, child abuse, and child-support enforcement are little more than what Phyllis Schlafly calls “feminist pork,” taxpayer subsidies on family dissolution that also trample due process protections. Family law may technically be the purview of states, but it is driven by federal policies and funded by a Congress fearful of accusations that it is not doing enough against pedophiles, batterers, and deadbeats.

In fact, each of these figures is largely a hoax, a creation of feminist ideology disseminated at taxpayers’ expense and unchallenged by journalists, academics, civil libertarians, and family advocates who are either unaware of the reality or cowed into silence. Indeed, so diabolical are these hysterias that some family advocates simply accept them as additional evidence of the family crisis.

But while sensational examples can be found of anything, there is simply no evidence that the family and fatherhood crisis is caused primarily or even significantly by fathers abandoning their families, beating their wives, and molesting their children. Irrefutable evidence indicates that it is driven almost entirely by divorce courts forcibly separating parents from their children and using these false accusations as a rationalization.

Divorce Gamesmanship

During the 1980s and 1990s, waves of child abuse hysteria swept America and other countries. Sensational cases in Washington state, California, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Ontario, Saskatchewan, the north of England, and more recently France resulted in torn-apart families, blatantly unjust prison sentences, and ruined lives, while the media and civil libertarians looked the other way.

Today it is not clear that we have learned anything from these miscarriages of justice. If anything, the hysteria has been institutionalized in the divorce courts, where false allegations have become routine.

What is ironic about these witch-hunts is the fact that it is easily demonstrable that the child abuse epidemic—which is very real—is almost entirely the creation of feminism and the welfare bureaucracies themselves. It is well established by scholars that an intact family is the safest place for women and children and that very little abuse takes place in married families. Child abuse overwhelmingly occurs in single-parent homes, homes from which the father has been removed. Domestic violence, too, is far more likely during or after the breakup of a marriage than among married couples.

…government logic is marvelously self-justifying and self-perpetuating, since by eliminating the father, officials can present themselves as the solution to the problem they have created. The more child abuse there is—whether by single mothers, boyfriends, or even (as is often the case) by social workers and bureaucrats themselves—the more the proffered solution is to further expand the child abuse bureaucracy.

Waxing indignant about a string of child deaths at the hands of social workers in the District of Columbia, federal judges and the Washington Post found solace in the D.C. government’s solution: to hire more social workers (and lawyers too, for some unspecified reason). “Olivia Golden, the Child and Family Services’ latest director . . . will use her increased budget to recruit more social workers and double the number of lawyers.” Children die at the hands of social workers, so we must hire more social workers.

…A commonplace of political science is that bureaucracies relentlessly expand, often by creating the very problem they exist to address. Appalling as it sounds, the conclusion is inescapable that we have created a massive army of officials with a vested interest in child abuse.

…The explosion in foster care based on the assumed but unexamined need to find permanent homes for allegedly abused children has provided perhaps the strongest argument in favor of same-sex “marriage” and homosexual parenting. …

Child-Support Racket

The “deadbeat dad” is another figure largely manufactured by the divorce machinery. He is far less likely to have deliberately abandoned offspring he callously sired than to be an involuntarily divorced father who has been, as attorney Jed Abraham writes in From Courtship to Courtroom, “forced to finance the filching of his own children.”

Child support is plagued by the same contradictions as child custody. Like custody, it is awarded ostensibly without reference to “fault,” and yet nonpayment brings swift and severe punishments. Contrary to popular belief, child support today has nothing to do with fathers abandoning their children, reneging on their marital vows, or even agreeing to divorce. It is automatically assessed on all non-custodial parents, even those divorced against their will who lose their children through no legal fault or agreement of their own. It is an entitlement for all single mothers, in other words, regardless of their behavior.

…All this marks a new stage in the evolution of the welfare state: from distributing largesse to raising revenue and, from there, to law enforcement. The result is a self-financing machine, generating profits and expanding the size and scope of government—all by generating single-parent homes and fatherless children. Government has created a perpetual growth machine for destroying families, seizing children from legally blameless parents, and incarcerating parents without trial.

Incidentally, the onset of no-fault divorce explains the popularity of marriage among gays:

Today’s disputes over marriage in fact have their origin in this one. Demands to redefine marriage to include homosexual couples are inconceivable apart from the redefinition of marriage already effected by heterosexuals through divorce. Though gays cite the very desire to marry as evidence that their lifestyle is not inherently promiscuous, activist Andrew Sullivan acknowledges that that desire has arisen only because of the promiscuity permitted in modern marriage. “The world of no-strings heterosexual hookups and 50 percent divorce rates preceded gay marriage,” he points out. “All homosexuals are saying . . . is that, under the current definition, there’s no reason to exclude us. If you want to return straight marriage to the 1950s, go ahead. But until you do, the exclusion of gays is . . . a denial of basic civil equality” (emphasis added). Gays do not want traditional monogamous marriage, only the version debased by divorce.

Update: what caused the breakdown of the American family? There are certainly many factors, but the welfare system; glorification of the single-parent household; and ill-conceived legislation are among the chief culprits.

Translation Needed

And to be frank, I don’t know where to start. I have a hard time imagining any other glorified customs union needing an anthem:

Europe is united now
United may it remain;
Our unity in diversity
May it contribute to world peace.

May there forever reign in Europe
Faith and justice
And freedom of its people
In a greater motherland

Citizens, may Europe flourish,
A great task calls on you.
Golden stars in the sky are
The symbols that shall unite us.

Mother is the new father, I guess.

I think see a great reader participation moment in this. Friends, do please parse!

Solyent Green is Swedes!

It’s Birkenau-equse only kinda greenie-happy style.

Is this Swedish town that's routing heat from its crematorium to local homes morbid or brilliant? Let's just call them brilliantly morbid.

The town of Halmstad came up with the idea when trying to curb the amount of smoke emitted from the crematorium.

It was when we were discussing all these environmental issues that we started thinking about the energy that is used in the cremations and realised that instead of all that heat just going up into the air, we could make use of it somehow. It was just rising into the skies for nothing," said Lennart Andersson, the director of the cemetery in the town of Halmstad.

Actually it’s jacket heat, and not smoke that they’re really capturing here, but let’s play along with the only kind of engineering that lit-majors can partially grasp...

It’s the end of the day, only symbolically more hopeless and weak, and the logical conclusion of a life of peevish lecturing about some ideological "objets trouvees". One could almost see how it could be called a moment of glory, and call to arms of the movement championed by a aging, childess, dead continent without a future hoping for one last relevant act – one that amounts to heating some stranger’s apartment for a few hours in a nation with high GDP per capita.

But there must be something deeper in it to lure the caring, committed type expressing their terminal wishes. It reminds me of Joseph Cotton's last scene in Soylent Green: he accepts his death and “reprocessing” so long as fleeting images of an idealized (and harmless) natural world is paraded before him to salve his willful suicide in his last moments on this earth. Similarly, at least the ideologues can make themselves useful, if all they think they really amount to is aspiring to becoming a sort of eco-shaheed without murdering anyone.

The world of Soylent Green is a dystopia much as the one painted for us by environmentalists of our world. It must be hard to face the notion that it really isn’t as despairingly bad as ones’ personal campaign philosophy requires a belief in, so maybe this is a way they can finally end their pain.

Service Notice

Europeans might be comforted by the press and talking heads consistently airdropping novacaine spiked with fake angst into their happy place, but for several years David’s Medienkritik was serving up the anti-toxin. ¡No Pasarán! welcomes Ray as a new contributor.

Let’s all greet him with youthful, culturally ignorant ululation.

Coping Mechanism Type Rationalizations Likely to Follow Shortly

Sooner or later, someone will call torching cars a form of emotional release, politically meaningful, or even a form of noteworthy expression as a means of accepting hideous destrictiveness as normative or at least understandable. Fausta is up in the skybox with the play-by-play:

A few unruly kids light up some Roman candles and everyone takes it in stride

Un-hunh.

In a country where car-burning isn't a common symptom of socioeconomic unrest, news of so many automobiles being torched would be alarming - if not a sign of brewing insurrection. In France, however, word of the destruction that accompanied the evening the French call Saint-Sylvestre was met with a mix of Gaulic shrugs and low-grade peevishness.

In revealing the figures on Thursday, French Interior Minister Michele Alliot-Marie acknowledged that the tally of car-burnings had indeed increased over the previous year. Yet Alliot-Marie also said the enormous fleet of now carbonized vehicles shouldn't darken a New Year's Eve that was "unanimously considered mostly calm." Alliot-Marie also stressed that - in contrast to recent years - the first night of 2009 saw "no damage to public or private buildings."

Except for the fact that it IS becoming normal.

Nearly 43,000 cars were torched in France over the whole of 2007 - an average of almost 118 per day.

I say we just start calling every angry male out on the streets in France a flamer.

Fish meet barrel

Is this all conclusive, no:

Earlier this year, predictions were rife that the North Pole could melt entirely in 2008. Instead, the Arctic ice saw a substantial recovery. Bill Chapman, a researcher with the UIUC's Arctic Center, tells DailyTech this was due in part to colder temperatures in the region. Chapman says wind patterns have also been weaker this year. Strong winds can slow ice formation as well as forcing ice into warmer waters where it will melt.

Why were predictions so wrong? Researchers had expected the newer sea ice, which is thinner, to be less resilient and melt easier. Instead, the thinner ice had less snow cover to insulate it from the bitterly cold air, and therefore grew much faster than expected, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center.

In May, concerns over disappearing sea ice led the U.S. to officially list the polar bear a threatened species, over objections from experts who claimed the animal's numbers were increasing.

However, just imagine if the shoe was on the other foot. "Enviro-apocalypse now", "Mass hysteria" are a couple of phrases which come to mind.

Ninety-five more months to go before the latest "end of the world" prognosticus, better get crackin'.

A Majority Desperately Seeking Affirmation

The implication is quite clear, and indicative of sophisticated continental thought: direct election and perhaps democracy itself has to be suspended for the sake of “diversity”:

Immigrant mayors are thinly spread in Europe. There are a number of mayors and lord mayors in Britain with an ethnic minority background but they have largely a ceremonial role. In Germany there is a village with an engineer from India as mayor. In Belgium the socialist politician Emir Kir, who is of Turkish descent, may become mayor of Sint-Joost-Ten-Node. But countries like Sweden and Norway, which have welcomed immigrants for years, have no immigrant mayors.

France is a modest exception. Of the roughly 36,000 local councils, around ten have a mayor of immigrant descent. Most of these are villages of a few hundred souls. The most important is the left-wing politician Eddy Aït, with Berber parents and openly homosexual, who has been mayor of the Parisian suburb of Yvelines-sous-Poissy (population 14,000) since March 2008.

"France's singular position has to do with the fact that its mayors are directly elected," says Laure Michon, who researches the political representation of immigrants at Amsterdam University. "Half of the councils have fewer than 3,000 inhabitants and it's easier to become mayor on the basis of a personal network."

But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t time for self-congratulation, while the nutty ideas can be heard between their teeth. That a village of 100 inhabitants where there are virtually no “non-aboriginals” need to find one somewhere to keep up appearances, with the obvious obsession with race is something worth trumping the vote, just as it was two decades ago with the idea that there need to be “elected quotas” of women.

Rotterdam's new mayor, Ahmed Aboutaleb, illustrates the Netherlands' forward position when it comes to the participation of immigrants in politics.

It is almost impossible to overestimate the symbolic value of Ahmed Aboutaleb's career: born in Morocco, moved to the Netherlands as an adolescent, local councillor in Amsterdam, junior minister and, from January 5, mayor of the country's second biggest city Rotterdam (population 583,000).

All that is quite impressive – until you consider that it’s roughly mimicking a pattern that took place in American cities on a larger scale half a century ago, and in a prior wave with immigrants from the Mediterranean nearly a century ago.

"His [Aboutaleb's] position speaks to the imagination," says Andreas Wüst, political researcher at Mannheim University in Germany. "He has to be an example to many immigrants, and not just in the Netherlands."

Or rather the LACK of imagination of people trying to peddle irrelevant genetic attributes as a “Change and Hope” agenda, bypassing entirely the idea of political platforms, and a sort of desperate search to keep up with the idea of “finding their Obama” for its’ own sake.

Let’s be frank: most immigrants to Europe are more family oriented and are better disposed to a anti-syndication, anti-socialistic, non-intervetionist view of economy and society, and yet the press will search high and low for the few that can be radicalized to the left, and act as a de facto gatekeeper to their ability to make their electibility understood. Nothing nothing could be further from the idea of free, open, and participatory governance than the unspoken social agenda of the talking heads who only seem to be looking for new servile ‘friends’ to give them the feeling that their activism has a purpose in the world, and sating their feeling of being needed.

Otherwise, all you really need to do is show these boffins some other ‘victims’ to convince them of their benighted advocacy is indispensable to civilization. I wonder if it dawns on them that immigrants will perceive that the mushy middle-minded find a comparative equality of interest in house-pets as they have with them.

No Need to Explain. Not Later. Not Ever.

When it comes to business and economics, most journalist keep hitting the stupid juice:

10. Capitalism is dead or dying.
9. Gas at $4-a-gallon, blame the oil companies.
8. Fannie’s failure
7. Barack Obama sends stocks soaring, but not sinking.
6. Alternative energy: All gain, no pain
5. The economy has a fever and the only prescription is more bailouts.
4. Attack of the Killer Tomatoes
3. Oil prices will skyrocket to $200 a barrel, gas to $15.
2. Welcome to 1929: Great Depression II
1. America needs a new, New Deal.

Business and Media takes on each myth. The common thread is that each one was propagated by someone with little experience or knowledge of the subject of their pronouncements, and had an ideological agenda.

The miracle is that they never have hangovers that would cause them to question the assault of invented assumtions they seed the mind of the public with. Lefty political charlatans are no different. They just whack back another one, and keep flying the friendly skies.

He [Sen. McConnell] asked if Democrats would allow increased deep-sea exploration if the price of gas reached a national average of $10.00. Democrats objected.

Forgive me for finding joy is in the name of that post.