No e-thanks, e-spanky

This just in my inbox, and it isn't from Nigeria:

Me llamo Joe Minevich. I Director Compitum Soft LLC.

Nuestra empresa seocupa en el desarrollo aplicado de la empresa, las sistemas integracionistas, las cadenas corporativas y otras soluciones de software para el negocio, las haciendas y otros tipos de problemas. Nuestra empresa esta situada en Ucrania. Gozamos de buena fama y somos los socios seguros y dignos de confianza. Trabajamos con exito con muchas empresas de la Europa Occidental y America del Norte haciendo el software seguro para ellos. Casi un ano trabajamos con los clientes de los paises extranjeros y no teniamos los problemas con ellos a excepcion de los terminos del pago. Transferencias financieras en sumas de 3000-20 000 EUROS van al Ucrania cerca de 3-5 dias + lo mismo termino para la comprobacion por el Banco. En total, junto con los dias de descanso, este termino puede ser desde 10 dias hasta 2-3 semanas. Ahora estamos trabajando con los proyectos grandes, que tienen necesidad de los inversiones grandes de dinero y no tenemos las posibilidades para esperar el pago tan largo tiempo. Por eso, en este momento estamos buscando los socios en su pais, quien nos ayudara aceptar el pago mas rapido. Si Vds. quieren ganar el dinero complementario, Vds. pueden ser los representantes de nuestra empresa en su pias. Vds. podran recibir 8% de cada transaccion, que realizamos con la participacion de su cuenta. Su trabajo consistira en la aceptacion del capital en la forma de los giros postales a su cuenta y la salida del dinero a nosotros. Esto es un metodo muy comodo y rapido de recibir los ingresos adicionales. Ademas, estudiamos la posibilidad de la apertura de la oficina en su pais en el futuro proximo y entonces Vds. podran tener los privilegios de recibir el trabajo de plena ocupacion. Si Vds. tienen interes trabajar con nosotros, entonces, estamos en sus ordenes.

Pueden contactar con nosotros con ayuda de E-Mail:
(deleted)
y envien a nosotros la informacion siguiente:
Su nombre y apellido
Educacion
Direccion
Numero de telefono/fax
Conocimiento de la lengua Inglesa
Su edad

Por favor, respondan a nuestra carta y nosotros daremos los datos adicionales sobre la cooperacion. Este colaboracion no vale nada para Vds. , pero esto la posibilidad de recibir los ingresos adicionales muy comodo y rapido. Si Vds. tienen algunas preguntas, no tienen escrupulos en contactarse con nosotros.

Con respeto.
Director
Joe Minevich
Compitum Soft LLC

Look out Liberian scam artists, the Spaniards are now muscling in on your turf. It’s not the first time at that. They seem to have graduated from postal scamming into world of email. Ah, but no! They are artisans!

"No place to hide"

What a difference a day/year makes. Fresh from today's headlines:

The parliamentary authorities reacted to damaging revelations of cabinet and junior ministers cynically exploiting Commons expenses rules by calling in the police to investigate how the details were leaked and by whom.

The involvement of the police, and the prospect of a full-scale criminal inquiry, came as fresh disclosures emerged of expenses claims made by middle-ranking ministers for items as trivial as a razor and a kettle.

One MP implicated in the latest allegations told the Guardian that he believed a mole was still active operating inside parliament and feeding material to the Daily Telegraph. Others said the paper was guilty of trading in stolen property, and could be subject of a swingeing court fine running into millions.

No such qualms a scant year ago when it was private financial information being bought and traded, pork-belly style:

Britain's top taxman warned wealthy tax evaders yesterday that they were running out of places to hide their money after the authorities obtained details of secret accounts held in Liechtenstein.

Revenue & Customs said it was targeting up to 30,000 individuals, who together owe more than £100m in back taxes, as its pursuit of wealthy foreigners registered as non-domiciles in the UK gathers momentum. These include a substantial number of Russians, the Guardian has learned, who may now be trying to shift their accounts to other tax havens.

"It should now be clear to everyone that there is no safe hiding place for the proceeds of tax evasion," Dave Hartnett, acting chairman of Revenue & Customs (HMRC), said a day after his agency admitted paying up to £100,000 to an informant for secret details of the bank accounts in the Alpine principality.

As the petards are hoisting today, those who have nothing to hide sure seem to be living in a bit of fear:

The fees office set up a weekend hotline to advise panic-stricken MPs who are worried about how their claims covering the five years back to 2004 will look to their constituents.

As always, the hypocrite brigade remains silent on the issue, still.

Tyrants Funny! Ha! Ha!

From their own special place, the DPRK’s glorious internet outreach of the peoples’ massive gratitude, affirm their a commitment to Juche, political imprisonment, and this road to Damascus moment:

President Kim Il Sung dedicated his whole life to saving and defending the destiny of the country and the pope.

If they weren’t NorKs, I wouldn’t believe it. Then again, I’m impressed by any nation that would try to solve its’ hard currency problems by running a Cafépress store...

Another Great Blog from the Shameless Plug Department

Funnier than Sheckie Green, taller than Carleton the doorman, thoroughly under-medicated, Observing Hermann would not be half the blog it is without Clarsonimus. Of course it turns out that Clar, son of Imus, smiter of knuckleheads, is in fact, the funniest living über-Viking and not German at all. So put down your Ho-Ho and check it out.

Of course you probably need a sense of humor to live in Berlin anyway. Tilting against the self-referencial hell that German public debate tends to find itself in, where else could they stage “The Producers” and hope against hope that it’s taken to be a parody.

Fools Face Cretin

French fantasy public intellectual and neo-fascist Dieudonné M'Bala M'Bala is seeking office. Like any world view that can’t grasp genuine pluralism of thought, instead of trying to debate and argue with him, the instinct is to bar them legally. Since strengthening the democratic instinct of the society isn’t a high priority, the idea of making certain types of politics unlawful isn’t that much of a leap.

French officials are trying to ban the rabid anti-Zionist and Jew-hating comedian Dieudonne M'Bala M'Bala from fielding candidates in the country’s June regional elections. The comic has been fined at least five times for using terms such as “memorial pornography” when referring to Jews, and he faces a trial this week for inciting hatred against Jews.

Dieudonne’s political partner is Alain Soral, formerly associated with Jean Marie Le Pen’s far-right National Front, which has preached anti-Semitic views and Holocaust denial.

The comedian's political activity has alarmed officials, and Claude Gueant, chief of staff for French President Nicolas Sarkozy, told listeners on two French radio programs that Dieudonne should not be allowed to be active in political campaigns.

Besides befriending Pépé LePen, a man living politically in the 1950s, his partner in this is punching-bag stuntman Alain Soral, a man who in spite of other public stunts tends to advocate his own currency in the public by promoting notions of “European muscular whiteness”. It’s a strange mix of hating the representations of Europe’s allies through cultural anti-Americanism and indulging anti-European nationalist notions like closing borders and propping up French employers for the French, and that old mainstay, anti-Semitism. Convincing idiots that there are greedy Jews hiding under their bed has always worked on the continent before, so we can see opportunists trying it again, and with a great deal of success.

Dieudonne responded by calling Gueant "a good little soldier of the Zionist lobby.” His political partner Soral added, “It's scandalous. What he said and where he said it - on a [Jewish] radio station for one community - shows that the highest levels of the state take their orders from the Zionist lobby in France."

Dieudonne, who is 43 years old and was once an anti-racist, has been involved in European Union elections as a candidate or head of a party since 1997.

Let’s not forget that this guy’s draw was that his act was good for relations between racial and religious communities to diffuse friction through comedy. The concept was so new and limited, it gave him a kind of sainthood from the mainstream. In reality, his comedy has been a sort of small scale version of a Nuremburg rally speech.

That isn’t an exaggeration. As to the traditionalism and going “back to basics” employing what they think is comic in place of simply exciting mobs to break merchant’s windows:

During one recent performance, with Le Pen in the audience, he invited a Holocaust denier to join him on stage in honor of his 80th birthday. Several weeks earlier, Dieudonne presented the Holocaust denier, academic Robert Faurisson, with a "prize for maladaption and impertinence” that was presented by an assistant dressed in a concentration camp uniform with a yellow star.

You’ve [haven’t] come a long way, baby. It appears that only the natives are unable to smell the funk. Either that or they take more comfort in ignoring it.

Behold the Spirited Folkways of the Natives at Play

Emeute Paris 18ème sélectionné dans Actualité et Actu France

Note the sporting peasantry’s colorful colloquialisms and curious garb. Such elan. They deserve a cultural exception!

Euro-think

It always seems to need a new idol to stick pins in.

Hurriyet, Turkey
Dick Cheney's Torture Logic is 'Deeply Offensive'

"The reason U.S. policy is so important to us is that our own struggle to rein in heinous practices in Turkey is directly related to the standards set in Washington. … Cheney’s logic is that of the Spanish Inquisition. It is deeply offensive."

First of all, they aren’t struggling. Second of all, Turks have been torturing for virtually no reason for decades, if not centuries. OBVIOUSLY George Bush’s 2000 election can be implicated in the Armenian genocide.

Take that Vice:

The systematic and widespread nature of torture in Turkey puts nearly anyone at risk of being tortured, Amnesty International said today as it released its report Turkey: An end to torture and impunity is overdue!.

Amnesty International today concluded that the geographic spread of torture allegations, the range of potential victims and the number of testimonies the organization received, point to torture being systematic and widespread in Turkey. This, despite the European Union a year ago identifying the fight against torture as a priority for Turkey.

Torture is ubiquitous in Turkey, and goes ignored. There are trying to dus tit under the rug for the sake of what the neighbors might see, but little else, especially because there has been little or no logic at all to the torture that has taken place in Turkey long before they started to pretend that George Bush somehow darkened the earth for the first time in human history. Randomly looking at a 1998 report, now that we’ve established that W could travel through time and space to “enlightened” Turkey:

At least 209 children were tortured in 1998. Most of the reported cases of tortured children were detained on charges of such crimes as "theft." However, as is known, torture is a widespread practice in detentions for political charges.

For heavens’ sake, these Barbarians that have up until a few years ago not permitted Kurds to speak their own language in public, a medieval policy, on top of continuing to try to convince the world that all those Armenians “must have all just moved to L.A.” has no basis to lecture anyone.



The grand European idea of course, is to punish the former Adminstration for a war to topple THEIR favorite dictator, a man who tortured a huge number of his own citizens for no reason at all.

Shock Post: Horrid corporations actually pay taxes

Late nights and Google can make strange bedfellows for bloggers. Imagine the surprise at finding this letter regarding the increase in revenues (ie. taxes) received from US corporations circa 2003 to 2006:

Dear Mr. Chairman:

In response to your letter of May 11, 2007, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has reviewed the available data and analyzed the sources and underlying causes of the growth in revenues since 2003. This analysis shows that the overall increase in revenues as a share of gross domestic product (GDP) since 2003 is disproportionately accounted for by increases in corporate income tax revenues.

The letter is from the then head of the CBO, now President Obama's Director of OMB, to the Chairman of the US Senate Budget Committee. So, during those years two interesting facts come to light:

1) The increase in tax revenues is "disproportionately accounted for by increases in corporate income tax revenues", and
2) An increasing GDP may just have accounted for higher tax revenues coming in to government despite then lower rates of taxation.

Shocking

(Editor's note: This post does not address the other fact on the table. That which demonstrates corporations do not actually pay tax even if the marginal rate is 100%. Corporations collect taxes from individuals and pass them along to government. It is individuals who actually pay corporate taxes in some form of higher prices, lower wages and/or lower returns on capital.)

It Can’t Be! It Can’t Be!

Those raving, frothing Republican types (at National Geographic) have it all wrong!

Nonetheless the piper must be paid, the incantation must be read, the recitations of the ways in which comrade Stalin loves us must be said before the trial can go on:

"[Global warming] skeptics tend to leap forward," said Mike Lockwood, a solar terrestrial physicist at the University of Southampton in the U.K. (Get the facts about global warming.)

He and other researchers are therefore engaged in what they call "preemptive denial" of a solar minimum leading to global cooling.

That CAN’T be it! There's GOT to be a human angle there!

In the world of Zinn, things never evolve, economies don't recover, victims never overcome adversity, and white men are always to blame

Because [A People's History of the United States, 1492-Present] is the only book on American history that many students will read, Howard Zinn has become one of the most dangerous men in America

writes Bettina Esser;

the book's overarching thesis could best be summarized in this way: "America is not a republic but an empire controlled by white men, but only certain white men, and its heroes are anti-establishment protestors and those in the trenches of class warfare."

This book is a bestseller [only] because it is required reading in most colleges and an increasing number of high schools. … In the world of Zinn, things never evolve, economies don't recover, victims never overcome adversity, and white men are always to blame. Once a person is labeled as "evil," there is no personal redemption. "Robber barons" are not recognized for their own personal achievements or the risks and losses they endured, but only for their manipulation of people and money. In Zinn's economic view, where everybody is out for the most he can get, there is no room for voluntarism, charity, or philanthropy.

…In the world of Zinn, these were the only things that Columbus, Jackson, or Roosevelt ever did, and no other actions in their lives could compensate for their sins. In his chronology, the reader goes from one unpleasant climactic event to the next, and nothing good happens in the interim.

Licking the Boot That Kicks You

It’s what Europeans do best. Better than chiding other westerners about not being as “culturally European” in the trivial matters of culture as they are – cuisine, urbanism, work ways, and the like, as though those pet peeves was the only remaining features of a culture that one is permitted to defend in a miasma of post-modern emptiness.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s article published in the UK’s The First Post notes:

Take anti-Semitism in Europe. The sensitivity and guilt Europeans feel about the Holocaust is comparable to the sensitivity and guilt that Americans feel towards black Americans. A decade or two ago, it was unthinkable for Jews to be slandered openly and be targeted for no other reason than their Jewishness.

Today, in the name of Islam, synagogues are vandalised. There are open denials of the Holocaust. There is an active network of Muslim organisations lobbying to curtail or even get rid of Israel. There are incidents of Jews being harassed, beaten, even killed. All this is met with grim silence and rationalisations that it's not really anti-Semitic but anti-Israel. Can you imagine anything like this happening today in America to black people and it being met with silence?

Europe is a continent where they know well enough that being servile doesn’t bring you peace, or for that matter leaves you in peace for any length of time.

It is this state of affairs that makes Christopher Caldwell's book Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration and the West (Allen Lane, £17.99), which opens with the sentence, "Western Europe became a multi-ethnic society in a fit of absence of mind," a chilling read.

[ ... ]

Caldwell discusses this theme in an interesting light: he does not overlook the Europeans who feel that Islam is a danger to European values but asks, "How can you fight for something you cannot define?" And this is Europe's problem - insecurity about who we are, what our various flags mean, why, with every turn, we spend less and less on the military.

Argument Solved, Problem Ignored

And barbarism embraced as something requiring understanding.

Socialists Are Fools But Not All Fools Are Socialists

Says George Handerly

It has become fashionable to present reports on piracy that are wrapped in a tranquilizer. It is suggested that the solution of the problem is in Somalia. Save Somalia (throw money at it?) and all will be hanky-dory. One is tempted to suspect that the popularity of the mantra has to do with the trick of attaching an otherwise threateningly soluble problem to a precondition that cannot be met. The benefit is that, succumbing to the West’s luxurious self-doubts, a good reason is given to persist in doing the unreasonable. Thereafter it becomes easy to desist from solving the solvable.

It’s all about leftists making themselves feel smart, hearing the sound of their own voices saying “ah, but it’s more complicated than that”, not as a way of NOT trying to solve the problem, but subconsciously admitting that they will never, ever try to bring stability or civilization to anything they choose to grace with an opinion, despite the “struggle for global social well being” they keep promising – something they have never once provided to anyone who didn’t vote for them.

However all that misery there is out there DOES have a use to them – they need humanity’s open wounds to stay open for the sake of their solving of arguments.

The Belgian Curtain (Europe after Communism)

I rarely recommend or review books here, but will in the general interest point one out from time to time, especially free and timely e-books, which are a boon to the light traveler, outdoor loafer, or both. Coming across such things is often all it takes to spark ones’ interest, often with a tangentially related title or subject, so here we are...

This week, I recommend Sam Vaknin’s The Belgian Curtain, Europe after Communism. He muses freely on the Europe’s futile internal tugs of war, EU, NATO, and provides an accessible overview of the contrasts between eastern and western Europe in the political “concept of self” that generally dominate those cultural spaces.

A sample:

Though the EU is the new and aspiring members' biggest trading partner and foreign investor - it has, to borrow from Henry Kissinger, no "single phone number". While France is enmeshed in its Byzantine machinations, Spain and Britain are trying to obstruct the ominous re-emergence of French-German dominance.

By catering to popular aversion of America's policies, Germany's beleaguered Chancellor, Gerhard Schroeder, is attempting to score points domestically even as the German economy is imploding.

The euro-Atlantic structures never looked worse. The European Union is both disunited and losing its European character. NATO has long been a dysfunctional alliance in search of a purpose. For a while, Balkan skirmishes provided it with a new lease on life. But now the Euro-Atlantic alliance has become the Euro-Atlantic divide.

The only clear, consistent and cohesive voice is America's. The new members of NATO are trying to demonstrate their allegiance - nay, obsequiousness - to the sole identifiable leader of the free world. France's bid at European helmsmanship failed because both it and Russia are biased in favor of the current regime in Iraq. French and Russian firms have signed more than 1700 commercial contracts with Saddam's murderous clique while their British and American competitors were excluded by the policies of their governments.

Those interest in blogs like this one should find something of interest here.

"You are either with us or against us"

We do seem to recall a certain angst (rightfully so) in ever-thoughtful leftish circles regarding such absolutist statements when made by the previous US administration regarding a different topic.

Will the lefty angst repeat itself now:

As President Obama said, "If financial institutions won't cooperate with us, we will assume that they are sheltering money in tax havens and act accordingly."

So much for those quaint quirks of American jurisprudence. Little things like "due process" and "innocent until proven guilty". Never forget, fairness now trumps all.

Oh my....

It all goes so terribly wrong around the 5:50 mark

Obama: an expert in secret operations and subversion

All these data show that Obama doesn’t come from nowhere. He’s an expert in secret operations and subversion. He’s been recruited for a very specific task.

Guess who is the author of that statement (while adding that Hillary Clinton is a… "fundamentalist Christian" and that "the economic crisis … will lead to a dislocation of the United States and the end of the State of Israel.")

Sure, we Know how to Speak the Language of the Deal

The Politburo here at ¡No Pasarán! has unanimously resolved to make a special offer for Denis Boyles: we’ll flog anything you write to our adoring proletariat if you add an umlaut, dropped vowels, and improbably accents to your last name.

Not only does it make one heck of a marketing gimmick, it seems quite oddly to seem less “anglo-saxon-ness” while appearing brutally teutonic to at least a few chicks, and also strangely more pangalactically European, yet somehow inferring “globalness” by stroking the euro-chicken. Thanks a bunch, mijnheer Dnis’ Böylės. Just watching the confusion in trying to pronounce it makes one so feels oneself cosmopolitan!

Sir, we here at ¡N-P! are determined to make you better known than Häagen-Dazs. We'll install a dipthong at a later date.

World’s Stupidest Anti-Capitalist

As if there was a way to grade them...

Anticipating the revolutionary wave of people agreeing with them, roving bands of masked anti-capitalist paranoiacs roved the streets of DC in and around last weekend’s IMF leaders’ meeting.

As they are wont to do, they destroy property, something they believe should be the “peoples’“ property, but like whatever. They chose to vandalize a pair of ATM machines, even though the proletariat trying to withdraw from ‘the man’ the pittance of their blood, sweat, and tears. Oddly enough they hit up Amalgamated Bank, a.k.a. “Labor’s Bank” or as the banking choice of the non-profit political profiteers of the activism racket, which statistically makes it the favorite bank of the Suffering Sisters of Sappho.

Even the special must suffer to make a perfect society, where everything is free. It’s the part about what growing your own organic food would do to the collective farm that I still can’t get.