Theory-quest

Not that we still do not plump for the wonderful, "this is part of the cooling caused by the warming caused by the cooling caused by the warming caused by the cooling caused by the warming caused by the cooling" infinite loop routine, some new-new-new consensus would be nice to spice things up:

The average June-August 2009 summer temperature for the contiguous United States was below average – the 34th coolest on record, according to a preliminary analysis by NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C. August was also below the long-term average. The analysis is based on records dating back to 1895.

While we are at it, any new-new-new consensus on the dearth of hurricanes that were set to wipe-out all of humanity just a few scant years ago:

Now we are all learning what it’s like to reap the whirlwind of fossil fuel dependence which Barbour and his cronies have encouraged. Our destructive addiction has given us a catastrophic war in the Middle East and--now--Katrina is giving our nation a glimpse of the climate chaos we are bequeathing our children.

Ah well, On to København!

How will this be spun as the "just a few thousand bitter types" routine?

This despite the German commentariat assertions:

You could almost imagine the "Rocky" theme song blaring in the background Wednesday night when President Barack Obama -- after months of taking punches on the ropes -- stood before a rare joint session of Congress to defend his plan for massive health care reform and declared with steely eyes and a firm tone that "now is the season for action."

German commentators were thrilled by the speech. On the one hand, they were delighted to see Obama bounce off the ropes and use his rhetorical talent to re-take the offensive in this bitter debate. On the other hand, they have new reason to keep their fingers crossed that America might one day no longer be the only developed country in the world to not have universal health coverage.

Primitive Near-Eastern Village Life Comes Alive in Western Europe!

That is, if you want to put it in a PC way that ennobles the meaningless abuse of Christians and their churches, not that Socialists with their old straw men and bugaboos wouldn’t join right in as well.

On July 9, 2009, the chapel of la Croix-de-Metz in the city of Toul was the object of serious vandalism: stained glass windows smashed, the bell tower's cross covered with a black flag, and the priest threatened. Overwhelmed, he has left the area.

"My mind is made up, I'm leaving. It's becoming unbearable. For almost one week, it's been happening every evening!" declared abbé Noël. It's true that for several days, at nightfall, the priest of la Croix-de-Metz appears to have been the target of a group of young persons. Stones and pebbles rained down on the stained glass windows of the chapel where he has lived since 2002. "Until last year, I never had a problem," confides the priest. "For the past year, I would say that this sort of thing has been happening sporadically. But since last Wednesday, it has been continuous, or almost. It always begins at 9:30 p.m..."

My theory is to use the attackers’ tactics, and call any and all of these burgs a “holy city”, and every one of the faithful a “lay cleric”. Then say that it’s justified retribution for either something that happened centuries ago, even if those accused only sort of dress like the people who did it, or fault for the production of petroleum in large quantities.

Don’t Get All Surprised, Now

The Southern Poverty Law Center: Left-Leaning Station Airs Anti-Semitic Rants

As part of the Pacifica Radio network of commercial-free, listener-supported and unabashedly progressive community radio stations, Los Angeles station KPFK might seem like an unlikely forum for naked anti-Semitism.

Yet one of its weekly talk shows is becoming just that. "La Causa" ("The Cause"), a bilingual mix of English and Spanish which airs every Wednesday night, features callers, most of them Latino, who rant about ZOG ["Zionist Occupied Government"], a term coined by neo-Nazis and other white supremacists.

The show's hosts, who go by the names Augustín Cebada and Rafael Tlaloc, are more than just passive enablers of anti-Semitic rhetoric. They actively promote conspiracy theories about Jewish control of media and world governments, referring to Ponzi scheme crook Bernie Madoff as "that Jewish scam artist." Tlaloc said he felt no sympathy for Madoff's victims, many of whom were Jewish, because they were "shylocks and shysters."

Strange how The Cause and The Race are both rather obsessed with that “Social Justice” narrative that is supposed to be inspiring a new generation of Americans to something or another.

Carreon boasts about an ongoing collaboration with "La Causa" on the La Voz de Aztlán website. "La Voz de Aztlán is working with the staff of 'La Causa' to create additional radio programming at KPFK for La Raza,."

Are there stranger bedfellows? Hardly. The rhetoric and the methods sound little different then the deft description that La Causa has on Pacifica Radio’s website:

A program that deals with contemporary issues affecting our communities, such as: police abuse, cultural genocide through the "education" system. Cultural themes and current events are closely followed.

This is why Johnny can’t read.


True to form is the creative genius of Obama appointee (and now deposed Czar) van Jones, another person for who anti-racism is all about race, and naturally ones’ own obsession, because they are ones’ own, are immediately thought universal:

The American way manufactured by white folk in office, by these rich men here to mock us. The United States; a piece of stolen land led by right-wing, war-hungry, oil thirsty… And when it’s all said and done still can’t [garbled] the wrong place cause they got people of color playing servant to do that shit for them; mother fuckers ready to wipe out soft targets on territories harboring terrorists?
Tragedy.
The true terrorists are made in the U.S.

That the KKK was dominated by Democrats, and that the culture of the south did not genuinely transform itself until the Democrats lost a monopoly on it are entirely lost, as is the fact that “those right wingers’” party, the Republican Party, was founded as a an anti-slavery movement. Never mind all of that, he’s got a stale and ignorant narrative to promote about how his domestic enemies could be the only people on earth to execute the 9-11 attacks.



Thanks for all of that “Hope and Change” there, Sparky. When you’re calling for Marxism and Anarchy, do you have any actual idea what either of them are really like? Here’s a little hint: it normally involves mowing down religious and racial minorities, and silencing critics of the dominant paradigm, you idiot.

Ironing out the details

We were all set to present a training day of in-depth analysis (charts, graphs, expert speakers, powerpoint, tidy agendas, break-out sessions, free association, the works...)of another country's proposed/continued slide into the depths of statism, alas we are still waiting for the other side to produce some/any details to which we can begin the grappling proper:

One day after President Obama pitched his plan for comprehensive health-care reform to a joint session of Congress, administration officials struggled Thursday to detail how he would achieve his goal of extending coverage to tens of millions of uninsured Americans without increasing the deficit.

Likewise:

President Barack Obama vowed before a national television audience on Sept. 9 that his $900 billion proposal to overhaul health care wouldn’t add "one dime" to the federal deficit.

So far, White House officials have offered few details on how they intend to pay for the plan. Instead, they've deferred to Congress on the issue, saying they'll consider all options.

Suppose we will just have to wait in the parking lot until the other-side gets some modicum of their act together. Not that we are calling anyone out.....

A Forgotten Catastrophe, No Doubt

While Le Monde has for several years made smug references to “the real tragedy of September 11th”, which they always imply to be the anniversary of the coup against Salvador Allende, they overlook mourning over another tragic event in their beloved world view: 11-September-1989. Ouai, quelle misère!

What the present day hard left are sentimental about: a grim autocracy
that they never lived under, and don’t understand.

The Hungarian government decided that they would open their border to Austria, taking down their barbed wire section of the Iron Curtain . It permitted east block citizens to simply “walk off the rez” to freedom and away from Marxist-Leninism. Never mind the Marxist-Leninist sympathies they were stepping straight into, and how the failure of Communism would undercut their control fantasies about man, or delusions that in Socialism there is freedom. Morons.

Ordinary Berliners on both sides of the now-derelict Wall were certainly excited over the prospect of unity, but the city's opinion-makers were often blase or even hostile toward the project. It became fashionable among the leftist intelligentsia of West Berlin to condemn the easterners' longing for unification as a lamentable submission to the lure of Western materialism.

- ”Berlin”, David Clay Large

And if the ideology of the present day “peace camp”, Palestinian “Solidarity” movement, and their sympathists who pretend to be on the sign of human decency and freedom doesn’t sound familiar, this kind of thing might make them feel warm and right at home in the paradise of ”the workers’ and peasants’ state”

East Berlin itself had three Stasi prisons, each of them a hellhole where torture was a regular part of the "reeducation" process. In a report on his incarceration at Berlin-Pankow and Rummelsburg in the early 1970s, Timo Zilli, an Italian-born socialist, described a regimen of daily beatings, weeks of solitary confinement in a windowless cell, and hours of being hanged by his wrists with his feet barely touching the floor. A Jewish prisoner in Pankow who had spent five years in a Nazi concentration camp made the mistake of addressing his guards as "SS-Gestapo" and giving them the Hitler salute. As the guards beat him senseless, they shouted: "You Jewish swine think you can put on such a show because the Nazis let you survive.... We'll finish the job."

Obviously they travelled through time, since all of it must have been inspired by Gitmo. After all, mankind knew no cruelty before 2002.

Man the Mythmaker

Part of the post-rationalism religion of environmentalism requires that previous claims remain forever uncorrected. One of them is the notion that the Maldives is being overwhelmed by rising seas. By some past alarming claims, it should have already happened. The odd fact is that the seas are receding slightly notwithstanding, the genuine mysteries that don’t support the global collectivization arguments need not be investigated.

So it becomes rather amusing to the dramaturgs maintainers of the myth, that in order to keep their apocalyptic hopes alive, that the leader of such a nation victimized by the weather (as if no people were ever affected in the past), must be made into a noble hero. Being a noble hero comes with celebrity in that circle. As such, Maldives President Noah Mohamed Nasheed said he would only attend the Copenhagen climate confab if someone paid for the trip.

Of course the idea of teleconferencing would be far too offensive, and wouldn’t offer any good luxury shopping opportunities for the participants. That notwithstanding, the image they have of themselves is the very opposite of modesty, and likely has more to do with Sci Fi visions of what an planetary government would look like, just in case the aliens show up. Even at that, peace required them to surrender their sovereignty to a Federation, so you can tell that it’s as firmly founded in fiction as anything Gene Roddenberry could concoct. Anyway, I digress...

Expect the pitch and tone of the already regular feeding tube of fear-inducing claims about what man has done to change the weather to rise like an angry, modernity caused sea, between now and December to Dervish-like hallucination levels. Until then I DARE your island to drown! So take THAT, Hokkaido, Ireland, and Madagascar!

As for cheering on the apocalypse, outside of a crazy person with a sandwichboard sign who smells slightly of urine, not much can beat this idea that man will soon be assigned to the fossil record when that ship behind the comet comes:

Danish conceptual artist Kristian von Hornsleth will be visiting the Roskilde festival as part of his Deep Storage Project.

Hornsleth previously came to prominence when he convinced the villagers of a Ugandan village to all legally change their name to Hornsleth in return for livestock as part of an art project. The artist also launched a project buying up stock in arms companies, with the proceeds going to relief organisations.

This time around, the 46-year-old artist will be collecting DNA samples from willing volunteers attending the festival. Hair and blood samples taken by trained personnel from 800 participants, together with DNA samples from around the world, will be installed in a five metre tall sculpture to be placed at the deepest part of the world’s ocean in 2010.

The futuristic and angular sculpture will be placed in the 11,000 metre deep Mariana Trench, 200 miles off of Guam Island between Japan and the Philippines, next January.

Hornsleth’s aim is that in thousands of years from now the DNA of the volunteers will still be intact, buried in the centre of the Earth, while life above will have vastly changed.

‘The sculpture looks as it does because it should not resemble something organic – its made up of triangles and sharp points. The idea is that 10,000 years from now, when someone sails by with their deep sea sonar, they’ll see something down there and retrieve it. The people who donated DNA could be regenerated and maybe even come to Roskilde again,’ Hornsleth explained to public broadcaster DR.

As to those who don’t want to become part of the constructed analog to the resurrection:

However, for those not taking part in futuristic art projects or being inspired by Nobel laureates to make a change, festival goers can still make a difference by taking part in the humanitarian and climate change initiatives

Of course. What else IS there to get involved in?

Curious about US healthcare statistics

Anyone care to explain this:

1993

And on any given day, over 37 million Americans, most of them working people and their little children, have no health insurance at all.

US President Bill Clinton

2009

There are now more than thirty million American citizens who cannot get coverage.

US President Barack Obama

An increase of insurance coverage for 19% of the uninsured since 1993! This is a good thing, right?

Truth from the NYT

David M. Herszenhorn from the NYT hits the nail right on the head, not sure if it was intentional:

In his speech to Congress at 8 p.m. Wednesday, President Obama will press his case for major health care legislation, not just with lawmakers in the audience, but also with a deeply wary public watching at home.

And while Mr. Obama will probably talk in clear, plain-spoken terms, decoding his remarks and the reaction he gets will require both a careful ear and a keen eye.

This is quite the issue that grates when it comes to our political betters. The attempts by political hacks (at any level) to talk in clear, plain-spoken terms yet having to decode remarks is precisely the problem. If the terms are clear and plain-spoken, why any need to decode?

Perhaps because the political hacks are not talking in clear, plain-spoken terms?

Update: So the clear, plain-spoken terms will be the "more people will die" routine? Does anyone even fall for that one anymore? It seems like just the other day that Americans (normal ones, not the "free" healthcare drones) were celebrating:

Americans are living nearly two-and-a-half months longer, according to new life expectancy statistics released today. In 2007, life expectancy in the United States reached a high of nearly 78 years, up from 77.7 a year earlier.

Life expectancy in the United States has been on the rise for a decade, increasing 1.4 years — from 76.5 years in 1997 to 77.9 in 2007, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The life expectancy data, compiled by the agency’s National Center for Health Statistics, are based on nearly 90 percent of the death certificates filed in the United States.

Yes – but who will Teach the Libyans how to Yodel?

or Great Moments in Arab Public Intellectualism

Kaddafi has always been a comedian,a kind of sideshow of strange stunts, a sort of “lovable young thief” of fables who also happens to be a dictator running a small country along militaristic lines. It’s a view held even among most Arabs.

According to Swiss minister Christa Markwalder, when Khadafy comes to New York Sept. 23, he will ask the UN to dismantle Switzerland and parcel out the land to neighboring France, Germany and Italy.

The UN charter specifically states that no member can threaten the sovereignty of another, so the demand is unlikely to get far. But it's another sign of tension to come during the eccentric dictator's visit.

The Libya-Swiss kerfuffle began a year ago, when Khadafy's trouble-making youngest son, Hannibal, was arrested in a Geneva hotel for beating two servants with a belt and a coat-hanger.

Dripping with respect for such noblesse oblige, the really amusing part of it is that Europeans who think well and think much of themselves and their geopolitical sophistication are the ones who have to deal with this joker. I’m sure it makes they look comparatively brilliant, but having to carry on a “public dialogue” this base with a de facto simpleton must not be doing a great deal for their dignity.

The response to the offense of arresting someone for assault was to take hostages, so that the toffs of the north had to ingratiate themselves to them for no reason other than that of a perceived personal snub to the potentate.

For a year, the issue festered. Two weeks ago, Swiss President Hans-Rudolf Merz traveled to Tripoli to apologize for the arrest and Libya promised to let the hostages go by Sept. 1.

However, they have yet to be freed. Now Merz is fending off accusations of appeasement and calls for his resignation.

Statecraft at its’ best!

But the view that a nation can simply be mechanically abolished on grounds of “cultural insult” or by some force simply because it can, without any recognition that nations and people can and should make or unmake themselves is too typical and common to call a stunt.

The greatest intellectual breakthrough of our age started with the enlightenment came in force on the last quarter of the 20th century: that is the genuine ability of most individuals to free themselves from an imposed ideology, a kind of personal self-determination that mocks the elementary bleating of everyone from “the me generation” to the idea that “Communism frees the individual to create and think”, but that it needs to command all human action and published ideas to do this.

Not just the Arab world, but most of the world, and quite sadly many Europeans too live in that state of mind, unaware that a good society, through the shared need of individual respect and autonomy can find its’ freedoms defended NOT by an governmental apparatus of control, but rather a well supported concept of justice founded on the person and not the group, and by the free acting and thinking themselves.

Much of that venality isn’t limited to “the Colonel”. Adloyada is dismantling, piece by piece, the British farce of trading the sentenced Lockerbie bomber, employing the flinching sentiment of the public to forgive anyone who would do violence to them, as part of a commercial deal. Just think of it as a “public-private partnership” at its’ best.

Snap Poll of the Day

How many of you out there want to spend everyday/all day (literally) shoveling shit for a living? Not your cup of tea, how about just old-fashioned ditch-digging?

Your ¡No Pasarán! Travel Tip for the Day

What I have observed is that in Europe more than anywhere else, will you find people who assume that they know what your opinions are based on your nationality, culture, or some other now-acceptable analog for your race, if not your skin color itself, as if the person, their individual experience, the means of their moral thinking, and their choices were too much to wrap the brain around. It’s also why these very average dipwits still think it very sharp to hear some view that’s seemingly contrarian to the ideology they attribute to the pigeon holes they put people in. I.E.: “Even as a Jew, he said that!”

It’s precisely why bigots are called simple.

Next time you get trapped in one of those hall-of-mirrors conversations with one of those great minds in a bar eager-to-verbally-pounce trying out all of his or her trained-in assumptions about your society of origin, put on an impossible-to-place accent and say that...

Eet eez the tradition in the land of my ancestors to complement the chef by flatulating loudly, and then emitting contrived seal-barks of laughter like of a Shopping Mall Santa nearing the end of his shift, as though his buzz is also wearing off.

Respect!

Because we must all be included, no matter what type of boiling cabbage you decide to smell like, demand your place at civilization’s table.

German Exceptionalism? Where’s the Outrage?

Exporting Germans, Normally Offended at the idea of Imports, Take one for the Planet.

Take it away, Clarsonimus, because I sure can’t figure it out:

With calls for “Buy hybrid cars from Toyota!” and other provocative German-car-industry-bashing and name-calling name calls, Künast is hurting her fellow Germans’ German car loving feelings right and left. Or maybe she isn’t, hard to say for sure.

Personally, I’ve always felt that Germans secretly want to own Japanese cars (you rarely see one here, you know), it’s just that their families would disown them and the neighbors wouldn’t understand. Not that they do now, the neighbors, but still.

Which leads me to one of the only bits of advice that I ever give out. Remember, use this knowledge only for good, and never, NEVER for evil: Don’t mess with a middle-aged German who’s cleaning his or her car. It’ll, like, break some magical spell thingy, and they’ll lose their marbles.

What happens when a leader's advisors mitigate our liberties, urinate on our values, and call us a**holes, Nazis, terrorists, Astroturf, and retards…

Call us common senseis weird,

quips Doug Giles,

but when a person—president or otherwise—spurns our desires and he and his top advisors wildly misspend our money, mitigate our liberties, urinate on our values, and call us a**holes, Nazis, terrorists, Astroturf and retards, well, said person and his pals will not only fail to receive our respect or votes, but they have forfeited the privilege of addressing our kids—or our dogs for matter.

A statist dreamscape....

....never mind that bit at the end when reality actually kicks in.

Weekend giggles, in a bad way

Are there really enough superlatives, in a good way, to describe the work done by Michelle Malkin?

Idiots to the Left, Morons to the Right

They neither understand interest or inflation, and carry around the Marxist idea that people putting their money to work don’t deserve to benefit from it because they assume that these people “don’t work”. Some of them carry seriously carry around a primitive belief (which is no different than Islamic culture a millennium ago,) that charging interest on a loan is a sin, and a few of them seriously think that building a concrete bunkers is their way out of their lack of understanding of the world around them.

One could ask where they made the money that was invested to begin with, but that notion isn’t simple enough for the average French nationalist. It’s all brown shirts and red flags for these folks – meet France’s black helicopter crowd, any of whom hold that “all money is fake” and it exist merely to support an aristocracy.

They are simply too stupid to understand that money is the most basic form of exchange media, but anything else representing something of tangible value is as well, such as an equity or a bond. To this limited world view, all of these things are wrong, seemingly because they have a different sort of spirit to cash. It’s a lot like a medieval druidic belief that a tree has a persona, a rock has a persona, that they all must be respected, but there is a great reason to be cruel to the villagers whose well you just took a leak in.

These other instruments they hold as wrong, seemingly possessing some sort of bad juju in the same way the primitive followers of the hard left do, in spite of believing that a randomly selected thing of value, gold, is somehow different, when it is no different than any other metal with a fluctuating price of some market determined value.

This is how they do it

To the initiated, it is rather doubtful that the contents of this post will shed any light as to how our governmentalist betters act behind closed doors. As we have seen repeatedly, there is really no depth to which our betters will not sink.

To the unitiated, still think it the halls of government are filled with earnest/serious types trying to tackle the burning issues of the day for the betterment of man-kind? This post is for you. This particular example just happens to be British in nature, rinse and repeat based upon your particular locale and issues:

A Labour plot to smear the new head of the Army, General Sir David Richards, because of his daughter's 'crime' of working for David Cameron was exposed last night.

The threat to target the General, who took up his new job just nine days ago, was one of the real reasons that Labour MP Eric Joyce resigned as an aide to Defence Secretary Bob Ainsworth last week.

Former soldier Mr Joyce has told friends he attended a meeting at the Ministry of Defence where a discussion took place on how to target Sir David's predecessor, General Sir Richard Dannatt, for criticising the Government's failure to give enough support to British troops.

And The Mail on Sunday has established that Mr Joyce was also disturbed to hear Labour colleagues discuss Sir David’s 25-year-old daughter, Joanna Richards, who recently became Mr Cameron's diary secretary.

These particular brilliant policy experts (as their slavish toadies would no doubt describe them in terms of utmost solemnity) aren't tackling the tough policy questions: Should the UK be in Afghanistan? If not, why not? If so, why and how can we ensure the mission is supported? All fair questions.

No, these particular experts spend their time discussing how to shoot their own guy in the back because he is deemed a "loose cannon". As an aside, in governmentalist speak the term "loose cannon" is generally synonymous with "someone who tells the truth" and anyone labled as such is to be marginalised/smeared/hounded out (we can't have our carefully agenda-ised briefings continually shown-up as farce by those closest to the situation with actual facts on their side).

To our UK readers, if you wonder why the UK policy on Afghanistan seems to be a continual shambles, what do you expect upon learning how the brilliant policy experts spend their time?

To those know-it-all jaded hack-types who fall-back on the tired old, "This is how it is always done in politics....", no worries .... just one favour please, do stop pissing on our leg and tell us it is raining outside?

Update: How can one tell the British example above is actually true? Easy, those involved are denying the charges. Not sure if the denials are real-denials, non-denial-denials or Libyanesque-denials.