If it's the weekend, it's the New York Times

Upon reading this headline:

Turtles Are Casualties of Warming in Costa Rica

It is best to gird the loins, render a few garments, find a bit of sackcloth, some ashes and begin gnashing the teeth (preferably your own). The reason, you know it will be coming at you with both barrels, turtles are casualties of warming in Costa Rica. How do we know, the headline says so:

But haphazard development, in tandem with warmer temperatures and rising seas that many scientists link to global warming, have vastly diminished the Pacific turtle population.

Note to the reporter, can we please stay on message, this is about global warming. We continue with our lesson:

Even before scientists found temperatures creeping upward over the past decade, sea turtles were threatened by beach development, drift net fishing and Costa Ricans’ penchant for eating turtle eggs, considered a delicacy here. But climate change may deal the fatal blow to an animal that has dwelled in the Pacific for 150 million years.

Ahem, can we dispense with the facts and just stick with the global warming message please:

Beachside tables have been removed because rising tides have destroyed the restaurant’s concrete terrace and uprooted shading trees there. In different circumstances, the beaches could gradually extend backward as the sea level rose. But along much of Costa Rica’s Pacific coast, the back of the beach is now filled with hotels, restaurants and planted trees, giving the sand no place to go. "The squeezing of the beaches where turtles nest is going to be a big problem," said Carl Safina, head of the Blue Ocean Institute, a conservation group.

Precisely what does this have to do with global warming? Please stay on message:

In a country where turtle eggs are traditionally slurped in bars from a shot glass, uncooked and mixed with salsa and lemon, biologists are also promoting cultural change.

This is the result of global warming how exactly? Far be it for a blogger to help a professional reporter, but the issue, as the headline points out, is global warming. We have to get these things straight, there may be funding at stake. So, here is our help to the reporter:

Let us put aside the haphazard development, beach development, drift net fishing, Costa Ricans’ penchant for eating turtle eggs, deforestation, natural predators, the squeezing of the beaches and cultural traditions ..... the loss of these turtles is about global warming, get with the programme!

"Pay? No Way," Exclaimed the Lady. "It's Supposed to be Free! Free!"

Thanks to our very own "Julius Caesar", a tyrant for those who recall reading source, Americans can look forward to much of this kind of thing that happens in EUtopia. Inspiring the young to go into medicine, no doubt.

Dr. X. is a surgeon who not only does his job admirably: he's also very active in many charities and human rights groups. It will be understood that it is therefore not part of the cohort as countless fantasy that those who refuse medical care for state aid (AME). It is in this personal context that a foreign woman entered, who had nothing to pay her bill with. Until she appeared for her exam, her condition had never been treated.

- "Pay? No way," exclaimed the lady. "It's supposed to be free! Free!"

And again, it requires that the surgeon pay for her medication out of his own pocket ...

Somewhat taken aback (understandably), our colleague says that this is not how things are done in this country. But the woman, visibly persuaded in the arguments of "ad hoc associations" (activists), continued to insist. So much so that she finally get her "companion" in the waiting room, giving the same speech to protest as well. Even with the doctor's polite but firm denial yielded some result: the "companion" threw several punches at him.

Assassin of 1 Abortionist Declared a "Terrorist"; Shootist of Over 40 Citizens and Killer of 13 Deemed a Regular Bloke Who Snapped

Doesn't it make sense, and can't leftists and rightists agree, that inherent in the word "terrorism" is the fact that it entails indiscriminate killing, the murder of vast numbers of citizens, and that the individuals targeted are basically unsuspecting?

We have now come to the point where the assassin of one abortion doctor (who knew that, rightfully or otherwise, he was a targeted man) is called a terrorist — a terrorist of the "domestic" variety — while the man who shot over 50 people, killing 13 of them, is deemed little more than a regular bloke (a stressed-out one, to be sure) who snapped because of the pressure(s) he'd undergone.

Not to excuse Scott Roeder's murder of George Tiller, nor to get into an argument about the pros and cons of abortion, but Roeder specifically targeted a specific individual, one whose life had been threatened (rightfully or otherwise) numerous times in the past (for reasons good or bad), and he (Roeder) did not, manifestly, aim indiscriminately at unsuspecting individuals.

Nevertheless, leftists got on their high horses and sputtered about the "personal responsibility" of conservatives, along with expressions such as their "hate machine", "anti-abortion terrorists", and "Christian Fundamentalist Terrorism"… No desire, here, to understand and to show compassion; no fears, here, about an unjust backlash against conservatives, Republicans, Christians, or — yes — even pro-lifers…

In fact, in both cases — in all cases — the true villains prove, directly or indirectly, to be American conservatives and those who represent the values of America's heartland.

Because, as it happens, to leftists the world over, outside as well as inside the United States (and the latter, tragically, include the members of the Obama administration), the only enemies, the only danger (to America as to the rest of the planet), the only terrorists (would-be or real) are America's own conservatives. And thus you see Nidal Malik Hasan, aka "the alleged shooter" (Barack Obama), aka the "army major suspected of killing 13 people" turned into a victim of the stresses caused, directly or otherwise, by heartland America.

Reviews in the Comment Section Most Welcome

It could also have been titled “A Field Manual for Survival in Europe”.

Dreams of their Fathers

Hollywood’s panting, drooling 1943 love letter to Stalin has been released on DVD.



If their nipples got any harder, blood vessels would have burst.

Just Ignorant Enough to be Funny

As much as this t-shirt guy doesn’t seem to know about the DDR, he does seem to know enough about the “Green” political sensibility being little different than the authoritarian nature of the East German Volkspolizei or “people’s police”.

The more repressive the regime, the more likely that everything in identified, on the surface as being the “people’s property”. Then again, the VoPos were in bad taste too.

Generation Boudin

A recent TNS-Sofres poll of young adult women in France indicates that they are more than 3 times more likely to want to “do nothing,” more than 10 times more likely to want to watch TV, and 11 times more likely to want to surf the internet, than to participate in a benevolent or volunteer activity – a disembodied, intellectualized “want” (since this is not a poll of what 20-29 year old women actually does) that came in slightly behind playing video games.

In other words, even the pretense of what’s held in high regard in a collectivism promoting, socialized society isn’t even on the radar. After all, isn’t that the government’s job?

As if you couldn’t figure this out by the rarity of those that don’t preoccupy their time and crash-test their friendships by incessantly talking about themselves.

Reasons why today should be a day to celebrate wildly

Note, should.

Berliner Mauer, a query

During a recent walk down the Unter den Linden, a question popped into my head:

Will the socialists and statists be celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Wall falling? Afterall, it was their ideological side which proved to be the utterly unsustainable failure....

Weekend wonders

Rhetorically speaking, do you ever wonder why the statists are always yammering on about never "wasting a crisis"? The answer of course is simple, in the chaos and tumult of a crisis it is the statists who use the situation to gobble up more power for their church, government, and to diminish the ability of their enemies, the individual. During a crisis, never think the words and actions of the statist are about actually trying to ease the crisis situation.

Which brings us to our cod-mongering brothers and sisters in Iceland. As the dust settles from the financial implosion up north, individuals are having second thoughts about prostrating themselves before the keepers of hyper-statism:

Iceland this week appointed its chief EU accession negotiator, but the country's application is already hitting the buffers domestically and Brussels fears that the Arctic nation may "pull a Norway", meaning an application that the government is sincere about, but which the people strongly reject.

The country's finance minister, Steingrimur Sigfusson and leader of the government's junior coalition partner, the Left Green Movement, said last Tuesday at a meeting of the Nordic Council in Stockholm that while Iceland had applied to join, the people did not want to become members of the EU, a statement that has not been met with great enthusiasm in Brussels.

This is why the statists must strike when the crisis iron is hot. Once calmer heads prevail and the statist schemes are exposed under the clear light of day, the individual tends to notice the same old putrid stench in the air: more government, more regulation, more control-freaks and less freedom/liberty/individuality.

Obama: an American Walter Ulbricht

Leftists who sneer at Conservatives who call Obama a socialist don’t know Socialism. The costruction of the “progressive” states of the East Block was incremental, and peppered with euphemisms about democracy and even fake opposition parties to demonstrate that they were in reality pluralistic.

It all began with creeping nationalization.

The Second Five-Year Plan committed East Germany to accelerated efforts toward agricultural collectivization and completion of the nationalization of the industrial sector. By 1958 the agricultural sector still consisted primarily of the 750,000 privately owned farms that comprised 70 percent of all arable land; only 6,000 Agricultural Cooperatives (Landwirtschaftliche Produktionsgenossenschaften--LPGs) had been formed. In 1958-59 the SED subjected private farmers to quota pressures and sent agitation teams to villages in an effort to encourage "voluntary" collectivization. The teams used threats, and in November and December 1959 resisting farmers were arrested by the SSD. By mid-1960 nearly 85 percent of all arable land was incorporated in more than 19,000 LPGs; state farms comprised another 6 percent. By 1961 the socialist sector produced 90 percent of East Germany's agricultural products. An extensive economic management reform by the SED in February 1958 included the transfer of a large number of industrial ministries to the State Planning Commission. In order to accelerate the nationalization of industry, the SED offered entrepreneurs 50-percent partnership incentives for transforming their firms into VEBs. At the close of 1960, private enterprise controlled only 9 percent of total industrial production. Production Cooperatives (Produktionsgenossenschaften--PGs) incorporated one-third of the artisan sector during 1960-61, a rise from 6 percent in 1958.

Overraught? No. For one thing, I lived in the DDR and find the US left’s intelligentsia to be promoting IDENTICAL rhetoric. Even with the irony of Lavrenti Beria, the brutal intelligence chief telling the East Germans that they needed a freer market (Tito-like) solution to the poverty that was threatening the newly founded state, the adherents sticking to Stalinism long after the Soviets had painfully purged themselves of it pressed on. They pressed on in underhanded ways that seemed to boil the frog in subtle little steps which within 3 years, a time shorter than one US presidential term, to transform a society into an oppressive command state flouting it’s own Constitutional protections (such as that of Labor action) rather flagrantly.