A Festival of Rationalization

José Manuel Barroso is working the only force-multiplier available to a European Union not interested in actually doing anything to earn that respect:

We need to revisit the structures of global governance, to ensure that they work better for people everywhere, and in the interests of both current and future generations. The EU has led the discussion within its own structures and taken it to wider international fora. We welcome the emerging economies' call for reform of global institutions.

In other words: the think the world should voluntarily come under the same undemocratic headlock that the populous entities are putting the smaller or less wealthy members of the EU, and we should, of course employ Europe-centered institutions to do it, the ones dominated by European employees.

The economic crisis has made progress in the negotiations of the Doha Development Agenda in the World Trade Organisation even more important.

The WTO framework, to which the EU has always given priority, is increasingly recognised as being fundamental to our prosperity. It helps to anchor the global economy in an open, rules-based system based on international law

That is, the Doha round that the Europeans killed to maintain tacit protectionism.

Multilateral engagement is essential for dealing with these threats. The EU has multilateralism in its DNA. Others, too, can benefit from its experience. Europeans are long-standing champions of the United Nations and international cooperation, and continually seek to ensure that stability, freedom, democracy, and justice prevail as cornerstones of international relations.

Which is an interesting way to put the passive-aggression that charaterizes anything that happens between EU member states or in the UN where the most extreme and vile resolutions, as unenforcable as they all are, come from nation-states that can do it without any consequence to themeselves, and at no cost to themselves. Pledging tp spend others' money and issuing a pandering condemnation of the politically unpopular hardly amounts to sane or responsible action, let alone "global governance".

As it is, what is in the EU's DNA is totalitarian statism whose only addition in the past 20 years has been to put a smily face on it. If, as Barroso claims, that the EU has a growing role, or lessons to teach the world, their historically-recent revelation that they should stop dragging the rest of civilization into their internecine wars and awful top-down authoritarian ideas about social organization (Communism, Socialism, Fascism, etal), there is scant proof that it won't do as much harm in this century as it did in the 20th century.

Our best and brightest

Wonderful news:

Twelve million low-energy light bulbs were posted to households over Christmas by an energy company as part of its legal obligation to cut carbon emissions, despite government advice that many would never be used.

The reason:

In 2008 the Government ordered the big energy companies to invest in measures for improving energy efficiency and cutting fuel poverty.

Who pays for the 'free' bulbs:

Companies can pass on all the costs of the scheme to their customers. Over three years it is expected to add more than £100 to the average household’s energy bills.

Once again, the reason:

In 2008 the Government ordered the big energy companies to invest in measures for improving energy efficiency and cutting fuel poverty.

Where would we be without our governmental betters?

2009 Closes with Less Veneration of Saint Sylvester

New Years' Eve was declared "relatively calm" in Paris, pot-shots are taken at the NYPD - just because, dontcha know.

Head smashing

Le Parisien report -only- 11 injured police officers and 405 arrests on the Champs-Elysées in Paris. The qualifier being that there were significantly less people out there this year, and the head-smashing took place over a 4 hour period.

The same report indicates that Strasbourg "only burned up a little bit," as if this kind of thing is normal.

Carbeques

After a 30% spike last New Years' Eve, last night's events are reported to have yielded a significant drop in vehicular arson. Some of it can be attributed to bad weather, and my sense is the senselessness of past years' chaotic public behavior has blunted much of it this year, even among feral youths.

International broadcaster RFI reports on its' news blog that the drop can be attributed to a committed intervention by police. Clearly, the use of the "broken windows" apprach to policing has been applied to effect.

The French police will be mobilized in large numbers for the traditional New Year festivities. The night of Saint-Sylvestre normally degenerates [in its' safety]. Last year more than thousand cars had been deliberately burned, or 30% more than last year. Update on the mechanisms put in place to fight against this crime.

Heal Thyself, Pokey

No good deed going unslandered, while taking a non-disapproving position on the improvements in Paris with the special deployment of 45 000 cops, "calm" in New York gets a different characterization. It's declared "draconian".

From east to west across the globe, millions of people thronged the streets of major cities around the world to celebrate 2010 and try to forget within a few hours, the climate of uncertainty surrounding and upheavals of the global economic crisis.

Hard to believe when the numbers out on the streets are down.

In New York, a huge crowd braved the rain and snow to welcome with enthusiasm the midnight descent of the famous crystal ball in Times Square, symbolizing the transition to the new year.

Draconian security measures surrounding the festivities, six days after the attempt of a young Nigerian to blow up an aircraft from a U.S. company flying from Amsterdam to Detroit.

So while the statist tendency give's AFP's scribblers the notion that all is well when it takes place in a relatively small celabration in Paris which had one-fifth the revellers, it's jack-booted when it's employed to protect the nominal one million people who converge on time square.

And the Children Still Blindly Follow his Wisdom

"To send men to the firing squad, judicial proof is unnecessary."

--Ernesto "Che" Guevara

You will Read the Numbers now, Liebschen

Is it a parody of stereotypical irritatingly self-absorbed central European experimental film or the crude tailings of cold war espionage? Be the judge.

N/A in the 2nd Year of Age of O

When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty…

- Thomas Jefferson

Mr. Mota will take Care of that “Mr. Socrates,” Ha Ha Ha...

I tell ya man, they’re always working for the people! EUvian justice-ocrats finally catch up with corrupt Leftist official, 2 years after his appointment as the head of Eurojust, the über-mega-state's pan-galactic anti-crime agency.

Eurojust will not suffer any image damage because this was a "national matter" which did not involve the EU agency as such, its spokesman Johannes Thuy told this website.

Except for the fact that the guy in charge of the über-mega-state's pan-galactic anti-crime agency was implicated in the crime of the abuse of office, and the misuse of judicial processes.

I mean, like, so what!, eh?

José Luís Lopes da Mota is Vice-President and National Member for Portugal. He has 28 years’ experience in the judiciary as a prosecutor and as an assistant to the Portuguese Prosecutor General where he was responsible for matters related to management of the prosecution services at a national level and for international co-operation.

- Statement which at the time of this writing is still on
the über-mega-state's pan-galactic anti-crime
agency’s website.

A Massive Intellectual Regression In Which State Intervention Has Become the Panacea

As The Seventh Dimension is published, Michel Garroté brings us an interview with the book's author, namely Guy Millière.

On semble oublier tout ce que l’ouverture planétaire des marchés a permis en termes de recul de la pauvreté et des pénuries en deux ou trois décennies, et entrer dans une grande régression intellectuelle où l’interventionnisme étatique serait devenue la panacée.

Cow Mutilations are Up!

Yea, verily, ManBearPig hath spoken, and he makes about as much sense as nuts who can’t decide it cattle mutilations are caused by UFOs or nefarious secret military experiments.

Do you think that’s a stretch? Wheeeell, how cracked do you have to be to want to put a near septagenarian railroad engineer as the center and final judge of all geophysical science?

WWII-Era Higgins Boat in Action

Hugues Eliard's World War II-era Higgins Boat in action…

Challengelcvp "Objectif Omaha 2009" - Caudebec-en-Caux 31.05
envoyé par koucikoussa

Cette vidéo fait partie d’une série actuellement en cours de montage et tournées en mai/juin dernier durant l’opération "Objectif Omaha". Celle-ci est prise le 31 mai à Caudebec en Caux, lors de notre arrivée [à bord du LCVP PA30-4] à la station des Pilotes de la Seine, alors en route vers Honfleur.

As Revealing as a Barium Enema

The perpetual rigamarole surrounding the formation of the EU over the past 4 decades is rather more revealing of the state of the European political mind than one thinks. It’s an accounting of unredacted reactions, expressions of instincts, and the willingness to live with broad, warm-sounding feelings of communatarianism that wants to magnify it’s power around the world for no reason, while all the parties act like they want to take their ball, leave the sandbox, and go home.

Any detailed account of EU history reads like an endless list of failures, dissapointments, backtracking, non-compliance with commitments, unfulfilled expectations, hard bargaining, dull and unimpressive bureacrats, selfish national leaders, egoistic states, ever-growing scepticism, blatant behaviour of large member states, a ridiculous common agricultural policy, etc ., etc.

What I’m waiting for is the kind of commitment to “something-hood” (one cannot speak of nationhood, or cartel-hood for that matter), that, to a sufficient degree of confidence, will permit them to dismantle their 27 Embassies in every major capitol in the outside world in favor of a consolidated entity, ceding 26 of their UN General assembly seats, and one of their two UNSC seats, and live with the world in a way that the rest of the world must, and matches their own vision of the monoculturalism that they take to be inherent in any other national government on earth.

And what of the dull bureacrats? The European Commission has had 11 presidents since 1958. But who remembers presidents Rey, Malfatti, Ortoli or Thorn? You might remember Santer, but for the wrong reasons. Hallstein and Jenkins are somewhere in the back of the mind, but far from being household names. And only Delors looks impressive, but then many will tell you that he was appointed precisely because no one thought at the time he was a visionary.

And still the EU is somehow considered a big success. The truth is that the EU has almost always been an institution of dull bureaucrats pushing for incremental measures that mostly fail, and those that become successes are acknowledged as such only ten years later.

From without, the only reaction is “big deal”. Far from being a denouement of human advancement and the superiority of impotently wishing for good in the world, it’s a mere sign of incremental evolution from being a culture at war with itself and the rest of humanity for a millennium, an exporter of the most murderous ideas, especially that of the subservience of the man before the power of the state, only to construct an increasingly undemocratic super-state that takes the power people can have over their lives further away from them into a vague multi-lingual babble where one never knows what is getting lost in translation.

The only question at this point is “how long do the children have to be kept being told that they’re making history?” and “how long does Nana have to say they’re special?”