True Dat

"Everyone wants to live at the expense of the state. They forget that the state lives at the expense of everyone."

- Frederic Bastiat

Soccer is for Panzies

Why they call it a beautiful sport is beyond me. The javelin is beautiful. Track events are beautiful. “Le foot” is just another team game. I realize that the fact that few Americans enjoy it is used a reason to engage in lecturesome nagging – it also ignores the fact that the same people would feign outrage at displacing the native interests of any other culture on earth except that of the United States.

Should Canadians engage in symbolic displays of shame because the zombie-like interest in Hockey or even Curling? Just to worship at the empty, generic, gel-coated fiberglass alter of “football”? Should Britons have to apologize or enjoying Cricket? No.

So the next time you get the canned tirade about “Americans and their sports”, just tell them to go fuck themselves. The statement is commensurate with the motives of the usual recorded rant.

The Other McCain says it all when it comes to American who fixate on Metric Football:

But affluent elite American soccer fandom of the type celebrated by the Nation/NPR piece has roughly the same relationship to merely liking soccer that knowing show-tune lyrics has to sodomy — which is to say, none at all.

Put in context, it’s for non-fans of any sport who yearn to seem ‘butch’ once every couple of years. Slather on top a big helping of yearning to be liked by people who hate you (and are willing to indulge in irrelevancies over it) and you have the perfect, unsophisticated “cosmopolitan” – who is in fact nothing more than a dim-wit who vacations here and there and can parrot a few phrases about things they idealize.

conservatives don’t hate soccer because we hate brown people. We hate soccer because we hate liberals.

American liberals love soccer not merely because it allows them to engage in displays of their imagined superiority — “Look at me! I’m a sophisticated cosmopolitan!” — but also because it’s usually the only sport they’ve ever actually played.

“Mom Wouldn’t Let Me Play Football” is a convenient shorthand that I’ve used to describe a category of person typified by, inter alia, David Brooks.

Letters and Text Messages to Your Wife Can Theoretically Send You to Jail for Up to Three Years

FRANCE's parliament has approved a groundbreaking law that makes psychological violence an offence as part of a broader range of measures aimed at boosting protection for victims of domestic abuse

writes Emile Picy (merci à Benjamin), showing that Phyllis Schlafly's concerns are not limited to the American continent.

"We have introduced an important measure here, which recognises psychological violence, because it isn't just blows (that hurt) but also words," Nadine Morano, the minister for family affairs, told the lower house of parliament …

Anyone found guilty of breaking the new law faces up to three years in jail and a €75,000 fine.

The bill defines mental violence as "repeated acts which could be constituted by words or other machinations, to degrade one's quality of life and cause a change to one's mental or physical state".

Ms Morano said witnesses could be called on to testify in such cases, and doctors' certificates detailing their patients' descent into nervous depression could also be used as evidence.

"The judge could (also) take into consideration letters, SMSs or repetitive messages, because one knows that psychological violence is made up of insults," she added.

The law can be used to protect both women and men who might suffer from such abuse, however parliamentarians have acknowledged that women are the main victims of domestic violence.

See How Rapidly they React ?

Carrying on about their fantasies of what the UN can do that they won’t, which is defending them from risk and danger, Europeans are trying to employ argument and ‘discussion’ on themselves for the 30th year running.

An editorial in Sweden’s Dagens Nyheter asks What's the point in a European army?

For the first time in 2011, Sweden will assume command of Nordic Battlegroup 2, one of the 18 battlegroups that make up the European Rapid Reaction Force. The battlegroups are supposed to maintain readiness for deployment within ten days and a four month tour of duty in conflict zones.

Sounds good. I’m sure people feel warm and safe knowing that the reaction is nominally called to be rapid, and all that.

I imagine it also depends on your definition of ‘rapid’, though.

Although Europe's battlegroups "are an ideal force for the protection of populations, or the halting of ethnic cleansing," their deployment is often blocked by a lack of political will, and member states' reluctance to provide troops. The daily concludes that the idea of a "rapid" reaction force will remain a misnomer because "the UN is too slow and ponderous, and the United States follows its own agenda."

Actually, they are ideal - to those prone to imagining the world as it’s hoped to be, but not as it really is. Should anything like the ethnic cleansing in the fashion of the former Yugoslavia take place again, don’t think for a moment that the delays, unmet commitments, and bickering seen then will be any different today.

The usual argument European national forces have been under has been that their budgets and numbers are too small to have a complete effective defense and expeditionary structure. THEREfore a combined and coordinated force structure was needed. As we know, argumentation doesn’t lead to any actual accomplishment in meatspace.

The point of the ‘European Army’ was to solve that problem. Of course the moment it becomes possible, the yackity-yak engine fires up again, leaving the rest of humanity to hold the bag when forces are needed anywhere.

The emotionalism is summed up in the first reader comment that appeared in response to the article:

Sweden should not contribute to the EU's Waffen SS, we have barely resources here at home since the defense was destroyed during the past governments. Rather, we should rebuild a credible capacity so we can defend ourselves.

It’s a perfect circle of jabbering, since they will neither rebuild nor will they integrate into anything credible.

And by arguing about it endlessly, I’m sure there are people thinking that something is ‘being done’ to solve that dilemma.

Depriving Men of Constitutional Rights

Family courts routinely deprive divorced fathers not only of their own children, but even many constitutional rights

writes Phyllis Schlafly in The Awesome Power of Family Courts.

Family courts routinely deprive men of their fundamental right to parent their own children, by charging them with a wide variety of trivial offenses. Family courts generally uphold feminists' demands to kick a man out of his own home, and take control of their children and his money, based on a woman's unsubstantiated allegations. The principal tactics in this racket are domestic violence accusations and court-issued restraining orders.

The Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) was passed in 1994 as a payoff to the radical feminists for helping to elect Bill Clinton President in 1992. Personal sponsorship of this law was taken over by then-Senator Joe Biden.

VAWA shows the hypocrisy of noisy feminist demands that we kowtow to their ideology of gender neutrality, to their claim that there is no difference between male and female, and to their opposition to stereotyping and gender profiling. There is nothing sex neutral about VAWA. It is based on the proposition that there are, indeed, innate gender differences: men are naturally batterers and women are naturally victims. VAWA is not designed to eliminate or punish violence, but to punish only alleged violence against women. Most of the shelters financed by VAWA do not accept men as victims.

VAWA has been known from the getgo as "feminist pork" because it puts $1 Billion a year of U.S. taxpayers' money into the hands of the radical feminists. They have set up shop in domestic violence shelters where they promote divorce, marriage breakup, hatred of men, and false accusations, while rejecting marriage counseling, reconciliation, drug-abuse treatment, and evidence of mutual-partner abuse. There is no investigation or accountability for the taxpayers' money spent in these shelters. … VAWA has a built-in incentive for the woman to make false charges of domestic violence because she knows she will never be prosecuted for perjury.

Read the whole report…

Update from Instapundit:

YOUR CHILDREN BELONG TO THE STATE: To Get Children Back, Father Must Get Counseling to “Address His Use of Sexist and Racist Language.”

Looking More like a Third World Pit Every Passing Day

De Standaard has published a pair of articles on the fate of Jews of Antwerp: they are leaving, and it is reported further that there will be no Jews left in Antwerp in 50 years, or as Europe’s political adolescents nearly dare to say, “Judenrein” for the same old straw-man reasoning that dates back to the middle ages.

The growing anti-Semitism is increasingly driving young Jews to study in New York, London or Israel, and they are not returning. "Wearing a kippah to work in London is not a problem as it is here."

With one pack of haters after another trying to sound smart and ‘humane’ by telling Jews to “go back where they came from”, one wonders where exactly that is, and how little European and middle-eastern humanity has matured in the last century, since in large part, those not consumed by the ‘ethnic cleansing’ in Europe, had to evade the same fate in societies dominated by Muslims. It was ‘where they were from’ until they too were told to ‘go back where they came from’.

Since ‘Zionism’ took their imaginary scourge off of their hands, and they also oppose Zionism, it’s logical to assume that they are not ‘merely against what Israelis do’ or ‘against Israel’ or ‘against Israelis’, but rather just want to see the object of their obsessions dead. Will they satisfy their guilt in the same way Germans did in the Nazi area by saying that they were merely ‘resettled to the east’? Probably.

I also wonder when I hear the invective of a Gulf Arab or Iranian insisting that Palestine is ‘theirs’, whether or not they’ve through about what the Palestinians would think about that. Having long acted as though the Palestinians are their property for use as a political pawn, they’ve gone so far as to even skip a step in their contorted ‘humanistic’ argument about the Palestinians as well.

So Long, Exalted Cyclops!

Reason editor Nick Gillespie notes lat Senator Robert Byrd’s real negative legacy: having his snout in the government trough for a nigh 1/4 of the history of the United States.

it's Byrd's status as the Babe Ruth of pork-barrel spending and taxpayer-funded narcissism that is his real legacy and the one we should never forget or forgive. Here lies a man who pushed his home state to build a statue of him in defiance of a rule that such honorees be dead for 50 years.

And the legacy lives on, exemplified by the self-congratulatory nature of an award given to some lucky spendthrift for spending taxpayer’s money with extra special panache and élan, like a attention-seeking transvestite dressed up like the Sun King.

Whom Did You Fight For?

I Fought For You

How Do I Hate Me? Let me Count the Ways

To be a leftist, I’m convinced that one must try your best to live a short, ulcerate life. Just as kids eventually discover that the tooth fairly isn’t real, I have the sense that they trauma is no different for the cause-of-the-week activist leftist when they discover that their oppressed waifs think for themselves.

i.e.: German Footbal: Leftists harass Muslims for supporting Germany

The leftists have been particularly aggressive in the city’s Neukölln district, home to many residents of Turkish and Arabic heritage, daily Der Tagesspiegel reported on Monday.

Here they have made a point of destroying and removing Germany flags hanging outside shops and vehicles because they believe the proud patriotism hearkens back to the ugly nationalism of the Third Reich, the paper said.

Actually, judging by the trearing down of things hung outside shop windows, I think they DO hearkens back to the ugly nationalism of the Third Reich.

However, we all know that these outsider-types, prior to being programmed politically, are NOT to be permitted to think for themselves, or improve their own lives. After all, what is to become of their image as victims?

Bassal and his cousin Badr Mohammed, a well-known conservative Christian Democratic Berlin politician who lives in the same building, worked together to get the 20-metre-long flag, which cost them €500.

In recent days the situation has escalated, with the anarchists attempting to remove the flag four times and even setting it on fire, the paper reported. On one occasion a group managed to gain access to the roof of the building and cut the flag down.

Last Friday evening some 16 people dressed in typical black anarchist garb confronted Bassal in his shop, and the mood was tense, the paper said.

Opposing his existence, no doubt – or his right to an opinion... it always boils down to something like that.

“They see us as immigrants,” he said. “They don’t understand that Germans who aren’t from Germany would defend Germany.”

Both Bassal and Mohammed told Berliner Morgenpost that they are incredulous they have to defend hanging a German flag to native Germans.

Starting from the position that these ‘activist’ types operating from, you have to understand that they really DO believe that those they pretend to passionately defend aren’t fully human, and desperately need their aid.

Sillier still, they tend also to ‘get active’ in order to indulge their own joy of destructive violence, and are too young and stupid to have either a factual or contextual understanding of the horror that was East Germany – in fact, they tend to be the only sort that would support the neo-totalitarians peddling good old fashioned bait-and-switch class warfare, Die Linke.

But according to Der Tagesspiegel, Bassal has decided to remove the flag and hoist it only on days when there is a Germany match. Meanwhile other residents told the paper they were taking special care not to leave their flags unattended.

Said Without Irony

My, that’s some tasty kool-aid.

It is meant to be the most clear democratising feature of the EU's new rulebook, the Lisbon Treaty, but implementation of the "citizen's initiative" is a political minefield and is prompting much discussion about the danger of the tool turning into a mockery of democracy.

As opposed to, say, pandering to the public with the concept, of course. Even with it, the only less direct form of government there is to the EU is sitting in Pyongyang, where “the people” are said to have been in charge for 6 decades.

The modified proposal sees the commission decides at the moment it registers the initiative if it is fundamentally silly or against European "values."

Read into that all you like – if you can read it at all. Otherwise, enter “the activists”, those with a cause mentality that is more interested in perfecting the art of pretending that any citizen may have a say:

At a hearing on the issue organised by the parliament's Liberal group on Tuesday (22 June), democracy and civil society activists lined up to criticise the proposal.

What’s rather obvious is that the debate, now over 100 000 or 1 000 000 signatures are needed to rase a point any single lawmaker alone is permitted to raise, has entirely to do with the possible content of what the citizens are interested in: things that matter to them. We all know that that can’t be tolerated. After all, “the world” is watching them!

Others took issue with the commission's argument that 100,000 signatures have to be gathered before admissibility is considered, arguing it is too burdensome. The commission says that deciding on admissibility too early would see screeching media headlines like "Brussels gives greenlight to abortion."

Or anything else initiated by actual citizens, for that matter.

The culprit must be BP, presumably because there is no evidence that George Bush was scuba diving near the Deepwater Horizon rig on April 20th

In place of leadership we get photo-op trips to the gulf and the knee-jerk pattern of blaming others

writes Joe Hoerter to The Economist.

In this case it is BP, presumably because there is no evidence that George Bush was scuba diving near the Deepwater Horizon rig on April 20th.