Shovel Ready Song

(Thanks to Valerie)

Syria is a Backward, Third World Gaping Hole of Suck

It isn't that way for a lack of skill, ambition, or resources. It's caused by their increasingly de-christianized culture, tempered by half a century of Ba'athist fascistic Socialism.

Homs: a 5 year old boy is married off to a 3 year old girl.

Berlin's B-Z:

For little Khaled (5) and his fiancé Hala, two years his junior, the ceremony in the Syrian city of Homs was probably just a game. But their parents are serious: If the kids are younger than 15 and 13 years old, they can be married according to the will of their parents.

Local and international human rights groups are up in arms against the engagement. In Syria, the marriage of minors is not unusual.

Kulturschande? You bet. Let's see if those “international human rights” types will, after all of these decades demonstrate their usefulness and efficacy. Don't hold your breath.

Joining WikiLeaks' Latest Iraq War "Spill", Le Monde Lambastes Yanks While Ignoring the Fact that Most Iraqi Civilians Were Killed by… Other Iraqis

Referring to Hannah Arendt's "banality of evil" phrase (in its main article's final sentence) and thus, directly or otherwise, to the heinous crimes of the Nazi era, Le Monde reveals that it is among the newspapers and/or associations involved with the latest WikiLeaks "spill" of Pentagon documents on the Iraq War.

Le Monde, conjointement avec le New York Times, le Guardian, le Bureau of investigative journalism et le Spiegel, a pu consulter en avant-première 400 000 rapports de l'armée américaine en Irak, rendus publics ce vendredi par le site Wikileaks, spécialisé dans la publication de documents confidentiels. Il s'agit des rapports d'incidents, rédigés par les officiers sur le terrain, qui constituent le fichier SIGACTS ("significant activity") des forces américaines de janvier 2004 à décembre 2009. Une masse de documents qui décrivent, jour à près jour, les attentats, les échanges de tirs, les fouilles de caches d'armes, les arrestations, et les violences contre les civils.

Le Monde's team of reporters — Patrice Claude, Yves Eudes, Rémy Ourdan, and Damien Leloup — also has articles on Iraqi policemen's use of torture and on civilian deaths at military checkpoints, along with a graph of the conflict's victims.

The first thing to notice is that the leftist media still has no idea about what a country at war — never mind a country (previously) run by a bloodthirsty psychopath — is.

Les violences des soldats américains, notamment lors de l'arrestation des suspects, est aussi évoquée par les 400 000 fichiers.

"The violence of the American soldiers, notably during the arrest of suspects, is also mentioned in the 400,000 files." Le Monde speaks of "suspects" as if they were lethargic Amsterdam marijuana users and not heavily-armed fanatics ready, and eager, to use their weapons.

But most revealing, perhaps, is how all the violence is attributed to the Americans and/or to their allies (Iraqi or foreign) and to the very fact of their presence in Iraq. The money quote of blame by association remarks goes to the following sentence, in the main article, whose passive tense suggests that Yank soldiers are to blame for the "victims of summary executions" by the very fact of… simply discovering the "corpses of thousands of women and men"!

Les cadavres de milliers de femmes et d'hommes, victimes d'exécutions sommaires, ont été découverts par les soldats américains.

To hammer the blame by association home, the article immediately segues into the sentence "ading" that "in the span of six years, those same soldiers [!] killed at least 600 civilians at checkpoints"

Ces mêmes soldats ont tué au moins six cent civils en six ans aux checkpoints, ou en ouvrant le feu sur des véhicules pris pour une menace.

(Ain't it nice to know how nicely our French allies treat their American friends?)

The blame by association is shown again in the article referring to the graph of the conflict's victims, which opens with a sentence stating that those who — "by far" — have paid the heaviest price in the war are "civilians, victims of political and criminal assassinations as well as of attacks and 'collateral damage' provoked by the American army and the Iraqi police".

Les civils, victimes à la fois des assassinats politiques et crapuleux, des attentats et des "dégâts collatéraux" provoqués par l'armée américaine et la police irakienne, ont payé de très loin le plus lourd tribut à la guerre.

Notice the wording? "Civilians, victims of political and criminal assassinations" — oh yes, when we are speaking of political and criminal assassinations, i.e., crimes by other Iraqis (more than a few of who must be members of Saddam Hussein's former Ba'athist party), we do not hear who the perpetrators are — "as well as of attacks and 'collateral damage' provoked by the American army and the Iraqi police" — but when the damage is done by the Americans and their Iraqi allies, then, by all means, we must hear (all) about it, we do hear (all) about it (and how!)…

And as this part of the sentence comes in second and last (if it was really felt to be necessary not to mention the legions of Iraqi killers, it would have been more honest to turn the two phrases around, so that the sentence read "civilians, victims of attacks and 'collateral damage,' provoked by the American army and the Iraqi police, as well as of political and criminal assassinations"), it follows that Americans and their Iraqi allies are viewed as responsible (as guilty?) for all the violence…

There is another "by far" — see below — but, because it doesn't reflect badly on the Americans and because it doesn't make the Iraqi population look like poor harmless victims, nowhere does Le Monde specify this statistic. At least the New York Times does so:

The reports make it clear that most civilians, by far, were killed by other Iraqis.

Update: Needless to say, the French mention nothing about the bogus, trumped-up figures of lost Iraqi lives along with the discovery of, yes, WMDs in Iraq…

Moynihan at Harvard in 1971: “My impression of our graduating class was of persons who had apparently scarcely had an adult conversation in 4 years"

The liberal project began to fail when it began to lie

In a book review of Steven R. Weisman's Daniel Patrick Moynihan: A Portrait in Letters of an American Visionary, the New York Times' David Brooks knows to bring out what really stands out.

Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan was a liberal, but was suspicious of upper-middle-class liberals. … [He] grew increasingly alarmed as he watched the Democratic Party become more defined by the salon liberalism of the Upper West Side. …

Moynihan opposed the Vietnam War even while serving in administrations that waged it, but he became appalled by the effect late-’60s radicalism was having on the professoriate. “The elite intelligentsia of the country are turning against the country — in science, in politics, in the fundaments of patriotism. How can we not pay for this?” he wrote in a memo to Richard Nixon in 1969.

When Moynihan returned to Harvard in 1971 he found pervasive intellectual decay. “My impression of our graduating class this year was of persons who had apparently scarcely had an adult conversation in their full four years.”

The problem was that liberals were no longer willing to test their own assumptions. “The liberal project began to fail when it began to lie,” he remarked in 1991.

Also, it is interesting to note that, as David Brooks points out,

The problems were caused not merely by white racism, he argued [in a 1965 memo to LBJ regarding the troubles blacks suffered under within American society], but also weak family structure. “Probably not much more than a third of Negro youth reach 18 having lived all their lives with both parents,” Moynihan pointed out. “The breakdown of the Negro family is the principal cause of all the problems of delinquency, crime, school dropouts, unemployment and poverty which are bankrupting our cities.”

Single moms want their babies and confidently expect Big Brother to provide for them

The attack on the institution of marriage is not only the biggest cultural but also the biggest fiscal issue of our times

writes Phyllis Schlafly,

and political and judicial attacks by gays are only part of the problem. Marriage is being assaulted by unilateral divorce, feminist hostility toward marriage, the bias of family courts against fathers, and the taxpayer-paid financial incentives that subsidize illegitimate births.

…out-of-wedlock births in the United States have grown to 72.3 percent for blacks, 52.5 percent for Hispanics, and 28.6 percent for whites (non-Hispanic). For the population as a whole, out-of-wedlock births have risen from 6 percent in the 1960s to 40.6 percent today.

Sounding a Moynihan-style alarm today is Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation. He has assembled figures from U.S. Census Bureau and Centers for Disease Control data, and they are downright scary.

This is not, as Moynihan indicated, merely a black problem, and it's not just a cultural problem as the RINOs (Republicans In Name Only, the fiscal conservatives who disdain social issues) like to portray it. It's a very big money problem because the government is transferring nearly $1 trillion in taxpayer-funded handouts to the 40 percent of Americans who rely on government for all or part of their living expenses.

The crux of this problem and its costs is that a lack of marriage causes poverty. The poverty rate for single parents with children is 36.5 percent, while it is only 6.4 percent for married couples with children.

We just suffered the largest increase in government-designated poverty: 3.7 million more Americans moved into the "poor" column in 2009. The number of Americans receiving food stamps just rose to a record 41.8 million.

Obama's solution for the poverty problem is more redistribution of money from taxpayers to the poor. But there's no evidence that more money is the remedy because we've been increasing handouts every year and the problem keeps getting worse.

Contrary to a lot of chatter, this isn't a teenage problem (only 7.7 percent of new single moms are minors), and it isn't a failure of birth control, and it isn't the accidents of unplanned pregnancies. These single moms want their babies and confidently expect Big Brother to provide for them.

Rector's solution to the poverty problem is marriage. He urges government policies to promote and strengthen the institution of marriage instead of providing incentives to discourage it.

…Ronald Reagan's advice is still pertinent. If we subsidize something, we'll get more of it; if we tax it, we'll get less of it.

Why not ask for a lawyer while you're at it?!?!

— Huh?!… You want a cup of coffee?! Why not a lawyer while you're at it?!!

Plantu: Europe criticizes France's police custody (garde à vue) regimen

Apocalypse arriveth

Democtatorship: "As Expected From France's Newspaper of Reference, a Damning Article on the Tea Party Replete With Pejoratives and Caricatures"

A hand-wringing full-page article in Le Monde speaks with ill of Hungary because following the latest elections, a Hungarian rightist party has won commanding control over the nation. Asks Marion Van Renterghem:

Should we be afraid of Viktor Orban? … Triumphantly elected in April, the conservative prime minister and nationalist, 47, is no longer the man who led the country from 1998 to 2002. For the first time ever, he has full power in his hands. His party, Fidesz, has an overwhelming majority and municipal elections on October 3 confirmed its grip. … The writer [György Konrad] has his definition of the new regime: a "democtatorship" — something between democracy and dictatorship.

Le Monde regrets that

the Prime Minister [commands] a two-thirds majority in Parliament and total control of the legislative and executive branches. Facing him ... no powerful opposition force.

So far, so good.

The problem is that in another full-page article in Le Monde, on America's Tea Parties, Denis Lacorne multiplies caricatures of Republicans, ridicule of conservatives, and demonization of America's democracy ("une émeute", "rappel farfelu", "ses incohérences", les "plus extrémistes", "un chacun pour soi généralisé", "sans la moindre considération", "la hantise", "des amateurs", "une néophyte de la politique", "la risée des médias", "de façon hystérique", "des opinions aussi délirantes", "parodie du mouvement des droits civiques", "un discours insipide", "travestir la pensée de Martin Luther King", "partisans de l'ultralibéralisme", "un discours répressif", "cette maladie infantile de l'ultraconservatisme")…

After reading about the "supporters of ultra-liberalism", and about the "delusional" opinions among those "hysterically" opposed to Washington (and to the ruling party), and about the danger of "a comprehensive legislative paralysis" — if by (the largest of) misfortune(s), the opposition were to win too many seats — one gets the distinct impression that nothing would please France's newspaper of reference and the French élite more than if the U.S. were to become a "democtatorship" (just like, indeed, few things would seem to please the American left more)…

Nothing would be more wonderful than if Barack Obama commanded "full powers." Nothing would be more wonderful than if "his party," the Democratic Party, "had an overwhelming majority." Nothing would be more wonderful than if the One commanded a "two-thirds majority in Parliament, along with total control of the legislative and executive branches." And nothing would be more wonderful than if "Facing him, [there was] no powerful opposition force."

Ultimately, nothing would be more wonderful than a "democtatorship" when this democtatorship is a leftist democtatorship, and in the hands of an Great Helmsman of the caliber of Barack Obama, a spiritual guide for the American nation (and for the whole planet).

Sarkozy Learns That Taking Candy From the French is a Bitch

A Parisian teen I know has been telling her friends:

La fac veut qu'on aille manifester, les absences ne seront pas comptés! Jusqu'a Jeudi! génial Grasse Mat'! :D

Or in other words:

Our university wants us to join the demonstration, absences won't be counted! Until Thursday! Awesome — we can sleep in late!

Sarkozy Learns That Taking Candy From the French is a Bitch, writes Greg Gutfield (merci à Valerie et à Benjamin).

…what is France today?

It’s bankrupt …

And…what’s driving this heroic protest? Oppression? Fascism? Threat of war?

No – vacations. Really.

You know how folks in France enjoy not working for really long periods of time? Well, it turns out that, after a while – when you don’t work, you can no longer pay for stuff – like the pensions that allow you to loaf around.

The protesters are trying to stop a bill that would raise retirement age from 60 to 62. Yeah – 62 – still pretty much the youngest retirement age anywhere. But workers feel it’ll ruin a good time- including the long playful summers, subsidized health care, free berets and mime welfare.

… This is what happens when you give something to someone, and then – in order to survive – try to take it away.

We were wrong: Taking candy from a baby is actually a bitch.

And only the truly ballsy can pull that off. Sarkozy – bless him – has more balls than a McDonald’s play pit.

One Component of French Authorities' "Repressive Hysteria" Towards Its Citizens (la patrie des droits de l'homme?!) Declared Incompatible with EU Law

Five days after France was condemned by the European Court of Human Rights for the French police's heavy-handed approach towards its citizens (garde à vue), France's own supreme court (or the equivalent thereof) declared the garde à vue incompatible with European law, writes Le Monde.

La Cour de cassation a ouvert mardi 19 octobre une nouvelle brèche dans le régime de la garde à vue en France, procédure policière coercitive qui concerne chaque année plus de 900 000 personnes. … Plus de 790 000 mesures de garde à vue ont été décidées en 2009, dont plus de 170 000 pour les seuls délits routiers.

More than 170,000 people taken into police custody in 2009 for simple traffic violations?! (While the police stand by and refuse to intervene as (empty) schools are blocked by protestors and as school employees come under violent attack by masked thugs?!) No wonder that one reader opines:

790000 GàV pour un pays qui a un degré de délinquance normale par rapport à ses voisins c'est consternant et donne une idée de l'hystérie répressive de ce gvt et des orientations qu'il donne à la police. Tout ça pour faire oublier le reste, dont la politique sociale exclusivement en faveur des invités du Fouquet's à la sauterie d'après élection. Et en plus on réduit le nb de policiers ce qui aggrave leur condition de travail et celles des GàV. Le comble c'est que la violence augmente.

The first reader to react writes:

Enfin ! Après avoir été si longtemps la lanterne rouge de l'Europe en matière pénale (garde à vue, état des prisons, etc.), ce qui n'est quand même pas très brillant pour la supposée patrie des droits de l'homme, peut-être allons-nous faire quelques progrès ? Bravo à la Cour de Cassation !

EU Demonstrates that it’s Easily Defeated by Passive-Aggressive Taunts

"Such actions by EULEX do not at all contribute to stabilizing the situation on the ground, rather they only serve to fuel doubt and distrust among the Serbs," Bogdanović said, according to Beta news agency.

End of the world, you say? Serbs angered to a feverish pitch? What hideous sort of transgression are we talking about, anyway?

The Serbs from northern Kosovo held a protest rally at the Jarinje crossing on Oct. 7 against the installation of the antenna pole. Local government representatives said they had not been notified of EULEX's action.

Surely, the great peace loving master-diplomats of the universe will be able to get the situation in hand.

Elsewhere:

BELGRADE, 12. 10. 2010. President Boris Tadić meets with U.S. State Secretary Hillary Clinton in Belgrade

So which of them doesn’t look like they want to be there? Note too, the distinct lack of sniper fire to verify future claims.

Perhaps the most sycophantic article ever...

...and that says alot ..................and then some:

Lost Dreams

Now they are calling Obama a "weakling." But that's not fair. Naturally Barack Obama reacts in a more mature, adult way than his predecessor, George W. Bush. The problem is simply that Obama is smaller than the promise he made, and tiny in comparison to the hopes an entire nation placed on him in 2008. There's one thing that Barack Obama failed to do. That was his real failure, the big mistake he made, back when everything seemed possible.

This one goes out to a young man in Paris named Erik......

When discussion turns to France’s antiquated and underfinanced system of higher education, Gallic pride gives way to defensiveness and embarrassment

From food to fashion to architecture to transportation, the French take a justified pride in their country’s reputation for innovation

reports D. D. Guttenplan in the International Herald Tribune (more in Le Monde).

But when the discussion turns to France’s antiquated and underfinanced system of higher education, Gallic pride gives way to defensiveness, and even a certain embarrassment. In 2006, the best any French institution could do was 46th in the influential Shanghai rankings; this year France managed 39th place in two different rankings.

Denunciations of the “Anglo-Saxon” bias and arbitrary methodology of the rating systems was a common theme last week, when representatives from some 135 grandes écoles — literally “great schools,” the specialized academies of engineering, business, science and management that form the elite of the French higher education system — gathered in Paris for their annual conference.

…Born out of the French Enlightenment, the grandes écoles have long been the cradle of the governing class. [Their graduates] occupy a place in French national life similar to Oxbridge graduates in England or the Ivy League in the United States.

Internationally, however, these institutions have far less clout than their Anglo-American counterparts.

… Pierre Tapie, who heads the Conference of Grandes Écoles while also serving as president of the business school Essec, said foreigners found it difficult to understand France’s two-track system of higher education, which distinguishes between universities and the grandes écoles.

Why I'm Depressed (a Chain E-mail)

Over five thousand years ago, Moses said to the children of Israel, "Pick up your shovels, mount your asses and camels, and I will lead you to the Promised Land."

Nearly 75 years ago,(when Welfare was introduced) Roosevelt said, "Lay down your shovels, sit on your asses, and light up a Camel, this is the Promised Land."

Today, the government has stolen your shovel, taxed your asses, raised the price of camels and mortgaged the Promised Land!

I was so depressed last night thinking about Health Care Plans, the economy, the wars, lost jobs, savings, Social Security, retirement funds, etc . . . called a Suicide Hotline. I had to press 1 for English. I was connected to a call center in Pakistan. I told them I was suicidal.

They got excited and asked if I could drive a truck......

Shocker: Leftist Pacifist Who Ended France's Death Penalty Made Liberal Use of the Guillotine During Algerian War 25 Years Earlier

There are few things that enlightened Frenchmen enjoy more than attacking, ridiculing, and/or demonizing Americans for abhorrent features of American life, such as the death penalty and alleged wartime atrocities (along with racism and human rights violations). This is easier to do, needless to say, when their own failures are ignored and/or kept secret for an extended period of time, say, oh, 50 years or more. For example, François Mitterrand managed to win two seven-year terms to the French presidency without anybody — in the opposition, in the press, among historians — pointing out until the last year or so (and only with Mitterrand's connivance) that the proud leftist had served prominently in the Vichy government that collaborated with the Nazis during World War II. Now, 15 years (!) after the Socialist leader left the Élysée palace, it transpires that the man who famously abolished the death penalty in France (after coming to power in 1981) liberally made use of the guillotine for Algerian rebels captured during the Algerian War…

Death sentences come raining down. The guillotine, never used against a nationalist from the beginning of "the events" [the Algerian uprising], started doing its work in Paris as well as in Algiers. The heads of the Fellaghas are lopped off at a rate not seen since the German occupation: on some days, up to five.

Look Ma, No Commies!... Wow! What a Difference!

Spiegel Online has a gallery of before and after photos of buildings and places in the Former East Germany. Much as it is that the word “utopia” actually means nowhere, collectivism means “it’s no-ones’”.

Confidence in and loyalty to the traditional parties of the German middle ground have markedly diminished

The Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark: passionately democratic countries with strong creeds of tolerance, where parties of the right have now entered the political mainstream pushing anti-immigrant and anti-Islamic agendas.

That is how John Vinocur starts his International Herald Tribune article. The question that he (and it) asks — even as Chancellor Angela Merkel admits that attempts to build a multicultural society in Germany have "utterly failed" (actually, he asked it one week prior to Merkel's CDU speech) — is:

What are the chances that Germany escapes the emergence of its own version of the Sweden Democrats (who have just entered the Swedish Parliament), or Danish People’s Party (whose support props up a minority government in Denmark), or a figure like Geert Wilders, whose Party for Freedom now sits in third place as a Dutch vote-getter?

…confidence in and loyalty to the traditional parties of the German middle ground have markedly diminished.

These days, when it comes to the issue that has propelled anti-immigrant, anti-Islamic parties into greater power in Northern Europe — a sense among some citizens that Muslim newcomers are encroaching on their society without regard for its laws and standards — mainstream parties in Germany are starting to acknowledge they have not dealt with the concern anywhere near adequately.

…Intolerance, unmistakably, is part of the stock in trade of the new far-right outside Germany, but in most cases it does not replicate all of the classic rant of a party like France’s National Front: anti-capitalism, anti-American, and bigotry.

See You in November…

(Thanks to Damian…)

Origins: Anti-Globalization Founded as Marxist-Leninist Propaganda

Founded on the theory that those Mexicans didn't need jobs anyway, a typical "editorial" from the golden age of self-delusion. As if these regimes weren't in fact founded on the notion of making sure their entire population was an ill-remunerated near-slave workforce.



A Radio Berlin International broadcast from 1972. The goal wasn't to "liberate" anyone, but to nag , demonize,and construct another blood libel.