Fashionable Terror Pimps

Author may ban Hebrew editions of his work that is, if he’s ever actually had any.

In "Section AZ" of "Stadium USA", we have had enough of the failures of Security; We have decided to do our own ticket checking

I got this in the mail (gracias, Allie). It was allegedly written by a Mexican who is now a naturalized US Citizen, and whether true or not, it's a pretty good explanation of the illegal immigration issue.

If you had tickets to a sports event, concert, Disneyland, or for an airline flight, and when you got to your assigned seat you found someone else was in that seat, what would you do? You would call for a person in charge of ticket checking and have the person in your seat removed. You would properly be asked to show your ticket, and you would gladly and proudly do so, for you have bought and paid for that seat. The person in your seat would also be asked for a ticket, which they would not be able to produce.. They would be called "gate crashers" and they would properly be removed.

Now in this huge stadium called the USA we have had millions of gate crashers. We have been asking security to check for tickets and remove the gate crashers. We have been asking security to have better controls in checking at the door. We have asked security to lock the back doors. Security has failed us. They are still looking the other way. They are afraid to ask to see the tickets. Many people say there is unlimited seating, and whether there is or not, no one should be allowed in for free while the rest of us pay full price!

In "section AZ", of "Stadium USA", we have had enough of the failures of Security. We have decided to do our own ticket checking, and properly remove those who do not have tickets. Now it seems very strange to me that so many people in the other 49 "sections", and even many in our own "section" do not want tickets checked, or even to be asked to show their ticket! Even the head of Security is chastising us, while not doing his own job which he has sworn to do.

My own ticket has been bought and paid for, so I am proudly going to show it when asked to do so. I have a right to my seat, and I want the gate crashers to be asked to show their tickets too. The only reason that I can imagine anyone objecting to being asked for their ticket is that they are in favor of gate crashing, and all of the illegal activities that go with it, such as drug smuggling, gang wars, murder, human smuggling for profit, and many more illegal and inhumane acts that we are trying to prevent with our new legislation. Is that what I am hearing from all of the protesters such as Phoenix Mayor Gordon, US Rep. Grijalva, even President Obama? If you are not in favor of showing tickets (proof of citizenship, passport, green card, or other legal document) when asked, as I would do proudly, then you must be condoning those illegal activities.

Written by a US Citizen, Globe, Arizona…

This makes perfect sense to me. What do you think?

Since Obama has never shown his ticket I guess he feels obligated to not ask others to show theirs.

Irish Government Enabling Terror

It’s painfully obvious that the “Gaza Peace Flotilla’s” only purpose is to open up a conduit to Hamas for weapons. And in the spirit of their usual outbursts that they’re selectively-neutral, pro-nonviolence, and all about peace (which is to say, a propagandized teenager’s understanding of peace), the Irish government is propping up the Kabuki theater thus:

As an Irish ship carrying humanitarian aid continues to sail for Gaza, Ireland has found itself hurled to the forefront of tensions between Israel and the European Union.

On Wednesday (2 June), the Irish government warned Israel for a second time to let the boat, whose passengers count among their number five Irish nationals, including a former UN deputy secretary general and a Northern Irish Nobel peace prize laureate, carry on to its destination and deliver its cargo without hindrance.

The Irish Taoiseach, or prime minister, Brian Cowen said that the ship, which he described as Irish-owned, should be allowed to complete its mission, telling the country's parliament that Dublin has been in close contact with the boat

The press is ignorantly playing along too:

the MV Rachel Corrie, named after an American university student and peace activist who was killed by an Israeli army bulldozer while attempting to prevent the demolition of a Palestinian home in 2003.

Which must be what the kids these days are calling a tunnel to smuggle weapons used to kill civilians.

Given Teheran’s support of Hamas and Hizballah, it could even be that these shallow ‘pacifists’ are even stupid enough to believe that it will ingratiate them to Iran, and possibly dull their tacit threats.

Doubtful. Even amateur students of history should know better:

Since I first went to Berchtesgaden more than 20,0000 letters and telegrams have come to No. 10, Downing Street. Of course, I have been able to look at a tiny fraction of them, but I have seen enough to know that the people who wrote did not feel that they had such a cause for which to fight, if they were asked to go to war in order that the Sudeten Germans might not join the Reich. That is how they are feeling. That is my answer to those who say that we should have told Germany weeks ago that, if her army crossed the border of Czechoslovakia, we should be at war with her. We had no treaty obligations and no legal obligations to Czechoslovakia and if we had said that, we feel that we should have received no support from the people of this country. . .

- Neville Chamberlain, In Search of Peace (1939)

In other words, the “illegal war” argument. Can’t violate ‘international law’ can we? Even if we don’t say what that means or mention that there is no ‘big book of international law’ and a ‘big, God-like, stick-wielding constable to enforce it. Besides, how was invading Czechoslovakia any more ‘legal’ than stopping the invasion?

Amazing Discoveries

Who knew?

How Well Is That Gun Control Working for Ya, Europe?

The day after a British taxi driver shot 12 people dead in a rampage through Cumbria, a man in Brussels shoots two people dead — a judge and a clerk of the court (both female), no less — in a Brussels building — the Belgian capital's courthouse, no less.

The [Derrick Bird] incident echoed the massacres in Hungerford in 1987 and Dunblane in 1996, both of which led to tighter firearms legislation. Theresa May, the Home Secretary, is expected to address gun control issues when she makes a statement to the Commons today.

‘Hitler was Right’, and Other Conventional European Opinions

Like the Jenin ‘massacre’, calling the raid on the passive-aggressive flotilla ‘piracy’, a ‘crime against humanity’, and other overblown phrases that have lost all their force, we find that hatred now directed at anyone discussing it as well.

The Pavlovian Politically Correct Responses ain’t what they used to be. Melanie Philips, known to be one of those people who doesn’t fetishize ‘Palestina’, and follows actual events there received these charming and witty bonne mots:

What a disgrace to humanity the zionists have proven to be. I am of the firm opinion that Hitler was right in the assessment of the Jewish people. The protestors deaths have not been in vain as the support for Gaza & Palestine has reached all communities all over the world. It will only be a matter of time before they obtain their freedom.

As if they are denied their freedoms by the Israelis.

Have the honesty to let people know you are Jewish when you are voicing an opinion on TV. I understand why you are so ashamed.Its time the Jewish Sate of Israel was abolished. Have your religion but no state.

Which is the basic problem, no? Detached, hateful Europeans thinking that they have the right of refusal over what people can believe and whether or not they can exist.

All in the name of ‘peace’ you know, and Hamas taxing or stealing the aid given by gullible outsiders.

Every Dutch party now holds positions concerning immigrants’ obligations to Dutch society that might've been called fascistic by the left a decade ago

…the message of Geert Wilders, head of the anti-immigrant Freedom Party and Labor’s ideal boogeyman, has become an increasingly broken record for the electorate, with his poll scores running well under the projections of a few months ago

comments John Vinocur, regarding the upcoming elections in the Netherlands. But perhaps that is not as bad as it sounds at first. Indeed,

Every Dutch party, Labor included, now holds positions concerning immigrants’ obligations to Dutch society that might have been called fascistic by the left a decade earlier.

…the focus of the Netherlands and its voters has become adapting.

Their polling response is striking. The Liberal Party is the Dutch political formation most at ease with capitalism and the markets. It is neither statist nor moralistic about financial market regulation in the manner of most of Continental Europe’s leadership. Its prime ministerial candidate, Mark Rutte, is a former Unilever executive. Indeed, the party’s trademarks are both its pragmatism and its being a target for its rivals’ accusations of heartlessness.

…Early this decade, the Dutch were also the first Europeans to call into question a conventional premise that integration of Muslim immigrants could be accomplished through multiculturalism without specific rules for conforming to Dutch law and tradition. The issue is no longer a taboo here or elsewhere in Europe.

…[Mr. Rutte] wants to make €20 billion, or $25 billion, in immediate cuts in the Dutch budget, to stop social security payments to newcomers living in the Netherlands for less than 10 years, and, while supervising markets closely, to avoid characterizing them as immoral and destructive machines.

We are All Subsidized Windmill Installers

Straight from the burro’s mouth: It was thrown out there for political reasons, but is true nonetheless: there is no such thing as a “boom from a green economy,” when the entire, feeble exercise goes nowhere after four decades of exceptions, giveaways, and subsidies.

the truth about Spain’s “green jobs” boondoggle, which happens to be the one naively cited by President Obama no less than eight times as his model for the United States. It is now out there as a bust, a costly disaster that has come undone in Spain to the point that even the Socialists admit it, with the media now in full pursuit.

While it’s being thrown out there to cut off demands for more intervention in a time where austerity is needed, it seems to scrape away the crust of wishful thinking and outright fabrications that make up the larger part of Leftist economic thinking.

La Gaceta boldly exposes the failure of the Spanish renewable policy and how Obama has been following it. The headline screams: “Spain admits that the green economy as sold to Obama is a disaster.”

Elsewhere: it’s not polite to say that something other than the hole in the ozone layer, er, the greenhouse effect, um - no, greenhouse gasses, or rather, global warming, er, climate change is at fault, but June really should tell Ward not to be too hard on the beaver.

"The greatest enemy of the flood defenses is an animal called the beaver. Beavers live all along levees on the Vistula River and cause a lot of damage to them," Jerzy Miller said.

According to the Polish government, roughly 20,000 beavers inhabit Poland’s rivers, and are a protected species. Beavers were endangered in the 1950s, but have since rebounded because of a successful breeding program.

Thanks for the sh*t sandwich, Swampy.

The Essence of Western Socialism Explained

Sumfin’ fer nufin’, and if grows on trees.

Everyone's favourite statist, still at it.....

Is any commentary actually necessary in regards to this level of delusionalism?

Everything but the Mullet

Leon de Winter, novelist and columnist for the Netherland’s Elsevier Magazine misses the EEC. Remember that?

To me, Europe remains a geographical term for a messy bunch of land masses extending to the west of Asia. But unlike Asians, who’d never seriously contemplate forming an Asian Union, some Europeans believe in the existence of something along the lines of a European culture, which will only achieve full flower when all borders are abolished. And one day a bunch of suchlike Europeans set out to form the European Union. What ensued was precisely what people like me had foretold: that the Union couldn’t last because, apart from Europe’s political elite, nobody wants such a union, because Europe is a geographic, not a cultural term.

Let’s not forget the norther perspective in all of this: even by European standards, they’re more likely to feel that the “safety net” has mutated into a Hammock.

In northern Europe, fir trees grow and life is duller, people work harder, save more money and are generally pretty responsible in their dealings with the state. In the South, in contrast, people take a siesta and don’t sit down to supper till 10 o’clock at night, they run bulls through the streets, and cheating the authorities is a national sport. Thanks to the rules the establishment has laid down, we northerners are now being saddled with the southerners’ debts. The problem is I don’t feel any solidarity with the Greeks or Spanish. I like the Greeks and Spaniards I know a lot. But I don’t feel duty-bound to burden myself with their financial troubles.

In other words: get a job, ya bum.

The EEC was the ideal model for Europe. But our ambitious statesmen set their hearts on a project of historic proportions: to peacefully unify Europe by letting a new European bureaucracy stealthily conquer the continent. The Greek crisis now goes to show that Europe doesn’t exist. Europe is an idée fixe of Brussels bureaucrats.

As warm and lovable as the over-the-top curtainwall buildings with scale-less, soaring, improbable structural projects: utopia, in the original Klingon, means “nowhere”.

When the European constitution was being thrashed out in Brussels, I couldn’t help wondering why the architects of this edifice were not on TV all over the continent. Where were their rousing speeches? Where were their expositions of the European soul and Europe’s mission in the world? The European constitution is not the brainchild of prophetic founding fathers, but the product of technocrats, who see their big chance now that hundreds of billions in rescue packages are needed to bail out the Mediterranean countries. Brussels is going to regulate all that very nicely and lay harsh terms on the countries it is saving from bankruptcy. The first country to transfer a sizeable chunk of its autonomy to Brussels is Greece. Greece is to become the first bona fide Brussels protectorate: an old, civilised nation with its own traditions and ways of life is to be administered by supranational technocrats. I wonder how long that will work out.

Given that screwing the man and cheating on your taxes is a national sport, not long, I’d guess, and it will have the stench of colonialism that people don’t get sentimental about as they do in Malta, Cyprus, and Gibraltar.

You’ll recall that even under Nazi occupation, Greek communist partisans were just as likely to attack fellow Greek partisan opponents of the Nazis, as they were to attack the Nazis themselves. So expect them to at the very least fight for their right to party, at least on paper.

Also from Leon, is an item that inspired an old memory to reflexively pour forth: Ausweis Bitte!

Bravo

The EU parliament's most senior foreign relations personality has quit an official trip to Israel next week because he said his fellow deputies are plotting "anti-Israeli propaganda."

That is to say, more than the usual days’ detached tirade.

A stunt, I’m sure, which is likely to have descended into ridicule anyway, something along the lines of Marlon Brando asking an utterly fake Apache to indignantly refuse his Oscar on his behalf.

"Out of the 25 deputies who are to take part in the mission, there are fewer colleagues than the fingers on one hand whom you could define as pro-Israeli, or even [be] neutral!" he said. "Rather than a peacekeeping mission, it looks like an anti-Israeli propaganda mission is being prepared!"

Which should not surprise anyone, but if they REALLY meant it, wouldn’t self-immolation be a gesture whose sincerity one couldn’t question? A sort of ‘unimpeachable moral authority’ thing that they think they already have by, say, boycotting grapes and oranges.

The Israeli embassy to the EU said MEPs' visits to Gaza give moral support to Hamas, the militant Palestinian group which holds sway in the strip.

"It is discouraging to learn that a distinguished delegation, representing one of the symbols of European democracy, chooses to concentrate its programme around interlocutors representing the views of only one side of the conflict," it said in a statement on Tuesday.

I’d rather they need to be extinguished, and wonder if they really are distinguished, if’n you get my meaning.

Look at the bright side: at least this delegation won't have to worry about running out of Astro Glide.

Good-Bye, Friend

Dennis Hopper, 1936-2010

Good-Bye, Friend

Gary Coleman, 1968-2010

Plowshares into Swords

I can’t believe I missed this one: a German Tank manufacturer has received EU agricultural subsidies.

As translated from the original Klingon:

Hamburg - Farmers aren’t the only recipients of EU agricultural subsidies. The arms group Rheinmetall has received 2009 budget year funds from the European Union. The company conceded that it got €83 795 from a rural development funding program.

The grant recipient, the Rheinmetall Waffe Munition GmbH Forest Service, is part of the Unterlüß test range north of the Südheide nature reserve. The Forestry Commission said the center had received the funds as part of an effort to "convert our forest from a Pine monoculture to a mixed species forest environment.

Those treads should do a great job of aerating the soil.

Of Interest: between Rubble and Ruins

Presented by the German Historical Institute on their German History in Documents and Images website, is a rare collection of postwar photographs attributed to a known photographer, Friedrich Seidenstücker.

'

Feeding your Berlinalia:



A Flaneur between Rubble and Ruins – Friedrich Seidenstücker
Photographs of Berlin after 1945

Fear of an Iranian Planet

So what do you think this tells you about Iran’s “nuclear medicine” program?

PROJECT SCOPE: The project is for the construction of three (3) underground bunkers at three separate locations in and North of Amman, Jordan. One of the bunkers is approximately 3803 SM total and two of the bunkers are approximately 3288 SM total each. All are to be constructed below grade and include a burster slab, two means of ingress and egress, air supply, water storage, command and control operations areas, cafeterias, kitchens, offices, sleeping quarters, latrines, clean and dirty equipment areas, and blast attenuation/baffling structures. All work identified in the Scope of Work shall be completed within 450 days from the Notice to Proceed. Information on a site visit and instructions to obtain access to the site will be provided in the solicitation.

Can’t Buy Me Love

Eulex confounded: Kosovars still love the US more than them.

A Kosovo-Albanian and a Spaniard run into each other in New York City. Spain is the biggest among the EU countries that have yet to recognise Kosovo's independence. Upon finding out that the other is from Spain the Kosovan gives him a close hug. The Spaniard is astonished. "Hey, you guys discovered America. That's enough for us," says the Kosovan.

The joke was told in a restaurant in Pristina by a top official from Kosovo's home affairs ministry. It was meant to illustrate that the more than 2 million Albanians in Kosovo agree on one thing: it was the Americans - not the Europeans - who 'liberated' them from Serbian rule after a Nato bombing campaign forced Serbia to relinquish control over its Kosovo province in 1999. Then US president Bill Clinton was given a statue in Pristina this week; he already had a street named after him.

What with all of that “spreading freedom” twaddle, those silly Yanks. I mean WHO would want THAT, when the Europeans were perfectly prepared to let the schnooks keep burning villages, if it required any use of force on their part?

Who says satire is dead?

Or, for that matter, delusionalism:

Europe will introduce a surprise new plan today to combat global warming, committing Britain and the rest of the EU to the most ambitious targets in the world. The plan proposes a massive increase in the target for cutting greenhouse gas emissions in this decade.

The European Commission is determined to press ahead with the cuts despite the financial turmoil gripping the bloc, even though it would require Britain and other EU member states to impose far tougher financial penalties on their industries than are being considered by other large economies.

The plan, to cut emissions by 30 per cent on 1990 levels by 2020, would cost the EU an extra £33 billion a year by 2020, according to a draft of the Commission’s communication leaked to The Times.

Me? I’m Still Shorting their Sorry Asses

As one would expect, EUtopia is gunning for investors to give ‘the masses’ something to build some false social solidarity around.

“For the locusts in the finance sector, a new age is dawning.” This is how German Social Democrat and Member of the European Parliament Udo Bullmann commented on the prospect of new EU-wide regulations for hedge funds.

Those ‘locusts’ are making the revenues that happen to be buffering the collapse of your retirement, Udo baby. They’re also offering a hint at what those assets are really worth. Since you’d rather see the rating agencies lie to the public about what the sectors and industries people work for, investors and hedge funds snapping to and fro are the only approximation of mark to market you’ll ever really see.

That the Social Democrats would triumphantly bring out their “locust” bon mot again now is particularly troubling when one considers that the EU’s current offensive against hedge funds appears to be all about offering up a convenient scapegoat to public opinion, as opposed to addressing the fundamental problems underlying Europe’s debt crisis. Anti-Semitism, after all, has always been a matter of finding a scapegoat.

And look for it, they will. The old reliable straw man of European “intellectualism” is being pointlessly and evasively employed again, when it’s Europe’s government pandering to people for votes that have bankrupted society to make the political class look “generous” with people’s own money.

The comparison sparked controversy, especially after historian Michael Wolffsohn accused Müntefering and the Social Democrats of using rhetoric reminiscent of Nazi screeds. Indeed, as the German journalist Ulrich Speck pointed out at the time in a (no longer available) blog post, the “swarm of locusts” metaphor had a long history in anti-Semitic discourse dating back to at least the early 19th century. It is used, moreover, in the infamous Nazi propaganda film Jud Süß (“The Jew Süss”). In the film, the Jews are said “to descend upon our country like locusts.” Implicit in the German discussion — though rarely if ever stated openly — was the fact the Nazis had, of course, always associated Jews with finance, and vice-versa, and that this association was indeed an essential part of their anti-Semitism. (The “Jew Süss” to whom reference is made in the title of the eponymous film, for instance, is the 18th Century Jewish financier Joseph Süss Oppenheimer.)

Not to mention the fact that it’s also used by the left, right, and center in many of these “great cultures”.

The Social Democrats reacted indignantly to the criticisms. But it did not help the credibility of their cause when Germany’s biggest trade union, IG Metall, published a cartoon depicting the famous “swarm” of financial investors...

No need to guess that in the absence of an easy outsider characterization as Jews, what with their heads and noses being calipered for measurement, that these locusts, naturally, had to take another form:



Like you couldn’t have guessed that one