So Long, and Thanks for all the Kleingebäck

In the town of Breisbach on the Rhein river near the gateway to the Black Forest - in the most prosperous and Cutsie-poo part of Germany, we discover the success of European social solidarity and integration of outsiders, their tolerance for others, and their whimsical and rich incorporation of the host society’s values.

Two ethnic Turkish men walking in on the Christian funeral service of a dead baby violently pulled the deceased from the coffin to ritually wash it.

The two men who caused the disturbance, 62 years and 28-years-old men will appear on the 1st of August before the District Court of Breisach (Breisgau in the Black Forest).

Throughout the ritual, the two accused had forcefully pushed all the guests who wanted to intervene, a court spokesman said on Wednesday. The baby died of sudden infant death syndrome.

The 28-year-old was the biological father of the child - but never acknowledged paternity. The 62 year old father took the corpse from the coffin, stripped it, and washed it in a tub that he brought. According to court spokesman, all the mourners could see the scars from the child's autopsy. After washing the remains, they wrapped it in cloth, placed it in the coffin, and buried quite crudely by the two men.

“Trying to Make the World Safe for their Volvos”

That just about sums ‘em up.

Venezuela Cartoonist Compelled to Hire Bodyguards, Risks 30 Months Behind Bars

While the presidency of Hugo Chavez is denounced in a report by Human Rights Watch (HRW) — "The accumulation of power in the executive, the removal of institutional safeguards, and the erosion of human rights guarantees have given the Chávez government free rein to intimidate, censor, and punish Venezuelans who 'offend' the president or obstruct his political aims" — Paulo A. Paranagua reports on the ordeals of a political cartoonist :

For the past 20 years, Rayma Suprani has been publishing her cartoons on a daily basis in the Venezuelan newspaper El Universal. Her drawings denounce poverty, the lack of social justice and of free speech in a country where caricaturing the president can land you in prison for 30 months. Rayma Suprani is the object of harassment from the authorities which compels her to move about under the protection of bodyguards.

• See a portfolio of Rayma's cartoons

• Check out Rayma's website

Au Venezuela, les médias ne doivent pas "susciter l'angoisse dans la population". Pour avoir enfreint cette règle, la chaîne de télévision Globovision vient de payer une amende de 1,7 million d'euros. Parmi les sujets "anxiogènes" qui ont provoqué les foudres du pouvoir figurent les émeutes dans les prisons surpeuplées, la lenteur des secours après un séisme, des affaires de pollution et, bien entendu, l'explosion de la criminalité. Ainsi, il ne faut pas raconter à quel point la morgue de Caracas est débordée les weekends. Ni la douleur des familles obligées de soudoyer des employés pour récupérer le corps de leurs proches dans des délais raisonnables.

Cette dérive autoritaire du régime Chavez est décrite minutieusement dans un rapport de 133 pages de Human Rights Watch publié mardi 17 juillet, en espagnol en anglais.

Si le registre de la gravité est encadré et surveillé, la volonté de détendre le public grâce à la satire et à l'humour peut aussi s'avérer dangereuse. Des textes manifestement comiques et des caricatures ont été sanctionnés durement par le régime du lieutenant colonel Hugo Chavez. De mémoire caribéenne, on ne se souvient pas d'un président aussi susceptible. A croire que l'usage abusif de l'uniforme, alors qu'il est passé depuis longtemps au cadre de réserve, raidit le comportement et la parole. Prenant des allures de prédicateur télé, Hugo Chavez prétend bannir l'irrévérence traditionnelle des Vénézuéliens, leur méfiance à l'égard de tous ceux qui se prennent trop au sérieux, leur refus de l'intolérance.

… Ce contexte permet de mieux apprécier le courage des dessinateurs de presse comme Rayma Suprani, collaboratrice du quotidien El Universal. Une caricature du président est passible de trente mois de prison. A Caracas, le harcèlement du pouvoir l'oblige à se déplacer protégée par des gardes du corps. L'association Cartooning for peace, créée par Plantu, a adopté Rayma Suprani.

Voir le portfolio "Les caricatures de Rayma, une lutte pour la liberté d'expression"

(Gracias para Fausta)

What’s Yours is Theirs’

L’Express’ personal fiance section runs down a list of things that will come under taxation assault in France. Painful and economically stupefying as they are, they don’t appear to produce much in the way of receipts.

Unearned income of all types, we are promised, will eventually be aligned with income tax rates, which is to say a nominal 34,5%. Oh joy, oh rapture.

- Social security sur-tax will be raised to 15,5% from 12,3%
- Tax on income from property will go up to 34,5%, as will capital gains from property sale which were at 32,5%
- Interest of life insurance returns will go up the “sociaux” rate of 15,5%
- Estate taxes will range from 30.5 to 50.5%, with some allowance for subtractions at the low end

This comes before the anticipated 75% income take rate on insufferably high income earners (<€1 Million/per annum) has yet to be announced. This is likely because they’re trying to sort out some sort of “exit tax” for people who take their wealth abroad where someone other than the government can use it. In case you think that all of this is some sort of realignment to “produce a sustainable society” that encourages personal responsibility and savings, employee savings will ONLY be taxed at a rate of 20%. On planet earth, employee retirement savings not only normally goes untaxed, but is incented by exempting it from taxable income. But since you will have less income and fewer earning prospects anyway due to the rise in income taxes generally, you won’t have a chance to save anything anyway. Whatever you have left, should you happen to actually want to shod your children’s feet or buy goods of virtually any durable sort, is subject to a VAT of 19,6%. The truly sick thing about it all is that when VAT was introduced, it was made of the argument that making goods more costly for everyone would create an incentive to save. The most common form of saves, however is subject to a 20% rate. Whatever, taxes were already punitively high, and they don’t think you made that cabbage on your own to begin with. So in conclusion, I hope your move goes smoothly, and that your new neighbors in Australia, the US, Canada, New Zealand, and the UK prove to be friendly, welcoming, and helpful.

“Reagan should have a monument in every city” says Walesa as another Gipper statue unveiled in Eastern Europe

The Gdansk statue of Ronald Reagan is the second major statue to be unveiled in Poland — this one in the company of fellow Cold Warrior John Paul II — after that in Warsaw, and at least the fourth such commemoration of the Gipper in Eastern Europe, after Warsaw, Prague, and Budapest (the Hungarian capital has two statues of Reagan, as it also sports a bust of the former actor), not to mention the Reagan statue in London.

The Associated Press reports that

Polish officials unveiled a statue of former President Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II on Saturday, honoring two men widely credited in this Eastern European country with helping to topple communism 23 years ago.

The statue was unveiled in Gdansk, the birthplace of Lech Walesa’s Solidarity movement, in the presence of about 120 former Solidarity activists, many of whom were imprisoned in the 1980s for their roles in organizing or taking part in strikes against the communist regime.

Reagan and John Paul shared a conviction that communism was a moral evil, not just a bad economic system. And Lech Walesa, founder of the Solidarity movement that led the anti-communist struggle in Poland, has often paid homage to both men and told the AP in a recent interview that he deeply respected Reagan.

“Reagan should have a monument in every city,” Walesa said.

Rome’s Pantheon Symbolizes a Remarkable Leap in Human Knowledge

An article about the Pantheon in the Weekend WSJ provoked me to think about the example it represents to us in the broader context of human development.

Not only was it as good a solution to the idea of “just a dome over a drum” as can possibly be created Architecturally, it was also the first true concrete structure.

Aestheically, its’ précis is even more poetic in the economical use of ideas:

Seen from its north-facing front, the concrete-and-brick Pantheon consists of a pedimented entrance porch, a domed rotunda and a boxlike intermediate structure joining them. Their forms—triangle, hemisphere and rectangle—announce the underlying theme of pure geometry.

This is no small feat. While the Romans built arches and domes, there is no evidence that they actually understood the principals behind it. They understood their proportional thickness to span and limits of scale only by the skillful and advanced use of a much simpler principal that they used in the absence of other scientific knowledge: trial and error. This might seem like an insult to their intelligence, but it isn’t. Using a proxy for an engineering concept that you don’t have control of in order to use it is a risky strategy requiring their best engineering skills to manage.

Moreover the risk of using and evidence-based/ trial-and-error based engineering concept was high for other reasons: embarrassment in the face of failure of whomever tries it, and the ire of the powerful patron who put their resources and trust in whomever did it. Slavery or even beheading would not have been becoming when you’re a well-respected Architect in the Roman Empire or Republic, I’m sure.

We see that they cast coffers into the dome to lighten it, but we don’t know if they put two-and-two together, and understood that the space in between them turned into ribs made stronger by tie-ing them together with the concentric rings formed by the horizontal elements between the coffers. It took several centuries before we saw any rib-vaults that represent historical evidence that building technology knew and understood the concept.

The trial-and-error issue extend to the material too: they “discovered” concrete in that they thought it could do something based on making mortar. Using volcanic ash, they produced a hydrating-lime concrete without really knowing that it was the hydration that was producing something like modern concrete. The invention of modern concrete is attributed to French gardener in the 2nd half the 19th century noodling around with a better way to make flower pots, and an Englishman who observed some of the hydrating and heat generating reaction of slack lime.

So the take-away from this is that skillful use of what you know in order to do more than you know isn’t just possible, but it creates the examples that other can “reverse engineer” to determine the unknown engineering principals themselves.

So there you have it – someone had to take a leap of faith – but the results for civilization was the ability to build more and better shelter using fewer resources, and this incrementally improved the lives of more people. This whole concept is lost on modern environmentalists whose luddite outlook is based on a are nostalgia of something that never existed, and is detrimental to the largest number of people. After all, if you tried to engage in such an experiment today, they would do whatever they could to stop it because of the risk and use of resources, and immediately vilify the chemistry involved in making it as a “poison” that will only serve to pollute streams and “make the rich richer.”

The Only Good Woman Is a Leftist Woman

Ellen Barkin tells Jon Lovitz to "shut the fuck up", reports Twitchy (thanks to Instapundit).

In order to get to the bottom of the barrel and explain the basics of leftist logic to you once and for all, I am bringing the following announcement to you in the public interest:

Indeed, it is time for you to understand your lesson and to understand it once and for all:

• The only good woman is a leftist woman

• The only good black is a leftist black

• The only good Latino is a leftist Latino

• The only good queer is a leftist queer

• The only good comedian is a leftist comedian

• The only good member of the Hollywood community is a leftist member of the Hollywood community

• And, of course, the only good white male is a leftist white male — one who supports the above-mentioned minority members.

All other members of a minority, of any minority, and all other white males — aka "2 dumb and dangerous" "right wing fuckin morons" — should hereby be advised that they have the following right: to "shut the fuck up". (Otherwise, the famed narrative might not sound as attractive…)

And if they do not — as, say, Sarah Palin, Herman Cain, and Jon Lovitz have learned (or are learning) — they will be duly ostracized (see Jonah Goldberg's take on this).

In other words, the only good member of a minority is the one who believes that (s)he is a victim — scratch that, make that "the one who knows, who knows, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that (s)he is a victim" — and that (s)he needs to support and, to vote for, the victimization party, i.e., for the Democrats. The party in which (so goes the narrative) politicians dressed as white knights in shining armor ride to the rescue of the martyred wretches…

All others? They should STFU.

(At least, until such time as they have been duly reeducated…)

Update: Joe N writes:

In essence, to the left the only good HUMANS, worthy of decency, are the ones politically useful to them.

(You should check out his website sometime…)

America the Beautiful Sung by Jon Kahn

Jon Kahn sings America the Beautiful on Troopathon.

Isn’t Soylent Green a Place Name Somewhere in the UK?

In eastern Europe, there was a popular joke people told: “if the desert was made a socialist state, there would soon be a shortage of sand.”

Socialism creates shortages. Socialize medicine enough, and you create a reason not to treat people. Sooner or later they start making excuses for euthanasia to save money. After a while they stop concealing that this is why they tried to justify it.

‘Sanctity of life law has gone too far’.

said an editorial published in the British Medical Journal. The author then arrived at the conclusion that:

‘The logical implications of this judgment threaten to skew the delivery of severely resource limited healthcare services towards providing non-beneficial or minimally beneficial life prolonging treatments including artificial nutrition and hydration to thousands of severely demented patients whose families and friends believe they would not have wanted such treatment. The opportunity cost will probably be reduced provision of indisputably beneficial treatments to people who do want them.’

Now that THAT’s out of the way, how many years will it be before we have an artificial market and delivery structure that will make people in prosperous industrial nations fight over food ?

It’s Just Like Obama’s Vision of America

Translation from original Klingon German: ... “Welfare is sexy” ...

In the Brussels Journal, George Handlery decrypts the symbolism of graffiti put up by people with everything to gain by having the state reach into your pocket.


Update: greetings to the Instapunditry. Do pour yourself a glass of something, won't you?

A lust for power disguised as the phony virtue of “compassion”

Here it is only mid-July and already the true thuggish face of the Obama Permanent Campaign is emerging for all to see

writes Michael Walsh (thanks to Instapundit).

When the president of the United States feels utterly free to bash private enterprise and the now-deceased Protestant work ethic, and even tries to criminalize it, you know we have entered uncharted waters in American political history.

Not since the Copperhead Democrats tried to appease the South and derail the Lincoln presidency have the Democrats been such an explicitly anti-American party. The relatively moderate party of JFK and Hubert Humphrey was hijacked in the streets of Saul Alinsky’s Chicago in 1968 and at the Miami Beach convention of 1972, which nominated George McGovern, and was transformed into a radical group that can no longer contain its animus against our country, our history, and our Constitution.

All eminently predictable, of course.

I’ve often called the Democrats a “criminal organization masquerading as a political party” — please read my brief new book on the subject, The People v. the Democratic Party, now available on Amazon, for chapter and verse. But the current rogues calling themselves “Democrats” are, as I pointed out last year over on NRO, especially dangerous:tries to criminalize it, you know we have entered uncharted waters in American political history.

For years now, I’ve been saying that the modern Democratic party is the unholy issue of thirties gangsters and sixties Marxists, a criminal organization masquerading as a political party, composed of thugs, lawyers, layabouts, and guilt-ridden dupes, and motivated entirely by a lust for power disguised as the phony virtue of “compassion.” And I mean that in the nicest possible way: The Republicans could use a little — no, make that a lot — of their ruthless moxie.

… It’s all well and good for Mitt Romney to point out, in his golly-gee genteel way, that the Obama administration pays off its political contributors in the form of government-guaranteed loans and rigged contracts. Of course it does — that’s the very essence of gangsterism, rewarding your friends and punishing your enemies.

But if Romney thinks that’s going to enrage the good people of America, he’d better think again, and fast. Thanks to changing demographics, the Left’s relentless assault on the American educational system over the past half-century, and the Regressives’ control of the media, it’s an open question whether such folks are still a majority. We’ve entered a period in our history very similar to the late 1920s and early ’30s, in which a sizable percentage of gangland-occupied jurisdictions sided with the gangsters. It took two-fisted reformers like Tom Dewey to rearrange the popular imagination.

… Clearly, all the president’s men have gambled that — just as Axelrod has done throughout Obama’s fixed-fight career — they can knock Romney out early by destroying his squeaky-clean reputation. But, as Dewey and the others showed, you can still be a nice guy and fight as dirty as they do. The question is whether Romney understands that and, if so, what he plans to do about it.

Citing Mister Cuddles

They are fossils, these old-line Marxist-Leninist / Permanent Revolution type Trotskyite variants. They even fall for phony, concocted quotations from their heroes of the near distant ago as a kind of scripture. Here, one present day “revolutionary” quotes this blog’s patron mass murderer Che, to try to convince the reader that Free Enterprise thanklessly exploits the worker, ignoring that under the Marxist-Leninism that the author never lived under the loving heel of the state, THE STATE is the corporate exploiter.

In carrying out whatever leadership task he was assigned, Che organized along a course that made it possible for workers to transform themselves and their social and political consciousness as they collectively transformed the social relations under which they worked, produced, and lived.

He explained that this is the only way working people carrying out the revolutionary process can make the new social relations more transparent and direct and, at the same time, base these relations on human solidarity. It is the only way to tear away the veils and fetishes behind which the capitalist system hides the brutal consequences of its exploitation of working people and obscures the unique contribution labor makes to all social and cultural progress.

So I suppose that he was going to lead by example, and tell us how many of his political opponents he capped? Not likely. He does, however, advocate chaos and the descent into a base, regressed society though:

By the time the Cuban revolution conquered, the balance sheet of twentieth-century experience had demonstrated beyond any doubt that society will not—and cannot—advance toward socialism and communism along any other course.

If it is directed down any other road, it will become mired in bureaucratic planning and management, fostering growing demoralization and alienation of working people from their labor. New privileged social layers will be spawned that ape the values and attitudes of the capitalist classes still dominant on a world scale. Willy-nilly, revolutionists will be turned into accomplices of the law of value and its corrosive social consequences. They will begin, at first even unconsciously, to seek support and collaboration from petty-bourgeois layers at home and from bourgeois forces internationally, as they turn their faces away from the toilers of the world, who are humanity’s only salvation.

There’s the perpetual argument pointing somewhere else: “sure, you’re suffering, or are trapped in these borders, or poor – but you’re doing it for the good of man. The irony is that that man, whoever the hell he is, was always somewhere else: Africa, South America, East Asia, etc.

After some more piffle about the worker, he is reputed to have said:

Fear that the example of Cuba would spread and that other pro-imperialist regimes would be overthrown by mass revolutionary struggle underlay Washington’s determination to crush the workers and farmers government in Cuba. At Wall Street’s bidding, bourgeois governments throughout the hemisphere rushed to try to isolate the revolutionary regime. …

Yes, and it was the workers who feared it, which is why they had to use violent intimidation and “never let a crisis go to waste”. Those who actually ARE workers, taking a moment to think about who the new boss is, realizes that not only does the State Mega-Nasty-Corp of the Socialists’ paradise have no competition, but they also have no incentive not to REALLY abuse the person.

Proof of this is plain: these regimes maintained impotent unions as a useful distraction to help keep the workers from rising up and taking their power away. Their job as a union, was to militate an already trapped people into towing the bosses’ political line. When the workers did rise up to protest unreasonable production quotas, they shot at them.

Can the fossils find even ONE example of anything that bad being done to working people by the state where there is Free Enterprise without massive repercussions? Well?

In that minor instance of the 1953 East German uprising, one of many events in the solidaristic “free world” that they called their walled-in lands, 170 were executed for political crimes, 123 for other ‘crimes’, connected to the protests in addition to the scores of victims shot down in the street when the protests were put down.

Voting rights, voting wrongs

The Economist ends its article on voter fraud (Voting rights, voting wrongs, July 14) with the sentence:

it would be awkward, to say the least, if Mr Romney won because new laws kept some of Mr Obama’s supporters from voting.

Would it not be far worse if Barack Obama — or if either candidate, really — won because the absence of a voting law allowed fraudulent voters from his party (with or without the candidate's consent) to steal the election?

In the latter case, a candidate might win as a result of a crime — a crime which election and law officers were deliberately prevented from detecting. In the (hypothetical) case you mention, his adversary might win because of the unintended consequences in the fight against crime, which is surely a distinction worth making.

To take another (far worse) crime, how prevalent is murder? Not very, if you take the statistics in percentage (something like 0.0048 %). Well, no matter how rare murder is, you still need to criminalize it as much for justice — to bring perpetrators (however rare they may be) to justice — as for prevention — to prevent people from being tempted to use it.

The last I heard, one needs some sort of poll card to cast a ballot in Britain, as indeed one does in every other democracy on this planet. Due to the Democrats' hysterical race-baiting, we have been subjected to the (absurd) spectacle of being the only country where having this (common-sense) requirement can only be viewed as vile, outrageous prejudice. Well, if it is racist to require voter ID in America, then Britain and every other democracy on the planet (including, of course, in Africa) can only qualify as racist as well.

The height of ridicule occurred when Democrats organized hearings in Washington to hear the sob stories of these oppressed masses. Except that in order to get out-of-state to DC, the wretched martyrs who find it such a hardship getting around their home towns managed to board an… airplane by showing an… ID.
Related:
Democrats don't support voter fraud;
they just worry about disenfranchising the deceased

Obama, You're No Ronald Reagan

Welcome to the Hotel California

Europeans are learning something is wrong with their long held utopian ideals. When even the slightest difficulty is presented to the Europeans as a whole, they passive-aggressively turn on one another – each threatening to take their football and go home.

On a recent BBC Newsnight debate, Jeremy Paxman drew applause by popping up on a screen a photo of Herman Van Rompuy, the rather nondescript Belgian president of the European Council, and asking the audience whether they had voted for him and even knew who he was. Argument over: of course we’d rather not be bossed about by unelected officials whom we can’t even name.

Except for this. It was tosh. Why didn’t he also put up photos of the Secretary General of Nato, or the head of the World Trade Organisation, or the United Nations, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the International Maritime Organisation, or even the head of Fifa? We didn’t vote for any of those either; they come from funny foreign countries and we don’t even know their names – except perhaps the President of FIFA.

But naturally, it take a Briton to really understand that the issue is one of self-interest, having long-since shed the notion that there is such a thing called enlightened self interest. Writing in the Times of London, Bill Emmott reminds us that there are even bigger temples of dysfunction trying to exercise “global governance”, and that Europeans have been following along with all manner of nonsense with the UN, IMF, and a bunch of other alphabet soup outfits with a childish optimism about human nature.

The side effects have been the shaky legal ground this leaves them on, insofar as they really don’t actually say they’re ceding sovereignty on one matter of another when they are, and the irreversibility of it all:

The point is that a crucial part of British policy since 1945 has been that of setting up, and joining, international organisations to agree upon common rules for various activities, to foster co-operation rather than conflict, to increase collective security, or to promote freer trade. All of them involve the pooling of sovereignty in exchange for an expected benefit – rather as the FA joined Fifa to play in international tournaments and to all follow the same rules of football. We could be independent and set our own rules. But it wouldn’t get us very far.

[ ... ]

Is the extra degree of sovereignty regained enough to make it worthwhile? Is the then less Common Market still common enough? Is the loss of Britons’ automatic right to live and work in Spain, Italy, Germany or elsewhere a price worth paying?

No-one asked you that either, did they?

What’s the end result of all of this? Pretending to be a helpless, servile victim of these imagined external powers with a sort of universal power ascribed to them by the well promoted feeling that international institutions are of man’s way to build some sort of “heaven on earth,” with harmless, pointless lives for everyone. A case in point is a headline. Forget the content, just look at the tone, and the assumption of who’s in charge:

IMF tells eurozone to turn on printing presses

Actually, you really don’t HAVE to, friend.

Like Babes in the Woods

Free-riding is a problem. Eventually, the free-riders either believe that they are entitled to the position that they’ve put others into, or convince themselves of some other world view in order to ignore their real behavior.

Case in point: Lecturesome pacifist Germans being willfully ignorant of their nations’ arms sales.

Observing Hermann:

These pacifistic (German made) and very expensive peaceships not only make big profits for traditional Waffenschmiede (weapons makers) like Thyssen-Krupp Marine-Systeme, they finally give Germany’s alibi army something vernünftig (reasonable) to do: Train the folks who might actually be using these weapons one day.

Of course when sold to the right parties, the DO keep the peace, but it doesn’t square with the broadly held view among Germans that they can
1) ...somehow check out on having any responsibility in the world, and,
2) ...continue imagining the world can be some peaceful little dorf where people get along without making anyone else uncomfortable, shed anyone elses’ blood, or seize one anothers’ resources (as if there even exists such a dorf in Germany,) and,
3) ...abide by the vision of “peace” held by dewey-eyed adolescents.
4) ...keep that scary, icky world “away”, (after all, it’s just too far to go to these places other than on vacation,) and pretend it’s not there.

While they prefer to not be distracted by pretending their making totally unique art, or making money and expanding their economy on the back of goofy currency manipulation, they can’t keep it up for long.

It Doesn't Matter What Mitt Romney Says at the NAACP, They Are Going to Call It Racist Anyway

Ann Althouse notes that Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi goes all racial on Mitt Romney's appearance before the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People ("a genuinely repugnant human being [and] a grasping corporate hypocrite", thanks for the link to Instapundit), as do, elsewhere, The Daily Mail's Toby Harnden, Salon's Alex Seitz-Wald ("what if Romney went to Houston intending to spark boos all along?"), and the Daily Beast's Michael Tomasky (Romney is nothing but "a spineless, disingenuous, supercilious, race-mongering pyromaniac").

This leads No Pasarán to make the following observation, which I think all can agree is highly astute, highly original, and highly unexpected (with apologies to Harry Stein):

It doesn't matter WHAT @MittRomney says at the #naacp, the @naacp is going to call it #racist ANYway! (As will the usual racebaiters…)

— ¡No Pasarán! (@nopasa) July 14, 2012

To Win at the Communist Monopoly Board Game, Your Piece Must Wait in Line for Hours to Buy a Sausage

A game can last several hours, during which not a whole hell of a lot is happening.

"The most boring game in the world" is how Le Monde quotes the makers of Kolejka ("line" or "queue") defining their own board game. Also known as the communist version of the Monopoly board game, where communist "rules" replace the capitalist rules of Wall Street, the box asks if you are "courageous enough to confront daily life in the 1980s?"

At Kolejka, whose surface is, inevitably, dominated by gray — the game is made by Poles who work for the Poland's Institute of National Remembrance and who want today's youth to understand the hardships of daily life prior to 1989 — the winner is the player who manages to buy all the products on his list, from butter and gasoline to cigarettes and toilet paper. Special cards allow you to gain time, by going to the black market (but prices are twice as high), by having a Communist Party "friend" open the door of a special store for party members, or by having a "mother with a baby in her arms" loan you her child to go to the front of the line.

Spoiling for a Fight: French Foreign Legion Versus Jungle Gold Diggers

Popular Mechanics' Joe Pappalardo goes to South America to find France's elite jungle warriors readying for a deadly new phase of a hidden conflict. Their targets: black market gold miners who have killed French officers (Merci à Instapundit).

The Legion is spoiling for a fight. In the weeks ahead, their jungle warfare skills will be tested in an escalating battle between illegal gold miners and French authorities. Last week a gang of these miners (garimpeiros) killed two French military noncommissioned officers during a raid near the isolated jungle town of Dorlin. The operation to disband the miners was met with violence from the start. First, a helicopter was peppered with bullets from below as it flew over the camp. The subsequent raid on the ground was met with a well-coordinated attack; in addition to the two soliders killed, another two were seriously wounded. The attackers fled toward nearby Suriname as French forces sought to seal off the border. As of this writing they have not been found.

Read more: Deep in the Jungle With the French Foreign Legion - Popular Mechanics

Muslim Toulouse Killer: I Dressed and Acted Western to "Fool the Enemy"

"War amounts to ruse" declared a Muslim terrorist to the French police as he was besieged in his apartment during the last hours of his life. According to the transcript of negotiations between Mohamed Merah and the French police (illegally) obtained by TF1 (to the anger of the victims' scandalized families), the Toulouse killer said that his decision to act western, by going to nightclubs and by dying his hair (or part of his hair) blond one day and red the next, was a trick to "fool the enemy" and make them "think that I am not … on the path of Allah."

Besides faking the role of "a non-serious Muslim", his brother Abdelkader Merah adds in the page-long Le Monde article by Laurent Borredon and Emeline Cazi, Mohamed also pretended to act like a tourist. As his handler, "H", tells the Toulouse killer, "you really pulled one over me" (tu m'as bien roulé dans la farine).

Muslim deception and deceit should hardly be an uninteresting subject in the West, for while all Muslims do admittedly not belong in the scooter killer's category (or in a terrorist category or in any violent category at all), the Left's excusing, ho-hum viewpoint on the matter of integration (either Muslims are obviously integrated — and can't you see so for yourself?! — or else their failure to integrate is of no concern to anybody, indeed they should be respected for remaining true to their faith and culture) can be dangerous for us all…

Mohamed Merah admitted that his primary target were members of the military, in view of the fact that the French army is deployed in Afghanistan. When a plot to kill a fourth soldier went awry, he fell back on the secondary target on his list of "enemies" — the Jews. (Somewhere down the list came people such as diplomats, notably the ambassador of India.) The Toulouse terrorist never had a kind word or a word of regret for any of his victims.

COQUETTERIES CAPILAIRES ET SORTIES EN BOÎTE POUR "TROMPER L'ENNEMI"

Est-ce au Pakistan qu'on lui apprend à se fondre dans la masse pour mieux tromper l'ennemi ? A ne pas attirer l'attention avec des tenues trop connotées ? Hizia, la jeune fille qu'il avait épousée religieusement en décembre 2011 -l'union dura deux semaines - s'était étonnée de le voir enfiler des jeans et des New Balance plutôt que la robe traditionnelle. Elle avait trouvé curieux qu'il ne fréquente pas la mosquée, ne porte pas la barbe, lui qui se disait si religieux. Son mari avait rétorqué "avoir 'ses' raisons, sans les préciser."

A son "ami" du renseignement, Merah daigne s'expliquer: "La guerre est une ruse." Ses coquetteries capillaires - la nuque longue et blonde un matin, une crête rouge le lendemain - ses sorties en boîte de nuit? C'était pour "tromper l'ennemi" et "faire croire que je suis pas (...) dans le chemin d'Allah".

"Mohamed se faisait passer pour un touriste et c'est comme cela qu'il a trompé son monde, exposera Abdelkader aux policiers lors de sa garde à vue. Il a même réussi à tromper votre service [en donnant de lui] une image de musulman pas sérieux."

… Tuer n'était pas son seul but. Diffuser les images de ses crimes et s'assurer qu'elles soient vues par le plus grand nombre, semer la terreur fait partie intégrante de son entreprise funeste.

Merah a acheté "la meilleure" caméra, une "full HD", dans un magasin spécialisé. "J'ai fait un excellent montage vidéo avec des versets, (...) on voit toutes les exécutions, crâne-t-il. Elle va être mise sur le Net. (...) Elle sera prise par les moudjahidines. Elle sera prise par certaines chaînes télé. (...) Je sais que quand elle va être vue inch'allah ça va mettre l'effroi (...) dans vos cœurs et ça va motiver d'autres frères."

JUSQU'AU BOUT LES NÉGOCIATEURS ONT PENSÉ OBTENIR SA REDDITION

Jamais Merah n'aura de mot pour les victimes. Avec une précision clinique, il liste toutes les autres cibles qu'il envisageait d'abattre. Ses "frères" lui auraient soufflé quelques idées: des "diplomates", l'ambassadeur d'Inde notamment. Mais l'enfant du quartier des Izards avait son propre programme. Les militaires d'abord, parce qu'ils "sont engagés en Afghanistan". Le 19 mars, c'est à nouveau l'un d'eux qu'il visait. Mais il a raté sa cible, et a décidé de passer à la catégorie suivante sur la liste de ses "ennemis", les juifs. Ce sera l'école Ozar Hatorah.

Il avait également "repéré une maison juive où il y a beaucoup d'habitants dedans", et la "synagogue à Bagatelle", une cité de Toulouse. Il avait aussi noté l'adresse d'un gendarme, celles de policiers.

"Même tu veux que j'te dise une chose, H.?

- J'espère que tu m'avais pas ciblé quand même?

- Si, crois-moi que j't'avais ciblé. (...) Mon but c'était de t'appeler, de te dire que j'avais le nom [du tueur] pour que tu viennes à moi et t'en aurais pris une en pleine tête."

As for Mohamed Merah's handler, "H" says:

"On reprend la discussion qu'on a eue en novembre, et là bon, sur de bonnes bases, quoi, avec un peu plus de sincérité, résume le policier. Parce que bon, tu m'as bien roulé dans la farine, hein, avoue-le. T'as été bon sur ce coup-là." Derrière les mots destinés à mettre Merah en confiance, on sent poindre le désarroi du policier qui découvre l'ampleur de ce qui lui a échappé. Il lui avoue : "On va se faire engueuler. (...) On savait pas grand-chose de toi."

Update: Michel Garroté adds:

La diffusion des conversations de Merah aura au moins eu un mérite : tordre le coup à ces « analyses » qui, au moment des assassinats de Toulouse et de Montauban, ont fleuri dans la presse, nous présentant l’homme comme un pauvre garçon des cités un peu perdu, sans repères familiaux, une sorte de victime d’une société qui n’aura pas su l’écouter, le comprendre et le remettre à temps dans le droit chemin. Le cynisme de Merah, sa froideur, son arrogance, sa haine de la France, sa détestation des Juifs, cette « ruse » dont il se prévaut : peut-être les plus obtus, les plus inconscients vont-ils enfin ouvrir les yeux sur ce qu’ils ne veulent pas voir, sur cette haine de l’Occident et des Juifs qui habite une partie de la jeunesse musulmane de nos banlieues. Un aveuglement qui explique, peut-être, comment, pourtant entendu par les services de renseignement, Merah a pu passer entre les mailles du filet, conclut Robert Ménard.