That Lisbon thing continues to go full steam ahead

This is gonna be cool.

Many Men Will Pass This Way…

The story of D-Day.

Many Men Will Pass This Way…

Remember what happened…

Uncle Barack's Cabin

Beyond their moral haughtiness and their tendency to give lessons to everyone in the world (Americans above all), the true spirit of Europeans come through (see U*2's post below)…

Typical European Class: After topless 13 year old girls on mass market magazine covers, the Germans go for their gold standard: overt racism

Remember Americans, you are hated here and you will still be hated even if Obama is elected. Hell, they hated you when Clinton was President.

Mud Slung Right'n'Left on the Football Field

…"l'hypocrisie d'un milieu où aucune vérité n'est bonne à dire"

While former soccer champion Emmanuel Petit tears into the reputation of France's national football team, calling it essentially a sham, an unauthorized biography of all-time great Zinédine Zidane is causing a ruckus…

Who knows what they will tax next?

Who knows what they will tax next?

Qui sait ce qu'ils taxeront ensuite ?
Uploaded by Contribuables

Europe’s Venal Pedophiliac Culture

I’m really glad that they generally hate America. It means we’re doing something right.

Germany's largest-circulation newspaper, the tabloid Bild, which routinely places nude photos of women on its front page, has admitted that it published a topless photo of a 13-year-old girl.

On August 8, 2003, as part of a reader contest seeking the "hottest girl of summer," the newspaper ran a topless photo of "Melanie from Leipzig." Generally, the newspaper includes the age of the models it uses on its front page, but on that date, it was conspicuously absent.

”Na, und?” You say?

A major German newspaper admits it ran a naked photo of a 13-year-old girl on its front page as part of a contest to find the country's "hottest summer girl."

This is all that the “openmindedness” that they keep referring to amounts to as making European culture and its’ precious, holy self something they keep promoting as the social model for the world. An aberration, you say? Not what the ‘social model’ really leads to? Hardly. It’s promoted as groundbreaking social commentary, dialogue, and literature to think that we’re nothing more than mindless rutting beasts without a conscience, and are incapable of reasoning anything else (but are intellectually superior to those simpletons and patrician damp squibs in North America!)

Witch Hunts in Contemporary America: Is the United States Turning Into a Fascist Country?

The question above is one we would normally associate with a liberal column (or hysterics) and dismiss with a sigh or a smirk. It is therefore with profound sadness that I confess that the title is mine, with no irony intended.

Indeed, if I were not of the optimistic type, I would have titled this post Has America (Already) Turned Into a Fascist State? Like many conservatives, I assume, I have been more of the optimistic type, thinking that conservatives lovers of liberty were winning the battle of ideas against the liberals statists, or at least doing a pretty good job of holding their own.

It is therefore highly distressing to discover a book that not only says that conservatives are losing — scratch that; that Americans and lovers of liberty are losing the war but that they have hardly been aware of the main battle in the first place, which has swept by under their (under our) noses.

We thought that feminism was all (or mostly) about "date rape and sexual harassment" and the like, and we believed (or at least hoped) that perhaps the term "feminazis" was slightly exaggerated, finding the gals (and their male allies) slightly inoffensive and amusing; and so it is that we find our society has been warped and hamstrung for the past 30 years by related, if unrecognized, hysterics — with the government and the law on the side of the feminists (i.e., the statists and the state interventionists). What is double maddening (as we can read in the second and third next-to-last paragraphs) is how the bleeding-hearted liberals deliberately (if unconsciously (?)) create poverty and add ever more people to the ranks of the poor.

By fascist, naturally, I don't mean the popular meaning used by liberals, i.e., to "describe anything outside the control of the state". No, I mean just the opposite, the type described by Jonah Goldberg in his Liberal Fascism:

Fascism, at its core, is the view that every nook and cranny of society should work together in spiritual union toward the same goals overseen by the state. "Everything in the State, nothing outside the State," is how Mussolini defined it. Mussolini coined the word "totalitarian" to describe not a tyrannical society but a humane one in which everyone is taken care of and contributes equally. It was an organic concept in which every class, every individual, was part of the larger whole.

In that respect, I call upon Stephen Baskerville's Taken Into Custody (The War Against Fathers, Marriage, and the Family) which I have been reading for the past couple of weeks, during which time I have been feeling ever more down, pessimistic, depressed, all the while trying not to "tremble for my nation". Just read what Baskerville reports from the trenches (emphasis in bold mine):

…the ideologues who control organized feminism today have found that the penal apparatus provides an effective instrument for waging gender warfare on the most personal level, institutionalizing feminist ideology within private life, and criminalizing individual men (and sometimes women) who fail to measure up to the feminist ideal of ideologically correct behavior in their private lives…

Child custody is not the only area where feminists have discovered they can commandeer the criminal justice system to punish ideologically incorrect private behavior, and certainly it is not the best known. Their agenda in more politically salient issues such as date rape and sexual harassment has commanded far more media and scholarly attention (where it is frequently characterized as "totalitarian"). "Feminism today, in its erasure of the boundaries between public and private, is writing a new chapter in the dystopian tradition of surveillance and unfreedom," observes Daphne Patai, "… whereby one's every gesture, every thought, is exposed to the judgment of one's fellow citizens."

Yet while the trends are connected, the intrusive tendencies of law governing sexual harassment or date rape are minor compared to the invasiveness government-enforced feminism has already realized in family law. Yet this receives no comparable scrutiny from critics of feminism, let alone from the mainstream media or civil libertarians. As recently as 1996 a scholarly critique of "feminine jurisprudence" did not address family law at all. Nevertheless, we were warned then that "through the use of civil rather than criminal law for purposes of censorship, and under the guise of legislating equality, large areas of speech are becoming per se illegal, unbeknownst to the majority of Americans."

…Ostensibly scientific feminist scholarship is similarly revealing. Fathers trying to see their children following unproven accusations is described as "further violence" and the "threat of kidnapping"; simply responding to court proceedings is described as "violence." One highly influential feminist scholar claims to have examined 100,000 cases where women "reported" that "the batterer threatened to kidnap their children," "batterers had threatened legal custody action," and "the battering man used court-ordered visitation as an occasion to continue verbal and emotional abuse of the woman." This is not violence; it is fathers trying to recover their children through the same legal process by which their children were removed and which, in most cases, they themselves did not initiate.

…What we confront here is a bureaucratic machine of a kind that has never before been seen in the United States or the other English-speaking democracies. … The implications reach far beyond fathers and even beyond the family itself, for forcibly severing the intimate bond between parents and their children threatens the liberties of all of us. "The right to one's own children … is perhaps the most basic individual right," writes Susan Shell, "so basic we hardly think of it." By establishing a private sphere of life from which the state is excluded, family bonds also serve as the foundation of a free society. "No known society treats the question of who may properly call a child his or her own as simply … a matter to be decided entirely politically as one might distribute land or wealth," Shell continues.

…To understand what is at work here, it is necessary to examine and discard some legal jargon that serves more to obfuscate than to illuminate. Foremost is the term "custody," which I have adopted in my title. Common sense notions of young children needing their mother — along with the mistaken belief that fathers are behind the dissolution of most marriages — lead many people to accept the overwhelming bias towards mothers in custody decisions. But it is important to understand that "custody" is not the right to parent one's children; it is the power to prevent someone else from parenting his children and to marshal the penal apparatus — courts, police, and jails — to ensure he stays away from them. [Similarly, it would be more correct to speak of plundered pops than deadbeat dads.]

…Contrary to popular belief (and centuries of common-law precedent), child support today has nothing to do with fathers abandoning their children, reneging on their marital vows, of even agreeing to a divorce. It is automatically assessed on all non-custodial parents, even those divorced over their objections and who lose their children through no legal fault or agreement of their own. It is an entitlement, in short, for all divorcing mothers…

…child support is no longer primarily a method for requiring men to take responsibility for the offspring they have sired and then abandoned, as most people are led to believe. Overwhelmingly it is now a regime whereby "a father is forced to finance the filching of his own children."

…Ironically, the one thing that cannot be debated in the court is legal guilt or innocence — such as violating the marriage contract or leveling false accusations. For to admit the most rudimentary notions of justice would be to undermine the logic of the proceeding.

…In the jargon of family law, faithfully parroted by the media and academia, this father has "lost custody," a simple and harmless enough sounding formulation of events, so common as to be mundane. But this jargon disguises far-reaching implications. In plain English, this father's unauthorized association with his own children is now a crime.

…the media will go to any lengths to avoid admitting that we are in a massive epidemic of government-sponsored child stealing. So pervasive is the demonization of fathers today that fathers themselves share in it even after they have become its victims. "It is typical for a man to believe … the media myth of the Evil Male," writes Robert Seidenberg. "While he knows that he is a great father himself, he thinks everybody else is a deadbeat dad."

…The growth of this machinery has been accompanied by a huge propaganda campaign that has served to justify punitive measures against citizens who are not convicted of any crime. "is there a species on the planet who is more unjustly maligned than fathers?" writes columnist Naomi Lakritz. "Fathers are abusers, bullies, deadbeats, molesters, and all-around sexist clods who have a lot of gall wanting a relationship with their children once the initial moment of conception is over."

… "The overwhelming majority of so-called 'dead-beat dads' are just judicially created," says [an] attorney. "Why all this talk about so-called 'deadbeat dads'? Because there is a lot of money to be made through that myth." … Contrary to highly publicized but inaccurate figures on the cost of divorce to women, peer-reviewed economic research concluded that "it is the non-custodial parent, usually the father, who suffers the most [from divorce]."

…The December 1999 issue of Government Executive, a trade journal that describes itself as "government's business magazine" representing public and private bureaucracies, ran a cover story that blared out, "Where's Dad? HHS is leading a forceful change to make deadbeat parents pay up." … Strikingly, the article never addressed its own question, the most likely answer being that Dad is being kept away by the government.

…"We're ratcheting up the pressure on these deadbeats," Westchester County Executive Andrew Spano tells the New York Post, which allows its pages to be used to publicly "shame" citizens who have been convicted of no crime by publishing their photograph. Were these citizens wanted for murder, they would be described as "suspects," but the government and media have already convicted them.

…social scientists have found that as much as 95 percent of fathers having no unemployment problems for the previous five years pay their ordered child support regularly, and that 81 percent paid in full and on time. Columnist Kathleen Parker concluded that "the 'deadbeat dad' is an egregious exaggeration, a caricature of a few desperate men who for various reasons — sometimes pretty good ones — fail to hand over their paycheck, assuming they have one." Deborah Simmons of the Washington Times observes that "there is scant evidence that crackdowns … serve any purpose other than to increase the bank accounts of those special-interest groups pushing enforcement."

…The federal Office of Child Support Enforcement and its state affiliates now maintain an army of some 60,000 enforcement agents (13 times that of the Drug Enforcement Administration, which has about 4,600 agents worldwide) … What may be most striking about this police mobilization is that the initiative has come entirely from government officials. No public outcry ever preceded these measures, nor did any public perception of such a problem exist until government officials began saying they did … Needless to say, the voices of pursued parents are seldom heard amid the chorus of condemnation. The bipartisan certainty of their guilt is sufficient to set aside their right to trial and declare them public enemies by general acclaim. Yet there is reason to believe that this problem is largely an optical illusion and that what is being portrayed as irresponsible fathers is in reality a massive abuse of government power.

… What is taking place here should be made very clear: Citizens who are completely innocent of any legal wrongdoing and simply minding their own business — not seeking any litigation and neither convicted nor accused of any legal infraction, criminal or civil — are ordered into court and told to write checks to officials of the court or they will be summarily arrested and jailed. Judges also order citizens to sell their houses and other property and turn proceeds over to lawyers and other cronies they never hired. Summoning legally unimpeachable citizens to court and forcing them to empty their bank accounts to people they have neither hired for services they have requested nor received on threat of physical punishment is what most people would call a protection racket. Were any other public officials to use their position of public trust to coerce money out of private citizens, they would likely face indictment. Yet family court judges do this as a matter of routine. This is by far the clearest example I have ever encountered in my professional research of what we political scientists term a "kleptocracy," or government by thieves.

…The regime of involuntary divorce, forcible removal of children, coerced child support, and knowingly false accusations is now warping our entire legal system, undermining and overturning principles of common law that have protected individual rights for centuries. The presumption of innocence has been inverted

…It is always tempting to dismiss such violations as aberrations, the result of excess by a few overzealous officials, since civil and human rights are violated be every government, even in democracies. Yet considered in the light of constitutional principle, the destruction of ancient protections is clearly systematic with the nation's family courts and endemic to a governmental regime whose very existence is predicated and dependent on the power to remove children from their parents. Far from simple violations of particular constitutional clauses, these practices and powers are undermining constitutional government in its most fundamental principles. The power to take children from their parents for no reason is arbitrary government at its most intrusive, since it invades and obliterates all of private life. Yet we have created a governmental machinery that exists for no other purpose.

…But what may be most insidious — because it undermines the material foundations of constitutional government — is when systematic means are mobilized to finance unconstitutional government operations. Like any system of accountable government, the divorce regime can only be sustained so long as it can be paid for. This is the effect of the system of child support, coerced on pain of incarceration whose children have been seized by the courts literally through "no fault" of their own.

…The federal funding also supplies an added incentive to make guidelines as onerous as possible and to squeeze every dollar from every parent available (as well as to turn as many parents as possible into payers by providing financial incentives for mothers to divorce)…

Perhaps most destructive is that this federal funding is subsidizing middle-class divorce and fatherless children. "While the new measures resulted in virtually no measurable improvement in the lives of impoverished single-mother families,' [Robert] Seidenberg points out, "it did create a windfall of income for middle-class and upper-middle-class divorced women." Misleadingly promoted as a measure to help poor children whose mostly young and unmarried fathers had allegedly abandoned them, the new laws ended up as a means to plunder middle-aged and middle-class fathers who had done no such thing and whose children were taken from them through literally "no fault" or agreement of their own. Empirical evidence indicates that this is precisely the effect. Economist Robert Willis calculates that child-support levels vastly exceeding the cost of raising children creates "an incentive for divorce by the custodial mother. His analysis indicates that only between one-fifth and one-third of child-support payments are actually used for the children; the rest is profit for the custodial parent. "We believe that this recent entitlement," write two other scholars, "… has led to the destruction of families by creating financial incentives to divorce [and] the prevention of families by creating financial incentives not to marry upon conceiving a child."


This simply extends well-established findings that increased welfare payments result in increased divorce. In this case, however, a dimension of law enforcement is added, which effectively becomes a system of federal divorce enforcement … In other words, a mother can simply escape the uncertainties, vicissitudes, and compromises inherent to life shared with a working husband by divorcing, whereupon she acquires the police as a private collection agency who will force him, at gunpoint if necessary, to pay her the family income that she then controls alone.

…The pursuit of these fathers by armed federal agents has now reached the dimensions of a national witch hunt, by far the most extensive this country has ever seen … A look at the government machinery reveals that it was created not in response to claims of widespread nonpayment but before them, and that it was less a response to "deadbeat dads" than a mechanism to create them.

…Men who are truly intent on abandoning their progeny have little difficulty in disappearing; it is fathers who want to see their children who allow themselves to be snared. This may reveal the cruelest and most cynical side of the child-support machine: its willingness to use a father's love for his children to plunder and destroy him.…

To the question of why so many ejected fathers are unemployed or penurious, this is not to difficult to answer once one understands how the courts operate. Once the children are separated from their father, neither the courts nor the bureaucracy has much incentive to ensure his continued solvency — indeed, a solvent father is a threat — so they can happily reduce him to penury. After all, a fresh supply of fathers is constantly being brought into the system. The myopia was starkly illustrated during periodic controversies over whether to give child support priority over other debts in bankruptcy proceedings, when noone stops to ask the obvious question of why so many allegedly well-heeled "deadbeats" were going through bankruptcy in the first place…

To what extent child support is responsible for the very poverty it is claimed to alleviate is unclear. It has long been known that the vast majority of the homeless are male. Widespread anecdotal evidence suggests that family courts may be partially responsible for their plight.

…Do these questions matter? Yes, they do matter, because in these questions lies the difference between a father who is pursued because he has abandoned his children and a father who is pursued because he refuses to abandon his children. Courts exist to dispense justice against those who violate the law or agreements. When they abandon this role to become a "social service delivery system" it is much more likely that the justice and penal systems will be perverted to persecute the innocent.

Update: “We’re from the Government, and We’re Here to End Your Marriage”; Ces parents qui tuent leurs enfants quand ils se séparent in Le Monde; Breaking the French Family Up Even More By Giving Parental Rights to the Step-Parent; Au Japon, la garde partagée est un combat in Le Monde

Update 2: Protecting Children by Empowering Parents: check out the Parental Rights website…

Update 3: A truly new kind of politics, the most personal and thus potentially the most total ever devised: the politics of private life and sexual relations

Update 4: An Exposé of the Family Court System: Parents Have a Right to the Care, Custody, and Companionship of Their Children

Update 5: A Legal System Run Amok: The Violence Against Women Act includes a definition of domestic violence that is so wide you could drive a Mack truck through it

Update 6 by Phyllis Schlafly: 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

Update 7 by a feminist veteran of the 1980s fight for the rights of a woman to be believed (which brought about a culture of “women don’t lie”) whose perspective changed somewhat when her own son was falsely accused decades later of attempted sexual assault: If you think that women don’t lie to get back at men, how naive can you be? And who is going to protect our sons? (Related: "More than 30 percent of [Baltimore's rape] cases investigated by detectives each year are deemed unfounded")

Update 8 by Phyllis Schlafly: Federal and state laws and subsidies that undermine marriage are the biggest fiscal as well as cultural issue of our times

Update 9: Frustrated with years of exasperating distress thanks to the divorce industry, a father sets himself on fire on the steps of a New Hampshire courthouse; Tom Ball's Last Statement: "The only thing you really have in this world is your family"; Now, thanks to the government, neither we nor our children have that

Update 10: Father's Day should be a call to action

Update 11: Ignored in the Facebook Killer story: the divorce industry's contribution to the father going bonkers in the first place ("How does it feel to not have your child when I did not have mine for three months?")

Update 12 by Phyllis Schlafly: Feminist Pork — Women who make domestic violence accusations are not required to produce evidence and are never prosecuted for perjury if they lie

Trailers for two documentaries: Overruled (Government Invasion of Your Parental Rights) and Guilty Until Proven Innocent


Update 13: Phyllis Schlafly on the feminist theory that in all sexual controversies or accusations, the man is guilty unless he proves himself innocent 

Update 14: Glenn Reynolds:

One characteristic of modern feminism is the strong belief that men are not entitled to judge women for anything, coupled with the equally strong belief that women are entitled to judge men for everything.

Update 15: from Stephen Baskerville himself:

The Sexual Revolution’s promise of a new age of freedom is already manifesting itself as a new form of tyranny … determined, disciplined, and organized activists can seize power by wheedling their way into key institutions, such as the police, justice system, penal apparatus, and military … New gender crimes and new forms of criminality, based on sexual relations, are rapidly debasing our understanding of justice and criminalizing our population. … The reality of the witch hunts thus bears no necessary relation to what is suggested by the inflammatory language and jargon:

• “rape” that includes consensual relations and in most instances is no more than that;
  

• domestic “violence” that involves no violence or any physical contact or threat of it;
  

• sexual “harassment” that can mean anything from simple flirtation to unauthorized opinions about morality or politics;
  

• “child abuse” that is routine parental discipline, or homeschooling, or concocted altogether to win advantage in divorce court;
  

• “bullying” that involves criticism of the homosexual agenda or other differences of belief and opinion; 

• “that is forcibly divorced fathers trying to see their own children;

 … It is in this context that current attacks on marriage and the family must be seen.  Past redefinitions of marriage effected by unilateral and involuntary divorce laws have already resulted in the most repressive government machinery ever created in the United States.  In the name of divorce, legally unimpeachable citizens are now summarily evicted from their homes, forcible separated from their children, expropriated of all they possess, and incarcerated without trial – while the world mouths excuses and averts its eyes.  The divorce apparat is the government’s purpose-built mechanism for dismembering families and criminalizing the embodiments of the hated “patriarchy”: fathers.

Update 16: from Dalrock:

 … starting in the late sixties we reorganized our legal and social structure with the (unquestioned) assumption that replacing marriage wasn’t a necessary evil, but a moral imperative. … Suddenly child support and alimony went from necessary evil to an open bribe available to any woman who was willing to betray her husband and children. Now we not only promise a woman cash and prizes if she will agree to betray her family, but we have created a presumption of guilt on the part of the very husband she sells out.

Update 17 — from Dalrock, again:

 … we don’t live in a sane culture, we live in a feminist culture.   Feminism’s founding motto is “I never get to have any fun!”  Instead of curbing the worst instincts of women, our culture instead amplifies them.

A Frenchman's D-Day Wish Comes True

As he was driving along a Normandy river 12 years ago, Hugues Eliard suddenly did a double take. Out in the mud was an odd shape. He stopped his car and, lo and behold, it was indeed the hulk a World War II-era Higgins Boat, the ones which sent Allied forces ashore on D-Day.

A new goal took root in the Frenchman's mind, one that would change his life. He would clean the LCVP, restore it to its former glory, and, last but not least, make it seaworthy. It took lots — lots — of hard, back-breaking work and longer — much longer — than Eliard had anticipated but twelve years later, the Higgins Boat is afloat and ready to take part in D-Day celebrations on June 6…

This Liberal Will Be All About Socializing — Uh, Ah, Will Be About…

Maxine Waters seems to admit what the word liberal really means…

Europe is just one gigantic whorehouse

Please wipe before leaving...

Europe fucking sucks

... and if you like Europe, fuck you too.

How to Lie in One Easy Step

Big ego stroking headline: Europe's Rich-Poor Gap Smaller Than America's - But only if you can compare Alabama to Alabama, but Portugal to the entire EU, and ignore the sum-total of what it means to be poor in Europe versus America..

However, the gap between the rich and poor in Portugal, Poland, Lithuania and Latvia is greater than that in the United States, according to the commission report.

The report shows that those most at risk of falling into poverty in the EU are single parents, the retired, the unemployed and families with only one income.

So how about comparing Tirana to Vienna? Can we go there too? As you can see, the fetishizing of national league tables, cherry-picked data, and the like which have no bearing on personal behavior, are used to explain away personal behavior.

But who’s counting? What they’re fishing for isn’t a way of understanding the state of life at the lower end of the ladder in order to improve it, they’re trying to wax their dolphins.

Waziristan on the Seine

You know what? I couldn't give two shits about either one of these assholes. They're French and they deserve to wallow in the socialist theocratic hellhole of a bed that they've made for themselves. The funniest part of this whole mess is watching French Leftists fall over themselves explaining about how it has nothing to do with Islam and that French secularism is fully intact.

So, Which Candidate Actually RESISTED Marxist Indoctrination?

“It seems that Senator Obama's Old party was called the New Party. The party was a Marxist Political coalition. This was not a guilt by association thing. Senator Obama sought out their nomination. He was successful in obtaining that endorsement, and he used a number of New Party volunteers as campaign workers.”

Be Thankful

From the unctuous Euractiv website:

Highlighting the bloc's lack of political direction, the May paper raises issues relating to Europe's political, economic and international objectives as well as limits to further enlargement.

Chopin stresses that it is essential to clarify the aims of the EU in order to "define the Union's goals and shed light on the European project".

If history and common opinion is any sort of guide, we should all be thankful for the EU's lack of direction. Soren Kern summed up the alternative nicely:

The Reform Treaty, in its essence, is all about the centralization of political power by an unelected ruling clique in Brussels that wants to pursue its superpower ambitions free from the constraints of democracy.

Our Effete, Sophisticated Friends, Part 289

Just what is it that Egyptian civil servants do all day?

Deutsche Popkultur

The schlock is artistic, in its’ own forgetful way.

Utterly un-Yekish economist and comic actor Ben Stein, seen here recently in an airport sporting a suit and those whacky roller-skating Vans would probably not find it as amusing as we find him.

La BAF's Cavemen Raid Greenpeace's HQ in Paris

This week, la BAF launched a commando raid on Greenpeace's headquarters in Paris, replete with prehistoric yells and modern-day satire…

Les Arriératus à l'assault du siège de Greenpeace
Uploaded by Labaf

SPONtaneous Stupidity

Speigel Online’s English Edition could not wait to call the US Embassy, the product of the usual European process of asking everyone and their pet Beagle what you’re allowed to do with your property, “banal”. This brings me to arrive to one conclusion: bite me, you hypocrites.

O.M. Ungers’ demonstrably banal play on Italian Fasci styling was built in DC without objection, and obviously without taking any advice judging by its’ present condition. The dim-witted German habit (which just barely works in the climate of northern Germany) of applying a thin, polymer-modified Portland cement plaster was over crappy masonry work doesn’t work in the challenging climate of the mid-Atlantic, where you need some actual technical ability, not just a condescending attitude, anal-retention problems, and looking good in a lab-coat.

The plaster is trapping condensate coming through the joints, and it’s visible on the entire surface of the façade. It looks like neglected concrete block garage that hasn’t been painted in 23 years.

The notion of doing a basic study on which way the vapor is travelling in winter and summer, a basic exercise that every architect can do in his sleep, would have beneath the man’s firm which is, after all from a nation populated entirely by experts.

It is also, by the way, a hideous and tragically dull. You’ll note how few photos of any size are available of the thing.

Gallic Logic

Your town has a train station.
The train station has three tracks.
What do you choose to call them?

Track 1, Track 2, and Track 3, right?
(Or, alternatively, Track A, Track B, and Track C…)

Indeed, a traveler (French or otherwise) running to catch his train and throwing a (quick) look at the schedule in the main train station would expect to be able to quickly calculate where to go, i.e., whether his train is one, two, or three tracks away, with Track 1 (or Track A) being — needless to say — the first one built and thus the closest…

Not in places like Toulon or Saint Raphaël.
In the latter town, the first railway line is Track 1.
The second railway line is Track… A!
And the third railway line is Track 2!

Except that (just to make things a bit simpler) they go backwards: the main track (the one closest to the main part of the station) is not 1 but… 2, the second is A, and the third (the one furthest away) is 1.

(PS: Did we mention that the SNCF is run by the government?…)

Bull Connor and Stalin Worship

1968. Uttering the number nearly provokes spontaneous orgasms among aging leftists and the adolescents they still manage to guilt trip into buying their line. Prior to its revision it was marked more by leftist brutality than anything else. The restoration of an equitable civil society thereafter was due largely to the right.

When the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968, there were no mass demonstrations in London. Why was that? Can anyone around at the time enlighten me on that worrying issue?

But Hey! Who's counting when they're assigning blame, lionizing the FARC or the Sindero Luminoso, or playing with their Ché dolls? The unfortunate reality was this:

Wait a minute -- 1968 was a pretty good year out here in the Mid-West.

Stock markets were at record highs - corn and wheat prices were going through the roof. Gas was 29 cents a gallon, pickup-trucks were made with wrought iron undercarriages and you can buy a six-pack of beer for only a $1.36

Aside from a bunch of dancing, drugged "flower children" all over the place and them commie-pinko-hippies on the East and West coast supporting charlie and Uncle Ho ... 1968 was a very good year.

Cannes Memories

The bad (although hardly surprising) news from Cannes (above, Saint Tropez's La Voile Rouge on a Croisette beach) is that Karl Zéro (or someone like him) is back… (Between Karl and Oliver Stone's new project, W seems to be in good (?) hands…)

"Oh God, let zem 'URRY UP, nom de #$%$^@&!!" (aka: The Can in Cannes)

Behind the glitter of Cannes (and, more generally, of France?) is sometimes a very different reality: the fact that the town's train station seems to have (as this circling — and very stressed — gent was finding out) only two toilets — not two bathrooms, two toilets! (Later, he let out a sigh as he leaned against the blue column before resuming his nervous circling…)

What a long strange trip it's been

It's José Bové looking for his chemical toilet.

Seriously unhinged

European radical pacifists are very dangerous people.

Because the Dopes Don’t Know how to do Anything Else, That’s Why

At a loss for words in the face of an entire world that you don’t understand? Well then fire up the part organ!

The moronic institutional Marxism of a good part of the French population reveals its real motives. E-nough translates:

What is sorely missed, is a revolutionary Communist party embedded in entreprises that can defy the trade-union bureaucracies and the party reformists who made us resume work all too quickly.

As if in this post 1930s world, this could really translate anywhere.

The New Tranzi Internationale of Solidarity

The European Left has reduced itself to alliances with any violent dope peddling thugs that call themselves 'revolutionaries".

Left-wing Colombian FARC rebels had contacts with leftist groups in Germany, according to data on a laptop belonging to slain commander Raul Reyes, German magazine Der Spiegel reported on Sunday.

Reyes, the number two commander in the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), was killed on March 1 in a raid by Colombian forces just inside Ecuador.

Emails on his laptop show that in January 2005 he sent his son to Germany in a secret mission, Der Spiegel said in an article to be published Monday.

There his son met with members of the German communist party and with far-left politician Wolfgang Gehrcke, who offered to press the European Parliament to take the FARC off its list of terrorist organizations.

“It was a very positive meeting,” Der Spiegel quotes an email found on Reyes’s laptop. “We were able to substantiate several points to reactivate solidarity with the struggle of the Colombian people.”

- with thanks to the chanming and talented Elizabetta

Not Yet Sufficiently Abused to Satisfaction

To understand the violent peak in passivity and inaction, all one need do is look at just what it is that the apparently bookish natives find of literary and/or philosophical value. To sum it up, it sounds more of less like that there MUST be something wrong with the world that MUST be specifically insoluble in any tenable way so that reflection remains mildly painful. It is to remind one of ones’ ability to look like you’re suffering in thought, and that it should be as easy to find as graphitti and broken bottles on the streets of the planet’s continent of Elysium.

Glänta is out to find various missing links, seeking them in short prose, long poems, and essays, treating subjects and objects such as archaeopteryxes, the Higgs particle, borderlands, the physiology of giraffes, Tiktaaliks, the cypher nought and its role in roulette, and colleagues at work.

Conceptualist writer Pär Thörn picked quotes from the blog of a Swedish website for employers and managers, using them as material for a prose-collage with a wailing tone, lamenting over the entire scale of any imaginable misbehaviour on the job and revealing a desperate forlornness: "Could someone please give me a tip on what to 'do'?"

Do? When the improbabilities are endless? Why?

Further to the self-referential hell that European culture lives in, Clarsonimus has made a curious observation:

Extremely high number of young Germans not suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder

“We really can’t explain why this is,”

It seems the answer is right here. Blame the oppressive state that isn’t oppressive enough.

Why did they refuse to hand a blank cheque to the state monopoly on the use of force? And why did they want to pit the counter-violence of the downtrodden against oppressive state force?

Did the radical Left have a psychological defect, as some critics think today? Were they fetishists of violence, existentialist dreamers for whom the use of guns and explosives promised an intoxicating intensification of experience?

In other words, in a culture of ubiquitous pointing and suspicion, internal violence for the sake of pacifism is okay, literary lamentation may take the form of minor workplace grumblings, and there isn’t enough trauma worthy of a novel (but not hospital treatment) to go around.

Let me though, put it more simply: life is so boring and managed that they have to cut themselves to feel anything, and the struggles some find in life are too common to be worth reflecting on. It’s the rare, concocted, top-shelf invented suffering that fetches the best price.

Get down on it

Baisodrome.

When the French were told to "get down on it", they got down.

Purple Helmets of Peace Molesting Children in Côte d’Ivoire

Not really breaking news, as we know, but a brand new round of information on the gentle ministrations of the casques bleu is popping up all over he place:

A 13-year-old girl described to the BBC how 10 UN peacekeepers gang-raped her in a field near her Ivory Coast home, and left her bleeding, trembling and vomiting on the ground.

No action has been taken against the soldiers

BBC World Service is not naming nations. Beside the general opinion that the sensitivities of their own editors matters more than reporting news with the notion that certain types of truthful reportage would be going too far, it might have something to do with the fact that there are so many nations thought of of as model states involved including Europeans, and because the UN are all about Human Rights®© of the saintly downtrodden all the time... or at least their own saintly appearing to be.

Well, it Makes Sense to me...

If your goal is to force conformity on people, and you admire killing people for your own pleasure, concentrating power in a violent, unelected elite, and enslaving, impoverishing, and propagandizing the public into unquestioning fealty, then yes, that might well be the case.

What am I on about? Some hack writer with absolutely no perspective on life asks the question: Ché Guevara and Sean Penn: same battle?

The exact number of Che’s Cuban victims has not been verified, but include people he personally executed and those put to death under his orders. Che’s biographers consistently report that he sent thousands to the firing squad. Over 4,000 deaths are documented to have taken place in Cuba, mostly firing squad execution, in the first three years after Fidel Castro’s takeover (1959-1962). Che Guevara was one of the regime’s chief executioners during this period and is said to have acknowledged ordering "several thousand" executions. All took place without affording the victims fair trials and due process of law.

More Proof of Historic Friendship from the French

In a book review of former CGT head Georges Séguy's autobiography, Michel Noblecourt notes a revelation, that is the true thoughts of a French prime minister and president (in an era before Bush):

cette confidence [que lui fit] Georges Pompidou, avant les négociations de Grenelle, selon laquelle il préférerait "être simple fonctionnaire d'un gouvernement communiste que premier ministre d'une France dominée par les Américains".

Georges Pompidou would rather be a simple civil servant in a communist government than prime minister in a France dominated by Americans? Not a France generally foreign-dominated, mind you, but — specifically — dominated by the Yanks. This reveals not only some things about the supposedly eternal Franco-American friendship, it also gives an idea of how, in contrast to their attitude towards the Americans, the communists and their dictatorships are seen with benign eyes in France. (But no, this can in no way be construed as either surrender or appeasement; perish the thought!)

One is tempted to ask how the Hungarians, the Estonians, the Czechs, and the Poles would feel about a VIP's comment regarding the benefits of having communist governments versus the horrendous bad luck of being dominated by those horrible Americans. It is true that resisting is easier to do in a democracy and with a democratic superpower at one's side than in a communist-dominated government or in a pact dominated by the Kremlin…

European Hatred of America as ‘the Other’ is Still an Act of Forgetting

On the ignoring of poverty in Europe, the very being of the US plays an important role.

I want to understand the whole picture. Is Europe better than the US to the extent that we want to believe? I start to hunt for books and research findings, trawl library catalogues and the Internet, but come up with amazingly little. The pile on my desk does grow, admittedly, but relevant content is sparse. If I had looked for American research on poverty in the US, I would have been drowning in information.

Sweden’s Arena Magazine editor Per Wirtén discusses the means by which the Euvian identity has attempted to construct itself without being engineered by however many attempts to make institutes, venues, and eventes that few visit, and magazines, journals, and blogs that no-one really reads. Where the warm glow is felt knowing telling oneself just how wonder the example before you – i.e. Sicko, repeating the images from the wake of hurricane Katrina, and the like, the way of not knowing and not wanting to know hasn’t changed in a century.

In the autumn of 2005, New Orleans was submerged after hurricane Katrina breached the levees. It was the city's poorest quarters that suffered the greatest devastation. The authorities' arrogance and inability to react shocked the rest of the world. Europe offered the US emergency relief; in Paris, intellectuals wondered how the country could afford to wage war in Baghdad but not to protect its own people; and Swedish premier Göran Persson declared that a catastrophe of such a kind would be unthinkable in European welfare states. Exactly two years later, Greece was in flames. The Greek state was just as ineffectual as the American state had been after Katrina. Help from the EU was slow to arrive; people died and villages were left in ruins. Of course, questions were asked in the European media, but the criticism came nowhere near the wave of indignation that was directed at the US after the New Orleans disaster. Yet Greece's position in the EU as one its most corrupt, unequal and poorest member states is not unlike that of Louisiana in the US.

Perhaps the storm of criticism of the Greek government failed to materialise because it would risk shattering the self-image Europeans have been keen to create since the 1990s. In terms of the politics of identity, the magnet that binds together the EU more than any other is that of being an alternative to the US. Europe is more peaceable, more enlightened and civilised, more democratic, more egalitarian and without any real problems of poverty, more soft power than hard power, saying yes to market economy but no to market society. The identity construct of the Union rests not on culture and ethnicity, but on the idea of not being the US. Europe sees itself as an anti-America.

In this context, criticism of conditions in America assumes particular significance. It works like a television screen in the living room. Europe soaks up anything critical of the US: books, news items, documentaries and feature films. Our eyes are drawn to the moving pictures. But this seems to mean that we stop seeing our own living room.

Nonetheless, many of the poor are overlooked with a view to comparisons of their own society and a superior alternative to some sort of elsewhere that’s hard to reconcile.

The average income in Spain is sixty per cent of that in Germany. Roughly the same disparity, incidentally, as that between white and black Americans. If comparisons are drawn with low-wage countries like Romania and Portugal, the disparity becomes greater than any in America.

Otherwise the critics of America, presumably until they can find a reason to blame some externality for this problem, banish facing the problem in favor of some comfortable proof of something to themselves that can only be statistically supported by the very same banishment of interest in the problem. After all, if few notice, it musn’t really be happening.

All the Polls Agree: Sympathy in the U.S. for France Has Never Been As High As Now

No wonder a Frenchman like SuperFrenchie will not allow contrarian opinions to be expressed on his website and bans said people from his comments section: on his post on Americans' alleged anti-French racism, for instance, some of us might report France's prime minister stating (Embassy TV 02:10) that

nous sommes heureux de constater que la sympathie pour la France aux États-Unis n'a jamais été à un niveau aussi élévé qu'en ce moment. Tous les sondages que nous effectuons montrent que l'opinion que les Américains ont de la France depuis un an est à son meilleur niveau.

Oh, and SuperFrenchie would have to admit that Fox News does allow the French to speak their minds…

Euro-logic 101

Legal



Illegal

Any questions?

Acidland and the Terror Cell

Amnesia about social pyromania and malicious intent, as anyone who has lived there knows the Germany’s public intellectuals to hold, is reported on by World Politics Review’s John Rosenthal. So resistant to believing that there is anything threatening about the world out there that can’t be satisfied with a public rant about the US Arms Lobby or a new regulation and tax, they appear to have been flummoxed by a series of attacks brewed up from within. Not long ago, the news that a Lebanese immigrant to Germany tried to plant a bomb on a public train. Then the notion that other world views don’t think like they do, and that there might be asymmetrical reprisal on the Bundeswehr, it seems had to be banished from the mind.

I think the media are thinking far too little of the German public if they think that they have to be protected from the news. Far too little. This is a population that, not too long ago, had to accept the sort of personal hardships that come with reconstruction and the usual ways of a notion of the state as so eager to regulate people for fear of believing that they haven’t done their job properly.

The Islamic Jihad Union (IJU), the Taliban-affiliated Jihadist group that took responsibility for the attack, claimed a more massive death toll: some 60 dead in both the explosion itself and a follow-on attack by Taliban forces. In a Turkish-language statement posted in the internet, the IJU also identified the bomber: "This operation was successfully carried out by the brave Cüneyt Ciftci from Germany, who has traded in his life of luxury for paradise" (source: Focus). The text was accompanied by photos of a smiling Ciftci brandishing a pistol and sitting behind the wheel of vehicle.

And what did the American public learn about all this from American [N.B.: the German public as well] news organizations? A Factiva database search turns up a single sparse 280 word AP dispatch tentatively noting that German authorities were "checking" whether the German-born Ciftci might possibly be "linked" to the bombing. Instead, Americans were left to glean whatever more substantial information they could from the English-language website of the German weekly Der Spiegel. While Der Spiegel's March 15 article likewise studiously avoided treating Ciftci's responsibility for the attack as given, it nonetheless conceded that it was "likely": thus prompting the authors to pronounce Ciftci -- in all probability -- "the first suicide bomber from Germany." In light of the fact that Mohammad Atta and two of the three other pilots in the 9/11 attacks also lived in Germany, and indeed plotted the attacks there, the formula gives serious cause to pause. Der Spiegel dramatically described Ciftci's presumptive involvement as "Berlin's Worst Nightmare": as if the Hamburg Cell's leading role in the 9/11 attacks had not already been an even worse one or as if "Berlin" was suffering from collective amnesia and no longer remembered -- or wanted to remember -- the major German connection to 9/11.

C’mon, get happy.

But alas, hope springs eternal:

Following the emergence of the [“martyrdom”] video, Der Spiegel and the rest of the German media largely abandoned their hopeful expressions of doubt about Ciftci's responsibility. "The first perpetrator of a suicide attack from Germany," the weekly Stern now called Ciftci -- displaying the same startling obliviousness to the German role in the 9/11 attacks as Der Spiegel had previously. But when interviewed by ZDF television, Jörg Ziercke, chief of Germany's Federal Bureau of Criminal Investigations (BKA), continued to insist that he could not confirm that Ciftci had been the bomber. "We don't have the corpse," Ziercke said, "We have to undertake an identification of the corpse." As anyone who watches the massive explosion documented in the video will be able to appreciate, there is not likely to be much of Ciftci left to facilitate this identification.

Bolton on the Left’s Delusion Craving to find Humanity in Jihadists

Negotiation is not a policy. It is a technique.

Says H.E. John Bolton of Obama’s notion that acquiescing to Ahmedinejad will make him nice. All it will do is happen too soom, and force America to negotiate from a position of weakness. The outcome will be good PR and bad for the future, merely postponing a conflict with the Iranians so hell bent on imposing themselves on others.

A pacifist, it was once said, is someone who believes that if you throw a hungry lion a steak, that he’ll become a vegetarian. Given that among out many drive-by commentators here, we know that their affection isn’t for peaceful discussions with Iran, Hamas, and Hizballah – it’s the erasure of American involvement on the world. A funny position to hold when the Arab world is divided but frequently in favor of America, and Europe is generally not divided, otherwise disinterested, and their public prefers to see a supine US at whatever cost it comes to them.

Bolton continues:

Like all human activity, negotiation has costs and benefits. If only benefits were involved, then it would be hard to quarrel with the “what can we lose?” mantra one hears so often. In fact, the costs and potential downsides are real, and not to be ignored.
When the U.S. negotiates with “terrorists and radicals,” it gives them legitimacy, a precious and tangible political asset. Thus, even Mr. Obama criticized former President Jimmy Carter for his recent meetings with Hamas leaders. Meeting with leaders of state sponsors of terrorism such as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or Kim Jong Il is also a mistake. State sponsors use others as surrogates, but they are just as much terrorists as those who actually carry out the dastardly acts. Legitimacy and international acceptability are qualities terrorists crave, and should therefore not be conferred casually, if at all.
Moreover, negotiations – especially those “without precondition” as Mr. Obama has specifically advocated – consume time, another precious asset that terrorists and rogue leaders prize. Here, President Bush’s reference to Hitler was particularly apt: While the diplomats of European democracies played with their umbrellas, the Nazis were rearming and expanding their industrial power.

The industrial power, in this case is the building of the means to decimate populations in the west, and the non-conformists within. Not exactly the thing you want to see when you’re “giving peace a chance”.

- from the WSJ via James Tiberius Crittenden

It’s also worth noting at this point that Sarkozy may be playing using talks as a gambit on a much smaller scale with Hamas:

U.S.-brokered peace talks between Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert have made little tangible progress, and few observers expect them to reach a deal by the end of the year as planned.

Kouchner played down the talks between France and Hamas.

"They are not relations. They are contacts," he said.

But they will be, and it may well be part of something larger that stands a chance. Again, it’s WHAT you’re talking about, not just bringing home to your eternally baleful voting block some atmospheric notion that talking itself is a goal.

That’s Sure to Wow the Chads off of ‘em in Florida

Young Gazan proto-rocketeers say “GObama!”

It is important to know what kinds of people you want to call. Ibrahim and his friends, were calling random numbers in the US. Calling Democratic party members would have been more effective, though of course they did not have access to this information. Still, if you know the person that you want to call - the office of a political leader, for example - then international online phone-banking is a great (and so far under-used) tactic.

- Vielen Dank für die Blumen, Strummin’ Joe

For the Love of Anagrams and Batteries

European Union becomes Inane Euro No Up

Vibrators are the reason 35-year-old Heinrich Brueggemann is standing on the stage in the conference room of a Hamburg hotel, holding a pink specimen in his right hand. His tone is that of an engineer: to the point and businesslike. "Today's woman," he says, "wants to know what she's inserting into her body."

Which is a relief, because I always used to wonder about them before.

in the end, many feel that sex is totally exciting for everyone else, just not for them. Dildo-maker Brueggemann believes that this impression has nothing to do with reality in German bedrooms. "Our real needs are much more banal."

His top-selling vibrator is called "Paulchen" ("Little Paul"). It looks a little like a toy caterpillar, with a bulbous nose and funny little eyes. It seems that even vibrator buyers -- likely the more liberal-minded women -- prefer all things cute.

Symbolic Fighting

It is unclear why the Germans were sent after the Baghlan Bomber but there are more and more Taliban insurgents pouring into the nine provinces the Germans command.

Although it is quite clear why the Taliban are pouring into the German AO:

A top Taliban commander in Afghanistan with links to the killers of several British Army soldiers has escaped from German special forces because they were not authorised to kill him.

The fiasco highlights the absurd role played by the German military in the country which is known to other combat nations as "the bridge builders" because Berlin will not let them fire shots in any situation other than in self-defence.

German special forces had an important Taliban commander in their sights in Afghanistan but he escaped as the Germans were not authorised to use lethal force.

Which is a curious thing to have to do – risk your neck by being forced to live-trap key Taliban people when they know that Berlin’s orders are completely misplaced. If they want the Afghans on their side, they need to eliminate the Taliban leadership such as the one thy had in their sights who killed 79 people at the opening of a sugar plant, and 12 at a school.

"The Krauts are allowing the most dangerous people to get away and are in the process increasing the danger for the Afghans and for all foreign forces here," one an incredulous British officer at ISAF headquarters told Spiegel.

As if he’s Never Thought his Neighbors were “Frednecks”...

In the mean time, Superfrenchie, a resident of suburban Washington DC, can’t, in his zealous pursuit of pity, figure out the difference between a nationality and a race. He seems to find greater enlightenment in a nation where, unless propagandized and suppressed, sports fans ‘monkey chant’.

The French and racism - This brings us to another observation. The French people of European descent, with the exception of those descended from recent intra-European immigration (mainly from Italy, Spain, Poland), have no practical experience of racism from the receiving end. Here, I must mention the recent formulation of “anti-white racism”, but just to say that it’s both an epiphenomenon and irrelevant to the issue at hand. This absence of personal experience regarding racism explains why stereotypes against black people are so handy for the French who discuss racism. More clearly: French experience as emitters of racism toward black people is used as a reference to understand the feelings elicited by French bashing. This might offend some people, but it’s not rocket science. We always use the known to figure out the unknown.

Which is puzzling when you’re atmospherically accusing people largely of European origin of ‘racism’, when in fact, they were pelted all of their lives with reasons to think that European arts, culture, style, etc., were to be admired. In fact, those non-Europeans who don’t see the incessant imposition of the message about “see, we’re übermenschen because of our [opinions of our own lifestyles/inanimate products we’re selling you/opinions of you.]”

Any nominally skilled speaker of the English language would allege bigotry, not racism, but even at that, it can hardly be called bigotry when most of them have come to this conclusion through interpersonal experience, often going back decades of pedantic repetition.

SF’s insane assertion comes from an even longer history of prejudice that he should not be under any illusions about. The Republic’s policy on the handing of race is sound and highly principled. Many in the public, even the ‘educated’ babbling away in the ‘society of debate’ leave a great deal to be desired. Not just in the fundamentally monolithic nature of taking up outlying opinions, but within a bracket, for the sake of attention-seeking, but the underlying cultural habit of seeing nations as predictable entities comprising something-like-race and the treatment of their opinions of it with all the seriousness of a international sports league table.

Quite simply, that practice is a primitive thing for adults to engage in, yet those who do believe that they are illuminating us with their opinions based largely on an assumed image of a people-cum-race they like to opine about as a undifferentiated whole called “America”, or in the public’s gentle, infallible wisdom as ”les Ricains” or “les Amerloqs”, among other things as if their nation-state fixation wasn’t itself a form of bigotry with which they would like to write on your forehead.

And to Think That They Bought all of Chávez’ Crap about Wanting “Peace”

From the Feuilletons (of Freaks)

Cited by big-media blog Sight and Sign from the Frankfurter Rundschau

For Austrian writer Franzobel, Josef Frizl is not an un-typical Austrian ("even the threats about gassing his victims if they tried to escape don't come from just anywhere")

Um. Kind of a blatant generalization there, but keep going.

and warns about demonising him.

Woah. Hold it right there Chief.

"The more perverse and bestial Fritzl is made out to be, the more normal he appears. He did the shopping, took the rubbish out, bought clothes, paid the electricity bills. He kept his second family like pets, cared for them and even loved them in his way. The more inhuman he is made to look (he has a bit of Saddam Hussein about him) the more ordinary, quotidian his obsessions about control and security seem – which only makes the whole thing more terrifying."

Oh, forshame! Hide him, and the resort of those frightful things about human nature and hide them sofort! So, never mind what he did. His crime was to remind us just how capable these open-minded, “flexible” thinkers are to doing the same thing.

Why doesn’t THAT surprise me as not being that blatant a generalization.

Building Peace and Harmony through Multi- Inter- Mono- Omni-Intercultural Dialogue

Developing understanding and respect for other cultures in the Netherlands, the parents appear to have had their bubble of idealism burst.

A primary school in Amsterdam wished to provide its pupils with an understanding for other cultures. But during a visit to a mosque, the children were told they were dogs.

With a view to developing understanding and respect for other cultures among children, primary school De Horizon regularly organises outings to various religious organisations. The chairman of the El Mouchidine mosque told the children from group 7 (aged 10) and their chaperones however that non-Muslims are dogs.

Hey, give peace a chance, will ya, folks?

In a letter to the children's parents, the school expresses its regret at the incident: "We are shocked that during the guided tour, the mosque's chairman told the children and chaperoning parents that non believers were dogs. We consider this statement as unacceptable since we allow our children to partake in this project to develop respect for freedom of religious choice"

Bush!

Theatrics Forgotten

TRANS-ATLANTIC TENSIONS: Europe Divided Over US Missile Defense Plan

Washington’s plans to build a missile defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic have cast a shadow over US relations with Europe. Will German Chancellor Angela Merkel feel compelled to distance herself from US President George Bush?

[snip]

Instead Stoiber argued that the sensitive issue of "Europe’s security architecture” should be discussed in the three-party committee of Berlin’s ruling coalition, which consists of the conservative CDU and CSU along with the center-left Social Democrats (SPD). Stoiber felt it was important that the SPD were finally included in discussions about "Germany's strategic positioning in foreign and security policy." Merkel agreed, meaning that top members of the government and the leadership of the various factions of the coalition will soon meet for strategy discussions.

Only took 14 months to mutate into

In the essay, Schockenhoff argues for Germany to take steps to better protect itself from the threat of a nuclear attack from rogue states, saying it must support "a missile defense shield over Europe."

Meanwhile, he added, Germany needs to be prepared for "further deployments of the German armed forces that last longer -- from stabilizing peace to forcing peace," he wrote.