A lIfe in the Merde

Trying to pare down gub’mint? Trying to pad it for votes and to creep toward an entirely centralized economy? Makes no difference in the land where you end up with Socialism no matter who you elect.

During the presidential campaign, Nicolas Sarkozy had said would only replace one in two government employees as their positions are made vacant at retirement. Half of the savings generated would go to deficit reduction, and the rest to increase civil servant salaries. Once in office, he decided to pursue the decline in the public service started under Chirac. In the 2008 budget, 23 000 public service positions will be eliminated.
But, incredible as it may seem, the State does not know exactly how many people it employs.

I suppose this includes the long-since communized parts of the economy itself, which is to say the state enterprises that have as their workforce “state employees” such as EdF, GdF (which now owns formerly-nearly non-state Suez), the passenger trains, the post office, etal. While HItlerian state-run corporatism rules that day in some parts of Europe, these “champions” invariably buy-up other Europeans’ privatized entities.

Free-markets? Just you try it! We’ll fix your wagon!

The True Purveyors of Lies: Hear about the 550 metric tons of yellowcake uranium found in Iraq, enough to make 142 nuclear weapons?

Hear about the 550 metric tons of yellowcake uranium found in Iraq?

asks Investor's Business Daily.

No? Why should you? It doesn't fit the media's neat story line that Saddam Hussein's Iraq posed no nuclear threat when we invaded in 2003.

It's a little known fact that, after invading Iraq in 2003, the U.S. found massive amounts of uranium yellowcake, the stuff that can be refined into nuclear weapons or nuclear fuel, at a facility in Tuwaitha outside of Baghdad.

In recent weeks, the U.S. secretly has helped the Iraqi government ship it all to Canada, where it was bought by a Canadian company for further processing into nuclear fuel — thus keeping it from potential use by terrorists or unsavory regimes in the region.

This has been virtually ignored by the mainstream media. Yet, as the AP reported, this marks a "significant step toward closing the books on Saddam's nuclear legacy."

Seems to us this should be big news.

After all, much of the early opposition to the war in Iraq involved claims that President Bush "lied" about weapons of mass destruction and that Saddam posed little if any nuclear threat to the U.S.

This more or less proves Saddam in 2003 had a program on hold for building WMD and that he planned to boot it up again soon.

…That means Saddam held onto it for more than a decade. Why? He hoped to wait out U.N. sanctions on Iraq and start his WMD program anew. This would seem to vindicate Bush's decision to invade.

The American Thinker Web site reported four years ago on the scary math behind Saddam's uranium hoard: 500 tons of yellowcake, once refined, could make 142 nuclear weapons.

But yellowcake wasn't all they found at Tuwaitha. According to the AP, the military also discovered "four devices for controlled radiation exposure . . . that could potentially be used in a weapon."

By the way, this should put to rest the canard peddled by the American left and by former Ambassador Joseph Wilson that "Bush lied" about Iraq seeking yellowcake from the African country of Niger.

Given what we know, including comments by officials in Niger's government, Iraq did make overtures to buy uranium. And it's quite possible all or part of the 550 tons came from there.

What's more, if Bush hadn't acted, we might today see a nuclear Iraq, an Iran on the way to having a weapon, Libya with an expanded nuclear program, and Syria — with its close ties to Saddam — on the way to having a nuke.

Of equal concern is why the media ignored this good news coming from Iraq. It seems to be of a piece with how they've treated other recent positive developments in Iraq.

We ask again — why aren't you seeing and hearing more about this? The reason is simple: The mainstream media find it inconveniently contradicts the story they have been telling you for years.

Christopher Merola adds:

We have been hearing from the far-left for more than five years how, “Bush lied.” Somehow, that slogan loses its credibility now that 550 metric tons of Saddam’s yellowcake, used for nuclear weapon enrichment, has been discovered and shipped to Canada for its new use as nuclear energy.

It appears that American troops found the 550 metric tons of uranium in 2003 after invading Iraq. They had to sit on this information and the uranium itself, for fear of terrorists attempting to steal it. It was guarded and kept safe by our military in a 23,000-acre site with large sand beams surrounding the site.

This is vindication for the Bush administration, having been attacked mercilessly by the liberal media and the far-left pundits on the blogosphere. Now that it is proven that President Bush did not lie about Saddam’s nuclear ambitions, one would think the mainstream media would report the story? Once the AP released the story, the mainstream media should have picked it up and broadcast it worldwide.

This never happened, due in large part I believe, to the fact that the mainstream media would have to admit they were wrong about Bush’s war motives all along.

…The truth is, due to their opposition to the war, Joe Wilson, Valerie Plame, the mainstream media and their left-wing friends on the blogosphere engaged in a propaganda campaign to undermine the Bush administration.

No. It was not just a propaganda campaign. The truth is that this is the true point where the word lie should enter the debate: the adversaries of the Bush White House lied. They lied knowingly and they lied deliberately.

If anyone suggested that Tiger Woods should try to be more like other golfers, people would question the sanity of whoever made that suggestion

Yet there are those who think that the United States should follow policies more like those in Europe,

writes Thomas Sowell,

often with no stronger reason than the fact that Europeans follow such policies. For some Americans, it is considered chic to be like Europeans.

…Those Americans who are pushing us toward the kinds of policies that Europeans impose on pharmaceutical companies show not the slightest interest in what the consequences of such laws have been.

One consequence is that even European pharmaceutical companies do much of their research and development of new medications in the U.S., in order to take advantage of American patent protections and freedom from price controls.

These are the very policies that the European imitators want us to change.

It is not a coincidence that such a high proportion of the major pharmaceutical drugs are developed in the U.S. If we kill the goose that lays the golden egg, as the Europeans have done, both we and the Europeans — as well as the rest of the world — will be worse off, because there are few other places for such medications to be developed. …

A Not-So-Sophisticated Record

Some of the people who are most adamant against outsourcing economic activity from the U.S. to other countries often seem to think we should outsource our foreign policy to "world opinion" or act only in conjunction "with our NATO allies."

Like so many things that are said when it comes to public policy, there is very little attention paid to the actual track record of "world opinion" or of "our NATO allies."

Often there is a blanket assumption that European countries are just so much more sophisticated than American "cowboys." But there is incredibly little interest in the track record of those European sophisticates whom we are supposed to consult about our own national interests — including, in an age when terrorists may acquire nuclear weapons, our national survival.

In the course of the 20th century, supposedly sophisticated Europeans managed to create some of the most monstrous forms of government on earth — communism, fascism, Nazism — in peacetime, and to start the two World Wars, the bloodiest in all human history. In each of these wars, both the winners and the losers ended up far worse off than they were before these wars were started.

Mad like a Sandmonkey

F’ing brilliant:

Unarguably , Obama's number one foreign policy objective is to get things right with the arab and muslim world. And that's when you are going to watch the best circus in the world, because no a single leader, in the arab or the muslim world, really wants to get right with the US. Hell, our rulers have justified their entire existence in power by positioning themselves as opposed to America . They continue , in their state-sponsored media, to point fingers at the US and go " See, those bloodthirsty Americans. They will kill you all, rape all of your women and drink the blood of your babies, if we are not here to protect you. So eat shit and shut up!", and If you think I am exaggerating please check Egypt, Syria, Iran, Yemen, etc.. etc.. Those people have built their entire rule on that whole notion, you think they are going to give that up because the silly Americans voted for a 40-something inexperienced Black dude? Get real!

He also raises this excellent point of perceptions. The nodding, bien pensent repugnant elite might think Obama some sort of healer to those people who are “victimized by our existence”, when the inverse is rather more obvious.

Oh, and I am sure that once he gets elected that the Islamists will warm up to him immediately. You know, because there is nothing that Islamists like more than a former born- muslim who chose, by his own accord, to become a Christian and an active one at that. Yeah, I am sure they will be very impressed, and quit fighting the US immediately. After all, he said that he intends to deliver a speech from a muslim nation in his first 100 days of office. Yeah, that kind of pandering really calms islamists down, especially coming from apostates. And they will surely respect him if he withdraws partially from Iraq, and not mistake it as a sign of weakness or that they are winning or anything. And since we are on the topic, can you imagine what will happen if a terrorist attack took place during the Obama Presidency, after he does all of this? Can you imagine how America will feel, when they realize that even after they voted for the Blackman with Arab middle name and Muslim background who gave a speech during his first 100 days in a muslim nation, that the world still hates them and that Islamists still want to kill them?

But it would never dawn on the Birkenstock-wearing buffoons with PhDs at your local fair-trade anti-capitalist co-op grocery store to understand the obvious. It really is too much to ask of the “brilliant progressives” of this world.

Unfortunately, karma does not easily cross the Atlantic

Upon her liberation, Betancourt offered profuse thanks to God and the Virgin Mary, to her supporters and the media, to France and Colombia and just about everybody else

writes Charles Krauthammer as he discusses a "Europe luxuriat[ing] in soft power", a "Europe specializ[ing] in providing haven for those fleeing the evil that Europe does nothing about", and the "Solemn condemnations [that] have been issued from every forum of soft-power fecklessness — the EU, the U.N., the G-8 foreign ministers". Returning to Ingrid Betancourt's "profuse thanks to … just about everybody else", he adds:

As of this writing, none to the United States.

Cue the Accordions

Pépé Le Pen Godfather to Dieudonné’s Newborn Daughter
Horse head in the bed to follow

Humorist Dieudonné has had his fourth child baptized last Friday in Bordeaux by a traditionalist bishop in the presence of Jean-Marie Le Pen, according to a website close to the Front National and Liberation.

The site "Nation Presse hebdo" [Nation Press Weekly] said that the president of the National Front is the godfather of the youngest of four children of Dieudonné.

"It could have been a fairly ordinary baptism if the godfather of the girl had been anyone other than the President of the National Front, Jean-Marie le Pen," he wrote.

Reached by telephone on Wednesday, an FN official refused to comment, stressing that it is "a private matter." Abbé Philippe Laguérie, a traditionalist known for its links with the extreme right, presided. According to "Nation Presse hebdo", information has been confirmed by the abbot."

The rapprochement of Dieudonné with the FN had started on November 11, 2006, when he participated in the Bleu, Blanc, Rouge festival at Le Bourget, near Paris.

The comedian had clarified a few days later he did not vote FN, but he did not "not to vote FN." A month later, leaders of the far-right party had attended a show by the comedian.

Think about it, it’s a win-win PR stunt for both of these psychos, and it only comes at the expense of a child’s dignity for the rest of her life. The press, giddy with excitement, did leave out a minor detail, of course.

Can you confirm being the godfather of Dieudonné’s 4th child, as reported by Libération on Wednesday morning?

"Yes, I confirm. But contrary to what was reported by Libération, I'm the godfather of the third child of Dieudonne, not the fourth. The rest is true: it went well at a ceremony in the Bordeaux last week. It went well in the traditionalist parish of Saint-Eloi. The baptism was celebrated by Father Philippe Laguérie."

"I didn’t have any interest in talking about it publicly. It is a fact of privacy. I'm not like Sarkozy: I do not feel obliged to stage my privacy."

What is the nature of your relationship with Dieudonné?
"It was Dieudonné who asked me to become the godfather of one of his children because he thinks that this is not incompatible with the meaning of life and honor."

"I have esteem for Dieudonné. We are closer because we have things in common. We all belong both to the 'community of outcasts’. In addition, we’re both from Brittany: he’s 50% Breton, and I’m 100%. This is what created the link between us."

Have you asked Dieudonné to join the FN?
"No, he can join is he wishes, though."

The only question is: who’s legitimizing who?

Want to Know What Torture Is Really Like, New York Times?

It's in your own pages…

[The Iranian's] alienation began at age 9, when he witnessed a deadly stoning. Though forbidden by his mother, he slipped out of the house to see the commotion near his school. He saw a man, accused of adultery, buried to the waist, his head covered with a sack that turned red as Revolutionary Guards hurled chunks of concrete. … Years later, he would witness public hangings and dismemberments.

…At the University of Tehran in the mid-1990s, [Ahmed Batebi] joined in student protests, getting arrested three times. … Mr. Batebi described 17 months in solitary confinement … His jailers thrashed him with a metal cable, beating his testicles and kicked in his teet, he said. They held his face down in a pool of excrement. They tied his arms behind his back and hung him from the ceiling. At other times, strapping him to a chair, they kept him awake night after night, cutting him and rubbing salt into the wounds. … They tied his arms behind his back and hung him from the ceiling. At other times, strapping him to a chair, they kept him awake night after night, cutting him and rubbing salt into the wounds.

"Well, let them go f*ck themselves! The Lithuanians!? Do you know any Lithuanians?! I never met one of them in my life!"

Arnaud Leparmentier et Marion Van Renterghem reveal what the French really think of their fellow members in the European brotherhood, certainly when those Eastern Europeans have the gall not to agree with the French (remember Chirac's "They have missed an opportunity to shut up"?)…

Alle Menschen Werden Brüder

In their usual gentle and culturally superior manner, Europeans know how to party and contemplatively celebrate their patriotism.

The July 14 festivities were glazed many incidents, including in Ile-de-France. On Monday night, 295 cars were set ablaze in the country bringing to nearly 600 the number of vehicles damaged in two days.

As with the previous night, the night of the 14th gave rise to numerous incidents and many skirmishes between youths and police. 295 vehicles were burned in France, including 150 in Ile-de-France and 145 elsewhere in the country. The figures for the previous night showed 297 cars were torched.

In two days, nearly 600 vehicles were burned and a total of 219 people were arrested.

The national secretary of the PS [Socialist Party], Bruno Leroux, has accused the Interior Ministry yesterday of trying to obscure the figures on the violence committed on Saturday night, especially in Seine-Saint-Denis. That was a false charge against the Interior Ministry, which confirmed these figures and also recorded a 20% drop in car torching incidents for the first six months of the year compared to 2007. In addition, the ministry announced its intention to tighten legislation on the sale of fireworks after a police commissioner was very seriously injured in the eye by one in clashes between youths and Police in Asnières (Hauts-de-Seine).

Primitives that we are, Americans have yet to develop a taste for carbeque on their national day.

Suckahs

The FARC's Swiss Dupe gets even weirder, now that we get to see the paper trail:

Switzerland’s Colombia policy is suffering one blow after another. A few days after the liberation of Ingrid Betancourt, the Colombian President Uribe officially withdrew Switzerland’s mandate to conduct negotiations. On Tuesday, things escalated still further: Bogotá announced that it was opening a criminal investigation into the activities of Swiss envoy Jean-Pierre Gontard. The crime: "concierto para delinquir" - membership in a criminal association. According to the Colombian district attorney, there is evidence that Gontard led a conspiracy or participated in one.

It's damning stuff, and the “sophisticated” Swiss were such bozos that they couldn't figure out what the FARC's “Foreign Minister” was doing right under their noses, and with their money.

According to Minister of Defense Juan Manuel Santos, e-mails found on the computer of the killed FARC commander Raúl Reyes suggest that Gontard delivered some $500,000 to the Marxist guerilla in 2001. In so doing, the Swiss envoy would have overstepped his function as "mediator."

As is so often the case when she is confronted by serious criticism, the head of the Swiss Department of Foreign Affairs (EDA), Michéline Calmy-Rey, has maintained an eloquent silence ever since the crisis with Colombia began. But she has dispatched her underlings before the press, in order roundly to deny all the accusations. M. Gontard "never delivered ransom payments," the EDA announced.

Why talk to them at all? Why dispatch funds? Why deny that you pay ransom?

Colombian authorities suspect that the half a million dollars was part of the ransom money with which the pharmaceutical firm Novartis purchased the freedom of two of its employees who had been taken hostage. They accuse Gontard of having personally delivered the cash.

The King of French comedy

Dieudonné has a new show. After trying it out on Montreal audiences, who were rolling in the aisles with the standard anti-Semitic and anti-American fare, he's bringing the show to Paris. After posing as a Nazi during a wave of Jew bashing in Paris streets (yes, Jews were being bashed, literally), he's now taken to wearing terrorist garb to promote his latest show.

Note that Dieudonné's production company has purchased the theatre where his Paris shows are held and he plays to standing-room-only audiences. French youth cannot give up enough of their hard earned cash drug money to see this guy.

Then	Now

Midnight Blue over the Land of 10,000 Lakes

Skye will be at the Republican National Convention in the North Star State this summer as an official accredited blog…

Revolution through Administrative Inaction

Think anyone noticed?

A seemingly innocuous judicial ruling introduced the right to polygamy in Belgian law. On 26 June, the Constitutional Court amended the law of 15 December 1980, and thus prohibited discrimination against children from polygamous families.

A circular noting the change sent to embassies and consulates in Belgium said that children "are not responsible for the marital status of their parents." But an oversight of the Court gives a completely different flavor to the text. "On the last page, the Court deletes text from Article 10 regarding the exclusion of spouses in a polygamous marriage," said Freddy Roosemont, Director-General of the Foreign Residents Office.

The new law stipulates that "the spouse of a foreigner whose polygamous relationship with another spouse already residing in Belgium can not be unrecognized. It permits polygamy.

And the sheep will soon tremble.

Might Europeans Perhaps Go So Far as to Wring Their Hands?

Doubtful. By the time they’re done navel gazing, there wont even be a régime be bananes left.

Euro-Peace©®™

In the case of the Swiss Foreign Ministry ant the FARC, the European notion of “constructive engagement” promoted the FARC’s narco-smuggling, kidnapping, and terror. Switzerland’s Weltwoche [the world this week], reports on an initial effort to “reel them in” and legitimize the FARC that led to actively supporting their actions.

Switzerland, the Helpful Courier

The seizure of the computers provoked a political earthquake. What had long been merely suspected was now out in the open for all to see: the socialist governments of Ecuador and Nicaragua, as well as and above all that of the Venezuelan caudillo Hugo Chávez, were involved up to the elbows in the sinister drug and arms dealing of the FARC. The blow was struck just as Chávez, intent on extending his influence across the South American continent, was seeking to take control of the militarily severely depleted FARC.

It might be that the world still see the Swiss with rose colored glasses given the image and reputation they’ve built, but what is far more likely is that outside of commerce, they have no meaningful stake in the goings-on beyond the European fortress, and are a lot more scared by their position as Europe’s Lesotho puts them in.

Switzerland has played a central role in the Colombian hostage crisis as a supposedly “neutral” mediator. But the e-mail correspondence of the FARC, extracts from which are available to Die Weltwoche, shows that a solution of the hostage crisis was never in fact a priority for the FARC. The “negotiations” as such, which provided an international stage for the militarily beleaguered guerilla, were from the start an end in themselves for the FARC. The Swiss Department of Foreign Affairs (EDA), under the direction of Foreign Minister Micheline Calmy-Rey, took on the role of helpful courier in the cynical game of poker being played by the guerilla and often neglected to take even the slightest distance from the FARC extortionists.

As early as June 2001, almost a year before the kidnapping of Betancourt, Lucas Gualdrón, the Lausanne-based FARC coordinator for Europe, assessed the possibility of Switzerland playing a role as mediator. In an e-mail to a superior stationed in Cuba, Gualdrón comes to a positive conclusion: “They [the Swiss] have changed their communication policy and they no longer only work low profile, but also pursue a very aggressive communication policy.” Switzerland is open to the FARC’s cause, Gualdrón reports, and ready to organize meetings “at the highest level.”

In addition to that, these supposedly shrewd Swiss interlocutors were made into useful idiots.

Prolonging the Hostage Crisis

From the standpoint of the FARC, Switzerland has served its purpose and can leave now. In summer 2007, the EDA withdraws from the negotiations. The Venezuelan caudillo Hugo Chávez takes over. His aims are by no means humanitarian in nature, as Chávez wants to make the world believe. The correspondence on Reyes’s computer shows that the Venezuelan president promises the FARC substantial arms shipments and financial aid on the order of some $300 million. Hugo Chávez wants to integrate the guerilla force into his “Bolivarian Revolution,” which is supposed to transform the entire subcontinent from the Rio Grande to Tierra del Fuego into one big socialist paradise according to the well-known recipes of Karl Marx and Fidel Castro.

Instead of “giving peace a chance”, what they did was gullibly buy the FARC more time.

Cops Lazy in the Unhinged Kingdom

'He then stood up, put his hands in the air and said, "I've just murdered two people, I've got third degree f***ing burns and they are not even f***ing arresting me."
'Me and my cousin looked at one another and I said, "What did you do?" Then he said, "I've just told them I've killed two people in New Cross and they are not even f***ing arresting me.'''

Not only did the perpetrator of a brutal double murder get a chance to change his mind when he was about to confess, but no longer will burglary get one you thrown into the crowbar hotel.

“Property is theft”, and all that. I wouldn’t be surprised if the entire retired population moved to Spain or Arizona by winter.

Good-Bye, Friend

I listened to Tony Snow at CPAC in February and thought him to be — at an event at which all Republican candidates showed up to speak — one of the three best speakers among the whole lot of them. (The two others? Newt Gingrich and — yes — George W Bush…) He was so good and got members of the audience so excited (at least, listen to his speech between 41:18 and 41:50) that some of them told him to run for president in his own right…

So how's that Lisbon 2010 thing workin' for you all?

European economy blown apart like a cheap toy. The US economy has creative destruction. Europe's only has destruction.

"Let them eat Tastykakes!"

Bastille Day in Philadelphia




They always did a good job playing angry peasants.

Funny, I’ve Seen a Lot of Cases

Anyone who has worked in an a bar or hospital emergency room will tell you that you never know what will come through the door. Andrew Bolt makes that abundantly clear:

Psychiatrists have detected the first case of "climate change delusion" - and they haven't even yet got to Kevin Rudd and his global warming guru.
Writing in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, Joshua Wolf and Robert Salo of our Royal Children's Hospital say this delusion was a "previously unreported phenomenon".
"A 17-year-old man was referred to the inpatient psychiatric unit at Royal Children's Hospital Melbourne with an eight-month history of depressed mood . . . He also . . . had visions of apocalyptic events."

Green is indeed the new bleak, and this desire to kick the legs out from under civilization is ubiquitous, as Bret Stephens pointed out this week in the Wall Street Journal noting in the number of ways Global Warming science, now called “Climate Change” science in a desperate bit to give it credibility might – just might – suffer from the same uncertainty and politically induced corruption that theories suffer from when they get big-game-prize money attached to them. A parasitic casts emerges and makes itself out to be a priestly class to benefit off of it, much like Charles Manson, using the impressionable young and the intellectually weak and wayward as a victimized flock. Free to wrap their limit their philosophical exploration to doom, self abuse and little else, it’s hard to imagine a Thomas Aquinas or Augustine emerging from it, nor do they want anything more elaborate than the repetitive pinning of the voodoo doll:

If even slight global cooling remains evidence of global warming, what isn't evidence of global warming? What we have here is a nonfalsifiable hypothesis, logically indistinguishable from claims for the existence of God. This doesn't mean God doesn't exist, or that global warming isn't happening. It does mean it isn't science.
So let's stop fussing about the interpretation of ice core samples from the South Pole and temperature readings in the troposphere. The real place where discussions of global warming belong is in the realm of belief, and particularly the motives for belief. I see three mutually compatible explanations.
The first is as a vehicle of ideological convenience. Socialism may have failed as an economic theory, but global warming alarmism, with its dire warnings about the consequences of industry and consumerism, is equally a rebuke to capitalism. Take just about any other discredited leftist nostrum of yore – population control, higher taxes, a vast new regulatory regime, global economic redistribution, an enhanced role for the United Nations – and global warming provides a justification. One wonders what the left would make of a scientific "consensus" warning that some looming environmental crisis could only be averted if every college-educated woman bore six children: Thumbs to "patriarchal" science; curtains to the species.
A second explanation is theological. Surely it is no accident that the principal catastrophe predicted by global warming alarmists is diluvian in nature. Surely it is not a coincidence that modern-day environmentalists are awfully biblical in their critique of the depredations of modern society: "And it repented the LORD that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart." That's Genesis, but it sounds like Jim Hansen.
And surely it is in keeping with this essentially religious outlook that the "solutions" chiefly offered to global warming involve radical changes to personal behavior, all of them with an ascetic, virtue-centric bent: drive less, buy less, walk lightly upon the earth and so on. A light carbon footprint has become the 21st-century equivalent of sexual abstinence.

Can you feel the love there? The hand-wringing, the concern for out mother earth on the way to a universally poor, unhealthy, and short life where all we burdensome inhabitants of the planet earth can be both equal and the same? Pfft!

The Best Rendition of La Marseillaise

...is from Casablanca...

Constructive Optimist Bewilders Sour Grapes

Deep in the heart of the arrogant soul of a developing world aristocratic normally lies an irrational viciousness that’s hard to understand. Normally, we’re talking about intelligent achievers, but frequently ones finds beneath it comfortably out of touch prince who confuses hate for edginess.

Take for example a senior Indian diplomat asked to sum up the impact of the Bush years on south Asia. No matter the achievements, it’s either inadequate, or in violation of the newly improvised theory of the-only-thing-that-now-matters:

Rice said the US's "strategic accomplishments in Asia" also included "partnerships with a newly democratic Afghanistan, a democratic Pakistan, and an historic transformation of our relationship with the rising democratic power, India". But the bulk of her speech related to North Korea problem, underlining Washington's expectation Pyongyang will soon make a "verifiable, complete and accurate" declaration of its nuclear programs, facilities and materials so that Bush claims a legacy.

As Bush heads toward Japan for the Group of Eight (G-8) summit in Hokkaido, he anticipates he's likely wrapping up two Asian legacies - and if luck holds, three. Beware the lame duck. As the Washington Post summed up, "George W Bush's presidency seems exhausted and irrelevant, but that's a dangerous illusion. The Decider remains in command ..." Clearly, North Korea has begun disabling its plutonium production facility at Yongbyon under the watchful eyes of US inspectors. Rice's consultations in Beijing last week galvanized the process. The White House announced that Bush proposed to attend the opening ceremony of Beijing Summer Olympic Games in August.

Meanwhile, a second Asian legacy for the Bush era is also gaining traction. On Wednesday, on the sidelines of the G-8, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh will inform Bush that New Delhi has decided to give the final push to the civilian nuclear cooperation agreement with the US. The Indian deal goes way beyond Kim Jong-iI's "denuclearization". It is a major non-proliferation move. India will surrender its right to test nuclear weapons; India's nuclear program will come under US monitoring and control; and India's capacity and will for augmenting its weapon stockpile will remain under US scrutiny.

Bitterly, of course it MUST come down to something. Something where the author/his theory/his land/etc. mutates into the great cotter pin in the great axle in the great wheel of humanity... even if it’s something entirely invented:

The big question now is whether Bush's gargantuan appetite for Asian legacies will be satiated.

Does anyone have a gargantuan craving for an Asian legacy?

See? They matter! They Really matter, dammit! Even if it’s slightly cracked to think that Bush personally covets some sort of legacy that’s theirs! Their’s dammit!

Take that nap, M.K. You might feel better in a few hours.

A Title (Mis)Match

For the past two weeks the story has been making the rounds. Johns Hopkins Majid Khadduri professor of Middle East studies at the School for Advanced International Studies
Fouad Ajami writing in the Wall Street Journals Opinion pages offers a recitation of the timbre of the traditional hatred floating around between Europe and the Near East. The title given is “Anti-Americanism Is Mostly Hype“, but seems to end up being betrayed by selectively deciding the bombings of the 80’s and 90’s being little other than hype, not to mention the Hizballah’s debutante party on Marines stationed in Beirut as part of an Palestinian-Israeli cease fire, the holding of American diplomats as hostages in Teheran, and so forth.

I grew up in the Arab world in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and anti-Americanism was the standard political language – even for those pining for American visas and green cards. Precious few took this seriously. The attraction to the glamorous, distant society was too strong in the Beirut of my boyhood.
It is no different today in Egypt or Pakistan. And what people tell pollsters who turn up in their midst with their clipboards? In Hosni Mubarak's tyranny, anti-Americanism is the permissible safety valve for Egyptians unable to speak of their despot. We stand between Pharaoh and his frustrated people, and the Egyptians railing against America are giving voice to the disappointment that runs through their life and culture. Scapegoating and anti-Americanism are a substitute for a sober assessment of what ails that old, burdened country.

This happens to be rather at odds of the Beirut of my childhood, where being apparently “Imriki,” and not Lebanese in ones’ American-ness made one a hostage-taker’s commodity. For all you youngsters out there: it was not a status symbol.

With the tone of “see!” I’ve received this article from people of numerous ideological appeals, it seems to have become something of thing that is either all things to all people, when in fact it offers the most inscrutable thing to those lacking healthy skepticism: a handful of data points. That it helps prop up a theory is one thing, that it shows us patterns that will remain in force for a century to come is another: a fundamental lack of seriousness in those carrying that anger around.

Nor should we listen too closely to the anti-American hysteria that now grips Turkey. That country was once a serious, earnest land. It knew its place in the world as a bridge between Europe and Islam. But of late it has become the "torn country" that the celebrated political scientist Samuel Huntington said it was, its very identity fought over between the old Kemalist elites and the new Islamists.

Imagine the self-evasion associated with looking for evil under every sack of American corn meal, and what this means to the risk it exposes the emoting “victim” of this malady of the concrete risks to their lives, and to the detriment it does to the prospect of looking at ones’ own society honestly.

That we are to minimize the weight given to the impact Anti-Americanism has is an evasion in itself. If it IS just a metaphor for those who can’t “discuss the Pharaoh,” and it remains that way for the next 50 years as it has for the past 50 years, then it’s indicative of a much larger problem than even those hesitating to minimize the use of anti-Americanism as a verbal magic wand can imagine.

Further, he notes:

He said he feared that Mr. Obama, as a "black man," might succumb to an "inferiority complex" if he were to come to power. "This is a great menace because Obama might turn out to be more white than the whites, exaggerating his persecution and disdain of blacks. The statements of our Kenyan brother with an American nationality about Jerusalem, and his support for Israelis, and his slighting of the Palestinian people is either a measure of his ignorance of international politics or a lie perpetrated on the Jews in the course of an election campaign."
There is no need to roam distant lands in search of indictments of America's ways. Tales of our demise appear every day in our media. Yes, it is not perfect, this republic of ours. But the possibilities for emancipation and self-improvement it affords are unmatched in other lands.

But this is meaningless in the context of America’s future, or even the future of the anti-American at that. It is simply a truth, but one that may not cause anti-Americanism as some would fear, nor endear America to those given to resentment.

It simply ‘is’ while the risk to America is not in it’s image, it’s the concrete risks identified on the left as “the amount of time we must remain in the dar ul harb, and by the right that the concept of the dar ul harb still exists in the zeitgeist at all. Either way, a beloved or hated America, as Ajami cites the lack of seriousness found among those who hate it, still has to debate whether or not we are America Alone.

Image, as Ajami points out by example, isn’t everything. But risk and interest have very little to do with image. The European Union should take this as an object lesson, since that very same concern with their image seems rather consuming, and consuming at the expense of their effectiveness in creating any sort of instrument of statecraft at all.

- Cross-posted on Atlantic Review

Since Obama likes to play the "crypto-Zeropean", I tell him what I tell the French: "allez vous faire foutre, pôvs cons"

The only good thing about being a bilingual American is being able to tell foreigners to "fuck off" in their own language.

If their Culture is so Precious, Why is it Packaged and Exported like Menthos?

Humble yet powerful. Tall yet short. Touching, yet lecturesome. I have a question: is there anything a European Architect think he (but rarely she) isn’t? Or are they everything, nothing, and its’ opposite too? Why not when you can always rationalize that the magic from your fingertips will otherwise be wasted like the sperm on the walls.

In an article in der Spiegel from 21.12.2007, architect Christoph Ingenhoven wrote an article aimed at provoking a "long overdue debate" about what Deyan Sudjic describes as the "close ties between architecture, power, money and politics", which make it difficult for some architects to view their work with the necessary political distance. Ingenhoven said he would never "want to be responsible for the representative buildings of a non-democratic regime", adding that he wouldn't build for Libya, because he couldn't see "why [he] should champion an intolerable regime."

Amazingly, what these guys still do best is put a pretty face on de-facto tyrants building idealized factory cities, and using the “sustainable city” cover to retread Cabrini Green style schemes and oafish central planning concepts.

Strangely enough when they impose their imprint on people, they call it “Elysium”. If these self-absorbed, self-declared übermenchen need to bone up on “Architecture and Morality” (both of which they think are out of the common man’s reach), they should probably tone down their marketing racket for a few minutes and look here, where it’s quite clear that the debate is not long overdue to the rest of us, and has been ongoing continuously.

The world’s favorite game: handing France its ass

Conquer France.

Don't believe your lying eyes

There have been no anti-Semitic attacks in Paris and its suburbs recently, just as there were no Muslim riots in the Paris suburbs in 2005.

O! Compared to Republican Warmonger Who Suspended Haebeus Corpus

Of course being everything to everyone, and all that, a jihad to “Lincolnize” a man who has never liberated anybody is underway.

Euro-intellectualism in Film School

Timing is Everything

Bétancourt:

But, while praising President Alvaro Uribe's work towards her release, she said it was time to end "extremist" language towards the Farc.

That 'time' being right after she was freed. Then again, consider the audience.

Ms Betancourt is in Paris, where she flew after her release on Wednesday.

"I think we have reached a point where we must change this radical, extremist vocabulary of hate of very strong words that intimately wound the human being," she told French radio.

The FARC (or their flunkies) not being given to that kind of thing.

Meanwhile, back in the bosom of democracy and reason, the hunt for bigots continues.

Surprise, Surprise

First the denials, then the legalisms. As if it wasn’t obvious, German fantasy-lefty Gregor Gysi was a stool pigeon for commie spooks.

Linksfraktionschef (Left group leader) Gregor Gysi has repeatedly failed, by court Stasi allegations against him in the media. [Television network] ZDF had "sufficient factual evidence," the court ruled.


Hamburg - In the dispute over allegations of Stasi cooperation, left Group chief Gregor Gysi suffered another legal defeat: the Hamburg regional court rejected a request to gag ZDF disclosure of their investigative report, according to a court spokeswoman on Wednesday. Gysi wanted Stasi document Supervisor Marianne Birthler to defend her statement [of his participation with the Stasi]. Birthler had accused him on "Heute Journal" that as a lawyer in the GDR regime he "knowingly and willingly" reported Robert Havemann, a critic of the regime, to the State Security Service. Gysi denies the allegation.

The court ruled that there is a legitimate public interest in the publication to be able to see Birthler’s statements. Gysi’s privacy rights have to defer to the public interest in this case. "The report is still permissible as investigative journalism," said court spokeswoman. ZDF had carefully researched the facts behind the allegations against Gysi. It would be "sufficient factual evidence, expressed suspicion that the case". Gysi had requested an injunction against ZDF over the release of the report.

The district court ruled in ZDF’s favor. Moreover, the facts were presented to Gysi, and he was given an opportunity to refute them. He was offered an interview but declined. According to a group spokesman, Gysi will dispute the court’s decision. Previously, a court in Mainz rejected Gysi’s request to require that his reply be broadcast.

It needs to be noted that a great Germans take at face value accusations that American suppress dissent, but will rationalize the right to gag journalism at home. Even in a strange, nearly kangaroo-court-like matter of regurgitating harm-done under a government that no longer exists. It might be in poor taste, and that he could potentially be found at fault for the consequences, but to try to say that it’s discussion can be disputed is nearly as chilling.

Parce qu'on s'en lasse pas !

In Perpetual Morrissey Mode

Europe

Humanity

Any questions?

Roger Kusch, a former senator in Hamburg and a prominent right-to-die campaigner, has said he advised Bettina Schardt, a healthy 79-year-old pensioner, on how to prepare a lethal cocktail of sedatives and anti-malaria drugs which would kill her. He said he then left her flat shortly before she died.

Mr Kusch filmed nine hours of conversations with the unmarried and childless woman, who said she dreaded being taken to a home for the elderly. However, she did not have a terminal illness and said: "I can't say that I am suffering."

- Hat-tips to Perfesser Norm and Clarsonimus

Something for the hippies to Digg

The New Greatest Generation...

Something for the hippies to Digg

"It's kind of like the fight's never over," Fultz said. "It started on July 4, 1776, and now it's 2008."

With Whom Would You Prefer to Spend the Night? Vladimir? Mahmoud? Fidel? Or Pamela?

Wielding a secret weapon, La Baf tries to get marchers in Paris's Gay Pride parade to become interested in charms of the femal sort…

La BAF à la Gaypride - Et si on essayait les femmes ?
envoyé par Labaf

July 4: What the Mainstream Media (in the US and Abroad) Does Not Show You…

While the mainstream media, American and foreign (which otherwise loves to point out superlative events), go on and on about the soldiers' fears, the soldiers' solitude and depression, the soldiers' disenchantment, the soldiers' abandonment by American society, etc, etc, etc, the largest reenlistment ceremony in the history of the U.S. military took place in the rotunda of the Al Faw Palace in Baghdad, Iraq (thanks to Christopher Cook).



Update: Believe it or not, the New York Times actually has a picture prominently featured on its front page, as does the International Herald Tribune. Time to eat crow? Not so fast: the story (beyond the caption) seems to stand totally uncommented and, as for the New York Times front page picture, look at what stands right next to it: an article entitled… Despair Drives Suicide Attacks by Iraqi Women (sigh).

Meet the Feebles

From macho to gaucho: the desperate struggle against learned helplessness hits new heights in EUtopia:

Few would deny that living side-by-side with stinking, oozing piles of garbage for months on end makes life more difficult. Even in the normally chaotic southern Italian city of Naples, garbage-induced temper tantrums have periodically resulted in trash piles being set on fire -- and the firemen who respond to the call are then pelted with detritus.

We had our New Orleans, they have their entire middle class.

Help is on the way. Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi not only pledged on Tuesday that the problem would be solved within two weeks, he also is sending a thousand volunteers to Naples to teach the city about the importance of separating recyclables out of their garbage. Among those volunteers will be dozens of psychologists from an organization specially trained for missions in disaster areas.

And then they came to change their diapers.

"We’re not talking about psychology in the way that many people understand it," Luigi Ranzato, president of the group Psicologi per i Popoli, which is sending the psychologists, told SPIEGEL ONLINE. "Instead, we will be there to try to help introduce a sensibility about garbage disposal to, for example, the old and the young. They need to learn how to separate the garbage so that it doesn’t become an inconvenience for their daily life.“

- With thanks to the artist formerly known as j

You’ve got to love that Belgian Style Trans-nation Prosecution Stuff

This is the kind of thing the ICC is really meant for:

A Jordanian prosecutor on Tuesday charged Dutch politician Geert Wilders with blasphemy and contempt of Muslims for making an anti-Koran film and ordered him to stand trial in the kingdom, judicial sources said.

In Riyadh, the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC), a league of 56 Muslim nations, said it was "deeply annoyed" after Dutch prosecutors said on Monday they would not take action against Wilders as he was protected by the right to free speech.

"The decision ... encourages and supports the irresponsible defamatory style followed by some media outlets and instigates feelings of hatred, animosity and antipathy towards Muslims," the Saudi Arabia-based OIC, said in a statement.

Doing anything they can to suppress bad news at the cost of anything, including occasionally free speech. On the other hand a pressure group of concerned, caring European types show their colors:

Dutch prosecutors said Wilders was not inciting hatred of Muslims as he did not call for acts of violence against them.

A Dutch anti-discrimination group, The Netherlands Shows its Colours, said it would appeal the prosecutors' decision.

I’m sure they’re all about freedom of speech and liberties, ‘n stuff, given that they pushed for a different prosecution of Wilders in the Netherlands based partly on “statements made in public”. Next stop on the neo-fascist lefty love train: thought crimes. They have yet to explain to anyone how it is that the things other people say are somehow worse that the things they actually do.

How to Pick Up a Girl in 15 Seconds

Another inane BAF production

Drague en 15 seconde
envoyé par Labaf

Clinging to Satan Worship and Rape

They call themselves “Agents of Change”

- Hat-tip to Strummin’ Joe

God Bless America this 4th of July

As always, making the rest of this world (which is just one big shithole) sing, dance, and just plain dream. Shit, the French losers in the 9-3 would give anything, and I do mean anything, to live it large - California style.

God Bless America this 4th of July

Non, mais faut quand même pas oublier Juliette et ses chansons à chier". FAIL!

God Bless America this 4th of July

America is where it's going on. All eyez on us...

Kouchner Should Have Been France's Foreign Minister in the 1990s

In addition to a piece on French foreign diplomacy, Natalie Nougayrède has an article in Le Monde on Bernard Kouchner, who calls the Islamic threat "green fascism" but who mocks the Tibetans' theocratic beliefs in private.

Seulement voilà, il lui aurait été plus facile d'être ministre des affaires étrangères dans la décennie 1990, cette fenêtre inespérée pour l'"ingérence", au Kurdistan, au Timor, au Kosovo. Au Conseil de sécurité de l'ONU, la Russie et la Chine protègent des dictateurs, birmans, soudanais et autres. Des nationalismes se sont soulevés. L'heure est aux résistances pugnaces contre l'imposition de normes par l'Occident, et au refus des interventions armées au nom des valeurs. L'Irak, l'Afghanistan sont passés par là. Il y a, convient Kouchner, "un retour de bâton".

Sometimes, reality has a way of intruding…

…En juillet 2007, il reçoit son homologue tchèque, le prince Schwarzenberg, un proche de Vaclav Havel et grand militant de la cause des dissidents cubains. Le ministre tchèque lui expose sa vision de ce que devrait être la politique de l'Union européenne à Cuba. Soudain, Kouchner s'exclame : "Ah ! Fidel ! J'ai été ça, aussi !" Il partait dans ses souvenirs, dans son voyage à Cuba en 1964, quand il dînait avec Castro. "L'entretien s'est mal passé, ça partait dans tous les sens", relate un témoin.

Unfortunately, it does not seem Bernard Kouchner can, or wants to, take hard, unpolitically-correct decisions.

…quand les rebelles ont attaqué N'Djamena, début février 2008, il n'était pas opposé à l'emploi de la force aérienne française. De Washington, la sous-secrétaire d'Etat américaine, Jendayi Frazer, appelait les Français à pulvériser les rebelles déboulant du Soudan : "Bomb them ! Kill them ! Do it !", lançait-elle. Nicolas Sarkozy opta pour une aide militaire en sous-main. Les partenaires européens avaient prévenu : une intervention militaire ouverte signerait la mort de l'Eufor.

"L'ingérence, ç'aurait été d'aller au Darfour, dit un diplomate spécialiste de l'Afrique, ç'aurait été, au moins, d'imposer une zone d'interdiction de survols (pour empêcher l'armée soudanaise de bombarder des civils). Mais ça, Kouchner n'a pas pu le faire. Le Darfour n'est pas suffisamment une priorité de la communauté internationale, au moment où on est pris avec l'Afghanistan. On est au Tchad car on n'est pas au Darfour."

Interrogé sur ce point, Kouchner se cabre : "Au Darfour, il y a de l'ingérence quand même ! Une résolution de l'ONU ! Sauf qu'on n'a pas réussi... Ils (les Soudanais) ne veulent pas de nos troupes. Je ne veux pas imposer des troupes européennes partout, ce serait de l'impérialisme."

"Because only Spartan women give birth to real men"

The comments filled with suspicion, skepticism, insults, and mockery, and others similar to them, in their reply to Christopher Cook's (belated but brilliant) review of 300, would be more inviting and more interesting (be sure to join the fray! — as Cook points out, "The lefties have found it [the review/article], and it's driven them mad! Thousands of visits and over 100 comments—a large number of which question [Cook's] sexual orientation, [his] lifestyle, or [his] intellectual credibility....and that of all conservatives") if their authors had left the same comments on the pages of such movies as Lions for Lambs, In the Valley of Elah, Redacted, and Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 911. Somehow, I don't really have reason to believe that many of them have. Indeed, I feel that if anything, many of the commentators probably felt elated by those movies. (In other words: double standards.)

As for the chickenhawk charge, it is dissected here and described exactly for what it is: an attempt to curtail free speech —

notice how this position can be turned against the so-called peace camp. If only a soldier can speak for the war, then how can somebody who is not a soldier speak against the war? If it so happened that (a majority of) the soldiers in Iraq were/are against the war, then yes, the anti-war position might make sense... In other words, my point is, shouldn't we be asking ourselves (and shouldn't the "pacifists" be asking themselves) what the soldiers themselves are saying about the war?

As Benjamin Duffy (a serviceman who, yes, did serve in Iraq) points out:

Military service is a prerequisite for supporting the war effort, whereas absolutely anyone can oppose it. If you have no military service, you can either agree with them or you can shut up. Forcing the other side to shut up is, in fact, the goal of the movement.

To quote one of No Pasarán's readers:

If you accept the "chickenhawk" premise that you can't support the war and ask the troops to put themselves into harm's way unles you yourself enlist, there are a couple of corollaries that I think apply:
1. if your house is being broken into, and you are not a police officer, you may not call the police; you have no right to ask them to risk their lives when you yourself are not willing to to do so.
2. if your house is on fire, and you yourself are not a fireperson, you may not call the fire department. You have no right to ask them to risk their lives when you yourself are not willing to do so.

(Be sure to read Penny's comment underneath…)

And here we can get a look at the gist behind all the comments here. They snicker, they snort, they bully, they insult, they ridicule, and it is quite obvious that they don't think that the opinions and comments by conservatives are worth much ink, space, thought, or debate. Unless I am mistaken, the gist of the comments betrays the attitude that conservatives should keep quiet and not be heard unless (or until the time) they agree with the liberals. Something like this, needless to say, is exactly what — on a much larger scale — we see in the mainstream media.

As the above list of liberal anti-war movies suggests — it is obviously far, far longer — the fact that there is one — one (!) — single movie that can be called conservative and/or pro-war is unbearable to them. That movie, too (and any like it), must be snorted about, pulled apart, maligned, and ridiculed.

And this brings us full circle to the other major topic of the Christopher Cook 300 post thread — the book Liberal Fascism — when Jonah Goldberg explains

how the liberal Gleichschaltung works; contrary voices are regulated, barred, banned when possible, mocked and marginalized when not, Progressive voices are encouraged, lionized, amplified — in the name of "diversity,'' or "liberation," or "unity," and, most of all, "progress."

Let it be pointed out that Jonah Goldberg's book is not (and correct me if I am mistaken) a one-sentence screed of …sneering, name-calling, and ridicule, but over 400 pages filled with evidence for his thesis. Here are some more outtakes that illustrate this evidence:

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. The militarization of society and politics was considered simply the best available means toward this end.

…In the liberal telling of America's story, there are only two perpetrators of official misdeeds: conservatives and "America" writ large. Progressives, or modern liberals, are never bigots or tyrants, but conservatives often are. For example, one will virtually never hear that the Palmer Raids, Prohibition, or American eugenics were thoroughly progressive phenomena. These are sins America itself must atone for.

Meanwhile, real or alleged "conservative" misdeeds — say, McCarthyism — are always the exclusive fault of conservatives and a sign of the policies they would repeat if given power. The only culpable mistake that liberals make is failing to fight "hard enough" for their principles. Liberals are never responsible for their historic misdeeds, because they feel no compulsion to defend the inherent goodness of America. Conservatives, meanwhile, not only take the blame for events not of their own making that they often worked the most assiduously against, but find themselves defending liberal misdeeds in order to defend America herself.

Rescue is Imprisonment. Freedom is Captivity.

Serguei is an Idiot.



It’s quite obvious from her tone on Wednesday, that in her heart, that Bétancourt is happy to be free, not permanently imprisoned and chained to her misery as Serguei’s hope to find melodrama would suggest. In truth, some things just are, and there is no stock "better abstraction" to be trotted out for them. "Progressives" have a hard time dealing with this kind of thing, especially if it's good news because it isn't useful to them.

Worst still, Serguei grasps at some higher meaning than the best possible outcome to the situation, by suggesting that freedom is somehow imprisonment. I guess every other self-indulgent inversion of “whatever is the best you can hope for” applies too in his feeble world view, evan as it links to an article about Sarkozy praising the Columbian forces for their rescue. Want some meta-this-or-that or social meaning to decrypt, Serguei?:

The hostages, who had been divided in three groups, were taken to a rendezvous where two disguised helicopters piloted by Colombian military agents were waiting...

The pilots, [Betancourt] said, were posing as members of a relief organization, but “they were dressed like clowns,” wearing Che Guevara shirts, so she assumed they were rebels.

Actually, she assumed by their t-shirts that they were clowns. Aptly so.

Now this is their kind of Crisis

The BBC makes history. Every day. Note how something they never called ‘a crisis’ before suddenly becomes one, what with the fate of the FARC’s fate is in play, and that her freedom by having been ‘released’ appears numerous times, while there is one mention of her having been rescued appears near the top, but beneath the emotive headline, and only once and in lesser type.

Audacious rescue
What the freeing of Ingrid Betancourt means for Colombia's Farc rebels

The only question now, is how the Columbians can engineer the circumstances of the FARC’s surrender, while the title editors seem to be hoping for precisely the reverse.

But accuracy doesn’t really matter to them when there’s political spin to do. As for the nation that adopted Bétancourt as their patron saint, Ingrid’s “release” doesn’t matter to them anyway. The boys are looking for their own kind of “happy ending”.



To hell with Ingrid, les gars are just looking for some trim.

Frenchwoman: What Freed Ingrid Bétancourt Was Not President Uribe, But… "International Pressure" on President Uribe!

It turns out that Alvaro Uribe is not — at least not directly — responsible for the liberation of Ingrid Betancourt (the other 14 freed hostages seem to have been forgotten in France), according to Fanny Hess. International pressure on the Colombian president is…

In the meantime, Béret Vert reports that Ingrid (who compares (08:55) Colombia's army to Israel's) is herself being compared to Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King on French TV, while Uribe is barely mentioned…

Ingrid Bétancourt Freed, Along with 14 Other FARC Hostages (Including 3 Americans), in Colombia

Ingrid Bétancourt has been liberated from Columbia's FARC guerillas, along with Marc Gonsalves, Keith Stansell, Thomas Howes and 11 other hostages, apparently not in a civilian-type humanitarian mission but instead in a purely military-style commando operation.



Listen to the journalists' astonishment (0:35, followed by applause) as defense minister Juan Manuel Santos announces that Ingrid Bétancourt is among those liberated…

The Union that Hates its’ Members

A transit worker on the RER A line is assaulted. Colleagues of said victim inflict their sorrow on roughly 1 million commuters on Tuesday in a wildcat strike without consulting the politically manipulative trade union umbrella’s leadership at the CGT. Oddly enough this has the effect of caving in to crime. One perturbed branch of the suburban rail system disrupted the entire transit system which took most of the day to progressively back on line.

Probably bitter that they weren’t in charge of that little bit of social arson, someone from the CGT is quoted saying that the victim had it coming to them. They’ve also grown aware after 40 years that transit problems just make them look greedy and hateful. It seem that this gets them no brownie points from the “lumpenproletariat” that they think they commandeer.

"...she put herself in a position that made it totally predictable," said Yannick Le Bohec, CGT delegate to the RATP. He denounced the rising tensions between passengers and drivers in recent months which is due according to him, to "the degradation of service" on the RER A. "Passengers are transported in appalling conditions”, "he said. The CGT calls into question the decision to increase service on the line with 27 additional trains at peak times, instead of 24.

"This assault is last straw," he summarized, after a meeting with the leadership of the RATP. The unions representing the strikers indicate that the discussions have not resulted in a compromise, leaving open the possibility of a new day of strikes Wednesday. "RATP will intensify the presence of teams of security officers to the end of the feast of Loges [until August 17], "she said, but unions have regretted that" the representatives only want to talk about personal safety."

That’s what they mean by “power to the people,” I guess. The unions over the years have realized that the population want the population to control the “means of production” and not the venal CGT.

What, Isn’t their Misery Politically Useful Enough?

Farrakhan has yet to rule on the elaborate conspiracy behind this one.

Hudna Achieved

From Marseilles, that multicultural success story of a city:

They owe their lives to a customer in a snack bar patron who kindly get them indoors until police arrive. Three Romany were lynched and their vehicles burned by a hundred people Saturday evening at Bricarde, a housing project in the 15th arrondissement of Marseille, the daily La Provence revealed on Tuesday morning. The police had to resort to tear gas. The three people assaulted were seriously injured and hospitalized. The scene is surreal for the three male victims who were the apparent victims of rumor.
 
Indeed, since the disappearance of a young woman named Fatima on May 7 in Marseilles, a text message was circulating in the city indicating that the young woman was allegedly kidnapped by Roma as part of an organ trafficking scheme. Since then, in school yard, public parks, and coffee counters, the rumor swelled. Authorities are submerged in calls by people worried about their children. And what should happen has happened with a Saturday night having been lynching-free.
 
Interviewed by LCI.fr, Pierre Carton, the departmental director for public safety, again denies "any child abduction and trafficking in human organs is currently going on Marseilles" and was concerned about the stigma around a community "who did nothing.

That was the weekend that was. Elsewhere: in France, they aren’t so kind as to call them trailer trash. People just assault them and leave them for dead.

The gendarmes, accustomed to some grizzly scenes, did not recall seeing something this sordid in the Gironde in years. They found it difficult to believe their eyes on Saturday when they discovered the body of a young man beaten to death an disfigured. The victim had been abandoned on the edge of a forest, in a ditch near a road at a place called Cousseau in the town of Gours in Dordogne.

You know how those slack-jawed hicks are: elsewhere on the crime beat, weapons found:

Weapons were discovered. After being abandoned in the woods, his torturers returned to celebrate, their clothes stained with blood.
But then they got worried and returned to the scene of the beating and decided to get rid of the body. They flagged down a Parisien and a 21 year old woman and went about a dozen kilometres. When they reached Gours, they took a country lane, and once out of sight abandoned the corpse wrapped in a blanket, and tried to undress. They then recovered the blunt instruments and the rifle that and threw them into the water.

Further “Partying” Noted

It’s a worrying indicator of the trauma caused by a night of rioting. Since the June 14 incidents in Vitry-le-François (Marne), where groups of youths had destroyed some sixty cars and were taken in by police after the murder of one of their comrades killed in a brawl, people in the rushed to install security systems.

Good luck with all that.

Um. Oops.

French probe military display that leaves 17 injured

CARCASSONNE, France (AFP) — France mounted an investigation Monday into why live rounds, rather than blanks, were used at a weekend visitors day display at a French military base, injuring 17 people, including a child in critical condition.
Fifteen civilians, including five children, and two soldiers were injured on Sunday when paratroopers demonstrated a hostage freeing exercise to visitors at their barracks outside the southwestern city of Carcassonne, regional officials said.
Four of the 17 were seriously injured, two critically, but doctors said early Monday that the condition of the worst injured had stabilised.
Hospitals in the southern cities and towns of Toulouse, Narbonne, Montpellier and Perpignan, as well as Carcassonne, were treating the injured.
One soldier, described as experienced with no history of behavioral or psychological problems, was detained following the incident.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy was due to visit the injured in the hospitals in Carcassonne and Toulouse, his office said.

[snip]

He said that "an experienced soldier" would not confuse blanks and real bullets, adding that the two munitions are packed into different-coloured magazines.
Earlier, Morin told journalists that safety measures had been respected and that the soldier who fired the live rounds had an exemplary record.

And made his target, in a way.

Most critically injured was a man with wounds to his chest, he said.

THEREfore...!

How does MSNBC get to make insane assertions? They do it in plain sight. Behold the alarmist headline from that hideous never-healing “Post Katrina world” we live in:

Worms and parasites afflict the poorest in U.S.

MSNBC need to alert the media! FIrsy you throw in a alarming SUB-heading too, while you’re at it:

Increased threat after Hurricane Katrina

go into a recitation of how very, very awful the disease is:

Chagas disease, caused by the parasite Trypanosoma cruzi, infects as many as 8 to 11 million people in Latin America and may become a U.S. threat,

Allusions to underdeveloped countries, managed only slightly better than one gripped by venal, lefty machine politics, and PRESTO!:

and a case of Chagas disease was recently reported in post-Katrina New Orleans," he wrote.

THREE YEARS “post-Katrina”. It’s a miracle! It’s the hurricane that keeps on giving!

We're on the Map!

As Boorish a Bunch of Idiots as You’ll Ever Meet

Bowdlerizing the reality of who they really are is a habit Europeans have had for some time. They lead the world to believe that there is some sort of magical supra-gentility and humanity found in the engineered ‘human systems’ that dominate everyday life. There is the notion that these “well-raised/educated/socialized” individuals are the elixir of this miracle, when in reality (for now) it’s feeding off the former habits of the family-centric nations they once were.

The social glue now is the loose collection of positive habits that are endangered but remain in a ‘bowling alone’ society like no other. The comparatively feeble state of enduring marriage and the number of sole children speaks to a social narrative that is leading into a desperately untrusting and lonely state. One whose only convenient and emotionally un-risky remedy is more of what used to be the realm of the individual or the family’s doing toward those of collective ‘human systems’. We find this in relying on hired-in expertise to raise children from the crèche to the employment office. Cooking the family mean has become take-away or par-prepared, and so forth. People are not better for it.

See any symptoms? Janet Levy points out the obvious to outsiders who don’t pay attention that nothing could be further from the truth, and that people quite primitively seek comfort from this in the “robust, socially unified seeming” past that never was for very long in Europe when it wasn’t also barbaric and diseased with broadly shared vile hatred:

In recent years, soccer crowds have gone so far as to simulate the hissing of Nazi gas chambers, pairing the sound with Nazi salutes. In Belgium, Muslim fans at a soccer match between Israel and Belgium shouted "Jews to the gas chambers" and "strangle the Jews," while waving Hamas and Hezbollah flags. Freed from the restraints of acceptable behavior, with inhibitions loosened by alcohol consumption and the intense camaraderie of team spirit, soccer fans freely unleash anti-Semitic slurs with abandon and without fear of retribution.

This alarming behavior prompts questions as to whether anti-Semitism is becoming acceptable again in a Europe that has forgotten its Nazi past, and whether guilt has been supplanted by denial. Is the era of Nazism being re-examined and re-framed in a more positive light that contributes to such gratuitous and ugly outbursts?

Two recent disturbing incidents appear to support this idea, raising legitimate concerns that Europe is indeed repainting its Nazi past.

First there were few siblings. Then there were few cousins. Then all they had for human warmth was a mob of one flavor or another to choose from, (social action/ sporting head-breaking /political head-breaking/ dangerous thrill-seeking...) making solitude and distance, if not emigration the only remaining reasonable option. That brave new world is on its’ way.

Making beeg trouble for Crazy Moose and Squirrel!

The Times Online held a Communist joke competition. Enjoy, and make your last vote count. The winning contestant won a copy of the MPI sponsored film “Hammer and Tickle”.

Why? Cause They Was Home...

Oh, those poor, misguided youts:

The night of the music festival, about 15 youths tore in to a family, and brought more friends with them. Five fished the night off in the emergency room.

It was a nasty free-for-all, said Adele, a woman in her 30s who had an eardrum perforated when she was hit. On Saturday, she and her husband decided to meet up with family and friends for the music festival. Around 11 p.m., five youths trading insults with two friends in front of the house on Blvd. de Cluis. It could have all stopped there, but it didn’t.
The gang of youths returned a little later with reinforcements – about 14 of them between the ages of 15 and 20. After tearing off the security shutters covering the door, they physically attacked the occupants. Trying to interrupt, a woman is thrown to the ground and kicked. During the scuffle, a little girl ends up with wounds from broken glass.

Hitting women is inhuman

In tears, the other other children watched from the window of there room where they were sheltering themselves. Five people – among them friends and family were taken to the emergency room. One will be in a cast, and the others have sores, bumps, and bruises.