The Care and Feeding of Savages

Paris: thugs toss molotov cocktails at a Synagogue and a Jewish run business as though they were the IDF points out the extreme stupidity of what civilization is dealing with here. You can imagine their fellow travellers screaming false accusations as they have since 12 September 2001, that by virtue of their being from the near east or muslim or anything else they can dine on, that they're bing "treated like terrorists", all the while not discussing just how non-existent their rights would be in the Taliban's paradise.

Here the sypathizers of such a view are, those that will forever parade themselves as victims of a non-specific miasma, yet assert all manner of anger to look all butch for their bitches, destroying Jewish-owned businesses and a synagogue displaying the arrogance and thoughtlessness that they accuse others of harboring.

And this "movement" "merely protesting" and "showing solidarity" with the civilians (never mentioning those that aren't...) we are told is so broad and inclusive that Zapatero need not explain why he marched in one which was coordinated with other protests where children are marched along covered in fake blood. This from the left that claims to have a monopoly on caring for children.

Finally, a think tank in Europe has called it what it really is: child abuse. My translation below.

PRESS RELEASE

The ESISC interviewed the General Delegate for Childrens' Rights and the presidents of the Democratic Party of Belgium on the using of children in Gaza Solidarity Marches.

Claude Moniquet and Genovefa Etienne, president and vice president of the ESISC, wrote on Monday 12 January 2009 to Mr. Bernard YOUR Delegate General for Children's Rights in the French Community of Belgium, Mr. Elio di Rupo , chairman of the PS, Mrs Joëlle Milquet, president of HRC, Mr Didier Reynders, president of the Movement reformer and Isabelle Durant and Jean-Michel JAVAUX, ECOLO presidents to ask them to take a position on the exploitation of children in demonstrations of solidarity with Gaza.

11 January 2009, in fact, an important demonstration of solidarity with the Palestinian People was held in Brussels. It is to this day one of the major events of its kind held in Europe in recent weeks.

It is also the one that gave rise to the most shocking exploitation of children:

- From the start of the event, dozens of children were grouped at the top of event, supervised by adults and forced to repeat slogans it was clear to some of them they do not understand.

- Some children carried banners and placards containing explicit calls to hatred, while others waved the flags of terrorist organizations such as Hezbollah.

- The order of the event has allowed a group of children put fire to an Israeli flag and then walked to the cries of "Allah hu Akhbar."

- In the final event, the children were forced to lie on the ground to run a macabre "die in" to symbolize child victims of Gaza.

The ESISC questioned the compatibility of this manipulation of children with Articles 19 and 29 (paragraphs B and C) of the International Convention on the Rights of the Child and, more generally, with the values of democracy such as Belgium.

Part in parcel to all of this is the sort of violent ideas and trained-in intolerant hatred they will be exposed to. Again: from people who rationalize that they are the vicitms of intolerance, Mark Steyn has this to report from Montreal:

"Les Juifs sont nos chiens"

... or "The Jews are our dogs": The enthusiastic chant on the streets of Montreal, along with cries of "Hezbollah! Nasrallah!"

It's easy to think all this stuff is just about the Jew troublemakers, and who cares about them, right? But the thuggery on display in western cities is meant to intimidate not the despised Jew dogs but a more general audience — and it seems to be doing the job.

As though THEY were being put upon with respect to their religion. Further, he quotes the French Interior Minister illustrating plainly the inability of the "authorities" to make a plausible argument for keeping the abuse and mendacity in these protests under control.

Interior Minister Michele Alliot-Marie said France has faced a "very clear increase" in anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim attacks since Israel started an offensive against the militant group Hamas in Gaza on Dec. 27.

Would it be too much for a French reporter to ask Mme Alliot-Marie to provide an example of an "anti-Muslim attack" since December 27th? None seems to have been reported in the French press, unlike the daily attacks on synagogues, kosher butchers, schools, and individual Jews in Paris, Toulouse, Bordeaux, etc. So the Interior Minister would appear to be promoting a wholly false equivalence.

In the absence of any deep understanding of justice and morality, all there IS to resort to is "equivlence" - especially when you're too fearful of verbal abuse and reprisal yourself, which is the currency that the Jihadist world view deals in.

What chants supporting Hizballah have to do with symapthy for the suffering civilians of Gaza (combattants always seem to go unmentioned), is only clear on the level of those most easily led, suggested to, and abused themselves, as though they too were children programmed early on in life and initiated into a faith in somethign they can't see another side of. But wait. They're just that.

Hey, Wait: 24 More Hours!

Some fan of No Pasarán tells us you can actually vote from each computer you have access to until today (Tuesday, January 13th) at 22h00 GMT (that's 11 p.m. in Berlin, 5 p.m. in Boston, 2 p.m. in Vancouver)

French Government Confirms Hospitals' 10,000 Accidental Deaths Per Year

The number of 10,000 accidental deaths in French hospitals per year is confirmed by Health Minister Roselyne Bachelot. Now, come on, President Obama: what are we waiting for, instituting a similar system in the United States?!

Environ 10.000 personnes meurent chaque année à l'hôpital du fait de l'exercice de la médecine, a indiqué mardi la ministre de la Santé Roselyne Bachelot, confirmant un chiffre cité au cours du week-end.

Sign o' the times

Ask to choose the most pressing issues of the day, one may come up with: world economic turmoil, Gaza, Gazprom, ending true poverty/hunger, Irak, Afghanistan, Zimbabwe, or even pirates.

Obviously you are not in Brussels. Truly serious issues of the day require truly serious action by truly serious individuals:

Mobile phone operators in the European Union may face a ban on charging customers for receiving voice mail messages outside their home state in the EU, turning the screw on industry revenues, a document showed on Monday.

EU Telecoms Commissioner Viviane Reding has proposed capping the retail price of roamed text messages at 11 euro cents (15 U.S. cents) each from July compared with around 29 cents now.

She has also proposed a cap of 1 euro per megabyte on the wholesale price of data downloads such as using a phone or laptop to check emails or surf the Web outside a home state in the 27-nation EU.

Reding also wants existing price caps on roamed voice calls to be extended by three years to 2013.

Of course this will result in higher domestic mobile costs for the consumer and less competition. All designed to stick it to the man. Go ahead, pay more with less choice and enjoy the benefits of those unintended consequences.

If we are really lucky mobile providers will find roaming unprofitable enough to discontinue those services abroad. That'll show 'em who's boss.

Spoiling the plot

If you are reading this you are of unfortunately afflicted with the worst curse to ever afflict man-kind, being alive in the most unfair, inequitable, and doomed period of human existence, the 21st century. Proof can always be found here, here, here, here, and of course here.

Imagine your surprise at reading this:

Personal information from the (1911) census, which has been put online for the first time, paints a picture of a society that is in many ways, unrecognisable from modern Britain.

People did different jobs, lived considerably shorter lives and existed in a society that was vastly less equitable, according to 1911 Census - the oldest from which the original forms were kept.

Noted:

In 1911, the leading occupational category for workers in England and Wales was domestic service, said Mark Pearsall, a records specialist and expert in family history at the National Archives.

Some 1.3 million people worked as domestic servants, he said, compared to a "tiny proportion" today. That was followed by agriculture (1.2 million) and coal mining (971,000).

Figures from a 2008 labour force survey showed that 1.6 million work as sales assistants and retail cashiers; 1.4 million as 'functional managers - such as those employed in sales and marketing, personnel and information technology - and 1.3 million in teaching. There are no longer enough coal miners to even register on the survey.

Almost 100 years ago, the richest one per cent of the population held around 70 per cent of the nation's wealth; today it is about 23 per cent.

The horrors of modern-day living in a western European country, why can't we all just go back to those simpler, happier times .....

Batty Britain

An octopus-shaped UFO was reported flying through the air hours before a wind turbine was destroyed in mysterious circumstances.

It's time for a nation wide house-to-house search - to

check their freezers for human heads.

UFO enthusiasts have described the incident as potentially one of the most significant encounters in years, and have called for the damaged parts to be tested to uncover the cause of the collision.

A more down-to-earth theory is that the turbine was damaged due to the build up of ice on the blades

Only a Few More Heures

You can vote from each computer you have access to until today (Monday, January 12th) at 22h00 GMT (that's 11 p.m. in Berlin, 5 p.m. in Boston, 2 p.m. in Vancouver)

More Proof of Europe's Intellectual (and Artistic) Superiority

Look at how France is represented, says RV, in the EU sculpture, the one that shows how superior European art is to that of the clueless Americans… (Incidentally, Britain has disappeared entirely from the "map" of Europe.)

In a related matter, check out the similarities between Italy and the rest of Europe (although it can hardly be denied that the EU is somewhat overrated, consider sending Bruno Bozzetto's video to your amici italiani all the same)…

Relativism meets Absolutism

From the local edition of Italy's La Repubblica we find a portrait of primitive communication and anger more akin to pre-renaissance Bologna than anything else:

In front of the symbol of Christianity so dear to Bologna, the Basilica di San Petronio, almost two thousand Muslims pray in an unreal silence interrupted only by the imam and the responses of the prostate faithful. These are the five, in Piazza Maggiore and the verses echo the prayer of the Maghreb (sunset) and then that of the dead "for the martyrs of Gaza." Before, during the short march started from the Piazza del Nettuno, chanting against Bush and Olmert, amid a scene of desperation to express anger against the Israeli bombardment which is bringing the Gaza Strip to its’ knees. Some protesters burned a flag emblazoned with the Star of David and then stepped on the ashen remains. Among the marchers were many Palestinians, Egyptians, and Moroccans who also came from Modena and Ferrara to lead the procession with dozens and dozens of children covered in red paint to symbolize their "brothers" killed by Israeli bombs.

"Free Palestine", "from Bologna to Gaza, resistance resistance", "God is with Gaza," as a slogan scanned litany while the demonstrators estimated at little more than five hundred people paraded around the town. The initiative, which was coordinated with demonstration in other cities in Italy, have joined some Bolognese groups (Crash and TPO), the Rdb-Cub and several members of the Communist Refoundation, as the team leader Roberto Sconciaforni. Atop a pickup truck moved slowly through the crowd, a boy raised a burning Israeli flag, the demonstrators shouted and waved, holding posters with pictures of dead and wounded Palestinians.

The vice president of the center of Islamic culture in Bologna, Daniele Parracino, sought to prevent the act to be carried out. "This is not the way to react” he said, if it’s a visceral reaction and not a thoughtful one. What we like is the sensitivity of many Italians who are supporting us, and who care about the right of everyone to live in peace."

Many Muslims were wearing kefiahs, and someone in the front row threw a shoe, recalling the act of and Iraqi journalist who threw his at U.S. President Bush. In front of the Prefecture, many lay on the pavement to symbolize the deads in Gaza. Other waved sheets of paper with the Star of David accompanied by the swastika, the Nazi symbol. Soon after, Parracino burst into tears when the news arrived of the bombing of a mosque. Not long thereafter all the protesters came to pray.

It's no wonder Parracino was concerned that people would see the emotionalism, chants, and flag-burning. The successful overtaking of the locals' minds require that they not be reminded of the kind of savage anger that leads to firing rocket propelled artillary at Israeli civilians. They might even get to the point where they realize, somehow, with no thanks to the press, that the Israeli reaction is in fact a reaction. They might speculate that some action might have taken place to cause a reaction, and that these protesters are just calling for a cease-fire only on the part of the Israelis.

In turns, they see conflict as though it should be a game of darts, where it's simply disproportional for one party to have more darts than the other. Otherwise when it's convenient a world of schoolhouse rules id imagined, and appeals to "social justice" is employed in the rationalization that a uniformed and militaristic Hamas should be able to shell civilians across its' borders.

48 Hours More (More or Less) to Hit the Buttons…

You can vote once every 24 hours from each computer you have access to until Monday, January 12th at 22h00 GMT (that's 11 p.m. in Berlin, 5 p.m. in Boston, 2 p.m. in Vancouver)

America Needs a National Health Care System Like the Europeans'; After All, France's Medical Accidents Result in No More Than 10,000 Deaths Per Year

Why are American health care statistics so bad (relatively speaking), while the Europeans' national health care statistics are so good — leading to innumerable calls to imitate the Europeans and nationalize America's system? Well, it turns out that one reason is not that the Americans are clueless, reactionary, and backward, but that… the Europeans don't calculate their statistics as thoroughly as… (those clueless) Americans do. When one French doctor tried calculating his country's statistics, using the American model, it turned out that the system "only" produced the trifling number of… 10,000 deaths a year.

Selon [Philippe Juvin, chef des urgences à l'hôpital Beaujon, professeur d'anesthésie-réanimation (et secrétaire national de l'UMP chargé de la santé)], "au moins 10 000 personnes meurent chaque année à l'hôpital du fait de l'exercice de la médecine" et "de 300 000 à 500 000 événements indésirables graves se produisent chaque année" ; pour avancer ces chiffres, il se base sur "sur les chiffres américains" concernant ce même type d'accidents.

Intolerant Europe at a Glance

Again, and again, and again - the mighty braintrust can't even get past it's medieval concept of race and culture, even when they're out looking rage out with irrational invective. When they have a bone to pick with Israelis, they wan't to smash heads, only they try smashing European, not Israeli heads.

PARIS: Signs are mounting that the conflict in Gaza is starting to spill over into violence in Europe's towns and cities, with assaults against Jews and arson attacks on Jewish congregations in France, Sweden and Britain.

Assailants rammed a burning car into the gates of a synagogue in Toulouse, in southwest France, on Monday night.

Seriously, are they winners or what? And this is just the "polite" type of reporting that can be dressed up and trotted out: the stuff on the various Indymedia type sites and all of their bots are trotting out the no longer plausible superlative again.

What Is the Difference Between a Democracy and a Republic?

The Wimp provides the answer…

Hit the Button and Go Vote for the Best European Blog of the Year

Yo! You!

If/When you have time, why not?

Why not go vote (once every 24 hours from each computer you have access to until Monday, January 12th at 22h00 GMT) for the best blog in continental Europe? Mercy buckets.

Zoroastrologicalclimatology

Remember a few years back when the oceanic "conveyor belt" (which helps deliver seasonal temperatures to various parts of the Atlantic) "stopped" working? Remember how everyone was going to die within 15 minutes or so after the "news" broke? Remember how it was all blamed on man-made global warming (née, cooling - née, climate change - née, insert newest newest bogeyman here)?

Any updates of late?

One of the "pumps" contributing to the ocean's global circulation suddenly switched on again last winter for the first time this decade, scientists reported Tuesday (Dec. 23) in Nature Geoscience. The finding surprised scientists, who had been wondering if global warming was inhibiting the pump-which, in turn, would cause other far-reaching climate changes.

Gosh (emphasis mine):

“The obvious question is, why?” wrote Våge, Pickart, and colleagues. Investigating that question, the researchers turned up a myriad of interrelated factors that may have caused Labrador and Irminger Seas water to resume sinking. The complexity of the process makes it difficult to predict future changes in ocean circulation and climate, concluded the research team, which included Virginie Thierry ( Laboratoire de Physique des Océans ), Gilles Reverdin ( Laboratoire d'Océanographie Dynamique et de Climatologie ), Craig M. Lee ( University of Washington ), Brian Petrie ( Bedford Institute of Oceanography ), Tom A. Agnew and Amy Wong ( Meteorological Service of Canada ), and Mads H. Ribergaard ( Danish Meteorological Institute ).

Of course the reason given back in the day for the stoppage of this system was man-made global warming. The reason for the re-start of the very same system now? Natch, man-made global warming:

The scientists noted “that the increased liquid and frozen freshwater flux into the Labrador Sea was probably tied to the large export of sea ice from the Arctic Ocean that contributed to the record minimum in sea-ice extent observed in the summer of 2007. Ironically, this disappearance of Arctic sea ice, which has been linked to global warming, may have helped trigger the return of deep wintertime [water sinking] to the North Atlantic.”

All sides covered, all angles played, all future funding available.

Sarah Palin on the Media's Double Standards

John Ziegler interviews Sarah Palin about the media's double standards…

Tolerant Europe at a Glance

Other than hating someone, I'm not sure much else will get them out of bed. But wait, it get's better: the negative views held of Americans by Europeans is the same. In fact the European nymphomania for hating others is within the same range and has the same 10-15 point delta revealing the inverse relationships.

- Americans, relative to the Europeans polled give as much slack to Europeans as they do to those identified as Muslims and Jews.

- Muslims and Jews are more likely to feel comfortable with Americans as they are with Europeans by about the same margin.

- Europeans, on the other hand, are rather more likely (and more uniformly likely by age and level of education) to have equally negative views of Americans, Muslims, and Jews.

A surly lot all around. and rather unlikely to extend to other nationalities and cultures the same concideration afforded to them.

We'd Like to Thank the Academy...

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So far a Czech shrink is ahead of us, managing to use some kind of Bohemian firewall evading trickery. Will you stand for that?

Europe’s Gitmo Problem

French Navy dumps pirates on Puntland in violation of the European Court of Human Rights dictum that it is unlawful for an EU member state to engage in any kind of rendition that could expose a suspect, guilty or not, to the possibility of the death penalty.

Germans, on the other hand, are refusing to prosecute under international piracy laws unless German property is involved. This is more-or-less a precedent to not enforce the law of the sea and a sort of tacit deal-making measure with pirates without the need of any form of negotiation. It gives them free reign to pillage vessels in any area of the sea patrolled by German forces so long as they agree to leave German merchant vessels, or presumably ships travelling from Hamburg (which likely carry German property) alone.

So much for that globally involved “I’ve stopped cowering from life in this corner” thing where they were feeling all butch. For Deutschland, it’s the law of the sea for me, but not for thee. At the end of the day, the most important feature of European life is being servile in the face of ugliness so long as nobody notices this and makes you feel embarrassed after your social ideas kill another 150 million people. Do, please avert your gaze, for there are facts to be manipulated, twisted, or ignored

There is only one way to solve this problem: the EU clearly needs a Camp Delta at a Gitmo. I suggest that they do this at the French Military Base in nearby Djibouti, which has the advantage of not being in the EU and has a host government unwilling to challenge the French about their presence and practices. One where Europeans under the guise of being civil libertarians will not abuse broad-ranging laws to make a cottage industry out of freeing criminals. Since the problem effects international trade, the unstated underlying motive will fit hand-in-glove with anti-globalization initiatives seeking to promote an “altermondialiste/alternative world” where crime and violence that’s emotionally satisfying to 16-22 year olds is encouraged, and people will have to perform dental work on themselves.

So let’s review this again, shall we?: some Europeans are already saying that they won’t prosecute, they may not engage in rendition, even to states that don’t use allow for a death penalty, whatever pirates they pick up will be Gitmo-ized into “innocence”, they can’t be shot on site, and they certainly wouldn’t want to let them enter heaven on earth, even if just to be tried.

Do tell, what options do they have left?

“We’re from the Government, and We’re Here to End Your Marriage”

Read excerpts from Stephen Baskerville's article…

“We’re from the Government, and We’re Here to End Your Marriage”

G. K. Chesterton once observed that the family serves as the principal check on government power, and he suggested that someday the family and the state would confront one another

writes Stephen Baskerville in Touchstone Magazine (read excerpts from his book, Taken Into Custody: The War Against Fathers, Marriage, and the Family).

That day has arrived.

Chesterton was writing about divorce, and despite extensive public attention to almost every other threat to the family, divorce remains the most direct and serious. Michael McManus of Marriage Savers writes that “divorce is a far more grievous blow to marriage than today’s challenge by gays.”

Most Americans would be deeply shocked if they knew what goes on today under the name of divorce. Indeed, many are devastated to discover that they can be forced into divorce by procedures entirely beyond their control. Divorce licenses unprecedented government intrusion into family life, including the power to sunder families, seize children, loot family wealth, and incarcerate parents without trial. Comprised of family courts and vast, federally funded social services bureaucracies that wield what amount to police powers, the divorce machinery has become the most predatory and repressive sector of government ever created in the United States and is today’s greatest threat to constitutional freedom.

… Contrary to common assumptions, divorce today seldom involves two people mutually deciding to part ways. According to Frank Furstenberg and Andrew Cherlin in Divided Families, 80 percent of divorces are unilateral, that is, over the objection of one spouse. Patricia Morgan of London’s Civitas think tank reports that in over half of divorces, there was no recollection of major conflict before the separation.

Under “no-fault,” or what some call “unilateral,” divorce—a legal regime that expunged all considerations of justice from the procedure—divorce becomes a sudden power grab by one spouse, assisted by an army of judicial hangers-on who reward belligerence and profit from the ensuing litigation: judges, lawyers, psychotherapists, counselors, mediators, custody evaluators, social workers, and more.

If marriage is not wholly a private affair, as today’s marriage advocates insist, involuntary divorce by its nature requires constant government supervision over family life. Far more than marriage, divorce mobilizes and expands government power. Marriage creates a private household, which may or may not necessitate signing some legal documents. Divorce dissolves a private household, usually against the wishes of one spouse. It inevitably involves state functionaries—including police and jails—to enforce the divorce and the post-marriage order.

Almost invariably, the involuntarily divorced spouse will want and expect to continue enjoying the protections and prerogatives of private life: the right to live in the common home, to possess the common property, or—most vexing of all—to parent the common children. These claims must be terminated, using the penal system if necessary.

Onerous Implications

Few stopped to consider the implications of laws that shifted the breakup of private households from a voluntary to an involuntary process. Unilateral divorce inescapably involves government agents forcibly removing legally innocent people from their homes, seizing their property, and separating them from their children. It inherently abrogates not only the inviolability of marriage but the very concept of private life.

By far the most serious consequences involve children, who have become the principal weapons of the divorce machinery. Invariably the first action of a divorce court, once a divorce is filed, is to separate the children from one of their parents, usually the father. Until this happens, no one in the machinery acquires any power or earnings. The first principle and first action of divorce court therefore: Remove the father.

Family court judges’ contempt for both fathers and constitutional rights was openly expressed by New Jersey municipal court judge Richard Russell: “Your job is not to become concerned about the constitutional rights of the man that you’re violating,” he told his colleagues at a judges’ training seminar in 1994. “Throw him out on the street. . . . We don’t have to worry about the rights.”

Generated Hysteria

…Why do we hear almost nothing about this? Aside from media that sympathize with the divorce revolution, the multi-billion-dollar divorce industry also commands a huge government-funded propaganda machine that has distorted our view of what is happening.

The growth of the divorce machinery during the 1970s and 1980s did not follow but preceded (in other words, it generated) a series of hysterias against parents—especially fathers—so hideous and inflammatory that no one, left or right, dared question them or defend those accused: child abuse and molestation, wife-beating, and nonpayment of “child support.” Each of these hysterias has been propagated largely by feminists, bar associations, and social work bureaucracies, whose federal funding is generously shared with state and local law-enforcement officials.

The parent on the receiving end of such accusations—even in the absence of any formal charge, evidence, or conviction—not only loses his children summarily and often permanently; he also finds himself abandoned by friends and family members, parishioners and pastors, co-workers and employers (and he may well lose his job)—all terrified to be associated with an accused “pedophile,” “batterer,” or “deadbeat dad.”

It is not clear that these nefarious figures are other than bogeymen created by divorce interests, well aware that not only the public generally but conservatives and family advocates in particular are a soft touch when it comes to anything concerning irresponsible behavior or sexual perversion.

…It is also largely credulity and fear that leads Congress by overwhelming majorities to appropriate billions for anti-family programs in response to these hysterias. The massive federal funds devoted to domestic violence, child abuse, and child-support enforcement are little more than what Phyllis Schlafly calls “feminist pork,” taxpayer subsidies on family dissolution that also trample due process protections. Family law may technically be the purview of states, but it is driven by federal policies and funded by a Congress fearful of accusations that it is not doing enough against pedophiles, batterers, and deadbeats.

In fact, each of these figures is largely a hoax, a creation of feminist ideology disseminated at taxpayers’ expense and unchallenged by journalists, academics, civil libertarians, and family advocates who are either unaware of the reality or cowed into silence. Indeed, so diabolical are these hysterias that some family advocates simply accept them as additional evidence of the family crisis.

But while sensational examples can be found of anything, there is simply no evidence that the family and fatherhood crisis is caused primarily or even significantly by fathers abandoning their families, beating their wives, and molesting their children. Irrefutable evidence indicates that it is driven almost entirely by divorce courts forcibly separating parents from their children and using these false accusations as a rationalization.

Divorce Gamesmanship

During the 1980s and 1990s, waves of child abuse hysteria swept America and other countries. Sensational cases in Washington state, California, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Ontario, Saskatchewan, the north of England, and more recently France resulted in torn-apart families, blatantly unjust prison sentences, and ruined lives, while the media and civil libertarians looked the other way.

Today it is not clear that we have learned anything from these miscarriages of justice. If anything, the hysteria has been institutionalized in the divorce courts, where false allegations have become routine.

What is ironic about these witch-hunts is the fact that it is easily demonstrable that the child abuse epidemic—which is very real—is almost entirely the creation of feminism and the welfare bureaucracies themselves. It is well established by scholars that an intact family is the safest place for women and children and that very little abuse takes place in married families. Child abuse overwhelmingly occurs in single-parent homes, homes from which the father has been removed. Domestic violence, too, is far more likely during or after the breakup of a marriage than among married couples.

…government logic is marvelously self-justifying and self-perpetuating, since by eliminating the father, officials can present themselves as the solution to the problem they have created. The more child abuse there is—whether by single mothers, boyfriends, or even (as is often the case) by social workers and bureaucrats themselves—the more the proffered solution is to further expand the child abuse bureaucracy.

Waxing indignant about a string of child deaths at the hands of social workers in the District of Columbia, federal judges and the Washington Post found solace in the D.C. government’s solution: to hire more social workers (and lawyers too, for some unspecified reason). “Olivia Golden, the Child and Family Services’ latest director . . . will use her increased budget to recruit more social workers and double the number of lawyers.” Children die at the hands of social workers, so we must hire more social workers.

…A commonplace of political science is that bureaucracies relentlessly expand, often by creating the very problem they exist to address. Appalling as it sounds, the conclusion is inescapable that we have created a massive army of officials with a vested interest in child abuse.

…The explosion in foster care based on the assumed but unexamined need to find permanent homes for allegedly abused children has provided perhaps the strongest argument in favor of same-sex “marriage” and homosexual parenting. …

Child-Support Racket

The “deadbeat dad” is another figure largely manufactured by the divorce machinery. He is far less likely to have deliberately abandoned offspring he callously sired than to be an involuntarily divorced father who has been, as attorney Jed Abraham writes in From Courtship to Courtroom, “forced to finance the filching of his own children.”

Child support is plagued by the same contradictions as child custody. Like custody, it is awarded ostensibly without reference to “fault,” and yet nonpayment brings swift and severe punishments. Contrary to popular belief, child support today has nothing to do with fathers abandoning their children, reneging on their marital vows, or even agreeing to divorce. It is automatically assessed on all non-custodial parents, even those divorced against their will who lose their children through no legal fault or agreement of their own. It is an entitlement for all single mothers, in other words, regardless of their behavior.

…All this marks a new stage in the evolution of the welfare state: from distributing largesse to raising revenue and, from there, to law enforcement. The result is a self-financing machine, generating profits and expanding the size and scope of government—all by generating single-parent homes and fatherless children. Government has created a perpetual growth machine for destroying families, seizing children from legally blameless parents, and incarcerating parents without trial.

Incidentally, the onset of no-fault divorce explains the popularity of marriage among gays:

Today’s disputes over marriage in fact have their origin in this one. Demands to redefine marriage to include homosexual couples are inconceivable apart from the redefinition of marriage already effected by heterosexuals through divorce. Though gays cite the very desire to marry as evidence that their lifestyle is not inherently promiscuous, activist Andrew Sullivan acknowledges that that desire has arisen only because of the promiscuity permitted in modern marriage. “The world of no-strings heterosexual hookups and 50 percent divorce rates preceded gay marriage,” he points out. “All homosexuals are saying . . . is that, under the current definition, there’s no reason to exclude us. If you want to return straight marriage to the 1950s, go ahead. But until you do, the exclusion of gays is . . . a denial of basic civil equality” (emphasis added). Gays do not want traditional monogamous marriage, only the version debased by divorce.

Update: what caused the breakdown of the American family? There are certainly many factors, but the welfare system; glorification of the single-parent household; and ill-conceived legislation are among the chief culprits.

Translation Needed

And to be frank, I don’t know where to start. I have a hard time imagining any other glorified customs union needing an anthem:

Europe is united now
United may it remain;
Our unity in diversity
May it contribute to world peace.

May there forever reign in Europe
Faith and justice
And freedom of its people
In a greater motherland

Citizens, may Europe flourish,
A great task calls on you.
Golden stars in the sky are
The symbols that shall unite us.

Mother is the new father, I guess.

I think see a great reader participation moment in this. Friends, do please parse!

Solyent Green is Swedes!

It’s Birkenau-equse only kinda greenie-happy style.

Is this Swedish town that's routing heat from its crematorium to local homes morbid or brilliant? Let's just call them brilliantly morbid.

The town of Halmstad came up with the idea when trying to curb the amount of smoke emitted from the crematorium.

It was when we were discussing all these environmental issues that we started thinking about the energy that is used in the cremations and realised that instead of all that heat just going up into the air, we could make use of it somehow. It was just rising into the skies for nothing," said Lennart Andersson, the director of the cemetery in the town of Halmstad.

Actually it’s jacket heat, and not smoke that they’re really capturing here, but let’s play along with the only kind of engineering that lit-majors can partially grasp...

It’s the end of the day, only symbolically more hopeless and weak, and the logical conclusion of a life of peevish lecturing about some ideological "objets trouvees". One could almost see how it could be called a moment of glory, and call to arms of the movement championed by a aging, childess, dead continent without a future hoping for one last relevant act – one that amounts to heating some stranger’s apartment for a few hours in a nation with high GDP per capita.

But there must be something deeper in it to lure the caring, committed type expressing their terminal wishes. It reminds me of Joseph Cotton's last scene in Soylent Green: he accepts his death and “reprocessing” so long as fleeting images of an idealized (and harmless) natural world is paraded before him to salve his willful suicide in his last moments on this earth. Similarly, at least the ideologues can make themselves useful, if all they think they really amount to is aspiring to becoming a sort of eco-shaheed without murdering anyone.

The world of Soylent Green is a dystopia much as the one painted for us by environmentalists of our world. It must be hard to face the notion that it really isn’t as despairingly bad as ones’ personal campaign philosophy requires a belief in, so maybe this is a way they can finally end their pain.

Service Notice

Europeans might be comforted by the press and talking heads consistently airdropping novacaine spiked with fake angst into their happy place, but for several years David’s Medienkritik was serving up the anti-toxin. ¡No Pasarán! welcomes Ray as a new contributor.

Let’s all greet him with youthful, culturally ignorant ululation.

Coping Mechanism Type Rationalizations Likely to Follow Shortly

Sooner or later, someone will call torching cars a form of emotional release, politically meaningful, or even a form of noteworthy expression as a means of accepting hideous destrictiveness as normative or at least understandable. Fausta is up in the skybox with the play-by-play:

A few unruly kids light up some Roman candles and everyone takes it in stride

Un-hunh.

In a country where car-burning isn't a common symptom of socioeconomic unrest, news of so many automobiles being torched would be alarming - if not a sign of brewing insurrection. In France, however, word of the destruction that accompanied the evening the French call Saint-Sylvestre was met with a mix of Gaulic shrugs and low-grade peevishness.

In revealing the figures on Thursday, French Interior Minister Michele Alliot-Marie acknowledged that the tally of car-burnings had indeed increased over the previous year. Yet Alliot-Marie also said the enormous fleet of now carbonized vehicles shouldn't darken a New Year's Eve that was "unanimously considered mostly calm." Alliot-Marie also stressed that - in contrast to recent years - the first night of 2009 saw "no damage to public or private buildings."

Except for the fact that it IS becoming normal.

Nearly 43,000 cars were torched in France over the whole of 2007 - an average of almost 118 per day.

I say we just start calling every angry male out on the streets in France a flamer.

Fish meet barrel

Is this all conclusive, no:

Earlier this year, predictions were rife that the North Pole could melt entirely in 2008. Instead, the Arctic ice saw a substantial recovery. Bill Chapman, a researcher with the UIUC's Arctic Center, tells DailyTech this was due in part to colder temperatures in the region. Chapman says wind patterns have also been weaker this year. Strong winds can slow ice formation as well as forcing ice into warmer waters where it will melt.

Why were predictions so wrong? Researchers had expected the newer sea ice, which is thinner, to be less resilient and melt easier. Instead, the thinner ice had less snow cover to insulate it from the bitterly cold air, and therefore grew much faster than expected, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center.

In May, concerns over disappearing sea ice led the U.S. to officially list the polar bear a threatened species, over objections from experts who claimed the animal's numbers were increasing.

However, just imagine if the shoe was on the other foot. "Enviro-apocalypse now", "Mass hysteria" are a couple of phrases which come to mind.

Ninety-five more months to go before the latest "end of the world" prognosticus, better get crackin'.

A Majority Desperately Seeking Affirmation

The implication is quite clear, and indicative of sophisticated continental thought: direct election and perhaps democracy itself has to be suspended for the sake of “diversity”:

Immigrant mayors are thinly spread in Europe. There are a number of mayors and lord mayors in Britain with an ethnic minority background but they have largely a ceremonial role. In Germany there is a village with an engineer from India as mayor. In Belgium the socialist politician Emir Kir, who is of Turkish descent, may become mayor of Sint-Joost-Ten-Node. But countries like Sweden and Norway, which have welcomed immigrants for years, have no immigrant mayors.

France is a modest exception. Of the roughly 36,000 local councils, around ten have a mayor of immigrant descent. Most of these are villages of a few hundred souls. The most important is the left-wing politician Eddy Aït, with Berber parents and openly homosexual, who has been mayor of the Parisian suburb of Yvelines-sous-Poissy (population 14,000) since March 2008.

"France's singular position has to do with the fact that its mayors are directly elected," says Laure Michon, who researches the political representation of immigrants at Amsterdam University. "Half of the councils have fewer than 3,000 inhabitants and it's easier to become mayor on the basis of a personal network."

But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t time for self-congratulation, while the nutty ideas can be heard between their teeth. That a village of 100 inhabitants where there are virtually no “non-aboriginals” need to find one somewhere to keep up appearances, with the obvious obsession with race is something worth trumping the vote, just as it was two decades ago with the idea that there need to be “elected quotas” of women.

Rotterdam's new mayor, Ahmed Aboutaleb, illustrates the Netherlands' forward position when it comes to the participation of immigrants in politics.

It is almost impossible to overestimate the symbolic value of Ahmed Aboutaleb's career: born in Morocco, moved to the Netherlands as an adolescent, local councillor in Amsterdam, junior minister and, from January 5, mayor of the country's second biggest city Rotterdam (population 583,000).

All that is quite impressive – until you consider that it’s roughly mimicking a pattern that took place in American cities on a larger scale half a century ago, and in a prior wave with immigrants from the Mediterranean nearly a century ago.

"His [Aboutaleb's] position speaks to the imagination," says Andreas Wüst, political researcher at Mannheim University in Germany. "He has to be an example to many immigrants, and not just in the Netherlands."

Or rather the LACK of imagination of people trying to peddle irrelevant genetic attributes as a “Change and Hope” agenda, bypassing entirely the idea of political platforms, and a sort of desperate search to keep up with the idea of “finding their Obama” for its’ own sake.

Let’s be frank: most immigrants to Europe are more family oriented and are better disposed to a anti-syndication, anti-socialistic, non-intervetionist view of economy and society, and yet the press will search high and low for the few that can be radicalized to the left, and act as a de facto gatekeeper to their ability to make their electibility understood. Nothing nothing could be further from the idea of free, open, and participatory governance than the unspoken social agenda of the talking heads who only seem to be looking for new servile ‘friends’ to give them the feeling that their activism has a purpose in the world, and sating their feeling of being needed.

Otherwise, all you really need to do is show these boffins some other ‘victims’ to convince them of their benighted advocacy is indispensable to civilization. I wonder if it dawns on them that immigrants will perceive that the mushy middle-minded find a comparative equality of interest in house-pets as they have with them.

No Need to Explain. Not Later. Not Ever.

When it comes to business and economics, most journalist keep hitting the stupid juice:

10. Capitalism is dead or dying.
9. Gas at $4-a-gallon, blame the oil companies.
8. Fannie’s failure
7. Barack Obama sends stocks soaring, but not sinking.
6. Alternative energy: All gain, no pain
5. The economy has a fever and the only prescription is more bailouts.
4. Attack of the Killer Tomatoes
3. Oil prices will skyrocket to $200 a barrel, gas to $15.
2. Welcome to 1929: Great Depression II
1. America needs a new, New Deal.

Business and Media takes on each myth. The common thread is that each one was propagated by someone with little experience or knowledge of the subject of their pronouncements, and had an ideological agenda.

The miracle is that they never have hangovers that would cause them to question the assault of invented assumtions they seed the mind of the public with. Lefty political charlatans are no different. They just whack back another one, and keep flying the friendly skies.

He [Sen. McConnell] asked if Democrats would allow increased deep-sea exploration if the price of gas reached a national average of $10.00. Democrats objected.

Forgive me for finding joy is in the name of that post.

The Low Performing Intellectual

Euro-mind Tomas Kavaliauskas writes in Eurozine about the same Euro-fables that caused mass protest and long, widespread wars over the centuries: class-warfare, class-hatred, and that strange hatred of authority that seems to find a place in its’ heart for things that can only be accomplished through totalitarianism. 
 
As usual, they have to get around to limiting human freedom.

The capitalist order implies that the ultimate objective of citizens is to be consumers. Yet consumerism grounded in indebtedness means financial dependence as opposed to democratic freedom

Prattle on about something you don’t understand, pretend social philosophy needs municipal control, pretend that you’re the one to do it, and people call you an intellectual.  Here, our brave gladiator wanting to toy with all our lives manages to describe the only option anti-capitalists can cite as capitalism, and goes through the necessary ‘talking in circles’ to tell us that in fact it was the capitalist societies where social control is at its’ greatest.

According to Foucault, the individual, whose life and activities are restricted by the social order, is constantly examined and classified; this facilitates identification. This process, obviously political, is especially important in contemporary megapolises. The practical and political interest of every state is to control and discipline its citizens in order to secure the successful functioning of its political and economic systems. Moreover, control and discipline help preserve the consumerist order.

I’m sorry, but what history of Europe exactly did you have to exclude from view to arrive at this point?  It’s the poorer, economically dysfunctional societies that permitted tyrannies to calcify permanently. 
 
I’d really like to know where he got the idea that the freedom to make a living in the way you want is the same as programmed consumption or is an all-occupying philosophy of those who live in it.  I’d also really like to know his notion of a viable alternative.  Invariably, the ‘alter-monde’ involves less control over ones’ life and less of a connection between what you do and the conditions you can live in. 
 
I’d also like to know where this nostalgia for Gothic life of communist authoritarian leftism comes from.  Under the only other ‘alter-monde’  to democratic-socialism/socialism Europe has know in living memory has been a system based entirely on consumption – one that not only based itself on the need to ration and construct a destructive level of human conformity, but didn’t even succeed a providing for the population materially.

It would be naïve to assume that prosumers can choose identity. It is ascribed to them by default. Today, one is even born with it. Such is the order of the capitalist system, when individuals are free to choose professions but not the status of the producer and the consumer. Indeed, if Europe or the USA saw the emergence within their boundaries of a state that refused to participate in this global system and instead effected a Rousseauesque return to nature, and if the ideology of this state were based on principles other than production and consumption, contemporary western morality grounded in the maximization of economic growth would simply collapse. This would mean that an "advanced" country chooses "backwardness". What is seen as inevitable in Africa would, in Europe or the USA, be regarded as a choice and thus become a challenge to the ideology, ethics, politics, economics, and culture of utilitarian efficiency.

This can only be true if all people are in fact just like the worst example of constructed negative architypes you see on TV, and that people are not capable of anything else.  How he and his fellow travelers evaded this fate is stunning when you see just how willing they seem to be to parrot ideas no-one with a shred of healthy scepticism would accept.  The poor in Africa cannot passively ‘choose’ to have a European quality of life, and the very idea that these choices can be made sort of undermines the idea that a bogeyman is forcibly ascribing anything to the rest of us. 
 
To think that we choose our identities rather than develop them as individuals tells one just how little the likes of Tomas Kavaliauskas knows about people to begin with, and how trapped he is in the illusions necessary to maintain the adolescent view of class-warfare into adulthood.  That arbitrariness with which others’ philosophies, even ones that they aren’t familiar with are judged and describes must be the prerequisite to be called a European intellectual these days. 
 
I would pity him if he could admit that his identity was something that developed under a number of influences, (perhaps even things he perceived as traumas) through the course of actually living and wasn’t something he chose one day or was assigned.

A depressing tale of collaboration, corruption, and subsequent denial that taxes the will of even the most determined Francophile

The history of France under German rule during World War II is a depressing tale of collaboration, corruption and subsequent denial that taxes the will of even the most determined Francophile

writes Mark Falcoff in his WSJ book review of Frederic Spotts' The Shameful Peace (danke zu wahabicorridor).

Perhaps not surprisingly it was not a French scholar but an American one, Robert Paxton, who produced the first serious examination of the period (1940-44)… Now comes Frederic Spotts, a British writer known for his studies of German history. With "The Shameful Peace" he lifts the lid on one of the least known -- and most shameful episodes -- of the period: namely, the role of artists and intellectuals in occupied France.

The first effect of the armistice was to convert the French capital into a kind of vacation paradise for the German occupier. … Representatives of leading Nazi figures, notably Hermann Goering, sacked the homes of wealthy Jews for masterpieces of art -- an expedition in which some of the city's grandest art dealers were pleased to assist. Even low-ranking German functionaries partook of the feast. "I never lived so well anywhere," a secretary-typist later recalled. "We could buy what we wanted. . . . [It was] the most wonderful and unforgettable time of my youth."

One area where the Germans completely understood what they were about, however, was in the co-opting of the French cultural establishment.

What made the French experience of German occupation so different from that of, say, Poland or Czechoslovakia or Greece was that Hitler, far from trying to eradicate French national culture, chose to nourish it as a distraction from his other demands. …

The most obvious minions of Berlin were fascist or protofascist intellectuals who had been at war with French democracy long before the armistice. … Here there could be no surprises. Other writers, however, had not been fascist proponents in the 1930s and simply went with the flow. As novelist Jean Giono put it with great economy of words: "I prefer being a living German to a dead Frenchman."

At a time when both food and fuel were painfully scarce, many cultural figures preferred to live well rather than poorly. The list here is far longer -- a virtual "Who's Who" of the French artistic world [including Picasso, often cited as a principled anti-Fascist, and Céline, often quoted by our detractors as an example of someone with obviously superior francophone sensibilities, artistic prowess, lucidité, and so on]. [Cocteau's] record of the times, Mr. Spotts writes, "gives the impression that the Germans he knew were visiting tourists rather than officers of an invading army."

… The need to nourish the myth of la France combattante -- the cornerstone of Gaullist ideology -- required far fewer collaborators than actually existed. The myth was also necessary to wrest the nimbus of Resistance from the communists, who claimed exclusive rights to it. Then, almost before anyone knew it, anti-Americanism became the ideology of choice for French intellectuals and artists, bringing both left and right happily together.

An excerpt on France's "blindness to several cardinal truths about the Occupation":

…the Occupation yielded its secrets only slowly and partially. The story remains complex and confusing, without a satisfying conclusion. Biography is still sanitized; history continues to be rewritten; silence prevails over candour. "The true France was not at Vichy, the true France never collaborated." So spake President Sarkosy as late as May 2008, on the anniversary of the end of the Second World War. But though the myths continue to be officially perpetuated, everyone in France knows they are false. Consequently there remains what de Gaulle once referred to as "a dull pain in the depths of our national consciousness'.

For all that has been written about the subject, for all the continuing [unease] and for all the importance of the issues involved, if you want to know how artists and intellectuals survived, worked and adapted, or if you want to have some idea of what cultural life was like and what policies were followed by German and Vichy authorities, you will have difficulty finding answers.

…Failure to understand the importance of culture in a nation's life was not a mistake Hitler made. For him culture was not peripheral but central to his Occupation policy. In the arts he saw a narcotic to be used to pacify the French and make them amenable to collaboration while he was busy with his war in the Soviet Union. So he not only allowed but actively encouraged a rich artistic life. … At the … time there were … artists who socialized with the Enemy and in some cases toured Germany as Hitler's guests as though unaware that the two countries were still at war.

…After the war the German ambassador in Paris during the Occupation made the astonishing claim that "it would be extremely difficult to name any notable French artist who had not supported collaboration'.

Lips like Sugar

From the Centrum of the most Centrum of EU originalis:

Who knew???!!!! Where is Jove? Wait a minute...........I'm the bad guy?

Lost in Luxembourg

Note, not the sepulture of the Court of First Instance:

Noted all the same................

Another Success for Belgian Diversity Initiatives

Via Dinah Lord, we find out about Jew hunting in Belgium. The hit list even included BHL.

Jewish-French philosopher Bernard Henri-Levy was listed by a Belgium-based Islamist group as a target for assassination alongside other leading Jewish personalities in Europe, the Belgian daily La Derniere Heure reported earlier this week.

The planned assassination was apparently thwarted after group leader Abdelkader Belliraj, a Belgian of Moroccan ascent, was arrested last February in Morocco, the newspaper reported. Belgian authorities found the list during a raid on homes of local Muslim community members last November, according to the report.

Considering all the whacked-out “they control the world” crap coming out of the fevered minds of the enlightened continent’s university students and other inquiring minds, one would hardly need to parse the group leaders’ motives. Nonetheless, that fine, socially involved son of Belgium has links to al Queda, and like any respectable European “social justice” activist pushing for vernichtung, he squeals the most dramatic accusation he thinks will draw sympathy, and that he himself must be handled with civilized standards while advocating some abysmal medievalism be imposed on everyone else. From his home in Belgium, he was operating a terror network in Morocco, and trying to live a low-rent style Ernst Blofeld lifestyle:

The Moroccan-born Belgian had quite a resume: accused terrorist kingpin, assassin, gangster, double agent and hotelier. He visited from Belgium now and then to oversee the hotel, a three-star inn with a sidewalk cafe where men sip tea and watch a parade of whining scooters, dusty taxis, sunburned tourists and veiled Berber women.

Among other things, this psycho-puppy is accused of plotting to knock off “M6,” (King Mohammed VI of Morocco.)

In total Belliraj has confessed to involvement in six murder cases in the years 1988-1989, among them the murder of an aging homosexual who had made a proposal that Belliraj believed dishonored his manhood, and a Belgian grocer who was mistakenly identified as a Jew, on a mission for Abu Nidal. On missions for the Iranians he allegedly committed three more murders: of a Saudi imam and a librarian at the Great Mosque in Brussels, and a driver at the Saudi Arabian Embassy.

For the sake of sensitivity, they should permit him a traditional, culturally appropriate death for a jihadist - a Yemeni execution. It’s only fair, after all.

"The mistake we can never repeat is stifling criticism of cultures and religions for reasons of tolerance"

…something fairly remarkable is happening

in the Netherlands, writes John Vinocur.

Two weeks ago, the country's biggest left-wing political grouping, the Labor Party, which has responsibility for integration as a member of the coalition government led by the Christian Democrats, issued a position paper calling for the end of the failed model of Dutch "tolerance."

…If judged on the standard scale of caution in dealing with cultural clashes and Muslims' obligations to their new homes in Europe, the language of the Dutch position paper and Lilianne Ploumen, Labor's chairperson, was exceptional.

The paper said: "The mistake we can never repeat is stifling criticism of cultures and religions for reasons of tolerance."

Government and politicians had too long failed to acknowledge the feelings of "loss and estrangement" felt by Dutch society facing parallel communities that disregard its language, laws and customs.

Newcomers, according to Ploumen, must avoid "self-designated victimization." …

Instead of reflexively offering tolerance with the expectation that things would work out in the long run, she said, the government strategy should be "bringing our values into confrontation with people who think otherwise."…

"Without a strategy to deal with these issues, all discussion about creating opportunities and acceptance of diversity will be blocked by suspicion and negative experience."

And that comes from the heart of the traditional, democratic European left, where placing the onus of compatibility on immigrants never found such comfort before.

It's a point of view that makes reference to work and education as essential, but without the emphasis that they are the single path to integration.

Rather, Labor's line seems to stand on its head the old equation of jobs-plus-education equals integration. Conforming to Dutch society's social standards now comes first. Strikingly, it turns its back on cultural relativism and uses the word emancipation in discussing the process of outsiders' becoming Dutch. …

Indeed, Ploumen says, "Integration calls on the greatest effort from the new Dutch. Let go of where you come from; choose the Netherlands unconditionally." Immigrants must "take responsibility for this country" and cherish and protect its Dutch essence.

Not clear enough? Ploumen insists, "The success of the integration process is hindered by the disproportionate number of non-natives involved in criminality and trouble-making, by men who refuse to shake hands with women, by burqas and separate courses for women on citizenship.

"We have to stop the existence of parallel societies within our society."

And the obligations of the native Dutch? Ploumen's answer is, "People who have their roots here have to offer space to traditions, religions and cultures which are new to Dutch society" - but without fear of expressing criticism. "Hurting feelings is allowed, and criticism of religion, too."

…[One uncynical] explanation (that comes, remarkably, from Frits Bolkestein, the former Liberal Party leader, European commissioner, and no friend of the socialists, who began writing in 1991 about the enormous challenge posed to Europe by Muslim immigration):

"The multi-cultis just aren't making the running anymore. It's a brave step towards a new normalcy in this country. "

Oh, That Cultural Exception!

New Years Eve at the stroke of midnight: normal people kiss, toast with champagne, and wish one another happiness and good health. Others, those people of refinement, are so culturally exceptional that they forego such pedestrian rituals.

The interior ministry had earlier said 445 vehicles were set on fire overnight, but later revised that figure to 1,147.

The number of arrests and cars torched topped last year's tally of 259 people detained and 372 vehicles burned.

This is for all of those sneering clowns peddling the “good society” “superior lifestyle” and even that “superiority due to their ability to execute well their own cuisine” racket. The entire country often sounds like it’s a PR racket, and little else.

- PS.: Welcome Lizardoids. Pull up a chair and don't forget

the mashmallows. It usually get even better after a few days.

Stop the World, They Want to Get off: European Critics of America Seek a Way Out

NRC Handelsblad International Relations Correspondent Juurd Eijsvoogel reports on a “A Dutch Offer to Obama.”

From feeble minds come strange rationalizations which become the basis necessary to support things that they’ve previously said and done. European critics of anything American became fixated by Gitmo, and as such found in the detainees themselves a form of fairytale hero.

America will soon have a president who has promised to close Guantanamo -- but there are all kinds of practical risks associated with it. For example, there are dozens of prisoners who, as far as Washington is concerned, can go free, but they may be tortured, or worse, in their own country. Where can they go?

To the Netherlands, for example, suggested Lower House member Hans van Baalen (VVD--Dutch People's Party for Freedom and Democracy) last year, and to other NATO member countries. There was no support for the idea. Not from other members of Parliament, not from the Government, and not from the allies.

Correction: the US will have ANOTHER President that has promised to close down the Guantanamo Bay detention facility.

Until last week. On the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Portugal offered to accept a number of innocent prisoners who have been locked up without trial. And, at the same time, Lisbon called upon other E.U. countries to do the same. A deep silence then descended upon the European capitals.

The offer to take the detainees has been made for years. The problem now, as then, is that the governments in these “highly enlightened” states don’t want them, often not even wanting their own nationals.

This concerns not only the 50 to 60 innocent prisoners who can not be repatriated. There is also a group of around one hundred Yemenis who probably will soon be returned to their own country, to a rehabilitation program for Jihadists.

It all sounds magnanimous until you realize what it is that they are and aren’t willing to do: they’ll take the ones that they can parade as innocent, but still demand the release of the guilty ones, and insist that they are the United States’ responsibility, that their actions are the United States’ responsibility, and not the responsibility of the guilty themselves.

It will not be easy to return people to a society -- people who have been held prisoners for years, while innocent, under such appalling conditions. But if they are given the opportunity to request refugee status here, they will finally have the prospect for a new future, in a country that - more than, for example, Albania - has experience in the reception, counseling and treatment of refugees who have suffered serious psychological trauma.

Isn’t it brave of the Europeans to have spared these detainees the possibility of trauma by not taking detainees? Taken in the light “Watching America” is placing it in, isn’t that just another cruel follow-up to the years of lecturing being turned into a festival of self-congratulation?

Once the Obama administration is in place, it is likely that Washington will quickly come to the European allies with a request for help with receiving Guantanamo prisoners. Then refusing this will be difficult. By letting it be known in advance that the innocent prisoners, as well as Washington, can count on us, we not only help the detainees and Obama, but also ourselves.

Which is to say that in order to avoid making good on their demands, complaints, and on their word, they’ll take them, as long as they (first) can all be declared harmless, and (further) only take the few among them that really are harmless. That way, the US can continue to bear criticism for protecting the populations of crowded European cities from harm, and giving the populations of crowded European vindication from their parasitism at least cost, demonstrated to themselves a fake degree of involvement in the security of populations (the genuinely innocent) by inverting the concept to guilt and innocence, and getting that “activist feeling” by pushing for the release of killers and abetters of jihadi violence, as though they themselves aren’t “little Eichmanns” for giving aid and comfort to those that DO pull the trigger. It gives them maximum domestic PR at least cost.

The bold emphasis was mine. The word “innocent” appears in the article 5 times. “Danger” appears once (and in the context of the Chinese suppression of the Uigers at that, not in reference to the danger to civilians anywhere in the world).

The word “guilt” does not appear at all. It has the same evasiveness that the early stage of fixation of Iran had with Israel, and it starts with the revision of terms, and the construction of a far-away figure to blame in a desperate effort to distract a population into some organized purpose benefiting a social elite of some sort.

What if these critics were offered clearer choices in this matter (that they have no stake in anyway): 1) shooting irregular combatants on sight in the field as the Geneva Convention virtually proscribes, 2) not detaining combatants at all, 3) hiring non-state entities, not in uniform as the terrorists are, to do our fighting for us as a proxy, disposing the coalition of all responsibility for anyone’s fate, or 4) (their inferred solution) bringing those who want to kill your population INTO your country and freeing them.

Jihadists do not wear uniforms, but are a force organized under an ideology. The critics (“Watchers”) of America in any form that provides a vehicle for their hatefulness, insist on forcing the defenders against terrorism to operate on a different standard based on rules and not the implication of those rules.

The Jihadists are, in fact, being used by the critics’ as proxy army to embolden the image they have of themselves in an imaginary opera where they cast themselves as the moderators between the civilization and its’ enemies, while carefully casting America as an moral equivalent to the enemy. It’s only about casting themselves, somehow as relevant figures which they aren’t. They are empowering evil, and still can’t tell the difference between proponents of peaceful pluralism possible with enlightenment philosophy and a violent movement exploiting religious doctrine to impose an autocratic theocracy on the rest of humanity.

Juurd Eijsvoogel writing in the NRC Handesblad isn’t really “watching America”. He is watching the tendencies and temperament his own society through a haze of confusion which requires the demonization of the fake image of antithesis of themselves that Europeans have constructed. This entire bit of theater is about them, not us, and the effort put to manipulating America. By clearly airing statements (that they’re loath to back up anyway) as open support for Obama, and not America or even their own security, they make this quite plain.

Let’s review this again for those can’t get the years of wailing and complaint out of their melons: critics declaring some kind victory in this are not liberating anyone, nor are they facing the matter of dealing with the guilty or even their own wild demands - they are reciting the same dilemma facing the United States that has been present since 2002 as if they’ve solved it, one which the US alone has to tend to for the sake of these writers, not doers or entitled to protection from terrorism.

American Sheepdog Christmas 2008 (and New Year's 2009)

Skye sings to the troops…

A Guy Who Thinks that the Entire World is After Him

This is the most stunningly stupid collection of complaints I’ve seen in, well, days. Everything he doesn’t like about the world is somehow related. What’s more, just like the people who were puzzled by the idea that crime drops when the rate of conviction goes up,:

Who would have guessed that, with the end of the disastrous Bush regime in sight, we would have been so gloomy on New Year's Eve 2008?

You'd think this would be a time of celebration, or at least some happy whistling to ourselves as we sweep out Dick Cheney's accumulated droppings from the past eight years.

Layoffs! Cold weather! Global warming! Not enough debutantes! IDF videos presenting for criticism what they do to Hamas artillery ‘happy rocketeers’ is renamed ‘agitprop’!

Can’t you just feel that noose tightening? If that doesn’t make you bust a gut, get a load of the title:

Drop a ball on Times Square! Drop a bomb on Gaza!

Is humorless paranoia a prerequisite to by a well regarded leftist in New York?

Silent Night, Holy Night.

All is chaos, All is alight.

More unrest in Malmö suburb

The unrest began in Oxie, a suburb south-west of central Malmö, when a skip began burning soon after 7.30pm on Monday evening. Police confirmed that security guards and passers-by were shot at with fireworks and several more fires were started.

The Christmas tree on the main square in Oxie was one of the targets and local resident Bo Persson expressed concern over recent developments.

"It has been awful lately. They should really ban fireworks.

But this trouble in paradise goes quietly unexplained, despite a great quantity of complete sentences ‘n stuff.

The streets of Malmö’s Rosengård district were relatively calm on Friday evening, as the hundreds of youth who rioted earlier in the week refrained from engaging in renewed clashes with police.

Just stuff, y’know!? Done by just some local youths.

The troubles began as a quiet protest linked to the recent closure of an Islamic cultural centre in Rosengård that housed a mosque, but have spread to become a general expression of discontent among disadvantaged youths.

The police "think they can appease us by joking with us, but they hassle us all the time, they arrest us for nothing and then they're surprised that we fight back," Ahmed Baccar, a 20-year-old unemployed Palestinian with a shaved head, told AFP.

"And they hit 11- and 12-year-old kids, set their dogs on us like they did yesterday, and then you want us to like them," said his friend Rached El Ali, an 18-year-old Palestinian.

We are either on the far edge of the implausible, or see a great hearts-and-minds campaign at work. Either way, what could bear mention by virtue of unavoidable fact in 20-December article had to be obscured on the 30th when the town’s Christmas tree was reported torched, what with the torching of a Christmas tree reminding Swedes how vulnerable their post-modern Jinna is to mall punk Jihad.

As long as “wisdom” dictates that reality need be discussed in the manner of the Soviet era popular criticism found in circumloquatious songs and jokes, Americans can expect a new age of wellness to be declared for no particular reason or cause.

All the campaign talk of the Great Depression, a Vietnam-like war, and our shredded Constitution will now thankfully subside as the Obama administration assumes office and solves problems with conciliation, dialogue, and multilateral wisdom, rather than shrillness, unilateralism, preemption, and my-way-or-the-highway dogmatism. We will hear that, by historical levels, unemployment is still not that bad, that GDP growth is not historically all that low, and that deficits, inflation, interest rates, and housing starts are all within manageable parameters. "Depression" will transmogrify into "recession" which in turn by July will be a "downturn" and by year next an "upswing" on its way to boom times.

Now that we finally have that “compliant press” that the anti-Bush “peace camp” said was meming us into a police state, can’t you just see us becoming numbed by the same kinds of painful omission that makes one not seek out the “root cause” of Palestinian quasi-muslim youts’ faith-based torching a Christmas tree and then claiming that it’s just based on police trying to quell their “right” to use 11 and 12 year old kids in a riot.

Prone to exaggeration, they know that there will be some sympathy to be had in accusing the police of giving mere helpless children a wood shampoo, and that the aborigines will quietly accept that they somehow deserve having whatever remaining symbols of their culture they have left defiled around advent, and that just like claiming that their political opponents are “shredding the constitution”, it will come at no cost. The personae are more alike then they are different.

What Are We Waiting For?! Put Al Gore in Charge!

That Sure Is a Lot of Global Warming…

That's an (Illinois) Ad That Sounds Convincing

(Merci à François Guillaumat…)