Is Euranet propaganda?

Hell no! It’s ignorant fluff with less entertainment value than a Community College radio station at 2 in the afternoon, when some DJ nicknamed “the Bongmeister” lets his vending machine repairman neighbor cover for him while his DTs are acting up.

Such was the case with this brilliant, penetrating exposé, where the intrepid reporter was shocked to discover that exorcisms actually exist and that even thought they weren’t an actual product of a William Peter Bladdy feature, the existence of Catholicism in Poland surely must be.

Defending the mighty feather-pillow of virtue, Euranet and Radio Netherlands stringer Richard Walker asks of those who raise the point of biases in production (which is to say, about 3 radio reports a week):

It is our job to present the important but overlooked details of European life fairly and accurately so that they can better understand where their money is going.

I challenge the writers of this report to find more balanced coverage than ours on such issues. I suspect that they have not bothered to research it. I do not see any evidence of pro-EU bias in the EU-funded web and radio they speak of.

Which technically speaking, is probably right because the reports are so lacking in substantive anything that biases in reporting are hard to detect, assuming that you aren’t taking on issues local newspapers might not even bother with, and operate on the assumptions that there are no Catholics left to mock.

Privately funded media have products to sell and advertisers to please. Instead of a charter guaranteeing balance they must live by the first rule of free market economics – to maximise profits. I suggest the latter is less well positioned to offer unbiased news coverage.

So where does funding you can trust come from?

By which he means ”meal ticket”, and sitting at said meal, he can present his ignorance of things not run by states having “required” opinions or otherwise having first, before HIS FIRST notion of “maximizing profits”, to cover the real “first” thing: appealing to an audience, and letting that audience’s actual appeal inform whether or not the form of presentation should stay on the air. The reason he needs EU funding is because, as he notes correctly, individuals, no matter what subsector out there, would be willing to fund that kind of reporting by lending their ears to the potential advertisers.

"Maximizing profits", are we? Gruel being served up by "the bosses" again? If he got any more facile and archaic, it would stop being funny. Rule number one of radio is to get as many listeners as you need to keep doing what you're doing. In fact, I would wonder if outside of a handful of real cultural lightening-rods, ANYONE is living lavishly off of radio work, outside of state-run media, that is.

The idea that if MUST be funded “because if people wanted it, no commercial operation would produce it” is curious, if not also mildly interesting, if I can say so in the most unbiased way possible.

Which brings me back to one of the great bugaboos of their editorial interest: like the funding they want to see grow, the appeal of the magic of free stuff falling out of the sky, but a distaste for any form of philosophy that requires one to challenge your own weaknesses and the easiness of taking the path of least resistance.

If wizardry isn’t a form of philosophically vacuous religious quackery that the Catholic Church may warn the faithful about, what is? Oh, right! The ‘unbiased view’ that the Church may be mocked since all believers should themselves accept that their beliefs are quackery, but that ‘magical stuff for free out of thin air’ isn’t.

So it goes with the trying to read out the incantations that are supposed to keep your project funded. My feeling about the logical inconstancies is that they can only cause psychic pain if you’re smart enough to notice them, which in EUvia would make you biased, but biased in a way that’s opens you up to invective, as opposed to the popular kind that makes people who agree with you nod their chins sheepishly.

Let’s leave it at this: if you’re decent enough to respect the beliefs of another human being, you are able to find the cheap kind of bias in about 10 seconds flat. If, on the other hand, you are entirely incapable of recognizing that other people can have a world view unlike your own, even if they generally look like you, then you’re too stupid to be aware of the judgment that might present a bias. So, like, hey – no brains, no problem! Right?

Therein we find the basis of government funded mass media.

Brussels after dark, continued

Only the best, of course... Drinking straight from the decanter is frowned upon.

"A Very Corrupt System": Six Years in Jail Without a Trial

Thanks to federal matching funding for domestic violence "claims", William Christopher has not seen his son (Joshua, now 10) for nine years…

This is a way of bringing in a Nazi police state…

Up your GONGO, M8!

Or if you prefer to call them by the accurate and damning descriptor, “Government Organized Non-Governmental Organizations”. Their purpose? To make the public love policies that were not initiated by the public, among other things, and the EU is one of the biggest violators of the trust of good governance in this respect, according to the TIMBRO think tank.

Further European integration is a practical political ideal, and many powerful European leaders dream of a united and strong Europe to offset such global powers as the United States and China. Yet Europe’s citizens are conflicted when it comes to further political and economic integration, and have consistently voted down referenda that would move Europe in this direction.

To bridge this gap, the EU launched a communications effort to burnish the image of European cooperation. It includes traditional printed materials such as books, leaflets and brochures, but also encompasses television, radio, training programs for journalists and legislation designed to give the EU a facelift. More, efforts are underway to create a common European identity in the hopes of building support for closer economic and political cooperation. These activities extend beyond the normal realm of factual information, treading dangerously close to propaganda.

Which is quite true when you look at most media, where goings on in Brussels are clearly being reported from deep in the heart of a broadly emailed press release. The problem with this kind of uncritical tripe being promoted to Europeans is that a great many of them have a history of eventually accepting it at face value until they find themselves trying to find the truth in either tea leaves or rumors and conspiracy theories.

TIMBRO’s Director, Maria Rankka indicated quite plainly that there’s a dishonesty to it, if not a violation of that supposedly sacred social contract going on as well:

"The EU, at the tax-payers' expense, actively advocates more European integration and prevents free debate on the future of Europe, extending the limits of what we normally regard as communication," the study says.

Some of the stuff even looks like it’s meant to produce a conditioned response.

In one striking example, the report notes that schools keen to benefit from Brussels' €69 million a year free milk scheme must display an A3-format poster outside their canteens showing the EU flag and stating that EU money paid for the drink.

Brussels is currently rolling out a similar-scale free fruit project.

Or anything else for that matter. But what seems to be lacking here is the widespread sense that there is something wrong with selling something hard when 1) you either don’t have to, or 2) knowing that support isn’t what you want it to be; but going on to try to say that it’s also quite magically also a government by and for the people.

Remembering a Flight to Freedom

On 15 August 1961, 19 year old trooper Conrad Schumann was photographed taking flight to freedom. The image is an icon, and demonstrated to the east, as well as those enamored with the Marxism that has nowhere to lead but to totalitarianism, that the “people’s revolution” hardly represented many of the people at all

That young, newly trained NCO was there to guard the construction of the barbed wire barrier that was to become the Berlin wall, then in it’s 3rd day. He, like scores of east Germans knew what was coming. We might be able to see it all again in Venezuela quite soon. In Bolivia, it’s already starting. The “Revolution” must be guarded from losing all of its’ Revolutionaries.

To quote Bertolt Brecht’s reflection on the East German uprising of 1953:

Stating that the people had forfeited the confidence of the government
And could win it back only by redoubled efforts.

Would it not be easier in that case for the government to dissolve the people and elect another?

Such as it was with that ironic humor, that “Berliner Schnauze,” of a man who himself a believer in the DDR could never bring himself to renounce his Austrian citizenship, went the notion of listening to Communists make arguments about their states, the ones trapping people inside and making it functionally unlawful to criticize nearly anything meaningful the state does – to listen to them argue that they were the true democracies and held the keys to the freedom of people from tyranny.

Reflecting on that uprising, the leaders of the DDR proved to be true to form:

Ulbricht and Pieck had plenty of experience talking to the workers, but not talking with them. Moreover, demonstrations that were not organized by the state were beyond their ken. In their eyes, this was revolution, or, more accurately, counterrevolution,...

Which is to say that it was a thing that they were rather good at repeating a contrived and rationalized narrative about, but wouldn’t recognize in any real terms if they had to face it: a people speaking out on their own volition, a democracy, the notion that they are in power at the will of the people, or even the very idea that they possess any free will. All the people were to them were instruments before who one made an argument that you though that they could parrot back to you.

As was repeated then to the point of drawing mockery was an overarching truth: they simply couldn’t grasp the idea of freedom that America proved could be theirs’ too. Given the continued venality of the public politics on the continent, the poor regard held broadly about the lack of concern for the philosophical meaning and the virtue of people knowing that they are as free as they reasonably can be over their fate - it remains true.

1890: A Warning From the Tomb

(Thanks to Larwyn)

"Agents of Blame" Wreck a Reunion

Quelle couleur, les amerloques en question ? Contrairement à ce qui se passe chez nous, les SDF sont souvent des Noirs, là-bas.

The working of the French public’s mind where politics (or cultural animosity – same thing) is fascinating, at least from an ethological perspective. The usual Munichois commenters at FDS run across and equally fevered story at Rue89 about the City of New York “exporting its’ homeless to France”, carefully omitting information to permit those who enjoy wallowing in their agony to assume that they are shipping over a thousand crazy bums who show signs of violent mood swings.

It turns out that we’re talking about a voluntary program of family reunification for down on their luck folk to get back on their feet somewhere where they can be more firmly grounded, and (as would interest the sofa-bound “revolutionaries” at Rue89 and the crackpot nationalists supremacists,) a couple and their three children rejoining the childrens’ grandmother in Normandy.

“The person I spoke to in the shelter informed me that if I have a person I could stay with in Puerto Rico, that I could get help to go,” said Mr. Correa, who worked as a mechanic in Carolina, on the north shore of the island. They will stay with Ms. Mojica’s father. “I feel very happy because I’m going to be able to get back to do the things that I know how to do,” he said.

The usual amusement, of course is all taking place in at François’ fever swamp, where several punctilious francophone correctors of others’ details refer to Hizzoner as Blumberg. Several first reactions had nothing to do with the piece, but leap to ask if “Blumberg” is a Jew, and one of the first wonder “quelle couleur” that massive horde of SDF “Newyorkais” is.

Ce bloomberg , maire feuj de N.Y.,a le même comportement qu’un certain Adolf H.,de sinistre mémoire…

- which is funny, given the usual soft touch they take to Hitler, and just about any other fascist that Europe has created.

In other words, all the usual, garden variety questions you get from a French citizen when they have the chance to hate anonymously. All without thinking for a moment that this same bunch of mental knob polishers is wild for the idea of ejecting from France anyone who resembles a foreigner to them, often regardless of their citizenship, impact on the state treasury, or much else.

Of course no francophone day can be complete without a good conspiracy theory suggestion , where one must immediately confuse random, self-serving opinion for fact as well!:

Vous n’y êtes pas les amis. Cette solution n’est que temporaire, car une fois que la construction des tours remplaçantes du défunt « World Trade Center » sera achevée, et bien les SDF new-yorkais pourront rentrer chez eux, et ils ne seront plus SDF.
Mes sources, je les tiens de Larry Silverstein (le gars qui a racheté le complexe du « World Trade Center » juste 5 semaines avant les attentats du 11 septembre et qui a pris une double assurance contre tout accident, et contre tout attentat, double JackPot), de Frank Lowy, de Lewis Eisenberg, et de Ronald S. Lauder.

I wonder what day of theirs’ is really complete without some nutty “troofer” theorization, mentioning (as someone does with this item) a vague link between the name “Blumberg”, the existence of “financiers”, and Israeli technology exports. All such murky and menacing stuff. There has to be a link!

What practically split my gut was the Desouche commenter that called this the “deuxième débarquement”, or 2nd D-Day, as if America’s target was France. There’s more sincerity there than you would think. As far as the FDS reader’s political proclivities are concerned, since D-Day did spell the beginning of the end for Fascism, they WERE under attack.

The psychic pain of being that stupid must be a heavy burden. That too is obviously the generalized fault of America, no doubt.

Ho hum...

More settled science:

Is the Amazon rainforest recovering? New studies suggest that the long-term consequences of deforestation may not be as bad as predicted, as vegetation makes a comeback on abandoned agricultural land.

Either someone did not get the memo -or- someone has secured air-tight funding.

Calling Doctor Howard, Doctor Fine, Doctor Howard

Grassroots Versus Astroturf? Really?!

While Democrats dismiss and sully conservatives for allegedly engaging in an Astroturf protest, it is they themselves and their alleged grassroots protesters who come out with preprinted signs while the conservatives have them basically hand-made and -painted (thanks to Larwyn)…

The two camps can be seen together in a black-and-white photo accompanying a Gerald F. Seib article in the European edition of the Wall Street Journal.

And 1989 Couldn’t Come Soon Enough

On this day in 1961, the barbed wire barricade that was to become the Berlin Wall went up. They had 28 more years imprisonment in Stasiland to look forward to. Oh, boy. “Free” health care.

Naughty, naughty

Fresh from using off-shore entities to faciliate structured transactions for tax-abating purposes, the Guardian gets caught out on the hypocrisy tip again:

Guardian Media Group lost £24m on foreign exchange derivatives last year as the slumping pound played havoc with its hedge fund investments.

Lefties using those vile hedge funds and destructive derivatives? Tsk, tsk

Pity the little people:

The Guardian News & Media editor-in-chief, Alan Rusbridger received an 11% rise in salary and benefits to £445,000 for the year to 29 March.

The GMG chief executive, Carolyn McCall, took a 39.7% pay cut* last year, receiving a total package of £498,000. The previous year McCall received a total of £827,000, including a salary of £424,000 and bonus of £385,000.

In the year to 29 March, McCall's salary remained almost unchanged at £472,000, she received no bonus and her benefits totalled £26,000.

Tim Brooks, the managing director of Guardian News & Media, the GMG division that publishes the Guardian, Observer and MediaGuardian.co.uk, received a total package of £256,000. This represents a 33.6% drop on the last financial year primarily due to him receiving no bonus.

Mark Dodson, the chief executive of Manchester Evening News publisher GMG Regional Media, had a cut of just under £100,000 in his package to £309,000 last year.

John Myers, the former chief executive of GMG Radio who left the company at the end of February, received a 140% year-on-year boost in his remuneration package from £227,000 to £545,000, due to a payout from a loyalty scheme. Myers received a basic salary of £210,000 and a bonus of £333,000.

*Salary "cut" meaning salary "increase"

Truthspotting

Going along with the theme of this particular New York Times article on healthcare anecdotes (the general subtexts are touched - what is wrong with you people, nobody has healthcare, mass deprivation, insert hand-wringing here), a question arises: If this is true regarding the number of individuals "lining up" for free healthcare in Los Angeles, CA:

Hundreds of volunteer doctors, dentists, optometrists, nurses and others are expected to serve 8,000 patients by the end of the eight days.

How does the remaining population of Los Angeles county not queued up at the end of eight days (9,854,049 individuals or 99.9% of the total county population not involved) get by on the health front? Afterall, if the "problem" of healthcare is so acute one would expect the free facility to be absolutely gridlocked.

Not going along with the theme of the article, how are these bits of information reconciled:

For the second day in a row, thousands of people lined up on Wednesday — starting after midnight and snaking into the early hours — for free dental, medical and vision services, courtesy of a nonprofit group that more typically provides mobile health care for the rural poor.

Set up for eight days of care, the group was already overwhelmed on the first day after allowing 1,500 people through the door, nearly 500 of whom had still not been served by day’s end and had to return in the wee hours Wednesday morning.

On Tuesday, volunteers provided 1,448 services to about 600 patients, including 95 tooth extractions, 470 fillings, 140 pairs of eyeglasses,96 Pap smears and 93 tuberculosis tests, the organizers said.

"Thousands", in the general sense, implies some plural version of "thousand" (singular). The article itself shows 1,600 (hundreds not thousands) individuals being treated after day two. The number of individuals "lining up" rather means nothing, unless of course the story needs a bit of a dramatic punch. No, this is not nit-picking. The intention of the story is to imply "thousands" of Angelinos are desperate and scrounging creatures thirsting for even the glimpse of an aspirin.

The above, yet another healthcare article which reinforces and underlines the no-doubt straight-faced musing of one reporter on the subject:

But Jessica Yellin, CNN's national political correspondent, commenting on Senator Cardin's town meeting in Hagerstown, Md., pointed out what news people already know: when journalists cite outright misstatements by public officials, the American people "don't seem to trust us."

Gosh, really?

Comparing the human and veterinary health services of Great Britain: on the whole it is better to be a dog

In the last few years, I have had the opportunity to compare the human and veterinary health services of Great Britain,

writes Theodore Dalrymple in the Wall Street Journal,

and on the whole it is better to be a dog.

As a British dog, you get to choose (through an intermediary, I admit) your veterinarian. If you don’t like him, you can pick up your leash and go elsewhere, that very day if necessary. Any vet will see you straight away, there is no delay in such investigations as you may need, and treatment is immediate. There are no waiting lists for dogs, no operations postponed because something more important has come up, no appalling stories of dogs being made to wait for years because other dogs—or hamsters—come first.

The conditions in which you receive your treatment are much more pleasant than British humans have to endure. For one thing, there is no bureaucracy to be negotiated with the skill of a white-water canoeist; above all, the atmosphere is different. There is no tension, no feeling that one more patient will bring the whole system to the point of collapse, and all the staff go off with nervous breakdowns. In the waiting rooms, a perfect calm reigns; the patients’ relatives are not on the verge of hysteria, and do not suspect that the system is cheating their loved one, for economic reasons, of the treatment which he needs. The relatives are united by their concern for the welfare of each other’s loved one. They are not terrified that someone is getting more out of the system than they.

The latter is the fear that also haunts Americans, at least those Americans who think of justice as equality in actual, tangible benefits. That is the ideological driving force of health-care reform in America.

…oddly enough, one of the things about the British National Health Service for human beings that has persuaded the British over its 60 years of existence that it is socially just is the difficulty and unpleasantness it throws in the way of patients, rich and poor alike: for equality has the connotation not only of justice, but of hardship and suffering. And, as everyone knows, it is easier to spread hardship equally than to disseminate blessings equally.

…And I mean no disrespect to the proper function of government when I say that government control, especially when highly centralized, can sap the will even of highly motivated people to do their best.

…There are parts of Glasgow that have almost Russian levels of premature male death. Britain’s hospitals have vastly higher rates of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (a measurement of the cleanliness of hospitals) than those of any other European country; and survival rates from cancer and cardiovascular disease are the lowest in the western world, and lower even than among the worst-off Americans.

…Therefore I, who have no solution to my own health-care problems, let alone those of the United States, say only, beware of health-care economists bearing statistics that prove the inevitability of their own solutions. I mistrust the fact that, while those people who work for commercial companies (rightly) have to declare their interests in writing in medical journals, those who work for governmental agencies do not do so: as if government agencies had not interests of their own, and worked only for the common good.

The one kind of reform that America should avoid is one that is imposed uniformly upon the whole country, with a vast central bureaucracy. No nation in the world is more fortunate than America in its suitability for testing various possible solutions. The federal government should concern itself very little in health care arrangements, and leave it almost entirely to the states. I don’t want to provoke a new war of secession but surely this is a matter of states’ rights.

…And what I want, at least for that part of my time that I spend in England, is to be a dog. I also want, wherever I am, the Americans to go on paying for the great majority of the world’s progress in medical research and technological innovation by the preposterous expense of their system: for it is a truth universally acknowledged that American clinical research has long reigned supreme, so overall, the American health-care system must have been doing something right. The rest of the world soon adopts the progress, without the pain of having had to pay for it.

“Agents of Change” Hold a Reunion

They were just, y’know, revolutionaries, who wanted to, y’know, change things, y’know? The sad thing is that no-one could really look at the faithful and their “Manson Family Values” and say out loud what they really wanted, if you could get a coherent thought out of them:

Marxism, except with them in dictatorial charge of civilization, legal pedophilia, and free buds for them and their friends.

Our self-styled bipartisan president is telling his critics to shut up, while his partners in crime are calling them un-American and Nazis

Our self-styled bipartisan president is telling his critics to shut up,

writes David Limbaugh (in his article about the "hubris, arrogance, and deceit of President Barack Obama and the Democratic leadership [which] are breathtaking"),

while his partners in crime, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her colleagues, are calling them un-American and Nazis.

… It wasn't enough for Pelosi to call us Nazis. She also co-wrote, with House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, an op-ed in USA Today calling us un-American and projecting her own nefarious tactics onto her opposition.

… How can these government propaganda ministers sleep at night? They are the ones misrepresenting the legislation and closing their meetings to genuine dissent.

… Obama … obviously thinks that he has the unilateral right as president, with 53 percent of the vote, to use our money to impoverish and enslave us and destroy our health care and that we have no right even to object. We only get to speak every two years.

Meanwhile, Phyllis Schlafly says that "We are seeing a coordinated smear on those who oppose socialized medicine" while Dennis Prager writes that the

worst part of the liberal mantra, "Dissent is Patriotic," however, is not that is meaningless. It is that it is apparently meant solely to defend liberal and left dissent. Dissent against the right is inherently patriotic.

Dissent against the left is another matter. To Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and to the New York Times Paul Krugman and every other left-wing commentator I have read on the issue, those who dissent against the Obama/Democratic Party health care plan are not only not patriotic; they are Nazis, mobs, white racists (according to Krugman's non-sequitur thesis) and are always organized. They are activists sent by health insurance companies, the Republican Party, or by some other nefarious right-wing organization.

…Like most of the left since Marx, the American left today has created an image of the world to which reality is subservient. Left-wing theories define reality, not vice versa. And in that closed world, left-wing dissent is patriotic, while dissent against the left is fascistic at worst, or paid for by the greedy at best.

The Lincoln-Douglas Debates

How Abraham Lincoln really emerged the victor of the Lincoln-Douglas debates (Merci à Dan)

Look, Someone just made a Funny!

If they’re more interested in the social outcome of movements than of science, why don’t they just use re-education camps? Citing a rather odd item for the FT which reads like a treatise on the growing of turnips, anti-individualist Richard Murphy huzzahs the shoving of ideas down the throats of economics students, but pair back the subject matter so that when you’re done, they’re little more that Comintern graduate bookkeepers who follow a recipe book of desiccated past ideas that appeal to Murphy.

They should take as their motto Keynes’s dictum that “economics is a moral and not a natural science”. They should contain not just the standard courses in elementary microeconomics and macroeconomics but economic and political history, the history of economic thought, moral and political philosophy, and sociology. Though some specialisation would be allowed in the final year, the mathematical component in the weighting of the degree should be sharply reduced.

Great idea: impose you own views on them, but don’t continue the advancement of the actual subject. Remember, free will is only “free will” in his world.

Clawback Nation

Lo, the gentle “farmers” of France, such as they (and their attorneys are,) are fighting off a misappropriated malaprop of €500 000 000 that the government of Frankistan wants back.

The government, under pressure from Brussels, will require producers of fruits and vegetables reimbursement grant an undue amount of half a billion euros.

How they don’t think it’s already been spent is beyond me.

The french state will require producers of fruits and vegetables, according to a requirement of the European Union, the repayment of subsidies paid between 1992 and 2002, totaling around 500 million euros.

And from the “too polite to tell ourselves the truth” department:

Brussels considers that the aid has distorted competition.

Which (if you haven’t been paying attention to the decades of the passionate defense of subsidies for “cultural reasons”) was the idea.

- Thanks to Pat Patterson
(who is an evil genius.)

In the Workers’ Paradise, all our Growlers will Sound the Same

Communism: it can’t even help you take a dump.

To each what isn’t stolen or lost to incompetence will be given...

Silent Scream

Just how DO you Zapatero an otherwise developing nation?

Spain has gone from being a European model for growth, creating more than a third of all euro-zone jobs over the past decade, to having the region's highest unemployment rate.

With 4.13 million people out of work, Spain's unemployment hit 17.9 percent in the second quarter. The EU statistics agency Eurostat puts the figure even higher, at 18.1 percent.

Nonetheless, Europeans take the usual tack: march against global issues that are beyond the control of their local governments, but display their ‘therapeutic invective’ anyway.



Dig it!: Circus People!

Ouch! You’re THINKING Something!

In Europe, words must hurt more than they do anywhere in the world. Especially if they actually mean something.

Former KGB man, Vladimir “Vladimir” Putin and Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s widow try to minimize the horror of the Gulags for, well, “social reasons” of hurt feelings.

Language, however, can be a sensitive matter. In Soviet Russia communist rulers saw 'propaganda' as a healthy weapon to be used against enemies of the state. To enemies of the state such as Solzhenitsyn it was an evil to be combated.

"In just few days we will mark a year since Alexander Isayevich Solzhenitsyn passed away," Putin began, in welcoming Natalya Solzhenitsyna to his office. "Remembering this, I would like to return today to the issue we have discussed with Alexander Isayevich - the propaganda of his work, studying..."

un-hunh. Oddly enough, we see no evidence of disagreement by the Reuters hack over the subject of propaganda either.

Squatting in the Mind of Ingmar Bergman

The ¡N-P! Film Festival continues with this classic, a parodic tale of lost love for one’s little sister, the Grim Reaper’s dry cleaner, and the Pakistani Badminton obsession.

Enjoy the Swedelish, and do have a pleasant self-immolation, would you old chap?

Hanging Tough and Holding the Line, Euro Style

They say that they’re all against beating demonstrators, of course.

Top diplomats from all but two EU embassies in Iran attended the inauguration of president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Tehran on Wednesday (5 August). The Swedish EU presidency, the UK, France, Spain, Finland, Greece and the Czech republic were present at ambassador level, the Swedish foreign ministry told EUobserver.

Belgium, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Denmark, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovenia and Slovakia sent charges d'affaires - acting heads of mission when the ambassador is away.

You can hear their balls clanking, can’t you?

The British foreign office in a statement described its decision to attend as "hard-headed diplomacy."

"We have not sent a message of congratulations to president Ahmadinejad. But ...communication channels have to be kept open," it also said.

That’s exactly how Iran bought the time it took to mine the Straits of Hormuz some time back, build longer range missiles, and construct centrifuges.

Only Germany and Austria stood out by sending lower rank representatives.

Nothing that the Europeans have done so far has induced meaningful conversation of any sort. Nonetheless, they pursue the only course of action impirically proven NOT to work because it requires no meaningful action on their part, no matter how much it increases their future risk. It’s what makes lefties sound so totally brilliant when they say that “you need to talk to your enemies and not your friends.”

You’re lookin’ really butch there, pal.

Amazing discoveries

The things we learn after taking a week off:

Have no doubt: politically we’re in for a rough ride and the Left will win in the end - because people want what only the state can provide.

I am starting a list of those wants which only the state can provide: televisions, clothing, refrigerators, cars, shoes, coffee, food, carpeting, windows, light bulbs, furniture, cutlery, beer, crockery, belts, watches, socks, ice-cube trays, soap, razors, deo, toothpaste, salt-shakers, lawn-mowers, bicycles, prams, luggage....

Victory Gin anyone?

Dead Marxists Society

Mourn, if you can. In very continental fashion, philosopher (and aren't they all philosophers...) Francis Jeanson made the argument that for the love of his country it had to be defeated, an argument he continued to qualify and recycle as he went along. Doesn’t that sound familiar?

In "Our war", a book published in 1960 and immediately seized from the shelves, he explained his fight, responding to those who accused him of supporting France’s enemies that he was defending France’s values.

Tried in absentia and sentenced in October 1960 to ten years in prison after the trial of its network of associates, he was pardoned in 1966.

Of course, back then, French society knew what treason was, having had to endure accusations of it from the Free French AND the Vichy, all of who tried to use the divinity of the imagined image of a rural culture, rarely by comparison did the notion of a free society see any use as its’ justification. In the end, they all pull out the “magic words”:

He then turned to the cultural and social work in psychiatric institutions.

Peeks into the future

Free™ healthcare certainly does seem to cost a lot of money:

French taxpayers fund a state health insurer, Assurance Maladie, proportionally to their income, and patients get treatment even if they can't pay for it. France spends 11% of national output on health services, compared with 17% in the U.S., and routinely outranks the U.S. in infant mortality and some other health measures.

The problem is that Assurance Maladie has been in the red since 1989. This year the annual shortfall is expected to reach €9.4 billion ($13.5 billion), and €15 billion in 2010, or roughly 10% of its budget.

Who knew?

Action! (2)

The ¡No Pasarán! Berlinophilia film festival continues, with this recommendation from 1953: “The Man Between,” Starring James Mason and Claire Bloom, made in the same year as the first East German uprising.

Chinoiseries ?

About 100 local residents and Chinese migrant workers have clashed in the Algerian capital, some brandishing knives and rods, reports say.

And imagine that, all with no-one to sneering some humanity into them too.

"I told him not to park his car in front of my shop, but he insulted me," 31-year-old Abdelkrim Salouda said.

and from then on out it was “I’m gonna git you sucka!”

Cry, the Beloved Delusion

I am tempted to look for the pull string in their backs when I hear over and over and over and over about the inherent wrongness of American social practices. One which always has as a counterpoint of the European supremacists the idea that something that is done right is explained as simply being European, always as if wasn’t the policy, idea, or measure that offers a planet holding its’ breath for wisdom to be thankful for, but something about their culture or race which conveniently explains anything that need not be explained to point to the superiority of whatever nutty example is brought out to make that point.

One bright American PoliSci major suffering through the Kabuki of being a straw man for his fellow students in Germany explains this tedious phenomenon which has been going on for centuries, with Europeans lecturing others even when they stand on the rubble of the lives they and their forbearers have thrown away idly.

As a student studying in Berlin for the year, I’m fighting that tired stereotype Europeans hold of the United States of America: that Americans are heartless and lack compassion. They point to our cutthroat capitalist system as well as our failure to guarantee a more equitable distribution of our nation’s wealth. They also bring up the disregard we show for the natural environment. One even mentioned our propensity to resort to violence, both domestically with our high incidence of gun-related crimes and internationally with our notion of foreign intervention.

All of which has a limitation on the things that are always dwelled upon – a narrow selection of things that Europeans tell themselves they don’t do, even as they employ themselves exporting a stunning number of handguns, and are littered with personal crime to a degree unimaginable to most Americans.

I stopped my selfish habit of simply placing my empty bottles in the trash can; I now prefer flinging them into bushes that homeless people must eventually sleep in, or setting them down right after I chug them on street corners, in order to save them some searching. I imagine as a sort of homeless treasure hunt, all facilitated by my heartfelt generosity.

Odd, is it not, that it took an American, brutal and heartless by definition, to find a small thing to do for the European homeless – a theoretically statistically insignificant if you take the “evil America” argument for what they are: the ravings of the emotionally bereft in what is still a limiting social framework where hatred and envy is supposed to salve the limitations that you’re placed under.

Guess what: boo hoo, Spankitos. You would be hard-pressed to find the individual voluntary spirit in Europe to the extent you do in the US, largely because of the ugly state of being that is seems most Europeans don’t want to face when one is helping the unfortunate.

Action!

As much as I never much respected Montgomery Clift’s choices, I can recommend this very interesting picture from 1950 centered around Berliners and American Airmen during the Berlin Airlift. Made in Berlin on location not even a year after the Airlift ended, it also offers a hidden surprise to Berlinophiles and history buffs, a sense of what the city looked like in 1950 which is especially interesting to those who know those same urban features as they are today, and what they were like before the wall came down, leading to the the eventual dissolution of the German Democratic Republic, an event that will see its’ 20th anniversary this fall.

You’ll note in the film the sight of the civilian population clearing rubble, knocking the mortar off of brick, and placing them in neat piles. It’s worth noting that in many parts of the east, some of those pallet-stacks of bricks remained untouched for 35 years.

It's Usually Spelled as one word in Pyongyang

Who knew that a totalitarian leftist regime could be SO, um, “ with it” as to take up a rather incongruous sexual fetish – especially for a society where the proletariat are all so “equal,” and being absorbed with oneself is a state crime. Unless you’re one of the of the elite in that society where everyone is supposed to be equal. In that case, it’s everyone else that get the golden shower.

Then again, when you’re done foraging for non-collectivist food, what else are you going to do?

Ne Taze me pas, Frère

There’s something honest, and, well, special about reflecting zee soci-all realitee. While mocking others about their cheap entertainment, you would think they would look at their own trash for what it is as well.

תודה, גיא ביישן -

“Retired” Terrorist Meets Hollywood Squares

When all the right people hate you...

The group condemned the use of the interview with Mr Abu Aita. “This was a dirty use of our brother, Ayman, and we don’t accept that the al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades is part of the film,” the statement said.

Mr Abu Aita claims that he was tricked into appearing in the film and that he is no longer involved with the Martyrs’ Brigades. He has threatened to sue Baron Cohen. “This man, I think he is not a man,” Mr Abu Aita said. “He is not saying the truth about me. He lied.”

...You’re doing something right.



Even our brother, Paul Lynde knew more about enlightened civilization that Brüno’s dupe ever would.

Even as flippant and goofy as he was, he knew what mattered, and could sum it up in a single line. Aita, on the other hand, doesn’t seem intelligent enough to understand that he’s given unearned rights to speech that he doesn’t deserve.

I Blame an Insufficient Number of Human Sacrifices

Chicago Sees Coldest July In 67 Years

After all, it’s no less scientific than the logic behind “global warming”, um, “climate change”, um, “climate turbulence”, and what’s even better, it doesn’t require coercive social conditioning and idiots bringing eugenics up again only 64 years after Hitler euthanized himself.

From Central and Eastern Europe to the Apologizer-in-Chief: A Remarkable Breach of Convention Doubling As a Public Expression of Mistrust

It’s a remarkable breach of convention when close and very dependent allies of the United States display their anxieties about being sold out to Russia by the country they regard as the guarantor of their sovereignty and independence

writes John Vinocur.

That’s what an open letter to the administration of President Barack Obama from Central and Eastern Europe, signed by 22 intellectuals and former leaders from the region, including Vaclav Havel and Lech Walesa, boils down to — a public expression of mistrust.

Released last Thursday, nine days after Mr. Obama’s speech in Moscow on Russian-American relations, the letter — which has gotten a public endorsement from Poland and, according to an American observer, has the approval of several of the region’s current leaders — makes plain an existential concern about what it regards the administration’s insufficient engagement in countering a “revisionist Russia.”

The letter is emblematic of a widening gap: On one side, an American government whose friends fear could trade off their East European interests as a hinge for deals on Iran and nuclear disarmament. And on the other, people from the old Soviet bloc who take as an ominous matter Russia’s attempts to re-establish a zone of influence along its borders.

The letter’s frankness is twice rare: It comes from a region absolutely without objective interest or amusement in needling the United States. And, whatever its signatories have been told by way of reassurance in the last weeks — like no U.S. sellout will occur — the document still disseminates the notion that the Obama administration is messing up an important piece of foreign policy.

In stating its view of Russia’s threat to the region, the letter makes clear the accompanying discomfort it feels about “a realist” America in 2009.

Of course, Mr. Obama’s Moscow speech did say “states must have the right to borders that are secure and their own foreign policies.” But in much of Eastern and Central Europe, not quite a year after Russia’s invasion of Georgia, the president’s reference to international law doesn’t suffice as reassurance from and to the heart.

Little is certain in this changing relationship of old allies, the letter suggests. Rather, the signatories talk — in terms of desire, not fait accompli — of their hopes of finding a “moral compass” and “commitment” in U.S. policy.

They add emphatically that no one is more capable than the people of Eastern and Central Europe to recognize the signs of a compliant America or a principled one:

“We know from our own historical experience the difference between when the United States stood up for democratic values and when it did not. Our region suffered when the United States succumbed to ‘realism’ at Yalta. And it benefited when the United States used its power to fight for principle” during the Soviet era.

…These Europeans, in particular anti-Communist heroes of the stature of Mr. Havel and Mr. Walesa, can find dreaded signposts for a newly “realist” America — in this context, a contemptible word meaning willingness for compromise at democracy’s expense — when the United States waters down the description of its essential role in winning the Cold War and ending the Soviet domination of their region.

This view holds that if the Americans don’t talk confidently about their victory, their obligation to defend it is diminished.

In Moscow, Mr. Obama seemed mostly to relativize the era.

He spoke of the Cold War almost as a disembodied time when “American and Soviet armies were still massed in Europe, trained and ready to fight” across “ideological trenches.”

Then, vaulting over the deaths, the dictatorships, the Berlin Wall and the economic collapse of the Soviet Union, he said, “in a few short years, the world as it was ceased to be.”

There was no specific reference to the successful outcome of two generations of American policy, or to U.S. responsibility for defending its results.

For those Europeans under Soviet control for almost 50 years — taking into account the president’s status as a guest in Moscow — the omission and the speech’s aftertaste of moral equivalence had to be striking.

Especially since Mr. Obama, in his book “The Audacity of Hope,” praised Ronald Reagan for his “insistence there was no easy equivalence between East and West. In all this, I had no quarrel with Reagan. And when the Berlin Wall came tumbling down, I had to give the old man his due.”

(There’s more here: Compare the president’s Moscow reference to the “Cold War reaching a conclusion through the actions of many nations” to Chancellor Angela Merkel’s version of events. Experiencing the Soviet empire’s implosion from the East German side of the wall, she has pointed to Mr. Reagan’s strength and said “it was exactly this strength that led to the collapse of socialism and to Germany’s reunification.”)

Is This the America That Obama Wants?

A decision by France’s energy regulator that seems to defy both logic and Europe’s green consciousness has set off a political storm here, shaking up entrenched interests in the electrical power sector

writes David Jolly (some sentences are different between the NYT's online version and the IHT's print version — I have sometimes reestablished the original (?) wording).

At the center is a tiny company that seeks to save consumers money.

Two weeks ago, the French Energy Regulatory Commission, the C.R.E., decided that Voltalis, a company that installs electricity management devices in homes and businesses and then manages their use, would have to, in effect, pay power producers for the power that it saves — effectively destroying its business model.

…The ruling immediately led to charges of too much coziness among entrenched interests in the electrical power sector.

Challenges, a French business magazine, suggested that the country’s electricity producers, including Électricité de France, which is 85 percent owned by the government, wielded too much influence over regulators.

Voltalis’s chief executive, Pierre Bivas, took his case to the public last weekend, where the reaction has been scathing.

“At this rate, it will soon be obligatory in France to consume large quantities of electricity, or face taxes and fines, and maybe imprisonment, too,” the antinuclear group Sortir du Nucléaire said in criticizing the decision.

At peak periods, producers must bring more costly capacity on line or demand must be limited. Voltalis’s technology, which is also in use in the United States, has disrupted the existing model.

“From the consumer’s side, it’s exactly symmetrical,” Mr. Bivas said on Tuesday. “In both cases, the energy produced is used by consumers and paid for by consumers. They’re saying consumers should pay for the energy that was never produced and never used.”

…Cécile George, a technical expert for the regulator, said the decision hinged on how the company would be paid, because having the grid operator pay Voltalis "would be discriminatory against how other large suppliers are treated." “Voltalis can’t be a free rider,” she said.

Following the airing of the "discriminatory" view, with its attending "we, in the government bureaucracy, are valiantly fighting against injustice", we get to the government administration's reaction, complete with the necessary "we are all in this together, we fair knights of France, and we are fairly going to give a little to everyone" language.

Jean-Louis Borloo, the French energy and environment minister, backed the regulators in their decision. But on Monday, perhaps because of the rising political heat, he said he would appoint a working group to propose the legal and regulatory changes necessary “to favor energy-saving and respect the interest of all the parties involved.” The panel is to report back by year’s end.

The Culture has been Reduced to a Sad PR Exercise

Funny, isn’t it that failed societies seem to grasp at straws. The doofuses on C Dans L’Air, a kind of metrosexual Oprah program are in their journalistic mimicry trying to plausit that Barack Obama has French ancestry through a distant character somewhere who was a Huguenot escapee. Nonetheless, this give him a lineage the empty shells of C Dans L’Air something to finally live for. They even rather amusingly filed it under “International Politics.”

Just as the first logo-branded Presidential product is proving himself to be rather quite unintelligent, and politically divisive, people in the US are growing to regret the fact that they elected him. Ergo – quite naturally, as the specter of quasi-magical thinking and philosophical emptiness rises, the more appealing he is in Europastan. The fact remain that the more it is that a society hates and resents America, the more they like Barack Obama and want to claim him as their puppet.

Maybe the stories are connected on some gut-level

In Battle, Hunches Prove to Be Valuable

New Poll Finds Growing Unease on Health Plan

Dutch to neo-Malthusian sects: Been there, done that, got the t-shirt

It looks as though somebody missed the memo: the idea is to ratchet up the hysteria, not speak rationally about it:

The Netherlands is warming up twice as fast as the rest of the world, but the Dutch meteorological institute sees no reason to adapt its scenarios for the future.

There is no reason to panic. Despite last year's finding that the Netherlands and Western Europe are warming up twice as fast as the rest of the world, there is no need revise the climate change scenarios that the Dutchmeteorological institute (KNMI) drew up three years ago to help the Netherlands deal with climate change. In other words: there is no need to make the dikes twice as high.

That is the reassuring message of a new KNMI report published on Wednesday.

In 2006, the KNMI envisioned four possible scenarios for the Netherlands in 2050, based on different degrees of global warming. All four scenarios started from the premise that the Netherlands will continue to warm up, its winters will get wetter and the sea level will continue to rise.

Since then a lot has been said about climate change: from theories that it is just a lot of scaremongering to the prediction that the central Dutch town of Amersfoort will soon have a beach, as in Al Gore's climate change movie. As a result, the KNMI was being asked more and more often by local authorities, water boards and architects if its 2006 predictions were still up to date. Wasn't it time to raise thedikes, widen the sewers, start building heat-resistant buildings?

"There was a need to make an intermediary assessment, to look at the recent research and to judge it as part of one vision for the Netherlands," says KNMI researcher Albert Klein Tank. "That's what we're there for."

The KNMI's conclusion is that the existing scenarios are still a good foundation to base policy on.

Yes, the Netherlands and Western Europe are warming up twice as fast as the rest of the world; storms are more intense than was predicted three years ago, and international research shows that the polar caps of Western Antarctica and Greenland are melting faster, which may have an impact on the Netherlands.

But, the KNMI says, our scenarios still stand. "The changes are still within the margins of the scenarios."

I wonder what the 100-monther 89-monther sect thinks about such blasé talk from officialdom?

Note the graphic 23 seconds into the clip

Mythbusters, a continuing series

With the exception of the price, of course:

Organic food is no healthier than ordinary food, a large independent review has concluded.

There is little difference in nutritional value and no evidence of any extra health benefits from eating organic produce, UK researchers found.

The Food Standards Agency who commissioned the report said the findings would help people make an "informed choice".

But the Soil Association criticised the study and called for better research.

Researchers from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine looked at all the evidence on nutrition and health benefits from the past 50 years.

Note to those of the "food miles" faith. Then again, maybe the organic brand is actually an example of those mystical products which only have sales because of marketing tricks by Big Business and induced wants versus actual needs. The "No Logo" types are always going on about the pernicious nature of advertising, never actually providing examples mind you.

Who would have guessed that organic foods are the closest product to fit the misleading/marketing-driven/hood-wink the public into purchasing un-needed products routine?

How many of you Canadians in the room think you have a terrible health care system?

From Paul Krugman, aka the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics "for his analysis of trade patterns and location of economic activity", we have this (thanks to Hervé). (By the way: Should an analyst — an unbiased, objective analyst — say "bad move on my part" when things do not go in the direction he expected them to?)

That Nonexistent Cat Sure Likes Lasagna!

Care for some disturbingly dark graphic Haiku?

You Want a Lifetime of Freedom and Stability

So do we.

More Pitot Problems Seem to Be Emerging for Airbus

During a recent flight, more problems seem to be emerging for Air France (and Airbus) regarding one of its planes' Pitot tubes…

Leading one patriotic reader to exclaim:

Et pour les autres compagnies ? Bon sang, pourquoi personne ne pose t-il la question pour les autres compagnies ??

Mais Oui, Of Course; Garçon! One More Glass of Rouge For la Mam'zelle

But ov course, zis ees a storee zat could onlee 'ave been sent to mee by a Frenchman — what you zink? (zank iou, François)…

The Governor of Arkansas, a Former Vice-Presidential Candidate, Has Resigned

Or so said the France 2 channel's introductory comment announcing its report on the resignation of Alaska's Sarah Palin…

Kangaroo Juvenile Court Kidnaps Babies

"All they want is our money" says one couple whose child was kidnapped by the Child Protective Services (sic) "and our child — for more money". (More from Phyllis Schlafly and from Stephen Baskerville…)

Dieu Merci We Don't Live in George Bush's America

Thank God we don't live in George Bush's Amérique, deadpans Hervé, as the Frenchman points out that between 2001 and 2008, telephone wiretapping in France has increased by 440% (although even this high number is allegedly a far cry from other West European countries).

According to Le Monde (although some readers point out that the newspaper of reference needs to tidy up on its math),

Selon une étude universitaire dont rend compte Le Figaro dans son édition de mardi 28 juillet, disponible dès lundi sur le site internet du quotidien, les interceptions téléphoniques judiciaires ont augmenté de 440 % entre 2001 et 2008, passant de 5 845 en 2001 à 26 000 en 2008. "De quoi grever le budget de la Chancellerie", souligne le quotidien : les opérateurs et leurs prestataires facturent 497 euros hors taxes chaque interception sur une ligne fixe, et 88 euros hors taxes celles sur un téléphone mobile.

Is it Spanky Time Yet?

Much as it was with the fighting KPD and SA brown-shirts in the collapsing days of the Weimar Republic, violence is thought to be in the cards for Berlin. The only difference between these leftists and Liebknecht or Hitler’s leftist thugs is that they really don’t have anything to really fight over.

The headlines are there almost every morning: BMW burnt, VW set alight, a Mercedes torched. Almost nightly, somewhere in Berlin, a vehicle is set on fire in what police say are political statements by an increasingly militant left-wing. Around 170 cars have gone up in flames this year; and earlier this month, police vehicles became the latest targets.

Additionally, during May Day celebrations this year the traditional scuffle between left-wing protestors and police became unusually violent. Leftists also recently staged a demonstration at Berlin's defunct downtown Tempelhof airport.

The really funny part of all of this is that it isn’t happening to nearly the same degree in the former east Berlin, but rather in the traditional land of the fantasy-radicals and “mall punks”. The other funny thing is that the Berlin Brigade booked out of Tempelhof more than a decade ago, leaving its’ heritage to the Prussians who paraded there, and the Nazis building Lufthansa’s rep there.



The Army as the left would have it. Oohrah!

Is Wowereit Fanning the Flames?

"The capital's mayor is stirring things up against the police and then using (them) his employees as cannon fodder during large protests," Wendt told SPIEGEL ONLINE, referring to this year's May Day demonstrations in Berlin when more than double the number of police were injured than the previous year and local police chiefs were blamed for not being more forceful. Not only that, Wendt said, but parts of Wowereit's administration -- the governing coalition pairs the center-left Social Democrats with the far-left Left Party -- were openly sympathetic to the left-wing extremists. "That's not really a shot in the arm for my colleagues. A lot of Berlin police have had enough," Wendt said.

But there really isn’t anything new about this. Berlin has always enjoyed it’s educational head-wounds as much as it’s enjoyed being unenthusiastic about the perversions and misperceptions that were most easily at hand.

Writer Christopher Isherwood saw in 1932 what is largely still true about anything that seems “big” or “dangerous” there.

"Wasn't Berlin's famous `decadence' largely a commercial `line' which the Berliners had instinctively developed in their competition with Paris? Paris had long since cornered the straight-girl market, so what was left for Berlin to offer its visitors but a masquerade of perversions?"

A masquerade, not unlike the prospect of Kabuki protests and Kabuki violence, when they then couldn’t tell where the risk of social destruction was until too late because of the ideological filter that they were seeing everything through. It was all repetition. Standard fare. Just like Berliner “youts” going at it today, in 1980, 1970, or in the 1930’s.

Christopher Isherwood, gamely hanging on in the city, lost touch with most of his gay friends. The more prudent ones, he guessed, were lying low, while a few "silly ones fluttered around town exclaiming how sexy the Storm Troopers looked in their uniforms." One pair of homosexual lovers, believing that "Germany was entering an era of military man-love,"

I mean, like, what a legacy. Too bad nothing has changed. The ritual bred boredom and silliness then, and it went on until it was too late. Now, the ritual breeds boredom to the extent that whatever it is that these black-shirts, ignorant of the ideology that claim to anyway, are fighting over nothing – or nothing more than a symbolic point of disagreement with civilization.

The problem comes in when the meaning is gone, the marches are nothing more than a day in the fresh air, and the minds are numb. It doesn’t take much for a new Fascism of the moral framework to step right in.

"Let's hope 1929 brings us plenty of struggle, friction, and sparks," wrote the left-wing playwright Friedrich Wolf in late 1928. Wolf got his wish: 1929, of course, was the year of the great stock crash on Wall Street, which had devastating consequences for Germany and Berlin. But 1929 had generated plenty of "sparks" in Berlin even before the October financial fire in New York leaped across the Atlantic to do its damage in Europe. Looking back, we can see that it was the beginning of the end for Weimar democracy.

- David Clay Large, “Berlin”

And it was all, in reality, over nothing. Any intelligent observer could tell you that the Communists and the Nazis would be handing that genuinely exhausted and exploited population the exact same thing.

If only the clown army that will be wrecking the city this fall could be broad enough to realize that.

Some things are best left un-discovered

Who says talking about taxes is a drag?

Big, Big Talkers

The more dominated by irrationalism and wishful thinking, the worse they stand. The universities in la culture du débat rank qualitatively less than they do in Hong Hong, with a population base less than 1/8th of that of France. It looks like all of those decades of social commitment to the population and social institutions has really paid off: even a mercantile obsessed (and therefore anti-intellectual) culture a fraction of its’ size can do better.

Oddly enough, and in spite of higher ed not being treated like a “right”, the rapacious and retrograde United States, representing a population roughly 6% of the sample base has roughly 40% of the top 6000 ranked universities, and 44 of the top 50.

But don’t feel bad, EUvians: Germany is matched evenly with Canada, despite the lack of Germanic-ness, its’ Polythechnik traditions, rye whiskey, only 40% of its’ population, and a distracting overabundance of hoochie mamas.

Good intentions, paving stones, etc...

Here we were led to believe the statists making decisions for the people™ was all sweetness and light:

Implementing the European Working Time Directive next Saturday, when the NHS is already under pressure with 100,000 new cases of swine flu being diagnosed in a week, is the 'probably the worst time in living memory to do this', the junior doctors' campaign group RemedyUK said.

Junior doctors are the last group of NHS staff to come into the Directive this Saturday by cutting their working week from 56 hours to 48.

Experts have warned that the NHS is not ready for the change and there will be gaps left in rotas putting patients at risk.

Generally speaking, that whole life/work balance thing usually works best if one is actually alive to enjoy it.

In the parlance of the caring professionals this is called a "push back"

Now all that is needed is a "work around":

A split between rich and poor nations in the run-up to climate-change talks widened on Thursday.

India rejected key scientific findings on global warming, while the European Union called for more action by developing states on greenhouse gas emissions.

Jairam Ramesh, the Indian environment minister, accused the developed world of needlessly raising alarm over melting Himalayan glaciers.

He dismissed scientists' predictions that Himalayan glaciers might disappear within 40 years as a result of global warming.

Let's hope Jairam is not just holding out for more funding. Meanwhile the principals in the main room seem to have hit a bit of rough patch:

Germany called a French idea to slap "carbon tariffs" on products from countries that are not trying to cut greenhouse gases a form of "eco-imperialism" and a direct violation of WTO rules.

The issue of greenhouse tariffs has met bitter opposition from developing countries such as China and India, who count on the developed world to buy their exports as they build their economies in the face of the worst financial crisis in decades.

Matthias Machnig, Germany's State Secretary for the Environment, told a news briefing on Friday that a French push for Europe to impose carbon tariffs on imports from countries that flout rules on carbon emissions would send the wrong signal to the international community.

"There are two problems -- the WTO (World Trade Organization), and the signal would be that this is a new form of eco-imperialism," Machnig said.

"We are closing our markets for their products, and I don't think this is a very helpful signal for the international negotiations."

Maybe this can all be straightened out "off-line".

It’s Perfectly Normal on EUranus

Hatred is the only thing that gets their rocks off.

Hey Scooter, Nice Peashooter

After a decade of subsidies, and every industry having to grease themselves up with endless political Astro Glide, someone in Germany finally noticed that you can’t run an industrial economy on something as poorly energetically inferior as wind power.

Germany's renewable energy companies are a tremendous success story. Roughly 15 percent of the country's electricity comes from solar, wind or biomass facilities, almost 250,000 jobs have been created and the net worth of the business is €35 billion per year.

But there's a catch: The climate hasn't in fact profited from these developments. As astonishing as it may sound, the new wind turbines and solar cells haven't prohibited the emission of even a single gram of CO2.

They also learned about something called a “market” – which is to say “people figuring out what price they can sell things to one another”, if you can imagine that. More specifically, the idea behind Carbon trading that I found hilarious a few minutes after I heard of the idea more than a decade ago: if you want people to emit less, and they succeed, wouldn’t the price of that asset fall?

Even more surprising, the European Union's own climate change policies, touted as the most progressive in the world, are to blame. The EU-wide emissions trading system determines the total amount of CO2 that can be emitted by power companies and industries. And this amount doesn't change -- no matter how many wind turbines are erected.

Experts have known about this situation for some time, but it still isn't widely known to the public. Even Germany's government officials mention it only under their breath. No one wants to discuss the political ramifications.

What gets even funnier is that all of this talk of the rising level of ‘green power’ production taking place, touted as a tool against foreign energy dependency, is leading to the reduction in demand and eventual shutting down of coal-fired power plants, displacing the only serious and non-nuclear source of energy available to Germans domestically, and making them more dependant on Russian natural gas for both base and peak loading.

Poll duel

On the one hand:

GERMANY REDISCOVERS LOVE FOR AMERICA

European Approval of Obama Surges

A new survey finds that a majority of Europeans approve of, and trust, America's new president. But the rest of the world, the Middle East in particular, has yet to surrender to Barack Obama's international charm offensive.

On the other:

The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Sunday shows that 29% of the nation's voters now Strongly Approve of the way that Barack Obama is performing his role as President. Forty percent (40%) Strongly Disapprove giving Obama a Presidential Approval Index rating of -11. That’s the first time his ratings have reached double digits in negative territory (see trends).

The only victories the Apologizer-in-Chief is concerned with is over America conservatives and the American Way of Life

Victory is not the goal in Afghanistan (shookhran to Arnaud).

The only victories the Apologizer-in-Chief is concerned with is over America conservatives, over American military funds, and over the American Way of Life…

Arnaud adds:

Hussein is now worried about using the world victory? Did his victory speech in Chicago worried him as being reminiscent of “the Emperor coming down to Mc Arthur”?

Since when is victory a cursed word?

Can’t wait to see Hussein landing on a plane carrier with a “Mission NON accomplished” banderole.

Interesting is also his description of Al Qaida and the Talibans as “non-nation state” and “non state actor”, then why on earth does he want the Geneva convention be applied to these AH?