15 Km From Paris: 70% of Families Living Below the Poverty Line and the Ghettoization of France Which Continues Unabated

Some 15 km from Paris, it is possible to witness government-managed housing which resembles the kind that exists (or that used to exist) in Russia's "Soviet-style" pigeon hole apartments. In Seine-Saint-Denis, world-renown for being the epicenter of the riots that erupted in the Fall of 2005, the mayor of Clichy-sous-Bois (30 000 inhabitants), Claude Dilain, warns against the ghettoization of French society.

In that part of France — the country, remember, that delights in giving clueless American clods lessons on racism and on poverty — immigrant families (70% of whom live below the poverty line) have to share kitchens and bathrooms, they have no lease, the heat doesn't work, windows are broken, the walls are blackened by the humidity, the elevators of 10-story buildings (with 1,500 units) don't work, and the staircases have been the object of arsonists…

Nouvelle visite de logement au 4^e étage et rencontre hallucinante dans la cage d'escalier, noir complet, avec de nombreux voisins descendus ou montés pour l'occasion, venus crier une nouvelle fois leur désespoir, devant cette arrivée impromptue de représentants de la mairie, de l'Assemblée nationale et de l'Etat...

Des pères et mères de famille que nous connaissons bien à la mairie pour les avoir reçus à maintes reprises pendant l'hiver pour des problèmes récurrents de chauffage collectif et d'ascenseurs. Je sais hélas que nous les reverrons bientôt car ces problèmes ne sont pas résolus à ce jour. Il faudra évidemment y ajouter la cage d'escalier incendiée, qui attendra probablement des mois avant d'être rénovée, à moins que les habitants eux-mêmes ne décident de la repeindre par leurs propres moyens.

Cette scène, dans une cage d'escalier étroite, à la seule lumière des lampes de poche, prend des allures surréalistes. Des personnes arrivent, toujours plus nombreuses, du dessus, du dessous... Dans ce capharnaüm, une femme monte lentement et silencieusement l'escalier, elle est pliée en deux, sous le poids d'un caddie plein, qu'elle porte avec une lanière sur le front. Elle habite au 8^e étage. Nous sommes à 15 km de Paris, est-ce possible ? Dehors, une trentaine de jeunes sont venus voir le maire et ces "politiques" qui ne "font rien".

The mayor concludes by saying that he is "ashamed of being the powerless representative of the French Republic."

It’s About the Uranium, Stupid

Actually the Nuclear Security Summit was an irrelevant farce, and obviously meant to cover for the ineffectual response to Nork and Iranian nukes. After all, who stays up nights worrying about the security of Canadian yellowcake? Most importantly, Iran and North Korea knew that in the kabuki of congratulating people for never having built nukes, or demilitarizing, as South Africa, Switzerland, and even peaced-out Sweden did, that they have little to worry about.

Whatever notice to the real bad guys it may have drawn, it’s made even less noteworthy by the presence of the disinvolved, the tangentially involved, and the likes of the European Union’s member state representatives, and China, whose industries are supplying the tools needed to build these nukes.

Nonetheless, the EU showed up seeking legitimacy, only to find Van Rompuy discovering:

But the summit was not a social function. Obama had business to take care of and had to make the most of the time allotted. So there was a clear-cut rationale behind the choice of bilateral meetings

Luckily, expectations are coming into line with the reality of Europe’s place in the world:

Van Rompuy gets handshake in Washington

Fully aware that he showed up for no good reason, De Standaard goes into full amnesiac whining mode:

Now we’ve got the proof: Herman Van Rompuy can’t stop the traffic in Washington DC. Worse still, at the nuclear security summit there on 12/13 April, he wasn’t even deemed worthy of a little tête-à-tête with Barack Obama, but just a handshake. Another occasion for Europeans to bewail their fate. First, Obama refused to attend the EU-US summit in Madrid this May. Then he did not invite a single EU representative to sign the START III treaty on nuclear disarmament last week in Prague. And now yet another slap in the face.

Are you kidding me? Sad as the whole affair was, Obama was actually trying to accomplish something in his nutty, adolescent-fantasy vision of whirled peas. What could old Herman Van possibly bring?is

Same old Schieße

You know the routine: the caring, nurturing brigades, they who are always longing for those by-gone pastoral days when everything in life was just oh so much more simpler and grand, past as present as unalterable destiny ............ well, unless it does not fit the preferred narrative:

Not much has survived intact from those East German days. But Konnopke sausages have. And, according to Ziervogel, they still taste the same as they did in East Germany 40 years ago.

Ziervogel lights another Marlboro. The stand -- which her father, Max, opened 80 years ago with a folding table and an awning -- has survived a great deal, including Hitler's Third Reich and the East German dictatorship. The current enemy it has to face is the growing number of politically correct Prenzlauer Berg inhabitants.

In fact, Ziervogel's stubbornness has convinced the city's urban redevelopment officials to enclose her stand like a museum exhibit. They will also spend €50,000 to outfit it with a high-pressure device to keep toxic fumes caused by the sandblasting of the subway supports from getting into the kitchen.

Other city officials just want to tear the stand down. As the city council member from the Green Party sees it, the whole affair is just "complete nonsense." But Ziervogel doesn't seem to care what he thinks.

Huzzah to the shopkeeper!

Foucault, Bourdieu, and Derrida figure at the top of the list of most-cited authors of books in America's humanities

As Duncan writes, the "Most cited authors of books in the humanities" list explains a lot: The table linked

lists those authors whose books, collectively, were cited 500 or more times in 2007. While representing a somewhat rough summary, these results provide some insight into the current trends in research in the social sciences and humanities: the listed authors serve as symbols for their ideas and approaches.

Barackey Obamouse

Diversity Training for Euroland

I’m sure it’s just because they’re feeling oppressed:

A large force of police officers has been sent to the Sandholm refugee and asylum centre where fighting has broken out among some 100 people, some of whom have been using knives.

Where do I get the feeling that there are third world police departments disposing of their crazies this way?

Promoting Peace and Pacifism, of Course

From a continental super-state with only 60-75.000 deployable troops, we see the role weapons and military equipment manufacturing has when you fancy yourself to be all “peaced out”: it’s a racket.

In a bizarre twist to the Greek debt crisis, France and Germany are pressing Greece to buy their gunboats and warplanes, even as they urge it to cut public spending and curb its deficit.

It also makes one reflect on the turbulence and complaints evident over the European complaints that EADS was unfairly eliminated from competition with Boeing when it came to a tanker contract for the US Air Force: when was the last time you heard of any foreign manufacturer being able to bid for a large scale contract for the French military? I mean, what is that justification that they always use when people ask why the Rafale even exists?

France is pushing to sell six frigates, 15 helicopters and up to 40 top-of-the-range Rafale fighter aircraft.

Greek and French officials said President Nicolas Sarkozy was personally involved and had broached the matter when Papandreou visited France last month to seek support in the financial crisis.

FRIGATE PURCHASE

The Greeks were so sensitive to Sarkozy's concerns that they announced on the day Papandreou went to Paris that they would go ahead with buying six Fremm frigates worth 2.5 billion euros ($3.38 billion), despite their budget woes.

The ships are made by the state-controlled shipyard DCNS, which is a quarter owned by defense electronics group Thales and may have to lay workers off in the downturn.

Speaking of overpriced rubbish:

The Rafale, made by Dassault Aviation, is a more distant and vastly dearer prospect. There is no published price, but each costs over $100 million, plus weapons.

Germany is meanwhile pressing Athens to pay for a diesel-electric submarine from ThyssenKrupp, of which it refused to take delivery in 2006 because the craft listed during sea trials following a disputed refurbishment in Kiel.

Further from my bulging “bigoted idiot” file, comes this "daddy drinks because you cry" rationale behind why this should get shoved through right now:

Asked whether big European suppliers were using the crisis to press arms sales on Athens, he said: "This has always been the case with these countries. It is not because of the crisis, there is no link."

As in “it’s what those kind of people are like”, not what they say or do.

Douchebags.

The Fate of Baltazar Garzón Gives a Peek into the Rules that Europe's Self-Proclaimed Humanitarians Use When Pursuing Alleged War Criminals

Even if one thinks what Garzon did was illegal or even unwise, nobody here thinks what he did was evil in any real sense of the word, you would think

writes a commentator on the Volokh Conspiracy (gracias para el Señor Reynolds), regarding the indictment of Baltazar Garzón for exceeding his jurisdiction (in the Spanish judge's investigation of the alleged atrocities committed by Francisco Franco and his allies during the Spanish Civil War and under Franco's subsequent régime).

Nobody thinks it was evil (or appears to be so), but you should at least entertain the thought that it is/was evil, directly or indirectly. To a certain degree, it was/is certainly unjust.

As I wrote some years back, what we are involved with here are the same old double standards of leftists (American or foreign) going berserk over the slightest crime (or misdemeanor) attributed to the right while ignoring completely any crime — or litany of crimes — on the left.

Again and again, the truth eventually reveals how the sequels "of arrests, death, torture, and exile" are often worse under would-be leftist authoritarian régimes than under rightist ones. Stalin, of course, killed far more people than Hitler did, and a recent best-seller (Checas de Madrid by César Vidal) teaches that the Spanish Republicans ran a series of sinister detention centers patterned on the Soviet Checas, which savagely tortured and often slaughtered its prisoners, without the slightest hint of legality; the dead and disappeared in the province of Madrid alone were, in only a couple of years, almost four times as numerous as the victims over 17 years of none other than… Chile's Augusto Pinochet (almost 12,000 in Madrid versus some 3,000 in Chile).

In my book, La Bannière Étalée, I spell out the rules that seem to govern Europe's (self-proclaimed) human rights defenders and its valorous democracy activists for, first of all, seething with indignation and, second, for choosing the targets of these holier-than-thou humanitarians' international arrest warrants.

• Be a U.S. leader: George W Bush. Donald Rumsfeld. Bill Clinton. George Bush the elder. Ronald Reagan. Be an American general. Or one of their soldiers (as recently as October 2005, a(nother) Spanish judge delivered an international arrest warrant against three American soldiers whose shots, in April 2003, had killed a Spanish cameraman in Baghdad);
• Be a U.S. ally — say, a British prime minister or an Israeli leader, civilian or military;
  
• Be a former dictator or one of his officers, usually rightist and if possible suffering from dementia or senility, and one who, for reasons good or ill, has been an ally of Washington (but the leading criterion is that the offender has to have been out of power for at least 10 years or so — see below).
  

By contrast, here are the people who, offhand, are not concerned by Europeans' passionate and principled search for "justice".

• The general rule is, no European since the Second World War, nor any non-European dictator having sought refuge in Europe (Haiti's Baby Doc is still alive and well in his mansion on France's Riviera, thank you very much), but Baltasar Garzón's search for alleged criminals (albeit, again, rightist-only) from Spain's Civil War is one — obvious — exception to that rule. (For instance, the numerous Nazis who escaped to Spain's very own Costa Brava in the late 1940s do not seem to have had much to worry about in the following six decades…) Note that this European exception to the rule may be precisely the reason Judge Garzón is getting his comeuppance;
  
• No dictator of the left (socialist, communist, etc), nor any enemy of Washington, wherever he is living and whether he is in power or not, nor any of the soldiers who have kept him in power;
• And — last but not least — no strongman currently in power, wherever he is on the political spectrum (even if he is an ally of the Americans!). People who never had to worry very much (during their respective lifetimes) about Europe's human rights activists include Fidel Castro, Colonel Qaddafi, Saddam Hussein, and comrades Honecker (who ended up, safe and sound, in… Pinochet's Chile), Brezhnev, Stalin, and Mao.

So here are the conclusions we can draw:

• The more a country is democratic (an allegedly false one or a democracy of any other type), the more it will be in the would-be cross-hairs of a European human rights activist;
• the more a country is anti-democratic, the more it will be given leeway — as much leeway as possible (often with this type of sentence: "Well, we think that we ought to keep bridges open to such-and-such a leader or such-and-such a country").
• Let's not even take into consideration the fact that Europe's desire for justice is entirely subject to the continent's need for commercial business activities. (That would be mean.)

Gordon Brown is an Oaf

ITV’s Tom Bradby noted something rather infantile about him:

But interviewing him is emotionally complicated. He doesn’t seem to understand that we are here to ask difficult questions and test his arguments by establishing contrary positions. He nearly always tells us we are wrong, both on and off camera, and that we have not done our research. He often gets angry, sometimes sulks and from time to time looks brutally hurt.

That is, once you get past this air he has about him that reminds one of an accountant with a secret life worn painfully on his face.

Ripley’s Law

Schnitzel Republic evil genius, impresario, and au-teur, has ten fine tips that will give you and the children hours, nay, days of entertainment. Actually, he has 10 fine ways to upset a German, as if it was really all that hard. It has echoes of “Americans Anonymous”.

Fifth....when the German associate criticizes your government or your American politics....smile, and just say "yeah, you're right". Don't waste effort in argument....it'll just aggravate the guy.

Leaving aside my bulging file of car and alcohol subject that are better left on pedantry’s doorstep, a challenge to ones’ pride must forever go untouched:

Ninth....when your German neighbor or associate tries awful hard to tell a joke, and its pretty bad....smile and just laugh. If you do anything otherwise...they will say that you don't have a sense of humor.

True, even when grading on a curve.

April 9 Vs July 13: Is It Any Wonder Why Europeans Must Constantly Pillory America?

Why do Europeans love Obama so much? Well, one reason is that Tax Freedom Day (the day on which the inhabitants of a country will have earned enough money to pay all federal, state, and local taxes for the year) in the United States comes on April 9 (merci au Professeur Reynolds), whereas in France, say, it comes a day before… Bastille Day (July 13)!

This is why Europe's leaders, élites, and media members must — constantly — make such a fuss about how horrible America is — if European citizens didn't hear that constant refrain, a number of them might be tempted to ask why they (the European citizens) are paying so much in taxes and in bureaucrats and in social services, when Americans (with many fewer) are just as well off if not much better off. The (invariable) answer: beneath the glitter (and the conspiracy!), America is really an inhuman place, a hell-hole full of crazy and/or ignorant clods (not to mention all kinds of victims and martyrs, racial, sexual, "poverty-induced", etc, etc, etc), who — contrary to us (to us reasonable and to us intelligent and to us extra-lucid and to us tolerant and to us compassionate souls) — have no love for their fellow human beings.

Remember all the soul-searching about "why (do) they hate us" during the Bush presidency? (The answer was invariably that it was obviously it was our fault. Or Bush's fault. Or our fault for electing Bush. Or the fault of America's "imperialist policies".)

The real reason why they hate us is the unending fare of anti-Americanism (and anti-capitalism) that Europeans are fed on a regular basis, in order to make the average citizen wary of, suspicious of, and scornful of America's every step, her every triumph, while failing to put into doubt — this is a direct correlation, the reverse side of the coin — the average EU nation's pursuit of "tolerant" and "compassionate" (i.e., leftist — and expensive) social policies. And this is why Europeans get giddy with delight every time an American politician arrives on the scene, saying Americans need more services, more controls, more bureaucrats — in one word, more taxes. It is somebody as reasonable as themselves, as intelligent as themselves, as compassionate as themselves, as lucid as themselves, and — of course — as improvident as themselves, who will bring the danger of an American example to the European citizen to a halt.

As Dick Morris and Eileen McGann explain,

Lenin was right. Socialism cannot exist in just one country — or one continent. It must dominate worldwide or wealth and power will flow to those who remain committed to the free market. Europe realizes this reality, and it makes Obama's election as president of the United States all the more welcome.

The Nobel Prize is really Obama's payback for disciplining the unruly United States and taming it to be a member of the European family of nations. Europe wants to reverse the American Revolution and re-colonize us, and it sees in Obama a kindred spirit willing to do its bidding.

This is How You Know They’ve Given up

In an article titled “Renewable energy projects in line for €115m windfall” we discover just how alien commerce is to educated Europeans, and how inherently hostile they are to it by virtue of an abject lack of awareness they have to the terms actual productive people who make things operate under.

Energy efficiency projects expected to get funds left over from the recovery package.

Projects to promote renewable energy or energy efficiency are in line for a windfall of at least €115 million, as the European Commission looks to reassign unspent money from the European recovery package.

In other words, a subsidy.

That same perception gap oozes out of everything on the enchanted continent. It shows that economic freedom, one of the core elements of genuine individual freedom, is neither well understood, or desired, so long as you can extract some resources from an unwilling doner.

Arms Control Instead of Dictator Control: Obama's vision is for an America that has no independent national defense and no independent foreign policy

The results of President Barack Obama's nuclear posture review are in: the US will not develop any new nuclear weapon designs, and the US will not target countries that sign and comply with the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT).

Thus writes TIA Daily's Jack Wakeland.

This nuclear posture follows the START treaty the US just signed with Russia that contains the following limits on each country:

• limit the total number of nuclear warheads to 1550
• limit the number of ICBM launchers and SLBM launch tubes to 800
• limit the total number of ICBMs, SLBMs, and nuclear-armed bombers deployed to 700

The vice president also affirms Obama's intention to pursue a comprehensive test ban treaty (CTBT) and to end programs to develop new anti-ballistic missile capabilities.

The problem with Obama's "nuclear posture review" is not that it is going to disarm America. Reducing the number of nuclear warheads from 2200 to 1550 does not significantly shrink the US nuclear weapons force. Declaring that the US will not develop any new nuclear weapons designs and pursuing the CTBT will not quickly render the aging and un-verified US nuclear weapons force obsolete and inoperative. It would take a few more decades of such purposeful neglect to complete the left's plan to sabotage our nation's nuclear force.

No, what Obama is trying to do is to create a set of international cultural-political commitments that will tend to lock in his vision of a post-American world. In this future, Barack Obama would like to see a world that is no longer led by the US. He would like to see America lose its dominant status and fade from center stage.

Despite the fact that ours is the first republic founded for the purpose of defending the rights of man; despite the fact that ours is the first nation to fight for liberty rather than for territorial plunder, and to do it on a global scale against all comers (Nazi, Communist, Islamo-fascist) for over 60 years—despite these obvious historical facts, President Barack Obama does not believe the US is an exception among nations.

(Remember that Obama attended a "liberation theology" church; a church in which the preacher fiercely objected to any pro-American feeling in the days after the 9/11 attacks in which 3000 Americans were killed. While people in Europe contemplated in horror America's defeat at the hands of Muslim terrorists, Obama's preacher was condemning those who spontaneously gathered to mourn that defeat and to sing "God Bless America." "God Bless America?!" Obama's preacher thundered in reply. "No!" "God Damn America!")

So—even though he could never be president long enough to assure that it will happen—Obama would like to see the US incrementally give up, promise not to use, and let fall into disrepair its exceptional arsenal of nuclear weapons. In Obama's determinist world view, America's exceptional weaponry does not belong in the hands of any nation. All men and all nations are driven deterministically by the material factors of their means of production and by the material factors of their "world-historical" and racial "power relationships." No man and no nation can claim to be a moral exception to that rule. Nuclear weapons give nations the capability to kill a large fraction of the human race. And unless that capability is removed, following the imperatives of their "world-historical" "power relationships," they will.

Removing nuclear weapons from the hands of free nations who have an exceptional history of using weapons only in defense of liberty will not, according to Obama, encourage dictatorships to become aggressive against their disarmed foes. No. It will encourage them to follow suit. Dictatorships will see that they will not lose their present standing in the "power relationships" among the nations of the world if they give up their nuclear weapons, too. They won't lose because the free nations of the world have given up theirs. Hell, given the qualitative and quantitative nuclear superiority of the US, Great Britain, France, and Israel, in a regime of worldwide nuclear disarmament the dictatorships would undoubtedly come out ahead.

Based on Obama's determinist nuclear posture review, for the next three years (at least), we're in for a foreign policy of arms control instead of dictator control:

• No more talk of the "forward strategy of freedom" (even though that Bush Administration policy will still be fully in operation in the Muslim World: Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan...even Yemen)

• No more talk about the US being the guardian of law and order for the world (even though the US Navy and Marine Corps will continue to guard global free trade on the high seas).

• Lots of talk about how the UN is the guardian of "world peace" (even though they will continue to do nothing about anything except to issue numerous resolutions against the US and Israel).

• No more talk about regime change for dangerous or aggressive dictatorships (but then again, the Bush administration stopped talking about that back in April of 2006).

• No more talk about modernizing the US nuclear weapons force to make it more relevant to the rogue nation threats we face today.

Characteristic of the foreign policy of the left, the substance of Obama's "big" shift in the US nuclear posture is thin. It is, for the most part, an empty gesture.

Only one president elected after the fall of the Berlin Wall has asked for Congress to fund new nuclear weapons designs. In 2007, George W. Bush asked for and Congress refused to fund a program to design miniature, low-yield, "bunker-buster" warheads. Mr. Bush also asked Congress and Congress also refused to fund a program to develop new thermo-nuclear weapons that would be more resistant to aging and would have more easily provable performance when they age. Obama's fellow party members already took new nuclear weapons design off the table three years ago.

Removing NPT signatories from our nuclear target lists is even less relevant.

Brazil never feared that we might be targeting Sao Palo or Rio de Janeiro. Although it would be nice to think that Hugo Chavez fears that we've got an MX missile aimed at his residence, what he really fears is the First Marine Expeditionary Force—a conventional amphibious force that could knock over his regime in one day.

The promise to not target NPT-compliant states is an empty gesture engineered to please the equally empty foreign policies of UN-centric, altruist-pacifist old Europe. Old Europe gave up its responsibility for national defense decades ago. They gave it up and dumped the responsibility onto the United States and have complained ever since that the US has usurped their independent foreign policies. But one can't have an independent foreign policy without having an independent capacity to defend oneself.

The foreign policy vision that drives Obama is that of an America that has faded away in the pattern of old Europe. His vision is for an America that has no independent national defense and no independent foreign policy; a territory that is a nation in name only; an America for a post-America world. Thus his policy is one of sabotage by inaction and neglect. This passive-aggressive stance against America's national interests must, however, be in place for decades before it pays its intended dividends.

In domestic policy, the Obama administration has given us the sabotage of America's semi-capitalist, semi-free economic and political order. When coupled with the Fed's policy of maintaining its "expanded" balance sheet indefinitely, Obama's ruinous spending spree promises to give us at least three years of "stagflation"—high unemployment and high inflation. So to complete the 1970s flashback, president Obama is going to give us a foreign policy of sabotage by inaction and neglect, just like Jimmy Carter's.

But Obama's vision of a post-American world will take more than three years to implement—much more. It will not get very far if we say "no" in 2012.

He’s Just not that Into You

The White House set up a focus meeting with former eastern European Soviet satellite states. The EU feels snubbed that it can’t bring to it a circus atmosphere of bring representatives of the utterly symbolic rotating Presidency, European Connission, Euro-this-and-that, and a retinue of thousands.

The US' decision not to invite any EU officials to a top-level security event in Prague is being seen as a fresh put-down by some in Brussels.

US leader Barack Obama will in the Czech capital on Thursday (8 April) sign a nuclear arms reduction treaty with his Russian counterpart before hosting a dinner with 11 heads of state and government from selected European countries.

The irony being that the internationally inept Obama is signing off on an arms reduction pact that the Bush White House negotiated.

The subject is security, something the EU has not the least serious bit of yet, but no matter – they need an orgy of photo-ops to cover for some deficiency of regards (as yet unearned, even in Europe,) that will replace any useful dialog with the near-weekly “historic summits” that have occupied the dim-bulb continental press for what now seems like years.

"This dinner points yet again to the fact that the European Union needs to make a common foreign policy a reality so that President Obama knows whom to call or who to invite for dinner."

Ergo: summits and dinners = continental security. Serious, serious “partners”, we have there.

The point is that there is no point in meeting at all with an ineffectual, consistently hostile “partner”, no matter how willing they are to set their passive-aggression aside for a week or so.

It also comes after Mr Obama cancelled an US-EU summit due to take place in Madrid in May, however. US and EU officials later suggested that future summits should be held only "when we both feel the need for one," rather than on a regular basis.

The developments embarrassed the Spanish EU presidency and have prompted questions of whether Washington continues to see the EU as an important player on the world stage.

The arrogance of the statement that assumes that anyone, anywhere “continues” to see the EU as an important player of the world stage, is undergirded by the idea that it even exists in any real way yet, as far as the rest of the world is concerned.

What’s emerging from the continued, strange hyperventilation from Brussels is that they are desperate to seek legitimacy, and that even those like the US who are desperate to help the Europeans form a Unitary state can’t find a way to plausibly support it with any seriousness.

Contentions are with those who ARE seriously in need to being dealt with diplomatically – and they are Russia, China, and the key players in the near east and Asia-pacific. There is a NEED to do that now, and on an ongoing basis. There is NO NEED to spend diplomatic capital playing dress-up for the Europeans, so that they can feel that they aren’t the dorky last kid picked to play dodge-ball.

”Caring mayor wants Roma register”

Why does their “caring” sound so much like a cross between pandering and fascism?

“Ethnic registration for Roma”, headlines De Volkskrant. Social democratic mayor Cor de Vos of Nieuwegein, a town in the central Holland, says that councils with the largest Roma populations should keep an ethnic register of the community. “We are dealing with a group of people which is not integrated in Dutch society,” he declared.

If that’s the case, why don’t they “register” gays and anyone who might haver ever practiced Islam?

“They need to be helped, for their own sake and that of their neighbourhood. But we can’t do that without knowing their situation.” Last Wednesday it was revealed that the city council of Ede has been holding police, child welfare and justice department files on the Roma since 1978. The council apologised but also said: “The law isn't in step with the issues.

And of course that was bad, and wrong. Sooooo in the interest of “caring”, there will be a lot more of it.

What next? Tattooed registration numbers to “show you care”?

Finally: An Entirely Valid Reason to Go on Strike

From Denmark: an entirely valid reason to go on strike (tak — hik — til Valerie)…

Scores of Carlsberg workers walked off their jobs in protest Thursday after the Danish brewer tightened laid-back rules on workplace drinking and removed beer coolers from work sites, a company spokesman said.

The warehouse and production workers in Denmark are rebelling against the company's new alcohol policy, which allows them to drink beer only during lunch hours in the canteen. Previously, they could help themselves to beer throughout the day, from coolers placed around the work sites.

We can't become Europe unless someone else is willing to become America

We can't become Europe unless someone else is willing to become America

writes Jonah Goldberg.

Look at it this way. My 7 year-old daughter has a great lifestyle. She has all of her clothes and food bought for her. She goes on great vacations. She has plenty of leisure time. A day doesn't go by where I don't look at her and feel envious at how good she's got it compared to me. But here's the problem: If I decide to live like her, who's going to take my place?

Europe is a free-rider. It can only afford to be Europe because we can afford to be America.

The most obvious and most cited illustration of this fact is national defense. Europe's defense budgets have been miniscule because Europeans can count on Uncle Sam to protect them. Britain, which has the most credible military in NATO after ours, has funded its butter account with its gun account. As Mark Steyn recently noted in National Review, from 1951 to 1997 the share of British government expenditure on defense fell from 24 percent to 7 percent, while the share on health and welfare increased from 22 percent to 53 percent. And that was before New Labor started rolling back Thatcherism. If America Europeanizes, who's going to protect Europe? Who's going to keep the sea lanes open? Who's going to contain Iran? China? OK, maybe. But then who's going to contain China?

But that's not the only way in which Europeans are free-riders. America invents a lot of stuff. When was the last time you used a Portuguese electronic device? How often does Europe come out with a breakthrough drug? Not often, and when they do, it's usually because companies like Novartis and GlaxoSmithKline increasingly conduct their research here. Indeed, the top five U.S. hospitals conduct more clinical trials than all the hospitals in any other single country combined. We nearly monopolize the Nobel Prize in medicine, and we create stuff at a rate Europe hasn't seen since da Vinci was in his workshop.

If America truly Europeanized, where would the innovations come from?

German. The Language of Lurrrrve.

Or not. Not really.

So tonight...along the Rhein River....sits Bodo, who ponders if any average German gal will have a butcher who reads cowboy westerns, is deeply into jazz, drinks only fizzy water, wears boxer shorts, vacations yearly in Bulgaria in a cheap $18 a night hotel with a open seafood buffet line, and would like to meet a beastly German woman with a voluptuous body that begs.

Don’t give up Bodo! There’s someone for everyone!

Left Because of Racial Discrimination: What Frenchmen Living Abroad Are Telling Their Compatriots

A new book by Christian Roudaut, France, je t'aime je te quitte (Ce que les Français de l'étranger nous disent), gives France the reasons so many of its sons and daughters have left the country to seek fame and fortune (or, simply, a better life) abroad.

The reasons are financial, of course, given France's high taxes, but the most surprising revelation in France, I Love You I am leaving you (What Frenchmen Abroad Are Telling Us) — which only studies Frenchmen having emigrated to Western-type countries with a development level comparable to France's own — is probably the number of Frenchmen of color deciding to relocate from the cradle of "Republican equality" — and from the eternal purveyor of racism lessons to clueless American clods — because of racial prejudice.

Verdict : "En France, les pratiques discriminatoires et le racisme ordinaire sont les mauvaises herbes que les autorités ne se donnent pas la peine de traiter sérieusement".

The only time racism is treated sérieusement in France is when it (allegedly) occurs en Amérique…

The Little Guy Looks Like he’s Really Getting into it

The Land of the Free Freeloader

It seems that the dictum of “getting good services in good and bad times” being the price for higher taxation, not to mention being the modern-day equivalent of a serf, just doesn’t work:

The education sector in Europe has been hard hit by cuts in budgets, personnel and investment. Some universities, e.g. in the UK, might even have to be closed down. And some leading institutions could soon lose their top international rankings.

Aren’t you comforted that the huge, meddling nanny state is there to cushion the fall?

Students and pensioners to fill vacancies

Even the northern nations have felt the pinch. In the Netherlands, fiscal 2010–2011 will see 20% cuts in several sectors, including higher education, according to a study put out in February by John Aubrey Douglass from the University of California, Berkeley. Among other things, student scholarships are to be transformed into a system of bank loans for young people. The proposal sparked protests in February, in which over a thousand students occupied lecture halls in Amsterdam, Nijmegen, Utrecht and Rotterdam.

That the students themselves are only real beneficiary of those educations continues to allude the sort that occupy lecture halls for free gub’mint stuff of course, and to be sure the “societal benefit” can’t be much better in a part of the world that doesn’t really invest in R&D, not to mention the “national pride” benefit of all that free gub’mint larnin’...

Wipe Europe off world rankings

Wow! Only Two Years Late at That!

Straight from the “Look, Paw, we kann reed!” department:

A study for the European Commission suggests growing biofuel crops can create more greenhouse gases than it saves.

Change: What has changed and what has not

What has changed and what has not? asks Bill Prast (thanks to Mark)

We used to have a strong dollar ...
Politicians changed that.

Life used to be sacred ...
Politicians changed that.

Marriage used to be sacred ...
Politicians changed that.

Families used to be respected ...
Politicians changed that.

WE USED TO PRAY TO GOD ...
Politicians changed that.

We used to have a strong manufacturing economy ...
Politicians changed that.

We used to have lower, fairer taxes ...
Politicians changed that.

We used to have a government that listened to the people ...
Politicians changed that.

We used to enjoy more freedom of movement ...
Politicians changed that.

We used to export American made goods ...
Politicians changed that.

We used to be an openly Christian nation ...
Politicians changed that.

We used to teach patriotism in schools ...
Politicians changed that.

We used to educate children in schools ...
Politicians changed that.

We used to pledge allegiance to our Flag ...
Politicians changed that.

We used to respect our Military Veterans ...
Politicians changed that.

We used to enjoy freedom of speech ...
Politicians changed that.

We used to enforce LEGAL citizenship ...
Politicians changed that.

We used to walk down the street safely ...
Politicians changed that.

We used to be ashamed of perverted behavior ...
Politicians changed that.

We used to be respected around the world ...
Politicians changed that.

We used to have affordable food & gas prices ...
Politicians changed that, too.

What hasn't been changed?

Is the politicians who promised Change.

Don't Forget to VOTE in November!!

Allons ons Dance

Where it all Falls Apart

Years of lefty and Euro-hyperventilation on the matter of imprisoning prisoners of war have always come down to this:

According to an Interior Ministry spokesman, Berlin is talking to Washington about relocating suitable detainees after they get released from the US-owned Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba.

An unnamed Interior Ministry official said on Saturday, March 27, that his ministry had "opened talks anew with the United States on this matter."

They want some magical solution, is exemplified by German home truthes.

Last year, Germany had considered accepting prisoners but later backed off amid concerns that the men could prove dangerous.

I suspect that the only thing that would ameliorate their laundry list of what a solution should look like would be akin to eliminating the prisoners themselves, but that it happen in such a way that would permit the bobos to bitch about it for about 3 decades – it’s really where they get the idea of pushing the GWOT as the “new Vietnam War”.

Again, the popular thing to do is to want your own society to fail, but advocate it knowing that it won’t place them at any risk, but give them a cause over which to bleed others’ attention and sympathies dry.

The Man With the Golden Pipe Dreams

L'homme au rateau d'Or Episode _01
envoyé par Scoflaire_video. - Cliquez pour voir plus de vidéos marrantes.

Hydrocephalic Mega-state goes into Mythmaking

Charter of Fundamental Rights to be re-written as epic poem

At least it will make a nice fable of some long lost happier time that never existed, someday.

The European Commission is bracing itself for the prospect of politically sensitive requests from EU citizens once a key direct-democracy clause contained in the Lisbon Treaty takes effect.

In the mean time, we still have to hear the usual dyspeptic whining from Paris:

In a move that is likely to provoke the ire of francophones, already smarting from what they view as the galloping advance of the English language within the EU institutions and European communication with citizens at the expense of French, the tender required that poem be composed in the language of Shakespeare as English is, according to the tender document, the "literary language".

The American Expatriate Who Said That the Only Thing That Helped Concentration Camp Inmates Survive During World War II Was "Hope"

Once a month or so, a group of expatriate Americans meet in one of Paris's Irish pubs (along with a smaller number of French and other-foreign friends) to discuss American politics, policies, and the events of the day. I'm often the only conservative present (or one of the few conservatives present) at "Political Pub" as most of them seem to be leftists or, at least, Democrats.

• Everyday Meetings with Common Europeans

During one of those meetings — in which the discussion led to war and to Obama's decision to send more troops to Afghanistan, and in which we were repeatedly told (certainly, I should say, I was repeatedly told) that the people present do not agree with war and that they are not in favor of military involvement — one young girl eventually got up and, for some reason, spoke of Adolf Hitler's concentration camps during World War II. She said that the only thing that those poor souls had going for them, the only thing that helped them survive, was "hope".

That's when I intervened. Hope did not help a single inmate survive. Whether the inmates were optimistic, they were murdered by Nazi butchers. Whether they were in a state of despair, they were murdered by Nazi butchers. Whatever they felt, however they felt, they were murdered by Nazi butchers. And the rare men and women and children who survived did so not because of hope (or because of despair), but in spite of hope (and in spite of despair).

No. The only thing that helped the inmates survive — or the main thing that helped the inmates survive, at any rate — was (well-armed) members of the United States armed forces (along with their British allies) killing Germans, as many as possible, as they headed East to defeat and destroy the Nazi régime.

La Grenouille qui Veut Etre Plus Forte que L'Elephant

We’ve touched on this idea of European talking heads “crowding out” to the point of absurdity any international confab. Never mind that they try to create and host as many of these moronic distractions as possible, or that they are a fantasy of a world long gone, where a head of state can merely accept the terms of any such event and force them on his population.

We’ve pointed out here on several occasions that there is also a desire to have it both ways. Sometimes they’re 27 members + the EP + the EC + OECD + whatever, and yet they want to be a singular, benevolent, apparently legitimate, über-power that the world bows to for simply appearing involved in so many worldy-world things, and you know, being European and saying what nice things the plebes should get for free from someone. Else.

You know it’s bad, when a European actually notices it too.

PASCAL Lamy, the formidable Frenchman who runs the World Trade Organisation, has a cunning plan to make Europeans less annoying as they crowd around the table at global gatherings like the G20. If they cannot agree to speak with one voice (by allowing a single envoy to represent the European Union), what if they agreed to speak with one mouth? If half a dozen European leaders will insist on turning up to the G20, could they divvy up the agenda ahead of time, and agree that one leader would speak (and only one) on each topic in the name of the EU?

It is a neat suggestion. Would it help?

When the G20 next meets, Europe will be represented by the national leaders of France, Germany, Britain and Italy (who are full members), plus Spain (which is an invited special guest), plus representatives of the union. The Dutch, who managed to sneak into the first G20 leaders' summits in Washington and London as Spanish-style guests, seem to have been axed from the list this time.

The thing worth noting here is that the writer doesn’t note that Pascal Lamy speaking on belaf of the WTO is doing a nice job of coaching the same folks he’s meant to adjudicate.

Realistically speaking, it isn’t a mob, or a “team” or anything of the sort. For the most part, if policy were a young, tender, innocent hope for the future, walking its’ way home, the combined effort of the Europeans to raise their profile, would be a gang raping her.

The new President of the European Council, Herman Van Rompuy, has convinced EU colleagues that he must attend meetings of the G20 to represent the union's 27 national leaders, in addition to José Manuel Barroso, the President of the European Commission (who is to represent the EU in areas where the commission's centralised bureaucracy has the lead, such as trade policy). In a nod to the rest of the world's impatience with the number of Europeans in the G20, the two presidents have agreed to share a sherpa, and to sit behind a single name-plate at the table. I don't think there are plans for anyone to sit on laps.

The problem is that what they bring is either pointless, or an internal matter and squabbling which due to the existence of borders within borders, is magically revived as an international matter, probably because there are still a few people out there who think the word “international” still sounds important.

The Invisible Hand Giving European Collectivist Types the Finger

In a bid to avert default on its sovereign debt, the Greek government is to sell off portions of its islands to Turkey

You’ll recall that just a week ago, the German suggestion that the Greek government sell off a few islands it owns was met with suggestions that it’s inhumane and racist, and was made worse by the unfounded image western Europeans hold of Greek corruption, sloppiness, and what Germans used to call uncontrollable Schlamperei.

Minister of Finance Giorgos Papakonstantinou claimed “accounting errors” before making the surprise offer, estimated in the region of €40 billion for 49% ownership of the Dodecanese islands of Patmos and Agathonissi, close to the Turkish coast.

The Frenchman in a Suit Who Inquired of a War Supporter If He Could Ask Him a Question

I was present at the speech David E. Sanger gave at the Paris launch of the French translation of his book, L'Héritage (The Inheritance: The World Obama Confronts and the Challenges to American Power).

During question-and-answer time, I made some comment to the Chief Washington Correspondent for The New York Times concerning Iraq and the fact that of the myriad reports and articles in Western newspapers and on Western TV shows throughout the years regarding the allegedly "unnecessary" and "disastrous" Iraq war, it was odd that so few seem to have been written by… Iraqis themselves.

• Everyday Meetings with Common Europeans

After the presentation was over, some young Frenchman (of Middle Eastern origins?) in a very well-tailored suit came up to me and said, "Can I ask you a question?" Mais oui. "Do you really believe that not a single Iraqi has died during the Iraqi war?!" At that, he let out a peal of high-pitched mocking laughter (I am tempted to think Brüno), his eyes wide open and staring into mine.

How to answer this? I decided to join in his laughter. "The way you described that was very funny." It indeed sounded ridiculous. "The only problem is, I wasn't the one who said that — or anything like it. You are…" This got him riled, and he started berating me about all the things about the Iraq war that I supposedly unaware of…

Everyday Meetings with Common Europeans

Notes taken from everyday life in France and "old" Europe

• The American Expatriate who said that the only thing that helped concentration camp inmates survive during World War II was "hope"
• The Frenchman who inquired of a war supporter if he could ask him a question
• More news of stellar treatment from France's health care system
• A dispassionate discussion with the members of the band
• The Spanish artist who would not go to America
• The Danish girl who knew what kind of nation the United States is
• The Latin American lady who refuses to drink Coca-Cola
• The friend who asked me if I was happy
• The flight attendant who doesn't like violence
• Some initial French reactions to 9-11
• Immortal proclamations of Franco-American friendship on 9-11
• The firefighter gives a lesson in truck mechanics
• The BUT argument: Patterns in conversations in France
• The 50-year-old man who lectured me about America's race problems
• Taking World War II as an example, a Frenchman gives a lesson on the meaning of injustice
• I give my cat's veterinarian a scare
• The train conductor explains why the SNCF website should not be user-friendly

You know the type

Why does it always seem to be our compassionate, all-inclusive, all-caring, all-knowing statist friends who display the latent streak of violence:


Just imagine the hand-wringing, indignation and concern if the shoe was on the other foot.

Also Known As…

Among other things, the Xaybe'h de Camara cantina
near Mexico's Chichen Itza offers fried fish…


This is also known as position 35-C
in the latest edition of the Kama Sutra…

Still Damp and Moist

Hermann’s Observer notes a high pressure front.

Elsewehere: Europeans loved for who they really are. What the hell – the old ways always worked for them.

Once More, with Feeling

Finally, we have an explanation to those strange syphilitic beings roaming the great Godhead’s chosen continent. And it the fault of those dastardly Americans!

Case have increased fourfold in Sunderland, Durham and Teesside, the areas of Britain where Facebook is most popular.

It probably has more to do with the unenthusiastic shiftless festered mess that has come to represent British womanhood at this point, and the number of them that out of pure boredom, would screw anything that’s tied down.

Meta-capitalists are natural allies of the communists … What we have is a gigantic symbiosis of all globalist and statist forces around the world

As always, Olavo de Carvalho has the inside dirt on the state of communism in Latin America — and on the entire planet…

Communist and pro-communist parties rule about a dozen Latin American countries today. This fact, by itself, is enough to prove that the “end of communism,” proclaimed by the Right soon after the fall of the Soviet Union, is a myth. World communism was never only an appendix of the USSR. It actually created the USSR, not the other way around. It existed a century before the Russian Revolution and continued to exist after the nominal extinction of Soviet power.

What made the resurgence of communism easier — not only in Latin America, but around the world — was the cowardly timidity of Western right-wingers who, instead of taking the opportunity of the fall of the USSR to punish the communists for their crimes, chose instead a policy of “extending them a hand,” as if asking for their pardon for having defeated them, and offering them all sorts of aid, enabling them to reappear with a new or attenuated identity, even protecting them from being called “communists” (the fashionable euphemism is now “populism”).

I believe that this absurd surrender of the winners was also stimulated by powerful globalist circles, whose interest in establishing worldwide bureaucratic controls converges with the objectives of the communists. The number of billionaire companies which came to openly contribute to leftist parties is enormous. I call “meta-capitalists” the individuals and groups which grew so wealthy with the market economy that they can’t stand anymore being at the mercy of the free market and seek, instead, to control everything, supporting bureaucracy instead of capitalism. Meta-capitalists are natural allies of the communists. … What we have is a gigantic symbiosis of all globalist and statist forces around the world.

To the New American's question, What role have Hugo Chavez and Venezuelan Petrodollars played in this resurgence? Is the Cuban government an important player? Olavo de Carvalho answers:

Hugo Chavez is only a scarecrow that the Latin American Left waves before the world to distract the attention away from the São Paulo Forum, which is the true strategic command of the Latin American revolution. Cuba and Venezuela are important as shelters for terrorists and drug traffickers. In Venezuela and other Spanish-speaking countries ruled by the São Paulo Forum, there is strong and organized opposition, while in Brazil all that is left is the Left itself, which controls the scene absolutely.

[Indeed,] however unbelievable it may seem, there is a strong and organized resistance against the rise of neo-communism in Venezuela. Colombia, likewise, is a remarkable center of resistance. On the other hand, nowhere else has the Right been so utterly destroyed as it has been in Brazil, which is, for this very reason, the headquarters of Latin American revolution. … In this sense, American political analysts are always getting it all backwards: They are alarmed at Venezuela and do not understand that the headquarters of the revolution is in Brazil.

And what does Olavo de Carvalho think of los Estados Unidos — where he currently lives?

In 2005, as I was getting tired of receiving weekly death threats from leftist maniacs, I found it was a good idea to accept a job as a Washington foreign correspondent that was offered to me by a traditional Brazilian business newspaper, the Diário do Comércio (“Business Daily”), and here I am living in Virginia with my family. I love to be here, because Americans, though already infected by the neo-communist virus, are not yet so stupid as Brazilians have become.

The French Decision to Step Back From the Carbon Tax, Says Rocard, Will One Day Be Seen as a Crime Against Humanity

Al Gore Redux: Although the relinquishment of France's carbon tax law is approved by a majority of Frenchmen (69%), Michel Rocard says that the government's decision to step back from the bill and wait instead for a EU-wide carbon tax law is criminal, suggesting that one day it will even be seen as a crime against humanity.

Meanwhile, Le Monde's readers are outraged that state governments in the U.S. are demanding that their respective schools teach a more differentiated view of global warming climate change, the French reporter and readers alike likening it to creationism and to believing the Earth is flat.

Privacy, Violated

Last month’s dancing bear routine of false indignation over the US government tracking financial transaction has yielded fairly efficiently to numb silence over the EU spying on people in precisely the same way.

The European Commission is to begin talks with member states on the Europe-wide monitoring of financial transactions by suspected terrorists.

Viviane Reding, the European commissioner for justice and fundamental rights, announced yesterday (24 March) that the scheme would be modelled on the Terrorist Financing Tracking Programme (TFTP) operated by the United States. “We would like to set up our own TFTP,” she said.

Now, it seems that looking at others’ data is oh-tay, except without these louts howling and baying about rights being shredded, etcetera, etcetera...

Reding said that she would also seek to negotiate a framework agreement with the US that would set standards for all transatlantic agreements involving data sharing.

A new agreement on Swift is necessary after the European Parliament, using new powers under the Lisbon treaty, rejected an interim agreement with the US in February.

After all, just a few weeks ago, the issue was all about as pedestrian as being about personal attention seeking behavior, if anything.

MEPs have been basking in the warm glow of global political attention over the EU-US arrangements on sharing bank transfer data. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called European Parliament President Jerzy Buzek on Friday (5 February) to enlist his support for a temporary data-sharing deal.

William Kennard, the new US ambassador to the EU, was lobbying so assiduously in the corridors of Parliament that Guy Verhofstadt, leader of the Liberal group, quipped that Kennard was “working harder than an MEP”. German centre-right MEP Manfred Weber, who is the European People Party's co-ordinator on SWIFT, also seemed to have doubts about the diligence of his colleagues

If anything says “too late, no deal” to data sharing with the EU from now on, it’s motives like those ones we see having been touted over the use of SWIFT data.

If they want to play that game with the lives of their citizens, then to hell with them. They simply can’t be trusted.

Behind the Green Door

While our statist friends prattle on and on and on and on about green new deal this, green jobs that, sustainability sustainability sustainability, it looks as though our Bosch brothers and sisters are indeed doing what they do best, putting it all into practice:

Dresden has long been known as centre for quality handicrafts, but an erotic shop is taking a new twist on the tradition by offering dildos formed from local Elbe River sandstone.

Not to be confused with those Saxons plying their own splinter-free version of green new jobs:

According to news agency DDP, Elmar Thüry and family started making the dildos in 2006. They' dubbed their woody sex toys "The country pleasure maker" and a "natural alternative to synthetic dildos."

When his wife, Maria, expressed misgivings about the business, Thüry says he told her what he tells all his customers - that spruce wood doesn't splinter and has a special resonance.

"Guitars and violins aren't made of spruce wood for nothing," he told DDP.

His wife satisfied, Thüry set about carving out his business, naming the company, "Waldmichlsholdi," which is a play on words on a popular German folk song. All five family members, aged 18 to 46, have a hand in producing the products.

Somehow we think our prodnose statist friends don't exactly have this pleasure-driven version of au naturale as the preferred version of au naturale.

However, that most holy of grails does play a part in our story. Our statist friends get what they crave most*, VAT is included in all purchases made (at least on the wood).

*outside of repeated attempts at forcing freakish controls upon the individual.

Sarkozy-Obama: The Subjects of Discord

Les Dossiers Qui Fâchent: An article in Le Monde concerning Nicolas Sarkozy's visit to the United States presents the objects of discord between the French president and Barack Obama: foreign policy (Afghanistan, Middle East, Iran…), EADS, finance regulation, global warming issues after Copenhagen…

For the Murder of Six Babies, One of the Worst Infanticide Cases in History, 2.5 Years per Victim in Jail

For killing her babies — six of them over as many years — in one of the worst infanticide cases in history, Céline Lesage was sentenced not to death, not to life in prison, but to 15 years in jail (2 1/2 per baby) — apparently because by the time she gets out, she will no longer be able to have children and there will be no more "reason" for the serial killer to remain behind bars…

"Elle pense que la justice a été correctement appliquée", dit son avocate.

Idealizing “a Virtuous and Equal Poverty for All”

Dr. Sanity nails it:

Indeed. As I have noted time and again, the left with their regressive agenda are in complete denial about the sinister motives that drive their so-called "compassion" for others. Progressivism is just another strategy to obtain power over the lives of others. Getting this kind of power over others--and at the same time reinforcing your own grandiosity and sense of superiority!-- is far more important than trying to convince others of your position.

But its all part of the ideologically enhanced sense of moral and intellectual superiority that drives all these progressive, neo-Marxist fascists.

If you listen to these fiscal histrionics, who believe that wealth and progress are magically created out of their wishes and whims, you begin to get an idea of the kind of utopia they actually envision--that is, if they were rational enough to actually take their cognitively dissonant ideas to a logical endpoint.

For example, spend enough time around these latter-day Marxists (whose political ideas invariably lead to untold poverty and human misery), and you could easily begin to think that human beings are entirely spiritual beings, existing in a golden glow of non-material nothingness. You would think that people are not composed of matter and have substance in a 3-dimensional, material world. Or, you could cue the Madonna music and believe exactly the opposite: that we are living in a material world, and that human beings are nothing more than physical, material creatures. And, of course the Obama Administration is going to rescue us from ourselves and make it so that we don't have all that money to spend on such useless "things". He says that he's only going to "soak the rich", but as the WSJ noted, there's only one teensy little problem:

Consider the IRS data for 2006, the most recent year that such tax data are available and a good year for the economy and "the wealthiest 2%." Roughly 3.8 million filers had adjusted gross incomes above $200,000 in 2006. (That's about 7% of all returns; the data aren't broken down at the $250,000 point.) These people paid about $522 billion in income taxes, or roughly 62% of all federal individual income receipts. The richest 1% -- about 1.65 million filers making above $388,806 --paid some $408 billion, or 39.9% of all income tax revenues, while earning about 22% of all reported U.S. income.

What is becoming obvious of the actions considered most important by the Obama Administration are:
The de facto nationalization of the Heath system
Financial regulation that will remander of autonomy of individual wealth and savings
Carbon regulation, providing effective control over the energy sector.
The three of which represent roughly half of the United States GNP. In the guise of trying to remake the crony-capitalism that the European “Social Democracies” are trying desperately to shed, he is creating the tools by which a bad actor can create a command economy. Don’t forget, it only took a decade of incrementalism for the eastern states of Germany to become the Marxist-Leninist DDR.

Let's stop and think about the Marxist modus operandi for a moment. If you take the anti-materialistic and anti-capitalist, "redistribute the wealth" message to its logical extreme, you must inexorably reach the conclusion that the highest values of society should be to encourage a virtuous--and equal--poverty for all; while homelessness and hunger would be proof that an individual has attained the highest moral plane. From the perspective of the "anti-materialists", malnourished children in societies of mud huts wearing rags and owning nothing- would be the epitome of human existence; since the possession of material wealth only condemns us to meaningless and empty lives given over in pursuit of meaningless and empty things. Clearly the poor have managed to eke out a life of powerful meaning and spiritual worth.

Only one problem with all this Marxist and neo-Marxst BS: human beings are not either spiritual or material. They are both at the same time. And, even more important for this discussion, there is a direct link between human freedom and those material goods the left incessantly tells us we should shun. Consider: all the marvelous goods and services that our incredible capitalistic society makes possible would not exist unless there were thinking, rational MINDS creating them.

Everything had to be done as it was, of course “for the workers”, and “the good of man”. This is the same rotten tree that the “progressives” who detest human progress hide behind as well.

As we have seen with the absurd demonization of the Insurance companies, those people who actually suppress the cost of procedures, and are little more than middle-men, the methodology of constructing a puppet show of inverse good-guys and bad-guys is alive and well in the present age. All it could leave us with is the culture of a Nomenclatura, where the government controls so many of life’s basic functions, and does it so badly, that getting ANYTHING done will require the petty criminality of “needing to know somebody”. Like the political penetration the left has made of educati0on and social services, I think you know what new “power class” will benefit from that.

As faith was an enemy of the fascists by virtue of its’ ability to give people a means of honest reflection independent of the vilest nationalists, so it goes today: which is why so many on the left, in the course of constructing an authoritarian framework over the little things in life, attempt to make an straw man of independent entities functioning freely in society, and are bound up with the notion of individual freedoms and autonomy, as “authorities” to be defeated. Mad as it sounds, 1918, 1933, and 2010 have more in common that anyone cares to think.

After all, we already have a minority of young willing “street fighters” treating a leader as though he is infallible, and press hacks willingly and unsceptically taking his every effort with unquestioning fealty – making a halo for him with every thoughtless repetition of his every breath being “historic”. Sure is. They just don’t know what history he’s reflecting back to.

Lincoln Graphic Biopic Preview: Honest Abe's Cooper Union Speech Described the Way Members of the Republican Party Were Demonized

Present at the Cooper Union's commemoration of the 150th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's February 1860 visit to New York City and of his speech in the Peter Cooper-founded venue — widely credited with being crucial to handing Honest Abe the Republican Party's nomination for presidential candidate three months later — Erik Svane and Dan Greenberg (authors of the upcoming graphic novel, The Life & Times of Abraham Lincoln — which is, really, more of a graphic "biopic") decided that their readers might want them to share a preview of the book's Cooper Union sequence…







Included in the Cooper Union sequence from Svane and Greenberg's graphic biopic are the remarks that Lincoln addresses to the Republican Party's adversaries; read them below or on the first and second pages above and… ask yourself how much things have really changed in a century and a half…

…when you speak of us Republicans, you do so only to denounce us as reptiles, or, at the best, as no better than outlaws. You will grant a hearing to pirates or murderers, but nothing like it to [Republicans]. In all your contentions with one another, each of you deems an unconditional condemnation of [Republicanism] as the first thing to be attended to. Indeed, such condemnation of us seems to be an indispensable prerequisite — license, so to speak — among you to be admitted or permitted to speak at all. Now, can you, or not, be prevailed upon to pause and to consider whether this is quite just to us, or even to yourselves? Bring forward your charges and specifications, and then be patient long enough to hear us deny or justify.

Crisis of faith in Germany

Astute readers of NP are no doubt aware of the myriad of problems which have been rocking the Church, especially in Germany. Years of scandal, cover-up and deception appear to be driving the flock away in droves from the faith:

Germans are losing their fear of climate change, according to a survey, with just 42 percent worried about global warming.

It seems the long and chilly winter has taken its toll on climate change sensibilities despite the fact that weather has nothing to do with climate.

The latest figure is a clear drop from the 62 percent of Germans who said they were scared of such changes just last autumn.

To add insult to injury, our German brothers and sisters firmly show their new-found heretical beliefs know no bounds:

The new survey, carried out by polling company Infratest for Der Spiegel magazine, showed a quarter of those questioned thought Germany would profit from climate change rather than be badly affected by it.

Flooding America with a tidal wave of poisonous initiatives, orders, regulations, and laws

The strategy of forcing political change through orchestrated crisis (thanks to Mark).

A flood of apocalyptic legislation: The real goal of "health care" legislation, the real foal of "cap-and-trade", and the real goal of the "stimulus" is to rip the guts out of our private economy and transfer wide swaths of it over to the government to control.

Pravda Tells the Truth About the State of the Free Market in America

It already made a splash when it came out several months ago, but Pravda's Stanislav Mishin article is as pertinent today, if not more so, as when it first came out.

…the population was dumbed down through a politicized and substandard education system based on pop culture, rather then the classics. Americans know more about their favorite TV dramas then the drama in DC that directly affects their lives.

…The final collapse has come with the election of Barack Obama. His speed in the past … months has been truly impressive. His spending and money printing has been a record setting, not just in America's short history but in the world. If this keeps up for more then another year, and there is no sign that it will not, America at best will resemble the Wiemar Republic and at worst Zimbabwe.

The good news is that the part about "the American public [taking] this with barely a whimper" has been proven false. As has the final paragraph, including the sentence, "The proud American will go down into his slavery with out a fight, beating his chest and proclaiming to the world, how free he really is."