It So Happens That Every Illegal Alien in America Already Does Have Papers

Everybody has the right to papers!

thundered one outraged Democrat among legions, as they castigate Arizona's (supposedly) undemocratic law demanding that illegal aliens show documentation. (Except of course, one is tempted to ask what the big deal is when, if liberals had their way, nobody actually would need papers anywhere when they show up to cast a vote in an election…)

Well, it so happens that every illegal alien in the United States is documented; every illegal alien in the United States does have papers.

Mexican papers.

(Well, sometimes, they have Honduran papers, or Guatemalan papers, or Belizean papers, or Filipino papers, or some other papers, but let's keep using Mexico as an illustrative example…)

If a foreigner, say an American, were to head to Mexico, for however short (a vacation) or however long a period (to work there) — and whether he entered the country legally or not (!) — he still, guess what, has papers. He has his American papers! Offhand, he has his driver's license, various IDs, and/or his passport…

True, a number of the Mexican and Central American illegals, many of them paupers, may not physically have papers in their pockets to produce, as is the case with many of their respective countrymen, but still, offhand, the "undocumented" immigrants retain as many (or as few) papers, and rights, as any other citizen of their own country before they emigrated, legally or otherwise.

Everybody has the right to papers, but everybody does not have the right to American papers!

What is there to be outraged about here? The equivalent is true for Americans, and for other Westerners — for instance the Yanqui Gringo mentioned above, who does not have the right (or an automatic right) to Mexican papers. Just as I, a foreigner living in Paris, do not have right — certainly, not an automatic right — to French papers and do not have the right to vote in French elections (it is not a right I would want — no offense intended — and I would never castigate the French for failing to give it to me or to any other foreigner)…

If I had the time, we could enter a discussion regarding the difference between natural rights (which every individual on Earth has) and civic rights (or citizen rights, which depend on the country you are — legally — living in, whatever part of the globe that country is located in), but I don't, so I will just suggest you read the books of Harry Jaffa…

To return to Mexico, nothing in Mexican law presupposes that our American expatriate be given, say, a job (or that he have the freedom to choose any job he wants) in Mexico or that, say, he vote in Mexican elections. Indeed, reports on Mexico's own problem with illegal aliens (Central Americans that cross over that nation's Southern border) point out to quite a few problems in that country (the one allegedly martyred by white American racists), far worse than anything in the United States, with Amnesty International calling "the abuse of migrants in Mexico a major human rights crisis".

Indeed, as JammieWearingFool puts it (gracias por el Professor Reynolds),

No wonder they're all moving to the Nazi-like, fascistic, police-state of Arizona.

Now, if any Mexicans, say the citizens of the estado de Chihuahua, want American papers, there is a simple solution: I suggest that they ask that the state be annexed by the United States. (Don't be so quick to issue a snort. I'm sure quite a few Mexicans would be more than willing to see that happen…)

Update: Referring to el Presidente de México, Rich Galen points out the double standards:

Felipe Calderón is whining about the way we are treating immigrants in the U.S. because they may be asked to produce documents proving they are here legally, while immigrants in his very own country are being kidnapped, robbed, raped, and murdered by the tens of thousands.

Update: Don Miguel adds as follows:

How about this: my father was born and grew up in Mexico. About 10 to 15 years ago Mexico passed a law allowing children of expatriates born in other countries to apply for citizenship. I was interested in this because it would then allow me to buy beachfront property in Mexico (foreigners cannot directly buy property within a few km of the beach or border legally). So I went to the closest consulate with my father's birth certificate and they told me basically to get lost since my father was considered by them to be a "gringo." Regardless of what the law said I wasn’t the “right” type of person for them. So even though I technically met the requirements of the law, there’s no way they would process my application.

That comment leads Pat Patterson to write:

I had heard some stories like the one Don Miguel related and to be honest thought they were either old wive's tales or simple misunderstandings.

Until one of my neighbors thought it would be a good idea for his children to have dual citizenship but was turned away at the consulate in Santa Ana for 'technical reasons' even though he had only recently become an American citizen. His delay oddly enough was because he had been an officer in the Mexican Air Force and the investigation took longer because the Mexican government wouldn't release his service record for years. It seems that the rule of thumb is that college educated American citizens of Mexican origin will either not be approved or delayed while working class Americans of Mexican origin will be approved asap.

Update: Mark Steyn:

…the coastal frothers denouncing Arizona as the Third Reich or, at best, apartheid South Africa, seem entirely relaxed about the ludicrous and embarrassing sight [in Quincy, Illinois,] of peaceful protesters being menaced by camp storm troopers from either a dinner-theater space opera or uniforms night at Mr. Newsom's re-election campaign.

Update: Ann Coulter:

The New York Times' Linda Greenhouse recently compared the Arizona law to Hitler's policies toward the Jews. You remember how Jews were constantly sneaking across the border into Nazi Germany?

The Pot-Banging Idiots are in Charge

Greece will never pay Germany back

Beware the rage of the Grecian street.

IFO’s Hand-Werner Sinn has warned, quite simply, that Greece is a bum. Any investor thinking of lending them a pfennig should be warned. The same is true for governments, and anyone buying the bonds of those governments that lend to them will see the rates creep up.

All fine and dandy, if you don’t think that they’ll default, but this is bad news for the taxpayers in those countries which will see the repayment cost on bond obligations rise.

The warning came as a new poll showed nearly two-thirds of Germans were opposed to helping Greece, with a majority believing that membership of the EU brought more disadvantages than advantages.

Asked on MDR radio if Berlin would ever get its money back, Sinn, who heads the Ifo institute and is one of the top economic advisers to the government, said: "To tell you the truth, no."

Greece "will not be in a position to carry out the necessary budgetary rigour" and will eventually have "to ask for Germany to waive the debt," he said.

He warned that bailing out Greece could set a precedent for other euro area countries labouring under high debt and public deficits.

Of course the feelies have to ring in as well, despite the fact that markets need to be left to establish the real, repayable, and durable value of what those loans will cost. German commentators, investors, and government are being accused to making things worse for Greece by merely thinking about what they are being asked to get into. How dare they consider the consequences to themselves.

The Greeks are mainly responsible for their current predicament. But the German government has made the country's situation worse with its lectures and reluctance to provide assistance. Chancellor Angela Merkel is mainly to blame for the fact that German taxpayers now have to suffer.

How? By her reluctance to lend an alcoholic the money to buy another bottle of Thunderbird only to have that vagrant smelling vaguely of urine show up again? It’s stupider than feeding squirrels.

Have no doubt about it, many in Europe will continue to carry on as though they’re Bolivian peasants “seeking justice” (and other people’s resources for free). Further, reason for the silence of the other EUvian über-champion economies (i.e. France, the UK, the Scandinavians, etal,) is rather obvious:

"It would be understandable if the Italians or the Spanish put pressure on us to pay up now because it is an important precedent for them," said Sinn.

Perhaps Berlin should bite this bullet, and leave the “national NINJA loans” of the likes of Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Ireland to the EU member states that are helping to be generous with German citizens’ resources now.

Agog, with Hands on Hips Akimbo

I silently hum “Don’t cry for me Argentina” when I hear this stuff:

BRUSSELS — European Union officials Wednesday were unable to mask their frustration with the downgrade of Greek debt by Standard & Poor’s to junk status.
“Who is Standard & Poor’s by the way?” asked Amadeu Altafaj

Oh piffle! Aren’t they something like People Magazine or something?

I mean, who’s this Amadeu Altafaj, anyway?

the spokesman for Olli Rehn, the E.U. monetary affairs commissioner, as he took the podium at a regular midday news briefing at the European Commission.

I guess they don’t teach that “you should actually know the subject” stuff at spokesman school. It gets better though, because it seems what they really want is that agencies DON’T rate anything in Europe, so as to put a Bund/Greek size yield gap between what their paper is really worth, versus what they wish it was worth.

Chantal Hughes, the spokeswoman for Michel Barnier, the E.U. commissioner for the internal market, then delivered a thinly veiled warning to agencies like Standard & Poor’s at the same news conference.

“We would expect that when credit rating agencies assess the Greek risk, they take due account of the fundamentals of the Greek economy and the support package prepared by the E.C.B., I.M.F. and Commission,” Ms. Hughes said. “And we of course expect that credit rating agencies, like other financial players, and in particular during this difficult and sensitive period, act in a responsible and rigorous way.”

I think they’re likely pricing in the Greek government’s ability and willingness to actually pay out on those maturities, actually, regardless of how much they can borrow from anyone else.

The E.U. passed new regulations for credit rating agencies last year after blaming them for significantly contributing to problems in the financial markets over the past two years and, in particular, for underestimating risks associated with complex financial instruments.

Which is alright, so long as you don’t price the risk on them.

Much ado about nothing....

Not sure what the AP is yammering on about:

World markets tumbled Wednesday amid acute fears that Greece's debt crisis would spread like wildfire through Europe after a leading credit ratings agency downgraded the country's debt to junk status and cut Portugal's rating as well.

After all, we know the seer of all statist seers recently reassured we the great unwashed that:

The reality is plain to see: there is no debt crisis that need cause us concern. Of course there are issues to deal with, but talk of a crisis is plain nonsense.

What is this, a moment of (somewhat) clarity from the statist touchstone:

And this then is a crisis created, in the main, by bankers – who put in place too many of the strictures inherent in the Euro; by libertarians who promote the hatred of the states and the poor regard for regulation that has denied the Greek government so much of the tax revenue it is owned and by financial institutions who (as Goldman Sachs seem to demonstrate, time and again) just love just situations to make short term profit at cost to ordinary people.

Nary a mention about the serial fraud perp'd by successive Greek governments in reporting phony economic data for years, nor the successive European governments who failed to hold the Greek governments accountable for their actions, nor the failure of EU-level governmental bodies for properly investigating the year over year over year fraud.

Then again, statists don't do governmental responsibility.

Eventually Going to Ground

A curious comment left on Gavin Hewett’s BBC news blog, went unrebutted.

In hard times Europe reasserts its true nature, antisemitic, antiroma, xenophobic, a cesspool of false national pride, ethnic hatred, and intense jealousies. All of the laws and treaties in the world can't change what is in people's hearts.

Then the author takes an interesting turn.

Outsiders may be ignored, their presence even tolerated to a degree but they are never fully integrated. Not after a generation, not after dozens of generations where they have lived peacefully yet are the objects of exclusion. America by contrast is based on a structure of shared values.

Further, without any sort of piling on to silence it, as one would normally find on this kind of forum, is a virtual Tea Party Movement sentiment coming from a Briton.

Well, people get sick and tired of being preyed upon by their government. They get sick and tired of being poor, watching their wages drop, watching their taxes rise. They get angry, they get tired. And then they start doing things all angry, tired folks generally do.

What Gavin is documenting here is the ritual of fascism. He calls it a "script" of European life. And that is correct.

Here’s looking at you, kid.

The New York Times Does It Again: Segregationist's 1960s "Hate Speech" Has "a Startlingly Contemporary Aspect"

The New York Times does it again: comparing tea partiers to the most excessive populists around the planet. This time — and again, with an insouciant and gratuitous comparison throw — Janet Maslin compares tea partiers to a Southern populist in favor of segregation. The tea partiers comparison, t'is true, is not quite spelled out, but it's quite clear whom she has (or whom her editors have) in mind. In a book review of Hampton Sides' Hellhound on His Trail, she writes that Eric Starvo Galt (aka James Earl Ray), the assassin of Martin Luther King Jr, "worked as a volunteer for the presidential campaign of George Wallace", which is fair enough, but then she adds a description of Wallace,

whose incendiary speeches and claims that a “whole heap of folks in this country feel the same way I do” are enough to give the hate speech in “Hellhound on His Trail” a startlingly contemporary aspect.

Enabling Evil

Merkel is aware of Germany’s aiding proliferation, but little is being done about it. How could it, in a world where the leader of Europe’s security benefactor still thinks that protecting oneself with a missile shield is a “provocation”?

‘According to the German-Iranian Chamber of Industry and Commerce in Tehran, two thirds of Iranian industrial enterprises and three quarters of its small and medium-sized firms use machines and systems of German origin. As Berlin’s Federal Agency for Foreign Trade affirmed in 2007, Germany is still Iran’s No. 1 supplier of almost all types of machinery apart from power systems and construction, where Italian manufacturers dominate the market.‘

The incredibly feeble part of it, is that it’s being used as an argument against free trade, using the tone of protectionist astroturfing of the issue from a “anti-globalization” position to get it through the reader’s thick heads:

When is such free trade, stupidity and suicidal? Should Europe be supplying Iran with instruments for the death of the West? Who in Brussels is listening while the regime and the crowds shout ‘Death to the Great Satan’ or ‘the world devourers’ — USA, Britain and Europe? They have been shouting that for THIRTY years.

And in that time, the Europeans, who are in the range of Iran’s missiles, used the opportunity to taunt the United States with accusations of fear-mongering for trying to do something about it, and in fact, using their flaccid and empty chattering, as if the Iranians were living by the rules of Victorian era gentlemen, as diplomatic cover under which Iran has managed to buy enough time to build (and buy from supposed “allies”) what they have.

The reaction, to all of this, is as one would expect. To demonize anyone mentioning the threat, and to advocate disarming their own states to put the strategic balance in the Iranians’ favor, and busying themselves with self-indulgent, stylized irrelevancies.

Step 3:

Seek the reason behind all of this ridiculous acting and then mush it together with all other hippie activists that have come before. Most hippies don't have new reasons for their social position or existence. Many just cling to a little dab here and there of purpose and protest but more or less are quiet, introspective, mumbling idealists. They may have great ideas in mind but have trouble expressing them. Many simply recycle old ideas and theories and regurgitate them in current tongue. World peace, anti-war, anti-establishment, free love, or simply liking the pretty colors will suffice for this step.

It’s probably a good way to pass the time waiting to watch missiles track overhead as well.

New York Times Compares Tea Parties to France's Ultra-Right-Wing and Racist National Front

In Michael Kimmelman's article about the status of the French language and about French culture and identity, the New York Times insouciantly (and gratuitously) throws in a comparison of America's tea parties to France's far-right party, the National Front, a faction whose members are routinely described as populist, reactionary, racist, and, above all, (very) dangerous. (That seems to be becoming the narrative, in France and elsewhere, as American expatriate Jake Lamar did something similar in Le Monde Magazine last weekend, "explaining" to French readers that Fox News would be like a popular French news channel, albeit run by le Front National.)

This ["having a common language doesn’t assure you a common political or cultural point of view"] may sound perfectly obvious to Americans, but it’s not necessarily so to France’s growing tea party contingent. The populist National Front party won some 20 percent of the vote in the south last month (less nationwide), despite Mr. Sarkozy’s monthslong campaign to seduce right-wing voters by stressing the preservation of French national identity. Part of that campaign has been affirming a policy of cultural exceptionalism.

The Front National is not only wrongly called the equivalent of a "tea party contingent" (for some reason, in case it might interest you, the International Herald Tribune's print version puts the expression "tea party" in quotes, thus: 'France’s growing "tea party" contingent'), the Michael Kimmelman article also wrongly seems to suggest, deliberately or otherwise, that the FN is a recent phenomenon (based you would think in effect on America's tea party), when Jean-Marie Le Pen founded the party almost 40 years ago…

Update: The New York Times does it again…

French is now spoken mostly by people who aren’t French

French is now spoken mostly by people who aren’t French

écrit Michael Kimmelman (see whom the New York Times compares tea partiers to).

More than 50 percent of them are African. French speakers are more likely to be Haitians and Canadians, Algerians and Senegalese, immigrants from Africa and Southeast Asia and the Caribbean who have settled in France, bringing their native cultures with them.

Which raises the question: So what does French culture signify these days when there are some 200 million French speakers in the world but only 65 million are actually French? Culture in general — and not just French culture — has become increasingly unfixed, unstable, fragmentary and elective. Globalization has hastened the desire of more people, both groups and individuals, to differentiate themselves from one another to claim a distinct place in the world, and language has long been an obvious means to do so.

You’re Hopeless if...

...all you can imagine freedom amounts to, is the unfettered theft of intellectual property. I’m sure the authors and musicians don’t think it’s a bargain.

Pirate parties fighting for increased freedom in sharing online content have formed an international organisation, writes Público. Gathered in Brussels, delegates from 44 countries approved statutes affirming the movement’s apolitical stance and non-profit motive. “The online content industry is leading a worldwide effort to limit civil liberties. This is the first step in our counterattack”,

And to think the German “Pirate Party” imagines themselves to be the continent’s smart and edgy, “I wear weird glasses” Libertarian types. The best they could come up with is basically to unionize, and stick it to the people who are actually creative. It flies in the face of their stand on the propriety of private communication, something they do believe to be somehow a different kind of private property than some author’s book or song. Tapping them is fair game.

Do they even know what rights are?

Oh No! They Killed Fatima!

Will someone find me some of those mobs of moderates who have something to say about this style of “raising awareness”?

A radical Islamic website is warning the creators of "South Park" that they could face violent retribution for depicting the Prophet Muhammad in a bear suit during an episode broadcast on Comedy Central last week.

The most utter humorless, thin skinned culture on earth, just got less worthy of anyone’s concern.

Reaching by phone early Tuesday, Abu Talhah al Amrikee, the author of the post, said he wrote the entry to "raise awareness." He said the grisly photograph of van Gogh was meant to "explain the severity" of what Parker and Stone did by mocking Muhammad.

"It's not a threat, but it really is a likely outcome," al Amrikee said, referring to the possibility that Parker and Stone could be murdered for mocking Muhammad. "They're going to be basically on a list in the back of the minds of a large number of Muslims. It's just the reality."

Using the naming style of al-Queda’s mud-hut-in-the-middle-of-dirt notion of internationalism, the man renamed himself “al Imriki” or “the American,” just like Azzam al Amriki (the buffoonish threat-monger, Adam Gadahn), Abu Ayyub al-Masri (Masri = Egyptian), etc., etc., and the rest of the muppet rejects.

The guy is a playtime wannabe Jihadist, who even by the dim standards of Arab society finds “enriching” the reducing of your persona to your nation of origin within “the global caliphate”.

Al Amrikee said the website is considering a protest against the "disgusting" show, which also depicted the Prophet Muhammad in an episode on July 4, 2001.

"This is not a small thing," he said. "We should do whatever we can to make sure it does not happen again."

And to think it only took him 8 years and 10 months to catch on.

Tell you what, Spanky: you stop apologizing, if not abetting the murder and abuse of Arab Christians simply because of their consciences, and I’ll start worrying about you tender little feelings, and ignore your desperate outbursts trying to prop up your distorted notion of what manhood is. To him, it seem that a man is someone who murders when offended, then tells himself something to call his extremism socially “just”.

Carville's "Reptiles" Smear Is a Perfect Illustration of Lincoln Describing the 19th-Century Demonization of Republicans

Plus ça change… James Taranto points out (thanks to Instapundit) that

former Clinton aide James Carville, raising money for the Democratic National Campaign Committee, put his name to an email titled "reptiles," which insults Republicans in a way some see as invidious:

First there was Sarah Palin. Now we can add another Republican reptile from the past trying to help the GOP win House races this year--former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum.

How could anybody better illustrate my contention (a mere observation, really) — discernible in my upcoming graphic novel with Dan Greenberg, The Life and Times of Abraham Lincoln — that not much has changed from a century and a half ago, specifically when Honest Abe spoke at the Cooper Union in February 1860 (150 years ago), addressing the Republicans' castigators:

…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.

Update: Lincoln Reloaded: The House Divided Speech, Updated for 2010

A Swiss TV Report on Sarkozy Unseen in France

(Merci à Sandy)

Stop All Human Activity Now!

What are, nettlesome wannabe do-gooders, if not the sort of people willing to be generous with other people’s resources? I ask myself that daily, quite frankly, knowing full well that it isn’t going to make EUvian do the only thing they know how: leveraging others’ ability to do what they’re incapable of.

Extra climate meetings agreed as treaty remains elusive

While it is likely at this stage, that the word “summit” has been banalized from overuse.

The lack of a specific roadmap means that the June talks in Bonn will have to continue to debate operational issues rather than moving on to debating the substance of any future treaty.

Thankfully, we have the developing world to spank some common sense into them:

Yvo de Boer, the UNFCCC executive secretary, told BBC News that the chances of seeing a new treaty this year are "very slim".

"I think that developing countries will want to see what the nature of an agreement is going to be before they will be willing to turn it into a legally-binding treaty, so that basically means a two-step process," he said.

As opposed to the preferred “one step” process, whereby the nations of the world agree to a legally binding mechanism concocted by a small committee (considering the global terms on which they would like to operate,) without knowing what the consequences are.

We R Smartr Than Kluless Amurcans, and We Kan Spel

Euranet, the sneery, EU funded radio operation, had heading their page a spelling error worthy of an unpaid blogger or University intern working for peanuts. With a sharp, critical eye on Romanian relationship with the United States, formed out of a complete absence of European support for Romanian security concerns, they are being critical of the Romanian military’s purchase of 24 refurbished F-16s. It could only “come as a surprise” to them if the EU-3 operate on the assumption that all other members of the union were “junior members” in nature, and can’t act without their approval on national matters.

Never mind the fact that German and French tried to condition financial aid to Greece on the sale of ships and fighters, or what that does to the Union for all’s relationship with Turkey. They European governments ARE the embodiment of that secretive and weird mystery-illuminati that so many of their citizens seem to think are lurking under every Menorah and behind every American flag.

As to the rest of the story, the likes of Euranet seem unwilling to touch the inconvenient background to the story from late March.

Swedish defense manufacturer Saab on March 26 asked the Romanian government to explain why it has decided to purchase second-hand U.S. F-16 fighter planes to the detriment of the Saab-manufactured Gripen fighter. The issue was also brought up in a meeting between Romanian Senate Chairman Mircea Geoana — the leading opposition figure in Romania — and EU member state ambassadors in Bucharest on March 25, with Geoana stating that he will bring the issue up for vote in the legislature if the government does not respond to the criticism. With the announced purchase of second-hand U.S. F-16s Romania is essentially signaling that its commitment to the U.S. security alliance takes precedent over its economic alliance with Europe.

Along with Swedish Saab, Romania also spurned the French-made Rafale and the British-Italian-French-Spanish Eurofighter. Bucharest’s decision also means that Saab will have to depend on the upcoming Brazilian decision on whether to purchase Gripen NG’s, F/A-18E/F Super Hornets or Rafales. Indications at the moment are that Brazil will choose Rafales in what is considered a “political” decision by the Brazilian government to increase its military cooperation with France.

Ergo: “cooperation” = sales from governments that wouldn't lift their finger if the Russians, always searching for Ivan Ivanovich's imaginary collective manhood, start to meddle in the Black Sea. Bien compris?

Prognosticus Revisited

Needless to say, we are all shocked and dismayed upon reading the latest:

Greek debt crisis gets worse as EU revises figures

Afterall, it was just a few scant weeks ago that our favourite statist touchstone was pronouncing, from on high, a verdict regarding the very same subject:

The reality is plain to see: there is no debt crisis that need cause us concern. Of course there are issues to deal with, but talk of a crisis is plain nonsense.

What, me worry?

das Mantras

Something is missing here:

Nevertheless, says Brannigan, "Germans can be proud of this law." Without the help of lawmakers, he says, Germany would hardly have seen such dynamic development of renewable energy sources. What was once a niche industry has turned into a sector with global importance. The solar industry is responsible for almost 80,000 jobs in Germany alone.

But lawmakers have overshot the mark by far, at least when it comes to subsidies for solar energy. Anyone who installs solar panels benefits from guaranteed feed-in tariffs for the next 20 years. That means that, over a 20-year period, Germany's electricity customers will pay a total of around €14 billion in subsidies -- just for the solar panels that were installed in 2009. And that cost is likely to rise in the future, because Germans are mounting more and more solar collectors on their roofs. Economists estimate that all the solar panels installed by 2013 will cost German consumers more than €70 billion. Thanks to the generous subsidy program, crops on some fields have been replaced with arrays of shimmering, bluish modules mounted on automated stands and tilted toward the sun. And all of this is being done for an amount of electricity that meets only 1.1 percent of German demand.

Ahh yes, the phraseology is no longer renewable and sustainable energy sources. The narrative moves on....

The Minister of Everything: Nicolas Sarkozy’s Rotten Spring

John Vinocur on Nicolas Sarkozy:

The polls are awful these days, while commentaries range largely from the impatient and disappointed to the cruel and vicious. Mr. Sarkozy’s seemingly raucous, self-absorbed personal style is a constant target, while his campaign promises to vitalize and reform French politics and economic performance are increasingly mocked as substanceless.

[Both Jacques Chirac and] his predecessor, François Mitterrand, had worse poll results than Mr. Sarkozy, and even more obvious political setbacks, each losing his parliamentary majority in mid-mandate elections.

…But both men, who ruled into their 70s, projected a kind of presidential serenity that Mr. Sarkozy, 20 years younger, has not. They kept a fairly regal distance from daily domestic policy making and politics — in contrast to their successor’s hands-on-everything approach.

…A Gaullist colleague of the president … said, “Sarkozy literally personalized every aspect of government and became the minister of everything. He thought he could move from agriculture to labor to immigration fast enough to stay a moving target. As it turned out, he became the target of every constituency imaginable.”

Roger Cohen joins in with Reading Sarkozy’s Mind:

And Iran. Ooh la la! All these advisers telling me Khamenei is not Ahmadinejad and Ahmadinejad is not Larijani. C’est du baloney! Du pur baloney! They’re all the same band of liars playing with us like a cat with a ball of wool.

Oh, Those Dastardly Francophobic Americans

I have yet to see any mention in the US general interest press, or even the financial press of the nationality of the Goldman Sachs VP who played a supporting role to John Paulson, the man behind the failed financial product that the SEC’s nicely timed investigation is all about.

Otherwise, you find the usual anonymous net nitwit comments that reveal a soul of a nation, the one that likes to find associations between nationalities and inherent wrongness in the same way bombasts used to use race:

Je suis très étonnée qu'il n'y ai que des français qui aient très mauvaise réputation. Tous les traders sont à mettre dans le même panier. on devrait supprimer la BOURSE on serait tranquille.

or:

“I am very surprised that there have only the French who have very bad reputation. All traders are put in one basket. we should eliminate STOCK to keep things calm”

As usual, there are no other people out there in the world, and that fact that people are more relevant for who they are instead of what they do figures into a good reason to bloviate stupidly about market economics that the commenter doesn’t understand anyway.

It’s like the old off-hand statement one used to hear “those smart, humane people” say about how there shouldn’t be any money, and then everyone will be free of worry and prosperous.

In either case, I’m always trying to figure out who’s taking the other side of that trade.

Hide the Ash

There’s no social prohibition on calling THIS ‘climate model’ flawed. No-one will berate you for hours on end. Then again, unlike the earthquake in Haiti, no-one is leaping to blame the Eyjafjallajökull volcano on manmade global warming.

The computer models that guided decisions to impose a no-fly zone across most of Europe in recent days are based on incomplete science and limited data, according to European officials. As a result, they may have over-stated the risks to the public, needlessly grounding flights and damaging businesses.

Nature’s power, yadda-yadda, indeed, not to mention the fine example it makes of man’s powerlessness to effect it. Just don’t say anything about man not being responsible for the entire earth’s weather.

“It is a black box in certain areas,” Matthias Ruete, the EU’s director-general for mobility and transport, said on Monday, noting that many of the assumptions in the computer models were not backed by scientific evidence.

Shhh!

Unity, at a Glance

It always boils down to “the better angels of your spirit be damned”. EU membership, is, if nothing else, a means by which to use stereotypes and history shake one another down. Like the UN, poor people in rich countries are being expected to indulge the desires of rich people in poor counties, and this is what it sounds like:

Greeks should boycott German goods

Berlin has been hesitant on the issue of a financial package for Greece and Chancellor Angela Merkel has suggested it should be possible to exclude offending countries from the Eurozone. The Greeks should not take such a show of contempt sitting down, writes the left-liberal daily Ta Nea: "The German attitude has nothing in common with how Kohl, Mitterrand and Delors saw the EU, namely as a melting pot that would bring about European unity. The time has come for us to react. Berlin has reaped much advantage from the EU, and now it is refusing to provide resources to help it out in a time of need.

Like all good little retrograde leftists, the class warfare card gets pulled out, even if does operate on the assumption that Germans are rich because they’re German, not because of what they do. It’s the SOS of European history.

They should import fewer German products and buy more Italian, French, Spanish and Greek goods. Only in this way will Merkel grasp that a racist attitude to other countries can be economically detrimental, particularly to Germany."

I guess that makes them “Anglo Saxon” straw-men after the fashion of the French nationalists looking at any population that goes its’ own way without taking the vague desires of their population as a guide to how they should conduct their lives.

My approach to that issue is to immediately make the point that if the rest of us are Anglo-Saxons, something that the Francophilic users of the term mysteriously avoid applying to Germans, is to say that it would otherwise be just to call the users of the term Visigoths, fans of brutal, central authority, and tribal goading and mayhem, which is actually more applicable to the melting-pot societies they try to apply the disparagement to.

The array of one caste against another, a practice which has never failed to destroy a government and degrade a people, is conspicuous everywhere. The court was regarded rather as a place of execution than the seat of the rendition of justice; the judge rather an avenger of injury, than the representative of the law and the guardian of social order.

Theirin we find the roots of modern day, European feel-good solidarity, no different than the anti-Anglo-Saxons of today:

The execrable errors of heretics in general, having been already prohibited and disposed of, it now becomes our duty to make special provision for some that exist in our days, and of which we are, at present, well aware. For while the virtue of God, by the sword of his Word, extirpated all other heresies, root and branch, we have to lament that the soil of our kingdom is still only defiled by the infamy of the Jews.

If that isn’t an accurate reflection of present day populism, I don’t know what is, and to think that it came after 1360 years of self-administered diversity training.

It's not about rich versus poor: It's about parasites versus producers; It's about takers versus makers

This will give you an idea of some of the outrage that’s fueling the tea party movement. When I asked a local tea party organizer what got her started, one of the first things she mentioned was the contrast between what ordinary people were doing with their own budgets—cutting back, giving up on luxuries, trying to dig themselves out of debt—and what the federal government was doing: a spending binge financed by vast new quantities of debt that we will have to pay. People are outraged, and they are terrified of a future in which America’s only growth industry is government.

Thus writes Robert Tracinski.

The New York Times just put out an analysis of a survey on the tea party movement. I love it when the mainstream media does surveys like this, because the results are usually a mix of the totally obvious and the totally wrong.

For example, they found out that "while most Republicans say they are 'dissatisfied' with Washington, Tea Party supporters are more likely to classify themselves as 'angry.'" I hope they didn't pay too much money to find that out.

Now for the totally wrong part. When I got an e-mail alert about this article, the headline read, "Poll Finds Tea Party Anger Rooted in Issues of Class." Issues of class? What does that mean? The article says that we're motivated by "the conviction that the policies of the Obama administration are disproportionately directed at helping the poor rather than the middle class or the rich." Yeah, we're concerned that the government hasn't done enough to help out the rich, that's why we're marching. Not enough bailouts for Goldman Sachs.

These guys are incorrigible old Marxists, so they want to see everything as class warfare between the workers and the capitalists. So they miss the real class division that is driving the tea party movement: a division between the producer class versus the parasite class. It's a division between people who take on the responsibility of supporting themselves and who end up having to pay all of the bills for runaway government, too, versus the people who want to live off of our work. That includes the poor people who are, for example, getting checks from the government for "tax credits" on income taxes that they never paid. This is the new form of welfare, by the way, because it's a way that politicians can give handouts while calling it a "tax cut." So you give people a tax credit that they can claim as going toward an income tax "refund," even though they don't make enough money to pay income taxes in the first place. It's a handout disguised as a tax refund. But we're also angry about the guys making $150,000 a year as bureaucratic paper-shufflers in Washington, and the guys with politically connected businesses who are getting money from bailouts and the stimulus and the "green jobs" racket.

It's not about rich versus poor. It's about parasites versus producers. It's about takers versus makers.

The Obama Doctrine: Ignore the great threats and cloak the lesser threats in faux unity, pomp, and circumstance

Assemble all these pieces and an Obama Doctrine begins to take shape

concludes Cliff May.

Assemble all these pieces and an Obama Doctrine begins to take shape. It might be summed up this way: Ignore the great threats and cloak the lesser threats in faux unity, pomp and circumstance; talk incessantly and carry a shrinking stick. Somehow, I doubt that's the change most Americans have been hoping for.

Compare with Frank Gaffney's definition of the Obama Doctrine…

Go West: “I am the liberals’ worst nightmare!”

Colonel Allen West (thanks to Valerie):

I've been called an oreo; I've been called a token; I've been called a sell-out; I've been called an Uncle Tom; and to all of those people that call me names, I want to tell you them something: all that does for an old paratrooper, just makes him dig in his heels even more!

I am standing here with my American brothers and sisters! And it has nothing to do with race! It has nothing to do with color! It's all about your character! And we don't have character in Washington, D.C.!

…I am the liberals’ worst nightmare! They cannot afford to have a young man from the inner city of Atlanta, Georgia, to rise up in this country, because I completely invalidate all of their social welfare policies that have been tearing up our country.

Mindless Class Warfare at it’s Oldest

So goes the headline:

“Rich getting richer, study finds”

Good, because I don’t think the poor are hiring anyone.

This repeating of this pedantic argument was overdue, anyway. It involved the RELATIVE differences in earnings. In other words, if you eliminate wealth in this statistical model, the rate of poverty falls. Not REAL poverty, just the poverty identified as that called out RELATIVE to the richest earner.

In fact, the fascinating thing about this notion is that if the rich REALLY DO get richer, and the middle income earners are impoverished, it still shows a drop in RELATIVE poverty – which they are using to calculate the rate of poverty.

That’s to be made distinct from ACTUAL poverty. Absolute social success in the “income gap” model means that everyone is poor, especially since they no longer have anyone to work for, short of a central government who will have to RAISE THE TAXES ON THE POOR to fund the milk of human kindness, which, at that point, usually requires that you know someone to have access to.

What does growing income inequality mean for society? Koedijk said he feared it could undermine social cohesion. Those on top, particularly in finance, can do as they please for the rest of their life after landing a top position. This leaves them free from entering into any long-term commitments.

Which is known to Americans as “owning your fate” and freedom from government dependency. It doesn’t require a great deal of wealth to achieve, just common sense, a ken for saving and investing, and a liberated mind. In fact it’s very “middle class” once you walk off of the plantation of the left.

Paging Michael Moore, Janeane Garofalo, Sean Penn, Tim Robbins and anyone at the New York Times Editorial Board

Ahem:

On a cool but sun-drenched Sunday, the president and three golfing companions went to Andrews Air Force Base to play 18 holes. It is the 32nd time Mr. Obama has played golf since taking office Jan. 20, 2009, according to CBS Radio's Mark Knoller.

Fair enough.

However:

Mr. Obama has played golf far more often than former President George W. Bush. In his eight years in office, Mr. Bush played just 24 times. His last time as president was Oct. 13, 2003.

He said in 2008 that he gave up golf "in solidarity" with the families of soldiers who were dying in Iraq.

"I don't want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the commander in chief playing golf," Mr. Bush said in a White House interview Saturday with the Politico. "I feel I owe it to the families to be as — to be in solidarity as best as I can with them. And I think playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal."

He stopped playing after he received word of a deadly attack in Iraq while playing golf during a stay at the family ranch near Crawford, Texas.

"They pulled me off the golf course, and I said it's just not worth it anymore to do," Mr. Bush said in the interview.

Since Mr. Obama took office, 397 soldiers have died in Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan. Another 151 have died in Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Filed under, consistency alert

The most pressing issues of war and peace ....

....can wait. Our best and brightest are otherwise engaged with the truly weighty issues of the day:

AN overseas holiday used to be thought of as a reward for a year’s hard work. Now Brussels has declared that tourism is a human right and pensioners, youths and those too poor to afford it should have their travel subsidised by the taxpayer.

Under the scheme, British pensioners could be given cut-price trips to Spain, while Greek teenagers could be taken around disused mills in Manchester to experience the cultural diversity of Europe.

The idea for the subsidised tours is the brainchild of Antonio Tajani, the European Union commissioner for enterprise and industry, who was appointed by Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian prime minister.

The scheme, which could cost hundreds of millions of pounds a year, is intended to promote a sense of pride in European culture, bridge the north-south divide in the continent and prop up resorts in their off-season.

Do note, that would cost hundreds of millions of tax-payer funded pounds a year.

(h/t to the Godfather)

"Vigilance" Now Has a Place in the Major League of Fuzziness Alongside "Inacceptable"

The United States’ notions of U.N. sanctions on Iran have devolved over the past months from crippling ones to ones that bite to the currently described smart ones, which although packaged with the words tough and strong might not be hard-nosed enough to cost the mullahs a half-hour’s lost sleep

writes John Vinocur.

Is this a descending spiral of resolve fated to result in sanctions that pinch, nip or tweak? …the United States could seem to some of its allies to be shying away from pressing the United Nations to adopt extensive sanctions on the export of refined petroleum products to Iran.

…Besides, if we’re dealing in morality on serious methods for depriving Iran of nuclear weapons capability or a bomb, lowering the level of gasoline exports to Iran instead of carrying out airstrikes on presumed nuclear installations would seem to be a far preferable “humanitarian” approach (Mr. Rhodes’ word) for both Iranians and the U.S. military.

The French, who are pretty consistently tough on Iran, appeared truly irritated a few months back when Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, in moving away from her call for crippling sanctions, expressed a preference for sanctions that would “not contribute to the suffering of ordinary Iranians.”

…Ah, vigilance. It’s also the word, open to a hundred interpretations, that has come under discussion as a substitute for U.N. sanctions banning transactions involving Iran’s central bank.

With all its vagueness, vigilance now has a place in the major league of fuzziness alongside “unacceptable,” the term used by the United States and its friends concerning Iran’s eventually achieving nuclear weapons status. No course in diplomatic exegesis is required to think that’s an awful long way from saying, “We won’t allow it.”

You’ll Eat it and You’ll Like it!

The EU’s Lisbon Treaty (Not to be confused with the Lisbon Strategy), it seems, has a Trojan Horse inside it. Laws, if passed by elected MEPs, can be simply re-written in closed committee as a part of the process of outlining the means of exercising those laws.

The system works like this: after an EU law has been agreed by the European Parliament and Council (after having been proposed by the Commission), the Commission, aided by national experts, still has room for manoeuvre in amending or adding to the Directive at a later date, with limited involvement from the European Parliament and the Council. Whenever a Directive says that something will be decided through "implementing measures",

Called “comitology,” it sounds very much like a term imported from France, one bound up with the far-left fantasies of a social state of lockstep action by the population.

The European Affairs Committee of the Danish Parliament has noted that the system of comitology “means that the Commission can adopt EU legislation against the will of a majority of Member States in the Council", saying “We find such a procedure undemocratic” and “Another problem with the comitology system is the short time made available for parliamentary scrutiny.”

And here’s the really sad part:

The word comitology is going to disappear! The only common element of understanding about it is going to be removed from the dictionary. From now on, people will talk of delegated acts (which replace quasi-legislative acts) and implementing acts (which replace comitology strictu sensu).

And it will simply be “assumed” to be part of the process that doesn’t need to be identified or mentioned. “Thank goodness!” Insiders must be thinking... “Democracy averted!” As for magnitude?

He concludes, "comitology represents about 98 percent of the regulatory activity of the Union in a year. And this 98 percent is the Commission's competence".

The author further notes that otherwise, the implementation of European construction would come to a standstill. Not quite. It’s those measures pushed through the Comity process that would come to a standstill, as only 2% of them seem to have the simplicity to become law on their own, or enough public support to not need revision.

What’s worse, is that the act of arguing and proposing those laws, absent the language of executable law, details, and enough information to determine the consequences from jump street, simply encourages irresponsibility and the unmooring of the caring sounding declarations from reality, as though it would be nice if every subject and serf should have their own unicorn ranch, and that it’s a human right, knowing that a committee is there it work out how to redefine a Unicorn and a Farm to be, say, a envelope with a stamp affixed to it.

It’s a moral hazard like no other.

And Now for Something Completely Scandinavian

Regarding the Iceland's volcano eruption:

Unable to fly out of Oslo after an appearance on the popular Scandinavian talk show Skavlan on Thursday, John Cleese explained to Norway’s TV2 in a telephone interview that he has hailed a taxi and embarked on a 930-mile ride from Oslo to Brussels.

The Poles' "Obsession" with Katyn

Little seems to have changed in French attitudes regarding communist crimes since Wajda's Katyn came out a year ago and was immediately lambasted by Le Monde for having the audacity to compare Soviet crimes with those of the Nazis…

In Le Monde, again, we have one article lamenting the Poles' obsession with Katyn (simple question: why is the Poles' anger over 21,000 murders over a few weeks — a liquidation that was denied for decades — an "obsession" while that of leftists the world over — i.e., the self-same leftists who took the Kremlin's decade-long denials for granted — regarding Pinochet's 3,000 victims over 17 years nothing but respect for life and truth and the pursuit of justice?), while another, by Franck Nouchi, speaks of the mass massacre without once mentioning Soviet guilt.

That "Sovietolatrous" article describes the the DVD of the Wajda film which has just come out in France, noting that the French version features, among other bonuses, two 1943 propaganda films, one of German (Nazi) newsreels from the area (rightly) accusing the Soviets of the massacre, along with later Soviet newsreels counter-accusing the Germans thereof. Franck Nouchi's conclusion (mentioning the alleged Soviet "academicians" and "scientists" — without quotation marks — who came to "study" the forest, allegedly objectively, in order to pinpoint guilt): Only the trees of Katyn know what really happened…

As one Le Monde reader concludes, regarding "ce sinistre billet soviétolâtre":

Nouchi et « Le Monde » se remettront-ils un jour de la chute de l'URSS ?

Will Nouchi and Le Monde ever get over the collapse of the USSR?

What’s Old is Old Again

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - The number of antisemitic incidents mushroomed in many western EU countries in 2009 due to an organised anti-Gaza war campaign, a new study says.

Alas, further furry fables from EUtopia, land of love, tolerance and world peace:

Looking at the number of violent incidents in absolute terms, the UK and France lead the EU league table, followed by Germany, Belgium and Austria. Relatively high numbers are also seen in the Czech Republic, Denmark, Hungary, Italy, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Poland and Sweden.

You’ll note that what triggers the attackers is not what any of the victims does, but what their identities are believed to represent to the attackers. In other words: the same old small-minded continental rubbish that they know “classically European” people can no longer do to one another in the same way they permit themselves to say and do to others, even to whole classes of people that they have always made straw-men of, and imaginary sources of their struggles of.

It’s only a matter of time until someone prominent starts to blame Greece’s economic problems on some generic concept they have of Jews. It will surely go unquestioned by Europeans who have likely never met a Jew too.

The institute said the rise was due to an organised campaign by far-left parties and Muslim communities, funded by "oil money" rather than due to a spontaneous reaction, although the report does not provide evidence for this accusation.

"The intensity and nature of the wave that began in January 2009 testified to pre-planned mobilisation among radicals from the left and among Muslim immigrant communities," it said.

The “oil money” part sounds a little sketchy, but isn’t that far fetched when you consider some of the opinions overheard made by near-Eastern business people. In fact one of the ttraits one finds with the younger ones, is a desire to be liked by the aboriginal Europeans, which frequently amounts to young, politically active and fairly extreme college students who coddle the old racial arguments out of mere ignorance of the past, being morally bereft when it comes to anyone other than their friends and families, and a youthful lack of life experience.

To single THEM out and characterize them, they are frequently seen wearing contrived looking whispy scarves, sweaters, no jackets (except for fake “army surplus” style jackets in the dead of winter,) and go strategically unkempt. Absent any air of dignity it’s just another uniform pulled out of history like so many others in their self-immolating continent’s past.

Remember, they’re better than you and I are. More smarter too!

Le Monde in Awe of Obama Bowing to China's Dictator

The Apologizer-in-Chief's bow to China's dictator Hu Jintao makes the front page of Le Monde…

Bookmarks switched at birth

Wait, did I click on the Onion or Spiegel......

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.