Sending one post after another into the Internet wilderness can eventually get you on the front page of the IHT

For years, almost nobody paid attention to the sky-is-falling alarms of Edward Hugh, a gregarious British blogger and self-taught economist who repeatedly predicted that the euro zone could not survive

writes Landon Thomas Jr regarding the unheeded Cassandra about Europe’s fiscal problems, in what must surely be encouraging news for bloggers the world over.

Living a largely hand-to-mouth existence here on his part-time teacher’s salary, he sent one post after another into the Internet wilderness. It was the height of policy folly, he warned, to think that aging, penny-pinching Germans could successfully coexist under one currency umbrella with the more youthful, credit-card-wielding Irish, Greeks and Spaniards who shared the euro with them.

But now that the European sovereign debt crisis is rattling world markets, driving the euro lower almost every day and raising doubts about the future of the monetary union, his voluminous musings have become a must-read for an influential and growing global audience, including policy makers in the White House.

He has even been courted by the International Monetary Fund, which recently asked him to fly to Madrid to assist in its analysis of the Spanish economy.

"It’s a Global World” and Other Empty, International Vapidity

As if the notion wasn’t idiotic to begin with, this is why I don’t particularly care when I hear complaints that the US is not really part of the ‘global community’ and needs to ‘join’.

The Taipei-based Liberty Times quoted unnamed travel agents as saying that Chinese authorities were concerned that "it was easier for bald people to disguise themselves".

Maybe it’s some strange, inexplicable trauma some apparachik had after watching Telly Savalas flip his top in The Dirty Dozen, or something.

Smart Diplomacy: Dutch troops are expected to leave Afghanistan by August

So how's that new diplomacy working for you, Mr. Apologizer-in-Chief?

The BBC:

The government [in the Netherlands] fell when Labour [i.e., Barack Obama's fellow leftists and "humanists"] withdrew from the coalition after refusing to extend the Dutch contribution to the Nato force, as outgoing PM Balkenende wanted.

Dutch troops are therefore expected to leave Afghanistan by August.

The good news from the Dutch elections, of course, is that

The unexpected big winner was the anti-Islam Freedom Party, the PVV, which took its number of seats from nine in the last parliament to 24 — its best-ever finish.

The campaign had been dominated by a debate over the economy, which was thought to have eclipsed immigration as an election issue.

But the strong showing for the Freedom Party, led by the controversial Geert Wilders, is a sign that immigration was still a powerful theme…

Who are you Callin’ “Yeller”?

Do your best to get through the condescension:

Five years ago, China was the Great Yellow Hope of the European Union (EU). Brussels believed the Middle Kingdom was moving along the same path of postmodern pacificism being taken by Europe. Today, Europeans recognise this was a Great Western Delusion.

Or rather, a great European delusion.

Brussels began to see values in Beijing’s worldview that were invisible to countries closer to China. China, it was said, sought a multipolar world based on international law.

That’s the China that beheads prisoners and harvests organs before sundown, which, it seems is okay if you keep repeating “international law,” whatever European delusion is associated with that, and hoping they don’t imagine any seriousness in your population’s “Free Tibet” loons, those hardcore advocates of ‘regime change’ if there ever were any.

Its politik was all about soft power. EU President Jose Manuel Barroso, after a 2005 visit to China, spoke of an EU-China-US “triangulation” that would mould “a 21st century world order.” He envisioned a “cooperative Eurasia under Sino-European leadership and a China-centred US policy towards Asia.” Some saw Europe as an elder statesmen teaching the Chinese novice the ways of the world.

What arrogance. One can easily imagine that sort of arrogance at work too. The notion that the Europeans have been geostrategic big-dick daddies all along (when all they’ve been doing for half a century is warming the bench), and that the Chinese wouldn’t notice, or even submit to “triangulation” against the US, with whom their relationship is far broader and more meaningful.

There’s also the assumption that for the chance to touch Europe’s blessed hem, that the Chinese government would willingly be used as a political tool. Who do they think they are?

In Beijing they could have surely heard the crackle of that crack-pipe in Brussels, and realized full well that the Europeans are a sort of Jonathan Winters in the global barnyard: they’re the comic relief, but have something tragically disturbing about them.

China had no illusions of what Europe meant to it. Europeans were wealthy but weak. They should be wooed for economic reasons, but ignored for strategic ones. Beijing treated the relationship like a game of chess “with 27 opponents crowding the other side of the board and squabbling about which piece to move.”

“It’s useless to try to hide the tensions between France and Germany": German-French relations and the EU in general have entered uncharted territory

…the idea of the inevitability and even the quasi-sacred character of the French-German relationship is one of the platitudes that have been shaken with the exposure of some of the European Union’s existential fibs, and the linked fragility of the European Union’s common currency

intones John Vinocur in his International Herald Tribune article about "the magnitude of what has changed in Europe in a few months’ time".

A German official I talked to last week … said German-French relations and the European Union in general have entered “Neuland,” German for uncharted territory. He believes a European decade has been wasted through a lack of frankness and realism.

…markets have become the daily judges of European policy, probity and sovereign debt. That hardly matches up with past French-German prerogatives.

…in what looked like a major, targeted transgression, Finance Minister Christine Lagarde of France has said (twice, for clarity) that Germany’s persistence in holding down wages and failure to stimulate domestic demand created imbalances in Germany’s favor that were impossible for other E.U. members to sustain.

Her statement, issued in a period of crisis with the approval of the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, entered a previously taboo area of French-German power relations: it suggested both that Germany was acting selfishly and that France could cast itself inside the European Union as Europe’s champion of solidarity, and outside as Europe’s foremost consensual representative.

Related: The Netherlands

Every Dutch party now holds positions concerning immigrants’ obligations to Dutch society that might've been called fascistic by the left a decade ago

Acid Flashback, Paul Krugman-style

Paul Krugman, 2005:

Americans tend to believe that we do everything better than anyone else. That belief makes it hard for us to learn from others. For example, I've found that many people refuse to believe that Europe has anything to teach us about health care policy. After all, they say, how can Europeans be good at health care when their economies are such failures?

Now, there's no reason a country can't have both an excellent health care system and a troubled economy (or vice versa). But are European economies really doing that badly?

The answer is no.

Paul Krugman, 2010:

Folks, this is getting ugly. And the US needs to be thinking about how to insulate itself from European masochism.

Hat-tip: the Statist

The Surrealism-based Community Slams into the Science of Economics

Who is better informed about the policy choices facing the country—liberals, conservatives or libertarians? According to a Zogby International survey that I write about in the May issue of Econ Journal Watch, the answer is unequivocal: The left flunks Econ 101.

Among the left’s self-lauditory rubbish about itself is the notion that they know how to conduct an economy well so that it serves the public well. Pshyeah, right. Compared to just about anyone else they register somewhere between a dull thud and a talking toy with a pull-string.

How did the six ideological groups do overall? Here they are, best to worst, with an average number of incorrect responses from 0 to 8: Very conservative, 1.30; Libertarian, 1.38; Conservative, 1.67; Moderate, 3.67; Liberal, 4.69; Progressive/very liberal, 5.26.

Americans in the first three categories do reasonably well. But the left has trouble squaring economic thinking with their political psychology, morals and aesthetics

Further still down the orbit-track circling planet dork, the divergence comes largely from imagining the things that establish the real cost (and thus the real problem) of virtually all goods and services in the real world meat-space occurring outside the left’s ideology.

Basic economics acknowledges that whatever redeeming features a restriction may have, it increases the cost of production and exchange, making goods and services less affordable. There may be exceptions to the general case, but they would be atypical.

Which can be noted in blowing questions as simple as this one:

"Restrictions on housing development make housing less affordable." People were asked if they: 1) strongly agree; 2) somewhat agree; 3) somewhat disagree; 4) strongly disagree; 5) are not sure.

”Progressives” were 4 times more likely to not understand that restrictions drive up cost as anyone else – even as they march in demand of “affordable housing”, priced based on who you are in the Social Justice™ scale.

The Incredible Dullness of Being (Them)

So dull, and so empty, that you’re ready to invite ‘the apocalypse’ and think of everything as a crisis, just to liven things up.

We are living in a time of crisis and potential apocalypse, with the overlapping of the financial crisis, ecological crisis and the crisis of movements of resistance. The apocalyptic imagination feeds on this to produce dreams or nightmares of a world "cleansed" of humanity, from 2012 to the History Channel's Life After People. These fundamentally reactionary fantasies can only imagine redemption of our fallen world on the condition that humanity ceases to exist, or is reduced to the "right" number of the "saved". What concerns me here is thinking more closely the relation between radical and revolutionary thought and an "apocalyptic tone" in our current context. The usual model of such a tone was proposed by Kant, when he argued that it was the result of the illegitimate extension of reason beyond its limits towards a transcendent "exalted vision" (schwärmerische Vision).[3] Failing to recognise the limits of reality the apocalyptic dreamer was a fanatic (Schwärmer) trying to impose an abstract vision on reality.

The resemblance this has to contemporary environmentalism is striking. It also shines a light on the obvious cracks in modern middle-minded thinking: while religion and faith must be appeared to be frowned upon, the vision is one of an unstable religious movement flirting with cult-like extremes, and dangling from anything it can find from feeble movies to disaster-porn on the History Channel.

On the opposite side of the ring is Norman Cohn's 1957 book In Pursuit of the Millennium, which wisely linked similar millenarian sentiments of the middle ages with illiberalism, Communism, totalitarians, and social anarchists. His conclusion is that these messianic movements aren‘t just something that will always be with us, but take donations and run for office. Writing about him, Greil Marcus notes that he identified them as:

a restlessly dynamic and utterly ruthless group which, obsessed by the apocalyptic phantasy and filled with the conviction of its own infallibility, set itself above the rest of humanity and recognized no claims save that of its own supposed mission . . . A boundless, millenial promise made with boundless, prophet-like conviction to a number of rootless and desperate men in the midst of a society where traditional norms and relationships are disintegrating -- here, it would seem, lay the source of that peculiar subterranean fanaticism.

It seems that Cohn is right – they seem to always be with us, and they will try to lead us into the totalitarian cycle that crash-tested civilization over, and over.

So, it seems that hate IS a family value

From the all-knowing, all-caring brigades:

According to sources in security circles, an 80-page pamphlet entitled "Prisma" ("prism") has recently been circulating in the far-left scene. The anonymous publication includes tips for carrying out terrorist attacks and acts of sabotage, and includes instructions for constructing various kinds of bombs with time fuses and special grappling hooks which can be used to stop trains. The book also describes techniques for sawing down power poles and has several chapters devoted to investigative methods used by the police, describing in detail how urban guerrillas can cover their tracks and shake off tails.

Berlin public prosecutors have already launched an investigation into the pamphlet, which is circulating mainly in the far-left scene in Hamburg, Berlin and the state of Lower Saxony. German security agencies are concerned that the manual could further increase the -- already high -- propensity of young radicals to carry out violent attacks. The document encourages extremists to commit crimes "with a hitherto unknown level of meticulousness and professionalism," says Hans-Werner Wargel, head of the Lower Saxony branch of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Germany's domestic intelligence service.

Shock, horror, wash, rinse, repeat

The Life and Times of Dave

Feel free to follow my paesano David on his travels in east and southeast Asia, featuring everything from Yaks to people to sites to pets.

Honor our troops, honor our veterans, a handshake, and a "thank you for serving"

And while we're on the subject of rock legends on this commemorative day, take a look at the Gene Simmons Military Tribute (thanks to Mark)…

…As They Live the Longest Day

The story of D-Day.

Read Ted Nugent's take on D-Day (thanks to Stu, whose "father landed on Omaha Beach, one of the few to make it off the beach physically unscathed (…) only to be horribly wounded in the Battle of the Bulge"):

Omaha Beach was literally red with American blood. But more landing boats full of young men from the Greatest Generation kept coming. And coming. The warriors would not be denied, their spirit unstoppable.

The Greatest Generation secured Omaha Beach on June 6, 1944 and from that very beach, covered in the blood of Americans heroes, began the assault that would literally save the world. Roughly one year later, the Nazi war machine would smolder in ruins, defeated by warriors dedicated to good over evil.

You probably won't read or hear much in the papers about the 66th anniversary of D-Day. Those of us who refuse to forget believe this epic day should be a front-page story in all newspapers, Internet news websites, television broadcasts, and certainly detailed in American schools, until the end of time. June 6, 1944 is that important.

See also the Gene Simmons Military Tribute…

Making Reporting Bad News About them Unlawful

Brussels sets out plans to regulate credit rating agencies

Okay. Got it. So what exactly does that mean, and why?

Credit rating agencies have attracted strong criticism for failing to identify the risk attached to certain financial products such as mortgage-backed securities in the US at the start of the financial crisis.

or...

More recently they have been blamed for exacerbating market turmoil in the eurozone, with Standard and Poor's downgrading of Greek bonds in April sending the country's borrowing costs skyward, ultimately leading Athens to call for a bail-out.

In other words, take your pick, just don’t say anything that might clarify the real state of affairs to an investor, if it doesn’t benefit us.

"Is it normal to have only three relevant actors on such a sensitive issue where there is a great possibility of conflict of interest?" he said, referring to the US-based Fitch, Moody's and Standard & Poor's agencies. "Is it normal that all of them come from the same country?"

Yes, it IS normal, based solely on the fact that there aren’t that many rating agencies willing to spend the time on it, or European companies willing to be ‘rated’ in the first place.

"It seems to me only reasonable that there should be a contribution from the financial sector for the common good," he [Mr. Barroso] said,

That is, besides employing people who are themselves overtaxed, and efficiently producing goods and services.

Besides, who do they really think will be paying the financial services taxes anyway? Savers and investors can check the line-items at the bottom of your statement if you can’t figure than out.

Fashionable Terror Pimps

Author may ban Hebrew editions of his work that is, if he’s ever actually had any.

In "Section AZ" of "Stadium USA", we have had enough of the failures of Security; We have decided to do our own ticket checking

I got this in the mail (gracias, Allie). It was allegedly written by a Mexican who is now a naturalized US Citizen, and whether true or not, it's a pretty good explanation of the illegal immigration issue.

If you had tickets to a sports event, concert, Disneyland, or for an airline flight, and when you got to your assigned seat you found someone else was in that seat, what would you do? You would call for a person in charge of ticket checking and have the person in your seat removed. You would properly be asked to show your ticket, and you would gladly and proudly do so, for you have bought and paid for that seat. The person in your seat would also be asked for a ticket, which they would not be able to produce.. They would be called "gate crashers" and they would properly be removed.

Now in this huge stadium called the USA we have had millions of gate crashers. We have been asking security to check for tickets and remove the gate crashers. We have been asking security to have better controls in checking at the door. We have asked security to lock the back doors. Security has failed us. They are still looking the other way. They are afraid to ask to see the tickets. Many people say there is unlimited seating, and whether there is or not, no one should be allowed in for free while the rest of us pay full price!

In "section AZ", of "Stadium USA", we have had enough of the failures of Security. We have decided to do our own ticket checking, and properly remove those who do not have tickets. Now it seems very strange to me that so many people in the other 49 "sections", and even many in our own "section" do not want tickets checked, or even to be asked to show their ticket! Even the head of Security is chastising us, while not doing his own job which he has sworn to do.

My own ticket has been bought and paid for, so I am proudly going to show it when asked to do so. I have a right to my seat, and I want the gate crashers to be asked to show their tickets too. The only reason that I can imagine anyone objecting to being asked for their ticket is that they are in favor of gate crashing, and all of the illegal activities that go with it, such as drug smuggling, gang wars, murder, human smuggling for profit, and many more illegal and inhumane acts that we are trying to prevent with our new legislation. Is that what I am hearing from all of the protesters such as Phoenix Mayor Gordon, US Rep. Grijalva, even President Obama? If you are not in favor of showing tickets (proof of citizenship, passport, green card, or other legal document) when asked, as I would do proudly, then you must be condoning those illegal activities.

Written by a US Citizen, Globe, Arizona…

This makes perfect sense to me. What do you think?

Since Obama has never shown his ticket I guess he feels obligated to not ask others to show theirs.

Irish Government Enabling Terror

It’s painfully obvious that the “Gaza Peace Flotilla’s” only purpose is to open up a conduit to Hamas for weapons. And in the spirit of their usual outbursts that they’re selectively-neutral, pro-nonviolence, and all about peace (which is to say, a propagandized teenager’s understanding of peace), the Irish government is propping up the Kabuki theater thus:

As an Irish ship carrying humanitarian aid continues to sail for Gaza, Ireland has found itself hurled to the forefront of tensions between Israel and the European Union.

On Wednesday (2 June), the Irish government warned Israel for a second time to let the boat, whose passengers count among their number five Irish nationals, including a former UN deputy secretary general and a Northern Irish Nobel peace prize laureate, carry on to its destination and deliver its cargo without hindrance.

The Irish Taoiseach, or prime minister, Brian Cowen said that the ship, which he described as Irish-owned, should be allowed to complete its mission, telling the country's parliament that Dublin has been in close contact with the boat

The press is ignorantly playing along too:

the MV Rachel Corrie, named after an American university student and peace activist who was killed by an Israeli army bulldozer while attempting to prevent the demolition of a Palestinian home in 2003.

Which must be what the kids these days are calling a tunnel to smuggle weapons used to kill civilians.

Given Teheran’s support of Hamas and Hizballah, it could even be that these shallow ‘pacifists’ are even stupid enough to believe that it will ingratiate them to Iran, and possibly dull their tacit threats.

Doubtful. Even amateur students of history should know better:

Since I first went to Berchtesgaden more than 20,0000 letters and telegrams have come to No. 10, Downing Street. Of course, I have been able to look at a tiny fraction of them, but I have seen enough to know that the people who wrote did not feel that they had such a cause for which to fight, if they were asked to go to war in order that the Sudeten Germans might not join the Reich. That is how they are feeling. That is my answer to those who say that we should have told Germany weeks ago that, if her army crossed the border of Czechoslovakia, we should be at war with her. We had no treaty obligations and no legal obligations to Czechoslovakia and if we had said that, we feel that we should have received no support from the people of this country. . .

- Neville Chamberlain, In Search of Peace (1939)

In other words, the “illegal war” argument. Can’t violate ‘international law’ can we? Even if we don’t say what that means or mention that there is no ‘big book of international law’ and a ‘big, God-like, stick-wielding constable to enforce it. Besides, how was invading Czechoslovakia any more ‘legal’ than stopping the invasion?

Amazing Discoveries

Who knew?

How Well Is That Gun Control Working for Ya, Europe?

The day after a British taxi driver shot 12 people dead in a rampage through Cumbria, a man in Brussels shoots two people dead — a judge and a clerk of the court (both female), no less — in a Brussels building — the Belgian capital's courthouse, no less.

The [Derrick Bird] incident echoed the massacres in Hungerford in 1987 and Dunblane in 1996, both of which led to tighter firearms legislation. Theresa May, the Home Secretary, is expected to address gun control issues when she makes a statement to the Commons today.

‘Hitler was Right’, and Other Conventional European Opinions

Like the Jenin ‘massacre’, calling the raid on the passive-aggressive flotilla ‘piracy’, a ‘crime against humanity’, and other overblown phrases that have lost all their force, we find that hatred now directed at anyone discussing it as well.

The Pavlovian Politically Correct Responses ain’t what they used to be. Melanie Philips, known to be one of those people who doesn’t fetishize ‘Palestina’, and follows actual events there received these charming and witty bonne mots:

What a disgrace to humanity the zionists have proven to be. I am of the firm opinion that Hitler was right in the assessment of the Jewish people. The protestors deaths have not been in vain as the support for Gaza & Palestine has reached all communities all over the world. It will only be a matter of time before they obtain their freedom.

As if they are denied their freedoms by the Israelis.

Have the honesty to let people know you are Jewish when you are voicing an opinion on TV. I understand why you are so ashamed.Its time the Jewish Sate of Israel was abolished. Have your religion but no state.

Which is the basic problem, no? Detached, hateful Europeans thinking that they have the right of refusal over what people can believe and whether or not they can exist.

All in the name of ‘peace’ you know, and Hamas taxing or stealing the aid given by gullible outsiders.

Every Dutch party now holds positions concerning immigrants’ obligations to Dutch society that might've been called fascistic by the left a decade ago

…the message of Geert Wilders, head of the anti-immigrant Freedom Party and Labor’s ideal boogeyman, has become an increasingly broken record for the electorate, with his poll scores running well under the projections of a few months ago

comments John Vinocur, regarding the upcoming elections in the Netherlands. But perhaps that is not as bad as it sounds at first. Indeed,

Every Dutch party, Labor included, now holds positions concerning immigrants’ obligations to Dutch society that might have been called fascistic by the left a decade earlier.

…the focus of the Netherlands and its voters has become adapting.

Their polling response is striking. The Liberal Party is the Dutch political formation most at ease with capitalism and the markets. It is neither statist nor moralistic about financial market regulation in the manner of most of Continental Europe’s leadership. Its prime ministerial candidate, Mark Rutte, is a former Unilever executive. Indeed, the party’s trademarks are both its pragmatism and its being a target for its rivals’ accusations of heartlessness.

…Early this decade, the Dutch were also the first Europeans to call into question a conventional premise that integration of Muslim immigrants could be accomplished through multiculturalism without specific rules for conforming to Dutch law and tradition. The issue is no longer a taboo here or elsewhere in Europe.

…[Mr. Rutte] wants to make €20 billion, or $25 billion, in immediate cuts in the Dutch budget, to stop social security payments to newcomers living in the Netherlands for less than 10 years, and, while supervising markets closely, to avoid characterizing them as immoral and destructive machines.

We are All Subsidized Windmill Installers

Straight from the burro’s mouth: It was thrown out there for political reasons, but is true nonetheless: there is no such thing as a “boom from a green economy,” when the entire, feeble exercise goes nowhere after four decades of exceptions, giveaways, and subsidies.

the truth about Spain’s “green jobs” boondoggle, which happens to be the one naively cited by President Obama no less than eight times as his model for the United States. It is now out there as a bust, a costly disaster that has come undone in Spain to the point that even the Socialists admit it, with the media now in full pursuit.

While it’s being thrown out there to cut off demands for more intervention in a time where austerity is needed, it seems to scrape away the crust of wishful thinking and outright fabrications that make up the larger part of Leftist economic thinking.

La Gaceta boldly exposes the failure of the Spanish renewable policy and how Obama has been following it. The headline screams: “Spain admits that the green economy as sold to Obama is a disaster.”

Elsewhere: it’s not polite to say that something other than the hole in the ozone layer, er, the greenhouse effect, um - no, greenhouse gasses, or rather, global warming, er, climate change is at fault, but June really should tell Ward not to be too hard on the beaver.

"The greatest enemy of the flood defenses is an animal called the beaver. Beavers live all along levees on the Vistula River and cause a lot of damage to them," Jerzy Miller said.

According to the Polish government, roughly 20,000 beavers inhabit Poland’s rivers, and are a protected species. Beavers were endangered in the 1950s, but have since rebounded because of a successful breeding program.

Thanks for the sh*t sandwich, Swampy.

The Essence of Western Socialism Explained

Sumfin’ fer nufin’, and if grows on trees.

Everyone's favourite statist, still at it.....

Is any commentary actually necessary in regards to this level of delusionalism?

Everything but the Mullet

Leon de Winter, novelist and columnist for the Netherland’s Elsevier Magazine misses the EEC. Remember that?

To me, Europe remains a geographical term for a messy bunch of land masses extending to the west of Asia. But unlike Asians, who’d never seriously contemplate forming an Asian Union, some Europeans believe in the existence of something along the lines of a European culture, which will only achieve full flower when all borders are abolished. And one day a bunch of suchlike Europeans set out to form the European Union. What ensued was precisely what people like me had foretold: that the Union couldn’t last because, apart from Europe’s political elite, nobody wants such a union, because Europe is a geographic, not a cultural term.

Let’s not forget the norther perspective in all of this: even by European standards, they’re more likely to feel that the “safety net” has mutated into a Hammock.

In northern Europe, fir trees grow and life is duller, people work harder, save more money and are generally pretty responsible in their dealings with the state. In the South, in contrast, people take a siesta and don’t sit down to supper till 10 o’clock at night, they run bulls through the streets, and cheating the authorities is a national sport. Thanks to the rules the establishment has laid down, we northerners are now being saddled with the southerners’ debts. The problem is I don’t feel any solidarity with the Greeks or Spanish. I like the Greeks and Spaniards I know a lot. But I don’t feel duty-bound to burden myself with their financial troubles.

In other words: get a job, ya bum.

The EEC was the ideal model for Europe. But our ambitious statesmen set their hearts on a project of historic proportions: to peacefully unify Europe by letting a new European bureaucracy stealthily conquer the continent. The Greek crisis now goes to show that Europe doesn’t exist. Europe is an idée fixe of Brussels bureaucrats.

As warm and lovable as the over-the-top curtainwall buildings with scale-less, soaring, improbable structural projects: utopia, in the original Klingon, means “nowhere”.

When the European constitution was being thrashed out in Brussels, I couldn’t help wondering why the architects of this edifice were not on TV all over the continent. Where were their rousing speeches? Where were their expositions of the European soul and Europe’s mission in the world? The European constitution is not the brainchild of prophetic founding fathers, but the product of technocrats, who see their big chance now that hundreds of billions in rescue packages are needed to bail out the Mediterranean countries. Brussels is going to regulate all that very nicely and lay harsh terms on the countries it is saving from bankruptcy. The first country to transfer a sizeable chunk of its autonomy to Brussels is Greece. Greece is to become the first bona fide Brussels protectorate: an old, civilised nation with its own traditions and ways of life is to be administered by supranational technocrats. I wonder how long that will work out.

Given that screwing the man and cheating on your taxes is a national sport, not long, I’d guess, and it will have the stench of colonialism that people don’t get sentimental about as they do in Malta, Cyprus, and Gibraltar.

You’ll recall that even under Nazi occupation, Greek communist partisans were just as likely to attack fellow Greek partisan opponents of the Nazis, as they were to attack the Nazis themselves. So expect them to at the very least fight for their right to party, at least on paper.

Also from Leon, is an item that inspired an old memory to reflexively pour forth: Ausweis Bitte!

Bravo

The EU parliament's most senior foreign relations personality has quit an official trip to Israel next week because he said his fellow deputies are plotting "anti-Israeli propaganda."

That is to say, more than the usual days’ detached tirade.

A stunt, I’m sure, which is likely to have descended into ridicule anyway, something along the lines of Marlon Brando asking an utterly fake Apache to indignantly refuse his Oscar on his behalf.

"Out of the 25 deputies who are to take part in the mission, there are fewer colleagues than the fingers on one hand whom you could define as pro-Israeli, or even [be] neutral!" he said. "Rather than a peacekeeping mission, it looks like an anti-Israeli propaganda mission is being prepared!"

Which should not surprise anyone, but if they REALLY meant it, wouldn’t self-immolation be a gesture whose sincerity one couldn’t question? A sort of ‘unimpeachable moral authority’ thing that they think they already have by, say, boycotting grapes and oranges.

The Israeli embassy to the EU said MEPs' visits to Gaza give moral support to Hamas, the militant Palestinian group which holds sway in the strip.

"It is discouraging to learn that a distinguished delegation, representing one of the symbols of European democracy, chooses to concentrate its programme around interlocutors representing the views of only one side of the conflict," it said in a statement on Tuesday.

I’d rather they need to be extinguished, and wonder if they really are distinguished, if’n you get my meaning.

Look at the bright side: at least this delegation won't have to worry about running out of Astro Glide.

Good-Bye, Friend

Dennis Hopper, 1936-2010

Good-Bye, Friend

Gary Coleman, 1968-2010

Plowshares into Swords

I can’t believe I missed this one: a German Tank manufacturer has received EU agricultural subsidies.

As translated from the original Klingon:

Hamburg - Farmers aren’t the only recipients of EU agricultural subsidies. The arms group Rheinmetall has received 2009 budget year funds from the European Union. The company conceded that it got €83 795 from a rural development funding program.

The grant recipient, the Rheinmetall Waffe Munition GmbH Forest Service, is part of the Unterlüß test range north of the Südheide nature reserve. The Forestry Commission said the center had received the funds as part of an effort to "convert our forest from a Pine monoculture to a mixed species forest environment.

Those treads should do a great job of aerating the soil.

Of Interest: between Rubble and Ruins

Presented by the German Historical Institute on their German History in Documents and Images website, is a rare collection of postwar photographs attributed to a known photographer, Friedrich Seidenstücker.

'

Feeding your Berlinalia:



A Flaneur between Rubble and Ruins – Friedrich Seidenstücker
Photographs of Berlin after 1945

Fear of an Iranian Planet

So what do you think this tells you about Iran’s “nuclear medicine” program?

PROJECT SCOPE: The project is for the construction of three (3) underground bunkers at three separate locations in and North of Amman, Jordan. One of the bunkers is approximately 3803 SM total and two of the bunkers are approximately 3288 SM total each. All are to be constructed below grade and include a burster slab, two means of ingress and egress, air supply, water storage, command and control operations areas, cafeterias, kitchens, offices, sleeping quarters, latrines, clean and dirty equipment areas, and blast attenuation/baffling structures. All work identified in the Scope of Work shall be completed within 450 days from the Notice to Proceed. Information on a site visit and instructions to obtain access to the site will be provided in the solicitation.

Can’t Buy Me Love

Eulex confounded: Kosovars still love the US more than them.

A Kosovo-Albanian and a Spaniard run into each other in New York City. Spain is the biggest among the EU countries that have yet to recognise Kosovo's independence. Upon finding out that the other is from Spain the Kosovan gives him a close hug. The Spaniard is astonished. "Hey, you guys discovered America. That's enough for us," says the Kosovan.

The joke was told in a restaurant in Pristina by a top official from Kosovo's home affairs ministry. It was meant to illustrate that the more than 2 million Albanians in Kosovo agree on one thing: it was the Americans - not the Europeans - who 'liberated' them from Serbian rule after a Nato bombing campaign forced Serbia to relinquish control over its Kosovo province in 1999. Then US president Bill Clinton was given a statue in Pristina this week; he already had a street named after him.

What with all of that “spreading freedom” twaddle, those silly Yanks. I mean WHO would want THAT, when the Europeans were perfectly prepared to let the schnooks keep burning villages, if it required any use of force on their part?

Who says satire is dead?

Or, for that matter, delusionalism:

Europe will introduce a surprise new plan today to combat global warming, committing Britain and the rest of the EU to the most ambitious targets in the world. The plan proposes a massive increase in the target for cutting greenhouse gas emissions in this decade.

The European Commission is determined to press ahead with the cuts despite the financial turmoil gripping the bloc, even though it would require Britain and other EU member states to impose far tougher financial penalties on their industries than are being considered by other large economies.

The plan, to cut emissions by 30 per cent on 1990 levels by 2020, would cost the EU an extra £33 billion a year by 2020, according to a draft of the Commission’s communication leaked to The Times.

Me? I’m Still Shorting their Sorry Asses

As one would expect, EUtopia is gunning for investors to give ‘the masses’ something to build some false social solidarity around.

“For the locusts in the finance sector, a new age is dawning.” This is how German Social Democrat and Member of the European Parliament Udo Bullmann commented on the prospect of new EU-wide regulations for hedge funds.

Those ‘locusts’ are making the revenues that happen to be buffering the collapse of your retirement, Udo baby. They’re also offering a hint at what those assets are really worth. Since you’d rather see the rating agencies lie to the public about what the sectors and industries people work for, investors and hedge funds snapping to and fro are the only approximation of mark to market you’ll ever really see.

That the Social Democrats would triumphantly bring out their “locust” bon mot again now is particularly troubling when one considers that the EU’s current offensive against hedge funds appears to be all about offering up a convenient scapegoat to public opinion, as opposed to addressing the fundamental problems underlying Europe’s debt crisis. Anti-Semitism, after all, has always been a matter of finding a scapegoat.

And look for it, they will. The old reliable straw man of European “intellectualism” is being pointlessly and evasively employed again, when it’s Europe’s government pandering to people for votes that have bankrupted society to make the political class look “generous” with people’s own money.

The comparison sparked controversy, especially after historian Michael Wolffsohn accused Müntefering and the Social Democrats of using rhetoric reminiscent of Nazi screeds. Indeed, as the German journalist Ulrich Speck pointed out at the time in a (no longer available) blog post, the “swarm of locusts” metaphor had a long history in anti-Semitic discourse dating back to at least the early 19th century. It is used, moreover, in the infamous Nazi propaganda film Jud Süß (“The Jew Süss”). In the film, the Jews are said “to descend upon our country like locusts.” Implicit in the German discussion — though rarely if ever stated openly — was the fact the Nazis had, of course, always associated Jews with finance, and vice-versa, and that this association was indeed an essential part of their anti-Semitism. (The “Jew Süss” to whom reference is made in the title of the eponymous film, for instance, is the 18th Century Jewish financier Joseph Süss Oppenheimer.)

Not to mention the fact that it’s also used by the left, right, and center in many of these “great cultures”.

The Social Democrats reacted indignantly to the criticisms. But it did not help the credibility of their cause when Germany’s biggest trade union, IG Metall, published a cartoon depicting the famous “swarm” of financial investors...

No need to guess that in the absence of an easy outsider characterization as Jews, what with their heads and noses being calipered for measurement, that these locusts, naturally, had to take another form:



Like you couldn’t have guessed that one

A Portrait of Arrogant Conceit and Ineptitude in the White House

Over the course of a few days during a state visit to the United States, Mexican President Felipe Calderon fed the left’s latest object of fixation: their misinformed and misguided invective directed at Arizona’s entirely lawful and rather desperate measure to stem the side-effects of the Federal Government’s non-enforcement of a basic function of a nation’s sovereignty. The very existence of national borders, it seems is some sort of embarrassment for which we need to apologize even to the still totalitarian government in Beijing for. But like the idea that such an apology would indulge an ego or a favor, the means of that sort of rapprochement, not to mention any potential benefits from it, are of no value. They also reveal an inability to even employ ones’ adopted international policy stature.

I really wish that clutch of bufoons weren't acting like such amateurs. To begin with, it's absolutely off limits in diplomatic protocol to criticize another nation's domestic laws and affairs, but Calderon threw some red meat to his population and did just that.

Next, there are those that applauded them who indulged in the epic foolishness of, like it or not, not backing up a fellow citizen or government body in the face of foreign criticism. Another error a college sophmore in government affairs, international affairs, or as this lot would prefer, a major in "peace studies" would know.

If this is their idea of soft power, you now know quite vividly they wasted it, and have made tool after tool in the negotiator's tool kit unusable ever again. It isn't just the stick that has been rendered unusable - the carrot has now had any ability to lure implausible. The president, the very man held up by an equally uninformed press corps as some sort of sophisticate, is an inept and incapable practitioner of statecraft. He can't even seem to execute the "soft power" posture that he advocates. He can't even understand how to use the simple (and questionable) thesis promoted by Joseph Nye on "soft power" to the benefit of the United States anyway.

What's taken for relational interaction is turned into popularity playcraft, not statecraft.

In fact all one can do after that is force oneself into direct confrontation to be taken seriously in any matter grave enough to require the President's direct involvement, much as Chamberlain's appeasament forced the hawks' hands: sooner or later, someone will have to make a dramatic and restorative turnabout and overdo making the point of being tough on that border problem.

That international man of mystery, what with all of that savoire faire...

The president is an abject failure, even on a platform where populations worldwide and much of their leadership are giving him a million second-chances, and are willing to pretend him a success.

Moreover, we have a Secretary of State who originated in the ginned up world of pretend-retail politics, with no international affairs abilities outside of being a hand-shaking spouse. What's worse, is that it's patently obvious that she is gunning for an electoral challenge to the president, making dealing with the State Dept. and the White House by other governments an uncertain excercise, and inrtoduces the simple problem of whether or not they can even take communication from the United States Government seriously, for fear of that effort being lost on an internal political matter befitting a small European state or a thugocracy in Asia Minor.

Worse still was the feeble reporting.

The story is there. A trail of crumbs that could fill a commodity stockyard presented itself to the press, all pointing to a distaste for the defense of a nation by a class of leaders, and an inability to reflect on the effect of airing ones’ domestic political feelings in an international forum is left in plain view. In plain sight of the press laid even the simple ignorance of basic diplomatic interaction. You would think one of them would want to break away from the pack, show some distinction, and write so much as a wire piece about it.

Alas, who knew that the height of the dawn of the great new age of Aquarius would be characterized by a servile, pliant, (and often ignorant) press that was willing to let every word a national leader go unchallenged and unexamined.

All we need now to complete the lifestyle of the overbearing autarkies of the Eastern European Communist Block are brave sounding statements that are meant to inspire national solidarity behind the leader hung at intersections and under train trestles.

All for the good of man, of course.

Farmers Bring the Country to Paris, Turning the Champs-Élysées Green

One of Paris's main thoroughfares, the Champs-Élysées, has been covered in earth and turned into a huge green space in an event staged by young French farmers.

…on Sunday the French Young Farmers union … brought the sights and scents of the countryside to Paris as its members covered a long stretch of the Champs-Élysée[s] with miniature fields of wheat and sunflower.

It was perhaps its sheer incongruity that drew massive crowds to the avenue that the French call the most beautiful in the world. The federation said that about 150,000 plants covered more than 3 hectares, or 7.4 acres, of the avenue. Farms animals — sheep, pigs and at least four breeds of cows — were held in pens along the avenue.

Needless to say, the politically correct compassion gurus have done their job well as

“The people worry about the animals,” said Nicolas Mousnier, 29, who raises sheep in Limoges, standing in a straw pit, watching over a herd of 40 sheep, a massive black sow and eight squealing piglets. “This connection still exists. We have to maintain it.” He had spent much of his day reassuring visitors that the animals were not uncomfortable in the sun…

Enjoy Watching the Fallout

France poised to raise retirement age.

Expectations are growing that France is set to remove the right to retire at 60, as it embarks on a contentious reform of its debt-laden pension system and brings public finances back into line.

Note that it does not necessarily mean that gangs of Pinkertons will FORCE anyone to work to 62, of anything else. It just means that you can’t draw a pension until you’re 62.

His comments are likely to give ammunition to unions planning a national strike on Thursday to protest against spending cuts and pension reforms.

As if you couldn’t guess THAT would happen.

The government is highly sensitive to the potential of pension reform sparking widespread unrest and will be watching Thursday’s protest closely. Former prime minister Alain Juppé was eventually brought down by national protests in 1995 when he attempted to restructure one of the most generous pensions systems in Europe.

The easiest way to solve that problem, if these helpless, servile idiots were able to imagine it, would be to actually save some money on their own, without the government managing your financial life.

They might be stunned to discover that in the USA, you can actually retire any time you like, and in most cases, take as MUCH VACATION as you want. Just don’t expect anyone to pay for it when you’re not giving them anything in return.

While the majority of adults in France understands the need to put off the drawing of pensions, you still have a stupid crust of haterz who honestly can’t figure out that the money to fund it has to come from someone else\ - someone NOT (not) doing their jobs with the large institutional entities that practically make it unnecessary to think about your work, or take any sort of initiative to do it well.

On the other side of the coin are those that work for themselves, who actually have both the burden of being taxed to fund these bums, and are (decade after decade) expected to be the magic bullet of innovation that will make the hard choices unnecessary. Good luck. I’m sure their only though is “You want WHAT?!? Thanks for nothing”.

A Rigged Market?

Sure! If you’re talking about Europe’s approach to the Kyoto accord.

The first swindle involves Europe using a 1990 baseline. The closure of socialist industry in eastern Europe, a massive Scandinavian economic crisis, and mad cow disease's effect on livestock production crashed emissions by 1995. Result?

The result was a kind of “heads I win, tails you lose” set-up. It was a position that activist distracts real people who actually DO clean the environment, and actually DO produce things from improving the fate of man, especially it’s weakest and poorest.

Further to the “positive results”, a shallow gin-up:

"In 1997 in Kyoto, the EU27 signed on to an aggregate cap on their GHGs that was 14% ABOVE the member states' aggregate 1995 actual emissions. [From 1997 to 2008]... Spain, +32.8%; Latvia, +27.4%; Cyprus, +23.1%; Estonia, +21.0%; Greenland (a Danish colony), +16.6%; Luxembourg, +16.2%; Lithuania, +13.6%; Ireland, +13.0%; Ukraine, +11.5%; Malta, +9.0%; Austria, + 7.5%; Bulgaria, +8.4%; Italy, +5.9%; Belgium, +4.0%; Netherlands, +3.2%; Portugal, +4.2%; France, +1.5%; Finland, -1.6%, United Kingdom, -2.9%.

It should be noted, further, that 100% of the emission "reductions" claimed by EU member states to date derive from offshoring manufacturing of goods and services EU demand, which has actually increased."

In a world of paper shufflers and paper tigers, that is considered “real”, “honest”, and a “brave facing of the issues”. Go figure.

Not letting a crisis go to waste, the recession will (no doubt) be reframed in emissions-terms with the “great leap forward” treatment, as presented in venal international fora. That’s the political dynamic of the new age of man that they are “inspiring us,“ and leading us in to.

Re.: the (In)continent of the 21st Century

The European Union has a flag no one salutes, an anthem no one sings, a president no one can name, a parliament (in Strasbourg) no one other than its members wants to have power (which must subtract from the powers of national legislatures), a capital (Brussels) of coagulated bureaucracy no one admires or controls, a currency that presupposes what neither does nor should nor soon will exist (a European central government), and rules of fiscal behavior that no member has been penalized for ignoring.

It isn’t mawkish to mock when you’re right on the money:

In stating the case for European superiority, much has been made by boosters of Europe’s different institutional framework, tax or regulatory structure. No question these have advantages and disadvantages compared with those of the United States, but there’s little case for arguing that the “Euro-model” has been a rip-roaring economic success. It’s imploding on its weak periphery, and the collapse is threatening even bigger players, including the United Kingdom.

Blög of Note

There’s schnitzelling, and then there’s schnitzelling. Me, I prefer to call the country in question the Berlin Currywurst Republic.

To wit, this rather common sense answer to volcanic interruption:

Maybe it's time to reconsider the blimp.

The Manchurian Candidates

The world remains inexplicably indifferent and uncurious about the deadliest ideology in history.

Writes Claire Berlinski in this quarter’s City Journal.

the word “Nazi” is synonymous with evil. It is widely understood that the Nazis’ ideology—nationalism, anti-Semitism, the autarkic ethnic state, the Führer principle—led directly to the furnaces of Auschwitz. It is not nearly as well understood that Communism led just as inexorably, everywhere on the globe where it was applied, to starvation, torture, and slave-labor camps. Nor is it widely acknowledged that Communism was responsible for the deaths of some 150 million human beings during the twentieth century.

And yet it continues to be idolized as a better way of life for the slef-perceived powerless individual, the very people chopped up in its’ machine. Setting aside the aging handful of hardcore proponents of Communist Socialism who actually lived under it, the common bond of its’ present-day proponents are an ignorance of it’s crimes, ignorance of the homogeneity and narrowness it requires to sustain it, and a literature based entirely outside of the experience of real, living Socialism.

Take as an example some of the bright lights of Europe, held up as potential “states-persons”, and their pasts, which are nearly as ugly as the passivated third world leaders that the KGB and Stasi were turning to their purposes. In the last of the cold-war missile treaty efforts, some of them are transparently going to bat for the Soviets, out of either ideology or programmed hatred of their own society.

Kinnock was vice president of the European Commission from 1999 to 2004, and his wife, Glenys, is now Britain’s minister for Europe. Gerard Batten, a member of the UK Independence Party, has noted the significance of the episode. “If the report given to Mr. Gorbachev is true, it means that Lord Kinnock approached one of Britain’s enemies in order to seek approval regarding his party’s defense policy and, had he been elected, Britain’s defense policy,” Batten said to the European Parliament in 2009. “If this report is true, then Lord Kinnock would be guilty of treason.”

Similarly, Baroness Catherine Ashton, who is now the European Union’s foreign minister, was treasurer of Britain’s Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament from 1980 to 1982. The papers offer evidence that this organization received “unidentified income” from the Soviet Union in the 1980s. Stroilov’s papers suggest as well that the government of the current Spanish EU commissioner for economic and monetary affairs, Joaquín Almunia, enthusiastically supported the Soviet project of gradually unifying Germany and Europe into a socialist “common European home” and strongly opposed the independence of the Baltic states and then of Ukraine.

Even the Vice President of the United States isn’t immune to it.

Perhaps it doesn’t surprise you to read that prominent European politicians held these views. But why doesn’t it? It is impossible to imagine that figures who had enjoyed such close ties to the Nazi Party—or, for that matter, to the Ku Klux Klan or to South Africa’s apartheid regime—would enjoy top positions in Europe today. The rules are different, apparently, for Communist fellow travelers. “We now have the EU unelected socialist party running Europe,” Stroilov said to me. “Bet the KGB can’t believe it.”

I’ll bet that the inheritors of the monomaniacal statist Fascist and Marxism can, when the see this dance again: the early, heady days of economic and social tumult that put well localized and scrappy ideologues in power for decades, soberly rationalizing the social needs to use the state’s power to contain the will of the individual.

ArtHausArt

It is all fun and games until you are ripped to shreds on an exploding TGV, other than that the New York Times raves:

Long before the festival opened, this 5 hour, 33 minute movie about the Venezuelan-born terrorist, international man of mystery and brutishly committed ladies man, Ilich Ramírez Sánchez – i.e., Carlos the Jackal – was a must see. The movie, which screened just once and out of competition, is scheduled to play on French television this week. It is likely to pop up in the United States this fall at the New York Film Festival before it plays on-demand and in good old-fashioned theaters.

Bring on the gush:

Opening in the early 1970s, and hop-scotching across assorted hot spots from London to Libya for the next 10 years, “Carlos” is itself something of a heroic endeavor...

A media star from almost the beginning of his blood-splattered career, Carlos has long served as one of pop culture’s brand-name villains...

When he wasn’t globetrotting, he was surfing the sheets, bedding different comradely chicks...

And if Carlos is essentially uninteresting – it’s his violence and the veneer of sexiness that violence can bring with it that makes him a star – it’s because Mr. Assayas has worked hard to create a new kind of movie terrorist. With his beard, beret and black leather jacket, the young Carlos is a militant pin-up...

In Mr. Assayas’s telling, Carlos was also a macho bully for whom weapons, especially guns, weren’t just tools of the terrorist trade. They are also representations of his penis – true Freudian fetishes — a concept that Mr. Assayas literalizes in an ugly-gripping sex scene involving Carlos, one of his writhing conquests and an apparent live (unexploded) grenade...

I’m still not sure what I think of all the groovy music – but that’s what second viewings are for...

ArtHausArt

"Filmmaking Is Muzzled in Iran and in the United States": French Newspaper Compares Polanski's Case with That of Jailed Iranian Dissident Director

Free Panahi and Polanski! shouts Franck Nouchi in Le Monde. At the Cannes Film Festival this May, an empty chair has been visible among the seated jury members throughout the festival, symbolizing the absence of jury member Jafar Panahi, the Iranian film director who is probably in a Tehran jail — for having made a documentary on Iran's post-electoral events.

But there is another major director missing in the Cannes seaside resort, adds Franck Nouchi (Roman Polanski is still held in his chalet in Switzerland, after all). And the conclusion, for the Le Monde writer — the very same who couldn't bring himself to say that the Soviet Union was behind of the Katyn massacre — is that

In Iran and in the United States, for reasons which admittedly are totally different, film-making is thus muzzled. … if today, Panahi and Polanski's freedom is so shackled today, it is because of what they are: first-rate artists.

That's right: the reason that Panahi is muzzled (in a Tehran jail) is because he is a first-rate artist. And the reason that Polanski is muzzled (in a Swiss chalet) is because he is a first-rate artist!

To their credit, several Le Monde readers denounce the article (using repeatedly, among others, the expressions false "amalgam" and "simplifications"), with one reader stating that "Mélanger la prison d'Evin à Théhéran où on peut craindre le pire et celle du chalet de Gstaad en Suisse, me paraît une 'offense' à Jafar Panahi." and another reacting thus:

Il faut être bourré de mépris et de certitudes pour comparer quelqu'un condamné dans une dictature pour avoir osé s'exprimer, et quelqu'un à qui une démocratie reproche d'avoir abusé de son statut pour s'envoyer des petites filles. Utiliser l'un pour dédouaner l'autre est scandaleux, et sera inefficace.

The Benign Stupidity of the World’s Navel

Economics is a social science. Aptitude in the understanding of economic matters requires a kind of facility with understanding human behavior, and divorcing oneself of the arrogance of imagining whatever forms of utopian arbitrary simplism should be forced on the society at large.

I think you know what world view that's referring to. They see the world in class warfare terms, but say that they're for everyone's dignity, social justice, etc.

So it comes at no surprise to discover that in that social science, conservatives and libertarians show an exemplary understanding of economics compared to leftists, whatever their level of education:

Based on a Zogby International online survey of 4,835 American adults, Columbia University psychologist Zeljka Buturovic and George Mason University economist Dan Klein find that economic enlightenment is not correlated to going to college.

They also find that it is the highest among those self-identifying “conservative” and “libertarian,” and descends through “moderate,” “liberal,” and “progressive.” Other variables include party affiliation, religious participation, union membership, NASCAR fandom, and Wal-Mart patronage.

Yes, those barbarian mouth-breathers who are fans of NASCAR and lower themselves to step into a Wal-Mart.

Even with the caveats in mind, however, the results are important. They indicate that, for people inclined to take such a survey, basic economic enlightenment is not correlated with going to college.

Or to put the motives of the state-centrism of the left, we have this old European saying consistent with the center-to-far left’s social and economic world view:

“Tutto nello Stato, niente al di fuori dello Stato, nulla contro lo Stato”

“Everything for the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.”

- some minion of Mussolini

Which is also why engaging with the ideas of the structurally more “progressive” social attitudes, politics, and polity of Europe reminds me of trying to talk to a class of dull-eyed, predictable adolescents. Some staring off into space, a few picking their noses, one or two of them staring at your crotch, but all of them prone to destroy something sooner or later based on single-mindedness, and a lack of personal moderation. Such is the state of those you’ll be sure to see protesting in the European streets in the coming year over matters of economy, wages, services, and entitlements.

Here it is again, The German Question

The German Question is back, ponders John Vinocur.

In fact, it’s German Questions, plural, and fateful enough for Europe and the euro’s future to merit the capital letters.

…The German Question these days has other, considerably more biting formulations. Ulrich Beck, a sociologist at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich and the London School of Economics, offered two.

“Does Germany consider that the time has come to defend itself against Europe’s excessive clutches — the German model of success against its jealous European neighbors?” he asked. And: “Has the united Europe referred to in the German Constitution’s preamble stopped being the lodestar of the Germans’ vision of themselves and German politics?”

John Vinocur goes on to discuss the subject with four Germans "who represent deep political engagement in an integrated Europe" — former Chancellor Helmut Schmidt; Joschka Fischer, former foreign minister, Greens party chief and urban street fighter; Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble, a Christian Democrat and former chief of staff to Chancellor Helmut Kohl; and Hans-Ulrich Klose, the Foreign Ministry’s coordinator for German-American cooperation and a former Social Democratic leader of the Bundestag’s Foreign Relations Committee.

For them, doubts among its friends about Germany’s solidarity, accelerated since the beginning of the recession by Chancellor Angela Merkel’s perceived Germany First reflexes, can’t be a comfortable notion.

…A darker view came from Mr. Beck in an essay titled “German euro-nationalism.”

He sees a new kind of German economic unilateralism replacing its old multilateral creed. He believes an “intellectual nationalism” now exists in Germany that bridges right-left party definitions.

He wrote, “Chancellor Merkel has employed the European currency crisis to set the euro-zone’s financial policy switches in the direction of a German Europe.”

This, Mr. Beck argues, is a “Germany that no longer personifies the most European of Europeans. Rather, it is one that downplays its European duties and ties. It’s a Germany that has dredged up Europe’s German Question.”

John Vinocur concludes:

Clearly, Germany has changed from the country that, in exchange for German reunification, bartered away the Deutsche mark and the Bundesbank’s roles as de facto European reserve currency and Europe’s monetary arbiter.

The new, most pertinent German Question flows from this reality: How can the rest of the Europeans manage an unabashedly self-interested Germany — normal is what it’s called here — that they hardly imagined would emerge from the deal they signed in 1992 as the Maastricht Treaty.

Because they didn’t make the Sale, -

EU Observer: EU skeptical about Iran nuclear deal

It Takes a Village Leftist...

...to rationalize this stuff:

"It would be good...if (Obama) could be dictator for a few years because he could do a lot of good things quickly," [Woody] Allen is quoted as saying.

he told the Spanish-language magazine La Vanguardia in his understated, quasi-Oedipal manner.

Delving into the history of the 20th century, not to mention the history of his erstwhile co-religionists, that sure he’ll be satisfied by the fact that the cattle cars will run on time.

Postcards from Pétainistan

Newsweek:

Seventy years ago, the Nazis conquered France. Since then, the country has changed less than you might think.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la meme chose"

And yet, despite all these changes, certain things about French society have remained remarkably constant since the blitzkrieg, particularly in comparison with the United States. Most important, the French state retains an outsize role in society. In a tradition of dirigisme (from the verb "to direct") that stretches back to the Old Regime, the state encases markets in thick webs of regulations while itself managing health care, most major cultural institutions, and most education from preschool to postdoctoral. When President Nicolas Sarkozy took office in 2007, conservative American observers hoped he would emulate Margaret Thatcher and slash the state sector. But despite some tentative reforms, the state's authority remains largely unshaken (government expenditures consistently account for more than 50 percent of GDP, compared with barely 36 percent in the United States before the recession). And as in 1940, the most attractive career track for smart, ambitious students is the elite civil service. As a French friend once put it to me, "Most of my classmates would rather become assistant secretary of agriculture than start Amazon.com."

Plus ultra.

And both in 1940 and today, immigration has been the occasion for furious outbursts of prejudice and agonized debates about "French identity." In 1940 the worst outbursts were directed at the Jews, and they set the stage for the anti-Semitic policies of the collaborationist Vichy government, which willingly sent 76,000 French Jews to their deaths in the Nazi extermination camps.

- Shookran to Pat “Panopticon” Patterson

What is not the decisive issue in evaluating the Iraq invasion and what is

Judging by the dominant reaction of the British press, [the sole function of the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq war] is to prove what we all know to be true: that the invasion was immoral and Tony Blair is to blame

writes Nigel Biggar in the Financial Times. Currently in the process of writing a book on the ethics of war, he is the regius professor of moral and pastoral theology at the University of Oxford.

The surfeit of moral certainty among the commentators is suspect; the zealous clarity of their moral waters needs muddying.

For sure, the invasion and occupation of Iraq was morally flawed. The US administration's motivation was hubristic and preparation for postwar reconstruction was woefully inadequate. Yet most just wars are flawed. Take the war against Nazi Germany. The RAF's indiscriminate bombing of German cities was largely driven by "Bomber" Harris's vengeful hatred. While the destruction of Hitler's hegemony was very good, the entrenchment of Stalin's was very bad. Any complex human enterprise will involve moral flaws. What needs determining is whether and how these undermine its justice as a whole.

…Arguments about a war's disproportion are often intractable. If one assumes the Iraq war was unjust, then no civilian deaths were worth it. Yet in affirming the justice of the war against Hitler we imply it was worth the deaths of 30m civilians. The loss of 150,000 civilians therefore does not, of itself, make the Iraq war unjust. The invasion would be harder to defend were the country's new regime to fail. But that has not happened yet, and those critics who care more for Iraqis than they hate the former US and UK leaders George W. Bush and Mr Blair will hope it never does.

…If determining the Iraq war's proportionality is difficult, maybe determining its legality is easier. It would seem so … But such condemnations can only be opinions, since international law can be variously interpreted. However, even if we grant that the invasion was illegal, we still have to grapple with the fact that so was Nato's 1999 intervention in Kosovo, which is now widely regarded as legitimate. The implication? That legality is not the final word.

Current international law is morally problematic. … The decisive issue in evaluating the Iraq invasion is not whether it was morally flawed or disproportionate or illegal, but whether it was really necessary to stop or prevent a sufficiently great evil.

No one disputes that Saddam Hussein's regime was grossly atrocious. … Critics of the invasion would presumably not tolerate such a regime in their own backyard; and an effective international policing authority would have changed it. Is the coalition to be condemned for filling the vacuum? Yes, there have been similar vacuums that it (and others) have failed to fill — Rwanda, Zimbabwe, Darfur. But is it not better to be inconsistently responsible than consistently irresponsible?

Now add the concern about weapons of mass destruction. This was sufficiently grave to rouse the UN to litter the period 1991-2003 with 17 resolutions calling on Saddam to disarm permanently. … there was good reason to withhold benefit of doubt and to suppose that it was developing WMDs. It was not just Messrs Bush and Blair who supposed this. So did Jacques Chirac, then French president, and Hans Blix, the UN's chief weapons inspector.

We now know this reasonable supposition was mistaken and that the problem was less urgent than it appeared. But it was still urgent. Saddam was intent on acquiring nuclear weapons and support for containment was dissolving.

Related: Exaggerated claims, substandard research, and a disservice to truth (shookhran to MadiMaxi): ORB's "million Iraqi deaths" survey seriously flawed, new study shows.

“Conflict Deaths in Iraq: A Methodological Critique of the ORB Survey Estimate” by Michael Spagat and Josh Dougherty, just published in Survey Research Methods, describes in detail how the ORB poll is riddled with critical inconsistencies and methodological shortcomings.

Like a “Diverse” Baader-Meinhof Gang

On first glance, the report in the popular German tabloid Bild could have seemed like a bad joke. “Guantánamo Detainees Slated to Go to Hamburg,”

Reports John Rosenthal.

Three terror detainees may soon be sent to the city that gave us Mohamed Atta.

A wire piece from dpa emphasized:

Hamburg’s “cosmopolitan,” “multi-ethnic,” “anything-goes” character.

As long as anything goes - there - if they plan on being that stupid.

L’érotisme du grand soir

The French language blog I Like Your Style has an interesting article on allure of violence of the “peacy-peace” left.

Three dead, three bank employees, who were the salesmen of the great Satan Capital anyway, for €1000 per month’s salary, the bastards! Oh, they would have liked to hang a banker, cigar and all, but none to be had for lefty, so they went for the small fish in the meantime. In the mean time we continue to tolerate the boy, since he’s just letting off a little steam. He avails himself well, the leftist anarchist parasite sponging off of the state. The three bank employees [who died in Athens], paid taxes, in fact paid the anarchist leftist’s welfare, and would spit in their mouthes, except when he went to cash his welfare check at the bank, again and again.

The small left-wing anarchist, hears stuff on TV, talks with his lousy little anarchist buddies again, and gets as excited as usual - except that here, they knew there would be cameras, so they was no risk, and they could then disappear. The little anarchist knew it was safe to toss a few molotov cocktails, and lets off a little steam, knowing it might guarantee him his welfare a little longer, paid by bank employees. So the little anarchist drank a few beers, lit some firecrackers, put on his ugliest black clothes, as usual, and he threw a few cocktails at the riot police, the bastards! How dare they! He knows that the riot police are instructed to do nothing, because the slightest scratch on the little leftist will permit looting, killing, and fires, with the approval of the TV and leftist journalists worldwide, with downstream and the cheers of the protesters,

”The justice of the left,” one of the comments say quite cogently, “is always about vengeance.”

What Freedoms Are You Talking About, Mr. Reagan?

I never knew what freedom was until I saw you lose yours, Ronald Reagan said, quoting a Soviet major he once played in a TV play (gracias por Virginia Margarita).