How Do I Hate Me? Let me Count the Ways

To be a leftist, I’m convinced that one must try your best to live a short, ulcerate life. Just as kids eventually discover that the tooth fairly isn’t real, I have the sense that they trauma is no different for the cause-of-the-week activist leftist when they discover that their oppressed waifs think for themselves.

i.e.: German Footbal: Leftists harass Muslims for supporting Germany

The leftists have been particularly aggressive in the city’s Neukölln district, home to many residents of Turkish and Arabic heritage, daily Der Tagesspiegel reported on Monday.

Here they have made a point of destroying and removing Germany flags hanging outside shops and vehicles because they believe the proud patriotism hearkens back to the ugly nationalism of the Third Reich, the paper said.

Actually, judging by the trearing down of things hung outside shop windows, I think they DO hearkens back to the ugly nationalism of the Third Reich.

However, we all know that these outsider-types, prior to being programmed politically, are NOT to be permitted to think for themselves, or improve their own lives. After all, what is to become of their image as victims?

Bassal and his cousin Badr Mohammed, a well-known conservative Christian Democratic Berlin politician who lives in the same building, worked together to get the 20-metre-long flag, which cost them €500.

In recent days the situation has escalated, with the anarchists attempting to remove the flag four times and even setting it on fire, the paper reported. On one occasion a group managed to gain access to the roof of the building and cut the flag down.

Last Friday evening some 16 people dressed in typical black anarchist garb confronted Bassal in his shop, and the mood was tense, the paper said.

Opposing his existence, no doubt – or his right to an opinion... it always boils down to something like that.

“They see us as immigrants,” he said. “They don’t understand that Germans who aren’t from Germany would defend Germany.”

Both Bassal and Mohammed told Berliner Morgenpost that they are incredulous they have to defend hanging a German flag to native Germans.

Starting from the position that these ‘activist’ types operating from, you have to understand that they really DO believe that those they pretend to passionately defend aren’t fully human, and desperately need their aid.

Sillier still, they tend also to ‘get active’ in order to indulge their own joy of destructive violence, and are too young and stupid to have either a factual or contextual understanding of the horror that was East Germany – in fact, they tend to be the only sort that would support the neo-totalitarians peddling good old fashioned bait-and-switch class warfare, Die Linke.

But according to Der Tagesspiegel, Bassal has decided to remove the flag and hoist it only on days when there is a Germany match. Meanwhile other residents told the paper they were taking special care not to leave their flags unattended.

Said Without Irony

My, that’s some tasty kool-aid.

It is meant to be the most clear democratising feature of the EU's new rulebook, the Lisbon Treaty, but implementation of the "citizen's initiative" is a political minefield and is prompting much discussion about the danger of the tool turning into a mockery of democracy.

As opposed to, say, pandering to the public with the concept, of course. Even with it, the only less direct form of government there is to the EU is sitting in Pyongyang, where “the people” are said to have been in charge for 6 decades.

The modified proposal sees the commission decides at the moment it registers the initiative if it is fundamentally silly or against European "values."

Read into that all you like – if you can read it at all. Otherwise, enter “the activists”, those with a cause mentality that is more interested in perfecting the art of pretending that any citizen may have a say:

At a hearing on the issue organised by the parliament's Liberal group on Tuesday (22 June), democracy and civil society activists lined up to criticise the proposal.

What’s rather obvious is that the debate, now over 100 000 or 1 000 000 signatures are needed to rase a point any single lawmaker alone is permitted to raise, has entirely to do with the possible content of what the citizens are interested in: things that matter to them. We all know that that can’t be tolerated. After all, “the world” is watching them!

Others took issue with the commission's argument that 100,000 signatures have to be gathered before admissibility is considered, arguing it is too burdensome. The commission says that deciding on admissibility too early would see screeching media headlines like "Brussels gives greenlight to abortion."

Or anything else initiated by actual citizens, for that matter.

The culprit must be BP, presumably because there is no evidence that George Bush was scuba diving near the Deepwater Horizon rig on April 20th

In place of leadership we get photo-op trips to the gulf and the knee-jerk pattern of blaming others

writes Joe Hoerter to The Economist.

In this case it is BP, presumably because there is no evidence that George Bush was scuba diving near the Deepwater Horizon rig on April 20th.

Highly Recommended

I know the liberals call you 'the most dangerous man in America,' but don't worry about it, they used to say the same thing about me. Keep up the good work.

— Ronald Reagan
in a letter to
Rush Limbaugh,
December 11, 1992

Cutting off their Early Morning Cocktails is Next

This is what happens to societies that put all of their hopes in the Government, and by extension, at the fate of any and all of their fellow citizens.

An EU Commission paper on pensions argues that no more than a third of our adult lives should be spent in retirement writes Natalie Hamill. This means that by 2060, according to current trends, we should expect to be retiring at 70.

The next few years look rather bleak, as member states grapple to get their national finances in order. With credit ratings slipping and austerity measures becoming more widespread, governments are scrambling to find ways to cut their deficits and implement drastic public spending cuts. Retirement reforms will be an area of high priority.

Quite simply, had these folks taken on the responsibility for their own savings for themselves, they won’t live in societies that through Kamakaze budget spending, have put them in a position where they have to work until they’re 70.

as famed for their 35 hour working week as for their croissants, are the latest to protest, after the French Government announced that the retirement age must be raised to 63. Despite the strikes last week President Sarkozy is adamant; the pension system in France is close to bankruptcy (currently £27 billion in deficit) and therefore the age must be raised. France has the lowest retirement age in the EU, and given the economic climate, it cannot justify this anymore.

But whilst French workers huff and puff on strikes in Paris, they should spare a thought for the hard-working Germans, pillar of the EU, and (as they always feared) now a crutch of the Eurozone. Contributing the largest proportion of the Greek bailout has damaged the German government’s standing with its citizens and frustration is simmering at the injustice of their working hard and retiring at 67, but having to pay for the, previously, comfortable retirements of the Greeks at 61.

In Greece, strikes and violent protests have plunged the country into chaos; but few of the austerity measures have caused as widespread outrage as the proposal to raise the retirement age to 63. Prime Minister Papandreou has no choice, he must cut public spending or he won’t get the rest of his bailout. Greece cannot finance the “golden” retirements its citizens expect, and other countries shouldn’t be asked to.

March, yell, set fire to cars, and bang pots all you like, but your well-being is still your responsibility.

I’m Surprised that he Didn’t Dress them up like Uncle Sam

A cartoon by Arend van Dam says all you really need to know about European intelligence and sophistication. It’s reporting bad news that causes the bad news, not the bad news itself that anyone would need to know about.

The subheading that reads “Credit ratings agencies' estimations of Eurozone debt is hurting the single currency.” Is careful to avoid the fact that it’s the Eurozone debt, unfunded mandates, and punitive over-regulation that might might have something to do with their credit rating instead.

More of the Same Ol' "Rightists, Watch Out You Don't Go Too Far"

The Economist last week printed an issue which included the articles What's wrong with America's right ("Too much anger and too few ideas. America needs a better alternative to Barack Obama") and The risks of “Hell, no!” ("The tea-party movement is pushing the Republicans to the right. That may make it harder to recapture the White House from Barack Obama").

The more positive (i.e., more realistic) news is that this week it compared the Community-Organizer-in-Chief to Vladimir Putin…

I responded by writing them the following:


When you write that America's "voters expect solutions, not just rage", you are suggesting that citizens are demanding (some sort of) intervention from above (from Washington, DC). But that is not what America is about. America is about solutions from the bottom — unfettered from (undue) interference from the top.

Speaking of foreign affairs and the USSR, Ronald Reagan said, "there is only one guaranteed way you can have peace" and that is to "surrender." The equivalent, for liberals, in America's internal affairs, is that there is one guaranteed way to "bridge the divide", to "renounce extremes", and to "go beyond polarization" and "beyond hatred and anger" (all "in the interests of America", of course), and that is for America's conservatives — never for the liberals themselves — to surrender their principles.

Therein we have the true meaning of the Democrats' "bipartisan support." It is Orwellian newspeak, concealing a request for Republicans to shut up and go along with liberals' progressive and statist politics.

The GOP is the party of No. As well it should be. Just as Democrats — and statists the world over — stand for "Yes we can" (get more government intervention and more bureaucracy and more hand-outs and more unity behind a "benevolent" ruler), the party of No stands (or ought to stand) by the Constitution, which itself is the declaration, 222 years ago, to statists the world over, from the British monarchy (in 1776) to would-be élites in the United States itself (from the 18th century to today), that the people stand up and say No.

They say No to the idea that we must rally behind the country's ruler (well-intentioned or otherwise); No to the idea that we must not question his policies, his taxes, and his decisions on our behalf (or not criticize them too harshly in any event); No to the very belief that our alleged betters have a better understanding of what is good for us; No to hamstrung efforts by would-be nannies to regulate our lives; and, indeed, No to the belief that the common individual is in need of oversight in the first place.

The EU Has More Regular Summit Meetings With Russia Than with the Obama Administration

So where is all that "smart diplomacy" of the Apologizer-in-Chief's leading us?

The main front page article of the International Herald Tribune on Tuesday (top right) has the European Commission president, José Manuel Barroso, criticizing Barack Obama in an interview with The New York Times' Steven Erlanger and Stephen Castle — criticizing him all so diplomatically, of course, but criticizing him (and his policies, fiscal as well as foreign) nonetheless.

Mr. Barroso, speaking animatedly for 90 minutes, was rebutting a criticism by President Obama and some economists that Europe’s rush to cut government spending to appease market sentiment risked worsening the region’s economic slump. Mr. Obama wrote in a letter last week to his Group of 20 counterparts that withdrawing fiscal stimulus too soon could lead to “renewed economic hardships and recession.”

Mr. Barroso also rejected an American contention, made recently by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, that Europe was driving Turkey into the arms of its less secular Islamic neighbors.

…Concerned by Mr. Obama’s postponement of a European Union-United States summit meeting in May, Mr. Barroso confirmed that he had set up a small study group to examine ways to make the relationship more substantive and coordinated, especially on issues of job growth and regulation. He said that he wanted to produce “deliverables” and that the two sides could do more in relations with third parties, like Russia and China.

Yet the European Union has more regular summit meetings with Russia, he pointed out — two a year.

International Day of Rage

Mr Monks said union barons across Europe were planning a co-ordinated ‘day of action’ against the cuts on 29 September, involving national strikes and protests.

They will call it a historic moment for those in love neo-authoritarian-socialism, a tragedy, the beginning of the end, etc. I call it an inflection point.

Further in the old European spirit of licking the boot that kicks you, all the talk is about the old-fashioned thrill of the goose-step. While some pace hither and fro about the diminution of rights and the creeping dictatorship of the non-internationalists, they are at risk of falling into it for no good reason other than the widespread, shared political views of their do-gooders, luvvies, and activist “caring” types.

Mr Monks, now head of the European TUC, said: ‘I had a discussion with Barroso last Friday about what can be done for Greece, Spain, Portugal and the rest and his message was blunt: “Look, if they do not carry out these austerity packages, these countries could virtually disappear in the way that we know them as democracies. They've got no choice, this is it.”

‘He's very, very worried. He shocked us with an apocalyptic vision of democracies in Europe collapsing because of the state of indebtedness.’

Greece, Spain and Portugal, which only became democracies in the 1970s, are all facing dire problems with their public finances. All three countries have a history of military coups.

All of it caused by caving in to those very same do-gooders, luvvies, and activist “caring” types who always seem to demand an enlargement of entitlements. It’s sort of a “we are all ACORN” type of universe.

However it’s all idiotic. Lethargy is the player with all the momentum. The talk of apocalypse, which I guess means having to drink canned beer, the the kind of thing arrived at in moments of fear and ignorance, while rowing through the middle of the stormy sea.

I’ll believe it when I see the promotion of a ‘national dress’ or a reconstituted form of socially unifying mechanism once codified in martial non-uniform garb, like seeing a lot of the same sloganeered t-shirts, or some “unity color” selected by the now-threadbare Roy G. Biv minus the ones used for Thai, Iranian, and Ukrainian protest movements.

However, if I DID have to place a bet, my guess is that if a charismatic Hitlerian figure is to emerge, it will actually be a TV personality with a New Age or self-help bent to their unspoken narrative. Deepak Chopra for “interim manager”, if you will. What makes the jackboot theme implausible is the lack of actual force nor population of military age to pull it off in the stylish manner that they’re accustomed to.

Other than that, I would expect a real meltdown to take the form of a continent in a sort of localized chaos where a continental government still exists, but all their laws governing their citizens are ignored, and local and regional entities function in the manner of a fragmented array of something that looks an awful lot like the duchies and mini-states of the previous millennium. Pockets of cosmopolitanism (i.e. running water and public transit), form an archipelago laid out on a plane of more rural entities that will provide a wide range of quality of life from prosperous suburban life to ones where outsiders passing through are attacked out of simple paranoia.

Assuming that IS the case, it will some time in the future beyond it, well after a struggle of reconstitution of some kind, be looked back upon with horror, but also a great age of awakening for a revival of the creative arts, the individual will, and perhaps even of faith. An aristocracy will emerge. A lack of funding and of ingenuity will end most any conflict we now know of. One issue crackpots will simply evaporate, and Greek public culture will rationalize its superiority somehow.

Then again, it could really go south, even by the standards of medieval age style fragmented continent. The Greenies could take over.

How Dare you Smoke in ze Presence of the Philosopher!

Having doubled back over and over, over the years to cover Martin Heidegger’s inspiration and rationalization of the acts of the Nazis, a transcript of his now notorious seminar has been published.

A darling of recent ‘deconstructionists’, who ironically enjoy aesthetic chaos, his work has been blindly used over the past 25 years in the same way Derrida’s empty, self-absorbed rubbish has: to obfuscate.

Now everyone can read for themselves what, according to student transcripts, Martin Heidegger lectured on between November 1933 and February 1934 under the title "On the Essence and Concepts of Nature, History and the State". In April 1933, he became rector of the Albert Ludwig University and in 1934, he handed in his resignation. During his year in power he applied himself single-mindedly to organising the university's Gleichschaltung (bringing into line). All the documents from his rectoral term are now all being published together. The lack of empathy in their tone stands in contrast, for example, to his speech honouring the the Nazi martyr figure Albert Leo Schlageter from May 1933. The documents show that during the one year intermezzo, the new masters could rely on Heidegger. He cancelled the evening readings in January 1934, so that the "swearing in of the People's Chancellor" could be celebrated in style. He called upon people to make donations to the Winterhilfswerk so that it might become a "visible demonstration of the Volksgemeinschaft" (people's community).

The “people coming together” theme, especially that of constructing gleischhaltung or (uniform and universal) social agreement, might sound familiar to those paying close attention to the contemporary left, that seems to call anything that doesn’t agree with them ‘divisive’.

As opposed to monomaniacal gleischhaltung that they like to promote as ‘nice’ and free of disagreement and other viewpoints.

Admired for enacting "the automatic restoration of voting rights for former felons": Charlie Crist Praised by a Democrat Back in 2007

In case anybody is wondering about the late transformation (or betrayal) of Charlie Crist: already back in 2007, in a letter to the editor of The Economist, a Florida Democrat is heard to praise the governor of the Sunshine State for bringing an end to the alleged bickering in a "state that had once symbolised polarisation", for allowing "meaningful relationships to be forged across the political aisle" (in spite of angering "many of his fellow Republicans"), and because "his post-partisanship appears to be every bit as meaningful" as that of Arnold Schwarzenegger.

In other areas pragmatism has almost always trumped partisanship. Mr Crist may not be as flashy as California's governor, but his post-partisanship appears to be every bit as meaningful.

The post-partisanship for which Crist is to be praised includes "the automatic restoration of voting rights for former felons"! Let nobody say we were not forewarned.

Sunshine state

SIR – Lexington frets that the “post-partisanship” politics of Arnold Schwarzenegger may not spread much beyond California (November 3rd). Lexington can find solace in another state that had once symbolised national polarisation: Florida. I voted against Charlie Crist in 2006, but in his first year as governor he has done more to re-enfranchise (mostly Democratic) black voters than any of his predecessors through his support for voting systems with paper records and the automatic restoration of voting rights for former felons. This has angered many of his fellow Republicans, but allowed meaningful relationships to be forged across the political aisle. In other areas pragmatism has almost always trumped partisanship. Mr Crist may not be as flashy as California's governor, but his post-partisanship appears to be every bit as meaningful.

Seth Kaplan
Miami Beach

Caring and Sharing

Remember: they’re better than you.

As the economic crisis pinches national budgets, EU member states' funds set aside for development are dwindling and increasingly being used instead as channels for public cash for domestic companies and promoting national vested interests rather than poverty reduction in the poorest of countries.

Some states are even counting the cost of deporting refugees back to their home countries as 'development aid'.

They even believe the platitudes they’ve been parroting about themselves.

"There is even talk of counting remittances - the money sent home by immigrants. This is taking the fruits of the labour of migrants and calling that aid."

Meanwhile, between breathless, overbearing complaints about the Arizona border enforcement law, they take time to be munificent and generous.

A number of countries, notably France and Italy, have made agreements with developing countries that force them to co-operate on repatriation of migrants before they can access the aid, making development aid into a tool of anti-immigrant policies.

Presumably, they aren’t talking about personal remittances.

Countries often use aid to funnel money to domestic companies. Aid to China makes up a large proportion of Polish aid and aims to boost national exports for example. This sort of activity, termed 'tied aid' has existed for as long as governments have offered development assistance, but in the last few years, this has taken off as a share of aid.

Surely you ‘little people’ will understand that.

Democracy is 5 wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for lunch; If you were the sheep, which would you rather live in—a republic or a democracy?

If you remember much from your high school history classes about the founding of this country

writes Chip Wood,

you know there was a great deal of controversy about what type of government the newly independent states should create.

The first effort, the Articles of Confederation, was generally regarded as a failure. But what should replace them? Each state sent a group of representatives to meet in Philadelphia and hammer out a new agreement. The deliberations of the Constitutional Convention in 1787 were held in strict secrecy. Consequently, anxious citizens gathered outside Independence Hall when the proceedings ended, eager to learn what had been produced behind those closed doors.

As the delegates left the building, a Mrs. Powel of Philadelphia asked Benjamin Franklin, “Well, Doctor, what have we got?”

With no hesitation, Franklin replied, “A republic, if you can keep it.” Not a democracy, not a democratic republic. But “a republic, if you can keep it.”

… I loved to tell [high school students] about the differences between a republic and a democracy.

“A lynch mob is democracy in action,” I would say. “While if you believe someone is innocent until proven guilty, that they deserve their day in court and that a jury of their peers should decide their fate, then you believe in a nation of laws, not just the whims of a mob.”

Another line I used a lot was, “Democracy is five wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for lunch. If you were the sheep, which would you rather live in—a republic or a democracy?”

I told them about the importance of “binding men down with the chains of a Constitution.” That this was the only sure way to protect their freedom. And that anyone who wanted to change this republic into a democracy was an enemy of liberty.

A century or two earlier there would have been no need to give such a talk—and no interest if one did. Back in the 18th and 19th centuries, every American who could read and write (and probably most of those who couldn’t), knew we were a republic. The campaign to brainwash us into believing we were a democracy didn’t begin until 100 years ago. Today, if you take a poll of high school or college students, the overwhelming majority will tell you that we are a democracy.

Please don’t dismiss this as a mere quarrel over semantics. Understanding the difference between the two systems of government is absolutely vital. I am not exaggerating when I tell you that our very liberties depend on getting more Americans to realize the importance of this seemingly arcane dispute.

Who’s the Cowboy (Capitalist) Now ?

Some Germans mull the sanest outcome of the Eurozone’s dependency on them. It isn’t kicking out the undercapitalized and profligate-borrower member states, it’s leaving them for dead.

Gerard Baker:

The euro version goes like this: fiscal policy is run by the Greeks, the Spanish and the Italians; interest rates are set by a central bank in thrall to politicians in France and Italy, and it is all organised by a Portuguese socialist and a Belgian. The idea will go down a treat in places like France, Greece and Portugal. But if you’re German — an increasingly disgruntled citizen of Europe’s largest and most productive economy — you might be starting to think it represents a final signal to get the hell out of there.

I exaggerate, of course. The EU summit is destined to break up without any firm plan being agreed.

The Battle Hymn of the Democrat

The Education Bubble

Michael Phillips sounds out on an argument made by Glenn Reynolds on the high cost and lack of efficacy of the present stae of higher education, a system geared more to be a make-work system for those employed in it that the development of the student.

The value of work after college, in general, will no longer justify the astronomic costs of college time. It hasn't for nearly two decades. The same goes for prep-schools and many post graduate departments.

Free government education types take note: it’s true, whoever is paying the bill. Phillips also notes some fundamental life-isses that Reynolds misses:

Paying off the associated student loans is debilitating and destroys the working life and working opportunities for many people. If you have to pay off a student loan at $700 per month, you usually can't take a job where you will learn important lessons about the business world, or start your own business if you have the skills. You also must look forward to a very grim loan paying future with no likely reward in sight. Depression. You postpone a family at the time when you are most capable of raising children.

Having carried student loans, I disagree. Then again, I took up an area of professional study and found a WAY to pay them off.

Similarly in the fantasy world of “free University education” the want ads in European publications and websites make it clear: the offers are limited largely due to the over-regulation, over-management, and burden of employer mandates. What is stunning from an American perspective, are the listings for academic programs found in those publications and websites where job openings should be.

Colleges are a business disaster. The administrative costs of college are far out of proportion to their contribution to the final product. I've consulted with several colleges and walked away stunned by the administrative overhead, not to mention the incredibly high salaries to faculty which is wasted in 98.3% of the positions.

Which can be only MORE true the more socialized the management mechanisms are, regardless if the costs of state-owned or managed institutions are hidden: i.e.: Does a state run university get an electric bill? Did they sourcing of their own facilities appear on their own budget? Etcetera, etcetera.

Either way, for the outcome, one which barely benefits society and confers it’s questionable benefits on the student, the price of the way things presently operate is just too high, even if they weren’t turning out too many graduates for the economy not to undercut their value in the economy.

If intellectual fulfillment is a larger (PC/non-“greed” feeding) goal, what’s missing is something that was once ubiquitous: a society of well read and literate workers who enjoyed the pursuit of knowledge on their own initiative, and for their own personal enrichment. It didn’t require a degree, just a library card and a well ordered use of ones free time. It’s a pursuit that’s equally true of those who did come through the degree mills.

Defining evil down in a fashion that does immense violence to good sense, good taste, and good leadership

Once more, Plantu makes an inappropriate comparison with 9-11, and that on the front page of Le Monde (and that's not even taking into account that no tanker was involved in the Deepwater Horizon disaster).


To quote John Podhoretz (merci, Professor Reynolds) — speaking of the Apologizer-in-Chief's efforts to do the same:

By likening the murder of 3,000 people and the efforts to take out the US government to a series of mistakes that added up to a catastrophe, Obama has defined evil down in a fashion that does immense violence to good sense, good taste and good leadership.

Update: Plantu is hardly the only French cartoonist to compare "an unwanted disaster to a conscious act of war, [thereby] adding an improper moral dimension to the effort to clean up the Gulf", as Delucq joins in the evil-down-defining "fun"…

A Signpost on the Road to Demographic Collapse

Paging the delusional Paul Ehrlich, and all those lauding the ‘environmental’ argument for self-selected social sterilization: a Danish government panel report finds one third of schools to be too small to be sustainable. [Bold emphasis mine.]

One of the key recommendations of the report, released yesterday, recommends setting a minimum of three pupils per class, a limit currently met by only 1,000 of the country’s schools.
The task force, set up to find ways to improve the quality of education, recommends implementing the closings over a period of five years.

Education experts and community activists disagree with the findings. Peter Allerup, a professor at Aarhus University’s School of Education, challenges the panel’s argument that larger schools are more effective and educate students better.

‘The right answer is we just don’t know,’ he told Kristeligt Dagblad newspaper.

He added that closing schools in small communities would probably result in families moving to towns where schools were located.

And a population of those who DO want the family to have a future engaging in palliative act of retreat – if only to keep life as normal as possible, for as long as possible.

Fear the USA and Its Ghastly Weapons, Weapons Far More Redoubtable Than America's B-52s: chewing gum, Coca-Cola, McDonald's, MTV, Michael Jordan, etc…

Anti-Americanism is as common in France as a baguette

writes Richard in an email. "This is Bloc Identitaire." The Awakening of Identities is the professed goal of the block, which pouts that "we have been Americanized"; which displays a photo of a Yankee "predator" (a pedophile?) tending (fellatio-like?) a bottle of soft drink (drugging?) an unsuspecting little innocent girl; and which claims that since 1945, America has been wielding "weapons far more redoubtable than all the B-52s mass-produced by America's military industry", an assertion followed by a partial listing of the ghastly weapons in question: "chewing gum, Coca-Cola, McDonald's, Desperate Housewives, MTV, Michael Jordan, etc."

Depuis 1945, l’environnement culturel européen est façonné par les Etats-Unis grâce à des armes bien plus redoutables que tous les B’52 produits en masse par l’industrie militaire américaine : le chewing gum, Coca-Cola, Mc Donalds, Desperate Housewives, MTV, Michael Jordan, etc…

This sounds almost like my (tongue-in-cheek) statement to Frenchmen in my book on anti-Americanism, La Bannière Étalée, in which I politely ask several ranters to forgive me, but I cannot say that tears well up in my eyes when I think of the "horrific sufferings" that France, Europe, and the rest of the world have been confronted with under American imperialism, since I can hardly abstain from pointing out that there have existed, through the centuries, peoples who have suffered worse ignominies than to have to submit to jeans, to Coca-Cola, to McDonald's, to Schwarzenegger movies, and to a rodent named Mickey.

[Les alarmistes] voudront bien avoir la gentillesse de m'excuser de ne pas montrer plus de solidarité avec leur indignation intense, mais je ne peux pas dire que les larmes me viennent aux yeux quand je pense aux "terribles souffrances" auxquelles ont été confrontées la France, l'Europe, et le reste du monde sous l'impérialisme américain, et j'ai peur que je ne puisse m'abstenir de dire que je pense qu'il existe des peuplades qui, au fil des siècles, ont souffert de pires ignomies que d'être soumises aux jeans, au Coca-Cola, à McDonald's, aux films de Schwarzie, et à une souris prénommée Mickey.

It’s That ‘Quality of Life’ World Power Thing

The Sofa bar in the northern city of Kiel caters to a very particular clientele -- unemployed alcoholics. The experiment has been such a success that other cities are now hoping to follow suit.

As opposed to, say, just about every decent sized town center and public park in Germany. Hey! Don’t judge! It’s a lifestyle thing.

It's 10:30 a.m., and things are hopping at the Sofa bar in the northern German city of Kiel. The men sitting at the table on the left, in the front of the room, have already had their first four rounds of beer, the radio is blasting loud guitar riffs, and a young girl hops onto a patron's lap and asks him for a sip. A glass bottle is rolling back and forth on the floor, and the air is thick with cigarette smoke. Atze and Dirk sit at the bar, coughing, rolling unfiltered cigarettes and asking if anyone wants a drink.

A.K.A., a perfectly normal thing to do, enabled by the ‘injection park’ idea, were it not for the fact that public drinking is nearly ubiquitous in German cities, and that they don’t need a “safe place” for what couldn’t ever amount to a handful of those that do it, but rather, just the most responsible of the irresponsible.

In this bar, some of the costs are covered by taxpayer money from the city treasury. The Sofa is Germany's first drinking room, a sort of crash smoking room for alcoholics. Most of the people who frequent the place are serious alcoholics and are allowed to bring their own cheap beer and sangria. The bar itself only serves soft drinks and strong coffee. "It's great," says Dirk, twisting his tattooed face into a smile, "isn't it?"

Yeah – free shit from your non-alcoholic neighbors who actually work. Sure, why not?!?

There are rarely aggressive confrontations, and anyone who does cause trouble is temporarily barred from the premises and forced to drink elsewhere for a few days. "The place is hopping," says Kai. He is 49, a recipient of benefits under the Hartz IV* welfare reform program, and the employment agency* considers him impossible to place. He does have a permanent residence*, like most of the regulars. The homeless rarely turn up at the Sofa.

* More free shit from your non-alcoholic neighbors who actually work.

Al Unable to Control His Emissions

"It couldn’t be avoided."

Of Mosques and Men: Reflections on the Ground Zero Mosque

Smiling in our faces while cursing us in our hearts
(Abu Darda; see also Tafsir Ibn Kathir, 3:33):
Reflections on the Ground Zero Mosque
(shookhran to Mark)

Bouncing Baby Go Boom

Puzzled? Confused? Take a look at the cheery scene at We Are Government. It’s sort of like ‘Toys ‘R Us’, except for megalomaniacs.

My, they blow-up so fast.

It this not a “Disproportionate Response” ?!?

UAE: Driver gets three months in jail for molestation

Riyadh: Saudi court sentences man to 90 lashes and prison for kissing woman in mall

A Saudi court has convicted a man and sentenced him to four months in prison and 90 lashes for kissing a woman in a mall.

In the land of Ferrari theme parks and outrage over the Fauxtilla as a ‘crime against humanity’, they’re all Just screaming to be understood, I guess.

The women will be tried in another court

And to think that these primitive idiots insist on being taken seriously by civilization.

"We Con the World" Video Removed; But YouTube Never Silenced the French Parody, "We F*ck the World"; Why? When it is anti-Bush and Anti-US, it's OK

And so it transpires that Youtube has pulled the We Con the World video, allegedly due to a copyright claim by Warner/ Chappell Music, Inc.

Strange, then, that they never silenced or removed the numerous versions of the Guignols parody of the song for the French cable channel Canal + (there's even a karaoke version), called We F*ck the World.



Oh, wait a minute…

I forgot!

When an alleged copyright breach concerns a parody that is anti-Bush and/or anti-American (or presumably anti-Israeli), it is perfectly OK…

Multiculturalism at a Glance

Which is to say, either no culture, or ignoring the culture and mores of those who welcomed you.

A Dutchman who was arrested by Israeli commandos on board a boat underway to Gaza is said by intelligence services to be a leader in terrorist organisation Hamas, De Telegraaf reports.

"Amin Abou Rashed is the leader of Hamas in the Netherlands", said an intelligence source in the newspaper yesterday. "He appears in several intelligence reports under an alias, namely Amin Abou Ibrahim. He works for the notorious al-Aksa Nederland foundation, suspected of fund-raising for Hamas.

Note that he’s actually called Dutch, despite preoccupying himself entirely with interests that have nothing to do with the Netherlands, and actually brings missile risks closer to its’ cold, grey skies.

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