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

Abraham Lincoln's House Divided speech (thanks to Greerwyn), updated for the 21st century…

"A house divided against itself cannot stand."

I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half socialist and half free.
I do not expect the Union to be dissolved -- I do not expect the house to fall -- but I do expect it will cease to be divided.

It will become all one thing or all the other.

Either the opponents of socialism will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new -- North as well as South, East as well as West.

Have we no tendency to the latter condition?

See also: Honest Abe's Cooper Union Speech Described the Way Members of the Republican Party Were Demonized

They have Issues Even when they don’t Really have Issues

Cannibalism in the news? Nope. Peevish characters living in the human warehouse that is Europe quibbling over stuff they’re getting ‘for free’ to begin with or something, that is, when they aren’t whinging about the neighbors.

he said he couldn’t stomach Swedes

Seriously, I doubt that this is a stunt where the guy’s trying to make a point.

Even though it may be difficult for the man, who became a Swede in 1998, to win asylum in Denmark, police point out that as an EU citizen, he is welcome to live here.

An EU citizen, they’re sticking to the continent’s traditions. He’s being sent to a detention camp.

Elsewhere in the land of unreal non-issues: the natives are orbiting Pluto.

According to the report, the two, who are unnamed, decided to ‘try something out’ for their last day in Paris, and left their hotel dressed only in shoes.

After purchasing a chocolate croissant at the local baker in the 18th arondissement, the couple went walkabout, ending up at a metro station

Let’s hope that they weren’t so blessed out that they actually sat down, because then they would need to be sheep-dipped, doused in ammonia, deloused, and put on a course of Cipro.

There is also a long looked-forward-to spanking in their future as well.

The Prefecture of Police says in its report that walking naked around Paris can carry a punishment of up to a year’s imprisonment and a EUR 15,000 fine for sexual exposure.

Whatever happened to Il est interdit d'interdire?, and the evil those puritanical Americans were punitively pushing their hang-ups on the peeps of Smurf village?

Mr. Singh, your country was never occupied by the Japanese Imperial Army!

…while many Japanese understandably have bitter memories of World War II, many of us throughout Asia, whose countries the Japanese occupied during that war, have our own searing memories

writes F Sionil Jose from Manila.

Some 20 years ago, my wife and I were in Kawazaki near Tokyo for a writers’ conference. In the first plenary session, a delegate from Calcutta started excoriating the U.S. for incinerating Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I was incensed, I stood from the floor and shouted, “Mr. Singh, your country was never occupied by the Japanese Imperial Army!”

Meanwhile, readers to Le Monde complain about the partisan attitude of the daily's article.

America's President Greets Troops Returning Home From Iraq and Afghanistan

The President of the United States and the First Lady greet American soldiers returning from overseas…

Can a Little Intellectual Élite in a Far Distant Capital Plan Our Lives for Us Better Than We Can Plan Them Ourselves?

Guidbye Caraid

Sad news from the New York Times's John F Burns:

Bill Millin, a Scottish bagpiper who played highland tunes as his fellow commandos landed on a Normandy beach on D-Day and lived to see his bravado immortalized in the 1962 film “The Longest Day,” died on Wednesday in a hospital in the western England county of Devon. He was 88.

In later years Mr. Millin told the BBC he did not regard what he had done as heroic. When Lord Lovat insisted that he play, he said, “I just said ‘O.K.,’ and got on with it.” He added: “I didn’t notice I was being shot at. When you’re young, you do things you wouldn’t dream of doing when you’re older.”

He said he found out later, after meeting Germans who had manned guns above the beach, that they didn’t shoot him “because they thought I was crazy.”

Bend Over and try their "New" Atlanticism, America

Trying to regain ground with the United States, the EU is proposing to upgrade the transatlantic relationship beyond traditional Atlanticism to one that is results-oriented and guided by strategic priorities.

The “upgrade” in the new atlanticism that they propose, as usual will be “we hold the summits, you provide the firepower”. This, from a continent where the word “atlanticist” has mutated to be used as an personal insult for talking heads and would-be policy wonks.

In a world of new threats and challenges, Barroso underlined the need for a more dynamic partnership, one that would be more outward-looking and engage more third parties, including China, India and Brazil.

All of which sound cute, if not painfully obvious that the best they can do is to try to get the rest of the world to do their donkey-work. These are 500 million people, the wealthiest entity on earth, trying to pawn off their security problems not just on the US, but on nations like Canada and India, something they do every time they wring their hands and urgently call for a “peacekeeping force” in order to lull the voices in their heads shouting that homus occasus, western man, is responsible for some sort of action that produces impressions that compassion is being played out, even if someone is just mouthing the words. Just don’t ask them.

It also sounds just easy-peasy on their part, because they really don’t have anything to offer other than spooks that spike any initiative you undertake and a debate mechanism that enables evil to arm itself with nukes.

EU-US cooperation in US President Barack Obama's first year has a mixed record at best, and certainly falls short of the hopes fuelled by his election in 2008.

Because their only desire was to ignore any real problem out there in humanity that presented itself, wanted to look like they were solving the fake crices that they could script the narrative to, and basically wanted their very own flunky in the White House.

If Brussels has focused in the past five years on consolidating the enlarged European Union and the final ratification of the Lisbon Treaty, the Barroso II Commission is determined to frame an agenda for a global Europe and that cannot be achieved without the US.

However, the European Union does not possess anything like a global foreign and security policy, or even a transatlantic policy, notes Stelzenmüller. The relationship between the EU and the US is old, broad and deep, she added, but it is not strategic – at least not as far as America is concerned, she added.

In other words, it is just as irrelevant as the sum of its’ parts, and needs the truly engaged entities in the world to play dress-up and pretend that they matter – until someday they are declared to matter having done nothing substantive to get there.

“Frame an agenda for a global?” My guess is that even Obama isn’t enough of an ingenue to bite. Add to that the hilarious attempt to characterize the make-work issues like the sea that isn’t rising and the European appeals for aid that they can’t swing, the EU has a “values” in themselves:

Denying that there was a "values crisis" in transatlantic relations, Ashton said the relationship would continue "forever".

Taking issue with Ashton, Estonian President Toomas Ilves said the problems that had dominated transatlantic relations for the last 60 years had been solved. "Europe is not on the radar screen in the way it has been in the past," he said, adding that "the real problems for the United States lie elsewhere"

As in we fixed your damned problems. You remember them: fascism, your liberties threatened by something called the CCCP, that Communism thing that murdered 100 million people, that religion you had of wanting to dismantle the free markets. Now go get a life, already. Europe LOST the ground with the United States by trying to trip it up at every turn, even with MINUTE issues that EUROPE initiated: i.e. they wanted the innocent waifs of Gitmo freed into their loving arms for the purpose of nagging interminably, but then didn’t. They didn’t want to be “left out” of Afghanistan, but most of the big playaz in Europe tacitly oppose it and were only willing to provide forces that wouldn’t expose themselves to risk. They demanded that aid go to Haiti, but criticized any minor detail that they could find. etc., etc., etc.

They think that THAT makes them involved – a “global Europe”. Obama should not even meet with them on the same simple grounds that one would not meet with a rebel entity that calls itself a nation, but has no functioning elements of governance that impact their external affairs, such as a diplomatic corps, an elected legislature, a stable military under the control of civilian leadership, a succession structure, and little internal bickering which would make one suspect that they’ll break down at any moment, and so on. The EU in any real respect has NONE of those things. In terms of classic legal legitimacy, it’s on par with Somalia when you really look at it, and yet they want to be universally declared the world’s pinnacle of Solomonic wisdom, and given the keys to a car that they don’t make the payments on.

Absolutely not, and certainly not making American security depend on them in any way either. Quite simply, they haven’t even yet done anything to demonstrate that they can be trusted.

And by the way, impotent rage and passive-aggression is NOT a policy strategy that will get the “Brussels Republic” any of the servile “partners” that they’re hoping to rope in.

A brief history of American politics

The two most important events in all of history … were the catalyst for the splitting of humanity into two distinct subgroups

writes April Wine (thanks to Damien):

Democrats and Republicans.

A Glimpse into the Fever Swamp

As you know, they are having forest fires in Russia. As you might expect, the “real truth©™” is “some other thing” that makes those “in the know” feel that they have some special wisdom that the ugly mass of morons that they imagine their fellow man to be. It always seems to be dispensed by what one can only describe as a modern day soothsayer-charlatan:

As Muscovites suffer record high temperatures this summer, a Russian political scientist has claimed the United States may be using climate-change weapons to alter the temperatures and crop yields of Russia and other Central Asian countries.

In a recent article, Andrei Areshev, deputy director of the Strategic Culture Foundation, wrote, "At the moment, climate weapons may be reaching their target capacity and may be used to provoke droughts, erase crops, and induce various anomalous phenomena in certain countries."

The second recurring features required for this kind of thing (that never seems to go away,) is that those that buy into it think that natural phenomena CAN’T be natural, because they are somehow personalized. The proof of this being that it is happening to them.

The primary recurring feature is ignorance.

But Russia isn't the only country suffering form a heat wave this summer. Indeed, the United States is also experiencing record temperatures. On July 24, temperatures in Washington, D.C., hit 37.7 degrees, and local weather services issued heat warnings for the first time this summer.

Areshev agrees that it is also hot in the United States, but notes that the United States is significantly farther south than Russia, meaning that such high temperatures are not so surprising there.

Statistics be damned! Some mysterious, evil Ernst Stavro Blofeld type controls the universe, and the weather at that, and has it IN FOR HIM! Possibly because he (at least believes) that he matters THAT MUCH! It’s the perfect, virtue-less circle.

Sustaining a benevolent nanny state is proving to be challenging even for the notably generous Danes

…sustaining a benevolent nanny state is proving to be challenging even for the notably generous Danes

writes Liz Alderman in a New York Times article on Denmark that appeared on the front page of the International Herald Tribune.

Le Monde Lauds Michael Bloomberg as "a Mayor with Convictions", a Man Who Is Fighting a "Crusade"

New York has "a Mayor with Convictions" reads the article of Sylvain Cypel in Le Monde, as the journalist reproduces Micael [sic] Bloomberg's speech, conveniently ignoring the arguments of those that oppose him and Barack Obama. He adds that Bloomberg's effort amounts to a crusade, because crusades waged by leftists are (obviously) good while crusades waged by conservatives are (needless to say) the epitome of bad taste. (Plantu has more…)

We ‘R da World... We ‘R da Children...

Do you want to know what a pitiful, helpless giant looks like?

Pierre Lellouche, France's minister for EU affairs, has said that the EU should have a crisis response force to deal with emergencies such as Russia's wildfires.

In an interview with Le Figaro published today (10 August), Lellouche said: “At European level it would be good to have real mutual assistance capabilities in the case of emergencies”. Lellouche said that he had stressed to European partners the importance of pooling assets to create a European emergency force after the earthquake in Haiti.

Where the plea to not look impotent, and put the blue patch on the rescuers’ shoulders was also not heard.

They make this call, of course, any time anything visually regrettable comes across their television screens, and nothing ever happens. A few of them do seem to get a kick out of wringing their hands.

And to think that this is the sort of image that they’re looking for, if not trying to convince humanity that they ALREADY have: N-n-nooo! No guns or anything like that! No, we’re your fairy godmother. We’re there for the hard work of hearing people thank us, and being loved.

For Decades, French Diplomacy Has Lived on an Illusion, "As If We Were Travelling in First Class with a Second-Class Ticket"

« Jamais nous n'avons été autant méprisés. »

The recent row over the allegedly sorry state of affairs of France's foreign affairs ministry has led the Le Monde's Natalie Nougayrède to devote two articles filling an entire page to the Quai d'Orsay.

Avec 160 ambassades et 21 représentations permanentes au sein des organisations internationales, la France a le deuxième réseau diplomatique au monde, après celui des Etats-Unis. Tout un symbole. Mais le gardera-t-elle longtemps encore ? « On a vécu pendant des décennies sur une illusion, comme si on voyageait en première classe avec un billet de seconde, commente un diplomate. Peut-être que la place de la France était sublimée, plus importante que la réalité... »

British Weekly Views Ground Zero Mosque Through the Liberals' Habitual Rose-Colored Lenses

The campaign against the proposed Cordoba centre in New York is unjust and dangerous

claims The Economist, the full cartoon of which (in the dead tree version) shows a wall being built by Newt Gingrich, the Anti-Defamation League, and Sarah Palin proclaiming "INTOLERANCE"

French Newspaper Views Ground Zero Mosque Through the Liberals' Habitual Rose-Colored Lenses

With his ubiquitous dove flying about and with a pair of arms rising to the skies — in replacement of the World Trade Center — to symbolize the harmony of all religions, Plantu lauds New York's planned Ground Zero mosque as a diversity-representing enterprise to bring about a new dawn — symbolized by the American flag's colors in the sky — for peace in the world…

Update: Le Monde Lauds Michael Bloomberg as "a Mayor with Convictions", a Man Who Fighting a "Crusade"

Bush and Blair to open new Ground Zero Mosque on 9/11 2011

Ten years to the day that fundamentalist Islamists brought down the World Trade Center in New York with a plane laden with passengers, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and President George W Bush will pay tribute to the rise of Islamism in the once cutely named land of the free, home of the brave

says a press release (thanks to Blair Supporter).

Thousands are expected to attend the opening of the Grand Mosque/Community Center a few hundreds yards from Ground Zero, where the remains of many of the 3,000 plus victims of Islamic fundamentalism still lie.

Make sure to read the whole thing (particularly the final caveat)…

Passing the (Political) Dutchie by the Left Hand Side

Intellectually speaking, they are indeed in a room with the blinds drawn for their comfort.

There was one thing you couldn't do at HempCon: Smoke pot. The director of the event asked the city for permission to set up a self-medication tent inside but they city said no. So any smoking -- cigarette or otherwise -- couldn't take place closer than 25 feet from the convention hall.

”Self medicating”. That’s interesting. Just don’t try to “medicate” yourself with tobacco in Baghdad on the bay, though.

San Francisco, which was at the vanguard of the anti-smoking movement more than a decade ago when it became one of the first American cities to bar people from lighting up in the workplace, now is poised to enact much tougher restrictions on smoking in public places.

Smokers no longer would be allowed to puff away near the doors, vents and operable windows of any building - restaurants, shops, offices and housing complexes.

Elsewhere... bongs in the news: head shops, like the rest of the culture of those who like to get f*cked up, are using libertarian arguments when they’re convenient. I wonder where they stand on de-socializing the cost of medical care? Because once announce that “what you do with your body is up to you”, you should not expect anyone else to pay the cost of fixing it.

Seriously. Choose one: what you’re calling you freedom, or other peoples’ Doritos, Yoo Hoo, and their rules.

Portrait of a Douchebag as a Young Man

Or rather a description of Daniel Cohn-Bendit during the May 1968 “your money or your life” revolution, to be more accurate.

What was unique about the Sorbonne, to which Cohn-Bendit had referred, what made it the model of the entire revolt, was its refusal of all leadership. People normally fear revolutions, on any scale, not necessarily because they fear disorder (for, in fact, disorder is often exhilarating), but because they fear the severity of a new order which succeeds the abandon. On the reverse side of the wild card that is revolution lurks the constant threat of dictatorship. In the French movement, which was directed specifically against an authoritarian regime, the participants were not about to allow another system to install itself where the previous one had cruelly reigned.

Except for the fact that so many of them joined hard left, revolutionary parties that look to authoritarian notions and leaders such as Lenin, Mao, and a man many of them could not bring themselves to really criticize: Stalin.

The walls of the Sorbonne, for so long deaf and dumb to the problems of the emerging consumer society, now rebounded with Marx and Lenin, Freud and Che Guevara, offering some lessons of their own: IT IS FORBIDDEN TO FORBID. ALL POWER TO THE IMAGINATION. ANSWER EXAMS WITH QUESTIONS. WE WANT A WORLD, NEW AND ORIGINAL. WE REFUSE A WORLD WHERE THE ASSURANCE OF NOT DYING FROM HUNGER IS EXCHANGED FOR THE RISK OF DYING FROM BOREDOM.

A curious thing for advocates of a welfare state parasitically drawing from the entrails of its former prosperity in tacitly state-run industries. Try as they will to characterize anything these louts thought to ‘libertarian’ in nature is as big a lie as the one the Warsaw Pact leaders used to tell: that THEY were the real democracies, and that their citizens were the ones who were truly free.

It looks like Decades of Governmental Astroglide have gotten them Nowhere

It’s the common market that isn’t.

For a large part of European societies, workforce immigration means lower wages, loss of work by fellow citizens, and creates a welfare burden. And yet Europe remains an area of very low worker mobility. Only 2.3 percent of Europeans live in a country other than the country of their ethnicity. Any significant change in this regard would require coordinating insurance systems or worker rights, transferring pension privileges, as well as fully recognising foreign professional qualifications.

Not to mention non-iteroperable medical coverage, the lack of integration despite the scale of intermarriage, etc.

It also can’t write:

Although you can you the same wall tiles, cheeses, shoes or cars all over the EU, the ‘common market’ remains common chiefly on paper.

They do share a common delusion, though:

There is no hiding the fact that the common market creates, temporarily at least, winners and losers, and that member states try various ways to support the latter through welfare policy. But income redistribution will not eliminate tensions between market integration and social goals.

No, but success and growth can. Remember what THAT was like?

They Even Left in the Working Title

I can't tell. I just can't tell.... is it Filme Noir wierndess, no budget, or a Senior year thesis from the Art School of the Blind? Starring the abundant Jayne Mansfield, the trailer to the 1964 barker: When Stranger Meet! "Dog Eat Dog".

"It's simply awful"
- the critics.

Recommended Reading

Page for page, Ian McEwan’s The Innocents is as gripping as anything you’ll find. Set in Berlin during the Cold War, its story revolves around a murder so vivid in its description that I had to shut the book and steel myself to continue. The infamous American spy tunnel figures prominently in the tale as well.

Despite the usual European treatment of Americans as passive and two dimensional, as if they’re simply furniture, the story is an excellent one.

Crossposted on Marxist Byproducts

That’s Okay, they Only use it from Time to Time

I love the “nothing to see here” reporting. A ceiling in the Supreme Soviet has fallen again.

Part of a false ceiling in the Jacques Delors building in Brussels - shared by the European Union's Committee of the Regions and the Economic and Social Committee - fell down over the weekend, according to a statement issued by the two institutions.

Parts of a false ceiling in an atrium on the fifth floor of the building on Rue Belliard collapsed during the night between Saturday and Sunday (7-8 August). No-one was hurt.

Let me reiterate: this is not normal. A trained Chimpanzee can figure out how to hang a ceiling.

The atrium is used occasionally for exhibitions and receptions and also by staff going from the Jacques Delors building to the Bertha Von Suttner building.

Should we do as so many of them would, and launch into a tirade of theorizing what this stands for? How it somehow tells a story of decayed character? Warmongering? Something momentarily like the omens of primitives looking at the world and seeing some meaning in, say Hurricane Katrina?

Of COURSE we can’t. That’s reserved for those retrograde, subhuman Americans!

Part of a false ceiling in the hemicycle in the European Parliament's Louise Weiss building in Strasbourg collapsed in August 2008. Two plenary sessions scheduled to be held in Strasbourg in September were moved to Brussels while repair work and safety checks were carried out. The hemicycle was reopened for use in October following repairs costing an estimated €8 million.

8 million Eurozlotys, when all they needed was a small crew of drywall mechanics and a scaffold. It’s efficiency at its’ best when your normal contracting practice is to hire your cousin Gégé who hangs wallpaper on the side.

Reflecting on the Light Musical Comedy that was Communism

No, not really. The seminal idea is still struggling to find its egg, but there are new postings up at The Near Distant Ago. I’m still holding out for Cosmonaut Hero week

“I offer him my congratulations as a European”

Wierdness for it’s own sake does not make it art. Yet another attention-seeking “don’t I just shock you?” type builds an “opera village” in Burkina Faso, one of the world’s poorest countries. They need food, not aliens bearing "culture". After all, they have plenty of culture of their own without Casper showing up to do a documentary about himself.

Why shove it down their throats? For oneself of course:

It's crazy, but I believe there is a sort of primal feeling which makes many people feel very connected to Africa. Perhaps because Africa is the cradle of humanity. We all long for our origins and in this context I find it very interesting that it was always in Africa that I experienced fear most intensely. Here at home we've made nests for ourselves and we're too scared to even go and buy a loaf of bread without life insurance, laptop insurance and dog insurance. At best we might throw caution to the wind by investing in one of those carefree holiday insurance packs for three weeks every year. But of course the inhabitants of our industrial world are suffering terribly because they are barely alive. I mean, how can you feel any sign of life when you are insured up to the teeth? And when someone is damaged enough to travel to Africa just to tell everyone how the world works, then it all becomes pretty grotesque.

It reads like the journal of a teenager who can’t wait to dye all of his clothes black, and find what they think to be a life experience – pandering to people just to want to have some reason to hate the folks back home.

In "Tunguska" my first full-length feature I sent avant-garde researchers to the North Pole to torture the Eskimos with German avant-garde films. This created the sort of friction which I have now grown into, but for a long time I had no feel of genuine autonomy and I am still scared today about falling out with people so badly that everything grinds to a halt.

I offer him my congratulations as a non-European, a non-Eskimo, or as a human with any sort of decency and capacity for shame, for that matter.

From the Literary Treasury of Our Times

Print is Dead.

- Egon Spengler (Harold Ramis), 1984, “Ghostbusters”

Menschenfresser Madness ISO SWF and Crunchy Bits

A sick(er) twist on disaster tourism saw people pursuing their fascination with cannibalism.

Sometimes the situation turns out to be very funny. Vladislav Anikeev, a man from the Russian city of Tula, has always dreamt to visit a cannibal tribe. And one day his dream came true. He went to Kalimantan, Indonesia, to the place where scull hunters live. The group of tourists finally found themselves in the village inhabited by cannibals.

The locals willingly told the details of their inhumane craft and shared their secrets and technology of scull processing and showed how to do it. The hospitable aboriginals even offered to buy some souvenirs made of their enemies.

Some Russians, however, have made it into a “staycation”, reflecting the optimism of their culture.

Six young Russians who declared themselves to be Satanists have been handed jail sentences of up to 20 years for ritually killing and then dismembering four teenagers in a forest.

The six, who were all teenagers at the time of the crime, reportedly also ate the body parts of their victims in a wooded area outside the city of Yaroslavl north-east of Moscow.

Chalk it up to artful eccentricity if you must. In a world absent a moral rudder, the strangeness of such a vile transgression could just as well be received by an unsatisfying shrug. Let’s face it: if, all things being equal, all things really ARE equal, what kind of appeal does cannibal kink have? Anthropological curiosity? Adolescent “shock art” esthetics?

They stabbed the victims and then dismembered their bodies and cooked and ate some body parts, Komsomolskaya Pravda reported.

The four minors received the maximum possible sentence for murder, 10 years, a prosecutor, Tatyana Rachinskaya, said after the sentencing.

Oh those crazy kids! They’re just showing what ebullient optimism and joy they see around them!

Amid the Kabuki Theatre of Pity...

...and the wringing of hands over the nuclear detonation at Hiroshima 65 years ago today is a forgotten lesson - the real lesson: that the society that those now-old once children victims of the a-bomb at Hiroshima committed their nation to total war IN SPITE of their children.

The lectures to an "aggressive America" and the pity will go on, for sure. All the while the denials of Japanese atrocities will continue with Pamyat-like passion for the lies that feel good:

"When [the Allied Powers] opened the so-called Tokyo war-crimes tribunal [after World War II], they needed evidence that Japan committed greater atrocities [than the Tokyo air raids and use of atomic bombs], so they made up the so-called Nanjing Massacre, which was completely unfounded," declares Mr. Kase, chair of the Committee for the Examination of the Facts about Nanjing.

Futher, those who drag on, using this date as an point in time to take an "initiative for peace" forget WHY the bomb was dropped, and what its' awful alternatives are. Forgotten too is that Mutually assured destruction was the only possible method of maintaining peace in a world of people as short-sighted as them.

Begone Foul Spot!

I write like
Kurt Vonnegut

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

I doth doubt, I must say. (Musn’t one?) If you’re up for a little recreational literary frotteur, drop some original text off at ”I write like...” style analyzer, and let the fun begin. It’s like a passing scene with Bob Newhart’s whacky neighbor, or, say, Carleton you Doorman in the tragic-comedy of blogging. After all, my writing style has become an homage to a strange, pervy idol of socially awkward teenagers.

Oddly enough, it identified Douglas Adams from roughly a 100 word excerpt from “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” but mistook a short rip from Mein Kampf for Edgar Allen Poe. The first chapter of The Communist Manifesto was identified to be styled after the manner of H. P. Lovecraft, a master of weird fiction who died in 1937. Marx and Engels, I take it are correctly attributed as authors of a made up tale of horror and scientific fiction.

It’s a puzzlement, but you can get your jollies off of it for about 93 seconds or so.

Can I Redesign the Seats?

You are what you eat. Then you’ll drive what you et.

Crossposted on Marxist Byproducts

Hey, Man, Pass the Album...

This is the third study of this kind: 2006, 2008, 2010. Denmark is number one in each. Blah, blah, blah. Thank you Chamber of Commerce.

It's a Danish study. What do you think it's going to say? Zimbabwe is numero uno?

I also want to know how Turkmenistan came in at no. 18, ahead of Luxembourg and the UAE. Turkmenistan is still a functioning dictatorship, only recently gotten rid of a dictator who:

“spent his 21 years in power building Turkmenistan into one of the world's most isolated regimes while imposing his mark on the gas-rich Central Asian state.
He styled himself Turkmenbashi, or "Father of all the Turkmen", and spent giant sums building sumptuous memorials to his own wisdom, including a 75-metre-tall (246 feet) tower in central Ashgabat whose summit is a statue of himself.”.

Happy, happy.

Elsewhere in Denmark happy-happy-land:

"A note on happiness:

Danes may well be the most contented people around but, as someone recently said, true happiness is not measurable and having low expectations met doesn’t really count. It might also be pointed out that answering survey questions about how happy one is as a Dane doesn’t rule out the possibility that one might tell fibs for fear that say, Sweden, will pip you in the happiness rankings. Remember, happiness is a patriotic duty: keep on grinning.

A note on eco-friendliness:

Often touted as the greenest society in the world, Denmark also produces more trash per person than any other EU country and is more reliant on coal power than China. Want to recycle that plastic bottle or eat a vegetarian meal in this eco haven? Good luck. Still, moves are afoot to take the country in the right direction and its pioneering use of wind power, as well as the army of cyclists, are something to be proud of."

Damn those wily Swedes!



What’s more telling about happiness, though, might be where the those self-identified “happiest national populations” rank in global suicide rates:

43 – Denmark
14 – Finland
39 - Norway
29 – Sweden
54 – Netherlands
55 - Costa Rica
28 - New Zealand
37 - Canada
69 - Israel
45 - Australia
17 - Switzerland
71 - Panama
75 - Brazil
41 - United States
15 - Belgium
66 - UK
78 - Mexico
53 – Turkmenistan

It’s also telling that the first 8 nations mentioned on the list have a population that roughly adds up to number 9.

It seems to be that there are three strong determinants to not being suicidal, and therefore not being very unhappy, statistically speaking:

1. Being a Jew: of all the Jewish countries (Israel and the republic of west Baltimore), things are lookin’ good for ya.
2. Being Catholic: Except for Poland, the Catholic majority countries are at the bottom of the list of people most likely to kill themselves.
3. Not being European helps too: 16 of the top 25 nations known for their high suicide rates are in Europe.

Conclusion: there is a continent, whose population is preoccupied with self-lionizing, where optimistic feeling about the future are so great, that committing suicide is more widely considered evidence of happiness than anywhere else on earth. Barring that, then simply telling oneself one is happier than the rest of the earth will do.

Hiroshima, 65 Years Later

Discussing the means that brought the War in the Pacific to an end:
Erik Svane: Unlike the endgames of the majority of wars, World War II in the Pacific grew increasingly bloody as U.S. forces approached the Japanese homeland (read more)…

Lt. Paul Fussell:

On Okinawa, only weeks before Hiroshima, 123,000 Japanese and Americans killed each other … the very idea of more combat made me breathe in gasps and shake all over (read more)…

Thomas Sowell:

the atomic bomb spared us (and the Japanese) a bloodbath that would have dwarfed the death toll from Hiroshima and Nagasaki (read more)…

Charles de Gaulle:

Les trois cent mille morts d'Hiroshima ont épargné bien davantage de Japonais, qui auraient été écrasés sous des bombes ordinaires (read more)…

The Wall Street Journal:

The Japanese army was expected to fight to the last man, as it had during the battles of Iwo Jima and Okinawa. Since the ratio of Japanese to American combat fatalities ran about four to one, a mainland invasion could have resulted in millions of Japanese deaths—and that's not counting civilians (read more)…

Thomas Sowell:

Japan's plans for defense against invasion involved mobilizing the civilian population, including women and children, for the customary suicidal battle tactics (read more)…

A Japanese-American:

Lance or spear practice was a regular women's exercise to practice for the anticipated U.S. landing (read more)…

The New York Times's Martin Fackler on Some Facts About Hiroshima and World War II That You Hear Neither From America's MSM, University Élites, and History Books, Nor From Japan's:

…most Japanese are shocked to hear that their nation also tried to build an atomic bomb. “I have no doubt Japan would have used it if it succeeded,” former schoolteacher Kiwamu Ariga, 81, said (read more)…

Bret Stephens:

Whatever side one takes here, the important point is that the debate fundamentally is about results. … In other words, the question here isn't about the intrinsic morality of the bombing. It's about whether the good that flowed from the bombing outweighed the unmistakable evil of the act itself (read more)…

Le Monde's Philippe Mesmer:

Although it is not said so openly, Hiroshima also played a purifying role, i.e., the baptism of a new Japan, the event that put an end to fifty years of crimes (read more)…

Paul Fussell: Thank God for the Atom Bomb (essay; available for download)

Victor Davis Hanson:

Post-facto critics never tell us what they would have done instead — lay off the German cities and send more ground troops into a pristine Third Reich; don’t bomb, but invade, an untouched Japan in 1946; keep out of WWII entirely; or in its aftermath invade the Soviet Union? (read more)…

Japan's defense minister forced to resign for having the gall to admit that

dropping the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 "ended the war," adding, "I think that it couldn't be helped" … Fumio Kyuma [added that] he did not resent the United States because the bombs prevented the Soviet Union from entering the war with Japan [and that] if Japan had not surrendered, northern Japan could have been occupied by the Soviet Union (read more…)

Erik Svane: A critical examination of some common charges against the Americans regarding the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (racism, intensification of the war, war on civilians, and the peace feelers ignored) (read more…)

Robert Maddox: the veteran historian ("I regard Hiroshima [revisionism] as the greatest hoax in American history") is interviewed by Victor Fic on every Atomic bombing subject imaginable (read more)…

Father Wilson Miscamble:

Truman's use of the bomb should be seen as his choosing the least awful of the options available to him (4:04, thanks to Instapundit)

Bill Whittle:

But the Japanese were warned … Over one million of these [Office of War Information warning leaflets] were dropped over Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and 33 other Japanese cities on the 1st of August, 1945 — that's five days before the Hiroshima bombing (01:10, aligato to Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit)

In addition, check out the information below the subhead "Watching for the 'Fool-Proof' Cards", about two thirds to three fourths down the drag zone of the AA page…

Better Red than Fed

At the heart of the Bailadila Hills in central India lie 1.1 billion tons of raw ore so pure and plentiful that half a century after miners first hacked at it with pickaxes, it remains the richest, and one of the largest, iron deposits on the planet.

Enter the spoiler.

Yet on this quiet June day, cobwebs hang on rusted pipes in the all-but-abandoned facility, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its September 2010 issue. Caretakers prepare to switch truck-size rock crushers out of their coma, rousing the machines for five minutes a month to ensure they still work.

Maoist rebels from the surrounding Dandakaranya forest armed with guns and explosives -- and some wielding axes and bows and arrows -- attacked the facility four times in little more than a year, officials at the now-mothballed plant say. They burned 54 trucks waiting at factory gates in April 2008 and damaged part of the slurry pipeline, the world’s second longest, in June 2009. Essar idled the plant that month.

One constant of the universe seems to be that Marxist-Leninist-Maoist-whatevers seem to enjoy their destructive revolutionary fervor more than their any affection that they have for “the proletariat”. In fact “the good of the people” seems more like a distant, ignorable abstraction to them more than they are to those of any other belief system.

Maoist-related violence killed a record 998 people last year as assaults on economic targets reached an all-time high, according to Ministry of Home Affairs data.

A Mumbai-bound train derailed in May, killing at least 146 people, after what police suspect was sabotage by a Maoist group. More than 200 security officers died in attacks in the first six months of 2010.

More specious still, for them to say that they were “sucked into the conflict” blithely ignores the fact that the Maoists are the ones who created it.

Much as they carry on the lie of “wanting to give the landless land”, they must sport a rather broad shit-eating grin when it comes to that idea that given confiscation, collectivization, and nationalization, everyone will be landless – and become a (fixed, unchanging) wage slave of the monopoly help by the state. It is the very essence of the empirialism that they pretend to, and pretend to call their foe.

How, for example, with their passion for heavy industry and such, are they to “redistribute” ore? This goes unsaid, even though there might be some terroristic vision that it’s better for all to remain poor than for one person, some owners, some engineers, etc., to succeed.

Invoking the usual laundry list of supposed virtues, they include things like “social justice”, exhibiting an ignorance of the singular distinction of Maoism to the rest of the Red rationalizations: Mao didn’t believe in it. He believed that the state had to be personified by the strongman controlling it, so that the people could, undistracted, go on with the business of constructing his autocratic empire on the footing of equally distributed misery.
More ignorant still is the emphasis the Indian Maoist place on social tribalism, as though this protecting of ones’ own was plausibly permissible in a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist vision. It more resembles the ironic place leftist feminism tries to occupy in that respect than any rigorously reasoned form of the classical leftist serfdom models of proletariat-based arguments.

These ignorant oafs don’t even know their own suicidal belief system. It’s personified by this elitist tripe of thinking that:

“The Indian revolution must take the road of relying on the peasants, establishing base areas in the countryside, persisting in protracted armed struggle and using the countryside to encircle and finally capture the cities,” the Communist mouthpiece said on July 5, 1967.

The vision holds that the only purpose the hardworking have is not to their own lives and well being, but to the power of the revolution’s elite. They damned-well BETTER love the people! It’s YOUR struggle, and THEIR revolution!

70 Years Ago: Recalling the Summer of 1940 (II)

Le Monde is running a series on the German defeat of the French forces 70 years ago, during the summer of 1940…

Histoire(s) de l'été 1940 (II)

7/12 : De la haine dans l'air par Jérôme Gautheret et Thomas Wieder. C'est dès le mois de juin que la persécution des juifs commence en France. Des écrits, des discours ont préparé les esprits à accepter le pire, voire à le commettre…
• Le franc-maçon, l'autre "juif" de Vichy et de l'occupant par Jérôme Gautheret et Thomas Wieder

8/12 : Menton sous la botte par Jérôme Gautheret et Thomas Wieder. Début juin, ce sont les troupes de l'Italie voisine qui envahissent ce paradis pour touristes. Un mois plus tard, Mussolini parade dans une ville italianisée par la force…
• Les victoires relatives de l'armée italienne par Jérôme Gautheret et Thomas Wieder

9/12 : Allons enfants du Général ! par Jérôme Gautheret et Thomas Wieder. C'est le 17 juin, lorsque Pétain appelle à arrêter les combats, qu'ils décident de continuer en partant à Londres, où de Gaulle est en train de constituer une armée…
• Jean-François Muracciole : "La France libre n'est pas du tout à l'image de la France" Propos recueillis par Jérôme Gautheret et Thomas Wieder

10/12 : Carcassonne-des-Prés par Jérôme Gautheret et Thomas Wieder. Gallimard, Gide, Paulhan, Bousquet... Les piliers de « La NRF » se sont repliés mi-juin dans l'Aude, où ils s'ennuient et se déchirent. A la rentrée, chacun choisit son camp…
• Grandes et basses manoeuvres autour de "La NRF" par Jérôme Gautheret et Thomas Wieder

11/12 : Camarade résistant par Jérôme Gautheret et Thomas Wieder. Des jeunes communistes s'engagent très tôt dans le combat. Pour eux, le pacte Hitler-Staline est une ruse, et ils ignorent tout de ce que le PCF négocie en coulisses…
• Olivier Wieviorka : « Les premiers résistants jaillissent des profondeurs de la société civile » Propos recueillis par Jérôme Gautheret et Thomas Wieder

12/12 : L'instituteur, voilà l'ennemi par Jérôme Gautheret et Thomas Wieder. Le régime de Vichy rend l'école laïque et républicaine responsable de la défaite. Une de ses priorités est de « nettoyer l'enseignement ». Pétain tient sa revanche…
• Ils avaient 10 ans en 1940 par Jérôme Gautheret et Thomas Wieder

Update: The daily's readers react and chime in…

Carefully Avoiding Attribution

Obviously, we’re talking about radical Presbyterians here, maybe even birders.

Greek terrorist movement Revolutionary Sect has delivered a letter to Ta Nea, claiming responsibility for the act. A “display of force and new threats", headlines the daily. In a scathing missive, members of the group, which sprang up after the 2008 riots, have declared they are armed and have issued death threats to named journalists and press chiefs alike.

A Greek terrorist outfit called “The Revolutionary Sect” claimed responsibility for the assassination journalist Sokratis Giolias. Reports about them are careful to avoid the fact that they are violent revolutionaries in the leftist model of “liberation”. This is the closest you will get:

believed to be the Sect of Revolutionaries, a report by the force’s counterterrorism unit notes that the group’s inspiration is a dead Russian nihilist revolutionary and that its goals are not to make a political statement but to fuel insurrection.

According to the report, compiled last summer and seen by Kathimerini, Sect of Revolutionaries is “the first Greek organization that is completely nihilist, its key aims being chaos and destruction.” This stance is believed to have been inspired by Sergey Nechayev, a Russian revolutionary associated with the Nihilist movement and known for his support of revolution by all means, including violence.The author of the group’s proclamations is believed to be aged over 40 and to hail from an upper-middle-class background. An extract of the report reads: “This person adopted terrorism as a way of reacting to society which, in his view, has hit rock bottom.” As for the other members of the group, police believe they fall into two camps: radicalized criminals and extremist anti-establishment protesters.

In other words: Trustafarians, but willing to murder for the sake of ‘nihilism’. If one were truly nihilistic, why kill? Why not just sit in the corner on a dirty linoleum floor and just die like a REAL nihilist?

Effete Pig, or Malodorous Lout?

Sergey Genadievich Nechayev, from whom they can set aside their despondency for a moment and admire, summed up his theory in his 1869 Magnum Opus “The Revolutionary Catechism”, caring long enough to say:

Tyrannical toward himself, he must be tyrannical toward others. All the gentle and enervating sentiments of kinship, love, friendship, gratitude, and even honor, must be suppressed in him and give place to the cold and single-minded passion for revolution. For him, there exists only one pleasure, on consolation, one reward, one satisfaction – the success of the revolution. Night and day he must have but one thought, one aim – merciless destruction. Striving cold-bloodedly and indefatigably toward this end, he must be prepared to destroy himself and to destroy with his own hands everything that stands in the path of the revolution.

The nature of those beliefs over which one should be willing to murder, die, adulate in misery, etc., are never articulated, but they do involve dispossessing anyone in authority for any reason to be replaced, I suppose, by Nihilists with the a social vision consistent with Sergey Genadievich’s writings:

The revolutionary enters the world of the State, of the privileged classes, of the so-called civilization, and he lives in this world only for the purpose of bringing about its speedy and total destruction. He is not a revolutionary if he has any sympathy for this world. He should not hesitate to destroy any position, any place, or any man in this world. He must hate everyone and everything in it with an equal hatred. All the worse for him if he has any relations with parents, friends, or lovers; he is no longer a revolutionary if he is swayed by these relationships.

All he needs now is some Goth clown make-up and a bunch of old Morrissey cassettes..

The second group comprises those who will be spared for the time being in order that, by a series of monstrous acts, they may drive the people into inevitable revolt..

From the Symbinese Liberation Army, to the Weather Underground, to the 68ers, to all of Communism, to this assmonkey, the single thing that never goes away is the vainglory, admiration, and violence of the leaders of the cult, or pretenders to that throne of “hero of popular revolution”.

Remember, only your “false consciousness” prevents you from surrendering your autonomy over your own life to them.

We could compare this guy to a whinging hairdresser....

....but that would give whinging hairdressers a bad name:

So, the chairman of Ipsa believes every MP who has made a complaint about Ipsa - including all of us who took part in a Westminster Hall debate on the subject on 16 June - is a liar.

As Tim and Obnoxio point out, the answer to that particular query is an unqualified and emphatic, yes.

Our statist-driven bureaucrat then goes on to bemoan statist-driven bureaucracy:

I'm sure his Director of Corporate Information and Communications Technology, or one of his three deputy directors, told McDonald that this was the case. But how does he know that on each occasion, the person using the system logged off entirely happy with the service? Yesterday, for example, I gritted my teeth and logged on to try to make some claims. As per procedure, after a few minutes I tried to phone Ipsa to ask for help. I waited for 15 minutes before hanging up and trying again. Then the phone cut out on me after I'd got through. Then I tried again and it was engaged. I tried three more times and on the third time I got through to a very helpful gentleman who explained how I could progress my session. He rung off and I continued my session. Then discovered I was locked out of the system. I gave up. Now, in IpsaLand, this was simply an MP logging onto the system and then, half an hour or so later, logging out. But on the planet Earth, this was an MP giving up in frustration and not claiming money that was due to him. I get the feeling that that's the point of the system. As for claims being paid within 13 days, the only claims that I know of that are paid that quickly are mileage claims. Many colleagues have claimed bitterly that they are thousands of pounds out of pocket thanks to Ipsa's tardiness. But then, they're MPs and are therefore lying, according to Mr Kennedy.

Pot, kettle. Petard, hoist.

Methinks Someone Feels Spunky

It’s summertime, and it seems that love is in the air.

Artless Celebrity Theft 101

Lady Gaga Protests Arizona's SB 1070 Bill

After all, she knows where her candy comes from:

Lady Gaga Reveals She Does "Cocaine"

Which is interesting, because she’ll blow lines, but not dick, because being paranoid is more creativity promoting than doing her moaning off stage.

Lady Gaga avoids having sex for fear someone could steal her 'creativity'

Just how does she define ‘creativity’? Her act is a mash up of the early 90’s faux glam “I’m self-absorbed, heard me roar” phase of American womanhood, which featured forgettable club music and kept the drum machine on life support for waaaay too long. After all, here she is looking more or less like Kim Wilde did 20 years ago. She also seems to have stolen her buzz my mugging Vivien Goldman’s The Flying Lizards, circa 1984. Someone, please find the “creativity” here, before another celeb is declared “controversial” for political parroting what the shallowest of the media gaggle is in complete agreement with to begin with.

An Excess of Ambition for Sarkozy

…if you think big — and the French and their president, Nicolas Sarkozy, can think grandiose (as in organizing “a new international monetary order”) — then [last week witnessed] the first official and annunciatory clash of cymbals in the short reign of Nicolas, king of the G-20, from November 2010 until November 2011

writes John Vinocur.

…here is Mr. Sarkozy, whose international calling card could read Energy + Chutzpah Unltd., preparing for his year of setting the agenda for the world’s economic summit meetings with the goal of demonstrating, as he has said, “America no longer has the world’s only currency.”

Ultimately, that means limiting — whatever euphemistic verbs are used — the role of the U.S. dollar as the world’s monetary standard.

…Could Mr. Sarkozy and France conceivably have the authority, practical leverage and international support to start a process that would try to turn the dollar into a co-equal player in a basket of reserve currencies with those, let’s say, of China, Russia, India and the euro zone countries?

…Funny, where interesting answers can be hiding. Mr. Obama’s great friend, President Dmitri A. Medvedev of Russia, attending an economic conference with Mr. Sarkozy in St. Petersburg in June, seemed to board the French president’s ship of dreams

… [However] Sarko’s Very Grand Ambitions have a history of imploding through excess.

New Slag from the Old Mill

Isn’t it interesting how the new vapidity so resembles the old vapidity? Train people to second guess everything that they already know, and they can be readily controlled by a strongman, a state, or a cult. In any event, they can be passivated into a form of personal disregard and self-destructive behavior.

If relativism signifies contempt for fixed categories and those who claim to be the bearers of objective immortal truth, then there is nothing more relativistic than Fascist attitudes and activity. From the fact that all ideologies are of equal value, we Fascists conclude that we have the right to create our own ideology and to enforce it with all the energy of which we are capable.

- from "Diuturna", 1921, by Benito Mussolini

So you can see that Relativism, as we react negatively to it, has so many political uses. Especially if you can make dilute the importance of questioning ideas, authority, or can make the act less relevant. As you know, there are people still trying to struggle to find nothing important, or comparatively important, or objectively worse than anything else. For example they kill in the interest of convenience and call it a ‘choice’, by removing the relevance of the act of actively ending a life. They relate the life into a clump of cells, and relate the act of ending it into a health procedure.

You see, it’s easy when it’s all relative.

70 Years Ago: Recalling the Summer of 1940 (I)

Il y a 70 ans, 80 parlementaires disaient "non" à Pétain par Le Monde avec l'AFP

Le Monde is running a series on the German defeat of the French forces 70 years ago, during the summer of 1940…

Histoire(s) de l'été 1940 (I)

1/12 : Carnets de déroute par Jérôme Gautheret et Thomas Wieder. Il y a soixante-dix ans, l'Allemagne envahissait la France. De la « drôle de guerre » à l'offensive éclair, de l'insouciance à l'humiliation, les écrits des soldats racontent…
• Louis Dauge : « Nous ne pouvions pas imaginer que tout irait si vite » Propos recueillis par Jérôme Gautheret et Thomas Wieder

2/12 : Un Etat sur les routes par Jérôme Gautheret et Thomas Wieder. Au fur et à mesure que les Allemands avancent, la République se délite. Fonctionnaires et ministres se replient à Bordeaux puis à Vichy. Rien ne se passe comme prévu…
• « Le maréchal Pétain, c'est le grand oiseau de France » par Georgette Guillot

3/12 : Paris en uniforme vert par Jérôme Gautheret et Thomas Wieder. La bataille de Paris n'a pas lieu. Grâce à la confusion qui règne à la tête de l'armée et de l'Etat, la Wehrmacht s'empare en quelques heures d'une capitale résignée…
• Cédric Gruat : La visite d'Hitler : deux heures chargées de symboles Propos recueillis par Thomas Wieder

4/12 : Un village coupé en deux par Jérôme Gautheret et Thomas Wieder. Soudain, la ligne de démarcation transforme des hameaux en lieux stratégiques et des fermiers en héros…
• Eric Alary : « La ligne de démarcation a été un superbe instrument de chantage » Propos recueillis par Jérôme Gautheret et Thomas Wieder

5/12 : L'île qui a dit non par Jérôme Gautheret et Thomas Wieder. Ils sont le symbole de la France libre : 128 hommes de l'île de Sein, caillou perdu au large de la Bretagne, qui décident, un jour de juin, de rejoindre de Gaulle à Londres…
• Un calvaire pour ceux qui restent par Jérôme Gautheret et Thomas Wieder

6/12 : Le chaos dans les têtes par Jérôme Gautheret et Thomas Wieder. En plein exode, qui se préoccupe des hôpitaux psychiatriques ? Certains malades fuient, disparaissant à jamais ; d'autres arrivent, victimes du « choc de la débâcle »…
• Isabelle von Bueltzingsloewen : "Vichy n'a pas voulu exterminer les malades mentaux" Propos recueillis par Thomas Wieder

Part II coming…

Update: The daily's readers react and chime in…



In addition, we have this bit of news: Les archives de la police sous Vichy seront numérisées et mises en ligne par Audrey Fournier