The endless drip drip of ethical turpitude exhibits it’s logical outcome - Houseswitz, writes AP’s Jocelyn Gecker: «PARIS (AP) -- An Internet video that depicts the Nazi death camp Auschwitz as a rave party drew sharp criticism Wednesday from a Jewish rights group, which urged authorities to have it removed from European Web sites. The three-minute video titled "Housewitz" - a pun on house music and Auschwitz - casts Nazi soldiers as DJs. It alternates black-and-white still photos of Holocaust atrocities with color images of youths at an outdoor party. And it advertises a "Free taxi ride home," showing a wheelbarrow full of corpses.
The Simon Wiesenthal Center's European office denounced the video as "outrageous," saying it goes "beyond the bounds of freedom of expression to an unprecedented level of obscenity."
The center asked the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe to call on countries where Web sites have posted the video to "immediately stop the spread of this pernicious nihilism."»
«The Dutch Web site, Geenstijl, says it's doing nothing wrong in posting the video. The site, whose name means "no style," says it mixes news with "light subjects and pleasantly twisted nonsense»
If you say “come on, they’re just kids” you’re projecting. They’re in their twenties, and hardly kids at all, but probably as grown-up as you can expect from EUtopians. They are also supposed to be the product of an über-enlightened world class über-education, replete with sensitivity training, environmental awareness, and multi-cultural dogma worthy of a Stalinist re-education camp.
Sicker still is GeenStijl’s item heading: „Tanzen macht frei!”
Vielen Dank, Herr Wei
Behind the Façades in France: What expats and the mainstream media (French and American alike) fail to notice (or fail to tell you) about French attitudes, principles, values, and official positions…
Wednesday, August 10, 2005
Light of Mind and Heart
"Lebanese Red" to return the the UK for free heart operation
«Hate preacher Omar Bakri Mohammed may undergo heart surgery in an NHS hospital if he returns to the UK.
Good idea. Let the taxpayers paying for your heart treatment croak. He's a wizard in the art of self preservation. It seems he has enough faith in Britain and the British to go under sedation with a dude holding a scalpel above him as well.
Bakri, who says he has a congenital heart problem, has already missed several appointments or had them postponed, friends said, but another one is likely to be scheduled before the end of the year.
Earlier this year the father-of-seven, who uses a walking stick, took delivery of a £30,000 Ford Galaxy people carrier paid for under the Motability scheme.
He is estimated to have received several hundred thousand pounds in benefits during his two decades in the UK.
Bakri, who had his mobile phone turned off today, sparked outrage last week by saying he would not inform police if he knew Muslim extremists were planning a bomb attack in Britain.»
You know the free charity clinics in Lebanon come highly recommended.
The Dutch: Trying to Make Depressing Nihilism Fun since 1962
«A cartoon on the front page of the NRC Handelsblad shows the [Space Shuttle Discovery] astronauts conversing with each other while they are waiting for the signal to return to Earth. One says to the other: "Can we land or do we have to wait till oil prices go down?"»
Morons. This little bit of humor attempts to poke fun at one of the only successful and usable hydrogen powered vehicles around. «A totally different sort of entertainment 'culture' is the subject of front page stories in the mass-circulation dailies, the Telegraaf and Algemeen Dagblad, where we read that a new Dutch commercial television broadcaster will soon be airing a contest in which male contestants compete with each other to become the sperm donor for a woman who wants a baby. The show, called 'I want your child and nothing else'.»
They used to call that falling in love, trying to get married and honestly facing oneself by having a full and sincere life with one that you love. The eternally confused post-natural types (particularly in northern Europe) are reduced to trying to live a normal life through analogies, and vicariously through TV characters at that.
American Jokes About France Are One More Element Used to Prove French Superiority Over Those Clueless Yanks
What was interesting (or disgusting) was how the French chose to report this batch of jokes. They make it sound as if, say, Jay Leno is some kind of patriotic newscaster, sprinkling his nationalistic speeches with jokes about the ennemi du jour.
That, needless to say, is a total deformation of reality. David Letterman, the cast of Saturday Night Live, and people of their ilk make jokes about everything, especially about domestic issues, from the election and leaders of both parties to (yes) George W Bush (or whoever is in the White House) and his administration, but also every element of foreign policy, from the Iraq war and the war on terrorism to Osama bin Laden and Abu Ghraib through the failure to find WMD!
Frank P Hart adds that Leno "is a great comedian precisely because there are no sacred cows for him — everyone is a target and nobody is spared." As for the difference between a late-night TV show and, say, Les Guignols, is that in the former, there's "a grain of truth — which is what makes it really funny — but the bottom line is that it's done for yuks, not as a policy statement." Jay joins in: "If Leno were french, his monologue would be non-stop Bush jokes, funny or not".
But if the late-night shows had been presented as they really were/are (and indeed, if the vast majority of American TV stations and their news shows had been shown as they really were/are, i.e., with the singular exception of Fox News, universally critical of Bush and the Iraq war), they could not have been turned into grist for the French mill mass-producing out images of masses of clueless American clods mindlessly following the every word of their retrograde patriotic leaders. No, this perception allowed them to shake their heads, tch-tch, and haughtily laugh the joke-telling off, and its self-serving nature ensured that this was the way that the view of the "event" would endure (as this example over than two years later testifies to).
What this tells us is that the French base their biased (self-serving) opinions on biased (self-serving) reporting in their own press which reflects the biased (self-serving) thinking of the members of their élite, and that all of the above think that the French should get a free pass, and be exempt from humor (at least, foreign humor) that puts the underlying "reasonable", "objective", "unemotional", "humanistic" nature of their policies into question...
In other words, French society as a whole — which supposedly loves to debate — has collectively pre-empted any soul-searching of their own policies (at least not beyond a certain line)…
Plus de pensées sur l'humour américain ici…
Failed Intelligence, Underhanded Motives, Aggressive Tendencies
DGSE to Britain: a very public “I TOLD you so”
Very helpful indeed, and also very reminiscent of the sickness most resembling the French “functionary” psyche.«PARIS, Aug 8 (AFP) - A confidential report by France's intelligence service that was finalised days before the 7 July London bombings pointed to the threat of an Al-Qaeda attack on Britain, the French daily Le Figaro said Monday.»
«I approached him and in my best French and told him the situation. He studied my documents and told me that I would have to resubmit the request again in writing. He assured me that if these letters had been received that the address would have been changed. Of course, I had sent them "return receipt requested," and I knew they had been received.
A world where imaginary authority collides with expectations of fealty, or something similarly small-minded, insular, and unimaginative.
I immediately pulled out of my case a small box of Belgium chocolates that I had purchased. I asked if he would like one. I then slid the entire box under the window and insisted that he keep all of them. Eh voila! Suddenly, he found that he could make the changes right then and there on his system. As well, he wanted to know why I didn't have a prélevement ("direct draft") already established for the payment of my taxes. He filled out his part of the form for me, and then showed me where to sign.»
As for their use in protecting people, and serving the public good, a glaring example of backing up allies and supporting larger strategic goals for the stability and safety of a larger world are quite obvious:«Charles De Gaulle undertook covert operations in Quebec using nationalist and separatist movements in Quebec, under the rubric of "Assistance et Cooperation Technique" or "Operation Ascot." Jacques Foccart dispatched SDECE agents to Quebec to develop and foment the growth of separatist movements. »
Having committed untold harm and grief, even to allies and friends, the question is and has always been: can you trust them at all? I think it’s quite obvious why the U.S., or anyone else for that matter, doesn’t take French governance seriously. « They say that France's intelligence services used an Italian-born middle-man to circulate a mixture of genuine and bogus documents to "trap" the two leading proponents of war with Saddam into making unsupportable claims.
It looks like yet another honorific legacy of DeGaulle's Monsieur Afrique. Don’t worry, it’s only the opaque regime they don’t like, not the people, and certainly not the 20% of the population that it’s composed of…
They have passed to The Sunday Telegraph a photograph which they claim shows the Italian go-between, sometimes known as "Giacomo" - who cannot be identified for legal reasons - meeting a senior French intelligence officer based in Brussels. "The French hoped that the bulk of the documents would be exposed as false, since many of them obviously were," an Italian official said.
"Their aim was to make the allies look ridiculous in order to undermine their case for war."»
Tuesday, August 09, 2005
N'Awlinz
FYI: My article on music & mirth in New Orleans was published in the current issue of the ASU Travel Guide.
Smackdown!
Locke versus Hobbes
Conclusions: Issue: The Social Contract - survey SAYS.....
Locke: We give up our right to ourselves exact retribution for crimes in return for impartial justice backed by overwhelming force. We retain the right to life and liberty, and gain the right to just, impartial protection of our property.
Hobbes: If you shut up and do as you are told, you have the right not to be killed.
Japan's plans for defense involved mobilizing the civilian population, including women and children, for the customary suicidal battle tactics
The guilt-mongers have twisted the facts of history beyond recognition in order to say that it was unnecessary to drop those atomic bombs. Japan was going to lose the war anyway, they say. What they don't say is — at what price in American lives? Or even in Japanese lives?Thomas Sowell continues:
Much of the self-righteous nonsense that abounds on so many subjects cannot stand up to three questions: (1) Compared to what? (2) At what cost? and (3) What are the hard facts?
The alternative to the atomic bombs was an invasion of Japan, which was already being planned for 1946, and those plans included casualty estimates even more staggering than the deaths that have left a sea of crosses in American cemeteries at Normandy and elsewhere. "Revisionist" historians have come up with casualty estimates a small fraction of what the American and British military leaders responsible for planning the invasion of Japan had come up with.
Who are we to believe, those who had personally experienced the horrors of the war in the Pacific, and who had a lifetime of military experience, or leftist historians [sic] hot to find something else to blame America for?
| Moral relativism à la franchouille |
 |
| Uncle Sam (wearing a heavy black Muslim-like beard instead of his usual white goattee): As the Al-Qaida barbarians say, you have to know how to massacre civilians from time to time. |
During the island-hopping war in the Pacific, it was not uncommon for thousands of Japanese troops to fight to the death on an island, while the number captured were a few dozen. Even some Japanese soldiers too badly wounded to stand would lie where they fell until an American medical corpsman approached to treat their wounds — and then they would set off a grenade to kill them both.
In the air the same spirit led the kamikaze pilots to deliberately crash their planes into American ships and bombers.
Japan's plans for defense against invasion involved mobilizing the civilian population, including women and children, for the same suicidal battle tactics. That invasion could have been the greatest bloodbath in history.
No mass killing, especially of civilians, can leave any humane person happy. But compared to what? Compared to killing many times more Japanese and seeing many times more American die?
More on Hiroshima…
There’s No Cure for Gravity. Not Yet at Least.
Click image for live video.
Discovery’s de-orbit burn is roughly 1 hour prior to landing. When that decision is “go” – the rest is up to Sir Isaac Newton and the reaction control system.
The first landing opportunity at Kennedy Space Center is for 09.07 UTC.
Meanwhile back in Aus, some folks were shocked to find out that they had one of the little discussed, 30 or so contingency landing sites NASA has arranged over the years in bilateral agreements.
Better version though, by this lot from Ball-tee-more though...
Monday, August 08, 2005
What Castro or Chavez Can Look Forward To
...they can look forward to the common man, the noble native, and anyone with the right length of rope to genuinely liberate themselves from cretins of that sort.
Hey, thought that Tony Blair is the only sort of person that can be dragged into an International Court type of political boondoggle?!?! How about a real life mass murderer?«The "Red Christmas" complaint refers to supposed crimes committed during the Sandinista army operation to remove some 8,500 Indians from their communities on the banks of the Coco River, along the border with Honduras, and relocate them in five camps to prevent them from giving logistical support to the Contra insurgents.Indigenous groups have complained that hundreds of their people died during the operation. The complaint also includes current Sandinista lawmaker and former Interior Minister Tomas Borge, former DGSE secret police chief Lenin Cerna and Nicaragua's current human rights prosecutor, Omar Cabezas.»
Imagine that, they even use the word “indigenous peoples” left and right too, and they’re still mass murderers, and still have friends in Hollywood. Take a moment and look at who the Indigenous “Peoples” were supporting – the ones opposed to people taking away personal liberties under the pretext of a pretend humane ideology.
Hat-tip to Ezra Levant at The Shotgun and PlubiusPundit
Plus Ça Change…
The French seem to find all kinds of interesting ways to fill their dayswrites Monica Crowley:
coddling the world's dictators, selling banned technologies to rogue regimes, and, of course, their favorite pastime: stabbing the United States in the back…
Congratulations to the EU3 on another successful 5 year plan.
«Iran resumed uranium conversion activities today at a nuclear facility – a step that Europeans and the US warned would prompt them to seek UN sanctions against Tehran.»
U.S. “accuses” (hoe DARE they), and Europe “fears” (how very touching of them):«The US accuses Iran of seeking to develop nuclear weapons, while Iran insists its programme aims only to produce electricity. But Iran has insisted it has the right to develop the entire fuel cycle – from raw uranium to the fuel for a reactor. Europe fears that if Iran can develop fuel on its own, it will also secretly produce material for a bomb.»
It’s not quite the same outcome of calling one thing “fear” and one thing an “accusation”, apart from the fact that the EU3 get characterized as a giant, (albeit ineffectual) warm-fuzzy, and with any hope on the part of a press ringer, the Iranian street mobs will be incited by an “accusation”.
Either way, the Iranian public is put at risk by their non-nuclear neighbors by all this. It doesn’t figures into the construction of a strategic balance of any sort, unless they plan on initiating a war with Israel, the Pakistanis, or wiping out Saudi Arabia.
Multiculturalism - A Cult at Crossed Purposes
They are talking about their own internal political struggle of course, and they’re exploiting immigrants and constructing disaffection to do it:
US News and World Report editor Michael Barone writes in his syndicated column about the flaws of the touting spin on a problem which caused itself – namely that multicultural programming created separate and hostile cultural factions in a society which are exploited by a left which has no awareness of s society needing a set of core beliefs that allow for coexistence, and allow for people to be different from one another without always presenting the risk of social meltdown in the process.
« When I was in Britain for the election in May, I was surprised to hear nothing from Tony Blair (or other politicians) about Britain's positive contributions to the world. Now, they are being heard.As for the conservative view, it sees that the disaffection. It finds itself having to work double-time and become distracted by the effort to hold together what the left tears apart. Under the leftist program, I would never be a real participant in American society – merely an Arab with a list of irremediable grievances who happens to carry a U.S. passport. The purpose isn’t in the interest of the immigrant, in fact it’s to his loss to not be positively involved in the society he lives in, and it has a distancing effect between himself and the world as a whole. It’s nothing more than a reason to develop an ulcer.
Multiculturalism is based on the lie that all cultures are morally equal. In practice, that soon degenerates to: All cultures are morally equal, except ours, which is worse. But all cultures are not equal in respecting representative government, guaranteed liberties and the rule of law. And those things arose not simultaneously and in all cultures, but in certain specific times and places -- mostly in Britain and America, but also in various parts of Europe. »
Its’ mere purpose is to indulge the native left’s desire to believe that there needs to be disaffection and “class struggle” for their own contrived moral vanity, which instead of actually being progressive, seems resigned to living in a previous century where the workers of the world were to unite, empower the “progressive” elite, and then wait in line for what an elite would ration out to them.
When the public has to tacitly do this on their own, they make up for the failing of that very elite. It works, but it only serves to indulge those “progressives” in their illusions that they words have no meaning and can do no serious harm.
« In America, as in Britain, multiculturalism has become the fashion in large swathes of our society. So the Founding Fathers are presented only as slaveholders, World War II is limited to the internment of Japanese-Americans and the bombing of Hiroshima. Slavery is identified with America, though it has existed in every society and the antislavery movement arose first among English-speaking evangelical Christians.So what is it that they have to offer? Tribalism and a hatred of the individual while all the while pretending to promote their freedom – which in reality means THEIR libertine rule over others through the micromanagement of everything from health, education, work, religious and political expression, and most sadly, the making and protecting of ones’ own well being.
But most Americans know there is something special about our cultural heritage. While Harvard and Brown are replacing scholars of the founding period with those studying other things, book-buyers are snapping up first-rate histories of the Founders by David McCullough, Joseph Ellis and Ron Chernow.»
So what’s left of their paradigm?: without the individual’s sense of self-preservation, and without presenting the value of the society as a whole, why bother with protecting a free society anyway? Barone quotes Jean Francois Revel who put it very well:
«A civilization that feels guilty for everything it is and does will lack the energy and conviction to defend itself."»
French Foreign Policy Regarded as Treasonous, and By Countries Closer to Paris Than the Neocons in Washington…
Of course, this dissing of the American perception of having been stabbed in the back in early 2003 fits straight into the (self-serving) world vision in which the French — conveniently — are always more reasonable, more wise, more sophisticated, more courageous, more tolerant, more open, etc, etc, than everyone else (and why isn't the world, and especially America — sigh — wise enough to recognize this irrefutable French strength?).
In conversations with ordinary Frenchmen, as well as on this blog, I have often had to defend my opinions — which I liken to common sense observations — of the charge of "being" pro-American with the idea that they must go deeper than dualistic thinking ("If you do not criticize America, you are a mindless zombie salivating about the American dream"; "if you are not anti-Bush, you believe everything the neo-cons say"; "if you don't stop bringing up pieces of evidence of French [or EU] perfidy and putting the Iraq crisis into context, you must be anti-French [or anti-European], et pourquoi vous vivez ici alors!?"), indeed (especially if the French are as wise as they claim to be, and as sophisticated in their thinking, as opposed to "good-evil" Americans) they ought to discard it altogether.
Although I rarely say so in so many words, I try to tell them you cannot have tunnel vision ("Are you pro-Bush or anti-Bush?", "Are you for [the] war or against [the] war?") and you must drop it in favor of wide-angle lenses. (This led to my pre-election posting in which I said that sure, Bush appears to be the worst politician in the world — with the exception of…) Indeed, by focusing their opprobrium on America — indeed, by having opprobrium at all and by celebrating the fact — the French overlook the situation, and situations, elsewhere in the world, as well as feelings of other actors around the globe — the least of whom, in the Iraqi crisis, certainly are not the Iraqis themselves.
In that perspective, let us turn to Eastern Europe: while the French continue to snicker over those clueless Americans and their (retrograde and uncalled-for) aggressiveness toward France, Andrew Borowiec points out (Ginkooyeh to Gregory) that in eastern Europe the "heritage of Gaullism" (i.e., French foreign policy since the end of World War II, basically) is regarded as treason. Excerpts:
Resentment of France is growing in Eastern Europe where French policies are perceived to be anti-American and undermining the European Union's cohesion.Not to worry, though, because of course, the French have a way to deal with this. The people who haughtily proclaim that friends ought to be allowed to make independent decisions can tell that the new members of the EU that they "ought to shut up" and fall in line.
… According to Polish sources, suggestions have been posited in the former communist countries for a more balanced policy by the EU that would see the United States as a partner, not as a competitor. Some diplomats say French prestige and France's role as one of the union's dominant powers have suffered.
A mainland invasion could have resulted in millions of Japanese deaths—and that's not counting civilians
In 1945, Paul Fussell, was a 21-year-old second lieutenant who'd spent much of the previous year fighting his way through Europewrites the Wall Street Journal.
At the time of Hiroshima, he was scheduled to participate in the invasion of the Japanese mainland, for which the Truman Administration anticipated casualties of between 200,000 and one million Allied soldiers. No surprise, then, that when news of the bomb reached Lt. Fussell and his men, they had no misgivings about its use:
"We learned to our astonishment that we would not be obliged in a few months to rush up the beaches near Tokyo assault-firing while being machine-gunned, mortared, and shelled, and for all the practiced phlegm of our tough facades we broke down and cried with relief and joy. We were going to live."
Mr. Fussell was writing about American lives. What about Japanese lives? 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. The March 1945 Tokyo fire raid killed about 100,000; such raids would have intensified had the war dragged on. The collective toll from the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings is estimated at between 110,000 and 200,000.Nuclear weapons are often said to pose a unique threat to humanity, and in the wrong hands they do. But when President Truman gave the go-ahead to deploy Fat Man and Little Boy, what those big bombs chiefly represented was salvation: salvation for young Lt. Fussell and all the GIs; salvation for the tens of thousands of Allied POWs the Japanese intended to execute in the event of an invasion; salvation for the grotesquely used Korean "comfort women"; salvation for millions of Asians enslaved by the Japanese.
Not least, and despite the terrible irony, the bombings were salvation for Japan, since they prompted Emperor Hirohito to intervene with his bitterly divided government to end the war, thus laying the groundwork for America's beneficent occupation and the country's subsequent prosperity. To understand the roots of modern Japan's pacifist mentality, so at variance with its old warrior culture, one need only visit Hiroshima's peace park.
More thoughts on Hiroshima…
How a Trusted Ally Betrayed Washington
«Perhaps the most enduring tenet of American history, implanted early in our school years, is the belief that France was our strongest ally and our closest friend during the American Revolution against the English.
...writes Ambassador Robert M. Smalley of historian Harlow Giles Unger’s " The French War Against America,"
Mr. Unger's book makes clear that none of them wanted to lose the war or their own territories that were put at stake to wage the conflict. All three wanted to come out richer than they came in. The British wanted to reinforce their hold on Canada, and regain whatever they had lost in earlier conflict with France. The British also wanted to reinforce their hold on the colonies, and on America as a whole. The French were not there, he says, to help win independence for the new United States, but to "recapture the United States."»
« The New World was seen by the nations of Europe, particularly France, England and Spain, but also smaller nations such as The Netherlands and Sweden, as huge hunks of new land for the taking, with new waterways, new resources and ample room for settlers and new trading companies.»Like their view of Africa and the Near East, some things never seem to change. The stakes in their effort now might be Nestlé, Unitlever, or BP Shell, but the subtext isn’t any different. It gets even more puzzling:
«By the summer of 1775 there were spies everywhere -- British spies, French spies and others -- all funneling information to the governments they served, including some stolen from Washington's own command, such as data on his need for arms and munitions. French spies reportedly were putting cash into the hands of various members of the American Congress. (And it was French money.)
The French spymaster in Paris, named Vergennes, informed his top agent in America, Gen. Rochambeau, to permit no French troops to separate from others, and to be certain they were serving under French generals. Mr. Unger cites Vergennes as the one who liked to plot Gen. Washington being shot from a horse, so that Rochambeau could take his place and control the American army.
It is of interest that John Adams (later the second president) spent much time in Europe during the Revolutionary War and warned repeatedly that the French should not be trusted.»
Sunday, August 07, 2005
Save the jet fuel...
Just march them to the fence. Give them to the neighbors. They actually have a lot in common, and have friends in high places.
Dispatches of The Angry Elf
MEMRI TV: Galloway on a variety of Arab language television channels calls for war to 'liberate' Baghdad and Jerusalem.
The EU: what a bunch of boobs.
By Paul Belien: Brussels bans what's possibly the only thing left that makes Germany interesting under the pretext of an "Optical Radiation Directive". (That means light, by the way.)
Strange thing to do in northern to central EUtopia where honky couldn't get a sunburn if he tried. Next week's bit of prudish pandering ban : beer.
Tax proceeds to promote gay pride festival tourism where shirts aren't worn.
Next week's new directive: compulsory headscarves.