Someday they Might even Resort to Democracy

Having never been any good at Engineering lately, the twitter-ati of the UK tries social engineering. It doesn’t say much for the state of democracy when people want to forcably impose racial quotas on “elected” officials in an effort to take away political choice from 99% of the population (humans) to pander to an elite amounting to 1% of the population who have such a low view of the public, that they don’t think anyone else can see past their own naïve view of people as easily compartmented tribes and factions.

More to the point is the sporting joy that elite of Islington exiles take in evoking a reaction of a few people in order to characterize something negative about the 92.4% of the population that’s Caucasian, and make the 2.4% of the population which is black, and the 5.2% that’s Asian feel to them like their helpless political wards who would otherwise be incapable of having among them a range of political views.

For that matter, the tiny, but morally repugnant elite that imagines that pluralism is so utterly disposable to a degree that you can limit who can run to begin with. The fact that they already have party lists shoved down their throats is sad enough.

There has to be some sort of distraction that the good people of Britain, the real Benetton ad crowd can offer these clueless “social overlords” that will make them believe that they’re indispensible to humanity, but keep them in the corner where that can’t do that much harm. I sort of though that this is what Radio 4 and “eco-tourism” were for, but apparently it’s a case of “today Parliament, tomorrow your last shred of liberty”.

Operation Black Vote, which conducted the research, recommends all-minority shortlists are used for four consecutive elections, in a bid to help BME candidates "get past go".

Report author Simon Wolley said: "The change in the law is not a sledgehammer to crack a nut; it's not forcing parties to use all-black shortlists.

Except when it is. If the same bullying meets the standard used to MEPs that don’t fit the dominant paradigm, or to call any number of things “constructing a climate of urgency”, then why not this?

Note the creative use of the word “we”. I don’t think they mean the public at large.

"But unless we take positive action measures we are not going to have a representative democracy for more than 75 years. It's not that we don't have [Barack] Obamas, but we don't have the mechanisms for them to see the light of day."

We have a Barack Obama precisely because we DO have a democracy, and DON’T compromise it as badly as they propose by force and coercion.

Making stupidity sound banal, one of it’s proponents managed this bit of brilliance too:

"The creation of ethnic-minority shortlists will undoubtedly see more ethnic minorities taking up seats in Parliament, which will mean a Parliament that mirrors the society it represents," he argued.

His Race Relations (Election Candidates) Bill would be a voluntary measure for parties to adopt in some seats but would remove legal obstacles surrounding the discrimination, as Labour had to do when its all-women shortlists were found to be illegal.

Note that “election candidates” has to remain in ellipses.

Photos from CPAC

Si vous me demandez si Chamberlain ressemble à Zapatero, je répondrai… que Chamberlain avait plus de relief et même plus de courage que Zapatero !

José Maria Aznar is interviewed by Alexandre del Valle.

Sincèrement, la gauche a instrumentalisé cette tragédie. Tous les sondages sont formels : sans ces attentats sur lesquels la gauche a surfé, nous aurions gagné les élections. Ce qui est terrible, c’est qu’au lieu d’en vouloir aux terroristes on en a voulu au gouvernement ! … N’oubliez pas que, le 11 mars 2004, le premier à accuser l’ETA pour dédouaner les islamistes et affaiblir mon gouvernement fut M. Zapatero ! La stratégie de la gauche changea quand elle constata qu’il était, pour elle, plus porteur électoralement de nous accuser d’avoir menti en attribuant les attentats à l’ETA — une hypothèse dont je rappelle que ce n’était, pour nous, qu’une supposition parmi d’autres. Comme je l’ai expliqué à maintes reprises, nous nous sommes contentés de transmettre au public toute les informations dont nous disposions. Nous avons collé au rapport des services de sécurité, qui faisait porter à ETA la responsabilité de l’attentat.

Les Espagnols ont voté ce jour-là dans un contexte de grande tension émotionnelle. … Personne n’a jamais posé la question de la légitimité de ces élections. Mais, chaque jour, il apparaît toujours plus clairement que les terroristes ont atteint l’objectif qu’ils poursuivaient : conditionner le processus électoral. C’est un sujet de réflexion essentiel pour toutes les démocraties — dans la mesure où ce phénomène risque de se reproduire. La décision de retirer les troupes espagnoles d’Irak, qui fut prise en violation des engagements internationaux de l’Espagne et des promesses que M. Zapatero lui-même avait faites durant la campagne électorale, fut considérée par les terroristes comme une victoire importante. Et lorsque les terroristes enregistrent une victoire, ils se renforcent…

Si vous me demandez si Chamberlain ressemble à Zapatero, je répondrai… que Chamberlain avait plus de relief et même plus de courage que Zapatero ! En effet, après avoir pactisé avec les nazis, Chamberlain, lui, avait au moins eu le courage de s’en aller par la grande porte. Zapatero n’ose même pas en faire autant ! Il doit certainement avoir honte de sa politique d’apaisement avec l’ETA mais il n’ose pas affronter les reproches de ses adversaires politiques et de son peuple. Chamberlain et Zapatero ont effectué les mêmes erreurs et ont les mêmes défauts ; seul le courage les différencie. Et je suis certain que si Zapatero venait à être réélu en 2008, il pactiserait à nouveau avec les terroristes d’ETA.

Barack Obama

The candidate that doesn’t wear a flag pin on his lapel has attracted some curious campaign volunteers.



Just what country is Barack Obama running for office in?

Actually, they’re from Uranus

The New York Times Sunday book reviews can be a rather cute thing sometimes. Especially when there’s a “disturbance in the force” that one of the apparachiks of the house organ of the empire of Sneer-opia thinks they need to neutralize the existence of any notion that doesn’t conform to their world view. The usual routine for them to find among the cadres, one with a pencil and a penchance to occasionally comb their hair, to take one for the team.

What I’m referring to, obviously, is Geoffrey Wheatcroft’s attempt to make James J. Sheehan’s “Where have all the Soldiers Gone, The Transformation of Modern Europe” to stop hurting his ears.

It is titled “Europeans are From Venus.” Oh, goodness me! What a wit!

The amusing thing about this train-wreck of his is that it does such an awful job of even understanding its own examples and sources. Citing Robert Kagan’s use of the term “Europeans are from Venus” from “Of Paradise and Power” in his title gives you the sense that there was some grand change in world view over the past century that ties the shrinking capacity of European nation-states to be a global agent for change and arbiter in conflicts, and the reflexive passivity that makes the continent’s Stepford children march against virtually any moving object. They are two entirely different subjects, but to the great minds of the Euro-yack-itopia they are because they both happen to involve soldiers, and, like, guns ‘n stuff, as opposed to the conflicts addressed in any of the theses. In fact at that level of unfamiliar ignorance, you could plausibly tie gravity and sunlight to his arguments.

This outpouring of popular feeling against war no doubt confirmed Kagan in his view that those “Europeans from Venus” are now incapable of the use of military force that still comes naturally to Americans, and that it was “time to stop pretending that Europeans and Americans share a common view of the world, or even that they occupy the same world.”

As if conflicts over which Americans have debated, taken issue on, supported or opposed, is somehow so easy to compartment in the “Venusian” mind really is easy for us. The first error is the bigoted one that you can attribute to his entire social orbit which permits him to believe that 302 million people are sufficiently similar to one another, and conform to his cartoonish view to say that without the editors laughing him to the impotent beehive of a continent whose gross neglect of human suffering he’s trying to salve.

However that may be, it’s a surely astonishing fact that no European war has been fought for more than 60 years, at least outside the ruins of Yugoslavia. Western Europe has become politically and socially demilitarized to a degree once unimaginable; after so many centuries of bloody conflict, Europeans don’t want to study war no more. In his scintillating tour d’horizon — and de force — Sheehan suggests that such obsolescence of war is specifically “the product of Europe’s distinctive history in the 20th century,” and he argues that it has created a new kind of European state along with “a dramatically new international system within Europe.”

Which is only possible if you’ve been so violent, so disruptive to humanity that your wars and ideas have killed hundreds of millions of people, that there is a need to be vanquished. This notion that they made this peace, fully born from the beneficence of their hearts is a dangerous delusion.

Which you can correct within five minutes radio listening. Of late, from that great blissful continent of EUtopia, whose dwindling number of children find themselves dancing about the maypole (both of them), we find one of many emerging forces bereft of any compelling moral framework. Not just the inability of the EU itself to embrace pluralism, but more to the point a frustrate Russia in fear of being in it’s last throws as a place with any form of social harmony and future. Never mind the age at which the men are die-ing by their own behavior, as telling as it is, just listen to the reanimated older nature of the Voice of Russia, which kicks off it’s broadcast with news of state visits as if the clock has turned back to 1977, and that whatever civil society there is outside of government is some of the art and sports that isn’t managed by a ministry.

Wheatcroft, in the cherry picking of examples about marching protestors is missing the pattern in European nature of marching armies as they remain, and the reasons they always have. To buy this line of shit so frequently parroted from the right side of the pond, you have to dissociate WHY some militaries are used. Even his citations in support of the “different, better people” argument make this quite obvious:

In late 1991, at the insistence of the German government (itself egged on, one might add, by Serb-bashing right-wing columnists in papers like The Frankfurter Allgemeine), the European Union recognized the sovereignty of Slovenia and Croatia, and then Bosnia, crucially and disastrously before the nationality questions in those territories had been resolved. This encouraged a competitive round of territorial acquisition and ethnic expulsion and “intensified the predatory war being fought by Serbs and Croatians against Bosnia.”
It was of course ludicrous as well as hubristic for Jacques Poos, foreign minister of Luxembourg, to say at this juncture that “the hour of Europe has dawned,” but trans-Atlantic denunciations of European weakness were also misplaced. When the tub-thumpers of Capitol Hill and the op-ed pages were asked 15 years ago what kind of military intervention in the Balkans they had in mind, it turned out to mean American air cover while the Western Europeans provided the P.B.I., as the British Army used to say, the poor bloody infantry, a division of labor that had little appeal in Europe.

Actually, it turned out (four times over) to require both Americans in the air, on the ground, and in the larger part of the reconstruction effort in EUtopia’s back yard.

One can talk about European soft power against American hard power, but the point is made better by Sheehan in the peroration to this excellent book. The birth of the Bolshevik regime — and then of Fascist and National Socialist regimes — was a direct consequence of the “intense violence” then poisoning Europe. The astonishingly peaceful collapse of Communism rather more than 70 years later reflected in turn “the decline of violence that, by the 1980s, had transformed international and domestic politics throughout Europe”: a change for the better if ever there was one. To put it another way, soccer is not only England’s and Europe’s gift to all mankind. It really is a better game.

Peace, you see, is being so vigilant on your passivity, that brutal hangovers of the state-fetishizing socialism can engage in genocide without any fear of intervention, mere hundreds of kilometers from the rotting boulevards where millions marched against the deposing of Saddam Hussein.

That surely must be something to be proud of. The only way to be so proud is to pasteurize the mind of the questions “why” and “when” to the reasons war is often unavoidable when the ugly memories or war are, in fact, inadequate to dissuade internecine violence and genocide from this continent that supposedly “remembers” war and brutality.

As for “whose game it is” is really the key to understanding a critic like Wheatcroft. It’s made obvious by spuriously throwing in an old quote from Evelyn Waugh:

It isn’t necessary to agree with Evelyn Waugh writing to his friend Graham Greene — “Of course the Americans are cowards. They are almost all the descendants of wretches who deserted their legitimate monarchs for fear of military service” — to see clearly that the United States isn’t a warlike country at all. In many ways it has always been more deeply peaceable in its instincts than ever Europe was.
And is the civilianization of Europe such a bad thing? Although there has been much grumbling about the Bundeswehr’s inadequate contribution in Afghanistan, some of us cannot see it as an occasion for pure regret if the Germans have changed character so drastically.

Because it isn’t about peace, the protection of innocents, or anything else – it’s about Europeans no longer “owning the game”. My sense is that if Europeans had a game, frankly ANYTHING that would work to even take a chip out of the abuse vulnerable people worldwide have to suffer, Americans would be more that happy to let them have their little never ending end-zone dance. But they have to actually do something to demonstrate that they can actually do something to support their self-flattery with fact.
And they might want to abandon their schitophrenic relationship with themselves as both a special class of humans and a mass of pitiable, emotionally vulnerable peace lovers in need to having their precious little feelings protected. Oh, and their class hatred at some point in the next century too, if they can, but I wouldn’t hold my breath – because somewhere in their S&M game of not being able to figure out if everyone in an over-or-under class, and the insistence of proletarian-seeming sameness of outcome, they’ll continue to forget as they’ve had so often before in their history – the people that get killed when they think they “know their game”. This time it might be a deterministic attempt to tax the carbon out of the atmosphere, or anti-globalize our way to impoverishing billions in Asia and Africa, but any way you shake it, the ugliness that comes out of the hubris that they can’t seem to develop in their breathtaking enlightenment will emerge to do more harm again.

Like one fellow I had to listen to last night who told me, imagining that everyone MUST agree with him, that there was something evil and calculating about George Bush spreading democracy, all you have to do is ask them when did promoting democracy and pluralism suddenly become so evil? Simple: when the people your childish hatred compels you to oppose do something you can’t bring yourself to admit is positive, and when your own world view completely failed to succeed in its’ own attempt to promote human freedom.

Much in the way that foolish old coot was willing to dispose of human dignity to make his point about his own notion of the defense of human dignity, so will the European social brain trust. Of course the humans themselves need not apply.

Greetings from CPAC

CPAC's annual conference is over (videos here), and it was a wunderbar experience.

Atlas Shrugs was there (i.e., at Washington's Omni Shoreham Hotel), as were Midnight Blue (Midnight Blues?) and Fausta, among many others — the Cap'n, the Gal, the Miss, the Shovel, the Wing, the Grizzly, (whom else did I forget?) etc — on Bloggers' Corner.

Some questions:

1) why is it not better known that Dubya is not only funny and eloquent (and the most energetic of us all at 7:15 in the morning), he was (is) one of the best speakers around?

2) the best (and most intelligent) speaker (Speaker?), however, was Newt Gingrich (Tony Snow rated a close second); how can Newt Gingrich's friends, colleagues, and important others harass and shame the man into running for president (if not, this year, another election year)?

Update: Veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan spoke on a panel while a bedazzling New Yorker shanghaied me into working as a cameraman as she interviewed a veteran running for Congress…

Hatched and educated by the 68ers

More likely to feel helpless about the future, more likely to be feel hopeless about their own future, less likely to want to support the old... this is wht teaching kids Marxist claptrap gets you.

Not Exactly Being All That You Can Be

Clarsonimus points out that the Bundesregierung has managed to used the Bundeswehr to be really
Bundes-evasive:

When asked by a reporter what the other 250,000 troops in the German military are doing back home at the moment and if it might not maybe be possible to dig up one or two hundred of them with guns and ammunition and everything who might not sort of perhaps consider kind of like coming down south to fight for a week or two tops pretty please, the angered spokesman said “We’re doing everything we can, I say. Not everything we should or even could, but can. Three letters here; c, a, and n. Got that? I can’t stress the word can enough.”

Which is to say: this is the time in the Bundeswehr when we dance. More to the point: you may not pet my monkey, or molest his skull for that matter.

Get a freaking Bundes-heart, will ya?

Complete with pics of French chicks with hairy armpits, and if you're lucky, BO in digitalized Odorama

Ça va s'appeler FesseBook je crois.

Way to go

Gotta love the way that Romney took a huge steaming dump on France (and Zeropa) yesterday in his withdrawal speech.

No Matter, They Don’t Really Have a Constitution Anyway

How is that Lefty do-gooders manage to be so willing to dispose of pluralism? Chief chin-scratcher of the former Church of England believes that some features of Sharia law are inevitable in the UK.

Dr Rowan Williams, symbolic head of the world's 70 million Anglicans, argued that other religions enjoyed tolerance of their own laws and called for "constructive accommodation" with Islamic practice in areas such as marital disputes.

First of all, when did 3% of the British population get the leverage to impose laws on others, when no other Muslims in reasonable, democratic societies outside of majority Islamic nations seem to need it?

He stressed that such practice should not take precedence over an individual’s rights as a citizen.

Take any man who says that, and just put him in a dress. Since when in the sphere of lefty-do-gooder culture did anything considered a ‘right’ (a list of which includes all of life’s needs, except for civilization, as we find in this case) not take the place of anyone else’s faith? Where does that ”so just don’t have an abortion” argument fit into tacitly or openly promoting a canon legal system in the civil code?

Thirdly, when did the Church of England lose so much of its leverage as a social entity that it feels compelled to resign itself to tribal factions getting their own laws?

Asked if the adoption of Sharia law was necessary for community cohesion, Dr Williams told the BBC: "It seems unavoidable and, as a matter of fact, certain conditions of Sharia are already recognised in our society and under our law, so it is not as if we are bringing in an alien and rival system."

Of COURSE it’s alien and rival – it’s an imposition on civil society to enforce imposed religious laws! Hello! McFly! Remember the enlightenment? I’ll bet not.

Whereas Almighty God hath created the mind free; that all attempts to influence it by temporal punishment or burthens, or by civil incapacitations, tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness, and are a departure from the plan of the Holy author of our religion, who being Lord both of body and mind, yet chose not to propagate it by coercions on either, as was his Almighty power to do . . .

- Thos. Jefferson, 1786

222 years ago, in that “great before” when promoters of Islam want you to believe that any society they now feel humiliated by was somehow “inferior” to them then.

Media Martyrdom Operation

The TF3 idiot on « Ce Soir Ou Jamais ! » interviewing Tariq Ramadan demonstrated the usual European bigotry, in thinking that politics is somehow genetic or hereditary. As if the world would really be able to sit still that long for these simpletons to understand it. It’s absurd. All he has to do is actually read what Ramadan actually says when he isn’t stroking your chicken.

From World Politics Review:

It has often been pointed out that Tariq Ramadan is the grandson of Hassan Al-Banna: the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, the pivotal organization in the history of Islamic fundamentalism. And it has at least just as often been pointed out that this should not matter, since, after all, no one chooses their parents and grandparents. In a debate with Tariq Ramadan on the French public television channel France 3 last Wednesday, the Franco-Tunisian author Abdelwahab Meddeb posed what is the real question in this connection: Is Tariq Ramadan faithful to the legacy of his grandfather's ideas?

The show runs on the tagline « L’actualité vur par la culture » (“the news seen through the prism of culture, and not as implied “the way the culture sees news”), which is basically how the French preSS sees everything anyway, because you can pretty much bend it any way you like.

Why not?

Et puis, si les putes notaient leurs clients ?

Truer words have never been spoken

Is the iPhone a smartphone?

Now bow down before the purple-helmeted soldiers of destruction

UN forces caught vandalizing prehistoric sites. Bof. Sahara occidental ou Villiers-Le-Bel, c'est du pareil au même.

Rip off Artist

It looks like the Mr. Der Stürmer Zeichner has either been inspired by ¡No Pasarán!, or managed a original thought for once. Westminster with Mickey (- the Ché) Ears tied to a story about surveillance. Of course the allegations aren’t about law but good taste, since the UK has no legal limitations on wiretapping.

For more on Steve Bell, our favorite hate-mongering anachronism, click here, for his illuminating and charming little scribbles which are obviously intended to promote understanding between the peoples of the USSR and her Marxist-Leninist comrades and have nothing to do with the sort of repetitive derision associated with coercive socialism such as that found in Orwell’s Oceania described in 1984, or even Aldous Huxley’s blissed out dictatorship in Brave New World.

"Il est clair qu’on ne peut rien approuver de ce qui vient d’Israël"

So says the darling of French media, Tariq Ramadan, who just last week was given a platform for justifying terrorism on French State TV. Now he is calling for the boycott of Israeli writers at the upcoming Torino Book Fair.

Slow news day

The minimum wage hacks over at Rue89.com have decided to do an in-depth article about the criminal records of American football players with a special emphasis on the criminal records of those involved in today's Super Bowl.

"C'est Le Gauche Sans Le Peuples"

Self-absorbed lefty eliteist Jack Lang's spawn proves much to the dictum: "like father, like son"

She thinks that illegal aliens have rights because some of them pay taxes. How feeble can you get? She's a "populist" who can't figure out an excess in "undocumented" labor might depress wages. But then again, she call herself a champion of the poor and those "without rights."

It's the adolescent pursuit of trying to have the image of a champion.

Selbstvernichtung, Progressive Style

Terminally deterministic educators in Britain might find that dooming kids to meaningless transnationalism (if anything at all.) As we'll found so often before, this has nothing to do with the kids education, but the educators who perceive themselves to be a sort of elite penchance for re-education. That is, if they'll amit that the past even exists in history class...

Three quarters of teachers felt obliged to tell students about the danger of patriotism. The survey suggested neither pupils nor teachers wanted patriotism endorsed by schools.

Historians said last night, however, that it was impossible to teach the subject without patriotism or a recognition that British values were rooted in the past.

Progressive call this progress. Who knew?

Inasmuch that many Britons live cheek by jowl with some in a culture selectively believing that history ended in the 7th century, all I can say that it was nice knowing ya!