Europeans are so lame

Galileo is scheduled for a 2013 service launch. Signals received from a "test" satellite have been hailed as a "historic step". In the meantime, the Chinese put together their own system, en moins de deux, and their looking at a 2010 launch date. By the time Europeans awake from their slumber, they'll be able to apply for jobs as street sweepers in Shanghai.

Is that better or worse than being a crypto-communist?

Obama is a crypto-European.

Our Effete, Sophisticated Friends, Part 285

As if he understood economics to begin with.

This little act of Plantu’s affection must be more of that nuanced cartooning for peace that we have to keep hearing about.

Throwing the book at 'em

Terrorist Recognition Handbook: A Practitioner's Manual for Predicting and Identifying Terrorist Activities, Second Edition

"The threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind"

Now that another Earth Day has come and gone, let's look at some environmentalist predictions that they would prefer we forget

writes Walter E. Williams on TownHall.

At the first Earth Day celebration, in 1969, environmentalist Nigel Calder warned, "The threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind."

C.C. Wallen of the World Meteorological Organization said, "The cooling since 1940 has been large enough and consistent enough that it will not soon be reversed."

In 1968, professor Paul Ehrlich, former Vice President Al Gore's hero and mentor, predicted that there would be a major food shortage in the U.S. and "in the 1970s . . . hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death."

Ehrlich forecast that 65 million Americans would die of starvation between 1980 and 1989, and that by 1999 the U.S. population would have declined to 22.6 million.

Ehrlich's predictions about England were gloomier: "If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000."

In 1972, a report was written for the Club of Rome warning that the world would run out of gold by 1981, mercury and silver by 1985, tin by 1987 and petroleum, copper, lead and natural gas by 1992.

Gordon Taylor, in his 1970 book "The Doomsday Book," said Americans were using 50% of the world's resources and "by 2000 they (Americans) will, if permitted, be using all of them."

In 1975, the Environmental Fund took out full-page ads warning, "The World as we know it will likely be ruined by the year 2000."

Harvard biologist George Wald in 1970 warned, "Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind." That was the same year that Sen. Gaylord Nelson warned, in Look magazine, that by 1995 "somewhere between 75% and 85% of all the species of living animals will be extinct."

It's not just latter-day doomsayers who have been wrong; doomsayers have always been wrong.

In 1885, the U.S. Geological Survey announced that there was "little or no chance" of oil being discovered in California, and a few years later they said the same about Kansas and Texas.

In 1939, the U.S. Department of the Interior said American oil supplies would last only another 13 years. In 1949, the secretary of the interior said the end of U.S. oil supplies was in sight. Having learned nothing from its earlier erroneous claims, in 1974 the U.S. Geological Survey advised us that the U.S. had only a 10-year supply of natural gas. The fact of the matter, according to the American Gas Association: There's a 1,000- to 2,500- year supply.

Here are my questions:

In 1970, when environmentalists were making predictions of man-made global cooling and the threat of an ice age and millions of Americans starving to death, what kind of government policy should we have undertaken to prevent such a calamity?

When Ehrlich predicted that England would not exist in the year 2000, what steps should the British Parliament have taken in 1970 to prevent such a dire outcome?

In 1939, when the Department of the Interior warned that we only had oil supplies for another 13 years, what actions should President Roosevelt have taken?

Finally, what makes us think that environmental alarmism is any more correct now that they have switched their tune to man-made global warming?

Here are a few facts:

More than 95% of the greenhouse effect is the result of water vapor in Earth's atmosphere. Without the greenhouse effect, Earth's average temperature would be zero degrees Fahrenheit.

Most climate change is a result of the orbital eccentricities of Earth and variations in the sun's output. On top of that, natural wetlands produce more greenhouse-gas contributions annually than all human sources combined.

Update: Do not miss the Earth Day predictions from 1970…

Trying to Beat the Other Crackpots to the Punch

Al Gore continues his Assault on Reason”:

Using tragedy to advance an agenda has been a strategy for many global warming activists, and it was just a matter of time before someone found a way to tie the recent Myanmar cyclone to global warming.

Former Vice President Al Gore in an interview on NPR’s May 6 “Fresh Air” broadcast did just that. He was interviewed by “Fresh Air” host Terry Gross about the release of his book, “The Assault on Reason,” in paperback.

“And as we’re talking today, Terry, the death count in Myanmar from the cyclone that hit there yesterday has been rising from 15,000 to way on up there to much higher numbers now being speculated,” Gore said. “And last year a catastrophic storm from last fall hit Bangladesh. The year before, the strongest cyclone in more than 50 years hit China – and we’re seeing consequences that scientists have long predicted might be associated with continued global warming.”

Apparently, thousands of dead mean little more to Gore that an opportunity to peddle the pet theory that has earned him a bundle and distracted much of science away from doing actual science.

Our Effete, Sophisticated Friends, Part 284

Steve Bell needs to heal his inner European



He believes that people should be forever chained to their roots, so long as it lets him see ill in you. To many a "wise, thoughtful" person like Bell, your flaws and world view are genetic, that is, only if you don't agree with him.

Attaqué pour "traitement inhumain et dégradant et détention arbitraire"

What type of "inhuman and degrading treatment" as well as "arbitrary detention" is the French state attacked for (before the European Court of Human Rights) from the likes of convict Lucien Léger, as recounted in the Le Monde article of Alain Salles? Prison for life. Said his lawyer (Jean-Jacques de Felice),

« La société avait le droit de le juger et de le détenir, mais n'avait pas le droit de tuer en lui, à petit feu, au fil des refus réitérés, tout espoir de liberté, toute perspective de réinsertion. »

For untold millions of anti-death penalty advocates, one of their main points has been, Keep the prisoner in jail for life, and there is no need to execute him (which becomes a cruel and unnecessary punishment).

But as I have said before, leftists only win one battle to go on to battle for the next so-called unjust cause. Yesterday, it was the death penalty. Today, it is a life sentence. Tomorrow, it will be the 30 year-sentence. After-tomorrow…

In any case, it turns out that, in France at least (and contrary to what they assure us), a guaranteed life sentence does not exist:

La Cour, une réclusion perpétuelle ne constitue pas un traitement inhumain si le condamné n'est pas privé de tout espoir d'obtenir un aménagement de sa peine.

The article goes on to point out that the authoritories — both French and European — going to lengths to… reassure (!) the public that life sentences are not mandatory, for instance quoting Judge Nicolas Bratza as stating that a mandatory life sentence is theoretically incompatible with the (French) constitution.

Le gouvernement français souligne que la libération de M. Léger montre qu'une peine à perpétuité n'est pas incompressible dans les faits. Dans un arrêt rendu en février, à propos de Chypre, la CEDH avait estimé que les peines perpétuelles n'étaient pas incompressibles.

Ann Coulter Recaps Funniest Videos of 2007

The Media Research Center's most humorous videos of 2007…



Ann Coulter has more…

Soft power rotting at the core

Multilateralism, multiculturalism, et al. They make up the Secular Liberation Theologies that have become the new age religions of this sickness that is Europe.

Our Effete, Sophisticated Friends, Part 283

After 1600 years of jew-hunting, isn’t it time they threw in the towel?

Immoderate Americans Prone to Extremism!

Jerks to the left, Idiots to the right.

In Germany, there’s almost no way to sing “stuck in the middle with you” because apart from the veneer, you’d be alone. Clarsonimus reports on the former East German Stasi-leute’s cold, moist, tonsil-hockey with the deep (blood) red PDS party, advocating an inversion of their very own history: an obligatory political “art exhibit” comparing the very same Berlin Wall where the Stasi’s mitarbeitern shot people who tried to leave for freedom with the Israel separation wall that keeps snipers out.

A better comparison would be the wall Egypt put on it’s border to Gaza, whose purpose is to keep Gazans from seeking a better life. But, hey – what does that matter. It’s only the essential meaning being lost in the lefty meme-factory.

Elsewhere a partisan of the wildly anti-American NDP, a nationalist party that succeed the Reichspartei or “Empirial Party” made a goose-step lovin’ sieg heil to a Jewish journalist. I’m sure it wasn’t a tangential editorial comment, he was just doing some tai chi or something, surely.

A regional court in Erding, outside of Munich, found that Horst Mahler had broken the law when he greeted journalist Michel Friedman with the words, "Heil Hitler, Herr Friedman."

Friedman, who had previously served as the vice president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, met Mahler in an airport hotel in October 2007 to speak with him for the German edition of Vanity Fair.

It’s a party that attracts asslicking skinheads much in the same way that the PDS attracts people willing to employ their equally pre-cambrian ethical non-compass to burn things down for “peace”. Germans think of them as the conservatives that they aren’t because of the headcracking that they like to get into with the very reds they share 99% of their ideas on society and government with, which are all authoritarian in the “loving” socialism and good old-fashioned zombie-like worship of one sort of dead idol or another. More than anything else though, is their common love of jew-hating, and a choice of one or two ways to hate immigrants: to see them as either helpless children that one should contemptfully coddle or a hideous horde that one should contemptfully detest. I’m sure they both have stock anti-racism speeches at hand when the subject of America comes up.

Otherwise there’s still the grand old European pass-time: defiling graves. It’s a healthy way to blow off some steam and takes the edge off when you’re Jonesing for some necrophilia.

Bush!

Realism

The new clip by Justice provides a very good depiction of what Paris has become.

Grandes phrases creuses

"Le droit à l'alimentation est un droit de l'homme fondamental". Les ONUziens en raffolent.

Our Effete, Sophisticated Friends, Part 282

Such grace. Such charm.

Feel Safer Now?

[A] neighbour … helped Elisabeth [Fritzl] to run away to Vienna but the teenager was tracked down by police and brought back to Amstetten at her fathers behest

write the Times' Roger Boyes and Bojan Pancevski (emphasis mine).

Elisabeth was repeatedly raped by her father. She could not take it to live at home anymore and tried to escape, [Sepp] Leitner told the Austrian private television channel ATV.

She had taken sleeping pills and went to Vienna. But the police found her and they, or her father, brought her back home. Mr Leitner did not explain why he and the unnamed neighbour failed to alert the police about Elisabeths plight, though he hinted darkly at their fear of the landlords revenge. Mr Leitner said that he was still tormented by nightmares.

And (drumbeat)… the money quote:

I took care of them all, Mr Frizl told police in his first (and only) interrogation. I meant well.

PS: Needless to say, the Incest Monster does not deserve to go to jail…

Fred Mertz takes shit from no one

Communism. The French get off on it.

Fun for the whole family.

It's official

It's been official for a long time now. Europeans have gone over the edge. There gone now and, as with all deceased, there's no bringing them back.

Human Consensus-Based Weather Undermined by Actual Weather

But don’t stop panicking, there’s always hopelessness:

The Earth's temperature may stay roughly the same for a decade, as natural climate cycles enter a cooling phase, scientists have predicted.

[snip]

However, temperatures will again be rising quickly by about 2020, they say.

Someone ought to “do something.”

“Imagine the payoff of knowing with some certainty what the next 10 years hold in terms of temperature and precipitation”

- H/T to Georgos