Becoming Thierry Meyssan

This is a how to, as it were, to becoming the great truth-teller and “I’m only asking questions” lesson-giver that constructed the “Bush made 9-11 happen”, widely admired as “complex” and “daring” in the new epicenter of self-serving and mendacious media schlock, Europe, where media figures making up theories to emboldent their world view, even if they cause misery, is all part of that air of superior enlightenment and humanity that they carry themselves with, and always in reference to other peoples and cultures. So very logical and inclusive of them, no? Okay, so let's do the hustle, shall we?

An Air France flight travelling from Brazil to France goes down at sea. Let’s just say that we’re all French now, and all Brazilian now. M’kay? Now let’s treat the item with the same high standards of the European press and conflate the all-too-frequent event of the phoned in bomb threat to say that it’s a conspiracy left over from sleeper cells of the Bush administration who as we know were trying to kill the economy at the expense of environmentalism, what with him having built a “sustainable home” when Al Gore was still growing his inner beard, and all, and probably for suspicious reasons at that.

Let’s ask questions about the automated fault codes, perhaps they were brave counter-terror personnel fighting back against the bombers, who we should make every attempt to understand because... and I’m only asking questions here... might have been trying to save the rainforests and protect the world from severe weather, which we’ve known for centuries, is a direct cause of aircraft and westerners employing combustion engines.

Let’s also start covering our cultural behinds the moment there is a suggestion that a bomb might have gone off too. But, you know, I’m only asking questions, and not making any light suggestions about Airbus executives, or maybe the nefarious murderers at Boeing just trying to prop up sales at the cost of however many lives.

I’m not making light of the victims’ families losses by only asking questions, after all, I have rayonnement to dispense. And if “just asking questions” doesn’t stroke my ego, I’ll passive-aggressively suggest it through fiction.

For example one can clearly see what a lackey of the regime Fraulein Cobb is for not saying that she is only asking question, and merely communicating known facts. I guess she’s is fear-ridden tool of the established order and seeks no troofiness. Of course she’ll get mad, but she just can’t handle the truth towing the line.

They (Heart) Death the Way You (Heart) Life

Youssouf Fofana, tries to bluster though his case, or attending to his “pride”, even though the case is not public. His gang burned alive, tortured, maimed, and left a man for dead for their entertainment because he’s a Jew.

“Élan” about being proud of what he did will not get him off a murder charge, but it’s a process of striving to a heroic image, of personal mythmaking, of somehow making himself into a sort of martyr, as it has now been revised to mean. Basically, he isn’t saying what influential people in the rest of the culture are saying: “may a thousand Fofanas bloom.” Fussing as it normally does, the rest of the culture is happy to either analyze ad nauseum, or dream up new sectarian crimes to legitimize.

They’ve been here before, and it Hurt. For Centuries.

Which is to say, in a death-spiral. While continental talking heads chide American for errors presumably made due to a lack of attention to history, in reality the ones wagging a finger at America for being a martial “new Rome” need to look at what really put it out of it’s misery, and the centuries of misery that came thereafter.

What did a number on the roman empire and set Europe on a centuries-long slog from which they could only have emerged from widespread poverty with free-trade and non-conformist ingenuity?

This peaceful infiltration of barbarians which altered the whole character of the society which it invaded would have been impossible, of course, if that society had not been stricken by disease. The disease is plain enough to see by the third century. It shows itself in those internecine civil wars in which civilization rends itself, province against province and army against army. It shows itself in the great inflationary crisis from about 268 and in the taxation which gradually crushed out the smaller bourgeoisie while the fortunes of the rich escaped its net. It shows itself in the gradual sinking back of an economy based upon free exchange into more and more primitive conditions when every province seeks to be self-sufficient and barter takes the place of trade.

From Eileen Edna Power’s 1924 book, Medieval People

The most obvious manifestation of Roman society in decline was the dwindling numbers of Roman citizens. The Empire was being depopulated long before the end of the period of peace and prosperity which stretched from Augustus to Marcus Aurelius.

[ ... ]

The long duration of Augustus's legislation to raise the birthrate is significant; successful it was not, but the fact that it was maintained on the statute book and systematically revised and developed for three centuries shows that it was at least accounted necessary. It is true of course that the mortality rate was a far more important factor in those days than it is in our own, and the mortality from pestilence and civil war from Marcus Aurelius onwards was exceptional. And it is plain that the proportion of celibates was high in the Roman empire and that the fall in the fertility of marriages was going on. It is the childless marriage, the small family system that contemporary writers deplore. In Seeley's striking phrase: 'The human harvest was bad,' It was bad in all classes, but the decline was most marked in the upper ranks, the most educated, the most civilized, the potential leaders of the race. In the terrible words of Swift, facing his own madness, the Roman Empire might have cried: 'I shall die like a tree--from the top downwards.'

[ ... ]

Why (the insistent question forces itself) did this civilization lose the power to reproduce itself? Was it, as Polybius said, because people preferred amusements to children or wished to bring their children up in comfort? Hardly, for it is more marked among the rich than the poor and the rich can have the best of both worlds. Was it because people had grown discouraged and disheartened, no longer believing in their own civilization and loath to bring children into the darkness and disaster of their war-shattered world?

[ ... ]

We do not know. But we can see the connection of the falling population with the other evils of the empire--the heavy cost of administration relatively heavier when the density of the population is low; the empty fields, the dwindling legions which did not suffice to guard the frontier.To cure this sickness of population the Roman rulers knew no other way than to dose it with barbarian vigour. Just a small injection to begin with and then more and more till in the end the blood that flowed in its veins was not Roman but barbarian.

Also employing Canada as an example, Mark Steyn notes that much of it goes not so much to ideologies, but their experience as a population bettered by state control, the brutal measures that inherently come with it, but also the same desire to put their own pleasure above their own children, and consequently about their lack of confidence in the future of humanity:

We are witnessing the end of the late twentieth-century progressive welfare democracy. Its fiscal bankruptcy is merely a symptom of a more fundamental bankruptcy: its insufficiency as an animating principle for society. The children and grandchildren of those Fascists and Republicans who waged a bitter civil war for the future of Spain now shrug when a bunch of foreigners blow up their capital. Too sedated even to sue for terms, they capitulate instantly.

To quote the Dead Kennedys, like the Romans they’re Too drunk to F*ck

Reconnecting nanny-state populations with cross-generational solidarity requires much more than the marginal tax breaks the Portuguese government announced or the nine thousand bucks the Russian state is now offering for second children. The most important action in reacquainting individuals with a larger sense of life is the one that governments recoil from: shrink the state.

The same demographic death-spiral that motivated dictator Nicolae Ceausescu to ban all forms of contraception and abortion was a result of something very similar: the making of the new communist man presented no case for the future, much as it did with the rigid roman society. What’s bewildering is that what is meant to be a sort of leisure-state socialism which has long tried to bolster having children with financial incentives is doing the same thing: making no case for the need to think about the future, especially in the face of a new barbarism – one with a potent ideology that wants your techniques to build domes and watermills, but could care less about your language, literature, and humanism.

In the end, it’s not about cash: after all, materialism and self-gratification are why Eutopians gave up on the future in the first place. The best reason to diminish social programs is not to put more money in people’s pockets but to put more responsibility in people’s pockets.

[ ... ]

To ask the question is, in large part, to answer it. Even if a Muslim wanted to, how would he assimilate with, say, Canadian national identity? You can’t assimilate with a nullity, which is what the modern multicultural state boils down to. It’s much easier to dismantle a society than to put anything new and lasting in its place. And across much of the developed world that’s what’s going on right now. Multiculturalism makes a nation no more than a holding pen.

Returning to Mme Power, we find a striking parallel to Europe’s newest barbarians, much as the socially dislocated culturally non-European confronts the decadent aborigine, the decay in society is at first unseen, later thought of as a ‘lifestyle’, and later still rationalized before the decent and decay that followed: life expectancies shortened, the pillaging continued, and what was left of the body of human knowledge had to be hidden away or survived inadvertently at what were Rome’s most remote outposts.

They cannot, Sidonius and his friends, ignore as Ausonius and his friends did, that something is happening to the empire. The men of the fifth century are concerned at these disasters and they console themselves, each according to his kind. There are some who think it cannot last. After all, they say, the empire has been in a tight place before and has always got out of it in the end and risen supreme over its enemies. Thus Sidonius himself, the very year after they sacked the city; Rome has endured as much before--there was Porsenna, there was Brennus, there was Hannibal.... Only that time Rome did not get over it. Others tried to use the disasters to castigate the sins of society. Thus Salvian of Marseilles who would no doubt have been called the gloomy dean if he had not been a bishop. For him all that the decadent Roman civilization needs is to copy some of the virtues of these fresh young barbarian people.

Not to peddle gloom or advertise for predestination, but the obstinacy of the present day folk we are talking about point directly to accommodation with vulgarity that will lead past their own morally acceptable limits, to be followed by an uncontrollable violence of some kind, and a punished population. All of it will be seen in reflection as unnecessary and a stain on humanity. Again.

La Baf's EU Election (Non-)Vote Sketch Shown on French TV

The La Baf sketch claiming it's useless to go vote in the June 7 elections for the European Union is shown on LCI (at 10:10)…

Proud to be on their Last Legs

The great well of Euro-culture always seems pre-occupied with kicking weak sectors of culture in the teeth if it fits their own individual adolescent obsessions about control and wresting control in their imaginary bugbears in society.

Lars von Trier's film was declared "the most misogynist movie from the self-proclaimed biggest director in the world" by an Ecumenical Jury which every year hands out a prize to a Cannes film that celebrates spiritual values.

With a message of tolerance and free speech, they accuse anyone airing a non-mainstream opinion of censorship, somehow.

Nonetheless, among these “cultural betters” at Cannes:

Critics gasped, jeered and hooted -- and at least four people fainted -- during a preview of the movie, one of 20 films competing for the Palme d'Or top award to be handed out

Apparently to the emptiest minds, this in itself makes it artful and worthy of consideration on that basis alone – that it would somehow offend their long-dead parents or make their kindergarten teacher squirm. It’s a sad display of their lack of depth, and their strange notion that anyone presenting an opinion that they dislike actually “censoring them.”

What is it that they’re rewarding? Thoughtlessness and a LACK of conscious intent of the part of “zee arteest.”

"Maybe von Trier doesn't either: in the press notes, he basically says as much, confessing scenes "were added for no reason. Images were composed free of logic or dramatic thinking," (though he does add "I am very happy about this film and the images in it. They come out of an inspiration that's real to me"

I no longer wonder what it is about “things added for no reason” cause him to thing something seems real to a subculture that can’t dislocate a message from willfully not knowing what one is saying. This by itself instantly makes someone forfeit any right they have to expect anyone else’s attention, especially those who think themselves aesthetes in the film sub-culture.

Stick a fork in them. They’re done.

¡ Но пасаран, Baby !

We are either stuck in their melons, or the thinly-veiled Iranian government propaganda operation is trying to employ the reflexes of the most gullible among the left to advance the cause of totalitarian illiberalism. The very sort who “don’t want you in their bedroom” eventually preferring Sharia.

The Iranian “Mehr News Agency” seems to have taken an interest in our editorial committee here at the HQ. If you don't know who they are, realize that they are an out-and-out propaganda outfit from the Islamic Republic of Iran that only a Spanish graduate student would believe is a genuine news operation. The irony being that they are so 4th rate that they have to navigate modernity using a Lebanese ISP. Nonetheless, we are to believe of the parent company, which is to say the regime, that this sort of outreach will light the world up to praise their brilliance and gentility:

Ahmadinejad told foreign reporters that if he is reelected president, he will invite Obama to a debate on the root causes of global problems.

He went on to say that he had invited former U.S. president George W. Bush to hold talks on global issues when he was in New York to address the 63rd session of the United Nations General Assembly on September 23, 2008.

The Iranian president also said all people and major powers should change their approach toward global issues because this is the only way to establish lasting world peace.

President Ahmadinejad also pointed out that there is no need for nuclear negotiations with Western countries, saying, ""Iran's nuclear issue is over, in our opinion.""

Where else, other than a population dumbed down by two decades of mental manipulation would a population believe that their leader, a social and economic nitwit, have “lessons about world peace” for the rest of the world. They must have learned this habit of “rayonnement” from the world’s greatest lesson-givers. But hey, no hard feelings, Mehr News noses! Lekhaim, baby!

Foot drain

It was just the other day when leading taxaholic Richard Murphy was rent-a-quoted as saying the following regarding the flight of individuals before facing taxation oblivion:

"Every time there is a threat to the rich that they will be taxed a little bit more, we have no evidence that they've actually left," Murphy said. "You are in the UK economy because it's a great place to make money. It's also quite a cool place to live."

The very same article chronicles a slate of firms already fleeing the taxman, thus refuting Murphy's thesis (never a difficult task). One wonders if incentives matter to the individual as well? Looks to be on their minds too:

Manchester United striker Cristiano Ronaldo - who earns a reputed £125,000-a-week - would face an increase of about £670,000 a year in his tax bill under the new rate of 50p in the pound.

Others who would be affected include Chelsea stars Frank Lampard, who earns £140,000 a week, his team-mate John Terry (£135,000), Liverpool's Steven Gerrard (£120,000) and Manchester United's Wayne Rooney (£115,000).

In Europe, although players are paid less than in the Premier League, their take-home pay is in some cases higher because of lower income tax rates. In Spain the top tax rate is only 25 per cent, in France it is 40 per cent, in Italy 43 per cent and in Germany it is 45 per cent.

You know you are in trouble when Germany's 45 per cent rate looks attractive. "No evidence" continues to mount.

Playing along for a moment

We all know that global warming is the most important only issue of consequence facing mankind which must be fixed immediately. Given this fact one assumes that all governments and all peoples will find any way to ensure that all solutions are implemented immediately. There are no considerations other than that of saving Gaia, immediately:

Most European Union member states indicated on Thursday they would support a European Commission plan to extend anti-dumping and anti-subsidy duties on imports of biodiesel from the United States, EU sources said.

The European Union's executive arm, which oversees trade policy for the 27-country bloc, submitted a proposal to impose "definitive", or permanent, tariffs of up to five years to member states at a meeting of the EU's anti-dumping committee.

So, does this mean that saving Gaia is not the most important consideration for some in the battle to save Gaia?

Lincoln, Reagan, and FDR all Marketably Rolled into One

Thanks pal, I realized Pinch needed a new marital aid, butthanks to this lameness, the world doesn’t respect
us anymore, they’re laughing at us. And this time it's real


It’s worse that the NYT selling O-dolitry rubbish for the politically slavish who can’t wait to follow blindly. For weeks now, ads for these Inaction figures have been making the rounds. Just like check-cashing places, loony preacher acts, and predatory lenders, they’re red-lining and preying on the week: I’m told they’re targeting well to do “blue” zip codes, like people being infected unwittingly to test a potent new drug that induces state interventionism.

NP PSA

As a public-service to NP readers as well as the entirety of the humanity, links to most any web browser you the user choose to download and use .... for free. There is no big brother standing over your shoulder insisting you must choose only their product (we leave that uni-directional approach to governmental types):

Mozilla Firefox
Apple Safari
Google Chrome
Opera
Maxthon
Flock

The cost of this post does not even come close to the 2bn siphoned from the productive class by the governmental class here in Bruxelles. The fun sleight of governmental hand being, as always, that consumers are the ones who have had the 2bn siphoned out of their wallets. Microsoft only writes the cheque to the EU, you are the one actually providing the funds.

Enjoy!

Maybe it's Krugman's Idea of Family Values

Makes you wonder, who’s really in the crowbar hotel here?

Jailed Islamic extremists want women prison officers banned from guarding them during Friday prayers - claiming it's against their human rights. Terrorists at Wakefield jail say having them there while they pray is an "insult to their religion".

The group at the West Yorks jail - led by convicted terrorist Kamel Bourgass who killed a cop during an anti-terrorism raid - told jail governor Jacqui Tilley of their anger.

Female and male prison guards oversee prayers from a glassed office.

Services are held in the prison's gym after the 60-strong group refused to pray in the jail's multi-faith chapel because it was used by "non-believers".

You can smell the cultural sensitivity and cooperative interchange, can’t you? To begin with, having seen all sorts of muslims immigrants improvise with all manner of properties, even disused churches, I don’t buy any of this “used by non-believers” crap. It’s just something for them to cause hostility over. You’re supposed to pray 5 times a day wherever you are. My mechanic does it, and apologizes un-necessarily for making me wait 3 minutes when he comes back from his storage room. Unlike these assho*es in the UK, he actually believes in something.

Were they to get prosecuted for crimes of the same magnitude among their “fellow believers” they would likely not be alive to whine like little girls crying over spilt pork. In fact they’re lucky they aren’t in Yemen of a time not that far back when capital punishment took the form of impalement.

They thought this civilized, because, as torturously painful as anything one could imagine, it became the strongest deterrent they could find. Would any of their lefty “civil liberty” supporters have understood that? Or would they just get all moist over using it on their own political opponents?

A Cultural Exception for an Exceptional Culture

This is how the young and vibrant Rock the Casbah:

A pensioner was killed by an urban joy-rider. Inhabitants of Saint-Cyr-l'Ecole are terrorized by the "friends" of a Murderer.

22/05/2009 - 12h00

SAINT-CYR L'ECOLE (NOVOpress) - Yvette, a retired 69 year old died from her injuries on Tuesday night at the Beaujon Hospital (Hauts-de-Seine). Tuesday afternoon, while walking down the sidewalk in Saint-Cyr-l'Ecole (Yvelines) this woman was struck by a motorcycle. Its’ driver, Youssof, was doing a wheelie on an unregistered motorcycle.

As part of the police investigation, several witnesses saw Youssof strike Yvette. Youssef was found to regularly do this type of urban rodeo. In 2006, he had struck and injured a child under the same circumstances. Youssof is also well known to the court for drug trafficking and for driving without a license. But a "support committee" was organized for Youssof ... "In the dense area of the city, the tension is rising a notch. Fear has gripped residents who dare not comment on the event for fear of reprisals," said Constant Julien in Le Parisien on 21 May.

Here’s that cultural exception that they’re always crowing about:

In this multicultural society, the French can die violently, but preferably in silence ...

Papered Over in the Middle of the Night

The “Anti-Zionist” party list posters reported here yesterday have been papered over with blanks, which makes me believe that since there is no counter-message and no public display of covering them over, that it was done by the municipality.



Nonetheless, the posters and the covering over of them are telling. Like people distracted and carried away with BDSM, it’s part of a general continental cultural inability to get past simple moral matters presented by history.

Another Bunch of Reason Why You can’t take them Seriously

To begin with, I can’t tell if these two women are running for office, or selling toothpaste. On the other hand, I realize that one of them is running on a platform of labeling foods that contain peanuts because her kid is allergic. Yup. That’s her platform. That’s it. MEP for three words: “May contains nuts.” In any civilized society, a polite letter to the company headquarters is sufficient.

Despite fitting right in to the Brussels scene, what with all of that serious agenda stuff, one wonders where that famous northern suicidal tendency went to. Basically, if this is why you have elected officials, then why bother. One can’t help but ask: Who is getting in the way of the labeling of packaged foods? For goodness’ sake, why are you wasting oxygen, lady? The other candidate we showcase, calls herself a ‘passionate centrist’, assuring a banal future dealing with Mrs. Peanut and all manner of empty platitudes.

Again, if these are the only things you can find out there that matter to run on, your doctor need to adjust your Lexapro. I don’t care how put together you think you are.

On the other side of this vacuity is Euro-casualness of this kind of thing: there are people in a small northern town of this sophisticated and complex culture, so full of depth and thoughtfulness, who scare off hapless refugees.

'Lynch mob' prompts refugees to flee town in northern Sweden

Nearly half of the predominantly Iraqi-refugees residing in Vännäs in northern Sweden have decided to permanently move out of the area after being terrorized by what police called “a lynch mob” in early May.

“I thought that Vännäs was the perfect place for us. And there are many, many friendly people here. But we still don’t dare to stay; I’m seriously concerned about my children’s safety,” said father of five Ismail Ramadan to the Svenska Dagbladet (SvD) newspaper.

Ramadan’s family and several others have decided to abandon plans of starting a life in the small community outside of Umeå less than two weeks after a group of 30 to 50 young people assembled outside the apartment building in which the refugees lived and began shouting threats and throwing stones.

The refugees appear to be making no attempts at being photogenic.

The Outward Signs of a Failed Society

They are one that quite clearly concludes to itself that a group of people may be hated and detested (using a code or pretext to defeat within the heart of the hater the last vestiges of humanism) – that they would be hated for their origin, religion, and belief. The other necessary leap is for the same lot to find a way to hate individual Jews or any other group at which this primitive tribal hatred is directed, not for what they do, but merely who they are.

Seen on the streets of Paris, playing on a recent series of public service announcements to reinforce the French population’s pride in their own nation and society, and recent MEP election compaign material:

In front of the Mairie in the 13th arrondissement.



« For a Europe liberated from censorship, affirmative action, financial speculators, and NATO . »
« The Anti-Zionist election list »

Much as I’ve heard the protest that by “Sioniste,” they do not mean all Jews, it’s entirely countervailed by everything the same sort of “anti-sioniste” does or says a minute later. I can’t even find a context in which those people themselves believe the rationalization.

Just like the 1330’s and the 1930’s myth-making and demonizing, Jews are the “money people” who employ others’ strife to cause wars, and they are the only reason an economy could possibly be in recession or go to war. It is nearly up to the level of the kind of theory-forming and hatefullness that you’d find in a 3rd world barrio.

The fact remains that Zionism’s real motives grew out of the actions of virtually the entire European population – it’s superstitions, its’ hatreds, its’ need to find a “genetic” enemy... In the centuries before the 2nd world war, and the years that followed, the obsession with cycles “ethnic cleansing” and repatriation found large population being “sent home” even if they were not born there. As much as they saw a home for the masses of people in DP camps, they wanted to send the Jews, another of many reminders of their inhumanity and hatefulness away – to “home”.

Seeing one opportunity in the history of their religion to do just that, Jews largely agreed – they wanted a place to go, to finally be free of the irrational accusations of “controlling money” as a group, or from the mass murders, forced relocations and pogroms. They wanted a fighting chance to live out their own lives. All of the circumstances that put them in that position were caused by Europeans.

Now in their uneducated, immoral, inhumane social torpor, entirely ignorant of the world, you find at best a strange fantasy of a bureaucratic nullity of a “magical combined land”, and at worst, open agreement that Israel and the Jews need to be effaced from the earth, even though the very thing they detest is the direct product of their own society’s making.

And it’s a society that appears to have not grown enough to genuinely understand what rights are with crowds “demand human rights” or any other cause place-holding for something in their empty lives. If there’s any disease that deserves the kind of “final solution” treatment they skirt around and incrementally try to bring into acceptable speech, it’s the mainstay of European society itself – the one whose past “elected” and unelected dictators, philosophies, movements and ideas, have killed hundreds of millions of people worldwide – from forcable colonization, fascism, socialism, communism, and so on. If humanity is to employ the logic behind what they tacitly hold for the Jews, it should apply to them with the same thoughtless discrimination.

Instead of the world feeding and securing them, and giving them the flattering, “whatever you say, pal,” false importance of being “global leaders” would they prefer that?

They Might Someday Stop Living the Myth

“Long Suffering Martyr” of the Loony Left Murdered by Long Suffering Martyrs of the Loony Left



... „ Benno Ohnesorg, murdered political victim ” ...
You got that right, for once.

I Pensively Remain on the Very Edge of my Seat

Yesterday one could not help but to meditate over the significance and consequences of Swedish Foreign Ministry’s condemnation Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons test (and further short-range missile display,) or the collective press releases of the rest of Europe’s standard reaction: to be sure, these wise words will be sure to change the course of events and bring the rogue opaque regime whose internecine struggles to come to book.

The truth of which is that it just raises the profile of another nuclear-capable weird Harold, and that the Europeans trotting out their WMD, the remote possibility of trade sanctions with a backwater they do little trade with to begin with, are really just raising the North Koreans’ profile, dignifying it while affirming their own impotence to do anything about it. In fact, to make declarations on the tides and turns in a dangerous environment knowing full well that nothing will come of it is largely about trying to raise THEIR profile to be taken seriously, even if they’re just proffering an opinion about a matter that a united ‘human rights and justice’ Europe will other do nothing about other than wring its’ hands over.

Indeed, just like the BBC, I waited with bated breathe in anticipation of the content of the emergency meeting of the UN Security Council. Would they use the word “condemn” or simply express “concern”? Would they go the extra mile and show “deep concern,” knowing of the severe mortal risk that as bold a statement as that would entail? To be sure, they will “speak up, even if their voice shakes!”

It’s altogether too frightening to open the European newspapers in a week or two to find out. Meanwhile, back in the “I’ve been asleep for a decade department”, BBC rings in affirming the efficacy of the “global community”

Laura Trevelyan, UN correspondent

The question is what kind of sanctions against North Korea can be agreed and whether they will be effective in getting this unpredictable nation to rejoin talks on dismantling its nuclear programme.

Existing measures could be expanded - like the financial sanctions against North Korean companies involved in the nuclear programme.

Western diplomats will be watching closely to see whether China will back tough sanctions. China has been reluctant to back measures which it believes could destabilise its erratic neighbour.

Indeed, they will be just watching, as they have many times before.

Do Not Go Vote in the EU Elections

Parce que voter ça craint !
Et que nous avons tous mieux à faire ce jour là !
Ne Votez pas !

Ne votez pas aux élections européennes de 2009
Uploaded by Labaf. - Sitcom, sketch, and standup comedy videos.

La Baf claims it's useless to go vote in the June 7 elections for the European Union…

Update: La Baf's sketch has not only appeared on French TV, but also on the home page of L'Express…

Really, There’s no Pattern There at All

Tales from the crypt Coo-Coo clock: a group of adult men come out of their mosque to attack a group of 15 year olds.

"Dirty Whites! Have you no shame?" Insulted, derided, and even pushed, photographed using mobile phones, fifteen students of the Ecole de Commerce André-Chavanne had been attacked by a group of men who came out of the Mosque of the Grand Saconnex. Their crime? They kept running at the athletic track of their school "during the hours of prayer."

Of course the action was condemned – as bad for their image, while in another corner of the land of glee, the sport of that religion of peace continues. Jihad is after all, about the “inner struggle” – to suggest anything else would be bad for their image:

Yesterday's sectarian clashes were brought about by an argument between the relative of a Coptic girl who was sexually harassed by a Muslim youth, and was on a small scale. Unfortunately, Muslim fanatics in the area propagated a rumour that during the melee, the Copts hurled stones towards the Mosque. As a result thousands of Muslims gathered and attacked the Copts living in the area, and destroyed 6 shops including a pharmacy, a supermarket and some vehicles.

Dr.Gibraeel demanded from the Interior Minister Habib Al Adly to intervene to put an end to this practice of torture.

and here we all thought that they didn’t torture, giving them that magical ‘moral legitimacy’ to call Gitmo a sort of Auschwitz and Stalingrad all rolled into one. As an aside, have you ever wondered why it’s so hard to find a better example on any other continent?

The incident, which took place on Wednesday, May 13, 2009,in the area of Saft El-Labn, Giza, resulted in the injury of 14 people from both sides. The police arrested 20 Copts, including 6 women, and 7 Muslims, and security imposed a curfew on the region.

Among the Copts randomly rounded up by the police is 29-year-old Sabry Shaker, a physically handicapped man suffering from infantile paralysis.

Seriously! Look out for THAT GUY!

Alas, we clueless stump-toothed Americans have so much to learn, don’t we? Especially when it comes to the kind of thing found in your hometown paper’s “variety” section, right under the church bazaars, the pie eating contest story, and the high school basketball scores:

Since the beginning of the year, the economic crisis and the various social movements have prompted a wave of protests in the capital. The prefecture of police of Paris had been a marked increase in the number of demonstrators (+ 80.6%) of the first four months of this year compared to last year, at these gatherings.

At the same time, the number of police injured during these events has increased significantly (+ 411%). "All the protesters are obviously not the thugs or do not come to do battle with the police, said a source close to the prefecture. There are employees, the unemployed, students or researchers who are mobilizing to advance their status or defend their gains. This is not questioned.

of course they obviously aren’t thugs, they just came to brain cops, is all.

Some protests are increasingly violent. "We found the presence almost instantly at some events, an organized evil of radical elements who come only to confront the police, argues Alain Gibelin, Assistant Director of DOPC. These are mainly people from the ranks of the ultra-left. In recent weeks, even in groups of Tamils in the capital, we noted the presence of elements belonging to this trend. They are highly mobile and well-organized. They also infiltrate the student demonstrations. "

NOT thugs, I repeat. NOT thugs. None of them. I mean, aren’t “we all Tamil Tigers now”?

What’s almost as predictable as a toy with a pull ring in its’ back is the retorts used when this kind of thing is reported:

Radical extreme left elements or cops in disguised to inflame the situation and cause the early incidents .. to enable their colleagues to unwind after long hours spent in the police car to play cards. As shown in duck fade, there is little time, with photographic evidence to prove their accusations!

As if there was some genuine reason that the riot cops, the steadiest work in the country, would want to basically act as the imaginary intellectual foil of every self-important Parisian wanker punk. I swear: decade after decade, it never changes.

Funny thing about exactly where it was that that “seething Arab street” the left kept telling impressionable, polite, westerners not to enflame – where it turned out to really be.

Steyn asks: Whither EUtopia?

Realistically speaking (because you know how Europeans value social pragmatism over morality): who cares. Your culture can’t compete with barbarians who idolize loitering and beheading people in a Wadi in the 8th century desert.

The joke about Mandatory Palestine was that it was the twice-promised land. But isn’t that Europe, too? And perhaps Russia and maybe Canada, a little ways down the line? Two cultures jostling within the same piece of real estate. Not long ago, I found myself watching the video of another “pro-Palestinian” protest in central London with the Metropolitan Police retreating up St. James’s Street to Piccadilly in the face of a mob hurling traffic cones and jeering, “Run, run, you cowards!” and “Allahu akbar!” You would think the deluded multi-culti progressives would understand: In the end, this isn’t about Gaza, this isn’t about the Middle East; it’s about them. It may be some consolation to an ever-lonelier Israel that, in one of history’s bleaker jests, in the coming Europe the Europeans will be the new Jews.

And history will teach them that ones’ opinions don’t count for very much of a shield, just as one of my slower Arab relatives who upon hearing any German sounding name instinctively mutters “jew” under their breathe.

Good luck with all that.