And Just How Many WAS it That it Took to Pull off a Beer-Hall Putsch? Hm?

1.3% of the general population in France supporting an Anti “Zionist” list is still rather sick. That means that 1 in 76 adults is looking for vengeance against a class of people to salve their empty little lives. In Europe, what that has always meant traditionally, is that you are the “political type”.

Still Healing their Inner Pétain

Al Jazeera sur Seine runs the story of an unemployed man who’s arrested for driving without a license in a distant suburb of Ba-reez, mostly because he’s so afraid of his neighbors that he doesn’t want to walk the streets.

They filed it under “Africa”.

Oddly enough, even though the man was not in the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, they also deigned to call what the man went through as torture.

Prognosticus

What a difficult day it must be for the left across Europe. How many more stars and planets, in their own fevered minds, must be aligned in order to strike the decisive blow against free markets? PES boss Martin Schulz sums it up:

However the Socialists expressed deep disappointment. Martin Schulz, head of the socialist group, said it was a "very bitter evening" for the party and that they "had hoped for a better result."

Ahead of the vote, the Socialists had been trying to position the centre-right as possessing a failed ideology that led to the economic crisis. They had been hoping for around 200 seats.

It seems as though only yesterday the pan-left's hopes and dreams where that of anger and outrage to be directed at financial bosses with attendant benefits to be harvested by evermore clamoring from the electorate for a hyper-increased role for government:

Police are preparing for a "summer of rage" as victims of the economic downturn take to the streets to demonstrate against financial institutions, the Guardian has learned.

As predicted on these pages, right idea - wrong target:

If the reporting is correct the police may be right in theory but wrong in practice. The riots/demonstrations to-date in Europe have been directed at government and the governmental failure to properly address the economic situation. If/when the "summer of rage" pops off it will be directed at government and the collective failure of leadership across the board.

Exhibit A.

Update: Looks like early views from the left should leave the more rational and logical among us with even more satisfaction, they just do not get it. The fears listed in this post are the end result of governmental policies and actions. The left has a true and chronic problem which goes to the core of their faith, the claim that more governmentalism will cure (insert topic here). Voters see through this ruse and know it for the sham it is. An acknowledgement by the left that more government is not the answer is simply heresy amongst the faithful. Again, good news for the rational and logical among us.

Time to gin up the "quick wins" and "good news stories"

Anyone who has spent time basking in the dull luminance of the "brilliant" types attracted to governmental work will not be surprised by the following prognostication hitting the skids:

The White House says America's employment picture is worse than the Obama administration had anticipated just a few months ago. The somber admission follows the latest jobless report showing the highest unemployment rate the United States has seen in more than 25 years.

These are the very same now proclaiming rosy economic corners being turned in late 2009, early 2010? Being set to control inflation in short order should it debut? Sure...

And to Think the EU Believes Itself a Wellspring of Humanism

It takes a lot of ignorance about the world, and about human nature – to be held in high regard in Europe.



Remember Mister Wong is your servant! And since many of the French imagine that all Asians admire their culture, it really isn’t culturally condescending in the least... After all, look at all those tourists!

Those EP Elections

No doubt an interesting shake-up will be taking place across the EU installing a different sort of parliament in Bruxelles. One can listen on-line to marathon results from Iain Dale and/or check out the EP's official results site:

Words to be on the look-out for

With today rounding out the elections for the European Parliament, a few words to be on the look-out for from both turfed out/failed candidates as well as the media:

- fear
- extremists
- far-right
- concerned

Strange things happen when individual citizens are actually given a say in the process via the ballot.

Caring and Cuddly and all that

Government: not “clever enough” to run your own life

A mother is taking her fight to the European Court of Human Rights after she was forbidden from seeing her three-year-old daughter because she is not “clever enough” to look after her.


The woman, who for legal reasons can be identified only by her first name, Rachel, has been told by a family court that her daughter will be placed with adoptive parents within the next three months, and she will then be barred from further contact.

The adoption is going ahead despite the declaration by a psychiatrist that Rachel, 24, has no learning difficulties and “good literacy and numeracy and [that] her general intellectual abilities appear to be within the normal range”.

Her daughter, K, was born prematurely and officials felt Rachel lacked the intelligence to cope with her complex medical needs Baby K was released from hospital into care and is currently with a foster family. Her health has now improved to the point where she needs little or no day-to-day medical care.

The Ingénue

Culturally speaking it is rather hard to top the music video produced by the Beastie Boys for the song "Sabotage". Lily Allen comes closer than anyone since with "Not Fair":



Brills...

As Lily is a staunch supporter of the Labour party, the song could be considered a metaphorical "Ode to Gordon" from the electorate.

Many Men Will Count the Hours…

The story of D-Day.

A Very Continental Brain-death

When you see a Dieudonné, or an Alain Soral, or anyone else admored by the delusional as a rising ”public intellectual” in Europe, do you really know what motivates them?

Volume, volume, volume!

They get off on thinking that they shock, but want to be considered brave. Or thoughtful. Or a signpost of the future. On the last part, they’re probably right, because in as stagnant and isolated a culture as the one they live in, what will be has always been. The cake of soap ask us to behold the mysterious intellectual suicide of Alain Soral

Perosnally I don’t think it’s a mystery. He’s a under-the-radar-Marxist totalitarian who backs any dangerous and violent fad, pretends he’s some kind of muscular white Green Hornet type, but plays the victim whenever his attention-starved ego requires it. He’s even pretended to be beaten up, faking an assault on himself (somehow). As for his publicity hound butt-buddy:

In this epic moment occurs around Dieudonné, if, if you remember, the very man who once excited blacks everywhere he could that France did not repent for its’ crimes during slavery. An act that today extends his audience by getting him on his pet peeves anti-Zionist and pro-Palestinian, in the name of "anti-communatarianism." It’s lame, but it's basic electoral arithmetic. Le bon Dieudo, has gotten in so deep with the morons, that he can argue that our ministers are nothing less than Mossad agents.

You're wrong Dieudo. These are in fact agents of alien powers who are spreading their inter-galactic conflict.

That’s it. That’s the height of their arguments, and yet they want to guide the future of 60 million well softened-up minds.



The Future according to these loons

Of one of the other « Liste Anti-Hebe » people:

According to Yahia Gouasmi, (and I quote), "Zionism is in the process of educating your children. You have to put more control over your children. It is currently directing at its’ will whatever they want , wherever they want it, even how one must vote. Zionism divides the home. Behind every divorce, I tell you, there is a Zionist behind it. Behind every thing that divides man, there a Zionism. This is what we believe. And we will demonstrate. For us, Zionism is evil. "

There you have it. That just about explains everything. Even meteor showers, bad weather, and Herpes. You are not responsible for your failed marriage, it was the miracle them, the same miracle “them” that have been the pin-cushion of Europe’s stupid, yet “educated” mass for centuries.

Many Men Will Count the Hours…

…as they live the Longest Day…

La Baf's Anti-EU Sketch on the Home Page of L'Express

The La Baf sketch claiming it's useless to go vote in the June 7 elections for the European Union is on the home page of lexpress.fr…

"Chateaubriand or nothing" said Hugo. Obviously the Current Powers Chose Nothing.

In a desperate and futile bid to be relevant, we find the likes of Dominique de Villepin saying on one hand that “Europe is the future of the world” (for no clear reason,) but that it is inadequate as a system. Nonetheless he says the only trying one is permitted to say these ddays, that the only solution to that problem is “more Europe,” whatever that’s supposed to mean.

It’s an injunction I’ve always found rather amusing, since there is a general refusal to broach the subject of WHAT that Europe, which more of is the only answer given to a statement of rumination over what governance should look like, what an individuals’ right are.

About all of which, Jean-Gilles Malliarakis writes:

Until then everything is fine. It would have liked it to stop there. For the rest of the text [de Villepin’s article] falls into storms and delirium.

Going on point attention to a huge ‘Eurocracy’ and the opacity not only of the institutional workings but the “don’t worry, be happy” notion that the constitution will just work itself out without much public scrutiny. One wonders what “more of that” is meant to solve, or whether it CAN solve anything.

"A good constitution is the work of time." Against those who scoff at the opacity, impotence, or the servility of the parliament in Strasbourg emphasize that during the last legislative term 2004-2009, it has endorsed 71% of draft guidelines of the Committee Brussels accepted by the Council of Heads of State and Government. He is currently the only obstacle to extending the dull Barroso. Of course, it could do better, but others are far worse.

The outlook for the article signed by M. de Villepin to be grandiose. Believing that the world of tomorrow will be crushed by what he calls the "dream, a duopoly Sino-American economic where the workshop of the world super-investor would agree with the hyper-consumer debt across the Atlantic." Because, "he says, the" silence of the [Europe] also encourages the logic blocks, as with Russia to restore its former sphere of influence. " Etc. etc..

In this way, as a good fan of the conquered Leipzig and Waterloo, he sees a dream Europe, completely expanded, including Russia, Turkey, of course, and even North Africa. Note that, of course, the former French North Africa seems to form a cohesive whole, from Tunis to Casablanca "as we said back in 1957. That is how he describes it: "Without prejudging the outcome of negotiations for accession, Turkey would have to join, as well as Russia and countries of the Maghreb, this pan-European alliance enlarged profits policies could be shared without leading to political integration, reserved for hard core that would remain the Union. "

Sounding like little more than treating these participant states as colonial investment outposts, one wonders what makes a man megalomaniacal enough to believe that this kind of cartel arrangement is to evolve into some kind of great light of the future to inspire the world – while all the same being to shy to indicate that it has any beliefs in anything to promote.

We are thus in the presence of a Franco-centric feature: Mr. de Villepin think Russia or North Africa from Paris, without taking into account the views of interested parties. Without doubt the son of a diplomat, "he says love alone. In 1943, Mussolini was planning to expand in Europe to Egypt. Decently, Villepin could not do less. Noblesse oblige, as they say in Galouzeau

He goes on to observe a number of things that the argument of the Social Model is often employed when there is a pregnant pause, and an elite politician having long since thought he or she has already purchased the public’s trust, and can’t seem to find anything else to say. So true. The lack of relevance seems to disturb dear Ovid, in that the European elections are amounting to a platform for people to shout-out about their special interests, as we’ve seen with our soup chicken from Sweden trying her hand at transnational politics, who is standing astride the world shouting “you got peanut butter in my chocolate!”, and otherwise elevating “the grand project” to a level of pointlessness, but one which represents the limits of seriousness that the population can tolerate: Nut additives are one thing, but genuine constitutional rights (not just a list of financial entitlements) are another, too painful a thing to discuss for fear of disagreement.

Which misses the point precisely: representative government’s purpose is to resolve differences amicably, to suppress or avoid the appearance of disagreement over difficult matters. “More Europe” is beginning to look in effect like a call for more Vicodin.

More News of Stellar Treatment from France's Health Care System

Today I had an interesting conversation with a French doctor who is now a director of a retirement home. Two people died on the same day this week, one of whom had donated his body to science, the other who insisted on being buried in a traditional tomb. At the very last minute, she says, she worried (about her not-so-smart employees), decided to double-check, and saw that the bodies had been switched and were headed for the wrong destinations.

• Everyday Meetings with Common Europeans

Not a big deal (except if the surviving members of the traditional-minded man had had the coffin opened at the last moment), and, to tell the truth, rather funny…

More to the point: While visiting her husband's parents' home in the French countryside several years ago (before the introduction of the Euro and of cel phones), the husband fell through a window pane (he was building a tree house for the kids) and cut his leg open to the bone.

Immediately they jumped (well, she did; he seems to have been a bit slower) into the car and drove to the hospital. Upon arriving at the emergency room, bleeding and with his bone visible, he was whisked in front of everybody.

So far, so good. The woman then asked to use the phone to tell the parents that all would be well. Do you have any francs, she was asked. No, came the (edgy) answer, with her husband's leg open and bleeding profusely, the doctor had not really thought of taking her handbag with her. Her demand for permission to (briefly) use the hospital phone was denied! And so, she says, she had to go around the waiting room begging for money to use the pay phone.

The nurse also demanded to see… her husband's social security card. Somewhat edgily (again), the woman replied that she hadn't really had the time either to think of taking the social security card with them when they had to rush to the hospital and that — for all that she knew — they (the couple) had left them in Paris. That's when the nurses started making derogatory remarks about Parigots (slang for Parisians) and how they ought to stay home and not come out and bother people en province…

But: apart from that, everybody always receives stellar treatment (five stars, I tell you) in Europe's health care…

But then their own Idolatry Failed Them

On the eve of his whirlwind trip to the Middle East and Europe, President Barack Obama gave exclusive interviews to two European television broadcasters: Britain’s BBC and France’s iTELE.

The choice of the BBC is self-explanatory. But iTELE? Why not France Télévisions, the publicly funded French equivalent of the BBC? Or the privately owned TF1, France’s longtime market leader in prime-time news broadcasting?

Elsewhere, John Rosenthal turns his eye to the shallow stupidity of the French press, and a near-failure digital-only startup called i>tété (a digital-terrestrial news outfit whose website tends to crash rather too often,) and the fact that they managed to land an interview with the US president. How do you swing that when you only have a 0,8% share of a small and isolated media market? Play to the king’s whores. The obvious reason I>tété landed the interview was due to the sobbing Bush hater who conducted it.

Perhaps it has something to do with the interviewer, iTELE’s White House correspondent Laurence Haïm (that’s Laurence Haïm, not Laura Haïm, as Jeff Zeleny of the ever linguistically challenged New York Times calls her). For if French journalists in general have abandoned any pretense to objectivity while reporting on American politics in recent years — as has been extensively documented on blogs like No Pasarán or my Transatlantic Intelligencer — Laurence Haïm’s preferences are even more transparent than most.

[ ... ]

“You can, I think, see the fanaticism of these people here,” Haïm says, referring to the merrily celebrating Bush supporters behind her. “You see the screen, you see the Fox News channel, you see the American flag, you see these people. George W. Bush is going, then, to become president again for four years.” And then, after remarking on her mounting emotions, she repeats the phrase punctuated by convulsive sobs.

Also worth noting in the “land of great global wisdom” where Haïm hails from, that in trying to “cheekily” use English in her blog’s subtitle, that she unselfconsciously mimics the complete incongruity of a Engrish. Nonsensically subtitled “The Blog Made in Obama,” she no doubt thinks herself brilliant and wired in to the world, when in reality the preoccupation of nearly the whole of the news media subculture is with the the Arab world, the US, but primarily the attitude of the domestic commentary about their own relationship with US and Arab cultures. It is a far more isolate global outlook than you find in the American and British press, but one dare not mention it for fear of besmirching the public’s dignity.

As for the president himself, he seems to find anything polite he can to play along with Haïm’s vapidity.

“What do you love about France, if I may ask?”
“Well, let’s see … we’ve got the food, we’ve got Paris, we’ve got the south of France, Provence, the wine.”
Elsewhere, on the topic of relations with the “Muslim world,” Ms. Haïm reminds the president that during the electoral campaign he had told her that he wanted to convene a “Muslim summit.” The idea will undoubtedly be of interest to the Organization of the Islamic Conference, whose 57 member states already convene every three years in an “Islamic summit.”
Ms. Haïm does, however, manage to ask at least one seemingly tough question.
“Do you speak French?”
“My French is terrible.”

So instead of asking him any real questions, Haïm is just doing the French thing and looking for ways in which anyone significant, and the rest of the world, can somehow honor them merely for being who they are – scrath the surface and there it is, the ultimate form of identity politics: a delusional nationalism offered at the expense of asking any sort of real questions in the kind of interview that could make or break a talking-head’s career.

Yes We Can! America Can Get Health Care Like They Enjoy It in Canada and Europe

Want to know exactly what's at stake when it comes to health care debate in Washington, D.C?

Shona TV Spot - "Survived" - kewego
TV spot from Patients United Now highlighting Shona's Story.

No doubt they will be Unquestionably Called “Fine Words”

Obama’s speech in Cairo will be declared an uncritical success. The only way that the press would find the awkward message a failure is by merely reporting it without much commentary. That’s just the way they are with the left. BBC filleted if for the tips that they prefer, and to be sure Al-Jazeera will do the same, but one thing they will never ever say is the obvious: it will be a flop with the potential audiences that matter.

To begin with, it will appeal greatly to the same passive mass in the Arab and Muslim world that tacitly oppose Jihad, but don’t say so. There is no evidence to suggest that they will treat this clumsy sort of “community outreach” the same way.

In spite of the fact that the Iranian leadership released a vengeful statement to undercut any potential rise in America’s popularity in Iran, they do that with a lot of things. To the BBC though, a press release like that is news that fits the bill and the editorial line – the construction of Obama as the brave and serious statesman that he really isn’t. To be sure, he isn’t a bad manager, but the passion held for him is growing to be limited the strange lionizing images in caps and t-shirts being sold by street vendors.

Now that their favorite American is actually presenting himself to the larger world, there might be shreds here and there of content to satisfy the hype created by the world press, and they have no choice but to run with it, else they prove their biased reporting biased. This maljournalisme, they must do to sustain their credibility with an audience whom they promised so much.

Otherwise there are still fragments of a vulgar narrative to be found in his speech, fragments of the scattered previous “international statements” which did more to confirm though apology the years of specious over-the-top howlings that the United States, which is not a religion, was somehow waging war with a religion, even though those targeting American civilians at every opportunity were fighting a religious war with the rest of humanity.

The tone of the reconciliatory message Barack Obama is trying to transmit to the proponent will look like little more than pandering, because unlike the message George Bush repeated as a proponent of human rights (one which the press in their own “humanism” tried to undercut at the expense of humanity,) it’s hard to tell if Obama, trapped in a complex of his own electors, would do anything for human rights beyond symbolism, maintaining appearances, and writing the occasional check. Obama’s entire administration is taking forever to form itself seriously and one wonders if it capable of strategic thinking at all.

Oddly enough, it doesn’t take long to find that the talking heads and the press worldwide find that their egos and ids simply love an incapacitated and ineffectual White House that can do little more than purvey an image that pleases them. The very reason it didn’t take long for them to go from passive-aggressive but vivid irrational haters of America to be in near permanent thrall of Obama is that it was a very short intellectual leap. They finally got the globally incapable (read: stupid, naïve, with a narrow political view) president they accuse us of having so long as it’s not a leftist, and they need to promote him as fast as they can dance to try and keep him there.

So a forgettable and awkward speech full of pandering to a imagined frame of culture has to be raised in profile, just as his roundabout apologies confirm to an mendacious accusatory terror-supporting subculture their world view. To our own rather silent tacitly terror-supporting subculture in the cultural elite and the press, this must be to confirm their delusions about America, and try to fix for them a place of influence in the world. The best that we can hope for is that those collaborationists to the lefty elite in our own society are undermined by hearing what they want to, permitting the White House in future to at least do something effectual.

Malicious Foe Confronts an Ignorant Victim

Employing “tolerance” as a subtext on an authority structure and population not intimately familiar with what the bounds of rights really are in a tolerant society, we find a great many sad struggles, a tugging and pulling among individuals in the face of an intellectual environment not equipped or sophisticated enough to manage it. From the Netherlands as an example we find an elbowing out of a population by visitors who appear to come from another century using the tools of a modern society that intends to structure legal fairness as a hammer, and a majority giving up on its’ tenets to buy a little peace:

Chris Ripke is a well-known artist in the city. His studio is near a mosque in Insuindestraat. Shocked in 2004 by the murder of director Theo Van Gogh by an Dutch Islamist, Chris decided to paint an angel on wall of his studio and the biblical commandment "Gij zult niet doden," thou shalt not kill. His neighbors at the mosque found the words "offensive," and called the mayor of Rotterdam at the time, the liberal Ivo Opstelten. The mayor ordered the police to erase the painting, because it was "racist." Wim Nottroth, a television journalist, camped out on the spot in protest.

Though the title would seem overreaching in an article entitled “Eurabia Has A Capital: Rotterdam”, there are among the portraits being painted in it some telling signs that the native western Europeans are being put upon directly, and in a way that skirts the limits of what they will permit without signaling to themselves a need to act.

The fact that Eurabia has arrived in Rotterdam has been demonstrated by an episode in April at the Zuidplein Theatre, one of the most prestigious in the city, a modernist theater proud of "representing the cultural diversity of Rotterdam." It is located in the southern part of the city, and receives funding from the municipality, headed by a Muslim, the son of the imam Ahmed Aboutaleb. Three weeks ago, the Zuidplein Theatre allowed an entire balcony to be reserved for women only, in the name of sharia. This is not happening in Pakistan or in Saudi Arabia, but in the city from which the Founding Fathers set out for the United States. It was from here that the Puritans disembarked in the Speedwell, which they later exchanged for the Mayflower. This is where the American adventure began. Today, it has legalized sharia.

For a performance by the Muslim Salaheddine Benchikhi, the Zuidplein Theatre agreed to his request to have the first five rows set aside for women only. Salaheddine, an editorialist for the website Morokko.nl, is known for his opposition to the integration of Muslims. The city council has approved this: "According to our Western values, the freedom to live one's own life by virtue of one's convictions is a precious possession." A spokesman for the theater has also defended the director: "It is hard to get Muslims to come to the theater, so we are willing to adapt."

Never mind that this isn’t diversity, it’s a minority monoculture trying to subsume it’s accommodating neighbors for the purpose a the very least of the pride of imagined conquest, and at the sharp end, a real conquest.

Lost on the writer even, is the same of the chap interviewed, and the inherent aggression embedded in it. The editor of Morokko.nl is name is Salaheddine, which is not a conventional given name of any sort, and not likely his real name at all. In proper Arabic it’s pronounced Solh-ed-deine or Duke Solh (with a hard H). In it’s anglicized form, it’s Saladin, the Muslim general who drove the Crusade era Christian Kingdom of Jerusalem, and the Frankish knights in particular. Moroccan or not, the naming of oneself after an 11th century muslim general displays its’ own lack of depth on another level: Saladin was a Kurd who “united” a large part of what is what is now the Arab by subsuming it in war, himself a cultural outsider. I’m sure to those who would recall him today, that it’s only results that matter – well, SOME selectively drawn results that matter.

In short, it’s a nom de guerre that even the article’s author shows overlooked, but doesn’t miss this point: what we are looking at is the uninspired sectarian warfare of the malicious and ignorant, something common to the developing world, the 3rd world, and those suspended in the lawlessness of war-zones. The broadly and deeply developed level of European social science is absent, having struck the immutability of a culture that while a lot less comfortable and welcoming, is readily accessible to the simplest minds and to the emotionally bereft.

And as is quite common in the case of France par example, the most politically involved don’t call themselves French, and discuss “muslim rule” in the millennium-old sense of a culture defeating and annexing another. Here they are thinking in terms of the ‘takeover’ of open society, not serious involvement IN it or with it. One can only imagine what they will want to do with the French of Vietnamese and Chinese origin who are themselves rather aware as a group of what oppression smells like.

Paging Captain Headwound

Rhetoric met reality, and the rhetoric that so many people claim as their political raison d’etre lost.

Germany in particular reckons that all additional environmental legislation should be put on ice until economic conditions return to normal, according to one senior diplomatic source.

The REACH regulation on chemicals and the extension of carbon dioxide emission limits to light duty vehicles in the automotive sector were both cited as areas where industry will be offered special treatment.

The aim is to soften the impact of Europe's strict environmental rules as industries fight their way through the economic recession.

Which is amusing given that greenies, pretending to be experts and experienced in any field of endeavor for which they present an opinion, try to convince one that ‘greening up’ will not just come at little or no additional cost, but somehow be more productive that the ‘old, lazy, dirty’ ways of doing and producing things. M’kay. Whatever you say there, Sparky. It sort of reminds me of the recent ‘initiatives’ to insulate ‘in the name of Climate Change’, even if the drive to insulate buildings now puts them 30+ years behind the United States.

The international dimension

Building efficiency has also been the topic of high-level discussions in international fora, particularly in connection with climate change. The 4th Assessment Report of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) of 4 May states that "Energy efficiency options for new and existing buildings could considerably reduce CO2 emissions with net economic benefit."

Losers. Virtually every word uttered out of the mouths of the politically involved is a saled job and an evasion, even over “international conferences” whose only conclusions are things that were done out of simple common sense decades ago. They are at the point where they need a Global Warning angle just to get out of bed in the morning, let alone insulate a house.