Utopianism and its’ Limits

With a history of extremist utopianism, European elites once again might be dreaming their populations into social failure again. Take for example the fetish for redrawing maps, exemplified by the bleatings of one who assumed that not just people, but whole nations can be bullied into conforming to some new model way of being:

Alfred Heineken did more than just brew beer. He also thought about things, like the future of Europe and how best to proceed.

"I propose a United Europe of 75 states," he wrote in a pamphlet published in the summer of 1992, "each with a population of five to 10 million inhabitants."

Heineken, a creative old man with a lot of time and money on his hands, was famous for having wacky ideas. And the one about Europe was quickly forgotten.

Alas. Because 20 years later, it is more relevant than ever.

Why all this you ask? It seems to be solely driven by a desire to rule the world, despite a distinct lack of interest in actually policing any dysfunctional part of it on an as-needed basis. Otherwise, it somehow goes all the way back to the 19th century need to buy off ugly mobs with bread and circuses instead of offering them the right to create their own opportunity and healthy civil society:

Everything which has a function, one could argue, has an optimal size. A pen can be bigger or smaller, you still need to be able to use it.

The European welfare state has multiple functions. It needs to protect its territory from outside, uphold the rule of law, provide healthcare, education, take care of the roads and the forests and - to a more or lesser degree - distribute wealth.

After all, an elite governing a bankrupted mass, emasculated by taxation and grand projets can still be loved for giving away whatever is left that they can find, can they not?

In an age where technology can either make people as independent as ever before, or as servile as ever before, they choose the class warfare racket to be their oriflamme, and the vessel of their hopes.

Goodbye, Friend

Robert Studley Forrest Hughes, 1938-2012

Tennessee Tree House: Living, and Preaching, in an Appalachian Tree Cathedral

David Walter Banks has some remarkable pictures from Tennessee, where Horace Burgess has spent twenty years of his life building an enormous tree house that doubles as a… cathedral. In fact,

The tree house includes seven trees, including one of the massive oaks that are common in this region of Tennessee. Crossville is in the foothills of the Appalachians. The forest has been beautifully preserved.

Horace recovers all kinds of boards on construction sites. Rather than see them destined for destruction, he retrieves the pieces of wood and adds them to the building.

Sunday, Horace preaches before visitors. … Horace Burgess had lived a life of wandering after his return from Vietnam. One day he "met" God. A "born again" Christian, he has devoted his tree house to Jesus.

Visitors can leave the tree house and truthfully
say that while at the top, "they saw Jesus"

Non Sequitur Cartoon: The Department of Economic Management

Learn the Word, Bro

The Atlanticist reminds your correspondent that CFO jobs don’t grow on trees. So morally repugnant Chic-Fil-A motorist and bullier of the 99% Adam Smith should probably learn the following phrase, now that he’s been fired from medical supplies manufacturer Vante:

“Do you want fries with that?”

The Leftist Way: Making the Useful Unwashed Believe Non-Existent Economics Facts

My clients are diminished by me having a gov contract?! Now you’re making shit up @nopasa @richlowrie @LilMissRightie #p2 #tcot #left #right

I received a curious tweet out of the blue, from someone looking very much like a funded political operator very-much mis-stating his identity. It begins with a name which is supposed to look banal and “non-partisan” in nature, and links a blog that looks too well produced not to have been put together by a paid political operation, obfuscating for a phony argument that President Obama has been good for the economy at large.

But a close look at the web page is a encylopedia example of passive-aggressive politicval demagoguery masking itself as a “mild” news-opinion site, promoted by someone who purports to be involved in business. There is nothing other than a bizzare defense of the Kony donation exploitation sham, Sandra Fluke’s stunt, and an attempt to compare Mitt Romney (who is not the President) to Vadimir Putin.

The type of business this light and authority on the workings of business and the economy is not stated.

When I tried to engage him in a conversation about productive businesses and the effect of aggressive regulation, he then went on to tell be something about having a US government contract in an attempt to silence the question. It assumes that business is business in any regulatory environment, and that all should be well is we all had tons of government contracts. As if.

If anything about his stated identity is true, the Solicitation number and possibly even his SF 330 should be a matter of public record. So far, he’s reinforced the fact that the “outreach” is Democrat political sham by not saying anything that makes any sense.

“Left Slash Right” is a propaganda operation run by a liar.

Le Débat sur France 24: Mitt Romney a-t'il commis des gaffes ou non ?

While a heated debate on Mitt Romney's alleged gaffes was taking place on the English-language set of the France 24 news channel, a similar one was taking place on the French set of Le Débat (partie 1 et partie 2 / partie 1 sur YouTube et partie 2 sur YouTube):

Tournée diplomatique de Mitt Romney : à la recherche d'une stature internationale

Débat consacré à la tournée internationale de Mitt Romney : Royaume-Uni, Israël, Pologne.... Le candidat républicain à la Maison Blanche veut montrer qu'il a l'étoffe d'un homme d'État. A-t-il remporté son pari ou a-t-il perdu des points dans la course à la présidentielle ? Quelle vision du monde pour le républicain ? Quel impact sur l'élection présidentielle de novembre ?

Émission préparée par Pauline Heilmann, Camille Febvrier et Anthony Saint-Léger.

Nos invités :

• Ellen WASYLINA, Membre de "Republicans Abroad"
• Martin MICHELOT, Chercheur au German Marshall Fund Paris, Spécialiste de la politique domestique et étrangère américaine
  
• François DURPAIRE, Historien, spécialiste des États-Unis
• Paul VALLET, Professeur de Relations Internationales, spécialiste de la politique américaine

Regardez la deuxième partie.

See also France24's mocking visual of Mitt Romney:

Update: Joe reacts:

[The] rather 2002-esque looking criticism of [Mitt Romney's] America … involve[s] the usual amplification of whatever leftist vulgarity the newsroom chortles about. It is essencially a masturbatory rant

Good-Bye, Friend: RIP John Keegan; Keegan's Perspective on the Iraq War

John Keegan has died (cheers to Instapundit), the military historian who is best known for The Face of Battle (I still treasure my college course book copy), although my own favorite is Warpaths: Travels of a Military Historian in North America:

Military history and geography explain each other in North America as nowhere else in the world. Award-winning historian John Keegan explores their relationship and examines the battles fought over three centuries between Frenchman and Indian, Royalist and colonist, Union and Confederacy.

Highly recommended. Keegan has been mentioned half a dozen times on No Pasarán. Back in June 2004, we quoted from his Daily Telegraph column:

What monopolises the headlines and prime time television at the moment is news from Iraq on the activity of small, localised minorities struggling to entrench themselves before full peace is imposed and an effective state structure is restored. The news is, in fact, very repetitive: disorder in Najaf and Fallujah, misbehaviour by a tiny handful of US Army reservists — not properly trained regular soldiers — in one prison. There is nothing from Iraq's other 8,000 towns and villages, nothing from Kurdistan, where complete peace prevails, very little from Basra, where British forces are on good terms with the residents.

A day earlier, I wrote a post mentioning his book, The Iraq War, and linking that year's D-Day commemorations to another anniversary from 2004:

… it turns out that there is another 60th birthday this year. That of the Ba'ath party. Yes. It was founded by a Syrian (a Christian, incidentally) in 1944.

I am currently reading a book by an author variously described as "our greatest modern military historian" and "the most readable and most original of living military historians". In The Iraq War, John Keegan does not only describe the military operations from March to April 2003, but gives the context and background of the Iraq conflict, from the history of Mesopotamia to the historic break between Sunnis and Shi'ites, from the fall of the Ottoman empire to the contemporary rivalries. What caught my attention (and what, if truth be told, got a flame of anger burning inside me) was the information on the last page of chapter 3 relating to the origin of the Ba'ath party.

Speaking of Saddam Hussein : "The nature of his régime owed more to twentieth-century ideologies of intolerance and systems of repression than to anything derived from the more distant past."

Speaking of Saddam's Ba'ath party: "Michel Aflaq, the founder of Ba'athism, had modelled the organization of his party on Hitler's Nazi movement, of which he was an admirer."

Let us remember the Iraqi citizens quoted in Steven Vincent's Reason article: "European and Arab journalists talk to us, but they don’t care about our happiness in being liberated. They only want us to make anti-American comments."

Our Sophisticated European Betters

They have such a healthy and open attitude toward life, especially where sex with sheep is involved.

A farm hand is reported to have received a shock when he wandered past the field shortly after 3pm on Monday afternoon and witness the elderly man in the act.

"The employee saw that the whole episode was, how shall I put it, close to completion,"

Maybe He Knows Something We Don't: Kofi Annan to Step Down as Syria Mediator

Unexpectedly, announces Le Monde, Kofi Annan will not renew his mandate as Syria mediator for the United Nations and the Arab League, and will accordingly step down on August 31. The UN is looking for someone to replace the former secretary general, says his successor to that post, U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon (see Reuters news item in English, merci au Drudge report)…

In an interview with Le Monde's Natalie Nougayrède three weeks ago, Kofi Annan said that "on the Syrian case, obviously, we were unsuccesful."

Erik Svane Discusses Romney's Alleged Gaffes During Heated Debate on France 24's English-Language TV Channel

During a heated 40-minute debate with Newsweek's Paris Bureau Chief and others on France 24's English-language channel (part 1 and part 2) (part 1 on Youtube and part 2 on Youtube), Erik Svane discusses Mitt Romney's alleged gaffes during his trip to Europe and Israel.

Romney stirs controversy on bumpy foreign trip
Gaffe-prone, wannabe or savvy statesman, Western media has slammed Mitt Romney's tour of American allies, but US opinion polls tell a different story. Laura Baines and her panel discuss the Republican candidate's choice of destinations and what they mean.

• Christopher DICKEY, Newsweek Paris Bureau Chief / Mideast Editor;
• Erik SVANE, Member Republicans Abroad France, Author of "La Bannière étalée";
• Aaron David MILLER, Distinguished Scholar at The Wilson Centre and advisor to Republican & Democratic Secretaries of State for over 20 years;
• Mordechai KEDAR, Researcher at the Begin-Sadat Centre for Strategic Studies Bar Ilan University; Watch the second part
  Programme prepared and produced by Wassim Nasr, Sara Bertilsson and Mary Colombel

Stranger Than Paradise

How weird, you ask?

They invite you to customize your pan-galactic omnivorous transnational super-dooper–state (the EU). As if it actually makes sense to make an online survey substitute for the use of a democratic process as a way of presenting your gripes to the state, or presenting your vision of an entity with half a billion belching welfare moochers in it.

Maybe they’re doing this to look engaged with the public, or trrying to grow more relevant. I suppose that’s possible, but it’s unlikely to be as successful as, say, the fact that it’s National Cheesecake day – and what National Cheesecake day can be truly complete without bakeries giving out samples.

So, let me also wish you a happy post May 9th belated Europe Day as Neelie is warmly extending to you in the video re-published today, if “happy” is indeed the right term. Maybe it’s “anxious,” or “merry,” or “bereft of cogent meaning.” I don’t know what Emily Post would say on such an august occasion.

So Long, and Thanks for all the Kleingebäck

In the town of Breisbach on the Rhein river near the gateway to the Black Forest - in the most prosperous and Cutsie-poo part of Germany, we discover the success of European social solidarity and integration of outsiders, their tolerance for others, and their whimsical and rich incorporation of the host society’s values.

Two ethnic Turkish men walking in on the Christian funeral service of a dead baby violently pulled the deceased from the coffin to ritually wash it.

The two men who caused the disturbance, 62 years and 28-years-old men will appear on the 1st of August before the District Court of Breisach (Breisgau in the Black Forest).

Throughout the ritual, the two accused had forcefully pushed all the guests who wanted to intervene, a court spokesman said on Wednesday. The baby died of sudden infant death syndrome.

The 28-year-old was the biological father of the child - but never acknowledged paternity. The 62 year old father took the corpse from the coffin, stripped it, and washed it in a tub that he brought. According to court spokesman, all the mourners could see the scars from the child's autopsy. After washing the remains, they wrapped it in cloth, placed it in the coffin, and buried quite crudely by the two men.

“Trying to Make the World Safe for their Volvos”

That just about sums ‘em up.

Venezuela Cartoonist Compelled to Hire Bodyguards, Risks 30 Months Behind Bars

While the presidency of Hugo Chavez is denounced in a report by Human Rights Watch (HRW) — "The accumulation of power in the executive, the removal of institutional safeguards, and the erosion of human rights guarantees have given the Chávez government free rein to intimidate, censor, and punish Venezuelans who 'offend' the president or obstruct his political aims" — Paulo A. Paranagua reports on the ordeals of a political cartoonist :

For the past 20 years, Rayma Suprani has been publishing her cartoons on a daily basis in the Venezuelan newspaper El Universal. Her drawings denounce poverty, the lack of social justice and of free speech in a country where caricaturing the president can land you in prison for 30 months. Rayma Suprani is the object of harassment from the authorities which compels her to move about under the protection of bodyguards.

• See a portfolio of Rayma's cartoons

• Check out Rayma's website

Au Venezuela, les médias ne doivent pas "susciter l'angoisse dans la population". Pour avoir enfreint cette règle, la chaîne de télévision Globovision vient de payer une amende de 1,7 million d'euros. Parmi les sujets "anxiogènes" qui ont provoqué les foudres du pouvoir figurent les émeutes dans les prisons surpeuplées, la lenteur des secours après un séisme, des affaires de pollution et, bien entendu, l'explosion de la criminalité. Ainsi, il ne faut pas raconter à quel point la morgue de Caracas est débordée les weekends. Ni la douleur des familles obligées de soudoyer des employés pour récupérer le corps de leurs proches dans des délais raisonnables.

Cette dérive autoritaire du régime Chavez est décrite minutieusement dans un rapport de 133 pages de Human Rights Watch publié mardi 17 juillet, en espagnol en anglais.

Si le registre de la gravité est encadré et surveillé, la volonté de détendre le public grâce à la satire et à l'humour peut aussi s'avérer dangereuse. Des textes manifestement comiques et des caricatures ont été sanctionnés durement par le régime du lieutenant colonel Hugo Chavez. De mémoire caribéenne, on ne se souvient pas d'un président aussi susceptible. A croire que l'usage abusif de l'uniforme, alors qu'il est passé depuis longtemps au cadre de réserve, raidit le comportement et la parole. Prenant des allures de prédicateur télé, Hugo Chavez prétend bannir l'irrévérence traditionnelle des Vénézuéliens, leur méfiance à l'égard de tous ceux qui se prennent trop au sérieux, leur refus de l'intolérance.

… Ce contexte permet de mieux apprécier le courage des dessinateurs de presse comme Rayma Suprani, collaboratrice du quotidien El Universal. Une caricature du président est passible de trente mois de prison. A Caracas, le harcèlement du pouvoir l'oblige à se déplacer protégée par des gardes du corps. L'association Cartooning for peace, créée par Plantu, a adopté Rayma Suprani.

Voir le portfolio "Les caricatures de Rayma, une lutte pour la liberté d'expression"

(Gracias para Fausta)

What’s Yours is Theirs’

L’Express’ personal fiance section runs down a list of things that will come under taxation assault in France. Painful and economically stupefying as they are, they don’t appear to produce much in the way of receipts.

Unearned income of all types, we are promised, will eventually be aligned with income tax rates, which is to say a nominal 34,5%. Oh joy, oh rapture.

- Social security sur-tax will be raised to 15,5% from 12,3%
- Tax on income from property will go up to 34,5%, as will capital gains from property sale which were at 32,5%
- Interest of life insurance returns will go up the “sociaux” rate of 15,5%
- Estate taxes will range from 30.5 to 50.5%, with some allowance for subtractions at the low end

This comes before the anticipated 75% income take rate on insufferably high income earners (<€1 Million/per annum) has yet to be announced. This is likely because they’re trying to sort out some sort of “exit tax” for people who take their wealth abroad where someone other than the government can use it. In case you think that all of this is some sort of realignment to “produce a sustainable society” that encourages personal responsibility and savings, employee savings will ONLY be taxed at a rate of 20%. On planet earth, employee retirement savings not only normally goes untaxed, but is incented by exempting it from taxable income. But since you will have less income and fewer earning prospects anyway due to the rise in income taxes generally, you won’t have a chance to save anything anyway. Whatever you have left, should you happen to actually want to shod your children’s feet or buy goods of virtually any durable sort, is subject to a VAT of 19,6%. The truly sick thing about it all is that when VAT was introduced, it was made of the argument that making goods more costly for everyone would create an incentive to save. The most common form of saves, however is subject to a 20% rate. Whatever, taxes were already punitively high, and they don’t think you made that cabbage on your own to begin with. So in conclusion, I hope your move goes smoothly, and that your new neighbors in Australia, the US, Canada, New Zealand, and the UK prove to be friendly, welcoming, and helpful.

“Reagan should have a monument in every city” says Walesa as another Gipper statue unveiled in Eastern Europe

The Gdansk statue of Ronald Reagan is the second major statue to be unveiled in Poland — this one in the company of fellow Cold Warrior John Paul II — after that in Warsaw, and at least the fourth such commemoration of the Gipper in Eastern Europe, after Warsaw, Prague, and Budapest (the Hungarian capital has two statues of Reagan, as it also sports a bust of the former actor), not to mention the Reagan statue in London.

The Associated Press reports that

Polish officials unveiled a statue of former President Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II on Saturday, honoring two men widely credited in this Eastern European country with helping to topple communism 23 years ago.

The statue was unveiled in Gdansk, the birthplace of Lech Walesa’s Solidarity movement, in the presence of about 120 former Solidarity activists, many of whom were imprisoned in the 1980s for their roles in organizing or taking part in strikes against the communist regime.

Reagan and John Paul shared a conviction that communism was a moral evil, not just a bad economic system. And Lech Walesa, founder of the Solidarity movement that led the anti-communist struggle in Poland, has often paid homage to both men and told the AP in a recent interview that he deeply respected Reagan.

“Reagan should have a monument in every city,” Walesa said.

Rome’s Pantheon Symbolizes a Remarkable Leap in Human Knowledge

An article about the Pantheon in the Weekend WSJ provoked me to think about the example it represents to us in the broader context of human development.

Not only was it as good a solution to the idea of “just a dome over a drum” as can possibly be created Architecturally, it was also the first true concrete structure.

Aestheically, its’ précis is even more poetic in the economical use of ideas:

Seen from its north-facing front, the concrete-and-brick Pantheon consists of a pedimented entrance porch, a domed rotunda and a boxlike intermediate structure joining them. Their forms—triangle, hemisphere and rectangle—announce the underlying theme of pure geometry.

This is no small feat. While the Romans built arches and domes, there is no evidence that they actually understood the principals behind it. They understood their proportional thickness to span and limits of scale only by the skillful and advanced use of a much simpler principal that they used in the absence of other scientific knowledge: trial and error. This might seem like an insult to their intelligence, but it isn’t. Using a proxy for an engineering concept that you don’t have control of in order to use it is a risky strategy requiring their best engineering skills to manage.

Moreover the risk of using and evidence-based/ trial-and-error based engineering concept was high for other reasons: embarrassment in the face of failure of whomever tries it, and the ire of the powerful patron who put their resources and trust in whomever did it. Slavery or even beheading would not have been becoming when you’re a well-respected Architect in the Roman Empire or Republic, I’m sure.

We see that they cast coffers into the dome to lighten it, but we don’t know if they put two-and-two together, and understood that the space in between them turned into ribs made stronger by tie-ing them together with the concentric rings formed by the horizontal elements between the coffers. It took several centuries before we saw any rib-vaults that represent historical evidence that building technology knew and understood the concept.

The trial-and-error issue extend to the material too: they “discovered” concrete in that they thought it could do something based on making mortar. Using volcanic ash, they produced a hydrating-lime concrete without really knowing that it was the hydration that was producing something like modern concrete. The invention of modern concrete is attributed to French gardener in the 2nd half the 19th century noodling around with a better way to make flower pots, and an Englishman who observed some of the hydrating and heat generating reaction of slack lime.

So the take-away from this is that skillful use of what you know in order to do more than you know isn’t just possible, but it creates the examples that other can “reverse engineer” to determine the unknown engineering principals themselves.

So there you have it – someone had to take a leap of faith – but the results for civilization was the ability to build more and better shelter using fewer resources, and this incrementally improved the lives of more people. This whole concept is lost on modern environmentalists whose luddite outlook is based on a are nostalgia of something that never existed, and is detrimental to the largest number of people. After all, if you tried to engage in such an experiment today, they would do whatever they could to stop it because of the risk and use of resources, and immediately vilify the chemistry involved in making it as a “poison” that will only serve to pollute streams and “make the rich richer.”

The Only Good Woman Is a Leftist Woman

Ellen Barkin tells Jon Lovitz to "shut the fuck up", reports Twitchy (thanks to Instapundit).

In order to get to the bottom of the barrel and explain the basics of leftist logic to you once and for all, I am bringing the following announcement to you in the public interest:

Indeed, it is time for you to understand your lesson and to understand it once and for all:

• The only good woman is a leftist woman

• The only good black is a leftist black

• The only good Latino is a leftist Latino

• The only good queer is a leftist queer

• The only good comedian is a leftist comedian

• The only good member of the Hollywood community is a leftist member of the Hollywood community

• And, of course, the only good white male is a leftist white male — one who supports the above-mentioned minority members.

All other members of a minority, of any minority, and all other white males — aka "2 dumb and dangerous" "right wing fuckin morons" — should hereby be advised that they have the following right: to "shut the fuck up". (Otherwise, the famed narrative might not sound as attractive…)

And if they do not — as, say, Sarah Palin, Herman Cain, and Jon Lovitz have learned (or are learning) — they will be duly ostracized (see Jonah Goldberg's take on this).

In other words, the only good member of a minority is the one who believes that (s)he is a victim — scratch that, make that "the one who knows, who knows, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that (s)he is a victim" — and that (s)he needs to support and, to vote for, the victimization party, i.e., for the Democrats. The party in which (so goes the narrative) politicians dressed as white knights in shining armor ride to the rescue of the martyred wretches…

All others? They should STFU.

(At least, until such time as they have been duly reeducated…)

Update: Joe N writes:

In essence, to the left the only good HUMANS, worthy of decency, are the ones politically useful to them.

(You should check out his website sometime…)

America the Beautiful Sung by Jon Kahn

Jon Kahn sings America the Beautiful on Troopathon.