The great "CornGoleo", no got teepee for his bunghole

The German company Nici which manufactures the 2006 World Cup mascot "Goleo" has just filed for bankruptcy.

 

France finishes a respectable 22nd (out of 24) with 5 points

Some 30 years after Kiss, and 20 after Gwar, the Eurovision Song Context was won by the Finnish group - Lordi - with "Hardrock Hallelujah".

Champagne!

Continuing to act like animals

‘Crow’ revealed, lobster still unworthy of anyone’s interest.

The fuse is lit!

Refreshingly Flakey?

Telegraph ‘Spy’ columnist Celia Walden noted that Hugh Grant is ‘refreshingly flaky’ enough in his views that he breaks out of the mold of the odiously typical and uniform celebrity concern for the children, flowers, butterflies, etc., and whatever else they’re too unctuous to have lost touch with.

She finds it more remarkable that the Stepford Children of moviedom would not robotically parrot far left views.

I’d also add that his approach to answering a reporter’s question about his views actually provides him with some privacy from the entertainment press which is largely as morally vane as an actor with a burning indingnace to tell us thier views on, say, Malaria. One would guess that they think it’s actually rather a bad thing, thus we can consider ourselves ‘educated’. How else would we ever know, I wonder?

Let’s cut to the tape:

>roll 'em

Truthfully, Grant does not seem like a flake. He seems to be using his acting skills to get scriblers to leave him be. Lost on the likes of people who count every kiss of his, is his desire to produce a film about his grandfather who found himself suddenly to be the senior survivor of his regiment, and successfully planned a breakout from a Nazi POW camp. Knowing how celeb-world emotes and barfs over the sincere, he may be waiting for his age to align with the press’ delusions.

The fuse is lit!

Chavez to shut pie-hole by 2010

Simply because oil prices will settle down, and he won’t have the money to “purchase consent” with. In the mean time, while the Gulf states diversifies and develop, Ahmedinejad’s crowd in Iran will likely keep pouring their resources into nukes and political boondoggles instead of solid economic development, the wind will close to them too.

Standard Chartered Bank (SCB) expects oil prices to average around $40 a barrel by 2010 but said it may not dim the economic prospects of the Middle East in general and particularly the GCC due to the structural changes in economies, mainly Qatar, UAE and Saudi Arabia.

It’s still the economy, stupid. Red + Green = smoldering grey ashes once their populations get the picture.the fuse is lit!

“Progressive vanguard”

Too violent even for the PLO, the PFLP (revolutionary Palestinian Marxists) in Lebanon are still armed and take pot shots at Lebanese soldiers at the behest of Syria. One more dead this week. The last one they capped (for no reason) was an Army topographic surveyor just doing his job.

The Syrians don’t particularly care for them being in their country, so it explains why they’re so big on keeping them paid off and in Lebanon where they can irritate the population and disturb the political balance. Remember that they have a "red" kinship with the Syrian Ba'athists, but come from the era of the Red Brigade, Red Army Faction, and other bands of killers founded with KGB and other Eastern Bloc intelligence aid and money. They are one of the anachronisms of the era that are still around. They have an ideological bone to pick with Jihad, but seem to not bother to say or do anything about it.

A Lebanese soldier has died from wounds sustained during clashes with Palestinian guerrillas in eastern Lebanon two days ago, Lebanese army sources said Friday.

Two soldiers and one militant were injured in the clashes and a Lebanese soldier was briefly kidnapped by the pro-Syrian gunmen.

On Thursday, Fatah Uprising militants smuggled reinforcements from Syria into eastern Lebanon, Lebanese security sources said.

'Fifteen military trucks smuggled the reinforcements during the night through a valley in eastern Lebanon,' Lebanese police said.

The Lebanese army also sent reinforcements to the area, deploying about 150 commando troops backed by at least 15 armoured vehicles, a Lebanese army source told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.

Both Fatah Uprising and the Damascus-based Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC), led by hardline leader Ahmed Jebril, maintain bases in eastern Lebanon.

There are some 367,000 Palestinian refugees sheltered in 12 camps across Lebanon, but only pro-Syrian Palestinian groups maintain military positions outside these camps.

The fuse is lit!

Deja vu EU

Robert Tumminello plays “quotation guessing game” again:

« We must have a European legal system, a European appeal court, a common currency, the same weights and measures, the same laws... »

Hint: NOT Giscard

The fuse is lit!

Familiar?

Evo Morales, 1977. Learning his craft.

The fuse is lit!

They do more than just make us look good

From the Sunday Times (UK): Thank you, my foolish friends in the West for keeping one of their archaic and vulgar traditions alive.

Hugo Chavez of Venezuela is only the latest dictator-in-waiting to bask in adulation from western 'progressives'

Last year a number of journalists, writers and showbiz figures, including Harold Pinter, Nadine Gordimer, Harry Belafonte and Tariq Ali, signed a letter claiming that in Cuba “there has not been a single case of disappearance, torture or extra-judicial execution since 1959 . . .”

And the hits just keep on coming. What’s becoming obvious with the ‘new axis of (don’t laugh) power’ in Latin America isn’t just their penchance for catfights, their suicidal and impoverishing economic politics, but their hard to conceal fascism:

Many observers commented that Morales’ decision reflects Latin America’s shift to the left. “Left” in this context does not mean mildly center-left policies. “Left” in the case of Morales and Chavez involves embracing aggressive class-struggle rhetoric and a classically socialist political agenda.

Up to a point, this is a fair depiction of affairs. But a more accurate description would be to say that Bolivia and Venezuela are experiencing a resurgence of “corporatism.”

Strongly associated with policies pursued by interwar fascist regimes, corporatism blends state-authoritarianism, populism, nationalism, and anti-foreign xenophobia. This is combined with extensive nationalization and regulation of the economy, the militarization of much of society, and the creation of state-controlled civil organizations that gradually suffocate any autonomous free associations

Crossposted on Marxist Byproducts

The fuse is lit!

Tut tut.

"In our society, there is a climate of tolerance and being accustomed to ethically reprehensible, if not outright illegal, behaviour, to huge conflict of interests, to sudden and shameless enrichment,"
[ … ]
"There is a moral crisis: the cunning must not prevail"

Romano Prodi’s lecture about people going about the immorally black art of making money reminds me of a certain book introduction which appeared recently:

“Liberals love to boast that they are not ‘religious,’ which is what one would expect to hear from the state-sanctioned religion. Of course liberalism is a religion. It has its own cosmology, its own miracles, its own beliefs in the supernatural, its own churches, its own high priests, its own saints, its own total worldview, and its own explanation of the existence of the universe. In other words, liberalism contains all the attributes of what is generally known as ‘religion.’ ”

It is in fact a religion of leftist statism where the high priest of the academy may incite violence, and irresponsibly hand blame to any notion they can’t comprehend.the fuse is lit!

Is it time to continue to do nothing?

Simply, civil war

Fine words butter no parsnips, as the starchy British saying goes. The Europeans in their thrall had better start churning.the fuse is lit!

Philadelphia Inquirer to the French

Get a life.

Can you tell me how to get – how to get to Mumia Street?

The absence of concern for right and wrong is striking. The puke-worthy Libé, Le Monde, La Croix, and LM Diplo report nothing on the naming of a street for a convicted murderer. Only the traffic-and-weather oriented Le Parisien as fit to mention it.

How about a Rue Youssouf Fofana in Philadelphia? Wouldn't THAT go over beautifully?

The fuse is lit!

Skøl, Girgis

From our man in Baghdad evidence that Arabs are more broadminded than the opportunistic peddlers that have been trying to shake the change out of their pockets.the fuse is lit!

Me talk moonbat someday

From a commercial guide to ESL instructors in France, this little bit of cuteness.

Which should get an F for running on. Number 3 fails for stupidity.
Better to ask Ivan:


ver01.ra
the fuse is lit!

A world view too corroded to describe

EdF/GdF HQ atrium

Bertrand Delanoë’s gentle little village names a street after a cop-killing murderer because it fits someone’s amoral view that it’s everyone else who has a prejudice. Despite a history of enablement, the only thing you can be sure of is that the emotional basis for going to bat for a murderer is because the dead are unable to defend themselves.

The fuse is lit!

How to lose your job in a Saudi newspaper

Fawaz Turki who wrote for the KSA based English publication, Arab News gives more evidence of the dense. The imperious mind obsessed with its’ superiority can’t absorb the facts of the world.

It didn't matter that I had been the senior columnist on the op-ed page for nine years or that my work was quoted widely in the European and American media, including this paper. What mattered was that I had committed one of the three cardinal sins an Arab journalist must avoid when working for the Arab press: I criticized the government.

The other two? Bringing up Islam as an issue and criticizing, by name, political leaders in the Arab or Islamic world for their brazen excesses, dismal failures and blatant abuses.

Never mind the absurdity of preventing your contributors from touching on the issue of Islam, a social ideology whose embrace by jihadists is the top news story in the world today. And never mind that Arab society -- a society that remains broken in body and spirit more than a half-century after independence -- needs very much to engage in serious self-assessment and to promote an open debate in the media among intellectuals, academics, political analysts and others about why Arabs have failed all these years to meet the challenges of modernity.

It’s proof positive that accepting that Israel shouldn’t be ‘pushed into the sea’ as the meme continued to demand must be put to rest. They have to grow to accept that the mere existence of others is no cause for fear, nor cause to express ‘power over’ and do them harm, as the Arabs have to the Arab Jews and to the Druze and Arab Christians in large part.

Imagine a paranoia so acute as to cause parents to compel their children to marry a cousin instead to involving ‘a stranger’. Imagine that and project it on the social and political thought.

Send wildlife to diversity training.

A lot like Woodstock. They’re just striving for that idyll – peace, love, sharing, etc.

The fuse is lit!

Mais où sont les intellectuels d'antan ?

French novelist, and next big thing, Bertrand Latour, gives us his latest take on the state of France : terminal anti-Americanism, radical pacifism, and what might be the final death throes of the 5th Republic. Now on Hotair.com.

Watching the detectives

Philippe Karsenty on the France 2 Al-Dura story:

Now, we are very few who try to have this story corrected. The problem to have this right is that the French elites are very happy with it because it confirms their hate feelings against Israel and the Jews. Israel-bashing is a national sport in France.

And on the undeniabity of denial,

...the Iraqi war was launched, according to most of the French people, in the name of Israel. And if you look at the nuclear bomb in preparation in Iran, you see that the French media only focus on the Israeli supposed interest. They just forget that if Iran provides terrorists with dirty radioactive material, it’s Europe that could be affected very soon. They also forget to recall that Europe has no anti-missile defense as Israel has with the Hetz. This means that, objectively, Israel is less endangered by a nuclear Iran than Europe. But, if you hear French media, the only country is danger is Israel and French people don’t want to fight a billion of Muslims to defend 6 million Israelis.

He also has much more to say on economy, media, and taking the temperature of a culture. Excellent stuff.

The fuse is lit!