Plowshares into Swords

I can’t believe I missed this one: a German Tank manufacturer has received EU agricultural subsidies.

As translated from the original Klingon:

Hamburg - Farmers aren’t the only recipients of EU agricultural subsidies. The arms group Rheinmetall has received 2009 budget year funds from the European Union. The company conceded that it got €83 795 from a rural development funding program.

The grant recipient, the Rheinmetall Waffe Munition GmbH Forest Service, is part of the Unterlüß test range north of the Südheide nature reserve. The Forestry Commission said the center had received the funds as part of an effort to "convert our forest from a Pine monoculture to a mixed species forest environment.

Those treads should do a great job of aerating the soil.

Of Interest: between Rubble and Ruins

Presented by the German Historical Institute on their German History in Documents and Images website, is a rare collection of postwar photographs attributed to a known photographer, Friedrich Seidenstücker.

'

Feeding your Berlinalia:



A Flaneur between Rubble and Ruins – Friedrich Seidenstücker
Photographs of Berlin after 1945

Fear of an Iranian Planet

So what do you think this tells you about Iran’s “nuclear medicine” program?

PROJECT SCOPE: The project is for the construction of three (3) underground bunkers at three separate locations in and North of Amman, Jordan. One of the bunkers is approximately 3803 SM total and two of the bunkers are approximately 3288 SM total each. All are to be constructed below grade and include a burster slab, two means of ingress and egress, air supply, water storage, command and control operations areas, cafeterias, kitchens, offices, sleeping quarters, latrines, clean and dirty equipment areas, and blast attenuation/baffling structures. All work identified in the Scope of Work shall be completed within 450 days from the Notice to Proceed. Information on a site visit and instructions to obtain access to the site will be provided in the solicitation.

Can’t Buy Me Love

Eulex confounded: Kosovars still love the US more than them.

A Kosovo-Albanian and a Spaniard run into each other in New York City. Spain is the biggest among the EU countries that have yet to recognise Kosovo's independence. Upon finding out that the other is from Spain the Kosovan gives him a close hug. The Spaniard is astonished. "Hey, you guys discovered America. That's enough for us," says the Kosovan.

The joke was told in a restaurant in Pristina by a top official from Kosovo's home affairs ministry. It was meant to illustrate that the more than 2 million Albanians in Kosovo agree on one thing: it was the Americans - not the Europeans - who 'liberated' them from Serbian rule after a Nato bombing campaign forced Serbia to relinquish control over its Kosovo province in 1999. Then US president Bill Clinton was given a statue in Pristina this week; he already had a street named after him.

What with all of that “spreading freedom” twaddle, those silly Yanks. I mean WHO would want THAT, when the Europeans were perfectly prepared to let the schnooks keep burning villages, if it required any use of force on their part?

Who says satire is dead?

Or, for that matter, delusionalism:

Europe will introduce a surprise new plan today to combat global warming, committing Britain and the rest of the EU to the most ambitious targets in the world. The plan proposes a massive increase in the target for cutting greenhouse gas emissions in this decade.

The European Commission is determined to press ahead with the cuts despite the financial turmoil gripping the bloc, even though it would require Britain and other EU member states to impose far tougher financial penalties on their industries than are being considered by other large economies.

The plan, to cut emissions by 30 per cent on 1990 levels by 2020, would cost the EU an extra £33 billion a year by 2020, according to a draft of the Commission’s communication leaked to The Times.

Me? I’m Still Shorting their Sorry Asses

As one would expect, EUtopia is gunning for investors to give ‘the masses’ something to build some false social solidarity around.

“For the locusts in the finance sector, a new age is dawning.” This is how German Social Democrat and Member of the European Parliament Udo Bullmann commented on the prospect of new EU-wide regulations for hedge funds.

Those ‘locusts’ are making the revenues that happen to be buffering the collapse of your retirement, Udo baby. They’re also offering a hint at what those assets are really worth. Since you’d rather see the rating agencies lie to the public about what the sectors and industries people work for, investors and hedge funds snapping to and fro are the only approximation of mark to market you’ll ever really see.

That the Social Democrats would triumphantly bring out their “locust” bon mot again now is particularly troubling when one considers that the EU’s current offensive against hedge funds appears to be all about offering up a convenient scapegoat to public opinion, as opposed to addressing the fundamental problems underlying Europe’s debt crisis. Anti-Semitism, after all, has always been a matter of finding a scapegoat.

And look for it, they will. The old reliable straw man of European “intellectualism” is being pointlessly and evasively employed again, when it’s Europe’s government pandering to people for votes that have bankrupted society to make the political class look “generous” with people’s own money.

The comparison sparked controversy, especially after historian Michael Wolffsohn accused Müntefering and the Social Democrats of using rhetoric reminiscent of Nazi screeds. Indeed, as the German journalist Ulrich Speck pointed out at the time in a (no longer available) blog post, the “swarm of locusts” metaphor had a long history in anti-Semitic discourse dating back to at least the early 19th century. It is used, moreover, in the infamous Nazi propaganda film Jud Süß (“The Jew Süss”). In the film, the Jews are said “to descend upon our country like locusts.” Implicit in the German discussion — though rarely if ever stated openly — was the fact the Nazis had, of course, always associated Jews with finance, and vice-versa, and that this association was indeed an essential part of their anti-Semitism. (The “Jew Süss” to whom reference is made in the title of the eponymous film, for instance, is the 18th Century Jewish financier Joseph Süss Oppenheimer.)

Not to mention the fact that it’s also used by the left, right, and center in many of these “great cultures”.

The Social Democrats reacted indignantly to the criticisms. But it did not help the credibility of their cause when Germany’s biggest trade union, IG Metall, published a cartoon depicting the famous “swarm” of financial investors...

No need to guess that in the absence of an easy outsider characterization as Jews, what with their heads and noses being calipered for measurement, that these locusts, naturally, had to take another form:



Like you couldn’t have guessed that one

A Portrait of Arrogant Conceit and Ineptitude in the White House

Over the course of a few days during a state visit to the United States, Mexican President Felipe Calderon fed the left’s latest object of fixation: their misinformed and misguided invective directed at Arizona’s entirely lawful and rather desperate measure to stem the side-effects of the Federal Government’s non-enforcement of a basic function of a nation’s sovereignty. The very existence of national borders, it seems is some sort of embarrassment for which we need to apologize even to the still totalitarian government in Beijing for. But like the idea that such an apology would indulge an ego or a favor, the means of that sort of rapprochement, not to mention any potential benefits from it, are of no value. They also reveal an inability to even employ ones’ adopted international policy stature.

I really wish that clutch of bufoons weren't acting like such amateurs. To begin with, it's absolutely off limits in diplomatic protocol to criticize another nation's domestic laws and affairs, but Calderon threw some red meat to his population and did just that.

Next, there are those that applauded them who indulged in the epic foolishness of, like it or not, not backing up a fellow citizen or government body in the face of foreign criticism. Another error a college sophmore in government affairs, international affairs, or as this lot would prefer, a major in "peace studies" would know.

If this is their idea of soft power, you now know quite vividly they wasted it, and have made tool after tool in the negotiator's tool kit unusable ever again. It isn't just the stick that has been rendered unusable - the carrot has now had any ability to lure implausible. The president, the very man held up by an equally uninformed press corps as some sort of sophisticate, is an inept and incapable practitioner of statecraft. He can't even seem to execute the "soft power" posture that he advocates. He can't even understand how to use the simple (and questionable) thesis promoted by Joseph Nye on "soft power" to the benefit of the United States anyway.

What's taken for relational interaction is turned into popularity playcraft, not statecraft.

In fact all one can do after that is force oneself into direct confrontation to be taken seriously in any matter grave enough to require the President's direct involvement, much as Chamberlain's appeasament forced the hawks' hands: sooner or later, someone will have to make a dramatic and restorative turnabout and overdo making the point of being tough on that border problem.

That international man of mystery, what with all of that savoire faire...

The president is an abject failure, even on a platform where populations worldwide and much of their leadership are giving him a million second-chances, and are willing to pretend him a success.

Moreover, we have a Secretary of State who originated in the ginned up world of pretend-retail politics, with no international affairs abilities outside of being a hand-shaking spouse. What's worse, is that it's patently obvious that she is gunning for an electoral challenge to the president, making dealing with the State Dept. and the White House by other governments an uncertain excercise, and inrtoduces the simple problem of whether or not they can even take communication from the United States Government seriously, for fear of that effort being lost on an internal political matter befitting a small European state or a thugocracy in Asia Minor.

Worse still was the feeble reporting.

The story is there. A trail of crumbs that could fill a commodity stockyard presented itself to the press, all pointing to a distaste for the defense of a nation by a class of leaders, and an inability to reflect on the effect of airing ones’ domestic political feelings in an international forum is left in plain view. In plain sight of the press laid even the simple ignorance of basic diplomatic interaction. You would think one of them would want to break away from the pack, show some distinction, and write so much as a wire piece about it.

Alas, who knew that the height of the dawn of the great new age of Aquarius would be characterized by a servile, pliant, (and often ignorant) press that was willing to let every word a national leader go unchallenged and unexamined.

All we need now to complete the lifestyle of the overbearing autarkies of the Eastern European Communist Block are brave sounding statements that are meant to inspire national solidarity behind the leader hung at intersections and under train trestles.

All for the good of man, of course.

Farmers Bring the Country to Paris, Turning the Champs-Élysées Green

One of Paris's main thoroughfares, the Champs-Élysées, has been covered in earth and turned into a huge green space in an event staged by young French farmers.

…on Sunday the French Young Farmers union … brought the sights and scents of the countryside to Paris as its members covered a long stretch of the Champs-Élysée[s] with miniature fields of wheat and sunflower.

It was perhaps its sheer incongruity that drew massive crowds to the avenue that the French call the most beautiful in the world. The federation said that about 150,000 plants covered more than 3 hectares, or 7.4 acres, of the avenue. Farms animals — sheep, pigs and at least four breeds of cows — were held in pens along the avenue.

Needless to say, the politically correct compassion gurus have done their job well as

“The people worry about the animals,” said Nicolas Mousnier, 29, who raises sheep in Limoges, standing in a straw pit, watching over a herd of 40 sheep, a massive black sow and eight squealing piglets. “This connection still exists. We have to maintain it.” He had spent much of his day reassuring visitors that the animals were not uncomfortable in the sun…

Enjoy Watching the Fallout

France poised to raise retirement age.

Expectations are growing that France is set to remove the right to retire at 60, as it embarks on a contentious reform of its debt-laden pension system and brings public finances back into line.

Note that it does not necessarily mean that gangs of Pinkertons will FORCE anyone to work to 62, of anything else. It just means that you can’t draw a pension until you’re 62.

His comments are likely to give ammunition to unions planning a national strike on Thursday to protest against spending cuts and pension reforms.

As if you couldn’t guess THAT would happen.

The government is highly sensitive to the potential of pension reform sparking widespread unrest and will be watching Thursday’s protest closely. Former prime minister Alain Juppé was eventually brought down by national protests in 1995 when he attempted to restructure one of the most generous pensions systems in Europe.

The easiest way to solve that problem, if these helpless, servile idiots were able to imagine it, would be to actually save some money on their own, without the government managing your financial life.

They might be stunned to discover that in the USA, you can actually retire any time you like, and in most cases, take as MUCH VACATION as you want. Just don’t expect anyone to pay for it when you’re not giving them anything in return.

While the majority of adults in France understands the need to put off the drawing of pensions, you still have a stupid crust of haterz who honestly can’t figure out that the money to fund it has to come from someone else\ - someone NOT (not) doing their jobs with the large institutional entities that practically make it unnecessary to think about your work, or take any sort of initiative to do it well.

On the other side of the coin are those that work for themselves, who actually have both the burden of being taxed to fund these bums, and are (decade after decade) expected to be the magic bullet of innovation that will make the hard choices unnecessary. Good luck. I’m sure their only though is “You want WHAT?!? Thanks for nothing”.

A Rigged Market?

Sure! If you’re talking about Europe’s approach to the Kyoto accord.

The first swindle involves Europe using a 1990 baseline. The closure of socialist industry in eastern Europe, a massive Scandinavian economic crisis, and mad cow disease's effect on livestock production crashed emissions by 1995. Result?

The result was a kind of “heads I win, tails you lose” set-up. It was a position that activist distracts real people who actually DO clean the environment, and actually DO produce things from improving the fate of man, especially it’s weakest and poorest.

Further to the “positive results”, a shallow gin-up:

"In 1997 in Kyoto, the EU27 signed on to an aggregate cap on their GHGs that was 14% ABOVE the member states' aggregate 1995 actual emissions. [From 1997 to 2008]... Spain, +32.8%; Latvia, +27.4%; Cyprus, +23.1%; Estonia, +21.0%; Greenland (a Danish colony), +16.6%; Luxembourg, +16.2%; Lithuania, +13.6%; Ireland, +13.0%; Ukraine, +11.5%; Malta, +9.0%; Austria, + 7.5%; Bulgaria, +8.4%; Italy, +5.9%; Belgium, +4.0%; Netherlands, +3.2%; Portugal, +4.2%; France, +1.5%; Finland, -1.6%, United Kingdom, -2.9%.

It should be noted, further, that 100% of the emission "reductions" claimed by EU member states to date derive from offshoring manufacturing of goods and services EU demand, which has actually increased."

In a world of paper shufflers and paper tigers, that is considered “real”, “honest”, and a “brave facing of the issues”. Go figure.

Not letting a crisis go to waste, the recession will (no doubt) be reframed in emissions-terms with the “great leap forward” treatment, as presented in venal international fora. That’s the political dynamic of the new age of man that they are “inspiring us,“ and leading us in to.

Re.: the (In)continent of the 21st Century

The European Union has a flag no one salutes, an anthem no one sings, a president no one can name, a parliament (in Strasbourg) no one other than its members wants to have power (which must subtract from the powers of national legislatures), a capital (Brussels) of coagulated bureaucracy no one admires or controls, a currency that presupposes what neither does nor should nor soon will exist (a European central government), and rules of fiscal behavior that no member has been penalized for ignoring.

It isn’t mawkish to mock when you’re right on the money:

In stating the case for European superiority, much has been made by boosters of Europe’s different institutional framework, tax or regulatory structure. No question these have advantages and disadvantages compared with those of the United States, but there’s little case for arguing that the “Euro-model” has been a rip-roaring economic success. It’s imploding on its weak periphery, and the collapse is threatening even bigger players, including the United Kingdom.

Blög of Note

There’s schnitzelling, and then there’s schnitzelling. Me, I prefer to call the country in question the Berlin Currywurst Republic.

To wit, this rather common sense answer to volcanic interruption:

Maybe it's time to reconsider the blimp.

The Manchurian Candidates

The world remains inexplicably indifferent and uncurious about the deadliest ideology in history.

Writes Claire Berlinski in this quarter’s City Journal.

the word “Nazi” is synonymous with evil. It is widely understood that the Nazis’ ideology—nationalism, anti-Semitism, the autarkic ethnic state, the Führer principle—led directly to the furnaces of Auschwitz. It is not nearly as well understood that Communism led just as inexorably, everywhere on the globe where it was applied, to starvation, torture, and slave-labor camps. Nor is it widely acknowledged that Communism was responsible for the deaths of some 150 million human beings during the twentieth century.

And yet it continues to be idolized as a better way of life for the slef-perceived powerless individual, the very people chopped up in its’ machine. Setting aside the aging handful of hardcore proponents of Communist Socialism who actually lived under it, the common bond of its’ present-day proponents are an ignorance of it’s crimes, ignorance of the homogeneity and narrowness it requires to sustain it, and a literature based entirely outside of the experience of real, living Socialism.

Take as an example some of the bright lights of Europe, held up as potential “states-persons”, and their pasts, which are nearly as ugly as the passivated third world leaders that the KGB and Stasi were turning to their purposes. In the last of the cold-war missile treaty efforts, some of them are transparently going to bat for the Soviets, out of either ideology or programmed hatred of their own society.

Kinnock was vice president of the European Commission from 1999 to 2004, and his wife, Glenys, is now Britain’s minister for Europe. Gerard Batten, a member of the UK Independence Party, has noted the significance of the episode. “If the report given to Mr. Gorbachev is true, it means that Lord Kinnock approached one of Britain’s enemies in order to seek approval regarding his party’s defense policy and, had he been elected, Britain’s defense policy,” Batten said to the European Parliament in 2009. “If this report is true, then Lord Kinnock would be guilty of treason.”

Similarly, Baroness Catherine Ashton, who is now the European Union’s foreign minister, was treasurer of Britain’s Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament from 1980 to 1982. The papers offer evidence that this organization received “unidentified income” from the Soviet Union in the 1980s. Stroilov’s papers suggest as well that the government of the current Spanish EU commissioner for economic and monetary affairs, Joaquín Almunia, enthusiastically supported the Soviet project of gradually unifying Germany and Europe into a socialist “common European home” and strongly opposed the independence of the Baltic states and then of Ukraine.

Even the Vice President of the United States isn’t immune to it.

Perhaps it doesn’t surprise you to read that prominent European politicians held these views. But why doesn’t it? It is impossible to imagine that figures who had enjoyed such close ties to the Nazi Party—or, for that matter, to the Ku Klux Klan or to South Africa’s apartheid regime—would enjoy top positions in Europe today. The rules are different, apparently, for Communist fellow travelers. “We now have the EU unelected socialist party running Europe,” Stroilov said to me. “Bet the KGB can’t believe it.”

I’ll bet that the inheritors of the monomaniacal statist Fascist and Marxism can, when the see this dance again: the early, heady days of economic and social tumult that put well localized and scrappy ideologues in power for decades, soberly rationalizing the social needs to use the state’s power to contain the will of the individual.

ArtHausArt

It is all fun and games until you are ripped to shreds on an exploding TGV, other than that the New York Times raves:

Long before the festival opened, this 5 hour, 33 minute movie about the Venezuelan-born terrorist, international man of mystery and brutishly committed ladies man, Ilich Ramírez Sánchez – i.e., Carlos the Jackal – was a must see. The movie, which screened just once and out of competition, is scheduled to play on French television this week. It is likely to pop up in the United States this fall at the New York Film Festival before it plays on-demand and in good old-fashioned theaters.

Bring on the gush:

Opening in the early 1970s, and hop-scotching across assorted hot spots from London to Libya for the next 10 years, “Carlos” is itself something of a heroic endeavor...

A media star from almost the beginning of his blood-splattered career, Carlos has long served as one of pop culture’s brand-name villains...

When he wasn’t globetrotting, he was surfing the sheets, bedding different comradely chicks...

And if Carlos is essentially uninteresting – it’s his violence and the veneer of sexiness that violence can bring with it that makes him a star – it’s because Mr. Assayas has worked hard to create a new kind of movie terrorist. With his beard, beret and black leather jacket, the young Carlos is a militant pin-up...

In Mr. Assayas’s telling, Carlos was also a macho bully for whom weapons, especially guns, weren’t just tools of the terrorist trade. They are also representations of his penis – true Freudian fetishes — a concept that Mr. Assayas literalizes in an ugly-gripping sex scene involving Carlos, one of his writhing conquests and an apparent live (unexploded) grenade...

I’m still not sure what I think of all the groovy music – but that’s what second viewings are for...

ArtHausArt

"Filmmaking Is Muzzled in Iran and in the United States": French Newspaper Compares Polanski's Case with That of Jailed Iranian Dissident Director

Free Panahi and Polanski! shouts Franck Nouchi in Le Monde. At the Cannes Film Festival this May, an empty chair has been visible among the seated jury members throughout the festival, symbolizing the absence of jury member Jafar Panahi, the Iranian film director who is probably in a Tehran jail — for having made a documentary on Iran's post-electoral events.

But there is another major director missing in the Cannes seaside resort, adds Franck Nouchi (Roman Polanski is still held in his chalet in Switzerland, after all). And the conclusion, for the Le Monde writer — the very same who couldn't bring himself to say that the Soviet Union was behind of the Katyn massacre — is that

In Iran and in the United States, for reasons which admittedly are totally different, film-making is thus muzzled. … if today, Panahi and Polanski's freedom is so shackled today, it is because of what they are: first-rate artists.

That's right: the reason that Panahi is muzzled (in a Tehran jail) is because he is a first-rate artist. And the reason that Polanski is muzzled (in a Swiss chalet) is because he is a first-rate artist!

To their credit, several Le Monde readers denounce the article (using repeatedly, among others, the expressions false "amalgam" and "simplifications"), with one reader stating that "Mélanger la prison d'Evin à Théhéran où on peut craindre le pire et celle du chalet de Gstaad en Suisse, me paraît une 'offense' à Jafar Panahi." and another reacting thus:

Il faut être bourré de mépris et de certitudes pour comparer quelqu'un condamné dans une dictature pour avoir osé s'exprimer, et quelqu'un à qui une démocratie reproche d'avoir abusé de son statut pour s'envoyer des petites filles. Utiliser l'un pour dédouaner l'autre est scandaleux, et sera inefficace.

The Benign Stupidity of the World’s Navel

Economics is a social science. Aptitude in the understanding of economic matters requires a kind of facility with understanding human behavior, and divorcing oneself of the arrogance of imagining whatever forms of utopian arbitrary simplism should be forced on the society at large.

I think you know what world view that's referring to. They see the world in class warfare terms, but say that they're for everyone's dignity, social justice, etc.

So it comes at no surprise to discover that in that social science, conservatives and libertarians show an exemplary understanding of economics compared to leftists, whatever their level of education:

Based on a Zogby International online survey of 4,835 American adults, Columbia University psychologist Zeljka Buturovic and George Mason University economist Dan Klein find that economic enlightenment is not correlated to going to college.

They also find that it is the highest among those self-identifying “conservative” and “libertarian,” and descends through “moderate,” “liberal,” and “progressive.” Other variables include party affiliation, religious participation, union membership, NASCAR fandom, and Wal-Mart patronage.

Yes, those barbarian mouth-breathers who are fans of NASCAR and lower themselves to step into a Wal-Mart.

Even with the caveats in mind, however, the results are important. They indicate that, for people inclined to take such a survey, basic economic enlightenment is not correlated with going to college.

Or to put the motives of the state-centrism of the left, we have this old European saying consistent with the center-to-far left’s social and economic world view:

“Tutto nello Stato, niente al di fuori dello Stato, nulla contro lo Stato”

“Everything for the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.”

- some minion of Mussolini

Which is also why engaging with the ideas of the structurally more “progressive” social attitudes, politics, and polity of Europe reminds me of trying to talk to a class of dull-eyed, predictable adolescents. Some staring off into space, a few picking their noses, one or two of them staring at your crotch, but all of them prone to destroy something sooner or later based on single-mindedness, and a lack of personal moderation. Such is the state of those you’ll be sure to see protesting in the European streets in the coming year over matters of economy, wages, services, and entitlements.

Here it is again, The German Question

The German Question is back, ponders John Vinocur.

In fact, it’s German Questions, plural, and fateful enough for Europe and the euro’s future to merit the capital letters.

…The German Question these days has other, considerably more biting formulations. Ulrich Beck, a sociologist at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich and the London School of Economics, offered two.

“Does Germany consider that the time has come to defend itself against Europe’s excessive clutches — the German model of success against its jealous European neighbors?” he asked. And: “Has the united Europe referred to in the German Constitution’s preamble stopped being the lodestar of the Germans’ vision of themselves and German politics?”

John Vinocur goes on to discuss the subject with four Germans "who represent deep political engagement in an integrated Europe" — former Chancellor Helmut Schmidt; Joschka Fischer, former foreign minister, Greens party chief and urban street fighter; Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble, a Christian Democrat and former chief of staff to Chancellor Helmut Kohl; and Hans-Ulrich Klose, the Foreign Ministry’s coordinator for German-American cooperation and a former Social Democratic leader of the Bundestag’s Foreign Relations Committee.

For them, doubts among its friends about Germany’s solidarity, accelerated since the beginning of the recession by Chancellor Angela Merkel’s perceived Germany First reflexes, can’t be a comfortable notion.

…A darker view came from Mr. Beck in an essay titled “German euro-nationalism.”

He sees a new kind of German economic unilateralism replacing its old multilateral creed. He believes an “intellectual nationalism” now exists in Germany that bridges right-left party definitions.

He wrote, “Chancellor Merkel has employed the European currency crisis to set the euro-zone’s financial policy switches in the direction of a German Europe.”

This, Mr. Beck argues, is a “Germany that no longer personifies the most European of Europeans. Rather, it is one that downplays its European duties and ties. It’s a Germany that has dredged up Europe’s German Question.”

John Vinocur concludes:

Clearly, Germany has changed from the country that, in exchange for German reunification, bartered away the Deutsche mark and the Bundesbank’s roles as de facto European reserve currency and Europe’s monetary arbiter.

The new, most pertinent German Question flows from this reality: How can the rest of the Europeans manage an unabashedly self-interested Germany — normal is what it’s called here — that they hardly imagined would emerge from the deal they signed in 1992 as the Maastricht Treaty.

Because they didn’t make the Sale, -

EU Observer: EU skeptical about Iran nuclear deal

It Takes a Village Leftist...

...to rationalize this stuff:

"It would be good...if (Obama) could be dictator for a few years because he could do a lot of good things quickly," [Woody] Allen is quoted as saying.

he told the Spanish-language magazine La Vanguardia in his understated, quasi-Oedipal manner.

Delving into the history of the 20th century, not to mention the history of his erstwhile co-religionists, that sure he’ll be satisfied by the fact that the cattle cars will run on time.

Postcards from Pétainistan

Newsweek:

Seventy years ago, the Nazis conquered France. Since then, the country has changed less than you might think.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la meme chose"

And yet, despite all these changes, certain things about French society have remained remarkably constant since the blitzkrieg, particularly in comparison with the United States. Most important, the French state retains an outsize role in society. In a tradition of dirigisme (from the verb "to direct") that stretches back to the Old Regime, the state encases markets in thick webs of regulations while itself managing health care, most major cultural institutions, and most education from preschool to postdoctoral. When President Nicolas Sarkozy took office in 2007, conservative American observers hoped he would emulate Margaret Thatcher and slash the state sector. But despite some tentative reforms, the state's authority remains largely unshaken (government expenditures consistently account for more than 50 percent of GDP, compared with barely 36 percent in the United States before the recession). And as in 1940, the most attractive career track for smart, ambitious students is the elite civil service. As a French friend once put it to me, "Most of my classmates would rather become assistant secretary of agriculture than start Amazon.com."

Plus ultra.

And both in 1940 and today, immigration has been the occasion for furious outbursts of prejudice and agonized debates about "French identity." In 1940 the worst outbursts were directed at the Jews, and they set the stage for the anti-Semitic policies of the collaborationist Vichy government, which willingly sent 76,000 French Jews to their deaths in the Nazi extermination camps.

- Shookran to Pat “Panopticon” Patterson