The Day After a Deranged Gunman Shoots 3 to Death in Santa Barbara—Prompting Calls for America to Emulate Gun-Control Europe—4 Are Gunned Down in Brussels

Less than 24 hours after three people were shot to death by a California madman (not counting himself, while his other three victims were stabbed to death) — prompting attacks on America's gun culture and calls for the U.S. to emulate gun-control havens such as those in Europe — the Daily News and Libération report a gunman in Brussels

hustling through a hallway at [a] museum where he quickly unpacks the long gun and opens fire 

killing four in the process, "before calmly and quickly packing his rifle and walking off." (It happened at a Jewish museum — in fact, the Jewish Museum — wouldn't you know it?)

Belgium has launched a nationwide manhunt for the gunman … who killed an Israeli tourist couple and a French woman and left a Belgian in critical condition with shots to the face and throat "probably acted alone, was armed and well prepared."

 … The attack, which came on the eve of national and European Parliament elections, led officials to immediately raise anti-terror measures and protection of Jewish sites.

In liberal California, meanwhile, the families involved in the Elliot Rodger tragedy have been blaming the usual suspects:

 … the father of 20-year-old student who was killed in the rampage near the University of California, Santa Barbara blames "craven, irresponsible politicians and the NRA" for his son's death.

Richard Martinez, says his son Christopher Martinez was one of those killed in the rampage that claimed seven in the Isla Vista area near UCSB on Friday night. The father went on to say "When will this insanity stop? When will enough people say, 'Stop this madness!' Too many have died. We should say to ourselves, 'Not one more!'"

As for the family of the killer himself, which is "staunchly against guns", reports the Daily Mail, its members have also been blaming "a country where weapons can be bought with ease":

 … the aunt of British born murderer Elliot Rodger made an impassioned appeal on Sunday to Barack Obama and the U.S. authorities to 'Stop the slaughter.'

Jenni Rodger, 55, who lives in south west France, said: 'He was a sick kid – somebody who was seriously mentally disturbed – and yet he was able to get hold of guns.'

 … 'What kind of a society allows this?' said Ms Rodger. 'How can this be allowed to happen? I want to appeal to Americans to do something about this horrific problem.

'I want the president and the authorities to finally stop these killings. The only possible good thing that can come out of all this is America finally taking action.'

Well, shouldn't the police also be held responsible (at least partially)? After all,

Police interviewed Rodger and found him to be a ‘perfectly polite, kind and wonderful human’. 

Police interviewed Rodger and found him to be a ‘perfectly polite, kind and wonderful human,’ but noted
Read more at http://clashdaily.com/2014/05/dumb-cops-cops-talked-gunman-ahead-shooting-wonderful-human/#CrOPE0hHIV92iU91.99

What's more, deputies never saw the menacing videos before the rampage.

Here we seem to have another culprit: why did the parents not make more of an effort to show the videos to the police?

And how present were those parents in the kid's life? Did they have no idea about his problems regarding his social life (and his virginity)?

All this is to say that, yes, there is a chance that, given an early enough intervention, game could have gotten him laid and quieted his inner rage

remarks Chateau Artiste in a PUA post (cheers to Instapundit).

Shouldn't the earliest intervention have been made by… Elliot's own… father?!

A Croatian friend once told me that in his country, when parents noticed a teen son starting to act like he needed something, something different, the father said "Come with me", drove (or rode, in the olden days) across town, and presented him to… a prostitute. Virginity problem solved, hormone rage lowered. (When learning the kid was a virgin, the gal sometimes did it for free, but always, she made an effort to "give" a bit more than usual.)

And with the money he had, Elliot Rodger could have gone not just to a cheap whore but to a high-class (yes, blonde) call girl. Several call girls. (Yes, all blonde.) At the same time. Several times a week.

OK, not the ideal solution, perhaps, for someone pining for lover and tenderness (although…), but, yes, it would have "quieted his inner rage", making him more attractive in the process to the "normal" LTC girls he craved…

And instead of blaming the NRA and (conservative) politicians for the deaths, how about blaming… the… mass murderer?! The murderer who also used knives and a car in his death spree, and yet no one is speaking of banning knives and motor vehicles.

As for his allegedly being a conservative, John Hinderaker has debunked that canard in this case of a person who in fact turns out to be a "prototypical liberal male" (cheers to Instapundit, again). Indeed, contrary to the wishes of most leftists, most mass murderers seem to turn out to come from the Left side of the political aisle.
Finally, "experts" have been claiming that mass murderers are hard to predict.

That is not entirely true, as I wrote in a dispassionate and in-depth study into the issue of gun control:

Unless I am mistaken, there was not a single occasion of a shootist over the past 50 years, whether underage kids or grown-up adults, who did not previously show warning signs — if only the fact that they were described as "remote" — warning signs that were deliberately and repeatedly ignored, by family and friends as well as by professionals and people in authority; and that, for fear of the left's PC police.

(This is true even in the military; think only of the warning signs concerning Major Nidal Hassan, universally and persistently ignored, prior to the Islamist's 2009 Fort Hood massacre.)

… After a shooting spree, as William S. Burroughs once said, they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn’t do it and who, (not at all) incidentally, would never do anything remotely like it.

 … had an armed American — had the average armed American — been present at the school or at the university, he (or she) would have used his (or her) weapon to start firing back at Adam Lanza [or Elliot Rodger], and either hit the gunman or forced him to take cover, preventing him from continuing his deadly spree.

As for Michael Moore claiming that "Americans kill people", 24 hours after Elliot Rodgers' rampage, a man enters a museum in Brussels (the Jewish Museum, who would have guessed?) and lets loose with the gun he is carrying, killing four (of course, we have no way of knowing if the unidentified killer is an American citizen, but somehow I doubt it). [Update: here is the reaction of a Jewish rock musician — en français.] One more than was shot by Rodger (the three other victims were stabbed to death). (Note to Michael Moore: Brussels is in Belgium; and Belgium is in Europe; neither is in, or anywhere near, the United States.)

Moreover, as I wrote in my post on gun control,

it is easy for leftists, American as well as foreign, to tout the success of the gun control laws in the rest of the Western world when you ignore :
• the 1996 massacre of 16 children at a Scottish primary school;
• the 2000 killing of eight kids in Japan;
• the 2002 deaths of eight people in Nanterre, France;
• the 2002 killing of 16 kids in Erfurt, Germany;
• the 2007 shootings to death of eight people in Tuusula, Finland;
• the killing of 10 people at a Finnish university less than a year later;
• the 2009 killing of 15 people in Winnenden, Germany;
• and, needless to say, Anders Breivik's 2011 mass murder of 77 Norwegians, most of them teenagers.

Dinesh D’Souza had to pay: Try to imagine Michael Moore being arrested during Bush’s 2nd term and the ensuing outcry it would have caused on the Left

Conservative author and filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza pleaded guilty last week to charges of funneling campaign donations in excess of the legal limit through straw donors to the campaign of Senate hopeful Wendy Long.

Thus starts Benny Huang's Patriot Update report.

The D’Souza case has reeked from the beginning of reprisal from on high. His film “2016: Obama’s America” was the second highest grossing political documentary of all time, just behind Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11.” Some have called D’Souza’s film the conservative answer to “Fahrenheit,” though I reject that comparison on the grounds that “2016” is actually truthful. But try to imagine Moore being arrested during Bush’s second term and the ensuing outcry it would have caused on the Left. Hollywood would be making movies for years to come portraying Moore as a political prisoner.

Some might argue that D’Souza is an innocent man who took a plea deal rather than going to trial and risking a harsher sentence. I doubt it, but if that’s the case he should have stuck to his guns.

Even in light of his recent guilty plea, the D’Souza case still seems fishy. In a society in which the application of the law is so often whimsical all prosecutions begin to take on the appearance of selectivity and even payback.

But wait a second, a dissenting voice might say, D’Souza did the crime and now he’s doing the time. How can that be political payback? The answer is that crimes have been so estranged from their punishments that they hardly seem even tangentially related. Yes, it appears that D’Souza broke the law but that in and of itself tells us little about why he’s in the docket.

There are all sorts of people breaking the law right now, in high places and low, who are being excused. Illegal aliens are living in our midst. Plenty of industries are employing them too, which is also illegal. CIA director David Petraeus divulged classified information to his biographer/mistress. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper perjured himself when he said that the NSA was not “wittingly” spying on Americans. Planned Parenthood is failing in their obligation as mandatory reporters by remaining silent about underage rape victims seeking abortions at their facilities. Both AG Eric Holder and IRS official Lois Lerner are in blatant contempt of Congress. Holder is also guilty of perjury, having testified before Congress that he only learned of Operation Fast and Furious “in the last few days,” implying that he had been in the dark about the gun-walking program. Officials at the IRS illegally disclosed classified tax information to the leftwing journalistic foundation ProPublica, as well as to the Human Rights Campaign and the Los Angeles Times.

Certain people are apparently above the law. Dinesh D’Souza isn’t one of those people, though he could be if he were one of the cool kids, that is, a progressive who receives invitations to all the right Georgetown parties. Instead he made a movie that examined Obama’s political education, including his anticolonialist roots and communist mentor, Frank Marshall Davis. So he had to pay.

Which isn’t to say that D’Souza should skate. The rule of law is a part of civilization’s foundation that has been steadily eroding for decades. Law breakers should face punishment and that includes D’Souza. I say this while still maintaining that the campaign finance law he broke is silly and constitutionally dubious. Laws that are unconstitutional should be overturned through judicial review, and laws that are bad policy should be repealed via the legislative process. Simply ignoring laws we don’t like is a slippery slope to anarchy.

Eric Holder, the highest law enforcement officer in the land, disagrees. He argues that his office has great “discretion” in enforcement. “There is a vast amount of discretion … that an attorney general has,” Holder said. “But that discretion has to be used in an appropriate way so that you’re acting consistent [sic] with the aims of the statute but at the same time making sure that you are acting in a way that is consistent with our values, consistent with the Constitution and protecting the American people.”

 A quick look at Holder’s track record, however, reveals that his exercise of discretion is not based on concern for values, the Constitution, or the American people. His idea of “discretion” should really be called bias. Holder’s DOJ only enforces laws it likes and only against people it doesn’t. By ignoring certain laws, it essentially nullifies them without actually having to go through the legislative process.

 … Dinesh D’Souza admitted to violating the law and for that he should pay. Yet his admitted guilt makes him no less of a victim of revanchist prosecution for a minor crime. As the old adage goes, “They’re framing a guilty man in there.”

If you want to change the world, start off by making your bed

Admiral William McRaven, a 36-year veteran Navy SEAL and commander of the forces that killed Osama bin Laden, delivered a rousing commencement speech Thursday to graduates at his alma mater, the University of Texas at Austin

writes Cheryl Carpenter Klimek (thanks to Valerie).

In urging students to find the courage to change the world, McRaven shared these 10 life lessons, as seen in the video below:

1. If you want to change the world, start off by making your bed.
2. If you want to change the world, find someone to help you paddle.
3. If you want to change the world, measure a person by the size of their heart, not the size of their flippers.
4. If you want to change the world get over being a sugar cookie and keep moving forward.
5. If you want to change the world, don’t be afraid of the circuses.
6. If you want to change the world sometimes you have to slide down the obstacle head first.
7. If you want to change the world, don’t back down from the sharks.
8. If you want to change the world, you must be your very best in the darkest moment.
9. If you want to change the world, start singing when you’re up to your neck in mud.
10. If you want to change the world don’t ever, ever ring the bell.

For each lesson, McRaven offered a narrative of how it applied to him. The most poignant explanation came just before No. 10, when he said:

Finally, in SEAL training there is a bell, a brass bell that hangs in the center of the compound for all the students to see.

All you have to do to quit is ring the bell. Ring the bell and you no longer have to wake up at 5 o’clock.  Ring the bell and you no longer have to do the freezing cold swims.

Ring the bell and you no longer have to do the runs, the obstacle course, the PT — and you no longer have to endure the hardships of training.

Just ring the bell.

New York Times Compares Nigel Farage and His UKIP's "Oddballs, Boors, and Buffoons" to Members of the Tea Party

Nigel Farage, the loquacious, dynamic, bumptious, bibulous, irrepressible leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party … was touring the country ahead of the elections to the European Parliament

on Sunday, writes Geoffrey Wheatcroft in a New York Times Magazine article whose title compares England's "oddballs", "boor[s]", and "buffoon[s]" to the members of the American Tea Party (probably not an original idea of the English journalist, but a decision made by the New York Times's editors) and which lets loose with expressions such as "Nigel Farage and his team of oddballs", "the proto-apostle of a revived free-market creed", "Farage’s vulgar assault", "the E.U. as its central obsession", and "you might charitably say that [Godfrey Bloom, a UKIP Euro M.P.] probably isn’t a real bigot, just a boor and a buffoon."

The EU elections are Sunday, but the UKIP posted big local wins today (cheers to Instapundit; incidentally, Matt Chorley and Tom McTague's Daily Mail report has been considerably updated and lengthened since it first appeared).

He has himself been a member of that body for 15 years and will doubtless be re-elected, although he belongs to it only to attack it, and his party exists to destroy it, or at least British participation in it and in the European Union.

 … Outside, there was a knot of demonstrators as well as a BBC television truck: Farage is news. Two protesters held a banner that said (incorrectly as it happens) “Nigel Farage is a banker,” and one woman had a small handwritten placard reading, “They called Hitler charismatic too.” If the comparison is hyperbolic, she’s hardly alone. For all his apparent geniality, Farage is seen by plenty of people as a pernicious figure and his party as a danger to the political health of the nation.

In addition to an egg thrown at him as he was walking through Nottingham three days later, a deluge of criticism and scandal has recently washed over him and his party — from allegations of financial impropriety to a concerted campaign to brand UKIP as racist, an accusation that some of its own activists have done nothing to discourage. And all of it is laughed off by Farage with cheeky bravado. At his peroration in Bath, he said that he had received a letter from a 92-year-old former bomber pilot: “Nigel, you only start getting flak when you’re near the target!”

 … That kind of brazen cheerfulness is part of his appeal, along with his act as a man of the people (albeit an expensively educated man whose father was a stockbroker).

 … Much of UKIP’s appeal is resentment at a fast-changing world and yearning for a lost — and no doubt largely imaginary — England, whispering the last enchantments of the 1950s. It may be retrograde, but some of it is harmless. Farage told me that one of the proudest moments of his life was appearing on “Test Match Special,” the BBC radio program covering cricket. Explaining that to American readers is a little like describing the arcane rites of a tribe in the Borneo rain forest, but anyway, a test match, or an international cricket game, say between England and Australia, lasts from 10:30 in the morning to 6 at night for five days running.

 … If anything, Farage’s brashly rebarbative manner and checkered career have made it too easy for the respectable consensus to dismiss him and to overlook the fact that not everything he says is wrong. The European Union really is bloated, corrupt and undemocratic. Its ruling elite is indeed an unaccountable, self-perpetuating and self-satisfied oligarchy.

A single currency embracing countries wildly disparate in economic performance has been a disaster for many, leaving tens of millions of young people in Greece, Spain and Italy with no jobs, no money and no future. The grandiose posturing of that oligarchy in Brussels or Strasbourg is embarrassing in the circumstances. They speak as if the “European Union” were some equivalent of, and rival to, the American Union, when in reality the member states can’t agree on anything from banking policy to Ukraine.

In one European country after another, nationalist or nativist or frankly racist parties — and UKIP has had a tinge of all these characteristics — are on the rise. It’s possible that many representatives of such parties will sweep into the European Parliament this week, but if that happens, it will not be good enough to blame those who vote for them. To the contrary, it will be hard not to feel that the complacent Eurocracy had it coming.

Down Under, the Immigration "Rules Have Changed"; "Anyone seeking to illegally enter Australia … will never make Australia home"

No Way, says Australia to its would-be illegal immigrants (cheers to Valerie):

You will not make Australia home.

The rules have changed. Check the facts.

Anyone seeking to illegally enter Australia by boat will never make Australia home.

It is the policy and practice of the Australian Government to intercept any vessel that is seeking to illegally enter Australia and safely remove it beyond our waters.

People who travelled to Australia by boat without a visa will not end up in Australia; they have been sent for processing in Nauru or Papua New Guinea.

They won't be able to work, and could be waiting a long time for their claim to be processed.

Australia has the toughest border protection measures ever. The Australian Government has announced that no temporary or permanent protection visas will be granted to anyone who arrives in Australia by boat without a visa until further notice.

The rules apply to everyone; families, children, unaccompanied children, educated and skilled. There are no exceptions.  …/…

Keep your family and friends safe – tell them to come the right way

You can still come to Australia through lawful migration. Asylum seekers are still processed for permanent settlement in Australia if they migrate through the humanitarian, skilled worker, or family migration programmes.

People who migrate to Australia lawfully are given priority when sponsoring their family to come to Australia.

If that ain't clear enough, there is a less p'lite version of the message (cheers to Hervé):

Finding a Hero in Putin: Snubbing the U.S. and the EU, Europe's Fringe Parties Look Towards Russia

At a rally last week near the Palace of Versailles, France’s largest far right party, the National Front, deployed all the familiar theatrics and populist themes of nationalist movements across Europe

reports Andrew Higgins in the New York Times;

the event, part of an energetic push for votes by France’s surging far right ahead of elections this week for the European Parliament, also promoted an agenda distant from the customary concerns of conservative voters: why Europe needs to break its “submission” to the United States and look to Russia as a force for peace and a bulwark against moral decay.

While the European Union has joined Washington in denouncing Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the chaos stirred by pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine, Europe’s right-wing populists have been gripped by a contrarian fever of enthusiasm for Russia and its president, Vladimir V. Putin.

“Russian influence in the affairs of the far right is a phenomenon seen all over Europe,” said a study by Political Capital Institute, a Hungarian research group. It predicted that far right parties, “spearheaded by the French National Front,” could form a pro-Russian bloc in the European Parliament or, at the very least, amplify previously marginal pro-Russian voices.

 … among far right groups, the sympathy for Russia and suspicion of Washington are in part tactical: Focused on clawing back power from the European Union’s bureaucracy, they seize any cause that puts them at odds with policy makers in Brussels and the conventional wisdom of European elites.

But they also reflect a general crumbling of public trust in the beliefs and institutions that have dominated Europe since the end of World War II, including the Continent’s relationship with the United States.

“Europe is a big sick body,” said Alain de Benoist, a French philosopher and a leading figure in a French school of political thought known as the “new right.” Mr. de Benoist said Russia “is now obviously the principal alternative to American hegemony.” Mr. Putin, he added, is perhaps “not the savior of humanity,” but “there are many good reasons to be pro-Russian.”

Some of Russia’s European fans, particularly those with a religious bent, are attracted by Mr. Putin’s image as a muscular foe of homosexuality and decadent Western ways. Others, like Aymeric Chauprade, a foreign policy adviser to the National Front’s leader, Marine Le Pen, are motivated more by geopolitical calculations that emphasize Russia’s role as a counterweight to American power.

Russia has added to its allure through the financing, mostly with corporate money, of media, research groups and other European organizations that promote Moscow’s take on the world. The United States also supports foreign groups that agree with it, but Russia’s boosters in Europe, unlike its leftist fans during the Cold War, now mostly veer to the far right and sometimes even fascism, the cause Moscow claims to be fighting in Ukraine.

Hungary’s Jobbik, one of Europe’s most extreme nationalist parties and a noisy cheerleader for Moscow, is now under investigation by the Hungarian authorities amid allegations that it has received funding from Russia and, in a case involving one of its leading candidates for the European Parliament, that it has worked for Russian intelligence.

No longer dismissed, as they were for decades, as fringe cranks steeped in anti-Semitism and other noxious beliefs from Europe’s fascist past, the National Front and like-minded counterparts elsewhere on the Continent are expected to post strong gains in this week’s election, which begins on Thursday in Britain and the Netherlands and then rolls across Europe through Sunday.

But they are unlikely to form a cohesive bloc: Nationalists from different countries tend to squabble, not cooperate.

Nigel Farage, the leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party, a group zealously opposed to the European Union, and a critic of American foreign policy, is already engaged in a bitter feud with Ms. Le Pen.

But Mr. Farage and Ms. Le Pen have at least found some common ground on Russia. The British politician recently named Mr. Putin as the world leader he most admired “as an operator but not as a human being,” he told a British magazine.

Ms. Le Pen has also expressed admiration for Mr. Putin and called for a strategic alliance with the Kremlin, proposing a “Pan-European union” that would include Russia.

In general, said Doru Frantescu, policy director of VoteWatch Europe, a Brussels research group, the affections of far right Europeans for Mr. Putin are simply opportunistic rather than ideological, “a convergence of interests toward weakening the E.U.”

  [At the recent election rally, Mr. Chaprade lambasted Washington for trying, unsuccessfully, to pressure France to cancel a contract with Russia for the sale of two amphibious assault ships. "We have the right to be partners with whomever we want without referring to the State Department of the United States," he said.]

The European Union, said Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, a member of the French Parliament and the niece of Marine Le Pen, “is the poodle of the United States.”

Russia offers the prospect of a new European order free of what Mr. Chauprade, in his own speech, described as its servitude to a “technocratic elite serving the American and European financial oligarchy” and its “enslavement by consumerist urges and sexual impulses.”

The view that Europe has been cut adrift from its traditional moral moorings gained new traction this month when Conchita Wurst, a bearded Austrian drag queen, won the annual Eurovision Song Contest. Russian officials and the Russian Orthodox Church bemoaned the victory — over, among others, singing Russian twins — as evidence of Europe’s moral disarray.

At the National Front’s pre-election rally, Mr. Chauprade mocked the “bearded lady” and won loud applause with a passionate plaint that Europeans had become a rootless mass of “consumers disconnected from their natural attachments — the family, the nation and the divine.”

The Learnist: Why Harry Truman Decided to Drop the Atomic Bomb on Japan

Curated By Dave Stancliff — Why Harry Truman Decided to Drop the Atomic Bomb on Japan:

President Truman never showed public regret for unleashing atomic bombs on Japan. In this letter to Chicago Sun Times reporter, Irv Kupcinet, written on August 5th, 1963, he thanks Kupcinet for a favorable column he wrote about him and his decision to drop atomic bombs on Japan.

The Paris Fair's Naughty Area: Vibrators in the shape of the Eiffel Tower, available (bien sûr) in red, white, or blue

The French, as we all know, are an inventive people

quips Stephen Clarke in the Daily Telegraph.

Where would we be without the bikini, hot-air balloons, and pétanque? (that gives me an idea for a great new televised sport, by the way, but let’s forget that for the moment.)

The problem is that France’s famous inventiveness can go a bit too far … It is May 1, the so-called Fête du Travail, or “Work Party” – a day on which, despite its name, the French don’t work.
 
[Alongside] the May Day parade (at which the French celebrate their right to work by marching in protest at working conditions), one traditional aspect of the holiday is the brin du muguet, the aromatic sprig of lily of the valley that is given as a gift to loved ones. Walk out into any main street and you’ll find half a dozen improvised muguet stands, with people selling bucketloads of flowers they’ve obtained from I don’t know where – I can only imagine that the autoroutes of France were full of fragrant-smelling lorries last night.

The sellers range from highly professional flower merchants with slick bouquets to kids earning extra cash for the family. The problem with the muguet stands this year was the sheer inventiveness of it all. I saw brins de muguet with a rose, brins in disposable vases of varying sickly colours, brins swamped in jungles of foliage, cut brins implanted in fake plastic “soil” … Where, I wanted to know, were the straightforward sprigs of lily of the valley au naturel? I couldn’t see any.

 … this is an inventive time of year in Paris. It’s the week of the Foire de Paris – the trade fair at which inventors and innovators show off their groundbreaking products.

 … The biggest novelty … was a new section of the fair, the Espace Coquin, or “naughty area” – a lovely euphemism. This curtained zone, out of bounds to the under-16s, is hosting a mini-fair for erotic products that – according to one report I saw – include vibrators in the shape of the Eiffel Tower, available (bien sûr) in red, white or blue. I suppose it’s the French version of “lie back and think of England.” Now personally, I’d feel that that was pushing patriotism a bit too far. Though you have to admit that the French are lucky to have a national monument that is so perfectly phallic. Imagine the same concept applied to the Pyramids (ouch) or Mount Rushmore (no, on second thoughts, don’t imagine that one at all).

Naturally, this being France, there is a pun to the whole thing. The annual competition for the best invention at the Foire de Paris is called the Concours Lépine. It just so happens that “pine” is a slang word for penis. So, spoken aloud, “concours Lépine” sounds like “concours les pines”, or “dicks competition”. If the vibrating Eiffel Towers win a prize, the headlines will be wonderful. …

France's Sale of the Ultramodern Mistral Warship to Moscow: A massive transfer of sensitive military technology by a NATO ally to the Kremlin

The French government is facing pressure from the U.S. over the sale of two warships to the Russian navy

reports Fox News,

amid reports that Paris plans to push ahead with the controversial deal.

Despite broader efforts by the U.S. and Europe to isolate Moscow over the intervention and unrest in Ukraine, French President Francois Hollande said he plans to go through with a $1.6 billion deal to build warships for Russia, NPR reported.

No Pasarán has been on this subject for the past four years. Indeed, with rare exceptions, I do not think that any American newspaper or blog had until now written anything of consequence about what amounts to as a massive transfer of sensitive military technology by a NATO ally to the Kremlin on Obama's watch — France having decided to sell Russia its ultramodern helicopter transportation ship (to the horror of, among others, Georgia).

We linked story after story about the Mistral — many of them written by the most conservative pundit in the entire New York Times organization (far more so than David Brooks), the International Herald Tribune's Paris-based John Vinocur. It would have been important for Americans (all Americans, not just conservatives) to understand, pre-Syria and pre-Crimea, to what degree the idealistic Obama White House had already then been deficient (or appeasing) in its relations with the Russian bear.

The money quote comes in the French defense minister's January 2011 excuse:

In Lisbon, I heard Barack Obama tell Dmitry Medvedev: "You're not just a partner but a friend." You can not blame France for delivering boats to a friend.

There you have it: that says all about Obama's idealistic foreign policy in a nutshell, doesn't it?!

Necronom's H R GIger of "Alien" Fame Is Dead

The Swiss artist and designer of Ridley Scott's Alien, H. R. Giger, has died aged 74 

reports the BBC, after a fall down the stairs at his Zurich home.

Born in 1940, Giger was best known for his 'Xenomorph' alien in Scott's sci-fi horror masterpiece for which he won a visual effects Oscar in 1980.

He studied architecture and industrial design in Zurich and was known for creating strange dreamscapes.

Meticulously detailed, Giger's surrealist paintings were usually produced in large formats and then reworked with an airbrush and usually feature scenes of humans and machines fused together.

Giger described his style as "biomechanical".

One of his pieces in particular - Necronom IV - inspired the alien killer in Sir Ridley's hit film. 

 … British film director Edgar Wright tweeted: "RIP the great HR Giger. The Swiss surrealist who made night terrors into unforgettable art. We will miss you."

We can’t have the American people thinking that hard work leads to success; people might start asking why liberal constituencies don’t just work harder instead of demanding more money from those who actually produce something

Liberals have a new word for what normal people call “success”

says Kurt Schlichter (thanks to Instapundit).

They call it “privilege,” as if a happy, prosperous life is the result of some magic process related to where your great-great-great-grandfather came from.

It’s the latest leftist argument tactic, which means it is a tactic designed to prevent any argument and to beat you into rhetorical submission. Conservatives, don’t play their game.

It’s easy to see that this notion that accomplishment comes not from hard work but from some mysterious force, operating out there in the ether, is essential to liberal thought. To excuse the dole-devouring layabouts who form so much of the Democrat voting base, it is critical that they undermine the achievements of those who support themselves. We can’t have the American people thinking that hard work leads to success; people might start asking why liberal constituencies don’t just work harder instead of demanding more money from those who actually produce something.

This “Check your privilege” meme is the newest trump card du jour on college campuses and in other domains of progressive tyranny. It morphed into existence from the “You racist!” wolf-cry that is now so discredited that it produces little but snickers even among liberal fellow travelers. After all, if everyone is racist – and to the progressives, everyone is except themselves – then no one is really racist. And it’s kind of hard to take seriously being called “racist” by adherents of a political party that made a KKK kleagle its Senate majority leader.

 …The plain fact is that what they understand to be “privilege” is really just what regular people understand is a “consequence.” It is a consequence of hard work, of delaying gratification and of sacrifice. No one came and bestowed this country upon us. We built it. Some of us died doing so. If we have privilege, it was earned at Bunker Hill, Gettysburg and Normandy. It’s not a function of skin tone or the number of vowels in your name; it’s a function of character.

Unlike them, many of us have lived overseas, and often in rather bullet-rich environs. Our life experience consists of more than reading Herbert Marcuse and showing solidarity with oppressed Guatemalan banana pickers by boycotting Chiquita. What we have today in this country is not anything to be ashamed of or to apologize for, but to be proud of.

Their poisonous notion of privilege is really just another way for liberals to pick winners and losers based not upon who has won or lost in the real world, but upon who is useful and not useful to the progressive project at any given moment.

This is why you see young people descended from Holocaust survivors tagged as bearers of “privilege” when their tattooed, emaciated grand-parents landed here with nothing but the clothes on their backs. Others who grew up in luxury get to bear the label of “unprivileged” because ten generations ago some relative came from a particular continent.

It’s idiocy. It’s immoral. We need to say so. For too long we’ve put up with this silliness.

What’s particularly amusing when you push back on these clowns is that they are so surprised to experience resistance to their petty fascism. Many of them, being the special snowflakes that they are, have never had anyone express to them the notion that they might be wrong. University administrators are too terrified of these whiny pipsqueaks to correct them. Certainly their helicopter parents never did – Gaia forbid that their little psyches be harmed by confronting them with their foolishness.

For too long we conservatives have played nicely, being good sports about being slandered and returning respect when offered contempt. It didn’t work. It’s time to try something new. And that something new is not taking guff from some 20 year-old gender studies major with a stupid tribal tatt, a sense of entitlement and a big mouth.

What they say is privilege is what we say is a reward for doing more with our lives than waiting for Uncle Sucker to refill our EBT cards. “Privilege” is a result of not being a human sloth, of not doing drugs, of not having kids we can’t afford them, and of not living our lives as a practical exercise in chaos theory.

To see a number of ways to answer the various accusations of liberals, both in America and abroad, don't forget to check out Americans Anonymous, which gives a myriad of examples…

Guess Who Won at the Eurovision Song Contest? A Bearded Austrian Transvestite (Video)

Austrian drag act Conchita Wurst has been crowned the winner of the 59th annual Eurovision Song Contest held in Denmark's capital, Copenhagen

reports the BBC (video at the link) which decided to stay clear of Bruno jokes.

The singer, whose real name is Tom Neuwirth, won with the song Rise Like a Phoenix, collecting 290 points.

I'm all for voting for a bearded transvestite's song if/when it is the best. Austria's song wasn't bad. But it wasn't fantastic either. Like the Swedish entry, the Dutch entry, and the Russian entry.

It was political correctness all the way around. With gays all over the continent voting for Conchita and with all the Soviet ex-republics voting systematically for one other.

BBC watcher Andy Den Haag adds,

Oh the Austrian guy's [gal's?] name - rather rude isnt it? Conchita is spanish for Vagina and Wurst is german for sausage

Update:  And Hervé adds:

Singing a song called "Rise like a Penis".
That's all you need to win the Zerovision.

Furthermore, the CBC quotes a Thomson Reuters story on the creeping in of geopolitics:

The Eurovision competition, which has been held annually since 1956, was created to help foster unity after World War Two and is meant to be non-political. But political strife slipped between the cracks at this year's contest.

Many in the audience booed when the Russian contestants, the 17-year-old Tolmachevy twin sisters, were presented at Saturday's opening ceremony and again when they were awarded points from other, mostly neighbouring, nations.

 … Ukraine's song was voted the sixth best of the 26 songs, and Russia's came in at seventh.
Since politics had played a role in the voting in the past, half the points are now awarded by professional judges and half by the public via phone and SMS.

Nudity in France: pass the beach towel – I'm British

There are many things one has to get used to as an expat in France

notes Gillian Harvey in the Daily Telegraph:

bureaucracy (bad), café culture (good), cheap wine (very good). But nothing beats the shock to the system of this country’s very different attitude to the human body.

No, I’m not talking about the famous French physique – maintained despite the copious chomping of croissants for breakfast – or even the nudist campsite that I’ve discovered is just 5km from my front door.

I’m talking about the blasé attitude towards exposed flesh, whether at the roadside or in the hospital.

 … Some of the local beaches, too, can cause the odd eyebrow raise. Last summer, I couldn’t help but notice when relaxing on a deckchair (as much as you can relax with three toddlers and a baby bump) that I was one of the few who wasn’t getting a full tan on my upper half. OK, had I wriggled out of my vest top at that point, it may have prompted calls to the RSPCA (or its French equivalent), but – like most of my terribly British friends – I’ve never been that bothered by the odd white bit, and would take covering up over letting it all hang out every time.

Mind you, the exposure of bronzed breasts paled in comparison to one man in the water that day: obviously on an impromptu visit to the shore, he had decided to frolic in the water in his grey Y-fronts, the wet cotton ensuring that not much was left to the imagination. And don’t get me started on the Speedos – while British men tend to go for overlong beach shorts, the French seem seduced by costumes that make all but the most buffed-up look as if they’ve tried on their wife’s underwear for a bet.

Could It Be that J Edgar Hoover Wasn't as Paranoid — or as Despotic — as the Former FBI Director Is Commonly Depicted?

Among the many, and totally unpardonable, sins we hear of American history in leftist history books is that of the harassment the harmless leftists and communists in America suffered unfairly from, mainly perhaps from the 1940s and 1950s. Due to "collective paranoia," we are told, McCarthyism tore apart the nation, destroying democracy in the process, with vicious witch hunts "sicced" on poor, innocent, and indeed noble victims.

Of course, t'is true that we silly paranoid Americans and Westerners had nothing, absolutely nothing, to fear from the harmless communists. Nothing other, of course, than the fact that the party members living in the West were fully supportive of their comrades in the Soviet Union, that the head of the USSR was a man named Stalin, that his Red Army was occupying half of Europe, and that the apparatus that Lenin and Stalin created was killing millions upon millions upon millions upon millions upon millions upon millions of people, Soviet and other. But apart from that, what have the communists ever done to harm us?!

But certainly, we are told, the leftists in America were (apart from that pesky little detail of supporting Stalin) different — harmless beings harassed by witch hunts for no other reason than being leftist, or different, and having different ideas and different plans. What, besides paranoia (collective or other), could possibly explain people like J Edgar Hoover (along with Joe McCarthy et al) not wanting leftists in government? (Head shakes, sighs, eye rolls…)

Well, let's take a moment to ask a few questions: what is it we have had since the 2008 election if not government by those "harmless" leftists?

Who is it who in effect are tearing apart the nation (and dare we say so?) destroying, or at least harming (viciously?), democracy in the process?


"Half the country feels — and is — beset by government," to hear Peggy Noonan say it (thanks to Instapundit).

We are suffering in great part from the politicization of everything and the spread of government not in a useful way but a destructive one. Everyone wants to help the poor, the old and the sick; the safety net exists because we want it. But voters and taxpayers feel bullied, burdened and jerked around, which again is not new but feels more intense every day. Common sense and native wit tell them America is losing the most vital part of itself in the continuing shift of power from private to public. Rules, regulations, many of them stupid, from all the agencies—local, state, federal—on the building of a house, or the starting of a business.

It's all part of the malaise, the sclerosis. So is the eroding end of the idea that religious scruples and beliefs have a high place that must culturally and politically be respected. The political-media complex is bravely coming down on florists with unfashionable views.

"The political-media complex is bravely coming down on florists with unfashionable views."

That's bad enough. Isn't it?

But isn't it far worse than that?

Unfashionable views being the mainstream, we have the government wielding its power against the average (i.e., the honest and law-abiding) citizen.

We have the government by those "harmless" leftists — I should say government by, of, and for those "harmless" leftists — which consists in the authorities going after people who have committed no crime or misdemeanor — none, that is, besides being skeptical of the very "harmless" leftists in government and/or of their policies. We have tax authorities tracking down and intimidating common citizens and we have the justice department tracking down and shaking down citizens for alleged crimes, or should we call, the worst of all possible sins.

What we have, indeed, is the leftists' government spending (wasting) colossal sums of money, on things that not only bring nothing to the average law-abiding American (whatever the color of his or her skin) but is on the contrary inimical to his or her interests as they are supposed to do little else but convince him that he or she is the product of a nightmarish society of intolerance (while showing that the leftists, and their policies, are necessary to save us from ourselves and bring about some sort of paradise on Earth).

Check out Elizabeth Price Foley's column on Peggy Noonan race-card playin' Eric "Holder’s latest foray into the intellectual tar pit of disparate impact, [the latest] the cause du jour of the political left, which isn’t interested in achieving racial harmony but racial balancing" (thanks to Glenn Reynolds).

Spending millions to collect data about racial disparities in police encounters will further various leftist political goals, including challenges to police stop-and-frisk practices. Indeed, data showing differences between whites and blacks — in virtually any situation — can provide valuable ammunition for intimidation. Under Holder’s tenure, DOJ now spends an inordinate amount of time and effort attempting to identify practices for which racial statistical differences can be obtained. DOJ then alleges racial discrimination, using the statistics as a cudgel to beat private parties and states into behaving the way the Obama administration wants. It’s Chicago Way extortion, applied nationwide.

Holder’s DOJ has used disparate impact in a mind-boggling array of situations. It has filed lawsuits — and garnered settlements — against virtually every major bank in the nation, alleging that because banks lend money to a higher percentage of white than minority applicants, they are engaging in racial discrimination. It has sued private employers for using credit and background checks, claiming that because a higher percentage of blacks than whites have poor credit or criminal records, the checks are racially discriminatory.

It has challenged competency tests for workers such as firefighters and police officers, claiming that because more whites than blacks pass, the tests are discriminatory. It has sued states that provide private school vouchers, perversely asserting that because more black children use the vouchers to escape failing public schools, the state must be trying to make public schools “more white.” It has suggested that because laws limiting felons’ voting rights impact more blacks than whites, they are racially discriminatory. It has issued threatening “guidance” to public schools, asserting that because more black than white students are disciplined by school administrators, “racial discrimination in school discipline is a real problem.”

"It’s Chicago Way extortion, applied nationwide."

J Edgar Hoover was supposed to go after mobsters and gangsters, we are told, not "harmless" political operatives who were doing nothing but sharing, entirely legally, their personal opinions.

Wouldn't plans to lead to nationwide-applied "Chicago Way extortion" be a reason for Hoover to treat leftist critics of America with a measure of circumspection?

In that sense, Olavo de Carvalho's thoughts are revealing. The difference between corruption in rightist governments and leftist governments, said the Brazilian philosopher, is that when rightists know they are doing wrong, they try to hide it (and are perhaps even sometimes ashamed), leftists are proud of their doings and try to write it into law.

When reading the following, remember that the comments apply to a foreign (a Brazilian) worker's party, Lula's Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT). And yet, ask yourself if they are not — chillingly — familiar.

It is one thing, I said, remembering an old Arab saying, to steal in the weight of the flour, selling 750 grams for the price of one kilo. Another thing is to modify the scale so that never more it accuses the difference between 750 grams and one kilo.

The old corrupt politicians [of Brazil] limited themselves to stealing. The PT transformed the robbery into a system, the system in political militancy, the militancy in a substitute of the laws and institutions, lowered to the condition of temporary impediments to the construction of the great utopia.

The old politicians stole for their own good, individually or in small groups, moderating the audacity of the blows from the fear of the denunciation. PT steals with a moral authority of someone, who arrogating itself the nobleness of a hypothetical future, is already forgiven a priori from all the faults of the present; with tranquillity and fearlessness from he who uses licitly all possible means, they steal since they are the absolute master of all.

Any political party that turns against "the society", promising to rebuild it from scratch — if not to reform the human nature itself — places itself , instantly, above the effective moral criteria in this society, and it cannot submit to them unless in appearance, laughing to themselves, at the naïveté of those who take them as a regular and loyal adversary. It is not possible to destroy the system and to obey its rules at the same time, but it's possible to use these rules just as a temporary camouflage until the destruction is completed. However, the system, as everything that is human, holds equally its dose of injustices, errors, scandals, and its parcel of morality, order, loyalty. All system consists of a precarious balance between disorder and order. No sane intelligence ignores that only it is possible to restrain or to control the former by fortifying the latter. All attempts to change the system integrally, either through the abrupt revolutionary subversion, either through the slow and gradual erosion of the institutional bases, starts for destroying the balance and therefore the order, under the vain promise of a future without disequilibrium nor disorder. The modesty of the objectives, the limitation of the political program to precise points that do not affect the beddings of the system, here is the mark of the honest parties — and this is not, definitively, the make of [a party like the] PT. The dishonesty of this party is measured by the megalomaniac amplitude of its promises.

Sexual Revolution

The "harmless" leftists also brought us such cultural wonders as the sexual revolution, which is supposed to be a giant leap forward against a society of old-fashioned taboos.

Is that all that the revolution has brought us? Is it only all that is good?

We now live in a society where kids asked for directions run screaming from a stranger's car because the driver was a man; where later London mayor Boris Johnson was once asked to change his seat in an airplane (in an airliner!) because the flight attendants did not want to seat a lone-traveling boy next to a singly-traveling man; where kids in French parks are forbidden to speak with any adult (certainly with any adult male) although they are their in classes of dozens running around on the grass and supervised by a number of teachers; where over 600 mall visitors walked by two lost- and "utterly forlorn"-looking girls in a Daily Mail experiment, ignoring them because they were afraid of being labeled a pedophile; and where males are no longer trusted to be in the teaching profession. Says Good Morning America's Susan Donaldson James:

"It's very hard to change the suspicion of men who are going to elementary education when there are so few of them," [said Massachusetts psychologist Michael Thompson, co-author of the groundbreaking 2000 book "Raising Cain," which argues that society shortchanges boys]. "Schools ask me to talk to men on their faculty and when I sit with them behind closed doors, they say the moms look at them like potential pedophiles. 

"If they are too nurturing or a mother comes in and sees a teacher reading in a chair and the child is leaning against the teacher or cuddling him, they freak out," he said. "Men tell me they only have to look in the mom's face to know what they are thinking." 

The professor adds that

as I’ve noted before, is that if you watch old movies, or even cartoons, it’s regularly assumed that adult males have nurturing instincts. Only in our supposedly progressive era are men reduced to cardboard cutouts dominated by lust and Mammon.

This is the mighty good that the sexual revolution and its good riddance to taboos have brought us: where no one trusts anyone, where every neighbor is a predator, a pedophile, or suspected of being one, if "only" potentially. Or, almost just as bad, a wife-beater or a father with no love for his children, who deserves to have his wife divorce him, his family broken up, and himself left as destitute as possible. (You will notice that the "culprits" most often are men, who are part of the gender most associated with — dare we speak the truth without hysterics breaking out? — a spirit of independence, not giving in, and resistance to the authorities.)

(Question: But, but… who is one supposed to turn to, then, in all those cases? Answer: but to the government, of course — to the government led by avant-garde progressives, or to a member of their ever-growing army of beneficent we-are-here-to-help-you bureaucrats; to the government forced by our own ineptitude and/or our own criminal degenerateness to take over the totality of our lives, for our own good.)

Glenn Reynolds links a Kevin Williamson post on Instapundit, leading to another description of the "harmless" leftists (or one of their subgroups), and the suspicion that the idea of putting spoiled brats (even be they grown-ups) to lord over our fate is hardly the smartest thing to do:  It has become simply “I Want!” in the mouths of a minority of women, but the right kind of women.

Feminism is not an idea or a collection of ideas but a collection of appetites wriggling queasily together like a bag of snakes. Feminism has nothing to do with the proposition that women should be considered whole and complete members of the body politic, though it has enjoyed great success marketing itself that way. . . .

A useful definition is this: “Feminism is the words ‘I Want!’ in the mouths of three or more women, provided they’re the right kind of women.” Feminism must therefore accommodate wildly incompatible propositions — e.g., (1) Women unquestionably belong alongside men in Marine units fighting pitched battles in Tora Bora but (2) really should not be expected to be able to perform three chin-ups. Or: (1) Women at Columbia are empowered by pornography but (2) women at Wellesley are victimized by a statue of a man sleepwalking in his Shenanigans. And then there is Fluke’s Law: (1) Women are responsible moral agents with full sexual and economic autonomy who (2) must be given an allowance, like children, when it comes to contraceptives.

More generally, the leftist society is where everyone is suspected of intolerance, of partisanship, and of (supposed) racism — his own and that of his wicked ancestors — along with innumerable other ghastly sins. In France, a decades-old effort to get drivers to slow down, by installing radars all over the country (which incidentally collects millions of Euros in revenue), refers to drivers — i.e, to common citizens — as "potential assassins" (des assassins en herbe).

No wonder Obama — and, by default, the media — cheated to win the 2012 elections: how could these avant-garde visionaries even think (perish the thought) of leaving such ghastly people as we-basically-trust-the-public Republicans to take over, dropping the utopia supposed to make their lot, the lot of all of us, better?!

Perhaps what is worst in all this, the most insidious of all, is that all of this is occurring, and most of the nation is not being informed of it. Au contraire, they are being told that the Obama White House is at worst a normal administration like any other and at best one that represents a huge step forward in all manners of ways…

This is the "dream" of the left: a place where every citizen is suspected of being a doofus and/or a criminal. And therefore where he must, for his own good, be led by a group of his betters, and by their ever-growing army of bureaucrats.

That's what the vast majority of countries and societies on the rest of the planet looks like. This is what leftists — what statists — American and foreign, dream of for the United States — and indeed have dreamed of for over two centuries. (Witness the Nobel  Peace Prize for Barack Obama by the giddy Norwegians the giddy Europeans only two weeks after the apologizer-in-chief entered the White House.)

Guess what: I don't know much about J Edgar Hoover, but might it not be that in the end, he was little more was one of those average Americans who had the silly temerity to believe that the average human being, that the average citizen, is good and caring besides being trustworthy?

And might it not be that the FBI chief wasn't so far off (or paranoid) when he, like millions of people, opined that allowing progressives into government would ruin the country, while tearing apart society and harming democracy? When he opined that, in the words of Olavo de Carvalho, the Left would place itself "above the effective moral criteria in this society," pretending to be "a regular and loyal adversary" in order "to use these rules just as a temporary camouflage until the destruction is completed"?

Update: Obrigado per o link, Sarah

Just as I was never told as a child that Lee Harvey Oswald was a communist stooge who defected to the USSR, the next generation won’t know that the 9/11 hijackers were hot for Jihad unless someone tells them

New York is set to unveil its September 11th Memorial Museum next month and already it’s ruffling feathers at the Council for American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). The self-styled “civil rights group” has taken issue with a seven-minute film clip entitled “The Rise of al-Qaeda.” The film describes the terrorist group as “Islamist,” and rightly identifies its modus operandi as Jihad. In other words, it tells the truth. 

Thus starts Benny Huang's latest opus.

The museum has thus far decided not to placate CAIR by diluting facts that make Muslims feel bad. Thankfully, someone with a smidgen of intestinal fortitude is refusing to be intimidated by the perpetually offended imams at CAIR.

Yet we shouldn’t be lulled into a false sense of security. The battle over “The Rise of al-Qaeda” is but one in a larger campaign to place the hijackers’ identities and motivations onto the list of Things We Can’t Talk About.

What an incredibly long list it is. Despite the fact that isn’t written down anywhere, the list of Things We Can’t Talk About is very real indeed. It is maintained mostly, but not exclusively, by liberals. They define the boundaries of acceptable discourse and they reserve the right to yank those boundaries incrementally tighter according to their whim. We can’t talk about communism, black violent crime statistics, Barack Obama’s Marxist upbringing, race and IQ, welfare abuse, or the health risks of male homosexuality.

And pretty soon we won’t be able to talk about the attacks of September 11th either, not unless we feign amnesia about who did it and why. It will be one of those things that only old screwballs talk about.

 … Never did I imagine that it would be controversial to say that Muslims attacked us on 9/11. How did we arrive here?

What appears to be happening now is a concerted effort to make the world forget what took place that September morning or, failing that, to erase from our collective memory the identity of the perpetrators. Years ago I would have thought it impossible to achieve such a task but that’s because I was twenty-one years old when those towers crumbled and the attacks have remained the formative event of my generation.

 I can see now that knowledge must be transmitted from each generation to the next. To my yet unborn children 9/11 will be ancient history, something like the Kennedy Assassination is to me. Just as I was never told as a child that Lee Harvey Oswald was a communist stooge who defected to the USSR, the next generation won’t know that the 9/11 hijackers were hot for Jihad unless someone tells them.

Read the whole thing…

The horrific state of our family courts: Husband Commits Suicide, (Ex-)Wife Asks Court for Copyfight of Suicide Note

Update: DIVORCED MEN 9.7 times more likely to commit suicide than divorced women (thanks to Instapundit).

Does a wife who may have driven a husband to suicide with the assistance of our corrupt family court system, then have a legal right to claim copyright

asks A Voice for Men's Paul Elam (merci à Hervé)

— of his suicide note?

According to attorney Rachelle E. Hill, of Bean, Kinney and Korman, and a judge, that is precisely the claim. Their lawyer has written the offices of A Voice for Men to demand that we remove a post from the forums containing the note.

It is not going to happen.

 … My identity was taken from me, as result of this process. When it began, I was a commercial real estate broker with CB Richard Ellis. I lived by the Golden rule and made a living by bringing parties together and finding the common ground. My reputation as a broker was built on my honesty and integrity. When it ended, I was broke, homeless, unemployed and had no visitation with my own children.

I had no confidence and was paralyzed with fear that I would be going to jail whenever my ex-wife wanted. Nothing I could say or do would stop it. This is what being to death or ‘targeted’ by a psychopath looks like. This is the outcome. I didn’t somehow change into a ‘high-conflict’ person or lose my ability to steer clear of the law. I’ve had never been arrested, depressed, homeless or suicidal before this process. The stress and pressure applied to me was deliberate and nothing I could do or say would get me any relief. Nothing I or my attorneys said to my ex-wife’s attorney or to the Court made any difference. Truth, facts, evidence or even the best interest of my children had no affect on the outcome.

The family court system is broken, but from my experience, it is not the laws, its the lawyers. They feed off of the conflict. They are not hired to reduce conflict or protect the best interest of children, which is why third parties need to be involved. It should be mandatory for children to have a guardian ad litem, with extensive training in abuse and aggression.

It is absolutely shameful that the Fairfax County Court did nothing to intervene or understand the ongoing conflict. Judge Randy Bellows also used the Children as punishment, by withholding access for failing to fax a receipt. The entire conflict centered around the denial of access to the children, it was inconceivable to me that he would use children like this. This is exactly what my ex-wife was doing and now Judge Bellows was doing it for her.

To all my family, friends and the people that supported me through this process, I am so sorry. I know my reactions and behavior throughout this process did not always make sense. None of this made sense to me either. I had no help and the only suggestion I got from my attorneys was to remain silent.

At first, I did what I was told, remained silent and listened to my attorneys. Then after I had given my ex-wife full custody to try and appease her, I learned about Psychopathy and emailed Dr. Samenow about my concerns and asked him for help. Of course, I was ignored. As the conflict continued, I was forced to defend myself. When that didn’t work, I thought I could get the help I needed by speaking out. There is no right or wrong way to defend yourself from abuse. Naively, I thought that abuse was abuse and it would be recognized and something would be done. I thought speaking out would end the abuse or at least get them to back off. It didn’t. When no one did anything they were emboldened.

I took my own life because I had come to the conclusion that there was nothing I could do or say to end the abuse. Every time I got up off my knees, I would get knocked back down. They were not going to let me be the father I wanted to be to my children. People may think I am a coward for giving up on my children, but I didn’t see how I was going to heal from this. I have no money for an attorney, therapy or medication. I have lost four jobs because of this process. I was going to be at their mercy for the rest of my life and they had shown me none.

Being alienated, legally abused, emotionally abused, isolated and financially ruined are all a recipe for suicide. I wish I were stronger to keep going, but the emotional pain and fear of going to court and jail [because of exorbitant child support] became overwhelming. I became paralyzed with fear. I couldn’t flee and I could not fight. I was never going to be allowed to heal or recover. I wish I were better at articulating the psychological and emotional trauma I experienced.

I could fill a book with all the lies and mysterious rulings of the Court. Never have I experienced this kind of pain. I asked for help, but good men did nothing and evil prevailed. All I wanted was a Guardian Ad Litem for my children. Any third party would have been easily been able to confirm or refute all of my allegations, which is why none was ever appointed to protect the children or reduce the conflict.

Abuse is about power and control. Stand up for the abused and speak out. If someone speaks out about abuse, believe them.

Please teach my children empathy and about emotional invalidation and ‘gas-lighting’ or they may end up like me.

God have mercy on my soul.

Chris Mackney

This link will give you a copy of demand letter, which like the suicide note, has the children’s names redacted.

Letter.
Within that document we note that an Arlington County, Virginia judge has ruled that Dina Mackney, the widow of this suicide victim, is authorized to seek reasonable legal remedies to force a large number of websites, where this information has already been made available, to remove the information in question.

We reject the notion that our publication is in violation of copyright laws, and that the suicide note is not covered by fair use statutes.

We also believe, given the horrific state of our family courts, it is in the compelling public interest that his final words be published and disseminated as robustly as possible.

The chief responsibility of A Voice for Men is advocacy for men who have been trampled in precisely the ways outlined in this tragic note, and to do whatever is within our means to address the disproportionate suicide rate in men, especially as it relates to high conflict divorces.

If what Mr. Mackney said in his final note is true, and we have no reason to believe that what amounts to his dying words are less than that, then what this threatened legal action represents is an attempt by his former wife to chase him down – even into the grave – to issue the final and complete edict for his silence in the face of horrendous abuse.

It is an act which will also probably eliminate any chance those children ever have to know how their father felt and what he was thinking before taking his own life.

I will gladly take residence in my own grave before I comply with that kind of agenda.

• Addendum – the suicide note provided here is not complete. The complete version of the letter is available here:

http://www.brainsyntax.com/Portal/Material/1/Lasttestamentofalovingfatherabusedbythefamilycourtsystem.pdf

Do not forget to read Stephen Baskerville's take on the divorce industry…

A business deals that threatened to break up a government

There are groundbreaking business deals. And then there are ones that threaten to break up governments.

Thus spake Danny Hakim in the New York Times a few months ago.

When Denmark gave the global financial giant Goldman Sachs the go-ahead on Thursday to buy a stake in its state utility, the move was not exactly followed by a celebratory signing ceremony.

So divided was the Socialist People’s Party that it withdrew its ministers from the country’s governing coalition. Some party members said the deal ceded too much power to Goldman. Annette Vilhelmsen, the party’s leader [pictured below], who supported the deal, stepped down from her leadership role since she could not reach agreement within her party.

The party’s withdrawal from the coalition left the government of Helle Thorning-Schmidt [she of the Cameron/Obama selfie at the Nelson Mandela funeral, pictured above], the prime minister, with a tenuous grip on power.

That so many Danes have been aghast at the idea of giving Goldman Sachs a prominent role in the country’s energy future reflects how far the damage to the investment bank’s reputation has spread since the financial crisis.

However much the financial world might envy Goldman’s trading prowess, many Danes see Goldman as an emblem of an industry that helped cause the crisis and then profited handsomely even as much of the Continent still struggles to recover.

… The deal was approved … by a parliamentary committee. The departure of the Socialists left the two remaining parties in a precarious position.

 … But Prime Minister Thorning-Schmidt, who is best known internationally for her recent “selfie” with President Obama at the funeral of Nelson Mandela, said she would form a new government. 

 … Under the terms of the deal, Goldman would invest about $1.45 billion for an 18 percent stake in Dong Energy, the state utility, which has become a green energy exemplar in its push for electricity from wind turbines. Though the deal buys far from a controlling share, the minority stake would come with special privileges.

THE LEFT WING INTERNET ARGUING CHECKLIST

Left wingers who can actually produce a solid argument are to be treasured and debated fully

writes Larry Correia (via Instapundit) in the science fiction author's first WARNING

(that’s sort of the point of debate). Unlike many of my liberal contemporaries, I don’t “manage” my blog comments until I have an echo chamber and my self-esteem isn’t predicated on how many sycophants pat my tender head while telling me how brilliant I am for standing up for some straw man cause de jour. I’ve got a bunch of regular left wing readers who can bring their A Game. I love them. Arguing with them, and honing my points against them makes my arguments stronger for the future.

Sadly, for every intelligent, articulate Eric Flint out there, most arguments against liberal group think results in a legion of poo flinging monkeys showing up.

This checklist is intended only for the willfully ignorant, banally stupid, sound byte spewers incapable of thinking through anything more complicated than a Facebook meme. The lowest form of debater is the pathetic crap sacks that can only follow this checklist.

WARNING 2!

If you are on my side, but this is how you debate, shut up. You’re making us look bad. Good arguing should consist of compelling rhetoric which is backed up with facts and logic. If your tactics are to shut down debate, you are an idiot. It should never be to shut down or scare off, but to WIN.

THE LEFT WING INTERNET ARGUING CHECKLIST

1. Skim until Offended
2. Disqualify that Opinion
3. Attack, Attack, Attack
4. Disregard Inconvenient facts
5. Make Shit Up
6. Resort to Moral Equivalency
7. Concern Trolling
8. When all else fails, Racism!

Read the whole thing to see Larry break it down

so you know what to look for, and you can have a good laugh as people who have zero substance, critical thinking skills, or facts make fools of themselves!

Conservative Writer and Iraq War Veteran's Book: A Biting Satire on Liberal Causes

Benjamin Duffy, a reader of No Pasaréan from its earliest days as well as an Iraq veteran whose post writings have been frequently linked on this blog, is now an author in his own right. He was already the author of a novella, his first book is out, and its title sounds heroic enough: We Are Fat and We Are Legion!

When fat civil rights activist Gabby Medeiros's supersized boyfriend decides to lose weight, he unwittingly forms a fissure in their relationship. Can their relationship survive? As a fat acceptance warrior, Gabby necessarily rejects dieting as unhealthy and counterproductive. A telephone bill collector by day, she spends two evenings a week doing what she really loves: pontificating from her position at the local radio station about the evils of the diet industry and a society that shames those who don't fill out the proper dimensions. Though people sometimes snicker at the cause she holds so dear, fat acceptance is very serious business for Gabby. When her live-in beau Denny Emory tells her that he is going to lose weight in order to control his diabetes, Gabby advises against it. Slowly, his diet changes the very dynamic of their relationship, to the point that Gabby questions whether it will survive.

FYI, I can confirm that Ben seems to have changed little, physically speaking, since the first time I met him, he has not gained weight, and he is still a slender, well-built guy. As for his new title, the first person to write a book review on Amazon sounds enthusiastic:

Loved the story and I was amazed at the amount of medical research done by Ben. I almost thought it was really OK to be fat. 

What Makes England Great?

What makes England great, asks The Daily Telegraph. Among the things up for a(n inter)national vote are several foods (believe it or not), Robin Hood, the Magna Carta, and

World renowned yet elusive graffiti artist Banksy [who] is from Bristol and many o[whose] original murals can still be seen on walls around the city and beyond. This example, which popped up recently in Cheltenham near GCHQ, depicting spies listening in on a phone box, is thought to be his work (Picture: Matt Cardy / Getty Images).

See the short list of things that sums up England's contribution to the world more than anything else

The top thing that sums up England's contribution to the world more than anything else will be revealed next Wednesday, April 23 – St George's Day. See the shortlist of 60 at englandshalloffame.com/shortlist or visit the exhibition at the Southbank Observation Point, London, from April 23 to 30.

The taxpayer will be robbed blind and anyone who doesn’t like it is a bad Christian, anti-American, and of course racist

Among the list of whoppers the public was told in order to sell the Affordable Care Act we can now include assurances that illegal aliens would not be able to claim benefits 

writes Benny Huang.

 … The “no illegals” pledge was a calculated lie that the president and his supporters discarded as soon as it was no longer needed. President Obama was counting on the people’s short memories not to recall the promises he made in order to ram through his pet piece of legislation, and on the sycophant press’s loyalty not to remind the public of what he said.

Anyone with a memory longer than a goldfish will remember the uproar that Representative Joe Wilson (R-South Carolina) caused at the 2009 State of the Union Address when he shouted “You lie!” during the new president’s remarks. Fewer people will remember what Obama was lying about.

“There are also those who claim that our reform effort will insure illegal immigrants,” said Obama. “This, too, is false – the reforms I’m proposing would not apply to those who are here illegally.”

 At that point Wilson rudely interrupted President Obama’s absurd lie, for which he later apologized. The president however, has not yet apologized for deluding us all. He still thinks he’s the wronged party because someone with no respect for decorum sounded the baloney alarm while he had the floor.

 … All liberals had to do was lie to get the enormous new entitlement established. Having achieved that, they can now shame anyone who was actually dumb enough to believe them by accusing them of depriving poor people of badly needed medical care, no doubt because of racist motives. “Of course Obamacare won’t cover illegals” is slowly being replaced with “What’s wrong with Obamacare helping the undocumented?”

 … To think that the new healthcare entitlement will be any different from previous entitlements is the pinnacle of foolishness. We’ve been down this road a thousand times before. The program is supposedly only for citizens or legal resident aliens, but in reality no one’s checking. It will all run on the honor system, at the insistence of the dishonorable. The taxpayer will be robbed blind and anyone who doesn’t like it is a bad Christian, anti-American, and of course racist.