Einstein (allegedly) defined insanity as "doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results".

Welcome to Europe, Continent of the Crazies:

Troublingly, the watered-down EU plan, which will be reviewed over the coming weeks, allowed for "exceptional circumstances" under which states may suspend the EU's stability and growth pact demanding a three per cent public deficit limit. In short, there's no EU bank rescue fund but there is an agreement to allow the European Union to become a potentially bottomless pit of public spending at the expense of European taxpayers. Of course, that is what the EU French Presidency terms a victory.

Emphasized my thoughts fears, exactly.

Whatever Darling decides, the Government's plans must not simply be designed to mimic the actions of our German friends, of which the German minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, said on Monday: "We learnt from worldwide economic crisis of the 1920s and 1930s that and (sic) economic crisis can result in an incredible threat for all of society."

I choose to trust a German on that, and the current rise of all kinds of European Collectivism extremists—Fascists from the Far-right to the Far-left— makes for a distressing vindication.

We've seen it coming—correction, we are seeing it coming—and kept warning each others but to no effect ; Boy, am I sick of this subcontinent, its people and their inability—or unwillingness—to learn from their own past mistakes.

One of the first regular emails that land in my inbox every morning is the BBC's daily top stories. Now don't get me wrong: I do not maintain my subscription for the informative value of what is merely an appalling list of Euro-Marxist tidbits trying to pass for "news" but rather because it provides me with a cheap alternative to caffeine.

One item in this morning's email had the opposite effect however, and actually managed to be lightly entertaining. Check this out:

* Iran unveils plan for women's car *
Iran announces plans for a car designed specially for women, with features aimed at appealing to females.
Full story: http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/-/1/hi/world/middle_east/7657810.stm

(Emphasis mine).

Nice choice of words, indeed, for a spineless article on Iranian women's plight—apparently, the harshest words the Beeb can muster are, quote, the official Iranian concept of equality is very different from that understood by Western feminists.—made even funnier by the AFP photo they picked up to illustrate the thing: a veiled woman at the wheel.

Funny heh? Yet I won't be outdone or outspoken, and will henceforth suggest another Iran-related top story which I hope the BBC will include in tomorrow's daily email. Check this out:

* Hang out in Tehran: Iranian Tourism Ministry publishes the 2008 Best Gay Bars Guide *

I am so in the mood for fun that I shall expect nothing less than your best (Islamic) women driving jokes in the comments, thank you very much.

Here is an important book on a very serious matter. The French on the cover translates as: "My fundamental rights within the European Union" and that is indeed what this book is about. It is the "Charter of Fundamental Rights in the European Union", as devised in December 2007 in Strasbourg by the European Commission, General Direction ("Justice, Liberty and Security") just so you know it is very important indeed, okay?



Now for perspective, here is the same book next to a wooden stick coated at one end with potassium chlorate, a little sulfur and starch, a bit of ZnO or perhaps CaCO3, 20-40% of siliceous filler plus diatomite and glue.

Also called a safety match.



Sometimes, I just don't know if I should laugh or cry or put on big huge security shoes and go stomp and kick fluffy bunnies frolicking in the daffodils.

It's the European Union. It does that to you.

If that's not a vicious attack on human dignity, I don't know what is:

“If Sarah Palin isn’t enough of a reason for you to get over whatever your problem is with Barack Obama, then you damn well had better pay attention,” Rep. Alcee Hastings of Florida said at a panel about the shared agenda of Jewish and African-American Democrats Wednesday. Hastings, who is African-American, was explaining what he intended to tell his Jewish constituents about the presidential race. “Anybody toting guns and stripping moose don’t care too much about what they do with Jews and blacks. So, you just think this through,” Hastings added as the room erupted in laughter and applause.

So let's sneer a bit: this black guy is in effect telling his audience that Jews and blacks are like, you know, animals and all.

And they applaud him.

Either that, or he is claiming this as Sarah Palin's position on The Toting of Guns And Other Practical Uses of The Boomstick. That would be defamatory for a start but then again: defamation is the very least you can expect from a Democrat.

It is also particularly stupid, and denotes the man's singular ignorance of what guns and hunting are all about: I mean does Alcee Hastings seriously expect the sane people in the audience to believe that in addition to moose, Sarah Palin also has a taste for Jew burger and black burger?

Yeah, stupid only comes second in the short list of what one can reasonably expect from a Democrat.

In addition to that, considering that nothing in Sarah Palin's deeds and pledges ever hinted at her intention or dedication to have subarctic Jews and black hunting safaris (and, perhaps, redecorate the Oval Office's walls with her trophies) then we can only conclude that Alcee Hastings' appalling paranoid rant is nothing more than plain old projection—and one that adds the third pillar to his address to that so-called "panel about the shared agenda of Jewish and African-American Democrats", and perhaps his own character as well:

Defamatory, stupid, and vicious.

Or maybe I'm just being nasty with poor old Alcee, and he just meant to say that since Sarah Palin holds her rank in the food chain, then poor old Alcee logically deduces that she won't be very nice to Jews and blacks. Or something.

For Alcee Hastings and his Merry Band of Applauding Morons that may sound logical—but for the rest of us that's non sequitur at its finest.

While only slightly less vicious and defamatory, it does proceed logically from stupid.

Think the subprime crisis was bad? Wait til you've seen financial Jihad.

Our Iwo Gina Early Warning System sounds the alarm: Wall Street, what's next?. Bits and pieces just to arouse and aggravate you enough to go there and read it all:

Tragically, in the process of leaping out of the scalding subprime frying pan, Wall Street is heading directly into a fire that promises, if anything, to be more devastating than the present disaster. Incredibly, it bears all the hallmarks of subprime with respect to a lack of transparency, a systematic failure to disclose and an utter absence of due diligence, good governance and accountability. The next "what" is called Shariah-Compliant Finance (SCF). (...) Like subprime, it is a black box, in which management and investors alike are told to trust in the experts. In this case, the experts are Shariah authorities who are accorded exclusive responsibility for determining whether investments are "pure" (halal) and therefore acceptable, or "impure" (haram) and not. (...)

[...] these authorities are, unsurprisingly, adherents to Shariah. A number of them explicitly embrace its call to jihad (including a former senior member of the Dow Jones Islamic Index, Sheik Taqi Usmani). This "holy war" is to be waged where possible through violent means, where necessary through "soft" means like Shariah-Compliant Finance. For this reason, such Islamists call SCF "financial jihad."

(...)

David Yerushalmi, a litigator specializing in securities law and an expert on Shariah, produced a riveting legal memorandum (...) examining the civil and criminal exposure inherent in Shariah-Compliant Finance [Acrobat PDF — DF]. His conclusion: banks and investment houses offering SCF products may be enabling or engaging in the following: racketeering, antitrust activity, securities fraud, consumer fraud and/or material support for terror.

What makes Shariah-Compliant Finance even more dangerous than subprime is that, in its effort to legitimize and institutionalize Shariah in America, it is advancing a criminal conspiracy whose purpose is the violent overthrow of the United States Constitution and government in favor of Islamic rule. That would make it sedition.

Read it all and start thinking about options and measures to take.

This is potentially far more dangerous for America than a few scumbags crossing the border to take one way flight lessons.

Don't let that happen.

Top cool things about this morning’s 6:00 AM run-in-the-woods routine: starting up under a full moon at an unexpectedly cold predawn hour—Autumn is definitely coming here—and going as the sun slowly rises up in the same crystal clear sky.

Top annoying things about this morning’s 6:00 AM run-in-the-woods routine: spotting a couple of utterly tranquil roe deer in the early morning mist watching me unalarmed, THUS feeling a bit miffed that I couldn’t pack a camera in my (stretchy) running pants.

Or a rifle, for that matter.

Ah yes, perhaps you’re wondering. Indeed, unlike your average practical caveman I do happen to run regularly, even when I do not have a foe to flee or a female to chase¹. There is some pretty nasty merde coming down our way in France—perhaps even on the rest of Old Europe—ranging from increasingly violent social unrest to full scale civil war. That’s a given, considering the fetid mix of dominant and disastrous Left and Far-Left politics and parties, the resulting Far-Right rising to the opportunity of feeding on Gallic aborigines’ discontent and fuel their larvated racial prejudices, and the hordes of young French Jihad trainees who will come of age in the next 10 years.

Although there is no way of telling exactly who, what, and when the merde will hit the fan, I know that either the lone rifleman’s Shoot-and-Relocate Power Combo and the team based Fire & Maneuver moves can’t accommodate short-breathed players.

Anybody foolish enough to go soft and complacent these days is like that majority of 1936 French who wouldn’t let the goose-stepping sounds over the German border spoil the Popular Front Party, and distract them from their newly acquired “paid vacations” when it was already obvious that the time for fun, games and welfare benefits had passed.

Ach so?

During his time in the Syrian capital, Sarkozy sat down with Lebanese daily newspaper Al-Akhbar, which quoted the French leader as saying that Paris "does not view Hizballah as a terror organization, rather it appreciates its opposition to occupation, as France has faced a similar experience in the past."

Okay, the Al-Akhbar Lebanese daily seems to be nothing more than Hizballah's unofficial press organ, so I will grant such a dubious source (yeah, I am being polite here. Enjoy while it lasts) as much credibility as I give any French daily such as Le Monde or Liberation.

I now, that's harsh, but after all they are Hizballah's mouthpiece so they shall expect decent people to treat them as lying thugs.

So when it comes to Sarko Two Face, it's probably not the point where I say "See? I told you so"—though I did tell you so, you know. Just for the record and all.

However, I'm not totally stupid or forgetful of the past, well, 200 years+ of French history and foreign policy, and particularly not when it comes to their last and finest representative, King Nicolas Sarkozy the 1st.

Sarkozy's main obsession is his pet project of a "Mediterranean Union", by which he doesn't mean any kind of Great Olive Oil Producers' Alliance between Spain, Italy and Greece—these are already part of that other great union, the European one.

Sarkozy's Mediterranean Union is just the old French Arab Policy, as initiated by the treacherous de Gaulle, with a new name but the same old principles—or rather, lack of.

The goals remain unchanged: "restore" France's stature on the international scene¹, link up with lots of Baksheesh Buddies® and make new ones, in order to secure the old French ways of doing business with the oil-rich and core-corrupt Arab world; but more importantly of all: oppose "American hegemony" (an ubiquitous term within the French political class for the last 60 years, at the very least) by all means and at all costs. Especially now that the top dawg in the Middle-East—so far France's nearly exclusive post-colonial playground—is Uncle Sam.

To that aim, Sarkozy re-empowered Muhammad Gaddafi, going so far as to provide that early rising star of Islamic terror sponsor state with nuclear technology², a few Rafale fighter planes³, and even letting that desert snake plant his Bedouin tent in the middle of Paris, next to the French presidential palace—a symbol of power and conquest that certainly didn't go amiss among the Muhammadans.

Then there's al-Assad offered petits-fours on the taxpayers' account in Paris for the Bastille Day parade⁴—and Sarkozy travelling to Syria in return.

And now this.

Makes for a lot of funny coincidence; so even though nothing that comes from Hizballah can be trusted, I would watch closely what will—should—come out of l'Elysée or the Quai d'Orsay in the coming days.

Surely, if Al-Akhbar made that up, the French presidency will issue a denial.

Like, anytime now.

EDIT: 1,2,3,3—fixed the bad case of footnote cloning. All hail Boogs the Watchful for the heads-up.

Look, it's a relatively long process, with quite a bit of work involved. One has to search and grab the best material. And it still requires a bit of tweaking and cleaning, because you're getting the video online, which means it's already been compressed. Then there's cutting and editing and if, like me, you are not a pro video editor but the hey-this-sounds-fun-I'll-just-push-that-button-and-see-what-it-does type and yet aim to pull the job as best as you can despite your aforementioned lack of expertise, then you know this can take quite a lot of industrious and laborious hours—punctuated by a fair amount of swearing when pushing that button didn't produce the desired effect.

Then there's converting and encapsulating it all into a Flash applet, writing the post (then revise and rewrite. Oh boy, how these sound trivial, yet can litterally devour hours of your time) and publishing it on the site.

All of that to say that, hmm, well, you have to understand that the notification email comes at the end of a busy day, when one is not at the top of one's faculties. Also, I'm the first to admit that my colloquial knowledge of the various iterations of spoken English is not unfailing.

I am therefore in full accordance with those of you who, quite humorously, replied and voiced their concern:

*cough* perhaps "bugger" wasn't indeed the best choice of words *cough*

Frankly the most baffling about the whole Hollywood stardom thing is that they manage to make us forget, or at least overlook, the fact that when you get down to it, all these actors are really nothing more than a bunch of buffoons and jesters—with a large variety of personal issues for many, if not most of them.

See Matt Damon here, who “condemns” Sarah Palin and hear why I believe it’s a good thing. I mean, we have this guy who plays rough, streetwise and corrupt cops in Sorcese’s uninspired gangster movies as well as lean, mean killing machines in the action-rich though memory-short Bourne trilogy. Yet this tough character is stammering and pissing his pants (quote: “this is the scary thing”, “terrifying”, “it’s crazy") as he shares with us his visions of Sarah Palin descending upon the White House from the frozen forests—and small towns—of Alaska, riding dinosaurs and holding nuclear fire in her right hand as she faces down Vladimir Putin with a hockey stick in the left¹.

Now, if among the male American voters with big titanium balls and laugh-in-the-face-of-death tattoos, who hunt Grizzly bears with their Victorinox Spartan 1.3603 just because they believe the bear deserves a chance and a fair fight, there was still anyone feeling a bit embarrassed at the idea of voting for a girl, I reckon Damon’s wimpish exhibition just signed these wild-wild hunks on the Palin ticket.

Score 1 for Sarah.

The same goes for ageing bimbos like Pamela Anderson, caught here exposing the full extend of her wit and reasoning on Sarah Palin—that’s about ten words folks, including one interjection and one expletive—thus demonstrating that if silicon could speak, she’d be more advised to let her boob job do the talking.

Nevertheless, I see that “intervention” as nothing if not positive for Mrs. Palin as well: Anderson looks like a hooker, talks like a hooker and, considering her dedication in a not so distant past to share the full details of her intimacy with the rest of the world, she even acts like one—or at least used to, when she was younger.

So I’ll wager that any female American voter worth her weight in gonads will decide whose side she’s on in less time than it takes Pamela Anderson to open her mouth and *beep* it. Yes, we’re talking a very short time.

Score 2 for Sarah. Next up, Hobo Superstar Nick Nolte speaking out against Sarah Palin?

[Notice: again, if you’re catching this through an RSS reader, you’re not getting the parodic video, so you may want to hit the old-fashioned web page. I know, I know, I must do something about it and push the audio/video enclosures down the XML feed. Look, why don’t you just sue me and call it a day?]

Never forget that on 9/11 2001, cowards murdered 2,996 innocents in the name of Allah the “most benevolent”, “merciful” and “gracious”.

Never forgive either.

This year again, my thoughts are with the victims, their families and relatives—and also with those who serve, protect and fight for Life and Liberty, and against all Islamic barbarians in this modern continuation of a centuries-old conflict.

Never submit, never surrender.

[Notice: requires Flash. Press play to begin. If reading this through an RSS feed reader, be advised that you’re missing the video clip]

When the Health Nazis mate with the Marketing & Advertising industry's inherent vulgarity in the cesspool of  Old Europe's moral bankruptcy, they whelp things like that:

World No Tobacco Day: Non Smoking Area. Advertising Agency: TBWA\Athens, Greece. Creative Director: Vangelis Vrouvas. Art Director: Christos Kliafas. Copywriters: George Loukoumis, Vassilis Kleisouras.

There are so many things wrong with this ad that I wouldn't know where to begin—though I suppose that hanging the "creative" director to the first lamppost would be a good start.

Having said that, I'm quite happy to be vindicated once again. In my experience, European operatives of the marketing and advertising industry always struck me as a bunch of half-educated jerks coupling Champaign Socialism with breathtaking stupidity, dreadful arrogance and terminal stages of narcissism disorder; the perfect illustration of which is provided by this sorry excuse for an advert.

Everything is wrong, both from the conceptual and technical point of view. The "visual" is totally irrelevant to the "message", as this is definitely not your average cemetary: the human beings buried under these specific crosses did not die from nicotine poisoning. The morale superiority that's alleged to drive the event advertized here is nullified by this disgraceful use of a memorial to those who fought and fell on the battlefields — in large parts liberating Europe — even more so considering the casual issue it supposedly illustrates, and the paternalizing tone and politically correct nature of those who claim to "tackle" it.

To top it all, even the production is crap. The heavy-handed Photoshop job on this thing (click for the larger version, and sneer at the blurry grass patch in the center) is obviously from the Adnan Hajj / Iranian Revolution¹ school of Unstrained Clone Tooling. Bottom line: the art doesn't save the concept, and the "art" director is not worth the "creative" one's skin.

Pathetic, but such as it is, a fine trademark of marketing and advertising.

This is on par with the latest trend of French couples shooting pornographic photos and videos in war memorials and cemetaries² — the one and only difference being that we could argue that, symptomatic as they are of the depths at which France has sunk, these slobs are just a few sick individuals who can't think of anything better to do with their sorry selves.

Not established businesses in the advertising industry, and the Holier-than-thou organizations and causes to which they lend their services.

It's important to remind ourselves from time to time that the mainstream media isn't exactly new to deceptive reporting — all the way down to bald-faced lies and forgeries — for the sake of their Leftist agenda.

The Reagan Diaries, entry for Tuesday October 5, 1982:

[…] C.B.S. & Wash. Post described my trip to Ohio as a chilly reception. That is blatant falsehood. I've never been greeted with greater warmth and enthusiasm. I think their bias toward the Dems. is showing