And even more so when you’re paying — or not paying — in Canadian.
Free health care is going to be so awesome!
Archive for the ‘Euroids’ Category
You get what you pay for
Posted by Ron Coleman on July 15, 2009
Posted in Euroids, Gelt | 4 Comments »
License to marry someone really stupid
Posted by Ron Coleman on July 4, 2009
Shaken, not stupid
My wife is smarter than I am and thinks social networking is mostly a stupid distraction. Other wives think social networking is the greatest thing ever — and in terms of brains? Don’t ask!:
The wife of the new head of Britain’s spy agency has posted pictures of her husband, family and friends on Internet networking site Facebook, details which could compromise security, a newspaper said on Sunday.
Sir John Sawers is due to take over as head of the Secret Intelligence Service in November. The SIS, popularly known as MI6, is Britain’s global intelligence-gathering organization.
In what the Mail on Sunday called an “extraordinary lapse,” the new spy chief’s wife, Lady Shelley Sawers, posted family pictures and exposed details of where the couple live and take their holidays and who their friends and relatives are.
This is in the category of check-the-date-and-make-sure-it”s-not-an-April-Fools-story. (You have that category, don’t you?) It’s brought to you by the people who gave you Kim Philby and all that lot, in which the movie MI6 looks and performs immensely smarter than the real world one.
The “intelligence” community (yes, apt, isn’t it?) should be grateful Lady Shelley was flushed out before she could drag the free world down with her husband’s career!
Posted in Blogophilia, Euroids, Social networking | 1 Comment »
Not everything’s relative
Posted by Ron Coleman on April 13, 2009
BRUCE BARTLETT WONDERS WHY TEA-PARTIERS ARE PROTESTING, as the United States remains a comparatively low-tax country.
I’m quite a the “tea party” skeptic — but Bruce’s question strikes me as a non-sequitur.
If Europe jumped off the Empire State Building….?
Posted in Euroids, Gelt, Stragety | 2 Comments »
It’s that time of day
Posted by Ron Coleman on February 4, 2009
Yes, even a stopped clock is right twice a day, and it’s that time of day of the United Nations — actually describing objective facts related to the Israeli-Arab conflict that depart from the “noble savages” script regarding Palestinians. Get this:
Christopher Gunness, a spokesman for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, said Hamas policemen broke into an aid warehouse in Gaza City on Tuesday evening and confiscated 3,500 blankets and more than 400 packages of food.
“They were armed, they seized this, they took it by force,” Gunness said, terming the seizure “absolutely unacceptable.” . . .
“Does anyone really think that the Americans, who are our single largest donor, or the Europeans, who are our largest multination donor, would give us aid in the generous way they do if they thought that aid would go to terrorists?” Gunness said.
Yeah, that’s right: They also acknowledged an American contribution in a public statement. This guy Gunness, I figure he’s on a bread line by the weekend, no?
And Hamas? Same old, same old — classic fascist Big Lie speak:
The Hamas government demanded an “immediate apology” from the U.N. “for spreading false news,” Hamas spokesman Taher Nunu said.
Amazing. Keep this up and even Jimmy Carter will be embarrassed by these guys!
Posted in Euroids, Oppression, Orient, Politics and Poker | 2 Comments »
Eurojustice
Posted by Ron Coleman on November 13, 2008
This creep in Austria is being charged with just about every awful crime in the book. It’s a grisly story. But here’s what jumped out at me:
If convicted of the murder charge, Fritzl would face life imprisonment, which in Austria typically means 15 years’ confinement. Austria, like other European countries, has no death penalty.
Which makes me wonder, what would be so terrible about the death penalty then? If “life imprisonment” means 15 years, a sentence of death probably means a really painful hangnail.
Posted in Euroids, Lex scripta, O Mores! | 1 Comment »
The lights go out in Georgia
Posted by Ron Coleman on August 10, 2008
U.S.-allied Georgia called a unilateral cease-fire — “We are not crazy,” said President Mikhail Saakashvili — and claimed its troops were retreating Sunday from the disputed province of South Ossetia in the face of Russia’s far superior firepower. Russia said the soldiers were “not withdrawing but regrouping” and refused to recognize a truce.
The tactical reality is completely besides the point, actually. The Georgia adventure will always be remembered as Putin’s Grenada: An opportunity to rationalize a strategically meaningful, but far more symbolically significant, local annoyance into a mismatched demonstration of new resolve, a shaking off of reluctance to utilize force, and an opportunity for cheaply-bought national pride. For Putin, it is all that and more, seeing as how his project is so essentially revanchiste, and the ongoing existence of Georgia both as an independent state and a putative American ally is an ongoing poke in the eye to his neostalinist dreams.
Roger Kimball’s article (via Glenn) comparing the McCain and Obama statements on the situation also demonstrates nicely how, like the Grenada invasion, the Putin war on Georgia has the quality of distilling a wide range of political and moral realities. So many Cold War moments do.
Cross-posted on Dean’s World.
Posted in Euroids, Oppression, Past is prologue, Politics and Poker, Stragety | 2 Comments »
Socialism, law and order
Posted by Ron Coleman on July 20, 2008
Wolf Howling makes a thorough argument that socialism, not “mere” liberalism, is at the root at the disintegration of law and order in Britain, which you have to read in full to appreciate. The conclusion:
This is all a case study in why the philosophy of Karl Marx should have been interred with his bones. Instead, it is alive and thriving – much like a malignant cancer – in Britain today. Either Britain will dispense with socialism or Britain will eventually crumble. I am an optimist and an anglophile, and thus my bet is on the former. But I am also a bit of a realist. Given the stranglehold of socialists on all the reigns of power in Britain, and in particular in academia and the news, the latter is a real possibility also.
There may always be “an England,” because it’s a big place and it’s hard to sink an island in the sea, and who would want to? But there may not always, necessarily, be England.
Were we wrong to think that’s a bad thing? I can’t quite bring myself around to that, though there are aspects of the enterprise that have far outlived their usefulness. But it’s hard to be optimistic about England’s future.
Cross-posted on Right-Wing News.
Posted in Euroids, Heart and spirit, Past is prologue, Politics and Poker | 2 Comments »
Too little, too late
Posted by Ron Coleman on May 29, 2008
An Anglican bishop laments the collapse of the English church:
The collapse of Christianity has wrecked British society, a leading Church of England bishop declared yesterday.
It has destroyed family life and left the country defenceless against the rise of radical Islam in a moral and spiritual vacuum.
In a lacerating attack on liberal values, the Right Reverend Michael Nazir-Ali, the Bishop of Rochester, said the country was mired in a doctrine of ‘endless self-indulgence’ that had brought an explosion in public violence and binge-drinking.
In a blow to Gordon Brown, he mocked the ‘scramblings and scratchings’ of politicians who try to cast new British values such as respect and tolerance.
The Pakistani-born bishop dated the downfall of Christianity from the ‘social and sexual revolution’ of the 1960s.
(Via Glenn.) Good luck with that one. The fact is, the empty churches of Britain are a culmination of over a century of failure by the Anglican Church to find a way to keep the English in the pews. Founded on reasons of state and lust by Henry VIII, the Church of England ripped the Catholic soul out of British Christianity and mainly flourished to the extent it did at all in the succeeding centuries as a flavoring for confident Jingoism.
With the collapse of the Empire, the COE’s main activity has been keeping up with the Joneses in terms of out-Vatican-II’ing Vatican II in a race to the left. It has lacked either the reactionary equilibration or the charisma — much less the interest and courage on behalf of freedom — of a John Paul II. And it has, in an effort to please leftist elites, tied the United Nations in the contest for foremost legitimatizer of antisemitism in the West.
Can Right Reverend Michael Nazir-Ali turn the ship of spirituality in England around? Almost certainly not. But if he really wants to try, let him catch up with Vatican II in one way the COE has completely punted: By publicly condemning the entrenched antisemitism, couched cynically as anti-Zionism, of the Anglican Church and English society in general. The Jews or their treatment may not matter so much in England’s big picture, but it is a simple fact that you can weigh the moral merit of any society, and any institution, in no small measure by how it deals with the social and cultural cancer of antisemitism. In the case of the COE, it has historically, and in contemporary times, done a despicable job. There’s no better way to show the world of what he is made, and to demonstrate that there just may just be a good reason to root for Anglican Christianity to survive, than for the Right Reverend Nazir-Ali to address that challenge head on.
Posted in Euroids, Faith and Works, Oppression | 6 Comments »
The global test
Posted by Ron Coleman on March 31, 2008
I EAGERLY AWAIT THE HOLLYWOOD BLOCKBUSTER BASED ON THIS REPORT: EU Soldiers Accused of Torturing Civilians in Congo.
Gosh, and to think that because of the Bush Administration, the reputation of the U.S. has been lowered in all those previously dewy eyes around the world!
It’s just better off for everyone to keep expectations real low, I guess.
Posted in Euroids, Oppression | Leave a Comment »
Dinesh-ing it out
Posted by Ron Coleman on February 16, 2008
One of my earliest posts here was about the back and forth between Robert Spencer and the Dinesh D’Souza. I hadn’t given D’Souza’s evident crackup a third thought since then (a second thought, I did).
Well, in contrast, Bob is about nothing if not focus:
You may recall that before the illustrious Dinesh D’Souza was a would-be C.S. Lewis, he was a would-be Bernard Lewis — and in his disastrous book The Enemy At Home, surely a candidate to be named The Most Wrongheaded Book of the Twenty-First Century, he declared: “If they want Sharia, let them have it.”And he repeated this grand Let-The-People-Rule sentiment just weeks ago, at which time I first noted the analogy between D’Souza and Stephen A. Douglas, who didn’t care whether slavery were voted up or down as long as it was voted on — and I expressed a preference not for a new Stephen A. Douglas, but a new Lincoln.
But now D’Souza is singing a decidedly different tune, excoriating the Archdhimmi of Canterbury for saying that accommodation of Sharia law was “inevitable” in Britain, saying that the Archdhimmi’s modest proposal was “absurd,” and “a little dangerous to boot.”
It’s just the good old constitutional republicanism against pure democracy question — one that D’Souza seems to be working out very publicly. Which, if you can get book advances to do, is really not so terrible, as long as no one is really listening to you anyway.
Posted in Euroids, Faith and Works, Oppression, Orient | 1 Comment »
