perfidy

NDR blogs on a curious European phenomenon: Gasoline tourism. The small Luxembourg town of Wasserbillig (Germanish for "cheap as water") is a popular destination for German drivers because tax differences between the two countries make for cheap Luxembourganian gas.

These gas stations have created a "gas tank tourism" for Luxembourg. A number of gift shops have appeared around these gas stations, selling jam, cheeses, cigarettes, sparkling wines--all of which are cheaper than in Germany. These trips to Luxembourg become gluttonous affairs of bulk purchases for Germans, who return home with full tanks and full trunks.

Below the fold is a pic of Wasserbillig's main strasse.

Does this remind anyone else of Breezewood, PA?

Steve of Begging to Differ takes time to remind us, with a short film, that Europe is not homogenous and also that Italy is one seriously messed up place with the chaos and the Begnini fellow and the FOOTball d'hoy glavinating.

See if you can spot what's wrong in this short piece from the New York Times:

SUDAN REGAINS HUMAN RIGHTS SEAT: Sudan was elected to another three-year term on the United Nations' Commission on Human Rights, but the United States delegation, citing allegations of ethnic cleansing in Sudan's western Darfur region, walked out of the meeting before the vote. The deputy representative of Sudan, Omar Bashir Manis, accused the United States of "shedding crocodile tears," and said American forces had committed atrocities against prisoners and civilians in Iraq. Sudan ran uncontested, as one of four nations chosen by the African Regional Group to fill four allotted vacancies on the commission. Daniel B. Schneider (NYT)

Now that's rich. Not only is the Sudan home to a continuing human-slavery industry, and not only has the Sudan been the site of various atrocities, imbroligos, attempted genocides, and general antihumanitarian mayhem for the past fifty years, but they are also a member of the UN's Human Rights council and have the temerity to claim that the actions of some US soldiers and civilians are worthy of scorn in comparison. The difference between us and them: we're punishing soldiers for humiliating and torturing POWs; they're harboring slave traders. Good for our delegates for walking out of that vote.

Not that all this is surprising or anything; it just gets my goat. When the Sudan can score hits off your human rights record, you know it's been a bad week.

Shane McGowen getting in a bar fight is perhaps predictable. But, he could find Jesus, and begin living a peaceful and contemplative life. Really. But for the ultimate in "Dog Bites Man" we have this Washington Post headline:

Beijing crushes a student group

Drudge's headlines, which are often better than the originals, caught the dog bites man flavor of the story even better:

China still ruthlessly cracking down on political dissent...

First, a thought. If you look back at last year's posts on Iraq, and the emails that Ministers Buckethead, Mike, and myself exchanged before that, you'll find that I opposed the libervasion partly because I feared that the US would screw it up royally, making matters worse for us here in the US. Not that I didn't see the good that could come from the action, but I felt the stakes were too high not to think things through.

Well, they didn't think things through. Many mistakes were made in the run-up and aftermath to the libervasion-- the disbanding of the Iraqi army, many of whom are shooting at us from behind trees and inside mosques, a wild overestimation of the readiness and capability of Iraq's oil infrastructure, firing the guy(s) who asked for more troops to provide security, etc., etc. That rather pisses me off.

But there is a worse alternative: giving the job to the United Nations. Before the war, the UN opposed any action in Iraq, requesting that weapons inspectors have more time to do the voodoo they do. At the time, I took this as a reasonable, albeit doggedly bureaucratic, tack to take. But the breaking Oil For Food For Large Bags Of Cash scandal (covered at length here by ABC News) makes me think otherwise.

It is now clear that the UN was and is rotten with corruption, and that even such halting work as it can do under the best intentions and clearest administration is now useless. They can't be trusted. That is a terrible shame. I am a great believer in the need for an organization like the UN as a counterbalance to the extreme alternative, a nakedly dog-eat-dog world in which nations all fend for themselves. A little red tape and stifling regulation on that scale is preferable to a free for all, in my opinion, but not if this is the way they are going to do business.

Just look at this partial list of who received oil bribes from Iraq.

Russia
The Companies of the Russian Communist Party: 137 million
The Companies of the Liberal Democratic Party: 79.8 million
The Russian Committee for Solidarity with Iraq: 6.5 million and 12.5 million (two separate contracts)
Head of the Russian Presidential Cabinet: 90 million
The Russian Orthodox Church: 5 million

France
Charles Pasqua, former minister of interior: 12 million
Trafigura (Patrick Maugein), businessman: 25 million
Ibex: 47.2 million
Bernard Merimee, former French ambassador to the United Nations: 3 million
Michel Grimard, founder of the French-Iraqi Export Club: 17.1 million

Canada
Arthur Millholland, president and CEO of Oilexco: 9.5 million

Italy
Father Benjamin, a French Catholic priest who arranged a meeting between the pope and Tariq Aziz: 4.5 million
Roberto Frimigoni: 24.5 million

United States
Samir Vincent: 7 million
Shakir Alkhalaji: 10.5 million

United Kingdom
George Galloway, member of Parliament: 19 million
Mujaheddin Khalq: 36.5 million

Egypt
Khaled Abdel Nasser: 16.5 million
Emad Al Galda, businessman and Parliament member: 14 million

Palestinian Territories
The Palestinian Liberation Organization: 4 million
Abu Al Abbas: 11.5 million

Qatar
Hamad bin Ali Al Thany: 14 million

Libya
Prime Minister Shukri Ghanem: 1 million

Brazil
The October 8th Movement: 4.5 million

Businessmen, statesmen, ambassadors, men of prominence, and (shockingly) the Russian Orthodox Church and a Catholic preist. A massive embarassment to the world community.

And yet the UN is the body that John Kerry wants running Iraq instead of the USA, as if Doc Ock would run Fort Knox better than Spider-Man. I'm no fan of Bush's foreign policy (indeed I think it's terrifyingly dangerous), but Kerry's seems just as stupid, if not even more so. Just who the hell can I vote for in November who won't make me feel like taking a shower afterward?

According to Palestinian DJ Saadeh, it's assassination season on the West Bank, which means his business is booming. In the bizzaro-world of Palestinian society, assassination season is the time for big, fun parties!

It's a time for gathering with friends, enjoying the cameraderie of your fellow rubble-dwellers, exhorting your young people to get themselves killed, and- Allah willing- take out some Jews while they're at it. And no block party is comlete without a killa DJ.

"Yeah yeah, party people in da house... yo yo just the ladies now, 'Revolt, revolt, revolt. Revolt with stones!' "

By having right-wing papers make up stuff about them, of course!

French ambassador to the US, Jean-David Effete...er, Levitte... claims that last year's media shitstorm against France for supporting Saddam was "racist".

The ambassador says that media efforts to denigrate France and Frenchmen was racism akin to that directed against "blacks and Jews", and that it was deplorable that a defamation campaign directed at those populations would get immediate and furious response, yet no one was overly concerned when similar venom was spat at France. Well Monsieur Ambassadeur, that's because there's little basis for comparison between racism, as the word is currently used, and nationality, you fucking nitwit.

And besides, when did "French" become a race, in the way we discuss race today? Am I supposed to infer "French" is included in the "Other" block on my census form? Let's see... black; hispanic, non-white; hispanic; white; native aboriginal...hmmm.. no French; I guess I'll check "other".

Unless he's refering to a Gaullic master race, of purer Aryan stock than mongrel Americans.

The Ministry's roadie and loyal minion Mapgirl recently asked:

"How angry would we be if a house of worship was blown up here in the States?"

The Geek's answer? Not as much as you might hope, since relatively few of us (compared to the Islamic world) have built our identities around religious affiliation. Or at least, not upset over the fact that it was a church, but something within our own borders that was attacked.

But even when churches abroad are attacked, there's not alot of mainstream outrage about it here: 2 years ago, when Pakistani terrorists blew up and/or shot all those people in a church; more recently, when savages shot their way into the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem and hid there for weeks while the IDF and Geraldo Rivera laid siege to the place and in fact, peace pricks from Europe and the US traveled there to provide widely publicized succour to the terrorists inside; and ongoing muslim destruction aimed at churches in Kosovo.

There are front pages covering the stories, but nothing like outrage over it. People don't take to the streets in droves and start burning "Palestinian" flags, or rush to their closets to get out that great effigy of al-Sadr they stayed up all night getting just so.

You'll find that media coverage of these and related events will often sympathize with the terrorist perspective, or at the very least choose language to obscure the unalterable fact that it's muslims who are on the rampage and doing the damage.

And shit I didn't even put on my tinfoil hat yet.

More and more often these days I find myself asking just what the flying hell is wrong with this country? There seems to be a new timidity, a new spinelessness that cuts across ideological lines and geographic regions.

No, I'm not talking about the dumbass Red/Blue thing.

I'm not talking about The Queering of America (or, if you will, the pussification of the American Male), nor the duToitification of the American Conservative.

I'm not talking about abortion, spending habits, class rage, or antiwar agitation.

I'm talking about this new puritianism that's all the rage these days, except it's puritanism with the fun parts removed. The actual Puritans, once you got past their Calvinist, Manichean Great Chain of Being City On a Hill bullplop, liked to drink and screw as much as the rest of us, as long as everyone was up for church in the A.M. and none of the Commandments got broken.

No, now you can't drink. You can't screw. You can't screw. You can't screw. You can't show a boobie on TV, unless the boobies in question are paid for by beer companies or football teams. It was a nice boobie. You can't say stupid shit on the radio without the government fining your ass from here to Tuesday. Chilling effects? You bet! A California college investigated a student for murder, and expelled him, for writing a crudely violent fiction piece in a creative writing class. The professor was eventually fired for teaching the David Foster Wallace story "Girl With Curious Hair." Ohio has mandated that "intelligent design" be taught in science class. Tommy Chong is in prison for selling bongs (and still terrorists run free!)

So sex drugs and violence are on the outs, especially the sex part. But what's the proximate cause of my dismay? The Attorney General-- and it is John Ashcroft behind it this time, really, for real, seriously-- has declared a fatwa against paw-naw-gra-phy, that insidious disease which "invades our homes persistently though the mail, phone, VCR, cable TV and the Internet," and has "strewn its victims from coast to coast."

Right. A Playboy Home Invasion, just forcing itself on you. Now, I don't know about John Ashcroft, but I had to pay for every lapdance I ever got.

Everyone is talking about this today, from blogmother Kathy to instahack. Instapundit, in fact, points to an extended and loving takedown of the entire anti-sex trend at classicalvalues.com which you should read if you think I'm being paranoid. His plea: "But I thought we were at war -- with the enemies of sexual freedom who declared war on us. While I know that we're not there yet, I hate to see the United States moving in the direction of developing its own anti-sex mutawein like the damned Saudis."

Exactly. I cannot-- CANNOT-- vote for Bush if he's going to let this stuff happen on his watch. Terrorism is a threat from outside. This is a threat from within. Both threaten my way of life. What to do?

[wik] An addendum to my esteemed colleague Buckethead, who is juuuust about to comment: yes, dear, the terrorists will kill me if they get the chance and the moralists won't. But life has to be worth living!!

[alsø wik] I know I post this same phrase every couple weeks, but it's like a tic now so here we go again...... "So Glad They Took Care Of The Important Stuff Like Terrorism First!"

[alsø alsø wik] Jeff Jarvis has a long collection of reactions and analysis. Many points for the title "The Daily Stern: This slope slippery with KY."

No, this isn't that kind of post. No great danes, no leather, and get your filthy mind out of the gutter. Jerry over at Commonsense and Wonder links to an article in the Telegraph about a new book examining the root causes, if you will, of Germany's relative decline over the last few decades. Germany: Decline of a Superstar has become a bestseller in a Germany. Its author, Gabor Steingart, is a political journalist and Berlin bureau chief for the widely read newsmagazine Der Spiegel. So this criticism is not coming from the fringes.

"The GDP of both the British and French is higher than the Germans' and this is a shocking discovery for us. In the 1970s, Britain's GDP was only half of ours."

He is concerned that Germans are unwilling to confront the issue: "It has not been politically correct until now to admit that we're in decline, that the Deutschland Modell is the wrong one."

Mr Steingart says a key reason for the problems lie in what he calls his "core-crust" theory.

The "core" consists of the innovators, the producers and the service providers, while the "crust" are those who contribute nothing to the economy.

At present the crust consists of the two thirds of Germans who are not in work. Germany, the land that produced people such as Einstein and Daimler and inventions such as aspirin, has for the first time been having to buy patents from abroad because it is insufficiently inventive.

That is an incredible percentage - and looking at the demographics, it can only get worse as the German population gets increasingly concentrated in the upper age brackets. If we think we have a problem getting politicians to think about the Social Security and Medicare problems lurking in the not to distant future, its nothing compared to the problems that the Germans and other Europeans face.

"Since 1945 there has never been as small a core and as big a crust as there is today," Mr Steingart says.

According to the Federal Office of Statistics, the average German now spends only 13 per cent of his or her life in paid employment, while men devote 18 per cent to sport, television and visits to the pub and women 12 per cent to eating and personal hygiene. Britons work 250 hours more per year than Germans, Americans 350 hours more.

It is for this reason that Germany is haemorrhaging jobs abroad at a rate comparable with no other industrial land. According to the Institute for Economic Research around 2.6 million jobs have been relocated. This week it was announced that the electronics giant Siemens was on the verge of moving 10,000 jobs to eastern Europe.

Not to be all alarmist and everything, but unless the nations of Western Europe change their course, they could be laying the foundations for some truly bad times.

Just think - an aging population grasping desperately at welfare benefits that simply cannot be supported. Low and declining productivity, and a relative decline in power, prestige and international standing as a result of backward economic policies. A ready supply of foriegn scapegoats - however, the new potential scapegoats are not Jews eager to assimilate but intransigant and increasingly militant Muslims. A pan-European bureaucratic superstate being constructed; one that will write into its constitution the very welfare benefits that will destroy the European economy, that has little if any provision for individual rights, and will give power to unelected bureacrats who have a demonstrated desire to rule, rather than serve, the public.

If fundamental reforms aren't made, I don't see how the Europeans can avoid dire economic problems. And we know what happened last time Europe had a depression.

There are many things that the Israelis are capable of. I don't think this is one of them. Whenever I read the Islamic media for any length of time, I become very, very depressed. This level of disconnect from reality, evidenced in a thousand Islamic media reports a week, is truly staggering. Link via Allah Pundit

Hey... shouldn't you be in church?

Pope John Paul (news - web sites) on Friday said Sunday should be a day for God, not for secular diversions like entertainment and sports.

"When Sunday loses its fundamental meaning and becomes subordinate to a secular concept of 'weekend' dominated by such things as entertainment and sport, people stay locked within a horizon so narrow that they can no longer see the heavens," the pontiff said in a speech to Australian bishops.

I know the Pope is obliged to say this kind of thing, it's his job and all, but does he really want all the Catholics of Parma, OH to make an all-or-nothing choice between church and the Cleveland Browns?

Does anyone else find it darkly ironic (that is, incredibly sad) that the (now) most senior leader of Hamas is a pediatrician? Because you know, children need to be healthy before they commit mass murder and discorporate violently.

That same article also notes that another senior Hamas leader is a doctor. Well, I guess the Christians have one thing right... humanity is depraved and base by nature.

Now the bastards are using the mentally challenged, though unsuccessfully so far. This New York Post article is a sobering look at how Palestinian groups are indoctrinating children from birth to be suicide bombers. According to the piece, 3 out of 4 Palestinian teenagers say they want to become martyrs (that is, become 'splodeydopes themselves), but also notes mounting outrage among Palestinians at these tactics. This article covers the same ground, focusing on the family of the mentally-challenged 16 year old who surrendered yesterday at an Israeli checkpoint wearing a suicide vest.

I don't know much about the Israel/Palestine conflict. It's not my field, and I haven't spent very much time schooling myself on the long history of murder, reprisal, terror, occupation, and rancor. From my lay perspective it looks like this: I know Israel has done some ugly things in the past but it's really hard to muster much outrage when the people trying to eradicate them have fallen so far from reason, decency or humanity.

Well, I think this is cool....

The fledgling Chinese Baseball League has chosen legendary folk hero Sun Wukong the Monkey King and his invincible as-you-will cudgel as its mascot. Perfect!

Known best to Westerners as the inspiration for the anime series "Dragonball Z," the adventures of the Bugs-Bunny-'cept-Godlike Sun Wukong are chronicled in the 16th century Chinese novel, "Journey to the West" by Wu Cheng'en. In JttW, Sun Wukong accompanies the priest Sanzang on his journey to the Western Heaven to recover the lost Buddhist sutras. This is his punishment and reward for challenging the gods and styling himself "Great Sage Equalling Heaven" in a previous life.

I'm about halfway (1200 pages) through "Journey to the West," and I have to give it the highest possible recommendation. The book can be read on several levels: as an endless chronicle of spectacular kung-fu battles with demons; as a travel novel; as a meditation on the synthesis of Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism in Chinese thought in the 16th century; or as an extended metaphor for the individual's quest toward enlightenment. As such, even when the demon-fighting gets a bit much and the poetry goes on for pages and pages (this book has more effing poems than The Silmarillion," it's still a surprisingly compulsive read.

If you have the least interest in China, you should check it out.

I think in general terms, the distinguished blogger from Washington has made a sound and polished essay. Buckethead's position is solidly based on historical facts and the cohesive flow of events therefrom. Which is the main reason his arguments are entirely ineffective. Because arguing is not the point.

Islamic terrorists are not interested in what has happened, what took the world to this stage. They are interested in killing you. Even translating your essay into Arabic and putting it across every media outlet in the world will not help the anti-terror cause. The terrorists aren't interested in a factual accounting of the Crusdaes, state supporters of terrorist units aren't interested, and the general population- already conspiracy minded and mistrustful of America- might be interested but won't believe any of it. Because America is the devil. Or something. Unless there's a chance to immigrate here, in which case it's not so bad.

As for the network of ideas, it might be nice if more Arabs were actually in the network. A recent Chronicle of Higher Ed piece points out that more books were translated in Spain last year than were translated into Arabic, across the entire Gulf region, in the last 1,000 years. The Arab world is not included in the network of ideas, largely by their own xenophobic tendencies. Unless by ideas we can include novel ways to exterminate large numbers of Jews. And as we send our children to public schools where they are taught to value and respect difference- indeed are forced to, at the risk of their own academic success- madrassas abroad continue to churn out youthful cadres of tiny terrorists weaned on a diet of "Death to America" diatribe. Children, as the PSAs insist, are the future. Here, moms get bent out of shape over toy guns and games that employ them; there, death and destruction against non-Arabs are cause for joyful celebration, dancing in the streets, random and continual gunfire (with real guns, moms!), and a joie de vive rooted, ironically, in the spectacularly violent deaths of others.

I don't know that culturally it's much different. A NY Times article last week mentioned the latest play for what amounts to off-Broadway in Cairo. A comedy, it takes to task Powell, Rice, Franks, and other military and policy leaders in the Bush administration for the Iraq war. Apparently it's not exactly novel, in that it marries tacky consumerism to military victory, ie soldiers don't fix the water pumps but hand out milkshakes and cheeseburgers, but audineces find it amusing. Oh, and especially the part where a suicide bomber sneaks on stage and attempts to blow up the general during a press conference. THAT part consistently gets a deafening roar of applause and brings audiences to their feet night after night. Like I said, it's a comedy.

I think arguing about the Crusades to Arabs is like arguing anything with a drunk. No one's mind will be changed, but everyone concerned will be annoyed or bloody before bed.

By way of Dodgeblogium and Momma Bear at On The Third Hand, we find this essay by the Gray Monk. The Monk is talking about the history underlying our current difficulties in the Middle East, and makes several valid points.

Islam, the religion of peace, was spread by the sword. Beginning in the seventh century, in a matter of little more than a hundred years, Arabs fired with religious fervor conquered first Arabia, then Persia, Syria and Palestine, Egypt and North Africa and Spain. Except for Persia, these regions had been Christian for centuries. Over the next several centuries, Islam reduced the once mighty Byzantine Empire to a nub of Asia Minor and Greece. It moved East, eventually all the way to Malaysia and Indonesia.

For all but the last three hundred years, Islam has been pressing at the borders of Christendom. As late as the seventeenth century, the Turks besieged Vienna several times within a few decades. The great victory at Lepanto ended the threat of Islamic navies only in 1571. For most of a millennium, Islam was an ever present threat to the survival of the West.

The Crusades are a big problem for Osama bin Laden. He forgets that Islam won those wars, and Christianity failed to achieve even the very limited goals the crusaders set for themselves. The Crusades were meant to regain Christian control over the holy lands. No one ever imagined that the Crusades would eliminate Islam, or take back the formerly Christian lands then held by Islam. The tragedy of Andalusia was used as an excuse for the Madrid bombings. The Islamofascists forget that the reconquista was in fact a re-conquest of territory seized by Islam from Christians hundreds of years before.

The crusades were not some sort of proto-colonialism from Edward Said's fevered brain. Hundreds of thousands of Christians died in defensive wars against the Arabs and the Turks. Since the Renaissance, the Industrial and Scientific Revolutions, and the Great Age of Discovery, Europe transformed itself from a marginal, impoverished and backward region at the outskirts of civilization to the center of the world. (Some in America might argue that they're heading back to marginal, impoverished and backward.) Islam has not lost any power or wealth. But they have stood still while Europe, and later America and the Far East made enormous gains in knowledge, wealth and power.

Islam failed to keep up. And the people who say that America and the West need to look at root causes for solutions to the problem of terrorism are missing the point. By saying that, they usually mean that the West should amend its behavior, be nicer to the Arabs, or some other Pollyanna program. They oppose the one real solution that would get to the actual root cause - globalization and the spread of liberty, he network of ideas and habits that allowed the West and other civilizations to advance. And this is the program that we are trying to implement in Iraq.

Commonsense and Wonder links to the mounting evidence of France's corrupt and nefarious involvement in the Iraq's oil industry.

the French interest in maintaining Saddam Hussein in power was spelled out in excruciating detail. The price tag: close to $100 billion. That was what French oil companies stood to profit in the first seven years of their exclusive oil arrangements - had Saddam remained in power.

Read the whole thing, as they say.

Last week an Australian news outlet reported the planned opening of a new brothel in Brisbane.

The punchline? The director of the new venture is already a government employee, Nicole Mair, a "highly paid Queensland Health professional". The director position (a position I think I am unfamiliar with- sounds a little too B/D for me) only requires 4 hours a week, so she won't have to quit her job. Since she is already professionally familiar with icky stuff like hygiene and fluids, she feels she can set new standards in model whorehousery.

Ms. Mair promises hers will not be a "sleazy" brothel, but "valid (?), with ethical workplace standards, and the girls will work in a high-quality environment." Amen sister, cuz I am sick and tired of paying top dollar for underperforming whores. She will also be responsible for education, whatever that means in a brothel.

She also asserts that 1/3 of the ground floor chambers will be reserved for disabled customers, the only brothel in Brisbane to do so.

As skeevy and peculiar as it sounds to Yankee ears (I mean, can you imagine the state surgeon general running a whorehouse on the side? Um, legally?), thinking it over I just can't say anything bad about this project.

Michael Totten has two sources that say yes!

Interesting, and Michael is right-- when Tehran falls, whenever that is, the press will treat it as a "Holy Shit! How Did That Happen?!?" moment, because they've done a piss-poor job of handling developing stories in the Middle East.

Hey, and how messed up is this? The ABC poll that everyone and their brother blogged about yesterday-- the one that said that Iraqis in general are pretty OK with how stuff is going, though they didn't dig the war so overmuch-- got a long favorable piece on NPR yesterday, but nearly nothing that I could see on other broadcast news outlets. NPR came to the table, and CNN didn't?

With all due respect to my colleagues Buckethead and GeekLethal, who are certainly more schooled in foreign affairs than I, I have to disagree with their concensus that a victory for Spanish socialism is a victory for terrorism.

If the Spanish people's choosing a new government amounts to giving in to terrorists' demands, then what about the US' decision to pull troops out of Saudi Arabia? As I remember, Osama sure had his turban in a twist about those troops in the caliphate! And we just caved to him like the weak-willed infidel running dog traitors to Islam we are.

Yes, Spain's political shifts might be cause for worry, but just because a nation does something a terrorist group favors does not automatically mean that the nation has done so to appease terrorists. Or do you really believe that a vote for John Kerry is a vote for HitlerOsama?