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Matter of perspective

Heh. An anonymous commenter sent me a link to this picture (thank you, masked stranger!) showing our fearless leaders kicking off the Unity March in Paris. Originally posted by this blog.

I actually did a little due diligence trying to authenticate it. “En direct” is just “live” in Spanish, but I did try to pick out individual figures (people wearing slightly different colors) in the top picture and match them to the bottom picture. Turned out not to be necessary, as the Independent has picked up on the story.

Oh, now, I understand dozens of heads of state can’t really mix in a giant, milling crowd of strangers in a city on super duper high terrorist alert. The security services would never allow it, nor should they. I understand completely.

But they tried to give that impression, and that pisses me off no end. Couldn’t they say “heads of state convened in Paris to wish the marchers well” or summat? Noooo, they had to be photographed on the street, arms linked, ‘leading’ the parade.

God, our leaders are phonies and mediocrities. And, worse, they assume we must be dumber than they are, if they’ve got the big offices with the comfy chairs.

Okay, not a huge point. But fair’s fair…everybody’s giving that poor ultra-Orthodox paper shit for P’shopping out all the wimmins (a move so pointlessly stupid I can’t even…). Leaderofthebandgate is something a little less benign, if only because it’s a lie to a much, much bigger audience.

January 15, 2015 — 8:23 pm
Comments: 11

Hmmmm…

The British Daily Telegraph used to be my favorite newspaper. Well written, right of center. It has– like so many once-great institutions — been trending left for years. All institutions drift leftward with time, and the Telegraph has had some unhelpful changes of ownership and management.

Recently, they’ve had theyselves a good old purge of conservatives, making the paper unreadable once and for all. Oh, well. The Telegraph’s loss has been Breitbart’s gain.

Gerald Warner is one such. I’m going to stamp my little foot and insist you read his essay published today (just kidding — I have huge feet!).

His thesis is that the scoundrels who locked arms at the front of the parade are the very incompetents who have made our countries into the violent, multiculti shit-holes they are today. He says it better. Go read.

But, not central to his thesis was a bit at the end about our ‘friends’ at Charlie Hebdo.

The brutal murder of its journalists should not blind us to the true character of the magazine. Charlie Hebdo is a far-left publication promoting authoritarian repression of politically incorrect views. Just 18 months ago it published a petition to President Francois Hollande demanding the compulsory dissolution of the Front National. It had already run a similar petition in 1996.

“We ask you to dissolve the Front National, this league whose political aim is to bring about the end of the Republic,” said the Charlie Hebdo petition. So, a party that came first in the recent European elections in France, with 4.7 million votes and 24 seats in the European parliament, and whose leader received 6.4 million votes in the 2012 presidential election and is ahead of Francois Hollande in polls for the next contest, should be forcibly dissolved, in the view of freedom-loving Charlie Hebdo.

Yeah, not quite the freedom absolutists one might have hoped. I still support their right to be assholes without getting murdered by even assier assholes but truly, they are assholes.

Oh, yes. That up there is exactly what you think it is: the Charlie Hebdo September 11 tribute issue.

January 14, 2015 — 9:15 pm
Comments: 15

…about that march…

I’d feel a whole lot better about this march thing if I knew for sure what the marchers thought they were marching for. I’ll bet you a shiny new Euro the majority of them thought they were marching in favor of multiculturalism. I don’t know when it started to be called the March for Unity, but it did. Dunno about you, but when I watched the Paris atrocity unfold, my first thought wasn’t, “what’s needed here is to open up a can of Unity.”

Maybe I’m just cynical. Maybe it was the sight of all those international scoundrels (the ones with very dodgy track records on freedom of the press) locking arms and looking pious and butter-wouldn’t-melt at the head of the procession.

Mahmoud Abbas? Really?

Maybe it was the people playing John Lennon’s Imagine out the window while the crowd roared.

Srsly. Imagine is my trigger. Whenever I hear the monotonous strains of that braindead puddle of toddler puke, my my eyeballs throb and my vision blurs and I am truly not responsible for what happens next.

It’s easy enough to turn out for the message, “I’m for nice things and against murder ‘n’ stuff.” It’s hard to decide what you’re going to do about it. I saw thousands of those “Je Suis Charlie” posters, and not a single picture of Mohammed. So, really, how Charlie were they?

Now, the PEGIDA thing. That’s getting interesting.

January 12, 2015 — 11:10 pm
Comments: 13

This is my favorite of the cartoon reactions. The artist is Joep Bertrams. Onsterfelijk means immortal.

I like the sentiment. Sadly, I don’t believe it. In every instance I can think of, terrorism worked. Works. Works exactly as intended.

If they keep Charlie Hebdo going, and it keeps publishing enthusiastic blasphemy, I’ll be impressed and encouraged. But the point stands. Hesitant people will hesitate even more, and there will be more hesitant people.

The Financial Times has *already* run a “now, I’m not condoning terrorism, but…” article (link goes to HotAir because FT is behind a firewall). Western media are blurring out the offending images in reports about the incident. (Here’s the Telegraph. Here’s the New York Daily News (scroll down).

The AP’s sniffy, sanctimonious press release describing how they avoid all controversial images hilariously exploded in their faces when the Washington Examiner discovered them selling prints of Piss Christ on their web site. You remember — Andres Serrano’s photo of a crucifix submerged in a jar of old pee. (Btw, hate to admit it, always sneakingly thought that was a really haunting and beautiful image. Shame about the pee).

Point is, it’s probably going to work. This is probably not the tipping point. That depresses me as much as the murders.

January 7, 2015 — 10:41 pm
Comments: 6

Movie Night with Kim

Since it seems Kim Jong-un has been handed Hollywood’s remote control, how’s about we look at a few films the little wiggler *does* approve of.

The above is a still from the gripping drama A Traffic Controller on Crossroads (the link goes to YouTube, full movie with subtitles). I excerpted this synopsis from the blog DPRK Video Database (he kindly put a spoiler alert on it):

…the traffic woman gives a presentation on traffic safety to local citizens, who appreciate her advice. There’s lots of scenes with the man and woman deliberating over what to do. The traffic woman begins to wonder whether she should have gone into rhythmic gymnastics. She eventually speaks to her supervisor, who talks about how she let another young driver slide on traffic regulations, which resulted in a terrible accident. Later, the chauffeur of the head of the Research Institute violates a no parking zone. The traffic woman chastises him, and the head of the Research Institute goes back later to make a formal apology.

Or if romantic comedy is more your thing, how about Urban Girl Comes to Get Married. It’s like Tammy’s in Love. Only, not.

Okay, you know what? Hong Kil Dong is actually a pretty awesome kung fu movie, in the tradition of low budget Eighties kung fu movies. I love that shit.

Check the DPRK Video Database blog linked above or the sidebar of any of the linked videos for more zany Korean film goodness. But if you want to see the Kim Jong-un death scene from The Interview, you’ll have to skip around and chase it yourself. That thing’s getting pulled offline as fast as it goes up.

December 18, 2014 — 10:35 pm
Comments: 16

#imwithstupid

My work computer is a shared computer, so the only news browsing I do is on the ultra-orthodox news.bbc.co.uk. This morning, I left their auto-updated news roll on the Sydney siege running and was surprised to see the very first entry for #illridewithyou. No explanation, just that someone had created the hashtag. I assume it was accidentally dropped into the wrong thread.

Nope. Did you see this thing? A Sydney woman was on a train this morning, seated next to a woman in a hijab. At one point, the woman took off the hijab. Woman A runs after Woman B at the station, tells her to put the hijab back on and Woman A will escort her to her destination. Woman B gives her a long hug but declines.

Thousands have now signed off on this — it’s the second most trendingest hashtag on Twitter at the moment — offering to escort people in religious garb safely around Oz.

If a Muslim commits a crime in the name of his religion and your first thought is, “ZOMG, how can I protect innocent Muslims from my violent, racist fellow citizens?” you have officially signed off of the team. You have ticked the “not my tribe” box on the demographic form. You have identified your neighbors as a greater threat than the barbarians at the gate.

This backlash? It has never happened. Oh, some moron sucker-punched a Sikh and I think an idiot threw a piece of bacon at a Mosque once. Some reprisal.

Just another opportunity for the ruling class to preen in public and congratulate itself on how morally superior it is to the rest of us knuckle-dragging plebs.

p.s. isn’t it equally possible that Woman B — the hijab-wearing Muslim woman — took off her identifying garment because she was distressed and embarrassed by the Sydney siege itself?

December 15, 2014 — 9:26 pm
Comments: 15

Could we, maybe, talk about this sometime?

December 6 is Finnish Independence Day and, apparently, it’s not uncommon for marches and demonstrations to happen alongside the celebrations. This year’s fun and games, though, did €100,000 worth of damage to businesses.

Here’s the thing, though: the article above goes into great detail about what was damaged and where and how the shopkeepers will get it back together for Christmas shoppers. It says absolutely jack about who the protesters were and what they’re agitating for.

Beyond labeling them as “left wing anarchists”. And this picture, which appears to say FUCK CAPITA. I seriously doubt Finnish anarchists are unhappy about the British personnel firm Capita. It seems unlikely our scholar will have room to spray FUCK CAPITALISM in the space provided. But, really, FUCK CAPITAL doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Whatevs.

Who are these people? We’ve had protests in the UK and the US and all over Europe, with millions in damages. The last ten years? Twenty? They were the core of the Occupy protests and the London riots. There are always signs from the Socialist Workers Party and similar socialist orgs. Lots of Anarchist symbols. We know they are turning up in Ferguson (and muddying up their nice race riots). And, really, wherever there’s trouble in the streets.

It’s bizarre that nobody seems to give a shit who they are or what they want (which makes what they’re doing utterly ineffective, other than to throw a pinch of sand under the wheels of the mighty juggernaut of Western Commerce).

Is it a homogeneous group? Is it just stupid local kids attracted to violence? Or is somebody bankrolling this stuff, and to what purpose?

I know lefty journalists (which is most of them) are blinded by their allegiances, but even they seem completely uninterested in digging into this phenomenon. And we do have a few righty journalists.

C’mon, guys — this shit is creepy and it’s costing us money.

December 9, 2014 — 10:26 pm
Comments: 16

spectators

You know that itching, burning, apocalyptic feeling? Yeah, me too.

Not our leaders, though. It’s not just Obama — Call Me Dave is on vacation, too. And it’s just grand to see snaps of him on the beach in the middle of this unholy shitstorm.

I get the feeling these guys think if they act like this is no big deal, it won’t be. Because if they act like it’s a big deal, it will be obvious how badly they’ve misjudged the ‘Arab Spring’ from the beginning. And that would be too, too embarrassing.

As part of a radio feature about WWI the other day, the BBC reeled off all world’s current war zones. With the exception of Ukraine and the Koreas, every single one of them was a case of Islamists versus the world.

They got around having to admit this explicitly by blaming ISIS in one place, Israel and Hamas in another, unnamed Islamists in another, Boko Haram in another, “separatists” in another, “militants” in another. Without ever acknowledging what all those fights have in common.

Odin help us all.

August 11, 2014 — 9:39 pm
Comments: 27

Ha! Ha! Ha! Come here, silly swans!

There’s an exhibition of rare Chinese propaganda posters going on in Edinburgh at the moment. It’s 133 posters from 1913-1997 on loan from the Propaganda Poster Art Centre in Shanghai.

I wouldn’t mind seeing that. Not enough for a field trip to Scotland, but enough to look it up online. I lumme some propaganda. (No, I really do. I’ve always thought that should have been my calling). The Telegraph has a better slideshow (I know, I know…slideshows are de debil).

I especially love these ladies, from the model opera Red Women’s Detachment, 1971. No, they don’t look silly at all.

Right. We’ll assemble here under the flagpole tomorrow, 6 sharp.

Dead Pool Round 65!

June 26, 2014 — 10:19 pm
Comments: 13

You should probably have that looked at

How did I miss this? Apologies if everyone knew but me. Apparently, when the 30-foot-tall commemorative statue of Nelson Mandela was unveiled in Pretoria in January, nobody noticed the tiny bronze rabbit in his ear.

The two Afrikaner sculptors had wanted to sign the work on his pantleg, but were told not to. So, covert bunny. It’s an Afrikaans pun. “Haas” means rabbit, but it also means haste, and they were in an almighty rush to finish the thing by the deadline.

When it was discovered, there was kerfuffle. Also brouhaha. Some thought Mandela was a jolly man and would have wanted it to stay. Others thought not.

My favorite quote is from Mogomotsi Mogodiri, spokesman for the Department of Arts and Culture, “We don’t think it’s appropriate because Nelson Mandela never had a rabbit on his ear.” If that isn’t hilariously literal enough, he went on to say, “We’d want people to see that statue as a symbol of hope, not about something like a rabbit.”

Well. You needed a pair of binoculars to spot it, but still it had to go. So it went.

Always hungry for attention on the cheap, PETA tried to “adopt” it, but nobody seems to know where it went. So PETA went away and murdered puppies and kittens until they felt better.

Right! New Dead Pool. Here. Tomorrow. 6 WBT! Be here. Or don’t. I’m not your mother.

June 19, 2014 — 10:35 pm
Comments: 16