The president of Brazil – a leftist, as one could have guessed from this story – blames the current economic mess on “white people with blue eyes.” “I do not know any black or indigenous* bankers so I can only say [it is wrong] that this part of mankind which is victimised more than any other should pay for the crisis.”**
A white person like myself – but I’m not blue-eyed, so I’m blameless in the present crisis! – might be called racist for saying that “I do not know any black or indigenous bankers.”*** A white person like myself would almost certainly be called racist for pointing out, “It’s those same white people who, uniquely in human history, created a widespread political and economic philosophy of freedom, which has produced the unprecedented prosperity of the last two hundred years.” But since I’m not a racist like Brazil’s Socialist president, I wouldn’t say such a thing. Perhaps it’s often best, in the name of racial harmony, to not point out certain facts that might be obvious to non-biased observers.
The best bit, though, is Gordon Brown, who responds to this racist shtick with, “I’m not going to attribute blame to any individuals.” Well neither, evidently, is Mr. Silva, who attributed it to a race (or, at least, the blue-eyed subset of a race) phenotype. Pretty nifty that when two socialists stand next to other and one says something blatantly racist, the other doesn’t have to criticize. No enemies on the left, eh Gordo?
*Aren’t white, blue-eyed people indigenous?
**Really, he thinks “black and indigenous” people, whatever that means, are paying for this crisis? That’s ignorant leftist demagoguery. But I’m redundant.
***I might also be called ignorant, and told, “Go to New York and actually meet some bankers.”
Mr. Obama’s transition team said Mrs. Browner’s membership in the organization is not a problem and that it brings experience in U.S. policymaking to her new role.
“The Commission for a Sustainable World Society includes world leaders from a variety of political parties, including British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who succeeded Tony Blair, in serving as vice president of the convening organization,” Obama transition spokesman Nick Shapiro said.
Fantastic. So the socialist party in Britain supports an international organization of Socialists, and the incoming Obama administration considers this a defense to charges of socialism? Indeed, the fact that she’s a Socialist is a positive! She has experience! Yay!
Of course, when people called Barry a socialist during the campaign, they were ridiculed. Now that he’s creating a new position and appointing a Socialist, we’re supposed to be thankful that she’s got such great experience.
In this midst of this story about workers staging a sit-in after being fired, I unexpectedly came Jesse Jackson saying “This may be the beginning of [sic] long struggle of worker resistance finally.”
Finally? That whole thing in St. Petersburg was just a dry run?
Apollo posted this at 5:26 PM EST on Monday, December 8th, 2008 as Commie Recrudescence
…but if He Kexin is 16, I’m 50. Reading this story in light of what was broadcast to the entire world tonight, I’m uncertain who can deny that the ChiComs fielded a “women’s” gymnastic team with several girls who were not old enough to compete.
Store it away; this will all come out one day when American historians are rooting around the Beijing archives.
Apollo posted this at 11:50 PM EDT on Tuesday, August 12th, 2008 as Commie Recrudescence
Gideon Rachman deliberately works a cliche into every sentence of his column today. It takes a very good writer to write so badly. A sample:
In the matter of clichés, we are all sinners. And with that appropriately hackneyed thought, let me begin:
The Beijing Olympics is one of those iconic moments that tell us we have reached a tipping point. Our kids are going to inherit a very different world.
As a confident China strides on to the Olympic stage, the US is mired in a credit crunch and a war on terror – it is the perfect storm.
It was Napoleon who said: “Let China sleep, for when China wakes she will shake the world.” The turbo-charged Chinese dragon woke up in the go-go 1980s. Whisper it softly, but there will be no respite. This is not even the beginning of the end, although it may be the end of the beginning.
Read, enjoy, ponder. I might need to re-examine everything I type before writing again.
This is perhaps one of the worst articles I have read all year. Not only does the author not understand the goals of the Reagan Revolution (the vast majority of which have become a permanent part of American Political Life; see: low taxes), he somehow completely misunderstands the culture of conservatism that surrounds giants like William F. Buckley. While a case can be made that the conservative movement is on the defensive, it would be hard to argue that it is dead as a political force.
Bonus Retarded Collectivist Points for the use of the word “counterrevolutionary”.
Back in November 2006, Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko died of Polonium-210 poisoning. At the time, Charles Krauthammer summarized well what many of us thought:
Some say that the Litvinenko murder was so obvious, so bold, so messy — five airplanes contaminated, 30,000 people alerted, dozens of places in London radioactive — that it could not possibly have been the KGB.
But that’s the beauty of it. Do it obvious, do it brazen, and count on those too-clever-by-half Westerners to find that exonerating. As the president of the Central Anarchist Council (in G.K. Chesterton’s “The Man Who Was Thursday”) advised: “You want a safe disguise, do you? . . . A dress in which no one would ever look for a bomb? Why, then, dress up as an anarchist, you fool!”
The other reason for making it obvious and brazen is to send a message. This is a warning to all the future Litvinenkos of what awaits them if they continue to go after the Russian government. They’ll get you even in London, where there is the rule of law. And they’ll get you even if it makes negative headlines for a month.
Some people say that the KGB would not have gone to such great lengths to get so small a fry as Litvinenko. Well, he might have been a small fry, but his investigations were not. He was looking into the Kremlin roots of Politkovskaya’s shooting. And Litvinenko claimed that the Russian government itself blew up apartment buildings in Moscow and elsewhere in 1999, killing hundreds of innocent civilians, in order to blame it on the Chechens and provoke the second Chechen war. Pretty damning stuff.
But even Litvinenko’s personal smallness serves the KGB’s purposes precisely. If they go to such lengths and such messiness and such risk to kill someone as small as Litvinenko, then no critic of the Putin dictatorship is safe. It is the ultimate in deterrence.
Edward Jay Epstein, as noted here before, has been busy askinghardquestions to get to the truth. Mr. Epstein has a long piece in today’s New York Sun that explains that explains the connection between Polonium-210 and arms smuggling. As it turns out, lots of of places other than Russia can produce Polonium-210: America, Britain, China, France, India, Israel, Pakistan, Taiwan, North Korea. This means that the exotic murder weapon didn’t necessarily come from Russia. Litvinenko, Epstein argues, may have had ties to arms dealers. This makes him a bigger fish than we realized. It also means that someone other than the Russians may have had a motive to keep Litvinenko quiet.
Another peculiarity is that Britain has refused to release the autopsy report or medical records. Admittedly, this may be Britain’s way of preventing an inquiry into its perpetually struggling National Health Services. After detailing the many tangled strands that surrounds Litvenenko, Epstein his conclusion:
After considering all the evidence, my hypothesis is that Litvinenko came in contact with a polonium-210 smuggling operation and was, either wittingly or unwittingly, exposed to it. Litvinenko had been a person of interest to the intelligence services of many countries, including Britain’s MI-6, Russia’s FSB, America’s CIA (which rejected his offer to defect in 2000), and Italy’s SISMI, which was monitoring his phone conversations. His murky operations, whatever their purpose, involved his seeking contacts in one of the most lawless areas in the former Soviet Union, the Pankisi Gorge, which had become a center for arms smuggling. He had also dealt with people accused of everything from money laundering to trafficking in nuclear components. These activities may have brought him, or his associates, in contact with a sample of polonium-210, which then, either by accident or by design, contaminated and killed him.
To unlock the mystery, Britain must make available its secret evidence, including the autopsy report, the comprehensive list of places in which radiation was detected, and the surveillance reports of Litvinenko and his associates. If Britain considers it too sensitive for public release, it should be turned over to an international commission of inquiry. The stakes are too high here to leave unresolved the mystery of the smuggled polonium-210.
I was afraid we would have to wait until the Democrat party had chosen its nominee, but someone has already stepped up to remind us what’s really at stake:
Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, speaking to a local Iowa radio station, said that terrorists would dance in the streets if Sen. Barack Obama, D-Illinois, is elected president
Remember that if we stop, even for a moment, obsessing over how the terrorists might want the election to turn out based on the shaky assumptions they have about American politics, than the terrorists win. Lest we forget the danger, there may be close to a million of them trying to sneak onto our airplanes. LIEberals may scoff at King’s claims, but World Net Daily (called Wing Nut Daily by the haters) will set us straight. Remember, this is World Net Daily – they possess the secrets to The Ultimate Fitness Program and a time machine! I think we can count on their geopolitical analysis.
Some of you are saying, “well, we don’t have to worry. The people still have two chances to save America from terrorists – the primary and the general election.”
You see, Clinton is no better than Obama. And neither is any better than the worst monsters of the last hundred years. That’s right, demonrats. I see your Bushitler and raise you a Vladimir Amin Hitlery Maossulini Stal Pot Hussein Obama bin Ladin. The People’s Cube’s “Guess Which Collectivist Said It” quiz is being treated as humorous snark by too many on the net, but at least some people understand that underneath it all it’s serious business.
I may be a biased source, but my dad just wrote the best article to be found about the future of Russia and its relationship with the U.S.:
Vladimir Putin has the heart and soul of a KGB Commissar — which, of course, he once was. He’s a thug, and he’s learned nothing from his country’s history. So he’s driving Russia into the same ditch the communists drove it into back in the twentieth century. He’s creating a one-party dictatorship in which the country’s wealth will be owned or controlled by the State. Like all dictators, he’s trying to gin up a foreign enemy — that would be us — to justify his domestic policies. And he’s embarking on a course to achieve his communist predecessors’ dream of imposing a sort of Pax Sovietica on the world.
The rigged election of Dmitri Medvedev as Russia’s president on March 2 was, of course, merely window-dressing to show that Putin is obeying his country’s constitution by limiting himself to two consecutive four-year terms. Putin himself will take the lesser post of prime minister, but there’s no doubt he’s the man in charge. The general assumption is that Putin will return to the presidency when Medvedev’s term expires, or sooner should the presidency become vacant before then. (A friendly word of advice for President Medvedev: Get yourself a food-taster, and send a flunky out each morning to start the car.)
Read the whole thing. His conclusion isn’t what I expected.
Sometimes when I see liberals do what I consider to be the right thing, I’m blown away by their reasoning. I’m not a Kantian and won’t gripe about them doing it for the wrong reason. But it leaves me confused.
Like this. Steven Spielberg’s no longer going to help the ChiComs with their Beijing Olympic production. Because the Chinese didn’t end the bloodshed in Darfur. I could have named off a dozen very good reasons not to help the ChiComs produce propaganda, and several dozen others that are still pretty good. Darfur would never cross my mind.
Apollo posted this at 1:51 AM EST on Wednesday, February 13th, 2008 as Commie Recrudescence
Bret Stephens discusses the enormities in Putin’s Russia:
Once sentenced, prisoners are transported in packed train wagons to distant correctional colonies that, under Russian law, range from relatively lax “general regime” colonies to “strict,” “special,” and (most terrifying of all) “medical” colonies. Arrival in the camps is particularly harrowing. According to prisoner testimonies collected by Mr. Ponomarev, in the winter of 2005 convicts from one torture colony in Karelia, near the Finnish border, were shipped to the IK-1 torture colony near the village of Yagul, in the Udmurt Republic, about 500 miles east of Moscow.
“The receipt of convicts ‘through the corridor’ takes place in the following manner,” Mr. Ponomarev reports. “From the [truck] in which a newly arrived stage [of prisoners] is brought… employees of the colony line up, equipped with special means — rubber truncheons and dog handlers with work dogs. . . . During the time of the run, each employee hits the prisoner running by with a truncheon. . . . The convicts run with luggage, which significantly complicates the run. At those [places] where employees with dogs are found, the run of the convict is slowed by a dog lunging from the leash.”
The prison gantlet is just the welcome mat. At IK-1, a prisoner with a broken leg named Zurab Baroyan made the mistake of testifying to conditions at the colony to a staff representative of the Human Rights Ombudsman of the Russian Federation. “After this,” Mr. Baroyan reported, the commandant of the colony “threatened to rot me in the dungeon. They did not complete treating me in the hospital. The leg festers [and] pus runs from the bandage. . . The festering has crossed over to the second leg.”
Mr. Stephens also mentions a youtube video documenting the abuses. It’s hideous. But I think it needs to be seen.
Let us recall that Putin, like Stalin and Hitler before him, was TIME’s man of the year. Let’s hope he’ll share the same cubicle in hell with them.
The moronic pinko hippies in Berkley have decided that the men who defend their freedoms every day are unwelcome in their city:
Berkeley gives Marines the boot
City Council says recruiting station not welcome; military mum for now
By Doug Oakley, STAFF WRITER
Article Last Updated: 01/31/2008 12:53:41 PM PST
BERKELEY — Hey-hey, ho-ho, the Marines in Berkeley have got to go.That’s the message from the Berkeley City Council, which voted 8-1 to tell the U.S. Marines that its Shattuck Avenue recruiting station “is not welcome in the city, and if recruiters choose to stay, they do so as uninvited and unwelcome intruders.”In addition, the council voted to explore enforcing its law prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation against the Marines because of the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. And it officially encouraged the women’s peace group Code Pink to impede the work of the Marines in the city by protesting in front of the station.In a separate item, the council voted 8-1 to give Code Pink a designated parking space in front of the recruiting station once a week for six months and a free sound permit for protesting once a week from noon to 4 p.m.
When you believe that the simpletons of Code Pink have more legitimacy than the United States Marine Corps you should be checked for mental illness. Don’t these high minded socialists understand that their freedom to stink of patchouli and wear hemp sandals is protected every single day by the men they seem to enjoy maligning?Our entire country would be better off if Berkley mysteriously fell into the sea.
