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You’ve got to have a heart of stone not to find this hilarious:
My favorite bits are at 1:04-1:07, and at 11:30, when Gaga says she could be friends with ghosts and then the translator explains that “Japanese ghosts are pretty scary.”
Apollo posted this at 7:16 PM CDT on Wednesday, June 29th, 2011 as Animal Kingdom Strikes Back, Pop Culture Is Filth, Those Wacky Foreigners
Marine Le Pen is a favorite of The Weekly Standard, despite the reflexive anti-Americanism of her National Front Party. So her qualified approval is of the treatment of Dominique Strauss-Kahn is noteworthy:
I don’t particularly like the American justice system, but in my opinion there’s at least one respect in which they have something to teach us: namely, the fact that they treat the immigrant maid and the head of the IMF perfectly equally. We have a lesson to learn from that: …on how to treat the victim [of a sexual assault], on how to treat the powerful and the poor, who should be treated on an equal basis, which is not the case in France. You know very well, if this episode had occurred in France, it would not have turned out [the same way]…
Good call.
Hubbard posted this at 4:22 PM CDT on Thursday, May 19th, 2011 as The Right Words, Those Wacky Foreigners, Uncategorized
In a thread regarding how spectacularly aggressive Obama was in his decision to raid Pakistan and murder bin Laden, FormerSwingVoter links to this NYT story. The lede:
President Obama insisted that the assault force hunting down Osama bin Laden last week be large enough to fight its way out of Pakistan if confronted by hostile local police officers and troops, senior administration and military officials said Monday.
Ay caramba! This struck a cord in my memory regarding how much Obama talked during the campaign about his willingness to launch raids into Pakistan. At the time, I didn’t take him seriously. Whether Pakistan is a friend or enemy, it is not terribly stable, has a large and powerful Islamist population that is sympathetic to our enemies, and, um, has nuclear weapons. It struck me that there could not possibly be a terrorist target in Pakistan important enough to risk upsetting or destabilizing such a country, and that no right-thinking person would take a risk with such enormous potential downsides.
How common was disbelief of Obama’s campaign rhetoric? It’s hard to say, but I found this in our archives. In one of the debates, McCain said that Obama’s threats of launching ”military strikes” in Pakistan were unwise. The Washington Post factcheckers called McCain’s characterization “misleading” and said that Obama had insisted he would only go into Pakistan with the approval of the Pakistani government. Here’s a Jake Tapper discussion from 2007 regarding what Obama actually promised, which features Obama plainly trying to walk back any from any hint that he would “invade” Pakistan.
Am I glad Osama’s dead? Hell yes. But I’m still concerned about the long-term effects of our actions on Pakistan. The Pakistanis appear to be starting to sort out some of this, regarding who knew what, when. There are forces in Pakistan beyond our control, and if this shakes out in such a way that the baddies in Pakistan gain power, history will not view his death as happily as we now do.
Apollo posted this at 9:47 AM CDT on Thursday, May 12th, 2011 as Barack Obama Couldn't Persuade a Bear to Crap in the Woods, Global War on Terror, Those Wacky Foreigners
Deputy PM Nick Clegg thinks Parliament should change the rules of succession because the United Kingdom’s current, sexually-discriminatory succession laws “would strike most people as a little old-fashioned.”
That’s like saying you should upgrade to disc brakes on your Model T because drum brakes strike most people as old-fashioned. Parliament could mandate that the Windsors drive flying cars, talk to each other over Star Trek-style communicators, and lead mankind’s fight against our robot overlords, and they’d still be “old-fashioned.” It’s a monarchy.
Apollo posted this at 1:57 PM CDT on Sunday, April 17th, 2011 as I don't know--but it's a Tradition, Those Wacky Foreigners
Ron Radosh reviews some of the recent ignorant journalism regarding Bob Dylan’s trip to China. The quote in the title is from this post, and is my take away from this whole thing. I am an enormous fan Dylan fan and a native English speaker, yet he has entire albums whose meanings escape me. I went to a Dylan concert, and I simply don’t think it was possible, if you didn’t already know the songs, to make heads or tales of what he was singing.
Yet somewhere in China an office of Commie bureaucrats, who almost certainly speak marginal English, read through the thousand or so songs in Dylan’s repetoire to decide which ones were subversive and which ones weren’t. That’s an awesome thought.
Apollo posted this at 9:14 AM CDT on Monday, April 11th, 2011 as Pop Culture Is Filth, Those Wacky Foreigners
So Socrates proposed a radical set of new ideas to guide his people into an age of reason and responsibility, and after lengthy efforts at persuasion these new ideas were rejected because they went against the morality of his age. We all know what came next, right? Read the rest of this entry »
Apollo posted this at 10:27 PM CDT on Wednesday, March 23rd, 2011 as Those Wacky Foreigners
So “U.S. officials” are “alarmed” at how the Japanese are handling the nuclear situation. Let me ask a question:
Has our federal government done a single thing in the last 10 years that would lead you to believe our “officials” are more competent than the Japanese?
If the Japanese say they’re getting things under control, and one of our trillion dollar nitwits, looking at the situation from 10,000 miles away, says they aren’t, I know who I’m believing. I hope our experts are providing whatever genuine assistance they can to the Japanese, but the boobs providing anonymous scaremongering to already ill-informed journalists need to STFU.
Apollo posted this at 5:58 PM CDT on Wednesday, March 16th, 2011 as Journalism, Those Wacky Foreigners
Egyptians need to come up with their own government. A people becomes free either when a tyrant is forcibly stripped of power (see U.S.A., Japan ca. 1945, France ca. 1789, Russia ca. 1919 and 1991) or after a very long time of gradual changes while suffering under marginally less tyrannical governments (see England).
The Egyptians have the chance to secure liberty and prosperity for themselves and their posterity. Either they can handle it, or they can’t. There’s no foreign army there to enforce good behavior; it’s all up to them.
In 1787, when America faced a constitutional crisis, some of its greatest citizens gathered in Philadelphia and, illegally, drafted a brand new constitution and seized control of the country through strength of argument and popular referendum. I’m not saying that Egyptians must do the same to earn self-government; frankly, holding anyone to the standards of The Founders is preposterous. But that’s the ideal to which popular uprisings should aspire.
Either the Egyptians can handles self-government – in which case some group will assemble and peaceably seize control – or they cannot. In either case, they shall get the government they deserve. I hope our national leaders understand that now is the time for all good men to STFU, and I hope against reason that Egyptians rise to the occasion. But the more we get involved in Cairo, the worse things will be.
Apollo posted this at 8:21 PM CDT on Thursday, February 10th, 2011 as Politics, Those Wacky Foreigners, Tragedy
Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot?
H/T: Ricochet.
Tom posted this at 1:34 PM CDT on Thursday, February 10th, 2011 as Those Wacky Foreigners
Heather MacDonald asks a reasonable question:
When such youth voice their overheated moral indignation in the West, my view is: Why should anyone listen to them? They don’t know a thing about the world; they have never had the responsibility of running a business, have only intermittently worked, have no parental duties, and believe themselves to be the first people in the history of the world to feel indignation about poverty or inequality and are all the more proud of themselves for doing so. The Western press loves to glorify such ignorant protesters in the U.S. or Europe, however, because a. it gives them a story, and b. the almost inevitable left-wing slant of youth protests fits nicely with the press’s own pretensions towards “progressive” enlightenment.
So why should we take the youth movement any more seriously when it erupts in repressive or totalitarian regimes?
My answer: the youth in the West are pretty darn safe and they know it, but the youth abroad know they risk death. They can riot with impunity, because they know that police in Seattle or Washington or New York are going to fire rubber bullets and water cannon; the youth in repressive regimes know they face actual bullets. The Western youth have all the courage of a chihuahua barking at a muzzled rottweiler that’s behind a fence; in repressive regimes the fence is gone. In 1968, the American radicals knew that the Chicago police would act with much more restraint than the Czechoslovakian military.
The youth under repressive regimes know that they’re facing death. Just because they look like the hipsters the clutter up arty coffeeshops in Chelsea or Adams Morgan doesn’t make them any less courageous. We can hope that they make Egypt and Tunisia better places, like Yeltsin did when the hardliners called out the tanks, but they might also wind up slaughtered like in Tiananmen Square.
Hubbard posted this at 12:37 PM CDT on Wednesday, February 9th, 2011 as Heroes, Those Wacky Foreigners
If you’re a typical reader of this website, then you’re probably pretty ticked off about all the speeding tickets you get in your Lamborghini. Fortunately, though, readership has its privileges: I’ve got a solution! Move to Australia, where your judge will be a Top Gear fan who make will make fun of the police officer’s crappy car and fine the police for having the impunity to ticket you in the first place.
Apollo posted this at 11:29 PM CDT on Thursday, November 18th, 2010 as Those Wacky Foreigners
I think the Haitians are trying to tell the world, in no uncertain terms, that it is time for us to leave them alone.
Because of Haiti’s heroic beginnings, its failure is particularly tragic. More than two hundred years of independence, and the best they can produce are some mid-quality rum exports and a cholera (!) epidemic. Whatever is wrong with that place is not going to be solved by Nepalese (!) soldiers, or probably any sort of foreign soldiers. Perhaps they can sort out their business without a civil war; perhaps not. But I cannot think of a finer example of the phrase “throwing good money after bad” than the world continuing to give aid to Haiti. We seem to be paying money to extend the Haitians misery, and we should probably stop that.
Apollo posted this at 8:57 AM CDT on Wednesday, November 17th, 2010 as Those Wacky Foreigners
(H/T)
Hubbard posted this at 11:01 AM CDT on Saturday, October 16th, 2010 as Humor, Those Wacky Foreigners
I’ve largely ignored what appears to be a glut of recent news about the “Middle East” (i.e. Israel – whatever happened to the term “Near East”?) “peace process,” because I think it’s inane. However, I came across this John Podhoretz post that got me reading and thinking about two things, in ascending order of importance.
1. Mahmoud Abbas’s elected term ended in January 2009, and there weren’t additional elections. The guy just seems to be staying in power by his own fiat, even though the most powerful faction in half of his country (Hamas) does not acknowledge his legitimacy. Yet here he is, trompsing about as though he were the legitimate leader of his people. This is the sort of thing that caused me to stop reading about “the Middle East” – the degeneracy of one side is so complete that I would prefer to simply ignore them.
2. In a news story I missed in February, Abbas visited Hiroshima.
Mr. Abbas wrote in the museum guest book: “My heart is aching for the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.” He then said to the press: “People in Palestine have also been afflicted by war. War causes destruction of humans and civilizations. . . “
I cannot think of anything that would cast the Palestinians in a less favorable light than to compare them to the Japanese. As much as Abbas and other Palestinians like to wallow in their own misery, it simply pales in comparison to what the Japanese, and specifically the residents of Hiroshima went through. For years during the war, the Japanese underwent starvation, the mass deaths of loved ones fighting in foreign campaigns, and American bombers destroying entire cities and killing hundreds of thousands of people.
And as though these apocalyptic events were not enough, America went and invented a theretofore inconceivable weapon that would in an instant annihilate 90% of Hiroshima and leave the wretched who survived afflicted with burns, radiation sickness, and cancer. Abbas can say what he wants about Hiroshima, and Hiroshima’s civic leaders are generally whiny enough that they soak up that sort of crap, but in no actual sense do Palestinians have a clue what Hiroshima went through.
Where the comparison gets unflattering is what Hiroshima, and Japan, did after the bombing. By combining hard work with what is, to me, an unfathomable ability to put the past behind them, the Japanese rose from their own ashes as the greatest industrial power in Asia, and second only to America worldwide. Hiroshima itself became a bustling metropolis of three times its pre-war size, the fifth wealthiest city in Japan (warning: PDF). The Japanese today are a free and prosperous people, lovers of baseball, allies with their former enemies, and friends of liberty worldwide. It is a story that cannot be told enough, and never ceases to amaze.
The Palestinians, on the other hand, still have refugee camps from a war that ended over 60 years ago, just three years after Japan’s war ended. Their level of economic development can best be characterized as “miserable,” and it’s only that good because of massive amount of foreign aid, constituting about 1/3 of the Palestinian economy. They have refused to move on from their lost war, continue to [futilely] fight the nation that defeated them, and have developed a national persona that revolves around their status as supposed victims.
Even if you look at 1967 as the date the Palestinians lost their war, the comparison is unfavorable. 43 years after the annihilation of Hiroshima, 1988, there were concerns throughout the Western world that the Japanese were going to overtake us, outproduce us, and buy us out, and that “the Japanese way” was, simply, superior to the Western way. Today, 43 years after the end of the 1967 war, the Palestinians have a self-appointed leader for life whose main purpose is to tell foreign audiences how miserable the Palestinians are.
We’d all be better off if Mr. Abbas had spent more time in Hiroshima and absorbed some of its atomic sunshine.
Apollo posted this at 12:25 AM CDT on Tuesday, September 7th, 2010 as Arafatistan, Those Wacky Foreigners
A 50-member church in Florida is going to burn some books, and this sets off international protests and prompts a statement by the greatest American general in 60 years.
Perhaps it’s my naturally laissez-faire attitude combined with a Western tolerance for others, but I simply cannot imagine anything that a church, of any size, in Afghanistan could do that would cause me wake up 5 minutes earlier on a Saturday, much less march in the streets. Or make a sign. Or burn another religion’s book. I might toast their ill health and eternal damnation, but only if I was drinking anyhow.
Still, this Terry Jones character is being burned in effigy in a country where not one person in a million has a clue what he looks like. C’est fantastique! We should all aspire to be so despised by the enemies of religious liberty, if only we could do so without being total jerks who need to be denounced by the greatest American general in 60 years.
Apollo posted this at 8:27 PM CDT on Monday, September 6th, 2010 as Excruciatingly Correct Behavior, Faith, Those Wacky Foreigners