Piraten! Move out of Your Parent's Basement!

I've never heard of a political party become so adept at repelling women without, say, making them wear veils or binding their feet:

Just after walking the German Pirate Party plank due to exhaustion, ex-Pirate political manager Marina Weisband dropped the boom on her mobbing male marauders by outing them as being just as chauvanistic and sexist as male types everywhere else are, political or otherwise.

The response she got from these thoroughly modern males amounted to "whatever you say, sweet cheeks."

„Barbara”

Christian Petzold’s film „Barbara” takes an unsentimental look at the DDR from the perspective of a Doctor who sought an exit visa.



Be warned, though. The place never looked that good.

Among the Impressionable: People Who Pay for Premium Cable

The Chicago Tribune reports that:

HBO's 'Boardwalk Empire' sparks demand for men's retro haircut

It's not really a MULLET we're talking about here, but we'll let them have their "fun".

It's actually just another collection of over-the-top adjectives being tossed around about the empty lives of hipsters.

"Most places around the country, the style is slightly less exaggerated," Ash says. "And the more severe James Darmody look is one we're seeing stronger in our major metropolitan areas where there's a little more high fashion.... [Men in] Los Angeles, New York and Miami seem to prefer more of an extreme look, where it's much shorter through the sides and longer and more artsy on top."

"art-say" !!! Spoken like someone who never kissed a girl, if you asked me.

What? You've Never Heard of the Paupers' Research Centre ?

What are they good at? Making broad, proud, sweeping summit-closing declarations on stuff they will never actually do:

The European Commission has presented plans to boost spending on scientific research by tens of billions of euros.

EU science commissioner Maire Geoghegan-Quinn on Wednesday (30 November) announced the bloc's new €80 billion envelope, up from €50.5 billion for its previous seven-year funding programme.

In fact it's SO visionary, (after all, who would ever think to do "research" or get the taxpayer to fund some of it,) that they had to come up with a new name for this phenomical invention.

The new scheme, dubbed Horizon 2020, will run from 2014-2020.

"We need a new vision for European research and innovation in a dramatically changed economic environment," said Geoghegan-Quinn.

Wait! Wait! I think I'm having a vision!

Pretentious Crap, circa 1988

"Halb-Stadt" (Berlin West)

Where exactly DOES Art-Haus rubbish go when it dies?

Achtung, Baby!

They’re coming for your vapid Hello Kitty memorabilia!

Dystopia Then, Dystopia Now

Just as now, the wasteland of popular culture promoted a sort of "unilateral disarmament" against the world's evils. Otherwise we were to still enjoy the misery we were deserving.

Achtung, Baby!

They’re coming for your vapid Hello Kitty memorabilia!

Save the Bears!

Counter-Counter-Counter Something or Other... Still With me?

Veeeeery Interestink!:

DFS 904 was a propaganda station from east germany in the cold war. These messages, sent during night, were absolutely nonsense and were intended to pretend it was an underground station operated by banned communists in western germany. On a website I found *exactly* this messages as an example mp3.

And You Though that they Just Bounced off of the Turnip Truck

Cucumber deaths provoke outbreak of EU bickering

It's a public health problem, not a summit, people!

Accusations and counter-accusations continue to be exchanged across Europe as the region struggles to tackle a lethal outbreak of enterohaemorrhagic E.coli linked to contaminated cucumbers, which has so far left 14 people dead in Germany.

News Digest from the Fake Crisis Management Center, no. 2011\05B

One can only guess how these things get counted: "US behind S.Korea, UK in broadband adoption, download speeds"

International Business Times:

Probably Google's new fibre optic project in Kansas city and the Missouri side which has promised to bring a 100X faster internet broadband connection will make US overcome its cyber crisis.

To me, the "crisis" elicits a so what, once you see what threy're talking about: an isolated part of Korea and the UK.

Nearly 8.4 million broadband users in New York found their average download speed to be 11.7 Mbps, crawling much behind Seoul and South Korea which has a speed of 35.8Mbps for 10 million residents.

SO why exactly is there a crisis? A lake of state ownership, of course!

Walter McCormick Jr, the USTelecoms chief executive, pointed to FCC data showing that 95 percent of Americans have access to fixed broadband, and 93 percent are happy with their service saying, "Clearly the private sector is doing its part -- broadband has been deployed to virtually every corner of America where a business case can be made for investment."

Fake Crisis Squared

Education system doesn't support NBN: Caelli

AUSTRALIA is not equipped to deal with the National Broadband Network due to past "dumbing down" of IT education and resulting lack of trained professionals, security expert Bill Caelli warns.

So, to have one crisis, they will have to equip themselves sufficiently first. And THAT'S a crisis.

Near Distant Ago: the Beginnings

The Golden age of Brit Flicks

Further to my weakness for UK mid-century fillums, from 1959, it's I'm Alright Jack

No, Seriously. You First.

News Digest from the Fake-Crisis Management Center, no. 2010\12-A

Germany unveils plans to tighten internet privacy
Monsters and Critics.com

Berlin - Germany unveiled plans Wednesday to regulate the internet, including opt-out rights from Google Street View.

Google Street View capturing child birth is a hoax
San Francisco Chronicle

That's what people were asking last week as this Google Street View< image capturing the birth of a baby in Berlin circulated around the Internet.


A law for every occasion, as usual:

'The Internet Is Not a Lawless Place'
Spiegel Online

Doorbusting Geopolitical Events

Which is to say, the very opposite of the NorK condition, unless fascism becomes an Olympic sport.

Pyongyang, November 21 (KCNA) -- The Puebla State Branch of the Mexican National Preparatory Committee for Commemorating the Centenary of Birth of President Kim Il Sung was inaugurated on Nov. 13.

Arturo Mauricio Juarez Lopez, president of the Mexican Puebla State Association for Friendship with the Korean People, was elected chief of the branch.

The branch decided to briskly conduct colorful commemorations till 2012, centenary of birth of the President.

How very cosmopolitan. It’s almost like an Ice Capades of authoritarian leftism. They insist that a desperate world yearns for their wisdom! They will not disappoint!

Steal His Book – If he ever Publishes One

Gutmenschtum cause requires flexibility. Flexibility, that is, with the reality of any situation over which you decide to become as theatrically outraged as those who tell you that you should (if you want to remain a good little Gutmensch.)


Sign and Sight, the product of near-monopoly mega-publisher Bertelsmann (AKA the Death Star of European gutmenschliche non-diversity of thought and opinion), takes up the matter in their unsalable digital form over a tempest in a teapot governing Argentine copyright law. Apparently it’s draconian because at it’s heart, it doesn’t exempt professional academic philosophers from stealing others’ copywritten work.

The article 17º states that "Every author or inventor is the exclusive owner of his work, invention or discovery, for the term granted by law".
Juan Bautista Alberdi intended for the copyright term to be indefinite, but during the writing of the Constitution it was decided to give a time limit, as done in Chile and the United States.

Pretty damn typical, and a good friend of authors who want to defend themselves from theft of their work by those evil corporate publishers, not to mention comforting the publishers enough to believe that if they print something, some ass isn’t going to turn around and give it away. It’s hard to see any publisher committing to print ANYTHING without that protection.

Alas, enter the outraged:

in 2009, something happened that no one in their right mind would have believed possible: the Argentinian Book Chamber filed charges against a university professor who was running a number of websites on philosophy. Among other things, these featured unpublished or unavailable texts by Derrida, Heidegger and Nietzsche.

Because laws are for vanity, I guess – not to be enforced!

[in 1913] Clemenceau learned that one of his theater plays was being played without authorization. After a dispute about the topic, the first copyright law was enacted in 1913.

The interview’s hero, Horatio Patel further bumbles:

In my naivete I had assumed that the existence of such a wonderful medium for sharing texts would mean that within a decade, the majority if not the entirety of philosophical writ could be available online. Which would mean that everyone would have a complete library in their homes, making it unnecessary to travel or wait, and that the 'books' could be leant to thousands simultaneously, and would be easy to locate. And finally I thought of philosophy magazines which are published once a year at most, and then only in editions of 50, which is barely enough to supply the specialist libraries. This would all change, I thought. Everything that had ever been or would ever be produced, could be published online. This was utterly fantastic, I thought.

Which in the case of copywritten work, can easily made spontaneous with online sales and e-book readers. However, that’s not good enough. The author or rights-holder must never be compensated for their work, even if they want to.

The source of his horror?

Horacio Potel's name was picked up by the European, Asian and US media. The case of the Argentinian professor who was taken to court for putting philosophical texts online, with no intent to make a profit, made it painfully clear that if everyone breaks the law, anyone could be prosecuted.

Picked up, because the idea of defending the hero of all great truths from intellectual repression couldn’t matter more based on the logic that the man wasn’t making a profit. He was giving away other people’s work without their permission, but that’s okay, because there wasn’t any profit involved in his giving something away.

Tell you what... I feel generous. I’m going to give you Potel’s shoes. How does that sound. There’s no profit involved, so we can all feel good and warm inside! Property is theft, Pal!

Doesn’t Horacio Potel realize that if the rights-holders of Derrida, Heidegger’s and Nietzsche’s work wanted their otherwise unavailable writings released for free, they would do it? Even Abbie Hoffman didn’t surrender his rights to “Steal this Book”. Even he understood that it wasn’t yours’ to give away.

News Digest of the Fake-Crisis Management Center, no. 2010\10-E

One thing a fake crisis can't bear is common sense and apathy. Case in point: the "broadband crisis"

At the Progress and Freedom Foundation blog, Adam Thierer notes that a recent Pew Center poll shows a slight majority of Americans don't think supplying broadband should be a big government priority.

The anatomy of this "crisis"? It all starts with satisfied people!

there might be a number of reasons that respondents downplayed the importance of government actions to spur broadband diffusion, including that: (1) many folks are quite content with the Internet service they get today; (2) others might get their online fix at work or other places and not feel the need for it at home; and (3) some may not care two bits (excuse the pun) about broadband at all. More generally, I noted that, with all the other issues out there to consider, broadband policy just isn't that important to most folks in the larger scheme of things....