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."

Among Other Things

Aside from common sense and tolerance, get a load of what’s banned in Iran.

Now if they'll only have a few Children to Corrupt this way Mentally...

Passivity and sheepishness... It even extends to finding new and horrible ways to neglect their childrens' well being in "innovative and modern" ways:

German sex experts (and there’s a whole bunch of those, let me tell you) think that parents’ porn fears are exaggerated and that online pornography is actually a wonderful and thoroughly wholesome way to change the way young people learn about sex.

Here's an idea: stop experimenting with on your children, and they won't turn into serial killers.

Gosh, those Zany Kids are at it Again!

The ususal German dial-a-mob thing isn't working this time.

Literally a dozen or two protesters took part in the “Occupy Frankfurt” campaign a week or two ago and some reports indicate that a few of them even stayed there to continue protesting overnight. And that was just the start of it, folks. There were surely even dozens more occupying Frankfurt during protests now being held against the ECB this weekend although I’m having trouble finding news reports covering them because most Frankfurters leave Frankfurt over the weekend, it seems, as nobody here really seems to care.

You've Gotta Look Busy

If I could rename all those “International” Geneva-based institutions anything, I would call them the “Fake-Crisis Emergency Management Center”

Violent Unbeardings Terrorizing the Good Burghers of Ohio

Oh my:

In Holmes County, a group of Amish men allegedly burst into a home and cut the hair off men and women inside and cut the beards off the men.

And they were acting on orders of a rather unfortunately named chap.

Jefferson County Sheriff Fred Abdalla said there was an incident in Trumbull County about three weeks ago in which a group of Amish men and women from Bergholz went to a home in that county and cut the hair off men and women inside. Abdalla said hair from the victims was brought back to Jefferson County to prove to Sam Mullet, the bishop of the Bergholz group, that Mullet's orders concerning the hair cutting was followed.

A Love that Dare not Speak its' Name

Meira Pentermann on the
Stasi’s legacy in film:

We are blessed to have many poignant movies about the Nazis and the atrocities committed in concentration camps. As the years tick by and those who lived through those unimaginable experiences slip between the pages of history, I thank God that history has been preserved in books and film.

In contrast, I find the lack of movies about East Germany (or any country behind the Iron Curtain for that matter) rather telling. It is not for absence of living witnesses or data. It is merely a lack of will to even touch the subject. When the president of the United States snubs the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, maybe it is best to just not go there. Encouraging Americans to think about the mind-boggling amount of resources required to maintain the socialist utopia might cause them to question the entire concept of socialism.

Because it’s too close to the hearts of those in Hollywood.

Mullets: The DARK Side

From a Law Journal... or a "Law Journal", if you prefer.

THE DARK SIDE: There is a reason we used to wear mullets

When you are an old man, eventually, the young people will demand accountability for your actions when you were young, asking questions such as, “Why did everybody wear mullets back in the day?”

To this, I explained: In the pre-mullet era, there only were two hair styles a young man could wear: the Ozzy Osbourne look and the Sean Cassidy look. But we were tired of both.

And it was impossible to just get a crew cut. We simply couldn’t wear any fashion that pre-dated the sexual revolution.

The formerly mulletted correspondent from the dark side:

You Know them by their Blank Stare

Berlin's eternally dyspeptic "Wutbürgers." Their intellectual heft makes one nearly want to evacuate in situ.

News Digest from the Fake-Crisis Management Center, no. 2011\08B

Every fake crisis needs its' orators

The international bee crisis needs to be addressed before we are really stung, says Green Party MP Sue Kedgley.

A Desperate Appeal for the Earth: through Interpretive Dance

Time to capitalize on it is running out

The poetic dance narrative was Nyarady's way of relating her research on the bee crisis. Part of the process is definitely trying to understand things

Actually it isn't. It's the actual crisis (if any). For the Arts to "understand and mobilize" is usually a sign that "the crisis", whatever it is, has graduated into somethign socially useful to them.

In that sense, the more fake their preferred horror is, the better it is for all of us.

What to Feel Tall? Hang out with Short People!

Want to feel smart? Randomly generate postmodernist trash. Reload for even more high-achieving academic brilliance obfuscation.

He is an evil genius, Thank him, sofort, tous de suite, and chop chop

Post-Nuclear Germany, Beware

Beware of fooling yourself most of all:

However, without these subsidies not one of the "world famous" Danish wind farms would be profitable. But not even the government largesse, courtesy of the taxpayers/consumers seems to be enough to keep wind power profitable in Denmark; Scan Energy, one of the major wind and solar energy companies, with production also in Germany and France, has finally called it a day. Among the major shareholders are a number of the biggest Danish farming estates. Now there is, according to the Danish daily Jylland-Posten, a real risk that some of these family estates, built up during centuries, will have to be sold as a consequense of the Scan Energy bankruptcy.

That Hemorrhoid you Feel Bothering you is your Brain

European discomfort grows about bin Laden killing

So what?

"It's likely that bin Laden sought his own destiny," Zapatero told parliament on Wednesday after Gaspar Llamazares, deputy from the small leftist party Izquierda Unida, questioned his congratulating Obama.

Zapatero said "any democrat" would have preferred bin Laden stood trial, but that he understood how the operation ended in the way it did for "one of history's bloodiest criminals."

Islamist militants set off bombs simultaneously in four packed commuter trains in Madrid in March 2004, killing 191 people and wounding more than 2,000, in attacks they said were inspired but not ordered by al Qaeda.

In Germany a senior member of parliament from Merkel's conservative Christian Democratic Union, Siegfried Kauder, criticized her statement on Monday which said she was "glad that killing bin Laden was successful".

"I wouldn't have used those words. That is a vengeful way of thinking that one shouldn't have. That's mediaeval," he said.

It sounds like they want to give him posthumus citizenship and a Nobel Prize.

Contrary to what their self-regard is telling them, sometimes, ones' opnions simply don't matter in the real world.

The Dreaded Google Street View now Confounding German Car Buyers

Oh, how very ironical. Volkswagen will be putting the dreaded privacy impuning Google Street View into Audi dash boards.

Forbes:

When Germany pushed back hard on Google Street View, Google complied with its conditions — blurring people’s faces and even going so far as to allow privacy-sensitive Germans to have their houses blurred out. (Not everyone in Germany was on board with the visual censorship, and some of those blurred houses wound up getting egged by pro-Googlers. Ironically, opting out made them even more visible.) But eventually Google got fed up with the restrictions, and abandoned Street View in Germany.

Talk about your Fahrvergnügen.

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

Internet Addiction: A Public Health Crisis?

The CRISIS has been found!!!

A large portion of studies on internet addiction come from countries like Taiwan, China and South Korea, which have some of the highest broadband use in the world.

The South Korean government has declared Internet addiction a "public health crisis,"...

Compare and Contrast

"All the other large and small nationalities and peoples are destined to perish before long in the revolutionary world storm… these residual fragments of peoples always become fanatical standard-bearers of counter-revolution and remain so until their complete extirpation or loss of their national character… [A general war will] wipe out all these petty hidebound nations, down to their very names. The next world war will result in the disappearance from the face of the earth not only of reactionary classes and dynasties, but also of entire reactionary peoples. And that, too, is a step forward."

- Friedrich Engels, "The Magyar Struggle," Neue Rheinische Zeitung, January 13, 1849

“As the Imam said, Israel must be wiped off the map,”

Elsewhere

“There is no doubt that the new wave (of attacks) in Palestine will wipe off this stigma (Israel) from the face of the Islamic world, ...”

- Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, “The World without Zionism.”

News Digest from the Fake-Crisis Management Center, no. 2011\03F

Tsunamis and reactor failures be damned!

Bee crisis could define 21st century.

An international panel of scientists found that more than a dozen factors, ranging from insecticides that damage a bee's memory to climate change...

In other words, the suspects with the highest propensity of getting the study's author either a) props or 2) moolah. Cabbage. Jack. Bling-bling.

Elsewhere, in the excuse and catalyst vehilce department:

Globe and Mail

If certain agricultural practices and public policies are changed, says Marie-Pierre Chauzat, one of the report’s lead researchers, a full-scale bee crisis can be averted.

Else-elsewhere...

Middle class fad for bee keeping sees doubling in number of hives

It's right up ther with the middle-class habit of getting passionate about 'crices' one only understands how to ritually imbibe in by reading the right papers.

News Digest from the Fake-Crisis Management Center, no. 2011\1-D

US investigation of Google Street View was a 'wasted summer'
Inquirer

DOCUMENTS HAVE SURFACED that shed some light on the lackadaisical attitude of US regulators towards last year's Google Street View privacy violations.

A senior attorney at the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) described the Google investigation as "a wasted summer" in a letter obtained by the Electronic Privacy Information Centre through a Freedom of Information Act request.

The letter was written only a couple of days after the FTC decided to drop its inquiry into the matter. Many privacy advocates, especially in the UK and Europe, would be aghast at hearing the attorney describe the matter as "a time suck".

They need more time to abuse for-profit schools between naps, I guess.

Data protection organisations in the UK and Germany certainly have, unleashing considerable fury over the fact that a company that has so much data about us didn't have policies in place to stop this from happening.

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

The Mystery of the Red Bees of Red Hook
New York Times

Finding some solution to the maraschino juice bee crisis — to all urban clashes of culture — is part of the project of New York, a wildly creative endeavor.