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Update: Lorne Comments

In the “progressive” world we have constructed for ourselves, it has become more important to be fondled by strangers and to have our unmentionables photographed, than to be even perceived as xenophobic. No matter how illogical and ineffective, progressia would turn us all into cattle in order to maintain the progressive dogma of political correctness… and to profit a few, of course.

Fabulous food, warm hearts, and open hands:

Greece was recently rated the most corrupt country in Europe according to Transparency International’s 2010 Corruption Perception Index, and 78th out of 178 ranked countries.

The average Greek family pays about 1,500 euros ($2,000) a year in various forms of bribery, according to surveys conducted by Transparency International Greece.

Hello. What can I do for you?

The biggest problem is the hospitals though,” said Leandros Rakintzis, Greece’s general inspector of Public Administration….Recently, one American expatriate married to a Greek woman had to slip 50 euros to an anesthesiologist and 40 euros to the nurse on duty before seeing his newborn baby…

Angela Merkel, addressing her Christian Democratic Union party:

“We don’t have too much Islam, we have too little Christianity. We have too few discussions about the Christian view of mankind,” she said to applause from the hall.

Germany needs more public discussion “about the values that guide us (and) about our Judeo-Christian tradition,” she said. “We have to stress this again with confidence, then we will also be able to bring about cohesion in our society.”

Nein. Das ist verboten:

Her party looks set to pass a resolution Tuesday stressing that German culture has Judeo-Christian roots, an idea that critics say aims to marginalize Islam.

Mr Delors told colleagues that any crisis would be a “beneficial crisis”, allowing the EU to break down resistance to fiscal federalism, and to accumulate fresh power. The purpose of EMU was political, not economic, so the objections of economists could happily be disregarded. Once the currency was in existence, EU states would have give up national sovereignty to make it work over time. It would lead ineluctably to the Monnet dream of a fully-fledged EU state. Bring the crisis on.

But then, somebody forgot to let the crisis in on the secret:

Behind this gamble, of course, was the assumption that any crisis could be contained at a tolerable cost once the imbalances of EMU’s one-size-fits-none monetary system had already reached catastrophic levels, and once the credit bubbles of Club Med and Ireland had collapsed. It assumed too that Germany, The Netherlands, and Finland would ultimately – under much protest – agree to foot the bill for a ‘Transferunion’.

ht

Pity:

NDP Leader Jack Layton accused the prime minister Wednesday of ordering Conservative senators to kill a climate-change bill, the day after a surprise vote in the Red Chamber ended in the legislation’s defeat.
A number of Liberals were not in the Senate when the vote occurred, and the bill died with a tally of 43-32.

ht

Fox:

Many of the existing approaches to climate change communications clearly seem unproductive. And it is not enough simply to produce yet more messages, based on rational argument and top-down persuasion, aimed at convincing people of the reality of climate change and urging them to act. Instead, we need to work in a more shrewd and contemporary way, using subtle techniques of engagement. To help address the chaotic nature of the climate change discourse in the UK today, interested agencies now need to treat the argument as having been won, at least for popular communications. This means simply behaving as if climate change exists and is real, and that individual actions are effective. The ‘facts’ need to be treated as being so taken-for-granted that they need not be spoken.

Heads?

I admit I have been as reluctant to admit this as anyone. My whole career has been based on the proposition that somewhere, under all the insults and lying and general bad behaviour that makes up the bulk of political life, there was some genuine issue at stake: that if you could just strip away the politics, you would eventually get to the policy. It has taken me all these years to understand that, no, it’s just politics all the way down.

… or tails?

However, the Liberal Party has a habit of hot dogging it on ethnicity and culture. They’re still trying to make the claim, after all their stupid mistakes, that Cultural Diversity is a capital “L” Liberal value – still trying to claim that diversity doesn’t find a home inside the Conservative tent. Liberals like to argue that their opinions are informed by facts as opposed to the other side which is purely ideological. Here are some facts for Mr Ignatieff. No games just the facts.

Dante:

Ed Dante is a pseudonym for a writer who lives on the East Coast. Through a literary agent, he approached The Chronicle wanting to tell the story of how he makes a living writing papers for a custom-essay company and to describe the extent of student cheating he has observed. In the course of editing his article, The Chronicle reviewed correspondence Dante had with clients and some of the papers he had been paid to write. In the article published here, some details of the assignment he describes have been altered to protect the identity of the student.

This of course, frees up time for the little darlings to do more valuable work:

The student association at Carleton University has decided that any club that is opposed to abortion has no place on campus and would have its funding as a student club cut off.