Category Archives: European theater

France to Iran: “We’ll Bring the Whoopin’, You Bring the Ass!”

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I love the new France, full of manly men and femme fatales who are looking for trouble and willing to throw down the wine glass, adjust their berets and and put a very stylish boot up the ass of the first country that gives them an excuse.

Right now it looks like Iran has gotten the Sarkozy government feeling froggy, excuse the pun. From The Telegraph:

The world should “prepare for war” with Iran, the French foreign minister has said, significantly escalating tensions over the country’s nuclear programme.

Bernard Kouchner said that while “we must negotiate right to the end” with Iran, if Teheran possessed an atomic weapon it would represent “a real danger for the whole world”.

The world should “prepare for the worst… which is war”, he said.

His comments came after Washington reminded Teheran that “all options were on the table” in confronting its nuclear policy, which many officials in the West believe has the ultimate aim of arming a nuclear warhead, despite Iran’s claim that it is for civilian purposes.

The five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council – Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States – plus Germany, are due to meet to discuss a new draft UN resolution on sanctions against Iran later this week in Washington.

So far proposals for tough sanctions have been resisted by Russia and China, while Teheran has ignored UN deadlines to stop enriching uranium, insisting its nuclear activity is for peaceful purposes only.

Sounds like they’re coming along for the ride this time if Uncle Sam decides Iran has a few too many unbombed military installations. Welcome aboard, Frenchie!

It’s nice to have an ally in Europe, instead of a bunch of people hiding behind America’s apron while giving us the finger.

Food Shortages Predicted for Europe!

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From EU Referendum:

Evidence is beginning to accumulate to suggest that, not only has the EU’s management of grain stocks been deficient, but its proposed emergency measures to bring more grain onto the market and stabilise food prices is going to be completely ineffective.

More worrying still, the EU commission is showing every sign that it has not the faintest idea of what is going on. As a result, we are set to see spiralling increases in the price of basic food commodities and there is the very real prospect of shortages.

It was only a few days ago that we reported that the EU commission had so misjudged the grain supply that it had sold off the bulk of grain stocks last year, in anticipation of a “bumper harvest” that has not materialised.

Yesterday, however, in a widely anticipated emergency move, the commission proposed the removal of the compulsory set-aside requirement for the next planting season – a requirement which currently takes ten percent of land out of food production.

This news has received limited media coverage, notably the BBC and The Guardian, the latter reporting EU agriculture commissioner Mariann Fischer Boel’s comments (pictured on the right in the photograph). She says that this will release up to seven of the ten million acres now under obligatory set-aside and produce 10-17million tons more grain.

The problem though – of which the commissioner seems to be wholly unaware – is that by far the bulk of set-aside is not available, being already dedicated to non-food production. This we have noted before, in the context of the land being used for biofuels production, but that is by no means the only use.

According to the commission’s own website, such uses include the production of textile fibres (flax, cotton and hemp), starch for industrial use, vegetable oils, chemical and pharmaceutical products and medicinal plants. Maize is also produced, not only for bio-energy but for several industrial processes such as surface finishing and heat and sound insulation. Maize particles can also be used in the packing industry for fragile goods.

Additionally, there is widespread growing of linseed, with the oil used for paint products and a co-adhesive in popular fibreboard. It also replaces some solvents and petroleum-based chemicals in the products’ formulations, and is used in linoleum flooring. Thus, rather than the popular view of an uncultivated, weed-filled land, this bucolic scene in Gloucestershire (right) is more likely to represent a set-aside area.

As well as these industrial products, farmers are also permitted to grow a wide range of crops for the production of processed animal feed and, although use of set-aside for these purposes, and particularly for biofuels, has been slow to develop – largely due to the bureaucratic obstacles and poor prices, more recently we have seen explosive growth in the non-food sector.

Thus, while in 1993/94, 17 percent of set-aside was under production (EU-12) it rose to 44 percent in 1995/96 (EU-15) and while it dropped to 20 percent for some years, the combination of increased demand for biofuels and the CAP reforms which brought about the Single Farm Payment scheme opened the floodgates. Currently, therefore, the bulk of usable set-aside land is under cultivation and, in 2006 the commission was reporting that more than 95 percent of the non-food set-aside areas were dedicated to energy crops.

Read the rest, it sounds like a TEOTWAWKI scenario from a survivalist blog. In essence, the EU bureaucrats, following the bio-fuel fads and blissfully unaware of how agriculture works, have set into motion a program guaranteed to create food shortages by encouraging farmers to not grow food. What’s worse is that now that the problem is visable on the horizon, the socialist political appointees seem to have no idea how to handle the situation:

One would have thought that commissioner Mariann Fischer Boel could not possibly be unaware of this as the non-food uses of agricultural land have been a core policy of the EU since 1993. Further, one would also have thought that she would have been aware that most of this land is tied up in long-term contracts and, even if production was switched, the shortfall would have to be made up from imports or from the conversion of land at present used for food crops.

With that knowledge, she would thus know that her predictions for increases in food production through the release of set-aside are fantasy. They cannot possibly be achieved. It therefore begs the questions as to whether she is in fact aware of the consequences of the EU’s policy or whether she is deliberately disregarding them.

Thus illustrating the problem of Marxist style central planning. Commissioner Boel has no idea how to solve the problem, but she has a directive to keep producing bio-fuels and that’s all that matters. Europeans will starve as Europe goes green, just as the left wants.

h/t Moonbattery

Even the English Admit Strict Gun Control Laws Cause Crimes!

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Despite what some of our English cousins like to claim, America is actually safer than Britain which is seeing a spike in violent crimes despite draconian gun control laws. From the Times Online:

Despite the recent spate of shootings on our streets, we pride ourselves on our strict gun laws. Every time an American gunman goes on a killing spree, we shake our heads in righteous disbelief at our poor benighted colonial cousins. Why is it, even after the Virginia Tech massacre, that Americans still resist calls for more gun controls?

The short answer is that “gun controls” do not work: they are indeed generally perverse in their effects. Virginia Tech, where 32 students were shot in April, had a strict gun ban policy and only last year successfully resisted a legal challenge that would have allowed the carrying of licensed defensive weapons on campus. It is with a measure of bitter irony that we recall Thomas Jefferson, founder of the University of Virginia, recording the words of Cesare Beccaria: “Laws that forbid the carrying of arms . . . disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes . . . Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man.”

One might contrast the Virginia Tech massacre with the assault on Virginia’s Appalachian Law School in 2002, where three lives were lost before a student fetched a pistol from his car and apprehended the gunman.

Virginia Tech reinforced the lesson that gun controls are obeyed only by the law-abiding. New York has “banned” pistols since 1911, and its fellow murder capitals, Washington DC and Chicago, have similar bans. One can draw a map of the US, showing the inverse relationship of the strictness of its gun laws, and levels of violence: all the way down to Vermont, with no gun laws at all, and the lowest level of armed violence (one thirteenth that of Britain).

America’s disenchantment with “gun control” is based on experience: whereas in the 1960s and 1970s armed crime rose in the face of more restrictive gun laws (in much of the US, it was illegal to possess a firearm away from the home or workplace), over the past 20 years all violent crime has dropped dramatically, in lockstep with the spread of laws allowing the carrying of concealed weapons by law-abiding citizens. Florida set this trend in 1987, and within five years the states that had followed its example showed an 8 per cent reduction in murders, 7 per cent reduction in aggravated assaults, and 5 per cent reduction in rapes. Today 40 states have such laws, and by 2004 the US Bureau of Justice reported that “firearms-related crime has plummeted”.

In Britain, however, the image of violent America remains unassailably entrenched. Never mind the findings of the International Crime Victims Survey (published by the Home Office in 2003), indicating that we now suffer three times the level of violent crime committed in the United States; never mind the doubling of handgun crime in Britain over the past decade, since we banned pistols outright and confiscated all the legal ones.

The English are three times as likely than we Americans to fall victim to violent crime. Interesting. Though to be fair there are other factors that likely work hand in hand with the English resistance to the idea of self defense to make England a criminal wonderland.

Thank the gods I live in America.

Sweden’s Intellectual Elites Suppressing Knowledge of Communist Genocides

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That wouldn’t want kids to hold views that were “right wing” :

A recent study by polling company Demoskop, commissioned by the ‘Upplysning om Kommunismen’ (Knowledge about Communism) association, showed that Swedish students have a skewed view of the history of communism. Few are aware of the massive loss of life caused by followers of this ideology, and 90 percent of Swedish students aged 15-20 do not even know what a gulag was.

A recent opinion piece in Biblioteksbladet magazine (a periodical for Swedish librarians) denounced the government’s plan to spread knowledge to students about the horrors of communism.

In the article, two school librarians write that informing students about the crimes of communism would be wrong as it would risk making the pupils’ views more right-wing.

Former foreign correspondent Kjell Albin Abrahamsson, who has spent many years reporting from the former communist countries in Europe, reacted strongly to the piece.

Writing in tabloid Expressen, Abrahamsson points out how strange it is for two librarians to be so keen to preserve students’ support for socialism that they are are not willing to acknowledge the crimes of communism. He notes that a Russian government commission has admitted that the country’s former communist rulers killed 32 million people.

Support for communism, both hidden and visible, is still quite prevalent among many groups of intellectuals, such as journalists, librarians and those writing in the culture pages of the daily papers. Indeed, outright supporters of communism can be found not only in the Swedish Left Party but also in the Green Party and in the ranks of the influential Social Democrats.

One symptom of this tendency is the widely believed myth among Swedes that Cuba is a relatively prosperous welfare state, offering a decent quality of life and fantastic healthcare to its citizens. Few bother to question the official statistics from a communist country where thousands of citizens have lost their lives whilst attempting to escape on rafts to the United States. Cuba might have gone from being the richest country in Central American to being the second poorest due to Castro’s rule – but this has not stopped Swedish intelligentsia from spreading a positive view of his policies.

Similarly, Swedish journalists seem more interested in pointing out that Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez is a morally superior socialist standing up to the vile Americans, than looking at his dubious moves towards a socialist planned economy and authoritarian rule.

The socialist ideology is not only responsible for the deaths of upwards a 100 million individuals in the former communist countries, the oppression behind the iron curtain and widespread starvation in failed socialist economies. Socialist policies also account for much of the stagnation we see today in Africa, South America and the poorer countries of Asia. Indeed, the countries that today show the greatest rates of development are typically those who quite recently have abandoned socialism in favour of capitalism – India, China, Vietnam and many eastern European countries.

h/t Moonbattery

Academic analysis of the genocidal tendencies of Communism can be found here and here. The Black Book of Communism, a book which details the atrocities of Socialist regimes, ignited controversy in Europe and deserves a place on your bookshelf.