John on July 6, 2010
Der Spiegel has a longish piece on the conveniently forgotten fascination of the Communist left with liberating sexuality, in particular the sexuality of young children: [M]embers of the 1968 movement and their successors were caught up in a strange obsession about childhood sexuality. It is a chapter of the movement’s history which is never mentioned in the more glowing accounts of the era. On this issue, the veterans of the [...]
John on May 24, 2010
Not this year or next, but this decade unless something is done: Across Western Europe, the “lifestyle superpower,” the assumptions and gains of a lifetime are suddenly in doubt. The deficit crisis that threatens the euro has also undermined the sustainability of the European standard of social welfare, built by left-leaning governments since the end of World War II. Europeans have boasted about their social model, with its generous vacations [...]
John on May 11, 2010
Watch as Lars Vilks, the cartoonist who drew this is attacked: He was “head butted” to the ground by someone who lept out of the front row. Two people have been arrested. Listening to the crowd shout “Allahu Ackbar” gives me the creeps.
John on April 26, 2010
I love this: In declaring May 20th to be “Everybody Draw Muhammad Day,” Seattle artist Molly Norris created a poster-like cartoon showing many objects — from a cup of coffee to a box of pasta to a tomato — all claiming to be the likeness of Muhammad. [...]On Friday, Norris told a radio talk show host in Seattle that she came up with the idea because “as a cartoonist, I [...]
John on March 16, 2010
I’m stealing this from Dan Mitchell at Big Government. Definitely worth five minutes. The lessons are, shall we say, timely:
John on March 11, 2010
Claudia Rosett has a must read description of North Korean logging camps in the Russian wilderness: In 1994 I was working as a reporter for The Wall Street Journal in Moscow when a story turned up in the Russian press, saying that North Korea was running lumber camps in remote areas of Russia. In Moscow, Russian officials confirmed to me that they had two big logging operations manned and policed [...]
John on March 10, 2010
Over at Big Journalism, Humberto Fontova notes a story that has bubbled up from Cubans on the street to Spanish language blogs and finally crossed the language barrier: During that cold snap in mid January, Cuban dissidents snuck out (by internet) a report claiming that over forty patients had somehow frozen to death in Cuba’s Mazorra mental hospital (not far from the one featured in Michael Moore’s propaganda film, Sicko.) [...]
Morgen on May 9, 2009
The national Vice Chairman of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) – a man named Joseph M. Stalin…uh, I mean Schwartz – published an article last December where he laid out a set of very clear policy prescriptions for the incoming Obama Administration. Now I happen to agree with those conservatives who say that using the “socialist” label is not really that helpful (earlier posts notwithstanding). The term has become [...]
John on January 22, 2009
The Local has a story about a cache of child pornography which was discovered in the Royal Library. More interesting than that discovery was the story of how it got there in the first place: The presence of child pornography in Sweden’s National Library stems in part from the library’s legal obligation to collect everything printed in Sweden or in Swedish, including pornographic magazines. While it’s widely known that a [...]
John on December 3, 2008
In Sweden of course. Where else would this happen? The murder took place the night of May 15th following a violent fight between the two in their shared apartment in Alingsås in western Sweden. The 21-year-old put his hands around Johansen’s throat at which point the pair tumbled to the bathroom floor. He then put his right arm over her throat and then pushed her head forward by pressing his [...]
John on October 3, 2008
One guess where this happened: A Swedish man acquitted of rape charges after he filmed himself having sex with a 14-year-old girl is set to receive 157,000 kronor ($22,500) in compensation for being wrongly accused. The 34-year-old man from just outside Malmö met the girl over the internet and admitted to having sex with her. He claimed, however, that he didn’t know the girls was younger than 15-years-old, the age [...]
John on May 6, 2008
The correlation of secularism and increased suicide rates is well established. Occasionally, we see the personal impetus toward suicide spill into the news when some over-zealous professor is found either relishing or spelling out a grand plan for social suicide. What applies on the personal level does seem to have a cumulative effect society-wide. The connection between secularism and declining population has long been remarked upon. Though there are details [...]
John on May 2, 2008
Yesterday was May Day, an annual orgy of leftist protest and street theater. In Olympia, Washington a contingent of black-clad anarchists turned it into a rock-throwing, police-wrassling, building-tagging, state-house-occupying, semi-violent riot: A celebration of the rights of workers and immigrants turned ugly Thursday afternoon, as a smattering of May Day marchers clad in black from head to toe threw rocks through windows at two downtown Olympia banks. The vandalism, which [...]
John on March 3, 2008
If you see this sign as you’re looking for gas, you might want to keep driving. Citgo is Venezuela’s petroleum producer. Venezuela is currently run by Hugo Chavez, would be communist dictator who has announced his intention to rule Venezuela for the next 20 years. Chavez also styles himself the left’s answer to George Bush. In fact, back in May 2005, lefty website Common Dreams suggested that people should buy [...]
John on February 26, 2008
The murder took place in Sweden but the killer served most of his time in Finland. Here’s the story. In 1988, Nikita Joakim Foughantine was released from prison at age 22 and began wandering Sweden with his girlfirend. Two months later, he shot and killed a father and his 15 year old son when they tried to retrieve their stolen bicycle. Later, the wife and mother of the family went [...]
John on December 6, 2007
Where is Michael Moore’s camera crew when you need it? “They barged in spraying gas in the faces of people from those spray cans, and went about dishing out blows and shouting,” Conrad told AFP by telephone. He said some 15-20 patrol cars turned up at the church, outside which some 600 people had gathered, many of them from a protest march that had just ended. Some 25 dissidents dressed [...]
John on December 3, 2007
A socialist icon gets his due! Here’s what the text at the bottom says: During his vicious campaigns to impose communism on countries throughout Latin America, Che Guevara trained and motivated the Castro regime’s firing squads that executed thousands of men, women, and children. All individuals used in this photo montage were murdered by Che and the Cuban regime, revealing the truth of Che’s cruel murderous hypocrisy and acknowledging his [...]
John on November 21, 2007
They call themselves The Indians of the Concrete Jungle, at least that’s how The Local is translating the name into English. Somehow I suspect they’d prefer to be called Native Americans of the Concrete Jungle. Personally, I like Eco-Nuts in the Big City, but what do I know. In any case, the group has decided to do their part for the environment by targeting SUVs, letting the air out of [...]
John on November 12, 2007
Actually the number is $3,162,055,987 per year, but only about half of that is to people intentionally cheating the social welfare system. The other half is put down to “mistakes”: Around 20 billion kronor in welfare benefits are wrongly paid out by government agencies every year, according to a new study. The report, by a committee drawn from various public authorities, says that 10 billion kronor a year is paid [...]
John on November 11, 2007
This gives me a new perspective on what it means to be “soft on crime“: The number of convicted murderers being sentenced to life imprisonment has fallen dramatically following the Swedish Supreme Court’s decision in March that the standard penalty for murder should be ten years in jail. A life sentence should be reserved only for the most serious crimes, ruled the court. There must be a translation problem going [...]
