Stockholm syndrome

 

Sweden, the goody-two-shoes of the Western world, so smugly superior to those who are not blind to the nature of the all-encompassing political/social/religious system of Islam, got its first taste of violent jihad over the weekend. A "youth," as the dhimmi media refer to Muslim criminals, Taimour Abdulwahab, aimed to create carnage in Stockholm's city center.

Abdulwahab tried to set fire to a car bomb packed with gas canisters in a busy shopping street in the Swedish capital on Saturday. The car caught fire and the bomber fled the scene before blowing himself up 15 minutes later, injuring two bystanders. 

 Before his exploit, he left a recording:

"Now the Islamic state has been created. We now exist here in Europe and in Sweden. We are a reality. I don't want to say more about this. Our actions will speak for themselves." He added: "We are not a lie, or imagination. We are real."

Yes, Taimour, you are real. It is the Swedes who are not real, living in a fantasy land of unicorned reindeer. One of the first postings I wrote for this blog, "Sweden's suicide note," quoted a government minister, Jens Orback: "We must be open and tolerant towards Islam and Muslims because when we become a minority, they will be so towards us.” 

Yeah, they'll be open and tolerant toward you, as long as Sweden is a Muslim state run according to Sharia law.

But Swedes, or at least the ruling establishment, don't want to know. They continue to ignore all the evidence while pretending that Islam and liberal secularist democracy can mix with a little more effort toward "integration," a little more give (on the part of Sweden's indigenes) and take (by Muslims).

Sweden has conned much of the rest of the world into believing the story. As Toronto's fatuous Globe and Mail says, in re the suicide bombing, "Explosions that killed a suspected bomber and injured two passersby on a busy shopping street in Stockholm are being investigated as a 'terrorist crime,' sending shock waves through Sweden, which prides itself on its open, peaceful society and had so far been untouched by the post-9/11 attacks."

In the same article:

“We’ve been a sheltered bay in a stormy world,” said Magnus Ranstorp, research director of the Centre for Asymmetric Threat Studies at the Swedish National Defence College. “We have even seen ourselves as a moral guardian for the world. Innocence lost is a good way to describe what has happened now.” 

Sorry, Magnus old boy, you have not been sheltered, you have found an illusory refuge in cowardice. Moral guardian of the world? What self-serving, condescending rubbish. You have bought temporary peace by handing parts of your cities to Muslims, who have made their turf into no-go areas.

Malmø, Sweden. The police now publicly admit what many Scandinavians have known for a long time: They no longer control the situation in the nations's third largest city. It is effectively ruled by violent gangs of Muslim immigrants.

Some of the Muslims have lived in the area of Rosengård, Malmø, for twenty years, and still don't know how to read or write Swedish. Ambulance personnel are attacked by stones or weapons, and refuse to help anybody in the area without police escort. The immigrants also spit at them when they come to help. Recently, an Albanian youth was stabbed by an Arab, and was left bleeding to death on the ground while the ambulance waited for the police to arrive. The police themselves hesitate to enter parts of their own city unless they have several patrols, and need to have guards to watch their cars, otherwise they will be vandalized. "Something drastic has to be done, or much more blood will be spilled" says one of the locals.

The official reaction to the suicide bomber was standard boilerplate. 

At a news conference, Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt urged Swedes not to jump to “premature conclusions” that “create tension which paints pictures that are then difficult to change.”

“Sweden is an open society ... which has stated a wish that people should be able to have different backgrounds, believe in different gods ... and live side by side in our open society.” 

Reinfeldt said that detonating explosives in a crowd was "unacceptable." Taimour, bad form, quite. Not what we mean by "side by side."

I am not so given to Schadenfreude as to take pleasure in seeing Swedish lives endangered by their worship of tolerance for the intolerant. I'd much rather the Swedes would drop their moral preening and get it that an open society need not be a defenseless one. 

Ultimately, there is no solution except separation between the West and Islam until such time as Islam actually is willing to live peacefully with those who have different values.

Streets of London

Have you seen the old man
In the closed-down market
Kicking up the paper,
with his worn out shoes?
In his eyes you see no pride
And held loosely at his side
Yesterday's paper telling yesterday's news.

And have you seen the old man
Outside the seaman's mission
Memory fading with
The medal ribbons that he wears.
In our winter city,
The rain cries a little pity
For one more forgotten hero
And a world that doesn't care.

So how can you tell me you're lonely,
And say for you that the sun don't shine?
Let me take you by the hand and lead you through
the streets of London
I'll show you something to make you change your mind.

— Ralph McTell, "Streets of London"

When Ralph McTell wrote his song in the 1960s, the tragedies of London were still about individuals, because despite decades of socialism and quasi-socialism, it was still a society of individuals. Another 40 years have changed that. Now the tragedy on the streets of London is a tragedy of mobs.

I don't really care that much if Prince Charlie — that's Dhimmi Prince Charlie, not to be confused with Bonnie Prince Charlie, the "King Across the Water" in exile after 1745 — had his limousine window smashed, or the Duchess of Cornwall is crying her heart out at being photographed with her mouth gaping open like a tunnel. Sic semper dhimmitis.

It does bother me right down to the ground to see a loutish "protester" tearing the flag from the cenotaph in Whitehall that memorializes the soldiers who went to France in the Great War and never came back.

And to see another pissing on the base of the statue of Winston Churchill, without whom this moron would probably have no freedom to protest anything, because he would be living in Das Englische Reich.

An eyewitness to the madness, Paul Harris, writes in the Mail:

Every symbol of government or establishment became a target. Anything to hand became a missile. I saw wood, metal, paint-bombs and smoke canisters hurled at male and female officers.  Police horses were beaten with sticks and at least one iron bar when a section of fencing was used to repel a line of mounted officers.  One of them suffered a serious neck injury after being trampled when he fell from the saddle. At least two other officers were badly hurt.

I suppose these students (how many actual students? how many just standard issue yobs and hard leftists?) have a right to be upset at their tuition being tripled. Who isn't narked when they have to pay more for something? Most of us have to deal with it — higher health insurance co-pays, $3-a-gallon gas. We gripe; it's healthy. We don't, except for certain inner city residents, go anarchist and tear up our cities. We don't vent our frustration on symbols of those who sacrificed their lives on our behalf.

If these students had gathered quietly to express their feelings, they probably would have attracted sympathy, even from some who were inconvenienced by the demo. But the spoiled children of the welfare state have no concept of balancing the needs of society as a whole with the wishes of the individual. They think everyone is entitled to have their college education paid for by someone else. But Britain, for all its foolishness of many varieties, is at least making an effort to stop spending money it doesn't have and forever digging itself deeper into debt. More than you can say for the U.S. of A.

McTell's old sailor with his fading ribbons in "a world that doesn't care" would still have cared for civilization, even one heedless of him. He had known violence, but his part in it had been violence with an ultimate good purpose, on behalf of his fellow Britons. It is probably as well that his generation is mostly gone now, because they would look at the streets of London, and ask themselves — without self-pity, unlike the whingeing, destructive brats who descended yesterday on Whitehall and the West End — if their heroism had been useless.

Misery watch

Carrie Weems-Distill, U.K. Human Services Minister,
poses outside California State Capitol 

California got lethal injection drug from Britain

— Los Angeles Times

So Britain decided to put California out of its misery? Perhaps a mercy killing.

In other California news, a pornographic film actor has "spoken out" as a celebrity endorser of condoms. In fact, he's so keen that he wants a law making condoms mandatory in porn productions. "Performers need to be educated," he says.

State Rep. Carlos Maquiladora (D–Hollywood) has responded by introducing a bill to require condom usage in off-color films. It would establish a Condom Review Board, reporting to the State Secretary of Foreign Relations, with 5,000 inspectors and a support staff of 30,000. It would also impose a condom tax of 25%, which would be waived for children of illegal immigrant porn stars.

"We must support California's pornography industry," Rep. Maquiladora said in a news conference at a San Fernando Valley motel. "And one key to that is to protect our performers from the HIV virus, which can raise insurance costs on film companies drastically, encouraging them to outsource their production to low-wage countries in Asia. Loss of this valuable industry would be a severe blow to tax revenues."

WITE flight

A new ETF was launched Friday and I bought shares today. It is the ETF Securities Physical White Metal Basket Shares, ticker WITE. 

In case this sounds like something you'd serve bread in, it's actually an exchange traded fund that owns three metals in physical form: silver, platinum, and palladium. The value of the shares rises and falls with the value of those metals on the open market.

I believe this is a good bet, and my conviction is so strong that I sold my position in Abbott Labs — which, ideally, I would have held — to raise money to buy a significant (for my little portfolio) amount of WITE.

Silver, you may have noticed, is on a tear and will probably continue for some time (with the usual one-step-back, two-steps-forward action), since Western governments seem determined to destroy the value of their currency to cheapen their debts and, supposedly, stimulate their economies.

Platinum and palladium are used for emissions reduction equipment in cars and trucks, a market that is almost bound to increase worldwide regardless of economic conditions.

The ETF's sponsor, ETF Securities, is also the sponsor of SGOL, which I wrote about here. The silver, palladium, and platinum are audited by the same reputable firm that audits the gold in the vaults for SGOL.

A writer at Seeking Alpha makes the case for WITE. (I learned of WITE Saturday from some smart investors at the stock discussion group I attend.)

The usual disclaimers apply. I have no formal qualifications as an investment adviser. I have often been wrong. I make no recommendations, simply suggest investments on which you might want to do your own due diligence. And since I now have a modest position in WITE, I'm "talking my book." Caveat emptor.

A Faceful of Lies, continued

The opening of A Faceful of Lies prompted many responses, most urging that I discontinue the detective novel forthwith. (If you have nothing better to do, you can read the beginning of Chapter I here.) However, it is a slow news day, the usual boring catastrophes, and I can summon up no thoughtful commentary. So my thought-free cyberzone once again runneth over.

Chapter I (continued)

Mrs. Cato (we'd known each other but 10 minutes and were already on a last-name basis) asked, "Can I get you a drink?" As I went through a mental Rolodex of possible answers, she continued:

"I know it's … " She glanced negligently at a wristwatch that was so petite and thin and tastefully unadorned that I knew it had cost at least two grand. "… 10:23 a.m., and besides being morning it's a day of mourning" (I could swear I heard her pronounce the u in her cultured voice) "and it's your office. So, what'll you have?" She glanced around the office. It was a cluttered, loathsome place. I'd never noticed before. "Or maybe I should ask, what do you have?"

Playing for time while trying to figure out what grand monkeyshines were in production, I said, "Let me check." I got up, went to the filing cabinet that held my case records for the last five years, and pulled open the drawer labeled A–Z. Bottles of varied shapes, sizes, and hues were revealed.

Well, I thought, if she wants to play the Duchess, I'm going to be the Country Squire. "Seeing as how this is such a solemn occasion, and life is short — uh, sorry — perhaps you will take a glass with me of Côtes de Fort Lee '99," I said. "Hard to find these days, you know, one of the best vintages of the 20th century. Rumor whispers that some of the vintners over in Jersey are holding back a lot of it for their old age. I paid over the odds, I'm afraid, but I'm sure you'll agree it's worth it."

"Quite," she answered. Were we now playing members of the English aristocracy?

I extracted the cork, sending up a prayer to Bacchus that the wine hadn't gone off in its two years of laying down in my file cabinet/wine rack. I'm just a private investigator, a stranger to society, but no one had to tell me that plastic Dixie cups were not on in this kind of situation. I rummaged in an unlabeled file drawer and found two glasses (not wine glasses; this was a working office, not a suite at the Plaza) that were almost entirely translucent. Unlike the windows, I thought, and suppressed a shudder.

After I'd poured us each a generous tot, we clinked glasses. "Let us drink to … " I stopped. To what? To having survived September 11? To having a new client, if she didn't turn out to be a stone loony? She was up to the task. "To detection," she finished.

"Detection," I agreed, as though that was a sacred ideal.

We sipped some more. Although apparently in no hurry, Anne-Lisa Cato was anything but casual. Her gaze was expressionless yet penetrating. Maybe she was weighing me in the balance. Maybe the joke was about up, and in another minute the door would be flung open and several of my best buddies would pop in, shouting and doubled over laughing. But I don't have any best buddies.

Perhaps it was time for me to look Mrs. Cato over in turn and try to get some sense of whom I was dealing with. Looking her over was well worth the effort. I've already mentioned the green eyes, emeralds come to life. Yes, she had gorgeous green eyes. Cracking. Once my eye-gazing lease was up, I checked out the rest of her that she had chosen to display. Skin properly pale as a widow's should be, framed by auburn hair smartly styled. Lips poised for a kiss or a cigarette: slightly puffy and naturally curved down a little on both sides, giving her a continuous hurt-but-bearing-up-bravely aura. The silk blouse hinted of anatomy worth detailed exploration.

I poured her another glass and refilled my own. She had taken her soundings of me and was ready to get on with business. "Thank you, Mr. Pflug … David. New Jersey can be proud of that wine, and you of your connoisseurship. Now, can we talk about finding the person who murdered my husband?"

"Your husband who was killed — murdered — in the North Tower, just before the terror strike."

She let out the briefest of sighs. "As I said, yes. Let's get started. What do I have to do, fill out a form or something?"

It occurred to me that she filled out her form extremely well, without even trying. But I smiled at her joke and said, "No, just answer some questions and put a farthing in the poor box as you leave. It's to the right of the door."

"Good." She was actually beginning to show signs of expression, a slight pleasure in her voice, even a slight relaxation of her body language. I thought, irrelevantly, of the '50s pop song "Teach Me Tonight." The Côtes de Fort Lee '99 had thinned the ice, if not broken it.

"Mr. … uh, David … go on. I'll tell you anything you want to know."

Mrs. Cato? Anne-Lisa? Formality or courage? I had to decide. So I didn't address her by any name at all. "I need to know a lot about your late husband," I said, the "late" making me feel like an obituary writer. "Did he have —"

"Any enemies. Anyone who would benefit from his death. Yes. Yes."

"I see. Well, I'm starting to get the picture. We're making progress already."

She smiled. Smiled! "That didn't take long … David. I had faith you wouldn't stay becalmed in the Horse Latitudes all day."

I returned the smile with interest and reached into the desk drawer to retrieve a note pad. Actually, I have total recall, visual and auditory, but clients feel reassured when I write things down. Unfortunately, along with the note pad I managed to dislodge a dog-eared copy of Seven Steps to Surveillance Excellence, which fell on the floor to the port side of the desk.  She glanced idly at it.

"Oh, wonderful!" she said. "I'm a big fan of Wittgenstein myself."

But it was accompanied by another smile. They were coming thick and fast now.

"All right … " Mrs. Cato? Anne-Lisa? This was getting ridiculous. "Mrs. Cicero, I mean, Mrs. Cato, let's start with a list of your husband's enemies."

"That would be a long list. I don't want you to get writer's cramp this early in the game. You might need that hand for something sooner or later."

"Point taken," I said. Who had wired me up to a car battery and was turning a crank? "And those who benefit from your husband's death?"

"If you wrote out the names on a list, it wouldn't be long enough to make a skirt for a snake. One name. Olympia Fibonacci. That's all."

"And Olympia Fibonacci is … "

"I'll give you the résumé highlights. Mmmm, may I have another glass — thank you. Olympia Fibonacci. Objective: Assume a controlling interest in my husband's wealth. Present position: Executive secretary to my husband. Work history: Seducing gentlemen at steadily increasing levels of responsibility. Education: Paris-on-Hudson Finishing School for Tarts."

I laughed. It was a faux pas. She didn't laugh this time.

"Well, I'll need to know a lot more in good time, of course. But for now, where can Mrs. … Miss … Ms. … Fibonacci be located?"

Anne-Lisa's good humor settled in again. One corner of her lips descended another increment in wry amusement. "That, I am afraid, is for you to find out. You could ask my husband, but he's dead." My face must have registered a little shock, because she added softly, "Sorry, I don't mean to be crude. Just trying to keep the terrible reality at arm's length while I deal with it …

"But I'm serious: I don't know where she lives, or anything, really, about her personal life. Last seen impersonating a fashion victim, looking at jewelry in Tiffany's. The store's not up to her standard, just practice for a trip to Milan and Zurich. Which, I am afraid, will be financed by my husband's estate."

To be continued, maybe.

The United Nations shakedown

A certain developed nation has lost its final appeal
to the U.N. Tribunal for Climate Justice.

How much longer must the U.S. continue to feed the hand that bites it? Wait, hands don't bite … back to the metaphor factory … feed the hand that smites it? Blights it?

A U.N. agency lumbered with the acronym MINUSTAH — acronyms are getting as long as real words — wants to spend another $864 million on "peacekeeping forces" in Haiti, of which the U.S. share is supposed to be $235 million. 

Heaven knows Haiti is in a dreadful state, not entirely of its own doing. Since $235 million is a mere speck of dust on the U.S. national debt, to withhold such an amount for humanitarian aid would seem egregiously cold-hearted. But what is this "peacekeeping"? Is Haiti lobbing artillery shells into the Dominican Republic? Launching missiles pointed at Jamaica? Or is there a standard, off-the-shelf Third World insurrection, barbed wire and tanks around what is left of the Presidential Palace?

As usual, the devil is hiding behind the details. Fox News notes:

… The bill for “general temporary assistance” in the Haiti peacekeeping budget is suddenly spiking from about $4.7 million in 2009-2010 to more than $31.6 million in the latest estimate, a hike of $26.9 million.

The budget also notes, however, that the cost of regular, non-temporary U.N. civilian staff has dipped as a result of the “temporary” surge, by about $17.6 million, to $83.8 million. But in almost every case noted in the 110-page budget document, wherever regular staff have been replaced by “temporary” U.N. civilian officials, the newcomers are higher ranked, and consequently earn weightier salaries.

The overall result is a considerably more top-heavy civilian and military component among the peacekeepers, which the budgeters argue is needed to face an array of formidable challenges, including “maintaining stability,” building “capacity to maintain the operations of state institutions,” and — remarkably for an emergency force — coordinating aid “to ensure that it does not exacerbate the unequal distribution of wealth and opportunities that have long fueled instability in the country.”

The U.N. mission, then, is not primarily to feed the hungry and clothe the poor. It is wealth (assuming any can be found in Haiti) redistribution. An international Job Corps for bureaucrats, playing Nation Building on its Xbox.

None of the additional U.N. peacekeeping help comes cheap. The salary ranges of the new, often “temporary” U.N. workers being layered into the “large and complex” mission that MINUTAH has become are not laid out in the budget document. But salaries for lower level U.N. professionals (Grade P-2) range from $61,919 annually to $81,568, depending on years of experience, while much higher ranked Directors (Grade D-2) make between $149,903 and $166,475. 

Those numbers, however, greatly understate the benefits and pay of U.N. professionals. For starters, all their salaries are tax-free. They are additionally augmented with cost of living allowances (around 45 percent in the case of Haiti), hazard pay (around $17,000 for Grade D-2 in Haiti), transfer and housing allowances and other perks that add greatly to the “temporary” bill.

You might expect that even a certain trickle-down effect would benefit suffering Haitians. Uh, hang on, though. Quite a few of these nation builders won't actually be in Haiti, because it's a dangerous place.

Among other things, the peacekeepers have located the vast bulk of their air supply efforts at Santo Domingo’s international airport, rather than Haiti’s international airfield in the capital of Port au Prince — where about 200 U.N. personnel are also located in a Santo Domingo Liaison and Support Center.

However safe they may be as a result, the U.N. peacekeepers are thereby undoubtedly providing a considerable economic boom to the Dominican Republic rather than Haiti — even though the U.N. budgeters argue that along with safety concerns, the civilian presence is also cheaper as a result, as the Santo Domingo staff do not qualify for the hefty U.N. hazard pay allowances that go with the Haiti assignment.

Meanwhile, one U.N. delegate (from Bolivia) wants to establish an "International Tribunal for Climate Justice," with the power to condemn nations for crimes against biodiversity, or to coin an expression — and coin is what the Bolivian Robespierre has in mind — "ecocide." 

Bolivia's UN Ambassador Pablo Salon asserted it was unacceptable for some developed countries to refuse a new commitment under the Kyoto Protocol. "Developed countries were looking for solutions that would put the onus on developing countries to reduce emissions," Salon said. Making "ecocide" the equivalent of a war crime (or a crime against peace) would apply exclusively to the actions of developed countries.

In the old muffler replacement commercial the mechanic said, with the trace of a smile on his lips, "You can pay us now … or you can pay us later." Too bad for him he wasn't a U.N. official, in which case he could say, "You can pay us now, and you'll pay us later."

I used to think only head cases wanted to get the U.S. out of the U.N. and the U.N. out of the U.S. Well, my ducks, I've either changed my mind or become a head case.

The U.N. should be given a month's notice to vacate the premises in Manhattan. To make it clear what I think of the U.N., it would overjoy me to see the buildings detonated, the space occupied by a new parking garage. And I hate the looks of parking garages.