Europe’s largest economy, Germany, which has been criticized for not doing enough to help struggling euro zone countries, has topped a poll as the world’s most popular country. The survey, carried out for the BBC, polled 26,000 people in 25 countries and asked them to rate 16 countries and the European Union as a whole on whether their influence on the world was mainly positive or negative.
Source: CNBC
Six million Jews were unavailable to comment.
Hey, there’s a lot to love about the Germans – they love sausage and sauerkraut, they love beer and they make awesome beer steins, they’re masters of precision engineering and fine automobiles and they look really cool when they dance in their lederhosen. We should also give the Germans credit for being the one Social Democracy in all of the Entitlement States of Continental Europe from sinking under their own weight. (How long they can continue to keep the other states afloat is anyone’s guess.)
But here’s the deal, in the century just passed, Germany might not have started World War I, but they definitely leapt at the chance to drag all of Europe into it, and even when the war was lost, they kept fighting for a lost cause, ensuring the deaths of millions more. They then started the Second World War and embarked on the worst campaign of genocide in human history.
Just out of common decency, shouldn’t there be some sort of mandatory hundred year probationary period before a country with that kind of history is even able to have it’s name on the ballot?
Greatest country in the world my ass. Let’s at least wait until 2045 before we even begin the discussion.
Another horrific act of Islamic terror, this time it came in the form of two men caught on camera savagely butchering an unarmed British soldier and yelling, “Allah akbar”.
As horrible as this story is, it could have been worse. Imagine if this had happened in America, where fourteen soldiers killed by an avowed Muslim yelling “Allah Akbar” was described as workplace violence by the Obama administration, going so far as to not give a single mention to the words “Muslim” or “Islam” in their entire 86-page report on the Fort Hood massacre.
As sickening as this latest act of Islamic terror is, at least it didn’t happen in an America where the media would certanly have embarrassed themselves once again by falsely accusing the tea party before any of the facts were in.
Thank God this didn’t happen in America, for at least we don’t have to listen to the insanity of a gun grabber calling for the repeal of the 2nd amendment after an attack that involved no guns, just as we heard in the wake of the Boston Bombing.
Nothing can diminish the horror of an unarmed soldier being butchered in broad daylight on the street in London, but thank God this didn’t happen in America or we might have to listen to Obama and the Secretary of State spewing lies in front of the coffin of the dead soldier, trying to blame the latest attack on some “awful Internet video.”
From the very beginning we’ve known that, in true Nixonian fashion, the Obama administration has kept an enemies list and has actively maintained and expanded that enemies list.
Early on, we saw examples of the Obama administration using agencies such as the EPA to target its enemies, as in the case of Gibson guitars and the Obama EPA has continued to persecute its list of enemies, but for the commoners, for all you lowly everyday Americans, you can rest assured that it’s the IRS who you should fear above all else if you dare whisper aloud against the Almighty State.
With the IRS now poised to expand its jurisdiction into the realm of personal health records and act as the enforcer for the purchase of mandatory health insurance, woe to all of you who dare still question our most benevolent leaders in Washington, D.C.
Allow me now to take the time to say that I have seen the error of my ways and the wrongness of my thinking as evidenced throughout the posts on this blog.
On these pages, I have dared to question the wisdom of installing the Almighty Government at the center of the national economy and the guiding force in our personal lives. I now believe wholeheartedly in the words of Our Dear Leader Obama as he spoke recently to graduates of Ohio State University:
“Unfortunately, you’ve grown up hearing voices that incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity that’s at the root of all our problems. They’ll warn that tyranny is always lurking just around the corner. You should reject these voices.”
source: Real Clear Politics
I have seen the error of my ways and I now reject all voices who dare to question our government and its supreme leaders. Our great and omniscient leaders know what’s best for us better than we do! For every problem, we should look to the government for the solutions.
Tyranny is not just around the corner, nor will it ever be. We should lay down our guns like meek little lambs, for history does not repeat itself.
We must embrace the teachings of our nation’s greatest thinkers, those great philosophers who have spent their whole lives in the hallowed halls of academia. We should value above all the wisdom of our book-learned professors and teachers who have never been tainted by profiting in the private sector.
We should disparage the evil of business people everywhere and we should envy their riches, for Obama tells us they are not paying their fair share.
We must reject the evils of Capitalism, we should abandon that greedy system which made America the most prosperous nation on Earth. We should hate and demonize the rich until we ourselves are no longer rich as a nation. The true path lies in following the examples of third world Marxist tyrants so we too can join the proles in their workers’ paradise.
War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. Whatever you built as an individual, you didn’t build that. All that is good comes forth from government.
I say these words in the name of Our Dear Leader Obama, amen.
He awoke from a dreamless sleep, but instead of moving, instead of stretching and yawning, there was only the light sensation of floating.
As he floated higher, slowly higher, he saw himself below, still sleeping without a sound. This was one hell of a dream, he thought, but in that very same moment, a calm, lucid sense of reality spread through his being and he knew that somehow, he was indeed floating above his body, watching himself sleep breathlessly below.
He thought of the latest contortion he’d managed to twist his life into, but where there had been months mixed with desire and aching, days on end with his stomach in knots, his heart soaring and then sinking, now all of this was replaced with a strange sense of detached perspective over his reflections. Memories flowed through of the woman who had made a pass at his wife, the wife who had sweetly rebuffed this woman’s repeated attempts to kiss her mouth, the way the woman had then resorted to begging to watch while he and his wife had sex.
He thought of her burning intensity as she sat and watched him abide in her request and how that was the moment he began to swoon so deliriously for her.
A mild sense of amusement rippled through as he thought of how things had got only got more complicated from there. The weekend had continued with him and the woman, two fellow alcoholics and partners in crime, boozing it up while his Muslim wife remained sober as always. What a bizarre trio they made, a random collection of strange fruits, the result of a life lived chasing chaos and spurning structure.
For years, his wife and he had invoked the story of Abraham and his barren wife Sarah and reflected on how both the Bible and the Quran had seemingly given license for a man in such circumstances to plant his seed in a woman other than his wife. He thought of how beautiful, strong and selfless his wife had been to give him the okay to take his new found friend into the bedroom that very next night.
He thought of how he knew even as they headed for the bedroom, it would only be a matter of time until his wife began having second thoughts. It had turned out to be only a matter of three hours to be exact.
In the days that followed, he began thinking of this Heaven-sent Hagar most hours of the day. He had been under no illusions and was well aware that this woman’s desire for his wife had been far stronger than her’s for him and her acquiescence to his lust hadn’t served to change that.
The more she seemed distant and unreachable, the more his heart yearned to draw her closer. He knew in a situation like this, the only way you had a chance to turn things around was to try to put things on an equal level by wearing a mask of ambivalence to equal her own, but where once he had been quite adept at playing that game, now he was controlled by the gnawing pit of desire that seemed to grow by the day, sometimes with every hour.
Thus began a roller coaster of days, when she was drunk, she’d ask him to take her in the bathroom and fuck her, on the mornings when she was sober, she was ashamed of her behavior, wishing only to reunite with her estranged husband.
What a wicked web we’d woven, he thought.
He remembered how he had relished the sweet agony of yearning for a woman who felt that desire just as deeply as he did, only to be repulsed by her behavior when she sobered. He cursed himself for wanting the drunk version of her when he knew how the drink was slowly killing her.
He thought of how shallow a life he had lived, like a Roman who only wanted to drink himself from one orgy to the next, somehow born into the wrong time and place. Then the realization swept over him that even if he had managed to find himself toga-clad in that world of drunken debauchery, he still would have felt the void, the emptiness that could never be filled.
He thought of how meaningless it had all been, a life lived in a never ending pursuit of pleasure and he imagined how his life might have been had he applied himself completely to building a family or accomplishing great things. As if in reply, he thought of how transitory those other lives were too, how even a great family man was only a few generations from being forgotten or just a name on the family tree and how even those men who were titans of their times would inevitably be obscured with the passage of time, senators and governors whose lives had loomed so large, only remembered by a handful of students of history. He thought of how so many great heads of churches and businesses were doomed to become little more than a face in a succession of framed faces of bygone leaders on the wall.
He thought of how, should the human race still exist in two or three centuries, even someone as great as Abraham Lincoln would end up known to most students as nothing more than the answer to a test question on who freed the slaves in the former United States of America.
He thought again of the woman, the troubled mother of two in whom he saw so much of himself, the woman who, at least for the short time he’d known her, had chosen her wine over life itself. He wished he could watch over her and guide her away from that miserable life of isolation and self-imposed slavery.
It was then that his thoughts began to fade, the out-of-body experience began to slip quietly away from him and he realized that there would be no watching over anyone.
His last wisps of consciousness slowly expanded like a cloud of smoke into nothingness.
To all my friends that I was texting last night saying, “Turn on the freakin’ game, I’m on TV!” I should say, well . . . it felt like we were close enough to be on TV! In the third inning though, I went up to get some pizza for my wife and in the concession line I saw the actual broadcast of the game and that’s when I realized we were just a few rows above where the camera was framing the batter at the plate. Doh! Oh well, you might have seen us on a couple of the pop-ups behind home plate.
I just like going to the game – I’ve been next to broke for most my life, so my attitude has always been, the cheaper the seats, the more times I can afford to go to the game. This time, I wanted to see what it was like to see the game from the VIP seats. (That’s what the section is actually called.) We were in Section 1. Section one, baby! That’s the spot right behind home plate where all the numbering for the rest of the sections begins. What a view! It was the closest to home plate I’ve ever been at a baseball game.
I’m used to a bit of a rowdier crowd out in the bleachers, but here in the VIP seats, we were surrounded by nice families and well-behaved fans. I was proud of myself the way I adapted to my surroundings and kept myself in check and didn’t drop a swear word the entire night.
You know how you could tell we were in the nicer part of the neighborhood at the ballpark? Because it wasn’t until Brandon League gave up the game-winning home run in the top of the ninth that I heard the first f-bombs being hurled by some drunken fans (probably sneaking down from the cheaper seats.) That’s pretty standard language out in the bleachers, but down in the VIP seats, I actually cringed thinking of the innocent ears of the kids around me.
This one Hispanic family in front of us was particularly charming. In the fifth inning, Josh Beckett gave up a single that put the Diamondbacks on top, 3 – 2 and as the hitter smacked the ball and it landed out in the outfield, all of a sudden, the eight-year-old girl in front of us shouted out, “YOU SUCK!” to Beckett for serving up that big meatball of a pitch.
My wife and I were cracking up, but I’m watching the mom, and this woman was so embarrassed by her daughter’s outburst that it seemed like she was horrified and just wanted to disappear. The girl’s dad, though not overly stern, made it clear that was not the way their family behaved at a baseball game. I was so impressed by the mom’s embarrassment and the dad’s gentle reprimand that I felt like I had just been time warped to the 1950s, like this was how Ward and June Cleaver would have reacted to The Beaver breaking out with something slightly vulgar.
Maybe I was a bit overly impressed by this family’s decorum and maybe that kind of politeness is not all that uncommon, but then again, I’ve seen way too many families in action at Walmart not to imagine that this family wasn’t a little bit special.
As far as my Dodgers go?
As great as the view from the VIP seats was, next time I go to see my Dodgers doing their best to extend a five-game losing streak to six, let it be from the cheap seats.