Tag: EU

Not merely huge, absolutely MASSIVE, if true:

VATICAN / ITALY – Pope Francis aka Jorge Mario Bergoglio was arrested Saturday in connection with an 80- count indictment of charges including possession of child pornography, human trafficking, incest, possession of drug paraphernalia and felony fraud. The Italian National Prosecutor’s Office confirmed it ordered the arrests, and filed the charges.

HOWEVER, there is literally NOTHING in the Italian media about this. Absolutely nothing at all. Nor have any of my contacts in Rome heard anything about this. And there is nothing about the Pope or the Vatican on the Ministero della Giustizia site either. That being said, (1) there was definitely a blackout at the Vatican last night, (2) it is true that St. Peter’s Square was empty this morning, and, (3) it is confirmed that the Pope did not say prayers in public at noon as previously scheduled. There simply isn’t any other information out there.

VERDICT: too soon to say. But if it turns out to be real, then we can be very highly confident that The Storm has begun and other significant arrests will follow.

Happy Rubicon Day!

UPDATE: If all the Smart Boys would please shut up and stop trying to demonstrate their Very Smart Knowledge of international law and the theoretical independence of the Vatican, that would be great. Perhaps they might recall that Iraq was an independent state and Saddam Hussein was a sovereign Head of State too, and that didn’t prevent him from being arrested, tried, and executed without ever being extradited anywhere.

UPDATE: I am dubious too. But if you want to wait until three days after something has happened before even discussing the possibility of it, then go back to Facebook, CNN, and Fox News. You don’t belong here.

UPDATE: Lin Woods has now mentioned the story, but he appears to be citing the same source as everyone else. I remain dubious, but intrigued.

 Multiculturalism strikes again, this time in Nice:

At least three people have been killed – two of them beheaded – and several others stabbed in a terrorist knife attack at a cathedral in Nice.

The attack began around 9am just as Mass at the Notre Dame basilica – the largest Roman Catholic church in Nice – was getting underway. Two of those who were killed died inside the church, French media reported.

It’s time for another Crusade, albeit one to reclaim the West for Christianity. Multiculturalism isn’t just wrong, it is dyscivilizational evil. Which is why there will be no peace until the repatriations are complete. More political bleating about “not being divided” are stupid, pointless, and offensive. Divisions and borders exist for a reason.

While the French authorities are going to try to crush any French resistance to the Islamic invasion, even the French women are observably becoming militant:

Two Muslim women were ‘stabbed repeatedly’ under the Eiffel Tower amid rising tensions in Paris after the beheading of a teacher last week. French police have arrested two female suspects after an argument about dogs allegedly descended into violence and racist insults including the words ‘Dirty Arabs’. 

One of the Muslim women said the attackers had pulled out a knife after refusing to put their dogs on a leash and slashed her on the skull, arm and ribs. The victims of Sunday’s attacks have been identified as French women from an Algerian background named only as Kenza, 49, and Amel, who is a few years younger. 

Those in custody are described as being white women of ‘European appearance’, who now face ‘attempted murder’ charges, said city prosecutors after the alleged row about dogs – which are seen as unclean in Islam.

However, the government’s attempts to crack down on anti-invader violence are going to backfire, once it becomes clear that merely expressing one’s opinion will be met with essentially the same punishment as lethal mass violence. 

Meanwhile, in Great Britain, seven “British” citizens were arrested for attempting to kill a policeman:

Seven Britons were in custody in Paris today in connection with the attempted ‘hit and run’ murder of a police officer outside the Israeli Embassy in France.

The four men and three women have not been named but are said to be London residents of Pakistani origin, who were travelling in a Mercedes and a BMW with false number plates.Their vehicles were filmed threatening the policeman outside the hugely secure Embassy close to the Champs Elysée on Monday night.

‘They suddenly deviated from their direction of travel and rushed towards the officer, who narrowly escaped’ said an investigating source.

The lie of civnattery has got to die. The state is not the nation! There is literally no political philosophy, not even communism, that is more intrinsically statist than civic nationalism.

I tend to doubt it was the lesson for the day that the teacher had in mind, but it will indubitably prove an indelible one.

A parent shouting Allahu Akbar and thought to be wearing an explosive vest has been shot dead by French police near Paris after allegedly beheading a school teacher with a knife.

The victim was said to have been a school teacher who had enraged parents by displaying cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed to pupils.

A source told Le Parisien: ‘The victim had recently given a lesson to his students on freedom of expression and had shown the caricatures of Muhammad’.

This led to an enraged parent confronting the teacher with a kitchen knife, and then cutting his head off, said the source.

The real tragedy, of course, would be if the students were to develop an unfortunate antipathy for Muslims as a result of their cultural enrichment. 

UPDATE: Of course, the feckless French surrender monkey who purports to “lead” the country is still pushing idiotic civnattery.

‘He said the attack should not divide France because that is what the extremists want. We must stand all together as citizens.’    

Civnattery is a fraud. Nationalism, genuine nationalism, is the only cure for the multicultural disease.

In case you doubted the inevitable rise of nationalism, the fact that the EU states are resorting to legal charades and Soviet-style show trials to keep the nationalist opposition out of electoral office should suffice to prove otherwise.

Multiple European Union states are breaking with post-war liberal conventions and openly imprisoning prominent political opponents and intellectuals for ideological crimes.

The tactic being used by these governments is “rule through law,” as opposed to rule of law. The strategy is commonly deployed in nations like Saudi Arabia against journalists, intellectuals and opposition figures who are targeted for repression first, then selectively prosecuted using often vaguely defined existing laws after.

Greece

Earlier today a judge in Athens condemned almost all of Golden Dawn’s elected officials, including sitting European parliament member Ioannis Lagos, to years in prison. Nikos Michaloliakos, Golden Dawn’s General Secretary, was given 13 years for a RICO-style charge that alleged his patriotic Greek party, which until recently was the third most popular in the country, is a criminal organization.

Michaloliakos was not tied to any specific crime, but prosecutors used editions of his group’s magazine featuring articles about Germany during World War II from the 1980s and 90s to argue that their political ideas were a form of violence in and of themselves.

In a public statement published to the Golden Dawn website Michaloliakos blamed the court’s ruling on Golden Dawn’s sudden electoral rise in 2013, stating “They say we are a criminal Nazi organization. [If that’s true] why did they wait 30 years to charge us?”

He accurately pointed out that Golden Dawn was never accused of being a criminal organization since its founding in the 1980s. It was only after May 2012, when the party achieved 7{5c1a0fb425e4d1363f644252322efd648e1c42835b2836cd8f67071ddd0ad0e3} of the vote, that the Greek state decided it was time to arrest them in 2013.

All that the neoliberals will accomplish is to reveal their own fascism and democratic illegitimacy. These are acts of desperation and fear, they are indications that the neoliberals know the end of their era is rapidly approaching.

The European Union, like California, is starting to rein in the ability of the digital platforms to do whatever they want, to whomever they want, for any reason:

New EU regulation came into play at the start of the week that applies to digital storefronts, most notably Apple and Google’s for mobile devices. With the new regulations significantly strengthen the rights of those selling through such marketplaces.

The rules, which you can see here in full if you’re happy to fight through them, or as discussed here by the EGDF’s Jari-Pekka Kaleva on GI.Biz, cover a wide range of ongoing issues that developers have with stores.

Platforms will have to provide 30 days notice to publishers before removing content from stores, allowing them time to appeal or make changes to their software. So no immediate and opaque bans (article 4).

The regulations (in article 5) will force stores to be more transparent in how their ranking systems work, letting publishers understand how ‘trending’ apps are being chosen for instance.

Article 7 follows similar themes, with storefronts having to disclose any ‘differentiated treatment’ it may give one seller of goods over another, which should put paid to any real (or imagined) preferential treatment for larger publishers – or at least make it clear to everyone how and when the playing field isn’t even.

Also, that information, and all the information that publishers receive will have to be written in terms that you can understand. With all terms and conditions to be drafted in ‘plain and intelligible language’.

Armchair lawyers and real lawyers have been discussing various deplatformings as well as the 72 Bears vs Patreon situation. One thing they have repeatedly failed to grasp, however, is that the very clear trend of the legislators is strongly pro-consumer and anti-platform.

Some have questioned why I’m not banned from various platforms when less controversial figures have been. But there is no reason for suspicion as the reason is very straightforward: I live in Europe and any sensible US-based company is very, very hesitant to put itself at the mercy of an anti-US European court given the enthusiasm European courts have repeatedly demonstrated for saddling US tech companies with massive fines.

Never let it be said that the ideological Left is all bad. Their instinctive opposition to corpocracy is the one thing they have on the ideological Right.

The Germans have decided that their law takes precedence over what passes for EU “law”:

A ruling by Germany’s constitutional court has sparked serious fears of the unravelling of the European Union.

It’s a delayed judgment from an old fight that has hit the EU at its most vulnerable. A group of German academics, including a former leader of the far-right party Alternative für Deutschland, Bernd Lucke, took a case in 2015 to challenge the bond-buying programme of the European Central Bank (ECB).

They hardly hoped to win, but thought they could make a political point. During the euro zone crisis, as now, the ECB was buying the debt of economically weaker EU countries to bid down their borrowing costs and rescue them from the threat of a debt spiral, and directing national central banks to do likewise.

This is an emergency measure taken to hold the euro zone together when its economic imbalances threaten to tear it apart, but it has long been hated by German conservatives who believe it harms savers and pension funds.

Last week, the German constitutional court unexpectedly sided with them. It ruled that the ECB failed to conduct a “proportionality” analysis of the effect of its bond-buying policies on “public debt, personal savings, pension and retirement schemes, real estate prices and the keeping afloat of economically unviable companies”.

In a pithy 110-page judgment, the court ordered the German central bank to stop buying bonds if the ECB failed to produce such an assessment within three months. This immediately raised fears it could jeopardise current bond-buying efforts, and cause a run on Italian debt.

This is perilous to the euro zone, but not as damaging to the EU as another part of the ruling, which has tugged at a thread that some fear may lead to the unravelling of its very order.

The German court stated that it was free to ignore an earlier ruling from the European Court of Justice (ECJ) on the issue because “the Court of Justice of the European Union exceeds its judicial mandate”. This is contrary to the concept of the primacy of EU law. Under this precept, if laws of a member state are in conflict with EU law, EU law takes precedence, and the ECJ is the final authority to adjudicate on it. For the European Commission, agreeing to this is what it means to be a member state.

The Germans have effectively declared the EU to be nothing more than a treaty that nation-states can ignore at will. It’s a bit of a surprise, as I would have expected the Italians to be the next to leave the would-be Fourth Reich, with the Hungarians and Poles as dark horses.

The nations are rising at last.

Sospesi manifestazioni ed eventi. Scuole e musei e cinema chiusi

La Regione Lombardia sta predisponendo un’ordinanza, firmata dal presidente Attilio Fontana di concerto con il ministro della salute Roberto Speranza, valida per tutto il territorio lombardo. Il documento, non appena emanato, sarà trasmesso a tutti i prefetti delle Province lombarde per la tempestiva comunicazione ai sindaci. L’ordinanza sarà efficace fino a un nuovo provvedimento. Tra i provvedimenti previsti sono contemplati: la sospensione di manifestazioni o iniziative di qualsiasi natura, di eventi e di ogni forma di riunione in luogo pubblico o privato, anche di carattere culturale, ludico, sportivo e religioso, anche se svolti in luoghi chiusi aperti al pubblico; sospensione dei servizi educativi dell’infanzia e delle scuole di ogni ordine e grado, nonché della frequenza delle attività scolastiche e di formazione superiore, corsi professionali, master, corsi per le professioni sanitarie e università per gli anziani ad esclusione degli specializzandi e tirocinanti delle professioni sanitarie, salvo le attività formative svolte a distanza; sospensione dei servizi di apertura al pubblico dei musei e degli altri istituti e luoghi della cultura.

To put this into perspective, these actions by the presidents of Lombardy, Piedmont, Emilia Romagna, and the Veneto are the equivalent of about 15 US states shutting down their schools, universities, and all public and private events. Contrary to what some people seem to imagine, this isn’t bad news and it doesn’t mean that things are worse in Italy than elsewhere, but rather, demonstrates the willingness of the Italian regional governments to put the interests of the Italian people ahead of the global economy.

Swedes are beginning to reconsider their national suicide:

Sweden’s right-wing Sweden Democrats are now neck and neck with the ruling Social Democrats in opinion polls. Though vilified and demonized, the party’s success represents a complete failure of liberalism in the face of reality.

The Sweden Democrats – who were until recently dismissed as a fringe, racist party – are now surging in the polls. A voter survey, commissioned by the Dagens Nyheter newspaper last week, puts the party within 0.2 percentage points of Prime Minister Stefan Lofven’s left-wing Social Democrats. Moreover, voters now agree with the party’s policies on nine out of nine issues.

On immigration, 43 percent of voters side with the party and its leader, Jimmie Akesson. Only 15 percent favor Lofven’s policies. Likewise, 31 percent favor Akesson’s position on law and order, compared to 19 percent for Lofven.

The nation is not an idea or some Platonic abstract, the nation is the people. The physical, material human beings who share blood, DNA, language, and culture. If the nation does not survive, the individuals who comprise it will not either.

Matteo Salvini makes his long-awaited move:

Crisi di governo, le dimissioni di Conte: “Il governo finisce qui, Salvini ha seguito interessi personali e di partito”. 

Goverment crisis, the resignation of Prime Minister Conte: “The government is finished here, Salvini has followed his personal ambitions and the interests of his party.

What’s happening here is that the nationalists of La Lega are in a position to take power in the Italian government without their former left-wing allies in the Movimento Cinque Stelle who have been preventing them from dealing conclusively with the migration crisis and the European Union.

So, Interior Minister Matteo Salvini, who is the most popular man in Italy now due to his forthright nationalism, brought down the government by severing the La Lega-Cinque Stelle alliance with the intention of forcing new elections in October. Rather than try to avoid the elections by putting together a new minority government, Conte elected to resign and end the current government.

The irony, of course, is that Salvini is the one politician who actually cares about the Italian nation. Conte is projecting when he implies that Salvini is only pursuing power for its own sake. And the amusing thing was the way that Salvini responded to Conte’s broadside by kissing the crucifix he was holding in his hand.

I’m not entirely certain what he meant by that, but I suspect it was a gesture intended to echo that of many Italian soccer players when they are substituted for a starter. They reach down, touch the grass, cross themselves, then raise the team badge on the chest of their jersey and kiss it. In other words, Salvini was symbolically saying “you’re done, Conte. It’s my turn now.”