Here's a bad joke for you: What did French president Nicolas Sarkozy say to Carla Bruni the first night they met?

Give up?

"Voulez-vous karcher avec moi ce soir?"

(Karcher is a manufacturer of power washers.)

And really, can you blame him? I mean, let's face it: there are people in this world who love to take advantage of others. These parasites use everyone around them for their own personal gain and glory. They feed off of the hard work of normal people like you and me. They don't believe in a hard day's work; they believe in hardly working. They lie, cheat, steal, and then more or less complain about how unfairly they're being treated by using the most mangled logic to justify their actions. Quite often, even when caught in a lie, they just keep on lying.

That's the kind of scum we're dealing with here.

So, I agree wholeheartedly with the good Sarkonator: break out the powerwashers!

It has been a month now since the Signs editors engaged in a little exercise of connecting the dots: we noticed a number of high level meetings of some of the most prominent Axis of Evil personalities, and thinking it likely that there is an important reason for the activity, we published our observations here.

We have decided to make this a periodical effort of 'joining the dots', hoping to make sense of the avalanche of information that comes our way on a daily basis. It may help us to detect trends, and to understand which way the drivers are steering this bus called Planet Earth.

Well, judging by the events of April, it seems that they are taking us towards a cliff, and it is rapidly approaching.

©Tooz

So, we've seen Obama being put on the ropes by Hillary over the question of Israel. The two are involved in a spitting match to see who can support Israel in the most rabid and mindless manner.

It seems some influential supporters of Israel had a little get-together back in March to challenge representatives from the three presidential candidates who have Israel's backing to make the most outrageously pro-Israel statements imaginable.

Reading an article from the current issue of Time Magazine really makes one stop and think. At the beginning of the article, one sees a lovely color photo that, except for a few fashion details, could have been taken last week in Paris.

©Andre Zucca

One of the photos showing the supposedly sunny, happy life in Paris during the German occupation

And then, one reads the text:

The photographs from the early 1940s show Paris as sunny, airy, bursting with color. Its inhabitants appear carefree, content and refreshingly unaware of their proclivity for looking très chic. It's all very much at odds with the prevailing image of the French capital suffering and smoldering under the yoke of its Nazi occupiers. Indeed, that very dissonance has made the current photo exhibit "Parisians Under the Occupation" one of the city's most controversial cultural events of late. Was life in Nazi-controlled Paris really as idyllic as these pictures suggest?

I would say that life in Nazi-controlled Paris was exactly as idyllic as life is in Neocon controlled New York City where Machine Gun-Toting Officers will be Patrolling the NYC Subway and several citizens were quoted as actually saying they now feel "safer," never mind that the Phantom Terrorist menace is exactly as real as the Jewish Terror Menace was to the Germans. This must, of course, give us pause to consider...

©Unknown

Lake View man hit by Taser dies

A 24-year-old Lake View man died Thursday, five days after suburban Cincinnati police shocked him with a Taser outside a bar there....

©John Cole

Where does one start with the new wave of propaganda that passes for US news and opinion regarding Iran? It is clear that the aim is to flood the airwaves (and our brains) with so much insanely ridiculous propaganda that we throw up our hands, give up trying to fathom the details, and retreat into a numbed state of acceptance.

What we are seeing is pure propaganda and Newspeak, and for those who know something of Pavlov and his work on Transmarginal Inhibition, the scenario is classic. People, ordinary people, do not want to go to war if left to their own devices. The kick or shove to provoke a reaction for war must come from outside. History provides us with many examples from the last 100 years: the Maine, the Lusitania, Pearl Harbor, the Gulf of Tonkin, 911. In each case, the event galvanized public opinion, and war, which had been unthinkable the day before, became a certainty.

Ever since the 9/11 attacks, Sott.net, along with many others commentators (including US government officials), have repeatedly stated that "al-qaeda" is a fabricated enemy. That it is used to justify the Ziocon's military rampage though the Middle East while simultaneously terrorising the folks back home.

In the past 7 years the world public has repeatedly been treated to bogus missives from "al-Qaeda leaders" that strangely echo the Islamophobic claims of the leaders of the Western world.

Every time a member of the US or Israeli government expounded on the "Muslim terror threat to freedom and democracy everywhere", soon afterwards "al-Qaeda" obligingly popped up with a new video or statement in which they threatened freedom and democracy.

As the massive holes in the US government's official story of the 9/11 attacks continue to widen, and sites like Sott.net continue to point to the real culprits in Tel Aviv and Washington DC, disembodied internet voices that US government officials "believe to be that of Osama bin laden", set the record straight and claim responsibility. In spite of such strenuous efforts to fool the entire world, fewer and fewer people are buying the terror hysteria, and recently the desperation on the part of the Ziocons has begun to show.

©Unknown

Browsing the shelves of a bookstore this afternoon I came across The Heebie-Jeebies at CBGB's - A Secret History of Jewish Punk (2006) by Steven Lee Beeber. Jewish Punk? - that stood out! The inside fly reads:

"Focusing on punk rock's beginnings in New York, this book is certain to change how we view not only punk music and culture, but the nature of Jewish identity since the Holocaust....Originally known as New York Rock, punk began in that city because it could begin nowhere else - it was all about outsiders in the shtetl-like East Village. Wiseasses with sharp minds and wounded psyches; it reflected the irony, the romanticism, and, above all, the humor of the Jewish experience."

©Unknown

The infant believes that mother/the breast/ food, everything, is part of itself; it experiences itself solely through neural input.

[T]the problem of group violence, is one of the most important issues facing society. Not only is this a most crucial topic for our American society but we are confronted with events that are occurring all over the globe, on all continents and in all countries...

So said Dr. Ernest Wolf in a talk given to the International Self-Psychology Symposium in Dreieich, Germany, in May of 2001, four months before 9-11.

This essay was recently brought to our attention, having been posted on the SOTT Forum for the express purpose of highlighting Wolf's description of Narcissistic Rage. Frankly, that was the best part of the essay; the rest was hopelessly muddled and naive.

Why?

Well, Dr. Wolf attempts to explain the causes of evil - individual and macro-social - using the framework of Heinz Kohut's theory of "Self Psychology" (or psychoanalytic psychology of the self). With all due respect to Dr. Kohut and Dr. Wolf, we think that this theory isn't bad if you are just talking about normal human beings who are born healthy and live in basically healthy environments. What this theory does not take into account is the role of pathogenic factors in our society - human beings who are carriers of abnormal psychopathological traits - who can infect groups and even entire societies, bringing pandemic evil on macro-social scales. More than that, it seeks to "spread the blame" over all people, to ignore the fact that moral evil and psychobiological evil are, in effect, interlinked via so many causal relationships and mutual influences that they can only be separated by means of abstraction. Yes, the body social must be weakened before it can succumb to an infection, but if there is no infecting pathogen, it will merely be weak and ineffectual.

In short, Wolf's essay amounts to little more than apologia for Narcissistic Personality Disorder and Psychopathy and only adds to the confusion of our times when the problems pressed upon humanity by such types are nothing short of catastrophic.

But, like we said, Wolf has provided one heck of a description of Narcissistic Rage. Since it really is good, let's take a look at it:

©SOTT

Some people just don't get it.

Ken Gude is a senior advisor to the Institute for Public Policy Research's Commission on National Security in the 21st Century. He wrote a piece called "Tortured Explanations" that ran this weekend in the Guardian. It is a review of a book by Philippe Sands on who drew up the current US torture policy.

Well, in the first paragraph we find this pearl:

Ever since the first horrific images from Abu Ghraib emerged almost exactly four years ago, I have repeatedly asked myself: how in the world could my country be responsible for such terrible things? I know a lot of people out there think that this is not an aberration and believe the worst about the United States, its motives and its actions. The Bush administration has certainly added a lot of fuel to that fire. But in this case, the "hate America" crowd are simply wrong: never before in the modern history of the United States has there been an officially sanctioned, government-wide system of inflicting torture and abuse on detainees. Until now.

Oh, yeah. The "hate America crowd". That group of loony tunes who have this irrational hatred of the US for no reason at all.