Showing posts with label London. Show all posts
Showing posts with label London. Show all posts

Tuesday, January 20, 2015

You want some assimilation, Governor?


Louisiana's embarrassment-in-chief is at it again.

This time, Gov. Bobby Jindal went all the way to London to say deeply stupid things, making his state a laughingstock internationally as opposed to scandalizing just a domestic American audience, as Louisiana has done time and again.

In a speech to the Henry Jackson Society, a British think tank named for the late U.S. senator from Washington state, Jindal took discredited Fox News assertions about Islamic "no-go zones" in the United Kingdom and France, then ran with them in decrying immigrant Muslims' failure to assimilate into Western societies. After all, what is truth, anyway?

According to an Associated Press  report:
In a speech prepared for delivery at a British think tank, Jindal said some immigrants are seeking “to colonize Western countries, because setting up your own enclave and demanding recognition of a no-go zone are exactly that.” He also said Muslim leaders must condemn the people who commit terrorism in the name of faith as “murderers who are going to hell.”

Jindal aides said he did not make significant changes to the prepared text.

The claims on “no-go zones” are similar to those a Fox News guest made last week about places where non-Muslims were not welcome in parts of the United Kingdom such as Birmingham, and “Muslim religious police” enforce faith-based laws.

Steven Emerson, an American author who often is asked about terror networks, told Fox News that in Britain “there are actual cities like Birmingham that are totally Muslim, where non-Muslims just simply don’t go in.”

Prime Minister David Cameron responded by calling Emerson a “complete idiot.”

Emerson later apologized and said his comments “were totally in error.” Fox News also issued apologies for broadcasting the comments.

Jindal, however, used similar rhetoric during a speech, warning of “no-go zones” in London and other Western cities. Jindal’s remarks come in the wake of the massacre by Islamic extremists at a Paris magazine’s offices and subsequent attack on a kosher supermarket in the city. Three gunmen killed 17 people in the attacks.

“I knew that by speaking the truth we were going to make people upset,” Jindal told CNN during an interview from London.

“The huge issue, the big issue in non-assimilation is the fact that you have people that want to come to our country but not adopt our values, not adopt our language and in some cases want to set apart their own enclaves and hold onto their own values,” said Jindal. “I think that’s dangerous.”

Jindal’s parents immigrated to the United States from India. As a young man, Jindal converted from Hinduism to Catholicism.
TO HIS CREDIT, the governor did not tell his British audience that he was "a recovering wog."
"My dad and mom told my brother and me that we came to America to be Americans. Not Indian-Americans, simply Americans. If we wanted to be Indians, we would have stayed in India," Jindal, who is seen as a potential Republican Presidential candidate, is slated to tell the Henry Jackson Society in London on Monday, according to an advance transcript of his speech released by his office.

"It's not that they are embarrassed to be from India, they love India. But they came to America because they were looking for greater opportunity and freedom," Jindal maintains, adding that he does not believe in "hyphenated Americans."

"They like to refer to Indian-Americans, Irish-Americans, African-Americans, Italian-Americans, Mexican-Americans, and all the rest. To be clear - I am not suggesting for one second that people should be shy or embarrassed about their ethnic heritage. But, I am explicitly saying that it is completely reasonable for nations to discriminate between allowing people into their country who want to embrace their culture, or allowing people into their country who want to destroy their culture, or establish a separate culture within," Jindal argues. 
THAT IS a fair point. But exactly what is "establish a separate culture within"? And exactly how credibly can the governor of Louisiana say such a thing?

For example, you have the United States of America. And then you have Louisiana. Technically, the state is part of the United States. Practically, not so much.

In Louisiana, you have an entire tourism infrastructure predicated upon how not typically American the state is. And if Louisiana ever were to be assimilated to the Borg level Jindal seems to advocate for immigrants to Western nations, it would cease to be anything one might recognize as Louisiana -- both for good and for bad.

If tomorrow, the executive, legislative and judicial branches of the federal government woke up and decided to make Bobby Jindal and his constituents eat a big heapin' helpin' of what the governor feels free to preach to Europeans, I doubt that would go down well. In fact, it might go down something like this:

You want assimilation, Louisiana Governor Boy? We'll give you some damn assimilation.

First off, the United States Army arrives tomorrow to resume Radical Reconstruction, thanks to Louisiana's woeful non-assimilation on matters of race, poverty, education and official corruption. Your whole high-functioning Third World vibe continues to give the United States of America an international black eye. Furthermore, your election -- twice -- proves that the Louisiana electorate is in need of some radical re-education and, frankly, an attitude adjustment.

Also, because David Duke.

About that civil-law, Napoleonic Code thing that screws up your legal dealings with the rest of the country and makes it quite difficult for attorneys educated elsewhere to practice in Louisiana . . . we'll be sending a Justice Department legal task force within the month to rewrite your statutes and begin the rewrite of your constitution. Two words for you, Governor: Unassimilated and un-American.

And you now have counties, not "parishes" . . . and all your remaining "police juries" will be known as either "county boards" or "county commissions," effective immediately.

Now, while we're at it, about your state flag and state seal. . . . 





WE DETECT medieval Catholic symbolism for the Eucharist there. They'll have to go. Separation of church and state, don't you know?

What, Governor? You are displeased by our heavy-handed, totalitarian cultural imperialism? Just the kind of thing we have come to expect from unassimilated, un-American separatists like yourself. If you people do not wish to live as Americans, we certainly won't make you stay, Governor. Comprenez-vous?

Listen, Gov. Jindal -- May we call you Piyush? -- you quite publicly have made your and your state's bed. Now lie in it.


We are America. You will be assimilated.



Love and kisses,

The United States of America

Monday, July 16, 2012

Noise nazis mind the bollocks


The sun not only has set on the British Empire, but now it's set on what's left of British civilization as well.

Never mind the lads and ladettes, skirmishing with the bobbies in the street . . . or on the street, prostrate in their own vomit.

Never mind last year's mindless riots all across England.

Never mind Hackgate . . . or Rupertgate, if you will.

Never mind austerity, either.


AND NEVER MIND Sarah Ferguson, for God's sake. All that could happen anywhere, and probably will. Hell, even Fergie -- the British one -- is kinda like if Snooki and Britney had gone to finishing school.

No, you know a great nation is finished well and good when it pulls the plug on Bruce Springsteen and Paul McCartney. Together.

In concert.

For the first time ever.

Why? All because a bunch of Westminster Council noise nazis dared not to, in the name of history, turn back the hands of time in the face of a 10:30 p.m. Hyde Park "noise curfew." How twee . . . in a vaguely fascist kind of way.


When Britain's contributions to music begin to equal its achievements in dentistry, it's just time for 'em to hang it up and let the French run the joint. Again.

Tuesday, March 13, 2012

I hope I die before I get old. Oops.


See, I knew it was better to not try, rather than to try, succeed, then not try anymore, then think "OH MY GOD, I'M A HAS-BEEN!", then panic and do any damn thing, then fail miserably and have people write stuff like this about you.
A Thousand Words: Eddie Murphy's most pitiful effort yet

Eddie Murphy's latest film 'A Thousand Words' is the crown jewel in an unspeakably dreadful career.

“If I don’t die in a plane crash or something, this country has a rare opportunity to watch a great talent grow,” Eddie Murphy once said, little realising that there was one further option that was possibly the least appealing of the lot.

That third possibility – a career that turned out to be both inexplicably long and unspeakably dreadful – is, lo and behold, exactly what came to pass. Things have come to a peak of sorts with his latest effort, the high concept comedy A Thousand Words, which has been finished since 2008 but has spent the last four years sitting in a box at Paramount, possibly marked ‘open on pain of death’ and shaped a bit like the Ark of the Covenant.

On its release in the US last weekend, the critical response was more negative than for any other Murphy movie: the review-aggregating website Rotten Tomatoes found that of 39 reviews, all 39 were variations on calls for the negative to be shipped to Geneva and taken down to its constituent elements inside the Large Hadron Collider.
YES, it is better to try and fail than never to try at all. I guess. But you can be damned sure there's something worse than never trying at all.

That would be the career of Eddie Murray.
Uh, I mean Murphy.


IS IT too late for the guy to just go back to Saturday Night Live? Probably.

Well, that's enough trying for this post. I think I'll just get me another beer.

Friday, August 12, 2011

3 Chords & the Truth: Cheerio, got a match?


I wanna be . . . anarchy.

Oh, wait, Anarchy, we got. Maybe I want to aim for something more original -- like putting out a kick-ass music program every week.

Yeah, that's the ticket.

And we call that little something 3 Chords & the Truth. It's a little bit punk; it's a little bit country. It's a lot rock 'n' roll, and it's the blues in the night.

Or jazz in the morning. Whatever.


THIS WEEK, we're all over the place, and we're topical, too. I'll bet you can guess.

Anyway, you're free not to like what we're doing on this Internet Age version of "Loose Radio" on 'shrooms -- if you're of a certain age and from Baton Rouge, La., you'll get that pop-culture reference -- and I guess you're also free not to give the best damned thing on the Internets a listen, either. But I just want to tell you that we at the Big Show are packin' bricks and petrol, and we know where you live.

Destroy!

It's 3 Chords & the Truth, y'all. Be there. Aloha.

Make that right-o!

Monday, November 08, 2010

Your Daily '80s: Wanna go to London


Skinny ties are back in, I hear.

Good. I have some.

That's reason enough, on this edition of
Your Daily '80s, to revisit local music in 1982. That local music would be the U.S. Times, a New Wave band that was in the forefront of hip in Baton Rouge, by God, Louisiana.

Well, at least as far as we LSU students were concerned at the time.

But if you want to know the truth, I think the Times -- as the band was known before it adopted the "U.S." as part of its name -- remains pretty hip today, even though now they're just a footnote in the history of a middling town's "college bands."


THE TITLE TRACK from the band's "Wanna Go to London" album pretty much sums up a time and a place . . . and the music we loved. We just as soon would have loaded up a trunk and flown to London town -- skinny ties, rock 'n' roll stars.

Heck, in 1982, I actually sent my resumé and clips to an English newspaper. Unfortunately for me, the economy was crappy all over, and the editor politely informed me he didn't have jobs for British reporters, much less ones from --
What was the name of that place in the colonies again?

STILL, dreaming was as cheap as air-mail postage.

I wan, I wan, I wan, I wanna go to London,

Go to London, England. . . .


(NOTE: Contains a single F-bomb, not overly noticeable.)