Death marches in Europe. Toldja.

No one. Ever. Listens.

But having encouraged people to move, the Europeans are now pulling up the drawbridge because they have found dealing with the influx overwhelming. Where were the preparations? Why were fleets of buses and trains and boats not laid on at the borders of the EU to bring people safely to Germany, which is, after all, where most people are headed?

Why were arrangements not made? Two reasons, the first being practicality. It is politically and economically unfeasible to do what is currently being done in Europe. If anyone saw their government making arrangements to do it gracefully, they would find out how much it is going to cost, and they would stop it. The cost of trucking that many migrants to Germany is, on the grand scale of government spending, not high. The cost of feeding and housing them, reachable.

The cost of funding their welfare payments in perpetuity? It's not going to happen, is how high that is. Because it will cost more money than there is in Europe. They aren't going to get jobs in Germany and become productive German citizens, because THERE AREN'T THAT MANY JOBS available. And there never, ever will be. And everybody knows it.

But that's not the real reason there are no buses or trains. The real reason is that this is a -spectacle-. This is a circus act! The Great and the Good of the German intelligentsia are putting on a show featuring other people's pain, paid for with other people's money, for political gain. They are happy to have thousands, or maybe even tens of thousands of itinerant Mooselimbs DIE this winter, so that they can run pictures of the corpses in all the newspapers. Then presumably they get the thing that they want, which probably boils down to money.

How many guys had heart attacks so the EU could take this picture?

They are doing this deliberately, because they want that picture. The picture is the reason.

Somebody please tell me again how the socialists are the friends of the Little Guy. And remind me when the socialists INEVITABLY start machine-gunning columns of people in front of hastily dug trenches.

They do it because they care, right?

The Phantom

Tiny House sales job: making poverty cool.

The Cognoscenti have decided you shall live in a refrigerator box on wheels, and you shall be grateful for the opportunity. If you really do well, they will give you a shipping container. You filthy peasant.

Looks like Architectural Digest, don't it?

For San Franciscans, the rent refuge is here in Oakland, where the rates are increasing as well — so much so that young professionals are living in repurposed shipping containers while the homeless are lugging around coffinlike sleeping boxes on wheels.

These two improvised housing arrangements have emerged in an industrial pocket of Oakland where the median rent has gone up by 20 percent over the past year. One, in a warehouse, is called Containertopia, a community of young people who have set up a village of 160-square-foot shipping containers like ones used in the Port of Oakland. Each resident pays $600 a month to live in a container, which can be modified with things like insulation, glass doors, electrical outlets, solar panels and a self-contained shower and toilet.

Container "which can be modified" sounds pretty crappy. Could it be worse? Yes it could!

The artist, with one of his "tiny houses". Note the bucket. It's not for champagne.

Just outside the warehouse doors is another community, residing, too, in containers of a sort. Here, the homeless live in dwellings made by a local artist named Gregory Kloehn, set on wheels and made for the streets. Each is about eight feet long and tall enough for a person to sit up in.

"It doesn't fit our mind-set of what a home is," said Mr. Kloehn, 44, who began creating and giving away the portable homes, which are made of recycled material, in 2011.

Imagine yourself walking out the door of your lovely container, with it's "self contained" toilet that you have to empty by hand. Because no plumbing, my friends! So here you are, walking out the door of your container with a bucket of toilet leavings (don't spill it!!!) and you hump this fifty pound thing down the FIVE FLIGHTS of stairs to chuck it in the communal poo disposal (which you pay for, don't forget, because no plumbing!)

And on the curb, in front of the beautiful, multicolored container stack you call home, is some bum with a brightly painted hand cart. He's setting up camp on the sidewalk and emptying his own poo bucket into the gutter. Where it will stink for all eternity, because this is California and it never rains, therefore the poo will never be washed away.

Sounds like an awesome place to raise your kids, doesn't it?

It isn't recycled material. It's junk. You're living in a makeshift pile of junk that other people threw out.

It's not a tiny house. Its a shack, or possibly a hand-cart.

You're not a hipster. You're a bum.

It isn't an alternative lifestyle. It's SQUALOR, and it isn't good for you.

Oh, and by the way. Mr. Kloehn isn't an artist. He's a would-be aristo with no visible means of support. I'd be fascinated to find out where his money comes from.

The Phantom

Shipping Containers the New Hotness in Architecture

Architecture is yet another field of endeavor hopelessly ruined by Marxism and the shadow of Central Planning. Evidence for today, they would very much like to replace proper apartment buildings with stacks of shipping containers.

Advocates for shipping container homes say speed of installation, cost savings on materials and the capacity to re-use units in new locations make it a serious option for urban housing. The latest exhibition at The Building Centre in central London captures the trend. Designers are offering lunchtime tours of a model shipping container home, asking whether these "highly adaptable and move-able" objects might play a much bigger role in easing the housing crisis.

Instant slums, designed to hide away the excess unemployed and unwanted "migrants" as cheaply as possible. They aren't even pretending otherwise, a somewhat refreshing change from the usual housing project bullroar. They're attempting to hitch on to the tail of the "Tiny House" hipster thing, but that seems to be burning out as more and more hipsters realize "Tiny House" = shack.

I want you to imagine a stack of shipping containers, five high. Each one filled with combustible rug, furniture, bedding. Inhabited by drunks and drug addicts... and you. Because Big Brother said this is where you get to live.

Drug addict Bob is making hash oil out of "medical marijuana"  in his "kitchen" using butane. He lives on the ground floor. Oops, Bob lights his container on fire because he is a brain damaged dumb-ass.

A fire in a stack of shipping containers. Be a hell of a thing, wouldn't it?

The Phantom.

The new war on biceps.

Yes, apparently having muscles is now bad. Who knew?

Political correctness has value, Katz said. Supporters of presidential candidate Donald Trump say like they him for "not being politically correct," but what they really mean is they like him "for saying racist and sexist comments," Katz added.

Pop culture also has an insidious effect on masculinity, Katz continued, imploring the audience not to "check your brain and moral conscience when you go to the movies."

He showed clips from his film Tough Guise, in which Katz claims "there has been a ratcheting up of what it takes to be considered menacing in the 1980s and 90s."

As evidence, Katz noted that G.I. Joe's biceps have gotten larger over the years and that Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone use bigger guns for their iconic roles as the Terminator and Rambo than did Humphrey Bogart in his 1930s and 1940s film roles.

I want to ask this guy, if biceps and and six-pack abs are bad, how about beard stubble and a beer gut?

The Phantom