"Je m'appelle Rodoljub Marjanovic, j'ai 23 ans, je suis footballeur professionnel en Serbie. Il y a deux ans, j'ai signé un contrat avec le FK Hadjuk Kula. Pendant six mois je n'ai pas été payé, puis on m'a forcé à mettre un terme à mon contrat auprès de la fédération serbe. J'ai voulu me défendre, mais le directeur financier du club m'a dit que je serais tué si je ne retirais pas ma plainte. Je me suis senti très mal, car le directeur financier, Nikola Dzomba, est célèbre en Serbie pour être quelqu'un prêt à tout. (...) J'étais dans un tel état psychique que j'ai dit aux médias que j'allais m'immoler par le feu devant le siège de la fédération serbe."

When Europeans aren't deploring the Yanks' lack of refinement or when they are trying to point out, say, how the European version of football is far more civilized and far more beautiful than American football, it turns out that Europe's football players, at least those in the Eastern part, are subject to intimidation, violence, and racism, not to mention the deliberate withholding of their pay and the corruption brought about by criminal gang activity.

Cet extrait choisi parmi de nombreux témoignages contenus dans le "Livre noir" réalisé par la FIFPro (le syndicat international des joueurs professionnels) donne une vision alarmante de la situation du football professionnel en Europe de l'Est. Ce rapport de 177 pages, que révèle Le Monde et qui sera rendu public mardi 7 février, démontre - à rebours des clichés qui nimbent celui nanti d'Europe de l'Ouest - qu'à l'est du continent le footballeur est un travailleur dont les droits ne sont pas toujours respectés, que les mauvais traitements sont légion, le racisme omniprésent et les pressions de corruption exercées par des organisations criminelles endémiques.

… 41,4 % des joueurs, toutes nationalités confondues, qui ont répondu à la FIFPro ont indiqué que leurs salaires n'était pas versés à temps. 11,7 % ont affirmé avoir subi des violences, 10,2 %, des brimades physiques ou psychologiques. Le rapport évoque par exemple le cas de Nikola Nikezic, ancien joueur du club russe FC Kuban, molesté et menacé par un revolver en janvier 2011 : "Quelques minutes après que j'ai refusé de signer un document qui mettait fin à mon contrat, deux gars très costauds sont entrés dans la pièce que l'entraîneur s'est empressé de quitter... J'ai fini par signer..." 9,6 % disent avoir été l'objet de discriminations raciales. Roberto Carlos, capitaine brésilien d'un autre club russe de l'élite, FC Anzhi Makhachkala, a été accueilli au stade du Zenith Saint-Pétersbourg par un supporteur qui lui a tendu une banane. 15,6 % ont été obligés de s'entraîner seuls, à l'écart du groupe. Le footballeur russe Igor Strelkov a dû respecter un programme individuel consistant à courir autour du terrain pendant plusieurs jours. La température moyenne était de - 20 °C.

Ces professionnels deviennent, dès lors, plus vulnérables à la corruption mise en place par des organisations de type criminel. 11,9 % des joueurs interrogés ont admis avoir été approchés pour manipuler le résultat d'un match. Pour la FIFPro, il y a "un lien évident entre le non-paiement et les matches arrangés". Un tiers des joueurs approchés pour arranger un match ont subi des violences.

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Let’s not forget about that other #European union.

The document was signed by the leaders of the Russian Federation, Belarus, and Kazakhstan. Only the ignorant will be less than impressed.

And it wasn’t just about “Kampuchean-Yemeni Solidarity” like the bad old days.

The Eurasian Union is part of an integration process leading to the Common Economic Space. Russian President Dmitry Medvedev likens it to a train. Think of it as a new European Union with Russia in the driver’s seat, picking up new passengers as it happily motors along.

Western Europe’s clout on world affairs is fading. My sad analysis is that the EU’s economy will soon implode like that of the old Soviet Bloc. Its people’s poverty and austerity will resemble that of communist Romania or Albania.

While the “implosion” fantasies are bogus, the notion of going through a transition phase of mediocrity and dependence isn’t. The EU being the world’s locus of high finance or “big-wind” in the form of being perpetual UN conference hosts will not pay the bills. The fact that we are talking about two R&D deserts doesn’t really figure into things either when you consider who it is that has the natural resources.

The harsh fact is that thanks to years of political ineptitude, the European Union has nothing left to offer the world. It is an also-ran.

I don’t see a sauve qui peut threshold being crossed in the future, but rather a creeping awareness that comes in the form of independent treaties and partnerships that critics will characterize as being rather too “British“ or “Hungarian” for their happy, loving family.

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Besides the firing of radio and TV reporters who did not please the powers-that-be, censorship and self-censorship were the rule in France's radio and television stations, while "taboo" subjects were avoided.

Needless to say, sentences like this one in Daniel Psenny's Le Monde book review help explain the widespread opposition in France to George W. Bush during the Iraq War coupled with just-as-widespread support for Jacques Chirac's "peace camp" histrionics.

The book itself that Psenny is reviewing — Augustin Scalbert's La Voix de son maître ? France Inter et le pouvoir politique, 1963-2012 — goes into more specifics, and that from the very beginning: In his speech launching the official French radio and TV station almost 50 years ago, Charles de Gaulle had no compunction about stating incontrovertibly that the Radiodiffusion-télévision française (including France Inter) should be "a propaganda instrument", writes Daniel Psenny. (As for Le Monde itself, it turns out that France's newspaper of reference was born under similar circumstances and with similar goals…)

Inaugurée le 14 décembre 1963 par le général de Gaulle, la Maison de la radio, qui abrite les radios de service public (dont France Inter), a longtemps été considérée comme "la voix de la France". Dans son discours inaugural, le Général n'avait d'ailleurs pas hésité à affirmer que la Radiodiffusion-télévision française (la RTF) de l'époque avait "une responsabilité nationale" et devait être clairement un instrument de propagande.

C'est ce que rappelle Augustin Scalbert, journaliste à Rue89, dans son livre La Voix de son maître ? France Inter et le pouvoir politique, 1963-2012, qui raconte les relations complexes entretenues entre la radio publique et le pouvoir politique. En clair, l'"avant" et l'"après" Nicolas Sarkozy, qui, en 2008, a décidé de nommer lui-même les présidents de l'audiovisuel public (dont celui de Radio France), pour mettre fin à "l'hypocrisie".

La première partie du livre est historique. Le journaliste y rappelle que la droite (de Gaulle, Georges Pompidou, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing) a toujours veillé à ce que l'audiovisuel public soit sous l'emprise du pouvoir politique. Outre les renvois de journalistes qui ne plaisaient pas, la censure et l'autocensure étaient la règle, et l'on évitait les sujets "tabous" …

En près de cinquante ans, les choses ont bien changé. Même si, financièrement, Radio France reste toujours dépendante de l'Etat, elle n'est plus le "relais de propagande" du pouvoir.

La décision de Nicolas Sarkozy de nommer lui-même le PDG de Radio France a jeté le trouble, tant à l'intérieur qu'à l'extérieur de la Maison ronde, et fait l'objet de la seconde partie du livre.

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With no exit mechanism, and no substantive federalism, or a unifying idea, Francis Fukuyama decribes why the EU empire-building project is more or less like the Hotel California

in a sense, there is a deeper failure at the European level, a failure in European identity. That is to say, there was never a successful attempt to create a European sense of identity and a European sense of citizenship that would define the obligations, responsibilities, duties and rights that Europeans have to one another beyond simply the wording of the different treaties that were signed. The EU in many respects was created as a technocratic exercise done for purposes of economic efficiency. What we can see now is that economic and post-national values are not enough to get people to buy into this community. So wealthy Germans feel a sense of noblesse oblige towards poorer Germans; this social solidarity is the basis of the German welfare state. But they do not feel similar obligations towards the Greeks,whom they regard as being poor disciplined, very non-German in their general approach to fiscal matters.
So there is no solidarity in that broader European sense. I think for various reasons Europe is stumbling toward a short-term solution to this crisis. But I do not think that any form of deepening at this point is a viable project unless someone pays more attention to identity and is able to answer the question in a more substantive sense of what it means to be a European. Not just in a negative sense that we don’t want conflict and old nationalisms and war, but what it means in terms of positive values.

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Plantu cartoon:
• If I had a job in a newspaper, I could also break important news stories!
• Newspaper headlines:
— Snow Is Falling!
— It's Freezing!
— Snow Is Falling!
— It's Freezing!


More Global Warming news here…

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#Occupy Cathouse!

Following a progressive clampdown by French police, Le Temps reports that hookers are flocking to Geneva in droves.

Though most agree that the prostitution market in Geneva is booming, the local police vice unit is not concerned, saying that the increase will eventually level off. "In the 1980s, Geneva prostitutes were already complaining about competition from German prostitutes," says Michel Félix, a member of Aspasie, an association that has been protecting the rights of prostitutes for 30 years. "Then other nationalities started arriving – it works in cycles."

Which might possibly give then more of a sense of how supply and demand works than their Johns who are probably representing the finance industry well.

Lisa angrily accuses the media of hyping up the Swiss Eldorado’s huge salaries, thus attracting throngs of girls lured by easy money. Girls can indeed bring in 15,000 to 20,000 Swiss francs (12,000 to 17,000 euros) a month. But rates are actually comparable to those in the other European capitals. As the Gclub puts it: "Customers will usually pay 150 to 300 Swiss francs (120 to 250 euros) in high-class places, but 25 to 40 euros to turn a trick in the street -- that’s really slashing prices."

The economic nationalism, labor competition, and nativism are rife. It’s busting out all over, in fact:

Lisa, who runs Venusia, a legal and regulated house of prostitution in Geneva, has just about had enough. "France is trying to get rid of its prostitutes by sending them abroad. So they come here," she says. "We’re sick and tired of this situation."

Protectionism is rearing its’ ugly head in an industry critical to Europe, my friends, and something must be done.

I recommend the conventional European solution: a syndicat that you have to bribe your way in to despite a lack of “talent”, and, of course, unionization. Organize the workers and shut the place down!!! Death to the bosses!!!

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Watching "the canals of Venice […] thickening as they start to turn to ice," the BBC refers to a "throwback to another era" in view of the fact that

…the last time the surrounding lagoon froze was in 1929.

As for the Italian capital further South, "Rome has seen its heaviest snowfall in more than 25 years."

As for Bosnia's capital, "Sarajevo lies buried under its heaviest snowfall ever" (read another BBC report).

All in all, over 200 people have died of the cold in Europe (more than 100 of them in the Ukraine), but apart from (entirely) insignificant details like that, heaven forbid that we should let such an (entirely) insignificant fluke deter us from our fight against global warming.

Update: Meanwhile — and as Plantu tries to steer the narrative towards heart-breaking unemployment and homelessness — it is unclear whether Garry Trudeau catches the unintentional irony in today's Doonesbury strip as the satirist (although a one-direction satirist only, i.e., only or mostly with the right) takes on alleged climate-change deniers and their alleged flexibility with facts

(doubled to make sure Monday's cartoon stays on this post)…

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I'm tired of love; I'm still more tired of rhyme;
But money gives me pleasure all the time.

Belloc, Hilaire (1870 - 1953)

Word up.

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Robert Thomason moved to Copenhagen to live with his Danish girlfriend nearly 10 years ago

writes The Telegraph.

He describes the city, which he has captured in thousands of pictures, as "a photogenic gem", full of "old and new buildings that compliment each other perfectly".

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Sylvie Vartan’s 1967 Japanese TV Ad



A fun fact: Vartan was married to France’s no. 1 Elvis impersonator, Johnny Hallyday.

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While American Democrats opposed funds for the military, reported the International Herald Tribune in its 100/75/50 Years Ago section, some 800 French workers were protesting a government shutdown while threatening hunger strikes.

Democrats Oppose Battleships

The Democrats of the House of Representatives, in caucus last night [Jan. 29, 1912], voted against making an appropriation for any new battleship. This precipitates the annual fight for naval increase.

…/…

Strike in France

Eight hundred coal miners who have spent 42 days sitting underground in protest against a government move to close down the mines today [Jan. 30, 1962] topped off their efforts with a hunger strike. They said they had decided to starve themselves “in view of the government’s intransigence in refusing to open negotiations.” The government wants to shut down mines employing about 8,000 miners in this southwestern region because, it asserts, the coal here is of poor quality and it is losing money on the operation.

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"The abandonment of the reproductive function is the common feature of all perversions. We actually describe a sexual activity as perverse if it has given up the aim of reproduction and pursues the attainment of pleasure as an aim independent of it. So, as you will see, the breach and turning point in the development of sexual life lies in becoming subordinate to the purpose of reproduction. Everything that happens before this turn of events and equally everything that disregards it and that aims solely at obtaining pleasure is given the uncomplimentary name of 'perverse' and as such is proscribed."

- Sigmund Freud, Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse

In other news, other varied forms of unproductive assplay or watersports will have come at a price:

Europe's demographics also aren't on the side of growth. Populations across the developed world are graying, but Europe's low productivity growth means that its future labor shortfall will be especially acute. It doesn't help that Europeans draw social security benefits earlier and more easily than their developed-world peers.

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When I am dead, I hope it may be said:
His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.

Belloc, Hilaire (1870 - 1953)

Daz right, bitches!

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Sujet délicat cette semaine pour le médiateur

It's a delicate subject, admits Le Monde ombudsman Pascal Galinier, as France's newspaper of reference joins (as a 34 % shareholder) in the launching of the French edition of the Huffington Post.

Indeed, it turns out that the editorial director of HuffPo France is none other than the wife of a famous (or infamous) socialist politician (also read an MSM article, as well as a previous No Pasarán post).

Une certaine Anne Sinclair. Ancienne journaliste de TF1, mais aussi et surtout épouse de Dominique Strauss-Kahn.

"Superbe opération de com'", comme s'exclament Ariane Chemin et Marion Van Renterghem, grands reporters au Monde ? De fait, dans la foulée, Anne Sinclair a fait cette semaine la cover de Gala, de Paris Match, de VSD... Avec de belles photos dans les locaux du Monde... De quoi faire un peu oublier les articles moins avenants de la presse américaine ? Cette presse qu'Anne Sinclair juge "exigeante, précise, travailleuse" dans un entretien au magazine Elle la semaine dernière. "Certains commentateurs français ont questionné son objectivité quant aux scandales en cours en lien avec son mari", écrivait dès mardi le Herald Tribune, qui cite "certaines critiques (qui) pensent qu'elle a perdu sa pertinence depuis qu'elle a abandonné son job de présentatrice en 1997 quand M. Strauss-Kahn a été nommé ministre des finances". L'hebdomadaire Newsweek, lui, est plus lapidaire : "Anne Sinclair - M^me DSK - a été nommée directrice éditoriale d'une nouvelle extension française du Huffington Post, une publication qui fait aux auteurs ce que son mari est réputé faire aux femmes de chambre." Façon un peu "limite" de rappeler aux lecteurs américains qui est Anne Sinclair, illustre inconnue outre-Atlantique...

"Lui c'est lui, moi c'est moi", semble-t-elle répliquer à ceux qui évoquent son époux. Pas si simple. "Elle est à la fois journaliste et femme de DSK. Personne ne peut l'oublier", observe Raphaëlle Bacqué, grand reporter au Monde. "Elle a abandonné le journalisme quand son mari est entré au gouvernement, en expliquant elle-même qu'il y avait conflit d'intérêts. En quoi le conflit d'intérêts n'a-t-il plus cours ? DSK, dont elle a fait la communication, reste mêlé à un fait divers majeur de l'actualité française, dont on ignore encore toutes les ramifications", rappelle Marion Van Renterghem.

Comme toujours, le médiateur se pose plus de questions qu'il n'obtient de réponses. Etre ou ne pas être dans le "plan com'" de DSK ? Sacré dilemme, que le médiateur soulevait déjà une chronique en septembre 2011. La réponse n'a pas changé. Et l'accueil d'Anne Sinclair dans notre maison n'y changera rien. Tenez, lundi, la conférence de presse du Huffington Post était organisée par Anne Hommel, d'Euro-RSCG, la "communicante" de... Dominique Strauss-Kahn.

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Ten years ago today, Daniel Pearl was decapitated by Salifist barbarians.

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Chris from Arizona writes:

[Members of the "Christian" rightwing] claim to worship Jesus but don't want to help the poor. They claim to be prolife but like war, guns, and the death penality [sic]. They claim to want freedom but want to decide who can marry and what a woman can do with her uterus.

Okay, let's see, here, and let's take this step by step…

They claim to worship Jesus but don't want to help the poor.

Excuse me, but conservatives and Christians do help the poor. In fact, they are perfectly capable of doing so without the intervention of the government — which is what they object to. And the reason why they object to it is precisely because man is good — not incompetent (as the left, and as statists, believe) — and does not need a nanny state to tell him how to treat his fellow man.

They claim to be prolife but like war, guns, and the death penality.

They do not like war, guns, and the death penalty. They see the need for their use when it's necessary. This is because they know that, contrary to what leftist type individuals believe, heaven has not been, and can not be, established on Earth (it does exist, but somewhere else) and that, therefore, people should not believe in the fairy tales of the left.

They claim to want freedom but want to decide who can marry and what a woman can do with her uterus.

Again, they do not believe in the fairy tales of the left and, therefore, there are things which people can do and there are things which they cannot do. To take an extreme example, you do not have the freedom to steal from your neighbor, either.

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Eighteen years after the genocide in Rwanda, write Christophe Ayad and Philippe Bernard in an article that fills an entire two-page spread in Le Monde, France is still wondering if it has a part of responsibility, direct or otherwise, in the killing of 800,000 people over the period of a single month.

Beyond that rises the issues of France's role in Africa, in the world, and in history.

C'est l'une de ces zones d'ombre de l'histoire récente de la France, l'une de ces plaies mal refermées qui nourrissent guerres idéologiques et anathèmes. Une de ces passions françaises qui enflamment régulièrement intellectuels, politiques et militants. Elle tient en une question, simple et terrible à la fois : la France porte-t-elle une part de responsabilité dans le génocide rwandais qui fit 800 000 morts en un mois ?

Bientôt dix-huit ans après, la question reste le sujet de violentes controverses qui en disent au moins autant sur les fractures politiques et intimes de la France que sur le génocide de 1994 lui-même.

… Tout comme l'attentat et le génocide lui-même, [l'opération militaro-humanitaire] Turquoise divise : seule tentative de sauver des vies selon les partisans de l'armée française ; ultime tentative pour stopper l'avancée de la guérilla tutsi et sauver le régime hutu, selon ses détracteurs.

Pour d'autres, notamment des journalistes non présents sur place à l'époque, mais très audibles dans les médias actuels, le Rwanda est devenu une formidable caisse de résonance de leur vision du monde. "Certains sont tentés de faire entrer leur petite personne dans une histoire qu'ils n'ont pas vécue, dit Christophe Boisbouvier, journaliste à RFI et envoyé spécial de la chaîne au Rwanda, au printemps 1994. L'atrocité du génocide est telle qu'elle permet de faire passer ses idées sur l'armée, sur la France et l'Afrique, sans risquer d'être critiqué, surtout si l'on prétend se placer du côté des victimes. L'horreur laisse les gens bouche bée." Plusieurs médias - RFI, Libération, Le Figaro ainsi que Le Monde - ont été déchirés par des querelles internes.

Illustrations extraites de Turquoise, d'Olivier Bramanti et Frédéric Debomy (Buchet-Chastel, " Les Cahiers dessinés ", 96 p., 23 ¤).

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An editorial in Denmark’s Jyllands-Posten displays an undercurrent common to Europeans who are just as nominally supportive of authoritarianism inducing central planning economics, more likely in a form of nicey-nicey seeming government management of enterprise, and are also nominally supportive of free markets.

Oddly enough, the odd reasoning behind the quivering lips are visible even behind the centrist positions typically held by Jyllands-Posten:

The gap between rich and poor increased. The global financial crisis has shown that we have to rethink a capitalist model, which meant that financial institutions without the necessary checks could throw first USA and then Europe into a deep crisis that it can take decades to fix the economy up.

We’re all familiar with what this bemoans, and how it can never be salved outside of assigning every working person with the same income and benefits, something even Marxist-Leninism couldn’t achieve – so why even bother saying it if it wasn’t part of the usual atmospherics – no different than saying hello when you picking up a telephone?

It gets worse.

It is an economic crisis that has also become a political crisis because it is about lack of leadership. It is now so deep that it has started to weaken democracy.

No, being skeptical about or dissatisfied with your elected officials doesn’t weaken democracy, it gives you a reason to not vote for them again and embolden democracy by using it and letting it operate.

The crisis of capitalism in the West certainly raises many issues in Asia, whose interventionist economic model so often been criticized by the West but whose economies are nevertheless going ahead. The western model has taught them that the economic downturn has gruesome consequences and that one should be cautious in liberalizing the economy too much. So it's safer to have the state on track with the adjustments, such as the banking sector, as the U.S. and Europe lacked.

Sure, you say that now, but could you live in that kind of ‘company store’ society? Not likely.

Worse still is a total forgetting of who Nick Leeson was, and under whose laws he operated under, and .

The crisis of capitalism in the West certainly raises many issues in Asia, whose interventionist economic model so often been criticized by the West but whose economies are nevertheless going ahead. The western model has taught them that the economic downturn has gruesome consequences and that one should be cautious in liberalizing the economy too much. So it's safer to have the state on track with the adjustments, such as the banking sector, as the U.S. and Europe lacked.

Which oddly enough is that same ‘pirate capitalism’ that made Hong Kong’s economy grow and robustly resist a state of aggression that Havana can only dream of whining about.

Worried about democracy? Then stop alluding to the value of the Asia’s crypto-authoritarian factory states. The pointless bedwetting must stop.

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You remember Hee Haw! Don’t you? In the same spirit as “Russia Today”, Kremlin TV is giving global identity thief Julian Assange his own TV show.

RT television stepped forward Wednesday to say it will be broadcasting the show, a series of 10 interviews with what it described as "key political players, thinkers and revolutionaries - figures who in the author's opinion will be shaping the political agenda of tomorrow."

The names of the guests are still to be disclosed.

And now for the “no shinola, Sherlock” statement of the century, fitting in with the grand theme of Assange’s linear existence:

RT, which also broadcasts in Spanish and Arabic on its cable networks, often takes a critical stance on U.S. policy.

Possibly because RT, a channel no-one is willing to pay to watch, is an obscuritarian near-complete FSB propaganda operation that Assange, the presumed hater of secrecy finds himself hitching his fate to: an operation propped up by people who keep secret files on people for a living.

Otherwise how do you think they can afford to buy capacity on 25 different satellite transponders without any real advertising? We’d follow the money, but Assange’s choice of venue is as opaque as the drinking water was in east Berlin.

Certainly intended to either propagandize TO Americans if not ABOUT Americans, it least it stands the chance of being less unwatchable as European television.

"We're proud to host Julian Assange's new project," editor in chief Margarita Simonyan said in the statement. "RT has rallied a global audience of open-minded people who don't take things around them for granted."

No, they prefer getting their received wisdom from an illiberal paranoid crypto-police state reminiscent of the days of Moscow Central.

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C'est son 18 juin 1940.

In a one-page spread in Le Monde Magazine called Le Roman-Photo de Villepin le Magnifique, Bastien Bonnefous compares Dominique de Villepin to Charles de Gaulle, no less — both in the title of the caption (L'homme qui a dit non) and in the caption itself. When Jacques Chirac's foreign minister appears at the United Nations to oppose George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld in their decision to oust Saddam Hussein, Bonnefous says that

It is his June 18, 1940.

Uh, is that so, Monsieur Bonnefous? Charles de Gaulle was not a minister at the time he launched his appeal over the BBC, far from it, and he was not opposing a fellow democratic republic. He was an outcast, battling Nazi Germany, and an outcast whose (French) government would pronounce the death penalty against him… Dominique de Villepin was hardly in danger of death, or of anything else, for opposing Washington. So… Let's not mix things up, shall we?

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Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius hailed [the CDC’s National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey] for giving “a clear picture of the devastating impact these violent acts have on the lives of millions of Americans”

writes Christina Hoff Sommers in the Washington Post (thanks to Instapundit).

In fact, what the study reveals is the devastating impact that careless advocacy research can have on truth.

The FBI found that 84,767 rapes were reported to law enforcement authorities in 2010. … where did the CDC find 13.7 million victims of sexual crimes that the professional criminologists had overlooked?

It found them by defining sexual violence in impossibly elastic ways and then letting the surveyors, rather than subjects, determine what counted as an assault.

… [This] shows how the study fits into the administration’s effort to apply the advocacy agenda of the women’s lobby to rape research.

In addition, I added the following to the comments section, responding to an outraged feminist:

Notice the precise — and misleading — wording in the outraged question asked by sammy328:

"Are you implying that if a girl is drunk it is acceptable for someone to rape her?"

That is what noone, that is PRECISELY what noone, is saying, yet alone implying.

What the point is, is that if a girl has sex while tipsy or drunk, and this holds true whoever initiated it (she or the man), one should not — automatically — assume afterwards, like the CDC seems to be doing, that she was incontrovertibly raped.

Let's turn the question on sammy328:

Are you implying that if a girl is tipsy or drunk (probably like the other girls and guys in her presence) it is unacceptable for her (for them) to be in the mood or for anyone to else to be in the mood (for sex with her)? Lest whatever happens afterwards be described indubitably as rape?!

sammy328's outrage is a deliberate attempt, whether she recognizes it consciously or not, to prevent people from thinking this issue through thoroughly.

Pretty much any time you read something to the effect that "This comment is incredibly insensitive, ignorant, and offensive", you can be pretty sure that the underlying motif is to prevent rational thought (not to mention "thought-provoking, timely comments on politics, national and international affairs"), and, in this case, to prevent readers (and voters!) from putting the feminists' (self-serving) victimhood status into doubt.

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I find a disturbing similarity in the outlook of the political and institutional “lights” of our age, and a memorandum on how religion should be maligned written by Gorky to Stalin.

We need to know the "fathers of the church," the apologists of Christianity, especially indispensable to the study of the history of Catholicism, the most powerful and intellectual church organization whose political significance is quite clear. We need to know the history of church schisms, heresies, the Inquisition, the "religious" wars, etc. Every quotation by a believer is easily countered with dozens of theological quotations which contradict it.

We cannot do without an edition of the "Bible" with critical commentaries from the Tubingen school and books on criticism of biblical texts, which could bring a very useful "confusion into the minds" of believers.

It also brings to mind Howard Zinn’s efforts to rewrite history and work it into the curriculum of the American public school systems.

For this reason, there should be courses set up at the Communist Academy which would not only treat the history of religion, and mainly the history of the Christian church, i.e., the study of church history as politics.

Even the willfully constructed ‘soft touch’ when it comes to managing the news and the minds of youth:

By strongly emphasizing facts of a negative nature, we open ourselves up to our enemies, providing them an enormous amount of material, which they in turn very aptly use against us, compromising our party and our leadership in the eyes of Europe's proletariat, compromising the very principle of the dictatorship of the working class, because the proletariat of Europe and America feeds on the bourgeois newspapers for the most part—and for this reason it cannot grasp our country's cultural-
revolutionary progress, our successes and achievements in industrialization, the enthusiasm of our working masses, and of their influence on the impoverished peasantry.

The imperative to destroy faith by those who want control over a people is clear:

Our youth is very poorly informed on questions of this nature. The "tendency" toward a religious disposition is very noticeable--a natural result of developing individualism. At this time, as always, the young are in a hurry to find "the definitive answer."

Which is why those who like the idea of controlling a society feel such a strong need to manipulate education and the spinning of news. They know that a society left to make its’ own choices simply wouldn’t guarantee them the power over others that they seek.

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The mental leap to freedom is hard for those programmed into the ideology of the revolutionary left.

“When I was a teenager growing up in Chicago, I went through the standard teenage rebellion,” Bill Browder told me one afternoon in the Hermitage office in London, during the first of several conversations I had with him in 2011. “But instead of growing my hair long and joining a rock band, coming from my specific family, I decided I was going to become a capitalist. There was nothing that would piss off my family more than that.”

Bill Browder is CEO of Hermitage Capital Management, and...

was the largest capitalist in Eastern Europe for a while, but he’s now known as an international justice crusader. In the past two years, he has singlehandedly waged an intercontinental lobbying campaign to get Western governments to pass a suite of sanctions and travel restrictions on Russian officials involved in the conspiracy to arrest, torture, and murder Browder’s thirty-seven-year-old Moscow-based attorney, Sergei Magnitsky, who had uncovered a $230 million tax fraud pegged to companies that had been expropriated by Russian officials.

If you have not heard or read about Magnitsky’s rectitude, bravery, and suffering, I urge you to right away.

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Imagine a law in America that could set children against their parents, centralize power away from the states toward the federal government, mandate increases in government spending regardless of taxpayer wishes, bypass the House of Representatives, and abrogate constitutional limitations on government power

wrote Stephen Baskerville in an issue of Touchstone last year (he is the author of Taken Into Custody: The War Against Fathers, Marriage, and the Family whose latest article is "The Rape of Justice" (PDF), published in the Salisbury Review ).

Such a measure may soon come up for ratification by the US Senate: the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC).

Children have become today’s favorite political weapon. From gun restrictions to mandatory seat-belts, the way to neuter opposition to intrusive government measures is to present them as being “for the children.” But the first casualties in the politicization of children are parents and therefore the family. Professionals who advocate for other people’s children inevitably do so at the expense of those whose first responsibility is their own children.

The CRC illustrates how radically human rights law has turned from its fundamental purpose, to be a shield protecting individuals from government intrusion, to being used as a tool of government intrusion.

…Geraldine Van Bueren, a law professor and one of the drafters of the CRC, … bluntly states that “the CRC provides an ideology for state intervention” into social and economic life. It is not a limitation on state power but a rationale for expanding it.

Subverting Sovereignty

… in America a ratified treaty becomes by constitutional stipulation the “supreme law of the land,” equal to the Constitution itself. That means that domestic courts are automatically required to enforce its provisions, without recourse to international tribunals. Treaty-making thus presents a loophole through which various interest groups can effectively legislate American domestic policy while bypassing the people’s elected lawmakers in the House of Representatives and in state legislatures.

… Anyone who doubts this need only glance at the family policy of the European Union. The EU has no legal authority to legislate in areas of family law or policy, which theoretically are left to national governments. Yet in practice, the EU sponsors many activities that undermine parents and traditional families. Driving much of this activity is EU collaboration with the CRC. …

The Dubious “Best Interest” Standard

One seemingly unexceptionable requirement of the CRC is that governments ensure the “best interest of the child.” In fact, however, the “best interest” standard is highly destructive of parental rights, because it allows government officials to decide the “best interest” of other people’s children, usurping that prerogative from parents.

Traditionally, legal authority over children has been recognized as residing with their parents, unless they somehow forfeit it. In Parham v. J. R. (1979), the Supreme Court recognized “that natural bonds of affection lead parents to act in the best interests of their children.” As Justice Potter Stewart observed in that case, “For centuries it has been a canon of the common law that parents speak for their minor children. So deeply imbedded in our traditions is this principle of law that the Constitution itself may compel a State to respect it.”

This principle has been so eroded in American domestic law that it is now the norm to assume precisely the opposite: that “the child’s best interest is perceived as being independent of the parents,” as family law practitioner Robert Williams writes, “and a court review is held to be necessary to protect the child’s interests.” …

More Dubious Provisions

Then there is Article 12, which provides that signatory governments

shall assure to the child who is capable of forming his or her own views the right to express those views freely in all matters affecting the child, the views of the child being given due weight in accordance with the age and maturity of the child.

This provision essentially institutionalizes the right of children to rebel against their parents’ authority and puts the state on the side of the child, with the backing of international law. “The Children’s Convention potentially protects the rights of the child who philosophically disagrees with the parents’ educational goals,” writes Van Bueren.

Any parent can recognize the threat. What makes the disagreement “philosophical”? What is the difference between a child who “philosophically” disagrees with his parents and one who simply doesn’t want to do his homework?

Consider also the provision regarding children’s “privacy.” Article 16 says that “no child shall be subjected to arbitrary or unlawful interference with his or her privacy, family, home, or correspondence” and that “the child has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.” But against whom is the child’s privacy being protected? His parents?

Ironically, authorizing the state to protect a child’s “privacy” justifies massive state intrusion into family privacy. This illustrates how the concept of privacy—while valid (and in my view undervalued by many family advocates today)—is meaningless outside the context of the family.

These types of provisions might be innocuous when used to protect adults against government repression. But when applied to children, they have the effect of abolishing parental and all other authority between children and the state. This starkly illustrates how the family is essential to freedom, and how the state, when it claims to be protecting “freedom” and “privacy” and “rights”—without the mediating authority of the family—is the fox protecting the henhouse.

Out of the Mouths of Lawyers

The CRC’s provisions allow government officials to pose as the mouthpieces and defenders of other people’s children, children they do not know and do not love. The altruism of these officials is assumed without question, while parents are depicted as selfishly promoting their own interests, which are cast as contrary to those of their own children. …”

Payoffs & GONGOs

The CRC also allows UN and government officials to demand that expenditures be made to implement certain of its policies. … Thus, under the guise of “human rights,” the UN is trying to control the spending priorities of sovereign nations.

This paves the way for patronage payoffs to favored clients, in this case groups professionally involved in child welfare. … [For instance] UN officials are attempting to funnel Moldovans’ money to their cronies, who become extensions of the government.

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