Behind the Façades in France: What expats and the mainstream media (French and American alike) fail to notice (or fail to tell you) about French attitudes, principles, values, and official positions…
When he's not emptying Castro's bedpan, he's trying to be legislatively creative. But his latest move is soooo 1933. Been there, done that. Ermächtigungsgesetz. Thanks to George A. and Joe.
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Is Zeropean geopositioning hubris going the way of that Zeropean smoke-and-mirrors search engine thing?
Venezuela's National Assembly has given initial approval to a bill granting the president the power to bypass congress and rule by decree for 18 months. President Hugo Chavez says he wants "revolutionary laws" to enact sweeping political, economic and social changes.
He has said he wants to nationalise key sectors of the economy and scrap limits on the terms a president can serve.
And the present meets the past.
An Enabling Act (Ermächtigungsgesetz in German) was passed by Germany's parliament (the Reichstag) on March 23, 1933. It was the second major step after the Reichstag Fire Decree through which the Nazis obtained dictatorial powers using largely legal means. The Act enabled Chancellor Adolf Hitler and his cabinet to enact laws without the participation of the Reichstag.
Good luck with all that. I was told that I have to wash away the smell of sulphur in some room somewhere.
One independent report puts Iraq’s per capita GDP growth rate at %13, and another at 17%, based on data which included small businesses. The EU says its’ own is somewhere between 1.7 and 2.4%.
At that rate they will reach parity in 26,1 years, a span of time much shorter than it took to get from an EEC to an EU.
Have a nice day.The Fuse is Lit (No Pasaran!)
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Friday, January 19, 2007
Amnesia: "France did all it could to suppress native languages in its colonies"
As a French-speaking African I am always mildly amused when I hear France clamoring for "cultural diversity," which to all intents and purposes amounts to mobilizing the world in a fight against Anglo-Saxon cultural and economic "imperialism"
The French seem to suffer from amnesia. France did all it could to suppress native languages in its colonies. I have personally suffered from this. And to this day, France tries to perpetuate the French language in its former colonies while attempting to enlist foot soldiers in the French war on Anglo-Saxon pre-eminence.
Still, and strangely enough, France seems to find it natural that its former colonies should join in the fight to "defend" its language against English.
We connect with each other based on our similarities, and we enrich each other based on our differences.
Now, the question is: Why can't the French stop living in the past, come to terms with the reality of globalization and start learning English — and Chinese — like everybody else?
About a year ago, Stanford Engineering Researcher Dr. Robert Gray made advance arrangements for a month-long rental of a Paris apartment, including a €2300 payment in advance. Dr. Gray and his wife are elderly, and his wife requires an operational elevator to get to a 4th floor (5 floors up) apartment.
However, when they arrived in April the elevator was not operational, so they made alternate arrangements. It seems reasonably clear that the elevator not being in working order was a breach of contract and thus Dr. Gray's advance payment should have been reimbursed.
Instead, a representative for the rental agency and the building's owner appear to have engaged in a collusive "good cop, bad cop" arrangement whereby Dr. Gray will never see a reimbursement. Dr. Gray, being a competent researcher, has found other connections between the two clowns in question and other Paris rental agencies -- see the text near the bottom of the page for blow by blow details of what it’s like to deal with these operators.
Bottom Line: If you're going to rent temporarily in Paris, avoid Paristay, Apartment Rentals Paris, LOGDIS, and especially Paul Bernie and Andre Brue.
The irony is that the only way to get a leftist to care about individual rights is threaten to take some idiots’ stash of Turkish Blond away.The Fuse is Lit (No Pasaran!)
In an effort to be “diplomatic”, the Embassy turned Cambodian refugees over to the Khmer Rouge, knowing full well that they would be killed.
On television, a journalist tells that dramatic events that took place in the [French] embassy. The Kampucheans who took refuge there were handed over to the Khmer Rouges! Among them, the husband of Ung Balk. “I did not any more smell my legs, explain it twenty and one years later. My daughter, who was 12 years old, ran with joy to embrace the screen while saying: “Don’t worry mom, dad will join us”. Me, I understood that all was finished, that I was going to be alone and have to assume sll the family responsibilities.”
Never mind the fact that the writer is using the term “Kampuchean” which was favored by the Khmer Rouge, and now firmly rejected by Cambodians today. As for that superior humanism?
“Remember that Mr. Dyrac had to face a true ultimatum, whose consequences for the community from abroad taken refuge in the [Embassy] compound could, in the event of refusal, become catastrophic.”
Why ask why? For the simple reason that nothing has changed – the inability to back the offer of a carrot with a stick:
Defense budgets in Europe are dropping. The US defense budget is larger than the next 20 largest defense budgets in the world combined. The European solution is to solve problems multilaterally, and not by military means. Why? If a military solution is required, then Europe must follow the American lead and be in America's shadow. This is a dignity issue. If international problems are addressed multilaterally, then Europe has 27 EU nations, and in international forums like the UN, Europe has more than 30 votes, and the US just one.
And with that their dimished ability to be heard, because the consequences of ignoring their wisdom are few, even though the irony of the situation is that the formation of the EU is in part an attempt to re-establish some significance to themselves in a larger world.
- Thanks go to reader btesh for the story link to RealClearPolitics.
What the leftist world view has boiled down to at this point is that causes need to be invented to channel rage, almost to the point of ridiculousness:
Most of UPC’s activities, though, are fairly regarded as theatre of the absurd. Its 2001 campaign to abolish the production and sale of “rubber chicken” toys is a good example. UPC’s Davis says that these comic props are “cruel and obscene.” She also claimed that these harmless gag items have “pornographic implications.”
And yet the media will employ only conservative causes and organizations as the goat in any mocking exposé. How cute.
Ce vidéo était le 8ème clip le plus regardé hier dans la catégorie "Art and Animation - French" sur Youtube.com. Bravo les gars ! Ainsi, c'est les 'New Media' qui bousillent de l'intérieur la baudruche de la Ripoublika Franska des Zarzélettres !
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Tuesday, January 16, 2007
How Do You Say "F*ck You, Motherf*cker" in French?
It seems that each of these conspiracy theory peddling clowns, like one who won’t stop sending us rambling, frothing emails from his home in the Keebler Elf tree, seems to ramble and fronth in their own special way.
Those 9-11 attacks? It was all about data centers!
The plane banked attacking the World Trade Center, and adding another hair-brained theory to hundreds of others, some drooling freak is convinced that amateur pilots yelling allah hu akhbar! were capable of counting floors in a split second and controlling the aircraft with laser precision. To which I say: have you ever seen how most Saudi men drive?
It must have been the menacing color of the battery racks...
These units were bolted to the raised floor which stood about 3 feet above the reinforced 81st floor. Beneath the raised floor ran the cables and power supply that connected the army of batteries. IT techies had to get down on all fours and crawl around beneath the raised floor to connect cables.
"The whole floor was batteries," he said, "huge battery-looking things." They were "all black" and "solid, very heavy" things that had been brought in during the night. They had been put in place during the summer prior to 9/11, he said.
As an Architect I’ve worked on plenty of office designs and test-fits and several data centers. Battery rooms are usually full of batteries. Construction work is nearly always done at night if it effects another floor or produces an excess of noise with adjacent spaces occupied. There’s also the matter of “mysterious” structural work, which if the author had even a marginal clue how heavy data center UPS batteries are. Stacked 2 tiers high you quickly get to a 600 pounds per square foot (29 kPa) load. Office space is normally designed for 100-150 psf (5-7 kPa), depending on whether or not it’s identified as an area where a file or book library can occur. No matter – that anyone would need to perform any structural work to make up the difference, right? RIGHT? They also need 1 cfm of ventilation directly to the great outdoors since they give off small quantities of chlorine and hydrogen gas when they start to fail. No work needed THERE either, surely... As to the last point, why doesn’t he “investigate” how it might be possible that they were brought up AFTER 9-11? Hm?
Simpler still, why doesn’t the guy just say that the evil architect of everything he doesn’t like Dick Cheney, was flying both planes that day. PERSONALLY! Sure beats the theory which he had bit of a hard time with: that on 20 floors large flower pots surreptitiously containing thermite were situated in the same general location near the elevators. They must have been places there “mysteriously” by people posing as office cleaners. I mean, what kind of Wall Street offices hire cleaning companies?!?
How about this theory: al-Queda terrorist did it. After all, bin Laden eventually started bragging about it. Not enough complicity with America, I guess. For that eventuality, one must claim that the US “created” him, in exactly the same way they “created” Saddam Hussein, Tojo, Vlad the Impaler, and Alexander the Great.
”Why execute an imprisoned dictator who’s got no more power?” “Oh, don’t believe it: he got power!” “He’s got a weapon of mass destruction: his mouth.”
« Les États-Unis: maîtres du jeu mondial pour le pire... Et le meilleur »
I hate to admit it, but I really have a hard time reading this trash while sober or even in a timely manner for that matter. Every day should be a Saturday anyway.
In Le Figaro the long sufferingTed Stanger disabuses the reader that France 24 is seen as anything other than still-born in the US, but with a anti-US dig to keep his cred. I have to correct Stanger here: France 24 has no impression in the US because no-one has paid any attention to it.
By creating France 24, Jacques Chirac was guided by the Gaullist idea that information needs to serve the national interest. In view of that, Americans have seen the new network as dead-on-arrival. That the French want to present their view of the world is a legitimate desire. Vive France24, to but those who look to it to find an alliance of anti-Americanism and anti-globalization, they would just shrug their shoulders across the atlantic. On our side [of the pond] it's seen more as a political instrument than a news network. Don't forget that after rightly rejecting pro-war politics in 2003, Chirac was desperate to find strategic allies and turned to Germany, Russia, the third world, and even that politically fictional francophonie.
Nearly 4 years later the rejection of the Iraqi campaign exposes a foundation as fragile as the one found after rejecting the [EU] constitution under the weight of domestic politics. Paris is still as isolated as Bush, and France 24 won't change that.
Locked up in the attic of the back pages Dominique Dhombres blows the cover off of " national interest" in Le Monde as an object of indecision and guilt, but still doesn't seem sure why he's doing it, asking us to "pray for peace" in a post-Christian society. Good luck with all that. I doubt we'll be seeing many candles being lit.
On the cover and below the fold, Le Monde finally notices a devastated Mogadishu now that those probable-Neo-con-lovin' Etheopians have stepped in – at least they make mention of a decade of lawless chaos, but it took a US air-raid in the south to get it onto their radar. I guess those groovy Abyssinians have just dropped off the French list of the officially pitiable oppressed that otherwise get an Albanian a glare reserved for bums and panhandlers.
From our bulging "are you f'in kidding me?" file:
Worst of all is a cartoon as implausible as Bill Clinton's trope of blackness: " Bravitude Royale". Obviously pumping Ségolène's minor statement about China while posing as the Michelin man, the minor bout of verbal "bravitude" is meant to jump the train of the actual Tiananmin Square protestor who defiantly challenged a column of tanks. Verbal bravery is the best you'll ever get from someone who will stick her neck out, provided that it's a momentary crane to pander the "human rights" voter and is eventually rendered illegible of insignificant to the snubbed. Sounds mighty damn brave, doesn't it?
Now for a moment of light comedy: LM features union shakedown artist Bernard Thibault is shown demonstrating necktie-tie-ing skills poorer than a comic Abe Vigoda character.The Fuse is Lit (No Pasaran!)
Present at the UMP Congress was La Baf, trying to get signatures to prevent Ségolène's execution of Jacques Chirac.
As for myself, I was unceremeniously thrown out.
Arthur Wneir and I were supposed to meet up, but we missed each other, first because I was late, then because he didn't hear his phone ringing.
So you won't see much of me in the Baf post, notably what follows: I took things into my own hands. Dressed up as le bourreau, I walked around the congress as it was closing (there were still hundreds of people) with a sign saying
Ségolène à l'Elysée! Votez Chirac!
Most people got the fact, that offhand, it was pro-UMP, a lot of them took pictures, but some people were offended, and a drunk UMP guy started pushing me around. By now, burly men started gathering around me.
"C'est de la provoc'," I admitted, "mais c'est de la provoc' PRO-ump et PRO-Sarkozy", so that the equivalent of Jospin's 2002 downfall doesn't happen to Nicolas (NP's W has been predicting a disastrous first round for months), allowing Ségolène to win by default (as Chichi did in 2002).
Finally, the security guys started pushing me around, grabbing for my sign, which they tore from my hands. Then I stood around there for awhile, until seven huge security guys came over, and started pushing, pulling, and dragging me out.
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Unconfirmed by Danes or Any Other Reputable Adults.
The Italian newspaper la Repubblica reports that an Iranian news agency reports that a Danish “Mohammed cartoonist” has been burned alive:
TEHRAN - One of the Danish cartoonists of the Mohammed caricatures that, because thought blasphemous, inflamed the Muslim world a year ago, has been found died in a narrow alleyway in Copenhagen. The news, broadcast from the Iranian government news agency Fars, has not yet been confirmed by Police in Denmark. The cartoonist, whose name Fars doesn’t reveal, was said to have been burnt alive.
Not only is it hard to believe that someone could be burned alive in an alleyway that quickly without drawing attention, but note too how the cause of death is written to be attributed to the “blasphemy” and not the rage or the murderer.
Developing, I suppose, but it sounds like Big Brother giving the “Iranian Street” something to be proud of now that they’ve surmised that their uncredentialed “diplomats” in northern Iraq might have not been above board about their activities. The news appears nowhere else at the time of this writing, raising suspicion that the whole thing is just domestic Iranian propaganda.
- With thanks to reader PJC for the tip-off.
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Mistakes, Sins, and Demands for Excuses, But Only if They Concern Uncle Sam
John R. MacArthur, Publisher of Harper's Magazine and the Grandson of the late billionaire John D. MacArthur speaking from New York on the tidy and tedious France24 made a polemically charged “report” out of his feelings on deploying more troops to Baghdad to provide some more safety for Baghdadis that John R. seem otherwise quite ready to fret about.
I really don’t know how to sum it up other than to say that his “thesis” seemed so obsessed with the Vietnam war that it came to no conclusion other than to assume that everyone over 40 in America would be made anxious somehow by it. It’s an armed conflict on a low boil – people should be anxious, and anxious to snuff the insurgency long enough for a beefier Iraqi government to stand up for its’ own sovereignty. I think that this might include people who weren’t 9 when the last helicopter took off of the roof of a US Embassy.
One would think that John R. has neither the facility to reason outside of the use of infantile analogues or is ill prepared to look at the world outside of the narrow slot of an anti-civilizational-half decade where the Weathermen, Black Panthers, and Symbionese “Liberation” Army was a subculture’s idea of peacekeeping.
What I wonder about is why some in “his generation’s” view of history is so short that they can’t seem to find any other events or time to think about.
Imagine just how much reason you have to suspend to appeal to trope of aging leftist revolutionaries: after all they were more willing than anyone to dispose of cultural norms developed through millennia of trial and error in favor of notions more symbolic than rational, all so they could personally feel like they’re “getting over” something.
He was 12 years old in 1968, the year the subculture he inhabits idolizes in secret the nibbling away of the foundation of the society they live in the way Harry Hopkins tried to impose an bacterium unwanted by the people to begin with. I’m glad John R. is working out his issues in words and on a little-watched TV outlet far from his home where they can remain as significant to the rest of us as any individuals’ reminiscences of the past are: in his youthful adoration of others’ adolescent memories of having a fabrication to rage against.The Fuse is Lit (No Pasaran!)
Corbusier has a word or two for that growing lumpenproletariat, the impressionable and forgetful part of western society that takes the impressions left by a biased media at its’ word:
From our perspective of a society that takes for granted the prevailing rule of law and basks in limitless freedom to express oneself and make as much money as we endeavour, there is little difference between one dictator responsible for killing a few thousand of his countrymen for the sake of permanent political stability, rule of law and prosperity for his country and another totalitarian ruler who exterminated several hundred thousands of his own subjects for the sake of sowing permanent tribal division, economic degradation and political anarchy. Jeanne Kirkpatrick pointed to this difference, and urged that American foreign policy acknowledge it. But due to the extraordinary circumstance of growing up in a country where one hasn't experienced any degree of authoritarian rule for more than 230 years, many Americans are naive to the fact that most of the populations of the world are subject regimes that are far more invasive and deterministic in one's individual life than we can imagine.
If the left wants to sneak into the background an inescapable sense that “Iraq=Vietnam” than they need to complete the picture:
Two more days passed, everybody got weaker, no one moved or said a word! It was so quiet and peaceful! Suddenly, a man screamed : - I see a boat over there!... Like magic, we energetically got up and looked to where he pointed his finger. We saw a boat! Everybody was so grateful, we used all kinds of cloth, towel, t-shirt to wave and scream. The boat seemed like approaching us closer and closer but when we saw it clearly, we started to be afraid because there was a fishing boat with more than a dozen mean looking men, dark skin, carrying weapons and speaking Thai language strongly. When that boat was next to ours, they signaled us to get on their boat, the little boat was empty. Some of them jumped on it starting to search our luggages, they took everything they liked! When they finished searching, we were returned back to our boat and they left.
Quasi-hysteria? Hell no. It’s not quazi-anything. The instinct is to hear words, transcribe them, and then take them entirely out of context for the sake an imagined public temperament that someone imagines to be in need to a baby-sitter. Paranoically, a few words found criticizing that “management” is called “an attack.” Grow a pair, will ya?
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Now for a moment of light comedy: LM features 
