Two thoughts about Angela Merkel’s weekend of political debacle: Her government’s shifts and pivots in an effort to avoid defeat in a regional election override in importance the loss itself. And they leave Germany’s governing coalition with a fracture in credibility affecting the country’s international role and notions of its leadership in Europe.

Thus does John Vinocur start his International Herald Tribune article on Germany's "election hangover".

…the government effectively turned its back on Mrs. Merkel’s supposed virtues of loyalty, resolve and calm as its dominant campaign message.

Instead, it appeared to pander to the electorate’s most hypersensitive instincts…

Across party lines, and before the voting, the political class picked up on the deepest ramifications of a contradictory-looking attempt by the government in Berlin to both spook voters and coddle their fears.

Patrick Adenauer, grandson of postwar Germany’s first chancellor and head of the Association of Family Enterprise — Christian Democrat roots don’t go deeper — told Handelsblatt, the newspaper: “The German reactions to the events in Libya and Japan appear hysterical on one hand, and on the other without any substantive basis.”

Hans-Ulrich Klose, the man Mrs. Merkel named last year as special coordinator for German-American relations (he has since left the post because of illness in his family), maintained that the situation damaged Germany’s reputation in Europe. The Social Democrat told me in a conversation that the election campaign’s pirouettes “raised the issue of our reliability. Germany has lost credibility.”

…Here was the essence of the problem that the German government, as Europe’s de facto leader, created for itself in a month of openly subordinating to very risky domestic political considerations what were thought to be its international credo and sense of responsibility.

For some, it had been caught out acting far beyond enlightened self-interest and, unpredictably, abandoning principles.

Update: Some voices in Germany are growing louder in portraying the Merkel government’s inaction as a disaster

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(See Update below…) In response to the International Herald Tribune article on Bernard-Henri Lévy's view on and role in the conflict against Muammar el-Qaddafi, Umberto Eco (who was recently in Paris for the Salon du Livre) responds from Milan:

I totally disagree with the French writer Bernard-Henri Lévy. The war in Libya is a terrible mistake.

The situation in Libya now is catastrophic and the war is a real danger for the European economy and can increase the risk of terrorist attacks in Western countries. This war can create a new Iraq on the Mediterranean coasts. This war is stupid and dangerous for all.

Note that each writer happens to be reflecting the attitude of his respective government (or vice-versa)…

Update: Turns out that the Umberto Eco letter is a hoax:

In the newspaper of April 6, the International Herald Tribune published a letter over the name of the writer Umberto Eco, criticizing the military actions in Libya. This letter was a hoax and should not have been published. We take efforts to verify the authenticity of every letter we publish. In this case, however, we failed to contact Mr. Eco for confirmation. We have expressed our regret to him, and we apologize to our readers.

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Ever wonder what it’s like to travel back in time?

“A guy from Hezbollah TV came down here to Fatima Gate once,” Leena said, “and some Israelis having a picnic on the other side recognized him. ‘Hey!’ they said. ‘You’re that guy from Hezbollah! What’s up?’ He was furious. He wanted to say something, but no one here is allowed to talk to Israelis. So he growled at them.”

She smiled. “He just clenched his teeth and went, ‘Grr.’”

The notion that we should feel “inclusive” of this culture is why I will never willingly go back there:

Hezbollah erected a billboard next to him that faced south and taunted Israelis with horrific images of violence and war — dead bodies gunned down in a street, a soldier with skin missing on one side of his face holding a rocket launcher, and a Hezbollah militiaman holding up the severed head of an Israeli man by his hair. Underneath these gruesome photographs was text written in Hebrew referring to Israelis who had been captured and never returned: “Sharon don’t forget, your soldiers are still in Lebanon.”

I felt embarrassed for Lebanon that this was what Israelis saw when they looked north. What on earth must they have thought when their eyes lit upon that barbarous billboard?

Why? Because they’re barbarians, and they don’t care. Hizb’allah are more than happy to turn Lebanese society into a Iranian proxy populated by angry, illiterate, and vulgar louts willing to use the general population as a human shield against their will.

Of all the cities in the world I could have relocated to, I chose Beirut, partly because I liked it, but mostly because it was the capital of the only country in the whole Middle East that had freed itself from the great Arab prison. Damascus was a dungeon, Baghdad was on fire, Cairo was choking with slums, and Dubai was a mall. Beirut was the light. From Israeli soil, however, Lebanon must have looked like Somalia.

To be more precise, from most of Lebanon, Hizb’allahstan looks like Somalia.

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An avid Shortwave radio listener reports:

A reliable source in the politburo informed me a few months ago that China Radio International's distribution of content on radio stations in Australia, United Kingdom, United States and Canada is not just way to have foreign listeners. My source informed me that since 2005/06 China's Ministry of State Security has been embedding messages into the Chinese programs. The messages are encoded in the audio. How the messages are encoded is unknown at this time.

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It’s all sunshine and lollipops, as you know because it’s what we’re told with Stalinesque repetition. Let me correct that. It’s all sunshine, lollipops, and child abuse:

JEONJU (SOUTH KOREA): A transgender father of four was sentenced to a two-year jail term for abusing his children, who refused to call him "mom", according to South Korea's Yonhap news agency, citing a local court on Wednesday.

The poster children of diversity, as with every other one of the left’s cultural re-education efforts are normally exempt from the kind of attention borne by human frailty, of course. The same people who tell us not to feed the wildlife because it might change their nature, might make them greedy to violate norms, and make them dependent can’t seem to understand that this also goes for humans.

During court trials, he showed strong desire to receive a sex reassignment surgery to become a "real woman."

That was at HIS trial for the abuse of his children. Somehow, as predictably as a NYT tirade anything social aberrant to those with any common sense and kindness, it stops being about the issue at hand.

It became about him. It became about his identity. Little does any officially “socially aware” type realize that abusing his children just said a lot more about his identity than a reality defying hatred of how he was born.

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Ce mardi 5 avril, une question pour le moins inhabituelle sera posée aux députés : acceptent-ils, oui ou non, de rendre publics les débats tenus à huis clos par leurs prédécesseurs pendant la guerre franco-prussienne de 1870 et à la veille de la Commune de Paris ?

Come evening, the députés chose common sense and finally voted in favor — unanimously — writes Thomas Wieder in Le Monde, but still it seems odd to many that politicians in the 2010s should have a say concerning the release or not of a trove of government secrets from the 1870s and that there is no prescription rule to deal with events when they are up to 140 years old.

Conservées depuis cent quarante ans au fond d'un coffre-fort situé dans les caves du Palais-Bourbon, les 723 pages dont la publication est aujourd'hui soumise au vote des députés nous replongent dans quelques-uns des moments les plus dramatiques de l'époque. Ce mois d'août 1870, quand l'opposition républicaine à Napoléon III plaida – en vain – pour une mobilisation massive des Parisiens contre les Prussiens.

Pointing out that the last time a vote concerning the disclosure of the talks of secret committees took place was in 1968 (concerning the discussions of comités secrets from 1916-1917, the latest secret committee talks in French history having taken place during the Spring of 1940), Thomas Wieder explains the rule:

[Le règlement est] clair. Depuis la Révolution française, les comités secrets – la possibilité pour les parlementaires de débattre à huis clos – obéissent à des règles strictes. Les tribunes réservées au public doivent être évacuées. Le nombre des fonctionnaires nécessaires au bon déroulement des séances est limité au minimum indispensable. Afin d'éviter les fuites, les comptes rendus doivent rester confidentiels à tout jamais, sauf si la représentation nationale en décide autrement – d'où le vote de ce 5 avril.

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Things that give him a woody. 24 Dec 2006

The pending total annihilation of the US regime in Somalia

The US backed Somali "government", the Somali Transitional National Assembly (TNA), faces total annihilation, avoidable only by an Ethiopian invasion of Somalia and the creation of a Quisling regime.

In the past year the TNA has been routed from all regions of Somalia by the Union of Islamic Courts (UIC) and now holds only Baidoa, a middling town close to the Ethiopian border. The "government" has already lost the capital, Mogadishu. The TNA is a US supported power broker club with many detested warlords, including those behind the 1991 atrocities in Black Hawk Down. Its hold on Baidoa is weak and has only been maintained in the last 24 hours by aggressive Ethiopian air-strikes, artillery and the invasion of 10 to 20 thousand Ethiopian troops. Ethiopia is the traditional, hated enemy of Somalis. Whatever legitimacy the TNA may have had with Somalias is now completely lost. The Molotov-Tribbentrop Pact is statesmanship compared to cynicism behind the TNA inviting Ethiopian troops and artillery into Somalia.

Not that he didn’t appear to take joy in it, linking all of the miseries of the Somalis to it when he gets the urge to write the words. Like a conditioned pigeon, parroting the fictional Manchurian Candidate’s behavior, he thinks wildly creative and witty to call his public thoughts about it: Black Hawk Down, White Wash Up

With the characteristic inferences drawn by a teenager trying to mimic the house organs of the Soviet age, he arrives to this: the American Revolution was illegitimate, nor is the notion of western-style participatory government, and...

...God.. Creator.. Men are created equal... Life, Liberty,... pursuit of Happiness.. Safety and Happiness... [followed by 26(!) paragraphs of hatred for the abuses of King George].

Because it’s in bad taste? Because it might offend someone named Julian two centuries later? The question with all of his thoughts, other than the proof that he is unpleasable as a shoeless Imelda Marcos, is to ask “what crawled up HIS ass and died? He prattles on:

In other words, religious feeling (x2), equality, life, liberty, happiness (x2), safety and above all, an extreme hatred for the brutal acts, preferment, and corruption of foreign influenced or controlled government.

It’s funny thing for a fellow traveller in Australia’s recreational revolutionaries taking up stance for a genuine and native anti-Commonwealth, Australian Republic movement to hold, as it seeks to divest itself of the symbolic allegiance to Great Britain and no longer have the British Monarch as its titular head of state.

Not once does democracy or shopping appear.

Where foreign influence is promoted in the American Declaration of Independence is beyond me. In fact it seems to rather explicitly seek to end it, which Assange views solely as “rudeness” toward the British Monarcy.

It seems that even past figures HAVING principals of their own that he doesn’t approve of is criminal. I wonder if he even notices what an authoritarian reflex he’s hiding under his awkward, affected manner.

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Making his mark young as a philosopher, [BHL] was satirized neatly by a critic with the words: “God is dead, but my hair is perfect.”

Thus does Steven Erlanger start his New York Times article about the philosopher who alone, by his own reckoning, made Libya a French cause.

…in the space of roughly two weeks, [Bernard-Henri Lévy] managed to get a fledgling Libyan opposition group a hearing from the president of France and the American secretary of state, a process that has led both countries and NATO into waging war against the forces of the Libyan leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi.

It was Mr. Lévy, by his own still undisputed account, who brought top members of the Libyan opposition — the Interim Transitional National Council — from Benghazi to Paris to meet President Nicolas Sarkozy on March 10, who suggested the unprecedented French recognition of the council as the legitimate government of Libya and who warned Mr. Sarkozy that unless he acted, “there will be a massacre in Benghazi, a bloodbath, and the blood of the people of Benghazi will stain the flag of France.”

Mr. Lévy, a celebrated philosopher, journalist and public intellectual, gives Mr. Sarkozy sole credit for persuading London, Washington and others to support intervention in Libya.

“I’m proud of my country, which I haven’t felt for many years,” Mr. Lévy said in an interview. “When I compare Libya to the long time we had to scream in the desert about Bosnia, I must agree that despite all our disagreements, Sarkozy did a very good job.”

…[B.H.L.] has outdone himself on Libya, playing to Mr. Sarkozy’s vanity and need for success as well as gratifying his own, and it is hard to say who used the other more.

It is an extraordinary tale, about which neither the Élysée Palace nor the Foreign Ministry wished to comment, other than quietly urging a grain of salt.

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Huffington Post discusses Dany the Red’s outrage at Germany’s non-action on Libya, and overlooks Daniel Cohn-Bendit pederasty.

Like the Jacobean queens and their horses, this seems to be "their thing."

The real question is: why is the outrage of an MEP over some nation NOT doing something news? It isn’t. It’s to artificially raise the sale pédé’s profile, and amplify his criticism of Merkel?

Oh, and in case you’re wondering why so many Europeans are eager to “enforce the No-Fly Zone”, it’s because Libya has virtually no airworthy aircraft. This way they can look like they’re doing something.

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"Not only are they [French politicians] smooth talkers, but in France, the fact that a politician tells a lie is not considered very serious. While in the United States, in Great Britain, it is unthinkable."

Thus is France 2's David Pujadas quoted (speaking to Arrêt sur images' Daniel Schneidermann) in Franck Nouchi's Le Monde column.

"In France there is a tradition of non-communication", adds Philippe Chaffanjon, director of France Info. "Ask the foreign correspondents stationed in Paris. They are appalled by the way the system works."

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For those of you getting sentimental for the city of lights, art, fashion, etc., etc.™®©, ¡No Pasarán! Brings you truth in advertising.

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In December 2010, Frank Schneider, the president of the German Society for Psychiatry, Psychotherapy and Treatment of Nervous Diseases admitted that the race and euthanasia policies of the Third Reich had not been forced upon German psychiatrists, but that they had been among its initiators.

Germans, always hypersensitive to the telling of any history or comparisons of present day German society with Nazism need to stop fretting, because you aren’t alone. No-one buys the routine any more, and humanity realizes that it comes a lot more naturally to Europeans that we want to believe.

Forty-seven percent of Germans are of the opinion that Israel is exterminating the Palestinians according to a poll undertaken by the University of Bielefeld for the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, affiliated with the German Social Democratic Party. These findings raise fundamental questions about the future of German society and not only about those Germans who falsely accuse Israelis of behaving like their own totalitarian or murderous ancestors.

It’s the few of them that aren’t conspiracy crackpots, that handful that don’t believe things for the sake for their egos that I have some slight hope for.

The recent data should not surprise anyone. It even marks some progress when compared with the past. This same university undertook a major poll in 2004. Some 68% percent of Germans then agreed with the allegation: “Israel undertakes a war of destruction against the Palestinians.” Fifty-one percent shared the opinion: “The way the State of Israel acts toward the Palestinians is in principle no different from the Nazis’ behavior in the Third Reich toward the Jews.”

All of those lesson-givers, going at it again...

At least they have Norwegians to keep them company. Alan Dershowitz offered to offer to speak without compensation at Norwegian Universities, only to be turned down for similarly one-sided reasons. These “tolerant” academics “in search of the truth,” it seems tend to stick to plugging their ears while yelling nya-nya-nya-nya

A third university, Bergen, answered that it was only willing to host Dershowitz provided he change his topic to an analysis of the O. J. Simpson trial, the American star football player who became a criminal. They did not want him to speak about Israel. Dershowitz rightly refused. The student unions of the three universities then quickly organized lectures by him, thus saving a little bit of the country’s honor.

Dershowitz told the small Christian daily Dagen that the refusals by the Norwegian universities to let him speak reminded him of his visits to the Soviet Union, and South Africa under the apartheid regime. He called the Norwegian universities propaganda tools, with leaders who are smart yet ignorant. Dershowitz added that Norwegian government policies were a hindrance to the peace process, as their double standards helped Hamas.

Americans to look down on, whodaguessedit? Somehow, I don’t think the Dersh takes requests, especially when it comes to offering a survey of the kind of law practiced by scheissters who advertise on buses.



Another new high for European culture

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• Yo! Where you from? Show some I.D!

France's borders are inside France's borders, says Plantu, in places (i.e., in 'hoods) where even doctors fear to tread…

The cartoon relates to the beating at a Noisy-le-Sec train station of a Sartrouville 19-year-old (he was almost beaten to death) by a dozen Rosny-sous-Bois "youths" who could not stand that he was dating a girl from their cité (from their 'hood).

"Les agresseurs seraient des jeunes d'une cité de Rosny-sous-Bois (la cité de Bois-Perrier) qui n'auraient pas supporté de croiser l'une des filles habitant le même quartier qu'eux et qui fréquentait un jeune de Sartrouville", a raconté à l'AFP une source proche de l'enquête. "Il est très probable que la jeune fille connaissait les agresseurs", a ajouté cette source. La jeune femme, choquée, devait d'ailleurs de nouveau être entendue par les policiers dimanche en début de soirée.

… Pour le responsable du syndicat de police USGP-FO de la Seine-Saint-Denis, Michel Marrec, "c'est une affaire de jeunes de cité qui n'ont pas grand-chose dans le cerveau".

Pour des sociologues, ce nouveau fait divers, après des rixes entre des bandes d'Asnières et de Gennevilliers, dans les Hauts-de-Seine, s'apparente à un nouvel épisode de rivalités entre jeunes de cités de la banlieue parisienne. "Il y a une identité de territoire très forte (...) en Ile-de-France car dans cette région, il n'y a pas d'identité régionale comme on peut en trouver à Marseille. Il y a donc une identité de quartier qui est surévaluée", dit le sociologue Marwan Mohammed. "Il y a toujours une rivalité entre cités, quelles que soient les cités, a expliqué une source policière. Mais avant il y avait des motifs bien précis, maintenant c'est pour n'importe quoi."

Claude Bartolone, député PS et président du conseil général de Saine-Saint-Denis, a pour sa part dénoncé un "repli sur soi d'un certain nombre de quartiers" où s'impose "une espèce de patriotisme de cages d'escaliers".

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March 1981: Germans selling out to the highest bidding autocrat, otherwise complain about American arms trade and “hegemony”. In the meantime, they continued with the peacenik hair-shirt routine.

March 2011: Germans selling out to the highest bidding autocrat, otherwise complain about American arms trade and “hegemonyIn the meantime, they continued with the peacenik hair-shirt routine.

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Wars caused by capitalism... Jews are behind everything bad... Evil central bankers lustily rub their hands at the thought of your personal misery... If all of the arguments sound familiar, don't be surprised. You could hear them on the airwaves of Nazi era German propaganda radio broadcasts just as easily as you can hear them on the streets of cities in Europe and the Near East today.





Nazi Propaganda, "back in the day" that the anti-everything (and supposedly anti-authoritarian) left should be honest about and get sentimentally reflective about.

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Comment l'Amérique peut-elle défendre ses intérêts dans un monde multipolaire ?

Zbigniew Brzezinski is interviewed by Le Monde's Natalie Nougayrède.

Le monde est et n'est pas multipolaire. Ce n'est pas un monde uniquement fait d'un Léviathan et de Lilliputiens. C'est un monde dans lequel existent des puissances régionales significatives, dont certaines pourraient un jour, même si cette perspective reste pour l'instant lointaine, devenir des puissances mondiales. Bien entendu, la Chine. Peut-être — mais cela me paraît très peu probable — l'Inde. Je ne vois aucun autre candidat pour l'instant. (...) Que le Brésil soit une puissance régionale, cela ne fait pas de doute. Un acteur sur la scène mondiale, bien sûr. Mais y aura-t-il des soldats brésiliens stationnés en Corée ? Au fond, nous sommes dans un monde très asymétrique. Et cela demeurera une réalité, sauf si les Etats-Unis se "suicident" par stupidité.

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Stupid EU cookie law will hand the advantage to the US, kill our startps stone dead

Says TechCrunch

From 25 May, new European laws will dictate that “explicit consent” must be gathered from web users who are being tracked via cookies. That translates into warnings which will put off consumers from EU sites, while US-based startups will be free to continue as they are. How convenient huh.

Although businesses are being urged to work out how they gain ‘consent’ from users, this is bound to cause consternation.

The new European e-Privacy directive is supposedly to protect privacy, although seems to be operating in a bubble. Privacy controls have existed in Web browsers for years. Indeed there are even privacy specific browsers. But consumers have consistently ignored them and carried on happily using cookies, with many people knowing that cookies actually help the browsing experience.

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It is rational interests, rather than cultural affinity, that draw this type of Frenchman to London

writes The Economist in its article on The French community in London (Paris-on-Thames):

high-paid work, lower taxes (especially on wealth), and the chance to raise bilingual children. …

The superior beauty and efficiency of Paris often come at the price of dynamism. Many young French arrivals in London say they are fleeing rigid social codes, hierarchical corporate culture and a sense of distance from the global swirl of people and ideas.

…Many young French of African or Arab origin also say that there is less discrimination in Britain.

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It’s all very Carnaby Street.

Instead, the Polish and Balkan baristas were hurriedly dragging in all the sidewalk tables and chairs before the Socialist Workers’ Party chaps showed up in search of projectiles. Nobody in the Socialist Workers’ Party actually works, which is one reason why it’s Mitteleuropeans frothing your coffee rather than any of the natives.

So right after watching the real proletariat trying to save their hides in the face of the puerile children’s crusade, we get to go from the Mittel-Europäern to the Middle-Minded:

Still, on balance I prefer the class-war thugs trashing the joint, who at least have the courage of their convictions. The “nice” people bussed in from the shires struck me as some of the most stupid people I’ve ever met anywhere on the planet. One elderly lady from Yorkshire told me she was there because her grandson’s university fees were likely to go up.

... SNIP ...

She stared at me blankly. “Well, I don’t want to argue,” she said politely. “I just think it’s a disgrace.”

It’s all a matter of “being nice” this desire to take and take for ones’ illusions and comforts. After all, if one is truly nostalgic for a Britain of the 70’s and 80’s, you might as well note a feature of that nation that has gone unchanged the whole while:

I was in a cranky mood because I hadn’t had my coffee. “You can protest all you like,” I said. “But this country’s broke, so all you’re doing is postponing its reacquaintanceship with reality, and ensuring that your grandson and his contemporaries are going to be stuck with the tab because you guys spent their future.” I pointed out that in her part of the world – northern England – as in Wales and Northern Ireland, the state accounts for three-quarters of the economy. And it’s still not enough for the likes of her and her pals.

And all of that is BEFORE every other single issue faction tries to salve their perspectiveless guilt by proposing the same dedication to THEIR issues. Either way, it’s a class firm in their belief that only a huge, paternalistic, government with obscenely high levels of power can solve problems, and that the solution to each problem starts by sucking more capitol out of society.

Not only can Ian and Nigella not add, but they don’t want to know the ugliness of knowing what those numbers do to them of the rest of society.

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• And when I touch you on this spot, does that hurt?

The 'hoods in France are reft by violence, both between gangs and against honest people, including even doctors…

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