¡No Pasarán!

A Moment for Morbid Poesie

2012-02-02T15:35:00.000Z

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!

Le Monde and the HuffPost: "Why Isn't the Conflict of Interest Principle Applicable Here?"

2012-02-02T09:53:00.003Z

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.

In Memoriam

2012-02-01T13:30:00.002Z

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

Caricatures and Myths About the "Christian Rightwing"

2012-02-01T10:50:00.004Z

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.

18 Years Later, France Still Divided Over Its Role in the Rwanda Genocide

2012-01-31T16:27:00.007Z

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 ¤).

The (Anti-) Capitalism of Fools

2012-01-31T15:29:00.001Z

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.

Becoming Mortimer Snerd

2012-01-30T15:30:00.001Z

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.

Dominique de Villepin's Opposition to Bush and Rumsfeld Compared to Charles de Gaulle's Resistance to Pétain and Hitler

2012-01-30T13:29:00.000Z

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?

Defining sexual violence in impossibly elastic ways and letting the surveyors, rather than subjects, determine what counted as an assault

2012-01-29T16:10:00.000Z

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.

On the Left and Religion

2012-01-29T14:28:00.001Z

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.

An Unreconstructed Kremlin

2012-01-28T16:29:00.000Z

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.

The way to neuter opposition to intrusive government measures is to present them as being “for the children”

2012-01-28T14:37:00.001Z

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.

The French Cultural Exception Explained

2012-01-27T19:29:00.000Z

It’s an exemption from the shackles of reason and truth-telling. It’s purpose is to fit whatever uninformed view of reality that you have – because there is simply no way you can’t be right.

What’s all that about? You ask... An Elle blogger, like a typical higher-being of the continent decided that all African-Americans could and should be defined by the three or four African-Americans that she’s familiar with in passing.

In an blog post titled “Black Fashion Power,” writer Nathalie Dolivo managed to insult American blacks as a whole while offering left-handed compliments to the First Lady Michelle Obama for taking on the Jackie O role in a “jazzy” way.

The writer imagines that the Obamas are the first to bring true style to African-Americans.

See, there you go. She did her national duty by defining nearly 37 million people she has no knowledge of outside of the doctored appearances found in photographs and videos, and there you have it.

And throw in some of that Jazz stuff too while you’re at it, it still being the hip thing with the kids, you see, at least in the minds of those Europeans who we are told simply know everything there is to be known.

I was reminded of this again just a few weeks ago when a Parisian in a bar was inquiring about the south as if the world that they lived in was straight out of ‘Mississippi Burning’. The man’s age, mature nature, and outward air of intelligence almost made me confuse him with someone with a shred of decency and intelligence. While willing to be ignorant of a culture, he was more than willing to have an opinion about who he thought were the good-guys and bad-guys in it.

Typische Deutsche Schlamperei

2012-01-27T15:32:00.002Z

One in five Germans are unaware of Auschwitz.

The poll comes ahead of the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by Soviet troops on January 27, 1945, which Germany has marked since 1996 with official memorial ceremonies for Holocaust victims.

In other news of the no-duh!

According to a report by independent experts commissioned by the German parliament and published earlier this week, about one in five Germans is latently anti-Semitic.

And as long as it doesn’t get in the way of making money, Germans are not likely to even care. It makes the received wisdom behind European anti-semitism all that more special, especially since the breadth of German antisemitism only ranks them in the middle of the Euro-liga of irrational hatred.

Will a Remake of 2002 See a Le Pen Become One of the Two Winners in the First Round of France's Presidential Election?

2012-01-27T13:58:00.003Z

April 22 is the first round of France's 2012 presidential elections, which will thus take place exactly 10 years to the day after the first round of the 2002 presidential elections put a Le Pen in the runoff for the second round, writes Le Monde's ombudsman, Pascal Galinier. And this year people are frightened that the same scenario might occur again…

Pour Pierre Bonn (Toulouse), c'est entendu : "Je pense que malheureusement Marine Le Pen va atteindre le second tour." Ce président d'une association de défense de l'environnement pointe du doigt la montée en puissance d'"une autre catégorie d'électeurs : ceux qui ne sont d'accord ni avec Hollande ni avec Sarkozy. Comme le bulletin blanc n'est pas comptabilisé, leur seul moyen d'expression est de "casser la baraque" en votant FN, même s'ils ne sont pas d'accord avec les idées et le "programme" du FN." Robert Nadot (Arradon, Morbihan) semble être de ceux-là : "Je pense que la majorité des Français feront comme moi : si Sarkozy est au deuxième tour, je voterai pour son adversaire quel qu'il soit, sans états d'âme, les yeux et les narines fermés. A bon entendeur, salut." Dominique

Destroying America one family at a time

2012-01-26T15:07:00.002Z

Living a nightmare the last few years dealing with Family Court, Nick Tufaro testifies on

The Destruction of American Society – One Family At A Time

With regard to the best interest of the child(ren), the truth is that no one, besides the family, including the extended family, is expert enough to determine that. Truth be told, there have been significant studies to indicate that in the best interest of the child, it is both parents that need to have equal contact with the children. However, Family Court in the United States, has become so adversarial between the parents that the minor children are destroyed by the events of a hostile divorce. According

The Never-ending Game of Diplomatic Slap and Tickle Continues

2012-01-26T13:15:00.000Z

EU ministers agree new bail-out fund, criticise Greece

But the tentative agreement to have non-meetings continues:

A deal on the final wording of the fiscal treaty has not been achieved yet. Participation of non-euro leaders in eurozone summits remains an open issue that will have to be agreed by EU leaders when they meet on 30 January, he added.

It does sound better this way, though:

What Is Wrong (or Indeed Atypical) About Wanting Obama to Be a 1-Term President and Desiring His Policies to Fail?

2012-01-26T10:20:00.004Z

I left this comment on the webpage of a New York Times article but, unless I am mistaken, they seem to have refused it (I just submitted a shorter version of it for a third time)…

"McConnell's prime wish for Obama was that he be a one-term president" complains a Democrat.

Uh, hello?…

Forgive me if I cannot build up the level of sputtering outrage that Jim Steinberg is obviously seeking.

Wasn't the prime wish for many a Democrat in 2004 (as well as in the years leading up to that year) that George W Bush should be a one-term president? Wasn't their prime wish in 1992 that Dubya's father should be a one-term president (one wish that came true), and in 1984 that Reagan should be one? And in 1972… (you get the idea)

Wasn't the democrats' goal to see Bush, and Bush, and Reagan, etc, uh (let me find the word)… fail?

Ever since Rush Limbaugh was assaulted for making his hope-Obama-fail statement in 2009, I have found the outraged over-the-top reaction of the Democrats absurd…

Now, suddenly, when the Republicans react no differently with a Democrat in the White House, the Democrats go berserk.

Note to Democrats: the USA is not a cult of the personality, with the One towering benevolently over the flock of little people, a Dear Leader and protector who is deserving of nothing but respect and gratitude from his always-reverential subjects; it's a republic where the citizen is king and the "leader" his servant. And when we, or a majority of us, do not like the job he's doing, he's out of the White House.

As for "the fact" that wishing that Obama fail "means our nation would fail along with the president", you may not have noticed, but on the watch of the Apologizer-in-Chief (a man who said in 2008 that his goal was to cut the debt in half), the debt has quintupled. Now, you can go on and on with saying that that ain't his fault, but for a number of us — and hey! maybe we are wrong — it's proof positive that the socialist-imbued college professor that he is, who has famously never worked in the private sector, has been nourished with leftist fairy tales and has no idea how to work a real economy…

Against it Before they Were for it

2012-01-25T13:58:00.000Z

The EU will this week outline an overhaul of its 17-year- old data-protection policies addressing online advertising and social-networking sites. The bill, which includes stricter sanctions and will equip national data-protection authorities with powers to levy administrative sanctions and fines, will “become a trademark people recognize and trust worldwide,” Reding said at a conference in Munich yesterday.

Anticipating an opportunity to pander, the EU’s trinity (the perpetually promoting rarely elected Commissars Kroes, Malmström and Reding) become the faces of a new privacy rule, despite a uniform continental history of ignoring your privacy. And they also should have made the announcement in Berlin:

Since 2008, the Berlin police has collected data on 4.2 million mobile phone connections, reports German daily Tageszeitung. Most of the data has been collected in order to capture those who have set fire to luxury cars, a phenomenon that has been rampant in the German capital for the last five years. In 410 data requests by the judiciary to mobile phone operators, the police were able to identify the names and home addresses of people located near a burning car. "The only problem is they never identified any suspects," the paper notes.

Elsewhere, they’re promoting their presumed monopoly on human rights as happy hoo-hah in an initiative that duplicates what the CIA managed years ago.

EU Vice President Kroes appoints the discredited Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg to run it.

Kroes defends her pick of zu Guttenberg in her blog post, saying that she's looking for "talent, not saints." Fair enough. On the other point, I think that the irony of the battle over access benefits us more than the IP interests, as well, but I certainly understand people who are stunned and spluttering.

”Access” of “Intellectual Property”. In other words, if it’s not bolted down, and it comes from abroad, it’s yours, and it spills an interesting shade of ochre on zu Guttenberg street cred as an academic plagiarist.

French Elections: Neither Nicolas Sarkozy nor François Hollande is talking about the perspective for painful change

2012-01-25T13:00:00.003Z

What kind of country would France be if it abandoned its 35-hour work week (it actually kills jobs), set up an affirmative action program for its Muslim immigrants (featuring a zero-tolerance framework for their assimilation), and scaled back its ambitions for Europe as a global political force to more attainable goals?

asks John Vinocur flippantly in the International Herald Tribune.

Answer: An imaginary one. There are no signs of it happening.

…100 days before voting in an elimination round April 22, and then in a final ballot on May 6, the French presidential election campaign so far involves back and forth on possible variations in French comfort — tinkering with, adjusting and applying new coats of paint to familiar and nonthreatening aspects of national life.

There’s something surreal here. Neither Nicolas Sarkozy, who has been a brash president for the last five years, or the presumedly bland François Hollande, named Socialist candidate on Oct. 16, is talking about the perspective for painful change.

… For all of France’s accomplishments and uniqueness, a sense of lost identity and decline resonates.
At a moment that seems to command existential choice, the candidates are responding piecemeal and with calculation in a manner the French call “petit bras” — taking hesitant, little strokes where a full swing is needed.
… Their refusal so far to confront sweeping structural change reads as if [Mr. Sarkozy and Mr. Hollande] agree with the notion that the French perceive almost any change in the system as a threat because virtually everyone’s self-interest is wired to a state-protected status quo. The biggest issue of avoidance for the election campaign is structural reform of the labor market.
… Mr. Hollande thinks that by avoiding a clear set of campaign commitments, he can circumvent anything specific that might threaten his wide lead over Mr. Sarkozy in current polling. The president concentrates on casting himself to the French not as a dispenser of much-need reform medicine, but as their worldly, combative protector.
That common burst of subterfuge means an election campaign poor in meaningful, coherent ideas. In this country, normally so productive in inventiveness and nerve, there’s nothing new or promising going on as it stutters and drifts toward choosing a president.

The Zombies Among Us

2012-01-24T13:44:00.001Z

A dull, “housekeeping” style article presumably penned by DSK spouse and enabler Anne Sinclair rouses “bravos” from the HuffPo.fr readership, which plainly shows how empty their heads are.

In any case, our space, one that brings together the team that chose to devote to this project: to create The Huffington Post in France, was welcomed today to bring his modest stone to the plurality of information.

The Huffington Post has, for seven years, to blow on the U.S. press in line with an air of freedom, controversies, "conversations", a word dear to Americans, which means first exchange of ideas, discussions, debates. Arianna Huffington, founder of what became the first news site in the United States brings its expertise, experience, its platform, its technological tools. The other stakeholders, the Le Monde group and New Independent Publishing also give us the chance to have this French adventure.

This is all in French society today, and nourishes the columns of prestigious journals and news sites developing in front of us.

To those who say that sometimes shrinks, we want to answer that, together with our colleagues is also an obsession, we will expand the space, provide places of expression to those who do not have easy access.

We’ll ignore her moronic Kim-Jong-Il-esque claims about Ariana’s technological insight, and not even wonder why banal congratulations of other media babblers would provoke wooden (almost fake sounding) sounding huzzahs being heard from the party membership.

Rather, let’s do the typical French Blab-erati thing and try to infer whatever specious meaning we want - or one that strokes a passive-aggressive ego whose childish missives are read by no-one, and say with complete certainty that she is into pegging DSK.

That’s usually all it takes to get onto a French daytime talk show that has a epilepsy provoking set and a host who thinks they’re a political expert.

All of this comes on the heels of the launch (after the totally ignored prior launch) of a French edition of the Huffington Post, headed by Anne Sinclair. What she has in common with Ariana Huffington is rather Stepford child like. Neither of these two members of the 0.0001% earned their billions, pretend to be for the masses, steal wire pieces, got their momentum from other equally pointless fellow travelers, and bully writers into working for them for free.

A court like no other

2012-01-24T13:36:00.005Z

Jim's first indication that his life was about to be turned upside down came the night he got home from work and was approached by an off-duty sheriff's deputy

writes Nina Shapiro (thanks to Arf) whose Seattle weekly article helps explain what prompted Stephen Baskerville to write the book Taken Into Custody (The War Against Fathers, Marriage, and the Family). His latest article is "The Rape of Justice", published in the Salisbury Review (PDF).

"Are you Jim?" the deputy asked.

"I am," he replied.

The deputy then informed him that not only was he no longer welcome inside his own house, he wasn't allowed even to collect his things. The officer handed him a suitcase his wife had packed and a $3,000 check—also from his wife, who earned far more than he did.
… Had he been charged with domestic violence in criminal court, where guilt must be proved beyond a reasonable doubt and the standards of due process are high, this might not have happened. But Jim's fate was decided in a very different venue: family court.

It's a court like no other—a hugely busy and rancorous place where the most personal aspects of people's lives are not only on display, but judged and reshaped in proceedings that often last no longer than 20 minutes. Appointed commissioners, rather than elected judges, make many of the most crucial decisions. And the standard of evidence (known as "preponderance of the evidence") is the lowest allowed by law.

For years, dads'-rights groups have claimed that family court overwhelmingly favors women, particularly when it comes to custody. In former times, when dads generally did far less hands-on child-rearing than moms, those claims tended to be viewed as the ranting of bitter misogynists.
… the most damaging allegation—the one that can change everything in an instant—is domestic violence. That's why, Rolfe says, "there are attorneys who will advise a client to accuse the other party of domestic violence in order to gain an advantage."
The accusations may not constitute what the general public thinks of as domestic violence. "Frequently, it's not a big thing that you did, but the woman claims to be afraid," says Rolfe.

Yet commissioners—and what Bianco calls a "little cottage industry" of professionals used by the court to assess and treat domestic violence—tend to give those allegations credibility and see a man's denials as further proof of his guilt—the ultimate catch-22.
… the most precious relationships in people's lives—relationships that impact not only the adults standing before a commissioner but the unseen children used to being around both parents every day—are reconstituted according to whatever spin embittered spouses can put forward in the time it takes to walk around the block.
Related Content

Family Court: Dads Regularly Lose Access to Kids, Sparking Claims of Anti-Male Bias
January 18, 2012
Sky Metalwala's Dad Is Victim of Family Court Bias, Activists Say
January 20, 2012

Also check out James Christianson's How I Got Custody (thanks to Arf, again)

Women and Children First!

2012-01-24T09:48:00.001Z

Serguei:
• Women and children first!
• Aye, aye, skipper!

Less Than 100 Days from France's Presidential Election, Sarkozy Is Tempted by a Speedy Retreat from Afghanistan

2012-01-23T20:43:00.007Z

There must be no debate on Afghanistan

That is the message to army commanders from l'Élysée during France's presidential election.

The war in Afghanistan is entering France's presidential election, writes Nathalie Guibert in Le Monde, as Nicolas Sarkozy — who is torn between domestic politics and the demands of France's allies, the countries of the coalition, writes Natalie Nougayrède — suspends all military operations and ponders whether to leave the country.

In the wake of a man wearing the uniform of Afghanistan's national army machine gunning two dozen unarmed soldiers on a French base, four of whom have died, the French government, which has been pressuring army commanders to avoid losses for some time, sent the defense minister (Gérard Longuet) and the head of the armed forces (Admiral Edouard Guillaud) to Kabul.

Meanwhile, the socialist candidate, François Hollande, reacted by saying that "we must have the intelligence to recognize that this mission is over."

" Toutes les opérations de formation, d'aide au combat, de l'armée française sont suspendues ", a annoncé le président Nicolas Sarkozy. Si " les conditions de sécurité ne sont pas clairement rétablies, alors se posera la question d'un retour anticipé ", a-t-il ajouté. Le ministre de la défense et le chef d'état-major des armées ont été dépêchés à Kaboul.

… Sur le terrain, les chefs passent le message : il faut " un niveau de pertes compatible " avec l'état de l'opinion. Les soldats comprennent qu'on les prive de la possibilité de " finir le travail " qui a coûté la vie à 82 d'entre eux depuis 2001. Un haut responsable militaire explique au Monde : " Il ne doit pas y avoir de débat sur l'Afghanistan. "

Mormons to Build Temple in Versailles, Protesters Against this Christian-Inspired Religion NOT to Be Labelled Racists

2012-01-23T15:10:00.004Z

Méconnus en France en dépit de leur prosélytisme aux effets incertains, les mormons sont ces dernières semaines sortis de leur relatif anonymat.

Basically unknown in France until presidential candidate Mitt Romney made their religion prominent, writes Stéphanie Le Bars in Le Monde, the Mormons are to open their first temple in France. However, the purchase of a piece of land next to the (very Catholic) château de Versailles has given rise to a protest movement against the building of a temple there. Needless to say, the protesters will not, in any way, be depicted as racists — as they would were they protesting the building of a Muslim mosque.

Grâce à Mitt Romney, certes, le favori des primaires républicaines pour la présidentielle américaine, qui fut, entre 1966 et 1968, missionnaire à Brest, au Havre et à Bordeaux. Mais aussi parce que l'année 2012 pourrait être en France celle de leur "visibilité". Après treize ans de recherches et de déconvenues, l'Eglise vient d'acquérir un terrain au Chesnay (Yvelines), pour y construire le premier temple mormon du pays, un imposant bâtiment sans fioritures.

… Mais cette implantation sur des terres très catholiques, à deux pas du château de Versailles, a suscité un début de polémique. Une pétition qui aurait recueilli près de 4 000 signatures circule sur Internet pour demander "une consultation publique" sur ce projet, susceptible de "modifier la ville et ses environs", et qui, selon ses détracteurs, "ne correspond pas à un besoin". Contestant le permis de construire accordé par le maire (UMP) et sur fond de bataille politique, un de ses adjoints a même démissionné.

… "La plupart des gens sont polis, mais ils n'ont juste pas le temps de parler de Jésus-Christ", reconnaissent les deux garçons, qui font partie des 300 missionnaires présents en France.

Smell You Later

2012-01-23T13:46:00.000Z

The smart ones are booking ass as quick as they can.

Economic distress is driving tens of thousands of skilled professionals from Europe, and many are being lured to thriving former European colonies in Latin America and Africa, reversing well-worn migration patterns. Asia and Australia, as well as the U.S. and Canada, are absorbing others leaving the troubled euro zone.

In fact monarchs are reduced to begging:

King Juan Carlos highlighted Spain's losses with a poignant remark while handing out scholarships to young Spaniards for postgraduate study abroad.

"I sincerely hope and wish that when your time comes to return home there will be more jobs for you and that you can stay here," he told the 121 assembled winners in March. "We really need you in Spain."

In the meantime the enterprising aren’t fighting their way into EUtopia either.

At the same time, an influx of Third World immigrants whose labor helped fuel Europe's growth over the past decade is subsiding. Hundreds of thousands of them, including some white-collar professionals, have been returning home.

“U.S. Americans”

2012-01-22T13:16:00.000Z

The term is as absurd as “États-Unien” (FR: “United-statesian”), and I hear it more and more.
My simple retort to the pinheaded who argue to me that they have the right to define the terms by which we Americans describe ourselves is to enlighten a lower being and ask how many other nations that have the word “America” in their name.

In ignorance, the answer nearly without fail is “all of the nations in the Americas.” I then ask them to name them.

The only nation other than the Unites States of America that has the word America in its’ name isn’t in the Americas: it’s American Samoa.

Remember, because they are inherently higher beings whose egos generally cannot bear even the most discreet bit of correction or presicion, you must insist that they’re right in order to make them go away or give you your measly €0,14 in change at the register.

États-Unien » est parfois préféré à « américain » afin de différencier les États-Unis du Canada et du Mexique.

No it isn’t.

Is This Who?!?!

2012-01-21T21:57:00.011Z

iPhoto has gotten its face recognition technology wrong before, but this! this… is over the top!

Go, Newt!

(In case you can't see the name that iPhoto proposes for Mitt Romney, the question it asks is, "Is this Ronald Reagan?")

Alas, the Fickle Finger of Pols in Need of Populist Love

2012-01-21T14:05:00.000Z

September 23, 2010:

The European parliament pressed on Wednesday for a crackdown on film and music piracy on the Internet, raising fears among online rights groups that a new law will soon follow.

January 20, 2011:

Digital Agenda Commissioner Neelie Kroes has joined the throng of high-profile opponents to the controversial US internet legislation Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). In a message on her Twitter feed, Kroes said: "glad tide is turning on SOPA: don't need bad legislation when should be safeguarding benefits of open net".

It’s nothing new: the cultural mucki-mucks of the continent’s zeitgeist, even former Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes: they’ve always like the idea of legalizing the theft of other people’s IP, as long as it isn’t European.

Don’t Mention Les Talibanlieusardes

2012-01-20T13:07:00.001Z

Reality being insufficient for their perennial hatred and demonization, French academics turn to fiction, turning to the lecturesome US crime series “The Wire” which another scholar plainly calls a vehicle to convey a political message

I suppose the point is to throw red meat at their own delusions and find some contrivance of "social realism” that feeds their prejudices that the whole of the United States (apart from those who are too well off are a slum.

To delve into the topic of social inequality in the United States, a French university has turned to a slice of American popular culture: the HBO series The Wire.

The critically acclaimed show, created by former journalist David Simon, had previously been the subject of a course at Harvard, but now will be used by students at Paris' University Nanterre La Défense to look in on American social ills from the outside.

From January 13 to June 1, several seminars will take place within the walls of the university, the latest tribute to the gritty realism of a series depicting the largely African-American, crime-plagued neighborhoods of Baltimore. The course will focus on subjects such as the American city, the representation of African Americans and the role of institutions as they are depicted in The Wire.

So they turn to ‘political art’. How cute. Never mind the fact that most French people who ask about life in America still think that it’s 1958 in the American south, most of them also seem to condescendingly want to believe by extension that dramas like “The Wire” represent all urban America, and all African Americans.

As if these things weren’t universal enough to make them realize that they are no better, while their strange fantasies about American society continue: they play at detesting it, and pretend that they need to prove they’ve got a “street cred” in that same “fake thug” fantasy world that their own pop culture is assuming American cities to be.

Nanterre c’est west side yo. Pour faire un « The Wire » en France faudrait surtout trouver un journaliste qui limite pas ses enquêtes à son compte twitter.

Photos From the Tuscany Coast

2012-01-19T16:50:00.004Z

Le Monde offers a batch of photos from the Costa Concordia shipwreck.

Le naufrage du navire, qui a coûté la vie à 11 personnes, a offert une série d'images plus saisissantes les unes que les autres, illustrations de la course au gigantisme que se livrent les armateurs.

A Non-2-Dimensional European Reads the Newspaper

2012-01-19T16:37:00.001Z

Affordable energy = growth. Expensive energy = impoverishment for the poor and middle income and no growth. “Renewables” = bogus moral vanity of the non-productive, non-producing, and detached.

The truth is that Italy wastes its subsidies and uses the costliest sources. Nuclear energy was mothballed before the power stations were fully depreciated, bringing forward billion-euro decommissioning costs by decades. In 1992, Italy adopted the CIP 6 measures, which for assimilated energy – gas treated as a renewable source – will end up adding €20 billion in incentives to bills over its 15 or 20-year lifespan. In 2007, energy watchdog chair Alessandro Ortis managed to put a €600 million cut in place by interpreting the avoided fuel cost’s tariff component very strictly. But this only lasted two years until the Council of State upheld appeals from the big groups that had cornered all the public resources. Compensatory price hikes loom.

In 2012, aid for renewables gets into full stride. Some €160-170 billion is budgeted from 2005 to 2034, much of it concentrated in this decade. It’s a huge burden on household energy bills without even creating a national manufacturing base for the sector,

For a Country Always Giving Yanks Lessons on Civility and Gun Control, There Has Been an Amazing Amount of Kalashnikov-Related Killings

2012-01-18T14:39:00.004Z

[À Marseille] le mois de décembre a vu s'enchaîner des meurtres spectaculaires.

In the land that is always giving clueless Yanks lessons on gun control and on remaining civilized and in a Zen state of conscience, Le Monde features on its front page the photo of… a 17-year-old gunned down by a Kalashnikov burst.

Indeed, while Frenchmen remain blinded (or because they remain blinded) to all types of crimes — as noted in Pamela Gellar's Atlas Shrugs story on the Serial Rapist in France [Who] Asks Victims Their Nationality and Religion Before Raping Them (hmm — what religion might he be part of?!) — we learn that homicides and attempted homicides are rising amidst bursts of Kalashnikov fire and spectacular murders.

An investigation by Yves Bordenave and Laurent Borredon into the Marseilles drug rings teaches us the following:

Le rituel est le même dans chaque cité. Les policiers ont à peine montré le bout de leur calandre que le "Arrraaah !" retentit de bloc en bloc, d'immeuble en immeuble, de cage d'escalier en cage d'escalier. Les guetteurs, des gamins, pas plus de 15 ans, veillent avec vigilance sur le commerce de la drogue. Parfois, un ou deux scooters escortent le véhicule jusqu'à ce qu'il sorte de la cité. Font-Vert, le Clos la Rose, la Castellane... toutes sont touchées, organisées, structurées par le trafic.

… cela fait en réalité trois ans que ces cités se mènent une guerre qui ensanglante la ville. Dans son bureau de l'hôtel de police, à l'Evêché, Roland Gauze, le patron de la police judiciaire (PJ) marseillaise, fait ses comptes : "En 2010, dans Marseille, on a dénombré 54 homicides et tentatives dont 17 relevaient de règlements de comptes ; en 2011, on a fini à 38 homicides et tentatives dont 20 règlements de comptes."
Une année plus calme donc, mais gâchée par un mois de décembre particulièrement meurtrier. Cinq morts en quatre semaines. Cinq jeunes hommes, dont un policier, tombés sous les rafales des kalachnikovs. Les victimes ont entre 18 et 38 ans. Elles sont plus ou moins connues des services de police pour leur implication à des degrés divers dans des trafics de drogue. Le scénario : deux ou trois individus cagoulés font irruption dans une cité, armés le plus fréquemment d'une kalachnikov. Ils s'approchent de leur cible, vident le chargeur et repartent à bord de puissants 4 × 4 aussi vite qu'ils sont apparus. "Les gains en argent sont tellement faciles, alors on tue", explique Yves Robert, délégué du SNOP, le syndicat majoritaire chez les officiers.

Parfois, la violence monte d'un cran encore. Dans la nuit du 25 au 26 décembre 2011, trois cadavres de jeunes gens ont été découverts en partie calcinés sur le siège arrière d'une Audi A3 aux Pennes-Mirabeau, à quelques encablures de la Canebière. Ils avaient 19 et 20 ans. Les hommes de la BAC se souviennent d'avoir contrôlé l'un d'eux quelques jours avant sa mort : "Il portait un gilet pare-balles !" Leurs assassins les ont exécutés à l'arme automatique avant d'incendier leur voiture pour faire disparaître toutes traces, certes, mais aussi pour marquer les esprits. Pour impressionner l'ennemi, on ne lésine ni sur les moyens ni sur la méthode.

Yves Bordenave and Laurent Borredon point out that there are places that the police do not dare go.

Une course-poursuite débute. Elle tourne court dans un cul-de-sac. Le passager s'enfuit en courant. Un policier le poursuit, mais revient vite : l'homme s'est engagé dans une zone d'ombre, où une dizaine de personnes veillent. "Trop dangereux", explique-t-il. Rien à reprocher au conducteur, connu des policiers mais resté sur place. Un coup pour rien.
… Des réseaux, il y en a des dizaines. "Impossible à chiffrer", indique prudemment Roland Gauze. Chacun veille, arme au pied, à défendre son territoire, sa part de marché. Le kalachnikov, c'est le nec plus ultra, un signe ostensible de puissance qui a remplacé le fusil à pompe d'antan. Ça fait du bruit. Ça impressionne. Mais les récentes saisies ont mis fin au fantasme d'un déferlement de mitraillettes sur le Vieux-Port. Il s'agit souvent d'armes anciennes ayant déjà servi.
A chaque opération, les enquêteurs mettent la main sur des butins à peu près identiques : quelques dizaines de kilos de cannabis, quelques milliers d'euros en liquide et quelques armes. A la Visitation, les salaires mensuels variaient de 5 000 euros pour les plus mal payés (les guetteurs) à 10 000 euros pour le "charbonneur".

Alan’s Parsing Project

2012-01-18T14:04:00.000Z

Manning the ideological ramparts: behold yet another douchebag who doesn’t get that Nazis and Neo-nazis are actually leftists.

A Love that Dare not Speak His Name

2012-01-17T20:12:00.000Z

Bruce Brawer on “Urinegate”:

Anti-Americanism is, of course, as European as Apfelstrudel

He goes on to detail implausibly stupid Norwegian attempts at comparing US troops to, you guessed it, the Nazis:

Still, it wasn’t until I ran across an article the other day in the Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet that I realized European anti-Americanism, thanks to Urinegate, is once again in full bloom. The article, written by somebody named Asbjørn Svarstad, begins by noting that the American soldiers who filmed themselves urinating on dead Taliban members may not be the first GIs to have behaved in such a manner. “American commandos who were dropped over Snåsa [in northern Norway] toward the end of World War II,” writes Asbjørn Svarstad, “are suspected of having displayed the same kind of contempt for their enemies.”

The main character in Svarstad’s story is none other than William Colby, who would later become head of the CIA but who back in 1945 was a 24-year-old major in charge of the Norwegian Special Operation Group (NORSO) under the command of the OSS. NORSO, which sounds rather like Brad Pitt’s unit in Inglourious Basterds, consisted of Norwegian-Americans and Norwegians who were operating behind enemy lines on a mission called Operation RYPE. On May 2, 1945, Colby’s men, who were stationed at a farm called Gjevsjøen, were discovered by five German soldiers, whom they quickly dispatched. According to Svarstad, local Norwegians – and here’s the meat of the story – later claimed that they were then invited by the Americans to urinate on the Germans’ corpses.

One of Svarstad’s sources is Norwegian journalist Ola Flyum, whom he describes as an authority on how northern Norway experienced World War II. Flyum’s verdict on the NORSO episode is as follows: “This kind of behavior says a great deal about the way in which the Americans conducted themselves. The Norwegians were shaken. Such a culture was unknown to them. I see many reasons to examine whether this was a war crime.”

Yes, you read that right. The local Norwegians had lived for five years under the Nazis, who had come to subdue and tyrannize them, to execute troublemakers and cart Jews off to their deaths. But, if Flyum is to be believed, the real trauma for these folks was being invited by their American liberators to relieve themselves on the bodies of their oppressors

It’s also worth noting that this blog gets a great number of its’ hits from the European continent from image searches, having posted a few pictures of Hitler in various articles, we have become enlightened to a larger European public, not just those we meet having a “nuanced” view of the murderous Charlie Chaplin impersonator.

So it comes as a shock to us that those same anti-Americans also use him their silent hero as a stick to beat people with. The posted articles’ comments he cites are even more masturbatory:

A couple of readers cited the Allied bombing of Dresden as proof that America and the western Allies were at least as bad as the Nazis; one recalled having “seen videos from WWII of P51 planes mowing down German farmers in May 1945.” Several readers insisted that it wasn’t the Western Allies that whupped the Nazis and freed Norway, but the Soviets: “America would have been a**-f***ed in a one-on-one against Nazi Germany.”

And in a unsurprising turn among leftists, we find elitism, racism, cultural condescention, and fictional assumptions about their straw-man, one no different than the type the Nazis cultivated in “The Eternal Jew”:

A running theme was that American soldiers are, as one reader put it, “typical American white trash.” Indeed, the words “white trash” recurred frequently. Left-wing readers who undoubtedly pride themselves on their purported respect for people (especially the underprivileged) of all races and religions, and who fret about the human rights of even the most loathsome members of the species (such as Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden), were quick to deride American GIs as poor, dumb – and, indeed, barely human – hicks: “There’s no doubt that white trash from the US…have lukewarm attitudes toward morality. Without the local minister and sheriff they fumble around, unwashed and drunk, and rape, kill, and film their crimes. They’re garbage.”

I only point this out because it is banal and typical of any bar-room on the continent, and because it seems to be the only public evidence of Europe’s cultural legacy, having otherwise abandoned any virtues not connected with the kind of enforcement of public morality that the state would dispense.

What then is the result of all of that helpless grasping for proof of their being right in their attitudes? A strange, nearly erotic affection for Nazis.

Le Monde Suggests that the Fault for the Concordia's Shipwreck Belongs Not to Captain Schettino, But to… American Capitalism!

2012-01-17T18:37:00.007Z

Elsewhere in Le Monde, we hear (from Sylvain Cypel) that the Republicans, or that their debates, as well as their focus on capitalism (imagine: private equity!), let off a nauseous stench, no less.

And so, it should come as no surprise that, even if it is only one paragraph in a major article in Le Monde, at one point in his portrait of the Concordia's skipper, Philippe Ridet seems to find that the fault for the shipwreck lies not with Francesco Schettino, but with… capitalism — making sure to point out that the culprit is American capitalism!

Francesco Schettino, un coupable idéal ? Pour la compagnie, propriété de la société américaine Carnival qui règne sur les trois quarts du marché des croisières avec Royal Caribbean, la thèse de l'erreur humaine est essentielle. Alors que l'action de Carnival a perdu, le 12 janvier, 17 % à la Bourse de Londres, l'entreprise doit à tout prix sauver au moins sa réputation. Costa, qui avait prévu de serrer ses prix en 2012 pour affronter la crise, prévoit une perte de 90 millions d'euros, soit le chiffre d'affaires attendu par le Concordia en 2012. Le navire, assuré pour une valeur de 450 millions de dollars, effectuait une rotation par semaine sur un parcours passant par Savone (Ligurie), Barcelone, Palma, Tunis, Palerme, Civitavecchia (Latium).

I know the Taste of our Readership...

2012-01-17T13:58:00.000Z

WASHINGTON -

All Metrobuses are now equipped with drivecam systems, which capture these types of incidents. When WTOP asked for drivecam videos from August and September, we received 134 near-collision videos, along with dozens showing collisions, traffic violations and even pedestrian accidents.

Ah, l’Éloquence: Politics Highlights Importance of Language in France

2012-01-16T15:10:00.000Z

The French are in love with words

writes Christine Ockrent.

Written words, spoken words, words to sing or to scream or to declaim. Their elite schools train them to believe that once they forge an elegant formula, the problem they have to confront is already half solved.

Nowhere does it show better than in politics.

…a few days ago [François Hollande] published an “open letter to the French” in the newspaper Libération. It is two full pages long, beautifully written, an ode to the basic principles of the Republic and a description of the many evils the Sarkozy regime purportedly inflicted on the country.
All the right words are there: truth, willpower, justice, hope, the suffering of the common people; the need to contain the deficits, reduce inequalities, share wealth and regulate markets; the decisive moment for our future and that of our children. In short, a great piece of French political literature — completely abstract and theoretical from beginning to end, and almost impossible to translate into any other language.
Here’s a sample: “The French are suffering. They are suffering in their own lives ... . They are also suffering in their collective soul; they feel there is contempt for the values and the institutions of the Republic, the social contract is under attack, the influence of the country is damaged and they watch with anger France being humbled, weakened, damaged, downgraded.”»
… Language in France is a major issue. Politicians feel compelled to publish a book if they want to be taken seriously. Whether they actually write it is another matter — it is not considered proper to name a ghostwriter. [Nicolas Sarkozy] has put his name to three books, Hollande to at least four.
The latter is a master at the profuse and crisp vocabulary of the well-educated senior civil servant. The former, a business lawyer, tends to take liberties with grammar — and the French do not like that. …
Sarkozy believed that at the start of the 21st century, the French wanted a young, energetic, modern leader who talked like them, after 26 years under two aging presidents locked in old-time rhetoric. It turned out he was wrong. He has since assumed the sort of public restraint and presidential solemnity expected of their president by the French.

The Rest of the Time the Bien Pensants are Enamored with Jew Killers

2012-01-16T13:03:00.000Z

Europeans nearly universally support Hamas and Fatah, but then they get cranked about this? Especially given the all-too-common graffiti found at a highly visible passageway near Les Halles in Paris, not painted-over for at least two years.

"SS canonised," leads Tageszeitung, with a front-page photo of the leader of the Nazi organisation, Heinrich Himmler, on a visit to SS volunteers in Estonia in October 1943.

The Berlin daily is referring to a bill that the Estonian Minister of Defence is hoping to have adopted in March. According to the text, all those who took part in the fight against the Soviet Union during the Second World War will be granted the status of “freedom fighters,” which includes Estonian members of the SS

The most amusing part is the sudden shock that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” might apply to their ugly past.

According to Clint Eastwood's Screenwriter, J Edgar Hoover Is the Dark Side of Harvey Milk, the Latter Being a Hero and the Former a Monster

2012-01-15T13:21:00.000Z

According to Dustin Lance Black, the subject of his first biopic, Harvey Milk, is an American hero, and the subject of his second, J. Edgar Hoover, is a monster, the second being the dark side of the first.

In an interview with Le Monde's Samuel Blumenfeld (that accompanies Thomas Sotinel's Behind the FBI, Clint Eastwood Targets America), Dustin Lance Black makes the following comparison (retranslated back from the French):

I cannot help but see in Hoover the dark side of Harvey Milk. The latter came out of the closet to start a fight for freedom. Hoover repressed his homosexuality to become, in the end, a monster.

Je ne peux m'empêcher de voir en Hoover la part obscure d'Harvey Milk. Ce dernier est sorti du placard pour engager un combat pour les libertés. Hoover a refoulé son homosexualité pour, au final, devenir un monstre.

I Never Ask for an Explanation of Past Positions

2012-01-15T13:17:00.000Z

Especially when it comes to the basic practice of European humiliation politics:

Germany and Italy undermine French bid for financial tax

German and Italian leaders at a meeting in Berlin said they would only back a financial transactions tax at the level of the EU-27, not just the eurozone-17, dampening France's campaign for the levy. Merkel said her earlier comment on Monday backing a eurozone-17 tax was a "personal opinion" only.

So if we use the EUvian attitude toward Britain as an example, aren’t Germany and Italy “isolating themselves”? Seriously, where are the comparisons to the sinking of the Titanic here?

Otherwise They Hate You, America

2012-01-14T14:01:00.000Z

The US’ rebalancing of military forces away from Europe and into the Asia-Pacific region is causing consternation in the land of the rich yet needy and helpless. Helsinki lawyer Ralf Grahn summarizes:

While both sides want to maintain the NATO alliance, this long expected move leaves European leaders naked with regard to the state of EU foreign, security and defence policy, especially their inability to even begin the construction of a common European defence.

Since a press statements on every mishap in the world seems to be the extent of EU foreign policy, perhaps the high representative Catherine Ashton could crank out a few lines to let the heads of state or government continue sleeping on the job

This, only being the befinning of the third decade that ”United Europeans” have said that they might get around to something substantive in the interest of their own defense and deterrence that the US has been supplying them.

Is Wikipedia Really Trustworthy? Asks Le Monde — as It Proceeds to Get Bush's Middle Name Wrong

2012-01-14T04:47:00.002Z

As the main title on the front page of its weekend edition, above the fold and across three fifths of the page, Le Monde has a heading asking whether Wikipedia is really trustworthy. Inside, Frédéric Joignot has an article pointing out Wikipedia's mistakes (while interviewing Jacques Florent), but what is perhaps noteworthy is that Le Monde might itself be in need of Wikipedia, since it still (!) gets the name of George W. Bush wrong (confusing Walker with Walter)…

…comment, en faisant appel au public, rédiger une encyclopédie fiable, sans amateurisme, qui ne devienne pas une foire d'empoigne ou un lieu de toutes les manipulations ? C'est très difficile. Depuis sa création, Wikipédia se trouve écartelée entre ses deux exigences originelles : le souci de la relecture experte voulue par Larry Sanger, dans la tradition des grands encyclopédistes depuis Diderot et d'Alembert, et la richesse d'une matière éditoriale parfois approximative, de parti pris, peu référencée, apportée par des milliers de passionnés ou des esprits sectaires.

Quant aux fameux " trolls ", les vandales et farceurs du Net, ils sont désormais repérés plus vite quand ils changent le second prénom de George W. Bush, Walter, en " Wanker " (branleur), prétendent que la boisson Red Bull contient du " sperme de vache " ou annoncent à tort le décès d'une star.

Those Who Are Against Shariah, Raise Your Hand

2012-01-13T17:15:00.009Z

Plantu in Le Monde:
• Those of You Who Are Against Shariah, Raise Your Hand!

Arm aber Hässlich

2012-01-13T14:11:00.000Z

63% of working Spanish households are now living off of €1000 per month.

To get to the end of the month on this kind of money in your pocket is a Herculean task. Many families are counting the cents closely before they head out to shop. For thousands of Spaniards today, buying something has become an act of renunciation.

That’s a hard fact, one which I wish on no one, but a hard fact that makes this argument about non-rising lower-tier America look especially foolish. It also takes the mickey out of the endless grinding griping about the WalMart-ization of America, and the Americanization of Europe since 63% of Spaniards now appear to be needing their sources of WalMart-ization and hideous Americanization to subsist with any dignity:

Against this harsh backdrop, the low-cost shopping phenomenon is flourishing, and it does not look set to die out any time soon. Quite to the contrary, it's becoming a more and more prominent feature of society and its economy. Restaurants, travel, cars, insurance, electronics, real estate, leisure, clothing, food: nothing seems to escape the pull of low-cost shopping.

The question, though, is whether low-cost shopping will still be around once the crisis has passed. Is it a structural or temporary strategy? How will the consumer have changed by then? Will he or she be more rational, less impulsive? Dare we assume that the search for the lowest price has become a new way of life?

Dare we not ask pointless questions about the survival skills of people and second guess individuals? Sit on your extra-special world-beating super-duper everything and spin – Spaniards are getting by without the luxury-aspirant subtext of the new Europe.

In the meantime, the low-cost concept is spreading fast and wide. “The consumer has gone from looking for what I call a 'superior functionality' to looking for the 'good enough functionality', which is cheaper. In other words, why should I buy a car with all the extras if I don't really need them?”

As with everything, unless it’s Europeans talking about Europeans, all European discussion of the state of the economy takes the form of either economically illiterate and emotionalized fits of kicking the victim, or using the usual straw men as a point of reference. That much-lauded compassion comes last.

But I digress. Let’s go back to those folks that should be thanking Sam Walton:

In any case, at bottom this phenomenon conveys a sense of urgency and need. As paradoxical as it sounds, it also conveys a desire to keep up one's standard of living and to go on enjoying a product or a simple luxury.

Rwanda: An Inconvenient Truth for France

2012-01-13T01:00:00.004Z

A truth that is inconvenient for France, titles a Le Monde editorial as Christophe Châtelot returns to the Rwanda for new revelations on the genocide of the Tutsis, asking why it took 18 years to investigate the missile that brought down Juvénal Habyarimana's plane and determine that it was fired not from a Tutsi camp, as previously believed, but from a Hutu one (harboring the president's own troops, including extremists who used the occasion to go on a genocidal rampage against the Tutsi "culprits").

These revelations did not come out until France's head of state was Nicolas Sarkozy, whose government has little to fear from revelations that discredit François Mitterrand and Édouard Balladur, who supported both the Habyarimana régime and the Rwandan army…

L'enquête établit donc que ce sont les extrémistes hutu qui ont assassiné le président Habyarimana parce qu'il venait d'accepter un partage du pouvoir avec les Tutsi. Et non par des combattants tutsi proches de l'actuel président Paul Kagamé, en guerre contre le régime Habyarimana, comme le juge Jean-Louis Bruguière, prédécesseur de M. Trévidic, l'avait affirmé en 2006 sans jamais avoir enquêté sur le terrain. A l'époque, ses conclusions avaient conduit le Rwanda à rompre ses relations diplomatiques avec la France.

… Parce qu'elle dérange beaucoup de monde, cette vérité a mis longtemps à être établie. Elle ne gêne pas tellement la France de Nicolas Sarkozy, qui a renoué avec le régime de Paul Kagamé et qui, à Kigali, a reconnu les "graves erreurs d'appréciation" de Paris. Mais plutôt la France de la cohabitation Mitterrand-Balladur, qui a soutenu jusqu'au bout le régime Habyarimana, et celle d'une armée tricolore qui, longtemps, a approvisionné et entraîné les militaires rwandais, dont certains allaient participer au génocide.

Why the Greeks are Quintessentially European

2012-01-12T13:50:00.000Z

They put pederasty and welfare over the fate of the genuinely disabled, the future, and the debt passed on to their children:

The National Confederation of Disabled People called the action "incomprehensible," and said pedophiles are now awarded a higher government disability pay than some people who have received organ transplants.

The Labor Ministry said categories added to the expanded list - that also includes pyromaniacs, compulsive gamblers, fetishists and sadomasochists - were included for purposes of medical assessment and used as a gauge for allocating financial assistance.

So is this is the slow food-esque “quality of life” thing we get a finger wagged at us about, or the compassion and humanism thing we get a finger wagged at us about?

The new list gives pyromaniacs and pedophiles disability pay up to 35 percent, compared to 80 percent for heart transplant recipients.

"It's really not serious to grant Peeping Toms a 20-30 percent disability rate, and 10 percent to diabetics, who have insulin shots four or five times a day," said Vardakastanis.

Greece has been fighting to avoid bankruptcy since 2009. Public spending on health and welfare programs has been sharply cut under austerity measures imposed as a condition for receiving emergency loans from the International Monetary Fund and other countries using the euro currency.

So it seems that compassion and humanism®©™ come in state approved percentages of last years’ income. Who knew?

The Quadrennial Retelling of the Same Old Stories

2012-01-11T20:20:00.002Z

Well know globally for their lack of curiosity for anything other than ego-reinforcing rationalizations, European critics of the US (who detest the US anyway) are whining that using European society and a point of comparison with the US is “European bashing”.

What they conveniently ignore is that American Dream is not what it used to be. (Neither is the European Dream of an ever closer union, but that's another story).

Yes, it’s ALWAYS another story when you don’t want to tell the story.

In fact, it arrives to the usual level of stupidity Spiegel readers are familiar with, to the extent that one example is enough evidence to call it a trend, or perhaps a scourge. In fact to the extent that they start to make things up:

Europe is socialist, bloated and a threat to the global economy. That appears to be the message from the ongoing presidential campaign in the US. Republicans in particular have discovered Europe as a convenient punching bag -- and have even begun accusing each other of being too "European."

That message, also happening to be identical to many Europeans’ criticism of European society, but that’s not the point. Even as German growth is expected to be the strongest in Europe in 2012, and expected to top out at 1%, expect more of this, as well as the ritual retelling of the “American dream is dead”, for which there are vivid examples in the German press dating back to 1954.

Chock this up to “Freedom Fries” syndrome, a one-week story in the US which has reached its’ first decade of smug anger in the precious and benighted continent.

To back it up, an unrelated sneer has to be tangentially attached: an article in the NYT which selectively looks at a variety of unexplained studies to say that the US, where the poor live in comforts many middle income Europeans don’t have, and is the focus of criticism of “Americans being too well off” in turns, that Americans are less upwardly mobile than Europeans.

How, exactly? The same old saw: income disparity, the statistical tool of propagandists for more than a century. For example: how long a period is the trends mapped in multiple unexplained “studies” sampling? Are we being shown a delta founded on the 2008 contraction as the centerpiece? Is aggregate improvement in the state of what “bottom fifth” actually means being taken into account?

How, in our inexorable downward mobility spiral, can we also be criticized for also using too many resources, especially in a broad way across the income spectrum? How is it that we allow our unwashed and uneducated “lower 5th” or people like them, out of the country to find out that they are the boors so broadly offensive to Europeans as ignorant tourists? HOW doesn’t matter.

I’m not sure it even matters to the local reseller of meme X this week, given the notion of what they think “equal opportunity” means:

If equal opportunity is essential to freedom, then freedom is under attack!

So many misused truisms, so little time. Equal Opportunity, for one thing is assumed to mean Equal Outcome, an entirely Marxist jerking point, and one that Marxist-Leninism did a particularly bad job of actually achieving. This actually ADDS credence to the Americans are from Mars, Europeans are from the Politburo argument more than anything else.
And who knew that the lack of forced redistribution of wealth was critical in protecting freedom from attack, when freedom, and rights of all sorts can’t be redistributed, aren’t based in getting resources from others in society that aren’t earned, and are inherently equal before the “liberators from the shackles of common sense” like the author of “If equal opportunity is essential to freedom, then freedom is under attack!” can manage a go at them.

In fact the notion that one can shun Americans into using European society as a point of reference is, if anything, an attempt to obfuscate a curtailment of freedom.

But that doesn’t matter, because the ~~guy behind that organ grinder~~ author, like one European critic too many, is more interested in irrational point-scoring that the content of people’s arguments. That paragraph two has nothing to do with paragraph one outside of an old assumption having nothing to do with wither source is irrelevant.

The Narrative Couldn’t Get any More Lame

2012-01-10T14:00:00.001Z

After the Washington Post finally stopped sitting on the Solyndra “theft by greenist compassion” scandal, they manage a rather ludicrous and emotive revision.

David Burge:
« There you have it. In the Post's sob story narrative, the problem is not that a politically-connected network of donors devised a con to loot taxpayers of a half billion dollars; to the contrary, it's that the government negligently allowed the Solyndra scam to collapse, thereby depriving Ms. Sterio of her "clean-energy job." And, by implication, it continues to "betray" her by not creating another clean-energy job for her elsewhere. »
In fact it’s worthy of the weeper-style use of stage theater by FDR’s crypto-Communists covering for the confusing and useless policies of the time – which, as now, did little more than scare the economy’s real driving forces from wanting to even get out of bed. I’m reminded of the cause of all of this chaos which gives those selling green power and magic carpets an opportunity at mischief by Roosevelt himself quoted in Amity Schlaes’ “The Forgotten Man”:
« The main tasks Roosevelt assigned himself were simple. The first was that there be a broad sweep of activity; Americans must know Washington was doing something. If there were contradictions between experiments and within them, well, that did not matter. Partly this came out of the restlessness of the invalid; Roosevelt had risen politically but he still could not stand unaided. But partly it came out of a grandeur of spirit. “Do I contradict myself?” Roosevelt seemed to be asking, as Walt Whitman had. “Very well then, I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes.” »
All encompassing! To the point of near-infalabilty and super-human intelligence and ability no less than that mocked by Frank Flemming epic poem about another dissembler:
« If Obama is not listening to you, you can sleep soundly at night knowing your concerns are stupid. »

- from “Obama: The Greatest President in the History of Everything”, (Frank J. Fleming)

And the Progressive beat goes on. Even in the case of enabled and rationalized graft, their echo-chamber of protectors permits no questioning.

Steven Pinker on the Myth of Violence

2012-01-10T13:57:00.002Z

Steven Pinker on the myth of violence (merci à Patrick)

The Return of ShadyRAT

2012-01-09T21:02:00.002Z

Remember that endless whinging by people using the EU venue to complain about onerous US data security criteria? Remember the endless hammering on and on about SWIFT and information required of travelers invading the precious, immutable, eternally superior privacy and online identities of Europeans?

Well, ask your beloved activists and miscellaneous Wikileaks and Anonymous loving people who are into “revealing hidden truths” about this sort of “truth” telling.

A number of people working for the EU institutions have had their emails, passwords and credit card details hacked and released to the general public over the Christmas break.

A partial list was recently published online by Anonymous, a loose network of cyber activists campaigning against the so-called 'New World Order'.

Among the victims are administrators and officials at the European Commission, Eurojust (an EU body fighting organised crime), the European External Action Service, the European Parliament and Brussels-based think-tank the European Policy Centre (EPC).

That’s right! It’s that same pacifism brigade again. Their target? Their ever expanding Pantheon of imaginary hate puppets along the lines of Bu$hChimpHitlerBurton fetishisms, which now seems to include the EU and anyone else old enough to tie their shoe laces.

All together, some 850,000 confidential details were released when Anonymous hacked into the Texas-based Stratfor Global Intelligence security firm.

Stratfor is a widely used private security research company. About 75,000 of its paying subscribers also had their credit card details disclosed, including some working for the EU institutions.

The leaked database has 19,000 email addresses ending in the .mil domain of the US military according to the Guardian newspaper. The list also included 242 Nato staff members.

Peace out, peeps, because the blame goes back to where it always does: elsewhere. Apparently it’s American lobbying the administrative issues that caused this breech!

The entire operation could cast a long shadow over intense US lobbying against a leaked draft proposal for a Data Protection Regulation from the European Commission this past December.

Among the US complaints are the European Commission's views on data breach requirements, which they consider as "overly" severe and could undermine corporate data security practices.

"It is interesting to note that the US document tends to oppose specific proposals, such as the notification deadline and fines, in support of the vague issues such as not distracting businesses from improving corporate data security practices,"

Vague things like the real effect of minutae in regulation getting in the way of data security, something that you're not going to do anything about unless the never-ending threats to change reporting requiements and practices is done.

Happy Birthday to Elvis, from… Denmark?!

2012-01-08T18:17:00.002Z

A replica of Elvis Presley's Graceland estate is opening in Denmark

reports the BBC.

The Danish tribute to 'The King' has been built in the town of Randers, and will be known as Graceland Randers.
The building is almost identical to the original, although it is twice the size to house a shop, restaurant and museum.

In a more detailed report, the BBC adds that

The building is the brainchild of Henrick Knudsen, an Elvis fan who … said the project has the backing of Elvis's widow Priscilla.

Web Goes Viral After Naked Man Turns Up in French Store's Kid Clothes Photo

2012-01-08T14:36:00.009Z

Unfortunately for one of the French equivalents of Sears Roebuck, a number of mistakes appear on its online catalog. If only it had been solely the fact that the English spelling and grammar on one of La Redoute's T-shirts was questionable (Enjoy Holydays). Far worse, indeed, was discovering that lurking in the background of a beach photo for kids' clothes (one of the kid models is wearing a light blue version of the incriminating T-shirt) was an unsuspecting nudist walking delicately through the ocean water.

La Redoute promptly removed the photo, but not quickly enough to prevent the photo of the Naked Man (as the so-far-unidentified individual has been dubbed) from going viral (more examples here and by clicking on each of the pictures below). The second Redoute parody shows Nicolas Sarkozy from the back heading into the water and says "Black Swim Shorts (Sold Without the Rolex Watch)"

Parisian Truffles

2012-01-07T17:23:00.001Z

I'll bet you thought I was done speaking glowingly of the city of lights...

According to One (Disgusted) Leftist, 90% of Frenchmen Support the 18-Year-Old Mother's Killing of an Oklahoma Burglar

2012-01-07T01:55:00.007Z

According to one outraged and disgusted leftist responding to Corine Lesnes's post on the Sarah McKinley shooting, almost 90% of Frenchmen support the 18-year-old Oklahoma mother's killing of the burglar trying to enter her home while supporting the introduction (or the reintroduction) of something akin to the Castle Doctrine in France…

Et alors ? Où est le problème ? Ce qui me choque plus, c’est que, si cette scène était transposée, disons, à Orléans, la jeune femme serait aujourd’hui en prison…

Rédigé par : demari | le 05 janvier 2012 à 15:49 | Répondre | Alerter |

Il est bien dommage que la législation ne soit pas la même en France.

En France, vous êtes priés de vous laisser égorger avant de prétendre être victime.

Se faire flinguer quand on rentre par effraction dans une maison me semble être un risque du métier parfaitement normal. Si on n’assume pas ce risque, il faut faire un autre métier que voleur.

Rédigé par : FbS | le 05 janvier 2012 à 15:37 | Répondre | Alerter |

Quand on a le choix entre tuer ou être tué, on ne prévient pas. Un cambriolage crapuleux n’est pas un duel entre chevaliers du Moyen-Age…

Rédigé par : thôt | le 05 janvier 2012 à 19:12 | Répondre | Alerter |

He bien oui, moi, je salue le courage de cette jeune mère. Je ne suis pas un partisan du tout arme à feu, mais je constate qu’en France, la victime ne peut se défendre à mort avant qu’elle ne se soit elle même fait couper un bras par l’assaillant.
Ici, en Alsace, un agriculteur père et grand père de famille, encours actuellement plusieurs années de prison pour avoir lègérement blessé à la chevrotine un membre d’une bande d’Europe de l’est qui était en train de dérober tranquillement l’un de ses tracteurs sous ses yeux. Le criminel a porté plainte contre sa victime et cela semble evidemment normal aux bobos de tous poils ?

Rédigé par : Gaillus | le 06 janvier 2012 à 03:52 | Répondre | Alerter |

En France, le voleur entre, la viole, la tue, tue son bébé, vole la télé, l’ordi, le iphone, prend 5 ans, rejoint ses potes en prison, fume, joue à la play, fait du sport, sort après 3 ans, recommence.

Rédigé par : Jean | le 05 janvier 2012 à 15:42 | Répondre | Alerter |

je suis francais , vivant aux USA depuis bientot 7 ans , ma femme et mes enfants sont americains et nous vivons a Memphis et je bosse en majeure partie sur NY .
je me sens 2000 fois plus en securite a Memphis ou a NY qu a Paris ou j ai pourtant vecu pres de 30 ans !
et j ai ce sentiment d insecurite a chaque fois que je passe en France , malheureusement .

Les USA ne sont pas un pays plus violent que la France , loin de la .J ai moins peur d aller dans le Bronx que dans les banlieues pourries de Bordeaux , Pau ou Montpellier ( je parle de celle que je connais )

Rédigé par : karl | le 05 janvier 2012 à 17:25 | Répondre | Alerter |

On the One Hand, a Dictator Who Starved His People; on the Other, a Freedom Fighter Like Walesa — And Whom Does Le Monde Choose for Its Main Headline?

2012-01-06T00:50:00.004Z

In the wake of reading the issue in which Le Monde announced the deaths of Vaclav Havel and Kim Jong-il, a Le Monde reader protested in a letter to the editor:

Le Monde of December 20: huge headline on the death of Kim Jong-il, along with his photo. Only a modest column a fifth of a page wide is allocated to the day's other passing, Vaclav Havel. On the one hand, a dictator who starved his people while enriching his clan by putting his country under an iron fist. On the other, a freedom fighter of the same mettle as a Mandela, a Walesa, a Lula. And whom does my newspaper choose for its main headline? The North Korean tyrant! Is Le Monde's mistake not obvious to everyone?!...

Fifty years from now, who will remember this obscure North Korean "son of"? By contrast, the name of Vaclav Havel will remain a universal reference for all those who still believe it possible for man to change the course of events when these become unbearable and contrary to dignity.

His is the photo that we would have liked to see on the front page, not that of a character who will end up in the ash heap of history, as will his Tunisian, Egyptian, Libyan, and Syrian comrades tomorrow!
Christian Colas,
Paris

It is unconscionable to recommend marriage to any man under a legal regime in which he has no protection under the law

2012-01-04T10:41:00.002Z

Echoing Stephen Baskerville, Vox is quoted by Instapundit as saying:

Nancy French asks what marriage has to offer men and decides that some major changes have to take place if young men are going to start considering marriage part of the normal and anticipated process of adulthood:
[P]arents have to stop getting divorced for less than dire reasons. …

Second, we must retract the message Boomers sent young women about female empowerment. Indeed, it isn’t a coincidence that marriage rates have plummeted alongside America’s fascination with the feminist movement. Empowerment for women, as defined by feminists, neither liberates women nor brings couples together. It separates them. It focuses on women as perpetual victims of the Big Bad Male. Why would any man want to get married when he’s been branded a sexist pig at “hello”? In the span of just a few decades, women have managed to demote men from respected providers and protectors to being unnecessary, irrelevant, and downright expendable.
Changing both of these things won't accomplish anything. It's not true that men have no idea what to look for. They know what they want, they're just not finding it as easily anymore. And it's not being branded "a sexist pig" that turns men off to marriage, it is the guarantee of severe economic liability and the unacceptably high possibility of losing his house, his children, his savings, and reducing his future net income.

It is unconscionable to recommend marriage to any man under a legal regime in which he has no protection under the law and can be forced out of his own home by a single false charge. While this state of affairs is fair to neither individual men nor individual women, the lamentable fact is that very, very few women, even conservative, politically minded women who are correctly concerned about what low marriage rates will do to American society, are willing to speak out against Marriage 2.0 because they still wish to retain the legal benefits it affords married women in the event of divorce.

Marriage is extremely important for societal stability and survival. But the current legal form of marriage is evil and is not only deleterious to society, but to men, women, and children alike.

A Nuremberg-scale trial for all the corporate agents and treasonous capitalisto-fascist architects of our democracy’s current and most pressing misery

2012-01-03T18:24:00.002Z

“The scale of Right Wing sociopolitical sabotage necessitates a Nuremberg-scale trial for all the corporate agents and treasonous capitalisto-fascist architects of our democracy’s current and most pressing misery. From the blatant Republican policy doublespeak emanating from think-tank sponsored word doctors to the outright obstruction and lies expectorated by Republican congressional representatives and senators, the very concept of governance can only be considered once the culprits are removed. Driven to real madness by unadulterated greed they have embraced an ideology, the success of which hinges upon the very ruin of this nation.”

— Actor Steven Weber (from the 1990s NBC sitcom Wings) writing at the Huffington Post, October 24 (MRC Notable Quotables)

Like I wrote back in July 2010, if liberal opinions are

taken to their/to its logical conclusion…

…then Americans should go through some sort of reeducation centers to be made to understand the good they are being bestowed, and to be made to refrain from criticizing (at least, not too much) the Spiritual Guide who is benevolently bestowing them upon us;

…then democracy should be curtailed and elections banned (polls as well, probably), at least temporarily, so that the benevolent Great Helmsman can implement his (benevolent) policies in the absence of obstacles from clueless idiots— be they common citizens or the unpatriotic naysayers in the opposition;

…in fact, then Barack Obama should be allowed to dictate his (benevolent) policies to the nation (the nation of clueless clods who are preventing him from carrying those dashing avant-garde ideas of his through to completion).

While there have always been differences about how proactive government should be, few Europeans question the basic premise of a welfare state

2012-01-03T12:23:00.002Z

Most Europeans associate democracy with a social safety net

writes Katrin Bennhold in The Female Factor in an International Herald Tribune article in which the German reporter manages to mock "the bellows of nostalgic 'bulldog' conservatives in Britain" while shrugging off memories of World War II as "this fixation with 1945 [which] has long been easy to dismiss as island mentality, empire nostalgia or perhaps compensation for repeated defeats by Germany on the soccer field." (That's the left for you — they hate to be reminded of the good the West has done (and enjoy dismissing memories thereof), but they adore "commemorating", ad infinitum, the West's sins, alleged or otherwise, and even when they are far older, like slavery and colonialism.)

Still, Katrin Bennhold's observations on the differences between Europe's health care systems are interesting, not least because they are based on personal knowledge, i.e., her "recent experience of pregnancy and birth in Europe’s three biggest economies". The most interesting observation? Perhaps the fact (or the alleged fact — I have tended to get skeptical over liberal observations over the years) that the "higher the birthrate, the higher the proportion of women in work — and the degree of state support for working mothers."

While there have always been pronounced differences about how proactive government should be, few Europeans question the basic premise of a welfare state.
… As the past three years of financial and economic strife have made plain, Europe does not have a common narrative for the 21st century. There is no European Union of welfare states, no common philosophy on how to run one’s economy or manage public finances, let alone European public opinion. Chancellor Angela Merkel’s efforts to make all Europeans more German have borne some fruit, but also rankled those who felt lectured and stymied.
Partly as a result, nationalism is increasingly prevalent across the 27-country bloc. A familiar fault line has emerged: “The euro crisis has sharpened the focus on old divisions over the role of the state in the economy and in people’s lives,” said Ute Frevert, director of the Center for the History of Emotions at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin.
This fault line runs across society. Just how differently the state treats one of the most basic experiences — motherhood — has been plain in my recent experience of pregnancy and birth in Europe’s three biggest economies.
In London, where I just had my second daughter in a public hospital by Caesarean section, I was sent home after three nights. Midwives who were supposed to check up on me and my baby at home in the days after never showed up.
In early 2009, when I had a first Caesarean section in Germany, I was in the hospital for more than a week. Pediatric nurses gave me one-on-one lessons on how to pick up my baby, bathe and even massage her. A specialized physiotherapist exercised with newborns every morning.
Meanwhile in France, where I spent most of my two pregnancies and the time between, I was offered months of physiotherapy to get abdominal muscles back into shape after giving birth.
The differences do not stop at the degree of pampering.
In Britain, more than one midwife evangelized about the benefits of giving birth at home, breast-feeding and drug-free “natural” birth. In France, when I inquired about waiting on an epidural, the doctor brushed me off by saying that 97 percent of French women have epidurals — “and for a good reason.” The same doctor informed me about hormones to stop the milk flow if I preferred not to nurse.
… as Avivah Wittenberg-Cox, chief executive of 20-first, a gender management consultancy, points out: “You can tell the different approaches to motherhood in Europe by looking at birthrates.” The higher the birthrate, the higher the proportion of women in work — and the degree of state support for working mothers.
“There are the countries that get it, like France and the Scandinavian countries, and the ones that don’t, like Germany, which has been losing population since 2003,” Ms. Wittenberg-Cox said.

In Iraq, once-dead streets now bustle with Thursday night shoppers and acres of razed buildings have been replanted with palatial new houses

2012-01-02T13:37:00.001Z

In Iraq, the [war's] legacy will be lived, day by day, with fatalism and frustration at the country’s intractable political crises

writes Jack Healy somberly in an article that accompanies photographer David Gonzalez's Portraits of Iraqi Pride.

But it will also be lived with an undercurrent of optimism, particularly among the young, and a broad Iraqi resilience that predates the arrival of any American soldiers.

In Jack Healy's New York Times article, it is almost as an aside that we learn that the hellish nightmare that Iraqis have gone through since George W Bush sent the US Army to flush out Saddam Hussein's dictatorship in "an unpopular war" (aka a disaster) was perhaps not that bad after all.

… if the war gouged Iraq’s soul, it left lighter fingerprints, too.

… Soldiers or journalists returning for the first time since the depths of civil war sometimes marvel at the transformation of public and private life, how once-dead streets now bustle with Thursday night shoppers and acres of razed buildings have been replanted with palatial new houses. The muffled report of car bombs is startling, not inevitable.

Perhaps two million people have fled Iraq, but Iraqis like the ones pictured here have lived through the painful and terrifying gap between then and now. One raised two daughters. Another built a library of cookbooks and opened a pastry shop.

They are living and working and getting engaged and bringing up a new generation. They are more than a postscript to an unpopular war. For Iraq, they are what comes next.

Well? Should It?

2012-01-02T09:18:00.000Z

Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
and never brought to mind?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot
and days of auld lang syne?
(Thanks to Duncan)

That Old Meme: We WOULD Support You, You Understand, exCEPT for Your "Set of ideas" ("That are Cranky, Extreme, and Backward-Looking")

2012-01-01T13:00:00.004Z

It is a sad commentary that this late in the day “the right Republican” does not even seem to be running yet.

Again, The Economist — which just happened not to support George W Bush in 2004 and John McCain in 2008 — proves it has taken a hard turn towards the left as it castigates "compassionless conservatism" in its search for The right Republican.

Rather than answering the call for a credible right-of-centre, pro-business party to provide independents, including this newspaper, with a choice in November, it is saddling its candidate with a set of ideas that are cranky, extreme and backward-looking.

Happy New Year to One and All

2011-12-31T18:06:00.002Z

Gandhi: “If you can’t retain your principles, take out your sword and fight”

2011-12-31T10:44:00.001Z

In its 50 Years Ago section, the International Herald Tribune mentions a Gandhi quote that is not often referred to, reverently, by the war-and-violence-is-always-bad peacenik crowd.

1961 India Abandons Gandhi’s Policy

Premier Jawaharlal Nehru said today [Dec. 28, 1961] that his ruling Congress party had abandoned Mahatma Gandhi’s concept of non-violence. Mr. Nehru told a press conference that peace could not be maintained by cowardice, and that Gandhi’s concept of non-violence implied the disbanding of armies and virtual elimination of police. He defended his decision by quoting Gandhi as saying: “If you can’t retain your principles, take out your sword and fight.” He denied that India’s action constituted an encouragement for Indonesia to take over Dutch New Guinea. While India supports Indonesia’s claim to the Dutch-held territory, he said, he was hoping for a peaceful settlement of the problem. Mr. Nehru said that India had “full justification” for using armed force against Portugal, and by doing so India became the agent of “the irrepressive force of history.”

Will Obama Lose Iraq the Same Way that Carter Lost Iran?

2011-12-30T13:53:00.006Z

In 1979 President Carter "lost Iran"

Gérald Olivier reminds us, as even French commentators (!) start noticing the good tidings that have reached Iraq (well, some of them at least) and start drawing comparisons between Barack Obama and Jimmy Carter.

The whole planet is still paying the price of his blindness. Tomorrow, will we be saying that Obama "lost Iraq"?

For a long time, I have been drawing parallels with Carter (not that there is anything unduly virtuoso in doing so) and, indeed, a number of us made the Jimmy Carter comparison before Barack Obama even won the 2008 election…

What Gingrich's liberal critics have always found insanely maddening about him is a reputation for intellectual depth

2011-12-30T11:10:00.006Z

While Thomas Sowell again endorses Newt Gingrich, the New York Times Magazine publishes an interesting portrait of Newt.

The money quote of Matt Bai's long piece, followed by the concluding sentence:

What Gingrich provides, and what his liberal critics have always found insanely maddening about him, is a reputation for intellectual depth. Among the candidates, he alone combines contempt with credibility, not just giving voice to conservative fury but also making it sound like a legitimate basis for governing.

… The way Newt sees it, fate doesn’t hinge on his being a perfect man. Only a great one.

Can we just take a month or two to contemplate Obama the way we might a painting by Vermeer or any other astounding, ecstatic human achievement?

2011-12-29T12:30:00.003Z

And the winner of the Media Research Center's Obamagasm Award is (dramatic pause)…

…Stephen Marche!

“Can we just enjoy Obama for a moment? Before the policy choices have to be weighed and the hard decisions have to be made, can we just take a month or two to contemplate him the way we might contemplate a painting by Vermeer or a guitar lick by the early-seventies Rolling Stones or a Peyton Manning pass or any other astounding, ecstatic human achievement? Because twenty years from now, we’re going to look back on this time as a glorious idyll in American politics, with a confident, intelligent, fascinating president riding the surge of his prodigious talents from triumph to triumph....’I am large, I contain multitudes,’ Walt Whitman wrote, and Obama lives that lyrical prophecy....Barack Obama is developing into what Hegel called a ‘world-historical soul,’ an embodiment of the spirit of the times. He is what we hope we can be.”

— Esquire’s Stephen Marche in a column for the magazine’s August 2011 issue: “How Can We Not Love Obama? Because Like It or Not, He Is All of Us.”

Check out all of the Media Research Center's Notable Quotable awards…

Because of Bush, "Iraq Has Been Deprived of Part of Its History" as Well as of Its "Stability" Under Saddam

2011-12-28T13:50:00.005Z

Because of George W. Bush, editorializes a Le Monde editorial, Iraq has been deprived of the… "stability" that it apparently enjoyed under Saddam Hussein. And the country "has been deprived of part of its history" — whatever that means…

Specifically, writes Le Monde,

it will be years before Iraq rediscovers the path of stability.

Rediscovers (retrouve); doesn't that mean that Iraq enjoyed stability,i.e., a positive state, before the American invasion (called in Le Monde "Bush's war", as well as "a disaster"), i.e., during the murderous Saddam era?

To be sure, Le Monde goes out of its way to say that nobody will regret "one of the most bloodthirsty tyrants of the Middle East," a man "responsible for the death of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis." Needless to say, it ends all these "to be sures" with a "but" — and what a "but"!

But the Iraqis did not liberate themselves from this tyranny. The United States did not associate them with their [the Americans'] intervention. There are no "Free Iraqi Forces" to accompany the American troops when they enter Baghdad in April 2003.

Yeah? And so (what)? How many legions of Dutchmen, finally, helped in the allies' liberation of the German-occupied Netherlands and how many Filipinos helped in the ouster of the Japanese from the Philippines? Who cares?! As long as the oppression and blood-letting came to an end! This is where Le Monde writes that "Iraq has been deprived of part of its history", as if the family members of the "tens of thousands" who disappeared in the killing fields would not want their oppressor and his henchmen to be overthrown unless it was Iraqis who stood behind the deed and as if they would wait around for months, for years (decades?) more with more thousands of deaths until an Iraqi-led rebellion occurred…

Le Monde goes on with the Bush-lied canard as well as the can't-export-democracy-with-weapons meme, but in the final analysis, it all boils down to everything being the fault of the invasion, aka "Bush's war", from "the destabilization of America's public finances" to "the 2008 crisis" through the current "dead end" in Afghanistan.

In other words, prepare for a shocker — it's all turns out to be… the fault of one George W. Bush.

Update: Will Obama Lose Iraq the Same Way that Carter Lost Iran?

Raúl & Fidel: The Tyranny of the Enemy Brothers

2011-12-27T19:00:00.002Z

Several books about the Castro brothers have been published in the past year, including one by the Cuban liders' own sister and one by Cuban émigré and specialist Jacobo Machover. We learn in Raúl & Fidel: The Tyranny of the Enemy Brothers that, as the title suggests, the two Castros are basically totally opposites, although they — obviously — work together and it could never have worked out any other way.

According to Martine Jacot's Le Monde book review, "Jacobo Machover points out everything that differentiates the two brothers and that has been doing so since their earliest childhood, even though they form a duo that is as inseparable as it is complementary."

Pour soulager la population, Raul voulait rouvrir les marchés paysans ; Fidel s'y opposait. A l'issue d'une discussion orageuse de plusieurs heures dans le bureau du Lider Maximo, d'où fusaient les éclats de voix, Raul obtint finalement gain de cause.
Pour avoir osé aborder les relations entre les frères Castro - secret d'Etat au même titre que la santé de chacun d'eux - Fernando Ravsberg faillit être expulsé de Cuba. Sermonné par Fidel dans les Réflexions qu'il publiait, le journaliste fit amende honorable sur son blog, où il écrivit : "Il n'y a pas de différences entre Raul et Fidel."

"Cubanologue" méticuleux depuis de nombreuses années - et anticastriste affiché -, Jacobo Machover souligne au contraire dans son livre tout ce qui différencie les deux frères depuis leur plus tendre enfance, bien qu'ils forment à la vie à la mort un duo aussi inséparable que complémentaire. Raul n'a jamais eu ni l'envergure intellectuelle, ni la faconde, ni l'habileté politique de Fidel, de cinq ans son aîné. Mais le cadet, organisateur, pragmatique, impitoyable à l'égard de tous les opposants, a permis au "Commandante" de briller de tous ses feux de chef révolutionnaire charismatique, et à son régime de survivre contre vents et marées depuis 1959.

On en apprend davantage sur Raul, dans cet ouvrage documenté, que sur Fidel. Quoi qu'en ait dit plus tard le Lider Maximo, dont le programme était assez confus lorsqu'il est entré en lutte contre la dictature de Batista, c'est Raul, adhérent du Parti communiste dès 1953 (à 22 ans), qui a fini par structurer la pensée désordonnée de son frère. Celui-ci n'embrassa le marxisme-léninisme qu'en 1961. Ernesto Guevara l'y a aidé, qui vénérait Staline (il a signé certaines lettres à sa famille "Staline II"). Fidel, lui, voulait avant tout le pouvoir, un pouvoir total.
Dans la Sierra Maestra, les "barbudos" définissent leur conception d'une "justice révolutionnaire" qui va confiner à la terreur, tranche l'auteur. Raul organisera l'exécution sommaire de dizaines de prisonniers, sans y assister, laissant ce soin au Che.

… Les temps ont changé, même à Cuba, où un moratoire sur les exécutions des condamnés à mort est en vigueur depuis 2003, réaffirmé par Raul en 2008. Toujours pragmatique, le cadet des Castro a converti ses généraux à la gestion, l'armée ayant fait main basse sur l'économie. Tandis que son frère s'efface peu à peu de la scène publique, le président cubain "décollectivise" l'île depuis trois ans. Avec des limites. Jacobo Machover, de même que la plupart des autres "cubanologues" l'affirment : Raul Castro ne sera pas le Gorbatchev de Cuba.

Save the Date

2011-12-26T14:13:00.000Z

Act of Valor will be released in U.S. cinemas on 17 FEB 2011

Merry Christmas

2011-12-25T13:12:00.001Z

After all your obligations are done for Christmas day, and you've done all the reflecting that you can do, might I suggest you settle in and relax with a treasure of a film starring Cary Grant, David Niven, Loretta Young, Monty Woolly, Elsa Lanchester, and one fo the great character actors of his day, James Gleason.

From 1947, this is The Bishop's Wife

Food for Thought On this day in History

2011-12-24T18:19:00.000Z

There was no room at the inn for Mary. Just as would happen today, the innkeeper didn’t announce, “Folks, we have a woman among us who is about to have a child, let’s a couple of families combine rooms so she can have a bed! Let us keep vigil! Let us fast, then feast!”

Just as would happen today, the other guests didn’t rise up and say, “O blessed night, O holy night that God has sent this woman among us.” They gave her a cursory glance, saw she was poor, said, “Oh – too bad,” and sent her to the barn.

Just as today, the clerk at the chain motel would say, “Sorry, fifty-nine dollars plus tax,” and the rest of us would likely watch Mary trail back to her broken-down van as we go on snacking, texting, and scrolling through our Dish listings.

And yet in our better moments, we carry our little prayer around with us as Mary carried Christ. Like Mary, we’re in solidarity with all the poor, all those in exile, all who are powerless, frightened, weak. Like Jesus in today’s Gospel, we rejoice that the kingdom is revealed to the childlike. And just as back then, that prayer moves the world. Just as back then, that prayer is seen by the stars.

Reflection based on
Luke 10: 21-24 by Heather King

When iPhoto's Faces App Gets It Wrong

2011-12-24T13:33:00.009Z

To its credit, iPhoto's face recognition technology does get it right, most of the time.
However…

Look who iPhoto confuses with an Arab Islamic extremist:

Look who iPhoto confuses with a Danish cartoonist:

(Jixie Juny is… my cat!)

Look who iPhoto confuses with (someone
wearing a mask depicting) Jacques Chirac:

Merry Christmas to all our readers and, for that matter, to everybody else…

Just Thinking Inside the Box, Here...

2011-12-23T14:29:00.000Z

I’ve got an idea... let’s deindustrialize and impoverish western civilization on an unproven theory so that we can try to drop the worlds mean temperature by 0.6 degrees!

Little Stickers and Platitudes Insufficient

2011-12-22T16:41:00.000Z

Dateline Tibet: Just when nobody could possibly need Chinese investment in shabby Eurozone bonds, the Dalai Lama is asking Catherine Ashton to keep asking China for EU diplomats to visit Tibet.

Zhu on Monday accused Western governments of funding the Dalai Lama's India-based movement to weaken China for strategic reasons.

He called the Dalai Lama a "savage" who gets young monks to set themselves on fire to provoke anti-Chinese feeling. He added that Chinese intelligence has evidence the head-in-exile of the Kirti monastery in Tibet, Kirti Rinpoche, organised three of the 12 recent self-immolations.

Regime change in China!, they demanded!

"Should the Chinese side reject the request, the EU could issue a strong statement of deep concern and raise the issue at international fora, such as the United Nations Human Rights Council."

To which the response will surely be “keep asking”, or “keep asking and...”

But China's man in charge of Tibet, vice-minister Zhu Weiqun, at a rare meeting with press in Brussels also on Monday, ruled out the possibility.

"China is an independent country and we have the full capacity to handle problems on our territory. So under no circumstances will we allow foreign fact-finding missions into the Tibetan autonomous region ... I don't believe that the interference of any foreign force could achieve anything constructive. Indeed it could very well lead to an escalation of the crisis and to wars," he told this website.

Why Maximize Employment when you can Maximize Welfare ?

2011-12-21T18:40:00.000Z

In addition to Krugmann’s suggestion that the tax rate on “the wealthy”, whichever half or third of earners he thinks that is, should be 70%, the figure is derived by the suggestion that this will “maximize welfare” for the lower and middle class.

Obsessiveness about non-existent social castes and class aside, the correct term is Low/ Middle/ High INCOME. Like this bunghole apologist for State-Command-Economics, it’s rather obvious that the identification is one they’re so fluid in, that they forgot that they’re supposed to hide their pointless society impoverishing agitprop.

Thomas Sowell Endorses Newt Gingrich: "How much weight should we give to Newt's 'baggage' when we are talking about the future of a nation?"

2011-12-20T16:40:00.004Z

If Newt Gingrich were being nominated for sainthood, many of us would vote very differently from the way we would vote if he were being nominated for a political office

writes Thomas Sowell as he endorsed Newt Gingrich over Mitt Romney today.

What the media call Gingrich's "baggage" concerns largely his personal life and the fact that he made a lot of money running a consulting firm after he left Congress.

… But how much weight should we give to this stuff when we are talking about the future of a nation?
This is not just another election and Barack Obama is not just another president whose policies we may not like. With all of President Obama's broken promises, glib demagoguery and cynical political moves, one promise he has kept all too well. That was his boast on the eve of the 2008 election: "We are going to change the United States of America."
Many Americans are already saying that they can hardly recognize the country they grew up in. We have already started down the path that has led Western European nations to the brink of financial disaster.
Internationally, it is worse. A president who has pulled the rug out from under our allies, whether in Eastern Europe or the Middle East, tried to cozy up to our enemies, and has bowed low from the waist to foreign leaders certainly has not represented either the values or the interests of America. If he continues to do nothing that is likely to stop terrorist-sponsoring Iran from getting nuclear weapons, the consequences can be beyond our worst imagining.
Against this background, how much does Newt Gingrich's personal life matter, whether we accept his claim that he has now matured or his critics' claim that he has not?

… Do we wish we had another Ronald Reagan? We could certainly use one. But we have to play the hand we were dealt. And the Reagan card is not in the deck.

… Those who want to concentrate on the baggage in Newt Gingrich's past, rather than on the nation's future, should remember what Winston Churchill said: "If the past sits in judgment on the present, the future will be lost."

All the Newt Gingrich posts on No Pasarán…

Arrogantly Saving the Planet with Bumper Stickers

2011-12-20T15:41:00.000Z

Selfishly mounted on NON-ELECTRIC VEHICLES for that matter!

For Fans of the Deliciously Grim

2011-12-19T13:39:00.000Z

No-one told the operators that the USSR ever really went away.

Then somebody took pictures, recorded audio, and mashed up a remix out of the scraps left behind by a paranoid and repressive state.

Another One Bites the Dust

2011-12-19T11:14:00.005Z

Kim Jong-il, 1941-2011

Writes Julie Anna: It's only fair that after Hitchens and Havel, the dark side also lost a fellow comrade — Kim Jong II

Update: Josh Trevino’s tweet of the year:

I’d like to think God let Havel and Hitchens pick the third.

Berlinski on America

2011-12-18T15:38:00.000Z

Her message works well with those who have known nothing but irrational criticism for it, and anything and everything about it. You know the type. The ones at home and worldwide who emit a Pavlovian response to any subject eliciting a through on the United States. If you’re lucky, you might get some partially rephrased variation on the canned argument that you will hear used again a block away wherever you happen to find yourself.

Berlinski:

America is like no other place on earth. For all the talk of pessimism, recession, decline and fall, this remains--so clearly!--a country of mad, nutty, innocence and optimism; it is a place where everything works; it is a place where every man feels in the depth of his soul that he is the equal of every other man, and it is a country so free, in so many ways, that I doubt I will ever be able to convince anyone who hasn't seen it with his own eyes that this kind of freedom really exists.

That’s the quality of life thing like no other – the one that relates to life itself. It’s normally accompanied by a tut-tutting retort related to anything the critic thinks their nation does well, such as high-speed trains. Trains being a suitable retort to someone, somewhere being happy about the feeling that they have in the depth of their soul which the critic for no particular reason feels a need to retort. I hear engineering can do that for ya.

She does have words with something in the US that doesn’t work, though:

And this brings me to the First Law of Journalism. For some reason, American journalism's just not working. I figure we'll solve this problem; that's what we do. But as of now, it's broken. Exhibit A: Time Magazine's US Story of the Year. The Occupy Wall Street Protests Spread. Well, here I am on Wall Street, or very close to it, anyway, and if this is someone's idea of the top story--or even a major story--he's crazy as an outhouse rat. The top story? In a year, say, in which the United States, for the first time in 62 years, has become a net energy exporter?

So here's my advice. You know what you hear in the news? If you haven't seen it with your own eyes, don't believe it. And don't worry so much about America, it will probably be fine.

It’s worth noting some of the characteristic features of this non-operative piece of gear: its willfully developed its’ disingenuousness through a political ideology that has specific motives and largely looks to two general areas for affirmation: within its own ideological echo chamber, and to specific societies outside of the US that are conspicuously hostile to any outlook that hints at the curtailment of the power of the state or the crowding out of the individuals’ opinion by socially favored castes and ideologies.

But the most astonishing thing about America is this. I know full well that I can go on television, with millions of people watching, and say anything I please about the American government--anything--and even if for some malignant reason I feel like saying something false, gratuitously insulting, bad for the stock market, ruinous to a politician's happy marriage, or frankly seditious, I can just say it, and when I walk out of the studio, whatever I said will be between me and my conscience. It won't even occur to me that I may have exposed myself to an unpleasant risk of a pre-dawn police raid and a show trial. Possibly I'll get a few indignant e-mails.

The color coded-public-conveniences, the high-speed trains, and the stylized buzz of generic modernity are nice, but that isn’t the least bit meaningful where the dominant theme of the information set and public intellectuals is that of the demonizer or the bully.

The stylized buzz of generic modernity does not actually indicate that you’re in civilization.

1961: "the German public, and many German government officials, have regarded the Eichmann trial primarily as an irritating event"

2011-12-18T12:31:00.003Z

…observers could see only limited signs that the [Eichmann] proceedings in Jerusalem occasioned a sympathetic reaction [in Germany] toward the Jews

we learn from the International Herald Tribune's In Our Pages 50 Years Ago department (also of interest: Bin Laden and Eichmann).

1961 Few Germans Back Eichmann Verdict

West Germany’s ambiguous reaction today [Dec. 15, 1961] to the death sentence conferred in Israel on Adolf Eichmann reflected the equivocal attitude which the German public has displayed toward his trial from the outset. There was relatively little indication this afternoon of a belief among the German people that justice triumphed in the Israeli courtroom. From the start, observers here have been aware that the German public, and many German government officials, have regarded the trial primarily as an irritating event which could damage West Germany’s present-day interests. Although there has been extensive coverage of the Eichmann story by German newspapers and television stations, observers could see only limited signs that the proceedings in Jerusalem occasioned a sympathetic reaction toward the Jews.

Good-Bye, Friend

2011-12-18T11:45:00.010Z

Václav Havel, 1936-2011

Děkuji to Instapundit!
If you have a few minutes, you might want to reminisce about the time when Havel criticized Obama (in an affair involving three Nobel Prize winners) and how, when a member of the European élite became involved in Obama criticism, suddenly American liberals like Maureen Dowd found it much harder to accuse the Obama critic of being a clueless racist… Update: just learned that Havel never did receive the Nobel Prize (thanks to Instapundit again); well, as Rand Simberg remarks, he certainly deserved it more than Obama or Arafat, for that matter…

Europeans would Tax Your Wiener

2011-12-17T18:46:00.000Z

That’s right kids - no link, no frankfurter, no banger, no bockwurst or merguez for that matter... is safe, not to mention homemade bake-sale items too. The Svenska Dagbladet reports that the EU Commission has ordered Sweden to levy a 25% VAT on concessions at amateur sporting events. This includes the table a few parents set up at their kids’ intermural and local sport club games.

We're not talking about professional businesses here but about thousands of people who do unpaid work for their children and others. The people's representatives in the EU - the European Parliament - have realised that and supported the exemption by 521 to 50 votes. The Commission however, with its non-elected bureaucrats, is now demanding that what belongs to Caesar must be rendered unto Caesar. To comply with this demand the small clubs will have to become bureaucratised. It's no overstatement to say that the position of the treasurer - already a thankless task - will be harder to fill than ever.

Ironically, even Swedes get that this is micromanagement.

Death of George Whitman, Paris Bookseller and Cultural Beacon

2011-12-17T12:25:00.002Z

George Whitman, the American-born owner of Shakespeare & Company, a fabled English-language bookstore on the Left Bank in Paris and a magnet for writers, poets and tourists for close to 60 years, died on Wednesday in his apartment above the store

writes Marlise Simons.

He was 98. …
More than a distributor of books, Mr. Whitman saw himself as patron of a literary haven, above all in the lean years after World War II, and the heir to Sylvia Beach, the founder of the original Shakespeare & Company, the celebrated haunt of Hemingway and James Joyce.
As Mr. Whitman put it, “I wanted a bookstore because the book business is the business of life.”
Overlooking the Seine and facing the Cathedral of Notre-Dame, the store, looking somewhat beat-up behind a Dickensian facade and spread over three floors, has been an offbeat mix of open house and literary commune. For decades Mr. Whitman provided food and makeshift beds to young aspiring novelists or writing nomads, often letting them spend a night, a week, or even months living among the crowded shelves and alcoves.
He welcomed visitors with large-print messages on the walls. “Be not inhospitable to strangers, lest they be angels in disguise,” was one, quoting Yeats. Next to a wishing well at the center of the store, a sign said: “Give what you can, take what you need. George.” By his own estimate, he lodged some 40,000 people.
…Mr. Whitman was famously frugal and expected the bibliophiles residing in his store to work a few hours every day sorting and selling books. Yet he also invited uncounted numbers of people for weekly tea parties to his own apartment, or for late-night readings enriched with dumplings or pots of Irish stew.
Some guests later described him as a kind and magnetic father figure to needy souls but also as a man who could throw tantrums and preside over the store’s residents, sometimes up to 20 people, like a moody and unpredictable dictator.
Mr. Whitman had variously called himself a communist, a utopian and a humanist. But he may have also been a romantic himself, at least concerning his life’s work. “I may disappear leaving behind me no worldly possessions — just a few old socks and love letters, “ he wrote in his last years. Paraphrasing a line from Yeats, he added, “and my little Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart.”

The EU's Future: No War, but No Growth

2011-12-16T16:34:00.000Z

Just about 15 years ago, Martin Feldstein, the Harvard economist and former adviser to Ronald Reagan, wrote that the coming of a common currency to Europe promised “incompatible expectations about the sharing of power.” There were future conflicts in play, he argued, making an intra-European war “too real a possibility to ignore.”

That is how John Vinocur starts his latest International Herald Tribune article.

Over-the-top, Reaganite musings, some said. Neither the great bang of war nor its whimpers has materialized.
Still, without a shot being fired, Europe and its project to achieve power and greatness is in many ways demoralized, even devastated.
After another in a series of debt and deficit crisis summit meetings last week, the European Union, still uncertain about eliminating the markets’ disbelief in its probity, has locked itself into a survival plan that turns the euro zone’s back on growth to seek stability alone.
The results of the decision: A perspective of stagnation as the culmination of 18 months of fibbing and stalling about Europe’s financial and economic reality that markets saw through and may continue to doubt. And a gap in enthusiasm (in truth there is none) between the E.U.’s common currency and its citizens — a Brussels official describes Europeans regarding the euro as a “convenience” rather than a necessity — at a moment when the euro zone’s leaders have chosen to confront a likely recession with savings and rigor but no parallel plan for a surge in activity.
… Mr. Feldstein’s war, of course, has not occurred, and the achievements of the E.U.’s common currency are real. But he had a sharp sense for trouble.
… So: The E.U.’s situation about a decade after the coming of the euro is, no war, but no hard-wired plan for growth. And now, after the French fade, an absence of any member standing up as expansion’s advocate while the chancellor talks about a marathon of “stabilizing” to last a decade.

Keep Thinking, Butch

2011-12-16T15:39:00.000Z

Thanks to ~~Libération~~ Propagandastaffel, we discover that movements and theories are invented by the leftists and postmodern freaks that describe those theories to other leftists and postmodern freaks like Libé

We are indebted to Michel Foucault for identifying, in his January 1979 Collège de France lecture (The birth of bio-politics), the originality of this school of liberalism, which makes constitutional regulation and judges the levers and principle guarantors of the construction of a political order founded on a strict respect for economic freedom and free competition.

Bio-politics. Whatever, Spanky. On planet earth, we call this mental masturbation. What they’re calling “Liberalism” was identified long before 1979.

To that end, they desperately try to understand the world around them that they’ve been ignoring for decades, the dead secular Gods of nationalist-socialist mythology are being dredged up in this case to explain Angela Merkel’s views on European economics. It’s as if using big names mean that they know enough to appear to be correcting her. After all, she’s though to have all the money that these finger-wagging ~~marvels~~ ignorant jokers want hidden under her bed or something.

Why would they then not resort to this tortured explanation of the lack of EU level legal empowerment of the ECB in the way the US Federal Reserve can act. Hence, they go hat-in-hand to Berlin, and the illiterates at Libé think this is some sort of dark art for reasons that their dyspeptic leftist frustrations with the lack of dictatorial control in their favor can’t digest.

Her direction has once again confirmed the precarious status of political legitimacy in the European Union: the credibility of the euro cannot be safeguarded by apolitical measures alone.

Further to the sick penchant to claim by identification, other miscellaneous vilified historical characters are used. This is meant to lend some veneer of accuracy and intelligence to the specious practice of thinking that you’ve just named things for the first time because you didn’t think they existed before, at least not in the low-altitude the left orbits in.

This is not a Bismarckian policy, as Arnaud Montebourg has so awkardly asserted, but one that is based on one of the most well-established schools of liberal thought, “ordoliberalism”, which emerged between the wars in Germany and was popularised in the postwar period as “the social market economy” by the influential Christian-Democrat Ludwig Erhard, who was Minister of Economics from 1949 to 1963 and Federal Chancellor from 1963 to 1966.

Otto von Bismark could not be reached for comment.

From the Ongoing Chronicles of Weird European Pederasty

2011-12-15T15:09:00.000Z

And it’s from one of those enlightened societies again:

A 62-year-old man from Drammen in southern Norway has received a 7-year jail sentence after he was found guilty of sexually abusing his two young daughters.

Kid, if you don’t want to ride in the van, don’t take the candy, I say. Otherwise it’s back to an enlightened solution in that enlightened society: no real punitive consequences.

He denied committing the offences and told the court the older girl’s claims were financially motivated.

The district court, however, found the accounts of both girls to be credible and ordered their father to pay each of them non-pecuniary damages of 200,000 kroner ($33,600).

Elsewhere: real consequences await those commiting the grave crime of trying to introduce Ms Supply to Mr. Demand.

A Russian smuggler is detained for transporting underage butter across state lines.

Last Friday, customs officers stopped a Russian at the Norwegian-Swedish border and seized 90 kilos of butter stashed in his car.

Why is this such a severe social disturbance of the placid nation proud of it’s orderly ways, laws, solidarity, and nicely concealed child molestation?

Norway has a butter monopolist called “Tine” that is deliberately protected from foreign competitors by government-imposed import tariffs.

Narrative Watch

2011-12-15T11:29:00.003Z

A downgrade of France's AAA credit rating would not be justified and ratings agencies are making decisions based more on politics than economics,European Central Bank policymaker Christian Noyer said on Thursday.

"In the arguments they (ratings agencies) present, there are more political arguments than economic ones," said Noyer, the head of the Bank of France and a member of the ECB's governing council.

Yeah, why can't these ratings agencies be more like our elected and un-elected elites who .... ummmm, well ..... you know, present arguments based upon economic and not political ones.

"Worse Than Bush!": Gingrich and His "Criminal Remarks" Are Driving Frenchmen Up the Wall

2011-12-15T10:55:00.012Z

Last week, he was a real bad guy (as well as the Big Bad Newt), earlier this week, he was electrifying (in the negative sense), as well as divisive, and today (quoting a Jonah Goldberg article; not surprisingly, MSM reporter Corine Lesnes reads the Los Angeles Times but not Townhall), he is Newtzilla! And all that in Le Monde's… headlines!

Of course, we also get comments from horrified readers complaining of Newt's "criminal" remarks, sputtering that "Gingrich is worse than Bush," not only in terms of fiscal matters, "but also in terms of foreign policy", and regretting, basically, the existence of elections and of democracy…

Add to that the opening sentence which may be one of the most condescending in the history of the mainstream media:

Despite his Playmobil-style haircut and the face of an aging baby, Newt Gingrich and his carnivorous smile are not fooling anyone.

Malgré sa coupe de cheveux façon Playmobil et son visage de poupon vieillissant, le sourire carnassier de Newt Gingrich ne trompe personne.

The Corinne Lesnes article goes on to refer to the "savvy" Newt as "controversial" (we already had him being divisive) and to call his policies "at best unrealistic and at worst demagogic."

…les propositions de Gingrich ne brillent pas par leur originalité. … ce plan paraît au mieux irréaliste, au pire démagogique.

Corinne Lesnes goes on to quote… Mother Jones and the New Yorker, ending her piece — from an allegedly serious daily, aka France's newspaper of record — with John Cassidy's tongue-in-cheek "festive" list of the "40 Nicest Things [You Can Think of to Say] About Newt" (Number 1: “He’s the one to get Obama reelected”).

Et ses adversaires ne vont pas le rater. La chasse est déjà ouverte : sur le mode de la dérision, The New Yorker a organisé un appel à contributions pour établir une liste des "40 choses les plus sympathiques que l'on peut dire sur Newt Gingrich". Numéro un de ce vrai-faux concours de gentillesse : "Gingrich est celui grâce à qui Obama sera réélu."

That's right, the French are echoing liberals' snarkiness and getting voluble about the Republican's embrace of Gingrich ensuring Obama's reelection.

Avec un peu de chance les républicains l’élisent... et le peuple américain effaré renouvelle B Obama !

At which point, all we can say is this: there can't be many better arguments in favor of an American's opinions and policies being the correct ones than the fact that he leaves the French spitting with contempt and hating his guts. And there can hardly be a better argument for the that man to run for president of the United States on the Republican ticket.

Hey, Living isn’t Everything when it Comes to, um, Living...

2011-12-14T14:14:00.000Z

Economic power is not the only criterion for global power. What matters is how political systems respond to new crises. And from this perspective, the EU is still in with a chance, writes Dutch historian Dirk-Jan van Baar. Excerpts.

Writes Dirk-Jan van Baar in de Volkskrant, ignoring THE LAST TWO YEARS OF EUROPEAN FISCAL CHAOS AND LACK OF LEADERSHIP.

Add to this rthe oft-used argument that political power is not the only criterion for global power and that military power is not the only criterion for global power, and you get the perfect rationalization for 500 million of the world’s richest people free-riding on the backs of the rest of humanity.

Again.

Taking passivity and inaction to a higher, more noble and superior plane, he goes on with a predictable related theme of somehow comparing Europe to the US, for which there is no rational basis to do so in this context:

The American president is behaving accordingly : he thinks America must get its own economic house in order before embarking on further foreign interventions. If even the most powerful man in the world thinks that Washington has taken on too much, then one can tend to agree with historian Paul Kennedy (who wrote on the theme in his 1987 work The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers) that America is suffering from imperial overstretch.

The search for analogues and examples, I suppose, must go on.

Not only is Newt Gingrich divisive, he goes as far as "plunging the party into a deep state of division"

2011-12-14T13:18:00.006Z

Newt Gingrich is electrifying America's Republicans, writes Corine Lesnes in Le Monde, before pulling out that age-old leftist expression, he is "divisive." Not only is he divisive, nor is he simply divisive, he goes as far as "plunging the party into a deep state of division."

Newt Gingrich s'est installé en tête de la course à l'investiture pour l'élection présidentielle de novembre 2012 aux Etats-Unis, plongeant le parti dans un profond état de division. Aucun des candidats en lice ne semble en mesure de "marier le soutien de la base et de celui de l'establishment", relève Nate Silver, l'auteur du blog électoral du New York Times.

… Un vent d'affolement s'est emparé de la classe politique républicaine, qui a commencé à faire rempart contre la candidature Gingrich. Les caciques ont l'oeil sur les sondages qui montrent que Mitt Romney est le républicain le plus menaçant pour Barack Obama.
"Personne à Washington ne pense que Gingrich peut gagner. Et Washington est l'endroit où on le connaît le mieux", a résumé Kathleen Parker, une éditorialiste républicaine, dans le Washington Post..

Then the woman who called Newt a real bad guy calls on… the New York Times' in-house RINO for testimony!

David Brooks, l'un des éditorialistes conservateurs du New York Times, généralement magnanime, lui a attribué tous les traits excessifs des années 1960 : "Narcissisme, autosatisfaction, intempérance." Comme le savent tous ceux qui ont travaillé avec lui, "il causerait un tort important au conservatisme et au Parti républicain s'il était désigné", écrit-il.

Narcissism, self-satisfaction, intemperance? Doesn't that sound like somebody by the name of… Barack Obama to you?

5 Dead, 123 Wounded During Attack on Belgian Christmas Market: Some Politically Incorrect Points You Will Hardly See Many of in the MSM

2011-12-13T20:15:00.007Z

Five people killed in a single assassin's attack on a Liège Christmas market, 123 wounded (BBC Videos) besides the killer who committed suicide immediately afterwards.

In such a bloody and tragic context, how many politically incorrect details are we allowed to point out straight away?

• Well, besides the fact that all this occurred — yet again — in famously (and proudly) gun-free Europe, and
• besides the fact that the name of the killer who struck at a Christmas market is Arabic and/or Muslim (Nordine Amrani), how about
• the fact that if this recidivist had not been let out of jail on conditional release, five people would be alive today while 123 of their countrymen would not be in hospital. Indeed, had the jail authorities, like most of Europe's political authorities, not suffered from "tolerance"-itis©, all these scores of people would still be looking forward to a merry Christmas with their families…

Related: For a gun-free zone like Europe (always ready to give lessons to clueless Yanks regarding such things as violence, trusting in the police, and gun control versus the obsolete right to bear arms), France for one has recently seen a plethora of crimes with automatic pistols, Kalashnikovs, and explosives.

• Violence and Gun Control: Facts Which Europeans and American Leftists Conveniently Ignore

Permanent Pre-Pubescence

2011-12-13T16:27:00.000Z

All of our problems today come from trying to maintain an unsustainable form of social economy, and yet the moaners want more of what they think other people have.

Instead they resort to tortured logic:

In practice, liberalisation and austerity are making matters far worse. In Greece, Ireland and Portugal, adjustment packages imposed from the outside but with the collusion of domestic governments have resulted in sharp falls in economic activity, large rises in unemployment and painful social dislocation. Government deficits have risen.

Work by Research on Money and Finance and others has shown that the build-up of debt in peripheral economies was not the result of government profligacy. The fundamental cause has been diverging competitiveness between the economies of the periphery and those of the core, above all Germany. By heavily repressing the wages of its own workers, Germany ensured that there was no chance for peripheral economies to compete, locked as they were into monetary union and unable to devalue their currencies.

So if you don’t buy the line that it’s all the fault of people trying to take the giveaway monster, then at least blame Germans for “repression,”

AKA harmonizing their wages with the rest of the zone.

This divergence of competitiveness resulted in entrenched structural imbalances between core and periphery, leading to surpluses for Germany and deficits for others. These deficits in peripheral countries were matched by borrowing abroad resulting in accumulation of private and public debt. When the sub-prime crisis struck, public deficits soared as private liabilities were taken onto government books, tax revenues fell and social security payments rose.

Which is another way of trying to say that governments borrowed more because there was no income left to tax. This may be the first time any main-line European brain has thought of this concept. Too bad that the conclusion drawn isn’t the obvious one: that spending is too high. In fact the though is being used to prop up an even stranger and less plausible argument: that wages and prices should be fixed after the fashion of wartime America and corroded Marxist-Leninism, and that German wages should be structurally fixed higher for similarly simplistic social effects.

So if the European states are all hunters, without also mentioning the Dutch, the Germans should (for the sake of equality of outcome) set out unarmed. Nonetheless in the interest of public self-pity, even those they employ should imagine that they are Bambi in this scene.

As always, even the “austerity” of curtailing middle-class welfare by trying to get a grip on public service pensions, staff size, and the like is characterized as a political fascism:

As the eurozone crisis worsens, proposals to resolve it are becoming increasingly authoritarian. Two in particular are now widely advocated by commentators across the political spectrum. First, that technocratic governments should be installed to carry out necessary reforms in stricken economies. Second, that in the short-term the European Central Bank could halt the crisis, if only Germany could be persuaded to drop its opposition.

Hilariously, the Bundesbank’s only real position is to not lend for the sake of public spending, but only debt restructuring.

This, of course, cannot stand. There’s a political cadre to fund, and votes to buy at a tense, critical time. The really funny part is that the same Germany that it is imagined could be compelled to go naked in order to clothe her neighbors is now a straw-man synonymous with “the bosses”, like the purposely misunderstood “1%” of the Occupy Wall Street complex of economic illiteracy, demonization and ignorance.

How far do you get saying “you’re just plain evil because of who you are – now buy me lunch and give me your shoes” ?

Summing up that whole Eurozone problem thingy

2011-12-13T16:05:00.002Z

Starting at 0:51 and crescendo-ing with Mdme De Farge speaking on behalf all Eurozoneans at 1:16......

Italy's New National Hero Is an Accountant and a Disciple of Hayek to Boot

2011-12-13T16:00:00.005Z

Italy's latest national hero is a protester of a different sort, writes Philippe Ridet in Le Monde, an accountant and a protester who does not condemn the capitalist system to boot. Au contraire. Giuliano Melani, who has been taking out ads in Italian newspapers to suggest in what places his countrymen should invest their money, is a disciple of Friedrich Hayek and Karl Popper.

Cet "indigné" d'un nouveau genre ne condamne pas l'économie capitaliste, bien au contraire. Cet admirateur des économistes autrichiens Friedrich Hayek et Karl Popper la voudrait plus claire et transparente : "Personne ne sait comment fonctionne le budget de l'Etat. Moi-même, j'ai mis trois jours pour trouver tous les chiffres. L'information financière, dit-il, est présentée comme occulte et ésotérique. Mais l'économie n'est pas si compliquée. Il faut juste qu'on l'explique mieux. Pour cela, il aurait fallu qu'on nous parle moins de Ruby", lâche-t-il dans une allusion au dernier des scandales sexuels de Silvio Berlusconi.

Der Doppelte Kotau

2011-12-12T15:30:00.000Z

TAKI’S MAGAZINE takes a look into the absurd world of European politics through the lens of German self-regard.

I can tell you that it seems to have always been guilt and shame based, exceedingly simplistic, and reminiscent of chattering and political classes who rarely contact reality.

It ain’t pretty.

Perhaps the most comical argument for bailing out Greece has come from Merkel’s CDU Labor Minister and outspoken feminist Ursula von der Leyen, who has been vocal in her support for “helping the Greeks get back on their feet.” In a recent appearance on a weekend talk show hosted by TV celebrity Günther Jauch, Ms. von der Leyen went after those who criticize Greece’s spending habits and bloated state bureaucracy. According to van der Leyen, such a captious judgment does not take into account the close resemblance between the “Greeks at the present hour and the Germans in 1945, when we were a battered people.” To the Labor Minister, assisting the Greeks seems the proper thing to do. It is “like the CARE-packages that the Americans sent us after the War.”

Remember the asinine prejudice about German policy and motives having something to do with a disappointingly false reputation for kinkiness? Well here’s it’s flip side: the equally asinine need to ameliorate the no-longer-existent harm caused by an imaginary “national personality attribute” by sufferers of the cult of leftist victim theory who so believe in that the notion of class warfare can have a “national personality”, that they see it all within the prism of their own Stockholm Syndrome.

This last comparison borders on the lunatic, except when a German politician is trying to be “nice.” Then it simply reflects the dominant national culture. Perhaps the Germans should insist on a fundamental right which the Americans once exercised: to carpet with bombs an enemy country and then hang its leaders as war criminals. Once having done this, the Germans could get on with the good stuff, such as providing those they’ve mercilessly “battered” with chocolate bars and sewing kits. Like other German politicians, von der Leyen is accustomed to the double kowtow (der doppelte Kotau), which involves simultaneously sucking up to the Yankees and non-German Europeans. Whereas Germans were once feared for lunging at their neighbors’ necks, now they’re delighted to be at everyone’s feet.

After all if the European public, and particularly German society, is good at one thing, it’s licking the boot that kicks you. This comes well after one is conditioned into the old misguided belief that the state is the only vehicle of relief, scholarship, and humanism itself.

Recognized by some is the malleability of governance theory to the convenience of leaders avoiding verbal confrontation within the EU tribe. It’s consequences are themselves frequently absurd and remind one of the forehead-slap-worthy hijinks of the UN. The difference being that states regularly ignore the suggestions and dictates of the “singular world body”:

Presumably the banks, which made loans to the Greeks at the German government’s urging, will have to be saved as a first step to dealing with Greek insolvency. An article in the relatively right-wing Preußische Allgemeine Zeitung explains a ridiculous situation: The Germans have the same representation in the EU Council as Cyprus and Malta combined, yet they contribute 28% of the organization’s available capital as opposed to the 0.3% given by Cyprus and Malta. Germans are watching their earnings decline while paying for other countries’ insolvency, yet they seem determined to make their problem even worse. Although Germans gripe about the bailout, the vast majority support leftist parties that will give away even more of their money to foreign governments. German voters snub and even despise parties such as the Republikaner which oppose the bailouts.

All of whom are wrong in their own way, considering that they are an economic area as dependant on exports as they are consumption, and find themselves competing with Burmese indentured labor and a Chinese workforce laboring under Pinkerton gang-pressers, but have upward labor cost pressure priced in an inflated currency. If growth is your only way out of this pickle, even the fiscal hawks have a few more realities to embrace, and they sure as hell don’t involve reputations for national kinkiness and images of the not-yet-brought-low beating their fellow Europeans into servile callowness.

Order Your New Pet Newt!

2011-12-12T13:15:00.008Z

Seventh in New York Times article popularity among Gray Lady readers is a Brian McFadden cartoon mocking Newt Gingrich on the Opinion Pages (click on link to see a larger image).

Which is fair. And — indeed — even (more than) a little funny.

But still. How many leftist cartoons have we seen regarding Barack Obama, compared with conservatives like Newt or with a Republican president like Dubya? And how many (of these relatively rare) Obama jokes made it, in terms of popularity, to the New York Times' top 10?

What is it about "focusing humor and satire on the people currently in power" (not their out-of-power opponents, not just them or overwhelmingly them, at least) that leftist writers (and readers!), aka self-declared objective neutrals, do not understand?

(And check the right-hand side of Brian McFadden's Think Tank cartoon: besides the fact that conservatives — unlike liberals — are not supposed to teach citizens "valuable life lessons" (what a ridiculous conceit!), how dare Newt treat reporters of the mainstream media bent with anything but the utmost respect?!)

Germany’s New Morgenthau Plan

2011-12-11T13:30:00.000Z

Two Norwegian owned gas-fired power plants in northern Germany, critical to complementing the nation’s planned wind power capacity when the winds aren’t blowing, will be shut down. Because they’re operating at 20% capacity, they are not economical. The result of the shutting down of these two massive plants will be that the power will simply go out when the wind isn’t blowing hard enough.

Financial Times Deutschland reported:

"We will possibly need to make more power intervention," [Ed.: subsidies] said a spokeswoman for network operator Tennet. Of the failure of the two gas-fired power plants in the north: "If it were up to southern Germany, the situation would be difficult." Because of high wind power capacity in the North German Plain, the gas-fired power plants are seldom used, found Tzschoppe’s closure plan report. The two plants combined generate nearly 1,000 megawatts of power - almost as much as a nuclear power plant. Best run in operation 1000 to 2000 hours per year, they have been running only a few hundred hours.

Plans on track to deindustrialize? Yes. In more ways than one, we finally get to see the structured enfeeblement of an advanced society in action.

The Federal Network Agency has not scheduled a closing date of the Statkraft plants. After last week’s submitted monitoring report, the Authority expects to terminate in addition to about 3,000 megawatts of nuclear power plants are coal power from the grid in 2013, but no gas-fired power plants. Power shortages threaten the network, especially in southern Germany.

And now for the ugly truth: business defined by political goals fail.

But in the face of high gas costs and relatively low electricity prices were to achieve even with new gas-fired power plants currently barely adequate margins indicated Tzschoppe.

And what it all boils down to is the money that isn’t there, which “to save the planet” will become a cost that they will have to drop on the foot of a public that doesn’t have much of a choice in where their power comes from.

The price of electricity would have to reach reach 85 to 90 euros per megawatt hour in order to justify investments in new gas-fired power plants - about 50 percent more than it costs now.

The exhausted and angry postwar allies couldn’t have done any better.

Sarkozy to DSK Pre-IMF: "In the States, Women Are Different; I'm Warning You, Be Careful with the Women"

2011-12-11T12:39:00.003Z

Ariane Chemin has a major report in Le Monde about what Nicolas Sarkozy knew and didn't know regarding Dominique Strauss-Kahn's weaknesses (penchant for girls, etc)…

Les deux hommes – ex-députés, avocats d'affaires, venus à la politique sans passer par l'ENA – s'apprécient. Ils se fréquentaient de temps à autre, avec leurs épouses. En 1993, au début de la cohabitation, un premier dîner a eu lieu au Fouquet's : Anne Sinclair présente le ministre du budget à son mari, qui vient de perdre les législatives. Ils se retrouvent sur l'île de la Jatte, chez Cécilia et Nicolas, ou chez le couple Strauss-Kahn-Sinclair, avenue du Général- Maunoury, dans le 16^e arrondissement, ou encore chez Jacques Attali pour une pendaison de crémaillère. Entre eux, une forme d'estime et de connivence sociale.
A son "frère" Brice Hortefeux, Nicolas Sarkozy glisse un jour : "Quand je pense comme on m'a emm… pour mon escalier de Neuilly, je ne sais pas comment lui ferait dans une campagne !" A Alain Minc, quand les préparatifs de la course à l'Elysée du socialiste deviennent patents : "Tu sais bien qu'il ne PEUT pas se présenter…"

Et à l'intéressé, les yeux dans les yeux, un jour que le patron du FMI a fait le voyage de Washington jusqu'à la rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré : "Dominique, toi et moi, on ne nous aime pas, on est pareils, on est des métèques, on aime le fric et les femmes, raconte Michel Taubmann, le biographe de DSK. Mais les femmes, aux Etats-Unis, ce n'est pas pareil. Je te préviens, fais attention avec les femmes."