¡No Pasarán!: 09/10/2006

Saturday, September 16, 2006

Blair has already been replaced

French ex-Prime Minister Laurent Fabius has stated that "Nicolas Sarkozy is Bush's poodle". Un peu fort de café de la part d'un type qui était vide-couille pour Mitterand. It should be noted that Fabius' rabid anti-Americanism has already proved costly and life threatening for his fellow citizens.

Don't you go shaking that thang.

MK points out the one thing the French won’t regulate. Showing rare wisdom in not making yet another law for yet another occasion, it seems to result in do-gooders annoying other do-gooders - always a good source of comedy.the fuse is lit!

Understatement of the century

'L'Europe ne dit pas ce qu'elle fait ; elle ne fait pas ce qu'elle dit'.

-- Pierre Bourdieu

Friday, September 15, 2006

What will be has always been

Europe’s main export: mental masturbation.

Published in Le Monde on 11 September, as Americans commemorated the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks and their victims. From Plantu’s pea-brained intellect: "all the same." Founding democracies and Islamist fascism are morally equivalent.

Well, Whaddja Expect? It's Only Been Six Years, After All…

I thought America's president was supposed to be the big idiot, but France's newspaper of reference still can't get the name of Georges Bush right after six years…

Time to Listen to All Sides of the Debate…

Meanwhile, Le Monde continues its webchats with experts on the subject of terrorism, Iraq, and everything else in the universe, all of whom, from Rémy Ourdan to Jean-Luc Marret, happen to be French and all of whom just happen to know all the mistakes, all the errors, all the idiocies, and all the fallacies in logical thinking of the Americans (and the neo-con hawks) and few to none of those (always cropping up are those ubiquitous "buts") of the reasonable and ever-lucid French (and members of the peace camp).

Update (thanks to Tom Pechinski): with regards to double standards and terrorism, Gateway Pundit has quite something to say…

A nation of animal lovers gets their priorities straight.

...If’n you get my drift. A mangy, herpetic, dead ape sparks more fear than “superfriends” style terror threats.

No, I really don’t want to know why. Shouldn't they be going apeshit as usual?

No comment

And your proof is, um, where?

...”security here = war there”...

Mocking, obviously – but also absent reality. War THERE has meant no WAR here. I guess that also means that they admit it's a war, and that terrorist shitsacks are after civilization - even though I'm quite sure they wouldn't ever consciously imply that. I guess history just isn’t “truthy” enough to fit Le Monde’s world view, mmm, okay? Alles klar, Herr Kommissar.

First Canada, Then Germany…

Now France. (Or should we say "the treacherous sons of France"? (merci à Tom Pechinski et Arf who comments that it "Looks like anti-Americanism didn't save them") Neither did anything else — see the poster that didn't do much good.)

Al Qaeda's deputy leader Ayman al-Zawahri … urged a militant Algerian Islamist group to punish 'Crusader nation' France, even though it vehemently opposed the U.S.-led war in Iraq

PS: Notice how Le Monde buries France's being a target deep inside its article while its headline ignores the fact that France is a terrorist group's "enemy number 1".

Moving the Goalposts

The biggest news item of the summer was not the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, nor was it the foiled terrorist attacks on U.S.-bound airliners flying out of London

writes Ben Duffy.

The biggest story of the summer was a report from the National Ground Intelligence Center (NGIC), which announced the discovery of approximately 500 chemical munitions uncovered in Iraq.

In other words, WMD have been found in Iraq. While you might expect this bombshell (pun intended) to rock the Iraq war debate, nothing of the sort has happened. Quickly deemed insignificant, this report has been ignored by the so-called "anti-war" Left and the laughably "non-partisan" American media.

In order to justify putting this incredibly significant story on the back page, the media needed a reason why these chemical munitions were not really consequential after all. They came up with two such justifications.

Read the rest…

Thursday, September 14, 2006

What passes for "human warmth" these days in EUtopia

Indeed, how very “genuine”. This guy thinks that a family’s argumentative “raging out” and ignoring paying guests is some kind of floor show:

I just this week read a story in Ouest-France about how this whole category has exploded in the last 15 years in France, growing from barely 12,000 to 34,000 official chambres d'hôtes (this includes everything labelled Gîtes de France, Clévacances, Accueil Paysan, Fleurs de Soleil or Bienvenue au Château).

They're so great… cheaper than a hotel, but often much prettier, with breakfast and sometimes other real meals on top, plus, just like the article said, they are overflowing with "authenticity" and "human warmth". I just love all that human warmth.
Just this past week, for example, my family and I stayed in one in Tours and it was so warm at the dinner table it got hot. There was shouting and table-pounding, bad language and a mild-mannered Belgian couple fleeing for their room. I never had so much fun — and all just part of the service.

Uh, like NOT. It’s called ambivalence to people and their feelings, even if they are paying guests. It sounds like they would pay more attention to their cattle.

September 11 Wall Street Sonnets and Other New York City Poems

45 New York City poems by the Wall Street Poet, Eugene Schlanger, in a special English-French bi-lingual edition now available for North American readers (European orders will be taken starting next week).

September 11 Wall Street Sonnets

Signs Of Wonder
The Rain
Former Friends And Lovers
So Many And So Few
Afghanistan
Traders’ Call To Arms
A New Saloon
The Wrong Direction
The Babbling Technician
Unaccounted For
Flags And Pins
Sikhs Are Mistaken For Arabs And Attacked
Benevolence And Greed
Porters And Promoters
Cigarettes
The Fixed Income Salesman’s Pitch
Nothing Happened
Stuyvesant High School
Bagpipes
Fin de siècle

2002 - The Return

Return to the Financial District
Afternoon Interlude At Trinity Church
Advice to Tourists

2003 - Death Again

Wall Street
Counselors
Made For Television
Disgracing Ground Zero
In Memory Of Michael Leonard
Death Again Descends
The Children’s Crusade
8 Mute Minimal Designs

2004 - At War

In God We Trust
Meditation In A Time Of War
View From The Millenium Hilton
Economic Sense
Towards An Anti-War Poetry Reading
Greenwich Village On Veterans Day
Monument For Civil Servants

2005 - For the Corporate Dead

Reading Balzac Reveals Intimacies
The Desecration Of Ground Zero
How To Master Grief
Against Convention At Ground Zero
For the Corporate Dead
The Political Season
The Sentinel

We Are All New Yorkers

Elegy for Daniel Pearl

Panzer Pope

Bog blast them.

France's Forgotten Journalist

Florence [Aubenas] was the beneficiary of strong media involvement because she is a journalist

Paulo A Paranagua reports Corinne Vallerent as saying last October, as the glitterati of Paree joined for a tear fest for Ingrid Betancourt, a French hostage held by Columbian rebels (needless to say, the article's final sentence has singer Renaud discover that the bottom line of the tragic situation is that the culprit is… American dollars).

As for Aubenas herself (who recently decided to quit Libération with three colleagues for ~~principled~~ monetary grounds), her latest book has to do with an infamous pedophilia trial in France (which evolved into in a scandal in its own right when it was learned that for the French justice ministry had botched the investigation, condemning several innocent people). Regarding her time as a hostage in Iraq, strangely enough, she has never written a book about that experience.

When Jacques Chirac spoke about the release of Florence Aubenas in June 2005 (read about the mysteries surrounding the release of the French journalist and of Hussein Hannoun), the president added that he hoped that this would not let the French forget France's other hostages throughout the world, the example he chose to mention being Ingrid Betancourt (who has spent now four Christmases in captivity in Columbia's jungles; whose husband has nominated the disappeared woman as candidate for president of Columbia; who, as explained in Jacques Thomet's Ingrid Betancourt, was the object of an Indiana Jones-type secret rescue mission [Opération 14 juillet] in 2003; and whose friend, Clara Rojas, is little heard of in France although she vanished on the same trip as Ingrid).

What was important, though, was the vanished journalist whom Chirac did not mention.

On the 150th day of the Aubenas kidnapping, 150 ships gathered in Marseille, reports Patrice Claude, and for the 170th day, a banner was due to be unveiled atop the Mont Blanc. At one point, an Airbus A380 carried her and Hannoun's names on its flanks.

Le Monde marked the hundredth day of the disappearance of Florence Aubenas with an opinion piece on its front page by her mother Jacqueline, accompanied inside by Giuliana Sgrena's l etter to Florence and her chauffeur.

Besides saying she will never feel totally free until the fate of Nicola Calipari's death is cleared up (apparently she doesn't read the news, but then again that would be the type of news that newspapers like hers would not report — no, what Sgrena means is that she won't rest until it is determined that the Italian secret serviceman's death is irrefutably seen as an integral part of Uncle Sam's illegal, reprehensible, and criminal venture in Iraq), the Italian (cough) journalist wrote:

I ignore who your kidnappers are, but even the most ferocious of warriors can not remain insensitive to these calls [to free you]. If they truly want the liberation of Iraq, they cannot deprive Iraqis from their freedom of information. Because our only objective is that to inform, to make the world aware of the suffering of the Iraqi people under the occupation. The kidnappers they too will understand that, you will make them understand, I am sure of it.

My destiny crossed yours, the people who demonstrated for our freedom and for that of Iraq on the squares of Rome and Paris made no distinction. Florence, Hussein, Giuliana and, now, the Romanian journalists.

The Romanian journalists? Yes, the French media never made much of it, but for almost two months, three Romanian journalists went missing in Baghdad. (In fact, the media made so little of this kidnapping that the RSF page and the Sgrena letter were the first place and the first time I heard of it.)

Meanwhile, there is a missing French reporter who has been largely forgotten in the deal. His photo is missing from the posters "at every step, in every city", and even with an association devoted to him, there is nowhere as much media hoopla as there is for Florence.

Although every so often, some noise arises for Guy-André Kieffer (notably when an Ivory Coast officer was arrested in early February and when those responsible for his kidnapping seemed to have been identified in early September), the level of decibels is nowhere near that for Aubenas or that for Christian Chesnot and Georges Malbrunot, the first two French reporters to be kidnapped by "ferocious warriors". Just see the difference in the mobilisation for Aubenas and in the demonstration for Kieffer.

France on Friday [April 15, 2005] showed its support for a French reporter and her Iraqi interpreter taken hostage in Baghdad 100 days ago with torch-lit rallies, messages of support in the media and balloons.

The country's newspapers ran front-page headlines, television networks used corner logos and radio stations broadcast messages of support to mark the 100th day in captivity for reporter Florence Aubenas and Hussein Hanun al-Saadi. …

On Saturday, 100,000 balloons [were] released in 100 cities across the country in a sign of support for the reporting duo.

Compare with:

Members of Reporters without Borders (RSF) on Friday threw buckets of liquid chocolate at the gates of the Ivorian embassy in Paris, demanding information about a journalist who vanished in Abidjan a year ago.

"We're throwing chocolate because it's the government's 'slush fund' and everyone knows that (Ivorian) President Laurent Gbagbo is responsible for the disappearance of Guy-André," RSF secretary general Robert Menard told AFP.

Guy-André Kieffer, a Franco-Canadian independent journalist, disappeared from a crowded shopping mall in Ivory Coast's commercial hub Abidjan in April last year.

The members of the international, Paris-based media watchdog group, wearing white jumpsuits, threw about 10 buckets of liquid chocolate at the embassy's gates and then stuck fake dollar bills into the sticky mess.

"Truth for Guy-André!" they shouted.

As for the first anniversary of GAK's disappearance, as Eric Fottorino pointed out, it was passed over in silence.

What might seem to account for the difference?

Well, a cynic (or a realist) might say that when tragedies and scandals (or would-be scandals) concern or involve the Yankee bogeyman, French politicians, media outlets, and common citizens make a big deal out of it. When tragedies and scandals (or would-be tragedies and scandals) — at least the international kind — touch French leaders (in this case, blood for cocoa), there is much less pressure to go to the same extent as with l'Oncle Sam.

A rare letter to the editor in Le Monde said as much in February 2005, mentioning the many links between France's élite and the corrupt politicians off Abidjan. (Unfortunately, Aline Richard's letter to the editor amounted to nothing but a token article.)

Two journalists. Two people lost from sight trapped in those so numerous conflicts, where journalist rhymes with pest. … Florence, Guy-André: two experienced professionals victims of "work-related accidents".

If the two situations are so similar, why then such a difference in their treatment? French authorities mobilized with no second thoughts for Florence Aubenas. That is normal, legitiamate, expected. It should have been the same for Guy-André. So what happened?…

Since [the first days of Kieffer's disappearance], French authorities have not "moved heaven and earth to learn the truth about the disappearance of Guy-André Kieffer", as President Chirac promised us. On the contrary.…

Double standards. And for other reasons, the same inequality has shown itself in the media's treatment of the two cases. As friends of Guy-André and as journalists, we have trouble living it well. Put yourself in our shoes. Taking a stand besides the posters of Florence Aubenas and Hussein Hanoun all over the Paris métro, we are members of that sacred union to save them, which brings together prestigious journalists, politicians, artists, and business leaders. Then, a malaise sets in. Why, instead of the advertisement in the poster next to theirs, is there not a portrait of Guy-André? Are there two categories of countries in which to disappear, the "good" ones and the "bad" ones?

In the latter, France participates actively in the local political games, has interests to defend, and doesn't want to make waves. No exit from the crisis, no future in Ivory Coast without Laurent Gbagbo, who must be preserved, as our leaders, or at least an important part of them, have concluded. Ivory Coast's president has sure friends in Paris, on the right, on the left, on the sidelines and in the cabinets. Those pillars of support never fail to weaken, no matter the régime's corruption, the death squads, the numerous abusess denounced by the UN and, previously, by journalists such as Guy-André Kieffer. It has been more than [850] days since GAK disappeared. We want him not to be forgotten.

Régisseur dadaïste

If he only knew that there really is virtually no such thing as self-deprecating French humor:

Director Oliver Stone, whose mother was French, adds, "And it helps that they don't complain about it. The French dish it out, but they can take it too. Their arrogance does not mask insecurity. They're confident of their culture and have a long tradition of self-criticism."

Usually, it’s a bigger hit when deprecating others, but that’s another story

Wednesday, September 13, 2006

Boviations

Jose Bové, killing them softly:But as he told the French press in a self-proclaimed move of solidarity with his captured brethren, "I act with my face uncovered, I take responsibility for my actions."

This sort of brazenly unapologetic rhetoric is typical of Bové, who justified this crime just like he has his others -- by claiming to have uncovered evidence of "genetic pollution" and a "risk of contamination" to nearby organic farms.

If that sounds like spin without any scientific basis, that's because it is. As Bove's detractors (otherwise known as "scientists") point out, genetically modified foods -- which grow faster and are more disease-resistant than their "natural" counterparts -- have saved millions of people from starving to death.

Dédicace Fnac Saint Lazare

Erik Svane et Dan Greenberg dédicaceront leur album à la Fnac Saint-Lazare aujourd'hui 13 septembre à partir de 17h.

Synopsis: À 32 ans, Léonardo est un des artistes les plus réputés d'Italie, menant une vie foisonnante, s'adonnant allégrement aussi bien à la peinture qu'à des inventions en tous genres.

Jusqu'au jour où le Vatican découvre avec enthousiasme les machines de guerre novatrices imaginées par le jeune Florentin. En effet, il se trouve qu'au Saint-Siège se prépare dans le plus grand secret une nouvelle Croisade — la première en 250 ans — dont on confie le commandement au charismatique Général Scharano.

Le Vatican décide aussitôt de se servir des fameux engins inventés par Léonardo afin de mettre à bien son expédition... Ce qui n'enchante pas vraiment l'inventeur au caractère irrévérencieux...

Lire un extrait…

I think you can come out now

How is it that all of these alarmist crackpots sound alike when they make irresponsible allegations and absurd predictions?
A sidewalk handbill, Philadelphia, PA, USA:

Alas, when in doubt, revise:« A titre privé j’avais fait la prévision que les Etats-Unis interviendraient militairement en Iran en 2005. Je me suis révélé un prophète aux capacités bien limitées. Mais je me demande maintenant si nous devons nous en réjouir en 2006. »

I had forecasted that the United States would intervene militarily in Iran in 2005. It seems I'm a rather unskilled fortuneteller. But I wonder now if we’ll be able to expect it in 2006.
Thank the fantasists, their endless opimism, and their persistence in the face of history. 12 September has become a international holiday marked by watching the faces of the overraught turn red, tap their feet and imitate Gilda Radner: Never mind!

If you want to ask them WHY the nuking hasn't started yet, you can call them at (code+)325-670-9494, or drop them a line at info@propheticword.com

“I’m not going to run away from this.”

There are few things quite as striking as a comedian speaking his mind about pluralism and the tolerance a good society has for a broad range of opinion:

"I’m not going to run away from this. This is a defining moment for our generation. For one generation, it was the assassination of Kennedy, for another it's 9/11."

Via Newsbusters, we find the Late Late Show’s Craig Ferguson setting the jokes aside as he takes a moment to reflect on 9/11, calling it an “ill wind” that won’t shake us loose.

Tuesday, September 12, 2006

Pravda

French crushing of dissent.

Reunited and it feels so good

Whacky he-she and former police captain wants to make the ~~personal~~ genital political.

Tch, Tch, Tch…

Just a reminder ...

... for readers who appreciated Bertrand Latour's 9-11 piece. You can pre-order his new book due out in January (with Flammarion) on Amazon.fr. The very few pro-American French writers still out there need all our support. The Vietnamese edition of 1984 with Bertrand's French language preface (available end of September), will also be available with translated editions of his preface in Vietnamese and English, by the end of the year.

The West is the best

You just get here, we'll do the rest.

Regime des bananes.

The Swedish social model that lefty is so much in love with is increasingly showing itself to be an inconcealable third-world cesspit.

Of the failed state, TheBusiness says:

Unemployment in general is high, too, with some estimates suggesting it could be above 20%, triple the official rate. Plus, on any given day, one-fifth of the workforce is at home sick. Furthermore, around one-quarter of those under 25 are out of work.

But hey, this is the country that other left wing politicians Europe fawn over. Is it the Swedish healthcare system they love so much? This is the same system that let a friend limp around for more than a year as he waited for a surgeon to find time to repair his knee. “We have great healthcare, if you get to see a doctor,” he says sardonically. I’m sure the health minister would say this is just another anecdote.

Among other things. Ségo should be careful for what she wishes for.

Monday, September 11, 2006

Some of his friends call him Maurice

I suggest the Eurowanker of the day award go as a group to anyone who finds this funny.

That was the day that was

Embarrassed by their own hatred – Quick! Rationalize!

Jacquard calls the revisionist theories that say no plane hit the Pentagon nothing but marketing tools. Boniface (below) opens his gob and says that these >theories are the price to pay for Bush's lies about why we invaded Iraq...

In other words, the only combat they can do is to lie.

My spy (who can stomache watching this crap) saw this DGSE or DST security type, basically, talking in circles about nothing. Someone please put the cloth back over his cage.

Nicolas Sarkozy goes to NYC yesterday, and all the Socialists can do is bang their spoons on their highchairs.

Then going on to set aside their tender look at America and focus on what really matters – smearing them to the expense of noticing their simplistic journalistic practices.

Dwelling on someone who as a result of 9/11 needs a large array of medications, but isn’t getting them for free from the Federal Government, as if the purpose of embarrassing him on television abroad is going to help him or make a difference, assuming that French people start a letter-writing campaign or fill out the guy’s scrips.

In Memoriam Ad Vitam Æternam

In Paris: Unite!

This evening at 19h00 friends of America will gather at Place Trocadéro to remember the victims of 9/11 and to stand against terror.