Behind the Façades in France: What expats and the mainstream media (French and American alike) fail to notice (or fail to tell you) about French attitudes, principles, values, and official positions…
With imaginary robot soldiers, little shame, even less pride, and some psychotropic compounds that can shorten their memories:EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS – EU defence ministries are going to have to contend with a shrinking recruitment pool for soldiers, a public that is more cautious about interventionist operations and 24/7 media scrutiny,
Methinks someone is smoking some good kaka. Big markets like the U.S. and the E.U. are more dangerous than the sellers in the energy market since all you need to bankrupt the seller is to change sources and release strategic reserves.
The 28-page study looks to a future where Europe will be externally dependent for 90 percent of its oil and 80 percent of gas by 2025 and where "strong migratory pressures" due to the fast-growing populations in Africa and the Middle East offset by stable and ageing European population are set to cause "direct or indirect challenges" to Europe's security interests.
Remember that most of the “No War for Oil!!!” mob failed Econ 101, and have no idea what a monpsony is anyway, even if they do see thing through the “Us ‘n Them” prism.
One major buyer (the west) and one seller (an imaginary OPEC where they actually act in unison) makes for a kind of balancing of power that would make the greenie notion of energy independence an act of war in itself that would impoverish the populations that export petrolium. After all, because we all implicity trust every leftist theory, we all know how unemployment causes terrorism, right? Imagine all the terrorist pouring out of Alberta for every PV panel you install on the roof of your house.
Have you no soul, man!?!However, Europe's possible need to act in any of these regions or situations will be tempered by a more clued-up, risk-averse society.
Risk averse? More like narcoleptic.
Here’s one of the gems, though:"Military action, not explicitly authorised by the UN, may become increasingly controversial," states the report, adding "military operations will be subject to ever-increasing scrutiny by elected officials, media and populations."
The sketchiness the public has about being a nation (or nations), or being worthy of pursuing a public interest is patently obvious. Circumspect to the point of indecision and such incredible fearfulness that they need the barbaric kmajority of the U.N. to tell them it’s okay to fight at all, even if it weren’t for oil, but about the stability of global society and even their own security. The question, like many in the Holy Land is entirely academic anyway since the potential manpower figures are dwindling, and assume pacifists and people with no particular affection for their “continent” will not find any personal irony in being conscripted.As well as the social perceptions, defence ministries will also have to deal with the fact that less and less people are likely to become soldiers, with the armed forces recruitment pool (16-30 years) to fall by over 15 percent by 2025.
2 million largely worthless meatbags in uniform, whereas the estimates of combat ready forces hasn’t exceeded 100 000 in the past two decades.
"As armed forces professionalise and the falling birth-rate increases competition in the labour market for young men and women, personnel costs will, in practice, pre-empt more and more of defence spending unless manpower is reduced," says the report.
With some 2 million people currently in uniform in Europe, "there is plenty of scope to do this," it highlighted.
One way of overcoming this problem would be to "outsource" and to resort to "increased automation, from warships to robots," the report suggested.
No-one fears the marching band, so bring out the Roombas with rifles. Don’t forget that at the time of the Kosovo conflict, the European participants agreed to provide 50 000 deployable troops and came almost 10 percent short. That with no other major goings on for them to be distracted by. Forget win-hold-win, this is a case of hold-maybe-hold.
The night of Friday to Saturday turned out to be an ordinary weekend, according to the police: in the entire départment of Seine-Saint-Denis, by the early hours of Saturday, one counted little more than twenty cases of arson on cars. Specific incidents however took place in spite of the 4000 police officers and gendarmes deployed to head off possible turmoil. The course of the night saw 25 rock throwing incedents including 21 in Isle-de-France [the Paris Metropolitan area], according to the leadership of the national police.[Emphasis mine] Now that’s what I call calm.
Friday morning, Larbi Chouaieb, in charge for the Muslim community in Clichy-Montfermeil had invited the young people of Montfermeil “to follow the steps of their brothers and sisters” of Clichy-sous-Bois, where a thousand of people had just taken part in a silent march in memory of the two teenagers whose death one year ago sparked the riots of Fall 2005. “By your example, show that it’s calm here too”, said the religious figure.Ironically, the white socialist mayor of Clichy-sous-Bois was saying the exact same thing in the weird memorial ceremony which is sure to construct little in the way of calm. A wreath was laid at a memorial for the two “riot sparkers” electrocuted when they hid from les pigeons in a transformer bed after the two were up to no good.
- Brought to you as a public service by
alert reader Sebastien. Thanks, man.
According to [Manfred Nowak's] latest proposal, the vast majority of current detainees (all but "5-10%") should either be repatriated to their countries of origin or—presumably in case they might face "persecution" in the latter—taken in as "refugees" by "European countries or others such as Chile and Argentina."4 Were this proposal implemented, it would transform captured combatants in what are by all accounts ongoing hostilities into political asylum-seekers—an act of benevolence toward the enemy that is surely unprecedented in the annals of warfare!writes John Rosenthal in a chilling article that looks deeper into the Europeans' antecedents than has been done before (emphasis in bold is mine).
…the revisionism of Ermacora and his colleagues has not involved denying the crimes of Nazi Germany, but rather diminishing their significance by affirming the commission of commensurate crimes by the Allied powers. In this sense, they pioneered the practice of moral equivalence that is the hallmark of so much of the criticism leveled against the U.S. in its current war with Islamist terror groups. Thus, in 1991, in a commissioned "expert opinion" for the Bavarian government, Ermacora concluded that the expulsion of the Sudeten-Germans constituted a "genocide and crime against humanity." Thereby, the unquestionable suffering that Allied policies inflicted on Germans was upgraded to a "crime" on par with those committed by Germans against the populations that had been previously subjected to Nazi rule and, in particular, to the "signature" crime of Nazi Germany: the systematic extermination of European Jewry. Thereby too, the concept of genocide gets banalized, making the enormity of Nazi Germany's crimes more difficult to grasp and impossible to name.Update: The hyper-inflationary conception of genocide, holocaust, and other Nazi crimes never seems to cease (merci à RV).
Such revisionism has often been accompanied by unmistakable tones of resentment—and sometimes, indeed, outright revanchism—toward the United States and its WWII allies. The authority whom Ermacora cites for his "scientific" account of the Potsdam Agreement and its consequences, the American-born Alfred de Zayas, has, for instance, in a recent interview with the Germany weekly Junge Freiheit, denounced Roosevelt and Churchill as "war criminals." In a similar vein, yet another influential German NGO, the Society for Endangered Peoples (GfbV), published a memorandum in 1998 titled "For an Independent International Criminal Court! Remember [the] Crimes of the Permanent Members of the UN Security Council!"
The GfbV has made a hyper-inflationary conception of genocide into its calling card. GfbV founder Tilman Zülch has declared the 20th century the "Century of Genocides" and in his seemingly endless enumeration of modern genocides the crimes of Nazi Germany—in his words, "the most terrible in German history" (my italics)—fade into relative insignificance. In keeping with Felix Ermacora's "expert opinion," Zülch includes the forced transfer of the Sudeten-Germans in his enumeration. Indeed, it turns out on closer inspection that the Allied powers that defeated Nazi Germany are made either directly or indirectly responsible for the bulk of the alleged crimes included in Zülch's account, with the United States, at least as measured in Zülch's expenditure of verbiage, seemingly topping the list.
…Manfred Nowak's charges of "torture" against the U.S. can be understood as just the latest instance of the debased usage of key categories in international humanitarian law that Ermacora and his revisionist colleagues pioneered. It was perhaps only to be expected that the challenges faced by America in its current war should provide renewed impetus for the old anti-American resentments that have animated this usage. To close Guantanamo in deference to such resentments would not serve the cause of justice. In light of the potential risk to American security, however, it could well end up serving the cause of a furtive and long-awaited revenge.
The phrase ‘climate change denier’ is meant to be evocative of the phrase ‘holocaust denierUpdate 2: Medienkritik quotes the Washington Post's Charles Lane as reporting on yet another instance of forward-looking Europeans' principled "stand" against reactionary American "crimes" hiding an uglier picture.
…the actual history of the German death penalty ban casts this claim [that of the lessons learned from Nazi state-sponsored killing] in a different light. Article 102 was in fact the brainchild of a right-wing politician who sympathized with convicted Nazi war criminals — and sought to prevent their execution by British and American occupation authorities. Far from intending to repudiate the barbarism of Hitler, the author of Article 102 wanted to make a statement about the supposed excesses of Allied victors' justice.In other words, when Europeans say their lofty principles stem from their experience during the Second World War, it is far from false, albeit not always in ways that the proud current masses think…
Life, engineered: In March 2005, the EU relaunched its Lisbon Strategy to become the world's most dynamic knowledge-based economy by 2010. More on growth and jobs and transfering more ownership of the strategy to national member states via national action plans were the two essential elements of the "Lisbon renewal".
Which is impossible under these circumstances: PARIS (AFP) - Martine Aubry, national secretary of the PS [Socialist Party] for employment, commented on Thursday with the proposal of Thierry Breton to liberalize [the 35 hour per week] working hours regulations, saying that the government is engaging in “social regression”.
[ ... ]
“Bear in mind that the law is there to guarantee minimal protection for workers. Convention imposes it as well since we ratified [rules] of the International Labour Organization”, the author of the 35 hour workweek laws.
The mayor of Lille [Aubry] brings to bear the social dialogue that [Finance Minister] Thierry Breton is using in an “authoritative way” that the majority agrees with, which has just been reintroduced by legal amendment. The decree by the Home Office exempting hotel and restaurant workers’ from the 35 hour workweek law was to be phased out otherwise.Leave it up to a Socialist: There goes your sovereignty, folks! ILO making immutable, unquestionable rules which one ideology among many can bully through as if it absolved them of their tyrannical desire to zombify the population by making every job, every life, every lifestyle identical. It’s so constricting that even union types found stupid this economy-killing bit of attempted populism.
The real question is: why is a law needed anyway? If people want to work more or less hours than is conventional for whatever reasons they have, why can’t they find a career or employer compatible with that? – either to have more personal time or higher earnings to retire early, support a hobby like collecting art or mountain climbing – or whatnot – why sort of society feels compelled to limit it and make everyone less free?
...and all bullshit and rotten from the heart up. The Bundeswehr’s very own Abu Greib type lightening rod is sure to be explained away rather than bleated on and on about for years on end. Europeans, you see can do no wrong, and even if they do, there’s no reason to dwell on it or gin-up theories that talking heads could call ”decryptage”.
The press: fat, happy and stupid, and more bothered by having a “stance” on events than reporting events.
Rock on, Medienkritik
Also known as speaking your mind: Galician blogger Alejandro de Llano has told in his blog that he has been charged with the great crime of supporting Israel and being against the Palestinian people.
The primitive European view of free speech is staggering in its’ stupidity. They don’t even know what freedom is anymore. On October 13th, 2006, he has received a summons from a Criminal Judge announcing him that he is held responsible of the crime of supporting Israel and also of acting against Palestinian people. They did not give him a copy of the summons and they did not let him make any copies.
Barcepundit has more about this form of a knock on the door late at night.the fuse is lit!
- chapeau to Georges in Baghdad.
The hypocrites are at it again: ”[Parliament] calls on the European Commission and the EU member states to take a principled and consequent stand in the negotiations on a new Partnership and Cooperation Agreement (PCA)...with a view to placing democracy, human rights and freedom of expression at the core of any future agreement and instituting a clear mechanism to monitor implementation," the formal resolution said.
But as usual, the higher principals, the dreams, the hopes, the better angels of their spirit snuff the tender budding flower of decency before it can poison the European view of itself which is otherwise so eager to mention just how much more humanistic is is than the rest of humanity: The Finnish EU presidency also took great pains not to offend the Russian leader at its Lahti dinner, while the European Commission continues to focus on getting access to Russian gas and oil for EU firms and building new pipelines to Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.
So much for all that. Must be about another pipeline then, eh fat boy?the fuse is lit!
Why couldn't the president and his fellow neocons open their minds and listen to the wise voices of France, its fellow peace camp countries, and the UN (merci à Hervé) when they collectively explained that their sound and sensible opposition to Bush's unwise war against Saddam Hussein was due to their experience, their sagacity, and their knowledge of the horrors of war?
A recent random look at a Egyptian newspaper leaves one with little hope. The headlines:
3 stories about Mubarak which contained no news, at least not from this decade –
All that and some further speaking in Runes meant to look like actual news. There are also a page of sports, some fashion, TV, weather, a few ads. The only other items of news other than a short article about Condoleeza Rice failng to leave Jerusalem with anything, don’t even com in the form of articles. Five 150 word-long blurbs fall under the headings: UNIFIL. Iraq, Darfour, Gaza (a hit-piece about Israel), and Israel (another hit-piece about Israel).- “Mubarak: the liberation of the Sinai, a turning point in history”
(if memory serves, they lost.)- “Mubarak: Egypt advances on the irreversible course of global reform”
- “Interview with Mubarak: Egypt refuses the classification of nations into moderade and radical.”
The men and women met in the Durzy gardens behind the Town Hall, where a wall was used for their propaganda posters. It was here in July 1920 that Cai Hesen -- the leading theoretician -- set out a programme for the "salvation of China" which the next month he urged in a letter to Mao.
Then I guess it should come as no surprise that the CCP killed 77 million of their own people.
"It is known as the letter of August 13th, and it proposed the creation of a Chinese Communist Party. Mao signalled his approval and the following year the party was set up," says Wang.
writes Eric Hazan in Le Monde.On peut dire que plus un organe de presse ou un média est aux ordres de l'oligarchie dirigeante, plus il emploie d'euphémismes
Je pense qu'il y a une intériorisation de la censure. Il n'y a pas de censure au sens habituel du terme. Mais la plupart des journalistes ont intériorisé des règles qui se fixent et qui font que les choses dérangeantes, on n'en parle pas ou en utilisant le langage que j'ai essayé de décrire dans mon livre, la LQR, qui aplatit, anesthésie, qui crée le consensus.
A sophisticated culture runs headlong into those charming traditions of another one:
The phenomenon, which the newspaper dubbed "Paris Syndrome", was first detailed in the psychiatric journal Nervure in 2004.
Bernard Delage of Jeunes Japon, an association that helps Japanese families settle in France, said: "In Japanese shops, the customer is king, whereas here assistants hardly look at them ... People using public transport all look stern, and handbag snatchers increase the ill feeling."
Lost: a small terrier who disappeared on October 20th near my apartment in the 14th arrondissement. This gentle sweetheart is called Mohammed and isn’t the least bit dangerous.
- With thanks to Sebastian, who will
probably receive death threats shortly.
After a bus was set on fire by about thirty young people in the town of Grigny on Sunday afternoon, bus drivers on Monday have refused to drive routes through large, sensitive district, saying that they need more safety. “It had a psychological impact on the[transit] workers”, said a union representative.
- from Le Figaro
I am opposed to Turkey’s entering the European Union and I have much sympathy for the numerous Armenians [in France] who have become more French than the Duponts and the Durands. But what does the PS [Socialist Party] think it is doing in seeking to punish as criminals those who refuse to admit the existence of a genocide against the Armenians? Why not also punish those who deny the mass crimes of Stalin, Mao or Pol Pot (and they are numerous)? Why not also fine or send to prison those who have dared to claim that no plane crashed into the Pentagon in September 2001? When will our representatives begin treating us as adults? We are old enough to research subjects of this nature ourselves and to form our own opinions. It is in guaranteeing that the necessary documentary evidence is available – both for and against a given proposition – that we will make democracy work, not by threatening heretics.Jean-Louis Caccomo (maître de conférences
Il a belle allure, le déclin américain, périodiquement annoncé (souhaité ?) par nos intellectuels en lutte... La France devrait se mobiliser à l'ONU pour demander que soient appliqués des quotas dans l'attribution des prix Nobel reflétant plus justement la diversité culturelle dans le monde. Mais les astrophysiciens, chimistes, biologistes ou économistes du monde entier qui veulent travailler sérieusement (avec des moyens réels) et librement (en toute indépendance, car une science manipulée n'est plus une science), où trouvent-ils meilleur asile si ce n'est aux Etats-Unis ?(Unfortunately, the letters amount to tokens.)
"Our former warriors have now joined a long line of Soldiers of the Sea who have given their lives in the service of a grateful nation,"
- Former President Ronald Reagan.
"The whole idea of knowing that this person gave his life for something he truly believed in," said Perry, reiterating words spoken by 1st Sgt. James Richard, "how the flood of memories of that person burned into your mind, is lost in people who have never experienced it."
- Former Defense Secretary William Perry
241 U.S. Marines and 58 French paratroopers were lost. UK Royal Marines ran to their aid along with the French and American survivors, Lebanese civilians, and Lebanese Army and Police.
The goofy, clueless left in the UK, for all their crackpot logic about diversity (celebrating something that simply exists whether they “celebrate” it or not), has no clue when it comes to respecting religion or other cultures for that matter.
The veiled woman counts off all the cosmetics she no longer needs to apply to her face - she just does up her eyes. She says she also enjoys the veil because she knows that every man who sees her is dieing to see what she looks like naked.
Barely funny, but all done in the name of entertainment, if that's what you can call it.
Expect Channel 4's studios at Broadcast House to be burned down by certain members of a religion C4 keeps apologizing for otherwise.
