Peace Train

EU peace prize awarded to death penalty supporter. Wild world.

Slow burn

The French Riviera is a tacky, overpriced, filthy dump anyway.

"I am Chirac's Brain"

Béatrice Gurrey et Christophe Jakubyszyn explain why Dominique de Villepin, who until early in 2006 seemed to be a strong contender as a ruling UMP candidate for the presidential election (with help from his close ally, Jacques Chirac), seems to have lost the head of state's good will and to be definitely out of the presidential race.

The Invisible Hand

Markets decide. Not central planners.

... The markets still determine
Everything, like Greek gods, capriciously.
-- Eugene Schlanger, "A New Saloon"
from "September 11 Wall Street Sonnets and Other New York City Poems", Editions Underbahn

... Ce sont encore les marchés
Qui décident, tels des dieux grecs, capricieusement.
-- Eugene Schlanger, "Un bar, un soir"
de "Wall Street Sonnets du 11 september et autres poèmes new-yorkais", Editions Underbahn

French foreign policy in Africa : have machete, will travel

Can strategic machete production be far off? Chiraq jawbones on and on (and on) about America's failure in Iraq. Chiraq fails to underline that the failure in Iraq was that of his good pal Saddam and the Baathist regime. Something Saddam had a few seconds to ponder from the end of his noose. As for the saintly Chiraq, always ready to pay lip service to anything even remotely anti-American, anti-Anglo-Saxon, anti-free market, and anti-globalisation -- he has nothing to say about the torrents of blood provoked by French lucidity in Africa. Townhouse marching orders have been distributed to French preSS henchmen to muffle any noise about such un-lucid like disorder. Thankfully, we have the Anglo-Saxon press to report on that.

No soup for you!

Who's the Soup Nazi now?

Comments by the Lucid, the Intelligent, and the Peaceful

An in-depth article by Mouna Naïm on Saddam Hussein graces the pages of Le Monde, but to judge by the comments by average French readers (those paragons of lucidity), George W Bush is at least as (translation = far more) guilty than the Iraqi dictator.

Speaking of comments, Hervé asks us to have "a compassionate look at those moderate posts at this peaceful url:" the Voice of the Oppressed.

French prison cuisine

Two All-Beef Patties Special Sauce Lettuce Cheese Pickles Onion on a Sesame Seed Bun! It's to die for. Miam, miam !

Faker than Fake

You were going to “redistribute” that, right?



The NYT is only three weeks late to the party. Just long enough to be easy on another leftist despot.

Greenies: I know you’re going to want to sit down for this one.

Tsk, tsk. Lose the green halo.

Although I’ll bet they sit down for it anyway. Tally-Ho!

Get a Load of This Guy

Some Europeans are sounding more and more like Juche-Girl every day. Atlantic review is the blog of a group akin to Mensa, all the smart people on Star Trek with large crania, and your younger sibling who was always smarter that you were. Joerg seems to have found a real winner, and a Bavarian CSU guy named Peter Gauweiler at that, which makes his insane assertion prove himself to be unremediably “Coocoo for Coco Puffs”:

The military commitment in Afghanistan is on another, much firmer mandate of international-law than the American war in Iraq which is indisputably contrary to international law. Nevertheless one must be blind and deaf not to recognize that we in Afghanistan are actually “Irakifying” the war in the south.

The Bundestag did not give it a mandate, nor does our Basic Law doesn’t even make participation a possible. Mrs. Merkel must make clear to the Americans that it is not applicable for example that Americans can send German Federal Armed Forces as they are presently doing to the south of Afghanistan into confusing and catastrophic conditions. For example, they also want support from our Tornado fighters by calling in positions [ed.: to attack as ground air support, I would guess].

We must make clear to the Americans, or rather more precisely to the current American government, that there can be no difference in cultural efforts worldwide, and that everything isn’t automatically terrorism, and to exterminate whoever they’re able to as they did it with the Apache and the Sioux.

And Gauweiler thought the German Military was there just to observe and be supported no doubt, and that fighting meant never really having to fight well with other – something the soldiers themselves know well and are clear about.

So much for brave leadership. That the current American Administration didn’t fight the Apache and Sioux nations doesn’t seem to matter to him very much either. Whatever. Georg Strauch did it. Georg Strauch does everything.

“Rebranding” Everything as the Center

Judging by the inherent social fascism, view of the state-as-center of all life (behold the payoff), the making of demons, and controlling nature of the society anyway, the statement might actually be correct:

“It is said that Jean-Marie Le Pen is an extremist, that he is of the extreme-right, just to disqualify my message. They’re wrong. I am a man of center-right”, he declared.

Sure. Why don’t you go take a nice little nap and sleep it off.
What’s the first sign of craziness? Referring to oneself in the third person.

Not Exactly Learning to Heal the Brown-shirt Within

It seems that Elton John hasn't just grown delusional about his own importance, but has become quite a fascist when it comes to turdburglar politics:

Elton John's convoluted message to the masses is: Religion should be outlawed because it promotes hatred towards homosexuals, that religious hatred is leading us towards World War III, and the only way to prevent another world war is for musicians to solve all the world's problems.

It is comforting to know that if the world would all hold hands and sing Tiny Dancer we would all be safer. But frankly, I'd rather hear Randy Travis sing Three Wooden Crosses.

He seems to feel himself at liberty to promote quite a bit of hatred himself. I guess some people are born royal.The Fuse is Lit (No Pasaran!)

What Becomes of the Broken Hearted?

Oran, Algeria: A woman so saddened by the execution of Saddam Hussein commits suicide.

In addition, according to the daily Arabic-language newspaper Sawt Al-Ahrar, several new-born babies of the area of El-Wadi (southern Algerian) were named for the former Iraqi president and torture victim “in homage to the late Arab leader”.

The local committee for support of the Iraqi people organized the taking care of condolences in the memory of Saddam Hussein, according to the source.

The Fuse is Lit (No Pasaran!)

Devilishly Undead

Scott lives, but he's inadequately green:

A turn of the page finds "Green Goddess" and Ablution favourite Julia Stephenson stressed out as well, as her unfortunate boyfriend has made the intolerable mistake of buying her unacceptable undergarments:

"Sadly the garments proffered weren't green but another, much inferior colour, so no good."

- The dry season is over.
Feel free to Ablute.

Barking up the wrong tree

Sung by a cretinous gap-toothed stoner of an ex-tennis star, this is not just a typically rubbishy contemporary French song. It is indicative of what now passes for serious political and economic commentary in French universities and via the French preSS.

How Sad! How Unjust!

Instead of minding her own business, a 22-year-old law (!) student travelling in Mexico gets involved in the Oaxaca "cauldron" of troubles, writes Nicolas Bourcier, leading into a series of unpleasant happenings. "Naturally", she says matter-of-factly, she not joins, she "embraces", the movement.

Sarah croise des étudiants venus d'Europe et d'Amérique du Nord. "Pas toujours des militants, souvent des anarchistes", glisse-t-elle. Elle se prend au jeu, embrasse le mouvement, "forcément". Au mois de novembre, elle se trouve au milieu des affrontements avec les forces fédérales.

As I explain in my book, French society has these words and expressions that lead les citoyens into a form of self-hypnosis. Once they hear them (in conversations with friends or acquaintances, on television — they are a staple on the evening news), they go into a form of trance in which they know that they are invariably in the right and they (consequently) don't need to ask whether the description of any given situtation is correct, whether, for example, the militants might be (even theoretically) dishonest, misinformed, or simply retarded. (Words include: lucidité, solidarité, générosité, humanisme, militants.) And they have no reason to do so (to ask such questions), since the words invariably paint a self-serving portrait of them in any given situations, i.e, shows them (the French) as heroes, martyrs, or wise prophets.

Paranoid, Schizophrenic, Hypochondriac

France's "national psychiatrist" has issued an alarming report on the democratic and social health of the nation as it prepares to select a new president

writes John Lichfield in the Independent (merci à RV).

Gérard Mermet, a sociologist who publishes a much respected bulletin on the country's state of mind every two years, suggests that France now suffers from a collective form of three mental illnesses: paranoia, schizophrenia and hypochondria.

In Francosopie 2007, M. Mermet says that France is "schizophrenic", because it finds it difficult to "recognise the realities" of the "great changes" happening in the world around it.

He says France is "paranoid" because it believes itself to be the victim of a "global plot" and to have been betrayed by its own "elites".

Finally, France is a "hypochondriac" because it downplays its achievements and advantages and wilfully exaggerates its economic and social ills.

French youths get set to vote

Le Pen and Dieudonné are getting set to bring in the youth vote. Le Pen will have a limitless supply of young strong arm thugs, all rabidly anti-Semitic, to act as security for Front National functions.

“All the News that’s Fit to Script”, Part 127

The New York Times looks with glassy eyed idealism at France the way a Dachshund adores it’s master. At the same time, France looks at Americans the way a cat looks at it’s “human companion”: as a gullible meal ticket.

In 2004, an NYT writer went so far as to say that the French state eliminated homelessness, and that if you did see panhandlers and people living under bridges, that they were Polish. Not from anywhere else, not the benighted French, but Polish. As statistically impossible as that is, the reality of street life disproved that insane assertion. There are (and were) street people all over the place. They are more aggressive and carry themselves with a more miserable air than any crazy person that New York City’s Social Workers can talk in from the cold. Quite simply, they lied.

In Summer 2004, the New York Times declared that the great day had arrived: Europe had eliminated -- nay, "abolished," as if by a legislative act-- poverty: or, at any rate, its "desperate" variety. "Even America's defenders must admit to the persistence of poverty amid plenty," the Times reporter Richard Bernstein wrote in an August 8 piece ("Does Europe Need to Get a Life?"), "and, by contrast, the abolition of desperate poverty in Europe."

Bernstein attributed this remarkable accomplishment to the European "continent": a continent that notably includes Albania, for instance: a country with a per capita Gross National Income, according to World Bank statistics, of roughly $2,000 per year. But let us be generous and allow that Bernstein was taking poetic license in referring to the "continent" and really meant to refer just to the European Union. And let us be even more generous and assume that the triumphal claim of Europe's "abolition" of poverty was in fact only meant to apply to the "EU-15"

The fiction continued this past May:

On Boulevard Montparnasse, where Polish men have gathered eight tents under a railroad bridge, a middle-aged man named André asked Mr. Borg for help finding a cheap flat and French lessons. He has a job and said his employer had promised to help him get working papers if he could move to a fixed address.
Not far away three young Poles, who gave their names as Roberto, Raphael and Annette, huddled in a tent with a pit bull named Ares. A white ceramic dish of dog food sat beside the tent.

The natives, though seem to bristle at even the slightest criticism, no matter how factual, as one can see from even the NYT’s own Roger Cohen.

The fiction of human superiority continues by reporting on middle-class and middle-minded empathy of something that was presumable “abolished”.

Dozens of otherwise well-housed, middle-class French have been spending nights in tents along the canal, in the 10th Arrondissement, in solidarity with the country’s growing number of “sans domicile fixe,” or “without fixed address,” the French euphemism for people living on the street. The bleak yet determinedly cheerful sleep-in is meant to embarrass the French government into doing something about the problem.

John Rosenthal has more to say about the reporting of this “middle class” act of moral vanity which is more telling about the top-down view which is more akin to government social control than engagement. “The state knows best.”:

This reassuringly low official French homelessness figure of 86,000 is widely-cited in the docile French media and it is sometimes even dated, as in the NYTimes article, to 2004. In fact, however, it dates from a study conducted by the French National Institute for Statistics and Economic Studies [INSEE] in 2001

More to the point the “inconsequential” nature of the government’s stance on this is to not report the problem, and when that’s unavoidable, to suppress reporting on the scale of the problem.

Moreover, even when it was first made public in 2002, the 86,000 INSEE figure was criticized for underestimating the real extent of homelessness in France. Anne-Laure Pham, writing in a recent issue of the French weekly L'Express, notes that French charitable associations -- already at the time -- put the real figure "between 100,000 and 800,000."

Estimates varying by a factor of 8 tell us that the allegation is as political as the effort to silence it, but a simple observation of life on the street showing homelessness to be no less visible or widespread as New York, Philadelphia, or Washington, DC takes the Mickey out of a figure like 86.000 people bei9ng homeless in a nation of 60 million.

Jumping stateside again, it needs to be understood that for about 6 years now, American leftists wanting to make some kind of point about conservatives evincing more homelessness than leftists (which they haven’t) – have duped high-school kids and college students to engage in empathetic “urban camping” for the purpose of “solidarity” with the homeless. The difference is that a cadre of compliant adults are hovering around to protect the “urban campers” from being violated or ripped off by the less scrupulous homeless in a manner that they would never protect the rest of the homeless.

If this isn’t a personal display and a political gin-up, I don’t know what is – it has the same stench of the assertion that anyone, anywhere even in the totalitarian days of the eastern block ever “eliminated” homelessness. In fact it has the same stench as the pocket parts and quays of the Seine where the homeless “camp”.

Actually, the “Alternatives” are the Other 364 Days of the Year

But to some political “fashion slaves” every day is a day to display ones’ fickle problems with (and hatred of) the societies they live in. I mean, what DO you tell someone who rejected Christianity when the complain about losing the “spirit of Christmas”, when they’re busy blaming the society (that presumably "caused" their rejection of the 'Spirit of Christmas') for it?

Listen closely and note her complaints that the tolerance she receives is somehow inadequate, presumably because it doesn’t ban criticism and discussion of anything SHE supports.

Who killed Bambi ?

... and not a moment too soon.

Gentle pretty thing
Who only had one spring
You bravely faced the world
Ready for anything
I'm happy that you lived
For your life is mine
What have I except to cry
Spirit never die
Birds of the air
Beasts of the earth
Overjoyed at Bambi's birth they gambolled in the glade

Who killed Bambi?

Murder murder murder
Someone should be angry
The crime of the century
Who shot little Bambi
Never trust a hippie
'Cause I love punky Bambi
I'll kill to find the killer
In that rotten roll army
All the spikey punkers
Believers in the ruins
With one big shout
They all cry out
Who killed Bambi?

“The Epitome of Culinary Civilization”

The French outrage over foie gras boils down to this: getting over-emotional in order to eliminate economic competition wherever possible.

Patería de Sousa was awarded the Coup de Coeur by the Paris International Food Salon for innovation.

Yet it is precisely its innovative techniques that have set French foie gras makers in a flutter. They claim that the Spanish version of the goose liver extract is not foie gras at all and have demanded the prize is withdrawn.

The animals are not force-fed.

Animal rights activists criticise the practice of force-feeding a duck or a goose for four weeks before they are slaughtered, claiming that it is cruel. Producers say that they fatten the birds’ livers to add flavour to the foie gras.

Marie-Pierre Pée, secretary-general of the French Professional Committee of Foie Gras Producers, condemned the Sousa version of the luxury paste: “This cannot be called foie gras because it is strictly defined as a product from an animal which has been fattened,” he said.

Eduardo Sousa, president of the Spanish company, which is based in Badajoz, was unabashed by the French criticism: “It’s normal that they have asked for their prize back because they are scared.

“We have won a prize in Paris where the jury has given (the French) a clip round the ears because we have shown that you can make a good foie gras without mistreating the animals.”

Needless to say, it is not exported to France.The Fuse is Lit (No Pasaran!)

Pig soup legal in Paris

Notre Dame de Paris throws a hissy fit.

A refreshing absence of newspeak

No more of Kofi's touchy-feely crap (no, I'm not talking about what his goons do with children). The new UN SecGen tells reporters that Saddam had it coming and perhaps they should keep that in mind.

How do you like your insurgent?

Roasted or Extra Crispy?

The U.N. : promoting world peace piece of ass

The purple helmuts of peace are on the march. More sex and thuggery on Kofi's watch.

Like The T-Shirt Says: “I’m With Stupid”

The usual small-mined Euro enmities and petty racism make for the ultimate political rope-a-dope. This, from a note from a friend:

...this is something I actually heard back in 1999-2002 when I lived in Bobigny (93).
This brings me back to the old days: When I was young I grew up in a small city near Lyon, and I had a good Gypsy friend. He came from Dreux, a city located 80km west of Paris: the first big city to have a FN mayor in 1983. What sounded strange back in these days of Universal Peace and Prosperity of the Mitterand reign was that Dreux was highly multicultural as we say nowadays. My friend explained me that basically Portugese voted FN against Blacks that voted FN against Arabs that voted FN against Gypsies that voted FN against Portugese...

The Fuse is Lit (No Pasaran!)

Branlette espagnole

Zapatero gets exactly what he's been looking for. The real problem is that he is exactly the kind of stinking Zeropean radical pacifist that will be the death of us all. The money quote in the article is "the Spanish government was caught completely off guard".

Télé Racaille

Here are some homemade videos making the rounds which attest to the rising popularity of Jean Marie Le Pen's Front National among suburban French youth. The first video shows an Alain Soral character being attacked by Jewish Defense League members (wearing curlers in their hair). Soral is then thrown in jail by the police. (Soral latest obsession is creating bogus attacks against himself, committed by Jewish gangs as he so claims, in order to boost his flagging book sales).

The second installment shows Soral being sprung from the joint by French comic Dieudonné. In the last instants of the second installment, Soral and Dieudonné discuss the impending victory of "free expression". Soral notes however, that it will be difficult given the state of French media and starts naming French Jewish intellectuals who are supposedly persecuting him.

The second installment can also be viewed at Alain Soral's web site. Alain Soral is now part of the Front National braintrust in support of Jean Marie Le Pen's candidacy.

Traditional French Jew hatred, as expressed by the Front National, has found a ready and willing audience among suburban French youth who are hopped up on a second generation, Intifada fueled Jew hatred. A marriage made in French anti-Semite heaven.

Carte Bleue, Comrade! Now!

Showing the guys at the Hague how to get things done

Iraqis can be proud.

It’s what they Non

Light hearted but telling.

The Fuse is Lit (No Pasaran!)

I wonder

Do Muslims lacking perspective in Brazil drive cars?

Speaking of smarts, I never cease to be amazed:

In Turkey, at least 1,179 people - dubbed "amateur butchers" by the Turkish media - were treated at hospitals across the country, most suffering cuts to their hands and legs.

The Fuse is Lit (No Pasaran!)

Tales from the crypt

This is the safe life full of “solidarity” that your Lit 101 Teaching Assistant was trying to turn you on to.

Meet the new boss

Izzy, the King of Clubs.

Love in the Age of Chop-Chop

- thanks to reader Grouik

The Fuse is Lit (No Pasaran!)

The French would be shocked to learn (if their preSS let them) that these countries do not aspire to a French standard of living -- they want more

Bulgaria and Roumania. Two more countries that Chiraq will scold with a hearty "shut up" if they do anything that he disagrees with.

One of those nights

New Year's Eve scorecard: 313 cars torched (plus 83 by ricochet) and 258 arrests despite a police presence of 25,000. The French are getting so touchy about these statistics that they are "breaking out" a separate category of torched cars as in "cars accidentally exploding because they were too close to cars that were intentionally torched" (voitures brûlée par propagation). French authorities (who seem to have much more authority over bean counting regulations than over their own territory) confide that such levels of violence are well within what is now considered to be acceptable inevitable. They do express concern that the average age of festive French youths is ever younger as witnessed by incidents involving 8 to 10 year olds. No doubt some new statistical gimmick will be found to finesse such hard realities in time for 2008.

The Euston Manifesto: A leftist expression of moderate sanity amidst the left's America-hating, over-the-top ranting, and mindless cacophony

Among hyper-ventilating left-liberals, hatred of Bush is so intense that rational argument usually goes out the window

writes Roger Cohen (himself usually a rather left-leaning liberal — read how he haughtily disparages Dubya — but otherwise he is here right on the money), who has a good read in the New York Times for those who are "tired of sterile screaming in the wilderness, tired of the comfortably ensconced "hindsighters" poring over every American error in Iraq, tired of facile anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism masquerading as anti-Zionism".

The result is a mindless cacophony. … Much of the left, in both Europe and the United States, is so convinced that the Iraq invasion was no more than an American grab for oil and military bases, it seems to have forgotten the myriad crimes of Saddam Hussein.

There appears to be little hope that Bush will ever abandon his with-us-or-against-us take on the post-9/11 world. Division is the president's adrenalin; he abhors shades of gray. Nor does it seem likely that the America-hating, over-the-top ranting of the left — the kind that equates Guantánamo with the Gulag and holds that the real threat to human rights comes from the White House rather than Al Qaeda — will abate during the Bush presidency.

This state of affairs is grave. The threat posed by Islamic fanaticism, inside and outside Iraq, requires the lucid analysis and informed disagreement of civilized minds. Bush's certainties are dangerous. But so is the moral equivalency of the left, the kind that during the Cold War could not see the crimes of communism, and now seems ready to equate the conservative leadership of a great democracy with dictatorship.

…the leftist Respect coalition represented in the British Parliament by George Galloway had this to say about Iraq:

"The resistance in Iraq is engaged in a battle to liberate the country. The Iraqi resistance deserves the support of the international antiwar movement."

That's a call for the mass of European pacifists to back the beheading brigade, the child-bombers and other fundamentalist loonies who want to restore the Caliphate. A call made in the name of defeating what Galloway and his ilk see as the greater evil, the United States.

Fortunately, in the face of such hysteria, an expression of moderate sanity has emerged over the past year. Precisely because of its sanity, it has received too little attention.

I refer to the Euston Manifesto (www.eustonmanifesto.org), published last March by a group of mainly left-of-center thinkers, and the supporting statement called American Liberalism and the Euston Manifesto, published by U.S. intellectuals in September.

… The Euston Manifesto says: "We reject without qualification the anti-Americanism now infecting so much left-liberal (and some conservative) thinking."

It also declares: "Drawing the lesson of the disastrous history of left apologetics over the crimes of Stalinism and Maoism, as well as more recent exercises in the same vein (some of the reaction to the crimes of 9/11, the excuse making for suicide-terrorism, the disgraceful alliances lately set up inside the antiwar movement with illiberal theocrats), we reject the notion that there no opponents on the left."

It states: "We stand against all claims to a total — unquestionable or unquestioning — truth."

It supports a global "responsibility to protect" — the principle of armed intervention in a state where the slaughter and torture of citizens is rampant.

On Iraq, it has this to say: "We recognize that it was possible reasonably to disagree about the justification for the intervention, the manner in which it was carried through, the planning (or lack of it) for the aftermath, and the prospects for the successful implementation of democratic change. We are, however, united in our view about the reactionary, semi-fascist and murderous character of the Baathist regime in Iraq, and we recognize the overthrow as a liberation of the Iraqi people."

The proper concern of the left after Saddam's overthrow should have been "the battle to put in place in Iraq a democratic political order" rather than "picking through the rubble of the arguments over intervention."

The manifesto observes that: "The many left opponents of regime change in Iraq who have been unable to understand the considerations that led others on the left to support it, dishing out anathema and excommunication, more lately demanding apology or repentance, betray the democratic values they profess." …

They deplore the tendency on the left to substitute hatred of Bush for thought about fighting jihadism. Why, they ask, is the left more incensed by America's errors in Iraq than "terrorist outrages by Islamic extremists?"

They note: "In World War II and the Cold War, liberals, centrists and conservatives found moments of commonality. Indeed, if those efforts had been borne exclusively by the left or the right they very well might have failed."

…If you're tired of sterile screaming in the wilderness, tired of the comfortably ensconced "hindsighters" poring over every American error in Iraq, tired of facile anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism masquerading as anti-Zionism, try the Euston road in 2007. It might actually lead somewhere.

In a top-down society, nobody cares what you are for (or against, for that matter)

Europeans for Saddam's execution.

Happy New Year Zeropa

Happy New Year to the Zeropean leaders who are forced to stand by helpless as their number one bidniz partner takes the fall. Happy New Year to Zeropean groupies of les Lumières et la raison humaniste (vétuste et immonde quincaillerie zéropéenne à foutre à la décharge). Happy New Year to the Saddamite hack journalistes at Libération PropagandaStaffel and Le Monde Al-Jazeera on the Seine. Happy New Year and good riddance to Kofi Annan. Happy New Year to Emmanuel Todd. Happy New Year to Zeropean radical pacifists. Happy New Year to George Galloway. Happy New Year to Robert Fisk. Happy New Year to the 9-3 racaille and other suburban French youth (they now have something to view in the cellphones other than Nick Berg and Daniel Pearl). Happy New Year to the degenerate pédaloïdes sidaïsés de la pédéblogosphère franchouille.

So true

Nidra Poller notes that the French preSS used up its quota of torture stories for Pinochet. Touché!