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…
of “mantyhose”. Now be a good girl, and follow whatever trend you’re told to. I'm sure they'll sell like hot cakes.
Update: in view of all that, I can't even gage the coolness of this comment by Linda:
All those years we women have been wanting to rid the world of the abomination known as pantyhose and now the manufacturers want to subject "men" to it?Kiss me, you fool.
- With thanks to Papertiger
The BBC, ready to report yet more of that comfort food for aging radical-symps that they like to call news, leaps on a statement by Putin that the US is “very dangerous” and is using almost unconstrained force around the world. This from a man more than willing to use unconstrained force on journalist and his own population. After all, THAT’S okay – there’s a long, auspicious tradition of that... Lost is the fact that Putin has a stranglehold on Europe’s energy, and is manipulating it to effect.
Iranian nuclear negotiator Ali Larijani is among delegates at the conference.
On their planet, the Soviets attended western power security summits in 1962.
The conference, founded in 1962, has become an annual opportunity for world leaders to discuss the most pressing issues of the day.
Funnier still, the story titled with Putin’s slag has virtually nothing to do with the US, and reveals quite plainly that the dynamics of the event reported were over a disagreement in approach between Merkel and Putin vis-à-vis Iran and nukes. The smear of the US was a throwaway line, and a distraction, and yet the all-knowing anonymous sophisticate from the BBC fell for it.
Nonetheless, modesty must be stopping them from addressing this part of the report:European diplomats are hoping to hold informal talks with Mr Larijani at the two-day summit.
It’s baffling that they won’t discuss that tremendous bit of diplomatic success. After years of pressure, the Iranians might talk to Europe about the nukes that they’re building to put on the missiles with a range designed specifically to hit Europe.
It would be their first meeting since the collapse of talks last year and the imposition of limited UN sanctions on Tehran for its failure to stop the enrichment of uranium.
The Pierre Trudeau strategy: get an adequate number of language laws in, so that your citizens end up taking charge over everyone else. Now control freak language-eugenicists are trying it in Europe, and are using a "more equal than others" type argument. Maybe they imagine no-one will react to the proposal because the overwhelming graciousness of the statement. After all, they did use the magic word "equality," even if they actually mean to impose its' opposite.The CPLDE proposes that French should have the ultimate linguistic primacy in situations where EU officials or politicians are squabbling over what an EU text actually says when written in several languages.
All the while making moronic assumptions about which languages are scientific sounding, romantic sounding, and other corner-store codswallop that hasn't been true for a century. Were that the case, German speakers would dominate science, Italians would be ubiquitous in contemporary art, and the French would actually seem the least bit precise in their logic.
"All languages are equal and all the national sensitivities are duly protected. However, as regards the interpretation of texts it is better to be certain what we are writing," said Mr Druon.
He argued that French should be "the authoritative" language as it is both related to Latin - in which Roman law was written - as well as the language of the Napoleonic code.
Pink Floyd's peddler of paraded perpetual pain ignores just where it is the terror has come from for 40 years, and like the Euro-preSS, refuses to direct attention to
insurgents killing Iraqis, only Americans killing anyone they can feature on page 1. Daily they become more and more enamored with those rollicking days of 70's era murders, hijackings, and kidnappings by nebulously well funded bands of "passionate youth".
Warm fuzzies all around:With the collapse of Communism, the ideology of the Red Army Faction seems anachronistic to the point of quaintness, and certainly no longer threatening.
Except for the fact that they weren’t just murderers, but also a bunch of complete tools.The Fuse is Lit (No Pasaran!)
However, the Arctic blast is not expected to last; there should be a return to the wet and milder weather over the weekend.Righto. As soon as we get rid of global warming we can “start controlling the weather again.” In the mean time, the evil, SUV driving residents of Oswego, New York are expected to have 2,5 meters of accumulation by Sunday.The Fuse is Lit (No Pasaran!)
What irritates me the most about the constant harping of the German media is that they seem less concerned with what is wrong in their own backyard than with what is wrong with the United States. School shooting in Colorado? Big news. School shooting in Erfurt, Germany? Not really that important. Race riots in Los Angeles? Extremely newsworthy. Race riots in France? Not so much. It seems to spring from malice towards the United States, as if every news item is supposed to be a stick in our eye. It’s almost if they know who their enemy is (the US), and then intend to follow their enemy around and make sure that every slip-up (real or imagined) is shown to the world in the worst light possible. Then they wonder why we think that they’re anti-American.Benjamin Duffy explains why the Americans have replaced Germans as the new Nazis. Meanwhile, Andrei S. Markovits points out that anti-Americanism is essential for Europe's identity. The resentments
are present in polite company and acceptable in the discourse of the political classes. They constitute common fare not only among Western Europe's cultural and media elites, but also throughout society itself, from London to Athens and from Stockholm to Rome, even if European politicians visiting Washington or European professors at international conferences about anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism are adamant about denying or sugarcoating that reality.
How a Socialist former French Foreign Minister Roland Dumas learned to love the (Iranian) bomb. This makes collective and socialistic sense: because Iran’s missiles are pointed at Socialism’s great rhetorical enemies – any society that looks like his own.
As such, he’s willing to imagine that some body “makes the law” which can’t be true or necessary in a world where strategic balances determine the state of relations, and is more than willing to cave in to threats for one simple reason: the US, he believes, will permit it’s well being to be jeopardized by fickle European elite playing PR to a fickle European public.For François Mitterrand’s former [foreign] minister, “it is not inevitable that to have the atomic bomb is a worsening factor”. “It is a function of reestablishing of the balance and which says balance, known as maintenance of the peace”, he added. “On the contrary, if in an area of the world an over-armed powerful country has the atomic bomb they get to make the law”, explained Roland Dumas. He called for “a general negotiation with Iran to begin very quickly”. Last week, a maintenance with Jacques Chirac to the New Observer, New York Times and International Herald Tribune caused a sharp reaction. Before reconsidering his remarks, the president had considered openly that Teheran could become a nuclear power.
As if there ever was a strategic balance or a moment of peace between the parties in the Gulf to begin with, and blocking Iran’s nuclear ambitions were even in Chirac’s power, or that anyone will even ask France what it thinks.
Except for an ability to make the law by threatening to nuke Iran in retaliation of a nuclear strike, they have nothing to say to this point – period – and they certainly aren’t going to use their world-beating ”bravitude” to “lay down the law.”
The only way to believe that an nuclear armed Iran would create a strategic balance would be to assume that Saudi Arabia doesn’t exist, and heeb-hating mites are nesting in your overly coiffed aging scalp.
Writing about the Charlie Hebdo/MoToones court fight, these leftist assclowns are accusing the center-right of colluding with islamists, while blindly failing to notice the blatant, habitual, and pointless Fasco-Green-Red undermining of any kind of available social order that reminds them of their parents....last December 9th in Lyon the Minister of Interior had required that in the preamble a sentence appear recognizing the right for any Moslem to change religion, or to declare themselves an atheist. Let us recall that in Koran, this fact is punishable by death.
Ironically, in what they state as a defense of secularism and a social “solidarity” they’re attacking their political foes and accusing the equally weak-kneed center-right of somehow making the left-leaning Charlie Hebdo publication print the Mohammed Cartoons in the first place. With deep concern for what the Koran declares legal under their canon laws, they are offended by the suggestion of making it self-limiting in scope in civil law. Faced with the non-compliance of a nearly-meaningless interfaith lovefest, they criticize anyone for backing down.
Banding together, the religious organizations rejected this preamble, and the government backed off.
It’s puzzling how stupid some people can be to the ways of the world. The internet makes the kind of banishing of information that lefty is accusing the right of not engaging in rather meaningless. Right or wrong, truth or lie, the information goes out there – and so do the critiques, fiskings, and corrections – something lefties enamored with an affection for only permitting private media competition if it’s zombie-like in it’s taste for intellectual diversity and prefaced with the words “indy-“ or is “ATTAC”. By letting the Charlie Hebdo court case continue for the offence of blasphemy made up in racist offence (did they take Mouloud Aounit like advising?), Boubakeur and the UOIF can maintain a pressure on the whole of French society. If they win, they will have to the great pleasure of the Catholic Church and other religious dogmas, to insert an important corner against the freedom of expression and the right to free criticism of all the dogmas.
Since when have these people ever cared about defending a Church or any other domestic seeming religious body’s right to free speech? They might as well buy this line of crap style of rhetoric about “legality” and the “right to question this or that” that pleases them politically, and take it for truth, and rattle on about what they think “the culture” is or that it’s merely to be employed for their goals, not preserved as a plain upon which people can freely conduct their lives in.
...George Bush's legacy will be all about the war. It seems certain that he'll be remembered, mostly, for soldiers killed, billions wasted, terrorism spawned and worse decisions on top of bad ones. ...
Unless you can’t even agree with yourself:They'll remember George Bush in near apocalyptic terms. He'll be the denier-in-chief who failed to acknowledge, much less confront, the coming ecological catastrophe.
etc., etc., Katrina, Katrina, etc., etc. Weather patterns and ocean currents, the product of ''unevenly heated rotating fluids,'' are already difficult enough to predict. ``It's like being at a bank when a crack addict robs it. You don't want to get the crack addict excited.''
You see, they USED to be able to predict the weather, and as for not wanting to anger a crack addict, the red-cum-green left were the ones most likely to appease the Soviets and Eastern Europeans whose “robust,” "solidaristic," and cheerful collective industries polluted beyond belief, and had no difficulty romanticizing that form of labor by compulsion. That CO2 emissions are rising 3 times faster in Holy Land of Europe than they are in the US doesn’t seem to matter to this clown when he’s dispensing other peoples' “legacies” while his appears to be, well, his miserable nature, and this hateful column of his.
Exodus: Germans are leaving the EU in droves for the US, Switzerland, and Canada.Dr. Nina Lenhoff, 31, from Münster, moved to London for training in psychiatry because she thought it would be nice to live in another country. “But once I got here, I was just amazed,” she said.
Her salary is nearly double what she earned in Germany, and when she had a baby 18 months ago she was able to work part time — something she said would not have been possible in Germany.
The same is true for Dr. Boettner, 35, who studied orthopedics in Münster and got a taste of New York when he trained for a year in arthroplasty, or joint replacement, at the Hospital for Special Surgery.
Back home in 2001, Dr. Boettner found that Germany did not appreciate that specialty. He also dreaded the formality of the medical system, rooted in a society where people still address their superiors with formal titles like “Herr Professor Doktor.”
- from the NYT
Marxist inspired writer and polemist Alain Soral defended Tuesday his endorsement presidential candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen, being convinced that today Marx “would compel him to vote” for the FN president Le Pen.
Midnight Monday: France24 calls the proposed B$622 US 5-year military budget increase ‘over $700 billion!”, and refers to the Army 1st Lieutenant who refuses to ship out to Iraq as a ‘high ranking officer.’ Wow – I've heard of 1LTs who think of themselves as ’high ranking’, but I didn’t know that there were French journos who would agree with them,
It's a shame. It would make for nice conference for Soviet-American cultural exchange.The Fuse is Lit (No Pasaran!)
This cat is right on the money: In 50 years, Martha's Vinyard might have smaller beaches. Long before that, tens of millions of people living in socialist countries will have been poisoned by unrestrained development. For that reason alone, the Greens ought to support the war in Iraq. It's hard to find a democracy with an environmental record as bad as the totalitarian part of the world.
Ideological greenies always seem to want to line people up and shoot them. Too bad they're structurally incapable of doping out the good guys from the bad guys.The Fuse is Lit (No Pasaran!)
Don’t worry, inspite of massive failure, they’ll still find a way to spin it.One would never know this from reading European Union press releases, most any media account or even White House statements on the issue. The latter fact is deeply troubling given the political and diplomatic capital lost over public misunderstanding of this matter, and also the traction that proposals to mimic Europe's failed approach are gaining in Congress. In truth, Europe's CO2 emissions are rising twice as fast as those of the U.S. since Kyoto, three times as fast since 2000. This figure balloons to more than five times as fast when one tallies the individual country average of the EU-15.
The Fuse is Lit (No Pasaran!)
