That Famous Continental Quivering Lower Lip

Seen on Charles Bremner’s delightful blog:

”Owned by a Trotskyite, a Maoist, a Socialist and a Sarkozist without ever changing hands.”

This amusing advertisement from the French division of Volkswagen could not be better timed. Trotskyite and other far left students have shut down about a third of France's universities this week, many of them dreaming of overturning the "Facho-Sarko" regime.

So the “Mai 68” generation isn’t just dead, it seems that people are finally realizing that it’s symbolism was also incredibly fake:

Though the WV Microbus of the flower power hippy years was really a US phenomenon, the advert is a wink at France's 1968 generation. Many of those students who worshipped Leon Trotsky and Chairman Mao matured into Socialists in their 30s. They moved fruther right over the years and voted for Nicolas Sarkozy last spring.

And in an incredible coup of once again thelling themselves how far they are ahead of the curve, it only comes 27 years after the “Reagan Democrats” phenomemon.

They’re Too Stupid For Sarcasm

Never mind the commie cruelty. Apparently these idiots think they can find a few zit-faced adolescents that believe their claim that Saudi Arabia, Brazil, Argentina, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, and the like are “part of the third world.”

You were in Morocco, dumbass.

Last night at the Stade de France, France's showcase stadium in Saint Denis (the notorious Nine-Three), France and Morocco played a 2-2 tie. Before the match, the French national anthem was widely booed by the French youths in attendance. French defender William Gallas, commenting the total absence of French flags in a sea of waving Moroccan flags, stated "I thought I was in Morocco."

World-beating Euro-technology

Still, ripped off.

In Spite of (A) Plenty of Money and (B) a Large Mouth

The EU is unable to arrange putting A where B is. Probably for want of complete paperwork which can’t be clearly read due to blood stains.

The EU gets outdone by the likes of DHL.

If you want to see the future of the European Union and understand the reality of its vainglorious ambitions, look to the present. In particular, look to the wearily predictable fracas over the supply of helicopters for the humanitarian mission in Chad, intended to relieve the suffering of the peoples of Darfur.

This is an issue on which EU member states are in the frame, in an area within the French sphere of influence and one which is crying out for urgent, practical action.

Yet, as the Associated Press tells us, the launch of the Eus peacekeeping could (yet again) be delayed, while the force commander Gen. Henri Bentegeat waits for firm commitments on the supply of vital helicopters.

All the man wants is a meagre dozen transport helicopters, which are absolutely essential to the mission as force multipliers to move peacekeepers quickly along the vast, sparsely populated borderlands west of Darfur.

And people will die for want of a continent of peaced-out blathering buffoons who can’t come up with a mere dozen military and a dozen transport helicopters.

Alert reader Joe Strummer points out: “I foresee EU looking eastwards for possible solutions” After all, since the EU has relied on a A.U. and then a UN paint job and troops from Rwanda, Nigeria, Cameroon, a variety of African nations, Thailand, Nepal and Norway to relieve their guilt, perhaps it’s time to extend the tired old saw about Europeans to include peacekeeping and supplying relief “with an accordion”

A message for OBL

Somebody set up him the bomb. All his base in Iraq are belong to us.

A Nation Exploding With Happiness

Looks like that EUvian “high quality of life through forcable modesty” schtick is working like a charm. Happy-happy-joy-joy is breaking out all over the precious place, liebschen.

Unilateralism: the US’ Only Option

Given that engaging any foe out there with Limp Larry is rather worthless. Stuart Koehl has more:

one of the most common complaints made against the Bush administration's war policies is it's alleged "unilateralism," an unwillingness to bring in our allies or fight as a coalition. This view overlooks the participation of many countries alongside U.S. forces in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Granted, these are often small countries, with proportionally small contingents, but they are there, they share the risk, and sometimes they spill their blood as well.

And repeat and repeat and repeat they will. Most of it comes from Europe for this simple reason: outside of the UK and France, they hardly have any forces with whom to express some magical non-unilateralism.

How can this be, when Western Europe has an economy as large as that of the United States, and a combined military establishment of more than 1.7 million troops? Well, as shown in British defense analyst Julian Lindley-French's highly perceptive study for the Bertelsmann Foundation, this impressive force is largely hollow: "There are 1.7 million Europeans in uniform, but only 170,000 soldiers, of which 40-50,000 could be used for robust combat operations at any one time." Lindley-French notes that a large proportion of those 40-50,000 combat-ready troops are either incapable of overseas deployment or already committed to various missions (and thus unavailable for deployment elsewhere). The net deployable combat-effective force generated by Europe may be as low as 25-30,000 men, the majority of which are resident in the British and French military.

It seems to having nothing to do with an air of ‘pacisfism’ at all. The cause is neglect and ineptitude.

Today, all of Europe (excluding Russia) has a GDP of $16.17 trillion and spends only about $314 billion on defense--1.93 percent of combined GDP. In contrast, the United States has a GDP of $13.16 trillion, and spends $534 billon--4.06 percent--on defense. The global average for defense spending is 2.0 percent of GDP. Clearly, Europe has not been spending as much as it should on defense, being in effect a "free rider" benefiting from the security provided by the U.S. forces whose activities it regularly criticizes.

Bad as this is, the situation is worse than it appears, because of the fragmentation and duplication of European defense spending. While in the United States it is considered scandalous that the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines have duplicative research and development (R&D), procurement, and logistic systems, in Europe every country has its own national defense policy supporting redundant R&D, procurement, command, administrative, and logistic establishments. Thus, for example, though Europe spends only about half of what the U.S. does on procurement, and only about a quarter as much on R&D, each European dollar spent buys a lot less capability, as a result of which, the pace of force modernization is much slower than it should be.

This is not helped by Europe maintaining a large and aging force structure intended to fight the Warsaw Pact on the North German Plain. Germany, France, Italy--all have hundreds of tanks, armored personnel carriers, and artillery pieces of very limited utility in an age of low-intensity expeditionary warfare.

AKA “Peacekeeping,” the one thing they seem to be able to fawn and blubber over, publicly admire, and would like to think “sets Europe apart” from the 5,6 billion mere plebeians that make up the rest of humanity.

Nonetheless, in they begged America not to ‘go it alone’

For many critics of U.S. "unilateralism," there is an implicit assumption that the lack of allied participation in ongoing military efforts is due mainly to U.S. policies and the unfavorable European response to them. This begs the question of whether our European allies would be able to do much more than they are doing now, let alone respond to any unforeseen contingencies in the future, even if they were inclined to do so. The answer, to those who have examined the present state of the European defense establishment, increasingly seems to be "no": European armed forces are neither structured, nor equipped, nor trained to play a meaningful role in the scenarios most likely to challenge the security of the civilized world in the coming decades.

So they will stick to doing what they do best when they aren’t twiddling their thumbs as massacres in Rwanda, Sudan, the former Yugoslavia, and countless other places in their neighborhood were going on: being critics.

For the Jew-baiting French State TV, it's called "business as usual"

French State TV fauxtography:

"In the United States that’s called tampering with evidence, obstruction of justice, and perjury. In France, we’ll find out what it’s called."

Mai 68 liquidé

In forty years the chant has changed from "CRS = SS" to "Allez les bleus". '68 is officially dead and buried and not a moment too soon.

Welcome to Canada

Canadian humanists, so quick to shit on their neighbor to the South of the border, show how to welcome foreign tourists. The French preSS, constantly blathering about lack of hospitality at the US border, doesn't peep a word.

The latent feeling that globalization may be an American-directed plot to undermine their country's place in the world

…polls repeatedly show that the French people are alarmed about the effect of globalization, with the latent feeling that it may all be an American-directed plot to undermine their country's place in the world

writes Jonathan Fenby.

President Nicolas Sarkozy epitomizes this duality.

…The strength of nationalist feeling and distrust of the wider world has been shown in France in recent years: First by the continuing strength of the chauvinist far right of Jean-Marie Le Pen's National Front before Sarkozy stole its electoral clothes this year, and, second, the rejection of the European Union Constitution in the 2005 referendum. The vote was less about the wording of that massive document than a dismissal of what is known in France as Anglo-American economic liberalism, which is castigated by everybody from the Communists to Chirac.

…like de Gaulle, [Sarkozy] is also deeply attached to the French state, and the use of its power to get his way. He showed this when he intervened personally to sew up a deal forcing a merger between the Suez energy and environmental group with the state gas company, Gaz de France. Sarkozy is now busy to promote a similar link-up to create a nuclear group around France's Areva company.

…A couple of years ago, the mere rumor that Pepsi Cola might be thinking of buying the French food group Danone set off a storm of protest in France. Danone, meanwhile, continued its expansion as a major player in the fast-growing milk products business in China without raising any eyebrows. The Chirac administration drew up a comprehensive list of "security" industries where foreigners would not be allowed to invest — including casinos. The list has not been modified under the new president.

The inheritance of the powerful state, the tradition of nationalist economic policy stretching back to the era of Louis XIV, and the doubts many French have about the challenges of globalization all influence the new president. How he resolves them will be a continuing story of his five-year term.

Truthy Heights

Looks like the world will need new and interesting EUphemisms for European notions of journalism. John Rosenthal reports further on just how Reporters Without Borders is singing for their dinner.

A heading on the Web page for the RSF index promising "Evaluation by region" gives one hope for finding something more to chew on. The heading is followed by links for "Americas," "Asia," "Africa," "Europe" and "Middle East." Anyone clicking on those links, however, will discover that they lead to exactly the same 1373-word press release, with merely the subtitles changed! A more brazen expression of RSF's disinterest in providing a detailed justification for its rankings would hardly be possible.

In addition to the press release, RSF provides a brief note on "How the index was compiled" -- pompously titled a "methodological note" in the French version. The note is barely 400 words long. It begins: "The Reporters Without Borders index measures the state of press freedom in the world. It reflects the degree of freedom that journalists and news organisations enjoy in each country. . . ." Consisting almost exclusively of such bland assurances, the note contains virtually nothing that would merit the description of a "methodology." The only relevant piece of information one learns from RSF's "methodological note," is that RSF's rankings are supposed to be based on the responses to a questionnaire sent out by RSF "to its network of 130 correspondents around the world, and to journalists, researchers, jurists and human rights activists." Just how these responses are supposed to have been converted into the numerical "score" that determines the rank of each country in the index, we are not told.

In effect, it’s an opinion poll on the like-minded, and like-funded sort. It has nothing to do with incidents of press harassment itself, and were one to look for information as to just what it is that the judicial bodies of nations targeted in this report need to work on, leaves far too much to the imagination. Nothing is cited.

John goes nation by nation using RSF’s own standards of what press freedom is to demonstrate that the outcome is clearly tilted in the favor of the European nation states that fund RSF

The first 19 places in the RSF index are occupied by small, mostly European, countries whose excellent "performance" is unlikely to be begrudged by any of the larger global powers that battle it out for legitimacy and influence on the world stage: "consensus" candidates, so to say.

The first major power to appear in the ranking is Germany in 20th place -- some 28 places in front of the United States. In the six years that RSF has published its Press Freedom Index, Germany has never ranked below 23rd and it has always been ranked first among the EU "big three" powers (Germany, France and the United Kingdom) and well above all other major world powers: most notably, the United States. During this same period, both investigative journalists and media commentators have been subjected to a degree of interference and harassment by organs of the German state that would be unthinkable in the United States. The numerous episodes of press harassment and interference have included spying on journalists, police raids on editorial offices, and criminal investigations. Virtually any of these cases, had they occurred in the United States, would undoubtedly have been enduring front page stories -- not only in the newspapers of reference in the United States itself, but also in Germany and the rest of Europe -- and led to a (further) precipitous decline in the United States' ranking in the RSF Press Freedom Index.

In April of this year, the German television news magazine Panorama reported that the German intelligence service, the BND, and the German Federal Office for Criminal Investigation, or BKA, had mounted a joint surveillance operation against journalists of the German news weekly Focus between 2002 and 2004. Focus has been the venue of numerous explosive revelations on German intelligence operations: notably in connection with the Iraq War and Germany's highly ambiguous stance toward the American-led "War on Terror." It came out in 2005 that the BND had pursued spying operations against Focus reporter Josef Hufelschulte and the freelance journalist and intelligence expert Erich Schmidt-Eenboom starting in the mid-1990s.

Also afoot today: a finding is expected on the France2-Enderlin case concerning the staged coverage of the death of a Palestinian child.

Today — November 14 — the public will finally be able to view the 27 minutes of raw footage of the death of Mohammed Al Dura and determine whether or not it was a fake. Or will they?

[ ... ]

France 2 refused to hand over the original film but a court order last month by the French court of appeals forces the station to air the 27 minutes of raw footage--which actually consists of staged scenes of Palestinians pretending to be shot, according to the few journalists who previously saw it.

But just when we thought the truth would finally be revealed, France 2 is backtracking again. Enderlin now is telling Jerusalem Post, there were never 27 minutes of raw footage

What else did you expect?

Being skeptical means having a "show me" attitude; It does not mean refusing to believe facts that are as plain as day

When casualties are up, that's news

writes Benjamin Duffy.

When casualties plummet precipitously, reporters stand around waiting for a "trend" to develop.

…Yes, it must have been excruciating listening to a retired general testify about positive trends in Iraq. … Yes, and we wouldn't want good news leaked to the media.

Finky balance la purée

Daring French cut with plunging eye slit

Kebab über alles

Some Zeropean multicultural integrationist bullshit.

Mamère niqué

Le Meilleur des Mondes :

En se rendant en Irak, fin août, pendant trois jours et sans gilet pare-balles, Bernard Kouchner a fait honneur à la France qu’il représente, à la gauche dont il est issu et à ses amis dont nous faisons partie. Hélas ! « Quand le singe montre la lune, dit un proverbe chinois, l’imbécile regarde le doigt. » La visite à Bagdad de Bernard Kouchner était amplement justifiée par l’effroyable tragédie dont souffre la population irakienne livrée à la barbarie des terroristes. Mais les « imbéciles » de l’antiaméricanisme obsessionnel se fichent de l’Irak et de son peuple ! Leur indignation ? Ignorant les poseurs de bombes qui détruisent méthodiquement ce pauvre pays, ils la réservent au moindre indice d’une « soumission » de la France à « l’hyperpuissance » honnie et dénoncent mesquinement l’hébergement de Bernard Kouchner dans l’antre de la « zone verte » sous la protection des Américains. Ainsi un député Vert, Noël Mamère – qui sans doute n’aime pas les chiens –, qualifia le ministre des Affaires étrangères de « caniche » de George Bush. Et un ancien ministre de la Défense – qui avait démissionné du gouvernement en 1991 pour protester contre la première guerre du Golfe – s’est permis de reprocher à l’actuel ministre des Affaires étrangères ses « amitiés kurdes », en clair d’avoir toujours préféré le camp des victimes à celui du bourreau Saddam Hussein dont lui, Jean-Pierre Chevènement, a constamment soutenu la dictature soi-disant « laïque ». Cet étrange thème du « lobby kurde » – dont on ignorait jusqu’alors la néfaste puissance occulte ! – fut aussi évoqué fin août par Marianne, ce « radeau de la Méduse » de la presse française où les soldats perdus du Figaro-Magazine et de L’Humanité trempent désormais leur plume amère dans le même encrier d’un populisme gaucho-réactionnaire qui rappelle le défunt Crapouillot.

It Looks Like Some of Them Stayed Awake in Class

Pas si dupes des médias: 62% or students in one university (in "red” Rennes no less) oppose the student 'strike'.

C'est à 21h que le verdict des urnes est tombé. Les étudiants ont voté à 62 % contre le blocage après un vote à bulletin secret. Mais qu'en sera-t-il aujourd'hui sur le terrain ?

Other, more “humanism” and “consensus” spouting types continue to whinge and whinge...

« Pour nous, ça ne change rien. Ce vote à bulletins secrets n'est pas légitime et pour nous n'a aucune valeur. On continuera mardi matin le blocage de l'université et on maintiendra les piquets de grève de force si besoin. »

“For us this changes nothing. A secret ballot isn't legitimate to us, and is worthless. We'll continue to blockade the University, and we'll cotinue our strike and use force if need be.”

You can almost smell the “solidarity”.

School of hard knocks

Striking University students clubbed at Nanterre. Beat them to a pulp.

"On regrette que la force soit employée" dans l'enceinte de la faculté de Nanterre
LEMONDE.FR | 13.11.07

UPDATE: French students who are against the strikers cheer the riot police as they club the racaille.

Pfft! Snxpthhhhh!

But can Europe become a superpower? And should Americans care?

Asks Soeren Kern.

No and yes.

The biggest barrier to European superpowerdom is that European elites refuse to bring their postmodern fantasies about the illegitimacy of military “hard power” into line with the way the rest of the world interprets reality. Indeed, after years of overselling the efficacy of diplomatic and economic “soft power” as the elixir for the world’s problems, Europeans have been losing, not gaining, international influence.

Three years of European “soft power” diplomacy have not persuaded Iran to abandon what even the most cynical Europeans say is a clandestine nuclear-weapons program. If anything, Iran has been emboldened by European equivocation. At the same time, China and Russia, expert practitioners of the game of power politics, continue to pursue aggressive trade and energy policies vis-à-vis Europe with obvious impunity. Meanwhile, most Europeans admit that their peacekeeping performance in Afghanistan and Lebanon has been downright pathetic, even embarrassing in the case of Spain.

So why do Europeans continue to assail American “hard power” as bad for the world, when their own “soft power” consistently fails to make the grade?

Actually, the US has been waiting for decades for the Euro-entities (other than the UK and Dutch largely) that have mutated into the EU cartel to actually build up some power to back up what is otherwise non-statecraft and join the non-dictatorial, not-cretinous minority on this earth in an effort to stand up for the occasional nicety like human decency for once.

I mean, it isn’t like ‘Europe’ can depend on Fiji and Bangladesh to man every peacekeeping effort out there for them.

The World Envies The Quality Of Life

"Cette désorganisation organisée": More Pleasant News from France's Health Care System

Even though Dr. Laurent Sedel, M.D. takes on private health care at the end of his two-page article in Le Monde and even though he ends his diatribe with "le système de santé français, l'un des meilleurs du monde", one can sense that the physician's desire to end his opus on a positive note is of a political nature, in order to avoid unpleasant fallouts. What with his views on the undisputed evidence of France's vaunted solidarity in the hospital, the surgeon appears to be someone that Michael Moore somehow managed to miss during his visit to European health care units for Sicko (italics mine)…

Un sandwich et le courrier m'attendent. Parmi les lettres, le double d'un jugement dans une affaire d'infection prétendument nosocomiale : une fracture ouverte de jambe qui s'est infectée. Les torts sont partagés, et l'Assistance publique devra payer la moitié des dédommagements. J'écris pour expliquer qu'il faut faire appel de ce jugement, qu'il faut contester la version de ce patient qui a été mal reçu aux urgences.

…La routine ! Pourquoi la chirurgie est-elle une discipline en voie d'asphyxie ? Réponse : les recrutements se font rares, imposant le recours massif à l'immigration pour combler les postes vacants dans les hôpitaux publics. Les étudiants nous voient peu, nous connaissent mal et pensent que la chirurgie est un domaine où l'on ne parle pas avec le patient. Le public, lui, continue de vivre au rythme des feuilletons télévisés ("Urgences" et autres) ou des caricatures vues dans les films ou lues dans les romans.

…Paradoxalement, alors que les techniques s'améliorent, que l'anesthésie et la prise en compte de la douleur n'ont jamais été aussi au point, pourquoi faut-il que le service rendu ne soit plus apprécié comme il le devrait ? Je voudrais ici tenter de rétablir la vérité du métier, essayer de montrer pourquoi nous allons vers une détérioration du recrutement, de la qualité et, à terme, du service rendu.

Bien sûr, il n'existe pas une mais plusieurs explications. La société évolue, plus hédoniste, plus protectrice, plus récriminatrice aussi. Il faut tenir compte du sacro-saint principe de précaution. A l'hôpital, mais aussi en clinique privée, cela conduit à la disparition du pouvoir médical, à la perte de la notion d'équipe et à la mainmise de l'administration. Les effectifs de celle-ci se sont d'ailleurs considérablement étoffés en trente ans, le nombre de chirurgiens d'un service comme le mien restant le même. Enfin, osons le dire, il faut compter avec la faiblesse des rémunérations ou, plutôt, des tarifs opposables fixés par la Sécurité sociale.

Cette faiblesse est très démotivante à une époque où les footballeurs, les acteurs, les dentistes et, parmi les médecins, d'autres spécialités gagnent beaucoup plus. Citons les radiologues, les cancérologues, les radiothérapeutes, les biologistes et les anesthésistes (données de la Caisse de retraite 2006).

Les 5 000 chirurgiens français font pourtant vivre des dizaines de milliers de gens. … Un seul perdant dans tout cela : le patient.

…Une opération ressemble à une pièce de théâtre. Pour qu'elle puisse se dérouler, il faut un ensemble d'acteurs, de machinistes et de techniciens. … Tout cela demande une coordination rigoureuse, quasi militaire, or c'est un peu chacun pour soi : le chirurgien, même lorsqu'il est chef de service, n'a aucun pouvoir. Chaque corps de métier possède ses règles de fonctionnement : les brancardiers, organisés en pool commun, ont un sens de la ponctualité variable ; les anesthésistes doivent travailler un nombre d'heures au-delà desquelles ils ont droit aux RTT. Ils fixent leurs horaires, décident vers 15 heures qu'il est trop tard pour faire descendre le malade suivant puisque cela les ferait sortir après 17 heures. Ils sont pour la plupart arrivés à 8 h 30, en décalage de 30 minutes avec l'infirmière anesthésiste.

…Mais il faut bien reconnaître que le quasi-blocage des rémunérations lié aux 35 heures a eu des effets pervers sur ces emplois techniques, dont les effectifs sont insuffisants. L'un de ces effets est le recours de plus en plus habituel à l'intérim.

…Comprenons-nous bien : nous ne mettons pas en cause la valeur des individus, ni leur compétence ni leur fiabilité, encore moins leur conscience professionnelle. Le problème est l'absence de notion d'équipe soudée autour du but commun. Chaque corps de métier obéit à ses propres règles, ses syndicats, sa logique, son organisation. Alors que c'est l'équipe tout entière qui gagne ou perd. C'est comme si une équipe de foot ou un corps de ballet voyait ses éléments changer à chaque match ou ballet. On imagine les performances !

En chirurgie, les conséquences sont surtout une perte de temps avec les dix acteurs concernés par l'acte opératoire au chômage technique parce que l'un d'entre eux manque à l'appel ou n'a pas fait son travail, parce que le brancardier, par exemple, n'a pas emmené le patient au bloc et que tout le monde attend.

…En garde, c'est pire, les chirurgiens sont souvent jeunes, les anesthésistes qui travaillent en équipe ne sont plus affectés à une spécialité chirurgicale. Les cas bénins ne les intéressent pas, toutes ces fractures, ces plaies, ces bobos divers qui représentent la grande majorité des soins à donner et qui doivent être opérés en urgence. Ces cas "simples" peuvent, mal traités, représenter de véritables catastrophes individuelles : un tendon fléchisseur du pouce coupé chez un travailleur manuel peut l'obliger à changer de métier après six mois de convalescence et de rééducation.

(Le médecin urgentiste) Patrick Pelloux s'élève contre l'indisponibilité des services de chirurgie, alors que cela n'a souvent rien à voir avec les chirurgiens. C'est un problème de gestion de flux, de disponibilité des lits (l'administration), des blocs opératoires et des anesthésistes (département d'anesthésie), des instruments stériles (la pharmacie). Cette désorganisation organisée engendre des pertes de temps à répétition. Elle est vécue par le chirurgien comme vexatoire.

…L'appropriation du principe de précaution par l'administration n'a qu'un seul but : se couvrir pour qu'un scandale ne soit plus de son fait. …le pire est sans doute la peur de l'échec. Or il n'y a pas et il ne peut pas y avoir de chirurgie sans complications. Une ambiance de précaution absolue conduit à terme, soit à supprimer toute intervention réparatrice non vitale au prétexte qu'elle n'était pas indispensable, soit à employer des méthodes beaucoup plus radicales.

…On parle tous du trou de la Sécurité sociale. Sait-on la quantité d'argent perdu par une mauvaise organisation ? Nous avons déjà développé la perte que représente l'absence de fonctionnement d'équipe, la mauvaise coordination, la mauvaise gestion des équipements. D'autres gouffres financiers sont bien connus : c'est notamment le maintien, pour des raisons politiques, de petites structures dans de petites villes, parce que les administrés, manipulés par le maire, sont persuadés que parcourir 30 kilomètres pour aller se faire opérer est une perte de temps inouïe.

…Autre exemple récent, je demandais un clou d'humérus spécial (300 euros) qui permettait d'éviter, pour certaines fractures de l'épaule, de poser une prothèse (environ 2 000 euros). Comme le clou d'humérus était "au marché" à 180 euros, l'administration n'admettait pas de payer un clou plus cher. Il m'a fallu plus d'un an de lettres à la direction pour expliquer cela.

Gina Cobb is my Hero(ine)

She asks a simple question I’ve also always wondered about: why do the left keep scrounging for a “class struggle anger thing” that people who own their homes and two cars can buy into?

Here’s the crisis: if the poor keep disappearing like this, how will Socialists be able to justify their own existence?

And Yet Confounding to Those “Sophisticates"

- Via Freedom and Whiskey

No comment

Thatcher or Reagan? France should be so lucky!

France braces for more strikes starting Tuesday evening. French students are looking to crank up their actions and possibly hook up with striking workers in a May 1968 redux. Where is the Thatcher or Reagan that will break the backs of these blackmailers?

Édition française offshore

Guy Millière commente la genèse de Houdna.

... Houdna a été publié par un éditeur américain dont le siège social est dans le Delaware. L’éditeur lui-même est de New York. Ce n’est pas seulement physiquement et mentalement que New York m’apporte de l’oxygène.

En des temps qu’on pourrait penser révolus, des livres qu’on ne pouvait éditer en France étaient édités aux Pays-Bas ou en Suisse et rentraient sous le manteau. Nous n’en sommes pas tout à fait là. Mais il faut parfois un éditeur venu de la libre Amérique pour que des livres en langue française pas très « politiquement corrects » existent. Cela en dit long sur la situation présente. Cela explique mon scepticisme.