Anne Sinclair : Femme de tête, dame de coeur

Le nouveau livre de Alain Hertoghe, avec Marc Tronchot, c'est Anne Sinclair : Femme de tête, dame de coeur.

Le livre le plus connu de Hertoghe, c'est La guerre à outrances (Comment la presse nous a désinformés sur l'Irak).

Brent Bozell and His Media Research Centre Mentioned in The Economist

It seems that, thanks to the internet, it is becoming increasingly hard for the mainstream media to ignore conservative voices and outlets. The Media Research Centre isn't treated too tenderly (the MRC 'purports to unmask 'liberal bias'” with quotes) in The Economist (nor is Herman Cain), but at least it is indeed mentioned and Brent Bozell is quoted.

Mr Cain complained, and some of his friends agreed, that the story was not a case of the newspapers doing their job but a racist “witch-hunt”. Brent Bozell, president of the Media Research Centre, which purports to unmask “liberal bias”, said that Mr Cain had predicted months ago that he might face a “high-tech lynching” like the accusations of sexual harassment that afflicted Clarence Thomas during his confirmation hearings for the Supreme Court. “In the eyes of the liberal media”, said Mr Bozell, “Herman Cain is just another uppity black American who has had the audacity to leave the liberal plantation. So they must destroy him, just as they tried destroying Clarence Thomas.”

How Unamerican is #OWS, you Ask?

"The utopian schemes of leveling and a community of goods are as visionary and impracticable as those which vest all property in the Crown, are arbitrary, despotic, and, in our government, unconstitutional."

- Samuel Adams, Letter to Dennys De Berdt, Massachusetts
agent in London (January 12, 1768)

Barely a Mention of Corzine's Affiliation in Long Le Monde Piece, Except That He "Claims" to Be a Democrat

A major article on Jon Corzine in Le Monde with nary a mention, by Sylvain Cypel and Marc Roche, that the head of MF Global was a Democrat and certainly none that he was a major donor to Barack Obama. The entire piece is meant to make one think that he is one of those traditional conservative fat cats whom the left (and Obama) has been heroically battling for so long and who turned out to be a political parvenu. A couple of lines of his mentor Robert Rubin working for Bill Clinton, not a single mention of Obama, and, following then — the clinger — the brief mention with wording that "Jon Corzine runs as a Democrat", i.e., that he "claims to be a Democrat"!

Update: Corzine's past ties to Obama is not mentioned in any of three Economist articles either…

Meurtri, l'homme se tourne alors vers l'une des carrières qui, aux Etats-Unis, nécessite le plus de moyens financiers : la politique. Par chance, il a accumulé, durant ses années Goldman et pour salaire de son retrait, une fortune estimée à 400 millions de dollars. De quoi se montrer persuasif auprès des instances de son parti — Jon Corzine s'affiche démocrate — et plus encore auprès des électeurs. En 2000, l'ex-patron de GS remporte l'un des deux sièges de sénateur du New Jersey. Il a dépensé 62 millions de dollars de sa fortune personnelle, ce qui en fait, à ce jour, la campagne la plus chère de l'histoire du Sénat. Le sénateur Corzine sera actif sur des projets de loi touchant aux aides aux étudiants et à l'extension de la couverture-santé et votera, en 2002, contre l'entrée en guerre des Etats-Unis en Irak. Mais l'activité de législateur n'est pas la tasse de thé de cet homme d'action. Avant même la fin de son mandat, il l'abandonne pour se lancer dans la course à la fonction de gouverneur du même Etat.

Relax. Don’t Do it.

For the Frivolous, Postmodern Foodie Types in your Life

They’re sure to get excited for new ideas, such as cuisine with spunk.

Semen is not only nutritious, but it also has a wonderful texture and amazing cooking properties. Like fine wine and cheeses, the taste of semen is complex and dynamic. Semen is inexpensive to produce and is commonly available in many, if not most, homes and restaurants. Despite all of these positive qualities, semen remains neglected as a food. This book hopes to change that. Once you overcome any initial hesitation, you will be surprised to learn how wonderful semen is in the kitchen. Semen is an exciting ingredient that can give every dish you make an interesting twist.

Sure. Whatever. This is precisely the kind of goofy trend that becomes ‘all the rage’ for 3 days in the city (I'll let you name your own). It’s accompanied with similar explanations of healing properties and bogus claims of life extention.

Then again, why does that remind me of this kind of thing?

"Go to the Devil, Charlie Hebdo!" "You Will Reap the Consequences"

Following the firebombing of the offices of Charlie Hebdo, as described by Yves Bordenave et Xavier Ternisien (video excerpts from French news reports), it is now the turn of the weekly's Facebook page to be assaulted, albeit with violent words that are altogether less destructive, writes the AFP in Le Monde.

The comments relish the destruction of Charlie Hebdo's offices for its special Sharia Hebdo issue (100 lashes if you don’t die laughing), and call out for the Muslim faith.

"You have touched our prophet." "There is no God but God and Mohammed is his messenger." "Muslims ask but one thing: a public apology." "Where's Charlie? hahahahahahahahaha" [a reference to Martin Handford's "Where's Waldo?" books, translated to "Où est Charlie?" in French]. "Go to Hell, Charlie Hebdo." "Shame on Charlie Hebdo, you have sold lots of issues but you will reap the consequences."

While cartoonists and a Le Monde editorial come to the magazine's defense, and while Joan Tilouine reports that Libération has offered to help next week's Charlie Hebdo appear on the newsstands, a Turkish group (one from central Anatolia which operates Cyberwarrior) is claiming responsibility for hacking into the weekly's website.

What’s wrong with men? Nothing that isn’t also wrong with women

Stephen Baskerville described this in less prosaic and more acceptable words than Roissy does (thanks to Instapundit) — as did Dennis Prager recently in his Four Legacies of Feminism — but still Roissy (aka Chateau Heartiste) provides some hard truths (language warning) "where pretty lies perish". His language — and Roissy himself — won't be everybody's cup of tea, but as he says, society has a problem when, thanks to feminist-driven misandrist divorce laws, the husband has become the "second class spouse under the law".

The bubble boy boundaries of the conservative imagination are never more evident than in its grappling with the sociosexual differences between men and women and the workings of the dating market. An appalling lack of understanding, of even a tangential blow with the truth about female nature, suggests that traditionalists and their offspring — Promise Keepers, Iron Johns, (some) MRAs, evangelists, etc. — have an allergic reaction to plumbing the depths of the human sexual soul, a revulsion likely concocted in a cauldron of sheltered life experiences and morbid fear of their own temptations.

Someone, anyone, has to pull the wool from their eyes, because their ignorance compounds a problem they rightly see as anathema to civilized prosperity. Their haste to lay the fault at the feet of men and to wholly absolve women of any responsibility gives the id monster free reign to lay waste to their utopian ideal. This is because it is the shackling or the unleashing of the female id, not the male id, that ultimately controls the destiny of a society.

So, a sincere plea to Bennett and his ilk: Get your heads out of the sand. You can start by repeating the following to yourself every morning in the mirror:

What’s wrong with men? Nothing that isn’t also wrong with women.

Men don’t “refuse to grow up”. They drop out, (or rather, beta males drop out), and with good reason, because the sexual market has been reconstructed to pander to female hypergamous impulses. Men can no longer achieve the clearly-defined status over hypergamous women they once could because the traditional field of battle that afforded them relative supremacy and, thus, attractiveness, to women — the corporate office — has, via managerial despotism strengthening PC and diversity to a state religion, lopped their balls clean off. And so men retreat from the corporate drone working world to achieve their status elsewhere.

Men don’t avoid marriage and family because they have a “maturity deficit”. They rationally avoid marriage and family because, as the institutions are currently constituted, they are a raw deal for men. Marriage is a risk made too great by misandrist divorce laws, and kids are a cost made too high by falling wages and tightening housing markets, of which part of the blame must go to women who have been voting for increasingly leftie and feminist-friendly governments since suffrage.

Men don’t play the field because they “avoid responsibility”. Men play the field because they can; because women, in their zeal to delay marriage until their careers have been established, to hop a parade of alpha cock during their roaring twenties, and to reward the players over the providers with their prime sexual access, have opened the field to men.

Men don’t “treat women as toys”. Men get the sex while the getting’s good because women allow — nay, PREFER — themselves to be toyed with by the kinds of men who are good at it.

In other words, Mr. Bennett, women GET EXACTLY THE KINDS OF MEN they deserve. Even more dispiriting to your conception of the universe, women get the men they WANT.

Women are the gatekeepers and the hadron collider tubes of sexuality. This has never changed, and likely never will as long as our biology remains rooted in the material world. The shape and direction of man is primarily an effect, not a cause, of the pathway laid out by women. The ancients you revere knew this, which is why they found it perfectly natural to restrict female power where they could.

… If conservatives are serious about restoring a traditional concept of manhood to the modern man, I have a few suggestions for them.

1. Industriousness will only be a worthwhile pursuit for men if they can extract some real status out of it to satisfy their guiding compulsion to attract women. This means removing women from the workplace, where female career growth acts indirectly to undermine male provider and leadership status, and directly through the feminization of the workplace.

2. Marriage will only be a worthwhile goal for men when divorce laws are gutted and reinvented to stop massively favoring women at the expense of men. No-fault divorce should be abolished. Child support changed so that men and women have automatic equal share of custody if the man wants it. Alimony abolished so that we never again see a callous situation where the ex-husband is writing checks to an ex-wife who initiated divorce and is now banging a new lover. Women who initiate divorce for any reason other than provable physical abuse should be kicked out of the house and made to get by living in an apartment.

3. Religion is dead in the water. The fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil has been bitten, and no one who matters in the developed nations can take it seriously again until they and their shrinking descendants have been purged from the human pool. But if you want a fighting chance to return religion to some honorable place in society, and to have men return to the fold, the constant, sanctimonious drumbeat of chiding men to behave must stop, and be replaced with sermons that take into account the fallen nature of women. Remember, women WANT to be led. They won’t abandon the church if their natures are examined candidly and honestly, and without fear.

… The answers conservatives do have are laughable. Bill Bennett gives his:

We may need to say to a number of our twenty-something men, “Get off the video games five hours a day, get yourself together, get a challenging job and get married.” It’s time for men to man up.

Yes, men, man up. That’s the ticket. When she cuckolds you, man up. When she rejects your gentlemanly kindness for an aloof badboy, man up. When she unceremoniously files for divorce because she got bored of your beta personality after she went off the pill, man up. When she takes the house, car, dog and half to fund her live-in boyfriend’s porn habit, man up. When she writes love letters to terrorists and serial killers on death row because her honorable hubby doesn’t amuse her anymore, man up. When she boffs the first douchebag DJ who comes along but makes a courteous accountant wait three months for sex, man up. When she devours pulp romance novels and vacuous feminized trash that desensitizes her to the value of real life men she can reasonably hope to attract, man up. When she gets aroused by a backhanded compliment but remains unmoved by a sincere compliment, man up. When she cries to HR about what she thinks was an inappropriate flirtation, man up. When she “forgets” to take the Pill and puts you on the hook for the 18 year enslavement, man up. When she gets multiple degrees that price her out of the mating market, man up. When she gets legal protections and favors that aren’t given to men, man up. When her every misdeed and misbehavior and poor choice is excused, man the fuck up.

Wow. What man wouldn’t want to sign up for this program?

Men will man up when women man down. The one must follow the other. The polarity cannot be reversed.

Or as Dennis Prager puts it, less prosaically, in his Four Legacies of Feminism:

thanks to feminism, very many women slept with too many men for their own happiness; posponed marriage too long to find the right man to marry; are having hired hands do much of the raising of their children; and now find they are dating boy-men because manly men are so rare.

Feminism exemplifies the truth of the saying, "Be careful what you wish for -- you may get it."

While We're on the Subject of Absurdities and Outsider Mystique…

confident that whatever absurdity [Herman Cain] comes up with

?!

…will only add to his outsider mystique

?!

"Whatever absurdity"?! "Outsider mystique"?!

You know what you sound like, Dana Milbank?
You sound like you're the describing the Democrats' candidate in 2008!

How about, during the campaign, the "hope'n'change"?!
How about the "oceans will start to rise"?!
How about the man described (by a Newsweek editor) as "God"
How about, after the campaign, adding $4 trillion to the national debt?!
How about spending, and wasting, more money in his first year as president than Bush or Clinton in their 8 years in office?!
How about someone who says that America must imitate the holier-than-thou EU?!
How about a law on health "reform" that is unreadable, even to those who support it and who wrote it, because it's over 2,000 pages long?!
How about someone who can't get the jobless figure down, but has only seen it rise?!
And finally, and basically, how about a president who has no inkling of an idea of how the free market system works?!

Not a single absurdity there, Mr. Milbank?!

(PS: And before someone brings up the Republican Congress (it is only the House, ladies and gents, not the Senate), the One's party had two years of full control of the executive and legislative branches of government…)

« 100 lashes if you don’t die laughing »

The Paris office of Charlie Hebdo, a satirical publication,
has been firebombed for publishing the following:



Our humorless friends from the Tali-banlieu of the neuf trois think that the western press can be bombed into submission. And they literally seek out submission, and not the kinky freak role-playing variety that sums up their empty lives to a tee.

In fact, even Marianne2 has stopped bed-wetting over this kind of “intercultural” aggression.

EU’s desire to have China become the major national investor in its bailout fund has been met by insistence that China get something major in return

The challenge [for Europeans] is to identify what kind of reality confronts an E.U. that now insists it has come up with elements of a solution to its loss of credibility and relevance

writes John Vinocur in the International Herald Tribune.

Have the countries of the euro common currency zone created a new culture of truthfulness, or a plan for growth to compensate for their covenant of economic and financial constraint, or hard guidelines to keep potentially massive creditors, like China, from encroaching on Europe’s independence and its place as a pillar of the West?

A Matterhorn of doubt follows here in three segments:

Bad History Quite simply, the euro zone always had clear rules, supervision and penalties. Saying now that new rules will be strictly and suddenly enforced means little, considering the precedents.

The Maastricht Treaty provided for stringent controls — but all the members of the common currency disregarded them and set a pattern of easy variance from the truth.

Jean-Pierre Jouyet, president of the French Financial Markets Authority, has described the existence of a “culture of connivance” that resulted in a decision in 2004, countenanced by the European Commission, to let a Greek government admission of fraud (made in Mr. Jouyet’s presence) pass in silence.

A year later, Germany and France both exceeded the euro zone’s debt and deficit targets while avoiding either political or cash penalties, and anything akin to embarrassment. Cooked books, disdain for the E.U. rules, contempt for the truth — for a good part of a decade, the result was, Mr. Jouyet told me two years ago, “countries felt there were no rules. The notion of rigor was gone.”

… In the end, rather than the E.U. reckoning with its own implosion of standards, it was the markets and ratings agencies, although demonized in the process by European leaders, that caught out the game that held a Greek bond was as solid as a Dutch one.

Even as the crisis gained force, European denial and deflection dominated. …

Little Growth When Angela Merkel returned from the Brussels meeting last week, she said its achievement was as “a step on the way to more stability and a stability union.” The growth part of the equation went missing.

Bottom line: minus a clear plan that makes an improbable combination of consolidation and growth believable and sustainable in the near future, the real European perspective is for trouble.

… In response to countries like the United States, and an institution like the International Monetary Fund, that call for greater domestic demand in Germany, and see German (and Chinese) trade imbalances as a major hindrance to growth around the world, Mrs. Merkel has again said fuggedaboutit.

She insisted last week that highly competitive nations must not be punished because of their greater skills.

Responsibilities Europe’s desire to have China become the major national investor in its bailout fund has been met by unmistakable Chinese insistence that China get something major in return.

Greater economic investment and trade access to Europe are troubling enough.

But suppose Beijing insisted the E.U. lifts its embargo on arms sales to China as a quid pro quo.

Nicolas Sarkozy has long been on the record as being in favor. Catherine Ashton, the E.U. foreign policy chief, said earlier in the year, “The current arms embargo is a major impediment for developing strong E.U.-China cooperation. The E.U. should discuss its practical implication and design a way forward.”

Of course, Europe could just say no. Or, very possibly, pay back a bailout with a decision challenging the Obama administration’s analysis that China is a growing military threat — not to mention American notions of the West’s solidarity.

This is new ground for a vaguely and still unconvincingly redefined E.U., its reins increasingly in the hands of a Germany whose departure from nuclear energy points to its and its neighbors’ growing energy supply dependence on Russia.

Call the E.U.’s response to China’s investment conditions a sudden, global responsibility of a kind that goes beyond the boundaries of what 21st-century Europe had always done best: blur the edges of any definitive choice more complicated than pure self-interest.

Starve the Beast

It’s actually rather hard to find out who “the people” are:

One of the paradoxes of the French industrial relations system is that despite its low rate of unionisation, close to 8 per cent, it has a very high rate of collective bargaining coverage, close to 98 per cent. There are two major reasons for this: the extension of collective bargaining agreements by the Ministry of Labour and the legal form of union recognition according to which each of the five confederations CGT, FO, CFDT, CFTC and CGC were recognised by the government in 1966 as ‘representative’ at the national level and were therefore entitled to sign collective agreements at any level. Union pluralism has increased since, with the appearance of new confederations of ‘autonomous’ unions, namely UNSA and Solidaires.

Got it? By way of the state, designating an minute elite that represent 8% of the employed, Government is used as a tool to multiply that power to impose their rules not just on 98% of the employed who have no way to get in on that conversation, but the rest of society.

Europeans call this majority rule representing the united masses, somehow imagining the fate of the characters in Germinal. This “minority as majority,” something the radical clique who have coopted the Democratic Party in the us can’t wait to foist on what little healthy parts there are of the US economy.

Legislation adopted in 2008 introduced new criteria for determining whether a union is representative and therefore allowed to participate in collective bargaining at national, industry and company level. The new law requires a union to win at least 10 per cent of the votes at the workplace level, 8 per cent of the votes at industry level and 8 per cent of votes at national ‘inter-professional’ level to be considered representative. The new legislation will only come fully into effect at national and industry level in 2013.

Rules, rules, rules. In fact it’s a coil that wants rule over others. The point of “controversy” is that the lay will require 30% affirmation to have a mandate over 100% of the workers. And the “organization,” that selected sliver representing 8% of those employed by the private sector, still gets a right of refusal over a rebellion among the 49% of that 8%

In order to be valid, collective bargaining agreements at industry level currently need to be unopposed from a majority of representative union organisation. From 2013, it will only be valid if it has been signed by unions with at least a 30 per cent support in the industry, based on works council and similar elections, and if it is not opposed by unions with majority (more than 50 per cent) support. These rules have already started taking effect at the company level where elections under the new rules have taken place.

As for now, they’ll find a way to live off of the carrion of free market invention, but how long could that possibly last?

Gaddafi Is Starting to Be Compared to Che Guevara, Allende, and Other Leftist Icons

Is Gaddafi greater dead than alive?

asks the Ombudsman of Le Monde as it seems that comparisons of the former Libyan dictator with the Left's greatest "martyrs" and icons have started — as can be confirmed in a blog post on the testimony of Gaddafi's chauffeur, where one reader reaction after another speaks of Gaddafi's courage, his being a man, his lording over a country where noone went hungry, etc, etc, etc…

The (questionable) broadcast of the violent images of his capture and death leaves readers torn between fascination and repulsion. On the Internet, some are already comparing him to Che Guevara. "Death in battle," intones George Henry, of Lons-le-Saunier (Jura) [if that is what you call being pulled out of a drainage pipe — NP]. "A feather in their cap that many overthrown heads of state were unable, except for Salvador Allende, to acquire," said Christian Vezon.

Sirio Caramelli (Montpellier) took a second look at "pictures of Mussolini hanged. Well, with due respect to all those noble souls, a lynched dictator does not bother me, not in the least!" "Very beautiful images of a dictator's humiliation, the like of which it would be nice to see more often" agrees "Aline Maginot", who "hopes that these images will be seen by the Assads in Damascus"

Is the MSM "the 'Useful Idiot' of Islam?": Admiration for the Arab Spring Starting to Fade

In Libya, Gaddafi's tragic end and the announcement by the National Transitional Council (CNT), as an epitaph, of a return to sharia and polygamy, leads one Le Monde reader to opine that "the Gaddafi cholera has been replaced by the Muslim plague."

The outcome of the "Arab spring" leaves a sour taste in the mouthes of our readers," admits the Ombudsman of Le Monde as missives opposed to the mainstream media's political correctness stream in, warning of the "cold" Arab winter that may be coming.

"Has the West meek again helped a Khomeini clone seize power?" sighs one Jean-Claude Demari. He would like to think that "the opposition to obscurantist Islamism is fortunately no longer the preserve of the extreme right or the hard right." […] Witness the reaction to the editorial line of Le Monde asking, "What if, in Tunisia, democracy was arrived at through Islam?" (October 27). "The naive self-righteous editorials of Le Monde is staggering," says a certain "Alain Neurohr." "Is Le Monde the 'useful idiot' of Islam?" sneers "DR".

... Skepticism prevails. "I would like to remind you that in the 1930s, Hitler was thought of as a clown, not a danger: you know what happened next!" says Jacques Adit (Chambéry): "It's a safe bet that once in power, the new government in Tripoli will be described by Western leaders as 'moderate' in order to enjoy good business relationships with it without damning themselves", writes Laure Fouré (Versailles). "Let no one in France dare to criticize the Islamic veil because it is the niqab that France has just stuck on the face of Libya," snaps Wardia Salem (Montrouge), a radical pro-Gaddafi woman.

He Must Have Desperately Needed Something to be Mad About

So much so, that he’s willing to impoverish and bankrupt civilization to gets that rah-rah feeling that he had when he was young, and thought that he has something to say to the world that it didn’t already know.

Below you’ll find an interesting retort to a cause of the week zombie who is so worried about “climate change” that, well, he won’t ask himself these rather obvious questions:

Make your scientific case for imminent Catastrophic Climate Disaster. The science is settled and irrefutable. It is urgent we must implement comprehensive regulatory reform to reduce CO2 emissions to avoid climate catastrophe.

1) In this century please list the catastrophic climate events in North America that will be aberrations to what has occurred in the past 100 years? Please be specific (range estimate is fine) as to the event, scope, region, and timing. How are these disasters outside what we have observed and experienced in the previous century?

2) Please provide the scientific data that substantiates that public policy to control CO2 will in fact reverse climate change? Please quantify this reversal from current trends.

3) Please make the scientific case that man cannot effectively adapt to changing weather patterns just as he has done in previous centuries without the help of extravagant public policy to regulate the climate?

4) Please make the scientific case that catastrophic global warming and climate disaster must be a higher priority than entitlement reform, economic prosperity, balancing the budget, reducing sovereign debt, jobs, etc., etc.? Why is mitigating catastrophic climate change such an urgent and high priority?

5) How much sleep have you lost in the past year worrying about climate disaster? Please compare this to your worry over retirement and career security? If you are not losing any sleep over climate doomsday then why should I?

6) What is the ideal standard climate for North America? Is this a static state that we must achieve? How much does climate change over geologic time naturally?

7) Please provide the % of climate change this century that is natural vs. human-caused?

The science is settled. The science is irrefutable. There is nothing to debate. We must act now or else disaster is imminent. It is urgent we do so. Therefore, the answers to these questions are obvious.

”Catastrophic warmists” are turning out to be more of a parody of reason and compassion than anything else.

It Couldn’t Happen to a More Deserving Bunch

Europa, Europa... They wish America ill all the time, amplifying any bad news that they hear about it. In the spirit of that decades long tradition of theirs’, they shouldn’t mind this report delivered with a Bronx cheer.

The eurozone debt crisis could lead to a decade-long recession and rising social unrest, the International Labour Organisation (ILO) has warned, according to a German media report on Sunday.

Knock yourselves out.



Superior Euro-engineering put to good use

Le Monde Article —Approvingly— Describes Goal of Chile's Protesters as the —Overdue— Return of the Country to Its Allende Roots

If a protest movement in South America is deserving of a fawning (full-page) article in Le Monde, then where else, to what other country, should the MSM daily's editors send its special envoy but to "ultracapitalist" Chile?

Needless to say, Hervé Kempf makes sure to mention that the country is allegedly the record holder of emissions of greenhouse gases in Latin America and to quote the disapproving head of the Senate without mentioning that Guido Girardi is a member of the opposition party.

But the money quote only comes in the very last paragraphs. Fully over three quarters of the article is devoted to a seemingly minor protest between citizens in a town in the Southernmost part of Chile and a mining company on an island 50 km off the coast.

Only in the last three paragraphs, at the end of Hervé Kempf's article, are we made to understand that the Punta Arenas protests against the Riesco island's coal project is linked to "the earthquake in Chilean society since early 2011" and the movement of massive protests against the government of Sebastian Piñera (described as a "billionaire", of course).

But it gets better: Only in the next-to-last paragraph are we appraised that what is at stake in Chile — those are the words spoken "objectively" by the Le Monde journalist in the course of his article, as if what is at stake were a given — is to do away with capitalism, to do away with privatization, and to do away with the free market in order to… bring the country back to the "democratic" Allende years before Pinochet's coup of September 11, 1973!

Dictatorship (the Pinochet variety) was done away with 20 years ago, so goes the story, now is the (long-overdue) turn of the free market!

What is at stake now is the challenge to the ultra-free market model existing in Chile since the coup of September 11, 1973 which remained in place after the return of democracy 20 years ago. Many sectors of the economy have been privatized. "There has been a huge concentration of power and wealth, in banking, commerce, media, and mining, observes the Santiago economist Andrés Solimano. This explains the current discontent."

***

…le centre de cette agglomération de 120 000 habitants [Punta Arenas, la ville la plus australe de la Patagonie chilienne] est traversé par une large banderole sur laquelle on lit : " Le charbon aujourd'hui, la misère demain. " Une trentaine de personnes, surtout des jeunes, la suivent en criant et frappant sur des couvercles de casserole : " Charbon, charbon, tu apportes la mort et la destruction ", " Nous avons du vent, nous avons du soleil, pourquoi utiliser du charbon ? " La scène se répète tous les vendredis depuis février. Angelica, une jeune fille qui travaille comme vendeuse dans un magasin, explique : " Je suis ici pour défendre ma terre. Les gens sont très mal informés sur ce projet. "

Le projet ? Une mine à ciel ouvert de 500 hectares, sur une grande île située à une cinquantaine de kilomètres de Punta Arenas. Le gouvernement chilien y a autorisé, en août, l'extraction future de 6 millions de tonnes de charbon par an, qui seraient exportées vers les mines du nord du Chili par un port à construire sur l'île Riesco.

… l'augmentation des émissions de gaz à effet de serre entraînée par la combustion du charbon dans les centrales électriques. Les émissions du pays croissent déjà de 5 % par an depuis 1994 - un record en Amérique latine.

… à Santiago, le président du Sénat lui-même, Guido Girardi, ne mâche pas ses mots : " La pointe du continent est un des endroits les plus purs, les plus préservés du monde. Y exploiter des mines de charbon est une imbécillité ! Le Chili a d'énormes possibilités en énergies renouvelables, qu'il faut exploiter. "

… En fait, la lutte autour du projet de l'île Riesco est une expression supplémentaire de l'ébranlement de la société chilienne depuis le début de 2011. C'est de Punta Arenas, d'ailleurs, que le mouvement était parti : en janvier, des manifestations massives s'y sont produites contre l'augmentation du prix du gaz. Puis, en avril, 80 000 personnes ont manifesté à Santiago contre des projets de barrages en Patagonie, avant qu'en mai commence un mouvement des étudiants contre le prix très élevé de l'enseignement supérieur.

Ce qui est en jeu, maintenant, c'est la contestation du modèle ultralibéral mise en place depuis le coup d'Etat du 11 septembre 1973 et resté en place après le retour de la démocratie, voici vingt ans. De nombreux secteurs de l'économie ont été privatisés. " Il s'est produit une concentration énorme du pouvoir et des richesses, dans la banque, le commerce, les médias et les mines, observe, à Santiago, l'économiste Andrés Solimano. Cela explique le mécontentement actuel. "

Brother, can you Fix my Φθαρεί ορθού ?

Beware: Broke nations contemplating further socializing their medical sectors. And by that I mean YOU, America.

The Greeks are broke. They would socialize and unionize crime if there was a way to do it. Now they are turning to NGOs to cover their medical needs, much as nations beset by pandemics, endemic poverty, and natural disasters do.

Europeans and Westerners in general are accustomed to being asked to donate money to emergency aid NGOs to tackle medical humanitarian crises in Africa, Asia and other parts of the developing world where governments are too unwilling, poor or incapable to be able to help their own citizens.

It is unheard of for aid groups such as Medecins Sans Frontieres or Medicins du Monde to have to take over the role of providing basic medical services from normal state or private providers in a Western country.

No worries. Since they are in demographic decline like much of Europe’s Club Med, it shouldn’t be a problem for too long.

True, in a “Aren’t I Just so Witty Sort of Way

“A politician is someone who gets in front of a mob and tries to call it a parade.”

- unknown

In the Euro Zone, China Has Become the Controlling Player, Charges Socialists' Presidential Candidate

Newly-designed socialist candidate for the French presidential elections in 2012, François Hollande answers the questions of David Revault d'Allonnes and Thomas Wieder in Le Monde.

M. Sarkozy n'est pas opposé à ce que la Chine contribue au sauvetage de la zone euro. Qu'en pensez-vous ?

Le contact que Nicolas Sarkozy a cru bon de prendre avec le président chinois, au lendemain de l'accord, en dit long sur la nouvelle dépendance de la zone euro. La Chine est désormais la maîtresse du jeu, de sorte que le sommet du G20 des 3 et 4 novembre, qui devait être le moment de vérité pour le yuan, va consacrer l'empire économique chinois. […]

M. Sarkozy semble également décidé à vous attaquer sur les "erreurs" historiques de la gauche, notamment les 35 heures et la retraite à 60 ans de 1982. Que répliquez-vous ?

Pourquoi n'est-il pas remonté à 1936 avec les congés payés, ou même au début du XXe siècle avec la journée de huit heures et le repos dominical ! M. Sarkozy a la mémoire longue pour les autres, mais courte pour lui-même. De ses cadeaux fiscaux, de son aveuglement budgétaire, du creusement des inégalités, du laxisme en matière de hautes rémunérations, de l'impuissance face aux banques, de l'innocence face aux désordres commerciaux et de la dépendance à l'égard de la Chine, finalement, il n'est en rien responsable. Nous aurons face à nous un candidat sans mémoire. L'amnésie lui servira de viatique.