“About 9,980,000 results”

Summit value? Not about results.

Ignore the Absurd European Definitions of “the Right”

In the wake of the Charlie Hebdo Molotov cocktail attack, an attempt is being made to consolidate (or rather discount) the obvious about leftist cheer-led violence with their own sick ideological prejudices, a handful of critics in the benighted continent are attempting to understand.

Binding it up with their other bugaboos, they go on to pointlessly expound about the guilt of their fellow citizens whom they refuse to understand with a centuries-old example, as if the right today was guilty of the imagined horrors that they still use as a straw man.

But the larger picture looks more alarming. Nobody has yet claimed responsibility for the attack, but it would not be far-fetched to assume that it is linked to the publication of the special issue published by Charia Hebdo on the day the attack took place. The incident therefore constitutes a radical resurgence of the religious curtailment of free speech - in the midst of one of the very cradles of freedom of expression. It was in Paris that free speech was first established as a fundamental legal fact in the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man - after a protracted and bitter decade-long struggle between the radical Enlightenment on the one hand and the Catholic Church and French Absolutism on the other - a history rife with burning books, which prefigured the burning piles of Charlie Hebdo copies on Tuesday night.

Give them more undeserved attention, and some pregnant silence, and it would become George Bush’s fault or something... anything but the left’s example and educational involvement in the interest of mindless revolutionary violence worldwide... anything.

It is, of course, America’s fault because an American mentioned something useful in this crass campaigning:

On the international scene, the internet versions of many leading European newspapers feature the photograph of Charlie's editor holding up the front page of the magazine with the drawing of the prophet saying "100 lashes, if you do not die from laughter!" before the sooty ruins of its premises. But not a single English or American news media ran the image, as far as a quick net survey shows. At the same time, new threats against Libération are trying to force the daily to stop protecting Charlie. Slowly and steadily, the poison of the extreme religious right is spreading in democratic societies, shrinking the space of free speech and criticism day by day. The strange and unsavoury cocktail of death threats, bombings and arson with whining and whimpering - topped off by defeatist intellectuals talking about "sensibilities" - is slowly eating away at the heart of open societies.

Got that? There are things about this sad, indicative, but minor event that the were supposed to say, and in some specific fashion too.

So somehow these lefty cover artists suddenly forget the interference they ran for virtually anyone willing to murder westerners over the past decade, and in their brilliance FINALLY figured out who’s at fault: the same and only people they can ever find at fault – the domestic political opponents they are so thoroughly obsessed with.

In fact even citing the regrettable stupid piece by Time Magazine’s Bruce Crumley as some sort of negligent disrespect of their divine nature of journalists, so long as they are leftists is another rabbit they’re chasing. Crumly’s motives are patently based in the illiterate chant of the multi-culturalists and founded in the political ritual of trying to heap abuse on the right for taking Islamist religious violence seriously.

Remember the “what did we do to deserve this” crowd heard on September 12th, 2001 ? Well here they are trying to make their fundamental moral ignorance in the interest of their own cultural war the fault of the conventional part of civilization that they live in.

Amazingly, we are somehow, again, supposed to care because they still rebelliously resent their parents. Too bad they can’t keep up the trick long enough to show their hand:

But it is contentious, at very least, to assume that the supposedly Islamist attack is fuelled by the "offense of Muslim sensibilities". A much more obvious reason for fundamentalists to exert religious pressure against the satirical characterisation of their faith is that such joking may, in fact, be detrimental to them by helping to delegitimise their extreme political aims. Satire famously played an important role in the long process through which European societies emancipated themselves from religious dominance over centuries and finally forced Christianity to give in to enlightened principles and liberties

In other words, the bedwetting leftist intelligentia is once again exploiting terror. Much like the leftist Hitler, who saw religion as a barrier to dictatorial power much as the leftist tyrannies of the Soviet sphere did, all is now explained away as “far right extremism”

...simply because that is the only phrase they know.

Another France24 Debate Over the Debt and Its Effect on the 2012 Election

On Wednesday, there was also a(n English-language) debate on the France 24 TV channel about the debt and the upcoming 2012 campaign (Part 1 and Part 2).

US debt showdown: who's to blame for the deadlock?

Its Thanksgiving in the United States but millions of Americans will be hard pushed to find much to be grateful for this year: 9 percent of the population is out of work. In Washington its deadlock as usual. The so-called Supercommitte of 3 democrats and 3 republicans has proven its anything but missed a deadline on an agreement to reduce a record national debt. That means across the board spending cuts will take effect.

• Ellen WASYLINA, Republicans Abroad
• Zachary MILLER, Democrats Abroad
• Amine OUZAD, Assistant Professor of Economics and Political Science, INSEAD
• Daniel HAMILTON, Executive Director of the Center for Transatlantic Relations, SAIS

French Female Journalist Fondled and Beaten on Cairo's Tahrir Square (VIDEO)

In the latest frightening incident for a female reporter in Egypt during the Arab Spring, one that lasted 45 minutes, a French female journalist was beaten, had various parts of her clothing torn off, and was sexually attacked on Cairo's Tahrir Square, reports Le Monde. Update: Another reporter, "Egyptian-American journalist Mona Eltahawy[,] said she [also] was sexually assaulted [although not by the protesters but] by police during hours under detention"!

A reporter from the television channel France 3 said that she had been severely beaten and sexually assaulted on Thursday November 24 in Cairo, where she was reporting from. Caroline Sinz and his cameraman, Salah Agrab, began to be aggressed in a street leading from Tahrir Square to the Interior Ministry, where the most violent clashes between demonstrators and security forces have taken place in recent days.

"We were filming in the Mohammed Mahmoud Street when we were attacked by teens 14 or 15 years old," she said, referring to "fondling". The journalist and her cameraman were then forced by a group of men to Tahrir Square where they found themselves separated.

"We were then attacked by a crowd of men. I was beaten by a pack of young people and adults who ripped off my clothes" and engaged in the type of fondling responding "to the definition of rape," she said. "Some people tried to help me, to no avail. I was lynched. It took about three quarters of an hour, until I was pulled out of the crowd. I thought I would die," she said, adding that the cameraman had also been" beaten up."

Finally rescued, she was able to reach her hotel, where she was assisted by the Embassy of France in Cairo before consulting a doctor.

As for Mona Eltahawy (or el-Tahawy), the Egyptian-American journalist said that

she was sexually assaulted by police during hours under detention after taking part in protests on the sprawling square that has become a landmark of the Arab Spring.

"Besides beating me, the dogs of (central security forces) subjected me to the worst sexual assault ever," Eltahawy said on her Twitter account.

"5 or 6 surrounded me, groped and prodded my breasts, grabbed my genital area and I lost count how many hands tried to get into my trousers," she said.

Lara Logan sur la place Tahrir au Caire, quelques instants avant son
agression, le 11 février 2011, jour du départ de Hosni Moubarak.

France24 Debate Between Right and Left Over the Debt and Its Effect on the 2012 Election

Last night, I participated in a (French-language) debate on the France 24 TV channel about the debt and the upcoming 2012 campaign (Part 1 and Part 2).

États-Unis : la dette, la campagne... Les politiques perdent leur crédit

La Grèce, l'Italie, la crise de la zone euro...Et maintenant les Etats Unis. Obama et les Républicains s'affrontent sur les impôts et les économies budgetaires. Après l'échec de la concertation entre democrates et republicains, une chose est sûre: La croissance américaine sera en berne... Quels enjeux pour l'économie américaine ? Pour la campagne présidentielle ?

LE DÉBAT

• François DURPAIRE, Historien à l'Université Paris 1 La Sorbonne
• Frédérique BONNEVAY, Économiste
• Joseph SMALLHOOVER, Democrats Abroad France
• Erik SVANE, Republicans Abroad
  

Lefty Attempts Blogging, Fails to Amuse

Typical of the Cultural Sensitivity of those most prone to criticize America, we find this mook sums up hoe Europeans treat one another fairly nicely: cultural prejudice, veneer-thin assumptions, feeble cultural slander, childishly making fun of accents, and a universal inability to differentiate an individual from the fake reputation attributed to their nationality. Hell, he might even think that Solesnkniks would be amused by him.

At 7 pm, I Will Be Participating in a France 24 Debate in French on the Debt in America and the World

Ce soir, à 19h heure continentale (one hour from now), je participe à un débat sur France 24 concernant la dette aux États-Unis.

The Barbarians are Behind the Gates

As one might expect:

U.S. money market funds, which are key providers of liquidity to banks and have been pulling back from the euro zone since May, cut their exposure to European banks by a further 9 percent in October, according to ratings agency Fitch.

But here is the interesting part on their counterparties’ fate. The ECB is curtailing bond sales to European banks. This is the precise opposite of what one does to bolster the banks, and seems somewhat fishy. Do they want banks to increase their appetite for Member-State bonds that the ECB are being coy about backing up through repurchases?

The ECB's weekly, limit-free handout of funding underscored the widespread problems, with 178 banks requesting 247 billion euros, the highest amount since mid-2009.

Despite that, they say that the ECB ‘floodgates are open’.

Not quite it looks like they’re holding back for what they suspect will be the worse to come.

"The reality is it's hard to see investors get any confidence (before the end of the year), as the sovereign crisis is out of control. Confidence has disappeared from the banks as they are a conduit for the sovereigns," a senior debt market banker said.

The strangest part of the story is that it reacting to what have been announced to be to repurchasing and bailout rules so far: bondholders, those banks bullied into putting depositors’ money into buying BAD sovereign debt have been told that in a ‘haircut’ scenario, that they will be paid AFTER governments holding other governments’ debt.

Now imagine the scenario: the public gets 50 cents on the Euro for their government bonds, and this send whatever liquid assets still inside Fortress Europe abroad. Recession looks more like influenza than a short case of the sniffles.

THEN the ECB will have put governments into a position where recapitalization of the banks that have had their depositors’ funds lost to bad government debt have to then pay for the socialization as well.

And to think that until just a few weeks ago, Trichet was aimlessly fighting non-existent inflation and beavering away on his price-stability mandate.

The world will catch this cold, all because of European governments’ social “largesse” and “generosity” that put marooned them in this cycle of borrowing. The reaction of the economically illiterate European population will be, as usual “Gimme-gimme-gimme! Me-me-me!” and unable to think anything up for themselves, pick up the work “bankseters” as a fixation for their blame. What they need to do is turn their attention to governments who sang “I’m just a girl who can’t say no” who spent those staggering borrowed sums despite collecting more than half of all GDP in taxes.

Now that population who has been paying for those punitive taxes and had their banks used as “an additional revenue stream” will have the restoration of the system thrust upon them too. It seems that there has never been a better time to be on the dole.

13-Year-Old Girl Murdered by Teenage Rapist Thanks to the Left's Altruism Fairy Tales

Agnès, a 13-year-old schoolgirl, is dead thanks to the Left's fairy tale of generosity and altruism for criminals, reports the AFP in Le Monde (with a different choice of words), which let a teen-age rapist, now 17, return to school after four months in the slammer without telling the school authorities why he had been behind bars.

Interrogé sur la connaissance qu'avait l'établissement du passé judiciaire de l'élève, source de polémiques, le magistrat a souligné que "la loi ne permet pas aux juges ou aux éducateurs de communiquer officiellement les éléments sur les mises en examen en raison de la présomption d'innocence".

…l'établissement du Chambon-sur-Lignon avait admis qu'il savait que l'élève avait fait quatre mois de prison avant d'intégrer le lycée, mais sans en connaître le motif. Auparavant, son directeur, Philip Bauwens, avait créé la polémique en déclarant : "Nous avions des éléments de sa scolarité, mais pas connaissance de son passé judiciaire. On savait qu'il avait eu des ennuis avec la justice, mais on n'en connaissait pas la nature. Et nous n'avions aucun contact avec les services de justice."

Moreover, Hélène Bekmezian sets up the history of the Sarkozy government's history of sexual delinquent laws passed every time another scandalous crime rises.

Interviewé par Patricia Jolly, Daniel Zagury explique que

A chaque drame, le discours des faux-savants et des chevaliers de l'après-coup – qui laissent entendre qu'ils auraient tiré la sonnette d'alarme si on leur avait confié l'expertise – donne l'illusion qu'on peut disposer d'une traçabilité du mal. Il prétend qu'on doit déceler le plus précocement possible les sujets susceptibles de commettre des infractions sexuelles. Mais ce modèle simpliste est plus incantatoire qu'efficient.

Our Vapid Friends go to their Usual Place to Explain the World’s Complexity

By demonizing anything that seems foreign. As if they fart daisies.



France’s fiscal behavior makes their bonds a bad prospect, not Moody’s mentioning it.

“Europe Needs Enemies”

In an entirely roundabout and subconscious manner, Prague’s Hospodářské Noviny newspaper explains the purpose of Europeans’ outlook toward Americans: because Europeans seek unity and high personal regard by imagining that they have enemies. It also helps that those enemies won’t actually do anything about that enmity, and otherwise just ignore that atmospheric hatred, especially when they are in a pinch.

This crisis of having nothing to hate is downright existential:

So long as Europeans do not feel a sufficient sense of belonging, the French and Germans will be able to go on negotiating coordinated taxes or changes to the Lisbon Treaty. In the long run, though, this kind of united Europe is doomed to disappear all the same.

Since many of them regard any form of national pride as jingoism, and they’re willing to let each other drown economically, “the enemy without” appears to be their source, (and possibly their sole source,) of unity and pride in the circle jerk of stars.

Nothing illustrates that childishness like thinking that “pride in Europe” is in fact anything other than nationalism too:

In a global economy, one has to lay aside old national and ideological categories. A stronger European identity, which could be the basis for restoring the prosperity of the peoples of the old continent, could be created by tighter restrictions on a quite different class of people: politicians who are unable or unwilling to look beyond the horizon of a term in office, who speak a language remote from the everyday lives of ordinary Europeans, who are unwilling to resign even while dragging their countries towards the brink of bankruptcy...

not to mention that it also make a tidy argument for suspending elections, very much after the fashion of Canadian fake-crisis promoter Naomi Klein, who James Delingpole calls out to be the tyranny promoter that she is.

The “Europe needs toothless frenemies” screed is no less of a reality-evading useful bit of catnip.

National identity has all too often been shaped by a variety of traumas, as societies were brought together by a sense of shared fate. European identity, Professor Řezník believes, needs a deep, thorough-going crisis, in order to test its own viability.

So the instead of people making valiant sacrifices for the good of society, people have to be made a sacrifice for the good of society. Got it.

That’s sharp thinking Perfesser, bus hardly new despite being incredibly European. Let’s test that theory by making professional political philosophers destitute, and start from there. After all, I think you ran out of Jews, Gypsies, and whatever Foreign laborers are around to use as a unifying instrument a long time ago. I’m not being cute. That was precisely the purpose of that form of hatred then, and in it’s distinctly less plausible form the reason now: to serve in the absence of a unifying, positive social principle.

The Difference Between Palestine and Tibet and Why It Shows that Israel Isn't China

The monks have been protesting about the erosion of Tibetan culture and their treatment by the Chinese authorities.

A BBC news story reports on how the suicide of a Buddhist nun by fire is symbolic of how the increasingly frustrated Tibetans choose immolation in order to protest the presence of the Chinese occupiers.

A few years ago, I was told — in no uncertain terms — that Israel was the only country in the world occupying another; when I mentioned China and Tibet, the subject was rapidly changed.

Notice how the Tibetans resorting to suicide in order to protest Chinese occupation do not choose to "take" any of the occupiers with them; they do not try to kill as many as they can, they do not even try to kill a single one of them, military or civilian.

Think about it. What does that tell you about Israel and about its "occupation" of Palestine?

(Perhaps, for starters, that one reason that Tibetans do not target their occupiers is that, besides being part of a culture that is taught some basic human values, they know to what degree their compatriots will be made to suffer, disproportionately, by the occupiers if they were to target the latter. Perhaps, this means that, in turn, the Palestinians are not suffering as much from their alleged occupiers as they claim to be in the first place…)

Coluche and the French Republic Which Is Not as Republican as Often Vaunted

Patrick Jarreau has a Le Monde book review about Jean-Jérôme Bertolus and Frédérique Bredin's Tir à vue : La folle histoire des présidentielles, which doubles as a documentary on the France 3 television channel with Michel Royer.

Ce livre n'aurait pas pu être écrit il y a dix ans. Les personnages qui s'y expriment auraient tenu des propos plus évasifs, et les journalistes auraient dû s'en contenter. Pourtant, de Charles de Gaulle cherchant à éliminer Georges Pompidou, en 1968 et 1969, jusqu'à Jacques Chirac tentant de se débarrasser de Nicolas Sarkozy en 2004, en passant par la rivalité Mitterrand-Rocard des années 1980, l'attraction de ce pouvoir suscite des comportements peu édifiants et fabrique une vie politique décevante. La défiance qu'expriment les citoyens envers leurs dirigeants en est la conséquence.

La France "a des institutions qui invitent à la trahison", observe François Bayrou, parce que "tout pouvoir vient du sommet" et qu'on tente de prévoir qui sera le maître demain pour se ranger à temps derrière lui. Ce constat lucide est le revers du dithyrambe chanté par Henri Guaino, pour qui, "en faisant adopter l'élection du président de la République au suffrage universel", le général de Gaulle "a renoué un vieux fil de l'histoire de France", car "l'élection est un sacre". Comment mieux avouer que cette République-là n'est pas tout à fait républicaine ?

In a separate article, Daniel Psenny reveals how the tongue-in-cheek 1981 presidential campaign of a humorist was taken very seriously by the powers-that-be (the state "panicked") and how the humorist — Coluche got up to 16% in the polls — was put under surveillance and was hassled, receiving death threats so credible that he finally caved and withdrew from the race.

En quelques mois, il est crédité de 16 % d'intentions de vote. Un score qui inquiète autant la droite que la gauche. Mais, en avril 1981, au grand dam de ses comités de soutien, il annonce son retrait de la course présidentielle.

Que s'est-il passé ? Dans leur documentaire Coluche : un clown ennemi d'Etat, Jean-Louis Perez et Michel Despratx racontent, à l'aide de nombreux témoignages, comment l'Etat a demandé aux Renseignements généraux (RG) d'utiliser tous les moyens pour obliger le comique à renoncer à sa candidature.

Pour la première fois, les auteurs montrent le dossier des RG n° 817706 au nom de Michel Colucci, où sont consignés son casier judiciaire et toutes ses activités quotidiennes. Une opération supervisée de près par

le « groupe de direction » des RG qui n'a pas hésité à sortir des clous de la légalité et à utiliser des moyens très musclés, comme le révèlent plusieurs flics ayant participé à cette déstabilisation. « Il est vrai que le «groupe de direction» des RG était un Etat dans l'Etat policier », reconnaît Yves Bertrand, directeur des RG de l'époque.

A plusieurs reprises, Coluche a reçu des menaces de mort signées « Honneur de la police », un commando qui avait revendiqué l'assassinat de Pierre Goldman quelques mois auparavant. Les auteurs montrent aussi que la surveillance de Coluche ne s'est pas arrêtée après le retrait de sa candidature.

Elle a continué jusqu'au 19 juin 1986, jour de son accident de moto mortel. Le lendemain, la main anonyme d'un fonctionnaire de police a écrit sur le dossier : « DCD ».

Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places

One amazing feature of the modern nanny state, especially the sort that recuse themselves from anything that matters, is that people become bored, silly, and stupid.

Thanks to Arf, a friend of this blog, has remitted to the editors of ¡No Pasarán!, a report on this warped Canadian broad who duct-tapes food to herself in the hope of having raccoons, already gorged on residential waste, flatter her orally.





The muffdiving rodentia in action

7 If you’re really coon smitten and want to go the extra mile for your soon-to-be new best friends, find a fishmonger who will sell or give you a bag of discarded fish stewing in their own putrid juices (the raccoon equivalent of foie gras topped with caviar). Voilà! In a matter of seconds you will be up to your genitals in raccoons.

8 While you’re at it, why not get creative and be fulfilled by encouraging a little coonilingus? If you find one that doesn’t mind the broccoli, consider it a keeper.