Kulture Korner: the Yé-yé girl

Sylvie Vartan’s 1967 Japanese TV Ad



A fun fact: Vartan was married to France’s no. 1 Elvis impersonator, Johnny Hallyday.

Plus ça change…

While American Democrats opposed funds for the military, reported the International Herald Tribune in its 100/75/50 Years Ago section, some 800 French workers were protesting a government shutdown while threatening hunger strikes.

Democrats Oppose Battleships

The Democrats of the House of Representatives, in caucus last night [Jan. 29, 1912], voted against making an appropriation for any new battleship. This precipitates the annual fight for naval increase.

…/…

Strike in France

Eight hundred coal miners who have spent 42 days sitting underground in protest against a government move to close down the mines today [Jan. 30, 1962] topped off their efforts with a hunger strike. They said they had decided to starve themselves “in view of the government’s intransigence in refusing to open negotiations.” The government wants to shut down mines employing about 8,000 miners in this southwestern region because, it asserts, the coal here is of poor quality and it is losing money on the operation.

Defining Deviancy Downward

"The abandonment of the reproductive function is the common feature of all perversions. We actually describe a sexual activity as perverse if it has given up the aim of reproduction and pursues the attainment of pleasure as an aim independent of it. So, as you will see, the breach and turning point in the development of sexual life lies in becoming subordinate to the purpose of reproduction. Everything that happens before this turn of events and equally everything that disregards it and that aims solely at obtaining pleasure is given the uncomplimentary name of 'perverse' and as such is proscribed."

- Sigmund Freud, Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse

In other news, other varied forms of unproductive assplay or watersports will have come at a price:

Europe's demographics also aren't on the side of growth. Populations across the developed world are graying, but Europe's low productivity growth means that its future labor shortfall will be especially acute. It doesn't help that Europeans draw social security benefits earlier and more easily than their developed-world peers.

The Economist's Facebook Cover

A Moment for Morbid Poesie

When I am dead, I hope it may be said:
His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.

Belloc, Hilaire (1870 - 1953)

Daz right, bitches!

Le Monde and the HuffPost: "Why Isn't the Conflict of Interest Principle Applicable Here?"

Sujet délicat cette semaine pour le médiateur

It's a delicate subject, admits Le Monde ombudsman Pascal Galinier, as France's newspaper of reference joins (as a 34 % shareholder) in the launching of the French edition of the Huffington Post.

Indeed, it turns out that the editorial director of HuffPo France is none other than the wife of a famous (or infamous) socialist politician (also read an MSM article, as well as a previous No Pasarán post).

Une certaine Anne Sinclair. Ancienne journaliste de TF1, mais aussi et surtout épouse de Dominique Strauss-Kahn.

"Superbe opération de com'", comme s'exclament Ariane Chemin et Marion Van Renterghem, grands reporters au Monde ? De fait, dans la foulée, Anne Sinclair a fait cette semaine la cover de Gala, de Paris Match, de VSD... Avec de belles photos dans les locaux du Monde... De quoi faire un peu oublier les articles moins avenants de la presse américaine ? Cette presse qu'Anne Sinclair juge "exigeante, précise, travailleuse" dans un entretien au magazine Elle la semaine dernière. "Certains commentateurs français ont questionné son objectivité quant aux scandales en cours en lien avec son mari", écrivait dès mardi le Herald Tribune, qui cite "certaines critiques (qui) pensent qu'elle a perdu sa pertinence depuis qu'elle a abandonné son job de présentatrice en 1997 quand M. Strauss-Kahn a été nommé ministre des finances". L'hebdomadaire Newsweek, lui, est plus lapidaire : "Anne Sinclair - M^me DSK - a été nommée directrice éditoriale d'une nouvelle extension française du Huffington Post, une publication qui fait aux auteurs ce que son mari est réputé faire aux femmes de chambre." Façon un peu "limite" de rappeler aux lecteurs américains qui est Anne Sinclair, illustre inconnue outre-Atlantique...

"Lui c'est lui, moi c'est moi", semble-t-elle répliquer à ceux qui évoquent son époux. Pas si simple. "Elle est à la fois journaliste et femme de DSK. Personne ne peut l'oublier", observe Raphaëlle Bacqué, grand reporter au Monde. "Elle a abandonné le journalisme quand son mari est entré au gouvernement, en expliquant elle-même qu'il y avait conflit d'intérêts. En quoi le conflit d'intérêts n'a-t-il plus cours ? DSK, dont elle a fait la communication, reste mêlé à un fait divers majeur de l'actualité française, dont on ignore encore toutes les ramifications", rappelle Marion Van Renterghem.

Comme toujours, le médiateur se pose plus de questions qu'il n'obtient de réponses. Etre ou ne pas être dans le "plan com'" de DSK ? Sacré dilemme, que le médiateur soulevait déjà une chronique en septembre 2011. La réponse n'a pas changé. Et l'accueil d'Anne Sinclair dans notre maison n'y changera rien. Tenez, lundi, la conférence de presse du Huffington Post était organisée par Anne Hommel, d'Euro-RSCG, la "communicante" de... Dominique Strauss-Kahn.

In Memoriam

Ten years ago today, Daniel Pearl was decapitated by Salifist barbarians.

Caricatures and Myths About the "Christian Rightwing"

Chris from Arizona writes:

[Members of the "Christian" rightwing] claim to worship Jesus but don't want to help the poor. They claim to be prolife but like war, guns, and the death penality [sic]. They claim to want freedom but want to decide who can marry and what a woman can do with her uterus.

Okay, let's see, here, and let's take this step by step…

They claim to worship Jesus but don't want to help the poor.

Excuse me, but conservatives and Christians do help the poor. In fact, they are perfectly capable of doing so without the intervention of the government — which is what they object to. And the reason why they object to it is precisely because man is good — not incompetent (as the left, and as statists, believe) — and does not need a nanny state to tell him how to treat his fellow man.

They claim to be prolife but like war, guns, and the death penality.

They do not like war, guns, and the death penalty. They see the need for their use when it's necessary. This is because they know that, contrary to what leftist type individuals believe, heaven has not been, and can not be, established on Earth (it does exist, but somewhere else) and that, therefore, people should not believe in the fairy tales of the left.

They claim to want freedom but want to decide who can marry and what a woman can do with her uterus.

Again, they do not believe in the fairy tales of the left and, therefore, there are things which people can do and there are things which they cannot do. To take an extreme example, you do not have the freedom to steal from your neighbor, either.

18 Years Later, France Still Divided Over Its Role in the Rwanda Genocide

Eighteen years after the genocide in Rwanda, write Christophe Ayad and Philippe Bernard in an article that fills an entire two-page spread in Le Monde, France is still wondering if it has a part of responsibility, direct or otherwise, in the killing of 800,000 people over the period of a single month.

Beyond that rises the issues of France's role in Africa, in the world, and in history.

C'est l'une de ces zones d'ombre de l'histoire récente de la France, l'une de ces plaies mal refermées qui nourrissent guerres idéologiques et anathèmes. Une de ces passions françaises qui enflamment régulièrement intellectuels, politiques et militants. Elle tient en une question, simple et terrible à la fois : la France porte-t-elle une part de responsabilité dans le génocide rwandais qui fit 800 000 morts en un mois ?

Bientôt dix-huit ans après, la question reste le sujet de violentes controverses qui en disent au moins autant sur les fractures politiques et intimes de la France que sur le génocide de 1994 lui-même.

… Tout comme l'attentat et le génocide lui-même, [l'opération militaro-humanitaire] Turquoise divise : seule tentative de sauver des vies selon les partisans de l'armée française ; ultime tentative pour stopper l'avancée de la guérilla tutsi et sauver le régime hutu, selon ses détracteurs.

Pour d'autres, notamment des journalistes non présents sur place à l'époque, mais très audibles dans les médias actuels, le Rwanda est devenu une formidable caisse de résonance de leur vision du monde. "Certains sont tentés de faire entrer leur petite personne dans une histoire qu'ils n'ont pas vécue, dit Christophe Boisbouvier, journaliste à RFI et envoyé spécial de la chaîne au Rwanda, au printemps 1994. L'atrocité du génocide est telle qu'elle permet de faire passer ses idées sur l'armée, sur la France et l'Afrique, sans risquer d'être critiqué, surtout si l'on prétend se placer du côté des victimes. L'horreur laisse les gens bouche bée." Plusieurs médias - RFI, Libération, Le Figaro ainsi que Le Monde - ont été déchirés par des querelles internes.

Illustrations extraites de Turquoise, d'Olivier Bramanti et Frédéric Debomy (Buchet-Chastel, " Les Cahiers dessinés ", 96 p., 23 ¤).

The (Anti-) Capitalism of Fools

An editorial in Denmark’s Jyllands-Posten displays an undercurrent common to Europeans who are just as nominally supportive of authoritarianism inducing central planning economics, more likely in a form of nicey-nicey seeming government management of enterprise, and are also nominally supportive of free markets.

Oddly enough, the odd reasoning behind the quivering lips are visible even behind the centrist positions typically held by Jyllands-Posten:

The gap between rich and poor increased. The global financial crisis has shown that we have to rethink a capitalist model, which meant that financial institutions without the necessary checks could throw first USA and then Europe into a deep crisis that it can take decades to fix the economy up.

We’re all familiar with what this bemoans, and how it can never be salved outside of assigning every working person with the same income and benefits, something even Marxist-Leninism couldn’t achieve – so why even bother saying it if it wasn’t part of the usual atmospherics – no different than saying hello when you picking up a telephone?

It gets worse.

It is an economic crisis that has also become a political crisis because it is about lack of leadership. It is now so deep that it has started to weaken democracy.

No, being skeptical about or dissatisfied with your elected officials doesn’t weaken democracy, it gives you a reason to not vote for them again and embolden democracy by using it and letting it operate.

The crisis of capitalism in the West certainly raises many issues in Asia, whose interventionist economic model so often been criticized by the West but whose economies are nevertheless going ahead. The western model has taught them that the economic downturn has gruesome consequences and that one should be cautious in liberalizing the economy too much. So it's safer to have the state on track with the adjustments, such as the banking sector, as the U.S. and Europe lacked.

Sure, you say that now, but could you live in that kind of ‘company store’ society? Not likely.

Worse still is a total forgetting of who Nick Leeson was, and under whose laws he operated under, and .

The crisis of capitalism in the West certainly raises many issues in Asia, whose interventionist economic model so often been criticized by the West but whose economies are nevertheless going ahead. The western model has taught them that the economic downturn has gruesome consequences and that one should be cautious in liberalizing the economy too much. So it's safer to have the state on track with the adjustments, such as the banking sector, as the U.S. and Europe lacked.

Which oddly enough is that same ‘pirate capitalism’ that made Hong Kong’s economy grow and robustly resist a state of aggression that Havana can only dream of whining about.

Worried about democracy? Then stop alluding to the value of the Asia’s crypto-authoritarian factory states. The pointless bedwetting must stop.

Becoming Mortimer Snerd

You remember Hee Haw! Don’t you? In the same spirit as “Russia Today”, Kremlin TV is giving global identity thief Julian Assange his own TV show.

RT television stepped forward Wednesday to say it will be broadcasting the show, a series of 10 interviews with what it described as "key political players, thinkers and revolutionaries - figures who in the author's opinion will be shaping the political agenda of tomorrow."

The names of the guests are still to be disclosed.

And now for the “no shinola, Sherlock” statement of the century, fitting in with the grand theme of Assange’s linear existence:

RT, which also broadcasts in Spanish and Arabic on its cable networks, often takes a critical stance on U.S. policy.

Possibly because RT, a channel no-one is willing to pay to watch, is an obscuritarian near-complete FSB propaganda operation that Assange, the presumed hater of secrecy finds himself hitching his fate to: an operation propped up by people who keep secret files on people for a living.

Otherwise how do you think they can afford to buy capacity on 25 different satellite transponders without any real advertising? We’d follow the money, but Assange’s choice of venue is as opaque as the drinking water was in east Berlin.

Certainly intended to either propagandize TO Americans if not ABOUT Americans, it least it stands the chance of being less unwatchable as European television.

"We're proud to host Julian Assange's new project," editor in chief Margarita Simonyan said in the statement. "RT has rallied a global audience of open-minded people who don't take things around them for granted."

No, they prefer getting their received wisdom from an illiberal paranoid crypto-police state reminiscent of the days of Moscow Central.

Dominique de Villepin's Opposition to Bush and Rumsfeld Compared to Charles de Gaulle's Resistance to Pétain and Hitler

C'est son 18 juin 1940.

In a one-page spread in Le Monde Magazine called Le Roman-Photo de Villepin le Magnifique, Bastien Bonnefous compares Dominique de Villepin to Charles de Gaulle, no less — both in the title of the caption (L'homme qui a dit non) and in the caption itself. When Jacques Chirac's foreign minister appears at the United Nations to oppose George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld in their decision to oust Saddam Hussein, Bonnefous says that

It is his June 18, 1940.

Uh, is that so, Monsieur Bonnefous? Charles de Gaulle was not a minister at the time he launched his appeal over the BBC, far from it, and he was not opposing a fellow democratic republic. He was an outcast, battling Nazi Germany, and an outcast whose (French) government would pronounce the death penalty against him… Dominique de Villepin was hardly in danger of death, or of anything else, for opposing Washington. So… Let's not mix things up, shall we?

Defining sexual violence in impossibly elastic ways and letting the surveyors, rather than subjects, determine what counted as an assault

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius hailed [the CDC’s National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey] for giving “a clear picture of the devastating impact these violent acts have on the lives of millions of Americans”

writes Christina Hoff Sommers in the Washington Post (thanks to Instapundit).

In fact, what the study reveals is the devastating impact that careless advocacy research can have on truth.

The FBI found that 84,767 rapes were reported to law enforcement authorities in 2010. … where did the CDC find 13.7 million victims of sexual crimes that the professional criminologists had overlooked?

It found them by defining sexual violence in impossibly elastic ways and then letting the surveyors, rather than subjects, determine what counted as an assault.

… [This] shows how the study fits into the administration’s effort to apply the advocacy agenda of the women’s lobby to rape research.

In addition, I added the following to the comments section, responding to an outraged feminist:

Notice the precise — and misleading — wording in the outraged question asked by sammy328:

"Are you implying that if a girl is drunk it is acceptable for someone to rape her?"

That is what noone, that is PRECISELY what noone, is saying, yet alone implying.

What the point is, is that if a girl has sex while tipsy or drunk, and this holds true whoever initiated it (she or the man), one should not — automatically — assume afterwards, like the CDC seems to be doing, that she was incontrovertibly raped.

Let's turn the question on sammy328:

Are you implying that if a girl is tipsy or drunk (probably like the other girls and guys in her presence) it is unacceptable for her (for them) to be in the mood or for anyone to else to be in the mood (for sex with her)? Lest whatever happens afterwards be described indubitably as rape?!

sammy328's outrage is a deliberate attempt, whether she recognizes it consciously or not, to prevent people from thinking this issue through thoroughly.

Pretty much any time you read something to the effect that "This comment is incredibly insensitive, ignorant, and offensive", you can be pretty sure that the underlying motif is to prevent rational thought (not to mention "thought-provoking, timely comments on politics, national and international affairs"), and, in this case, to prevent readers (and voters!) from putting the feminists' (self-serving) victimhood status into doubt.

On the Left and Religion

I find a disturbing similarity in the outlook of the political and institutional “lights” of our age, and a memorandum on how religion should be maligned written by Gorky to Stalin.

We need to know the "fathers of the church," the apologists of Christianity, especially indispensable to the study of the history of Catholicism, the most powerful and intellectual church organization whose political significance is quite clear. We need to know the history of church schisms, heresies, the Inquisition, the "religious" wars, etc. Every quotation by a believer is easily countered with dozens of theological quotations which contradict it.

We cannot do without an edition of the "Bible" with critical commentaries from the Tubingen school and books on criticism of biblical texts, which could bring a very useful "confusion into the minds" of believers.

It also brings to mind Howard Zinn’s efforts to rewrite history and work it into the curriculum of the American public school systems.

For this reason, there should be courses set up at the Communist Academy which would not only treat the history of religion, and mainly the history of the Christian church, i.e., the study of church history as politics.

Even the willfully constructed ‘soft touch’ when it comes to managing the news and the minds of youth:

By strongly emphasizing facts of a negative nature, we open ourselves up to our enemies, providing them an enormous amount of material, which they in turn very aptly use against us, compromising our party and our leadership in the eyes of Europe's proletariat, compromising the very principle of the dictatorship of the working class, because the proletariat of Europe and America feeds on the bourgeois newspapers for the most part—and for this reason it cannot grasp our country's cultural-
revolutionary progress, our successes and achievements in industrialization, the enthusiasm of our working masses, and of their influence on the impoverished peasantry.

The imperative to destroy faith by those who want control over a people is clear:

Our youth is very poorly informed on questions of this nature. The "tendency" toward a religious disposition is very noticeable--a natural result of developing individualism. At this time, as always, the young are in a hurry to find "the definitive answer."

Which is why those who like the idea of controlling a society feel such a strong need to manipulate education and the spinning of news. They know that a society left to make its’ own choices simply wouldn’t guarantee them the power over others that they seek.