Behind the Façades in France: What expats and the mainstream media (French and American alike) fail to notice (or fail to tell you) about French attitudes, principles, values, and official positions…
Question: What would have become of Aylan had he lived and grown to become an adult?More controversy from Charlie Hebdo, as Riss publishes a cartoon on the the Syrian child (Alan Kurdi) whose drowned body was found (and photographed) on a Mediterranean beach.
Answer: An ass groper in Germany
It's a shame. An American disgrace. But thankfully Barack Obama's administration is intervening to set things right:America’s air traffic control towers suffer from a stunning lack of diversitywrites Benny Huang
—that’s the official position of the Obama Administration’s FAA, which quietly moved to abolish merit-based testing for air traffic controllers two years ago in an attempt to boost the number of women and minorities in the career field. Blacks and Hispanics apparently don’t score as high on the Air Traffic Selection and Training (AT-SAT) exam, the test the FAA once used to judge an applicant’s job knowledge. That’s not really a shocker, considering the fact that blacks and Hispanics score lower on every standardized test known to man, including the bar exam, English proficiency tests, the SAT, the ACT and the IQ test. All of the aforementioned tests are racist, you see, because if they weren’t racist all races would achieve identical average scores.Correct! Myself, Benny, and all other airline passengers — white, black, 'n' yellow, male and female alike — will all feel safer, now that the people manning (if you will forgive the sexist verb) America's control towers include more blacks, more Hispanics, and more females.
I must say, this new decision makes me feel a lot better about flying. My plane might crash but at least the guys and gals deconflicting airspace will hail from diverse backgrounds. As an occasional airline passenger, I have to say that diversity in the tower is really, really important to me. I mean, really. I lose sleep over it.
… what the FAA [is] looking for [these days is] compelling life stories.If you don't care anymore, Benny, then the leftists win. Because they don't take being fed up as criticism or even a slap; au contraire: that is exactly the outcome they are looking for.
One recent applicant, Ryan Meryhew, who earned his air traffic controller’s degree and scored a 99.5 on his AT-SAT, would have been a shoo-in under the old system but under the new system he was just another applicant. “It didn’t ask me anything about my college experience, my grades, my scores, (and) my ability for the actual job. It asked me what sports I played in high school. What was my least favorite subject in high school. Nothing related to aviation,” said Meryhew.
For once I want someone to really explain to me what the point of diversity is. Not that I haven’t heard the sales pitch a thousand times—diversity brings different perspectives, diversity makes us well-rounded—but that just isn’t cutting it anymore. I want answers not bromides.
One argument usually made in support of diversity is that it’s a quantity we desperately need in our air traffic control towers—and in our military, police forces, fire departments, boards of directors, etc.—so that they can serve a diverse public. That one might actually have some truth to it though only because certain demographic groups resent white people and don’t want them policing their streets, teaching in their classrooms, etc. Those people are known as black racists, or sometimes brown or yellow racists …
… But let’s not be afraid to look deeper into the argument that we need a diverse workforce to serve a diverse population. In this formulation, diversity is both the problem and the solution. We need more diversity because diversity. If we weren’t so fabulously diverse, race wouldn’t matter—but because we are, it does.
… Even the military worries that it doesn’t have enough diversity, especially in the most glamorous jobs. Contrary to Hollywood myth, elite military units aren’t filled with tough black dudes from the streets but rather with ordinary-looking white guys like Rob O’Neill and Marcus Luttrell who happen to be mentally tough.
In 2012 journalist Mark Thompson tackled the “problem” of too many white Navy SEALS in Time Magazine … But really, who cares what color they are? Thompson attempted to answer that question, trying his best to find a deficiency that only more minority SEALs could meet. “U.S. special operators have long acknowledged they face challenges mixing in with foreign populations because they look so American,” wrote Thompson. This is truly a novel argument for diversity—the SEALs need to get some more color for the sake of camouflage!
… So there’s your mission, SEALs—look like America but try not to look too American.
The Air Force has similar diversity concerns, especially among its pilots, according to Secretary of the Air Force Deborah Lee James. She has proposed “diversity and inclusion requirements” that sound suspiciously like illegal race and gender quotas.
… Diversity isn’t really a compelling need in most sectors of society. Liberals just tell us that because they hate merit-based hiring. And they’re compulsive liars. Simply hiring the best man (or woman) for the job is anathema to who they are and how they think. It’s time we stopped taking their silly justifications at face value. We need to start asking “why?” What’s the tangible benefit here? It will take courage of course, because to even question diversity hints at bigotry. I, for one, just don’t care anymore.
What the Hell Are We Doing in Iraq? (I)
Condoleezza Rice:
There are those who say, "Well, if you didn't go into Iraq, there wouldn't be terrorists there." They weren't some place drinking tea and playing Scrabble. These are hardened Jihadists who will fight us some place. And if they want to fight us in Iraq, where we are 140,000 strong, better there than in New York City again.
What the Hell Are We Doing in Iraq? (II)
Rudolph Giuliani:
President Bush will make certain that we are combating terrorism at the source, beyond our shores, so we don't have to confront it, or we reduce [the chance] of confronting it here in New York City, or in Chicago or in Los Angeles or in Miami or in the rural areas of America.
That's what it means to play offense with terrorism, and not just defense.What the Hell Are We Doing in Iraq? (III)
George W Bush:
Our strategy is clear. … We are staying on the offensive striking terrorists abroad so we do not have to face them here at home. …
What the Hell Are We Doing in Iraq? (IV)
Ronald Dominick Winchester, US Marine Corps:
Better that I go over there. Because if I don't, they're going to come here.Winchester, a 25-year-old first lieutenant with the United States Marine Corps (who used to admire a drawing of a firefighter in the rubble of the Twin Towers handing an American flag to a marine, who is saying "I'll take it from here"), was killed in western Iraq in September 2004.
This New Year’s Eve was a lot less fun in Europe than in previous yearswrites Benny Huang,
as violence and threats of violence put a damper on the party atmosphere. … in three German cities—Hamburg, Stuttgart, and Cologne—mobs of men, reportedly of “Arab or North African origin,” allegedly attacked female partygoers.Related: Benny H bids Good-Bye to 2015, the year of lies, hoaxes, and outright fakeries
This is the new Europe. It’s not going to get better.
Cologne stood out among the cities plagued by predatory mobs for the sheer quantity of mayhem on display. As many as a thousand men allegedly robbed, groped and even raped women in and around the main train station and gothic cathedral. One hundred seventy criminal complaints were made, 120 of which had a “sexual angle.” Thirty-one men, a tiny fraction of the estimated one thousand, have been arrested. Eighteen of them are “asylum-seekers.” Not a single widow or orphan was found among them, and apparently none was named Hans or Franz.
The government’s response had been, shall we say, inadequate. On January 1st, a police press release called the New Year’s Eve celebrations “peaceful,” which suggests an official cover-up. When the government was finally willing to admit that something had happened, they still seemed to be in damage control mode. Ralf Jaeger, the Interior Minister for the state of North Rhine-Westphalia said that, “What happens on the right-wing platforms and in chatrooms is at least as awful as the acts of those assaulting the women.”
Oh, I see—so the people expressing their outrage online are at least as awful the wild hyenas perpetrating sexual violence. He isn’t sure if the online commenters are more awful but they must be equally awful. A more absurd false equivalence has never been drawn.
But the award for the most obtuse public official in this whole affair (besides Angela Merkel of course) goes to Cologne’s pro-asylum mayor, Henriette Reker, who just couldn’t stop putting her foot in her mouth. She originally said that there was “no reason to suspect that they are refugees.” We now know that many of them are, but can we blame her for not wanting to jump to conclusions? Yes. You’d have to be a fool to think that among the thousand or so men, all of whom were obviously not far removed from the Middle East or North Africa, there wasn’t a single one of the 1.1 million “refugees” admitted in 2015.
… Mayor Reker also angered the public with remarks that she surely meant to be helpful but were nonetheless alarming. She told women that they should follow a “code of conduct” if they wanted to avoid being sexual assaulted and advised women against succumbing to a “celebratory mood”—which I think used to be allowed on New Year’s Eve. As a strategy for not getting sexually assaulted Frau Reker told women to stick together with girlfriends and to “make sure yourself you don’t look to be too close to people who are not known to you, and to whom you don’t have a trusting relationship.”
And some people think that mass immigration reduces social cohesion! Wherever did they get an idea like that?
Not only are Reker’s suggestions insulting but they’re also ineffective.
… Then there’s the racism angle. Reker’s comments weren’t overtly racist but “dog whistles” never are. It sounds as if she’s enjoining white German women to avoid swarthy Middle Eastern males. That’s raaaaaacist! It also happens to be pretty good advice though it wouldn’t have prevented this attack and the suggestion would also be a lot easier to follow if the swarthy Middle Eastern men weren’t in the white German women’s country in the first place. As more and more refugees arrive, it will be increasingly difficult to find any sanctuary from these shady characters. They will be everywhere, if they aren’t already.
… This is the New Normal.
I’ll bet that a lot of those women miss the Old Normal. I do too. I spent three years living in Germany and came to love the city of Cologne. I’ve been to the train station many times and I think I even slept on a bench there overnight once, though I slept in a lot of train stations so I can’t be sure. These days I wouldn’t dare sleep at the Cologne train station and I’m not even a girl. [Indeed, Benny Huang is a U.S. army veteran!]
… If Chancellor Angela Merkel is any indicator, the political will to really do something about this problem is lacking. In response to the sexual attacks in German cities, she said “But we must accept that the number of criminal offenses committed by young immigrants is particularly high.” Yes it’s true that immigrants’ criminality is off the charts, something she might have mentioned before committing her country to unprecedented immigration, but does that mean Germans have to accept it? The chancellor who let them all in says yes. Tomorrow’s Germany will be more Muslim than today’s and, let’s not sugarcoat it, more dangerous. So get used to it.
Resignation has already swept across neighboring France where Islamization is even more advanced. Their New Year’s Eve wasn’t exactly tranquil either; across the country, 1,067 automobiles were set ablaze. Torching cars has become something of a New Year’s Eve tradition among France’s Muslim minority. It’s a nice tradition, don’t you think? Americans sing Auld Lang Syne and kiss at midnight, French Muslims burn Peugeots. That’s just their culture—please don’t judge.
… Obviously, [French Interior Minister] Manuel Valls is a glass-half-full kind of guy but dour old pessimists like me still think France has a slight problem.
This is how societies die. Little by little they adapt to barbarism, constantly making small concessions until it all seems normal. With the passage of time people forget that it had ever been different. They even convince themselves that nostalgic memories of the “good old days” are mere figments of some racist’s imagination. They never happened!
More immigrants are coming next year. Brace yourself for New Year’s Eve 2016.