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…
… memory, after all, is what history is all about
In a Veterans Day/Armistice Day piece for the Daily Telegraph otherwise devoted to the distinctions between beer and wine,
Stephen Clarke had remark to make:If nothing else, we in Western Europe might like to spend a couple of minutes a year thinking about the people who saved us from getting stomped on by jackboots and sent to death camps. The French more than anyone.
couple of days after Laurent Fabius brought down the gavel for a glorious new future for mankind, and just as he was thanked in parliament with a standing ovation, his son spent 12 hours in police custody for forgery and fraud, as well as money laundering.
Thomas Fabius isn't only wanted by the French police. Just to make things a bit more interesting, Laurent's oldest son, a playboy who apparently has something of the gambler about him, has a U.S. arrest warrant issued in his name—for bounced checks running in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, and written in Las Vegas, of all places, totaling $3.5 million ($1,000,000 to The Palazzo, $900,000 to the Cosmopolitan, etc…).
From the December report, Son of Frenchman Who Presided COP21 in Police Custody for Fraud and Forgery:I am told that [these posts are] unjust, that Thomas Fabius is an adult with allegedly no connection (?) to his father.In French — Le Monde's Simon Piel:
That might seem to be a valid comment if you believe that the workings, attitudes, and beliefs inside families,especially families of the ruling élites, in the exact same timeframe have no meaning at all. Had something positive occurred in the Fabius family, for instance, one can be sure it would be treated with pride by all the other family members.
The comment would especially make sense if, by some accident, the same rules happened to apply to conservatives. (See especially Prescott Bush, and the Bush family being lambasted for their (grand-)father's foreign dealings, with a German régime recognized by all countries prior to World War II and before the Holocaust had even started, in a time when the elder George Bush was 10 and 50 years prior to any Bush attaining the White House.)
Related: Koch Derangement Syndrome: Leftists breathlessly report that the "Koch Brothers' father helped build a Nazi oil refinery that Hitler approved" without noting that construction occurred in 1933 (the first year that the National Socialists were in power), that it happened exactly five years prior to Time Magazine naming the Führer Person of the Year, that it happened before either Charles or David were born, and, last but not least, that similar actions by leftists such as the members of the Soros family or members of the the Kennedy dynasty are ignored. (See also: When Demonizing Billionaires, Leftists Like Paul Krugman Conveniently Ignore the Left-Leaning Statists Who Donate (Far More) Millions to the Left)
Deux ans et demi après l’ouverture d’une information judiciaire pour faux, escroquerie et blanchiment, le juge d’instruction René Cros s’est finalement décidé à entendre l’unique personne mise en cause dans l’enquête sur Thomas Fabius, Thomas Fabius lui-même.
Convoqué ce vendredi, un peu plus d’un mois après une garde à vue de douze heures devant les policiers spécialisés de l’Office central de répression de la grande délinquance financière (OCRDGDF), le fils de l’actuel ministre des affaires étrangères, âgé de 34 ans, a été mis en examen pour faux et usage de faux après une longue journée d’audition.
Il a par ailleurs été placé sous le statut de témoin assisté concernant les chefs d’escroquerie, de blanchiment de fraude fiscale, d’abus de confiance, d’abus de bien social et de recel d’abus de bien
social
L’enquête avait débuté après une plainte pour faux déposée par la Société Générale. La banque française lui reprochait d’avoir produit un faux courriel émanant de ses services dans le but d’obtenir un crédit du casino de la Mamounia à Marrakech, au Maroc.
Cette plainte ainsi que plusieurs signalements de Tracfin, l’organisme antiblanchiment du ministère des finances, avaient finalement conduit le parquet de Paris à ouvrir une information judiciaire en mai 2013.
Des ardoises à Las Vegas
Thomas Fabius, comme l’avait révélé Le Point, fait par ailleurs l’objet d’un mandat d’arrêt émis par le procureur du comté de Clark, dont dépend la ville de Las Vegas (Nevada), pour avoir émis des chèques sans provision pour un montant supérieur à 3,5 millions de dollars (3,2 millions d’euros) dans le but de pouvoir continuer à jouer à la roulette dans différents casinos de la ville. Le parquet de Paris a délivré un réquisitoire supplétif sur ce volet américain de l’affaire au juge d’instruction afin d’en obtenir les éléments.
Oxford University’s statue of Cecil Rhodes is to stay in place after furious donors threatened to withdraw gifts and bequests worth more than £100 million if it was taken down,The Daily Telegraph's Javier Espinoza has learnt (Update: cheers to Instapundit for the link).
The governing body of Oriel College, which owns the statue, has ruled out its removal after being warned that £1.5m worth of donations have already been cancelled, and that it faces dire financial consequences if it bows to the Rhodes Must Fall student campaign.
A leaked copy of a report prepared for the governors and seen by this newspaper discloses that wealthy alumni angered by the “shame and embarrassment” brought on the 690-year-old college by its own actions have now written it out of their wills.
The college now fears a proposed £100m gift - to be left in the will of one donor - is now in jeopardy following the row.
The donors were astonished by a proposal to remove a plaque marking where Rhodes lived, and to launch a six-month consultation over whether the statue of the college’s biggest benefactor should be taken down.
… Oriel has now been panicked into cancelling the proposed six-month consultation and the plaque marking the building where he lived while he was a student at Oriel will also stay, but both will have an accompanying sign providing historical “context”.
… Sean Power, Oriel’s development director and the man in charge of fundraising, told the governors in a report that the college was unprepared for the national and international condemnation of the suggestion that the statue might be removed, described by the classicist Professor Mary Beard as a “completely barking” plan to “erase” history.Punching back twice as hard.
Mr Power wrote that: “The overall reaction has been significant, much more than any in the College predicted. It has also been overwhelmingly negative of the College’s position and its actions.
“The likely long-term impact on development and fundraising, assuming our current course of action regarding the statue, is potentially extremely damaging…our alumni do not need many excuses not to give, and for many this will be such an excuse for years to come.
“The current situation is generating a media storm that is right at the limits of what the University can deal with, and support us in.”
Incredible: last summer, the New York Times' faux conservative,
David Brooks, actually penned a conservative-sounding column:This administration has given us a choice between two terrible options: accept the partial-surrender agreement that was negotiated or reject it and slide immediately into what is in effect our total surrender — a collapsed sanctions regime and a booming Iranian nuclear program.Many members of Congress will be tempted to accept the terms of our partial surrender as the least bad option in the wake of our defeat. I get that. But in voting for this deal they may be affixing their names to an arrangement that will increase the chance of more comprehensive war further down the road.Iran is a fanatical, hegemonic, hate-filled regime. If you think its radicalism is going to be softened by a few global trade opportunities, you really haven’t been paying attention to the Middle East over the past four decades.
Iran will use its $150 billion windfall to spread terror around the region and exert its power. It will incrementally but dangerously cheat on the accord. Armed with money, ballistic weapons and an eventual nuclear breakout, it will become more aggressive. As the end of the nuclear delay comes into view, the 45th or 46th president will decide that action must be taken.Economic and political defeats can be as bad as military ones. Sometimes when you surrender to a tyranny you lay the groundwork for a more cataclysmic conflict to come.
Wall Street Journal piece,
The Dangerous Lie That ‘Bush Lied’.astonishing to see the “Bush lied” allegation evolve from antiwar slogan to journalistic fact.Indeed, if anybody can be accused of lying in this matter, it is the very people — in America as well as abroad — who are not only accusing George W Bush of lying but who are simply presenting that as an incontrovertible (an almost ho-hum) fact. As I wrote in 2008,
… it is one thing to assert, then or now, that the Iraq war was ill-advised. It is quite another to make the horrendous charge that President Bush lied to or deceived the American people about the threat from Saddam.
… It is … certainly possible to criticize President Bush for having believed what the CIA told him, although it seems to me that any president would have credited such confident assertions by the intelligence community. But to accuse the president of lying us into war must be seen as not only false, but as dangerously defamatory.
The charge is dangerous because it can take on the air of historical fact—with potentially dire consequences. I am reminded of a similarly baseless accusation that helped the Nazis come to power in Germany: that the German army had not really lost World War I, that the soldiers instead had been “stabbed in the back” by politicians.
his opponents, his accusers (both American and foreign!), did lie (in the very fact that they charged him with lying), and that they were lying all the time. (And if you think lying is too strong a term, and want to say that they "were mistaken", that would be fine with me — except for one thing: that was/is an alternative explanation that they never allowed for Bush and/or the neocons!)Isn't one of the lies ignoring what was the one of the really most pressing reason for sending U.S. troops to Iraq?
Rudolph Giuliani:Furthermore, Mr. Watergate scandal himself, aka Bob Woodward, has stated that
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 San Bernardino] or in the rural areas of America.
That's what it means to play offense with terrorism, and not just defense.
there was no lying in this that I could find.
Is Bush the World's Worst Leader?
When confronted by a militant leftist many years ago who was ticking off all the sins and failures of capitalist democracy, Winston Churchill finally indicated that he agreed with the man. "Democracy is the worst form of government", nodded the Old Lion. He marked a pause, before adding, "…with the exception of all the rest."
That is what I think about when I am confronted by angry people, American or foreign, who proceed to tell me what a "disaster" George W Bush has been and who can tick off his every sin and bewail the sorry record of his administration. (Not to mention every sin linked to America and capitalist society.)
Bush, I agree with them, is the worst leader in the world, and the worst politician, and the worst liar, and the man with the worst record… with the exception of… all the rest. (And the same can be said of capitalism compared to the rest of the world's economic systems…)
Foremost among the liars worse than Bush is Saddam Hussein, of course. The tyrant was a known fibber, doubling as a psychopath and — last but not least — a man repeatedly seeking war-making capabilities, and if Dubya mentioned WMD as a reason to oust the dictator, it's not because he (Dubya) was lying, but because Saddam had built the reputation he had.
Take the members of the "peace camp". Their foremost lie lay in their eagerness to castigate Bush and his administration, in the process conveniently forgetting that Saddam was the liar with the reputation just mentioned and that their secret services, as much as the CIA and MI6, had concluded that Saddam was hiding WMD.
In addition, they gave credence to the pretense that with just a bit of goodwill, the United Nations could, and would, solve the entire problem and entice the murderer of hundreds of thousands of his countrymen, if not to share power, at least to tone down on his killing… This being the same organization that threw a democracy out of its seat in the UN human rights committee (it happened to be Uncle Sam, but it could just as well have been any other Western-type democracy) while elevating countries like Libya or Syria to its chairmanship. It was also the organization that, when subsequently faced with genocide in Sudan, proceeded to do little else but issue communiqués deploring the situation and calling upon the murderers to ease up on their killing.
Take the United Nations as a whole, which, in unison with the "peace camp" members, pretended to be objective, detached, and holier than thou, when its members, in fact, were involved in the largest scam in human history. This, of course, brings us back to the Peace Camp, which pretended that their only, or their foremost, concern was a just and lasting peace, in contrast to Bush's "war for oil" when, in fact, it would have been more appropriate to have the pre-conflict situation termed as their "tyranny for oil" gambit.
Then there are the pacifists, both private citizens and government bigwigs, who marched through the streets and/or made rousing speeches, pretending that the largest threat to the world today was Uncle Sam.
Then there are the media outlets, both within the United States and abroad, which echoed those sentiments, while making much out of the fact that Iraq now is supposedly in chaos and insecurity — as if having the thuggish members of Saddam's secret police enter into your home with impunity, take away your parents, spouse, and/or children, and torture and murder them, can in any way be likened to an environment of public safety and to the absence of chaos.
To be totally honest, I liken the accusations concerning Bush and Blair's claims about Saddam's WMD to accusing Churchill, Roosevelt, Eisenhower, or Montgomery of lying to the Rangers when they ordered them to storm the cliffs of the Pointe du Hoc on June 6, 1944, to neutralize some long-range cannons (weapons of mass destruction, one could call them); after sustaining heavy losses, the Rangers found that the cannons were nowhere to be found, the Germans having removed them from the Normandy coast not long before.
History has a long flow of evidence showing that when Uncle Sam is being attacked, castigated, or mocked, it is usually the people, institutions, and countries doing the berating who are the worse sinners. And who have something to hide, as much from the rest of the world as from themselves.
To quote Sir Winston again,
Shall we let the last word go to Dennis Prager?a fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject.Lire la version française…Read the three-and-a-half-years-later (!) update …
Few liberal activist groups tell the truth. Not because their members are liars -- in private life they may well be as honest as anyone else -- but because whatever the left advocates it deems more important than truth.
… when the left ceaselessly repeats the mantra "Bush lied," it may simply be projecting onto George W. Bush what comes quite naturally to the left — when it offers false Iraqi death statistics, false homeless data, false rape statistics, false secondhand smoke statistics, false claims about the percentage of gays in the population, and false claims of just about everything else the left cares about.
Paul Krugman implicates all billionaires as smug, selfish, pathological and Republicannotes James Gerard, referring to the New York Times columnist's “Privilege, pathology and power” (Jan. 2-3).
Hence they are without empathy, out of touch, and use their money and power to influence elections. What about George Soros, Eli Broad, David Geffen and Tom Steyer? Are they without gobs of money, ego or the desire to inject their own “statist” principles into elections? Have they not sworn to spend countless millions in an effort to “re-shape” America? Mr. Krugman would do better to write about both sides of the billionaires’ battle.This is how Jonah Goldberg puts it (thanks to Instapundit):
To listen to the Left, [those old devils, Charles and David Koch] are the closest thing we have to real-world James Bond villains. So what is their agenda? Is it to retreat to their orbiting harems, populated with fertile females, as they wipe out humanity below so that they can return to repopulate the planet? Or is to dupe the Russians and Americans into a nuclear squabble so that the Kochs can rule the ashes?
Well, here’s [Jane] Mayer’s explanation of their dark and sinister ambitions.
“What people need to understand is the Kochs have been playing a very long game,” [the author of Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right] told NPR’s Steve Inskeep. “And it’s not just about elections. It started four decades ago with a plan to change how America thinks and votes. So while some elections they win and some elections they lose, what they’re aiming at is changing the conversation in the country.”
Dear God, it’s worse than I thought! They want to change the conversation! They want to persuade Americans to vote differently! The horror, the horror.
You might be forgiven for thinking that this is pretty much exactly what democracy is about. But no. For you see, only Hollywood, college professors and administrators, the ACLU, People for the American Way, the Human Rights Campaign, NARAL, Emily’s List, the Ford Foundation, Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street, MoveOn.org, the NAACP, the Union of Concerned Scientists, Greenpeace, Tom Steyer, Michael Bloomberg, George Soros, Steven Spielberg and, of course, publications such as the New York Times [including Paul Krugman], The New Republic, The Nation and Mayer’s own The New Yorker are allowed to try to change conversations and argue for people to vote differently.
For you see, only Hollywood, college professors and administrators, the ACLU, People for the American Way, the Human Rights Campaign, NARAL, Emily’s List, the Ford Foundation, Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street, MoveOn.org, the NAACP, the Union of Concerned Scientists, Greenpeace, Tom Steyer, Michael Bloomberg, George Soros, Steven Spielberg and, of course, publications such as the New York Times, The New Republic, The Nation and Mayer’s own The New Yorker are allowed to try to change conversations and argue for people to vote differently.
Ah, but those voices are open and honest — and progressive! — about it, while the Kochs are secretive, sinister denizens of the stygian underworld of “dark money” and the “radical right.” Except for the fact that the Kochs have been out in the open for nearly a half-century.
… How, then, are the Kochs members of the radical Right?• They are pro-gay marriage.• They favor liberal immigration policies.• They are passionate non-interventionists when it comes to foreign policy.• They are against the drug war and are spending a bundle on dismantling so-called “mass-incarceration” policies.• They’ve never seized a national park at gunpoint.
They are members of the radical Right for the simple reason that they don’t like big government and spend money to make that case.
… And that’s their great sin. Liberals are constantly talking about how we need an “honest conversation” about race or guns or this or that. But what they invariably mean is, they want everyone who disagrees to shut up. (That’s why they hate Fox News, too.)
The best working definition of “right wing” today has almost nothing to do with the ideological content of what right-wingers say or do.
A right-winger is someone who disagrees with the liberal narrative, has the temerity to say so, and dares to actually try to change the conversation.
Now that Hollywood has mostly figured out how to get its biggest movies approved for release in China,write Brooks Barnes and Amy Qin,
studio marketers here are grappling with a new puzzle: What is the best way to woo China’s ticket buyers?
a company with enormous reach that few people outside of China have ever heard of: Mtime [which] is effectively Fandango, IMDb, Rotten Tomatoes and Yahoo Movies rolled into one.
the truth is that anti-Americanism rears its ugly head in even the most innocent-looking children's (or family) fareproduced in… the United States, we wrote two years ago, with examples galore (from Kung Fu Panda 3 to Iron Man 3—all submitted to Chinese censors—via… Kung Fu Panda 2), in a post entitled Hollywood's Offerings Promise Only to Get More Anti-American.
Chinese conglomerate Dalian Wanda Group, which already owns the AMC chain of multiplex cinemas, is poised to buy a majority stake in a Hollywood production company that makes blockbuster-style movies, giving the politically powerful company with close ties to the Communist Party’s ruling elite a foothold in the heart of America’s entertainment industry.We learn further that
the deal makes sense for both Wanda and Legendary, which tends to produce the type of big-budget, special-effects-driven movies that Chinese audiences like. In addition to owning AMC, Wanda controls the biggest cinema chain in China, where box-office receipts are set to eclipse the North American market in coming years. Wanda, a company owned by Wang Jianlin, China’s richest man, can provide Mr. Tull with money, a growing audience and a champion in China that can get more of his films into the tightly controlled market.
… The deal, earlier reported by Reuters, deepens Wanda’s foray into the movie production business. Wanda made a splash in 2013 when it announced the construction of a mammoth, $8.2 billion studio in eastern China, flying in stars like Leonardo DiCaprio and Nicole Kidman for the occasion.
… Wanda’s investment also makes sense politically for its chairman, Mr. Wang, a former military officer who is carrying out the Communist Party’s goal of deepening China’s influence in the global entertainment industry. As many of China’s most powerful families, including relatives of President Xi Jinping, have bought shares in Wanda, the Legendary purchase furthers Mr. Wang’s importance to the country’s political elite at a time when some of the country’s richest businessmen are falling victim to Mr. Xi’s anticorruption campaign, now entering its fourth year.
From the Washington Examiner's Philip Klein (obrigado por Sarah Hoyt) on an episode of "Downton Abbey" featuring the Dowager Countess Violet Crawley (Maggie Smith):"For years I've watched governments take control of our lives, and their argument is always the same — fewer costs, greater efficiency — but the result is the same too," Violet said. "Less control by the people, more control by the state, until the individual's own wishes count for nothing. That is what I consider my duty to resist."
She went on to argue, "Your great-grandchildren won't thank you when the state is all powerful because we didn't fight."
Britain instituted national healthcare in 1948 with the establishment of the National Health Service, whose many failings [Philip Klein] explored in more detail in the Washington Examiner's magazine.
which illustrates the horrendous bureaucracy that accompanies the American health system. I moved to the US two years ago and I am only now starting to understand how it works. I knew I needed insurance and I knew health was expensive, but I was completely unprepared for its complexity.
It is not, as I soon learnt, just a matter of paying for health insurance and going to the doctor when sick. Patients have a choice of policies, in fact rather a lot of choice. … Wading through the fine print [of 89 different policies] was a miserable and time-consuming process even with the aid of a spreadsheet.
Ruth Margolis chimes in on America's "predictably incomprehensible forms" along with other examples of "lunacy":… when my fiancé and I moved from London to New York in 2011 because he’d got a job there, we weren’t expecting our lives to be overtaken by killer paperwork. The complete absence of humour or flexibility exhibited by anyone behind a desk or at the end of a “help” line only made the form filling and hoop jumping worse. It was like trying to settle in Stalinist Russia. Multiple times in those first few weeks we’d look at each other, then at the growing pile of semi-literate documents on our friends’ spare bedroom floor, and feel ready to give up.Personally, I cannot tell to what extent any of this is due to the statism inherent in the East Coast's blue states (the states mentioned, after all, are Maine and New York)
Signing up for the internet, dealing with the US health care system – even renting a flat – were all soul-crushing experiences.
or to what degree Obamacare has made this better or worse. But maybe some readers can testify here…
[The Obama] administration has proliferated too many guns to too many bad actors to preach to the rest of us about gun controlwrites Benny Huang.
“I’m really good at killing people,” Barack Obama once allegedly said. … Though the Obama aides say that he was speaking of drone warfare when he bragged about his death-dealing, his prowess in the field of killing people is hardly limited to Hellfire missiles. Take, for example, the recent discovery of a Fast & Furious-linked .50 caliber rifle at the criminal hideout of Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, who was arrested in Mexico on January 8th. The rifle, which was capable of shooting down a helicopter, found its way into the drug lord’s hands through a still opaque program that allowed American guns to cross the border into Mexico with the full knowledge of the Department of Justice. Federal officials have not precluded the possibility that other weapons found at El Chapo’s hideout will be traced back to the ill-conceived Operation Fast & Furious. It’s good to know that our DOJ is playing a role, even if only through willful negligence, in arming the most notorious narco-gangster since Pablo Escobar.
When I first read about El Chapo’s .50 caliber rifle I was immediately reminded of Mr. Obama’s unilateral gun control executive orders and the associated town hall meetings which were designed to leave the false impression that he sought the American people’s input. The hypocrisy of it all was stunning. A man who armed El Chapo shouldn’t have a say in American citizens’ second amendment rights. We’re not the problem. He is.
This is a man who stated “I do not believe people should be able to own guns” and praised Australia as the model for gun laws. Australia does not permit private citizens to own guns so I must conclude that Obama supports an outright ban. He is not just tweaking the system a little to make sure that underworld figures don’t get guns.
To the contrary, he’s facilitating the transaction. On the other hand, he wants your gun—even if you’re a model citizen.
… As a consequence of Obama’s and Holder’s gunwalking operation, our government has armed Muslim terrorists, cop killers, and the biggest drug lord in the world. Pretty good at killing people? Don’t be modest, Mr. President. You’re the best.
But Obama’s guns aren’t just found in Mexico or in the border states. They can also be found across the Middle East and North Africa.
… Barack Obama really is adept at killing people. He’s killed a lot of people “by accident,” I suppose, though all of his accidents were easily foreseen and easily avoidable. He nonetheless lectures the rest of us about our guns.
Brits were horrified by news earlier this week that Americans have never heard of the meaty treat known as the sausage roll. And it made us worry about what else you could be missing out on on the other side of the Pond.Among the tips 'n' recommendations are the Scotch egg, mushy peas, and bubble and squeak, along with Toad in the Hole and Spotted Dick.
