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…
A French police officer who offered himself up in a hostage swap Friday after an armed man reportedly yelling “Allahu Akbar” went on a rampage in southern France, has died
Details about the death of the officer, identified as Col. Arnaud Beltrame, were not immediately available.
Interior Minister Gerard Collomb wrote in a tweet early Saturday that Beltrame had "died for his country."
The officer had offered himself up unarmed to the 25-year-old attacker in exchange for a female hostage.
He managed to surreptitiously leave his cellphone on so that police outside could hear what was going on inside the supermarket.
Officials said once they heard shots inside the market they decided to storm it, killing the gunman.
Beltrame was grievously injured, and his death raised the toll from the attack to four.
The Islamic State group claimed responsibility for the attack, the deadliest since Emmanuel Macron became president last May.
Police said the suspect, identified as Redouane Lakdim, 26, carjacked a vehicle, shot at police and barricaded himself inside a Super U supermarket in Trebes before officers stormed in, fatally shooting him.
The mother of a French police officer who was killed after he swapped himself for a hostage during an Islamic extremist attack on a supermarket says that she wasn't surprised by her son's courage.
Col. Arnaud …
Beltrame's mother told RTL radio Friday night before the announcement of his death that
"I'm not surprised. I knew it had to be him. He has always been like that. It's someone, since he was born, who gives everything for his homeland."
Asked if she was proud of him, she said he would have told her "'I'm doing my job mom, that's all.'"
She said to "defend the homeland" was his "reason for living."
Jakob Stegelmann (th) var med som Tintin-ekspert, da kronprins Frederik så udstillingen på Brandts. V til H: Erik Svane, Belgisk ambassadør Leo Peeters, Odense borgmester Peter Rahbæk Juel, Kronprins Frederik, direktør for Brandts Mads Damsbo, Jakob Stegelmann
At the last moment, I was asked to join the inaugural tour of Brandts's Hergé exhibit in Odense for Crown Prince Frederik, since I had met the Belgian artist as a child when one of the Danish Embassy's top honchos (none other than my father) helped get two signed Tintin albums to the Danish princes (the one to Kronprins Frederik being Tintin au Tibet).
Photos by Fyns Stifitstidendes Birgitte Carol Holberg
Kronprins Frederik fik en rundvisning i den nye Hergé-udstilling af flere Tintin-eksperter. Her snakker han med Nick Rodwell, direktør for Musée Hergé, mens borgmester Peter Rahbæk Juel (i midten) og tegneserie-elsker Jakob Stegelmann (th) ser på. V til H: Nick Rodwell, Belgisk ambassadør Leo Peeters (skjult), Kronprins Frederik, Erik Svane, Odense borgmester Peter Rahbæk Juel, ukendt, Jakob Stegelmann. (Michael Farr var også tilstede.)
The Judges’ handbook on the language of equality misses out the despised new underclass: Oxbridge-educated, cis males. Thus writes Giles Coren in the Times of London:
According to a story in Thursday’s Times, a handbook has at last been published offering judges “advice in how to avoid giving offence”.
… Thank heavens. We live in better and more enlightened times. Overt
racism and sexism are not tolerated anywhere, by anyone. Except in the
White House, of course. So what the Judicial College is looking to stamp
out now, as the noose tightens around those who would seek to upset
their fellow humans with outrageous prejudice, are words like
“Afro-Caribbean” (which I didn’t know was actively offensive but is a
mouthful and I’d never say it anyway), “transsexual” (which I assumed
was fine but should apparently be “trans person”), “ethnic minority”
(which I truly thought was just a description of when one ethnic group
is outnumbered by another), and “postman”, which is obviously downright
bloody disgusting fascist language and must be stamped out now, or we
will soon be in a situation like Germany in 1933, with postmen first
being denied marriage licences and council flats, then being hounded
into special “postie” ghettos, then “relocated in the East” and
ultimately marched to their deaths in the gas chambers of Poland — all
of which, the Equal Treatment Bench Book asserts, can be avoided by merely calling them “postal operatives” instead. So a big “phew” for that.
And speaking of gas chambers, they are also looking to stamp
out the word “Jew” on account of its “potentially negative
connotations”. So does that mean I am not one any more? I mean, it’s
great that judges are being told not to chase me down the street
throwing rashers of bacon at me, shouting “Jew! Jew! Jew!”, because
frankly I have had enough of that, but if it’s at the expense of my
using the only word I can think of to describe my racial identity then
maybe I’m not such a big winner after all.
And “Jew” is my racial
identity only, by the way. I do not practise. I am a “Jew” only in the
way that a black person is black. Although with more counting money and
less dancing. Is that racist? Yes. But only because I said “Jew”,
according to the handbook. What I should have said was “Jewish person”.
Because that is MASSIVELY different.
It’s like when Benedict Cumberbatch got hauled up (rightly) for
saying “coloured actors” and we suddenly learnt that “person of colour”
was a thing. So white columnists all started writing “person of colour”
everywhere to show how liberal they were, until Twitter exploded with
pissed-off black people, shouting, “I’m not a person of colour! I am a
black woman!” And damn right. Because euphemism is the worst thing of
all. It compels people to apologise linguistically for being who they
are.
The political correctness movement did a wonderful thing
from the mid-1980s onwards to change the language used about groups who
had suffered years of bigotry. But changing the focus of language did
not reduce the sum total of hate. You can’t do that.
Telling a
blind person — as the handbook recommends — that she is “a person with
sensory impairment” does not give her back her sight.
… In ten years on social media, nobody has ever called me a y**. Or
even a Jewish person. But every time I write something that the
millennials don’t like, they pour forth a stream of personal abuse
centred around such new disentitlements as being “privileged”, “cis
male”, “Oxbridge” and “public school”, all of them accidents of birth
which my abusers believe should disqualify me from work in the media.
When
I write something angry they ask, “U okay hon?” which, in case you
didn’t know, is the modern way of suggesting that a person is
experiencing mental health issues. It is exactly the same as calling
someone with depression a “spastic in the head”. It’s just new words for
an old thing. No less hate.
And when the swarms of millennials who will misread this piece for a
defence of bigotry set about snarling “privileged, public school,
cisgender male!” at me, they will do it — just like the tribal Labour
supporter who yells “Tory scum!” with a venom that passes way beyond the
realm of political dissent — with every ounce as much hatred as any
black-shirted Mosleyite ever shouted “n***er!” or “p*ki!”
So I’m
going to say to the judges: burn your stupid handbooks (although not in a
Nazi way) and just show respect for your fellow humans. And if that
leads to a Holocaust of the postmen, well . . . my bad.
“I want you to know that in this election you are not
electing a member of the House of Representatives. You are electing the
jury for the impeachment of Donald J. Trump. Never forget that over
these next few months.”
When Michael Moore gives Democrats that message (thanks to Stephen Green) — he is actually quoting "a Democrat running in my district in Michigan" — he does not realize how revealing he is of the true nature of the Democrat Party. (Thanks to Ed Driscoll for the Instalink.)
A jury is supposed to be impartial — with lots of vetting from both defense and prosecution before each person is accepted as a bona fide member of said jury.
For leftists like Michael Moore, the courts, like the people in general, are supposed to fulfill the desires of the élites — our betters — and of the (Deep) State, in the same fashion as the kangaroo courts do or did in all authoritarian countries, from Nazi Germany to Sovet Russia.
How strange is that, however, for a man who, 11 years ago, basically admitted to a French newspaper that he was a full-fledged Marxist?
In the States, mainstream media types have called Michael Moore's Sicko his "least political film". But in his interview with Thomas Sotinel, the Le Mondereporter states that this seems to be Michael's coming-out as "a socialist". To which Moore answers (retranslated from the French) that, in a scene in Sicko,
I film myself on Marx's tomb. Nobody mentioned it. In the reviews in
America, they wrote, "it's his least political film." And I say: "Dude, I
am on Marx's Tomb!" Do I need to take out a baseball bat and hit them
on the head [for them to understand]?!
In case you hadn't understood, this says — and this reveals —
almost more about the powers-that-be (both in the U.S. and abroad) than
about Michael Moore:
being on the socialist/marxist-bordering left, for the MSM and
America's Eastern élites (as for Europe's MSM and élites), is
mainstream, is normal, is understandable, is OK, is cool. It is
avant-garde. Beyond being (naturally) avant-garde and therefore
(obviously) a positive and endearing trait, it hardly bares mentioning.
And it is "not political" (that's only a dirty game that America's
hit-below-the-belt Republicans play).
Nicolas Sarkozy was placed in custody … as part of an
investigation that he received millions of euros in illegal campaign
financing from the regime of the late Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi …
No Pasarán has reported on this before — and on something far worse (see below) — and tried to bring it to the attention of American conservatives. Back in 2011, Instapundit quoted Foreign Policy's Joshua Keating as reporting on the Qaddafi régime's response to the French government's recognition of Libya's rebel forces, through Colonel Kaddhafi's son.
Saif al-Islam: “Sarkozy must first give back the money he took from
Libya to finance his electoral campaign. We funded it and we have all
the details and are ready to reveal everything. The first thing we want
this clown to do is to give the money back to the Libyan people.”
But that ain't all.
Far from it!
France ain't alone and Sarkozy's winning 2007 presidential campaign may hardly be the only one.
Is it possible that Obama's reluctance to interfere in the Libyan crisis has something to do with secrets?
Five months before the 2008 election, indeed, in June of that year,
E-nough's Damien reported on a speech (broadcast and translated by Memritv), which was held by none other than the "Brotherly Guide of the First of September Great Revolution of the Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya". (We will look away from Gaddafi's birther
credentials, even though from his perspective, calling Obama a Kenyan,
an African, and/or a Muslim is hardly a smear — far from it.) [Here is what Gadhafi said]
There
are elections in America now. Along came a black citizen of Kenyan
African origins, a Muslim, who had studied in an Islamic school in
Indonesia. His name is Obama. All the people in the Arab and Islamic world and in Africa applauded this man. They welcomed him and prayed for him and for his success, and they may have even been involved in legitimate contribution campaigns to enable him to win the American presidency.
Europe is being battered by unusually frigid conditions even as temperatures at the North Pole soar well above normal.
As the month of March 2018 started, Kendra Pierre-Louis reported that Europe was colder than the North Pole. So, naturally, with all the hoopla around global warming for the past few decades, her New York Times article could not only report on the (climate) news, it also had to explain how on Earth (yes, that's also meant literally) this could be the case. [Update: thanks to Ed Driscoll for the Instalink.] In the process, Kendra Pierre-Louis managed to repeat myths such as the one that "human-caused climate change … is agreed upon by 97
percent of climate scientists."
Subfreezing temperatures have spread across much of Europe over the past week, stretching from Poland to Spain. Snow fell in Rome
for the first time in six years. Norway recorded the lowest
temperatures of the cold snap: minus 43 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 42
Celsius) in the southeast part of the country on Thursday [March 1].
And
on Friday [March 2], Britain and Ireland were buffeted by a storm that brought
snow and high winds, along with cold that was expected to linger for
days.
If Europe feels like the Arctic
right now, the Arctic itself is balmy by comparison. The North Pole is
above the freezing mark in the dead of winter; there are no direct
measurements there, but merging satellite data with other temperature data
shows that temperatures soared this week to 35 degrees Fahrenheit (2
degrees Celsius). That is 50 degrees Fahrenheit above normal, and 78
degrees warmer than in parts of Norway.
The
Arctic warmth and the European cold snap have raised questions over
whether the unusual weather occurrences are linked to each other, and if
they are somehow related to climate change. Here are some answers.
Are the Arctic and European weather patterns connected?
Probably, according to Judah Cohen, a
climatologist who is director of seasonal forecasting at Atmospheric and
Environmental Research, a weather risk assessment firm. Dr. Cohen is the author of a 2017 study that linked a warming Arctic to the intermittent blasts of cold that those of us in the Northern Hemisphere have come to know as the polar vortex.
The
polar vortex is a low-pressure system that, as its name suggests,
ordinarily rests over the North Pole. (There is also a polar vortex over
the Antarctic.)
When it behaves normally, the polar vortex helps trap cold air in the Arctic.
“It’s
locking in that cold air at the high latitudes in the Arctic region,”
Dr. Cohen said, comparing the polar vortex to a dam holding back the
frigid arctic air from the rest of the Northern Hemisphere.
But
sometimes that dam bursts as the polar vortex weakens and allows cold
air to escape the Arctic to more temperate climes. This has always
happened from time to time, but a growing body of research suggests that because of climate change the warming Arctic is weakening the polar vortex.
Why is the polar vortex weakening?
Researchers
are still figuring out how the warming Arctic is triggering the polar
vortex’s aberrant behavior. Some of them, including Dr. Cohen, point to
melting sea ice, caused by global warming. Dr. Cohen says the loss of
ice creates patterns of high pressure near the Barents Sea and Kara Sea
off northern Russia. That high pressure blocks the low-pressure system
of the polar vortex, weakening it in the process.
There
is not yet a scientific consensus over the root cause of the weakening
polar vortex; it’s fair to say that it is not as definitive as, say, the
evidence for human-caused climate change, which is agreed upon by 97
percent of climate scientists.
When
the polar vortex weakens it allows cold air to escape and head south.
This is what Dr. Cohen suspects happened in late December and early
January when the Northeast United States endured some of its coldest
temperatures on record. Other researchers who conducted a rapid analysis of the weather event aren’t so sure, though they stress theirs is just a first pass at the data.
… meanwhile, some countries like Spain that are wholly unused to the cold are freezing.
That explains why Europe is freezing, but why is the Arctic so warm right now?
Dr.
Cohen likens the Arctic to the refrigerator in your kitchen. When the
refrigerator door is closed, the fridge stays cold and the kitchen stays
warm, but if you leave the fridge door open all the cold air comes out.
Because air is spilling out of the fridge, it has to be replaced by
surrounding air — air also has to flow into the fridge, or in this case
the Arctic. And since the air outside the Arctic is warmer, it will
necessarily move in.
For the first time in over 30 years, reports Géo, Corsica's capital is covered with snow.
Those explanations are all good'n'well, but as a Prager U video reveals, the New York Times is repeating a myth ("human-caused climate change … is agreed upon by 97
percent of climate scientists") that, according to Alex Epstein, Director of the Center for Industrial Progress and author of The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, has a shady source, is a manipulative scare tactic disguised as scientific claim, and should never be used by anyone with intellectual honesty.
