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…
Sébastien Laye (beard) celebrates the publication of his book with the blogger of No Pasarán
While it is pretty much certain that at some point [artificial intelligence] will bring about new innovations and eliminate entire categories of problems faced by humanity, suffice it to say that at the moment, it is still an automation tool.
Like with all general-purpose technologies, in a first sequence, AI is already affecting employment — junior roles are being replaced, weakening intergenerational training and reducing opportunities for skill transmission within professions. As this new technology dramatically lowers costs, there is a clear path for higher corporate margins, hence the frothy stock market despite a more muted general macroeconomic environment, but no clear short-term mechanism to manage the transition for most people, notwithstanding reskilling and training.
It feels similar to when the United States accepted China into the World Trade Organization or signed the North American Free Trade Agreement: Costs went down, but the disruption was real. Over the short term, AI might have a comparable impact for the average U.S. citizen.
When it comes to public policies, AI is indeed all over the news, as the Trump administration is pushing an ambitious Promethean agenda and a form of techno-nationalism inspired by China but more private-market-oriented. With the exception of the Genesis Mission, modest in funding, the AI revolution is essentially funded by the private sector, Silicon Valley upstarts, Big Tech, and Wall Street.
… As the edifice of established paradigms begins to fracture under the weight of AI, it becomes imperative to interrogate governments and administrations. Winning the AI race against China is one thing. But winning the race for all Americans is no less important, and an altogether underdiscussed issue.
Prior to the ROF vice-president joining the guests on Darius Rochebin's TV show (from 1:13:07 to 1:54:17), the group discussed such things as the Bondi beach terrorist attacks (0:05) along with the Ukraine war and the Berlin summit (24:36). (Merci à Sarah pour le hyperlien.)
Regarding the 24 minutes devoted to the Bondi Beach attack: Not until ten minutes in does somebody mention that the two shooters are Muslim (10:00). Prior to that, everybody was blabbering about the father-son combo, Neo-Nazi right-wingers, and "a terrorist ideology" in which "individuals are submerged" (9:44, sounds quite like Ilhan Omar describing 9-11 as the day that "some people did something"), while the existence of guns and gun rights were, needless to say, condemned. And when the subject of Islam is finally breached, it's by two guests feeling the need to state that "Muslims are the primary victims" of Islamist violence.
Isaac … does a great job of framing the argument in support of Trumps peace-through-strength efforts and how Europe has no effective leader and continues to act in an unserious manner to end the war.
The usual Trump skeptics on the set had no choice but to agree with him. When Fenwick complains about Trump considering lifting the ban on underground nuclear tests, Isaac then hits them with the truth, that Trump's strength is a reflection of Europe’s leaderless weakness and also will no longer be Europe's protector. This reality scares them and they have to state that they don’t want US to be their “boss” but Isaac reminds them that the head of NATO still calls Trump "Daddy" — that was hilarious. He continued to defend Trump's view of Europe in his Securuty Strategy memo discussed at the end of the show. Bravo Isaac!
(for those that can stand to listen, the first part of the show talks about Sydney and notice that it takes them a full 10-12 min before they’re able to even say the word « Muslims ». Before then they even mention white supremacist threats to the Jewish and of course the problem of guns).
Never one to forget — as news of the Joe Biden Presidential Library prove extremely problematic (to use a well-worn Leftist term) — Damian Bennett has picked up the tomahawk and gone on the warpath again:
… the Biden zero-funded
Presidential Library's … funding woes
reveal just how completely Biden has been turned out and kicked to the
curb by his pals and kingmakers. Biden was never destined for greatness.
He has always been a small incapable man aching to be an accomplished
big man. It is telling that money, high office, state propaganda, and
the Dark Blue Powers could not save Biden from being Biden.
A
year of Trump has made it easy to forget four awful years of Biden. So
it is instructive to remind ourselves just how Biden improbably came to
be installed as a president. In any review two things jump out
immediately: Biden was never mentally fit for office, and he was never
popular enough to pull 80M+ votes.
The Secret History Of THE SHADOW CAMPAIGN THAT SAVED THE 2020 ELECTION February 4, 2021 [T]he
participants want the secret history of the 2020 election told, even
though it sounds like a paranoid fever dream–a well-funded cabal of
powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working
together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and
laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information. They were not rigging the election; they were fortifying it.
The 'fortifying' actually happened. Joe Biden went on to bring his not-there Chauncey Gardinerrevue to the White House. And the hard sell was sold hard.
Joe Scarborough: 'F-You' If You Don't Believe This Is The Best Biden Ever March 6, 2024 Scarborough: "But comparing that guy's mental state -- I've said it for years now: he's cogent. But I undersold him when I said he was cogent. He's far beyond cogent. ... Start your tape right now, because I'm about to tell you the truth. And f-you if you can't handle the truth. This version of Biden intellectually, analytically, is the best Biden ever. Not a close second. And I've known him for years. ... If it weren't the truth, I wouldn't say it."
Byron York On X December 13, 2025:From @nytimes: 'Biden Has Raised Little of What He Needs to Build a Presidential Library.' Raised exactly $0 in new donations in all of 2024.
Will
a Biden library ever be built? Big-money fundraising is punishing work.
The most effective fundraiser for a presidential library is a
president rattling
his begging bowl. Biden is 82, has the vigor of a man twice his age,
does not inspire the closed wallet to open, and has near nothing
to offer by way of political ROI. No doubt the Dark Blue Powers will
cobble something together to save face...
In
60 years the 2020 Election Steal story will finally 'break'. It will
glide from disputed snippets of conspiracy into a body of established
facts; the historical record will be scandalized but corrected. The
guilty, the Judases will be snug in the grave unindicted. The truth will
out, and another iteration of MoveOn.com
will materialize to tell all to 'move on', that is, eyes front and
STFU. Please. Yes, they will say 'please', and we will point triumphant
to the politesse and call it a day. But they will be back tenfold,
uglier, more hateful, more dishonest (if such is possible) than ever.
If there is one historical quote that could be used in every single post of this blog for the past 21 years, it is that of a French writer who traveled through America two centuries ago:
It is easier for the world to accept a simple lie than a complex truth — Alexis de Tocqueville
That also applies in the present post addressing the Left's
contention that Charlie Kirk "had it coming" due to his "insensitive"
declarations in favor of that "repulsive" Second Amendment (the full quote and the full context, including the omitted parts, are at the very end of this post) — such as (in the words of Fox's Hanna Panreck) Far-left podcast host Jennifer Welch [claiming] Charlie Kirk 'justified' his own death.
Far-left podcast host Jennifer Welch
claimed on her show Saturday that Charlie Kirk "justified" his own
killing, reacting to a clip of his widow, Erika Kirk, condemning people
for mocking or rationalizing his assassination.
"The person that I heard that justified his death was him," Welch said.
"He’s the one that said on tape that if school kids die, but it means
he gets to have a Second Amendment, then that’s what it’s going to be.
He’s the one that justified it."
"And I believe at the time of
shooting, he was talking about gun violence at the time. That’s wild to
me, number one. And then for her — I want to get your opinion on this as
a Black man — for her to say that people are dehumanizing Charlie
Kirk," Welch told former CNN host Don Lemon on her "I've Had It" podcast.
I would like
to start with a question for those, foreign as well as American — not a
few of them among my social media contacts — making jokes about,
laughing about, or otherwise celebrating the Charlie Kirk assassination:
Besides the fact that your attitude is heinous, how — how on Earth —
do you propose to convince a sizable of citizens in future elections —
not just Republicans but also Independents and even your own fellow
Leftists (Democrats, Socialist Democrats, outright Communists, etc) —
that a would-be leader supported by somebody like yourself (by somebody
as childish and as vile as yourself) deserves to be elected to office
and be put in charge of the well-being and the welfare of the country
and its population?!
Incidentally, I will add that I am not in favor of Elon Musk taking
down these videos on X/Twitter — I think that all people should know
exactly the childish, the wicked, and the abhorrent attitudes of the "tolerant" locofocos on the Left.
In that perspective, I will add a message to those — again,
foreign as well as American — who seem (slightly) less partisan and more
thoughtful, "simply" calling the founder of TPUSA (or his speeches)
hateful. As many others have pointed out, if you call Charlie Kirk odious and the perpetrator of hate speech — the epitome of a conservative seeking an honest debate — then there is no hope for what you claim to seek, a bridge to connect with any of you.
In addition, your homilies about a "divided America" — when Charlie Kirk did nothing but try to engage in dignified debate
with you and, indeed, try to unify America — are nothing but a
deliberately passive description of a rift that is entirely caused by
you yourselves and by your (by the postmodern left's) own pedantic didacticism and depravity.
1) Two Basic Attitudes of Liberals That They Are Totally Oblivious About
Let
us examine the holding that Charlie Kirk deserved to die because of his
statements. One in particular stands out: The speech claimed to be the
most controversial is that in which he is described as allegedly
ignorant or uncaring about the country's murder rate, specifically
school shootings of kids.
"I think it's worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths
every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect
our other God-given rights."
As usual, with the Left, it can only be described as a lie: they omit the entire context,
which ends by addressing the very school shootings that CK was supposed
to be criminally ignorant and/or repulsively uncaring about. (This will
be examined in detail at the end of this post.)
Having said that: has it occurred to you that, first of all,
you are engaging in superstition? You people of the Left don't believe
in religion, you claim, and you instead prefer rationality — pure
rationality. Then in the very next breath, the drama queens that
you are claim that some so-called invisible force in the universe —
whether it is (some type of) God or karma or whatever — that, like a
deity from a pagan religion, unleashes his (or her) wrath on people and
reigns down injustice on evil capitalists (see also 9-11 and Gaia and
tsunamis along with various other natural catastrophes).
A more general observation about karma (and superstition) is
the extent to which the charge proves too often to be remarkably
one-sided and the source of double standards. For instance, when
Canadians vowed to boycott U.S. products because of Donald Trump's
controversial comments about their
country last winter, leftists and anti-Americans the world over cheered,
saying that the conservative Yankee president was getting his just
desserts. Now
that populations the world over, not least the Canadians,
are holding memorials for a conservative Yank — even singing America's
national anthem! — the karma aspect is suddenly nowhere to be seen.
Second of all, ask yourselves this, Leftists: what are we doing, exactly, by pursuing this line of thought?
Think about it…
Aren't you validating the need for the… very Second Amendment that a certain… Charlie Kirk defended?!
There
are millions of people who, rightly or wrongly, hold the same opinions
and viewpoints as the husband of Erika Kirk. If
you say that the founder of TPUSA deserved to die, then millions of
other Americans presumably also deserve to die — by being gunned down or
by any other means. Well, guess what: since we disagree with you
(rather vehemently) about this, I would suggest that this makes our
desire for weaponry rather more rational than (as you claim) irrational.
Indeed, if one of you were to (God forbid) be elevated to a position of
power in this country, how — how on earth — are we to trust you to be
in any way benevolent towards us (i.e., towards that part of the
population that does not agree with you)?!
In any case, your attitude about karma proves nothing less than — get this — the very necessity of private citizens to own and bear arms.
But
the Left is ignoring (and the mainstream media never covers) the
numerous instances of mass shootings where only two or three people
died. (And for the sake of brevity, let's not get into the many
instances of killings that the MSM refrains from covering because they
don't further the Left's narratives — see, e.g., Iryna Zarutska.) And
here you are bound to ask: If only two or three people were killed, why
should the media, American or foreign, cover it?
And, besides: why would anyone call it a "mass shooting" in the first place?
Because the "mass" part of the shooting was prevented
by an armed citizen (aka "a good guy with a gun") who subdued and
neutralized the shooter (either by killing him outright or by holding
him in check).
Think of another mass shooting unreported
in America and across the globe, the one in December 2019 where only three
people were killed in Texas. Hold on, you ask: Three people? Certainly a tragedy,
but why, then, call the West Freeway Church of
Christ event a "mass" shooting? Well, because that low figure was due
only to one parishioner pulling out his weapon and gunning down the
(would-be) mass shootist. Jack Wilson is what we call "a good guy with a
gun."
In the comments section of a Herschel Smith piece, a person named David writes that
The other factor here is when a concealed carry holder intervenes
it often means the number of victims is not as high as waiting for
police. In that situation it doesn’t make the list of “mass shootings”.
I saw another analysis that said if you look at just the incidents
that don’t occur in gun-free zones, 46% of mass shootings end because of
intervention by a civilians.
As for Gary Griffiths, he goes on to note to what extent the logic is skewered (bold and italics by myself):
Part of the problem is, it is impossible for an armed citizen to
stop a mass shooting. Here’s why: If the shooter is stopped before
three victims are shot, it is, by definition, not a mass shooting. If
the shooter is not stopped before three victims are shot, then by
definition, the citizen did not stop the mass shooting. Liberal logic
at it’s finest!
How
many mass shootings did NOT happen because of someone with a legal
firearm? How many crimes and of what kind prevented by someone with a
legal firearm - if they only threaten to use it and do not shoot?
Police/FBI do not keep any statistics on this, but the NRA publishes a
page full of such incidents every month in their magazine.
Events like this one happen every day in America, but
because they don’t fit the narrative of liberal gun control activists,
they rarely get the attention mass shootings do. Instead of advocating
for ways by which citizens can empower themselves, rather than wait
around as sitting ducks for the police to show up, the left-wing media
habitually uses tragic events as a political platform by which to
trumpet for more gun control. Stories of armed citizens brandishing
their weapons to deter a criminal are also not as sensational as a mass
gunman killing innocent people, and, to borrow an analogy from crime prevention researcher John Lott, “Airplane crashes get news coverage, while successful take-offs and landings do not.”
An armed civilian doesn’t have to fire his weapon to stop a tragedy.
Many shootings or mass shootings have been prevented by an armed citizen
brandishing a weapon or simply revealing it to someone threatening
others. No shots were fired. There was no need. This is far more common
and just as heroic as the actions taken by Mr. Dicken.
3) Wouldn't Gun Control, European-Style, End Shootings in the First Place?
But
all of this hardly addresses the call to imitate Europe and the
contention that with gun control of the European type, there would be no
shootings, and certainly no mass shootings, to begin with.
On May 25, 2022, I was on a train to Switzerland that morning when I was called back to Paris to participate in a debate on the BFMTV channel after the atrocious Uvalde school shooting.
That
evening, naturally, I was the first guest asked to speak, in response
to the question, "shouldn't Americans change their views on the 2nd
Amendment?" or on the free sale of firearms, a question that they didn't
think any person could answer other than Yes.
I responded as follows (slightly redacted):
Every
time there is a shooting, we are told — both by Europeans and by
Democrats in America — that these American neanderthals ought to imitate
the rational Europeans, and notably they are told that they ought to
imitate those nice countries like the ones in Scandinavia, a country
like Denmark or Norway — Norway, where in 2011, a person gunned down 77
people, most of them teen-agers. Therefore, European-type legislation,
i.e., gun control, did nothing to save the children of Utøya.
Then
I went on to try to ask a question, indeed two questions: Wouldn't it
have been a good thing if someone on the Oslo island had had a gun and
shot back at Anders Breivik (perhaps not to kill him, but at the very
least to get him to seek cover, thereby interrupting his killing spree)?
Furthermore — to take on a different progressive talking point — didn't
Breivik deserve the death penalty?
All of which was an expansion of what I wrote in my response to a New York Times gun control editorial ten years ago:
It is easy for leftists, American as well as foreign, to tout the
success of the gun control laws in the rest of the Western world … when
you (deliberately or otherwise) ignore:
the 1996 massacre of 16
children at a Scottish primary school; the 2000 killing of eight kids
in Japan; the 2002 deaths of eight people in Nanterre, France; the 2002
killing of 16 kids in Erfurt, Germany; the 2007 shootings to death of
eight people in Tuusula, Finland; the killing of 10 people at a Finnish
university less than a year later; the 2009 killing of 15 people in
Winnenden, Germany; and, needless to say, Anders Breivik's 2011 mass
murder of 77 Norwegians, most of them teenagers.
Is it
unreasonable (or perhaps politically incorrect) to wonder whether the
death tolls might have been lower in any of those places — or in the
Bataclan concert hall in 2015 (137 dead) — had a few of the adults (or
some of the eldest teens) carried a weapon and tried to shoot back at
the respective killers?
In the 18th century — the century at the end of which the Second
Amendment was being passed in the newly-born United States — the biggest
problem for the majority of the world's population was not the right to keep and bear arms.
It was the lack of the right to keep and bear arms.
In the 19th century, likewise, the greatest problem for most people on this planet was not the absence of gun control.
It was the presence of gun control.
In the 20th century, most people did not suffer from the right to keep and bear arms.
They suffered from the lack of the right to keep and bear arms.
As can be attested by the victims (assuming they could talk) of the likes of Hitler, Lenin, Stalin,
Pol Pot, and Milosevic, along with the Hutus…
As an aside, one of the first measures taken by each of the
aforementioned (ahem) leaders after coming to power — for the good of
the people, needless to say — was to impose or to tighten arms control.
And it is no different today.
Look at Saddam's Iraq, at Khadaffi's Libya, at the Assads' Syria…
(Would not the average Iraqi citizen, the average Libyan citizen, the
average Syrian citizen over the past 30 to 40 years have been better off
with the right to keep and bear arms?)
And all of this brings us back, full circle, to Charlie Kirk's "controversial" statement, with locofocos and fire-eaters
falling over themselves and going ballistic with regards to school
shootings — which he is accused of (carelessly) ignoring or (despicably)
minimizing. Except that his reply is far less controversial if you take
the TPUSA founder's full reply (tak til Thomas Petersen) into context,
not least the issue of school shootings, the most important part of
which he addresses forthrightly in his conclusion, notably the final
paragraph's final sentence (duly emboldened below + video at very bottom of this post):
Yeah, it's a great question. Thank you. So, I'm a big Second Amendment
fan but I think most politicians are cowards when it comes to defending
why we have a Second Amendment. This is why I would not be a good
politician, or maybe I would, I don't know, because I actually speak my
mind.
The Second Amendment is not about hunting. I love hunting. The Second
Amendment is not even about personal defense. That is important. The
Second Amendment is there, God forbid, so that you can defend yourself
against a tyrannical government. And if that talk scares you — "wow,
that's radical, Charlie, I don't know about that" — well then, you have
not really read any of the literature of our Founding Fathers. Number
two, you've not read any 20th-century history. You're just living in
Narnia. By the way, if you're actually living in Narnia, you would be
wiser than wherever you're living, because C.S. Lewis was really smart.
So I don't know what alternative universe you're living in. You just
don't want to face reality that governments tend to get tyrannical and
that if people need an ability to protect themselves and their
communities and their families.
Now, we must also be real. We must be honest with the population. Having an armed citizenry comes with a price, and that is part of liberty.
Driving comes with a price. 50,000, 50,000, 50,000 people die on the
road every year. That's a price. You get rid of driving, you'd have
50,000 less auto fatalities. But we have decided that the benefit of
driving — speed, accessibility, mobility, having products, services — is
worth the cost of 50,000 people dying on the road. So we need to be
very clear that you're not going to get gun deaths to zero. It will not
happen. You could significantly reduce them through having more fathers
in the home, by having more armed guards in front of schools. We should
have a honest and clear reductionist view of gun violence, but we should
not have a utopian one.
You will never live in a society when you have an armed citizenry and
you won't have a single gun death. That is nonsense. It's drivel. But I
am, I, I — I think it's worth it. I think it's worth to have a cost
of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have
the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal. It is rational. Nobody talks like this. They live in a complete alternate universe.
So then, how do you reduce? Very simple. People say, oh, Charlie, how do
you stop school shootings? I don't know. How did we stop shootings at
baseball games? Because we have armed guards outside of baseball games.
That's why. How did we stop all the shootings at airports? We have armed
guards outside of airports. How do we stop all the shootings at banks?
We have armed guards outside of banks. How did we stop all the shootings
at gun shows? Notice there's not a lot of mass shootings at gun shows,
there's all these guns. Because everyone's armed. If our money and our sporting events and our airplanes have armed guards, why don't our children?
Take a break by listening to the Elwood's Recital at Longwood University Music Department in the Old Dominion. We have two performances accompanied by Sarah Gates at the piano: Theresa Bennett, voice. Yasmin Lopez, voice.
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