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.
In the very first sentence that Thomas Sotinel writes about the Hateful Eight in his (otherwise unconvinced) Le Monde film review, we learn that one virtue that we can find in the western is "the help that Quentin Tarantino brings to climate change."The only thing left to perpetuate the memory of snow is cinema
Si l’on peut trouver une vertu aux 8 Salopards, c’est le secours quece huitième long-métrage de Quentin Tarantino apporte en période de changement climatique. Il ne reste que le cinéma pour perpétuer le souvenir de la neige, de l’enveloppement du monde dans un linceul. Et quand un monde enneigé est filmé sur une pellicule argentique de 70 mm, le port des verres filtrants est recommandé, tant de splendeur peut provoquer des lésions irrémédiables aux rétines des spectateurs.
Incidentally, we also learn that Tarantino's eighth movie is inspired partially by André de Toth's La Chevauchée des bannis (Day of the Outlaw, 1958).
travels to three continents to “steal” good ideas from foreign lands and bring them back to the United States, including France’s gourmet school lunches and Finland’s successful, and homework-free, public education system.Moore spoke about the film’s origins, which began with a 1970s backpacking trip.
Well, maybe Moore would do well to consider the arguments in the following posts:Q. Was the idea for this film cooking for a long time?A. Since I was 19. Since I got a Youth Hostel card and Eurail Pass. Each country I went to with my backpack and my little tent, I’d keep saying,“That’s such a good idea, how come we don’t do that?” Then I was hiking in Sweden and busted my foot and had to go to the emergency room and they fixed it. And I’m so nervous because my Blue Cross from the U.S. wasn’t going to cover me. I don’t have any money on me. “They go, ‘O.K., goodbye.” “What? That’s it? Don’t I owe you anything?” “‘No. It’s all free here.” “But I’m not a Swede.” “It doesn’t matter.” I couldn’t believe it. I was gobsmacked.
After my [2003] Oscar speech and I got booed off the stage, somebody at the [Transportation Security Administration] keyed the Oscar. I got home, I live in a ruralarea in northern Michigan, some guys had a dump truck full of horse manure and built an almost four-foot wall across our driveway with the manure and then taped signs on all the trees along the road saying “Move to Cuba,” “Get the hell out of here,” just nutty stuff like that. Then I went through five years of a number of physical assaults on me, a couple of those were actually attempts to kill me, and then the attempt to blow up my house by this guy who had a fertilizer bomb, à la Oklahoma City.
Q. Do you avoid some topics that you would otherwise tackle were it not for the death threats?
A. No, no, no, no. Oh, no. “Bowling for Columbine” was a lot about how our fear is what motivates us to get these guns, and it puts us in a discombobulated state. … I can’t live in this constant state of fear that the hate machine that exists on talk radio and on Fox News whips up.Reminder: Among No Pasarán's Michael Moore posts over a dozen years, we find the following:
• Masters of Deception: Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore, and the 9-11 Conspiracy Industry
(Somewhat) Related: Good-Bye to 2015, the year of lies, hoaxes, and outright fakeriesSo far, no one has been hurt, the “occupation” is occurring in a vacant federal building in the middle of nowhere, and there is no reported threat to innocent bystanders. It would be absurd for the federal government to treat the protesters like it treated the men and women at Waco or Ruby Ridge, and it would be absurd for the protesters to shoot police officers who are ordered to reasonably and properly enforce the law. The occupation is far less intrusive and disruptive than the Occupy Movement’s dirty and violent seizure of urban public parks, and authorities permitted that to go on for weeks. Now is the time for calm, not escalation.
André Glucksmann, one of the most prominent of the French “New Philosophers,” a group of former radicals who broke with Marxism in the 1970s and became an intellectual counterweight to France’s political left, [has died] in Pariswrites William Grimes in his New York Times obituary.
Mr. Glucksmann came to prominence in May 1968, when, as a teacher and militant Marxist at the Sorbonne, he publicly cheered on the student revolt both there and, a year later, at the University of Paris 8 Vincennes, where he and the philosopher Michel Foucault led the intellectual charge.He joined the Proletarian Left, a Maoist group, in the early 1970s, but soon became disenchanted with revolutionary politics. He was dismayed when the group kidnapped a Renault executive and, as a Jew, was shocked when radical Palestinians murdered 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich.The turning point came with the publication of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s “The Gulag Archipelago,” a work that transformed him into an implacable enemy of the Soviet Union and all ideologies.
In 1975, in “The Cook and the Cannibal,” Mr. Glucksmann subjected Marxism to a scalding critique. Two years later, he broadened his attack in his most influential work, “The Master Thinkers,” which drew a direct line from the philosophies of Marx, Hegel, Fichte and Nietzsche to the enormities of Nazism and Soviet Communism. It was they, he wrote in his conclusion, who “erected the mental apparatus which is indispensable for launching the grand final solutions of the 20th century.”An instant best seller, the book put him in the company of several like-minded former radicals, notably Bernard-Henri Lévy and Pascal Bruckner. Known as the nouveaux philosophes, a term coined by Mr. Lévy, they became some of France’s most prominent public intellectuals, somewhat analogous to the neoconservatives in the United States, but with a lingering leftist orientation.Their apostasy sent shock waves through French intellectual life, and onward to Moscow, which depended on the cachet afforded by Jean-Paul Sartre and other leftist philosophers.“It was André Glucksmann who dealt the decisive blow to Communism in France,” Mr. Bruckner told French radio on Tuesday.… “In the West, he presented the anti-totalitarian case more starkly and more passionately than anyone else in modern times,” said Paul Berman, who wrote extensively about Mr. Glucksmann in his books “A Tale of Two Utopias” and “Power and the Idealists.”“He was a passionate defender of the superoppressed, whether it was the prisoners of the Gulag, the Bosnians and Kosovars, gays during the height of the AIDS crisis, the Chechens under Putin or the Iraqis under Saddam,” he said. “When he turned against Communism, it was because he realized that Communists were not on the same side.”… At 13, while a high school student, he joined the Communist Party, but he was expelled after criticizing the Soviet Union’s suppression of the revolt in Hungary. In a 2006 memoir, “A Child’s Rage,” he chronicled his parents’ lives and his early upbringing.After earning the teaching degree known as an agrégation from the École Normale Supérieure de Saint-Cloud in 1961, Mr. Glucksmann enrolled in the National Center for Scientific Research to pursue a doctorate under Raymond Aron — an odd matchup because Aron was France’s leading anti-Marxist intellectual.
… His subsequent turn away from Marxism made him a reviled figure on the left, and former comrades looked on aghast as he became one of France’s most outspoken defenders of the United States. He argued for President Ronald Reagan’s policy of nuclear deterrence toward the Soviet Union, intervention in the Balkans and both American invasions of Iraq. In 2007, he supported the candidacy of Nicolas Sarkozy for the French presidency.“There is the Glucksmann who was right and the Glucksmann who could — with the same fervor, the same feeling of being in the right — be wrong,” Mr. Lévy wrote in a posthumous appreciation for Le Monde. “What set him apart from others under such circumstances is that he would admit his error, and when he came around he was fanatical about studying his mistake, mulling it over, understanding it.”… “I think thought is an individual action, not one of a party,” Mr. Glucksmann told The Chicago Tribune in 1991. “First you think. And if that corresponds with the Left, then you are of the Left; if Right, then you are of the Right. But this idea of thinking Left or Right is a sin against the spirit and an illusion.”
Are we becoming a nations of liars, or a nation of people who like being lied to?Benny Huang says goodbye to "the year of lies, hoaxes, and outright fakeries."
In what looked like a staged moment on the campaign trail, Hillary Clinton fielded a question from a nine year-old boy at a town hall meeting in New Hampshire concerning pay inequity between the sexes. The boy, Relic Reilly, asked why his engineer father earned more than his mother, a pre-K teacher.
I think my mother is working much harder, is working more harder than my father and she deserves to have more money, like, get more money, than my father. Because she’s taking care of children and I just don’t think it’s fair.… if Hillary Clinton is going to make her campaign into another historic “first” for women, she needs to pretend that women such as herself are oppressed—hence the fake question about a fake issue. Coming, as this question did, on New Year’s Eve, I saw it as a fitting end to 2015, the fakest year on record. Never before has the news been dominated by so many lies, hoaxes, and counterfeits.
When 2015 began, we were already in the midst of a rape hoax at the University of Virginia, where a college student claimed to have been raped on broken glass at a frat party that never actually happened. … When the story became absolutely indefensible, Rolling Stone retracted it and conducted an investigation to determine what had gone wrong, though the investigation itself was pretty fake …
That rape hoax was followed by another at Columbia University, where a female student carried a mattress around campus to protest the university’s supposed refusal to address her rape at the hands of a former lover. Actually, the university did investigate and found that her story lacked credibility. The details did not stack up and her story was almost certainly a lie, a desperate act of revenge against a man she had been infatuated with—and probably still was [still is?].
Also in January, Muslim terrorists conducted a very real attack against the satirical French magazine Charlie Hebdo. What followed, however, was a completely insincere outpouring of support for the principle of free speech. Leaders from across Europe and the world converged in Paris to declare that they would not be bullied into censoring speech. That was a huge lie, of course, because nearly all European governments punish speech, especially speech that offends Muslims. Before, during, and after the attacks citizens were being arrested for mere words. In July, Charlie Hebdo announced that it would no longer draw Mohammed. In the future, they would self-censor.
[2015] was also the year of fake women—by which I mean dudes who wear skirts and demand to be treated as women. Two high profile cases in American high schools involving transgender “girls” who were demanding to use the girls’ locker room were settled when the Department of Education required all schools that receive federal funds—which is nearly every public school in the country—to allow students to use the locker room of their choice. Another fake woman, Bruce “Caitlyn” Jenner, won Glamour magazine’s Woman of the Year Award. The husband of a former winner, NYPD policewoman Moira Smith who died in the 9/11 attacks, returned the award he had accepted on behalf of his deceased wife. “I was shocked and saddened to learn that Glamour has just named Bruce Jenner ‘Woman of the Year’…” said James Smith. “Was there no woman in America, or the rest of the world, more deserving than this man?” Indeed. [And let's not forget the deception by the defenders of Planned Parenthood.]
The catchy phrase “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” was found to be an utter fabrication after a lengthy investigation into the 2014 shooting of Michael Brown at the hands of a police officer. Brown’s hands had not been up, he was not shot in the back, he had not been kneeling on the ground, and he was not “minding [his] own business” as Brown’s thug friend Dorian Johnson told reporters after the incident. Brown was fleeing a robbery when he attempted to murder Officer Darren Wilson with his own gun. The investigation revealed that witnesses lied in order to frame Wilson. The only element of reality in the entire Michael Brown case was all the mayhem and looting that followed. [More on gun control and on racial issues at the links.]
In June a supposedly scientific study published in the peer-reviewed Science magazine was found to have been a graduate student’s concoction. The study, titled “When Contact Changes Minds” was designed to measure the degree to which entrenched opponents of same-sex marriage could be swayed by sob stories, or what they called “heartfelt, reciprocal and vulnerable conversations.” The study’s designer, PhD candidate Michael LaCour of UCLA, intended to show that mean old bigots (like me) just haven’t met many “gay” people. After a little contact with homosexuals and hearing them pour their hearts out about all the made-up grief they have to suffer through, we bigots usually relent. Or at least that’s what the study showed.
But the study was fake. … How this study passed peer review is a mystery—unless peer review is basically a worthless ritual, as I suspect.
The news cycle was dominated for the better part of two weeks in mid-September with the tale of Ahmed Mohamed, a fourteen year old in Irving, Texas who was arrested for bringing to school what looked very much like a bomb. As it turned out, it was just a briefcase with the innards of an old Radio Shack alarm clock mounted inside. Young Mr. Mohamed claimed to have “invented” a clock, which wasn’t even true. It didn’t take long for the narrative factory to manufacture the story that Ahmed wanted—“Muslim Kid Genius Arrested by Bigoted Texans!” The story was absolute rubbish from beginning to end. Ahmed Mohamed was hoping and praying that his teachers would take the bait he was dangling before them—a briefcase with protruding wires. Prior to his arrest he was told by at least two teachers that the clock he “invented” looked like a bomb. Having succeeded in raising an alarm, he proceeded to play the victim, and is still playing the victim. Victimhood is a pretty good gig, if you can get it. Crowdfunding sites raised money for his college education. The White House, NASA, Facebook and Google all extended invitations to the supposed child prodigy. And of course—of course!—his family is suing for fifteen million dollars. Getting arrested is the best thing that ever happened to this kid.
The year ended with another disintegrating tale of anti-Muslim bigotry, also in Texas. On Christmas Day, a mosque in Houston burned down in an apparent act of arson. The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) leaped on the incident as a possible bias crime. Unfortunately for CAIR, the feds arrested a devout Muslim named Gary Nathaniel Moore. He is the lead suspect. This one has self-victimization hoax written all over it.
[2015] should be remembered as the Year of the Big Lie—the year the US Army’s once prestigious Ranger School debased the coveted Ranger tab by handing it out to women who failed to meet standards, the year in which black students posing online as angry white racists made terroristic threats to kill black people, and the year that the Supreme Court discovered a fake right to a fake marriages in the text of our Constitution.
This trend toward mendacity is truly disturbing. Are we becoming a nation of liars, or a nation of people who like being lied to? I say no. We’re merely victims of a journalistic establishment that barely even pretends to report the news anymore.
A new appraisal names the United States as one of the threats to Russia's national security for the first timewrites Vladimir Soldatkin at Thomson Reuters,
a sign of how relations with the west have deteriorated in recent yearsin addition to being a piece of news which must surely be an homage to the apologizer-in-chief's brilliant forward-looking policy of smart diplomacy (Update: spasiba to Instapundit).
The document, "About the Strategy of National Security of Russian Federation", was signed by President Vladimir Putin on New Year's Eve. It replaces a 2009 version, endorsed by then-President Dmitry Medvedev, the current prime minister, which mentioned neither the United States not NATO.
… Relations between Russia and the West reached a low after Russian forces annexed the Crimean peninsula from Ukraine in March 2014, after protests in Ukraine forced its pro-Moscow president to flee to Russia.
Reminder: Back during the 2008 election campaign, Sarah Palin was vilified for saying another incredibly dimwitted thing, that the election of a pacifist like Barack Obama to the White Housewould only encourage Russia’s Putin to invade Ukraine next.(Gratefully, intelligent people like those writing for Foreign Policy were around to remind everybody that in fact, such an invasion was, and is, "an extremely far-fetched scenario.")
Hillary Clinton says that her “not-so-secret weapon” is her husband Billreports Benny Huang,
and has asked the former president to campaign for her in New Hampshire after the New Year.Read the whole thing
Bringing in Bill to rescue a flailing Hillary actually sounds like a pretty decent strategy. It appears that she’s trying to cash in on the curious but nonetheless real phenomenon of Clinton nostalgia—Bill Clinton nostalgia, that is. People genuinely like the former president even if they can’t name a single thing he accomplished while in office.
Even so, Bill’s rescue operation reflects poorly on Hillary. It’s as if she’s saying “Yes, I know I’m a dud as a candidate—but my husband’s pretty cool, isn’t he?” Oh, yeah. He practically invented cool. William Jefferson Clinton may not be a particularly good leader but he’s certainly a masterful politician. He’s got that cool vibe that Hillary doesn’t. The Clintons have long recognized this problem and have even reached out to their friend Steven Spielberg for help, asking him to refer Hillary to an acting coach so she could learn what Bill instinctively knows. Hillary grew weary of the lessons quickly.
Lib-Dems don’t appeal to nostalgia and they usually chalk it up to racism when Republicans do; now that Hillary Clinton realizes that Bill is a lot more popular than she is, nostalgia’s okay
While Hillary’s invocation of Clinton Nostalgia is understandable it is also out of character for a progressive Democrat. Lib-Dems don’t often appeal to nostalgia and they usually chalk it up to racism when Republicans do. The good old days never were, they say. Or at least they used to say that until Hillary Clinton realized that her husband is a lot more popular than she is. Now nostalgia’s okay.
It is worth noting however that Team Clinton relied on almost exactly the opposite strategy for winning hearts and minds the last time they occupied the White House. When Bill accepted his party’s nomination at the 1996 Democratic National Convention he spoke boldly of the future, leaning heavily on his campaign’s official slogan “Building a Bridge to the 21st Century.” In that speech, he used the word “future” ten times, the words “21st Century” twenty-two times, and the word “children” a whopping thirty-six times! As any do-gooder will tell you, the children are the future—making the two words practically interchangeable. The speech was classic dumb-downed politics, the use of repetition and glittering generalities to hammer home one simple, emotionally-charged message: Democrats are the future, Republicans are the past.
Speaking as one of those children Bill Clinton mentioned thirty-six times—I was fifteen years old at the time of the convention—I will say that we’ve arrived at the future he spoke of…and it sucks. It’s no wonder Hillary is placing her bets on nostalgia.
Remember back before everything sucked? Yeah, my husband was president then.
So just what went wrong in the meantime? A lot of things, I suppose, though if I had to choose just two I would name 9/11 and the 2008 fiscal crisis as the most substantial. Bill Clinton bears a large portion of the responsibility for both of those events which makes me wonder why so many people seem to eagerly await his comeback tour. He’s not solely responsible for either event, of course, but he does deserve the lion’s share of blame.
… As economist Stan Liebowitz wrote: “From the current handwringing, you’d think that the banks came up with the idea of looser underwriting standards on their own, with regulators just asleep on the job. In fact, it was the regulators who relaxed these standards–at the behest of community groups and ‘progressive’ political forces.”
Things got worse when wealthier borrowers began to demand the same terms for their loans as poor people got. It was rather difficult to tell a person with good credit that he couldn’t have the same terms as someone with bad credit. Fueled by easy money from the banks, often loaned at favorable interest rates and sometimes with no down payment necessary, builders got to work adorning the American landscape with new homes.
Goodbye to 2015, a year of absurdity and overreachwrites George Will.
We learned that a dismal threshold has been passed. The value of property that police departments seized through civil asset forfeiture — usually without accusing, let alone convicting, the property owners of a crime — exceeded the value of property stolen by nongovernment burglars.There's more — much more — at the link…
… The Internal Revenue Service persecutes conservative advocacy groups but does not prosecute IRS employees who are tax cheats: An audit revealed that over the past decade, the IRS fired only 400 of the 1,580 employees who deliberately violated tax laws, rather than the 100 percent required by law.
This list of 2015 ludicrousness could be lengthened indefinitely, but enough already. The common thread is the collapse of judgment in, and the infantilization of society by, government. Happier New Year.
President Obama held up France as the gold standard the U.S. workplace should emulate
writes The Washington Examiner's
Susan Crabtree.Extolling the business virtues of helping workers balance family and employment demands, including providing paid time off for the birth of a child, Obama said that if France can provide the benefits, so can the United States.
“Other countries know how to do this,” Obama said. “If France can figure this out, we can figure it out.”
France provides some of the most far-reaching worker rights in the developed world, including limiting a standard work week at 35 hours and providing 16 weeks of paid maternity leave.
France also has an unemployment rate that has hovered above 10 percent for more than two years, well above the rate of unemployed in the United Kingdom and the United States, which are both in the 6 percent range.
Obama made the comment at the first White House summit for working families, which sought to amplify issues like paid maternity leave and the ability to take paid leave to take care of elderly loved ones.
“Many women can't even get a paid day off to give birth,” Obama said. “There is only one developed country in the world that does not offer paid maternity leave, and that is us. And that is not a list you want to be on, by your lonesome.”
The White House hosted the summit jointly with the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, and it served in part as a campaign pep rally focused on turning women voters out in November.
Just in case there was any lingering doubt that Planned Parenthood doesn’t give a hoot about “women’s health”—or anyone’s health, for that matter—the abortion giant is now on record favoring the “right” of HIV-positive people not to disclose their status to sex partners.Thus writes Benny Huang.
From their pamphlet, the ironically titled “Happy, Healthy, and Hot”: “Your decision about whether to disclose may change with different people and situations. You have the right to decide if, when, and how to disclose your HIV status.”
Surely the pamphlet only means friends and co-workers though, right? Actually, no. The pamphlet continues: “Some countries have laws that say people living with HIV must tell their sexual partner(s) about their status before having sex, even if they use condoms or only engage in sexual activity with a low risk of giving HIV to someone else. These laws violate the rights of people living with HIV by forcing them to disclose or face the possibility of criminal charges.” The pamphlet then encourages the reader to get involved to change such laws “that violate your rights.”
So basically Planned Parenthood is encouraging people to pull a Charlie Sheen; or at least condoning it. The renowned actor revealed in November that he had known for about four years that he is HIV positive, though he claimed that he always informed his sex partners of his status, with “no exceptions.” This came as something of a surprise to Bree Olson, Sheen’s former live-in girlfriend, who thankfully tested negative. … “He doesn’t even value my life,” said Olson about Sheen’s revelation. No kidding, cupcake.
Her only purpose was to serve his pleasure. If she had to die so that he could get his rocks off, that was, in Sheen’s calculation, a price worth paying. …
It’s hard to believe that such selfish people as Charlie Sheen really exist but they do and they’re actually a lot more common than you might imagine. The fact that Planned Parenthood, which masquerades as a reputable medical organization, endorses the “right” not to inform sex partners of HIV status tells us that the camel has already gotten its nose under the tent. Though the attitude may not yet be mainstream, that doesn’t mean it could never be.
The author and journalist Randy Shilts, who died of AIDS in 1994, shed light on the homosexual community’s culture of denial in his 1987 book “And the Band Played On”. Among Shilts’s premises is that homosexual political leaders talked a great game when it came to combatting AIDS but their action was lacking. They refused to consider any countermeasure to the AIDS “epidemic” that might hamper their sex lives. The most they would do is promote the use of condoms. They refused to speak out against the hookup culture that pervaded and continues to pervade the male homosexual community or, heaven forbid, to tell male homosexuals to keep their butt cheeks together. …
One can almost understand the rationale behind this kind of reckless denialism. The disease was discovered in 1981, just a few short years after male homosexuals had established sexually “liberated” enclaves in places like New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. …
In the mid-1980s, the author David Horowitz, who was then on a journey from the Marxist Left to conservative Right, sat down with Randy Shilts to discuss AIDS, the burgeoning menace then stalking San Francisco. What Shilts told him was shocking. As Horowitz wrote in his biography, “Radical Son”: “According to Shilts, it was the gay leaders themselves who suppressed the research findings, along with the fact—now generally accepted by medical officials—that AIDS was a sexually transmitted disease. This was difficult to believe, but when I checked Shilts’s story, it turned out to be true. The Stonewall Gay Democratic Club, one of the political powers in the community, had summarized the politically correct view prevailing among activists in a slogan: ‘Sex doesn’t cause AIDS—a virus does.’ The activists were afraid that identifying the disease with promiscuous sex and also with gay sex—95 percent of the cases in San Francisco were among homosexual males—would stigmatize the ‘gay life-style’ and create a political backlash.”
Yeah, and we wouldn’t want to stigmatize the “gay” lifestyle, would we? I don’t know what’s wrong with stigmatizing a filthy sexual practice rife with adverse health consequences, including AIDS of course, but also gonorrhea, anal cancer, and intestinal parasites. We stigmatize smoking, why wouldn’t we stigmatize anal sex? Put me down as pro-stigma.
Unfortunately, male homosexuals whine that their rights are being violated whenever anyone looks askance at butt sex, the activity that apparently defines them. They demand not only the right to engage in dangerous, unhealthy sexual behavior, but the right to positive affirmation as well.
Sadly, the medical community seems to be fulfilling their wish. Doctors these days live in fear that their careers will be summarily ended if they advise against anal sodomy—which is pretty good medical advice, no matter how you slice it. To cite just one example, consider Dr. Paul Church, a well-respected urologist who was recently fired from his position at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) in Boston for opposing the homosexual lifestyle on moral and medical grounds. His story began in 2009 when BIDMC sent out an email inviting staff members to ride on the hospital-sponsored float in an upcoming “pride” parade. Dr. Church responded with a mass email of his own, asking why a hospital would endorse a behavior with undeniable health consequences that include death. “If a medical scientist cannot raise research that the federal government’s Centers for Disease Control clearly shows homosexual conduct as harmful,” he concluded, “then that means that your health, my health, medical science — all of that is being called into question simply because of a political agenda.”
He was right, of course, though it’s dangerous to be right when your employer is wrong. The torrent of homosexual outrage came down on Dr. Church hard. After a lengthy fight with BIDMC, he lost his job. He may lose his positions at other Boston-area medical centers, including Harvard Medical School, where he also practices medicine.
Church was essentially fired for being a good doctor, for staying true to the Hippocratic Oath he took to “do no harm” at a time when all the other doctors around him had abandoned theirs. “Truly caring for the well-being of individuals requires telling them the truth about their choices,” said Church. “The hospital does this on less controversial issues such as smoking and diet.” Yes, that’s true, but smokers and fat people don’t have well-financed and well-organized political apparatuses and they don’t crush people who get in their way. That’s the difference.
The homofascists had to make an example out of somebody and they chose Dr. Church. The chilling effect will be felt far and wide—no one will dare point out that homosexuals are perverting medicine’s core mission, though they plainly are.
We’re living in an era of hedonism, in which a substantial portion of the population careens from disco to disco and from orgasm to orgasm. Not all such hedonists are homosexuals, of course—there is always the occasional Charlie Sheen—but a significant number of them are. There is nothing they won’t do just to keep the good times rolling. They don’t care about other people’s health or safety, nor do they care about facts or truth. They care only about their own pleasure and they will stop at nothing to secure it.
Les services secrets allemands ont espionné le ministre français des Affaires étrangères Laurent Fabius, affirme mercredi la radio publique allemande Berlin-Brandebourg (rbb), qui apporte de nouveaux détails dans l’affaire d’espionnage qui embarrasse depuis plusieurs mois la chancellerie allemande.Related: Son of Frenchman Who Presided COP21 in Police Custody for Fraud and Forgery
«Laurent Fabius a été mis sur écoute par le BND», les services de renseignement extérieurs allemands, souligne la radio sans préciser ses sources. Elle cite également parmi les cibles des écoutes allemandes la Cour internationale de justice de la Haye, l’Unicef, l’organisation mondiale de la santé (OMS), le FBI, la radio financée par les Etats-Unis Voice of America ou encore «de nombreuses d’entreprises européennes et américaines, dont l’entreprise d’armement Lockheed aux Etats-Unis».
Where was this photo taken?asks the monthly magazine Geo in its regular multiple choice question game (you have to click on each photo to see the three options to choose among).
and I was (very) happy I did
People have allegedly found all sorts of plot holes,
but the only one which really bothered me
I have not seen talked about anywhere