What the World Doesn’t Think of Itself

"I believe that forgiving them is God's function. Our job is simply to arrange the meeting."

- Norman Schwarzkopf

Conservative American columnist Debbie Schlussel appeared on the BBC World Service’s “World (Don’t) Have Your Say” program. With the usual ever vigilant love of tolerance and an open feeling for a broad range of opnions, callers’ first instinct was to ask to silence her or get her off the air. Who can take these critics seriously? In the face of great challenge the best they can come up with is more hyperventilating.

Like everything else as deranged as these useless criticisms of Americans and America do, they never, NEVER ask what Russia does, or China, or Pakistan, or India, or what Europe does for that matter. Those “concerned” about the US’ image (which is to say that they do their best to hack at it themselves) have to offer is limited, one thinks of the aptly named “Chewbacca defense”.

Euro-peevishness on parade... Useful, truly.

The sun shines out her ass

Rayonnement.

Bouteflika has got him by the short and curlies

King Chiraq dispatches the retarded brother of the writer of the Constitution of the 5th Ripoublika Franska to Algeria in order to patch up some Friendship Treaty which nobody cares about anyway (not least the chers têtes blondes du Neuf-Trois). ... or is it because "America's strategic and market penetration is growing by the day"?

And now for something completely different

Whip me, beat me, make me write bad checks!

In an effort to snuff whatever growth they have, 68% of the socialist zombies, 54% of the centre-"right" and 52% of the right think raising taxes is a good idea. Reds at 68%, and the "big tent" of the overtly fascist FN at 58% support it likewise.


Hopeless morons.

The latest breakthrough has come from an unlikely place. François Bayrou proposed letting every company, whatever the size, hire 2 new employees at no administrative cost to the employer which would be due to the government. The concept is a sound, inexpensive one-time economic stimulus that would result in rehirings of parasitic collectors of unemployment who are costly to the business owener, and an overall reduction of the burden placed on public welfare.

So what's the first thing people asked about it? What about the Lost Tax Revenue?!?

Hopeless.

Highway Autobahn to Hell

When he's not emptying Castro's bedpan, he's trying to be legislatively creative. But his latest move is soooo 1933. Been there, done that. Ermächtigungsgesetz. Thanks to George A. and Joe.

Is Zeropean geopositioning hubris going the way of that Zeropean smoke-and-mirrors search engine thing?

Will Galileo wind up like Quaero?

The anguish of capitalist conspiracy ... as seen through James Bond movies

"The propensity people have to speak of so many things with so much seriousness — it's incredible ..." Yup, that's the French. All talk and no action.

Stranger than Paradise Socialist Glory

Separated at Birth:

Venezuela's National Assembly has given initial approval to a bill granting the president the power to bypass congress and rule by decree for 18 months.
President Hugo Chavez says he wants "revolutionary laws" to enact sweeping political, economic and social changes.

He has said he wants to nationalise key sectors of the economy and scrap limits on the terms a president can serve.

And the present meets the past.

An Enabling Act (Ermächtigungsgesetz in German) was passed by Germany's parliament (the Reichstag) on March 23, 1933. It was the second major step after the Reichstag Fire Decree through which the Nazis obtained dictatorial powers using largely legal means. The Act enabled Chancellor Adolf Hitler and his cabinet to enact laws without the participation of the Reichstag.

Good luck with all that. I was told that I have to wash away the smell of sulphur in some room somewhere.

Grow a Pair

One independent report puts Iraq’s per capita GDP growth rate at %13, and another at 17%, based on data which included small businesses. The EU says its’ own is somewhere between 1.7 and 2.4%.

At that rate they will reach parity in 26,1 years, a span of time much shorter than it took to get from an EEC to an EU.

Have a nice day.The Fuse is Lit (No Pasaran!)

Amnesia: "France did all it could to suppress native languages in its colonies"

As a French-speaking African I am always mildly amused when I hear France clamoring for "cultural diversity," which to all intents and purposes amounts to mobilizing the world in a fight against Anglo-Saxon cultural and economic "imperialism"

writes A M Sall from Saint-Louis, Senegal (regarding American culture: A French appreciation).

The French seem to suffer from amnesia. France did all it could to suppress native languages in its colonies. I have personally suffered from this. And to this day, France tries to perpetuate the French language in its former colonies while attempting to enlist foot soldiers in the French war on Anglo-Saxon pre-eminence.

Still, and strangely enough, France seems to find it natural that its former colonies should join in the fight to "defend" its language against English.

We connect with each other based on our similarities, and we enrich each other based on our differences.

Now, the question is: Why can't the French stop living in the past, come to terms with the reality of globalization and start learning English — and Chinese — like everybody else?

Au Revoir, l'Ami

Here. Have Some of that Repulsive Bourgeois Commerce

Ché “tchotchkes ‘R us” Guevara. Still at it after all these years.

The only kind of Globalization they can Fathom

There are fine hos, and then there are monumental hos:

The statue represents a self-assured woman, her hands on her hips, looking sideways towards the sky, and standing on a doorstep, ANP said.

But until pride can be redefined to include these now well-worn Dutch values, they’ll still have to use the two-phone-call system.

The precise place where the statue will be laid and its title have not yet been announced, it said.

Jacqued

About a year ago, Stanford Engineering Researcher Dr. Robert Gray made advance arrangements for a month-long rental of a Paris apartment, including a €2300 payment in advance. Dr. Gray and his wife are elderly, and his wife requires an operational elevator to get to a 4th floor (5 floors up) apartment.

However, when they arrived in April the elevator was not operational, so they made alternate arrangements. It seems reasonably clear that the elevator not being in working order was a breach of contract and thus Dr. Gray's advance payment should have been reimbursed.

Instead, a representative for the rental agency and the building's owner appear to have engaged in a collusive "good cop, bad cop" arrangement whereby Dr. Gray will never see a reimbursement. Dr. Gray, being a competent researcher, has found other connections between the two clowns in question and other Paris rental agencies -- see the text near the bottom of the page for blow by blow details of what it’s like to deal with these operators.

Bottom Line: If you're going to rent temporarily in Paris, avoid Paristay, Apartment Rentals Paris, LOGDIS, and especially Paul Bernie and Andre Brue.

Chasing Votes

Yes, they have a lobby.

The irony is that the only way to get a leftist to care about individual rights is threaten to take some idiots’ stash of Turkish Blond away.The Fuse is Lit (No Pasaran!)

All Hat and No Cattle

In an effort to be “diplomatic”, the Embassy turned Cambodian refugees over to the Khmer Rouge, knowing full well that they would be killed.

On television, a journalist tells that dramatic events that took place in the [French] embassy. The Kampucheans who took refuge there were handed over to the Khmer Rouges! Among them, the husband of Ung Balk. “I did not any more smell my legs, explain it twenty and one years later. My daughter, who was 12 years old, ran with joy to embrace the screen while saying: “Don’t worry mom, dad will join us”. Me, I understood that all was finished, that I was going to be alone and have to assume sll the family responsibilities.”

Never mind the fact that the writer is using the term “Kampuchean” which was favored by the Khmer Rouge, and now firmly rejected by Cambodians today. As for that superior humanism?

“Remember that Mr. Dyrac had to face a true ultimatum, whose consequences for the community from abroad taken refuge in the [Embassy] compound could, in the event of refusal, become catastrophic.”

Why ask why? For the simple reason that nothing has changed – the inability to back the offer of a carrot with a stick:

Defense budgets in Europe are dropping. The US defense budget is larger than the next 20 largest defense budgets in the world combined. The European solution is to solve problems multilaterally, and not by military means. Why? If a military solution is required, then Europe must follow the American lead and be in America's shadow. This is a dignity issue. If international problems are addressed multilaterally, then Europe has 27 EU nations, and in international forums like the UN, Europe has more than 30 votes, and the US just one.

And with that their dimished ability to be heard, because the consequences of ignoring their wisdom are few, even though the irony of the situation is that the formation of the EU is in part an attempt to re-establish some significance to themselves in a larger world.

- Thanks go to reader btesh for the story link to RealClearPolitics.

More Zeropean Art

To be shown at Berkeley. SOS ... Same old shit. Botero est déjà très prisé dans les cloaques pédaloïdes de la blogosphère franchouille.

Say ‘plastic turkey’ and watch ‘em drool like Pavlov’s dog

What the leftist world view has boiled down to at this point is that causes need to be invented to channel rage, almost to the point of ridiculousness:

Most of UPC’s activities, though, are fairly regarded as theatre of the absurd. Its 2001 campaign to abolish the production and sale of “rubber chicken” toys is a good example. UPC’s Davis says that these comic props are “cruel and obscene.” She also claimed that these harmless gag items have “pornographic implications.”

And yet the media will employ only conservative causes and organizations as the goat in any mocking exposé. How cute.

Up close

Forget the MSM.

Hearts and Minds

This seems to clash with the "America out of everywhere" mantra which is incessantly bleated by the French mainstream preSS.

Only In Pancho’s Moist Underoos

"Latest Try?" by Pancho

... “ Trust Me! Don’t miss out on this opportunity! ” ...

(“Dead” US Army “for sale”)

Financial domination

The Clearstream scandal transformed into pretentious, globophobic, French art.

Ce vidéo était le 8ème clip le plus regardé hier dans la catégorie "Art and Animation - French" sur Youtube.com. Bravo les gars ! Ainsi, c'est les 'New Media' qui bousillent de l'intérieur la baudruche de la Ripoublika Franska des Zarzélettres !

How Do You Say "F*ck You, Motherf*cker" in French?

Va te faire voir, espèce de voyou!

Mumia

Frédéric Valandré, auteur de France Intox, parle du cas Mumia sur Underbahn.TV.

Midnight at the Full Moon Saloon

It seems that each of these conspiracy theory peddling clowns, like one who won’t stop sending us rambling, frothing emails from his home in the Keebler Elf tree, seems to ramble and fronth in their own special way.

Those 9-11 attacks? It was all about data centers!

The plane banked attacking the World Trade Center, and adding another hair-brained theory to hundreds of others, some drooling freak is convinced that amateur pilots yelling allah hu akhbar! were capable of counting floors in a split second and controlling the aircraft with laser precision. To which I say: have you ever seen how most Saudi men drive?

It must have been the menacing color of the battery racks...

These units were bolted to the raised floor which stood about 3 feet above the reinforced 81st floor. Beneath the raised floor ran the cables and power supply that connected the army of batteries. IT techies had to get down on all fours and crawl around beneath the raised floor to connect cables.

"The whole floor was batteries," he said, "huge battery-looking things." They were "all black" and "solid, very heavy" things that had been brought in during the night. They had been put in place during the summer prior to 9/11, he said.

As an Architect I’ve worked on plenty of office designs and test-fits and several data centers. Battery rooms are usually full of batteries. Construction work is nearly always done at night if it effects another floor or produces an excess of noise with adjacent spaces occupied. There’s also the matter of “mysterious” structural work, which if the author had even a marginal clue how heavy data center UPS batteries are. Stacked 2 tiers high you quickly get to a 600 pounds per square foot (29 kPa) load. Office space is normally designed for 100-150 psf (5-7 kPa), depending on whether or not it’s identified as an area where a file or book library can occur. No matter – that anyone would need to perform any structural work to make up the difference, right? RIGHT?
They also need 1 cfm of ventilation directly to the great outdoors since they give off small quantities of chlorine and hydrogen gas when they start to fail. No work needed THERE either, surely...
As to the last point, why doesn’t he “investigate” how it might be possible that they were brought up AFTER 9-11? Hm?

Simpler still, why doesn’t the guy just say that the evil architect of everything he doesn’t like Dick Cheney, was flying both planes that day. PERSONALLY! Sure beats the theory which he had bit of a hard time with: that on 20 floors large flower pots surreptitiously containing thermite were situated in the same general location near the elevators. They must have been places there “mysteriously” by people posing as office cleaners. I mean, what kind of Wall Street offices hire cleaning companies?!?

How about this theory: al-Queda terrorist did it. After all, bin Laden eventually started bragging about it. Not enough complicity with America, I guess. For that eventuality, one must claim that the US “created” him, in exactly the same way they “created” Saddam Hussein, Tojo, Vlad the Impaler, and Alexander the Great.

I mean what REALLY happened can keep changing, can’t it?

Euro-pengies for Mass Murderers

Pinochet? Well, that’s ANOTHER story!?!

”Why execute an imprisoned dictator who’s got no more power?”
“Oh, don’t believe it: he got power!”
“He’s got a weapon of mass destruction: his mouth.”

The Fuse is Lit (No Pasaran!)

Weekend Roundup

« Les États-Unis: maîtres du jeu mondial pour le pire...
Et le meilleur »

I hate to admit it, but I really have a hard time reading this trash while sober or even in a timely manner for that matter. Every day should be a Saturday anyway.

In Le Figaro the long suffering Ted Stanger disabuses the reader that France 24 is seen as anything other than still-born in the US, but with a anti-US dig to keep his cred. I have to correct Stanger here: France 24 has no impression in the US because no-one has paid any attention to it.

By creating France 24, Jacques Chirac was guided by the Gaullist idea that information needs to serve the national interest. In view of that, Americans have seen the new network as dead-on-arrival. That the French want to present their view of the world is a legitimate desire. Vive France24, to but those who look to it to find an alliance of anti-Americanism and anti-globalization, they would just shrug their shoulders across the atlantic. On our side [of the pond] it's seen more as a political instrument than a news network. Don't forget that after rightly rejecting pro-war politics in 2003, Chirac was desperate to find strategic allies and turned to Germany, Russia, the third world, and even that politically fictional francophonie.

Nearly 4 years later the rejection of the Iraqi campaign exposes a foundation as fragile as the one found after rejecting the [EU] constitution under the weight of domestic politics. Paris is still as isolated as Bush, and France 24 won't change that.

Locked up in the attic of the back pages Dominique Dhombres blows the cover off of " national interest" in Le Monde as an object of indecision and guilt, but still doesn't seem sure why he's doing it, asking us to "pray for peace" in a post-Christian society. Good luck with all that. I doubt we'll be seeing many candles being lit.

On the cover and below the fold, Le Monde finally notices a devastated Mogadishu now that those probable-Neo-con-lovin' Etheopians have stepped in – at least they make mention of a decade of lawless chaos, but it took a US air-raid in the south to get it onto their radar. I guess those groovy Abyssinians have just dropped off the French list of the officially pitiable oppressed that otherwise get an Albanian a glare reserved for bums and panhandlers.

From our bulging "are you f'in kidding me?" file:

Worst of all is a cartoon as implausible as Bill Clinton's trope of blackness: " Bravitude Royale". Obviously pumping Ségolène's minor statement about China while posing as the Michelin man, the minor bout of verbal "bravitude" is meant to jump the train of the actual Tiananmin Square protestor who defiantly challenged a column of tanks. Verbal bravery is the best you'll ever get from someone who will stick her neck out, provided that it's a momentary crane to pander the "human rights" voter and is eventually rendered illegible of insignificant to the snubbed. Sounds mighty damn brave, doesn't it?

Now for a moment of light comedy: LM features union shakedown artist Bernard Thibault is shown demonstrating necktie-tie-ing skills poorer than a comic Abe Vigoda character.The Fuse is Lit (No Pasaran!)

Le Pen Knows Whom French Youth Will Vote For

NP's W has been predicting it, the FN's Le Pen is confirming it…

UMP Congress Is Crashed (in a Rather Friendly Way)

Present at the UMP Congress was La Baf, trying to get signatures to prevent Ségolène's execution of Jacques Chirac.

As for myself, I was unceremeniously thrown out.

Arthur Wneir and I were supposed to meet up, but we missed each other, first because I was late, then because he didn't hear his phone ringing.

So you won't see much of me in the Baf post, notably what follows: I took things into my own hands. Dressed up as le bourreau, I walked around the congress as it was closing (there were still hundreds of people) with a sign saying

Ségolène à l'Elysée!
Votez Chirac!

Most people got the fact, that offhand, it was pro-UMP, a lot of them took pictures, but some people were offended, and a drunk UMP guy started pushing me around. By now, burly men started gathering around me.

"C'est de la provoc'," I admitted, "mais c'est de la provoc' PRO-ump et PRO-Sarkozy", so that the equivalent of Jospin's 2002 downfall doesn't happen to Nicolas (NP's W has been predicting a disastrous first round for months), allowing Ségolène to win by default (as Chichi did in 2002).

Finally, the security guys started pushing me around, grabbing for my sign, which they tore from my hands. Then I stood around there for awhile, until seven huge security guys came over, and started pushing, pulling, and dragging me out.

Unconfirmed by Danes or Any Other Reputable Adults.

The Italian newspaper la Repubblica reports that an Iranian news agency reports that a Danish “Mohammed cartoonist” has been burned alive:

TEHRAN - One of the Danish cartoonists of the Mohammed caricatures that, because thought blasphemous, inflamed the Muslim world a year ago, has been found died in a narrow alleyway in Copenhagen. The news, broadcast from the Iranian government news agency Fars, has not yet been confirmed by Police in Denmark. The cartoonist, whose name Fars doesn’t reveal, was said to have been burnt alive.

Not only is it hard to believe that someone could be burned alive in an alleyway that quickly without drawing attention, but note too how the cause of death is written to be attributed to the “blasphemy” and not the rage or the murderer.

Developing, I suppose, but it sounds like Big Brother giving the “Iranian Street” something to be proud of now that they’ve surmised that their uncredentialed “diplomats” in northern Iraq might have not been above board about their activities. The news appears nowhere else at the time of this writing, raising suspicion that the whole thing is just domestic Iranian propaganda.

- With thanks to reader
PJC for the tip-off.

Mistakes, Sins, and Demands for Excuses, But Only if They Concern Uncle Sam

It's all about Bush's mistakes, America's sins, and the neocons having to ask for forgiveness in the comments section of
Daniel Vernet's interview with Francis Fukuyama.

Piñata

From this weekend's Le Monde Al-Jazeera on the Seine.

A French broad that needs to get a life

No comment

Courtesy of Seguei in this weekend's Le Monde Al-Jazeera on the Seine.

Jeez, I sure hope he wasn't heckled before he took the fall

I always thought that guy was a pencil neck geek.

There’s Never a Nixon Around When They Need One

John R. MacArthur, Publisher of Harper's Magazine and the Grandson of the late billionaire John D. MacArthur speaking from New York on the tidy and tedious France24 made a polemically charged “report” out of his feelings on deploying more troops to Baghdad to provide some more safety for Baghdadis that John R. seem otherwise quite ready to fret about.

I really don’t know how to sum it up other than to say that his “thesis” seemed so obsessed with the Vietnam war that it came to no conclusion other than to assume that everyone over 40 in America would be made anxious somehow by it. It’s an armed conflict on a low boil – people should be anxious, and anxious to snuff the insurgency long enough for a beefier Iraqi government to stand up for its’ own sovereignty. I think that this might include people who weren’t 9 when the last helicopter took off of the roof of a US Embassy.

One would think that John R. has neither the facility to reason outside of the use of infantile analogues or is ill prepared to look at the world outside of the narrow slot of an anti-civilizational-half decade where the Weathermen, Black Panthers, and Symbionese “Liberation” Army was a subculture’s idea of peacekeeping.

What I wonder about is why some in “his generation’s” view of history is so short that they can’t seem to find any other events or time to think about.

Imagine just how much reason you have to suspend to appeal to trope of aging leftist revolutionaries: after all they were more willing than anyone to dispose of cultural norms developed through millennia of trial and error in favor of notions more symbolic than rational, all so they could personally feel like they’re “getting over” something.

He was 12 years old in 1968, the year the subculture he inhabits idolizes in secret the nibbling away of the foundation of the society they live in the way Harry Hopkins tried to impose an bacterium unwanted by the people to begin with. I’m glad John R. is working out his issues in words and on a little-watched TV outlet far from his home where they can remain as significant to the rest of us as any individuals’ reminiscences of the past are: in his youthful adoration of others’ adolescent memories of having a fabrication to rage against.The Fuse is Lit (No Pasaran!)

Max Headroom Rides Again

With "Art of Noise" minus the "Art" bits.

Consequences Shielded from View at All Costs

Corbusier has a word or two for that growing lumpenproletariat, the impressionable and forgetful part of western society that takes the impressions left by a biased media at its’ word:

From our perspective of a society that takes for granted the prevailing rule of law and basks in limitless freedom to express oneself and make as much money as we endeavour, there is little difference between one dictator responsible for killing a few thousand of his countrymen for the sake of permanent political stability, rule of law and prosperity for his country and another totalitarian ruler who exterminated several hundred thousands of his own subjects for the sake of sowing permanent tribal division, economic degradation and political anarchy. Jeanne Kirkpatrick pointed to this difference, and urged that American foreign policy acknowledge it. But due to the extraordinary circumstance of growing up in a country where one hasn't experienced any degree of authoritarian rule for more than 230 years, many Americans are naive to the fact that most of the populations of the world are subject regimes that are far more invasive and deterministic in one's individual life than we can imagine.

If the left wants to sneak into the background an inescapable sense that “Iraq=Vietnam” than they need to complete the picture:

Two more days passed, everybody got weaker, no one moved or said a word! It was so quiet and peaceful! Suddenly, a man screamed : - I see a boat over there!... Like magic, we energetically got up and looked to where he pointed his finger. We saw a boat! Everybody was so grateful, we used all kinds of cloth, towel, t-shirt to wave and scream. The boat seemed like approaching us closer and closer but when we saw it clearly, we started to be afraid because there was a fishing boat with more than a dozen mean looking men, dark skin, carrying weapons and speaking Thai language strongly.
When that boat was next to ours, they signaled us to get on their boat, the little boat was empty. Some of them jumped on it starting to search our luggages, they took everything they liked! When they finished searching, we were returned back to our boat and they left.

The social justice types duping civilization can be so proud.The Fuse is Lit (No Pasaran!)

What is it with these people?

Why do Europeans have such an unbreakable predilection with monarchy and absolute rule?

Ban Ki-moon puts on Kofi Annan's heavy crown

Quasi-hysteria? Hell no. It’s not quazi-anything. The instinct is to hear words, transcribe them, and then take them entirely out of context for the sake an imagined public temperament that someone imagines to be in need to a baby-sitter. Paranoically, a few words found criticizing that “management” is called “an attack.” Grow a pair, will ya?

Bitchslap Culture

As Carine said the other day: “The so called Clash of Civilizations would be possible if we had to face an actual civilization.”The Fuse is Lit (No Pasaran!)

Where’s Did His Soiled Mac Get To?

The Fuse is Lit (No Pasaran!)

Embracing their Helplessness

An opinion column in a Connecticut newspaper today puts on display the numbness of those seeking the empty center of any argument which is often confused for agreement, one that puts the usual inaction of European governments on a pedestal, no matter how dim-witted the statements are to begin with. It operates on the assumption that the US can be European, or broadly that anyone would want to be.

The outlook almost always points an adoring eye to the exclusion of mentioning anything else European states have let fester or not done in international relations, and the arguments themselves almost always dwell on looking for affirmation in the sort of statement parroted by street protestors. Since both camps have checked out of having any real ideas or taken any concrete action in the larger world, they can’t but help but look to use one another as an authority of some sort or another to prop up one anothers’ ideas.

The social role of how and what is said dominates any discussion of this sort. It has a thin veneer used to shield from the embarrassment of having disengaged from doing anything serious long ago:

For some, the response was a study in haughty indifference.

The statements read otherwise like catchphrases.

“Europeans and Germans believe you have to talk to regimes you don't like,” said Eberhard Sandschneider, the director of the Research Institute of the German Council on Foreign Relations. (Pointedly, Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, declined to discuss Iraq in an interview with correspondents on Thursday.)

”Talk to your enemies, not your friends” that latest signboard goes, looking to find a way to tell the US to go hat in hand to the regimes enabling the Iraq insurgency. Nonsense – it’s an attempt to force the US into a weak strategic position for reasons of the sign carrier’s pride as if these were matters between people and not nations. They have it entirely reversed: you make your enemies try to come talk to you.

Indeed, said Philippe Douste-Blazy, the French foreign minister, only a broad political strategy would enable Iraq to “recover stability, and beyond Iraq, stability in the region.” That was the view, too, among Spanish officials. “Only political solutions can solve the crisis which affects stability in the region,” said Miguel Ángel Moratinos, the Spanish foreign minister.

Ultimately, yes, but that’s not what motivates the same argument that is nearly identical to the peacenik argument that has been kicking around since US went after the Taliban in novemeber 2001: the statement is always made with a view of getting the US to negotiate from a position of weakness.

At the same time, there was some sympathy — if not always explicit — for the American quandary: This was, many analysts sensed, a defining event, a last throw of the dice that would measure American prestige and credibility against the clamor of its adversaries.

Proforma statements of supposed sympathy are never in short supply, and they have NEVER amounted to anything. Ever. They are always phrased in a way to veil a mood to save face at the moment but try to say “I’m sorry you’re so stupid”.

If you can attribute European shrugs to having an actual goal, it’s always the same: to maintain a strategic balance for its’ own sake because it requires no visible action to support. It’s the same strategic that doesn’t ask why tyrannies are encouraged to continue provided that they conceal from plain view their treatment of people from a sensitive European public who are easily outraged and have had their sympathy exhausted to the point to that they sometimes confuse not knowing about the things that outrage them with things going well.

Never far away though are the usual verbal daggers:

Others painted their analogies in a more apocalyptic hue. In France, the newspaper Le Monde — which, after the Sept. 11 attacks, had declared: “We are all Americans” — published a cartoon depicting President Bush as a bulldozer driver shoveling American soldiers into a ditch in the shape of Iraq.

A statement confused for action and a statement confused for action – the “We are all Americans” has been used too often to be meaningful to any American, and from the week after it was written, used as a kind of emotional set-up to point out the disappointment with any statement stapled onto the end cleft with the word “but”.

Useless. Dead words used solely to find meaning in statements, not actions or even beliefs. They are a vessel of pride, or rather the hubris coming out of inaction and self-imposed helplessness. It is merely another signboard carried by a marcher in a crowd who could neither summin the same bravery on his own or look anyone in the eye.The Fuse is Lit (No Pasaran!)

Moteur, kaput !

Merkel's government sends the French a message to put on a lid on all the hissy fits they are throwing over EU Central Bank independence. The famed Franco-German engine is no longer firing on all cylinders.

Baudruche boursoufflée

This will not please the French heads-up-their-asses pseudo-economists who are convinced that France and the Euro are at the vanguard of some kind of post-industrial, post-free market, dare I say post-economic EUtopia. A study has just shown that the Euro is not at all, not even slowly, replacing the US Dollar in central bank reserves. It's a smoke and mirror shell game thing.

Dreams of a Glossy, Post-Democratic World

If fashion pimps ran the world, they would let people who are a monument to their own self-indulgent hype in the pop-culture run it.

Why isn’t Ah-nold on the list? Because he had to face a challenger in an actual election where people who just don't look good actually VOTE. He can’t be on a list of any sort of course – he’s conservative, silly.

Just what is it that curls the toes of equally vapid lefty Britons who read that tripe? They want their MTV.

The idea of appointing an adamant pacifist as minister of war isn’t just a warm, “humanistic thought” for which the thinker should be richly loved and rewarded for merely saying it, but would really do well off-off Broadway, which many such people who enjoy the victory of warm intentions could confuse for real life.

Fun W/ №s: the New Year Carbeque

In an effort to manage and dim the public temperament the Police lied with the help of the media. The number of cars torched on New Years’ Eve was initially stated at 301, then 396, up until the number 483 appeared somewhere. Nouvel Obs now reports it to be 683, up from 425 from 2005.

Partying like it’s 1939The Fuse is Lit (No Pasaran!)

De jour en jour, on voit qu'elle est vraiment la bonne conne

Ségolène Royal praised the rapidity of China's criminal courts and had not a single word to say about capital punishment (something that always gets the French on their high horses), or the use of executed prisoners' body parts for organ transplants. She even mumbled something about not wanting to give lessons to others. Funny how the French suddenly decide to no longer distribute lessons when the USA is not involved. Elsewhere, (c'est à dire, en dehors de la planète Maboule qui s'appelle la Fwance), Royal's visit is the subject of some ridicule.

The bulldozer is missing a "Halliburton" logo. Plantu is slipping.

Plantu made one of his more goulish efforts in yesterday's Le Monde Al-Jazeera on the Seine. French commentators have gone into all-is-lost overdrive since Bush's speech. The French preSS is a bit lost to say the least. They had fully expected all of this to be over by now, what with the Democrats winning the mid-term elections and all.

And it was Just in time for Christmas too

Cable operator Noos seems to have snuck in a few new channels over Christmas.



Lube it up for the new aristocracy!



The Fuse is Lit (No Pasaran!)

Ironically, the Protestors Can Leave Cuba

Unlike the Cubans, these wankers don’t need to risk it on an innertube:

A dozen American peace activists, including Cindy Sheehan, marched to the security fence around the US military enclave in eastern Cuba chanting "Guantanamo prison, place of shame, no more torture in our name."

Fine. Feel free do it in MY name if you have to. The Fascist Fishwife can join her peaced-out pacifistic kindred spirits and just stay in Castro’s “paradise” for all I care.

As for her fellow travelers, make a note of the fake photo montage and how many times the word “probably” appears in this feeble parody, all anticipating hopes of finding the very worst of their “real enemy” – their fellow citizens from a country where it’s still bad form and at last check unlawful to target unsuspecting civilians just to get your jollies. Behold, their chachas at Reuters prattling on about Sheehan and Medea Benjamin “defying” the travel ban on Cuba under the heading of “crisis” while neglecting to mention the Cuban “travel ban” on Cubans that thousands have died defying.

Apparently, that’s not a crisis to Reuters or the "peace" camp, and neither was this:

"I was ten years old. But they changed my age to 18 for execution.”
“Dear Mom and Dad. I am going to be executed by the Baath. I will not see you again.”
10,725 people were killed in this one building alone. All died during torture. Formal execution actually took place in Abu Ghraib.

Yet the sad subculture of leftist protesters is uniquely obsessed with entirely different things that happened at Abu Ghreib and on the island of Cuba.The Fuse is Lit (No Pasaran!)

Comrade Plushtoi

Luxurious old cars and some cute, fuzzy Stalin worship. How cute.The Fuse is Lit (No Pasaran!)

Bi-Polar Nation

After talking it up, and rationalizing it, they’re talking it down:

Mr Breton said French growth in the final quarter of 2006 would be between 0.6 and 0.8 per cent, an improvement on the third quarter, when the economy stagnated, but lower than the 0.9 forecast from Insee, the state statistics agency.

The Fuse is Lit (No Pasaran!)

And Europeans are orbiting Uranus

« An astrologer accuses America of altering the zodiac. »
The Fuse is Lit (No Pasaran!)

What Morons

I really wonder if these goose-stepping jerk-offs have any idea how stupid they really sound:

Votez: Le Pen !
LE PEN! Don’t let yourself be deceived by the propaganda of Jewish liars that want to fight France to the last "beur" [Arab]!

Is it 1939 yet?

LE PEN was the only French politician who was clearly opposed to the war which the américano-Zionists carried out against Iraq, the cradle of Arab civilization.

The Fuse is Lit (No Pasaran!)

EU : le club aux abonnés absents

EU members cannot adopt a common stance with regards to Russia's energy shenanigans.

National Cultural Profile: A mission to teach and to civilise others

The French believe that they are intellectually superior to any other nationality. The length and magnificence of their historical achievements leave the French convinced that they have a mission to teach and to civilise others. Their political, military and economic strengths may no longer predominate as they once did, but they perceive no diminishment or fading of their moral and didactic authority.

So we learn from the Daily Telegraph's National Cultural Profiles page devoted to France.

How to Be a Rude Parisian

The Daily Telegraph also gives lessons to its readers on how to be a rude Parisian.

Well, it’s about time!

Moonbattery outage in Baghdad.

Murderous Hateful Creep Employed Peddling Soft Drink

They’re sticking to the script at all costs.


Adoring a man who enjoyed violating civilians and wrecked the Cuban economy, some twit try to fawn over a murderer who wanted to “make beeg revolution” using a veil of charitable donation as a marketing gimmick:

In homage of an emblematic figure, legendary Ernesto Ché Guevara was known for sound effort and for his fight counter the inequalities for a world righter. Far from any political ideology or partisanship, the company “El Ché-Cola” is the first commercial operation to take choose to divert 50% of its net profit to NGOs that fight world hunger, and humanitarian organizations coming to the assistance of orphans and the needy in France and throughout the world. Sharing the wealth to fight together against hunger in the world is our goal.

- The Founder, J.M. Ferreira

Yeah, right. Whatever you say, spanky. Link omitted.

Middle Class Trappings

Go ahead. Badger them about not recycling, of maybe about the “rights of the transgendered” or something. See if they’ll play along.

Sticking it to a Morally Repugnant Elite

Thin skinned, outraged, millionaire ‘revolutionaries’ like the unctuous poster-child for the decay of the public mind Tracy Emin are out raising all the ‘awareness’ that they can sell you or parlay into public exposure. But criticize the echo chamber that serves them and the parasites living off of them and they would call you “stuck”.

The torrent pointed at the handful of people who merely asked the question as to why the Turner Prize has grown into a sick joke has mutated into an annual event involving those feeding off the institutions going on the defensive against society at large. It goes so far as to find them opposing a zeitgeist that holds similar, if not nearly identical world view to that generally found uniformly among the ‘revolutionaries’ of the art racket with a few important ethically founded distinctions: one that holds that the publicized personalization of the artist is not art.

Every year, the elite wanting to be “controversial” without the attendant criticism exhibits something more akin to pack animal behaviour: the wagons are circled, and the public are frowned upon in a Pomish way not seen since the lost days of the Raj.

“Stuckism” calls itself [a]

Radical international art movement for new figurative painting with ideas. Anti the pretensions of conceptual art. Anti-anti-art. The first Remodernist art group. Daubers (daubing is the new painting).

It is. And fascism is the new black. Noted one dejected juror:

There was a pre-party party for the judges and shortlisted artists but I was so busy keeping my lips sealed that it wasn't much fun. Then we went through to join the main thrash in the Duveen gallery where Yoko Ono (dressed bizarrely as a French mime artist) announced the result. In previous years it has been a sitdown dinner but this was a milling-about party with mouse-sized food. (No wonder Nick Serota and all the Tate curators are so thin - they subsist on fairy dust.) And of course there was no smoking, so I was soon out on the front steps in the rain with the artists, and delighted to find Sarah Lucas among them. I thought she disapproved of the Turner Prize because she has always refused to accept nomination, but she says no, she doesn't disapprove per se, she just thinks it's not her thing. Anyway, she is doing the Tate's Christmas tree this year - she showed me photos of her decorations which I think were all genitalia but I didn't have my glasses on.

Solutions for a Better World

Tell the Journalists "How Close I Was to Mitterrand"

Ariane Chemin has a long portrait of Ségolène Royal (more blunt outspokenness and bravitude on the issue of basic principles and human rights during her visit to China here) and how François Mitterrand has been a central feature in her political life.

France Intox

Frédéric Valandré, auteur de France Intox, parle du MRAP sur Underbahn.TV.

Déjà vu

18 December 2006: Paris' Zenith witnessed the largest anti-Jew rally since Vichy Fwance.

De l'eau dans le gaz

The EU has just been sent a message. Looks like we are in for some serious strategic sensibilities management.

Sign the Petition to Help Chirac Avoid the Hangman

Quickly! Go visit La Baf in order to sign the international petition for the pardon of Jacques Chirac, President of France ("Let's stand united against the execution of Jacques Chirac by the puppet governement of Ségolène Royal").

Y en a marre de la même merdouille franchouille ?

Regarde un peu Underbahn.tv. La télé garantie 100% non-consensuelle. Actuellement : l'interview en trois partie avec Frédéric Valandré, auteur de France Intox. A venir : beaucoup plus.

Serguei is Still Castro’s Poodle

Them is Some Angry Lefties

You may not pet my monkey.

Always getting it wrong

Saddam supporters. Lost and sick is Zeropa.

The Difference in the Treatment Accorded by the MSM to Strongmen Aligned with the US and Despots Opposed to the US

We are against the death penalty. It is a shameful abomination (and a disaster and a catastrophe)!

We are against the war in Iraq. It is a shameful abomination (and a disaster and a catastrophe)!

We are against capitalism. It is a shameful abomination (and a disaster and a catastrophe)!

How about Saddam Hussein?

Well… yeah… y'know, that too… but, y'know…

it is hard to draw a portrait of Saddam Hussein. The man, like numerous dictators [like Castro, like Deng, like Kim Il Sung, but not like Pinochet (!)] presents numerous sides. His paranoia does not make the task easier…

Whereas the MSM had called unequivocably for moving heaven and earth to go after Pinochet while depicting Chile's former head as nothing but a monster, they have taken to referring to the environment in which Warsaw's Stanislaw Wojciech Wielgus met his fate as "Eastern Europe's widening witch hunt for former Communist secret police informers".

To go after Pinochet (as well as his henchmen and people such as the officers forming the 1970s junta of Argentina) is necessary, even heroic, but to go after the leaders of communist states (or their henchmen) amounts to nothing but a "witch hunt"?!

Read Brent Bozell's Dying dictators and double standards (written two to three weeks before Saddam's execution). He hits the nail straight on the head:

The New York Times headline noted Pinochet was a "Dictator Who Ruled by Terror in Chile." The Times began by describing him as "the brutal dictator who repressed and reshaped Chile for nearly two decades and became a notorious symbol of human rights abuse and corruption." He was "never brought to trial." Both the Post and the Times used post-Pinochet government estimates that more than 3,000 people were executed or disappeared during the Pinochet dictatorship.

But the same liberal press that despises right-wing autocrats cannot bring that same vigorous denunciation to bear when a communist dictator dies. When Chinese dictator Deng Xiaoping died in 1997, the Post mentioned the "bloody crackdown" in Tiananmen Square in 1989, but the words "dictator" or "dark legacy" did not appear in the headline, which simply recited the fact of death: "China's Deng Xiaoping, Dead at 92." The Post reporter did not attempt to enumerate the thousands or millions killed on Deng's watch, or wonder why he was never put on trial.

The Post presented Deng as a great liberalizer, to a point. "Deng had guided the country out of the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, flung open China's doors to the outside world and loosened the grip of central economic planning," while, ahem, "insisting that the Communist Party's monopoly on power go unchallenged."

Some communist leaders couldn't even be accused of liberalizing tendencies. When Korean despot Kim Il Sung died in 1994, The New York Times couldn't call him a dictator in their headlines, let along mention ruling by terror. The second story on the death was headlined, "Kim Il Sung, Enigmatic 'Great Leader' of North Korea for 5 Decades, Dies at 82." (…)

So let's review. A right-wing ruler responsible for the deaths of 3,000 -- but also responsible for an economic miracle of free enterprise, and who allowed the democratic process which forced him from power: "dictator." But communist despots who controlled their citizens with iron fists until the day they died, preventing all manner of political, economic and religious freedoms, and who caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands, if not millions: "leaders."

The more things change, the more they stay the same. While conservatives still seek to defend both democracy and American interests, liberals are still fawning over communist and terrorist thugs.

France's — and Europe's — Inviolate Human Rights Principles

When interacting with Americans, French citizens at all levels — common people, media outlets, government leaders — must make them (likewise, America's common people, media outlets, government leaders) understand the rock-hard base of European principles and the fundamental position of the latter in the European Union. Europeans must make Americans understand that they disagree with the death penalty, that they disagree with Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, that they disagree with pre-emptive war and saber-rattling and the Iraq conflict and Bush's lies, etc etc etc…

Europeans are not against America per se, you understand; they are only against America's current government. They are only against America's leaders and the country's policies. Thus, Europeans must tell Americans that they preferred the policies of the country's past administrations, and that they have no choice, but that they are compelled to say (in a snotty voice or otherwise) that this side of America is not the America that they like.

Europeans are the good friends of the Americans, in fact; they just want to make Americans (its citizens as well as its leaders) aware of certain realities in the new world and, indeed, make them understand that their (the Europeans') outbursts are done for their (the Americans') own good.

This is Europe's human rights principles!

How about Russia (whose "sensibilities" France's president said the French "should manage") and China (for whose leader's state visit the Eiffel Tower was lit up in red)? Where Moscow and Beijing and their "extremely sensitive political questions" are concerned, the Europeans haven't exactly come around to making a stand and stating their principles forcefully yet, but don't worry. The Chinese will soon feel the full force of France's outrage (danke zu Jörg Wolf) and the Russians can't be far behind.

Here is a French government tip on how best to do business with the Chinese: Do not mention Tibet, Taiwan or the Tiananmen Square crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators.

…And do not mention politics, the guide says. "Avoid speaking about Chinese politics, for example: The events on Tiananmen Square, strategic questions of Taiwan or of Tibet," it says.

Hundreds, possibly thousands, of unarmed protesters were killed when the Chinese army cleared the square in the heart of Beijing of student demonstrators on June 4, 1989. China has threatened to use force to assert its claim of sovereignty over the self-ruling island of Taiwan and has been accused of widespread human rights abuses in Tibet since it invaded the Himalayan territory in 1950.

Update: Currently on a visit to China, Ségolène Royal, who famously told a Hezbollah (!) "lawmaker" how awful Bush was and who like most French people is constantly trying to give Americans lessons,

told reporters that she plans to discuss human rights — without browbeating her Communist Party hosts. "I am not going as a giver of lessons," she told reporters.

The French Socialists' presidential candidate has gone out of her way to minimize human rights, an issue that is "sensitive" to the Chinese (no sh-t!), in favor of questions like globalisation and ecological rights.

Just in Time for that Special Day

Je parle français très mieux que vous et je vous merde!

Bravitude.