Une terrible épée de Damoclès suspendue au-dessus de la tête du responsable de la Défense

Au terme d'une enquête de plusieurs mois, tant en France que dans les pays de l'Est, L'Express est en mesure de lever le voile sur cette affaire d'Etat: un futur ministre français de la Défense a été — pendant au moins dix ans — rémunéré par des agents de Moscou. C'est l'incroyable vérité que contenaient les documents venus du froid.

Mitterrand's first defense minister (alias "André" and "Dinu") was a Soviet spy, revealed Jérôme Dupuis and Jean-Marie Pontaut 10 years ago (spasiba to RV). (Notice the French Wikipedia's take on this — and that, under the heading… "miscellaneous" : "Under the code name Dinu, he worked for overseas [pour l'étranger] during the Cold War" — as if he were doing nothing more — or less worthy — than humanitarian work for an NGO in darkest Africa!!)

…l'«investissement» soviétique sur Charles Hernu, dans les années 60, qu'il ait continué ou non, a été couronné de succès au-delà de tout ce que Moscou pouvait imaginer. Tout au long des années 70, Hernu est le spécialiste de la chose militaire au sein du Parti socialiste, principal parti d'alternance.

…Arrive 1981: l'apothéose. Ce vieux grognard du nouveau président de la République devient, tout naturellement, ministre de la Défense. Certains de ses anciens traitants roumains et bulgares assistent avec stupéfaction à la formidable promotion de leur ex-ami «André-Dinu». Charles Hernu, à son nouveau poste, règne sur la politique nucléaire, les services secrets et la défense stratégique de la France. Les services roumains, qui ont transformé leur pays en un terrible Etat policier, comprennent tout le parti qu'ils peuvent tirer d'une telle promotion.

…La divulgation publique de ces éléments — même en 1992, lorsque François Mitterrand en prit connaissance — sur l'homme qui, de 1981 à 1985 (jusqu'à sa démission après l'affaire Greenpeace), fut responsable de la défense nationale française aurait déclenché une crise internationale. A ce poste, Charles Hernu a eu en effet à gérer, notamment, la crise des missiles SS 20 avec l'URSS...

Giving Lessons to the Bush Administration

Since George W Bush is such a clueless bungling idiot, it's only right that his administration be given lessons by a handful of brilliant strategists. (And that's only the American ones!)

Pol Pot in Prada

According to Ralph Peters, all you need to warn you about the worst possibilities in the future is to look at the worst of the present:

Malthusian linear projections never fulfill themselves (and hysteria is never productive). But, beyond that, the notion that Europe, the continent that's exported more death and destruction than any other, is going to just shuffle wimpily to its doom is crazy. The Europeans have been playing pacifist dress-up while we protected them, but, sufficiently threatened, they'll revert to their historical pattern--which is to over-react. Europe's Muslims may prove to be the real endangered species; after all, Europe's history of dealing with rejected minorities veers between genocide and, for the lucky, ethnic cleansing. For me, the question isn't whether Muslims will take over Europe, but whether Europe will simply expel them or kill any number of them first. Sound far-fetched? How would the Holocaust have sounded to an educated German (or Brit, or American) in 1932? Europe is a killer continent. When the chips are down, it will kill again.

Meanwhile, Europe's Muslims are behaving so stupidly that their folly can't be measured with any tools at our disposal. Even as British pols pander to radical clerics, the average Brit has had enough of coddling mullahs who preach the destruction of all non-Muslims (and closing the pubs). In mid-July, in Germany, the major organizations representing the millions of Turkish residents refused to come to a conference held by the chancellor to address integration. The Turkish leaders demanded--demanded--that the German parliament first rescind a new immigration law that would have prevented Turks from importing child-brides, isolating them as virtual prisoners and beating them to death. Oh, and the Germans also wanted new immigrants to have a vocabulary of 300 German words upon arrival--just enough to say, "Help, husband killing me." No self-respecting Turk was going to stand for that.

So if the pattern repeats itself, after insisting that we all “give peace a chance” they will again have to be protected and restored from without by people stuck with the effects and aftermath of their ideology.

Thanks a lot, spanky.

La propagande anti-américaine se glisse dans les moindres recoins, au point qu'on peut se demander si ce n'est pas une sorte d'exercice de style

La propagande socio-démocrate (et anti-américaine) se glisse dans les moindres recoins, au point qu'on peut parfois se demander si ce n'est pas une sorte d'exercice de style.

Any opportunity in the European press is good to exercise one's anti-Americanism, concludes Stéphane, all the while (of course) hailing Europe's state interventionism.

La pique est évidemment dans la fin de l'article, qui lance quelques slogans d'une façon totalement gratuite …

Pour l'auteur de l'article, une enfance saine, c'est la souscription à une assurance-maladie. Difficile d'avoir une vision plus socio-démocrate de l'existence.

The Big Question

As early as 1932, Winston Churchill said: "France, though armed to the teeth, is pacifist to the core"

writes Thomas Sowell in his column regarding "moral paralysis" and "what is still the magic mantra today — 'negotiations'."

History may be interesting but it is the present and the future that pose the crucial question: Is America today the France of yesterday?

…Not only the history of the UN, but the history of the League of Nations before it, demonstrates again and again that going to such places is a way for weak-kneed leaders of democracies to look like they are doing something when in fact they are doing nothing.

…Incidentally, Hitler made some of the best anti-war statements of the 1930s. He knew that this was what the Western democracies wanted to hear -- and that it would keep them morally paralyzed while he continued building up his military machine to attack them.

…the big question is: Are we France? Are we morally paralyzed, perhaps fatally?

„ La Jeune Garde Socialiste ”

How to look like an idiot: make a simple case of your political opinions sound gallant and rebellious: give yourself funny and anachronistic names the way creepy Euro-aristocrats always have.

I’m in sync with you!

We assist, seems to me it, as the “Great mass from the rear” of Serge Halimi’s book and whom one can find in the index: “D.O.L”. I didn’t see the videos, but just read the introductory notes and some comments. I voted for the first socialist time at in 2nd presidential round for “none of the above” and against SN [ed.: pacifist-leaning National Teachers Union].
I am more in phase with the speech of Olivier Besançenot and I make a point of specifying that I am not member of any “party”. As long as some will want to be khalife in the place of the khalife… It is really a question of knowing if a minority of people will be able to stop this steamrolling “fascistic” “xenophobia” neo-liberal even with (secret prisons where torture in “democratic” countries is supposedly practised…)

Are the media (TV and consort) controlled by arms merchants? Does that not remind anybody of anything?

Damn the BOSSES! Otherwise pretend it’s 1927 when you’re in your thirties trying to hide you receding hairline and the crow’s feet at your eyes. I mean do any of these twits seem at all “jeune” to you? They’re throwbacks to a time in Europe where even individual, unenlightened self-interest trumped their own ideology and even societal meltdown.

But remember, always demand tolerance and fairness in the midst of your calling everyone who disagrees with you Hitler. One commenter was keepin’ it real, or as real as it get to them:

Ne jetez pas la pierre à la femme adultère, je suis derriére.

Customer warming

McDonald's reminds Paris residents that their restaurants are among the few eating establishments that are air-conditioned. That and the fact that customers may buy just a coffee and sit down without paying extra (Paris cafés jack up the price for table service) means that McDonalds are about the only establishments in the city where elderly French on a retirement pension can afford to go while remaining confortable.


Say no to customer warming. Our restaurants are air-conditioned.

Ever feel like you've been cheated?

Dissident Frogman has a go at the language police.

Soirée Maurice G. Dantec

Pour la sortie de son nouveau roman, "Artefact, machines à écrire 1.0", Une soirée spéciale aura lieu le 11 septembre 2007 à Paris en présence de Maurice G. Dantec. Renseignez-vous rapidement. Le nombre de places est limité.

Sneers for Fears

The BBC has been whinging on The World Service all day about the US Federally mandated minimum wage (which only 0.32% of earners are paid,) neglecting the fact that the US has had a minimum wage since 1938. That was fully 61 years before the UK introduced theirs in 1999 more as a PR stunt than anything else.

The rise, long awaited in the US by those looking to exploit as many gullible people as possible with a “social justice” argument, who want to make the minimum wage’s use as a provisional and on-the-job training mechanism for employers as permanent as possible for as many people as possible.

Distortions and outright fabrications about the war: When troops come back complaining there aren't enough fights to go around, you are not losing

Much of the reporting on the war in Iraq suffers from [an] abandonment of integrity in pursuit of short-term profit

writes Patrick S Lasswell (quoting in the process Michael Totten's post about the media being "a total distortion machine" ["Baghdad is gigantic and sprawling. It looks much less ramshackle from the air than I expected. … The sheer enormity of the place puts the almost daily car bomb attacks into perspective. The odds that you personally will be anywhere near the next car bomb or IED are microscopic."]).

Even though it will cost the free people of the world massively if the United States abandons the Coalition and Iraq, the media continues to present distortions and outright fabrications about the conditions of the war. By maintaining a bubble of panic, they keep their sagging ratings afloat. But this panic is a bubble that may not last until a retreat occurs, and the bursting of that bubble must be terrifying to people profiting from it.

This weekend I talked with a Marine friend of mine who recently came back from a tour in Anbar province. His base was attacked (incompetently) twice while he was there, and that used to be the worst place in the whole country. He was disappointed in the level of action he saw and felt that as Marines his unit should have been rotated to the active fighting in Baghdad. When troops come back complaining that there aren't enough fights to go around, you are not losing.

If the Iraq panic bubble bursts before a retreat is forced on our otherwise undefeated military, the impact on the perpetrators of the bubble may be catastrophic.

If you call "constantly thinking about your retirement" thinking

French leaders tell the French to stop thinking and get on the stick.

De la merde entre les deux oreilles

Just a fluid filled space. French civil servant gets by using a tiny brain in a fluid filled cranium.

When the doctors went to look at his brain to see if the problem lay there, they found, well, pretty much nothing but a great black hole.

Never ask a boy to do a man's job

Djibouti gets fed up with France's looking down its nose at the natives and reaches out to the USA. They've had enough of France and its condescending 70s world view.

Au sujet de ce petit pays de merde européen et sa façon de se comporter en Afrique :

Ali Youssouf s'insurge toutefois contre une vision économique de la France "vieille de trente ans". "Le monde a changé ! Djibouti a d'autres ambitions que de demeurer un petit pays qui vit de l'aide de la France. Laissez-moi vous dire que le rôle économique de la France est proche de zéro ! Nous répétons sans cesse que le secteur privé français doit venir prendre sa part dans la vie économique de Djibouti. Or il ne le fait pas : personne ne vient, personne n'investit !" lance-t-il avant de conclure : "La France est en train de rater une occasion historique. Qu'elle cesse de croire que Djibouti n'est qu'une caserne de légionnaires !"

The French That We Will Never Forget

Month of the Living Dead

In the nation of Stepford Children given to synchronized operation meltdown in August, the businesses that actually remain in open actually merit a newspaper article.

August vacationers, like tourists, will have some difficulty this year knowing if restaurants are opened or closed. Some establishments that normally remain open all summer will close their doors on the week of August 15, while others normally closed this time of the year will make an exception and stay open.

Though more in decades past, the campers and overstuffed hatchbacks worthy of Jed Clampett jam the highways to such an extent that the folks even have a name: « Les Aoûtiens »... and they’re here to drink your blood.

As for the rest of them – mighty green of you to stick around, but isn’t it just because you’re broke?

Meanwhile Plantu emerged from his absence into a narcotics induced haze comparing Sarko to a winning cyclist doped up on yellow-jersey mojo juice of Sarko with an ever growing phallic-symbol of a nose.

Remembering Daniel Pearl

Never mind Hollywood's moral equivalence and other hypocritical fluff. The real tributes are elsewhere.

François, ton MoDem 9600 fout le camp

The steady French drumbeat of anti-Americanism. Hapless Presidential candidate and big-time loser François Bayrou thinks that French political power has been Americanized by Sarkozy.

Strategic yogurt production

Villepin isn't around to protect French strategic yogurt production anymore. France's phoney poet laureat and racist ex-Prime Sinister is now busy tidying up his home after it was raided a few weeks ago. Now all on its own, Danone acts like an entreprise voyou and attacks its Chinese partners but it might soon join the Pepsi Generation.

Peace? More like piece of ass

United Nations staffers demand that you bow down before their purple helmeted soldiers of peace.

No talent hacks

France's feeble attempt to influence popular culture.

The French are just doing their job

Le Monde Al-Jazeera on the Seine spinning non-news into the usual anti-US, pro-terrorist rubbish. Barely a mention in the French preSS of France's secret underground prisons (the link is to the original 'Merde in France' post on this subject which quotes a Libération newspaper article no longer online -- Libération only keeps them online for a short period. For French language verbatim copy of article see here).

'It starts off by being stripped naked in front of 10 police officers including two women, gratutious humiliation is used to break you down.' '... worst jail that you can possibly imagine.' 'Not even a hole to go to the bathroom. You have to piss against a wall and you sleep in piss on the concrete floor.' The torture victim demands 'the immediate shutdown of this secret underground prison'. It's not at Abu Ghraib, it's in Marseille, France.

France isolation watch

Sarkozy is looking to rejig the Euro in order to boost French competitiveness without having to subject the country to painful reforms. No pain, no gain. Other EU countries have no truck with Sarko's inbred French brand of commerical and financial interventionism. It's a genetic French trait handed down from some idiot called Colbert (not the Colbert idiot on American TV).

Clutching at straws

Dedicated to all the American-bashing French that love to blather on about American militarism.


No, that's not taking place at the Red Square. That's Bastille Day in Paris as illustrated on a French government web site.

Four on the floor

He's headhunted Kouchner, Lang, and Védrine ... and it looks like with his encouragement, Strauss-Kahn might soon be operating in some higher sphere. Sarko's first accomplishment has been to leave the French Socialist Party splayed and gutted and shamelessly writhing on the killing floor. Qu'il pisse du sang par tous les trous.

Get a job!

That's what I say to the dirty fucking hippies I always see hanging around my neck of the Paris woods. Pas de pitié pour les cul-de-jattes et autres bras cassés.

I Guess They Need it to Make Them Feel Better

They should stick to their colonic cleansing parties and various useless “race for the cure” displays of moral vanity. Hey, they’re just trying desperately to “keep it real.”

When Gareth Groves brought home his new Hummer SUV, he knew his eco-friendly neighbors disapproved. But he didn't expect this. His Hummer only lasted five days.

On Monday, two masked men were seen taking a bat to every window, knifing each tire and scratching a message into the body - "For The Environ."

Alas, the “greening” of Washington DC by resident’s of one its’ elitist, wealthy, blueblood neighborhoods: a hummer owned by a hockey shirt wearing kind of dude is vandalized in a neighborhood populated by people who are just now after ten years barely questioning the sanity of their “eco-tourism”.

He says some people who have driven by and seen the Hummer since the attack glare at him in satisfaction.

Neighbors admit they don't like gas-guzzling Hummers.

By the way, people like this disapprove of nearly everything that it’s fashionable to at any given moment. If there was a spa-treatment that could turn an idle MILF into a pitiable Andean peasant they’d be standing in line for the first time in their lives for it.

Meanwhile, Dad is pretending that he knows baseball stats, and REAL former Andean peasants are raising their children for them. They really should stick to their campaign for magical non-violent regime change in Tibet on the way to their “farms” in New England.

All About “Peace” No Doubt

The left compares Bush to Hitler. Chirac compared self to Hitler.



Besides, I wonder just what ”combat” or “challenge” Chirac is talking about when he’s dramatizing himself? The “challenge” to do what? Competative embezzlement for sleazy old coots?

Don’t Just Stand There! Start “Truthing” !

There was a plane, building, and fuel involved. Surely it was a hoax!
Those truthers had better get cracking and start "truthing" - to be intellectually consistent with their Aryan science that claims that planes, (if they really exist!) can demolish buildings and ignite fires at all - that is, if fuel, buildings, and fires themselves aren't just a devious capitalist invention imposed on humanity by Bu$hChimpyHitlerburton - because a “truth” from 2001 isn’t about actual events, it’s always about something else that’s been chafing the underoos at bong-smoking losers since 1967.

Go ahead - use that "truthy" logic with the families and friends of these victims. See how they react.

Maybe They Vandalize Because They Have a Small Schmekel or Something

New European integration scheme not unlike old European integration scheme.

A Holocaust memorial at a Berlin train station where tens of thousands of Jews were once shipped to Nazi concentration camps was vandalized overnight, police said Wednesday.

Several candles near the train tracks at Grunewald station had been knocked over, and an Israeli flag was burned, Berlin police said in a statement. Such acts are considered crimes in Germany.

The Grunewald memorial is called "Platform 17," commemorating the more than 50,000 Jews transported from the station to concentration camps.

In case you’re wondering, Grünewald station isn’t exactly in ‘da hood. It’s in the boonies, if Berlin had anything you could call the boonies.

- h/t Clarsonimus

Sarkozy's Early Days Under the Spotlight

A newspaper in the American South once claimed readership and reporting that covered Dixie like the dew. In the league of cynical response, that line linked up with a put-down which lives on with real universality: yeah, a mile wide, and an inch deep.

Thus does John Vinocur start his article in the International Herald Tribune about France under "a new leader who could well be called the omnipresident and who "has leapt into French life as the man who will change everything."

The hitch is that on inspection the depth of Sarkozy's convictions — or in many cases their definition — has not become clear.

The mile-wide, inch-deep label would be cruel and hasty. Still, for early days, the contradictions are already there. Examples:

… Last week, when a whiff of renewal concerning French Middle East policy was in the air - Sarkozy quite reasonably referred to Hezbollah as "terrorist" - the presidential bureaucracy reverted to form 24 hours later, reaffirming France's opposition to including Hezbollah on the European Union's list of terrorist organizations.

A day or two later, the president, who as the campaigning Sarkozy openly expressed his unwillingness to let Russia strengthen its strategic influence over Europe, was on the phone with Vladimir Putin. Gazprom had just picked Total, the French energy concern, to assist in the development of its vast Stokman gas reserves.

The deal limited Total's involvement to that of a hired hand, with Gazprom controlling 100 percent ownership of the gas the new field will produce. Much of France's requirement happily comes from non-Russian sources and nuclear power, yet the now presidential Sarkozy passed up on the occasion to express concern about a regime that uses gas and oil as a means of pressure on other EU members.

This was not a new France speaking out on what its new leader, two months earlier, said was on his mind.

Concerning the EU itself, Sarkozy's voice, rather than solely that of a nation embodying change and cooperation as its new European creed, alternately has been one of the old self-interested France, comfortable with slipping around its obligations as a team player.

Sarkozy has talked up both a European industrial policy, which decoded comes out as reflexive French protectionism, and greater political involvement in policy making at the European Central Bank, which basically boils down to a desire to bolster French competitiveness through a cheaper euro.

…So, where and when do the breadth of Sarkozy's presidential presence, his considerable double-edged language, and - based on performance so far - the legitimate questions about the variable level of his commitment to change run into political reality, and/or trouble?

Meanwhile, Bernard-Henri Lévy chimes in with a book review (although a reader complains that as "we progress through the [review's] seemingly endless Proustian sentences, it becomes increasingly difficult to tell whether Henri-Lévy is writing about Sarkozy or about another subject particularly close to his heart, namely Bernard Henri-Lévy"). In Sarkozy's Testimony ("two [French] books combined into one for publication in English"), BHL tells us, we

discover a young man, apparently happy, whose evident good humor seems to be a part of his political agenda. Much has been said about his postelection escapade in Malta on the ostentatious yacht of the French billionaire Vincent Bolloré, which some have called Sarkozy's first political mistake. What if it was the other way around? What if the gesture was really in keeping with the part of his project that calls for unguilting us when it comes to luxury, success and money, even at the risk of going whole hog into bad taste and kitsch? What if this young president wanted to reconcile France, if not with actual happiness, then with the signs of happiness that our puritanism, our depression and fear of glitter and success, have long discredited and suppressed?

…we discover — as will Americans — the first of our presidents for whom our relationship with the rest of the world is so clearly inspired by the best result of the antitotalitarian movements of the '70s and '80s, namely a fidelity to Israel that will no longer waver in the face of "ups and downs in our interests in Arab societies"; a sensitivity to genocide and in particular to the Holocaust, that "stain on the 20th century and all of human history"; a refusal of that "cultural relativism" that would allow us to look at the Chechen drama or the fate of Chinese political prisoners differently from events happening in Europe; a true concern that human rights be respected in relationships between states, between democracies and dictatorships; and last but not least, his view of America, for which, beginning in his preface, he declares an outright and unfeigned admiration if not love, contrasting sharply with the stubborn anti-Americanism that for decades has been part of the platform of much of the French political class.

So in light of all that, why did I not vote for him? And why for the entire campaign, unlike most of my comrades in the ideological battles of the last 30 years, unlike most of my friends from the leftist anticommunist movement born during the 1970s, did I fight against this man who seems so likable?

… Where would the United States be if it were not ashamed of its past of slavery, then of racism? Where would France be if — under the pretext that, as Sarkozy says, we have not "produced" a Hitler (true) or Stalin (unclear, given how much the French intelligentsia participated in the creation of the Stalinist vulgate) or Pol Pot (rather doubtful, given that Pol Pot and his men all trained in Paris, in the very cradle of human rights) — we were simply to sing together the sinister "proud to be French" refrain the new president keeps humming, which amounts to finessing, for example, the enormous anti-Semitism of the Dreyfus era, or the huge collaborationist enthusiasm of the cultural and administrative elite in the darkest Vichy years, or the practice of state-sanctioned torture in the last years of the war in Algeria?

Red, Not Blue

Celebrating the “strength” of the overvalued Euro, our intrepid Le Monde cartoonist can’t even bring himself to use the color blue. Instead, while favoring book-burning red, he doesn’t seem to realize that he lives in an export economy where their overpriced rubbish now costs even more.

This euro-bravado is funnier still given that it comes from a place where an extended global economic boom nearly passed them up entirely, and only now seems to be kicking in after about a decade of fits and starts.

Want Fries With That?

French people are not against McDonald's. They are against the Bush administration," José Bové, the radical farmer and French presidential candidate, said in an interview.

How, HOW do you get to the point where you make something as meaningless as a retail outlet that is a vast sanitary improvement over the cruddy corner “Sandwicherie” an object of “philosophical” discussions, a bit of shorthand for a nation five times as populous that they refuse to understand, and a dagger of the mind?

Easy. Have an empty life, nothing to say, and let a unexplainable cancerous well of envy grow inside you that you actively ignore:

Last year, McDonald's sales in France grew by 8%, almost doubling its growth in American sales, which have also rebounded in recent years. Every 12 months, one out of two French people visit McDonald's at least once. Annually, they consume 22 million McDonald's salads, 60,000 tons of French fries, 32,000 tons of beef patties, 12,000 tons of chicken, and 600 million buns.

"We hate it and go to it. It's our paradox," a journalist for the French magazine Challenges, Alice Mérieux, said. "We're very anti-American in principle, but individually, if you're going to the movies and have to eat in 10 minutes, you go to McDonald's."

Things are truly hopeless when Merlin the Wizard Bové himself barely realizes that Mickey D’s predates (even “semioticly” in the French left’s banal tradition of illogic) the object of his weird fixation, George Bush.

It takes an infantile mind to associate a product, logo, or fast food joint for that matter with the characterized culture of a whole society. Nonetheless, a culture so obsessed with touting its’ own ubiquity of intellectualism is reduced to being blinkered by just that. To do otherwise just wouldn’t be simple enough, I guess.

-H/T to Valerie

Fahrenhype 911

Luís Afonso Assumpção brings Fahrenhype 911 to the people who think Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 911 is the final word in the history of the Bush administration and modern America…

Sarkozy's Promises of a Greater Police Presence, More Police Officers, and Heightened Security Confirmed

22, v'là les poulets !

It’s Really Very Simple: Heads I Win, Tails You Lose!

The radio 4 way: when you feel no need to prove your throbbing, pulsating hatred for something, and don’t even have a chance of arguing it under the cover of bad-journalism, you do it in the form of a play.

Called to Account!
Acclaimed play asking if Tony Blair was guilty of war crimes.

Normally, they call this broadcast segment the “classic radio play” which almost always ALWAYS revolves around the early days of Communism, the Soviet revolution, or some other subject that cramps the mind of the most fantasist of the left in middle age. They can tell themselves listening through an exercise in their self-pitying angst has some sort of traditional “classicism,” and as such something respectable about it. The incredibly sad part isn’t just the characterization opportunities that they use to throw in the occasional objectified American, but the “class struggle” Rorschach signaling that always seems to use an Irish accent for the oppressed™, but that the heroine is always a put upon young female whose role is rewritten from the original form of condescension as a weakling in need of rescue to the condescension as a put-upon secular Saint “empowered” in spite of the absence of the intelligence, resourcefulness, or decency evident on any human not raised on decades Gramscian organic fertilizer.

Thereafter, yet another installment of the self-absorbed “Women Sour,” in search of new and exciting victims you never knew were worth caring about. As I write this, they are presently hosting an “investigative” piece about the conspiracy that medicine has against women, and that the problem can be solved in some kind of grant or funding that they’re arguing for. Don’t confuse this with the “Womens’ Hour Drama”, which is more or less the under-the-radar “Real IRA” to the nominal radio drama’s Gerry Adams.

Of course they refuse to count among them the genocides tacitly caused by pacifism.

For My Money, There Are Two Kinds of Men That Walk the Earth

Men of action; and all others (thanks to Valerie)…


Randolph C White (a different sort of intellectual with different sorts of theories) continues:

[Regarding] the best and the brightest that we have in this country … that unique band of brotherhood that is the infantrymen … Their moral clarity won't allow them to sit back and let someone else provide the blanket of freedom that we here today cherish and so many others take for granted. …

Your head will not be filled with the empty theory of those who in actuality know very little, because they lack the intestinal fortitude to commit to anything that requires risk. I'm speaking of the snide arrogant sort who spends the day blaming America for every wrong in the world before going home to sleep at night under that blanket of freedom provided by better men. Better men just like you…

Yes Menning the Yes Men

La Baf's Washington bureau helps the Bureaucrashers trap the Yes Men.

Thump, thump, thump...

Via American Digest, we meet a typical propagandized European who can’t quite consolidate the media plonk he’s been digesting and the facts: prattling on and on about the environment, he forgets that without America, there might never have been a movement for clean air and clean water.

What I do mind is that Americans are setting a bad example for everyone else; as a small example the streets of Britain are filled with grotesquely large 4x4s. I am quite sure the fashion comes from across the pond. As another, the Chinese might well ask why they should restrict their economic growth when America already uses many times more fuel than they do - and they'd be right.

Thump, thump, thump... No Londoner has ever thought for himself then. Eh? Is the critic’s assumption that they’re incapable of ti?

What I do mind is various American corporations not only trying to foist their Frankenstein food on us, but trying to make it impossible for us to tell that they are doing it - did you know that Monsanto are claiming in various court cases that labelling of food containing GM soya is against free trade treaties?

Thump, thump, thump... Whatever you do, don’t mind the omnipresence of that Europe, Inc., that chosen champion that gets subsidies, putsches, and industrial espionage services from the all caring, all fair emotional crutch called the bloated, overbearing state.

As for the last paragraph - well, personally, I don't dive a damn whether Americans kill themselves through gross overeating and under-exercising, filling their food with chemicals for short-term profit or turning their cities' air into poison gas - not to mention handing terrorists billions of dollars to kill Americans (and others) with.

Thump, thump, thump... Pay no notice to the man behind the curtain, the one that continues to coddle any dictator with natural resources which can provide an economic advantage, or for that matter, seven centuries of it.

More curious still is that the commenter misuses the moniker “Fletcher Christian”, try to make himself out to be a dashing rebellious hero who was in fact a thin-skinned, emotional pedophile.

Too tall, too short. Too fit, too fat. Too this, too that, and so on. Is it any wonder that the quickest way for a European to make someone detest hin is merely to call attention to their received wisdom.

Stalin II

There is a misperception that [Ernesto "Che" Guevara] was a free spirit. He had cold Stalinist personality. He used to sign his early correspondence "Stalin II." He said early on that he saw the solution to all the world's problems behind (the) Iron Curtain. But this was not some hippie dippie Marxist, Guevara said in speech in 1962 that he regarded the very spirit of rebellion as anti-revolutionary. Figure that out, he said individualism must disappear in Cuba. If you tried to do your own thing under his regime you wound up in a prison camp.

Humberto Fontova researched the man behind the image, exploring why pop culture seems so enamored of Che Guevara. Speaking to dozens of Cubans who knew and fought with Guevara (1928-1967), Fontova pieced together a very different picture of Guevara for his book.

He had an arrogant nature. I interviewed people who visited him and tried to save their sons from firing squad executions without trial. He liked to toy with them. He liked to pick up the phone in front of weeping mothers and bark out, "Execute the Fernandez boy right now!"

He was clinically a sadist. Fidel, you could call a psychopath. Murders didn't affect him one way or another. For him, it was a utilitarian slaughter to consolidate his one-man rule.

Che, from all the people I talked to, relished the slaughter. He had a section of a wall knocked out of his second story office so he could watch his beloved firing squads at work.

…Alan Colmes of "Hannity and Colmes" once asked me, "Why are these stories coming out now as opposed to 20 years ago? All of a sudden, you discover all this horrible information on Che."

I said, "No, Alan, people have been talking about this since 1959, but it never made it past the mainstream media filter." That monopoly is over, so our side can tell its story to middle America. I like to think this book is an example of that.

Whinging Your Way to Utopia

If this Tintin story is as racist as the “campaigners” allege, and it is so grossly offensive to the general public, why then, hasn’t that a lack of demand pulled it off of the shelf? It was published in 1931 – after Marx’s Das Kapital, but before Mein Kampf which are also still on the shelf and have been exceedingly more harmful to civilization than a old-timey Belgian comic book.

An official British racism watchdog recommended on Wednesday that bookshops across the country remove copies of a comic book which tells the tale of fictional Belgian hero Tintin's adventures in the Congo.
Britain's Commission for Racial Equality (CRE) recommended that "Tintin in the Congo" be removed from shelves after it received a complaint from a member of the public who had seen it in a branch of the Borders chain of book stores.

To understand the meddlesome mindset of folks of the ‘campaigning’ ilk, the fact that it could go unpurchased or ignored would not enter their minds. While banning a comic book gives them the Tipper Gore air, Mein Kampf and Das Kapital would be defended as something use as a barometer of europe's history.

The same is true for all of three, whatever it is someone wants to ban. Besides, all three of these tomes seem to get scooped up by bipeds under 17 anyway.

(h/t to Ikonos.)

I still wonder how could ONE complaining customer be heard if certain well placed political outfits weren't willing to make something of it, and appealing to an already popular cause? In the pedantic world of contemporary advocacy the whole story can harldy be seen as some kind of brave challenge against a sea of iniquity, since one can hardly imagine any significant number of people in the western world in the past 20 years actually being for racism. Why too was Borders was targeted and not, say, an exclusively British bookseller? Probably because it would appear to come too close to home.

A game we have all played for nearly fifty years whose only winners have been corrupt governments and the international development industry

Aid can alleviate immediate misery and that is why we love it. Charity is a profoundly human response to all those images that pull on our heartstrings. But all evidence points to the maddening conclusion that, in the long run, aid not only has no positive effect on economic growth, it may even undermine it.

Discussing the TED conference, Jennifer Brea describes "a game we have all played for nearly fifty years whose only winners have been corrupt governments and the international development industry" (thanks to Ashbrook's Joseph Knippenberg).

Andrew Mwenda, an outspoken Ugandan journalist who was jailed last year for criticizing President Museveni, lambasted the Western world's "international cocktail of good intentions" for robbing Africa of its future. After all, what country has ever gotten rich from aid? What Africa needs is investment.

…Here's a radical idea: if we really want to help, why not ask Africans, not their governments, how they perceive the challenges before them, the dreams they have for the future, and the resources they think they need to realize them?

Instead, we let a well-intentioned Irish rock star, a Jewish-American economist, and their Hollywood cohort become the voice and face of Africa.

And in the process, the story of the other Africa, the Africa that is dynamic, creative, and wants to work as a partner and the leader of its own future, is being drowned out by the clarion cry of the anti-poverty glitterati–and our own appetites for gripping, salacious headlines of war, poverty, and grief.

Now Clinton, There Was a President/an American We Respected!

It's all (its only) about Bush!! (Merci to Hervé)

Jacques Chirac renversé sur sa chaise, la tête en arrière, à ronfler bruyamment. La scène paraît surréaliste, mais d'après Alastair Campbell, l'ancien chef de la communication de Tony Blair, elle se serait bel et bien produite lors d'une réunion dans le cadre du G8 en juillet 2000. La scène se passe à Tokyo. Le secrétaire américain au Trésor, Larry Summers, monte à la tribune. Le public ne lui est pas acquis d'avance : Bill Clinton est retardé par des négociations, le chancelier allemand Gerhard Schroeder se désintéresse de la réunion, Tony Blair estime que c'est "la réunion la plus inutile" à laquelle il n'a jamais assisté. Quant au président français, il est arrivé le dernier.

Le secrétaire américaine au Trésor se lance alors dans un discours fleuve. C'est alors que la scène se produit : "Chirac s'est renversé sur sa chaise, la tête en arrière, il a ronflé bruyamment, puis après quelques minutes il a poussé un grognement sonore selon Tony Blair et il a crié 'trop long, trop long' en anglais pendant que Summers n'arrêtait pas de parler", raconte Alastair Campbell, dans ses mémoires. La salle est choquée, à commencer par Tony Blair qui "a dit qu'il n'avait jamais vu une manifestation aussi impressionnante d'impolitesse et d'anti-américanisme", se souvient Alastair Campbell [emphasis mine].

More examples of nothing-but-the-deepest-respect-for-Americans/ for-presidents-other-than-Bush (such as Clinton) can be found in my book.

… quand Javier Solana leva son verre en décembre 1996 pour porter un toast à Warren Christopher, qui assistait à son dernier déjeuner au QG de l’Otan (il faisait ses adieux à la politique en tant que ministre des affaires étrangères de Bill Clinton), le ministre des affaires étrangères français... se leva et quitta la pièce. La place de Hervé de Charrette fut prise par l’ambassadeur français à l’Otan, lequel ambassadeur (Gérard Errara) tourna le dos aux personnalités présentes pendant la durée du toast pour parler avec un assistant. Imagine-t’on la réaction si un ministre étranger — américain, de surcroît ! — avait traité un Français de la même manière ? Les Français, des plus hautes instances au dernier des citoyens, n’en croiraient pas leurs yeux et secoueraient leur tête de dégoût devant un tel manque de savoir-vivre.

C’est un épisode parmi d’autres qui montre que, contrairement à la légende qu’on veut véhiculer aujourd’hui, les relation avec l’Amérique de Clinton n’étaient pas au plus beau (sauf quand le président démocrate s’alignait sur la position française, bien sûr).

But the Chipmunk on the Right Isn’t Even Bald!?!

While rose worshipping fascists accuse the media of being in the pocket of the right, the media run yet another apologetic documentary about François Mitterand. Yet another one that would eventually make the lumpenproletariat believe that Premier Chernyenko was an Olympic athlete.

‘Ey! What’s Not To Love Dere Anyway?

Can anyone tell me why making fun of separatists is so much fun? I mean, it isn’t like they don’t want to get paid to hate the rest of humanity anyway.

BBC: The Little Revisionists That Could

Quality time with Papa. How cute.

Little Green Grease Spot

Splat.

Yup. Everything We Do is all about YOU, Man!

Goofy comments about the recent roll-out of the Boeing 787 were sure to pop up out of no-where as they always do, even in “classy” publications like the Nouvel Observateur.

quel bel oiseau mécanique, sans nul doute les commerciaux de Boeing ont fait du lobbying à merveille pour atteindre pareil chiffre en vente!

Il est beau de voir la technologie au service de l'homme, les américains nous donnent une belle image de leur esprit de créativité, mais ecornée par bien des crimes.....

translation:

what a beautiful bird, without any doubt the marketing types at Boeing did some serious lobbying to reach similar sales figures! It’s great to see technology being put to the service of man. Americans give us a beautiful indication of their creative spirit, but it’s chipped away at by many crimes.....

Biiiiig circle! Industry, crimes against humanity... all the same thing because the American is an idea – one idea, one so many of these fabulous continental intellects try to fit in a single, very small box. One of their imagining.

The typical take by those socialized out of their common sense is that a business like Boeing’s shouldn’t primarily be about business, but that when it does succeed, it must have been lobbying. Talk about projection!
That someone would imagine (as so many Euro-brainiacs do) that every part of America somehow coordinates to say something to them and them alone is a rather typical recurring feature of the America Derangement Syndrome that we get so many laughs at here at ¡ No Pasarán! Nearly as much as the amusement the people who say that stuff give us. You know we’re always looking for that gold medalist in the crackpot Olympics.

- Merci buckets to Michael
for the heads-up..

Otherwise Returning to the Middle Ages

In Quebecistan, it’s always 1938. It really isn’t much of a surprise when you imagine just how much the province that has done so much to guilt trip and bilk the Anglophones that they have a hate-hate relationship with has grown into a complex of Cultural Nationalism and Socialism. So much so, they might as well try a beer hall putsch, and then seek compensation from Ottawa.

Brussels Journal Reports:

Some three weeks ago, in close succession, anti-Semitic cartoons – at least two of which appeared to have been borrowed from Der Sturmer – were published on the editorial pages of three mainstream newspapers in the Canadian province of Quebec. The cartoons concerned the meeting between Mario Dumont, the leader of Quebec’s opposition party, the Action Democratique du Quebec, with fundraisers who had traditionally supported Quebec’s Liberal Party – the party currently in power. Some of the fundraisers were Jewish businessmen.

That some of them are Jewish is more than enough to stoke these primitives who have in the past and up to the present day, have used their own “cultural exception” be a fig leaf for their bigotry, racism, and tradition of corrupt political political blackmail.



Soldier, diplomat, and statesmanlike Governor General Georges-Phil Vanier would be in tears.

The MSM article suggests the local population is against an American base "when in fact the situation is quite the opposite"

The article about the protests surrounding the expansion of the U.S. Army garrison on the military airfield (Neighbors of U.S. Army in Italy reach their limit, July 4) caught my attention

writes Christian Braham, an American citizen who has lived for over 30 years in Vicenza, Italy (his father is a former U.S. Army officer and his mother is Italian), to the International Herald Tribune.

I was dismayed by the tone of the article because it suggests that the entire local population is against the building of the new base when in fact the situation is quite the opposite.

The base is one of the region's largest employers. Had it shut down, hundreds of Italians would have lost their jobs. The economic impact of this garrison is huge; and most locals are aware of this. The majority of Italians see this as an opportunity for increased jobs, contracts and everything else that goes with this kind of project.

Indeed, while the IHT version of a previous NYT article (by Peter Kiefer) saw nothing wrong with generalizing to all the nation's citizens (Italians protest expansion of U.S. base), it is only towards the end of the more recent piece that we learn that "the protesters are not representative of this city of 114,000", and even then, this information (needless to say) has to be "nuanced" by the fact that it is the opinion of one person and that, the opinion of someone on the right (one Enrico Hüllweck who is Vicenza's center-right mayor).

Uninsured in America

And loving it.



Any way you shake it, it beats Canuckistan.

Europe, Your Fly Is Down. It’s Always Been Down.

This is what a rendition flight is for, and this is why there is a Gitmo. It is simply because the US does not have the laws that permit nearly every European state to administratively detain suspects, often indefinitely – something that they’ve had since they've had modern laws to reason their way around. So stop whining, grow some huevos. You're overding the passive-agressive beaten wife routine.

Political Correctness in Japan: The comment "tramples on the feelings of victims", so… Shut the F**k Up and Lose Your Job!

No mention, of course, is made of the (many more) Japanese people that would have been victims had the bombs not been dropped — which (needless to say) was the entire point behind Fumio Kyuma's comment in the first place!

In a public appearance [last] Saturday — the unofficial start of the campaign for [Japan's] upcoming election — Kyuma said that dropping the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 "ended the war," adding, "I think that it couldn't be helped."

Otherwise, Kyuma said, the war would have dragged on and the Soviet Union would have ended up occupying northern Japan.

…The comments by Kyuma, who represents Nagasaki in the lower house, caused widespread anger by apparently treating lightly Japan's status as the only country ever targeted by nuclear weapons. Although the debate over the use of nuclear arms is not the taboo it once was, Japan's self-image as a special victim of World War II remains deeply rooted, even as revisionist politicians like Abe have tried to minimize Japan's militarist past.

Kyuma had to resign as Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's defense minister (and was replaced by Yuriko Koike, Japan's first female defense chief). His comments, more specifically, said:

"I understand that the bombing ended the war, and I think that it couldn't be helped," Kyuma said.

Kyuma, who is from Nagasaki, said the bombing caused great suffering in the city, but he said he did not resent the United States because the bombs prevented the Soviet Union from entering the war with Japan, according to Kyodo news agency.

Kyuma said if Japan had not surrendered, northern Japan could have been occupied by the Soviet Union, which had begun invading Manchuria on the same day Nagasaki was attacked, according to Japanese media.

The remarks, rare for a Japanese cabinet minister, were quickly criticized by atomic bomb victims.

What the MSM Missed About Iraq's Jihadists, Insurgents, and Freedom Fighters

At first … they would only target Shia, but over time the new al Qaeda directed attacks against Sunni, and then anyone who thought differently. The official reported that on a couple of occasions in Baqubah, al Qaeda invited to lunch families they wanted to convert to their way of thinking. In each instance, the family had a boy, he said, who was about 11 years old. As LT David Wallach interpreted the man’s words, I saw Wallach go blank and silent. He stopped interpreting for a moment. I asked Wallach, “What did he say?”…

Read what the local sheik of “al Ameriki tribe” (i.e., Lt. Wallach) answered… (two paragraphs above Michael Yon's first photo (more insurgent courage here))

Crank up the Rationalization Engine!

And fire up the Heisenberg compensators while you’re at it! It’s time to protect the precious, vulnerable, and strategic yogurt production.

French business radio channel BFM reported, citing an unnamed source close to the matter.

'Never has Pepsi's appetite for Danone been so strong,' the channel cited its source as saying.

Yessiree, you heard that right. Rennet culture is a birthright! Not only that, corporate entities have grown emotively thirsty! Pepsi, you anthropomorphically alluring little corporate minx!

Clearstream Scandal Catching Up With Villepin

The great hero of the UN's Iraq crisis seems about to get his come-uppance…

What with Nicolas Sarkozy further undermining the unity of the socialist party (by reaching out to PS honchos Dominique Strauss-Kahn and Laurent Fabius to head the IMF), the French political arena is starting to look more and more like the final settling of scores in the Godfather…

Thomas Lifson (merci à Penny) puts it best:

Remember how many media libs swooned over former French prime minister Daniel de Villepin? He published poetry! He wrote a book about Napoleon! He dressed in fancy suits and was oh, so sophisticated. Not like you-know-who, the [cowboy] who makes self-styled sophisticated Americans cringe in embarrassment.

Many conservatives heartily despised de Villepin and his boss President Chirac, recognizing them as hypocritical libs, and smarting over French betrayal in the UN Security Council. Evidence is now accumulating that conservatives were right all along.

The Kit Carson Scouts: Sunni Iraqis Team Up With Yankee Soldiers

Michael R Gordon calls them "unexpected" or "unlikely" alliances. Note to the New York Times and other like-minded mainstream media (inside or outside the U.S.): The alliances are indeed unexpected and unlikely (and the twists surprising) if (and only if) you have been so busy listening to your own verbiage and hand-wringing for the past four years that, in the process, you have ignored the voices of the Iraqis (and of American service members) — the two populations who just happen to be most concerned by Bush's decision to intervene in Iraq.

Here is a portrait of Iraq's "insurgents" and "freedom fighters":

In a surprising twist, the jihadists — the Americans’ most ardent foes — made the new strategy possible. Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a predominantly Iraqi organization with a small but significant foreign component, severely overplayed its hand, spawning resentment by many residents and other insurgent groups.

…The fighters raised funds by kidnapping local Iraqis, found accommodations by evicting some residents from their homes and killed with abandon when anyone got in their way, residents say. A small group of bearded black-clad militants took down the Iraqi flag and raised the banner of their self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq.

“They used religion as a ploy to get in and exploit people’s passions,” said one member of the Kit Carson scouts, who gave his name as Haidar. “They were Iraqis and other Arabs from Syria, Afghanistan, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. They started kicking people out of their houses and getting ransom from rich people. They would shoot people in front of their houses to scare the others.”

Or, as the know-all liberals keep telling us in dramatic tones: "You too would take up weapons, you too would act the same, if a foreign army invaded your country." Kick people out of their houses and get ransom from rich people? Shoot people in front of their houses to scare the others? The hell we would! Maybe your understanding of the entire situation over there is, uh, slightly simplistic!

He Is, After All…

…in recent days, criticism of Sarkozy's interventionist language and unapologetic intent to ignore EU budget rules is mounting. The question that Eurocrats, central bankers and fellow politicians are asking is the same they asked three years ago: Is the man who wants to shake up France's labor market and ignite economic growth with a flurry of tax cuts the liberal European he claims? Or is he an old-style Gaullist in modern disguise?

…"Sarkozy talks right but rules left. Portrayals of him as a French Thatcher who will shake things up are vastly exaggerated," said one EU official in reference to the former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher. "He is, after all, French."

What Evil Lurks in the Hearts of American Neocons?

The search for more treachery and more evil plots is on…



More tales of horror here…

Wealthy Europeans (and the Continent's legislatures) are laughing up their sleeves, while the ordinary person pays a flat tax on everything purchased

As so often with critics of American policy, they would be on sounder ground if they first understood what goes on at home

writes a John Ellis of Rockland, Maine.

Renaat Horemans states in a letter to the editor (Letters, June 6) that Americans must be willing to accept a more progressive tax structure to support better health care. He cites Europe as an example of what needs to be done: "Social justice starts by paying taxes according to one's income. In Europe, even the wealthy have accepted this basic principle."

I suggest he examine Europe's ubiquitous Value Added Tax, one of the major regressive tax structures in the world. Wealthy Europeans (and the Continent's legislatures) are laughing up their sleeves, while the ordinary person pays a flat tax on practically everything purchased. VAT goes well over 20 percent, depending on the country - 21 percent in Belgium and up to 25 percent in Scandinavia. Adding to the charade, the tax is hidden in the price of the merchandise. Many Europeans don't really seem to realize what is going on here.

As so often with critics of American policy, they would be on sounder ground if they first understood what goes on at home.

Getting an education

Guy Millière stands up to the pretentious filth that is the French Left and media elite and sticks to his pro-US, pro-Bush guns.

A Truther in Sarko's government

"Could Bush be behind the 9-11 attacks?" In November 2006, Christine Boutin, now Minister of Housing and Urban Affairs responds "I believe it is possible."

Bah. Pas étonnant. Et puis de toute façon, Sarko se chiraquise de jour en jour.

Why Would a Hollywood Movie Make the Front Page of Le Monde?

When a French daily puts the review of a Hollywood movie on its front page, you know that it's because the movie will be blasting Washington's policies (past or present). And so it is with Robert De Niro's The Good Shepherd (called Raison d'État in French) in the bottom center of Le Monde's front page…

In His Heart, Sarkozy "Is Like the Corsicans, a Gaullist and a Bonapartist"

On "lui a donné sa chance, il a su la saisir, estime Camille de Rocca-Serra, dans le fond il est comme les Corses, gaulliste et bonapartiste."

An article by Jacques Follorou states how much Nicolas Sarkozy owes to Corsica (the island where he won over 60% of the votes)…

Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control

Al Gore III caught doing 100mph in hybrid car containing marijuana and pills, police say.

To the left, of course, this is the one only bits of individual freedom they show any sign of wanting to defend.

The deputies smelled marijuana and searched the car, Mr Amormino said. They found less than an ounce (28 grams) of marijuana along with the tranquilizers and painkillers Xanax, Valium and Vicodin, and the attention deficit disorder drug Adderall. "He does not have a prescription for any of those drugs," Mr Amormino said.

I’d take all of that crap too if I couldn’t escape the shadow of a disingenuous, messianic, and thoughtless father who wanted us all to turn back the clock on human development, and impoverish humanity while he plays with his “enlightened” MacBook and Prius.