Reporters Without Scruples

Created ostensibly to promote honesty in the media and defend those who report from the influence of influencial parties, specifically governments and international organizations, Reporters Without Borders promotes itself as a kind of Red Cross of information beyond the reach of corruption or manipulation. They’re supposed to be the ones in the white hats who ride in to defend the channels of communication from governments when they coerce or bar the press to get them to act at their will.

At least that’s what they say they do. World Politics Review has noted just how rigged up the whole basis of their foundation and claims really are.

Last month, the Paris-based advocacy group Reporters Without Borders released its annual "Press Freedom Index," which ostensibly "measures the level of press freedom in 169 countries throughout the world." (Reflecting its French origins, Reporters Without Borders is most commonly known internationally by its French initials, RSF for Reporters sans frontières, and this acronym will be used here.) The 14 countries performing best in the RSF evaluation were all European, as were 17 of the top 20, 20 of the top 25, and 25 of the top 35. The United States placed a very mediocre 48th -- just behind Nicaragua. "Outside Europe," the RSF press release notes, "no region of the world has been spared censorship or violence towards journalists" -- an assessment that suggests that Europe has indeed been "spared" both.

The performance of European countries in the RSF press freedom rankings is impressive. It becomes less impressive, however, when one knows the extent to which RSF depends for its financing upon European governments: either directly or indirectly via the European Union. RSF is commonly referred to as a "non-governmental organization" or "NGO." But in light of its financial dependence upon and close ties to, in particular, the French government and, above all, European institutions, RSF could be regarded as the very prototype of what might better be called a "PGO": a "para-governmental organization." As will be seen in Part II of this exposé (to be published next week), its highly curious rankings map far better upon the external -- and, in certain cases, internal -- political agenda of the European Union than upon any concrete indicators of press freedoms, or restrictions thereupon, in the countries RSF claims to be objectively evaluating.

All you have to do is follow the money.

To start with, and by its own reckoning, 9 percent of RSF's 2006 income consisted of "public subsidies." The source of these subsidies is, namely, the French state. The Prime Minister's Office, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the International Organization for "Francophonie" (OIF) are specifically mentioned as contributors. (On the largely French-funded OIF, see here.) This 9 percent figure represents, again by RSF's reckoning, "a very slight decline" compared to 2005 (when the French subsidies represented 10 percent of the RSF budget).

In RSF's published 2006 accounts, which include only aggregate numbers, the budget line "subsidies" lists some €562,179 in income for 2006. This, however, amounts to 15 percent, not 9 percent, of RSF's total budget of nearly 3.9 million euros. It is down, moreover, from some €1,225,567 in 2005 -- which, as a percentage of RSF's relatively stable total budget, clearly represents far more than just a "very slight" 1 percent decline. These anomalies presumably indicate that some other -- unnamed and not French -- source is being counted under the heading of "subsidies" in the accounts.

More puzzling still, in the English version of the RSF 2006 accounts, the subsidies line in the French accounts quite simply . . . disappears.

What Rosenthal finds is that RSF has grown into a willing Propaganda operation for hire: they could discuss the glories of their nations, professions, and themselves on the taxpayers' nickel

Even if RSF continues to enjoy a special (if, as will be seen in Part II, sometimes, conflicted) relationship with the French government, the French subsidies it receives have over the years been far outstripped by those it receives from another "public" source: namely, the European Commission. A May 2001 European Commission working paper (link in French) lists a grant of some €1,487,000 to RSF. This figure would at the time have represented over half of RSF's total annual budget. In the same year, RSF was accorded yet another EU grant of €300,000. The Commission working paper notes that RSF "has long been a partner of the Commission in realizing activities focusing on the preservation and encouragement of independent media." It then goes on to describe at length the benefits expected from the grant to RSF, treating RSF throughout as just a vector of its own activity in the area of ostensible promotion of press freedoms. ("These activities will give rise to a large number of publications and other projects," the working paper notes, "such as the annual RSF reports for 2001 and 2002, which will focus on cases of imprisoned journalists.")

In other words, the metrics pointing to their own purity of everything uses means as simple and crass as a shoebox full of cash is engineered to promote the nation as a product, without flaws or lapses in ethics such as these:

As such, we’ve coined the term "bogus opposition” to identify the sources of those people who try to find substitutes for real opponents [of the government]. At the service of the regime, these “faux-opposants” deliver a message hostile to any change in the regime.

Our task is made all the more difficult because the AFP Iran Bureau talks tirelessly of moderation or pragmatism reminiscent of the past, of moderates who’ve gotten their hands dirty, sometimes under an international arrest warrant for crimes against humanity for murder, or real exiled members of the opposition.

Right beside news written by the AFP Iran Bureau, are copies of dispatches written by the Iranian press agency official of the regime of the mullahs, IRNA!

Now our task is even more difficult because it is in Paris at the premises of the AFP, that the directors-general of the Iranian news agency, IRNA, and French AFP, have signed an agreement to “promote their cooperation.”

In other words, bought off at the service of a hostile theist regime which has already managed to spend nearly a decade playing the governments of the population that AFP serves like a violin. Playing them in this manner doesn’t serve the cause of any interest in the truth. Were the truth not something that the Iranian regime feared, none of this would be necessary.

The making rare of any access they can have, and then dispensing it by the spoonful at the cost of honesty points clearly to the Iranian regime’s intent.

"I never understood why we had to fight with the United States," Sarkozy told business leaders Tuesday night; "I never got it"

Nicolas Sarkozy's warm embrace of America on Wednesday did much to improve a relationship his "sophisticated" predecessor had trashed

editorializes Investor's Business Daily, which also carries Nicolas Sarkozy's speech… IBD goes on to say that

Though there's no reason to doubt Sarkozy's sincerity, his approach also is pragmatic. Ending perceptions that America is a "hegemon" whose strength comes only at the expense of others, is a ridiculous reading of the U.S. to which only Europe's elite could cling.

Censored on Le Monde.fr — Eight Times!

Because I have lots of work and because I felt I had said just about everything there was to say (it was getting depressing to continue doing so), I started letting go of my other blog, Le Monde Watch, in favor sometimes of leaving notes on the appropriate Le Monde articles of the daily's web site (although its editors seem adamant in keeping reasoned thought and detailed analysis — because they might contradict their regal articles? — to a minimum, by allowing a maximum of two comments with a maximum of 500 characters each).

Apparently, that was not a good idea. Usually, I have encountered no problem in leaving comments on Le Monde.fr. For a recent article, however, I left a first comment, which was duly accepted, but the following day, I left a second message. When I checked a few hours later, it had not been accepted, and the "window" that allowed for the writing of a second message — usually "shut" after a user's second message has been accepted (since a maximum of only two are allowed) — was open again. This p'd me off, as I had to write the whole thing again (again taking pain-staking measures to make sure that the comment fit in the 500-character space), but I blamed the problem on my badly-functioning computer. A couple of hours later, however, it had again reverted to "you have one comment left to post". When rewriting it this time, I duly made a copy and over the next 30 hours, I have posted it again and again — all to no effect. It's apparently not good enough. It's apparently not worth keeping. It's apparently not as intelligent, and as reasoned, and as thought out, and as intellectual as all of the other comments on the site.

You can read the two comments on Le Monde Watch, (in blockquote form at the end of the article) — the one that was accepted and the one that was (that until now, at least, has been) censored — and you can judge for yourself what might have the cause of Le Monde.fr's intense displeasure (although Le Monde Watch's French text offers a couple of suggestions as the tabos that were violated)…

French Student Strikes 2.0

"Realtime" map of French universities now affected by student strikes.


Agrandir le plan

PRTV

Sarkozy's speech for the French community in Washington.

The Little Bozos are at it Again

Strikingly naïve students (who protested today) will join the Metro workers strike. Or is that vice-versa – it’s so hard to tell anymore.

French students took their growing protest against President Nicolas Sarkozy's reforms onto the streets of Paris on Thursday and the government accused them of jumping on the bandwagon of demonstrations over pension reform.
Hundreds of students, chanting, setting off flares and bearing banners with slogans like "Together everything is possible, in the streets!" and "Free culture, public education!" marched from the Place de la Bastille in central Paris.

They are protesting a law which will... do what?

The law, which injects 1 billion euros ($1.46 billion) into higher education, grants universities more freedom to choose their own students and opens the way for some private sector financing to boost public funding.

Of course they don’t realize that the moment government institutionalized the culture by trying to manage it, in effect mugging it, dosing it with formaldehyde, and sticking it in a museum instead of letting it evolve and live – it stopped being “free”.

Student unions say the law does nothing to address student poverty

Which they are too stupid to realize is temporary. Everywhere else on earth (outside of the third world) it normally ends in graduation and getting a job.

Then again, what all of this amounts to at this point is about 200 of the little pischers at each protest, with the rest of them probably wondering why they’re protesting against Universities having more autonomy.

“Only in AmeriKKKa EUtopia”

Life is just a meaningless coincidence… result of long process of evolution and many several factors, causes and effects. However, life is also something that an individual wants and determines it to be. And I’m the dictator and god of my own life. And me, I have chosen my way. I am prepared to fight and die for my cause. I, as a natural selector, will eliminate all who I see unfit, disgraces of human race and failures of natural selection.

- Murderer Pekka-Eric Auvinen

Seven teenagers were killed when an 18-year-old student went on a rampage at his school in southern Finland after announcing the bloodbath with a posting on the internet site YouTube.
The murderer, named by police as Pekka-Eric Auvinen, then shot himself in the head and died in hospital last night. He killed eight people, including his headteacher, after moving from classroom to classroom and spraying them with gunfire at the secondary he attended in Tuusula, a small town north of Helsinki.

When there is some sort of public violence in teh US, especially in schools, the BBC bolts into action pre-empting the schedules of their call-in programs to talk about it endlessly and in circles. Not so with the latest outburst in Finland, a nation any traveler who’s been to a bar or club there can tell you is populated with an unusual number of violent alcoholics.

Almost nowhere is the fact that the shooter yelled “Revolution. Smash everything”, nor will his anti-religious diatribe typical of leftist thought ever be identified as such:

"I cannot say that I am of the same race as this miserable, selfish human race. No!

"I have evolved a step higher. I am prepared to fight and die for my cause ... I, as a natural selector, will eliminate all who I see unfit, disgraces of human race and failures of natural selection."

Find me a Conservative critic of revolving door abortion who will say that, and I might reconsider the already emeging theses about this murder being anything other than an expression of the murderer's illness and inhumanity. Notably, predictably, and consistent with his impulse:

We know from our mass media that he was misanthropic, disliked the direction society was headed, and felt himself drawn to extremes to break through the fog of delusion in which most people move. For example, he admired extreme leftist and extreme rightist leaders alike4 and called himself a "social darwinist" and admired "natural selection." (He may have confused "social darwinism," or the theory that linear competitive systems like capitalism and academia produce humanity's best, with Darwinism applied to society.)

So like so many emotionally helpless “do-gooders” he attacks anything representing a pillar of traditional society. The only difference between his hatefulness and idiocy and that those that make a living off of it, is that he is better armed.

But a garden variety "humanistic" and "philosophical" mainstream Euro-bigot, where this multiple murder is being characterized as somehow, tangentially “American” take the cake:

Hah, idiots like that really get on my nerves. While we are on the subject idiots why not rant some about usa as well? Let me start it off with a few quotes.

“america is a Nation with a mission - and that mission comes from our most basic beliefs. We have no desire to dominate, no ambitions of empire. Our aim is a democratic peace - a peace founded upon the dignity and rights of every man and woman.”

- George W. Bush

He goes on, but apparently to him, Pekka-Eric Auvinen’s evil act is somehow all about oil.

Auvinen and that blogger seem to share the same, characteristically misguided determinism, but one of them was better armed. In reality, he’s reported to have had heros in the fashion of something a little more home-grown to the continent whose cultures and ideas have killed hundreds of millions in the last century alone:

Investigators did not specify the motives, but several media indicated that the young man was fascinated by weapons and violence. On several occasions he expressed his admiration for Hitler and Stalin. "He comes from a normal family, with both parents and a brother." He had no problem at school," the source added. The student, who had celebrated his 18th birthday in June, was studying philosophy and history in the final year of high school.

So by the standards of the previous blogger cited, far to “enlightened” to be American.

Recommended for the 2008 Nobel Peace Prize

And the winner is…

“Oh, holy moly! Deliverance.”

"It’s fun to watch…"

“Just watching those dumb teens at the mall get their calls dropped is worth it. Can you hear me now? NO! Good!"

HIGHly Recommended

Next time someone tells you it's all about Bush, tell them to get a hold of a copy of James W. Ceaser's Reconstructing America (The Symbol of America in Modern Thought), which — like Philippe Roger's The American Enemy (L'Ennemi américain) — goes through two and a half centuries of history all the way back to 18th (!) century intellectuals and élites to show how aware (sic) these lucid beings were of Americans' cluelessness (check out the back cover, the table of contents, and the excerpt).

Ceaser (government and foreign affairs, Univ. of Virgina) distinguishes between the "metaphysical or symbolic" America (the notion of America as a materialistic, decadent country) and the "real" America (America as a preeminent bastion of freedom and opportunity). The negative concept, he argues, originated in Europe — primarily in Germany and France. To flesh out this idea, he traces the thought of pertinent Germans from Hegel to Heidegger ("with passages through Spengler and Junger") and the French from Buffon to Bandrillard ("with passages through Maistre and Kojeve"). An engagingly written excursion through American and European political and intellectual history. this book touches on an important issue in contemporary American society: not only how other countries see America but the negative attitudes prevalent among certain groups, including academics here at home. In view of the climate of opinion surrounding Waco and Oklahoma City [the book was written in 1997], this book's positive appraisal, written in a style accessible to the lay reader, could be of interest to a wide readership. (Leon H. Brody, U.S. Office of Personnel Mgt. Lib., Washingon, D.C.)

When the reviewer mentions "the climate of opinion surrounding Waco and Oklahoma City", it is because James W. Ceaser wrote this book in 1997. But by no means should you let the decade-old publication prevent from buying the book. Au contraire: it shows that when the Professor of Politics at the University of Virginia decided to write the book — due to being fed up with the prevalent anti-Americanism (abroad as well as stateside) — it was during the supposedly warm and cuddly Clinton days of yore! Incidentally, he is in no way a polemicist; his book is written in an entirely matter-of-fact manner. (On my Christmas list is Ceaser's more recent Nature and History in American Political Development…)

Update: Grayp provides a link to a more recent James W. Ceaser article…

Never Mind the Vichy Collabos, Here’s the Filmmakers

Standing Up to Uncle Sam? Always a Heroic Gesture! But the Arab World? Then It's "Provocative" (!) to Take a Stand for… Freedom of Speech

While the French have no problem expressing their disagreements and noting their differences with Washington, and while they have no problem devising a poster which changes the American flag to the Stars and Stripes and Swastikas, Le Monde's Olivier Truc charges a Danish party (granted, the Danish People's Party is a far-right one) with being not only an "embarrassment" (to its partner, Anders Fogh Rasmussen's ruling party) but "being provocative". How? Through the use of a poster showing a drawing of Muhammed and stating that… Freedom of Speech Is Danish, Censorship Is Not.

For Le Monde, apparently (if not, hopefully, for Sarkozy), speaking up and stating one's high-falutin' principles is only for Washington, a democracy in which speaking up is hardly risky and doesn't, in the final analysis, cost you much, and not for any despot ready to, for instance, kill a huge contract if you in any way offend him.

The Wallace people took a poll

Look what some French advertising fruit came up with

Ditt ist ‘ne Große Oops, Nicht?

It looks like the brain-children at German department store chain Karstadt (the one in Altstadt Spandau - Berlin) are doing the old bait-n-switch. Their travel agency display advertising “Christmas in New York” promises two buildings that no longer exist. So much for that ol’ historical memory and stuff.

Scrooged in the UK

Behold the fascism of the ‘Radio 4’ set: don’t “downgrade” and “degrade” really mean the same thing? Daily Mail: Christmas should be 'downgraded' to help race relations says Labour think tank

Said one commentator:

I really have given up on our future as a Great Britain nation. Show me the exit please.

- Via Brussels Journal

Bringing Taxpayers' Dough Directly to the Civil Servants and to Their Unions

Since a country's civil servants are financed by the private sector, as are the public functionaries' (very advantageous and very lavish) "special régimes" — and as are their unions' strikes (which are aimed at said private sector)!!! — la BAF decided to spare time (and perhaps prevent the strikes in question) by bringing the taxes, i.e., the dough (in cash, natch) directly to the establishments concerned.

As Revan remarks, it seems that our admirable civil servants "like to receive other people's money for their retirement funds… Above all, however, they don't want to see it or know were it's coming from"…

2007-10-12 - Les Regimes Speciaux Partie 1
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Les Regimes Speciaux Partie 2
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12ème Salon des Écrivains

Guy Millière, auteur de Houdna, sera présent au 12ème Salon des Ecrivains à la Mairie du XVIème arrondissement de Paris le 11 novembre 2007 de 14h - 19h.

Airbus is AWOL

Airbus’ A380 was late and over budget, so too is their military lifter, the much touted competition for the C-130J, the A400M.

Shares of EADS, based in Paris and Munich, fell as much as 5.1 percent, the most in 16 months. Delays to the A400M, designed to carry 116 paratroops or two attack helicopters, may lead to 1.4 billion euros ($2 billion) in charges and the bill could rise, the company said in a statement today.

Airbus, the world's biggest maker of commercial planes, may hand over the first A400M a year late after setbacks in engine development, EADS said Oct. 17. Airbus fell two years behind schedule with the A380 superjumbo at a cost of $6.8 billion and was forced to redesign its A350 model to win acceptance from airlines, pushing deliveries five years behind Boeing Co.'s 787.

“The charge for the A400M is higher than we expected,''

Initially, trolls dispensing the usual hatefulness on the word that the United States military put in orders for the A400M itself. Strange, how these people who are normally enjoy making a straw-man of some imaginary illuminati of the “the military-industrial complex” and suddenly get very nationalistic and hateful at the same time about “those evil corporations” run (no doubt) by greasy little men in top hats, and twirling their moustaches. As always, it turns out that this is only a philosophical bearing point when the greasy little men aren’t European.

You can almost see the constructivist Soviet posters of factory workers punching bolts in their dim little imaginations. Now if they would only “take one for the team,” get off of unemployment welfare, and get a job, they might have a point. For now, I guess they’ll hang their personal pride on people actually working and making something, that great shining attraction to peasants in the 19th century.

In any event, someone at DoD was smart enough to not want that albatross around their neck and that sale turns out to have been false, and tant mieux given that it’s over-budget and behind schedule.

Otherwise, to the lumpenproletariat mindset, it pays to screw up. The cities plants are situated in get to enjoy the time extension that the delay will require, bilking the tax-base for the privilege, and the moronic get to believe that the delay will serve the great cause of pacifism as an absurd defiance of a mysteriously hard to locate “arms lobby”, when it is far more likely that labor unions are pressuring European states to place orders for this thing.

Ah, the City of Lights

Tournera-t-il la page Chiraq ?

From the NY Sun:

Tighter European economic sanctions against Iran, a more prominent role for France in Afghanistan, support for an independent Kosovo, and the gradual return of France to the command structure of NATO are expected to result from the first state visit of President Sarkozy to Washington tomorrow.

Mr. Sarkozy is expected to make rapid amends for his Gaullist party's five decades of hostility to America this week with a visit to President Bush that includes a state dinner at the White House tomorrow, followed by lunch with the president, a visit to George Washington's home at Mount Vernon, and an address to the joint houses of Congress on Wednesday.

Scum

It's shaping up to be a Death Match

French unions VS. Sarko.

Unaware

Zeropean “Art”



An ad for an art center in Brussels

So people are cattle, except the artist can tell tham that, but still make them think that the image is empathetically telling them that we should sympathize with women who nurture being sufferers, as though there is something un-natural about nurturing – especially in a world where offspring are entirely optional, and don’t need to figure into your sex life.

Remember – it’s sophisticated and because you can abstract from the images the implications, you AREN’T...

Maybe I’m Hung Up or Something

But this is just plain bewildering, and smacks slightly of “taking food from a child”, if not slightly like cannibalism by proxy.

Founded in 1947, the Cosma dairy has managed to find the richness of a tradition ancestral Ardennes farm practice which has been hitherto forgotten. Indeed, le Petit Singly, the only cheese made from the milk of women, has long remained in the shadow of more specialized cheeses made from ordinary cow, goat, or sheep’s milk.

I particularly like the fact that they’re putting women on the level of cattle. That should go over with a bang over at underwater cave headquarters of Code Pink. It goes well with the whole “Ah, those grand artisanal traditions! How we love the land” blather which is ubiquitous in French marketing. Then again, the way birth rates are going in Europe, they don’t seem to need it for much else.

And the Beginning of Another Successful 5-year Plan is Set to Begin

Reeking of the awkwardness of the weekly Soviet “international socialist friendship meetings” in the 70’s of fake amity between, say, the “Soviet Peoples” and the charming peasant folk/proletarians of, for example, Mozambique or Mongolia (playing along with the domestic propaganda for some goods, fuel, weapons, or cash) – the EU is pumping the “pan-European” nature of, well, just about anything possible including the past. It assumes people individually can be coerced into believing that they’re simply part of “a people” in the classic totalitarian sense, and can eventually be made to believe anything.

“The chief function (of propaganda) is to convince the masses, whose slowness of understanding needs to be given time in order that they may absorb information; and only constant repetition will finally succeed in imprinting an idea on their mind ... The success of any advertisement, whether of a business or a political nature, depends upon the consistency and perseverance with which it is employed.”

- From Joachim Fest,’s “Das Gesicht des Dritten Reiches, Profile einer totalitären Herrschaft”, quoting August Kubizek, a boyhood friend of Adolf Hitler.

One overdone example is a show in Brussels that’s been promoted for at least 8 months titled “Le Grand Atelier: Chemins de l’art en Europe (Ve – XVIIe siècle)” which you can read about at Brussels Journal:

For all its considerable merits, ‘Le Grand Atelier’ is to a certain extent art in the service of the European dream. In light of Oxford professor Jan Zielonka’s latest writings on the ‘neo-medieval’ paradigm at work in the EU project, it is at least worthwhile to investigate the deep cultural history of pan-European trends. Nonetheless, one is immediately confronted with a sad irony. Elsewhere in the splendid Beaux-Arts complex, one can see the triumphant Gustaf Wappers oil-on-canvas Episode from September Days 1830 (on the Place de l’Hôtel de Ville in Brussels), a sort of Belgian (and hence Rubensian) La Liberté guidant le peuple. Yet now, all over Brussels, the Belgian tricolour flag is manifested rather differently. It hangs limply and pleadingly from city windows, or is brandished in the occasional solidarité marches (‘un dieu, un roi, une nation’ proclaimed one banner I ran across of late) that crisscross the capital of a country reeling from popular linguistic-nationalisms

And that’s all they seem to have to work with, which is why one would even need to scratch at promoting things like a ‘neo-medieval paradigm’ to begin with. ...not to mention their Reubensian bits.

Message to themselves? Something about a “pan-European solidarity” does indeed bear heavily on the distant past and constructed emotions because it would have to – just to get itself beyond it’s immediate past, even as recent as the years of rationalization about letting the mass killings in the former Yugoslavia sort themselves out.

That aside, let’s just look at the basis of all of this: European tribalism both on the ground and in the mind. To begin with, the reason that you can’t go more than 150 km in northern Europe without employing another language is because historically people had little or no contact with one another, except for the “exchange of amity” on the battlefield or using an elite of intermediaries while doing commerce. They spent more than a millennium killing one another and trying the same schtick on everyone else, and their “enlightened” ideas (Fascism, Marxism, Socialism) have murdered and impoverished hundreds of millions.

Absurdly, their aspirations for seeing themselves as a example of a population at peace are based on the fact that most of them have taken a break from their chop-chop-Saturday-afternoons for the past 60 years while globally relevant entities were actually protecting them.

And yet, and yet... they think that the way these pint-sized sub-entities deal with one another while mumbling laudatory things about themselves in the mirror entitles a well placed elite in media and institutions to rattle on about the very same notions that nearly killed the rest of us (i.e. Fascism, Marxism, Socialism,) and the supposed recklessness, anti-trans-nationalism, and backwardness of America.

Quite simply – after decades of having the rest of the world shelter them, their emotions, their fragile egos, the “people in Solidarity’s” collective self-esteem is in a state where it actually requires *propaganda* in spite of decades of “an ever closer union” being pitched to them and constructing itself in the same way Paris ‘liberated itself’ from the Nazis.

Harder still will be training INTO these very same people an affection for any sort of nation which at odds with the TRANS-nationalism that they imagine the EU itself, if not all peace that has ever existed. The meme-droppers have their work cut out for them. While notions of ‘post-medieval notions of self’ will have to be examined, the elephant in the room of the EU’s future past history is their first meaningful unifying entity in the modern age which was not even a thing of their true making:

NATO.

Goodbye friend

"I viewed my mission as one to save lives. I didn’t bomb Pearl Harbor. I didn’t start the war. But I was going to finish it.”

-- Brig. Gen. Paul W. Tibbets Jr.,

Commander of the 509th Composite Group, Pilot of the Enola Gay, and a great American War Hero.

Feb. 23, 1915-Nov. 1, 2007

Marxist Science

Translation:

- Chavez: How many years old is the human race, Francois? 20 centuries, right? Something like 20 centuries?
- Francois: A little more.
- Chavez: A little more?
- Francois: Yes.
- Chavez: about 25?
- Francois: Yes, sure
- Chavez: 25 centuries, yes -- thanks bro.

They’d do better sticking to Martian Bachelor Science

- Merci buckets à RV

I LOL'd ‘til I Cried

The mainstream thinking of a nation of quasi-intellectual hooligans is laid bear: the mainstream left are fairly sure that anyone criticizing the murder attempt on a political activist (who doesn’t tow the PC line) makes the mainstream left journos who happen to report it is a neo-con in the pocket of Uncle Sam. To them it seems that Rue89 isn’t extreme and doctrinaire enough, and thus gets thrown off of the ideological island.

Proof positive to these deterministic inheritors of the continent’s natural facism: one of the zombies at Rue89.com even wrote an article critical of Hugo Chavez, therefore they too must be the enemy.

I gues it’s "égalité et reconciliation" for me, but not for thee...

In a nation of people in such dire need of “thrills” vicariously demonstrated to them passively through print and TV, what do you expect? Somewhere along the way “I think therefore I am” became “I talk therefore I am.” Behold its bounty.

Cash and Carry Leftism

AP’s Washington television and print bureaus are moving into the same building as Reuters’ DC bureau near 13th and K. Only one block from the Washington Post, it provides for nearly one-stop shopping for lefty candidates fishing for flattering, marginally ‘newsy’ sounding puff-pieces about them in 2008.

What’s A Few Mines Between Friends?

Hey, you whacky anti-landmine celebs, what’s mine is yours’!:

ALGIERS (Reuters) - France, anxious to improve its relations with Algeria, handed over to Algerian authorities the location charts of mines places at the time of the war of independence (1954-1962).

The French army dispersed landmines on the eastern and western borders of Algeria during the war of liberation to prevent FLN fighters from attacking French forces from their bases in Tunisia and Morocco.

These plans of mines between 1956 and 1959 were handed over by the French Interservice Chief of Staff, General Louis Georgelin on visit to Algeria, said the French embassy.

"This decision, which was expected by Algeria, reflects a determination of French authorities to remove obstacles inherited from the past, and their desire to build trust with Algeria," said the diplomatic mission said in a statement to the press.

According to Algiers, which has called for this gesture for a long time, the French military placed about three million landmines in Algeria.

"With the delivery of these plans, Nicolas Sarkozy (...) is trying to remove obstacles that hinder French-Algerian relations", the mission wrote for the influential El Watan daily. The newspaper commentary responds with an editorial cartoon where a victim of a mine says "See, it only took 45 years to say that."

The French Head of IS due in December on an official visit to Algeria. His Algerian counterpart, Abdelaziz Bouteflika has repeatedly called on France to repent for "the crimes committed during the colonial period."

In other words, the victorious Algerians wouldn’t demine their own country after 45 years, and still demand “repentance.” The play managed to prove yet again that the emotional subservience can turn Europe’s bien pensent who are otherwise petulant into jelly at the push of an emotional button – whether there is right, wrong, or generations gone, can replace statesmanship and diplomatic dealings with them altogether.

- Shukran, ya Viktor!

It's never enough for the homosexual lobby to do what they do "behind closed doors," as they like to put it

It's never enough for the homosexual lobby to do what they do "behind closed doors," as they like to put it

fumes Benjamin Duffy in the Daily Collegian.

No, the whole world has to approve of it, too. Everyone from the mayor to the parish priest has to celebrate their deviant sexuality.

…When homosexuals object to something, everyone else's rights go flying out the window. The gay rights movement, in their quest for "rights," have become one of the greatest threats to civil liberties.

The EU Officially Certifying It’s own Status as Overbearing

[…]The EU is drafting a new wine statute, and the Finnish government has decided to ask that Finland be granted the status of a wine producing country. If it did not do so, the approximately 20 grape growers in the Åland Islands would not be allowed to sell their wines.

- Via the as yet unlicensed überblogger Phil

This from the Nation of Peace, Love, and “the Rest of You Are Always Wrong”

No Blood for oil!

For 40 years, the French government has been fighting a secret war in Africa, hidden not only from its people, but from the world. It has led the French to slaughter democrats, install dictator after dictator – and to fund and fuel the most vicious genocide since the Nazis. Today, this war is so violent that thousands are fleeing across the border from the Central African Republic into Darfur – seeking sanctuary in the world's most notorious killing fields

So while they have large public weep-fests for “Darfour” as a pretext to listen to washed up bands and writers try to restart their careers, you would think that they would pay some attention to the “root causes” of their today’s glance and someone else’s misery. While they flatter themselves about the fact that they wring their hands at the same, they can’t assemble the same moral fiber of the average Total victim, and not fight wars at the behest of their domestic corporate interests.

James Oddo Makes Me Feel Proud to be an American

NYC James Oddo Councilman gives it back to a Euro TV-prankster. Oddly enough, it’s hand to find a distinction between most the of the TV press and these rather unimaginative comedic skit.

Theirs’ Doesn’t Stink, But Yours’ Sure Does

Sarkozy on 60 Minutes

Good For Him

Sarko walks out on the pointy header lefties at 60 minutes.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy walked out of an interview with US CBS television news show 60 minutes, according to a clip of the show released Sunday in advance of the interview's airing.
A clearly disturbed Sarkozy stood up muttering in French about the question, which was not heard, in a short publicity clip put on the Internet ahead of the 60 Minutes broadcast Sunday night.

WWCD?

The wise one asks: What Would Ché Do? I have a fairly good idea what... the thought that comes to my mind is “have fun with your new little friends.”

Game over

It ain't over till it's over.

Faut pas raconter ça aux chères têtes blondes du Neuf-Trois

Ils pourraient se mettre à chialer.

Don't tell the boys in the 93

They might start crying.

Blowhards left high and dry

Sarko cuts short 60 Minutes interview.

Some In Western Europe are beginning to Get It

Communism kills.

At the request of Eduardo Mackenzie I am now party to correspondence he devoted to the political situation in his country marked by the crimes of the FARC, the Communist Revolutionary Armed Forces, while democratic bodies in Europe remain silent.

Chavez funds the FARC, and Cuba has become little more than an economic dependency to him, not to mention numerous other efforts he’s engaged in such as making his nation a gateway for Hizballah, al Qaida, and running the economy into the ground in spite of record oil prices. Now his proxies are trying to take power by taking assassinating opposition candidates in towns and cities in Columbia. That’s right: local mayors and legislative representatives...

In less than a week of regional elections in Colombia there have already been 26 candidates killed, most by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), a terrorist organization that intends to interfere this barbaric way in the October 28, 2007 caucuses where 18,332 Colombians will elect people for the posts of governors of departments, mayors, city councilors and county deputies. The 86,449 registered candidates belong to 235 different political groups.

But to commie throwbacks from the last century, ”THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE!!!” I guess the left are for the people, so long as they shut up or die.

- with thanks to Kevin (or is that ”Kevain”...)

The Segway Diaries

Neer do’ well/ man about town Clarsonimus, that veritable denizen of the moist and intrigue ridden alleyways of Berlin interviews some shady booze-hound. Enjoy. If the voices don’t get to you.

Greenies Still Orbiting Uranus

Remember that scourge to humanity, however many humanity destroying scourges before called the Hole in the Ozone Layer™®©? The n-th thing that was supposed to prove to the the poor misguided children with running water and flush toilets that everyone in humanity was wrong about the way they live, and that environmentalist who live no differently weren’t? Well ¡No Pasarán! Reader and commentator Papertiger writes:

Do you remember way back when you wrote up this about the ozone hole?

As it turns out, you were right. Chemists poke holes in ozone theory.
The Montreal Protocol, agreed in 1987 and ratified two years later, stopped the production and consumption of most ozone-destroying chemicals. But many will linger on in the atmosphere for decades to come. How and on what timescales they will break down depend on the molecules' ultraviolet absorption spectrum (the wavelength of light a molecule can absorb), as the energy for the process comes from sunlight.

So Markus Rex, an atmosphere scientist at the Alfred Wegener Institute of Polar and Marine Research in Potsdam, Germany, did a double-take when he saw new data for the break-down rate of a crucial molecule, dichlorine peroxide (Cl2O2). The rate of photolysis (light-activated splitting) of this molecule reported by chemists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California1, was extremely low in the wavelengths available in the stratosphere - almost an order of magnitude lower than the currently accepted rate.
The rapid photolysis of Cl2O2 is a key reaction in the chemical model of ozone destruction developed 20 years ago.
If the rate is substantially lower than previously thought, then it would not be possible to create enough aggressive chlorine radicals to explain the observed ozone losses at high latitudes, says Rex. The extent of the discrepancy became apparent only when he incorporated the new photolysis rate into a chemical model of ozone depletion. The result was a shock: at least 60% of ozone destruction at the poles seems to be due to an unknown mechanism, Rex told a meeting of stratosphere researchers in Bremen, Germany, last week.

In the course of investigating global warming, I have discovered that the other planets you would expect, the ones with atmospheres, also have their analogs of "ozone holes". It seems that they are a feature of planetary rotation rather then a defect.

Here are some pictures: Uranus, Saturn, Jupiter, Venus, and Mars, and finally Earth.
Note: The Martian ozone hole is barely visible due to the thin atmosphere. The only reason it is viewable at all is because of a planet wide dust storm in 2002.

Good on ya, PT – and thank you. The one thing that’s obvious about the things that greenies always seem to find so pressing, urgent, risk-laden, around the corner, and so forth, have far more to do with a need to be liked while they act on their urge to dismantle any available pillar of a civilization they had no part in building.

After all, who really wants to go back to the days where we were all worse off: less healthy, lived shorter and uncomfortable lives because the economy and society as a whole depended heavily on human and animal manual labor, and didn’t have the advantage of energy and material resources that are affordable enough for everyone in society (and not just an elite,) could benefit from – which ultimately where the “green” movement is leading us away from, whether they know it or not.

Imagine that: a slow dissolution of individual rights over how they conduct themselves and what they do with their property for the sake of an abstraction which is supposed to be for our own good, regardless of the fact that a majority wouldn’t agree... sounds mighty familiar.

As if a bunch of lit majors could even tell you what ozone even is. All they know is that someone told them that you aren’t allowed to disagree with them.

French rabble rousers file lawsuit calling for arrest of Rumsfeld while he is in Paris

Détestables petites crottes de groupuscules des droits de l'homme-euh. French human rights groups file complaint against Rumsfeld for torture at Abu Graib and Guantanamo while he is present in France for a Friday morning conference. French judicial system is dragging its feet until Rumsfeld blows this joint.

Leftist Strikes Versus Reform

Trains stand idle in French train stations as strikes against badly- needed reforms in the public sector get worse. Meanwhile, La Baf heads for the Gare Saint Lazare to put the situation into meta- ouch! -phor…

Détestable petite crotte de pisse-copie franchouille

Espèce de connard de journaliste francisque (avec à l'appui, ses ouvrages issus de son boulot d'un planqué d'un institut de recherche) : les Américains disent que le problème, c'est islamisation de l'Europe, donc le problème c'est forcément les Amérloques.

UPDATE: Rue89, dans une démonstration éclatante de bravoure franchouille, change de titre pour son article. Détestable petite crotte de pédaloïde de pisse-copie franchouille.

Erik Svane et Dan Greenberg dédicaceront leurs albums (Général Leonardo : Croisade vers la Terre Sainte et Au service du Vatican) au Boulevard des Bulles (50 Boulevard Saint-Germain) le 25 octobre à partir de 15 h, à la librairie Nation le 26 octobre, et à Album Bercy le 27…

(More on Leonardo Da Vinci…)

Geneva Conventions: Follow the Rules and Let the Fight Be Fair!

(Thanks to RV)

Fest shows the trivialization of the Nazi era (& demonization of America) seeking to create a category of good Americans like Hitler's "good Germans"

Published in Germany 13 months ago, Ich Nicht is a memoir by the late Joachim Fest, author of the best-known German study of Hitler and a co-publisher of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. It describes his father, his family and growing up in Nazi Germany. The book is exceptional because it tells in a modest, believable, quietly bitter and totally proud way of the family's extraordinary decency — no ironically "good" Germans here — and its refusal to bend before Hitler.

Thus writes John Vinocur in an article that ought to be distributed throughout the blogosphere.

The title packs it all in: Ich nicht, Fest's father's phrase, borrowed from the Book of Matthew. Others betray you, Ich nicht.

…Just days before he died and his book came out, Fest said of [Günter Grass]: "This confession comes a bit too late. I can't understand how someone who for decades set himself up as a moral authority, a rather smug one, could pull this off."

A year later, going over Fest again, and thinking vast English-speaking audiences have no access to Ich Nicht, it's clear his book should be read in tandem with, or in opposition to, Grass's Peeling the Onion.

On one hand, Grass the great novelist has composed a personal recollection almost absent of history, but suffused with willful imprecision about his days in infamy's uniform.

On the other, Fest has written with remarkable detail about being a teenager in that awful time, describing his father's unfailing resistance to the Nazis, how a family could work to learn of Germany's atrocities and mass exterminations, avoid having its middle son get pulled into the SS and keep its honor to the end.

The juxtaposition of the books is remarkable, and it goes against reflex thinking about what or who is automatically prone to good or evil.

Nazi horror has not much place in the account by Grass, the leftist icon. A knock on the door, a letter, the phone ringing are the daily terrors, confronted and often overcome by the Fest family in the memoir by a man who didn't argue with those who called him a conservative.

…Other current happenings struck home, too, at the absurdity of Ich Nicht not finding a publisher in English:

A German opinion poll, appearing last week, showed 25 percent thought there were "good sides" to the Nazis; and a 1,238-page book by Jean-Luc Leleu, published in France with the title La Waffen SS, Soldats Politiques en Guerre (or, the Waffen SS, Political Soldiers at War), came out detailing the training, indoctrination and political function of this component of the SS world that Grass has so much trouble remembering.

That's not all.

Fest's book, in its description of his family's difficult life in Berlin, also testifies to the absolute trivialization of the Nazi era (and demonization of America) present in blogs seeking to create a category of Good Americans, comparable in their submissiveness on Iraq to the so-called Good Germans who went along with Hitler.

…As Fest makes clear, nobody in Berlin in 1940 was listening to radio call-in shows debating whether the invasions of France and Poland were morally acceptable.

…Read now, Fest's memoir can work as a warning to today's easy claimants of righteousness, and against the reflex appropriation of the moral high ground by any person, or faction.

Ich Nicht is strong and unique. Without it, the English language these days is short a very good book.

The Anti-Americans (a hate/love relationship)

David's Medienkritik has the entire broadcast of the PBS documentary that No Pasarán described a couple of months ago, including the teachings in the Lycée Henri IV, "the school where France's future leaders are groomed" (video 2, 2:10 minutes from the end, with an extract on No Pasarán)…

هُدْنَة

Paru le 23 octobre 2007: Houdna de Guy Millière. (ISBN 0-9774224-6-1)

Séances de dédicaces

Erik Svane et Dan Greenberg dédicaceront leurs albums (Général Leonardo : Croisade vers la Terre Sainte et Au service du Vatican) au Boulevard des Bulles (50 Boulevard Saint-Germain) le 25 octobre à partir de 15 h, à la librairie Nation le 26 octobre, et à Album Bercy le 27…

(More on Leonardo Da Vinci…)

To Arms! Brothers Dear! Gird on the Trenchant Brand! Strike Home! Strike Home! No Craven Fear! For Home and Native Land!

A short article of mine was published in CHAB News, the quarterly newsletter of the Confederate Historical Association of Belgium.

"La Louisianaise" (CHAB News, Volume XXXV # 1, mars 2007, p 11-12) speaks of the place of music in the Civil War era while showing the influence of immigrants' homelands on soldiers of the 1860s.

While Germans from Baltimore adapted Tannenbaum, O Tannenbaum, turning the Christmas tree song into a patriotic tune (Maryland, My Maryland), Louisiana soldiers took La Marseillaise and adapted the words (in English) to the situation in the 1860s.

Al Gore Carbon-Neutral Speech Thingy

Nobody seems to believe the Draft Gore poster is real. T'is indeed! Thank goodness, it allows for so many parodies (cheers to Mamapajamas with inspiration by K T Cat)…

A "big ball of humanity, rolling around, limbs and heads sticking out of it": More science fiction from Christopher Cook…

Damn Those Catholic Priests and… When You Think About It… Religion in General!

No; much better to entrust our children to our schools (preferably secular) and to our teachers…

Better dead than Red

... too bad Sarkozy wants him to be read.

« Parmi ceux qui sont en prison
Se trouvent nos 3 camarades
Berselli, Planquette et Simon
Qui vont passer des jours maussades

Vous êtes tous trois enfermés
Mais patience, prenez courage
Vous serez bientôt libérés
Par tous vos frères d’esclavage

Les traîtres de notre pays
Ces agents du capitalisme
Nous les chasserons hors d’ici
Pour instaurer le socialisme

Main dans la main Révolution
Pour que vainque le communisme
Pour vous sortir de la prison
Pour tuer le capitalisme

Ils se sont sacrifiés pour nous
Par leur action libératrice.»

Al-Assad feels the lurve

Deep penetration.

Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week

Le Che reçoit une balle entre les deux yeux

Nice shot. Getcha a case of Polar beer for that one!



.. and there are more where that came from. Thanks to The Elohim.

Did you ever feel like you'd been cheated?

EU leaders to French and Dutch voters suckers: we don't need your stinking NO votes!

Can you smell what the French are cooking ?

In Madrid They're Mens' Bikes

In among the worn out middle-aged whores are scads of bike rental stands. Inasmuch as they've seen some more use than usual, they didn't sell (rent) like hotcakes. In fact, todays transit strike was a write-off, and a victory for the forces encouraging the dismemberment of individual responsibility.

One paper recommended along with the suggestion that people sleep at their jobs, ollerbading or skatebordingr at ones' peril on the “charming” cobblestone pavement. Good luck with all that.

The Sarkozy's split up and the French preSS still puts an American slant on it

Noël Mamère, France's other bushy mustached American hating globophobe (who spends his time arranging illegal marriages for criminals), declares that "It's time to close the book on the Americanisation of French public life".

"I have sworn before a picture of the old and mourned comrade Stalin that I won't rest until I see these capitalist octopuses annihilated"

Did [Che Guevara] keep a picture of Josef Stalin at home?

asks Benjamin Duffy.

Che's idolatry is bad enough, but it's even worse that Stalin was its object. Che once signed a letter to his aunt as "Stalin II," and even placed flowers on Stalin's tomb when visiting the USSR in 1960. If Che wanted to follow in the footsteps of his hero, he succeeded brilliantly.

…The future T-shirt icon … proclaimed to the press that his ideal societal model was Kim Il-Sung's North Korea. North Korea has been arguably the most unlivable spot on earth since the end of World War II. Guevara traveled there in 1965, saw the brutality and poverty with his own eyes, and then made it his goal to import that system to Latin America. As a champion of the poor, Che aspired to emulate a society that truly benefits its poorest inhabitants -anyone not named Kim Jong-il or Kim Il-Sung.

Most of the whining about Che's death seems to revolve around the fact that he was executed without trial, and that it was carried out by another one of those "U.S.-backed dictatorships" that they talk so much about. Well, that's true. Che was executed without a trial, and our country's relationship with Bolivia was one of many deals with the devil consecrated during the Cold War. Leftists always have a problem with U.S.-backed dictatorships, but never with Stalinist and Maoist stooges like — well, like Che Guevara.

…Actually, Che was a big fan of execution without a fair trial. As he once remarked, "To send men to the firing squad, judicial proof is unnecessary...These procedures are an archaic bourgeois detail. This is a revolution! And a revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate."

…So Che executed hundreds of people, and he's the hero. Felix Rodriguez executed Che, and he's the villain. Whose face belongs on a T-shirt?

Deep in the Gallic soul

Deep in the Gallic soul resides the notion that work is exploitation, a ruse concocted by American robber barons, best regulated and minimized and offset by hours of idleness. The demise of the Soviet Union left France leading the counter-capitalist school.

Thus speaks Roger Cohen in his article of Christine Lagarde, France's finance minister aka "the anti-Descartes by declaring the French should think less to work more."

In an interview, Lagarde says that more than two decades at a U.S. corporation taught her: "The more hours you worked, the more hours you billed, the more profit you could generate for yourself and your firm. That was the mantra."

The equivalent mantra in the French bureaucracy might be: The fewer hours you work, the more vacation you take, the more time you have to grumble about the state of the universe, and the smarter you feel, especially compared to workaholic dingbats across the Atlantic with no time for boules.

Socialist Striking to get More than Others

To have similar work condition as the general public is not acceptable to transit workers, who are, as it is, already civil servants, are accorded with benefits employees and businesses have to struggle to create under legal mandates and a desire to do well by people. The public is NOT amused.



After the first wave of people clearing out of the city early on, all stations look abandoned as the 8 p.m. shutdown rolled around.

Don't forget that this is the country where college students protested in order to get their first job guaranteed for life. But from whom?

In effect, everything and its opposite is prima facie evidence of a U.S. government conspiracy

While Le Monde and Plantu chose their special ways to commemorate 9-11 and while French TV (both cable and public) chose that day to broadcast all sorts of interesting "documentaries" on American history, past and present, John Rosenthal comments on Medienkritik's report of Germany's public television ZDF TV "honoring" that sixth anniversary by the prime-time broadcast of a "documentary" in the Michael Moore mold, replete with conspiracy theorists and blame for America.

When the ZDF "investigators" manage finally to cast doubt upon one or another of even the most ludicrous arguments of the "theorists," moreover, it is only ever after a seemingly immense intellectual effort -- when simple common sense ought to have sufficed.

…in the earlier segment [of September 11, 2001: What Really Happened], the fact that U.S. authorities did not shoot down [the first three] passenger jets is supposed to provide prima facie evidence of a U.S. government conspiracy; in the Shanksville segment, however, alleged evidence that U.S. authorities did in fact shoot down UA93 [the fourth jet] is supposed likewise to provide prima facie evidence of a U.S. government conspiracy. This is to say, in effect, that for the filmmakers — as indeed for the "theorists" — everything and its opposite is prima facie evidence of a U.S. government conspiracy.

The final abiding message of the ZDF documentary is that America is, in any case, somehow to blame: if not perhaps for the attacks themselves, then at least for the fact that the "skeptics" believe that America was responsible for the attacks.

…Never once in the ZDF documentary, however, is serious attention drawn to the responsibility of the 19 hijackers who carried out the attacks and their al-Qaida enablers and co-conspirators. The results of a ZDF online poll that appears on the promotional page for the documentary are thus hardly surprising. Asked to identify "who pulled the strings" in the 9/11 attacks, fully 66 percent of respondents, as of this writing, have chosen either "George W. Bush" (26 percent) or "U.S. Authorities" (25 percent) or the "Armaments Lobby" (15 percent). The fourth and remaining choice, "Osama Bin Laden," is given the nod by only 26 percent of respondents.

Masterful Self-Censorship with Élan

France's freedom of the press rating ranks below Ghana's, “missed an opportunity to shut up” Lithuania's, and Costa Rica's at 31st.

Only HE Can Tame the Raging Sun!

At first sight, nobody seems to believe the Al Gore poster is real, thinking it can only be a satire. In any case, the altogether serious Draft Gore website poster keeps getting improved.

After Ché Gorevara, it's (thanks to Dave Runyan) the turn of Al God-ore…

Mais on est tellement mieux avec Bertrand Cantat et Matthieu Chedid

Chuck Berry, supposedly appearing on French TV circa 1965.

The Usual Pedantry

A minority of transit workers plan on paralyzing France, punishing the rest of the population with their demands on Thursday 18 October.

Liberté Chérie says simply:

NON AUX BLOCAGES!
NON AUX PRIVILEGES!

In other words: “eat me”, and urges them to get a life.

Cultural Exception

Too often the French can't think (and speak) straight … English provides freedom of thought and scope of expression, things that French doesn't offer

The pretentiousness and fuzziness are unbearable. Often when I doubt the soundness of a French statement, I translate it into English, and if it still sounds absurd in English, I know it's absurd.

A Frenchman who went to live in the United States before returning to France has been accused of having an "abhorrence of French". Bookaroo replies:

Of course no, I have no "abhorrence of French" as they superficially put it. I belong to the last generation of French kids who had to learn Latin (I had 8 years of it) and to master the inflexible rules of good classical French. In NY I was known as the only French-American in my crowd who made a systematic effort to maintain his practice of the language.

With the few special students I am occasionally willing to instruct in French, I use only plays, especially Georges Feydeau's, or J.P. Sartre's for contemporary French. Both show an exquisite use of French. But in real life in GP, there's nothing that we hear in ordinary conversation or read in ordinary newspapers that can be compared to those playwrights.

What I can't stand is the mangling of the language by all ordinary modern French who've never learnt how to use it, and thus just write or say whatever they feel is understandable. My joke is that the French language is too difficult for the (modern) French. I would estimate that 80-90 % of modern French people don't know the language any more. Only professionals, who have to use French as their main tool — politicians, diplomats, lawyers, professors, bankers, writers — who need to be precise and have mastered good French through disciplined and relentless practice. And their kids, lucky they, directly learn from these proficient speakers. What a rarity and what pleasure to meet a 20-year old who can speak French beautifully and fluently. But all the other kids learn their French from parents who had only limited or bastardized knowledge of it (country people, immigrants, farm and industry workers, etc...) French is a rigid language (another joke: God invented French to torture people's minds), with much less flexibility than English, and much more difficult to use than English. English provides freedom of thought and scope of expression, things that French doesn't offer.

In addition I can no longer stand the pretentious French that is used to sound "serious", "profound", "malin", with flights of mysticism, pseudo-poetry, or often obscure verbosity. The big abstractions in French are unbearably vapid and cloudy (l'amour, la tendresse, la violence, la liberté, la fraternité, l'égalité, la connerie, etc...) all that mawkish sentimentality that has no real connection with people who are only interested in money, sex and food, in that order.

Too often the French can't think (and speak) straight. They don't know how to come to the point and love to go circles around the bush and leave you guessing. They've never been taught to be efficient, to focus and stay with the subject. Digressions, divagations, tangents, etc...the art of obfuscation. I read the Figaro every morning, and often I have to puke at the writing. The pretentiousness and fuzziness are unbearable. Often when I doubt the soundness of a French statement, I translate it into English, and if it still sounds absurd in English, I know it's absurd. That's my limus test. I have 500 books on art and art history, including French art, but I avoid those written by French art historians because of their temptations to sound profound and (to me) totally off their rocker. Not surprisingly the major art books on French art are written by British or American writers (occasionally Australian, as in the case of Robert Hughes).

I do follow the English-language theater in GP, but I avoid its attempts at performing in French. The English-language actors in GP find it exciting to test their ability to perform in French. For them it has great personal value. For me, their exercise holds no interest at all. Better to go to an authentic French play.

This is not abhorrence of French, but abhorrence of the mangling of the language by those who don't know it, and the misuse by those who know it but want to impress their audience by sounding "profond," "serieux," "malin", etc...always trying to make an effect even if they have to torture the language. Swim in ambiguity and fuzziness, sound high-falutin like an angel floating down from the heavens, never say what you mean, and never mean what you say seems to be their implicit principle. The French either don't know how to communicate, and waste an enormous amount of time and energy in conveying their meaning or trying to decipher others' meaning. With huge accidents of miscomprehension along the way. I fled to the US to escape from all this.

This was not the case in the 17th, 18th and even 19th century. The present state of French communication and writing is the consequence of the universal teaching adopted after the French Revolution, and of having to find new teachers for the millions of kids who suddenly had to go to school, teachers who themselves had little grounding in good living French. Those millions of kids are now those shaping up modern French. Where is it going? Who knows?

Meanwhile people who want to communicate clearly, rapidly and efficiently on the modern international scene resort to English. And rightly so.

هُدْنَة

Guy Millière, dans un article publié par la Metula News Agency, pose la question : Vers un cycle de logique suicidaire ?, et annonce la sortie de son nouveau livre, "Houdna".

Lefty Sucks

Need more proof?

Now Suriname wants a U.S. military base, just like its neighbors, Colombia and Peru. Over in Brazil, the military is reasserting itself. With Venezuela on the prowl, these are signs of an anxious region.

Lefty predators threatening violence "for the people." Now isn't that a cute little anachronism...

Last Call for Alcohol, Last Call for Human Rights...

It's all about who you aren't:

These men and women put their own lives and livelihoods at risk by working to rid the world of violence and oppression. Let us hope they survive the coming year so that the Nobel Prize Committee might consider them for the 2008 award.

Yet another European institution disposes of its' sense of proportion and common sense.

In Olso Friday, the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize was not awarded to the Burmese monks whose defiance against, and brutalization at the hands of, the country's military junta in recent weeks captured the attention of the Free World.

He's out

Rock n' roll.