Un "Maudit Français": "I shouldn't say this but I find the Quebeckers very… Anglo-Saxon" admits Françoise, as though this was the worst kind of insult

Benajamin Duffy's Québec adventure (more global warming in the region's "legendary harsh winters") makes for a hyperlink in the Wall Street Journal, no less.

The bitterness of the many disappointed French immigrants who had seen Canada through rose-tinted glasses

is palpable. Quebec is described as a matriarchal society ("Feministan") with failing infrastructures ("Kebekistan"). The Quebeckers are described as "intolerant racists" who speak an outdated and incorrect language, bask in their own ignorance and suffer from an inferiority complex that results in a loathing of "maudits Français" ("damned French").

…A Frenchman who has been living in Quebec for 11 years but now plans to leave, Yann complains among other things that he was not made aware of the appalling quality of health care [something Michael Moore failed to see while making Sicko, apparently]. "Sometimes you have to wait a whole day to see a doctor. Patients even have to wait on stretchers in the corridors, resources are so limited," he explains.

…Another element plays a part in the return rate: the culture shock. Their common language means that the French are unprepared for this. Many expect to find "an acre of France in America" rather than "America in French." And even then, it's not the same French. Johanna admits she still uses typical Quebecker expressions months after her return to France.

Language is only one aspect of the cultural divide faced by the French immigrant. The basic cultural precepts are also unique. "I know I shouldn't say this but I find the Quebeckers very… Anglo-Saxon," admits Françoise, as though this was the worst kind of insult. With their more right-wing economic vision, a culinary approach that is a long way from its French origins and policies based on individual freedom, the Quebeckers are first and foremost North-Americans.

Annie:

Et oui nous disons "Les maudits Français" et vous que dites vous des Québécois...

Nous on dit ça pour rire, en France je me suis fait poser des questions sérieuses du genre "L'hiver à Mtl tu vas travailler en motoneige?" ou "Ça doit pas etre marrant d'aller dehors à -50 pour aller au WC?" ou encore "Vous dormez en habit de ski la nuit car des maisons en bois ça doit pas être chaud?", "Tu dois bien chanter?", "Tu connais Céline Dion?", "Ça doit être stressant de pas pouvoir sortir pendant des jours à cause d'une tempête de neige", et j'en ai tout une liste complète comme ça... Pendant 4 ans presque à tout les jours on m'a étiquetté comme ça... Ils sont hypochrites avec tout le monde...

C'est p-t pas nous traiter de con mais c'est vraiment nous prendre pour des cons...

Super, on vit dans des cabanes en bois au travers des orignaux avec nos bécosses dans cour en plein Montréal... Et malgré tout ça on arrive à faire un emission de TV qu'on entend parler jusqu'en France... WOW pour des bûcherons je nous trouve très forts...

C'est quand même bizarre que beaucoup de Français s'installent ici au Québec alors que les Québécois qui expérimentent la vie en France revient presque tous au Québec... P-t parce que même au bout de plusieurs années là-bas on se fait encore dire tout les jours "Ha vous etes Canadien!"... Non mais on peut pas vivre tout simplement sa petit vie comme tout le monde mais non... Quand t'es arabe t'es çi, quand t'es noir t'es ça, quand t'es Canadien t'es bucheron, ect... A part etre Francais pur laine pas moyen de vivre une vie tranquille normal... Toujours un commentaire par çi, un commentaire par là, un critique par çi, un exagération par là... En passant j'ai beaucoup beaucoup beaucoup voyagé dans le monde et nous ne sommes pas les seuls à dire "Maudit Français"... Hi hi hi

L'Irak n'a-t-il aucune dette envers la France ?

From the exceptional World Politics Review: In violation of the divine holy order of the UN Security Council’s resolution, the French government is continuing to resist Iraqi efforts to recover the financial assets of Saddam Hussein in France. According to George Malbrunot' recent investigative report in Le Figaro, some €23.48 million of Saddam's money remains blocked in French banks, withheld from the elected government of Iraq.

But perhaps the most startling revelation in the Malbrunot piece -- and the most relevant for American readers -- concerns the extent of Saddam's corporate holdings in France and, notably, in French publishing. Malbrunot writes:

Apart from the villa in Cannes and the assets frozen at the Banque de France, the Iraq of Saddam Hussein held shares in French companies via offshore corporations, based, notably, in Switzerland and Panama. One of these front corporations, Montana Management, held 8.4 percent of [the French publishing house] Hachette and 2.5 percent of [the French aeronautics and defense firm] Matra, prior to their fusion in Lagardère. The value of these shares is today estimated to be around €200 million. The former owner, Khalaf al-Dulaymi, a former Baath Party official close to Saddam Hussein, is supposed to have taken refuge in Jordan. . . . . Iraqi lawyers have demanded the seizure of the property of Dulaymi, who also possessed another front corporation named Midco, but Dulaymi has opposed the move.

Aérospatiale Matra was one of the founding members of the Franco-German aeronautics and defense consortium EADS, some 7.5 percent of whose shares continue to be controlled by Matra's parent company the Groupe Lagardère. The French publishing giant Hachette is likewise part of the Lagardère Group. In 2006, Hachette purchased Time Warner Books, thus becoming a major player also in American book publishing. Under its "Grand Central" imprint, the Hachette Book Group USA is the publisher, for instance, of comic Stephen Colbert's "I am America (And So Can You!)."

Which is about as humorless as anyone who read it twice, but that’s beside the point. Is this ideology at work, just the usual use of technicalities to grab a dead dictator’s loot, or an attempt to play ‘hide the weenie’ after Saddam’s connections came to be so widely known?

Of course a few commenter to the article in Le Figaro couldn’t just leave it at that, what with the conclusions and even the majority of comments showing some healthy anger at the amorality of holding back any funds from a post-dictatorial state in formation:

Tr.: Bravo to France

The international community recognised this Iraqi puppet regime under the American occupation, falsely sectarian regime that it is. As a product of the American occupation. This obscurantist criminal sectarian regime has no national or international legitimacy and death squads. Iraq is the most corrupt country in the world.
France should hold on to this money for the next Iraqi nationalist regime.

and

Why you do not reclaim it from others ?

from the Chinese or Dutch

Or Danes, or Belgians, or English, or Americans, or others

Or Saddam and Bush who declare war.

It hard not to laugh at the strange absence of any moral compass, what with those who depose dictators being no better than the dictator himself, or that the same lot yelled and screamed asking why they didn’t fight in Rwanda, when life showed them something that horrified them, as long as it’s always done by somebody else. It is, after all beneath the deep intellects who find “bravitude” in acting out a minor political vendetta on the new Iraqi government as a proxy for the hate-puppet they’ve been fixated on.

That must be when some of those drive-by commenters think of as blood and treasure.

Don't you Need Schade to have Schadenfreude?

l'empire américain est-il en train de s'effondrer ?

It seems to be making their nipples hard to think about the US unemployment rate "surrrrrging" to 5% while it's still only 2/3rds of the EU's earth-shattering "lookie-lookie-look-at-meeee!" 40 year record low of 7.5%. Europe hasn't seen a rate of 5% since the post-war years of manpower shrotages caused by huge number of dead.

In fact this lame blurb wants us to believe that the gap in figures between predictions and November US unemplyment data is "a deception". I suppose that if you think the world is static and the author is willing to discount the fact that European states constantly talk-up their futures and doctor their employment data, then, well, that's okay - for them, even if the euro-zone is still the OECD's sick man, weighing the aggregate rate of 5.5% with their 7.5% rate or able -bodied loafers. Come on, people... the world can't wait!

Otherwise that sideshow of caring, "income inequality" so important to the romper room social thinkers of the continent would also align employment, and would require 4 million Americans to be put out of work to salve their guilt-ridden spirits. Fat chance. The next public obsession will bring out the old saw about the EU catching a cold when the US sneezes. This might have to do with the fact that even as adults they refuse to build up an immunity for themselves.

If there was only a Convention on the Torture of Statistics

I really want to know how you can torture data that gets you from here:

EU global image improving, US fading

to here:

While it is now perceived as the world's number one superpower by 81 percent of the respondents, 61 percent think the US will still be top world player in 13 years time.

Terminally obsessed with Welmacht, the report is titled “Who Rules the World”. The title and its’ motives alone offer far more veracity than it’s contents or conclusions.

The US is still seen as the world's number one superpower, while the EU ranks fifth

This, after saying that they are behind Russia which has one third the population of the EU, and that unimpeachable Mother Theresa human-rights, China. Actually it should say that China and Russia’s global image is improving – displacing the EU, but that would be unthinkable. More amusing still is who they asked:

Respondents to the survey from within the EU are the most optimistic about the bloc's future as a global actor, with percentages ranging from 80 percent in Germany, to 70 percent (UK), and 38 percent (France).

And they go on to suggest that some Russians imagine themselves a power, and so forth. In other words, far from being a survey on others’ image of EUtopia, it’s a survey that tells you just how in love people are with their own countries, and how thoroughly they believe the image constructed by it. The only people convinced that the EU is a “global actor” for a positive future of humanity are Europeans who think that it acts at all. It doesn’t. It does comparatively little compared to its’ wealth and writes a exposé every time a sac of rice is sent to someone they’re using to prop of their image of themselves. They bury the fact that of the 8911 people in this survey, only 1000 are from the US and each nation polled in the EU, and the don’t innumerate any further. In terms of population, this over-represents Germany, France, and the UK by a factor of two over Russia, and more than four times over the US.

They also absurdly call respondents “the world population” when they refer to the entire sample which come from 9 countries, 3 of which are in the EU.

It is nonetheless quite revealing. In terms of perceptions of just who is a world power, it arrives to the conclusion that the only people in the world who believe the EU is a world power are Germans and Britons. It also absurdly asserts Germans and Britons believe the UN, which is a forum (used mainly for political grandstanding,) and not a state actor, is actually a "world power".

Were it a world power it might act effectively on its' mandate, and there would be no hunger or disease left in the world. But it isn't. It's an extranational not supranational player which they try enoble the EU with by association. In fact they flatly and falsely assume that the EU is a supranational entity when it is in reality just a nation (a region functioning under a body of binding laws) incomplete in its formation.

Cloying for both pity and for someone to lick their boot, the motives behind ginning up this kind of non-story, one need look no further than the following emotional set-up. In fact this survey by Bertelsmann Stiftung discussed with Josef Janning both seem unnaturally preoccupied with improving Europe’s image by trashing America’s. Instead of quoting Janning, I’d rather quote a blogger who puts the motives and the methodology into some perspective with an emotional hostage-taking of her own:

At this time of year Ms R normally wants to go all Eastern European, gaze out of the window and say things like,“The frosts are early this year, there will be no apples," whereupon someone will put their head in their hands, a grandmother will start to sob uncontrollably and a small, disturbingly happy child will play with a broken musical toy.

Thanks to a very good friend, Ms R won't be indulging in this somewhat Chekovian tableau. Oh no. For the next week Ms R will be living like an European aristocrat or at least the Eurotrash lover of a Hedge Funder.

Unlike the desperate beings at Bertelsmann she’s actually self-aware enough to know the difference between sarcasm and a lie. This leads me back to the study which is actually only about the EU.

Whereas the majority of the Japanese population are undecided when it comes to cooperation with Europe (though the vast majority of those who can make up their minds is in favour of greater cooperation), the British population is especially sceptical about greater cooperation with the EU–almost a third of the British are against it, and only 60 per cent are in favour of the idea.

The population of the U.S. thinks differently. Here 78 per cent are in favour of greater cooperation with Europe. However, an interpretation of the results needs to take into account the level of cooperation which already exists with any particular country.

In other words the more familiar any of the people question are likely to be involved with the EU, the LESS likely they are to like the idea of cooperation with them – which makes one woder about the puff-pieces put out in the press about it: where did they find anything in the poll supporting ANY of their conclusions?

The Heat Is Unbearable: Bush's Global Warming Extends to Lake Michigan's Sunny South Haven

Economic growth comes to those as do wait

Hooray!

French economic growth has found its source. A Lyon café owner has decided to "enter the resistance" against France's new anti-smoking law. He has already been fined (after a police raid during which 20, count 'em, 20 cops showed up in his café) but is encouraging his customers to keep right on smoking. He is taking "artsy photos" of the butt filled ashtrays and plans to sell the photos on the Internet to pay his fines. Whatever is left over will be profit. Good luck with that, bud.

Café 203, Lyon

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Over 60 years later, France's new "Zone Libre"

That Lisbon Strategy thing is going to kick in real soon now, I'm sure

Not so long ago, France still officially had a 5 Year Plan. Now, Sarkozy is boasting that he's going to go and find economic growth. Perhaps there is a government plan to crank up strategic yogurt production.

As if they had the disposable income to shop more often

Shop 'til you drop? Not if EUtopian business police can help it.

Just One Little Window in Their New “Kristallnacht”

New York Defender est un nouveau venu dans le monde des jeux Flash à thème sérieux.

[ ... ]

Le jeu lui même est sans envergure, mais il suscite néanmoins un débat intéressant.”

Note the shallowness of “seriousness” with which it’s taken. Just one of their precious little possible « débats » that they’ll imagine they’re enlightening the world with. If Americans really wanted to reciprocate, they would have to advocate the destruction of European cities on Arab satellite TV channels.  That's how far that goes:

Remembered as one of the worst days in American history, countless millions believe Sept. 11, 2001, should never be duplicated, not even in a video game. 

Apparently, a group of French Internet video game makers never got the message, and now families of victims from that horrid day are enraged with the notion that children get to replay the tragedy over and over again.

"It's horrible what happened. People shouldn't see it again and kids should not be playing games like that. It's just not funny," said Lauren Zaifart, a Battery Park resident.

So when lefty asks “why do they hate us?”, they need look no further than the fantasies of Europeans that have been exported to the third world fever-swamps that their own colonization and resource wars created.

Those complaining about this are not overreacting. The game was designed to demonstrate from abroad an argument to Americans about their own actions, not those of the terrorists. The French game designer told the Denver Post in 2002 that there is no way to win the game.

The sole purpose is to illustrate the ultimate impossibility of fighting terrorism – a fight the United States is still waging in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere throughout the world.

Odd, isn't it that nowhere in that clown's world view is there room for making the same "brave statement" to al Qaida.

Is it safer to walk around in Baghdad than it is in Caracas? Hugo Chávez's socialist "sea of happiness" resembles a war zone.

…which nation shows average civilian deaths at 33 a day in the last third of 2007?

asks Investor's Business Daily.

Now name the one where civilian deaths average 19 a day? If you guessed Iraq and Venezuela, you'd have it backward.

…This is Hugo Chavez's Venezuela, the place wildly praised by Hollywood eminentos like Oliver Stone and Sean Penn, and its crime is so bad it tops that seen in actual warfare.

People like Stone and Penn frequently criticize the Iraq war effort and its progress toward peace. But not once have we seen any of them express outrage at the slaughter brought to the streets of Venezuela courtesy of Hugo Chavez, a supposed champion of the poor.

Warm Fuzzy Blackmail

How goes the verse? Green skies at night, capitalist take flight...

EU environment ministers meeting in Brussels on Thursday (20 December) agreed that restrictions should be put on carbon dioxide emissions from air planes from 2012.

Under the proposal, all airlines coming to and leaving the EU bloc of 27 member states, as well as intra-EU flights - will be included in an emission trading scheme, something that has already been applied to other polluting sectors in the Union.

Airlines would be able to meet pollution-reduction quotas either by reducing their own emissions or buying credits from other industries.

European Industries, or more precisely the racketeers trading in the credits. (It will only work if you BELIEVE. Just BELIEVE!)

Of course the whole thing involves forcing private enterprise, much of it non-EUvian, to “do something” has only one purpose. So Eurocrats like pre-cambrian Marxist coocoo Tony Benn can say:

"This is a bold step by Europe ...”

Which, of course, it really isn’t. It’s a bold step for someone in Brussels who never learned to touch-type, and what he was really trying to say was “bend over, or else”. It’s a subsidy – not for the Airline industry as the Greenie crackheads cited in the article say it is – but one for the “carbon credit” racket. And those credits are allotted by EU governments, not those imaginary hordes of “Eco-enterpreneurs”.

Only if we can Carpet-Bomb Your Cities

Brussels Journal cites some of that predictable and amusing nuttiness that we've come to know and love: ”Liberal Europeans Demand Right to Vote in U.S. Elections”

American presidential elections are not “home affairs.” American decisions have repercussions all over the globe. The American mortgage crisis affects banks in Europe. The insatiable American demand for oil makes the Arabian sheiks rich.

Actually Europe gets most of its oil from the Arab world and is propping up a charming little ex-KGB station chief in Moscow. The U.S. is addicted to domestic, Nigerian, and Venezuelan oil.

The American refusal to care for the environment causes the North Pole ice to melt and coastal areas in Asia to flood. A weakened dollar and an immense budget deficit affect the global economy.

Sounds more like their nocturnal emissions... Let me see if I can understand this one – the EU’s carbon emission grow at more than twice the rate of the US’, and they persist in trotting out this stale old saw. Quick question: have you ever SEEM anyone use those pretty little multi-compartment recycling dust-bins in blessed out EUtopia? Have you ever wondered why by comparison, a photo from outer space of the US makes the EU look like a parking lot? Probably not.

Hence, the world should be given the right to vote. Because the current situation is a blatant case of taxation without representation, against which the Americans rebelled in 1776. But of course the world will not be allowed to vote. The best we can hope for is that the Americans choose a leader who is deeply aware of the U.S.’s responsibility, as a superpower, for the rest of mankind.

And they think themselves capable of actually being responsible for anything positive in the world after spending 5 centuries screwing it up, of course. Sure. They were going to get to that next week. Right after they realized that Pol Pot, Ho Chi Minh, and Mao Tse Tung leaned all about their “healing, inclusive philosophy” at the Sorbonne.

It’s all part of the old “internationalism” schtick. They make themselves the sort of entrepot of these alphabet soup talking shop operations, find a few people who don’t look like Europeans to play the part of the shepard in the nativity play they scripted for themselves, and go to town. Ever heard them criticize Russian or Chinese capital punishment? Of course not.

This silliness has gotten to the point that they’re trying to form a nation which can count itself 25 times over in all of these international babble-fests, and try to call that a sort of “internationalism”. Why they love pluralism so much that they see the UN as a governing entity when all it really is, is a forum to speed up their own loony pronouncements for the rest of the world.

The answer in short is NO. You can’t vote here, so stay in your little playpen. You don’t understand democracy, individual responsibility, or even the basic notion of government by the people, let alone the difference between being a subject and a citizen, or being ruled rather than being governed.

Earth to Europe: go pound sand. Just because the US actually fights what you happy to just fear, doesn’t mean that we have to listen to your Borderline Personality Disorder talking to us.

Gee Pancho, You’re Such a, like, "Rebel”

Euro-reasoning 101: cultish hatred can be useful to create your own “facts on the ground”.



... Yeah, but at this moment, I’m still the most popular Republican of the 21st century ...

In other words, even if Bush has been chosen as America’s most admired man, Pancho’s notion of “news” is to simply smear the object of his ire with a polar opposite. This cartoon was titled “The Primaries have started!”... as if they would ever otherwise care. Bush can’t run again, but since this “Euro-übermensch” needs to periodically fondle his little plushie toy of hatred to keep the threads of his tender ego together, he trots out his best Georges Boosh.

Quiet

Well, you know, quiet for France.

Cradle to Grave EUDistopia

Europeans start to wonder about the numerous nanny state laws that they have woken up to in 2008.

One Big Mac IV coming up

José Bové©® and cohorts scheduled to start hunger strike to protest GMOs.

Russian Politics Finally Matures to the Continent’s High Standards

Putin mutates into Vladimir Zhirinovsky to find the sort of political dramatus personae Europeans will actually pay notice of . Some recently elected to Russia’s electoral body are young, firm, and fully packed with that form of intellect and idealism reserved for political environments where nothing they do could possibly matter:

ALINA KABAYEVA , A rhythmic gymnast known for her extreme flexibility.

The 24-year-old said: “People often asked me if I got offers to be pictured in erotic magazines such as Playboy. Yes, it did happen but I answered no each time. I know about ethical issues.
“I first of all consider a woman’s beauty from an aesthetic point of view.”

I can sense your relief at that great ethical stand. If that doesn’t give Euro-politicking a stiffie, I don’t know what will.

Paying Others to Bravely Fly in the Face of Adversity

Weeks and weeks later: unwilling to free up 10 helicopters out of a fleet of 2400 to support the UN/AU cum UN/AU/EU operation in Darfour, grotty Gordo proposed checkbook diplomacy:

Mr Mitchell called for tough sanctions to be imposed on the Sudanese government and said that Britain should offer to pay countries like India or China for the use of vital helicopters in support of the UN-AU force.

Let me see if I understand this: Blackwater bad, paying India good. The Corporatist continent sees contract security as mercenary, but bribing governments to do the same thing as not. It’s almost charming in its’ naïvité:

"The UN and EU should now set clear benchmarks and a clear deadline for the imposition of sanctions, unless the UN-AU force is allowed to deploy in full. The sanctions should include asset freezes and travel bans on key figures in the Government of Sudan and on rebel leaders who impede the deployment of the force."

Which are the very travel bans that Germany opposed, the sanctions that various figures in the EU called inhumane, and the force was one lefties kept chiding the US was required in 2001 in lieu of the one that deposed the Taliban. In other words ANYTHING but what’s needed WHEN it’s needed.

Harmless Fun "like Scouts or Cadets"

The UK: stranger than fiction:

An Electrician accused of being a Muslim holy warrior claimed he was hunting Nessie during an alleged jihad training course.

- Thx to EUdada

Prescience

Mad Magazine, 1977: a.k.a. Europe, 2008

Fini, les clopes au bec

French smoking ban starts today.

Sugar Pops

EU aid packages are loaded.

Hope it wasn't his drinking arm

Courageous AFP fotog Thomas Coex leaves hotel bar and gets his elbow smashed.



AFP press people have a long documented problem of substance abuse.

You calling them animals is hate speech

But when they symbolically behead someone, it's some form of Zeropean artistic license. Dutch rap group Youssef & Kamal symbolically behead Dutch anti-immigration politician Geert Wilders.

Sick, Pervy Visitor of the Day - Part 8

Sick, Pervy Visitor of the Day - Part 7

Let's See How This Goes Over

Even when they're acting like idiots, the image thing works for them.

Dec. 28 (Bloomberg) -- France bans smoking in cafes, hotels and clubs on Jan. 1, stamping out the habit popularized by Jean- Paul Sartre puffing Gauloises in hazy brasseries

Of course there IS the standard "personal defense mechanism" idiotic reply:

"Maybe we're a bit stupid with our traditions, but we have the right to be as such and I cannot stand the idea of a hygienic, clean, and sorry to say `American style' society," said David Droulez, head of the Friends of Pleasure and Taste Association in Paris, which wants to defend France's "epicurean conviviality."

Whatever the hell that's supposed to mean.

Either way whenever you hear the term "American Style ______" you're sure that it's something generally detested, and is as innacurate as their decades of "peasant science" of people telling one another that the black tobacco isn't as bad as the blond tobacco.

Kidnappers of children get off easy

Chad lets them off easy, probably in exchange for some contracts. 8 years hard labor for kidnapping kids is a bit on the light side. Expect them to be spirited out of Chad, real soon now, to do their time in France. The French preSS is fairly uniformly spreading the good word that these guys are misguided and their intentions were good. The fact is that these criminals were simply looking to build themselves a good street rep among competing NGOs (the better to attract those donations), and if they had to kidnap a bunch of brown skinned kids to do it, so much the better. The entire affair, from the government approved junket into Africa - the snatching of the children - the medical personnel bandaging the kids and putting phoney blood on them to make them look injured - the self righteous cries of those convinced that they know what is best for others - and the uncalled for support of the preSS for this criminal activity, is typically French: condescending, holier-than-thou, paternalistic, and profoundly racist.

The foolproof design of its long standing "Arab Policy" allows France to avoid this kind of messiness

Not. So tell us again, how's that working for 'ya?

Your Choice is to Lose Either Way

Delusions abound. That doesn’t stop the NYT’s international “agent of change”, the International Herald Tribune from arranging their priorities in the most foolish manner possible by thinking that can limit the landscape of choices among their fellow travelers to having to make a choice between human freedom and greenie moral vanity.

And since the imposition of the embargo in 1962, and especially with the collapse in 1991 of the Soviet Union, its major economic patron, Cuba's economy has stagnated.

Cuba has not been free of development, including Soviet-style top-down agricultural and mining operations and, in recent years, an expansion of tourism. But it also has an abundance of landscapes that elsewhere in the region have been ripped up, paved over, poisoned or otherwise destroyed in the decades since the Cuban revolution, when development has been most intense. Once the embargo ends, the island could face a flood of investors from the United States and elsewhere, eager to exploit those landscapes.

Oh the horror! Cubans have to keep gleaning fields, and doing dental work on themselves for the sake of mother earth!

Cuba has done "what we should have done — identify your hot spots of biodiversity and set them aside," said Oliver Houck, a professor of environmental law at Tulane University Law School who attended the conference.

In the late 1990s, Houck was involved in an effort, financed in part by the MacArthur Foundation, to advise Cuban officials writing new environmental laws.

But, he said in an interview, "an invasion of U.S. consumerism, a U.S.-dominated future, could roll over it like a bulldozer" when the embargo ends.

Gaia Loves You Conditionally

Let me take the opportunity on this day, as if it should be different from any other, to wish you a spiritually fortifying Ramadan, happy Hannukah (only if you’re into that kind of Kabalah that pop-culture figures fall for), and whatever the heck it is those geeks who want to revive Viking religion do, you know, because, we have to be, like inclusive. Well – except if it seems conventional or your parents believed it. They were, after all Patriarchal and selfish for bringing us into this world, and in spite of the great inequities out there, had the gall to feed us. It makes me grip my dream-catcher on my way to Yoga...

Now let me wish all of the UK a Happy Diwali since that’s not socially inappropriate in the same way as wishing you well for Christmas – which was invented by Coca-Cola and other corporations - *spit* - anyway to sell something that will kill you. Being as how 92% of the population has it as the festive tradition of their culture, we should all look for the shocking, non-applicable, and improbable to distract ourselves with. While we in the civilized west may be told every other day that we ‘have no culture’, at least we take comfort in knowing that the same critics don’t want us to share in that culture to begin with. WHAT culture you ask?

Given the loving ministrations of the promoters of anything improbable as a sort of virtue, that’s a good question.

Petite nature

She aids and abets kidnappers of children and then conveniently falls ill during the trial. She's risking 20 years of hard labor in a Chadian prison if convicted. Pretty intolerable for a broad coming from the country of the 35 hour work week®©.

Global Warming, Obviously

Weather forecast is less than festive:

Environment Canada began issuing a plethora of bad weather warnings for much of the province as last night wore on, forecasting fast freezing, heavy winds and overnight snow squalls. Mild temperatures that led to rainfall across part of Ontario on Saturday and yesterday were being pushed down by strong southwesterly winds gusting up to 90 km/h and sweeping eastward across the province and into Quebec by early morning.

“Justice” Employed to Effect

What’s fair or not depends on how European you are. Once again, Microsoft is getting sued in Europe over its web browser, this time by the makers of Opera. The term double jeopardy appeared nowhere in the discourse of course.

Microsoft Corp. was accused of abusing its dominant position in Internet browsers -- the first major new antitrust complaint against the tech giant since it lost a landmark European Union case in September.

Yesterday's complaint, lodged by Oslo-based Opera Software ASA, a Web-browser maker, followed on the ruling here that confirmed the European Union's power to regulate Microsoft's behavior.

”Anti-trust” defined by this:

"After four years of no growth, Opera is looking for someone to blame for its failures, and Microsoft is always an easy target. With the Firefox Web browser grabbing as much as 20 percent of the market in some European countries, it is clear that companies can compete and beat Microsoft in the browser market. ... Windows users have nearly unlimited choices for their web browsing and Internet search needs. Windows XP and Vista allow users to choose any Internet search provider as their default provider and to run searches using any browser – including Opera's."

It’s all about doing protectionism another way, and in the end, forcing your own population to have to live with it – either in the form of higher prices or limited choices, even if in the case of Opera, no-one is stopping the public from loading it, or the even more successful and free Mozilla Firefox. No matter.

Microsoft said that it is ready to cooperate with the latest proceedings, but it will be deeply unenthused by the prospect of returning to Brussels to defend yet another competition case. In September, the company suffered a bruising blow from European judges who upheld a record €497 million fine. The penalty was imposed on Microsoft for abusing its dominant market position by bundling its Media Player software, used to access video and audio content online, into Windows.

It’s about making others’ success unlawful. Case in point: “our trust” trumps “anti-trust” in a bid to provide poor services at high prices.

Amazon.com may not offer free delivery on books in France, the high court in Versailles has ruled.

The action, brought in January 2004 by the French Booksellers' Union (Syndicat de la librairie française), accused Amazon of offering illegal discounts on books and even of selling some books below cost.

The court gave Amazon 10 days to start charging for the delivery of books, which should at least allow the company to maintain the offer through the end-of-year gift-giving season. After that, it must pay a fine of €1,000 (US$1,470) per day that it continues to offer free delivery. It must also pay €100,000 in compensation to the booksellers' union.

Damages to the Booksellers’ UNION, not anyone actually aggrieved by their “free shipping” thing. This is probably because there is no harmed party to be found.

Even in a stitched up market within stitched up market, (cartel vs. any startup, France cartel vs. other European entering their market, etc.) that there are more buyers that sellers, and that other than a handful of book-sellers, logistics companies who could just as well be trucking potatoes around, as well as those they’re “protecting” in a puny vertical market, that no-one, no-one benefits from these rackets. Not one consumer, or even the merchant in the long run even benefits from this loony habit of using tribalism one day, nationalism the next, and them a phony anti-trust case the next.

Meanwhile back at the ranch, business needs a little palm greasing to remain as “competitive” as these books peddlers which they know you should read.

AN Indian court overnight ordered police to complete a probe into charges that a bribe was paid in a multi-billion dollar deal to buy Scorpene submarines from a French defence firm.
The Delhi High Court told the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) to complete its inquiry within three months and report back to a two-judge bench.
The judges also told the CBI to press criminal charges against "accused persons" if it could establish an offence had been committed in the^€2.4 billion ($4.03 billion) deal.

[ ... ]

Earlier this month, India said it was scrapping a $US600 million ($700.16 million) deal to buy 197 military helicopters from the European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company (EADS) after allegations of corruption in the bidding process.
India banned middlemen in military deals following charges of bribery in a multi-billion-dollar artillery deal in the 1980s with Swedish firm Bofors.

Of course the answer just to this month's thievery will be “but everybody does it!” Erm... No, Spanky. They don’t.

Sick, Pervy Visitor of the Day - Part 6

Una Propositum Immunda

If indeed the French and many others fell so offended by the incorporation of “anglo-saxon” (as if there’s such a thing) words into their language, and think it dangerous to learn the “lingua franca” of global exchange, diplomacy, and ideas, then they need to find something that all EUvians can agree on as a middle ground, and offer up something the rest of the world will embrace as a satisfying challenge. Something historically appropriate to the blessed continent of eternal peace… something of their own invention.

I propose Latin. If you want to walk the walk, you gotta talk the talk (as it were).

Imagine the novelty! The entire sickly cartel, nearly-continent in size, run by priests, nuns, and a handful of squirrelly, verbally combative, and indecisive middle age scholars in corduroy and other peculiar garments. In fact it will be just like the old days when there were plagues and mercenaries.

What a world-beating notion - especially when Putin stares them down to shake the change out of their pockets.

Bové is going to blow a gasket

No negotiations with terroirists.

Sick, Pervy Visitor of the Day - Part 5

Welcome to the Mid 20th Century, People!

Just like the heady days of Sputnik! In France, they’re finally thinking of the consumer in the land where any and all business is stitched up to serve the population as poorly as possible:

France is moving a step closer to allowing shopping on Sundays, with Parliament within the week expected to take up a measure that would permit all furniture stores to stay open on the country's traditional day of rest.

- with thanks to erstwhile
blogging maven EUdada

He'll always have Paris

Tariq Ramadan still banned from entering the USA.

The story thus far

French entrepreneur in Silicon Valley gets a can of whup ass opened up all over his bright new start-up. French entrepreneur gets uppity and calls the tech reviewer a racist. Unfortunately for the French entrepreneur, the tech reviewer is well connected and the French entrepreneur surrenders. Tech reviewer then swamps and KOs French entrepreneur's start-up's Crackerjack box servers with a grand total of 10 video uploads.

Click To Play

When your web site starts showing up as a punchline on a TechCrunch poll, it means you have to get to work. And I don't mean the 35 hour a week kind.

Make the myths

Rock n roll.

More Sense Than Their Would-Be Dictator

Ché shirt wearing Cuban idiots booed in Venezuela.

- A double ration of peoples’ gruel
To ¡No Pasarán! reader Jabba the Tutt

No Duh

There’s an insult German drivers have that either involves tapping your finger on your forehead (to tell someone that they’re an airhead,) or waving your hand in front of your eyes to tell someone that they’re like a horse with blinders on (and is an idiot).

The lefty poodles at Rue89.com deserve both. They’ve run a piece on how the East Germans were extorting cash out of the West Germans to give citizens their freedom, and that the money wasn’t trickling down to comrade ditchdigger.

Even in the DDR this was common knowledge in the early 80’s. Thankfully Rue89.com has permitted this bit of enlightenment to finally see some air 18 years after the wall came down, and only about 35 years after the commies’ racket started, including getting the hard-working taxpayers of the BRD to pay for the construction of the Autobahns that went to West Berlin, and comprised more than half of the DDR’s expressways. What might be more telling was how they built them: with cobblestone on and off ramps, just as it was under Hitler’s specs, but depending even more heavily on manual labor.

The question really is when will the Rue89 dopes charge past the Grenztruppen of their minds and finally see the sign “Sie verlassen jetzt den DDR”?

Sick, Pervy Visitor of the Day - Part 4

Great Moments in Schadenfreude

From degree programs in Social Engineering to degrading into a sort of haven for socially awkward but violent outré lefty Animal Farm types, Antioch College is finally giving up the ghost.

Of the eight student organizations currently listed on Antioch's website, only one, the Antioch Environmental Group, is not focused on identity politics of one sort or other. The others are By Any Means Necessary for students of African descent, Unidad for Latinos, the Third World Alliance, Kehilla (formerly the Jew Crew) for Jews, two separate groups for gays and lesbians (the Queer Center and Queers of Color), and the Womyn's Center. (The spelling looks like another Saturday Night Live parody, but it is in fact the center's official orthography, although "wombmen" is also in current use on campus.) The only Antioch College students who do not have a campus organization listed in their name are white, heterosexual, non-Jewish males. Traditional college clubs centered around student interests--say, French or music or film or chess or debate--seem to be entirely lacking. Even the events featured for this fall's "Community Day" on October 16--an Antioch tradition in which classes are suspended to accommodate student hayrides and other social events--seemed obsessively focused on identity. The evening events, for example, consisted of a queer lecture followed by a queer movie followed by a dance to the music of a queer band--leaving one wondering what Antioch's non-queers were supposed to do with themselves.

Enjoy. Watch it smolder. After the dominant student culture resembled militant intolerance, and thus looking an awful lot like dominaition, what else could one hope for other than for the entire thing to “go out in style”?

Although political views at Antioch might have tilted leftward even back then, the students of the 1950s and early-to-mid 1960s prided themselves on their willingness to hear out their more conservative classmates in lively all-night dorm discussions on politics and philosophy, inspired by professors who encouraged them to test all their assumptions against the evidence. "We were completely respectful of every point of view," recalled Rick Daily, a Denver lawyer who graduated from Antioch in 1968 and is treasurer of the alumni committee that is struggling to save the college from closure. "We even had a Goldwater Republican in our graduating class," Daily said in a telephone interview.

That was Antioch then. Antioch now might be fairly represented by a September 21 article in the student newspaper, the Record, consisting of a gloating account of the invasion by 40 gay and lesbian Antioch students (a full fifth of the current student body) of an evangelical Christian book-signing event at a Barnes & Noble store located in a mall in nearby Beavercreek, Ohio. Record reporter Marysia Walcerz described the hours-long "Gay Takeover," whose participants wore rainbow-tinted bandannas, ostentatiously held hands and kissed, and did their best to shock both authors and customers in this socially conservative sector of Ohio, as a "success .  .  . for direct action executed in style."

Regardless of their presceient trendsetting in 2000 that would inspire Paris’ City Hall years later in asking murderer Mumia Abu Jamal (née Wesley Cook) to address their graduating class (calling him a “political prisoner” for reasons that only the most inventive and mendacious could gin up), their prospects do map out the future of the “radical” left: dumbed further and further down as the reality of events in the world are kept further at bay, and dumbed further and further down as they try to engage with the reality of events in the world. Toast some marshmallows while you’re at it.

It Would Seem That…

…Somebody got interviewed on Fausta's Blog (on France, Kadhafi, anti-Americanism, and a coupla books…)

It’s Their Kind of Aspirational Society Thing

When the President is banging a former supermodel. It gives a whole new meaning to the phrase Allez les Bleus!

Just in Time for “Winterval”

A little something for that tender little revolutionary in your life. Give Snoogums two perfectly matched boxed CD sets sure to provide more of the endless repetition EUvians have been babbling to themselves since 1917.

Sick, Pervy Visitor of the Day - Part 3

Something for Sneering Know-it-alls to Think About

Before the “U.S. smogging civilization out” meme is repeated for the n-th time by the bien pensent who think that nature (which just is) is really either a philosophy, an new reason to believe in rationing and redistribution, in or a tree in the sidewalk - should read this before they go jump in a lake:

The Kyoto treaty was agreed upon in late 1997 and countries started signing and ratifying it in 1998.  A list of countries and their carbon dioxide emissions due to consumption of fossil fuels is available from the U.S. government.  If we look at that data and compare 2004 (latest year for which data is available) to 1997 (last year before the Kyoto treaty was signed), we find the following.

· Emissions worldwide increased 18.0%.
· Emissions from countries that signed the treaty increased 21.1%.
· Emissions from non-signers increased 10.0%.
· Emissions from the U.S. increased 6.6%.

In fact, emissions from the U.S. grew slower than those of over 75% of the countries that signed Kyoto.  Below are the growth rates of carbon dioxide emissions, from 1997 to 2004, for a few selected countries, all Kyoto signers.  (Remember, the comparative number for the U.S. is 6.6%.)

· Maldives, 252%.
· Sudan, 142%.
· China, 55%.
· Luxembourg, 43%
· Iran, 39%.
· Iceland, 29%.
· Norway, 24%.
· Russia, 16%.
· Italy, 16%.
· Finland, 15%.
· Mexico, 11%.
· Japan, 11%.
· Canada, 8.8%.

That’s right – that industrial cipher, Luxembourg where their ridiculous wealth is a result of being a parasitic bank and tax haven investing other people’s hard earned money, and basically being a member of as many morally vane alphabet-soup international organizations as is possible.

While greenies always seem to be looking forward glowingly to the misery and failures of an earlier age, they cant wait to get a swipe in at anything seeming marginally conventional which a large part of society shares.

In fact all it’s about is hearing the sound of your own voice, and the social coercion:

Last week, two newspaper columnists called for a return to the kind of social coercion only ever seen before in wartime. It's all for the sake of "the environment", but as we'll see - it's a very peculiar and selective version of environmentalism.

Singer Thom Yorke told The Observer: "Unless you have laws in place, nothing's going to happen," he said.

"Nothing of this is going to be voluntary. [sic] It's a bizarre form of rationing that we're all going to have to accept, just like people did in the Second World War."

It's the War On CO2, of course, and Radiohead will be doing "their bit".

As for applying any of these “warm and fuzzy” strictures to the anyone other than those that are symbolic of the “developed world” in the limited intellects of the campaigning activist in need of an emotional outlet, Christmas, unlike the Berlin Love Parade, the Glastonbury Festival, or anything else celebrated by one of the flavor of the week coddled social factions becomes fair game.

It is claimed the UK's love of the traditional turkey dinner will generate 51,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide.

Academics calculated the production, processing and transportation costs of the festive ingredients.

The Manchester researchers estimate a dinner for eight generates 20kg (44lbs) of carbon dioxide emissions.

They arrived at the total emissions figure by assuming one third of the UK population eats a typical Christmas meal.

The slaughtering of sheep in Brussels or any other colonized city need not apply because of the lunacy of people being little more than symbols to designated “social thinkers” of the day who have a monopoly on what ideas are permitted to be promoted out there. Seem like you’re from the developing world, even if you’ve grown up in Minneapolis? That’s okay. The smart money says that that little feature of the genetic lottery matters more than what people say or think in the world view of the cultural left – the same one whose emissions growth are 3 times higher that the “Kyoto deniers” they like to berate.

We’ll just leave them to those confused do-gooders to their nocturnal emissions while we take the real challenges in the world seriously.

Peace is “No-one Taking You Seriously”

This couple answers the questions lefties ask about the Jihad: “why do they hate us”

The couple, known just as 'Johan' and 'Jenny', say they registered their marriage in a ceremony in the 'BjornSocialist Republic'. This, they say, is an independent Marxist state, located "on a stone that looks like a tractor", in front of the Bos Islands in Lake Immeln in Skåne, southern Sweden.

The republic, they say, is the smallest in the world, with a land area of 6-8 square metres, a national anthem, a president and ministers, including a minister for 'Enlightenment and Insight.'

The couple applied in August for the Swedish tax authority to recognize the marriage. The application was turned down on the grounds that the republic was not recognized by Swedish law.

The question should really by, why shouldn’t we hate them. They were refused on a point of law, not that they lied to the court by trying to declare a fictitious nation. Who knows – maybe it’s a joke about Marxism, but given that Marxist love taxes but want to evade them anyway, I’d think that they show that same incapacity for irony that bedevils the average revolutionary who has a summer home.

They live in a culture that doesn’t seem to know what to make of people who either a) want to be liberated, or b) kill people who want to be liberated.

Assyrian Professor Stabbed in Sweden

Assyrian professor Fuat Deniz, of the University of Örebro, was stabbed in the back of the neck at 3.30 AM on Tuesday and has been declared brain-dead. Swedish police have collected a description of the suspect, who remains at large, from witnesses and have a picture of him from a surveillance camera from a local store.

I gess it comes wioth all of that public-order inducing peaciness and social engineering and stuff in places that actually have “environmental courts”.

The 45-metre (148-foot) elk, or moose in north America, is the brainchild of Thorbjörn Holmlund, who recently received permission from Arvidsjaur and Skellefteå councils to begin construction of the wooden animal.

[ ... ]

The area would be better served by investment in eco-tourism, they argue, rather than the construction of roads leading to an enormous elk on the top of a mountain.

As we all know, eco-tourists don’t travel, stay in hotels, use camp sites, eat, or defecate.

The Sights, the sounds, the Smells... of The City of Lurrrve

Voilà Kadhafi avec ses cheveux en bataille, son regard que rien n'accroche et ses faux airs de Keith Richards, le plus déjanté des Rolling Stones

Kadhafi is a "guide" whom Sarkozy will hardly be forgetting soon, write Raphaëlle Bacqué and Ariane Chemin in Le Monde.

My father was born in Peru, as poor as poor can be…

I don't know how they got that scholarship…



Dammit! America, man… you guys really treated my family well…

You may think "Oh how corny! Oh what a corny guy!" … and I'm not gonna apologize if I sound corny, but let me tell how grateful I am… that I am an American…

Without a word said about the total inefficiency of Socialism

French Socialists recognize the efficiency of the market economy.

Sick, Pervy Visitor of the Day - Part 2

Rhetorically Speaking, the Designer Might Actually Exists

The designer himself describes the filter as "a vegetal brain enclosed in an aluminium and Pyrex cranial box." That "brain" then cleans the air in your house for you.

And I refer to that as overblown nonsense that on a construction site might even result in a brick being therapeutically and anonymously thrown at you to induce some humility.

Elsewhere one of my favorite bloggers out there notes something he heard at a lecture. An Architect with a nutsack addresses the unstoppable gob of that whole “I talk therefore I am” phenomenon that so many people attempt to lunch on:

To rephrase Garcia-Abril's response to the audience member's question on whether his architecture posed a moral dilemma: "Some architects are excellent theorists and writers but often produce terrible buildings, while others never write a sentence yet produce sublime works of art. I choose to believe that it is better to let the architecture speak for itself, independent of any theoretical or philosophical justification. In the end there is just a building, and whatever verbal rhetoric that accompanied it will eventually be forgotten." I'm sure the Spaniard would somewhat object to my interpretation of what he was trying to say in a foreign tongue that evening, but what I do recall still deeply affects my view of the matter. To be honest, I admire the fact that he refused to directly engage the question by arguing that his designs are sustainable and green depending on the criteria used. And he refused to publicly claim that he was fully committed to sustainability (though he might be), since his work showed quite a few contradictions such a statement (unlike numerous hyprocrite designers who do exactly that). Rather, Garcia-Abril's retort transcended such mundane eco-talk by essentially saying - "Here are my buildings, here is what the design process is like for me, make what you will of it, since in the end its about the building itself and it is independent of any contemporary value system".

How do you think history will judge Bush?

Pretty Amazing: AOL polls (not to mention New York Times polls) tend to show heavy leanings in favor of the left, but in polls linked to the server's news service "reprinting" of Sheryl Gay Stolberg's NYT story ("Bush Scores Victories Despite Low Ratings"), Bush, the White House, and the Republicans consistently come out in front.

According to the polls, the White House is generally favored over Congress, more people are unsurprised by Bush's victories over Congress than otherwise, more respondents like Bush's leadership style than not, and more people think history will judge Bush… for the better!

Update: More evidence of global warming in Le Monde…

The European Union, which so much likes to take the high moral ground on human rights, is rather agile in finding excuses

For the European Union, which so much likes to take the high moral ground on human rights, it has been a pretty miserable month

writes Judy Dempsey.

Last week, EU leaders and their African counterparts held a summit in Lisbon, the first in seven years. But it was marred from the beginning. Britain's prime minister, Gordon Brown, was the only leader to take a principled stand. He stayed away after Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe's president, had been invited by Portugal, the current holder of the EU's rotating presidency.

The rest of the EU seemed to have forgotten that the member states had imposed a travel ban on Zimbabwe's top leadership because of its appalling human rights record. But when African leaders threatened to boycott the summit without Mugabe's presence, the EU caved in and declared that it was more important to have a public dialogue with Africa.

…The EU has been cowardly in demanding the truth over the shooting of hundreds of [Uzbek] protestors in Andijan in 2005. …

[That and other] examples also show just how agile the EU is in finding excuses. …

Take Kazakhstan. Ruled by Nursultan Nazarbayev, who has created a cult of personality equal to North Korea's Kim Jong Il, this Central Asian country has been awarded the annual rotating chairmanship of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. … EU officials … say that if Kazakhstan had not been given the chairmanship, its foreign policy would shift eastward to China — and so would its vast energy resources and business contracts.

…if Germany and the rest of the EU did not engage Africa in a serious way, then China would set the agenda there. …

If the EU claims that it is competing with China for influence in Africa, the first thing it should do is break down its protectionist trade barriers and then speak up much more forcefully for human rights, which is crucial for civil society.

It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Solstice

Trapped in Beeb-istan: the Provisional Wing of the PC left has finally found a way to get into the Christmas spirit.

Former Brookside babe Jennifer Ellison is to star in a new BBC adaptation of the Nativity story.
The new show will be broadcast live on BBC Three on December 16th and will see Ellison playing the part of a pregnant Mary who is fighting to stop her asylum-seeker boyfriend Joseph from being deported.

Further, the Ho Ho Hosebag will be sexing-up the dumbing-down of the greatest story ever told:

Jennifer Ellison will don a silver catsuit to play an angel in the BBC's new adaptation of the Nativity story.

I suppose the point they’re making really is that there is no reason to become a citizen since the only notion they now have of what a citizenship is feeling perpetually guilty about your very being. That’s sure to bring the brain-trust knocking on their doors, and that forgiveness and salvation are available with a Scheisster and paperwork sent to the Home Office.

This is the same BBC that refers to any other nations newcomers as immigrants, but otherwise as “migrants” only when referring to a foreigner in the UK, legally there or not, seeking citizenship or not.

Sick, Pervy Visitor of the Day - Part 1

The next Khalid Sheik Mohammed or Abu Zubaydah can rest easy: Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., is looking out for you

Democrats have created a climate where investigators are to follow some kind of Robert's Rules of Order and the interrogators are to be more fearful than those they interrogate

editorializes Investor's Business Daily.

But we didn't necessarily want the terrorists to know that or what other techniques, like being forced to listen to Rosie O'Donnell, might be employed. If we do not torture, we would still want captured jihadists to think we do, that we will do more than read them their Miranda rights and ask if they want an attorney.

…Is waterboarding in fact torture? Not if torture is defined as the deliberate infliction of intense pain and possible physical harm. Waterboarding instilled fear, and we see no reason terrorists should not be afraid, very afraid, of us.

…the congressional leaders of both parties were extensively briefed on the techniques used in interrogating captured prisoners. Thanks to Democrats and the mainstream media, so were the terrorists who are trying to kill us.

Swedes Should Probably Stop Singing “Take a Chance on Me”

(Pictured: a charming and welcoming German street scene, left in place for years because it's concidered "art") Immigrants vote with their feet.

toward the end of last year – following the riots in France's immigrant-populated suburbs - something happened: discussions about Europe's "social model" grew quiet, very quiet.

Just a few months earlier, when Hurricane Katrina had struck New Orleans, European media and politicians were wallowing in schadenfreude (taking pleasure in the misfortune of others). The U.S. was called a "developing country," unable to protect its own citizens, and thus a world away from a Europe of solidarity and compassion.

But then the fires began in Paris, Lyon and Marseille. And an embarrassed silence settled in.

The American societal model, with its wide disparities and gaping safety net, is something that few in Europe wish to emulate. There is, however, quite a bit to learn from it. One example is the assimilation of immigrants into the labor market.

The case in point? Comparing the success and level of happiness of Somalis who immigrated abroad after that nation’s descent into lawlessness and civil war.

Compared to the odds of things working out for an immigrant in the US, Europe stinks.

When Somalia collapsed at the beginning of the 1990s, hundreds of thousands of Somalis fled the country. Those who reached Sweden had almost no chance of finding work: In 1997 only 10 percent were employed. Currently, the number has risen to some 30 percent, which is long way off the national level of 77 percent.

This isn’t a matter of pulling out the Euro-pavlovian rationalization-response number 1,547 about the better disposed and more ambitious immigrants bypassing Europe in favor of the US, Canada, Australia, Brazil, and so forth. The study compared apples to apples, and demonstrates something that anyone familiar with immigrant communities on both sides of the pond can readily see – the socialist-cum-dogooder rhetoric found in Europe is most frequently a failure, and at times an outright lie aimed at using social self-flattery to compensate for a failed social model.

Calling In and Airstrike

Antoine di Zazzo, identified by AFP as "one of the biggest Taser representatives" outside the United States, said his company is "developing a mini-flying saucer like drone which could also fire Taser stun rounds on criminal suspects or rioting crowds.

The roadblock obviously is that because it’s been used in the US and Canada, that the UN determined that it is a form of torture. Otherwise they’d be abusing themselves to the sound of Nicholai Tesla’s words, zapping “youts”, and going on smugly about the superiority of their export numbers.

And in the national interest, of course, the AFP’s notion of fair journalism lives on: some German guy uses Chinese prisoners remains are used to make art, a flying taser is seen uncritically, but the same lot lose their continence over Gitmo.

What I don't get is that AFP put the flying saucer thing at the end of the freakin' story about TASER! What the heck!? Are stun-gun equipped flying saucers just sort of ho-hum in France? This should have been a huge headline with pictures of children running for their lives, as the evil alien-looking TASER saucers attack.

This shouldn’t be confused with the culture’s more normal sounding loopiness preoccupied with the “Bush Junta”.

"Vous n'avez ici que des amis, Excellence"

Although Kadhafi's Paris visit has led to a number of criticisms by French lawmakers (notice reactions like the crybaby Christiane D's agreeing with the dictator as well as pouting how much the Iraq war had led to suffering for… Europe — Europe, for Christ's sake!), heaven forbid that there be any demonstrations like that in Paris when George W Bush came to commorate the 60th anniversary of D-Day.

Heaven forbid as well that there would have been a glowing reception given to the American president like the Ritz event described by Ariane Chemin in Le Monde in which Kadhafi is told he has nothing but friends and is oohed and aahed over by Paris's intelligentsia.

Ambassadeurs, admirateurs, éditeurs, on se rue sur la petite table où Kadhafi signe ses oeuvres.

One woman is "delighted" that her book has been signed by Kadhafi with the word "friendship". Meanwhile, André Fontaine is taken out of the mothball closet to explain how an insult made during his first Paris visit 34 years ago (the Guide of the Libyan Revolution had more criticism for France this week) had to be answered by then-Le Monde editor Fontaine. He then goes on to say, obviously with a nodding attitude, even with admiration (for the interpreter):

Mais la manière dont l'interprète libyen traduisit ma réponse fut assez habile pour satisfaire Kadhafi, dont le visage s'illumina.

I thought that when it comes to a free country like France, the point is to be upright and always to tell friends and enemies alike the truth outside of all fear? If your translators are going to mis-translate the words, or the sense of the phrase, then what's the point?!

Don't think that these monuments to France's lucidité at the Ritz don't have principles, however. They are in rage. Over what? Over Bernard Kouchner's refusal to attend the Kadhafi love-fest, as well as his refusal to explain his reason for not attending, which Roland Dumas deems nothing less than… "a dual cowardice"!

Update: Axel Poniatowski answers questions from Le Monde readers (teaching them — and us — that, among other things, "à partir du 1er janvier prochain, la Libye va présider le Conseil de sécurité de l'ONU")…

The left's one-dimensional conception of racism is entirely unsatisfactory and needs to be revised

The American left's perception of racism is contradictory at its base

writes Ben Duffy.

On the one hand, they see racists under every bed, but on the other hand, they don't recognize someone like Bob Green as the bigot that he is. …

If you listen to his program for 30 seconds, you will know that Mr. Green is black because that's all he ever talks about. He allows his identity to be determined by his pigmentation. Bob Green is also incredibly racist. His racism is usually directed towards white people, but our society is so constrained by white guilt that we don't recognize anti-white racism as a form of bigotry.

Stand procedure in these parts

Down-and-out French journalmists with no money obsess about Jews with money.

So How’s That “Weapons Free Zone” Thing Going

Woman's Square or Woman's Station?

Oddly (or appropriately?) enough, Place de la Femme can mean both Woman's Square (the supposed meaning on the sign on this Moroccan statue's pedestal) and Woman's Station (as in her station in life, vis-à-vis men)…

Y aura des rediffs de la Famille RamDam ?

EurabiaTV.

Just do it

Wait a second before you jump so I can get my videocam and post it on Youtube (peut-être même j'y mettrai des bruitages rigolos pour envoyer à VideoGag).

Bad Boys, Bad Boys, Whatcha Gonna Do?

There’s naïve, and then there’s this:

...last year, the 24-year-old German reached out to a convicted killer on Texas' death row. Her motives were altruistic, she said, not romantic. In time, after more than 50 letters posted back and forth across the Atlantic, Ms. Deeken said, mutual feelings grew.

"I have a connection with him," she explained recently, shaking slightly, tears running down her cheek. "Everyone in life has a vision, has dreams, has fears, is searching for something. He is the person I can talk deeply with about these things."

It seems that in the absence of a more grounded existence to help put things into context, let’s say, one where they try to legislate the trials and tribulations of human life out of existence, it should come as no surprise that loneliness and a need for irredeemable empathy would bubble up to the surface as a preoccupation. Perhaps it’s thought of as a sort of “giving back” or charity, but of a sort selected to give one ultimately the greatest degree of personal anguish in the end. Where some who have no family or close relationships fall into bad habits, others genuinely give of themselves. Some, it seems want to appear to be generous, but choose as vessel for those emotions something that could only result in ones’ own helplessness:

Each month, dozens of travel-weary, love-struck European women arrive in Livingston for visits with condemned inmates, a pair of four-hour chats through Plexiglas. There is no touching.

There are people out there who see something out there in the world that gives them pain. Some try to understand the phenomenon, while others foolishly believe that they can go make that painful thing go away, in spite of the reasons they have for exiting to begin with.

In other words, they are sick people who have been living in comfort so long that they are no longer able to interpret the value of their emotions, the hurt feelings of the convict, and the actions of the convict. It’s all equally incomprehensible it it’s purpose or reasons for being. It all seems intended when they all stem from the consequences of the actions of the convict. To the simpleton, retribution and justice are the same, they are riddled with things that are hurtful to think about, therefore the circumstances must be done away with.

In 1995, Mr. Martinez was convicted of stabbing to death a 68-year-old woman and her 4-year-old granddaughter. He sexually assaulted the older woman, defiled the corpse of the child, and reportedly threatened the victims' family as he was led from the courtroom, saying, "It's not over yet."

The reasons usually speak for themselves when you consider the alternatives are to let them walk, leave them to inflict yet more non-therapeutic violence on the prison population, or even creating a society where ones’ harmful actions don’t result in consequences of any sort.

- Vielen Dank, Corbusier

It Makes Me Think of Haute Couture, ‘n Stuff...

Have a Richard Dawkins Christmas

Looking for psychotic murderers? Look no further than products of that leftist hobby horse, the social welfare system!