The Reason Why the French and the Europeans Can Give All Manner of Lessons to the Yanks Is That Their Own Racist Events Are Officially Ignored

Why is there — allegedly — so much racism in America as compared to other countries? Why do other countries feel so confident in giving lessons on racism to Americans? As we have said before, a large part of the reason is because other nations' shameful incidents (racist or other) are, deliberately or otherwise, consciously or unconsciously, belittled, ignored, and/or forgotten — often with official backing.

Witness the Béatrice Gurrey article in Le Monde about the May 1967 events in Guadeloupe which have been buried under 40 years of silence (and which was illustrated in Le Monde by a map of… neighboring Martinique):

Cet après-midi du vendredi 26 mai [1967], Hubert Jasor se pointe sur la darse [de Pointe-à-Pitre, en Guadeloupe]. Un bâtiment de la marine nationale est au mouillage, les marins en ville. Un matelot blanc est pris à partie par la foule, Jasor s'interpose, une balle lui frôle la nuque. Puis il est blessé par le coup de crosse d'un gendarme. Recousu à l'hôpital Ricou, le libraire rentre chez lui, quand une patrouille de "képis rouges" l'arrête. L'insulte. Emmené dans la cour de la sous-préfecture, il y est battu comme plâtre.

Caché sous des corps inertes, Hubert Jasor entend ces mots qui le glacent : "Les morts, on les fout à la darse ou à la Gabarre" — le pont qui sépare Grande-Terre de Basse-Terre. Vers 4 heures du matin, reconnu par les forces de l'ordre, il échappe à son calvaire. Conduit à la gendarmerie, il entend des têtes cogner contre les murs, lors d'interrogatoires où les aveux pleuvent à la vitesse des coups. "Ils l'ont arrêté puis l'ont jeté devant la maison", raconte son fils.

Depuis des heures déjà, la situation a dégénéré en une violence incontrôlable. Une phrase, que son auteur présumé jure ne jamais avoir prononcée, a fait en un éclair le tour des manifestants et déclenché l'émeute, en tout début d'après-midi : "Quand les nègres auront faim, ils se remettront au travail." Georges Brizard, le président du syndicat des entrepreneurs du bâtiment, patron de la Socotra, l'aurait prononcée.

…Devant les CRS, les jeunes voient rouge. Des barrages sont érigés partout, des voitures incendiées, le supermarché Unimag, au bout de la rue Frébault, pillé, les pierres volent. Et surtout, l'armurerie Boyer, rue Delgrès, en centre-ville, a été dévalisée. Noir ou Blanc, il ne fait pas bon être dans les rues.

…Le jeune Jasor a raccompagné chez lui l'un de ses copains du lycée Carnot pour le protéger, car il a la peau si claire qu'il pourrait passer pour un Blanc. Au retour, il observe, médusé, une femme noire, assez sophistiquée, que l'on questionne méchamment sur un barrage : "Tu es noire ou tu es blanche ?" Elle : "Je n'ai pas à répondre à cette question." Alors que son véhicule est secoué de plus en plus fort, elle se met à pleurer et dit en créole : "Zot pa ka voué an nwé ?" ("Vous ne voyez pas que je suis noire ?")

…Des gendarmes mobiles arrêtent son ID 19. "J'ai fait l'Algérie : ces gars étaient dopés au vin rouge et au bismuth. Ils sautillaient sur place en disant : "On va tirer."" L'enseignant assure que certains d'entre eux parlaient mal le français, des légionnaires. On lui intime l'ordre de descendre de voiture. "Le couvre-feu, on s'en fout. On a ordre de tirer sur les nègres comme sur des lapins." Il est aligné contre un mur quand arrive une Jeep de gendarmes, avec un chef de détachement. Les hommes baissent tout de suite leur arme.

…La chasse à l'homme a commencé. Dès le 26 mai au soir, à 18 h 45, le préfet envoie un long télégramme au ministre, qui mentionne notamment ceci : "Ai ordonné arrestation principaux meneurs dont TOMICHE, secrétaire syndical employé de commerce et récemment exclu du comité central du Parti communiste STOP." Sur une radio amateur, Paul Tomiche capte les ondes de la police : il faut amener le propriétaire de "l'Opel Corsa 77 MV, Max, Victorine, mort ou vif à Petit Papa" (la gendarmerie de Petit-Pérou). Sa voiture. Il se cache à Bergevin, puis beaucoup plus loin, à Petit-Canal. Coupe sa barbe. Part au Moule. L'Etincelle, l'organe du PCG, titrera : "Les aventuriers ont pris la fuite." Il sera arrêté et fera onze mois de prison. … Depuis 1967, aucun CRS n'a remis les pieds dans l'île.

As Béatrice Gurrey's companion article (40 years of silence and still no exact figures on the losses), points out, the toll of the dead varies from 7 to 87.

Dès 1967, le bilan officiel de sept morts, après les émeutes de Pointe-à-Pitre des 26 et 27 mai, a été contesté. Lors du procès des indépendantistes, en 1968, à la Cour de sûreté de l'Etat, leur défense, et notamment M^e Henri Leclerc, souligne que le nombre de morts est beaucoup plus important que celui annoncé par le préfet Pierre Bolotte. Jusqu'au 14 mars 1985, où, sur RFO Guadeloupe, le secrétaire d'Etat aux DOM-TOM, Georges Lemoine, mentionne 87 morts. "Cela nous avait tous surpris. A l'époque, on parlait d'une quarantaine de morts, sans que cela ait été vérifié", se souvient l'historien Jean-Pierre Sainton, auteur avec Raymond Gama du premier ouvrage sur la question Mé 67 (Société guadeloupéenne d'édition et de diffusion, 1985, épuisé).

"Le nombre, je ne pense pas l'avoir inventé. On a dû me faire des notes. Mais je n'ai pas le souvenir des documents sur lesquels ils s'appuyaient", dit aujourd'hui M. Lemoine, 75 ans.

…aucune réaction au ministère de l'intérieur et de l'outre-mer de Michèle Alliot-Marie, malgré des demandes répétées. Les archives sensibles de l'armée sont couvertes par la confidentialité pendant cinquante ans, sauf dérogation. … Beaucoup d'archives ont disparu. Jean Chomereau-Lamotte, reporter et photographe, raconte : "Le commissaire Canales, sa spécialité, c'était de venir après chaque manif pour exiger les clichés des photographes de France-Antilles. Cela a failli faire plusieurs fois un clash au journal."

The final paragraphs contains an ultraconfidential government note on influencing opinion that should interest Americans (and others) curious about France's near-unanimous opposition to Bush and to the Iraq war:

Celles du préfet Bolotte, en revanche, ont pu être consultées par Jean-Pierre Sainton (fils du D^r Pierre Sainton, fondateur du GONG), avant d'être retirées de l'accès public. Elles montrent un préfet très politique, qui reçoit des instructions précises du gouvernement. Ainsi cette note ultraconfidentielle du 2 mai 1966 qu'on lui recommande de détruire : "En Guadeloupe, votre politique doit tendre d'une part à dresser l'un contre l'autre le communisme et l'autonomisme et, d'autre part, à séparer les socialistes en deux formations, le parti socialiste gaulliste et le parti socialiste classique ; les tenants du premier bénéficiant de votre appui, les autres étant livrés à leur impuissance."

Le docteur Guy Dramort, 86 ans, anesthésiste à l'ancien hôpital Ricou, veut bien raconter qu'il a travaillé toute la nuit du vendredi 26 au samedi 27 mai, mais pas davantage : "Pourquoi remuer tout cela ?" Parce que, comme le dit Raymond Gama : "Fé mémwa maché, Fé konsyans vansé." Faire marcher la mémoire, c'est faire avancer la conscience.

Trying to Come Up with a Professional Code of Ethics for French Journalism

In an interview with Le Monde's Xavier Ternisien, Bruno Frappat (formerly of La Croix and Le Monde) explains how he has set up a group that is trying to write a professional code of ethics for French journalists.

La crise de confiance est-elle si grave que cela ? La presse est-elle si mauvaise ?

Une étude un peu sérieuse des journaux d'aujourd'hui comparés à ceux de l'entre-deux-guerres ou de l'immédiat après-guerre tournerait à l'avantage de la presse contemporaine. A la Libération, ils étaient plus nombreux, mais fortement idéologisés, et l'information y était noyée dans le commentaire. La nouveauté, c'est la pluralité des médias. Le discrédit de la presse est souvent lié à celui d'un média dominant. Vous pouvez faire tous les bons papiers que vous voulez, si, par ailleurs, sur une chaîne de télévision de grande audience, un journaliste réalise une fausse interview, cela rejaillira sur l'ensemble de la profession. Je demande que l'on ne pratique pas l'amalgame avec les médias.

Le Monde Blasts Dr Strangelove's Guinea Pigs

Why would an article (by Fabienne Lips-Dumas) from the avant-garde quarterly XXI be republished in Le Monde? Because it equates American cold warriors as Doctor Strangelove…

Les scientifiques américains, emmenés par Edward Teller, le docteur Folamour du laboratoire Lawrence Livermore National, creuset de la recherche nucléaire, brûlaient de connaître la force de leur bombe H. Elle leur fera peur. Castle Bravo reste la bombe la plus puissante qu'ils aient jamais osé tester.

A lot of irony surrounds the phrase used by the army, "For the good of mankind", and the realities of the Cold War and of the world, then and now, are uniformly repressed in order to depict the Americans as nothing less than evil, bellicose warmongers…

The Narcissism of Minor Critics: Why Americans and Europeans are not that Alike

European obsessions with the US aren't just mixed up, but feed an unhelthy resentment of the rest of humanity. Peter Baldwin writing in Prospect magazine sums up some of the lunacy of the endless list of rotating European complaints about the USA, Americans, and anything that remotely reminds them of the United States, that fills in the gaps in so many empty heads.

It is universally observed that America is an economically more unequal society than Europe, with greater stratification between rich and poor. Much of this is true. Income is more disproportionately distributed in the US than in western Europe. In 1998, for example, the richest 1 per cent of Americans took home 14 per cent of total income, while in Sweden the figure was only about 6 per cent. Wealth concentration is another matter, however. The richest 1 per cent of Americans owned about 21 per cent of all wealth in 2000. Some European nations have higher concentrations than that. In Sweden—despite that nation’s egalitarian reputation—the figure is 21 per cent, exactly the same as for the Americans.

Which means that at some point, that tired old saw will be abandoned. Either way, it’s just a mathematical parlor trick of comparing the assets of the rich to the mean and arbitrarily constructing a political class called poverty, where the fate of the worst off in society is actually ignored. The most amusing part of this is that if the top 1% of the population’s wealth rose appreciably, and the other 98% of the population had their wealth reduced to the bottom 1%, poverty would be technically eliminated. Purpose of this mathematical construct? To construct specious arguments, just like the trite complaint above that has America as the evil antithesis of Scandinavia’s saintly and solidaristic uniformity of wealth and social sameness. The only relief it provides is to the challenged egos of emotional adolescents looking for something outside of fortress Europe to hate.

True, public social spending in America—that is, monies channelled through the state—is low compared to many European countries. But other avenues of redistribution are equally important: voluntary efforts, private but statutorily encouraged benefits (like employee health insurance) and taxes. Given all of these, the American welfare state is more extensive than is often realised: the total social policy effort made in the US falls precisely at the centre of the European scale.

In other words, we have solved the problem that Europeans fight over with one another, but that’s not to be ever understood in that way, because in general, the point of most European criticism of America is not to shed light on what they can do better in the society where they live and vote, but evading any need to self evaluate based on who they can hate more than their own political systems or other European societies.

Moreover, Europe’s various cultures are ones still steeped in the lore of national stereotypes and quite happy to wring whatever elixir can be had from them. Who can forget Edith Cresson, Mitterrand’s prime minister, convinced that no Frenchman was gay, while the English were all limp-wristed poofs? Or consider the extent to which no Europeans, however otherwise politically correct, can be shaken in their conviction that the Roma really are shifty and thieving. Having a transatlantic whipping boy is convenient and serves politically useful purposes, especially if there is little else that you can agree on. The purveyors of anti-Americanism in Europe appear to have rediscovered the truism that nothing unites like a common enemy.

This is basically how it’s worked, both in present dynamic of the EU evolving into some kind of nation-state and historically. The concencus view is that Americans are detestable, everything that reminds them of us is detestable, and yet as things change in Europe for the better, it’s almost always a case of mimicking the American social or economic model that provides that betterment. So the same bunch of psychiatrically unsound critics gather up another set of issues to beat on for another decade.

Simone de Beauvoir was convinced that Americans do not need to read because they do not think. Thinking is hard to quantify; reading less so. And Americans, it turns out, do read. The percentage of illiterate Americans is average by European standards. There are more newspapers per head in the US than anywhere in Europe outside Scandinavia, Switzerland and Luxembourg. The long tradition of well-funded public libraries in the US means that the average American reader is better supplied with library books than his peers in Germany, Britain, France, Holland, Austria and all the Mediterranean nations. They also make better use of these public library books than most Europeans. The average American borrowed more library books in 2001 than their peers in Germany, Austria, Norway, Ireland, Luxembourg, France and throughout the Mediterranean. Not content with borrowing, Americans also buy more books per head than any Europeans for whom we have numbers. And they write more books per capita than most Europeans too.

You’ll recall that 20 years ago we were Nazis and idiots for being health nuts and obsessed with exercise. Once that or any other cultural phenomenon gets adopted, anything else to complain about will do, even if it the inverse of what was apparently yesterday’s of next week’s stunningly huge sin that will sink civilization.

But what about other aspects of the social environment? In ecological terms, America is thought to be a wastrel. Big cars, big houses, long commutes, cold winters, hot summers, profligate habits: such perceptions of the country have combined with the Bush administration’s cosy relationship with the oil industry and its refusal to sign the Kyoto Protocol to paint the nation as an environmental black hole. Once again, the numbers tell a somewhat different story.

Although oil use per capita is high in America, measured as a function of economic production (in other words, putting the input in relation to the output) it remains within European norms, and indeed lower than in Portugal, Greece, Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Iceland. Between 1990 and 2002, America’s carbon dioxide output rose, but per unit of GDP it fell by 17 per cent—a greater reduction than in nine western European countries. In its output of renewable energy, the US is middle of the spectrum on all counts, whether biogas, solid biomass energy, geothermal or wind. Only Austria, Denmark, Italy and the Netherlands have higher levels of spending (public and private) on pollution abatement and control as a percentage of GDP than America. Despite the myths of a hyper-motorised nation, Americans own fewer passenger cars per head than the French, Austrians, Swiss, Germans, Luxembourgers and Italians. Per capita, Americans rely on their cars more than Europeans. But adjusting for the size of the country, automobile usage is lower only in Finland, Sweden and Greece. Similarly, Americans produce a lot of waste per head, though the Norwegians are worse, and the Irish and Danes are close competitors. But they recycle as well as the Finns and the French, and better than the British, Greeks and the Portuguese. Since 1990, Americans’ production of waste has scarcely gone up per capita, while in all European nations for which figures are available, there have been big increases—70 per cent in Spain, almost 60 per cent in Italy and over 30 per cent in Sweden.

But never mind that, so long as there’s a ‘them’ out there to resent they will, which in spite of that century long pattern, the retort to the occasional American who notices this obsession remain that it has ‘nothing to do with envy’, despite all evidence to the contrary.

But then again, there is always something else – some other ‘pull the ring and hear the doll talk’ argument that you hear right after it’s printed on an A4 homemade posterette taped to a lamppost.

And if we shift our focus to education, the contrasts across the Atlantic are, if anything, reversed. A higher percentage of Americans have graduated from university and from secondary school than in any European nation. America’s adults are, in this sense, better educated than Europe’s. And the US lavishes more money per child at all levels of education than any western European nation. Europeans often believe that good US schools are private and serve only an elite. Yet American education is, if anything, less privatised than most European systems.

And in spite of that, the American can expect to take flack from university students with no meaningful life experiences of their own, an absolute certainty in Marxism, and a bloodlust to smash anything conventional in their already theoretically superior social order. Yes, the trope even pervades the interpersonal level. Either that, or the whole mess grew out of the dyspeptic grumbling on the “European street”. For example, “The Americas” are a pair of continents, and among the million and one trained-in delusional arguments one gets verbally assaulted with by strangers is the “arrogance” of calling ourselves America. Name the countries on this bright blue ball of ours that have “America” in their name? The person setting the gotcha-trap for you will likely be silent or tell you “all of them”, in abject and smugly confident ignorance.

Then one should ask in reply why they call the EU ‘Europe’ all the time, even making ‘Europe’ the shorthand reference to that cartel in Brussels, when all of the European continent is NOT in the EU. At best you’ll get a dumb stare of a newly found crumb of awareness that civilization does not order itself around their fetishistic little arguments. But the mere fact that someone wants you to address their problem that they generated to begin with is pointless. It’s more or less like teaching a 6 year old a knock-knock joke, and having them repeat it until they fall asleep, the next 10 minutes offer the next request to have you duel with the next unfounded, ill-informed, and ignorant assumption where one little fact they like becomes the center of the next ‘theory’ about a population of 300 million people.

And on and on it goes without end. We will hear this kind of thing forever so long as people seek their own dignity in the cretinizing of others who seem successful. But remember, the criticism of the US are never about envy. Those lessons are simply being dispensed for our benefit based on the notion that a superior society (not simply one respecting different public choices) has an obligation to give.

Since it’s hard to tell if they are entertaining themselves in trying to verbally duel with you by degrading your country or the other way around, the only way to stop this is to just tell them that you don’t care that they think because the idea that they would take the same thing from a complete stranger in stride is completely implausible.

Non, c'est non !

One president has balls, says Fausta, who adds that she "can't imagine Obama doing this!" (Then, again, in the Apolgizer-in-Chief's simplistic fairy-tale world view, only — conservative — America and Westerners are ever the enemies of the world and ever need to be chastened and put straight…)

As Much of a Religious Charlatan as Ali Khamenei

Fearless leader is invoking scripture to rationalize taxation. George W. Bush, on the other hand would have been mercilessly pilloried for months for the mere use of the words “God” and “bible”.

An Ape and Not a Frenchman

While France delights in the nation of clueless retards and treacherous bigots finally managing to see the light and show themselves as open-minded™ and humanistic© as the lucid™ and tolerant© sages of France and the rest of Europe by electing a black man as president of their nation, a black football (soccer) player is thinking of leaving France and even of renouncing his nationality.

La France ? Il l'aime encore, mais Makam Traoré pense la quitter. Juste un temps, le temps d'oublier qu'il n'est pas un "sale singe", un "sale Nègre". Partir loin de son HLM de Chambéry (Savoie) pour retourner au bled, à Diataya, au Mali. Là-bas, sous le ciel de ses ancêtres, la "misère" adoucira, pense-t-il, sa douleur, celle qui le ronge jusqu'au plus profond de son ADN, celle qui l'empêche de dormir. Depuis cent vingt-huit jours, l'insomnie est devenue sa nouvelle compagne.

"Dirty Negro, shut yer mouth! Where do you think you are?!"

Depuis qu'un autre joueur lui a "craché" à la figure "sale singe", "sale Nègre", le 25 janvier, lors d'un match de football de 2^e division départementale dans l'Ain, Makam Traoré, 32 ans, n'arrive pas à se relever. Ce dimanche-là, le capitaine de l'équipe de Rossillon, qui compte, entre autres, sept Africains et deux Russes, se déplaçait à Lagnieu devant une trentaine de spectateurs.

"Be careful, we've put five of 'em [bullets?] in your ass, dirty Nigger, you ain't got nothing to say, you dirty ape!"

85^e minute, 5 à 0 pour Lagnieu. Makam signale une faute à l'arbitre. Des personnes dans le public lancent : "Sale Nègre, ferme ta gueule ! Tu te crois où ?" Puis le capitaine jure qu'un joueur de Lagnieu, le numéro 13, lui aurait lâché : "Va doucement, on en a mis cinq dans votre cul, sale Nègre, t'as rien à dire, sale singe !"

Prior to this, Makam had never been insulted in this fashion before, he'd "only" [sic] been harassed by the police once and undergone incessant controls, and that while forebearing the stares in the streets of Chambéry when he goes for walks with his (white) wife.

…"Et, depuis le procès, Makam ne va pas mieux", soupire sa conjointe, Kristel Favre-Rochey, 28 ans. "C'est dur. C'est la première fois que je le vois comme ça", poursuit-elle. Dans le passé, Makam ne s'était jamais fait insulter de cette manière, juste un harcèlement de la police, des contrôles incessants, des regards dans les rues de Chambéry quand le couple les arpente. "Je ne sais pas m'y prendre. On ne m'a jamais traitée de "sale Blanche"", raconte, démunie, Kristel.

He's bought a stuffed gorilla toy and takes it with him when he goes for walks. "I had to show people that I am nothing but an ape." … "An ape and not a Frenchman." France? He still loves it, but he's "disgusted" by it.

Depuis ce dimanche 25 janvier, Makam est détruit. Les huit jours d'arrêt maladie pour "syndrome dépressif" ne l'ont pas apaisé. "Je me sens sale, souffle-t-il, C'est comme si on m'avait violé : j'ai honte. Je n'ai plus envie de sortir avec ma famille." Il l'a fait, il y a quelques semaines. Dans une foire, il s'est acheté un... gorille en peluche et s'est baladé en ville avec. "Ben quoi ?, lance Makam. Il fallait bien montrer aux gens que je ne suis qu'un singe." Il s'arrête. Silence : "Un singe et pas un Français !" La France ? Il l'aime encore, mais il en est "dégoûté". Makam se demande s'il ne va pas renoncer à sa nationalité acquise en 2003 après dix ans de vie dans les Alpes.

He tried bringing his toy gorilla inside the courthouse and asked his lawyer if he could change his name to… "Dirty Negro."

…il lui a demandé s'il pouvait changer son nom en... "sale négro". Le footballeur a tenté d'apporter au tribunal sa peluche, son amie l'en a dissuadé. Makam est tout de même venu vêtu d'une chemise et d'un pantalon aux couleurs de l'Afrique.

"Grossir le trait est une réponse à l'agression, explique Patrick Lozès, président du Conseil représentatif des associations noires de France (CRAN). Ce "repli identitaire" est malheureusement une manière de se défendre." Pour Joëlle Bordet, psychosociologue, "il faut prendre en compte la fonction symbolique du terrain de foot, explique-t-elle. C'est une scène sociale où les joueurs doivent partager des valeurs, où toutes les défenses tombent, même là, on se fait rattraper." Pour cette spécialiste des préjugés, "le sport est le révélateur des rapports sociaux dans un pays de plus en plus violent et raciste".

"You can't fight the whites!" shouted his father, enraged by Makam's lawsuit. "You're in their home!"

Makam cherche des soutiens. Il a pu compter sur La Ligue contre le racisme et l'antisémitisme (Licra) — partie civile au procès — qui l'a pris en charge. Du côté de sa famille aussi, mais pas de son père, enragé par son action en justice. "Tu peux pas combattre les Blancs, ils sont chez eux !", lui a-t-il lancé. "C'est chez nous ici. Faut arrêter de subir !", a-t-il riposté.

Makam's African teamplayers are leaving the team. "Every Sunday it's the same thing…"

Ses coéquipiers africains, eux, larguent l'équipe. "Je les comprends, c'est tous les dimanches la même chose, s'attriste Myriam Maraud, la présidente du club de Rossillon. C'est lamentable d'en arriver là."

And why, after all that (interestingly, even Mustapha Kessous's sympathetic article seems to vehicle racism as it calls the black player by his first name alone throughout the text — this, however, is not totally uncommon with football players, whatever their color), are the French still lamenting Americans' (alleged) bigotry — while giving lessons in anti-racism to same? The very first comment from Le Monde's readers helps explain it:

Merci au "Monde" d'avoir révélé cette affaire, qu'aucun autre média n'a jamais évoqué.

This, of course — "this" being unpalatable news to the usual paeans to France's heroism undergoing (ahem) regulation and censorship (it's very similar to what happens with the American left (see, notably, points # 4 and 5) — which is why the French, and the Europeans generally, feel so close to America's Democrats) — is also why (the real reason why) certain French bloggers bar Americans and their sympathizers from commenting on their (high-falutin') websites on which they self-servingly (claim to) establish "a dialogue [sic] about our different perceptions of one another"…

Two other articles in Le Monde by Mustapha Kessous give further details of the lawsuit, including the accused's comparing his insulting Makam to his own hardships behind bars (Maxence Cavalcante is of Italian origin), that is of being … served spaghetti by the police, and — upon the judge denying any similarity in the two men's treatment — including his "reasoning" being (loudly) supported by shouts from the public. "C'est pareil !", a hurlé le public.

…le prévenu, Maxence Cavalcante, 23 ans, chauffeur livreur - qui l'aurait traité de "sale singe" et de "sale Nègre", lors d'un match de football de 2^e division départementale dans l'Ain, le 25 janvier - loin de se laisser démonter par la cour et les médias, s'est rétracté et a dénoncé des aveux "extorqués" par la gendarmerie. "En garde à vue, les gendarmes m'ont dit que j'allais manger des pâtes parce que je suis Italien, ce n'est pas normal", a lancé M. Cavalcante. "Ce n'est pas la même chose que de se faire traiter de sale Nègre", a repris le président du tribunal, François-Xavier Manteau. "C'est pareil !", a hurlé le public.

…"J'ai craqué quand j'ai entendu que Makam avait l'impression de voir des ennemis quand il croise des Blancs", souffle Kristel Favre-Rochey, la mère, blanche, de ses deux enfants.

The comments page allows for interesting commentary by Le Monde readers:

finalement pas si étonnant quand on connait les mentalités de la France profonde

And, as one of them points out:

Waouh! Le déchaînement de la haine racistophobe sur cette affaire a quelque chose de terrifiant. Quand on est instruit et de gauche, il est interdit de mépriser le peuple, ignorant et incorrect. Mais il est permis de hurler sur un de ses membres qui a cru qu'il avait le droit de traiter en égal (et par exemple d'insulter) quelqu'un qu'il est si gratifiant de protéger. La bigoterie, toujours.

Lucidité: Plantu Has Got Capitalists and the Free Market All Figured Out

They were only ‘Not Following Orders’ Because there Weren’t any to Follow

The NuUrope mantra is: “of those little is expected, little will be returned.”

General Wolfgang Schneiderhahn, the general inspector of the Bundeswehr, told the German parliament that depite their positive contribution in Afghanistan, complaints from troops about their conditions were an "embarrassment".

Although it become rather easier to call it that if you redefine what people mean by a positive contribution.

...in Afghanistan they are not allowed at the "sharp end" of fighting with the Taliban and Berlin is under constant pressure from America and Nato to send more manpower

Or at least be permitted by Berlin to do something about this ‘please align yourself with the weak horse’ argument that the Bundeswehr is forced to demonstrate.

In a typical example of the local Taliban's response to this pressure, groups of fighters drive through the area on motorcycles, wielding bazookas. The Bundeswehr responds by taking up pursuit. At some point, the Taliban fighters jump from the motorcycles and open fire on the Germans, who hold them at bay until Afghan security forces are able to arrive and defeat the Taliban fighters.

Can this be an argument to call for the withdrawal of the Bundeswehr?

Under the theory that their carrot has no stick and they are purposely made ineffectual by the hectoring lefty shills in the Green Party, yes. You would think that you might actually be able to find at least a tangential environmental argument where there was a carrot and stick involved to enliven the empty intellectual lives of a party founded entirely on things like recycling, instituting a newly appreciated poverty, and Atomkraft, Nein Danke! but I don’t.

It’s awfully hard to expect much from a force so thoroughly detested by its’ own population on fluffy and thoughtless grounds, and it’s even harder to expect them to not demand comforts knowing that they’re only use is to be a historically detached population’s political pincushion. If you want to get men killed in action, the mushy mass of the left and the puritanical Greens are going about it the right way: they are debasing the morale of their enemy, which in this case is their own military and any cartoon image that they think it represents, is associated with, or permits them to pitch a fit over.

How will you Know if Things Really Start to Turn?

To know for sure, you will know when things are turning in Teheran when they turn in Isfahan and the like, especially with the police paramilitaries, and perhaps even the Revolutionary Guard or their official plain-clothed pinkertons decide to not turn on the demonstrators. More so if units join the demonstrators.

That aside, in the great land of passive-aggression (western Europe) there's another series of indicators. You will know that they are well and truly behind the removal of the pathetic mullocracy when they start to tell themselves that "America created Ahmedinejad."

Not that they would ever do anything about the situation other than their governments discussing trade sanctions only to reject them 5 weeks later in favor of peddling WMD precursers, and other humanitarian "necessities".

Gray + red = Brown Communist Cheat

(Gracias para François)

Ridding the Land of Thieves and Outlaws

(Merci à François)

New York Times Editors Find Spying "Romantic" and the Story of Traitors Spying on the United States a "Romance" That Reads "Like a Novel"

In the New York Times, Ginger Thompson's article is soberly titled Couple’s Capital Ties Said to Veil Spying for Cuba, but in its sister publication, the International Herald Tribune, Paris-based NYT editors correctly read (and share) the journalist's passions and rosy views (coupled with disdain for America's foreign policy) and retitled the article Romance of spying lured couple, subtitled it The government's case against the Myers reads in parts like a novel, and make their espionage for Fidel Castro sound like a personal path of self-discovery.

Together, Gwendolyn and Kendall Myers set out to give the second half of their lives new meaning. At first … they embraced a counterculture lifestyle, even growing marijuana in the basement. They marched for legalized abortion, promoted solar energy, and repaired relations with six children from previous marriages.

With phrases like "the thrill of espionage returned", the rest sounds adventuresome and even heroic.

When the wide-open spaces of the West quickly grew too small, the couple returned to Washington a year later, renewing their ties to the establishment that they had rejected.

…It appears that the Myerses were not motivated by money. The authorities said that other than being reimbursed for equipment, the couple were not paid for spying. On the contrary, according to the statements cited in the complaint, which one federal magistrate said made the case against the couple “insuperable,” the couple felt disdain for America’s foreign policy — Mr. Myers’s diary described watching the television news as a “radicalizing experience” — and a romanticized view of Cuba’s Communist government.

And, just months after Mr. Myers’s retirement supposedly ended the scheme, they hinted that spying provided adventure to what seemed to have otherwise been a relatively mundane life. “We really have missed you,” Mr. Myers said in April to the undercover F.B.I. agent who was posing as a Cuban intelligence official. “You, speaking collectively, have been a really important part of our lives, and we have felt incomplete.”

…A homemaker and a mother of four [as well as an aide to Senator James Abourezk, a South Dakota Democrat who was one of the leading proponents for ending the United States embargo against Cuba, Gwendolyn Steingraber] had been George McGovern’s anti-Vietnam War movement of the Democratic Party and began volunteering in political campaigns.

…Peter Stavrianos, another former colleague, added, “She was not remarkably different than dozens and dozens of other people that you ran across in the 1970s who were McGovernites that got into politics for reasons other than to make a lot of money.”

Mutual friends introduced Mr. Myers and Ms. Steingraber, who soon became inseparable.

“I have yet to meet a couple who are more in love than the two of them,” said Amanda Myers Klein, 40, Mr. Myers’s daughter. “They are beautiful together.”

You won't believe this, but the husband spying for Havana, who referred to Cuba as “home” and who was a university professor (!) working part-time as a teacher at the School for Advanced International Studies, once

worked on a biography of Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister, whom Mr. Myers admired for his policies [sic] toward the Nazis.

How European Leaders Use their Influence and Spend their Political Capital

By being #1 in the #2 business.

It’s an Algorithm not an Al Gore Rhythm

Where climate chagelists get the idea that they can control planetary temperatures though their spittle-laden verbal outrage and ignorance of scales, the natural science, and the very concept of what an order of magnitude looks like is simply beyond me. Maybe I just don’t the part where social justice is used to take the place of the science, but one thing I do know is what they haven’t yet found: there ain’t no fine-tuning knob on the sun.

Run That Particular Mainstream Media Principle By Us Again, Will Ya?

"We are very relieved that our New York Times colleague escaped safely, and this episode has ended happily," said AP Senior Managing Editor John Daniszewski [about the escape from Afghan captivity of David S. Rohde]. "It was an unusual and difficult news judgment to withhold reporting on his abduction, but our practice is to avoid transmitting stories if we believe they endanger someone's life."

They avoid transmitting such stories, that is, if the stories endanger the life of a specific individual (or two) with a human face and (therefore) with a compelling backstory (who, in addition, happens to be a colleague).

However, the mainstream media's practice is not to avoid transmitting stories if they "merely" endanger national security as well as the lives of faceless American servicemen and, incidentally (therefore), faceless American civilians in general… (Although, of course, there may be some slight change in this attitude during the reign of the Anointed One and of any other Democratic president…)

Real Presidents

Socialized Medicine: A Foot in the Door

A Hollywood actor by the name of Ronald Reagan speaks up…

Lost Without their Insoluble Nihilism

Members of the ‘sad but real’ German-cliché community should be passively resigned. Herrmann is thus observed:

Actress Tilda Swinton will be biking along the same ex-Berlin Wall route she and filmmaker Cynthia Beatt took ten years ago when they filmed the wall that wasn’t there then, either. This Gesamtkunstwerk (total art form) will then be put together in a piece to be called “Cycling the Invisible Frame.”

Whatever. But if I were her I would take it easier on myself and travel along what used to be the Berlin Wall on what used to be a bike – and take a car instead.

Got that? They’re so set in their ways and ideas that they’re reenacting an old schtick. Why is that?

“The title refers to the fact that most of the wall has been torn down, though many Germans still speak of an invisible wall in the minds dividing east and west Germany.“

Blah, blah, blah. Another complaint about the intangible for the sake of art. Unanswerable questions, demand that you prove a negative. Whatever. You’re, like, so deep, that you can’t seem to walk off of the plantation yourself.

In other words, hanging onto an old world view, and an old agony as if you’re ability to wallow in self-loathing depended on it.

Go ahead, connect the dots. After all, it’s not like they can! They MISS it. It gave them the ulcer that made their lives dramatic, let them think that that alone imbued some meaning in it, and gave them a pass on dealing with themselves.

What’s sad about the stunt, is that it mocks the people I knew who preferred their mental health to this high-school-angst and actually DID tear down that Berlin Wall in their heads, and it didn’t require attention-seeking behavior or revival shows of something they did 10 years ago.

The Wages of Statism

The sad thing about America’s leftist ‘cultural overseers’ is that they look to Europe as a model of how a society should operate. It’s more likely that they opt for the ‘manageable failure’ option out of mere sentimentality. The Perfesser blows a hole in them:

If socialist health care is so preferable, with the power of the state to mandate preventative health care, why do Europeans smoke far more than Americans? On cultural issues, such as politely forming lines, or not defacing monuments with graffiti, or yielding to pedestrians, or driving with concern for others, I think supposedly selfish Americans are light years ahead. But how so, when our capitalist system breeds ‘me first’? And what exactly once created the European genius that we see expressed in the beauty of Italian architecture and the zest for excellence throughout the art and literature of old Europe?

Earth to elites: we are NOT Europe. For the most part they are a comparatively miserable and unhappy population. Quit trying to make us into them. The social ‘equity’ they tout is an act.

Hey! It’s Wrong to Judge!

Have you ever wondered what those peasants with warm-hearted looks in National Georgraphic photo layouts were really doing?

Respect!

Aviation's Debt to the French

The [Wright brothers] knew [Louis] Blériot well, having traveled frequently to France since 1905, where interest in their airplanes was far more intense than in their home country

writes Nicola Clark.

The brothers flew in exhibitions all over France and even set up schools in Pau and Le Mans, where pilots trained on Wright machines. “There was a kind of competition and mutual motivation” among the Wrights and the French air pioneers, which included Mr. Blériot, Gabriel Voisin, Henry Farman and others, said Patrick Guérin, co-author of Le Ciel en Heritage (Heritage in the sky), a history of French aviation.

(Not to downplay Guérin's credibility — and not that it necessarily means anything — but for what the news is worth, he is also the author of books on… magic!) Nicola Clark, again:

By the time of the outbreak of World War I, the airplane’s usefulness in the battlefield was clear, and French manufacturers, among the few who were able to build planes in large numbers, became by default the main suppliers to foreign military forces, including the U.S. Army. By 1914, French aircraft were being produced at a rate of around 50 a month, principally by Mr. Blériot and Mr. Farman. By the time the armistice was signed in 1918, the French were churning out more than 2,700 planes a month.

…Today’s aerospace manufacturers on both sides of the Atlantic are postwar creations in terms of their corporate lineage. Yet their debt to the achievements of aviation’s pioneers a century ago is unquestioned.

Friday Ha-Has

Enjoy, frail humanoids.

A French Mentor of Obama's Economic Model Is Awarded the AEA's John Bates Clark Medal

Antoine Reverchon has an article in Le Monde about Emmanuel Saez, the first Frenchman — "un pur produit de l'élitisme scolaire hexagonal" who lives in Santa Cruz — to receive the John Bates Clark Medal from the American Economic Association.

En traitant ces centaines de milliers de chiffres, Emmanuel Saez a reformulé la théorie économique de l'effet redistributif de l'impôt sur les revenus, démontrant que sa progressivité était un facteur-clé de réduction des inégalités, fortement aggravées par les cadeaux fiscaux consentis aux hauts revenus par Reagan et Bush (père et fils) à partir des années 1980. Sa réussite est saluée par le monde académique dès la parution des premiers résultats, en 2003. "Les papiers de Saez sont maintenant au programme des meilleurs départements d'économie fiscale aux Etats-Unis", confirme James Poterba, directeur du National Bureau of Economic Research, qui a été son directeur de thèse au Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

…Lycée de Bayonne, puis classe préparatoire à Bordeaux, et ce brillantissime élève qui a la bosse des maths entre à l'Ecole normale supérieure (ENS) de la rue d'Ulm. Là, il découvre l'économie. "Les inégalités produites par le capitalisme, c'était abordé quasiment tous les jours à la table familiale, où on était plutôt engagés à gauche. A Ulm, j'ai compris que les maths pouvaient aussi être utiles pour comprendre scientifiquement cette réalité sociale."

…Il est embauché par Harvard et, deux ans plus tard, débauché par Berkeley. Et n'envisage plus de rentrer : il s'est marié à une Américaine il y a trois ans, et dit ne pas connaître de Français qui n'envient pas le système universitaire américain après l'avoir vu fonctionner.

…Surfeur et économiste de talent, il est aussi ravi d'avoir participé au débat politique américain. Les conclusions de Saez et de Piketty figurent dans le projet de loi du budget 2009 présenté par le président Obama au Congrès. Emmanuel Saez brandit volontiers un article du Wall Street Journal du 12 mars 2009, où Daniel Henninger, un éditorialiste conservateur, reproche à Barack Obama d'avoir choisi comme pierre de Rosette de sa politique fiscale le travail de deux "économistes français, rock stars de la gauche intellectuelle".

…Barack Obama a même adressé dès son arrivée à la Maison Blanche un Memorandum on Scientific Integrity aux départements et agences de son administration, les enjoignant de respecter et de s'inspirer des résultats de la recherche académique pour piloter leurs décisions. Une autre façon de rompre avec l'ère Bush brouillée avec le monde de la recherche.

Provence on Two Wheels

Provence on Two Wheels

Peak Molybdenum?

An article to set the pulses racing for some:

Geologists have found deposits of the rare metal molybdenum in the Erzgebirge mountain range in eastern Germany. The valuable find has triggered a gold rush mentality in the economically depressed area.

Just when we think man has mastered Gaia utterly, she throws us yet another curve.

Vacuousness is the new Seriousness

« Famous women conquer European Parliament »

With all of the real issues out there in the world to tend to, isn’t it funny just when and in what context you hear Europeans using assertive or martial sounding tone?

EU commissioners, impressive justice campaigners or just young and splashy, they are the famous women who scored big in the European elections.

She always wears Dior and has made a name for herself as France's first justice minister with an immigrant background.

You guessed right: when they can attack straw-man type authority figures in their own society, knowing that they can enjoy that hostility without any actual consequences to it. Something for nothing: ‘tis the superior continental way.

The Fuse is Lit! (No Pasaran)

"La France, on n'en veut plus. Partez ! Laissez le Gabon tranquille !"

Jamais sans doute Nicolas Sarkozy ne s'était heurté si abruptement aux ambiguïtés de la "Françafrique"

reports Philippe Bernard from Omar Bongo's funeral in Libreville, Gabon, contradicting those NP detractors whose favorite mantra is that France and all that she represents is nothing if not beloved — nay, revered — all over the planet.

"La France, on n'en veut plus. Partez ! Laissez le Gabon tranquille !", hurlait une quarantaine de jeunes manifestants à son arrivée aux obsèques d'Omar Bongo, mardi 16 juin.

L'accueil houleux réservé au chef de l'Etat français semble avoir reçu la bénédiction des autorités gabonaises : l'incident a eu lieu dans l'enceinte filtrée du palais présidentiel et en présence de nombreux représentants des forces de l'ordre.

Two readers of Le Monde write:

un dictateur de moins que la patrie des droits de l'homme, la France, soutenait, engraissait depuis tant d'années. Sans compter que les parons des grandes multinationales vont être très tristes de ce décès, mais faisons leur confiance, elles ont du trouver son remplaçant à la tête du Gabon afin de continuer les petits arrangements entre amis !!!!

Un de moins! Encore un d'ailleurs qui a seulement tenu si longtemps parce que la France l'a soutenu. Et après il y en a qui diront que "l'Afrique n'est pas assez rentré dans l'histoire". Bien entendu, on fait comme si les interventions postcoloniales et les marchés biaisés n'existaient pas. Elle est belle la France-Afrique et tous ceux qui s'offusquent qu'on reproche quoi que ce soit à la France. Mais bien sûr, la France a payé toutes ses dettes et l'Afrique est abondamment traité à l'école ...

Iraq's Prime Minister Bashes Bush, Hails Obama, Praises the UN, and Pays Respect to Iran

Besides hailing the Apologizer-in-Chief (while betraying his predecessor) in an interview with Le Monde's Patrice Claude which appeared on Tuesday (the French mainstream media, like the American, only pays attention to Iraqis when and if they bash Bush, directly or indirectly, which is why so few of them — why so few of the Iraqis — have appeared in the MSM's pages and on their broadcasts over the past six years), Iraq's starry-eyed prime minister, Nouri Al-Maliki, claims that Iran's meddling in Iraq's affairs has come to an end.

Nos relations sont bonnes. Elles doivent rester marquées par le respect mutuel et la non-ingérence. Un grand vide politique s'est créé en Irak après l'intervention armée étrangère en 2003. Cela a produit, c'est vrai, beaucoup d'ingérences de divers pays de la région dans nos affaires. Toujours sous prétexte de protéger leurs propres intérêts nationaux bien sûr. Mais depuis le rétablissement de notre souveraineté et de l'ordre civil dans le pays, nous y avons mis un terme.

Well, it seems like Iraq can be joined to the leftist or left-leaning countries (such as Obama's U.S.) whom Iranian democrats should refrain from counting on for help, to paraphrase Dennis Prager's words…

A primary reason America is "waiting" and "watching" and "monitoring" while Iranians are beaten in the streets of Tehran is that the country is led by the left.

…The world is "closely following the situation," just as it followed the situations of the Jews during the Holocaust, the Ukrainians, the Chinese under Mao, the Rwandans, the Cambodians, Tibetans, and so many others.

Les journalistes français ont tendance à mélanger faits et commentaire, et sont trop enclins à raconter la misère du monde

In his book Are French Journalists That Bad?, François Dufour answers oui, stating that (in the words of Xavier Ternisien's book review)

French journalists tend to mix facts and commentary, are too urbane [trop parisiens], too occupied in copying each other, and too inclined to talk incessantly about misery on the planet.

If "political opinions predominate over facts", the problem comes from the fact that they are too far to the left:

One quarter on the far left, one half on the left, one quarter in the center and on the right

The huddled masses of Iranians yearning to breathe free think hope and change means something more; But the new American colossus stands silent

Stop fawning over the mythological Muslim street only when it hates America, and look to the real Iranian street at the moment of its greatest need, when its heart may be open to loving America

Jonah Goldberg implores the Apologizer-in-Chief.

During the campaign you mocked those who belittled your rhetoric as "just words." Well, what you've offered so far is less than just words. You've put a fresh coat of whitewash on Iran's sham "democracy." On Monday, you proclaimed yourself "troubled" by the events in Iran, before hinting that you'd negotiate with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad no matter what an official investigation into his "landslide" victory found. (Would you trust Mafia internal audits, too?)

Before the sham election you cheered Iran's "robust debate." But that debate has been robust only if you are grading on a curve. Ahmadinejad's main opponent, Mir Hossein Mousavi, was an accidental reform candidate. The mullahs had disqualified about 400 others, leaving in the race only four presumed hacks deemed pliant enough not to rock the boat. Mousavi's popular support and the robustness of the debate he ignited were an unintended consequence of a rigged election and a clerical politburo indifferent to its people's desires, not the intention of a democratic regime.

Reportedly, you are biding your time, waiting to see what happens, as if it is a great mystery. Your campaign lived and breathed YouTube. Check it now, check it often. You and your team promised "soft power" and "smart power." How about moral power? Because by not clearly picking a side, it appears you have chosen the wrong side.

Do you fear antagonizing the powers-that-be in Iran? That ship has sailed. Though I am sure they're tickled by your eagerness not to roil the seas around them. Is it because you think "leader of the free world" is just another of those Cold War relics best mothballed in favor of a more cosmopolitan and universal awe at your own story?

"Enough about those people bleeding in the street. What do you think of me?" Is that how it is to be?

…So far, "hope and change" has meant spending trillions we do not have on expanded government we do not need. Meanwhile, the huddled masses of Iranians yearning to breathe free think hope and change means something more. But the new American colossus stands all but silent, her beacon dimmed, her luster tarnished.

Please, Mr. President, prove me wrong. Stop voting "present" on democracy.

The Penalty That the Prosecutor Asks For Killing Three (of One's Own) Newborns? Ten Years Behind Bars

Asking the jury not to "demonize" Véronique Courjault, the mother who, over four years, killed three of her newborns, the prosecutor asked the jury to sentence her to ten years in jail — or three and 2/3 years per murder.

Pretty soon, protests towards — no, not the leniency — the severity (!) of the prosecution's (!) demand (not even the jury's final sentence) started appearing on Le Monde's website! One (male) reader offering this piece of immortal philosophy:

Vanité de l'homme qui croit connaître le vivant, juge et condamne. Quand est ce que l'homme acceptera de regarder ce qu'il est : Rien ou si peu. De quel droit le genre humain se permet il de juger du comportement de ses freres de race alors qu'il ignore TOUT de lui même.

Another voice joining the chorus thought she had it all figured out when she said that

Le Code civil a été écrit par des hommes, et il s'agit d'une femme

That (female) reader felt compelled to add this piece of heroic prose:

Liberté pour cette femme, notre soeur, notre doute, notre terreur à toutes

What’s the Matter? We Thought you Cared about them.

Funny just when it is that one can call yourself a ‘crusader’. It’s also amusing to see just where and when it is such adamant ‘crusaders for justice’ themselves have to fess up to their own adolescent ardency:

A Guantanamo Bay inmate said he wants to live in Germany because he has "good memories" of the country. So far, though, Germany's Interior Ministry has no plans to accept a request from Washington to take two prisoners. Berlin fears the men, who allegedy trained at terror camps, could be dangerous.

It turns out that these men are dangerous? Maybe it’s because they were ‘created by America’, or are really CIA flunkies!

Following his time in Germany, Hami moved to Pakistan and Afghanistan. According to the files the US has collected, he attended a paramilitary training camp -- a claim he disputes. They also state that he moved to Kandahar in Afghanistan in 2001 to study Islam. During interrogations at Guantanamo, al-Hami admitted to having received weapons training in the al-Qaida camp Khalden.

Maybe this former drug-dealer, like every other detainee, was just ‘inspecting charities and new mosques’, much as any gathering targeted by the US military in Afghanistan, turns out to be a wedding attended only my militant males without fail, and accepted as such by an unquestioning press.

Here we find after nearly 8 years of hectoring America, some tiny little hint in the Euro-mind that there might have been a reason to pick up ‘charity and mosque inspectors’. Perhaps even some time in the next decade, the notion that there is something wrong with them being dangerous might even sink in too.

In fact the very reason the Bush administration couldn’t comply with the Europeans ardent demands to close Gitmo, it largely because they wouldn’t take their own nationals, and largely ignored the idea that just because they demanded that the remainder weren’t remanded to places where they REALLY WOULD be tortured, they want the US to remand them to places where they didn’t have to deal with the torture that they would be remanded to.

Berlin's skepticism about the two men echoes its recent reluctance to take in a group of Uighurs, members of China's Muslim ethnic minority.

Of course that ethical maze has a different set of causes, respecting a sacred philosophical epistemology called the “cha ching”.

The Ladies in Red

Seems as though "the people" do not dig what they have to say:

Guardian Media Group is set to report an operating loss for the financial year to the end of March, the company said today.

This will be the first time GMG has posted an operating loss for several years. The company's national newspaper division, Guardian News & Media, which publishes the Guardian, the Observer and the guardian.co.uk website network – including MediaGuardian.co.uk – will report a loss of about £35m in the year to the end of March 2009.

GMG Radio and GMG Property will both report operating losses. The regional newspaper division, GMG Regional Media, will make an operating profit of less than £1m, down from the previous financial year's operating profit of £14.3m.

Other than that, all is well. The above rather informs the true motivations behind this closely linked story:

UK newspaper publishers, in their latest plea for regulatory reform, want to be allowed to collectively lobby Google for story payments. It was among a litany of woes Guardian Media Group CEO Carolyn McCall, Johnson Press CEO John Fry and Trinity Mirror CEO Sly Bailey—sitting at the same table together—reported to the House of Commons’ culture, media and sport select committee’s inquiry on the future of local and regional media on Tuesday. Newspapers have made the Google-should-pay case before but this is the first time publishers have publicly discussed collaborating to tackle the Google problem, and it says everything about how pressing their problems are.

As for the Guardian's American cousin and editorial soulmate, well that is a well-known story by now:

Update: Likewise

It’s Why They’re Called Social Movements

as opposed to scientific movements. One fact that jumps out is that as soon as the loony left grab onto something in a big way, you’re sure to garner demonization and the factual basis of their entire argument crumbles.

For the second time in little over a year, it looks as though the world may be heading for a serious food crisis, thanks to our old friend "climate change". In many parts of the world recently the weather has not been too brilliant for farmers. After a fearsomely cold winter, June brought heavy snowfall across large parts of western Canada and the northern states of the American Midwest. In Manitoba last week, it was -4ºC. North Dakota had its first June snow for 60 years.

There was midsummer snow not just in Norway and the Cairngorms, but even in Saudi Arabia. At least in the southern hemisphere it is winter, but snowfalls in New Zealand and Australia have been abnormal. There have been frosts in Brazil, elsewhere in South America they have had prolonged droughts, while in China they have had to cope with abnormal rain and freak hailstorms, which in one province killed 20 people.

Crumbling to the point where all they have left is the abuse of reason solely to appease activists.

It is appropriate that another contributory factor to the world's food shortage should be the millions of acres of farmland now being switched from food crops to biofuels, to stop the world warming, Last year even the experts of the European Commission admitted that, to meet the EU's biofuel targets, we will eventually need almost all the food-growing land in Europe. But that didn't persuade them to change their policy. They would rather we starved than did that.

The power to tax is the power to destroy....

...does not feature prominently in this video:

Obama doesn’t see himself as POTUS, but more as a ruler over the world; He sees himself above it all, trying to orchestrate & coordinate all nations

Directorblue has notes from the Charles Krauthammer speech to the Center for the American Experiment (thanks to Larwyn), the most important of which may be the following:

Obama has a ruthless quest for power. He did not come to Washington to make something out of himself, but rather to change everything, including dismantling capitalism. He can’t be straightforward on his ambitions, as the public would not go along. He has a heavy hand, and wants to ‘level the playing field’ with income redistribution and punishment to the achievers of society.

…Obama’s not a socialist; rather he's a far-left secular progressive bent on nothing short of revolution. He ran as a moderate, but will govern from the hard left. Again, watch what he does, not what he says.

…Obama doesn’t really see himself as President of the United States, but more as a ruler over the world. He sees himself above it all, trying to orchestrate & coordinate various countries and their agendas. He sees moral equivalency in all cultures. His apology tour in Germany and England was a prime example of how he sees America, as an imperialist nation that has been arrogant, rather than a great noble nation that has at times made errors. This is the first President ever who has chastised our allies and appeased our enemies!

More Lessons for Deranged American Cowboys From the Society of Safety, Solidarity, and the Absence of Dangerous Firearms

While France is still scandalized about acts of alleged torture as (allegedly) practiced by Americans, another fait divers (sic) hits the stands (one that started less than a month after Ilan Halami's in Paris). Needless to say, Patricia Jolly's story in Le Monde shows that none of the neighbors dared call the police — as if that would have helped (!).

Les tortionnaires de Compiègne semblent avoir imité, si ce n'est "sophistiqué", certaines techniques de la bande parisienne [le "gang des barbares"]. Mais ils ont assuré aux enquêteurs que cette tragédie ne les avaient en rien inspirés.

…Thiam et Bouhi étaient alors âgés de 19 et 18 ans, leur victime en avait 28. Ils encourent la réclusion criminelle à perpétuité. Contrairement à Youssouf Fofana, l'assassin présumé d'Ilan Halimi, qui a fait torturer sa victime pendant vingt-quatre jours, eux ont libéré leur proie après une nuit et une matinée de barbarie. Ils sont accusés d'"enlèvement ou séquestration accompagné ou suivi de tortures ou d'actes de barbarie, de tentative d'extorsion et de vol avec violence en réunion".

…Ligoté par ses ravisseurs à une chaise en plastique avec un câble téléphonique, Macel est roué de coups. On lui fait appeler sa mère au téléphone. "Maman, est-ce que tu as de l'argent tout de suite ?", crie-t-il paniqué. Elle répond par la négative. "Ils vont me séquestrer, ils vont me tabasser !", hurle Macel. Affolée, sa mère assure avoir appelé deux fois la police sans obtenir de réponse.

How come the police weren't answering the phone? They had more important things to do, as the victim himself (!) was to find out a few years later.

Depuis, Dominique Macel vit en couple et a eu deux enfants. Mais c'est en convoi pénitentiaire qu'il arrivera lundi 8 juin à la cour d'assises de Beauvais. Il est en prison depuis le début de l'année pour conduite sans permis. Domicilié près de la cité, il n'osait plus s'y promener à pied.

Peace Out!

Your Sharing and Caring World Body at Work

UN food stolen from the starving in Somalia

Since taxation is caring, and disembodied guilt about people you don’t know is the new coin of the realm, then the theft of that caring isn’t theft, but the very act of sharing someone else’s caring! Right?

One of the UN’s largest international relief efforts is under investigation after it emerged that thousands of sacks of food aid were being diverted from starving refugees and openly sold for profit.

Surprised? I’m not. I mean it isn’t like we aren’t talking about somebody’s meal ticket here, anyway.

So here’s the basic logic behind all of this Vaudevillian “the UN cares about you” crapola: picture yourself standing around with me and some shoeless waif from a well advertized pitiable society that seems unusually fashionable this week. I demand that you give him your shoes, conceal the theft, and declare myself to be generous. Take enough shoes away from people so that even if people steal them again and sell them, that somewhere out there, there’s still a picture of me giving the waif some shoes. Then I exhibit some outrage if people out in TV land catch on the never-ending pattern.

Britain gave the WFP £9 million for Somalia last year through the Department for International Development and is now deciding whether to give more.

Wow. Impressive! They shod the world… they shod the children….

Many of the sacks for sale are marked: “A gift from the American people”, with the US government’s aid agency, USAID, providing $274 million last year in food and in humanitarian assistance for Somalia.

Peter Goossens, the WFP’s Somalia director, describes food for sale as a “minor phenomenon”.

Sure. No problem. It’s just a part of doing business, just as long as the orbiting aid employees have their contracts renwewed.

The other funny thing is that you will note that you never hear of anyone plausibly pleading for the UN or EU to save them either in Eritrea or anywhere else.

thank you for the news.please US punish the tyrant financing the terrorist group in Somalia from THE POOR ERTREA

ABRAHAM, asmara, eritrea

What’s telling here is that Abraham KNOWS BETTER not to expect any great helpful act of anything out of those pangalactic dispensers of human virtue, the UN or the EU, and doesn’t even bother to ask. He’s probably rather aware that anything they do isn’t likely to come in time or at all if there isn’t a photo-op and some airtime on BBC World or Al-Jazeera.

Make them Feel Better. Pretend they Matter.

Aren’t you relieved whenever the EU “expresses concern’ about risks they will never, ever do anything about?

Obviously, the Earth is Warming

Funny that.

Canada frosts the most widespread in recent memory

Either Algore is in town, or he’s yet to find that fine-tuning knob on the sun.

I don’t want to get too technical, but what they seem to be saying is that the more solar activity there is, the warmer the Earth gets. Um, how counterintuitive can you get?

No!

Political Philosophy has Found its’ Chauncey Gardner

In effect Dante with this contrast of good/bad, ugly/beautiful, true/false, puny/precious, is saying that this unique earth which is Man's only home within time and space is meant to be beautiful as a garden at the outset, but the sad ugly present reality is that in this garden brother kills brother; it is one of general viciousness and incessant warfare. Dante is pointing out that this garden is a garden of exile and humankind's journey is a journey back to the future, a journey of a return toward that utopist garden it originally left behind. Later in his imaginary journey Dante will enter the earthly garden of Eden on top of the mountain of Purgatory, but his journey transcends even that beautiful earthly garden

There is a kind of lunacy to people who believe that all history has ended because they stopped trying to face the world for what it is.

Dante is therefore one of the grandfathers of this vision of a United Europe. As the consummate poet he is, he reminds all Europeans that, in the words of the Dante scholar, the British-American poet T.S. Eliot, "...The end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started from and know the place for the first time." At that place we shall rediscover "l'amor che move il sole e l'altre stelle" [The love that moves the sun and the other stars]—Paradiso XXXIII, 145.

As if Dante was talking about what was then a concept far less tangible – “A Europe” did not really exist to their minds because it was quite plainly an extension of the little patches of dirt that their were fighting over. “A far away land” was where the dialect changed, right over yonder hill.

And if this guy doesn’t realize that Dante wasn’t talking of a specific society or culture at all, but about man’s relationship (universal man in his view), with right and wrong, not little tiny earthly law as Paparella’s feeble misuse of a basic, widely read text would indicate. In a sick attempt to define the EU, “Europe” as the writer puts it, with a respite on the way to heaven, or akin to heaven itself, especially for someone who seems to be rather willing to also mock the former Utopianism of the faithful.

It’s a Government construct, you fool. Vesting Utopian notions in it has brought us nothing but the likes of Hitler, Stalin, and “Cultural Revolutions” where millions end up dying anonymously at the hands of a rather covetous earthly cult of power OVER others.

It does not matter that we lost....

...you still have to listen:

The European Socialists have warned EU leaders meeting next week in Brussels not to disrespect the European Parliament by formally agreeing to appoint commission chief Jose Manuel Barroso for a second term in office.

Following a meeting on Friday (12 June ) of representatives from national delegations to discuss the beating that the left took in last week's European elections, Poul Nyrup Rasmussen, head of the European socialists, said their main message was to "be careful."

While chastened at their defeat, the Socialist grouping still flashes a bit of unintended humour:

However Mr Rasmussen's threat rang hollow when he admitted that he was not sure what the socialists would do if EU leaders ignored their warning and went ahead and gave Mr Barroso formal approval for a second term in office.

He said this still had to be "discussed."

In addition, while saying that the socialists "cannot support [Mr] Barroso," the party still has no alternative candidate of their own.

The old "this calls for immediate discussion" routine still brings about the grins.

I think it is going to be close

From the begining of the Industrial Revolution the challenge of man versus machine has always been hotly contested. This is no different in today's blog-fuelled internet.

The challenege is laid-down by the eponymous blog commentator "Peter" in a comment regarding future budget cuts facing a particular government:

No is listening anymore. The majority of voters (which must, by definition, include those who allegedly depend on public services) according to a PoliticsHome poll this week want cuts in public spending. The last 12 years have tested to destruction the idea that more and more spending necessarily means improvements to public services. I suspect in your heart you know that. Public spending cuts are coming, whether you like it or not, because you are losing the argument about the efficacy of state intervention. In fact it is already lost. Get ready for slash and burn and a reduction in the size and power of your beloved state, with a concomitant increase in the power of the ordinary citizen. It’s coming…

Nothing flaming. Nothing feral. Fairly straight forward. How will our contestants do in terms of logical and rational thought when answering Peter?

First up, the machine: Autorantic Virtual Moonbat, who replied thusly to Peter:

Rove is pure evil!!!! If you aren't morose about this head warmonger, then actually you are a Repimplican blood-stained robot of Karl Rove!!! We've seen this before, in 1992 in Montreal, when 20,248 Shiite BABY seals were HYPNOTIZED by the House of Representatives!!! What about gender equality? What about pollutant-free air and gay marriage for the countless millions of whales who are eaten in Abu Ghraib every single day by our Thief-in-Chief!!? The CHIMP in charge's War Against Recycling must end!

Next up, the (hu)man: Richard Murphy, who replied thusly to Peter:

Power for the ordinary citzen

To die

To be uneducated

To pollute

To clear their own waste

To be undefended

To have no access to justice

To have no protectiion at work

To eat unsafe food

To drive unsafe cars

That’s liberty is it?

Richard

In terms of logical and rational thought, advantage Autorantic.

The Silence of the Shams

Somewhere in the giant pantheon of social behavior modification to be imposed on others that IS the left, there are animal rights; nebulous ideas that blood-letting revolutions are a priority, if not a sport; economic mythological thinking, of course; and the phrase ‘social justice,’ which is just a new term for soul crushing and discredited Marxism.

Brainiac Renaissance-man Michael Phillips wonders what the tacity anti-human folk at pEta would make of the revised version of the insurgent donkey bomb. It goes without saying that ‘little p’ people for the Ethical treatment of Animals would have certainly not considered the ancillary use of the mentally handicapped or mentally retarded in the same way worthy of comment either. The application of ethical thinking, it seems, stops when you have opposable thumbs. Having mutually exclusive beliefs that you can feel good about is what they must mean by a ‘big tent’.

Elsewhere: hold the tater-tots, Selma!

“Death to potatoes,” they chant at rallies.

Speaking of dung, Iran goes all Atkins on us.

The European Social Model

Bild

Two homosexual penguins at Bremerhaven Zoo in Germany were given an unhatched egg to look after.

Of course they don’t mention the breeders that allowed them to have the same happy delusions that the humans have. That is, when you don’t notice the remnant instincts favoring oppression.

Husband of His Three Babies' Killer: I "Understand" and "One Must Understand" the Acts of My Wife

The Frenchwoman who killed three of her own newborns as she gave birth to them in secret over a period of four years is receiving support from all over, including her family, her in-laws, and her husband — i.e., the father of the three dead babies, two of whom were stored in their Seoul apartment freezer — who said he "understands" the acts of his wife and that, generally, "one must understand" said acts.

Of the few Le Monde readers who have so far reacted on the Le Monde website, a majority have happily picked up Jean-Louis Courjault's tolerance baton to say to the rare skeptic among them such things as "Thank you for sparing the actors of the drama from your morality lessons" and "Spare us any preemptory judgment" of what ("pregnancy denial") is, in the final analysis, a "phenomenon" not only "mysterious" but (I kid you not) "contagious" (by the members of all the woman's entourage, none of whom seems to have noticed that she was pregnant).