Behind the Façades in France: What expats and the mainstream media (French and American alike) fail to notice (or fail to tell you) about French attitudes, principles, values, and official positions…
No blondes or white skin in these new women's magazines, writes Elise Vincent. With titles such as Brown, Miss Ebony, Gazelle, Amina, and Pilibo, French publishers are going after minority females with ties to Africa or the Middle East, whether they are recent arrivals to France or second- or third-generation immigrants..
a less realistic cartoon (below) and the article it accompanies is replete with leftist condescension and phrases such as "a radical budget plan drawn up by Paul Ryan", "a merciless purge", "recklessness", "its rigidity on taxes", "anti-tax ideologues", and "Obstructive, reckless, extreme, willing to dismantle the whole edifice of the New Deal", all the while speaking of "Mr Obama’s bad luck".
Le nouveau livre de Alain Hertoghe, avec Marc Tronchot, c'est Anne Sinclair : Femme de tête, dame de coeur.
Mr Cain complained, and some of his friends agreed, that the story was not a case of the newspapers doing their jobbut a racist “witch-hunt”. Brent Bozell, president of the Media Research Centre, which purports to unmask “liberal bias”, said that Mr Cain had predicted months ago that he might face a “high-tech lynching” like the accusations of sexual harassment that afflicted Clarence Thomas during his confirmation hearings for the Supreme Court. “In the eyes of the liberal media”, said Mr Bozell, “Herman Cain is just another uppity black American who has had the audacity to leave the liberal plantation. So they must destroy him, just as they tried destroying Clarence Thomas.”
"The utopian schemes of leveling and a community of goods are as visionary and impracticable as those which vest all property in the Crown, are arbitrary, despotic, and, in our government, unconstitutional."
- Samuel Adams, Letter to Dennys De Berdt, Massachusetts
agent in London (January 12, 1768)
Barack Obama. The entire piece is meant to make one think that he is one of those traditional conservative fat cats whom the left (and Obama) has been heroically battling for so long and who turned out to be a political parvenu. A couple of lines of his mentor Robert Rubin working for Bill Clinton, not a single mention of Obama, and, following then — the clinger — the brief mention with wording that "Jon Corzine runs as a Democrat", i.e., that he "claims to be a Democrat"! 
Meurtri, l'homme se tourne alors vers l'une des carrières qui, aux Etats-Unis, nécessite le plus de moyens financiers : la politique. Par chance, il a accumulé, durant ses années Goldman et pour salaire de son retrait, une fortune estimée à 400 millions de dollars. De quoi se montrer persuasif auprès desinstances de son parti — Jon Corzine s'affiche démocrate — et plus encore auprès des électeurs. En 2000, l'ex-patron de GS remporte l'un des deux sièges de sénateur du New Jersey. Il a dépensé 62 millions de dollars de sa fortune personnelle, ce qui en fait, à ce jour, la campagne la plus chère de l'histoire du Sénat. Le sénateur Corzine sera actif sur des projets de loi touchant aux aides aux étudiants et à l'extension de la couverture-santé et votera, en 2002, contre l'entrée en guerre des Etats-Unis en Irak. Mais l'activité de législateur n'est pas la tasse de thé de cet homme d'action. Avant même la fin de son mandat, il l'abandonne pour se lancer dans la course à la fonction de gouverneur du même Etat.
For the Frivolous, Postmodern Foodie Types in your Life
They’re sure to get excited for new ideas, such as cuisine with spunk. Semen is not only nutritious, but it also has a wonderful texture and amazing cooking properties. Like fine wine and cheeses, the taste of semen is complex and dynamic. Semen is inexpensive to produce and is commonly available in many, if not most, homes and restaurants. Despite all of these positive qualities, semen remains neglected as a food. This book hopes to change that. Once you overcome any initial hesitation, you will be surprised to learn how wonderful semen is in the kitchen. Semen is an exciting ingredient that can give every dish you make an interesting twist.
Sure. Whatever. This is precisely the kind of goofy trend that becomes ‘all the rage’ for 3 days in the city (I'll let you name your own). It’s accompanied with similar explanations of healing properties and bogus claims of life extention.
Then again, why does that remind me of this kind of thing?
writes the AFP in Le Monde.
his messenger." "Muslims ask but one thing: a public apology." "Where's Charlie? hahahahahahahahaha" [a reference to Martin Handford's "Where's Waldo?" books, translated to "Où est Charlie?" in French]. "Go to Hell, Charlie Hebdo." "Shame on Charlie Hebdo, you have sold lots of issues but you will reap the consequences."
Stephen Baskerville described this in less prosaic and more acceptable words than Roissy does (thanks to Instapundit) — as did Dennis Prager recently in his Four Legacies of Feminism — but still Roissy (aka Chateau Heartiste) provides some hard truths (language warning) "where pretty lies perish". His language — and Roissy himself — won't be everybody's cup of tea, but as he says, society has a problem when, thanks to feminist-driven misandrist divorce laws, the husband has become the "second class spouse under the law".Or as Dennis Prager puts it, less prosaically, in his Four Legacies of Feminism:The bubble boy boundaries of the conservative imagination are never more evident than in its grappling with the sociosexual differences between men and women and the workings of the dating market. An appalling lack of understanding, of even a tangential blow with the truth about female nature, suggests that traditionalists and their offspring — Promise Keepers, Iron Johns, (some) MRAs, evangelists, etc. — have an allergic reaction to plumbing the depths of the human sexual soul, a revulsion likely concocted in a cauldron of sheltered life experiences and morbid fear of their own temptations.
Someone, anyone, has to pull the wool from their eyes, because their ignorance compounds a problem they rightly see as anathema to civilized prosperity. Their haste to lay the fault at the feet of men and to wholly absolve women of any responsibility gives the id monster free reign to lay waste to their utopian ideal. This is because it is the shackling or the unleashing of the female id, not the male id, that ultimately controls the destiny of a society.
So, a sincere plea to Bennett and his ilk: Get your heads out of the sand. You can start by repeating the following to yourself every morning in the mirror:
What’s wrong with men? Nothing that isn’t also wrong with women.
Men don’t “refuse to grow up”. They drop out, (or rather, beta males drop out), and with good reason, because the sexual market has been reconstructed to pander to female hypergamous impulses. Men can no longer achieve the clearly-defined status over hypergamous women they once could because the traditional field of battle that afforded them relative supremacy and, thus, attractiveness, to women — the corporate office — has, via managerial despotism strengthening PC and diversity to a state religion, lopped their balls clean off. And so men retreat from the corporate drone working world to achieve their status elsewhere.
Men don’t avoid marriage and family because they have a “maturity deficit”. They rationally avoid marriage and family because, as the institutions are currently constituted, they are a raw deal for men. Marriage is a risk made too great by misandrist divorce laws, and kids are a cost made too high by falling wages and tightening housing markets, of which part of the blame must go to women who have been voting for increasingly leftie and feminist-friendly governments since suffrage.
Men don’t play the field because they “avoid responsibility”. Men play the field because they can; because women, in their zeal to delay marriage until their careers have been established, to hop a parade of alpha cock during their roaring twenties, and to reward the players over the providers with their prime sexual access, have opened the field to men.
Men don’t “treat women as toys”. Men get the sex while the getting’s good because women allow — nay, PREFER — themselves to be toyed with by the kinds of men who are good at it.
In other words, Mr. Bennett, women GET EXACTLY THE KINDS OF MEN they deserve. Even more dispiriting to your conception of the universe, women get the men they WANT.
Women are the gatekeepers and the hadron collider tubes of sexuality. This has never changed, and likely never will as long as our biology remains rooted in the material world. The shape and direction of man is primarily an effect, not a cause, of the pathway laid out by women. The ancients you revere knew this, which is why they found it perfectly natural to restrict female power where they could.
… If conservatives are serious about restoring a traditional concept of manhood to the modern man, I have a few suggestions for them.
1. Industriousness will only be a worthwhile pursuit for men if they can extract some real status out of it to satisfy their guiding compulsion to attract women. This means removing women from the workplace, where female career growth acts indirectly to undermine male provider and leadership status, and directly through the feminization of the workplace.
2. Marriage will only be a worthwhile goal for men when divorce laws are gutted and reinvented to stop massively favoring women at the expense of men. No-fault divorce should be abolished. Child support changed so that men and women have automatic equal share of custody if the man wants it. Alimony abolished so that we never again see a callous situation where the ex-husband is writing checks to an ex-wife who initiated divorce and is now banging a new lover. Women who initiate divorce for any reason other than provable physical abuse should be kicked out of the house and made to get by living in an apartment.
3. Religion is dead in the water. The fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil has been bitten, and no one who matters in the developed nations can take it seriously again until they and their shrinking descendants have been purged from the human pool. But if you want a fighting chance to return religion to some honorable place in society, and to have men return to the fold, the constant, sanctimonious drumbeat of chiding men to behave must stop, and be replaced with sermons that take into account the fallen nature of women. Remember, women WANT to be led. They won’t abandon the church if their natures are examined candidly and honestly, and without fear.
… The answers conservatives do have are laughable. Bill Bennett gives his:
We may need to say to a number of our twenty-something men, “Get off the video games five hours a day, get yourself together, get a challenging job and get married.” It’s time for men to man up.
Yes, men, man up. That’s the ticket. When she cuckolds you, man up. When she rejects your gentlemanly kindness for an aloof badboy, man up. When she unceremoniously files for divorce because she got bored of your beta personality after she went off the pill, man up. When she takes the house, car, dog and half to fund her live-in boyfriend’s porn habit, man up. When she writes love letters to terrorists and serial killers on death row because her honorable hubby doesn’t amuse her anymore, man up. When she boffs the first douchebag DJ who comes along but makes a courteous accountant wait three months for sex, man up. When she devours pulp romance novels and vacuous feminized trash that desensitizes her to the value of real life men she can reasonably hope to attract, man up. When she gets aroused by a backhanded compliment but remains unmoved by a sincere compliment, man up. When she cries to HR about what she thinks was an inappropriate flirtation, man up. When she “forgets” to take the Pill and puts you on the hook for the 18 year enslavement, man up. When she gets multiple degrees that price her out of the mating market, man up. When she gets legal protections and favors that aren’t given to men, man up. When her every misdeed and misbehavior and poor choice is excused, man the fuck up.
Wow. What man wouldn’t want to sign up for this program?
Men will man up when women man down. The one must follow the other. The polarity cannot be reversed.
thanks to feminism, very many women slept with too many men for their own happiness; posponed marriage too long to find the right man to marry; are having hired hands do much of the raising of their children; and now find they are dating boy-men because manly men are so rare.Feminism exemplifies the truth of the saying, "Be careful what you wish for -- you may get it."
confident that whatever absurdity [Herman Cain] comes up with
?! …will only add to his outsider mystique?!
The challenge [for Europeans] is to identify what kind of reality confronts an E.U. that now insists it has come up with elements of a solution to its loss of credibility and relevancewrites John Vinocur in the International Herald Tribune.
Have the countries of the euro common currency zone created a new culture of truthfulness, or a plan for growth to compensate for their covenant of economic and financial constraint, or hard guidelines to keep potentially massive creditors, like China, from encroaching on Europe’s independence and its place as a pillar of the West?
A Matterhorn of doubt follows here in three segments:Bad History Quite simply, the euro zone always had clear rules, supervision and penalties. Saying now that new rules will be strictly and suddenly enforced means little, considering the precedents.
The Maastricht Treaty provided for stringent controls — but all the members of the common currency disregarded them and set a pattern of easy variance from the truth.
Jean-Pierre Jouyet, president of the French Financial Markets Authority, has described the existence of a “culture of connivance” that resulted in a decision in 2004, countenanced by the European Commission, to let a Greek government admission of fraud (made in Mr. Jouyet’s presence) pass in silence.
A year later, Germany and France both exceeded the euro zone’s debt and deficit targets while avoiding either political or cash penalties, and anything akin to embarrassment. Cooked books, disdain for the E.U. rules, contempt for the truth — for a good part of a decade, the result was, Mr. Jouyet told me two years ago, “countries felt there were no rules. The notion of rigor was gone.”
… In the end, rather than the E.U. reckoning with its own implosion of standards, it was the markets and ratings agencies, although demonized in the process by European leaders, that caught out the game that held a Greek bond was as solid as a Dutch one.
Even as the crisis gained force, European denial and deflection dominated. …
Little Growth When Angela Merkel returned from the Brussels meeting last week, she said its achievement was as “a step on the way to more stability and a stability union.” The growth part of the equation went missing.
Bottom line: minus a clear plan that makes an improbable combination of consolidation and growth believable and sustainable in the near future, the real European perspective is for trouble.
… In response to countries like the United States, and an institution like the International Monetary Fund, that call for greater domestic demand in Germany, and see German (and Chinese) trade imbalances as a major hindrance to growth around the world, Mrs. Merkel has again said fuggedaboutit.
She insisted last week that highly competitive nations must not be punished because of their greater skills.
Responsibilities Europe’s desire to have China become the major national investor in its bailout fund has been met by unmistakable Chinese insistence that China get something major in return.
Greater economic investment and trade access to Europe are troubling enough.
But suppose Beijing insisted the E.U. lifts its embargo on arms sales to China as a quid pro quo.
Nicolas Sarkozy has long been on the record as being in favor. Catherine Ashton, the E.U. foreign policy chief, said earlier in the year, “The current arms embargo is a major impediment for developing strong E.U.-China cooperation. The E.U. should discuss its practical implication and design a way forward.”
Of course, Europe could just say no. Or, very possibly, pay back a bailout with a decision challenging the Obama administration’s analysis that China is a growing military threat — not to mention American notions of the West’s solidarity.
This is new ground for a vaguely and still unconvincingly redefined E.U., its reins increasingly in the hands of a Germany whose departure from nuclear energy points to its and its neighbors’ growing energy supply dependence on Russia.
Call the E.U.’s response to China’s investment conditions a sudden, global responsibility of a kind that goes beyond the boundaries of what 21st-century Europe had always done best: blur the edges of any definitive choice more complicated than pure self-interest.
It’s actually rather hard to find out who “the people” are:One of the paradoxes of the French industrial relations system is that despite its low rate of unionisation, close to 8 per cent, it has a very high rate of collective bargaining coverage, close to 98 per cent. There are two major reasons for this: the extension of collective bargaining agreements by the Ministry of Labour and the legal form of union recognition according to which each of the five confederations CGT, FO, CFDT, CFTC and CGC were recognised by the government in 1966 as ‘representative’ at the national level and were therefore entitled to sign collective agreements at any level. Union pluralism has increased since, with the appearance of new confederations of ‘autonomous’ unions, namely UNSA and Solidaires.
Got it? By way of the state, designating an minute elite that represent 8% of the employed, Government is used as a tool to multiply that power to impose their rules not just on 98% of the employed who have no way to get in on that conversation, but the rest of society.
Europeans call this majority rule representing the united masses, somehow imagining the fate of the characters in Germinal. This “minority as majority,” something the radical clique who have coopted the Democratic Party in the us can’t wait to foist on what little healthy parts there are of the US economy.Legislation adopted in 2008 introduced new criteria for determining whether a union is representative and therefore allowed to participate in collective bargaining at national, industry and company level. The new law requires a union to win at least 10 per cent of the votes at the workplace level, 8 per cent of the votes at industry level and 8 per cent of votes at national ‘inter-professional’ level to be considered representative. The new legislation will only come fully into effect at national and industry level in 2013.
Rules, rules, rules. In fact it’s a coil that wants rule over others. The point of “controversy” is that the lay will require 30% affirmation to have a mandate over 100% of the workers. And the “organization,” that selected sliver representing 8% of those employed by the private sector, still gets a right of refusal over a rebellion among the 49% of that 8%In order to be valid, collective bargaining agreements at industry level currently need to be unopposed from a majority of representative union organisation. From 2013, it will only be valid if it has been signed by unions with at least a 30 per cent support in the industry, based on works council and similar elections, and if it is not opposed by unions with majority (more than 50 per cent) support. These rules have already started taking effect at the company level where elections under the new rules have taken place.
As for now, they’ll find a way to live off of the carrion of free market invention, but how long could that possibly last?
Is Gaddafi greater dead than alive?
The (questionable) broadcast of the violent images of his capture and death leaves readers torn between fascination and repulsion. On the Internet,some are already comparing him to Che Guevara. "Death in battle," intones George Henry, of Lons-le-Saunier (Jura) [if that is what you call being pulled out of a drainage pipe — NP]. "A feather in their cap that many overthrown heads of state were unable, except for Salvador Allende, to acquire," said Christian Vezon.
Sirio Caramelli (Montpellier) took a second look at "pictures of Mussolini hanged. Well, with due respect to all those noble souls, a lynched dictator does not bother me, not in the least!" "Very beautiful images of a dictator's humiliation, the like of which it would be nice to see more often" agrees "Aline Maginot", who "hopes that these images will be seen by the Assads in Damascus"
In Libya, Gaddafi's tragic end and the announcement by the National Transitional Council (CNT), as an epitaph, of a return to sharia and polygamy, leads one Le Monde reader to opine that "the Gaddafi cholera has been replaced by the Muslim plague."The outcome of the "Arab spring" leaves a sour taste in the mouthes of our readers," admits the Ombudsman of Le Monde as missives opposed to the mainstream media's political correctness stream in, warning of the "cold" Arab winter that may be coming.
"Has the West meek again helped a Khomeini clone seize power?" sighs one Jean-Claude Demari. He would like to think that "the opposition to obscurantist Islamism isfortunately no longer the preserve of the extreme right or the hard right." […] Witness the reaction to the editorial line of Le Monde asking, "What if, in Tunisia, democracy was arrived at through Islam?" (October 27). "The naive self-righteous editorials of Le Monde is staggering," says a certain "Alain Neurohr." "Is Le Monde the 'useful idiot' of Islam?" sneers "DR".
... Skepticism prevails. "I would like to remind you that in the 1930s, Hitler was thought of as a clown, not a danger: you know what happened next!" says Jacques Adit (Chambéry): "It's a safe bet that once in power, the new government in Tripoli will be described by Western leaders as 'moderate' in order to enjoy good business relationships with it without damning themselves", writes Laure Fouré (Versailles). "Let no one in France dare to criticize the Islamic veil because it is the niqab that France has just stuck on the face of Libya," snaps Wardia Salem (Montrouge), a radical pro-Gaddafi woman.
So much so, that he’s willing to impoverish and bankrupt civilization to gets that rah-rah feeling that he had when he was young, and thought that he has something to say to the world that it didn’t already know.
Below you’ll find an interesting retort to a cause of the week zombie who is so worried about “climate change” that, well, he won’t ask himself these rather obvious questions:Make your scientific case for imminent Catastrophic Climate Disaster. The science is settled and irrefutable. It is urgent we must implement comprehensive regulatory reform to reduce CO2 emissions to avoid climate catastrophe.
”Catastrophic warmists” are turning out to be more of a parody of reason and compassion than anything else.1) In this century please list the catastrophic climate events in North America that will be aberrations to what has occurred in the past 100 years? Please be specific (range estimate is fine) as to the event, scope, region, and timing. How are these disasters outside what we have observed and experienced in the previous century?
The science is settled. The science is irrefutable. There is nothing to debate. We must act now or else disaster is imminent. It is urgent we do so. Therefore, the answers to these questions are obvious.
2) Please provide the scientific data that substantiates that public policy to control CO2 will in fact reverse climate change? Please quantify this reversal from current trends.
3) Please make the scientific case that man cannot effectively adapt to changing weather patterns just as he has done in previous centuries without the help of extravagant public policy to regulate the climate?
4) Please make the scientific case that catastrophic global warming and climate disaster must be a higher priority than entitlement reform, economic prosperity, balancing the budget, reducing sovereign debt, jobs, etc., etc.? Why is mitigating catastrophic climate change such an urgent and high priority?
5) How much sleep have you lost in the past year worrying about climate disaster? Please compare this to your worry over retirement and career security? If you are not losing any sleep over climate doomsday then why should I?
6) What is the ideal standard climate for North America? Is this a static state that we must achieve? How much does climate change over geologic time naturally?
7) Please provide the % of climate change this century that is natural vs. human-caused?
Europa, Europa... They wish America ill all the time, amplifying any bad news that they hear about it. In the spirit of that decades long tradition of theirs’, they shouldn’t mind this report delivered with a Bronx cheer.The eurozone debt crisis could lead to a decade-long recession and rising social unrest, the International Labour Organisation (ILO) has warned, according to a German media report on Sunday.
Knock yourselves out.
What is at stake now is the challenge to the ultra-free market model existing in Chile since the coup of September 11, 1973 which remained in place after the return of democracy 20 years ago. Many sectors of the economy have been privatized. "There has been a huge concentration of power and wealth, in banking, commerce, media, and mining, observes the Santiago economist Andrés Solimano. This explains the current discontent."***…le centre de cette agglomération de 120 000 habitants [Punta Arenas, la ville la plus australe de la Patagonie chilienne] est traversé par une large banderole sur laquelle on lit : " Le charbon aujourd'hui, la misère demain. " Une trentaine de personnes, surtout des jeunes, la suivent en criant et frappant sur des couvercles de casserole : " Charbon, charbon, tu apportes la mort et la destruction ", " Nous avons du vent, nous avons du soleil, pourquoi utiliser du charbon ? " La scène se répète tous les vendredis depuis février. Angelica, une jeune fille qui travaille comme vendeuse dans un magasin, explique : " Je suis ici pour défendre ma terre. Les gens sont très mal informés sur ce projet. "
Le projet ? Une mine à ciel ouvert de 500 hectares, sur une grande île située à une cinquantaine de kilomètres de Punta Arenas. Le gouvernement chilien y a autorisé, en août, l'extraction future de 6 millions de tonnes de charbon par an, qui seraient exportées vers les mines du nord du Chili par un port à construire sur l'île Riesco.
… l'augmentation des émissions de gaz à effet de serre entraînée par la combustion du charbon dans les centrales électriques. Les émissions du pays croissent déjà de 5 % par an depuis 1994 - un record en Amérique latine.
… à Santiago, le président du Sénat lui-même, Guido Girardi, ne mâche pas ses mots : " La pointe du continent est un des endroits les plus purs, les plus préservés du monde. Y exploiter des mines de charbon est une imbécillité ! Le Chili a d'énormes possibilités en énergies renouvelables, qu'il faut exploiter. "
… En fait, la lutte autour du projet de l'île Riesco est une expression supplémentaire de l'ébranlement de la société chilienne depuis le début de 2011. C'est de Punta Arenas, d'ailleurs, que le mouvement était parti : en janvier, des manifestations massives s'y sont produites contre l'augmentation du prix du gaz. Puis, en avril, 80 000 personnes ont manifesté à Santiago contre des projets de barrages en Patagonie, avant qu'en mai commence un mouvement des étudiants contre le prix très élevé de l'enseignement supérieur.
Ce qui est en jeu, maintenant, c'est la contestation du modèle ultralibéral mise en place depuis le coup d'Etat du 11 septembre 1973 et resté en place après le retour de la démocratie, voici vingt ans. De nombreux secteurs de l'économie ont été privatisés. " Il s'est produit une concentration énorme du pouvoir et des richesses, dans la banque, le commerce, les médias et les mines, observe, à Santiago, l'économiste Andrés Solimano. Cela explique le mécontentement actuel. "
Beware: Broke nations contemplating further socializing their medical sectors. And by that I mean YOU, America.
The Greeks are broke. They would socialize and unionize crime if there was a way to do it. Now they are turning to NGOs to cover their medical needs, much as nations beset by pandemics, endemic poverty, and natural disasters do.Europeans and Westerners in general are accustomed to being asked to donate money to emergency aid NGOs to tackle medical humanitarian crises in Africa, Asia and other parts of the developing world where governments are too unwilling, poor or incapable to be able to help their own citizens.
No worries. Since they are in demographic decline like much of Europe’s Club Med, it shouldn’t be a problem for too long.
It is unheard of for aid groups such as Medecins Sans Frontieres or Medicins du Monde to have to take over the role of providing basic medical services from normal state or private providers in a Western country.
“A politician is someone who gets in front of a mob and tries to call it a parade.”
- unknown
M. Sarkozy n'est pas opposé à ce que la Chine contribue au sauvetage de la zone euro. Qu'en pensez-vous ?
Le contact que Nicolas Sarkozy a cru bon de prendre avec le président chinois, au lendemain de l'accord, en dit long sur la nouvelle dépendance de la zone euro. La Chine est désormais la maîtresse du jeu, de sorte que le sommet du G20 des 3 et 4 novembre, qui devait être le moment de vérité pour le yuan, va consacrer l'empire économique chinois. […]
M. Sarkozy semble également décidé à vous attaquer sur les "erreurs" historiques de la gauche, notamment les 35 heures et la retraite à 60 ans de 1982. Que répliquez-vous ?
Pourquoi n'est-il pas remonté à 1936 avec les congés payés, ou même au début du XXe siècle avec la journée de huit heures et le repos dominical ! M. Sarkozy a la mémoire longue pour les autres, mais courte pour lui-même. De ses cadeaux fiscaux, de son aveuglement budgétaire, ducreusement des inégalités, du laxisme en matière de hautes rémunérations, de l'impuissance face aux banques, de l'innocence face aux désordres commerciaux et de la dépendance à l'égard de la Chine, finalement, il n'est en rien responsable. Nous aurons face à nous un candidat sans mémoire. L'amnésie lui servira de viatique.
If business is challenging when entrepreneurs make decisions for sound business reasons, it’s doomed when politicians become involved, because they make decisions for political reasons. Politicians like to pay off big campaign contributors by steering government contracts their way, regardless of how dubious the campaign contributors might be as business executives.
For one thing, they are sad attempts to prove their bad economic theories, for another:politicians expect that those who receive government funding will help their re-election campaigns. No surprise that many businesses have chief executives best known for their ability to find a place at the public trough, rather than boosting sales in free markets.
Very simply, to quote Iowahawk (after a fashion,) if you don’t want to be drugged and forcibly sodimized in the van, don’t take the candy.
Government attempts to pick winners are most likely to increase the amount of money lost betting on losers. This is because with the power to tax, subsidize and mandate, politicians are able to pour money into unprofitable projects that private investors would never touch voluntarily.
The French like to think they are better than other Europeans at resisting Americanizationwrites Christine Ockrent in the International Herald Tribune as she discusses France's main opposition party.
So don’t tell the Socialists they have given in, first by holding France’s first-ever party primaries, and second by embracing the mantra of their newly anointed champion, François Hollande, about reviving the “French Dream.” In contrast to the American Dream (whatever has happened to it), we’ve not heard much about a French one. In France individualism and self-improvement are supposed to be sacrificed for the common good on the altar of “la République.”In any case, Hollande has every right to savor a personal victory few people bet on last summer, and to hear the change in the way people talk of him. Gone is the unfocused, indecisive, inexperienced party bureaucrat. The 57-year-old member of the National Assembly from central France is now hailed as “a true statesman” by former Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, who never gave him a government post. To some of his former rivals, now eager to gather under his banner, Hollande is a “born leader,” a pragmatist clever enough to bury the ideological party platform they prepared in deference to the imperatives of the current crisis.
Europe has a long tradition of alternating conservative and left-wing governments. France has been doing that since the 1980s, which makes it more difficult for either side to blame the other for a huge increase in the national debt or unemployment.
Still, the French Socialist Party is in many ways the most archaic in Europe — riddled with Marxist-tainted platitudes, reluctant to adjust to the more mainstream social-democrat stance adopted long ago in Britain and elsewhere on the Continent. So it is worth noting that Hollande’s team now calls him “a true social-democrat” — something that not long ago was almost an insult in the official party lexicon.
This stance explains in part his victory over the official party leader, Martine Aubry, the mayor of Lille and a member of governments under François Mitterrand and Jospin. Hard working, stubborn, possessed of an acid tongue, but warm with the few she trusts, the woman who implemented the 35-hour work week is the daughter of Jacques Delors, the former president of the European Commission who opted out of the French presidential contest in 1995, to the despair of the pragmatic left. Hollande, clever, agile and humorous, has long posed as the political heir to Delors — the spiritual son against the true daughter.
Hollande and Aubry have always disliked each other intensely. Their fight for the nomination was both brutal and constrained — Aubry more on the left, doctrinaire side of the party, Hollande more to the center, smooth, cautious, conciliatory, calling constantly for party unity.
His campaign for the primaries was a good indication of the course he will follow to try to reach the Elysée Palace. Thinner than before, his hair dyed dark, with custom-tailored suits and new spectacles, Hollande imitates Mitterrand, copying his gestures, even his rhetoric, as if to revive memories of gentler economic and social conditions. From the start, he has been pleading for a “normal” presidency, far from Nicolas Sarkozy’s frenzied and chaotic performance. He thus appeals to a kind of French conservatism which has more to do with style than politics, a longing to be comforted rather than challenged.
The socialist candidate seems to have caught the mood of a nation more anxious than most about globalization, torn between universalism and provincialism, plagued with economic frailties that no government has been brave enough to confront. Even if their country is not the worst off in Europe, opinion surveys show that the French are the most pessimistic about the future, and consume the most anti-depressants.
What will be Hollande’s platform? To win the primaries, he never went far from his party’s mantra — create jobs without increasing public debt, foster economic growth, take money from the rich and regulate the banks, retire at 60 as if there were no demographic and financial constraints (although he was more cautious on that score than his competitors). But the gravity of the economic crisis is bound to have a sobering effect on the campaign. Hollande is a pragmatist. That is why he is such a dangerous adversary for Sarkozy, who will have to be making difficult decisions right up to the spring election.
The conservatives at first sneered at the Socialist primaries, then quarrelled over the need to do the same. In the end, Sarkozy has let the opposition monopolize the discussion, and blame the crisis all on him. In the meantime, scandals have stained his entourage; his party leaders keep bickering; his rating in public opinion polls is lower than ever, and he appears to have been rejected by many of those he seduced four years ago, including traditional conservatives.
Were the election held today, polls show that Hollande would win by a 10 percent margin — and that’s without a clear program. There are still six months to go. Sarkozy is a formidable campaigner, but he has a difficult uphill battle to fight.
Your article about the rising number of black unmarried women in America illustrates society’s prevailing double standard regarding race (“Down or out”, October 15th)writes Honolulu's Ken Pedersen in (and to) The Economist.
It informs us that “fewer than one in ten black women intermarries” with other races because it is their “greatest taboo”. We are told that some black women “find non-black men unattractive” and that others fear the children of such marriages might not be “black enough”,but that the most common reason for not intermarrying is that black women regard it “as tantamount to betraying the race”. One black woman explained that if she were to marry a man from another race it would be akin to turning in her “black heart”.
If The Economist had reported that racial intermarriage was white women’s greatest taboo, that some white women find non-white men unattractive, that others fear their children would not be white enough and that it was common for them to view intermarriage as a betrayal of their race, such views would be utterly condemned. If a white woman said that she would have to turn in her white heart to marry out of her race, she would be called a racist. But isn’t this double standard itself racist?
“Yes, but what is a European?”
A student asked Gareth Harding, a freelance journalist (and journo-publicist for hire) based in Brussels. He replied: And yet I found myself stuttering and stammering as I searched for an answer. I waffled for a bit about European values – freedom, democracy, human rights, the rule of law – but realized any American or Australian could also lay claim to these values.
Well the answer is clear. You see it now in plain view in any image of the rioting hooded masses or the needy, long-screwed-over pot-bangers. The bickering masses causing, when otherwise not wondering why leaders are putting off disastrously big issues until the last possible moment. Heads of state making the ritual of sumiteering and negotiating the height of their leadership itself.
In the end I settled on a statement of the blindingly obvious. “A European is someone who lives in Europe.”
I didn’t convince myself, let alone the class. I left utterly dejected and deep in thought.
A people deserve the leaders they elect, so I think we can appoint “the social thing” that they laud far and wide as a mark of neo-everything-ism. Today we see it, with all of its chaotic pointlessness acting out in a bloodless form of natural European interaction. The more I mulled the question over the more I came to the conclusion that after over half a century of European integration and over 200,000 pages of EU laws, we still have little idea what Europe is, what it stands for, what binds its people together and where it is going?
He cites a moment from 2004, which itself came too late after much delay, about the very same question, and it makes one ask: is European civilization just a cozy human warehouse with artifacts, traditions that no-one practices, and beliefs that people ignore?
Until recently these could have been dismissed as existential questions – of interest only to policy wonks, Economist readers and Brussels eurocrats.
Then came Europe’s most profound economic crisis since the 1930s. Like the United States Europe is in the midst of a deep depression. Unemployment is high, growth low, banks are collapsing and indebted governments are running out of money. Some countries, like Greece, Ireland, Portugal and possibly Britain, Spain and Italy, face the prospect of a generation of penury.Those who argue for an ever wider union – or even an even deeper one – often fall-back on the argument of common European values in an effort to prove that Europeans share a set of immutable ideals that bind them together. Yet they are often sketchy as to what those values are.
For which I think we see the answer. A people afraid of having to personally make good on those values, for whatever postmodern or selfish reasons vigorously DO define the state of the Union and its capacity to come unglued. Privacy violator Wikileaks is widely regarded as a democrat, many have personal expectations that all of their life needs will be served by their neighbors, and the rest of humanity is expected to bail them out of whatever trouble they’re in. There’s your value system at a glance.
The Dutch government held a series of seminars about European values during its presidency of the EU in 2004. “European fundamental values are sacred,” intoned former Dutch Prime Minister Jan-Peter Balkenende at one event. But when it came to defining those values, he was fuzzier. “We have been discussing the idea of Europe for the last 12 hundred years. But we cannot grasp what it means, we cannot pin it down,” he said.
Values matter because they are the glue that binds a country together.
"icon", "ideology", Rand's "cultish book", and "one of the most radical apostles of an unhibited capitalism." Icône du mouvement Tea Party, la romancière et philosophe Ayn Rand (1905-1982) est mal connue en France. La traduction de son livre culte aux Etats-Unis, Atlas Shrugged, ainsi que la biographie d'Alain Laurent (Ayn Rand ou la Passion de l'égoïsme rationnel, Les Belles Lettres, 240 p., 25 ¤) font découvrir l'une des plus radicales apôtres d'un capitalisme décomplexé célébrant la " vertu d'égoïsme ". Ce roman dresse le tableau d'une époque de collectivisme et d'étatisme généralisés, que bouleverse soudain une grève inédite : ses protagonistes sont des inventeurs et industriels qui supportent le poids du monde grâce à leur effort. Refusant d'être culpabilisés et ponctionnés par cette société égalitariste, ils fomentent une résistance victorieuse, sous l'inspiration de l'énigmatique ingénieur John Galt. Adapté au cinéma, ce récit d'action et d'amour reste une référence centrale de l'idéologie dite " libertarienne ", hostile au legs du New Deal et à l'Etat interventionniste.
Serge Audier
La Grève
(Atlas Shrugged),
de Ayn Rand,
traduit de l'américain par Sophie-Bastide-Foltz, Les Belles Lettres, 1170 p., 29,50 ¤.
Pimco’s Bill Gross: Cesi n'est pas une summitThis is no summit. It’s a coffee klatch filled with petit fours and empty promises.
And another big thank you to EUropastan...EU is a dysfunctional family. Recession ahead even if agreement is reached. Greek default certain, Portugal/Ireland loom.
He put more succinctly though:fiscal contraction is long term scenario. Risk off.
The Europe needs to get some head:The latest summit in Brussels marked a turning point in the euro crisis that has been raging for two years now. For the first time, the denial of Europe’s leaders about the true gravity of the situation seems to finally be lifting.
That’s a strange sort of solace to take. What they have done is wait too long for too long.
Much like their vaunted celebration of their unity, one-ness, etcetera, born largely out of the fact that it only took a millennium of murdering on another to get there, the idea that they would call this week’s events a breakthrough is somewhere between bizarre and a sad attempt at positive spin.
I mean, try to find the rah-rah, we are one unity in this:The report of “Troika” inspectors from the International Monetary Fund, the EU Commission, and the European Central Bank reads like a horror story. It also calls into question all of the previous attempts to rescue the euro.
It makes one sentimental for endless general strikes the good old days of Italian governments lasting about 4 months. Oh. Wait a minute.
Is the irreverent (and demonstrably anti-American) Guignols TV show 
starting to look and feel old and out of touch? As the French presidential election campaign starts in earnest, that is the question that Le Monde's Jean-Baptiste de Montvalon is forced to ask himself.
23 years after its creation, the Canal + nightly news parody is feeling old and doesn't make people laugh out loud any more, hardly making them even smile. Ceux qui travaillent quotidiennement sur l’émission le savent et en conviennent volontiers : "On n’est plus à la mode", concède Yves Le Rolland. Tout aussi sincères, les auteurs, Lionel Dutemple et Julien Hervé, arrivés en 1999, et Philippe Mechelen, qui les a rejoints en 2009, font le même constat.A lot of readers agree, with one of them saying:
Il est temps de s'en rendre compte... Les Guignols sont devenus ringards depuisdéjà quelques années, ne faisant plus jamais sourire (le rire, on n'en parle pas), nous resservant toujours les mêmes antiennes, sortant le grand jeu de la bonne conscience moralisatrice pour mélanger les genres et tomber dans le pire des populismes... Il y a un côté Huchon dans cette pathétique guignolade. Si ce n'est justement qu'il le nourrit, ce populisme. Allez ouste!
(it is true, one must admit, that for instance Americans have never elected a black man to the Oval Off— uh, wait a minute…), more trouble looms for France's troubled relations with its former African colonies, as Philippe Bernard interviews Achille Mbembe, a history professor and writer, about the failed integration of Africans into French society and about the perennial French demands for African money to finance ruling political parties.Les " révélations " de Robert Bourgi sur le financement de responsables politiques français par des chefs d'Etat africains remettent en lumière les relations troubles de la France avec ses ex-colonies. Tenez-vous pour un fait cette " corruption mutuelle " et, dans ce cas, comment en expliquez-vous la persistance cinquante ans après les indépendances ?When asked by Philippe Bernard whether Les échecs de la démocratie en Afrique reflètent-ils l'incapacité des Occidentaux à exporter leur " modèle ", ou l'immaturité des Africains ?, Achille Mbembe adds that
Les révélations de M. Bourgi n'en sont point, car ces pratiques étaient connues. Le fait que l'un des acteurs importants de ces marchandages prenne la parole en public maintenant montre que cet anachronisme que l'on a appelé la Françafrique est condamné à terme. Aujourd'hui, l'important est de porter nos regards sur ce qui vient, sur les dynamiques neuves. La France n'est plus le soleil de l'Afrique, car elle se trouve en compétition avec des acteurs nouveaux comme la Chine, le Brésil et l'Inde. Elle n'en est même plus le miroir et je crois que cela est bon. En même temps, un tissu de liens humains s'est constitué au fil des siècles entre la France et l'Afrique. Il faut investir dans ces relations humaines pour faire naître des solidarités neuves qui dépassent les rapports entre Etats. …Après le " printemps arabe ", un " printemps africain " est-il possible ?
Non, aucun régime africain ne court ce risque. Les conditions qui ont conduit aux événements du printemps n'existent nulle part. Au sud du Sahara, les classes moyennes existent depuis cinquante ans tout au plus et n'ont ni le recul historique des égyptiennes, ni le niveau de professionnalisation des tunisiennes.
Vous avez écrit qu'avec l'immigration, " la France récolte ce qu'elle a semé avec sa politique africaine ". De quelle façon le passé colonial pèse-t-il sur la politique française d'immigration ?
Il faut dédramatiser : la France n'est plus le pôle privilégié de l'immigration africaine en direction de l'Occident. Le nombre d'Africains qui ont pour objectif d'alleren France est très petit et va décroissant. Les discours français sur l'immigration africaine relèvent du fantasme. Ils sont liés à la période particulière que nous vivons, marquée par une rebalkanisation du monde, une redistribution planétaire très inégale des possibilités de mouvement, la construction de murs et la militarisation des frontières. Cela n'est pas typiquement français, mais la France s'exprime en mettant la peur de l'immigré au service d'une politique raciste, en attisant le fantasme d'une France sans étranger, une idée qui est contraire à son histoire.
Les Africains ont une vieille culture de la délibération. Le concept de la " palabre " renvoie à une structure sociale où la confrontation des points de vue est une donnée de légitimation du pouvoir. Les cultures africaines tolèrent plus ou moins l'idée de l'inégalité, mais les idées d'exclusion et de non-partage y sont frappées d'anathème. Ces pratiques culturelles, si elles étaient prises en compte, ouvriraient la voie à des schémas institutionnels capables d'" inculturer " la démocratie. La question n'est pas de savoir si les Africains sont mûrs pour la démocratie, mais de s'atteler à ce travail patient et critique d'invention de formes sociales d'échanges qui correspondent à la mémoire et aux pratiques des gens. Or pour le moment, l'affrontement politique en Afrique est un jeu à sommes nulles où le gagnant gagne tout et le perdant perd tout.
Thet are NOT the 99%. Among their Anti-Korporate-Kidz style demands are these:Demand investigation into the source of secret funding for CIA occupation programs since WWII, the cover up of the trillions of dollars that aided in the collapse of the Soviet Union and may have ultimately instigated the 911 attacks as well as their cover-up.
Not to mention a lot of that passive-aggressive “we’re just asking questions” crapola to blunt what is obviously the exact same sort of obfuscation defined by old-school agit-prop:The destruction of the contents of the basement of the World Trade Centre - less than a billion in gold, but hundreds of billions of dollars of government securities? In addition why were specific brokers from the major government security brokerages in the Twin Towers eliminated? To create chaos in the government securities market? To create a situation wherein $240 billion dollars of covert securities could be electronically “cleared” without anyone asking questions? Which happened when the Federal Reserve declared an emergency and invoked its “emergency powers” that afternoon.
They even use the trope of the violent, hate-fulled, inhumane revolutionaries of the last century. With foam around the edges of their lips, you get underpuntuated paragraph after paragraph of this kind of thing:It suggests that certain key unknown figures in the Federal Reserve may have been in collusion with key unknown figures at the Bank of New York to create a situation where $240 billion in off balance sheet securities created in 1991 as part of an official covert operation to overthrow the Soviet Union, could be cleared without publicly acknowledging their existence.These securities, originally managed by Cantor Fitzgerald, were cleared and settled in the aftermath of September 11th through the Bank of New York. The $100 billion account balance bubble reported by the Wall Street Journal as being experienced by the Bank of New York was the tip of a three-day operation, when these securities were moved from off-balance-sheet to the balance sheet.
So... no, these are not just “aggrieved American family-man types”. The movement is being taken over by socially programmed radicals who could care less whether or not the tent-dwellers get a job, or any of the “free this” and “free that” that they’re demanding, because they would have you live in a model consistent with the temperament of their screeds, which is the authoritarian socialism of the last century in eastern Europe, where the message to people was: Don’t be unique. Don’t speak out. Don’t try to leave the country, not to mention the ultimate message of socialism: you don’t eat if you don’t work, and don’t do what authority assigns you, and humanism and charity are no longer needed.
The above gives an idea of the intricate activities both to perpetrate and then to cover the crime, which was then used under its "terrorist attack" label as an excuse for the attack on Iraq.
The fine words are merely to buy public affirmation. “Crises” will be used to explain why you aren’t given what you’ve been promised. Social excuses are and will be made for their using coercion to a form of political conformity, and when many of life’s basic needs are distributed by official organs of society, they will be used to enforce that conformity for reasons like the sake of your health. If you think that’s a kooky thought, consider how welfare and old-age benefits recipients are used as a political constituency. Leftist would use all of society to advance their power, and define society’s makeup.
Unlike these cretins thinking that they’re just making the world “nicer and fairer”, I saw the kind of world that inevitably comes from those ideas first hand. They may not impose that on anyone ever again. Every word of it is anti-American, un-American, and did not originate in American society.
To call that a red-baiting comparison using the history of failed Marxist-Leninism is flawed. It isn’t the panzer Communism that made that era awful as much as the ideas the collectivism and social-dependency part of it that the radicals in the “Occupy” movement try to hint was “the good part” of Socialism. It was all bad. The use of force was merely a detail in all of that, albeit an inevitable one.
There was always, at least for its critics, something preposterous about the idea of Turkey entering the European Unionquips John Vinocur in the International Herald Tribune.
It meant, in their eyes, Europe literally extending its frontiers to the borders of Iran, Syria and Iraq, and the E.U. adding to its membership a predominantly Muslim country whose population would soon give it the biggest number of seats in the European Parliament.As for Turkey’s government, its uncertain relationship with democracy was exemplified by 57 journalists in jail — more, at last count by international watchdogs, than either China or Iran.
Now, at an increasing pace over the last six months, Turkey is portraying itself as a regional power in the Middle East, threatening to send its ships to challenge Cypriot or Israeli gas exploration rights in the Mediterranean, talking up “an axis” with Egypt, and warning of a “real crisis” with the E.U. if it allows the Republic of Cyprus to hold, as scheduled, its six-month rotating presidency next year. To its backers in Europe, this Turkey can no longer look much like an idealized bridge to a world beyond clashes of civilizations.
… [Also] the question of Turkey’s new engagement in the Arab world, its falling out with Israel, and general bluster is a more intimate one for Europe. Some Europeans would like to minimize the problem.
… But if you take Turkey’s Middle East power ambitions as serious — and not blowhard fantasizing — then it is the Turks who are forcing the E.U. to turn away from its candidacy. Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu has said, “A Turkey that wants to become a regional power must build up its political and economic influence on the waterways from the Aegean to the Adriatic and from the Suez Canal to the Persian Gulf.”
