The Only Serious, Responsible, Level-Headed Player on the International Scene Happens (Needless to Say) to Be… Us!

• Europa: Any proposals?
• Irresponsible Player: Put the AC on full blast!
In order to illustrate an alarmist Le Monde article by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie — On the Road Towards a Climate Disaster? — as another Durban round is underway, Serguei presents us with a cartoon (called La Terre, brûle-t-elle? or Is the Earth Burning?, a reference to the World War II book Is Paris Burning?) showing how every single player on the international scene is failing to act responsibly regarding global warning and is sticking their heads in the sand (or down into the oven): The United States, India, Russia, China, y'know, everybody…

Everybody? Isn't someone missing? Everybody is being irresponsible, with… one exception. And who might that exception be?! It's… us! By the strangest of coincidences — states a… European cartoon by a… European cartoonist in a… European newspaper with… European readers — the only level-headed, the only responsible, the only serious player in international talks — with an appropriately grave expression on her face and her hands joined in intellectual contemplation — happens, just happens, to be… us — us Europeans. How convenient…

Of Chumps, Attention Seekers, and Morons

And just to up the ante, they’ll challenge the world to join them in a plan to drop the mean global temperature by 28,5°C by next week!

But emerging economies such as Brazil and India have joined rich nations in not wishing to start talks on such a deal before 2015, angering small island states and other countries immediately threatened by climate change. According to the Italian business daily, the UN summit “does not seem to have a chance of producing a binding international treaty. Those who have rowed against it, like the US, will be pleased. But for Europe, this is a triple somersault.”:

No, it’s not a triple summersault, it’s a stunt and a joke, one European governments know that they will never have to make good on, because no society really can, or would, or gain anything by it.

Despite that, they know what’s its always far better to demand regime change over a fake crisis rather than a real one.

Thirdly, because the brave European commitment to cut emissions by 20 per cent by 2020 could sideline it in a fight which is meaningful only if shared by all the planet. But which also requires billions in public spending which do not go well with the regime of fiscal discipline [practised in] these modern times.

Cesare Battisti Interviewed in Brazil

Le Monde has a full-page article on Cesare Battisti, from an interview by Nicolas Bourcier especially sent to Brazil to meet with the Italian criminal in his Cananeia refuge. Although there is, thankfully, a fair amount of skepticism towards the Piradinho's self-serving comments, the piece is filled, needless to say, with lots of psychological pseudo-science… The newspaper also fails to understand that, in Brazil at least (and maybe also in the Spanish-speaking parts of Latin America), "gringo" does not mean exclusively an American (or a Norteamericano) but any foreigner with white skin and/or with Western attitudes, from the U.S., from Europe, or from elsewhere…

D'emblée, il rigole. "Ils n'ont pas l'habitude qu'un gringo s'installe chez eux." Cesare Battisti, l'ancien activiste d'extrême gauche, réclamé pour meurtres par l'Italie, estampillé "gringo" : c'est peut-être cela, l'art de brouiller les pistes.

Le visage est toujours anguleux, tout en lignes brisées. Le regard dit encore l'anxiété, les tribulations d'une vie mouvementée. Mais les traits tirés et le teint blafard qu'on lui connaissait sur les photos ont disparu.

Money Chasing Too Few Instruments, and the Senile Continent

Spengler’s take is direct and plausible. While Europeans enjoy blaming the US financial crisis for their woes, one wonders why they were invested in it to begin with? It’s simple:

The aging pensioners of Europe and Asia must find young people to pay interest into their pensions, and they do not have enough young people at home. Germans aged 15 to 24, on the threshold of family formation, comprise only 12% of the country's population today and will fall to only 8% by 2030. But one-fifth of Germans now are on the threshold of retirement and half will be there by mid-century.

There’s an echo of what the “occupists” don’t get as well. If they’re young and mad, and don’t want to tell themselves just who it is who have the wealth they want to take, why don’t they just come out and say “eat the old” instead of “eat the rich”? Well, aside from it not being as politically useful, they only understand the red leftist recreational fisting chants that have been trained into them.

The monster is not the financial system, crooked and stupid as it may have been. The monster is the burgeoning horde of pensioners in Germany and other industrial countries. It is easy to change the financial system. The central banks can assemble on any Tuesday morning and announce tougher lending standards. But it is impossible to fix the financial problems that arise from Europe's senescence. Thanks to the one-child policy, moreover, China has a relatively young population that is aging faster than any other, and China's appetite for savings vastly exceeds what its own financial market can offer.

There is nothing complicated about finance. It is based on old people lending to young people. Young people invest in homes and businesses; aging people save to acquire assets on which to retire. The new generation supports the old one, and retirement systems simply apportion rights to income between the generations. Never before in human history, though, has a new generation simply failed to appear.

Tax rthe old? Sure – you try saying that, #OWS spuds!

The world kept shipping capital to the United States over the past 10 years, however, because it had nowhere else to go. The financial markets, in turn, found ways to persuade Americans to borrow more and more money. If there weren't enough young Americans to borrow money on a sound basis, the banks arranged for a smaller number of Americans to borrow more money on an unsound basis. That is why subprime, interest-only, no-money-down and other mortgages waxed great in bank portfolios.

America's financial market could not produce enough pork chops, so the Europeans bought Spam and scrapple. America's rating agencies assured them that derivatives created from subprime mortgages, second-lien mortgages and other dubious parts of the pig were the equivalent of pork chops, and foreign investors wolfed them down.

Invented to Counter America's Alleged Cultural Imperialism, the French Cultural Exception Is Outdated, Says New Book, and Ought to Be Junked

A concept invented in the 1980s to counter America's alleged cultural imperialism, the French cultural exception "remains the bedrock of our [of France's] cultural policy," writes Daniel Psenny in his Le Monde book review.

But in the Atawad (any time, any where, any device) era, declares Philippe Bailly in Pour en finir avec l'exception culturelle, the concept of the French cultural exception is outdated and ought to be junked once and for all.

Avec son livre en forme de coup de gueule Pour en finir avec l'exception culturelle, le journaliste Philippe Bailly, fondateur de NPA Conseil, société de conseil en audiovisuel, ne va pas se faire que des amis parmi les créateurs. Sur 200 pages bien argumentées, didactiques et remplies de références, il préconise tout simplement de passer de l'exception culturelle, datant des poussiéreuses années 1980 où cinq chaînes hertziennes rivalisaient entre elles, au "rayonnement culturel " plus adapté à notre époque numérique.

Face à la multiplication des écrans (télévision, tablette, smartphone...), à l'extension des réseaux sociaux et à l'irruption de la télévision connectée à Internet qui, dans quelques années, bouleversera entièrement le paysage audiovisuel, la réglementation française est aujourd'hui totalement inadaptée et obsolète.

"La société de l'écran remet radicalement en cause notre façon d'accéder aux programmes culturels et de divertissements", écrit Philippe Bailly. "La nouvelle donne se joue des réglementations nationales et rend l'action des régulateurs largement inopérante. Il est plus que temps de repenser les règles qui organisent en France la défense de la création."

Face à "l'impérialisme" culturel américain qui a déferlé sur le monde, l'exception culturelle française, mise en place au milieu des années 1980, reste le socle de notre politique culturelle. Avec cette "French Touch", il s'agissait avant tout, face aux Américains et aux directives de Bruxelles, de défendre la langue française et les industries culturelles, de protéger les créateurs, les auteurs et leurs droits. La bataille a été parfois rude et compliquée, mais les politiques — de droite comme de gauche — ont finalement admis que la culture n'est pas une marchandise comme les autres, mais un bien commun qu'il faut préserver des perversités économiques et financières.'

… Or, si l'exception culturelle fonctionnait bien au siècle dernier avec un numérique balbutiant, elle est aujourd'hui mise à mal par la liberté de choix donné au "specta-teur/consommateur" qui se joue des "lignes Maginot réglementaires". La réglementation française ne protège plus les créateurs constate Philippe Bailly, car "nous sommes entrés dans l'ère de l'Atawad : any time, any where, any device".

I Want Mo Free Stuff!

Greater Berlin is a Federal State in Germany. Due to recent elections and what must now seem like a bad headache, few of its’ legislators are from the “Pirate Party”. Having published their platform, I can say that it’s typically European, despite their onetime oevre as a sort of tech-fixated quasi-Libertarians, they are neither quasi- nor libertarian. Their platform can be summarized in two phrases:

I Want Mo Free Stuff!
...and...
I’m going to demand things that already exist!

The rest of it involves institutionalized theft of intellectual property rights, and a distinct lack of awareness that no-one washes a rental car.

For those of You Wanting to Join the “Meter High” Club

Not brave enough for the “Mile High Club”? Go through your very own pre-flight checklist, and in the perfect place to distribute disease worldwide by using the SleepBox™©.



It might even inspire an art movement, not to mention low humor having something to do with Doctor Who. As an additional “revenue center”, in major European cities as well as San Francisco, a conveniently located vending machine will be offering ruminating pastoral livestock for short term rentals. You know, just to express sympathy for the Greeks.

So have a blast, chicharonne.

The Attack of that Sinister Dark Lord Electrolux

May 10th: the Ringhals nuclear reactor near Gothernburg, Sweden has a fire event. From the greenie hysteria (which included a spontaneous light-mural being painted by that famous artist known as “Greenpeace”) that ensued sounded like they hoped for, or either thought they had a Chernobyl on their hands.

The shut-down cost hundreds of millions of Kroner.

At Sweden's largest nuclear plant Ringhals power plant 60 km south of Gothenburg, says all four reactors now quiet. Cause: There is, according to utility company Vattenfall found "undesirable objects" found in emergency shutdown system for reactors 2 and 4. Reactor 1 stopped operation on Sunday for - like the other three - being subjected to a thorough review of the safety systems.

"Before any of the reactors are allowed to start again, Ringhals AB systematically examine all checks of safety and security features, and explain the outcome of the review of the Radiation Safety Office," writes Swedish control body.

Well, little missy, the culprit has been located.

The reactor was barbarously savaged by a vacuum cleaner that was plugged in, got wet during a pressure test, and caught fire. Details are sparse. For obvious security reasons, they won’t say if it was one of those Dyson jobbies that looks like it belongs in an “Art of Noise” video.

I’m sure they didn’t need all of those pesky Kroner anyway.

Waiting for Europe’s Ugly Head to Pop Out into the Open

Multi-Cultural Tolerance Alert

China is looking to buy EU factories and railways instead of wobbly government bonds as prices fall amid the eurozone crisis.

Minister of commerce Chen Deming articulated the strategy at a business congress in China on Monday (28 November).

"Next year, we will send a delegation for promoting trade and investment to the European countries ... Some European countries are facing a debt crisis and hope to convert their assets to cash and would like foreign capital to acquire their enterprises. We will be closely watching and pushing forward the process," he said.

I can’t wait for the real, nativistic fun and cheap, base cultural slander to begin:

Speaking to the Sina Finance news agency, he hit out at what he called European "prejudice ... like the view that state-owned enterprises represent your country, that whatever your background is you're a military business."

"You can come and buy a house, and you can emigrate here and bring your riches with you, or you can buy my luxury goods, but if you want to touch my natural resources, then I'm sorry, I won't let you."

Along with the expected prejudice, in a silent way the slander has already started with the idea that Chinese investors would simply had over their money as directed, when in fact...

For their part, Chinese analysts predict the spending spree will not begin until prices hit rock bottom.

Obama "personally has shown almost no interest in the human rights situation in Russia"

But, of course, why should the Apologizer-in-Chief show any interest in the human rights situation in Russia or in any other place when the only thing that stirs the interest of leftists the world over, American or foreign, and gets them frothing at the mouth, is the unbearable, shocking, catastrophic, nightmarish situation in… capitalist America and the West?!

Vladimir Putin has no official opponent yet to accompany him on his planned victory march back into the Russian presidency next March

quips John Vinocur in the International Herald Tribune, as he discusses the result of the Apologizer-in-Chief's "smart" diplomacy.

But from the look of things, he may be setting up Barack Obama as a notional fill-in.

…In terms of Russian politics and jacking up United Russia’s scores in the presidential election next year and in national legislative voting on Sunday, Mr. Obama and the United States were being held up to nationalist voters as the ugly opposition. This Russian audience (and plenty of foreigners, as well) has often heard from Mr. Putin, in line with a major policy speech he made in Munich in 2007, that an aggressive, overbearing United States is a central problem for the world.

… All the same, the threat to New Start is a first, endangering the arms treaty that Mr. Obama has called the most significant in two decades. The reverberations from the threat create a new mood of international tension going beyond a challenge to the wisdom of the administration’s reset with Russia and its insistence that Moscow is generally helpful.

Mr. Obama’s response? There has not been a word.

Rather, the White House staff has described as unfounded Russia’s concerns that the missile shield, designed as protection against Iranian nukes, could be used against Moscow’s ballistic missiles, and has repeated its willingness to discuss the matter.

But the problems with Russia are piling up just a couple of months before a U.S. presidential election campaign in which the reset was to be portrayed as a foreign policy triumph.

Here are just a couple of Russian-made points of confrontation that are meeting with Mr. Obama’s silence: Russia’s continued supply of weapons to a murderous regime in Syria, and Russian leaders’ revived talk about targeting eventual U.S. missile-defense sites in Europe with its own weapons.

… Kurt Volker, a former U.S. ambassador to NATO under both the Obama and Bush administrations, said: “If Putin wants to destroy missile defense, he can play the German card. That is, pushing Germany to resist it because, ‘If Russia is upset, the reason is NATO and the United States are doing something wrong.’ Putin did it in 2007 with some success, and he can make that move again anytime.”

… In her Senate confirmation hearing in 2009, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, speaking of what appeared to be Russia’s goal to create a Europe dependent on Gazprom’s natural gas exports, said, “It is certainly a security challenge that we ignore at our peril.”

These days, while Germany has chosen to abandon nuclear energy, a major German utility is currently negotiating a deal with Gazprom that would give Russia a foothold in Europe’s downstream business, and Gazprom is achieving end-user access through its first purchase of a German supplier. The French energy consulting firm Capgemini estimates that Russia’s present 26 percent share of the European Union’s natural gas supply will be 50 percent by 2030.

… Against this background, and with Mr. Putin’s government needling Mr. Obama with threats about renouncing New Start, can Mr. Obama respond in a way that both better defines the Russian leadership the United States is dealing with and makes clear that the U.S. president is not a pushover for it?

A possibly effective method might be Mr. Obama telling the world what he has left unsaid but what is obvious and incontrovertible: that the “election” returning Mr. Putin to the presidency is an opaque exercise that the United States, for the sake of the Russian people and their human rights, bemoans — or, even more to the point, condemns.

I asked David Kramer, a former U.S. assistant secretary of state for human rights, and now president of Freedom House, an organization that supports the global expansion of freedom, whether he thought such a declaration was likely. His answer: not very.

“Beyond a speech in 2009 by President Obama, he personally has shown almost no interest in the human rights situation in Russia,” he said. “When the United States says something, Russians particularly care who is saying it — and it hasn’t been the president.”

#Europeans Call in the B52!

If you take the traditional definition of terror to mean that a minute coterie cause doubt, indecision, confusion, and a lack of knowing what to do, the past two years of European economic dithering, fake summiteering, and public announcements have amounted to a form of economic terrorism. In fact all it has always been about has been the Europeans unwillingness to do anything for one another, and childishly hoping other people’s resources will save them from themselves.

Whenever Europe can't make its mind up the United States is called in, Fernando Sobral complains in the business paper Jornal de Negócios:

"Europeans are always criticising how culturally backwards the US is, but when the moment of truth arrives they adore Uncle Sam. ...

Now the time has come to ask for help, however it's not General Custer's cavalry we need but some of those B52 bombers to drop dollar parcels on Europe. A Europe that is unable to persuade the ECB to fork out the money it needs. The Fed has no qualms like puritanical Europe. ... It puts money into circulation without getting nightmares about inflation. The fed has the 'hard power' the ECB lacks. The ECB is increasingly a bank with plastic money, that can be moulded to suit Germany's wishes.

Those who say Germany's hands are tied because of its constitution should bear in mind that when Helmut Kohl pushed ahead with German reunification he didn't spend too much time looking at the accounts. His political impetus carried the economy along with it. Europe is different: it's afraid of its own shadow and still dancing on a volcano."

- Fernando Sobral, writing in Jornal de Negócios (Portugal)

Their problems stem largely from the problem of imagining what the state can do to compensate for a population that largely prefers to try a to see how little it can do to get more out of society than it puts into it. The effect of wanting the state to tend to all and sundry, whether they have any need or not, has been that despite seizing half the GNP in an array of tax streams governments needed to borrow unsustainable amounts of money to serve it’s constituencies: the public sector feeding off of the population, and a large portion of the population expecting too much from others (whom they imagine can afford it and don’t mind.)

Now, through the IMF they seek more resources for their palliative care from abroad, in particular from a United States that has its’ own garden to tend right now. America’s only motivation to play along is to try and stop the chill on the neck of the global economy (and thus her own) caused by #Europe’s entrenched begging masses in need of more government cheese.

Arrogantly, they assume that they can actually call in that air strike. Expect complaints at the terms for having the slightest doubts in their ability to make good, and carping about what little will be asked for in return.

Still Not Funny

...Europeans tastelessly repeating the same old Kapo camp guard and Frau Helga von Bondage (/cruel yet naive milkmaid) themed "humor" for Germans and Germany, that is. Surely evel THEY must get tired of the pedantry, after, say HALF A CENTURY?

Sheez Louise. Okay, I'm better now But seriously, the ONE PLACE Germans don't get this kind of shabby treatment, even among the sobriety-challenged - is in the US and Canada where despite the interminable list of "cultural flaws" we suffer from, we stopped thinking this crapola was funny when we reached the age of 16 or 17.

Nothing Says Euro-Governance like...

...good old fashioned operant conditioning.

In France, many people are dying in prison; it is talked about very little

In France, many people are dying in prison. It is talked about very little.

With that laconic statement, Le Monde starts a front-page editorial, one which fits straight into the "It's Much Easier to Attack Americans For Their (Alleged) Sins When French Failings Are Overlooked" department.

"Almost every day" in a French jail, we are told, someone dies. Out of 263 deaths officially noted by the penitentiary authorities in 2010, 138 died "of natural causes", 4 were killed, and 121 committed suicide. Of the suicides — most of them young or very young (18 or under), most of them simply in (temporary) custody, and most of them (60%) for misdemeanors and not for crimes — 96% chose hanging as their way out and many (15%) did so within 10 days of being placed behind bars.

"15 novembre, un homme, 49 ans, par suicide. 15 novembre, un homme, 32 ans, par suicide. 16 novembre, un homme, 19 ans, par pendaison. 18 novembre, un homme, 46 ans, par pendaison..." 263 fois, presque tous les jours.

Il s'agissait théoriquement de lire la liste des prénoms, mais on ne les a même pas ; la plupart du temps, on meurt en prison dans la solitude et dans l'anonymat.

For the record, however, a perspicacious Le Monde reader does point out that

At the risk of being labeled a fascist, prison is not supposed to be a Disneyland experience.

France's Foremost Free-Market Politician Gives Sarkozy Government's Economic Plan an F

While the popularity of the free market in France is in the doldrums, writes Patrick Roger in Le Monde, France's foremost Free Marketeer appears like a teacher giving the Sarkozy government and its plan for the country's economic future ("doping its competitive side") an F.

Says Alain Madelin (whose blog is called Libre Échange):

Le jugement est implacable : "Des propositions indigentes et affligeantes." La note rédhibitoire : "0/20". Ainsi se moque-t-il allègrement du "courage" de la majorité sur les 35 heures. "L'UMP propose d'augmenter le temps de travail par l'ouverture de négociations de branche, note M.Madelin. On reste stupéfait devant l'audace d'une telle proposition. A se demander si les ministres et les députés lisent les lois qu'ils votent ou font voter. Car, faut-il le rappeler, cette possibilité de déroger aux 35 heures existe déjà : c'est la loi du 20 août 2008."

The Superior Lifestyle and Joie de Vivre is More than Apparent

Today’s media jumble ask the eternal question: who actually wants to live with Germans to begin with ?

Want to know why day to day crime and event reporting in Europeastan reads like “the news of the weird”? Because in large part that’s about all most of the people living in their society amount to at this point.

Leftist hat the Pope for existing, and for just being so darn papal all the time. So we find things like this “Piss Christ” redux by other means in the form of petty legalistic niggling from people who think human free is limited to having something to do with free and legal recreational narcotics.

Johannes Christian Sundermann, a lawyer from Unna in North Rhine Westphalia, filed a legal complaint against the German-born pope formerly known as Joseph Ratzinger for not wearing his seat belt on several occasions “for more than one hour at a time,” according to a report in the Westfälischen Rundschau newspaper.

Because leftism these days is all about acting like something crawled up your hoagie and died, pretending that your attention seeking dog-whistle cues are about “public safety” and anything else that might make people believe that you want to share in man’s future.

Sundermann represents a Dortmund man. As evidence the two are offering YouTube videos and are also calling the Archbishop of Freiburg, the chairman of Germany’s Bishops Conference and Winfried Kretschmann, the Green Party politician who heads the state government in Baden-Württemberg.

The lawyer, a member of the socialist Left party, took on the case after several other attorneys rejected it. Both Sundermann and his client are no longer members of the Catholic Church.

But we’re forgetting about the broadly held understanding of the meaning of the word laissez faire as well.

A new study shows roughly half of all physically disabled women in Germany have been sexually abused during their youth. Women are also subjected to widespread physical abuse, according to the study.

After all, what’s an open attitude about sexuality good for if you can’t exploit the weak for your emotionally barren jollies while claiming to be a superhuman advanced being, what is it good for anyway?

A man charged with raping his daughter nearly 500 times and fathering three children by her during a 34-year reign of domestic terror told a German court on Monday the sex had been consensual.

So there it is – your choices are plain to see: you can sue the Pope with the hope that Catholicism and personal faith cease to exist while forgetting about the real harm done by those who never had a moral compass installed, or you can go with the old fashioned leftism of the past, and try calling them “the far right”.

“We have people in our programmes who have had weapons training themselves,” said Koch. “They were trained in western Germany, in Lower Saxony, by neo-Nazis who used to be mercenaries, for instance in the former Yugoslavia. Some were part of European training networks and got training in France or Belgium.”

The training takes place in remote country areas, sometimes privately owned, and sometimes rented for the purpose, either in an afternoon or over several days. “They often look for isolated wooded areas,” said Koch.

And outside of that, and the unceasing calls for Revolutionary Violence™ from the far left, they’re a thoughtful, pacifist, and peaceful society that just doesn’t want to get tangled up in that weird, incomprehensible, icky world out there so that they can get back to the business of talking up their society-improving role in advancing the human condition spending all day working on their self-awareness.

Islands of Greece Are Green and Beautiful

Green and Beautiful
Where the Olive Trees Grow
In the Fields Below

No tongue-in-cheek tie-ups to the current situation in Greece;
simply, it's the 50th anniversary of The Guns of Navarone, a war movie I never thought was that exciting, but whose movie theme, and whose Mitch Miller-led chorus, are pretty fabulous… It was OK (the role of the American held by David Niven?!?!), but after seeing, as a kid, realistic war movie recreations with officers and troops from all over the map, like The Longest Day (also Mitch Miller) and Tora Tora Tora, made-up stories with a handful of soldiers ("six men come to save 2,000 men, 2,000 men the brave and the bold, for whom the bells have tolled") didn't do it for me any more…

”First Pirate MEP: We expect party to grow”

Thus spake Christian Engström, Swedish Pirate Party Minister of European Parliament, to which I am inclined to agree. Since their platform either has pointless platitiudes, and otherwise promises to make free the kind of things that “I have yet to grow up” Urban dwellers in their 20s and 30s do to amuse themselves in privacy, they surely will take off. They’re a sort of NAMBLA for gamers and people who download music without paying for it.

Nothing sells in EUtopia like legalizing theft - in this case of intellectual property. Imagine the future. Campaigners will use allusions to Angry Birds as a allusions in speeches. The less real the stakes, the more likely it will be to sell like hotcakes.

After all, we all know that when a government gives away something for free, people take care of it, and don’t abuse or over-use it. That’s why the Berlin Senate Piraten platform included the idea that all transit should be free of charge.



So hats off to this stunningly delusional bunch – they are the only “entitlement libertarians” that I’ve ever had the pleasure of seeing taken seriously.

Was the Libyan Operation "a Just War" or Was It "Just a War"?

Answering the questions of Le Monde's Nicolas Truong, Bernard-Henry Lévy and Rony Brauman offer opposing answers. The Médecins Sans Frontières leader (the MSF's Rony Brauman) thinks the Libyan revolution was all anti-Gaddafi propaganda while BHL feels one must make a distinction between George W Bush's Iraq war ("preventive war" not good) and the Libyan conflict ("preemptive war" good). Sigh.

Les théoriciens de la guerre juste établissent une distinction, que vous effacez allègrement, entre la guerre préventive (l'Irak) et la guerre préemptive (on a les preuves qu'un massacre est programmé, qu'il commence d'être mis en oeuvre - et on l'arrête avant qu'il ne soit allé au bout de son programme). En Libye, on est clairement dans ce second cas. … la Libye est le contraire de l'Irak.

“About 9,980,000 results”

Summit value? Not about results.

Ignore the Absurd European Definitions of “the Right”

In the wake of the Charlie Hebdo Molotov cocktail attack, an attempt is being made to consolidate (or rather discount) the obvious about leftist cheer-led violence with their own sick ideological prejudices, a handful of critics in the benighted continent are attempting to understand.

Binding it up with their other bugaboos, they go on to pointlessly expound about the guilt of their fellow citizens whom they refuse to understand with a centuries-old example, as if the right today was guilty of the imagined horrors that they still use as a straw man.

But the larger picture looks more alarming. Nobody has yet claimed responsibility for the attack, but it would not be far-fetched to assume that it is linked to the publication of the special issue published by Charia Hebdo on the day the attack took place. The incident therefore constitutes a radical resurgence of the religious curtailment of free speech - in the midst of one of the very cradles of freedom of expression. It was in Paris that free speech was first established as a fundamental legal fact in the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man - after a protracted and bitter decade-long struggle between the radical Enlightenment on the one hand and the Catholic Church and French Absolutism on the other - a history rife with burning books, which prefigured the burning piles of Charlie Hebdo copies on Tuesday night.

Give them more undeserved attention, and some pregnant silence, and it would become George Bush’s fault or something... anything but the left’s example and educational involvement in the interest of mindless revolutionary violence worldwide... anything.

It is, of course, America’s fault because an American mentioned something useful in this crass campaigning:

On the international scene, the internet versions of many leading European newspapers feature the photograph of Charlie's editor holding up the front page of the magazine with the drawing of the prophet saying "100 lashes, if you do not die from laughter!" before the sooty ruins of its premises. But not a single English or American news media ran the image, as far as a quick net survey shows. At the same time, new threats against Libération are trying to force the daily to stop protecting Charlie. Slowly and steadily, the poison of the extreme religious right is spreading in democratic societies, shrinking the space of free speech and criticism day by day. The strange and unsavoury cocktail of death threats, bombings and arson with whining and whimpering - topped off by defeatist intellectuals talking about "sensibilities" - is slowly eating away at the heart of open societies.

Got that? There are things about this sad, indicative, but minor event that the were supposed to say, and in some specific fashion too.

So somehow these lefty cover artists suddenly forget the interference they ran for virtually anyone willing to murder westerners over the past decade, and in their brilliance FINALLY figured out who’s at fault: the same and only people they can ever find at fault – the domestic political opponents they are so thoroughly obsessed with.

In fact even citing the regrettable stupid piece by Time Magazine’s Bruce Crumley as some sort of negligent disrespect of their divine nature of journalists, so long as they are leftists is another rabbit they’re chasing. Crumly’s motives are patently based in the illiterate chant of the multi-culturalists and founded in the political ritual of trying to heap abuse on the right for taking Islamist religious violence seriously.

Remember the “what did we do to deserve this” crowd heard on September 12th, 2001 ? Well here they are trying to make their fundamental moral ignorance in the interest of their own cultural war the fault of the conventional part of civilization that they live in.

Amazingly, we are somehow, again, supposed to care because they still rebelliously resent their parents. Too bad they can’t keep up the trick long enough to show their hand:

But it is contentious, at very least, to assume that the supposedly Islamist attack is fuelled by the "offense of Muslim sensibilities". A much more obvious reason for fundamentalists to exert religious pressure against the satirical characterisation of their faith is that such joking may, in fact, be detrimental to them by helping to delegitimise their extreme political aims. Satire famously played an important role in the long process through which European societies emancipated themselves from religious dominance over centuries and finally forced Christianity to give in to enlightened principles and liberties

In other words, the bedwetting leftist intelligentia is once again exploiting terror. Much like the leftist Hitler, who saw religion as a barrier to dictatorial power much as the leftist tyrannies of the Soviet sphere did, all is now explained away as “far right extremism”

...simply because that is the only phrase they know.

Another France24 Debate Over the Debt and Its Effect on the 2012 Election

On Wednesday, there was also a(n English-language) debate on the France 24 TV channel about the debt and the upcoming 2012 campaign (Part 1 and Part 2).

US debt showdown: who's to blame for the deadlock?

Its Thanksgiving in the United States but millions of Americans will be hard pushed to find much to be grateful for this year: 9 percent of the population is out of work. In Washington its deadlock as usual. The so-called Supercommitte of 3 democrats and 3 republicans has proven its anything but missed a deadline on an agreement to reduce a record national debt. That means across the board spending cuts will take effect.

• Ellen WASYLINA, Republicans Abroad
• Zachary MILLER, Democrats Abroad
• Amine OUZAD, Assistant Professor of Economics and Political Science, INSEAD
• Daniel HAMILTON, Executive Director of the Center for Transatlantic Relations, SAIS

French Female Journalist Fondled and Beaten on Cairo's Tahrir Square (VIDEO)

In the latest frightening incident for a female reporter in Egypt during the Arab Spring, one that lasted 45 minutes, a French female journalist was beaten, had various parts of her clothing torn off, and was sexually attacked on Cairo's Tahrir Square, reports Le Monde. Update: Another reporter, "Egyptian-American journalist Mona Eltahawy[,] said she [also] was sexually assaulted [although not by the protesters but] by police during hours under detention"!

A reporter from the television channel France 3 said that she had been severely beaten and sexually assaulted on Thursday November 24 in Cairo, where she was reporting from. Caroline Sinz and his cameraman, Salah Agrab, began to be aggressed in a street leading from Tahrir Square to the Interior Ministry, where the most violent clashes between demonstrators and security forces have taken place in recent days.

"We were filming in the Mohammed Mahmoud Street when we were attacked by teens 14 or 15 years old," she said, referring to "fondling". The journalist and her cameraman were then forced by a group of men to Tahrir Square where they found themselves separated.

"We were then attacked by a crowd of men. I was beaten by a pack of young people and adults who ripped off my clothes" and engaged in the type of fondling responding "to the definition of rape," she said. "Some people tried to help me, to no avail. I was lynched. It took about three quarters of an hour, until I was pulled out of the crowd. I thought I would die," she said, adding that the cameraman had also been" beaten up."

Finally rescued, she was able to reach her hotel, where she was assisted by the Embassy of France in Cairo before consulting a doctor.

As for Mona Eltahawy (or el-Tahawy), the Egyptian-American journalist said that

she was sexually assaulted by police during hours under detention after taking part in protests on the sprawling square that has become a landmark of the Arab Spring.

"Besides beating me, the dogs of (central security forces) subjected me to the worst sexual assault ever," Eltahawy said on her Twitter account.

"5 or 6 surrounded me, groped and prodded my breasts, grabbed my genital area and I lost count how many hands tried to get into my trousers," she said.

Lara Logan sur la place Tahrir au Caire, quelques instants avant son
agression, le 11 février 2011, jour du départ de Hosni Moubarak.

France24 Debate Between Right and Left Over the Debt and Its Effect on the 2012 Election

Last night, I participated in a (French-language) debate on the France 24 TV channel about the debt and the upcoming 2012 campaign (Part 1 and Part 2).

États-Unis : la dette, la campagne... Les politiques perdent leur crédit

La Grèce, l'Italie, la crise de la zone euro...Et maintenant les Etats Unis. Obama et les Républicains s'affrontent sur les impôts et les économies budgetaires. Après l'échec de la concertation entre democrates et republicains, une chose est sûre: La croissance américaine sera en berne... Quels enjeux pour l'économie américaine ? Pour la campagne présidentielle ?

LE DÉBAT

• François DURPAIRE, Historien à l'Université Paris 1 La Sorbonne
• Frédérique BONNEVAY, Économiste
• Joseph SMALLHOOVER, Democrats Abroad France
• Erik SVANE, Republicans Abroad
  

Lefty Attempts Blogging, Fails to Amuse

Typical of the Cultural Sensitivity of those most prone to criticize America, we find this mook sums up hoe Europeans treat one another fairly nicely: cultural prejudice, veneer-thin assumptions, feeble cultural slander, childishly making fun of accents, and a universal inability to differentiate an individual from the fake reputation attributed to their nationality. Hell, he might even think that Solesnkniks would be amused by him.

At 7 pm, I Will Be Participating in a France 24 Debate in French on the Debt in America and the World

Ce soir, à 19h heure continentale (one hour from now), je participe à un débat sur France 24 concernant la dette aux États-Unis.

The Barbarians are Behind the Gates

As one might expect:

U.S. money market funds, which are key providers of liquidity to banks and have been pulling back from the euro zone since May, cut their exposure to European banks by a further 9 percent in October, according to ratings agency Fitch.

But here is the interesting part on their counterparties’ fate. The ECB is curtailing bond sales to European banks. This is the precise opposite of what one does to bolster the banks, and seems somewhat fishy. Do they want banks to increase their appetite for Member-State bonds that the ECB are being coy about backing up through repurchases?

The ECB's weekly, limit-free handout of funding underscored the widespread problems, with 178 banks requesting 247 billion euros, the highest amount since mid-2009.

Despite that, they say that the ECB ‘floodgates are open’.

Not quite it looks like they’re holding back for what they suspect will be the worse to come.

"The reality is it's hard to see investors get any confidence (before the end of the year), as the sovereign crisis is out of control. Confidence has disappeared from the banks as they are a conduit for the sovereigns," a senior debt market banker said.

The strangest part of the story is that it reacting to what have been announced to be to repurchasing and bailout rules so far: bondholders, those banks bullied into putting depositors’ money into buying BAD sovereign debt have been told that in a ‘haircut’ scenario, that they will be paid AFTER governments holding other governments’ debt.

Now imagine the scenario: the public gets 50 cents on the Euro for their government bonds, and this send whatever liquid assets still inside Fortress Europe abroad. Recession looks more like influenza than a short case of the sniffles.

THEN the ECB will have put governments into a position where recapitalization of the banks that have had their depositors’ funds lost to bad government debt have to then pay for the socialization as well.

And to think that until just a few weeks ago, Trichet was aimlessly fighting non-existent inflation and beavering away on his price-stability mandate.

The world will catch this cold, all because of European governments’ social “largesse” and “generosity” that put marooned them in this cycle of borrowing. The reaction of the economically illiterate European population will be, as usual “Gimme-gimme-gimme! Me-me-me!” and unable to think anything up for themselves, pick up the work “bankseters” as a fixation for their blame. What they need to do is turn their attention to governments who sang “I’m just a girl who can’t say no” who spent those staggering borrowed sums despite collecting more than half of all GDP in taxes.

Now that population who has been paying for those punitive taxes and had their banks used as “an additional revenue stream” will have the restoration of the system thrust upon them too. It seems that there has never been a better time to be on the dole.

13-Year-Old Girl Murdered by Teenage Rapist Thanks to the Left's Altruism Fairy Tales

Agnès, a 13-year-old schoolgirl, is dead thanks to the Left's fairy tale of generosity and altruism for criminals, reports the AFP in Le Monde (with a different choice of words), which let a teen-age rapist, now 17, return to school after four months in the slammer without telling the school authorities why he had been behind bars.

Interrogé sur la connaissance qu'avait l'établissement du passé judiciaire de l'élève, source de polémiques, le magistrat a souligné que "la loi ne permet pas aux juges ou aux éducateurs de communiquer officiellement les éléments sur les mises en examen en raison de la présomption d'innocence".

…l'établissement du Chambon-sur-Lignon avait admis qu'il savait que l'élève avait fait quatre mois de prison avant d'intégrer le lycée, mais sans en connaître le motif. Auparavant, son directeur, Philip Bauwens, avait créé la polémique en déclarant : "Nous avions des éléments de sa scolarité, mais pas connaissance de son passé judiciaire. On savait qu'il avait eu des ennuis avec la justice, mais on n'en connaissait pas la nature. Et nous n'avions aucun contact avec les services de justice."

Moreover, Hélène Bekmezian sets up the history of the Sarkozy government's history of sexual delinquent laws passed every time another scandalous crime rises.

Interviewé par Patricia Jolly, Daniel Zagury explique que

A chaque drame, le discours des faux-savants et des chevaliers de l'après-coup – qui laissent entendre qu'ils auraient tiré la sonnette d'alarme si on leur avait confié l'expertise – donne l'illusion qu'on peut disposer d'une traçabilité du mal. Il prétend qu'on doit déceler le plus précocement possible les sujets susceptibles de commettre des infractions sexuelles. Mais ce modèle simpliste est plus incantatoire qu'efficient.

Our Vapid Friends go to their Usual Place to Explain the World’s Complexity

By demonizing anything that seems foreign. As if they fart daisies.



France’s fiscal behavior makes their bonds a bad prospect, not Moody’s mentioning it.

“Europe Needs Enemies”

In an entirely roundabout and subconscious manner, Prague’s Hospodářské Noviny newspaper explains the purpose of Europeans’ outlook toward Americans: because Europeans seek unity and high personal regard by imagining that they have enemies. It also helps that those enemies won’t actually do anything about that enmity, and otherwise just ignore that atmospheric hatred, especially when they are in a pinch.

This crisis of having nothing to hate is downright existential:

So long as Europeans do not feel a sufficient sense of belonging, the French and Germans will be able to go on negotiating coordinated taxes or changes to the Lisbon Treaty. In the long run, though, this kind of united Europe is doomed to disappear all the same.

Since many of them regard any form of national pride as jingoism, and they’re willing to let each other drown economically, “the enemy without” appears to be their source, (and possibly their sole source,) of unity and pride in the circle jerk of stars.

Nothing illustrates that childishness like thinking that “pride in Europe” is in fact anything other than nationalism too:

In a global economy, one has to lay aside old national and ideological categories. A stronger European identity, which could be the basis for restoring the prosperity of the peoples of the old continent, could be created by tighter restrictions on a quite different class of people: politicians who are unable or unwilling to look beyond the horizon of a term in office, who speak a language remote from the everyday lives of ordinary Europeans, who are unwilling to resign even while dragging their countries towards the brink of bankruptcy...

not to mention that it also make a tidy argument for suspending elections, very much after the fashion of Canadian fake-crisis promoter Naomi Klein, who James Delingpole calls out to be the tyranny promoter that she is.

The “Europe needs toothless frenemies” screed is no less of a reality-evading useful bit of catnip.

National identity has all too often been shaped by a variety of traumas, as societies were brought together by a sense of shared fate. European identity, Professor Řezník believes, needs a deep, thorough-going crisis, in order to test its own viability.

So the instead of people making valiant sacrifices for the good of society, people have to be made a sacrifice for the good of society. Got it.

That’s sharp thinking Perfesser, bus hardly new despite being incredibly European. Let’s test that theory by making professional political philosophers destitute, and start from there. After all, I think you ran out of Jews, Gypsies, and whatever Foreign laborers are around to use as a unifying instrument a long time ago. I’m not being cute. That was precisely the purpose of that form of hatred then, and in it’s distinctly less plausible form the reason now: to serve in the absence of a unifying, positive social principle.

The Difference Between Palestine and Tibet and Why It Shows that Israel Isn't China

The monks have been protesting about the erosion of Tibetan culture and their treatment by the Chinese authorities.

A BBC news story reports on how the suicide of a Buddhist nun by fire is symbolic of how the increasingly frustrated Tibetans choose immolation in order to protest the presence of the Chinese occupiers.

A few years ago, I was told — in no uncertain terms — that Israel was the only country in the world occupying another; when I mentioned China and Tibet, the subject was rapidly changed.

Notice how the Tibetans resorting to suicide in order to protest Chinese occupation do not choose to "take" any of the occupiers with them; they do not try to kill as many as they can, they do not even try to kill a single one of them, military or civilian.

Think about it. What does that tell you about Israel and about its "occupation" of Palestine?

(Perhaps, for starters, that one reason that Tibetans do not target their occupiers is that, besides being part of a culture that is taught some basic human values, they know to what degree their compatriots will be made to suffer, disproportionately, by the occupiers if they were to target the latter. Perhaps, this means that, in turn, the Palestinians are not suffering as much from their alleged occupiers as they claim to be in the first place…)

Coluche and the French Republic Which Is Not as Republican as Often Vaunted

Patrick Jarreau has a Le Monde book review about Jean-Jérôme Bertolus and Frédérique Bredin's Tir à vue : La folle histoire des présidentielles, which doubles as a documentary on the France 3 television channel with Michel Royer.

Ce livre n'aurait pas pu être écrit il y a dix ans. Les personnages qui s'y expriment auraient tenu des propos plus évasifs, et les journalistes auraient dû s'en contenter. Pourtant, de Charles de Gaulle cherchant à éliminer Georges Pompidou, en 1968 et 1969, jusqu'à Jacques Chirac tentant de se débarrasser de Nicolas Sarkozy en 2004, en passant par la rivalité Mitterrand-Rocard des années 1980, l'attraction de ce pouvoir suscite des comportements peu édifiants et fabrique une vie politique décevante. La défiance qu'expriment les citoyens envers leurs dirigeants en est la conséquence.

La France "a des institutions qui invitent à la trahison", observe François Bayrou, parce que "tout pouvoir vient du sommet" et qu'on tente de prévoir qui sera le maître demain pour se ranger à temps derrière lui. Ce constat lucide est le revers du dithyrambe chanté par Henri Guaino, pour qui, "en faisant adopter l'élection du président de la République au suffrage universel", le général de Gaulle "a renoué un vieux fil de l'histoire de France", car "l'élection est un sacre". Comment mieux avouer que cette République-là n'est pas tout à fait républicaine ?

In a separate article, Daniel Psenny reveals how the tongue-in-cheek 1981 presidential campaign of a humorist was taken very seriously by the powers-that-be (the state "panicked") and how the humorist — Coluche got up to 16% in the polls — was put under surveillance and was hassled, receiving death threats so credible that he finally caved and withdrew from the race.

En quelques mois, il est crédité de 16 % d'intentions de vote. Un score qui inquiète autant la droite que la gauche. Mais, en avril 1981, au grand dam de ses comités de soutien, il annonce son retrait de la course présidentielle.

Que s'est-il passé ? Dans leur documentaire Coluche : un clown ennemi d'Etat, Jean-Louis Perez et Michel Despratx racontent, à l'aide de nombreux témoignages, comment l'Etat a demandé aux Renseignements généraux (RG) d'utiliser tous les moyens pour obliger le comique à renoncer à sa candidature.

Pour la première fois, les auteurs montrent le dossier des RG n° 817706 au nom de Michel Colucci, où sont consignés son casier judiciaire et toutes ses activités quotidiennes. Une opération supervisée de près par

le « groupe de direction » des RG qui n'a pas hésité à sortir des clous de la légalité et à utiliser des moyens très musclés, comme le révèlent plusieurs flics ayant participé à cette déstabilisation. « Il est vrai que le «groupe de direction» des RG était un Etat dans l'Etat policier », reconnaît Yves Bertrand, directeur des RG de l'époque.

A plusieurs reprises, Coluche a reçu des menaces de mort signées « Honneur de la police », un commando qui avait revendiqué l'assassinat de Pierre Goldman quelques mois auparavant. Les auteurs montrent aussi que la surveillance de Coluche ne s'est pas arrêtée après le retrait de sa candidature.

Elle a continué jusqu'au 19 juin 1986, jour de son accident de moto mortel. Le lendemain, la main anonyme d'un fonctionnaire de police a écrit sur le dossier : « DCD ».

Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places

One amazing feature of the modern nanny state, especially the sort that recuse themselves from anything that matters, is that people become bored, silly, and stupid.

Thanks to Arf, a friend of this blog, has remitted to the editors of ¡No Pasarán!, a report on this warped Canadian broad who duct-tapes food to herself in the hope of having raccoons, already gorged on residential waste, flatter her orally.





The muffdiving rodentia in action

7 If you’re really coon smitten and want to go the extra mile for your soon-to-be new best friends, find a fishmonger who will sell or give you a bag of discarded fish stewing in their own putrid juices (the raccoon equivalent of foie gras topped with caviar). Voilà! In a matter of seconds you will be up to your genitals in raccoons.

8 While you’re at it, why not get creative and be fulfilled by encouraging a little coonilingus? If you find one that doesn’t mind the broccoli, consider it a keeper.