Is Wikipedia Really Trustworthy? Asks Le Monde — as It Proceeds to Get Bush's Middle Name Wrong

As the main title on the front page of its weekend edition, above the fold and across three fifths of the page, Le Monde has a heading asking whether Wikipedia is really trustworthy. Inside, Frédéric Joignot has an article pointing out Wikipedia's mistakes (while interviewing Jacques Florent), but what is perhaps noteworthy is that Le Monde might itself be in need of Wikipedia, since it still (!) gets the name of George W. Bush wrong (confusing Walker with Walter)…

…comment, en faisant appel au public, rédiger une encyclopédie fiable, sans amateurisme, qui ne devienne pas une foire d'empoigne ou un lieu de toutes les manipulations ? C'est très difficile. Depuis sa création, Wikipédia se trouve écartelée entre ses deux exigences originelles : le souci de la relecture experte voulue par Larry Sanger, dans la tradition des grands encyclopédistes depuis Diderot et d'Alembert, et la richesse d'une matière éditoriale parfois approximative, de parti pris, peu référencée, apportée par des milliers de passionnés ou des esprits sectaires.

Quant aux fameux " trolls ", les vandales et farceurs du Net, ils sont désormais repérés plus vite quand ils changent le second prénom de George W. Bush, Walter, en " Wanker " (branleur), prétendent que la boisson Red Bull contient du " sperme de vache " ou annoncent à tort le décès d'une star.

Those Who Are Against Shariah, Raise Your Hand

Plantu in Le Monde:
• Those of You Who Are Against Shariah, Raise Your Hand!

Arm aber Hässlich

63% of working Spanish households are now living off of €1000 per month.

To get to the end of the month on this kind of money in your pocket is a Herculean task. Many families are counting the cents closely before they head out to shop. For thousands of Spaniards today, buying something has become an act of renunciation.

That’s a hard fact, one which I wish on no one, but a hard fact that makes this argument about non-rising lower-tier America look especially foolish. It also takes the mickey out of the endless grinding griping about the WalMart-ization of America, and the Americanization of Europe since 63% of Spaniards now appear to be needing their sources of WalMart-ization and hideous Americanization to subsist with any dignity:

Against this harsh backdrop, the low-cost shopping phenomenon is flourishing, and it does not look set to die out any time soon. Quite to the contrary, it's becoming a more and more prominent feature of society and its economy. Restaurants, travel, cars, insurance, electronics, real estate, leisure, clothing, food: nothing seems to escape the pull of low-cost shopping.

The question, though, is whether low-cost shopping will still be around once the crisis has passed. Is it a structural or temporary strategy? How will the consumer have changed by then? Will he or she be more rational, less impulsive? Dare we assume that the search for the lowest price has become a new way of life?

Dare we not ask pointless questions about the survival skills of people and second guess individuals? Sit on your extra-special world-beating super-duper everything and spin – Spaniards are getting by without the luxury-aspirant subtext of the new Europe.

In the meantime, the low-cost concept is spreading fast and wide. “The consumer has gone from looking for what I call a 'superior functionality' to looking for the 'good enough functionality', which is cheaper. In other words, why should I buy a car with all the extras if I don't really need them?”

As with everything, unless it’s Europeans talking about Europeans, all European discussion of the state of the economy takes the form of either economically illiterate and emotionalized fits of kicking the victim, or using the usual straw men as a point of reference. That much-lauded compassion comes last.

But I digress. Let’s go back to those folks that should be thanking Sam Walton:

In any case, at bottom this phenomenon conveys a sense of urgency and need. As paradoxical as it sounds, it also conveys a desire to keep up one's standard of living and to go on enjoying a product or a simple luxury.

Rwanda: An Inconvenient Truth for France

A truth that is inconvenient for France, titles a Le Monde editorial as Christophe Châtelot returns to the Rwanda for new revelations on the genocide of the Tutsis, asking why it took 18 years to investigate the missile that brought down Juvénal Habyarimana's plane and determine that it was fired not from a Tutsi camp, as previously believed, but from a Hutu one (harboring the president's own troops, including extremists who used the occasion to go on a genocidal rampage against the Tutsi "culprits").

These revelations did not come out until France's head of state was Nicolas Sarkozy, whose government has little to fear from revelations that discredit François Mitterrand and Édouard Balladur, who supported both the Habyarimana régime and the Rwandan army…

L'enquête établit donc que ce sont les extrémistes hutu qui ont assassiné le président Habyarimana parce qu'il venait d'accepter un partage du pouvoir avec les Tutsi. Et non par des combattants tutsi proches de l'actuel président Paul Kagamé, en guerre contre le régime Habyarimana, comme le juge Jean-Louis Bruguière, prédécesseur de M. Trévidic, l'avait affirmé en 2006 sans jamais avoir enquêté sur le terrain. A l'époque, ses conclusions avaient conduit le Rwanda à rompre ses relations diplomatiques avec la France.

… Parce qu'elle dérange beaucoup de monde, cette vérité a mis longtemps à être établie. Elle ne gêne pas tellement la France de Nicolas Sarkozy, qui a renoué avec le régime de Paul Kagamé et qui, à Kigali, a reconnu les "graves erreurs d'appréciation" de Paris. Mais plutôt la France de la cohabitation Mitterrand-Balladur, qui a soutenu jusqu'au bout le régime Habyarimana, et celle d'une armée tricolore qui, longtemps, a approvisionné et entraîné les militaires rwandais, dont certains allaient participer au génocide.

Why the Greeks are Quintessentially European

They put pederasty and welfare over the fate of the genuinely disabled, the future, and the debt passed on to their children:

The National Confederation of Disabled People called the action "incomprehensible," and said pedophiles are now awarded a higher government disability pay than some people who have received organ transplants.

The Labor Ministry said categories added to the expanded list - that also includes pyromaniacs, compulsive gamblers, fetishists and sadomasochists - were included for purposes of medical assessment and used as a gauge for allocating financial assistance.

So is this is the slow food-esque “quality of life” thing we get a finger wagged at us about, or the compassion and humanism thing we get a finger wagged at us about?

The new list gives pyromaniacs and pedophiles disability pay up to 35 percent, compared to 80 percent for heart transplant recipients.

"It's really not serious to grant Peeping Toms a 20-30 percent disability rate, and 10 percent to diabetics, who have insulin shots four or five times a day," said Vardakastanis.

Greece has been fighting to avoid bankruptcy since 2009. Public spending on health and welfare programs has been sharply cut under austerity measures imposed as a condition for receiving emergency loans from the International Monetary Fund and other countries using the euro currency.

So it seems that compassion and humanism®©™ come in state approved percentages of last years’ income. Who knew?

The Quadrennial Retelling of the Same Old Stories

Well know globally for their lack of curiosity for anything other than ego-reinforcing rationalizations, European critics of the US (who detest the US anyway) are whining that using European society and a point of comparison with the US is “European bashing”.

What they conveniently ignore is that American Dream is not what it used to be. (Neither is the European Dream of an ever closer union, but that's another story).

Yes, it’s ALWAYS another story when you don’t want to tell the story.

In fact, it arrives to the usual level of stupidity Spiegel readers are familiar with, to the extent that one example is enough evidence to call it a trend, or perhaps a scourge. In fact to the extent that they start to make things up:

Europe is socialist, bloated and a threat to the global economy. That appears to be the message from the ongoing presidential campaign in the US. Republicans in particular have discovered Europe as a convenient punching bag -- and have even begun accusing each other of being too "European."

That message, also happening to be identical to many Europeans’ criticism of European society, but that’s not the point. Even as German growth is expected to be the strongest in Europe in 2012, and expected to top out at 1%, expect more of this, as well as the ritual retelling of the “American dream is dead”, for which there are vivid examples in the German press dating back to 1954.

Chock this up to “Freedom Fries” syndrome, a one-week story in the US which has reached its’ first decade of smug anger in the precious and benighted continent.

To back it up, an unrelated sneer has to be tangentially attached: an article in the NYT which selectively looks at a variety of unexplained studies to say that the US, where the poor live in comforts many middle income Europeans don’t have, and is the focus of criticism of “Americans being too well off” in turns, that Americans are less upwardly mobile than Europeans.

How, exactly? The same old saw: income disparity, the statistical tool of propagandists for more than a century. For example: how long a period is the trends mapped in multiple unexplained “studies” sampling? Are we being shown a delta founded on the 2008 contraction as the centerpiece? Is aggregate improvement in the state of what “bottom fifth” actually means being taken into account?

How, in our inexorable downward mobility spiral, can we also be criticized for also using too many resources, especially in a broad way across the income spectrum? How is it that we allow our unwashed and uneducated “lower 5th” or people like them, out of the country to find out that they are the boors so broadly offensive to Europeans as ignorant tourists? HOW doesn’t matter.

I’m not sure it even matters to the local reseller of meme X this week, given the notion of what they think “equal opportunity” means:

If equal opportunity is essential to freedom, then freedom is under attack!

So many misused truisms, so little time. Equal Opportunity, for one thing is assumed to mean Equal Outcome, an entirely Marxist jerking point, and one that Marxist-Leninism did a particularly bad job of actually achieving. This actually ADDS credence to the Americans are from Mars, Europeans are from the Politburo argument more than anything else.
And who knew that the lack of forced redistribution of wealth was critical in protecting freedom from attack, when freedom, and rights of all sorts can’t be redistributed, aren’t based in getting resources from others in society that aren’t earned, and are inherently equal before the “liberators from the shackles of common sense” like the author of “If equal opportunity is essential to freedom, then freedom is under attack!” can manage a go at them.

In fact the notion that one can shun Americans into using European society as a point of reference is, if anything, an attempt to obfuscate a curtailment of freedom.

But that doesn’t matter, because the guy behind that organ grinder author, like one European critic too many, is more interested in irrational point-scoring that the content of people’s arguments. That paragraph two has nothing to do with paragraph one outside of an old assumption having nothing to do with wither source is irrelevant.

The Narrative Couldn’t Get any More Lame

After the Washington Post finally stopped sitting on the Solyndra “theft by greenist compassion” scandal, they manage a rather ludicrous and emotive revision.

David Burge:

« There you have it. In the Post's sob story narrative, the problem is not that a politically-connected network of donors devised a con to loot taxpayers of a half billion dollars; to the contrary, it's that the government negligently allowed the Solyndra scam to collapse, thereby depriving Ms. Sterio of her "clean-energy job." And, by implication, it continues to "betray" her by not creating another clean-energy job for her elsewhere. »

In fact it’s worthy of the weeper-style use of stage theater by FDR’s crypto-Communists covering for the confusing and useless policies of the time – which, as now, did little more than scare the economy’s real driving forces from wanting to even get out of bed. I’m reminded of the cause of all of this chaos which gives those selling green power and magic carpets an opportunity at mischief by Roosevelt himself quoted in Amity Schlaes’ “The Forgotten Man”:

« The main tasks Roosevelt assigned himself were simple. The first was that there be a broad sweep of activity; Americans must know Washington was doing something. If there were contradictions between experiments and within them, well, that did not matter. Partly this came out of the restlessness of the invalid; Roosevelt had risen politically but he still could not stand unaided. But partly it came out of a grandeur of spirit. “Do I contradict myself?” Roosevelt seemed to be asking, as Walt Whitman had. “Very well then, I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes.” »

All encompassing! To the point of near-infalabilty and super-human intelligence and ability no less than that mocked by Frank Flemming epic poem about another dissembler:

« If Obama is not listening to you, you can sleep soundly at night knowing your concerns are stupid. »

- from “Obama: The Greatest President in the History of Everything”, (Frank J. Fleming)

And the Progressive beat goes on. Even in the case of enabled and rationalized graft, their echo-chamber of protectors permits no questioning.

Steven Pinker on the Myth of Violence

Steven Pinker on the myth of violence (merci à Patrick)

The Return of ShadyRAT

Remember that endless whinging by people using the EU venue to complain about onerous US data security criteria? Remember the endless hammering on and on about SWIFT and information required of travelers invading the precious, immutable, eternally superior privacy and online identities of Europeans?

Well, ask your beloved activists and miscellaneous Wikileaks and Anonymous loving people who are into “revealing hidden truths” about this sort of “truth” telling.

A number of people working for the EU institutions have had their emails, passwords and credit card details hacked and released to the general public over the Christmas break.

A partial list was recently published online by Anonymous, a loose network of cyber activists campaigning against the so-called 'New World Order'.

Among the victims are administrators and officials at the European Commission, Eurojust (an EU body fighting organised crime), the European External Action Service, the European Parliament and Brussels-based think-tank the European Policy Centre (EPC).

That’s right! It’s that same pacifism brigade again. Their target? Their ever expanding Pantheon of imaginary hate puppets along the lines of Bu$hChimpHitlerBurton fetishisms, which now seems to include the EU and anyone else old enough to tie their shoe laces.

All together, some 850,000 confidential details were released when Anonymous hacked into the Texas-based Stratfor Global Intelligence security firm.

Stratfor is a widely used private security research company. About 75,000 of its paying subscribers also had their credit card details disclosed, including some working for the EU institutions.

The leaked database has 19,000 email addresses ending in the .mil domain of the US military according to the Guardian newspaper. The list also included 242 Nato staff members.

Peace out, peeps, because the blame goes back to where it always does: elsewhere. Apparently it’s American lobbying the administrative issues that caused this breech!

The entire operation could cast a long shadow over intense US lobbying against a leaked draft proposal for a Data Protection Regulation from the European Commission this past December.

Among the US complaints are the European Commission's views on data breach requirements, which they consider as "overly" severe and could undermine corporate data security practices.

"It is interesting to note that the US document tends to oppose specific proposals, such as the notification deadline and fines, in support of the vague issues such as not distracting businesses from improving corporate data security practices,"

Vague things like the real effect of minutae in regulation getting in the way of data security, something that you're not going to do anything about unless the never-ending threats to change reporting requiements and practices is done.

Happy Birthday to Elvis, from… Denmark?!

A replica of Elvis Presley's Graceland estate is opening in Denmark

reports the BBC.

The Danish tribute to 'The King' has been built in the town of Randers, and will be known as Graceland Randers.

The building is almost identical to the original, although it is twice the size to house a shop, restaurant and museum.

In a more detailed report, the BBC adds that

The building is the brainchild of Henrick Knudsen, an Elvis fan who … said the project has the backing of Elvis's widow Priscilla.

Web Goes Viral After Naked Man Turns Up in French Store's Kid Clothes Photo

Unfortunately for one of the French equivalents of Sears Roebuck, a number of mistakes appear on its online catalog. If only it had been solely the fact that the English spelling and grammar on one of La Redoute's T-shirts was questionable (Enjoy Holydays). Far worse, indeed, was discovering that lurking in the background of a beach photo for kids' clothes (one of the kid models is wearing a light blue version of the incriminating T-shirt) was an unsuspecting nudist walking delicately through the ocean water.

La Redoute promptly removed the photo, but not quickly enough to prevent the photo of the Naked Man (as the so-far-unidentified individual has been dubbed) from going viral (more examples here and by clicking on each of the pictures below). The second Redoute parody shows Nicolas Sarkozy from the back heading into the water and says "Black Swim Shorts (Sold Without the Rolex Watch)"

Parisian Truffles

I'll bet you thought I was done speaking glowingly of the city of lights...

According to One (Disgusted) Leftist, 90% of Frenchmen Support the 18-Year-Old Mother's Killing of an Oklahoma Burglar

According to one outraged and disgusted leftist responding to Corine Lesnes's post on the Sarah McKinley shooting, almost 90% of Frenchmen support the 18-year-old Oklahoma mother's killing of the burglar trying to enter her home while supporting the introduction (or the reintroduction) of something akin to the Castle Doctrine in France…

Et alors ? Où est le problème ? Ce qui me choque plus, c’est que, si cette scène était transposée, disons, à Orléans, la jeune femme serait aujourd’hui en prison…

Rédigé par : demari | le 05 janvier 2012 à 15:49 | Répondre | Alerter |

Il est bien dommage que la législation ne soit pas la même en France.

En France, vous êtes priés de vous laisser égorger avant de prétendre être victime.

Se faire flinguer quand on rentre par effraction dans une maison me semble être un risque du métier parfaitement normal. Si on n’assume pas ce risque, il faut faire un autre métier que voleur.

Rédigé par : FbS | le 05 janvier 2012 à 15:37 | Répondre | Alerter |

Quand on a le choix entre tuer ou être tué, on ne prévient pas. Un cambriolage crapuleux n’est pas un duel entre chevaliers du Moyen-Age…

Rédigé par : thôt | le 05 janvier 2012 à 19:12 | Répondre | Alerter |

He bien oui, moi, je salue le courage de cette jeune mère. Je ne suis pas un partisan du tout arme à feu, mais je constate qu’en France, la victime ne peut se défendre à mort avant qu’elle ne se soit elle même fait couper un bras par l’assaillant.
Ici, en Alsace, un agriculteur père et grand père de famille, encours actuellement plusieurs années de prison pour avoir lègérement blessé à la chevrotine un membre d’une bande d’Europe de l’est qui était en train de dérober tranquillement l’un de ses tracteurs sous ses yeux. Le criminel a porté plainte contre sa victime et cela semble evidemment normal aux bobos de tous poils ?

Rédigé par : Gaillus | le 06 janvier 2012 à 03:52 | Répondre | Alerter |

En France, le voleur entre, la viole, la tue, tue son bébé, vole la télé, l’ordi, le iphone, prend 5 ans, rejoint ses potes en prison, fume, joue à la play, fait du sport, sort après 3 ans, recommence.

Rédigé par : Jean | le 05 janvier 2012 à 15:42 | Répondre | Alerter |

je suis francais , vivant aux USA depuis bientot 7 ans , ma femme et mes enfants sont americains et nous vivons a Memphis et je bosse en majeure partie sur NY .
je me sens 2000 fois plus en securite a Memphis ou a NY qu a Paris ou j ai pourtant vecu pres de 30 ans !
et j ai ce sentiment d insecurite a chaque fois que je passe en France , malheureusement .

Les USA ne sont pas un pays plus violent que la France , loin de la .J ai moins peur d aller dans le Bronx que dans les banlieues pourries de Bordeaux , Pau ou Montpellier ( je parle de celle que je connais )

Rédigé par : karl | le 05 janvier 2012 à 17:25 | Répondre | Alerter |

On the One Hand, a Dictator Who Starved His People; on the Other, a Freedom Fighter Like Walesa — And Whom Does Le Monde Choose for Its Main Headline?

In the wake of reading the issue in which Le Monde announced the deaths of Vaclav Havel and Kim Jong-il, a Le Monde reader protested in a letter to the editor:

Le Monde of December 20: huge headline on the death of Kim Jong-il, along with his photo. Only a modest column a fifth of a page wide is allocated to the day's other passing, Vaclav Havel. On the one hand, a dictator who starved his people while enriching his clan by putting his country under an iron fist. On the other, a freedom fighter of the same mettle as a Mandela, a Walesa, a Lula. And whom does my newspaper choose for its main headline? The North Korean tyrant! Is Le Monde's mistake not obvious to everyone?!...

Fifty years from now, who will remember this obscure North Korean "son of"? By contrast, the name of Vaclav Havel will remain a universal reference for all those who still believe it possible for man to change the course of events when these become unbearable and contrary to dignity.

His is the photo that we would have liked to see on the front page, not that of a character who will end up in the ash heap of history, as will his Tunisian, Egyptian, Libyan, and Syrian comrades tomorrow!

Christian Colas,
Paris

It is unconscionable to recommend marriage to any man under a legal regime in which he has no protection under the law

Echoing Stephen Baskerville, Vox is quoted by Instapundit as saying:

Nancy French asks what marriage has to offer men and decides that some major changes have to take place if young men are going to start considering marriage part of the normal and anticipated process of adulthood:

[P]arents have to stop getting divorced for less than dire reasons. …

Second, we must retract the message Boomers sent young women about female empowerment. Indeed, it isn’t a coincidence that marriage rates have plummeted alongside America’s fascination with the feminist movement. Empowerment for women, as defined by feminists, neither liberates women nor brings couples together. It separates them. It focuses on women as perpetual victims of the Big Bad Male. Why would any man want to get married when he’s been branded a sexist pig at “hello”? In the span of just a few decades, women have managed to demote men from respected providers and protectors to being unnecessary, irrelevant, and downright expendable.

Changing both of these things won't accomplish anything. It's not true that men have no idea what to look for. They know what they want, they're just not finding it as easily anymore. And it's not being branded "a sexist pig" that turns men off to marriage, it is the guarantee of severe economic liability and the unacceptably high possibility of losing his house, his children, his savings, and reducing his future net income.

It is unconscionable to recommend marriage to any man under a legal regime in which he has no protection under the law and can be forced out of his own home by a single false charge. While this state of affairs is fair to neither individual men nor individual women, the lamentable fact is that very, very few women, even conservative, politically minded women who are correctly concerned about what low marriage rates will do to American society, are willing to speak out against Marriage 2.0 because they still wish to retain the legal benefits it affords married women in the event of divorce.

Marriage is extremely important for societal stability and survival. But the current legal form of marriage is evil and is not only deleterious to society, but to men, women, and children alike.

A Nuremberg-scale trial for all the corporate agents and treasonous capitalisto-fascist architects of our democracy’s current and most pressing misery

“The scale of Right Wing sociopolitical sabotage necessitates a Nuremberg-scale trial for all the corporate agents and treasonous capitalisto-fascist architects of our democracy’s current and most pressing misery. From the blatant Republican policy doublespeak emanating from think-tank sponsored word doctors to the outright obstruction and lies expectorated by Republican congressional representatives and senators, the very concept of governance can only be considered once the culprits are removed. Driven to real madness by unadulterated greed they have embraced an ideology, the success of which hinges upon the very ruin of this nation.”

— Actor Steven Weber (from the 1990s NBC sitcom Wings) writing at the Huffington Post, October 24 (MRC Notable Quotables)

Like I wrote back in July 2010, if liberal opinions are

taken to their/to its logical conclusion…

…then Americans should go through some sort of reeducation centers to be made to understand the good they are being bestowed, and to be made to refrain from criticizing (at least, not too much) the Spiritual Guide who is benevolently bestowing them upon us;

…then democracy should be curtailed and elections banned (polls as well, probably), at least temporarily, so that the benevolent Great Helmsman can implement his (benevolent) policies in the absence of obstacles from clueless idiots— be they common citizens or the unpatriotic naysayers in the opposition;

…in fact, then Barack Obama should be allowed to dictate his (benevolent) policies to the nation (the nation of clueless clods who are preventing him from carrying those dashing avant-garde ideas of his through to completion).

While there have always been differences about how proactive government should be, few Europeans question the basic premise of a welfare state

Most Europeans associate democracy with a social safety net

writes Katrin Bennhold in The Female Factor in an International Herald Tribune article in which the German reporter manages to mock "the bellows of nostalgic 'bulldog' conservatives in Britain" while shrugging off memories of World War II as "this fixation with 1945 [which] has long been easy to dismiss as island mentality, empire nostalgia or perhaps compensation for repeated defeats by Germany on the soccer field." (That's the left for you — they hate to be reminded of the good the West has done (and enjoy dismissing memories thereof), but they adore "commemorating", ad infinitum, the West's sins, alleged or otherwise, and even when they are far older, like slavery and colonialism.)

Still, Katrin Bennhold's observations on the differences between Europe's health care systems are interesting, not least because they are based on personal knowledge, i.e., her "recent experience of pregnancy and birth in Europe’s three biggest economies". The most interesting observation? Perhaps the fact (or the alleged fact — I have tended to get skeptical over liberal observations over the years) that the "higher the birthrate, the higher the proportion of women in work — and the degree of state support for working mothers."

While there have always been pronounced differences about how proactive government should be, few Europeans question the basic premise of a welfare state.

… As the past three years of financial and economic strife have made plain, Europe does not have a common narrative for the 21st century. There is no European Union of welfare states, no common philosophy on how to run one’s economy or manage public finances, let alone European public opinion. Chancellor Angela Merkel’s efforts to make all Europeans more German have borne some fruit, but also rankled those who felt lectured and stymied.

Partly as a result, nationalism is increasingly prevalent across the 27-country bloc. A familiar fault line has emerged: “The euro crisis has sharpened the focus on old divisions over the role of the state in the economy and in people’s lives,” said Ute Frevert, director of the Center for the History of Emotions at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin.

This fault line runs across society. Just how differently the state treats one of the most basic experiences — motherhood — has been plain in my recent experience of pregnancy and birth in Europe’s three biggest economies.

In London, where I just had my second daughter in a public hospital by Caesarean section, I was sent home after three nights. Midwives who were supposed to check up on me and my baby at home in the days after never showed up.

In early 2009, when I had a first Caesarean section in Germany, I was in the hospital for more than a week. Pediatric nurses gave me one-on-one lessons on how to pick up my baby, bathe and even massage her. A specialized physiotherapist exercised with newborns every morning.

Meanwhile in France, where I spent most of my two pregnancies and the time between, I was offered months of physiotherapy to get abdominal muscles back into shape after giving birth.

The differences do not stop at the degree of pampering.

In Britain, more than one midwife evangelized about the benefits of giving birth at home, breast-feeding and drug-free “natural” birth. In France, when I inquired about waiting on an epidural, the doctor brushed me off by saying that 97 percent of French women have epidurals — “and for a good reason.” The same doctor informed me about hormones to stop the milk flow if I preferred not to nurse.

… as Avivah Wittenberg-Cox, chief executive of 20-first, a gender management consultancy, points out: “You can tell the different approaches to motherhood in Europe by looking at birthrates.” The higher the birthrate, the higher the proportion of women in work — and the degree of state support for working mothers.

“There are the countries that get it, like France and the Scandinavian countries, and the ones that don’t, like Germany, which has been losing population since 2003,” Ms. Wittenberg-Cox said.

In Iraq, once-dead streets now bustle with Thursday night shoppers and acres of razed buildings have been replanted with palatial new houses

In Iraq, the [war's] legacy will be lived, day by day, with fatalism and frustration at the country’s intractable political crises

writes Jack Healy somberly in an article that accompanies photographer David Gonzalez's Portraits of Iraqi Pride.

But it will also be lived with an undercurrent of optimism, particularly among the young, and a broad Iraqi resilience that predates the arrival of any American soldiers.

In Jack Healy's New York Times article, it is almost as an aside that we learn that the hellish nightmare that Iraqis have gone through since George W Bush sent the US Army to flush out Saddam Hussein's dictatorship in "an unpopular war" (aka a disaster) was perhaps not that bad after all.

… if the war gouged Iraq’s soul, it left lighter fingerprints, too.

… Soldiers or journalists returning for the first time since the depths of civil war sometimes marvel at the transformation of public and private life, how once-dead streets now bustle with Thursday night shoppers and acres of razed buildings have been replanted with palatial new houses. The muffled report of car bombs is startling, not inevitable.

Perhaps two million people have fled Iraq, but Iraqis like the ones pictured here have lived through the painful and terrifying gap between then and now. One raised two daughters. Another built a library of cookbooks and opened a pastry shop.

They are living and working and getting engaged and bringing up a new generation. They are more than a postscript to an unpopular war. For Iraq, they are what comes next.

Well? Should It?

Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
and never brought to mind?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot
and days of auld lang syne?
(Thanks to Duncan)

That Old Meme: We WOULD Support You, You Understand, exCEPT for Your "Set of ideas" ("That are Cranky, Extreme, and Backward-Looking")

It is a sad commentary that this late in the day “the right Republican” does not even seem to be running yet.

Again, The Economist — which just happened not to support George W Bush in 2004 and John McCain in 2008 — proves it has taken a hard turn towards the left as it castigates "compassionless conservatism" in its search for The right Republican.

Rather than answering the call for a credible right-of-centre, pro-business party to provide independents, including this newspaper, with a choice in November, it is saddling its candidate with a set of ideas that are cranky, extreme and backward-looking.

Happy New Year to One and All

Gandhi: “If you can’t retain your principles, take out your sword and fight”

In its 50 Years Ago section, the International Herald Tribune mentions a Gandhi quote that is not often referred to, reverently, by the war-and-violence-is-always-bad peacenik crowd.

1961 India Abandons Gandhi’s Policy

Premier Jawaharlal Nehru said today [Dec. 28, 1961] that his ruling Congress party had abandoned Mahatma Gandhi’s concept of non-violence. Mr. Nehru told a press conference that peace could not be maintained by cowardice, and that Gandhi’s concept of non-violence implied the disbanding of armies and virtual elimination of police. He defended his decision by quoting Gandhi as saying: “If you can’t retain your principles, take out your sword and fight.” He denied that India’s action constituted an encouragement for Indonesia to take over Dutch New Guinea. While India supports Indonesia’s claim to the Dutch-held territory, he said, he was hoping for a peaceful settlement of the problem. Mr. Nehru said that India had “full justification” for using armed force against Portugal, and by doing so India became the agent of “the irrepressive force of history.”

Will Obama Lose Iraq the Same Way that Carter Lost Iran?

In 1979 President Carter "lost Iran"

Gérald Olivier reminds us, as even French commentators (!) start noticing the good tidings that have reached Iraq (well, some of them at least) and start drawing comparisons between Barack Obama and Jimmy Carter.

The whole planet is still paying the price of his blindness. Tomorrow, will we be saying that Obama "lost Iraq"?

For a long time, I have been drawing parallels with Carter (not that there is anything unduly virtuoso in doing so) and, indeed, a number of us made the Jimmy Carter comparison before Barack Obama even won the 2008 election…

What Gingrich's liberal critics have always found insanely maddening about him is a reputation for intellectual depth

While Thomas Sowell again endorses Newt Gingrich, the New York Times Magazine publishes an interesting portrait of Newt.

The money quote of Matt Bai's long piece, followed by the concluding sentence:

What Gingrich provides, and what his liberal critics have always found insanely maddening about him, is a reputation for intellectual depth. Among the candidates, he alone combines contempt with credibility, not just giving voice to conservative fury but also making it sound like a legitimate basis for governing.

… The way Newt sees it, fate doesn’t hinge on his being a perfect man. Only a great one.

Can we just take a month or two to contemplate Obama the way we might a painting by Vermeer or any other astounding, ecstatic human achievement?

And the winner of the Media Research Center's Obamagasm Award is (dramatic pause)…

…Stephen Marche!

“Can we just enjoy Obama for a moment? Before the policy choices have to be weighed and the hard decisions have to be made, can we just take a month or two to contemplate him the way we might contemplate a painting by Vermeer or a guitar lick by the early-seventies Rolling Stones or a Peyton Manning pass or any other astounding, ecstatic human achievement? Because twenty years from now, we’re going to look back on this time as a glorious idyll in American politics, with a confident, intelligent, fascinating president riding the surge of his prodigious talents from triumph to triumph....’I am large, I contain multitudes,’ Walt Whitman wrote, and Obama lives that lyrical prophecy....Barack Obama is developing into what Hegel called a ‘world-historical soul,’ an embodiment of the spirit of the times. He is what we hope we can be.”

— Esquire’s Stephen Marche in a column for the magazine’s August 2011 issue: “How Can We Not Love Obama? Because Like It or Not, He Is All of Us.”

Check out all of the Media Research Center's Notable Quotable awards…

Because of Bush, "Iraq Has Been Deprived of Part of Its History" as Well as of Its "Stability" Under Saddam

Because of George W. Bush, editorializes a Le Monde editorial, Iraq has been deprived of the… "stability" that it apparently enjoyed under Saddam Hussein. And the country "has been deprived of part of its history" — whatever that means…

Specifically, writes Le Monde,

it will be years before Iraq rediscovers the path of stability.

Rediscovers (retrouve); doesn't that mean that Iraq enjoyed stability,i.e., a positive state, before the American invasion (called in Le Monde "Bush's war", as well as "a disaster"), i.e., during the murderous Saddam era?

To be sure, Le Monde goes out of its way to say that nobody will regret "one of the most bloodthirsty tyrants of the Middle East," a man "responsible for the death of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis." Needless to say, it ends all these "to be sures" with a "but" — and what a "but"!

But the Iraqis did not liberate themselves from this tyranny. The United States did not associate them with their [the Americans'] intervention. There are no "Free Iraqi Forces" to accompany the American troops when they enter Baghdad in April 2003.

Yeah? And so (what)? How many legions of Dutchmen, finally, helped in the allies' liberation of the German-occupied Netherlands and how many Filipinos helped in the ouster of the Japanese from the Philippines? Who cares?! As long as the oppression and blood-letting came to an end! This is where Le Monde writes that "Iraq has been deprived of part of its history", as if the family members of the "tens of thousands" who disappeared in the killing fields would not want their oppressor and his henchmen to be overthrown unless it was Iraqis who stood behind the deed and as if they would wait around for months, for years (decades?) more with more thousands of deaths until an Iraqi-led rebellion occurred…

Le Monde goes on with the Bush-lied canard as well as the can't-export-democracy-with-weapons meme, but in the final analysis, it all boils down to everything being the fault of the invasion, aka "Bush's war", from "the destabilization of America's public finances" to "the 2008 crisis" through the current "dead end" in Afghanistan.

In other words, prepare for a shocker — it's all turns out to be… the fault of one George W. Bush.

Update: Will Obama Lose Iraq the Same Way that Carter Lost Iran?

Raúl & Fidel: The Tyranny of the Enemy Brothers

Several books about the Castro brothers have been published in the past year, including one by the Cuban liders' own sister and one by Cuban émigré and specialist Jacobo Machover. We learn in Raúl & Fidel: The Tyranny of the Enemy Brothers that, as the title suggests, the two Castros are basically totally opposites, although they — obviously — work together and it could never have worked out any other way.

According to Martine Jacot's Le Monde book review, "Jacobo Machover points out everything that differentiates the two brothers and that has been doing so since their earliest childhood, even though they form a duo that is as inseparable as it is complementary."

Pour soulager la population, Raul voulait rouvrir les marchés paysans ; Fidel s'y opposait. A l'issue d'une discussion orageuse de plusieurs heures dans le bureau du Lider Maximo, d'où fusaient les éclats de voix, Raul obtint finalement gain de cause.

Pour avoir osé aborder les relations entre les frères Castro - secret d'Etat au même titre que la santé de chacun d'eux - Fernando Ravsberg faillit être expulsé de Cuba. Sermonné par Fidel dans les Réflexions qu'il publiait, le journaliste fit amende honorable sur son blog, où il écrivit : "Il n'y a pas de différences entre Raul et Fidel."

"Cubanologue" méticuleux depuis de nombreuses années - et anticastriste affiché -, Jacobo Machover souligne au contraire dans son livre tout ce qui différencie les deux frères depuis leur plus tendre enfance, bien qu'ils forment à la vie à la mort un duo aussi inséparable que complémentaire. Raul n'a jamais eu ni l'envergure intellectuelle, ni la faconde, ni l'habileté politique de Fidel, de cinq ans son aîné. Mais le cadet, organisateur, pragmatique, impitoyable à l'égard de tous les opposants, a permis au "Commandante" de briller de tous ses feux de chef révolutionnaire charismatique, et à son régime de survivre contre vents et marées depuis 1959.

On en apprend davantage sur Raul, dans cet ouvrage documenté, que sur Fidel. Quoi qu'en ait dit plus tard le Lider Maximo, dont le programme était assez confus lorsqu'il est entré en lutte contre la dictature de Batista, c'est Raul, adhérent du Parti communiste dès 1953 (à 22 ans), qui a fini par structurer la pensée désordonnée de son frère. Celui-ci n'embrassa le marxisme-léninisme qu'en 1961. Ernesto Guevara l'y a aidé, qui vénérait Staline (il a signé certaines lettres à sa famille "Staline II"). Fidel, lui, voulait avant tout le pouvoir, un pouvoir total.

Dans la Sierra Maestra, les "barbudos" définissent leur conception d'une "justice révolutionnaire" qui va confiner à la terreur, tranche l'auteur. Raul organisera l'exécution sommaire de dizaines de prisonniers, sans y assister, laissant ce soin au Che.

… Les temps ont changé, même à Cuba, où un moratoire sur les exécutions des condamnés à mort est en vigueur depuis 2003, réaffirmé par Raul en 2008. Toujours pragmatique, le cadet des Castro a converti ses généraux à la gestion, l'armée ayant fait main basse sur l'économie. Tandis que son frère s'efface peu à peu de la scène publique, le président cubain "décollectivise" l'île depuis trois ans. Avec des limites. Jacobo Machover, de même que la plupart des autres "cubanologues" l'affirment : Raul Castro ne sera pas le Gorbatchev de Cuba.

Save the Date

Act of Valor will be released in U.S. cinemas on 17 FEB 2011

Merry Christmas

After all your obligations are done for Christmas day, and you've done all the reflecting that you can do, might I suggest you settle in and relax with a treasure of a film starring Cary Grant, David Niven, Loretta Young, Monty Woolly, Elsa Lanchester, and one fo the great character actors of his day, James Gleason.

From 1947, this is The Bishop's Wife

Food for Thought On this day in History

There was no room at the inn for Mary. Just as would happen today, the innkeeper didn’t announce, “Folks, we have a woman among us who is about to have a child, let’s a couple of families combine rooms so she can have a bed! Let us keep vigil! Let us fast, then feast!”

Just as would happen today, the other guests didn’t rise up and say, “O blessed night, O holy night that God has sent this woman among us.” They gave her a cursory glance, saw she was poor, said, “Oh – too bad,” and sent her to the barn.

Just as today, the clerk at the chain motel would say, “Sorry, fifty-nine dollars plus tax,” and the rest of us would likely watch Mary trail back to her broken-down van as we go on snacking, texting, and scrolling through our Dish listings.

And yet in our better moments, we carry our little prayer around with us as Mary carried Christ. Like Mary, we’re in solidarity with all the poor, all those in exile, all who are powerless, frightened, weak. Like Jesus in today’s Gospel, we rejoice that the kingdom is revealed to the childlike. And just as back then, that prayer moves the world. Just as back then, that prayer is seen by the stars.

Reflection based on
Luke 10: 21-24 by Heather King

When iPhoto's Faces App Gets It Wrong

To its credit, iPhoto's face recognition technology does get it right, most of the time.
However…

Look who iPhoto confuses with an Arab Islamic extremist:


Look who iPhoto confuses with a Danish cartoonist:

(Jixie Juny is… my cat!)

Look who iPhoto confuses with (someone
wearing a mask depicting) Jacques Chirac:


Merry Christmas to all our readers and, for that matter, to everybody else…

Just Thinking Inside the Box, Here...

I’ve got an idea... let’s deindustrialize and impoverish western civilization on an unproven theory so that we can try to drop the worlds mean temperature by 0.6 degrees!

Little Stickers and Platitudes Insufficient

Dateline Tibet: Just when nobody could possibly need Chinese investment in shabby Eurozone bonds, the Dalai Lama is asking Catherine Ashton to keep asking China for EU diplomats to visit Tibet.

Zhu on Monday accused Western governments of funding the Dalai Lama's India-based movement to weaken China for strategic reasons.

He called the Dalai Lama a "savage" who gets young monks to set themselves on fire to provoke anti-Chinese feeling. He added that Chinese intelligence has evidence the head-in-exile of the Kirti monastery in Tibet, Kirti Rinpoche, organised three of the 12 recent self-immolations.

Regime change in China!, they demanded!

"Should the Chinese side reject the request, the EU could issue a strong statement of deep concern and raise the issue at international fora, such as the United Nations Human Rights Council."

To which the response will surely be “keep asking”, or “keep asking and...”

But China's man in charge of Tibet, vice-minister Zhu Weiqun, at a rare meeting with press in Brussels also on Monday, ruled out the possibility.

"China is an independent country and we have the full capacity to handle problems on our territory. So under no circumstances will we allow foreign fact-finding missions into the Tibetan autonomous region ... I don't believe that the interference of any foreign force could achieve anything constructive. Indeed it could very well lead to an escalation of the crisis and to wars," he told this website.

Why Maximize Employment when you can Maximize Welfare ?

In addition to Krugmann’s suggestion that the tax rate on “the wealthy”, whichever half or third of earners he thinks that is, should be 70%, the figure is derived by the suggestion that this will “maximize welfare” for the lower and middle class.

Obsessiveness about non-existent social castes and class aside, the correct term is Low/ Middle/ High INCOME. Like this bunghole apologist for State-Command-Economics, it’s rather obvious that the identification is one they’re so fluid in, that they forgot that they’re supposed to hide their pointless society impoverishing agitprop.

Thomas Sowell Endorses Newt Gingrich: "How much weight should we give to Newt's 'baggage' when we are talking about the future of a nation?"

If Newt Gingrich were being nominated for sainthood, many of us would vote very differently from the way we would vote if he were being nominated for a political office

writes Thomas Sowell as he endorsed Newt Gingrich over Mitt Romney today.

What the media call Gingrich's "baggage" concerns largely his personal life and the fact that he made a lot of money running a consulting firm after he left Congress.

… But how much weight should we give to this stuff when we are talking about the future of a nation?

This is not just another election and Barack Obama is not just another president whose policies we may not like. With all of President Obama's broken promises, glib demagoguery and cynical political moves, one promise he has kept all too well. That was his boast on the eve of the 2008 election: "We are going to change the United States of America."

Many Americans are already saying that they can hardly recognize the country they grew up in. We have already started down the path that has led Western European nations to the brink of financial disaster.

Internationally, it is worse. A president who has pulled the rug out from under our allies, whether in Eastern Europe or the Middle East, tried to cozy up to our enemies, and has bowed low from the waist to foreign leaders certainly has not represented either the values or the interests of America. If he continues to do nothing that is likely to stop terrorist-sponsoring Iran from getting nuclear weapons, the consequences can be beyond our worst imagining.

Against this background, how much does Newt Gingrich's personal life matter, whether we accept his claim that he has now matured or his critics' claim that he has not?

… Do we wish we had another Ronald Reagan? We could certainly use one. But we have to play the hand we were dealt. And the Reagan card is not in the deck.

… Those who want to concentrate on the baggage in Newt Gingrich's past, rather than on the nation's future, should remember what Winston Churchill said: "If the past sits in judgment on the present, the future will be lost."

All the Newt Gingrich posts on No Pasarán…

Arrogantly Saving the Planet with Bumper Stickers

Selfishly mounted on NON-ELECTRIC VEHICLES for that matter!

For Fans of the Deliciously Grim

No-one told the operators that the USSR ever really went away.



Then somebody took pictures, recorded audio, and mashed up a remix out of the scraps left behind by a paranoid and repressive state.

Another One Bites the Dust

Kim Jong-il, 1941-2011

Writes Julie Anna: It's only fair that after Hitchens and Havel, the dark side also lost a fellow comrade — Kim Jong II

Update: Josh Trevino’s tweet of the year:

I’d like to think God let Havel and Hitchens pick the third.

Berlinski on America

Her message works well with those who have known nothing but irrational criticism for it, and anything and everything about it. You know the type. The ones at home and worldwide who emit a Pavlovian response to any subject eliciting a through on the United States. If you’re lucky, you might get some partially rephrased variation on the canned argument that you will hear used again a block away wherever you happen to find yourself.

Berlinski:

America is like no other place on earth. For all the talk of pessimism, recession, decline and fall, this remains--so clearly!--a country of mad, nutty, innocence and optimism; it is a place where everything works; it is a place where every man feels in the depth of his soul that he is the equal of every other man, and it is a country so free, in so many ways, that I doubt I will ever be able to convince anyone who hasn't seen it with his own eyes that this kind of freedom really exists.

That’s the quality of life thing like no other – the one that relates to life itself. It’s normally accompanied by a tut-tutting retort related to anything the critic thinks their nation does well, such as high-speed trains. Trains being a suitable retort to someone, somewhere being happy about the feeling that they have in the depth of their soul which the critic for no particular reason feels a need to retort. I hear engineering can do that for ya.

She does have words with something in the US that doesn’t work, though:

And this brings me to the First Law of Journalism. For some reason, American journalism's just not working. I figure we'll solve this problem; that's what we do. But as of now, it's broken. Exhibit A: Time Magazine's US Story of the Year. The Occupy Wall Street Protests Spread. Well, here I am on Wall Street, or very close to it, anyway, and if this is someone's idea of the top story--or even a major story--he's crazy as an outhouse rat. The top story? In a year, say, in which the United States, for the first time in 62 years, has become a net energy exporter?

So here's my advice. You know what you hear in the news? If you haven't seen it with your own eyes, don't believe it. And don't worry so much about America, it will probably be fine.

It’s worth noting some of the characteristic features of this non-operative piece of gear: its willfully developed its’ disingenuousness through a political ideology that has specific motives and largely looks to two general areas for affirmation: within its own ideological echo chamber, and to specific societies outside of the US that are conspicuously hostile to any outlook that hints at the curtailment of the power of the state or the crowding out of the individuals’ opinion by socially favored castes and ideologies.

But the most astonishing thing about America is this. I know full well that I can go on television, with millions of people watching, and say anything I please about the American government--anything--and even if for some malignant reason I feel like saying something false, gratuitously insulting, bad for the stock market, ruinous to a politician's happy marriage, or frankly seditious, I can just say it, and when I walk out of the studio, whatever I said will be between me and my conscience. It won't even occur to me that I may have exposed myself to an unpleasant risk of a pre-dawn police raid and a show trial. Possibly I'll get a few indignant e-mails.

The color coded-public-conveniences, the high-speed trains, and the stylized buzz of generic modernity are nice, but that isn’t the least bit meaningful where the dominant theme of the information set and public intellectuals is that of the demonizer or the bully.

The stylized buzz of generic modernity does not actually indicate that you’re in civilization.

1961: "the German public, and many German government officials, have regarded the Eichmann trial primarily as an irritating event"

…observers could see only limited signs that the [Eichmann] proceedings in Jerusalem occasioned a sympathetic reaction [in Germany] toward the Jews

we learn from the International Herald Tribune's In Our Pages 50 Years Ago department (also of interest: Bin Laden and Eichmann).

1961 Few Germans Back Eichmann Verdict

West Germany’s ambiguous reaction today [Dec. 15, 1961] to the death sentence conferred in Israel on Adolf Eichmann reflected the equivocal attitude which the German public has displayed toward his trial from the outset. There was relatively little indication this afternoon of a belief among the German people that justice triumphed in the Israeli courtroom. From the start, observers here have been aware that the German public, and many German government officials, have regarded the trial primarily as an irritating event which could damage West Germany’s present-day interests. Although there has been extensive coverage of the Eichmann story by German newspapers and television stations, observers could see only limited signs that the proceedings in Jerusalem occasioned a sympathetic reaction toward the Jews.

Good-Bye, Friend

Václav Havel, 1936-2011

Děkuji to Instapundit!
If you have a few minutes, you might want to reminisce about the time when Havel criticized Obama (in an affair involving three Nobel Prize winners) and how, when a member of the European élite became involved in Obama criticism, suddenly American liberals like Maureen Dowd found it much harder to accuse the Obama critic of being a clueless racist… Update: just learned that Havel never did receive the Nobel Prize (thanks to Instapundit again); well, as Rand Simberg remarks, he certainly deserved it more than Obama or Arafat, for that matter…