Is there no one in Francois Hollande's entourage with the courage to say, sorry but this is a one way-autoroute to absurdity?

It is ironic 

quips Stephen Clarke

– politicians get to live their dream of ultimate power and it turns so quickly to nightmare. And the sad thing in [Francois Hollande]’s case is that, leaving all political allegiances aside, only one of the nightmares was really his fault. The problem was that this one mistake was all-embracing.

The question I’ve been asking myself all year, or rather most of the time since he was elected, is: how has he managed to surround himself with such a bad gang of advisors?

I thought this most recently when Le Président went to Kazakhstan in early December, and someone allowed him to be photographed wearing local costume, which doubtless looks great when you’re riding a Mongolian pony across the steppes, but less so when you’re a small Frenchman swamped in a fur hat and mountainous overcoat, and standing next to the Kazakhstani president who is looking comfortable in his sharp French-style  suit? Which member of M. Hollande’s entourage said ” oh oui, a photo opportunity as an exhibit in a folklore museum, bonne idée”?

More importantly, why did no one say it was a terrible idea and steer him clear of trouble?

But by then, it was no longer a surprise. After all, the year started terribly with the magazine article revealing that France’s president had thought that it was a clever idea to borrow a love nest a few metres outside the presidential palace and drive there on the back of a scooter to meet his mistress – when he was already being criticised for installing a high-maintenance unmarried First Lady in his official residence? Honestly, is there no one in his entourage with the courage or the nous to say, sorry but this is a one way-autoroute to absurdity?

Apparently not…

 … speaking of the economy, what kind of Socialist president is so badly advised that he nominates a minister of commerce who is then forced to resign when accusations are made that he has been less than scrupulous about paying his income tax? This happened in September when Thomas Thevenoud stepped down – after only nine days in the job. Did no one check out his CV? Did no one say, we’re Socialists, so let’s spend five minutes seeing if the candidate has the right credentials? The answer is apparently non. All of which must make 2014 a year that M. Hollande might want to skip over when he writes his autobiography.

50 Years Since We Said a Last Good-Bye to Winston Churchill

After Sir Winston Churchill died on Jan 24 1965, his body lay in state for three days at Westminster Hall 

writes the Daily Telegraph.

Mourners queued in wintry weather to pay their respects. It was only the second time that the Monarch had bestowed the honour of a state funeral on a Prime Minister – the first was William Gladstone in 1898.

Here are some choice quotes of Churchill, who makes an appearance in Erik Svane and Thierry Capezzone's Daisy graphic novel • Is That Winston Speaking of the Iraq War of 2003?
• WInston Churchill on Socialism and the Cold War

Massaging the Message: In a complete inversion of reality, the Charlie Hebdo massacre story is morphing into a parable about how difficult it is to be a Muslim in the West

Benny Huang has been wondering how long it was going to take for "the talking heads on MSNBC to portray Muslims as the true victims of the Charlie Hebdo massacre."

In a complete inversion of reality, this story is morphing into a parable about how difficult it is to be a Muslim in Europe.

  … MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell is deeply concerned about the terrorist attacks that rocked Paris earlier this month. Unfortunately, her misdirected concern seems to manifest itself in a lot of fretting over how the attacks will benefit the political Right.

“There are two other issues that need to be addressed,” said Mitchell. “One is anti-Muslim sentiment throughout Europe, anti-immigration sentiment, the rise of the right wing, and of course anti-Semitism.”

 … Mitchell’s comments echoed sentiments expressed by Christopher Dickey, Newsweek’s bureau chief in Paris, who appeared on MSNBC’s The Cycle. “This is an issue that’s going to be used very effectively and cynically by the far-right politicians,” said Dickey, “not only of France but especially in the rest of Europe, places like Dresden, places like the Netherlands…” Translation: Europe’s insufferable right-wingers aren’t actually concerned with the seemingly endless acts of terrorism or even about their own culture being displaced by one that’s stuck in the seventh century. They merely “use” those issues, “very effectively and cynically.” It’s brown skin they hate.

 … Andrea Mitchell and Christopher Dickey spend an inordinate amount of time worrying that the wrong people will reap electoral benefits from media coverage of the Paris attacks. It’s difficult to imagine Mitchell, Dickey, or any other reporter working for any other mainstream news outfit fretting that saturation coverage of the 2011 Tucson shooting would be used “effectively and cynically” by gun-grabbers on the far Left, probably because they can’t even conceive of anything called “the far Left.”

Incidentally, I once debated Christopher Dickey (the son of novelist James Dickey) on international television.

The dirty little secret of journalism is that reporters are very conscious of their substantial influence. They are not just hired eyes and ears conveying all they see and hear. Journalists know that news coverage can impact policy and world events. Consequently, they think of their constant massaging of the news as just plain old responsibility. Yet most journalists still pay lip service to the ideal of covering the news without fear or favor, something that simply can’t be achieved while constantly placing their collective thumb on the scale to ensure that one side of the debate can never win.

That’s not “responsibility;” it’s rigging the game. The role of journalists isn’t to wonder whom their stories will benefit. Their job is to report the news and let the chips fall where they may.

Mitchell and Dickey aren’t the only reporters who ask themselves “What will the Right do with this story?” A case in point can be found in Andrew Norfolk, the Times of London reporter who broke the Rotherham sex ring story in which a group of child rapists across Northern England victimized approximately 1,400 young girls. Authorities were aware of the sex ring for about eleven years of its sixteen year existence but refused to make arrests because the perpetrators were almost entirely Pakistani men and the victims were almost entirely white English girls.

Andrew Norfolk admitted feeling tempted to join the government in its conspiracy of silence. “I didn’t want the story to be true because it made me deeply uncomfortable,” said Norfolk. “The suggestion that men from a minority ethnic background were committing sex crimes against white children was always going to be the far right’s fantasy story come true. Innocent white victims, evil dark-skinned abusers. Liberal angst kicked instinctively into top gear.”

Thankfully he got over his liberal angst long enough to cover the story but his admitted reluctance to do his job raises questions about deeper problems in the journalistic community. How many other Rotherham-type stories never see the light of day because some reporter feels duty-bound not to give the Right any grist for their mill? We may never know.

Norfolk’s remarks are troubling for another reason—his implication that young girls being raped is the fulfillment of the far Right’s fantasy.

 … France has its own censors, ever eager to filter the news out of some warped sense of responsibility. Jean-Claude Dassier, director general of the news outfit LCI—France’s version of CNN—admitted in 2005 that his network shielded viewers from seeing the true destruction wrought by angry Muslim rioters who were then besieging France. “Politics in France is heading to the right and I don’t want rightwing politicians back in second, or even first place because we showed burning cars on television,” he confided.

The only rational conclusion is that Dassier wants to keep the French public uninformed because they’d likely vote for Front National, France’s unapologetically nationalist party, if they knew what the heck was happening to their country. Better not to cover the news lest people figure out that the “bigots” have a point.

 … I have no doubt that most journalists think very hard about what they broadcast and that’s the problem. They don’t give it to us straight. The constant impulse to shape the news to fit an agenda strips their reporting of any value. That omnipresent question “What would the Right do with this?” hangs over their coverage, influencing editorial decisions to the point that their end product can only be called propaganda.

Kalashnikov AK47s seem to be as trendy in France as iPhones

I wasn’t exactly surprised by the attack 

confesses the Telegraph's Stephen Clarke.

First of all, there have been plenty of shootings with AK47s in France recently. They seem to be as trendy as iPhones. They even have a slang name in French – “une kalache“. Most of them are apparently in the Marseille area, in the possession of drug gangs, but they also get sold on to the rest of France. A couple of years ago, only three or four kilometres from where I live, some Polish men were walking to a birthday party when they were stopped by two muggers, one of whom had a Kalashnikov. When the Poles refused to hand over their money, the gunman let rip, killing one victim and shooting his friend in the foot. The police caught them soon afterwards, after a man arrived at a nearby hospital complaining that he’d lost some of his toes in an accident. It sounds insane, but it’s true, and the surviving Poles were probably lucky that their mugger hadn’t had any weapons training.

The other reason why I was horrified, but not exactly surprised, by the Charlie Hebdo attack was that the magazine had been provoking some highly sensitive people. Of course I’m not saying that anyone deserved to be shot. I’m just saying that extreme provocation was the magazine’s raison d’être, and they knew that they were playing with fire. That was why the editor had a police bodyguard (who was also killed in the attack). Charlie Hebdo belongs to a tradition of French satire that pushes anti-establishment mockery to the edge, and beyond. Their cartoons could be viciously accurate, especially when deflating the egos of politicians, but they could also be just plain offensive. Often they had a point, but sometimes they seemed to forget the point and descend into gratuitous obscenity.

This was why the French were fond of Charlie Hebdo, even if hardly any of them actually read it until this week. Cabu, Wolinski and the veteran cartoonists were like old friends. The kind of friends you love but wouldn’t dare invite to your house because you know they’d take the pee out of your other guests, graffiti the walls, and explain to you why your whole life was a failure – while smiling charmingly. They were like Sheldon in The Big Bang Theory – social misfits who felt it was their duty to broadcast their home truths loud and clear, and who couldn’t understand if anyone was offended. The sad thing is that real life is not an American sitcom.

For all these reasons, I personally am not so sure that the cover of today’s edition of Charlie Hebdo is a good idea. Why cause new offence, when what France really needs is some determined peacemaking?  …

Governmental censorship has infested the birthplaces of Voltaire and John Stuart Mill

 … in the wake of the horrific massacre at the offices of French satire magazine Charlie Hebdo

writes Benny Huang, a defiant breeze has swept across Europe.

Londoners, Berliners, and Romans are reaching out in solidarity to the people of Paris in their time of grief and anger. “Je Suis Charlie” (I am Charlie) they proclaim, an affirmation of their common European heritage of free speech and openness.

Yet I can’t help but wonder if the mourners aren’t a day late and a euro short in their defense of a value that has slowly but persistently eroded over a period of decades. It would be wonderful if the sentiment expressed at these vigils were a genuine revival of the spirit of 1848 but it hardly seems possible to “defend” a principle that in all likelihood no longer exists.

Free speech is dead in Europe and while it is certainly tempting to blame the immigrants, as intolerant as they may be, it would also be folly. The real culprits are the cowardly, hedonistic, post-Christian, post-industrial native born white majority.

The three bestial al-Qaeda terrorists who murdered twelve people at Charlie Hebdo HQ might seem like menacing enemies of free speech but they’re actually bush league amateurs when it comes to gagging people. The real pros are sitting behind desks in the various capitals of Europe. Nearly every European nation extends some guarantee of free speech to its citizens, and nearly every one of them flagrantly violates that guarantee.

  … The authorities in Britain arrest people who harbor banned ideas, and believe me, I’ve got a lot of them. Clegg’s prescient countryman, Eric Blair (George Orwell) predicted this phenomenon nearly seventy years ago and gave it a name—thoughtcrime.

Thought criminals should take notice that they will find no shelter in today’s United Kingdom. Little more than a week before the cartoon jihadists spilled French blood, police in Scotland tweeted the following threat: “Please be aware that we will continue to monitor comments on social media & any offensive comments will be investigated.” Offensive to whom, exactly? They don’t say. But in a free society it shouldn’t matter a lick. Offensive comments are exactly the kind of comments that free speech is designed to protect. Innocuous comments don’t require protection.

  … On the Continent, outspoken MP Geert Wilders faces criminal prosecution under “hate speech” laws for comments he made about immigration. At a rally in the Hague he asked a crowd “Do you want more or fewer Moroccans?” to which they chanted, “Fewer! Fewer! Fewer!” Mindless xenophobia? I don’t think so, though it’s also irrelevant. Free speech protects mindless xenophobia.

Nor is everyone feeling the spirit of freedom after the Charlie Hebdo massacre. Swedish MP Veronica Palm contacted the police to report that another MP of an opposing party, Bjoern Soeder, might have violated Swedish law with a comment he posted on Facebook concerning the terrorist attack in Paris. “’The Religion of Peace’ shows its face,” he said, clearly indicating with his use of derisive quotes that he doubts Islam’s pacifistic nature, as many people do. His nemesis Veronica Palm declared: “This statement is offensive to a group of people and I want to see if it comes under laws against inciting racial hatred.” Ms. Palm apparently does not understand that Islam is not a race. Even if it were, free speech guarantees the right to make racist comments as well.

Are we much better? Oh, a little bit, I suppose. Anyone who thinks that free speech is alive and well in America ought to experience the suffocating environment of academia. If you happen to be on a college campus and you still think America guarantees a healthy exchange of controversial ideas then you’re probably one of the drones who keeps the rest of us line. Good for you.

Europe, however, is a decade or two ahead of us in the downward slide toward mind control. Governmental censorship has infested the birthplaces of Voltaire and John Stuart Mill.

The land of humblebrag and its drunk, depressed, lazy, tumor-ridden, pig-bonking bureaucrats

In the American liberal compass, the needle is always pointing to places like Denmark

writes The New York Post's Kyle Smith (tack till Instapundit).

Everything they most fervently hope for here has already happened there.

So: Why does no one seem particularly interested in visiting Denmark? (“Honey, on our European trip, I want to see Tuscany, Paris, Berlin and . . . Jutland!”) Visitors say Danes are joyless to be around. Denmark suffers from high rates of alcoholism. In its use of antidepressants it ranks fourth in the world. (Its fellow Nordics the Icelanders are in front by a wide margin.) Some 5% of Danish men have had sex with an animal. Denmark’s productivity is in decline, its workers put in only 28 hours a week, and everybody you meet seems to have a government job. Oh, and as The Telegraph put it, it’s “the cancer capital of the world.”

So how happy can these drunk, depressed, lazy, tumor-ridden, pig-bonking bureaucrats really be?

Let’s look a little closer, asks Michael Booth, a Brit who has lived in Denmark for many years, in his new book, “The Almost Nearly Perfect People: Behind the Myth of the Scandinavian Utopia” (Picador).

Those sky-high happiness surveys, it turns out, are mostly bunk. Asking people “Are you happy?” means different things in different cultures. In Japan, for instance, answering “yes” seems like boasting, Booth points out. Whereas in Denmark, it’s considered “shameful to be unhappy,” newspaper editor Anne Knudsen says in the book.

Moreover, there is a group of people that believes the Danes are lying when they say they’re the happiest people on the planet. This group is known as “Danes.”
 
“Over the years I have asked many Danes about these happiness surveys — whether they really believe that they are the global happiness champions — and I have yet to meet a single one of them who seriously believes it’s true,” Booth writes. “They tend to approach the subject of their much-vaunted happiness like the victims of a practical joke waiting to discover who the perpetrator is.”

 … Denmark is a land of 5.3 million homogenous people. Everyone talks the same, everyone looks the same, everyone thinks the same.

This is universally considered a feature — a glorious source of national pride in the land of humblebrag. Any rebels will be made to conform; tall poppies will be chopped down to average.

 … One of the most country’s most widely known quirks is a satirist’s crafting of what’s still known as the Jante Law — the Ten Commandments of Buzzkill. “You shall not believe that you are someone,” goes one. “You shall not believe that you are as good as we are,” is another. Others included “You shall not believe that you are going to amount to anything,” “You shall not believe that you are more important than we are” and “You shall not laugh at us.”

 … Macho isn’t a problem in Sweden. Dubbed the least masculine country on Earth by anthropologist Geert Hofstede, it’s the place where male soldiers are issued hairnets instead of being made to cut their hair.

 … As for its supposedly sweet-natured national persona, in a poll in which Swedes were asked to describe themselves, the adjectives that led the pack were “envious, stiff, industrious, nature-loving, quiet, honest, dishonest and xenophobic.” In last place were these words: “masculine,” “sexy” and “artistic.”

Scandinavia, as a wag in The Economist once put it, is a great place to be born — but only if you are average. The dead-on satire of Scandinavian mores “Together” is a 2000 movie by Sweden’s Lukas Moodysson set in a multi-family commune in 1975, when the groovy Social Democratic ideal was utterly unquestioned in Sweden.

In the film’s signature scene, a sensitive-apron wearing man tells his niece and nephew as he is making breakfast, “You could say that we are like porridge. First we’re like small oat flakes — small, dry, fragile, alone. But then we’re cooked with the other oat flakes and become soft. We join so that one flake can’t be told apart from another. We’re almost dissolved. Together we become a big porridge that’s warm, tasty, and nutritious and yes, quite beautiful, too. So we are no longer small and isolated but we have become warm, soft and joined together. Part of something bigger than ourselves. Sometimes life feels like an enormous porridge, don’t you think?”

Then he spoons a great glutinous glob of tasteless starch unto the poor kids’ plates. That’s Scandinavia for you, folks: Bland, wholesome, individual-erasing mush. But, hey, at least we’re all united in being slowly digested by the system.

Muhammad will be back on the cover of the next edition of Charlie Hebdo,

reports Fox News,

along with a message of forgiveness from surviving staffers at the French satirical magazine where 12 people were killed last week by a pair of Islamist brothers angered over the publication's penchant for showing images of the prophet.

The decimated, but uncowed magazine upped its usual print run of 60,000 copies to 3 million for the magazine, due out Wednesday but released to the French newspaper Liberation. Fierce bidding on eBay had editions commanding as much as $500 following the outpouring of support for Charlie Hebdo, whose four top cartoonists were among the dozen killed. Editor-in-chief Gérard Biard said in a Tuesday radio interview the decision to run a cartoon if Muhammad holding a a “Je Suis Charlie” sign with the caption "Tout est pardonné," or "All is forgiven," and said the message was not that Muhammad was offering forgiveness, as some initially assumed.

"It is we who forgive, not Muhammad,” he told France Info.

Be Careful, the Artists Might Be Armed

Like millions of others around the world, I’m horrified and grief-stricken by the sickening events that unfolded in Paris this week

writes the Daily Telegraph's Mark Johnson,

that snuffed out the lives of 12 innocents in a brutal and murderous attack.
 
It’s difficult to comprehend the malignancy that orders the death of innocent people in the name of anything, let alone a religion. The French national motto ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’ has been tested, but it will prevail.

As a nation now takes the time it needs to mourn the terrible loss of January 7, Charlie Hebdo – the name of the newspaper where the attacks were focused – is at the same time becoming world famous as a symbol of defiance against those who would seek to control freedom of expression.

 

A French Immigrant to America Explains the Charlie Hebdo Phenomenon to His Yankee Hosts (NSFW)

[Disclaimer: not for young children, and definitely NSFW]

RV:

I was listening to NPR [Thursday] morning and, on the top of the usual tripe, some idiot correspondent in Paris described Charlie Hebdo as a mix of Mad, Playboy, and The Daily Show.

Oh boy.

If you're interested, I'll try to describe what it was, where it comes from, and why the death of the main, historical cartoonists is such a shock for 3 generations of French people.

This is my take on it, I don't pretend to be objective. I'm a Frenchman who grew up with these guys, and stuff they did played a big role in my childhood.

  … First off, French humor in general is far more rude and crass than American humor. We're not nearly as prudish as Americans in general are, and culturally much more confrontational than Americans, who already are a very confrontational bunch by world's standards.

Evidently, it's impossible to give a proper comparison or point of reference in the American pop culture, especially being an immigrant that knows very little about American pop culture.

As it stood 2 days ago, the best humor equivalent I can think of would be some moments in the movie Team America, World Police: getting a point across in and crude way, uncaring of people's opinions and beliefs, and primarily for shits and giggles. Here's a very Charlie Hebdo moment in this movie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2cV_q-mVAAA

Charlie Hebdo used to be a pretty underground, extremely Gallic mag called Hara Kiri. This wiki page traces the transition from Hara Kiri to Charlie Hebdo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hara-Kiri_%28magazine%29

Hara Kiri's subtitle was "Le journal bête et méchant": litt. the stupid and mean magazine, but IMHO it's better translated as the For Shits and Giggles Magazine.

They were running extremely outrageous stuff, even by Gallic standards. If you're not at the office, here are some covers: https://www.google.com/search?q=hara+kiri+magazine&espv=2&biw=1110&bih=1042&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=zrquVLiYMsauggSG0oCwDw&ved=0CAYQ_AUoAQ

The founder and captain of this boat of fools was a particular character with the nom de plume Professeur Choron. The guy is kind of an armchair general GG Allin … [Professeur Choron (Georges Bernier)] was (he died in 2005) an extremely rude, nihilistic, alcoholic, in-your-face jerk, but he also was extremely well read and witty, and he saw through literally everybody's bullshit. He could bury anybody under a pile of his own shit in 2 sentences, discarding entirely the "class" and "social rank" of who he was addressing. He hated absolutely everybody: French, Italians, Jews, Arabs, Germans, Blacks, Americans, Russians, Chinese, any nationality, any race or creed, you name it; the whole damn world was a shitter to him, and he was the guy taking a massive dump in it while enjoying himself and making everybody laugh at the same time.

He's the guy who set the tone for Hara Kiri and later Charlie Hebdo. Hara Kiri used to be pretty underground, but everybody who was in their teens in the 60s knew it. My father had a subscription to this mag and kept them, and I used to steal them (he didn't want me to get a hold of them) when I was a teenager. They were so crass and rustled so many jimmies that they ended up being influential; much to their regret I would say, because they were merely working hard on the funniest way shit in your cornflakes, nothing more, nothing less.

It's probably hard to understand why such a thing would be so popular on that side of the pond, but keep in mind that the post-WW2 generations on the 2 sides of the ponds grew to to have extremely divergent mindsets. I won't venture into some victors vs humiliated losers pseudo-philosophical tripe, you get the point.

As cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo grew older, they got much softer too. But they really kept their extremely provocative attitude from Hara Kiri, something they took pride in, and everybody in France saluted them for, to the extent it became a source of national pride when these goat fuckers got their panties in a twist over a drawing.

Then there was Cabu, the main cartoonist at Charlie Hebdo. Cabu [Jean Cabut] was a pretty soft spoken, far left leaning Anarchist. This guy worked at Hara Kiri then Charlie Hebdo, but also other cartoon magazines like Fluide Glacial that many people my generation read. He also featured in kids TV show like Récré A2 that virtually my entire generation watched (there were 3 TV channels nation wide at the time) when coming back from school. I don't know any American equivalent since I didn't grow up here, but imagine a guy you used to watch and love every day for your entire childhood: he was THAT guy to an entire generation of French people.

Cabu was very far from Choron as it comes to personal behavior, but they did share a very strong taste for "provocation", for lack of a better term.

Charb [Stéphane Charbonnier] and Tignous [Bernard Verlhac] are also well know by the large readership of Fluide Glacial, a cartoon mag that made 2 generations of French people laugh their asses off, and counting.

Wolinksi has always been a commie, but he published so many cartoons and drew in so many commie publications that a lot of people knew and enjoyed him (there's no shortage of commies in France).

So there it is: these people were considered a national treasure, and they were a huge part of French popular culture for 3 generations of French people. Even though they were arguably controversial and proud of it, they were not considered such in France, since they became such an important part of the modern French culture. Don't get me wrong, I'm not idolizing them, after all I disagreed with Charlie's political views 99% of the time, but to the average Frenchman they were an actual part of our lives, including mine.

This is what we lost [Wednesday]. …

Update: More covers from ActuaBD (merci à OT)

Three Commando-Style Islamists Have Been Identified, Hunt for Cartoonist Killers Continues

French police have identified the three Islamist gunmen who mounted Wednesday's terrorist attack at a Paris satirical magazine's office 

reports Fox News, killing four controversial cartoonists along with eight other people.

Two officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, named the suspects to

the Associated Press as Frenchmen Said Kouachi and Cherif Kouachi, in their early 30s, as well as 18-year-old Hamyd Mourad, whose nationality wasn't immediately clear.

One of the officials said they were linked to a Yemeni terrorist network.

All three remain at large.

 … The gunmen moved with the skill and precision of highly-trained commandos, military experts told FoxNews.com.

Decimation of Charlie Hebdo Artists: "Not Afraid"

Following the bloody attack on Charlie Hebdo's editorial office, tens of thousands of demonstrators gathered in cities all over France in the evening.

France Gathers to Mourn Charlie Hebdo's Satirical Artists

See No Pasarán's archives on Charlie Hebdo, the martyred magazine which was firebombed already in 2011.

• "Go to the Devil, Charlie Hebdo!" "You Will Reap the Consequences" 

“We’ve avenged the honor of the prophet!” the killers shouted after they machine-gunned the Paris office of a satirical publication, killing at least 12

Three black-clad gunmen shouting "Allahu Akbar!" stormed the Paris offices of a satirical publication known for lampooning Islam Wednesday, 

reports Fox News,

killing 12, including its editor, three political cartoonists and a police officer whose cold-blooded murder at close range was captured on a disturbing video.

The masked, Kalashnikov-toting shooters moved with military precision, and then escaped following the 11:30 a.m. attack at Charlie Hebdo, the publication known for challenging Muslim terrorists with a 2011 caricature of Prophet Muhammed on its cover and which recently tweeted a cartoon of Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and were being sought.

“We’ve avenged the honor of the prophet!” the killers shouted, according to witnesses who spoke to Sky News. Other witnesses said the men shouted "Allahu Akbar," Arabic for "God is great." The gunmen spoke French without any accent, according to Le Monde.

Les dessinateurs (de gauche à droite) Cabu, Charb, Tignous, et Wolinski,
tous décédés dans la fusillade de "Charlie Hebdo" © DR

That evening, tens of thousands of Frenchmen will gather in streets across France to mourn the deaths of the Charlie Hebdo artists and to declare that they are not afraid…

The French consumer really ought to feel grateful to the French service sector for actually serving them

… today is the first day of the winter soldes – the sales

exclaims Stephen Clarke.

 … any shop daring to start its soldes before 8am, even online, could have been hit with a hefty fine. The sales are defined in article D 310-15-2 of France’s code du commerce, and various government websites publish timetables giving the exact dates when they’re permitted to start and finish.

Strange, you might think, to be so strict. Surely the French government should be rebooting the economy, letting businesses do what they want to make money? We’ve recently been told that two major links in the French retail chain are about to break. Surcouf, a computer shop, and the Virgin Megastores are putting their electronic keys under their mousepads. You’d think that France would have encouraged them to slash prices and tempt in the customers before things got too bad. Mais non. You will begin your winter sales on (and I quote) “8 o’clock on the morning of the second Wednesday in January, except if it falls after the 12th, in which case the sales will begin on the first Wednesday of January.” It’s the same for the summer sales, except they’re on the last Wednesday of June. And they can only last for five weeks.

To us free-market Anglos, it sounds crazy. If I as a shopkeeper want to cut my profits and clear my shelves or racks before, say, going ski-ing or heading off on a stockbuying trip, why shouldn’t I?

The simple answer is: because you’re in France. But to get some more subtle detail on the subject, I turned to an expert, Pascale Hebel, head of the consumer department of the Crédoc, the Centre de Recherche pour l’Étude et l’Observations des Conditions de Vie.

“It’s all about protecting small businesses,” she told me. “The law stops big chain stores cutting prices whenever they want, and it also makes it illegal to sell anything at a loss, even during sales periods. That way, small businesses, who can’t afford to sell too cheaply, have a fair chance.”

This is similar to the French law that protects small bookshops – even the on-line giants can’t take more than 5% off the recommended retail price of a book, which explains why there are still so many independents (and, incidentally, why French books are so incredibly expensive – the French large paperback edition of my 1000 Years of Annoying the French costs 21 euros, compared to about £9 full price in the UK.)

 … In short, in sounds like business as usual – the French consumer really ought to feel grateful to the French service sector for actually serving them.

You're in the Army Now: “While these insurgents are chopping people’s heads off and raping women, the idea they can take us to court because somebody shouted at them is ridiculous”

The latest military guidelines on interrogating terrorists and other prisoners are so stringent that it makes interrogation pointless, write Robert Mendick and Tim Ross in the Daily Telegraph (“Don’t yell at terrorist suspects, soldiers told”).

British soldiers have “lost their capability” to interrogate terrorist insurgents because of strict new rules on questioning that even ban shouting in captives’ ears, military chiefs have warned.

The rules — detailed in court papers obtained by The Telegraph — also prevent military intelligence officers from banging their fists on tables or walls, or using “insulting words” when interrogating a suspect.

 … “The effect of the ambulance-chasing lawyers and the play-it-safe judges is that we have got to the point where we have lost our operational capability to do tactical questioning. That in itself brings risks to the lives of the people we deploy.

“These insurgents are not nice people. These are criminals. They behead people; they keep sex slaves. They are not normal people.”

Lord West, the former First Sea Lord and national security adviser, said: “We have gone too far in letting people take us to court.

“While these insurgents are chopping people’s heads off and raping women, the idea they can take us to court because somebody shouted at them is ridiculous.”

In an interview with The Telegraph, Michael Fallon, the Defence Secretary, voices his concern about the legal scrutiny on British troops. He says he is gravely concerned about the rising cost of legal cases “that turn out to be completely spurious”. He added: “What’s important for us is to understand the legal scrutiny that we are under all the time now, the cases that are being brought sometimes spuriously by law firms representing people who claim they were wrongly detained.

Today, MLK Jr Would Be Unemployable in America, Given That He Would Be Anathema to Most Americans… of the Left (!)

For some reason, Benny Huang ain't that impressed about Martin Luther King, Jr. He must be a racist or something. (Oh, wait; he is either Asian himself or married to one—I forget which—so that theory doesn't hold a lot of water…) Having said that, Benny Huang has shown in the past how much admiration he has for Dr. King's I Have a Dream speech, so let's hear what he has to say…

Left, right, and center, everybody thinks MLK was pretty cool.

The consensus, I believe, arises from the fact that most people admire Martin Luther King for the man they wish he had been rather than the man he really was. King has become the embodiment of justice, an intangible element that is difficult to define because it means different things to different people. Consequently, we create our own images of who he was, some of which are divorced from reality.

That the real flesh and blood Martin Luther King does not conform to the immaculate image that we have created for him should come as no surprise. He was a mortal man.

What’s not to like about Dr. King? He wasn’t a real doctor, for starters. His alma mater, Boston University, admitted in 1991 that his PhD was secured through academic fraud. But there are more reasons why conservatives and liberals alike should dispense with the hero worship.

 … Martin Luther King was sexist. There were actually fewer women in King’s inner circle (zero) than former members of the Communist Party (three that I have counted). Bernard Lee, a personal assistant to King, spoke candidly on the subject: “Martin…was absolutely a male chauvinist. He believed that the wife should stay home and take care of the babies while he’d be out there in the streets.”

Perhaps he believed that Coretta should stay home with the babies because he didn’t want her to discover his philandering? Sure, the fact that King was an adulterer is old news. Liberals don’t care about that stuff because they aren’t prudes like the rest of us; but would they be bothered to know that he was physically abusive to women he was cheating with? Rev. Ralph Abernathy, King’s second-in-command wrote in his autobiography “And the Walls Came Tumbling Down” that King got into a physical altercation with a girlfriend just hours before his assassination. After losing his temper with her, “he knocked her across the bed… She leapt up to fight back, and for a moment they were engaged in a full-blown fight, with [King] clearly winning.”

Of course he was winning. He was a man beating up a woman. When he talked about nonviolence what he really meant was that he avoided fights with policemen. Fisticuffs with an unarmed woman was another matter entirely.

King was also “homophobic,” which should come as no surprise to anyone. [The charismatic black preacher who led the struggle against Jim Crow] spent his life studying a holy text, the Bible, that is unequivocal in its condemnation of homosexuality. These days there are some clergymen who preach the very unbiblical message that however your wiggle your worm is okay with The Man Upstairs, which is supposed to prove that there is a legitimate debate within Christianity concerning sexual morality. There isn’t. “Anything goes” clergymen merely demonstrate that some churches have given up preaching Christianity.

MLK, however, was not a twenty-first century, college town, rainbow-flag waiving, post-Christian kind of pastor. He made his beliefs clear in an advice column he wrote for Ebony magazine in 1958. A boy asked for advice on how to deal with same-sex attraction. King responded: “Your problem is not at all an uncommon one.” Problem? What problem? He continued, sounding much like the Michele Bachmann of his time: “…The type of feeling that you have toward boys is probably not an innate tendency, but something that has been culturally acquired… Therefore, it is necessary to deal with this problem by getting back to some of the experiences and circumstances that lead to the habit.” What he’s saying is that the boy could change his sexuality if he tried hard enough. Barbaric!

 … To sum up King’s philosophy on homosexuality, he believed that it was a “problem” that needed to be “solved,” as well as a “habit” that could be ditched with the benefit of a little psychotherapy. He essentially held the traditional view that all Christians held for the first two millennia Anno Domini, that we should hate the sin and love the sinner.

Will the revelation that King held such “unenlightened” views on homosexuality change liberals’ attitude toward his marital infidelities? Perhaps. If we learned anything from the Monica Lewinsky thing, (and the Anthony Weiner thing, and the Gavin Newsome thing, and the John Edwards thing) it’s that liberals are pretty blasé about adultery. It’s hypocrisy they don’t like. Cheat on your wife if you’d like, just don’t oppose the homosexual agenda. …

Related: • Is It Possible?! What If All Southern Whites Weren't the Equals of Nazis and What If the South Had Not Been a Total Racialist Nightmare?! •

Germany's Atlantic Wall Was Built by the Occupied Local Populations; T'Was the Greatest Feat of Military Engineering Since the Great Wall of China

Pour bâtir en un temps record cet ouvrage destiné à empêcher un débarquement, les Allemands recoururent à des entreprises hexagonales. Qui, faute de travail, ne se firent pas prier.

The European geographic magazine Geo reminds us that in order to build the Atlantic Wall, the Germans used French builders.

Qui se souvient que 1500 entreprises françaises du BTP contribuèrent à édifier ces blockhaus du front de mer, parties intégrantes de l'«Atlantikwall» destiné à défendre le flanc ouest de l'empire nazi contre les assauts anglo-saxons?

Pour Jérôme Prieur, auteur d'un livre sur le mur de l'Atlantique (aux éditions Denoël), «ce monument de la collaboration a été la plus grosse entreprise née en France, au service de l'Allemagne, durant la guerre». Et le plus gros employeur de ces années noires: jusqu'à 300000 ouvriers français participèrent à son édification. «On a voulu effacer cette mémoire, continue Jérôme Prieur. A la Libération, les entreprises ont fait le ménage dans les archives. Mais les rapports des préfectures dévoilent l'ampleur du chantier et son incidence sur le territoire. On dispose aussi des comptes des petites sociétés et artisans qui ont été employés: plombiers, menuisiers, boulangers, et même blanchisseuses...»

La création du Mur, la plus formidable entreprise de génie militaire depuis la Muraille de Chine, fut décidée par Hitler quand échoua son offensive éclair contre l'URSS. Ce que le Führer craignait plus que tout, l'enlisement du conflit, était en effet arrivé. Bientôt, ce serait Stalingrad. A partir du printemps 1942, le Reich, citadelle assiégée, décida donc de s'abriter derrière un formidable ouvrage défensif. Le «Wall» comprenait, de la hollande aux Pyrénées, 8000 casemates, une batterie d'artillerie tous les deux kilomètres, une ligne ininterrompue de chevaux de frise sur chaque plage, des radars et des postes de commande tous les 20 kilomètres, des bases pour trente sous-marins U-Boots à Brest, Lorient, Saint-Nazaire, La Pallice et Le Havre. Cet ensemble de fortifications discontinues comprenait aussi 700 modèles de blockhaus différents conçus de façon à ne laisser aucun angle mort.

 … Fritz Todt … rêvait d'étendre le réseau autoroutier de la Norvège à Bagdad et de Bordeaux à Bakou. Mais il mourut en février 1942 dans un mystérieux accident d'avion. Albert Speer, jeune architecte de 30 ans et favori d'Hitler, se vit alors confier l'édification du Mur. L'Organisation Todt, sous sa direction, fit d'abord appel à 200 grandes firmes allemandes, comme siemens. Mais, très vite, l'occupant découvrit qu'il était incapable d'effectuer seul, et dans les délais serrés réclamés par Hitler, les travaux de mise en défense du rivage.

Tokens of Feminist Mythology & Endless Rape Hyperbole: Lying for a good cause doesn’t mean that you care; It means you’re a liar

Jonah Goldberg should have known he would be painted as a rape apologist

sighs Benny Huang,

when he refuted the oft-repeated “one in five” campus rape statistic. The National Review Online editor was locked in a Twitter debate with Matthew Dowd of ABC News, who posited, “[O]ne out of five college women are either raped or victims of attempted rape. thats [sic] a fact.”

Well, no. It isn’t a fact. That statistic has been proven, again and again, to be nothing more than a token of feminist mythology, similar to the claim that wife-beating spikes on Super Bowl Sunday. The Department of Justice’s most recent comprehensive study of rape on college campuses concludes that the number is actually .03-in-five, making Dowd’s claim roughly a thirty-three fold exaggeration.

The emotionalism that envelopes the topic of rape makes truth a commodity much less valued than concern for the victims, some of whom are genuine, and some of whom are false accusers. Ron Fournier of National Journal demonstrated this tendency to undervalue truth when he joined in the chiding of Goldberg, tweeting: “Jonah, you’re splitting statistical hairs to undermine an argument against …. rape. Let’s call it a day.”

Fournier begins by referring to the exaggeration of the problem by a factor of thirty-three as merely “splitting statistical hairs,” then makes clear that he thinks Goldberg a real heel for “undermining” an argument against rape. As if Goldberg has taken the pro-rape side of the argument! Could Goldberg be a rapist himself? Keep an eye on that fellow.

What we’ve learned from the UVA rape hoax is that a person’s opposition to sexual violence can be measured by the degree to which that person inflates rape statistics. Why then should anyone stop with the thoroughly discredited “one in five” stat? How about one in three? Four in five? One in one? If Fournier and Dowd can trot out a grossly exaggerated rape statistic then I can trot out an even more overblown one, thus rendering theirs a low-ball estimate. Who would minimize rape stats unless he was in fact a rapist sympathizer? Dowd and Fournier have some ‘splaining to do.

Some people don’t see any harm in a little hyperbole; or a lot, for that matter. They’re only telling noble lies, you see, intended to “raise awareness” about some issue that’s really, really important. How noble their lies are is very questionable, but they fact that they’re fibbing is not.

The end result of this kind of endless hyperbole is utter hysteria. Lives are ruined, freedom curtailed, and demagogues empowered when truth-challenged activists try to one-up each other with their alarmist claims. I, for one, am fed up with it. Lying for a good cause doesn’t mean that you care. It means you’re a liar.

Homeless advocates, for example, peddle some pretty suspicious facts. Mitch Snyder, the now deceased homeless advocate who made a name for himself in the 1980s with his rather overheated anti-Reagan rhetoric, liked to claim that there were three million homeless people in the United States. … The same Mitch Snyder later claimed that forty-five homeless people died every second, which would mean 1.4 billion dying every year.…

So Mitch Snyder’s numbers were a little off but his heart was in the right place. If you dispute his ridiculous statistics, yours isn’t. That’s how this game is played.

Environmentalists have their own catalogue of hair-on fire scare statistics and doomsday predictions. I recall my third grade teacher telling the class that the Amazon rainforest would be completely cleared in just twenty years and I believed her. Twenty-five years have gone by and that pesky Amazon still exists. I don’t blame my teacher. I’m sure someone passed that little factoid to her and she passed it along to us, believing it to be the truth.

 … AIDS activists are just as alarmist in their rhetoric as environmentalists or homeless advocates. During the early days of the AIDS “crisis”—which was only really a crisis if you indulged an appetite for intravenous drug use of anal sex with men—the movement’s tactic seemed to be to scare the bejeesus out of white, suburban, heterosexual America. …

 … In 1987, Oprah Winfrey had her own bogus “one in five” warning for America: “Research studies now project that one in five—listen to me, hard to believe—one in five heterosexuals could be dead from AIDS at the end of the next three years. That’s by 1990. One in five. It is no longer a gay disease, believe me.”

Yes, it was hard to believe, as she put it. Because it wasn’t true.

Whether it’s projections of the number of “climate refugees” there will be in a few years or the number of young black men gunned down by racist cops, there’s always someone who will hype a problem with undue hysterics. The alarmists don’t seem to think they’re doing anything wrong. Perhaps it’s because their theatrics are usually rewarded with press accolades if not more tangible items. Consequently, we end up making bad policy based on unfounded fears and indefensible prejudices.

Most Parisian cyclists are very philosophical about their chances of ending up on the tarmac or of being deprived of the chance to do so by someone stealing their bike

Paris is home to existentialism, the complex philosophical doctrine about the ultimate meaningless of the universe that is in fact just a long-winded way of making France’s favourite gesture 

writes Stephen Clarke:

the shrug.

The most extreme existentialist hero of them all was Meursault, the hero of Albert Camus’ novel L’Étranger, who kills someone for no reason then goes to the guillotine feeling little more than boredom. Head about to be chopped off? Bof.

Most Parisian cyclists I know are pretty much like Meursault, if you take out the bits about killing someone and going to the guillotine. They are very philosophical about their chances of ending up on the tarmac or of being deprived of the chance to do so by someone stealing their bike.

A story in today’s newspapers illustrated this. A Parisian man who’d had his bike stolen went online to buy a new one, and discovered his own bike for sale there. He called the police, who tracked down the sellers and found that two men had stolen and offered for sale 360 bikes in the past two months – that’s six a day. In other words, the chances of holding on to a bike in Paris are almost zero. Like Meursault, you can’t form any emotional attachments at all.

The main problem is that very few people have room in their building to park their bike. Buildings with courtyards or large entrance halls often ban bikes because they clutter up the place. My own building did this last year after people realised that half the bikes in the entrance hall were never used. Some of them belonged to tenants who had moved out months ago. It was a bike cemetery.

Dennis Prager on Commandments 6 to 10

Following a general introduction, Dennis Prager posts a series of 10 short videos on each of the 10 Commandments:

Humanity has everything it needs to create a good world. We've had it for 3,000 years. It's the Ten Commandments; ten basic, yet profound instructions for how to lead a moral life. If everyone followed the Ten Commandments, we would not need armies or police; marriages and families would be stronger; truth would be a paramount value. Dennis Prager explains how the Ten Commandments led to the creation of Western Civilization and why they remain relevant to your life today. This video course introduces a ten-part series.

The Ten Commandments, in 6 Minutes Or Less (Commandments 1-5)

Following a general introduction, Dennis Prager posts a series of 10 short videos on each of the 10 Commandments:

Humanity has everything it needs to create a good world. We've had it for 3,000 years. It's the Ten Commandments; ten basic, yet profound instructions for how to lead a moral life. If everyone followed the Ten Commandments, we would not need armies or police; marriages and families would be stronger; truth would be a paramount value. Dennis Prager explains how the Ten Commandments led to the creation of Western Civilization and why they remain relevant to your life today. This video course introduces a ten-part series.

Several unusual Christmas customs to become familiar with while living Danishly

From the surreal to the health and safety nightmare, Danes do Christmas differently.

Thus does expat Helen Russell, author of the forthcoming The Year of Living Danishly, introduce the Ten ways to have a Danish Christmas. with the "several … unusual customs I’ve become familiar with during my time of living Danishly."

9. Dance
Remember the tree decorated with naked flames? Well, Danes love living on the edge so much that it’s customary to dance around the candle-lit Christmas tree after you’ve eaten and drunk your fill. Accidents are surprisingly rare and the exercise does wonders for kick-starting the metabolism after all those caramelised potatoes.

Danish Xmas: Soon, every other bite was greeted with more schnapps; “To help the herring swim better!” my host beamed

When new expat Helen Russell (author of the forthcoming The Year of Living Danishly) offered to host a traditional Danish Christmas for her neighbours, she entered a strange world of sugared potatoes, marzipan pigs – and lots of pickled herring.

Julefrokost (Christmas lunch) was my first introduction to traditional Danish festivities. When our new neighbours invited us to “come round for lunch” shortly before Christmas, I was presented with an artfully arranged stack of rye bread and jars of pickled herring, flavoured with everything from curry sauce to cinnamon.

The meal started with a Carlsberg (Danish since 1847) and we constructed our own sandwiches, before drinking to the party’s good health with a shot of schnapps. The children, to my surprise, drank beer. “But it’s Juleol – a Christmas beer. Sweet; very low alcohol,” my host explained. So far, so Danish.

I was just taking mouthful number two of my sandwich (avoiding the cinnamon herring) when my glass was refilled for another toast: “Skål!” Soon, every other bite was greeted with more schnapps. “To help the herring swim better!” my host beamed. By shot number five, I was pretty sure that my herring was Duncan Goodhew.
 
There was some singing, as there is at the slightest excuse in Denmark, and the next thing I knew, I was holding hands with my new pals and dancing around their Christmas tree. The vast, bushy fir was lit not by fairy lights, but by real candles that flickered precariously close to children’s heads/the curtains/my hostess’s flammable-looking skirt.

 … “Christmas dinner in Denmark is duck and pork,” [the only shop assistant in our local supermarket who could speak some English] told me.

“Duck or pork?”

“Duck and pork,” she corrected me. “Together. With potatoes.”

“Roast potatoes?”

“Boiled. Then rolled in butter. And sugar.”

“What?” I tried to hide my surprise. A potato with melted frosting?

…  God Jul!

Paris’s airports suffer from existential problems

France is a country that believes you should only know what the powers that be want you to know 

wrote Stephen Clarke after landing in a snow storm at a Paris airport a couple of years ago,

and containing this situation obviously depended on people sitting around in ignorance until they decided individually to come and ask what the hell was going on. Too much information would have caused a stampede for luggage forms and a sense of outraged solidarity in the crowd that would have required even more riot police.

Here Comes Wonder Woman Like a Speeding — Wait a Minute!

A Richard Foubert painting on La Croisette in Cannes

Here Comes Superman, Like a Speeding — Wait a Minute!

A Richard Foubert painting on La Croisette in Cannes

Festive winter fun in times gone by

From the Daily Telegraph, we are treated to Festive winter fun in times gone by

The 1930s Persecution of the Jews in Europe? It's the Fault of the Nazi Party (Not Germany); The Segregation of Blacks in the South? It's the Fault of the South, or America Writ Large (Not the Democrat Party)

See if you can figure out what is wrong with Johnny Clark's AP story on the anniversary of the premiere of the film based on Margaret Mitchell's best-seller:

Seventy-five years after the premiere of the movie "Gone with the Wind," research is shedding light on the racial tensions that existed at the time between the producer and city of Atlanta officials.

 … "Producer David O. Selznick was upset that Hattie McDaniel would not be invited to the Atlanta premiere," said [Emory University film studies professor Matthew Bernstein]. "He argued over and over that she should be allowed."

 … Selznick was guided by the office of Atlanta's then-mayor William B. Hartsfield. It was Hartsfield that originally reached out to Selznick to bring the premiere to the city.

But due to the racial segregation laws in the Jim Crow south, none of the movie's black stars were allowed to attend the premiere or even be included in the movie's promotional program. McDaniel did attend the Los Angeles premiere and was featured in the program.

"Selznick, because he was Jewish, was very mindful of the persecution of the Jews in Europe in the late-1930s under Nazism," Bernstein remarks. "And he saw an analogy between that persecution and the life of African-Americans under Jim Crow, especially in the South."

Can you figure out what is wrong with the story? It's in the last paragraph, in the Emory University film studies professor's remarks, and it may refer to a significant detail that Selznick himself may not have been aware of.

Have you re-read the para? Can you find it?

Okay; there are actually several problems.

First, sorry to sound like an apologist for slavery or Jim Crow, but it happens to be a fact that segregation of the blacks in the South was in no way akin, or even close to akin, to persecution of the Jews in Germany. (I hasten to add — I have no choice, or I risk being pilloried as someone who has nostalgia for the old South (which I don't) — that I am not someone who has nostalgia for the old South.)

Persecution is "we go after you", segregation is "keep your place." Persecution is "we are coming after you — after all of you"; "segregation is "we don't expect to react to you, or even notice you, unless one of you gets our of line — then we'll go after the one that gets out of line." No, I am not defending segregation — in any way. Yes, I know it is anti-American, and anti-Democratic, and against the values of the Republic.

I am just pointing out that one distasteful policy is (far) less distasteful than another distasteful policy. Note that the Emory University film studies professor Matthew Bernstein manages to avoid mentioning the word "segregation" for a more general term — "the life of African-Americans" — to compare the persecution of the Jews to, in order to make it easier to put America (or the South) on the same level, or close to the same level, as Nazi Germany.

You still object? You still think I am defending something that is indefensible?

Okay. Let me go ahead and accept that. But you ought to watch out; because here is where we go to the bigger problem:

Prosecution of the Jews is not laid at the feet of the Germans (Germany isn't even mentioned, Europe is). Persecution of the Jews is laid (far from inappropriately, by the way) at the feet of the Nazis.

By contrast, segregation of the blacks is not laid at the feet of the Democratic Party; nor is Jim Crow. They are laid at the feet of the South, or America in general.

The name of the party that defended slavery, that tore apart the Union in the defense of slavery, that instituted Jim Crow laws, and that ruled over the South as long as the anti-democratic laws were in place — the word Democrat (party) — cannot even be found in the article. Not once.

As Jonah Goldberg writes in Liberal Fascism,

In the liberal telling of America's story, there are only two perpetrators of official misdeeds: conservatives and "America" writ large. Progressives, or modern liberals, are never bigots or tyrants, but conservatives often are. For example, one will virtually never hear that the Palmer Raids, Prohibition, or American eugenics were thoroughly progressive phenomena. These are sins America itself must atone for.

 … Liberals are never responsible for their historic misdeeds, because they feel no compulsion to defend the inherent goodness of America. Conservatives, meanwhile, not only take the blame for events not of their own making that they often worked the most assiduously against, but find themselves defending liberal misdeeds in order to defend America herself.

Unseen On-Set Photos of Original Star Wars Movie on Display in London

Rare behind-the-scenes pictures on the set of the original Star Wars film are currently on display at the British Film Institute, announces Popular Mechanics.

Good news for Star Wars fans in London: now you can relive the making of Episode IV, the original film, with just a short trip to the Southbank location of the British Film Institute, where these incredible behind-the-scenes photos are on display.

The collection belonged to Ann Skinner, who served as continuity supervisor for Star Wars (1977). It features shots of the original script, candids of the cast members on set in Tunisia, an unmasked Darth Vader, and much more.

The exhibit will run through January 4th, and is part of BFI’s ‘Sci-Fi: Days of Fear and Wonder,’ a celebration of “film and TV’s original blockbuster genre.”

So much of contemporary liberalism reeks of a scheme by which already affluent and influential people increase their margins and extend their sway

Contemporary liberalism is a scheme for the already affluent and influential to increase their power 

explains Matthew Continetti, with examples galore.

The 2006 Duke Lacrosse case is the paradigmatic example of a liberal rush to judgment when the perceived victim is a minority (in that case, a black woman) and the alleged perpetrator a straight white male. But it is not the sole example.

In 2007, an instructor at Columbia’s Teachers College specializing in racial “micro-aggressions” and under investigation for plagiarism discovered a noose hanging from her office door; when she was fired the following year for academic malfeasance it was widely suspected that she had put the noose there herself. The racist graffiti and Klan sightings that rocked the Oberlin campus in 2013 and served as the basis of an anti-racism campaign were later revealed to be a left-wing “joke.” And of course the leader of the Michael Brown protest movement, tax cheat Al Sharpton, was involved in the Tawana Brawley hoax of 1987.

Recently critics noted serious flaws in the reporting and writing of a Rolling Stone article that purports to describe a violent gang rape in a University of Virginia fraternity house. The article was the basis for the university’s decision to suspend Greek life on campus for the duration of 2014. The magazine was evasive in its response to the challenges. Then, on Friday afternoon, it released the following statement: “There now appear to be discrepancies in Jackie’s [the alleged victim’s] account, and we have come to our conclusion that our trust in her was misplaced.” The story is false.

Does it even matter? Some liberals are upfront that the factuality of these cases is secondary to their political import. “Actually, in both the case of the UVA rape and in the case of the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri,” says a writer for The New Republic digital-media company, “the major takeaway of recent weeks should be that our systems do not work” (emphasis in the original).

What The New Republic means by “our systems” is our systems of power: the institutions through which a free society allocates resources and decision making, chooses priorities, delegates responsibilities and authority. It is the goal of contemporary liberalism to command these institutions — in particular institutions resistant to the left such as police and fire departments, fraternal societies and private clubs, the military and extractive industry — and to alter them according to fashionable theories of equality and justice. The details are unimportant so long as the “takeaway” is communicated, the desired policy achieved.

It is sometimes difficult to understand that, for the Left, racism and sexism and prejudice are not ethical categories but political ones. We are not merely talking about bad manners when the subject turns to Michael Brown or UVA or Thomas Piketty. We are talking about power.

“The new elite that seeks to supersede the old one, or merely share its power and honors, does not admit to such intention frankly and openly,” writes Vilfredo Pareto. “Instead it assumes the leadership of all the oppressed, declares that it will pursue not its own good but the good of the many; and it goes to battle, not for the rights of a restricted class but for the rights of almost the entire citizenry.”

Such is the conduct of our new elite, the archons and tribunes of the “coalition of the ascendant,” which proclaims itself the advocate of minority rights, of the poor, of the sick, as it entrenches its power and furthers its self-interest.

 … So much of contemporary liberalism reeks of a scheme by which already affluent and influential people increase their margins and extend their sway. Liberalism, mind you, in both parties: The Republican elite seems as devoted as their Democratic cousins to the shibboleths of diversity and immigration even as they bemoan the fate of the middle class and seek desperately the votes of white working families.

Just-so stories, extravagant assertions, heated denunciations, empty gestures, moral posturing that increases in intensity the further removed it is from the truth: If the mainstream narration of our ethnic, social, and cultural life is susceptible to error, it is because liberalism is the prevailing disposition of our institutions of higher education, of our media, of our nonprofit and public sectors, and it is therefore cocooned from skepticism and incredulity and independent thought. Sometimes the truth punctures the bubble. And when that happens — and lately it seems to be happening with increasing frequency — liberalism itself goes on trial.