Behind the Façades in France: What expats and the mainstream media (French and American alike) fail to notice (or fail to tell you) about French attitudes, principles, values, and official positions…
“Hands up, don’t shoot!”—the rallying cry of the Ferguson protestors (or rioters, in some cases)—was always a fiction, the Department of Justice admitted last week.
Michael Brown’s hands were not up and he was not attempting to surrender when Officer Darren Wilson killed him in self-defense.
That Eric Holder is finally admitting this, five months after autopsy
results indicated that Brown’s hands must have been at his side, is
progress, I suppose. But don’t expect too much from the attorney general
too quickly. Baby steps. Despite admitting that there’s no evidence
that Officer Wilson did anything wrong, Holder still wants us to
contemplate why so many people believed the lie. “It remains not only
valid – but essential – to question how such a strong alternative
version of events was able to take hold so swiftly, and be accepted so
readily,” he said.
Holder’s clear implication is that the lie could only have gotten
legs if it had the ring of authenticity in the ears of Ferguson’s black
citizens. So even though it’s not technically true, let’s all pretend
that it speaks to the larger truth that white cops routinely gun down
defenseless black males for sport.
Which they don’t. In this great big country we live in,
liberals have tried and failed to evidence even one example of cops
wantonly murdering unarmed blacks out of racist motives.
… What Holder is trying to say is that even though the “alternative
version of events” has been thoroughly debunked, the narrative lives on.
It always does.
The primacy of narrative over facts is perhaps the greatest enigma of
the leftist mind. “Fake but accurate” seems to be their guiding
philosophy, as evidenced by the 2004 Rathergate scandal. Seemingly
intelligent people really believe that it doesn’t matter that Matthew Shepard wasn’t the victim of a “homophobic” hate crime because surely
someone else was. The same people also find it immaterial that Crystal
Mangum wasn’t actually raped by three Duke lacrosse players because
white men have been raping black women since slave times.
In place of facts they prefer compelling narrative, usually
cultivated at the expense of actual people, their lives and reputations.
The now utterly debunked UVA rape story that Rolling Stone ran in
November is an excellent example. Reporter Sabrina Rubin Erdely failed
to conduct even the most basic fact checking; in fact, she promised not
to contact the accused rapists as a condition of getting her exclusive
interview with “Jackie,” the alleged victim, who turned out to be a
fraud.
… This tendency to elevate the narrative over the facts is not a new
feature of the Left. Consider Ray Mungo, the radical 1960s journalist
and co-founder of the Liberation New Service, a wire service for the
underground press. Mungo admitted in his 1970 memoir, Famous Long Ago, “Facts are less important than truth
and the two are far from equivalent, you see; for cold facts are nearly
always boring and may even distort the truth, but Truth is the highest
achievement of human expression.”
… What liberals fail to realize is that their narrative, if it is to be
worth anything, must be supported by facts. Like a house standing on a
crumbling foundation, their larger, capital-T Truth cannot remain
upright while its foundation of smaller truths—what used to be called
“facts”—dissipates. But alas, for liberals, it can. A myriad of concrete
examples can turn out to be bogus and their narrative will still hold,
because they “know” they are correct in the abstract. In their own
minds, they are still right even when they’re wrong, and truthful even
when they’re lying.
Remember When the Media Was Terrified of the Coming Ice Age?
asks Onan Coca regarding the global warming scare.
I know; it's almost as if one might be allowed to think that our self-described élites are not the purveyors of wisdom but little more than simple drama queens.
!
During his explanation of what motivates the hatred towards Robert Murdoch's
flagship TV show —
Hating Fox News, there's a reason for it — Bill O'Reilly asks
What would happen if Fox News were to disappear (08:05-08:30).
Check out especially Charles Krauthammer's comment at 05:25 to 06:15.
Last year, Serguei produced a hard-hitting cartoon on "Super-Tsar Putin" and his muscular saber-rattling in Ukraine, but in the very same issue of Le Monde, needless to say,
Plantu had to, just had to, draw a moral equivalence with Israel and the Palestinians.
Note to those who think this is an immeasurably smart cartoon: unless I am mistaken, there is no party in Kiev which holds that Russia and its people ought to be pushed back into the sea (which sea would that be?!) or that the children of (or the adults who make up) the Ukrainian people ought to blow themselves up in Russian malls and schools.
• Another 400 hectares annexed!!!
• That Putin, what a dirty sonuvabitch!!
• Not at all! This is the West Bank!
Just like in MSM America, as can be seen in its special
40 Urban Legends
piece, the Décodeurs' rule seems to be much more to expose and fight against the ideas and policies
of the right than their equivalents of the left (little if anything on, say, global
warming)… '
Welcome to the United States!
One night a year, all crimes are allowed.
In France,
the Purge films are called American Nightmare — just so you know where the really inhumane and monstrous people live and in what country the real danger to humanity comes from…
For someone who is supposed to be the most intelligent man in the world and the best president in U.S. history as well as someone who understands just about all problems and, just as importantly, has the solution to just about every one of those problems, Barack Obama seems to have a strange dearth of information about the government he leads when scandals about his administration surface. Fox News:
FOR ALL THE VAST INTELLIGENCE RESOURCES at his fingertips, the most powerful man in the world claims he gets a lot of his first dose of inside info on scandals and controversy — like deaths at VA facilities, IRS targeting, Fast and Furious gun-running, the Air Force One NYC flyover, and now Clinton emails — from outside news sources.
… surely a momentous decision like this one can’t be made within the executive branch, behind closed doors, by a group of unelected bureaucrats? And surely they can’t keep the plan secret until it passes?
Constitutionally speaking, they can’t. According to Article I of the
Constitution, the power to create law is vested in the legislative
branch. Legislators are not authorized to abdicate their
responsibilities to a board, much less to the executive branch, which is
where the FCC resides. A decision this important requires a full
hearing in the halls of Congress with a vote by our elected
representatives.
But that’s soooooo twentieth century. If the events of
recent months are any indicator, the United States has officially
transcended the messy process of legislating. We simply don’t decide
contentious issues in Congress anymore. That’s what President Obama and
his proxies are for.
The trend didn’t begin in recent months, or even with the 2009
inauguration of Barack Obama, but it has nonetheless picked up speed
like a runaway train since the Republican landslide of 2014. The
president, if you can still call him that, is now facing some tepid
opposition in Congress, which apparently entitles him to bypass that
body entirely. It’s their fault for opposing his agenda. If they weren’t
so “obstructionist” or “dysfunctional,” they’d give the president
whatever he wants, no questions asked. The same principle does not apply
to all presidents, of course, only this one.
… there’s the issue of President Obama’s
executive amnesty for illegal aliens, which is clearly illegal, and he
knows it. He even said so on Univision, warning Hispanic voters that
there’s a process to changing laws and the process matters. “With
respect to the notion that I can just suspend deportations through
executive order, that’s just not the case…. There are enough laws on the
books by Congress that are very clear in terms of how we have to
enforce our immigration system that for me to simply through executive
order ignore those congressional mandates would not conform with my
appropriate role as president.” That was before he decided that the
power was in fact his to wield. Kind of makes you wonder what took him
so long to use it?
The Obama Administration’s argument, as far as I can tell, is that
it’s merely exercising a little prosecutorial “discretion.” Such a thing
does exist but it must be exercised with extreme caution lest justice
devolve into the arbitrary rule of men, which I’m beginning to suspect
is this president’s goal.
Actually changing the law would require congressional action but, the
administration posits, since the administration is not changing the
law, there’s no need. Unfortunately, President Obama said something
quite different when a group of pro-illegal immigration hecklers
interrupted him in Chicago. “You’re absolutely right that there have
been significant numbers of deportations… But what you are not paying
attention to is the fact that I just took an action to change the law,”
Obama said.
Change the law? Can presidents just do that? Apparently no
one ever taught this supposed constitutional scholar that the president
doesn’t get to do whatever he wants just because he thinks he has right
on his side. But alas, the lesson he’s learned in Washington is quite
the opposite. He’s seen that he can change immigration laws and ban a
popular type of ammunition with the snap of his fingers, so what’s to
stop him from regulating the internet? No one has yet stopped him. I’ve
resigned myself to believe that no one ever will.
A few years back, Brenda Bedrick wrote from East Greenwich, R.I., to the New York Times a missive that remains timely to this day:
“The Secret Weapon: All of Us,”
by Nicholas D. Kristof (column, Aug. 29), made my blood boil. I am a
small-business owner and, yes, my clients get to the store on roads
built by everyone, and we use public services paid for by everyone.
Yet,
none of these workers had to use their houses as collateral and none of
them had to worry about paying for the health benefits of their
employees, and not everyone is taking advantage of tax loopholes. This
unrealistic view of the average business owner by the media drains my
spirit.
That's right! Who pioneered the pantsuit in Washington and who did not pioneer the pantsuit in Washington is of utmost interest these days!
Incidentally, what this does is allow America OnLine to eulogize another member of Congress, needless to say also a Democrat (in the person of Maryland Senator Barbara Mikulski, aka a "pint-sized trailblazer with a huge legacy" as well as "one of the fiercest fighters for women, families and the middle class").
(There is another State Department email story on today's second AOL page, but it is not the private email account scandal per se, it is not even an AOL story, it is a simple one-line link to a Fox News story on the Benghazi probe.)
So wait a minute: how about the real story? How about the former secretary of state's private email account scandal?
It's there alright.
Yup, AOL does do its duty and does cover it.
But…
needless to say, it shows Hillary Rodham Clinton in a positive light (she is responding to the "controversy" pro-actively while showing total transparency on the issue, "urging" — urging — the State Department to release the emails) and…
Update 2: perhaps someone at AOL reads No Pasarán? Or, perhaps, Instapundit? In any case, within hours of
the Glenn Reynolds re-post, America OnLine effectively and suddenly put the Hillary story (the email article, not the pantsuit article) in its number 1 position. Where it remained for… a few hours, before disappearing entirely from the 40-section news department.
or at least the portion attributed to
conservative columnist George Will. Last September, Politifact
“corrected” Will when he tweeted, “Some doctors say Ebola can be
transmitted through the air by a ‘sneeze or some cough.’” His statement
was later rolled up with other Ebola-related claims and deemed the
biggest fib of 2014.
Not that Will’s statement was very definitive. “Some doctors” could
mean only a handful, but even so, Jon Greenberg of Politifact couldn’t
let it stand. His rebuttal to Will was rather hard to follow as it
meandered quickly into the realm of irrelevancy. Greenberg also admitted
that he was unsure which doctors Will was quoting.
… Besides common sense, there’s another
reason to believe that Ebola could in fact be transmitted by cough and
sneezes—the fact that the World Health Organization (WHO) said in
October that the Ebola virus could be transmitted exactly that way,
provided that the person on the receiving end has an open cut or sore.
So yes, “some doctors” do make that claim and they work at the WHO.
This isn’t the first time that Politifact’s “Lie of the Year” turned
out not to be a lie at all. Its 2012 “Lie of the Year” was a claim made
by candidate Mitt Romney that the bailed-out semi-American automaker
Chrysler had plans to build a Jeep factory in China. Politifact rebuffed
Romney, citing a statement from a Chrysler spokesman who declared,
“Jeep has no intentions of shifting production of its Jeep models out of
North America to China.” Apparently, the whole thing was debunked
because a corporate spokesman denied it, which is an interesting
standard of proof that I’d wager Politifact employs selectively.
Then, in January of 2013, Chrysler and its parent company Fiat
announced plans to open a new factory in Guangzhou, China. Which is
exactly what Romney said.
Just don’t accuse Politifact of having a partisan agenda. They hate
that. It’s not that they consistently side with the Democrats, it’s just
that the Democrats are always right. Or at least most of the time.
Since Politifact started giving out “Lie of the Year” awards in 2009, it
has awarded it to conservative or Republican claims four times, often
for inconsequential statements, and at least twice for statements that
turned out to be true.
It awarded its “Lie of the Year” to liberal or Democratic claims only
twice. Surprisingly, it even gave Obama’s “If you like your plan, you
can keep your plan” fib its “Lie of the Year” Award in 2013. The
difference is that Obama’s lie really was a big fat whopper that
everyone knew to be false but repeated endlessly in order to get
Obamacare passed.
In any case, fact checking has gotten to be rather absurd. What was
supposed to be a nonpartisan exercise in discerning the truth through a
haze of competing claims has become nothing but partisan hackery.
It isn’t even honest partisan hackery. It’s liberals
pretending not to be liberals, which I’ve noticed they do a lot. “Fact
checking” is nothing more than reliably liberal mouthpieces going to bat
for the Democrats while pretending to be umpires calling balls and strikes.
The American journalistic establishment, you see, claims to value objectivity.
… Fact checking is arguably the most corrupt business in America,
second perhaps only to personal injury lawyers. The little charade fact
checkers play, in which they pretend to help readers navigate a sea of
chicanery, is really getting quite tiresome.
We live in hard times. This is a hard, hard time for the Republic.
We live in the era of the Drama Queen.
We have been digging ourselves deeper and deeper into that era for the past fifty years.
Leftists are drama queens. Leftists constantly erupting in hysterics — male (girly men?) or female — rule the roost.
Racism! Patriarchy! Sexism! Rape on campus!
Global warming! Christianity's bigotry! The reactionary average American! Republicans' hate speech and hate thought! US history, a litany of racism and oppression! All the founding fathers, hypocritical sonzabitches! All our ancestors, imperialist mongrels! Oppression of women, and gays, and transgenders!
(The only person, the only people, who come out positive in this (self-serving) world view are — surprise, surprise — the drama queens themselves! Also known as the wise men, and the wise women, arriving as knights in shining armor on their white steeds to fight for the victims and the martyrs of the world.)
Whenever there is drama — whenever there is a crisis (or the semblance of a crisis) — the left's drama queens win.
There must be constant drama — crises, if you prefer — or the movement loses momentum and/or comes to a standstill and/or dies out.
We have been in the midst of the triumph of the drama
queens and the Chicken Littles and the other arrested-development adolescents since the 1960s, with the movement reaching its zenith with the 2008
election.
Ain't that true? Can't the biggest drama queen of all be found in the White House? [Barack Obama]
When the Republicans won the 2014 elections, they didn't realize that this was actually manna in heaven to the top drama queen of them all.
— I will defend the poor innocent martyred immigrants against the monstrous Republicans, against the ignominious inhabitants of Middle America! — I will defeat the aggressive and clueless warlike policies of the despicable Republicans, regarding the relations with (say) Russia or Cuba, provide a reset, and open an era of peace and prosperity and friendship with those poor, misunderstood nations! — I will fight for the American people tenaciously, by attacking the nation's, indeed the world's, main enemy, its only enemy (no, not Isis, not Al Qaeda, not the Russians, not the Chinese, not the Iranians, not any foreign dictator), and that as relentlessly and as often as I can — the contemptible members of America's Republican Party and the clueless average American citizen.
Anything that will provide food for drama, for a crisis, may, and will, be used.
In no sense whatsoever is there the slightest value in unity.
Creating chaos is their raison d'être.
War, and crises, with the opposition must be used all the time, and no event may occur without it being used for political advantage.
All these battles in Congress makes Obama happy. He has created his crises, one after the other. He appears as the knight in shining armor come to save the American people.
With the Homeland Security shutdown, you have to wonder if nothing would make Obama happier if there was a terrorist attack on some place in America.
He could blame it, would blame it, on the Republicans.
And the media would gobble it up.
Why? Because journalists are drama queens too (they have to be, that is how the "newsmakers" survive). That is why so many of them are Democrats, while that is why so many leftists go into the news business in the first place (I want to fight for the little man).
(And why do the drama queens, in- or outside the media, hate conservatives? Republicans? Fox News? Where does their sense of anger, and revulsion, at Dubya, and Reagan, and Sarah Palin, and Glenn Beck originate? The main reason is because the latter are, they were, happy people with a smile on their face, who take pleasure — indeed, pride — in their country, and who are not constantly outraged at everything around them.)
Does Obama deserve to be impeached? Want to impeach Obama?
You know what? Nothing would make Barack Obama happier than to be impeached. Then there would be another drama, another one at which he would be the center, and one which could be milked to increase the fortunes of the Democrat Party.
PS: Do I doubt that Obama is patriotic and loves America?
What is the American Dream? The dream to be rich, i.e., the dream to be powerful, i.e., the dream to be independent — independent of politicians — the dream to be content and feel secure.
This is the American Dream as far back as the 1770s.
This is the America that statists like Obama wanted to "fundamentally transform."
There is nothing Obama resents more than the America where its citizens are independent of the politicians, the élites, and their ever-growing armies of bureaucrats (there to "help them").
The founders' vision was the dream to be rid of Drama Queens — certainly, the dream that we should be rid, that we could be rid, of those drama queens who are in positions of power to rule, or who wish to rule, over us.
Since then, drama queens at home and abroad have done all in their power (Norway's 2009 Nobel Peace Prize, f'r'instance) to make America a Drama Queen-run nation…
Related: Bernie Marcus's dependable, mature golf player acting responsibly to prevent the ice hockey players from going berserk (Republicans are playing golf while the Democrats are playing ice hockey)
Since the Obama Administration
announced its intentions last month to normalize relations with the
“workers’ paradise” of the Caribbean, Governor Christie has asked the
administration to put pressure on Cuba to extradite Joanne Chesimard,
also known by her African nom de guerre Assata Shakur, a black
militant convicted of murdering state trooper Werner Foerster. She
escaped from prison in 1979 and later fled to Cuba where she has been
sheltered ever since.
The Obama Administration seems to be paying lip service to the
Chesimard issue, claiming that “the return of fugitives is one of the
issues on the U.S-Cuban agenda,” according to a USA Today article from
David Jackson. Frankly, their reassurances sound like more of this
administration’s empty promises. The State Department should demand that
Chesimard be extradited as a precondition of diplomatic negotiations. I
say this as someone who believes that our “talk to the hand” foreign
policy toward Cuba needs to change. We should absolutely open up to
Cuba, but we can’t have relations with them while they harbor miscreants
like Chesimard.
Yet I won’t hold my breath waiting for President Obama to press his
advantage to bring a cop killer to justice. After all, if Obama had an
older sister she’d look like Assata Shakur, which tells me that Obama
will side with her by default. He doesn’t have all the facts, nor does
he ever, but he knows that the police acted stupidly…or something.
… President Obama is undoubtedly cut from the same reflexive,
cop-hating cloth as the congresswomen [Maxine Waters and Barbara Lee, both
Democrats from the People’s Republic of California, were actually
embarrassed to have voted for a 1998 resolution calling upon Cuba to
extradite Chesimard], if only a little more cagey about
it. I predict that he will purposely fail to bring Chesimard to justice
and then pretend that he tried his hardest but it just wasn’t meant to
be.
President Obama is (or was), after all, a close friend of Bill Ayers,
a left-wing terrorist whose Weather Underground group bombed NYPD
headquarters, among other acts of terrorism targeting police. Obama has
repeatedly denied the relationship, insisting that Ayers was just some
guy in the neighborhood, but Ayers himself described Obama as a “family
friend” in an updated edition of his terrorist memoir “Fugitive Days”
that was published after Obama was safely elected in 2008. In the same
book, Ayers also admitted hosting an Obama fundraiser at his home,
something which Obama supporters had dismissed as right-wing conspiracy
theories.
Ayers belonged to a movement that spoke openly of “offing pigs,”
rhetoric that was not unusual in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. This
fact has been erased from history so that the era could be remembered as
a time when utopian peace activists employed nonviolence to defeat the
skull-cracking reactionary establishment. But it wasn’t all peace and
love. As the Yippee prankster Abbie Hoffman once said, “I think killing a
cop can be an act of love.” This from a man who was a squishy liberal
compared to the Weather Underground and Black Panthers. The fact that
Hoffman could say that and still maintain his good standing with the
progressive community speaks volumes.
The quickest way to achieve celebrity status among chic leftists is
to blast a cop. Ray Luc Levasseur, Leonard Peltier, Huey Newton, and
Mumia Abu Jamal are but a few of the Left’s favorite cop killers. Most
leftists would never touch a police officer, of course, but only because
they’re chicken excrement, hence all of the jock-sniffing they do when
they find an actual cop killer. They’re like teenage girls at a Beatles
concert circa 1964, only not nearly as composed.
… Even supposed examples of unwarranted violence by police, cited by
leftists as part of a pattern of police brutality, are actually examples
of violence against police. Poor Michael Brown, the “gentle
giant” of Ferguson is dead today because he tried and failed to murder a
patrolman with his own gun. Yet Brown is portrayed as the victim, his
myth padded with now debunked lies about being shot in the back while
his hands were raised. When the Left inverts reality to the extent that a
cop is guilty of murder because he fought for his life when someone
else was trying to murder him, that tells you a lot about how these
people think. The only good cop is a dead cop.
… The belief system of the Left today is so
twisted and bloodthirsty that it excuses and even glorifies those who
gun down police officers.
Presented by immigration author/journalist Roy Beck,
Global humanitarian reasons for current U.S. immigration are tested in
this updated version of immigration author and journalist Roy Beck's
colorful presentation of data from the World Bank and U.S. Census
Bureau. The 1996 version of this immigration gumballs presentation has
been one of the most viewed immigration policy presentations on the
internet.
NumbersUSA
Education & Research Foundation is a non-profit, non-partisan
organization that favors an environmentally sustainable and economically
just America and seeks to educate the public about the effects of high
levels of immigration on U.S. overpopulation, the environment, jobs, and
wages. We use government data to conduct research on the impacts of
U.S. population growth, consumption, sprawl, and current levels of
immigration and educate the public, opinion leaders and policy makers on
the results of those and other studies.
Ready to unwind, ready to let loose — Muslim-style?
Okay, take any hats off your head.
Stand up.
Get one hand (high) up in the air.
Ready?
Set!
And here we go!
WARNING: Before you hit play and watch this, swallow
any liquid (coffee, etc…) that may be in your mouth
(FYI, this Muslim Rave Party earned a post on No Pasarán 8 or 9 years ago,
but I was never able to find it again. Thanks to RV for unearthing it on Youtube.)
Overshadowed by the fighting in Ukraine, another armed conflict in the former Soviet Union — between Armenia and Azerbaijan
over the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh — has escalated with deadly
ferocity in recent months, killing dozens of soldiers on each side and
pushing the countries perilously close to open war.
most recent clashes prompted an unusually pointed rebuke by
international mediators who met on Monday in Krakow, Poland, with the
Azerbaijani foreign minister, Elmar Mammadyarov.
“The
rise in violence that began last year must stop,” the mediators, from
France, Russia and the United States, said in a joint statement, adding,
“We called on Azerbaijan to observe its commitments to a peaceful
resolution of the conflict. We also called on Armenia to take all
measures to reduce tensions.”
Immediately following the [Chapel Hill] murders, the
internet buzzed with speculation that the victims—Deah Shaddy Barakat,
Yusor Mohammad, and Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha—had been targeted because
they were Muslims
Early assumptions were that [Craig Hicks] must
have been a right-winger and a Christian, presumably because he’s white
and from the “Bible Belt.” (Anyone who thinks Chapel Hill is part of the
Bible Belt obviously hasn’t been there lately.)
Slowly the truth came out—Hicks, as it turns out, is on the political
Left and a self-described “anti-theist” to boot. Whatever his beef with
Islam may be,
this acolyte of Richard Dawkins also harbors animus
against all religions. His Facebook page sums up his attitude toward
people of faith: “Of course I want religion to go away.
I don’t deny you your right to believe whatever you’d like; but I have
the right to point out that it’s ignorant and dangerous as long as your
baseless superstitions keep killing people.” [Emphasis original.]
Noting that Craig Hicks seems to be affiliated with United Atheists of America and that the IB Times reports
that his "Facebook Likes included the Huffington Post, Rachel Maddow, the
Southern Poverty Law Center, Freedom from Religion Foundation, Bill Nye
'The Science Guy,' Neil deGrasse Tyson, 'Gay Marriage' groups and
similar progressive pages", Eagle Rising's Tim Brown called the killer nothing less than a "disgusting atheist."
Craig Hicks’s wife, Karen Hicks, claimed that the victims’ religion
was incidental to the crime, which she says actually arose from a
long-standing parking dispute … It sounded as if
Mrs. Hicks was desperately trying to obfuscate her husband’s true motive
in order to shield him from accusations of bigotry, or worse, from
federal hate crimes charges.
Yet other residents of the same apartment complex where the shooting
took place confirm Karen Hicks’s version of events, saying that Mr.
Hicks was absolutely obsessed with residents parking in their assigned
spaces. A local towing company said that Hicks’s requests to tow unknown
cars got to be so repetitive that they eventually refused to respond to
his calls. He also had a reputation for being loud and aggressive.
Residents reportedly held a meeting to discuss what to do about this
troublesome man.
… Unfortunately, under federal law, the killer’s motive makes all the
difference in the world. We have a thing in this country called “hate
crimes,” you see, which is an utterly insipid category that really
shouldn’t exist. If Craig Hicks murdered three people because they were
Muslims then he will face federal charges and, theoretically at least, a
stiffer sentence. If he murdered them for some other reason, he won’t.
A harsher sentence may not even be possible in this case, as Hicks
stands a chance of being sentenced to death. How do you top that? Yet
hate crimes charges may still be filed because it’s not enough to
demonstrate that Craig Hicks killed these people; the court still has to
determine if he hated them while he was doing it. Such is the stupidity
of hate crimes laws.
… Nowhere in America is assault legal
unless the victim happens to be unborn, though that’s another column
entirely. It doesn’t matter if that person is black or white, a man or a
woman, a libertarian, Unitarian, vegetarian, or Rotarian. Such laws
don’t distinguish between people based on their race or their bedroom
behavior. Nor should they.
But hate crimes laws do. They require jurors to peer into the mind of
the assailant and determine if he was motivated by “hate.” Hating
someone for parking in the wrong space doesn’t count. If he wasn’t
motivated by “hate,” or if his hate was directed against groups that
don’t appear on Eric Holder’s list of recognized victims, then the perp
receives a lesser sentence and the feds don’t get involved.
call it a "hate crime." Let me ask anyone, is there any
other crime? Is there a crime that occurs out of love? Every crime that
occurs against another person made in the image of God is a crime that
is born of hate, period. True, it may have been because Hicks despised
their dress and religion, but he also hated Christians too.
Brian Williams … told one whopper of a tale after another for years to pump up his
personal resume and give himself some "street creds" among progressives
who think that Williams and his ilk are intelligent, savvy, and bearers
of the TRUE WORD.
As it turns out, ladies and gentlemen, he lied about saving puppies from
a fire; about getting robbed by a gun-wielding mugger when Williams was
a teen supposedly working for a charity on the "mean streets" of 1970s
small-town New Jersey; about braving Hezbollah rockets in Israel; about
watching bodies float down the Mississippi River during Katrina; about
seeing a man jump to his death in a football stadium; and, of course,
most famously, about flying on a chopper that got shot down in Iraq in
2003. Aside from proving a serial liar, he has become one of the most
fawning, outright boot-licking fans and promoters of the disaster known
as President Obama. He also has served as a regular on progressive TV
shows, where he plays the part of the wise, humorous, Hemingway-esque
man of the world. He is the man who has seen it all, and who can with a
knowing smirk or wink put down and dismiss all the deluded right-wing
nuts out there. In other words, he is a hero and a product of the
Hollywood-University-Media complex which has done so much irreparable
damage to our nation and Western civilization.
Williams joins the ranks of other progressive "journalists" such as,
Dan Rather, who tried to throw an American election by pushing a patently false story about George W. Bush;
Janet Cook, who concocted a much awarded narrative of an eight-year-old heroin addict;
Jayson Blair, who fabricated a number of much-commented on stories for the New York Times;
Sabrina Erdely of Rolling Stone who spread the UVA fake rape story;
and, of course, who could forget, The Lord of Them All, Commissar in Chief Walter Duranty, New York Times apologist extraordinaire for Joseph Stalin and his mass murders in Ukraine.
You certainly can name many others.
I never met Williams, but during my long career did have dealings with
other prominent "anchors"--one of whom nearly ended my career--and found
them boring and idiotic. They were just actors: make-up, lights,
dramatic pose, and read lines written by young staffers from the "best"
schools. There was no journalism as most of us would think of
journalism. The British have it mostly right. They call persons such as
Williams, "readers," because they read the news to you. In one way,
however, American "anchors" are not like British "readers." In our
benighted Republic, "anchors" are vastly better paid, revered, and
allowed a great deal of say over what and how they will report. In the
recent past, if Williams, Rather, or Jennings did not want to report on
something, then it simply must not have happened.
That little world of the "anchor," however, took a major hit with the
invention of the internet by Al "Is it Getting Warm?" Gore--another
fabulist of distinction. We now have millions of little "anchors" who
can fact-check, provide alternative explanations for events, and bring
sunlight to otherwise forgotten happenings and issues. Dan Rather, let
us not forget, got brought down by bloggers. The internet also has
debunked Williams. Imagine, just imagine, if we had had the internet in
the time of Duranty, or even when the Saintly Walter Cronkite declared
that we were losing in Vietnam when, in fact, we were winning . . .
There is something in the progressive mind-set that promotes, nay,
requires compulsive lying. We see it in John Kerry and his fake stories
of secret missions in Cambodia and his flying dog;
Hillary Clinton and her Bosnian snipers; Susan Rice and her video
explanation for Benghazi; Eric Holder with Fast and Furious; and even
FDR who famously said these words now engraved on his DC monument,
I have seen war. I have seen war on land and sea. I have seen blood
running from the wounded. I have seen men coughing out their gassed
lungs. I have seen the dead in the mud. I have seen cities destroyed. I
have seen 200 limping, exhausted men come out of line—the survivors of a
regiment of 1,000 that went forward 48 hours before. I have seen
children starving. I have seen the agony of mothers and wives. I hate
war.
In fact, of course, he saw none of these horrors. Those things tend not to happen in Hyde Park, New York.
The fundamental problem progressives such as Williams face is that the
world is not as they would have it. Not at all. Many if not most of them
have limited experience in the real world, having spent lives of wealth
and privilege, sheltered in progressive educational institutions. They
have very superficial knowledge of the world outside these bubbles, and
rely, therefore, to a great deal on Hollywood. They incorporate into
their personae the largely leftist rubbish pumped out by Hollywood.
In their world, the United States is still 1930's Alabama--or, better
said, the Alabama of Hollywood. They want to unleash their inner Atticus
Finch. In their world, murderers in the United States are middle aged
white male business executives who kill black people instead of what
happens in the real world where murderers are overwhelmingly young black
men who generally kill black people. In their world, women can kung fu
better and be bigger badasses than big burly guys, when, in fact, the
opposite is true as shown by the progressives' contradictory and
ceaseless calls for government to "protect" women from men. "I am woman! I am strong! Call the cops! Men are looking at me!" In progressive world, the KKK equals the Tea Party, when in the real
world, the KKK served as the armed wing of the Democratic Party. In
progressive world, Western civilization is the source for all the
poverty and evil in the world, when, in fact, the concepts of liberty,
justice, and human rights are Western constructs.
Your standard progressive activist has really done nothing very
interesting, so he or she needs to get proper credentials, to show that
he or she knows what's what, and that progressivism is what the world
needs to deal with "problems"--after all, isn't life just a series of
problems calling for progressive intervention? They want to see what
they believe.
We, hence, have progressives making up the sort of stuff that puts them,
the elite, in the center of the battle, on the ramparts, in the muddy
trenches and downed helicopters with the common schlubs--the sort of
worldly experience that allows progressives to tell us how to live our
lives.
recently received the Obama
Administration’s 322-page plan for “net neutrality” and he finds it
appalling. He’d like to share his specific objections with the +public
but he can’t because the plan is under wraps until the Federal
Communications Commission (FCC) votes on it.
Would you expect anything less from the
most transparent administration in history? Secret plans to regulate the
internet are circulated among the unelected members of a commission,
who then make huge decisions with ramifications that will be felt around
the globe, and we’re not allowed to know what they’re considering until
the decision has been made. Par for the course.
… Those of us who are … skeptical tend to see “net neutrality” as
little more than a government takeover of the internet, something
Washington has been itching to do for years. All they needed was an
excuse and finally they’ve found it. Capitalizing on a popular and not
necessarily unfounded distrust of corporations, the government will
seize control of the freest, most egalitarian means of communication
known to man…and strangle it with regulation.
Surely, you wouldn’t want ISP’s to prioritize search results for a
fee, would you? Just empower the government to protect you from this huge problem that you probably didn’t even know existed and you won’t have to worry.
Supporters of net neutrality are already complaining that dissenters
are mere conspiracy theorists steeped in misinformation. Net neutrality
isn’t a government seizure of the internet, they argue, it’s simply a
set of rules that prohibits corporations from favoring users or content.
Call me crazy, but I think that a policy like that could be expressed
in a few sentences. Why then is the administration’s net neutrality
policy 322 pages long? And why hasn’t it been released to the public?
… Net neutrality is essentially Obamacare for the web—a government
takeover, sold to the public as a means of protecting us from
corporations, which is in fact supported by the corporations that are
supposed to hate it, which will invariably give us a crappier product at
a higher price.
The problem with the internet is that it’s just too liberated for our
leviathan federal government to tolerate. People can say stuff on the
internet without fear of censorship. They can buy and sell things
without paying the tax man. They can organize political movements that
the government would rather suffocate. In short, the World Wide Web
(WWW) closely resembles the Wild Wild West, and that really scares the
control freaks in Washington.
… The beauty of the internet is that it’s an open space for the free
exchange of goods, services, information, and most importantly, ideas.
Whatever minimal degradation of that freedom that might result from
your ISP providing preferential treatment to paying customers does not
merit government intrusion. It’s a red herring anyway—the government
doesn’t want to control the internet to protect you from Comcast, a
corporation that is already abiding by the supposed principles of net
neutrality on a voluntary basis. The government wants to control the
internet because it’s in the business of control and it can’t stand to
sit idly by while a domain of nearly limitless freedom is permitted to
exist.
Vlasa Mircia, the mayor of [Pungesti, a] destitute village in eastern Romania,
thought he had struck it rich when the American energy giant Chevron
showed up here last year and leased a plot of land he owned for
exploratory shale gas drilling.
But
the encounter between big business and rural Romania quickly turned
into a nightmare. The village became a magnet for activists from across
the country opposed to hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. Violent
clashes broke out between the police and protesters. The mayor, one of
the few locals who sided openly with Chevron, was run out of town,
reviled as a corrupt sellout in what activists presented as a David
versus Goliath struggle between impoverished farmers and corporate
America.
“I
was really shocked,” recalled the mayor, who is now back at his office
on Pungesti’s main, in fact only, street. “We never had protesters here
and suddenly they were everywhere.”
Pointing
to a mysteriously well-financed and well-organized campaign of protest,
Romanian officials including the prime minister say that the struggle
over fracking in Europe does feature a Goliath, but it is the Russian
company Gazprom, not the American Chevron.
Gazprom, a state-controlled energy giant, has a clear interest in preventing countries dependent on Russian natural gas
from developing their own alternative supplies of energy, they say,
preserving a lucrative market for itself — and a potent foreign policy
tool for the Kremlin.
“Everything that has gone wrong is from Gazprom,” Mr. Mircia said.
This belief that Russia
is fueling the protests, shared by officials in Lithuania, where
Chevron also ran into a wave of unusually fervent protests and then
decided to pull out, has not yet been backed up by any clear proof. And
Gazprom has denied accusations that it has bankrolled anti-fracking
protests. But circumstantial evidence, plus large dollops of Cold
War-style suspicion, have added to mounting alarm over covert Russian
meddling to block threats to its energy stranglehold on Europe.
Before stepping down in September as NATO’s secretary general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen gave voice to this alarm with remarks in London that pointed a finger at Russia and infuriated environmentalists.
“Russia,
as part of their sophisticated information and disinformation
operations, engaged actively with so-called nongovernmental
organizations — environmental organizations working against shale gas —
to maintain dependence on imported Russian gas,” Mr. Rasmussen said. He
presented no proof and said the judgment was based on what NATO allies
had reported.
Feeding
what environmental groups denounce as a frenzy of paranoia have been
Russian actions in Ukraine. Russia’s president, the former K.G.B.
officer Vladimir V. Putin, has deployed a powerful arsenal there
dominated by stealth and subterfuge, first to annex Crimea in March and,
more recently, to foment an armed separatist rebellion in the east.
“It
is crucial for Russia to keep this energy dependence. It is playing a
dirty game,” said Iulian Iancu, chairman of the Romanian Parliament’s
industry committee and a firm believer that Russia has had a hand in
stirring opposition to shale gas exploration across Eastern Europe. He
acknowledged that he had no direct evidence to support this allegation,
nor for an assertion he made recently in Parliament that Gazprom had
spent 82 million euros, or about $100 million, to fund anti-fracking
activities across Europe.
“You have to realize how smart their secret services are,” he added. “They will never act in the spotlight.”
What
has become a tide of protest against fracking in Eastern Europe, where
countries are most dependent on Russian energy, began three years ago in
Bulgaria, a member of the European Union but far more sympathetic to
Russian interests than any other member of the 28-nation bloc. Faced
with a sudden surge of street protests by activists, many of whom had
previously shown little interest in environmental issues, the Bulgarian
government in 2012 banned fracking and canceled a shale gas license
issued earlier to Chevron.
… Romania
is already far less reliant on Russian energy than are Bulgaria and
other countries in the region, but a sharp expansion in domestic
production would allow it to export energy to neighboring Moldova and
blunt an important Russian foreign policy goal. Like Ukraine, Moldova
has tilted away from Moscow toward the European Union and has come under
strong pressure, notably through gas prices, to stay within Russia’s
economic and political orbit.
“Energy
is the most effective weapon today of the Russian Federation — much
more effective than aircraft and tanks,” Victor Ponta, the Romanian
prime minister, said in an interview.
… Anca-Maria
Cernea, a leader of a conservative political group in Bucharest that
has exposed the prospect of a Russian connection, said that while no
documents have been uncovered proving payments or other direct support
from Russia, circumstantial evidence shows that “Russians are behind the
protests against Chevron.”
The
protesters, she noted, included groups that usually have nothing to do
with one another, like radical socialists, some with ties to the heavily
Russian influenced security apparatus in neighboring Moldova, and
deeply conservative Orthodox priests. Russian news media, she added,
were curiously active in covering and fueling opposition to fracking in
Pungesti. RT, a state-run Russian TV news channel aimed at foreign
audiences, provided blanket coverage of the protests and carried
warnings that villagers, along with their crops and animals, would
perish from poisoned water.
But now it’s a scientific fact: a survey conducted by the
University of Zürich has shown that Danes are the most shameless people in
the world. A mere 1.62 per cent of Danes suffer from gelotophobia
- fear of ridicule - the lowest proportion of the population in any country
surveyed. In the UK, we have the highest number of people with the phobia.
As a Brit who was also raised a Catholic and went to an all-girls school,
I’m practically a lost, hyper-repressed cause. So moving to Denmark proved
quite the eye opener. From the encouragement of office-based sing-alongs to
a large emphasis on public nudity and a big appreciation for alcohol, Danes
seem to be raised utterly uninhibited.
Take school, for example. From the age of six, Danish children participate in
a national curriculum sex week to learn how babies are made and by the age
of 13, they’ve covered everything from masturbation to transgender rights in
frank and open discussions. Having learned about sex from Judy Blume’s
Forever and Lady Chatterley’s Lover in my own formative
years because our biology teacher blushed beetroot at the mere mention of
stamen, this was a revelation. Danish children are also taught to question
authority and speak their minds – without worrying about what other people
think.
During my adolescence in 1990s British suburbia, swimming was something to be
avoided whenever possible. The crushing embarrassment of displaying
sprouting pubescent bodies drove many a teen to fake notes from their
parents to get out of class and I spent a good 50 per cent of my time on the
claggy poolside bench on ‘float-duty’. But not in Denmark. Here, exercise is
mandatory, showers are communal and a supervised naked scrub-down is
expected of all swimmers before entering the pool. Family nudist nights are
not uncommon and many of the beaches along Denmark’s 7,000 km of coastline
are clothing-optional.
… Family nudist nights are
not uncommon and many of the beaches along Denmark’s 7,000 km of coastline
are clothing-optional.
Once they hit 16, Danes can drink, consuming 11 litres of pure alcohol per
person per year, according to the World
Health Organisation - something that’s bound to stave off shame. At
least until morning. And because Denmark still has student grants (remember
them?), anyone over the age of 18 is paid to study - for as long as they
like. Lubricated, uninhibited and happy to live like a student until their
30s, in some cases, it’s no wonder Danes are so relaxed.
When Danes do make it to the workplace, the fun continues. Birthdays are
marked with lots of singing and special man-shaped cakes - everyone screams
when you behead the cakeman. Danish celebrations are not for shrinking
violets. Many workplaces have leisure clubs or associations attached and
several in my area also boast their own office band. Guitars are whipped out
at every opportunity and communal music making with Lars from accounts is
considered a perfectly normal hygge (‘relaxed’, ‘friendly’ or ‘cosy’)
time.
Your article on the state of Britain’s coalition government used “dominatrixes” as the plural of dominatrix (“Enter the van men”, August 3rd). Whoever wrote that, rather than “dominatrices”, deserves a good spanking.
Stephen Clarke couldn’t get in to visit Paris's new Philharmonie building on its open day.
This is the gigantic new concert hall on the northern edge of the
city, at the Parc de la Villette. Well, I could have waited, but the two
queues of prospective visitors were three or four deep and 50 and 100
metres long (those are estimates, by the way, I didn’t actually measure
them). It was also freezing cold, and as an über-Parisian, queuing up is
not my speciality, so I wandered around the outside of the building
then went for a coffee.
I’m not surprised there were so many
visitors. Parisians love open days, and in this case we all have a
vested interest. As payers of both city and national taxes, we have all
crowd-funded the new concert hall without being asked, and the maths are
complicated but I calculate that I’m in for about ten euros personally,
plus a few euros per year from now on to cover subsidies and loan
repayments (according to the très sérieux magazine Le Point,
the project somehow managed to obtain itself a 150-million euro loan at
over 5 per cent interest – there’s one mortgage broker who must have
retired to the Cayman Islands on the spot).
So what are we getting for our 400 million euros? At the moment, a
building site, with a partially unfinished facade, but when it’s
finished, it will look (and this is a purely personal view) as though
someone is trying to iron a giant Batman cape that has been thrown down
by the superhero after a tiring mission (perhaps to track down an errant
mortgage broker), crossed with a multi-storey car park. Unsporting,
perhaps, but when you step to one side of the façade and go inside the
adjacent Parc de la Villette, you have a view of a series of balconies
that look like car park ramps. Functional, maybe, but for all that
money, couldn’t we have got all-round beauty?
… This isn’t my first outbreak of Victor Meldrew-like grumpiness about the new concert hall, I know. But it is just so expensive, and the whole budget process has been so dubious. The Le Point
article revealed some exasperating facts: the initial tender was for a
concert hall that would cost 200 million. Two bids came in, at 300
million each. After haggling, one of the builders came down to 218
million, though allegedly (according to Le Point) certain
people admitted that they knew it couldn’t be built for that. And now
we’re footing the bill for double the original – wrong – estimate.
This at a time when subsidies for Paris’s sports clubs, gyms and many
social charities are being slashed.
It’s pretty hard to get away from the French in Shanghai
quips Sarah O’Meara in the Daily Telegraph as she goes exploring for the French influence in Asia.
Their architecture remains some of the best in the city, as do
their restaurants. And they sip imported wine at pavement cafes with
such casual confidence (and regularity) it suggests continued
preeminence in China.
“Didn’t you learn about France’s colonisation of Indochina at school?” my husband asks as I query their considerable influence.
“No. We did the suffragettes, native Americans, the Holocaust and the Arab-Israeli conflict,” I explain.
“What happened in Asia?”
He looks despairing. He was raised in Australia, where they give
children a more rounded sense of what the Europeans were doing in the
20th century, when they weren’t fighting for freedom on home turf.
But the French in Shanghai are now guests, and any air of security
comes from finding one another within China rather than a sense of
dominance.
For modern Europeans who live in Asia, the challenge is to find our
home in the present, and definitely not dwell on the past. And for
nationalities such as French, this becomes less and less easy.
In days gone by, children across south-east Asia were taught
French. Now, the second national language of their adopted home has
moved to English.
But the French speak English about as well as the English speak French.
The absurdity of the decision however, is only an extension of the
absurdity of a philosophy that considers discrimination to be among the
most egregious of all offenses. All organizations that have membership
requirements discriminate, which includes nearly every organization that
I can think of.
In 2000, the Supreme Court upheld the right of the Boy Scouts, and
every private club, not to be forced by government to accept members
that it doesn’t want.
Liberals didn’t like that decision and have spent
the ensuing fifteen years trying to formulate alternative strategies to
pressure the Boy Scouts to change, all the while pretending that they
respect the right of the Boy Scouts as a private organization to freely
associate. Which they don’t. They merely lost their case in the highest
court and had to resort to plan B—ostracizing.
Their newest tactic is to tell judges what they’re allowed to do when
off the clock. Oh no! A judge might be teaching youth the importance of
trustworthiness, courtesy, and thrift, to name just three of the
Scouts’ values.
… Organizations that remain in liberals’ good graces are given a pass to discriminate as they see fit.
If the ethics code were interpreted to mean what it clearly says it
would also prohibit membership in the Girl Scouts of America. The GSA
discriminates against both boys and adult men who want to become
leaders. A troop in Colorado made an exception for a boy who
“identifies” as a girl though the decision was a one-time policy
exception made at the local level. In any case, the troop didn’t decide
that they would allow this boy to join because they’re now hip to boys,
they decided to participate in the boy’s delusion that he’s actually a
girl. So in their minds the new member was a girl…who happened to be a
boy.
This stuff gets really confusing.
And then there’s still the issue of banning adult men from being Girl
Scout leaders. It’s a perfectly sensible policy, mind you, but it’s a
policy that nonetheless runs afoul of California’s judicial code of
ethical behavior. The code doesn’t make an exception for clubs that
think they have a “good reason” to discriminate based on the
aforementioned protected categories. Every club that discriminates
thinks that their reason for doing so is valid. The code nonetheless
stipulates that California judges may not belong to that club. No one in
their right mind, however, truly believes that the code will be
enforced fairly and equally. BSA bad, GSA good.
Why is the GSA good? For starters, they allow homosexual leaders.
They have also shed most of their religious identity, and now inculcate
girls with feminist values. God is out, lesbianism and abortion are in.
That the Girl Scouts’ policy of not allowing men to take little girls
camping is considered judicious, while the Boy Scouts’ policy of not
allowing homosexuals to take boys camping is considered rank
discrimination on par with segregated lunch counters, is proof positive
that our society has truly lost its dang fool mind.
The two policies are both rooted in the same concern for children’s safety. Neither club wants adults diddling kids.
… even if “gay” men molested children at the same rate as “straight” men—and they don’t,
by the way—there should at least be equal concern with either group
being in intimate situations with children. There is not equal concern.
The Girls Scouts essentially treat all adult men like child molesters
waiting to happen. No one has a problem with this, not even adult men
like me. Yet when the Boy Scouts do the same to guys who like having
anal sex with guys, people flip their lids. That’s discrimination!
…
The irony of a nondiscrimination policy being enforced in a
discriminatory manner is palpable. California’s policy is stupid, and
everyone knows it’s stupid too, which is why no one will actually follow
it, much the same way no one actually follows the vaunted Civil Rights
Act of 1964. The utility of such laws/codes is to have a handy weapon
around with which to bludgeon people liberals don’t like. …
Typical: In the New York Times' cover headline linking to the Liz Alderman story of the Greek government's new coalition members, the far right remains the "Far Right" while the far left is reassuringly renamed simply the "Left".
FYI, regarding the animal photo, here is Erica Goode's story on unlikely animal friendships…
… “Virgin Galactic’s partner Scaled Composites conducted a powered test
flight of SpaceShipTwo earlier today,” the company website’s stated
Friday. “During the test, the vehicle suffered a serious anomaly
resulting in the loss of the vehicle. Our first concern is the status of
the pilots, which is unknown at this time. We will work closely with
the relevant authorities to determine the cause of the accident and
provide updates as soon as we are able to do so.”
… Onlookers who spotted the
craft crumble from the sky reportedly saw a sky-high explosion and later
found debris scattered across the desert sand. The Kern County Fire
Department that responded to the crash did not answer its communication
line.
Update: several hours after this story was posted, other news outlets still have no story on this, so we are starting to wonder if NP (and Jeffrey Scott Shapiro) wasn't (weren't) taken in by a hoax
But don’t expect too much from the attorney general too quickly. Baby steps. Despite admitting that there’s no evidence that Officer Wilson did anything wrong, Holder still wants us to contemplate why so many people believed the lie. “It remains not only valid – but essential – to question how such a strong alternative version of events was able to take hold so swiftly, and be accepted so readily,” he said.
