As the FN Wins Big in the France's Regional Elections, the Question Arises: Is the Le Pen Party Extreme Rightist or Is It Actually a Reincarnation of the Communist Party?

As the Le Pen family's National Front emerges victorious from the first ballot in France's regional elections (check out Anne-Elisabeth Moutet's report in The Daily Telegraph), the head of a libertarian think tank warns that the Front National is not extreme right, as commonly depicted, but actually the direct opposite, i.e., nothing less than a modernized rehash of the Communist Party (merci à Carine). (Needless to say, outside of the United States, the word "liberal" retains its original meaning…)

GenerationLibre's Gaspard Koenig in Les Échos:

If one is to believe the polls, the Communist Party is poised this weekend to surpass its historic high-water score of 28% reached in the parliamentary elections of October 1946. Seventy years after "Red Autumn", here she comes again, up to the gates of power, even if by a trick hardly novel to the course history, it is slipping in under a borrowed skin: that of the National Front.

I am one of those candid voters who actually reads the programs of political parties. The one that can be read on the website of the Front National, rejecting "ultra-liberal globalization" as well as "the dictatorship of the market" or "the dogma of competition", could be signed Maurice Thorez [leader of the French Communist Party for 34 years]. Beyond the occasional promises on keeping the 35-hour workweek, returning the retirement age to 60, or the alignment of taxation of capital and labor, beyond rhetorical outbursts against big capital for not sharing profits, what the FN is proposing, in a coherent and detailed manner, is nothing less than a total nationalization of France.

 … Spearheading this takeover will be the civil servants, whose numbers will be stabilized, and whose status will be preserved — provided, however, that they follow the party line: Thus the ENA civil servant school will see to the "recruitment of bureaucrats who are highly patriotic" (sic). Finally, in a tragicomic wink to history, the FN promises to reorient French foreign policy in order to work towards an "in-depth strategic alliance" with… Russia!

 … The tragedy is that all of France's major parries, left as well as right, remain marked by a faint nostalgia for the planned economy, and are careful not to criticize the FN on this matter. One can find all sorts of explanations. In his book, La Grande Parade, Jean-François Revel considers that the vocabulary derived from socialism held by the ruling élites has been the fertile ground that has given birth to the "illiberal single-thought narrative". More radical still, the historian Robert Paxton, in pages from his book on Vichy that were not studied enough, sees in the Pétain government the birth of le dirigisme à la française, which has continued to permeate all governments since the war. Whatever the case, it seems that the FN is doing little but saying out loud what other members of the élite think in secret: that everything in life would be rosier under the sunshine of the State.

Marine Le Pen, 4 Years Ago: France Should Leave NATO, "Turn Its Back" on the American "Hyper-Power", and "Turn Towards Russia"

Related: “Obama is way to the right of us”

Dukakis at 82: Heart-Warming Holiday Story About a Retired Democrat Politician Unwittingly Reveals Unsavory Details

Even a funny, and rather heart-warming, story about a retired Democrat politician leads to unintended information of a slightly less savory and definitely far from uncommon type (which makes it even more unsavory), as the Boston Globe's Matt Viser (via James Taranto) writes about Michael Dukakis and his love for… turkey carcasses.

First, the fun, cutesy part:

In his tidy Brookline kitchen, the state’s former governor and onetime Democratic presidential nominee has had a quirky but endearing tradition legendary among family and friends. He collects Thanksgiving turkey carcasses to make soup for his extended family for the year to come.

 … “Throwing out a turkey carcass is sinful. Absolutely sinful,” Dukakis says, in all seriousness. “It’s a terrible thing to do. There’s so much richness and goodness in a turkey carcass, God.”

So eager is Dukakis to gather turkey carcasses that he offers his home address (see below) for anyone who wants to drop one off.

Besides the recipe for Dukakis turkey soup, we are then treated to the cute reaction of the 82-year-old ex-governor's grand-children.

“For some reason my grandkids just love this,’’ he says. “They eat bowls and bowls of it.”

The grandkids confirm part of this.

“We roll our eyes and laugh,” says Ali Dukakis, who is one of a dozen grandchildren. “Any wincing that we have is not reflected on him. He could not care less. That’s why he’s a special person.”

So you think that Ali is a little kid, right, running around the house?

That's where you are wrong.

(Okay, so she's older, an adult? So what's the big deal?! Wait a second.)

Two years ago, Dukakis went to Washington, where Ali works at ABC News, and insisted on buying a turkey to carve up in her studio apartment. 

Okay, sure, the turkey story is cute and family-friendly, and so on. But hold on a minute — There you go again: once more, a family member of a Democrat politician has been hired to work for an outlet of the mainstream media (and that in the nation's capital, no less), and, just as typically, Democrats and the media alike (but I repeat myself) see so little of a problem with this that it doesn't even register when it's mentioned in a news story.

And with that there is not much more to say, and that brings this post to an end.

However… if you were thinking of chucking your Thanksgiving remains, read on:

And just as it has become a Dukakis tradition to preserve turkey carcasses, it has become a tradition for some of his friends to drop off their picked-over turkeys at his house.

“I’m collecting if you know anybody. People throw this thing out — it’s crazy!” he says.

“Tell your readers under no circumstances should they do that,” he adds. “They should use the carcass. And if they don’t want to, tell them to come to 85 Perry Street in Brookline. We’ll make full use of it, believe me.”

Thank God

for the 22nd Amendment

In 2015 alone, France suffered more casualties from gun violence than the U.S. has suffered during Obama's entire presidency

What we basically get — from sources as diverse as The Washington Post (The Volokh Conspiracy's David Kopel), as The Wall Street Journal (Joe Palazzolo and Alexis Flynn on the forthcoming book, “Mass Shootings: Media, Myths, and Realities), as PolitiFact (Keely Herring and Louis Jacobson), and as Fox News and IBD (the same piece by John R. Lott) — is the shooting down of Barack Obama's wishful thinking regarding "these mass shootings", i.e., that this type of thing "just doesn’t happen in other countries.”

This statement, in Paris of all places (!), only two or three weeks after Islamist killers murdered 130 people over the course of not much more than a couple of hours. (No wonder French called him un connard et un trouduc (an a**hole); to which I can do little more than make the, rather unhelpful, remark, Congratulations Europeans! You got the U.S. president that you had been pining for!)

As I wrote in my in-depth examination of the gun control issue [slightly redacted],

it is easy for leftists, American as well as foreign, to tout the success of the gun control laws in the rest of the western world and to say that "this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries” when you ignore:
• the 1996 massacre of 16 children at a Scottish primary school;
• the 2000 killing of eight kids in Japan;
• the 2002 deaths of eight people in Nanterre, France;
• the 2002 killing of 16 kids in Erfurt, Germany;
• the 2007 fatal shootings of eight people in Tuusula, Finland;
• the killing of 10 people at a Finnish university less than a year later;
• the 2009 killing of 15 people in Winnenden, Germany;
• and, needless to say, Anders Breivik's 2011 mass murder of 77 Norwegians, most of them teenagers.

Is it unrealistic to wonder whether the tolls would have been lesser had a few of the adults in each place — as well as in Paris's Bataclan a couple of weeks ago — carried a weapon and tried to shoot back at the respective killers?

(Update: a slightly revised version of the above argument was published in the New York Times.)

Listen some more to John R. Lott:
(John R. Lott, Jr. is a columnist for FoxNews.com. He is an economist and was formerly chief economist at the United States Sentencing Commission. Lott is also a leading expert on guns and op-eds on that issue are done in conjunction with the Crime Prevention Research Center. He is the author of eight books including "More Guns, Less Crime." His latest book is "Dumbing Down the Courts: How Politics Keeps the Smartest Judges Off the Bench" Bascom Hill Publishing Group (September 17, 2013). Follow him on Twitter@johnrlottjr.)

In just 2015, France suffered more casualties – killings and injuries – from mass public shootings than the U.S. has suffered during Obama’s entire presidency (508 to 424). This number includes the San Bernandino massacre on Wednesday.

Obama also overlooks Norway, where Anders Behring Breivik used a gun to kill 67 people and wound 110 others. Still others were killed by bombs that Breivik detonated.  Of the four worst K-12 school shootings, three have occurred in Europe. Germany had two of these — one in 2002 at Erfut and another in 2009 at Winnenden, with a total death toll of 34.

Obama isn’t correct even if he meant the frequency of fatalities or attacks. Many European countries actually have higher rates of death from public shootings that resulted in four or more murders. It’s simply a matter of adjusting for America’s much larger population.

 … In terms of the frequency of attacks, the United States ranks ninth, with 0.09 attacks per million people.  Macedonia, Serbia, Switzerland, Norway, Slovakia, Finland, Belgium, and the Czech Republic all had higher rates.

 … It takes a lot of time and effort to find all the cases, but if you get all the attacks in the U.S. and miss those in other countries, it makes the U.S. look a lot worse.

 … The president’s statement was also limited in another sense.  He was referring only to shootings in his statement, but bombs are frequently used elsewhere in the world.

The Boston Marathon bombing was a rare exception these days in the United States. But countries such as Russia have frequently suffered bombings. Indeed, since 2009, the nation has seen 1.31 deaths per million from bombings that caused four or more fatalities.

 … Obama keeps using these attacks to advocate requiring background checks on private transfers of guns. Such a requirement, however, already exists in France and almost all of Europe.

The background checks failed. So too did France and Belgium's complete bans on the weapons used in those attacks. The terrorists who attacked those countries still got the weapons that they wanted.

 … There is another common factor between mass public shootings.  Virtually all of the attacks in America and Europe are taking place where general citizens can’t carry guns for protection. At some point, it has to become apparent to gun control advocates that gun-free zones only protect the killers.

But as The Volokh Conspiracy's David Kopel points out in the Washington Post,

Obama explained to Russian President Dmitry Medvedev in March 2012, “After my election I have more flexibility.” This was an accurate prediction, and not just about foreign relations. After winning reelection in November 2012, President Obama in December 2012 used the Newtown, Conn., murders as the basis to make gun control the primary focus of his political efforts through April 2013. He has promised that gun control will be his top priority during his final year in office. When commenting on mass murders in the United States, President Obama has repeatedly claimed that such crimes do not occur in other countries.

Gun Free Zone points out (obrigado per Sarah Hoyt) that the way the élitish liberals look at this issue, as with all others, is as human beings as part of a herd:

As Mark Twain famously wrote:  “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”  I don’t know if the “shoot and kill about 30 U.S. citizens every day” statement is accurate, but the way [Brett Arends] approaches it is not.  Assuming the number is accurate, those shootings are not evenly distributed across all law abiding gun owners.  It’s not as though 30 random law abiding gun owners a day decide to kill someone.  The overwhelming majority of shootings are concentrated in certain areas and socioeconomic groups (criminals be committing crimes).  This video breaks the numbers down much better than I can do a write up here.  The point is, the vast majority of law abiding gun owners will never shoot anybody, ever.

In the U.S. prosecutors win virtually all of their cases, nearly all of them without a trial

Conrad Black responds to an article in The Economist:

You included me in a gallery of apparently larcenous peers in Britain’s House of Lords (“The rotters’ club”, August 1st). The article’s graphic suggests that America’s criminal-justice system accords an accused what a citizen of Britain would consider due process. It does not. In the United States prosecutors win virtually all of their cases, nearly all of them without a trial, so severe is the distortion of the plea-bargain system in which inculpatory testimony is extorted from witnesses in exchange for immunity, including from charges of perjury.

I also believe I am ineligible for membership of your rotters’ club, because every count against me was abandoned, rejected by jurors, or vacated by America’s Supreme Court. Two spurious counts were self-servingly retrieved by a lower court that the Supreme Court had criticised and which had sent the two charges back to the lower court to assess its errors. The whole prosecution was nonsense and I achieved by far the largest libel settlement in Canadian history from my original accusers.

I would be happy to have the question of whether I am a rotter determined in a cursory review by an impartial ethics committee of Their Lordships’ House.
CONRAD (LORD) BLACK
Toronto

Blast from the Past: Conrad Black Gives Us a Lesson on How a Conservative Should Interact with the MSM

Nej Tak: A Clear No Vote in Denmark's Referendum on Further EU Integration

No thanks: As counting continues in Denmark, results of the nation-wide referendum show a clear Nej (No) towards further EU integration, reports Berlingske (link in Danish). At this time, the Ja to Nej vote stands at about 47 to 53%.

UPDATE: Denmark's most libertarian-leaning party, Liberal Alliance (outside of the United States, of course, "liberal" has retained its original meaning), claims to have been instrumental in defeating the government's initiative.

The BBC's Gavin Lee notes that the

vote comes three weeks after the deadly attacks in Paris [and was] seen as a test of whether the Danes will accept or reject greater integration within a 28-member bloc that is being tested more than ever by the migrant crisis

This has led a German newspaper to despair that the Danes are moving the country towards becoming a Hungary Light.

Incidentally, in Denmark as in the rest of the Western world (and indeed the world at large), you need to show some form of ID — if only a voter's registration (sent to your home) accompanied by a correct answer to a query regarding your date of birth (below is the picture of a French equivalent) — before you are allowed to vote.

From the Archives: On Voting Fraud:

…/… The last I heard, one needs some sort of poll card to cast a ballot in Britain, as indeed one does in every other democracy on this planet. Due to the Democrats' hysterical race-baiting, we have been subjected to the (absurd) spectacle of being the only country where having this (common-sense) requirement can only be viewed as vile, outrageous prejudice. Well, if it is racist to require voter ID in America, then Britain and every other democracy on the planet (including, of course, in Africa) can only qualify as racist as well …/…

By laying the Crusades at the feet of Christianity, Obama was unwittingly laying ISIL's atrocities at Islam’s feet—at least rhetorically

In Planned Parenthood and those villainous Christians, Jonah Goldberg asks If we can't condemn Islam for Muslim terrorists, why do we condemn Christians? (Instapundit's answer? "Because it’s politically useful, of course.")

We’ve spent years hearing how associating Islam with terrorism is outrageous and bigoted. President Obama, Secretary of State John Kerry and Hillary Clinton have all made the case that Islamic terrorism has “nothing whatsoever” — Clinton’s words — to do with Islam. President Obama insists the Islamic State “is not Islamic.”

Even phrases such as “Muslim terrorism” are forbidden because they imply that Islam itself has something to do with terrorism. Better to talk about “death cults,” “violent extremism” and criminals. And if you have to mention religion, make sure you adorn the word with lots of specific adjectives such as “radical” and “extremist,” or deploy euphemisms such as “jihadist.”

Whether any of that is convincing is a topic for another time. Liberals insist they believe it to be true, and at least for argument’s sake, I’m happy to take them at their word.

So where is the condemnation of the phrase “Christian terrorism” (or, for that matter, “white terrorism”)? By all means, Christian leaders should denounce violent attacks on Planned Parenthood. But shouldn’t progressive leaders condemn any effort to tie Christianity with terrorism?

Apparently not. It seems taking sides against Christianity is the progressive thing to do.

In a famous speech at the National Prayer Breakfast this year, President Obama lectured Christian clergy not to get on their “high horse” about the atrocities committed by ISIL, given that Christians committed (allegedly) similar atrocities during the Crusades.

It’s difficult to catalog all the flaws with this comparison, but one problem stands above all of the rest. By laying the Crusades at the feet of Christianity, Obama was unwittingly laying ISIL's atrocities at Islam’s feet, at least rhetorically.

Consider that modern-day Council of Nicea, ABC’s The View. Joy Behar recently insisted concern over Muslim refugees was overblown. After all, Oklahoma City bomber "Timothy McVeigh was a Christian,” Behar said. “Just sayin’.”

Whoopi Goldberg (no relation) concurred. “There have been a lot of monster Christians,” she said. “Hitler was a Christian.”

Just for the record, Hitler detested Christianity, and McVeigh was an avowed agnostic who never cited Jesus as the inspiration for his crimes.

Personally, I’m opposed to all such forms of guilt by association, but it seems obvious to me that contemporary Christianity is not struggling with a Crusades problem, while Islam is certainly struggling with a jihad problem.

Related:
• Adolf Hitler in Religious Surroundings: Is There Really Evidence That the Führer Was a Christian?

• Worshipping Little Else But the Aryan Race, Hitler Abhorred the Christian Faith and Wanted to Replace Christmas with the Pagans' Yuletide

Rhetoric doesn’t kill people—people kill people

CFP’s role in stirring [up Robert Dear's red-hot anger] was limited to peeling back the veil of secrecy that Planned Parenthood very much wanted to keep in place

says Benny Huang

“No more baby parts!” is what investigators say Robert Dear, the alleged Planned Parenthood spree killer, said after surrendering to police. It isn’t difficult to deduce his motives in shooting up a “women’s health clinic.” He was revolted by Planned Parenthood’s trade in baby parts—er, I mean fetal tissue—and he decided to pick up a gun to avenge the injustice.

Predictably, abortion supporters are using the incident to maximum political advantage. From now on, anyone who references Planned Parenthood’s lucrative side business in baby parts will be dismissed as a terrorist sympathizer. Planned Parenthood can also blame pro-lifers generally, and the Center for Medical Progress (CFP) specifically, for inspiring the shooting. Never mind the fact that CFP condemned the attack on its website, they still have blood on their hands.

The idea that Dear took his inspiration from this summer’s undercover CFP videos is unfair though not entirely untrue. I’ll depart here from a lot of pro-lifers and say that the videos are linked to the shooting, though not quite in the way that Planned Parenthood would have you believe. Robert Dear was likely driven into a fit of rage after seeing CFP-produced videos but it wasn’t the videos that angered him so much as their content. That’s a substantial distinction.

In any case, CFP cannot be held responsible for the actions of an unstable third party. Leftists, I believe, would understand this principle a little better if the shoe were on the other foot.

 … There is no doubt, however, that their rhetoric amplifies the vitriol against our military. These are people who cavalierly toss around terms such as “war criminal” and “genocide” until they become meaningless noise. They claim that the Bush-era War on Terror was in fact a religious crusade to kill or convert all Muslims.

 … But Code Pink and International A.N.S.W.E.R. don’t think that their rhetoric makes them responsible for terrorism against military recruiters. And they’re right. Blaming them would only let the guys who actually did it off the hook. Rhetoric doesn’t kill people—people kill people.

What about CBS News? Surely it put our soldiers at risk, if only because their program 60 Minutes II broke the Abu Ghraib prison scandal? No, CBS News isn’t culpable either. It isn’t the media’s job to collude in silence just because the story might make someone angry enough to go off the edge and kill someone. The same principle applies to the baby parts videos—CFP was only the messenger, and for that we should be grateful.

Robert Dear did indeed act from a red-hot anger, though CFP’s role in stirring it up was limited to peeling back the veil of secrecy that Planned Parenthood very much wanted to keep in place. Their role in Baby Parts-gate was identical that of 60 Minutes II in the Abu Ghraib scandal—namely, as the messenger.

Through the use of undercover videos, CFP exposed Planned Parenthood’s harvesting and selling of baby parts—eyes, liver, brains, and more. Perhaps you’ve heard that the videos were deceptively edited. Wrong. A study by Coalfire, a digital forensic analysis company, found that the videos were “authentic and show no evidence of manipulation.” Yes, all the videos were “edited”—just like nearly everything else seen on TV, because they are hours long and viewers generally like to see the highlight reel. Anyone who wants to see the uncut videos can find those on CFP’s website as well. …

Had you noticed how leftists have falsified the debate? If no one else has, Benny Huang points it out in stark terms:

 As the drip-drip-drip release of videos continued, the debate descended into abject silliness with Planned Parenthood defending its baby chop shops by falsely claiming that they operate on a strictly nonprofit basis. True to form, progressives implied that there is nothing morally suspect about killing children or divvying their organs. The real evil is profit. As long as no one gets rich off the deal they’re as pure as the driven snow.

Except Planned Parenthood did make a profit and anyone who tells you otherwise is a liar. One video features abortionist Mary Gatter haggling with prospective “buyers” over the price of organs. When Gatter is asked how much she would charge for “intact tissue,” she responds by saying, “Why don’t you start by telling me what you’re used to paying?” Odd. Why should that matter? If Planned Parenthood only wants to be reimbursed for expenses then it should have one non-negotiable price.

… Yet no one has gone to jail. There were meaningless congressional hearings of course, and a few states tried to turn off the spigots of cash to this reprehensible organization but no one at Planned Parenthood is wearing an orange jumpsuit. So Robert Dear decided to exercise some vigilante justice. That makes him a(n alleged) murderer and he will likely be convicted and jailed for the rest of his life, unlike the Planned Parenthood execs who have thus far been allowed to skate.

Mark my words—in the coming weeks there will be an intense media campaign to marginalize anyone who dares to mention the fact that Planned Parenthood sells baby parts. That’s wing-nutty terrorist talk! …

Oh, Lord, No! No More! Please! No More Hope'n'Change

Whether this is far from relevant or whether it bodes ill waits to be seen:

In Danish, the title of Jimmy Burns's Francis, Pope of Good Promise has been translated to Pave Frans - Forandring og håb, or, re-translated back to English: Pope Francis: Hope and Change (to be 100% accurate, Pope Francis: Change and Hope)!
 

Is Apple Losing It? With the Relinquishment of iPhoto, It Sure Seems to Be the Case

One of the worst "innovations" over the past years
was the decision to "improve" the Mac computer's iPhoto
feature,
I wrote on Instapundit in response to Don Norman and
Bruce Tognazzini's How Apple Is Giving Design A Bad Name,
indeed to have it replaced by an app called,
simply, Photos (to coincide with the iPhone's Photos
app, which actually had that straight-forward name
because it was/is really little more a simple straight-forward
description of results of the in-built camera).

iPhoto was already as near perfection as can be, and
making it "better" got rid of some of its best features.

• You used to be able to write captions for a batch of
photos at a time, from 2 photos to 20 to 200, if need be;
this feature is gone, and now you have (if indeed you have
the courage to go ahead with such onerous a task) to write
(or copy and paste) every caption one photo at a time.

• The above-mentioned caption used to be immediately
visible when you clicked on the photo, and appear right
next to it, along with the technical information on the
photo (lighting, lens aperture, etc…) and the (GPS) place
where it was taken;
now it is only visible when and if you press the
information command (CMD + I) and it appears in a
separate window, one that hovers over and therefore
sometimes hides part of the photo. (Nothing drastic,
I know, but, again, still something that hardly needed
"improvement" in the first place.)

• Apple used to have an iPhoto feature called Events, which
allowed people to put photos related to a certain (wait for
it)… event into the same file.  Gone (in order to make the
Mac computer compatible with the iPhone's photo app,
something that hardly seemed called for or necessary).
Events seems to be replaced by a feature that most of
us have no use whatsoever for, the ability to file photos
by days, weeks, months, and years.

(If you go on a trip from the middle of one week to the middle of the
next, for business or pleasure, you hardly want that vacation or business
trip in two files, along with photos in each from your home town before
and after the trip; you want them together, with the home photos in two
(before and after) separate files (or, if you so wish, in one separate file).)

So what Apple has done is get rid of options.

But the greatest option that Apple got rid of was iPhotos itself.
Once you have upgraded to the first non-Feline operating system (OS),
i.e., to the first California landmark (as I learned to my great displeasure
when I upgraded from Mountain Lion to Mavericks),
the option to use iPhoto vanishes. If a user likes Photos, fine.
But why should he not be able to retain iPhotos if he prefers that?!
In other words, why can't, why couldn't, Apple retain both?!

Judgment Is Always Bad (Except for Certain Exceptions…)

Jim Davis rarely, if ever, takes political sides in his Garfield cartoon, but in this instance he seems to have captured the liberal mindset fairly well.

Related (on a more serious note): a post discussing Martin Luther King Jr:
It isn’t judging that perturbs liberals so much;
it’s other people judging according to criteria that liberals don’t like

Thanksgiving: What to Be Greatful For in the 21st Century (Yes, Greatful)

At this time of Thanksgiving, I just think we should all take the time to think about what to be happy about and greatful (not grateful) for.

We should be grateful because we are the most intelligent people in history.

We should be grateful because we are more humane than anybody who preceded us.

We should be grateful because we are the most compassionate people who have ever lived.

We should be grateful because we are the most tolerant people who ever lived.

Never has anyone been as open to debate, never has anyone been so open to discussion, as we are.

We may be no more than a nose-pickin' high-schooler or a victimized college student, but we are so wonderful, so much more avant-garde than all the clueless morons who have preceded us.

George Washington? Abraham Lincoln? Christian IX? Montesquieu?

They were all racists.

Shakespeare? Voltaire? Hans Christian Andersen? Alexander the Great?

They were all sexists.

Cicero? Benjamin Franklin? Kierkegaard? Leonardo da Vinci?

They were all homophobes. (Okay, Leonardo was not.)

Hateful beings! The lot of 'em! Haters!

And in the White House, we finally have the most intelligent person to ever occupy the Oval Office. (Think about it: this compassionate being figured out that "the Russians love their children too", his secretary of state set the Reset button with the Kremlin in 2009, and Vladimir Putin has — hardly — bothered anyone since then; the humane leftist who replaced the dumb cowboy Bush understood that violence was always wrong, the pacifist refrained from carrying out his threats towards Assad, and Syria and its citizens have — hardly — been in the news cycle since.)

This is why I am so grateful.

I think of my father.
I think of my mother.
I think of my grand-fathers.
I think of my grand-mothers.

Think about it!!

I am more intelligent than my parents,
I am more humane than my grand-parents,
I am compassionate than all the ancestors who have preceded me.
I am much more tolerant than those… those… those filthy Christian swine!

Can you somehow imagine meeting all of your ancestors? Or one of them (those morons!)? (Allegedly, the Christian religion promises this in some way, but let us ignore that for the time being, due to those haters' ridiculous superstition.)

• One of your ancestors: God in heaven, my great-great-great-grand-son!!! It's a miracle! How are you, dear great-great-great-grand-son?!?! Speak! Speak to me!!

• You (or Me): Hi there, gramps. Uh… you shouldn't, er, open your mouth too much.

• One of them: What are you saying, dear child?!

• You: You are a Christian, right? You are religious, at least? Right?
Then (how to put this?)… you should… shut up.

• One of them: But why, dear child?! Why?!

• You: Because, thank God (so to speak), the likes of you are looked down upon these days. They can even get arrested.

• One of them: For what reason?!

• You: For being hateful, of course. And arrogant.

You see, great-great-great-grand-father, I am far more intelligent than you are (than you ever were).

I am far more humane than you are.

I am far more compassionate than you are.

I am far more tolerant than you are.

And… (last but not least)…
I am far more open to debate and discussion than you are.

• One of them: But—

• You: Enough!! SHUT THE @##%^&&& UP!!!

How Does the—Totally Unbiased—French Media Describe Nigel Farage and His UKIP Party Members? Le Monde Compares Them to Teenagers and to Clowns

Wondering how Le Monde's Marion Van Renterghem describes the UKIP leader (or how the MSM outlet did so last year, at least)?

Accompanying a picture where the "ultra-conservative" "ultra-capitalist" ("l'ultraconservateur" "ultralibéral") looks like a demented fundamentalist Sunday preacher and referring to the party's alleged "racist meanderings" ("les dérapages racistes du UKIP"), she compares him and his entourage to teenagers:

Between Farage and his aides, talking ill of Brussels is part of the big jokes that they get as little tired of as adolescents do of dirty stories.

Entre Farage et ses assistants, dire du mal de Bruxelles fait partie des grosses blagues dont on se lasse aussi peu que les adolescents des histoires de fesses.

Then, borrowing from Goscinny and Uderzo's (Asterix and) Obelix, she concludes that

Nigel Farage is the populist Italian clown Beppe Grillo who's fell into a Tea Party à l'américaine with the posh accent of an English conservative. 

That's right. Very objective. And very unbiased.

Nigel Farage, c'est le clown populiste italien Beppe Grillo tombé dans un Tea-Party à l'américaine avec l'accent posh d'un conservateur anglais.

Jedi Mind Tricks and Two Sides to the Delusional Coin: On the one hand liberals embrace lies as truth, while on the other they reject truth as lies

Where does Bobby Jindal go to get his reputation back?

asks Benny Huang.

The Louisiana governor and former presidential candidate took some heat following last January’s Charlie Hebdo attack when he spoke about Muslim no-go zones in Europe. No-go zones are Muslim enclaves, completely separate from civil law and authority, run according to street justice and Muslim tradition.

Jindal was quickly rebuked by political commentators and even the mayor of London, Boris Johnson, who insisted that “no-go zones” are fictional. “Jindal condemns imaginary no-go zones” wrote Steve Benen on Rachel Maddow’s MaddowBlog. A Washington Post headline mused, “Bobby Jindal Won’t Back Down on no-go Zones. Why?” Geez, I don’t know—because he was right?

 … Ten months later, after an even more horrific terror attack in Paris, we learned that in fact some of the perpetrators had emerged from exactly the no-go zones whose existence Jindal’s detractors had denied in January. When investigators followed the terrorists’ trail to Brussels, they raided homes in the Molenbeek neighborhood, which the New York Times describes as “working class.” That’s Times-speak for non-working class and, of course, Muslim. The Times tweeted: “Belgian Minister Says Government Lacks Control Over Neighborhood Linked to Terror Plots” That’s as good a definition as any for a “no-go zone.” Days later, French police laid siege to an apartment in Saint Denis, a heavily Muslim suburb of Paris known for its high crime and wide availability of guns. Saint Denis is by all accounts a no-go zone.

But don’t worry—there’s no such thing as a no-go zone. Never has been, never will be.

This habit of denying the existence of very real threats seems to be a distinguishing characteristic of the Left. Even more enigmatic is the fact that they simultaneously believe in a lot of things that happen to be pure fiction. Until recently I considered liberals’ primary malfeasance to be in stirring up hysteria through the fabrication of incidents that never happened.

Rape hoaxes are a favorite. These are the people who brought us the Rolling Stone rape hoax—not to mention the Lena Dunham rape hoax, the Duke lacrosse team rape hoax, the mattress girl rape hoax, and the Tawana Brawley rape hoax. Liberals recently experienced a mass hallucination at the University of Missouri, claiming that the KKK was roaming the campus. Some went as far as to claim that the klansmen were receiving police protection as they tossed bricks through dormitory windows. None of this actually happened. Liberals stage hate crimes, invent appalling statistics, and plant racist signs at Tea Party rallies. They subscribe to all sorts of unproven and unprovable theories such as the “gay” gene. They inhabit a world of utter fakeness—and that’s just the way they like it.

This delusional coin of theirs has two sides. On the one hand liberals embrace lies as truth, while on the other they reject truth as lies.

Nor is it enough to simply deny the existence of very real things; they have to defame others, like Bobby Jindal, who refuse to play along. It didn’t suffice to say that he was wrong about no-go zones in Europe—which he wasn’t wrong, by the way—they had to accuse him of far worse.

Be sure to read Benny Huang's list of "a few things that liberals refuse to allow to exist", from False Rape Accusers to Black-on-Black Crime through Islamic terrorism and
Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq:

Some eleven years after the invasion of Iraq, the New York Times finally got around to publishing a story about the five thousand chemical munitions discovered since 2003. Yet the myth of “no WMD” persists to the present day. Even the author of the Times article, CJ Chivers, tried to perpetuate the falsehood that the weapons don’t count because they were left over from the 1980s and were thus not the weapons used to justify the war. He must have been expecting his readers not to read UN Resolution 1441, which laid out in explicit detail the rationale or the war. It essentially demanded that Saddam account for all WMD known to be in its possession at the time of his 1991 surrender, which would of course include 1980s weapons. 

Benny Huang, who might also have mentioned that Fox News felt compelled to apologize to Paris after the mayor (pre-November 13) harshly criticized its report on the French capital's no-go zones, concludes:

Liberals are like Ben Kenobi employing Jedi mind tricks to convince the rest of us that “These are not the drones you’re looking for.” With a wave of the hand they can make people disbelieve their very eyes. How a person can believe, despite all evidence to the contrary, that Matthew Shepard was killed for his sexuality is truly astounding, though not nearly as astounding as the idea that these people deny the very existence of ex-gays! They’ve invented this thing called the War on Women™, but vehemently deny that there’s any such thing as a war on Christmas. They deny the existence of voter fraud, non-citizens on the welfare rolls, and disease-carrying illegal aliens. How on earth could one group of people be so out of touch with reality? That’s liberals for you.

Spare me the Saddam nostalgia: Saddam's Iraq was a concentration camp above ground and a mass grave beneath it

In the wake of the Paris attacks, the executive director of the Human Security Centre, Julie Lenarz, writes that

I'm hearing a lot of "if it hadn't been for the Iraq war, we wouldn't be in this mess". The Kurds right now are digging out Yezidi mass graves. Not so long ago it was us digging out Kurdish mass graves.

By all means, let's discuss what went wrong, but spare me the Saddam nostalgia by the historically illiterate. I can't eat as much as I want to vomit.

Jalal Talabani captured it beautifully when he said:

"Saddam's Iraq was a concentration camp above ground and a mass grave beneath it."

In France, the immigrant’s life means dealing with the country’s bureaucratic maze

After I moved just over the Paris city limit to Pantin 

wrote the New York Times' Mira Kamdar a few months prior to the November attacks,

I realized my status as a foreigner in France had changed. In leaving Paris for the banlieue, I had ceased to be an American expatriate, and became just another immigrant in France.

 … The immigrant’s life also means dealing with France’s bureaucratic maze. Police prefectures handle immigration matters here. In Paris, Americans — and foreigners from a few other countries — are sent to a room upstairs. There, I had taken a number and within a half-hour was sitting before an administrator’s desk. Downstairs, a room crowded with people, most of whom appeared to be from sub-Saharan Africa and the Maghreb, waited for their turn at a stand-up window. I now have some idea what they went through.

 … Many of the foreigners at the Bobigny prefecture are from former French colonies in sub-Saharan Africa and the Maghreb. In seeking legal residency, they are asking for official recognition of their existence in France.

Most foreigners begin with a one-year permit. In principle, you are eligible for a 10-year permit after five years, and may also be eligible to apply for citizenship. In practice, many people must renew their residency permit every year, a humiliating exercise that makes it nearly impossible to do things that would actually help them integrate into French society, like getting a permanent job or applying for credit.

The real problem is France’s attitude toward immigrants. …

Have the Awful Climate Change Deniers Turned a Cartoonist?!

For a cartoonist living in a period of unprecedented™ global warming, Wiley Miller sure doesn't seem to be showing a lot of responsibility in his choice of subjects!

The Big, Existential Question on Our Campuses

How Come So Much of What Honest Abe Spoke of 150 Years Ago Seems Relevant Today?

Today is the anniversary of the Gettysburg Address (thanks to Duncan Hill).

This brings us to a post from five years ago:

How come so much of what Abraham Lincoln spoke of 150 years ago seems relevant today?

A careful reading of Abraham Lincoln's speeches seems to bring up pertinent comments on or about: the stimulus, the ever-increasing debt and deficits, the arguments for reforming (and ditching) the Constitution, the Democrats' double standards, and the caricature made of the Republican Party and their members (such as Sarah Palin) and like-minded people (such as the tea partiers) contrasted with the heroic image bestowed upon the Democrats and progressives' standard-bearers (such as Barack Obama), and the élites of the East Coast, the Ivy League universities, and Hollywood.

Incidentally, Dan Greenberg's and my graphic novel biography of Honest Abe, The Life & Times of Abraham Lincoln, is slated for publication later this year…

Doesn't Abraham Lincoln's Speech in the Illinois Legislature on the State Bank (January 11, 1837) sound somewhat like the sub-prime mess, the stimulus, and the search for ever-larger deficits?

It is an old maxim and a very sound one, that he that dances should always pay the fiddler. Now, sir, in the present case, if any gentlemen, whose money is a burden to them, choose to lead off a dance, I am decidedly opposed to the people's money being used to pay the fiddler …

These capitalists generally generally act harmoniously, and in concert, to fleece the people, and now, that they have got into a quarrel with themselves, we are called upon to appropriate the people's money to settle the quarrel.

… I make the assertion boldly, and without fear of contradiction, that no man, who does not hold an office, or does not aspire to one, has ever found any fault of the Bank. … No, Sir, it it the politician who is the first to sound the alarm, (which, by the way, is a false one.) It is he, who, by these unholy means, is endeavoring to blow up a storm that he may ride upon and direct. It is he, and he alone, that here proposes to spend thousands of the people's public treasure…

Doesn't Abraham Lincoln's June 20, 1848, Speech on Internal Improvements (first para below) and his February 13, 1848, letter to a Josephus Hewett (second para) sound like he is talking to those who wish to ditch or at least reform the Constitution and the Electoral College?

I now wish to submit a few remarks on the general proposition of amending the constitution. As a general rule, I think, we would much better let it alone. No slight occasion should tempt us to touch it. Better not take the first step, which may lead to a habit of altering it. Better, rather, habituate ourselves to think of it, as unalterable. It can scarcely be made better than it is. New provisions, would introduce new difficulties, and thus create, and increase appetite for still further change. No sir, let it stand as it is. New hands have never touched it. The men who made it, have done their work, and have passed away. Who shall improve, on what they did?

I was once of your opinion … that presidential electors should be dispensed with; but a more thorough knowledge of the causes that first introduced them, has made me doubt. Those causes were briefly these. The convention that framed the constitution had this difficulty: the small states wished to so frame the government as that they might be equal to the large ones regardless of the inequality of the population; the large ones insisted on equality in proportion to population. They compromised it, by basing the House of Representatives on population, and the Senate on states regardless of population; and the executive on both principles, by electors in each state, equal in numbers to her senators and representatives. Now, throw away the machinery of electors, and the compromise is broken up, and the whole yielded to the principle of large states. … Have you reflected on these things?

Doesn't Abraham Lincoln's 1854 Fragments on Government sound like he is (re)asserting what true Americans stand for — belief in the individual and the common man?

Most governments have been based, practically, on the denial of equal rights of men … ours began, by affirming those rights. They said, some men are too ignorant, and vicious, to share in government. Possibly so, said we; and, by your system, you would always keep them ignorant, and vicious. We proposed to give all a chance; and we expected the weak to grow stronger, the ignorant, wiser; and all better, and happier, together.

Moreover, with regards to Washington politicos trying to submit every part of society (and their allegedly ignorant, vicious members) to government control:

This is a world of compensations, and he who would be no slave, must consent to have no slave. Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves.

Doesn't Abraham Lincoln's Speech on the Sub-Treasury at Springfield (December 26, 1839) sound somewhat like he is refuting what the holier-than-thou Democrats insist is the difference between themselves and the greedy, flawed, treacherous members of the demonized opposition party?

Mr. Lamborn [a prominent Democrat] insists that the difference between the Van Buren party [the Democrats], and the Whigs [to a certain extent, the forerunners of the Republicans] is, that although, the former sometimes err in practice, they are always correct in principle — whereas the latter are wrong in principle — and the better to impress this proposition, he uses a figurative expression in these words: "The Democrats are vulnerable in the heel, but they are sound in the head and the heart."

The first branch of the figure, that the Democrats are vulnerable in the heel, I admit is not merely figuratively, but literally true. Who that looks but for a moment at their Swartwouts, their Prices, their Harringtons, and their hundreds of others [who have also handled the nation's purses in, uh, less than an honest way], scampering away with the public money to Texas [then an independent republic], to Europe, and to every spot of the earth where a villain may hope to find refuge from justice, can at all doubt that they are most distressingly affected in their heels with a species of "running itch."

It seems that this malady of the heels, operates on these sound-headed and honest-hearted creatures, very much like the cork-leg, in the comic song, did on its owner: which, when he had once got started on it, the more he tried to stop it, the more it would run away. At the hazard of wearing this point thread bare, I will related an anecdote, which seems too strikingly in point to be omitted.

A witty Irish soldier, who was always boasting of his bravery, when no danger was near, but who invariably retreated without orders at the first charge of an engagement, being asked by his Captain why he did so, replied: "Captain, I have as brave a heart as Julius Caesar ever had; but some how or other, whenever danger approaches, my cowardly legs will run away with it." So with Mr. Lamborn's party. They take the public money into their hand for the most laudable purpose, that wise heads and honest hearts can dictate; but before they can possibly get it out again their rascally "vulnerable heels" will run away with them.

Seriously: this proposition of Mr. Lamborn is nothing more or less, than a request that his party may be tried by their professions instead of their practices. Perhaps no position that the party assumes is more liable to, or more deserving of exposure, than this very modest request.

Doesn't Abraham Lincoln's demonstration of the Democrats' double standards in the 1852 election between his party's Millard Fillmore and the Democrats' Franklin Pierce remind you somewhat of the clueless-Palin-vs.-dream-candidate-Obama double standards during the campaign?

O ho! Judge [Douglas]; it is you, is it, that thinks a man [or a woman] should furnish proof of superiority of statesmanship, before he [or she] is looked to as a candidate for the first office? Do please show us those proofs in the case of your "gallant and honest man, Frank Pierce." Do please name a single one that you consider such. What good thing, or even part of a good thing has the country ever enjoyed, which originated with him? What evil thing has been averted by him? Compare his proofs of statesmanship with those of Mr. Fillmore, up to the times respectively when their names were first connected with presidential elections.

Doesn't Abraham Lincoln's "few words" defending maligned Republicans and conservative principles "to the Southern people" during his Cooper Union speech of February 27, 1860, sound like he is speaking about principled Republicans and earnest tea partiers to today's Democrats, élite Easterners, university professors (and students), Hollywood bigwigs, and other self-declared liberals and progressives?

You consider yourselves a reasonable and a just people; and I consider that in the general qualities of reason and justice you are not inferior to any other people. Still, when you speak of us Republicans, you do so only to denounce us a reptiles, or, at the best, as no better than outlaws. You will grant a hearing to pirates or murderers, but nothing like it to "Black Republicans." In all your contentions with one another, each of you deems an unconditional condemnation of "Black Republicanism" as the first thing to be attended to. Indeed, such condemnation of us seems to be an indispensable prerequisite — license, so to speak — among you to be admitted or permitted to speak at all. Now, can you, or not, be prevailed upon to pause and to consider whether this is quite just to us, or even to yourselves? Bring forward your charges and specifications, and then be patient long enough to hear us deny or justify.

And — mournfully — this from Abraham Lincoln January 27, 1838, Address Before the Young Men's Lyceum of Springfield:

At what point shall we expect the approach of danger? By what means shall we fortify against it? Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant, to step the Ocean, and crush us at a blow? Never! All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest; with a Buonaparte for a commander, could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years. At what point, then, is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.

Mourning "all lives lost to gun violence" is like calling the people murdered on 9/11 victims of “airplane violence”

If only france had sensible gun control laws, the Paris attacks of November 13^th would not have happened

writes Benny Huang acidly, with irony galore.

Okay, everyone knows that isn’t true. france has gone way beyond “sensible” gun control laws and has, for all practical purposes, banned civilian ownership of firearms. It didn’t stop last week’s surreal carnage—and it won’t stop the next attack either.

Freelance reporter David Axe explained on the Daily Beast how fully automatic rifles have come to contaminate la République française. … As David Axe explains, it isn’t particularly difficult to obtain an AK-47 in france today—provided you have the proper underworld connections. The underworld, by definition, is the domain of the criminal class, so it should come as no surprise that bad guys can get their hands on serious firepower without much difficulty.

The problem is getting worse. In 2012, a young Muslim shot up a Jewish school in Toulouse, killing a teacher and three students. In January, a team of Muslim terrorists attacked the offices of Charlie Hebdo, a left-wing satire magazine that regularly mocked religion—and didn’t spare Islam. There was also the attempted shooting spree in August of this year by a Muslim terrorist onboard an Amsterdam-to-Paris train that was thankfully thwarted by an American trio.

And that’s just the terrorism! France also suffers from ordinary violent crime, centered in its immigrant ghettoes, of course. The city of Marseille in the south of France has become something of a war zone in recent years, earning it the ignominious title “the most dangerous city in Europe.” Turf wars are fought with the same full-auto Kalashnikovs used in the most recent Paris attacks. “Marseille is sick with its violence,” then-Interior Minister Manuel Valls said in 2013.

If the recent Paris attacks prove anything it’s that mass shootings are not a uniquely American phenomenon. Some people will surely argue that the US still leads the world in violent rampages and that any comparison between us and them would be a false one. Of course, I don’t mean to imply that the US, when compared to Western Europe, has an equal number of spree killings, or even a proportional number of spree killings, but I will posit that the explanation for the disparity has little to do with differences in our laws.

The second amendment to the Constitution has been the law of the land since 1791. For the better part of two hundred years Americans managed to keep and bear arms with very few instances of people “going postal.” But then things began to change.

People were shocked when, in 1966, a man named Charles Whitman climbed the clock tower at UT-Austin and began sniping at students below. Stuff like that just didn’t happen in those more innocent times. In the decades that followed, the situation only worsened. The killing seemed to be everywhere in the 1990s—Jonesboro, Arkansas, Springfield, Oregon, and Paducah, Kentucky. The levy broke in 1999 when two teenagers in Colorado laid siege to their high school, killing thirteen people before committing suicide. Since then the massacres have all become a blur—Newtown, Virginia Tech, Fort Hood, Charleston, the Sikh Temple. It never seems to end.

Liberals have indicted guns. They believe that banning them would be a quick fix and it’s what they strongly imply we should do—usually before issuing heated denials that anyone wants to trample your second amendment rights. They just want a few “common sense” controls to make sure guns don’t fall into the wrong hands, or so they say. But of course they want to ban guns and that’s why they look to European nations like France as their model. Spree killings just don’t happen there—except when they do.

Contrary to gun control propaganda, Europe has not escaped the modern scourge of spree killings. Norway’s tough gun control laws didn’t stop the monstrous Anders Brevik from killing 77 people, mostly children, in 2011. Germany’s tough gun control laws didn’t prevent Robert Steinhäuser from killing sixteen people at an Erfurt high school in 2002, nor did they prevent Tim Kretschmer from killing sixteen people “for fun” at a Winnenden secondary school in 2009. The Czech Republic’s gun control laws didn’t stop a gunman from shooting up a popular restaurant in 2015, killing nine. And of course France’s tough gun control laws didn’t stop the most recent attacks, the Charlie Hebdo attacks, the foiled train shooting, the Toulouse Jewish day school shooting, or even armed street crime.

Banning guns won’t get to the root of the problem, it will only disarm the victims. But just what is the problem? I would argue that we have two.

The first of these problems is a creeping darkness of the soul. I believe Mike Huckabee summed it up well when he remarked, in the aftermath of the Oregon community college shooting that “We have not so much a gun problem, we have a problem with sin and evil.” His remark did not sit well with liberals who were leery of his religious overtones. Also, they don’t want to admit that the revolutionary changes that have swept through society since the 1960s have been anything but positive. Instead they talk about guns. They would have us believe that the roots of our problem are as old as our Constitution and the bitter-clinger frontiersmen who built this country. To them it’s not evil, it’s “gun culture.”

 … The other problem is even more difficult to talk about. It’s called jihad. This unholy “holy war” is responsible for not only the Paris attacks but also the Fort Hood massacres and the military recruiting station shootings in Chattanooga and Little Rock.

If liberals are loathe to discuss the sin and evil problem, they are even more reluctant to talk about jihad because it feels like racism. Take for example the recent tweet from Moms Demand Action, a Michael Bloomberg-funded gun control group which advocates European-style gun control here in America. You’d think they’d keep quiet at a time when their preferred policies failed so miserably but they just couldn’t resist. “We are united in mourning all lives lost to gun violence” they proclaimed. Gun violence? Oh, I suppose that some of the people in Paris were killed with guns—and others with bombs—but none were killed by “gun violence.” They were killed by crazy-ass Muslim violence. Why can’t they bring themselves to say it?

This unwillingness to talk about radical Islam in connection with terroristic violence does us all a disservice because it lets the perps off the hook. It would be like calling the people murdered on 9/11 victims of “airplane violence.” Yes, airplanes played a role in what happened that day but no one was killed by a 747. They were killed by Mohammad Atta and eighteen of his buddies, all Muslims.

Guns are liberals’ favorite patsy, the inanimate objects they like to blame when they can’t—or won’t—account for what really ails us.

The November 13 attacks targeted activities that are dear to Parisians, symbols of the French joie de vivre

  … reports say at least 129 people died and more than 350 were wounded in last Friday’s attacks 

writes Carine Martinez-Gouhier at the Federalist;

99 people are still in critical condition. Terrorists all carried powerful rifles and suicide bomb vests, which they did not hesitate to detonate. Not only were those attacks the most deadly Paris has known in the past decades, they are likely to tremendously impact the way of life of Parisians and French people in the months to come. …

The Terrorists Chose Specifically French Targets

 … In their statement claiming responsibility for the attacks, ISIS declared targets were carefully chosen in advance. In fact, while the Charlie Hebdo attack aimed to suppress free speech, the November 13 attacks targeted activities that are dear to Parisians, symbols of the French joie de vivre: restaurants where diners were enjoying food and drinks on a Friday night, a soccer game (soccer is France’s favorite sport), and a legendary Parisian concert venue.

The attacks were obviously meant to make as many victims as possible and to change the way the French would go about their life. French President Francois Hollande started this by asking Parisians to stay home. But his recommendation was probably not necessary.

 … By definition, terrorism is meant to create a state of fear in the population. Economically, this is not good for France, of course, which is already struggling to reach an estimated 1.1 percent growth rate for 2015. More worrisome is how the country might be politically impacted by the attacks. The temptation to turn to populist voices may be easy. Although the next presidential election will take place in 2017, results from regional elections next month might give us a hint (supposing people will go out to vote). Marine Le Pen’s far-right Front National Party might end up gaining more support following the events.

Mourn, Then Take Action

What can be done, then?

The French should first give themselves time to mourn their dead. Three days of national mourning started on Sunday, November 15. Emotional reactions to the attacks should then be followed by serious questioning about the effectiveness of several policies.

There are times in life when one wishes to be wrong. Sadly, I can’t say we did not see these attacks coming. Not only had ISIS warned France several times, but it is no secret that some areas of France, and some suburbs of Paris, have become fertile breeding ground for Islamization of young people and weapons trafficking. This problem should be addressed without having to play contortionist to avoid hurting the feelings of anyone.

France has very restrictive speech laws. Forbid people to engage in open debate, and unscrupulous politicians will exploit fears. Open debate would bring additional ideas, probably good and bad, on how to better fight the enemy we are facing. Anyone who opposes the attacks should be able to understand that. To use a popular expression these days, the victims of the attacks received no trigger warnings (no pun intended) before being executed in cold blood. Censoring fears will not help.

A good example would start with debating allowing the French to be able to carry guns to defend themselves and their loved ones, if necessary. Do we need further evidence that strict gun laws do not prevent criminals from obtaining deadly weapons to commit their crimes? The police will never be able to react soon enough to all dangerous situations, not to mention cases like Friday’s attacks, in which the goal is to kill as many people as possible. Someone carrying a gun might not have stopped the attacks, but the death toll might have been reduced. After the November 13 attacks, the French deserve to at least have the opportunity to debate whether gun control has made their livee safer.

The Paris Attacks Are the Work of Islam Itself, Writes Salem Ben Ammar

In the post entitled The Paris Attacks Are the Work of Islam, and the Beginning of the End of Our Humanity, Dreuz's Salem Ben Ammar presents a controversial theory about the Jihadists.

In related news, leftist journalists are quietly scrubbing the pro-refuge tenor of their pre-attack articles…

Revising History: Quietly, Leftist Journalists Are Scrubbing the Pro-Refuge Tenor of Their Pre-Attack Articles

Without warning, without an apology, and without an explanation, the headline of a 14-month-old  France Inter article was changed over the weekend, leading the Dreuz blog to write France Inter insults us, then changes its titles to his its error.


France Inter's September 2014 title read: Réfugiés: le fantasme de l’infiltration terroriste (Refugees: The Fantasy of the Terrorist Infiltration).

Two days after the Paris attacks (see a picture of the Bataclan carnage), "in order to hide the evidence of their incompetence" writes Christian Larnet, the title was changed to Des terroristes parmi les migrants? (Terrorists Among the Migrants?).

Wizard of Id's Advice for a Comedian: How to Play It Safe on Campus

Parker and Hart's Wizard of Id takes on the PC culture.