From a commercial guide to ESL instructors in France, this little bit of cuteness.
Which should get an F for running on. Number 3 fails for stupidity.
Better to ask Ivan:
ver01.ra
Fawaz Turki who wrote for the KSA based English publication, Arab News gives more evidence of the dense. The imperious mind obsessed with its’ superiority can’t absorb the facts of the world.
It’s proof positive that accepting that Israel shouldn’t be ‘pushed into the sea’ as the meme continued to demand must be put to rest. They have to grow to accept that the mere existence of others is no cause for fear, nor cause to express ‘power over’ and do them harm, as the Arabs have to the Arab Jews and to the Druze and Arab Christians in large part.It didn't matter that I had been the senior columnist on the op-ed page for nine years or that my work was quoted widely in the European and American media, including this paper. What mattered was that I had committed one of the three cardinal sins an Arab journalist must avoid when working for the Arab press: I criticized the government.
The other two? Bringing up Islam as an issue and criticizing, by name, political leaders in the Arab or Islamic world for their brazen excesses, dismal failures and blatant abuses.Never mind the absurdity of preventing your contributors from touching on the issue of Islam, a social ideology whose embrace by jihadists is the top news story in the world today. And never mind that Arab society -- a society that remains broken in body and spirit more than a half-century after independence -- needs very much to engage in serious self-assessment and to promote an open debate in the media among intellectuals, academics, political analysts and others about why Arabs have failed all these years to meet the challenges of modernity.
Imagine a paranoia so acute as to cause parents to compel their children to marry a cousin instead to involving ‘a stranger’. Imagine that and project it on the social and political thought.
Philippe Karsenty on the France 2 Al-Dura story:
Now, we are very few who try to have this story corrected. The problem to have this right is that the French elites are very happy with it because it confirms their hate feelings against Israel and the Jews. Israel-bashing is a national sport in France.
And on the undeniabity of denial,
He also has much more to say on economy, media, and taking the temperature of a culture. Excellent stuff.
...the Iraqi war was launched, according to most of the French people, in the name of Israel. And if you look at the nuclear bomb in preparation in Iran, you see that the French media only focus on the Israeli supposed interest. They just forget that if Iran provides terrorists with dirty radioactive material, it’s Europe that could be affected very soon. They also forget to recall that Europe has no anti-missile defense as Israel has with the Hetz. This means that, objectively, Israel is less endangered by a nuclear Iran than Europe. But, if you hear French media, the only country is danger is Israel and French people don’t want to fight a billion of Muslims to defend 6 million Israelis.
"I suggest this as an idea not only for the EU but also for member states themselves and on the worldwide scale"
"A small tax on an SMS from Paris to another French city could be allocated to the French government, but taxes on emails or SMS messages from Paris to Rome could be dedicated to the EU budget," he said.How typical. Plus, I doubt it would really raise much revenue. If you send 274 emails a day for a year, the tax would be €1. At most this is €100 M per year – “peanuts” -, much of which would be spent collecting it and extorting it out of ISPs. It wouldn't deter spammers since a million emails would only cost €10 in tax and make legitimate their dark art.
"In France an SMS costs 15 cents. We could tax it by 1.5 cents, or less," the MEP added.
For email, the rate could be as little as €0.00001. "This is peanuts, but given the billions of transactions every day, this could still raise an immense income."
Where people fighting for their future are at least sincere about it.Last year, some 2,700 new immigrants and another 300 returning Israelis arrived from North America. Immigration from North America, which has been on the upswing for the past three years, is expected to reach 3,500 people this year, with an equal number arriving from France.
Which is rather amusing when you consider the grand and glorious future their boorish neighbors have. Reader Jonathan alerts us to their positive outlook:
The number of immigrants from France totaled 2,100 in 2003, rose to 2,415 in 2004 and reached 3,000 in 2005. The rise in the number of French Jews moving to Israel is proportionally more significant, since half a million Jews live in France, as opposed to some 6 million Jews in the United States.The Palestinian Company for Economic Development, which is in charge of thousands of greenhouses that used to belong to Morag and other settlements in Gush Katif, said the attack, which took place on Friday, was the latest in a series that began almost immediately after the settlements were evacuated.
He also says that “it looks like it's going be a long, hot summer in Hamastan,” one where the public is significantly more intelligent than the leadership, well at least the ones that are smart enough to turn on the tossers:Internal clashes in the territory have raised fears among Palestinians of civil war.
the fuse is lit!
Last week, three gunmen were killed and a dozen people wounded in violence between Fatah and Hamas. The two organizations agreed to set up a joint committee to defuse
tensions.
Blaming Paul for inciting violence is like arresting a weatherman for predicting a hurricane.
Today Father Johan Leman, a Catholic priest of the Order of Saint Dominic (the inquisition order) and a professor at the Catholic University of Leuven, has joined the chorus. Father Leman is the previous president of the CEOOR (Center for Equal Opportunities and Opposition to Racism), the inquisition center of the Belgian government. In today’s news broadcast on the national radio he says that the CEOOR has been negligent because it has not already started prosecutions against me.
Synopsis: À 32 ans, Léonardo est un des artistes les plus réputés d'Italie, menant une vie foisonnante, s'adonnant allégrement aussi bien à la peinture qu'à des inventions en tous genres.
Jusqu'au jour où le Vatican découvre avec enthousiasme les machines de guerre novatrices imaginées par le jeune Florentin. En effet, il se trouve qu'au Saint-Siège se prépare dans le plus grand secret une nouvelle Croisade -- la première en 250 ans -- dont on confie le commandement au charismatique Général Scharano.
Le Vatican décide aussitôt de se servir des fameux engins inventés par Léonardo afin de mettre à bien son expédition... Ce qui n'enchante pas vraiment l'inventeur au caractère irrévérencieux...
Google lifted the veil this week on one of its best-kept secretswrites Anand Giridharadas in the IHT:
which nations search for what. Who looks up democracy most avidly? Who seeks out Allah or Christ most faithfully? Who types in "drugs" or "sex" most frequently?
No country's secrets are spared.
Pakistanis look up "Danish cartoons" more avidly than anyone, according to Google. They also lead the rankings for "sex" - with their neighbor and nuclear rival India seldom far behind.
…French users … shed light on France's power struggles. Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy draws as many searches on his own as his rivals, President Jacques Chirac and Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, combined.
…Not everything on the site is a surprise. People in Boston and Minneapolis and in Halifax, Nova Scotia, lead the search for "mittens." Dubliners top the list in "Guinness" searches. When it comes to looking up "dowry," surfers in Pakistan and India are clear leaders.
Other findings are quirkier, and at times to difficult to explain.
Even though homosexuality is punishable by death in Saudi Arabia, the kingdom ranks No. 2 for searches for "gay sex," behind the Philippines.
And consider the list of cities that most frequently look up "amour," the French word for love. Paris, allegedly a romantic haven, is absent from the top 10. The top three berths went to Rabat, Morocco; Algiers and Tunis.
Other findings suggest the stirrings of a trend. Searchers for "Allah" come overwhelmingly from the Islamic world. But, in a sign of shifting social realities, the word is searched from the Dutch-language version of Google more avidly than from the Arabic-language one. Norwegian, French, Danish, Swedish and German sites also featured in the top 10 for "Allah" inquiries.
A student at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee makes a reasonable observation in the campus newspaper: that “radicals” who seem to rather enjoy the comforts of the societies they want to violently dismantle don’t really know what they want, or why they want it.
A quick glance at the student body at any university across the United States would easily display the many different groups that students sort themselves into. Within these groups, you can find those who display their political ideology very easily. You will see them walking around in their popularized and commercialized “Che Guevara” t-shirts (I wonder what communist Che would say about his face on a popular t-shirt further representing the successes of capitalism). However, do these students truly know and consider themselves revolutionaries? And if so, what revolution are they exactly fighting for?
Liberal universities do not want to see any semblance of conservative thought having an outlet on campus. It is for good reasons that they do so. They realize that after students graduate, the appeal and popularity of liberalism is often replaced by the rational adoption of conservative views and values. Universities know that they only have a short time to indoctrinate their students. Therefore, the presence of another ideology is simply unacceptable.
I wonder how much latitude to speak freely he’ll be afforded once he’s written this?
Radio Netherlands, that paragon of knowing nods, has gone out of it's way to report on a freedom of speech award bestowed upon Muhammad al-Baradei. It was firmly implied that is was due to his occasional disagreement with the US Government, which has done absolutely nothing to limit his speech.
The producer of this piece seems to be so unsophisticated as to confuse a difference of view with the quashing of said isegoria. It's quite apparent that many are more than willing to silence a Conservative through humiliation of speaking at all because arguing a concept on its' merits requires emotional effort and an exposure to the possibility that one just might be wrong.Undeterred, al-Baradei didn't fully play along. He cited American president Franklin Roosevelt's hope that all people deserved these freedoms, noting that he said this quite some time ago, and that in an 'age of globalization' (which certainly isn't new,) that it's more imortant than ever. Roosevelt said this in 1941 when Hitler was taking care of the free-speech problem with an archipelago of concentration camps.
As we find today with the war on terror, collaborators and a rather dim intelligentsia in the lands Hitler attacked were more than happy to ignore this notion, and turn the very concept of a right to speech on its' ear.
The parallels with today are striking with the actions of a transnational network of Jihadists offering comfort to the ideas of a transnational network of 'peace' activists. They must be thinking of the peace found with death.
Bush, like Roosevelt is trying to preserve international civil society by quelling jihad's random acts of 'making peace' in the same way, only to find the bien-pensent sophmores of the left channeling Lord HawHaw - valuing a classroom 'time-out' over the arrest, detention, or otherwise active stopping of mass-murders.The Four Freedoms event where al-Baradei was honored also rightly focused also on Burma where true oppression is more than evident. Were one to mention the admiration the Burmese Junta has with oppressive socialism, it might likely go unmentioned.
All forms of socialism, even the nanny state have at least a subconscious instinct to punish the opinionated into silence. They only want to be loved, co-dependant, and "essential," if you will.
An elderly anti-abortion campaigner in the UK is being punished for legally airing his views by being denied medical treatment.
Odder yet, this man who sent photos of abortions to a hospital must have been surprised at the hospital staff being shocked by seeing medical photos - proof positive that they aren't practicing a great deal of medicine to begin with.
With the ASBO replacing the trust and faith they no longer have in the very population that has been socially engineered by illiberal leftism, one would need these shows of moral vanity to have goals as small as "making the trains run on time," for example - forgetting that these very same trains would run perfectly well were the government not trying to run them.