The Island of Despair

More from Plantu on Japan…

25 Years Later, Plantu Declares That the War-Monger Ronald Reagan Was Right

Every week, Le Monde Magazine gives Plantu a whole page upon which the Le Monde cartoonist can cover a current issue by reminiscing about the given subject and illustrating it with a handful of cartoons he has devoted to the matter in question over the years — or, indeed, over the decades…

The uprising in Libya gave Plantu the idea to choose Moammar Gadhafi, which brought him back to the 1980s and the conflict which opposed the "Messenger of the Desert" to Ronald Reagan (in the wake of Libya's involvement in the bombing of a Berlin discotheque attended by American servicemen)… Declareth Plantu:

They cannot say that they hadn't been warned, long ago, that Colonel Qaddafi was a tyrant and an international terrorist. On several occasions, American president Ronald Reagan warned the Europeans who… already then… preferred to close their eyes [literally: to look at their shoes].

Well, that's swell — maybe, in 2028 (if he's still around), Plantu will have a page in Le Monde Magazine (if it's still around) on how George W Bush was right to take on the Taliban and Saddam Hussein and how the Europeans were wrong to keep their eyes closed.

Because at the time, of course, all was different: notice Plantu's eternal saliva drop from Reagan's mouth showing how the drooliong president is old and senile. Notice also how the April 1986 cartoon (bottom left) depicts the war-mongering American (from whose aircraft-carrier-like head of hair a fighter takes off) and the war-mongering sheik flank the worried peace-loving (and innocent-looking) European in-between them.

Chernippon

Maybe the Japanese disaster is not the right occasion to complain about Plantu, but what with his combining of the words Chernobyl and Nippon (Japanese), it is the second time in two days that he can hardly be said to shine by his originality…

If the death penalty does deter, then the two sides in the argument over the death penalty have similar moral problems

In a dispassionate study in which he invokes common sense, Jim Miller reviews the decades-old "academic debate over whether the death penalty deters murders."

Simplifying greatly, you could say that the early part of that debate was dominated by sociologists who found no deterrent effect, and the latter part has been dominated by economists, who have found that every execution deters a number of murders, with most studies finding that it deters between 5 and 15 murders.

In an earlier study on the subject of the death penalty and deterrence (where we learn for instance that one "common mistake is to compare states with death penalty laws to states without them", ignoring "the fact that the states with the laws do not always impose the death penalty"), Jim Miller used the case of BTK serial killer Dennis Rader as an illustration.

If the death penalty does deter, then the two sides in the argument over the death penalty have similar moral problems. Supporters of the death penalty must admit that it is possible that some innocents will be executed. Opponents of the death penalty must admit that it is possible that, without the death penalty, more innocents will murdered than would be murdered otherwise. (And each side tends to believe that what is possible never happens, or almost never happens.)

Paris Sera Toujours Paris

For those of you getting sentimental for the city of lights, art, fashion, etc., etc.™®©, ¡No Pasarán! Brings you truth in advertising.

Plantu and Japan's Tsunami

After a week of absence, Plantu returns to the fold (although his cartoon is basically the same Hokusai spin-off as the Kap cartoon that Le Monde printed the previous issue)…

No, it's not true that Europe does not have the death penalty because its systems are more insulated from populist impulses than the U.S. government

Regarding the death penalty, already (more than) a decade ago (thanks to Jim Miller), Josh Marshall had this to say:

You seldom hear conservatives note, disapprovingly, that "America is the only industrialized country in the world that doesn't have X." It's not hard to figure out why, since X usually involves European (or Canadian or Japanese) big government.
But liberals sometimes imagine that America's peculiar lack of, say, nationalized health care, tough gun control, decent child care, widespread mass transport, or substantial arts funding is a sign of political underdevelopment. And so they bemoan America's uniqueness.

Particularly on the death penalty … The flood of capital punishment horror stories … has left anti-death-penalty liberals more convinced than ever that, on this issue at least, American political culture is inferior to its counterparts across the Atlantic.

If only it were that simple. It's true that all of America's G-7 partners, save Japan, have abolished capital punishment, but the reason isn't, as death-penalty opponents usually assume, that their populations eschew vengeance. In fact, opinion polls show that Europeans and Canadians crave executions almost as much as their American counterparts do. It's just that their politicians don't listen to them. In other words, if these countries' political cultures are morally superior to America's, it's because they're less democratic.

…Differences in the way survey questions are framed complicate direct comparisons with Europe. …you find very few European countries where the public clearly opposes it, and there are a number where support is very strong. … There is barely a country in Europe where the death penalty was abolished in response to public opinion rather than in spite of it.

…Differences between European parliamentary government and the American separation-of-powers system also play a role. Parliamentary government may provide voters with more ideological variety, but it is much more resistant to political upstarts, outsiders, and the single-issue politics on which the death penalty thrives. In parliamentary systems, people tend to vote for parties, not individuals; and party committees choose which candidates stand for election. As a result, parties are less influenced by the odd new impulses that now and again bubble up from the electorate.

…Basically, then, Europe doesn't have the death penalty because its political systems are less democratic, or at least more insulated from populist impulses, than the U.S. government. And elites know it. Referring to France, a recent article in the UNESCO Courier noted that "action by courageous political leaders has been needed to overcome local public opinion that has remained mostly in favour of the death penalty."

…all over the industrialized world, it turns out that the men and women on the street like the death penalty. It's just that in Europe and Canada elites have exercised a kind of noblesse oblige. They've chosen a[n allegedly — ES] more civilized and humane political order over a fully popular and participatory one.

Stop Whining. You've Created your Own Worst Stereotypes.

Now iss de time on Schprockets venn ve tance.

The Axis of Feeble

Someone finally gets it:

Castro's reforms envision a growing "non-state" retail and farming sector and more efficient state-run companies. They are expected to be approved at a Communist Party congress in April.

The massive lay-offs have reportedly come under fire during tens of thousands of meetings held across the island as a prelude to the congress.
The program is being described as a "reorganization" of the labor force because in theory laid-off workers are declared "available" and offered other jobs or they can lease fallow state land or become self-employed.

While others STILL don't get it:

Yet despite these failures of the EU project-greater prosperity, peace, and international influence through increased economic and political unification-many liberals in America continue to pursue policies, both domestic and foreign, that are moving the United States closer to the EU paradigm. Indeed, many on the Left approve of the European model as something to emulate. Partly, this reflects the place Europe has traditionally held in the imagination of some Americans. Like the Yankee ingénues in a Henry James novel, they have admired the Old World of sophistication, culture, and civilization that contrasts with the New World of crude, go-getting, frontier brashness. But these days, this admiration more fundamentally reflects the belief that Europe provides a more humane and sophisticated set of social and political values.

Elsewhere in Hypocracy Watch... Is there something to this humaneness-sophistication-superiority PR meme that I'm missing about globalization being an American invention, and being unthinkably bad?

Rumours that Renault is considering plans to delocalise production for some of the models made for its low-cost brand Dacia to Morocco have prompted concern in Romania. "Morocco threatens 'Romanian made' Dacia," headlines Gândul, which reports that there are two reasons why the carmaker could delocalise: first and foremost, "management's exasperation with union demands for annual bonuses of 700 lei (175 euros) and an extra of 500 lei (125 euros) per month;" and secondly, the poor state of Romanian road system, which has made it expensive to export cars from the country. Hourly rates of around five euros per hour that Renault could expect to pay in Tangier are considerably less than the 8 euros per hour it currently pays in Romania. However, the Bucharest daily notes that the plant in Mioveni was nonetheless responsible for 2.5 billion euros in exports in 2010, or 7% of Romania's export revenue. Gândul also points out that Dacia currently employes 150,000 people in Romania, of whom 20,000 work at Mioveni.

And you thought it was their superhuman intelligence, organizational skills, and engineering that made them what they are today.... I suggest that they import Wisconsin's Democrat societal-crash-test-dummies for a while. After all, they're using the rhetoric of unshod children starving in the street were it not for mommie's 6 hour a day, 10 month a year, $87K per year job which a trsined chimpanzee can do on auto-pilot.

A conservative is a liberal who just got mugged, and a liberal is a conservative who just got arrested

As a reader of The Economist puts it,

There is a straightforward reason as to why the baby-boomer generation is becoming more conservative (“As boomers wrinkle”, January 1st). As the old joke puts it, a conservative is a liberal who just got mugged, and a liberal is a conservative who just got arrested. As one ages, the likelihood of being mugged increases while the likelihood of being arrested decreases.

Frank Lowther
Los Angeles

The will of the people is generally seen by Eurocrats as an obstacle to overcome, not a reason to change direction

On a U.S. talk-radio show recently, I was asked what I thought about the notion that Barack Obama had been born in Kenya. "Pah!" I replied. "Your president was plainly born in Brussels."

That is how Daniel Hannan starts his Warning to America (thanks to Instapundit) regarding the perils of following Europeans toward greater regulation, higher taxes, and centralized power.

My guess is that, if anything, Obama would verbalize his ideology using the same vocabulary that Eurocrats do. He would say he wants a fairer America, a more tolerant America, a less arrogant America, a more engaged America. When you prize away the cliché, what these phrases amount to are higher taxes, less patriotism, a bigger role for state bureaucracies, and a transfer of sovereignty to global institutions.

He is not pursuing a set of random initiatives but a program of comprehensive Europeanization: European health care, European welfare, European carbon taxes, European day care, European college education, even a European foreign policy, based on engagement with supranational technocracies, nuclear disarmament and a reluctance to deploy forces overseas.

No previous president has offered such uncritical support for European integration. On his very first trip to Europe as president, Mr. Obama declared, "In my view, there is no Old Europe or New Europe. There is a united Europe."

I don't doubt the sincerity of those Americans who want to copy the European model. A few may be snobs who wear their euro-enthusiasm as a badge of sophistication. But most genuinely believe that making their country less American and more like the rest of the world would make it more comfortable and peaceable.

All right, growth would be slower, but the quality of life might improve. All right, taxes would be higher, but workers need no longer fear sickness or unemployment. All right, the U.S. would no longer be the world's superpower, but perhaps that would make it more popular. Is a European future truly so terrible?

Yes. I have been an elected member of the European Parliament for 11 years. I have seen firsthand what the European political model means.

The critical difference between the American and European unions has to do with the location of power. The U.S. was founded on what we might loosely call the Jeffersonian ideal: the notion that decisions should be taken as closely as possible to the people they affect. The European Union was based on precisely the opposite ideal.

…The will of the people is generally seen by Eurocrats as an obstacle to overcome, not a reason to change direction. When France, the Netherlands and Ireland voted against the European Constitution, the referendum results were swatted aside and the document adopted regardless. For, in Brussels, the ruling doctrine—that the nation-state must be transcended—is seen as more important than freedom, democracy or the rule of law.

This doctrine has had several malign consequences. … We can now see where that road [a European "third way" between the excesses of American capitalism and the totalitarianism of Soviet communism] leads: to burgeoning bureaucracy, more spending, higher taxes, slower growth and rising unemployment. But an entire political class has grown up believing not just in the economic superiority of euro-corporatism but in its moral superiority. After all, if the American system were better—if people could thrive without government supervision—there would be less need for politicians. As Upton Sinclair once observed, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it."

…Why is a European politician urging America to avoid Europeanization? As a Briton, I see the American republic as a repository of our traditional freedoms. The doctrines rooted in the common law, in the Magna Carta, and in the Bill of Rights found their fullest and most sublime expression in the old courthouse of Philadelphia. Britain, as a result of its unhappy membership in the European Union, has now surrendered a large part of its birthright. But our freedoms live on in America.

Well Now Isn't That Embarassing...

Those of you who are interested in the daily doings of Kim Jong Il, North Korea's hereditary autocrat and wacky man-about-town will be interested to know that he thinks Americans honor him, for being y'know him:

Pyongyang, March 8 (KCNA) -- Thomas Curley, president of the Associated Press of the United States, and his party visited the statue of President Kim Il Sung on Mansu Hill on Tuesday.

The guests laid bouquets before the statue and paid homage to the President

Today's Human Props.

Beware Constitutional Convention!

Beware Constitutional Convention! warns Phyllis Schlafly, who recently recorded 3 short videos on the dangers of the proposed Con Con (convention to propose amendments to the U.S. Constitution)

Diversity, Near East Style

The usual brutal carrying-on in those genteel and thoughtful Muslim-dominated societies makes this no real surprise:

The father of the Muslim woman was killed by his cousin because he did not kill his daughter to preserve the family's honor, which led the woman's brother to avenge the death of his father by killing the cousin.

Pourquoi, you ask?

The village Muslims blamed the Christians.

Of course the causes are obfuscated away at the top of their delusional lungs. The "family affair" shouldn't be confused by more lethal and common events:

A mob of nearly four thousand Muslims has attacked Coptic homes this evening in the village of Soul, Atfif in Helwan Governorate, 30 kilometers from Cairo, and torched the Church of St. Mina and St. George. There are conflicting reports about the whereabouts of the Church pastor Father Yosha and three deacons who were at church; some say they died in the fire and some say they are being held captive by the Muslims inside the church.

Witnesses report the mob prevented the fire brigade from entering the village. The army, which has been stationed for the last two days in the village of Bromil, 7 kilometers from Soul, initially refused to go into Soul, according to the officer in charge. When the army finally sent three tanks to the village, Muslim elders sent them away, saying that everything was "in order now."

A curfew has been imposed on the 12,000 Christians in the village.

Aren't we Being a Might Bit Overprotective?

Canada's tsunami warnings include many of the erstwhile dominion's highest points, inluding much of the canadian Rockies.

France's Strategic Yogurt Production is in Peril

It's splitsville for Danone in China, and Yoplait is now expected to pick up an accordion and go native: General Mills and China's Bright Food is talking about acquisition. The question is, now that an evil American company isn't the sole focus, will a Franco-fetishistic stink be made about those gentle, transparent, human employers from China?

"Bright wants to accelerate going global and expand its dairy business through mergers and cooperation," said Wang, who recently travelled to France to meet Yoplait's major shareholders.

Given the aboriginals' propensity to see outsiders as exploiting marauders, all I can say is Boo Ho, Spanky.

An American of Indian Heritage to Head the Insead Business School

Dipak C. Jain est un doyen "global" pour une institution qui cherche plus que jamais à affirmer sa vocation d'"école globale" : "The Business School for the World", comme se définit elle-même cette école spécialisée dans la formation en management pour cadres.

The new head of one of Europe's most prestigious management schools is American. And not just your typical American, writes Benoît Floc'h in Le Monde. The former head of Chicago's Kellogg School of Management (Northwestern University, where Christine Lagarde was among his pupils) is of Indian heritage (as are the new heads of Harvard and Chicago Booth), he is a vegetarian, he does not own a laptop, and he does not know how to drive…

"Mes racines ont eu un grand impact sur ma personnalité, confie-t-il. En vertu de ces racines, je reste fidèle aux trois principes fondamentaux de non-violence, de multiplicité des points de vue et de non-possessivité. Mon père, aveugle, m'a appris que quand on fait les choses dans la vie comme si l'on était totalement aveugle, on se trompe rarement. Ma mère m'a enseigné la bienveillance et le partage, le pardon et l'oubli, à être sûr de moi sans être agressif."

Tonight I Join the Participants in the France 24 Debate (in French) on Peter King's Hearings on Islamic Terrorism

Ce soir, entre 19h et 20 h, je serai parmi les intervenants dans le débat de France 24 sur les "hearings" de Peter King à Washington sur le terrorisme islamique…

Since 1631, with France’s first newspaper, La Gazette, “the French press has been dependent on power”

A malaise that goes back more than 300 years

is the way that The Economist styles its article on French newspapers, Too close to power.

Christophe Deloire, director of the Centre for Journalist Training in Paris, traces the problem to France’s first newspaper, La Gazette, founded in 1631 under the auspices of Cardinal Richelieu. Since then “the French press has been dependent on power,” he says; this has blunted its edge.

While another article reminds us that it was it was the country's ruler(s), in the form of "Charles de Gaulle [himself, who] called for the launch of Le Monde, first published in 1944, to replace Le Temps," one French reader writes that

French unions and government have killed their print media. The government almost edits the papers; it controls far too much. People will eventually realize they need a democracy without the enarques running everything.

In Turns, both at Fault and Inconsequential

N.B.: I wrote this in January 2008. This
looks funny, in reflection.

Funny (ha-ha), don’t you think, that the U.S. is somehow the virus that gives Europe a cold when it sneezes? This implies that the US is somehow responsible for economic affairs in the U.S., despite the fact that every morning in New York, traders have to wake up to Europe’s mid-day jitters more often than not.
After all, even Christine Lagarde, who is nearly as North American as she is French, is adding the usual pedantic continental commentary as a show at home to be taken seriously and appear to have social depth while effectively demanding something from others one is largely unable to do oneself.

French Economy Minister Christine Lagarde said Tuesday that U.S. President George W. Bush should explain how the 140-billion-U.S.-dollar stimulus package will work to revive economy.

Who’s economy does she think Bush should primarily be concerned with anyway? Suddenly, suddenly the U.S. is commanded to stick to its’ role as the fuel in the locomotive pulling the global economy along, while the caboose only conditionally considers easing up on its brakes if you’ll indulge their delusions, but otherwise act in their interest.

When asked if a U.S. recession will implicate Europe, Lagarde said there are big economic differences between the United States and Europe.
She explained that unemployment rate is on the rise in the United States but is declining in Europe and U.S. economy has begun a slowdown while Europe grows at a steady 2 percent.

Which is especially funny, because they virtually never experience rates of growth as high as 2 percent, while the world worries about the U.S. having that yearly rate now, and ironically trying to call that a “recession.”

The minister also said a U.S. recession will not be a "tragedy" for France as bilateral trade between the two countries only accounts for 8 percent of France's total foreign trade volume.

Hypocrites. Which is to say that they really want the U.S. push through stimulus, give other central banks enough information to profit off of the sectors that it dwells on, but hey!, ya know what? No problem here! We’re BETTER than that! We call the inflation rates/ unemployment rates/ growth rates in France a stellar success, while those same rates in the U.S. are a sign of decay, meltdown, and an inadequate amount of nagging crypto-marxism. Right-o. Got it.
At the same time the Bank of France (whose real authority has been ceded to the ECB) chose a different tack while going into blame mode.

French regulator sees 'partial decoupling' of U.S. and EU economies
While there is increasing evidence that the eurozone economy is slowing, most of the factors that are contributing to the bleak outlook in the United States are not present on the Continent, according to the governor of the Bank of France, Christian Noyer.

See? Different! That’s a sign of the breadth and richness of their broadmindedness. That famous continental touch, if you will. Their failure to jump onto a decade-long global economic expansion goes unmentioned and nearly never discussed. Their lack of abject stagnation for 2 years somehow points out the failure of two decades of systematic growth in the U.S., and yet if it didn’t, the cultural buzz would try to say that American growth is somehow inimical to humanity – an eco-sin and a decadence of reactionaries that they choose not to take. Until they experience some growth themselves, and get some relief from the state of stagnation normal to their way of life. No, THEN everyone else on earth is an idiot for some other reason.

Got it. We’ll see how different the public zeitgeist looks when thing are different, and America is called another sort of demon.