The French tractor fetish persists, explained by the usual crap

Next week” has come and gone, and nothing has changed.

«Today, direct CAP subsidies make up, on average, 90% of a farmer's pre-tax income. That suggests that the average farmer would barely scrape a living without such aid. But the figure masks wide variations. For market gardeners, the share is below 10%; for quality wine-growers, it is 8%. Over a quarter of payments go to just 5% of farmers, according to the Groupe d'Economie Mondiale (GEM) at Paris's Institut d'Etudes Politiques. It calculates that the biggest 30 farmers—among them, Prince Albert of Monaco—get an average of over €390,000 each a year. That is 217 times the average received by the 180,000 or so smallest farms, which make up 40% of the country's total.»

Meanwhile a “free range” activist with colorful friends is still chasing sheep.

Hey, Lefty - afraid of where that purple finger has been?

NYT:

«Iraq's Election Day was a glorious success. Now on to the hard part.»

To the left, the absence of spontaneous post bombing perfection, hot and cold running Mecca Cola, and room service no longer seem to be the first thing on their minds anymore, but the near-silence is deafening on the left side of the turf now that they're at this point of development. Probably because there isn’t enough bad news about their ideological opponents to get them out of bed.

“On to the hard part,” indeed – start eating your hat.

The whole thing has been hard. The only difference is that the likes of those who scribble for the NYT didn’t really seem to want to notice it before. There is one thing we can excpect: we'll know they're on board when they try to take the credit for it.

Update: Tammy Bruce points out who the real loser of the Iraqi election.

All in the name of self esteem, I’m sure

Caution: narcissism at work. Via MND we hear of a 40 year old guilt trip queen in the Real Estate business “empowering her sales team” in an unusual way.

«SOUTHLAKE -- Kimberly Dobbs and Alicia Fruin had been close friends for at least two years. So Dobbs was eager to help through her charity for needy babies when Fruin said she had ovarian cancer and could not pay her medical bills.

But instead of cancer treatment, Fruin used the money to augment her breasts two bra cup sizes, bilking the Little Angels charity out of nearly $15,000.

Fruin told the couple that she had three months to live because her cancer was terminal and that it had spread to her breasts, Barbara Kilgore said.

At the time, she had no idea their friendship was cloaked in deception, said Dobbs, whose Southlake charity, Little Angels, was founded in 1998 to assist babies in need at Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas.

We were very upset [that] she would do something like this," Dobbs said. "How could she claim to have cancer and play on people's sympathy? She stole from innocent babies."»

Marketing tactic or just plain evil? We report, you decide. From her pitch as a ”seminar coach”:

«Self Description
My committment to communication and life-long learning allows me to support those around me, especially my clients, in their endeavors. I am not as committed to my bottom-line, as I am committed to yours!

Goals
Building a global coaching and training company where all businesses, large or small, have the opportunity to succeed.

Interests
• A strong personal belief in life-long learning.
• Language/communication skills. Almost any problem in business and in life, is a communication issue.
• A strong drive to help others grow professionally

Qualities & Strengths
Ability to identify whether you need to plan or get into action and provide the structure and focus needed to help you succeed.»

How unique, how very innovative. One barely ever reads about someone’s ‘committment to communication and life-long learning’, let alone twice in the same blurb. A ‘strong drive to help others grow professionally’ seems to also go well with the indelicate reference to “sweater meat.”

Maybe she should have used the same tagline as the next person listed on her nitwit index who posed for her photo with two small dogs and wants you to “uncover your radiance”

Al-Beeb imagines itself informative, lavishes eggcups on itself

Nick Cohen being his usual bright, witty, kick-ass self points out some of the things that makes the BBC public affairs programming little more than a over-grown version of the Gerry Springer Show except for the fact that it’s completely unaware of itself. From his column in the Evening Standard:

«I turned on the Today programme yesterday morning and thought I’d got a feeble comedy show instead of the news.

A sub-Michael Moore clown was doing a turn the gist of which was that George W. Bush was the stooge of the Haliburton Corporation. John Humphrys was the next act. He shouted at Lord Falconer for so long and with such assurance in the righteousness of his beliefs, the Lord Chancellor was barely able to get three words out in reply.

I may be surprised, but I don’t expect tomorrow’s programme will feature a comedian mocking Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein. Nor do I expect to hear its presenters tearing into Charles Kennedy about the Liberal Democrats shameful failure to support the beleaguered liberals and democrats of Iraq.

If they do, it will be a first. I haven’t heard one opponent of the war given a hard time on Today in three years. Not even George Galloway.

The BBC’s managers must recognise that if they recruit arts graduates and put them in West London, they will inevitably have to deal with a middle-class liberal bias.»

hm. Haliburton. Stooge. Bush. Novel and innovative programming indeed. Someone please send Nich Cohen a box of steaks. Even if he’s a vegetarian.

On giving

It’s long been suspected that the more socialized a society is, the more loathing and generalized envy there is among its’ citizens. However all previous comparisons have had too many other cultural factors involved to indicate anything reliable – until now. No nation is more similar to Canada as the United States is, and Canada’s Fraser Institute has just published a comparative study of charitable giving in Canada and the United States.

«The average donation in the US ($3,731) is over three times more than the average donation in Canada ($1,165) even before accounting for differences in the value of currencies. In Alberta, Canada’s top-ranked province, the average donation ($1,468) is only 18.6 percent of the value of the average donation for tax filers in Wyoming ($7,888), America’s top-ranked state. Even in Rhode Island, the lowest ranked US state, average donations are close to $1,000 more than in Alberta. These differences become even more pronounced when currency differences are taken into account.»

Looking under every US flag, Menorah, and set of golf clubs for the most callous people trapped by the false conscienceness of capitalism, we have found them. The argument that people doing their part WITH THEIR TAXES is a abject ruse. The taxpayer isn’t doing the giving, the lawmaker is being charitable with the taxpayer’s money.

It also provides just enough of an emotional shield for the taxpayer to assign the needy off of the plane of reality and into an realm of abstraction – one where they can also be romanticized and politically exploited. They need not be faced by a person, and certainly not by you. “The State” will deal with them. So like a bad parent resigned to let the school system teach children values, we add one more detachment between the human and himself.

It also helps to actually make enough to be ABLE to be generous.

Freeze. You’re surrounded by idiots.

Not exactly bored suburban teenagers, and not exactly the
bridge and tunnel crowd:

« The arms were found in a garage in Clichy-sous-Bois just north of Paris. Agents found several pounds of TNT, assault rifles, revolvers, ammunition, ski masks and bulletproof vests.

Investigators believe the weapons were used to carry out robberies in France. Some money may have gone to Abu Musab Zarqawi's group Al Qaeda in Iraq, officials said.»

Merci for Your Support

Thanks to your vote, we are the runner-up in the European department of the 2005 Weblog Awards. Thanks to all the blogs which participated, thanks to all the people who voted, and well-deserved congratulations to David and Ray of Medienkritik.

Perfidious Germania

Reactionary capitalist apparachiks outpace the grand and glorious revolutionaries by preventing minorities from voting, rigging Diebold voting machines, and signing up the recently undead to vote for them.

Redefeat DMK!

Stop the madness!

Anti-Americanism in the IHT

Today, my letter to the editor was printed, slightly shortened, in the International Herald Tribune. FYI, here is the original version:

Scot Lehigh claims that anti-Americanism is at best non-existent and at worst exaggerated, referring to the tired old canard that "it is only our leaders they are against" (Anti-Americans? Not on my trip to Europe, Dec. 10-11). Really? Is that so?

Tell me, how often have the Europeans commented on the disdain they have for, say, the leaders and/or administrations of Russia, China, Cuba, Zimbabwe, Iran, and (Saddam's) Iraq, and that with the same vehemence they reserve for Uncle Sam?

How often have they held mass demonstrations against the fighting in Chechnya, the conflict between Ethiopie and Eritrea, and the Iran-Iraq war?

How often have they held vigils against the death penalty in China, in Saudi Arabia, or in Sudan, and when did they ever express "concern" over how prisoners in those countries were treated?

Those Frenchmen who stated proudly "Chirac had the balls to stand up to Bush", how did they react when their president said that France would not mention human rights during a visit to the Kremlin because it was necessary "to show consideration for Russian sensibilities"?

How did those humanists react when Paris lit the Eiffel Tower in red for the visit of the Chinese president, when the government banned Nobel laureate Gao Xingjian from attending the Paris Book Fair, or when Chirac, along with fellow peace-lover Gerhard Schröder, tried to resume selling weapons to the saber-rattlers of Beijing?

There was not much of a reaction, was there?

The truth is, the Europeans didn't (and don't) care.  They didn't care one way or the other for one simple reason:  they were issues in which Uncle Sam was not involved.

Anti-Americanism is quite alive: it is the practice, on a regular basis, of double standards.  Nothing more.  And nothing less.

The “good global citizens” of the EU want the US to be more like them: les faux culs

Rich Tucker addresses a theme of Euro-politics. Never really doing what you say you will, and becoming defensive and hostile to those who do. After all, who can afford to allow someone to hold one to your own standards:

«For some reason, even though most countries are falling short of the pledges they’ve already made, they’re eager to make even more. Before leaving Montreal, delegates agreed to hold new talks “aimed at producing a new set of binding limits on greenhouse gas emissions that would take effect beginning in 2012,” as The Washington Post put it. “We should not underestimate the strength of this package,” Stavros Dimas, the European Union’s commissioner for the environment, said about the new deal. “Kyoto is alive and kicking.”
Not really.

Once again, the U.S. declined to participate in the charade. Our clarity was, apparently, confusing. “If it walks like a duck and talks like duck, it’s a duck,” American climate negotiator Harlan Watson told the other delegates when they tried to lure him into a new round of talks. That was too much for foreign delegates. “I don’t understand your reference to a duck. What about this document is like a duck?” one reportedly asked.

Maybe if Watson has tap danced around the truth a bit, said something such as “we’ll sign the agreement as long as we don’t have to abide by it,” the Europeans would have understood. Sort of like what Bill Clinton did while president. “Keep in mind, I supported Kyoto,” Clinton told the conference on its final day.

You see, to global elites, Kyoto is like a lousy Christmas gift: It’s the thought that counts. “It was signed up to by every single nation on earth, and if America now tries to walk away ... I think this is not just an environmental issue, it’s an issue of transatlantic global foreign policy.”»

That’s an air that the fetishists using climate for political purposes never, ever really want to clear. Their meal-ticket is a never ending theater of posturing, imposing new requirements, and ginning up an enemy to the benefit of no-one.

Defining prosperity down

The power hungry "radicals" of the left have to maintain a set of hysterical causes going at any given time to keep themselves on the radar, and to keep their supports purple enough in the face to keep their mean ticket.
Jack Kemp writes about one such front in the left's assaults whose only purpose is to convince themselves that they have some virtue at all:

«The Bush administration deserves enormous credit for resisting this thinly disguised attempt to disadvantage America economically under the pretext of environmentalism and the pseudo-science of global warming. Scientists cannot even agree on whether global temperatures are rising, falling or staying the same, much less find scientific consensus on what might account for any changes in average temperatures. The administration should use these discussions to unmask the hostile, anti- American agenda that lies beneath this nonsense.

According to Fred Singer, University of Virginia scientist and professor emeritus, the data on global temperature are ambiguous, at best. The climate clearly warmed between 1900 and 1940, long before modern industrial activity consumed much energy. Between 1940 and 1975, when industrial carbon emissions accelerated, the climate cooled and then warmed again for a brief five years. Since then, the most reliable data indicate the climate has been cooling just slightly.
"Certainly," Singer says, "it has not been warming ... and there is no evidence that man is causing the warming."

If the models don't even square with what's going on now in the real world, how can any reasonable person place confidence in what they predict for the future, especially if taking action based on those dubious predictions means inflicting incredible damage on the economy and consigning people to a declining standard of living?
The calls for radical reductions in carbon emissions are a frontal attack on American global economic pre-eminence and a pretext for replacing the current international system of sovereign nation states with a global government possessing the far-reaching authority to engage in economic leveling and redistribution.

The best statement of this [the Kyoto supports'] agenda can be found in a Harper's magazine article by Bill McKibben titled "The Great Leap."

McKibben revealed the real agenda behind Kyoto and its progeny when he said, "The goal of the 21st century must somehow be to simultaneously develop the economies of the poorest parts of the world and undevelop those of the rich - to transfer enough technology and wealth that we're able to meet somewhere in the middle."

Global warming is not really about the global climate at all; it's about global government turning the whole world into Old Europe or stagnating Japan. This most recent round of eco-hysteria - along with its predecessors - is simply a thinly veiled effort to do by international treaty, and eventually global government, what Communism failed to do, namely define global prosperity down in the name of "equality."»

- as if the Zero Sum Game which was never true can be made true. By McKibben's logic, for him to be concidered wise, everyone else must become a fool. The trend has nothing to do with natural science, but a desire to validate poor scholarship and science in the name of its' authors. It embodies the vanity of the comfortable and detatched who remain enamored with failed ideas and utopian models that have led us to disasters in the past.
The idea that these jerks have is that in order to make the rest of civilization "feel better" that we have to be worse off, so that they don't have any goals in life. It's a joke to the rest of us, including the developing world, but in the sankpdbox that it's advocates live in it's supposed to be globally meaningful. In reality it's an emotional problem shared by leftists.
They want the admiration that comes with being the first to change things somehow and we're supposed to admire them unquestionably for simply knowing better. If you've ever witnessed a faculty lounge disagreement, you'll notice that they even do this among themselves.

It's about personal power, or more accurately their own powerlessness because the rest of the world doesn't drop everything and carry through their ideas into practice.

"Drive Slowly, You Know What I'm Saying"

Il faut les attraper, les salopards, il faut les choper et en buter un.

Gérard Davet and Fabrice Lhomme tell us the last hours of Firmin Mahé, the Ivory Coast rebel who died while in custody of the French military.

Roulez doucement, vous me comprenez.

What exactly is it that the like of Jose Bové want?

It seems to change weekly. Right now they don't want protectionism, tomorrow they will - and call it "food security". The WTO has a set of issues all its' own which they seem to be trying to muscle in on. Its' fearless leader seems either disintersted, like the Cheshire Cat, or resigned to the chaos of the circus of NGOs and protestors that seems to follow the circus of conventioneers around the world.
But just WHAT IS IT that these sign carrying political groupies want? These are the same people who talk like crazed do-gooders who actually resemble survivalists and want us to live the same “sustainable” existence that characterized the hard-bitten poverty that took generations to struggle out of before the industrial revolution and the advent of modern farming. That “sustainable” existence really wasn’t – it could barely sustain people.

The planet should only listen to them at its’ peril before we all agree to live a life which could have come off of Steinbeck's pen.

The Big Black Book of Saddam Hussein: "I am angry with those who mix the crimes of the Americans with those of Saddam when they are not comparable"

The youngest Hakim detained was only 14. His father and two brothers, together with 13 other relatives, were executed within the first weeks of detention. He and the rest were held in Abu Ghraib, 22 in a cell that measured 4mx6m. There was no running water and a hole in the corner served as a toilet. Recounting his detention in the book, Abdoul al-Hakim says: "The worst moments? It was all terrible, but the worst was the fear of being executed. Each time we heard the lock turn we were silent; it could be the moment to leave, for me, for another. I am angry with those who mix the crimes of the Americans with those of Saddam when they are not comparable."

The best riposte to the God-damn-America camp, Rebecca Weisser notes (merci à RV), is a scholarly and sober 700-page volume that has just been published.

Le Livre Noir de Saddam Hussein (The Black Book of Saddam Hussein) is a robust denunciation of Saddam's regime that does not fall into the trap of viewing everything in Iraq through a US-centric prism. The writers - Arabs, Americans, Germans, French and Iranian - have produced the most comprehensive work to date on the former Iraqi president's war crimes, assembling a mass of evidence that makes the anti-intervention arguments redundant.

…The obsession of many journalists and commentators with the fruitless hunt for chemical, biological and nuclear weapons has meant much of the evidence of Saddam's atrocities in liberated Iraq has been under-reported. Sinje Caren Stoyke, a German archeologist and president of Archeologists for Human Rights, catalogues 288 mass graves, a list that is already out of date with the discovery of fresh sites every week.

"There is no secret about these mass graves," Stoyke writes. "Military convoys crossed towns, full of civilian prisoners, and returned empty. People living near execution sites heard the cries of men, women and children. They heard shots followed by silence."

…Saadoun Kassab, an engineer who helped build Abu Ghraib in 1957, a prison that was designed to hold 4000 prisoners, was later to be held there for a year. He told Chris Kutschera, the book's editor: "When I was imprisoned in Abu Ghraib in 1985, there were 48,500 prisoners. I was imprisoned for eight months in a space 1mx1.5m, a box. I was sometimes in there for a fortnight without going outside. I wanted to be interrogated to get outside, to see daylight and human beings. All that because I said hello to Saad Saleh Jaber [son of a former Shi'ite prime minister from the time of the monarchy]. I saw people die."

…In Saddam's Iraq no one, not even the dictator's closest relatives and collaborators, was safe. Tariq Ali Saleh, a former Iraqi judge and the president of the Iraqi Jurists Association, writes that during the reign of the Baath party from 1968 to 2003, the security services arrested and imprisoned people without charging them, with no access to a lawyer or contact with their family. Everyone was targeted, including women and children. Torture was systematically used to secure confessions including beating, burning, ripping out finger nails, rape, electric shocks, acid baths and deprivation of sleep, food or water.

While the "robust denunciation of Saddam's regime that does not fall into the trap of viewing everything in Iraq through a US-centric prism", unfortunately the editor could not refrain from putting up on the back cover precisely those parts of Bernard Kouchner's introduction that form an anti-American, pro-peace-camp diatribe (see Présentation de l'éditeur).

What our soldiers died for

[This] is what our soldiers died for: a world in which Middle East dictators no longer murder their own, ruin their own societies, and then cynically use terrorism to whip up the Arab street and deflect their own self-induced miseries onto the United States. This is the calculus that led to 9/11, and the reason why Saddam gave sanctuary to 1980s terrorists, the killer Yasin who failed in his first attempt to take down the twin towers, and the likes of Zarqawi.

— Victor Davis Hanson

I love George Walker Bush because I think he's a revolutionary

Who said that? (merci à Bertrand Latour)

We Are Not Amused by Ali G, Kazakhs Say

"Kazakhstan is as civilized as any other country in the world!" Borat, as he is known, boasted in a Web site posting that is actually the work of the British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen, star of "Da Ali G Show," a television comedy in Britain and the United States.

"Women can now travel on inside of bus, homosexuals no longer have to wear blue hat and age of consent has been raised to 8 years old."

Kazakhs are not amused by Ali G's Borat, writes Doreen Carvajal in a frontpage article of the International Herald Tribune.

Inside, Dan Bilefsky profiles the Baltic Iron Lady, aka Estonia's Vaira Vike-Freiberga:

…she cautions that Latvia is still living in the shadow of a Russia that, she says, has not come to terms with its lost empire or past transgressions: suppressing Latvia's culture for 50 years, banning its flag and deporting tens of thousands to Siberia as part of an effort to Russify the country.

"It's hard for Russia and its leaders to swallow the independence of countries it has been coveting since the time of Peter the Great," she said, referring to the three Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia.

"Russia has a problem recognizing us as a sovereign country. They tell us we never had a Tolstoy or a Dostoevski. I enjoy reading these writers, but they have no bearing on our right to be here."

Der Spiegel, Move-On – same thing

Via EU Rota points out the ‘C’ in CIA on a Der Spiegel cover might stand for Canada, which it perfectly appropriate if you’re looking for an evil, underhanded regime driven by an oil industry anding emitting earth-hating unctuous gasses. Hardly the ant’s pants that Move On would look for.

Sod off Swampy

Chinese sheep are trembling in fear. Under pressure from the French government Jose Bové’s expulsion from Hong King has been reversed. Look out, HK, Swampy McSheep-boy is coming to town – and he’s one wild and crazy guy. What the Chinese should REALLY do is march him to the border with North Korea so he can be with his buddies:

«HONG KONG bowed to pressure from the French Government yesterday and lifted an expulsion order on Jose Bové.

Christine Lagarde, the French Trade Minister, asked the authorities to let M Bové into the territory after he performed a characteristically showy stunt, going on to France Inter radio live from a detention centre at the Hong Kong airport.

“Upon my arrival in Hong Kong they seized my passport and took me to a detention centre,” M Bové said.

Mme Lagarde asked the French consul-general in Hong Kong to make contact with the local authorities while her staff sought a promise from M Bové that he would behave during the summit.»

That puts the nanny state in a whole new light, doesn’t it?

«M Bové, 53, who casts himself as a martyr to capitalist oppression, is awaiting an appeal against a three-month prison sentence for destroying fields of experimental genetically modified crops.

As a known troublemaker with a criminal record, he has been barred from visiting summits in the United States and Canada in the past.»

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