Behind the Façades in France: What expats and the mainstream media (French and American alike) fail to notice (or fail to tell you) about French attitudes, principles, values, and official positions…
By that standard, would he caricature Rutger Hauer by putting him in wooden shoes?
" Seven Japanese automakers accept a settlement in a lawsuit to compensate people for the harm done by pollution. "After all, people don’t kill people, guns kill people. So by extension, cars pollute because people don’t have any free will of their own. Not in the well managed asylum Europeans like this strive for.
By opening her mail last Saturday, Sylvia Bourdon discovered that it was invited to go to consult a psychiatrist at the Maison-Blanche hospital in Paris. An appointment planned for August 20 at 2 p.m. Subject of the consultaion: emails sent to the ministry for the Interior “to complain about what occurred in my neighborhood”.
Sylvia Bourdon then decides to take the things into her own hands. She created several blogs to denounce “this chaotic ghetto, this busted-up crime-ridden capital”. She spent June 14th at the window of her apartment taking photographs of what she qualifies as “persistent criminal activity”.
Tracked down by ten young men, her apartment was broken into a few days later. She had it. So much so that she sent angry emails to senior people at the Ministry for the Interior just to ask them to ensure her safety.
Last Saturday she received a letter which made it all clear to her: “Due to the various emails which you addressed to the Ministry of the Interior, the proper authorities required of us to contact you. If you wish, we can set up an appointment[with a Psychitarist] for you. I propose Monday August 20, 2007 at 2 p.m”, wrote someone from the hospital.
- Hat-tip to Carine
Socialists seeking youthful “solidarity”:by all accounts, the country is a major destination for sex tourism, including child sex tourism. Cuba's thriving sex trade caters to thousands of European, Canadian, and Latin American tourists every year, and involves large numbers of Cuban girls and boys, some as young as 12. State-run hotel workers, travel employees, cab drivers, hospitality staff, and police steer tourists to prostituted women and children and facilitate the commercial sexual exploitation of these women and children.
Thousands of these lucid and thoughtful types are licking their chops over the revolution and class struggle no doubt.
Pretend provocation, pretend sensitivity: This cartoon was published the day after the Feast of the Assumption, not that it really means much to your average Le Monde reader numb to the genuine beliefs of others. That very fake form of concern by way of telling oneself how fair one is, is the first step to not realizing how offensive this (and they) really are.
Virgin Mary matronly EU apparition: "What? The French only have 9 weeks of summer vacation and Bulgarians get 16? I foresee strikes at back-to-school time!"The EU angle? There isn’t one. I suppose he’s trying to imply something about either traditional France or the EU commenting on the horrible “Anglo-Saxon-like” mechanization of their lives through the mere realization that there are schoolkids in Europe who get more vacation than they do.
Vacationers (who look like Plantu’s derisive characterization of Americans:"No-one will belive us."
Girl on phone: "I’m in school in Denmark, François."Conclusion: the government and the rest of society should be responsible for your love lives, and that
Surfer (too old to be a schoolkid anyway): "Maybe next year then, Ingrid."
Cupid: "That’s not the way to construct a single Europe."
... ”New idea: he fights against the evil power, but we'll make it less historically heavy and he can become the Harry Potter of the 1940s.” ...Many Germans have been fearful of Tom Cruise, citing their own puzzling obsession with Scientology. If it wasn’t a religion, I’m sure many EUvians would surely ignore it with the same passivity they have for subcultures that actually cause harm.
... “Brilliant Mr. Cruise!” ...
For those of you who might have forgotten just how McDo-like the imposition of European culture really is, let us all sing, then kumbaya.
"An elderly Iraqi woman shows two bullets which she says hit her house following an early coalition forces raid in the predominantly Shiite Baghdad suburb of Sadr City."
- Thanky-thanky to Kevin
Ahead of a very flat piece about the American treatment of the poor little Iranian National Guard (“Les Gardiens” – they support the troops, you see...) comes a confused story about France lagging behind in the number of days kids are in school per year. Since it’s about “les congés d'été” and not these kids growing to be as smart as your average speedbump, their deference must be toward the class-struggle angle of these brats only getting however much of this thing they like to think of as a grand national tradition, only to find out that a bunch of other European countries, all less developed, get more.
Décroisse it on up, baby!
Preferring Jihadi total war, hacking “Cyber Protestors” post Anti-American invective on a UN website, of all places.A page usually used to display statements from UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon was yesterday showing remarks accusing the US and Israel of killing children.
It’s a good thing that they’re idiots too:
The message on the site read: “Hey Ysrail and Usa don’t kill children and other people Peace for ever No war.”
Security experts believe a group of hackers known as Cyber Protest was behind the attack. The malicious users called themselves “Gsy”, “kerem125” and “M0sted”.the group, one of whom is from Turkey, has allegedly hacked into other sites, including those of the Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital, the University of California and the Japanese car manufacturer Toyota.
Ooh, Sass-ay!
A vacationing Italian sportscaster/journalist was murdered on Sunday afternoon by two petty thieves in the 15th arrondissement at the Bir-Hakim (above ground) Metro station.Sergio Vantaggiato, a journalist for Italian television on vacation in Paris, was attacked by two people who stole his backpack on Sunday in a accessway of Bir-Hakeim station. The man in his 40s died of his wounds.
It’s an otherwise decent neighborhood where I once lived. The irony is that the French press will take little notice of Parisian gangbangers in favor of 24/7 coverage of crime in America. The source for this story?: the only Parisian paper with a shred of integrity.
Libération sat on the story until Tuesday afternoon. That must mean that there can't be much crime, I guess.
Today they'd probably form a rock group rather than a political one, and Andreas Baader, Ulrike Meinhof and Gudrun Ensslin would play death metal rather than live it till their deaths. On the stage of Hamburg's Thalia Theater, the RAF veterans have reformed as an OAP band. One standing on a tripod, the other on a dolly, the two erstwhile rivals Gundrun and Ulrike wobble towards each other. Physically disintegrating but ideologically in tact, the RAF setptuageneriennes pose with their Andy, who can no longer close his biker jacket round his belly of affluence, Bond girls and their manchild with the golden Colt, fighting more over him than for a new world order. From the bitch fight with poisoned love, a menage sentimentaleBehold: gentle, lucid, humane, and solidaristic EUtopia. The idea that those happy go lucky terrorists wanting to be in nothing more than a band if they were running around today is undermined by the fact that they weren’t a band THEN. In fact if they were “Active” today, they’d be Jihad-and-kill-the-system-symps like Richard Reed, David Hicks, John Walker Lindh, Adam Yahiye Gadahn (a.k.a. Adam Perlman) and the “European Citizens” in Gitmo.
