"I never understood why some people destroyed my career, my life, insulted me while I was the victim"

TO some, she is a frail, tormented young woman who was preyed upon by an influential politician and well-known womanizer. To others, she is a publicity-seeking fantasist. To still others, she is a skillful manipulator who helped foment a plot against the Socialist Party.

Whether fairly or not, Tristane Banon … has become one of France’s most polarizing figures, even to some of her colleagues and friends

writes Maïa de la Baume in her article on the 32-year-old writer who contends that Dominique Strauss-Kahn tried to rape her in 2003.

For Ms. Banon herself, the complaint brought an end to years of indecision and turmoil. “It’s liberation,” she said in a phone interview. “It’s the most liberating and violent thing I’ve ever done in my life.”

…In [a L’Express] interview, Ms. Banon said the [DSK] episode destroyed her self-confidence, affected her relationships with men and hurt her chances to find work in journalism. “I never understood why some people destroyed my career, my life, insulted me while I was the victim,” she said.

…after the episode with Mr. Strauss-Kahn, she says she was branded with a reputation. Many in the French media world knew about her accusations against Mr. Strauss-Kahn and feared them, she said. She implied that she was a marked person. “I was hired at a radio station and then a month later, my boss would tell me abruptly that he couldn’t keep me anymore,” she said.

Damn Those Presbyterians!

Pix of the Near Distant Ago

SPON features a set of images of a disused Soviet military hospital in the Brandenburg town of Beelitz, a sanitarium in Oranienburg, and other abandoned structures in what was the DDR by Berlin photographer Axel Hansmann. Is it art or merely deliciously grim scenery?

"Needless to say, America's right is having a field day"

Pour la première fois depuis 1938, la droite s'est emparée du poste de gouverneur ainsi que de la majorité dans les deux Chambres locales. Autant dire qu'elle s'en donne à coeur joie.

So much for respect of the outcome of elections. In Corine Lesnes' Le Monde articles on Scott Walker and the situation in Wisconsin, we are treated to social "traditions" that "date to the Roosevelt era" while members of the left are duly "motivated" while the right — and the Tea Party — are, needless to say, behaving irresponsibly.

Scott Walker n'aurait été qu'un gouverneur parmi d'autres, aux prises avec la crise budgétaire, s'il ne s'était attaqué aux syndicats. A la faveur du passage du budget, il a aboli le droit de négocier par conventions collectives dans la fonction publique, un acquis datant de 1959. "Il a changé fondamentalement cette idée que les syndicats de fonctionnaires ont le droit d'exister", considère le professeur Charles Franklin, de l'université du Wisconsin à Madison, capitale de l'Etat.

Sentant le danger, les organisations de gauche se sont mobilisées, et le Wisconsin est devenu une cause nationale, l'emblème du bras de fer historique qui oppose démocrates et républicains sur le modèle social à l'heure de la crise. "Le Wisconsin a toujours été pionnier pour les conventions collectives, pour les indemnités-chômage, rappelle Peter Barca, chef de file des démocrates à l'Assemblée. Tout le pays nous observe. Les gens se disent : si on peut changer les droits syndicaux dans le Wisconsin, on peut le faire n'importe où."
.
…"Ces élections vont changer le débat jusqu'à Washington, assure Charles Chamberlain, de Democracy for America, une association nationale venue aider les militants locaux. Les républicains, où qu'ils soient, ne seront plus si pressés de toucher aux programmes sociaux s'ils s'aperçoivent de la réaction violente qu'ils engendrent."

From the Obama-loving newspaper, we are treated to the description of a statesman (Scott Walker, needless to say, not Barack Obama) as a politician "without much experience" ("M. Walker, ancien élu local sans grande expérience") and to healthy doses of paranoia about the Koch brothers without apparently noticing the irony in the fact that in the very next paragraphs we learn — but here vast amounts of money from out-of-state is apparently a good thing — that thousands upon thousands of dollars have been spent on recall elections by MoveOn and the AFL-CIO, etc…

Johnny Hallyday is as French as the baguette, and he has been singing for more than 50 years

It is hard to explain the place [JOHNNY HALLYDAY] has in French life

muses Steven Erlanger from Paris about the French rocker, now 68, who "has survived three previous marriages, kidney stones, a bout with colon cancer and [a] bungled operation on his spine" along with "a couple of suicide attempts, and even an effort at retirement."

— he has done more than 100 tours, sold more than 100 million records, made 47 studio albums and 26 live ones. He has been on more than 2,100 magazine covers, and his Wikipedia entry in French is longer than Jesus Christ’s.

Johnny Hallyday is as French as the baguette, and he has been singing for more than 50 years, bringing Elvis rhythms, energy and glitter to a culture steeped in ballads.

…IN Los Angeles, at least, where he went in part to escape high French taxes, his children are untouched by his celebrity, since few Americans outside the music world know who he is.

Remembering Past Hissy Fits

Remember those endless, repetitious, screamed-hoarse blubbering about the US not having a victory or a postwar plan in Iraq, when in fact they did? We were led to believe that lefties, should they be “forced” to fight a war, and it wouldn’t be “of choice” would at least get that part right.

Wars of choice, however, are fundamentally different. They are normally undertaken for reasons that do not involve obvious self-defense of the United States or an ally.

Fast forward to the truth. Libya is not a war “of choice”. Worse still, Europeans are trying to run it. There is no apparent plan to win, and postwar planning seems to be limited to “you’re on your own, kid - now cough up that light-sweet Brent grade crude”.

In theory, this would all have been worked out before NATO intervened, thus taking ownership of the outcome. And it's possible that someone, somewhere planned all this out. But, if they did, they've been awfully quiet about it.

Elsewhere: an excellent data source is found for the “dead hippy index”.

"German society is changing and it's not easy to be a naturist anymore," said Kurt Fischer, president of the German FKK association (DFK). There are some 500,000 registered nudists and a total of seven million Germans sunbathe naked regularly.

"But the numbers are unfortunately falling by about two percent each year," Fischer told a group of reporters in the Foreign Press Association (VAP) while sitting, fully clothed, at a beach bar in Berlin's government quarter. "Times are tough."

The main problem is the shrinking population, Fischer said.

Aside from a still fetid river cum canal, Berlin’s government district (as if that didn’t describe their whole society), is far enough away from a tropical beach (Club Med Libya, perchance?) to make this look about as silly as most impromptu press events in Germany.

And WHO makes all of those Solar Panels ?

They would sell their Grandmother for a nickel.

German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble has advised the Greeks to invest more in solar energy to overcome the crisis.

FAZ called him „Sonnyboy Schäuble” for this. I say start singing “Danny Boy” for a continent if they’re going to keep attitudes like that.

Need Some Comic Relief?

Just wait for some Russian scientist (seeking attention) to open his mouth.

Europe: A Paradise for Social Pyromaniacs

Of course no explanation is ever given to bombastic claims like this:

Lack of women in top jobs to cause 'problems' for EU economy

But the well subsidized crow seems to have no problem with threats:

The commissioner said that come March next year she will look to see whether companies have made a "clear, precise and measurable evolution" towards greater gender balance within their walls.

"If yes, there will be no need for European legislation. If no, we will have a problem with the internal market," said the commissioner explaining that major companies who work across the EU will be confronted with different national laws on women quotas.

The Luxembourgeoise, whose only real job outside of government was “journalism” while in various parliamentary posts went on to prattle on about ‘the boardroom’, as if that’s where the economy really was. Really, it’s the imagined prize of getting power quick that the boardroom obsession, the one that assumes that the internal operation of private entities are under the rule of the state.

The commissioner, who wants to boost female boardroom positions to 30 percent by 2015 and to 40 percent by 2020, said she is "completely supported" by internal market commissioner Michel Barnier.

Who is used in this context as if he was an advocate of getting the albatross off from around the neck of business. He isn’t. He’s a Commisariat type like Reding, indifferent about them or anyone else being generous with other people’s resources. They’d all join in to buy off some dickless votes anyway.

She is supported by the EU parliament, which earlier this month said Brussels should make such quotas mandatory. An EU law in an area dealing with employment and social policy is likely to be controversial among member states, however.

The threatening tone is borne out of disappointment at the public not doing what’s “being asked”. So it’s no more Mr. Nice Guy for Viviane’s pet issue of female cronyism that uses government as an enforcing thug.

Although Reding has been increasingly vocal about her campaign, to date only seven companies have signed up to the public pledge, up and running since March.

A Pause for Poesy

In fact it’s all about beef

Terribly upset.
It is my birthday today.
No one gave me beef.

"Incoming, small arms fire!"

Frédéric Bobin files a Le Monde story from Afghanistan's Honaker-Miracle Base, named after two U.S. soldiers who lost their lives in combat.Needless to say, it reflects leftist, pacifist tendencies…

Les soldats Christopher Honaker et Joseph Miracle, tombés au combat, ont donné leur nom à cet avant-poste américain butant sur les marches du massif de l'Abas Ghar au coeur de la province de Kunar, dans l'Est afghan, tout proche de la frontière avec le Pakistan.

…Silence, solitude et adversité. La bannière étoilée flotte sur l'enclos de bunkers et barbelés cerné de "hescos", ces paniers en treillage métallique bourrés de cailloux faisant office de fortifications. Au pied du mât, des stèles funéraires égrènent soixante-dix patronymes, soixante-dix gars du Colorado, du Tennessee ou de l'Ohio, morts au nom de la "guerre contre la terreur". Dans quelques jours, la liste s'allongera.

Feminist Pork: Women who make domestic violence accusations are not required to produce evidence and are never prosecuted for perjury if they lie

For 30 years, the feminists have been pretending that their goal is to abolish all sex discrimination, eliminating all gender differences no matter how reasonable

writes Phyllis Schlafly in her article on the "feminists' determination to punish men, guilty or innocent" and on the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), whose billion-dollar-a-year price tag is "spent by the radical feminists to pursue their ideology and goals (known as feminist pork)".

When it comes to domestic violence, however, feminist dogma preaches that there is an innate gender difference: Men are naturally batterers, and women are naturally victims (i.e., gender profiling).

Starting with its title, VAWA is just about as sex discriminatory as legislation can get. It is written and implemented to oppose the abuse of women and to punish men.

…Currently used definitions of domestic violence that are unacceptably trivial include calling your partner a naughty word, raising your voice, causing "annoyance" or "emotional distress," or just not doing what your partner wants. The law's revision should use an accurate definition of domestic violence that includes violence, such as: "any act or threatened act of violence, including any forceful detention of an individual, which results or threatens to result in physical injury."

Women who make domestic violence accusations are not required to produce evidence and are never prosecuted for perjury if they lie. Accused men are not accorded fundamental protections of due process, not considered innocent until proven guilty and in many cases are not afforded the right to confront their accusers.

Legal assistance is customarily provided to women but not to men. Men ought to be entitled to equal protection of the law because many charges are felonies and could result in prison and loss of money, job and reputation.

…Feminist [lobbying — on the taxpayers' dime —] has resulted in laws calling for mandatory arrest (i.e., the police must arrest someone -- guess who) of the predominant aggressor (i.e., ignore the facts and assume the man is the aggressor) and no-drop prosecution (i.e., prosecute the man even if the woman has withdrawn her accusation or refuses to testify).

…The way the Duke lacrosse players' reputations and college education were destroyed is typical of feminist control of university attitudes. The prosecutor who falsely accused the men was disbarred, but there were no sanctions against the professors and college administrators who rushed to public judgment against the guys.

Merkel’s dwindling interest in foreign policy: Together, the chancellor and Westerwelle have weakened Germany’s international standing

The slump in the popularity of [Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle] and the Free Democrats is bad news for [Chancellor Angela Merkel], especially when the Christian Democratic Union is also smarting after big setbacks in recent regional elections

writes Judy Dempsey (while, in an unrelated story, Michael Kimmelman discusses the latest revelations regarding the "dark secrets" linked to Adolf Eichmann's post-war escape to Argentina.)

For Germany, Mr. Westerwelle’s weakness is compounded by Mrs. Merkel’s dwindling interest in foreign policy at a time when Europe is in desperate need of strong leadership to deal with the immense changes sweeping across the Middle East. Together, say analysts, Mrs. Merkel and Mr. Westerwelle have weakened Germany’s international standing.

In March, they snubbed their French, British and U.S. allies by abstaining in a U.N. Security Council vote authorizing a no-flight zone over Libya. “It was the wrong decision. It damaged Germany’s reputation as a reliable ally,” said Elmar Brok, a European Parliament lawmaker and leading foreign policy expert in Mrs. Merkel’s conservative Christian Democratic Union party.

“The point is that Germany did not bring anyone else along,” said Heather Grabbe, E.U. expert and director of the Open Society Institute in Brussels, which promotes democracy and human rights. “Maybe it was a justified decision but there was no strong moral argument communicated either to the domestic audience or Germany’s E.U. partners.”

…With Europe confronted with upheaval in the Middle East, a continuing war in Afghanistan and unresolved issues in the Balkans, Germany can ill afford a weak foreign minister.

“Germany has often acted as a moral conscience of Europe in foreign policy,” said Ms. Grabbe. “To play that role, Germany’s foreign minister has to take a lead and articulate the foreign policy dilemmas facing all of Europe.”

It was Mrs. Merkel who tried to do just that during her first term as Chancellor from 2005 to 2009. She repaired the rift between Berlin and Washington after former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, a Social Democrat, had opposed the U.S invasion of Iraq. With Russia and France, he established an anti-war “alliance” which in turn deeply divided NATO and the European Union

Mrs. Merkel also became a beacon for human rights campaigners in Russia, China and Iran by speaking out for the values of an independent news media and basic civil and human rights.

But since being re-elected, she has shown scant interest in foreign policy. It is the euro crisis and the future of nuclear energy that have monopolized her time, leaving little time even for fundamental issues like the war in Afghanistan or the Arab revolutions.

No Surprise at all: Statists’ Personal Priorities Coming Before the Public Good

It’s that all-important quality of life thing that matters I guess. If you can count yourself among the elite.

economists, such as Commerzbank's Christoph Weil, do not rule out a spontaneous market event, such as one or two top private investors moving out of Ireland, Italy, Portugal or Spain and causing wider panic.

So I guess the solution (to whatever) needs to be more Europe not less Europe, but only when a power-grab is possible. Otherwise it’s all one big sunny “slow food” movement.

Amid a "clear risk" of potentially seismic events in the eurozone and the Arab world in the next six weeks, EU institutions will drop to staff levels of just 20 percent as officials go on holiday, limiting their capacity to react.

Unaware of the concept of irony, the piece goes on:

Amid the common perception that the EU sleeps in August, institutions will have four major crisis-monitoring centres running 24/7. The biggest one, the Joint Situation Centre, keeps half its staff in place during holidays.

...despite “the situation”, chaos will know when to strike.

The Ancient and Dark Art of Listening to the Radio

A number station of undetermined origin was heard 15 June 2011, 0135 UT on 6767 khz. 5 digit cifer was read in multiple languages by what sounded like a computer generated female voice.

It went off air at 0140.

The use of number stations is an ‘old school’ method of communicating with your spies from the home land to the nation where they are doing their surveillance without being detected. The transmission times are short, giving a counterespionage operation little time to determine the location of the transmitting antenna. It is likely that the phasing of the sound of the signal, or a heterodyne that might be heard on top of the signal might offer clues.

The strength of the signal and the use of this reliable but primitive method of messaging suggest that it likely originated in Cuba, Venezuela, or transmitted from sea.

Democrats in 1936: Plus ça change…

75 Years Ago:

1936 Zioncheck Escapes Over Wall

A new chapter in the checkered career of Representative Marion A. Zioncheck, Democrat of Washington, began today [June 28] with the allegedly insane Congressman from Seattle breaking out of the private sanatorium in which he had been confined and regaining the turbulent freedom he so dearly loves. Zioncheck was docilely exercising with a number of other patients in the enclosed yard of the institution when suddenly and without the slightest warning he made a dash for the eight-foot wall, scaled it, and with a wild whoop, leaped to the ground on the other side.

2012, Mission: Élysée Part 1 (Movie Trailer)

2012, mission: elysée part 1 movie trailer UNCUT... par staiffDA

Vive la Similarité

… the ties that bind America and France are more important and infinitely more interesting than most of us know

writes David McCullough as the author of The Greater Journey (Americans in Paris) tries to mention every allegedly positive French aspect in the United States, from Pierre Charles L’Enfant and Jean-Antoine Houdon to over "a million American students [who] are taking French" and "the hundreds of young Americans who went to study medicine in France in the 19th century" via the "the number of French names all across the map of America" and the "nine million of us [who] are of French descent."

Consider that the war that gave birth to the nation, our war for independence, would almost certainly have failed had it not been for heavy French financial backing and military support, on both land and sea. At the crucial surrender of the British at Yorktown, for example, the French army under Rochambeau was larger than our own commanded by Washington. The British commander, Cornwallis, was left with no escape and no choice but to surrender only because a French fleet sailed into the Chesapeake Bay at exactly the right moment. …

The first major study of us as a people, “Democracy in America,” was written by a French historian, Alexis de Tocqueville. Published in 1835, it remains one of the wisest books ever written about us.

What David McCullough fails to mention, though, is that the charge that is regularly fired in America's direction can equally apply to the French presence in the 1770s and 1780s ("well, sure, but… didn't they do it for their own interests?") and that Tocqueville's book was meant to serve as a rebuttal to the stream of anti-American and anti-Democratic tomes being published in France on a regular basis and how, in the aftermath of the book's appearance, dozens if not hundreds of books were published to disparage “Democracy in America” as well as its author.

To be sure, our relations with France have not always been smooth.

…But the rewards of our ties with France have far exceeded any difficulties there have been. With the purchase of the Louisiana Territory from France, the size of the country was more than doubled. The Statue of Liberty, one of our most treasured symbols, was a gift from France.

Not to want to destroy the feel-good atmosphere, but again, wasn't la Louisiane sold mainly, if not solely, in and for the interests of Napoleon? As for the Statue of Liberty, wasn't it offered to America only after and only because the Egyptians refused a statue meant to be raised at the newly-built Suez Canal?

Especially for American women and for African-Americans, Paris provided an atmosphere of freedom and of acceptance such as they had never experienced.

Fine, except how tolerant and anti-racist would the French have been, would they be, if there were a similar percentage of blacks in their society as there was, as there is, in the United States? (Not that that should in any way serve as a pretext for racism…)

To end on a positive note, I will not offer any comments on the following:

And there is a further reason France should hold a prominent place in our memories and in our hearts. More American history has unfolded in France and more Americans are buried there than in any other country but our own.

During World War I more than two million American soldiers served “Over There.” In World War II another generation of American soldiers numbering more than 800,000 served in France. In all, more than 60,000 Americans are buried in French soil, at Meuse-Argonne, Normandy and nine other cemeteries. At the Meuse-Argonne, the largest, lie fully 14,246 American dead. The grave markers are a sight never to be forgotten.

Paging Bashar Assad!

Whose very nom de guerre (Bashar = messenger of good news, al Assad = “the lion”) has the cast of infantile fakery that sneers at the intelligence of the people. Because they’re stupid and need bold leadership that they can easily understand?

No. They need to dispose of the Socialist hereditary dictatorship that has led them into one war after another, suppressed them politically, and given them decades of isolationism, state economic control, and periodic bloodbathes. So it’s time to go. Alas, but where?

That’s a fine question. I’m so glad you asked.

What do all the places that an ousted dictator can flee to have in common?

The places?
Belarus
Venezuela
Cuba
Uruguay

The habitual rhetoric that they commonly share?

1. A hatred of the United States, individual freedom,
2. Anything that doesn’t fit the Marxist-Leninist Revolutionary recipe for taking power.
3. Leftism

The balance of the world’s anti-Americans are in good company.

Bastille Day Cancelled? France No Longer Has the Military Means to Carry Out Its Political Ambitions

Le ministère des finances a décidé que le défilé militaire du 14-Juillet coûtait trop cher. Comme d'autres démocraties, la France renonce à sa démonstration annuelle. Elle se contentera d'un logiciel de simulation pour donner au pays un aperçu des capacités de son armée. Ce scénario de fiction le restera-t-il longtemps ? Le 14 juillet 2011 a lieu dans un climat tendu entre les armées et le pouvoir politique.

As Frédéric Bobin reports that all French soldiers will have left Afghanistan by 2014 and as Olivier Hubac warns that France will pay dearly for its engagement in Libya, Nathalie Guibert's front-page article in Le Monde informs us that France no longer has the military means to carry out its political ambitions (see map of French military presence around the globe, an image which expands as the browser window is enlarged), with the daily adding a warning that one day, what with all the current budget cuts, a finance minister may decide that the Bastille Day parade is too expensive and cancel it once and for all.

L'appareil militaire est " au taquet ", a pourtant convenu le ministre de la défense, Gérard Longuet. Depuis les années 1960, les armées ont connu des restructurations, des projections extérieures et des phases de contrainte financière. " Mais jamais les trois à la fois comme aujourd'hui ", souligne le chef d'état-major des armées, l'amiral Edouard Guillaud. " Les armées sont fragiles et fragilisées, il ne faut pas le nier ni se voiler la face : nous sommes dans une situation difficile ", admettait-il, en mai, devant l'Institut des hautes études de défense nationale.

… Si les militaires s'inquiètent de perdre à ce jeu, c'est que les budgets de défense européens ne cessent de baisser au profit des priorités économiques et sociales.

While a Colonel François Chauvancy wonders what kind of army France will have in the 21st century, Sénat president Gérard Larcher claims, in an interview with Patrick Roger, that "internationally, we are defending our [France's] values."

Meanwhile, Bastien Guibert tells Nathalie Guibert that in France, there is no debate about the country's role in the world, unlike in the UK, and that France wants to box in a category above its weight.