In Detroit, free enterprise is slowly trying to find its way back through the hurdles of statism

This may come as a surprise

admits Carine Martinez-Gouhier (as much a surprise to herself as to anybody else),

but my first impression of Detroit was good. It was not thanks to the government but to free enterprise and the hard work and aspirations to a better life of individual Detroiters. My first experience, and a few others after that, let me see glimpses of hope for Detroit.

 … The image of Detroit I had in mind was the one the media is spreading: a zombie city, where the remaining inhabitants, those who didn’t flee to the suburbs or further away, were left with abandoned and burned-down houses everywhere, where crime and drugs are rampant; the image of the fall of a formerly great American city.

Media reports ventured: Detroit was once the epitome of American success; will it represent America’s future?

Truth is Detroit is a city of many contrasts. Yes, the vision of a ghost town is everywhere, but downtown, the empty streets and the blight also stand alongside buildings filled with bubbly tech start-ups; some abandoned houses are taken over to make room for gardens. The heavy hand of government regulation and intervention is sometimes mind-bogglingly absent, for better or worse for Detroiters.

Just like nature reclaiming abandoned houses though, free enterprise is slowly trying to find its way back through the hurdles of statism.

 … Detroit is fighting for its life. At the heart of the revival, is something quintessentially American: individuals taking responsibility for their lives, fighting the wilderness when necessary, convinced that they can make it on their own. If some insist in seeing Detroit as the future of America, this should be about this, not about the ruins of failed government policies.

By Not Opposing Israel, Says NYT, Arab Nations Are to Blame for "New Obstacles to Efforts to End the Gaza Conflict"

Nothing should come as a surprise from the New York Times, correct?

From Cairo, David Kirkpatrick reports that

Egypt has led a new coalition of Arab states — including Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates — that has effectively lined up with Israel in its fight against Hamas, the Islamist movement that controls the Gaza Strip. That, in turn, may have contributed to the failure of the antagonists to reach a negotiated cease-fire even after more than three weeks of bloodshed.

“The Arab states’ loathing and fear of political Islam is so strong that it outweighs their allergy to Benjamin Netanyahu,” the prime minister of Israel, said Aaron David Miller, a scholar at the Wilson Center in Washington and a former Middle East negotiator under several presidents. 

“I have never seen a situation like it, where you have so many Arab states acquiescing in the death and destruction in Gaza and the pummeling of Hamas,” he said. “The silence is deafening.”

So how does the New York Times advertise David Kirkpatrick's story on its front page?

Yes, that's right, the Arab states' new policy poses — as in, "is to blame for" —

new obstacles to efforts to end the Gaza conflict.

As Ronald Reagan said, there is an easy way to obtain peace; all you have to do is to give in, to surrender…

PS:  Incidentally, the story goes on to say that

Secretary of State John Kerry turned to the more Islamist-friendly states of Qatar and Turkey as alternative mediators — two states that grew in regional stature with the rising tide of political Islam after the Arab Spring, and that have suffered a degree of isolation as that tide has ebbed.

But that move has put Mr. Kerry in the incongruous position of appearing to some analysts as less hostile to Hamas — and thus less supportive of Israel — than Egypt or its Arab allies.

For Israeli hawks, the change in the Arab states has been relatively liberating.

French Comedian Louis de Funès, Who Would Be 100 Today, Criticized the Left for Its Hateful Humor

Today would be the 100th birthday of Louis de Funès, the comic French movie star who in 1971 criticized leftist humor as being "at the expense of others [and causing] sad, weeping laughter."

Le Monde : Savez-vous que des jeunes considèrent votre comique sans cible politique comme démobilisateur et donc favorable à l'ordre etabli?

Louis de Funès : Ce sont des isolés et je demande à voir leur photo ! Etre de gauche, c'est une mode, comme les cheveux longs. Le rire, lui, dure. Il est innocent. Je ne vois pas comment on peut aller lui chercher des sens cachés. … nous on est l'antidote. Et qu'on ne me dise pas qu'ils rient en Union Soviétique ou dans les pays communistes ! Des pièces comiques, il n'y en a pas lourd …

Le Monde : Un nouvel humour apparaît, très critique. Qu'en pensez-vous?

Louis de Funès : Ah oui! le rire de gauche pour cafés-théâtres, comme Romain Bouteille, ce sont des rires aux dépens des autres, des rires tristes, à pleurer, je n'aime pas ça. Ils arrachent tout, ils jettent tout aux ordures sans rien reconstruire. …

For religious liberty to mean something it has to protect us from the Chuck Schumers of this world who claim to support that religious freedom jive unless it impedes their legislative agenda

Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) … speaks as if those who work for other people have unhindered free exercise rights

writes Benny Huang.

Nothing could be further from the truth. As society becomes increasingly hostile to people of faith, employees are discovering that they cannot keep their jobs and remain true to their sincerely held beliefs, which the Civil Rights Act of 1964 supposedly guarantees. That portion of the law everyone hypocritically claims to adore is routinely ignored.

One solution has been to start your own business though that doesn’t always solve the problem. As the Green family of Hobby Lobby has learned, even being your own boss doesn’t guarantee that you can live your life according to your faith.

You can’t practice your religion if you work for yourself and you can’t practice your religion if you work for someone else. What do you think this is? America?

Schumer’s remarks were delivered at a press conference in support of the misnamed and ultimately doomed Protect Women’s Health from Corporate Interference Act, which ought to have been called the Abolish Religious Freedom Act because that’s what it really is. Its purpose was to do an end-run around last month’s Burwell v. Hobby Lobby decision, thus forcing religious business owners to purchase abortion-inducing drugs for their employees. Thankfully, it failed even in the Democrat-controlled Senate.

Like most great charlatans, Chuck Schumer speaks out of both sides of his mouth. He is conscious that he sounds hostile to free exercise rights so he makes the effort to begin each sentence with a pro forma affirmation of his adoration for religious liberty, followed by the word “but.” If it sounds like lip service that’s because it is.

 … Nearly every government in the world pays lip service to religious liberty. Even the North Korean constitution guarantees that “Citizens shall have freedom of religion.” Such guarantees of religious freedom are a sham of course, brushed aside whenever Kim Jong-Un feels inconvenienced, which is almost always. 

Britain claims that it guarantees religious liberty yet authorities have arrested street preachers who proclaim the sinfulness of homosexuality. Canada claims that it respects religious freedom but one of its provinces prohibits Catholic schools from teaching that abortion is wrong because such lessons amount to “bullying.”

As the aforementioned examples illustrate, in some localities religious liberty is just words on a page. For religious liberty to mean something it has to protect us from the Chuck Schumers of this world who claim to support that religious freedom jive unless it impedes their legislative agenda.

Schumer’s insincerity is apparent when one of his sentences is broken in half. He begins by saying, “We wouldn’t tell the owners of Hobby Lobby to convert to a different religion or disobey their religion…” Well yes, as a matter of fact “we”—the government, that is—would. That’s exactly what this lawsuit was about. This first part of the sentence is the pro forma portion that Schumer doesn’t really believe because it isn’t true. “We” really do want to bludgeon the Green family into submission, which is why “we” wasted millions of taxpayer dollars trying to force them to comply with the illegal mandate.

The senator continues: “…but we don’t say that they have to open up a company and go sell toys or hobby kits.” See? So the Greens brought it upon themselves by opening a business. They should have known that business owners don’t have the same rights as other people.

 … David Green … has always made his Christian values the cornerstone of his company. That wasn’t a problem for the first four decades of Hobby Lobby’s existence because the idea that a Christian business owner had a right to run his business according to Christian principles was remarkably uncontroversial.

But then came the “You didn’t build that” mentality, which essentially argues that private companies aren’t really private. The people who take the risk of starting a business, run the day-to-day operations, pay the taxes and insurance, and meet the payroll are mere managers who can be overruled in all instances by an intrusive and all-powerful government, even when its mandates run afoul of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act or even the US Constitution.

 … Schumer’s contention here is that Americans can’t have it both ways. We can go into business for ourselves or we can have our constitutional rights but not both. That’s too much freedom. It makes Chuck woozy.

Stories of homegrown jihadists are becoming tragically familiar in France

A French citizen who had converted to Islam, Nicolas Bons, 30, died as a suicide bomber, fighting for the jihadi cause near Homs, Syria

writes Sylvie Kaufmann in Commentary.

A few months earlier, his half brother, Jean-Daniel, 22, had also been killed in Syria. The two had traveled together to Syria from Toulouse.

Once there, they became poster boys for foreign jihad. They even posted a video on YouTube, calling on their “brothers” in France to join them.

[Their mother, Dominique] Bons, herself an atheist, had watched helplessly as Nicolas changed his lifestyle, turning away from friends, drinking, dancing, dating. But when he sent a message from Syria, she was at a loss to understand.

“To convert to Islam, O.K., maybe this is not so serious,” she told the television channel France 2. “But Syria, that was a big shock.”

Stories of homegrown jihadists are becoming tragically familiar this year in France. A month after Nicolas’s death, also in Toulouse, two teenagers (whose names have not been released as they are minors), left one morning apparently to go to school; instead, they went to the airport and boarded a plane to Istanbul.

 … Foreign fighters in Syria come from all over Europe, but the French have provided the biggest group. French journalists held since last year in the infamous “factory of hostages” area near Aleppo, and released in April, were dismayed to discover that some of their hooded guards were, in fact, their countrymen.

This is not happening in faraway Waziristan. This new jihad is just on the other side of the Mediterranean. European Union citizens don’t even need a visa to go to Turkey, bordering Syria.

Who are these young men and, in some cases, women? What drives them? The days of Al Qaeda cells, of groups formed in radical mosques, easily monitored by police, are gone, experts say. This is the era of “lone wolves” — self-radicalized or radicalized in prison, brainwashed with videos of violence and martyrdom circulated on the Internet.

While prattling incessantly about other countries’ “sensible gun laws”, strangely liberals never mention Switzerland, Israel, or Mexico, the neighbor which has some of the strictest laws in the world

Marine reservist Andrew Tahmooressi [was] imprisoned under Mexico’s gun laws which are some of the strictest in the world

writes Benny Huang.

It is essentially illegal for a civilian to possess a gun outside of his home. According to the website of the US consulate, an American who enters Mexico in possession of a firearm can receive thirty years in prison.

I wouldn’t mention this if it weren’t for liberals’ incessant prattling about other countries’ “sensible gun laws.” They like to compare gun death statistics from the United States to Japan, Australia, or some other country that severely restricts gun ownership and then draw the facile conclusion that the decisive factor is our laws. Let’s just ignore that pesky Second Amendment and there will never be another murderous rampage, or so goes the argument.

Yet Mexico, our southern neighbor, is never their shining example. Peculiar. With such a great case study in the benefits of gun control so close to home, why do they always reach to distant Japan to make their case?

Probably because northern Mexico is a warzone where lawmen are routinely gunned down and people have a strange habit of being separated from their heads. The cartels still pack heat but ordinary Mexicans do not because they want to stay on the right side of the law.

It would be just as easy to select two counterexamples to demonstrate that gun rights result in safer societies. Gun ownership is a right enshrined in law in Switzerland and a responsibility in Israel. Both have well-armed populaces and lower rates of gun deaths than the US or Mexico. See how easy it is to cherrypick an example to illustrate a point?

 … There’s no doubt that there’s something seriously out of whack about a society that produces two or three spree-shootings a year. We’ve had so many now I’m losing track. Who will even remember the DC Navy Yard shooter in a few years? How about the guy who shot up the Sikh temple? These days we only remember the biggees—Newtown, Columbine, Virginia Tech, Aurora. 

It wasn’t always this way. Something changed and it wasn’t our laws or our “access” to firearms. The second amendment has been the law of the land since 1791. Firearms have been with us since the Renaissance. Automatic and semiautomatic weapons were both invented in the nineteenth century.

At the risk of sounding corny, I must positively assert that the change has been within us. We’re suffering from a profound sickness of the soul. That’s the cause of our troubles, not the inanimate objects that people use to act out their violent fantasies.

Liberals tend to get nervous whenever anyone starts talking about spiritual illness. It all sounds very preachy to them and they worry that someone might use the next spree-shooting as an excuse to censor music lyrics or video games, something I completely oppose.

 … Liberals will call it scapegoating if I cast blame upon the cultural changes that have swept our country since the mid-1960s, but I must. A few of the lessons that we’ve learned since that time are that it’s all about me, if it feels good do it, and screw the man. God was declared dead on the cover of Time magazine and anyone who warned of eternal consequences was a square. Could those attitudes be responsible for the mayhem unleashed upon our nation? I say yes.

 … Like the multiplying brooms of Goethe’s “Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” the effects of the empty, nihilistic culture just keep propagating with no end in sight. Conservatives keep thwacking away at those multiplying brooms, getting more and more fatigued with each passing year. No one can deny we’re losing ground.

Guns aren’t our problem. It’s the vacuousness that pervades our lives. In generations past our societal immune system would have had some kind of resistance to many of the pathologies that infect us, but no longer. So we pass laws that we think will treat the symptoms and often don’t even do that. We can expect more of the same results in years to come.

What are Americans obsessed by? The three C’s: control, competition, and choreography

“Do you remember your, ahem, appreciative remarks to the woman who marched onto the assembly line? Don’t do that when the Americans are here. A woman from Italy might laugh; a Michigan girl will sue.”

  Beppe Severgnini tries to explain Americans to a bunch of Italian autoworkers at the Fiat-Chrysler plant Melfi, southern Italy.

“Americans are great to work with, but they have their manias, just like us,” I started out. “They are obsessed by three C’s: control, competition and choreography. You may think this is odd, but you have to respect it. After all, the United States is the most powerful country on the planet.”

 … Control reveals America’s passion for order and predictability. How-to books date from Benjamin Franklin, who was always quick to spot a market niche. America is a nation of optimistic self-improvers, convinced that happiness is above all a question of mind over matter.

The books also prove that Americans reject the idea that success comes all at once, without effort or luck. Often, we Italians mistake this for naïveté, but it actually reflects a love of precision and a desire to stay in charge of your own life. Don’t mock it.

The second C-word is competition. Americans love it; we fear it. Americans are prepared to lose in order to win, in almost every aspect of life. In Italy — and in most of Europe — we hate losing more than we love winning and tend to settle for an uneventful draw.

Come to think of it, competition goes a long way toward explaining the excellence and excesses of the United States, including the abundance of colleges, the number of television channels and the financial instability of the many airlines. You build automobiles here. Your American colleagues know that these automobiles have to be better than the ones your competitors make. If they aren’t, it’s only right that you go bust.

For a long time in Italy, we thought that back-scratching regulations and protectionism would save our industry. How wrong we were. Competition in America is more than a healthy economic precept; it’s a moral imperative.

The third word on the list is choreography. In Italy, important events like presidential inaugurations, national holidays or graduation ceremonies are slightly boring. Americans are convinced that anything important has also got to be spectacular, if not plain over the top, and ear-splittingly loud.

The phenomenon called “motivated reasoning”—we tend to use logic and reason, not to discover what we believe, but to confirm what we already think we know

The sexes can't be warring tribes, says Christina Sommers as the author of Freedom Feminism—Its Surprising History and Why it Matters Today is interviewed by Ravishly's Katie Tandy (thanks to Instapundit).

In the new video series that you've created with American Enterprise—"Factual Feminist"—you recently answered the question, "Why Call Yourself a Feminist?" A reader wrote in and asked you to drop the moniker because it's been so "sullied" with man-hating rhetoric. You basically responded that you simply want women to be "free, responsible, self-determining beings." That your concept of feminism has nothing to do with "denigrating men or fixating on victimhood." How do your studies and writings help forge a much-needed, "healthy, evidence-based women's movement." What does evidence-based mean exactly?

Classical equality of opportunity feminism (I call it “freedom feminism”) is a legitimate human rights movement. There were arbitrary laws holding women back. Women organized and set things right. But, as I try to show in my writings, that reality-based movement has been hijacked by male-averse, conspiracy-minded activists. (I call them “gender feminists"). American women happen to be among the freest, most self-determining people in the world, but the gender feminists seek to liberate them from an all-encompassing “patriarchal rape culture.” What is their evidence that such a culture exits? They point to their own research as proof. But most of that research, including their famous statistics on women’s victimization, is spurious. Gender feminism is the opposite of an evidence-based movement—it’s propaganda based. Social movements fueled by paranoia and fantasy tend to be toxic.

What's your take-away from the #YesAllWomen phenomenon? Is it more gasoline on the gender-dividing fire, a societal zeitgeist or something in the middle?

Hashtag feminism (e.g. #YesAllWomen) is a scourge. It brings out the worst in contemporary feminism: injustice-collecting, trauma-valorizing, male-bashing. It also encourages group think and vigilanteeism. Other than that, it’s fine.    
                           
What's the most interesting thing you've learned recently?

I only recently came to appreciate the limited power of logic, reason and evidence to change minds. Most of us, whether we know it or not, are driven by emotion and group loyalty. Cognitive scientists have long known about a phenomenon called “motivated reasoning”—we tend to use logic and reason, not to discover what we believe, but to confirm what we already think we know. Instead of changing our minds in the face of contradictory evidence, we are more likely to seize on rationalizations for what we already believe. I see this tendency in myself once in a while and try mightily to resist it.

Smart Diplomacy: Regarding the BNP affair, "there is a perception that France was targeted"

As the American authorities announced a record penalty on Monday against BNP Paribas for violating United States rules on trading with blacklisted countries, the French political establishment had an unusual reaction: silence.

Thus writes Liz Alderman in a New York Times story to which one is tempted to react to with biting irony: "So, Messieurs les Français, you finally got him, the U.S. president you dreamed of — the one who like the visionary Europeans is against bankers and other dirty capitalist pigs. Ain'tcha happy?!" Having said that, we must remember that Obama's outstanding, second-to-none smart diplomacy is nothing to laugh at.

American prosecutors obtained most of what they fought for, but financial authorities here are warning of a potential negative consequence for the United States.

The dollar clearing at issue in the BNP Paribas case was conducted in the United States. But, said a person with direct knowledge of the negotiations, there is concern that using dollars in international trade could ‘‘trigger risks even if you do things outside the United States, because one day the dollar you used may be seen as an opening for an extraterritorial application of U.S. legislation.’’ 

‘‘That means that using the dollar is now perceived as less safe than before the episode, and it will probably reinforce the willingness of many countries to trade as much as possible in other currencies,’’ the person added.

Nor will the French government easily forget the episode. French officials are still upset that American prosecutors appeared to be imposing a standard of justice on foreign banks that has not been applied to American financial institutions.

 … ‘‘There is a perception that France was targeted,’’ the French official said.

  … France could turn up the heat on the United States on other fronts, especially in negotiations underway on an American-European trade deal. ‘‘It will probably mean that the French attitude will be even tougher,’’ said the French official close to the discussions. 

Intensifying French resistance to the deal could undermine the European Commission’s ability to champion trans-Atlantic trade, Famke Krumbmuller, a London-based analyst for the Eurasia Group, wrote in a recent note to clients. But those talks are only limping along as it is, and increasingly look doubtful to advance significantly during the Obama presidency.

Also unclear is how the American action will ricochet at a European level. The European Commission has already imposed hefty fines on Microsoft and other large American technology companies for violating anti-trust behavior in Europe’s backyard.

Given that the financial penalties by the American authorities against not only BNP, but other European banks, have been eye-popping, ‘‘the temptation may be there to also raise the level of the fines in Europe,’’ Mr. Godement said, ‘‘and we could get into a kind of tit-for-tat war, which has the added advantage of replenishing public coffers.’’ 

Whatever the softening of the penalties, the BNP affair will sting in France. ‘‘This amounts to targeting probably the closest ally that the U.S. has had in Europe over the past four to five years,’’ Mr. Godement said. ‘‘It is very disquieting.’’

If you want to know what US Government-run healthcare looks like, the VA is a pretty good case study

The Veterans Administration scandal is worse than you think

dissects Benny Huang.

A report out this week from retiring Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) found that approximately one thousand veterans have died in the last ten years while languishing on wait lists. Doctors, nurses, and administrators within the system say that they faced retaliation when they spoke out about unethical practices. One VA employee in Phoenix says that deceased veterans’ medical records were altered post mortem so that it would appear that they did not die on the VA’s watch.
The VA’s biggest problem, besides dishonesty of course, is timeliness. Delayed healthcare can mean the difference between life and death, as this scandal illustrates in vivid color.

If you want to know what US Government-run healthcare looks like, the VA is a pretty good case study. I understand that some of those vets probably wouldn’t have any healthcare at all if it weren’t for this system but is that really a testament to their quality? What healthcare system would adopt as its motto, “Hey, it’s better than nothin’!”

There is an alternative to the wholly government-run model that is the VA. Vets could be given vouchers redeemable with private physicians. It might work better; it could hardly work worse.

Strangely, 31% of Americans polled this month said that they expected Obamacare to function better than the VA system. In other news, 31% of Americans are too stupid to vote.

 … Of course, Obamacare differs from the VA in that it is not a self-contained system wholly operated by the US government, or what we might call the single payer policy that liberals really wanted and may still get. They will therefore shrug off Obamacare’s faults by saying that it doesn’t go far enough. If only we allowed the government to take over healthcare completely we’d have a great system, like they do in Canada and France!

Well, no. What we’d have is a VA-style system for everybody.

While the VA scandal may be a tragedy, it is also a teachable moment. Now is a good time for conservatives to explain to the American people that we are not against universal healthcare. We are opposed to more government meddling in our medical system because our health is too important to entrust to a bunch of incompetent buffoons who destroy everything they touch.

 … Conservatives aren’t against people seeing the doctor, we just think that the government sucks at almost everything, from education to mortgage-lending to energy production. Nothing in the last decade has persuaded me that our government is anything but incompetent and corrupt.

 … We all want healthcare for everyone. The question is how to best provide it. Should we provide for our own medical care, just as we buy our own groceries? Or should we look for the generous hand of government to give it to us for “free”, no matter how crappy it is? Conservatives don’t want to prevent poor people from receiving life-saving medications or getting a yearly checkup, we simply don’t want to be trapped in the shameful system that has already killed a thousand veterans.

Reminder to the NYT: Saddam Hussein had slaughtered several thousand Kurds with sarin and other poison gases

Margaret McGirr speaks up at the liberal partisanship of the New York Times and at that of one of its star columnists. (At least, the newspaper has the decency to publish the letter — although, to be fair, the letter to the editor is but a token one.)

Re Nicholas Kristof’s column “Obama’s weakness, or ours?” (June 27): Terrorists killed nearly 3,000 Americans and people of several other nationalities on Sept. 11, 2001. There were real concerns at the time about follow-up attacks, a threat that many of us seem to have forgotten. 

Saddam Hussein had slaughtered several thousand Kurds with sarin and other poison gases. Many Western governments, including the Clinton administration, believed that he had chemical weapons. President George W. Bush was repeatedly rebuffed in his efforts through the United Nations to get the Iraqi dictator to allow a complete inspection of his country by international weapons inspectors. 

Finally, with the responsibility for the safety of millions of Americans resting on his shoulders, President Bush made the decision, supported by Congress, to invade Iraq.

This painstaking, deliberative process Mr. Kristof describes as “swagger.” He is irritated by what he sees as over-harsh treatment of our current president but is happy to dish it out to our previous one.

5 Things To Remember Before You Quit And Say, ‘I’m Done With America’

Have you ever looked at all the schlock we’re currently mired in thanks to BHO’s “fundamental transformation” of America and thought, or actually said, “Screw it. I’m done. I officially don’t give a crap anymore”?

asks Doug Giles.

I have. And I prize myself as being somewhat of a scrappy-faith-filled dude. I hate to admit it, but sometimes I get sick and tired of being sick and tired.

 … After I have these little pouting sessions of pathetic wussiness, I realize two things: 1). I’m being a hamster; and 2). Historically, that’s pretty much the crumble of the cookie, in that things usually turned repugnant before they turned around. Indeed, in the very formation of our blessed union we tend to forget King George’s oppressive hell spawned a defiant and free rebel nation; and that didn’t happen with ease or overnight.

 … So, little kiddies … we need to cheer up. You and I can’t curl up in the fetal position and wet our big diaper since things seem bad right now, because that’s exactly what the enemies of our nation would like us to do, namely … check out. Give up. Lose heart. Instead, we must realize the historical pattern of things usually gets real frickin’ bad before it gets better.

Read the whole thing

Putin's Dreamin' of a Greater Russia

(A Serguei cartoon that was published in Le Monde before the Malaysian airliner was shot down)

Good-Bye, Friend — James Garner

James Garner

Eastern Europe Leaders Protest Paris's Sale of High-Tech Mistral Warships to Russia

One East European leader on an official Paris visit after another voices his apprehension about France's decision to sell high-tech Mistral warships to the Kremlin.

Estonia's prime minister, Taavi Roivas:

I am not convinced that it would be opportune to deliver sophisticated and high-tech weaponry to Russia at this moment. 

Poland's foreign minister, Radoslaw Sikorski:

When countries forcefully seize a part of their neighbors' territory, it's not the best moment to furnish them with sophisticated armaments.

There are two online petitions protesting the Mistral sale to Moscow:

• Monsieur le Président : Ne pas livrer à la Russie les 2 navires de guerre "Mistral" commandés
• Find another buyer than Putin for the Mistral ships

Putin's Gesticulations, by Selçuk

Remnants of Saddam’s Toxic Arsenal: What the MSM Has Been Keeping Secret for Years

By late 2003, even the Bush White House’s staunchest defenders were starting to give up on the idea that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq

admits Wired's Noah Shachtman (shookhran to Instapundit).

But WikiLeaks’ newly-released Iraq war documents reveal that for years afterward, U.S. troops continued to find chemical weapons labs, encounter insurgent specialists in toxins and uncover weapons of mass destruction.

An initial glance at the WikiLeaks war logs doesn’t reveal evidence of some massive WMD program by the Saddam Hussein regime — the Bush administration’s most (in)famous rationale for invading Iraq. But chemical weapons, especially, did not vanish from the Iraqi battlefield. Remnants of Saddam’s toxic arsenal, largely destroyed after the Gulf War, remained. Jihadists, insurgents and foreign (possibly Iranian) agitators turned to these stockpiles during the Iraq conflict — and may have brewed up their own deadly agents.

 … even late in the war, WMDs were still being unearthed. In the summer of 2008, according to one WikiLeaked report, American troops found at least 10 rounds that tested positive for chemical agents. “These rounds were most likely left over from the [Saddam]-era regime. Based on location, these rounds may be an AQI [Al Qaeda in Iraq] cache. However, the rounds were all total disrepair and did not appear to have been moved for a long time.”

A small group — mostly of the political right — has long maintained that there was more evidence of a major and modern WMD program than the American people were led to believe. A few Congressmen and Senators gravitated to the idea, but it was largely dismissed as conspiratorial hooey.

The WMD diehards will likely find some comfort in these newly-WikiLeaked documents. Skeptics will note that these relatively small WMD stockpiles were hardly the kind of grave danger that the Bush administration presented in the run-up to the war. …

The main conclusion to be taken from this, however, is neither the first note nor the second one. It is that the Mainstream media deliberately ignored any discussion or even the slightest consideration of the findings to hammer home their (self-serving) obstruction to the White House when it was the home of a Republican of George W Bush's bent…

The Left is throwing a tantrum over the Hobby Lobby case precisely because they intend to further curtail religious liberty; Religious liberty is a huge problem for people who recognize no higher power than the state

[The] narrow victory for religious freedom is still causing heads to explode on the political Left

writes Benny Huang.

The wailing and gnashing of teeth from the likes of NARAL, NOW, and the Daily Kos is more of the same hysterical overreaction they have to everything. They seem worried that if we allow any religious exemption to any law, no matter how small, then everyone will cite “sincerely held religious belief” whenever the law inconveniences them. Anarchy will then ensue and the whole world will end.

Of course, Hobby Lobby did not ask for the law to be waived for them. The court sided with them because the law—the Religious Freedom Restoration Act or RFRA—is on their side. I would argue that the First Amendment is too, though the court didn’t speak to that.

Ryan Grim of The Huffington Post penned a piece in which he expressed the slippery slope argument fairly well. “8 Other Laws That Could be Ignored Now That Christians Get to Pick and Choose” is a hyperbolic harangue riddled with errors but the basic gist is that everything is now in jeopardy because Christians, and only Christians, can do whatever they want.

Among Grim’s list of laws that could be ignored are bans on hemp and LSD because some people use them religiously. “While we’re at it, all drug laws rub up against religious practice,” Grim argues. “Sorry officer, this is our church.”

 … That’s where liberals stand on the religious freedom issue. Before they can get behind it, they apply a two-prong test. First—do they like you? If the answer is no, then you’re a bigot. Sorry, but bigots have no rights. Second—is their agenda in any way impeded? If the answer is yes, then freedom of religion does not apply.

I don’t remember any liberals howling that religious exemptions would lead to privileged groups picking and choosing which laws they would follow back when a Democrat-controlled Congress passed, and President Clinton signed, the RFRA. They should have argued that everyone must follow all laws, no exceptions. If we allow a religious exemption for American Indians and their holy stash, next thing you know Christians might think that they have rights too! Then we won’t be able to force them to pay for someone else’s abortifacients. It’s a slippery slope. Let’s not go there.

 …The Left is throwing a tantrum over the Hobby Lobby case precisely because they intend to further curtail religious liberty. All this free exercise stuff terrifies them. If people can simply say “It’s my religion” then liberals won’t be able to force military chaplains to perform same-sex marriages and people will be free to teach their children what they want. Religious liberty is a huge problem for people who recognize no higher power than the state.

The Legacies of World War I and World War II

The Wall Street Journal has selected 100 legacies from World War I that continue to shape our lives today (thanks to Damian Bennett and Duncan Hill), while The Atlantic presents a photo essay on the aftermath of World War II (one in a series of WWII-era retrospective entries, among which is one from D-Day).

Liberals will bring in a slew of (mostly illegal) immigrants, transform them into wards of the state, and register them to vote, thus diluting the power of the Cable Guy voting bloc

A Pew Research Center poll last week found that among those who described themselves as solid liberals only forty percent reported often feeling “proud to be an American”

writes Benny Huang. in an article echoing Jonah Goldberg's Resenting the Republic (Liberals take exception to exceptionalism).

The Washington Post greeted the survey with the headline: “Proud to be an American? You’re probably not a true liberal.”

What is it about this country that brings liberals so much shame? It’s the people—our values, our habits, our traditions. We’re an incorrigible lot. Too many Americans look, act, and talk like Larry the Cable Guy. We’re obese and we only speak English, perhaps not that well. I say, so what? While I can’t deny that plenty of Americans fit that stereotype, those are both overlookable faults. America is full of Cable Guys and that’s okay.

What Americans need, liberals argue, is to change; and if we can’t or won’t, we need to be changed. We can start by embracing hate speech laws, then outlawing guns, and finally getting excited about soccer. Except we musn’t call it soccer, we must call it football, as the rest of the world does. Above all, we must change our values and the way we vote so that they always win.

If that doesn’t work, liberals will just bring in a slew of (mostly illegal) immigrants, transform them into wards of the state and register them to vote, thus diluting the power of the Cable Guy voting bloc.

Behold the tsunami of children at our southern border and the giddy liberal politicians salivating at the prospect of all those undocumented Democrats. Texas will be blue in a generation if they have their way. By bringing in enough ringers to vote for them, liberals hope to “fundamentally transform” this country. America needs a transformation because it sucks, that’s why.

What do they want to transform it to? Based on their immigration policy it appears that Mexico is their model, but I don’t think so. Their true vision of what America should be is something like the Netherlands, complete with sidewalk cafes, baby euthanasia, and lots of dope. How we’re going to get there by importing primarily impoverished Latin Americans is anyone’s guess. In any case, it’s pretty clear that they don’t like America the way it is now.

People of the Left generally struggle with love of country and not just in the United States either. Most places I’ve traveled I’ve found that people on the Right identify freely with their nations, while people on the Left tend to squirm at the mention of patriotism and then become very defensive. I’ve seen it in Japan, Great Britain and elsewhere, but never as pronounced as here in the United States.

Selçuk Cartoon: The Providential Man

Nudist beaches, naturist resorts, naked camping: No-one should be surprised when they come across nudists in France

Let’s face it, the French pretty much invented naturism

writes Mark Johnson,

so no-one should be surprised when they come across it in France. Here, there are nudist beaches, naturist resorts, naked camping – sounds painful – and any number of clothes optional guest houses and hotels.

Although I’m not an avid naturist myself, I have been known to get my kit off at the plage natural on the Cote Sauvage, and never had any issues with that. Mostly, though, I keep my swimming trunks on, simply because I like the tan line, but being naked is the most natural thing in the world and I wouldn’t begrudge anyone their right to strip off.

Granted, the prospect of seeing everyone’s wobbly bits on show down the local supermarket just after breakfast may be stretching things – no pun intended – but here in deepest rural France people sometimes also prefer to be at one with nature around their own homes. …

The 1900 Exposition Universelle Exhibit at the Petit Palais — Complete with a Display Room Dedicated to Paris Brothels

I don’t know how many people I heard gasping when they saw photos of the fabulous buildings created for the 1900 Exposition Universelle

marvels Stephen Clarke as he discusses "the fascinating exhibition at the Petit Palais" – Paris 1900

– of which the Petit Palais and Grand Palais are just two – and wondering aloud why the others weren’t preserved too. The river bank down to the Eiffel Tower was a façade of palaces instead of a busy road and a line of rather dull apartments, and the whole neighbourhood around the Tower was a patchwork of pavilions designed by the world’s most famous architects.

The author of Dirty Bertie: an English King Made in France goes on to reveal that he

was on a personal mission at the Petit Palais – I wanted to see how the city acknowledged the presence of one of its most influential people, the Prince of Wales, alias Dirty Bertie, the future King Edward VII. He was, after all, friendly (or more than friendly) with almost every French actress in the posters decorating the exhibition’s walls. He was the man who introduced Sarah Bernhardt to London (and took her along to high-society dinners to shock the snobs). And more seriously, he was the Englishman who was lobbying for closer ties with his friends across the Channel, at a time when most British politicians were spitting with rage over France’s support for the Boers. He was also calming his nephew the Kaiser, who was prone to outbursts of anti-French aggression (while cruising the Med, he “invaded” Morocco, just himself on a horse basically, to make a speech supporting Moroccan independence from France). By [maintaining] his close contacts with all of Europe’s leaders, Bertie was in fact protecting Europe’s balance of power, and in a way making France’s carefree 1900 lifestyle possible. So how was he acknowledged in the exhibition?

In a room dedicated to brothels. There – rather magnificently, I have to admit – was his love seat, the extraordinary piece of furniture he had built by a Parisian chairmaker, a cross between a gynecologist’s examination table and an art nouveau toboggan, with footplates to keep everyone in place and gilded woodwork to give the fornicatory proceedings a royal feel.

The chair was kept in Bertie’s private room at a luxury brothel called Le Chabanais, along with a bathtub that the exhibition, like everyone else, claims to have been filled with Champagne, which is almost certainly a lazy fantasy. Apart from the fact that you would need dozens of bottles to fill a bath, would anyone want to sit in the stuff, either chilled or (yuk) warm? You’d emerge smelling like a bar after closing time. No, much more likely, it was filled with conventional hot soapy water and used for frolicking, or to wash off the perfume and other liquids that might have come into contact with the royal skin. Après l’amour, the Prince had to go on to other appointments. He couldn’t step out reeking of brothel. And incidentally, the women would probably have made use of the bathwater too, their backstage living quarters being considerably less luxurious than the settings that the customers saw.

Anyway, the love seat, and a strangely-named engraving by Félix Vallotton – l’Étranger, ie the stranger or foreigner – were the only signs of Bertie’s presence in Paris. Vallotton’s engraving underlined the impression that Paris seemed to be almost ashamed of Bertie. We see a plump, top-hatted figure from the back as he chats up two smirking ladies of obviously ill repute, while a man in front bows reverently. It’s generally assumed that Bertie is the subject – he is the foreigner, the outsider, when he was in fact an integral, and vitally important, part of Parisian society. At the time, his presence at a theatre show could almost guarantee its success. He featured in novels by Proust and Zola, and Offenbach more or less wrote him into an operetta. His style, and that of his long-suffering wife Alexandra, were huge influences on Parisian fashion. Yet all he is in the exhibition is a buyer of brothel furniture and chatter-up of street girls. Not even a hint (as far as I could see) that three years later, against all expectations, the Entente Cordiale would be signed, largely thanks to Bertie.
Like I said, it’s a sumptuous exhibition, but it seems to be suffering from another case of France re-writing its own history.

What If Dan Quayle Had Misspelled the Name of a Previous Occupant of the White House?

The [White House's] press office misspelled the name of 40th president Ronald Reagan

reports Fox News —

not once, but three times in media documents about President Obama's schedule on Wednesday.

In the version of Obama's schedule that is available online, Reagan's name is spelled "Regan."

"The President delivers remarks at the League of Conservation Voters Capitol Dinner (at the) Ronald Regan Building and International Trade Center," it says.

The Washington Times reports the name of the building was also misspelled twice on a daily email briefing sent to members of the media.

Remember Dan Quayle's "potatoes"? Imagine if it had been a Republican White House making a typo like that. We would never hear the end of it from the mainstream media.

Check out the difference between the never-ending treatment of Dubya's flubs and the hardly-touched-upon Obama mistakes, from his 57 states to his Austrian language through his mistaking an icy Atlantic Ocean group of islands (las Malvinas aka the Falklands) with a tropic Indian Ocean one (the Maldives)…  

What's worse, it shows how little interest liberals have in the past, it being all about them and about the outstanding, second-to-none policy changes they are about to embark upon for the country and for the good of their (clueless) countrymen.

Indeed, do not forget how blessed we are to have smart policies from the smartest (and the most intellectual?) administration ever.

Searching the Forests of Normandy for the MIAs of World War II

Benoît Hopquin has an article in Le Monde on the search for the lost allied soldiers of World War II, i.e., the aviators whose planes were shot down and whose bodies were never found.

Dans la forêt du hameau de Grattenoix, un petit monument régulièrement fleuri a été érigé au milieu de la haute futaie, au centre de quatre cratères envahis par les ronces et les orties. Ici s'écrasa, le 21 janvier 1944, un bombardier américain B-24 Liberator, abattu alors qu'il était en opération contre une rampe de fusées V1. Six des dix membres d'équipage purent sauter en parachute. Quatre furent faits prisonniers et deux pris en charge par la Résistance. Deux corps furent retrouvés et dignement inhumés. Mais les dépouilles mortelles du pilote, le lieutenant Franck W. Sobotka Jr, de New York, et du mécanicien, le sergent Clair P. Shaeffer, de Pennsylvanie, restèrent introuvables.

Le 2 février 1944, Anne Sobotka, la mère de Franck, reçut le télégramme type. Il l'informait « avec un profond regret » que son fils était déclaré « manquant à l'appel ». « Si nous recevons des informations plus précises, nous vous les notifierons avec promptitude », concluait la missive.

HONORER CETTE PROMESSE DE L'ETAT AMÉRICAIN

Près de soixante-dix ans après, en ce petit matin ensoleillé de septembre 2013, Ian Spurgeon attend devant la mairie de Beaussault pour tenter d'honorer cette promesse de l'Etat américain à la mère d'un combattant. L'historien serre dans un dossier une copie du vieux télégramme et quelques informations sur Sobotka et Shaeffer. Il est accompagné de Christine Cohn, une autre historienne, et de Joan Baker, une anthropologue et médecin légiste.

L'équipe arrive de Washington. Elle appartient au DPMO, le service de la défense chargé des prisonniers de guerre et des disparus. Dans le jargon peu sentimental du Pentagone, on appelle ces derniers les MIA, pour missing in action. Au dernier décompte, ils sont encore 73 624 soldats américains de la seconde guerre mondiale qui errent sans sépulture connue. Ils sont quelque part dans un fossé, un champ ou une forêt d'Europe, dans un coin de jungle d'Asie ou dans un pli de rocaille des îles du Pacifique.

Lire aussi : tous nos récits, portraits et reportages dans le dossier 1944 : la libération de la France

 … la mémoire locale s'étiole. Les paysages changent, ici avec la construction d'une route, là d'un immeuble. Les souvenirs deviennent plus vagues. Les témoins directs disparaissent un à un. Agée de 91 ans, Edmonde, la mère de Lionel Legrand, est une des dernières survivantes à avoir assisté au crash du B-24 le 21 janvier 1944.

Elle reçoit les visiteurs étrangers en blouse, dans sa maison cernée par les poules. Sans jamais lâcher son balai, elle raconte, tandis qu'une courageuse interprète traduit son français patoisant : le bombardier en perdition passant au-dessus de la maison en direction des « bouais », le fracas puis son père courant avec d'autres hommes du village vers le lieu du drame. Ian Spurgeon note ses informations dans un petit cahier jaune, remercie. …

UN DÉNOUEMENT INATTENDU

Certaines quêtes obtiennent un dénouement inattendu. Le pilote Billie Dove Harris, de l'Oklahoma, s'était marié à Peggy six semaines avant de partir au front. Son avion fut abattu le 17 juillet 1944. La jeune veuve reçut des messages contradictoires, le disant mort, puis vivant, puis disparu. Elle resta avec cette incertitude et ne se remaria jamais.

Par un incroyable concours de circonstances et un non moins improbable raté de l'administration américaine, Peggy Harris devait apprendre, après plus de six décennies, que son mari était en fait enterré à Colleville. Mieux, une place avait été baptisée en son honneur dans un village normand, Les Ventes, lieu de son décès. Peggy Harris se rendit donc en Normandie et put se recueillir sur la tombe de son mari. Elle rencontra des vieux habitants du village qui lui racontèrent les circonstances de l'accident.

Pour l'heure, à Beaussault, les investigations s'arrêteront là. Le rapport du DPMO sera remis à un autre service au sigle tout aussi intraduisible, le JPAC, qui décidera ou non de l'utilité de procéder à des excavations. Franck Sobotka et Clair Shaeffer attendront encore un peu, là, quelque part dans la forêt de Grattenoix.

Guess Who Is Blamed by France's Newspaper of Record: After Over Five Years of Obama Presidency, Anything Wrong in Iraq Is Still All Bush's Fault

Barack Obama … is right

intones the editorial of France's daily Le Monde (Barack Obama is always right ; unlike, say, his predecessor who was always wrong, as we will discover later in the text)

– et ceux de ses adversaires politiques qui lui imputent la responsabilité de la situation en Irak ont tort ou affichent une mauvaise foi qui confine à l'indécence.

 … M. Obama est peut-être timide sur l'emploi de la force. Mais il faut une bonne dose d'impudence pour lui faire endosser la paternité des événements actuels en Irak. Hormis la part prise par les Irakiens dans leur propre malheur, la responsabilité première dans le démantèlement de l'Etat à Bagdad, dans la dissolution de l'armée, dans l'exacerbation des différends religieux et dans l'explosion du djihadisme en Irak repose d'abord sur celui qui décida d'envahir ce pays : George W. Bush.

In other words, Iraq, and the world, would be better off is only Saddam Hussein was still in power, sending his people to the death fields.

And how dare anybody even think of having the gall to raise their voice to put some of the opprobrium on Obama-the-merciful come to save the American people from itself and to apologize for all of America's past sins?!

To summarize: during the Bush years, everything was Bush's fault.

Electing a paragon like Obama — tolerant (like the Europeans), in harmony with the rest of the world (still like the Europeans) — would solve all the problems on the planet, while making the U.S. respected (and beloved) again.

Since then, we have had chemical massacres in Syria, a Russian invasion of Ukraine, Chinese threats in Southeast Asia. (Yes, yes, of course Assad, Putin, and Beijing have nothing but the utmost respect for Obama, and for America, a deeper love you will never see!)

Over five (!) years after Obama's election, who is responsible? It's... still Dubya!

(While on the internal front, everything is the fault of the… Republicans…)

The extreme violence of the assault on June 6, 1944? The Sounds on D-Day Were Soothing

A Frenchman with a German name, Maxime J E Heinisch, writes to the New York Times from Toulouse to say Merci

Every June 6, I, a young Frenchman, remember that I have had the chance to live my life because some foreigners gave theirs, and that many of these lives ended up on the sand without having the chance to fire or fight, a sacrifice that left most of them alone with fear while crossing over to the other side, literally and figuratively.

Every June 6, I remember the words from my grandparents that were all about soothing sounds: the quiet of the crepe soles of the American troops contrasting with those of the invader, or the smooth whistling of gliders landing quietly in the fields. It seemed to them that war’s deafening noises were vanishing with the Allied armies coming.

Every June 6, I also remember my hand full of cartridge cases, when at 9 I discovered Normandy’s beaches: There were so many in the gravel that my schoolmates and I at first thought that someone had spread them around.

On that sunny day, I felt the extreme violence of the assault, and as soon as I was back home, I pinned up the Star and Stripes and United States Army patches on the walls of my bedroom. This was the only way for me to say thank you at that time.

We don’t live in a sane culture, we live in a feminist culture; instead of curbing the worst instincts of women, our culture instead amplifies them

Women are hard wired to wonder if they aren’t missing out on something.  Could they find a better man?  Do they have enough money, the right clothes and shoes?  Are they being treated well enough by their husbands, and at their job?  

A Dalrock post linked by Instapundit links in turn to another, previous Dalrock post entitled The Whispers, which is worth quoting on its own.

I think this pretty neatly fits with the concept of hypergamy, and it does serve a biological purpose.  Women need to make sure they choose the best mate possible, and that they have the status and means to care for the child.

But constantly wondering if what you have is enough isn’t always a virtue;  in the wrong context (most of modern life) it is a prescription for unhappiness.  Not just their unhappiness, but that of their family, especially their children.  A sane culture would curb the dangerous part of this tendency.  It would caution women of the danger of never being happy, as the Brothers Grimm tale The Fisherman’s Wife does (post pending).

But then again we don’t live in a sane culture, we live in a feminist culture.   Feminism’s founding motto is “I never get to have any fun!”  Instead of curbing the worst instincts of women, our culture instead amplifies them.

Here’s an experiment you can try on your own.  Find a five year old, and ask them why did all of your friends get ice cream today and you didn’t? or  why are all of their toys better than yours? Find a bunch of toys they don’t have which look like they would be really great to play with.  Then ask them why their parents don’t love them enough to buy them for them.  For best results, taunt them relentlessly every day.  Wake them up in the middle of the night and ask why their classmates get to sleep in a more comfortable bed than they do.  At breakfast ask them if they think their classmates are eating better food right now.  Find new and interesting things they should feel slighted about.  Try this for say, 30 years.

Now test and see if they are happy.

Read the whole thing™ and check out quotes from Stephen Baskerville's Taken Into Custody (The War Against Fathers, Marriage, and the Family).

As for Instapundit readers, also check out what Miles Per Galleon has to say:

Thing is, I think women in general have *always* been status-conscious when it comes to their relationships with men. Women (again, in general) are obsessed with relationships, period. The never-ending comparisons, check lists, gossip, the microscopic parsing of every conversation, every nuance of every syllable in a conversation with That Man ... this is as old as the hills & hasn't really changed since wimmins were wearing bearskins & grinding meal with stone. This is what wimmins do.

What has changed are the cultural & technological contexts.

Too many to list, but we are aware of the biggies: material affluence, labor-saving machines in the home, mass media, huge changes in law & labor force participation, artificial contraception, feminization of the culture at large, radical moral autonomy & sexual license in place of traditional Judeo-Christian concepts of marriage & family, etc etc.

The combination of all these is a toxic brew exacerbating what have always been women's unfortunate tendencies towards relationship nit-picking, status-checking & insecurity. The physical harshness of life, the lack of a mass media echo chamber, the prominence of traditional religion, social taboos against and legal obstacles to divorce, used to act as strong restraints on excessive dwelling on discontent & fantasies of ditching one's familial & marital obligations ISO the elusive "carefree" life.

Those restraints for the most part have faded & been dismantled, but the less-than-admirable psychological, emotional & behavioral tendencies they held in check did not go away. So we now have the dismal portrait of what a society looks like when unrealistic expectations in relationships and marriage are a dime a dozen, selfishness is hyped and rewarded, neurosis is coddled, promiscuity romanticized & celebrated, and happiness is the ever-elusive mechanical rabbit that keeps the dogs racing around and around the track.

Myths of World War I Debunked and the BBC's Debunking List Debunked in Turn

The BBC presents an opinion piece called 10 big myths about World War One debunked, but a couple of Instapundit readers do a good job of debunking the Dan Snow article in turn, mainly JMH:

The BBC "Myth" article is mostly a crock. Good God, have they forgotten so much over there? The "myths" that they are correct about are mostly ones I've never heard anyone mention.

1. Bloodiest war in history to that point: They're right about this.
2. Most soldiers died - never heard anyone make this claim. BBC made it up so they could debunk it.
3. Men lived in trenches for years on end - No, but they didn't spend three days there either. Men lived in detestable conditions for weeks on end.
4. The Upper Class Got off Lightly: Never, ever, heard anyone make this claim either. Anyone with any knowledge of WWI knows this isn't true. Again, they made it up so they would have something to debunk.
5. Lions led by Donkeys: The source of the quote is in dispute, but the truth of the claim is not. The British had terrible generals throughout the war, especially at the top. Donkeys doesn't mean they were cowards (they weren't), it means they were stupid and stubborn (they were).
6. Gallipoli - yes, there were British soldiers in the general area, but the ANZACs were the ones landed on the wrong beaches and stuck in an untenable position.
7. Tactics remained unchanged - yes, yes they did. This is not a myth, it's truth, at least as far as the British were concerned. The Germans did learn new tactics. The French didn't necessarily change tactics, but they changed strategies. The British donkeys stubbornly stuck to the same failed tactics year after year.
8. No one won - Of the six Great Powers (Germany, Russia, Austria-Hungary, France. UK, Ottomans) that started the war, two (Austria-Hungary, Ottoman Empire) no longer existed at the end, two more (Germany, Russia) saw their governments ended and replaced by new forms, and the final two (France and the UK) lost so many men, they were no longer World Powers at the end of the war. So, yes, it's true that no one won.
9. Versailles - Was it harsh, or was it just stupid and misguided? At the time it was called the Peace to end all Peace.
10. Everyone hated it - oh, so somebody who got a cush, rear-echelon job where he could make time with the lonely ladies didn't mind it, eh? Idiots.

Related: also check out Debunking Three Big Myths of World War I

While discussing who bears the responsibility for starting the conflict, JMH goes on to add that

Germany started it if you blame the Schlieffen plan for leaving Germany no other option for responding to Russian mobilization but invading France.

Russia started it if you blame them for mobilizing against Austria despite clear warnings from Germany that would mean war with Germany.

France started it if you blame them for egging the Russians on against Austria because their government wanted a war with Germany before Germany got any stronger and while Russia was their ally.

Austria started it if you blame them for using the death of a noble they didn't even like as a pretext for subjugating Serbia.

Germany started it if you blame them for supporting Austria's strong-arming of Serbia out of fear that they couldn't lose Austria as an ally because everyone else was allied against Germany.

Serbia started it if you blame them for shooting the Austrian Crown Prince as an act of pointless, idiotic terror.

Britain started it if you blame them for not just effing declaring a side before Germany gave Austria the green light. If they'd said they would be on Frances side, Germany would have restrained Austria. If they'd said they were going to sit it out, France would have refused to support Russia. Instead they dithered, and let everyone believe what they wanted.

Or, you can blame the Ottomans for the centuries of mis-rule that created the ethnic and religious powderkeg in the Balkans and the final decades of collapse that set everyone else scrambling for the pickings.

Or, finally, I supposed if you are Barack Obama, you can blame George W. Bush. Or maybe a hard drive crash. 

No one is afraid of big, bad America anymore — This is what it looks like when the world’s only superpower decides it’s going to get in touch with its inner self

This is What Declining American Power Looks Like

writes Benny Huang —

Emperor Nero was said to have played the fiddle while Rome burned; Barrack Obama was busy working on his golf game while Iraq did the same. According to his press secretary Jay Carney, the president was fully engaged in that whole Iraq thing while he chipped  and putted his way across Porcupine Creek, an exclusive golf club.

And maybe that’s where he should have been. I don’t know.

 … A little known fact about Obama is that he has fired more hellfire missiles that any other Nobel Peace Prize winner!

So he isn’t afraid to pull the trigger and make bad guys die. Yet despite using drones like playtoys, Obama’s presidency marks an American retreat. I’ll leave that up to the reader to determine whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing. I know some conservatives and some liberals who can agree that sitting out the next global conflict would be just what the doctor ordered.

Where did it all begin? If I had to put a finger on it, I would say that it began in April of 2009 when, in the midst of his world apology tour, Mr. Obama bowed to the Saudi king. American presidents have not traditionally bowed before foreign leaders. We fought a revolution so that we wouldn’t have to. Though he lied and said that his obvious bow was not a bow, liberals pooh-poohed the whole thing, and pretty soon he was bowing to the Emperor of Japan, the president of China, a robot, and probably the bellhop at his hotel.

The message was clear: We’re not the same superpower we once were. We have been humbled.

Then he began making deep cuts to the military, which is usually a popular thing to do when most people have been deluded into believing that the military receives more funding than welfare programs or education, a preposterous lie. Proposed personnel cuts would reduce the Army in size to a number not seen since 1940. The future of the A-10 Thunderbolt, every infantryman’s best friend, is uncertain due to budget cuts. Long-held garrisons in Europe are being closed.

Not surprisingly, the bad guys of the world are misbehaving. In Egypt, a “pro-democracy” movement that looked suspiciously like a pro-Shariah law movement swept Hosni Mubarak, an American ally, from power. Russia tore away a piece of its neighbor, the Ukraine, without any fear of reprisal from the US or NATO. In Syria, Bashar Assad defied Obama’s “red lines” and (likely) used chemical weapons against his own people. In Iraq, a fledging force of Islamists is routing the Iraqi Army and taunting the United States.

This is what it looks like when the world’s only superpower decides it’s going to get in touch with its inner self.

American fingers have been plugging holes in too many levees for far too long. We’ve held back the North Koreans from attacking their southern cousins, but for how much longer? How many small former satellite states will Putin decide to invade? What’s to prevent China from taking Taiwan? If the Iranians create a worldwide economic catastrophe by blockading the Strait of Hormuz, who will stop them?

Not us. No one is afraid of big, bad America anymore.

It’s clear that the United States has been overextended. In every corner of the world, wherever there is a conflict, the United States picks a side and attempts to influence outcomes using hard or soft power. No other country takes foreign policy to such extremes. Never in the history of the world has one country attempted to do so much—pledging to defend nations such as Japan, Taiwan, and Germany, using its navy to fight piracy and keep the world’s shipping lanes open, battling the narcotics trade, and responding to humanitarian disasters. We do it all!

Whether we can keep doing it is doubtful. Besides the fact that we’re in debt, the young people of our nation, like most of their peers in post-industrial nations, aren’t joining the military in droves.
Yet we should not forget that the news we’re hearing now about the resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan, about ISIS in Iraq, and about a truculent Russian Federation, are really stories about declining American power. This is what happens when Team America: World Police decides to turn in its badge.

How to have fun during a French train strike

There is a train strike on at the moment in France

writes Stephen Clarke

– but it has, perversely, become an excellent time to travel by train. As long as you don’t have to be at your destination at a certain fixed time, and don’t mind taking the risk that you won’t get a seat (unlikely on all except the really busy routes), now is a great time to take a TGV – one of France’s excellent fast trains. Most of them are running more or less on time, and there are lots of railway workers in red waistcoats at the stations telling you exactly when the next train is leaving. You can also look on the internet, which has reliable lists of non-cancelled trains. I have had to travel around quite a bit over the past few days and have had nothing but good experiences.

 … I’ve taken advantage of this situation recently by ignoring my reservations and travelling when I want. Once I even turned up a whole day early. It’s been very liberating.

… This hasn’t been the case for everyone. There have been the usual news reports about commuters losing income, waiting for hours on platforms, being forced to imitate sardines, and the like.

 … The strike, which has only been supported by a small minority of railway workers, is about reform, as most strikes in France are. The government is being forced by Europe to open up the railways to competition, and is therefore planning to split the French SNCF into three companies. Divide and rule, the unions say. They also don’t want to lose their very French privileges, which include retirement at age 52 for what they call the “personnel roulant” (those who actually work on the trains), with a lifelong pension of 75% of their salary. Enough to buy a decent train set. This has been sweetened even more by an offer from the government to give two years’ salary to anyone who accepts early retirement. They’re among the world’s most privileged industrial workers, which is why they’re on strike – they want to stay that way. Logical, really.

 … One of the places I travelled to by train this week was Waterloo. Not the station in London, the battlefield in Belgium. I went there to see what was happening on the 199th anniversary of the battle, on 18 June. The answer: nothing except massive renovation and building work in preparation for next year. By June 2015, the buildings on the battlefield will never have looked better since the day before Napoleon, Wellington and Blücher started firing cannons at them.

The official film on show at the Lion mound museum is very French, as are most of the displays. Fans of Napoleon seem to have recaptured the whole area now that Wellington has left. The film tells the story of the battle and concludes along the lines that although Napoleon lost (a big admission), at least during the years of his reign, he managed to spread French revolutionary ideas across Europe. It’s a very French interpretation, which made me think that in a way, you have to be grateful to Wellington and Blücher for stopping Napoleon in 1815. Otherwise right now we might have train strikes across the whole continent …

The Political Ad That Applies to Every Nation in the World

"We can't afford that" says the young adult in the Shopping Cart political ad reported on by The Hill (thanks to Instapundit).

Bart Guevara

From The New Yorker