Once Again, Surprise: Mediators' Call for Violence (Between Armenia and Azerbaijan) to Stop Is Ignored

Overshadowed by the fighting in Ukraine, another armed conflict in the former Soviet Union — between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh — has escalated with deadly ferocity in recent months, killing dozens of soldiers on each side and pushing the countries perilously close to open war.

In the New York Times, David M Herszenhorn writes that the

most recent clashes prompted an unusually pointed rebuke by international mediators who met on Monday in Krakow, Poland, with the Azerbaijani foreign minister, Elmar Mammadyarov.

“The rise in violence that began last year must stop,” the mediators, from France, Russia and the United States, said in a joint statement, adding, “We called on Azerbaijan to observe its commitments to a peaceful resolution of the conflict. We also called on Armenia to take all measures to reduce tensions.”

Instead, the violence has continued.

Accused of Being a Christian Right-Winger, Killer of 3 Muslims Turns Out to Be (Surprise!) an Anti-Theist on the Political Left

Immediately following the [Chapel Hill] murders, the internet buzzed with speculation that the victims—Deah Shaddy Barakat, Yusor Mohammad, and Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha—had been targeted because they were Muslims

writes Benny Huang.

Early assumptions were that [Craig Hicks] must have been a right-winger and a Christian, presumably because he’s white and from the “Bible Belt.” (Anyone who thinks Chapel Hill is part of the Bible Belt obviously hasn’t been there lately.)

Slowly the truth came out—Hicks, as it turns out, is on the political Left and a self-described “anti-theist” to boot. Whatever his beef with Islam may be, this acolyte of Richard Dawkins also harbors animus against all religions. His Facebook page sums up his attitude toward people of faith: “Of course I want religion to go away. I don’t deny you your right to believe whatever you’d like; but I have the right to point out that it’s ignorant and dangerous as long as your baseless superstitions keep killing people.” [Emphasis original.]

Noting that Craig Hicks seems to be affiliated with United Atheists of America and that the IB Times reports that his "Facebook Likes included the Huffington Post, Rachel Maddow, the Southern Poverty Law Center, Freedom from Religion Foundation, Bill Nye 'The Science Guy,' Neil deGrasse Tyson, 'Gay Marriage' groups and similar progressive pages", Eagle Rising's Tim Brown called the killer nothing less than a "disgusting atheist."

Craig Hicks’s wife, Karen Hicks, claimed that the victims’ religion was incidental to the crime, which she says actually arose from a long-standing parking dispute … It sounded as if Mrs. Hicks was desperately trying to obfuscate her husband’s true motive in order to shield him from accusations of bigotry, or worse, from federal hate crimes charges.

Yet other residents of the same apartment complex where the shooting took place confirm Karen Hicks’s version of events, saying that Mr. Hicks was absolutely obsessed with residents parking in their assigned spaces. A local towing company said that Hicks’s requests to tow unknown cars got to be so repetitive that they eventually refused to respond to his calls. He also had a reputation for being loud and aggressive. Residents reportedly held a meeting to discuss what to do about this troublesome man.

 … Unfortunately, under federal law, the killer’s motive makes all the difference in the world. We have a thing in this country called “hate crimes,” you see, which is an utterly insipid category that really shouldn’t exist. If Craig Hicks murdered three people because they were Muslims then he will face federal charges and, theoretically at least, a stiffer sentence. If he murdered them for some other reason, he won’t.

A harsher sentence may not even be possible in this case, as Hicks stands a chance of being sentenced to death. How do you top that? Yet hate crimes charges may still be filed because it’s not enough to demonstrate that Craig Hicks killed these people; the court still has to determine if he hated them while he was doing it. Such is the stupidity of hate crimes laws.

 … Nowhere in America is assault legal unless the victim happens to be unborn, though that’s another column entirely. It doesn’t matter if that person is black or white, a man or a woman, a libertarian, Unitarian, vegetarian, or Rotarian. Such laws don’t distinguish between people based on their race or their bedroom behavior. Nor should they.

But hate crimes laws do. They require jurors to peer into the mind of the assailant and determine if he was motivated by “hate.” Hating someone for parking in the wrong space doesn’t count. If he wasn’t motivated by “hate,” or if his hate was directed against groups that don’t appear on Eric Holder’s list of recognized victims, then the perp receives a lesser sentence and the feds don’t get involved.

That’s not justice.

Eagle Rising's Tim Brown adds that they

call it a "hate crime." Let me ask anyone, is there any other crime? Is there a crime that occurs out of love? Every crime that occurs against another person made in the image of God is a crime that is born of hate, period. True, it may have been because Hicks despised their dress and religion, but he also hated Christians too.

Progressives? They Are Just Actors in a Make-Believe World

Brian Williams …  told one whopper of a tale after another for years to pump up his personal resume and give himself some "street creds" among progressives who think that Williams and his ilk are intelligent, savvy, and bearers of the TRUE WORD.

Outstanding commentary from the DiploMad (thanks to Instapundit):

As it turns out, ladies and gentlemen, he lied about saving puppies from a fire; about getting robbed by a gun-wielding mugger when Williams was a teen supposedly working for a charity on the "mean streets" of 1970s small-town New Jersey; about braving Hezbollah rockets in Israel; about watching bodies float down the Mississippi River during Katrina; about seeing a man jump to his death in a football stadium; and, of course, most famously, about flying on a chopper that got shot down in Iraq in 2003. Aside from proving a serial liar, he has become one of the most fawning, outright boot-licking fans and promoters of the disaster known as President Obama. He also has served as a regular on progressive TV shows, where he plays the part of the wise, humorous, Hemingway-esque man of the world. He is the man who has seen it all, and who can with a knowing smirk or wink put down and dismiss all the deluded right-wing nuts out there. In other words, he is a hero and a product of the Hollywood-University-Media complex which has done so much irreparable damage to our nation and Western civilization.

Williams joins the ranks of other progressive "journalists" such as,

Dan Rather, who tried to throw an American election by pushing a patently false story about George W. Bush;

Janet Cook, who concocted a much awarded narrative of an eight-year-old heroin addict;

Jayson Blair, who fabricated a number of much-commented on stories for the New York Times;

Sabrina Erdely of Rolling Stone who spread the UVA fake rape story;

and, of course, who could forget, The Lord of Them All, Commissar in Chief Walter Duranty, New York Times apologist extraordinaire for Joseph Stalin and his mass murders in Ukraine.

You certainly can name many others.

I never met Williams, but during my long career did have dealings with other prominent "anchors"--one of whom nearly ended my career--and found them boring and idiotic. They were just actors: make-up, lights, dramatic pose, and read lines written by young staffers from the "best" schools. There was no journalism as most of us would think of journalism. The British have it mostly right. They call persons such as Williams, "readers," because they read the news to you. In one way, however, American "anchors" are not like British "readers." In our benighted Republic, "anchors" are vastly better paid, revered, and allowed a great deal of say over what and how they will report. In the recent past, if Williams, Rather, or Jennings did not want to report on something, then it simply must not have happened.

That little world of the "anchor," however, took a major hit with the invention of the internet by Al "Is it Getting Warm?" Gore--another fabulist of distinction. We now have millions of little "anchors" who can fact-check, provide alternative explanations for events, and bring sunlight to otherwise forgotten happenings and issues. Dan Rather, let us not forget, got brought down by bloggers. The internet also has debunked Williams. Imagine, just imagine, if we had had the internet in the time of Duranty, or even when the Saintly Walter Cronkite declared that we were losing in Vietnam when, in fact, we were winning . . .

There is something in the progressive mind-set that promotes, nay, requires compulsive lying. We see it in John Kerry and his fake stories of secret missions in Cambodia and his flying dog; Hillary Clinton and her Bosnian snipers; Susan Rice and her video explanation for Benghazi; Eric Holder with Fast and Furious; and even FDR who famously said these words now engraved on his DC monument,

I have seen war. I have seen war on land and sea. I have seen blood running from the wounded. I have seen men coughing out their gassed lungs. I have seen the dead in the mud. I have seen cities destroyed. I have seen 200 limping, exhausted men come out of line—the survivors of a regiment of 1,000 that went forward 48 hours before. I have seen children starving. I have seen the agony of mothers and wives. I hate war.

In fact, of course, he saw none of these horrors. Those things tend not to happen in Hyde Park, New York.

The fundamental problem progressives such as Williams face is that the world is not as they would have it. Not at all. Many if not most of them have limited experience in the real world, having spent lives of wealth and privilege, sheltered in progressive educational institutions. They have very superficial knowledge of the world outside these bubbles, and rely, therefore, to a great deal on Hollywood. They incorporate into their personae the largely leftist rubbish pumped out by Hollywood.

In their world, the United States is still 1930's Alabama--or, better said, the Alabama of Hollywood. They want to unleash their inner Atticus Finch. In their world, murderers in the United States are middle aged white male business executives who kill black people instead of what happens in the real world where murderers are overwhelmingly young black men who generally kill black people. In their world, women can kung fu better and be bigger badasses than big burly guys, when, in fact, the opposite is true as shown by the progressives' contradictory and ceaseless calls for government to "protect" women from men. "I am woman! I am strong! Call the cops! Men are looking at me!" In progressive world, the KKK equals the Tea Party, when in the real world, the KKK served as the armed wing of the Democratic Party. In progressive world, Western civilization is the source for all the poverty and evil in the world, when, in fact, the concepts of liberty, justice, and human rights are Western constructs.

Your standard progressive activist has really done nothing very interesting, so he or she needs to get proper credentials, to show that he or she knows what's what, and that progressivism is what the world needs to deal with "problems"--after all, isn't life just a series of problems calling for progressive intervention? They want to see what they believe.

We, hence, have progressives making up the sort of stuff that puts them, the elite, in the center of the battle, on the ramparts, in the muddy trenches and downed helicopters with the common schlubs--the sort of worldly experience that allows progressives to tell us how to live our lives.

Telling lies is essential to progressivism.

What Is Net Neutrality? Essentially, It Is Obamacare for the Web

[An FCC Commissioner in person] is sounding the alarm about an attempted federal takeover of the internet

writes Benny Huang. Ajit Pai

recently received the Obama Administration’s 322-page plan for “net neutrality” and he finds it appalling. He’d like to share his specific objections with the +public but he can’t because the plan is under wraps until the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) votes on it.

Would you expect anything less from the most transparent administration in history? Secret plans to regulate the internet are circulated among the unelected members of a commission, who then make huge decisions with ramifications that will be felt around the globe, and we’re not allowed to know what they’re considering until the decision has been made. Par for the course.

 … Those of us who are … skeptical tend to see “net neutrality” as little more than a government takeover of the internet, something Washington has been itching to do for years. All they needed was an excuse and finally they’ve found it. Capitalizing on a popular and not necessarily unfounded distrust of corporations, the government will seize control of the freest, most egalitarian means of communication known to man…and strangle it with regulation. 

Surely, you wouldn’t want ISP’s to prioritize search results for a fee, would you? Just empower the government to protect you from this huge problem that you probably didn’t even know existed and you won’t have to worry.

Supporters of net neutrality are already complaining that dissenters are mere conspiracy theorists steeped in misinformation. Net neutrality isn’t a government seizure of the internet, they argue, it’s simply a set of rules that prohibits corporations from favoring users or content. Call me crazy, but I think that a policy like that could be expressed in a few sentences. Why then is the administration’s net neutrality policy 322 pages long? And why hasn’t it been released to the public?

 … Net neutrality is essentially Obamacare for the web—a government takeover, sold to the public as a means of protecting us from corporations, which is in fact supported by the corporations that are supposed to hate it, which will invariably give us a crappier product at a higher price.

The problem with the internet is that it’s just too liberated for our leviathan federal government to tolerate. People can say stuff on the internet without fear of censorship. They can buy and sell things without paying the tax man. They can organize political movements that the government would rather suffocate. In short, the World Wide Web (WWW) closely resembles the Wild Wild West, and that really scares the control freaks in Washington.

 … The beauty of the internet is that it’s an open space for the free exchange of goods, services, information, and most importantly, ideas. Whatever minimal degradation of that freedom that might result from your ISP providing preferential treatment to paying customers does not merit government intrusion. It’s a red herring anyway—the government doesn’t want to control the internet to protect you from Comcast, a corporation that is already abiding by the supposed principles of net neutrality on a voluntary basis. The government wants to control the internet because it’s in the business of control and it can’t stand to sit idly by while a domain of nearly limitless freedom is permitted to exist.

The struggle over fracking in Europe does feature a Goliath, but it is not any American mutinational; it is the Russian company Gazprom

Vlasa Mircia, the mayor of [Pungesti, a] destitute village in eastern Romania, thought he had struck it rich when the American energy giant Chevron showed up here last year and leased a plot of land he owned for exploratory shale gas drilling.

Thus writes Andrew Higgins in the New York Times.

But the encounter between big business and rural Romania quickly turned into a nightmare. The village became a magnet for activists from across the country opposed to hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. Violent clashes broke out between the police and protesters. The mayor, one of the few locals who sided openly with Chevron, was run out of town, reviled as a corrupt sellout in what activists presented as a David versus Goliath struggle between impoverished farmers and corporate America.

“I was really shocked,” recalled the mayor, who is now back at his office on Pungesti’s main, in fact only, street. “We never had protesters here and suddenly they were everywhere.”

Pointing to a mysteriously well-financed and well-organized campaign of protest, Romanian officials including the prime minister say that the struggle over fracking in Europe does feature a Goliath, but it is the Russian company Gazprom, not the American Chevron.

Gazprom, a state-controlled energy giant, has a clear interest in preventing countries dependent on Russian natural gas from developing their own alternative supplies of energy, they say, preserving a lucrative market for itself — and a potent foreign policy tool for the Kremlin.

“Everything that has gone wrong is from Gazprom,” Mr. Mircia said.

This belief that Russia is fueling the protests, shared by officials in Lithuania, where Chevron also ran into a wave of unusually fervent protests and then decided to pull out, has not yet been backed up by any clear proof. And Gazprom has denied accusations that it has bankrolled anti-fracking protests. But circumstantial evidence, plus large dollops of Cold War-style suspicion, have added to mounting alarm over covert Russian meddling to block threats to its energy stranglehold on Europe.

Before stepping down in September as NATO’s secretary general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen gave voice to this alarm with remarks in London that pointed a finger at Russia and infuriated environmentalists.

“Russia, as part of their sophisticated information and disinformation operations, engaged actively with so-called nongovernmental organizations — environmental organizations working against shale gas — to maintain dependence on imported Russian gas,” Mr. Rasmussen said. He presented no proof and said the judgment was based on what NATO allies had reported.

Feeding what environmental groups denounce as a frenzy of paranoia have been Russian actions in Ukraine. Russia’s president, the former K.G.B. officer Vladimir V. Putin, has deployed a powerful arsenal there dominated by stealth and subterfuge, first to annex Crimea in March and, more recently, to foment an armed separatist rebellion in the east.

“It is crucial for Russia to keep this energy dependence. It is playing a dirty game,” said Iulian Iancu, chairman of the Romanian Parliament’s industry committee and a firm believer that Russia has had a hand in stirring opposition to shale gas exploration across Eastern Europe. He acknowledged that he had no direct evidence to support this allegation, nor for an assertion he made recently in Parliament that Gazprom had spent 82 million euros, or about $100 million, to fund anti-fracking activities across Europe.

“You have to realize how smart their secret services are,” he added. “They will never act in the spotlight.”

What has become a tide of protest against fracking in Eastern Europe, where countries are most dependent on Russian energy, began three years ago in Bulgaria, a member of the European Union but far more sympathetic to Russian interests than any other member of the 28-nation bloc. Faced with a sudden surge of street protests by activists, many of whom had previously shown little interest in environmental issues, the Bulgarian government in 2012 banned fracking and canceled a shale gas license issued earlier to Chevron.

 … Romania is already far less reliant on Russian energy than are Bulgaria and other countries in the region, but a sharp expansion in domestic production would allow it to export energy to neighboring Moldova and blunt an important Russian foreign policy goal. Like Ukraine, Moldova has tilted away from Moscow toward the European Union and has come under strong pressure, notably through gas prices, to stay within Russia’s economic and political orbit.

“Energy is the most effective weapon today of the Russian Federation — much more effective than aircraft and tanks,” Victor Ponta, the Romanian prime minister, said in an interview.

 … Anca-Maria Cernea, a leader of a conservative political group in Bucharest that has exposed the prospect of a Russian connection, said that while no documents have been uncovered proving payments or other direct support from Russia, circumstantial evidence shows that “Russians are behind the protests against Chevron.”

The protesters, she noted, included groups that usually have nothing to do with one another, like radical socialists, some with ties to the heavily Russian influenced security apparatus in neighboring Moldova, and deeply conservative Orthodox priests. Russian news media, she added, were curiously active in covering and fueling opposition to fracking in Pungesti. RT, a state-run Russian TV news channel aimed at foreign audiences, provided blanket coverage of the protests and carried warnings that villagers, along with their crops and animals, would perish from poisoned water.

SkyMall: Good-Bye, Friend

After traveling by plane in the States, I always brought back a stack of SkyMall catalogs to show my friends in Europe what they were missing out on…

My favorite item (that I never bought)?

A close cousin to the Bigfoot Tree Yeti Sculpture pictured above, the garden gnome-type ornament of a zombie digging itself out of the earth…

It’s a scientific fact: Danes are the most shameless people in the world

I’d long suspected it, and during my time living Danishly, I’d become convinced of it

admits Helen Russell, the author of The Year of Living Danishly (available from the Telegraph Bookshop).

But now it’s a scientific fact: a survey conducted by the University of Zürich has shown that Danes are the most shameless people in the world. A mere 1.62 per cent of Danes suffer from gelotophobia - fear of ridicule - the lowest proportion of the population in any country surveyed. In the UK, we have the highest number of people with the phobia. As a Brit who was also raised a Catholic and went to an all-girls school, I’m practically a lost, hyper-repressed cause. So moving to Denmark proved quite the eye opener. From the encouragement of office-based sing-alongs to a large emphasis on public nudity and a big appreciation for alcohol, Danes seem to be raised utterly uninhibited.

Take school, for example. From the age of six, Danish children participate in a national curriculum sex week to learn how babies are made and by the age of 13, they’ve covered everything from masturbation to transgender rights in frank and open discussions. Having learned about sex from Judy Blume’s Forever and Lady Chatterley’s Lover in my own formative years because our biology teacher blushed beetroot at the mere mention of stamen, this was a revelation. Danish children are also taught to question authority and speak their minds – without worrying about what other people think.

During my adolescence in 1990s British suburbia, swimming was something to be avoided whenever possible. The crushing embarrassment of displaying sprouting pubescent bodies drove many a teen to fake notes from their parents to get out of class and I spent a good 50 per cent of my time on the claggy poolside bench on ‘float-duty’. But not in Denmark. Here, exercise is mandatory, showers are communal and a supervised naked scrub-down is expected of all swimmers before entering the pool. Family nudist nights are not uncommon and many of the beaches along Denmark’s 7,000 km of coastline are clothing-optional.

 … Family nudist nights are not uncommon and many of the beaches along Denmark’s 7,000 km of coastline are clothing-optional.

Once they hit 16, Danes can drink, consuming 11 litres of pure alcohol per person per year, according to the World Health Organisation - something that’s bound to stave off shame. At least until morning. And because Denmark still has student grants (remember them?), anyone over the age of 18 is paid to study - for as long as they like. Lubricated, uninhibited and happy to live like a student until their 30s, in some cases, it’s no wonder Danes are so relaxed.

When Danes do make it to the workplace, the fun continues. Birthdays are marked with lots of singing and special man-shaped cakes - everyone screams when you behead the cakeman. Danish celebrations are not for shrinking violets. Many workplaces have leisure clubs or associations attached and several in my area also boast their own office band. Guitars are whipped out at every opportunity and communal music making with Lars from accounts is considered a perfectly normal hygge (‘relaxed’, ‘friendly’ or ‘cosy’) time.

Red cheeks all round

John Brisby writes to The Economist:

Your article on the state of Britain’s coalition government used “dominatrixes” as the plural of dominatrix (“Enter the van men”, August 3rd). Whoever wrote that, rather than “dominatrices”, deserves a good spanking.

What Paris's expensive concert hall looks like? Like a giant Batman cape thrown down by the superhero after a tiring mission

Stephen Clarke couldn’t get in to visit Paris's new Philharmonie building on its open day.

This is the gigantic new concert hall on the northern edge of the city, at the Parc de la Villette. Well, I could have waited, but the two queues of prospective visitors were three or four deep and 50 and 100 metres long (those are estimates, by the way, I didn’t actually measure them). It was also freezing cold, and as an über-Parisian, queuing up is not my speciality, so I wandered around the outside of the building then went for a coffee.

I’m not surprised there were so many visitors. Parisians love open days, and in this case we all have a vested interest. As payers of both city and national taxes, we have all crowd-funded the new concert hall without being asked, and the maths are complicated but I calculate that I’m in for about ten euros personally, plus a few euros per year from now on to cover subsidies and loan repayments (according to the très sérieux magazine Le Point, the project somehow managed to obtain itself a 150-million euro loan at over 5 per cent interest – there’s one mortgage broker who must have retired to the Cayman Islands on the spot).

So what are we getting for our 400 million euros? At the moment, a building site, with a partially unfinished facade, but when it’s finished, it will look (and this is a purely personal view) as though someone is trying to iron a giant Batman cape that has been thrown down by the superhero after a tiring mission (perhaps to track down an errant mortgage broker), crossed with a multi-storey car park. Unsporting, perhaps, but when you step to one side of the façade and go inside the adjacent Parc de la Villette, you have a view of a series of balconies that look like car park ramps. Functional, maybe, but for all that money, couldn’t we have got all-round beauty?

 … This isn’t my first outbreak of Victor Meldrew-like grumpiness about the new concert hall, I know. But it is just so expensive, and the whole budget process has been so dubious. The Le Point article revealed some exasperating facts: the initial tender was for a concert hall that would cost 200 million. Two bids came in, at 300 million each. After haggling, one of the builders came down to 218 million, though allegedly (according to Le Point) certain people admitted that they knew it couldn’t be built for that. And now we’re footing the bill for double the original – wrong – estimate. This at a time when subsidies for Paris’s sports clubs, gyms and many social charities are being slashed.

Searching French Roots on the Asian Continent

It’s pretty hard to get away from the French in Shanghai

quips Sarah O’Meara in the Daily Telegraph as she goes exploring for the French influence in Asia.

Their architecture remains some of the best in the city, as do their restaurants. And they sip imported wine at pavement cafes with such casual confidence (and regularity) it suggests continued preeminence in China.

“Didn’t you learn about France’s colonisation of Indochina at school?” my husband asks as I query their considerable influence.

“No. We did the suffragettes, native Americans, the Holocaust and the Arab-Israeli conflict,” I explain.

“What happened in Asia?”

He looks despairing. He was raised in Australia, where they give children a more rounded sense of what the Europeans were doing in the 20th century, when they weren’t fighting for freedom on home turf.

But the French in Shanghai are now guests, and any air of security comes from finding one another within China rather than a sense of dominance.

For modern Europeans who live in Asia, the challenge is to find our home in the present, and definitely not dwell on the past. And for nationalities such as French, this becomes less and less easy.

In days gone by, children across south-east Asia were taught French. Now, the second national language of their adopted home has moved to English.

But the French speak English about as well as the English speak French. 

Shanghai Sarah goes on to describe holiday resorts such as Le Passe Temps, "secreted away in nearby Thailand".

Is Discrimination OK? It Depends Whether You Are a Boy Scout or a Girl Scout

Starting in 2016, judges in California will be forced to hang up their scoutmaster hats or lose their jobs

writes Benny Huang.

The absurdity of the decision however, is only an extension of the absurdity of a philosophy that considers discrimination to be among the most egregious of all offenses. All organizations that have membership requirements discriminate, which includes nearly every organization that I can think of.

In 2000, the Supreme Court upheld the right of the Boy Scouts, and every private club, not to be forced by government to accept members that it doesn’t want. Liberals didn’t like that decision and have spent the ensuing fifteen years trying to formulate alternative strategies to pressure the Boy Scouts to change, all the while pretending that they respect the right of the Boy Scouts as a private organization to freely associate. Which they don’t. They merely lost their case in the highest court and had to resort to plan B—ostracizing.

Their newest tactic is to tell judges what they’re allowed to do when off the clock. Oh no! A judge might be teaching youth the importance of trustworthiness, courtesy, and thrift, to name just three of the Scouts’ values.

 … Organizations that remain in liberals’ good graces are given a pass to discriminate as they see fit.

If the ethics code were interpreted to mean what it clearly says it would also prohibit membership in the Girl Scouts of America. The GSA discriminates against both boys and adult men who want to become leaders. A troop in Colorado made an exception for a boy who “identifies” as a girl though the decision was a one-time policy exception made at the local level. In any case, the troop didn’t decide that they would allow this boy to join because they’re now hip to boys, they decided to participate in the boy’s delusion that he’s actually a girl. So in their minds the new member was a girl…who happened to be a boy.

This stuff gets really confusing.

And then there’s still the issue of banning adult men from being Girl Scout leaders. It’s a perfectly sensible policy, mind you, but it’s a policy that nonetheless runs afoul of California’s judicial code of ethical behavior. The code doesn’t make an exception for clubs that think they have a “good reason” to discriminate based on the aforementioned protected categories. Every club that discriminates thinks that their reason for doing so is valid. The code nonetheless stipulates that California judges may not belong to that club. No one in their right mind, however, truly believes that the code will be enforced fairly and equally. BSA bad, GSA good.

Why is the GSA good? For starters, they allow homosexual leaders. They have also shed most of their religious identity, and now inculcate girls with feminist values. God is out, lesbianism and abortion are in.

That the Girl Scouts’ policy of not allowing men to take little girls camping is considered judicious, while the Boy Scouts’ policy of not allowing homosexuals to take boys camping is considered rank discrimination on par with segregated lunch counters, is proof positive that our society has truly lost its dang fool mind.

The two policies are both rooted in the same concern for children’s safety. Neither club wants adults diddling kids.

  … even if “gay” men molested children at the same rate as “straight” men—and they don’t, by the way—there should at least be equal concern with either group being in intimate situations with children. There is not equal concern. The Girls Scouts essentially treat all adult men like child molesters waiting to happen. No one has a problem with this, not even adult men like me. Yet when the Boy Scouts do the same to guys who like having anal sex with guys, people flip their lids. That’s discrimination! 

 …  The irony of a nondiscrimination policy being enforced in a discriminatory manner is palpable. California’s policy is stupid, and everyone knows it’s stupid too, which is why no one will actually follow it, much the same way no one actually follows the vaunted Civil Rights Act of 1964. The utility of such laws/codes is to have a handy weapon around with which to bludgeon people liberals don’t like. …

To the New York Times, Greece's Far Right Remains the "Far Right" Whilst Its Victorious Far Left Is Reassuringly Changed to Simply the "Left"

Typical: In the New York Times' cover headline linking to the Liz Alderman story of the Greek government's new coalition members, the far right remains the "Far Right" while the far left is reassuringly renamed simply the "Left". FYI, regarding the animal photo, here is Erica Goode's story on unlikely animal friendships…

Commercial Spaceship Crashes in Mojave Desert

A Virgin Galactic rocket plane known as SpaceShipTwo crashed in the Cantill area of the California Mojave desert during a test flight,

reports The Washington Times' Jeffrey Scott Shapiro,

leaving one pilot dead and another injured.

 … “Virgin Galactic’s partner Scaled Composites conducted a powered test flight of SpaceShipTwo earlier today,” the company website’s stated Friday. “During the test, the vehicle suffered a serious anomaly resulting in the loss of the vehicle. Our first concern is the status of the pilots, which is unknown at this time. We will work closely with the relevant authorities to determine the cause of the accident and provide updates as soon as we are able to do so.”

 … Onlookers who spotted the craft crumble from the sky reportedly saw a sky-high explosion and later found debris scattered across the desert sand. The Kern County Fire Department that responded to the crash did not answer its communication line.

Update: several hours after this story was posted, other news outlets still have no story on this, so we are starting to wonder if NP (and Jeffrey Scott Shapiro) wasn't (weren't) taken in by a hoax

Is there no one in Francois Hollande's entourage with the courage to say, sorry but this is a one way-autoroute to absurdity?

It is ironic 

quips Stephen Clarke

– politicians get to live their dream of ultimate power and it turns so quickly to nightmare. And the sad thing in [Francois Hollande]’s case is that, leaving all political allegiances aside, only one of the nightmares was really his fault. The problem was that this one mistake was all-embracing.

The question I’ve been asking myself all year, or rather most of the time since he was elected, is: how has he managed to surround himself with such a bad gang of advisors?

I thought this most recently when Le Président went to Kazakhstan in early December, and someone allowed him to be photographed wearing local costume, which doubtless looks great when you’re riding a Mongolian pony across the steppes, but less so when you’re a small Frenchman swamped in a fur hat and mountainous overcoat, and standing next to the Kazakhstani president who is looking comfortable in his sharp French-style  suit? Which member of M. Hollande’s entourage said ” oh oui, a photo opportunity as an exhibit in a folklore museum, bonne idée”?

More importantly, why did no one say it was a terrible idea and steer him clear of trouble?

But by then, it was no longer a surprise. After all, the year started terribly with the magazine article revealing that France’s president had thought that it was a clever idea to borrow a love nest a few metres outside the presidential palace and drive there on the back of a scooter to meet his mistress – when he was already being criticised for installing a high-maintenance unmarried First Lady in his official residence? Honestly, is there no one in his entourage with the courage or the nous to say, sorry but this is a one way-autoroute to absurdity?

Apparently not…

 … speaking of the economy, what kind of Socialist president is so badly advised that he nominates a minister of commerce who is then forced to resign when accusations are made that he has been less than scrupulous about paying his income tax? This happened in September when Thomas Thevenoud stepped down – after only nine days in the job. Did no one check out his CV? Did no one say, we’re Socialists, so let’s spend five minutes seeing if the candidate has the right credentials? The answer is apparently non. All of which must make 2014 a year that M. Hollande might want to skip over when he writes his autobiography.

50 Years Since We Said a Last Good-Bye to Winston Churchill

After Sir Winston Churchill died on Jan 24 1965, his body lay in state for three days at Westminster Hall 

writes the Daily Telegraph.

Mourners queued in wintry weather to pay their respects. It was only the second time that the Monarch had bestowed the honour of a state funeral on a Prime Minister – the first was William Gladstone in 1898.

Here are some choice quotes of Churchill, who makes an appearance in Erik Svane and Thierry Capezzone's Daisy graphic novel • Is That Winston Speaking of the Iraq War of 2003?
• WInston Churchill on Socialism and the Cold War

Massaging the Message: In a complete inversion of reality, the Charlie Hebdo massacre story is morphing into a parable about how difficult it is to be a Muslim in the West

Benny Huang has been wondering how long it was going to take for "the talking heads on MSNBC to portray Muslims as the true victims of the Charlie Hebdo massacre."

In a complete inversion of reality, this story is morphing into a parable about how difficult it is to be a Muslim in Europe.

  … MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell is deeply concerned about the terrorist attacks that rocked Paris earlier this month. Unfortunately, her misdirected concern seems to manifest itself in a lot of fretting over how the attacks will benefit the political Right.

“There are two other issues that need to be addressed,” said Mitchell. “One is anti-Muslim sentiment throughout Europe, anti-immigration sentiment, the rise of the right wing, and of course anti-Semitism.”

 … Mitchell’s comments echoed sentiments expressed by Christopher Dickey, Newsweek’s bureau chief in Paris, who appeared on MSNBC’s The Cycle. “This is an issue that’s going to be used very effectively and cynically by the far-right politicians,” said Dickey, “not only of France but especially in the rest of Europe, places like Dresden, places like the Netherlands…” Translation: Europe’s insufferable right-wingers aren’t actually concerned with the seemingly endless acts of terrorism or even about their own culture being displaced by one that’s stuck in the seventh century. They merely “use” those issues, “very effectively and cynically.” It’s brown skin they hate.

 … Andrea Mitchell and Christopher Dickey spend an inordinate amount of time worrying that the wrong people will reap electoral benefits from media coverage of the Paris attacks. It’s difficult to imagine Mitchell, Dickey, or any other reporter working for any other mainstream news outfit fretting that saturation coverage of the 2011 Tucson shooting would be used “effectively and cynically” by gun-grabbers on the far Left, probably because they can’t even conceive of anything called “the far Left.”

Incidentally, I once debated Christopher Dickey (the son of novelist James Dickey) on international television.

The dirty little secret of journalism is that reporters are very conscious of their substantial influence. They are not just hired eyes and ears conveying all they see and hear. Journalists know that news coverage can impact policy and world events. Consequently, they think of their constant massaging of the news as just plain old responsibility. Yet most journalists still pay lip service to the ideal of covering the news without fear or favor, something that simply can’t be achieved while constantly placing their collective thumb on the scale to ensure that one side of the debate can never win.

That’s not “responsibility;” it’s rigging the game. The role of journalists isn’t to wonder whom their stories will benefit. Their job is to report the news and let the chips fall where they may.

Mitchell and Dickey aren’t the only reporters who ask themselves “What will the Right do with this story?” A case in point can be found in Andrew Norfolk, the Times of London reporter who broke the Rotherham sex ring story in which a group of child rapists across Northern England victimized approximately 1,400 young girls. Authorities were aware of the sex ring for about eleven years of its sixteen year existence but refused to make arrests because the perpetrators were almost entirely Pakistani men and the victims were almost entirely white English girls.

Andrew Norfolk admitted feeling tempted to join the government in its conspiracy of silence. “I didn’t want the story to be true because it made me deeply uncomfortable,” said Norfolk. “The suggestion that men from a minority ethnic background were committing sex crimes against white children was always going to be the far right’s fantasy story come true. Innocent white victims, evil dark-skinned abusers. Liberal angst kicked instinctively into top gear.”

Thankfully he got over his liberal angst long enough to cover the story but his admitted reluctance to do his job raises questions about deeper problems in the journalistic community. How many other Rotherham-type stories never see the light of day because some reporter feels duty-bound not to give the Right any grist for their mill? We may never know.

Norfolk’s remarks are troubling for another reason—his implication that young girls being raped is the fulfillment of the far Right’s fantasy.

 … France has its own censors, ever eager to filter the news out of some warped sense of responsibility. Jean-Claude Dassier, director general of the news outfit LCI—France’s version of CNN—admitted in 2005 that his network shielded viewers from seeing the true destruction wrought by angry Muslim rioters who were then besieging France. “Politics in France is heading to the right and I don’t want rightwing politicians back in second, or even first place because we showed burning cars on television,” he confided.

The only rational conclusion is that Dassier wants to keep the French public uninformed because they’d likely vote for Front National, France’s unapologetically nationalist party, if they knew what the heck was happening to their country. Better not to cover the news lest people figure out that the “bigots” have a point.

 … I have no doubt that most journalists think very hard about what they broadcast and that’s the problem. They don’t give it to us straight. The constant impulse to shape the news to fit an agenda strips their reporting of any value. That omnipresent question “What would the Right do with this?” hangs over their coverage, influencing editorial decisions to the point that their end product can only be called propaganda.

Kalashnikov AK47s seem to be as trendy in France as iPhones

I wasn’t exactly surprised by the attack 

confesses the Telegraph's Stephen Clarke.

First of all, there have been plenty of shootings with AK47s in France recently. They seem to be as trendy as iPhones. They even have a slang name in French – “une kalache“. Most of them are apparently in the Marseille area, in the possession of drug gangs, but they also get sold on to the rest of France. A couple of years ago, only three or four kilometres from where I live, some Polish men were walking to a birthday party when they were stopped by two muggers, one of whom had a Kalashnikov. When the Poles refused to hand over their money, the gunman let rip, killing one victim and shooting his friend in the foot. The police caught them soon afterwards, after a man arrived at a nearby hospital complaining that he’d lost some of his toes in an accident. It sounds insane, but it’s true, and the surviving Poles were probably lucky that their mugger hadn’t had any weapons training.

The other reason why I was horrified, but not exactly surprised, by the Charlie Hebdo attack was that the magazine had been provoking some highly sensitive people. Of course I’m not saying that anyone deserved to be shot. I’m just saying that extreme provocation was the magazine’s raison d’être, and they knew that they were playing with fire. That was why the editor had a police bodyguard (who was also killed in the attack). Charlie Hebdo belongs to a tradition of French satire that pushes anti-establishment mockery to the edge, and beyond. Their cartoons could be viciously accurate, especially when deflating the egos of politicians, but they could also be just plain offensive. Often they had a point, but sometimes they seemed to forget the point and descend into gratuitous obscenity.

This was why the French were fond of Charlie Hebdo, even if hardly any of them actually read it until this week. Cabu, Wolinski and the veteran cartoonists were like old friends. The kind of friends you love but wouldn’t dare invite to your house because you know they’d take the pee out of your other guests, graffiti the walls, and explain to you why your whole life was a failure – while smiling charmingly. They were like Sheldon in The Big Bang Theory – social misfits who felt it was their duty to broadcast their home truths loud and clear, and who couldn’t understand if anyone was offended. The sad thing is that real life is not an American sitcom.

For all these reasons, I personally am not so sure that the cover of today’s edition of Charlie Hebdo is a good idea. Why cause new offence, when what France really needs is some determined peacemaking?  …

Governmental censorship has infested the birthplaces of Voltaire and John Stuart Mill

 … in the wake of the horrific massacre at the offices of French satire magazine Charlie Hebdo

writes Benny Huang, a defiant breeze has swept across Europe.

Londoners, Berliners, and Romans are reaching out in solidarity to the people of Paris in their time of grief and anger. “Je Suis Charlie” (I am Charlie) they proclaim, an affirmation of their common European heritage of free speech and openness.

Yet I can’t help but wonder if the mourners aren’t a day late and a euro short in their defense of a value that has slowly but persistently eroded over a period of decades. It would be wonderful if the sentiment expressed at these vigils were a genuine revival of the spirit of 1848 but it hardly seems possible to “defend” a principle that in all likelihood no longer exists.

Free speech is dead in Europe and while it is certainly tempting to blame the immigrants, as intolerant as they may be, it would also be folly. The real culprits are the cowardly, hedonistic, post-Christian, post-industrial native born white majority.

The three bestial al-Qaeda terrorists who murdered twelve people at Charlie Hebdo HQ might seem like menacing enemies of free speech but they’re actually bush league amateurs when it comes to gagging people. The real pros are sitting behind desks in the various capitals of Europe. Nearly every European nation extends some guarantee of free speech to its citizens, and nearly every one of them flagrantly violates that guarantee.

  … The authorities in Britain arrest people who harbor banned ideas, and believe me, I’ve got a lot of them. Clegg’s prescient countryman, Eric Blair (George Orwell) predicted this phenomenon nearly seventy years ago and gave it a name—thoughtcrime.

Thought criminals should take notice that they will find no shelter in today’s United Kingdom. Little more than a week before the cartoon jihadists spilled French blood, police in Scotland tweeted the following threat: “Please be aware that we will continue to monitor comments on social media & any offensive comments will be investigated.” Offensive to whom, exactly? They don’t say. But in a free society it shouldn’t matter a lick. Offensive comments are exactly the kind of comments that free speech is designed to protect. Innocuous comments don’t require protection.

  … On the Continent, outspoken MP Geert Wilders faces criminal prosecution under “hate speech” laws for comments he made about immigration. At a rally in the Hague he asked a crowd “Do you want more or fewer Moroccans?” to which they chanted, “Fewer! Fewer! Fewer!” Mindless xenophobia? I don’t think so, though it’s also irrelevant. Free speech protects mindless xenophobia.

Nor is everyone feeling the spirit of freedom after the Charlie Hebdo massacre. Swedish MP Veronica Palm contacted the police to report that another MP of an opposing party, Bjoern Soeder, might have violated Swedish law with a comment he posted on Facebook concerning the terrorist attack in Paris. “’The Religion of Peace’ shows its face,” he said, clearly indicating with his use of derisive quotes that he doubts Islam’s pacifistic nature, as many people do. His nemesis Veronica Palm declared: “This statement is offensive to a group of people and I want to see if it comes under laws against inciting racial hatred.” Ms. Palm apparently does not understand that Islam is not a race. Even if it were, free speech guarantees the right to make racist comments as well.

Are we much better? Oh, a little bit, I suppose. Anyone who thinks that free speech is alive and well in America ought to experience the suffocating environment of academia. If you happen to be on a college campus and you still think America guarantees a healthy exchange of controversial ideas then you’re probably one of the drones who keeps the rest of us line. Good for you.

Europe, however, is a decade or two ahead of us in the downward slide toward mind control. Governmental censorship has infested the birthplaces of Voltaire and John Stuart Mill.

The land of humblebrag and its drunk, depressed, lazy, tumor-ridden, pig-bonking bureaucrats

In the American liberal compass, the needle is always pointing to places like Denmark

writes The New York Post's Kyle Smith (tack till Instapundit).

Everything they most fervently hope for here has already happened there.

So: Why does no one seem particularly interested in visiting Denmark? (“Honey, on our European trip, I want to see Tuscany, Paris, Berlin and . . . Jutland!”) Visitors say Danes are joyless to be around. Denmark suffers from high rates of alcoholism. In its use of antidepressants it ranks fourth in the world. (Its fellow Nordics the Icelanders are in front by a wide margin.) Some 5% of Danish men have had sex with an animal. Denmark’s productivity is in decline, its workers put in only 28 hours a week, and everybody you meet seems to have a government job. Oh, and as The Telegraph put it, it’s “the cancer capital of the world.”

So how happy can these drunk, depressed, lazy, tumor-ridden, pig-bonking bureaucrats really be?

Let’s look a little closer, asks Michael Booth, a Brit who has lived in Denmark for many years, in his new book, “The Almost Nearly Perfect People: Behind the Myth of the Scandinavian Utopia” (Picador).

Those sky-high happiness surveys, it turns out, are mostly bunk. Asking people “Are you happy?” means different things in different cultures. In Japan, for instance, answering “yes” seems like boasting, Booth points out. Whereas in Denmark, it’s considered “shameful to be unhappy,” newspaper editor Anne Knudsen says in the book.

Moreover, there is a group of people that believes the Danes are lying when they say they’re the happiest people on the planet. This group is known as “Danes.”
 
“Over the years I have asked many Danes about these happiness surveys — whether they really believe that they are the global happiness champions — and I have yet to meet a single one of them who seriously believes it’s true,” Booth writes. “They tend to approach the subject of their much-vaunted happiness like the victims of a practical joke waiting to discover who the perpetrator is.”

 … Denmark is a land of 5.3 million homogenous people. Everyone talks the same, everyone looks the same, everyone thinks the same.

This is universally considered a feature — a glorious source of national pride in the land of humblebrag. Any rebels will be made to conform; tall poppies will be chopped down to average.

 … One of the most country’s most widely known quirks is a satirist’s crafting of what’s still known as the Jante Law — the Ten Commandments of Buzzkill. “You shall not believe that you are someone,” goes one. “You shall not believe that you are as good as we are,” is another. Others included “You shall not believe that you are going to amount to anything,” “You shall not believe that you are more important than we are” and “You shall not laugh at us.”

 … Macho isn’t a problem in Sweden. Dubbed the least masculine country on Earth by anthropologist Geert Hofstede, it’s the place where male soldiers are issued hairnets instead of being made to cut their hair.

 … As for its supposedly sweet-natured national persona, in a poll in which Swedes were asked to describe themselves, the adjectives that led the pack were “envious, stiff, industrious, nature-loving, quiet, honest, dishonest and xenophobic.” In last place were these words: “masculine,” “sexy” and “artistic.”

Scandinavia, as a wag in The Economist once put it, is a great place to be born — but only if you are average. The dead-on satire of Scandinavian mores “Together” is a 2000 movie by Sweden’s Lukas Moodysson set in a multi-family commune in 1975, when the groovy Social Democratic ideal was utterly unquestioned in Sweden.

In the film’s signature scene, a sensitive-apron wearing man tells his niece and nephew as he is making breakfast, “You could say that we are like porridge. First we’re like small oat flakes — small, dry, fragile, alone. But then we’re cooked with the other oat flakes and become soft. We join so that one flake can’t be told apart from another. We’re almost dissolved. Together we become a big porridge that’s warm, tasty, and nutritious and yes, quite beautiful, too. So we are no longer small and isolated but we have become warm, soft and joined together. Part of something bigger than ourselves. Sometimes life feels like an enormous porridge, don’t you think?”

Then he spoons a great glutinous glob of tasteless starch unto the poor kids’ plates. That’s Scandinavia for you, folks: Bland, wholesome, individual-erasing mush. But, hey, at least we’re all united in being slowly digested by the system.

Muhammad will be back on the cover of the next edition of Charlie Hebdo,

reports Fox News,

along with a message of forgiveness from surviving staffers at the French satirical magazine where 12 people were killed last week by a pair of Islamist brothers angered over the publication's penchant for showing images of the prophet.

The decimated, but uncowed magazine upped its usual print run of 60,000 copies to 3 million for the magazine, due out Wednesday but released to the French newspaper Liberation. Fierce bidding on eBay had editions commanding as much as $500 following the outpouring of support for Charlie Hebdo, whose four top cartoonists were among the dozen killed. Editor-in-chief Gérard Biard said in a Tuesday radio interview the decision to run a cartoon if Muhammad holding a a “Je Suis Charlie” sign with the caption "Tout est pardonné," or "All is forgiven," and said the message was not that Muhammad was offering forgiveness, as some initially assumed.

"It is we who forgive, not Muhammad,” he told France Info.