The most efficient way to set the various family members in opposition to one another is to encourage every kind of selfish behaviour

A century ago, it was not at all uncommon to have an entire extended family — one or two sets of grandparents, parents, at least a half-dozen children — all in one house.

Thus wrote a Catholic by the name of Skellmeyer in a highly interesting Fifth Column post a few years back (via Instapundit).

Families like that used to pose an enormous problem to modern economies.

Think about it. A dozen or two people living in one house find hand-me-downs virtuous, they only need one set of cook pots, they only have one toaster. Large households are not good for the economy because they consume fewer goods.

If there were some way to split those people up so they inhabit three, four, five or six households, then we can sell five or six toasters, five or six sets of cook pots, five or six sets of dishes or cars or houses. From a capitalist’s point of view, it would be best if every one of our 300 million Americans lived in a separate house since that would maximize both purchases and profit.

However, as one might expect, while there are enormous economic advantages to creating this level of social disintegration, there’s a downside as well. In order to break up the multi-generational family, sowing social dissension between the members of the family is absolutely critical. The most efficient way to set the various family members in opposition to one another is to encourage every kind of selfish behaviour. If each person thinks only of his own best interests, then each person will spend his income on himself, saving none of it for anyone else.

Unfortunately, this selfishness bleeds over into the workplace. A selfish worker is more likely to steal, to use up sick days and similar benefits at the highest possible rates, in short, s/he will have little loyalty to the company.

Part of the cost of doing business is precisely the controlled anarchy that tends to be engendered in the larger society as each person looks out primarily for number one. As experience shows, anarchy can be managed so as to produce significant profits for particular people.

But, to be fair, most businesses don’t do well in total anarchy. Rather, they do best at a level just below total anarchy, a situation in which everyone invests their money in goods and services that will protect them from the various kinds of physical, emotional, and social harm which the larger society so willingly inflicts on the weak.

Unmade in America

Since World War II, the United States has been the pre-eminent leader in creating an economy whose citizens tremble on that knife edge between maximum profit-generation and general anarchy.

We do this by placing enormous obstacles in the way of every personal relationship. Early daycare, year-round schooling and the perceived need for a two-income family effectively separates parents from their own children for as long as possible each day, guaranteeing that the family is essentially composed of strangers living at the same address. Better yet, the schools teach children how to be consumers: needy, unable to solve their own problems, always looking towards the external authority: peer pressure.

We encourage pornography and contraception, and thereby divorce, by transforming every person into an object of use. Easy access to abortion and euthanasia encourage family members to destroy one another at the first sign of burden. Homosexuals become the icons for our generation because they (1) rise rapidly on the corporate ladder through assiduous attention to their own good and (2) spend all their money on their greatest love, themselves. Homosexuals are the darlings of the media because homosexuals have far more per capita disposable income than a married couple with five children.

But, even as the corporate world encourages homosexuality precisely because it is profligate, encourages contraception/abortion precisely because it is an abdication of responsibility and encourages euthanasia precisely because it does cut costs, Christian faith attempts to undercut these movements. America’s economy works well because it has harnessed two opposing forces: integration and disintegration, and kept both from gaining majority control.

We Need a New Quarry

But there’s a problem in paradise. You can shear a sheep many times, but you can only skin him once. … In its endless quest for profits, too many sheep have been skinned. American corporations are running out of families to exploit. There are fewer and fewer families to break up, fewer and fewer children to dispossess.

But not to worry. We still have Mexico.

 … Hispanics … are Christians who still tend towards multi-generational households, households whose piggy banks are growing through the money sent home by immigrant workers. The American economy needs Hispanics not just because they do jobs Americans will not, but also because their unbroken families are as untilled fields to us, their Catholicism is strong enough to maintain the necessary tension against anarchy. Like a new granite quarry, they can be tunneled into, mined, and blown apart. These are sheep we know how to shear.

What Obama and his Democratic allies are attempting to do is to completely remake America into a government-dependent society, and importing millions of low-skilled low-educated aliens is central to that goal

“The very illegal aliens [Jeanne Shaheen] wants to help Obama grant amnesty to—and steal your job—are in many cases also violent criminals, driver’s without licenses, members of gangs, or are in some way endangering the welfare of New Hampshire families,” … Maria Espinoza, the national director of The Remembrance Project, told Matt Boyle of Breitbart News.

Conservative HQ explains how the Democrat party, and how the administrative state, wins if the average American gets poorer.

 … illegal immigration is not a victimless crime as countless American families have learned, most recently through the murder of two California law enforcement officers at the hands of an illegal alien.

But as important as keeping criminal aliens out of America is, what may be even more important is keeping American jobs for Americans.

As Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama has observed on numerous occasions an executive order on immigration would increase by millions of people the nation's workforce pool — and further hurt the opportunities of American citizens to get jobs.

"We have the lowest percentage of people in America today who have been working in 40 years. This is a stunning statistic. Almost every person who's gotten a job in the last 10 years is going to an illegal immigrant," he recently told NewsMax.

As Senator Session wrote in an op-ed for FOX, “A nation’s first loyalty must be to its own citizens.”

But the immigration policies of President Obama and Congressional Democrats help only billionaire special interests, amnesty activists, and the citizens of other countries – while reducing jobs and pay for our own.

Every single Senate Democrat voted for the Obama-backed plan to provide immediate work permits to 12 million illegal immigrants – allowing them to compete for any job in America. This legislation would also double the rate at which low-wage guest workers are brought into the U.S. to fill jobs throughout the economy.

Further, the legislation would triple the rate of permanent immigration, giving lifetime work permits and citizenship to over 30 million immigrants over the next ten years.

America already has the world’s most generous immigration policy. The foreign-born population is at record levels, quadrupling since 1970. Since 2000, the U.S. has issued nearly 30 million lawful visas to foreign guest workers and permanent immigrants. During that time, all net employment gains among the working-age went to immigrant workers.

This large surplus of labor has also pulled down wages – family incomes are down more than $3,000 since 2009 alone.

Imagine then what will happen if we double the supply of foreign labor. For many Americans, who will be pushed out of the workforce altogether, their wages will be reduced to zero.

What Obama and his Democratic allies are attempting to do through both legal and illegal means is to completely remake America into a government-dependent society, and importing millions of low-skilled low-educated aliens is central to that goal.

As Instapundit writes regularly, They’ll turn us all into beggars ’cause they’re easier to please…

Photos of US army tanks and shipwrecks off the coast of Ireland

Following a 12-year survey of the offshore waters and coastal seas around Ireland

writes Irish Central's Dara Kelly,

the Irish government launched an illustrated book entitled “Warships, U-Boats & Liners - A Guide to Shipwrecks Mapped in Irish Waters.”

The coffee table book features stunning shots of wrecks on the seabed including the Lusitania off the Cork coast and US army tanks on the seabed 17 miles off of Donegal. Many of the 300 shipwrecks featured in the book where not known about before this survey.

The book [by Karl Brady, Charise McKeon, James Lyttleton, and Ian Lawlor] includes details on the background of the vessels alongside the photograph and sonar images.

The publication was launched in 2012 by Minister for Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht, Jimmy Deenihan TD, together with Fergus O'Dowd TD, Minister of State, Department of Communications, Energy and Natural Resources.

  … According to Minister O'Dowd, the collaboration has "truly made Ireland a leader in this field of endeavor."

 … [The Underwater Archaeology Unit (UAU)] have built an extensive database of shipwrecks, Afloat Magazine reported.

It's actually against the law in France to pass a boulangerie without stopping to buy one of their lovingly crafted entremets

One thing about life as an expat in rural France that I always warn people about is the need to keep moving and staying active, otherwise things start to head south and outwards very quickly

writes Mark Johnson.

This is mainly because hospitality is still a way of life out here. If you stop by a neighbour to ask a question about something, or even just to say hello – the offer of an aperitif won’t be far off. Drop into the village bar to ask about a reservation – it’ll be discussed over a Pineau for sure.

And, in case you didn’t know, it’s actually against the law in France to pass a boulangerie without stopping to buy one of their lovingly crafted entremets.

Obama "is destroying this country and it’s what he intended to do"; More Hatred From Racist Americans Who — Wait a Minute!

The frustration with the the leftist Democrats who support Barack Obama's agenda, notes Christopher Agee,

was on full display when a self-described “82-year-old black senior citizen grandmother” named Joyce called C-SPAN to explain why she voted for the Republican candidate in every race on the ballot this cycle.

“I voted straight Republican because I have noticed for years what the Democrat Party has done to my people,” she said. “Unemployment is higher in the black community that it is — double with unemployment than it is anywhere else.”

 … Clarifying that she supports government assistance for those truly unable to provide for themselves, she noting that “with so many getting help that doesn’t need help, it prevents the people that really need help from getting it.”

 … Before wrapping up her remarks, the octogenarian set her sights on those who allege any criticism of Barack Obama is rooted in racism.

“We need to stop that foolishness,” she said. “This man is destroying this country and it’s what he intended to do. He said he would transform America and that’s what he’s doing.”

View more instances of conservatives' unbelievably hateful racism here

Army Sergeant: “I love it when I hear, ‘Oh there weren’t any chemical weapons in Iraq. There were plenty.’"

Last month the New York Times reported that US troops had in fact discovered chemical weapons in Iraq after all

writes Iraq War veteran Benny Huang.

Five thousand munitions containing nerve and blister agent were uncovered between 2004 and 2011. The revelation made headlines for a day or two before vanishing again.

As it turns out, the Bush administration knew about these weapons and, counter-intuitively, chose to keep them secret. Conjecture abounds as to why Team Bush would choose to withhold vindicating evidence. Some have suggested that no one wanted to look backwards at yesterday’s controversy.

 … “The discoveries of these chemical weapons did not support the government’s invasion rationale,” write Pulitzer Prize winner CJ Chivers.

I can’t decide whether Chivers is deceitful or just another lazy journalist. Actually, those were exactly the weapons we were looking for. In November of 2002, President Bush asked the UN for, and received, Resolution 1441, which found Iraq in material breach of Resolution 667, the 1991 ceasefire agreement that ended the Gulf War. Resolution 667 demanded that Saddam destroy all of his chemical weapons and document the process to the satisfaction of UN weapons inspectors. He failed to do this.

 … The diplomatic push of 2002 was the world’s final warning to the dictator that he had to forfeit those weapons known to be in his possession in 1991. The resolution is crystal clear. Over and over again it refers to Saddam’s failure to discard his pre-Gulf War weaponry. CJ Chivers is not just moving the goalposts, he’s rewriting history.

The idea that Saddam didn’t have any WMD was a little wacky, and yet it was those of us who insisted that he did who were portrayed as conspiracy theorists grasping at straws. He used those weapons against Iranians and Kurds. We know that they existed in 1991. Did they simple evaporate?

We now know that they did not. Quoted in Chivers’s story was Jarod Taylor, a former Army sergeant who handled some of the weapons. He remarked, “I love it when I hear, ‘Oh there weren’t any chemical weapons in Iraq. There were plenty.’”

 … when the Times revealed that Saddam’s WMD were in fact not phantasmal, as we had been led to believe, I wondered if it was worth dredging up an old debate.

Yes, I decided. Because the truth matters.

The public deserves to know what really happened though it may never hear it because the Iraq War narrative is now so thoroughly rehearsed that it actively resists change. Tomorrow’s history books will probably tell an oversimplified and basically inaccurate story about an evil Texas oil man who sent his troops on a fool’s errand. That’s not the case and it’s important that the lie doesn’t become the “truth” because of constant repetition.

 … The leadup to the Iraq invasion may seem like ancient history now. Heck, most kids in high school today can’t even remember it. It’s not too late however, to insist upon the truth because truth has a value of its own.

Tea Party-Backed Black Republican Wins Senate Landslide in Southern State

Among the Republican winners of the 2014 mid-terms is Tim Scott, the black South Carolinian who won his Senate seat in a landslide, making history in the process.

But even the Daily Mail seems to report on this landslide (!) victory mainly to report on America's alleged racism, i.e., to comment how "shocking" it is that Tim Scott is the first black man elected to the Senate. (Never mind the congressmen, the governors, the mayors, the business leaders, the sports stars, the movie and TV stars, the music stars, the occupant of the White House (!), etc, etc, etc…)

But isn't it possible that the true racism comes from the left — including the mainstream media itself? (There are quite a number of pretty outstanding comments in the comments section of the Guardian.) As I wrote in a post one year ago, a plethora of "inconvenient facts must be ignored or belittled by media people … in order to push the narrative that America is an intolerant hell hole of prejudice populated by hordes of despicable racists":

Witness the Unbelievable Amount of Racism That Exists Among Conservatives and in the Tea Party

    Every time I read a column [in which a member of the MSM] laments the racism he constantly finds among conservative groups … I wonder if he has ever heard about Tim Scott.  Given that for awhile, the legislator from South Carolina was the only member of the United States Senate who is African-American, one would think that his name might be — almost — as renowned as Barack Obama's.

    The explanation for Scott's relative obscurity is that he is a Republican — one who is backed by Tea Partiers (endorsed by Tea Party favorite Jim DeMint, Scott's Senate predecessor) and one from a Southern state to boot.  And were Scott better known, it would be far more difficult for people like Krugman to bewail the racism of Republicans and Tea Partiers, not to mention Southerners. 

    You would think that this black pauper's rise from rags to the halls of the U.S. Senate is a living memorial to Martin Luther King's dream.  But because leftists (conveniently and self-servingly) define themselves as the valiant fighters against the racism they (conveniently and self-servingly) constantly find throughout the ranks of the Republican Party, it comes as no surprise that South Carolina's conservative Senator did not even receive an invitation to participate in the 50th anniversary commemorations of MLK's Lincoln Memorial speech.

    Should Krugman need more evidence of his own prejudices, one could also mention Nikki Haley and Bobby Jindal, Republican governors (both of Indian heritage) backed by the Tea Party whose skin is about as dark as, if not darker than, that of Barack Obama. Yes, they too were elected in states from the former Confederacy.

    As for blacks who are favorites of the Tea Party, either nationally or locally, they include Herman Cain, Allen West, and Mia Love as well as Thomas Sowell (the Stanford economist who deserves the Nobel Prize in Economics at least as much as Krugman), Walter Williams, and Larry Elder.  But all these African-Americans must be ignored, because for the Left, the only good "Negro" is the martyred "Negro" — the one who constantly thinks he and his like are victims and therefore votes for the victimization party (i.e., the Democrats).

    Currently, one favorite of the Tea Party crowd for presidential candidate in 2016 is Dr Benjamin Carson, a neurosurgeon who is offering a free-market alternative to Obamacare that would keep prices down and Washington's brand-new army of bureaucrats out of the health care system.  His skin, too, is darker than Obama's.

    But all these inconvenient facts must be ignored or belittled by media people like Krugman in order to push the narrative that America is an intolerant hell hole of prejudice populated by hordes of despicable racists.

Related — Right on cue: Libs spew ‘Uncle Tom’ hatred after S.C. GOP Sen. Tim Scott’s historic win

The Science Is Settled — The MSM Is Always the Place to Go To For Valid, Trustworthy Information

The science is settled, or so we're told: conservative media is always wrong, ridiculous, and off the charts.

You have to turn to the liberal mainstream media, such as the New York Times, to get a correct view of the world…

Or… Really?!

The “no money for abortion” pledge was just another empty promise that Obama made to get Obamacare passed

Obamacare is an intentionally vague piece of legislation that grants enormous power to bureaucrats to make policy

writes Benny Huang in a post about free speech in Ohio,

particularly to the Secretary of Health and Human Services.

For example, nothing in the ACA specifically stipulates that employer-purchased health plans must include twenty methods of birth control. Why then did Hobby Lobby have to fight for its right not to provide four of them? Because former HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius added that requirement after Obamacare had been signed into law using the authority it granted her.

Pro-lifers recognized that Obamacare allowed bureaucrats so much latitude in policy-making that it could be construed to mean virtually anything, including taxpayer-funded abortion. Considering the track record of then-HHS Secretary Sebelius, the darling of the baby-killing industry, it seemed likely that taxpayer-funded abortion would be allowed if not expressly prohibited.

Some of those pro-lifers even supported Obamacare as long as it closed the door to taxpayer-funded abortion coverage. One such supporter was Congressman Bart Stupak (D-MI) who proposed an amendment to the bill which would have stipulated in no uncertain terms that Obamacare funds were not to be spent on abortion. Abortion supporters balked. While still contending that the bill would not fund abortion, they refused to include the Stupak Amendment. It certainly appeared that they were leaving themselves a loophole that could be exploited at a later date by simply having Kathleen Sebelius dictate the policy they wanted.

 … Four years have passed and the pro-lifers have been vindicated. The “no money for abortion” pledge was just another empty promise that President Obama made to get this piece of garbage legislation passed. In 2012, Planned Parenthood’s best friend, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, predictably decreed that taxpayer-subsidized plans would have the option of including abortion services, which means that taxpayers will not have the option of footing the bill. SBA List was correct yet the Ohio Election Commission didn’t see it that way in 2010.

No one in Obama’s federal government seems to be doing what they’re supposed to do

The president must believe that the military is flush with cash and extra bodies or else he wouldn’t be committing our troops to a war against Ebola 

writes Benny Huang.

A senior official told Fox News that General Martin Dempsey, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at a recent meeting that combatting Ebola is the Pentagon’s “number one priority.” And I thought its highest priority was getting chicks on submarines and shaming soldiers who smoke cigarettes!

If the Ebola crisis is the Pentagon’s number one priority then everything else must come second, right? That’s what “number one priority” means. The Taliban in Afghanistan and ISIS in Iraq can rest easy tonight knowing that they simply don’t rank anymore. We’ll get around to them later if at all.

Disordered priorities are the hallmark of this administration. Like no other chief executive before him, President Obama appears to misunderstand the mission statements of the various agencies, bureaus, and departments he has the privilege of overseeing.

 … No one in Obama’s federal government seems to be doing what they’re supposed to [do]. The military is so busy containing disease that actual warfighting is placed on the back burner. The VA prioritizes Obamacare applications over veterans’ healthcare. NASA doesn’t send men into space anymore but it does stroke Muslims’ egos. The IRS is in the business of making you buy health insurance, very likely a policy you don’t want at a price you can’t afford. When it isn’t doing that, it’s harassing conservatives with frivolous audits. The DOJ doesn’t enforce the law. In fact, if you encounter a member of the New Black Panther Party armed with a billyclub on the way to vote this November, you can rest assured that the DOJ will not help you. They will however, make your life hell if you don’t want to hire a felon.

Anarchy reigns in Washington and will continue to reign as long as the Obama philosophy dominates.

Latest PC Stunt in Paris: Smoking to be banned in children’s playgrounds in public parks

  … Paris has apparently decided that children need protection

quips Stephen Clarke as the British expatriate gets ready to tell us about the latest PC stunt to emerge from the French capital's town hall.

In a new one-year experiment, smoking is to be banned in children’s playgrounds in public parks. Personally I have always been against cigarettes for toddlers, but this ban apparently includes parents, too.

So far, there will be no fines for offenders, just warnings from park keepers, which probably means that smoking will go on unabated. After that, if fines are introduced, the scenes we see outside office buildings all over Europe will be repeated in parks – gaggles of parents and babysitters standing just outside the playground, getting their hit of nicotine before heading back into the exclusion zone. They’ll probably have to start communicating with their distant kids by phone, or by shouting. Time to buy shares in toddler-friendly telephones and cough pastilles.

It will almost certainly become more common to see Parisian parents smoking while pushing buggies, too, taking advantage of the journey to and from the playground. Another business opportunity – clip-on ashtrays for prams.

Sexual assault is a serious crime, but a college is not a justice system

As a female student I read your article on new college codes for sexual conduct with interest (“Yes means yes, says Mr Brown”, October 4th)

writes Jena López writes to The Economist from Houston.

Universities are overstepping their boundaries. Sexual assault is a serious crime, but a college is not a justice system. It does not have the right to say if a person is innocent or guilty. Instead, colleges should tell students what the legal definition of sexual assault is when they first arrive and help them if they want to go to the police if an assault occurs. If one student is accused by the other it is the job of the courts to declare innocence or guilt, not the college.

Unrelated: also check out the letter to the editor on "Napoleon’s flair for genius".

WInston Churchill on Socialism and the Cold War

The graphic novel biography of the life and times of Princess Margrethe before she became queen spans the middle third of the 20th century, from 1940 to the early 1970s. 

While a family saga on the lives, private and public, of three generations of monarchs, Erik Svane and Thierry Capezzone's graphic novel touches on Danish and world history, from Hitler and the German occupation of Denmark through Eisenhower and the formation of NATO to the murder of John F Kennedy and the student protests of the 1960s.

The excerpt from the Danish-language Cobolt-published book below (which can be ordered from Cobolt or from Saxo) is from the couple of pages in English recounting Winston Churchill's visit to Copenhagen during the height of the Cold War.

What Obama doesn’t want is for people to draw the connection between immigration and the spreading of disease because it would be disastrous for his long term plans to change the demographics of this country

The latest perplexing statement from the most incompetent White House in history

writes Benny Huang,

is that a travel ban from Ebola-ravaged Liberia would “actually impede the response” to the disease. Flights will therefore continue between the United States and the epicenter of pestilence. Oh how predictable.

So attempting to contain the disease is actually bad policy? Apparently so, says Lisa Monaco, assistant to the president for Homeland Security and Counter-terrorism. “They impede and slow down the ability of the United States and other international partners to actually get expertise and capabilities and equipment into the affected areas,” said Monaco.

No one is talking about keeping Americans out of Liberia. There isn’t exactly a rush to get there now. But some in Congress are talking about keeping Liberians out of the United States. Clearly Ms. Monaco is confused about the direction of travel that would be banned.

Of course, some Americans are traveling to Liberia to bring relief. Many of those Americans are members of the military and must follow orders, even if that means putting their lives at risk combating an invisible enemy they haven’t been trained to fight. At some point they will have to come back here. There’s a risk, of course, to the relief workers and to others they may infect upon their return but there’s no reason why we can’t allow only those Americans who were part of the relief effort back into the United States.

Perhaps we shouldn’t send them in the first place? Well, it’s too late for that. The first uniformed Americans arrived on September 19^th.

Ms. Monaco was asked about a one-way travel ban. She said that such a ban wouldn’t be necessary because people in Liberia are being screened for the virus before departing on international flights.

Let’s unravel the twisted logic of this charlatan. She began by knocking down a straw man argument—that relief workers shouldn’t be allowed to go to Liberia. No one was suggesting they shouldn’t. The argument was that Liberians should not be allowed to come here. If such a policy had been in place two weeks ago, Ebola patient Thomas Eric Duncan would not have been allowed into the country and one hundred people would not have been exposed to the virus. Monaco quickly changed her tune. Suddenly the travel ban wasn’t counterproductive but unnecessary.

Sure. Because travelers will be screened, right?

 … If you believe anything this administration says—and you need your head checked if you do—Ebola isn’t even supposed to be here. As President Obama said on the September 7^th installment of Meet the Press: “Americans shouldn’t be concerned about the prospect of contagions here in the United States, short term, because this is not an airborne disease.” Thirteen days later an Ebola-positive Liberian arrived on American soil. I guess that all depends on what your definition of “short term” is but I’d say that his prediction missed its mark by just a little.

 … Anxieties need to be soothed because they hurt Obama who is a huge supporter of immigration, both legal and illegal. Both varieties carry the risk of bringing infectious diseases into the country, though the illegal kind is riskier because there are no controls. Legal immigrants, of course, have to go through screening which is imperfect, as mentioned above.

What the president doesn’t want is for people to draw the connection between immigration and the spreading of disease, and not because the connection isn’t there but because it would be disastrous for his long term plans to change the demographics of this country for the benefit of his party and its politics. He’s already announced that amnesty by royal decree is coming after the November elections.

Thus far, liberals have been able to vilify anyone who opposes amnesty as a crypto-racist who harbors deeply irrational fears of The Other. It might be a little harder to sell that tripe if people realized that previously eradicated diseases are making a comeback like a bad 80s singer. What’s “irrational” about not wanting scabies at your child’s school? Anarchy at the border might not be such a crowd pleaser when concerns about disease are on the public’s mind. What’s a liberal to do?
Scream “racism” louder?

 … Unfortunately, one party in this country is “all in” for lawless immigration, and the other is halfway there too. They won’t let a little thing like Ebola—or tuberculosis, scabies, or leprosy—to sway the debate. Your health is not as important as their source of future voters.

New York Times: What Is the True Crime in Rotherham? Westerners' "Easy, Powerful Stereotypes" Against "Asian" Perpetrators Which "Overshadow the Bigger Picture"!

“The blindness is fascinating.”

The blindness of Western citizens, that is.

You knew this was coming, didn'tcha?

The New York Times' Katrin Bennhold pens a story on the "legacy of Rotherham" warning of the danger of… easy stereotypes and, indeed, indirectly calling for more laws and more repression for all citizens.

She starts off by linking the rapes of hundreds of teens by untold numbers of Pakistanis by untold numbers of Asians, reflecting at least some aspects of their Islamic culture, to the abuse perpetrated by BBC host Jimmy Savile (along with Rolf Harris, Max Clifford, and Stuart Hall), the work of a handful of members of the élite acting against the values of their country's general culture.

In the process, Katrin Bennhold gets into a talk about class warfare and decides that the point to remember about Rotherham was that the victims were among the low-status part of society.

This is all the same problem, you see.

First there was abuse at the hands of a popular BBC host. There were scandals at private schools and in the church and talk of a pedophile ring in Parliament. Then there was Rotherham: over a thousand teenagers sexually exploited as the authorities looked away.

Over the past two years, high-profile revelations of sexual abuse of children have painted a picture of Britain as a place where such abuse is not just endemic but systematically covered up — either because the perpetrators are of the very highest status or because the victims are of the very lowest.

There are two lessons here, scholars and officials say. The first is that sexual abuse is far more common than previously believed: Currently, 2,500 children in England have child protection plans because they are deemed to be at risk of sexual abuse. But the police now speak publicly of “tens of thousands” of victims a year.

The second lesson is that the main driver of abuse is impunity: “Abuse happens in a context of permissibility,” said Helen Beckett, an expert on the subject at the University of Bedfordshire.

Of course, it is of vital importance that we learn that "Mr. Savile … was a friend of former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher" (needless to say, how the strength of this friendship — two public figures smiling before the camera? — is judged is never established; nor, why the alleged friendship would matter in light — or in darkness — of Savile's hidden life).

Moreover, immediately afterwards (with only one intervening sentence), we learn about "allegations that Cyril Smith, a former member of Parliament who died in 2010, abused boys in a care home in his constituency." Notice that no party is given (Smith was of the Liberal Party, in the British sense); color me paranoid, if you will, but it would hardly surprise me if a left-leaning writer like a Times writer wouldn't mind if it were thought that one of the abusers was of the same party, or of the same bent, as the conservative Thatcher. 

 … Nothing, it seemed, could still shock this country — but in August an outside report on the northern town of Rotherham exploded in the headlines: At least 1,400 white girls had been abused, raped and trafficked by groups of men, mostly of Pakistani heritage, from 1997 to 2013.

Notice how Katrin Bennhold puts the actions of a handful of (very) bad apples — all members of the élite — on the same level as the scandal of mass rape in entire neighborhoods of a British town.

Simon Bailey, the lead officer on child abuse for the Association of Chief Police Officers, last week warned of “many more Rotherhams to come.”

The abusers relied on powerful stereotypes, said Alexis Jay, the author of the Rotherham report, most prominently the idea of lower-class girls being problematic and promiscuous. The police routinely referred to 12-year-old victims as “prostitutes” or worse.

Now, of course, another powerful stereotype risks taking hold: that of the Asian perpetrator and the white victim. The legacy of Rotherham, Ms. Beckett warned, must not be to replace one set of blinkers with another. “If we focus too much on the race factor, we inadvertently give the message that you don’t have to look at risk anywhere else,” she said.

See, folks. The problem is not rape. Or not only rape. It's stereotypes. Y'know, the thing that you clueless clods are so guilty of in everyday life.

Well, actually, yes, it's also rapes. And any one of you could have it happen to your child, just as you might potentially be a child rapist yourself.

So, let's take care of the rape factor, with more and more laws, more and more suspicion, and more and more repression on common citizens from a Western culture which does not support, and has never supported (well, not until the 1960s Sexual Revolution), child sex.

Having ascertained that, we all need to start on the next project: working against "powerful stereotypes" (tch, tch) as well.

“The blindness is fascinating,” said Ms. Berelowitz, adding that the same was true for victims. “Ethnic minority victims are falling through the cracks.”

Her concerns were echoed by Mr. Bailey, who warned that “an unhealthy focus” on the Asian-on-white model of abuse overshadows the bigger picture. “That bigger picture is that 90 percent of child sexual abuse takes place in the home,” he told The Guardian last week.

But when it comes to child abuse, stereotypes die hard. “It’s easier to report that a particular ethnic group is guilty or that victims are troubled,” Ms. Beckett said. “No one wants to believe this could happen to someone near them.”

An adventurous story based on the life of Queen Margrethe II

Needless to say, all of the articles, book reviews, and TV appearances related to the new graphic novel on the life and times of Denmark's Princess Margrethe before she became queen have been in Danish.

All of them?

No.

The capital's English-speaking weekly, The Copenhagen Post, has printed a piece by Lucie Rychla on Daisy — en prinsesse i Danmark, along with a photo from the launching of the book at the French Embassy.The French ambassador (centre) Francois Zimeray hosted the book's author Erik Swan (right) and illustrator Thierry Capezzone (left) to mark the release of 'Daisy' (Photo: Hasse Ferrold)And, believe it or not, there is also an article in… Spanish, thanks to the Hola weekly.

(Notice that they get one of the authors' names wrong. Erik Svane is rendered as Erik Swan, supposedly because someone ran a Danish text through an automatic translation software without bothering to double-check the finished product; Thierry Capezzone remains as is.)

Comic book about Queen Margrethe released

Some 76 pages long, 'Daisy – a princess in Denmark' includes true stories from the Danish monarch's life

Daisy – a princess in Denmark', a comic book biography of Queen Margrethe II, was officially launched on September 16 at the French Embassy in the centre of Copenhagen.

According to it authors, Erik Swan and Thierry Capezzone, the illustrated biography will be the first instalment.

It covers the first 32 years of Margrethe's life, from her birth to coronation, and includes some episodes that many people will have never heard about before.

Once upon a time

The story begins just a week after the German occupation of Denmark in 1940, when a princess is born at the royal palace in Copenhagen. 

She is baptised Margrethe Alexandrine Þórhildur Ingrid, but people mostly call her by her family nickname, 'Daisy'.

Initially, everyone expects Daisy will remain 'just' a princess for the rest of her life.
But shortly before her 12th birthday, this studious and thoughtful girl finds out that one day – thanks to a constitutional change to the Danish Act of Succession – she will take over her father's throne and become Her Majesty Queen Margrethe.

To be continued ...

Over the course of 76 pages in their comic book, the France-based, Danish author Erik Swan and the Frederiksberg-based, Danish-French artist Thierry Capezzone unfold an adventurous story based on the life of  Queen Margrethe II.

The first volume ends when king Frederik IX dies in January 1972, and a day later Daisy is crowned the queen of Denmark.

The "Daisy" Graphic Novel Is Noticed by the Media

The new graphic novel on the life and times of Denmark's Princess Margrethe before she became queen has received quite a deal of notice in the Danish press since Cobolt published it on September 16, from Billed Bladet and Ugeavisen to Politiken and Jyllands-Posten.

The longest article on Daisy — en prinsesse i Danmark came in the form of a full two-page spread authored by Kristian Lindberg in Berlingske Tidende (incidentally one of the oldest newspapers on the planet).

The book has also been noticed in the English- and Spanish-language press.

Finally, Erik Svane and Thierry Capezzone were interviewed on national TV, with questions from Aftenshowet's Louise Wolff.

Daisy, Princess of Denmark

The graphic novel biography of the early years of Denmark's queen has appeared.
Written by Erik Svane, drawn by Thierry Capezzone, and published by Cobolt, Daisy — en prinsesse i Danmark is a family saga of Denmark's ruling royal family that takes us from the birth of Princess Margrethe in 1940, a week after Hitler's troops invaded the country, through the Cold War to her crowning as queen 32 years later.

There is drama as well as humor in the graphic novel, as you can see from its "making-of" blog, called H.M. Dronning Margrethe II — The Comic Book.

The book, which is in Danish — excerpt for various parts in French or English (such as the pages relating to Churchill's visit to Copenhagen during the Cold War) — has received quite a lot of notice in the press and media. It can be ordered from Cobolt or from Denmark's version of Amazon, Saxo.

Name the issue, and you can be pretty sure that Democrats will lie about it until they’re convinced it’s safe to come out and say what they really mean

The indispensable James O’Keefe rolled out another video last week

quips Benny Huang,

this one targeting Alison Grimes, a Kentucky Democrat who hopes to unseat Senator Mitch McConnell in November. Her website and campaign advertisements state in no uncertain terms that she opposes the Obama Administration’s attempt to strangle coal industry, a vital sector of Kentucky’s economy. Too bad it isn’t true. O’Keefe’s video reveals that Grimes has been mouthing platitudes about her love of coal just to get herself elected.

Grimes’s campaign staffers will be happy to explain their Machiavellian strategy, provided they believe a sympathetic ear is listening. In clip after clip, organizers and foot soldiers for the Grimes campaign opined that opposing coal is political suicide in Kentucky, which necessitates lying on the candidate’s part. Politics, you see, is “a lying game, unfortunately,” according to one Grimes staffer.
Another staffer was asked: “If we can get her elected, do you think she’s going to do the right thing, and she’s going to try to wipe out that coal industry and go for better resources?” The staffer responded: “I absolutely think she is.”

Oh, I see. First she poses as the coal miner’s best friend just to get their votes, then she deliberately “wipe[s] out” their livelihood. A masterstroke!

Wouldn’t it be great if we knew where candidates stood on the issues? Then we could match their positions to our own and decide which candidate most closely matches our beliefs and priorities. But that would mean they’d have to tell us where they stand, and they won’t do that.

Yes, it’s true that “both sides” engage in this kind of duplicity—Republicans and Democrats, that is.

 … While “both sides” may fib to get elected, the two parties do not engage in electoral fake-outs in equal proportions. Democratic politicians are more prolific in their lying, and Democratic voters are more comfortable with being lied to. They know a line of baloney when they hear it but so long as it’s utilitarian they don’t care.

Liberals, I believe, have begrudgingly accepted the notion that ours is a center-right country. I don’t believe that we are anymore, but in this instance perception is reality. As a consequence of their perceived minority status they have embraced the “noble lie” concept. They gain their victories by stealth, always pretending to believe what anyone with an IQ above room temperature knows they do not.
 
Does anyone think that Barack Obama actually opposed same-sex marriage at any point in his political career? I certainly don’t, but he claimed that “[M]arriage is the union between a man and a woman” when he ran for president in 2008. He made a point of visiting Pastor Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church, one of the country’s largest evangelical congregations, where he told the audience: “Now, for me as a Christian, [marriage is] also a sacred union. You know, God’s in the mix.”

Why didn’t the tolerance bullies tear Obama limb from limb over that remark? Doesn’t that type of rhetoric qualify Obama as a bona fide member of the American (Christian) Taliban? Well, no. Because he was lying through his teeth. The foul-mouthed homosexual activist Dan Savage admitted as much in a column he penned earlier this year.  “…[T]he president pretended to oppose marriage equality and we pretended to believe him… The president’s evolution on marriage equality was a lovely piece of political performance art. And by the time Obama was ready to publicly endorse marriage equality—another calculated decision on his part—Obama had managed to bring a lot of the country along with him. So, as it turned out, the president’s political calculations were pretty f—g sound.”

The lie advanced the cause. The lie was good.

Furthermore, did anyone expect that the flood of illegal alien children who inundated the border this summer would be sent home? Polls indicated that a supermajority of Americans supported that position so Obama claimed that he did too. We know now that most will be treated as refugees and allowed to stay, and the others will probably be granted amnesty by royal decree after the election. But back in the summer, Obama’s ideological compatriots were spraying invective at anyone who actually agreed with Obama’s stated position. Was Obama a heartless racist like the other deportation supporters? No, because he was lying.

Name the issue, and you can be pretty sure that Democrats will lie about it until they’re convinced it’s safe to come out and say what they really mean. There’s a reason why Planned Parenthood supported Obama’s health care overhaul, even when he swore that it would not cover abortion. It’s because they knew it would! I have no doubt that he told them so behind closed doors. The illegal alien advocates were similarly tacit about public proclamations, made at the State of the Union Address no less, that Obamacare benefits would never find their way to illegal aliens. Why weren’t they apoplectic? Because the statement was a lie and everyone knew it, even the illegal aliens.

Politics may be a “lying game,” as Alison Grimes’s staffer put it, but it shouldn’t be. Voters should punish these deceitful finks at the polls every time they try to snow us with assurances that they don’t want to do what they obviously will do. They should be hounded with questions until they’ve made completely clear what they mean, and never allowed to skate away with weasel words and generalities.

No Pasarán Is Back

After one month of inactivity — due to the publishing of a book along with password problems — No Pasarán is back.

Little pleasures of life lost

From Britain's Daily Telegraph: Little pleasures of life lost to today's children

Praise for the TGV and efficiency à la française

One of the great things about France (about which there are many great things, even if the French don’t always admit it) is that it sits on two climate zones. You can be sitting up north in Paris staring at clouds and then get on a train, and in the time it takes some poor commuter to drive into the centre of the city from an outlying suburb, you’re sitting by the Mediterranean wondering which rosé to order.

Thus writes Stephen Clarke.

Obviously you can do this by aeroplane from almost anywhere in the world, but then you’d have to add several hours on to your journey to allow for all the queueing. France’s fast trains, the TGVs, zip you down to the south coast so fast you wouldn’t even have time to get into the departure lounge at the airport.

Needless to say, Stephen Clarke does not address the issue of the taxes that pay for France's, or for the world's, high-speed train systems or how this contributes to the poor paying for the well-off. But that will have to wait for another day.

I realize that this is a life of luxury. Being a self-employed writer who has enough money to afford last-minute TGV tickets and a pleasant hotel has definite advantages, but the whole trip cost about the same as, say, a day trip to see Manchester United, or a C-list celebrity’s left shoe. And France is a place where you get value for money for all things luxurious.

Two days to proofread a book, when you’ve also been able to snorkel and enjoy two excellent and not outrageous meals of fresh local produce, that’s what I call efficiency à la française.

A Promise of Paradise — by Selçuk

The Rotherham sex ring isn’t even the first example of authorities brushing pedophilia under the rug because the perps belonged to a well-organized, militant minority

When an anonymous researcher in Rotherham, England submitted a report thirteen years ago concerning a group of Pakistani men who were sexually abusing local girls she didn’t expect to face disciplinary action.

Benny Huang points out that the Rotherham scandal is not an isolated incident — far from it.

Her report was poorly received by the Rotherham Council which proceeded to launch a hasty coverup. Its members were so fearful that they would be accused of bias against racial and religious minorities that they turned a blind eye to the child-rape bonanza occurring under their noses.

 … Fortunately, the coverup appears to be over. Authorities are now admitting that a major sex slavery ring was operating across northern England between 1997 and 2013. A conservative estimate of the number of victims is about 1,400. One wonders how many of those victims might have been allowed to keep their innocence if someone in Rotherham had taken action in 2001 when the anonymous researcher first submitted her report. We’ll never know.

It takes a special kind of coward to allow kiddie-diddlers to run amok for fear of being called a bigot. Or does it? Covering for child molesters is getting to be rather routine in Britain. The Rotherham sex ring isn’t even the first example I’ve read of authorities brushing pedophilia under the rug because the perps belonged to a well-organized, militant minority. In at least two other situations, repeated credible accusations of child abuse against male homosexuals were ignored because the officials feared being perceived as “homophobic.”

Craig Faunch and Ian Wathey of Wakefield, England served as foster parents to eighteen children in 2003 and 2004. The two men sexually abused at least four of them. The fact that they requested troubled boys didn’t seem to send up any red flags. A report released in 2007 indicated that the two pervy child rapists were considered “trophy carers” because of their sexuality and that social workers went out of their way to show how accepting they were of same-sex foster parents. “It was clear that a number of staff were afraid of being thought homophobic,” said the report. “The fear of being discriminatory led them to fail to discriminate between the appropriate and the abusive.”

Child sexual abuse on a larger scale infested the Islington section of central London in the 1970s and 1980s. Again, the perpetrators were “gay” men, and again the crimes were covered up for precisely that reason. One survivor was Demetrious Panton who is now a forty-seven year old lawyer. According to the Daily Mail: “[Panton] was targeted by a now notorious paedophile ring, whose members at some point ran every one of the council’s twelve care homes. For more than a decade, the group was able to prey on children with virtual impunity, convincing Labour-run Islington’s political elite that anyone who attempted to blow the whistle on their crimes was motivated by homophobia.”

 … Some might argue that “straights” sometimes rape kids too. They would be right, of course, though proportionately speaking there’s simply no comparison—male homosexuals commit an absurdly large percentage of sex crimes against minors. Even so, the “straights do it too” argument fails for another, more important reason—no one ignores credible accusations of sexual abuse out of fear of being called a “heterophobe.” People aren’t trained to self-censor their words, and even their thoughts, when heterosexual men are preying on underage girls. Not unless those men happen to belong another protected group such as Pakistani Muslims.

That’s just the reality of Britain today and we’re probably not much better. Their society suffers from a surplus of cowardly authority figures who won’t lift a finger to protect children if it means that someone might call them a mean name. What spawned this kind of gutless pusillanimity?

 … Members of the cultural elite have created a taboo against criticizing members of groups they deem to be oppressed. The very same cultural elite serves as defenders and enforcers of that taboo, making sure that anyone who defies them pays a steep price. Like dogs who are taught via electrical shock not to stray from their kennels, ordinary people learn to keep mum about things they know aren’t right, even it means acting as an accomplice after the fact by concealing the truth.

When local news is bigger than national “news”

A highlight of the day [in my rented house on the island of Oléron, off the west coast of France] was going to the café and reading the local paper, Sud Ouest

reminisces Stephen Clarke.

I enjoy national papers, but at the moment, the French ones are annoying me. So here, the news that a group of local ladies, dressed as sailors, are doing the rounds of retirement homes to entertain the residents is far more interesting to me than a scoop about one French MP potentially disagreeing with another. It’s real life as opposed to press release life.

A quarter-page article about a librarian who was retiring was as neat a potted biography as I’ve read in any paper for a long time. Usually you only get them in the obituaries, and then only bigwigs and their weighty achievements. But this lady was born in the area, went to Paris, met her husband, moved to Normandy, then came back to the region with their children, presumably (it wasn’t revealed) to take advantage of the grandparents’ free time. Now she’s retiring, and, judging by the photo, her colleagues put together a very friendly send-off with plenty of drinks and snacks. Again, it’s much more immediate than the news that France might or might not end the 35-hour week (which everyone knows can’t be done overnight even if you want to do it), especially because you learn than small towns in France still have libraries. That really is news.

All this, plus a local ladies’ bowling team, a new computer club, the amount of salt put aside by salt producers against bad salt seasons, the problems of local honey producers because their bees are dying – it’s real life. Unlike the week’s massive story in France which is (in case you haven’t heard) that the former First Lady is bringing out a book about her life with Le Président. Yes, now it’s not only politicians talking about politicians. One of their ex-girlfriends is getting in on the act. Excerpts of the book take up half of the country’s biggest-selling glossy magazine. Every TV news channel is blaring about it. The newspapers will all be at it tomorrow. We will probably find out who said what to whom when, where and why, but the real question is, who cares?

I’m all in favour of big-selling books, whatever they are (within reason, of course). They put money in publishers’ coffers, which publishers spend on other books. But when you’ve got big magazine excerpts, you can kill book sales.

So please, give me more details about the librarian’s retirement party. What did she get as a going-away present? What’s she going to do now? It will tell us a lot more about France and the French than how journalists feel about how the First Lady feels about what the President used to feel about her.

If you want to see what real anarchy looks like, just have a look at our southern border

Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley this week instructed officials at a Baltimore prison not to detain suspected illegal alien prisoners for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)

notes Benny Huang,

unless they “present an actual threat to public safety.” The laws of the United States apparently no longer apply within the borders of Maryland.

Across the country, states and localities are refusing to work with the US government to enforce immigration laws. Some have gone as far as declaring themselves “sanctuary cities,” or places where illegal aliens can live in work (or not work) without fear of the law.

It seems like just yesterday that liberals were griping about the Supreme Court’s affirmation of Hobby Lobby’s right not to provide abortafacients to its employees. It was a slippery slope to anarchy, they argued. They almost made “anarchy” sound like a bad thing so I’ll assume they’re against it.

Their arguments were childish at best. If we don’t violate the Green Family’s rights, the next thing you know it’ll be human sacrifice! Better not to have any of that pesky religious freedom stuff lest it get out of control.

 … Of course, allowing the Greens the same rights guaranteed to all Americans will not lead to anarchy because the law is on their side. The court ruled that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act protected their free exercise rights. I would argue that the Constitution does too. Upholding the law is the opposite of anarchy.

If you want to see what real anarchy looks like, just have a look at our southern border. Illegals are streaming across precisely because they believe that the law does not apply to them. NBC News’s Stephanie Gosk reported in July about attitudes in Honduras that might be driving young people to attempt the trek to and across the US-Mexico border.

“There has been for about a year now, this idea …flirting around places like Honduras, that when young people, when they arrive to the U.S., mothers of children when they arrive, that they are going to be allowed to stay. There was a director of one of the groups here who said that a lot of women believed if they could just show up at the border, the official border crossing, and they would be allowed to stay.”

And they will be.

They are not misinformed. Our top law enforcement officials are dedicated to getting as many undocumented Democrats into this country as possible. Enforcement is a joke.

The freefall into lawlessness with regard to illegal immigration is having a myriad of second and third order effects but none more detrimental than the warping of our concept of the rule of law.

Those who cross our border are quickly absorbing this lesson. The first thing they learn about the country they have entered, and which they will likely never leave, is that the rules don’t apply to them. They’re special. Rather than being turned around and sent back where they came from, they are sheltered and fed at the taxpayers’ expense. On top of that, they are then given bus, train, or plane tickets to wherever they want within the interior of the US.

If they don’t have IDs they are even allowed to board airplanes without proving their identity. (TSA initially lied about this but has since admitted it’s true.) Elderly Irish nuns still have to show their IDs and go through the whole rigmarole, because, you know, they might be terrorists! Or something.

Well, not exactly. I think even liberals know that elderly Irish nuns don’t actually pose a terrorist threat but they are uncomfortable with allowing certain groups through airport screening with little scrutiny because other groups might cry foul. By “other groups,” I mean Muslims, of course. We all have to endure an equal amount of harassment at the airport to avoid the appearance of singling out Muslims.

All of us, that is, except illegal aliens. They don’t have to show identification because they’re obviously not terrorists. MS-13 members maybe, but not terrorists. Predictably, the terrorist supergroup known as ISIS has been overheard on social media discussing plans to infiltrate the US via the southern border. We’ll probably give them a ride to their intended target.

After illegal aliens have crossed the border and are safely transported, at the taxpayers’ expense, to Your Town, USA, they are then given court dates. Most will not show up.

 … Rules are for the other guy. That’s the message they hear repeated over and over again.

Is it any surprise that illegal aliens then go on to work under the table, thus stiffing the Social Security Administration of much needed funds? Or that they sometimes “borrow” other people’s social security numbers? That they drive without licenses or insurance, often drunk? In my state, cops are fed up with pulling over illegal alien unlicensed drivers because they know that the drivers will simply give false names and then skip their court dates. Illegal aliens also vote illegally in our elections and collect welfare benefits to which they are not entitled. President Obama’s illegal alien Aunt Zeituni even made an illegal campaign contribution to her nephew’s campaign.

This is what real anarchy looks like. It is the predictable outcome of a judicial system that refuses to enforce the law against a certain group of people. That group of people learns with great alacrity that they are entitled to show the same disregard toward all of our laws that they showed to the laws they brushed aside on their way through the door.

10 Years Ago, Rotherham's Denis MacShane Was Among the Good Guys

Not that multiculti double standards should be defended in any way, and not that Denis MacShane does not deserve what's coming to him, but just a word to point out that 10 years ago, during the Iraq war, the MP for Rotherham was among the good guys. He was not only a supporter of Tony Blair's alliance with George W Bush, he was vocal in his support.

"That's Why We're Fighting the Bastards, Isn't It?"

"It hurts that war, it hurts me," [A. A. Khaliq of Rotherham said in May 2004]. "Blair made a mistake in backing Bush. I support the British troops, but not the United States. We should never have let the U.S. draw us in. We're in with a regime that doesn't listen to anybody. We should pull out."

 … Rotherham's member of Parliament during the same period, MacShane said of Khaliq, "A ways back, this is a guy who was shouting that the Brits and the Americans were wimping out and demanding the 7th Fleet bombard Milosevic when the Serbs were mistreating the Muslims."

"That's Why We're Fighting the Bastards, Isn't It?"

"Going door to door," said MacShane after two days of talking [prior to the June 2004 elections], "I don't get the impression that Iraq is what's on people's minds. It's how things are working out for them. One guy said, 'Iraq's a problem, isn't it Denis?' Then he talked about the young fellow beheaded on television, and he said, 'that's why we're fighting the bastards, isn't it Denis?' "

Then again, Tony Blair's Labour Party was always close to outstanding on the international scene, and (much) less so on the domestic scene.
Click for more vintage MacShane posts on No Pasarán

The wise, disinterested experts of the regulatory state will deliver progress for our own good, whether we understand it or not

Government requires trust. Government by progressives, however, demands such inordinate amounts of trust that the demand itself should provoke distrust. Progressivism can be distilled into two words: “Trust us.”

Thus writes George Will (thanks to Instapundit and Ed Driscoll).

The antecedent of the pronoun is: The wise, disinterested experts through whom the vast powers of the regulatory state’s executive branch will deliver progress for our own good, as the executive branch understands this, whether we understand it or not. Lois Lerner is the scowling face of this state, which has earned Americans’ distrust. 

From now on France can forget recovery, forget unemployment, it’s all about politicians’ egos

Monday, Stephen Clarke heard that Arnaud Montebourg, the economy minister, has resigned;

it turns out that he has been saying a bit too loudly that he doesn’t agree with the government’s economic policies (a bit rich from the man who accepted the job of conceiving and implementing them, one might think) and that he has been “resigned”. In fact the PM Manuel Valls has decided that he’s had enough of sniping ministers and has announced to President Hollande that his government has resigned, which simply means that he is going to have a massive ministerial reshuffle.

Montebourg wasn’t the first by any means to start openly criticizing Francois Hollande. The knives are out. A former ecology minister Cecile Duflot has just ripped into him in a book. Other left-wing figures having been queuing up to distance themselves from Hollande.

It’s no coincidence, of course. The politicians are well aware that ex-President Nicolas Sarkozy is preparing his comeback, and that the Socialists need someone strong, and new, to stand against him. They’re all thinking “pourquoi pas moi?” This naturally involves forgetting that the elections are three years away and that France needs to be governed in the meantime.

Three years till presidential elections, and the campaign is under way. From now on the country can forget recovery, forget unemployment, it’s all about politicians’ egos. As if it was ever any different.

From now on, I predict non-stop rumours about who wants to run for President, a glut of new parties, and endless speeches about how moi and only moi can save the country – despite the fact that all I’ve done for the past three years is sit back and criticise.

Oh joy …

The BBC reports that a

central aim of his latest reshuffle is to replace those left-wing critics [Arnaud Montebourg (L), Benoit Hamon (C) and Aurelie Filippetti (R)] with more sympathetic minds, and give President Hollande's economic drive a boost.

Key among the new appointments announced on Tuesday is a fresh face in government. Emmanuel Macron is a former banker and economic adviser to the president who now takes up the job of economy minister.

His key selling point is that he shares the president's pro-business, centre-right vision - unlike his predecessor.

White Americans avoid speaking the truth aloud for reasons of racial guilt and black Americans avoid saying it for reasons of racial solidarity, but no one is really fooled

The tragic death of Michael Brown, an eighteen year old black man, at the hands of the police, has sparked days of rioting and looting in Ferguson, Missouri. His community rallied around him from the start, telling reporters that Mike Brown was a great kid who was shot down “like an animal” because of his race.

Thus writes Benny Huang.

Unfortunately, the portrait they painted of the gentle giant wasn’t entirely accurate.

 … The version of the story that portrays Brown as a hapless victim of racism and police brutality is quickly unraveling. He was not shot in the back as Brown’s friend Dorian Johnson, a witness to the killing (and accomplice to the robbery), claims. Nor was he shot for jaywalking as ludicrous early reports indicated. Brown robbed a store then attempted to take a police officer’s gun, presumably to shoot him with it.

Either Brown’s die-hard supporters are truly mistaken about what happened on August 9^th or else they know that the story is a concoction and they just don’t care.

The Michael Brown case is starting to look a lot like a warmed over version of the Duke lacrosse case, the Trayvon Martin case, and the Tawana Brawley case. In other words, a rush to judgment has resulted in a lynch mob mentality.

Yet I suspect that most black Americans know, in their heart of hearts, that the fictional narrative being foisted upon the nation is a sham. The black citizens of Ferguson are doing what blacks tend to do whenever a racial controversy erupts—presenting a united front to the outside world. It’s a form of tribalism that would rightly be called racism if white people did it, which they occasionally do.

No one knows better than black Americans that there’s something amiss in black America. They know that black-on-black crime is a far greater threat than the supposedly racist cops who patrol their streets and that their values and priorities are out of whack, yet they prefer to discuss these matters when only black ears are listening.

 … A code of silence dictates that black criticisms of black behavior be kept in-house. If outsiders were to overhear them admitting that blacks need to straighten up and fly right they might take it as confirmation that “the system” is not broken; black culture is. “Racists” might exploit that.

Comedian Bill Cosby was chided in 2004 for his remarks at an NAACP function marking the fiftieth anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education. The thrust of his remarks was that black Americans should forgo any celebration about how far they’ve come since the fifties and sixties because blacks themselves have largely squandered the gains they struggled for. The black community needs to do some soul-searching about what really ails them—white racism or black attitudes and habits? 

While most black leaders found Bill Cosby’s remarks abrasive, some admitted that they sometimes say the same things to black audiences. Cosby’s transgression was to air the black community’s “dirty laundry” for the whole world to see. In fairness to Cosby, he didn’t know his comments would leak to the media. He believed he was speaking entre nous.

Cosby has responded on several occasions to accusations of airing dirty laundry.   “When you go looking for the dirty laundry, I would appreciate it if you would direct your attention to a school where there is, for sure, a fifty per cent dropout rate among black males. And don’t forget the guards, the ones that have to check for the guns and the knives. Shhhh.This will be our personal little black secret.”  What Cosby meant is that black delinquency and underachievement is the worst kept secret in the world. Hiding the problems isn’t working because anyone with eyes can see them. White Americans avoid speaking the truth aloud for reasons of racial guilt and black Americans avoid saying it for reasons of racial solidarity, but no one is really fooled.

French-Speaking History Professor: Say No to Pro-Russian Propaganda and Do Not Engage in Moral Relativism

Depuis le début de la crise ukrainienne, un discours structuré de défense systématique des actions de la Russie est très dynamique sur les réseaux sociaux, dans des médias officiels russes publiés en français et leurs relais d’opinion en France. Il relève d’une propagande qui joue habilement sur un aspect commun à plusieurs cultures politiques françaises, l’anti-impérialisme, lui permettant de trouver un écho dans des milieux politiques variés. 

In the face of what he calls all the pro-Russian propaganda present in France, Olivier Schmitt has decided to protest in Le Monde:

UN ETAT AUTORITAIRE

 … le relativisme moral est mal placé. D’un côté, une démocratie dont les dirigeants sont régulièrement renouvelés, les soldats sanctionnés lorsqu’ils violent le droit international humanitaire, qui dispose d’une presse libre et reconnaît les droits des minorités.

De l’autre, un Etat autoritaire, dont la brutalité des troupes s’exerce en Tchétchénie, en Géorgie et en Ukraine, où les homosexuels sont pourchassés et la liberté d’expression un concept oublié. Personne ne dit que les Etats-Unis sont parfaits, mais créer une équivalence morale entre les deux pays relève de la cécité ou de la complicité.

Vladimir Poutine veut être entouré d’Etats vassalisés – auxquels il dénie donc la souveraineté qu’il prétend défendre par ailleurs – et, obnubilé par son maintien au pouvoir, ne peut pas concevoir qu’une révolution telle que le soulèvement de Maïdan à Kiev ne soit pas forcément un complot américain.

L’exploitation habile par la propagande russe de divers aspects de l’anti-impérialisme commun à plusieurs courants politiques français fausse ainsi la perception d’une politique russe particulièrement inquiétante pour la sécurité de l’Europe et de la France.

Almost impossible for anyone to set up their own business in France because the administrative costs are so high

The French economy is not in a great place right now

writes Mark Johnson,

but my heart still sinks when I see that yet another local business has closed down in the nearby towns round my part of rural France.
 
Recently, I noticed that the local kitchen and bathroom business in the enclave of Savigné had shut its doors for good. To be honest, I wasn’t surprised, they’d once quoted me €28,500 for two bathroom renovations.

An English expat friend, who owns a beautiful seven bedroom chateau in the Limousin, collapsed in fits of laughter at that quote, saying he’d managed to install five luxury bathrooms for less than €12,000.

But, while President Hollande dithers over how to get the nation back on its economic feet, business owners, employees and their suppliers are counting the cost in real terms of a country that refuses to modernise and create opportunities for the next generation of local entrepreneurs.

This is nothing new of course. Years ago, when I lived in the thriving Arabian emirate of Dubai, I met loads of young French folk who had forsaken their homeland for a nation that would encourage entrepreneurialism and reward their hard work.

One French friend said that it was almost impossible for anyone to set up their own business in France because the administrative costs are so high that you need to already have a fortune in order to get going. Even today, there’s a pile of government regulations and a raft of taxes to pay before you even serve your first customer. “That’s why so many people in France work for the government,” she said.