Is Tarantino's Hateful 8 Really a Boon to Climate Change?!

In the very first sentence that Thomas Sotinel writes about the Hateful Eight in his (otherwise unconvinced) Le Monde film review, we learn that one virtue that we can find in the western is "the help that Quentin Tarantino brings to climate change."

The only thing left to perpetuate the memory of snow is cinema

Thomas Sotinel:

L’avis du « Monde » – on peut éviter

Si l’on peut trouver une vertu aux 8 Salopards, c’est le secours que ce huitième long-métrage de Quentin Tarantino apporte en période de changement climatique. Il ne reste que le cinéma pour perpétuer le souvenir de la neige, de l’enveloppement du monde dans un linceul. Et quand un monde enneigé est filmé sur une pellicule argentique de 70 mm, le port des verres filtrants est recommandé, tant de splendeur peut provoquer des lésions irrémédiables aux rétines des spectateurs.

Incidentally, we also learn that Tarantino's eighth movie is inspired partially by André de Toth's La Chevauchée des bannis (Day of the Outlaw, 1958).

In other news, we learn that the maker of Django Unchained has called the Confederate flag an American swastika. Which we must all thank the director for (very profusely), as — once again — it reminds everybody that Godwin's Law is an absolute double standard that applies to conservatives alone and that only serves to shame the right and in the process make them shut up.

In Michael Moore's New Film, He Shows Cinema-Goers, American and Foreign, How Every Other Place in the World Is Far More Humane than the U.S. Is

Cara Buckley has a New York Times interview with Michael Moore, the point of whose “Where to Invade Next” is, basically, that everywhere in the world is a lot more humane than America is. Moore

travels to three continents to “steal” good ideas from foreign lands and bring them back to the United States, including France’s gourmet school lunches and Finland’s successful, and homework-free, public education system. 

Moore spoke about the film’s origins, which began with a 1970s backpacking trip.

Q. Was the idea for this film cooking for a long time?

A. Since I was 19. Since I got a Youth Hostel card and Eurail Pass. Each country I went to with my backpack and my little tent, I’d keep saying, “That’s such a good idea, how come we don’t do that?” Then I was hiking in Sweden and busted my foot and had to go to the emergency room and they fixed it. And I’m so nervous because my Blue Cross from the U.S. wasn’t going to cover me. I don’t have any money on me. “They go, ‘O.K., goodbye.” “What? That’s it? Don’t I owe you anything?” “‘No. It’s all free here.” “But I’m not a Swede.” “It doesn’t matter.” I couldn’t believe it. I was gobsmacked.

Well, maybe Moore would do well to consider the arguments in the following posts:

• The French healthcare system, even if taken at its best, is like an expensive jewel on a beggar’s neck by Bojidar Marinov

• What the American enamored with French health care doesn’t realize is that the French, too, would love to have such a perfect health system by Guy Sorman

• Call it the grass-is-greener syndrome: the French have their own problems that show there's no such thing as a free lunch — or a free doctor's visit by Investor's Business Daily

Color me skeptical when Moore explains the extent to which he has allegedly been the target of assassination attempts.

After my [2003] Oscar speech and I got booed off the stage, somebody at the [Transportation Security Administration] keyed the Oscar. I got home, I live in a rural area in northern Michigan, some guys had a dump truck full of horse manure and built an almost four-foot wall across our driveway with the manure and then taped signs on all the trees along the road saying “Move to Cuba,” “Get the hell out of here,” just nutty stuff like that. Then I went through five years of a number of physical assaults on me, a couple of those were actually attempts to kill me, and then the attempt to blow up my house by this guy who had a fertilizer bomb, à la Oklahoma City.

Q. Do you avoid some topics that you would otherwise tackle were it not for the death threats?

A. No, no, no, no. Oh, no. “Bowling for Columbine” was a lot about how our fear is what motivates us to get these guns, and it puts us in a discombobulated state. … I can’t live in this constant state of fear that the hate machine that exists on talk radio and on Fox News whips up.

Reminder: Among No Pasarán's Michael Moore posts over a dozen years, we find the following:
• As the French Doctors Prepared Their Sharpened Instruments to Remove the Donor's Organs, Something… Twitched
• Masters of Deception: Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore, and the 9-11 Conspiracy Industry
• "Michael Moore could not withstand Michael Moore's scrutiny for more than 15 seconds"
• And last, but (certainly) not least:
the interview with the French newspaper in which the director of Sicko and Capitalism (A Love Story) admits in so many words — "Dude, I am on Marx's Tomb!" — to being nothing less than a Marxist

Michel Galabru: Good-Bye, Friend

 Michel Galabru, 1922-2016

Have You Noticed What the Oregon Ranchers Have NOT Done?

Has anybody noticed something special about the Oregon ranchers' revolt against the Absurdly Harsh Penalties That Sparked Their Protest?

They occupied a building. An empty building. A public building. A building that was directly linked tot he issue of their concern.

Now notice something else.

Notice what the Oregon ranchers did not do.

• The Oregon ranchers did not turn themselves into a mob
• and they did not march, armed or otherwise, to the private homes of the officials involved in the subject of their despondency
• and threaten the officials' physical residence
• and/or terrorize the officials' family members.

Furthermore:
If various posts that I have read on Instapundit are to be believed, the Oregon ranchers have made no threats of violence, i.e., they have not threatened once to use those weapons they (happen to be—legally—) carry(ing). What they have said is that, yes, they might use said weapons, but only in the (hypothetical) course of being attacked, or, in other words, if threats of violence against them are carried out. The Second Amendment is supposed to guarantee the natural right that a person is allowed to protect himself if he is, and/or his loved ones are, attacked.

Does this rule/right disappear if state agents, such as the feds, are doing the attacking?

Does this rule/right disappear if there seems to exist a law giving the authorities the right to attack (and one banning people from defending themselves)?

Furthermore, regarding the difference or lack of difference between (allegedly) peaceful civil disobedience and armed occupation:

The issue lies elsewhere. For the left, civil disobedience works only for their constituents, white or otherwise — the victims or alleged victims of society, white or otherwise. Witness Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, and the Wisconsin State Capitol takeover — which, additionally, might have been weapons-less, but were filled with scorn, hatred, and — yes — very definitely an atmosphere of threats and violence or the likelihood thereof!

A conservative (white or other) — not least because of the fact that he or she is accused of being the (accursed) cause of the above-mentioned victims in the first place — has a lot less chance of being listened to and respected and of escaping unscathed.

Let's end this with an article from the National Review's David French:

So far, no one has been hurt, the “occupation” is occurring in a vacant federal building in the middle of nowhere, and there is no reported threat to innocent bystanders. It would be absurd for the federal government to treat the protesters like it treated the men and women at Waco or Ruby Ridge, and it would be absurd for the protesters to shoot police officers who are ordered to reasonably and properly enforce the law. The occupation is far less intrusive and disruptive than the Occupy Movement’s dirty and violent seizure of urban public parks, and authorities permitted that to go on for weeks. Now is the time for calm, not escalation.

(Somewhat) Related: Good-Bye to 2015, the year of lies, hoaxes, and outright fakeries

"This idea of thinking Left or Right is a sin against the spirit and an illusion"

André Glucksmann, one of the most prominent of the French “New Philosophers,” a group of former radicals who broke with Marxism in the 1970s and became an intellectual counterweight to France’s political left, [has died] in Paris

writes William Grimes in his New York Times obituary.

André Glucksmann on No Pasarán:
• The anti-capitalist vituperation, says Glucksman, is what led to the communist and fascist political strategies which “dragged humanity into hell”
• Bin Laden Is Gone, Not The Strategy of Radical Hatred Without Quarter
• Sleeping soundly is the slogan of every cowardice
• The "Absolute Crime": For "the Battle of His Life" —the Fight Against the Kremlin's Rule— André Glucksmann Is Hated By His Fellow French Intellectuals

Mr. Glucksmann came to prominence in May 1968, when, as a teacher and militant Marxist at the Sorbonne, he publicly cheered on the student revolt both there and, a year later, at the University of Paris 8 Vincennes, where he and the philosopher Michel Foucault led the intellectual charge.

He joined the Proletarian Left, a Maoist group, in the early 1970s, but soon became disenchanted with revolutionary politics. He was dismayed when the group kidnapped a Renault executive and, as a Jew, was shocked when radical Palestinians murdered 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich.

The turning point came with the publication of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s “The Gulag Archipelago,” a work that transformed him into an implacable enemy of the Soviet Union and all ideologies.

In 1975, in “The Cook and the Cannibal,” Mr. Glucksmann subjected Marxism to a scalding critique. Two years later, he broadened his attack in his most influential work, “The Master Thinkers,” which drew a direct line from the philosophies of Marx, Hegel, Fichte and Nietzsche to the enormities of Nazism and Soviet Communism. It was they, he wrote in his conclusion, who “erected the mental apparatus which is indispensable for launching the grand final solutions of the 20th century.”

An instant best seller, the book put him in the company of several like-minded former radicals, notably Bernard-Henri Lévy and Pascal Bruckner. Known as the nouveaux philosophes, a term coined by Mr. Lévy, they became some of France’s most prominent public intellectuals, somewhat analogous to the neoconservatives in the United States, but with a lingering leftist orientation.

Their apostasy sent shock waves through French intellectual life, and onward to Moscow, which depended on the cachet afforded by Jean-Paul Sartre and other leftist philosophers.

“It was André Glucksmann who dealt the decisive blow to Communism in France,” Mr. Bruckner told French radio on Tuesday.

 … “In the West, he presented the anti-totalitarian case more starkly and more passionately than anyone else in modern times,” said Paul Berman, who wrote extensively about Mr. Glucksmann in his books “A Tale of Two Utopias” and “Power and the Idealists.”

“He was a passionate defender of the superoppressed, whether it was the prisoners of the Gulag, the Bosnians and Kosovars, gays during the height of the AIDS crisis, the Chechens under Putin or the Iraqis under Saddam,” he said. “When he turned against Communism, it was because he realized that Communists were not on the same side.”

 … At 13, while a high school student, he joined the Communist Party, but he was expelled after criticizing the Soviet Union’s suppression of the revolt in Hungary. In a 2006 memoir, “A Child’s Rage,” he chronicled his parents’ lives and his early upbringing.

After earning the teaching degree known as an agrégation from the École Normale Supérieure de Saint-Cloud in 1961, Mr. Glucksmann enrolled in the National Center for Scientific Research to pursue a doctorate under Raymond Aron — an odd matchup because Aron was France’s leading anti-Marxist intellectual.

 … His subsequent turn away from Marxism made him a reviled figure on the left, and former comrades looked on aghast as he became one of France’s most outspoken defenders of the United States. He argued for President Ronald Reagan’s policy of nuclear deterrence toward the Soviet Union, intervention in the Balkans and both American invasions of Iraq. In 2007, he supported the candidacy of Nicolas Sarkozy for the French presidency.

“There is the Glucksmann who was right and the Glucksmann who could — with the same fervor, the same feeling of being in the right — be wrong,” Mr. Lévy wrote in a posthumous appreciation for Le Monde. “What set him apart from others under such circumstances is that he would admit his error, and when he came around he was fanatical about studying his mistake, mulling it over, understanding it.”

 … “I think thought is an individual action, not one of a party,” Mr. Glucksmann told The Chicago Tribune in 1991. “First you think. And if that corresponds with the Left, then you are of the Left; if Right, then you are of the Right. But this idea of thinking Left or Right is a sin against the spirit and an illusion.”

Good-Bye to 2015, the year of lies, hoaxes, and outright fakeries

Are we becoming a nations of liars, or a nation of people who like being lied to?

Benny Huang says goodbye to "the year of lies, hoaxes, and outright fakeries."

In what looked like a staged moment on the campaign trail, Hillary Clinton fielded a question from a nine year-old boy at a town hall meeting in New Hampshire concerning pay inequity between the sexes. The boy, Relic Reilly, asked why his engineer father earned more than his mother, a pre-K teacher.

I think my mother is working much harder, is working more harder than my father and she deserves to have more money, like, get more money, than my father. Because she’s taking care of children and I just don’t think it’s fair.

 … if Hillary Clinton is going to make her campaign into another historic “first” for women, she needs to pretend that women such as herself are oppressed—hence the fake question about a fake issue. Coming, as this question did, on New Year’s Eve, I saw it as a fitting end to 2015, the fakest year on record. Never before has the news been dominated by so many lies, hoaxes, and counterfeits.

When 2015 began, we were already in the midst of a rape hoax at the University of Virginia, where a college student claimed to have been raped on broken glass at a frat party that never actually happened. … When the story became absolutely indefensible, Rolling Stone retracted it and conducted an investigation to determine what had gone wrong, though the investigation itself was pretty fake …

That rape hoax was followed by another at Columbia University, where a female student carried a mattress around campus to protest the university’s supposed refusal to address her rape at the hands of a former lover. Actually, the university did investigate and found that her story lacked credibility. The details did not stack up and her story was almost certainly a lie, a desperate act of revenge against a man she had been infatuated with—and probably still was [still is?].
 
Also in January, Muslim terrorists conducted a very real attack against the satirical French magazine Charlie Hebdo. What followed, however, was a completely insincere outpouring of support for the principle of free speech. Leaders from across Europe and the world converged in Paris to declare that they would not be bullied into censoring speech. That was a huge lie, of course, because nearly all European governments punish speech, especially speech that offends Muslims. Before, during, and after the attacks citizens were being arrested for mere words. In July, Charlie Hebdo announced that it would no longer draw Mohammed. In the future, they would self-censor.

[2015] was also the year of fake women—by which I mean dudes who wear skirts and demand to be treated as women. Two high profile cases in American high schools involving transgender “girls” who were demanding to use the girls’ locker room were settled when the Department of Education required all schools that receive federal funds—which is nearly every public school in the country—to allow students to use the locker room of their choice. Another fake woman, Bruce “Caitlyn” Jenner, won Glamour magazine’s Woman of the Year Award. The husband of a former winner, NYPD policewoman Moira Smith who died in the 9/11 attacks, returned the award he had accepted on behalf of his deceased wife. “I was shocked and saddened to learn that Glamour has just named Bruce Jenner ‘Woman of the Year’…” said James Smith. “Was there no woman in America, or the rest of the world, more deserving than this man?” Indeed. [And let's not forget the deception by the defenders of Planned Parenthood.]

The catchy phrase “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” was found to be an utter fabrication after a lengthy investigation into the 2014 shooting of Michael Brown at the hands of a police officer. Brown’s hands had not been up, he was not shot in the back, he had not been kneeling on the ground, and he was not “minding [his] own business” as Brown’s thug friend Dorian Johnson told reporters after the incident. Brown was fleeing a robbery when he attempted to murder Officer Darren Wilson with his own gun. The investigation revealed that witnesses lied in order to frame Wilson. The only element of reality in the entire Michael Brown case was all the mayhem and looting that followed. [More on gun control and on racial issues at the links.]

In June a supposedly scientific study published in the peer-reviewed Science magazine was found to have been a graduate student’s concoction. The study, titled “When Contact Changes Minds” was designed to measure the degree to which entrenched opponents of same-sex marriage could be swayed by sob stories, or what they called “heartfelt, reciprocal and vulnerable conversations.” The study’s designer, PhD candidate Michael LaCour of UCLA, intended to show that mean old bigots (like me) just haven’t met many “gay” people. After a little contact with homosexuals and hearing them pour their hearts out about all the made-up grief they have to suffer through, we bigots usually relent. Or at least that’s what the study showed.

But the study was fake. … How this study passed peer review is a mystery—unless peer review is basically a worthless ritual, as I suspect.
 
The news cycle was dominated for the better part of two weeks in mid-September with the tale of Ahmed Mohamed, a fourteen year old in Irving, Texas who was arrested for bringing to school what looked very much like a bomb. As it turned out, it was just a briefcase with the innards of an old Radio Shack alarm clock mounted inside. Young Mr. Mohamed claimed to have “invented” a clock, which wasn’t even true. It didn’t take long for the narrative factory to manufacture the story that Ahmed wanted—“Muslim Kid Genius Arrested by Bigoted Texans!” The story was absolute rubbish from beginning to end. Ahmed Mohamed was hoping and praying that his teachers would take the bait he was dangling before them—a briefcase with protruding wires. Prior to his arrest he was told by at least two teachers that the clock he “invented” looked like a bomb. Having succeeded in raising an alarm, he proceeded to play the victim, and is still playing the victim. Victimhood is a pretty good gig, if you can get it. Crowdfunding sites raised money for his college education. The White House, NASA, Facebook and Google all extended invitations to the supposed child prodigy. And of course—of course!—his family is suing for fifteen million dollars. Getting arrested is the best thing that ever happened to this kid.

The year ended with another disintegrating tale of anti-Muslim bigotry, also in Texas. On Christmas Day, a mosque in Houston burned down in an apparent act of arson. The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) leaped on the incident as a possible bias crime. Unfortunately for CAIR, the feds arrested a devout Muslim named Gary Nathaniel Moore. He is the lead suspect. This one has self-victimization hoax written all over it.

[2015] should be remembered as the Year of the Big Lie—the year the US Army’s once prestigious Ranger School debased the coveted Ranger tab by handing it out to women who failed to meet standards, the year in which black students posing online as angry white racists made terroristic threats to kill black people, and the year that the Supreme Court discovered a fake right to a fake marriages in the text of our Constitution.

This trend toward mendacity is truly disturbing. Are we becoming a nation of liars, or a nation of people who like being lied to? I say no. We’re merely victims of a journalistic establishment that barely even pretends to report the news anymore.

Smart Diplomacy: For 1st Time, Putin Officially Names the U.S. as a Threat

A new appraisal names the United States as one of the threats to Russia's national security for the first time

writes Vladimir Soldatkin at Thomson Reuters,

a sign of how relations with the west have deteriorated in recent years

in addition to being a piece of news which must surely be an homage to the apologizer-in-chief's brilliant forward-looking policy of smart diplomacy (Update: spasiba to Instapundit).

The document, "About the Strategy of National Security of Russian Federation", was signed by President Vladimir Putin on New Year's Eve. It replaces a 2009 version, endorsed by then-President Dmitry Medvedev, the current prime minister, which mentioned neither the United States not NATO.

 … Relations between Russia and the West reached a low after Russian forces annexed the Crimean peninsula from Ukraine in March 2014, after protests in Ukraine forced its pro-Moscow president to flee to Russia.

Reminder: Back during the 2008 election campaign, Sarah Palin was vilified for saying another incredibly dimwitted thing, that the election of a pacifist like Barack Obama to the White House

would only encourage Russia’s Putin to invade Ukraine next.

(Gratefully, intelligent people like those writing for Foreign Policy were around to remind everybody that in fact, such an invasion was, and is, "an extremely far-fetched scenario.")

A "sign of how relations with the west have deteriorated in recent years" is the Thomson Reuters journalist's wording of choice.

"In recent years," Vladimir Soldatkin?! "Recent"?!

You might read some blogs once in a while, Vlad. Over there, in your MSM office. And their posts.

Such as:
• Four years of NP posts on Obama caving in to the Kremlin (2011)
• Moscow's tone is "reminiscent of Soviet days";
If anyone is stuck in the Cold War mentality, it is the Russians (2012)
• Smart Diplomacy: "Surging anti-American sentiment" in Moscow
and its legislators' "unanimous pseudo-patriotic frenzy” (2013)
• Smart Diplomacy: what is happening in Eastern Europe
now is as much Obama’s fault as it is Putin’s (2014)
• Have U.S. Relations with Russia Reverted to The Same Type as Those
During the Cold War That Obama Once Mocked Romney For? (2015)
• The Fruits of Smart Diplomacy: For the First Time Since the
Cold War, the U.S. Stations Heavy Weapons in Eastern Europe (2015)
• Advice to the Republican Hopefuls and to Other Leaders and Members of the GOP (2015)

Lib-Dems don’t appeal to nostalgia and they usually chalk it up to racism when Republicans do; now that Team Clinton realizes that Bill is a lot more popular than Hillary is, nostalgia’s okay

Hillary Clinton says that her “not-so-secret weapon” is her husband Bill

reports Benny Huang,

and has asked the former president to campaign for her in New Hampshire after the New Year.

Bringing in Bill to rescue a flailing Hillary actually sounds like a pretty decent strategy. It appears that she’s trying to cash in on the curious but nonetheless real phenomenon of Clinton nostalgia—Bill Clinton nostalgia, that is. People genuinely like the former president even if they can’t name a single thing he accomplished while in office.

Even so, Bill’s rescue operation reflects poorly on Hillary. It’s as if she’s saying “Yes, I know I’m a dud as a candidate—but my husband’s pretty cool, isn’t he?” Oh, yeah. He practically invented cool. William Jefferson Clinton may not be a particularly good leader but he’s certainly a masterful politician. He’s got that cool vibe that Hillary doesn’t. The Clintons have long recognized this problem and have even reached out to their friend Steven Spielberg for help, asking him to refer Hillary to an acting coach so she could learn what Bill instinctively knows. Hillary grew weary of the lessons quickly.

Lib-Dems don’t appeal to nostalgia and they usually chalk it up to racism when Republicans do; now that Hillary Clinton realizes that Bill is a lot more popular than she is, nostalgia’s okay

While Hillary’s invocation of Clinton Nostalgia is understandable it is also out of character for a progressive Democrat. Lib-Dems don’t often appeal to nostalgia and they usually chalk it up to racism when Republicans do. The good old days never were, they say. Or at least they used to say that until Hillary Clinton realized that her husband is a lot more popular than she is. Now nostalgia’s okay.

It is worth noting however that Team Clinton relied on almost exactly the opposite strategy for winning hearts and minds the last time they occupied the White House. When Bill accepted his party’s nomination at the 1996 Democratic National Convention he spoke boldly of the future, leaning heavily on his campaign’s official slogan “Building a Bridge to the 21^st Century.” In that speech, he used the word “future” ten times, the words “21^st Century” twenty-two times, and the word “children” a whopping thirty-six times! As any do-gooder will tell you, the children are the future—making the two words practically interchangeable. The speech was classic dumb-downed politics, the use of repetition and glittering generalities to hammer home one simple, emotionally-charged message: Democrats are the future, Republicans are the past.

Speaking as one of those children Bill Clinton mentioned thirty-six times—I was fifteen years old at the time of the convention—I will say that we’ve arrived at the future he spoke of…and it sucks. It’s no wonder Hillary is placing her bets on nostalgia.

Remember back before everything sucked? Yeah, my husband was president then.

So just what went wrong in the meantime? A lot of things, I suppose, though if I had to choose just two I would name 9/11 and the 2008 fiscal crisis as the most substantial. Bill Clinton bears a large portion of the responsibility for both of those events which makes me wonder why so many people seem to eagerly await his comeback tour. He’s not solely responsible for either event, of course, but he does deserve the lion’s share of blame.

 … As economist Stan Liebowitz wrote: “From the current handwringing, you’d think that the banks came up with the idea of looser underwriting standards on their own, with regulators just asleep on the job. In fact, it was the regulators who relaxed these standards–at the behest of community groups and ‘progressive’ political forces.”

Things got worse when wealthier borrowers began to demand the same terms for their loans as poor people got. It was rather difficult to tell a person with good credit that he couldn’t have the same terms as someone with bad credit. Fueled by easy money from the banks, often loaned at favorable interest rates and sometimes with no down payment necessary, builders got to work adorning the American landscape with new homes.

Read the whole thing

A year of absurdity and overreach: The common thread for the year 2015 in review is the collapse of judgment in, and the infantilization of society by, government

Goodbye to 2015, a year of absurdity and overreach

writes George Will.

We learned that a dismal threshold has been passed. The value of property that police departments seized through civil asset forfeiture — usually without accusing, let alone convicting, the property owners of a crime — exceeded the value of property stolen by nongovernment burglars.

 … The Internal Revenue Service persecutes conservative advocacy groups but does not prosecute IRS employees who are tax cheats: An audit revealed that over the past decade, the IRS fired only 400 of the 1,580 employees who deliberately violated tax laws, rather than the 100 percent required by law.

There's more — much more — at the link…

This list of 2015 ludicrousness could be lengthened indefinitely, but enough already. The common thread is the collapse of judgment in, and the infantilization of society by, government. Happier New Year.

New Year's Resolutions

Big Star Wars Spoiler Ahead

I went to see the new Star Wars film
and I was (very) happy I did

People have allegedly found all sorts of plot holes,
but the only one which really bothered me
I have not seen talked about anywhere

BIG SPOILER AHEAD
DO NOT READ FURTHER
IF YOU HAVE NOT SEEN
THE FORCE AWAKENS

Once a central figure is gone, a new crew forms for the Millennium Falcon:
Rey and Chewbacca; fair enough — but why — why on Hoth?! — does
Chewie remain co-pilot while the young novice takes over the pilot's seat?

Doesn't the older and more experienced Wookie, the one who has so
many years of flight behind him, deserve to advance to full pilot on the ship
he has served on for so many years, with the novice starting out
(à la Obi-Wan Kenobi and other Padawans) in the novice position?!

In Obama's Simplified World, Countries Like France Are Always Places to Contrast America with, to Praise, and to Emulate

President Obama held up France as the gold standard the U.S. workplace should emulate

writes The Washington Examiner's Susan Crabtree.

Extolling the business virtues of helping workers balance family and employment demands, including providing paid time off for the birth of a child, Obama said that if France can provide the benefits, so can the United States.

“Other countries know how to do this,” Obama said. “If France can figure this out, we can figure it out.”

France provides some of the most far-reaching worker rights in the developed world, including limiting a standard work week at 35 hours and providing 16 weeks of paid maternity leave.

France also has an unemployment rate that has hovered above 10 percent for more than two years, well above the rate of unemployed in the United Kingdom and the United States, which are both in the 6 percent range.


Obama made the comment at the first White House summit for working families, which sought to amplify issues like paid maternity leave and the ability to take paid leave to take care of elderly loved ones.

“Many women can't even get a paid day off to give birth,” Obama said. “There is only one developed country in the world that does not offer paid maternity leave, and that is us. And that is not a list you want to be on, by your lonesome.”

The White House hosted the summit jointly with the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, and it served in part as a campaign pep rally focused on turning women voters out in November.

Doctors live in fear that their careers will be ended if they advise against anal sodomy—which turns out to be pretty good medical advice

Just in case there was any lingering doubt that Planned Parenthood doesn’t give a hoot about “women’s health”—or anyone’s health, for that matter—the abortion giant is now on record favoring the “right” of HIV-positive people not to disclose their status to sex partners.

Thus writes Benny Huang.

From their pamphlet, the ironically titled “Happy, Healthy, and Hot”: “Your decision about whether to disclose may change with different people and situations. You have the right to decide if, when, and how to disclose your HIV status.”

Surely the pamphlet only means friends and co-workers though, right? Actually, no. The pamphlet continues: “Some countries have laws that say people living with HIV must tell their sexual partner(s) about their status before having sex, even if they use condoms or only engage in sexual activity with a low risk of giving HIV to someone else. These laws violate the rights of people living with HIV by forcing them to disclose or face the possibility of criminal charges.” The pamphlet then encourages the reader to get involved to change such laws “that violate your rights.”

So basically Planned Parenthood is encouraging people to pull a Charlie Sheen; or at least condoning it. The renowned actor revealed in November that he had known for about four years that he is HIV positive, though he claimed that he always informed his sex partners of his status, with “no exceptions.” This came as something of a surprise to Bree Olson, Sheen’s former live-in girlfriend, who thankfully tested negative. … “He doesn’t even value my life,” said Olson about Sheen’s revelation. No kidding, cupcake.

Her only purpose was to serve his pleasure. If she had to die so that he could get his rocks off, that was, in Sheen’s calculation, a price worth paying. …

It’s hard to believe that such selfish people as Charlie Sheen really exist but they do and they’re actually a lot more common than you might imagine. The fact that Planned Parenthood, which masquerades as a reputable medical organization, endorses the “right” not to inform sex partners of HIV status tells us that the camel has already gotten its nose under the tent. Though the attitude may not yet be mainstream, that doesn’t mean it could never be.

The author and journalist Randy Shilts, who died of AIDS in 1994, shed light on the homosexual community’s culture of denial in his 1987 book “And the Band Played On”. Among Shilts’s premises is that homosexual political leaders talked a great game when it came to combatting AIDS but their action was lacking. They refused to consider any countermeasure to the AIDS “epidemic” that might hamper their sex lives. The most they would do is promote the use of condoms. They refused to speak out against the hookup culture that pervaded and continues to pervade the male homosexual community or, heaven forbid, to tell male homosexuals to keep their butt cheeks together. …

One can almost understand the rationale behind this kind of reckless denialism. The disease was discovered in 1981, just a few short years after male homosexuals had established sexually “liberated” enclaves in places like New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. …

In the mid-1980s, the author David Horowitz, who was then on a journey from the Marxist Left to conservative Right, sat down with Randy Shilts to discuss AIDS, the burgeoning menace then stalking San Francisco. What Shilts told him was shocking. As Horowitz wrote in his biography, “Radical Son”: “According to Shilts, it was the gay leaders themselves who suppressed the research findings, along with the fact—now generally accepted by medical officials—that AIDS was a sexually transmitted disease. This was difficult to believe, but when I checked Shilts’s story, it turned out to be true. The Stonewall Gay Democratic Club, one of the political powers in the community, had summarized the politically correct view prevailing among activists in a slogan: ‘Sex doesn’t cause AIDS—a virus does.’ The activists were afraid that identifying the disease with promiscuous sex and also with gay sex—95 percent of the cases in San Francisco were among homosexual males—would stigmatize the ‘gay life-style’ and create a political backlash.”

Yeah, and we wouldn’t want to stigmatize the “gay” lifestyle, would we? I don’t know what’s wrong with stigmatizing a filthy sexual practice rife with adverse health consequences, including AIDS of course, but also gonorrhea, anal cancer, and intestinal parasites. We stigmatize smoking, why wouldn’t we stigmatize anal sex? Put me down as pro-stigma.

Unfortunately, male homosexuals whine that their rights are being violated whenever anyone looks askance at butt sex, the activity that apparently defines them. They demand not only the right to engage in dangerous, unhealthy sexual behavior, but the right to positive affirmation as well.
 
Sadly, the medical community seems to be fulfilling their wish. Doctors these days live in fear that their careers will be summarily ended if they advise against anal sodomy—which is pretty good medical advice, no matter how you slice it. To cite just one example, consider Dr. Paul Church, a well-respected urologist who was recently fired from his position at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) in Boston for opposing the homosexual lifestyle on moral and medical grounds. His story began in 2009 when BIDMC sent out an email inviting staff members to ride on the hospital-sponsored float in an upcoming “pride” parade. Dr. Church responded with a mass email of his own, asking why a hospital would endorse a behavior with undeniable health consequences that include death. “If a medical scientist cannot raise research that the federal government’s Centers for Disease Control clearly shows homosexual conduct as harmful,” he concluded, “then that means that your health, my health, medical science — all of that is being called into question simply because of a political agenda.”

He was right, of course, though it’s dangerous to be right when your employer is wrong. The torrent of homosexual outrage came down on Dr. Church hard. After a lengthy fight with BIDMC, he lost his job. He may lose his positions at other Boston-area medical centers, including Harvard Medical School, where he also practices medicine.

Church was essentially fired for being a good doctor, for staying true to the Hippocratic Oath he took to “do no harm” at a time when all the other doctors around him had abandoned theirs. “Truly caring for the well-being of individuals requires telling them the truth about their choices,” said Church. “The hospital does this on less controversial issues such as smoking and diet.” Yes, that’s true, but smokers and fat people don’t have well-financed and well-organized political apparatuses and they don’t crush people who get in their way. That’s the difference.

The homofascists had to make an example out of somebody and they chose Dr. Church. The chilling effect will be felt far and wide—no one will dare point out that homosexuals are perverting medicine’s core mission, though they plainly are.

We’re living in an era of hedonism, in which a substantial portion of the population careens from disco to disco and from orgasm to orgasm. Not all such hedonists are homosexuals, of course—there is always the occasional Charlie Sheen—but a significant number of them are. There is nothing they won’t do just to keep the good times rolling. They don’t care about other people’s health or safety, nor do they care about facts or truth. They care only about their own pleasure and they will stop at nothing to secure it.

French Foreign Minister Joins International Organizations, the FBI, and EU and U.S. Companies as Targets for German Spy Agency

In more Fabius family news, Morandini reveals that France's foreign minister was spied upon while visiting Germany.

Laurent Fabius thus joins the list of targets spied upon by the Bundesnachrichtendienst's (BND's) eyes and ears, including the International Court of Justice, WHO, the FBI, and Voice of America, as well as numerous companies, European as well as American, not least of which was Lockheed.

But, hey…

…if America ain't involved, it don't make da news…

(Or, certainly, it does not turn into a major scandal.)

Les services secrets allemands ont espionné le ministre français des Affaires étrangères Laurent Fabius, affirme mercredi la radio publique allemande Berlin-Brandebourg (rbb), qui apporte de nouveaux détails dans l’affaire d’espionnage qui embarrasse depuis plusieurs mois la chancellerie allemande.

«Laurent Fabius a été mis sur écoute par le BND», les services de renseignement extérieurs allemands, souligne la radio sans préciser ses sources. Elle cite également parmi les cibles des écoutes allemandes la Cour internationale de justice de la Haye, l’Unicef, l’organisation mondiale de la santé (OMS), le FBI, la radio financée par les Etats-Unis Voice of America ou encore «de nombreuses d’entreprises européennes et américaines, dont l’entreprise d’armement Lockheed aux Etats-Unis».

Related: Son of Frenchman Who Presided COP21 in Police Custody for Fraud and Forgery

In France, Typos Make for Interesting History Lessons

Where was this photo taken?

asks the monthly magazine Geo in its regular multiple choice question game (you have to click on each photo to see the three options to choose among).

With Ryann972's "statue men" photo, you must choose among the following three options:

• On Chile's Easter Island (they would be the earliest Moai statues)
• Near China's Xian city (they would count among the Middle Kingdom's terra cotta soldiers)
• On France's Martinique (this would be the exotic island's Slavery Memorial)

Before scrolling down this post and reading on, see if you can guess the answer (FYI, I nailed it, as did 80% of Geo readers).

We discover that the correct answer is the third and last one (the first two did sound far-fetched), to which we are treated with further information informing us that slavery was not abolished in France in 1794, as we had previously thought, but only in 1974!

At the Apple Store's Genius Bar

(From Maria Scrivan)

Why Santa Has Reindeer Instead of Cats

From Maria Scrivan
(Dziękuję dla Janina)

A MIRACULOUS REUNION

Now comes one of those feel-good stories you only
read about on Facebook or in the Reader's Digest.

In the 1980s or 1990s there was a cartoon of a
helmeted astronaut at the door of his landing
module, making a report of his first impressions 
to headquarters back on Earth while looking out 
at a barren planet. Barren except for one thing: 
Next to the spaceship was what looked like a 
gargantuan heap of laundry. The caption read:

Houston. We have found the missing socks.

As some of you know, I am for the time being living
between Copenhagen and Paris. Like most people,
I suppose, I have orphan socks that I hesitate to throw
away — in both places. (That is, I am determined to
throw them away until… the last second — at which time
I relent, reckoning, I may just run into that other sock
within a day or two.) The last time I was in Denmark,
I thought, I will take my half dozen orphan socks from
Copenhagen to France, and see if any good news would
transpire.

After 13 hours on the highways of Denmark, Germany,
Belgium, and France (not to forget the 45-minute ferry ride),
I arrived in Paris. Lo and behold, one of the orphan socks
from one country was an exact match with one orphan sock
from the other, separated by 1208 km (the exact distance
from my place in one city to that in the other).

If that ain't a miracle, I ask you, what is?!



Merry Christmas to one and to all!

New York Times Urged to Make a Crusade Against the Revolver

What a continual source of trouble [the revolver] is.

In 1901, a reader of the New York Times signing as Solon, Jr wrote a missive to the Gray Lady urging it to take action and embark on gun control or a peculiar form of same.
 

10 British things you just don’t mess with

The Daily Telegraph has a list of 10 British things you just don’t mess with.

According to a recent report, American film director George Lucas experienced a baptism of fire on the Elstree set of Star Wars back in 1976. Instead of the work ethic he was used to when filming in the States, a very British adherence to union rules prevailed which meant shooting was delayed for twice-daily tea breaks. What Lucas failed to appreciate is that for the British, tea is more than a warm beverage. Tea is a way of life. It is the answer to almost any problem that arises. In the face of disaster we put the kettle on. We are very serious about our tea.

There is advice for the Yanks:

As the Telegraph’s Christopher Howse observed recently, to use your eating-irons as the Americans do is considered to be worse than a crime.