Category — France

French PM says world ‘on edge of abyss’

PARIS/LONDON, Oct 3 (Reuters) - French Prime Minister Francois Fillon said on Friday the world stood on the “edge of the abyss”, gripped by a global financial crisis now threatening industry, trade and jobs worldwide.
Fillon’s words echoed a growing sense of alarm sweeping EU capitals ahead of an expected U.S. Congressional vote on Friday on a $700 billion bailout plan for the financial industry. Approval is far from certain. [snip]

Monsieur Fillon, the French economy has been in the cloacae since the German Chowder and Marching Society showed up in Paris a couple hundred thousand strong.

After that excursion into French diplomacy, France employed Marxist economics, which is why you are such an economic powerhouse today.
How about working on your end of the problem, like firing the dead wood and killing off the leech unions. France might even find productivity in that mess.

Listen to Sarkozy, You have a chance of getting out of the ditch.

Contrary to law, truth isn’t a defense against the PC idiots.

Brigitte Bardot on trial for Muslim slur

PARIS (Reuters) - French former film star Brigitte Bardot went on trial on Tuesday for insulting Muslims, the fifth time she has faced the charge of “inciting racial hatred” over her controversial remarks about Islam and its followers. [snip]
She has been fined four times for inciting racial hatred since 1997, at first 1,500 euros and most recently 5,000. [snip]

France bans Bogarting in public places…but leaves those other cultural abominations, the beret and turtle-neck sweater, un-banned.

“France bans smoking in cafe’s, hotels and clubs on Jan 1, stamping out the habit popularized by Jean Paul Sarte puffing Gauloises in hazy brasseries.”

Even with its faults, the simple beauty of this ban is that it obliterates something popularized by Jean Paul Sarte, and we can’t get enough of that. And for you folks educated in Connecticut sometime after 1965, the word is “brasseries”, which is not the same as “brassieres”.

The first, brasserie, is a place to eat and drink, and while away the time pondering Being and Nothingness, or moving your lips a Francais while pretending to read Le Monde, or The Guardian. A brassiere is something else.

Objections to the ban? Declaiming the obvious was David Droulez, head of the Friends of Pleasure and Taste Association in Paris, who defends his right to be stupid, un-hygienic, dirty and non-American. “Fighting” for his right to party, Dave said…

“Maybe we’re a bit stupid with our traditions, but we have a right to be as such and I cannot stand the idea of a hygienic, clean and, sorry to say, “American-style society”".

The ban also threatens France’s 800 water-pipe cafes, employing an estimated 4000 people. This assumes that the Hookah combustible is tobacco and not something else.

The Real Reason for the Smoking Ban

France has 14 million smokers, accounting for an estimated 72,000 deaths annually, which costs France about 3.1% of the country’s GNP. Now get this, for those of you in favor of a single-payer national health system:

“France wants to narrow its public-health care deficit to 4.2 billion Euros ($6.2 billion) in 2008 from 5.9 billion Euros in 2006″.

Don’t bother with the math. In 2006 France had a nearly a $9 billion dollar deficit with its public health care system. Limiting smoking in public places is not going to address this problem.

 More media bias from the MSM and their flunkies.

Agence France Presse writer Jihad Siqlawi gives us the terrorist viewpoint, in a respectful eulogy to a murderous Hizballah “fighter.”

EL-TIRI, Lebanon (AFP) - Thousands of Hezbollah supporters massed on Wednesday for the funeral of a Lebanese guerrilla whose body was handed over in a rare swap between Israel and the Shiite Muslim militia. [snip]

Black-clad men carried the coffin at the head of a cortege that filled the village streets, chanting “Our party is Hezbollah and our leader is Nasrallah,” and “Death to America”, “Death to Israel.”

From windows and balconies overlooking the procession, women sprinkled the “martyr” with rice and rose petals, ululating with joy, while others handed out sweets in the village.

Israel should have packed the body with Semtex. That would have been a super send off for everybody!

…60 leading international climate change experts recently wrote a letter to urge Canada’s new Prime Minster to carefully review global warming policies, warning that “Climate change is real’ is a meaningless phrase used repeatedly by activists…

British Judge Bruises Al Gore’s Movie

Critics of “An Inconvenient Truth” include Al Gore’s political opponents, global warming skeptics and even rank-and-file scientists. But the former vice president waited until today for a detailed review from a high court in Britain.

Asked to ban the film from secondary schools, Judge Michael Burton refused, as long as “serious scientific inaccuracies, political propaganda and sentimental mush” were explained at screenings, Agence France-Presse reported.

The bill of particulars that he issued, posted to the Web site of the plaintiff’s political party, had 11 points. Here’s the first and possibly most stinging, courtesy of The Times of London:

Al Gore: A sea-level rise of up to 20 feet would be caused by melting of either West Antarctica or Greenland “in the near future”.

The judge’s finding: “This is distinctly alarmist and part of Mr Gore’s ”wake-up call“. It was common ground that if Greenland melted it would release this amount of water - “but only after, and over, millennia.”

In an e-mail obtained by The New York Times in March, Al Gore answered earlier criticisms that were echoed by the judge today. Here’s a few excerpts from William J. Broad’s article:

Mr. Gore, in an e-mail exchange about the critics, said his work made “the most important and salient points” about climate change, if not “some nuances and distinctions” scientists might want. “The degree of scientific consensus on global warming has never been stronger,” he said, adding, “I am trying to communicate the essence of it in the lay language that I understand.”

But is his work fundamentally accurate?

Stewart Dimmock Challenges the World According to Gore

[snip] Gore and his allies pretend all serious-minded scientists agree with them and that only simpletons or charlatans disagree. [snip]

Al Gore and other global warming enthusiasts are fond of reciting that 2,611 scientists have signed a letter stating that global warming poses a serious and real threat. Yet, only about one in ten of the so-called 2611 scientists had scientific expertise. And only 5 out the 2,611 so-called scientists had training in climate, weather or other atmospheric sciences. That is less than 1/2 of one percent. Excuse me, for being underwhelmed.

Perhaps more revealing is that Gore’s list of “scientists” included landscape architects, psychologists, lawyers, a philosopher, a dermatologist, a gynecologist, and a diplomat. On this flimsy basis, as only Al Gore can, he tells us that the “debate is over” and that there is complete agreement.

The truth is that more than 17,000 scientists (not landscape architects, dermatologists or diplomats) have signed a petition stating, in part, that “there is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate.” This petition was circulated by the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, an independent research foundation that is not funded by industry. This petition was signed by more than 2,100 physicists, geophysicists, climatologists, meteorologists, and environmental scientists and by more than another 4,400 scientists with expertise on carbon dioxide’s effects on plant and animal life.

An inconvenient truth that Gore has failed to reveal are his low grades in Environmental Science when he was in college. [snip]

That’s not all. Gore lied about living on a farm; in 1984, he didn’t work to defeat “big” tobacco. Of course we can thank him for the internet, right?

“Violence never solved anything” was my mother’s refrain when sorting out sibling spats. Well, was she ever so wrong. In fact, the opposite is true, so it seems when dealing with Liberals, Commies, Progressives and that assorted vileness. Given history, those tainted personages apply violence at every given chance while rebuking those applying violence against them.

“Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Breeds that forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and freedoms.”–Robert Heinlein, Starship Troopers

Burma, ‘gun control’ and David Hume

Burma is a good example of ‘gun control’, i.e. a state of affairs where firearms are a legal monopoly of the government forces. One side has good intentions and the other side has loaded rifles, and the result (so far) has been the same as it was in 1988 - or even back in 1962 when the late General Ne Win first set up his socialist administration. [snip]

…the philosophy of David Hume. This mid 18th century Scottish philosopher claimed that government was not based on force - but rather that it was based on opinion. Hume did this to mock the claim that there was a great difference between the ‘constitutional’ government of Britain and the ‘tyranny’ of France - under the skin both sides are basically the same, was his point. [snip]

In Burma, as in so many other places, many people seem to have thought that opinion, namely the good intentions of the majority, were more important than firepower - they appear to be mistaken.

“You are showing lack of respect for the dead” - perhaps, but I am warning people not to stand against men with rifles when you are unarmed. Get the firepower, one way or another, and learn how to use it, then you may have a chance at liberty - you can not have it, or keep it, without firepower. And that remains true even if you win some soldiers over to your side with appeals to their reason.

Lest you wonder why the Left in this country are so adamant about disarming the populace, here is the sole reason, not crime prevention, target shooting, hunting or collecting.

Now ask yourself where the so called GOP candidates stand on your liberty.

While Optimistic Patriot and Vermont Woodchuck pursue  serious high-quality news-blogging for New England Republican, Hotspur grazes the blogs, the super-market tabloids,  Home Surgery Quarterly  and The Yale Law Review for the latest in the human sideshow.   He found this, linked by Instapundit to The Economist Online, for September 20th. 

                                              Who Needs Toothpaste?

One of the tired cliches about Europe is that all its inhabitants have mossy teeth, and have limited enthusiasm for matters of personal hygiene.  This is a deplorable generalisation and not a serious subject for discussion.  That said…crikey, there’s a jaw-dropping piece in today’s Le Figaro, tucked away in the health pages (alas, seemingly not available on the Internet).

The article quotes a pair of dentists, one from a Paris teaching hospital, and one from the French dentistry association,and offers the following statistics (without citing sources:

- one million French citizens never brush their teeth.

- half of all French do not brush their teeth in the evening.

- 57% of French children under five have NEVER brushed their teeth.

- The average French citizen uses between one and two toothbrushes in a year.

Note to travellers to France.  When in the villages, and the usual flock of children gathers around you, doing Apache Dances and surrender pantomimes for treats and laughs, remember this:  The preferred gratuity for their performances is chocolate, Spam, antibiotic creams or cigarettes…and those cheesy smiles and Gorgonzola breath are NOT due to cheese.  

Nothing in our MSM about this anywhere.

Here is what PC thought and behavior holds for our future. Wait until the illegals mix with Code Pink, ANSWER and the Sudden Jihad Syndrome crowd. You will be praying for a strong 2^nd Amendment.

Here’s how Rudy would protect you.

Photos of the “event.”

A mix of muslims-lefties raised up new riots, but not in France, in the usually peaceful Switzerland. A good look at the european civil wars coming in a near future. LAUSANNE, yesterday (Switzerland)

Tomorrow the US

Résultat : la manifestation a sans doute été un franc succès… Trans. (No doubt the demonstration was a bold success…)

LeBlogdrzz posted from Lausanne in French (You will be able to make out much of what is going on)

La Raza threatens to cancel convention in KC, cites controversial park board appointee

The nation’s largest Hispanic rights group is warning it may cancel its 2009 convention here because of a controversial Kansas City park board member.
The head of the National Council of La Raza said Thursday that the organization is already looking at several other cities because of the appointment of Frances Semler. [snip]

Janet Murguía, head of the Washington-based La Raza, said Thursday that Mayor Mark Funkhouser’s appointment of a member of a militant group opposing illegal immigration gave pause to the Hispanic rights organization.

Semler is a member of the Minutemen Civil Defense Corps and has taken a strong stance against illegal immigration and has suggested a moratorium on legal immigration.

Murguía said she told Funkhouser in a telephone conversation last week that the conference all but certainly will go elsewhere if Semler doesn’t step down.

“It is very troubling that we would be in a position to reconsider but in fact we are,” Murguía said during a trip to Kansas City. “I don’t know there is a way short of her stepping down that we could salvage this. This is offensive on many levels. We want the mayor to understand it is something that sends a very wrong signal to the Hispanic community about what the city represents.” [snip]

This is the particular signal we wish to send to La Raza.

La Raza mission statement:

Partido Nacional La Raza Unida (PNLRU) supports a revolutionary alternative that will change current power structures, realize economic democracy and foster spiritual and cultural growth. Re-education of Raza, control of our communities and a commitment to our families are essential to our self-determination.

Hmmm! Nothing in their logo to suggest US goodwill. Was the background borrowed from the Nazis?

To facilitate their get-together, a suggestion is in order . Try booking the Loco Room at the Mexico City Motel 6 for the assemblage. They have a great buffet at the snack machine and very easy on the pocket. Be sure to savor the local water; it has piquancy not found in the 1^st world.

My understanding of Treason as a legal and ethical matter is that of a patriot layman.  I know very little about the subject.  Article III of our Constitution employs only nineteen words for Treason…(it) “shall consist only in levying war against them (the United States), or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and  Comfort”.  The Englightenment figure who composed these lines might have been Jefferson.  Another man who had something to say about Treason was Madison, who ruminated on the topic in Federalist #43.  None of it helps.

The minimalist description of Treason in Article III means, to me, that the author of the passage on Treason faced a process problem, and he knew it.  The 18th century was a time when the crime of Treason was kin to the crime of Heresy from a few centuries earlier.  Heresy was a thought and speech crime of disloyalty, and in the European hereditary monarchies, Treason was nearly the same.  America,  the new country aborning when our Constitutional author wrote his portion of Article III, had no room for either of these crimes.  They just didn’t fit.

So he didn’t mention the thought and speech crime of disloyalty, which is what Heresy and Crown Treason is.  He mentioned only an act.  An act of betrayal, and a pretty narrow one at that.  He knew that one can be disloyal without betraying one’s country if one doesn’t act upon it.  The example of disloyalty in action is John Walker Lindh.  He was probably disloyal for the entire segment of his life that he spent with the leftists cranks who raised him.  His spiritual journeys to Pakistan and Afghanistan are what got him into trouble; not thoughts of disloyalty but joining the Taliban.

Lindh wasn’t charged with, or prosecuted for, Treason.  Hardly anyone ever is.  He was charged with conspiring to kill Americans, and with supporting terrorists, although he pleaded to the lesser charge of carrying explosives to the Taliban.    That’s what sent him to jail for twenty years, and sent his ridiculous father into a frenzy of belated support for his son.

Now, there’s a body of law which governs the matters of espionage, sabotage, disclosure of secrets, that kind of stuff.  I don’t know where Lindh’s statutory problems come from, but it clearly isn’t Treason, even though he certainly fits one description of a treasonous slug.  His legal difficulties, then, cloud the matter of Treason even more.  If we can’t decide what Treason is, then what is a traitor?  No American is subject to punishment for disloyal thoughts, moods or attitudes.  Treachery is not necessarily treasonous.

History is of little use in clarifying the matter.  50,000 presumed “traitors” were executed in France after the liberation, either by the sham legality of French courts, or through revenge killing, because they supported the Vichy government.  De Gaulle himself was ruled a traitor by the same government.  Lord Haw Haw was executed after WWII because, as a British subject, he openly supported The Reich.  Hitler’s potential assassins were found guilty of treason because they didn’t support The Reich.

The problem, at the moment, is that Treason no longer matters.  It’s been erased by new targets for our loyalties. The old ways have been shattered by the suspect aims and bogus ambitions of early 21st-century American life.  It’s impossible to sustain loyalties to a welfare state,  to a nation without self-respect, or to the UN, to a mall or product line, or to any of the ideas supported by the idiot persuasions of the political class.  Unrealistic and fantastic, American politics is a silly pantomime of national purpose.  The human response is to find other things worthy of our loyalties.  Organizations of all kinds are our surrogates for the national family we no longer have.

Sometimes in this search for loyalties, things go wrong.  The robed law lords expect loyalty to some codes and not to others, which is why Libby is in jail and Berger is free. It explains a droning dolt like John Conyers and his calls for impeachment, or the free-immigration fanatics whose loyalty has fixed upon abstractions about compassion and not about a mature concept of citizenship.  Politicians are loyal to the frauds of their own propaganda.  The list is very long.  Loyalty is a personal issue, not a national issue.

Treason can only exist where the nation is understood, by its citizens, as a family.  For me, that includes liberals and the crazy left, even if we’re estranged.  I love the flag.  If called upon I would go again, to fight and die for it, anywhere, anytime, at any age, and for everyone who lives under its snap and flutter.   No law requires this of me or anyone else.  The country that offers this dispensation is worthy of our loyalty as nothing else in life can be. 

America’s first War on Terror

Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, then serving as American ambassadors to France and Britain, respectively, met in 1786 in London with the Tripolitan Ambassador to Britain, Sidi Haji Abdul Rahman Adja. [snip] …questioned Ambassador Adja as to the source of the unprovoked animus directed at the nascent United States republic. Jefferson and Adams, in their subsequent report to the Continental Congress, recorded the Tripolitan Ambassador’s justification:

… that it was founded on the Laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as Prisoners, and that every Musselman who should be slain in Battle was sure to go to Paradise.

Thus as Joshua London’s Victory in Tripoli elaborates in lucid prose, an aggressive jihad was already being waged against the United States almost 200 years prior to America becoming a dominant international power in the Middle East. Moreover, these jihad depredations targeting America antedated the earliest vestiges of the Zionist movement by a century, and the formal creation of Israel by 162 years—exploding the ahistorical canard that American support for the modern Jewish state is a prerequisite for jihadist attacks on the United States.

Prevarications about history have the same results as those in science. The pinkies are wrong on global warming as well as history. Altering or deleting inconvenient facts fails to amend history. Adulterated positions may carry the moment, but never the day.

One neither can prove truth wrong, nor fallacy right; obfuscation of facts is merely a temporary position.

In Iraq, we are dallying with the future. As our gunboats crushed the Barbary Pirates, we shall have to repeat that confrontation again on a grander scale. The Marquis of Queensbury or the Geneva Convention rules will not be followed. Prepare thyself!

I’ve written in other places on and about this individual who forced 19^th century France to change some of its ways. Bastiat is a Libertarian first, a “conservative” second; one who can see the damage inflicted by socialized government. Thomas Jefferson used many of Basiat’s ideas in his writings and during his presidency, bringing to law libertarian principles in the young nation. These are the first few paragraphs of this article, far to long to post in its entirety.

What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen^**1

Frédéric Bastiat (1801-1850)

In the economic sphere an act, a habit, an institution, a law produces not only one effect, but a series of effects. Of these effects, the first alone is immediate; it appears simultaneously with its cause; it is seen. The other effects emerge only subsequently; they are not seen; we are fortunate if we foresee them.

There is only one difference between a bad economist and a good one: the bad economist confines himself to the visible effect; the good economist takes into account both the effect that can be seen and those effects that must be foreseen.

Yet this difference is tremendous; for it almost always happens that when the immediate consequence is favorable, the later consequences are disastrous, and vice versa. Whence it follows that the bad economist pursues a small present good that will be followed by a great evil to come, while the good economist pursues a great good to come, at the risk of a small present evil.

The same thing, of course, is true of health and morals. Often, the sweeter the first fruit of a habit, the more bitter are its later fruits: for example, debauchery, sloth, prodigality. When a man is impressed by the effect that is seen and has not yet learned to discern the effects that are not seen, he indulges in deplorable habits, not only through natural inclination, but deliberately.

This explains man’s necessarily painful evolution. Ignorance surrounds him at his cradle; therefore, he regulates his acts according to their first consequences, the only ones that, in his infancy, he can see. It is only after a long time that he learns to take account of the others^**2 Two very different masters teach him this lesson: experience and foresight. Experience teaches efficaciously but brutally. It instructs us in all the effects of an act by making us feel them, and we cannot fail to learn eventually, from having been burned ourselves, that fire burns. I should prefer, in so far as possible, to replace this rude teacher with one more gentle: foresight. For that reason I shall investigate the consequences of several economic phenomena, contrasting those that are seen with those that are not seen. [snip]

There are certain things that people who always live on concrete should not try to identify. This goes for the cutline writer of this photo of the Tour de France. One might look at the photo before naming the botanical specimens in the image.

Riders pass by a corn field near Celles, Belgium, during the 3rd stage of the 94th Tour de France cycling race between Waregem, Belgium, and Compiegne, France, Tuesday July 10, 2007. (AP Photo/Bas Czerwinski)

Of course, this is France!

Marxist Moonbats Move to Motivate Maoist Markets

EAST MONTPELIER — Local warriors in the battle between capital and labor are moving their ops — to China.

[snip] Their ambitious aim is to help mitigate the negative effects of the global market economy model espoused by Gov. James Douglas and the Vermont business leaders who recently concluded a joint prospecting trip to China.
“My fond hope is that I can work with people in trade unions and share my experiences in Western labor-organizing practices and collective bargaining,” David-Friedman says. [snip]

In this political environment, David-Friedman’s activities and analysis are fraught with ironies and subtleties.
As a labor organizer from the world’s leading capitalist country… notes ruefully that most of the students say they have little use for the Marxist worldview that she regards as essential to understanding history and politics. [snip]

They understand your history and politics; they rejected it out of hand.

“Sure, there are sweatshops” and strict limitations on individual freedom, David-Friedman concedes. But there’s much more to China than that, she adds. Communist Party apparatchiks and overseers at Guangzhou University have never attempted to censor her or Stuart’s teaching, David-Friedman points out. “We can say anything we want to in the classroom,” she notes.

As long as it is in the “Little Red Book.”

But China’s communist revolution has gone off the rails, David-Friedman adds. The party “has divorced itself, tragically, from allowing itself to be led by the needs of workers,” she adds. [snip]

The “Radiant Future” that worked so well in the USSR, Sweden, Cuba, and France is now in China’s path. I’m sure they will embrace it.

“In the end, one or the other will triumph. A funeral dirge will be sung over the Soviet republic or over world capitalism.” - Vladimir I. Lenin, 1920

Well Ilyich, the fat lady sang and went home.

“Francesco Sforza became Duke of Milan from being a private citizen because he was armed; his successors, since they avoided the inconveniences of arms, became private citizens after having been dukes.”- - Machiavelli

This from someone who knew his way around power and government. Heeding his advice is instructive to your personal survival as a freeman.