The French have some well known traits: arrogance, not working while complaining about how hard they are working, complaining how low their pay is for not working, striking about having to work too hard, electing spineless leaders that capitulate to bloodthirsty tyrants, and surrendering in the face of adversity, just to name a few.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy does not seem to be cut from the same cloth. In fact, Sarkozy is quickly becoming my favorite Frenchman ever.
Before his election Sarkozy promised to "liquidate the legacy" of the May 1968. That was a defining moment in French history; the moment when conservative morality (religion, patriotism, respect for authority) was replaced with the liberal morality (equality, sexual liberation, human rights) that dominates French society today.
Sarkozy wined and dined union leaders, but did not back down on wanting to make railway, electricity and gas workers work 40 years before being eligible for retirement, rather than the 37½ years that they are now required to work before gaining full pension. His predecessor, Jacques Chirac, attempted similar pension reforms in his first year of office back in '95. After three weeks of strikes that paralyzed the country, Chirac backed down and never attempted anything so bold again.
True to form, transportation unions went on strike and were soon joined by students and civil servants. But after a mere ten days the union opposition is crumbling and it appears Sarkozy has won this round. The difference this time is that the citizens of France were on Sarkozy's side, not the striking worker's. Plus, Sarkozy is negotiating, not trying to strong arm the unions into compliance, offering pay raises and other perks.
The result is that Sarkozy has won an enormous victory, giving him the momentum to take on his next target for reform:
But Sarkozy does not plan to back down on the civil servants' other complaint: his plans to streamline France's bloated state sector and public administration, the biggest and costliest in Europe. Next year one in three public sector workers who retire will not be replaced. At least 11,000 education jobs will go. Civil servants this week said they would be prepared to strike again.
Even though Sarkozy didn't play hardball like Reagan did with air traffic controllers or Thatcher did with coal miners, he his still receiving some very impressive kudos from certain quarters. The best quote comes from New Europe:
Maybe it’s still only the first round, but French President Nicolas Sarkozy came close to knocking out the striking rail workers union when they suspended their walkout in the face of his intransigence, unlike his predecessor, the weak-in-the-knees effete milquetoast, Jacques Chirac, who caved in to a similar strike in 1995 faster than you could say “sacre bleu!”
Sarkozy is now headed to China. Let us all hope that he is just as successful as he tries to get the Chinese to allow a fair monetary exchange rate.
I generally have no use for philosophers (those living today, anyway), nor Frenchmen. In fact, if I could go back in time and kill one individual I would have a hard time coming up with a better candidate than Jean-Jacques Rousseau. (Yes, he was Swiss, but he adopted France and they embraced him to the point of having a revolution and there are statues of the crazy old pervert in town squares all over France to this day.)
So you can imagine what my opinion of a living French philosopher would normally be.
But a commentary by André Glucksmann has me reconsidering that position. His work is too good to excerpt, so go read You said 'war', Mr Kouchner, and you were not mistaken...
Brilliant.
Quote of the Day:
Weakness and renunciation do not lead to peace. They lead to war.
— French President Nicolas Sarkozy to UN General Assembly
The back story:
In mid-September, French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner was almost Bush-like as he used plain language to warn against a nuclear Tehran, warning the world "to prepare for the worst... and the worst means war". Who would have thought a French diplomat could be so, uh, un-Frenchly plain spoken?
Of course, Kouchner started taking flack immediately. Russian Acting Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov confronted Kouchner, saying that neither military force nor unilateral sanctions were acceptable in dealing with Iran's nuclear program. Italian Foreign Minister Massimo D'Alema said sanctions must be given time and a war in the region "wouldn't resolve the problem and would only create new tragedies and new dangers." (Coincidently, Italy is Iran's leading trading partner in the EU.)
The head of the French Foreign Affairs Commission declared Kouchner's statement was "inappropriate and untimely" as there are still many economic sanctions that can be imposed before making dire threats (i.e., there's a lot of cajoling and appeasement "diplomacy" that can make it look like they're not total cowards before the stern talk has to start and somebody ends up looking like a "cowboy").
Meanwhile, Middle East pundits are labeling Sarkozy the "new poodle," taking Tony Blair's place (read the article, it's actually quite funny).
Last week, Sarkozy went on French television and appeared to back away from the war-drum beating rhetoric of his foreign minister, stating that while a nuclear-armed Iran was "unacceptable", he hoped a mix of negotiations and sanctions would persuade Iran to drop its nuclear ambitions. But he ratcheted up the sanction rhetoric, declaring that if the UN Security Council can't apply sanctions, then the EU should come up with their own.
The US has been pressing for additional sanctions since June, as the previous UN resolution (demanding Iran suspend uranium enrichment) expired in May. So the addition of the French voice to this demand is welcome.
The Economist declares that the French are "palpably impatient" with the Security Council as Russia and China are stalling, supporting the International Atomic Energy Agency's agreement with Iran to complete inspections. This plan, by the way, is really just a series of talks that could stretch into December even as Iran adds centrifuges to its Natanz enrichment plant, nearing the 3,000 needed to start producing usable quantities of nuclear fuel. Nice plan, eh?
Yesterday, Sarkozy gave a long interview to the NYT and IHT, again downplaying the possibility of war. But he again put tough new EU sanctions on the table.
When Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad addressed the UN General Assembly today, he defiantly declared that Iran would ignore any further UN resolutions. He said that Iran would continue to work with the International Atomic Energy Agency. [Thinking back to the months preceding the liberation of Iraq, I recall my amusement at the IAEA being led around the Iraqi countryside like the Keystone Cops chasing Buster Keaton. No wonder Ahmadinejad wants to work with them.]
When French President Sarkozy addressed the UN General Assembly today, he made a wide-ranging speech, but again stressing the need for action in the form of firm sanctions. While reiterating Iran's right to nuclear energy (he even offered to help Iran achieve that goal), Sarkozy added there would be no world peace if the international community "shows weakness in the face of the proliferation of nuclear weapons."
Newsweek describes recent events as a "revolution in [French] foreign policy that could transform the transatlantic relationship."
What is really playing out is that lines are being drawn in the sand, and they aren't exactly new lines. Gordon Chang at Contentions says it well:
Russia and China this week have made it clear they will side with Iran until the theocrats announce they have the bomb—all the while saying they are defending the concept of joint action. As Thomas Friedman says, we are entering the post-post-cold-war period. And in that period the West has no choice but to realize that the world’s authoritarian nations are banding together, and Russia and China are undermining the concept of collective security. Whether we like it or not, we are now engaged in a series of global struggles, with neither Beijing nor Moscow on our side.
As for me, I'm starting to like France again. I may even start buying French wine again.
Another Palestinian terrorist claims that the French medical reports state that Yasser Arafat died of AIDS. If true, then the French are protecting yet another terrorist, although this time it is a dead terrorist and it is only his reputation. Still, how very French.
The French may be close to actually improving their lethargic economy by removing oppressive taxation on overtime pay (anything over 35 hours), a measure championed by new president Nicolas Sarkozy:
Under the overtime measure, workers would not pay income tax or social charges on overtime hours, and employers would pay reduced payroll fees. . . .
The measure is aimed at weakening, without abolishing, the 35-hour workweek, a landmark measure introduced by a Socialist government in 1999 to boost job creation. Opponents say it has dragged down growth and not increased employment, but it remains dear to many French leftists.
Silly leftists. How does removing the incentive to work help anybody?
No, really. I was in the market for one until I watched this:
Hat Tip to non-blogging Advised by Wolves.
The MSM is reporting that France is "mostly calm" except for "minor skirmishes" on the anniversary of the riots that spread across the country one year ago.
Tell that to the woman who is lying in the hospital with burns over nearly 60 percent of her body. She was a passenger on a bus that a gang of Muslim youths torched last night.
In all, last night:
Here's an example of the some of the charming behavior shown in one "minor skirmish":
‘‘Four guys attacked Bus 346,’’ said witness Thierry Ange, 19. ‘‘They made everyone get off, then they hit a woman and dragged out the bus driver by his tie,’’ then torched the bus with a gasoline bomb in a bottle, he said.
Make no mistake: just because the MSM considers the burning of a few hundred cars and attacks on policemen as trivial news items, this is serious business. Imagine being in your home with bands of masked and armed youths roaming the streets.
Also imagine if it happened here. The MSM would be crucifying us.
. . . comes courtesy of my second-favorite comic, Get Fuzzy.
And while we're on the subject of the French, their Finance Minister has determined that the 35-hour work week has added €100 billion () to the French national debt.
That's £67 billion or $126 billion U.S. And yet:
The 35-hour working week, introduced by the former Socialist Prime Minister, Lionel Jospin, in 2000, is at the centre of the debate ahead of next year’s presidential election.
The leading Socialist contender, Ségolène Royal, and her two challengers, Laurent Fabius and Dominique Strauss-Kahn, have all called for the 35-hour week to be extended to all workers.
It remains to be seen as to just how bad the violence will be in the coming days.
Loosely based on a timeline in the LA Times
One hundred and twelve. That's how many cars are going up in flames in France every day, even after the promises by the French government made in response to last year's riots.
Worse yet, police and emergency services have been the target of over 4,000 attacks so far this year.
Before next week’s anniversary of the Clichy riots, the violence and despair on the estates are again to the fore. Despite a promised renaissance, little has changed, and the lid could blow at any moment.
The figures are stark. An average of 112 cars a day have been torched across France so far this year and there have been 15 attacks a day on police and emergency services. Nearly 3,000 police officers have been injured in clashes this year. Officers have been badly injured in four ambushes in the Paris outskirts since September. Some police talk of open war with youths who are bent on more than vandalism.
“The thing that has changed over the past month is that they now want to kill us,” said Bruno Beschizza, the leader of Synergie, a union to which 40 per cent of officers belong. Action Police, a hardline union, said: “We are in a civil war, orchestrated by radical Islamists.”
In an ambush last week, three policemen were attacked by up to 50 youths wielding stones, bats and tear gas after a car darted out to block their path.
"Many youths, many arsonists, many vandals behind the violence do it to cries of 'Allah Akbar' (God is Great) when our police cars are stoned," he said in an interview. ...
"First, it was a rock here or there. Then it was rocks by the dozen. Now, they're leading operations of an almost military sort to trap us," said Loic Lecouplier, a police union official in the Seine-Saint-Denis region north of Paris. "These are acts of war."
Today, 30 youths stopped a bus in broad daylight, forced everyone to get off, set it on fire and then stoned the firemen who responded.
A high school teacher has been forced into hiding, fearing for his life, after he wrote an editorial saying Muslim fundamentalists are trying to muzzle Europe's democratic liberties. [What's the opposite of irony?]
It is feared that the anniversary of last year's November riots will see violence escalate to an orgy of destruction. The National Syndicate of Police Officers (SNOP) is demanding that reinforcements be deployed where last year's riots originated, because "the delinquents in certain housing estates are preparing to violently 'celebrate' (last year's) events."
So great is the fear about a renewal of violence, that Interior Nicolas Sarkozy said this week he will draw up a bill that would make it a crime - rather than a misdemeanor, as it is currently - to attack police officers, gendarmes or fire-fighters and will propose a law to treat juvenile repeat offenders as adults in court.
Technorati tags: France, War on Islamofacism, Rewards of Appeasement, Muslim Violence, Islamic Jihad.
Having a black news anchor for six weeks is a big deal in France:
In a country with more blacks on its national soccer team (13 of the 23 players) than in the 577-member National Assembly (10, none from the mainland), Roselmack's sudden celebrity has highlighted how rare it still is here to see minorities in prominent posts.It has also given a boost to France's growing black empowerment movement.
They don't seem to have a grasp on that whole liberté, égalité, fraternité thing just yet. Oh well, it's only been 217 years.
Recently declassified documents reveal that Nixon was considering using nuclear bombs to bring an end to the Vietnam war in an operation code named "Duck Hook":
But Nixon abandoned Duck Hook shortly after Oct. 2. Both his secretaries of Defense and State, Melvin Laird and William Rogers, opposed the plan. Nixon apparently also began to doubt whether he could sustain public support for the three- to six-month period the plan might require. He also concluded that his military threats against the North Vietnamese had no effect.
Threats are rarely useful. For instance, French threats of economic sanctions against Iran. Uh, OK, French threats of anything (except surrender — those are always taken seriously).
Indeed, the time and place to use nukes in Vietnam was in 1953 in a place called Dien Bien Phu. The French were trying for a decisive military victory out in the middle of nowhere. Instead, General Vo Nguyen Giap conducted a brilliant 56-day siege that ended with at least 2,200 dead Frenchmen (including many of the elite Foreign Legion) and a French surrender of 11,000 men (of which a little over 4,000 survived captivity).
If the French had accepted the two tactical nukes that Eisenhower offered, history would have turned out vastly different.
Just as an aside, fourteen years later General Giap tried to do the same thing to an American Marine base called Khe Sanh. 205 American soldiers were killed while ten to fifteen thousand Viet Min died before they gave up eleven weeks later and trickled back into the jungle. When the NVA shut down the airstrip, the French had resorted to high-altitude parachute drops resulting in a great many supplies, ammunition and even vital intelligence landing outside the base and falling into enemy hands. At Khe Sanh, the U.S. Army 109th Quartermaster Company used the Low Altitude Parachute Extraction System (LAPES) with great success. The seige for Khe Sanh was a great American military victory (achieved without dipping into the nuclear arsenal) that was turned into a major North Vietnamese propaganda win by our Fourth Estate.
Technorati Tags: Richard Nixon, Vietnam, Nuclear Weapons, Military History, Dien Bien Phu, Khe Sanh, History, Famous French Military Defeats, Famous American Military Victories, Fourth Estate Equals Fifth Column.
As seen by the Germans:
As seen by the French:
As seen by the Italians:
As seen by the Americans:
As reported by the Press:
If anyone knows where these came from, please let me know so I can either credit the source or remove it (if copyrighted).
Update: I finally found these on the UK media at The Register, along with some additions:
From a Japanese Gamer's perspective :
But wait! The Frenchman, he is so brave! He saves the Italian's life!:
It's Hammer time!:
But this one show real imagination, from Awful Forums (where there is much more):
Headbutts in Anime:
OK, so it was more of a shoe toss in anime.
Technorati Tags: Humor, World Cup Headbutt, Zinedine Zidane Headbutt.
Since their failure to support us in Iraq, France-bashing has become almost as popular of a sport amongst the American punditry as America-bashing is en vogue amongst their French counterparts.In this, McClellan implies that bashing the French is a recent affectation, when quite the opposite is true. One of the most beloved American authors, Mark Twain, did so frequently with quips like, "France has usually been governed by prostitutes", "French are the connecting link between man and the monkey", and my personal favorite:
A dead Frenchman has many good qualities, many things to recommend him; many attractions--even innocencies. Why cannot we have more of these?Even Saturday Night Live agrees that it is time that we "got back to hating the French".
With that in mind, let's first tear apart McClellan's reasons for supporting France, and then list a few reasons for why we should continue to loathe the French.
McClellan's Reasons to root for the French:
Reason One: The Fourth of July
While it is true, as McClellan says, that France gave "French blood, treasure, and frigates", let's examine why.
King Charles XVI made few decision on his own, and no issue of any import bothered his dull mind for long. But his foreign minister, Charles Gravier, Comte de Vergennes, hated England with an intensity that rivals the most passionate anti-French American of today.
Nor was it a one-sided agreement: in return for military support the fledgling nation agreed to engage in commerce, trading agricultural products and raw materials for manufactured goods. In other words, France would now have access to the very thing that had given Britain its great wealth without all the trouble of trying to rule a populace across an ocean.
War between France and England was seen as inevitable, so by supporting the colonies the French hoped to divert English resources. Plus, should war erupt, there was the hope of carving off the West India Islands which was in British hands.
As for the Marquis de Lafayette (which McClellan mentions), his (and other idealistic young Frenchmen's) participation in the Revolution was expressly forbidden. Indeed, upon hearing that he was preparing to leave a warrant for his arrest was issued. So don't thank the French for giving us a general.
In fact, students of the Revolution know that France acted throughout with the most selfish of reasons — there was no altruism involved. Knowledge of France's motives is really reason number one to dislike the French.
Reason Two: The Statue of Liberty
The statue is, as McClellan says, "no ordinary gift". Yet it is hardly equivalent to the $2.3 billion that the United States "loaned" France under the Marshall Plan. I know that Britain finally paid off its debt (in May of this year), but has France?
Reason Three: The Middle of the United States
Ah, the bargain of the Louisiana Purchase. Yep, a good deal that stunned Jefferson and his negotiators. They had been willing to pay up to $10 million for New Orleans alone, but Napoleon offered them all of the territory to which the French laid claim for a mere $15 million, instantly doubling the size of our nation. Why?
Napoleon was losing control of Saint-Domingue (the Haiti of today) to a slave rebellion and thus didn't have the forces to occupy and control the territory. He was faced with a choice: give up his dream of a New World empire or give up his dream of conquering England. As war with England was deemed inevitable (as was always the case with the French), it seemed likely that England would just take advantage of the conflict and take the New World territory anyway (via Canada). So why not? After all, they had given it to Spain once and only recently taken it back. And one-quarter of the money was poured right back into the American economy: 20 million francs was to be used to cover French debts to American arms producers who had suffered during the Franco-British war.
But the bottom line is that the sale had little nothing to do with helping America, and everything to do with establishing an empire. A year after the sale, Napoleon Bonaparte crowned himself Emperor. Motives again, which upgrades reason number one from a reason to dislike the French to a full-blown reason to hate the French, especially given the fact that the money helped finance a war on all of Europe.
Reason Four: World War I
Yes, it is true that the "French people fought for four years as the anvil to Kaiser Wilhelm's war hammer," and that this was tragic. But for this I should root for their soccer team? By that reasoning, I should take the side of the Iranians for having fought and died in chemical attacks perpetuated by Saddam Hussein. No thanks.
Reason Five: The Tricolor
The Tricolor marched against the imperial ambitions of the Second Reich, against the hatred of the Third Reich, and it stood, under NATO, against the Hammer and Sickle of the Soviet Union.The Tricolor flew over ships that attacked our merchant ships and over soldiers that folded to the Third Reich in record time. The Tricolor flew over the collaborationist and counterrevolutionary Vichy France regime.
Today, the Tricolor stands with any tyrant willing to fill the pockets of the prostitutes in charge of France. It stands for mealymouthed diplomacy that has results in massive grants and concessions to anyone that threatens to build a missile or attack another country. It no longer deserves our respect. As far as I am concerned, the Tricolor and everything it has stood for (or not stood for) is reason number two to hate the French.
And so a review of McClellan's reasons gives us two solid reasons to hate the French. But wait, there's more!
AlphaPatriot's Reasons to Hate the French:
Reason One: French Privateers
French perfidy came early in American history: by the summer of 1797, France had seized 300 American ships and broken off diplomatic relations, demanding bribes and an outrageous loan to the government just to begin negotiations (resulting in the rhetoric, "Millions for defense, sir, but not one cent for tribute!" How typically American!).
All of which led to the "Quasi-War", the build up of the tiny American Navy, the reestablishment of the Marine Corps and, due to widespread hostility towards the French, the passing of the infamous Alien and Sedition Acts.
During the two years of the Quasi-War about 85 French ships were taken as prizes, quite an accomplishment for the tiny American Navy, and some victories were spectacular.
Reason Two: Rousseau
Although born in Switzerland, the French have embraced Jean-Jacques Rousseau as one of their own and you can find statues of him littering the landscape throughout France.
Rousseau can arguably be blamed for communism because of his work The Social Contract which documented the concepts of "general will" and the belief that private property leads to greed, competition, vanity, inequality, and vice.
Rousseau inflicted , significant harm to educational philosophy with the publication of Émile.
Rousseau even brought death and destruction to his adopted homeland. Napoleon is said to have exclaimed, "If there had been no Rousseau, there would have been no Revolution, and without the Revolution, I should have been impossible."
Even if you don't blame the French Revolution on Rousseau, there is little doubt that he made it worse. Indeed, Maximilien Robespierre was a fanatical devotee of Rousseau's social theories, reputedly sleeping with a copy of Rousseau's Social Contract at his side. One can remember Robespierre as one of the principal architects of the Reign of Terror, which ended with his arrest and subsequent guillotining. During the eleven months of "The Terror" over 200,000 French citizens were arrested, 10,000 of those died in pestiferous jails and 17,000 death sentences were handed down.
Rousseau was an adulterer, put all five of his children into orphanages (where most children died), was sexist, and eventually went insane and died. Yet we are still saddled with his horrid legacy. Worst of all, I had to read five of his books in one semester of my lone PoliSci course.
Aside: I have it on good authority that admiration for Rousseau is the reason that we have the phrase "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness". The original read, "life, liberty and property". Think of how the eminent domain issue would be influenced had Rousseauian thought not intruded.
So while Rousseau has given us many, many reasons to hate the French, we will only count him as one.
Reason Three: Napoleon
Right smack in the middle of the Reign of Terror, the "new" French promote Napoleon Bonaparte to Brigadier General — and the man wasn't even French (nor did he ever learn to speak French particularly well!). But by 1800 he was a virtual dictator as First Consul.
And even though the French had just gone through a bloody revolution in the name of liberté, égalité, fraternité, they up and elected Napoleon Consulate for Life by 1802, after which he crowns himself Emperor of France in 1804. Beginning in 1803 and continuing for eleven years he waged war across Europe, crushing 70 million Europeans under his tyrannical heel.
Sure, he was eventually defeated and exiled to Elba. But when Napoleon showed up in Paris nine months later he once again took power without firing a shot. Yes, the French inflicted Napoleon on the world not once, but twice (but we will only count Napoleon as a whole as a single reason to hate the French).
And so started the Hundred Days, which ended at Waterloo. Thank heavens for the Brits.
Reason Four: Dien Bien Phu
The Viet Minh arose to throw off a hundred years of French colonialism and in 1946 the French creates a puppet government for South Vietnam. What followed was a long, expensive and bloody campaign to keep their colony until, in 1953, the French tried for a decisive military victory to strengthen their position at peace talks scheduled for the next year.
The place they chose was Dien Bien Phu, located in a remote Vietnamese valley near the border with Laos and China. But instead of a decisive victory, General Vo Nguyen Giap conducted a brilliant 56-day siege that ended with a French surrender of 11,000 men (of which a little over 4,000 survived captivity).
The French showed that a third-world country could defeat a western nation, giving hope to would-be communists everywhere.
And as a result, the French negotiated and withdrew their forces from Indochina, leaving a gap that Eisenhower felt the need to fill. If only the French hadn't whimped out and accepted the two tactical nukes that Eisenhower offered.
Reason Five: Vichy Kills Allies
It's one thing to fold under a Nazi blitzkrieg and set up a collaborationist government. It is quite another to spill Allied blood to keep on being occupied by a monster.
In 1941 a mainly-Australian Allied force entered Syria to prevent the Nazis from using it as a base for for attacks on Allied forces in Egypt and to protect the oil supplies coming from Iraq.
The Vichy forces, including elements of the French Foreign Legion, were instructed to fight against any Free French cause and did so passionately. Vichy forces lost about 1,000 soldiers. The Australians suffered about 1,500 casualties, including 416 deaths.
In 1942, an invasion of North Africa by U.S. and British forces is planned. Operation Torch was launched and (predictably) the French forces fired on us.
The French Resistance took control of key locations in Algiers in the hours before the invasion. However, American Consul Robert Murphy was unable to convince General Alphonse Juin (the senior French Army officer in North Africa) or Admiral François Darlan (commander of all Vichy French forces) to side with the allies and the Vichy retook almost all the positions by morning. (Of course, the entire city surrendered by six that evening when the Americans came to town.)
French ground forces resisted for three days, causing about 3000 casualties on each side and the French navy stubbornly fought on behalf of their Nazi master for several days.
Reason Six: Oil for Palaces
This one is simple enough: Chirac supported the Oil for Palaces program even though he knew it was crooked. He opposed the liberation of Iraq because it affected the French purse. To hell with starving children or the fact that their daddies were being fed into plastic shredders or disappearing into mass graves in the desert. There was money to be made!
Reason Seven: My Experience in Paris
I spent nine hours in Paris and it was fantastic. I would live there, if not for the people.
At one point we jumped on a crowded bus, at which point I came face-to-face with Parisians. Or, I should say, nose to armpit.
The rumors of poor personal hygiene are absolutely true. I held my nose for two blocks before stumbling off, gasping, eyes streaming, forcing my traveling companions to walk the rest of the way because I simply could not take it!
Add to this the incredible French arrogance, the fact that they create a French word for every new concept rather than accepting foreign words into their language ("diskette" is "diskette" in every country except France), and those really really tiny portions they serve and we have another ample reason to hate the French.
Conclusion:
OK, I've given nine good reasons to hate the French (two from McClellan and seven of my own. I figure the comments section will yield at least one more good reason to fill out the ten that I put in the title.
Technorati Tags: France, Arrogance of the French, Mark Twain Hated the French, Reasons to Hate the French.
"Jews are fed up," said a league member named Maxime who refused to give his full name, saying he feared for his safety. "We've been nice for 30 years. Now, we gather and fight back."Who can blame them?
Meanwhile, a French court has linked French President Jacques Chirac to a military coup in Africa:
In a damning ruling, the Paris Criminal Tribunal said the French authorities had given at least tacit approval to the 1995 coup led by Bob Denard, the best-known French soldier of fortune.This is not surprising to anyone familiar with the man that allegedly used taxpayer funds to help his reelection campaign.
But now we are supposed to feel sorry for the two-faced, tyrant-loving, money-pocketing, cheese-eating surrender monkey: he's "worn out and a little depressed":
After a difficult year in which his countrymen rejected the European constitution, arson and violence terrorised city streets and students shut down universities and schools, Paul-Henri Cugnenc said the 73-year-old president was worn out.On top of it all, the French-based aviation company Airbus is way behind on being able to deliver the new A380 superjumbo passenger jet because of electrical wiring problems (for the second time), which will cost the company billions in lost contracts and penalty payments. Quantas was promised delivery beginning in October and is demanding compensation because the seven-month delay.
All this is causing quite a commotion in the halls of French government, with Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin calling Socialist Party leader Francois Hollande a coward (twice), which made Socialist lawmakers "leap" to their feet and shout, "resign, resign!" at Villepin.
But not to worry, the French government is pomising action, even to the point of considering reneging on their deal with the Germans in which they promised not to interfere with how the company is run [perfidy comes so easy to the French]. Of course, that isn't sitting too well with the Germans:
"The French have finally got to understand that this cannot be a state-run but a normal business," an insider said. "This cannot drag on for six months or a year as there are three major problems to be sorted out which cannot wait for a political solution."Indeed, it isn't exactly being run like a "normal business". The company is behind on development yet still hiking the price 4.7 per cent to $316 million before the first plane has even rolled off the assembly line! This following the news that top Airbus management is under investigation for dumping stock just before the latest delays were announced.
Finally, adding insult to injury is the wine situation in Europe. Wine consumption is falling while "New World" wine imports are soaring. The EU ag commissioner is predicting that Europe will become a net importer of wine!
In the past 15 years, EU wine exports increased by 20 percent, while U.S. exports have risen fourfold and Chilean exports, 19-fold, according to Boel.This is in spite of the fact that the EU spends a half-billion euros each year to distill surplus wine into ethanol for cars and factories ("a huge waste of money" according to the above-mentioned ag commissioner).The EU also produces wine for which there is no market. Excess production is forecast to reach 15 percent of total output by 2011 if nothing is done, she said.
"Stocks are already the equivalent of a year's production. I'm afraid to say that the 'wine lake' is a reality."
Hmmm, perhaps that can put that 'wine lake' in EuroDisney. That'll be sure to bring in the French tourists.
Update: Davids Medienkritik has a great post on the Airbus fiasco.
Technorati Tags: Jews in France, Crooked Jacques Chirac, Justice for Chirac, Airbus, Quantas, French Perfidy, Dominique de Villepin, Francois Hollande, French Wine Industry, EU Wine.
After a decade of free-fall hipster pants, bared midriffs, bras on show under sheer dresses and naked legs, fashion has started on its great coverup. Forget girlie frills and celebrities flashing flesh on the red carpet. The typical outfit in the current international fashion collections is in any color as long as it is black with a silhouette long, lean and layered.Black capes and dark flowing robe-like dresses are the hallmarks of the new fashion. And though the designers attempt to deny the motivation publically, there's no doubt that intimidation plays a part:The mood is now for a chaste sobriety, with sturdy fabrics, thick leggings and even ankle-length hemlines.
The world's leading designers have no doubts as to where fashion is headed as they talk about "restraint" and "sobriety."
"We have talked about the Muslim- ization in fashion, but I don't want to be quoted," says one Paris-based designer, referring to conversations between himself and his partner. "I remember what an idiot Tom Ford looked when he raved about Hamid Karzai's robes, with all that was going on in Iran. It just makes fashion seem so dumb."Imagine, making fashion "seem so dumb". Out of the mouth of babes and fools.
Marc Jacobs, founding father of the girl-woman aesthetic, shocked the audience at his New York show last month with hefty knits, leg warmers and thick layers of clothes shrouding the body.Pants under skirts. Thick layers "shrouding the body". Somber colors."The leg thing was a conscious decision," says Jacobs. "Early on I knew I wanted to show pants under skirts - and I didn't want to do pink and frills."
Marc Jacobs has declared that sexy femininity is dead.
As Karl Lagerfeld, whose New York show debut featured entirely long, dark, layered clothes, puts it: "If you read the daily papers, you are not in the mood for pink and green."After decades of mini-skirts, hip-huggers, hot pants, ever-smaller bikinis, French-cut panties, see-through blouses and bare-midriffs, suddenly the fashion world is repulsed by the female form. Suddenly it is "vulgar" to expose skin.Various influences are pushing fashion away from bare-it-all vulgarity - not least that there is nowhere to go but up from low-slung pants and strapless gowns. But among themselves, thoughtful designers are putting the change of mood into a different context, as they talk about the "Muslim-ization" of fashion. They are referring both to drawing, deliberately or unconsciously, on a culture of female sobriety. In a world clearly in turmoil, cocooning clothes are a response.
With the wearing of Muslim headscarves in school an abrasive issue in France and after the violent reaction in the Muslim world to the Danish cartoons considered disrespectful to the prophet Mohammed, few designers want to speculate openly about the influence of visual exposure to constant news reports on the Muslim world. Jacobs describes how his multicultural references included snap shots of Arab women with only eyes uncovered, but that he deliberately effaced the shrouded Muslim women in the corner of the collage.
Nobody is really suggesting that the winter 2006 shows are covering the body for political reasons, although Olivier Saillard, program curator for fashion at the Paris Musée des Arts Décoratifs, said at this week's Yohji Yamamoto show (where the clothes were over-size, body-concealing and with giant crosses, as for crusaders) that "fashion is much more political" than it was 20 years ago.After defining women's clothes as tiny, sexy little fashion, suddenly they are no longer "women's clothes".The Japanese Yamamoto, a designer of poetic, romantic clothes for a quarter of a century, said backstage: "I am very bored with tiny, sexy little fashion and with T-shirts and jeans - I want women's clothes."
Asked about the Christian symbol, he said: "I don't know what it meant. I don't know why I did it."
And speaking of "making fashion seem dumb", get a load of that hat. What was Yamamoto thinking?
Riccardo Tischi, 31, the designer for Givenchy has a similar outlook. His January couture show featured the ankle-length hemlines which gave a chic sobriety to his line.Yes, I'm sure his sisters' dresses dragged the ground in southern Italy, just like Sophia Loren's did when she grew up there. And I'm sure they wore big furry hats, too."Everything starts from your background," says the designer, who comes from a modest and traditional Catholic family in southern Italy, where he is the only son among eight sisters.
On the other hand, we don't want to offend anyone. After all, they might go on a rampage and burn some cars.
End note: I realize that not all of the designers that participate in Paris fashion shows are French, but I couldn't resist the post title.
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