We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
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De Great White Colonial Adminstrator, Tony Blair, him be most worried about stirring up de
Champagne is a French drink and so it seems only right that the French have a right to find other uses for their bubbly then drinking or exporting it. There is always a possibility of holding a few bottles ransom to make your employer give in to your demands. Striking is so last year, mon cheri.
Angry workers at a French champagne manufacturer are threatening to dump large loads of champagne in a protest over the uncertain future of their firm, Bricout-Delbeck. Noel Sainzelle, a worker from the CGT trade union was heard yesterday:
We’re fed up and we’re determined. If recent mistakes are not corrected, we will destroy some of the stock.
Way to go. That really is going to help the company that employs you.
Reuters reports that staff at Bricout-Delbeck have seized six million to seven million champagne bottles and 800,000 bottles of the firm’s not yet fully manufactured wine stock, estimated to be worth about 200 million pounds. Several dozen workers at the company in the eastern French champagne producing region have already destroyed 300 litres of not fully manufactured stock.
The champagne apocalypse hangs on a court decision on the firm’s future in November. Bricout-Delbeck was purchased by a U.S. group earlier this year for the symbolic sum of one euro, but was declared bankrupt in April. Market leaders Moet-et-Chandon and Vranken-Pommery then launched a new plan for the firm, offering to take on 95 of the 133 employees and some stock and production facilities. The firm’s previous owners have appealed the plan and a court decision is due on November 13. The delay and uncertainty sparking the protest by staff.
I do not have more detail about the ‘Champagne Affair’. I appreciate the distress of the employees over their future and their right to protest. However, ruining the business of the company that they work for strikes me a bit short-sighted and ultimately self-defeating. But who knows, if they fulfill the threat, the vintage may become extraordinarily expensive due to its rarity. Markets work in mysterious ways…
The ‘fraudster’ meaning, of course, Jacques Chirac. The new president of the European Central Bank is M. Jean-Claude Trichet and buried away at the foot of an old news report is this gem:
Mr Trichet’s nomination was made possible earlier this week when he was cleared of involvement in the Credit Lyonnais banking scandal in the 1990s. He was one of nine men on trial for their part in the affair, which culminated in a €31bn ($33.7bn) bailout by the government.
That is more than £21,000,000,000! For one bank. Nine people. I can just hear them: “Bah! Nick Leeson! “Betsygate” indeed! You English drive your minis with your Benny Hill and your Michael Caine, stealing a few gold bars in Milan and think you’re so marvellous! Hah!”
The Crédit Lyonnais bank ‘affair’ included a massive fraud including loans being made to friends of the late president François Mitterand. At least one of them got a few months in jail to my knowledge. A concerted effort was made to delay the appointment of a new ECB president until M. Trichet’s problems could be dealt with. Ironically, the French verb for to cheat is tricher which is pronounced exactly the same as our new Euro bank president’s name. A very suitable friend for M. Jacques Chirac. The president whose unofficial re-election campaign slogan was Vote for the fraudster, not the fascist! but who has avoided judicial processes by virtue of presidential immunity from prosecution. So much in common for them to talk about.
Now let us assume that M. Trichet were the innocent victim of devious bank subordinates who stole £21,000 million. Personally, I find such a degree of stupidity fantastic: the guy could scarcely have enough brain cells to know how to breathe. Is this really the calibre of executive to put in charge of an EU institution?
A couple of other things worry me. What did the other European leaders think they were doing when none of then vetoed the appointment of Trichet? Perhaps Mr Blair really is a closet hater of the euro – I hope so. And if the currency markets are not dumping euros for US dollars before M. Chirac’s friends get their pillaging underway… what do they know about what the Federal Reserve guys are up to?
French anti-terror police have arrested five people suspected of links with the Real IRA. This is the splinter group of the IRA that is opposed to the peace process (such as it may be) and has been blamed for a series of attacks since breaking away from the IRA. The most serious was the 1998 Omagh bombing, which killed 29 people and was the worst single atrocity in 30 years of violence.
The suspects were all French nationals and they are suspected of involvement in a support network for the Irish group. They were held after police discovered a cache of weapons and ammunition outside the ferry port of Dieppe.
Okay, hands up all those people who did not see this coming:
France faces a year of turbulent and possibly explosive politics after a tactical alliance was formed at the weekend between two parties of a resurgent far left.
Mainstream parties will go into three important polls next year, with a spluttering economy, rising unemployment, a continuing menace from the far-right and an extreme left which is united and powerful for the first time in 30 years.
In an opinion poll published yesterday, after two leading Trotskyist parties agreed to fight regional and European elections together next spring, 31 per cent of French people said that they would “consider” voting for the far left.
One of the parties, the Ligue Communiste Revolutionnaire (LCR), has doubled its membership in the past 18 months, as young French people, seduced by the anti-globalisation movement and cynical about conventional politics, flocked to the extremes.
France is going down. It may well be too late to prevent this national self-immolation and were it not for their force du frappe that would be that. A tragic historical footnote but no more.
But will anyone be able to rest easy in the knowledge that a substantial nuclear arsenal has fallen into the hands of Les Moonbats? I just hope that someone, somewhere in the Anglosphere defence establishment is drawing up a contingency plan to deal with this. After all, we know for sure that they exist and the task of locating them should not prove too difficult.
Sylvain Galineau at Chicago Boyz, who refer to us affectionately(?) as Les Samiz, thus imbuing us with confidence to comment on matters Françaises, has a fast-paced and insightful analysis of a backlash against the French establishment’s intellectual jihad.
The French intellectual spectrum has narrowed considerably in the past twenty years. Fourteen years of socialism, following the emasculation of the Right in 1981 by Mitterand, control of the main media outlets by former 1968 hippies and radicals, and a generalized popular addiction to state handouts have produced an extremely poor, predictable, rarefied environment where political correctness rules and little dissent is effectively accepted or tolerated as such.
Enter a bookshop and books by Chomsky, Krugman, Moore or Clinton are displayed prominently, available in their French edition weeks after they come out in the U.S. Good luck finding Julian Simon or Bjorn Lomborg in French, or anything that seriously and thoroughly challenges the daily Litany.
Combine such intellectually emasculated existence with the political elite of continental proportions and what you get is staid, bland, bitter, hateful and self-aggrandising public discourse. Wait, does not that remind you of someplace?
This generally dull, stultifying, suffocating homogeneity of thought is disturbing more and more people, as they grasp daily with the unintended consequences of social-engineering train wrecks and struggle to keep up with the increasing scale of governmental hypocrisy. One day, Chirac opposes a US intervention in Iraq on “principle”, as being “illegal” and “immoral”. Six months later, the very same government votes a UN resolution making the same intervention legal and legitimate, post-facto. After criticizing the “simplism” and “dangerous folly” or America’s defense strategy, the same French government then updates its nuclear dissuasion policy to include rogue states either equipped with, or seeking WMDs, and a study of pre-emptive strikes using mini-nukes. One day health care is an “obvious and necessary mission of the state”; the next, after a heatwave kills thousands while officials and doctors are tanning their noodle on the beach and already limited nursing staff rests at home courtesy of the 35-hour week, it is the “responsibility of each and everyone of us”.
Read the whole thing including a further comment by Sylvain in the comments section.
Nothing like a nice bit of Frog-bashing to fire up the commentariat and get the weekend off to a good start.
Alstom, builder of high speed trains (TGV), nuclear plants and cruise liners, was the showcase of French technology. It is now the showcase of French bankruptcy.
Like France, Alstom is badly managed, unable to balance its accounts, and encumbered with debt. Alstom illustrates the failure of French “social-capitalism,” a state driven capitalism that is actually closer to socialism.
Hmm. State-driven capitalism. Where have we heard of that before?
The socialo-gaullist elites, who control French media groups, buy their support by distributing money to Communist (CGT) and Trotskyite (FO) unions, to 7 million public servants (often useless), to 12 million retirees (often pre-retired), plus millions of immigrants living on welfare. But French politicians are so “generous” that even with the highest taxes of any OECD country, they chronically accumulate huge debts in all public entities: state, regions, cities, social programs, public companies. Having been unable to balance any French budget for more than 30 years, they are driving France to a financial crisis that will shake all of Europe.
A very satisfying rant against the enarquist elite ensues, bringing on a moment of nostalgia for past French contributions to the cause of liberty.
Courtesy of one of the great Middle Men of the Internet, Dave Barry, comes this gripping story:
Bordeaux, France – A French magistrate caught masturbating during a court session was locked up on Thursday and put under investigation, justice officials in the south-western city of Bordeaux said.
The head judge of the city’s appeals court said “a penal inquiry ordered by the prosecutor of the republic is currently being carried out by the police” while a request for a psychiatric evaluation of the magistrate, who was not named, had been made.
He said the justice ministry had also been asked to temporarily suspend the magistrate while the matter was looked into.
According to La Charente Libre, a local newspaper who had a reporter in court at the time of the alleged offence, the magistrate had discreetly lifted up his ceremonial robe while a lawyer was presenting final arguments, undid his pants and “engaged in gestures that left nothing to the imagination”. Sapa-AFP
Which, said a later commenter chez Barry, is how justice gets to be blind.
One of the most notorious features of Britain’s socialist-inspired near-collapse of the 1970’s were the insanely militant trade unions who helped drive much of our remaining smokestack industries either out of the country or onto the scrapheap.
Industrial disputes were such a common feature fo everyday life that they became a cultural as well as a political phenomenon. I can remember in particular a popular joke about a trade union official who calls a meeting of his members to announce that, from now on, they would only have to work on Wednesdays.
A moment’s silence while this sinks in. Then one worker shouts from the back: “What, every bloody Wednesday”?
I wonder if a Gallic version of this joke has been doing the rounds in France:
The French government called yesterday for a renegotiation of the 35-hour working week introduced four years ago by the previous, Socialist-led government to create jobs and reduce unemployment.
It begs the questions of exactly what these people have rattling around in their heads that leads them to believe that forcing everyone to work less will create jobs? I suppose we should call it the ‘fixed quantity of time fallacy’.
Left-wing politicians countered that the government was starting a “witch-hunt” to disguise its bad economic and budgetary management. Even independent economists poured scorn on the government’s arguments and figures.
Well, I would love to know exactly who these ‘independent economists’ are. Unless they actually meant to say ‘economists from the Independent‘ in which case their opinions deserve about as much respect as those of French left-wing politicians.
But the Grand Union of Philosophy Professors (which probably counts most of the adult population among its members) is not going to lie down for this. In fact, they will vote with their feet. From the cafes and bookshops they will pour forth onto the streets of Paris in droves and legions, complete with banners, drums, whistles and George Bush rubber face-masks. Nobody is going to tell them to work for a living when they can agitate for a living instead. Street protest is their last growth industry.
Times online (which we do not link to) has an article about France writing itself off as arrogant failure. Words such as “diplomatic Agincourt”, “a nation in decline”, “empty arrogance” and “a laughing stock” pepper the piece.
This soul-searching is apparently being done in a proper intellectual manner:
The mood is being fanned by three books which argue that there is nothing temporary about France’s troubles. With its chronic unemployment and dinosaur centralised state, France can no longer pose as a universal model of progress and civilisation, they argue. In L’Arrogance Française, Romain Gubert and Emmanuel Saint-Martin, both journalists, say that France infuriates the rest of the world with its discredited diplomacy.
In Adieu à la France qui s’en va (Farewell to a France that is departing) Jean-Marie Rouart, a novelist and member of the august Académie Française, says that France is losing its soul to mediocrity and needs a great leader to restore its grandeur. The biggest splash is being made by La France Qui Tombe (Collapsing France) by Nicolas Baverez, an historian and economist.
To read a gentle fisking of the article visit Cronaca. Now let’s just sit back and wait for shrill accusations of frogbashing…
Via Instapundit
James Lileks has a piece today on the war and its critics that is worth reading (scroll down a bit, although the first few paragraphs about his daughter culminate in a nice insight into diplomacy).
James can certainly speak for himself, but his point is that there is a war on, and wars are all about who wins, which means that anyone who cares about the war has to pick a side sooner or later. He hopes that we win (as do I). While it is certainly possible to criticize a war effort in order to help it succeed (and indeed, such criticism is very helpful to ensuring success), it is clear, and has been for awhile, that some critics of the war do not particularly care if we win or lose. Some are quite open about their desire for us to lose, others seem simply not to care that the result of their preferred policies is the advancement of terrorism.
Quick sample, but you really should read the whole thing:
→ Continue reading: “I hope we win”
The Telegraph reports that the French government has told an airline that it is not to ferry British troops to Basra. The ban is seen as reflecting Paris’s opposition to the occupation of Iraq.
Corsair, which has been chartered numerous times to transport UK forces around the world, pulled out of a contract to fly reinforcements to Basra at the weekend.
Transport ministry officials said yesterday that the move had nothing to do with safety but was a result of the intervention of the foreign ministry. The foreign ministry denied the report, saying there was “no political motive”. But British defence officials appeared to confirm that the ban was political and not technical.
A Corsair spokesman said most of the flights undertaken for the MoD took troops to training exercises. For security and insurance reasons they rarely flew to war zones.
We did fly to Pristina during the Kosovo crisis, but only once it had been cleared for civil aviation.
Basra is already open to civilian aircraft.
For once I have nothing to add to Instapundit’s commentary:
Hmm. Petty? Yes. Ineffectual? Yes. Infuriating and off-putting? Yes. Counterproductive? Yes. It’s got to be a product of the French Foreign Ministry.
Via Instapundit
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We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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