The French, they are a lovely race.

The recent regional elections in France have sent President Sarkozy and his government reeling. I asked a French friend to explain what's going on. What I got was a splendid précis of the political culture in France, which I post here.

The Caste System of France

In the centuries since the 1789 revolution, the bourgeoisie, left and right, have restored, by manner and habit, the ancien regime of the Bourbon monarchy, the political system they purportedly abolished.

Political élites and professional members of the high administration, educated in the famous Ecole Nationale d'Administration (ENA), are a caste, endogamous and incestuous, reproducing themselves by the distribution of roles and privileges. Often politicians in France are former "civil administration" out of the ENA. Some examples to the right: Jacques Chirac, Alain Juppé, Dominique de Villepin ... Left: Lionel Jospin, Laurent Fabius, François Hollande, Ségolène Royal, Martine Aubry ... In fact, they are very numerous and occupy the majority of key positions in France -- in finance, industry, international trade, in the media.

This caste is the highest élite. This is the "Court". They live in Paris, the "New Versailles". The children of these "great servants of the state" (a term typically French) systematically become artists, journalists, writers, TV and film producers, financiers, etc. Raymond Barre, former prime minister in the 70s, called this world the "microcosm". All being said and thought in Paris comes from this caste -- "good taste," political correctness, especially anti-Americanism, socialism, the utopian "caviar left," who would give all the poor of the whole Earth asylum in France -- pocket money, free housing, free medical care, etc. -- the élites' generosity paid for by the people of France.

There is also a caste system of secondary, wider province. It consists of the "elects of decentralization": the chairpersons of the Regions and departments, MPs, mayors of major cities. This is the part of the feudal system. It functions as the system of the Roman Empire. These are families of notables who have elected politicians sometimes from father to son, often for decades. They are loving people, practicing patronage (you know: the way the Sicilian Don Corleone helped people in The Godfather). It is also here (in regions and departments) that political party money is manufactured, because these mini-republics spend a lot of money on public projects. That brings them substantial income hidden by the method of false invoices or billings cleverly disguised.

Sarkozy and his family are from this second caste. More specifically, the part of the feudal caste that represents the "lords" of the territories closer to Paris. Like those of his caste, he behaves as a nouveau riche. He hates the members of the old elite, the "Court" and ENA in general. It has not refined their manners or their connivance. He dares to think and say things considered shocking in circles of the "Court". He is also very close to a very special caste of French politics: "Corsicans". He was brought into politics by members of this special caste. Not for nothing was he the "spiritual son" of people like Charles Pasqua. I dare not write here what to think of politicians from the "caste Corsica," for fear tomorrow I'll find  a horse's head in my bed!

And I didn't....for three months

The last blog entry was me as Howard Beale, screaming that I was mad as hell and wasn't going to take it any more. Well, I didn't until now. I was tired of not only the stupidity and evil of the Republicans, but the fecklessness of the Democrats in fighting them and the sanctimony and arrogance and intellectual dishonesty of the left.

And perhaps most of all I was tired of being a scold. It rots the soul not to pause, at least occasionally, to smell the roses, to be happy and grateful at being alive, to celebrate the good, the positive. Well, I'll try to do better.

Meanwhile, back to truth-telling.

Late Night TV and Society

TV before bed causes chronic health problems, study claims

For almost 60 years Americans have been conditioned to go to bed by The Tonight Show: Steve, then Jack, then Johnny, then Jay. For much of the show's run, the audience would stay awake as late as 1 am. But wait, there's more! Late Night (Letterman) was created, and working America, particularly younger America, was up on weeknights till 2 am. This was a bit much, even for TV networks, whose concern for the welfare of their audiences is like the farmers' concern for their livestock. Thus, to forestall audiences from dropping off before Late Night, NBC shortened The Tonight Show by a half hour.

NBC's failed experiment to move Jay Leno to prime time had sound reasoning: broadcast network primetime is being killed by cable programming. Lower ratings mean lower add revenues. The Tonight Show has much lower overhead than the drama series which traditionally filled the prime-time 10 slot. So, the thinking went, moving The Tonight Show to 10 would help compensate for the network's primetime revenue hit. And it did. Trouble is, audiences who ended their TV watching by Jay at 12:30 am, continued to end their TV watching by Jay, resulting is a huge drop in audience levels for local network affiliates and their 11 O'Clock news broadcasts.

Lost in the network's calculus is the fact that ending the working weeknight at 11 pm is simply better for the audience than ending it at 12:30 or 1:30 am. Alas, better and more profitable have never been synonymous in the mind of network television, nor, for that matter, in the mind of business in general.

One of the greatest errors in the history of American governance was the decision to make broadcasting commercial. Commercial television has corrupted everything it has touched, including the family, politics, education, sports, the arts. It has replaced excellence with mediocrity and merit with money. Television and its cognate, the Internet, have deliberately addled, dumbed down, isolated and enervated the American public, in order to deliver brains to advertisers. Monolithic commercial media has atomized society, leading to the decline of fraternal and civic organizations through which individuals could empower and protect themselves from media's depredations.

And now, with the triumph of American capitalism and its morally bankrupt but seductive cult of the individual, the rest of the world is falling in line. Instant gratification, self-indulgence, narcissism, selfishness, disengagement. Perhaps the future of the world would be brighter if dominated by the Chinese.

Of Dogs and Cats . . .

What is intelligence? Is it knowledge or the ability to use knowledge? Is it the ability to focus? Or is it simply the ability to survive in a given environment? The lesson of dogs and cats is illuminating.

Dogs have "doggy odor". That is, the typical dog stinks. This isn't because dogs are nasty animals but because dogs have turned what could have been an evolutionary liability into an asset, by becoming pack animals.

The hunting strategy of dogs is to send part of the pack upwind of the prey and the other part of the pack downwind of the prey. When the odor of the upwind pack is picked up by the prey, the prey flees from the odor into the jaws of the downwind pack. This strategy requires coördination. Coördination requires communication.

To domestic dogs, humans are members of the pack, whom they respond to, because part of their survival menu is communication.

Because cats are lone hunters, odor is a disability rather than a hunting tool, as it is with dogs. After eating, cats remove the odor of their prey by licking themselves, what we call grooming, cat saliva's being a natural deodorant. Thus a cat, even when sated, is always ready for the next hunting opportunity, a valuable survival strategy when successful hunts occur sporadically. Because cats are lone hunters, there is no reason to communicate with each other. Except when mating and mothering, cats rarely interact.

Domestic cats have no social relationship with humans other than convenience. Communication is not a part of a cat's survival menu. Having no need to communicate, cats simply have not evolved to know what communication is. Because dogs seem to respond to us, while cats seem capable only of staring at us blankly, we tend to think of dogs as more "intelligent" than cats. Yet cats have mastered their environments better than dogs, as individuals. A dog in the wild without his pack, the "lone wolf," is severely handicapped. Not so the cat.

Which, then, is the more intelligent animal, and what does this say about our understanding of intelligence?

Lawyers

There's a piece in the L.A. Times about lawyers. Apparently, the over-accreditation of law schools by the American Bar Association (ABA) has led to an oversupply of lawyers, leading to thousands of law school graduates unable to find jobs.

Dershowitz likes to tell this one: A newly-minted JD finds a town with no lawyer and hangs out his shingle. Time passes, but no business comes his way. He's about to take down his shingle, when another lawyer moves to town, and suddenly both have all the business they can handle.

George Bernard Shaw: "Every profession is a conspiracy against the layman." Shaw doubtless had just read Dickens's horror story about lawyers, Bleak House.

The 1995 consent decree between Justice and the ABA, constraining the ABA from throttling law school accreditations (which the ABA ignored anyway), was done with a wink and a nod. Lawyers-to-lawyers. (The Ma Bell breakup was the same: "Oh, hurt me so good!") The ABA wants an unlimited stream of lawyers coming on line. Organizations having a life of their own, the ABA seeks ever to grow its membership and thus its lobby. The plethora of lawyers in legislatures, in the seats and in the corridors, is why tort reform has so little chance of passage.

Lawyers are at once high priests and gangsters, a lethal combination for any civilization:

High priests, because they have gamed the system so that no one may approach the law except through them. The bar is a freemasonry, with robes and jargon and secret handshakes and old-boy networks.

Gangsters, because we "need" lawyers to protect us from other lawyers, i.e. the American legal system is most monstrous protection racket in history.

More Left-wing Mendacity

Survivor of Tamil "liberation"


Part of 111 stacked coffins, 1987 handiwork of Tamil "victims"

Terrorists as victims: Palestinians, who strap bombs to their children in order to kill Jews, Tamils who forcibly recruited children to wear cyanide vials on their murderous missions. And their targets, the Israelis and Sri Lankans? Why, oppressors and war criminals, of course, according to left-wing terrorist sympathizers and their media echo chambers.

Airport bombings by Tamil "victims"

Yes, Sri Lanka's government was ruthless in putting an end, finally, to decades of slaughter by arguably the most savage of the so-called liberation movements, who made the PLO look like humanitarians, who assassinated thousands indiscriminately, from poor civilians to the Prime Minister of India. And yet, here we see hand-wringing over their eradication by those who seem to have awakened from a coma only yesterday, or whose sympathy for the underdog trumps the fact that said "underdog" is a mass murderer.

Indian Prime Minister, murdered by Tamil "victims"

Sri Lankan president, murdered by Tamil "victims"

In their final assault against the Tamil terrorists, the Sri Lankan government saved countless future lives and ended fear and chaos inflicted on everyday life in Sri Lanka and Southern India. Their success is a reminder to the world that war, to be fought successfully, must be fought without compromise or remorse, a reality which craven Western nations, mired in moral sloth cloaked in the mindless platitudes of political correctness, have long forgotten.

Tamil baby evacuated from war zone by government "oppressor"

Skyscrapers and Rockets

Shining moments

The Chrysler Building, for a moment the world's tallest building, has been likened to an Art Deco rocket. Dubai's new tallest, by more than 300 meters (unless you count Toronto's CN Tower, which many do not), is also compared to a rocket.

Why do they build them? Because they can. Does this make building the world's tallest buildings simply exercises in hubris? Consider the words of John F. Kennedy:

We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.

"Organize and measure the best of our energies and skills..."

Two generations have gone by since Americans walked on the moon. It has been a generation since the world's tallest building was built in the West. Meanwhile, the West cowers under the siege of Muslims, Europeans dhimmis in their own lands, feckless western governments supplicating to the Iranian terrorist state, while the jihadis bring paroxysms of fear and panic, even in their failed attacks. What more appropriate symbol of Islamic triumphalism than this 828 meter minaret?

Oscar Wilde said we are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars. Preoccupied by our orgy of consumerist self-gratification, addled by television and computer screens, distracted by the equivocations of academics and pundits and the cheap bromides of demagogues, enervated by the sloth of luxury, fewer and fewer in the West are looking at the stars.

Sending men into space and building ever taller buildings have less to do with where we are than where we are headed. We think it fitting to build monuments to the past. Why not monuments to the future?

About Business

John F. Kennedy once remarked that his father told him that all businessmen are sons of bitches. A reporter reminded Kennedy that his father was a himself businessman, to which JFK replied, "Well, then, he should know what he's talking about."

Republicans (GOP) are the party of sons (and daughters) of bitches. Since its inception, the GOP's agenda has been to plunder society on behalf of the fat cats who created it, by pandering to the greed, fear and bigotry of the masses and by sabotaging the government, whose purpose is to protect society from predators. Though right-wing demagogues have convinced NASCAR America of the opposite, the nation prospers under Democrats, while the GOP brings ruin to all but its own, from Grant to Hayes to Harding/Coolidge/Hoover to Bush.

The irony of the GOP's claim to the moral and political high ground was brought home to me in a mundane way today. I needed a new dishwasher in December. I went to the Sears Website and found a model, but decided to defer the purchase until January, the sale month. Sure enough, today Sears is offering "15% off Appliances." I went to the model I had seen in December, for $480 including rebate, and found the new, "discounted" price had been raised to $518.49 and no rebate.

People are confronted by this kind of deception and chiseling every day. And yet for them, there seems to be a disconnect between their being played for suckers and the party who plays them. The GOP knows how to push the boobocracy's buttons, of greed, fear and bigotry, phantoms which effectively obscure the very real abuses which the GOP inflicts upon its prey.

There's a reason for this absurdity, an answer to What's the matter with Kansas. Quite simply, the GOP, like the class which owns it, is well-aware of the stupidity of the average Joe and cynically exploits it to make Joe believe black is white and up is down. Orwell's doublespeak was never so well-employed, when Ronald Reagan proclaimed, in 1984, that Orwell's 1984 had failed to materialize, when in fact, Regan and his GOP had brought this nation to a permanent 1984 state, where society has become a mindless mob.

Theft and deceit are the basis of business. John Calvin said that business is God's providence, enabling men to pillage one another without resort to violence, as it was before business and still is in the kleptocracies of sub-Saharan Africa and central Asia. It is not a coincidence that Calvinism/Presbyterianism remains the religion of businessmen (Ronald Reagan and his idol Calvin Coolidge, for example).

It's true that business, or capitalism, has had a civilizing influence on the world. As with replacing war with diplomacy, replacing violence with mendacity -- replacing robbery with guile, in terms of human lives, has been a worthy trade-off. But before we get too sanctimonious about the pursuit of wealth, which we have come to equate with the pursuit of happiness, let us remember, in the New Year, that business is not a virtue but the lesser of evils.

They admit it, but they still don't get it.

After being virtually laughed out of the room, Janet Napolitano and fellow accountability escape artists have now retreated from their claims, that their airport security systems are just peachy, and admitted, as far as self-serving bureaucrats are capable, what this blog has been shouting. Clothed in their, "Well, maybe things aren't as good as they could be" admission is the plain fact that the performance of TSA and foreign security personnel in the Northwest 253 incident was abysmal.

The problem isn't "the system," Folks, it's the people!

Yet, still they don't get it. They talk about improving their detection machines and refining the no-fly lists. Bullshit! These have nothing to do with their failure to stop an individual who should have been stopped, regardless of the machines, regardless of the lists. They were passively sitting on their butts, waiting for machines and lists to spot terrorists, instead of watching, instead of thinking, instead of PROFILING.

They do not need machines and lists to tell them to pat down, even strip-search a young African male with a ticket paid for with cash and no checked baggage.

What is wrong with these idiots?

Now, it's CYA time.

Our lives are in their hands.

After miserably bungling their mission to protect the flying public, the so-called security services are circling the wagons, issuing their "It's not our fault" proclamations.

The Dutch and America's Homeland Security Bozo-in-Chief Janet Napolitano say it's not their fault that their machines didn't pick up the explosives strapped to the would-be terrorist intent on blowing up Northwest 253 from Amsterdam to Detroit on Christmas Day. It's not their fault that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab wasn't on their no-fly list.

Of course, their self-serving alibis evade the glaring reality that here was an individual who, no-fly list or not, undetectable explosives or not, screamed out for heightened scrutiny, for secondary examination, for at least a pat-down, by profile alone.

• Young, single African
• Traveling on a one-way ticket
• With no checked baggage
• From a region of Muslim militants
• From a country of rampant corruption

Proper work would have quickly revealed Abdulmutallab's presence in a terrorist suspect database (TIDE).

The facts that Abdulmutallab was not on a no-fly list and that he passed through metal detectors are irrelevant. This man should have been stopped!

But he was not stopped, and it is only luck and the quick reactions of passengers that averted disaster.

And now, for the gross incompetence of Janet Napolitano's crew, Dutch security at Schiphol, Nigerian security at Lagos and the gross incompetence of the State Department for ignoring the desperate warnings of the terrorist's father, we get alibis and excuses and, to add insult to injury, airline passengers will be subjected to additional, more onerous measures which, though utterly useless in their effect, are aimed at making the incompetents look like they are doing something.

Islamic radicals would be comical were they not homicidal. The spectacle of Napolitano and her colleagues covering their collective asses would also be comical were it not for the fact that, alas, our lives are in their hands.