[la gioconda smile] eating her with relish

Eating La Gioconda [dipinto di Leonardo da Vinci che mostra una donna con un'espressione pensierosa e un leggero sorriso quasi enigmatico – in case you didn’t know] is very tasty, even when she’s not quite fresh. You see, a French speaking girl brought her and 19 other art chocolates back from Paris and I’m saving the wrappers.

[france] ségolène’s proposals

# 500,000 subsidized jobs for young people;
# the streamlining of presidential ministries;

# free medical care for children younger than 16;
# reduced class sizes;
# better unemployment benefits;
# interest-free government loans to graduates to start businesses.

Royal did not detail Sunday how the country would pay for the new entitlements. So she’s consistently leftist.

Her supporters drifted to other candidates, experts say, after she blundered on trips abroad and refused to be specific about how she'd run the country.

Also consistently left, she has said she’s a victim of "a hard right, without principles, without virtue" that had her "vilified in seedy publications and on the cover of weekly magazines linked to the government."

Currently it stands Sarkozy 53% and Royal 47% but both acknowledge that under the French system, that is far from certain.

[obama] john howard sticks his oar in

Australia's prime minister is in hot water for suggesting that Barack Obama would be popular among terrorist leaders because of his promise to recall troops from Iraq if he wins.

Howard says his remarks were appropriate.

Obama challenged John Howard to send another 20,000 Australian troops. "Otherwise, it's just a bunch of empty rhetoric," he said in Iowa.

Republicans and Democrats have both told John Howard to butt out and not to interfere in another country’s politics, which is quite delicious, coming as it does from the U.S.

I'd like to know how you can have a 'bunch' of rhetoric. Just asking. Seems to this blogger that as long as the Americans keep out the Lizard Queen, the rest hardly matters.

UPDATE: John Howard has reiterated his stance: "I hold the strongest possible view that it is contrary to the security interests of this country for America to be defeated in Iraq."

[miss deutschland] schön schauspiel oder fragwürdig wettbewerb

Nummerngirls: "Miss zu sein, heißt nicht, ein Model zu sein, sondern ein Repräsentant", sagt Katie Steiner, die 23-jährige Miss Norddeutschland

Und Platz 1 geht an - extra langer Trommelwirbel - "die Nummer vierzehn"! "Oh G-tt, das ist ja meine Nummer." Es dauert einen Moment, bis Nelly realisiert, dass sie gemeint ist, dass sie nun Miss Germany 2007 ist. Die Miss Germany 2006, Isabelle Knispel, setzt ihrer Nachfolgerin die Krone auf - und hat Tränen in den Augen. Weil sie an ihre Siegerehrung vor einem Jahr denken musste, und welch ein toller Moment das war. Und die anderen Mädchen sagen unisono: "Wir freuen uns alle für Nelly." Sie sei so superlieb, sympathisch und die Hübscheste von allen - das Mädchen, dessen Make-Up in der Schule nur aus Wimperntusche besteht.

Fantastisch Leistung oder einfach ein Fleischmarkt?

[cricket] yes, more does need to be said

… as Colin Campbell has pointed out. Please click on the photo either here or at his site.

[evil empires] so which is which

Fifty kilometres from where I live in the ‘Former Evil Empire’

Ronald Reagan, in his speech to the National Association of Evangelicals, Orlando, Florida March 8, 1983, uttered the classic lines:

I urge you to beware the temptation of pride, the temptation of blithely declaring yourselves above it all and label both sides equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire, to simply call the arms race a giant misunderstanding and thereby remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong and good and evil.

Now it has come full circle and in an address at an annual international security conference in Munich on Saturday, Vladimir Putin, in some of his harshest criticism of the United States since he took office seven years ago, said that Washington's unilateral militaristic approach had made the world a more dangerous place than at any time during the Cold War.

The United States has overstepped its national borders in every way. Nobody feels secure anymore, because nobody can take safety behind the stone wall of international law … Stability and economic justice should be not only for the chosen ones, but for everybody.

Interesting, don't you think?

[pumpkin stew] couples have divorced for less

Now what would you do in this situation?

Let’s say you had a wife of eighteen years standing, whom we’ll call Yeleda D and you both lived in Voronezh in Russia. There’s just been a bumper pumpkin harvest and so she makes stews for you but pretends they’re made from zucchini [courgettes], instead of the less well-regarded but more plentiful pumpkins. For half a year you eat and enjoy these stews and then, one day, you discover the horrifying truth.

What do you do? Why you file for divorce, of course, on the grounds that you can never trust a woman who poisons your food. The court, of course, agrees with you and grants a decree.

[cricket] need any more be said

[faust takeover] latest manifestation of the same old thing

Reader, you may see this post as not directly concerning you and yet it really does concern you. It really does.

When I ran this post on Faust, I felt something was wrong with her but couldn’t quite pinpoint it and so wrote nothing more. That this lady should have been rushed into the job, after the vilification of Lawrence Summers, seemed to smack of “Them”.

“Them” is different things to different people – PC mafia, moral relativists, feminists, Marxists et al – but the agenda’s the same and I kept returning, over and over, to Woodrow Wilson [1913]:

"Some of the biggest men … are afraid of somebody, are afraid of something. They know that there is a power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, that they had better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it."

and Churchill [1920]:

"[T]his world wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilization and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence and impossible equality, has been steadily growing … It has been the mainspring of every subversive movement during the nineteenth century, and now at last this band of extraordinary personalities from the underworld of the great cities of Europe and America have gripped the Russian people by the hair of their heads."

It is the greatest foolhardiness and misreading of history to suggest that because Churchill was speaking then of communism, the threat exists no more. It very much does, only in its latest manifestations. So it was no surprise to read Sissy Willis’ own post on the Harvard takeover and if someone were to subsequently bring out that Faust is a dignitary in some group like Eastern Star or whatever, it would equally not surprise:

"The feminist takeover of Harvard is imminent," writes Heather MacDonald at City Journal. "Faust runs one of the most powerful incubators of feminist complaint and nonsensical academic theory in the country. … [This] confirmation, could not have more clearly repudiated Lawrence Summers's all-too-brief reign of meritocracy and academic honesty Harvard will now be the leader in politically correct victimology."

Nonsensical academic theory - I wrote on this here and here, the latter with, admittedly, only 70 linked references but how many do you need?

Christina Hoff Sommers’ equity feminism is one thing and as a male, I can hardly blame the women for sticking up for their sisters but Feminism was given a capital F and hijacked along the way by those very forces just alluded to:

"The women at the Heilbrun conference are the New Feminists: articulate, prone to self-dramatization, and chronically offended. Many of the women on the "Anger" panel were tenured professors at prestigious universities. All had fine and expensive educations."

Behind Faust’s seemingly mild views lie assumptions which are terrifying in their full implications for policy and for academic programming:

# I guess I've been studying unpleasant people or politically incorrect people for my whole academic career.
# it's very important to understand how individuals in the past rationalized lives that we might find unthinkable …
# My daughter, a committed vegetarian, now tells me that in a hundred years none of us will ever believe that we were eating meat.
# It is important to celebrate people but not to do so uncritically. By celebrating people in an uncritical way we only make them removed from ourselves . . .

As Sissy says: “Who but politically correct Marxist "thinkers" would ever dream of "celebrating" people uncritically?” And I add that Faust’s stated and implied feminist agenda for Radcliffe may well be arguable to a $300 million point but her takeover of all of Harvard, male and female alike, is nothing short of execrable.

Finally: "Whether it's back in the gulags of the old USSR, in the inimically orchestrated "street" of today's Arab tyrannies or in the politically correct, ivy-covered towers in our own backyard at Harvard, intimidation is the blogtheme that keeps on giving."

And intimidation is what we’re all facing now, from the evil of ID cards through to enforced views in the halls of learning.

Earlier post here.

[blogfocus saturday] girlpower, yo

Let me say, upfront, that the number of blogs has expanded to the point that both the blogroll and the e-mail list are woefully out of date. The roll I’ve half done; the other I must attempt tomorrow.

Now to Girlpower, the girls only edition of Blogfocus, where the boys are the voyeurs and without further ado, we’ll start in the North of England:

1 Just how grim can it get up north? Very. One Wife's lonely journey into the Northern heartlands is told here, as the heartrending housemoving takes place:

The plan then, (for want of another word,) is to manhandle the contents of the cottage out into the van on a room by room basis, drive it two miles down the lane to the rented house and then unpack the contents and install them on a room by room basis into the rented house, recreating our life exactly as it was before. Perhaps, he was a museum curator in a different incarnation. In fact, he could probably submit it for the Turner prize. He could call it something like: "Our life - a mess in two places."

2 This, thinks Bel, is beyond scandalous:

Some families of soldiers killed in Iraq have been trying for a long time to meet Tony Blair. They have organised demonstrations, launched petitions, and done their utmost to get a meeting. Unfortunately, the Prime Minister has been too busy to see them. Anyway, how lucky for Shilpa that she managed to secure a meeting with the busy Blair. In his office at the House of Commons, no less. So it can be done, then? Perhaps the soldiers’ families should try harder.

3 Ellee continues to enjoy the presidential race and I do my best to cater for her in this:

I am fascinated to see how American politicians are actively using social media for their political campaigning. However, can Hillary Clinton break her carefully crafted mould to embrace a more open and interactive style? Would it suit her personality? The lesser known Obama could find it the perfect way to reach out to new supporters who decide they like what they see in cyberspace.

14 more bloggers plus the Mystery Blogger here.