[statism] and the people suffer again

Nicolas Sarkozy went on holiday, with his home owners mortgage relief package in place and ready to sign "when he returns to the Elysée next week."

“This tax break, I have promised it . . . and it will apply to all loans,” he had said.

But the French Constitutional Council, which rules on the validity of laws passed by parliament, said existing homeowners should not benefit from the measure, arguing that the tax break was meant to target people who have yet to get on the property ladder.

Firstly, a non-elected body decides that the bulk of the French populace will not get some relief, just when the world economy is twitchy and it would have been of most benefit in riding through the rough patch and when the elected President with a clear mandate promised it.

Secondly, how is this law invalid? In which way is mortgage relief unconstitutional?

Thirdly, short-termism like this, which points to 0.3 per cent GDP growth in the second quarter and employment figures showing virtual zero growth, ignores the principle of trading your way out of trouble.

Sarkozy was elected on a clear platform as stated above. Either he is the ultimate cynic, knowing full well the Council would strike this down and transferring the onus to them, hoping for an outcry and the consequent restriction of the Council's further powers, leading to more autocratic rule or else it is a genuine slap in the face for the French people.

Which brings us back to first principles again. The French people want something - a strong economy and a high standard of living, along with the other major economies. They don't have it. They elected Sarkozy to get it but an unelected body stuck its oar in and stopped it.

The dead hand of either Statism, Socialism or whatever your political proclivities name it.

[google reader] fabulous stuff

So pleased - converted all my sidebars to Reader today and went through 150 blogs in 3 hours, commenting on about 100 and not one or two worders either unless I planned it that way.

That has infinitely sped up the process but now I have to get Matt Wardman, Shades and the Thunderdragon to get me to the next stage. Possibly this OPEC country thing - is it OPML?

[names] sweet smelling roses

What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet [Will the Bard, 1594]

The Pedant-General in Ordinary, to give Cleanthes his full title, is a fine, upstanding, curmudgeonly chap by his lights [except from his insane ideas on intelligent design which all right thinking people know to be true] and he rightly points out, initially quoting a fellow blogger:

“Do we want a Prime Minister named Kevin?”

Quite. I recall in the dim and distant past a threat to Margaret Thatcher’s leadership. Cabinet Ministers Tebbit and Fowler were both touted as challengers, apparently seriously. My instant reaction, correctly for once, was to dismiss the entire story as nonsense.

Britain in the 1980s was simply not ready for a Prime Minister called “Norman”…

Could a man named Balls [as in got me by the] ever become PM? Could Howard Brush Dean ever be President? How about a local candidate named Slartibartfast?

Recently, officials at the Cornwall Record Office in England (motto: “We’re called Cornwall, we know about strange names”) searched through birth, death, and marriage records dating as far back as the 16th century and found Abraham Thunderwolff, Freke Dorothy Fluck Lane, Philadelphia Bunnyface, and Offspring Gurney.

But why need names be weird? What about names designed to elevate you to high office? Here are five male English names and I've done that to eliminate choice based on gender or nationality. Which of these would you be more inclined to place your trust in, as leader?

1. Franklin James

2. John Smith

3. Uriah Beckett

4. Tersel Badcock

5. Steve Casey

Sometimes the association of the name is offputting. Which of these would you immediately reject?

1. Manson Hume

2. Blair Gordon

3. Adolph Barlow

4. Obama Fleming

5. Napoleon Jamison

Lastly, what would you name your new baby?

Raquelle? Roy? Roxy? Rock? How about Charlotte?

Slartibartfast

[compulsion] tool of the new tolerance

Ruthie Malhotra

Years ago, in the Academic Days, I had to attend a teachers' conference, I think in Newark, can't remember. The highlight was going to be a young girl who'd been making big waves over student's rights and she'd become some sort of cause celebre in her own lunchtime.

Typical male, when I first saw her diminutive figure on the other side of the auditorium in her smart jacket, I thought, "Hmmm. Nice." Then the assessment was progressively revised downwards as she clearly had an adoring entourage who were hanging on every utterance and I couldn't help but think:

"Hey, hang on a minute - she's 17 if she's a day. Bright- yes, able to communicate - reputedly, physically attractive - undoubtedly but she's still a kid. A kid with an idea but still a kid. Oh well, let's listen to her."

Well, it was appalling. She strode to the stage like royalty, waited till someone adjusted the mike downwards and then launched into such an incoherent torrent of invective against all teachers, all heads, all parents - in fact any with the temerity to harbour a difference of opinion with her but the worst of it was that she was virtually inarticulate with rage.

Two years ago, over here, I was privately teaching a very similar young lady. As I zeroed in on her weakness - numbers and kept asking her questions, she first went red, then exploded, flinging her pen across the room and sitting rigidly, staring straight ahead. She'd come to me with a reputation as a star.

What was the connection? Apart from lack of self control, it was a sort of trouble making penchant. I think it hardly mattered what the cause was - if there was a cause, she was the one at hand to act without respect no matter how august the personage. If it was someone in authority, this was red rag to a bull.

So to America. The clarion call from the Front Page announced:

When Ruth Malhotra told her college professor she planned to miss a class to attend a conservative political conference, the professor wasn't happy. You're just going to fail my class," she said the instructor told her.

What Ms Malhotra skipped over was the provocative tone in her voice as she "told", not "asked" the professor for leave. Actually she did highlight, for the world, an appalling state of affairs in colleges of higher learning - just ask Norman Geras about the infestation of socialists and political correctness in universities today - it's pretty dire, as Sisu brought to our attention.

The conservatives in congress got to hear about it and:

They have proposed a measure that would encourage colleges to present dissenting sources and viewpoints in the classroom and to promote intellectual pluralism in selecting outside speakers and financing student activities.

Rep. Howard P. "Buck" McKeon, R-Calif., chairman of the House subcommittee in charge of the reauthorization bill, said the proposals are designed to send a message to liberal academic officials: "You're using the school in many cases to brainwash and not to educate."

No arguments there. On campus, there's no choice - it's enforced by the thought police. You don't accept the indecency - you fail your course, as Ms Malhotra did. You refuse to admit that gays can be "married" and they incarcerate you. You dare speak of old values and you're labelled a nazi [they do love invoking that word, don't they?]

College administrators counter that the legislation marks an unprecedented and unjustified attempt by Congress to control college curricula.

Natch.

Now admittedly, Ruthie was a little madam, a little provocateur with an acid tongue and the ability to send her targets apoplectic and further to this, she was actually lapping up the notoriety and when I went to her site, she offered her e-mail and told us to "contact me - go on - you know you want to."

Her pronouncements on the gay pretence at marriage and on abortion were designed to get the lefties up in arms - just read the web denunciations of Nazi Fascist Ruthie.

These same people who write these generally misspelt and ungrammatical denunciations are the very ones preaching the religion of tolerance and respect of course. Calm measured language and argument versus hysteria, they argue. Such as this threat to our Ruthie:

This Valentine’s Day, you cannot attack gay marriage. It is about love and you are about hate.

This Valentine’s Day, you cannot condemn a woman’s choice. It is about love and you are about hate.

This Valentine’ Day, you cannot protest the Vagina Monologues. It is about love and you are about hate.

No, this Valentine’s Day, you will be Raped. Sex is about love and through it you will experience hate. I cannot wait.

Nice people, the tolerant left.

Now, on the Vagina Monologues, a play that has been trotted around 650 campuses for the kids to enforcedly view, Debra Rae has this to say:

Since then, the Monologues have become all the rage on campuses around the world with dozens of professors, administrators, and students participating as cast. In order to promote this Obie-winning play, women's studies representatives parade around college campuses in six-foot-tall costumes of women's private parts.

The central issue which Ruthie raised was the compulsion. When admins and staff exhort kids to attend such things, then something is deeply sicko. Young people will always be less offended by things the older generation finds reprehensible so the issue isn't shock. It's the compulsion the so-called tolerant free-thinkers love to utilize to impose their way without the slightest awareness of what they're actually doing.

Except of course for the deep cynicism of those who know full well and are laughing up their sleeves. Welcome to the decade where, on a clear day, you can see the decency bar lowered.

The appropriately named Faust, who has Harvard in thrall

[pub philosopher] fair bit of this going on lately

Spare a thought for Steve today, if you will.

[homelessness] there but for the grace …

Whenever I briefly glimpse this topic, I shudder. At the keyboard of my computer now, surely I'm lightyears from it.

But am I?

Father David Holdcroft, refuge organizer, describes the common elements connecting the homeless, as he sees them:

Few had married. Mothers, in the case of the men, sometimes figured strongly in their lives, but fathers were almost universally absent, emotionally distant or violent. Always there were deep feelings of rejection associated with family.

Along with rejection there was always a sense of displacement, a sense that life was not where it should have been, that the normal growth and development of life had been radically interrupted by something or someone. Such interruptions are surely relatively common but, in the case of the homeless, there had been no recovery, no resumption of a "normal" life.

"Normal growth and development of life had been radically interrupted." "A sense of displacement." I've read the stats on mental illness, cost of housing, governmental displacement of populations such as the one coming up in the next five years and so on.

Seems to me that intellect plays a huge part - reasoning power. For example, here in the fSU, everyday can be your last and that's them telling me that. Me - I still have vestiges of that implicit western faith that things can never go suddenly awry in one's station.

It's not so. I can be on the street within a month but, I say to my friend: "We're in demand, you and I; we'd always find a place."

He looks quizzically and murmurs: "Pok'a," meaning "for now".

And he's right. Gradual loss of memory, slight eccentricities starting to appear, a few wrong moves, angry reactions and our word-of-mouth clientele melts away with our reputation. Reputation is everything in this country, my friend says.

If you don't have the extended family, then you need a network of well-placed connections. Not necessarily highly placed but well-placed, according to needs. Every single person here survives only on those connections. Family is dependent. It doesn't save the man and this is still a patriarchal society.

Truth is, I'm dislocated. There are no roots here and my roots in Britain and Australia have withered and died away. There are still a few former friends over there. So here I currently am, enjoying a tenuous status out of proportion to my true state but I only need to annoy one highly placed official and I'm blackballed.

That's the end of food on the table and no family to throw you any crumbs. Suddenly, regulations which once passed you by now crowd in on you and life doesn't bear thnking about. You can't survive on the street here without both intellect and language, the latter equally important .

The beggars you see at the crossroads are mafia run - the cash goes to the man in black and the beggar gets some soup to drink. You do not want to be in that situation, any more than in a London dole queue with a landlord beating on the door every Friday for the exorbitant rent.

The only solution is to trust the promise of the Lord that you'll be looked after but it also helps to think laterally. Instead of descending to the street - fly to Canada or Australia, all documentation in order and the last of the money at the ready. Then you can use your wherewithal, your ability to start up again.

As long as you have that ability of course. Age first kills the resolve, then the health and finally the reasoning power. Then you're gone. Interesting article I read, which challenges:

Define Homeless: 'An inadequate experience of connectedness with family and or community.' This fact is now recognized by Habitat, the United Nations Human Settlements Programme.

When I see the poor unfortunates on the street denied even basic hygiene, Father Holdcroft's view comes home that there can be intellect there, a sort of self-worth, even past achievements but that there is always some sort of dislocation, a missing link.

There, but for the Grace of G-d, go I.

Of course I have another cunning plan ...

[Crossposted at Tiberius Gracchus' site]