Saturday French-bashing

It’s been a rough week in France. First of all, the French are determined to teach Apple Computer a lesson and tell them how to sell iPod and iTunes in France. According to the Sydney Morning Herald:

French politicians have approved an online copyright bill that will require Apple to break open the exclusive format behind its market-leading iTunes music store and iPod players.

This is a great relief. Finally someone is coming to the rescue of battered consumers and teaching our big American tech giants how to run their businesses. And there is nobody as qualified as the French to do this.

Of course there is always the danger that Apple will just decide not to sell iPods and iTunes in France. And why not? The French, being a cultured people, surely do not need the ersatz music offered by cowboy American corporations. They can make their own music.

The iTunes kerfuffle is bad enough. But then also this week the president of the French Republic couldn’t take it any more. As reported by Tom Braithwaite and Tim Smyth in the Financial Times “Jacques Chirac stormed out of a meeting at the European Union summit...because he had been "profoundly shocked" to hear a French industrialist speaking in English.”

Despite the appearance that the French president often presents of being an arrogant old man completely out of touch with his nation and the times this incident makes it clear that he is, in fact, profoundly sensitive. Anyone would get upset when subjected to the kind of insult President Chirac suffered when he heard

Ernest-Antoine Seillière, the head of the Unice employers' organisation, explain he had decided to deliver his speech in English because it was "the language of business".

As usual in such cases, the politicians are trying to shut the stable door long after the horse has bolted. The rule at Alstom, the French electrical manufacturer is that email is conducted in English and that any meeting at which a non-French person is present is conducted in English. Braithwaite and Smyth agree. According to their source Jean-Loius Muller:

the rise of English in French boardrooms appeared unstoppable: "I witnessed a meeting at [engineering group] Alstom where there were only French managers in the room but English was still the language."



Business French has become peppered with anglicisms - from "les roadshows" to "le spin-off" - and few managers prefer "une marge brute d'autofinancement" to "le cash-flow".

It’s enough to make a grown Frenchman cry. And what is worse, we know that this is just the thin end of the wedge.

Sooner or later (cue the Fram oil filter guy) the French are going to have to ditch their vaunted Social Model and accept reality, the Anglo-Saxon (and rapidly becoming Indo-Chinese) cowboy model.

They can do it now, or they can do it later.

Saving American Lives in Iraq

It’s an untold story. And the mainstream media isn’t telling it.
According to Mark Yost in the American Spectator there has been a remarkable improvement in the care of the wounded over previous US wars.

"Soldiers are walking on prostheses that wouldn't have lived before," said Lieutenant Colonel Clark Searle, an Army orthopedic surgeon who served in Iraq in 2003 with the 86th and 21st Combat Support Hospitals. "People are keeping limbs that ten years ago they would have lost."

It’s a story of teamwork and dedication, as you might expect, but it starts right on the battlefield with better training.

[T]he U.S. military has started giving basic first-aid instruction to as many soldiers as possible -- not just medics and corpsmen -- through a program called Combat Lifesavers.

The key to the program is the control of bleeding. Mostly they can get a wounded soldier to a hospital in 20 minutes, because “‘a major arterial bleed will cause you to die within five minutes,’ said Major Lisa Maxwell.”

[In] combat medicine [they] used to refer to "the golden hour" to describe the all-important initial care that a soldier receives after being wounded. Today, thanks to Combat Lifesavers and some of the new medical technology, the talk is about "the platinum five minutes."

The improvements go on from there. They can save limbs that used to be amputated as a matter of course, and the new prostheses are amazing. And, of course, the body armor is crucial as it prevents abdominal wounds that simply can’t be fixed in time before a soldier dies.

But it all comes down to teamwork, a “seamless chain” that starts with the Combat Lifesavers and goes on up the line.

Unfortunately, not everyone is helping. The lefties at Code Pink have

regularly gathered outside the gates at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in suburban Washington. The purpose? To heckle amputees going out for dinner and a movie.

It’s good to know that the rest of us support our troops.

Manliness and Iraq

As we have seen here at Road to the Middle Class, the MSM don’t like Harvey Mansfield’s Manliness. And you can understand why. The whole concept of manliness, the masculine trait of confident risk-taking goes against the central principle of the progressive class and their Precautionary Principle, the idea that you should not risk anything unless you are really sure that nothing can go wrong.

It therefore makes complete sense that the MSM would be against the Iraq War. Just read what Mark Steyn has to say on the Hugh Hewitt Show (perm) about why. It’s the passivity, stupid.

Oh, we can't do this, and we can't do that, because something may go wrong, and it may not be easy, and this will happen, and that will happen. And we don't understand any of these strange, wacky foreign places anyway. That passivity will end freedom in the world.

We know where that passivity comes from. Liberals have spent half a century doing everything in their power to build a society without traditional gender roles. Actually, that is not strictly true. They have tried to stamp out the difference between the sexes by stamping out manliness, the manliness of the patriarch, the manliness of the soldier, the manliness of the prudent risk-taker.

So when a world-historical challenge emerges, like the eruption of Islamism, they are completely flummoxed. The only response is manliness, to take measured, courageous action, balancing all the risks, and having the courage and the fortitude to see it through.

But that is just what liberals have just spent half a century saying you must not do. No wonder they are angry and confused, hoping against hope that Bush is wrong, and calling him a jerk.

Because if Bush is right then liberals are wrong. And that just cannot be.

Is It Civil War Yet?

Here at Road to the Middle Class we have said: Of course there is civil war in Iraq. There are parties contending for power, parties that mobilized for war after the collapse of the Saddam regime. What else are you going to call it?

But Ralph Peters in The New York Post says no. You want civil war, he writes, try this definition:

I'd define it as a broad internal conflict between at least two contending governments, each of which has the overt support of a substantial portion of the population and each of which fields organized (if not always professional) military forces.

Indeed, the strategy of the terrorists in Iraq is to provoke a general civil war in which the Iraqis are mobilized into general conflict their entho-religious parties: Shia, Sunni, and Kurd.

Clearly, general civil war hasn’t happened, not yet. But it might, and the parties have been building militias just in case.

Meanwhile there is a great civil conflict in Iraq, and our western media isn’t doing anything to help, as White House reporter Helen Thomas this week seemed determined to prove.

The MSM and the Democrats need to be careful here. The president says, as he did in response to Helen Thomas’s question on Monday asking him why he went to war in Iraq when “Every reason given, publicly at least, has turned out not to be true.”

I'm never going to forget the vow I made to the American people that we will do everything in our power to protect our people.

You can tell that he invited Helen Thomas to make her question so that he could wrap himself in the flag as the protector of the American people.

Liberals like to sneer about the president wrapping himself in the flag. They are wrong. The president’s job is first and foremost to protect the American people from enemies foreign and domestic. All the other stuff, the pensions, the rights, the programs, the promises, all that is mere bagatelle.

So when the president says that his entire effort is to protect the American people, you’d better be sure of your facts before you call him a liar. That is why Bush carefully, and politely makes sure to call Helen Thomas on her accusation.

I think your premise -- in all due respect to your question and to you as a lifelong journalist -- is that, you know, I didn’t want war. To assume I wanted war is just -- is just flat wrong, Helen, in all due respect --

All that stuff about “due respect” and “lifelong journalist” is gentlemenly politeness, packaging around the basic message: You are flat wrong.

The problem is that our news media and our educated elite just don’t get it. Not on the war, not on the economy, not on the social issues, not on the war on terror, and certainly not on civil war in Iraq.

Andrew Young Shills for Wal-Mart!

Another Wal-Mart nightmare. Famed civil-rights activist Andrew Young has gone over to the dark side. Yes, here he is boogie-ing with Wal-Mart workers at the grand opening of a Wal-Mart in a black area of Atlanta. And judging from the photo, a grand time was had by all.

It was just a month ago, reports Errin Haines of the Associated Press, that Andrew Young and his company GoodWorks International were hired

to promote Wal-Mart at public appearances, in interviews and in op-ed pieces, said Kevin Sheridan, spokesman for Working Families for Wal-Mart, a group organized with backing from the company.

Guess what: The inequality police aren’t happy.

Akinyele Umoja, a professor of black studies at Georgia State University, complained: "What he's doing is providing credibility and legitimacy for some of these corporations that have policies that just reinforce inequality."

You could see that coming. It’s a pity that the learned scholars in our nation’s universities are still peddling this immiseration stuff, 150 years after the proletarians of the nineteenth century got good jobs, bought houses, and starting driving around in big cars.

On Wednesday, Young hugged customers, signed autographs and posed for pictures with local dignitaries while singing Wal-Mart's praises. He cut the ribbon at a store that replaces an abandoned Kmart that closed two decades ago in the mostly black neighborhood.



The new store has received more than 8,000 applicants for 500 jobs.

That’s a bit over the average for Wal-Mart. They usually expect about 10 people to apply for every job at a new store.

Good luck to the customers and the new employees at the new Wal-Mart in Atlanta. Because who knows, the evil Wal-Mart may end up making eevil Republicans out of them.

Wal-Mart to Sell Sushi

As if Wal-Mart didn’t have enough on its plate, what with every sushi-loving liberal sneering at its products and its shoppers and trying to unionize is employees, now Wal-Mart wants to sell sushi.

Its new Plano, Texas, store will be targeted at a higher income demographic, according to David Koening of Associated Press. The new store will come

with an expanded selection of high-end electronics, more fine jewelry, hundreds of types of wine ranging up to $500 a bottle, and even a sushi bar.

Of course, we all wish Wal-Mart the best in its new venture, but still, there’s a feeling of regret. Wal-Mart has come to represent everything that liberals love to hate, from its low prices to its limited employee “benefits” to its out-and-out bigness. And we conservatives loved Wal-Mart for that.

We loved it when Chicago told Wal-Mart to get lost, and Wal-Mart opened a store right across the city line in Evergreen Park. And we loved it that 23,000 people applied to work at that Wal-Mart store.

Of course, it isn’t going to be easy for Wal-Mart to go upscale.

"The challenge they face is value, and upper-end consumers define value differently than a moderate-income shopper," said Patricia Edwards, who helps manage retail funds for Wentworth, Hauser and Violich investment counselors.

The whole point of upscale shopping is that other people can’t afford it. It’s like the old story about a reporter asking J. Pierpont Morgan how much it cost to own his yacht, the Corsair. “If you have to ask, you can’t afford it,” replied America’s banker.

But perhaps Wal-Mart can prosper by selling upscale stuff cheap. That way people can show off their upscale loot to their upscale friends but fail to mention that they got it cheap at Wal-Mart.

But when we read that Wal-Mart is chi-chi-fying itself, well, something dies inside, that’s all.

School Choice Advocate Offers Steak Dinner

Are you an opponent of school choice? Do you know in your bones that taking money away from the “common school” will hurt kids? Do you have a pile of academic, peer reviewed studies sitting on your kitchen table that prove without a doubt that choice choice is “right-wing utopianism?” Now is your chance to teach the school choice shills a lesson and win a steak dinner!

School-choice advocate Matthew Ladner is offering on NRO a steak dinner to anyone who can

provide two random assignment control-group studies of the attitudes of parents who have actually used a private school-choice program showing anything less than substantial improvement in satisfaction with their child's school.

Actually he is offering more than that. “I'll even throw in drinks and dessert — the whole nine yards,” he writes.

Of course, nobody is going to be fooled by that. You can see that Ladner is really a mean-spirited conservative after all. A confident, non-conformist liberal would have offered steak dinners for two, not just for one. Anyway, the liberal would not have offered a bloody gunky mess of a steak dinner, but a fair-trade meal at a vegetarian restaurant.

This all started when

Jon Talton of the Arizona Republic... used a Sunday column to describe a school-choice program that passed the Arizona legislature with bipartisan support as "right-wing utopianism,"

Ladner was outraged. Why, he had shelves full of studies showing that school choice worked. Where had Talton come up with the notion that school choice was mere right wing vaporware? So he wrote a reply to Talton challenging him to back up his fighting words.

If within the week Mr. Talton can provide two control-group studies of the attitudes of parents who have actually used one of the private school choice programs showing something less than substantial improvement in satisfaction with their child's school, I will happily buy him a steak dinner at a downtown restaurant of his choice. I can produce a large number of studies that demonstrate the opposite, but two will do the trick for Mr. Talton.

Thus far, Ladner reports, Mr. Talton has not collected on his steak dinner. But perhaps that is because he is a vegan liberal and would not want to be seen dead in a steak restaurant.