What the French Students are Saying

Suppose you had been watching the French riots on your TV. Which ones, you ask? They do seem to run together.

Let us start with the riots of Fall 2005 when the young folks from the banlieues expressed their rage and frustration.

Many compassionate and sensitive analysts voiced their concern about the “root cause” of the riots. They pointed to the 25 percent youth unemployment that reached, in the banlieues, 50 percent. It was time for the French government to do something about the sclerotic economy and social deprivation that tossed its young people onto the scrap heap.

What then is the meaning of the elite French students’ street protests, in which the students of France’s top university, the Sorbonne, are protesting the proposal of French Prime Minister Villepin to introduce a law to make it easier to fire young people from their jobs?

British essayist Theodore Dalrymple writes in the London Times that we should not overlook the obvious.

We should never forget that to break a shop window for the good of humanity is one of the greatest pleasures known to Man. Trying to topple governments by shouting insults is also great fun.

But we are looking here for meaning, not for sarcasm, even if it is also one of the greatest pleasures known to Man. So Dalrymple gets to the point.

Whether they know it or not, the people on the streets in France were demonstrating to keep the youth of the banlieues... exactly where they are, namely hopeless, unemployed and feeling betrayed.

A little arithmetic makes Dalrymple’s point for him. If the youth unemployment is the banlieues is 50 percent and the youth unemployment in France generally is 25 percent, then

there must be a considerable section of the young population in which unemployment is less than a quarter, actually much less. One would hardly have to be de Tocqueville to guess in which section of the young population the unemployment was less: the section from which the demonstrators, or at least their leaders and agents provocateurs, are drawn.

Yes, those lefty student demonstrators and their union allies are the ones with the jobs, or the ones most likely to get the good jobs as soon as they graduate. They are anxious to preserve their privileges, as any good aristocrat would.

But the facts on the ground aren’t going to change. Talk to a French small businessman or construction worker and they will tell you that

The French labour regulations make employment of untried persons completely uneconomic for them.

And there is nobody more untried or uneconomic than an angry young teenager in an American inner city or a French banlieue.

Now It's College Graduates That Can't Write

Here in the United States colleges have complained for years about students who need to take remedial courses before they can start their freshman classes. But in Britain, if that is possible, things are worse, according to Minette Marrin. In Britain

huge numbers of children arrive at secondary school unable to read properly for their age or for their studies. That is well known, despite new Labour’s empty claims of success in education. What is less well known is that most students arrive at university or at colleges of further education unable to write properly. Most of them have little or no idea of how to set out an essay or of how to express themselves in writing at all.

And it seems that a lot of them don’t even know how to think properly after they leave the university. So why bother to hire university graduates? Good point.

The director of the Heads, Teachers & Industry trust recently said “there is a growing sense in industry that [university] graduates are no more useful as employees than [high] school-leavers. Transferable and functional skills such as communication, writing and comprehension are lacking, and companies often find it more cost-effective to employ school-leavers and train them themselves.”

So what’s the point? What is the point of having government elementary schools that fail to teach students to read and write properly. What is the point of having government secondary schools that fail to deliver students to the university with the skills to write a term paper? The cost of primary and secondary education in Britain, as in the United States, is about 4.5 percent of GDP.

It’s hard to remember now but back in the day the argument that the government education activists made was that only the government could mobilize the children of the nation, educate them, and prepare them to contribute to society in the challenging modern world. But now the government education system clearly is not bothering to educate the children in its charge. And it sounds as though it doesn’t matter because employers will spend the money to train their employees instead.

So why spend the money on the government schools?

Will Immigration Really Hurt Republicans?

Every time Washington DC is consumed by a controversial national issue, there seems to be an assumption that Republicans are the most vulnerable.

In the present immigration flap, everyone assumes that Republicans are in danger of splitting. Dick Morris writes that at least there is a chance that Republicans can get out alive. In the Washington Post David Ignatius writes that the Democrats are a party ready to pounce. Meanwhile the Gallup Poll announces that more voters identify as Democrats than as Republicans.

But Tony Blankley looks at the numbers.

A Gallup poll (March 27, 2006) finds 80 percent of the public wants federal government to get tougher on illegal immigration. A Quinnipiac University Poll (March 3, 2006) finds 62 percent oppose making it easier for illegals to become citizens (72 percent in that poll don’t even want illegals to be permitted to have driver’s licenses).



Time magazine’s recent poll (Jan. 24-26, 2006) found 74 percent favor "major penalties" on employers of illegals, and 70 percent believe illegals increase the likelihood of terrorism. Fifty-seven percent would use military force at the Mexican-American border.



NBC/Wall St. Journal’s poll (March 10-13, 2006) found 59 percent opposing a guest worker proposal. Seventy-one percent would more likely vote for a congressional candidate who would tighten immigration controls.

Just where in these numbers would the Democratic Party come out ahead of the Republican Party.

This looks like one of those issues that cuts another slice of reluctant Democrats away from the party of their parents. The media will drone on about helpless immigrants and incompetent Bush and mean-spirited Republicans. But on election day there will be another group of Democrats that went missing.

Hispanic Media Organized Protests

So now we know. About a week later. The apparently spontaneous marches and demonstrations against the immigration bills now before the U.S. Congress were organized by the Hispanic Media.

Nothing wrong with that. It’s a free country. But you’s expect better performance from professional journalists raised in the Who What When Where Why and How school and supported by professional editors, researchers, and fact-checkers.

According to KCET in Los Angeles the marches

were organized, promoted or publicized for weeks by Spanish-language radio hosts and TV anchors as a demonstration of Hispanic pride and power.

...

[S]aid Felix Gutierrez, a professor at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication. "If the mainstream media had been paying better attention, there would not have been the surprise about the turnout."

Will the protests affect the bills before Congress? Almost certainly, it will make Congress a little less inclined to send all the illegals home and a little more inclined to sneak through an amnesty. Perhaps amnesty was always in the cards but was being held back as a bargaining card.

Pity about the people didn’t get the instructions from the parade organizers: “Carry an American flag.”

NBC: News Before Context

Yesterday, if you were a conservative blogreader you would have read InstaPundit or Road to the Middle Class and learned about this report from StrategyPage.

StrategyPage reported that war in Iraq against the insurgency, Al Qaeda and the Saddamites, is all but over. Now the conflict was going to be between the official government and the Sadr and Badr militias. The government was getting ready to deal with the Iran-backed parties and their armed followers.

But of course when NBC’s Brian Williams reported that very day that Iraqi special forces assaulted a militia stronghold in Iraq we got first the Sadrist accusations of US forces attacking a mosque. Later did we hear from an American commander denying that the building attacked was a mosque.

But we never got to hear about the new strategy of the Iraqi government. All we could see was that the big explosions and the bloodshed continued.

In addition, NBC also reported on people marching in the US against immigration reform without telling us who is organizing and participating in the marches.

Who is organizing them, Brian Williams? Liberal activist groups? The Democrats? Labor Unions? Chicano groups funded by US philanthropic foundations? Authentic organizations of the undocumented workers? The world would like to get some context here, as in Who What When Why, and so forth.

When the MSM has a dog in the fight they are punctilious about cutting to their analyst and making sure that their great unwashed audience understands what to think. But when it comes to immigration and the War in Iraq then they would prefer to have the American people feel that they are being attacked on their TV screens by confusing, incomprehensible forces.

Don’t forget, MSM, that when you refuse to provide context you allow other people to offer context and meaning. Karl Rove: any ideas?

The Cranes are Flying in Eckert, CO

Enough of politics. Let’s return to the important stuff, the cycle of generation. It is spring and everywhere the birds and the bees and doing what comes naturally.

Right now the sandhill cranes are flying through Eckert, in western Colorado, on their way from New Mexico to their breeding grounds at Grays Lake, Idaho. At Eckert Crane Count they count the birds as they come in every night to roost around Fruit Growers Reservoir. Yesterday, March 26, there were about 2,500 birds taking off in the morning. Today, March 27, there were about 1,000.

There’s an audience at Fruit Growers Reservoir every morning around 9:00 am, as people drive up to watch the birds take off at about 9:30 am. And until the sandhill cranes get the urge to jump into the air and slowly circle up catching the first suggestion of a thermal, you can always look at the coots, the cinnamon teal, the pintails, the Canada geese, and the meadowlarks.

Can Iraqis Stop the Revenge Killing?

Let’s change the subject in Iraq. According to StrategyPage “Deaths from revenge killings now exceed those from terrorist or anti-government activity.”

Al Qaeda is beaten, and running for cover. The Sunni Arab groups that financed thousands of attacks against the government and coalition groups, are now battling each other, al Qaeda, and Shia death squads.

That puts a different aspect on events in Iraq. It takes the focus off the initial conflict in Iraq after Saddam, the effort of Saddamite remnants and Al Qaeda to prevent the emergence of a new national government and its security services. There were, after all, 30 years of Saddamite oppression, and hundreds of thousands of victims and their families.
And many of the Shia majority aren’t too exercised about a little bloodletting.

Many of the terrorists carrying out the revenge killings belong to militias of the extremist Shia political parties. This presents the emerging elected Iraqi government with a challenge and an opportunity.

Iraqis, even Shia Arab Iraqis, have always been fearful, and suspicious, of Iran. Iraqi Shia Arabs fought against Iran during the 1980s war, not because they loved Saddam, but because they feared Iranian domination. The Sadr and Badr groups are vulnerable in this area, and the government is apparently going to exploit it.

But it obviously isn’t going to be easy. You can imagine that our beloved media will be running stories about Iraq on the point of inter-Shia civil war for months, if not years.

Here’s a prediction. The international left is going to start talking about Shia “death squads” sponsored and tolerated by the United States. And the MSM is going to pick up the meme and give it credibility.