inter lineas

Last week France eagerly proposed to take care of another African problem, the CAR, part of their colonial playground where, if puish comes to shove (as it often does), their historical weight, and interests, are still in evidence.

I wondered why, apart from global humanistic and local economic reasons, they would volunteer to intervene. After all, such operations are expensive and France cannot scoop funds out of overflowing state coffers. Of course, there are a lot of “national interests” (primarily commercial in nature) to protect in these former colonies, providing tit-for-tat compensation.

Yesterday it became clear though that France saw its troops, in the style of the Légionnaires mercenary forces, as substantial export earners, when Fabius declared that the cost of the CAR operations should largely be borne by the EU.

What is surprising here is not that the EU (and, presumably, the rest of the world) might contribute to the financing of the intervention, but that France first volunteers for the job, and afterwards demands to be paid for it!

The rules of politicians’ business and the regular business variety are ostensibly quite different.

Grimbergen, December 10, 2013

In its Health+Science section, the international NYT reports on November 27 that “Gay parents enter an era of normalcy”.

What do you say? Great. The story reads like an all-is-well-that-ends-well fable. May we now look forward to the long awaited sequel :”Gay’s children enter an era of normalcy”?

Or should we wait some more to exclaim our happiness? Perhaps until the new generation genomefiddlers can create offspring prototypes that are happily entering their era of normalcy as well?

If you want to discover through the western newspapers today why Chodorkovsky sits in jail, you ought to dig very deep. And even then success is not assured.

Just as a reminder: even the “defenders” of the gentleman do not dispute the charges that he unrightfully disappropriated billions (27 according to the prosecution) of dollars that actually belonged to the Russian people/state. That he was making moves to use precisely thàt money to buy himself political power in Russia is not an item of disagreement either.

Yet, the western news media choose to paint Comrade Chodorkovsky as a semi saint who was going to push over Tsar Putin and subsequently install the ideal democracy in Russia. Nowhere can one read that, instead and foremost, he should get a place in the World Gallery of White-collar Crimes! Such is, in this day and age, the “political correctness”, according to the contemporary news media bible.

How can we, democrats of the world united, make sure that news does not get first interpreted and then distorted by the unelected dictators of the media?