Category Archives: France
Climate Fire
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When wild fires destroyed the town of Paradise, California Governor Jerry Brown blamed climate change. For the past few weeks Paris has been burning and French President Macron can blame the climate too. The French revolted against a carbon taxed aimed at reducing France’s .4% share of global warming caused by cars.
The €8 billion tax bite comes on top of a 9% unemployment rate. The peasants are pissed.
And so far it’s peasants 1, president 0. Macron backed down and delayed the tax.
Bureaucratic Patriotism
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World leaders gathered in Paris over the weekend to commemorate Armistice Day. It occurred 100 years ago. French president Macron used the occasion to trash Trump’s idea of nationalism. He called it a “betrayal of patriotism.”
So President Trump went into a snit. He insisted his helicopter couldn’t fly in the rain and skipped a cemetery visit.
Earlier Macron and Angela Merkel embraced patriotism for an E.U. army that would stand up to China and America.
So, classicist author Victor Davis Hanson offered a history lesson about French leaders and nationalism.
Oh, and a 101 year old French woman mistook Chancellor Merkel for the 60 something wife of the the 40 year old Macron.
G7 American Allies Battle
There was discord during the buildup to the G7 meetings of rich nations in Quebec. Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau was insulted because he thinks Trump considers Canada to be a security threat.
But President Trump did say he had to hit American allies with high tariffs for national security reasons.
G7 American Allies
Then on Thursday, which happened to be the D-Day anniversary, French President Macron took a shot at Trump saying, “No leader is forever.” He also said, “the six G7 countries without the U.S. are bigger than the American market.”
The next day Trump waded into the meetings insisting that Russia be included.
Global Community versus Global Warming
The civilized world rebuked ISIS by agreeing to turn down the global thermostat.
Al Gore was giddy. He proclaimed, “the global community is speaking with one voice”.
Last time the “global community” tried to speak with one voice was the Kyota Protocol. Poor countries said screw it, we want to get rich too. So this time around the rich countries agreed to buy off the poor ones for $100 billion a year. Or, as The Wall Street Journal editorial board put it, “governments of the West are going to dun their taxpayers to transfer money to clean and green governments run by the likes of Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe”.
But not to worry. John Kerry says the deal is non-binding. It’s not a treaty because a treaty would never get past the US Senate. In other words it’s empty symbolism. Not that that’s a bad thing, according to Robert Tracinski:
As a global warming skeptic, who thinks it’s absurd that the entire world is supposed to get together to prevent relentlessly rising temperatures (that aren’t happening) and who considers the idea of an international political target for global temperatures at the end of the century to be a monument to the hubris of central planning, I’m not bothered that the Paris Agreement is empty symbolism.
Mass Shooting
Two weeks after the Islamist Terror shootings in Paris a madman struck at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs. He killed three people. President Obama took the opportunity to proclaim mass shootings just don’t happen in other countries:
With respect to Planned Parenthood, obviously, my heart goes out to the families of those impacted. … I say this every time we’ve got one of these mass shootings: This just doesn’t happen in other countries.
The Washington Post Fact Checker gave him two Pinocchios for that one.
Here’s a list showing mass shooting fatalities per 100,000 worldwide. The U.S. is high but not alone.
