Chinese takeaway

Is there anyone else out there who thinks, as City friend of mine put it to me, that a very happy and oh-so-coincidental by-product of Mr Brown's China trip will be that Northern Rock gets new owners, who just happen to have Chinese money?

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France is France

If you want to know what's wrong with France (and, by the way, what's right with Amazon) ,this pretty much says it all:

The online retailer Amazon.com said Monday that it would pay €1,000 a day in fines, rather than comply with a court ruling upholding French limits on price discounts for books.

The company decided to pay the daily fine worth $1,500 rather than eliminate its offer of free shipping on book purchases, said Xavier Garambois, director of Amazon's French subsidiary.

...The 1981 Lang law was passed at a time when booksellers were losing sales to supermarkets and other new competitors. It was meant to assure that the French public had equal access to a wide variety of books, both high-brow and low-brow, not just heavily marked-down publications.

The law has twice come before the European Court of Justice and both times it has been affirmed. The law is not considered anticompetitive because all book retailers are held to the same standard, Manara said.

In the Amazon case, a union of French bookstores won its lawsuit against the company last month over the free-shipping offer, which applies only to deliveries within France on book orders of more than €20.

The Tribunal de Grande Instance in Versailles awarded the bookstore association €100,000 and ordered Amazon to start charging for delivery. The court said if the cost of Amazon's delivery reduced the price of a book more than the 5 percent allowed by law, then the sale violated the law.

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It's the  thermostatic impairment wot does it

James commends a piece in the Telegraph by Camila Batmanghelidjh. I'm sure she does good work, but forgive me for finding her a rather preposterous figure. Whenever I've seen her on the telly she seems to mix platitudes with nonsense. This, for instance (unearthed by Peter Hitchens), on the radio, is simply beyond satire: 

There are very exciting studies emerging that may really help our thinking. A lot of these types of very violent young people are thermostatically impaired. The reason they're thermostatically impaired is that they've been exposed to so much violence and trauma that they almost get addicted to operating through adrenaline.

This adrenaline recharges their system into a violent state of being. In addition they have got very poor selfsoothing repertoires because they have been deprived of loving care. Loving care and compassion is what gives you your repertoire for empathy.

On the one hand they are maternally and carewise very depressed so that the control areas of the brain don't develop, and on the other hand they are supercharged with traumatic memories which disregulate their management of energy. And I think we need to be looking at the problem at these levels. Cultural factors only give you the weapons, they don't give you the feeling to kill.

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The downfall of HD DVD

You might have read about the apparent victory of Blu-Ray over HD DVD. This is how the news was taken at HD DVD HQ (thanks to Comment Central):

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Not to be missed!

You get the feeling he liked it:

Truly great performances of Verdi's La Traviata come along once in a generation, and this astonishing revival of Richard Eyre's 1994 Royal Opera production may well go down in history as one of the defining operatic experiences of our times. Conducted by Maurizio Benini, it stars Anna Netrebko as Violetta, Jonas Kaufmann as Alfredo and Dmitri Hvorostovsky as Germont. Giving three of the finest performances you will ever see, they challenge many of our most deeply held assumptions about this most familiar of operas.

Mrs P and I are lucky enough to be going to this Sunday's performance. I can't wait.

Meanwhile, here is the amazing Anna Netrebko singing Dvorak's gorgeous Song to the Moon:

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Double standards

This is Samizadata's Quote of the Day:

Kill six millions Jews in Germany, your name becomes a synonym with evil. Kill between 44 and 72 million Chinese, you get a cafe named after you. It's a funny old world, eh?

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Lucky Lancashire!

I've a penchant for dull headlines. This one today, from the Guardian, is up there with the best:

Sindy's Williams to lecture in Lancashire.  

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It's the Jews, it's the Jews.

Comment is Free has an interesting piece by Alan Johnson on neoconitis:

an all-purpose insult for anyone who still believes that American power is inextricable from global stability and still thinks the muscular anti-totalitarian US interventionism that brought down Slobodan Milosevic has a place.

But while you're about it, take a look at the comments. CiF has become a hot bed of the kind of noxious anti-Americanism which so infects the Left. And with that, as night follows day, comes a large dose of antisemitism, which the Guardian editors always seem happy to leave up. Take this comment, below. I know of two people who emailed to complain about it, but the CiF editors appear not to consider it in any way improper, since as I write it remains in place (I realise that I am giving it wider currency by copying it, but I hope you agree that there's a useful purpose in so doing):

Do you guys ever think when you write out all of this propaganda? It doesn't seem like it. You say this stuff about "A cabal controlling the word for Israel" in a dismissive tone, and talk about reading things in a falsetto voice as if it is all ridiculous.

Then you go on to list people in your article for various things. Let's take a look at that list.

Paul Berman - jewish name
Roger Cohen - jewish name
Joe Lieberman - definitely jewish
Adam Michnik - jewish name
Jurgen Habermas - jewish name?
Tony Blair - Zionist tool
George Bush - Zionist tool
Bernard Kouchner - definitely jewish
-------------------

So. There is no cabal controlling the world for Israel and jewish people, but half of the people you list in your article are jewish, or their actions over the past 7 years have proved that they work for the zionists.

I am guessing the non jewish names are neocon collaborators who have just not been exposed yet. In a year or 5, we will find out they have connections to some neocon institute somewhere or the other. Or they are married to a jewish person like Kofi Annan is.

That really surprised me. I could never figure out why Kofi Annan was so pro Israel until I found that out.

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More Thompson drivel

A promising headline in the Guardian:

BBC launches action to rebuild trust.

In a speech entitled The Trouble with Trust: Building Confidence in Institutions, to be given in Westminster's Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre, he will promise new multimedia portals to reconnect parliament with the public.

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Give it to Paris

Well, I must say this comes as a huge shock:

Britain faces a £1 billion black hole after the 2012 Olympics because of “ludicrous” property price projections backed by ministers, it emerged last night.

I do, however, have a get out of jail free solution to this obscene squandering of public money.

Gordon Brown should pick up the phone to Nicholas Sarkozy and tell him that Paris can have the whole damn thing. 

There is nothing the French would like more than rubbing our noses in the humiliation of it, and they would happily pay whatever it took. And it would be worth every moment of the humiliation to escape the debts that Tessa Jowell and her crowd of moronic spendthrift incompetents are saddling us with. 

Just to be certain the French bite, Mr Brown should offer to sign a public document saying that we Brits should never even have bid for the games against the far superior French, and that it is Paris' historic destiny to host the games. Lay on the 'umbleness, lay on the 'we're not worthy', lay on the 'you French are mighty'-ness with a trowell.

And then stand back and watch Paris saddle itself with debt the like of which no country has ever known before, so that some people can run around in a stadium in the summer of 2012.

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