Notre Dame distractions, how acquiessence in rubbish service leads to dicatorial demands, and why Big Strong Butch Boy Macron is still under the watchful eyes of farmers and Yellow Vests.

 

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I very much doubt if more than a single column inch has appeared on this subject in the United Kingdom, but today the media here is full of a very big story involving Notre Dame, and actual or intended conflagrations. A French court on Monday sentenced five members of a female jihadist cell to between five and thirty years in relation to a failed attempt to detonate a car bomb outside Notre-Dame cathedral in Paris in 2016. 

The case is the first to involve a group of women attempting to stage an attack in France. It is however one of a great many since 2015, the death toll from which during that period stands at 255 dead in support of the Religion of Peace. Jihadists do not, of course, represent Isam as a whole, but that same Islam frequently refuses to condemn their actions in mass media.

The women were sentenced to 30 years and 25 years in prison respectively. However, there are two major distractions in this news. The first is gender, and the second is failure.

The reality is that this offence was entirely unrepresentative – and completely ignores the much more obvious trend: successful premeditated attacks on churches in France. Last February, five churches were attacked on one day. During mid March, eleven churches were attacked in one week.

But the Establishment line remains one of rather odd omission. For example, one anglofone title bizarrely recorded that attacks on Christian churches had been ‘relatively low’ during 2018 – at 28 incidents. Others, meanwhile, have focused on the ‘rise’ in attacks on mosques in France. In terms of volume, the comparison is laughable.

But the gigantic smelly mammoth in this bed sitting room is the real Notre Dame fire that stunned us all last April. As it happens, the defendants in the 2016 failed attack on on Our Old Girl used a lighted cigarette to ignite the petrol involved. The latest from the French government last June on the 2019 success said, ‘the Notre Dame Cathedral could have been caused by a burning cigarette or an electrical malfunction’.

This “verdict” is unchanged, by the way, since the rush to judgement of imagined but untested theories within fifteen days of the conflagration.

It leaves a lot to be desired in terms of credibility….and as many loose ends that lead in no especially reassuring direction.

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While this is a somewhat catch-all post, the central character is la belle France….which as most of you know, I love – up to but not including the two national diseases: Emmanuel Macron, and Je m’en fou, the polite translation of the latter being ‘I couldn’t give a toss’.

The central point, however, is rather bigger, and it’s this: if you don’t complain to service providers in general and governments in particular – to the point of  seriously embarrassing them in every medium you can find – the service will go through a mutation as follows:

Risible >> Execrable >> Unaccountable >> Dictatorial

Enter Episode 3 of The Slog’s attempt to replace his passport. What I originally imagined was the brainless reliance of HM Passport Office on Artificial Intelligence turns out to be the obsession of the Civil Aviation Authority with airline terrorism.

The CAA had, on HMP’s supine behalf, rejected eight of my previous attempts to upload a high-pixcellation picture of The Slog that met their stringent requirements for open eyes, closed mouths, zero smiles, no shadows, impeccable hairlines…and in fact all the signs of being a psychopathically humourless ideological nutjob.

So today, I went to a photographic studio here for the perfect picture shoot. The owner (a very nice lady with an reassuring air of efficiency) told me her passport photo business had exploded since the CAA madcaps got involved. She took the shots and vowed to email them to me that morning.

The email she sent just before lunch was bang on schedule, but 100% deficient in an image file attachment.

At 2.40 in the afternoon, I rang her office and pointed out the lack of digital photography to a voice message.

At 4.30 I rang again, and this time a humanoid said oh yes, silly me – I’ll send it directly.

At 6.20 I called the studio yet again to say hi, still no picture, really need this picture to get a passport asap as you already know.

The picture then arrived.

So….to sum up, I – a taxpaying EU national – wasted an entire day dealing with a dictatorial passport service, having kicked an execrable service up the arse three times purely to obtain that for which I had paid upfront.

I will leave you all to join up the dots re this one. As the Buddhists so rightly say, “Everything is connected”.

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Meanwhile, back to Episode 7 of the insoluble French deficit issue….and the Gilets Jaunes opposition (at present the sole viable opposition to Macronism in France) upon which the Anglo-Saxon media refuse to report, but to which the Macronites continue to make concessions….which is more than can be said for the Spanish “Justice System”, and the obscene prison sentences dished out to Catalan separatists….as the European Gauleiters look fixedly in the opposite direction.

The Slog has published three posts this year in relation to the yawning 35% gap between Gallic tax income and State expenditure. Thus far, the MSM too have yawned as the overture to falling asleep on the matter.

But today the Elysée has come up with the solution: a radical block – during the remaining three months of the sovereign fiscal year – on imports.

Um, this has been a recurring request from French farming lobbysists and the GJs over many months.

Er, the EU is meant to be a Free Trade bloc in which there are no, as it were, blocs on imports from fellow members.

You really couldn’t make this protectionist/free trade hypocrisy up. And if you did, no self-respecting publisher would give it the oxygen of publicity.