European Leaders Stun European Importance

The EU is now officially headed by an aubergine, and a turnip. It’s actually two people, really, and I am sure they are worthy of all praises, but the fact that their notoriety was strictly limited to local phone directories and the immediate family suggests that 27 European leaders can only agree on names nobody will ever be satisfied with (and never mind they look like Gary Larson’s characters too).

The end result will be two-and-a-half years in which hundreds of millions of European will be represented on the world stage literally by Nobody. Could anybody please tell me who is ever going to listen to “Nobody”?

Expect 30 months of European daze.

Congratulations to all those not selected, as it indicates they were candidates of some importance. And please do keep the President of the EU away from the President of the USA, as in terms of charisma they are the respective antiparticle. If they’ll just shake their hands, they’ll annihilate!

Skeptical About ‘The message From The Streets Of Tehran’

Nazenin Ansati and Jonathan Paris claim that “many in the [Iranian] Green Movement […] would like to see the international community exert pressure on the regime through a progressive set of smart, vigorous and targeted sanctions and more forceful advocacy of human rights” (“The message from the streets of Tehran“, IHT, Nov 7).

But haven’t “targeted sanctions” against the Iranian regime and a seemingly perennial “advocacy of human rights” been in place for decades? And what would any Iranian internal opposition movement ever gain from associating itself with foreign Powers, given the anti-Western-Governments paranoia widespread among the ruling classes, and the evidence of History suggesting that foreign intervention in Iran has invariably been for the worst?

Not Much Hope For Journalism Standards Worldwide

I was already disappointed enough after learning a few details about British journalism in Nick Davies’ “Flat Earth News”. And I better reserve my comments about Italian journalism. Could it have gotten any worse?

It could. And it did. Here’s a story from Randy Cassingham’s (unmissable) “This is True” (28 June 2009):

PICTURE THIS: The magazine Paris Match announced its annual prize for student photojournalism. The winners, Guillaume Chauvin and Remi Hubert from the Strasbourg School of Decorative Arts, were handed their prize: a check for 5,000 euros (US$7,050), for their investigative report on student poverty. The magazine published the photos, showing how students had to resort to prostitution, or digging in the trash for food, to survive. “We pushed the cliches to the limit,” Chauvin and Hubert said. “We thought the whole thing was so hackneyed that it could never win.” The real subject of their project, they announced at the award ceremony, was to use staged photos “to call into question the inner workings of the attitude of the kind of media which portrays human distress with complacency and voyeurism.” The “crestfallen” judges still managed to applaud, reporters say — but Paris Match stopped payment on the prize check. “There was nothing in the rules of the competition to say that rigged photos were banned,” Hubert told a reporter. (London Independent) …No worries: the project should easily qualify to win the 10,000-euro Striking the Match Prize.
©2009 Randy Cassingham, excerpted from This is True with the author’s permission

Yes, there is a very good point in blogging!!