Notre Dame: the most in depth coverage available (photos, videos, diagrams)

Half an hour from COLLAPSE: Firefighters saved Notre Dame with moments to spare reveals minister – but blaze still took its toll on priceless artifacts after crews failed to find the fire for 23 minutes after first smoke alarm sounded

• Several of Notre Dame's most prized artefacts are said to have been damaged in the devastating inferno
• Franck Riester, France's culture minister, said the great organ and several paintings had been affected
• Heroic rescue team charged into the burning cathedral and saved the 850-year-old building from destruction 
• Notre Dame's roof and spire collapsed but priceless treasures including reputed crown of Thorns were saved  
• Police currently interviewing specialist restorers who were carrying out works on the cathedral's iconic spire 
• Authorities currently treating blaze as a tragic accident caused by a 'stray flame' and not arson or terrorism
• Two of France's richest men have pledged 300million euros with the total donor tally at over 600million  

By PETER ALLEN IN PARIS and GEORGE MARTIN and ALEXANDER ROBERTSON and TIM STICKINGS FOR MAILONLINE

PUBLISHED: 20:57 EDT, 16 April 2019 | UPDATED: 06:21 EDT, 17 April 2019

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6930245/Notre-Dame-just-THIRTY-MINUTES-collapse-minister-reveals.html

BREAKING - AOC!!

AOC, or Appellation d'Origine Contrôlée, is the French system for designating and controlling the geography and quality of wines and other products!!!

VIVE LA FRANCE!

In a move of impeccable timing, a group of House Democrats and quisling Republicans have introduced a bill to impose a carbon tax here in the U.S., and the climatistas are falling all over themselves to say “Pay no attention to those riots over fuel taxes in France! Our carbon tax is completely different!” Here it is being called “tax and dividend” (or sometimes “revenue recycling,” which sounds even greener, because recycling!), as the tax revenue will supposedly be rebated to everyone. In other words, say the advocates, we merely want to induce fuel conservation by increasing the consumer price tag, but you’ll get your money back! So no harm, no foul air. I’m sure the next thing they’ll say is “Of course I’ll still respect you in the morning!” Why, I imagine the first carbon tax rebate checks are already in the mail.

No one over the age of six believes that a carbon tax would be “revenue neutral,” or that any rebate scheme wouldn’t be tilted into a de facto redistribution scheme. Some advocates are quite open about it. The prize for the most exquisite take on the whole matter comes from Tom Steyer on Twitter:

READ MORE

Major European countries, such as Norway, Finland, France, Switzerland and Russia, all have at least 25 percent higher per capita murder rates from mass public shootings than the United States!

America doesn’t lead the world in mass public shootings. We’re not even close. Just last month, a school shooting in Crimea, Russia, claimed 20 lives and wounded 65 others. But Americans usually don’t hear about such events.

The Crime Prevention Research Center, of which I am president, recently finished updating a list of mass public shootings worldwide. . .

Of the 97 countries where we identified mass public shootings, the U.S. ranks 64th per capita in its rate of attacks and 65th in fatalities. Major European countries, such as Norway, Finland, France, Switzerland and Russia, all have at least 25 percent higher per capita murder rates from mass public shootings.

While Americans are rightly concerned by the increased frequency and severity of mass public shootings, the rest of the world is experiencing much larger increases in per capita rates of attack. The frequency of foreign mass public shootings since 1998 has grown 291 percent faster than in the U.S.

The media bias on this is overwhelming. Even after President Donald Trump again raised the danger of gun-free zones, the news media still refuse to mention this fact in its reporting of mass shootings. . .

READ MORE

ISIS knifemen forced elderly priest, 84, to kneel at altar before they slit his throat on camera after invading Mass

If we elect Hillary and all her cohorts, this is all we'll have here in the United States -- WAKE UP PEOPLE!!!!!

BRUTAL PRIEST KILLING IS LATEST IN SPATE OF DEADLY ATTACKS ACROSS EUROPE IN THE LAST YEAR

Today's attack is the latest to hit Europe in what has been a year of bloodshed on the continent:

July 24: Festival suicide bombing - A failed Syrian asylum seeker set off an explosive device near an open-air music festival in the southern city of Ansbach that killed himself and wounded a dozen others.

The 27-year-old had spent time in a psychiatric facility, while the regional authorities said an there was 'likely' a jihadist motive for the attack.

However a spokesman for the interior ministry later said there was as yet 'no credible evidence' of a link to Islamic extremism.

July 24: Knife attack - A Syrian refugee was arrested after killing a Polish woman with a large kebab knife at a snack bar in the southwestern city of Reutlingen, in an incident police said did not bear the hallmarks of a 'terrorist attack' and was more likely a crime of passion.

Three people were also injured in the assault, which ended when the 21-year-old assailant was deliberately struck by a BMW driver, believed to be the snack bar owner's son, trying to stop the man.

July 22: Munich mall mass shooting - David Ali Sonboly, 18, shot dead nine people at a Munich shopping mall before turning the gun on himself, having spent a year planning the rampage.

Police said that the German-Iranian was 'obsessed' with mass killers like Norwegian right-wing fanatic Anders Behring Breivik and had no links to the Islamic State group.

July 18: Train axe attack - A 17-year-old migrant wielding an axe and a knife went on a rampage on a regional train, seriously injuring four members of a tourist family from Hong Kong and a German passer-by.

ISIS group subsequently released a video purportedly featuring the assailant, named by media as Riaz Khan Ahmadzai, announcing he would carry out an 'operation' in Germany, and presenting himself as a 'soldier of the caliphate'.

He is believed to have been Afghan or Pakistani.

July 14: Tunisian Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel ploughed a truck into a crowd of people celebrating Bastille Day in the French Riviera city of Nice, killing 84 people and injuring over 300.

The Nice attack was the third major strike on France in 18 months and was claimed by ISIS.

June 14: A Frenchman of Moroccan origin stabs a police commander to death outside his home in a Paris suburb and kills his partner, who also worked for the police. The attacker told police negotiators during a siege that he was answering an appeal by Islamic State.

March 22: Suicide attacks claimed by ISIS kill 32 people and wound more than 300 at the Brussels airport and Maelbeek metro station, near European Union offices. They appear to have been carried out by members of the same cell that committed attacks in Paris four months earlier.

November 13, 2015: Coordinated suicide attacks in Paris kill 130 people and wound more than 350 at the Bataclan concert hall, cafes and the national stadium. ISIS claims responsibility for the attacks.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3708394/Two-men-armed-knives-people-hostage-French-church.html#ixzz4FY8Fys7d
Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook

What to do and to don’t in response to the Paris attacks

Nov 15, 2015 - Kimberly Kagan

By Dr. Kimberly Kagan and Dr. Frederick W. KaganThis article is co-authored with AEI's Critical Threats Project.

ISW: INSTITUTE FOR THE STUDY OF WAR

The French police and security forces are among the most competent and determined in the world. They have been on alert for precisely this kind of attack since the Charlie Hebdo murders and the attack on the kosher supermarket. They generally have fewer restrictions on their abilities to collect information within their own country than do their American counterparts. If ISIS can beat the French in Paris, they can beat us here.

READ MORE

PARIS - Update

UPDATE:

White man evil; noble savage good

"White man evil, noble savage good. The same guilt-mongering claptrap that’s been around since Rousseau..." --Dr. Jack Wheeler

THE NEW YORK SUN, 2/2/2005:

"I have lived 78 years without hearing of bloody places like Cambodia," Winston Churchill was once heard to remark. Now, of course, we have all heard of Cambodia. It was there, in the 1970s, that one of the most drastic programs of social engineering in all of history was carried out. The Khmer Rouge, a peasant movement led by utopian leftists educated in postwar Paris, took over the country and began shoveling her population around like wet concrete, with the aim of eliminating forever such bourgeois blights as private property, money, love, education, and religion.

The Khmer Rouge practiced a collective style of leadership, but from 1968 onwards a middle-aged cadre named Saloth Sar emerged as first among equals. In 1970 he changed his name to Pol Pot, for reasons he never explained. It is as Pol Pot that he is known to history; and it is under this name that he is commonly listed with the other ideologically driven gangster-despots — Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Kim, and Castro — who brought so much destruction and misery to the world in the 20th century.

Like most communist leaders, Pol Pot came from a well-off family...

READ MORE

Monsieur Hollende's Socialist Opus

Another biting bitch slap from Neville!

The French have taken their first step to financial ruin by electing the first avowed socialist, Francois Hollende, since the 1980's. Mon Dieu!! Sacre Bleu!!!! No Eurozone weeny austerity programs needed here. More spending....yeah, that's the ticket. Prosperity is just around the corner. Vive La France!!!

READ MORE

France has been occupied all over again

Excerpt from THE NEW NAZIS

There was a time when Jewish children were hunted down and killed in France. Their killers believed themselves to be members of a superior group that was destined to rule the world and enslave or exterminate members of inferior groups. The cowardice and appeasement of the French authorities allowed them to operate freely, to kill Jews and launch attacks on other countries.

What was then is now again. The occupying army doesn't wear uniforms, it wears keffiyahs. It doesn't speak German, it speaks Arabic. It doesn't believe that it is superior for reasons of race as much as for reasons of religion. It does not view all others as Untermenschen, but as infidels. It looks forward not to a thousand year Reich, but to a thousand year Caliphate.

Mohammed Merah did not chase down a French-Jewish seven year old girl, put a gun to her head and pull the trigger because he came from an economically depressed area or any of the other media spin. He was only doing what Muslims had been doing to non-Muslims for over a thousand years. He didn't do what he did because he was "radicalized", he did it because he became a fully committed Muslim.

It won't end with taking down one man and it won't end with Jewish children. When your ideology believes that it is in a zero-sum struggle with the rest of the world and that membership means that you are a superior breed of human being because you worship the Fuhrer or Allah, then it won't stop. It won't ever stop. Not until the figurehead is toppled, the creed is humiliated and the supermen are shown to be cowards, neurotics, pedophiles, insecure men dressing up their weaknesses in power fantasies.

Between all the non-stop coverage, the expressions of grief, the political pandering, no one is stating the obvious. France has been occupied all over again. . .

READ MORE

OBAMA'S CURSE

As so often in the past, but catastrophically this time, he found the “sour spot”: the position that angers everyone and pleases none.

The Dreamer Goes Down For The Count

Like toast?

Under the radar:

Spain is toast. That's the solid opinion of a billionaire global investor I know with whom I met privately in Paris last weekend. The only European countries left standing financially when Spain and thus the EU-Euro enterprise goes under are Germany, Denmark, and Holland - plus non-eurozone countries like Norway and of course Switzerland. There's a chance Italy might barely squeak through, but likely not the UK, and France is broke.

We'll always have Paris, and Europe too - but the EU-Euro game is soon to be over.

Oh - and my billionaire friend (whose $20B private equity fund is averaging 68% returns, so he knows what he's doing) won't touch investing in China with a 20-foot pole...

Libyan diplomat: “The three Western states (US/UK/France) have landed their special forces troops in Cyrinacia (eastern coastal region of Libya) and are now setting up their bases and training centres..."

Read more: PAKISTAN OBSERVER

Never forget: We don't survive without oil, period.

UPDATE: So...are we really there and would it be "disastrous"?

UPDATE #2:

The U.S. ordered two warships and 400 Marines to the waters off Libya on Tuesday, but a top Obama administration official stopped short of saying the forces would intervene in the country's growing civil war.

U.S. Orders Ships to Libya as Battle Lines Harden

Ode to Parker

Ahhh...now I know why they named my favorite character--on the tv show Leverage--Parker!

It's because she does so much of THIS...which I just now heard about via GatewayPundit

First Lady says she HATES her job: "It’s hell. I can’t stand it!’

Details of the private conversation, which took place at the White House during an official visit by Nicolas Sarkozy last March, emerged in Carla And The Ambitious, a book written in collaboration with Miss Bruni.

Read more

MUSLIM POWER!!!

Imagine that a very large group of people with their own private security force blocked off the streets of your city every week so that no one could enter or leave their businesses or their homes...and your police just turned their heads the other way and let them continue to violate your city's laws: HIDDEN CAMERA IN PARIS, FRANCE

Update: Whew! It's a good thing I saw this video BEFORE I saw it on Gateway Pundit...now I don't have to Hat Tip him :-)

THE LAW

Frederic Bastiat

Preface

When a reviewer wishes to give special recognition to a book, he predicts that it will still be read "a hundred years from now." The Law, first published as a pamphlet in June, 1850, is already more than a hundred years old. And because its truths are eternal, it will still be read when another century has passed.

Frederic Bastiat (1801-1850) was a French economist, statesman, and author. He did most of his writing during the years just before - and immediately following -- the Revolution of February 1848. This was the period when France was rapidly turning to complete socialism. As a Deputy to the Legislative Assembly, Mr. Bastiat was studying and explaining each socialist fallacy as it appeared. And he explained how socialism must inevitably degenerate into communism. But most of his countrymen chose to ignore his logic.

The Law is here presented again because the same situation exists in America today as in the France of 1848. The same socialist-communist ideas and plans that were then adopted in France are now sweeping America. The explanations and arguments then advanced against socialism by Mr. Bastiat are -- word for word -- equally valid today. His ideas deserve a serious hearing.

"...some important part of every society consists of people who actively want tyranny: either to exercise it themselves or—much more mysteriously—to submit to it...Anyone who thinks the totalitarian temptation lies buried in Lenin's mausoleum would do well to read this book..."

Blog of the Day

Conservatives often wonder why the heck a bunch of people in the freest country that ever existed on this planet just can't wait to take on the great burden of an ever-growing bureaucracy that will monitor and dictate their every bodily function, their mobility, their choices, and their freedom.

Amazingly, a Frenchman figured it all out!

"Last Exit to Utopia" was first published in France nearly a decade ago. It concerns itself primarily with the failure of much of the French left to come to grips with the collapse of communism and the exposure of its innumerable crimes. The events and debates under its review date mainly to the 1990s, and its author died in 2006.

Yet the book, at last available in English in this fine translation, ought to command close attention because it was written by Jean-François Revel, who—unlike such bien-pensant idols as Jean-Paul Sartre (an admirer of Stalin) and Michel Foucault (a cheerleader of the Ayatollah Khomeini)—deserves to be ranked as the pre-eminent French political philosopher of the second half of the 20th century. What's more, the book's themes continue to resonate today, when murderous ideologies still compete for legitimacy and "enlightened" understanding by the Western intelligentsia.

Revel's great subject was totalitarianism, not just its practice but also its intellectual methods, deceits and disturbing psychological attractions. In books such as The Totalitarian Temptation (1976) and How Democracies Perish
(1983), he dissected the mind-set of Western intellectuals who, living in democracies, found much to admire in gulag countries like the Soviet Union and Cuba and much to detest in free ones—the U.S. most of all.

So...you'd think that the collapse of the Soviet Union woulda put an end to all that bullshit...BUT NO (as the late John Belushi of Saturday Night Live used to say)!

The tipping point, in Revel's view, was the publication in 1997 of "The Black Book of Communism," an 800-page compendium of the serial barbarities of communist regimes from China and Ethiopia to Russia and Cambodia. This massive scholarly undertaking, meticulous in its research and incontrovertible in its findings, was instantly greeted with fury by much of the French intelligentsia, which refused to accept that its own eyes-wide-shut apologetics for the likes of Mao, Mengistu, Stalin and Pol Pot were no less a form of complicity in mass murder than Holocaust denial.

Karl Marx gives us a hint of at least some part of the attraction to the brutality of totalitarianism:

"What is the worldly religion of the Jew?" Marx asked. "Huckstering. What is his God? Money." Communism, according to its founding father, "would make the Jew impossible."

And, like the race hustlers who'd be out of a job if they ever acceded to the end of racism in America,

"Utopia is not under the slightest obligation to produce results: its sole function is to allow its devotees to condemn what exists in the name of what does not." --Jean-François Revel

Ravel has also given us a great gift--a clue to our own situation today in dealing with the radical savages who have a blind dedication to the "excommunication of modernity":

Revel's analysis helps to make sense of the latest version of the totalitarian temptation, this time the temptation of radical Islam...

...but you'll have to read the whole book review in order to get this, the new modern mystery of our time.

The Siren Call Of Tyranny
The hard-left former groupies of totalitarianism keep searching for new murderous ideologies to defend.

Another book to consider:

I'm not really the President, I just play one on TV

Finally, the MSM gets wise: Richard Cohen, Washington Post: Time To Act Like A President

Obama: "Where da white women at?"