[E]ven though society is changing, Jean-Pierre Fourcat, a director with consultants Sociovision specialising in discerning social trends, believes there are some common threads.

"We are also moving into a different situation. We no longer need what we are used to, rather we need what is new. But a motorway without any signs is total panic. So we need some beacons ... and we need a little bit of fun."

"We have to help people to create their own look. And we absolutely must help people to dream, and if we help people to dream perhaps the world will be a little bit better," he said.

We have often wondered where the line forms to apply as a highly paid consultant repackaging dull bromides as wondrous insights. As discerned social trends. As aids to help the little folk dream the little dreams discerned for them by commercial agencies and marketers. "A new man is emerging. A man who is not a man. A man who is a flower." Just where does that line form?

PARIS June 10, 2005 (AFP) - Macho man is an endangered species... A study along these lines led by French marketing and style consultants Nelly Rodi was unveiled to Fashion Group International during a seminar Tuesday on future strategy for the fashion industry in Europe.

"The masculine ideal is being completely modified. All the traditional male values of authority, infallibility, virility and strength are being completely overturned," said Pierre Francois Le Louet, the agency's managing director.

Instead today's males are turning more towards "creativity, sensitivity and multiplicity," as seen already in recent seasons on the catwalks of Paris and Milan.

And as all the little people know, the masculine ideal has always been established on the catwalks of Paris and Milan. George S. Patton defined the masculine ideal for a generation after his waggle down a Paris catwalk.

"We are watching the birth of a hybrid man. ... He is looking for a more radical affirmation of who he is, and wants to test out all the barbarity of modern life" including in the sexual domain, said Le Louet.

Complete and utter twaddle. Then this:

FRENCH MEN YEARN FOR PREGNANCY

[N]early 40 percent of French men told a recent survey that they would, science permitting, like to become pregnant.

The poll, conducted by Ipsos and published in the current issue of Children Magazine (Enfants Magazine), showed that 38 percent of the more than 500 fathers of children up to seven interviewed by phone said they would like, or would have liked, to be the one to carry their offspring to term.

Your new man sets his limits by what science permits not what straitened Nature ordains. A new man is emerging. An enceinte Frenchman who is standing on his head.

[Hat tip: Sofia Sideshow and V de T]

I'd die from embarassment if I were a Frenchman.

Ministers were told of need for Gulf war ‘excuse’
Michael Smith

MINISTERS were warned in July 2002 that Britain was committed to taking part in an American-led invasion of Iraq and they had no choice but to find a way of making it legal.

The warning, in a leaked Cabinet Office briefing paper, said Tony Blair had already agreed to back military action to get rid of Saddam Hussein at a summit at the Texas ranch of President George W Bush three months earlier.

NI_MPU('middle');
The briefing paper, for participants at a meeting of Blair’s inner circle on July 23, 2002, said that since regime change was illegal it was “necessary to create the conditions” which would make it legal.

This was required because, even if ministers decided Britain should not take part in an invasion, the American military would be using British bases. This would automatically make Britain complicit in any illegal US action.

“US plans assume, as a minimum, the use of British bases in Cyprus and Diego Garcia,” the briefing paper warned. This meant that issues of legality “would arise virtually whatever option ministers choose with regard to UK participation”.

The paper was circulated to those present at the meeting, among whom were Blair, Geoff Hoon, then defence secretary, Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, and Sir Richard Dearlove, then chief of MI6. The full minutes of the meeting were published last month in The Sunday Times.

The document said the only way the allies could justify military action was to place Saddam Hussein in a position where he ignored or rejected a United Nations ultimatum ordering him to co-operate with the weapons inspectors. But it warned this would be difficult.

“It is just possible that an ultimatum could be cast in terms which Saddam would reject,” the document says. But if he accepted it and did not attack the allies, they would be “most unlikely” to obtain the legal justification they needed.

The suggestions that the allies use the UN to justify war contradicts claims by Blair and Bush, repeated during their Washington summit last week, that they turned to the UN in order to avoid having to go to war. The attack on Iraq finally began in March 2003.

The briefing paper is certain to add to the pressure, particularly on the American president, because of the damaging revelation that Bush and Blair agreed on regime change in April 2002 and then looked for a way to justify it.

There has been a growing storm of protest in America, created by last month’s publication of the minutes in The Sunday Times. A host of citizens, including many internet bloggers, have demanded to know why the Downing Street memo (often shortened to “the DSM” on websites) has been largely ignored by the US mainstream media.

The White House has declined to respond to a letter from 89 Democratic congressmen asking if it was true — as Dearlove told the July meeting — that “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy” in Washington.

The Downing Street memo burst into the mainstream American media only last week after it was raised at a joint Bush-Blair press conference, forcing the prime minister to insist that “the facts were not fixed in any shape or form at all”.

John Conyers, the Democratic congressman who drafted the letter to Bush, has now written to Dearlove asking him to say whether or not it was accurate that he believed the intelligence was being “fixed” around the policy. He also asked the former MI6 chief precisely when Bush and Blair had agreed to invade Iraq and whether it is true they agreed to “manufacture” the UN ultimatum in order to justify the war.

He and other Democratic congressmen plan to hold their own inquiry this Thursday with witnesses including Joe Wilson, the American former ambassador who went to Niger to investigate claims that Iraq was seeking to buy uranium ore for its nuclear weapons programme.

Frustrated at the refusal by the White House to respond to their letter, the congressmen have set up a website — www.downingstreetmemo.com — to collect signatures on a petition demanding the same answers.

Conyers promised to deliver it to Bush once it reached 250,000 signatures. By Friday morning it already had more than 500,000 with as many as 1m expected to have been obtained when he delivers it to the White House on Thursday.

NI_MPU('middle');
AfterDowningStreet.org, another website set up as a result of the memo, is calling for a congressional committee to consider whether Bush’s actions as depicted in the memo constitute grounds for impeachment.

It has been flooded with visits from people angry at what they see as media self-censorship in ignoring the memo. It claims to have attracted more than 1m hits a day.

Democrats.com, another website, even offered $1,000 (about £550) to any journalist who quizzed Bush about the memo’s contents, although the Reuters reporter who asked the question last Tuesday was not aware of the reward and has no intention of claiming it.

The complaints of media self-censorship have been backed up by the ombudsmen of The Washington Post, The New York Times and National Public Radio, who have questioned the lack of attention the minutes have received from their organisations.

I have come up with 2 other possible solutions for the "French Problem":

1. Saddam Hussein should immediately
be made President of France.

2. The United States should correct its
foreign policy boon doggle of the
1940s and give France back to
Germany.

Oh and a Congressional Investigation and/or Impeechment of U.S. President George W. Bush, reference to the Downing Street Memo, is absolutely out of the question. Congress is much too busy with Congressional hearings regarding Major League Baseball Players and their possible use of steriods.

Had Mr. Pulaski actually listened to the NPR broadcast mentioned in his cut-and-paste, he would know that the reasons this purported memo has not gotten exhaustive coverage are 1) only two news mediums claim to have actually seen this document and 2) the key phrase "fixed around" in British English does not hold the sinster conspiratorial tones being suggested by Mr. Pulaski's American English. But Mr. Pulaski wants to beat his better-Saddam-than-democratic-Iraq drum with off-topic cut-and-paste commentary.

What, we are curious to know, is Mr. Pulaski's standard for damning intelligence? Alas, he does not tell us, but we can safely infer that it is hard intelligence of infallible accuracy. A standard of intelligence that has never existed for any government of any party of any nation planning for war. Mr. Pulaski envokes the Pearl Harbor standard. The 09.11 standard. And then after being visited by the hard intelligence of national disaster, we see Mr. Pulaski and his ilk then switch to the who-knew-what-when standard to condemn inaction.

What disturbs us about the liberal project, which, fair to say, is Mr. Pulaski's project, is its dishonesty in pursuit of a limited political complaint. Whatever one thought before the Allies liberated Iraq, what exactly after the liberation are the likes of Mr. Pulaski arguing for? The restoration of Mr. Saddam?

Even were the Downing Street memo to be as Mr. Pulaski suggests, the surmise is that the American position was sinister. Whether accurate or no, the American position was the consensus position. Even France concurred with the American position, the French having provided intelligence that helped shape the American position.

But Mr. Pulaski suggests a Saddam Iraq is not only the legitimate Iraq but the best Iraq for...well, for Mr. Pulaski, who is spared the inconvenience of living under Mr. Saddam.

DGB

The old " leaked Cabinet Office briefing paper " gag. Wonder how many skeletons, and atrocities, the socialists tripped over looking for this memo. I can almost hear " Ouch ... [find something?] ... No but I stubbed my toe on one of Galloway's oil drums. ... [ do be careful old boy]"

I heard this memo was heresay of heresay of heresay - that is heresay three times removed.

But I have heard from a friend, who has a neighbor, who rented an apartment to a guy, who has a cousin, who claims to have seen Joe Polaski blowing a horse.
YOu can take that to the bank.