Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

Tuesday 31 March 2015

The European Union Times


Posted: 30 Mar 2015 06:22 AM PDT

France’s National Front party has won a sizeable number of council seats in Sunday’s second round of local elections. Though the party didn’t do as well as was predicted in polls, its leader Marine Le Pen calls the results a “magnificent success.”
The National Front is “becoming a powerful political force in numerous regions,” Le Pen tweeted, adding that that the party won the elections in 43 departments.
“We now have a multitude of local officials throughout France, which will help to secure future victories,” she added.
Prime Minister Manuel Valls acknowledged the improved progression of Le Pen’s party, though the National Front hasn’t won power in any local councils, according to projections based on early counting.
“The FN [National Front] is now implemented nationwide, it has reached a level that is high, too high,” Valls told France’s Le Journal Du Dimanche.
Le Pen’s party, however, didn’t manage to outpace Nicolas Sarkozy’s UMP (Union for a Popular Movement) party and its allies, which took about two thirds of the possible 98 departments, according to projections.
The ruling Socialists under guidance of the current President François Hollande were defeated. Left-wing parties managed to grab only between 27 and 37 councils. The socialists previously had 61.
“Tonight the Republican right and the center have clearly won these departmental elections. Never before in the Fifth Republic has our political family achieved such a result,” said Sarkozy, hailing the victory of his party.
“Through this vote the French public has massively rejected the policies of François Hollande and his government,” he added.
Hollande’s ratings are at a record low and there are fears in the Elysee Palace that he won’t even ‘survive’ the first round of presidential elections.
“Everyone in the [Elysee] is scared he will be eliminated in the first round in 2017,” a presidential advisor told AFP.
An even bleaker future for Hollande’s party was predicted by Gilles Finchelstein, a political strategist close to the Socialists.
“The left is in danger of dying [and] risks becoming nothing more than a residual political force,” he told L’Express magazine.
Pierrre Guerlain, a professor at Paris West University, told RT that he was not surprised by the election results, as “all opinion polls predicted such a situation.”
“Hollande was elected on a left-wing platform and immediately implemented economic polices which corresponded more to the right, so he is [carrying out] the policy of the right,” Guerlain said. “And a lot of people who supported him are dissatisfied.”
“Another factor is that there is as crisis affecting the poor, low- and middle-class people…They project their dissatisfaction [on] to Europe, and Europe is not helping.”
Guerlain said that Le Pen, as the far-right National Front candidate, would “have a good chance” in the second round of the 2017 presidential elections.
On the first round of local elections on March 22 Le Pen’s far-right National Front (FN) achieved a historic high watermark, but again failed to outrun Nicolas Sarkozy’s center-right UMP.
“The National Front has done 10 points better than it did in the 2011 local elections, but its progress has stalled. It seems to have reached a ceiling,” said Bernard Sananes, head of the polling organization CSA on BFMTV.

Of the total 2054 local voting districts, the UMP and its conservative allies took 170 seats outright, ahead of the left’s 44 and six for the FN, according to the interior ministry’s count. The Socialist Party came third with around 21 percent of the vote.

Le Pen, commenting on the vote, said that the mainstream parties are conspiring against her party.
“This massive vote for the National Front that is taking root in election after election shows that the French want to rediscover their freedom,” she said. “Send home those who have brought France to her knees, and bring a new political generation to power.”
Le Pen has seen her party enjoy success in the recent European elections. They secured 25 percent of the votes and took over a dozen municipalities in local elections last year. The FN also secured a historic victory in 2014, winning two seats in the upper house of parliament for the first time.
Source
Posted: 30 Mar 2015 06:05 AM PDT

Geographically one finds France in Europe, but demographically the country is swiftly drifting towards Africa as recent data indicates. France, unlike America, does not hold censuses on ethnicity, but follows instead its ideal of the color-blind republic. This, obviously, does not change one bit the ethnic reality on the ground, but it certainly helps to keep its citizens in the dark about it. Little in the way of official figures exists on the size of the immigrant population and the native French, until now. Pertinent material has come from quite an unexpected source, medicine, and it has all the hallmarks of allowing us an adequately precise and unbiased look into the strong growth of the non-White population in France.
National Screening Program for Sickle Cell Disease
Since 2000, the country has conducted a nationwide program of neonatal screening for sickle cell disease (SCD). SCD is a genetic disease by and large peculiar to non-European people. However, due to Third World immigration it has become the most common genetic disorder in today’s France. To provide early medical treatment for the illness, the French public health authorities have defined risk groups which are liable to screening. These comprise primarily people of African origin, from North and sub-Saharan Africa as well as ethnic Africans from the Americas. A second risk group consists of persons with a Near or Middle Eastern background (Turkey, the Arabian peninsula and the Arab lands in between) and from the Indian subcontinent. The rest is made up of migrants from a comparatively small coastal rim in Southern Europe, namely Portugal, Southern Italy, Greece and the isles of Corsica and Sicily.
Newborn babies in France are defined as “being at-risk for SCD when at least one parent originates from a risk region” where the responsible gene is prevalent. This national screening policy based on the ethnic origin of the parents permits us to see the full extent of the rapidly expanding demographics of the non-white French population:
In 2000, 19 percent of all newborn babies in mainland France had at least one parent originating from the regions above. This share rose to 28.45 percent in 2007, to 31.5 percent in 2010, to 34.44 percent in 2012, and to 35.7 percent in 2013. This percentage corresponds to 279,903 out of the 783,964 babies born last year. In other words: within thirteen years, the number of (partly) extra-European babies has risen on mainland from about one fifth to more than one third.
The medical survey provides us with even more data, namely a breakdown per region (see map below). We learn that in 2013, 67.9 percent of newborns in the Ile de France, essentially Paris, descended from non-Europeans. In Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur, where Le Pen’s Front National is particularly strong, the non-White share was 44.27 percent; in neighbouring Languedoc-Roussillon 40.04 percent. The lowest share was recorded in the Bretagne, 7.33 percent. In every single one of the 22 Metropolitan regions of France the portion of immigrant babies rose between 2005 and 2013.
The Figures Hold Water
What can be said against the accuracy of these figures? Not much actually, they seem to hold water to all appearances. While the authors of the study point out that the screening of newborn babies is not applied universally, they regard missed cases to be “relatively infrequent”. These would, in any case, not reduce, but increase the share of non-White babies among the total population.
This leaves the Southern European immigrants, who are not independently accounted for in the statistics, as the dark horse in the equation. How high is their share in the studied risk group? Do we have to significantly adjust the number of non-white babies downwards to accommodate their share in the risk group? I would argue by far not enough to blur the trend: although descendants from Italian people reportedly number into the millions in France, most of them have immigrated generations ago. The screening, however, was employed in my understanding only for babies whose father and/or mother had immigrated from one of the risk zones, thus covering recent immigration only.
The authors of the medical survey themselves leave no doubt as to what they view the main cause of the rise of sickle cell disease. They squarely attribute it to the rise of African immigration or, in their words,
“as a result of population growth in African-Caribbean regions of overseas France, and now immigration essentially from North and sub-Saharan Africa to mainland France.”
Now my concern here is not with the spread of sickle cell disease as such, but with the sharp demographic decline of white France which these figures reflect and the impossibility to be allowed to talk about it in Europe’s current multiculturalist climate.
Being a political scientist by profession I look with envy on how freely these medical scientists, biochemists and geneticists, not burdened by the expediencies of political correctness and apparently completely unaware of the huge demographic implications of their findings, can go on discussing to what presumably amounts to the profoundest demographic change of France since the Frankish conquest and the creation of the French state itself.
The French Republican Self-defeat
It’s stunning: One only needs to substitute their discussion of the “screened babies” with “African-Oriental newborns,” take a look at the SCD target population map of France they provide, and get a fairly complete picture of what enlightened France has been persistently denying to communicate to its people: that white France – the original France, the France which made France – is being phased out, making place for a hybrid Eurafrican society.
Mass immigration has evidently become a self-defeat for La Grande Nation. One could argue that even for the immigrants themselves it produces diminishing returns: the more white France disappears, the less the country retains the character which had attracted all these immigrants in the first place.
When I said fairly complete, this was not entirely correct. In fact, the demographic situation of white France is even worse for two reasons: first, the discussion has not touched so far on its overseas departments which have always been home to an ethnically diverse population. Four-fifths of their newborns, the medical survey tells us, were subjected to SCD testing in 2013. By including this number, 36,844 babies, the share of non-White births increases from 35.7 percent for mainland France to 38.18 percent in all of France (316,747 out of 829,570 newborns). Second, the screening figures do not cover all those extra-European immigrant groups to the mainland which do not have a genetic disposition to SCD, like East Asians and Hispanics. Adding their birthrates further reduces the white French share of the total by an unknown margin.
The bitter irony is that these population figures suggest that France has been more radically changed by its former colonies than it ever changed the face of them. Unlike its maritime rival Great Britain, France was never a successful colonizer. Its only permanent settler colony of note is Québec to which it sent no more than 10,000 settlers. If there is a “revenge of the colonies,” as the White guilt trip of Western leftist thought has it, then France certainly gets more than its share back.
France, like America, has always prided herself as a champion of modern, “culture-neutral” Republican values to the whole world. Her historical achievement in spreading enlightenment around the globe is undeniable. But her lighthouse role has blinded her to the negative effects at home: it never fully realized that the total propagation of these ideals also gave rise to a culturally and ethnically gutted citoyen, someone dispossessed from his own roots and denied the right to have them. It never quite understood that a strong sense of cultural and ethnic identity is not the enemy of democratic values, but rather its necessary and natural complement. It forgot that the French Revolution, its gift to the democratic world, was not created in an ethnic and cultural vacuum but by people with an identity and history — a white European identity.
It may therefore be no coincidence that France, again like America, is among the first Western countries to fall demographic victim to its own negation of culture and ethnicity. In a way, history has come full circle: what France originally exported as an idea, the radically culture-blind republic, leaves her now helpless to come to grips with its own rapid de-Europeanization – the revolution devours its children, for good.
Addendum: French mass media missing the subject
The continuously rising share of non-white children in France as evidenced by the constantly expanding nationwide tests on sickle cell disease (SCD) in newborns has finally come to the attention of the French mainstream media. In a September 2014 article two journalists of the newspaper Le Monde, Nicolas Six and Alexandre Léchenet, picked up the subject and attempted to refute the above figures as unsubstantiated. They failed at it completely, though, by confusing logical categories, misinterpreting statistical data and largely missing the point altogether. The key question, in fact the only pertinent question here, is whether the data on sickle cell disease collected by the French health authorities accurately reflects non-white births in France. I will briefly outline their five counter-arguments and show why neither is valid or relevant:
1. Six & Léchenet acknowledge that the French authorities conduct these tests for parents from the above risk regions which lie overwhelmingly outside Europe (mainly in Africa, but also the Middle East and territories with a substantial black populace like the Antilles and South America). Yet, they like to make the point that the disease is due to “geographic, not ethnic factors.” But this is merely a different label for the same phenomenon. Whether we call this risk group as coming from the continent of Africa or being of ethnic African origin is semantics, nothing more. The point is they are not from Europe, they are non-European immigrants.
2. Six & Léchenet argue that SCD is a “globalised” disease, but this is just another angle that aims to blur the ethnic character of SCD. Yes, SCD has been — mainly in the Western hemisphere — globalised, but the point is through the migration of African people. It is prevalent where people with African origin have settled; it affects people with African DNA. This means that by looking at the results of the screening program, nationwide applied as it is in France, we can determine their share of newborns in French hospitals reliably.
3. Six & Léchenet claim that the figures of non-white births in France widely circulating on patriotic websites include the ethnically diverse overseas departments (DOM) and thus have to be lowered considerably. But this is not true. The French agency in charge, the Association Française pour le Dépistage et la Prévention des Handicaps de l’Enfant (AFDPHE), has been listing for years the SCD screening figures separately for mainland France and the DOM, as well as their aggregate. It is invariably the figure for mainland France only which is cited prominently on these sites, giving rise to fears among ethnic French people about being replaced by foreigners. As of 2013, this figure is 35.7 percent for mainland France and 38.18 percent for all of France, and it has been rising sharply ever since the time of the inception of the screening program.
4. Six & Léchenet go on citing data from the national statistical institute INSEE, according to which only around 20 percent of the births in France are to “non-French”. However, they are comparing apples with oranges. INSEE does not gather data based on ethnicity, but exclusively on the criteria of citizenship. These 20 percent refer only to babies born on French soil with one or two parents who do not hold a French passport. This figure tells us nothing about the real ethnic ratio in French delivery wards because the French Republic traditionally observes the ius soli which millions of Maghrebians and other non-European immigrants born in the country have enjoyed in recent decades. Six & Léchenet might object that this is all the French need to know. But an increasing number of French people do want to know about the population distribution by race and not just by law. INSEE does not provide this kind of information, but AFDPHE does, if only unwittingly so.
5. Six & Léchenet further cite an estimate by the Institut national d’études démographiques (INED) which holds that currently about one fourth of the French people have a migrational background in the sense of having at least one grand-parent from abroad. They list a number of “immigration waves” by various European peoples to France and conclude that, in the light of this figure, speaking of an “autochthonous population” makes little sense. Again, they miss the point. The rising popularity of the French websites they castigate and the increasingly widespread concern about a “Grand Remplacement” amply demonstrate that French people do not easily equate current African-Oriental with past or present European immigration. The French evidently do not worry about being overwhelmed by people going by the slightly foreign names of Jean-Paul Belmondo, Lino Ventura or Louis de Funès. But they do seem to be worried about the impact of immigrants from beyond European civilization like Mohammed Merah, Mehdi Nemmouche, and Dieudonné M’bala M’bala.
The question is will the mainstream media address these concerns as they are or will it forever continue to shift the subject by miscategorizing ethnic French interests in terms of vacuous passport possession statistics.
Source
Posted: 30 Mar 2015 05:25 AM PDT


Footage out of Fort Lauderdale, Florida shot earlier this week shows military and law enforcement practicing the internment of citizens during martial-law style training.
The clip shows armed troops arresting role players on the street before a column of prisoners are marched towards a mock internment facility. Black Hawk choppers are also seen whizzing between buildings.
The exercise was accompanied by very little media coverage. A Sun-Sentinel report said that Broward County police would be “assisting members of the U.S. Special Operations Forces who are undergoing urban warfare training.”
The drill, which was held in locations the military refused to disclose beforehand, began on March 17 and ended on Friday. 200 military personnel from all four branches, Air Force, Army, Marines and Navy, took part in the exercise.
“The goal is to prepare participants in realistic, unfamiliar training conditions before they deploy for combat overseas,” states the report. Residents were advised “not to be alarmed by the Black Hawk helicopters in the sky.”
Broward County also saw similar drills back in March 2014, when Navy SEALS practicing storming a university building from a helicopter.
Concerns continue to circulate that such drills are designed for dual purpose and are part of a plan to acclimate Americans to accept martial law in a time of national emergency. As we have exhaustively documented, the fact that preparations are being made to use the military during domestic unrest is manifestly provable.
Jade Helm, an upcoming military drill that will involve nine states, caused controversy after Texas and Utah were labeled “hostile” territory in documents related to the exercise.
As we reported earlier this week, the exercise will involve soldiers operating “undetected amongst civilian populations,” to see if they can infiltrate without being noticed.
Source
Posted: 30 Mar 2015 04:48 AM PDT
Playing music enhances gene activity related to memory, learning, motor behavior and dopaminergic neurotransmission, a new study says.
A Finnish research group carried out the study on musicians from a professional orchestra and music university, the ScienceDaily website reported on Friday.
“The findings provide a valuable background for molecular studies of music perception and evolution, and music therapy,” said study leader Dr Irma Järvelä.
The group investigated the effect performing music had on the musicians during a two-hour long concert.
The study also revealed that some of the activated genes are known to be involved in biological pathways, such as calcium ion homeostasis and iron ion homeostasis, which are vital to neuronal functions and survival.
According to the group, musical performance has been proven to stimulate functional and structural alterations in the human brain and increase cognitive activity.
However, the fundamental molecular mechanisms of music performance had never been thoroughly researched.
Some of the genes activated by musical performance, such as SNCA, FOS and DUSP1, are known contributors to song perception and production in songbirds, which suggests a possible evolutionary conservation in molecular mechanisms linked to the production of sound throughout various species.
Dopamine is a hormone and neurotransmitter from the catecholamine and phenethylamine families and functions as a chemical signal released by nerve cells to send messages to other nerve cells in the brain. One of the dopamine systems of the brain plays a major role in reward-motivated behavior.
Source
Posted: 30 Mar 2015 04:33 AM PDT

Two of Japan’s whaling ships have returned home from Antarctic with no catch onboard for the first time in nearly 30 years, local news reported. The news comes after a UN court ordered an halt to Japan’s annual “scientific” whale hunt.
The 724-ton Yushinmaru and the 747-ton Daini (No 2) Yushinmaru returned to port in Shimonoseki, western Japan, which is considered to be one of the major whaling bases in the country, on Saturday.
This is the first time the whale-hunting vessels have returned “empty-handed” since 1987, the year Japan started its annual scientific hunt of whales in the Antarctic, according to Asahi Shimbun newspaper.
Researchers who took part in the expedition focused on observing marine mammals from aboard the ships. They conducted the survey and only took skin samples of the whales.
“By collecting scientific data, we aim to resume commercial whaling,” agriculture, forestry and fisheries minister Yoshimasa Hayashi told reporters in the port city as quoted by AFP.
In 1986, a moratorium against commercial whaling came into force, under the International Whaling Commission (IWC), as whale populations plummeted toward collapse after decades of industrial-scale whaling.
Since then, Tokyo has used a provision in the whaling convention that allows killing whales “for purposes of scientific research.” Japan began whaling for “scientific research” back in 1987, saying that most whale species were not endangered.
In March 2014, the International Court of Justice ruled that Japan must stop whaling in Antarctica, saying that Tokyo had produced insufficient scientific data to justify the killing of whales for research. Tokyo canceled its Antarctic hunt, but carried out a smaller version of the hunt in the Northern Pacific in the summer.
Japanese authorities then said that they planned to resume “research” whaling hunting by the end of 2015. In September, Japan submitted a new plan to the International Whaling Commission and its Scientific Committee, which set an annual target of 333 minke whales for future hunts instead of 900.
Japanese whaling is a centuries-old tradition which dates back to the 12th century. During the 2014 Antarctic hunt 251 minke whales were killed and 103 the previous year, according to data from Japan’s fisheries agency. In the Northwest Pacific, 132 whales were killed in 2013, and 92 off the Japanese coast. Meat from the whales usually ends up in food markets.
Environmental organizations have repeatedly staged protests against whaling, which is also popular in Norway and Iceland.
Posted by Roberto Abraham Scaruffi at 08:47