You don’t need necessarily need a driver’s license in France, but your driving-school does need a state-mandated DVD player:

‘Francis Kramarz, an economist who has studied the French licensing system, says that barriers to getting a license are so high that about one million French people, who should have licenses, have never been able to get them. Although it is technically possible to reduce the cost by having parents teach students in a dual-control car, few expect to succeed this way, and so it is rarely done.
Mr. Kramarz said that it often costs 3,000 euros, or about $3,900, to get a license. But others said the average was closer to 1,500 to 2,000 euros.’

Let’s be like Europe!

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Surely, all the moral equivalence and moral rationalism that finds expression in comparing Israeli deaths and Palestinian deaths equally and ignoring much else is….purely rational.  Such calculations float free above the frenzied passions and direct needs of many coalitions of Left, Left-liberal and even anti-semitic sentiment looking for oppressed victim classes in the Palestinians and Hamas through a certain ideological lens.  Social justice is nigh.

Freddie deBoer, Lefty with some socialist leanings, explains his reasoning here.

Maverick Philosopher takes a look at some of Juan Cole’s statements:

‘What Cole has given us is a text-book example of ignoratio elenchi.  This is an informal fallacy of reasoning committed by a person who launches into the refutation of some thesis that is  other than the one being forwarded by the dialectical opponent. ‘

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So that Libyan intervention didn’t work out too well. Competing militias fight for control as does a very weak government.  The French had to go in to Mali to contain some of the spillover from Gadhafi’s overthrow, and now the UAE and Egypt are trying to have some influence.

From Via Media: ‘Egypt, UAE Join Libyan Afterparty:’

‘Since the beginning of the current crises in the Middle East, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE have been attacking terror groups, standing beside Israel against Hamas, and confronting Iran. Unlovely though these allies may sometimes be, they are embracing a war on extremism that the U.S. has been pushing hard for a decade. Yet the Obama Administration has been giving them the cold shoulder, betting instead on ideas that look increasingly tenuous: a grand bargain with Iran, pressuring Israel to achieve peace with Hamas, and looking to mediations and the UN to repair Libya, even as it collapses into civil war.’

Don’t worry, this will all work-out.