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Friday, June 20, 2003
posted by gbarto at 12:18 AM:
French news headlines:Le Monde: Opening of European Summit of Thessalonika. First they're going to work on policies for immigration and asylum. Then peskier international issues like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Le Figaro:
Raffarin has won; Unions prepare for return
It looks like he's pulled it off for at least the short term by not blinking. We congratulate him. Notwithstanding Chirac's international politics, the Raffarin regime could bring France forward. The change in attitude comes as millions of demonstrators have dropped to a couple hundred thousand and as thoughts shift to - it's France - summer vacations.Libé: Landscape for Unions Modified by Two Months of Protests. Something like that.
Ouest-France: Last Marches Before Vacation Season. Ouest-France says Raffarin has won a short term victory but things remain unstable.
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posted by gbarto at 12:06 AM:
Kerry Blasts Bush on Iraq, EconomyMass. senator now undisputed front-runner in N.H. primary, poll says
Who? Oh, Mr. Heinz?
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posted by gbarto at 12:05 AM:
Jewish Settlers Fight Israeli SoldiersFists fly during outpost dismantling; homicide bomber kills shopkeeper
The first part of the headline should give away a novel bit of news: Ariel Sharon is actually implementing his part of the agreements under discussion. And he has sufficient forces to enforce the sort of civil order needed to do it, albeit with problems. We shall see if Palestinian society proves equally ready for prime time now that it's "put-up-or-shut-up" time. I admit to having doubts myself.
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Thursday, June 19, 2003
posted by gbarto at 12:57 AM:
Here's Marcus on the Dems, everybody's favorite redistributionists. But what else are they thinking about doing?* * *
posted by gbarto at 12:51 AM:
French news headlines:Le Monde: Retirement: 8th Action Day - scheduled for today. Underneath, we have Suicide Bombing in North of Israel. Two killed including the bomber.
Le Figaro: Battle over payment for strike days. Will the strikers be paid? How much? The unions are starting to wonder and insist the question come before any other negotiations. Whether ordinary people who couldn't get to work get paid is a matter to which they are indifferent unless there are propaganda points to be found.
Libé: For the Law, the Blood Scandal Never Happened. Twenty years after faulty blood handling procedures put AIDS contaminated blood in the blood supply, a court has closed the file.
Ouest-France, surprisingly enough, wins the prize for goofy headline tonight: "For Bac 2003, it's check and math" (the words for "mate" and "math" are homophones in French). Notes Ouest-France, the written part of the science bac (there are different exam formats depending on what you specialized in and what you plan to study in college) is over and the biggest hurdle proved to be not strikes but calculus.
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Wednesday, June 18, 2003
posted by gbarto at 10:13 AM:
Accused Hit-and-Run Bishop QuitsPhoenix ex-prelate admits sipping sacramental wine before accident
I guess this should go with my "wealthy of idiocy" post below.
Meanwhile, following up the French news:
Iranian Exiles Set Selves on Fire
Dramatic moves to protest French crackdown on People's Mujahedeen
It really tears me up because on the one hand I want an Iraqi opposition but on the other hand, I'm not exactly comfy with a crew that goes in for self-immolation and the like, leaving the awful fear the French might have shown some wisdom in cracking down. The best we can hope is that they did it for the wrong reasons.
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posted by gbarto at 1:38 AM:
I see Marcus feels as fond of Carl Levin as I do.* * *
posted by gbarto at 1:35 AM:
A Dog's Life has some disturbing Adventures in Babysitting (am I the only one who remembers the movie?).* * *
posted by gbarto at 1:28 AM:
From Instapundit:GOOD GRIEF: Last week it was Andrew Sullivan. This week National Review Online is rattling the tipjar. And with some success -- scroll up from this entry. I think we're seeing the growth of a new revenue model for the Internet before our very eyes.If all that makes you queasy, I know of a little site that would never be so crass where you can ring the tip jar in protest. There's a little turkey at the top, if you're trying to identify it.
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posted by gbarto at 1:12 AM:
French news headlines:Le Monde: Reform of the C(ommon) A(gricultural) P(olicy): Difficult Negotiations. It sounds too much like the five year plan for my tastes, but in any case, Europe is trying with little success to agree on how the countries will face each other and the world as far as agriculture goes. I understand everything's on the table save open market competition.
Le Figaro: France Dismantles the Iranian Opposition. Law enforcement moved fast and in impressive numbers to round up 165 members of a so called Mujheddin Iran bent on eliminating the current rulers of Japan. It's too early to get a good read on whether a group calling itself Mujheddin would be better or worse than the current regime.
Libé: The Two Months That Moved the Profs looks at the radicalization of the education sector.
Ouest-France: Cockel Traffic: Seizure at Erquy. The seafood industry, of course, is quite important for Bretagne, so a coup against those violating rules and restrictions by the understaffed maritime patrols is a big deal there.
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posted by gbarto at 12:56 AM:
A wealth of idiocy:Police Fight Rioters in Michigan
Building, cars set ablaze as hundreds gather at site of fatal police chase
The city in question is Benton Harbor and I regret to say I'm not too terribly surprised. The place has been a mess for years. Par for the course in these situations, the public response to a questionable police action has been largely to destroy their own stuff, as though that would do anything other than confirm every bigoted impression that they're trying to fight. As for the chase, it's a hell of a note because the choices for the cops are to let a suspect go who might pose who knows what danger or risk - as was the case - a crash - in this case, of a motorcyclist. Of course there are two roots for the problems in Benton Harbor as far as my understanding of things go: a sense of aggrievement equaling entitlement on the part of the black community and a general failure to understand the possibility of blacks as human on the part of certain sectors of the white community. The whites started it, but the civil rights establishment hasn't done Benton Harbor many favors in terms of actually trying to lift anyone out of the situation. An ugly mess, in short, that exploded. Unfortunately, the end result is less likely to be a realization that this nonsense is untenable than a continuing hardening of differences that causes blacks and whites alike to watch their city disintegrate around them while too suspicious of the other to look for a better way.
In other news of the idiotic:
Mom Dies After Boxing Bout
Florida police investigating 'Toughman' fight that led to woman's injuries
It's the THIRD death in nine months! Oh, and it happened at a public fairground. It's bad enough that this stuff goes on and that some people view it as entertainment. But must tax dollars provide the venue?
This fight is a reminder that grownups, too, need to listen to the stuff about "you could put an eye out" and all that and understand that as grownups they should know better. But that's okay. Here's boxing promoter and all round asshole Art Dore:
Dore in a statement Tuesday said he was "devastated" by the death. He added that Toughman bouts still have "the best safety record among all forms of boxing," and that all safety precautions were taken before the event.It's nice to see that his ass is covered. But you know the millionaire will find a way to keep collecting his big bucks while rubes fill up his accounts fifty bucks at a time for the opportunity to get pummeled. Sick.
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Tuesday, June 17, 2003
posted by gbarto at 1:52 AM:
Charming. I just finished noting A Dog's Life's move to its own site to escape blogger a minute ago and now blogger isn't updating properly. We'll see if this post kicks it through. Meanwhile, a thought:Early today I commented a little on bipolar disorder and new research. One important point is that many specialists are shying away from the term manic depressive because bipolar commonly causes alternating euphoria and depression but can (for type II) cause alternating anxiety and depression - it's a shift between poles, not between mania and depression necessarily. My question: What is the range for where these poles might be located and is the disease significant for the moods it causes or the way it causes inexplicable shifting of mood between extremes? The question is important, for if it is the latter, we should also be looking at sudden shifts from anxiety to euphoria, from passion to detachment, from anger to calm with a stronger focus on what goes bing! in the feedback mechanisms in the brain. I would not be surprised to discover that there are a lot more bipolar disorders out there than widely acknowledged because some of the shifts, while surprising, might not be as inherently destructive as those that get the focus. In which case, we would be missing a lot of potential understanding of what hits those who are most profoundly hurt by the disease's effects because they are often not in shape to do the sort of probing necessary to figure out what's going on when the sudden shifts hit. I would also not be surprised to discover that the newly discovered genetic components produce the volatility but that other factors, both innate and environmental, determine where the poles exist between which sufferers flip. But this is drawn from my experiences with one sufferer of bipolar disorder, not from a clinical research project, so take it as food for thought, not the latest line of inquiry.
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posted by gbarto at 1:36 AM:
Nice thoughts under the heading "Are you a man or a mouse?" at Common Sense and Wonder. Alternative title suggestion: Of mice and men. Subject: human and mice genomes - what's the difference?* * *
posted by gbarto at 1:23 AM:
We're sending internet flowers to A Dog's Life in its new home at http://borzoiblog.com/. We see Greg got fed up with Blogger and blogspot's lack of reliability and took the plunge to MT and his own home. The TurkeyBlog is still typing away on Blogger, being too lazy to see if the Perl interpreter at his host is up to MT standards, but agrees with Greg on the importance of being hosted somewhere more reliable. Congratulations on the move, Greg, and we look forward to reading you with more ease and better downloads.* * *
posted by gbarto at 1:15 AM:
French news headlines:Le Monde: Deputies Vote First Article in Fillon Plan. And Raffarin is sending "the French people" a letter to tell them the truth about the state of the retirement system, which this plan will fix by changing apportionment of benefits.
Le Figaro: Integrist Success Worries French Islam. In plainer language, advocates of a liberal interpretation of Islam are worried by strides made by fundamentalists in nearly capturing a majority of regional presidencies in France's official Islamic Council.
Libération: Raffarin Loses the Benefit of the Doubt. In the wake of the opening rounds of the retirement debate, he has ceased to be viewed as above politics.
Ouest-France: Ready for your vocab lesson, folks? Here's the headline in French and English:
Après la canicule, les orages arrivent / After the Caniculars, the Storms Arrive
And yes, that canicule is a word readers were supposed to figure out. All you Latinists out there probably identified canis, Latin for "dog," as the root. This is the diminuitive, "little dog," and our plain English translation is the "Dog Days," those hot days of early summer. Incidentally, the reference is not to earthly dogs but to the position of the "dog star," Sirius, a bit of trivia that you probably already knew if you run in circles were trivia is oft annoyingly repeated. The TurkeyBlog inhabits such a circle though he must admit to being the one who usually does the annoying repeating.
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posted by gbarto at 12:44 AM:
Abbas Pushes for Mideast TruceSeeks talks with Hamas, militants
Not sure what I think of this. I hate to see anyone trying to work with Hamas, but then again it is an acknowledgement that Islamist anti-Semites, not Israel, pose the fundamental threat to peace.
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posted by gbarto at 12:42 AM:
These people can't get anything right:Bishop Charged in Fatal Hit-and-Run
Police: Phoenix Catholic leader said he thought he hit a cat or dog
Last month he said he thought the priests under his jurisdiction were just playing an elaborate version of pattycake. Or something like that.
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posted by gbarto at 12:38 AM:
Levin Seeks Release of Intelligence Data on IraqGood old Carl, still the grandstanding idiot he's always been.
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Monday, June 16, 2003
posted by gbarto at 10:32 AM:
Raiders center's battle not overInteresting. That battle is getting bipolar disorder under control; he had been self-medicating with booze and missed the Super Bowl as a result. His team lost, and his absence gets part of the blame. I guess we can put that down to a very high cost for not recognizing and treating mental and emotional illness. It's good to see this being talked about a little. I hope his teammates will let him try to make it up to them, but I have to warn that ups and downs are quite possible, even probable in the first few months. After that - well, he's got the best docs and probably won't be as worried as others as to the amazing costs of the different mood levelers, antipsychotics, etc. that are at the forefront of treating the disorder. In the meantime, hope for new understanding:
Scientists Find Manic-Depression Gene
Incidentally, there's a battle raging over terminology. This article uses bipolar and manic-depression almost interchangeably. Some do that, others have specific meanings for each, others favor bipolar because its sufferers don't all flip between the same poles. The most common form has euphoria and depression poles, but a variant, bipolar II has mania/anxiety and depression poles and every case is special in its own way with components of personality outside the disease (including innate components and those affected by family and social background) playing a role in ease of treatment, nature of attacks, etc. As far as I understand and observe, in any case.
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posted by gbarto at 3:28 AM:
Davis Recall Seen as LikelyIt's certainly been getting its share of play around here. Frankly, this is the the fault of Republicans who should have been able to mount a credible challenge, but inexplicably didn't in 2002. While I would not be sorry to see him get the boot - not in the least - this is not really the way it should happen since most of the complaints against him have been around a long time. Which means that the state of politics is that the people detest an unattractive, unpleasant, autocratic and repugnant governor but didn't believe the Republicans couldn't (or didn't) come up with anyone better when it counted.
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posted by gbarto at 3:20 AM:
The TurkeySister tells me the French news of the day is counter-demonstrations against the strikers in France, with a CNN scroll indicating 15,000 turned out against the transport workers in Paris. So here come the French news headlines:Le Monde is leading with the Middle East: A Break in Bombings In Negotiation, with Hamas taken the suggestions of an Egyptian cleric for approaching Israel under consideration. Le Monde also running AFP's outrage of the day, a Danish Theme Park Sells Pornographic Suckers to Children. I'll let you guess what they're shaped like.
Le Figaro: Retirement: The Majority Wants to Avoid Getting Bogged Down. The bill's been at the Assembly awhile but they've yet to consider the first thing about it.
Libé: Who wants a skin in the Alègre affair? You can read that "skin" as "hide" if it suits you better. Whatever your read, the gendarme who was on the case has been ordered off parts of it.
Ouest-France: Minimal Service, Maximum Caution. The thought is to have a minimum level of public service in case of strikes, but the government is being careful what it says it means by such a promise (first made by Chirac and picked up by Raffarin).
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Sunday, June 15, 2003
posted by gbarto at 4:58 AM:
French news headlines:Le Monde: Deadly Confrontations in Iraq. The strikes have disappeared from the top headlines.
Ouest-France: The Social Coming Back: An Interesting Weekend for Sarkozy's Police - who believe they brought calm to the streets and should be better recognized for having done so. The article also has poll numbers: 47% oppose reform, 45% support; 77% believe it will happen; 49% believe the strikers doth protesteth too much.
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