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Saturday, September 27, 2003
posted by gbarto at 4:34 AM:
French news headlinesLe Monde: The Government Opposes Euthanasia. Vincent Humbert became blind and paraplegic after a bad car accident about three years ago. And his mother's obsession became, in her view, the elimination of his misery. And so she lobbied for his right to die and gave him poisonous injections that put him into a coma. He is now dead and there comes the question: Was this about eliminating suffering for someone who wanted to die or eliminating a life when its promise doesn't line up with our idea of a good life. Because of the circumstances of this case, it will be hard to know where Vincent stood; we can only look at where others stand. Yesterday, the French government took its stand: It is opposed.
Le Figaro: Euthanasia: Raffarin Refuses To Modify the Law.
Libération: Digital Photography Taking Off. Notes Libé, the market for digital cameras has grown 63% in France in six months. No word on what percentage of the market this brings it up to but they do tell us it adds up to 900 000 cameras. They also note that Kodak is getting out of the film business to concentrate on digital as film sales are down 1.8B dollars over two years.
Ouest-France: Vincent "liberated from his suffering." Ouest-France puts the mom's phrase in quotes and plays the story pretty much straight.
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Friday, September 26, 2003
posted by gbarto at 1:27 AM:
New Judge Blocks 'Do-Not-Call' ListCongress approved bill hours earlier
I may be reading this entirely wrong, but as far as I can tell, the judge says that Congress forgot to say "Simon says..." when it gave different powers to the FTC and FCC regarding the creation of a don't-call list and mechanism to protect those on the list. While I'm as opposed to judges reading things into the Constitution and our laws as the next guy, I don't think this is exactly a case where Congress was vague about its intent or how the law it drafted was supposed to work; this looks, rather, like a desperate effort to pretend a law doesn't apply if the atoms that will be moved in the process of its enforcement are not specified and someone doesn't like the bill.
The only thing more asinine is a telemarketers association insistent that it has the right to call people who don't want to be called. Forget the rudeness factor, forget the privacy concerns - who incorporates into their business model the idea they'll make money by trying to sell to people intrinsically hostile to their business, the way it works, etc.? This looks like an effort to screw not only the American people, but every business that contracts telemarketers to help promote its services, since they're ultimately asking to be allowed to maintain an arrangement whereby they charge businesses to make calls that are easy to set up but unlikely to result in sales instead of accepting a refinement that should enable them to better serve by focusing on people who are not expressly opposed to purchasing things over the phone from cold callers.
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posted by gbarto at 12:52 AM:
French news headlines:Le Monde: 2004 Budget: Big Deficits, Severe Criticism. The old Raffarin magic doesn't seem to be working of late. While Chirac maintains his popularity in leading the charge against the U.S., the rest of his party is having a tougher time dealing with a bigger challenge than George W. Bush's purported adventurism: governing the French.
Libération: Social Services Pay Price For Budgetary Rigor. Libé focuses squarely on what will most directly affect the French people in the new budget. Incidentally, the headline did not say "Social Services" (sécurité sociale) - they're ubiquitious enough that the shorthand "Le Social" was sufficient for understanding.
Ouest-France: A Budget Cramped In By Crisis. Bercy - the Finance Ministry - says "Though the figures are bad, they're going in the right direction." Many believe that statement is open to dispute. And lest we think that the cost of the Iraqi effort is the only economic problem out there in a world where the US alone is troubled, try out these lines from Ouest-France's lead editorial:
ContradictionsThings are tough all over.
They're lowering taxes but raising fees. They worship healthy financial practices but let the deficitis plunge to abysmal depths...
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posted by gbarto at 12:20 AM:
Edward Said, Requiescat in PaceI am not sure it would have been possible to be a serious student of the humanities in the 1990s without forming an opinion of Edward Said, given his time as president of the Modern Language Association and his theories on Orientalism and whether a dominant culture could know, interpret or understand an "other" without romanticizing that culture or itself and losing perspective. The opinion formed did not necessarily have to be favorable. Mine was not - I fear that Said's theories on Orientalism laid the groundwork for a nativism that hijacks theories about the impossibility of understanding other cultures for the purposes of not trying. This leads to two forms of intellectual dishonesty - that of a hard right that is too ready to write off the rest of the world and that of a hard left that is too ready to defend the devaluing of human beings in the name of preserving cultures that are not, in fact, unique, but merely evolving toward more civilized norms and need to attain them faster. It is interesting that the Nigerian woman to be stoned for adultery had her life spared the same day Said died. Presented with such a stark case, few were prepared to demand respect for age-old Islamic traditions and insist that Western standards about cruelty not be imposed upon a civilization in the process of defining its own norms. I don't think Said would have - or did - make the case that we needed to try to understand where those implementing Sharia were coming from and back off while Northern Nigeria found its own truth that the West could not understand. And yet, with the likes of the Palestinian suicide bombers, just such cases have been made. This is not to condemn Said, who could neither control where others took his theories nor foresee the evolution of the societies against which they would be tested. I merely suggest that ideas have both consequences and practical implications, and for this reason we must decide which ideas to adopt into our ways of thinking and which to avoid. I do not list Edward Said among my intellectual inspirations.
That said, I have had colleagues who respected Said a great deal; one of my fiancé's professors even considered him an intellectual mentor from the time they worked together. To those who are tonight missing a favorite thinker, an old colleague, even a friend, I offer my condolences.
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Thursday, September 25, 2003
posted by gbarto at 8:34 AM:
The lead France story here in the US is that they've revised the heatwave death tolls to closer to 15000! Which makes it pretty definitively safer to be a participant in America's effort to democratize Iraq than to be an elderly or infirm citizen of the French Republic. But what's getting play at the French papers, where government foul-ups are taken for granted but a statist mentality prevents one from wanting to undermine faith in government too much?Le Monde: Euthanasia: A Mother's Gesture Relaunches Debate. She's been writing letters and giving injections in an effort to purchase the death of her 25 year-old son, rendered paraplegic and blind by a car accident. She was placed under house arrest, then freed. He's in a deep coma.
Le Figaro: Corsican Nationalists Elected to Assembly Refuse To Condemn Violence, is the more direct way of putting this one.
Libé has the euthanasia story: Marie Humbert Tried To Help Her Son Die.
But Ouest-France is running an up to the minute bulletin: Heat Wave: 14,802 dead between August 1 and 20th.
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posted by gbarto at 8:23 AM:
Nigerian Won't Be Killed for AdulterySingle mom faced death by stoning
Prosecutors argued Lawal's child was living proof she committed a crime under Shariah.I'm not quite sure how anyone kept a straight face during this exchange, but I guess that if your religious belief let's you think it's ok to bury people up to the neck and proceed to stoning, waiving the sentence because of a possible five year gestation is about as sane as you can get.
But lead defense lawyer Aliyu Musa Yawuri said that under some interpretations of Shariah, babies can remain in gestation in a mother's womb for five years, opening the possibility her ex-husband could have fathered the child.
Of course one knows that with the international attention, the main motivation of the panel was convincing the world that Islam and barbarism were not synonymous. A good thing to be concerned about, that, when your authority rests on what you stand for continuing to be thought good, holy and righteous, not morbidly mad.
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Wednesday, September 24, 2003
posted by gbarto at 4:03 AM:
French news headlines:Le Monde: George Bush Struggles to Convince UN - to help the US with Iraq the way Bush wants to be helped, while - according to Le Monde - ceding few points to critics or advocates for greater UN involvement.
Le Figaro: Chirac-Bush Showdown At UN
Libération: Raffarin Struggles to Fulfill 2006 Agenda - he's pushed back welfare reform to 2004 while seeming at odds to figure out what to do right now.
Ouest-France: Welfare: Big Hole, Small Economies - offered to finally balance the welfare budget - and on the backs of the government insured and health care providers. But, as noted above, this is pushed back to "the horizon of the legislature" - i.e. near the end of their term.
btw, I see my user experience (see below) was apparently the result of being on Win ME instead of an NT operating system; back on W2K tonight and all is normal.
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Tuesday, September 23, 2003
posted by gbarto at 3:26 AM:
Cicero has a look at why the J-Post editor may have gone overboard in the Chicago Sun-Times. The TurkeyBlog, it must be said, enjoys just such vitriol and has spewed a little of it himself. But he has also lived in France, and realizes these are not a people with horns on their heads and cloven hooves for feet. Somewhere between Cicero's dismay and disgust at neocon "adventuring" and the J-Post's conviction that one is anti-Semitic if one's positions fall short of Zionist, I think there is a middle ground that would simultaneously recognize Israel as the only decent democracy in the region and worth defending and still call for a better approach to the Palestinian question, etc. Glad it's not my job to find it though...* * *
posted by gbarto at 3:15 AM:
TurkeyBlog gets RSSSaw the RSS button yet again while looking at the latest nonsense they've done to modify the user experience at blogger. Not sure what I think of the interface (or does this just relate to the fact I'm on a ME machine instead of a 2000+ machine?) but didn't find RSS as difficult to install as I'd feared. And after a visit to our pals at the Webmonkey, I not only found RSS info but also a neat little reader so that now I can look at the neat little TurkeyBlog headlines. And hey, if I have two ways to read this, I may have doubled my readership!
Anyway, the TurkeyBlog will heretofore have titles for the RSS feed so that it's easy to see what we've been babbling about. And, while we're here, if you're new to the RSS thing the Instapundit's feed is at www.instapundit.com/index.xml. And now, metablogging about RSS ceases for good old blogging above; there's one short entry you'll have to get through below.
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posted by gbarto at 2:53 AM:
RSS is one of the in-things, but the TurkeyBlog doesn't yet have it, since it usually runs behind the curve. So this will be the first post attempting to feed to RSS.* * *
posted by gbarto at 2:08 AM:
French news headlines:Libération: Bush-Chirac Rematch. They're both at the UN Tuesday regarding Iraq. Says Libé, France will probably raise hell for an immediate transfer of sovereignty but not veto US plans.
Ouest-France leads with France's credibility gap of the moment: European Approval For Salvage of Alstom. So the French got their reprieve, but at a not inconsiderable cost in goodwill and prestige.
Le Figaro: Chirac Plays At Appeasement With Americans. He spent his first 24 hours in New York emphasizing what unites the US and France and explaining why they should work together in his view.
Le Monde: Iraq at Center of UN Debate. It's the annual meeting of the General Assembly and world leaders from Chirac to Bush will be there - you thought a French newspaper would focus on others? - and thus returns the struggle over what role the UN and the world will play in settling down Iraq.
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Monday, September 22, 2003
posted by gbarto at 6:12 AM:
NYSE Names New Interim DirectorFormer Citigroup CEO John Reed to temporarily take helm for salary of $1
A pretty good guy who got the shaft from Sandy Weill and Bob Rubin for his efforts to bring off a good merger. Let's hope the NYSE assignment enables him to have a better close to a long and important career in finance.
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posted by gbarto at 3:59 AM:
Congrats to "Everybody Loves Raymond" and scene stealer Brad Garret on their Emmies. Two very deserving winners.* * *
posted by gbarto at 3:58 AM:
French news headlines:Ouest-France: Beginnings of Start to Solution for Alstom, the largely French-government held company whose finances are creating headaches not only for shareholders but for France, as it tries to satisfy the EU, and the EU as it tries to deal with France. They think they've cobbled together something to hold off the EU for the moment.
Le Monde: Bombing Near UN HQ in Iraq. With one Iraqi security guard killed in the process.
Le Figaro: A Day Without Cars after a Mortally Polluted Summer. Sixty-two cities are participating in a day where cars are banned or limited in town.
Libération: Fits and Starts For Zero Car Day. Says Libé, it's very nice to shut down the cities for a day, but the suburbs are the problem and nothing is going to be done about them.
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