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Saturday, October 04, 2003
posted by gbarto at 11:56 PM:
French news headlines on Saturday (so from Le Monde):Israel: Bloody Bombing on Eve of Yom Kippur. Not bad. The Palestinians hit the night before the Day of Atonement. 18 dead, several dozen wounded.
This AFP follow-up says Israel is on the move, having hit two houses near Jenin - presumably in retaliation.
Finally, we'll note France facing zero growth. That's economically. Which is surprising since their Iraq stance was supposed to cause all Saddam fans to rally round.
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posted by gbarto at 12:20 AM:
French news headlines:Le Monde: In Rome, Europe of 25 prepares a constitution.
Le Figaro: The Battle Over the Constitution is Underway. Will Europe's leaders come together to build a new constitution for the EU or will the project fall apart?
Libération: Union Moving Backwards Toward Constitution. Libé highlights the fact small countries don't want to make the large countries - esp. France and Germany - the power center of the EU.
Ouest-France: 35 Hours: The New Political Battle. Are all the problems in France the result of the 35 hour work week? No. Many? Perhaps.
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Friday, October 03, 2003
posted by gbarto at 2:17 AM:
Cicero considers what else a court that overturns Roe might do and suggests that abortion foes would be better off pushing for an amendment.The TurkeyBlog maintains the hypocrisy of personally opposing abortion but also opposing a government ban, but thinks Cicero is on the right track here. For starters, overturning Roe wouldn't necessarily end abortion. A simple reversal would simply make it a state issue again. And a truly strict interpretation of the Constitution would have to acknowledge that there is virtually nothing in the text that gives a definitive answer. Anti-abortionists need to realize that their every victory has come in changing hearts and minds, hence the spread of legislation against partial-birth abortion. Winning enough hearts and minds to get an amendment stating, "The Right to Life asserted in our founding Declaration of Independence applies to all human life, defined as any body of one or more cells containing unique human DNA" would pretty much settle the matter. And I'm pretty sure my wording precludes arguing about fetus viability, when conception occurs, etc. Would I want such an amendment? No. But those truly opposed to abortion should recognize the passage of such an amendment as the only truly secure victory.
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posted by gbarto at 1:55 AM:
Limbaugh Facing Drug AllegationsSource says radio host could become target of future criminal probe
Damn shame if so. But of course the libertarian leaning TurkeyBlog is appalled by the whole thing, wondering why taxpayer dollars are being used for this. If the drugs are addictive, the focus should be on getting treatment, not indictments, because the users are ultimately victims of their biology. If they're dangerous, a generous government might try to save people from themselves - again with treatment. But trying to lock up full-grown adults for private use of recreational pharmaceuticals is ridiculous. Those full-grown adults should, of course, bear the consequences of their use, but imprisonment for violating puritanical social mores rooted in a distrust of artifical pleasure, not public health or safety issues, is vulgar, low and the best argument for putting government on a diet every time we get the chance.
For those who wish to bring up class issues, the TurkeyBlog joins in condemning a world where Rush Limbaugh's high-powered lawyers might keep him out of jail while the poor and struggling are serving sentences: None of them belong in jail, but all - regardless of class - need our compassion and support if in thrall to an addiction.
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posted by gbarto at 1:37 AM:
French news headlines:Le Monde: Iraq: The Bush Administration's Reverse. With the WMD inspections coming up empty, questions about the Bush foreign policy are getting sharper.
Le Figaro: UMP Launches Assault on 35 Hours. Under pressure from his parliament, PM Raffarin has convened committees to studying ending the 35 hour mandatory maximum work week.
Libération: CIA Hunting Mirages In Iraqi Desert. So, where are the WMDs?
Ouest-France: Airport and High-Speed Trains: The West Watches Patiently. Specifically, the Northwest area of France has been promised TGV (high speed train) runs and a new airport. Will they get them? The local right says yea but the left wants evidence.
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Thursday, October 02, 2003
posted by gbarto at 4:20 AM:
French news headlines:Le Monde: New American Resolution Before UN. It gives a broader, better defined, but still not central role to the UN and the international community in Iraq.
Le Figaro: Vincent Humbert's Death: Doctor Chaussoy Heard By Police. Now that he's taken the heat off the mother, he's very upset that police are looking into the job he did. If you're a euthanasia advocate, of course, all this looks very backward. But the self-righteous need consider that if you consider Vincent Humbert's death murder then what's happened is tantamount to the man who shoots his wife, lets the coroner claim responsability then demands the coroner not be charged out of sensistivity to an already grieving family. One suspects the doctor did not realize that making a grand gesture would lead to grand consequences. But if you're going to protest the injustice of a law or of laws through civil disobedience, your moral authority comes from a willingness to suffer the penalties as proof that in your conscience you prefer those penalties to the injustice that would be done if you didn't expose yourself to them. If others agree with your view, the law might get changed in a democracy and power might be subverted elsewhere. But, in the meantime, it's your willingness to suffer for the cause, not merely your conviction, that drives things. Guess no one told Chaussoy it would be hard being a trailblazer for changing the line between murder and mercy. How unfortunate.
Libération: Elected Officials Raise Taboo on Euthanasia with their inquiry into the matter above.
Ouest-France: Europe In Search Of A Constitution. One has been drawn up, actually. Now they just need to modify it according to the will of the member countries, then harmonize it...
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posted by gbarto at 3:56 AM:
On AOL's rotating headlines:Limbaugh Quits ESPN Show
His Comments About Black QB Drew Charges of Racism
AOL Latino 9.0 Is Here!
Explore Our New Spanish Language Service
I'm glad Time-Warner does a better job with cultural sensitivity... AOL Latino? How about Hispanophone?
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Wednesday, October 01, 2003
posted by gbarto at 4:23 AM:
Cicero notes what strange times we're living in: Pat Buchanan is praising Ted Kennedy, Dennis Kucinich and even Bill Clinton! The TurkeyBlog thinks Buchanan has finally made the full swing around the opinion spectrum, moving so far right he wound up left. We'd invoke a Columbus, round-earth metaphor but we're not sure Pat didn't at some point fall right off the edge.* * *
posted by gbarto at 4:03 AM:
Music and Books Reviews| Seal IV. Out a little less than a month, the newest album is every bit as new-agey and touchy-feely as anything Seal has every done, but there's a little more of a rock and roll feel to it. If that's your thing - and the TurkeyBlogger has nothing against it - the album should be enjoyable enough. For those of us who found Seal thanks to Kiss From A Rose, the album may seem just a little peppy. Still, this is one artist who wears his heart on his sleeve so you take what comes out when it comes out. Particularly sweet and hummable: Love's Divine and Don't Make Me Wait. But the coolest - smoothest, not most hip - song on the album is probably My Vision, a song that flips between new age and light rock without overdoing either. |
| Bach Concertos. There are young artists who show amazing promise. And there are young artists who are just plain already artists. Hilary Hahn is firmly in the latter category. Her newest album, her first with Deutsche Grammophon - after five with Sony Classical, is a collection of Bach Violin Concertos and once again it is simply a delight to hear from her. The pieces presented are pretty standard fare, but subject to being misunderstood. Specifically, they may be performed in the way older poetry is too often read aloud - with a quaintly serious air that is too reverent of the work's status to revel in its magic. But Bach is fun, is wild, is crazy, is happy, is moody, is mysterious, is... everything. In composing the purest of music, Bach simultaneously captured and transcended the human experience like no one before or since. Hilary Hahn knows this. In her playing she sings, she dances, she shrieks with abandon and whispers softly, conspiratorially, offering the finest tribute to Bach that one can: to shrug off the fact that it's the oh so magisterial Bach and give the fullest life to the splendid music he wrote. Also recommended: Hahn's earlier albums including her Brahms · Stravinsky - Violin Concertos and Mendelssohn: Violin Concerto; Shostakovich: Violin Concerto No. 1 (featuring the most marvelous works of those two composers). |
| Prime Obsession: Bernhard Riemann and the Greatest Unsolved Problem in Mathematics. Readers on the web know John Derbyshire as a cranky conservative from England, but he's got a university education in math and brings his talent for plain-folks talk to an amazingly complex topic - tracking down the prime numbers and seeing what was going through the mind of the mathematician who set us off on this wild goose chase. Complete math-phobes may beg off from the equations, but if you made it through first semester high school algebra you'll be able to follow the basics of one of the most vexing mathematical riddles of the last two centuries. But I would also recommend this book for the math-phobes: in his portraits of Reimann and other important players and in his presentation of the social contexts in which this problem has been attacked, Derbyshire reveals a world where mathematicians are people too, subject to the same struggles and problems as the rest of us even as they work to find the purest - or at least most abstract - truths. |
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posted by gbarto at 2:16 AM:
Just doublechecked the RSS feed with Amphetadesk and the links are screwed up. Which I can't figure out since the XML specifies different links than what Amphetadesk's page is generating; not sure how often it updates since I did have to correct the way the XML updates earlier.Update: Problem seems to be fixed. By the way, if you want a reader to get headlines from the TurkeyBlog, Instapundit, news services and more, you might look up Amphetadesk.
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posted by gbarto at 1:58 AM:
French news headlines:Le Monde: Bush Under Fire From Critics - over Iraq and the Wilson affair. In other news... Euthanasia: A Doctor Assumes Responsability for the Death of Vincent Humbert - which takes the mother off the hook at least for the moment.
Le Figaro: Political Storm At White House. The White House is now launching its own investigation into the leaking of a CIA agent's identity after all. We hope that the source of the leak wasn't the White House and that - in the White House or elsewhere - the source of the leak will move from the executive branch to the judicial posthaste. Anything less would be uncomfortably evocative of the previous administration.
Libération: Raffarin Points Finger At Unemployment Benefit Seekers. Says Libé, "It's not good to be unemployed under Raffarin" - not only are you short a job, you're accused of being a "budgetivore" ! In related news, The French economy has stopped creating jobs. I also wanted to note this local color piece: At the Unemployment Office In Vannes, Silence and Shame. A hostile government attitude toward the unemployed can prove discouraging, but when it melds with local attitudes it can make things really tough. The article leads with a woman who has decided to starve rather than risk having her parents find out she's unemployed now that - with unemployment back at 9.6% - the Raffarin government has decided long-term unemployed are leeches and cut the budget for the chronically un-/under-employed. That's because Bretagne is among the most conservative areas in the country. Predominantly working class, the area is all for the little guy who's struggling, but it's also strongly anti-entitlement. And yet, it strikes me as one area in a France bloated on entitlements that could stand to slacken its attitude. I lived in Bretagne - specifically, Rennes - for about six months. I've been to the district unemployment office in Rennes - my host mother was a supervisor/case worker there. Hell, I've been to the office in Vannes that they're discussing - I hitched a ride to go check out the town when my host mother was checking up on the local office. I've gotta say that neither office was your typical American idea of an unemployment office - everything was neat and clean and the people waiting for appointments generally were neatly if simply attired and seemed hell-bent on maintaining their dignity, as opposed to demanding it. Of course, as I note, this was Bretagne, not France at large. Which may be the point. Like every other reform France has attempted, once again those who pose the fewest problems and may well be the most deserving are getting shut out because the French system of democracy by mob rule is based on volume, not justice. One hoped that Raffarin and Chirac, with their unprecedented power after the elections of a year ago, would have taken a tack to correct this, but after the results of the strikes earlier in the summer, it is plain that the French government and the French people have squandered yet another opportunity to turn their country around, all too happy to license the plunder of those who are doing the best they can - including the truly struggling unemployed - to purchase the silence of France's real leeches - public unions, private sector unions, government financed monopolies and the Eurocracy.
A day behind, Ouest-France leads with Air France Buys Dutch KLM.
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Tuesday, September 30, 2003
posted by gbarto at 4:09 AM:
French news headlines:Le Monde: Air France and KLM Agree To Merge.
Le Figaro: Air France In Club of Sky-Giants.
Libération: KLM Under Air-France's Wing.
Ouest-France: France Ill-Prepared for White Revolution. The 75+ voting bloc is growing in importance, retirees are becoming a big political force and the government is trying to prepare its agenda for the elderly. But there are things like the response to the heat wave that make the whole project seem very tenuous. Can the government and society adjust to the change in demographics? Here's this: it has no choice.
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Monday, September 29, 2003
posted by gbarto at 2:29 AM:
Clark: Americans 'embarrassed' by BushThe Dixie Chicks told him so.
Clark, for those who have forgotten, came to prominence as the NATO general who led the effort to oust Slobodan Milosevic, a bloodthirsty dictator who terrorized his own people and slaughtered whole communities he considered a threat to his own power. Having led a military action to force a dictator's ouster and free an enslaved people - or so we gather his campaign literature goes - he is uniquely qualified to be the sort of president who would not force a dictator's ouster to free an enslaved people.
It's almost cute how generals think it's "getting the job done" when they're in charge and unnecessary, ill-conceived, hell of war, etc. when they're not. No glory, no guts, I guess.
That could be Wesley Clark's motto for the whole thing though. He spent his summer doing whatever it is that retired generals do, watched some longtime, hardworking politicians go through the grueling process of launching presidential campaigns, then announced that maybe he'd run after all once the worst part was over and he could emerge as a surprise candidate come to save the day. Sort of like he surprised the Balkans by coming to save the day as soon as the Bosnians and Croats had fought their hearts out and lost millions of their fellows. But hey, that was because of Clinton's temporizing and bickering in NATO, not Wesley Clark's fault. Wesley Clark is a heroic general who did what had to be done to oust a dictator and free an enslaved people in the Balkans - once he was ordered to do so -, uniquely qualifying him to be the one to not give orders to oust a dictator and liberate the people the dictator had enslaved. Or something like that.
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posted by gbarto at 1:06 AM:
Natalie Solent has thoughts on the American and Italian blackouts - like were they just bad luck? Or does one's position on Iraq have an effect on all this?If it's the latter, we should soon hear Michael Moore again remonstrating the terrorists for hitting mostly Gore states, not Bush states.
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posted by gbarto at 1:00 AM:
Cicero, noting the conservative drive to fight gay marriage, etc, wonders about abortion taking a backseat since, after all, the latter kills living beings - people, dare we say - a claim that even the most ardent homophobe can't make about gay couples.True enough, but abortion polls better than gay marriage and when you combine the words "conservative" and "Republican" into one phrase you get a movement that will only stand on a principle until it has offended enough sensibilities to pay the price for its position, but never after.
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posted by gbarto at 12:55 AM:
Cicero hits it on the head with Pat Buchanan and with the Kucinich presidential campaign's positioning. Be sure to check out his site for the best questions and thoughts on why Howard Dean gets a free pass as an earnest liberal while ducking the issues that make liberals liberal, and why Kucinich is the only real anti-war candidate.The TurkeyBlog, incidentally, is not anti-war, but is as mystified as Cicero as to why those who are would put their trust in Howard Dean.
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posted by gbarto at 12:32 AM:
French news headlines:Le Monde: Fictional Jobs Of RPR On Trial. The RPR - Rally for the Republic - is Jacques Chirac's old party (before it merged with the UDF to form the UPF (Union for France) which became the UMP (Union for a Presidential Majority, then Union for a Parliamentary Majority). At issue, did certain businesses add to funds from the city of Paris to pay for party projects when the funds were supposedly going to city workers. All this transpired when St. Jacques was Mayor of Paris, by the way. But as President of the French Republic, he cannot be pursued by the courts right now. His former Prime Minister - former president of the RPR and current president of the UDF part of the UMP - is another story.
Libération: Charges alleged for defendant Juppé. See above.
Le Figaro: Italians Plunged Into Darkness. They're blaming problems with French and Swiss lines coming into the country.
Ouest-France appears to be down at the moment.
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Sunday, September 28, 2003
posted by gbarto at 12:03 PM:
According to Amazon.fr (the French version of Amazon.com), their top selling book at the moment is... Je vous demande le droit de mourir de Vincent Humbert |
That, of course, is the book of the blind, young paraplegic who fell into a coma and died after his mother gave him some heavy duty injections. The fight had been on to allow him to be euthanized rather than living with the after effects of a particularly gruesome car accident.
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posted by gbarto at 3:15 AM:
Arafat's Fatah Names New CabinetPalestinian group replaces U.S.-backed security chief with Arafat loyalist
The US should, of course, factor the latest into their calculations over how hard to lean on Israel in the peace process. If we've any intelligence, the load factor just got a lot smaller, else the lesson is that it's ok to try to wipe out the Jews as long as you do it slowly.
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posted by gbarto at 3:11 AM:
Good News from Iraq:U.S. Soldiers Find Huge Weapons Cache in Iraq
Stash uncovered near Saddam Hussein's birthplace includes 1,000 pounds of explosives used to make homemade bombs that have killed numerous GIs
It will be good to have this stuff not contributing to attacks on us and it's good to weaken Saddam and friends that much more.
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posted by gbarto at 3:02 AM:
French news headlines:Saturday night brings a focus on Le Monde; here we go:
Russia Could Intervene In Iraq. So saith Vladimir Putin - depending on how the UN vote goes. He and Bush just met.
Israel-Palestine: Impasse and the Wall. We're entering year four of intifada, with more than 3500 dead. The clear majority of the dead are Palestinian. The peace process pushed by Bush is stalled. So will things ever get better?
And, from Burma, Mme Suu Kyi Again Under House Arrest.
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