Oh boy. What did I get myself into…
Gotta stop taking on huge epics that bore even myself to tears, halfway through realization.
Not only am I no longer finding the motivation to write the (otherwise entirely planned out) remaining paragraphs of this post, but it will be poisoning my every thought and inspiration until I get done with it.
Here goes: the second of three parts in our increasingly-inaccurately-named diptych on French society, laws and politics:

Freedom of Expression in France (cont.)

As seen previously, you are free to express yourself in France, as long as you are neither a holocaust-denier nor advocating antisemitism, racial hatred or homophobic positions. Incidentally, a separate text also restricts your right to openly question recreational drugs laws (”presenting drugs under a positive light”). These are a lot of restrictions on what some think should be the unfettered right of people to freely express their views. The more 1st amendment-conscious US readers among you might even be appalled by the practice. Although you better make sure beforehand that you do not live in a country where many have once dubbed it “unpatriotic”, “treacherous” and therefore a crime, not to stand behind their leader… Dissent in times of “war” is just as much a part of freedom of speech as the right to express your twisted hatred for one group of people or another.

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… something about serving it cold while listening to 100 Watts of bass-heavy electroclash?

Guess what the French Post finally delivered to my doorstep this morning (don’t ever use their “48 hour” delivery service if you fancy seeing your stuff in less than two weeks)…

How ironic my brand new speakers should arrive on the morning following one of my dear neighbour’s bi-weekly all-nighter.

9:30 am couldn’t be too early to run a full sound-test, now could it?

While blogging the most mundane details of my daily existence, there has been a plethora of more serious topics I have been wanting to discuss for many weeks now. Just never found the time or the motivation to dig up all the data and roll it into something coherent and mildly interesting. At long last, and in no small part thanks to the wonders of modern urban warfare on academic grounds, I am about to fill up my quota for heady controversial postings on France, for the whole year at once.

Hang on to your baguette and pop a few aspirins, because today we are not going to focus on recent anti-government demonstrations, nor on the ongoing work-law reform that prompted them, or the already fading debate over France’s antisemitism, its suspected racism, the fuss over the Danish cartoons or the ever recurrent theme of freedom of speech and limits thereof in the birth country of Mr. Arouet.

No. Instead, we are going to talk about all these issues at once, and even attempt to weave some sort of grand theory throughout.

We are about to set some new record for lengthy pomposity on this blog and you will soon be longing for my endless digressions on weather and French flu medication, but you must realize I currently live in France: over here, it is uncouth not to have a strong opinion on every matter political and shout it as loud as your understanding of the material is thin. Besides, I see no reason to leave the business of spouting inane drivel on foreign countries, solely to the local pros.

So let’s begin:

1. Anti-semitism and racism in France

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In one particularly brilliant installment of the Daily Show, Jon Stewart sums up the real question on every American mind, following Canada’s recent political turn to the conservative right:

Can we still stitch their flag to our backpacks to get through Europe?

The French blogging community is currently abuzz following announcement that a high school principal, whose blog had reached a fair amount of popularity in its time, had been officially revoked due solely to his blogging activities.

Now, a few of you are probably incensed at such blatant disrespect for civil liberties, all the while wondering how you say “first amendment” in French, while others will object that employers are free to do what they want and getting dooced nowadays is hardly newsworthy stuff.

Here is where both would be wrong and what makes this situation very particular:

First off, being a school principal in France means being directly employed by the government as a civil servant (the infamous fonctionnaires). This work status implies an incredible number of particularities, both advantages and constraints. For instance, such employment cannot be terminated for any reasons other than gross misconduct on the part of the employee who is otherwise guaranteed a job for life. On the other hand, working for the State and being, in essence, representatives of the State, employees are held to what the French call “devoir de réserve“: an obligation to remain loyal to the State’s institutions and not harm its standing by one’s declarations or actions in public. Doing so being the one major ground for losing your job and status.

Ironically, this ground for termination, commonly used in countries where average work contracts do not require anything more than a notice anyway, would land any private company foolish enough to use it here in very hot water (ever heard of French labor laws? They make US HR execs wake up in a puddle of cold sweat in the middle of the night). If you are the government, though: it’s ok.

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No comment.

I already expressed in the past my thoughts on hot-linkers…

I don’t think I need to go over the vast insignificance of script-kiddies: they rank somewhere between leeches and mono-cellular organisms in the general scheme of Internet things. Actually more like irritating little flies or mosquitoes…. Mosquitoes with really, really small penises and a need to overcompensate for it.

But to be both a script-kiddy defacer and a hotlinker…

That just begs for me to take 10 minutes off my very busy moving day and go the extra-mile in moronic-hot-linking prevention:

[Before] [After]

Anybody in charge of that Web 2.0 thing?

I feel it’s time I tell you about my business plan for http://p.et/s.

This time around, we’ll be using AJAX and RSS technologies. You won’t have to reload a single page to order your dog food. Just. Brilliant.

Please send your contributions to the first round of funding via Paypal.

Watching a small online condensate of worldwide TV programs, I stumbled upon a bit of French national news wherein a journalist comments, in French, over footage of flooded NOLA streets.

At one point, the camera stops on a man laying on the ground, zooms in, and we can hear the following voice-over:

Voiceover: “… Un homme a terre, qui dans un souffle parvient à peine à dire à une équipe de reporters…” ["... a man on the ground, barely manages to tell a team of reporters..."]
Offscreen (in English): “Are you alright?”
Man on the ground (in English): “I got a kidney stone…”
Voiceover (allegedly translating from English): “… qu’il est affamé.” ["... that he is starving."]

Yea… Next time I see somebody with a kidney stone, I’ll just cook them some food, ’cause they must be hungry…

Could they actually hand their reporters a dictionary before they send them abroad?

Chalk it up to a simple equation involving roughly 2 weeks of time, 50 pages of yet-unwritten report and 500+ pages of reading material… Blogging just hasn’t been a priority round here lately.

What has been a priority, though, was the quest for any combination of chemical aides, likely to make the required 250 hours of studies in 10 days, a technical, if not quite reasonable health-wise, possibility.

Thus, in the spirit of killing two heart-attacks with one stone, and without further ado, the first episode of:

Dr Dave’s Guide to Chemically-Enhanced Studying in Japan

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One thing that nearly all people have in common is that they like to know when another person send them something. Using a variety of sources, I think I have a pretty good handle on finding other people who send me stuff. In fact, I think I find about 90% of all packages sent to me — but I may be wrong.

This is an experiment to see how “findable” my house is. Put me to the the test, fellow retarded monkeys bloggers science-inclined readers.

All you have to do is send a $100 bill to this particular postal address (i.e., the one I’ll email you privately). Just call it Dr Dave Postal Tracking Experiment or something like that. After a few days, I’ll post a list of every people I found have sent me a $100 bill. If you’re not on the list, I’ll invite you to send me your tracking number. I’ll report these unfound bills to the Post Office, and we’ll try to figure out why I didn’t get them.

By the way, this is not just a cheap way to get some money (although it won’t hurt). I really think it will be a useful experiment. I’ll reveal all of my sources and, hopefully, learn about some new ones. I think other people and the postal tracking companies may benefit from the results.

Inspired by Mr. J-Walk and his brilliant scheme idiot-trap Blogger Experiment.

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Not long after I arrived in Japan, I was introduced to an older gentleman, who shared a keen interests in some European authors and was altogether a pleasure to converse with. That man spoke extremely little English, but was practically fluent in both German and French, while I was, on my end, doing my best to start conveying meaningful sentences through the 15 words of Japanese I had mastered at the time.

I have been in the past ironically referring to “my Japanese lawyer“, and people naturally always assumed I was joking… Well, he is a lawyer. While he should probably have hit retirement a few years ago now, he seems well intent on pleading cases until the very last day. He has, on rare occasions, given me some pro bono advices, repaid in old whiskey and binded european books, which, I suppose, makes him my Japanese lawyer after all.

We once had a conversation about his youth: growing up in Japan during and immediately after the war. The bombing over Tokyo, where his parents lived, got extremely intensive during the last two years. Most of his childhood neighbourhood burnt down before the end of the war. He and his older sister had therefore been sent to some relatives’ house in the country, near a smaller city that had been so far spared from most of the bombings.

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A few interesting facts:

• If Chinese economy keeps growing at the same rate it is growing now, by 2030 its GDP will have more or less caught up with that of the United States of A.
• Its population will also have reached an overall population peak (peak in workforce population will happen before, in ten years or so). Conservative estimates would give it a population of 1.4 billion people around that time.
• Current U.S. population is estimated at a little under 300 million people (and growing fast, thanks to steady fertility and migration flux).
• As it is, at its current GDP and population levels and growth, the United States consume roughly 30% of most resources available worldwide. Particularly in certain areas such as: non-renewable energy, food (grain and meat), minerals etc.
• By most reasonable estimates (read: those not directly financed by the Project for a New American Century or some such), current use of world resource is fairly close to optimal exploitation. 80% is a figure commonly given.
• If China’s current upper-class is any indicator: once introduced to the virtues of the American Way of Life, Chinese people gladly embrace the model and aspire to nothing more than emulating the consumerist habits of the average U.S. citizen.

Now, basic mathematics and a wide margin of error (in favor of a Fluffy-Rabbits-in-a-Perfect-World hypothesis) would seem to indicate that, by 2030, China will be using a neat 100% of all world resources to sustain its own population’s consumption. And keep in mind that this consumption is only based on current consumption habits of the American population, not even taking in account the fact that it seems to double every few decades or so.

Gee, I guess we have a little problem after all.

This little exercise makes a few bold assumptions such as the fact that world resource supply will not only maintain (while many serious analysts contend that it will all but dwindle by then, particularly in the case of fossile fuel) but even grow so as to reach its full potential. That means pretty much every possible miracle in the book, short of discovering that the moon is indeed made of a soft cheese crust, filled to the brim with crude oil. Additionally, it doesn’t even start taking in account other factors, such as ecological footprint, water pollution, gas emissions etc. (but we all know that global warming is just a vast liberal conspiracy after all).

Adding India, Africa, Russia, Europe and, well, the whole rest of the world, to the mix, makes it an even more interesting problem.

And a few hard cold numbers for the data crowd out there.

As often, this entry started as a comment on one of my own entry, specifically addressing Mark’s comment… Then I realized it may as well become its own entry. Consider this the heady and serious counterpart that had to follow last week’s joke…

Mark,

Where do I begin…

No, I do not think poverty exists in African countries just because they need to be freed from their despots and embrace the market.

All these despots, like about every other plague that’s befallen Africa over the past few centuries can be, without a hint of exaggeration, directly traced to one western nation or another. Sure, there are lots of Africans killing and oppressing other Africans. There are bad people in Africa, like anywhere else. But the people manipulating these dictators and benefitting ultimately from the insane amount of corruption and plundering that is underway: they are most definitely not Africans.

Africa is not “dependent”: it currently provides most of the oil that’s running your SUV, my friend. Can you tell me what it gets in return? Beside funding and weapons to whatever warlord agrees to give the best protection for Oil companies, that is.

Entire African countries are currently run, without any pretense at hiding it, by US and European corporations. Countries lucky enough to be devoid of valuable resources (or whose wealth was exhausted in the previous decades) usually have to deal with impossibly stupid artificial borders that make tribal wars a given.

Believe me, it would be a while before whatever money the IMF “invests” in African countries comes any close to even-out what is simultaneously being pumped out of the continent straight into the hands of private corporate interests. And talking about these investments, I hope you do realize that we aren’t even talking about “financial help” here: the debt some of these countries have, was loaned at such rates that the mere interests sometimes overcome their GNP, making it practically impossible to pay back. That is, unless they’d do something like repossess national resources and re-negotiate actual trade agreements that do not just give it away to foreign companies… And I’ll let you count how many government have survived to tell their successful tale of taking on such enterprise (cf. South America).

So in the end, I’ll tell you why that half of the world slowly dying from its excess of fat and junk food, ought to do something for the other half:

Not just out of simple human decency, not just because of that Book they love to flaunt whenever it’s time to burn or stone a sinner but conveniently forget when it comes to the part about human life over material possessions and such other Nazarethian hippy nonsense, not just because even the most raging capitalist ought to realize that there is a problem in a system where people die daily for lack of 5 c. worth of food, while others accumulate more wealth than they could possibly spend in a lifetime…

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Nine concerts, hundreds of artists, millions of spectators all over the world…

I think the G8 bigwigs got the message loud and clear: this generation as a whole is still able to stand up, rise, and demonstrate its love of pop music concerts. especially free ones.

Oh, and also they think poverty’s bad and people dying of starvation during evening news is like, so not cool, you know.

I think we are nearly there.

Update: All right, maybe I was a bit hasty in my conclusions. Three billions telespectators, ought to show that this generation does not merely love attending pop music concerts: it is also perfectly happy sitting at home on a couch and watching them on the telly. Wow, take that poverty!
And yea, I think this figure is pure bullshit too, but I read it on the interweb, so it must be true.