French factories and businesses often have to move from one place to another

People in France have been following the case of the Alstom organization in Belfort, which was about to be either closed down or relocated in another place. The French government finally intervened, and made it possible for the manufacturer to remain in Belfort. To do so, the SNCF (state-owned French railroad system) agreed to order a huge volume of rolling stock from Alstom. But do they really need all this new equipment? The cartoonist Xavier Gorce imagines that French bakeries might take the hint.

Unpleasant aspect of a top job

An observer might imagine that a prime minister spends most of his time prancing around in nice places. Manuel Vals has been obliged to face up to the poor state of French prisons. The situation has become all the more urgent in that France is starting to imprison, not only authentic terrorists, but also (as little as possible, of course) mere suspects of terrorism. The PM announced today that, during the next decade, over 30 new penitentiary establishments are to be built.

Le Premier ministre Manuel Valls et

le ministre de la Justice Jean-Jacques Urvoas
visitent une prison à Caen (Calvados), le 13 juin 2016.
(CHARLY TRIBALLEAU / AFP)

South-western USA threatened with megadroughts throughout this century

 

                                                                      [photo David McNew AFP]

Click here to see the US magazine Science Advances. Click here to access the full article that warns Americans of the risk of prolonged droughts throughout this century.

No happy marriage in Melbourne

Kylie Minogue and her British fiancé Joshua Sasse have decided not to get married in Melbourne. They are protesting against Australia’s refusal to marry homosexual couples.

Come on, Australia, take Kylie's advice.

Get your country up to date with the world!

Paris Agreement on climate change

The Kyoto Protocol, adopted in December 1997, only went into force 7 years later. Things have been far more rapid for the Paris Agreement, adopted in December 2015. It will go into action in a month.

For the ratification of the Paris Agreement, December 2015 :
Jean-Claude Junker, Ségolène Royal, Ban Ki-Moon and Martin Schulz
[left to right, photo Jean-Francois Badias/AP/SIPA]

Winter vaccination in France

The annual flu vaccination campaign will be starting in France next Friday, and will concern 10 million patients. The health system spotted me well in advance. For the last month or so, I’ve been carrying around the pharmacy paper that I received.

Blasphemy is good for you

Abolish Blasphemy Laws

Aussie speech going uphill

Most often, I believe that Australian news is going downhill, in the sense that nothing much is ever happening in that remote country, and the outside world rarely receives news from Australia about anything at all. On the other hand, whenever I succeed in hearing Australian voices, generally about totally uninteresting subjects, I’m amazed to see that they’ve totally adopted an unpleasant new vocal accent. The end of every sentence soars upwards into the sky, as if they were asking lots of big questions. Even a run-of-the-mill policeman seems to be asking you questions all the time. Click here to listen to a good demonstration of this ascending intonation in a short and boring news video from South Grafton, my home town.

Trump stands a chance of winning a Nobel

Click here to see some of the 376 candidacies for the Nobel Prize for Peace. I would be thrilled if Donald Trump were to win. This victory would have no effect whatsoever on peace and war in the world, but it might blow up Trump’s head to such a point that it would burst. That explosion would keep him out of the forthcoming presidential election. I hope the members of the Swedish Academy read my blog.

Three Europeans win the chemistry Nobel

In the domain of molecular machines, the Nobel Prize for chemistry was awarded to Jean-Pierre Sauvage (University of Strasbourg, France), J Fraser Stoddart (an Englishman working at Northwestern University, Evanston, USA) and Bernard Feringa (University of Groningen, the Netherlands).

Time to leave

Diane James has nothing to say, and she knows it. She has no authority, and she can’t count upon the esteem of her colleagues. So, after merely 18 days in charge of Britain’s xenophobic Ukip party, Diane James has bowed out. The English call such a departure “taking French leave”. The French say “filer à l’anglaise”.

Amazing documentary on Australia

This evening, France 2 showed an amazing documentary, shot in Australia, on the subject of animal intelligence. We saw baby kangaroos being reared in a clinic, a female crocodile examined by echography, clouds of fruit bats in the sky (a familiar scene in Grafton, my place of birth), horses that communicate with humans through emotions, a huge snake being captured in a suburban house, the glorious movements of dolphins, giant turtles and rays, a presentation of the extraordinary cuttlefish...

This was one of the most intelligent and exhilarating documentaries from Australia that I've ever seen, totally different to the general touristic rubbish that emerges regularly from Down Under. There wasn't a single shot of koalas, Aborigines,  opal mines or Uluru. We didn't even get a glimpse of the Harbour Bridge or the Opera House. Not even Taronga Park. And no surfers or lifesavers. Viewers were simply presented with a land whose animal diversity surpasses that of all other places on the planet. Australia has 378 species of mammals, 828 bird species, 4,000 fish species, 300 lizard species, 140 snake species and 2 species of crocodiles. 80 % of these creatures are endemic, which means that they don't exist anywhere else in the world.

This documentary, created by a team of friendly and intelligent French people, was the 13th in a series designated as The Extraordinary Powers of the Human Body, directed by Michel Cymès and Adriana Karembeu.

 

Michel Cymès et Adriana Karembeu (Crédit photo : Philippe Doignon / FTV)

Don't get screwed!

This message is powerful.
It's from an American talking
to young Americans about America.
He tells them to vote, and to vote for Clinton.
But the message can be understood by
young people throughout the world.

I hope that young Brits listen.

The young generation of the UK know now

that the Brexit was a gigantic mistake.

A blunder made by oldies for oldies.

The mistake cannot be corrected,

but it might be attenuated.

No such mistake should

ever be made again.

Pope Francis seems to think the French are idiots

Somebody apparently told Pope Francis that the French have crazy ideas about the differences between boys and girls. One of his mates (?) told him a funny story, along the following lines:

          QUESTION : What do you want to be when you grow up?

          LITTLE BOY : I want to be a little girl.

Pope Francis seems to think that we really teach young French kids to behave like that.

Personally, I think that Pope Francis needs to get his papal head read.

Nobel Prize for Physics

Three British scientists: David Thouless, Duncan Haldane and Michael Kosterlitz. They "revealed the secrets of exotic matter". The biggest surprise of the announcement was that it didn't go to the team behind the discovery of gravitational waves.

Augmenting intelligence

To augment your intelligence, you need to be stimulated, indeed shocked. Your brain needs to receive a burst of energy that makes it cogitate. A bolt of cerebral lightning. If that doesn’t happen, then you’ll finish the day no more intelligent than when you woke up. In certain places, at certain times, there might be so few flashes of cerebral lightning that your brain might even go into hibernation. This happens, I believe, in binary situations where crowds are watching win/lose happenings such as sporting competitions. The brain is not really being stimulated in a cognitive manner. It is simply being turned on to applaud in joy, or turned off to weep in despair. People in such situations are being manipulated like pigeons in a Skinner box, designated technically as an operant conditioning chamber.

The ancient Romans believed in a protective spirit of a place, known as a genius loci. In certain wonderlands, the spirit of place can operate in a way that makes passers-by more intelligent. It all depends on what’s available in the way of cerebral surprises. The other evening, I watched a TV documentary about the huge sewage canals beneath Paris. Crowds of onlookers in the street were behaving feverishly because workers digging up the street had asked them to step back a little… to make way for an emerging boat. When people are told that a boat is about to appear from beneath the street pavement, their brains are indeed capable of going into overdrive. First, you imagine that somebody is cracking a joke, and making fun of you. When you do indeed grasp the image of a big flat-bottomed vessel being hauled up from the bowels of the City of Light, your neurons go wild, and start to chatter like a Geiger counter in a nuclear fallout zone. I should explain that the above vessel is simply used in Paris sewage canals to pick up solid rubbish. It needs to be taken out of the water from time to time and brought up onto dry land, to be cleaned and repaired.

For understandable local reasons, often historical or purely incidental, there are more chances of a spirit of place becoming excited in the streets of Paris than in a dull Antipodean neighborhood, regardless of the sunny weather. The sewage canals are more ancient and complex.

It's all a fraud

Don't waste time comparing one fraud with another. One book of lies is no better than another book of lies. They're all shit. Lies are lies are lies. Only truth counts.

Incidentally, the organization that created the following pleasant poster is Catholic.

So, don't fall into the trap of imagining that they know what they're talking about. Catholics simply cannot ever really understand all that they're talking about. Those folk talk with God and angels, and they believe in magic. They got themselves brain-damaged long ago, and they've never really succeeded in escaping from that accident, which they like to call Original Sin. They might appear to be nice folk, but they're merely a mob of nutty fruit-cakes. Shit, they "pray"... Do you see what I'm saying? Catholics actually believe that they can chat away with a guy who lives up in the sky, who once built the universe. As I said, they're totally crazy. Raving lunatics. Mad as cut snakes.

Probably our next president

The candidate is Alain Juppé, currently mayor of Bordeaux : our likely future president.

Click here for a short announcement of a TV documentary by FOG (Franz-Olivier Giesbert), which France will we watching this evening. If I wanted to be "sarkastic", I would say that Juppé’s major merit is that he’ll save us from Sarkozy.

Eternal silence

Frequently on French TV, several times a week, exceptional movies describe the universe, just above the horizon. Without such splendid reminders, I would surely shrink up and die.

Le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m'effraie.
— Blaise Pascal

Children speak the language of Pascal, but differently.

And a tweet from Bold Atheism transmits that language.
Through the Cosmos ? Yes, forever.

Getting their act together

The slogan alongside Theresa May is curious. Who exactly is included in the "everyone" for whom Brexit Britain is working? Why is Britain working for her citizens? Wouldn't it be more logical, inversely, if her citizens worked for Britain? Is the country really working for the huge proportion of citizens who didn't want the Brexit at all? How exactly is this "work" being conducted? The formula is fuzzy.

This morning, on the BBC and in the Sunday Times, Theresa May reassured the world that the UK plans to activate article 50 of the Treaty of Lisbon, to obtain a divorce settlement with the European Union, before March 2017. In that case, the UK would normally be able to leave Europe around the start of 2019. Not too soon...

This afternoon, she'll open the congress of the Conservative Party in Birmingham.