Quotulatiousness

May 3, 2012

Sarkozy’s best chance to win? The DSK effect

Filed under: Europe, France, Government — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:26

John Gizzi on the slim hopes Nicolas Sarkozy has to catch up to front-runner Francois Hollande in the French presidential election:

Before arriving here today to find France braced for its presidential election run-off May 6, I stopped at London’s Ladbroke’s, the world’s most storied of oddsmakers. The odds against Nicolas Sarkozy winning, the bookmaker told me, were 4-to-1, while the odds favoring Socialist challenger Francois Hollande were 1-to-7.

[. . .]

With those chunks of LePen and Bayrou voters, Sarkozy would be in a near-tie with his Socialist nemesis and would need some dramatic event or stumble by Hollande to put him over. As to what this stumble might be, one possibility could have occurred at a birthday party for Socialist politician Julian Drey last Sunday. The big news was who showed up: Dominique Strauss-Kahn, whose own presidential hopes were dashed in a sensational string of scandals beginning with his arrest in New York last May for allegedly assaulting a hotel maid. The politician known as DSK dodged that bullet, but is now facing more serious charges of his alleged involvement in a prostitution ring in France.

Upon learning that DSK was at the birthday party, 2007 Socialist nominee Segolene Royal (who is the mother of Hollande’s four children) stormed out and Hollande himself canceled an appearance at the party. Incredibly, the party was held at the site of what was once a notorious house of prostitution.

Just the appearance of Strauss-Kahn sent the Hollande camp into fervent denials that DSK would ever be considered for a position in a Socialist government.

April 23, 2012

French presidential voting: on to the second round

Filed under: Europe, France, Government, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:30

For the first time, a sitting French president did not win the plurality of votes in the first round:

French President Nicolas Sarkozy is wooing far-right voters after losing narrowly to his Socialist rival in the presidential election’s first round.

Francois Hollande came top with 28.6% and Mr Sarkozy got 27.1% — the first time a sitting president has lost in the first round.

Third-place Marine Le Pen took the largest share of the vote her far-right National Front has ever won, with 18%.

Referring to her voters, Mr Sarkozy said: “I have heard you.”

“There was this crisis vote that doubled from one election to another — an answer must be given to this crisis vote,” he said.

Pollsters say Mr Hollande is the clear favourite to win the second round on 6 May, a duel between him and Mr Sarkozy, who leads the centre-right UMP.

If Mr Hollande wins he will become the first Socialist president in France in 17 years

[. . .]

Nearly a fifth of voters backed a party — the National Front — that wants to ditch the euro and return to the franc.

Reacting to the Front’s success on Monday both the President of the European Commission, Jose Manuel Barroso, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel warned that populist politics was a threat to Europe.

Mrs Merkel said the Front’s “alarming” rise would probably be “ironed out” in the second round. She said she would continue to support Mr Sarkozy.

April 21, 2012

The French presidential election candidates

Filed under: Europe, France, Government, Politics — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:49

Conrad Black provides a thumbnail sketch of the first round of the French presidential election:

There are five principal candidates, arrayed very symmetrically, from right to left: The reactionary anti-Europe and anti-immigration National Front’s Marine Le Pen, espousing petit bourgeois know-nothingism, though less rancorously than her father, the party’s founder, did. Next on the ideological compass is the centre-right Gaullist Sarkozy, who believes in the omnipotent French state of Richelieu, Colbert and Napoleon. He has lengthened the work week and boosted the retirement age. He has also raised taxes, and now wants to impose a heavy exit tax, as the wealthy French are again fleeing the country, as they often have before. The French call Sarkozy “the water-bug” and “President Bling-bling” because of his frenetic behaviour and garish tastes.

Then there is the radical centrist Francois Bayrou, who doesn’t really have a party, and departs his farm every five years to take 10%-12% of the presidential vote for a median platform of moderate tax increases and spending reductions.

Moving to the left, there is M. Hollande, who casually repeats: “I don’t like the rich,” and wants to raise their taxes to 90%.

The piece de resistance in every respect is Jean-Luc Melenchon, leader of the Leftist Bloc, a coalition of Trotskyites, orthodox Communists, dissident socialists, militant environmentalists, vegetarians, nudists and anarchists. Melenchon wants a 100% tax on incomes above 360,000 euros a year, a 20% increase in the minimum wage, and the inability of any profitable company to lay off anyone.

April 15, 2012

Sarkozy reaps media benefit from video conference with Obama

Filed under: Europe, France, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:24

It’s often said that there’s no such thing as bad media exposure during an election campaign, and Nicolas Sarkozy is trying to take advantage of this in the run-up to the first round of voting:

Nicolas Sarkozy has been accused of using a video conference with Barack Obama to boost his election campaign. In an unprecedented move in French diplomacy, newscasts on several TV channels showed the first few minutes of a video link-up between the French president and his Washington counterpart.

Days before the 22 April first-round vote in the French presidential election, the rare glimpse of banter between world leaders shows Obama saying of the campaign, “It must be a busy time.” He adds: “I admire the tough battle you are waging.” Sarkozy replies, grinning and with arms folded: “We will win, Mr Obama. You and me, together.” The cameras leave before the presidents talk about Syria, Iran and oil.

The benefits to Sarkozy are quite clear: it allows him to appear presidential (always a trick the incumbent can use and the ambitious opponent is denied) and gives a subtle boost to French pride — their president is clearly on good personal terms with the American president. France’s representative is seen as being the equal of the superpower’s representative (it doesn’t have to be stated, but it’s a useful subliminal message in an election).

It’s not quite as beneficial to Obama, although this may be a marker put down to be redeemed later in the US presidential cycle. The same trick can be played for the benefit of Obama’s east coast voting base: look how well he deals with foreign dignitaries.

April 14, 2012

John Moore thinks that Canada is stupid to consider Vimy Ridge a “defining moment”

Filed under: Cancon, Europe, France, Germany, History, Military, WW1 — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 11:27

Writing in the Pacifist Times National Post, John Moore expresses the opinion that Canada should derive its sense of national pride from “compassion, hard work and character” rather than remembering anything positive from the bravery and sacrifice of Canadian soldiers in the war against Imperial Germany:

The tropes are well known to Vimy devotes. Over four days in April in 1917, Canadian soldiers accomplished through planning, guts and guile what 150,000 dead French and British soldiers had failed to achieve: The capture of seven kilometres of land rising up to a ridge held by the Germans. It was the first time all four divisions of the Canadian Corps had fought together — 3,598 Canadians lay dead; 7,000 were wounded.

But is Vimy really the best of Canada? Does our modern identity and national purpose hinge on the harrowing slaughter of our citizens on a foreign field of mud in a pointless war?

Canada went to war in 1914 at the same moment that Britain did. Britain went to war because they had guaranteed the independence of Belgium, but Germany needed to violate that independence in order to push the massive right wing of their armies past the French frontier forces in an attempt to outflank and destroy the French army. If Canada entering the war was “pointless”, then we should never have taken part in World War 2 (which Moore paints as being “one of the most unambiguously moral wars in history” either.

If anything, modern Canada should reflect on Vimy and our total First World War sacrifice as a national tragedy. Sixty-thousand Canadian men died in a war in which we had no real casus belli and which was largely administered by damnable incompetents. A generation of teachers, milkmen, farm hands, labourers, students and artists died on the field of battle, so hollowing out the population that many of the women they left behind would never marry. One hundred and seventythree thousand returned home suffering from burns, chemical poisoning, amputations and traumatic stress disorder that would leave them depressed and spastic for the remainder of their lives.

So why, 95 years later, do we venerate Vimy? Perhaps because it’s far easier to stir emotions where military matters are concerned. You can’t erect a heroic statue to the civility for which Canada is renowned. Social justice has never been able to muster an inspiring flypast. The national understanding that in Canada we look after each other doesn’t have a solemn bugle call to draw a tear.

So Moore thinks that Canada is defined by social justice and civility? I guess that’s at least a bit better than the even more common notion on the left that Canada is defined only by socialized medicine.

March 30, 2012

The mystery of Le Pain Maudit (Cursed Bread) finally solved

Filed under: Europe, France, History, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:01

In a twist that will delight conspiracy theorists everywhere, it really was a CIA plot:

In 1951, a quiet, picturesque village in southern France was suddenly and mysteriously struck down with mass insanity and hallucinations. At least five people died, dozens were interned in asylums and hundreds afflicted.

For decades it was assumed that the local bread had been unwittingly poisoned with a psychedelic mould. Now, however, an American investigative journalist has uncovered evidence suggesting the CIA peppered local food with the hallucinogenic drug LSD as part of a mind control experiment at the height of the Cold War.

The mystery of Le Pain Maudit (Cursed Bread) still haunts the inhabitants of Pont-Saint-Esprit, in the Gard, southeast France.

March 28, 2012

Speaking of science, here’s a new development in “thermal cloaking”

Filed under: France, Science, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:42

Lewis Page at The Register walks us through the high points of a new development from France:

Top boffins in France have come up with a radical new take on the “cloaking” and invisible-shed physics breakthroughs of recent years. They have designed a technology which instead of bending microwaves or light can shield an object from heat — or concentrate heat upon it.

“Our key goal with this research was to control the way heat diffuses in a manner similar to those that have already been achieved for waves, such as light waves or sound waves,” says Sebastien Guenneau, of Aix-Marseille uni and France’s Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CRNS).

“Heat isn’t a wave — it simply diffuses from hot to cold regions,” Guenneau adds. “The mathematics and physics at play are much different.”

For now designed only in two dimensions, Guenneau and his colleagues’ approach involved shaping isotherms — lines showing density of heat flux transferring from point — so as to make heat travel around a given area rather than into it.

“We can design a cloak so that heat diffuses around an invisibility region, which is then protected from heat. Or we can force heat to concentrate in a small volume, which will then heat up very rapidly,” Guenneau says.

March 18, 2012

Can there ever be a “canonical” release of Abel Gance’s Napoleon?

Filed under: Europe, France, History, Media, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:42

Manohla Dargis charts the incredibly rocky history of Abel Gance’s silent masterpiece Napoleon:

SOON after Abel Gance’s “Napoleon” had its premiere in Paris in 1927, he wrote a letter to his audience, soliciting open eyes and hearts. “I have made,” he wrote, “a tangible effort toward a somewhat richer and more elevated form of cinema.” He had created a film towering in ambition, scale, cost, narrative and technical innovations, and believed that nothing less than “the future of the cinema” was at stake. His audacity had merit. The origins of the widescreen image can be traced to “Napoleon,” which also featured hand-held camerawork, eye-blink-fast editing, gorgeous tints, densely layered superimpositions and images shot from a pendulum, a sled, a bicycle and a galloping horse.

The film was an astonishment, and it was doomed. One hurdle was its length — his early versions ran from 3 hours to 6 hours 28 minutes (down from 9 hours) — while other difficulties were posed by Gance’s advances, specifically a process later called Polyvision that extended the visual plane into a panorama or three separate images and that required three screens to show it. Partly as a consequence, distributors and exhibitors took harsh liberties: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer cut it down to around 70 minutes for the American release, a butchering that seemed to encourage bad reviews. Gance continued to rework the film, adding sound for a 1935 version and, decades later, new material. Yet even as he was taking it apart, others — notably the British historian Kevin Brownlow — were trying to restore “Napoleon” to its original glory.

In truth “Napoleon,” as it was initially hailed, no longer exists, which raises ticklish questions about authorship. In his book on the film, Mr. Brownlow lists 19 versions of “Napoleon” — including those created by distributors, Gance and Mr. Brownlow himself, who for decades has tried to restore the long-lost full version.

It’s almost a metaphysical question: how can you re-create the “original” when even the creator was busy re-shaping it at every stage along the way? George Lucas looks like an arch-conservator in comparison to Gance’s efforts.

February 28, 2012

Hacker-Artist group UX roves under Paris streets

Filed under: Europe, France, History, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:03

A fascinating article in Wired talks about a French group that does the opposite of vandalism — unauthorized repairs to neglected historical objets d’art:

This stealthy undertaking was not an act of robbery or espionage but rather a crucial operation in what would become an association called UX, for “Urban eXperiment.” UX is sort of like an artist’s collective, but far from being avant-garde — confronting audiences by pushing the boundaries of the new — its only audience is itself. More surprising still, its work is often radically conservative, intemperate in its devotion to the old. Through meticulous infiltration, UX members have carried out shocking acts of cultural preservation and repair, with an ethos of “restoring those invisible parts of our patrimony that the government has abandoned or doesn’t have the means to maintain.” The group claims to have conducted 15 such covert restorations, often in centuries-old spaces, all over Paris.

What has made much of this work possible is UX’s mastery, established 30 years ago and refined since, of the city’s network of underground passageways — hundreds of miles of interconnected telecom, electricity, and water tunnels, sewers, catacombs, subways, and centuries-old quarries. Like computer hackers who crack digital networks and surreptitiously take control of key machines, members of UX carry out clandestine missions throughout Paris’ supposedly secure underground tunnels and rooms. The group routinely uses the tunnels to access restoration sites and stage film festivals, for example, in the disused basements of government buildings.

H/T to CuthSpies for the link.

February 16, 2012

Rum running in the Maritimes during Prohibition

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, France, History, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:33

I just received a press release about a new documentary to be shown on the CBC this Sunday. Here’s the trailer:

Rum Running is a half hour documentary that will celebrate its world broadcast premiere on CBC Television’s Land & Sea on Sunday, February 19, 2012 at 12 Noon. Rum Running describes the history of rum running and depicts the high stakes role that Nova Scotia and the French Islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon played during the era. The film reveals how thousands of law abiding citizens of Atlantic Canada were lured into the alcohol smuggling trade during Prohibition in the 1920’s and 30s.

February 8, 2012

A spectre is haunting the EU elite: the spectre of democracy

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Europe, France, Greece, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:25

Bruno Waterfield on the worries of the movers and shakers in the fancy office suites in Brussels:

The European Union is currently straining every sinew in a campaign to stifle outbreaks of politics across Europe.

For the EU oligarchs, democracy sucks. What if the Greeks — voting in elections this April — decide to tear up an austerity programme painstakingly hammered out by their betters in the EU and the IMF? Imagine — and the memory of all those lost referendums still smarts among Eurocrats — if a country should decide it has had enough of the economic mismanagement and diktat that has characterised the Eurozone’s handling of the economic crisis.

A spectre is indeed haunting the corridors of Brussels offices and it is real: a well-founded fear that voters will reject the ‘fiscal compacts’, ‘debt brakes’ and ‘golden rules’ aimed at securing the EU’s reign in de facto perpetuity.

[. . .]

Pierre Moscovici, the Socialist campaign manager, has further horrified the EU by hinting that a new French president could hold a referendum — a taboo in contemporary European politics. ‘I am convinced that we will find allies for a renegotiation aimed at a policy change to pull us out of this austerity spiral and recession. We don’t like the idea of a popular vote because we are pro-Europeans and we don’t want a “No”, but nor can we allow tensions to spill over’, he said last week.

February 6, 2012

What would follow a European Union crack-up?

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Economics, Europe, France, Germany, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:13

If you listen to Angela Merkel and other European leaders, what would follow a break-up of the EU would be something out of Mad Max, a post-apocalyptic wasteland where the living would envy the dead. With no Brussels bureaucrats to direct everyone’s affairs, war, pestilence, starvation, looting, violence and unregulated bananas would proliferate. Bruno Frey isn’t quite as sanguine:

The major problem is that people do not see any alternative to the presently enacted European unification. The Europe-minded politicians even insist that, if the euro and the EU collapse, complete chaos will break out. The European continent will go back to the situation before World War II. The various nations will isolate themselves economically, and they will even start to fight each other. A war within the core of Europe, in particular between France and Germany, is taken to be a real possibility lurking in the background.

This view disregards the fact that the European unification process was made possible only because Germany and France stopped considering each other as enemies. They then saw themselves as the ‘motor’ of the European integration process, which started with the establishment of an economic union and then expanded to the political sphere. It is certainly wrong to think that the only thing that was needed to bring peace to Europe was a formal international treaty.

The claim that the downfall of the euro and the EU would produce chaos and war may be interpreted to be just a strategy necessary to get support for helping the highly indebted nations such as Greece, Portugal, Spain, or Italy with ever more financial support. However, conversations I have had with persons from various European countries suggest that many people really believe that Europe will disintegrate and that wars are looming if the EU dissolves. I hold this view to be seriously mistaken.

[. . .]

The individual countries in Europe will quickly form new treaties among themselves. Collaboration will be maintained in all those areas where it has worked well. Some countries will remain in a newly formed and smaller Eurozone, for which the appropriate treaties will be designed. A similar reconstitution will take place with respect to Schengen, which will then encompass different members. Only those countries that find it advantageous will join a new convention on the free movement of persons. In contrast, those nations that do not find such new treaties attractive, or that are not admitted to them by the other members, will not join.

The result will be a net of overlapping contracts between countries, which the various nations will join at will. These contracts will not be based on a vague notion of what ‘Europe’ may mean, but rather on functional efficiency. Crucially, the individual treaties will be stable because they will be in the interest of each member.

December 26, 2011

Evaluating French aircraft carrier performance in the Libya campaign

Filed under: Africa, Europe, France, Military — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:59

Strategy Page summarizes the efforts of the French aircraft carrier de Gaulle in the recently concluded Libyan operations:

The French nuclear aircraft carrier, the Charles de Gaulle, put in an epic performance of sustained combat air operations off Libya this year. From March to August France was one of the major contributors to the effort, flying 25 percent of the air sorties and contributing many of the warships off the coast of Libya. The 4,500 French air sorties put their aircraft in the air for 20,000 hours. About 30 percent of French sorties were flown from the de Gaulle and over half the French strike sorties were flown from the de Gaulle. Most (62 percent) of the carrier sorties were combat missions (usually bombing). The de Gaulle averaged 11.25 sorties per day when it was conducting air operations. The de Gaulle spent 120 flying days off Libya, in one case 63 straight days conducting combat operations. Aircraft operating from the de Gaulle spent 3,600 hours in the air and conducted 2,380 catapult takeoffs and carrier landings.

French warplanes carried out 35 percent of the bombing missions, using 950 smart bombs. These included 15 French made SCALP missiles and 225 Hammer GPS guided bombs. French helicopter gunships flew 90 percent of NATO helicopter attack missions, using 431 HOT missiles and thousands of cannon rounds. French warships fired over 3,000 rounds of 100mm and 76mm naval gun rounds at sea and land targets off the Libyan coast.

December 15, 2011

Mick Hume: Dispelling Euro-myths

Filed under: Britain, Europe, France, Germany, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:49

In this post at Spiked, Mick Hume pours cold water on five Euro-myths:

Euro-myth No 1: ‘It was a triumph for Cameron — or Sarkozy’

Depending on who you listen to, either UK prime minister David Cameron bravely stood alone for Britain by rejecting a new EU treaty, or else he was beaten by the wily French president Nicolas Sarkozy who got what he wanted by the UK’s omission from the new deal around the Eurozone.

In fact, what the rupture showed was that both the six-footer Cameron and the diminutive Sarkozy are, to coin a phrase, pygmies in political terms. And so are German chancellor Angela Merkel and the rest of Europe’s political elite. Far from a triumph for anybody, it marked an embarrassing failure of basic diplomacy among substandard statesmen and women. There are always tensions and ructions at international summits. But in other times they would have been kept under control by careful diplomatic preparation and consultation beforehand – not left to break out in a schoolboy spat on the day, with Cameron and Sarkozy reportedly almost coming to blows. Even far more strident Eurosceptics such as Margaret Thatcher knew how to play the great power game without tripping over their own laces. Europe’s destiny is now in the hands of self-regarding pygmies who think more of their next headline than the shared future of the continent.

As for the notion that Cameron struck a noble blow for the British people and ‘our’ national sovereignty — come off it. Indeed, one of his main motives appears to have been to avoid giving the British people any kind of say on the matter, by dodging both the referendum that would be demanded if he accepted an amended EU treaty, and the general election that would follow if he went too far the other way and broke up his coalition with the EU-loving Liberal Democrats. The government would rather fall out with the French than risk the wrath of British voters.

December 7, 2011

Time to end the “forced march” to Fiskalunion?

Filed under: Europe, France, Germany, Government — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:40

Patrick Hayes outlines the way European national leaders and unelected EU officials are steadily blocking any democratic influence over the future of Europe:

Missing from this deal-making has been the European public, which has been held in complete disregard; whether such a ‘forced march’ is acceptable to the European populace is deemed utterly irrelevant, a triviality, in the face of impending doom. After all, as Merkel reminded us recently, ‘nobody should take for granted another 50 years of peace and prosperity in Europe’. The need for such fundamental changes to Europe’s government and economic system are deemed to be beyond debate.

Even when raising the importance of the national sovereignty of their countries, European leaders do so by pointing out too much economic and fiscal integration would get in the way of solving the short-term crisis. There is little discussion of sovereignty as a matter of principle, as the basis upon which voters can hold politicians and technocrats to account. Actually asking the people directly what they want, through national referenda on any new treaty, is regarded as an unnecessary distraction from the urgent task of saving the Euro, to be avoided at all costs.

[. . .]

Once again demonstrating who is actually wearing the trousers in the partnership between the two wealthiest Eurozone countries, Merkel largely got her way. Only last week, Sarkozy was calling for a return to greater democracy in the European Monetary Union: ‘The reform of Europe is not a march towards supra-nationality’, he said. However, Merkel also had to water down her desire to haul naughty countries before a supra-national authority such as the European Court of Justice or a ‘super commissioner’ in Brussels. Instead, sanctions for breaches of the new Eurozone rules would be enforced internally within countries, who would adopt new laws promising they will obey EU rules.

Despite this, as is evident by a leaked document being circulated by EU Council president Herman Van Rompuy and to be discussed by senior EU officials today, the full arsenal of punitive measures for rule-breaking Eurozone members remains on the table. Van Rompuy suggests that bailed-out countries could be temporarily deprived of political voting rights in EU councils; pension reforms, social security systems, labour-market policy and financial regulations could be ‘harmonised’ across EU countries; and there could be ‘more intrusive control of national budgetary policies by the EU’. Development aid for poorer EU countries could be cut, too.

[. . .]

Whatever gets decided at this week’s summit, and whether the fiscal rules are accepted by all 27 EU nations or just by the 17 Eurozone members, it’s clear that greater intrusion into member countries’ national sovereignty by EU officials is the way the wind is blowing. Should countries overspend and breach EU rules, they may no longer be allowed to decide how they set their taxes, how much they can borrow, even the make-up of their budgets. Such decisions, fundamental to a country’s sovereignty, get ripped from the hands of the people living in the countries and their elected representatives, with decisions instead being forcibly guided by European technocrats in Brussels.

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