France

The French have their priorities straight when it comes to sex, politics and scandals.

Meet Rachida Dati, the  France's Minister of Justice. A woman of many accomplishments, she is the first person of North African ascendancy to serve in a ministerial capacity in France. She is one of Nicolas Sarkozy's most powerful political allies; especially after being "attached to his hip" as his spokesperson during his presidential campaign.

Well ...

Rachida just had a baby girl, Zohra. Out of wedlock. As a single mother. And she won't name the baby's father.

That's not the scandal.

Ent over at Crazy Days and Nights breaks it down for us : Rumors have it that Sarkozy is the father. As in the President of France. That means that, by all accounts, the guy who left his wife for former supermodel and man-eater Carla Bruni, may have fathered a child with the Minister of Justice (that's kind of like the Attorney General in the United States) just 9 months ago. As in while he was married to the mistress he made his wife after leaving the wife.

Studying overseas is often thought to be an upper middle-class or wealthy bourgeois privilege that Black students cannot afford. Don't believe that hype! Because tuition, housing and transportation costs are higher in the United States than in many other countries, and educational subsidies are often lower here, astute Black students may find that they cannot afford NOT to study overseas.

For example, the annual tuition at United States colleges and universities is rarely less than $5000.00 per year and often comes closer to $$50,000 per year. Meanwhile, tuition at some French universities is as low as $500.00 per year, including a comprehensive health insurance package that covers prescription medicine. Effectively, the cost of college health insurance in the United States may exceed the cost of health insurance AND tuition in France.

Comprehensive US financial aid may be available for American students to study overseas. Many United States colleges and universities permit students to remain enrolled in the United States, paying a nominal fee of perhaps $15.00 per semester for continued enrollment, while actually earning many of their degree credits at a foreign institution, and paying the substantially lower foreign tuition. Because the students remain enrolled at US institutions, they remain eligible for all available US financial aid, but they can spend it overseas in an environment where money goes much further.

I try to get my news from several sources, and that can lead to some interesting discoveries. It seems that in the early days of Israel's attack on Lebanon, Jacques Chirac wanted Israel to go into Syria as well. This is from Guysen Israel News:

Jacques Chirac had urged Israel to attack Syria in the first few days of the war in Lebanon. According to the army radio Galei Tsahal, the French president sent a message to Jerusalem, via a secret channel. He proposed that Israel launch an offensive against Damas and bring down the regime of Bashar al-Assad in exchange for total French support in the war. According to the message from Paris, Syria was held responsible for sparking the war on the northern border and encouraged Hizbollah to act. (Guysen.Isra×›l.News)

I have found no confirmation of this. Most of the coverage of Chirac's view of Israel's attack on Lebanaon is of his condemnation of Israel's "disproportionate actions," as in here:

President Jacques Chirac said Friday that Israel's military offensive against Lebanon is "totally disproportionate" and asked whether destroying Lebanon was not the ultimate goal.

However, he also said that rockets fired on Israel by Hezbollah and Hamas are "inadmissible, unacceptable and irresponsible."

Chirac implicitly suggested that Syria and Iran might be playing a role in the expanding crisis in the Middle East which, along with the Iranian nuclear issue, creates "a truly dangerous situation in which we must be very, very careful."

This is more of a brainstorm than a post, but when I was talking about Jean Baudrillard's this morning over breakfast, it dawned on me that France had a second enlighment during the 20th Century.

The majority of the most influential French philosophers were born in the 1920s and most of them either studied, worked with or new each other through the French university system throughout the 60s, 70s, and 80s.

They all oohed and aahed at Georges Bataille and Albert Camus. Then there was Jean Paul Sartre and his lifemate, Simone de Beauvoir was a notorious organizer and party animal.

It seems like all of these people at one point of another studied or worked with Georges Bataille, Jacques Lacan, Michele Blanchot, or Claude Levi Strauss.

Michele Foucault was one of the few people who knew Blanchot personally. He was good friends at one point with Jacques Derrida and a had a falling out with Sartre.

Jean Baudrillard studied with Roland Barthes and so did Julia Kristeva.

Then there's Deleuze and Guattari. Everybody knew of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's magical and tempestuous working relationship.

"The university is in ruins ... Power ... no longer believes in the university. It knows fundamentally that it is only a zone of the shelter and surveillance of a whole class of a certain age, it therefore has only to select – it will find its elite elsewhere, or by other means. Diplomas are worthless ..."

Jean Baudrillard is the philosopher I seem to always forget.

I don't know which one came first into my hands, whether it was The System of Objects (Radical Thinkers) (Radical Thinkers) or For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign. All I know is that Baudrillard (along with Roland Barthes) was one of the first people to show me how to think about humanity not as a given but as a deliberate construction stemming from our desire, fear and lust for Power.

Baudrillard, through his look at American culture, his ponderings on advertising and his photographic musings, taught me to look at Man and Woman literally as auto (self-made) nomies (signs). I learned with him that History becomes in this quest for autonomy, a matrix of Power through meaningful domination.

I learned with Baudrillard, far before the creation of the web and the proliferation of the anonymous personae that litter the blogosphere, that we are fictions battling to be taken on as truths. Twenty years ago and before we even heard of blogs as noise machines, I learned from hims that it is not truth we seek to unravel through writing, punditry or blogging but the spectacle of being truthful.

I have much to thank Baudrillard for his gift of knowledge even if it is a knowledge that I always seem to forget. He has inspired my distrut of cultural absolutes (truth, evidence) and its perpetuation institutions (academia, media) through his piercing discussions of American culture. Ironically, he made very real and accessible the Marxist and Nietzschean philosphies that inform my creations. He ended up making real the unreal reality of reality makers.

After the jump you'll find Arthur Kroker's euology forwarded to me from the C-NET listserve.

A poll conducted by BBC in 27 countries shows that Bush's idea of an "Axis of Evil" may get some international support. Problem is, according to world opinion, the US is part of that Axis of Evil...or perhaps Axis of Destabilization:

According to a poll made for the BBC, carried out in 27 countries, 56% of those interviewed see in Israel, the United States, Iran and North Korea, "the countries with the most harmful influence on the world". (Guysen.Isra×›l.News)

Checking out the BBC website, shows that Israel, Iran and the US are viewed as having a "mostly negative influence" on the world by more than 50% of people polled. North Korea does slightly better with 48% of people polled seeing them as having a "mostly negative influence." So the US is slightly better than Iran and slightly worse than North Korea in its influence on the world, it seems. Great job, Bush! The world, which loved us under Clinton/Gore now see us as about as much a threat to the world as Iran and North Korea thanks to Bush/Cheney.

Looking at it from the other end, Canada, EU collectively, and Japan top the list as having a "mostly positive influence" according to more than half of people taking the poll. It is interesting that Japan does so well given how much China, Taiwan and the Koreas hate them. Isreal's low rating is not surprising given their unpopularity in the Muslim world and the negative view of their war with Lebanon.

As we gear up for the 2008 Presidential Elections here in the United States, many of us may be overlooking the French Presidential Election, the first round of which is April 22 of this year. Are there things that we can learn from the French elections that could help us here?

As far as I know there is no European yarmulke-specific ban. But there are numerous headscarf, burqa and veil bans in place or under consideration.

Yesterday I saw a pod on Current TV about Britain's consideration of a headscarf ban, pushed by politicians like Jack Straw. It wasn't the most detailed of their segments, but it showed some of the deep xenophobia behind this movement. As a side note, for those who haven't watched Current TV, they have some very powerful stuff. They filmed in North Korea, revealing how seriously weird and screwed up that place is and showing a wry humor in the process. Their earlier coverage of Haiti was excellent. Their coverage of the Iraq and Afghan wars from the point of view of both our soldiers and the citizens of those nations has sometimes been extraordinary. They have some crap, but some of their stuff is well worth watching.

Back to the headscarf ban.

In France a ban on Muslim headscarves and other "conspicuous" religious symbols at state schools has been in place since 2004. I don't like their law, but it has one advantage of including all "conspicuous" religious symbols. My question is has it been equally enforced? Have Jews been prevented from wearing their Yarmulkes openly? What about crucifixes?

Some German states have headsarf-specific bans, preventing school teachers from wearing them. One wonders world reaction had they made it a yarmulke-specific ban!