Exaggerating for Effect?

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Maybe

“A few days before 25 European Presidents and Prime Ministers met in Brussels to try to ratify a constitution, former French President Val?ry Giscard d’Estaing had dire words of warning. Failure to approve the 265-page text, of which he had been the principal author, would be a disaster for the cause of a united Europe: ‘We would see the gradual falling apart of the European Union.'”
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Corruption in France

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This article in Prospect is a must read. It expalins you of the role of corruption in the political system, look at its causes, the role of the press, the judiciary, and French culture, gives you the history and whrere things stand at the moment I’d quote the key parts, but then I would have to quote the whole article. Go and read it instead.

In short it says corruption is systemic and all-pervasive, that Chirac and most of the political elite are deeply corrupt, and that it doesn’t look like things are going to get better anytime soon. It paints a pretty belak picture.

Via the invaluble Matt Welch

A Brief American Interlude

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The front page of today’s Washington Post has a none-too-flattering analysis of Gov. Howard Dean, the man most likely to challenge GW Bush for the White House in 2004. It starts:

“Former Vermont governor Howard Dean stands on the brink of a remarkable achievement in American politics, having transformed himself from rank obscurity to clear favorite for his party’s presidential nomination. But rarely has a front-runner begun an election year with as many questions swirling around him as the man who rewrote the rules in presidential politics the past 12 months.”

Coming from someone whose profession is supposed to be reporting on American politics, the second sentence is rankest stupidity.
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Merry Xmas

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Just to say, sorry I haven’t been around too much recently. That will change in the New Year. I hope people in Italy aren’t going to be stuck for food. I also note that the US has one more problem to add to the list. This latter should come as no shock, for reasons you can find explained here and in particular here. Apart from anything else, the virtual inevitability of this is connected with something called the Gibbs Principle. The Mad Cow site used, in it’s day, to be one of the best on the net as far as I was concerned, and it is a pity that more have not followed the model. Ok that is enough of this gruesome topic, or you’ll all be vegetarians by tomorrow. So what about xmas?
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A note for people looking for my other blog

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I’ve moved it to pedantry.fistfulofeuros.eu. I’m putting this note here because, unfortunately, you can’t get to that URL because DNS to it has been cut off for a few hours. This is the third time our ISP has done this in a week – propagate DNS for a subdomain and then cancel it – and it is completely their fault. As a result, nothing will be posted to it until I’m able to get someone at Verve to fix it. However, due to the holidays, that will probably not be terribly soon.

In the mean time, have a merry Christmas, a happy Hanukkah, a cool Kwanzaa and a solemn winter solistice.

Update: Well, Verve’s tech support was prompt and at the phones on Christams Eve. This is truely impressive in an ISP. They claim everything is fine now and that the domain name ought to repropagate over the next couple hours. If so, then there will be a posting today.

Silly German Regulations, Part 438

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Did you know that in Bavaria, it is illegal to run a service station’s car wash on Sunday?

Apparently, this falls under the category of disturbing the peace. Equally apparently, the coin-operated industrial-strength vacuum cleaners do not disturb the peace.

I learned this where the six-lane A9 autobahn deposits its traffic onto the eight-lane Mittlerer Ring, about a hundred meters from the crossing with the six-lane Leopoldstrasse. A very peaceful spot indeed.