jeux de nupes

Two tribunes in the weekend edition of Le Monde denouncing the appalling surrender of the Socialist and Green parties, giving up their European ideals to unite with a Eurosceptic, Marxist, &tc. “untamed France” party in preparation of the incoming legislative elections, next June. The May 68 figurehead Dany Cohn-Bendit and his cowriters also point out the permanent ambiguity of this pro-Putin party, blatantly illustrated by the Ukrainian tragedy. Beyond giving away European principles, this electoralist strategy is simply disastrous as both Left parties will end up with many less representatives than in the previous elections…

to be demolished!

promises, misses

The French presidential elections are in two weeks four days and it sounds like a secondary issue, given the current state of the Universe! Incl. Russian massacres in Ukraine and Mali… Today Last week’s Le Monde had a comparative list of programs and promises for all twelve candidates, some of which I found hilariously absurd, in a sort of surrealist poem:

• abolish presidential elections
• abolish regions
• abolish bank privacy
• abolish State medical aid (AME)
• abolish public debt for European countries
• abolish tax evasion
• abolish foreign language initiation in primary schools
• abolish student selection by universities
• create a French Google
• create a French State microprocessor company
• create five State museums abroad
• create a Civil Code for animals
• disassemble all existing wind turbines and prohibit new ones
• expel jobless aliens
• free all political prisoners
• increase birds by 10%
• nationalise all forests larger than 20 hectares
• open a prison in the Kerguelen Islands for terrorist prisoners
• prohibit concrete
• prohibit overtime
• prohibit horse meat
• prohibit layoffs
• prohibit political judges unions
• prohibit ideological teaching at school
• reduce parking tickets to 17€
• recruit 90,000 (10%) new teachers
• support stable cryptocurrencies
• terminate the obsession with inclusion
• train 500,000 extra code developers

(The challenge being to identify which candidate(s) supports which measure.)

book bans

As a coincidence, Le Monde [weekend edition of 18 March] had an article about the rapidly growing number of book bans in US [school] libraries and Tor.com highlighted a tribune by a US school librarian detailing a concerted move by conservative forces to ban books going against their (bigoted) views… And giving advice for resisting the move (like, don’t donate banned books to the libraries).

the twilight of French mathematics