Tag: france

Absurdist France

perhaps the extreme bureaucracy nonsense of the french will finally catch up with them?

With the announcement of the third Paris lockdown last month to try to control the spread of Covid-19, an apotheosis of the absurd was reached.

A dense, 2-page version of the notorious “attestation,” a government form to be completed anytime one leaves home, was so convoluted that it tied the Interior Minister’s spokeswoman in verbal knots trying to explain it. The document had metastasized with each lockdown into an ever more ungainly monster.

Which of 15 boxes to check? That you planned to walk 1 kilometer with your dog, the maximum allowed, or up to 10 kilometers with your children? Would you be allowed 11 kilometers if you took the kids and the pet? What if Fido wanted to walk 10 kilometers and little Mathilde none?

Fake Politician

A well-respected local politician is elevated to one of the most powerful positions in France, but keeps his head down and gets on with the job instead of making an international media personality of himself. The perfect target for a most audacious identity theft.

“Everything about the story is exceptional. They dared to take on the identity of a serving French minister. Then they called up CEOs and heads of government round the world and asked for vast amounts of money. The nerve of it!”

Art Thief

The skilled climber and thief Vjeran Tomic, whom the French press referred to as Spider-Man, has described robbery as an act of imagination. Tomic’s confidence as a burglar grew to the point that he felt “indestructible and invulnerable.” Once, while fleeing the police across the rooftops of Paris, he took refuge in an empty apartment in a fashionable building. He decided to take whatever jewelry he could find; suddenly, the owner came home. “I saw that he was an old man with a very sexy girl”. He hid in a closet in the bathroom adjoining the man’s bedroom. “I couldn’t get out of it without crossing the room,” he recalled. “The couple . . . began making love, and that went on all night!” He waited until they finally fell asleep, then made his escape. “I have taken many risks like this one, and sometimes much worse ones. But I always perform well when faced with these sorts of obstacles.” Tomic kept moving through the galleries, taking down “Pigeon with Peas,” by Picasso, and “Olive Tree Near l’Estaque,” by Braque. He almost stole a 6th: Modigliani’s “Woman with Blue Eyes.” “When I went to get it off the wall, it told me, ‘If you take me, you will regret it the rest of your life.’ I will never forget what this ‘Woman with Blue Eyes’ did to me. When I touched it, to take it out of its frame . . . the feeling started instantly—a fear that came over me like an iceberg, a freezing fear that made me run away.” It took 2 trips for Tomic to carry the canvases out of the museum. He had parked his Renault a few minutes away, along the Avenue de New York. He sat in the driver’s seat for 5 minutes. As a professional thief, Tomic knew that it was reckless to linger at a crime scene, but he continued to equivocate about the Modigliani that he hadn’t taken. Tomic headed back, but within 1 minute reality set in: the streets of Paris were deserted, and he was quite possibly the only person within blocks of a recently burglarized museum. He fled the scene again, though his regret lingered. “When I drove, the blue-eyed lady was in my head”.

France Declares War on Islam

it will be very interesting to observe the parallels.

“It is a war against terrorism, against jihadism, against radical Islam, against everything that is aimed at breaking fraternity, freedom, solidarity… There needs to be a firm message about the values of the republic and of secularism.” French Prime Minister Manuel Valls

Based on this statement alone, it looks like France is about to fall into a Red Queen’s Trap. In this case, an all consuming struggle between an increasingly hollow nation-state and a large and growing population of people unwilling to assimilate.

Did Industry Cause Nations?

In 1800 almost nobody in France thought of themselves as French. By 1900 they all did. Unlike farming, industry needs steel, coal and other resources which are not uniformly distributed, so many micro-states were no longer viable. Meanwhile, empires became unwieldy as they industrialized and needed more actual governing. So in 19th-century Europe, micro-states fused and empires split.

Europe wants to spy too

A main outcome of all these revelations will be that the amateurish spying services in europe will be built up:

It also seems to be difficult for German intelligence agencies to actually track the activities of the NSA. The Americans’ technical capabilities are in many ways superior to what exists in Germany. At the BFV domestic intelligence agency, not even every employee has a computer with an Internet connection. But now, the German agencies want to beef up their capabilities. There are already more than 100 employees at the BFV responsible for counterintelligence, but officials are hoping to see this double.

all the calls by eurocrats to not use american sites make a lot more sense now.

Edward Snowden papers unmask close technical cooperation and loose alliance between British, German, French, Spanish and Swedish spy agencies

i have been amused how naive / hypocritical people have been around the world in assuming that their own governments aren’t spying on them. the funniest are the german politicians that sprout nonsense like the “right to be forgotten” while being fully aware of their own extensive spying.

Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, the BfV, received the coveted software program XKeyscore from the NSA – and promised data from Germany in return

2013-12-05: as expected, other countries are working hard to close the gap with the NSA.

Yesterday the 2014-2019 defense bill passed first reading in the French National Assembly. It marks a strong shift towards total online surveillance. If passed, the bill will not only allow live monitoring of everyone’s personal and private data but also do so without judicial oversight, as the surveillance will be enabled through administrative request. The bill also turns permanent measures that were only temporary.