The reality is that Paris and its "difficult" banlieues [impoverished suburbs] are two worlds that are completely foreign to each other. They don't even speak the same language: polished, accent-free French on one side, the verlan, or "reversed" speech, of the housing projects on the other.

I was intrigued by the notion of verlan and decided to look it up.

Verlan is a form of French slang that consists of playing around with syllables, kind of along the same lines as pig Latin. Unlike pig Latin, however, verlan is actively spoken in France - many verlan words have become so commonplace that they are used in everyday French.

Verlan was invented as a secret language, a way for people (notably youths, drug users, and criminals) to communicate freely in front of authority figures (parents, police). Because much of verlan has become incorporated into French, verlan continues to evolve - sometimes words are "re-verlaned."

About verlan, [2], Wikipedia adds:

Generally speaking, creating a verlan word on the fly from any random French word will result in smirks.

A brief clip from NPR's On Point about verlan is available.

Fascinating.

The French Disconnection

But stock-market capitalism is today's coin of the realm, consumerism its handmaiden, and technology is the great enabler. You think technology benefits you because it gives you an easier row to hoe? Bollocks. The ease it provides is illusory. It has trapped you, made you a slave to things you don't even need but suddenly can't live without. So you rot in a cubicle trying to get the money to get the stuff, when you should be out walking in a meadow or wooing a lover or writing a song.

Jollarian recommends a Holiday in Cambodia for this gentleman, as well as anyone who recommends this link. Really. They help. Nothing like... well, very little or nothing material, to clear the mind. Nothing like... Amoebic Dysentary to... clear the bowels.

Wired News: Eat, Sleep, Work, Consume, Die

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Passers-by stop to watch as flames envelope a young Buddhist monk, Saigon, October 5th, 1963.

The man sits impassively in the central market square, he has set himself on fire performing a ritual suicide in protest against governmental anti-Buddhist policies. Crowds gathered to protest in Hue after the South Vietnamese government prohibited Buddhists from carrying flags on Buddha's birthday. Government troops opened fire to disperse the dissidents, killing nine people, Diems government blamed the incident on the Vietcong and never admitted responsibility. The Buddhist leadership quickly organized demonstrations that eventually led to seven monks burning themselves to death.

I guess you must eventually become immune - the man behind the monk is still trying to find a light for his cigarette.

Vietnames Monk on Firee

Mike the Usurper wrote:

So Judy is now going to share notes from the reporting she did on Wilson in June 2003. I suspect those notes already reflect information gleaned from the INR memo. And I suspect Judy will be forced to identify a tidy network of sources on Wilson, including Libby and Bolton, but maybe Hadley and others.

All I can say is, this is a brilliant analysis of what may be going on with the Fitzgerald probe.

These cats make it feel all... WhiteWaterish. And I don't mean in that they just slap a -gate on everything. It's 5:40AM, and I gotta tell ya that reading this felt like watching 'All the President's Men' on Fenergan. Cause... well, cause I'm on Fenergan. Anyway, good link!

RE: The Next Hurrah: Sweet Judy Blew Lies

It is important to note that the absence of a two-way conversation in American television also means that there is no "meritocracy of ideas" on television. To the extent that there is a "marketplace" of any kind for ideas on television, it is a rigged market, an oligopoly, with imposing barriers to entry that exclude the average citizen. The German philosopher, Jurgen Habermas, describes what has happened as "the refeudalization of the public sphere." That may sound like gobbledygook, but it's a phrase that packs a lot of meaning. The feudal system which thrived before the printing press democratized knowledge and made the idea of America thinkable, was a system in which wealth and power were intimately intertwined, and where knowledge played no mediating role whatsoever. The great mass of the people were ignorant. And their powerlessness was born of their ignorance.

Good read. Only... I wish it could be packed into a 5 second blurb, so it might actually have some effect.

You know what Google Ads put up for this article? 'Pet Cremation Services.'

Pet Cremation Services.

Al Gore tells it like it is

2) Race is not an important part of the abortion-crime argument that John Donohue and I have made in academic papers and that Dubner and I discuss in Freakonomics. It is true that, on average, crime involvement in the U.S. is higher among blacks than whites. Importantly, however, once you control for income, the likelihood of growing up in a female-headed household, having a teenage mother, and how urban the environment is, the importance of race disappears for all crimes except homicide. (The homicide gap is partly explained by crack markets). In other words, for most crimes a white person and a black person who grow up next door to each other with similar incomes and the same family structure would be predicted to have the same crime involvement. Empirically, what matters is the fact that abortions are disproportionately used on unwanted pregnancies, and disproportionately by teenage women and single women.

Freakonomics on Bennett's Comments

He went on to call that "an impossible, ridiculous and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down. So these far-out, these far-reaching, extensive extrapolations are, I think, tricky."

In context it is SLIGHTLY less offensive... but just... damn.

White House Condemns Bennett's Remarks - Yahoo! News

A kibbutz (Hebrew: קיבוץ; plural: kibbutzim: קיבוצים, "gathering" or "together") is an Israeli collective community. Although other countries have had communal enterprises, in no other country have voluntary collective communities played as important a role as the kibbutzim have played in Israel; indeed, kibbutzim played an essential role in the creation of Israel.

There's even a 160 person fully anarchist Kibbutz Samar.

Kibbutz - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

In our book "All the President's Men," Carl and I described how we had speculated about Deep Throat and his piecemeal approach to providing information. Maybe it was to minimize his risk. Or because one or two big stories, no matter how devastating, could be blunted by the White House. Maybe it was simply to make the game more interesting. More likely, we concluded, "Deep Throat was trying to protect the office, to effect a change in its conduct before all was lost."

Each time I raised the question with Felt, he had the same answer: "I have to do this my way."

How Mark Felt Became 'Deep Throat'