NANTERRE, France: Forty years ago, students in neckties and bobby sox threw cobblestones at the police and demanded that France's sclerotic postwar system change. Today, students worried about finding jobs and losing state benefits are marching through the streets demanding that nothing change at all.

May 1968 was a watershed in French life, a holy moment of liberation for many, when youth coalesced, the workers listened and the semi-royal French government of President Charles de Gaulle took fright.

But for others, like the current president, Nicolas Sarkozy, only 13 years old at the time, May '68 represents anarchy and moral relativism, a destruction of social and patriotic values that, he has said in harsh terms, "must be liquidated."

The fierce debate about what happened 40 years ago is very French. There is even a fight about labels - the right calls May '68 "the events," while the left calls it "the movement."

While a youth revolt became general in the West - from anti-Vietnam protests in the United States to the Rolling Stones in swinging London and finally the Baader-Meinhof gang in Germany - France was where the protests of the baby-boom generation came closest to a real political revolution, with 10 million workers on strike and not just a revulsion against stifling social rules of class, education and sexual behavior.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/04/30/fruits-of-globalization/

"In fact, the combination of things that made the widespread consumption of bananas in America possible — railroads, steamships, refrigeration, and, not least, regime change often backed by American military might — where do you think banana republics came from? — makes containerization and the Washington Consensus look low-key by comparison."

And he is in Princeton.. my god, what a kick int he balls of the WC.... this is the kind of new look at things I love in physics and physicist.. and I find an economists doing it...Our economic narrative is living good times indeed.

A pleasure

I therefore claim to show, not how men think in myths, but how myths operate in men's minds without their being aware of the fact. Levi-Strauss, Claude

Before the summer heat comes along I'll need to do my annual lasagna verde from scratch. So good, so much cooking.

The entire Finnish population will be kaylied in a few hours. Here just north of Helsinki, we are enjoying some red wine, wasabe peas and getting ready to fire up the embarrassingly Battleship Galactica new gas-fired barbecue. I'd never have bought it, but my vote didn't count.

Dammit - now I have a call to make the salad dressing. Byeeee!

You can't be me, I'm taken

...It wasn't a transplant. Mr Spievak re-grew his finger tip. He used a powder - or pixie dust as he sometimes refers to it while telling his story.

Mr Speivak's brother Alan - who was working in the field of regenerative medicine - sent him the powder.

For ten days Mr Spievak put a little on his finger.

"The second time I put it on I already could see growth. Each day it was up further. Finally it closed up and was a finger.

"It took about four weeks before it was sealed."

Now he says he has "complete feeling, complete movement."

The "pixie dust" comes from the University of Pittsburgh, though in the lab Dr Stephen Badylak prefers to call it extra cellular matrix.

Gourmet chinese Take away urge has hit West Wales.

If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.

Germany's population is shrinking, with serious consequences for the country's economy and pension system. Can Family Minister Ursula von der Leyen persuade Germans to breed?

 Can Ursula von der Leyen stop Germany's population from shrinking? Pandas are famously bad at sex. In fact, they are so unwilling to breed that zoo keepers have to resort to all kinds of tricks to get them to procreate, including showing them pornographic movies to get them in the mood.

Ursula von der Leyen must feel a certain sympathy with the panda keepers. One of her main tasks as Germany's family minister is to coax reluctant Germans into having children, so that the shrinking of the country's population can be slowed or even reversed.

At the moment she has plenty of reasons to celebrate: Preliminary birth statistics for 2007 appear to show that her policies are having the desired effect.

Hi everyone.  You might think that with all the drama in my life I don't have time for relaxing activities.  Au contraire.  

I am finally reading Naomi Klein's "The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism".  Wow.  I can't put this down.  A while back we were talking about the simultaneously exciting and annoying feeling you get when you find someone has thought your brilliant thought before you (affirming you are have a great mind, but ensuring you don't get any credit for it...) like Marx, the ancient Greeks or Sartre.  I have that same feeling reading this book.  READ IT.  It's bloody brilliant.  Er.  Unfortunately, it is also making it a bit difficult to go to work these days. ((cough))  Oh well.  Like Pinochet, I too have to eat...

Last night I saw "Ia Liubliu Tebia".  Yay!  It was a movie I suspected I would love.  And I did.  That just doesn't happen enough.  It's a pretty light-hearted fim.  You could even call it a romantic comedy.  Nothing groundbreaking, artistically speaking.  But (and I didn't actually realize this) it was the first film made in Russia about homosexuality.  I'm hesitant to label it like that, because it's really just about people and love.  But still, it is an achievement they even got it made.  It's a funny and charming movie.  Reminds me of those French or Spanish romantic comedies.  

I am working on a Shoe Blog.  

And have developed a small obsession with cabbits.  I understand they do not actually exist.  They say.  But for years I've been under the impression that I am the only one who finds their cat distinctly rabbity in both appearance and behavior.  (My step-father, a gourmand, calls the poor beast "hasenpfeffer.")  Apparently not.  There are sites all over the internet.  So it must be a real phenomenon.  ;)  

"Pretending that you already know the answer when you don't is not actually very helpful." ~Migeru.

Now to annoy Sam with it ...

Since it's spring in Paris and I'm taking a few days off, let me indulge in some four-wheeled nostalgia. You see it in the picture --  the Citroen Deux Chevaux.

It's 60 years since the rustic, quirky "deudeuche" was offered to an initially unimpressed public and it's 18 years since the last of five million left the assembly line. You don't see many around any more but the intrepid little 2CV is the object of fond memory for anyone lived those decades. If you're one of them and around Paris, it's worth a visit to the show that the Cité des Sciences has just opened in homage to the little car.

In the post-war years, Italy had its Fiat 500, Germany its VW Beetle and Britain, a little later, its Mini. The Gallic motoring icon was la deudeuche, or the deux-pattes (two paws), as the two-horse car was also nicknamed.  The 2CV Expo Show offers a parade of deudeuches through the decades, from the austere, grey-only 1948 model to the retro-chic "Charleston" of the 1980s. 

So yesterday I went for a walk, and then I watched a little TV, and when I looked at the web again I discovered, to my disgust, that Obama apparently repudiated Wright some more. I can't pretend I'm happy with the way he has been handling this. Basically, he accepted the right-wing's characterization instead of fighting it and taking the opportunity to make a real show of values. Now that right-wing characterization has solified into "fact", And it doesn't work.

People who have aided and abetted the murder of over a million Iraqis and the destruction of our economy and an American city think they are in a position to condemn Jeremiah Wright. What's that about? How do you let them get away with that? These are people who condemn America all the time, and they think Jeremiah Wright went too far with a few strong (and basically true) words?

Hey, he's not the guy who remorselessly killed hundreds of thousands of Afghanis and Iraqis (and over 4,000 US troops) for no good reason. He's not the guy who shrugged off the danger to New Orleans and then made matters worse as the city was washed away. He's not the guy whose economic policies are breaking the backbone of America's middle class. He's not the guy who ignored the warnings of a coming real terrorist attack on America that blasted a big hole into the New York skyline. Nor is he the guy who has been shredding our Constitution and lawlessly torturing people.

What the Republicans have been doing is anti-American and indefensibly immoral, and the media has helped, and they think Wright needs to be condemned? But apparently, Obama does, too. I guess we just don't kill enough ragheads and fags. Go ahead, tell me how Arthur Silber is wrong

I'm going to drink Wybarowa vodka and watch Chelsea Liverpool.

Is there a chance i'm not an idiot?

Skennah Kowa

(not really explored, still on dialup. Should I be visible on any pic, can anyone point to it, or post it?)

In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes

An analysis of century-old bottles of absinthe - the kind once quaffed by the likes of van Gogh and Picasso to enhance their creativity - may end the controversy over what ingredient caused the green liqueur's supposed mind-altering effects .

The culprit seems plain and simple: The century-old absinthe contained about 70 percent alcohol, giving it a 140-proof kick. In comparison, most gins, vodkas and whiskeys are just 80- to 100-proof.

In recent years, the psychedelic nature of absinthe has been hotly debated. Absinthe was notorious among 19th-century and early 20th-century bohemian artists as "the Green Fairy" that expanded the mind. After it became infamous for madness and toxic side effects among drinkers, it was widely banned.

The modern scientific consensus is that absinthe's reputation could simply be traced back to alcoholism, or perhaps toxic compounds that leaked in during faulty distillation. Still, others have pointed at a chemical named thujone in wormwood, one of the herbs used to prepare absinthe and the one that gives the drink its green color. Thujone was blamed for "absinthe madness" and "absinthism," a collection of symptoms including hallucinations, facial tics, numbness and dementia.