La vraie vie est ailleurs: 2010

Wednesday, 6 October 2010

from The Independent

Julie Burchill: An up-itself language that deserves to be thrown in the dustbin of history

It was the advent of rock'n'roll which sent French into a tailspin that it would never recover from

Wednesday, 6 October 2010 The Independent

As someone who has always believed that the Italians do the things the French are famous for (vino, vittles, va-va-voom, First Ladies of the French Republic) far better anyway, I was pleased to hear that the incredibly up-itself French language suffered another blow this week when a Eurostat survey found that 66 per cent of Europeans now speak English, more than 300 million use English as their first foreign language, and half of these regard themselves as fluent.

English is apparently the first foreign language studied in primary schools in every country outside Britain and Ireland except Luxembourg, where they do German instead. (Come on Luxembourg – I know our Rhineland chums started two world wars by walking into other people's countries like they owned the place, but don't assume they're gonna do it again. We have to MOVE ON! You'll probably NEVER HAVE TO BEG THEM not to murder your entire family for looking at them funny – so give that nasty, phlegmy tongue up and learn English like the rest of your continental cousins.) In secondary schools, English is the first choice in every EU country; German is the second most popular. Ooo, someone's been reading their AJP Taylor!

This being so, it seems absolutely crazy – even by the bathing-in-asses'-milk-and-having-your-morning-paper-delivered-by-a-caravan-of-pink-painted-elephants level of extravagance of the average MEP – that a billion pounds a year is spent by Brussels translating every official document and speech by EU politicians and bureaucrats into the 23 recognised languages of the member states. Who do we think would have a full-on hissy-fit if this massively wasteful extravagance was curbed? Plucky Denmark? Soulful Bulgaria? Cheery Portugal? I doubt it. No, it's the French. If they thought for a minute that the EU was calling their twisty old tongue a dying language, they'd probably nuke Strasbourg.

Gone are the days when French used to be the international language of diplomacy. It must be a bitter pill that the remnants of this past glory can still be seen on international documents from passports to airmail – that PAR AVION which gave us such a kick when we were kids. Until the UK joined in 1973, French and German were the only official languages of the EEC – you bet that De Gaulle said "Non" for so long to our entry.

It was the advent of rock'n'roll, though, which sent French into a tailspin that it would never recover from. While perfectly appropriate for Maurice Chevalier to perv over little girls in, the more immediate emotions of this new music were a bad match with this emollient lingo. To my mind the inherent phoniness of French is expressed in the paradox of Edith Piaf's "Je Ne Regrette Rien", in which a perfectly sensible statement sounds like a person going crazy, so hard does the singer have to fight against the soppiness of the way it sounds.

Here in Britain we are so used to the idea that language is a living, breathing, changing thing – despite what the ridiculous Emma Thompson may wish – that when I first heard about the Academie Francaise, I really thought someone was having a laugh; that or describing the plot of some weird Peter Sellers film. So there's this organisation established in the 17th century by Cardinal Richelieu, made up of 40 members known as the "les immortels" (a total of 719, a whopping six of whom have been women: pretty fast going for a nation which didn't give women the vote until 1944) who, like the Pope, are elected for life, and are kept in line by a "Perpetual Secretary". Interestingly, the list of French writers who never became members is far more impressive – Rousseau, Balzac, Flaubert, Molière, Proust and Zola – than those who did.

Les immortels wear a uniform of long black coats and black-feathered cocked hats, each embroidered with golden-green leafy motifs, though I'm unclear as to whether they wield the ceremonial swords each member receives at their meetings. And then they get down to the serious business of attempting to keep their language pure, untouched by evil anglicisation. Just HOW comic is the idea of all these educated, cultured characters sitting around getting their French knickers in a twist over abominations such as le jazz hot and le weekend?

Anyone who's that precious about a language deserves to see it dumped in the remainder bin of history. Learn Italian, because it's beautiful, or Spanish, because it's beautiful and because it's already the second language of the USA. If you're really smart, learn Mandarin or Russian. If you're really, REALLY smart, like me, learn Hebrew. After all, if the Jews really run the world to the extent we're always being told they do, doesn't it make sense to eavesdrop on them and find out exactly what dastardly Gentile-baby-eating/Arab-toddler-organ-stealing deeds they're plotting next? Mazel tov!

Lifestyle: Why getting fat is a happiness issue

So many scientific surveys seem to prove nothing except that scientists are handed too much public money to state the sodding obvious. So when one first gives you a shock and then makes you smile at the idea of all the sad-sacks it'll upset, it's a real minor pleasure.

My favourite is the argument that the easier abortion is, the further crime levels plummet in the next generation, as explained so brilliantly in Stephen D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner's Freakonomics. And now those clever boffins at the University of Kentucky have found that sugar provides the brain with fuel to push away negative, dark and vengeful thoughts.

Someone tell Naomi Campbell! To us lard-buckets, it's pretty obvious that we're happier than the anorexic ranks of the "hangry" (hungry/angry.). And a lot of it has to do with being left alone by a certain sort of man. When I was 18, I was a perfect 10 with a handspan waist – I DID attract some specimens! As I got fatter and slid up rather than down the greasy pole of fame and fortune, the idea that creeps would never bother me for sex again was a wonderful idea – the sort of goal-led inspiration that getting into a lovely dress gives women who want to go from fat to thin.

Fat people aren't generally self-loathing. Self-indulgent, yes – but the two aren't the same. See the woman who starves herself, chucks up her dinner or spends her leisure time pounding the road to nowhere at the gym (all things which indicate dissatisfaction with oneself rather than acceptance) when she could be eating, drinking and making merry. That'll be your self-loather, not we indolent porkers. Eat THAT!

Education: A scandalous cover-up in school classrooms

Ofsted has approved three Muslim faith schools in which girls as young as 11 are required to wear the niquab – the face veil which leaves only the eyes uncovered – and/or the head-to-toe burka to and from school.

As used as we are to the sick Islamist view of human sexuality which has it that all women are temptresses and all men ravening beasts liable to run amok at the glimpse of an ankle, how shocking is this? How perverse and perverted to dress up even pre-teen girls in these life-denying shrouds? Surely the baby burka is already a twinkle in some mad mullah's eye, so that the filthy little sluts can safely be condemned to a living death while still in nappies – just to be on the safe side.

Wednesday, 13 January 2010

H1N1, The False Pandemic

Wolfgang Wodarg, Head of Health at the Council of Europe, considers that the A H1N1 scare was a “campaign of panic”, a “false pandemic”, “one of the great medicine scandals of the century” and claims that the vaccines, based on cancerous cells, spell the chilling message “there is worse to come”.

For Wolfgang Wodarg, the pandemic of A H1N1, which started as Mexican Flu, then Swine Flu, was no more and no less than a campaign to create a false notion of insecurity for the pharmaceutical companies to cash in. “The great campaign of panic we have seen provided a golden opportunity for representatives from labs who knew they would hit the jackpot in the case of a pandemic being declared,” he declared.

Claiming that the “pandemic” is “one of the great medicine scandals of the century,” Dr. Wodarg has called for an enquiry. The resolution he proposed for an investigation into the role of the pharma companies in the A H1N1 story has been passed by the Council of Europe, which is based in Strasbourg. An emergency debate will be held at the end of January.

“We want to clarify everything that brought about this massive operation of disinformation. We want to know who made decisions, on the basis of what evidence, and precisely how the influence of the pharmaceutical industry came to bear on the decision-making,” declared Dr. Wodarg, adding that a group of people in the World Health Organization “is associated very closely with the pharmaceutical industry”.

Are the vaccines dangerous?

Regarding the vaccines, Dr. Wodarg delivered some chilling statements in an interview with the French publication L’Humanité on Sunday: “The vaccines were developed too quickly. Some ingredients were insufficiently tested. But there is worse to come. The vaccine developed by Novartis was produced in a bioreactor from cancerous cells, a technique that had never been used until now”.

The health expert added that this was not necessary and huge quantities of public money were squandered as a result, developing a vaccine which has not followed the usual processes in place in national and international public institutions: “The latter are now discredited because millions of people have been vaccinated with products with inherent possible health risks”.

Pharma companies made billions from mass hysteria

Wolfgang Wodarg further accused the makers of antiflu drugs and vaccines of influencing the WHO’s decision to call a global pandemic, facilitating the implanting of mechanisms which in turn generated billions of dollars in profits. The British Department of Health, for example, set up special procedures, suspended normal rules, told national and local authorities to prepare for 65,000 deaths, prepare the morgues for record numbers of fatalities and instructed the armed forces to be on stand-by.

The result was less than 5,000 cases and 251 deaths, the vast majority of which occurred in patients with serious underlying chronic health problems, or a death rate 260 times less than that expected.

The seeds had been sown

For Dr. Wodarg, the seeds were sown five years ago with the warning that H5N1, avian flu, could develop a human-to-human transmissible form. According to the health expert, Governments then began panic stockpiling for the eventuality of a pandemic and placed “sleeper contracts” which would be activated automatically once a pandemic had been called by the WHO.

For this reason, believes Dr. Wodarg, drug companies placed people inside the WHO mechanisms to facilitate the calling of the pandemic.

posted in http://www.forteantimes.com/latest/breaking-news/2620/daily_roundup_of_the_worlds_weird_news.html