FOLLOW me on my popular Twitter feed. Just click this photo! @hbbtruth - David - Common sense on #Politics #PublicPolicy #Sports #PopCulture in USA, Great Britain, Sweden and France, via my life in #Texas #Memphis #Miami #IU #Chicago #DC #FL 🛫🌍📺📽️🏈. Photo is of Elvis and Joan Blackman in 'Blue Hawaii'

Beautiful Stockholm at night, looking west towards Gamla Stan
Showing posts with label France 24. Show all posts
Showing posts with label France 24. Show all posts

Saturday, November 14, 2015

#Paris - Initial thoughts on the latest example of #ISIS pathology on display on the streets of Paris, a city that stands in stark contrast to everything repressive Islamic fundamentalism rejects: Liberté, égalité, fraternité; @France24_en

#Paris - Initial thoughts on the latest example of #ISIS pathology on display on the streets of Paris, a city that stands in stark contrast to everything repressive Islamic fundamentalism rejects: Liberté, égalité, fraternité; @France24_en


Tom Burges Watson of France24

Per continuing developments in #Paris, you probably still have it from previous emails of mine but just in case... link for France24's English language channel in Paris, which I previously mentioned back in January during Charlie Hebdo massacres. http://www.france24.com/en/



I also watched both the English and French-language channels during the last French presidential elections, where Hollande defeated Sarkozy. A well-known international media organoization even contacted me about appearing on-air to discuss the election, if you can believe it.
I said no thanks, foolishly.

As it happens, I took French for many years at North Miami Beach High School in late '70's and even received an award for being the 2nd-best non-native speaker of French at the 1979 Dade County Youth Fair Oral competition down at FIU, open to all French high school students in greater Miami.
Of course, I lost to a ringer from Quebec. :-(


In case you forgot what some people in Great Britain were thinking back in January, since we are rarely reminded of it in the U.S.:




The Telegraph
Quarter of British Muslims sympathise with Charlie Hebdo terrorists 
Some 27 per cent of British Muslims sympathise with Paris gunmen, 
while more than one in ten say satirical cartoons "deserve" to be attacked
Am sure we will see similar polls done in U.K. and other European countries within the next few days, with results that both surprise and frustrate.





















Ann Coulter's thought about Donald Trump, on the other hand, seems reflected in both the words, action and human behavior of Americans I see and speak with everyday, not mystical elite salons that believe that their own unpopularity is, itself, a reflection of something positive. She's right, they're wrong. 
















































This blog post is based in part to my not only looking at themany emails I received from friends and contacts in Europe, but also watching and monitoring France24 all morning, including seeing the Interior Minister's speech outlawing public demonstrations until at least next Thursday (?), for fear, clearly, of creating so many new and completely undefensible targets for so-called '"one wolves."
That being a favorite topic of some U.S. TV reporters, even when there isn't as much empirical evidence of them as often suggested in their reports.
But it only takes one, right?
Or, two in Boston.

Also, since it was reported last night per French President Hollandes's speech to the nation, I've learned that there are 61 official "border' entrances and exits in France, which will be more closely monitored than ever before, even while plane flights into France continue.

Press reports I've seen in various places keep hinting at more than passing concern with the 
French-Belgium border for some reason, but yet the media seems reluctant to say just why that would be so compared to France's borders with Spain, Germany or via boat in #Calais, scene of so much craziness and heartbreak because of the surge of immigrants there and theri attempst to get into Great Britain via the Eurotunnel or any other means available to them, a topic which I've written emails about to friends bot not posted about on the blog this summer.

I wonder whether this info I have heard about Belgium is being mentioned specifically because of an errant police leak or it's merely a trial ballon? Sheer supposition? Intuition? 
Hard to say, which also makes it frustrating given how much mis-information has already gotten out and with MUCH more sure to come in the days ahead..

As of 9 am Eastern this morning, two Syrian passports and 1 French passport were found so far on the 7 dead terrorists who killed themselves.
Numbers show that French police did not actually kill any terrorists, leading to a growing if still somewhat under-the-radar for now criticism that French SWAT teams simply waited too long to go in, given history and pathology of hostage takers -i.e. they were selected for the assignment 
precisely because they are prepared (and happy) to kill themselves AFTER killing as many hostages as possible, for a radical ideology where #numbers DO matter.

(That "strain" of Islam that to the regret of this country, President Obama refuses to say aloud for fear of causing offense - Islamic fundamentalism.)

Which means that in these types of situations, law enforcement simply has no time to pretend they are military units with overwhelming numbers and have the freedom to mass, coordinate with everyone and then enter and attack on THEIR own timetable.
New reality is that in this type of terror hostage situation, the clock is ticking... and a real bomb WILL definitely go off.

Similar public criticism of Littleton police by parents during and after the Columbine High 
School massacre proved to be more than justified, as there's still extant video of assembled, frantic parents and public near school asking why police were waiting SO LONG back then,
given that the Littleton area SWAT teams were armored, armed and trained.

Los Angeles Times
Police Under Fire in Quest to Study Columbine
Emergencies: Public lacks understanding, officials say. They defend actions of Littleton officers.
April 27, 1999
By ERIC LICHTBLAU and MATT LAIT | TIMES STAFF WRITERS

(N.B.: Eric Lichtblau is now at NY Times and an excellent reporter.)

Too much police concern for SWAT team members and not enough for kid hostages?
Which is precisely what I was thinking even as I watched the LIVE coverage of that on CNN 
back in 1999, when I was still living/working in Washington DC and that day, doing some consulting work for a well-known U.S.law firm... until the news hit and everyone raced into the giant conference room to watch the TV and see what was happening.
And not quite believing the 'rescue operation' seemed to be going in slow-motion... 

I had a similar sinking feeling and thought last night, and I suspect that many of  you did as well 
-the Police are simply waiting TOO LONG... 

:-( Anguish and exasperation in equal measure.


The Tweet below from this morning is my clear reference to George Stephanopoulos' frequent
absence from his own Sunday morning public affairs show, This Week, NOT the amount of time per show he's actually visible on it, which may be the impression I mistakenly conveyed when I did it.
This fact is self-evident, esp. to someone like me who's tracked it all year, since I believe that as of July, he was barely on 55% of 2015's This Week shows.

I've mentioned to many of you in person and probably even tweeted it a few times, and mentioned in emails, that as far as I'm concerned, ABC News should have never allowed Jake Tapper to get away to CNN, however it happened.
He was the best host for that show since its creator and first host, David Brinkley.  







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Thursday, January 8, 2015

Poor news coverage in U.S. of terror attack on Charlie Hebdo in Paris reminds us of what we've complained about for years: inferior news coverage of foreign news on U.S. TV networks! Save yourself the aggravation of watching PC and sanitized MSM newscasts and start watching Sky News and France 24's English service if you really want to know what's going on in France right now








As many of you know from my past blog posts here over the years, due largely to my own wide-ranging pursuits, interests and inclinations, I've been watching Sky News and France 24's English and French language service for many, many years and have been watching them again since 
this terror attack happened in Paris yesterday.

(And SVT, SVT Play, TV4 and TV4 Play in Sweden, too, of course. Especailly the morning news shows like SVT's Gomorron Sverige and TV4's Nyhetsmorgon both of which I watch when I can and whose daily newsletters I receive, just as I receive Channel 4 News' daily Snowmail. 
I'll even admit to a bit of a crush on TV4 presenter Tilde de Paula Eby! 
Then again, over the past five years or so, I've gotten VERY frustrated with BBC America's mediocre programming lineup that for so long has featured StarTrek-TNG episodes instead of the sorts of engaging and compelling news shows and documentaries that have recently aired back in Great Britain, which I'd much rather be watching.)

The news coverage of yesterday's Paris terror attack at the headquarters of Charlie Hebdo reminds us of what we've complained about for years: inferior news coverage of foreign news on U.S. TV networks. Save yourself the aggravation of watching PC MSM newscasts in USA that sanitize news and start watching Sky News and France 24's English service if you really want to know what's going on in France right now

I strongly encourage you to check these tow news outlets out so you can see and hear the facts 
for yourself and not be forced to wonder, as so many do, why the highly-edited and highly-sanitized 
versions of reality seen on US. network evening newscasts, especially important news in foreign countries, seem to leave out so many important and salient facts after they are edited out in London:

Want to know what's going on? 
Close your mouth, open your eyes and expand your news horizons.

Dave
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Saturday, May 5, 2012

Sarkozy vs. Hollande: Watch the French Presidential election returns on Sunday LIVE in English online with France24's Élysée 2012 coverage



france24english video: Campaign Chronicles: 
Countdown to Sunday's French presidential elections and other top headlines. 






http://www.bfmtv.com  video: Les candidats à l'élection présidentielle passent la soirée en famille. May 5, 2012. http://youtu.be/MolZvdkfrK4



AFP video: Paris and Berlin set for standoff if Hollande wins. May 4, 2012.
http://youtu.be/W1f7tC1kfw0



From Friday, the last day of campaigning, in this review of the French newspapers and media
http://www.france24.com/en/20120504-french-election-bayrou-hollande-sarkozy-press-review-fran  
Article at: http://www.france24.com/en/20120504-french-election-bayrou-hollande-sarkozy-press-review-fran


Sarkozy vs. Hollande: Watch the French Presidential election returns on Sunday LIVE in English online with France24's Élysée 2012 coverage


http://www.france24.com/en/livefeed
http://www.france24.com/en/aef_player_popup/france24_player#



As many of you may already know, French law actually makes it illegal for the French news media to report any information regarding election results before the polls close at 8 p.m. Paris time. Similarly, because of this law, on almost every French news site you can think of, as well as popular blogs, there are representations of the blue Twitter icon that bears the following:


Présidentielle sur 
Afin de respecter la période de réserve avant l’annonce des résultats, les flux twitter sont désactivés jusqu’au dimanche 6 mai 20h.
Merci de votre compréhension


This even applies to the Twitter accounts of both presidential candidates, which bear the same message as above. 
Which is to say that all Twitter feeds featuring news regarding the Presidential election are disabled until 8 p.m. 


But that won't prevent neighboring news media in Belgium to the northwest and Switzerland to the east from announcing some tallies before that 8 p.m. deadline arrives.
http://www.bfmtv.com/presidentielle-les-medias-suisses-et-belges-actu27253.html



Election returns start at 8 p.m. Paris time, i.e C.E.S.T., which is GMT +2, so for those of us looking keenly towards Paris from the East Coast of the United States, that means 2 p.m.
is when you want to be near your computer to watch the action via France24.



-----


Over the past few months, as the French presidential election was fast approaching with the spectacle of the European Union  making like Humpty Dumpty over the most promiscuous spenders being in hock, I've been spending more and more time on the French TV, public policy and news websites than usual.


Which has necessarily meant getting used to seeing our old pals at France24, Vanessa Burggraff and Stéphanie Antoine, all over again after all these months apart, which is no problem. They're very smart and very watchable.


As always, and just as was the case when I was closely following the 2007 election between Nicolas Sarkozy and Ségolène Royal, you get a real immediate sense of the difference in how party politics is played in France compared to the U.S. when you read the nuances on how and why the various left and Right alliances are assembled from one election to another.


Sometimes, it seems more like a national convention of Favorite Son candidacies or an American Idol or Swedish Idol try-out in a large city like Atlanta or Göteborg that's going to be televised.


The TV producers and show judges know in advance that just as in the U.S., some political parties are held together by commonly-held beliefs on issues that their most reliable supporters will support, regardless of the actual nominee, others will only support it or watch it if there's an abundance of candidates who sing their own favorite genre: rock, pop, Indie, rap, et al.
They actually want to be the choir who is sung to!


Too much of another genre or catering to one issue or sub-group, to the exclusion of their favorite, and it's both a tune-off and a tune-out, and nobody wins when that happens.


After the first round of the election where Socialist and PRG candidate François Hollande narrowly defeated President Sarkozy for first among the many candidates, I went back and looked at many of the French videos I've received at my YouTube Channel since Hollande received the nomination last Fall that I never got around to watching the first time around, so that I could see if there was something I was missing that could explain his popularity besides the straight-out anti-Sarko factor.


No, there really wasn't, which is why the specter of someone like Hollande winning so deeply concerns many of my friends living over there now, or who visit there often from other European countries, because they can't quite wrap their heads around the idea that France will take a giant step backwards after finally breaking with the past and getting someone with common sense pragmatism in French policy like Sarkozy, instead of soft leftist pretentions masquerading as serious public policy, policies that nobody outside of France respected or took seriously, but instead, just laughed at.


In short, they were tired of the sort of parochial economic policies that made France forever seem to them like it was the least dynamic nation in Europe, relative to its size, because it always had to indulge certain domestic interest groups and forces that acted like the 21st Century hadn't yet arrived in France -to say nothing of the 20th!


Groups that used the state's power as a weapon against coming to terms with reality and who  
don't want anything to do with a real competitive marketplace where consumers, not producers, make the choices over what is popular and profitable, not bureaucrats and manifestos.



France24 video: Campaign Chronicles: France in denial over the economy? April 3, 2012.

The thought of Hollande winning and creating hundreds of thousands of subsidized jobs only would further postpone France's coming day of reckoning, where the professional activists, professional misfits and professional students have to leave the warm embrace of Maman et  l'état and grow-up and make something of themselves.
Time to take off the training-wheels, kids!


A country that is so full of so many well-educated people who produce or create nothing that anyone else wants is... well, the slippery slope.
And when you throw in all the myriad problems associated with assimilation of overly-indulged immigrants who think nothing of throwing rocks at ambulances responding to emergency calls... and who expect the same kind of lifestyle as the well-educated without the hard work, well, c'est un déluge pour la France all around, n'est-ce pas?
-----
Take that! The cut that sears the most: days before French runoff election, Jean-François Copé, Sarkozy's UMP Sec.-Gen., accuses François Hollande of not being a true intellectual. Election Sunday could be beginning of Francs rushing across the Channel to wait out the economic storm under Hollande
So, all that said, for me, the most genuinely interesting and only-in-France moment came this week when I read an interview in Metro where Jean-François Copé, Sarkozy's UMP Secretary.-General, accused Hollande of not being a true intellectual.


Jean-François Copé : "Hollande est une imposture intellectuelle", A quelques heures de la clôture de la campagne. Jean-François Copé a reçu "Metro" au siège de l'UMP.
03-05-2012 22:15


Read the interview at:
http://www.metrofrance.com/presidentielle-2012/jean-francois-cope-hollande-est-une-imposture-intellectuelle/mlec!qUd9TN9yzmlA/


Be sure to see their excellent presidential election webpage: http://www.metrofrance.com/presidentielle-2012/


New York Times 
In French Race, the Tortoise Sets His Own Pace
By Steven Erlanger
Published: May 5, 2012
PARIS — François Hollande, the 57-year-old favored to be elected narrowly on Sunday as France’s president, is no revolutionary. He likes to talk of “harmony” and “pragmatism” and often quotes the poet and politician Aimé Césaire about “lucid hope.”
Read the rest of the article at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/06/world/europe/in-race-to-french-presidency-hollande-sets-his-own-pace.html 


After watching the Sunday morning chat shows, I'm heading to the beach for a bit and then stop off and get some French wine and some La vache qui rit and see what happens like the rest of you. 
And hope for the best
-----

In English: 

In French:
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Tuesday, October 18, 2011

Thoughts on the modern tradition in France of succumbing to sycophancy and high self-regard. Oui, "Un certain regard."; DeGaulle

French culture discussed by an informed and erudite Englishman!
http://youtu.be/Dmh880HAOZU

Thoughts on the modern tradition in France of succumbing to sycophancy and high self-regard. Oui, "Un certain regard."; DeGaulle

This very interesting audio track about contemporary French cultural and political life -which I came across completely by accident this past weekend while looking for something else dealing with BBC Radio- is the polar opposite of the chestnut I grew-up knowing so well that ends -at least, the version of the old 1940's maxim I often heard- "that France is not great because DeGaulle is in France, France is great because France is in DeGaulle."
C'est vrai!

DE GAULLE TRIUMPHANT

Newsreel video: British Pathe Gazette: The Voice of Britain: DE GAULLE TRIUMPHANT, April 11, 1960

1945 - YOU WERE THERE WHEN HISTORY WAS MADE

Newsreel video: British Pathe Gazette: The Voice of Britain: 1945 - YOU WERE THERE WHEN HISTORY WAS MADE, December 27, 1945.

FRANCE 24

France 24
France 24 broadcasts from Paris 24/7 in English to bring you the French perspective on the world.
http://www.france24.com/en/aef_player_popup/france24_player#


France 24 News homepage: http://www.france24.com/en/

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Monday, January 11, 2010

C'est vrai! France 24 reports Eric Rohmer dead at 89, influential French New Wave film director

Heard the sad news around Noon.

See http://www.france24.com/en/ or watch LIVE in English at
http://www.france24.com/en/aef_player_popup/france24_player#

New York Times put something up around 1:13 p.m. this afternoon.
http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/11/eric-rohmer-new-wave-film-director-has-died/

I saw many of his films, like most of the French New Wave films I've seen, at film art houses while living in Chicago and Washington, D.C., as well as the National Gallery of Art, and while he was certainly an acquired taste for some American film-goers, I was a person who found his films very... quoi, interesting and idiosyncratic?

When they were good, they were very good, indeed, and gave you a lot to talk about with your friends and significant others afterwards, before you went home.
Lots of nights walking on cold Chicago sidewalks talking about morality and ambiguity in the modern
world.

So much more enlightening than rehashing for the 1,001st time whether The Tribune Company
was ruining the Cubs!

On the front of the videotape of his 1971 film Claire's Knee, the distributors run excerpts of New York Times film critic Vincent Canby's review, creating perhaps the most perfect blurb you could ever hope for on a film:
"Original, complete, mysterious... practically perfect."

That it was.



Great view of original poster:
http://www.starandshadow.org.uk/on/film/435

"One of the most extraordinary directorial careers in the history of cinema"
- SIGHT AND SOUND

In their DVD review of the box-set, Eric Rohmer's Six Moral Tales, in the BFI's Sight and Sound,
http://www.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/ Tim Lewis got to the very heart of what animated Eric Rohmer:
http://www.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/review/3493
The six films comprising this series offer different sketches of the same dilemma. A man falls in love with a woman, thereby forming a commitment, either in fact or in principle, and then must navigate safe passage through sexual temptation by relying on (and sometimes discovering) his moral code, proving himself worthy of that love. Rohmer's brand of morality is subjective and non-judgmental; his characters include students and petits bourgeois and the idle rich, Catholics and atheists, singles and marrieds-with-children, and their standards vary. The point is "to thine own self be true" as the series depicts the ways in which thoughtful people can meet themselves in the mazes of their own stratagems, and how their true selves are sometimes at odds with the people they think they are or aspire to be.
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