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This was the month of agriculture... especially because of the Paris International Agricultural Show. Like every year, the President and all the political personalities are awaited there by visitors and ... farmers. This year is a special year because of the riots and protests by many farmers all over France and Europe. The Prime Minister has already made many promises, which have been greeted cautiously by the main union, the FNSEA, and because the money is still not arriving in the bank accounts. Our king, sorry, President Macron, had a remarkable and unprecedented idea: to organise a big debate between farmers and ecologists with... him in the centre, of course. Too bad, everyone remembers the same idea during the yellow vests riots and nothing has changed. His advisers in his "chateau" made a strange mistake, telling journalists that the "Soulèvement de la terre", a "radical" environmental movement, had been invited. Macron and his government had just failed to dissolve the movement after being rejected by the courts. And the FNSEA is crying like a child because these ecologists are very, very angry with them. In the end, there was no debate and Macron was protected by hundreds of policemen dressed like medieval knights.
It was very violent, with a far-right farmers' union, 'Coordination rurale', pushing the police, despite all the poor animals there. It's symptomatic of what they really think of animals, these supporters of intensive farming. The reality in France and Europe is that the big farmers are killing the small farmers. There is a high suicide rate in agriculture. But the bigger they are, the deeper their graves are because the fixed costs are too high and they overproduce. There was an article in a newspaper about a young farmer with 400 cows of an English breed genetically modified to give more meat. I had never seen those cows in a field....Maybe because they are never in a field? They eat more pellets and soya than a nice green grass, just to make a heavy cow in the shortest possible time. It reminds me of those bodybuilders who aren't the big strong guys you think they are because their bodies are so bloated with special foods and other drugs.
It was the month of the Césars, the French film awards, not the Emperor and his salad. The feminist movement in France has shaken up old statues like Gérard Depardieu, Benoit Jacquot, Jacques Doillon... And French cinema is trying to appear more progressive than before. There are more women directors than before in the different categories. But if you look at who's at the top, it's still men. Sometimes it's worse in other art forms. There's a lot to be done in France. The pay gap between men and women is smaller than it used to be, but it's still 25% less for women, 4% at the beginning for the same job. The good news is that Justine Triet and her "Anatomy of a Fall" won the better prizes at this ceremony. She had high hopes for the Oscar. And she had one! ... But the Oscars are no longer a reference point with more politics than talent. Proof? Christopher Nolan won an Oscar with one of his worst films.
I have been sent a link to an app that tells you how to get around Paris during the Olympics. At the moment it's not useful at all, but they've managed to make already congested areas even worse. It's for cars and pedestrians, of course, with some metro lines to avoid. Lanes and carriages requisitioned? Not far off. It's only a month... or two. One of the first successes of these Olympics is the official poster. Even if the far right is always up in arms because there aren't enough cockades and roosters and a cross has disappeared. The poster is funny, playful and beautiful. What would be funny is... the promise of the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, to swim in the Seine... And even President Macron has made a kind of similar promise. Who still believes him?
Speaking of Macron, he's found a new game: war. He seems so childish when he talks about sending troops to Ukraine, as if he were playing with toy soldiers in his kindergarten. It's just to hide from his allies that France's defence budget is not what NATO expects. It's a pity that the communication trick doesn't work... I don't remember that this man has never known war in his life, nor military service. So he doesn't know what death and the sacrifice of a life are (dedication to a sergeant during my service who died after being hit by a rocket in Africa). He said he couldn't do it... Wrong, because if he had wanted to, he could have done it. For me it's important to know that in order to make the right decisions. Perhaps it was important in the head of the old Churchill, mad dog of war in his youth on the battlefields, making murderous mistakes, then a more composed man with age, but still no slouch when it comes to making mistakes. For the French, the war in Ukraine seems far away, and no one is behind Macron on this issue. The war in Gaza is still dividing people, reviving racism and religious prejudices for each of the belligerents.
It's also war in the French version of Wikipedia. It's not news that there's a governance problem in this encyclopaedia, especially in French. I had problems when I was editing some articles on cars, with people who believed more in marketing than in technical data. I've had problems with some people who mainly validate their own contributions and don't accept contributions from others. But the war has been declared on articles about transgender personalities. If the English articles are generally correct, the translation into French is a problem because some "ayatollahs" prevent the use of spelling adapted to transgender people, retreating into false spelling dogmas and the use of the "dead name" of transpeople in their biography. Some transgender users made edits just to "flood" some articles because nothing was validated by these small-minded, egocentric leaders of their little private garden. It's so French to see people like that. I'm fed up and I'm not going to edit the French Wikipedia anymore (like any other free project in France...). Maybe one day you will see a fork for the French Wikipedia, ha ha !
For more informations on this last subject, you can read David Larlet and the links in his post.
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