Café de Flore - BBC Arabic élégance et galantrie Egypte contre les pro-Morsi

L'analyse du BBC par la section arabe du BBC a été d'une élégance et d'une clarté digne du Café de Flore, Paris. Impossible de mettre des enregistrements mp3 dans blogger, maintenant!! Je m'excuse de ne pas pouvoir facilement mettre l'enregistrement du BBC en anglais ici, mais c'était très bien, expliquant que les Egyptiens avaient choisi Morsi et les islamistes parcequ'ils ont passe par le socialisme, etc.

 photo-vue depuis la terasse du Flore, Brasserie Lipp en face

Video de la vue du TGV

From my apartment

photo, not precisely of my apartment, but from a snack table at Dammam Airport after my Taxi had taken me from my apartment to my flight to Paris, August 2, 2013

All other comments shall be from my apartment...after a pleasant drive to the KLM office near the Meridien Hotel and back, I listened to the balanced coverage of the events in Cairo on BBC and CNN. They give too much credence to the Muslim Brotherhood, who have set about attacking government buildings and continuing to get themselves killed instead of reconciling themselves with the exiting times advancing the role of the Egyptian people finding space in politics that was heralded in by the huge, 19 million demonstrations of June 30.

Here is the not so surprising defense of the bad, rather violent and provocative protests the Muslim Brotherhood misguides (and hence sacrifices its followers) into, given by Oxford professor Tariq Ramadan on the BBC TV news tonight  Click here Since this is private on Sound Cloud, I'll just summarize some of the craziness of his argument, which is also typical of the Muslim Brotherhood spokesmen, and most current orientalist scholarship, which is quite openly serious about religion, and still tied into the study of the collapse of the caliphate with the rise of the colonial revolutions.  I believe that the Muslim Bretheren want the return of the authentic caliphate, which makes them, as a consequence, serious study for academics interested in "The Sleeping Giant," which was the Ottoman Empire before and after World War 1.  Anyway, Tariq Ramadan gives the typical complaint about the breakup of the peaceful sit-ins, and chastises Obama for not cutting off military aid to such a country that is "not part of our democratic tradition," with this military "coup."  It is exactly what the spokespeople for the Muslim Bretheren are saying.

McNamara Ground Ops Coffee Machine -- improved in Amsterdam

Foreign and domestic new you shall have from the coffee machines at the Detroit Airport.  What better theme for today's blog than this picture of the "Mediterranean Sandwich Bar" on the Europe side of the KLM terminal at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam.

Next to the Mediterranean Sandwich Bar is "le Grand Cafe," picture below:

Here is a little "MOV" of what it is like to be in the KLM City Hopper from Nice to Amsterdam, leaving at 6:25:

Fishawi, Cairo Poetry

Flore, Fishawi, Shati, McNamara

All accounts of gallantry, pleasure, and entertainment, shall be under the article of

Café Flore, Paris; poetry, under that of Fishawi, Jeddah or Cairo; learning under the title of the Shati Tea-and-Falafel-shop, Gaza; foreign and domestic news, you will have from

McNamara Ground Ops Lunchroom, Detroit; and what else I shall on any other subject offer, shall be dated from my own apartment.

The western commentators and hard line Islamicists can't see the poetry of the dismantling of the Rab'a Al-Adawiyya Mosque sit-in,

Poetic justice.  Fishawi is closed under curfew tonight, but, then, the evenings in Hussein were as wonderful as usual this Ramadan, I'm sure.

Café de flore, Café St. Germain, Paris

Une ile dans Paris, une ile de culture, donnant envie d'écrire ... comme tous les intellectuels parisiens, et comme Hemmingway.
Café crème, tartine 6 euros 90

Uni Cafe, SprachLehrinsitut

Albert-Ludwigs-Universitat Freiburg.   Near this nice little cafe, always full of people in the summer, is the "UniMuseum," where I learned that Freiburg Univ. was found in 1457, run by Jesuits, then played a role in the Enlightenment under Maria Theresa and Joseph II.  It opened to women a bit before WW II.  Heidigger was president, and Hannah Arendt, as well as many Nobel laureate were there.  The SprachLerninstitut helps teach languages.  They use an Amer. Univ. in Cairo book for Arabic.

Must find out about this French play about women, flowers? and the Quran, by a certain Schmidt.

McNamara Ground Ops Coffee machine- vigilantiism

A little bit of American history to understand the outrage over the Zimmerman Aquittal.
The 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments
The 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution outlawed slavery, made it the law of the land that all men could vote, and granted power to the federal government to take action against Ku Klux Klanners and other vigilante thugs who employed lynchings and mob violence against the social progress of Radical Reconstruction. Anti-vigilante laws were adopted in many areas of the country. The abolitionists and their allies who dominated the Congress sent federal troops to the South to defend freed Blacks and their allies.
1877 withdrawal of Federal troops and the end of 40 acres and a mule (Radical Reconstruction)
But with the 1877 withdrawal of federal troops from the South and other counterrevolutionary moves by the Northern rulers, the reactionary forces were given free rein and were ultimately successful in dealing the greatest blows ever inflicted on the working class in the U.S., a body blow that included the imposition of Jim Crow segregation.
Supreme court overturns 1876 New Orleans court conviction of 100 Colfax, Louisiana vigilantes
In 1873 some 150 heavily armed vigilantes attacked and murdered an equal number of out-gunned African-Americans, many members of the city’s militia, who were defending the county courthouse in Colfax, La. The U.S. Attorney in New Orleans indicted nearly 100 of the attackers under the enforcement provisions of the 14th Amendment, affording equal protection of the laws to all. When the case reached the Supreme Court, the justices unanimously overturned the convictions in 1876, ruling the amendment only applied to actions carried out by state governments. This notorious ruling — still the law of the land — was a milestone blow to the fight against vigilantism and racist violence.

facts quoted from the Militant

Uni Cafe, Freiburg am Briesgau

Pres de cette ancienne université ou Heidigger et Hanna Arandt ont vécu:

Reisenzentrum Bahnhof Café, Freiburg am Breisgau

J'ai envoyé de jolies cartes achetées a Gallimard a Paris, aux 5 Cubanos (maintenant les quatre qui sont toujours en prison) aux USA.

Pensant a l'importance de la traduction faite par Pathfinder des 2 déclarations de Havane en arabe.  Il y a des rapporteurs de notre journal préférée qui sont maintenant au Caire.

Je pense aussi a l'importance des chercheur allemands, comme Brockelmann, ici dans cette ville universitaire allemande.

Quelques photos du quartier universitaire dans la ville médiéval:

Cafe de Flore, Paris

Au Café de Flore on parle de la banqueroute de la ville de Detroit

Mais que les parisiennes et parisien s'habille avec l'élégance a la mode en été!!

With Detroit bankruptcy,
rulers target unions (front page)
 
BY BRIAN WILLIAMS  
The city of Detroit filed for bankruptcy July 18 in the largest such municipal filing in U.S. history. The move by Emergency Financial Manager Kevyn Orr — appointed with broad powers by Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder in March to run Detroit, effectively replacing the city’s elected officials — involves tearing up all city labor contracts and targeting in particular pensions and health care of public workers.

Of the city’s $18 billion in long-term debt, more than $3.5 billion is owed to the pension fund for 10,000 current employees and 20,000 retirees, along with some $6 billion for retirees’ health care costs. Through bankruptcy proceedings, Orr is seeking to slash funds owed to these workers by more than 90 percent, reported the Wall Street Journal. At the same time, $7 billion in municipal bonds secured by casino profits and utility taxes, held by the propertied rich, are protected.

However, Orr has also threatened to force wealthy general-obligation bondholders — whose $530 million in investments are guaranteed in the state constitution — to take a substantial “haircut.”

Working people in Detroit have been pummeled by the capitalist economic crisis. The official unemployment rate in May was 16.3 percent. The city’s population, currently 700,000, has declined 25 percent since 2000. More than one-third of workers live below the government’s official poverty level, according to the U.S. Census.

The city of Detroit, like all U.S. government bodies, has financed its day-to-day operations through selling municipal bonds. The $3.7 trillion municipal bond market is a prerogative of the very rich. These pieces of paper are guaranteed by the “full faith and credit” of the government agency that issues them.

The fact that Orr threatens to go after some bondholders has evoked a fierce outcry from those who defend the municipal bond market as sacrosanct. Such proposals “would flatten the traditional hierarchy of creditors, putting … a retired librarian on par with an investor holding a general obligation bond,” the New York Times said.

While workers’ benefits are slashed and union contracts torn up by bankruptcy courts, capitalist investors, contractors and others have been preparing to cash in on the backs of the bankruptcy.

Orr and others have made it clear that once the debts are wiped clean and health care, pensions and union contracts gutted, the city will issue new bonds for a round of construction and other projects, promising large profits for those in the know who get in early.