Laurel Zuckerman's Paris Weblog

What portion of the French population is * NOT * fully vaccinated against coronavirus?

 

86 % of French people are not fully vaccinated against coronavirus (May 15, 2021)

I'll admit I'm having trouble wading through all the different statistics on coronavirus. 

The French government used to publish a super clear coronavirus dashboard: new cases, deaths, hospitalisations, Ehpad, vaccinations - but the layout changed recently and I find it confusing.

As the country prepares to reopen in a fit of political optimism which is not necessarily shared by the medical community (there have been dissenting voices), I wonder how many people in France are fully vaccinated.

Should be a super-simple calculation, non?

Worldmeter puts France's population at an exceedingly precise  65,399,347

And, as of today, May 15, 2021, the French government puts the number of fully vaccinated people at: 9,142,420.

Which comes to 13.98%

That should mean that the number of people in France who are not fully vaccinated is:  65,399,347 - 9,142,420 = 56,256,927.

Which puts the portion of people in France who are not fully vaccinated at 86.02%

(May 15, 2021)

 

Suddenly, I see behind me tender owls and my soul feels happier - French-Russian-music video sensation

The story, I am told, goes like this...

In the 1990s a French student of Russian wrote a song in Russian. The words, while understandable were quirky and charmingly original. A French group recorded it (in Russian) and it sank into oblivion. Until a few months ago, when, under the direction of a Russian-American animation artist, animators around the world crowdsourced portions of the (absolutely magnificent) clip below.

 The refrain is :

Suddenly I see behind me

Tender Owls

And my soul feels happier ...

 

 

French Women Smoke

Lung cancer rates follow smoking rates as the night follows the day, so here's a question:

Why, in the world's best health care system, is virtually nothing being done to stop teenage girls from smoking in France?

Ideological French school reform forgets children, learning, languages, excellence

Schools in France have, for years, suffered from four terrible failures:

1) Inability to help students who are identified as fragile, or weak, or in need of help from their youngest years - thus perpetuating and even exacerbating social inequalities

2) Insufficient teacher training, both initially and as part of continuing education due in part to the preference for investing scarce resources into SELECTION instead of into training (I wrote about this, with as much humor as possible, in Sorbonne Confidential)

3) Failure to replace teachers who are absent in middle school and lycée, which leads to students losing ONE WHOLE YEAR of learning due to absent teachers who are not replaced as well as too few adults in the school.

4) Persistently poor results in foreign language learning, compared to other European countries

This is, of course, just a short list. And (since it is focused on failures) it does not mention the many successes.

The reason I mention it is to provide context for the current battle over what's called the "collège" (middle school) reform.

The first three points - all critical - are not dealt with at all. And the last point (languages) is deliberately made worse: the one thing that worked well will be destroyed.

***

 

President of SOS Racism: "Charlie Hebdo is anti-racist"

"Scandalous." "An insult to the memory" "An insult to the living and to the dead."

This is Dominique Sopo, the president de SOS Racisme, France's leading anti-racism and anti-discrimination organisation. In this video (in French) he expresses his  outrage that people falsely accuse Charlie Hebdo of being racist when it is the opposite. He says that Charlie Hebdo is the most important anti-racist weekly in France. That all the anti-racism activists in France know this, and that Cabu, Charb and Wolinski regularly did cartoons FOR anti-racist campaigns.  Mr Sopo says that lies about Charlie Hebdo are creating a "mob mentality". 

(Even if you don't understand French, you can hear from Mr Sopo's tone how angry he is that ignorant morons attack Charlie Hebdo for "racism". )

I don't know how exactly the moral brigade among writers in America got the idea that the fearless satirists of Charlie Hebdo were "racist", but it's simply not true. If you have been spreading these lies you should be ashamed of yourself for slandering the dead and the living.

Writers who don't understand the video might pause for a moment to think of the implications of this.

___

For more of my blog posts on related topics, please see:

145 Writers Against Freedom of Speech?

Garry Trudeau's Shame

 

 

Garry Trudeau's Shame

I loved Garry Trudeau's Doonesbury.

As a teenager I couldn't wait to read his comic strips and bought all his books.

I thought he was brilliant. Speaking truth to power.

Now, in a disturbing - and very sad - turn of events, this once admirable satirist has shamed himself and his profession.

In a speech delivered on the occasion of an award for lifetime achievement, Trudeau blamed the victims in the Charlie Hebdo attack, ignored the very real risk of death that satirists - as well as many other people - face from Islamists today, and advocated self-censorship to avoid offending people.

Killed over a parking space: tragically common in the USA

It is only natural that people are outraged at the idea that three young people can be murdered for something as stupid as a parking space. And yet, a quick Google search reveals this is tragically common in America.

Terrible attacks in Paris, March in honor of the victims this Sunday

My heart is too full to speak of these events at present. I can only hope that the appropriate response will be found. People in France and in many cities around the world are marching in solidarity, and this is heartening. But the darkness is very dark.

French schoolchildren continue to suffer due to absent teachers

A few years ago my Franco-American daughter was visiting Mississippi, and she met a 10-year-old boy whose situation was unlike any she had ever encountered in France.

"He doesn't go to school!" she said. "His parents refused. Said he should be homeschooled. But they're busy. So he's homeschooling - HIMSELF!"

How Trierweiler secretly prepared her bombshell book #publishing

Mega-bestseller. A first print run of 200,000 copies released September 4 and already out of stock in many stores and being reprinted.

Valérie Trierweiler's kiss and tell off Merci pour le Moment is a publishing success.

Lying, cheating politicos beware: French women don't keep quiet.

The myth that French women don't mind if their husbands (or boyfriends) cheat on them might just be a myth after all.

 Not only did Ms Trierweiler mind - which is kind of funny if one remembers that her ill-starred love affair started with the future president betraying his own wife with her - but she minded so much that she tried to commit suicide, followed by political murder.

(That's minding)

The real mystery here is how this book got into bookstores in the first place, since France has a long and not particularly distinguished tradition of censorhip of books.

HEC: France's elite business school turns fifty!

In 1964, the Général de Gaulle inaugurated France's great business school. HEC would be reserved exclusively for men until 1973. Famous alumni include France's current president, François Hollande (H75)  and former IMF chief Dominique Strauss Kahn (H71).

Other illustrious folk include Pascal Lamy (H69), Jean-Louis Borloo (H76), Valérie Pécresse (H88), Eric Woerth (H81), as well as CEOs  Henri de Castries (H76), Baudouin Prot (H72), Louis Gallois (H66), Henri Proglio (H71), Stéphane Richard (H83), Pierre Feraud (H61), François-Henri Pinault, ,Bruno Lafont (H77), Jean-Paul Agon (H78), Sidney Taurel (H69), and many, many more. Check out HEC's Wikipedia.