Longer

France's ports and platforms are looking at what they
would need to put in place in case of a no-deal Brexit.
It is considerable and costly. And under the best scenario,
a transit control to England will take twice as long for
a lambda traveller.

https://www.lemonde.fr/politique/article/2018/09/29/hard-brexit-le-prefet-des-hauts-de-france-tire-le-signal-d-alarme_5362083_823448.html

Food Travels

Awesome breaded shrimp at McDonalds Russia:



Delicious chicken at McDonalds London:





Biggest Burger in Europe Challenge: Nope!!



This restaurant specializes in food challenges.

Tuff

Talking Brexit

So BoJo - Boris Johnson - has just come out to argue
that the best Brexit deal might just be a Super Canada accord;
that is, one modelled on the EU deal Canada has
now entered. I just new knew were part of this Brexit thing
all along.

The ins and outs of just how expensive and disruptive various scenarios
might be for England is beyond my purview, but let us consider for a moment
the possibility that Mr Johnson might be on to something in another
register. From the point of view of International Relations, what is Canada
with respect to the UK: an ex-colony whose head of state is to this day
a stand-in for the British Crown. And the Crown controls quite a bit of the
wealth of England, indirectly witholding it from public trade.

All this might seem of academic interest in the day-to-day of trading
Tim Tams and auto parts, but International Relations is about more than
that. Mr Johnson might be trying to say that the UK's trading arrangements
should make geo-political sense. Perhaps we should be sensitive to that.

Complex Numbers

Half the battle in coming to grips with complex numbers is not letting

the look of the expressions intimidate one. All of a sudden, one finds onself on

what looks like a Cartesian plane, only the ordinate is i - the square root of minus 1 -

and the expression of the point contains a plus sign rather than a mere colon: (a + bi).

What is going on here?

The Complex plane looks like the Cartesian plane, and expressions on it are liable to

two different approaches. Here, a and b are real numbers, but because b

ia affixed to i, it is called imaginary. Nonetheless, if one needs to find r, the

length of the line to the point, one proceeds as always and merely ignores the i.

Thus, (3 + 4i) gets evaluated to square root of ( 9 + 16) ie (25)^.5, which is equal to 5.

For the second approach, one might want to use trigonometric functions; one then needs

to find the angle which the line to the point creates. Again, for length 5, and with sides 3 

and 4, the angle, theta, will be that of .927 rads (53 degrees).

Where the fact of i makes a difference is when one wants to calculate with it. For example, 

to multiply (3 + 4i) by its conjugate (3 - 4i) yields 25 ( and not -7, which is what

(3 + 4)(3 - 4) would have given)!!

Our little plus sign is a stern reminder...

There are many sites which go into al this, but the one below - intended for French candidates

tot he Bac S - is a charmer:

https://www.methodemaths.fr/complexes/

Demented

Big Day at Google: it's their 20th anniversary. Hooray!

Here's my little scribble for today, on a BIG question.

What is the Reimann hypothesis, and how does it involve
prime numbers. The best account of that I have found of
that - thank you, Google - is on the encyclopedia Britannica,
referenced below:

https://www.britannica.com/science/Riemann-zeta-function

Here is the second paragraph where I have highlighted in red an
assertion which might seem little odd. Why should x greater than
1 converge to a number when other values yield an infinite sum??:

"When x = 1, this series is called the harmonic series, which increases
without bound—i.e., its sum is infinite. For values of x larger than 1, 
the series converges to a finite number as successive terms are added. 
If x is less than 1, the sum is again infinite. The zeta function was known
to the Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler in 1737, but it was first
studied extensively by the German mathematician Bernhard Riemann."

On reflection, what is going on is this case is not  true addition of value
but merely an unveiling of more precision; one ends up extending the number
of decimals. It is a case of what I think if as the Demented Dieter Dilemna.
My weight is at the perfect point , but I still want to add more rice to the soup
every night. This will only work if I add an ever smaller amount
that never goes over the critical point which maintains my weight.

In the context of number theory, the Riemann extension of the zeta function
to a statement with complex numbers, is trying for a digit-free formulation.
It is no surprise that it will need to call on prime numbers...

Rising BR

President Trump at the UN is not the only item in the news today.
The US Fed is expected to announce a rise in the bank rate; might
even indicate it is planning a series of these. Such  a move is normally
undertaken to slow down the economy, for instance to combat inflation.
It also tends to devalue the currency.

Bad news for the consumer of stuff from other countries, then.

The rates calendar for Canada is a month off. How should Canada
respond!?

 https://www.xe.com/

http://www.cbrates.com/

To-do

It has been on my to-do list for days: translating
a longish excerpt from the introduction to a new collective
work on the pornographic view of indigenous peoples
over the colonil period.

The work is a picture book, necessary because we need to
deconstruct a certain way of seeing things.

Reference below:

https://theconversation.com/les-imaginaires-sexuels-coloniaux-ont-faconne-les-mentalites-des-societes-occidentales-103132?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=La%20lettre%20de%20The%20Conversation%20France%20du%2024%20septembre%202018%20-%201119510013&utm_content=La%20lettre%20de%20The%20Conversation%20France%20du%2024%20septembre%202018%20-%201119510013+CID_06f3420977b92c56b74af46fe0f54739&utm_source=campaign_monitor_fr&utm_term=Les%20imaginaires%20sexuels%20coloniaux%20ont%20faonn%20les%20mentalits%20des%20socits%20occidentales

                                             *     *     *

source: The Conversation

Extract from the Introduction to the collective work Sexe, race et colonies, La

domination des corps du XVe à nos jours, published under the direction of 

Pascal Blanchard, Nicolas Bancel, Gilles Boëtsch, Christelle Taraud and Dominic 

Thomas by publishers La Découverte and for sale starting September 27 2018

(544 pages, 1200 pictures, over one hundred authors; preface by Jacques Martial 

and Achille Mbembe, postface by Leïla Slimani).

translation: doxa-louise

‘The sexual imagination of colonizers forged the 

prevailing mentality of Western societies’

Examining six centuries of history (from 1420 on) at the heart of colonial empires, 

starting with the conquistadores, running through systematic slavery and up tp the 

postcolonial period, our work Sexe, race et colonies. La domination des corps du XVe 

à nos jours explores the central role of sexuality in power relationships.

It lays bare as well the manners with which slave-owning and colonizer countries

re-invented the ‘Other’ the better to dominate him, take possession of his body as 

well as his territory, all the while making sense of the formidable visual production behind

the notion of the exotic and fantasies of the West: so many images that illustrate racial 

and sexual domination.

A comprehension of the context of production, an appreciation of their means of 

diffusion, acceptance, importance in visual history, aims to  unfasten certain ways 

of looking and deconstruct what was so carefully and massively fabricated. A novel

project as much by its editorial ambition, as by its willingness to bring together many 

ways of seeing and critical approaches, the aim of this book is to present a panorama 

of this forgotten and ignored past, up to its contemporary descendants, as we follow 

step by step the domination of bodies.

Sexuality, domination, colonization. three terms that meet and mesh over six centuries 

of practices and representations that make up this book. Yet, even if the history of 

sexuality in colonies has been a research topic for over thirty years, it is still

unkown in  its extent. Yet, sexual domination, in colonized spaces such as the 

segregationist United States, was a long process of slavery practices  producing 

complex imaginary realms which, caught between the exotic and the erotic, find 

nourishment in fascination/repulsion with race-imbued bodies.

This explains why, the multiple contemporary lines of descent of this history frame, 

largely still, the relations between Western populations from the North and the 

ex-colonized from the South. For, as the sexual imaginary realms of the colonizers 

forged the thinking of Western societies, they as well determined those of the dominated.

A process of deconstruction is thus today more than ever necessary, linking up notably 

with the images produced in the course of this history.

The colony, a territory for sexual domination

Sexuality in the colonies has no bounding taboos, including that of childhood: the

offerd images often show pre-pubescent young girls (as well, although less frequently, 

young boys) in stagings with a strong sexual flavor. The violence of the fantasies projected 

unto colonized populations is thus without limit, because the body of the ‘other’ is itself 

placed outside the field to which norms apply, closer to the animal and the monster than 

the human, closer to nature than to culture.

This explains why the body of the ‘other’ is conceptualized simultaneously as a symbol of 

innocence and multiple depravations: a body which excites as much as it frightens. 

In this context, ‘indigenous’ women are clothed with a sexual innocence which guides them 

with great constancy toward ‘sin’, or an ‘atavistic sexual depravity’ tied to their race, reinforcing 

the conquerer and dominant position of the master and the colonizer.

The existence of these ‘other’ women always viewed as easy, lascivious, lecherous,

perverse and thus necessarily insatiable also allows the construction, as a mirror image, 

of the ideal white wife, prudish and chaste, reduced to a purely reproductive sexuality.

The sexual freedom of white men in colonies cannot, in effect, be transfered to women from 

colonial metropoles. These are, a contrario, under greater surveillance, because they are 

necessarily expected to present the sexual  and moral example-worthiness of the colony, 

from which white men escape in general. Thus, the ‘gigantic brothel’ created by slavery 

and colonialism allows colonizers to view themselves and live as masters in spaces where 

their sexual possibilities are maximized with respect to the norms and taboos of their own 

societies, all the while excluding their wives from these rights.

This explains how sexual practices, love and marriage depart, almost everywhere, from the 

rules, pronouncements and laws promulgated by the very people trangressing them

joyously and continuously.

This sexual liberty of the master and/colonizer does come up against, paradoxically, 

moral precepts and racial taboos, the refusal of white women to accept the cohabitation, 

seen as humiliating and dishonrable by most among them, of other women and other 

families; and, eventually, the growing fear, at the beginning of the XIXth century, of an

interbreeding echoing the idea of the degeneracy and disappearance of the white ‘race’. 

This new moralizing, hygienistic and prophylactic complex viewpoint will lead nonetheless 

to a growing call, although late in the game, to white women to populate empires, contribute 

offspring without interbreeding and bring morality to colonial

life. These veritable recruitment campaign for wives - or prostitutes for brothels - will

first take place, at the margins of European society - orphenages, hospices, asylums,

prisons, brothels...- among categories of women already stigmatized, such as delinquants, 

unwed mothers or prostitutes; colonial metropoles can then rid themselves of elements 

that are ‘asocial’ and/or ‘immoral’.

Furthermore, everywhere within colonies, the racial question is at the heart of constructions on 

sexuality because it is the central axis of political, economic and soxcial organization, particularly 

in the slavery societies of the Carabbean, Brazil or the United States. On this set of questions with 

respect to all geographical areas and all colonial empires, and for all historical periods, writers 

and artists have left their mark all the while participating in the elaboration of the view which 

metropolitans have of ’others’.

An immense production of images

Very early, as seen in the works assembled in this project (over 1200 documents reproduced, 

for the majority for the first time), artists show us colonial societies and, irregardless of prohibitions, 

call interbreedings into view all the while exhibiting the social hierarchies constructed on the 

melanine content of different populations. Based on prejudice, particularly religious, these 

hierarchies gave legitimacy to the racial domination of the modern period thus forming the first 

substrate of a racism evident in the color of skin and socio-economic status. The first images 

produced, from the beginnings of the XVth century to the end of the XVIIth, also invite one to

 dream and bear witness, for the clear majority, to an admiration and fascination with ‘exotic’ 

peoples and their bodily presence.

However, the spread of slavery between Africa and America, conflict relationships in the 

Mediterranean space, the rise in prominence of colonial empires and the emergence of 

scientific racism will progressively erase this ‘moment of surprise’ to the benefit

of increasingly disparaging representations. At the turn of the XVIIIth and XIXth centuries, 

one witnesses a decisive mutation which will transform ‘color prejudice’ into raciology. 

Sexuality, prostitution, homosexuality and ‘race’ thus become intertwined during this period, 

starting in 1830-1840, all through the XIXth century and ending around 1920.

Artists from all countries will in this contxt construct, in all possible artistic domains 

(drawing, etching, painting...), a view of the world which disturbs the representaion of 

these Elsewheres, up to the major break as a consequence of the emergence of new 

visual supports such as photography, posters and cheap widgets, thus promoting a 

taste for the Oriental, African or Japanese, all the while upping the exotic, erotic and/or 

pornographic presence of the ‘Other’ to an outrageous level.

The democraticization of colonial pornography, at the turn of the XIXth and XXth centuries, 

understand, in effect, colonies ans ‘empires of cie’, themes also present in romantic fiction 

and pseudo-science, as can be seen in the well-known book of doctor Jacobus, L’Art d’aimer 

aux colonies (1893). Very quickly, the movie industry, which becomes the dominant mass 

media of the period in Europe as well as America, will use the erotic potential of the the 

colonies by offering images in a recurrent manner of white men presented as the masters 

of colonized spaces, ‘protectors’ of white women, and ‘seducers’ and ‘liberators’ of ‘indigenous’ 

women, but also of mythical ‘siren women’, oriental or asiatic.

The century of the half-blood beauty

Lastly, the XXth century gives birth to a new paradigm in the form of utopia which finds 

expression in numerous images on many supports: that of a ‘half-blood beauty’. But

everywhere, from South-East Asia to India, Subsaharian Africa to Magreb, from the 

Caribbean to Polynesia, these mutations come at the price of a heady questionning, 

such as that of the place of half-blood children: the latter becoming the ‘lost children’ 

of societies still very much fractured by color lines, legal or not. These new concerns, 

exponentially grown by the Second World War with as background migratory crisis in 

Europe and the United states and more and more virulent protests in colonial empires.

This last phase of colonial history, put in motion after 1945, is a period characterized by a 

frenetic deployment of sexual violence, notably agains colonized women, within civil

societies: as if it were necessary to mark and beat up the bodies of the colonized and,

thus, punish their desire to be rid of their oppressors. As if it had become necessary, as well, 

to destroy these indigenous women who had become the graphical icons of liberation 

movements( and their allies of the moment in China, in the USSR, in Korea or in India) 

and of fighters militarily and politically active in all anti-colonial struggles.

Thus the practice of rape, by French forces, during the war in Indochina (1946-1954) and the 

war in Algeria (1954-1962) is now well documented, as is that of the last lynchings - often 

accompagnied by castration - in the United states in the 1950s. 

Elsewhere, in Africa, this violence is evident in the revolt of the Mau Mau in Kenya between 1

952 and 1960, where hundreds of cases of sexual violence against women (many rapes) 

and on men ( of which some castrations) have been noted.

These moment of extraordinary sexual violence also resonate with certain contemporary 

post-colonial conflicts, as seen by the use of rape by Americans and their allies during the 

War in Vietnam, between 1955 and 1975, but also by the Soviets during the first war in 

Afghanistan, between 1979 and 1989 and, more recently still, by Allied troops in Irak, 

the Russians in Chechnya or the UN Peace Corps in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Legacies and postcolonial mutations

Starting in the 1970s, many artists will embark on the work fo deconstruction of colonial 

stereotypes using the body as the centralobject - such as the French artist Jean-Paul 

Goude or one of the greats of english Pop Art Peter thomas Blake, but aldo an ex-member 

of the Black Panther Party, Emory Douglas -, sexualized institutions (harem or bordello) 

or sexual violence and rape. Thus, Coco Fusco and Guilermo Gomez-Pena, 

with their famous show The Couple in the Cage (1993), or the South-African Brett Bailey, 

with Exhibit B (2014), all try to deconstruct the power of representation of colonial sexual 

domination.

In a similar vein, the Hottentot Venus will also find herself at the heart of a series of post-colonial 

works, such as Venus Baartman by Tracey Rose, Venus by Suzan-Lori Parks, On t’appelle Vénus 

by Chantal Lïal, Hottentot Venus 2000 by Renee Cox, calling out what she was made to endure 

yet attempting to return her to her dignity, as with the film by Abdellatif Kechiche, Black Venus.

From all continents, artists will view this past with a critical eye: all want to go beyond the 

colonial legacy by analysing the effect that the images from that period produce even today 
on individuals and society.

Sexual Tourism

From another perspective, this same legacy goes on as well in Southern countries through 

sexual tourism. The latter developed before independence then during decolonization 

struggles and/or as part of the cold War (principally in Asia), and forms a true gloalized economy. 

A number of ex-colonized countries have opted to ‘specialize’ in the sexual offer to 

Westerners, but also to newly industrialized countries such as China, Turkey or the Persian 

Gulf Emirates. Coming out of colonial prostitution - and in reserved areas of the city such as 

Bousbir in Morocco or brothels for the American Army in Thaïland and the Philippines...

- sexual tourism still promotes the same fantasies and the same exhausted imaginary 

realms erotic and pornographic.

Nonetheless, let us note that migrations South to North can also provoque events wherein 

extreme sexual violence is invited such as the events of Koln, Germany in 2016.

In any event, a number of examples bring into question this ‘global right’ of men

to seize on, including by violence sexist and racist, all women: those which they consider 

as the possession of ‘others’, but obviously those that belong to their own family, group, 

culture, nation, «race»... Angela Davis has documenting this in the

context of the emergence of the Black Panthers in the United States in the 1970s:

‘They thought - and some think it still - that the fact of being of being a black man gave 

them rights on black women.’

Yet, in the new reality which is ours in this nascent XXIth century, if structures of domination 

persist unmistakebly, other inverse processes are at work as well. Postcolonial migrations, 

at least in ex-colonial-metropoles, have thus produced, almost mechanically, a flowering of 

mixted unions and their progressive acceptance. As a result, this process has given rise to 

a certain globalized cosmopolitanism. That the very existence of these unions has caused, 

all along its long history, more or less constant xenophobic reactions should not overshadow 

the fact that the figure of the racialy-mixed person has become, at the same time, an aesthetic 

reference point in world media culture. A model opposed and/or taken back everywhere, by 

supremacists of all ilks and religious fundamentalists of all religions, who reject migrations and 

minorities through polymorphous ‘community action’ and accompagnied, more often than not, 

by strong conservatism cultural and social, notably with respect to mores.

As for ‘other’ women still seen as types such as the ‘Beurettes’ in France, the Congolaises’ in 

Belgium, the ‘Pakistanis’ in the United Kingdom, they remain bound, practically as well as 

symbolically, by roles predefined through legacies patriarchal and/or colonial.

One thus sees how the equation of women and men ‘other’ with their sex/sexuality, founding 

principal of colonial doxa from its inception, but also social model of our now globalized cultures, 

is far from over. Yet, at the same time, racial mixity has also become the horizon of a utopia meant 

to come before, for some anyway, the eclosion of a true globalized society, post-racial and equal, 

by a boomerang effect that colonizers were far from imagining when they, for the first time, set foot 

in America, Africa, Asia and Oceania...

Tornadoes

The Ottawa newspapers report two distinct tornadoes, at
5 and 6:30 pm. On the Quebec side, there was one which first
cut through Gatineau Park  and residents had 5 minutes
of warning (I saved my toothbrush and lost everything else…)

                                         source: Journal de Montréal

                                                    *     *     *

Fiscal Paradise

source: Le Nouvel Obs

authors: Sophie Fay and Baptiste Legrand

translation: doxa-louise

Will the post-Brexit United Kingdom become the world’s 

largest tax haven?

Dissensus moment. Theresa May’s right-arm man, David Lidington, and 

journalist Marc Roche give the Nouvel Obs their respective views on the 

matter.

What might the United Kingdom look like post-Brexit? The Nouvel Obs 

discussed this burning issue, separately,  with two contradictory advocates.

David Lidington, number two in Theresa May’s government, takes a 

conciliatory view: ‘The United Kingdom and Europe will continue to work

together. They must construct a new relationship that remains economically 

profitable for both’, he advances.

However for Marc Roche, correspondant for the French press in London, 

‘the country will come through Brexit very different and dangerous for 

Europe, as it will be more offshore, less egalitarian and because it will have

disposed of all migratory problem’.

A few of their answers are contrasted below.

                                            «  Ireland  »

We find ourselves seven months from Brexit, next March, and still

no sign of an agreement between the United Kingdom and Europe. 

Why is this? Is Ireland the unresolved question?

David Lidington: I believe we are at the 80% mark towards an accord.

The major yet unresolved issue is the precise mechanism of the security

measure at the Irish border [the ‘backstop’: Brussels wants to guarantee

that there will be no return to a physical frontier between the two

Irelands, NDLR]. We could come to  a provisional solution, good to the

end of 2020, as we await the coming into force of our next partnership. I

feel confident, and the British government is as well, that we will reach an 

agreement this autumn.

Marc Roche: The problem comes from the fact that Theresa May’s government

needs, for its majority in Parliament, the Northern Ireland protestant unionists, 

of the DUP. A solution will be found because no one wants to endanger

peace accords by creating a hard frontier between the two Irelands, but 

especially because the demography is such that, in the very short term, catholics

will become the majority in the North. And they are militants for reunification

with the South and will play the card of only one Ireland. Many Brits who have 

never set foot in Northern Ireland don’t care. I have never met, in my time in London, 

anyone who had been to Belfast.

                                       « Tax haven »

What will the post-Bresit UK be like? A gigantic tax haven?

David Lidington: The Chequers Plan [from the name of the city where the

May government held a seminar, NDLD] carries very clear guaranties,

on questions such as social standards and environmental guaranties. I believe

these should re-assure our European partners. In any event, these are social and 

environmental norms which the British people want for themselves.

With respect to financial services, we suport a system of enhanced 

equivalence[...]. We are working towards the highest possible guarantee to 

protect our own consumers.

I can even cite examples where we have gone further than European norms. 

With respect to the required capitalization of banks, the EU has agreed to

a set of minimal norms. We have held out to reinforce the requirements for

capital base funds, because we wanted British taxpayers to be fully protected 

from the risk that comes with investment banks.

Marc Roche: The United Kingdom is already a tax haven! Here is proof:

Roman Abramovitch, the Russian oligarch, was allowed to sell the Chelsea 

Club he bought with dirty money from the pillage of the USSR without any 

questions asked. Given its network of offshore zones in British overseas 

territories and ex-colonies of the Crown, this is already the largest tax haven 

and the City lives off negotiation and treatment of funds brought back from 

these zones. One third of the world’s tax havens are British.

What will change after Brexit? Freed from European regulation - but not from

international regulation from the OECD, the G20, the Bank for International

Settlements -, the London exchange can only prosper. The limitations on bonuses 

to bankers will be lifted. Little activity will be transferred to Paris or Frnakfort. 

No bank, except for HSBC toward Paris, has delocalized many jobs. It is a 

question of tens, hundreds at the most. But, mostly, emergent countries, in 

particular China, will feel very much at home in the post-Brexit United Kingdom.

London will become the financial market and the Trojan horse for Chinese funds.

Starting with David Cameron in 2010, the United Kingdom has been courting China. 

It is the only country to sell its nuclear technology to China, [...] The United

Kingdom has been hosting since 2010 Chinese banks with short-circuit of the 

protective controls of the Bank of England, to the point where the ‘Financial Times’ 

has expressed concern about the systemic risks that might be involved. 

The City is the only true European center participating in the internationalization 

of the Chinese currency, the yuan. And London grants golden passports without

restraint to wealthy Chinese wanting to settle in Great Britain without 

question as to the origins of the funds.

                                      «  New referendum? »

If negotiations were to fail, and given the serious political divisions in 

London,would a new referendum ever be possible?

Davis Lidington: I see no desire for this, either with Labour, or the Conservatives,

to go back in time and replay the battle. And even if we did it: so why not a third

referendum, in a year or two? No, the only sensible thing to do, is to accept

the verdict of democracy, whether we like it or not. And come together.

Marc Roche: There was one referendum and the result was very clear: 52%

vs 48%, with a 12 point difference between the Leave vote and the Remain vote 

in England itself, which is the most important part of the country (82% of the

population).

It is thus out of the question that a second referendum be held. Those asking for

one are either has been politicians like Tony Blair, or those of the political class

cut off from the provincial electorate and the pro-Brexit electorate which is still

in the majority, whatever the opinion polls might be showing. A number of Brits

are saying to themselves: ‘Let’s give Brexit a chance’.

                                      « Immigration »

Can the pro-Brexit vote also be explained by a rejection of immigration?

David Lidington: There is no doubt that immigrtion was one of the most important

issue of the campaign. When I went door-to-door, a lot of people expressed

concern. In point of fact, a number of electors could see no difference between

the free circulation of Europeans and immigration from other countries. 

Time and time again, they made the point that we could not control the number

of people coming to ourcountry. The question was not whether we should be

more selective or generous, but the feeling that we had no means of controlling 

the numbers. This is what motivated a lot of people, even if it was not the only

factor.

Marc Roche: Immigration, after the departure of a high number of Eastern

Europeans, is no longer a high priority issue for Britain. Now, people are 

talking about housing, the pro-Brexit future, education, national health, 

but no more about immigration. The free movement of Europeans, which 

for me was a natural and especially of Eastern Europeans, has finaly shown 

itself to have been a negative thing, with hindsight. It was a discriminatory 

concept toward those who were not Europeans, all the Africans, Asiatics, 

Australians, Americans who wanted to settle in the UK. Which is why a number 

of East Indian and voters from India voted for Brexit in disregard of the racist

 discourse of a fringe of politicians favourable to leaving the EU.

Formerly minister for European Affairs for six years, David Lidington is a 

Minister of State, number two in the government of Theresa May.

London correspondant for the French language press, Marc Roche, Belgian in origin,

has asked for British citizenship. He has published ‘Le Brexit va réussir’ (Albin Michel).

Nice One!

Why not just calories, but macros matter!!

Bad Weather

Trying to get clear about today's weather. Doesn't look
to attractive out there!!

https://meteo.gc.ca/city/pages/qc-28_metric_f.html

                                        *     *     *

Fall Heaven

Hey, Big Spender!

For someone with a mess of calories on their MyFitnessPal allowance,
McDonalds Canada has some new stuff.

In Atlantic Canada, there is now a fish and chips offering. 740 calories.
A really delicious way to eat fresh fish.

On the McCafé menu: a Pumpkin Spice Frappé. At 740 calories, assuredly
not shaby.

McHeaven!

Hot C

This is all too easy and dangerous: I now know
how to make café moka (chocolate-flavoured coffee).
Found the recipe on the Web; works perfectly:

So there is the secret to cocoa powder perfectly blended
with the coffee. One mixes the powder with sugar - in a 1:2 ratio -
in the bottom of the cup. One then adds the coffee which
has been brewed separately. Then the milk.

How does it taste? Smooth, if a little bland. To my taste, better with
a few specks of cinnamon and a touch of vanilla. Hot, perhaps steamed
milk could be nice. Who would say no to whipped cream?

So I made the basic drink yesterday, with just cold milk from
the fridge. Then the French side of my personnality kicked in
and I made raisin toast with butter. That is the true French breakfast:
butter, on a baguette or biscottes, with hot milk, chocolate, café
au lait.

Indeed, I was tempted to have another go this morning, but no. Fall
begins on Sunday, September 23 this year, which is late on the calendar,
but same old planet. I'll make it then, for the blog.

Upscale French restaurants also offer chunks of expensive milk chocolate
melted in expresso but that would be getting ahead of myself; that would
be Christmas!

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The below text is explicit about it: the September Solciste is
a moment in time; that when the Earth is perfectly rightside up with
respect to the Sun. Because the Earth tilts back and forth, this
happens twice  per year, at the Spring and Autumn equinox.

The duration of Earth's orbital transit is expressed in days, which is a
different physical phenomenon ie the rotation of the planet on itself.
Both are physical processes, which evolve over long time periods.
For the last 400 years, the Earth has orbited the Sun in 365.2425 days.
Our civil calendar has 7 months of 31 days, 5 of 30 and one of 28 which
becomes 29 every four years. 2020 will be a Leap year.

The effect on the moment will vary by 6 hours every year, and the date
will clap back one every four years.

One needs to account for differences from Universal Time as well.
This year's equinox will be on September 23 in Europe, but on the
22nd in Canada because the moment is being read to two different
clocks.