HNY 2019

2019✨

PDress

Topshop kills it: a beautiful party dress!

source: The Guardian

Acte VII

Been gleaning some interesting insights today, as
different French media prepare for what might be
another day of Gilets Jaunes protests.

There was a Bonnets Rouges protest in 2013 - also against
an ecotax - which resulted in the government caving in and
removing the tax. This was a tax on heavy truck loads and people
in Brittany destroyed the gantries meant to identify them. Indeed,
the 'red caps' are a reference to an even earlier tax revolt under
Louis XIV, who wanted to tax formal sealed paper to help finance
a war... In short, tax revolts go back in French political culture.

This helps explain, to me at least, the great tolerance to street violence
expressed, as the population continues to sympathize with the
protestors.

Analysts report heightened conflictuality in the psychologie of the French
electorate, a desire for revenge to the 'symbolic violence of decision-makers'.

As well, many are surprised by the horizontal nature of the protests:
not a party because not organized, not a movement because without
a charismatic leader, just collective action in the entire country.

https://www.nouvelobs.com/societe/20181213.OBS7093/gilets-jaunes-la-violence-politique-devient-elle-une-strategie-payante.html

https://www.liberation.fr/debats/2018/12/22/la-lecon-des-gilets-jaunes-aux-gilets-rouges_1699024

Significant

There is a hard Core of Yellow Vests protesters in France apparently not giving
up for this Saturday, New Years and beyond. What would it take to wind the movement down?
According to organizers, a significant reduction in the costs of living essentials,
and the possibility of launching citizen initiatives (on the Swiss model).

https://www.huffingtonpost.fr/2018/12/27/que-prevoient-les-gilets-jaunes-pour-leur-acte-vii-et-la-suite_a_23628068/?utm_hp_ref=fr-homepage

Xmas Cheer

Santa gifted me from the Chelsea Market, NYC this year;
it smells absolutely wonderful, and I cannot wait to
use it.

Santa, you are funny . The Best Christmas!

Écrire

One of the surprising outputs from the gilets jaunes
disturbances - a cultural production, if you will - is an
account by writer Gregoire Bouillier of what it was like to be
part of the December 8 events on the Champ- Élysées.
Pretty brutal, it turns out.

It is a longish piece, published by Libération. Below:

...

                                                                                           ...

...

So what if this was how it actually happened? Could it be that simple? Could it be today? All of a sudden, I feel myself becoming totally paranoid. In a flash, I see the images of the students arrested at Mantes-la-Jolie and forced to spend hours kneeling with their hands on their heads under the armed surveillance of the CRS (Compagnies républicaines de sécurité) looking very much like Pinochet’s soldiers. Darth Vader for real. Damn it! I suddenly envision the Champs-Élysées transformed into an Elysian camp of prisoners. Only difference in a letter, all told. By a thread. Good God. The worst is possible, here, right away, now. I tell myself that many worsts are possible. They are there, palpable, waiting to pounce, on all sides. From the powers that be; but from the street as well. Because there are occult forces at work on the Fields. I can see. I am not blind. Shit-hole. I need a moment to calm down. I start to wander among the participants, with explosions in the background, intrusive cavalcades, sporadic chaos. I feel like ‘Fabrice à Waterloo’ (Stendhal, bereft of an overview). Find myself ridiculous. What am I doing here? Yellow Vest protesters are chanting ‘Macron resignation! Macron resignation!’ One is howling ’50 million to save the Banks and nothing to save the people?’ He is applauded. All around me, exasperation is mounting. It is principally Macron that is the focus of all the hate. He is clearly a rallying cry. The appointed whipping boy. The punching-ball meant for all. The king whose head must be severed. What the heck, we are in France since 1789. One still believes in the monarchy in these parts, in order to replay the primal revolutionary scene. Even Macron is a believer. He most of all, maybe. Although he is but an image. He is but a face. Decidedly more explicit than many before him, more frank in fact, because one finds with him a morphology typical of today’s dominant class, a type of rigidity which makes him stand out immediately, a smooth and disincarnated fixity in his features which recalls a world essentially dead, as before the prosperous bourgeois would show off their large bellies thus signaling  enviable and cynical opulence, yes, but the real problem isn’t him. It never is a problem with a person. Never that simple. Word would get around if that were the truth. Presidents come and go but it is ever the same lot who have it all. Ever the same who rub their hands. The obscenity remains. It even grows, from its own internal rhythm, nice and quiet.

translation: doxa-louise                                                                                                            ...

https://www.liberation.fr/debats/2018/12/20/la-traversee-de-paris-des-gilets-jaunes-par-gregoire-bouillier_1698562

                                            *     *     *

NY, NY.

Lyse is on her first trip to NYC. Go to the Met, I told
her. This is her first FB post!! 😹

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

My current favorite New Yorker cartoon:

Passages

https://www.nouvelobs.com/planete/20181222.OBS7542/la-fonte-de-l-arctique-s-accelere-14-000-tonnes-d-eau-par-seconde.html

Cuter

Appalled

The group 'apalled economists' has an interesting article
in today's Libération. Translation to come...

https://www.liberation.fr/debats/2018/12/21/la-devise-liberte-concurrence-finance-a-remplace-celle-de-liberte-egalite-fraternite_1699001


                                           *     *     *

source: Libération Opinion December 21, 2018

translation: doxa-louise

The slogan ‘liberty, competition, finance’ has replacedthat of ‘liberty, equality, fraternity’

The neoclassical regime, in the grips of Finance Capital, focuses on public 
spending, thus making inequalities worse and stoking anger,

according to these ‘appalled economists’.

Opinion. Giving emphasis to trailblazing leadership, the slogan ‘liberty, equality, 

fraternity’ has given way to ‘liberty, competition, finance’. Growing anger became 

inevitable. Response by the powers that be are not up to expectation. Seems the taxpayer 

must from now own assume the costs of higher salaries, a higher supplementation for 

low income earners has been chosen rather than direct action on the minimum wage. 

Same story for overtime, thus acting against creating more jobs. This crisis runs deep. 

One will not be able to get through this without a true re-orientation and thus an altered 

economic doctrine.

Before the French Revolution, those forced to pay taxes were considered ‘vile’,

the nobility being exempt from this. The feeling of fiscal injustice being expressed 

today is a legitimate one. In order to re-establish consent to taxation and thus the public 

sphere (res publica), it is important to get beyond exemption for the rich. Fighting fraud

and tax evasion, re-establishing the ISF (taxation on wealth), going back to a source

taking of 30% on financial revenues and upping taxes on large inheritances: all that is 

possible.

Discourse of untruths

At a more fundamental level, one needs to escape the discourse of untruths on

public spending, social security contributions and the public debt. The size of the

public debt is not catastrophic: the State letting its debt run on, which is in no way 

shocking, more money goes into public coffers (372 billion borrowed in 2017) than 

goes out (308 billion of that capital to be reimbursed and 40 billion in interests), which 

permits financing investments for future generations. The rise in public indebtedness

(close to 100% of GDP as opposed to 25% in 1982) is not explicable by out-of-control

spending, but rather by policies that have choked off activity through austerity measures, 

multiplied by gifts to the richest and then provoking the finncil crisis of 2008.

The strategy used by leadership consists of ‘starving the beast’: they argue for deficits 

and debts - which they sometimes worsen - to reduce the Social state and transfer to 

private interests (pension funds, insurance companies, building and civil engineering 

companies...) retirement, health, public services.

«Public spending accounts for 56% of GDP». Constantly waved around, this number 

hints that there is only 44% left to the private sector, which is false. Public spending 

(1 330 billion) clocks in at 56% of GDP ( 2 300 billion). But this is not a part. Public 

spending has two major components. Public services: civil servants contribute to GDP 

(375 billion) and their productions (police, hospital, teaching...), freely available, are 

paid for through taxation. This represents 17% of GDP, a number which has been stable 

for the last 35 years which thus can increase to meet pressing needs. The second component, 

benefits (retirement, family allowances, unemployment...) and social transfers (medical 

visits and drugs reimbursed...), is much more weighty (590 billion).

Far from being an ‘expense’ for households, it augments their incomes and sustain their 

consumption with respect to the private sphere.

The social State does much to reduce inequality: from 1 to 8 between the most poor 

20% and the 20% richest for primary revenues ( salaries, revenue from assets...), it

goes to with direct taxation, then to 3 thanks to public services and allowances. In certain 

countries, education, retirement or health are more privatized. Public spending and 

hard deductions are weaker, but private deductions (insurances, retirement funds...) 

are higher. An the private is non-egalitarian and often more expensive. America spends 

on health 18% of GDP as opposed to 12% in France, toward a life expectancy 3 years less.

Diminishing the Social State

One can see the wisdom of diminishing on certain public expenses, of which the blind 

help to enterprises which have not permitted the uptake of investment, and whose impact on employment is negligeable if not negative when one also considers (which is rarely done) the recessionary effect entailed, to finance them, by cuts in order jobs.

It also makes sense to help certain independent workers and certain ailing enterprises 

or to reduce certain taxes (the value added tax on collective transport as a prime example). 

But care must be taken not to use the crisis to further diminish the Social State. 

We need more resources for the ecological transition, the EHPAD (homes for the elderly), 

hospitals and schools. France is one of the countries where the rate of poverty among 

the elderly is at its lowest. We should be proud of tis. But to keep this lovely system in 

place, we will need tomorrow to keep paying in with goof humor, accept that the revenues 

of the active population progress less slowly than global wealth, because the part of the 

retired in the population will go up. Government is planning the contrary. It wishes to 

cap pensions at 14% of GDP, which will imply a substantial lessening (over 20% looking 

to 2035) relative to the revenues of the actives.

One needs to stop opposing public and private. A good part of private activity is made 

possible by public spending (consumption by the retired, etc). The economy is not a 

zero sum game. During the Thirty Glorious (...post-war years), public spending and 

salaries both went up regularly, this created more activity, in such a way in fact that 

public spending as a percentage of GDP went up very little. It is this virtuous circle we 

must create anew.

Societies of wage-earners

We live in wage-earner societies. For the most part, the outputs of enterprises, and 

hence their activities, depend on salaries direct and indirect (retirement incomes and 

allowances payed by deductions). Salaries are not the enemy, but the friend of employment.

Neoliberalism accentuates the grip of financial capital on enterprises. Holding down 

salaries permits pumping up dividends, stock buy-backs and fusion-acquisitions (for 

the most part in foreign countries), to the detriment of investment and employment. 

Large companies are held hostage by this short-term-leaning finance and often autocratic 

upper management bathing in excess (Carlos Ghos unfortunately is no exemption).

It is high time to leave behind the archaic liberal view of the corporation which only 

recognizes the shareholder, and denies that the workers are part and parcel of the whole.

Flipping perspectives

In imposing their views,  liberal proponents have methodically strengthened the power 

of finance and organized social and environmental dumping through free trade:

compressions in salaries and allowances, reduced taxes for the richest and enterprises 

all in the name of ‘attractiveness’. The rules we find for Europe and the Euro amplify 

those of liberal globalization. European countries compete among themselves socially 

and fiscally. The Euro is under-valued for Germany, over-valued for the countries of 

Southern Europe and France. The trade surplus for the Euro Zone is greater than 3% 

of GDP (larger than for China!) which bears witness to a too-weak internal demand.

It is up to France to put forward a reversal of perspective: stop using Europe as a tool to 

dismantle national Social States, propose a growth plan ( more important for countries 

in a surplus position such as Germany) with higher salaries and public spending 

investments (especially on ecology). If this doesn’t sit well with Germany, it must 

propose to countries that might agree( Spain, Italy, Portugal taken together with France, 

represent more than 50% of GDP of the Euro Zone), to break with current european 

rules, and go forward with this reconstruction pact. the demand for equality has doubled 

again in our country. It is a chance worth going for. Neoliberalism runs on inequality. 

It is time to turn the page.

To NYC

B Wings

Below,  short exercise sequence for arms I have
been enjoying for the last few days. Don't know if
it will much help the appearance of my arms, but it gives
a nice tingle to my previously hurt right arm.

Get up from the computer and try it, ladies:



                                  *     *     *

Here, a routine I haven't tried yet but it looks like fun.
Saving it for a rainy/snowy/anything_goes day, when
I am stuck in the house.



Winter begins December 21!

Billionaire

I used to find these ultra high New York buildings
frightening. Actually, it is all very ingenious: there
are empty floors that let the wind through, and thus,
the building doesn't sway and won't collapse...

NY Market

For the numbers:
https://www.journaldemontreal.com/2018/12/19/trump-veut-sauver-la-bourse

GJ FigaroVox

ource: FigaroVox 6/12/2018

author: Coraie Delaume

translation: doxa-louise

YELLOW VESTS: «Macron is tied hand and foot

by the European Union»

FIGAROVOS/OPINION - For Coralie Delaume, the demands of the

Gilets Jaunes may be quite legitimate, but no changes will be possible 

without putting the workings of the European Union in question.

By the current terms of treaties, no member State is free to forge

independent economic and commercial policies, she explains.

Coralie Delaume is an essayist and has just published Le Couple

franco-allemand n’existe pas (Michalon, October 2018). She also

keeps a blog, since 2011, L’Arène nue.

Upping the SMIC (minimum wage) and retirement incomes, taxing very 

large corporations, protecting French industry, ending government cut-backs 

and reopening public services: these are the demands of the Gilets Jaunes 

just published in the press. Re-establishing true democracy is also a recurrent demand.

Europe as an issue is notably absent from themes and slogans. Yet

none of the demands made explicit is possible within the current European 

Union, in the Common Market and Eurozone, which create the framework

for national policies. National governments are finally little more than consenting 

mid-ways of the EU, representatives satisfied with powerlessness.

The european Union is more than a mere international

organization

Democracy is impossible within the framework of the European Union

The European Union is more than a mere international organization. It is not 

international but supranational. Jurists point out that the Court of Justice of the 

communities has ‘constitutionalized the treaties’ by way of two decisions in 1963 

and 1964. In other words, the Court has created a new legal order and laid the basis of protofederalism without consulting the peoples concerned - without even a notice - 

of the coming into being of a quasi-Constitution.

The French were eventually consulted but... forty years later. The 2005 referendum 

on the European Constitutional Treaty came down to asking voters to make legitimate 

a posteriori a long standing situation. Which is one of the reasons why the French ‘no’

(and the Dutch ‘no’) were ignored, and why the text was re-introduced as the «Lisbon 

Treaty». To make good on the election decision, one would have needed to admit that 

one had validated a process of ‘furtive federalization’ for Europe, and gone back on part 

of the road already travelled. 

The European Parliament isn’t one

Where the quasi-constitutional transformation of treaties started early, the process

of removing democracy took the relay. Ending the requirement for unanimity within 

the European Council, for example, aggravated matters. As the German jurist Dieter 

Grimm has explained, this has effectively broken the ‘legitimacy chain’ between the 

peoples and the Council wherein the essential link was national elected governments. 

Given the end of unanimity, a State can very well see applied to itself a law which had 

been explicitly rejected by one of the links of its own national will, even if the weight 

of France within the Council grants it immunity from this particular outcome.

To counterbalance the ‘democratic deficit’ within the Community, the Treaty of Lisbon

has given more power to the European Parliament. There is here a problem: this Parliament 

isn’t one. It cannot represent the European People (there aren’t any members) but makes 

do with letting national representatives from twenty-eight States cohabit. Moreover, it 

cannot be, even if it wished, the principle purveyor of Community Law. This role belongs 

to the Court in Luxembourg, putting out directives in a steady stream, as jurisprudence and 

without consulting with anyone. Finally, the European Parliament has no means of altering 

the treaties even where these contain elements of economic policy. A left-wing or 

sovereignty-leaning majority could be sent to Strasbourg and nothing would change. 

Whatever happens at the 2019 European elections, the jurisprudence package made 

up of the treaties and Court Judgements will continue to impose more free trade, more 

austerity, more competition.

No reorientation of economic policy is possible within the framework of the Common 

Market and the Euro

The various European treaties are the ‘economic constitution’ of Europe. Their over-riding 

position explains why the economic policy coming out of France has been the same 

since 1980, although the Head of State position has been held by men of quite different 

ideas. As Michael Michéa has put it, we are dealing with ‘ever the same change’, a 

succession which appears different but never is. Within the European Union, voting

never changes anything.This is why the ex-commissioner Vivian Reding could say: ‘One 

needs to slowly but surely understand that there are no more domestic national policies.’

Within the European Union, voting never changes anything.

The governments of member countries possess very few instruments to forge

economic policy. No willed industrial policies are possible because the treaties 

forbid ‘impeding competition’ with state intervention. No protectionist commercial 

policy is possible because commercial policy is the ‘exclusive domain’ of the Union. 

Nothing can be done on the exchange rate because this is looked after by the European 

Central Bank. Finally, no budgetary policy is allowed because the countries within the 

one currency are expected to use ‘convergence criteria’, specifically the infamous - 

arbitrary - 3% public deficit rule. Moreover, since 2010 and within the calendar called 

the ‘European Semester’, the Commission oversees meticulously the elaboration of 

national budgets.

Given these operating conditions, national governments are left with only two tools:

tax policy and the ‘cost of labour’.

With respect to taxes, they generally choose to lighten those on easily mobile Capital 

and augment these on social classes that cannot escape taxation. In 1986 was established 

the principle of the ‘free circulation of capital’ within the Common Market. 

since that time, Capital has been free to engage in veritable blackmail on every State 

by threatening to move to a neighboring country. Member States are thus engaged in a 

frenetic fiscal competition with some (Luxembourg, Ireland) opting to become fiscal 

paradises and living off the possibilities for tax evasion they offer multinationals.

Remuneration guidelines and labour law are some of the favorite

themes of the supranational level

As for remuneration and labour law, these are some of the favorite

themes of the supranational level. To recognize this, one but needs to read the

framework documents incessantly produced by the European Commission,

from the ‘rules for employment’ to ‘annual overview of growth’ without forgetting 

the ‘recomandations of the Council’ drafted every year in the context of the European 

Semester. All of the changes to labour laws having been put forward in member 

countries, from the Jobs Act in Italy to the El KHomri Law in France, were prescribed 

in one or the other of these heavy documents.

Finally, the principles of ‘free movement of persons’ and ‘open provision of service’

within the common Market favor lower social coverage. Despite great differences in 

salary levels between one country and the other, these liberties put all salaried employees 

in Europe in competition one with the other. They make possible a whole series of practices one might call social dumping, the best known among these being recourse to

piece work. For the countries constrained by the Euro, this is all the more serious: 

not being able to devalue their currency to make themselves more competitive, they 

are forced to practice ‘internal devaluation’, hence to making salaries go down.

Why have a succession of French governments worked toward the building 

of such an Europe?

The use of traditional Marxist categories helps us make sense of current events. If, as 

Jérôme Sainte-Marie has argued, the Gilets Jaunes movement brings back to fashion 

class conflict, the latter, in fact, had never disappeared. The Europe of markets and 

currency is a class-based Europe. It will try to erode ceaselessly payment for work 

and destroy all redistribution tools, in particular public services, arguing for ‘ openness to competition’ on the one hand, and ‘overseeing of public spending’ and ‘debt resorption’ on the other.

As this is often the case in History, this class politics works very well through an 

‘occupation regime’ helping the governing class avoid responsibility and/ to give over

to someone stronger than they are responsibility in enforcing a certain Order. 

Clearly occupation stricto sensu, by a foreign power having invaded the territory 

militarily, is of course not possible, the post national lot of French elites has elaborated

modalities for a soft occupation. The ex-president of the Commission José Manuel 

Barroso liked to say of the European Union that it was a’non imperial empire’, an

expression that properly suggests that the aggregation of territories to the Empire had 

been the work of the economy and the law, and not by force. Once continental 

unification achieved, the rules of the Community kick in to play the roles they need to, 

that of exterior constraint chosen for a regimen of voluntary servitude.

To become masters of their destiny once again, the citizens of France need to 

demand that national sovereignty be returned.

One of the most prominent slogans heard in the Gilets Jaunes demonstrations or

on the roundabouts is «Macron, resign!» Given current conditions, the sacrifice of 

one man would be far from the mark. To become again masters of their destinies, 

the French (and all peoples of Europe) must insist that the European playing cards 

be reshuffled in a thorough fashion and that national sovereignty be returned, another 

name for ‘the rights of peoples to decide’.

And one needn’t fear: the end of the European Union, a contingent set of rules and 

institutions serving private interests, will not be the end of Europe, an old continent, 

nor of the countries that  make it up.

NYC

Been working on slides that explain how New York City
is laid out. So far, not bad. But the problem remains of
giving instructions to a (harried) taxi driver. It will
depend on where the destination actually fronts…

*     *     *

                                                                       *     *     *

https://www.drvoyageur.com/guides/newyork1c.html

Ideas!!

I've been really dragging my feet on Christmas this year.
Was playing with design features last night, and things were
looking bleak:

But this image I found on the net is really lovely. It is my new

desktop.

The star on the tree just pops out. This is how the outer glow tool is meant

to be used!

https://www.videoblocks.com/video/christmas-tree-background-cartoon-christmas-background-with-christmas-tree-and-snow-looping-animation-1y0msgc

Morning After

Some votes require more than a simple majority,
because they are disruptive; 2/3 thirds majority.
They indicate - the forever undecided and madmen
aside - a clear go-ahead with a new direction. Brexit
in the UK should have been one of these (I might
add with a cleaner view of Leave than a load of
money for Health Services, which wouldn't solve
the current health woes of an aging and badly nourished
population, anyway). The Brexit vote on record, in the 52-
48 range, is something of an indifference vote, crafted
by a so-clever debate. The Independance vote in Quebec
is one of those as well, and comes in at an elegant 50-50.

So what to do? Karl Lagerfeld said this morning that, although
he has great sympathy for the Gilets Jaunes, as a foreign national
in France, he doesn't need to have an opinion on all that. Same for
Brexit, I don't need an opinion. For what it's worth, those yellow vests
in the car are a European Union directive. I would hate to think that
the British everyman is loosing his. Europe is an old idea and, initially
only musicians and scientists were free-roving European citizens.
European-level institutions are still nascent, and I hate to think that
nobody at this point is expressing that...

The Error

If the best they can do to down Donald Trump is Stormy
Daniels well, shucks...  History will not be kind. If one of
me exes suddenly appeared on the ballot to run the free
world, I'd be moved and proud of the old scoudrel. A payment
from his lawyer would be invested - wisely - in a makeover.
I might be called to become a public figure, or I might not.
The error, the INSULT, is the confidentiality agreement. I'm
an adult, and would'nt hurt him or his family. Voilà!

The Impostor

                                    *     *     *

B&S

Made my own version, as smaller pancakes,
with cormeal to add crust (just didn't have duck
fat). Very tasty!

New Graphics

Just downloaded Drawpad; been playing with the
free version, which works quite nicely!

The thank you card for my Facebook feed:

*     *     *

Fun fact: Just figured out why that lone glass of wine I had a  while back made

me so drunk. No it wasn't old age. Wine curently holds 13% alcohol; back in the day

when I last had it, it was 7%. I drank in too large gulps, silly old me....

https://www.le-vin-pas-a-pas.com/2-facteurs-qui-expliquent-laugmentation-du-taux-dalcool-dans-les-vins/

Obsession

I read on the Web, this week, that Canada was the most Christmas-obsessed
country on Earth. I wonder what made them say that...

O Decision

Opec has decided on  cut in production.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/opec-production-cut-1.4936688

Not to be be totally out to lunch about the gas at the pump
issue, it is important to understand certain things.

Oil is a commodity, that is, a standard product. A company will
have an agreement with a country to exploit the petrol at a given
location. As well as being extracted, the oil needs to be refined
to function as fuel for a car.

An oil contract can be for an actual physical product, but mostly
it is a derivative contract ie a pure financial instrument, traded
on a commodity exchange. Oil companies use this to minimize
risk in their operations, and (sophisticated) investors trade in either
short-term or future prices on delivery.

On the settlement date or the expiry of futures contract, the buyer and seller have the obligation to make or take delivery of the instrument. In the case of oil, settlement can be carried out in two ways: through the actual delivery of oil into a predefined location or through a cash settlement.
In the case of the NYMEX WTI contract, physical delivery is possible and entails delivery into the oil hub of Cushing, Oklahoma. On the ICE Brent contract, there is no physical delivery but a cash settlement is available - the value of the position is assessed relative to the settlement price and a corresponding financial payment is made.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/energy/2790647/Oil-price-QandA-What-are-oil-futures-and-how-are-they-traded.html

The US Energy Information Administration attributes the price spread between WTI and Brent to an oversupply of crude oil in the interior of North America (WTI price is set at Cushing, Oklahoma) caused by rapidly increasing oil production from Canadian oil sands and tight oil formations such as the Bakken Formation, Niobrara Formation, and Eagle Ford Formation. Oil production in the interior of North America has exceeded the capacity of pipelines to carry it to markets on the Gulf Coast and east coast of North America; as a result, the oil price on the US and Canadian east coast and parts of the US Gulf Coast since 2011 has been set by the price of Brent Crude, while markets in the interior still follow the WTI price. Much US and Canadian crude oil from the interior is now shipped to the coast by railroad, which is much more expensive than pipeline.[7] 

Wikipedia

                                                   *     *     *

Arrangements between oil companies and government correspond to
three general models. The concession model, here in Canada, is accompanied
by tax revenue of various kinds.

https://www.slideshare.net/hzharraz/topic-4-types-of-petroleum-contracts-agreement

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Because of its geographic isolation, the area was settled relatively late in the history of Canada, and its true resource potential was not discovered until after World War II. As a result, Canada built its major manufacturing centres near its historic hydroelectric power sources in Ontario and Quebec, rather than its petroleum resources in Alberta and Saskatchewan. Not knowing about its own potential, Canada began to import the vast majority of its petroleum from other countries as it developed into a modern industrial economy. 

Wikipedia

My BDay

Saturday, December 8, is my birthday. Hoorah!

Oil

What can we expect on oil prices? The outstanding
feature of the present situation is increasing production
by the United States, which is becoming a world leader
once again (and building pipelines to boot).

OPEC is meeting to decide whether they will maintain
their present level of supply; a complicated decision.

https://www.lemonde.fr/economie/article/2018/12/05/energie-nous-entrons-dans-une-periode-d-incertitude-sans-precedent-dans-l-histoire-du-petrole_5392974_3234.html

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https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/06/business/opec-meeting-production-cut.html

True, the US both produces and consumes some 20 million barrels a day, out
of a 100 million world production. All the numbers:

https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/steo/report/global_oil.php

LHC Cern

source: Libération, December 2, 2018

author: Etienne Klein, physicist, director of research for the CEA

(Commissariat à l’énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives, France),

and doctor in the philosophy of science. Director of research for the Laboratoire des recherches sur les sciences de la matière.

translation: doxa-louise

HOPING TO GO FURTHER, THE PARTICLE ACCELERATOR IS TAKING A BREAK

Research on the Higgs boson: the red lines show two high energy photons;

the yellow, the traces left by the particles produced in the collision.

Photo AP. CERN

By causing a collision between very high energy protons,the huge machine at Cern allows one to pull from the quantum void virtual particles, as, in 2012, the Higgs boson. Yet toattain a finer grasp of reality, one needs to get even closer tothe primordial universe.

OPINION. Quantum mechanics is in many respects the craziest theory

offered up by physics. Quite a ways form ordinary notions of the real, it

presents itself through laws that defy the wildest imaginings. It also clashes 

with the ordinary meanings of words by showing that the void is not space

that is empty... It is an inhabited space, impossible to empty absolutely.

It seems to be filled by what we would call matter that is ‘tired’, made up

of particles that are really there but not really existing. They are like ghosts, 

agitated, yes, but not possessing enough energy to truly materialize and thus, 

because of this, that cannot be directly observed. These particles, called ‘virtual’

buzz vegetatively forming a soft ontology, not unlike Sleeping Beauties.

In order to bring them fully into existence, it is necessary to furnish the energy 

missing for their full incarnation ( their ‘mass energy’, in Einsteins parlance, 

that is mc^2). The void itself can in this matter play the role of Prince Charming.

In point of fact, it is more like an impatient banker, agreeing to lend energy to 

virtual particles but on the very strict condition that they pay off the loan very rapidly.

And ‘very rapidly’, here means ‘in less than 10^-21 seconds’. By the terms of this 

drastic contract, virtual particles can emerge from the quantum void by becoming 

real, but with the obligation to go back to it almost instantly to pay off their energy 

debt... almost to the point of annihilation! In other words, these pay dearly their 

foray into radical existence. 

Happily, there is another more efficient way to wake up the interlopers

from the quantum void: it is enough to create a collision, above their heads,

between two high energy particles. These will then offer their energy to the 

void at no cost and, as a result, certain virtual particles will become real

and escape their hiding-place. They who were napping away find their

energy of before and leave the quantum void with a more or less

high energy level.

This is the game plan at this huge machine which is the Large Hadron Collider:

it explores the quantic void by exciting it. Concretely it is a particle collider

of 27 kilometers in circumference, built by the Cern on both sides of the 

French-Swiss border, which permits collisions between protons (notably) with high 
energy. One can guess the level of expertise needed for such an accomplishment:

two beams of minute dimendions, covering in an inverse direction and 11 245 times 
per second a ring of 27 kilometers in circumference at a speed near that of light, entering

into a collision at perfectly determined spots. Spread out all along the ring, over 1 200

dipolar supraconducting magnets 15 meters in length, kept cold in superfluid helium,

with high magnetic properties, while supraconducting cavities for radiofrequency

give to each the level of energy equivalent to the flight of an insect.

It is thanks to this powerful collider that in 2012 the Higgs boson was called from 
the void, then found and identified thanks to two enormous detectors, CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) and Atlas (A Toroidal LHC Apparatus). This discovery is major in that it 
has provoked a reversal in thinking about the notion of mass. In our minds, the notions 
of mass and matter appear as inseperable, as if entangled one with the other: we cannot 
imagine a material object without a mass, and we have trouble imagining mass that 
would not be incarnate in material things, more or less small. Mass thus appears as an 
evident and intrinsic property of material objects.

However, what physicists now know, thanks to the discovery of the Higgs boson 
which had been foreseen in 1964, is that in place of being a primitive property of 
particles that are ‘elementary’, a characteristic that would be carried ‘by itself’, mass 
appears to be no more than a secondary property and indirect because caused by the 
interaction of the said particles with... the quantum void. The latter encompasses a quantum 
field filling all of space, with which these elementary particles, in truth without mass, 
interact more or less strongly, which results in a ‘hampering’ of their movement by 
conferring inertia, as if they had mass.

This conceptual revolution gave proof to what is called ‘ the Standard Model of 
particle physics’. Yet this cannot be the whole story, because this model, wholly quantic

in nature, does not include gravity. This somewhat special interaction is described 
elsewhere in any event, alone in a corner, by Einstein’s General Relativity theory, whose 
principles and concepts are totally different from those of quantum physics, and even in

contradiction with them. This hardly matters, because the domains of application

are quite distinct: they co-exist peacefully, without any one impinging on the other.

Up until now, no experiment has been asked to explore physical systems whose theoretical explanation needed both at once. But, and this is a crucial point, such a separation could 
not have held sway in the primitive universe, when it was of very small size and chock 
full of energy: at that time, the spatial dimensions fo the universe were so minuscule and 
the energies so colossal that matter and space-time overlapped, mixing so utterly that 
one hardly knows what calculations could translate this situation with exactitude.

The LHC will be stopped to do maintenance work and bring improvements. The 
performance of the detectors will be upped so that they may be better equiped to identify 
deviations from the standard model. This could herald the path to a ‘new physics’. There 
will also be work done to prepare the next increase in ‘luminosity’, this parameter important 
to physicists because it determines the number of collisions produced per unit of time: 
the greater the luminosity, the more one can observe rare phenomena.

Once the monster thus tweaked has been restarted, the data harvested will perhaps allow 
one to do a bit of housekeeping on the numerous theoretical starting points trying to describe 
the most dense and hot phases of the primordial universe. Perhaps they will also resolve the excrutiating problem called ‘dark matter’, this matter which seems to produce gravitational 
effects without emitting light. According to certain models, it could be made up of particles 
not yet identified which the LHC could ‘corner’... The down period ont the machine will 
last two years. The quantum void, in turn, will then be in for a visit.

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(Helped me!)

source: Wikipedia

http://skyserver.sdss.org/dr6/en/proj/advanced/spectraltypes/energylevels.asp

http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/quantum/lamb.html

Tax Problem

The French government had planned to change how
fiscality works in France, and tax revenue at the source,
the way it is done here in Canada and many other countries
starting January 1. This might well seem frightening to many.
And since the SMIC - minimum wage at which someone can be
hired calculated on a 35 hour week - becomes the floor at no tax,
the argument for a more generous SMIC becomes pressing.

The twist on it, the government is introducing - at the same time -
the carbon tax by raising the price of fuel by 6.5%. WHAT!?
Everyone knows this tax is meant to help phase out the automobile
by making it too expensive. It's supply and demand theory at the service
of Climate Change. But it would be economic aggression on the
less well-off to just introduce that with no cushion.

Here in Canada, Ontario has refused to administer this tax. The
federal government will impose it on distributors, and taxpayers at lower
rates will be getting checks in the mail. Why go through all this? Because
this kind of tax is meant to change the price of one transportation mode
with respect to another. The day care worker gets to keep her car because
she moves boxes around a lot. The retired supply teacher might decide to
take public transit and walk more. No one is going hungry on this.
And for government, it is a problem in tax design…

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??

I go to my beloved

Black Flag Paris

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The police union has complained that the violence is beyond
what they are meant to deal with.

https://www.lemonde.fr/police-justice/article/2018/12/02/gilets-jaunes-les-syndicats-de-policiers-denoncent-des-violences-insurrectionnelles_5391452_1653578.html

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The demands include  a higher minimum wage, up to 1300 euros per month.
It is currently 1,185. Retirement at 60. The ability to call a referendum.

http://video.lefigaro.fr/figaro/video/quelles-sont-les-revendications-des-gilets-jaunes/5974108733001/

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