Strike!

Marseilles, France: Arcelor Mittal workers demonstrate [Jean-paul Pelissier/Reuters]

Just a very general report from the Guardian to tack onto the photograph…

It is the first wide-ranging general strike since Sarkozy took office and a rare show of unity from France’s main unions. Train drivers, airport staff, teachers, postal workers and tax inspectors joined private-sector employees including bank clerks, car workers, ski-lift operators, supermarket check-out staff and even employees from the company that operates France’s stock exchange.

With lawyers and journalists from state TV and radio also walking out, the various groups are protesting for job protection and better wages and against a raft of Sarkozy’s reforms, ranging from justice to hospital and school reforms, and changes to the running of state TV.

Car workers downed tools over the crisis hitting the French auto industry. The arts world joined the ranks as north Paris’s cutting-edge new arts centre, Le 104, staged its own strike.

“We need to sound a cry of anger,” said François Chereque, head of the moderate CFDT union.

Greve!

From Lenin’s Tomb:

Greek workers are up in arms, the Italian working class is revolting against the Berlusconi administration, protesters in Iceland have deposed their government, and now Sarkozy is the latest to feel the wrath. Today’s strikes and rallies involved millions of workers and took place across the country as this map shows… -Lenin

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IOZ kept me laughing from sometime before 3 am to sometime after 3 am.  Several in a row that were hysterical… starting with this deceptively simple one..

From the Latin

Dear America,

Stimuli.

Orthographically,
IOZ

Can I hear a vote for stimulIE?  Stim u LIE  ?

Somewhere along the way a few weeks ago he mentioned he is a graduate of Oberlin.  As is, he helpfully offered, Michele Malkin.

There is just no accounting…

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Truly no accounting. In other, less gay and blithe, news… Blair “suffers” and thinks of the dead… the soldiers and the Iraqis.  He is an adult convert to Catholicism (he has a foundation for the furtherance of faith in the world)… perhaps as penance he can go (yes, please GO) and  prostrate himself before B16 and.. I don’t know…  Perhaps he can fall into some form of ecstatic suffering, develop stigmata and other wounds… war wounds would be appropriate, figments of his imagination can indulge him in lost and missing limbs, brain damage, vegetative states, PTSD, the abyss of pain, fear and confusion, the haunting –  so he can suffer on.

Such indulgent shits.

For now he bows his head and claims to bear “responsibility”. Troubled, but not haunted.  Such a good boy.  So obedient.

He said that he was not haunted by it “but of course I reflect on it, and am troubled by it, and feel a great sense of responsibility for it”.