Legal matters (1/3)

WEAPONS BLUNDER IN CARCASSONNE
In this type of case, it is more interesting and equitable to try and find who made a mistake in the chain of command rather than to sack a rifleman who is neither responsible (even indirectly) nor guilty. This prevents personnel disorganization and loss of motivation. Surely, we’re not about to terminate the Chief of the armed forces, the President of the Republic, each time a blunder’s been made at levels so far off that he can only be totally unaware of them …

PRISON OVERCROWDING
France has been condemned by the European Court of Justice because of its chronic prison overcrowding. A just and equitable step for the prisoners would be to reduce the ends of sentences served proportionately to prison overcrowding so as to quickly adjust the number of available places to the number of prisoners. In concrete terms, a prisoner who has served 8 years out of 10 would be free if there’s a 20% shortfall of (decent) prison places. Alternatively, s/he could finish his/her sentence under judicial supervision or wear an electronic bracelet at home. This kind of adjustment could take place twice a year, at Christmas/New Year (symbol of renewal) and on Bastille Day (symbol of justice owed by the State to all citizens). This measure would not exclude investing in the building of new prisons following European standards.

IMMIGRATION / INTEGRATION
At the risk of being called old-fashioned, I wish to point out that there are two prerequisites for two groups of human beings, locals and immigrants, to intermingle:
1. They should speak at least one common language so that they can communicate, hence understand each other and negotiate.
2. They should agree on a number of common values (Republican secularity here, managerial capitalism there, religion somewhere else). We also note that, historically, it is when jobs are plentiful that immigrants are welcomed.
We can always kid ourselves with the do-gooder approach. Reality is different.
Note. I am married to a foreigner. I taught her my tongue and helped her acculturation to my country’s values. She studied successfully and found a job. This, however, presupposed that she had a strong desire to integrate and share in the national collective movement. Not to worry, she enriched, rather than lost, her personality! Indeed, it’s all pretty straightforward …

CLANDESTINE IMMIGRATION
I wonder what all those Africans who endure all manner of hardships and who stake their lives to get to Europe think they will find there. Don’t they know that, if they survive, either they will be detained in camps before being sent back home, or they will live in fear and clandestine misery? Are they informed through publicity films and news reports in their country of origin? Or else, are they victims of the European equivalent of the Hollywood syndrome whereby immigrants to the United States expect an easy life in California (big car, swimming pool, love, good job) true to the image portrayed by the American TV series? In short, is the image that Europe is projecting that of an inaccessible mirage for Africans?

ONE-STOP-SHOPS / LEGAL SIMPLIFICATIONS
If the State wishes to avoid being perceived as needlessly heavy, or even tyrannical, ways must be found to lighten the pressure placed by the myriad administrations onto the citizens and corporations, 95% of whom are, on the whole, honest. In any case, fraudulent individuals and corporations will always find the loopholes, whether in content or form, of the most specific and best formulated set of laws and regulations. Overpolicing is totally unnecessary! Hence, it is time honest people’s energies were liberated. Here are several proposals:
1. Set up one-stop-shops, e.g. taxes + Ursaff + Anpe + CPAM + etc. for corporations: entrepreneurs should not have to learn the various administrations’ trade as prerequisite to exercising an occupation. It is administrations, that are expected to understand each other (otherwise, how can one ask SMEs, VSEs, and “auto-entrepreneurs” to do so!), that ought to go towards corporations and manage their various contributions, while justifying them!
2. Simplify the legal codes and regulations. I propose that one should set up and regularly update a Book of a hundred pages or so (but no more) which would bring together all that an adult citizen is expected to know about the law (whereas today, s/he is penalized for not knowing the mass of codes which judges themselves do not master! …). Should there be any offense, if the alleged wrongdoer has complied with the Book of laws in content and form, s/he is presumed to have acted in good faith, which means one can alleviate the penalties, sanctions, and procedures!
This Book would be taught to high school pupils at the end of their school career.
Note: I wish to point out that the Hebraic, multicentury-old civilization is essentially based on Moses’ Ten Commandments – talk about success! As for the Christian civilization, 2000 years old and currently involving 2 billion individuals, it is based on 4 rather short Gospels which overlap considerably… There’s a long list of civilization-founding texts. How could we boast of our mere 200-years old Republic? Will it still exist in 400 years’ time, despite all our legal codes adding up to several thousand pages? We should rather think about the philosophy behind the concept of Republican rights and how to transmit it, instead of causing the proliferation of legal texts that constitute a rather indigestible and disparate set.
3. Effect a complete, regular clean-up of the legal codes (certain laws are outdated) in order to make accessible, if not the whole, then at least the essentials of our laws and regulations to healthy and normal minds.

SIMPLIFYING THE LAWS
One could imagine a hierarchy-based, interlocking system of the set of behaviors and laws that an individual is expected to adhere to throughout his/her social life; compliance to content and form would be enough to establish good faith, hence bring about leniency on the part of judges, the lessening of potential penalties, the rapidity of procedures, a lightened load for the courts, the increase of citizens’ and corporations’ freedom and autonomy in a maze of laws and regulations. Here are a few examples:
Children: behavior at school, child-child and child-adult relationships
Adolescents: in addition, behavior relating to drugs, tobacco, lawful sexual relationships, law enforcement
Ordinary, adult citizen: voting behavior, Book of French laws (see previous item), Book of European laws
Corporations: the entrepreneur’s Book, Book of taxes
Lawyer: detailed legal codes
Note. Books would be guides that summarize within a hundred-odd pages the essentials of the laws that a council of eminent jurists, tasked with drawing up each Book, would want to see adhered to in content and form.
These experts would be responsible for the relevance of the Books which would be widely distributed in bookshops, on the Internet, in public places, and which would be taught.

SIMPLIFYING THE LEGAL CODES
In the world of computer science, we know that the simplest programs are those with the fewest bugs (design issues bring about execution errors). In the art of rhetoric, there are only 2 or 3 main parts to a synthesis. In the same way, in the Tax Code, one central idea is damaged by numerous exceptions, and a multitude of loopholes are provided to dishonest individuals and corporations. A well-balanced corpus, acceptable to all, will arise only out of a simplicity-based rewriting effort rather than management by exception.

THE COLONNA CASE
High-ranking judges who deny the obvious, that their inquiry is incomplete, that they are incorrect, biased … It’s a complete DISGRACE for the Republic! A collapsing world, yet another mental universe to be reconstructed …

THE LEVIATHAN STATE
Republicans live convinced that the State is governed by reason. Except that excesses lie in wait – they’re already in place. For instance, this week, Yvan Colonna has been sentenced to 22 years in jail without any evidence and despite numerous testimonies clearing him. Some are saying that this was to safeguard the reputation of the police and of anti-terrorist justice, and of their leader, the Home Secretary who became President of the Republic; this hypothesis will remain without proof.
What is going to happen when all our movements are electronically put on file and centralized, should an unscrupulous government come to power? The winning triptych for democracy remains a Parliament-controlled government, independent and determined press media, and trained and informed citizens.

THE VIGUIER CASE
It’s rather odd that the lead of murder by the lover, linked to the resentment caused by the woman’s refusal to leave her husband and her children for good, should not have been followed more closely. The police preferred to hound the ideal culprit, i.e. the husband having problems with his wife!
In fact, are we not here witnessing, through no scheduling coordination whatsoever, the third serious miscarriage of justice in France within 2 months, after the Colonna case and the clearing of Judge Burgeaud in the Outreau case? Intellectual leaders of this State, please answer this question: who, which ordinary citizen, is now going to feel secure in this country, given such (in)justice?

DNA TESTING
Fraudulent cases of family grouping probably concern only a hundred or so children a year. Why should it thus be necessary to mobilize Parliament and the political debate for several months for this rather marginal phenomenon, with responses on the borderline of ethics? Surely there are more important and topical issues (e.g. economic, industrial, and environmental).

CURFEW
People’s education also forms part of the mission of our National Police, even if, obviously, one should be flexible in application. Surely, it is not outrageous to ask young potential predelinquents to adhere to formative discipline!

PLANT SIT-INS + THREATS OF DESTRUCTION
1. I fully understand the distress of employees who have lost their job and who, in the current structural and economic context of the labor market, will not find another anytime soon.
2. However, do the staff who threaten to blow up their plant, and even to pollute streams, have any idea of the legal consequences that will befall them (damage repayment, possible jail sentences)?
3. In order to protect them against themselves (as in the case of maniacs), and to protect property and people, it is best to use strength to intervene in this type of case.

GAY MARRIAGES
The reasons that lead to the choice of a partner are so many and so irrelevant to morality: education, culture, encounters, personal history, genetic prediposition, historical context, etc.
Since the dawn of humanity, poets have celebrated the beauty of love without ever managing to exhaust all explanations. So let’s be modest. In the name of complexity, and of a certain beauty linked to complexity, I believe in the free choice of partners and, in particular, in gay marriages.

ABORTIONS
I firmly believe that anonymous births followed by possibly registered adoptions ought to be legally pursued and encouraged by social services and families, as in the United States (see the movie JUNO) ->law “JUNO”. This would provide a meaningful alternative to most abortions.

FACEBOOK GIANT-SIZE APERITIFS
Let the young people have their say! The risks are really rather limited …
Stop a sad world governed by and for fearful old people!

FEAR SOCIETY
We regularly hear on TV that adolescents rape one another, that priests are pedophiles, that the suburbs are violent, that burglaries are frequent, that teachers have no authority, that the young get drunk, that there is no employment, etc. The net outcome is that people are afraid, suspect one another, and that polls turn out extreme results. As far as you yourself are concerned, have you experienced any one of these misfortunes in the last 10 years?
Television is a fantastic soundbox which, if poorly conceived, brings considerable bias into our vision of the world. Let us rather think about what we wish to transmit our children: distrust or enthusiasm when faced with a new world carried by information technologies, ecology, new forms of energy, biomedicine? Trust in others and the future, or neurotic dread? I worry that many young minds have been distorted by our fear society. Our country will have to face the consequences in the current climate of global competition …

TEACHER TRAINING IN PRIMARY/SECONDARY EDUCATION
Contrary to what the teachers who are specialists in a discipline claim, a bachelors’ degree (i.e., a “licence” or 3-year degree) in that discipline is more than enough. On the other hand, teachers these days are recruited with i) utter ignorance of the realities of the classroom, and ii) obvious gaps in psychology and pedagogy. Hence, I would strongly suggest that one should establish a master’s cycle between the third and fifth year of study, devoted to alternation training: class observation, practicum for lessons + pedagogy and psychology theory classes. The competitive exam for entry into the teaching profession would be based equally on those subjects of the bachelor’s special field and psycho/pedagogy at the end of the psycho/pedagogy master’s.

MANIPULATIONS
In French politics, the search for truth and the best possible policy in absolute terms has been replaced by the manipulative and counter-manipulative presentation of political options supported by different constituencies of opinion. The point is that when everything is equivalent to everything else, nothing is worth anything! The world of lawyers represents the end of democracy, a kind of its own degeneration …

THE AUTHORITY NECESSARY IN THE EDUCATION WORLD
We need to get back to basics in our schools and community living. Even if the castrating or divinely ordained type of authority is no longer relevant in 21st century France, even if it is essential to explain, to support, and to help bright and independent people grow, the point is still that there must exist some kind of minimal authority, of the flexible, guiding type that helps protect us from our worst excesses and take responsibility for our choices.
Anarchic freedom is but the tyranny of all!

RIGHTS AND OBLIGATIONS
In France, the Unions are currently spinning workers’ brains. The latter are now well aware of their rights but should not forget their obligations.

THE ISSUE OF THE ROMA PEOPLE
These are people who refuse a sedentary lifestyle and live on nobody really knows what (benefits, small jobs, trafficking, thieving). It’s the obsolete nomadic economic model that is criticized by the sedentary rather than some kind of racism towards foreigners.
In the Pope’s ideal world, where it’s all sweetness and light, and in which we would all love to live, it’s rather awkward to stigmatize a portion of the population. In the real world, however, everybody is not everybody’s equal, and some are more deserving than others. It is the duty of the Church to provide the long-term utopian goal. The government’s job is to set the tone, to provide concrete goals, and to map out the course to reach them.

BREAKING THE TABOO SURROUNDING STREAMING IN JUNIOR AND SENIOR SECONDARY SCHOOLS
The main problem of many secondary school pupils is that they can’t keep up with a curriculum that’s too hard and uninteresting for them because they can’t see its practical applications in their current or future everyday life. Hence all the frustration and violence we witness.
Moreover, people are not equal, whether in terms of genetics, culture, or social class. To think in egalitarian terms might be generous and ambitious, but it’s also utopian. Quite simply, it just does not work! Teachers at the chalk face know this well.
Thus, why could we not imitate other countries (e.g. England) and institute streaming in our schools? Pupils would be placed in streamed classes per semester by the class council according to their results. In those classes, the curriculum would be more or less broad, more or less detailed, but always designed in such a way that pupils could link successively semesters of different levels. The idea would thus be to design successive courses that build on the elements of knowledge and understanding acquired in the lower classes; the knowledge acquired in the higher classes would become “optional” developments that are not essential.
For instance, the history curriculum in Year 7 (the first year of junior secondary school in the UK) would have two levels: at the lower level, only the Egyptians and Hebrews would be dealt with, and at the higher level, the Greeks and Romans would be added. The lower level maths curriculum would not deal with rational numbers but with decimal and real numbers only; a lower level biology curriculum would deal with human biology rather than geology or zoology; a lower level French curriculum would not deal with foreign or medieval literature, etc.
Another possibility would be to adjust staff involvement (to bring about savings): in the higher level classes, there would be greater discipline owing to a more positive attitude toward the school institution and greater facility to understand the new knowledge, hence a lesser need for authority-wielding and teaching members of staff.

COMMUNITY-BASED POLICING
The British Bobbies are highly successful, a real institution; they constitute the key to fighting against the uncivil behavior and petty crime that make life hell in the sensitive suburbs.
The Bobbies do not carry arms and let it be known; they are identified by their high, rounded hat which is equivalent in France to a uniform in a different color. This way, there’s little chance of their being attacked with firearms; if the risk exists, special armed forces will intervene. However, they had better be athletic and in good physical condition: long- and short-distance racing, kicks-and-punches fighting – this will prove useful in case of aggressiveness and helps them earn respect.
In their patrols, the Bobbies are engaged in a show of deterrent presence, intelligence, first-level mediation, conflict resolution, and fight against minor offences.
We need to remember that it is the combination of numerous and constant antisocial behaviors with a slow legal system, costing a good deal of money (paying lawyers) and time, which darkens our fellow citizens’ life.

COMMUNITY-BASED POLICING
The British Bobbies are highly successful, a real institution; they constitute the key to fighting against the uncivil behavior and petty crime that make life hell in the sensitive suburbs.
The Bobbies do not carry arms and let it be known; they are identified by their high, rounded hat which is equivalent in France to a uniform in a different color. This way, there’s little chance of their being attacked with firearms; if the risk exists, special armed forces will intervene. However, they had better be athletic and in good physical condition: long- and short-distance racing, kicks-and-punches fighting – this will prove useful in case of aggressiveness and helps them earn respect.
In their patrols, the Bobbies are engaged in a show of deterrent presence, intelligence, first-level mediation, conflict resolution, and fight against minor offences.
We need to remember that it is the combination of numerous and constant antisocial behaviors with a slow legal system, costing a good deal of money (paying lawyers) and time, which darkens our fellow citizens’ life.

WHERE IS FRANCOIS-MARIE BANIER’ BILLION EUROS?
François-Marie Banier sucked 1 000 000 000 Euros from Mme Bettencourt senior. The threat of a lawsuit has corresponded to coordinated media frenzy against first, Minister Eric Woerth, and then, President Nicolas Sarkozy, regarding the Roma case.
So, here’s my hypothesis (obviously to be verified…): with all that money, François-Marie Banier bought respectability certificates from his freemasons friends, who in turn activated the media connected to their coterie in order to carry out a coordinated smear campaign against certain government members non affiliated to the free mason sect.
The method involves attacking sick animals (suffering in the polls!), like a pack of scavenging hyenas; it is similar to the social Darwinism doctrine (neo-fascist) that the free mason sect is interested in and has taken over.

ABSOLUTE POVERTY
If one measures poverty according to a relative baseline of revenue compared to the rest of the population, one ends up with the following absurdity: a couple with two children who have less than 2,000 Euros/month is under the poverty line. Our grand-parents would laugh bitterly, and so would citizens in developing countries.
It would be much better to publish statistics relating to absolute poverty (measured according to a basket of essential goods), which would enable governments to concentrate on the at-risk population. Otherwise, the minute the majority of people thrive, the relative poverty figures increase automatically.
This would explain the absurd figure of 13% (1/8) of the French population under the poverty line (relative poverty, that is) as currently defined.

DOUBLE CULTURE
No, immigrants will not feel comfortable in France if they know nothing of a minimum of key features of French culture (democracy, secularity, Human Rights – of both men and women! – spoken language).
I advocate the notion of double culture: knowing one’s origins + one’s country of residence. I’m not talking about straightforward assimilation involving forgetting one’s origins because that would result in totally destabilized immigrants – individuals and groups.

GENIUS OR HARD WORK?
There exists in France a widespread myth, prevalent among both students and teachers, according to which we need a number of geniuses who stand out from the anonymous crowd, if possible without working – the whole idea of innate abilities. In contrast, the Germans thrive on the collective hard work of most individuals. If one considers the outcome of the 3 Franco-German wars of 1870-71, 1914-18, 1939-45 (if France had not enjoyed the support of powerful allies), the German method appears to be superior to the French one.
Hence, I conclude that 1) to organize society, it is better to have a hard-working community rather than a few lay-about, work-shy geniuses, and 2) as with culture, genius is something that needs to be maintained, developed, cultivated through very hard work!

NETWORK OF COLLECTIVE STRUCTURES FOR THE ROMA
We’ve tried giving the Roma individual earnings in cash or in kind to enable them to start a new, settled lifestyle in Romania. The attempt has failed as a result of the lack of economic culture and of settlement practice.
We could try collective farmers’ structures (such as phalansteries, kolkhozy, sovkhozy, kibbutzim) that would help them get organized and send their children to school. Should the Roma wish to continue travelling, they could migrate from kibbutz to kibbutz within Romania, or even abroad. The Roma kibbutzim network would be financed by the European Community and jointly coordinated by the European Community and Romania.