Freedom - oops! -
French president Jacques Chirac, is to ask parliament to pass a law banning Islamic headscarves and other religious insignia in French state schools. If the law is passed, from next year students will not be allowed to wear headscarves, Jewish skull caps or large(*) Christian crosses.
via the
Guardian and
the Beeb. This reminds me of, amongst other things, an article by former Liberal MP Jackie Ballard, who spent time in Iran and came to embrace wearing the chador as
liberating:
I wonder how the media might have treated Ann Widdecombe [NB: one of her nicknames is Doris Karloff] or Blair's so-called 'babes' if all women MPs here wore the uniform of the chador. Perhaps then the women in Parliament would be taken more seriously as professional politicians doing a job, not as fat or thin women in grey or pink suits. Maybe then I would not have been described by some witty journalist as having 'a good face for radio' or be told by the late Auberon Waugh that I was 'too fat to be an MP'.
A number of women I know have expressed an interest in anonymity and freedom obtained through wearing a
hijab, though none have tried it.
(
*) And on an entirely puerile note, how big is a
large cross anyway?
gwen :
god/atheism,
politics :
liberty, equality, fraternity :
To filibuster is to babble on and on. (It's actually a legislative term; Senators will filibuster, sometimes deep into the night , in order to kill a bill.) Thus, our blue canary is squawking endlessly (but tunefully) to the inanimate objects in the room. And filibuster sings well.*
Several
They Might Be Giants fans have been analyzing
that song that "always makes me happy" for about a year now. I'm sure they are not the first. And, certainly,
not the last.
*Come to think of it, from a distance,
the Capitol dome does look like a birdcage.
Adriana :
fluffy :
I don't feel thirty :
MP3 recordings of Daniel Pinchbeck at Palenque Norte 2003, a Burning Man theme camp. Author of
Breaking Open the Head: a psychedelic journey into the heart of contemporary shamanism, Pinchbeck said of this talk, "I was very proud of this event ... in a quite intense headspace at the time... think I put a lot of information together, and presented the core of what I am hoping to do in the next book."
adam :
living :
Emit Time: 2012...A Change in How We Experience Time :
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