Deaf dance

Yesterday, in the Parisian metro, I noticed two teenage girls “talking” to each other. The quotes are because there was no sound –they were signing.

It quickly occurred to me how wonderfully expressive they were. You have to be –a lot of signing is in the facial expressions. And I who, while maybe sometimes partly guessing the nature of an emotion conveyed, could not understand any of their conversation, found myself taken on by their communication dance.

Signing is a wonderfully observing creative language. It has to be, in order to be able to quickly describe something or someone with a few gestures, hinting at a signature trait. And while I realise that it can be used to express deep, even sad emotions, it always seem to carry an inherent joy of communicating. It is hard to feel entirely sad while dancing.

Don’t get me wrong, deafness is a terrible thing that I, with music my favourite hobby, would much rather avoid. But signing flies high the standard for not letting yourself down, it is a visual statement that communicating is the greatest of joy. Most people in public transport seem to behave like any interaction is an aggression. To see them, in the metro, wholly engaging their minds and bodies in a passionate conversation made me wish that, while I may not want permanent residence there, I could be invited on a visitor visa into their world.

Shock doctrine in the headlines

Travelling on the Eurostar is bad for my blood pressure. Well, I don't know that from a doctor's advice, but I’m sure it is.

Oh, nothing to do with the quality of the journey. Or the politeness of the staff (never had to complain). No, you see, the problem is that when I travel on the Eurostar I get to see the titles of their papers and magazines selection.

Indeed, I have had so many trips that, despite taking standard tickets, I get access to the business lounge. They do have papers and magazines. But, you see, it’s a business lounge. And so, mostly, the selection largely seems to reflect what they reckon very rich people would want to read –especially in the London lounge (the Parisian one is slightly better, or at least used to be, I did not find Alternatives Economiques today). Don’t expect to find even the Guardian there –but there will be an ample choice of the Times, the Daily Telegraph, the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, the Daily Mail (yes, I still can’t quite believe that), the Economist…

To be fair, on the away trip, it mattered very little what the selection would be, I would just have to be appalled. Lack of web access made me unable to post before so many household names with actual readers bases did so, but even a glimpse of a title on, well, any French newspaper would have read similar, and included words such as “supply-side socialism”. You see, the French president, François Hollande, had just given his January press conference, and said that the rest of his mandate would be based on supply-side “Economics” (cut me some slack with the quotations, if you are going to put supply-side before it, especially with high unemployment, you really are saying voodoo. You have no right to pretend it’s actually Economics).

When a refutation is anything but

For decades, many academics and pundits have pronounced that the 70s conclusively proved that Keynes had been completely wrong, and that it proved that Friedman had been completely right.

You see, there was a recession, and it should have created deflation, except if inflation was actually determined by expectations based on previous experience, in which case it would not be brought down by depression. Friedman went on to state that "inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon" which, if you think twice about it, is the most laughable statement.
And to this day, I keep reading articles, even by professors of economics in the UK, saying that the episode of inflation over 2% in the UK in the early years of the current Government is a clear indication that any stimulus would have had little to no effect, being swallowed by inflation.


That's what happens when you start believing that your model matters more than reality.