Olivier Noël, candidat pour Québec solidaire dans Duplessis, et toute l’équipe de Québec solidaire Duplessis vous disent 697 fois merci. « Déjà 697 personnes ont fait confiance à Québec solidaire dans Duplessis et c’est très encourageant pour nous, car nous sommes un jeune parti fondé depuis peu dans Duplessis. Nous avons fait une campagne d’idées et de contenu sur le développement social et économique pour la région et nous allons poursuivre sur cette voie », explique M.Noël.
"L'ONU projette l'image d'une organisation internationale basée sur les principes universels de justice et d'égalité. En réalité, elle n'est rien d'autre que le comité exécutif des dictatures du tiers-monde."
« On est dans la fabulation mentale incroyable.... Le Parti Québécois se fait larguer par ses nationalistes de droite, par ses nationalistes plus conservateurs, même par ses nationalistes centristes de banlieues, et le Parti Québécois répond quoi? "C'est parce qu'on a pas été assez loin dans ce que ces gens-là rejettent." » (Bock-Côté)
"Le vice inhérent au capitalisme consiste en une répartition inégale des richesses. La vertu inhérente au socialisme consiste en une égale répartition de la misère."
HH: Now let’s get to the first major issue of the day, which is Iran. Mr. Speaker, if the United Kingdom feels obliged to use force, if diplomacy fails to get their people back, will you applaud?
NG: I think there are two very simple steps that should be taken. The first is to use a covert operation, or a special forces operation to knock out the only gasoline producing refinery in Iran. There’s only one. And the second is to simply intercede by Naval force, and block any tankers from bringing gasoline to Iran…
HH: Would you do, would you urge them…
NG: And say to the Iranians, you know, you can keep the sailors as long as you want, but in about 30 days, everybody in your country will be walking.
HH: So how long would you give them, to give them that ultimatum, the Iranians?
NG: I would literally do that. I would say to them, I would right now say to them privately, within the next week, your refinery will no longer work. And within the following week, there will be no tankers arriving. Now if you would like to avoid being humiliated publicly, we recommend you calmly and quietly give them back now. But frankly, if you’d prefer to show the planet that you’re tiny and we’re not, we’re prepared to simply cut off your economy, and allow you to go back to walking and using oxen to pull carts, because you will have no gasoline left.
HH: I agree with that 100%. Would your recommendation to the United States President be the same if Iran seized our forces?
NG: Absolutely. I mean, the reason I say that, it is the least violent, least direct thing you can do. It uses our greatest strength…you know, the mismatch in Naval power is absolute. And so you don’t have to send troops into Iran. Everybody on the left is waiting for conservatives to say things that allow them to run amok and parade in San Francisco, and claim that we’re warmongers. I want to avoid war by intelligently using our power to eliminate the option of sustaining an economy, so that the Iranian dictatorship will be shown to be the hollow dictatorship it is, so the people of Iran decide they’d like to have a decent government with real electricity and real gasoline, so they overthrow it. And I want to do that without risking a single American life, or being engaged in a single direct confrontation. And Naval power lets you do that.
Dans un texte passablement hallucinant publié ce matin, Jocelyn Coulon, l'antiaméricain de service de La Presse, nous chante un "Ode à l'Europe":À lire et à entendre certains commentateurs, essentiellement anglo-saxons, l’Europe est à l’agonie, son modèle de développement politique et social un objet de musée, sa population frileuse, xénophobe et inadaptée au monde moderne. Ce genre d’imbécillités fait les choux gras des néoconservateurs américains et de plusieurs membres de l’administration Bush enragés par le succès éclatant de la seule organisation, l’Union européenne, qui a gagné une guerre, celle d’établir la paix sur le vieux continent. Cinquante ans après la signature du traité de Rome, les Européens ont de quoi entonner l’Ode à la joie de Beethoven, aujourd’hui hymne de l’Europe.
Et puisqu’il faut comparer, sur certains aspects de la vie quotidienne, l’Europe est l’avenir du monde, les États-Unis un repoussoir, parfois même un État du tiers monde.
Three years ago, E.U. leaders vowed to make the union "the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world" by 2010. But one of the most worrying signs of their failure is the continued drain of Europe's best and brightest scientific brains, who finish their degrees and pursue careers in the U.S. Some 400,000 European science and technology graduates now live in the U.S. and thousands more leave each year. A survey released in November by the European Commission found that only 13% of European science professionals working abroad currently intend to return home.
The flight of European scientists to the U.S. is nothing new, of course. Political and religious persecution drove luminaries like Albert Einstein and Enrico Fermi across the Atlantic. The exodus continued in the 1950s and 1960s, as the U.S. poured billions into defense-related research and created magnetic clusters of scientific excellence, staffing them with the world's best minds and prompting Britain's Royal Society to coin the term brain drain. America's investments laid the foundation for the tech booms of the 1980s and 1990s, which drew yet more entrepreneurial Europeans westward. Europe's bureaucracies, rigid hierarchies and frustrating scientific fragmentation also pushed people away as they still do to this day. "Europe is a mess," thunders Christopher Evans, a biotechnology professor at four British universities and chairman of the venture-capital firm Merlin Biosciences, "a haze of overregulated and overcomplicated bureaucracies smothering the rare flames of true entrepreneurial brilliance."
[...] complaints like those of Claude Allègre, the former French Education Minister who heads the Paris VII geochemical lab, are all too common. He decries France's anachronistic "Soviet" system, in which control is centralized and researchers must run a bureaucratic obstacle course, whether to buy expensive equipment or order basic office supplies. "I'm planning on moving to the U.S. indefinitely because I want to continue my research," says Allègre. "I can't do so in the current conditions."
Brain drain isn't a purely academic problem. Billions of euros and tens of thousands of jobs are at stake, because science drives economic growth in the IT, biotech and pharmaceutical sectors. Europe can't afford to fall further behind.
In the spring of 2002, after three productive years of research at the pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly in the U.S. state of Indiana, Matthias Tschöp went home. Leaving the country he calls "a paradise" for scientists was hard, says Tschöp, who studies hunger-related hormones. "I thought about staying, but I'm German. That's where I belong and where I should contribute."
He landed at the German Institute of Human Nutrition (DIfE) in Potsdam, and the shock set in. As at many German institutions, his colleagues were top-notch, but there was little money, and bureaucracy had a stranglehold on what resources were available. Though he quickly helped to win an €11.7 million E.U. grant for obesity research in collaboration with more than two dozen other institutions, it wasn't enough to overcome his disillusionment. "You had to file a four-page application to get a used computer, only to be rejected because of a mistake in paragraph 342," he says. "I could not deal with all that." He kept a visiting professorship at the DIfE and a role in the obesity project, but headed back to America, where he's now an associate professor in the University of Cincinnati's psychiatry department. He still laughs when he thinks of the $750,000 he got for his new lab, staff and travel at Cincinnati. In Germany, he says, "I couldn't even get a start-up grant."
No amount of funding can buy a culture of competitiveness. And if researchers don't see opportunities for reward, they'll take their talent to the States, where innovation and hard work are rewarded with generous grants, full credit and a financial stake in your work. "The U.S. has an entrepreneurial culture," says Finnish molecular biologist Erkki Ruoslahti, who moved to the U.S. in the 1970s and helped build San Diego's Burnham Institute into a top medical-research facility. "People tend to be more enterprising — because they have to be. Otherwise, they're out of business."
Scientists say the competitive spirit found in Ruoslahti's largely European-staffed lab and across America is absent from much of the Continent. In the U.S., "young people who prove they're good get many more opportunities, including perhaps the freedom to run their own labs," says physicist Guido Langouche, vice rector of the Catholic University of Leuven (K.U.L.), who did his postdoc work at Stanford and returned to Belgium for family reasons. "In Europe, you usually have to work for an older professor for 10 years before you get that chance."
Even those lucky enough to get their own labs feel restricted. "In Germany, the principle of reward for performance doesn't exist," says physicist Michael Alexander Rübhausen, 32, who leads a biophysics research group at Hamburg University. He cites a law requiring a doctoral-degree recipient to leave the institution at which the qualification was earned. The idea behind the law is to prevent favoritism in the hiring of new professors, but the practical result is to close off a logical growth path to young scientists at a career crossroads. Rübhausen is lucky — he got a grant guaranteeing his salary and funding for his group through the spring of 2004. But after that? "I don't know whether I'll be able to stay in Germany," he muses, because he won't be allowed to continue at Hamburg, and positions in his speciality are rare. So he's looking back to the U.S., where he did postdoc work.
Les associations étudiantes du Québec continuent de fourbir leurs armes en prévision d'un éventuel dégel des droits de scolarité que pourrait adopter le nouveau gouvernement minoritaire de Jean Charest.
L'Association pour une solidarité syndicale étudiante (ASSE), qui représente quelque 42 000 étudiants, tient une journée de débrayage jeudi. Ce groupe, réputé radical, préconise au contraire la gratuité complète des études postsecondaires.
Le Parti libéral du Québec et l'Action démocratique du Québec, qui occupent ensemble 89 des 125 sièges de l'Assemblée nationale, préconisent plutôt une hausse des droits de scolarité, qui sont gelés depuis 1994.
Le débrayage de l'ASSE culmine par une marche dans les rues de Montréal. La manifestation, qui s'est mise en branle vers 14 h 30 à l'UQAM, perturbe la circulation automobile. Les manifestants doivent en rejoindre d'autres au Square Victoria.
Depuis 1994, le gouvernement du Québec a gelé les frais de scolarité universitaires à 1668$. Aujourd’hui, un étudiant québécois faisant son entrée à l’université paye en moyenne 65% de moins qu’un étudiant ontarien. C’est peut-être une bonne affaire pour les étudiants, mais pas pour les universités. « Les universités québécoises sont sous-financées comparativement aux universités canadiennes et américaines », dit Heather Munroe-Blum, présidente de l’Université McGill. Récemment, le gouvernement Charest a annoncé une hausse de 100$ par étudiant par année, ce que Munroe-Blum qualifie de « très important ». Des frais peu élevés n’ont certainement pas créé plus de diplômés. Le Québec combine en effet le plus faible taux de fréquentation universitaire avec celui du plus faible taux d’achèvement des études, selon l’OCDE.
J'écrivais hier que la percée soudaine de l'ADQ était une sorte de retour du refoulé, une réaction tardive à la fuite en avant vitesse grand V amorcée par le Québec lors de la Révolution tranquille.
C'est aussi une attaque contre le dogme religieux qui étouffe le Québec depuis quarante ans.
On me dira que le Québec s'est libéré de l'emprise de la religion dans les années 1960.
Faux. On a juste changé de dieu.
Notre dieu, maintenant, s'appelle État.
C'est lui qui prend en charge chaque aspect de notre vie, qui nous récompense quand on est gentil et qui nous punit quand on est méchant. C'est lui qu'on prie quand ça va mal, c'est devant lui qu'on s'agenouille quand ça va bien et c'est lui qu'on invoque quand on a une faveur à demander.
Le dieu État a son clergé, ses curés, ses fidèles, son dogme, ses prophètes, sa littérature, ses églises, ses apôtres, son Père, son Fils, son Saint-Esprit.
Et malheur à ceux qui osent le critiquer! Ça ne se fait tout simplement pas.
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