Ectopist’s posterous

Les sadistes qui eduquent vos enfants

Il m'arrive souvent d'être profondément dérangé par la manière ouvertement sadique dont on traite les enfants, même en très bas âge, dans bon nombre d'écoles francophones de Bruxelles.

Bien que j'imagine que le goulag et l'armée soient légèrement pires, ça porte comparaison; sauf que vu l'effet devastateur que cela doit avoir sûr le développement émotionnel de si jeunes enfants, il faudrait sans doute considérer un effet multiplicateur lorsqu'il s'agit des traumatismes qui en résultent.

Il ne faut dès lors pas s'étonner des problèmes de société qui nous entourent.

Pour moi, un enfant est sacré, je les adore et ils me remplissent d'une telle joie juste à voir leur exubérance naturelle, que j'ai du mal à imaginer quel genre d'haine puisse motiver quelqu'un à se dédier la vie à leur torture. Pourtant, ce phénomène est courant et, en quelque sorte, ayant quelques notions de psychanalyse je comprend son origine.

Ce que je comprend moins c'est que personne n'agit contre. Car ça c'est bien plus grave. Ni les institutions scolaires lesquelles, en général, n'ont quand même pas le seul but d'être des Guantanamo pour les tout-pétits, ni les parents qui soit se désinteressent de ce qui arrive à leur enfant, soit le trouvent normal, voire bénéfique....

Ce sadisme est donc bien plus que le fait de quelques instituteurs isolés - il est un problème profond de société. Et moi j'en ai marre. Au nom de chacun de ces enfants, j'exprime leur détresse et leur rage face à ce démantèlement voulu de leur personnalité.

Je ne permettrais pas qu'un de mes enfants reste un seul instant dans un milieu traumatisant de ce genre, et je vous invite à faire pareil.

Heureusement ce problème, s'il est courant, n'est pas universel. J'ai rencontré le même jour sur le métro un groupe d'enfants en compagnie de quelques institutrices qui étaient visiblement ravies d'être entourées par ces jeunes esprits; et la bonheur des enfants était tout autant évidente.

Mais cela veut dire que vous ne pouvez même pas vous justifier en faisant appel à une imaginée fatalité.

Parents, protégez s'il vous plaît vos enfants en faisant un minimum de contrôle avant de les confier aux mains de n'importe qui!

Et voici... la vache rouge. Signee Alyssa.

Big hug cow!

Fetes medievales de Forest

Lots of fun, a number of cute babes in sexy peasant dresses, great weather and Belgium's perhaps best microbrewery, from the unlikely named Ellezelles. Every creator of medieval and role play clothing for hundreds of miles around must have been strutting their stuff. It's still on today, abbaye de Forest.

Brussels metro

What else was wrong today?
- the ticket machines weren't working at Gribaumont. Neither of them
- the new, but antediluvian, indication boards weren't working, anywhere
- the down escalator at delta is still not working, it has been like that for at least two weeks, but at least there are three workmen there today. Talking and reading the newspaper.
And I'm only half-way.

Metro in pictures

This is the line dirn Hermann Debroux OUT of the center at 8.20am.

Brussels metro

Is it, I wonder, the worst service in the entire Western world? There are two lines (inventively counted to get to six) so how difficult can it be to run the trains on time? Yet almost every day they tell us how they are doing their best to return the service to "normal". Normal here has the quintessentially French sense of a social desirable state which does not occur in nature.

I dream of the day when, abnormally, the not very difficult problem of mass transit in Brussels is temporarily solved in an adequate way!

(From the metro)

Cafe b-express, av de fre in Uccle - wonderful!

Facebook Says It Wants You to Be Less Private - But Why?

via readwriteweb.com

I am left wondering if the author has actually been on Facebook in the last five years... it's perfectly clear it has become more and more about getting in contact with new people : friends of friends, members of groups that interest you etc. In fact the recent changes have probably only slowed this down.

Still, interesting article on Facebook's policy and the rationale behind it.

Data roaming charges for Belgian home operators

via news.bbc.co.uk

I'm not sure if the 1€/MB data roaming cap really enters into force today, but anyway on Base's website it still has the old tarifs - 2.50€/MB for the partner networks, 3.50€ for the second tier and an astonishing 13€ as fallback, which is what I managed to pay in Turkey (these tariffs including VAT). The 13€ doesn't only apply outside the EU, though I think there's at least one second tier operator, thus a 3.50€ option (if you are within range of the signal, and figure out which network is the one you need to be on) in all Member States. This compares to the standard data plan of 10€ +VAT per 500 (yes, five hundred) megabytes, i.e. a mere 2.42 cents including VAT per megabyte nationally.

Thus the cap, even if it would cut data roaming costs by respectively 52%, 65% and 91%, still represents 34 times the national rate for a service which only differs in terms of reconciliation and billing.

I haven't found similar at least comprehensible overviews for Mobistar and Proximus, but on the test case of Latvia, where Base has only a second-tier partner, the Mobistar site gives me a slighter higher rate of 3.63€. Proximus (why am I not surprised?) is the biggest ripoff of all. It has a bizarre time-based formula available (where you presumably pay more the worse the service is, isn't that attractive?) and what seems to be presented as a better per-MB formula: 9.68€/MB in the EEA+CH, with a fallback of 14.52€ outside. If you stick to Vodafone abroad you can get it down to 2.42€/MB, 3.63 on the second-tier networks, but with a minimum of 24.20 per month. On Base there are subscription offers at 50 (first-tier only) or 90€/month which then give the same 500Mb included as nationally, but you'd really have to be using your smartphone very regularly abroad for this to represent any savings.

None of the sites mention any 1€ cap.

In short, it has been, and for the moment seems to remain, and indeed even with the cap would remain, a TOTAL RIPOFF.

Boy do I hate these dinosaurs!