[LINK] Another gay Republican sex scandal in the United States?

Jesus.

Really, it's OK to come out of the closet. It's not like anyone's being done a service the way things are now.

[LINK] Protests in Myanmar

Daniel Drezner observation last week that Buddhist monks were actively protesting against the military junta that runs Myanmar might be taken as a road sign pointing towards the broader spread of protests in that unfortunate Southeast Asian country.

Public protests are rare in Myanmar, where the regime maintains strict social controls. Military leaders apparently did not foresee or plan for the protests that have attended their shock-therapy policies. Whether the public anger snowballs into a full-blown mass movement, as happened in 1988, depends largely on how the historically heavy-handed regime responds in the weeks ahead.

The violent tactics employed by the regime to quell the protests so far, however, do not augur well for future stability. Small, peaceful protest marches have continued for weeks in Yangon, Myanmar's main commercial city and until recently the national capital.

They have since spread to several other parts of the country, including crucially the central town of Pakokku, near Mandalay, where an estimated 100 Buddhist monks recently spearheaded the unrest, including taking government officials hostage and burning their cars. The military eventually fired warning shots, and one monk was badly hurt in the melee.

The junta has long fretted about politicized monks - who command deep respect among the population and many of whom are known to sympathize with opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, who is under house arrest. Since the early 1990s, the military have effectively controlled the Buddhist governing religious bodies by retiring, replacing and relocating known-dissident abbots.

But the recent clergy-inspired violence and the military's violent response may yet prove to be a watershed moment. The monks have demanded an apology from the government for its use of force, but to date junta leaders have failed to reply. In the meantime, in an unprecedented move, police and security forces have been deployed outside the monasteries in the key Buddhist cities of Mandalay, Pakkoku and Yangon to prevent the monks from staging further protests.

Last year's relocation of the capital from the populous port city of Yangon to the isolated inland community of Naypyidaw may have been undertaken in part with the motive of sparing the government the bother of dealing with the general population. Hopefully, that might have been too little too late.

[LINK] "Language barriers can be higher than they seem"

Peter Gill's article in The Telegraph, "Language barriers can be higher than they seem", provides an amusing perspective on the language difficulties he encountered when he, like so many other Britons, moved to France to make a new home in old province of Béarn, located in the east of the modern department of Pyrénées-Atlantiques.

Although we knew the area we were moving to, we hadn't taken on board its linguistic complexity. If I look out of the window now I can see areas where four distinct languages are spoken.

Our house is on the northern boundary of the old kingdom of Béarn and the view is across the lovely Béarnaise countryside to the Pyrenees on the skyline. Now Béarn is part of France and its official language is French although that is a recent phenomenon.

Many of our older friends in the area only started to learn French when they went to school and their parents' generation never spoke it at all. But also we can see the (Spanish) Pyrenees - another language which is the main means of communication in a number of the mountain passes on the French side of the border.

All said, four languages--Basque, the local Gascon variant of Occitan, Spanish, and a local French heavily marked by Gascon influences that was quite distinct from the French that he and his wife had learned--were present in his new home. (Happily, Gill managed to pick up that last language. Eventually.)

[BRIEF NOTE] There's rattachisme, then there's less likely outcomes for Belgium

Paul Wells, writer for Canadian newsmagazine MacLean's, was the first person I read who pointed out that Luxembourg has been asked to solve Francophone Belgians' existential crises should Flanders leave.

The other day a reporter asked the prime minister of Luxembourg whether he'd like to take over most of Belgium if that country should fall apart. Jean-Claude Juncker sounded surprised. He should, because his tiny grand duchy is less than one-sixth the combined size of Belgium's Wallonie and Brussels regions. Taking them over would be like the goldfish swallowing the cat.

The reaction of Luxembourg's prime minister was reported in greater detail by Belgium's Le Vif.

Le Premier ministre luxembourgeois, Jean-Claude Juncker, estime samedi, dans une interview au Soir, que la crise politique risque de faire subir une perte de crédibilité à la Belgique.

"La crédibilité européenne de la Belgique risque d'être mise à néant si on n'arrive pas à faire en sorte que ce pays se ressaisisse", dit Jean-Claude Juncker. Interrogé sur le scénario qui évoquait un rapprochement des Communautés française et germanophone avec le Luxembourg, M. Juncker le trouve étrange. "Le Grand-Duché n'a pas vocation à dépanner une Belgique qui se cherche. Je crois que la réponse à la question belge réside en Belgique", dit M. Juncker. "Sans vouloir interférer dans ce genre de débat belgo-belge, j'ai beaucoup de sympathie pour la réaction de la communauté wallonne et francophone face aux exigences flamandes. Mais il faudra que la Belgique se ressaisisse. Qu'elle donne vers l'extérieur l'image d'un pays le plus uni possible", dit M. Juncker.

Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker, said Saturday, in an interview with the Soir, that the political crisis threatens Belgium's credibility.

"The European credibility of Belgium is at risk of being completely eliminated if no one bothers to put this country back together," said Jean-Claude Juncker. Asked about scenarios about uniting the French and Germanophone communities with Luxembourg, Mr. Juncker found them strange. "The Grand Duchy does not have vocation to repair Belgium which seeks itself. I believe that the answer to the Belgian question resides in Belgium," said Mr. Juncker.

I'd mentioned earlier, in my series of brief reports on Belgium's recent crisis, about how the idea of a Franco-Dutch partition of a failed Belgium on language lines was quite popular in those two countries even though there was very little sign that that sort of a partition was popular among Belgians. Recently, more fantastical scenarios still have begun to appear. The suggestion that Luxembourg might take on Francophone Belgium is one. Another came from The Brussels Journal, a far-right English/Dutch weblog associated with Flemish nationalists, which recently suggested that after Flanders leaves Wallonia might fall apart. Not only, the weblog argued, was Belgium's Luxembourg province likely to merge with Luxembourg, reversing the 1839 partition of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg between a Francophone west that became Belgian and a Germanic rump in the east that remained placed under Dutch suzerainty until 1890, but the "conservative and Catholic" province of Namur is "likely" to join the Grand Duchy, leaving only the provinces of Hainaut and Liège (and, as the blogger forget, Brabant Wallon) inside Wallonia. Like Greater Luxembourg, this second schema has also started to seep into the mainstream media, never mind that there seems to be little interest in the idea of Luxembourg reunification and I've never heard of Namurois separatism.

All these scenarios for the future, eccentric as they might be, seem to reflect the scenario-makers' common interest in predicting the futre that they would like to see. Yes, France and the Netherlands will be enriched by their new common border; yes, without Flanders Wallonia will fall apart; yes, Luxembourg will be happy to handle everything for Wallonia and Brussels. The problem with this wish-fulfillment school of futurology is that, as a rule, it doesn't seem to work very well in the face of reality. Some might find that a pity, but that would be a mistake.