• 2005 Oct. 27: Delinquents Youths hide from police (who weren’t even chasing them) by jumping a fence topped with barbed wire and hiding in a power substation. Two are electrocuted when they touched a massive, humming electrical unit transformer.
• 2005 Oct. 27: It turns out that the youths were Muslim. Other delinquents Muslim youths are outraged that the laws of physics apply to them and go on a rampage, burning cars and generally causing a nuisance.
• 2005 Oct. 30: Islamic rioters evidently don’t have a problem committing violence in the vicinity of a Mosque, but when police respond and a tear-gas grenade goes off near a prayer room, Muslims everywhere are enraged and riots crop up across the country.
  
• 2005 Nov. 6: By now, rioting and vandalism has affected 274 cities, towns and villages.
• Showing what an idle population can do if they really put their mind to it, after only 12 nights of violence:
• 6,000 cars were burned
• 84 public buildings (like police stations and schools) were attacked and burnt
• 1,550 arrests were made, including children as young as 12
• A man was beaten to death for the imagined crime of trying to put out a fire in a trash bin
• 2005 Nov. 8: Rather than surrendering, President Jacques Chirac grows a spine and declares state of emergency. Curfews go into effect, thousands of police are deployed and the violence gradually dies down.
• 2006 Jan. 3: The state of emergency is lifted. By this time the rioting has cost insurance companies 160 million euros ($200M) with 10,000 cars torched and 300 buildings damaged. Only 422 of the 6,000 people arrested were given jail terms. 244 police were injured.
• 2006 Apr. 2: After months of debate, the French parliament passes equal opportunities legislation, promising to throw millions of dollars euros at the problem, and Chirac signs it into law.
• In the intervening months, there is no perceptible change to the horrid unemployment of the immigrant population (about 40%) nor their housing conditions (tenements so bad that they make the high-rise miseries in Baltimore look like palaces).
• 2006 Oct. 13: Attacks on police personnel are being executed with military precision. In one attack, up to fifty attackers armed with bats and tear gas ambush three policemen in Paris, requiring one to get 30 stitches.
• In the days leading up to the first anniversary of the country-wide violence, more than 500 extra police officers have been assigned to the suburbs of Paris to beef up security.
• 2006 Oct 23: In another ritual that has become almost routine, passengers are forced off a bus in broad daylight by 30 youths and the bus is torched. Firemen who responded were subjected to having stones hurled at them.
• 2006 Oct. 26:  Muslim youths force passengers off three buses in a single night and set the vehicles on fire. One band of delinquents were armed with handguns [*gasp* in gun-free France!].
• 2006 Oct. 27: Happy Riot Anniversary! Hundreds of people march through Clichy-sous-Bois to mark the anniversary of the delinquent’s youth’s deaths.

  4,000 extra police are called up to quell the expected violence.

It remains to be seen as to just how bad the violence will be in the coming days.

Loosely based on a timeline in the LA Times

One hundred and twelve. That’s how many cars are going up in flames in France every day, even after the promises by the French government made in response to last year’s riots.

Worse yet, police and emergency services have been the target of over 4,000 attacks so far this year.

Continue Reading »

Having a black news anchor for six weeks is a big deal in France:

In a country with more blacks on its national soccer team (13 of the 23 players) than in the 577-member National Assembly (10, none from the mainland), Roselmack’s sudden celebrity has highlighted how rare it still is here to see minorities in prominent posts.

It has also given a boost to France’s growing black empowerment movement.

They don’t seem to have a grasp on that whole liberté, égalité, fraternité thing just yet. Oh well, it’s only been 217 years.

Recently declassified documents reveal that Nixon was considering using nuclear bombs to bring an end to the Vietnam war in an operation code named “Duck Hook”:

But Nixon abandoned Duck Hook shortly after Oct. 2. Both his secretaries of Defense and State, Melvin Laird and William Rogers, opposed the plan. Nixon apparently also began to doubt whether he could sustain public support for the three- to six-month period the plan might require. He also concluded that his military threats against the North Vietnamese had no effect.

Threats are rarely useful. For instance, French threats of economic sanctions against Iran. Uh, OK, French threats of anything (except surrender — those are always taken seriously).

Indeed, the time and place to use nukes in Vietnam was in 1953 in a place called Dien Bien Phu. The French were trying for a decisive military victory out in the middle of nowhere. Instead, General Vo Nguyen Giap conducted a brilliant 56-day siege that ended with at least 2,200 dead Frenchmen (including many of the elite Foreign Legion) and a French surrender of 11,000 men (of which a little over 4,000 survived captivity).

If the French had accepted the two tactical nukes that Eisenhower offered, history would have turned out vastly different.

Just as an aside, fourteen years later General Giap tried to do the same thing to an American Marine base called Khe Sanh. 205 American soldiers were killed while ten to fifteen thousand Viet Min died before they gave up eleven weeks later and trickled back into the jungle. When the NVA shut down the airstrip, the French had resorted to high-altitude parachute drops resulting in a great many supplies, ammunition and even vital intelligence landing outside the base and falling into enemy hands. At Khe Sanh, the U.S. Army 109th Quartermaster Company used the Low Altitude Parachute Extraction System (LAPES) with great success. The seige for Khe Sanh was a great American military victory (achieved without dipping into the nuclear arsenal) that was turned into a major North Vietnamese propaganda win by our Fourth Estate.

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Received via email this morning, the infamous World Cup headbutt as seen from various perspectives:

As seen by the Germans:

As seen by the French:

As seen by the Italians:

As seen by the Americans:

As reported by the Press:

If anyone knows where these came from, please let me know so I can either credit the source or remove it (if copyrighted).

Update: I finally found these on the UK media at The Register, along with some additions:

From a Japanese Gamer’s perspective :

But wait! The Frenchman, he is so brave! He saves the Italian’s life!:

It’s Hammer time!:

But this one show real imagination, from Awful Forums (where there is much more):
Headbutts in Anime:

OK, so it was more of a shoe toss in anime.

Technorati Tags: Humor,
World Cup Headbutt,
Zinedine Zidane Headbutt.

Michael Brandon McClellan has five reasons why Americans should cheer for France in today’s World Cup matchup against the Italians (also posted on his blog). He does this in spite of the fact that:

Since their failure to support us in Iraq, France-bashing has become almost as popular of a sport amongst the American punditry as America-bashing is en vogue amongst their French counterparts.

In this, McClellan implies that bashing the French is a recent affectation, when quite the opposite is true. One of the most beloved American authors, Mark Twain, did so frequently with quips like, “France has usually been governed by prostitutes”, “French are the connecting link between man and the monkey”, and my personal favorite:

A dead Frenchman has many good qualities, many things to recommend him; many attractions–even innocencies. Why cannot we have more of these?

Even Saturday Night Live agrees that it is time that we “got back to hating the French”.

With that in mind, let’s first tear apart McClellan’s reasons for supporting France, and then list a few reasons for why we should continue to loathe the French.

McClellan’s Reasons to root for the French:

Reason One: The Fourth of July

While it is true, as McClellan says, that France gave “French blood, treasure, and frigates”, let’s examine why.

King Charles XVI made few decision on his own, and no issue of any import bothered his dull mind for long. But his foreign minister, Charles Gravier, Comte de Vergennes, hated England with an intensity that rivals the most passionate anti-French American of today.

Nor was it a one-sided agreement: in return for military support the fledgling nation agreed to engage in commerce, trading agricultural products and raw materials for manufactured goods. In other words, France would now have access to the very thing that had given Britain its great wealth without all the trouble of trying to rule a populace across an ocean.

War between France and England was seen as inevitable, so by supporting the colonies the French hoped to divert English resources. Plus, should war erupt, there was the hope of carving off the West India Islands which was in British hands.

As for the Marquis de Lafayette (which McClellan mentions), his (and other idealistic young Frenchmen’s) participation in the Revolution was expressly forbidden. Indeed, upon hearing that he was preparing to leave a warrant for his arrest was issued. So don’t thank the French for giving us a general.

In fact, students of the Revolution know that France acted throughout with the most selfish of reasons — there was no altruism involved. Knowledge of France’s motives is really reason number one to dislike the French.

Reason Two: The Statue of Liberty

The statue is, as McClellan says, “no ordinary gift”. Yet it is hardly equivalent to the $2.3 billion that the United States “loaned” France under the Marshall Plan. I know that Britain finally paid off its debt (in May of this year), but has France?

Reason Three: The Middle of the United States

Ah, the bargain of the Louisiana Purchase. Yep, a good deal that stunned Jefferson and his negotiators. They had been willing to pay up to $10 million for New Orleans alone, but Napoleon offered them all of the territory to which the French laid claim for a mere $15 million, instantly doubling the size of our nation. Why?

Napoleon was losing control of Saint-Domingue (the Haiti of today) to a slave rebellion and thus didn’t have the forces to occupy and control the territory. He was faced with a choice: give up his dream of a New World empire or give up his dream of conquering England. As war with England was deemed inevitable (as was always the case with the French), it seemed likely that England would just take advantage of the conflict and take the New World territory anyway (via Canada). So why not? After all, they had given it to Spain once and only recently taken it back. And one-quarter of the money was poured right back into the American economy: 20 million francs was to be used to cover French debts to American arms producers who had suffered during the Franco-British war.

But the bottom line is that the sale had little nothing to do with helping America, and everything to do with establishing an empire. A year after the sale, Napoleon Bonaparte crowned himself Emperor. Motives again, which upgrades reason number one from a reason to dislike the French to a full-blown reason to hate the French, especially given the fact that the money helped finance a war on all of Europe.

Reason Four: World War I

Yes, it is true that the “French people fought for four years as the anvil to Kaiser Wilhelm’s war hammer,” and that this was tragic. But for this I should root for their soccer team? By that reasoning, I should take the side of the Iranians for having fought and died in chemical attacks perpetuated by Saddam Hussein. No thanks.

Reason Five: The Tricolor

The Tricolor marched against the imperial ambitions of the Second Reich, against the hatred of the Third Reich, and it stood, under NATO, against the Hammer and Sickle of the Soviet Union.

The Tricolor flew over ships that attacked our merchant ships and over soldiers that folded to the Third Reich in record time. The Tricolor flew over the collaborationist and counterrevolutionary Vichy France regime.

Today, the Tricolor stands with any tyrant willing to fill the pockets of the prostitutes in charge of France. It stands for mealymouthed diplomacy that has results in massive grants and concessions to anyone that threatens to build a missile or attack another country. It no longer deserves our respect. As far as I am concerned, the Tricolor and everything it has stood for (or not stood for) is reason number two to hate the French.

And so a review of McClellan’s reasons gives us two solid reasons to hate the French. But wait, there’s more!

AlphaPatriot’s Reasons to Hate the French:

Reason One: French Privateers

French perfidy came early in American history: by the summer of 1797, France had seized 300 American ships and broken off diplomatic relations, demanding bribes and an outrageous loan to the government just to begin negotiations (resulting in the rhetoric, “Millions for defense, sir, but not one cent for tribute!” How typically American!).

All of which led to the “Quasi-War“, the build up of the tiny American Navy, the reestablishment of the Marine Corps and, due to widespread hostility towards the French, the passing of the infamous Alien and Sedition Acts.

During the two years of the Quasi-War about 85 French ships were taken as prizes, quite an accomplishment for the tiny American Navy, and some victories were spectacular.

Reason Two: Rousseau

Although born in Switzerland, the French have embraced Jean-Jacques Rousseau as one of their own and you can find statues of him littering the landscape throughout France.

Rousseau can arguably be blamed for communism because of his work The Social Contract which documented the concepts of “general will” and the belief that private property leads to greed, competition, vanity, inequality, and vice.

Rousseau inflicted
, significant harm to educational philosophy with the publication of Émile.

Rousseau even brought death and destruction to his adopted homeland. Napoleon is said to have exclaimed, “If there had been no Rousseau, there would have been no Revolution, and without the Revolution, I should have been impossible.”

Even if you don’t blame the French Revolution on Rousseau, there is little doubt that he made it worse. Indeed, Maximilien Robespierre was a fanatical devotee of Rousseau’s social theories, reputedly sleeping with a copy of Rousseau’s Social Contract at his side. One can remember Robespierre as one of the principal architects of the Reign of Terror, which ended with his arrest and subsequent guillotining. During the eleven months of “The Terror” over 200,000 French citizens were arrested, 10,000 of those died in pestiferous jails and 17,000 death sentences were handed down.

Rousseau was an adulterer, put all five of his children into orphanages (where most children died), was sexist, and eventually went insane and died. Yet we are still saddled with his horrid legacy. Worst of all, I had to read five of his books in one semester of my lone PoliSci course.

Aside: I have it on good authority that admiration for Rousseau is the reason that we have the phrase “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”. The original read, “life, liberty and property”. Think of how the eminent domain issue would be influenced had Rousseauian thought not intruded.

So while Rousseau has given us many, many reasons to hate the French, we will only count him as one.

Reason Three: Napoleon

Right smack in the middle of the Reign of Terror, the “new” French promote Napoleon Bonaparte to Brigadier General — and the man wasn’t even French (nor did he ever learn to speak French particularly well!). But by 1800 he was a virtual dictator as First Consul.

And even though the French had just gone through a bloody revolution in the name of liberté, égalité, fraternité, they up and elected Napoleon Consulate for Life by 1802, after which he crowns himself Emperor of France in 1804. Beginning in 1803 and continuing for eleven years he waged war across Europe, crushing 70 million Europeans under his tyrannical heel.

Sure, he was eventually defeated and exiled to Elba. But when Napoleon showed up in Paris nine months later he once again took power without firing a shot. Yes, the French inflicted Napoleon on the world not once, but twice (but we will only count Napoleon as a whole as a single reason to hate the French).

And so started the Hundred Days, which ended at Waterloo. Thank heavens for the Brits.

Reason Four: Dien Bien Phu

The Viet Minh arose to throw off a hundred years of French colonialism and in 1946 the French creates a puppet government for South Vietnam. What followed was a long, expensive and bloody campaign to keep their colony until, in 1953, the French tried for a decisive military victory to strengthen their position at peace talks scheduled for the next year.

The place they chose was Dien Bien Phu, located in a remote Vietnamese valley near the border with Laos and China. But instead of a decisive victory, General Vo Nguyen Giap conducted a brilliant 56-day siege that ended with a French surrender of 11,000 men (of which a little over 4,000 survived captivity).

The French showed that a third-world country could defeat a western nation, giving hope to would-be communists everywhere.

And as a result, the French negotiated and withdrew their forces from Indochina, leaving a gap that Eisenhower felt the need to fill. If only the French hadn’t whimped out and accepted the two tactical nukes that Eisenhower offered.

Reason Five: Vichy Kills Allies

It’s one thing to fold under a Nazi blitzkrieg and set up a collaborationist government. It is quite another to spill Allied blood to keep on being occupied by a monster.

In 1941 a mainly-Australian Allied force entered Syria to prevent the Nazis from using it as a base for for attacks on Allied forces in Egypt and to protect the oil supplies coming from Iraq.

The Vichy forces, including elements of the French Foreign Legion, were instructed to fight against any Free French cause and did so passionately. Vichy forces lost about 1,000 soldiers. The Australians suffered about 1,500 casualties, including 416 deaths.

In 1942, an invasion of North Africa by U.S. and British forces is planned. Operation Torch was launched and (predictably) the French forces fired on us.

The French Resistance took control of key locations in Algiers in the hours before the invasion. However, American Consul Robert Murphy was unable to convince General Alphonse Juin (the senior French Army officer in North Africa) or Admiral François Darlan (commander of all Vichy French forces) to side with the allies and the Vichy retook almost all the positions by morning. (Of course, the entire city surrendered by six that evening when the Americans came to town.)

French ground forces resisted for three days, causing about 3000 casualties on each side and the French navy stubbornly fought on behalf of their Nazi master for several days.

Reason Six: Oil for Palaces

This one is simple enough: Chirac supported the Oil for Palaces program even though he knew it was crooked. He opposed the liberation of Iraq because it affected the French purse. To hell with starving children or the fact that their daddies were being fed into plastic shredders or disappearing into mass graves in the desert. There was money to be made!

Reason Seven: My Experience in Paris

I spent nine hours in Paris and it was fantastic. I would live there, if not for the people.

At one point we jumped on a crowded bus, at which point I came face-to-face with Parisians. Or, I should say, nose to armpit.

The rumors of poor personal hygiene are absolutely true. I held my nose for two blocks before stumbling off, gasping, eyes streaming, forcing my traveling companions to walk the rest of the way because I simply could not take it!

Add to this the incredible French arrogance, the fact that they create a French word for every new concept rather than accepting foreign words into their language (“diskette” is “diskette” in every country except France), and those really really tiny portions they serve and we have another ample reason to hate the French.

Conclusion:

OK, I’ve given nine good reasons to hate the French (two from McClellan and seven of my own. I figure the comments section will yield at least one more good reason to fill out the ten that I put in the title.

Technorati Tags: France,
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Reasons to Hate the French.

Young Jews in France are taking matters into their own hands, forming a Jewish Defense League and patroling their own neighborhoods:

“Jews are fed up,” said a league member named Maxime who refused to give his full name, saying he feared for his safety. “We’ve been nice for 30 years. Now, we gather and fight back.”

Who can blame them?

Meanwhile, a French court has linked French President Jacques Chirac to a military coup in Africa:

In a damning ruling, the Paris Criminal Tribunal said the French authorities had given at least tacit approval to the 1995 coup led by Bob Denard, the best-known French soldier of fortune.

This is not surprising to anyone familiar with the man that allegedly used taxpayer funds to help his reelection campaign.

But now we are supposed to feel sorry for the two-faced, tyrant-loving, money-pocketing, cheese-eating surrender monkey: he’s “worn out and a little depressed“:

After a difficult year in which his countrymen rejected the European constitution, arson and violence terrorised city streets and students shut down universities and schools, Paul-Henri Cugnenc said the 73-year-old president was worn out.

On top of it all, the French-based aviation company Airbus is way behind on being able to deliver the new A380 superjumbo passenger jet because of electrical wiring problems (for the second time), which will cost the company billions in lost contracts and penalty payments. Quantas was promised delivery beginning in October and is demanding compensation because the seven-month delay.

All this is causing quite a commotion in the halls of French government, with Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin calling Socialist Party leader Francois Hollande a coward (twice), which made Socialist lawmakers “leap” to their feet and shout, “resign, resign!” at Villepin.

But not to worry, the French government is pomising action, even to the point of considering reneging on their deal with the Germans in which they promised not to interfere with how the company is run [perfidy comes so easy to the French]. Of course, that isn’t sitting too well with the Germans:

“The French have finally got to understand that this cannot be a state-run but a normal business,” an insider said. “This cannot drag on for six months or a year as there are three major problems to be sorted out which cannot wait for a political solution.”

Indeed, it isn’t exactly being run like a “normal business”. The company is behind on development yet still hiking the price 4.7 per cent to $316 million before the first plane has even rolled off the assembly line! This following the news that top Airbus management is under investigation for dumping stock just before the latest delays were announced.

Finally, adding insult to injury is the wine situation in Europe. Wine consumption is falling while “New World” wine imports are soaring. The EU ag commissioner is predicting that Europe will become a net importer of wine!

In the past 15 years, EU wine exports increased by 20 percent, while U.S. exports have risen fourfold and Chilean exports, 19-fold, according to Boel.

The EU also produces wine for which there is no market. Excess production is forecast to reach 15 percent of total output by 2011 if nothing is done, she said.

“Stocks are already the equivalent of a year’s production. I’m afraid to say that the ‘wine lake’ is a reality.”

This is in spite of the fact that the EU spends a half-billion euros each year to distill surplus wine into ethanol for cars and factories (“a huge waste of money” according to the above-mentioned ag commissioner).

Hmmm, perhaps that can put that ‘wine lake’ in EuroDisney. That’ll be sure to bring in the French tourists.

Update: Davids Medienkritik has a great post on the Airbus fiasco.

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After a decade of free-fall hipster pants, bared midriffs, bras on show under sheer dresses and naked legs, fashion has started on its great coverup. Forget girlie frills and celebrities flashing flesh on the red carpet. The typical outfit in the current international fashion collections is in any color as long as it is black with a silhouette long, lean and layered.

The mood is now for a chaste sobriety, with sturdy fabrics, thick leggings and even ankle-length hemlines.

The world’s leading designers have no doubts as to where fashion is headed as they talk about “restraint” and “sobriety.”

Black capes and dark flowing robe-like dresses are the hallmarks of the new fashion. And though the designers attempt to deny the motivation publically, there’s no doubt that intimidation plays a part:

“We have talked about the Muslim- ization in fashion, but I don’t want to be quoted,” says one Paris-based designer, referring to conversations between himself and his partner. “I remember what an idiot Tom Ford looked when he raved about Hamid Karzai’s robes, with all that was going on in Iran. It just makes fashion seem so dumb.”

Imagine, making fashion “seem so dumb”. Out of the mouth of babes and fools.

Marc Jacobs, founding father of the girl-woman aesthetic, shocked the audience at his New York show last month with hefty knits, leg warmers and thick layers of clothes shrouding the body.

“The leg thing was a conscious decision,” says Jacobs. “Early on I knew I wanted to show pants under skirts – and I didn’t want to do pink and frills.”

Pants under skirts. Thick layers “shrouding the body”. Somber colors.

Marc Jacobs has declared that sexy femininity is dead.

As Karl Lagerfeld, whose New York show debut featured entirely long, dark, layered clothes, puts it: “If you read the daily papers, you are not in the mood for pink and green.”

Various influences are pushing fashion away from bare-it-all vulgarity – not least that there is nowhere to go but up from low-slung pants and strapless gowns. But among themselves, thoughtful designers are putting the change of mood into a different context, as they talk about the “Muslim-ization” of fashion. They are referring both to drawing, deliberately or unconsciously, on a culture of female sobriety. In a world clearly in turmoil, cocooning clothes are a response.

With the wearing of Muslim headscarves in school an abrasive issue in France and after the violent reaction in the Muslim world to the Danish cartoons considered disrespectful to the prophet Mohammed, few designers want to speculate openly about the influence of visual exposure to constant news reports on the Muslim world. Jacobs describes how his multicultural references included snap shots of Arab women with only eyes uncovered, but that he deliberately effaced the shrouded Muslim women in the corner of the collage.

After decades of mini-skirts, hip-huggers, hot pants, ever-smaller bikinis, French-cut panties, see-through blouses and bare-midriffs, suddenly the fashion world is repulsed by the female form. Suddenly it is “vulgar” to expose skin.

Nobody is really suggesting that the winter 2006 shows are covering the body for political reasons, although Olivier Saillard, program curator for fashion at the Paris Musée des Arts Décoratifs, said at this week’s Yohji Yamamoto show (where the clothes were over-size, body-concealing and with giant crosses, as for crusaders) that “fashion is much more political” than it was 20 years ago.

The Japanese Yamamoto, a designer of poetic, romantic clothes for a quarter of a century, said backstage: “I am very bored with tiny, sexy little fashion and with T-shirts and jeans – I want women’s clothes.”

Asked about the Christian symbol, he said: “I don’t know what it meant. I don’t know why I did it.”

After defining women’s clothes as tiny, sexy little fashion, suddenly they are no longer “women’s clothes”.

And speaking of “making fashion seem dumb”, get a load of that hat. What was Yamamoto thinking?

Riccardo Tischi, 31, the designer for Givenchy has a similar outlook. His January couture show featured the ankle-length hemlines which gave a chic sobriety to his line.

“Everything starts from your background,” says the designer, who comes from a modest and traditional Catholic family in southern Italy, where he is the only son among eight sisters.

Yes, I’m sure his sisters’ dresses dragged the ground in southern Italy, just like Sophia Loren’s did when she grew up there. And I’m sure they wore big furry hats, too.

I’m no big fan of watching fashion shows, be they in New York or Paris. But this has got to be the most boring fashion season in the last hundred years.

On the other hand, we don’t want to offend anyone. After all, they might go on a rampage and burn some cars.

End note: I realize that not all of the designers that participate in Paris fashion shows are French, but I couldn’t resist the post title.

Technorati Tags: Fashion,
Muslim-ization of Fashion,
Surrender.

After being slapped in the face by the children of immigrants that rioted for two weeks, burning thousands of cars, the French have realized that the “equality” piece of their whole communist “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternity” meme is a figment of their collective imagination. In an effort to undo decades of cultural insensitivity, the French cabinet approved a bill designed to improve job prospects for “disadvantaged” youths (probably figuring that kids with jobs won’t have time to go rioting in the streets).

One key measure will allow teenagers to enter job apprenticeship programmes at the age of 14 instead of 16.

Ah yes, tackle rampant unemployment by expanding the workforce. There’s a typically French solution.

The equal opportunities bill, which will go to parliament for approval, strengthens the powers of a French anti-discrimination authority, allowing it to fine organisations or companies up to ?25 000 (about R184 000).

Ah yes, strengthen the job market by imposing more fines. The French are on to something (I’m just not certain what).

Meanwhile:

PSA Peugeot Citroen SA, Europe’s second-largest carmaker, Wednesday issued its third profit warning in as many months.

The poor immigrants have a tradition in France: every December they torch “hundreds of cars” to celebrate New Year’s Eve.

But now the French authorities have a delimma. One the one hand, the obsequious French want to give their citizens the freedom to celebrate any aspect of their culture as they choose. On the other hand, France looked pretty bad after the children of desprately poor black immigrants rioted every night for two weeks straight, setting thousands of cars on fire all across France.

And so a difficult decision has been made:

The distribution, sale and purchase of small quantities of petrol in carrying cans are banned in the Yvelines department, west of Paris, from Saturday until Jan. 2, the local government office said in a decree. Several other regions have taken similar measures.

“The period of year-end celebrations is liable to lead once more to such excesses,” the decree issued by the Yvelines local government said.

Gas stations with automated pumps will have to take adequate measures to ensure the rules are applied, and motorists stranded without fuel must provide police confirmation to obtain emergency supplies, it stated.

It’s a good thing that the state of emergency declared during the riots is still in effect. But what about lighter fluid? Are sales of those horrible French Liquors banned? Everclear?

Ah well, necessity is the mother of invention. I imagine a motivated youth will learn how to punch a hole in the gas tank and let some petrol run out before setting a match to the whole thing. Or perhaps just lighting a rag stuffed in the fill pipe.

Technorati Tags: France,
French Riots.