Strip criminals of French nationality-Sarkozy

Strip criminals of French nationality-Sarkozy 30 Jul 2010 12:02:35 GMT


Source: Reuters

PARIS, July 30 (Reuters) - President Nicolas Sarkozy said on Friday he wanted to strip French nationality from anyone of foreign origin who threatened the life of a police officer, in a crackdown after riots shook two French towns this month.
Speaking in Grenoble, where street violence erupted in mid-July after a local man died fleeing police after allegedly holding up a casino, Sarkozy said he also wanted to increase prison sentences for violent crimes.
"French nationality should be stripped from anybody who has threatened the life of a police officer or anybody involved in public policing," Sarkozy said.
Police in the Grenoble area have received death threats since the riots.
Sarkozy, whose hardline stance helped him win the 2007 election, has promised to crack down on urban violence following the riots.
The conservative leader has failed to reduce violent crime despite tougher policing following widespread riots in 2005. Neighbourhoods remain stricken by high youth unemployment, poor public services, drug trafficking and a rise in gun crime.
Sarkozy on Wednesday ordered the dismantling of 300 illegal camps of travellers and Roma across France and the immediate expulsion of Roma from Bulgaria and Romania who had committed public order offences. (Reporting by Emmanuel Jarry; Writing by John Irish; editing by Daniel Flynn and Jon Boyle)

Cagey sing-a-long

You turn me on, you lift me up And like the sweetest cup I'd share with you

You lift me up, don't you ever stop, I'm here with you

Now it's all or nothing'

Cause you say you'll follow through

You follow me, and I, I, I follow you

What you gonna do when things go wrong?

What you gonna do when it all cracks up?

What you gonna do when the Love burns down?

What you gonna do when the flames go up?

Who is gonna come and turn the tide?

What's it gonna take to make a dream survive?

Who's got the touch to calm the storm inside?

Who's gonna save you?

Alive and Kicking

Stay until your love is,

Alive and Kicking

Stay until your love is,

until your love is,

Alive

Oh you lift me up to the crucial top,

so I can see

Oh you lead me on,

till the feelings come

And the lights that shine on

But if that don't mean nothing

Like if someday it should fall through

You'll take me home where the magic's from

And I'll be with you

What you gonna do when things go wrong?

What you gonna do when it all cracks up?

What you gonna do when the Love burns down?

What you gonna do when the flames go up?

Who is gonna come and turn the tide?

What's it gonna take to make a dream survive?

Who's got the touch to calm the storm inside?

Note from a friend: call your loved ones!

How is your emergency preparedness?  Are you right with God?  Do you have a call card in your wallet?  

Any loose ends with people you care about?  I know I have some. 

The following letter came in from my friend, and having deleted the personal info, I'm posting part of it here so that some good may come of it. 
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Thanks for all your thoughts and prayers after my wife's accident.
There is no earthly reason she survived that wreck. And she has no permanent injuries.
She was t boned in an intersection at the end of our street, rolled over three or four times. She was hit about 45-50 miles per hour, the other driver didn't leave any skid marks.

The paramedic told me she was trapped in the car for about 10 minutes before they could cut her out and remove her through the sunroof of her Ford Escape. Thank God for Henry Ford and building safe vehicles. If it were not for fuel cut off, she would have been in a pool of gasoline. The area between the wheels where the other car hit was pushed in about 12-18 inches. The salvage yard man told me he expected to be putting up coroners' tape.

Instead, she is home after a four day hospital stay with a bad concussion and a lot of pain meds. She is expected to be able to return to work in about twelve weeks. I was at work when I got the phone call. The passage from man to little girl is pretty quick. The voice on the other end of the phone was kind to quickly ID himself and let me know she was alive and on their way to the hospital. Within a few hours, I knew she would be ok.  So do me a favor and give your wife a hug and your kids a call.

A breath can cause your downfall.

Behind the Scenes: 'The Road'

"'Carrying the fire' - and the transfer of humanity." The trailer is worth watching for the descriptions of theme. Phew! I hate getting teary-eyed at movies, but then I realize it's refreshing to be able to occasionally pluck uncertain, more volatile emotions from the tableau. In the days of Shakespearean theater, the pathos in a heart-wrenching end often were the end, were the takeaway. "Sad" endings were as treasured as other endings!

I liked when Charlize Theron discussed the unmanufactured acting of the boy.

All these questions...

Can EMTs carry firearms?

What to do with all these obsolete wash-khakis?

Point/counterpoint from the N.Y. Post today: Sagging pants "legal." Some jackass was ticketed for wearing sagging pants, then the ticket was thrown out.

Cagey's listening to

The Fixx.


'You Don't Have to Prove Yourself'

'No One Has to Cry'

'Less Cities More Moving People'
Call and response.

Uncannily, every time I've been at a huge life's crossroads in the past three years, The Fixx and I cross paths, and they're making music on stage, Moving People!  Will be seeing them Saturday and Sunday.

Looks like I'm going to hit my goal of an average of a post per day this month.  Nice!

Are the actions of t.v.'s Whale Wars PIRACY?

Article 101, U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea:
Definition of piracy
Piracy consists of any of the following acts:

(a) any illegal acts of violence or detention, or any act of depredation, committed for private ends by the crew or the passengers of a private ship or a private aircraft, and directed:

(i) on the high seas, against another ship or aircraft, or against persons or property on board such ship or aircraft;

(ii) against a ship, aircraft, persons or property in a place outside the jurisdiction of any State;

(b) any act of voluntary participation in the operation of a ship or of an aircraft with knowledge of facts making it a pirate ship or aircraft;

(c) any act of inciting or of intentionally facilitating an act described in subparagraph (a) or (b).


So I've seen a few episodes of this Whale Wars.  A Dutch-flagged hippie ship goes around harrassing Japanese ships, purportedly out hunting whales.  The base questions I have are:

1.  Are whales endangered?  Subject to interpretation, I don't know what the definitive research says.

2.  Is whale hunting illegal?  Well, what is the standing and authority of the International Whaling Commission?  Looks like it's being ignored. 

3.  Would I eat whale, given the opportunity?  I really doubt it. [Sound of record needle swerving off record].  Kind of strikes me like how I might feel if I ate a dolphin.  And the thought of such an immense creature suffering makes me cringe.

4.  Are the Whale Wars crewmembers guilty of piracy?  I think so.  They foul propellers with giant steel cables, and in current episodes are attempting boardings of flagged vessels on the high seas, without being of any law-enforcement capacity.

5.  What are the international laws outside of territorial waters/contiguous zones?  Well, it's a different world.  I'm no sea lawyer, but I think of the gambling barges that go just beyond our waters.  It's no man's land.  The UNCLOS is the only sea-going law I'm mildly familiar with.  The U.S. accepts it as convention, but won't ratify it, presumably due to freedom of navigation and other concerns.  The U.S. recognizes other international law in a similar manner.  Piracy is piracy, the question becomes, "Who enforces against it?"

Cagey's listening to

'The Trial and the Search' - Jan Hammer

Patriotism in action

Decision point:

Appear on 'The View' and go to a fundraiser later;

                                 OR

Speak to 45,000 scouts at the 100th anniversary Boy Scouts of America Jamboree.

Yeah.
Don't worry, he gets paid to make the big decisions.

QOTD

"Ya know, Walmart is going to shut down Ringling Bros Circus. Who wants to wait a whole year for them to come to town when you can go to Walmart and see the circus every day of the week...for free too!"

I am finding that more and more that people like to do things for attention at Wal-Mart (thus, the circus-like displays), but maybe also because we lack outlets for this expression. We have a disjointed sense of community since we became a suburban culture during the last century. We have circuses, county fairs, etc., but what would be nice is for us to have town "plazas" and neighborhood centers instead of all this build-up. You end up with convenience but end up with harmful by-products like homogenous business (no diversity, no interest) and limited choices (small businesses suffer in competition).

The areas these occupy are usually filled by parking lots for a very great distance in every direction. I call them "concrete oases."  Quite apropos for the wasteland of tattered modesty and decency in which we live.

Charges dropped against Steven Seagal

On the heels of the news that the harrassment extortion suit against him was dropped, Steven Seagal will debut in a new show. The same jour-nihilists that ran with the story of indictment should now be proclaiming Seagal's innocence from the rooftops. But - social irresponsibility and the media go hand in hand, and we can only hope that as the media rolls around in dirt, the public will question and interrogate the motives instead of blindly believing.

Bonus: Quote of the day

"Steven Seagal goes through more phases than Barbie. So far, we've seen Mafioso Seagal, Reggae Musician Seagal, Environmental Activist Seagal, Gangsta Seagal, Asian Seagal, Jimmy Buffet Seagal, and Southern Lawman Seagal. It looks like his Southern phase is going to extend just a bit longer, with the news that Seagal will topline the TV crime procedural 'Southern Justice'."

- Wookie Johnson, Screen Junkies.

Cagey's listening to

'The Cage' - Johnny Hates Jazz

Cagey summer '10 music series repository

2011

Cy Curnin - Feb. 09


2010

Arlo Guthrie - Feb.
Suzanne Vega - Mar. 13   http://makalakapisei.blogspot.com/2010/03/quick-narrative-on-things_15.html
The Church - Apr.       http://makalakapisei.blogspot.com/2010/05/church-american-tour-2010-set-list.html
The Fixx - Jul. 31/Aug. 01
The Smithereens - Aug. 19
Tears for Fears - Sep. 04  http://makalakapisei.blogspot.com/2011/01/tears-for-fears-belt-em-out-on-east.html


2009

Depeche Mode - Jul. 06  http://makalakapisei.blogspot.com/2010/06/one-year-ago-today.html

Cagey's reading

1. "Lose Christianity or face expulsion"  A grad student faces compulsory re-education by liberals who disagree with her right to free thought. 

    - More reading on reeducation camps:  Wikipedia, Wendy McElroy

2. "Journolist: Is calling them racists a liberal media tactic?"  Cockroaches are scattering everywhere.

3. "Answers to your netiquette questions revealed!"  "Today, as we spend more and more hours interacting online (Americans devoted twice as many minutes to social networking and blog-reading in 2009 vs. 2008, according to a Nielsen survey), there are more opportunities than ever for awkwardness, unintentional insult, rejection, creepiness and misunderstanding."

4. "Obama team's panic over losing whites."  Racial tensions gripping politicos and the entire news complex these days. "One understands the bitterness of tea-party folks who carry signs that read: "What difference does it make what this placard says? You'll call it racist anyway'."

Cagey news compendium

I'm behind on my goal for 31 posts this month. Today, a compendium of what Cagey's reading:

1. "The Underground is Rewinding to Revive the Cassette"

“Tapes are great because they have a really nice warm and fuzzy sound,’’ says Quilt’s drummer Taylor McVay. “But also, unlike CDs, tapes cannot be copied onto iTunes, so the tape itself remains a valuable object, rather than just existing as a transfer of data.’’ Quilt guitarist Anna Rochinski echoes that sentiment. “The ultra-convenience of mp3s makes music very, very disposable to some people,’’ she says. “And I think that’s sad.’’

2. http://olehgirl.com/?p=3728

 A blog post by an Israeli on the de facto white flag the U.S is flying at park territory on the U.S./Mexican border makes for an interesting perspective.

On Savage [still] banned in Britain

On the ban of Michael Savage from Britain:

"In fact, the British government has not identified which specific statements he [Savage] made that they find so objectionable. This is akin to the lettres de cachet used for centuries in the French legal system whereby individuals could be denounced and imprisoned for serious crimes on flimsy grounds and without the full details of their crimes being disclosed to the accused. Even an elementary school student in Britain knows that the British pioneered a legal system that was once the envy of the world precisely because it was based on higher standards of proof and prosecution. This begets the fact that the case is not ultimately about speech; it is about appeasing the Muslim community. This is the politics of jihad, stupid."

Vuoto, Grace. "Who's Afraid of Michael Savage?" Reflections Magazine, July 2010 Vol. I, No. 18. URL: http://www.reflectionsebi.net/index.php?vol=001_vol&iss=018_issue§ion=01_cover_story&item=01_cover_story.xhtml

QOTD

"Considering the only culture most people share these days is pop-culture (not traditional stories or religious backgrounds) the stories we tell and experience are the only things holding us together in a communal sense."

Cagey sing-a-long

The face upon the wall
The curtains hanging teardrops
As night begins to fall
Reflected in the moonlight
Projected on my brain
The subject for a painting
An uncorroded ring

That's how I see you
The unforgotten dream
If I could talk to your picture
An unaccorded ring

Why me

Atttracted in the story
From lines within a play
The stage is set for actors
The scene is set to stay

That's how I see you
An unforgotten dream
If I could talk to your picture
And understand your need

Why me

You left me in the know

And now, a public service announcement

Crass, but true. I don't mean to hurt any feelings with this, but somehow our aesthetic is inclined toward "slim is beautiful."  This idea has been highly controversial; deleterious to health, and then not (e.g. anorexia/bulemia vs. a national obesity index); a struggle between old-world vs. new ("My mom used to feed us like lumberjacks," vs. parents starting their children on designer diets - Google it).  I know I have about 20 lbs. to lose, and that's just so running won't hurt my ankle and back anymore.  But it's also to increase my energy and develop self-control, character, and efficiency.

Article: "The Scapegoating of Michael Savage," by Robin of Berkeley

Precis:  This is what happens when people mature: they shed ideas that are self-destructive, and embrace what humanity's achieved.  Modern liberalism's changing, and tearing down the individual through demonizing and scapegoating (such as with Michael Savage, currently banned from the U.K.) is its primary tactic.  We see this far too often.  In another article, writer Robin of Berkeley writes this defining quote:

"I'm in my 50's and liberalism has changed so much since I was young. It used to be about free speech and now it's about controlling speech."

Excerpt:

Everything that came out of Savage's mouth offended me. He blared on about feminized men; borders, language and culture; and other alien concepts.

To my tender, politically correct ears, Savage seemed like a mad man. But in time, I realized that he was crazy like a fox.

Twain wrote that when he was a teenager, his father didn't know what he was talking about. When Twain became a young adult, suddenly his old man made sense. Twain quipped that he couldn't believe how much his dad had learned in a few short years. Like Twain, I was finally growing up.
 
If you've ever been scapegoated at work or at home, you know what it's like; it's psychologically eviscerating. Scapegoating is designed to wipe out another person's humanity.


Full article: http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/07/the_scapegoating_of_michael_sa.html

Cagey's listening to

Eat it, reds -

Cagey sing-a-long

And I thank you

For bringing me here

For showing me home

For singing these tears

Finally I've found that I

Belong

Feels like home

I should have known

From my first breath

Really, Michelle, the race card, really?!

If there's any organization that should be above using the race card, it would be the NAACP.   

Racism is stupid! And using it rhetorically does not advance your cause.



All over Drudge today:  http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/naacp-tea-party-civil-rights-group-considers-resolution/story?id=11144640

Racism in this country is a big deal, especially coming from the administration who supposedly would put an end to it, and whose handlers condemn any criticism as racism.

"We're deeply concerned about elements that are trying to move the country back, trying to reverse progress that we've made," NAACP spokeswoman Leila McDowell told ABC News. "We are asking that the law-abiding members of the Tea Party repudiate those racist elements, that they recognize the historic and present racist elements that are within the Tea Party movement."

- When the NAACP creates generalizations that a considerable segment of middle American voters is racist, it's not racism.  I've long wondered why the prevailing message isn't national unity; instead we get a vote on whether to call populist Americans racist. 

Forcing destructive policies - the "toxic" border issue, bailouts, tsars, the radical reshaping of marriage, Obamacare, destruction of small business, astronomical debt, and unmitigated arrogance assures some electoral defeats in November.  And when it happens, it ain't racism, folks.

"The fact that you ran a red light is probably because it is a norm in your culture"

How shiate gets done in today's America.

Oh no, what will happen to pro basketball's LeBron James?

Whether or not you love or could care less about LeBron James, I urge you to watch this video and engage in some critical thinking.

Perfect hash browns: Science vs. art

Science wins.

"We usually cube the potatoes and add water enough to cover them for about 10 minutes in order to cook them in the pan. Then we add butter, salt, pepper, and either garlic or Emeril's steak seasoning and fry until crispy and brown."

I like Montreal, personally (the seasoning).

Is this [cubing] possible? I have my suspicions. The scene of the crime: soft, black cubed hash browns today. Four fat red flags -

Too little heat: Use medium high. I used medium for 20 min.
Too much flipping: Try only to flip once. I flipped continuously.
Chopping method: They say slice them; I say f.u. (feign understanding) I'm cubing.
Oil: Two Tbsp. I used less this time than before, but couldn't keep track.

P.S., "Crispify" isn't a word, normally I like wordplay, but my intuition tells me the word he wanted was "crisp" and he wasn't playing. Pet peeve. Speaking of 'taters: Commenters needn't commentate; commenting does just fine.

Reference: http://www.life123.com/food/sides/potatoes/hash-browns.shtml

---------
I'm in an analytical frame of mind today. I just got done giving Red Robin a piece of my mind on their new marketing strategy, (e.g. "Earn 100,000 points and receive a Red Robin polo shirt, or spend $100 and get $7 back on your next meal), no oomph left to serve that up for you. Their survey was weighted on four cool items + a gimmick (Free b-day burger, etc. PLUS some kind of bizarre point/visit based offer, the premise being they could get you in 12+ times a year, to spend $20+ dollars per visit). In sum: No. Sticker shock of counting big numbers + "It's the economy, stupid!"
---------

Cagey's listening to

The Cure - All Cats Are Grey

Cagey's listening to

Article: Loss of language, loss of thought

by Wolfgang Grassl
(excerpted article - full article can be found HERE)

Loss of language among the younger population -- that is to say, the ability to formulate and enunciate properly constructed sentences that reflect clear thought -- is growing at a staggering rate in the United States. Even among students whose academic aptitude is well above the national average, my years as an undergraduate business professor show that four out of five will make grave spelling errors in written assignments or exams, and about half that regularly commit grammatical blunders. The ubiquitous confusion between "there" and "their" may still be considered a quaint and negligible fluke that nearly creates a new orthographic norm; the inability to express lucid arguments must not.


What is being lost is the capacity to think in terms of cause and effect, of distinguishing between differing levels of argument, and particularly any appreciation for abstraction. Increasingly, students expect to be spoon-fed with concrete examples, operational instructions, mechanical repetitions, and pictorial representation. The loss of language is but a symptom of the loss of thought -- and losing thought means losing much more.

Assume a typical question in an introductory class on marketing: "Why do we segment markets?" A typical student response is: "What do you mean?"

The traditional way of defining something, according to Aristotle and the scholastic logicians, was per genus proximum et differentiam specificam: We need to name the higher category to which a term belongs, then specify some characteristic that sets it apart from other things within this category.

However, "like" does not seek to place a ball into the next higher category of spheres or objects, nor does it offer a synonym. It gives an instance of balls, or of the usage of balls. Providing merely an aspect of what is to be explained is not only reductionist (by substituting a part for the whole); it is also a subjectivist move that avoids describing and thus reflecting on the essence of what is to be explained. It is indicative of our age of increasing relativism under the guise of "pluralism" and "tolerance" -- your feeling about the nature of something is just as good as my feeling, because there really isn't any "is"; there may not even be an "a." Then a ball might as well have edges, for who can tell me that I can only call something a ball if it is round?

The problem ultimately lies in a misconstrued metaphysics, or rather in the absence of any notion of ontology at all.

Surveys show that the average American receives some 5,000 external stimuli per day and spends more than eight hours a day in front of screens -- television, computer monitors, cellphones, gaming consoles, and so on. Where in earlier ages people worked in their gardens, played an instrument, went fishing, read books, entertained guests, or engaged in conversation with family or friends, they have become passive and speechless consumers of canned content. These screens help produce a people that is losing its language. But more importantly, these people no longer see structures in their world but rather a bewildering juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated events. Vicarious living and proxy experiences are the deeper problem with our students' loss of language.

Of course, not all students are alike: Many do excel and emerge as active thinkers and thoughtful speakers. But as a society, we are a far cry from seeing the critical thinking that progressive educators want to convey. In order to think critically, one must be able to keep causes apart from effects, fact from interpretation, belief from knowledge, definitions from explanations, and much more. Critical thought requires determining the range of alternatives and applying to them a clear and consistent standard of evaluation.

Cagey's listening to

Happy Independence Day

Today in good ol' small town Mudville, saw two young adults standing on a corner waving U.S. flags.
They weren't trying to bring people into a benefit car wash, they weren't selling anything, they were just showing love of country. They could be inside playing video games, stuffing themselves, playing horseshoes, but they were not.

That scene was the highlight of my Independence Day celebration.

Cue John Mellencamp. 

Kilroy was here... who is Kilroy?

Do you remember Kilroy?

This is interesting ... I have often wondered about Kilroy ... now I know. Great piece of history.

Anyone born in the mid thirties (or earlier) knew Kilroy. We didn't know why but we had lapel pins with his nose hanging over the label and the top of his face above his nose with his hands hanging over the label too. I believe it was orange colored. No one knew why he was so well known but we all joined in!

Kind of a war story – now we know!

In 1946 the American Transit Association, through its radio program, "Speak to America," sponsored a nationwide contest to find the REAL Kilroy, offering a prize of a real trolley car to the person who could prove himself to be the genuine article.

Almost 40 men stepped forward to make that claim, but only James Kilroy from Halifax, Massachusetts, had evidence of his identity.

Kilroy was a 46-year old shipyard worker during the war who worked as a checker at the Fore River Shipyard in Quincy. His job was to go around and check on the number of rivets completed. Riveters were on piecework and got paid by the rivet.

Kilroy would count a block of rivets and put a check mark in semi-waxed lumber chalk, so the rivets wouldn't be counted twice. When Kilroy went off duty, the riveters would erase the mark. Later on, an off-shift inspector would come through and count the rivets a second time, resulting in double pay for the riveters.

One day Kilroy's boss called him into his office. The foreman was upset about all the wages being paid to riveters, and asked him to investigate. It was then he realized what had been going on.

The tight spaces he had to crawl in to check the rivets didn't lend themselves to lugging around a paint can and brush, so Kilroy decided to stick with the waxy chalk. He continued to put his checkmark on each job he inspected, but added KILROY WAS HERE in king-sized letters next to the check, and eventually added the sketch of the chap with the long nose peering over the fence and that became part of the Kilroy message. Once he did that, the riveters stopped trying to wipe away his marks.

Ordinarily the rivets and chalk marks would have been covered up with paint. With war on, however, ships were leaving the Quincy Yard so fast that there wasn't time to paint them. As a result, Kilroy's inspection "trademark" was seen by thousands of servicemen who boarded the troopships the yard produced. His message apparently rang a bell with the servicemen, because they picked it up and spread it all over Europe and the South Pacific. Before war's end, "Kilroy" had been here, there, and everywhere on the long hauls to Berlin and Tokyo.

To the troops outbound in those ships, however, he was a complete mystery; all they knew for sure was that some jerk named Kilroy had "been there first." As a joke, U.S. servicemen began placing the graffiti wherever they landed, claiming it was already there when they arrived.

Kilroy became the U.S. super-GI who had always "already been" wherever GIs went. It became a challenge to place the logo in the most unlikely places imaginable (it is said to be atop Mt. Everest, the Statue of Liberty, the underside of l’Arc De Triomphe, and even scrawled in the dust on the moon).
As the war went on, the legend grew. Underwater demolition teams routinely sneaked ashore on Japanese-held islands in the Pacific to map the terrain for coming invasions by U.S. troops (and thus, presumably, were the first GI's there). On one occasion, however, they reported seeing enemy troops painting over the Kilroy logo! In 1945, an outhouse was built for the exclusive use of Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill at the Potsdam conference. Its’ first occupant was Stalin, who emerged and asked his aide (in Russian), "Who is Kilroy?"
To help prove his authenticity in 1946, James Kilroy brought along officials from the shipyard and some of the riveters. He won the trolley car, which he gave to his nine children as a Christmas gift and set it up as a playhouse in the Kilroy front yard in Halifax , Massachusetts..
So, now you know!
- author unknown

Happy Independence Day

Popular U.S. flag mural painted over by CA Dept. of Transportation. Sometimes, the best symbol of America is just a grey wall

Another priceless headline submission that alas, did not get green lit.  (Article Link)