Thanksgiving Weekend: Prayers and Random Musings

Prayers of Thanksgiving: For my family: for my wife's ever-closer walk with God; for my brilliant, talented, fiesty daughters; for all that we have been given: may we use it for good and God's work; for the gifts I have been given: that I may not bury them like the guy given one Talent; for Uncle Don: that his suffering has ended; for friends and neighbors: all the grace thay have shown us; for my local church: that we will continue to follow where the Spirit leads; for the whole Visible Body: that we will continue to enjoy revivial and a renewed sense of commitment; for all this and more: thanks be to God.

Prayers General: for my Life Guard "prayer victim:" that he may continue to grow an upright young man and may get his stated wish; for our nation: that we may continue to show compassion with common sense to all those who are suffering, especially from this year's disasters; for our leaders: that they may continue to be (or come to be) guided my Your wisdom; for all of our Soldiers, Sailors, Marines, Airmen, Coastguardsmen, and others in harm's way as we fight World War IV: may they be safe, continue to do good, and not hear the mewlings of mendacious, hateful cowards back home; for the mendacious, hateful cowards back home: may they see God's light; for our other enemies around the world: may they either turn from their paths and be healed, or be swiftly sent to meet the Truth face-to-face. I ask all these things in Jesus' name.

Speaking of our nation's leaders: it has now been 33 months since they sent Coalition forces into Iraq without clearly articulating the end state or strategy to the American people:


(Day by Day)

In other important news: The world's ugliest dog, Sam, has died at 14. Whoa:


How could they tell he was dead? His owner is a lady of surpassing compassion; I would not be able to sleep with such a thing under my roof. Sam looks like something out of Lovecraft (minus the tentacles on his face, of course). Needless to say, Sam had his own blog. RIP, bro. You deserve the rest.

A neighbor and friend of mine is similarly compassionate: she has "Sarah," a blind, mostly-deaf, stumbling, quivering, 73,000-year-old poodle-like thing. She adopted it from the local pound: "who else whould love such a creature?" I call her "Roomba," and delight in watching her: she lists blindly about until she walks into a wall and then turns and forges ahead until she runs into another wall, and so on. She seems quite content to continue this until someone stops her or it's time for bed. When anybody touches her, she startles so abruptly you'd think she'd popped an aneurism. I consider Sarah a microcosm of the human condition.

In news from the Glibtick community, my local "newspaper" carries this notice:

Shortly before his divestment, Rev. Alex
administers the Sacrament to Michael Jackson

Disgraced Priest Dies

Alex Sherlock, forced to resign as an active Catholic priest in the wake of sexual abuse claims against him, was a Biblical scholar and a superb fundraiser, said those who remember him fondly.

...The Rev. Charles Troncale, pastor of Church of the Holy Spirit in Montgomery and one of Sherlock's fellow seminary students four decades ago, remembered his friend as a man who excelled in the Scriptures.

Yeah, he used to rake in the cash for the local "Big Brothers" chapter. Guess in his studies of Scripture, he missed the part about not buggering little boys; that, or he took the injunction to "love the little children" a bit too literally. Perhaps in his search of the Bible, he was following W.C. Fields' advice.

Nonetheless, I'm glad folks in this town had positive things to say about him in death: "Other than that, Mrs Lincoln, how was the play?"

May God have mercy on his soul.

In other religious news, the Left's Holy and Sacred Mother of Perpetual Sorrows, Cindy Sheehan, was back in Crawford Texas to celebrate the unveiling of her very own battle monument:

Crawford, Texas (November 25, 2005) – Dozens of supporters and members of national and regional media were on hand today for the dedication of the new Crawford Peace House garden and memorial to Cindy’s stand, and the troops killed in Iraq.

Dozens! Mother Sheehan held a book signing, too. As usual, there were more media than supporters attending:



Meanwhile, Canuckistan* faces a threat even more dire than Cindy Sheehan; even more terrifying than the influx of unassimilable muslims that gives the country its name. The threat: US-provoked extraterrestrial invasion and, yes, (dare I speak its name?) intergalactic war!


Yes, the Canuckistanis have discovered our secret Moonbase (code name: Moon Unit Zappa) as well as our evil Yanqui imperialist plot to shoot at ET, the Children of the Sun, and the Architects of Nazca. The aliens themselves come in peace, naturally, but the cowboy war-mongering Americans will shoot at them out of unreasoning fear and loathing, thus starting the "intergalatic war:"

OTTAWA, CANADA (PRWEB) November 24, 2005 -- A former Canadian Minister of Defence and Deputy Prime Minister under Pierre Trudeau has joined forces with three Non-governmental organizations to ask the Parliament of Canada to hold public hearings on Exopolitics -- relations with “ETs.”

On September 25, 2005, in a startling speech at the University of Toronto that caught the attention of mainstream newspapers and magazines, Paul Hellyer, Canada’s Defence Minister from 1963-67 under Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Prime Minister Lester Pearson, publicly stated: "UFOs, are as real as the airplanes that fly over your head."

Mr. Hellyer went on to say, "I'm so concerned about what the consequences might be of starting an intergalactic war, that I just think I had to say something."

Hellyer warned, "The United States military are preparing weapons which could be used against the aliens, and they could get us into an intergalactic war without us ever having any warning. He stated, "The Bush administration has finally agreed to let the military build a forward base on the moon, which will put them in a better position to keep track of the goings and comings of the visitors from space, and to shoot at them, if they so decide."

(bow to LGF)

Let's think about this a moment. All of our physics tells us that light speed is the absolute maximum speed in the universe. Light travels at about 186,000 statute miles per second, or about 5,865,696,000,000 miles in a year (a "light year"). Our own Milky Way is about 100,000 light years across. We reside in an arm of our barred-spiral galaxy. The nearest galaxy (if we don't count the newly-found objects colliding with our own galaxy and the Magellanic clouds) is Andromeda (M31), some 2.5 million light years away.

Now, if a species can traverse these distances to visit us, there's very little chance that George Dubya Chimpler and his NASCAR-luvin' knuckle-draggin' cowhand yahoos can do very much to prevent it, is there? They're either gonna be so far beyond us in technology that even the very-enlightened Canadians will seem like insects to them, or they're gonna be real tired and cranky from having driven for so long and will likely be spoiling for a fight anyway. Either way, I don't think even the Canuckistani's tinfoil hats are going to save them if Dubya Franco-Macaque starts his war.

He's watching you, George

Monk

Update 29 Nov 05: here, by the way, is a picture of "Sarah," now officially the world's ugliest dog (courtesy of RightWingConspirator):

* A nation in North America, once known as "Canada."

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Surprising Scientific Find: the Vertibrate Republican

Turning the discipline of political paleotology on its head this week, researchers in the little-known but important field claim they have discovered evidence that Loxodonta Americanus Gopensis has survived extinction. The so-called "Vertibrate Republican" was previously thought to have become extinct during the Late Reaganaceous Era, having been crowded out of its ecological niche by the more adaptive invertibrate variety, Loxodonta Vermiformus Strangenewrespecticus.

This discovery has created great turmoil in scientific circles. Despite the recent discoveries, the so-called moderate invertibrate school still argues that the spineless variety of Loxodonta predominates, citing Republicans' knuckling under to pork-engorged spending bills, support for a Supreme Court nominee, selected on the basis of "diversity concerns," who was barely qualified to act as a women's room attendant, and failure to defend the US military's growing success in the Global War on Terror, even while Copperheads and fifth-columnists among America's "liberals" and media Establishment daily characterized America's Soldiers, Sailors, and Airmen as "Nazis," "torturers," "stormtroopers," and "baby-killers."

Adovcates for the re-appearance of vertibrate Republicans, however, cite the President's recent speech at Osan Air Base Korea:

Some might be tempted to dismiss the terrorist goals as fanatical or extreme. They are fanatical and extreme, but we cannot afford to dismiss them. Evil men obsessed with ambition and unburdened by conscience must be taken very seriously. Against such an enemy, there's only one effective response: We will never back down, and we will never give in, and we'll never accept anything less than complete victory.

Vertibrate school paeontologists go on to explain that the President has now presented a comprehensive strategy for the war in terms understandable to ordinary Americans, an accomplihsment many beleived possible only of the Vertibrate Loxodontae. Paleontologists of the invertibrate school point to the fact that the President has consistently missed opportunities to do just this over the past two years -- his current tough words may simply reflect a statistical anomaly.

The Vertibrate school counters with evidence that other specimens exhibiting at least partial remnants of backbone have been discovered: Indirect evidence of a Vertibrate colony, long thought to be lost, was seen in Congress this week, after Congressman Jack Murtha (Species: Perissoldactyla Assholinus Proditor), characterized as a "friend of the military" by the mainstream press, called for the US...

To immediately redeploy U.S. troops consistent with the safety of U.S. forces.
To create a quick reaction force in the region.
To create an over- the- horizon presence of Marines.
To diplomatically pursue security and stability in Iraq

Our military has done everything that has been asked of them, the U.S. can not accomplish anything further in Iraq militarily. IT IS TIME TO BRING THEM HOME.

The long-dormant colony of vertibrate Loxodontae reacted this call for moral and political cowardice by forcing a vote on troop withdrawal on the House floor, which was defeated 403-3. The timing and phrasing of the vote compelled even most liberal Perissodactylae to vote against it. Paleontologists of the vertibrate school point to forcing of the vote as indirect evidence that a colony of vertibrate Loxodontae still exists somewhere in the depths of Congress.

During debate over the troop withrawl vote, scientists of the vertibrate Loxodontae school point to what they call the first direct evidence of an evolving backbone in the remarks of fledgling Congresswoman Jean Schmidt, who quoted a Marine correspondent who wanted to remind Rep. Murtha that, "cowards cut and run, Marines never do." Perissodatylae from all over the House chamber rose in protest, accusing Schmidt of insulting Murtha, who won two Purple Hearts decades ago during his brief stint on active duty (he remained in the Reserves and retired as a Colonel). Schmidt maintained that she and her active duty Marine Colonel constituent, currently serving in Iraq were not insulting Murtha, just reminding him of a Marine's duty, since Murtha likes to make political hay of his association with the Corps. Take Murtha's service for the heroic sacrifice it was or not, your choice -- that his late words spoke cowardice is beyond denying.

Paleontologists of the vertibrate school are encouraged by this small and belated display of backbone and are cheered by evidence, however tenuous, that the vertibrate Loxodonta still exists.

Monk

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A Conservative, but Not In Full

I have recently been reading I Am Charlotte Simmons, Tom Wolfe's newest novel and I find that my enthusiasm for his work is beginning to wane. I have devoured everything the man has written over the last forty years and used to wait for each new work with great anticipation. He remains, in many ways, our most brilliant writer and IASS is a stylistic tour de force. He is also still a political and cultural conservative of long-standing and impeccable credentials. His earlier journalistic writing very significantly influenced my own thinking and when The Right Stuff came out in –what was it? 1981? – I was ecstatic: my favorite prose stylist and cultural commentator took on the very subculture that I grew up in – and liked it! No one has ever captured the mental and emotional world of military flyers in general and of test pilots in particular better than Wolfe does in TRS. My father, a test pilot, would have seen himself refelcted in its pages had he lived long enough to read it (he was killed testing the U-2, back when it was still a black program).

As Wolfe has gotten older, though, and segued into pure fiction, he has begun to deal with issues concerning the moral nature of the universe and man's place in it. His excursions have led him from a simpler, common-sense American practical conservatism into a kind of neo-Stoic philosophy with politically conservative overtones. In A Man In Full, one of his heroes even starts a stoic cult of Zeus worship toward the end of the book.

I can understand how Wolfe wound up in this place. Everyone tries to fill the God-hole with something. For most of Wolfe’s life, fame and adulation from his striking and influential prose filled the void. Everyone quoted and imitated him, even if they didn’t agree with his political views. Now, as he gets on in years and begins to question the fabric of his universe, he tries to make coherent sense of the philosophy his works have implied for decades.

What emerges is predictable. Wolfe’s philosophy is just a well-expressed example of where the conservative philosophical impulse goes in the absence of belief in God: either to the Stoics and Ayn Randian libertarian anomie and heroic individualism, or to the Cynics and neo-Strausian critiques of liberal progressivism. Both are as much against the grain of Christian teaching as any form of leftist communitarian utopianism. George Will went down the Cynic’s road (although the lesser gods he chose were Big Gub’ment and baseball). Tom Wolfe has chosen the Stoic path. I find echoes of both in things Izmud has written for this site.

In IASS, Wolfe has Charlotte reach emotional rock-bottom in an epiphany of self-abnegation, but despite her back-country, fundamental Christian upbringing, this does not resonate in any meaningful religious way with Charlotte. She does not seek God's counsel in any form a person of her upbringing, however intellectualized, probably would. Why not? Because Charlotte Simmons is much more Tom Wolfe (or perhaps Wolfe’s now-grown daughters) than she is a real, intelligent, back-country, Red America Christian girl. And Tom Wolfe is much more a creature of the modernist, secularized, materialist Blue Parentheses he so aptly identifies than he is of the America he purports to represent.

I find Charlotte’s character implausible, but understandable from Wolfe's perspective: he has so swallowed the modern world's conception of itself that he simply cannot get his mind around how a Christian might think about the situation Charlotte gets herself into. For him, Charlotte's Christianity is just a cultural artifact, no more important than a club membership – perhaps just a vague reminder of some rule-set that no longer applies to her in her lonely role as stoic (almost Randian) heroine. Her emotional life is otherwise plausible (Wolfe, after all, is one of America's greatest observers and has two daughters of his own), but Charlotte Simmons seems far too modern (secular, intellectual, rational, materialist) a person to be from her purported background and disposition. Wolfe has lost touch with the America he so eloquently defends. I admire Wolfe’s comments about “the Blue Parentheses” and other cultural matters, but he is now a creature of the Blue Parentheses himself. Heisenberg has triumphed; the observer has merged with the observed.

IASS and Wolfe's philosophy in general is all about what she and we and they can achieve in the world, and from a Christian's perspective, there is nothing ultimately lasting that we can achieve other than helping another soul somehow find a direct relationship with God.

Monk

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Lexicological Aside

My recent postings on "diversity" and the French have inevitably led me to many internet references to "gay," "queer," "effeminate," "limp-wristed," "light-in-the-loafers," "fudge-packers," "gerbil-meisters," and so on. I myself have posted on the subject in the past.

Since I always endeavor only to please my reading audience (both of you) and never, never offend, I feel it's only right to correct myself: the term "gay" is no longer acceptable according to authoritative sources. You see, "gay" is a term coined by male homosexuals to (ironically) refer to themselves, and is resented by lesbians, the transgendered, and many others in this somewhat confused but very diverse crowd. In the interest of political correctness, I hereby offer a profound and heartfelt apology to my vast legions of gay and lesbian readers: henceforth, you shall not be known as "gay," but by the more correct and inclusive term:

GLBTQC

Pronounced "glib-tick" (appropriately enough), and standing for "gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, questioning, or just confused." The term is coming into common usage and is leading to heightened multi-gender awareness around the English-speaking world.

Take, for instance, the recent decision to expand the popular book series, Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus, with new volumes aimed at the GLBTQC community: Lesbians Are from the Trans-Plutonian Planet Velcro and, of course, Gay Men Are from Uranus.

Solidarity, brothers and .....uh .... sisters .... er ..... or ... whatever you are!

Monk

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What Race Are You?

Picture: Ted Nasmith

It seems I am a rider of Rohan -- a result that will doubtless surprise my wife and children, who regard me as a slightly civlized variety of Orc.

Rohirrim


To which of the Elder Races dost thou belong?
brought to you by Quizilla

Monk

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Dispersity and the Burning of Paris

As I mentioned the other day, the mainstream media has given you your instructions on what you are permitted to think about the violent events unfolding in France, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, and Denmark. You are to regard the widespread rioting as the grumblings of “disaffected youth,” provoked by “poverty” and “racial prejudice.” These riots are “France’s Watts.” The WaPo, true to form, features the MSM’s most fawning bit of nostalgie de la boue. Deputy Assistant Under-Minister for International Affairs at the Ministry of Truth (Washington Dept), Molly Moore, in “Rage of French Youth Is a Fight for Recognition:”

[The rioters] are the children of baggage handlers at nearby Charles de Gaulle International Airport and cleaners at the local schools.

"It's not a political revolution or a Muslim revolution," said Rezzoug. "There's a lot of rage. Through this burning, they're saying, 'I exist, I'm here.' "
As they read local newspaper accounts of their previous night's exploits, they began discussing Saturday night's plans with more of an air of boredom than a commitment to a cause.
"We don't have the American dream here," said Rezzoug, as he surveyed the clusters of young men. "We don't even have the French dream here."

They are Just misunderstood young proles, essentially no different than the Sharks and Jets in West Side Story and their “grievances” are just the voice of the oppressed yearning for social justice.

That is what the Liberal Establishment wants you to think.

What we have in fact is Multiculturalism meets Nemesis – an implacably hostile, unassimilable alien presence, bent ultimately on subjugating it. France has met the Borg.

Several days ago, The Marine, on Austin Bay's blog, nailed it:

…As I watch events unfold in France, I cannot help but feel I am watching in living color the modern version of France’s “reign of terror.” It will be interesting to see if the French can save themselves…The fireworks are impressive if not cautionary on many levels. Modern Multiculturalism & Political Correctness are in every respect the tools of a Socialist/Progressive Design to devastate the very foundations of Western classic liberalism, democracy, liberty & civil Government (See J.S. Mill, J. Locke, J Berkeley, T. Jefferson, T. Paine, J. Madison & A. Hamilton).

A heterogeneous society (especially one premised on individual liberty and democratic freedom) demands a degree of acceptance & assimilation by those who seek its sanctuary. The extent to which a society so devoted promotes the balkanization of its own population, it contributes to its own demise. The truth and beauty of the Melting Pot cannot be denied in favor of some pop culture pseudo social science…

Steven Den Beste has an appropriate take on the origins: a number of factors converged to produce this disaster, but Islamic culture and ideology are certainly not least among them. The Marine and Den Beste have seen through to the crux of the matter: that sacrament of the modern secular materialist religion, multiculturalism, more highly (if hypocritically) touted in France than anywhere else, has created the context for its own destruction.

The truth behind The Cult of Multi that the left has foisted on us – and which lately chewed up French property at the rate of one thousand Metropolitains' cars a night – is capture very well by Tom Wolfe in I Am Charlotte Simmons. A college friend of the title character describes her experience with "diversity" at NC State:

"At State, everybody calls diversity dispersity. What happens is, everybody has their own clubs, their own signs, their own sections where they all sit in the dining hall – all the African-Americans are over there?….and all the Asians sit over't these other tables? – except for the Koreans? – because they don't get along with the Japanese, so they sit way over there? Everybody's dispersed into their own little groups – and everybody's told to distrust everybody else? Everybody's told that everybody else is trying to screw them over -- oops!" Laurie pulled a face and put her fingertips over her lips – "I'm sorry!" She rolled her eyes and smiled. "Anyway, the idea is, every other group is like prejudiced against your group, and no matter what they say, they're out to take advantage of you, and you should have nothing to do with them – unless you're white, in which case all the others are not prejudiced against you, they’re like totally right, because you really are racist and everything, even if you don't know it? Everybody ends up dispersed into their own turtle shells, suspicious of everybody else and being careful not to fraternize with them."

Wolfe is on the mark here (although not elsewhere). In IASS, he may somewhat overstate the depravity of the Ivy League campus, but he certainly nails multiculti dead on. I recall its manifestations (infestations?) myself from my own now-quarter-century-old college experiences on three campuses. Things are only worse today.

This is so alien to my own experience in the US military, where a true, melting-pot diversity actually exists because diverse groups are united by common cause, that it seems like another nation; perhaps another planet. Certainly it's another culture – one alien and inferior to the one I represent.

Inferior!? Oh, what a politically incorrect word! How dare I?

Why "inferior?" Because multiculti doesn't lead to the melting pot; it leads to balkanization, disassociation, and – eventually, in the extreme cases, as we see with Europe's muslim population today – to cultural warfare. A "melting pot" is created only when members of disparate groups buy into a common vision (and thus learn to tolerate differences for sake of the greater good). The idea of the United States of America still inspires enough to convert those who want to get ahead, despite its increasingly desperate welfare-dependent subcultures and the best efforts of Bluestaters, liberals, and Democratic Priests of the Multicult to subvert it and destroy its unique and visionary culture. Multiculturalists do not believe in a common good: they believe in a “fruit salad” of morally equal groupings, not a melting pot where all the parts are equally rendered to make a stew that is better and stronger than any of the parts by themselves are. (My wife was literally taught this meme in California schools in the 1980s).

A generation and a half of American youth have now grown up being force-fed this ideology, which was thought up in part expressly to weaken the idea of the nation and its apotheosis, America – a nation that is an idea and an ideal, not an ethnic group or a piece of land.

Monk

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Happy 230th!

Semper Fi!

From a fellow brother-in-arms

(Thanks to Powerline for the picture)

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Schadenfreude and Le Pew

Chirac: "Mons. Le Pew is resting comfortably"

It's hard not to take some dark pleasure in all this:

PARIS (AP) - President Jacques Chirac promised Sunday to restore public order across France as unrest spread from suburban Paris to cities south and north, with rioters injuring ten police officers, throwing Molotov cocktails and ramming a car into a housing project during an 11th night of mayhem.

The violence reached the well-guarded French capital Saturday night. Police said 35 cars were torched, most on the city's northern and southern edges.

In the city center, gasoline bombs damaged three cars near Place de la Republique. Residents reported a loud explosion and flames.

For a second night, a helicopter equipped with spotlights and video cameras to track bands of marauding youths combed Paris suburbs, and small teams of police chased rioters speeding from attack to attack in cars and on motorbikes.

"What we notice is that the bands of youths are, little by little, getting more organized," arranging attacks through cell phone text messages and learning how to make gasoline bombs, Hamon said.

Unrest extended west to Normandy and south to Nice and Cannes on the Mediterranean coast, with attacks in and around Lyon, Lille, Marseille and Strasbourg. In all, at least 3,300 buses, cars and other vehicles have been incinerated since the unrest started Oct. 27, the police spokesman said.

French president [Chirac]...faced criticism from opposition politicians for not publicly speaking about France's worst civil unrest in more than a decade. His only previous comments came through a spokesman.

Yes, and Chirac has yet to even mention the nature of the riots -- the rioters are all muslim youths, protesting what they regard as police "brutality" and unfair treatment in general.

Not that you'll get to the truth in MSM accounts of the unrest. A totally anecdotal, unscientific poll of today's NYT and WaPo coverage show the rioters characterized only as "immigrants." Just one WaPo story mentions the muslim angle:

The incident incensed youths in the neighborhoods, where unemployment is high, particularly among the French-born descendants of Muslim Africans and Arabs who say they feel the government has abandoned them.

France has fawned over every muslim dictator in the world with hand-wringing obsequiousness and has proudly touted its multiculturisme, claiming that it has avoided the kinds of problems its cultural nemesis, the US, has had with assimilation. The MSM idolizes France, of course, precisely because of it's vocal and emotional cotempt for everything American -- a contempt that the left in this country shares.

Well, France is now reaping what it sowed when it decided that its own people were too precious to work more than 30 hours a week or take jobs that involved menial labor. Those jobs went overwhelmingly to muslim immigrants from former French colonies in North Africa and the Middle East. France has placated this community for years by being solicitous to the islamic "cause" in various manifestations across the globe and by spreading welfare largesse around the immigrant community. As France's economy has stagnated, however, these menials were the first to be laid off, creating a huge bachelor herd of disaffected, idle young men.

France is just now beginning to learn that what it imported was not just luxury for lily-white, Metropolitain Frenchmen, but an eight-million-man army, implacably hostile to Western civilization in any manifestation and willing to take advantage of any percieved signs of weakness, which France has supplied in abundance. The French should consider themselves lucky that they're getting a taste of what is to come in so mild a manner -- no deaths as yet, other than the two youths who were accidentally electrocuted in the incident that started the riots ten days ago. Widespread property damage and intimidation is the worst of it so far, but the violence is spreading to other parts of France and other nations in Europe (Denmark and the Netherlands reportedly have seen some violence).

Mark Steyn has it right, as usual: Wake up Europe, you've a war on your hands. The European intifada has arrived. Welcome it, France -- it is your cultural legacy to the 21st Century.

In related news, it appears that at least one French film star has been injured in the rioting. Seems le Gouveurnment solicited his aid; he was only trying to help:

PARIS - Former French matinee idol Pepe Le Pew was among the hundreds injured last night amid violent feline rioting in the impoverished Parisian suburb of Dans-le-Crappeur. Le Pew, 58, a former Warner Brothers studio actor turned Chirac government spokes-skunk, sustained severe scratches and concussions in the melee before nose-pin equipped EMT rescue squads could drag him to safety. He is expected to make a full recovery.

Seeking to quell the burgeoning Kitty-fada and restore public order, French President Jacques Chirac and Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin enlisted the help of Le Pew yesterday. It was thought that Le Pew - who led France's UN efforts to oppose US sanctions against the so-called "pussies of evil" of Sylvester, Tom and Mr. Jinks - would help establish a diplomatic dialog with the Gallic feline community.

Instead, the outreach effort appeared to backfire. According to witnesses, Le Pew's appearance on the scene last night caused a stampede as panicked crowds began fleeing the smell. More trouble ensued when Le Pew was seen as making "inappropriate contact" with a burqqa-clad female cat, which reportedly sparked a mob of feline activists to don nose clips and begin beating him. Youths also set fire to a street-stripe painting truck which was allegedly involved in the incident.

Monk

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