November 2005
You are currently browsing the articles from Jay Currie written in the month of November 2005.
In a “10 Most Powerful Women in Blogging” piece,
Joi Ito of Technorati (http://joi.ito.com ) has her hands in a lot of Web 2.0 companies, some you might not even know about yet. This makes her damn powerful. Often times the one you don’t know that well is the most powerful. My personal favorite because she seems to help people get shit done.
jack of all blogs
Just one problem, Joi is a boi.
Written by jay on November 12th, 2005 with no comments.
Read more articles on Uncategorized and blogging and culture and tech.
Jean-Claude Dassier, the director general of the rolling news service LCI, said the prominence given to the rioters on international news networks had been “excessive” and could even be fanning the flames of the violence.
Mr Dassier said his own channel, which is owned by the private broadcaster TF1, recently decided not to show footage of burning cars.
“Politics in France is heading to the right and I don’t want rightwing politicians back in second, or even first place because we showed burning cars on television,” Mr Dassier told an audience of broadcasters at the News Xchange conference in Amsterdam today.
media guardian emphasis added
Frankly, I have always suspected this is what is affectionately called “news judgement” by the folks who actually run MSM. But it is rare for them to admit it.
Written by jay on November 12th, 2005 with 1 comment.
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I thought it was just me who noticed that the French riots had suddenly disappeared. I use disappeared advisedly. Even with the most effective curfew and policing one would have anticipated a tapering off. But non, the riots have disappeared from North American MSM. What could have happened??
Captain Ed at Captains Quarters noticed the same thing.
Does the American media suffer from ADHD and find themselves incapable of following an important story for longer than ten days? Or do they find themselves increasingly unable to explain the serious and continued violence despite the bribery and politically-correct strategies employed by French security forces? It seems to me that the media cannot bring themselves to admit that the uprising has more behind it than bored youths looking to blow off some steam and acting spontaneously and unilaterally. The riots have a purpose, and they have a central control structure — and that means someone wants to make specific gains from attacking France.
captains quarters
Turns out the riots have not ceased at all. In Lyon a power station was attacked. Thursday night’s Car-B-Que index was up Wednesday to Thursday.
Hmmm.
Written by jay on November 12th, 2005 with 2 comments.
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A happy day when you get a book hand delivered. Christine Sismondo’s Mondo Cocktail is just out and it looks grand. I am looking forward to reading and reviewing it.
But the wow is on page 117 where Christine is talking about New Orleans she actually has a couple of grafs on the New Orleans hurricane disaster. Which, in a printed book, is astonishing. It was only two months ago. Astonishing.
Written by jay on November 11th, 2005 with 1 comment.
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Scanning the net this morning I came across Colby’s piece on the Royal Canadian Legion’s absurd intellectual property claim agains Pierre Borque for putting up the poppy on his site.
the poppy is a trademark of the Legion and anyone who wants to use it has to apply. Otherwise it would be all over the place. There are numeorus [sic] examples where it has been used for sales and other purposes. As it is not in the public domain and because it is a registered trademark of the Legion the organization is taking every step it can to protect it (and I do mean every step). All this can be avoided in the future if you ask to use it on your site and you get the proper approval. Sorry, I know your heart and many others are in the right place. Unfortunately we have to protect this image or lose its use as a symbol of Remembrance.
bourque via colby
Colby says he’ll never wear the poppy again. I contented myself with this letter to the midgets at the Legion….
Gentlemen,
My grandfather Fredric Brown was a WWI flying ace, MC and bar. My father, George B. Currie was the youngest commissioned officer in the Royal Canadian Navy in WWII.
I wear my poppy to remember their service and the service and sacrifice of the millions of Canadians who were their comrades in arms.
I was about to put a poppy up at my websites.
I will not be in light of the Legion’s absurd position as to its “mark”.
Understand something: it is not your mark. It is the symbol, one of the few remaining symbols, of the people of Canada’s willingness to fight and die for our nation.
I am trying to raise my young boys with a sense of the honour which our military has given Canada in past wars and at present. I want them to wear their poppies with pride. Part of teaching them are the extraordinary resources of the net. Your sad position means that one important symbol is lost to an internet generation which needs those symbols desperately.
In peace, as in war, there are always little men whose obsession with yesterday’s detail means today’s battle is all the harder to fight. In war, the Canadians at Vimy showed the world what valour combined with vision might achieve. Your actions are the precise opposite of both valour and vision.
You should be ashamed of yourselves.
Yours,
Jay Currie
Written by jay on November 9th, 2005 with 7 comments.
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Meanwhile six youths, all aged under 18, were last night arrested in a raid on a building in Evry, south of Paris, during which more than 100 bottles, gallons of fuel and hoods for hiding rioters’ faces were also found.
So far more than 800 people have been arrested and 3,500 vehicles torched, mainly in the working-class, high-immigration outer suburbs of Paris where unemployment is as high as 20 percent.
But Saturday night’s rioting was the most destructive so far as 1,300 vehicles were set alight and 349 people arrested.
Cars were burned out in the historic centre of Paris for the first time last night. In the normally quiet Normandy town of Evreux, a shopping mall, 50 vehicles, a post office and two schools went up in flames.
….
Authorities now say the rolling nightly riots are being organised via the Internet and mobile phones, and have pointed the finger at drug traffickers and Islamist militants.
telegraph
Amusingly, el-Reuters is still keeping an open mind about the religious affiliation of the rioters,
Many rioters are of North African Arab and black African descent and assumed to be Muslims.
reuters my emphasis
I can hardly wait for Reuters to switch from calling the thugs “youths” to calling them “insurgents”.
Now that the rioters have stopped burning their own neighbourhoods and started in on downtown Paris it is a pretty good bet that even Chirac will stir himself to call out the Army - likely the Legion. Want to bet that the loonier fringes of the left will start calling these troops occupiers and blather on about apartheid.
Sarkozy will look like a hero to everyone but the geniuses who allowed the rot to set in over the last thirty years…for the most part his Cabinet colleagues. Delightfully, arch anti-American, pro-Hamas, pro-Saddam peot and Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, is looking rather vunerable as the mass of French citizens grow angrier at their cities being torched. Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.
Written by jay on November 7th, 2005 with 3 comments.
Read more articles on International and Terror and culture.
One of my favourite commentors on this blog is koby who write a propos my remarks on immigration,
Europe needs massive immigration. According to some estimates, if Europe continues on as it is, the median age in Europe will go from 37.7 today to 52.3 by 2050.
As Professor Charles Kupchan notes, “today there are 35 pensioners for every 100 workers within the European Union. By 2050, current demographic trends would leave Europe with 75 pensioners for every 100 workers and in countries like Italy and Spain the ratio would be 1 to 1.” Not only will there be a long and sustained pension crisis, but since the European population is on track to shrink quite rapidly, for that reason alone, prospects for economic growth do not look good. Despite having a high immigration rate by European standards (Germany has highest percentage of foreign born residents in Europe), according to a UN report at its current pace the German population will drop by 10 million. Italy, which has a much lower immigration rate, will loose 15 million.
This forms the backdrop of what Volpe is saying.
currie blog
I responded,
koby, it might be time for Europe (and Canada) to look at its future with and without immigration.
Japan, whose population is aging rapidly but which does not much like immigration, has been replacing workers with robots at a blistering pace.
In Europe several non-immigration solutions to the theoretical actuarial crisis might be implemented. First, the age at which pensions can be collected could be raised. Second, the work week could be extended and the number of weeks of vacation reduced. Third, the generosity of the “early retirement” schemes could be reduced.
More generally, the recognition that life extension technologies, as well as healthier living, is making 70 the new 50 (and not before time say I), needs to be reflected in social and pension policy.
The population of Germany and Italy may very well decline…So what?
Plus, and I’ve made this point before, what exactly is the moral status of importing what amount to “pension serfs” for boomers. In essence what we are saying is that we can deprive third world nations of their best and most skilled in order to ensure our boomers enjoy a cushy old age. How is that fair to the immigrants or the nations from which they are coming?
currie blog
In fact there is even less reason to import pension serfs when you begin to think about it. The boomers, as their parents die off, are inheriting trillions and trillions of dollars in capital. They themselves are socking away fortunes in RSPs and 10K plans and, in many cases, are the beneficiaries of the fifty year boom in the world’s equity markets. Why, exactly, should this, “most coddled generation” be looking forward to the level of pension which their parents earned?
The argument that immigrants are needed to do the work that Euros and Canadians turn up their noses at is silly. As with every labour market, people don’t want to clean toilets for a pitance. Especially if they can get 87% of that pitance from welfare or unemployment insurance or an early pension, without the bother of cleaning the toilets. Reduce that payment and cut back immigration and the price per toilet will rise to the point where it is attractive - financially - to muck out. (And, viz the Japanese, inventing the self cleaning nano tech toilet has already been done. It is just a matter of price.)
One answer to a stagnant or shrinking population is immigration. There are others beginning with government policy to encourage larger families. But kids from those larger families, even if they were started tomorrow, would not come to adulthood for twenty years.
Pro tem it makes sense to look at technological and economic solutions which do not require the mass importation of pension serfs at the expense of the existing culture. This is a fact which, of course, cannot be discussed in Canada by the current crop of politicians for fear of offending the current srop of ethnic voters. The only good news is that the coming destruction of the CPC may give an opening to politicians willing to grapple with the effects of mass immigration on a national culture. Which might not be a bad idea given what we are seeing in France as a direct result of trying to pretend that there is no problem.
Written by jay on November 7th, 2005 with 2 comments.
Read more articles on Canadian Politics.
“I speak with real words,” he told the popular daily, Le Parisien. “When you fire real bullets at police, you’re not a ‘youth’, you’re a thug.”
Nicolas Sarkozy, the scotsman
Of course, the poltically correct thing to do is look at root causes, but not to carefully else you notice that the root cause was massive Muslim immigration in the 60’s and 70’s added to which is a huge illegal and asylum seeking group. Oh, and if you look too carefully you’ll see that Eastern European countries with much the same unemployment levels as in the suburbs of Paris are exporting workers to western Europe because, er, they want to work.
Written by jay on November 6th, 2005 with no comments.
Read more articles on International and Uncategorized.
If you are interested in a blow by blow, fire by fire, political grovel by political grovel account of the situation in France you could do worse than to read http://no-pasaran.blogspot.com/
Written by jay on November 6th, 2005 with no comments.
Read more articles on International and Uncategorized.
Sarkozy’s decision to send the police back to the suburbs which had been abandoned by previous governments was resented by the “youths” who now rule there. That this would lead to riots was inevitable. Sarkozy knew it, and so did Chirac, Villepin and the others. Sarkozy intended to crack down hard on the rioters. If the French government had sent in the army last week, it would have been responding to the thugs in a language they understand: force. And the riots would long have ceased.
What happened instead was that Sarkozy’s “colleagues” in government used the riots as an excuse to turn on the “immigrant” in their own midst. Paris is well worth a mass, King Henri IV of France once said. Bringing down Nicolas Sarközy de Nagy-Bocsa is well worth a riot, King Chirac must have thought. Contrary to the normal French policy in dealing with trouble makers, the authorities decided to use a soft approach. Chirac and his designated crown prince Villepin blamed Sarkozy’s “disrespectful rhetoric” – such as calling thugs thugs – for having detonated the explosive situation in the suburbs. Dominique de Villepin stepped in and took over the task of restoring calm from Sarkozy. While the latter was told to shut up and keep a low profile, Villepin began a “dialogue” with the rioters. As a result the riots have spilled over from Paris to other French cities. Do not be surprised if this French epidemic soon crosses France’s borders into the North African areas surrounding cities in Belgium and the Netherlands.
brussels journal
If Sarkozy resigns from the French government in protest to the mollycoddling which has lead to the spread of the riots he might well be President of France in less than two years.
This would be a good thing as he would put paid to the shrill anti-Americanism which has been the hallmark of Chirac’s rather effete form of neo-Gaullism.
At the same time there are reports that the French police have been, wait for it, arresting some of the rioters and may even charge some.
Written by jay on November 6th, 2005 with no comments.
Read more articles on International and Uncategorized.
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