Wampum

The parents of the two boys who died October 27th asked for calm Saterday.

Nous appelons � l'apaisement et au retour au calme, � l'arr�t de toute violence et au sens civique de chacun car la France ne m�rite pas cela,

They are, unsurprisingly, more civic minded than the neo-facist UMP Minister of the Interior, Nicolas Sarkozy, who is messaging force as the solution, the social container, for the 700+ ghettos that exist in France, rather than improved social integration and a commitment to France's vision of cosmopolitianism.

The American Blog-o-Wrong is momentarily enamored with "French Socialism" as the reason for the riots. The causation offered by the electorate-facing retail-level politicians in Seine-Saint-Denis, Val-d'Oise and Yvelines, ground zero of the ... whatever this is ... is the cuts in social spending by the conservative UMP (Dominique de Villepin) government. The gas poured on the flames by a law-and-order pyromaniac (Nicolas Sarkozy) is causal for the spread of the conflagration, not its ignition.

That's about as rational as blaming the Iraq War on anti-militarism in the United States and the UK, since ... uh ... we must have egged a chicken to cross a road. Fortunately, others read the American Blog-o-Wrong, leaving me time to ... program in SNOBOL.