Wall Street Debacle: A Madame Defarge Moment

Madame Defarge smugly knitted while the guillotine decapitated the French aristocracy in Dicken's " A Tale of Two Cities". Likewise some of us indulge in schadenfreude as the " masters of the universe" on Wall Street are dying from a thousand financial cuts from the falling Dow Jones Averages. The peers of Wall Street like the nobility of France are and were the bigger losers.

Brangelina May Separate Twins !

Ah, the life of morons just got more interesting. And so the fans of B- films Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are all a dither by the arrival of the fraternal twins in Nice, France. That's nice. But the $15-20 million bids for exclusive photos of the newborns is shorting- out the meager brains of morons and regular people alike. Rumors of a bootleg "Angelina's contractions" clip are just that.

The cereal-sounding Brangelinas should pause. How about transforming this one-time event into a Brangelina serial about the twins growing up? The potential monetary returns could be enormous if handled correctly. Maybe something that resonates with the unmarried couples international adoption habits. How about separating the twins with one being raised in Africa and the other reared in China. After all the Brangelinas have taken African and Asian children away from those locales. Hey Africans mostly don't bother to marry either. Immitation is the sincerest form of flattery . Just think of the potential. A life-long sequel of the twins growing up . Long term ads, sponsors like the Gates Foundation with their logo on propeller beanies, members of Congress seeking endorsements, Oprah and diaper-changing then potty-training and then guests on the show and ... and... and....

Maybe even the morons would tire of this nonsense and drive down preoccupation with others lives.

French Fishermen Finally Forced To Face Reality

French fishermen are caught .They are straddling a dock of rising diesel fuel price and an away- drifting boat of elusive, depleted fishing stocks. The fishermen are protesting the 30% surge in the price of diesel in the past 4 months. They want the price rolled back so they can go further out to sea for the fish that they have depleted from their coastal waters.

Their anger has taken the form of port blockades, sea traffic disruption and acts of vandalism on land. The government has offered a limited subsidy but the fishermen say it's not enough. And so the natural world and its laws are brought into sharp focus. I.E. the using of a diminishing resource to pursue a frgile resource has its limits.

Many fishermen will probably go out of business. And well they should. Their business model and philosophy was flawed from the launch. Fishing for dinner is one thing. But the wholesale slaughter of worldwide fish stocks to a mere 20% of their former numbers is a sin. Let the monkeys eat more snails.

Holocaust Politics Update: Yet Another Angle

When one has lemons then the sale of lemonade follows. When one has dead bodies then the sale of guilt follows.

And so partly- Jewish President Nicolas Sarkozy of France has instructed his education minister to add yet more Holocaust education to fifth graders curriculum. France's schools already include extensive Holocaust studies , films, field trips to museums and concentration camps and the ubiquitous plaques placed on school walIs marking where children were taken away. It's also a crime requiring prison time to deny the Holocaust. It's not a crime to deny that Jesus was the son of god. I wonder if they had to delete anything in the curriculum to make room for this ? Sarkozy wants every fifth grader to learn the life story of one of the 11,000 French children that were killed by the Nazis in the Holocaust. He said," Every French child should be entrusted with the memory of a French child-victim of the Holocaust".

Does this morbid exercise lead to a kind of necrophilia or to a vetting of would-be saints?This is not good for young children. Holocaust mania has obviously produced too many Holocaust worshippers. One of them is the President of France. It reminds of Brer Rabbit's plea to Brer Bear in Disney's 1946 classic " Song Of The South". Brer Rabbit pleaded , " Please don't throw me in the briar patch". And so Brer Bear goes and throws the rabbit into the briar patch. And Brer Rabbit gleefully responds, " I was born and raised in a briar patch".

And some calculatingly perpetuate the horrors of the Holocaust for political advantage.What's next?