It's Easier To Be French Now, Troubling French Lovers, Taxing French Drug Dealers, Fixing France, And Money

French citizenship to become more accessible

Troubles expats have with French lovers

FRANCE TO DRUG DEALERS: 

WE'RE TAXING YOU TOO

Can Anyone Fix France?

Sisters find more than 150,000 euros 

inside dead brother’s couch

A New Way To Help NewAgers: No Breaks At All

Swing Girls - some great Jazz from Japan at the link. Music is a way out, people - but only the good stuff. Don't listen to those who don't know, or don't advocate for, the difference.

Why Naturopaths Should Not Be Licensed by Kimball C. Atwood IV, M.D.:

"Irrational, unscientific beliefs and practices abound in naturopathy, likening it more to a cult than to a valid form of health care. These beliefs and practices are not merely at the fringes but are the standards of the field. They are advocated by the leaders themselves.”

Irrational + beliefs + a cult + leaders. Take your time, those of you not familiar with the NewAge.

You'll figure it out,...

I thought Scientology made you perfect?:

Are Kirstie Alley and Maksim Chmerkovskiy cursed on the dance floor? A week after her partner tumbled to the ground after pulling a muscle, Alley’s shoe came undone during her performance on Monday’s Dancing with the Stars.

“I’m not doing a sitcom. I’m actually doing a dancing show!” the actress told reporters afterwards. “I’m tired of having to recover. I would just like to do something right.  I don’t feel like I’m jinxed, but I feel like I need to get my sh– together. When people are accident prone, there is something going on with them. There is something going on. Our rehearsals were swell. We’re bitchin’ in rehearsals. If you could just sort of tune into the rehearsals…”

“Look, I’m supposed to be Swan Lake out there, la la la la la,” she continued. “Instead I’m like, la la la la and he’s supposed to come out to me but he comes up and I’m like, my f—ing shoe, my f—ing shoe, my f—ing shoe is off, what do I do? I don’t know what you do in these situations! I’m going to write a book about this. I just feel like I want to be the people who dance well. First week, we were the people who danced really well. And somehow along we’ve become the freak show. The freak show is good but we need to take the dancing up a notch.”

A member of "the world's most dangerous cult" is on American television and this is all anyone cares about. The murders, kidnappings, brainwashing? They get nothing. Kirstie Alley loses a shoe and it's everywhere.

This country has changed.

Why do so few of us see this before it happens?

It might seem strange to link global warming and the futility of wind farms with the ongoing collapse of the euro. But in several directions at the moment we can see the unfolding of one of the hidden patterns shaping human affairs, which years ago I called “the fantasy cycle”. It is a pattern that recurs in personal lives, in politics, in history – and in storytelling.

When we embark on a course of action which is unconsciously driven by wishful thinking, all may seem to go well for a time, in what may be called the “dream stage”. But because this make-believe can never be reconciled with reality, it leads to a “frustration stage” as things start to go wrong, prompting a more determined effort to keep the fantasy in being. As reality presses in, it leads to a “nightmare stage” as everything goes wrong, culminating in an “explosion into reality”, when the fantasy finally falls apart.

We're falling apart, people. And - if you're an American who, say, recycles - you've been dreaming,...

California in the balance:

We calibrate California’s decline by its myriad of paradoxes. The nation’s highest bundle of gas, sales, and income taxes cannot close the nation’s largest annual deficit at $25 billion. Test scores are at the country’s near bottom; teachers’ salaries at the very top. Scores of the affluent are leaving each week; scores of the indigent are arriving. The nation’s most richly endowed state is also the most regulated; the most liberal of our residents are also the most ready to practice apartheid in their Bel Air or Palo Alto enclaves.

We now see highway patrolmen and city police, in the manner of South American law enforcement, out in force. Everywhere they are monitoring, watching, ticketing — no warnings, no margins of error — desperate to earn traffic fines that might feed the state that feeds them. I could go on. But you get the picture that we are living on the fumes of a rich state that our forefathers brilliantly exploited, and now there is not much energy left in the fading exhaust to keep us going.

What's going to happen when California falls? Even I don't know that.

I've said this more times than I can count - always leading to an argument:

It may be a key Christian principle but forgiving too easily can be dangerous, the Archbishop of Canterbury has suggested.

Rowan Williams has warned that easy forgiveness can make suffering appear not to matter.

In BBC1’s What is the Point in Forgiveness?, to be broadcast on Good Friday, the Archbishop also concedes that it is not fair to expect victims of abuse, rape or torture to turn the other cheek with ease.

Sorry everybody, but what you're doing ain't cutting it,...

Better Late Than Never (That's Only My Opinion)

I've been out of the house for most of the day, walking around and getting some air, so I apologize for not getting to this sooner, but some things can't be helped:

The £1m annual Templeton prize has been handed out to Sir Martin Rees, the astronomer royal and former president of the Royal Society, in another effort by the Templeton Foundation to confuse the science/religion debate:

Lord Rees, a churchgoer who neither believes in God nor subscribes to any religious dogma, said he attends chapel on a regular basis as Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, as part of a "traditional ritual". He also cites the choir – rated fifth in the world by Gramophone magazine – as a reason for his attendance.

"Doing science made me realise that even the simplest things are hard to understand and that makes me suspicious of people who believe they've got anything more than an incomplete and metaphorical understanding of any deep aspect of reality," he told the Guardian. "I participate in occasional religious services which are the customs of the society I grew up in. I'm not allergic to religion."

Good enough for me - an atheist "God Father" to several boys - but some are up in arms he'd take the money at all. My only criticism is he looks like a smug bastard in the photo.

Click the tag, below, for more on the Templeton Prize.

This piece made the Euro sound like Barack Obama to me:

The European debt crisis -- which saw its latest iteration inaugurated on Wednesday, April 6, when Portugal indicated it would request an EU bailout -- has exposed every single lie, every fudge, and every political, legal, and economic loophole that went into making the continent's common currency. One reason Europeans have yet to set the euro right is that they still haven't reckoned with the extent of bad faith that went into its creation.

To sell the euro to a diverse populace back in the 1990s, its advocates made a series of mostly inconstant promises. The Germans were promised that monetary union would not give rise to fiscal transfers, and would create a currency at least as stable as the Deutschmark. The French understood the euro as a vehicle for improved domestic competitiveness and global reach. For the Italians and the Spanish, it offered an opportunity for monetary stability and permanently low interest rates. And in countries with highly deregulated banking systems, such as Spain and Ireland, it brought the prospect of sudden wealth.

The various promises culminated in a lowest-common-denominator governance regime. Monetary discipline would be enforced by an independent central bank tasked with ensuring price stability. Fiscal discipline was supposed to be covered by the stability and growth pact, which set the famous 3 percent rule -- the ceiling of permitted annual deficits in relation to gross domestic product. And that was it.

Given this wishful thinking, the eurozone was always vulnerable to a financial crisis.

When are we going to catch on to wishful thinking, magical thinking, and delusional thinking? There's a story about the guy who predicted the Japanese tsunami and how, of course, nobody listened to him - just as nobody listened to the guy who said Bernie Madoff was a fraud, and the guy who predicted the world-wide economic crisis, and on and on and on. What is up with that?

My fervent desire is that, as we keep moving closer to reality in this new conservative period, we start listening to people who actually know things and away from those who step forward promising "Hope & Change".

Our old pal, James Arthur Ray (and Oprah's, and Larry King's, and that group of freaks, above, from The Secret) has had his NewAge murder trial take a very un-Law of Attraction-like turn for the worse - the judge is allowing testimony about his past sweatlodges to be entered into evidence - and that's opening the floodgates:

That final round, Mercer said, was uncharacteristically quiet. When it was over, Ray was the first one out.

"He crawled out the entrance, took a few deep breaths, said something and then he walked by the guy who thought he was dying," she said. "Then he went and sat down in a chair in the shade."

It took several minutes for everyone else to get out of the lodge, and Mercer said she dragged out at least four people who had passed out as well as others whose legs weren't working right. Then she made a gruesome discovery.

"I looked inside," she said. "Something made me look inside. I saw three people in the back of the sweat lodge just laying there. I was kneeling down and I looked for someone to help me. Everyone I saw was helping someone else."

She saw Ray and told him she needed to open up the back of the lodge to get those people out. She said Ray told her not to unless it was absolutely necessary.

Deciding it was, Mercer said she went to the back and began to untangle the interwoven blankets and tarps that covered the structure, screaming for help all the while. The only help nearby was her daughter, Sarah, 18 at the time.

"We lifted up the back of the tarp," she said. "We saw these people laying there. Their lips were blue and their faces were white and my daughter said, 'Mom, they're holding hands.'"

The two were Kirby Brown and Shore, who never exhibited vital signs from that point on in spite of efforts to perform CPR. A third person, Liz Neuman, died nine days after also being pulled from the lodge.

After others arrived to help, Mercer went to her nearby house and called 911.

Mercer's earlier testimony was much like her husband Ted's, who preceded her on the witness stand. She compared Ray's sweat lodges in 2007 and 2008 to others she'd witnessed, noting that no one ever got sick unless Ray was the leader.

Oopsie! Looks like the "Spiritual Warrior" is fighting for his (own) life now.

Let me put some food in my stomach and I'll be right back,...

Before You Whiners Buy Bull: Pay Attention

"Washington is happy to watch the dollar slide."

-- Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, writing for the Telegraph

"The dollar is in free fall, or so it seems,...It sounds ominous, but,...a weak dollar can be good for the U.S. economy, because it makes American exports cheaper and, therefore, helps close the trade deficit."

-- Eric Weiner, reporting for NPR

"Even as the greenback sinks to new lows against the euro and other global currencies, some experts say this is not necessarily a bad thing for the U.S. economy."

-- David Ellis, writing for CNNMoney.com

There is a method to our madness and few at home seem to 'get' it: our *brilliant* leaders, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, are now using our currency - as a weapon.

Europe, especially, is going to rue the day they ever decided to abandon, and laugh, at the United States. Giving America (the world's only superpower, and a nimble one at that) a reason to re-evaluate it's allies was the worst decision "Old Europe" could've ever made - when, they knew, we can change course at will - and have many, many, resources (like even our currency) to manipulate. Meanwhile, European countries - with their silly socialist structures and lack of cohesion - have nothing to counter us with: all they can do is watch as the ground changes under their feet. And, I'm telling you, my friends, things are about to get good.

I've told you guys, over and over, again:

Everything's fine - just do your part - like, for god's sake, quit whining (which leads to negative speculation that raises the price of things like oil) and really get to work: Stop buying stupid organic food (which has been raising the price of food overall) and get back to being practical-American, value-based, shoppers. You know - focus on putting some real worth, not just in our economy, but in our society again. Stop giving the scammers and the SHAMers the free ride they've gotten over the last few years and stick with quality you really know - not just a high price or some damned prestige shit. Get America out of the dead of that stupid stinkin' post-60's thinkin' and bring it's outlook up to date, because, once that shit's disposed of, our best years will, once again, be ahead of us. And they will be - soon.

I'm sure of it.