So the way the author of Europe’s Angry Muslims explains the 2005 riots in the French banlieues is the following. The banlieuesards rioted, he says, because, as the representatives of the nascent global underclass that was being left behind by the withdrawal of the nation-state, they wanted to provoke the nation-state into manifesting itself. They needed evidence that the nation-state still exists.

And the nation-state state they were trying to conjure was France.

The riots stopped when the nation-state finally did show up in the slums and even promised that there’d be a new labor law that would somewhat relax the harsh legislation in France that keeps a few lucky workers in amazing lifetime jobs while destroying the very notion of a career for everybody else.

That new legislation, however, never came into existence because every French person who was delusional enough to believe that those cushy lifetime jobs would go to him or her personally came out in a massive wave of protests. And that’s many very delusional folks.

Since the citizens so openly and massively walked out of their commitment to the nation-state, the nation-state responded in kind. So now there are no jobs for anyone.

What does this have to do with Muslims, you’ll ask? Only that , as immigrants, they were by nature more sensitive to not finding a nation-state and freaked out, trying to get it back. But there is no Islam in this story because it failed to show up.

Is anybody still wondering why I dig this book?

People, the blog turned 6 yesterday, and I didn’t even notice. 2,800,000+ hits, a crazy number of posts and comments, readers from every country in the world, and, I insist, the best group of regular commenters anywhere. This April Fool’s Day joke of six years ago has been very serious for quite a while.

Let’s celebrate the bloggiversary and our collective achievement with a traditional Q&A session. You ask me anything you want and I answer.

Scroll down for new posts because I’m making this one sticky.

And now Putin is threatening the NATO with nuclear strikes not only over the Crimea but also over the Baltics.

And I mean, why not? This threat worked beautifully when he easily got the US to go back on Budapest accords and allow Russia to annex the Crimea a year ago. So why not continue with such a winning strategy?