Index for posts concerning World&Travel

The Empire Strikes Back! by Darth B'strad
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Massive Earthquake in China by Darth B'strad
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Chicago! by Darth B'strad
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Sarkozy is angering the left! by Darth B'strad
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The Canadian thought Police are now after one of their own! by Darth B'strad
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Sarkozy says get outta’ my country by Darth B'strad
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A Eurotrip Retrospective by Bieren Skidels
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The Empire Strikes Back!

Posted on August 13th, 2008 by Darth B'strad.
Categories: Political, Energy, Ethics, Europe, War, Terrorism, Philosophy.

Just as you thought that things this year really couldn’t get all that more crazy this year you get slapped down with yet another crazy event that just makes life in this world just that much more absurd and much more dangerous. We are having the most absurd election in a long time (the DNC of this is also going to be in my hometown), we have an energy crisis (that Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats are forcing down our thoughts because of their environmental lobby), we have had possible wars breaking out in Colombia and Venezuela (Also something that Nancy Pelosi has had a hand in), we have a very real possibility that Israel will bomb Iran (that could lead to some really bad repercussions), not to mention all of the weird things that have been going on in my personal life and now in the mists of the Olympic games in China, we have Russia blowing up Georgia! No, not our state here in the US but the Country Georgia just south of Russia (you know! one of those countries that gained independence after the Soviet Union fell.) Well the Russians are back at it again! They’re trying to rebuild the Empire and that’s going to make things even more strange before this year concludes. This from the Washington Post:

Russia escalated its war in Georgia again Monday, sending troops and tanks out of friendly separatist enclaves to stage the first major invasion of undisputed Georgian territory. One armored column seized a town and major military base in the west of Georgia, while another menaced the central city of Gori.

The Georgian government abandoned Gori and ordered its troops to fall back to defend against a possible drive on Tbilisi, the capital, 40 miles away. In scenes of chaos, retreating Georgian army trucks shared the highway to the capital with cars and pickups loaded with frightened civilians. Other vehicles, victims of Russian attacks, burned by the roadside.

Georgian and Russian officials confirmed that Russian soldiers took over the western city of Senaki and its base, about 25 miles from Abkhazia, a disputed separatist zone where Russia has been massing troops in recent days. The seizure effectively opened a second front.

There was confusion Monday night over the status of Gori, with some reports saying it was already in Russian hands. The country’s main east-west highway, which passes through the city, was cut, Georgian officials said, and rumors swirled among residents of the capital that Russian soldiers would soon be on their streets.

In a television address, President Mikheil Saakashvili accused Russia of the “preplanned, coldblooded . . . murder of a small country.” His government, among the most pro-American in the region, appealed again to the outside world for help.

Well I’ll say so! This is crazy!

In Washington, President Bush toughened his rhetoric. “Russia has invaded a sovereign neighboring state and threatens a democratic government elected by its people. Such an action is unacceptable in the 21st century,” Bush said.

Well that will really scare the Russians!

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin used sharp language as well, accusing the West of supporting Georgian leaders who he contends committed genocide when their troops swept into the separatist zone of South Ossetia last week. The soldiers wiped out 10 villages, Putin said. “The very scale of this cynicism is astonishing,” he declared.

Putin also condemned the United States for airlifting Georgian troops home from Iraq on an emergency basis. Still dressed in desert fatigues, the Georgian soldiers stepped off a U.S. Air Force transport at a Georgian airport Monday.

I guess we at least did something! Doesn’t seem like much to me!

Moscow’s intentions remained a mystery. Russian soldiers, riding tanks and armored personnel carriers, were on the move even as Russian President Dmitry Medvedev seemed to suggest that the military operation was nearing its end, and a Russian general said there was no plan to take territory outside Georgia’s two pro-Russian separatist zones. Senior European officials flew into the Georgian capital to try to mediate a cease-fire plan that so far the Russians have ignored.

Repeat after me: “He’s K-G-B!” It’s all about power and dominance with them!

Over the weekend, Georgian leaders declared a unilateral cease-fire. But with Russian troops operating outside the country’s two separatist zones on soil the central government has always controlled, at least some Georgian forces were again in combat mode. Reporters witnessed Georgian troops and six helicopter gunships opening fire near the border of South Ossetia, one of the zones.

Abkhazia and South Ossetia broke away from Georgia in the early 1990s and have formed close relations with Russia. Last week, Georgian forces launched a major offensive that captured the South Ossetian capital in an effort to reestablish central government control; Russian forces drove them out two days later.

Let me see here? A little county call Georgia decides they need to get some control over their rebels and then that gives Russia permission to completely blow that country up!

The Russian news agency RIA-Novosti, quoting Russian Defense Ministry officials, confirmed the seizure of the Senaki base and said that Russia sent “peacekeepers” there on a “preventative mission.” Another Russian official, speaking in Moscow, said the seizure was designed to prevent Georgian forces from using the base to re-group and launch new attacks on South Ossetia. Russia accuses Georgia of continuing to shell South Ossetia.

Preventative mission! Why would Georgia have any reason to strike at Russia. Their not insane like the Jihadist!

The Russian news agency Interfax later reported that Russian troops had pulled out of Senaki after “eliminating” the potential to shell South Ossetia.

Senaki is several hours’ drive from South Ossetia and had been a concern for separatists in Abkhazia, not South Ossetia. Completed in 2006, the base was built to meet standards of the NATO alliance, which Georgia aspires to join.

And there’s the real reason! Russia doesn’t want the west to gain more reliable allies in their back yard. So their going to blow up a little country so that they can maintain dominance. It’s just Russians reverting back to being… Well, Russians!

The French and Finnish foreign ministers visited Tbilisi on Monday as part of a diplomatic push to end the fighting. They visited Gori as well, where they inspected a bombed apartment building. Bernard Kouchner, the French minister, said he wanted to get a “strong picture” of events on the ground. Finland’s Alexander Stubb was present in his country’s capacity as rotating head of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.

The Fins remember getting invaded by Russia back in 1940 and I am sure that they are looking at this quite seriously along with the rest of the countries in the former eastern bloc.

Saakashvili joined them in Gori. Toward the end of the visit, the sound of an airplane overhead caused panic among his security detail. Shouting “air, air” in Georgian, his bodyguards pulled him to the ground and covered him with flak jackets for protection. They later bundled him into a sport-utility vehicle that sped off.

Earlier Monday, Saakashvili signed a peace proposal offered by Kouchner, which calls for a cease-fire, the withdrawal of forces to positions held before the start of the recent hostilities, an international peacekeeping presence in South Ossetia, and the respect of Georgia’s territorial integrity.

It is unclear whether the plan will be acceptable in Moscow. Russians have said that Georgia must sign an agreement not to use force against the two separatist enclaves, which under international law are part of Georgia. Other Russian officials have suggested that Georgian troops near the enclaves would have to surrender their weapons to the Russians.

Well that’s a great deal for Georgia! Well, they don’t have many options. They have to hope that Russia will keep it’s word that they have already broken before.

Russian officials continued Monday to defend their country’s actions. Grigory Karasin, Russia’s deputy foreign minister, said Monday that “we want television screens in the West to be showing not only Russian tanks and saying Russia is at war in South Ossetia and with Georgia, but also to be showing the suffering of the Ossetian people, the murdered elderly people and children, the destroyed towns of South Ossetia, and Tskhinvali. This would be an objective way of presenting the material.”

Yea, Ok! Whatever you want.

The Russian claims of atrocities have not been independently verified. Some of them appear to echo hearsay accounts provided on Russian television by South Ossetians who fled a Georgian military assault on the capital, Tskhinvali.

Some of the few reporters who have visited Tskhinvali described a devastated city with large numbers of dead. Russian Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov said in a CNN interview Monday that 2,000 people had died in South Ossetia during the recent Georgian offensive.

Honestly, I really don’t know enough on this but Russia broke it’s word and they are asserting dominance over this region again and now to mention that they are the main suppliers to Iran, This situation makes me sick.

Western countries, particularly members of the European Union, are far from united about the conflict. East European and Baltic countries have been harshly critical of Russia’s action.

Major powers such as Germany, France and Britain have called for an end to the fighting, but they have avoided directly condemning Russia. Italy, whose prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, is a friend of Putin’s, is sympathetic to Russia’s position.

“We cannot create an anti-Russia coalition in Europe, and on this point we are close to Putin’s position,” said Foreign Minister Franco Frattini, speaking to the newspaper La Stampa. “This war has pushed Georgia further away . . . from Europe.”

Yea for the Italians! Man this is really starting to get bad! Now we have a Russia that is starting to turn fascist and is reasserting control over the former easter bloc countries and not to mention the oil situation we have going on makes this a big power grab for Russia. That is a massive stretch that Russia is just doing this to help the poor South Ossetians how are being brutalized by Georgia due to the fact that there is a massive oil pipe running through Georgia and oil just so happens to be at 140 bucks a barrel. This is sure to test the McCain and Obama on if they are ready to actually able to run this county. As expected McCain takes a more hawkish stance:

The candidates’ responses to the crisis were initially very different in tone. Sen. McCain forcefully blamed Russia, a country he has taken a hard stand on in the past. He has called for ejecting Russia from the Group of Eight leading nations and has mocked President George W. Bush’s statement that he saw goodness in former Russian President Vladimir Putin. Sen. McCain said that when he looked into Mr. Putin’s eyes, he “saw three letters: K-G-B.”

“Russia should immediately and unconditionally cease its military operations and withdraw all forces from sovereign Georgian territory,” Sen. McCain said Friday morning. He credited Georgia for having called for a cease-fire.

While Obama takes his usual talk it through stance:

Democratic U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama opposes excluding Russia from the Group of Eight industrial nations, as suggested by Republican rival John McCain, saying Moscow’s cooperation was needed in the fight against nuclear proliferation.

“It would be a mistake,” Obama told CNN in an interview when asked about McCain’s proposal. CNN on Saturday released excerpts from the interview that will air on Sunday.

“Look, if we’re going to do something about nuclear proliferation, just to take one issue that I think is as important as any on the list, we’ve got to have Russia involved,” the Illinois senator said.

“The amount of loose nuclear material that is floating around in the former Soviet Union, the amount of technical know-how that is in countries that used to be behind the Iron Curtain, without Russia’s cooperation, our efforts in that on that front will be greatly weakened.”

Man this is just getting insane! What’s next? China starts invading Taiwan? India starts invading Pakistan? Heck! for all we know maybe Iran already has a nuke ready and has it set up to lunch at Israel! And with that great Iranian Ballistic engineering; maybe it’ll just go haywire and just hit Egypt instead! This just seems to be the year for really crazy stuff to come out! (I wanted to curse right there but I thought I should try to stay professional.) We are most cleanly living the Chinese curse (and it’s ironic that the Olympics are in China.) “May you live in interesting times.” I hope that things will get really boring really fast but that’s not the current trend today!

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Massive Earthquake in China

Posted on May 19th, 2008 by Darth B'strad.
Categories: Asia, Philosophy, Christianity.

Last Monday China had a massive earthquake that reached up the Richter scale to 7.9 making this one of the most devastating earthquakes in history. Now China is still feeling the effect of it with aftershoks spreading around. This from the New York Times:

Panic erupted here in the capital of Sichuan Province and at least one other Sichuan city on Monday after provincial television issued a warning of the possibility of a severe aftershock.

Near midnight in Chengdu, thousands of people trying to evacuate the city by car became mired in gridlock, stuck bumper to bumper in clotted streets. Other people quickly gathered blankets and rushed outside, planning to sleep on the street or in neighborhood parks.

In Mianyang, one of the areas hit hardest by last week’s earthquake, guests were evacuated from hotels, joining the masses in the streets. It was not immediately clear on what basis the warning was issued. Hundreds of aftershocks have occurred since the main earthquake on May 12, which the government now says reached a magnitude of 8.0.

The panic occurred hours after the country observed an official period of silence to mourn the tens of thousands of quake victims. At 2:28 p.m., exactly a week after the quake, traffic halted around the country, and millions of Chinese stood with bowed heads and moist eyes. Rescue workers also stopped to honor the dead, marking a pause in a difficult but enormous relief effort as the hopes of finding new survivors faded.

The many powerful aftershocks have hampered relief efforts in Sichuan, located in southwest China. Rain and floods have posed additional threats, forcing some operations to be temporarily suspended. The deaths caused by landslides were reported by Xinhua, the official news agency, but the brief report gave few other details.

This one has a horrible death toll to it.

But with the confirmed death toll raised to 34,073 by late Monday, and the government saying the figure could reach 50,000, there is more grief than hope here.

The NY Times also gives some of the tragic stories:

A group of 12 family members trudged together up the winding road to the town, the county seat. They carried large plastic bags stuffed with clothing and food. Since the earthquake, they had been living in a huge stadium in the city of Mianyang, but now they were making the inevitable trip back to their farming village, somewhere in the mountains.

“We’re just going to take a look,” said Li Zhongying, whose husband was still missing. “Tonight, we’ll sleep wherever we can find a place.”

Her daughter, Li Qingna, 28, walked slowly with a 2-year-old baby in her arms. Her eyes were wet. The walk would take another 10 hours.

Behind them came two men, one from Yunnan Province and the other from Beichuan. They had met on the road earlier on Monday and had been walking side by side since. The man from Yunnan had a wife, daughter and aunt who had migrated here to work at a power plant. He had not heard from them since the earthquake.

That evening, inside the town of Beichuan, four women wailed as they burned incense and paper money in front of a towering pile of rubble. They had returned home today, only to find that their parents had died in a building collapse.

“We wanted to come two days earlier, but we couldn’t get in,” one of the women screamed into the air, her words meant for her parents. “We only got here today!”

There were a few signs of hope, though. Dozens soldiers and rescue workers had gathered atop a mound of rubble in the town center in the late afternoon. They had discovered someone alive in a crevice, more than a week after the earthquake, and were working to get the person out.

Relief efforts are under way but with how massive this earthquake is, it’s hard to get relief in.

More than 240,000 people have been hospitalized. Many survivors were forced to have limbs amputated. And now, thousands of bodies are being buried and cremated.

Somehow, experts say, an entire region needs to be bulldozed and rebuilt. Hundreds of dams and power stations damaged by the earthquake need repair.

And perhaps most troubling, the government says that about five million people have been left homeless by the earthquake. While huge donations have poured in, totaling over $1.2 billion, many of the survivors say they have nowhere to go.

For the moment, they are living in tents and sports stadiums, reflecting on what has happened to them since that fateful moment last Monday.

“These days I keep going to every hospital in Mianyang trying to find my son,” said Yang Li, 29, who is living in a gymnasium complex and hoping that somehow she will find her 5-year-old boy, Wang Tong Tian, who was in kindergarten when the earthquake struck. “I keep praying we’ll find him. I want my son and I want my home.”

As a Christan, this is one of the hardest questions to answer. “How can God be so good when he allows such horrible tragedies to happen?” Was this a punishment from God to China for committing immoral acts? There is a possibility that God poured out his wrath over China and the dead are paying for their sins. There are a number of passages in the Old and New Testament where God did or will use natural disasters to punish the sins of an immoral city. However as I read the article in the NY times, wrath is not what I felt from God but rather, extreme grief. This is some 50,000 of human beings that he created and wanted to save. He knows the name and personalty of each and every one of the men, women, and children that died tragically in this earthquake. I can not believe that he wanted this! So why did this happen? Unfortunately we Christians do not have a very good answer for it. This is the same question that Job asked God while he was going through his torment of losing everything he had despite being a Godly man. However this is how God responded to him:

Job 38:2-6
2“Who is this that questions my wisdom
with such ignorant words?
3 Brace yourself like a man,
because I have some questions for you,
and you must answer them.

4 “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?
Tell me, if you know so much.
5 Who determined its dimensions
and stretched out the surveying line?
6 What supports its foundations,
and who laid its cornerstone

The truth of the matter is, we really can’t understand why such things happen. Only God really knows why it happens and it is beyond our understanding. This is one of thous things that makes faith in God so hard because He, by definition, is unknowable. We can see only small bits and pieces of him but God as a whole is unfathomable. We can not give him any counsel because it is Him that created wisdom in the first place. How is it possible the He could not know the absolute best way for you to live your life? God doesn’t really give us commandments that are easy to follow and so in Deuteronomy 6:5 where he says “Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.” That’s also God’s way of telling you that he knows that He’s not all that lovable at times. Things like this happen all the time in people’s lives and it’s hard to trust in God when they happen. However If you can trust in God despite all of the tragic events in the world and in your own life, God will bless you. I have seen it in my own life as I have talked about my life in my A True B’Strad posts. However no one (and that includes God) can force you to trust in him. That is a decision that is entirely yours to make.

May God Bless thous that have perished in this earthquake and thous that suffer with it. If you would like to help, Caring for China has set up a relief fund going to help them.

Update:The horrible death toll just went up to 70,000

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Chicago!

Posted on May 15th, 2008 by Darth B'strad.
Categories: World&Travel.

Just got back tuesday from Chicago! And I have to say that, THAT was about the best vacation I have had in some time! Certainly well worth the horrible weather there (and everyone was telling me that’s the nicest time of year). Mostly we stayed in Evanston around Northwestern University and stayed with Aaron’s friends back there. Had some great home brews from Clark the first night. Thanks for the good tourer and tastings of your selection. Got to go to some blues bars Friday night and hang out with the Blast people. I was hanging out with Aaron’s good buddy that night and Man, you need too get out here to Denver so we show you to the Falling Rock! Saturday, we went downtown for lunch at a nice Armenian place and then found a good bar with some good beers and had a strange conversation with a lady there. Then we were off to the Blast show and that was Amazing! You guys guys really did great in those dance pieces. It’s tempting to say that one was my favorite but the truth is I couldn’t decide, they were all great! Then we headed to the after party and thanks for letting me be that odd random guy that shows up to the party (hopefully I didn’t cause too much of a stir). But I did try to make up for it by grilling for you guys the next day.  But I just had hit the karaoke that night to make a fool of myself even more than I already have but now I do owe Vova a song next time I see him. So after a day of drunkenness me and Aaron decided to take it easy the next day and walked around Evanston and then after that Vova took us to a Russian stem house and we burned out all the toxins we have accumulated over the trip. It was sad to leave you guys but I had to get back to work and the muggy weather was wearing me down. If it wasn’t for the mugginess I would be tempted to move over there but I am still very much in love with Denver.  Special thanks to Anya and her roommate for giveing us a place to sleep, you gals were wonderful. So to all you guys back in Evanston, tanks for the great time and if any of you are here in Denver, my house is always open to you.

4 comments.

Sarkozy is angering the left!

Posted on February 19th, 2008 by Darth B'strad.
Categories: Political, Europe.

You’ve just gotta love this guy! This from the New York Times:

President Nicolas Sarkozy dropped an intellectual bombshell this week, surprising the nation and touching off waves of protest with his revision of the school curriculum: beginning next fall, he said, every fifth grader will have to learn the life story of one of the 11,000 French children killed by the Nazis in the Holocaust.

“Nothing is more moving, for a child, than the story of a child his own age, who has the same games, the same joys and the same hopes as he, but who, in the dawn of the 1940s, had the bad fortune to be defined as a Jew,” Mr. Sarkozy said at the end of a dinner speech to France’s Jewish community on Wednesday night. He added that every French child should be “entrusted with the memory of a French child-victim of the Holocaust.”

Adding to the national fracas over the announcement, Mr. Sarkozy wrapped his plan in the cloak of religion, placing blame for the wars and violence of the last century on an “absence of God” and calling the Nazi belief in a hierarchy of races “radically incompatible with Judeo-Christian monotheism.”

Now that takes courage to say!

Education Minister Xavier Darcos explained later that the aim of the plan was to “create an identification between a child of today and one of the same age who was deported and gassed.”

The Holocaust is already taught in French schools, but some psychiatrists and educators predicted that requiring students to identify with a specific victim would traumatize them.

Traumatize them? No this is giveing them a sense of reality in this world and teaching them to fight evil.

Secularists accused Mr. Sarkozy, who is already under fire for his frequent praise of God and religion, of subverting both the country’s iron-clad separation of church and state and the national ideal of a single, nonreligious identity for all.

Iron Clad! You have just have to smile when you hear that.

Political opponents dismissed the plan as his latest misguided idea, unveiled without reflection or consultation. Some historians argued that the focus on victims could steer attention away from the Vichy government’s collaboration with the Nazis. Still others warned that the plan could backfire, creating resentment among France’s ethnic Arab and African populations if they felt their own histories were getting short shrift.

We have to focus on what our county has done wrong here not preventing evil!

“Every day the president throws out a new unhappy idea with no coherence,” said Pascal Bruckner, the philosopher. “But this last one is truly obscene, the very opposite of spirituality. Let’s judge it for what it is: a crazy proposal of the president, not the word of the Gospel.”

The initiative has also pitted some Jews against one another. “It is unimaginable, unbearable, tragic and above all, unjust,” Simone Veil, a Holocaust survivor and honorary president of the Foundation for the Memory of the Holocaust, told the Web site of the magazine L’Express. “You cannot inflict this on little ones of 10 years old! You cannot ask a child to identify with a dead child. The weight of this memory is much too heavy to bear.”

Ms. Veil was in the audience when Mr. Sarkozy spoke, and said that when she heard his words, “My blood turned to ice.”

It’s getting quite harsh out there.

But Serge Klarsfeld, a Jewish historian who has devoted his life to recording the list and biographies of France’s Holocaust victims, praised the president for his “courage.”

Good man!

“This is the crowning glory of long and arduous work,” he said. “To those who say it’s too difficult for young children — that’s not true. What they see on television or in a horror film is much worse. This is not a morbid mission.”

Mr. Klarsfeld likened the plan to a practice by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., which gives visitors small booklets describing the experiences of Holocaust victims and survivors.

I don’t know why 10 year olds can’t handle this!

But there is something else. Mr. Sarkozy is shattering another barrier in French intellectual life: religion. His public statements on the subject seem to reflect a deeply held belief that religious values have an important place in everyday French society — an iconoclastic position for a French politician.

When Mr. Sarkozy was made an Honorary Canon of the Basilica of St. John Lateran in Rome last December, he proposed a “positive secularism” that “does not consider religions a danger, but an asset.” He was even more provocative in declaring that “the schoolteacher will never be able to replace the priest or the pastor” in teaching the difference between good and evil.

In Saudi Arabia last month, he infused his speech with more than a dozen references to God, who, he said, “liberates” man. He also said last month that it was a mistake to delete the reference to “Europe’s Christian roots” from the European Constitution.

In France, a country where one’s religion is typically kept private, Mr. Sarkozy heralds his religious identity, referring publicly to his Jewish grandfather and wearing his Roman Catholicism on his sleeve.

“I am of Catholic culture, Catholic tradition, Catholic belief, even if my religious practice is episodic,” he wrote in a book of essays in 2004. “I consider myself as a member of the Catholic Church.”

This here is the key to all this. They hate him because he is trying to bring Judo-Christan values to a secularized country. They can’t understand that he is trying to build up a country that incorporates these values and frees people from government control. They can’t understand that he is trying to teach kids the impact of evil on people’s lives that are just like them. Keep up the good work Sarkozy.

1 comment.

The Canadian thought Police are now after one of their own!

Posted on December 18th, 2007 by Darth B'strad.
Categories: Political, Ethics, Crime, Europe, War, Law, Terrorism, Media.

And he also just so happens to be the Canadians best writer right now! Mark Steyn’s number one best seller America Alone is coming under fire by Canada’s very best: the Canadian Human Rights Commission and the British Columbia Human Rights Commission. This from nypost.com:

Celebrated author Mark Steyn has been summoned to appear before two Canadian judicial panels on charges linked to his book “America Alone.”

The book, a No. 1 bestseller in Canada, argues that Western nations are succumbing to an Islamist imperialist threat. The fact that charges based on it are proceeding apace proves his point.

Number one best seller in Canada! As they like to say 50 million people can’t all be wrong!

Steyn, who won the 2006 Eric Breindel Journalism Award (co-sponsored by The Post and its parent, News Corp), writes for dozens of publications on several continents. After the Canadian general-interest magazine Maclean’s reprinted a chapter from the book, five Muslim law-school students, acting through the auspices of the Canadian Islamic Congress, demanded that the magazine be punished for spreading “hatred and contempt” for Muslims.

The plaintiffs allege that Maclean’s advocated, among other things, the notion that Islamic culture is incompatible with Canada’s liberalized, Western civilization. They insist such a notion is untrue and, in effect, want opinions like that banned from publication.

Two separate panels, the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal and the Canadian Human Rights Commission, have agreed to hear the case. These bodies are empowered to hear and rule on cases of purported “hate speech.”

Of course, a ban on opinions - even disagreeable ones - is the very antithesis of the Western tradition of free speech and freedom of the press.

“But We’re the Canadian human rights commissions and this is in violation of angering Muslims.”

Indeed, this whole process of dragging Steyn and the magazine before two separate human-rights bodies for the “crime” of expressing an opinion is a good illustration of precisely what he was talking about.

If Maclean’s, Canada’s top-selling magazine, is found “guilty,” it could face financial or other penalties. And the affair could have a devastating impact on opinion journalism in Canada generally.

More proof that the left only allowes free speech that is on the left.

As it happens, Canadian human-rights commissions have already come down hard on those whose writings they dislike, like critics of gay rights.

Nor should Americans dismiss this campaign against Steyn and Maclean’s as merely another Canadian eccentricity. Speech cops in America, too, are forever attempting similar efforts - most visibly, on college campuses.

More proof that colleges generally make people more stupid.

In fact, New York City itself has a human-rights panel that tries to stamp out anything deemed too politically incorrect.

Since 9/11, Americans have been alert to the threat of terror from radical Islamists. But there’s been all too little concern for a creeping accommodation of radical Islamist tenets, like curbs on critical opinions.

That needs to change.

But I won’t let it go here! Here is the Article in Question from macleans.ca:

Sept. 11, 2001, was not “the day everything changed,” but the day that revealed how much had already changed. On Sept. 10, how many journalists had the Council of American-Islamic Relations or the Canadian Islamic Congress or the Muslim Council of Britain in their Rolodexes? If you’d said that whether something does or does not cause offence to Muslims would be the early 21st century’s principal political dynamic in Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands, Belgium, France and the United Kingdom, most folks would have thought you were crazy. Yet on that Tuesday morning the top of the iceberg bobbed up and toppled the Twin Towers.

This is about the seven-eighths below the surface — the larger forces at play in the developed world that have left Europe too enfeebled to resist its remorseless transformation into Eurabia and that call into question the future of much of the rest of the world. The key factors are: demographic decline; the unsustainability of the social democratic state; and civilizational exhaustion.

Let’s start with demography, because everything does:

Steyn is really in to Demography as you will find out.

If your school has 200 guys and you’re playing a school with 2,000 pupils, it doesn’t mean your baseball team is definitely going to lose but it certainly gives the other fellows a big starting advantage. Likewise, if you want to launch a revolution, it’s not very likely if you’ve only got seven revolutionaries. And they’re all over 80. But, if you’ve got two million and seven revolutionaries and they’re all under 30 you’re in business.

For example, I wonder how many pontificators on the “Middle East peace process” ever run this number:

The median age in the Gaza Strip is 15.8 years.

He’s always great at putting up little tidbits that put things into perspective.

Once you know that, all the rest is details. If you were a “moderate Palestinian” leader, would you want to try to persuade a nation — or pseudo-nation — of unemployed poorly educated teenage boys raised in a UN-supervised European-funded death cult to see sense? Any analysis of the “Palestinian problem” that doesn’t take into account the most important determinant on the ground is a waste of time.

Likewise, the salient feature of Europe, Canada, Japan and Russia is that they’re running out of babies. What’s happening in the developed world is one of the fastest demographic evolutions in history: most of us have seen a gazillion heartwarming ethnic comedies — My Big Fat Greek Wedding and its ilk — in which some uptight WASPy type starts dating a gal from a vast loving fecund Mediterranean family, so abundantly endowed with sisters and cousins and uncles that you can barely get in the room. It is, in fact, the inversion of the truth. Greece has a fertility rate hovering just below 1.3 births per couple, which is what demographers call the point of “lowest-low” fertility from which no human society has ever recovered. And Greece’s fertility is the healthiest in Mediterranean Europe: Italy has a fertility rate of 1.2, Spain 1.1. Insofar as any citizens of the developed world have “big” families these days, it’s the anglo democracies: America’s fertility rate is 2.1, New Zealand a little below. Hollywood should be making My Big Fat Uptight Protestant Wedding in which some sad Greek only child marries into a big heartwarming New Zealand family where the spouse actually has a sibling.

“But we’re Hollywood and we’re experts on world affairs!”

As I say, this isn’t a projection: it’s happening now. There’s no need to extrapolate, and if you do it gets a little freaky, but, just for fun, here goes: by 2050, 60 per cent of Italians will have no brothers, no sisters, no cousins, no aunts, no uncles. The big Italian family, with papa pouring the vino and mama spooning out the pasta down an endless table of grandparents and nieces and nephews, will be gone, no more, dead as the dinosaurs. As Noel Coward once remarked in another context, “Funiculi, funicula, funic yourself.” By mid-century, Italians will have no choice in the matter.

Experts talk about root causes. But demography is the most basic root of all. A people that won’t multiply can’t go forth or go anywhere. Those who do will shape the age we live in.

Demographic decline and the unsustainability of the social democratic state are closely related. In America, politicians upset about the federal deficit like to complain that we’re piling up debts our children and grandchildren will have to pay off. But in Europe the unaffordable entitlements are in even worse shape: there are no kids or grandkids to stick it to.

You might formulate it like this:

Age + Welfare = Disaster for you;

Youth + Will = Disaster for whoever gets in your way.

By “will,” I mean the metaphorical spine of a culture. Africa, to take another example, also has plenty of young people, but it’s riddled with AIDS and, for the most part, Africans don’t think of themselves as Africans: as we saw in Rwanda, their primary identity is tribal, and most tribes have no global ambitions. Islam, however, has serious global ambitions, and it forms the primal, core identity of most of its adherents — in the Middle East, South Asia and elsewhere.

Islam has youth and will, Europe has age and welfare.

He goes on to explain our current plight (that is way too lengthy for this post) but he concludes by saying this:

In a few years, as millions of Muslim teenagers are entering their voting booths, some European countries will not be living formally under sharia, but — as much as parts of Nigeria, they will have reached an accommodation with their radicalized Islamic compatriots, who like many intolerant types are expert at exploiting the “tolerance” of pluralist societies. In other Continental countries, things are likely to play out in more traditional fashion, though without a significantly different ending. Wherever one’s sympathies lie on Islam’s multiple battle fronts the fact is the jihad has held out a long time against very tough enemies. If you’re not shy about taking on the Israelis and Russians, why wouldn’t you fancy your chances against the Belgians and Spaniards?

“We’re the ones who will change you,” the Norwegian imam Mullah Krekar told the Oslo newspaper Dagbladet in 2006. “Just look at the development within Europe, where the number of Muslims is expanding like mosquitoes. Every Western woman in the EU is producing an average of 1.4 children. Every Muslim woman in the same countries is producing 3.5 children.” As he summed it up: “Our way of thinking will prove more powerful than yours.”

Steyn has the links to the grievances charged against him here. It’s like I said before: the right thinks the left is foolish and even dangerous but the left thinks the right is evil. For those of you who think that the left is also for free speech this is another proof that you are wrong. They are only for the free speech that agrees with their ideals and they will try to use political correctness to try to shut up any decent from it. Liberalism is not thought, it is felt and that is why they take so many irrational positions. Everyone has some irrational dogma and for me it is my faith in Jesus Christ. However my irrational faith does not effect the society were as the irrational leftist faith in secularism does affect the society. Steyn points this out in his book by showing the devastating effects that secularism has had on Europe and else where in the world and for that they try to shut him up. There is a sickness breeding in our society today and it weaken us to the battle that we must wage in order to secure our freedoms. If the entire western world would stand up and fight this growing threat then there would be no chance for the Jihadist to win but the left is fighting against that. If they are to win then we will live under shria law. Thus making us fight the war on two fronts: one being a military and intelligence battle against the Jihadist and one being a political battle against the left. Both must be won in order to secure our freedom.

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Sarkozy says get outta’ my country

Posted on May 30th, 2007 by Darth B'strad.
Categories: Political, Immigration, Europe.

The New French President Nicolas Sarkozy Won the French presidential elections a couple of weeks back against a socialist woman. The most interesting thing about that election is that Sarkozy is a conservative that won in the most socialist country in the world. He said things during the election like “we’re going to put the French back to work.” (I’m paraphrasing so don’t quote me on this.) That sounds very Regan’esk, doesn’t it? (ummm, maybe some republicans can learn from this example.) He is also a major supporter of the US and he is anti the anti US people in his country. A Frenchey that likes us? That’s almost unheard of! But not only is he talking like one he is acting like one. This from spiegel online:

France is home to over 5 million immigrants — and the new conservative-led government doesn’t plan on making things any more comfortable for them. While the new regime in Paris is determined to curb illegal immigration, it is also looking to encourage legal migrants to reconsider their decision to stay in France — by paying them to go back home.

New immigration minister, Brice Hortefeux, confirmed on Wednesday that the government is planning to offer incentives to more immigrants to return home voluntarily. “We must increase this measure to help voluntary return. I am very clearly committed to doing that,” Hortefeux said in an interview with RFI radio.

Under the scheme, Paris will provide each family with a nest egg of €6,000 ($8,000) for when they go back to their country of origin. A similar scheme, which was introduced in 2005 and 2006, was taken up by around 3,000 families.

I’ll give you 8000 buck to get the heck on out of my country: awww, is there anything more conservative. Well the problem is that France’s birth rate is below the replacement rate. France’s birth rate is at 1.89, that’s better than Spain’s 1.10, but still that means that the next generation is going to be 1.1 percent smaller than the next. If you want to restart you economy it doesn’t help to be shrinking your population as well as paying people to get out! However on the other hand the people he is paying to get out do not want to be French anyway. So it might not be a bad Idea to get rid of the people that are there that just want a job (allowing French to get those jobs too) and then bring in people that want to become French. Only problem is that France has a very poor track record of assimilation. But it is still a very bold move by Sarkozy and we’ll just have to see if this “here’s 8 grand, now get the hell out” policy is going to work.

1 comment.

A Eurotrip Retrospective

Posted on March 13th, 2007 by Bieren Skidels.
Categories: World&Travel, Europe, Creative Writing.

A retrospective… quite retrospective

Eurotrip: Day 1

in london, we went to westminster abbey, parliment, british musuem, picadilly… how fun, nice trip, all for it

Eurotrip: Day 2

oxfording it up today! meat pies in the covered market, smoking pipes and having a bitter in the eagle and child! wow, europe is sooo European

Eurotrip: day 3-4-5

pubbin it up… pubbin it up… pubbin it up! up! up!

Eurotrip: day 6

NOOOO SLEEEEP!!! 5 am Planes, 3 am busses - angry Irishmen!!!

uuhhh what? … still quite sleepy…

… had a nap and such… + CAFFEINE = Escotty says ” HI ! ”

Eurotrip: day 7

YO YO YO!!! WEEEE!!

some belgian waffles and fruit lambic… who says beer doesn’t make a great breakfast drenken… a;lskdhgoishasdaaa

… and Jedidiah drank water with his poor lip (*o*)

so today we were in brugge, belgium.. we took the train to lechtverde or something like that.. then caught a train from there to veurne, belgium… from there we took a bus to Oostvleteren… where we had to call and order a special “belbus” to take us to the abbey de sint sixtus in westvleteren, where we ate and drank then followed the same pattern to return.. catching the last train out of each place!

Eurotrip: day 8,9

AHHHHHHHHHh!!! TRrrrrRains!

How did we end up back in Flanders!??

next day, mmmmmmm… fries for dinner.

Eurotrip: day 10

lots of fries! lots of fries! today we visited the museum of torture… vanGoh gallery and heineken “factory”.. which actually was more like an amusement park with lots of videos and rides..

lates yo

Eurotrip: day 11

lot of windmills ..couldn’t find the pickled herrring [NOOOOOO]

The dark poet sewed my backpack (and that means nothing but what it means… how do you feel about feeling that way?)

4 countries down… 7 to go

Eurotrip: day 12

…[days of silence, beer, and LOT OF FRIES]…

Eurotrip: juliet 27

yay for french keyboards!

we set out on the search for ancestors of the Dark Poet… first in a graveyard then we decided to go to Nowa Weis (approximately 20 miles from the Latvian border): we didnt even know were it was and finally a taxi driver agreed to take us to the homestead. Through a taxi driver we were able to find someone that knew were the chalkos lived.. we found the son of the Dark Poet’s second great aunt once-removed, who’s grave was in the front yard…

writing on this keyboard is stressing ,e out noz so I zill zrite zithout fixing the typing qnd just spelling things the zqy thqt I zould nor,qlly zrite the, OK1

lqtes yo

Eurotrip: July 30

gay pariiii… eating crepes wtih nutel choclate and banana… mmmm … got rained on… ate a few baguettes… left for prague… got to prague… praha that is… hahaha - we were there for a day, or more like a morning and then left on the bus to Cesky Krumlov…. it’s very cool.. and very good food… I ordered a pork knee for dinner last night.. and they gave me like a family size peice of meat… the recipt said it was “1 kg” but I would swear it was 2. and how much did it cost? a whopping $5.20 what does that come out to.. like $2 a pound!

Escotty is smiling.. and wants to say escuchee to all of you

oh so yeah about the trip………………………………………….

Escotty has fallen desperately in love with a slovakian shoe-shine girl… she says she learned english while in the german navy.. but we think she is just a gypsy… well in any case… we haven’t seen Escotty for 2 days now, he is being held as a love slave in the gypsy perched-upon-cliffs…. yes?

or maybe not

Escotty’s words of wisdom:”a wish I wish I brought a rag to wipe all this sweat off”

Jedidiah’s call to jihad:

“just chewin on the raw details”

esbardo the indian chief commenting on aspects of devil worship

“Roe vs Wade reduced all crime and in particular homicides in the 90’s by almost 50%”

Mikey’s outcry:

“the kid is not my son!”

coming days: …eat more pork knuckle…

billie jean says I am the one, but it ain’t me your looking for babe

Eurotrip: July 31

cheap food… woooooo
good food… woooooo
and a nice place to sleep… beautiful big bathtub… and breakfast brought to the bedroom (and all for nickels)

Escotty’s words of wisdom:
“Escotty doesn’t know!, but he likes morbid cartoons”

Jedidiah’s call to jihad:
“planning to join the IRA now that it is ‘peaceful’”

esbardo’s mystifying muse of material manichism:
“SAUSAGE!”

Escotty is still working his wiles on the local la fem. Gypsies seem to take to his bohemian flare for romantic river dancing.

any suggestions for more reading… we are running out?
something intellectually nude… yet tasteful… yes, tastefully done

Eurotrip: Blues

we are in the airort now… 5:13 am
boarding starts in 17 mins to paris CDG…
the sun is just coming up… none of us have slept ..

we stayed up all night listening to Stan the Man. Packed into a smoky room the smaller than your bedroom with 30 others… with everything reserved including standing room in the adjacent

an old blues man.. considered by many to be the best blues guitarist in europe or eastern europe… grizzley, walks on to the stage and takes us along for the ride.

well time to fly

you can have paris.. I’ll take bohemia any day

Eurotrip: …someday?

yo yo

Eurotrip: more…salsa dancing and mmmm mmmm food

prague is beautiful, culturally progressive, seemingly healthy…. paris gives off a feeling of a stale culture, dirty and congested city, even stronger than I get from london.

to find european culture…. or simply to find something unique and beautiful, a traveller must attempt to stay ahead of the tourism curve, what was hot 20 years ago, is lost today. This changing face can be seen all over when I travel, to get a unique taste of a foriegn culture, the big cities may or may not give you what you are loooking for, they may have a new culture you weren’t looking for, or may even be void of much of anything that could be called unique.

on to barcelona… where the weather is hot and the country is in the worst drought in 30 or so years

Eurotrip: Barcelona

BARCELONA!!

awesome awesome awesome!!!

we have been kickin back for the last few days:
eating olives along with other tapas (and paella!) while basking in
the sun on the mediterranian beach! comparing medieval architecture
with ground breaking modern stuff!

did I mention beaches? food? oh yeah…

we went to another jazz concert here… had a lot of food…. slept
alot.. did I mention beaches?

too beautiful for words?

deep thoughts on european culture?? ramblings about san miguel? not now…
just know that salt stings the crevaces of your body, and Jedidiah’s new
favorite song is “billie jean”

Escotty is now braiding his chest hair, along with Jedidiah’s chinny-chin-chin

fun facts about eurotrip 2005:
- Escotty goes to the bathroom approx. 37.2 times a day, 3.2 times an
hour during eating periods

- I have limited my -OH consumption to a conservative 27.3 beers a day
(ammortized over the whole trip, which includes trappist monasteries,
irish stouts, and czech pilsners)

- Escotty was forced at gun point to buy deoderent 2 weeks into the trip

- as of now, we still do not have a watch to tell what time it is…
something that has been on the to-do list since DIA about 3 weeks ago..
what time is it?

notice all numbers in these facts contain a 2 or a 3, what does this
mean? I think you should really think about this!!

–
~esbardo

p.s. Escotty has been returned from the gypsies!!! with large amounts
of manchego.. and I thought they were barbarians…. goes to show…?

Eurotrip: Rome

YO YO YO… leaving rome tonight.. been sun burned and busy the last
few days… hard train rides.. and lots of sight seeing.. on a crappy
computer right now.. so I may have selected some rather crappy pics

for you .. but I can’t really see them… any way enjoy.. next stop
Davos.. Switzerland.. where I will visit the Kindschi brewery.. I
think.. aight, lates! gotta go catch another train.. overnight…
sleeping in trains .. YEAH! uggggg

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