What's so special about Allah?

Category:  [in English]  [Freedom]  [Islamophobia]  [Satire]

There are Jews in the world, there are Buddhists,
There are Hindus and Mormons and then,
There are those that follow Mohammed,
But I've never been one of them...

(Every sperm is sacred - ©Monty Python -
another great religious parody)

What's so special about Allah and about Muhammad then? We can parodize Thor, Freya, the Pope, Vishnu, Jews, Yahweh, Michael Jackson, Buddha, gays, George Bush, fat guys, politicians, French military victories. Why for heavens sake should Allah and Muhammad be exempted then from parody? Whether it's tasteful or not, or whether insulting to some is not at stake here. Opinions or parody for that matter will always shock somebody somewhere.

If Muhammad objects, he can always sue me with a copy of the birth certificate of Aisha, stating she was indeed way over 6 when he raped married her.

If depicting Muhammad is a blasphemy, well, nobody asked Muslims to depict him. For the rest of us who don’t believe in the Religion of Submission, it’s our freedom and our privilege to do so, and we do as we wish. If the sight of their Prophet shocks Muslims, - well, nobody asks them to look, did we?


And what’s this fuzz about anyways? Muhammad cartoons have been all over all the time. Better, sharper even, and funnier than the ones by the Jyllands-Posten. Check out the cartoons of Abdullah Aziz on the islamcomicbook.com.
There have been videogames featuring Muhammad in Holy War, raunchy cartoons, comic strips, and real hard stuff mocking Muhammad (overview on zombietime.com near the bottom). Also, take the opportunity to have a look at the work of infidel artist D.T.Devareaux.

Let us repeat again and again: there is absolutely no question of stigmatising Islam and Muslims. Religion is not the issue here but intolerance.
Journalists of the French newspaper Libération (that published Muhammad cartoons)

Editorial cartoons exist to challenge political thought and expose hypocrisy. Among religions, Islam should be the least protected from this form of speech, as it insists on involving itself in temporal political matters wherever it is practiced. Indeed, it insists on dictating political and legal matters, usually in the most extreme terms, and it uses the life of Mohammed as its claim on political and legal supremacy. Christianity hasn't taken that position in centuries, focusing on the spiritual and individual rather than group diktat.
(Captain's Quarters, thanks to DOF).

By the way, have a Carlsberg. After the Flemish beers and the Filipino San Miguel, it’s undoubtedly the best beer in the world. Cheers!

More

We are all Danish
Double standards
D.T.Devareaux blasphemous infidel art
Islamcomicbook.com
The Muhammad archive (below)

Muhammad's pictures.

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Ask him about the cemeteries Dean!

Category:  [in English]  [Photoblog]  [Freedom]  [Global Politics]





In 1966, upon being told that French president Charles de Gaulle was taking France out of the integrated military command structure of NATO and required NATO and U.S. forces and headquarters to leave French soil, - President Lyndon Johnson told Secretary of State Dean Rusk:
"Ask him about the cemeteries Dean!"

So at end of the meeting Rusk did ask de Gaulle if his order to remove all U.S. troops from French soil also included the 60,000+ soldiers buried in France from World War I and World War II.
De Gaulle never answered.

Forty one years ago, a German counter-offensive, nicknamed as the Battle of the Bulge or the von Rundstedt offensive, took the Allies by surprise near the end of European World War II.

It happened in the Belgian Ardennes from dawn December 16, 1944 till January 30, 1945. It was aimed at splitting the Allies armies in half and recapturing the port of Antwerp, the Allies' most vital supply port.

The Ardennes Offensive was actually a series of battles scattered over several hundred miles and involving more than 1 million combatants, including 500,000 U.S. troops, 500,000 Germans and about 55,000 British.
Americans suffered 76,890 casualties, including 19,000 killed and 23,554 captured.
Germans suffered about 100,000 casualties — killed, wounded or captured.

One of the Allied War Cemeteries is near the small Walloon city of Hotton. A winter February Saturday, almost 3 years ago, I drove by with my first digital cam, and I was impressed by the serenity and the solitude of the place in the fresh snow.

The photo album has been online a couple of years ago but since then it evaporated in stardust of free web hosting. On this quiet winter evening when snow is falling all over, I just felt those pictures should be online again.

For some, soldiers like these might be imperialists, for others, heroes that made a sacrifice. Looking at their gravestones, I can only observe they were just kids. Their life had barely begun and it ended abruptly in the frost and in the snow.

But whatever politics may have to say about Atlanticism, they made a darn convincing case in favor.

Going to war without France is like going deer hunting without your accordion.
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld quoting General H. Norman Schwarzkopf

I would rather have a German division in front of me than a French one behind me.
General George S. Patton

As far as I'm concerned, war always means failure
Jacques Chirac, President of France
As far as France is concerned, you're right.
Rush Limbaugh

If the box below is empty, you are using Microsoft Internet Explorer. In that case, or if you want to view the gallery full-screen, click here.

Links

The Ardennes Offensive on worldwar2database.com
The Battle of the Bulge: the Ardennes Offensive
The Battle of the Bulge in Wikipedia
1944: Germany counter-attacks in Ardennes on the BBC
Veterans site of the Battle of the Bulge
La bataille des Ardennes autour de Rochefort: memories and photos (in French)
The Battle of the Bulge: tactical overview and maps
The Battle of the Bulge on The History Channel
The German Counteroffensive in the Ardennes: a very complete account by the US Army Center of Military History
The Battle of the Bulge on u-s-history.com
The Battle of the Bulge on reference.com


Photos are copyrighted but offered free of charge as Royalty Free Stock to anybody. This includes all HTML and JavaScript to reproduce this album. The only restriction is that they can't be sold and that they are used in due respect and they can not defamate the U.S., U.K, Australian and New-Zealand military.
Zipped original photos (2MP) can be downloaded here.

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Dear Muqtedar

Category:  [in English]  [Islamophobia]  [Freedom]  [Global Politics]

Prof. Muqtedar, a Muslim social scientist and an Islam scholar, was in Brussels recently for business, and he was shocked as he saw a scarfed Muslim women begging on the Boulevard Adolphe Max in Brussels downtown.

In his weblog called IJTIHAD (Muqtedar Khan's Column on Islam and Global Affairs) he tells this story and makes some observations on the difference between the Belgian approach to its Muslims, and the one of the US.

As I sat listening to the stories of Muslim life in Belgium, I caught myself repeatedly touching the tiny U.S. flag on my lapel. Uncle Sam sure looked mighty friendly and hospitable from cross the pond. While discrimination against Muslims in America has certainly risen after 9/11 it looked insignificant compared to what Muslims in Belgium faced routinely.

You can read the article in full here and here and here and here.
Since the article sounds awfully prejudiced, especially from an academic, I took the liberty to comment on his weblog.

Dear Muqtedar,

It's an interesting article, for sure. I am a Brussels resident, and to be frank, I never saw Muslim women begging on the streets. Most beggars are organized Eastern-European gangs and locals. My guess is that it was an imposter, using the scarf just to draw attention and get some money.

It is true that the Belgian government does a lot for Muslims. Immans are state-paid, and it's illegal to phrase anti-Muslim remarks in public. You will not be harassed if you phrase anti-Christian remarks, but you will be fined or put on trial when you admit to be anti-Muslim.

It's also true that there is a very generous social security system in Belgium, and we have a guaranteed income for those who don't work. Muslims are over-represented in that system, but only males. Women and girls find work easily, they study longer, and they are under-represented in crime statistics.

But it's also true that most street crime in Brussels and in Antwerp (another large Belgian city) is perpetrated by male Moroccan youth gangs. I myself was beaten once up into hospital at night, once robbed of my cell phone by Moroccans, and one time harassed by Algerians that were vandalizing a public railway rest room.

Those are not isolated incidents at all. Local women that walk lightly dressed in summer are often scorned as "whores" by Moroccan and Maghreb male youth, and male "Muslims" do most violent rape in Northern Europe.

I am also residing in the island of Mindanao, Philippines, 5 months per year. It's interesting to observe the difference between the position of Muslims in Mindanao on one hand, and in Eurabia on the other. We in Eurabia can draw valuable lessons from the Philippine approach.

In the Philippines, Muslims are treated as reverse-dhimmis. They can practice their religion freely, and there is no overt form of discrimination. In fact, many Muslims have well-established businesses there.
But there is no question also about the fact that Muslims in Mindanao can’t claim supremacy based on their religion. The Filipinos took it a little bit further. In Mindanao cities like Davao, Mosks were banned from the inner city and expelled to the outskirts. Catholic churches and one cathedral are now in the center. The cathedral is in front of town hall.

In Belgium and in the rest of Eurabia (like France), the situation is the opposite. By locals, Muslims are perceived as the darlings of the regime, and there is at least one Muslim group (the AEL), which predicts that we, the locals, will live under dhimmi rule in the future.

It has to do with our Christian-Jewish civilization which is driven by guilt, while Muslims (at least in Eurabia) are driven by shame and a conquering spirit.
The demography of Muslim sections of the population is much better than that of the locals.

Personally, having read some parts of the Holy Qu'ran with an infidel eye, I am convinced that "Submission" is not just a simple religion, but most of all a theocratic discriminatory (against gays and women) ideology, that should have its government-provided privileges taken away. I mean in Belgium and in France, which are the worst affected areas by the Eurabia guilt complex.

Of course Muslims can cherish their beliefs but they also should be gently pushed back into a sort of reverse dhimmi-status like in the Philippines. It's not that unusual. In Turkey for instance, Christians have freedom of religion but they can't own churches and can't function as policemen or in a responsible government position. In Malaysia and Indonesia, there are similar laws as to mixed marriages (Muslim-Christian) where the children forcibly have to be educated in an Islam environment. n Saudi Arabia, Christians can be arrested and lashed for practicing their faith in public. No non-Muslims are allowed to become Saudi citizens. (see here)

Europe is indeed a Christian Club as the Turkish leader Erdogan stated so eloquently. That’s why we wonder why Turkey, as a Muslim club, is so keen on joining the EU. We are seculars that don't want religion nor irrational beliefs and sects mingling with state affairs. That doesn’t mean "secularism" is our belief. We just think that religion, any religion, should be kept out of government business.

We claim the right to publish "blasphemous" cartoons of the Prophet (PUB), because we believe in free speech civil liberties.
We fought the Christian theocratic aspirations for centuries, and we succeeded to push them back where they belong, that is in people's private minds and hearts.
We don’t want any other religion, how noble it may be, to take its place, ever again in the government of the state.

Of course Muslims are welcome in Eurabia, that we prefer to call our beloved "Europe". Discrimination based on personal beliefs is utterly wrong. Banning the headscarf in France is just humiliating. Enjoying all our civil liberties, Muslims should be kept in a reverse dhimmi-status in Europe nevertheless, just like Christians are in predominantly Muslim countries.
They should be discreet and not claim more than mere tolerance on the religious level. As to discreetness, we saw how France's predominantly Muslim youth behaved during the torching riots. My bet is that if Christians did a similar thing in any Muslim country, they would have been beheaded. But we (that is our governments) just throw money at them; it must be our guilt complex ;-)

And if some Muslims think they possess the only true religion, well, that belief is kindly granted. But in the case they practice that belief in a way to take away our civil liberties, they don't belong in our Europe. And of course, they are always free to leave. It's our country. With all respect for other countries and how they do it there, that’s how we do it here.

Live in Europe, and behave according to our rules. Maybe this sounds harsh, but that's how it is. And I hope you enjoyed our beloved "Manneken Pis" in Brussels. Look at the photo on your weblog: he had a scarf on! ;-)

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Free speech fined in Flanders

Category:  [in English]  [Lowlands Soul]  [Freedom]

In a recent decision (#2005/113 (PDF), December 16) of the VCM (Vlaams Commissariaat voor de Media) (Flemish Media Commission) a fine of €12,000 (14,836$) was imposed on member of the Flemish parliament and podcaster, (internet radio on demand) Mr. Jurgen Verstrepen.
The decision is apparently politically inspired and motivated by content, although formal reasons like non-compliancy with Flanders’ media regulation have been put forward in the motivation of the decision to fine.

The issue has raised some serious concerns about free speech on the Internet in Flanders, about the definition of "broadcasting", and about territoriality.

Mr. Verstrepen became quite popular with a Howard Stern-like weekly Sunday morning Talk Show ZwartofWit (in Dutch, Black or White) simultaneously both on Radio and on TV. In the show, he covered a wide range of controversial subject with uncensored audience telephone input.

What bothered leading officials and government parties most is that he didn’t back off raising sensitive issues like Muslim immigration, and inviting leaders of the right-wing Flemish independence and anti-immigration party VB (Vlaams Blok, Flemish Block) as studio guests.

About the VB

All other Belgian political parties consider the VB to be "racist" and have put a cordon sanitaire (sanitary quarantine circle) around it. They refuse any cooperation or coalition with the VB, blocking it from the state-controlled media (like the government-owned Radio and TV-channels VRT), and heavily and successfully pressuring private media to do so too.
As the situation became embarrassing because the VB kept winning every election and even ended up as the largest party in the last 2004 general elections, both on the Belgian and the Flemish level, - they had to resort to other measures. [The VB can only be elected in Flanders, but Flanders is by far the largest member state of the Belgian federation.]

Near the end of 2004, the VB was convicted in court for being a "racist" party, a trial that has raised some eyebrows here and there, as it was perceived by many as a political trial and technically flawed.
Whatever, since the VB was now a criminal organization, it quickly dissolved itself, and as a Phoenix it formed a "new" party with a different name (Vlaams Belang, Flemish Interests), and with some minor changes in its political program, but with still the same leaders and the same elected parliamentarians.

The vaudeville goes on, by the way, since the new VB faces a trial once more, simply because one its leaders said in an interview with an American-Jewish magazine to be "afraid of the Islam in Europe". The Belgian crown prince Philippe also added to the turmoil earlier this year, by declaring that he would fight the VB because they "want to split my country [Belgium]", - thereby violating the neutral political position of the king as required by the Belgian constitution.

About Jurgen Verstrepen

Mr. Verstrepen apparently didn’t want to give in to pressures from the government (and especially from the Socialist parties in the coalition) to observe some auto-censorship in his ZwartofWit show. But his commercial hosts Radio Contact and LibertyTV discontinued the show for "commercial reasons", while no other channel wanted to host the show either.
It was the second time that Verstrepen had to cancel his show. The first time it was hosted on TOPradio and Kanaal 2 but Belgian’s prime minister, Mr. Verhofstadt was not amused. Verstrepen had to stop it in 2001.

In an interview with the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad on November 16, 2002, Verstrepen told that he was under intense pressure from circles around Verhofstadt who should have said (in Dutch, translated):

If Verstrepen doesn’t stop with that fucking garbage in his columns, I will make sure no official will be his studio guest ever again.

(with thanks to lvb.net for the quote).

In the mean time, the popular and flamboyant media figure and rebel Verstrepen was elected as Flemish parliamentarian in the June 2004 general elections as an "independent" candidate for the VB, on the theme of Free Speech. He subsequently tried to revive his Radio Show as VB6015 on the short waves either analog or in DRM (Digital Radio Mondiale), and broadcasting from outside the Belgian territory. But his providers in the UK and in Germany were allegedly pressured not to do so. In his weblog, Verstrepen stated on May 31, 2005:

We've noticed that international and Belgian press described our project VB6015 as an extreme-right political propaganda broadcast. This is absolutely not the case; this information is false. The talk radio show ZwartofWit (Black or White) can be described as "more stimulating talk radio" and best of all compared with the US talk shows like Rush Limbaugh and others.
[…]
The name of the network was inspired by the nickname Jurgen Verstrepen had been using for years in the Flemish media: "Vlaams Bakkes" which means "Flemish Bigmouth".

Apart from political pressures, the initiative also faced some technical difficulties, as it went from 6.015 MHz over 13.680 MHz to 15.660 MHz. Moreover, not everybody can listen to DRM yet. The program was also broadcasted on the Internet, as a podcast, both streaming and as a MP3 file. Currently, this is the most popular way to listen to the program, as the ether broadcast seems to be discontinued. But it’s unclear, on the VB-site "ether" is still mentioned, but their MP3 archive doesn’t work either.

About the decision

Flanders’s media regulation stipulates that (political) broadcasts are subject to a license when transmitted through the ether. If through the Internet, the VCM must be notified by registered mail. Some excerpts (translated into English):

Art. 34. § 2. Private radio broadcasts have to offer a variety of programs. [...] Either as to content as in broadcasting schedule, there should be no discrimination whatsoever.
[They mean you shouldn’t be Islamophobic; you can tackle the Church, but not Islam; your can tackle locals but not immigrants.]

§ 3. It is strictly forbidden for private radio stations to broadcast programs that jeopardize the public order, public decency, state security or that are insulting to people’s beliefs or to a foreign state.
[They mean you shouldn’t be Islamophobic; you can tackle the Church, but not Islam; your can tackle locals but not immigrants; how can you show porn on radio? Does it involve moaning?].
A private radio station cannot broadcast electoral propaganda.
[Why not? Elections are essential to democracy. And why is it their business?]

Art. 35. Private radio stations must be independent from any political party.
[Why? Parties are essential to democracy. And why is it their business?]

Art. 36. Content broadcasted has to obey current rules of journalism deontology and the impartiality and journalists’ independency has to be guaranteed.
[Why are all the state-controlled media then manned by lefties?]

Art. 37. Broadcasting equipment of private radios should be located in Flanders or Brussels.
[How can they ever enforce that? It’s clearly incompatible with the freedom to establish a business anywhere in the EU].

Verstrepen apparently didn’t either ask for a license nor register his podcasts with the VCM.
Let’s not focus on the ether-broadcasts, since it is perfectly reasonable that the limited ether bandwidth should be regulated and assigned by the authorities. Let’s focus on the Internet podcast instead.

In a preliminary inquiry by the VCM about his station VB6015, Verstrepen objected that the servers he is "transmitting" from are located abroad, and that the content of his program is targeted to Flemish worldwide. The VCM discarded these arguments in its decision, claiming that the content of the VB6015 program apparently is targeted mostly to Flemish in Flanders itself, and that the programs were actually recorded on Flemish territory by a Media Company called "BCC&V" with its seat on Flanders' territory.
They considered the actual location of the transmitting servers as a mere technicality. Furthermore, Radio Stations owned by political parties are outlawed by the Flemish Media regulation.

Opinion

Verstrepen claims that his station offers a broad coverage of subjects like political gossip, politics, media events, music and trivia about all flavors in society, - is indeed slightly creative. Most of the politicians interviewed belong to the VB or at least appear to be very sympathetic towards it. Political issues selected mostly represent VB issues. VB1602 is mirrored on the VB-site and apparently the VB supports it.
On the other hand, Verstrepen claims his Station is independent and personal. He has a point, Radio Vatican is likely to be in tune with Christian-Democrat parties too.

And anyways, the friendly link between VB6502 and the VB is really irrelevant as the state-owned and state-sponsored media like the VRT are mostly populated by left-wing journalists and have an official policy of ignoring the VB. VB1602 just fills a gap in the political media spectrum.

Strictly spoken, the VCM might have a point, but one can wonder if the ban on political Radio Stations is fundamentally not against Free Speech, and if so, one can easily claim a station is voicing concerns of a Think Tank, not of a Party as such.
That’s how all the other parties do it by the way, quite hypocritically.

Verstrepen has been negligent and reckless not registering his Station. If the VCM had denied his request, he would have had a much more valid Free Speech case. He also could have registered his Media Company BCC&V abroad. That’s what the Isle of Man postboxes are for. Concerning the Internet podcasts, his reasoning could have been that a mandatory preliminary registration is unconstitutional, since the Belgian constitution guarantees Free Press and forbids preemptive censorship or state control of the Press.

It’s quite clear that the Establishment and the Flemish media Commissars are playing games with technicalities and use a very wide definition of the concept "broadcast". What they actually want to do, of course, is to stifle Verstrepen’s "free radio" and the voice of the "Vlaams Belang", just because its content is against the convictions of the politically correct ruling Socialists and Social(ist)-"Liberals". [Liberals in the Flemish sense are equivalent with Conservatives in the American sense; in fact the Flemish Liberals gradually evolved into a weak species of Collectivists over the years.]

For Flemish bloggers, the decision (which is not a ruling yet), has alarming consequences to be worried about. If a podcast on the Internet is considered to be a broadcast, what about a weblog then? Especially when the weblog carries some sound too? Since blogged podcasts are sprouting all over, they might be considered to be just a sound-version of a weblog.
None of these podcasts/weblogs has been under scrutiny by the VCM yet. Verstrepen was singled out, just because of his popularity and because of his connection with an "outlaw" party.

But where is the guarantee that problematic, incorrect or "Islamophobic" weblogs won’t take the heath soon too, if the Internet is not a form of Press but a form of Broadcast?
Do the Flemish commissars realize they can only succeed then by imposing a Chinese way of controlling the Internet?

Luckily, this very weblog is hosted on an American server, its content is posted from Asia, and the audience targeted are apparently the inhabitants of the outer moons of Uranus. Prove me wrong, commissars of the VCM.

Postscript

Verstrepen announced 2 days ago on his weblog that he will object the VCM decision, that he will file a complaint against Prime Minister’s Verhofstadt’s personal podcast on his site, the Flemish and Belgian Federal Parliament’s podcasts, - and that he will not pay the fine and will continue podcasting.

As every citizen can report a podcast to the VCM, of which he suspects it might not have been registered,- Verstrepen urges on his weblog today to file complaints against all podcasts of politicians and government institutions to flood the VCM.

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Bradley's silly question

Category:  [in English]  [(b)Eurocracy]  [Satire]

Hidden in the comment section of Paul Belien's article Blair Debacle. France Again Calls the Tune in the Brussels Journal, there is a little satirical masterpiece that deserves more exposure. It's an answer from Bob Doney to an American reader, Bradley, that wonders why the UK stays in the EU, and what it gets out of it.

Bradley, Bradley! The list of benefits is endless.

We get the opportunity to pay for the French to carry on producing their wonderful food, which we are allowed to sample when we go on our holidays there. There is a slight downside to the subsidy system, because it makes everyone else's food much more expensive than market forces would otherwise dictate. Us middle-class types don't worry too much about this though, as it's mainly the poor who bear the brunt of the suffering caused by overpriced food. Still they can always the sample the delicious French wine and cheeses when they take their mini-breaks to Provence. Oh, they can't afford them! Never mind. Nothing's perfect.


And we get to maintain the Spanish fishing fleet. Unfortunately they are so efficient they've nearly swept our seas bare of all the lovely cod we used to enjoy, but it would be churlish to grumble.

And another thing: Europe's bureaucrats are so productive that they've produced more rules and regulations in the few decades since we joined than our idle, native Whitehall chappies could manage in about 300 years. And we can read them all in twenty different languages. You Americans aren't very good at languages, are you? You miss out on all this.

We can now buy Cheddar Cheese made in Greece, but unfortunately not Feta Cheese made in Yorkshire.

We now have an excellent dumping ground for our failed politicians. We used to have to send them to the House of Lords, which has really comfy seats, but now our crooked, old losers can be sent off to a well-paid sinecure in Brussels to round off their careers. I've been reading in recent days about how much you Americans appreciate the negotiating skills of former Blair babe Peter Mandelson. He had to be sacked from the UK government a couple of times for dishonesty (yes, yes, I know the second time it was all a dreadful misunderstanding), but it's gratifying to know there is a place for him in the heart of Europe.

We have the benefit of Mr. Chirac's regular homilies on our shortcomings as a nation. As you can imagine, we really appreciate this, especially from a man of his truly fine calibre and blameless public life. A bit like being lectured by Bill Clinton on the sanctity of marriage, I would imagine.


But there's more!

As you know, Britain is the "sick man of Europe", but by our EU membership we get to join in the startling rate of economic growth that is the hallmark of the great European nations. Not for us the stagnation of non-members like China, India, Viet-Nam, Australia, USA, Singapore, Norway or Switzerland. We can share in France, Germany and Italy's bonanza. Unfortunately we haven't yet adopted their whizzy new currency, but I expect we'll see the error of our ways on this eventually.

There is one sour note however. Because of the craven way we are unduly influenced by the USA for historical reasons (some old diehards still feel a smidgeon of gratitude to you), we seem unable to fully enter into the European way of conducting foreign policy. Like you we can't seem to shake off this old imperial habit of blood and sacrifice in the cause of building a free world. I know we'll get over it one day, and learn the European way of soft power - and don't give me that crap about soft power just meaning not being prepared to pay for an proper army.

Hope this makes clear why we Brits have come to love Big Brother, err.... the European Union.

© Bob Doney, the Brussels Journal.

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The EU can do with half its budget.

The EU can do with half its budget.
Category:  [in English]  [(b)Eurocracy]  [Global politics]

The EU budget talks are in disarray. France wants to abolish the British rebate; the Brits want less farm subsidies that benefit the Frogs. Fritz is finally fed up paying for those Frog farmers. Belgian's prime minister and the EU commission want a larger pork barrel viable minimum to build a ever more bureaucratic "better and stronger" Europe. Net receivers like Greece, Spain and Portugal keep their mouth shut and just hope the manna will continue to materialize out of the Brussels sky. And the Ossies keep a low profile not to waken up the centripetal navel-staring Wessies that didn't digest their electoral defeat on the EU expansion to Turkey draft constitution yet.

But let's have a look at that budget. Is the federal money used to build and maintain a strong and common EU defense, to build trans-European roads, to sponsor a common Justice and Law Enforcement body?

No it isn't. The Emperor has no Chinese T-shirt on. Half of the budget goes to farming subsidies. Ouch!

Houston, we have a problem!

These farming subsidies (in Euro-jargon CAP, Common Agricultural Policy), combined with high import taxes on agricultural products from outside the EU, have 5 negative consequences.

According to the OECD, food prices in the EU are 44% higher because of the CAP than they would be under normal market rules. The EU-consumer is the first victim.

Apart from exorbitant food prices, the EU consumer has to dig out money a second time, as a taxpayer, since he ultimately pays for these subsidies.

Developing countries, which are relatively more axed towards agricultural than to industrial output, face an artificial cost handicap selling their products on EU-markets. They sell less than they would in a free and unsubsidized market.

Dumping. Those same developing countries are flooded with cheap subsidized agricultural surpluses from the industrial countries (the US is also to blame), which destroy local employment and businesses in the agricultural sector.

The EU citizen perceives much less tangible results than he should when the EU budget were used in a proper way to core EU government business. Hence the money-dematerializing machine that constitutes the CAP is partly responsible for the credibility crisis of the European project.

How did we end up with mountains of butter and rivers of milk produced solely for the sake of finagling subsidies out of an inert and bloated bureaucracy and deteriorating relationships with irate trade partners? Why is food so special, and not textile or oil or cameras? Would it be that food has some mythical properties as it is basic? Erst das Fressen, dann die Moral.

I love the taste of croissants in the morning! It tastes like... dioxin!

French Agriculture Minister Gaymard proffers the usual woolly mantras of "farm products are more than marketable goods", "France, and Europe in general, need security of food supply", "food cannot be left to the mercy of market forces". "Farmers, unlike industrialists" - insists the Minister counterfactually – "cannot simply relocate and agrarian pursuits are a pillar of the nation's culture and its attachment to the land". So it's about pagan bucolical myths and about irrational love for the ancestral soil after all?

Of course food safety is an issue. But it's not an issue for foreign food alone. A few years ago, it was discovered by coincidence that Belgian home raised chicken on ancestral soil contained a vast amount of dioxin from industrial and deliberate contamination with waste transformer oil. Now Thai chicken may contain salmonella once in a while, but the risk of industrial contamination is much less in rural areas than in the highly industrialized West.

Homegrown veggies in Flanders contain high levels of nitrates and Atrazin that makes it into the groundwater, when growing substandard subsidized corn used as subsidized pig food. Gaymard's "Terre de la patrie" might be something to love but it sure isn't healthy.
All food should pass the same quality control stations before making it to the consumer. There is no a priori reason to single out foreign food.

Autarky, now what about that? Is there autarky in oil supply? In raw materials? Autarky in the supply of a commodity can be an option when confronted with a foreign cartel, like the OPEC. But food suppliers come from all corners of the world and they are very diverse. A food embargo on the EU would never work.

How Germany lost the War two times.

So where did those farming subsidies come from? French President Charles de Gaulle's main argument for creating the CAP was that French industry could not afford to subsidize its agriculture on its own (see here, p. 253 bottom). There was no question of not subsidizing agriculture; it was merely a matter of spreading the costs. Germany agreed; it had to. In those days, Germany indeed was still the vilified and submissive loser of World War II.

A Subsidy, a Subsidy! My Kingdom for a Subsidy!

Apart from the CAP, the EU subsidies circus in general is riddled by fraud. In the case of Greece, for example, the EU subsidies helped prop up a bloated bureaucracy and keep industries afloat that would otherwise be unable to compete.

Germany ended up being the big loser in this circus. Of the €22 billion that Berlin sends to Brussels, only about €14 billion end up back in Germany, in the form of subsidies for German farmers and for economically disadvantaged regions, such as the states of the former East Germany.

For Germany, the bottom line is clear. Year after year, the Germans send significantly more money to Brussels than they receive back. In 2003, the difference amounted to €7.7 billion, making Germany the biggest net contributor by a long shot. Only the Netherlands and Sweden pay more on a per capita basis. (read here). Aside from Ireland, Luxembourg and the ten new EU members, the winners of the Europe redistribution machine are Greece (with a net gain of €3.4 billion), Portugal (€3.5 billion) and Spain (€8.7 billion).

From the TimesOnline (thanks to Foreign Dispatches):

The European Commission figures show why French farmers are so attached to the EU subsidies. More than 131,000 French farmers took €20,000 (£13,000) or more from Brussels in 2003, far more than the combined total of 104,000 farmers from Britain, Italy and Germany who receive that amount. About 3,200 French farmers secured more than €100,000 in subsidies. The biggest beneficiary in France was a rice farmer in the Camargue , who received €866,290.

Facing tough criticism, the EU redesigned its CAP in 2003. France - and six other EU countries - intended to stick religiously to a deal struck, tête-à-tête, between the French president and the German chancellor in 2002.

The CAP - which consumes close to half of the EU's budget - will not be revamped until 2013 at the earliest, though outlays will be frozen in real terms and, starting in 2006, gradually diverted from subsidizing production to environmental and other good causes ("decoupling" and "modulation" in EU jargon).

Well, as long as farmers are paid by the EU and grow crops, it's still about subsidies, although the money won't show up as agricultural subsidies in the budget tables.

France's SM love affair with its farmers.

Why does France love its farmers so much that it is prepared to destabilize the EU fabric by a fantasist budget, to harm EU consumers and developing countries, and to enrage the WTO? Why farmers, and not plumbers or taxi-drivers for instance? Well it's certainly not for the number of people involved. Only 5% of EU citizens - 10 million people - work in agriculture, and the sector generates just 1.6% of EU GDP. In France, we talk about 3.5% of its population.

The most direct answer to this question is plain money. The CAP has been very profitable for France as a whole. Even after recent cuts, French agriculture still receives €8 billion a year through the CAP. Chirac himself started his political career as an Agriculture Minister, and was elected at first in a poor rural department. Another political factor is the over-representation of the countryside in the French legislative Senate

One of the answer is also plain pressure and violence. The largest French agricultural trade union, the FNSEA has become more aggressive in recent years to avoid being outflanked by a new competitor, Confédération Paysanne, a radical rural organization for which the antiglobalization campaigner José Bové (of McDonald's ransacking fame) was a longtime spokesman. In a country with a conflict-prone social culture (and where politicians are known to cave in the face of the frequent protests and strikes), farmers are among the most determined, and sometimes violent, lobbies.

There finally must be some inexplicable magic in the mythical ancestral French soil.

As the International Herald Tribune (subscribers only) remarks:

For farmers in France have tremendous sympathy from the rest of the population. Traditional, high-quality food remains an important part of the culture, and France's defense of its "gastronomical sovereignty" is itself a tradition. Defenders of French agriculture like Bové argue that globalization of the agricultural market has not only made France susceptible to bad-tasting food but also to unsafe food, mad cow disease, hormone-treated beef, genetically modified organisms and preservatives - arguments that are very convincing to many French.

But it is not just about food. French farmers are also considered the keepers of the countryside. Most French citizens - who often think of themselves as having rural roots even if their families have lived in Paris or Lyon for generations. […] In reality, with half of EU subsidies going to just 10% of farms, it is far from clear that the CAP helps preserve villages rather than large industrial farms, but the argument still carries weight among the French.

Thoughts.

Tough times are ahead for the CAP, now that the Brits want to use the attack on their rebate as a casus belli to demand a review of the CAP itself, and of the huge money transfers to France that it causes.
If the CAP is not reformed, the EU will face complete deadlock. Blair will make this perfectly clear, and shift the debate onto the cost of the CAP, and the damage it causes to European consumers, but more importantly the cost it causes to poor farmers and the distortion of world trade.

The time is just right, now that the WTO meeting in Hong Kong is starting the fire on the barbeque that will grill the protectionist and unfair agriculture trade practices of the EU (and the US).

The EU taxpayer-consumer will be the first to win as the EU actually only needs half its budget. The food producing developing countries will be the next, and they will need less grants and gifts. Trade is Aid.

Postscript: subsidized luxury chocolates

A quick look at the table of the top 100 recipients of agricultural subsidies in Belgium offers a sweet surprise. Luxury chocolates and truffles manufacturer Godiva (also Neuhaus) from Brussels received a delicious €193,047 from the EU chocolate pork barrels in 2004. What's next? Subsidize Armani?

References

used to write this article:
A brand new critical and independent think tank on European farming subsidies: FarmSubsidy.org

How French farmers make themselves rich through EU (TimesOnline column)
Q&A: Common Agricultural Policy (BBC News)
CAP mid-term review 2003 (EurActiv article)
Why the French love their farmers (International Herald Tribune column, subscription only)
Germany Is Tired of Footing the European Bill (Der Spiegel article)
Multinationals, not farmers, reap biggest rewards in Britain's share of CAP payouts (The Guardian, article)
French Parasites (Foreign Dispatches blog item)

WTO Agreement on Agriculture: A Decade of Dumping (WTO, PDF, contains XXVI annexes with tables)
Agricultural Subsidies and Rural Poverty (GlobalPolicy articles list)
How EU Sugar Subsidies Devastate Africa (Independent article)
Farm Subsidies That Starve the World (New Statesman article)
Farm Fallacies That Hurt the Poor (Outreach report)
EU farm ministers hail CAP deal, aid workers call it disaster (Daily Mirror Article)

The Belgian Curtain. Europe after Communism. (Sam Vaknin, PDF, 141 pp.)
Winning the European CAP (Sam Vaknin article)
Europe's Agricultural Revolution (Sam Vaknin article)
Creating A common Market for Fraud in the European Union (Carolyn Warner, PDF, 257 pp.)

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French government faces Belgian racism charges.

Category: [in English] [Lowlands Soul] [Islamophobia] [Satire]

French target 'Islamic network' ©BBC World

"They described the arrests as a "major operation aimed at disbanding an Islamist network linked to terrorism".

Some of the suspects are believed to have been involved in crimes to help fund Islamic groups.

The raids on homes and internet cafes were ordered by French anti-terrorism magistrates.

Most of those detained were young men of Tunisian and Moroccan origin, some holding French nationality, officials told AFP.

Belgian officials didn’t rule out the possibility that France might be called before an international ad hoc Anti-Racism tribunal for naming the ethnic origin of the suspects, in breach of the Franco-German-Belgian agreement of last October to mention only "youth" in such cases.



[Brussels, December 12, 2005] - from our own infidel news desk:

The BBC World network would escape charges for now, according to the head Belgian Inquisition prosecutor, Mr. Kifkif, because they correctly put the word 'Islamic' in between quotes, admitting it was in fact a hoax. Nevertheless, BBC World, CNN and Fox News were warned sternly about any future use of the scapegoat mechanism referring to the Noble Religion.

The Belgian Inquisition prosecutor didn't want to comment on possible sanctions, but anonymous sources pointed to earlier leaked plans to bomb the BBC main Internet nodes near Hemel Hampstead in the U.K. by the Belgian Air Force.

Mr. Straw, the U.K. foreign secretary, questioned earlier today about those plans, denied any previous knowledge but apparently would have said (in an overheard remark by a Latvian camera crew):
"we have taken care of that thingie already, ourselves".

Asked about any similar 'Islamic' networks in Belgium, the prosecutor admitted there have indeed been some problems integrating native Belgians into the mainstream Islamic European culture in the past.
"But", as Mr. Kifkif said, "we are complying with the OIC and UN guidelines to proclaim Islamophobia as a serious infringement upon Human Rights" and he added:
"National and international Psychiatric Organizations and professional associations have been urged to include Islamophobia into the list of pandemic diseases which should necessitate compulsive treatment and eradication, just like the bird flu".
The UN WHO agency corroborated the existence of such a Belgian request today.

[Breaking News 7:03PM GMT 2005:12:12] Later tonight, Belgian officials denied rumors that Belgian warships were being prepared in the port of Zeebrugge to steam for Australia near the end of the week, in a protest against Australia's hateful media coverage of youth enjoying an entertaining night out on a local beach, thereby merely celebrating noble Islam values.

At home on Sunday night with his [Mark, a senior off-duty police] wife and three children, he said between 150 to 200 youths of Middle-Eastern appearance swept down the street trashing cars in their wake, including his.

[News Update 7:43PM GMT 2005:12:12, Zeebrugge, from a local correspondent] Unusual activity has been spotted around one of Belgium's Nimitz-class aircraft carriers, the Zizi d'Albert. The area is shielded from the press.

On condition to remain anonymous, sources in the Belgian Justice Department mentioned that the government is preparing legislation to safeguard free speech in general and free press in particular by installing a regulatory framework for a responsible press, at the same time outlining clear guidelines about opinion misdemeanors. Foreign news media would not be exempt from these guidelines.

There is no question whatsoever to censor the press in any way, our source said, but we can't tolerate the defamation of the Noble Religion any further in this country. This has been going on far too long. One should realize that even free speech has its limits, and it's not up to some irresponsible scoundrels to set the rules, but to us.

From the Final Communiqué of the Third Extraordinary Session of the Islamic Summit Conference, 5-6 Dhul Qa'adah 1426H (7-8 December 2005) [link]

The Conference underlined the need to collectively endeavor to reflect the noble Islamic values, counter Islamophobia, defamation of Islam and its values and desecration of Islamic holy sites, and to effectively coordinate with States as well as regional and international institutions and organizations to urge them to criminalize this phenomenon as a form of free speech racism.

The Conference expressed its concern at rising hatred against Islam and Muslims and condemned the funny cartoons recent incident of desecration of the image of the Holy Prophet Mohammad (PBUH) in the Jyllands-Posten media of Denmark certain countries and stressed the censorship responsibility of all governments to ensure full respect of the only true all religions and religious symbols and the inapplicability of using the freedom of expression as a reason pretext to defame Islam alone religions.

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Weapons of Mass Beer Destruction

Category: [in English] [Lowlands Soul] [Satire]

Flemish beer is like French wine. Every village used to have its own brewery and by natural fermentation (more or less), its particular ingredients and production methods, each local beer acquired a unique taste.

The Dutch and the Americans are good at marketing, and that’s why glorified water like Heineken and Bud Light made it into the global market. These liquid insults are just like making love in a canoo: f*cking close to water.
Real connoisseurs know better. The Flemish invented beer and they still are the best making it.

One of those local breweries, De Kluis (The Vault), is situated in the Flemish Brabant village Hoegaarden, somewhat east of Leuven (Louvain).
But not for long any more. It will be slaughtered soon on the altar of globalization.

In beer-drinking circles, Belgium is reputed to have one of the most interesting, varied, and high-quality selections of beer in the world. In fact, Michael Jackson wrote a book devoted entirely to the beers of Belgium. Yet we tend to be about as aware of Belgium’s beer as we are of the country in general.

Why? Well, some of the things I’ve read about Belgium suggest that while Belgians are very open-minded, live-and-let-live people who place high priority on education, quality of life, and, of course, good beer, the national character is a humble one, with little nationalistic pride and an aversion to risk.

In short, Belgium doesn’t really advertise itself a lot.

(The Beer Belly)

Hoegaarden beer is wheat-based, white and somewhat sour. It keeps on fermenting in the bottle, which gives it a murky aspect when poured in the glass. The glass itself looks more like a jar than like a plain beer glass. Nobody is supposed to drink Hoegaarden out of a mundane pilsner glass. It is served often with a slice of lemon for those who want to enhance the heavenly sour like taste of this divine drink. Not being sweet, females avoid it, and it’s only enjoyed by real men. In a cheering spirit of multicultural Beer Diversity, De Kluis also shares its Grand Cru and Delirium Tremens.

The beer lost a lot of its personality when the local Hoegaarden brewery De Kluis was taken over by industrial Belgian beer giant Stella Artois, later called Interbrew, - when it started to streamline its brewing and business operations, effectively becoming a Weapon of Malt Destruction.

They did so with many local breweries in the past (included Leffe), whose owners couldn’t resist the tempting Euro signs in Interbrew’s eyes, thereby denying the very beer culture fundamentals of Flemish Society. Not to mention pale tasteless copycats like Occidental Flanders’ Brugs Tarwebier. The Saxons near the Flemish coast should stick to doing what they are best at, that is sell shrimps and overcharge daytrip tourists.

Globalization is the buzzword, and Interbrew merged not too long ago with a large Brazilian beer holding, calling itself Inbev from then on. Bigger is better apparently, but not for beer. Inbev decided very recently to close down its facilities in the village of Hoegaarden, and move the production of Hoegaarden beer to a barbarian industrial mass production plant somewhere in darkest corners of corrupt and collectivist Wallonia. All in the name of cost management, thereby ignoring the self-evident truth that real beer is priceless.

Beerophobia and Human Rights

In a parade, organized by the Hoegaarden village officials, 3,000 locals and noble beer lovers rallied yesterday against the move. Their interests might be somewhat self-vested, that is to save local employment, but in the name of Western Civilization and True Beer Values, we can’t simply indulge in such a profane beer-defamation in the name of a barbarian globalization.

As we go from ‘Biggest to Best,’ we at Inbev recognize that we cannot be the best unless we do it in a manner which is both responsible and transparent.

(Inbev CEO, John Brock)

Yeah right, think global, act local. Save Hoegaarden, and you can also sign the petition there.
Let's just call a Fatwah against the beer-hating infidel scoundrels of Inbev and start a beer-Jihad.

Links

Save Hoegaarden (in Dutch), the official Jihadists
The Oxford Bottled Beer Database on Hoegaarden
The Beer Belly on Hoegaarden
TheBackPacker on Hoegaarden
OnlyFineBeer on Hoegaarden, and for sale too
Brave New World on Hoegaarden Grand Cru
The Beer Hunter on Hoegaarden

[read more...]

We Are All Danish

Category: [in English] [Global politics] [Islamophobia]

Photo in the Davao City bus station, Mindanao, Philippines. Picture taken a couple of weeks after the Valentine bombings on this very spot, earlier this year.
The bombings were claimed immediately by Muslim Jihad fighter Abu Solaiman, an Abu Sayyaf leader. Another case of freedom of speech as understood by the True Religion?

In his blogspot, Fjordman calls for support for the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten. It published about 12 cartoons of the prophet Muhammad, to test the tolerance of his followers in a Western European secular context.
Email addresses to send the support to can be found on Fjordman.

The UN is Appeasing Muslims - Again  (Fjordman)
UN to Investigate Racism of Danish Cartoonists  (Belien)
Keeping Islam Pure in Europe  (The Brussels Journal)
Dispatch from the Eurabian Front  (Belien)

I would hereby like to express my support for the newspaper Jyllands-Posten publishing cartoons of Islam's prophet Muhammad. Freedom of speech is the lifeblood of a democratic society, and cannot be tampered with. Muslims in Denmark freely exercise this right, even to say things that people in Denmark find greatly offensive.
A leading Danish mufti in 2004 said that Danish women not wearing the veil "were asking for rape". Another imam wanted to import the sharia concept of blood money to Denmark, and pay the equivalent of 100 camels for a man's life.

If Muslims in Denmark think these are acceptable statements, they cannot by any right claim to be offended by a few simple drawings. At least not if they really mean that Islam is compatible with Western democracy.

Jyllands-Posten should know that this case is being followed by individuals from all around the world, and that you have the support of thousands of people who don't want to see their freedom slip away.
Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen should also be commended for his clear and principled stand in this case, as Dutch ex-Muslim Ayaan Hirsi Ali points out.
In an age where too many political leaders shy away from defending the basic values of our societies, it serves to Denmark's credit to have a leader who still possesses a backbone.

I would also like to condemn the actions made by the ambassadors of several Muslims countries in this case, and those of Turkey in particular. The behavior of the Turkish government is incompatible with that of a nation with a desire to become a part of a Western community such as the EU.
If Turkey thinks that the EU shouldn't be a Christian club, then Turkey should respond in kind by withdrawing from all "Islamic clubs" such as the OIC.

Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan has earlier stated that anti-Islamism should be viewed as a "crime against humanity", has pushed for criticism of Islam to be treated as racism within the EU and is now backing an effort to curtail the freedom of speech of the citizens of an EU nation.
These actions are not those of a secular politician such as Ataturk, but more closely mirror the attitude of the Ottoman sultans. They indicate that a Turkey within the EU would threaten the freedom of European citizens, and clearly demonstrate that Turkey is not yet ready to become a part of the European community.

The 12 cartoons are mirrored here. © Jyllands-Posten.

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Rogue SIM cards, rogue nanny states

Category: [in English] [Global politics] [Filipino Soul] [Geeky & Tools]

In an article in the Brussels Journal, Chresten Anderson comments on the agreement between the justice and interior ministers of the 25 European Union member countries last Friday, to force providers to store all data of phone, cell phone (CP) and Internet communications for at least 6 to 24 months. Chresten Anderson is the president and founder of the Copenhagen Institute, the leading free market think tank in Denmark.

It is becoming quite obvious that the mandatory logging of communications (not only CP but also web-traffic), as proposed or even enforced already by the EU and nanny-states like Belgium is yet another excuse to invade our privacy. The "terrorism threat" popped up just as a convenient excuse to implement the logging scheme. It must be very naive (even for a EU-mandarin) to assume that terrorists or criminals use traceable CP's.

Even in Belgium, it's quite simple to get hold of a rogue SIM card. The shop attendant asks for a copy of your ID, but you can fake that one easily. He is not supposed (yet?) to connect to the central nanny-state database to verify the copy’s validity. Even if that would become mandatory, there will still be plenty of rogue SIM cards available on the black market. Just like non-registered guns in Brussels are.

In the Philippines for instance, the CP and txting (SMS) capital of the world, SIM cards are freely and anonymously available and dirt cheap: 99 P or 1.20 Euro. Many people (including myself) have several SIM's for different purposes. A popular thing is a SIM card for your spouse and your colleagues, and another one for your mistress(es). All these SIM's are prepaid, of course. Nobody would trust a Filipino postpaid billing scheme anyways in this flamboyantly corrupt and mismanaged country. One can activate the roaming function on these cards for a small and anonymous fee. When I returned to Belgium a couple of weeks ago, I noticed my card still worked, in roaming function.

Need reloading it with credit? I bought myself a few prepaid cards with reload codes in Manila, which I can activate from within Belgium (or from anywhere else) by a simple txt. Piece of cake. If I was a terrorist, that would be a safe and handy way to communicate. Connections can be tracked, but the track would end up nowhere.

Net cafés offer another anonymous and obvious way to surf the net and to email about sensitive matters. But don’t forget to clean the cache and the cookies of the browser when leaving the machine in that case. At least one member EU country, Italy, realized this loophole, and now it imposes an ID check by Net café attendants to all their customers, as well as keeping a log of the websites they visit, the machines they use, and their login and logout times.

Once again, how naïve. One can’t expect a real terrorist to carry his own ID. Fake ID’s are easy to come by. And shop or café attendants don’t have the proper resources, as police and customs do, to verify an ID’s validity. But they do have to buy expensive tracking software. Customers on the other hand are just harassed by the Italian regulation and they back off in masses from Net cafés in Italy now. And that’s it.

What a fine way to destroy small businesses. What’s next? Logging all the email addresses, user names and passwords? A state-approved PIN code to order a pizza? "Terrorists" might enjoy a pizza too, perhaps.

A Thought

The EU nanny states are fishing with a very expensive net that will catch and kill only small useless fish, but lets the sharks escape.

Links

Big EU Brother Is Listening
L’UE met en place la loi «Big Brother» anti-vie privée

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Double standards

Category: [in English] [Lowland Politics] [Islamophobia] [Satire]





Something is rotten in the state of Denmark. Heaven will direct it.

It has been all over in the press, and chewed over later in the blogosphere (see for instance the BrusselsJournal).
That is, the 12 cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in the Danish Journal Jyllands-Posten a while ago, by which the artists wanted to underline that freedom of speech overrides the Islamic ban on depicting the Prophet.

The paper wanted to know if it was possible to make jokes about the Prophet like Jesus has been in the middle of Western caricature and humor in the last decades.
Some people were not amused at all. Eleven ambassadors of Muslim states in Denmark wrote a letter to the Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen, asking for a meeting. They stated they felt deeply offended, calling the cartoons a smear campaign in the media against Islam and Muslims and requested an official apology for the cartoons.

Rasmussen denied, and said to the Copenhagen Post:
"This is a matter of principle. I won't meet with them because it is so crystal clear what principles Danish democracy is built upon that there is no reason to do so". He said that individuals who felt offended could take grievances to the courts.

"As prime minister, I have no power whatsoever to limit the press - nor do I want such a power. It is a basic principle of our democracy that a prime minister cannot control the press.".

"Can Muslims take a joke?" wondered The Free West, while Hoegin (in Dutch) commented here, here and here.

How serious Muslims take the row is proven by it being on the agenda of the OIC (The Organization of The Islamic Conference) next month.

As such, the row hits a sore nerve on one the leading European questions today, which is how to handle the numerous Islamic immigrants in Western Europe. In popular perception, they are the main perpetrators of street crimes, they refuse to conform to European culture and habits, they are the darlings of the nanny state, and they want to impose Islam and Islamic Law (Sharia) all over Europe. It's hard to think of any other single issue where political leaders and grassroots diverge more.

Belgium, for instance, has adopted a set of laws (commonly known as the Anti-Racism laws) making critique on Muslims immigrants virtually illegal, and the largest Belgian (Flemish) party, the secessionist ultra-right party Vlaams Belang has been condemned last year on the basis of these laws, a fact applauded by the OIC, see (here, p.43).

The privileged status of Islam has also been stressed by the UN's secretary-general, Mr. Annan, when he called for an end of Islamophobia, but never mentioned Christianophobia in the Muslim world. The debate on Turkey's admission to the EU is just a symptom of this broad divide between leaders and voters, as were the NO-votes on the EU draft constitution in Holland and France earlier this year.

The Free West muses:

By accident, today I saw The Life of Brian again, one of Monty Python's masterpieces. I think it is one of the most realistic portrayals of the period in which Jesus lived. The Pythons are still around, alive and successful, and their film is still available. I rented it at a Blockbuster store.
When the film was released, Christians were upset by it. But now it is part of the central body of Western culture.

When Mel Gibson's almost reactionary film was released, a film which took the most orthodox gospel for historic, the very blasphemous The Da Vinci Code hit the bookstores which told an anarchistic version of the Jesus legend. It was possible to have these two extremes speaking to its audiences - it was a confirmation of the vital freedom of Western culture.

All of that seems impossible with the Mohammed legend. In Denmark ambassadors of Muslim countries, among them Turkey, want the Danish prime minister to interfere in Denmark's freedom of speech.

A Flemish playwright and muslim of Tunesian descent, Chokri Ben Chikha, wrote a play recently about Our Lady of Flanders. The play will be on stage soon, supported by state funding. On the flyers, the Virgin is mockingly depicted with nude breasts. As the BrusselsJournal remarks:

Contrary to what Ben Chikha says there are things that one had better not laugh at, such as Islamic religion for instance. Some time ago a Dutch artist showed the backs of naked women with verses from the Quran written on them. This was considered blasphemy. A Muslim extremist ritually slaughtered the artist, Theo van Gogh, in broad daylight.

Opinion

It's very well possible that Muslims feel offended by the Muhammad cartoons, just like Christians were offended by Monty Python's Life of Brian a quarter of a century ago. In Western Europe, there were all kinds of blasphemy laws in vigor at that time and before, but they haven't been enforced for a long time, and often been abolished since.

It's very understandable that Muslim states have different views on free speech, blasphemy, secularism, and the equality of religions (even in "secular" Turkey, Christians are still discriminated in public life).

So Muslims and Islamic states should accept and understand equally well that Muslims can't impose their laws and customs in this matter on our Europe either. We didn't defeat fundamentalist Christianism over centuries with loads of blood, sweat and tears just to adopt another form of absolutist theocracy. I'm sorry guys, but we do it our way. And if you don't dig that, the southward exit door is still wide open. Call it Islamophobia, we call it pride.

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The unmaking of SONY.

Category: [in English] [Geeky & Tools]





"I've been around so long, I knew Doris Day before she was a virgin" goes one of my many favorite quotes of Groucho Marx. Back in the roaring eighties of last century, I found myself actually writing and tweaking operating systems and device drivers for all kinds of exotic processors, included the 8-bit 6502 and the Motorola 68000. Yes, in assembly (machine) language. There was a time I was even quite proficient in DOS internals. On a sidetrack, I remember designing an original copy protection scheme, based on some glitches in DOS, and selling it to Elsevier, making me some badly needed bucks. Windows got over my head, especially the first versions, which were nothing more than a layer over DOS, but could make a programmers life miserable. After that, I turned to applications, lately just programming in PHP and Javascript. But old geeks never die and I always kept a vivid interest in geeky issues and operation system internals, as well as an obsessive preference for US-qwerty keyboards. A sizeable intro to explain why this article on Geek News Central caught my attention. Sony is in deep legal and marketing trouble and it deserves it.
What happened?

In their fight against rampant piracy and online sharing of copyrighted music, the music industry has taken some drastic steps in the past. Suing naïve teens that offer music on P2P online networks and injecting Kazaa and other file-sharing networks with bogus music files is one of those. But P2P is hard to control so that's why some of the music labels turned to a DRM or digital rights management system, a euphemism for copy protection, also called TPM, technical protection measures. Most of the time it's a way to write CD's in a non-standard fashion, fooling some players. What it does to consumers is make their live complicated when they want to play a TPM-ed CD in their car or on their PC. The music industry has had a lot of critique doing so, for instance by consumer organizations.

But Sony took it a bit further. A bit too far as it turned out now. The ball started rolling when guru Mark Russinovich posted an article on his Sysinternals weblog, titled "Sony, Rootkits and Digital Rights Management Gone Too Far". Mark discovered that when playing a Sony CD on your PC, it installs software to prevent copying of the CD more than 3 times, and it needs a proprietary player. What's worse, it does so by using a poorly written Rootkit, a technique often used by the most malicious viruses. Sony CD's install this virus-like software without the users consent and without his knowledge, and it is uninstallable. A user that tries to remove the hidden files and folders ends up with a system that can't access the CD-drive any more.

Sony's malware (malicious software") replaces original Windows drivers, it modifies original Windows API tables, and it operates in stealth mode, consuming a large and unnecessary overhead on CPU resources. It even starts up in Windows safe mode, against all conventions that non-essential drivers shouldn't be loaded at that time. Its presence is hidden ("cloaking") from all system repair and maintenance tools since it fools the Windows API's to edit and inspect the registry and the file system: "Rootkits are cloaking technologies that hide files, registry keys, and other system objects from diagnostic and security software, and they are usually employed by malware attempting to keep their implementation hidden".

For Geeks with some sense for drama and suspense, Mark's story how he discovered Sony's virus reads like a great thriller. Highly recommended Geek-food. His story is complete with all the steps (including disassembly of some of Sony's software), screenshots, and some Google research that pointed to the original vendor, First4Internet, of the virus-like badly written TPM. "XPC, the true meaning of audio security" states its website. Yeah right, by installing a malicious virus.

Mark's story quickly hit the blogosphere and techsites like Slashdot and The Register, raising the whisper into a roaring noise. "My posting Monday on Sony's use of a rootkit as part of their Digital Rights Management (DRM) generated an outcry that's reached the mainstream media. As of this morning the story is being covered in newspapers and media sites around the world". Sony first denied, then confessed, but it was very reluctant to provide de-installation software. Things got worse when it turned out that Sony's poorly written TPM could be a piggyback for other malicious software like trojans. Moreover, it turned to be a phone home type of software, informing Sony of CD's played by users, how many times and when, their type of PC, etc. First4Internet denied this furiously, but this feature has been proved right.

For those interested in a good thriller that started as Geek-food but exploded into a wide debate about do's and don'ts by large companies, the unraveling of the story can be read in full on Sysinternals. It wouldn't be America if Sony wouldn't face a lawsuit soon, and the first one was filed by Himmelfarb (pun intended) in - of course - California. Many suits are to follow. Sony first published a "patch" on its website, which installed in effect a more dangerous version of its criticized TPM, then announced to stop to use the virus-like TPM scheme altogether. It later announced to recall all CD's carrying it and Amazon wants to refund Sony CD-buyers too. But the ghost may be well out of the jar as hackers eagerly started to exploit the flaws in Sony's TPM, which is undoubtedly installed on 100,000's of PC's worldwide.The woes for Sony are not over yet.

On BBCnews, Internet professor Michael Geist explains why Sony's rootkit problems have significant long-term implications for the industry (read here). There are the short-term woes, which may have a Perrier-effect on the Sony brand name: "the company also recalled millions of CDs, losing tens of millions in revenue and effectively acknowledging that the CD was a hazardous product. The recall was even bigger than anticipated as Sony disclosed that there were at least 52 affected CDs. Moreover, researchers estimated that the damaging program had infected at least 500,000 computers in 165 countries.".
But in the long term, Stewart Baker, the US Department of Homeland Security's assistant secretary of policy, admonished the music industry, reminding them that "it's very important to remember that it's your intellectual property - it's not your computer".

Opinion

Where does it leave us, humble consumers? We have to suffer from, and crank out money for keeping our systems clean from spam, trojans, viruses, trackers, browser hijacks that moronic companies try to dump on our disks all the time. It's difficult and time-consuming for our own PC's as it is. But having been in Asia for a couple of months again, I couldn't find a single Net café were PC's weren't infected with debilitating browser and info "organizers" that kicked me to idiot and loud bad looking porn sites with ugly obese women proudly showing off oversized tits.
For me personally, it is once bitten, twice shy. As a commenter on Mark Russinovich's weblog puts it: "Way to go, Sony. You've really made me want to legitimately purchase music, now that it includes worse viruses than I'll find on Kazaa".

First of all, I won't buy any Sony product again (the Perrier effect) and that includes their digital cameras. A dig cam has to be connected to your PC regularly, and why shouldn't Sony put in a neat little virus in its firmware too? Then, I really got nervous about DRM in general. My Windows Media Player has gone since long since I stumbled on that damned acronym, and moreover, I don't like phone home players like WMP and Realplayer. Anyways. Winamp is just great, it's free, and it's independent.

Of course, buying a CD, any music CD, is out of the question from now on. If Sony did this crap and tried to get away with it, won't every music label do it, and devise even more wicked schemes to hijack our PC's?

This is not a pledge for acquiring copyrighted music the illegal way whatsoever. But if I buy music, I want to buy music, not "bundled" software that takes over or controls my system in any way. Lean music without macro's, code, controls, management, that is.
Sony did a great marketing job for P2P. To end paraphrasing another Groucho Marx quote: "I never forget a brand name, but in Sony's case I'll be glad to make an exception."

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About: racism

Category: [in English] [Lowlands Soul]

So the past days I found myself in reach of a satellite TV and even near a working Net café. That is, a place with Net-connected PC's, with not too much loud screaming kids playing online games (preferably with 5 on a single isalang chair) inside, that doesn’t time out on every second web page access, and where the power brownouts are spaced at least 5 minutes apart.


Paris brûle-t-il? (here)


Finding out on BBC World (Asian version) that Paris and later France all over was plagued by extremely violent riots by “youth”, I had a hard time imagining why the placid and well educated French lycéens and collégiens suddenly would restage May 1968.
But aware of the fashionable West European political correct newspeak that apparently also has infested the objective BBC, I figured that the neutral "youth" stood for something else. Being robbed and/or beaten up by immigrant Moroccans myself on the streets in Antwerp, Brussels and Amsterdam, it wasn't hard at all to guess the ethnicity of the "youth" in question.

It took BBC World several days to mention reluctantly that it were in fact "immigrants" that manned those violent gangs of casseurs. Of course, this redundant statement was immediately followed by a procession of sturdy looking experts, social workers and venerable professors explaining eloquently that it was all our fault.

Because, as everybody knows or at least should know, - we, the abject post-Christian Westerners (1st Law of Bart Croughs) are the racists.
Not them, the enlightened children of Allah (His name be praised), ça va de soi.
We keep them unemployed and in poor houses with less than 3 bathrooms and no jacuzzi. Imagines! We stubbornly refuse to assimilate into Eurabia's coming? Islamic culture and its Shari'a. Quite rightfully, one should burn a thousand cars per night for less. And so they did.

At least CNN (Asian version) was more straight and to the point. They spoke all the time about rioting gangs composed of youngsters of North-African descent. Who said American media were biased and European media were not?


Jungle sounds.


And then there was the "racism" incident in a Spanish soccer stadium where the crowd started to imitate monkey sounds when a black (sorry, a new European of sub-Sahara African descent) player scored a goal or did something wrong, whatever. The match was halted and the No Racism sign appeared in large characters on the scoreboard, as if an act of blasphemy was committed by those melanin deficient bastards. Gasp.

It might have escaped the stadium supervisors that by interpreting the joyful and original animal sounds uttered by the crowd as being "racist", - they themselves proved to have a racist mindset. In fact, they assumed that the black player stood closer to the ape than the white ones on a Darwinian evolutionary scale, and that the monkey sounds per se were addressed to the black guy.

Would the British soccer supporters that killed about 50 Italians in a Brussels stadium back in 1985 also have been racists? Imagine the turmoil if the victims were not pasta-eaters but Ghanese.

The White West is supposed to pay, to donate, to understand, to embrace, and to assimilate into all World cultures, on condition that they are not European and not US. Doing less would be racist indeed.
And we aren't racists of course, n’est-ce pas, monsieur Mugabe?

Posted in the Philippines. The Belgian anti-"racism" laws crippling free speech are not applicable here. Don't try this at home.

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Tingnan nalang natin

Category: [in English] [Travel] [Filipino Soul]

It has been quite a while since this blog has been updated. Neither writers fatigue nor lack of inspiration, but South-East Asian travel far from the Net and satellite TV is responsible for this gap.

On a motorbike through wonderful Mindanao, surfing the giant waves of Pacific Cloud 9, barely surviving the streets of ugly, unsafe, polluted and criminal Manila, fighting a bronchitis in General Luna, bitten all over by nasty tropical mosquitoes [I start a one man guerilla if those useless creatures ever enter the list of endangered species] - I had it all.

Time and energy permitting, I will post some stories and observations later about the circus "democracy" in the Philippines, about the pathetic political soap around its president Gloria, about the do's and the don'ts in Flanders' sister ex-Spanish colony, and about the biggest hoaxes of this idiosyncratic archipelago. GETSCREWEDphilippines: eventually, you learn to love to hate it.

Tingnan nalang natin, let’s just wait and see.

 

 

 

 

 

Photos all from Mindanao, October-November 2005.

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Begijntjes en kwezeltjes dansen niet.

Category: [in Dutch] [Lowlands politics] [Lowlands Soul]

Zo'n 530 mensen hebben zich zaterdagnamiddag voor het Justitiepaleis in Brussel verzameld om op te stappen tegen de adoptie door homoseksuele of lesbische koppels. De organisatie is in handen van het collectief "Vader, moeder en ik". (De Tijd)

De obscure vereniging "Vader, Moeder en Ik" wordt gepatronneerd door exotische groepjes als "Non à l'homofolie", rozenkransfetishisten ("Rosaire pour la vie"), de katholieke doktoors van München (KÄM), bizarre Italiaanse psychiaters en Belgische markiezen (zie hier). Maar in de lijst vindt men geen politici.

Weinig schokkend, in Brussel betogen regelmatig groepen en groepjes van diverse pluimage, van weirdo's tot grote organisaties, en dat is fijn. Zo hoort het in een open Westerse democratie. Je krijgt allicht 500 geborneerde begijntjes bij mekaar voor om het even wat. Kwezels aller landen, verenigt U. Maar de zaak wordt natuurlijker interessanter als de grootste Vlaamse partij zich achter dit initiatief schaart (via een advertentie in het Vlaams Belang magazine, volgens de gay2day, maar deze advertentie is blijkbaar verdwenen), en Vlaams Belang kopstukken in de betoging mee opstappen. Dan wordt het nieuws.

Toch stapten enkele politieke kopstukken, zoals Gerolf Annemans, fractieleider van het Vlaams Belang in de Kamer, mee op. (Het Laatste Nieuws)

Op de site van Vlaams Belang provincieraadslid en blogger Tanguy Veys schaart ook hij zich achter deze groep en roept op tot twee betogingen.

De uitverkoop van het traditionele gezin gaat evenwel verder. Zeker nu er in het federale parlement een wetsvoorstel op tafel ligt dat homo’s in de mogelijkheid voorziet om nu ook kinderen te adopteren.

Het is een publiek geheim dat er onder het rimpelloos oppervlak van het electoraal succesvol Vlaams Belang nogal wat interne tegenstellingen sluimeren. Dat is trouwens ook zo bij andere partijen. De CD&V houdt zich al decenia staande ondanks het bestaan van een vakbonds- en ondernemers-vleugel. Bij het Vlaams Belang is er op economisch vlak duidelijk een socialistische vleugel, die de royale verzorgingsstaat kost wat kost wil in leven houden (en haar ex-socialistische kiezers niet terug afstoten), en een meer liberale vleugel die proefballonetjes oplaat over de vlaktaks.
Op "ethisch" vlak gaan verruimers "verligtes" als Jurgen Verstrepen en babe VB-senator Anke Van Der Meersch de wat lichtere toer op, terwijl Opperbegijn Alexandra Colen en Paul Belien tot de "verkramptes" horen.

Opinie

Het Vlaams Belang (VB) is door haar gewicht de belangrijkste politieke hefboom geworden naar Vlaamse onafhankelijkheid. Een onafhankelijkheid die broodnodig is om Vlaanderen zonder Waals-Belgische molensteen om de hals economisch boven water te houden in een globaliserende economie. Mèt een terminaal ziek Wallonië dat er niet in slaagt zijn collectivistische mentaliteit af te schudden en te leven zonder gigantische transfers lukt dat nooit. Ook niet met de andere Vlaamse partijen die als puntje bij paaltje komt de Waalse arrogantie voortdurend proberen te bezweren met het toegeven aan brandschattingen.
Bovendien biedt het VB door haar nadruk op de eigen Westerse identiteit als enige ernstig weerwerk tegen de aspiraties van een oprukkende obscurantistische secte Islam met zijn theocratische en vrouw- en homo-onvriendelijke trekken.

Het is dan ook enorm spijtig dat het VB zich door het trekken van de "waarden" achterlijke kwezelskaart in de periferie drukt met een punt dat eigenlijk niets met haar programma te maken heeft. Het is ironisch, maar met dergelijk standpunt wordt het VB precies de objectieve bondgenoot van de Islam, wanneer het gaat om de vrijheid van elk individu om te leven volgens zijn geaardheid of geloof, en hierbij all rechten te genieten die de staat aan iedereen toekent zonder begijnerij (zn.).


De jongste jaren en vooral na haar veroordeling voor racisme heeft het VB gepoogd haar aangepraat fascistisch en bekrompen odium van zich af te gooien en meer ministrabel te worden. Niet geheel onsuccesvol. Men kan zich afvragen wat hen bezielt om zich dan ineens te storten in "ethische" en discriminatoire achterhoedegevechten die toch tegen de Westerse maatschappelijke evolutie naar meer vrijheid voor iedereen ingaan.

Homofobie vindt men vaak bij jeanetten in self-denial. Adolf zèlf was homo, ondanks zijn excuus-truus Eva Braun. Dat terwijl (of juist daarom dat) het facisme bol staat van homo-erotische symboliek. Vlaams uiterst-rechts lijdt wat aan dezelfde fobie. Men moet het frisse knapendom in korte broek met opgegeheven vanen op de Yzerweide maar bekijken.
Een gezondere hetero heeft hoegenaamd geen probleem met de vermeende "homofolie". Het traditioneel gezin wordt helemaal niet ondermijnd door de openstelling van het huwelijk voor partners van hetzelfde geslacht. Maar het VB kan het begijnen (ww.) en discrimineren klaarblijkelijk niet laten. Het zal wel zijn zoals in de Parabel Van De Schorpioen En De Kikker waar de schorpioen de kikker doodstak terwijl die hem veilig over de rivier bracht. Ze kunnen het niet laten.

Waarom blijven Vlamingen almaar hun eigen ruiten ingooien? Het zal wel in de genen zitten. Dat komt ervan, ons ras is doorheen de geschiedenis bezoedeld door teveel vreemde invloeden en allochtone legers die hun geile soldaten niet in bedwang konden houden.

Zo'n "Belang" hoeft voor mij niet meer. Liberale Vlaams-nationalisten die verder kijken dan hun begijnhof staan politiek duidelijk in de kou.
Sans rancune, Tanguy ;-)

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Atomic Spidermen

Category: [Brussels] [Photoblog] [Lowlands Soul] [Timeless]






Symbols of World Fairs often outlive the Fair itself. The Eiffel Tower in Paris was originally built for the 1889 World Fair (Universal Exposition), in commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the French Revolution. The Industrial Revolution in Europe brought about a new trend: the use of metallurgy in construction. Because of this, the engineer's role became increasingly important, in some cases melding with or rivaling that of the architect. The Eiffel Tower was intended to provide a showcase of contemporary engineering, standing tall and proud for all to see. The Eiffel Tower was the triumphant statement of the fin de siècle, read Barbara Tuchman's Proud Tower.

In 1958, the Brussels World Fair wanted to make a similar statement. World War II ended 13 years before, a war out of which Belgium escaped fairly well. The unexpectedly swift liberation by the Allies of the largest part of Belgium in September 1944 saved most of its infrastructure and its industry. Ten years later, with a head start, Belgium's postwar economy was thriving again. A new age had started, called the atomic age. Opened by two destructive big bangs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the hope was then that peaceful nuclear energy would provide cheap and abundant energy in the future. Without its own natural energy resources, Belgium jumped early on the nuclear energy bandwagon. Still up till now most of its electricity is produced by nuclear reactors.


Apart from the atomic age, in 1957 started also the space age as Russia's Sputnik went into orbit. Commercial jet airliners reduced the flying time between continents from days to hours. The jet age had started too, although only the jet set could afford flying for a while. Computers were still far behind the horizon, but the promoters of Belgium's Universal Exposition in 1958 (the first one after New York's 1939 Fair) wanted to make an optimistic statement about the brave new high tech future, like the Parisians did in 1889. Expo 58 also wanted to be a showcase of the Belgian construction and technology industry. So the symbol of the atomic and the space age would be a giant replica of an iron crystal molecule, 165 billion times magnified. It would have 9 colossal spheres, 18 m in diameter, towering 102 m over the Fair grounds. The covering of the steel framework would be done in aluminum, the backbone material of commercial jet liners. Since 1958, the Atomium has been a major landmark in Brussels, apart from Manneken Pis and the medieval Grand Market.

The construction was intended only to last till the end of the Fair, then for 10 years after it. But many objected to the dismantling of this beautiful monument, and its decommissioning moment was postponed time after time. Since the Atomium had lost its shiny aspect over the years and some structural deficits were discovered, in 2003 a refurbishing project was planned, which started in March 2004, and will last till the end of 2005.

At the moment the spheres are almost covered totally with a new shiny skin. Construction workers suspended in cables on high cranes fill the joints between the panels that make up the skin of a sphere. This photo gallery is a report of their work, of the wharf, and of the almost-finished Atomium itself. I used my brand new Olympus E-300 8 Megapixel digital cam and an Olympus 40-150 (80-300 film equivalent) lens handheld.


The usual Creative Common License doesn't apply to these photos. They are fully copyrighted since it was a commissioned shoot, and they have been licensed to commercial stock photography agencies.
 
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Unbroken Dreams on Sunset Boulevard

Category: [Photoblog] [Filipino Soul] [Travel]






Some samples from my collection of Filipino sunsets and weather scenes. Most are done near the start or the end of the typhoon season, when the clouds break near sunset. Also a few from local tropical thunderstorms. All photos have been done in the Southern Philippines and Mindanao in particular. The Camiguin island sunsets are not here.

A cold beer, a hammock, a sunset, what more does one need? Perhaps a laptop and a digital camera to make it complete.

 

If the box below is empty, you are using Microsoft Internet Explorer. In that case, or if you want to view the gallery full-screen, click here.

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Sign here

Category: [Photoblog] [Filipino Soul] [Lowlands Soul]






All over the world, you can find funny street signs or commercials. Most can't be used for photography stock sites since they contain brand names. I started a gallery here with some stuff from Davao (Mindanao, Philippines) and from Brussels. More to come.

 

If the box below is empty, you are using Microsoft Internet Explorer. In that case, or if you want to view the gallery full-screen, click here.

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Beknopt Compendium van de Belgische politieke Newspeak

Category: [Satire] [Tools] [Lowlands Politics]

Dit is een bijgewerkte en aangevulde herhaling van een eerdere post.

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Van A tot Z, alle door politici en middenveld gehanteerde termen in Vlaanderen die een iets andere betekenis hebben dan in het normale taalgebruik. Handig voor het decoderen van de boodschappen van politici en media, zodanig dat uw perceptie niet fout en verzuurd zou worden.


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Accijns, (zn.,m.) | belasting, geheven op de verkoop van voorwerpen en/of goederen, en waarbij de normale verbruiksbelasting door de Staat immoreel laag en/of onvoldoende solidair wordt geacht.

Afbraak, (zn.,m.) | het in vraag stellen van het automatisch, ethisch en/of evident karakter van de uitgangspunten van de solidariteit; ook het aantasten en/of terugschroeven van de solidaire en progressieve verworvenheden.

Anders-globalisme, (zn.,o.) | syn. anti-globalisme, zie onder globalisme

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Belastingsverlaging, (zn.,v.) | herschikking door de Staat van de hoegrootheid van, en de verdeling tussen bestaande belastingen, heffingen, taksen en accijnzen met het doel om een globaal hogere fiscale opbrengst te bekomen.

Beleidsruimte, (zn.,v.) | het extra en onverwacht geld dat de Staat ontvangt door een voorafgaande onderschatting van de offers, inspanningen en belastingsverlagingen. Dit geld wordt in principe niet teruggegeven aan de belastingsplichtige, doch aangewend voor "nieuwe initiatieven".

Bewustwording, (zn.,v.) | mentaal proces dat mensen leidt naar een levenshouding van meer solidariteit en verdraagzaamheid en uiteindelijk tot ethisch correct stemmen op progressieve en/of anders-globalistische en/of solidaire partijen.

Biechtstoelprocedure, (zn.,v.) | handelswijze die wordt gevolgd door één of enkele leidende politici wanneer het overleg in een moeilijke onderhandelingsronde tussen verschillende partijen is vastgelopen, - waarbij sleutelfiguren van de deelnemende partijen achtereenvolgens en één voor één afzonderlijk op een intiem etentje in een exclusief restaurant worden uitgenodigd, - waarna uiteindelijk na lang en moeilijk beraad wordt overeengekomen in wèlk ander exclusief restaurant de volgende biechtstoelprocedure zal plaatsvinden. syn. Tijdswinst.

Bruin, (bn.) | (meestal samen met "gedachtengoed") het partijprogramma van het Vlaams Belang. In tegenstelling tot "rood", "groen", "blauw" en "paars" heeft "bruin" een erg pejoratieve bijklank.

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Democratie, (zn.,v.) | politiek stelsel waarbij de verhouding tussen de burgers en de Staat wordt geregeld, gekenmerkt door een souvereiniteitsoverdracht van de burgers naar beroepspolitici die vervolgens gedurende jaren ongehinderd doen wat ze op grond van hun professioneel en geïnformeerd inzicht weten goed en wenselijk te zijn voor het volk.

Democratisch, (bn.) | [1] hoedanigheid, uitsluitend gebruikt voor het beschrijven van de verzameling van alle politieke partijen behalve het Vlaams Belang. [2] compl. Anti-democratisch: hoedanigheid uitsluitend gebruikt voor het beschrijven van het Vlaams Belang. [3] Anti-democratische partijen (zn.,v., uitsl. mv.): het Vlaams Belang.

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Ecobonus, (zn.,m.) | malus, nieuwe belasting op wegwerpverpakkingen.

Egoïsme, (zn.,v.) | syn. zelfzucht. [1] (alg.) Geestesgesteldheid, instelling, houding, waarbij men zonder schroom uitsluitend opkomt voor eigen belang; toep. op personen of groepen van personen. [2] (pol.) Houding en opvattingen gekenmerkt door het aanvechten van de ethische noodzakelijkheid van solidariteit en de egalitaire herverdeling van inkomens - onbeschaamd het recht opeisen om zèlf te beschikken over te vruchten van zijn inspanningen zonder rekening te houden met anderen die deze inspanningen niet wensen te leveren. [3] (federaal) (uitsl. toep. op Vlaanderen) Aanvechting van het automatisch en ethisch juiste karakter van de Noord-Zuid financiële transfers binnen België.

Extreem, (bn.) | zich bevindend aan de uitersten van het politiek spectrum, politiek onhaalbare en/of immorele en/of kwetsende oplossingen voorstellend. In België alg.: alles rechts van centrum-links; spec.: het Vlaams Belang. Opgelet: de hoedanigheid 'extreem' wordt uitsl. gebruikt voor "extreem-rechts". De term "Extreem-links" is niet gebruikelijk en zelfs te vermijden; in dit geval spreek men van progressief en/of anders-globalistisch en/of solidair.

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Familiewaarden, (zn.,m., uitsl.mv.) | het geheel van tot rand-ideologie verwerkte opinies waarbij op grond van een particuliere en pre-Darwiniaanse interpretatie van de natuur gepoogd wordt kunstmatige geboortenregeling, vrouwen en homo's naar de rand van de maatschappij terug te dringen. Zie ook Islam. Opg.!: "familiewaarden" wordt uitsl. gehanteerd door autochtone niet-Islamitische fundamentalisten (syn. "ethisch rechts").

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Globalisme, (zn.,o.) | sociaal-economische denkstroming en politieke rand-ideologie die ijvert voor het slopen van externe tolmuren en handelsbarrières, om op die manier de interne solidariteit en onze sociale verworvenheden te ondermijnen - door het toelaten van goederen en diensten uit landen die deze goedkoper kunnen aanbieden omdat zij hun werknemers uitbuiten, onderverlonen, en/of omdat ze geen voldoend uitgebouwd solidair belastingsstelsel hebben.
compl. Anti-globalisme: de ethisch gemotiveerde denkstroming en ideologie die door het handhaven en het opdrijven van tolmuren en exportsubsidies, door het verzet tegen immigratie, en door het belasten van internationale kapitaalstromen - onze eigen landbouw, werkgelegenheid en productie wil vrijwaren tegen oneerlijke concurrentie uit lage-loon landen zonder interne solidariteit, en tegen externe landbouwproducten aan dumpingprijzen.

Gratis, (bn.) | de hoedanigheid van een voorwerp of dienst die door de Staat kostenloos kan worden aangeboden aan een deel der burgers door bijkomende inspanningen die aan andere burgers worden opgelegd.

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Heffing, (zn.,v.) | zie accijns doch geheven op bepaalde diensten of op het uitoefenen van bepaalde activiteiten.

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Inspanning, (zn.,v.) | syn. belasting. (vb. "er zullen bijkomende inspanningen worden gevraagd van de bevolking om het Rijnlandmodel te kunnen handhaven")

Inspanningsverbintenis, (zn.,v.) | de verplichting die men op zich neemt om vooraf en met een hoog profiel in de media, achteraf vooral geen resultaat te behalen.

Islam, (zn.,m.) | theocratische ideologie en religieus geïnspireerde denkstroming gekenmerkt door een andere en verbeterde benadering van de man-vrouw gelijkheid, van het gerecht, van de gelijkheid der godsdiensten, van de scheiding tussen Kerk en Staat, en van de vrij meningsuiting.

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Jongeren, (zn.,m.,mv.) | lett. jeugd, groepje jongere mensen. spec. Wanneer in een mediabericht over straatschuimerij of amokmakers: Marokkaanse jeugbende, Marokkaanse jongens. Ook: Brusselse jongeren: Marokkaanse jongensdbendes uit de Westelijke Brusselse randgemeenten, Antwerpse jongeren: Marokkaanse jongensbendes uit Borgerhout.

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Klimaatsverandering, (zn.,v.) | wetenschappelijk bewezen globale opwarming van de planeet door menselijk toedoen en zonder historisch voorgaande, en die kan worden ongedaan gemaakt door het invoeren van nieuwe belastingen op energie.

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Liberalisme, (zn.,o.) | syn. egoïsme [2] (pol.).

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Maakbaar, (bn.) | eigenschap van de samenleving, voor zover die via een geheel van richtsnoeren, procedures en opvolgingsmaatregelen in een meer solidaire, progressieve, verdraagzame en multiculturele richting wordt uitgestuurd.

Middenveld, (zn.,o.) | het geheel van niet-verkozen drukkingsgroepen die door hun netwerk van relaties met, en overtuigende invloed op politici ernaar streven om het democratisch en solidair karakter van de samenleving te verbeteren. Voetbal: het grasoppervlak tussen de twee tegenover mekaar liggende doelen.

Multiculturele samenleving, (zn.,v.) | een samenleving waar mensen van verschillende ethnische afkomst, culturen en godsdiensten op een klein gebied vreedzaam, open en verdraagzaam met mekaar samenleven, in respect voor ieders eigenheid, en nieuwsgierig naar andermans cultuur dit samenleven als een verrijking ervaren. Dit begrip heeft meer een normerend dan een beschrijvend karakter. uitspr.: Wordt uitgesproken met ietwat ingetogen tremolo.

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Normvervaging, (zn.,v.) | de toenemende tendens in de samenleving om zich minder te schikken naar, en het in vraag stellen van de normen (syn. preutsheid) die men zèlf aanhangt. Meestal gebruikt door ethisch rechts. opm.: Wanneer progressieve of solidaire normen worden aangevochten is de correcte term niet normvervaging maar afbraak.

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Offers, (zn.,o.,uitsl.mv.) | nieuwe belastingen, verhoging van bestaande belastingen.

Open Debatcultuur, (zn.,v.) | een stijl, een geheel van informele regels, een geheel van communicatietechnieken waarbij een politieke partij haar interne ideologische tegenstellingen en interpersoonlijke conflicten ostentatief, kleurrijk en zonder enige terughoudendheid in de media ten toon spreidt, en zichzelf hierbij genadeloos afmaakt.

Onverwijld, (bn.) | syn. onmiddellijk, dadelijk, zonder dralen. spec. Indien gebruikt voor de splitsing van BHV: syn. nooit, met Sint Juttemis.

Overstromingsverzekering, (zn.,v.) | syn. belasting.

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Perceptie, (zn.,v.) | syn. waarneming; pol. de veelal foute en verzuurde indruk bij de burger die ontstaat nadat politici verbeteringen doorvoeren op fiscaal, maatschappelijk, of democratisch vlak. Om deze verzuurde indruk te neutraliseren en bij te stellen in correcte zin worden door politici vaak spin-dokters in dienst genomen die met een geheel van communicatietechnieken en zorgvuldig ge-ensceneerd dramaspel in de media dit doel pogen te bereiken.

Privatisering, (zn.,v.) | creatieve financieel-technische operatie waarbij de Staat een (deel van een) staatsonderneming verkoopt aan particulieren om de lopende begroting in evenwicht te brengen, en waarbij het sociaal passief van die onderneming wordt ingeschreven op de lopende Staatsbegrotingen vanaf tien jaar na datum.

Progressief, (bn.) | syn. vooruitstrevend. Eigenschap van een persoon of een groep voorzover die streeft naar meer maakbaarheid van de samenleving, naar meer solidariteit, democratie en verdraagzaamheid - voorzover die streeft naar een meer gelijke herverderling der inkomens en naar een meer multiculturele maatschappij, - en op persoonlijk vlak van Wereldmuziek houdt.

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Racisme, (zn.,o.) | geestesgesteldheid en/of levenshouding die leidt tot opkomen voor de rechten van autochtonen, maar dit uitsl. in West-Europa. Opgelet: het uiten van racistische meningen is verboden bij wet. uitbr.: het geregeld vermelden van criminele feiten door allochtonen wordt - op zichzelf juist - het "zondebokmechanisme" genoemd en is dan ook strafbaar als racisme.

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Socialisme, (zn.,o.) | een godsdienst gestoeld op achterhaalde aannames uit de Plantenleer, die stelden dat bomen tot in de hemel groeien.

Spin-dokter, (zn.,m.) | alg.: dierenarts gespecialiseerd in arachniden; pol. opinie-deskundige die met behulp van communicatie-technieken, hoaxen, en ge-esceneerde politieke drama's in de media de perceptie van de burger probeert te verbeteren of te ontzuren.

Solidariteit, (zn.,v.) | [1] de verzameling van belastingen die aan sommige burgers worden opgelegd om de Staat toe te laten voorwerpen en diensten gratis aan andere burgers aan te bieden en/of deze een niet prestatie-verbonden inkomen te verschaffen. [2] De ideologie die stelt dat deze transfers moreel goed en democratisch zijn. [3] Specifieke betekenis Federale Solidariteit: het geheel van fiscaal en niet-fiscaal opgelegde financiële transfers van Vlaanderen naar Wallonië en Brussel. De ideologie die stelt dat deze transfers schromelijk overdreven, normaal en passend zijn, en een ethisch correct karakter bezitten.

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Taks, (zn.,m.) | syn. heffing.

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Verbeteren, (ww.) | fiscaal syn.: verhogen; pol.syn. verslechteren.

Verbeterde aanslagvoet, (zn.,m.) | syn. verhoogde aanslagvoet.

Verdraagzaamheid, (zn.,v.) | geestesgesteldheid en/of levenshouding van progressieve en solidaire burgers die gekenmerkt wordt door een gedreven afkeuring van ondemocratische partijen en van de stigmatisering van allochtone criminelen als "allochtone criminelen", - door het bewonderingswaardig geloof in de multiculturele samenleving, - en door een persoonlijke voorliefde voor Wereldmuziek en Folkmuziek (met uitsluiting van Vlaamse Folk).

Verkeersveiligheid, (zn.,v.) | het geheel van richtsnoeren, procedures en opvolgingsmaatregelen door de Staat met als doel middels flitspalen en repressieve controles meer boetes te kunnen innen en aldus meer beleidsruimte te krijgen, o.m. voor het plaatsen van meer flitspalen.

Verworvenheden, (zn.,v.,uitsl.mv.) | het geheel van voorrechten dat men wenst te behouden ten koste van andere, belastingsbetalende burgers, ondanks economische imperatieven of aanduidingen dat dit niet langer wenselijk of haalbaar is.

Verzuring, (zn.,v.) | geestesgesteldheid en/of beweegreden van kankerende en misleide burgers om op ondemocratische en/of extreem-rechtse partijen te stemmen wegens losliggende stoeptegels.

Vlaktaks, (zn.,m.) | een liberaal geïnspireerd belastingsstelsel ontdaan van enige vorm van solidariteit en ethisch noodzakelijke herverdeling van inkomens.

VRT, (zn.,m.) | acron. voor Vlaamse Radio en Televisie. Vlaamse gesubsidieerde Staatszender die commerciële niet-gesubsidieerde zenders bekampt met lichtvoetige spelletjesprogramma's en eenvoudige quizzen, - die zichzelf de progressieve en democratische opdracht heeft aangemeten om in woord en beeld de antidemocratische partijen te bestrijden met een aangepaste mengeling van schimpscheuten en doodzwijgen, - en zich radio-gewijs vooral toelegt op het populariseren van Wereldmuziek.

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Wereldmuziek, (zn.,v.) | muziekgenre, muziekstijl; omvat alle niet-commerciële en niet-Westerse of niet-verwesterde muziek, - op voorwaarde dat ze wordt uitgevoerd op eenvoudige en ongestemde instrumenten, en door allochtonen, - en ze zich niet houdt aan enig bekend toonstelsel.

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Zorgverzekering, (zn.,v.) | syn. belasting.

Zwembad, (zn.,o.) | multiculturele en verrijkende ontmoetingsplaats tussen voornamelijk Maghrebijnse allochtonen en autochtonen, gevuld met water; in een gebouw of in open lucht; ook de ruimte er rond waar vaak in een verdraagzame, ludieke, vrolijke en lichtvoetige atmosfeer kleinigheden worden uitgewisseld zoals GSM-toestellen, MP3-spelers en merkkledij.

Meer?

Wenst u dit kort compendium verder aan te vullen met termen en hun definitie? De commentaarsectie staat open. Een politiek-incorrectie jury zal zich zorgvuldig over uw bijdrage beraden, en desgevallend uw definitie in het compendium opnemen. Over de democratische beslissing van de jury kan niet worden geklavieretwist.

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N & Q: Once bitten, twice shy

Category: [Global Politics]

Mr. Bush said last Saturday that he did not rule out a military intervention in Iran to prevent its alleged nuclear build-up in the uranium (U-235 to U-238) conversion plant in Isfahan. The plant was temporarily shut down in November 2004 to allow for talks with the EU, after the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency), a Vienna-based UN organization, blamed Iran for not fully cooperating with its inquiry into nuclear activities. But on August 10, 2005, Iran rejected the EU proposals, it broke the UN seals, and resumed uranium enrichment work in the Isfahan nuclear plant.


The EU and US suspect Iran's scheme is a cover for a nuclear weapons programme. Iran denies, and it claims it just wants to produce nuclear fuel for peaceful energy production. Of course, it all depends on the degree of enrichment. A nuclear power plant needs 5% U-238 in the fuel mix, an atomic weapon needs at least 90% (read here). For the Belgian situation, read here. For an overview on the Iran issue by the IAEA, see here.


The reaction of the IAEA on Iran’s move was swift: reinstate the seals, while the EU wants Iran back to the negotiating table. The French foreign minister, Philippe Douste-Blazy, called the Iranian actions "a grave crisis". Gerhard Schröder, the German chancellor, told ARD television that the nuclear issue "will end up at the Security Council if Iran does not give in". European diplomats said Iran would be presented with an ultimatum during a meeting of the agency's board of governors in Vienna next Tuesday: "Cease the uranium conversion, or face sanctions" (source: NYT). Now, the US is not happy with wanting, urging and insisting but it has gone a step further by not excluding a military operation to stop Iran from further uranium enrichment. Iran claims it has done nothing wrong. Shutting down the plant was voluntary, reopening it too (read here).

Opinion

I have some technical questions. How rich does Iran wants its uranium to be? 5% or the full 90% weapons grade? Does Iran need expensive nuclear energy at all as it sits on top of an oil bubble? Let’s just assume the IAEA does its expert job, and it’s worried, to say the least. Will the real slim shady nuclear expert please stand up, please stand up?

And what if Persia doesn’t comply? Sure, the UN can condemn it. My bet is Iran can live with that, and get richer anyways. What about an economic boycott? We have seen how ineffective it was in Iraq’s case after the first Gulf War. The only ones hit were the people, not the leading politicians and their goals. What about a weapons or technology embargo? It has proven leaky before in Iraq's case, and prone to corruption as in Iraq’s food for oil programme. And is Europe really ready for that? Unlike the US, the EU has considerable trade links with Iran. We can do without their carpets and agricultural products but can we do without their oil? And without they buying our products? Does Airbus sound a bell?


But Bush doesn’t mind. Nuke them! Who is afraid of Virginia Woolfowitz? I don’t assume any of his neocon puppet masters have any business interests in Iran? It’s not tough at all to be tough when none of your own money is involved. Germany’s Schroeder was fast: "the military option for resolving the dispute over Iran's nuclear programme should be 'taken off the table'". In other words, "not with my money". But does Bush really mean it? Or is his threat just another move on the diplomatic checker board? Well, we don’t have a straight view into Mr. Bush’ mind, just assuming for the sake of argument that he has one. But his threat does not stand any reality check. He simply can’t invade Ira q n. Why?


Major US military invasions into other countries after WWII have been based on hoaxes to create a casus belli. The Tonkin Bay “incident" has been colorfully described by Barbara Tuchman, but that was 1968.

The first Gulf War was not a hoax, as Kuwait was brutally occupied by Iraq and the question – if unsolved – would have created a major local imbalance. But the second Gulf War was based on a hoax fabricated by the well-respected CIA. L’histoire Vietnamienne se répète.


They were totally sure Saddam had WMD’s, even if UN inspectors couldn’t find any. Who would doubt the CIA, backed by MI6? The masters of Intelligence, and one reconnaissance satellite that rules them all? Come on, do you really think they made a mistake?

"Sorry people, we saw some nuclear plants near Baghdad on the printouts but it turned out later that the janitor did it as a Photoshop exercise for her Sunday recreative class and somehow the sheet ended up on the President’s table. We really apologize". Another giant leap forward in The March Of Folly. Whatever.


Barbara taught us a lesson: "in the future the American electorate ought to choose candidates for high office who have more courage and character". Her hope was in vain, Mr. Bush got reelected after all his lies, and the American people knew it. The bottom line is, just don’t expect us, dear Mr. Bush, to believe your crap once again, ever. This time you might actually be right as to WMD’s, but you blew it. Once bitten, twice shy.

And the truth? Well, the American President just can’t pay for it after his Iraq’s debacle. You know it, Schroeder knows it, Iran knows it.
Talk to the hand man.

Link

No weapons in Iraq? We’ll find them in Iran (June 2000).

Pictures

Getty Images, AP.

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