Dems show their true colors

Is anyone wondering what the US would be like under full Democratic control? Well, we're getting a taste of it now in the horrid "Employee Free Choice Act" being considered by congress. This piece of legislation does exactly the opposite of what its name implies. It takes away the workers' right to vote on unionization via secret ballot, making the "Card Check" system of "voting" all that union leaders need to unionize a shop. For those unfamiliar with the Card Check system, it involves a bunch of union goons going around the company intimidating people into signing these "cards." Once they have a majority of the work force scared into signing these cards, the entire shop goes union, end of story. This is the most undemocratic piece of legislation to come around in a long time. The secret ballot is one of the pillars of democracy, allowing people to freely make choices in private without fear of repercussions. Unions are rightly going extinct all around the country, so these thugs are trying to change the rules since giving people the choice to be in a union or not almost always means they will choose not to.

The Democrats are trying to pay back the unions, who make up a huge amount of their voter base and give them vast quantities of money every year (did you know that 70% of union dues go directly to political contributions, and of that 70%, over 90% goes to democratic candidates?) They figure that completely tossing freedom and democracy in the toilet is a fair trade for them being in power. This bill is an outrage.

Here's a good summary of what's going on. I also highly recommend Linda Chavez' Betrayal, which exposes unions for the cancer that they are in this country.

THE VLAAMS BELANG GOES TO WASHINGTON.

If you live in or near Washington DC, you might want to consider attending a speech given there on Friday, February 23, by two prominent Vlaams Belang leaders, Filip Dewinter and Frank Vanhecke. Dewinter and Vanhecke are in Washington from February 20 to 23, with the aims of strengthening the ties between the American and the European Right, getting the VB known to its US counterparts and, last but not least, warn of the dangers of multiculturalism, radical Islam and mass immigration. While Dewinter and Vanhecke will attend several meetings, a.o. the one today, wednesday, at Grover Norquist's Center-Right Coalition Meeting, the most important event will be the speech given Friday evening before the Robert Taft Club, a think tank of traditionalists, conservatives and libertarians which holds a monthly meeting in the Washington, DC area.


Filip Dewinter, arguably the VB's best known strongman abroad, is not the Chairman of the VB itself. He is, a.o., VB fraction leader in the Flemish Parliament, the Flemish regional assembly. Keep in mind that Belgium is a federal state, with a federal government "above" the two regions, Dutch-speaking Flanders and French-speaking Wallonia. Both regions have their own "governments" and "parliaments". The VB is Flanders' biggest party, drawing about one quarter of the vote. Since Flanders has a bigger population than Wallonia, the VB is at the same time also Belgium's biggest party. Its name, Vlaams Belang, means "Flemish Interest" and highlights what is in fact the main aim of the party, that is to say Flemish Independence. Explaining this in itself important issue would require far too much space and time. Suffice to say that within the Belgian framework the Flemings have always been, even to this day, second rate citizens of some sort, as a provider of cheap labor power for early industrialized Wallonia in the nineteenth century and as a milk cow to keep the Wallonian semi-communist state afloat in the twentieth century. While I, as a Fleming, am fully aware of past and present injustices, personally I regret the independence stance because a divorce would ultimately cost Flanders much more than the 11.5 billion euros transferred every year to the south. A secession would be a very ugly divorce and create instability in the heart of the European Union. It would also very likely cause Brussels to lose its status as Capital of Europe, as well as the departure of countless international organizations, NATO on top. That said, I don't think it is that far yet, and the other very real issues the VB puts on the agenda are much more pressing. VB Chairman is actually Frank Vanhecke, who is also a MEP (Member of European Parliament). Under his guidance, the VB has shaken off its murky past and transformed itself into a decent, (relatively) business friendly conservative party which comes up for traditional western values and which firmly rejects the dogmatic belief in multiculturalism, forced upon Belgian citizens by the regime. A regime which by all means tries to kill the VB, even as we speak and write, but more about that later.


As for the meeting, here is where and when to meet:

When: Friday, February 23. 7:00-10:00 PM
Where: Crystal City Marriott
1999 Jefferson Davis Highway
Arlington, Virginia 22202

Crystal City Marriott is located above the Crystal City Metro, and is also less than a mile away from Ronald Reagan National Airport Washington. Admission is free, though donations are appreciated. Business attire is required. Please RSVP in advance to marcusepstein@gmail.com, but feel free to come if you do not RSVP.

Organizer and speechwriter for the two VB delegates' journey is Paul Beliën, the director of The Brussels Journal, one of Europes leading conservative websites. Mr. Beliën recently had an elaborate post on the subject. Mr. Beliën is Belgium's best known conservative journalist, and was spit out by the overwhelmingly leftist Belgian media landscape fifteen years ago after writing an op-ed in The WSJ the regime did not like. The irony is, that today, "that fascist from the Wall Street Journal" has become a major opinionmaker not only for the European, but indeed for the Western Right, while his leftist "colleagues" are still bickering and self-enjoying in their homemade incestuous leftozoid environment, "serving" a market of a mere 10.5 million people - of which, I gather, to their horror an increasingly bigger percentage is beginning to see them for them for what they are - obsolete, vile and utterly undemocratic crooks.

Recently, Mr. Beliën wrote the following column for The Washington Times. I hope the following, very telling exerpt may induce you to come to the Crystal City Marriott come Friday evening:

Americans who want to know what their country will be like 20 years from now if it follows the path its politicians want it to take, need only look at Europe. There, one can see what the undermining of Judeo-Christian values, higher taxes, onerous regulations and big, intrusive government will lead to: the collapse of a civilization.

First there was the rise of the welfare state, which led to the steady emergence of highly taxed, slow-moving and maladaptive economies that must support growing and eventually unsupportable demands by the citizens.

Second, there was secularism. People who have the state taking care of them from the cradle to the grave no longer need God. The welfare state also intentionally undermined religion to crush the spirit of freedom among its subjects. And it undermined demographics, because people who do not believe in God do not believe in the future and see children as a burden.

Third, a wholly new danger emerged, namely that of welfare immigration -- the immigration of people, increasingly from cultures which have not been shaped by the basic forces of European civilization, who come purely for the purpose of claiming benefits.

Take Holland, for example, Europe's equivalent of San Francisco. This is Pelosi Land. The Dutch are pampered by an extensive welfare system. They were the first in Europe to legalize abortion, euthanasia and homosexual "marriage." Today, Islam is filling the void that was left when the Dutch created a religious vacuum in the heart of their culture. There are already 1 million Muslims in the Netherlands out of a total population of 16 million. Their number is rising fast because the Muslims are fecund while the secularist Dutch have hardly any offspring. The native Dutch are moving out. Since 2004, more indigenous Dutchmen have emigrated each year than immigrants have moved in. People who have lost faith in God do not fight. They run. Since they do not believe in life after death, this life is the only thing they have to lose. One emigrant Dutchman, a homosexual author who lives in Brussels, writes: "I am not a warrior. I do not fight for freedom. I am only good at enjoying it." This mentality has affected the whole of Western Europe. A young German woman recently said that it is "better to let yourself be raped than risk injuries while resisting, better to avoid fighting than risk death." Europe has chosen the path of submission. Islamization is not the cause but the consequence of the collapse of Europe. The very word Islam means "submission." Many Europeans have submitted already. In that sense, they have already become Muslims.

Be there, if you can. Europes Right and America's Right will meet. Brothers in arms. Dare I have the audacity of hoping this meeting will be the start of a grand new Rightwing partnership across the Atlantic? I dare.


MFBB.

INFIDEL KIDS MUST EAT HALAL MEAT!!!

From De Standaard, Tuesday February 13, 2007:

Gaia and Vlaams Belang protest against halal meat on school.

During school treks children will only get halal meat with them. "Otherwise they won't participate".

ANTWERP. When classes of the Antwerp communal schoolnet do school trips, no pork meat is on the menu anymore. Moreover, meat from other animals is guaranteed from butchering according to islamic principles. "All meat was butchered halal by a recognised company" can be read in a letter to the parents. Town Selectman for Education Robert Voorhamme (socialist party SP.a) argues that in many classes children from [muslim - MFBB] immigrants are in the majority. If schools do not offer the correct meat, they stay at home. Vlaams Belang fraction leader Filip Dewinter reacts furious: "It is a real shame that Voorhamme presses through this far-reaching measure. That a neutral education net bows for islamic food prescriptions cannot be accepted. If we let this reversed integration, this world turned upside down, this overpowering of the newcomers happen, we commit a gigantic error."

Animal rights organization Gaia thinks it's a scandal that children have to eat meat from "animals which have died a cruel ritual death". Michel Vandenbosch of Gaia has protested too at the office of the selectman for Animal Well Being [yup - Antwerp has got that too. For animals owned by infidels of course. - MFBB], Luc Bungeneers (VLD).

"No, we won't butcher not more sheep and cattle ritually. It's about chickens and turkeys which are anaesthesized before being butchered", reacts Bungeneers.

"The imams with whom we have consulted, can live with that."

In the Flemish Parliament Vlaams Belang strongman Filip Dewinter will tomorrow ask Education Minister Frank Vandenbroucke (SP.a) about the matter.

Just imagine your kid sitting lonely, or with perhaps two or three more indigenous Flemish kids, in an Antwerp school class surrounded by twenty-five Ahmeds and Kareems and Ali's. Shudder.

Islam is an atrocious thing, but socialism is worse. Sixty years ago, just before the outbreak of the war, socialist playwright George Bernard Shaw of Fabian Society "fame", said that if the Germans invaded England, he'd be glad to welcome them in and offer them tea. Nothing new under the sun.

Thank God there was a Winston Churchill around then. At roughly the same time as the grossly overestimated loon above, he made the following remark:

We must recognise that we have a great inheritance in our possession, which represents the prolonged achievement of the centuries; that there is not one of our simple uncounted rights today for which better men than we are have not died on the scaffold or the battlefield. We have not only a great treasure; we have a great cause. Are we taking every measure within our power to defend that cause?

Europe needs another Winston Churchill. Where is he?


MFBB.


N.B.:

George Bernard Shaw in fine company. The dame to the right is Lady Astor. Once the Astors stayed at Blenheim Palace with Winston Churchill, and an argument spun out between her and Britains future Prime Minister, which lasted a whole weekend. Finally Lady Astor exclaimed: "Winston, if I were your wife I'd put poison in your coffee." To which Winston replied: "Nancy, if I were your husband I'd drink it."

Rightwingers have more sense of humor.

BARAKA HUSSEIN OBAMA. CLOWN. COWARD. TROJAN HORSE?

I sincerely hope American voters will in time recognize this BLOODY FOOKIN IDIOT for what he is: a ridiculous Barbecued Air Salesman. One could still dismiss Obama's vows for "a more hopeful America" as the meaningless lapsuses of a rookie. "Hope" seems to be quite the buzzword for this parvenu. Always hope hope hope hope hope hope. The first tinge of unrest I felt about our newest presidential "hopeful" was when, now some two years ago, he was apparently able to lure far too much Americans into some collective yearning for - yeah, for what? Blabbering about "the audacity of hope" he was then, although I never got the foggiest idea what he meant about that. And he was blabbering last week in Springfield, where, sadly, he announced his candidacy for President of the United States vowing to "build a more hopeful America". Personally, I don't see why the US should need hope. The only thing I see is that the rest of the world should hope to become one day like the US.

It gets more serious when this upstart begins about "change" and tackling "problems like poor schools, economic hardships and oil dependence", about the current "failure of leadership" which "is to blame for not meeting the nation's challenges". If your country has never been richer, if unemployment has never been lower, if house ownership has never been higher, if Bushonomics make the budget deficit shrink despite, or shall we say, thanks to lower taxes (the Laffer curve!), I guess only a fool would want change. I am sorry for the poor schools, but I suspect they are mostly black, the way Europes poor schools are mostly muslim. Instead of blaming that on the government, I think it is HIGH TIME some communities should start blaming themselves, although I am not holding my breath. Dittos for economic hardships. It is time for the left to acknowledge that Capitalism is the only genuine Creator of Prosperity. Obama sounds like your run of the mill euro socialist when he hints he "can" take on economic hardships, but at 41 I am pretty sure free markets do a damn good job with regards to wealth creation, as opposed to intervention by "people who know better". Socialists in my country are thumping themselves on the chest when they "help" poverty-stricken Cuba by sending 50 old computers and 25 secondhand buses. By contrast, if a state scraps price controls, import tariffs and high taxes, an invisible hand will let new computers and new buses appear by the gazillions.

But the worst threat emanating from this nutter is when he begins about Iraq and withdrawing US troops there by 2008. So he calls the Iraq war a "tragic mistake". Excuse me, but Barack Obama makes John Kerry look like Ronald Reagan. As a keen follower of the US's Middle East policy over the past decades, I still think the Bush Administration made the correct analysis by liberating Iraq and trying to plant the seeds of democracy there. In all those years, I have never known the region export something else than oil and terrorists. Something had to be done and I was glad it was something else than propping up dictators who let Islamonazis thrive anyway. Actually, the very viciousness with which Al Qaeda tries to disrupt the American scheme in Iraq is proof of the quintessential validity of the strategy. So, things don't go as smooth as one would wish? I'm glad the guys on Iwo Jima were no Barack Obamas. There's doubts about the strategy? When the US attacked the Vichy government in Morocco in 1942 and not the Germans there were doubts about the strategy too: the important thing is that the enemy is fought - on what front matters less. So, this whole idea of imposing democracy in Islamic countries isn't panning out so well? Well, IF it ultimately fails - and that's a big if - the Islamic world will only have itself to blame. The thing is, the US has grabbed a tiger by the tail. One thing you shouldn't do when you grab a tiger by the tail is let go and run away. Debate about it whether or not you should have grabbed that tail, but when you are in it, you are in it. You kill it, or it will come after you, something girlie man Obama seems not to be able to comprehend.

Baraka Hussein Obama is, unfortunately, not only blathering about the audacity of hope. He has another audacity: the audacity to invoke Abraham Lincoln.

"He had his doubts. He had his defeats. He had his setbacks, but through his will and his words, he moved a nation and helped free a people."

From what I know about Abe, he would have looked down upon Obama with disgust. President Lincoln had defeats and setbacks indeed. If Barack Obama would have paid attention instead of hopefully looking out the window when his history teacher was talking about Fort Sumter or the Army of the Potomac he might have truly known this. Barack Obama who is today defaming the 3,000 and more dead of the US Armed forces by saying their lives were "wasted", might have known that at the Gettysburg Address, November 19, 1863, President Lincoln "called the living to finish the war that the dead soldiers had begun". He might have known that at the Battle of Antietam, 23,000 men were killed, wounded or went missing in a single day. And he might have known that as late as 1864, the Union's top general Ulysses S. Grant lost more troops at Wilderness, Spotsylvania Court House and Cold Harbor than the Confederates.

Barack Obama, who today lives in a free country where he enjoys equal rights with whites to the extent that he, as a black person, can vie for the Presidency of the United States, should thank God on his bare knees that Abraham Lincoln was no... Barack Obama.


MFBB.

For those still drinking the Global Warming Kool Aid

Ok, so you're pretty much a puppet of Big Oil™ or a brainless Bush minion if you don't subscribe to the Al Gore theory of global warming right? Well, not exactly.

The global warming movement is finally beginning to be exposed for what it really is. Analysis is coming in on the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report, and all is not well in Enviroville. Below are several links that beat this report and the subsequent media frenzy surrounding it to a pulp.

While there's far too much wrong with this report to list here, I thought I'd share my favorite, um, curiosity. It seems the political appointees that wrote the report (that's right, this summary is not written by scientists, whose work is curiously being withheld from publication until a few months from now) put in a provision that allows them to alter work of the scientists to bring it into line with their "summary." That's right; if the science doesn't preach their gospel, they get to change it. Basically what's going on is that the most recent science doesn't tell nearly as gloomy a story as what they've been telling us for years, so they're having to do something to keep the momentum going. It's a total scam.

Melanie Phillips has a nice summary on her site (first link), but I've included her reference links below individually in case anyone wants to go there directly.

http://www.melaniephillips.com/diary/?p=1457

http://ff.org/centers/csspp/pdf/20070201_monckton.pdf

http://www.junkscience.com/jan07/Political_Science-WSJ.com.pdf

http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewCulture.asp?Page=/Culture/archive/200702/CUL20070202a.html


Hat tip to NRO's Corner

ASSAULT ON 13 PRECINCTS.

Plus first Christian church in France torched. In Nice, that's on the mediterranean side of France. Not Nice huh? Ha ha ha. Guess French youths got bored of burning synagogues. I can't even say it was the first Christian church in Europe, since some 150 Serbian-Orthodox churches and monasteries have been pillaged by Kosovar muslims over the past years. Btw, Kosovo was just bombarded a multicultural, multi-ethnic semi-independent gizmo by the UN - 100,000 Serbs and 2 million Kosovar muslims. I fear the latter have quite another idea of what multiculturalism means though. But OK, more about that church towards the end of this post. First the police stations.

Le colonel Hanset, chef de corps des pompiers de Charleroi, a précisé que les quatre interventions de la nuit de mercredi à jeudi ont été très rapprochées: le premier départ, en direction du poste de police de Lodelinsart, a eu lieu à 21h58; le suivant, quatre minutes plus tard, rue Saint-Gustave à Marchienne-au-Pont où, apparemment, les auteurs se sont trompés de cible: le bâtiment atteint est celui de l'Oeuvre de la Naissance et de l'Enfance, contigu au bureau police et qui a été très gravement endommagé; sept minutes après, un appel signalait un début d'incendie dans le commissariat du Chef-Lieu, à Jumet et huit minutes plus tard, c'était le commissariat de Dampremy qui était visé.

In short, in and around Charleroi, Belgium, during the night of Wednesday January 31 to Thursday February 1, four police stations were attacked with volleys of molotov cocktails. The first one in Lodelinsart at 9.58pm. The next one four minutes later in Marchienne-au-Pont, where the arsonists apparently mistook a local school, The Work of Birth and Childhood, for the police station. The building was very badly damaged. Seven minutes later, the Jumet police post was attacked and, 8 minutes after that, the police station at Damprémy. This was only the worst spat of attacks this week, since the night before, the Marchienne-au-Pont precinct had been attacked already. Furthermore, during the night of February 2, the maison communale of Damprémy was also attacked with molotov cocktails, luckily without much damage, as well as, strangely enough, two private houses in La Louvière. Luckily here the proprietors were able to extinguish the flames themselves before the arrival of the fire brigade.

While local judicial authorities - all of Parti Socialiste signature - at first denied knowledge of any link with the shooting of two criminals the week before, it became clear today that the attacks were indeed payback. If Fwench annoys you, here's an Expatica link in English. So what happened is that the week before two cops pursued a stolen car and pumped 11 bullets in it. In Marchienne-au-Pont the car swerved of the road and crashed against a Belgacom relay cabin (Belgacom is the main Belgian telephone company). When the policemen approached the wreckage, it appeared the driver, Henaday Numeri (23) was shot dead, and the passenger, Fayssal Hillal (20) gravely wounded. Numeri and Hillal were ethnic Liechtensteiners. Not. Multiculti loons keep telling us that all cultures are equal, but in my culture, when a white gangster has been shot dead, the overall reaction is, luckily still, "good riddance". Not so in islamic culture, where it is being proven time and again that young Moroccan and Turkish gangsters are, in fact, role models commanding considerable respect.

And oh, the procureur du roi is opening up a homicide investigation against the officer who fired the killing shots. You can't make this stuff up.


Over to France. Intifada in Les Mureaux, a town an hour driving from Paris. From a French blog with the incongruous name I Like Your Style:

Les Mureaux (Yvelines, 32 000 hab). 01 février 2007. Emeutes de racailles. 7 policiers blessés. Une centaine de racailles auraient affronté les forces de l’ordre. (LCI)Les “hostilités ont démarré vers 22 heures par l’agression d’automobilistes à coups de fumigènes, de pierres et de pavés par des jeunes des quartiers de la Vigne-Blanche et des Musiciens”

So on the night of February 1, a group of 100 North African youths harassed scores of automobile drivers by throwing stones and concrete blocks at them in Les Mureaux, a town of 32,000 in the Yvelines district. When police arrived the scum turned against them. Seven officers were wounded.


In Lille, a large industrial town perched on the Franco/Belgian border, there was also an arson attack a police station:

Lille (Nord, 180 000 hab). Mardi 30 janvier 2007. Attaque de poste de police à la voiture enflammée... A l’issue d’un rodéo, une voiture volée a été placée tôt ce matin devant le commissariat de Lille-Sud, puis incendiée volontairement provoquant de sérieux dégâts. D’après les enquêteurs, il pourrait d’agir d’une vengeance. Récemment plusieurs jeunes du quartier ont été interpellés pour toute une série de vols et d’agressions.

So on Tuesday, January 30, after a rodeo with a stolen car, the driver parked it in front of a police precinct and set it on fire, causing considerable damage to the station. Investigators think it's a vengeance act, because recently several youths from the quarter were arrested after a string of robberies and abuses. Sniff some of the drab atmosphere people. This is Eurabia:




Intifada in Chanteloup-les-Vignes, another Parisian suburb, February 3. From Le Monde, of all newspapers:

PARIS (Reuters) - Des policiers ont été pris à partie vendredi soir à Chanteloup-les-Vignes, dans les Yvelines, par des individus qui ont mis le feu à des véhicules, déclare-t-on à la préfecture de ce département. Une policière a été blessée dans les heurts, intervenus aux alentours de 20h00, a-t-on ajouté, en précisant que les individus avaient fait descendre le chauffeur d'un bus avant de mettre le feu à son véhicule. Un ou deux autres véhicules ont été incendiés.

Police fought "individuals" [I told you it was Le Monde! - MFBB] on Friday night in Chanteloup-les-Vignes, who were setting fire on vehicles. A female police officer was wounded. The "individuals" [again! Le Monde! - MFBB] had also forced a bus driver out of his vehicle before setting git on fire. Another one or two cars were set alight too.


Also on February 3, in Cugnaux, a suburb of Toulouse, an important city in France's southwest, 4 buses burned out. Le Figaro:

Le 03 février 2007 à 14h32 Incendie à Toulouse: 4 cars brûlés. Quatre autocars ont été entièrement détruits, samedi matin à Cugnaux, dans la banlieue de Toulouse, par un incendie vraisemblablement d'origine criminelle. L'incendie a visé un autocar et, par rayonnement, a détruit les autres, garés sur une place de cette commune.

Cugnaux, Toulouse. One bus attacked, fire spread to three others standing nearby.

Intifada in Mans, Saturday February 3. From I Like Your Style:

Banlieue du Mans (Sarthe, 145 000 hab). Samedi 3 février. Attaque de bus au cocktail Molotov. Le bus fonctionnait au gaz. Bilan : bus détruit, 3 maisons endommagées.

In Mans, pop. 145,000, a bus was attacked with a molotov cocktail. The bus seems to have ran on liquid gas. Bus destroyed, three houses damaged.


In Mantes-la-Ville, Fwench youths attacked police throwing stones and bottles filled with acid. One officer wounded.

A Mantes-la-Ville, des racailles auraient attaqués des policiers avec des jets de pierre et des bouteilles d’acide, un policier blessé.

In Nice, the Church of Saint Antoine de Ginestière has been set on fire. There is an amazing silence in French media, MSM and local, about this event. I found two bloggers reporting on it, ILYS (I Like your style, see above) and Vox Galliae. Vox Galliae has the following exerpt:

La délégation départementale de l’AGRIF [a volunteer organization against racism, but with strong christian background - MFBB] condamne fermement l’incendie criminel qui a ravagé l’église Saint Antoine de Ginestière à Nice. Après l’incendie d’une église à Marseille fin 2006 et les profanations qui ont eu lieu dans plusieurs églises du Vaucluse ces dernières semaines, il faut bien constater qu’un climat de haine et de violence anti-chrétienne s’installe en région PACA.

So what it says is that this AGRIF outfit strongly condems the arson attack (good luck with that) and notes that, after another arson attack on a Marseille church in late 2006 and defamations in several churches in the Vaucluse region these last few weeks, one has to conclude a climate of hatred and anti-christian violence is taking hold of the region.


MFBB.


STOP MUSLIM IMMIGRATION TO WESTERN COUNTRIES!!!
STOP MUSLIM IMMIGRATION TO WESTERN COUNTRIES!!!
STOP MUSLIM IMMIGRATION TO WESTERN COUNTRIES!!!
STOP MUSLIM IMMIGRATION TO WESTERN COUNTRIES!!!
STOP MUSLIM IMMIGRATION TO WESTERN COUNTRIES!!!
STOP MUSLIM IMMIGRATION TO WESTERN COUNTRIES!!!
STOP MUSLIM IMMIGRATION TO WESTERN COUNTRIES!!!
STOP MUSLIM IMMIGRATION TO WESTERN COUNTRIES!!!
STOP MUSLIM IMMIGRATION TO WESTERN COUNTRIES!!!
STOP MUSLIM IMMIGRATION TO WESTERN COUNTRIES!!!
STOP MUSLIM IMMIGRATION TO WESTERN COUNTRIES!!!
STOP MUSLIM IMMIGRATION TO WESTERN COUNTRIES!!!
STOP MUSLIM IMMIGRATION TO WESTERN COUNTRIES!!!
STOP MUSLIM IMMIGRATION TO WESTERN COUNTRIES!!!
STOP MUSLIM IMMIGRATION TO WESTERN COUNTRIES!!!
STOP MUSLIM IMMIGRATION TO WESTERN COUNTRIES!!!
STOP MUSLIM IMMIGRATION TO WESTERN COUNTRIES!!!
STOP MUSLIM IMMIGRATION TO WESTERN COUNTRIES!!!
STOP MUSLIM IMMIGRATION TO WESTERN COUNTRIES!!!
STOP MUSLIM IMMIGRATION TO WESTERN COUNTRIES!!!
STOP MUSLIM IMMIGRATION TO WESTERN COUNTRIES!!!
STOP MUSLIM IMMIGRATION TO WESTERN COUNTRIES!!!
STOP MUSLIM IMMIGRATION TO WESTERN COUNTRIES!!!
STOP MUSLIM IMMIGRATION TO WESTERN COUNTRIES!!!
STOP MUSLIM IMMIGRATION TO WESTERN COUNTRIES!!!
STOP MUSLIM IMMIGRATION TO WESTERN COUNTRIES!!!
STOP MUSLIM IMMIGRATION TO WESTERN COUNTRIES!!!
STOP MUSLIM IMMIGRATION TO WESTERN COUNTRIES!!!
STOP MUSLIM IMMIGRATION TO WESTERN COUNTRIES!!!
STOP MUSLIM IMMIGRATION TO WESTERN COUNTRIES!!!
STOP MUSLIM IMMIGRATION TO WESTERN COUNTRIES!!!
STOP MUSLIM IMMIGRATION TO WESTERN COUNTRIES!!!
STOP MUSLIM IMMIGRATION TO WESTERN COUNTRIES!!!
STOP MUSLIM IMMIGRATION TO WESTERN COUNTRIES!!!
STOP MUSLIM IMMIGRATION TO WESTERN COUNTRIES!!!
STOP MUSLIM IMMIGRATION TO WESTERN COUNTRIES!!!
STOP MUSLIM IMMIGRATION TO WESTERN COUNTRIES!!!
STOP MUSLIM IMMIGRATION TO WESTERN COUNTRIES!!!
STOP MUSLIM IMMIGRATION TO WESTERN COUNTRIES!!!
STOP MUSLIM IMMIGRATION TO WESTERN COUNTRIES!!!
STOP MUSLIM IMMIGRATION TO WESTERN COUNTRIES!!!
STOP MUSLIM IMMIGRATION TO WESTERN COUNTRIES!!!
STOP MUSLIM IMMIGRATION TO WESTERN COUNTRIES!!!
STOP MUSLIM IMMIGRATION TO WESTERN COUNTRIES!!!
STOP MUSLIM IMMIGRATION TO WESTERN COUNTRIES!!!
STOP MUSLIM IMMIGRATION TO WESTERN COUNTRIES!!!
STOP MUSLIM IMMIGRATION TO WESTERN COUNTRIES!!!
STOP MUSLIM IMMIGRATION TO WESTERN COUNTRIES!!!
STOP MUSLIM IMMIGRATION TO WESTERN COUNTRIES!!!
STOP MUSLIM IMMIGRATION TO WESTERN COUNTRIES!!!

You heard me.

ROMANIA AND BULGARIA JOIN EU - ONE MORE STEP TOWARDS A UNITED STATES OF EUROPE?

This may have escaped the radar of many, including in Europe itself, but since January 1, 2007, two more countries, Romania and Bulgaria, have joined the European Union, which de facto now counts 27 members states with a total population of around 480 million people. The borders of the "United States of Europe" in being now stretch from Ireland's Atlantic Coast to the Black Sea. Though small countries for US standards, R&B, as both Eastern European countries jokingly call themselves (though they argue over who stands for the Rhythm and who for the Blues), their entrance is quite significant for the Union. Together they add not only 30 million inhabitants, but also their fast growing economies. Since 1998 e.g. Bulgaria, with capital Sofia and a population of 7.7 million, has known a year-on-year GDP growth of over 4%, with a peak of 5.8% last year, far higher than most EU member states. Romania, with capital Bucharest and a 22-million strong population, does even better: its economy is growing at about 7% per year.



To those who have been following DowneastBlog for awhile, it will come as no surprise that personally, I hail this development - albeit cautiously. That is not to say that I do not understand though that Americans could be fretting about it. After all, in many respects European countries, and the EU itself, have, especially over the past five years but already long before that, proven to be questionable allies at best and downright traitors at worst. But... keep in mind that even so, Europe is STILL the closest ally America has on the world stage. We are each others biggest commercial partners, with our bilateral trade flow dwarfing anything else on the planet. Basically, we share the same roots and, theoretically at least, the same values. Americans do not feel aliens in European cities the way they may feel so in Bangalore, Nairobi or Bejing, and the same goes for Europeans in American cities. And don't forget, that even with our lackuster performance in the WOT thus far, European armour and infantry DO stand side by side with our American friends in Afghanistan, battling the same inhuman enemy - though I'd indeed prefer we'd get the effort some more muscle.



Now onto the reasons why I still think of the EU morphing into the USE as a good thing, and even a necessary development. As a Rightwinger, I am in favour of limited government. That is not to say I'm following my pal Scott all the way, when he professes his belief in libertarianism. Or, for that matter, faithful reader Mark, another Cato Institute aficionado. They may say I'm a Euroweenie after all. I say I don't believe in a skeleton state. So, I'm not as appalled as they would be over the inevitability of "more" European state which will invariably follow every further European enlargement or every further move towards more integration. It's something I am willing to accept because I am convinced that the bonuses of more Europe will outweigh the burden of more state. And if as Americans you think the European Union in its present form or in its future form as a "Superstate" is an ugly thing, I would like you to consider that in the early history of your very own country, there too was a dynamic towards more integration, towards more control from a governmental body superimposed over the original thirteen. I am not really an expert in American history, but what I do know is that between the victory of the loose coalition of the nascent American states over Britain and the implementation of the US Constitution on March 4, 1789, there was a period in which the US's political fabric very much resembled the one of the European Union today. I know that the relations between its member states were governed by the Articles of Confederation (1777), and that they were soon deemed imperfect. I know that some states had their own currency, their own army, their own petty navy and some even their own ambassadors abroad. And I know that there was much rivalry and serious potential for conflicts between them. Personally, I would like to compare this crucial, but by no means final step in American history with Europes Treaty of Rome of 1957, where what was then called the European Economic Community was born, but where also the nuclei of a European "government" (the European Commission) and "parliament" (the European Assembly), as well as a European Court of Justice, saw the light. The Treaty of Rome affirmed in its preamble that the signatory States were "determined to lay the foundations of an ever closer union among the peoples of Europe" (thus specifically affirming the political objective of a progressive political integration). It almost sounds like an echo of 180 years earlier, when the Articles of Confederation stated in III.) that "The said States hereby severally enter into a firm league of friendship with each other."



You, as Americans, may understandably be incensed over Europes lukewarm support until now in the War On Terror. To a considerable degree Europes deficiency as an ally can be attributed to the most widespread political affiliation among the ruling parties in Europes governments: Socialism. Socialists can never be trusted to physically fight for anything - as my compatriot Paul Beliën once aptly remarked "not even for their own hedonistic values". In their sick, perverted logic anyone who defends by force what is dear to him, even if it is his own country - even if it is his own family - becomes morally equivalent to the agressor the moment he picks up that gun. However, when as a result crushing defeat against that agressor becomes a reality, most Socialists have no quarrels siding with the invading party. In Belgium during WWII, one of the most notorious collaborators with the Nazis was a key Socialist personage and former Belgian PM, Hendrik De Man, who in summer 1940 exhorted the Belgian population to submit to the Nazi occupier with the words: "Here is what I ask you to do. Do not believe resistance should be offered to the occupier. Accept the fact of his victory and try to draw lessons from it. For the working classes and for socialism, this collapse of a decrepit world, far from being a disaster, is a deliverance." Some forty years later, in the early eighties, the leftwing motto during Europes great anti-American demonstrations, when the US was deploying Cruise Missiles for Europes defense against the Soviet missile threat, was: "Better Red than Dead". Here, too, was an echo. But this time its smell was foul and its aim perverted.



But socialist's inherent cowardness and immorality is only part of the explanation. It seems to me the larger part lies exactly in Europes still not fulfilled mission of complete integration. Imagine America on September 12, 2001 as merely some kind of free trade zone where every state would have had its own sovereign government, only symbolically subordinated to a rather powerless American Union Commission sitting in Washington. Would America's immediate response to 9/11 - the overthrow of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan - have been as swift as it was now? I doubt it very much, or rather, I'm sure it would not have been. I can, e.g., imagine the state of Texas arguing fiercely in the American Parliament for immediately dispatching the combined fleets and air arms to the Indian Ocean, while the states of California and Massachusetts would veto it, arguing for talks with Kabul instead.


In September 1987, during the Bicentennial Observance of the US Constitution, then President Ronald Reagan recalled the uncertainty of those early days, between the victory over the British at Yorktown in 1781, when the Articles went into effect, and the ratification of the Constitution eight years later. I ask you Americans to ponder for a moment - when you again feel exasperated over Europes seemingly inherent undeciseveness and its lack of moral courage to take the hard decisions - did not America two hundred years ago find herself in a very similar position as Europe over the past decades? To me, as a European, the words of that great President sound emblematic for Europes present dilemmas:

...The consensus that it was necessary to establish a strong national government emerged very early on, when the delegates agreed to scrap the Articles of Confederation and write a new Constitution that would be supreme. The new government was to have three branches—legislative, executive, and judicial. The rest of the negotiations, for all the serious disagreements and famous compromises that occurred, really amounted to working out the details.

...Sometimes we're tempted to think of the birth of our country as one such golden age, a time characterized primarily by harmony and cooperation. In fact, the Constitution and our government were born in crisis. The years leading up to our Constitutional Convention were some of the most difficult our nation ever endured. This young nation, threatened on every side by hostile powers, was on the verge of economic collapse. In some States inflation raged out of control; debt was crushing. In Massachusetts, ruinously high taxes provided—or provoked an uprising of poor farmers led by a former Revolutionary War captain, Daniel Shays.

Trade disputes between the States were bitter and sometimes violent, threatening not only the economy but even the peace. No one thought him guilty of exaggeration when Edmund Randolph described the perilous state of the confederacy. “Look at the public countenance,” he said, “from New Hampshire to Georgia! Are we not on the eve of war, which is only prevented by the hopes from this Convention?”

The Articles of Confederation, all could see, were not strong enough to hold this new nation together. But there was no general agreement on how a stronger Federal Government should be constituted—or, indeed, whether one should be constituted at all. There were strong secessionist feelings in many parts of the country. In Boston, some were calling for a separate nation of New England. Others felt the 13 States should divide into three independent nations. And it came as a shock to George Washington, recently traveling in New England, to find that sentiment in favor of returning to a monarchy still ran strong in that region.

We remember, too, that when the Annapolis Convention in September 1786 resolved to ask for a meeting of the states to consider both commercial and political problems of the thirteen states, only five states were present. The resistance to central planning, to the idea of a central, federal government, was so strong that the Continental Congress rejected the idea of calling a “Constitutional Convention.” Their resolution invited states to send delegates to Philadelphia in May, 1787, “for the sole and express purpose of revising the Articles of Confederation.”

Once peace had been achieved, the rivalries and tensions between the states began to surface. What happened was what has happened to every victorious alliance in history; the 13 allies began to fall out; Virginia and Maryland quarreled over boundaries and navigation, Pennsylvania and Connecticut over territory in western Pennsylvania claimed by Connecticut, New Jersey and New York over commercial matters. Since each state was free to maintain its own army and navy, there were threats—and acts—to resolve claims with force. In Massachusetts, Colonel Shays' troops engaged in a small war against state forces. For a time Shays' Rebellion closed courts in Massachusetts....

Personally, I think this is a marvellous speech - and I would ask Americans to look at Europes attempts to integrate further economically, politically and militarily through the prism of their own experience. Yes, more integration will mean more state. But I absolutely reject the dubious claim, repeated over and over again by far too many Americans and, to my great dismay, a large part of the European Right, that "Europe" is merely a bureaucratic colossus where non-elected shadowy officials impose undemocratic rules and laws on the European people. Even though there has now been a law-making European Parliament in various forms for fifty years, the detractors obviously fail to recognize that all Europeans ELECTED their law-makers! I, like all Belgians, have been regularly offered the chance to send people I deemed capable to the European Parliament, and then for sceptics to keep claiming European Laws are simply ordained by some ghastly, omnipresent and unaccountable political entity is gross ignorance at best and a willful lie at worst. I was talking about the European Right and almost naturally, my thoughts wander to my ideological confrères over at The Brussels Journal, who will never fail to rail against "Europe" and its institutions - especially the Brits. It is a very dismaying realizaton for me that with my support for a United States of Europe - the ultimate embodiment of a continent reinventing itself, a unique political project neither matched, parallelled nor approached anywhere on the planet - I find myself virtually alone. Yes, there's gross abuses of EU funds. Yes, the EU's REACH chemical regulations legislation is likely to give Europes and Americas chemical industry massive headaches. Yes, Europes CAP (Common Agricultural Policy) is not tenable. But WHY do we never hear these pundits at least acknowledge the blessings of the common market? Has not Europes economy benefited enormously from the free traffic of money, goods, persons and services? Is it not a huge step forward to be able to pay your entrance ticket to Château de Chambord in the Loire Valley, or your zurek soup in Zgorzelec just across the German/Polish border, or your Gorenje vacuum cleaner in Ljubljana with the same currency - in Euros? There are setbacks to the integration, but the objections to the European superstate are in the same category as the constant bitching of the average American against his federal government, and guess what? I think that is in se a good thing. Constantly scrutinizing the policy of your big gumint in distant Washington keeps the ones in charge there on tiptoe. But I for one am convinced that as much as ordinary Americans like to rail against Washington DC, in their hearts they would not want to swap the US as it is now for a present-day European alternative - a colourful collection of small geopolitical entities, each of which is virtually powerless on a world stage where the upcoming power players, not necessarily friendly, are monolithic mastodonts like India and China. The time has come for the European Right to quit their old provincial attitudes vis-à-vis the European Union, and to bolster instead the ranks of likeminded dignitaries already present in Europes institutions, to provide an effective counterweight to the Left's paralyzing hold over much of this domain. In other words, quit whining along the sidelines, and flush the Euro Left out of Europes power corridors.


We have already come a long way. And in many respects, the European Union seems like a close relative of the United States of America. Whereas The US has NASA, the EU has ESA, the European Space Agency, with a staff of about 2,000 and a yearly budget of 2,904 million Euros (2006 estimate). ESA operates EAC, its astronaut training facility in Cologne, Germany. In Noordwijk, The Netherlands, ESA's Tech Hub ESTEC develops its spacecraft. ESA's launching base is in Kourou, French Guyana. The EU has its (embryonal) army, the Eurocorps, a now 60,000-strong force drawn from the armies of Belgium, Germany, France, Luxembourg and Spain, technically independent from any military HQ within these countries and subordinated to the EU. Eurocorps HQ is in Strasbourg, France, and while most of the 60,000 personnel are just earmarked constituent troops, Eurocorps has one unit on permanent standby, the Franco-German Brigade. Those countries of the EU which fulfill the necessary conditions for membership of the so-called EMU (European Monetary Union), use the same currency. Most of the original 15 are EMU members, with notable exceptions the UK, Denmark and Sweden. The latest member to join the club - and the only one of the "gulf" of ten new eastern european EU states, is little Slovenia, which on January 1, 2007 exchanged its tolar for the new currency. There are other signs of increasing European integration, perhaps less profound, but all the more visible. One of them are European number plates on cars. Each country used to have its own design, now virtually all plates sport the characteristic golden stars on a blue background, and many plates use black numbers on a white background. The one in the photo is on a Finnish car, not looking that much different from its German counterpart. And then there is of course the fact that here and there manufacturers start to dispose with the label "Made in France", "Made in Spain", and replace it quietly by "Made in EU". I suppose I, too, will feel a tinge of nostalgia at having to give up one more reference to my native country, which I still like (I love the country, I loathe the Belgian state). But if we Europeans are to count on the world stage in years to come, we'll have to downplay the romanticism a bit. And after all, I suppose that even by the time that I am able to elect my own European President, I will still be able to cheer for Belgoland the way an American from Keene, New Hampshire, prides himself on being a Granite Stater.


MFBB.

IN MEMORIAM SERGEI KOROLYOV (1907-1966).

Vladimir Putin is obviously not a guy I'd like to have a beer with, and lately he displays a frightening tendency to follow in the footsteps of your average communist dictator. Personally, I have always suspected he was behind the bombings of apartment blocks in Moscow in 1999 so that he could blame it on Chechen rebels and have an excuse for invading Chechnya a second time. And that was just the beginning.

But last week Putin did something right.

He paid homage to Sergei Pavlovich Korolyov, Russia's Wernher von Braun. An outstanding rocket scientist, he was the man behind the Soviet space exploration programme. It was he who launched Sputnik and brought the first man into orbit, whether it be Yuri Gagarin or the son of aeronautical designer Ilyushin. On January 12, 2007, Putin praised Korolyov as being "not only a brilliant scientist. He was a true pioneer, author of the first great victory of space conquest". Flowers were laid at the space pioneer's grave (in a Kremlin wall), a concert was held at the Korolyov Ground Control Centre (just outside Moscow) and there was even a tribute via videolink from the International Space Station's current crew.





Who was this Korolyov? He was born in 1907 in Zhitomir, a provincial centre in the Ukraine, as the son of a literature teacher. The young student proved to be a natural talent in mathematics, and studied at the Odessa Building Trades School, the Kiev Polytechnic Institute, and the Moscow N.E. Bauman Higher Technical School. He also displayed an ardent passion for aviation, designing his first glider, the K-5, at age seventeen. Influenced by the writings of Russia's first space exploration theoretician, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, Korolyov became interested int he possibilities of rocket-propelled aeronautical design, and in September 1931, together with a certain F. A. Tsander, founded the Moscow rocketry organisation GIRD (Group for Investigation of Reactive Motion), which was funded by the Soviet military. The sponsors did not have to wait long: in 1933 Korolyov and Tsander launched the USSR's first liquid-propellant missile, the GIRD-9. By then the regime had developed a keen interest in the military potential of rocket aircraft and missiles, and expanded GIRD into RNII (Reaction Propulsion Scientific Research Institute). They brought in Korolyov's lifelong rival, Valentin Glushko, another brilliant aeronautical designer, who was put in charge of rocket engine design, while Korolyov concentrated on airframes. The two would become lifelong rivals. Their work culminated in Soviet Russia's first rocket propelled manned aircraft: Korolyov's RP-318, which was powered by Glushko's ORM-65 rocket engine.

Then came, from 1937 on, the Stalinist purges and one year later both Glushko and Korolyov, who was denounced by the former, found themselves in prison, accused of "economic sabotage". Korolyov was sent to a Gulag Camp in Kolyma, Siberia, where he was to dig for gold. The inhumane treatment there cost him his health, which would ultimately lead to his untimely death. It was Korolyov's - and the world's - great fortune that after a couple of months yet another famous Russian aeronautical engineer, Andrei Tupolev, himself a prisoner(!), was able to persuade the Gulag administration to have the rocket scientist work for him in Sharashka TsKB-29, or "prisoner design bureau 29", in Omsk. The sharashkas were special camps set up by the regime in order to not completely waste their human capital. In TsKB-29 Korolyov worked for some time on the Tu-2 bomber, after which he was transferred to another sharashka in Kazan, where he became deputy of... Valentin Glushko. In 1944 both Korolyov and Glushko were released on parole (having sat out the greater part of their sentence of eight years anyway) and the year after both were dispatched to Germany to evaluate captured A-4 ballistic missiles (he A-4 is better known as the V-2, Hitlers Vergeltungswaffe-2). Yet one year later, in 1946, Korolyov was appointed a Department Chief of RNII-8 in Podlipki, northeast of Moscow, and it was from this moment on that his career took a huge flight. RNII-8's task was the development and industrial production of missile technolgy based on German hardware, and in the following years Korolyov first designed the R-2 (a Russian variant of the A-4/V-2) and R-3 ballistic missiles, until, after partly leaning on German concepts (Groettrup's) coming up with the famous R-7, the worlds first Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM).



Ironically, the original R-7, intended to be launched with a thermonuclear warhead against the United States, was already obsolete before it ever took off. But its derivative, the R-7 Launcher, nicknamed semyorka, was to prove itself an indispensable tool for the Russian space program for the next half century. Indeed, the R-7 derived space boosters are used till this very day to carry Russian manned spacecraft and payloads into orbit and are even right now used for delivering personnel and supplies for the International Space Station. In popular literature, not the denomination R-7 is used but a name, like Sputnik, Vostok (swallow), Voskhod, Molniya or the most ubiquitous term, Soyuz (unity). Actually, the Soviet denomination system caused some confusion in the West because subsequent R-7 generations were often named after newly designed payloads: the R-7 carrying the world's first radio satellite, the Sputnik, was called Sputnik itself, the R-7 bringing into orbit the first manned spacecraft, the Vostok, was of the Vostok type, the R-7 with the first Soyuz (a more sophisticated, three-man crew spacecraft) was of the Soyuz type and so on.

But the overall look of the R-7 family throughout five decades has remained very much the same: a two-stage booster of which the first stage consists of a core element with a main engine (originally the four-chamber RD-107) and the characteristic four strapped-on boosters, and then a second stage with another main engine (originally the four-chamber RD-108), on top of which the payload is mounted. I'm sure those who sometimes watch Russian spacecraft take off recognize the craft - at first sight looking very much like Sergei Korolyov's maiden R-7 which first took off almost fifty years ago on May 15, 1957 , or the one which, on October 4 of that same year, orbited the first man-made satellite, the PS-1 or Sputnik-1. Of course, the propulsion system was Glushko's work, and the control systems Pilyugin's, but Korolyov was Chief Designer. Without him, the Soviets might not have succeeded in putting first a radio satellite and then a couple of dogs around the earth already in the fifties. Or, on April 12, 1961, the world's first astronaut, fighter pilot Yuri Gagarin, who was the first man to orbit the planet.

There's another reason, especially for Americans, to like this man. Korolyov, although basically working for the Soviet military, was fascinated by the conquest of space. As we have seen, his R-7 was a failure as an ICBM platform. It needed huge launching pads, was complex to assemble and had lenghty launching procedures. It used cryogenic liquid oxygen for fuel and was radio controlled. Being overweight, it only had a range of 6,800 kilometres, meaning that with a thermonuclear warhead on top it could basically only wipe out the northeastern tip of the United States. Even though MFBB would dread such a scenario, because ripping the state of Maine off the face off the earth would mean I'd have to pay myself for keeping DowneastBlog online, it's clear that the Soviet top brass was not pleased with the military potential of Korolyov's designs. He fell totally out with the Marshals and Generals when he was able to convince the Politburo to drop the development of the Zenit military reconnaissance satellite, begun in 1956, in favor of manned spaceflight, and when the R-7 (ICBM)'s successor, the R-9 (ICBM), proved to be an impractical weapon too, the rift was complete. Note that Korolyov stood virtually alone in this conflict, since not only the other ICBM designers (Chelomei, Yangel) were much more eager to please the military, but also because in addition, Korolyov was standing increasingly alone with his preference for cryogenic liquid oxygen fuel over solid or hypergolic (self-igniting) fuels. Use of the latter, albeit more dangerous, kept the missiles ready to fly at any moment, while Korolyov's cryogenic liquids could only be loaded onto the rockets right before launch, since they boiled off at normal tempareatures. Nothing illustrates the Soviet military's preference - or their dislike for Korolyov - better than how they deployed their early ICBM's: only 54 of Korolyov's R-9 missiles, against 380 of Yangel's R-16's, and 800 of Chelomei's UR-100's (the latter was considered the Russian answer to the US's Minuteman ICBM).

Still, Korolyov's standing was high: his Vostok and Voskhod manned spaceflight programs meant good propaganda for the regime. These years of frantic activity, when Korolyov led the development of several generations of (admitted, unsuccessful) ballistic missiles, launch vehicles, interplanetary probes (Luna, Venera), science, military and communications satellites, and manned spacecraft, marked the high point of his career. His finest realization with regards to the last category is without doubt the Soyuz spacecraft, which in 2006 achieve the milestone of a 40-year operational career. This well-known, most successful spacecraft ever consists of three parts with from front to back, an onion-shaped orbital module, a small aerodynamic reentry module, and a cylindrical service module with characteristic solar panels. A Soyuz offers three cosmonauts nine cubic metres of living space and provides life support for up to 3.2 days. A total of about 230 have been built, in a number of variants, for instance the unm

Things looked suddenly more bright for Korolyov in 1964, when first in August he obtained approval for a Soviet manned lunar lading program. Then, two months later, Kruschev was overthrown, and one of the side-effects was that Chelomei, a favorite of Kruschev and always more concerned about the military aspects in space exploration, was suddenly out of favor. In this crucial fall, Korolyov was able to gather under his control all elements of the Soviet manned space program, and work was begun on the giant, five-stage N-1 rocket, the Soviet Saturn-V.

Then, in 1965 Korolyov was diagnosed with colon cancer. In January of the year after he checked into a Moscow hospital, where he was operated by the Minister of Health himself. Colon surgery was not his area of expertise, and an operation which should have gone off smoothly lasted five hours and went horriby wrong. On January 14, 1966, the father of Soviet Space Conquest died on the operating table, 59 years old, and with him the Russian Moon Landing Program. It is true that the design of the N-1 was from the start marred by technical problems, and that Korolyov's insistence on an automated Moon approach unnecessarily complicated the undertaking. It is true that his stubbornness alienated him from other very talented chief designers, most notably Glushko. On the other hand, his genius, grandiose vision, enthusiasm and ability to inspire and motivate his co-workers and subordinates were legendary. A little more than two weeks after his death, on February 3, 1966, one of his brainchilds, the Luna 9 probe, soft-landed on the moon and sent back the first photographic data of earths closest celestial companion. It was a victory from the grave as well as a fitting epitaph. Although talented, Korolyov's successor, Mishin, was not able to lead the N-1 project the way his mentor might have done. Had Korolyov been allowed to live a couple of years longer, there might - there just have might - have been first a Hammer and Sicle on the Moon instead of a Stars and Stripes:





MFBB.


UPDATE:

Some twenty years ago, when I was a student in Ghent, I bought this particular volume in some bookshop:



Its title is, as you can see, "Three paces beyond the horizon", and it contains a large number of anecdotal information (not too technical) on the lives and works of a host of Russian/Soviet rocket scientists and/or space pioneers.

It is a rather thin volume, perhaps half an inch thick, and the photo shows it about real size (okay, maybe it's slightly larger - but not much). Printing quality is atrocious (characters not aligned e.g.), the overall tone is too bookish, and there are obvious lapsuses here and there, starting with the cover itself: one gets no clue who exactly the gentlemen are on the assembled photo. I knew the man to the upper left is Konstantin Tsiolkovski, a famous theoretician who a.o. established that rockets would have to enter space burning up stages in the process. I just found out the fella below him must be Keldysh And the guy below Keldysh is Mikhail Yangel. In the upper right corner we find, of course, Sergei Korolyov. But about the other I'm not sure, though I suspect strongly the guy to the right of Yangel is Chelomei and the one below Korolyov Isaev.

But despite its flaws, I consider this book one of my prized possessions, indispensable in my library. And not only because through it, I got a fascinating glimpse of what went in Soviet space exploration during the Cold War. The fact that it was printed very shortly before the demise of the USSR means something to me too: it's a Time Document of an era which has come to a close.

WORST. UN SECRETARY GENERAL. EVER.

“You have been sat to long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of god, go!.”

- Oliver Cromwell, April 1653


A.) THE SEX SCANDALS.

True, the UN has been plagued with them since the early nineties (when that other illustrious UN leader, Boutros Boutros Ghali, ran the show), but under Annan's tenure it got from bad to worse. The proliferation of nuke technology is one thing, the proliferation of sexual misbehaviour by "his" troops yet quite another still, from child exploitation in Haïti and Liberia over prostitution in Kosovo and Bosnia to UN staffers in Sudan picking up children for sex in their white cars, to Jordanian Blue Helmets in Timor sent home with injured penises because they tried their luck with goats. The worst incidents took place in Congo though, as UN "peacekeepers", supposedly assisting war refugees, made teenage girls and women prostitute themselves for food. And it wasn't only the troops. E.g., a French UN logistics expert, Didier Bourguet, now on trial in France, liked screwing literally hundreds of teenage girls so much he shot pornographic videos of his off-road exploits. His lawyer, Claude de Boosere-Lepidi, maintains he was part of a UN pedophile ring active from Africa to southeast Asia. It was in the wake of the 2005 revelations about sexual misconduct during the UN MONUC Operation in Congo, that Annan announced his famous “zero tolerance policy”. We are two years down the road now, and just days ago an article by The Daily Telegraph about the UN Operation in south Sudan had a report about...

... more than 20 victims' accounts claiming that some peacekeeping and civilian staff based in Juba regularly pick up young children in their UN vehicles and force them to have sex.

I suppose it's hard to impose a zero tolerance policy when you're a zero.


B.) THE OIL-FOR-FOOD SCANDAL.

The Oil-for-Food Programme was a UN-devised plan to allow Iraq to buy food, medicine and humanitarian supplies with the income garnered from regulated oil sales, without breaking the sanctions imposed after its 1990 invasion of Kuwait. The purpose was to alleviate the suffering of ordinary Iraqis while keeping a lid on the regime. Through OFF Iraq brought, between 1996 and 2003, oil for an estimated value of 65 billion US$ on the world market. Of this, about 46 billion should have been used for the purchase of humanitarian goods (the rest of the money being meant for war reparations in the Gulf and for financing the program as well as the UNSCOM investigations).

In reality however, individuals and organizations sympathetic to the Iraqi regime were offered oil contracts through OFF. In short, Iraqi oil was secretly sold on the world market and the sellers were allowed to keep a transaction fee, allegedly worth between $0.15 and $0.50/barrel (0.94 and 3.14 $/m³) of oil sold. US Senate investigators estimate the revenue Saddams regime garnered via illicit OFF oil contracts at 13.6bn US$. In addition, it received 4.4 billion more through kickbacks and illegal surcharges on services and goods provided by companies contracted under the OFF programme. The scandal emerged in early 2004, when an Iraqi newspaper published a list of about 270 people including UN officials, politicians and companies. Prominent among these was... the Executive Director of the UN OFF Programme, the Cypriot Benon Sevan , who explained the mysterious sudden appearance of 150,000 US$ on one of his banking accounts as a gift from an aunt on Cyprus who was sadly not able to confirm this version of events on account of unfortunately falling into an elevator shaft and croaking in the process, some time before. That may be, of course. However, another explanation for the magically appearing manna may be that Mr. Sevan was instrumental in soliciting Iraqi oil contracts for a company run by a cousin of Kofi Annan's predecessor, the highly U.N. efficient Secretary General Boutros Boutros Ghali.

Calling the investigations into a.) Annan's Director of the biggest UN programme ever Benon Sevan, into b.) Annan's Russian procurement officer Alexander Yakovlev, who received 1 million US$ in bribes, into c.) Annans Singaporean Chief of the U.N. Office for Internal Oversight Services Dileep Nair, who allegedly paid an employee with money from the oil-for-food programme, and into d.) who not a Greek drama is not such a stretch since there seems to have been at least one guy with a Greek sounding name on board, e.) Annan's Head of the U.N. Security Council Affairs Division, Joseph Stephanides, who was accused of tainting the competitive bidding process for a company to inspect humanitarian goods entering Iraq under OFF.

But from Greek drama it turned into a family drama when the investigations began to include Kofi's brother Kobina Annan, a Ghanaian ambassador, "family friend" Michael Wilson and more importantly, Kofi's son Kojo, who worked for the Swiss-based company Cotecna Inspection Services SA, which from 1998-2003 held a lucrative contract with the U.N. to monitor goods arriving in Saddam Hussein's Iraq under the oil-for-food program. Sure, documents show that Kojo was not on Cotecna's payroll anymore from late 1998 on. But other documents prove that he mysterioulsy kept receiving payments from Cotecna not only through 1999, but also through 2000, 2001, 2002 and right through November 2003, when coincidentally the UN closed the OFF programme and hence there was no further need for Cotecna Services' services. Poor Kojo, according to his pops "an international businessman", had but a $30,000-a-year job. Still he managed to find a spare 250,000 US dollars somewhere to invest in a Swiss football club. Probably it was a gift from an aunt who shortly thereafter fell off the Kilimanjaro.

Credit for unearthing all this fascinating stuff goes largely to the Investigation Committee led by former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker, who started working in April 2004. As we have seen you have Greek dramas and you have family dramas, but upon entering the Islamic World dramas have since two decades or so a habit of becoming increasingly not done. Possibly that's why Annans Pakistani Chief of Staff, Iqbal Riza, later referred to his seven-month-shredding-of-OFF-documents spree, which he curiously started the day after Volcker's team began to work, as destroying "simply extra copies" of records. In other words, nothing to be seen here folks, just move along. As a UN staffer working at the time at Mr. Riza's office testified, every day the U.N. Chief of Staff was present he spent hours destroying documents in a large paper shredder for public use standing in the middle of the office. It later transpired that these documents included confidential information about the Oil-for-Food programme's crucial first three years from 1997 to 1999, during which Annan shaped and expanded OFF and including the period when the UN hired the services of Cotecna, which as we have seen employed Kofi's son Kojo. When asked for an explanation for the frantic shreddingfest, Mr. Riza replied: "In hindsight, I can say, oh goodness, I shouldn't have."

In 2004, then US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld twice offered his resignation to President Bush because of the so-called Abu Ghraib scandal. One year later, when investigations had disclosed the complicity in the Oil-for-Food scandal of Annan's son, his brother, his brother's friend, his predecessor's cousin, his OFF Director, his Chief of Staff, his Chief of Staff's aide, his Procurement Officer, his UNSC Affairs Division Chief, and his Internal Oversight Office's Chief, to name but a few, Annan was asked whether he contemplated resignation, he replied "Hell, no!"

Keep in mind that after his first five-year term in 2001 Annan and the U.N. got rewarded with the Nobel Peace Prize for "their work for a better organized and more peaceful world." Annan himself was lauded for "bringing new life to the organization." In 2001 OFF was running on cruise speed and no-one noticed they actually meant the Baath organization.


C.) THE DARFUR SCREWUP AND WHAT PRECEDED IT.

Nothing new under the sun. To understand why an Annan-led U.N. has been pathetically unable to stop the Darfur genocide one needs to go back a decade. To early 1994 to be precisely, when Kofi Annan was Head of the UN's Department of Peackeeping Operations (DPKO). On January 11 of that year, the Canadian general Romeo Dallaire, operational commander of UN troops in Rwanda, cabled Annan: "Since Unamir mandate, he [Jean-Pierre, a source in a Hutu militia - MFBB] has been ordered to register all Tutsis in Kigali. He suspects it is for their extermination. Example he gave was that in 20 minutes his personnel [the Hutu militia] could kill up to 1,000 Tutsis." Dallaire said he planned to raid the Hutu arms caches within the next 36 hours and concluded with "Where there 's a will, there's a way. Let's go.". Annan's response was, in a cable signed by his deputy, a certain Iqbal Riza:

"We must handle this information with caution. No reconnaissance or other action, including response to request for protection, should be taken by Unamir until clear guidance is received from headquarters."

The next day Dallaire's UNAMIR boss, a Cameroon politician with the incongruous name of Jacques-Roger Booh-Booh, replied to Annan, backing a furious Dallaire, and emphasising that "Jean-Pierre" only had a maximum of 48 hours before he was due to distribute the arms for the massacres. Again Annan's answer, signed by Riza, was negative, ordering Dallaire not to proceed with the planned raid.

There is a lot to be said about responsibility for failing to quell the 1994 Rwandan genocide and virtually all involved had butter on their heads. Not in the least the Belgian government, whose spineless ministers, like the callous cowards they tend to be, withdrew the Belgian UN para battalion immediately after ten paras were murdered, after which the mass killings carried out by emboldened Hutu extremists basically started for real. Dallaire himself was not flawless. The EU was not flawless. Bill Clinton wasn't flawless either. And the Rwandans themselves, murdering each other like beasts were least flawless of all, a fact which is too often ignored for reasons of fucking political correctness. Later, the UN Security Council explicitly accepted responsibility for failing to prevent the 1994 genocide in Rwanda in which an estimated 1,000,000 people were killed. But... Annan was DPKO Director. In the field of players, he was the Coach. He failed miserably. Even as the genocide was well underway, he did nothing, as the top UN boss on the spot, to oppose his mother organization's decision on April 16 to reduce the UNAMIR force to a staff of 270 troops... down from 2,600. Only one month later did the UN authorize the deployment of 5,000 troops, by which time it was far too late. Dallaire has always maintained that if he had had 5,000 well equipped troops from the beginning, he would have been able to stop the murder spree. It was not to be. In Rwanda, Annan got blood on his hands. As he got blood on his hands one year later, when he was AWOL during five crucial days in July 1995 while desperate UNPROFOR troops on the ground tried in vain to get permission for airstrikes against Serb troops about to carry out the Srebrenica massacre.

Ten years later... on April 7, 2004, in New York U.N. Deputy Secretary-General Louise Fréchette addresses a U.N. General Assembly meeting to commemorate the 1994 Rwanda genocide in Rwanda, with the words:

Ten years ago, the international community failed Rwanda. None of us -–neither the Security Council, nor the UN Secretariat, nor governments in general, nor the international media -– paid enough attention to the gathering signs of disaster. And once the genocide was under way, none of us did enough to stop it, even when televised images of slaughter were visible all around the world.

Our sorrow is genuine and deep. But sorrow is of no use to the 800,000 people, at least -– men, women and children -– who were left to suffer the most brutal of deaths. It will be of little meaning to future generations, unless it is transformed into something more: into real, concerted action, by the entire international community, to ensure that such a descent into horror is never again permitted.

The Secretary-General regrets that he is not with us today. But his choice of the Commission on Human Rights as the forum for his statement today seems to me highly appropriate.

How some people in important positions don't drop dead on the spot of shame as they are selling sheer and utter crap perfumed with superheated smelly air to a global audience is beyond me. At the very moment that Mrs. Fréchette was ensuring the global community that such a descent into horror never again be permitted, shedding crocodile tears for one million victims of a killing spree her organization failed to prevent, Sudanese government backed janjaweed militia chalked up the 180,000th victim or so of yet another mass murder happening under the nose of the world. Then US Ambassador to the U.N. John Danforth did his best to have the UNSC label the Darfur drama a genocide, which would have forced the U.N. to act decisively as well as offered it an opportunity to make good on its promise never to let a Rwanda happening again. Powell visited Darfur and urged it be called a genocide. But it was all in vain. As Mark Steyn aptly noted one year and 100,000 corpses later:

If you think the case for intervention in Darfur depends on whether or not the Chinese guy raises his hand, sorry, you're not being serious. The good people of Darfur have been entrusted to the legitimacy of the UN for more than two years and it's killing them. In 2004, after months of expressing deep concern, grave concern, deep concern over the graves and deep grave concern over whether the graves were deep enough, Kofi Annan took decisive action and appointed a UN committee to look into what's going on. Eventually, they reported back that it's not genocide.

Actually, taking into account the voting behaviour of the General Assembly the United States were a bit naïve there with their 2004 Darfur Genocide Yes or No Resolution. After all, in 2003 e.g., voting for 85 yes-or-no US proposals in the General Assembly went as follows: Arab League members voted no in 88.7% of the cases; ASEAN members voted no in 84.5% of the cases; Islamic Conference members voted no in 84.1% of the cases; African members voted no in 83.8% of the cases, and Non-Aligned Movement members voted no in 82.7% of the cases. Luckily for the US, they still had their old pals of the European Union, who voted yes in 45.5% of the cases. Keep in mind that Mrs. Fréchette, of ensuring the global community that such a descent into horror never again be permitted fame, was involved in the Oil-for-Food scandal too and that Mr. Annan's choice of the Commission on Human Rights as the forum for the statement above was highly appropriate indeed since the UN Commission on Human Rights included a.o. Burma, Syria, Libya and Zimbabwe, not to forget Sudan. There was of course the case of Mr. Sichan Siv, US Representative for the HR Council walking out of the commission following the uncontested May 4, 2004 election of Sudan to the board of Human Rights Defenders but everyone knows Americans are bullies and harbor grudges against everyone.


D.) EPILOGUE.

When in December 2006, after a decade as U.N. Secretary General, Kofi Annan finally stepped down, the "President of the World" chose the opportunity to chastize his most important financier and in particular blast President Bush. A speech full of reprimands against the US but which ignored his own plethora of mistakes and failures ended with:

"More than ever today, Americans, like the rest of humanity, need a functioning global system through which the world's people can face global challenges together. And in order to function, the system still cries out for farsighted American leadership in the Truman tradition."

Which only proves that apart from a bad politician, Annan is also a bad historian. Truman did not hesitate to directly intervene militarily in South Korea in 1950 against the communists, and only afterwards cloaked his operation in a UN mantle. As a result of Trumans actions, South Korea today is a prospering democracy, albeit at a cost of some 53,000 dead US soldiers in three years of war - a terrible loss. More than fifty years later, another bold US President intervened directly militarily in two other countries to depose of two of the most horrible regimes the world had ever seen. The struggle is still far from over and the cost of 3,000 US servicemen and -women is a very sad and hard thing to bear - but already, after four years, both these countries have representative, elected governments and parliaments. Annan has been ten years at the helm of the UN. In how many countries where he and his organization intervened directly are there representative, elected governments and parliaments? Bosnia? Kosovo? Is not Congo a quagmire? Somalia? Sudan? In a perfect world, it would be President Bush blasting the epitome of political and human failure, and not the other way round.

But, obviously, this is not a perfect world.


MFBB.