In March, Italy will open the first prison designed exclusively for transgender inmates. Interesting tidbit: most of the 30 transgender criminals were convicted for prostitution or drug-related offences. Victimless crimes – if you don’t count the taxpayers, who are left with the bill for building the prisons and keeping the prisoners in.
Field of Dreams in Italian: If you won’t come, we’ll take it apart:
Another confesses to doing it on a fortnightly basis for over 25 years. Do they teach it in the seminaries?
How liberal is Europe? This will give you an idea:
In 2007, Abdelmalek Bayout admitted to stabbing and killing a man and received a sentenced of 9 years and 2 months. Last week, Nature reported that Pier Valerio Reinotti, an appeal court judge in Trieste, Italy, cut Bayout’s sentence by a year after finding out he has gene variants linked to aggression.
If it’s not his fault, why not just set him free? His genes made him do it. Are we supposed to be able to control our genes?
Over 83 years old and in one of the Netherlands’ government-run hospitals? They’ll let you die with dignity by not giving you any treatment – or food – until you free your bed for the next in line. A Dutch woman at the Orlando Tea Party tells the story of her mother’s last weeks:
The 85 year-old Dutch woman fell in a health care facility and hit her head, was put to bed, and then became non-responsive. She received no medical care, no treatment whatsoever because she was “over 83 years.” Then she was put on morphine so she could “go with dignity,” and also because they needed her room for other patients. It took her 3 1/2 weeks to die from euthanasia as a result of the Netherlands’ government run health care system.
Here is the video:
With dozens of Camorra bosses killed or in prison in Italy, their widows, wives and sisters are rising up to the challenge and becoming madrinas, or godmothers. And they are just as tough and ruthless as the men:
Carabinieri arrested 11 women for drug trafficking in a raid on Naples’ Sarno crime clan in July. A mother and her two adult daughters were arrested on organised-crime charges, including extortion.
“There is a growing number of women who hold executive roles,” said Gen Gaetano Maruccia, commander of the Carabinieri paramilitary police in the Naples area.
“They are either widows or wives of husbands who have been put in prison. They hold the reins. They’re very good at mapping out strategy, even sharper (than the men).”
Some Camorra women still perform the more traditional roles of cutting and repackaging cocaine and heroin in their kitchens or paying teenagers to act as lookouts, others are wielding power on the streets.
Women also extort businesses and shop owners for “pizzo” or protection money and control multi-million pound drug trafficking operations.
Women can do anything men can do, only better.
A German zoo needed some names beginning with an “O” for its baby animals, so one of the critters was obviously going to end up being called Obama. I guess the choice of animal to receive this name was also obvious for those enlightened, liberal Europeans – a monkey.
Here he is with his mother:
(Via Small Bits and Pieces.)
Unsurprisingly, the U.S. media aren’t reporting the news:
The government of Hungary voted to cut income taxes Monday to pull itself out of recession, and America’s media for the most part ignored it.
At the same time, German chancellor Angela Merkel is pushing for lower taxes to help her nation’s economy, and our press have similarly been less than enthusiastic about sharing the news.
The news the media suppress tell even more about their agenda than the news they report.
Bundeswehr General Inspector finds Germany’s professional soldiers to be a bunch of softies who don’t realise they are serving in the army. (This is in addition to being too fat to fight and drinking too much.)
German soldiers have been slammed as too soft, lacking discipline, hating responsibility and showing little desire to serve their country by the General Inspector of the armed forces.
Bundeswehr General Wolfgang Schneiderhahn told politicians in Berlin that the once-mighty German army had become a gang of gripers ‘of all ranks and age’.
‘We have given a good account of ourselves in Afghanistan,’ said the general in best-selling daily Bild – but he quickly went on to criticise troops.
‘We cannot guarantee an all-round, feel-good feeling for our soldiers,’ he said.
He cited trivial complaints reaching him about the quality of sleeping bags used in a deployment in the Congo as an ‘embarrassment’ to the parliament.
He also said that complaints were rising from professional soldiers at being sent on missions overseas.
But Herr Schneiderhahn’s blunt message was: ‘There is no remedy for this – this is their profession.’
The inspector general, speaking before an audience of politicians, heads of industry and senior officers, complained of a tendency to delegate blame from officer to officer to other ranks with no-one willing to take responsibility for their actions.
The general urged soldiers to have ‘a better feeling for discipline and to show a greater readiness to serve the state’.
Well, if the purpose of German soldiers is to “serve the state” – as opposed to serving the country or the people, – then maybe we all should hope they keep them soft, fat and drunk.
Europe is going through one of its periodic rejections of Socialist government until the next election. Don’t expect the continent-wide cradle-to-grave welfare state to be dismantled, though.
Right-leaning parties hailed European Parliament victories as a vote against stimulus spending and corporate bailouts, pledging Monday to forge ahead with conservative approaches to the economic crisis.
Socialists said they would rethink their platforms in the wake of heavy defeats. . . .
“Tonight is a very difficult evening for Socialists in many nations in Europe,” said Martin Schulz, the leader of the Socialists in the European Parliament. “(We will) continue to fight for social democracy in Europe.”
The Europeans are out of wealth to redistribute, and they know the Socialists can’t create it, so they are briefly bringing conservatives in to clean up the economic mess. When the conservatives are done and there is wealth to redistribute again, the Europeans will promptly kick them out and vote the redistributionists back in.
Norway’s oil wealth is keeping it afloat while the world is struggling. So what economic lesson does the New York Times see here? No, it’s not “Drill, drill, drill!” – it’s “Free markets don’t work! Socialism! Socialism!”.
Europeans love their public transport so much that they believe it’s the best way to transport vials of viruses, and when the vials blow up on a crowded intercity train, they just tell everyone not to worry because this particular variety of the swine flu virus just happens to be totally innocuous:
Vials of innocuous swine flu virus have exploded on an intercity train, prompting police to stop passengers before they arrived in Lausanne.
A laboratory technician from a Geneva hospital had been transporting the vials on Monday evening from a veterinary institute in Zurich. The Federal Health Office had called for the development of a diagnostic test for the illness that has killed as many as 150 people worldwide.
Near Fribourg the technician heard a muffled pop. Built-up gas from dry ice surrounding the vials had caused the package to explode.
The carriage in which the technician was travelling held 61 passengers at the time. The Federal Railways did not learn of the incident until 40 minutes later after the train had already passed through Fribourg. Police then stopped the train near Lausanne, inspected passengers and wrote down their names as a precaution.
“This virus is not dangerous to humans,” said Laurent Kaiser, head of the Geneva lab. “It is the same stock as the H1N1 virus but it has nothing in common with the strain spreading around the world.”
The technician and one passenger suffered slight wounds, the only injuries, but some travellers were angry that they had not been informed of the incident sooner.
“Why did they leave us enclosed in a contaminated car for an hour?” asked one passenger. “There was a pregnant woman who panicked. They only informed us sparingly. And why didn’t they stop the train in Fribourg?”
Viruses and other infectious specimens are often transported by train or even post. Kaiser said this particular shipment had been packaged according to regulations.
(Via Gang Stalking World.)
A sorta capitalist old sore:
Europe — given its Western heritage, its own intellectual roots (reflected in the French Enlightenment, the French Revolution, the canonization of 1848, Marx’s natural landscape, postcolonial guilt, the lingering shame of appeasement and collaboration, postmodern anti-Western philosophy), the legacy of the bloody twentieth century, the conditions of the Cold War, and the American defensive shield — has devolved into a largely secular, if not atheistic society.
That it is now shrinking, facing endemic childlessness, can neither assimilate nor deport Islamic immigrants, becoming increasingly protectionist, and is unarmed and pacifist is all logical rather than aberrant. How we still maintain such friendly relations with our now distant European cousins, given our (prior) capitalism, Christianity, fertility, assimilation practices, classlessness, enormous military power, and international profile is the real mystery. One thing that Europe most definitely does not want is for President Obama to turn the United States into a socialist, protectionist, disarmed, pacifist — Europe II — a clone of itself that won’t protect it, provide an open market for its goods, or stimulate the world economy.
While capitalism survives there, it does so by the more successful buying insider influence, relying on hereditary wealth and inherited privilege, avoiding as many laws as possible, and praising publicly socialism as you privately get around it in the real world — sorta like the New York Times lauding Obama’s bailout of GM while it threatens to shut down the Boston Globe unless the print unions shave off millions in wage concessions, or the city officials of Detroit serially alleging racism while they loot what little is left of the city solely for friends and family.
To visit Italy or Greece is to be impressed by the sheer human ingenuity of small entrepreneurs who deal mostly in cash, avoid taxes, arrange barter, skirt regulations (half their restaurants would be shut down for safety violations in the states), hire either family or workers off the books without proper papers, and generally try to have some sort of government job that requires no work but income in down times.
Again, despite our common culture and long shared history, there is bound to be differences. President Obama should read about poor General Pershing’s frustrations with Foch and Petain, the hatred between Wilson and Clemenceau, the tension between de Gaulle and Roosevelt/Truman, Reagan’s efforts to base Pershing missiles to counter Russian tactical nukes, and Bill Clinton’s five-year long frustrations in dealing with Germans, Italians, Greeks, and the Dutch over Milosevic.
Europe beyond mere high taxes and big government: The European philosophy of life.
Do like Hungary:
Not long ago, Hungary was Eastern Europe’s shining light, the one former Communist nation that was destined to catch up to its richer, Western European neighbors. Hungarians were egged on by their government to consume with abandon – to buy that new foreign car or take out a low-interest home mortgage, in euros, while resting assured that German or Austrian banks would guarantee the loans.
Similar thinking was used to justify tens of millions of euros in generous subsidies to pensioners, families with children, and the unemployed. After all, Europe wouldn’t turn a cold shoulder on a country that was on a fast track into the Eurozone, that club of 19 countries that use the euro as the national currency.
So Hungary spent, and the European Union covered the bulging deficit – until, that is, the financial crisis struck like a perfect storm. Today, Hungary is the EU’s most indebted member.
”It went on a spending spree and a borrowing spree when times were good and now Hungary is really on the edge of insolvency,” said British economist and historian Niall Ferguson. ”It’s a little bit like a Latin American economy. It’s spent itself to the brink of ruin.”
A spending spree? And a borrowing spree? You mean this can cause financial ruin?
No, of course not. Not in America. Not when Obama is doing the spreeing. He can get the spreeing right. Those timorous Europeans just didn’t spend and borrow enough.
A world without an America but with two Europes to protect will be an interesting place.
Fighting global warming in the E.U.:
Proposals to tax the flatulence of cows and other livestock have been denounced by farming groups in the Irish Republic and Denmark.
A cow tax of €13 per animal has been mooted in Ireland, while Denmark is discussing a levy as high as €80 per cow to offset the potential penalties each country faces from European Union legislation aimed at combating global warming.
The proposed levies are opposed vigorously by farming groups. The Irish Farmers’ Association said that the cattle industry would move to South America to avoid EU taxes.
Livestock contribute 18 per cent of the greenhouse gases believed to cause global warming, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation. The Danish Tax Commission estimates that a cow will emit four tonnes of methane a year in burps and flatulence, compared with 2.7 tonnes of carbon dioxide for an average car.
Mark Stein’s comment:
I asked White House press secretary Robert Gibbs if the Obama administration was also considering taxing cows, but he said only those cows earning over $250,000 a year. The Cow Jones fell 700 points on the news.
(Via Maggie’s Farm.)
No wonder the Europeans don’t want Turkey in the EU:
Via David Copperfield, whose reader from Germany comments:
Kind of thing we get nearly every day here.
There seems to be a general MO among Turks that:
1) Because it is allowed in Turkey, and they are Turks, they should also be allowed to do it here.
2) They can get away with anything if they have enough people to scream and shout at the [top] of their voice at the booking officer.
3) that ALL laws were made for their PERSONAL convienience, and do not apply to them.
4) although they have lived here 2 and 3 generations NONE of them speak German when talked to by the Police.All the Middle Easteners are the same, and more and more the East Europeans appear to be contracting the desease as well.
By pocketing taxpayers’ money:
Euro MPs are able to become millionaires from their parliamentary allowances and expenses in one single five-year term, a leaked report has revealed.
The internal audit of MEPs’ expenses – kept secret when delivered last year – discloses the ‘corruption, dodgy dealing and poor financial controls’ in the European Parliament.
Some MEPs claimed money for assistants that were neither accredited or registered with the parliament.
Every member could ‘easily’ save more than £1 million from their expenses and pension benefits over a five-year term at the European Parliament, according to the TPA.
Over five years, this includes a subsistence allowance of 117,000 euros, staff allowance of 489,840 euros, office expenses of 243,120 euros, travel expenses of 60,000 euros and an accrued pension of £350,000.
This does not include the MEP salary of £63,291, which is set to increase to £73,584 after the European Parliament elections in June 2009.
It’s a system that looks as though it was created to be abused in this way. They don’t even have to think up creative schemes like loaning money to their own election campaigns.
