Global warming

It's been a long time coming, but I do make the effort to re-appear once in a while, especially since very relevant issues pop up every once in a while. The following link is a priest's analysis of the whole 'global warming' issue. It is a comprehensive account of what is often regarded as a complex issue. One can never automatically come up with or list a whole array of scientific facts for or against the theory, but the very fact that it is universally acknowledged as a theory proves enough that the issue is ultimately one that is going to be disputed. And it is precisely at this point of dispute where the importance of it comes in, because global warming's most zealous advocates claim that what they hold is UNDISPUTED fact, and so it automatically makes the rational person question why they have this view when it is so obviously apparent that the whole issue is speculative and at heart debatable? For me it is enough to, for instance, remember the fact that the earth's climate was a lot hotter several thousand years ago than it is today, to debunk the idea that the earth is presently overheating because of industrial carbon dioxide emissions. But is precisely because of industry that the whole issue of global warming exists, and as such the measures used to supposedly tackle it seem to be overtly political and economic rather than environmental. Basically, the proponents of global warming want to end industry altogether, thereby putting to an end the chance of developing countries growing economically, especially countries which pose the biggest current political threat to western hegemony, notably China and India. I understand that Nikola is a bit hesitant about this issue because he doesn't know all the facts, but I also leave it to all you readers to give him a bit of inspiration, and let him see what really matters when they talk about global warming!:)
http://orthodoxengland.org.uk/gwarm.htm
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Immigration Gumballs

An old video , but worth watching since it highlights the impossibility of solving poverty in poorer countries through immigration into richer countries. Although the video focuses on America, the same is largely true of Europe.




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2 new blogs

I've been busy the last 2 weeks tying up loose ends here in the UK before my impending trip to Serbia, hence the lack of posts. I'll be staying there the entire summer, so posting will probably continue be sporadic.
In the meantime here are a few pieces of interest that I came across recently:
The USA vs. Itself is a good article, written by an American on neo-con war mongering and hypocrisy. Interestingly he mentions US-trained insurgent groups operating within Iran, which would explain the mysterious explosions that I read about occasionally (for instance here and here), but never get much mention in the mainstream media. The media tries to whip up outrage about Iranian influence in Iraq, but no one seems to have a problem that the US has occupied 2 countries that border Iran, and has military bases in others, such as Pakistan. Also I've found another Australian Serb blog, called 'The Serb liberation blog'. Both his blog, and the American one, Detain This are going in my links section.
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It's red faces all round over EU's dirty movie

Just when I thought I couldn't detest the EU any more than I already did...

The European Union has turned to shock tactics in its latest bid for self-promotion... making its own dirty video. In a bid to boost interest in the workings of the EU, the communications commission have made a video of 18 couples having sex.
The promotional 44-second video, posted on the website YouTube, opens with a man and a woman stripping each other naked. The video shows 18 couples having sex in an unusual bid to promote the workings of the European Union. What follows are a series of bed-rocking scenes, with sweaty passionate clinches in all manner of positionings. Two gay couples are included in the interests of sexual equality.
The highly charged scenes are interchanged with snaps of bottles rattling on a shelf and an egg on toast shaking under a grill. The film, entitled "Film Lovers Will Love This", finishes with the couples' orgasms and the double entendre "Let's come together".
It then tells the audience "Millions of cinema lovers enjoy European films... every year. Europe supports European films".
But not everyone who has watched the video, found it amusing. Maciej Giertych, an MEP with the League of Polish Families said the EU was using "immoral methods".
Godfrey Bloom, a UKIP MEP, said: "I suppose this film is appropriate. The EU has been screwing Britain for the past 30 years."
All sorts of couples are featured being intimate as part of the dirty video on YouTube. Wallstrom's spokesman said: "What can I say? It's a question of taste. It doesn't always have to be about press releases. These clips explain better what the EU is doing."
The video was compiled by the commission's press unit, using footage from films Amelie and All About My Mother. It is part of a campaign by Margot Wallstrom, the communications commissioner, as one of 44 posted to promote the EU. Other subjects covered are less risque, covering reform of the common market organisation for sugar and the EU's anti-fraud office.

Source: Daily Mail

The youtube clip can be seen here
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Serbia owed justice in Kosovo

A good article on the whole. These type of article's were almost completely absent in the 90's. Perhaps the only bits I'd dispute are the following:
1. The writer says:
'Even the Nazis are said to have been impressed by the brutality with which the Croatian forces — the dreaded Ustashi — set out to massacre and cleanse whole villages and even towns of their Serbian populations.'
It's easy to jump on the anti-Nazi bandwagon, but it deserves mention that some German officers were so appalled at Croatian crimes that they tried to halt them. They weren't all cheerleader's who delighted in the Ustasha atrocities.
2. He refers to the Muslim's that died during the Serb takeover of Srebrenica as 'revenge killings'. Even this fairly knowledgeable journalist has bought the official line on that battle. There was a Muslim army unit in a supposedly demilitarized UN safe-zone. When they were ambushed trying to flee the town, many died. I wouldn't presume to claim that no civilians died in the fighting, or that no fighter's were executed after capture, but it's a ludicrous notion that 'Srebrenica' was just a case of Serb's rounding up innocent civilian's in an attempt to exterminate Muslim's.

Anyway here's the entire article by the Australian Gregory Clark:

No commentator likes to sound like a conspiracy nut. But if that is the fate of anyone who tries to challenge the distortions involved in painting Serbia as criminally guilty over Kosovo and the breakup of the former Yugoslavia, then so be it.
Let's go back to the beginning. When Nazi Germany tried to occupy Yugoslavia during World War II, the Croat and Muslim minorities there backed the Nazis in their campaign against the mainly Serbian resistance. Even the Nazis are said to have been impressed by the brutality with which the Croatian forces — the dreaded Ustashi — set out to massacre and cleanse whole villages and even towns of their Serbian populations. Some 1 million Serbs died as a result, many of them in the Croatian death camp at Jasenovac, said to rival some Nazi Holocaust operations in scale and atrocity.
With the war over, Serb revenge seemed inevitable. But the Yugoslav resistance leader, Tito, managed to restrain passions by allowing Serbian domination of the central government while dividing the nation into semi-autonomous regions with mixed ethnic populations. But it was an uneasy compromise, as I saw on the ground in the former Yugoslavia of the '60s and as even we in distant Australia probably realized better than most.
There we saw frequent attacks by recalcitrant Ustashi elements on Yugoslav diplomatic missions and the large Serbian immigrant community. We took it for granted that in any breakup of post-communist Yugoslavia it would be insanity to ask the large Serbian minorities in Croatia and Bosnia to accept rule by their former pro-Nazi Croatian and Muslim oppressors. But insanity prevailed, thanks largely to pressure from Germany, Britain and the United States, all seeking to expand influence into yet another Eastern Europe ex-communist nation.
In short, the subsequent fighting was inevitable, as were the atrocities, by all sides. But the Serbs could at least claim they were seeking mainly to recover some of the towns and villages they had lost under the Nazis. Much is made of Serbian revenge killings in the Bosnian district of Srebrenica in 1995. But we see no mention of the wartime and postwar killings of Serbs in that area, which had reduced the Serbian population from a prewar level of over half to less than one third. Nor do we find much mention of the atrocities involved in expelling hundreds of thousands of Serbs from Croatia.
Enter the Kosovo problem.
To assist the Muslim side during the 1992-1995 Bosnian fighting, British and U.S. intelligence organs resorted to the extraordinary recruitment and training of Islamic extremists from Afghanistan's anti-Soviet wars of the 1980s. Help and training was also given to Albanian Muslim extremists setting up their Kosovo Liberation Army to launch guerrilla attacks against isolated Serbian communities. (These long-suspected facts were confirmed by Britain's former environment minister Michael Meacher writing in The Guardian newspaper recently).
Even more extraordinary was the way Serbian attempts to prevent or retaliate against those KLA attacks were denounced as the "ethnic cleansing" of Kosovo's Albanians (ironically it was the KLA that invented the term, to describe its plan to drive out the Serbian minority). The U.S. and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization move to bomb Serbia into submission followed soon after, even though it was the KLA, not Belgrade, that violated a 1998 ceasefire organized by the U.S.
The propaganda war used to justify Western policies over Kosovo was unrelenting. We were told that 500,000 ethnic Albanians had been killed there by the Serbs (miraculously we are now given a figure of around 10,000). Much was made of a 1989 speech by former Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic said to call for "ethnic cleansing" in Kosovo. But one has only to read the speech to realize it said the exact opposite — that it was a call for moderation in handling ethnic Albanian hostility to a justifiably stronger Serbian political presence there; the idea that the 10 percent Serbian minority there would set out deliberately to expel the large ethnic Albanian majority was patently absurd from the start. Yet that absurdity has regularly been trundled out by allegedly objective Western commentators relying heavily on the 1999 flight of ethnic Albanians to neighboring Macedonia as proof. But that flight was temporary, and came after the U.S./NATO bombing attacks, not before. Some of it was also staged.
Almost nowhere do we see any mention of the hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Jews, Gypsies and moderate ethnic Albanians since expelled permanently from Kosovo by the now dominant extremists. Meanwhile we are supposed to be annoyed by Belgrade's and Moscow's resistance to a Kosovo independence that would almost certainly see the remaining ethnic minorities even further victimized.
The implications for the future are frightening. The propaganda victory over Kosovo seems to have convinced our Western policymakers that they can say anything they like on any issue and rely on spin, black information and a lazy or compliant media to get away with it.
The 1999 ultimatum given Belgrade over Kosovo was pure blackmail: Either you agree to our demands, no matter how unreasonable (including the demand to put not only Kosovo but also Serbia under NATO military occupation), or we use our dominant air power to wreck your economic and social infrastructure. The subsequent destruction of Serbia's industries, including its only car factory, was pure vandalism.
Even Belgrade's willingness to accept a Kosovo under the control of moderate ethnic Albanians was rejected, in favor of the KLA Muslim extremists the U.S. had long supported. Ironically some of those extremists have now joined al-Qaida's anti-U.S. jihad.
On the 50th anniversary of their original unification, the EU powers congratulated themselves on the way they had kept Europe free of war ever since 1945. They did not seem even to notice how they had just gone to war with a European nation called Serbia. Serbia was the one European nation to resist Nazi German domination (the others either surrendered or collaborated). Its capital, Belgrade, was viciously bombed as a result. The next time it was bombed was by a NATO that included Germany and many of the other former collaborator nations, this time to force it to submit over Kosovo. Little wonder the Serbs remain angry.

Taken from The Japan Times online
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