On your left, a huge orange stack of doom with added amplifiers and a big effectboard. On your right an ampeg-based bass rig and a big marshal based guitar rig (with another big effectboard), with a hell of a lot added amplifiers. In the middle, a minimal drum set, backed up by a big gong. Add to this a lot of smoke and a deep sound coming out of nowhere, taking over your stomach, and voila, the stage is set for a three headed beast hailing from Japan: BORIS!

Boris are Wata, Atsuo and Takeshi. Three japanese art students who decided to form a band and make the music they like.

But boris is more. Boris is Jimmy Page in the desert (Takeshi).

Boris is the gong pummeling Atsuo between his yeehaws and ear piercing drumattacks.

Boris is the ice cold guitar solos coming from the silent Wata.

Boris is Heavy Ambient Sludge, Doom Noise Punkish Psychedelic Rock,

and much more…

They got their name from a track by (the) Melvins, and you can hear they are inspired by them. But Boris isn’t just drone/doom like everybody likes to tag them. They are everything they like. And that is very eclectic, with influences ranging from Black Sabbath to Pink Floyd. They also work with other artist from other genres ( like Keiji Hano, doom experst Sunn o))) or noise ‘god’ Merzbow ). The same counts for their records, from their first (absolutego) to their last (rainbow), they are all different.

So if you ever have the chance to see them live, be prepared for a trip through a wind tunnel, with only Boris as your guide…

website: http://homepage1.nifty.com/boris/

Last sunday, an estimated 100.000 rallied on the Zocalo main square in Mexico city to pledge their support for Lopez Obrador. A year ago, he suffered a narrow defeat in the presidential elections. The conservative Felipe Calderon thus became president, but Obrador never admitted his defeat. As a true leftwing nut, he immediatly proclaimed the elections had been rigged, and said he only was the true president of Mexico.

In the beginning he had a lot of support, for the popular support was almost evenly split between Obrador and Calderon. That’s why he started organizing strikes and rallies where he would delight his followers with the usual anti-american slander (Calderon favors closer ties with the US, as did his predecessor Fox). His popularity is waning though.

Recent polls show Calderons approval rate rising up to 65%. Especially his crackdown on drugtrade has made his popularity soar and his position is now questioned only by Obradors staunchest supporters.

• The 1992 “Statement by Atmospheric Scientists on Greenhouse Warming,” signed by 47 scientists, claims “such policy initiatives [those concerning the Earth Summit scheduled to convene in Brazil in June 1992] derive from highly uncertain scientific theories. They are based on the unsupported assumption that catastrophic global warming follows from the burning of fossil fuels and requires immediate action. We do not agree.
• The “Heidelberg Appeal” (also from 1992), signed by over 4000 scientists including 72 Nobel Prize winners. This appeal makes no mention of climate change or any other specific environmental issue, but is essentially a plea for policy based on “scientific criteria and not on irrational preconceptions”.
• The “Oregon Petition,” which was circulated in 1998 by physicist Frederick Seitz and contains 17,800 signatures.

The Oregon Petition states:

We urge the United States government to reject the global warming agreement that was written in Kyoto, Japan in December, 1997, and any other similar proposals. The proposed limits on greenhouse gases would harm the environment, hinder the advance of science and technology, and damage the health and welfare of mankind.

There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gasses is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.

And I know, Eco-fascists are going to say things like :’ they are paid by multinationals, by the oil industry’, and other mumbo jumbo. And of course, some might, but not this much. Besides, the same can be said about the scientists saying that there is global warming and that it is all our fault. They work for the ‘green’ lobby which is more powerfull these days than the “oh so dreaded multinationals”. So whether you believe it or not, just try to take these numbers into consideration next time someone claims that there is a scientific consensus on global warming. He is lying…

John McCain, the republican Arizona senator, who also backs the plan is being critized by his conservative supporters, which might endanger his bid for the republican nomination for the 2008 Presidential Elections. This eventhough his main opponents are Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney, who don’t condemn the bill either. This might give dark-horse candidate Tom Tancredo a chance to stand in the spotlight, for he has made his opposition to illegal immigration and his support for the construction of a border fence his main topic, and is gaining popularity that way.

Pat Buchanan, the paleoconservative political analyst wrote a very interesting book about this pending problem, ‘State of Emergency’. It’s a must-read for whoever interested in the topic, and explains in a clear way why this bill is the wrong way to go and how it undermines the US itself.

Yet for all that is good about the Turkish society, I don’t support it’s bid for membership of the European Union. Just recently Sarkozy hindered the advancement of Turkish integration in the EU, something he had vowed to when running for president. With Angela Merkel & Nicolas Sarkozy as leaders of the two most powerful continental nations of Europe, I doubt the Turks will make a lot of progress towards their goal. This is a good thing, for Turkey, despite it’s secularism remains a fundamentally non-European country. Europe has no need for an influx of yet many more millions of muslim immigrants, for it has been unable op till now to fully integrate those who are already there.

The fact that Turkey is not willing to admit and apologize for the genocide on the Armenians, and the persecutions of the christians within its border shows all the more that it is unfit to be part of Europe. The way the Kurds get treated nowadays shows another negative aspect of Turkey. The repression against the Kurds in Eastern Turkey and the border dispute with the Kurdish autonomous province in northern Iraq make the situation in the Middle East all the more tense. Just recently they bought high-tech airplanes to be used as advanced weaponry against the ‘terrorist’ Kurds, weapons, oh irony, bought from Israel.

Yet political courage is far to be found. The ‘every foreigner enriches us’ creed is dominant in most leftwing political parties. People who oppose this uncontrolled migration, and demand at least a durable integration, are labelled racist. But with rightwingers on the rise in Europe, there remains hope, and even some leftist seam to have common sense. The Dutch far-left Socialist Party (SP) of Jan Marijnissen, is a good and hopeful sign of a workersparty, which criticizes immigrants who refuse to integrate.

How the West Was Lost

The Last Days of Europe: Epitaph for an Old Continent, Walter Laqueur, Thomas Dunne Books, 256 pages

by Theodore Dalrymple

Flying to Rotterdam recently, the largest and busiest port in the world, I was forcibly struck by the aerial view. I doubt there is a sight anywhere that is more eloquent testimony to the power of human intelligence and organization. Indeed, this applies to the whole of the Netherlands: a physically unpromising fragment of land, much of it reclaimed from the sea, has been diligently transformed into one of the globe’s most flourishing regions, whose economic product exceeds that of the whole of Africa.

The text accompanying a book of photographs of the Dutch landscape that I was given as a present is an unconscious witness to the country’s wealth. Extolling Dutch society’s fundamental egalitarianism, the text stated that in Holland you will not see expensive cars, only middle-of-the-range models. The examples given were Mercedeses and BMWs.

The Dutch are probably the best-educated people in the world (though middle-aged people complain, as everywhere else, that standards are falling). Many Dutch have a vocabulary in English that exceeds that of native speakers in Britain and America. And for many years, the Dutch prided themselves that theirs was a country in which nothing ever happened. The business of Holland was business—plus social security with a bit of anti-Calvinist decadence thrown in. The country was so tranquil, contented, and firmly established that, failing a rise in the level of the North Sea, it seemed the idyll would continue forever.

But a couple of political assassinations, unprecedented in Holland for more than 300 years, suddenly illuminated, as if by a flash of lightning, a darker aspect of reality—one that was not confined to Holland but was Europe-wide. In a very short space of time, complacency gave way to a nagging sense of doom.

It is Europe’s doom that Walter Laqueur explores and explains in this succinct and clearly written book. He does not say anything that others have not said before him, but he says it better and with a greater tolerance of nuance than some other works on this vitally important subject.

There are three threats to Europe’s future. The first comes from demographic decline. Europeans are simply not reproducing, for reasons that are unclear. They seem to care more about the ozone layer and carbon emissions than they do about the continuation of their own societies. Or perhaps bringing up children interferes with what they conceive to be the real business of life: taking lengthy annual holidays in exotic locations and other such pleasures.

The second threat comes from the presence of a sizable and growing immigrant population, a large part of which is not necessarily interested in integration. As the population ages, the need for immigrant labor increases, and among the main sources of such labor are North Africa, the Middle East, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. When I recently drove to Antwerp from the South of France, I thought I had arrived in Casablanca. There are parts of Brussels where the police are enjoined not to be seen eating or drinking during Ramadan. Similar accommodations are occurring all over Europe: in the Central Library in Birmingham, for example, I found a women-only table occupied exclusively by young Muslims dressed in the hijab. (They were the lucky ones, members of liberal households that allowed them out on their own.)

The third threat comes from the existence of the welfare state and the welfare-state mentality. A system of entitlements has been created that, however economically counterproductive, is politically difficult to dismantle: once privileges are granted, they assume the metaphysical status of immemorial and fundamental rights. The right of French train drivers to retire on full pension at the age of 50 is probably more important to them than the right of free speech—especially that of those who think that retirement at such an age is preposterous. While Europe mortgages its future to pay for such extravagances—the French public debt doubled in ten years under the supposedly conservative Chirac—other areas of the world forge an unbeatable combination of high-tech and cheap labor. The European political class, more than ever dissociated from its electorate, has hardly woken up to the challenge.

All this Laqueur lays out with exemplary clarity. He sees Europe, once the home of a dynamic civilization that energized the rest of the world, declining into a kind of genteel theme park—if it’s lucky. The future might be grimmer than this, of course: there might be a real struggle for power once the immigrants and their descendents become numerically strong enough to take on the increasingly geriatric native population.

As is to be expected in a relatively short book, the author does not explore matters in great depth. One interesting and important question is why Europeans have abjectly surrendered to the dishonest nostrums of multiculturalism. Why, for example, can a couple of Dutch children be told by their teacher to remove the Dutch flag from their school bags because it might offend children of Moroccan descent—who, it should be noted, are supposed to be Dutch citizens? Why, when I arrive in regional airports in Britain, do I see signs for British passport holders written in Urdu, Punjabi, Bengali, and Hindi scripts, presumably for the benefit of British citizens who cannot read the Latin alphabet? Why do German courts rule that beating women is a religious right for Turks, just as terms such as “illegitimate children” have been banned from official usage as being denigratory and stigmatizing?

The answer surely lies in the shame of Europe’s recent past. The Dutch, for example, are aware that not only did many of them (or their parents and grandparents) collaborate enthusiastically with the Nazi occupiers, but no sooner was Holland liberated than it engaged in a bloody colonial war to try to retain the East Indies. Under these circumstances, reference to the extraordinary positive achievements of the country came to seem like chauvinism or worse, and no pride in Dutchness could be communicated to immigrants. The same, a fortiori, applies to Germany and even to Britain, whose enormous achievements intellectuals have long been deconstructing.

Only the French, with their republican model, have gone in for a salutary monoculturalism, but unfortunately their economic and social policies helped, if not to create, at least to maintain Muslim ghettoes. On one hand, the children of immigrants were told they were French; on the other, they were de facto excluded from the rest of society. Ferocious resentment was the result, and to coin a phrase, we ain’t seen nothing yet.

Laqueur makes the important point that shortcomings of the host countries notwithstanding, many immigrant groups have thrived without difficulty. He might have added that they have all successfully overcome initial prejudice against them. There is no Sikh or Hindu problem in Britain; the country has recently absorbed half a million Poles without any obvious tension or difficulty. (Tony Blair, with his usual perspicuity, predicted that when Poland joined the European Union, 13,000 Poles would move to Britain.)

This suggests—and Laqueur has no hesitation in so saying—that there is a problem peculiar to the integration of Muslims in Western countries, at any rate, when they are in such large numbers that they are able to make whole areas their own. Imbued with a sense of their own religious superiority, which considers a Muslim way of life better than any other, they are ill-prepared to adapt constructively to Western society.

Yet adapt they do, though not necessarily in the best way. The young men of the second generation adopt many aspects of American ghetto “culture,” which in conjunction with Islamic teaching and tradition, enables them to dominate women in a way that is to them extremely gratifying. This prevents the women (who, as Laqueur tells us, and I can confirm from personal experience, are vastly superior morally and intellectually to their menfolk) from achieving all they might in an open society. In turn, the cheap and unconstructive satisfactions of domestic dictatorship discourages Muslim men from real achievement and engagement in the wider society around them. For the majority of young men of Muslim descent in Europe, the chief attraction of Islam is the justification it offers for the ill-treatment of women.

Is a “clash of civilizations” within Europe thus inevitable at some time in the future? Laqueur is cautious, as befits a man who has seen so much that was unprecedented in his own lifetime. Secularization, if only of a strange and not altogether reassuring kind, has already made deep inroads into the Muslim population. On the other hand, it may be that this very secularization is what calls forth religious fanaticism as a response. After all, Muslims can see in European Christianity an example of what happens when the light of reason and historical criticism is allowed into the purlieus of religious doctrine: it falls apart. Since Islam is so much a part of the identity of people wherever it has predominated, an attack on Islam, even or especially in the form of rational criticism, provokes an existential crisis.

Laqueur is neither apocalyptic nor optimistic but measured and open-minded about the future. Yet given the earnest frivolity of the European political classes, who face up to and legislate for every problem except the serious ones, it is likely that his prediction for Europe is accurate: it will sink into insignificance, more important, it is true, than Africa but no more important than Latin America.

Actually, I like Latin America.

source: http://amconmag.com/2007/2007_06_18/review.html

PARIS —  President Nicolas Sarkozy held talks Wednesday with far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen _ the first time the nationalist firebrand has been invited to the presidential palace in at least 33 years.

Le Pen called the invitation a “democratic gesture,” and said the two talked about the European Union. “I told him what he already knew, of our profound differences on this subject,” Le Pen said, adding that they also had a “general exchange of views.” Sarkozy is preparing for an EU summit in Brussels this week, hoping to push through his idea of a “simplified treaty” to replace the draft EU constitution rejected in 2005 by French and Dutch voters.

Le Pen has called for France to pull out of the EU and its common currency, the euro.

Sarkozy said in a June 6 interview with Le Figaro newspaper that he would meet with “all political formations” represented in the French and European parliaments. Le Pen is a lawmaker in the European Parliament. “I saw that some people were astonished,” Sarkozy said in an interview with TF1 television about his decision to see Le Pen. “I don’t understand. Jean-Marie Le Pen has the right to stand for elections. … He represents millions of people. And I’m supposed to say … ‘I won’t see him?’”

Former presidents Jacques Chirac and Francois Mitterrand always refused to meet with Le Pen. He met twice with Alain Poher, who was president for two brief interludes in 1969 and 1974, according to National Front spokesman Alain Vizier, who could not provide exact dates.

Le Pen, who shocked France with his second-place finish in the 2002 presidential race against Chirac, came in a poor fourth in this year’s contest. His National Front Party fared so badly in this month’s legislative elections that it risks losing up to 60 percent of its state subsidies.

The 13th of june there were elections for a new president in Israël. Candidates were Shimon Peres (Kadima), Reuven Rivlin (Likud) and Colette Avital (Labor). Shimon Peres, former Prime Minister won after the other candidates retreated from the race because they didn’t got enough votes. Vice Premier Shimon Peres was elected Israel’s ninth president , capping a six-decade political career in which he has held every senior government post. While he started his political career in the far left mapai party(founded by Ben-gurion himself) he left labour in 2005 to join the centrist party, Kadima (founded by Ariel Sharon). Which shows us that labour (and the left in general) isn’t all that bad in Israël and surely isn’t the same like, say, the European left.

The elections followed after Former President Katsav was accused of fraud and rape. Though it is a ceremonial function, Peres might be able to restore the prestige of it with his record as a Nobel Laureate, former prime minister, defense minister, protege of David Ben-Gurion and founder of Israel’s nuclear program. He is also seen as a strong supporter of peace. Maybe this can help in negotiating with Mahmoud Abbas and bringing Israël partly to peace…(though it won’t help with that pesky hamas!)

 -”If a problem has no solution, it may not be a problem but a fact that must be coped with.” (Shimon Peres)

In the near future, I plan to write a review for ‘God’s Debris’, Adams’ non-dilbert book.

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