Amazed in Milan

Having been to Milan during the weekend and having thoroughly enjoyed myself in that fair city, I came home and reviewed the few photos I had taken. Like every tourist, I took pictures of the great Duomo Cathedral. It has been recently cleaned and stands now, pristine, a white and sandy coloured Catholic monolith. I am not religious by any means, I was simply admiring the architecture. My wife wondered if we should go inside. Then we saw the queue to get in and decided  against it.

The reason for the queue? Well, that is what was truly amazing. Since when, I wondered, and why, has it been necessary to have the police and the military, not to mention the Caribinieri, search people and their belongings when going into a church?
I couldn’t help myself. I had to have pictures.

See here.

There is something wrong here, isn’t there?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(These pictures are clickable if you want a better view.)
I can only imagine the outcry if it was a mosque we were talking about, but a Catholic Cathedral in Italy? Does the pope know about this?

I wonder who they are afraid of? The protestants?

How the New EuroParliament Looks

Well it certainly looks better now than it did a week or so ago. I have to say I’m more than pleased that the blue bits got a whole lot bigger. There is more to see at this Euro Parliament site.

 

 

I’m a sucker for facts and figures, especially when it comes to before and after and, especially again, when my side is winning, so I couldn’t help myself and put this little graph (below) together.  It’s worth mentioning that the amount of Euro seats has been reduced from 785 to 736 lately, so comparing the gains and losses is a bit harder than it should be. However, here are the results comparing the 2004 and 2009 elections.

 

 

The MSM reports in Europe appear not to have gotten the message. The march to the right is, they claim, the result of the financial situation. At the same time they are all screaming about the invisible neo-nazis, extremists and racists all over Europe. Surely, if one is to apportion the results of the elections over all of Europe to economic reasons, then the real culprits are the money movers, bankers and financial wizards that all voted right of centre. Strangely, all those right of centre, are by default, extremists, racists and neo-nazis. Not a banker amongst them, it seems. Unless all the financial types are, well, you know, neo-nazi racist extremists. Not to mention xenophobic islamophobes, or any other badge the left would like them to pin on you.

(Badges? Badges? We don’t need no stinkin’ badges!)

One would have thought the message was clearer than that. We, the people, have had enough of you, the leftist politicians, and your eternal bullshit. When government of the people becomes bullying of the people, then the people will unite against you. And that is exactly what happened. The MSM, being the eternal mouthpiece of the left, is apparently in open denial.

It’s going to be an interesting next five years.

Disgraceful Times

The Timesonline is a constant source of reading material. Most of what one reads is only slightly coloured by the editorial staff and generally speaking they are pretty fair. But the following caught my eye and had be swearing into my tea this morning:

The BNP has a wide choice of neo-fascist bedfellows to team up with in the European Parliament after voters delivered the far Right extra seats in nine countries.

I see. Since the fascists were actually national socialists, I don’t truly understand the title accorded to parties from all across Europe. The article is here.

I did note, however, that the times also quoted the infamous anti-BNP webside “Searchlight” which has no other purpose than to cast aspersions on the BNP. The quote leaves me wondering just what these people are thinking;

"The far-right growth is a really bad sign, and this is clearly linked to the economic crash," Gerry Gable, the editor of Searchlight, an anti-fascist monthly magazine, said. "This is the entirely predictable result of the social fall-out of the financial crisis. It is a particularly worrying trend."

Due to the economic crisis, eh? Doesn’t have anything to do with hordes of invading muslims and the like then?

You’re right to be worried Mr. Gable. Grow up and get real. The worm has only just started to turn.

Oh, Happy Day!

This from the Timesonline:

A far-right anti-Islamic party emerged as the big winner in the European elections in the Netherlands yesterday as the rest of the Continent braced itself for further gains by fringe parties over the weekend.

The Party for Freedom led by Geert Wilders, the maverick Dutch MP who was banned from entering Britain this year for his beliefs, won four seats in the European Parliament at the first time of asking, having been formed in 2006.

The result, which placed the party second in the Netherlands, behind only the ruling Christian Democratic Alliance (CDA), suggested that anti-immigrant parties would attract disaffected voters in a number of countries in the European polls. They are expected to gain seats in Austria, Belgium, Italy, Hungary, Slovakia and Romania.

With most of the votes counted, Mr Wilders’s party took 17 per cent of the vote, second to the CDA of Jan Peter Balkenende, the Prime Minister, which took 19.9 per cent…

At least the Times refrained from calling the Freedom party for racist nazis. Even if I do find their description unfair, misleading, unjust and downright unethical, all us far-right anti-islamists must be feeling pretty good about this one. I only hope the same sort of thing happens here in Denmark on Sunday.

My sincere congratulations to Mr. Wilders, his party and to the Netherlands.

Read it all here. Times article

Could it Be..?

This morning, we all woke up to the news that an Air France Airbus was missing after vanishing off the radar somewhere over the Atlantic between Brazil and Africa. So far, so good, albeit tragic.

There has been a search operation going on since then for the aircraft. Later this morning, debris was located. I read on the BBC webside, the following:

Air force spokesman Col Jorge Amaral [Brazilian Air Force] said the debris had been spotted by search planes early on Tuesday.

"At approximately 0530 Brazilian time [0830 GMT], a C-130 military aircraft spotted some debris in two locations approximately 60km apart from each other," he said.

"In this area, they saw an orange buoy, an airplane seat, small white pieces, an airplane turbine as well as oil and kerosene.

"The search is continuing because it’s very little material in relation to the size [of the Airbus A330]."

Officials, he said, needed "a piece that might have a serial number, some sort of identification" to be sure it came from the missing jet.

Now, let’s think about this astonishing news.

I have travelled about half way round the world on aircfaft twice, plus all the intercine European flights I have under my belt and never once have I experienced, even if their were football hooligans on the flight, that anyone ripped out the seats and threw them out of the windows or doors.

No aircraft other than AF447, the downed airbus, has reported losing a turbine (read; aircraft engine) over the Atlantic today. One would have thought, that an aircraft doing so would at least make some sort of complaint to someone, somewhere.

The oil and the kerosene, (how do they know that?) may have been dumped by a passing ship, so we’ll give them the benefit of the doubt there and I’ll throw in the orange buoy for good measure.

My question is then, how could this not be the remains of flight Af447?

Come on BBC. What’s the big secret?