This morning having my coffee with my darling wife and a friend, a tramp who, I was later told by the barman, had been drinking since 7am, came up to me, bent down by ear and said, "Yoou arsehole. You mean nothing. Waterloo, it means nothing," and promptly left the bar.

Whilst I am impressed that Brussels has multi-lingual tramps it was pretty random.

In 2000, the Belgian authorities voted a so-called “Quick Citizenship” Act, bestowing Belgian nationality on foreigners as a simple procedure. Everyone who has lived in the country for a number of years (usually seven, but in some cases barely three, and sometimes even only two years) is entitled to Belgian citizenship. One does not have to speak the language nor prove one’s will to integrate in the host country.

So far the Quick Citizenship Act created 337,904 “new Belgians” – an average of 4,277 per month. Belgium has only 10 million inhabitants. One million of them live in Brussels, Belgium’s as well as the EU’s (and NATO’s) capital. While in 1960 7.3% of the Brussels population was foreign, today the figure has risen to 56.5%. The latter figure refers to non-Belgians (26.3% of the Brussels population) and to foreigners who have acquired Belgian citizenship since 1980 and their children (30.2%).

Lying is of course one of the key precepts of political PR. The truth may be out there, but if you repeat a falsehood enough times people just begin to believe it.

Tony Blair has gone on record that he wants to see a reduced Constitution, mainly to avoid having to ask the British people what they think. In this he is supporting the lead runner in the French Elections, Nicolas Sarkozy.

A quote from Richard John Neuhaus in First Things, May 2007

[T]o invest in and sacrifice for the future of a people and its way of life—the most palpable form of which is in having babies—requires a timeline much longer than 2050. People who do not, in continuity with the world they know, hope to have grandchildren who will hope to have grandchildren do not have babies. The sacrifice of the identities of nations and peoples to the deracinated idea of “Europe” as institutionalized in the European Union, combined with the forceful counternarrative of Islam, does not suggest a future in which many will make an intergenerational investment.

A quote from Lawrence Auster on his blog, 16 April 2007

A truly horrifying possibility is emerging from this discussion, and it is so awful I have been slow to take it in. As a preface, I have always been utterly aghast at the American elites’ support for the unification of Europe. Why did Americans support the elimination of historic states and nations in this unaccountable, post-national, post-human, air-conditioned nightmare of the EU? It seemed the ultimate betrayal. It was also horrible that there was never any debate in America about this. No major voices in U.S. politics have opposed European unification or even questioned American support for it.

During the war, Saddam Hussein wanted to launch missiles from the Moroccan coast to the US, but when he pushed the button, nothing happened. Turned out there were so many Moroccans hanging on to the missiles that they simply couldn't lift off.

If your recall fails, remember that we like to forget the inconvenient. Therefore, as a punishment, play through this with me.
 

An unexpected problem arises. This is to be anticipated as, while problems are normal, most problems that come up are unexpected – to those designated to deal with such cases. The response: set up a group of experts to investigate. These will be unblemished folks who had no clue of what is about to happen. Eloquent surprise is what conveys expert status. Their qualification is a derivate of the “shock” caused by the facts. Upset, they will blame anything but the policy makers who control their appointment. “No wonder,” the nasty ones will say: they were advising the politicians that were caught with their pants down. You have already guessed the next stage. Setting up a special organization will be recommended. (It does not help with the problem but it lucratively saves kin and insiders from unemployment.)

A quote from the Franco-Arab scholar Chiheb Nasser, on David Orland’s blog, 14 April 2007

It remains to be seen what is the Arab-Muslim vote. It’s a complicated problem, especially in France because we have difficulty assessing so-called ethnic data due to rather intransigent republicanism. But an idea of how things stand can be had at the local level and it is today clear that, in certain at-risk districts, a portion of those referred to as immigrant-origin French people vote for the Front National. This phenomenon has begun to assume significant proportions. […]

A quote from Lawrence Auster on his blog, 15 April 2007

But if [...] Europe finds itself not merely threatened by Islamization but actually under the thumb of a Leftist-Islamist Coalition regime, then out of that catastrophe there could arise a new European right, different from any seen before, which knows that it has lost control of its civilization, and knows that it has no alternative but to fight to win it back. As I've said before, it is possible that only real defeat can make Europeans wake up to reality.

According to Mostafa Chendid of the Danish Islamic Society (Islamisk Trossamfund), not only Muslim women but other women too should wear a veil. Why? Because five up to ten percent of all men cannot control themselves when they see a woman without a veil.