A quote from The Sunday Times [London], 5 Novenber 2006

One of Britain’s royal medical colleges is calling on the health profession to consider permitting the euthanasia of seriously disabled newborn babies.

The proposal by the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecology is a reaction to the number of such children surviving because of medical advances. [...] The college’s submission was also welcomed by John Harris, a member of the government’s Human Genetics Commission and professor of bioethics at Manchester University. “We can terminate for serious foetal abnormality up to term but cannot kill a newborn. What do people think has happened in the passage down the birth canal to make it okay to kill the foetus at one end of the birth canal but not at the other?” he said.

The European, the American and the Icelandic constitutions.

It looks like not everyone in the Norwegian Lutheran Church has accepted homosexual clergymen yet. Yesterday, the Norwegian Association for Lesbian and Homosexual Emancipation (LLH, Landsforeningen for lesbisk og homofil frigjøring) said that it wants quota introduced for them. Another organization, the Open Church Group (Åpen kirkegruppe), stated that dioceses with a positive view towards homosexual clergymen should actively go out and recruit them for their parishes.

While many European countries have suffered from chronically high unemployment and relatively low economic growth, Denmark’s economy has performed well in recent years. Output growth has been running slightly above 3 percent per annum last year and in the first half of this year, and unemployment fell to about 4.4 per cent this past summer (well below the average of around 8 percent unemployment in the euro area as a whole).     

A quote from Pieter Dorsman on his blog, 2 November 2006

I think that the attempts to regulate and control speech, stifle debate, silence commentators and cleanse history have only grown in intensity since that fateful day in Amsterdam.

I am in Los Angeles at the moment, and do not have the opportunity to write about events in Europe as much as I would like to. I will not be back in Brussels until 12 November. Over here in the U.S. all attention is focused on the upcoming elections. There is a possibility that the Democrats will become the majority in the House of Representatives and that Nancy Pelosi, the California Liberal, will become the next Speaker of the House. I was in West Hollywood on Halloween. A friend described this area as one third retiree, one third Russian and one third gay. Sounds a bit like Europe to me.

The gays take every opportunity to dress up. Consequently Halloween has become a gay festival in LA. The first people I met when leaving the hotel were a group of men dressed up as ballerinas. This is Pelosi Land.

On Tuesday a Lutheran vicar set himself alight in the German town of Erfurt. The 73 year old Roland Weisselberg poured gasoline over himself and set fire to himself in the Erfurt monastery, where Martin Luther took his monastic vows in 1505. Tuesday was a national holiday in parts of Germany to celebrate the Protestant Reformation. Bystanders rushed to extinguish the flames. Weisselberg later died of his injuries.

In a farewell letter to his wife the vicar wrote that he was setting himself on fire to warn against the danger of the Islamization of Europe. During the past four years the vicar had frequently expressed his concern about the expansion of Islam, urging the Lutheran Church to take this issue seriously. As the fire started the vicar cried: “Jesus and Oskar!” Oskar Brüsewitz was a 47-year old German vicar who died after setting himself on fire 30 years ago, on 18 August 1976, in the market square of the German town of Zeitz in protest against the Communist regime in East Germany. Both Erfurt and Zeitz are situated in the former East German province of Saxony.

Why no riots? Why no mob of aggrieved taxpayers, descending on the European Commission with burning brands? On Tuesday, for the twelfth year in a row, the European Court of Auditors refused to approve the EU budget. Yet the story has pretty much passed Europe’s media by. If a national government agency could not account for the majority of its spending, it would be front page news. But, faced with the usual Brussels tales of bogus invoices and non-existent farm products and collusion between the authorities and the fraudsters, we shrug our shoulders indifferently.

I went to Hungary to participate in a heart-wrenching homage to a historic cause. What I experienced proved to be a shocking transmission of the totalitarian past into the dictatorial present. This article is about more than a country that has the misfortune to be the scene of the events to be presented. This piece is about the symptoms of an ailment, repackaged Communism that is “democratic” only as long as it can camouflage a dictatorial core with democratic theatrics.

I got some angry comments at Jihad Watch some days ago when I posted an essay saying that: “The welfare state is now just a big pyramid scheme where Leftist parties take our money and give it to Muslim immigrants in return for voter support. The welfare state in fact provides insecurity, since it is used to fund the Muslim colonization of the continent.”