Please note: Names and places have been purposely left out and faces removed to protect certain people’s identity due to the rabid, underhanded, and often immortal nature of our opposition.
General notes: From 1568–1648 the Dutch Protestants fought a long and bloody war against Spain for independence. The Southern quarter of the Dutch people were Catholics however and remained a part of the Spanish holdings after the Northern three fourths gained independence as the Netherlands. Spain then lumped this Catholic Dutch area with their French lowcountry holdings into the rather artificial country of Belgium. The French speaking Southern half of the country is called Wallonia and the Dutch speaking Northern half of the country is called Flanders. After World War II the Belgium government concerned that the dropping birthrate would cause a labour shortage contracted with the king of Morocco to import Moroccans to work in Belgium, most of them have never assimilated. This open border policy has continued with most of the immigrants coming from French West Africa. This has caused a dramatic shift in power away from the Dutch Flemish towards the French Walloons. Wallonia is heavily Left-Wing and continuously votes for Leftist-Socialist parties which transfer wealth from the hard-working Flemish to Wallonia where the unemployment rate is 20%. In spite of this the Walloons continue support more immigrants as this increases their voting power at the expensive of the Flemish. Brussels went from a majority Flemish city in 1950 to less than 10% Flemish as Flemish fled the third-world hordes, and Arabic has now replaced French as the language with the largest number of primary speakers in Brussels. The Flemish have remained solidly Right-Wing and in the last Flemish elections the Flemish Nationalist party, Vlaams Belang, running on a Flemish independence anti-immigration platform received 25% of the vote.
I flew into Brussels on Thursday, May 1st and from there I caught a northbound train to Antwerp. After the train left the third-world cesspool known as Brussels, I traveled through Flanders’ beautiful countryside; sheep grazed in small fields and the countryside was dotted by villages and small towns. The Flemish being a Dutch people most of their buildings and houses heavily reflect that fact. I arrived at Antwerp Central station after about an hour.
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I caught a taxi to the hotel where I was to meet the two friends from America I would be spending the week with. None of us had realized it when booking the hotel, but the hotel was in the middle of the diamond district which was the Jewish quarter, and the sidewalks were filled funny tall hats, Yakamas, funny coats and shoes, and shaved heads with long curls hanging down past the ears; have you ever seen a Hassidic Jew riding a bicycle? It’s absolutely hilarious. I have less of a dislike of these Jews than the coat and tie variety since these Jews keep to themselves, however the whole thing was ironic nonetheless.
Here are some pictures of Antwerp from my 7th story balcony of my hotel room. Notice the older beautiful houses and churches and the newer ugly apartment and commercial buildings; we’re fairly certain that beautiful architecture was outlawed in Europe after 1945, probably something to do with the “Holocau$t”.
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I arrived in Antwerp about 30 minutes before a big Vlaams Belang rally (the Flemish Nationalist Party and the people we were there to meet and hang out with) and so I jumped in a taxi and headed out. The taxi driver was surprised, to say the least, that an American knew anything about Flemish politics and, what’s more, cared. We talked about Vlaams Belang in some detail during the drive and he said he voted for them for 20 years until he got a Black girlfriend, race-traitor.
The Vlaams Belang several hundred people packed into the Hendrik Conscience Plaza honouring Hendrik Conscience a Flemish writer who in 1830 wrote a book called “The Lion of Flanders”, the book which started the Flemish Nationalist movement and is still it’s center point in some ways. The Lion of Flanders was Count Robert III who in 1302 led the Flemish army in a crushing victory against the French forces invading Flanders at the Battle of Golden Spurs, a sort of Flemish version of William Wallace. The rally was in Dutch and so even though I can’t understand what they were saying I could understand what they were talking about, crime, immigration, taxes, etc., because of the Germanic linguistic similarities. Some pictures from the edge of the rally:
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The Vlaams Belang had placed a placed a sign with the statue of Hendrik Conscience and had laid a wreath beneath it.
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Some more pictures as I moved around to the right and then into the crowd; the writing on the billboard basically means “one million votes ‘08”:
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After three speeches made by top Vlaams Belang leadership and then the Flemish nation anthem was sung. Afterwards the crowd broke into chants of “Vlaanderen voor Vlaams! Eigen Volk eerst!” (Flanders for Flemish! Our People first!)
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Here are some pictures of the empty plaza when we came back the next day; just to give you some grasp of the size of it:
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By the time the last speaker ended my two American friends had arrived at the plaza and I got to meet the leader of the VBJ – the Vlaams Belang Youth. Youth in Europe can mean anyone 14 to 30 years old. Everyone from the rally was then directed towards a meeting hall where they could relax and socialize. The whole was very impressively organized; rented buses waited for the majority of the VB people, while the three Americans and the VBJ leader took his car to the meeting hall. The meeting hall itself was rented but the decorations were impressive too. Food, drinks, books, and stickers were available for sale around the edge of the room while tables filled the middle. This is what it looked like before the buses arrived:
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The billboard reads “Time for independence”:
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After the buses arrived:
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We had a great time getting to meet many people from the Vlaams Belang and after most people left we got to pose with some flags and signs. Me holding a Vlaams Belang sign; I’m 6’2 for comparison purposes:
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The three Americans with a VB flag left and a Flanders flag right:
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Continued…
]]>For example, I created a very brief page for Agrarianism...if y"all would, check it out and make changes that you believe are necessary.
]]>New research underscores the impact of marketing and advertising on children, and one author says the impact is largely negative.
Susan Linn is the author of Consuming Kids: Protecting Our Children from the Onslaught of Marketing and Advertising. She claims that marketing campaigns aimed at children have become “more of a problem” over the last 25 years. “In 1983 companies were spending about [$100 million] annually marketing to kids—and now they’re spending about $17 billion,” she points out.
And advertisers have left no stones unturned in order to reach children, she claims. “It’s radio, it’s television, it’s the Internet, it’s product placement in movies, it’s toys that are actually ads for either food or ads for media characters,” Linn continues. “Marketing in schools is escalating. There’s marketing on mp3 players and on cell phones. It’s really just about everywhere,” she details.
Your thoughts, my friends?
God bless,
Laurel
A rally has been set for tomorrow in front of the magistrate’s office in Mt. Holly, Pa., in support of a Mennonite farmer who has brought the wrath of the government on himself for selling raw milk and other products – an act government prosecutors say violates a number of regulations.
That’s when the next court hearing is scheduled for Mark Nolt, a Pennsylvania farmer who turned in his state permit to sell raw milk because it didn’t allow for the sale of the other products he offered.
“They swooped in ... like a bunch of Vikings, handcuffed me and stole $30,000 worth of my milk, cheese and butter,” he told the New York Daily News.
While I must admit I got a little miffed at the reference to my ancestors ("like Vikings"), it sure does seem as if our government loves to find any reason for restricting our right to healthy food and a lifestyle of our choice.
The article continues with a positive reference to the Weston A. Price Foundation--Kinswoman, are you reading?
His case is just an example of what the government is trying to do to those who believe – based on medical results – that whole milk is better for them than the processed milk available in most grocery stores, according to Nolt’s supporters.
Processed milk, many believe, leads to clogged arteries, strokes and heart attacks.
According to reports published by the Weston A. Price Foundation, results of a study by the Medical Research Council in the United Kingdom revealed only one percent of the subjects in an ongoing lifestyle study of 5,000 men suffered heart attacks – if they drank full-fat milk and ate butter rather than margarine.
So far CA has allowed raw milk to be sold. But it’s a battle.
God bless,
Laurel
This topic was born in the Research Forum under the heading Exposed: the great GM crops myth (GM crops yield 10% less grain per acre). I have moved some posts from that topic over here because they address an expanded consideration of the ideas at hand.
Please remember that this is a discussion of human ideas/technologies in light of God’s word, and we should keep the discussion to ideas rather than personal defense or offense.
God bless,
Laurel
]]>Microlending Creator Says His Strategy Outshines Immigration
Posted By Brenda Walker On 9 March 2008 @ 4:21 In General | Comments Disabled
On Jan 17 I attended a lecture in San Francisco given by Bangladeshi-born Muhammad Yunus. He is the economist who invented the idea of microlending to help desperately poor people around the world better their lives through developing small businesses. In 1983, he founded the [1] Grameen Bank in Bangladesh to put the concept into practice. He received the [2] Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 and remains a popular figure among anti-poverty activists.
The crowd must have been around 500, and I was therefore pleased when my immigration-related question was one of the handful chosen to be read.
When I wrote my article that included mention of the speech ([3] Microlending: The Ticket to Staying Home), the audio file was not yet online so his exact words weren’t available. You can now listen to the whole talk online at [4] this link.
Here is my transcription of the question and Yunus’ answer, with a little clean-up editing:
COMMONWEALTH CLUB: A member of the audience asks this question. With five billion people living in countries poorer than Mexico, don’t you think microlending is a better strategy for tackling poverty than massive immigration…
YUNUS: People seek their opportunities if you can attract people with microcredit, keep them in their places, of course they will love that.
It’s not fun to leave your home and struggle through all kinds of legal barriers, live like thieves and criminals in another country.
[Immigration] is no fun. They do it out of desperation because life is so difficult there, So if we can all make life better where people live, where they were born, where their forefathers lived, then nobody will leave their place.
That’s what we’re talking about. Wherever we are, we should be able to get a better life for ourselves. Desperation will push us to do desperate things even at the risk of our own lives.
There you have it. One of the foremost, most honored humanitarians on the planet [5] agrees with me that microlending is a far [6] better solution to alleviating worldwide poverty than immigration.
Furthermore, he alluded to the cultural dimension, that people would rather remain in their forefathers’ country than undergo the shock of adjustment to a different society, as long as they can make a decent living and have hope for their children.
The next time some shallow do-gooders whine that America must open itself up to unlimited poor immigrants because we have too much money ([7] heh), you can quote Muhammad Yunus to them.
Article printed from VDARE.com: Blog Articles: http://blog.vdare.com
URL to article: http://blog.vdare.com/archives/2008/03/09/microlending-creator-says-his-strategy-outshines-immigration/
URLs in this post:
[1] Grameen Bank: http://www.grameen-info.org/bank/
[2] Nobel Peace Prize: http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/2006/yunus-interview.html
[3] Microlending: The Ticket to Staying Home: http://www.vdare.com/walker/080123_microloans.htm
[4] this link: http://audio.commonwealthclub.org/audio/podcast/cc_20080117_yunus.mp3
[5] agrees with me: http://www.thesocialcontract.com/artman2/publish/tsc1103/article_964.shtml
[6] better solution: http://www.limitstogrowth.org/WEB-text/alleviating-pressure.html
[7] heh: http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/
Unfortunately, it would appear that, to her, her life has no value. She spends it in rounds of debauchery and tears. I am posting the URL of the article I read about her here:
However, I would like to recommend that if you have a squeamish stomach, don’t go to the article, as the photographs of the singer there are truly disturbing. I’ve never seen anyone so young look so awful.
God bless,
Laurel
Over at Global Guerrillas http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/ the blogger is posting on how the global food production system has broken down, and the strains it puts on societies and the world. Here’s an interesting quote about how ethanol production via corn growing has had some untoward effects as farmers shift from corn for food to corn for ethanol.
QUOTE: Entropy Production
“It’s hard to believe that in five months our country has gone from a strong commitment to pay any price for energy security to the kind of backlash we’ve seen against ethanol” Jon Doggett, a lobbyist for the National Corn Growers Assn (to the LA Times).
This is what happens when a system’s ability to dampen shocks fails.
The blogger goes on to postulate that the laws of thermodynamics cover what is happening in human society right now. I think it’s somewhat simpler than that.
Going on as we speak is a global food crisis. For many of us it simply manifests as higher food prices, which blessedly prompt many of us to take up small scale gardening as a way of promoting our own independence from the food production system. For others, most notably in certain third world countries of the African variety, it means starvation because of the lethal combination of lower IQs in the general populace and systemic corruption of the upper classes. This, of course, leads to violence there because the other options never quite seem to occur to the upper classes. And there are other options. Starving Zimbabwe was once Rhodesia, breadbasket of Africa.
But the current upper classes in Zimbabwe are more concerned with skin color than they are with feeding their own people.
Whatever. Their choice.
In most cases it seems simple to me, and probably most Westerners, that despite the failings of our elites, they either care enough about the people of their countries eating regularly, producing happy, full-bellied people (or at least care about having happy “serfs” keep them in power), that they will work hard to provide food to them at a vaguely affordable price.
The upper classes in Africa don’t seem to have caught on to this. Must be all those Mercedes salesmen keeping them distracted.
OK, folks, it’s big question time.
Should Westerners feel that they are required in the sense of Christian compassion to provide food for starving African nations, most of which envy and hate us because of our skin color and basic success at supplying food and creature comforts to our own people?
Inquiring minds want to know.
God bless,
Laurel
I know that the ‘Christian Exodus’ to South Carolina (mostly homeschool full quiver Whites) also shows promise but the NW Migration seems like the more tangible of the two thus far. Any thoughts?
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