Eye For Eye

The EU’s fining of Microsoft is state robbery and follows similar US looting of EU companies. This “cycle of violence” is much more damaging to the global economy than the MidEast cycle, and State should address it quickly before the US dollar is further damaged.

The robbery:

Four months ago, Microsoft surrendered to Brussels. Yesterday came the bill for not capitulating sooner: €899 million, or $1.36 billion, another record fine for the American software giant.

The latest penalty covers a 488-day period when the European Commission says Microsoft wasn’t complying with a 2004 order to share certain software code with rivals on “reasonable” terms. The code allows other firms’ programs to work with Microsoft’s ubiquitous Windows software, which Brussels deems crucial to competition in the industry.

Microsoft has already racked up some $1 billion in fines in the case…

When the case started, Microsoft’s terms for sharing its code included a 2.98% royalty from the revenues of products that used it. In May, it lowered that price to 0.5% within Europe. But Ms. Kroes wasn’t satisfied until Microsoft dropped its price globally to a flat €10,000 charge, which it did in October.

By comparison, even anticorporate activists say a pharmaceutical company should get around 4% of revenues when a government forces it to hand over a drug patent to a generic maker.

So the EU has assumed the right to set Microsoft’s prices and in the process fined it $2.36 billion.

This is just as egregious as the US treatment of the highly respected Dutch company Royal Ahold, which in 2000 acquired a US company and left its management in place – an expensive mistake, because 3 years later (my ellipsis):

“Ahold was forced to restate more than $800 million in earnings after it came to light that U.S. Foodservice executives had inflated promotional rebates from suppliers to meet earnings targets. The scandal caused the parent company’s shares to plunge.”

“Ahold settled with the Securities and Exchange Commission (in 2005) and agreed to pay $1.1 billion to resolve shareholder lawsuits.”

Ahold then sold Foodservice at a profit, de-listed from the NYSE, and runs its US store chains from the Netherlands.

Now only the bravest European companies buy US enterprises, and that’s cut demand for US assets, weakening the dollar (although there are other reasons for the weakness). Plus the EU is getting even.

Crimping of trade between the world’s two largest trading areas is clearly bad for both, and if it continues will lead to an outright trade war.

And that will be vastly more damaging than the Mideast conflict.

America’s Shame

Ms. Rice wants more US cultural exchanges with, and visits from, North Korea. That makes her breathtakingly naive or a cynical appeaser – either way she’s betraying the 23 million poor devils suffering under that Fear State.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said the United States should consider future cultural exchanges with North Korea, even if last year’s deal to end the North’s nuclear programs falls through.

Speaking in Beijing minutes after the New York Philharmonic played “The Star-Spangled Banner” for the Communist Party elite in Pyongyang, North Korea, Miss Rice said cultural programs would help promote the North’s “opening to the rest of the world.”

“I’d like to see North Koreans come to the United States,” she told reporters during an East Asian tour aimed at breaking the latest nuclear impasse.

Reporters asked Miss Rice whether future cultural exchanges should be arranged even if an October agreement in six-nation talks collapses.

Miss Rice replied: “I believe that cultural exchange is something that we ought to be looking at in any case.”

Natan Sharansky’s definitive book analyzes how Fear States work, based on his life in the Soviet Union. In such states a small group of thugs use their monopoly of force exclusively to enrich themselves and their supporters.

The controlling group is small (about 200,000 in Iran) and it runs all the businesses, takes all luxury goods, uses all foreign exchange, and gets the bulk of educational and medical services (Saddam spent the UN’s oil for food money for breast implants for his supporters’ women, not antibiotics for kids).

The left believes in the benevolent dictator – for example Castro – but it’s a myth:

…a Cuban-American anti-Castro activist, claims, partially based on the testimonials of defectors who were close to Castro, that Castro and his loyalists control several billions of dollars in real estate, bank accounts, private estates, yachts and other assets — called “the Comandante’s Reserves” — in Europe, Latin America and Asia – and a luxurious lifestyle for the top Cuban leadership.

Here’s how it works in North Korea:

Multiple international human rights organizations, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, accuse North Korea of having one of the worst human rights records of any nation.

North Koreans have been referred to as “some of the world’s most brutalized people”, regarding their severe restrictions on political and economic freedoms.

North Korean defectors have testified to the existence of prison and detention camps with an estimated 150,000 to 200,000 inmates, and have reported torture, starvation, rape, murder, medical experimentation, forced labour, and forced abortions.

Fear State thugs use every perk available to cement the loyalty of their supporters – the audience for the New York Philharmonic’s shameful performance in Pyongyang will have been all-thug.

And the North Korean dictatorship will ensure that all of its citizens Rice allows into the US will also be thugs, bent on self enrichment, espionage, and criminality.

By providing the dictator with the means to reward his supporters, Rice perpetuates the enslavement of a suffering people.

In our lifetimes, the US has five times overthrown dictatorships by the only means that works: steadfast opposition and, where necessary, force.

Ms Rice shames her nation, and the sooner she goes, the better.

Germany Goes Nuts (Again)

The German government just bribed an employee of a foreign bank to steal details of German account holders. That’s an example of the end (catching tax evaders) justifying the means (theft). The last time Germans used that principle they went on to kill about 40 million people.

Liechtenstein accused Germany yesterday of attacking its sovereignty after Berlin admitted using spies to investigate tax fraud in the principality.

Crown Prince Alois launched his withering tirade after it emerged that German undercover investigators paid up to £3.75 million for bank details of Germans suspected of tax-fraud in the nearby state.

Evading (as opposed to avoiding) tax is a crime, but state sanctioned theft makes state employees and elected officials crooks too.

The level of tax evasion in a nation is a funtion of a) the level of taxes and b) the value taxpayers assign to that taxation. Danes we know happily pay high taxes in return for good social services, whereas no Brits we know think they get value for their taxes.

Germans seem to have the Brit attitude, leading to a poisonous combination – taxpayers who crookedly hide their incomes, governed by crooked pols and officials.

Here’s the last bunch of crooks that ran Germany:

…Hitler’s efforts to persuade Oskar von Hindenburg (the President’s son) included threats to bring criminal charges over estate taxation irregularities at the President’s Neudeck estate (although 5000 extra acres were soon allotted to Hindenburg’s property)…

Hindenburg, despite his misgivings about the Nazis’ goals and about Hitler as a person, reluctantly agreed.. that, with Nazi popular support on the wane, Hitler could now be controlled as chancellor. The date dubbed Machtergreifung (seizure of power) by the Nazi propaganda is commonly seen as the beginning of Nazi Germany.

Fortunately, they don’t have nukes.

The EU Will Rescue Brits

The secret English courts that take newborns for forced adoption have moved from victimizing young and defenseless mothers to attacking the middle class, while blocking access to elected representatives. That confirms the decay of Brit democracy, and it’s fortunate the EU is taking over.

The new victims:

A father has been jailed for helping his pregnant wife flee abroad because she was terrified that social services would take her baby.

The 56-year-old businessman drove his wife and her eight-year-old son from a previous marriage to Dover, and then on to Paris.

He was arrested on his return to Britain and lost a High Court appeal earlier this week to have a 16-month sentence reduced.

The mother, who is a professional woman in her 40s but cannot be identified for legal reasons, has since given birth prematurely to a girl and remains in hiding…

Dismissing the appeal, Mr Justice Bennett acknowledged the “powerful emotions” involved, but said: “Such proceedings taken by a local authority must be respected by parents.

I doubt anybody in England respects their local authority – they’ve increased taxes way over inflation for decades, and now that well is running dry have devised a variety of entrapments to make money by contrived fines for parking and speeding.

This latest oppression shows one at its most autocratic – here’s the London Times (my ellipsis):

Last autumn a small English congregation was rocked by the news that two of its parishioners had fled abroad. A 56-year-old man had helped his pregnant wife to flee from social workers, who had already taken her son into care and were threatening to seize their baby.

Most people had no idea why. For the process that led this couple to such a desperate act was entirely secret. The local authority had warned the mother not to talk to her friends or even her MP (Member of Parliament).

The judge who heard the arguments from social services sat in secret. The open-minded social workers who had initially been assigned to sort out a custody battle between the woman and her previous husband were replaced by others who seemed determined to build a guilty case against her.

That is how the secret State operates. A monumental injustice has been perpetrated in this quiet corner of England; our laws are being used to try to cover it up.

In stopping the couple appealing to their MP, this local authority places itself above Parliament, confirming the latter is now irrelevant.

So it’s good the Brits will soon be governed by the EU, since the other nations of the EU don’t countenance baby snatching, and the European Commission, the European Court of Justice, and the European Court of Human Rights will singly or collectively outlaw this odious practice.

The US Gets a Satellite Shield

The US shootdown of satellite USA 193 is a tremendous technical achievement, with profound and very positive strategic consequences.

A U.S. Navy cruiser blasted a disabled spy satellite with a pinpoint missile strike that achieved the main mission of exploding a tank of toxic fuel 130 miles above the Pacific Ocean, defense officials said. Destroying the satellite’s onboard tank of about 1,000 pounds of hydrazine fuel was the primary goal, and a senior defense official close to the mission said Thursday that it appears the tank was destroyed, and the strike with a specially designed missile was a complete success.

I think the only changes to the SM-3 missile were software – the kinetic kill vehicle is too complex for quick hacks. It looks like this:

And does this (my ellipsis and link):

…the kinetic warheadhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projectile#Kinetic_projectiles (KW) begins to search for the target using pointing data from the launching ship. The ATK (supplied) solid divert and attitude control system (SDACS) allows the kinetic warhead to maneuver in the final phase of the engagement. The KW’s sensors identify the target and attempt to identify the most lethal part of the target and aim the KW at that point.

The SDACS is a pulsable solid fuel rocket – you can switch it on and off. There are many other technical marvels to this weapon – it’s carried in and hot-launched from 24-cell vertical silos, its three stage guidance system uses GPS, the passive electronically scanned radar in its Aegis battle management system tracks hundreds of targets simultaneously hundreds of miles out.

And all this works on a ship, in all weathers, anywhere in the world.

So now the dictators running Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran know they’ll lose most missiles they fire at US targets, and that the US can remove their low-orbit GPS and observation satellites without fuss with just a few missile cruisers.

And precisely because they’re dictatorships, none of these nations has the intellectual, technical, or economic muscle to come close to the US in this area.

The best they can do is shoot anonymously and preemptively, use volleys in the hope of saturating defenses, fire multiple decoys, and maybe detonate EMP weapons in low orbit in the hope of taking out US satellites.

But each of these tactics can be countered – the US will see rockets fired at its satellites well before they arrive, and know their launch points exactly. Volleys are expensive and easy to detect, so the aggressor can be immediately counterattacked. The US BMD and ASAT assets are smart enough to filter out decoys. And EMP weapons need to detonate in the atmosphere so won’t reach the high orbit US satellites.

All of which makes the free world a safer place.

Provided, that is, Americans don’t elect the America-hating Obama.

Avoid Google

Google has ceased to censor news about UN corruption. That good, but it’s a reminder that it’s not just the MSM that censors, and the distortion is not just to airbrush terrorists and harm the US.

Google, up to it’s evil tricks:

Google News quietly reinstated Tuesday the articles of a news service that routinely exposes U.N. corruption, a day after FOXNews.com ran a story about the Internet giant’s decision to remove Inner City Press from its search engine…

Someone complained to Google early this month that Inner City Press was a one-man operation, violating the Google News ground rule that news organizations listed must have two or more employees, according to Gabriel Stricker, a Google spokesman.

Lee, who insists his organization has appropriate staff, believes someone within the U.N. pressured Google to drop him. U.N. spokesman David Morrison called the allegations preposterous.

Google said the “de-listing” was due to a misunderstanding and agreed to restore Inner City Press stories to the Google News service.

The reaction to the de-listing, however temporary, had been furious. The non-profit Government Accountability Project lambasted the company, calling Inner City Press “the most effective and important media organization for U.N. whistleblowers”.

In fact the UN fights tooth and nail to hide its corruption from the (mostly US) people that pay for it. It perpetrated the biggest fraud in history and took no responsibility for it, and needs to hide that to maintain the fat-cat lifestyles of its corrupt secretariat

Anyway, thanks to Fox News, this censorship was stopped, but there’ll be plenty more they’ll be blocking, including:

1. Science refuting man-made global warming.

2. Negative stories about rich and/or powerful dictatorships – China, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Russia.

3. Science undermining Darwinism.

4. Science showing differences between sexes, nations, and religions.

5. Plus of course anything confirming that the US has won in Iraq, or that the current president is an honest and competent man.

The solution is to use other search engines – I use Ask, but there are plenty of others.

And I’ve added The Inner City Press to the DU blogroll.

Fly El Al!

The food’s not bad, and they keep you safe from terrorists and their Brit cop agents.

Lawyers for the victims of an alleged Israeli war criminal criticised British police today for allowing him to slip through the net.

Major-General Doron Almog avoided arrest in September 2005 after he was tipped off that officers planned to detain him on landing at Heathrow airport.

He refused to leave his El Al flight, and remained on board for two hours before returning to Israel…

Detective Superintendent John MacBrayne, in charge of the operation, was unable to confirm whether his team had a right to board after El Al refused them entry.

He wrote: “Another consideration (was) that El Al flights carried armed air marshals, which raised issues around public safety.

“There was also no intelligence as to whether Mr Almog would have been travelling with personal security as befitted his status, armed or otherwise.”

This confirms my experience that the only way to get treated decently at Heathrow is to have a heavily armed guard.

Actually, I’ve only proved the negative, but, heh, it’s junk science month!

Speaking of which, Jerusalem just got clobbered with another snowfall.

Proscribing Islam

Brits have huge problems with some of their Islamic immigrants – oppression of women, insurrection, violent suppression of Brits’ right to free speech, and hatred of the nation that feeds them.

Muslim immigrants were welcomed to the UK because, since the 18th century, that nation has supported religious freedom. But while many Muslims have integrated into the host nation, a large minority seek to seize control of it.

This situation was foreseen by John Locke, writing in 1689 (see here, p 56, Free Press edition):

Another more secret evil, but more dangerous to the commonwealth, is when men arrogate to themselves, and to those of their own sect, some peculiar prerogative, covered over with a specious show of deceitful words, but in effect opposite to the civil rights of the community.

For example: we cannot find any sect that teaches expressly and openly that men are not obliged to keep their promise; that princes may be dethroned that differ from them in religion; or that the domination of all things belongs only to themselves…But nevertheless, we find those that say the same things in other words…

These therefore, and the like, who attribute unto the faithful, religious, and orthodox, that is in plain terms, unto themselves, any particular privilege or power over other mortals, in civil concernments; or who, upon pretence of religion, do challenge any manner of authority over such as are not associated with them in their ecclesiastical communion; I say these have no right to be tolerated by the magistrates; as neither those that will not own the duty of tolerating all men in matters of mere religion.

For what do all these and the like doctrines signify, but that they may, and are ready upon any occasion to seize the government of the estates and fortunes of their fellow-subjects; and that they only ask leave to be tolerated by the magistrates so long, until they find themselves strong enough to effect it.

This neatly to describes the current situation in the UK, and polls suggest Locke’s suggestion that Islam should not be tolerated would be welcomed by most Brits.

That won’t happen now, since both government and opposition are pusillanimous.

But political and economic stresses will soon cause Brits to elect a harder breed of men and women, who will follow Locke’s advise.

That might mean the removal of mosques, denial of state funding and employment of Muslims, and mass incarceration and deportation.

Any peaceful adherents of Islam living in the UK can avert this catastrophe by clearly separating themselves from those who believe “that the domination of all things belongs only to themselves”.

Reciprocity

If the West used the principle of reciprocity, we’d find it easy to control hostile Muslim immigrants and nations without descending to their level of barbarism. Here are some suggested examples using today’s reports.

Mohamed Fayed:

Prince Phillip. Princess Diana’s sister Sarah McCorquodale, two former Scotland Yard Commissioners Lord Condon and Lord Stevens, two French pathologists, the French police and the French Establishment today claimed Mohamed Fayed is “an habitual liar with no respect for British institutions”. The Home Office announced deportation proceedings have been commenced against Fayed.

Iran:

“The cancerous growth Iran will soon disappear,” the commander of Israel’s Rocket Forces announced today.

Hamas:

Two David rockets fired from Sderot hit a town in the southern Gaza strip on Monday afternoon, one of them exploding near an EU soup kitchen.

The Boys Brigades, the Israeli teenagers military wing, claimed responsibility for firing the rockets. A spokesman said they hoped to improve improve range beyond the current 100 km, and deploy thermobaric warheads as soon as their allowances were paid next week.

The Palestinian government announced plans to evacuate essential personnel, notably themselves, to Egypt.

Fanatical British pensioner given community service:

A British pensioner who was on the verge of carrying out his plan to to kidnap and execute the chairman of his local Sharia Court “like a pig” when police caught up with him has been sentenced to pick up litter for two weeks…

The 77-year-old talked of kidnapping someone and then tying them up before getting a “DVD movie camera” and recording a statement to be released on the BBC. He said he would put his victim’s head on a stick and then burn the body.

Sentencing him, the judge lauded the defendant’s public spirit, but convicted him of planning to improperly dispose of waste.

The Rage Boys:

NATO denounced yesterday the reprinting of a blasphemous Muslim cartoons labeling Christians, Jews and women as “Slaves and Kuffars”, warning it could lead to confrontations between, on the one side, Christians, Jews, and women, and on the other Muslims males.

“By reprinting these cartoons we are heading toward a bigger conflict and that shows that both sides will be hostages of their radicals,”NATO Secretary-General Tebbit told AFP in Istanbul.

“It is not a way of improving your rights and exercising your freedoms when you use these rights for insulting the most sacred values and symbols of the civilized and heavily armed Free World, and inciting hatred,” he said. “This is a very wrong, provocative way — unacceptable. And suicidal.”

Bring it on.

The Silence Of The Chickens

The warmenists have gone unusually quiet – that’s because the sun has has, and we’ve had a record cold January.

It’s cold outside:

…the intensity of planet-wide cooler temperatures seen in January 2008, particularly in the Northern Hemisphere, which has seen record amounts of snow coverage extent as well as new record low surface temperatures in many places.

In fact (my ellipsis):

…the northern hemisphere (except for western Europe) has been enduring its coldest winter for decades, with snow cover at its greatest extent since 1966.

January’s global temperatures were lower than their entire 20th-century average (and) Antarctic summer ice was at its highest January level ever recorded, 30 per cent above normal.

The warmenists say the world is heating up and it’s all our fault, and nothing to do with the sun. But this looks suspicious:

It is normal for our sun to have quiet periods between solar cycles, but we’ve seen months and months of next to nothing, and the start of Solar cycle 24 seems to have materialized…then abruptly disappeared. The reverse polarity sunspot that signaled the start of cycle 24 on January 4th, dissolved within two days after that.

Of course correlation does not imply causation (except to junk scientists), and this little difficulty could sort itself out so we get a nice century of warmth, with less people dying from cold, crops boosted by the extra CO2, and the poor of the world joining us in the (re-invigorated) sun.

On the other hand, we could be entering a Dalton Minimum, which means another Little Ice Age, with Frost Fairs on the frozen Thames, and Dickensian Christmases.

But it won’t be a winter wonderland:

“The fowls, fish and birds, and all our exotic plants and greens universally perishing. Many parks of deer were destroyed, and all sorts of fuel so dear that there were great contributions to keep the poor alive…

London, by reason for the excessive coldness of the air hindering the ascent of the smoke, was so filled with the fuliginous steam of the sea-coal… that one could hardly breath.

WEIRD COINCIDENCE UPDATE Feb 18

The above was written in 1684 – the following was written this day of 2008 (my ellipsis):

(In the photo) the sun rises over a herd of deer on a cold and frosty morning in Hampton Court Park, Middlesex, yesterday. Saturday night was the coldest of the year in England and Wales, with temperatures of minus 10C (14F) recorded in Birmingham.