Damn Foreigners: Giving names to British Places!!!

heh

Click here for the high resolution photo. 

And this one.

Turkey, USA are the exceptions

Ant and the Grasshopper–the UK & Norway

Both the UK and Norway found oil in the North Sea. The UK decided to spend the proceeds and tax the extractors and spend that as well on mainly current spending. Norway decided to put that into a fund and only use the profits. So now the Norwegian fund has grown to Eur 430 billion. While the UK has a trillion pound debt. Just saying.

Read this interview from the Norwegian Ambassador to the EU. I quote

A stereotype about Norway is that it is sitting on a lot of money proceeding from its oil and gas sales. What do you do in your country with this money?

You are thinking of what we in popular refer to as the oil fund, formally named the Pension Fund Global. The notion is very simple and we are not the only ones who have done it. The fund now has the size of around €430 billion and still growing.

We are not in position to inject all this money into our economy, it would completely destroy it.  Instead we only spend about 4% of the surplus, which is estimated to be the long-term profit of the fund. The rest is set aside in order to pay - not only my pension when I retire - but for the generations to come. It’s a transfer of natural wealth in the ground into money that will balance our wealth over many generations to come. It’s a challenging exercise, but it has a broad political consensus and I think that’s the strength of the entire construction.

Is it possible to use these huge amounts to help boost the EU funds designed to prevent new crises from happening – the EFSF [the European Financial Stability Facility] or its successor ESM [the European Stability Mechanism], or the IMF?

The key point with the Pension Fund is that it’s strictly a financial vehicle, not a strategic vehicle for Norwegian interest in different parts of the world. If we were to make investments of more strategic reasons, we would easily end up in situations of second guesses; why didn’t we do this or that ...

The fund and its management is probably the most open fund in the world, and this is to demonstrate that the fund is managed strictly for financial purposes linked to the basic role of the fund, namely to take care of the values of many generations. The issue whether the fund should be used to invest to solve [the] immediate crisis in Europe or elsewhere is simply a non issue. In cases where we would like to contribute and where we have contributed, it would be a political decision and by using public money available.

Let me make a reference to the most recent example: as you may recall on 9 December the European Council agreed to strengthen IMF resources by €200 billion and they encouraged non-EU countries to do a similar contribution. Ten days later Norway announced that we were providing a €7-billion additional loan to the IMF as a direct response to the encouragement by European leaders and the European Council. This money was taken from regular sources, in this case guarantees from our national bank. 

So the key point is that the Pension Fund Global is a 100% financial instrument for the purposes I alluded to. Our contributions to the IMF and the close to €2 billion that we contribute to reduce economic and social disparities in the new members of the European Union through the Norway Grants are political decisions taken and financed by regular sources.

Now who looks after our children and invests their money and who fitters all their money? The UK will say that it invested in its people now, but looking at the productivity, the performance of UK students in PISA tests, etc. etc. doesnt show much return there, does it?

The story of the Ant and Grasshopper comes to mind.

Norway a 'pimp' for my prostitute client

First of all, I dont think prostitution should be outlawed. One of the world’s oldest professions, history itself tells us the futility of trying to ban or outlaw prostitution. This does not mean that forcible prostitution is ok, but voluntary one, sure, by all means, knock yourself out. You hump bricks, you hump men, in both cases, its physical exertion in exchange of monetary gain. But then, here’s an interesting dilemma which shows the inherent stupidity in government legislations. .

and heh@take it lying down..

Norway’s tax office risks facing pimping charges if it insists on taxing a 29-year-old Lithuanian prostitute, the woman’s lawyer has said.

The eastern branch of the Norwegian Tax Administration (Skatteetaten) slapped the woman with a 1.2 million kroner tax bill after tracing undeclared income to her bank account, newspaper VG reports.

The woman said she acted in good faith when she didn’t tell the tax office about the money she earned from prostitution from 2006 to 2010.  

Her lawyer, John Christian Elden, said the Norwegian state was not authorized to demand a cut of earnings from prostitution.

“This contravenes the penal code and is punishable as a pimping offence,” Elden told the newspaper.

“The provision [regarding prostitution in Norwegian law] is set up in such a way that it protects people who have to prostitute themselves, while also enabling them to retain their income.”  

Never before has a Norwegian court heard a case involving a valued added tax bill for prostitution, and Elden has said he and his client won’t take it lying down.

“If the tax demand stands, we’ll report the state for pimping,” he told VG.

Elden said the hefty tax bill would essentially force his client to prostitute herself again to pay off the state paymaster.

The head of the regional tax office’s anti-evasion unit, Jan Egil Kristiansen, said he was prohibited from commenting on individual cases.

“But all business activity is liable for tax and VAT. There’s no exception for prostitution,” he told VG.

Kosher or Animal Cruelty?

Well, i am afraid I am on the side of the animal cruelty people. Yes, we have spoken about this many times, at end of the day, we are killing the animal so drawing the line on how you kill the animal is hypocrisy, but then the idea is that you do need protein and please do not get me started on the vegetarian argument, but you do not need to needlessly torture or cause pain to the animals. And yes, many animal farms are bad but that’s not what the usual laws state. The law states, in countries like UK and USA and EU and and and that you are not to do cruelty to animals and there is a pretty good state of history and precedent in defining what cruelty is.

See what the Dutch are doing. I quote:

The bill sponsored by the tiny Animal Rights Party, the first such group in Europe to win seats in a national parliament, passed the lower house of parliament and must be approved by the upper house before becoming law. It stipulates that livestock must be stunned before being slaughtered, contrary to the Jewish kashrut laws and Muslim halal laws that specify that animals killed for their meat must be unwounded at the time of slaughtering. Stunning damages the nervous system.
“This way of killing causes unnecessary pain to animals. Religious freedom cannot be unlimited,” Marianne Thieme, head of Animal Rights Party, said before the vote. “For us religious freedom stops where human or animal suffering begins.”

So what are the Jews saying?

“Has the freedom of religion already been ritually slaughtered?” wondered a tweeter named ‘Bozoc.’ The Netherlands’ Muslim and Jewish communities – about 1 million and 40,000, respectively, in a total population of 16 million – have condemned the proposed ban as a violation of their religious freedom. But as Jacobs pointed out on Tuesday, “only the most observant Muslims – some 30 percent of the total – are against stunning animals.”

But this isnt a question of freedom of religion. You have the right to practise whatever religion you wish as long as your rights do not interfere with other people’s rights. And as it turns out, animals have a right not to have a cruel death. Mind you, the animals do not have a right to life (that’s an interesting conundrum) but there you go.

Incidentally, Luxembourg, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland ban ritual slaughter already. So there is precedent. And yes, male circumcision is as bad as FGM. Let the kid grow up, when he is an adult, he can make the decision to lop off the tip of his todger or to put in a ring.

Incidentally, check this situation out about dogs who get their tails docked.

"MPs have rightly signalled that it is unacceptable in a civilised society to amputate a puppy's tail purely because some people think that it is aesthetically pleasing to disable a dog in this way," he said.

Well said, the idea that for cosmetic or silly sod religions reasons you will go about inflicting cruelty to animals is frankly Neanderthal.

Women make gains in Arab boardrooms

Excellent news and very shameful for Japan and Italy. I quote:

Public companies listed in Oman and Kuwait have more women on their boards than in Italy and Japan, highlighting rare gains made by businesswomen in one of the most restrictive parts of the world.

Overall, the numbers arent that good,

The representation on boards in the two Gulf countries masks a bleaker overall picture: across the region women represent only 1.5 per cent of board seats, compared with 13.6 per cent in the US and 22 per cent in Norway.

But its a start at improving women's lives.

Technorati Tags: Arab,Women's Rights,Corporate Governance

Delivering newspapers pays more than journalism in Norway

How strange and counter intuitive but unfortunately very economically simple. You have more journalists than delivery boys, that's why you have this amusing situation! Talk is cheap!, so more expensive to walk the talk than to talk the talk (if you excuse the mangling of the pun!)

Technorati Tags: Journalism , Norway , Economics , Jobs

The children of war - the abandoned, detested and spat upon children

Soldiers being soldiers, during wars, they sow their wild oats and from these wild oats, small children frequently come up and their lives are generally made hell. We have seen this with the round eyed children in Japan post the World War II.

We have seen this with the black and white children of the american soldiers who left them behind after the Vietnam War and the Korean War. We have seen the spate of babies born to Russian soldiers rapes across a swathe of Eastern Europe and Germany in the dying days of World War II.

Each of these children had a horrific upbringing (if they managed to live past the pregnancy/attempted abortions), many were detested by their own mothers and families, they were spat upon, discriminated against, and and and.

I had read about all these poor unfortunate children before but reading this review brought another forgotten corner to light. These are the children of the German Soldiers in Norway. We know how the mistresses and children of German soldiers in France, Belgium and Netherlands were treated (very badly). The women were frequently tonsured completely, kicked and abused, chased out of town. Less said about their children the better.

We do have a very difficult question. Do we visit the sins of the fathers on the children? Specially if the children are innocent? How long does historical restitution last? Can discrimination go so far? This is also related to discrimination and affirmative action.

Remember the quote about restitution which goes something like, "my grandfather didnt collect compensation from your grandfather but I am here to collect and you are here to pay. Difficult questions none the less.

Again, this very sad poignant story meant that this will go into my to be read file.

All this to be taken with a grain of piquant salt!!!

H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-Childhood@h-net.msu.edu (June, 2007)

Kjersti Ericsson and Eva Simonsen, eds. _Children of World War II: The Hidden Enemy Legacy_. Oxford: Berg, 2005. viii + 296 pp. Notes, references, index. $28.95 (paper), ISBN 978-1-84520-207-1.

Reviewed for H-Childhood by Richard Ivan Jobs, Department of History, Pacific University.

Children in Danger or Dangerous Children?

Few academic books could enjoy such propitious timeliness as this collection of essays. The essays resulted from a research project begun in Norway in 2001 to explore the history of children born of Norwegian mothers and German fathers during World War II. These children, now in their sixties, have been receiving considerable media coverage lately as they have organized to press their rights and seek damages for discrimination from Norway in the European Court of Human Rights. In the past year, major print and television media outlets, even in the United States, have covered this story as these "war children" from Norway, Germany, and elsewhere have sought to make their stories heard through organized activism. These essays give voice to these historical subjects through ethnographic interviews and personal testimonies as well as study the impact, experience, and variety of state policies regarding these ongoing reminders of the war's legacy. Thus, the book as a whole reveals, in a transnational and comparative fashion, the ways in which these children and their mothers were categorized and stigmatized as the object of both benevolent and harsh state policies and social pressures.
Importantly, the comparative aspect not only juxtaposes nation-states, but also examines the differences and continuities between the periods of Nazi occupation and the postwar years of liberation.

The editors, Kjersti Ericsson and Eva Simonsen, used the project in Norway as a base to work toward an international focus, resulting in this collection of fourteen essays which cover the prelude to the war via Republican children in Spain to Black German "Occupation" children of the war's aftermath. The essays, however, mostly focus on the offspring from German soldiers and local mothers throughout Nazi-occupied Europe. As is usually the case with such collections, the burden to make the essays cohere effectively falls to the editors, who, in their introduction and epilogue, have done a marvelous job of laying out the meaningful themes and historical significance of the topics under study. This is particularly noteworthy here, because several of the essays fail to fully capitalize on their interesting material with persuasive interpretation. That is to say, all the essays are interesting for the information they provide, but they are rather uneven in narrative quality and historical analysis. Perhaps this is a consequence of the disciplinary methodology of the individual authors, but without a descriptive list of contributors, this reader is left guessing. Still, Ericsson and Simonsen have a done a very good job of laying out the complexities, problems, and historical significance that these essays reveal collectively.

This compilation shows in new ways the contradictions and twisted logic of Nazi racial and social policies, but also, importantly, the problematic ways in which these children were managed in the postwar period in their respective countries. The various postwar national policies regarding these offspring of German soldiers are the focus of many articles in the book and show the range of responses possible. Thus state policy intersects with lived experience. Kåre Olsen's interesting opening chapter uses the Norwegian Lebensborn maternity home as a case study to explore how Nazi policy would place the children of German soldiers and local mothers on a racial scale that differentiated "valuable" populations of northern Europe from those of lesser quality, from the East for example. Thus, the Lebensborn maternity homes, designed to care for the mothers and their offspring in ways that would promote a healthy Aryan population, was the logical inverse of the genocidal efforts to eliminate racial undesirables. But after the war, these children became a national political problem for Norway because of the hostility directed towards them as a result of their German paternity. Lars Borgersrud examines the Norwegian War Child Committee established in 1945 and its efforts to deny these women and their children citizenship and to deport them, if not to Germany, then to Sweden or even Australia. Thus, these women and children landed in a legal limbo and were denied their rights and citizenship--the subject of the current legal suit. Meanwhile, Arne Øland's chapter shows how the Danish government succeeded in concealing the German paternities of several thousand children born during and shortly after the war. His chapter combines a historical narrative followed by extended personal testimonies, but it ends without any sort of conclusion or interpretive analysis that connects his policy survey with these biographical sketches. Thus, the reader is left wanting the author to advance an interpretation or argument in addition to providing information and anecdote. Still, the official silence in Denmark was a marked contrast to the overt machinations in Norway to be rid of the problem altogether.
Fabrice Virgili shows that in France it was felt that the children were French, but that due to their problematic paternity, they ought to be sheltered from social ostricization. Hence the French state responded in a protectionist and pronatalist manner, while in the Netherlands, these children were viewed as a threat to Dutch society and the object of occasional violence, as recounted by Monika Deiderichs.

Particularly interesting to this reader was the persistence of eugenic social policies and scientific endeavor in the wake of the war and its terrible racial legacies. Yara-Colette Lemke Muniz de Faria's article on the children of German women and African American soldiers clearly demonstrates how this racial/anthropological scientific enterprise continued well into the postwar period as these children were repeatedly put under professional study in ways reminiscent of the Nazi regime.
While not seeking to eliminate these children from the German population, the study of their racial difference did help determine social policy of the 1950s, emphasizing how they ought to be treated as different from the more purely German children. The policies of socialization, then, were meant to make up for this racial difference.
This theme comes through elsewhere, too, as states were worried that local children with soldier fathers might be too "German," which could be displayed, for example, in a propensity for marching. Hence, psychiatrists and other professionals across Europe engaged in diagnosis and remedy at the service of the state to determine if these children were in danger or themselves dangerous--perhaps even depraved due to their German paternity. It becomes evident over the course of the book that there were two competing paradigms regarding what might become of these children due either to their biological heritage or socialization.
Thus, these children became valued for what they offered as objects of scientific study in the postwar nature/nurture debate. Michael Richards looks at similar themes in prewar Spain. Since his essay is neither about World War II nor the German paternity of children, it is something of an outlier in this collection. Nonetheless, what is interesting is that the dilemma for Republican children in Francisco Franco's Spain was not about race or nationality so much as ideology. Many of these children were secretly given to families sympathetic to the new regime, because "it was concluded that 'Marxism' had 'psycho-biological roots'
and that women were particularly prone to this threatening 'bio-psychic'
conditioning" (p. 123). The danger to Spanish children lay within the ideology of the familial household, and particularly with the mother, thus efforts were made to counteract these pseudo-biological leftist tendencies among Republican children through the socialization and moral puericulture of Nationalist households.

Some chapters, like Dorothee Schmitz-Köster's on German Lebensborn homes, read more like reports than interpretative essays. While Ebba D.
Drohlshagen's ruminations on the terminology for these children are interesting and full of data, they again lack the interpretive bite of a compelling essay. Anette Warring's chapter on the plight of Danish women as sexual collaborators is a story familiar to historians of the period, though of course the particulars may be new. The issue of women's sexual practices during the war is a recurring theme throughout, and while related, it leads some essays away from the valuable contribution of this book and its focus on children into the well-trod territory of women, sex, and the war. However, the chapter by Kjersti Ericsson and Dag Ellingsen explicitly shows how the stigmatization of the mother affected the offspring, or as they write, "not only were the 'sins' of the mothers visited upon their children: so also were the sins against the mothers" (p. 99) as they suffered through violence both symbolic and real. In an interesting twist, Regina Mühlhäuser shows how the children of German fathers in the occupied eastern territories served to stigmatize the soldiers as lacking appropriate racial awareness. Owing to the children's "racially mixed" nature, the manner in which the Nazi state dealt with these children while in control of Poland was a marked contrast to those of Norway. In Poland there was a danger of either the dilution of German blood or the dangerous improvement of the subject population due to the infusion of German traits. The Nazi policies in Bohemia and Moravia lay somewhere in between those of Norway and Poland.
Michal Šimunek shows how the Nazi protectorate there adopted policies that it hoped would be a long-term eugenic breeding program for the systematic change and replacement of hereditary traits. Because of the already high degree of intermarriage between ethnic Czechs and Germans in the Sudetenland, the goal became carefully selective breeding to diminish the Czech qualities of children while augmenting the German ones.

This collection, as a whole, certainly adds to our understanding of the lasting impact and human legacy of the war. As the editors state, "the war did not only take lives, it also created lives" (p. 1). Taken as a whole, we also see how various policies of intervention in the postwar period anticipate or parallel the proliferation of the welfare state.
The suitability of mothers, the social scientific study of children, and the adoption of policies to develop and provide for these young charges all presages the expansion of the European state into familial affairs as the continent struggled to recover from the effects of the war. This book is, without a doubt, the most complete study of these war children to date, filling a significant void both in the history of the war and the history of children, but it also suggests numerous directions for new research or for a truly transnational monograph to examine the issue comparatively.


Copyright ? 2007 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit, educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author, web location, date of publication, originating list, and H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For any other proposed use, contact the Reviews editorial staff at hbooks@mail.h-net.msu.edu.