On 2002-04-18 10:33, JayN wrote:
Plane crashed into a skyscraper in Milan belonging to a famous tire company. Is this the start of TFT in Europe?+

Doubt it. Europe is still in the mid to late 1990s.

On 2002-04-18 10:40, madscientist wrote:

On 2002-04-18 10:33, JayN wrote:
Plane crashed into a skyscraper in Milan belonging to a famous tire company. Is this the start of TFT in Europe?+

Doubt it. Europe is still in the mid to late 1990s.

This seems to have been an accident, not an attack of any kind, but the pictures I've seen on-line are disturbingly familiar!

On 2002-04-18 10:40, madscientist wrote:

On 2002-04-18 10:33, JayN wrote:
Plane crashed into a skyscraper in Milan belonging to a famous tire company. Is this the start of TFT in Europe?+

Doubt it. Europe is still in the mid to late 1990s.

Mid to late 1990s? When's the next flight?

Yesterday's plane crash was probably an accident. No less tragic though.

I think most of Europe is still 3t.

Take this article about London.

Is London 2002 like New York 1994?


http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewForeignBu...20020418e.html

Statistics Confirm Huge London Crime WaveBy Mike WendlingCNSNews.com London Bureau ChiefApril 18, 2002

http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewForeignBu...20020418b.html

Britain is still definitely in the 1990?s.

British Pro-Lifers Lose Court Battle Over Morning-After Pill
By Mike Wendling
CNSNews.com London Bureau Chief
April 18, 2002

London (CNSNews.com) - A British pro-life group failed in its attempt to stop over-the-counter sales of the morning-after pill when a judge ruled in favor of the U.K. government on Thursday

The circumstances regarding the Milan crash are unclear. It may or may not have been an accident. It probably wasn't terrorism. But it may have been a despondent man. It might be somewhat like the Charles Bishop case.

The man who flew the plane was 67 years old which would make him a mid-Silent or maybe an early Silent by European standards. I might be reading too much into this but the elderly and adolescents both have the highest depression rates.

According to some who knew the man he loved life. But one of his relatives said he was suicidal because creditors were going after his property. He did fly the plane into the building around 5:50 PM in the afternoon. So it's hard to say but it was most likely a dramatically attempted suicide but the pilot was apparently trying to avoid killing others. Why didn't he just fly into an empty field then?

Milan Crash: Accident or Suicide?
By Mike Wendling
CNSNews.com London Bureau Chief
April 19, 2002

1st Add: Comments by pilot's son, nephew.
London (CNSNews.com) - Italian police were treating the crash of a small airplane into Milan's tallest building as an accident Friday, calming fears of a Sept. 11-style terrorist attack.

Three people were killed and at least 29 were injured when the plane smashed into the upper stories of the 415-foot Pirelli building, which houses the regional government.

The plane hit at about 5:50 p.m. local time when there were still hundreds of workers inside the building. But reports said the upper floors of the building were being renovated and were nearly empty when the plane struck.

Police said a female lawyer leapt to her death shortly after the crash as smoke engulfed the building's upper floors and that the body of another woman was later found inside the structure.

The 67-year-old pilot, identified as Luigi Fasulo, also died. Fasulo took off from the nearby town of Locarno, Switzerland and was headed for Milan's Linate airport when he reportedly told air traffic controllers that he was experiencing problems with the plane's landing gear.

A statement by the Italy's air traffic control association said the pilot was then instructed to fly to the west of the airport, but instead headed north. The association said the pilot didn't issue a SOS signal but radio contact was lost before the crash occurred.

Authorities say they are considering the crash an accident, but Fasulo's son Marco told the Italian newspaper La Repubblica that he was convinced his father had committed suicide.

"There were people who wanted to ruin him financially, so he committed suicide," he told the paper.

The statement was contradicted by one of the pilot's nephews, who said Fasulo "loved life" and had no reason to kill himself.

Firefighters put out blazes on two of the building's 30 stories and worked overnight searching for clues to explain what was behind the crash.

Stock exchanges in New York and Frankfurt plunged on the initial news of the crash but later stabilized. Milan's stock exchange had already closed for the day, but electronic after-hours trading was suspended.

Italy has been the target of terrorist threats and activity in recent months. The U.S. government issued a statement last month warning that several northern Italian cities, including Milan, might be targeted by terrorists over the Easter weekend, although no attacks occurred. And a leftist group once thought to be defunct claimed responsibility for the assassination of a government adviser on March 19.

But Italian officials moved quickly Thursday to ease public fears that the crash may have been terrorist-related.

"This had nothing to do with the haunting images of the Twin Towers," Interior Minister Claudio Scajola told reporters. "Sure, tragedy struck. But it could have been worse."

Shortly after the crash, Scajola had said the incident was "probably an accident," settling nerves after the leader of the country's Senate suggested that terrorism could not be ruled out.

In Washington, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said President Bush was immediately informed of the plane crash.

The crash was Milan's second aircraft disaster since Sept. 11. In October, a Scandinavian Airlines System plane and a small private craft collided on a runway at Linate, killing 118 people.

The Pirelli tower sits next to Milan's central rail station but no longer houses the Italian tire company that gave the building it its name.

E-mail a news tip to Mike Wendling.

Send a Letter to the Editor about this article.

Italy had the earliest crisis in western/southern Europe last time, starting in the late teens and culminating in Mussolini's rise to power. Italy was already beginning to unravel in the late 1970s--Red Brigades, kidnappings, etc. (Italy also had the earliest 19th-century crisis--about 1848-62.) And now Italy is the first western nation entering a 4T again. The new leadership is trying to undo the welfare state that was the creation of the last high. This is a portent of things to come for the rest of Europe, I am quite convinced.

David Kaiser '47

On 2002-04-22 19:46, KaiserD2 wrote:
Italy had the earliest crisis in western/southern Europe last time, starting in the late teens and culminating in Mussolini's rise to power. Italy was already beginning to unravel in the late 1970s--Red Brigades, kidnappings, etc. (Italy also had the earliest 19th-century crisis--about 1848-62.) And now Italy is the first western nation entering a 4T again. The new leadership is trying to undo the welfare state that was the creation of the last high. This is a portent of things to come for the rest of Europe, I am quite convinced.

I would disagree David on Italy, Mussolini's rise to power was in a unravelling. Basically a small well motatived group took over power not a mass movenment and before the 1930's very little changed in institutional order Italy had. The real huge change in Italy's institutions happended after WW2, when Italy became a Republic and a new institutional order was constructed.

School shooting by two German 18 year olds killing 18 students.

My money is that Germany is late 3T and 18 year olds in Germany are last wave Xers.

http://dailynews.netscape.com/dailyn...shortdate=0426

Latest reports are that 14 teachers were murdered, along with 2 students and a policeman, before the murderer committed suicide.

Remember that Germany's baby boom doesn't start until the mid 1950's, because of all the destruction and necessary rebuilding post-1945. So their cycle might be as much as 15 years behind ours.

Wow! That much behind us? I thought only about 5 years. Maybe it's a little more than what I said. But I'm not sure about 15 years. And the Boomers began three years before the demographic "Baby Boom".

Maybe thier Boom cohort starts in 1950 or so.
That would leave them about seven years behind us.

I hung out with alot of Berliners.
There is clearly a pre-divison and post-division generation.

The generational cycle here resembles the American Millenial Cycle of decline.

In both societies the souls of the young are crying out for a purpose and are being told the main purpose is to adhere to the dictates of the market.

When a student fails to meet this rigid pre-planned goal they are considered a failure.

The heart cries out for all the students and teachers wounded and killed. But it doesn't change the underlying fact of capitalist alienation that led to this killing.

In the Millenial Cycle the Western Capitalist nations are in decline and thier Asian competitors are rising and beating them at the game. The West is drifting towards such a large degree of alienation that we may see revolution real soon.

Whether the coming revolution will be peaceful or forced depends upon the will of the people. If they can convince their representatives (sic) to make changes tthen it may not be too late.

But, if not, then we may see violence in the streets the make the Battle for Seattle or the Battle for Milan look tame. Watch. Wait. The Millenial Generation will not accept to be another generation with lower living standards.

http://groups.google.com/groups?q=ch...ht.com&rnum=16

This Usenet post discusses the CIA's predictions as of September 6, 2001.
How wrong they can be.

We Australians have been there and done that in regard to the so-called third way social democratic governments and the rise of the far right. All is needed is for the centre-right to co-opt some of the far right's agenda and the Europeans will be in the political position we are in now.

How the PM remade his party
By Shaun Carney
April 27 2002


Probably because of Australia's status as a former colony, there's a tendency to look at any political trend overseas and then expect it to arrive here in a year or two. But from time to time, Australia is ahead of the curve.

Those continuing to argue that the ALP should embark on an antipodean version of Tony Blair's Third Way should bear in mind that Bob Hawke already did it back in 1983-84.

Similarly, the flourishing of nationalist parties in Western Europe and Scandinavia, most notably in France where the National Front's Jean-Marie Le Pen this week made it to the final presidential run-off, comes after Australia has already experienced the rise of One Nation.

Pauline Hanson has, it seems, taken off, then crashed as a serious political figure. But it's not all over for One Nation. Not yet, anyway. Sure, its vote went backwards at the federal election last November but compared with the other minor parties, it still did pretty well.

Nationally, the One Nation vote was halved, from 8.4 per cent in 1998 to 4.3 per cent last year. But that's not bad for a party that degenerated into soap opera within only a year of its formation.



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In fact, it represents the votes of 498,028 Australians. In New South Wales, Queensland and Western Australia, One Nation secured a higher House of Representatives vote than either the Australian Democrats or the Greens.

The truth, uncomfortable as it may be for some, is that a solid constituency has been established in the electorate for the type of politics that Hanson espoused. It's a constituency that embraces numerous sentiments and aspirations: old-fashioned nationalism, economic or social insecurity, a sense of nostalgia for a less complicated past, even some racism.

The nationalist constituency has so far expressed itself as a protest movement. It's anti-politics and mainstream politicians (the "they're all as bad as each other" chorus) and that's why its preferences have often sprayed all over the place, helping Labor just as much as the Coalition - if not more - in the 1998 federal election.

But when a mainstream politician successfully panders to the nationalist view, as John Howard did so astutely with his treatment of boat people last year, this constituency can provide rich electoral pickings.

While the One Nation vote fell by four percentage points last year, the Liberal-National vote increased by 3.5 percentage points.

The tantalising prospect for Howard, having won over nearly half of Hanson's supporters, is to pick up the remainder during this electoral term. If this were to happen, the Coalition's primary vote at the next election would exceed 47 per cent.

Howard has, up to this stage, managed to elude the fate of many leading conservative politicians in Western Europe, who have had to watch as nationalist parties have established themselves as viable political entities with real bargaining power.

This has happened in Belgium, Denmark, Italy, Norway, Germany, Austria and Holland. And, it would seem, France.

What has happened in France is that the protests have come from voters on the left and the right. While Le Pen has attracted all the attention because, with 17.8 per cent, he managed to come second in the first presidential ballot, there was also a massive blow-out among French voters with leftist sympathies.

Trotskyite and Green candidates secured a total of 21 per cent - a higher aggregate vote than their extreme right counterparts, Le Pen and his former ally Bruno Megret, who took a total of 20 per cent.

The central insight in Howard's approach to the rise of One Nation was to see it as a manifestation of a growing sensibility within a section of the electorate rather than as a specific political movement.

This meant that One Nation voters were always up for grabs.

It can now be seen that Hanson's appearance on the political horizon was more an aberration or a fluke than anything else. What she managed to do during the two-and-a-half years she was the member for Oxley in 1996-98 was appropriate an agenda, part of which had been associated with Howard for many years.

Howard was the one who, as opposition leader, offered the view in 1988 that perhaps the pace of Asian immigration could be slowed down in light of its social implications. For that, he attracted a massive amount of opprobrium from his opponents and city-based elements of his own party. Within a year, he had been ejected from the Liberal leadership and what followed was almost six years in the wilderness.

When Howard took back the leadership in early 1995, the political zeitgeist had changed. It suited him.

The backlash against Keating was growing. Howard, knowing that all he had to do was stay mum, did so.

When Hanson, as the Liberal candidate for Oxley, made a series of remarks that were highly critical of public financial aid to Aborigines during the 1996 campaign, the genie was out of the bottle.

Hanson was disendorsed by the Liberal Party, went on to win her seat as an independent and became the cause celebre of Australian politics.

When she made her first speech in parliament in September, 1996, with its warnings about the danger of Asian hordes coming to Australia and a complete repudiation of Aboriginal land rights, Howard's response was crucial to his long-term survival.

For weeks he said nothing. When he did respond, it was to claim credit for lifting the pall of "political correctness". In other words, he identified himself as Hanson's enabler. By doing this, he ensured that he had left the door open for those who were seduced by Hanson's message to either return or come over to the Liberal fold.

And that is where many former One Nation voters, powerfully impressed by Howard's unyielding approach to asylum seekers - those who try to come here by boat or those who are in detention - now reside.

Such is Howard's transformation of the Liberal Party. In the 1940s Sir Robert Menzies' masterstroke was to put together a mass-based party that blended conservatism with mild liberalism.

Howard has managed very astutely to begin a process in which the Liberal Party defines itself in a different way - essentially a conservative party with strong elements of the nationalist constituency. Having been mugged comprehensively by the populist-nationalist issue in 1988, and then threatened by it in 1998, he's made sure it will never happen again.

Not to him, anyway.

Shaun Carney is an associate editor of The Age.

E-mail: scarney@theage.com.au

Hey, Tristan.

I like your signature above.

Can I have your permission to use it.

I think it aptly describes the Jews of Israel and the Americans.

On 2002-04-29 11:56, JayN wrote:
Hey, Tristan.

I like your signature above.

Can I have your permission to use it.

I think it aptly describes the Jews of Israel and the Americans.

Sure

This might explain the question if Western Europe is still in an Unraveling.

Germans Blame Hollywood, Satanism for massacre

http://www.newsmax.com/archives/arti...6/180015.shtml

Yesterday, coming home from a wedding and seeing the well dressed crowds coming out from their Easter celebrations put me in a rare hopeful mood.

The assasination of Mr. Pim Fortuyn in the Netherlands brought me back to my normality. The politics of the gun in Europe (Spain, Italy and now the Dutch) speaks of a Third Turning growing stranger and stranger...the 4T might be a most vile creature.

On 2002-05-06 13:51, Virgil K. Saari wrote:

The politics of the gun in Europe (Spain, Italy and now the Dutch) speaks of a Third Turning growing stranger and stranger...the 4T might be a most vile creature.

Given highly consolidated power and highly lethal technology, it is going to be the most brutal time that mankind has ever known. Or do you have any reason to believe that it will not be?

On 2002-05-06 14:08, Stonewall Patton wrote:


Given highly consolidated power and highly lethal technology, it is going to be the most brutal time that mankind has ever known. Or do you have any reason to believe that it will not be?

One has to wonder why opposition to someone else's ideas has to take this form of personalized violence. Mr. Fortyn's demise was not of a highly advanced method; the good folks of St. Bartholomew's Day could have done this at the start of the Modern Age. The Dutch were a "tolerant" people; it did not seem to matter.


I never had any reason to believe; but, I sometimes had small hope that we might have a milder Crisis. I think it will be of an environmental nature; our mutual turn to murder will not make things turn out any faster or more fruitfully. If there is Big Trouble ahead; it is not the best idea to shoot one's generals as Mr. Stalin was to find out last time 'round.

It seems that the killer of Mr. Fortuyn was a vegetarian animal-rights whacko who found mink rearing reprehensible, but putting a few bullets in his fellow man just.


Pim Fortuyn's party will go to the polls with a Black immigrant leading the List. This brings to mind Mr. Jean Raspail's The Camp of the Saints.

Don't know about that book but I will mourn the death of Fortuyn even while disagreeing with his immigration policies. While I do support immigration for both moral and economic reason it is time for pro-immigration advocates to stop hiding behind the racism charge. Opposition to immigration should be regarded as a position worthy of respect rather than denigration. And it is a delicious irony the person leading the charge to rebuke these immigration advocates will be a black Netherlander. Good for them.

The Germans are talking about banning "violent video games" as a response to the school shooting in Erfurt, along with even tougher gun control laws.

It would seem that they have become very nervous about this shooting, previously convinced that such things were a purely, uniquely American problem.

Their Baby-Boom generation is younger than ours, and so any children born to parents of that generation will be younger than our "Millies". The shooter would therefore be part of their equivalent of Generation X, although he was only 18 or 19.

The birth rate in Germany is around "0" and has been for a while. Seeing a baby over there in a stroller is a rare event. I've read that at the current rate the population will fall to 65 million from 85 million by 2050, with the population skewed towards older people.

The reaction to ban video games is obviously an attempt by German Boomers to protect the few children in society.

[quote]
On 2002-05-09 06:18, Virgil K. Saari wrote:
It seems that the killer of Mr. Fortuyn was a vegetarian animal-rights whacko who found mink rearing reprehensible, but putting a few bullets in his fellow man just.

There has been next to nothing in the way of media coverage of this assassination and of the beliefs of the assassin out here in Seattle. Almost all of what I've read has been from the internet. This is rather interesting considering that we've had a number of arsons and other destructive actions from the Earth liberation Front. Last year they burned down a research center at the UW. Makes me wonder whether the media in the Northwest is afraid of being politically incorrect or of encouraging them to do something out here again. I would guess that the killing of a right-wing/gay/anti-immigration political candidate by an animal rights extremist would be an item of interest, but I guess I could be wrong.