Sarnie Tosser

People throwing items from cars at speed ....

Holger Becker, And The Offending Foil Sandwiches

 .... are not new to this blog, although I can't recall in which particular post it has been mentioned, but I do recall it being mentioned.

Nationalism Distorts Facts

When nationalism is the primary political ethos of a government, there is always a problem with the truth ....

Indian Nationalism Morphed Into Hindu Nationalism

.... after all, what your essentially promoting is the idea that the country (especially under your leadership), is better than any other country.

A Strange Anniversary

This week saw the anniversary of the defeat by Arminius and the Germans, of Publius Quinctilius Varus in the Teutoborg forest in Germany in 9 AD. I mention it, because there are those who still believe that the events of that defeat set the course of European history for the next 2,000 yrs.

That the division of Europe into a Romanised West, a German middle Europa, and a Slavic East, was direct result of that few days so long ago. Whether the fact that Germany remained outside the Empire was good (as 19th and 20th German Nationalists believed), or bad, as those who think a German race with a long history of being inside the Roman Empire would have followed a very different path in the 20th century think, is purely a matter of conjecture.

However, I think its unarguable that the Roman Empire would have been considerably stronger if the Germans had been inside its borders. The Eastern portion of the Roman Empire only fell to the Turks in 1453 AD, whereas the Western portion of the Empire fell a thousand years earlier in 476AD, mainly to Germanic tribes.

One look at the map shows that if Germania Magna up to the Elbe had been in the Empire, a massive buffer province would have been created, with large amounts of manpower and a huge influence right into the east of Europe, with who knows what long term consequences.

As it was, the defeat took away the eastward ambitions of Augustus, and although the Germans paid a very heavy price for their victory, as Roman armies regularly crossed the Rhine and devastated Germany for several hundred years (think of the opening scene in the film Gladiator), they never again tried to conquer the region between the Rhine and the Elbe.

Maybe if the Emperor Trajan had gone to Germany rather than Dacia, it might have been achieved, but Germany had no gold, whereas the more civilised Dacians did ... ah well on such facts history is made.

AIDS is a mass murderer!

German TV is showing an advert for AIDS awareness which features Adolf Hitler ...... as you might guess this is controversial, although in fairness the advertising campaign also features Stalin and Saddam Hussein having unprotected sex.

Apart from the matter of taste, I was surprised by this story because I was under the impression that any mention of the Nazi Party were Verboten in Germany?

Ah well, just another case of one set of laws when it suits and another when it doesn't.

The Lost "Drugs War"

Occasionally this blog looks at the insidious nature of the drug scourge that the Western world has created for itself. This affliction, fuelled entirely by a couple of feckless generations who use drugs to a value of $380 billion a year, primarily from the retail drug sales.

This drug using group are estimated to be around 4% of the worlds population but generate a trade that brings much sorrow and crime to the world.

The invasive nature of this drug trade was starkly illustrated when a story came out that showed that 95% of dollar bills in Washington DC, bear traces of the illegal drug cocaine. This figure for the US capital is up 20% for the last two years.

Other countries where notes were tested were Canada, Brazil, China and Japan. China had the lowest rates, with only 12% of its bills contaminated, other big US cities such as Baltimore, Boston and Detroit had the highest average cocaine levels in the US on their dollar bills. In the US the cleanest bills were collected from Salt Lake City, home of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, better known as the Mormons.

Europe has not been spared these sort of results, and in fact as long ago as 2003, in Germany, nine out of 10 banknotes showed clearly measurable amounts of cocaine according to the Institute for Biomedical and Pharmaceutical Research in Nuremberg. The same tests run looking for concentrations of cocaine on Spanish euro notes, found that they were almost a hundred times that of the levels recorded in Germany.

The only balance to this is that Bank notes can pick up traces of cocaine directly from users snorting it through rolled up bills, or when cash is stacked together, and its assumed that the latter is the main cause of the high levels of the drug traces.