Sent til festen, mest en note til mig selv

Hvis det stod til indvandrere og flygtninge her i landet ville 169 mandater gå til oppositionen; 6 til Venstre; K og O ville begge være ude af Folketinget. Jeg kopierer en stor del af artiklen, fordi nyhedsmedierne har en grim vane med at slette artikler efter noget tid, og den her vil jeg med stor sandsynlighed tage frem igen:

Massivt rødt flertal blandt indvandrere

Offentliggjort 27.01.10 kl. 15:02

Venstre ville med seks mandater være Folketingets mindste parti. Både De Konservative og Dansk Folkeparti ville ryge under spærregrænsen og dermed ud af Folketinget.

Det viser en meningsmåling blandt 1.055 repræsentativt udvalgte indvandrere og flygtninge, som Catinét har gennemført for Ritzau.

Til gengæld ville Socialdemokraterne, SF, De Radikale og Enhedslisten sidde tungt på magten med samlet 169 mandater.

Socialdemokraterne ville med 94 mandater være tingets største parti og alene have absolut flertal. [...]

De Radikale ville få 11 mandater, mens SF står til hele 56 mandater i målingen. Enhedslisten ville få otte mandater.

Målingen er gennemført fra den 17. december til den 7. januar som en del af Catinéts tilbagevendende interviewundersøgelse Integrationsstatus.

Deltagerne er flygtninge, indvandrere og deres efterkommere fra Pakistan, Tyrkiet, Somalia, Eksjugoslavien, Iran, Irak, Libanon, Palæstina samt statsløse.

Cirka 80 procent er muslimer.

(Selvfølgelig) via Kim Møller. Jeg betragter ovenstående som nogle fakta, der leverer et stærkt argument imod levedygtigheden af en model med åbne grænser og lukkede kasser.

Promoting the unknown, a continuing series

“Clementi you say? Never heard of the guy!” – Here’s wikipedia on Muzio Clementi. Here (unfortunately ‘among other things…’) you can find previous posts in the series.

Update: I see that youtube has disabled the embedding feature when it comes to Gilels’ recording (the last of the vids). I didn’t know that when I posted it, otherwise I’d have chosen another interpretation of that piece/another piece. Anyway, now it’s posted, and it’s well worth it to click the link to the video.

The Innocents Abroad III

Previous posts about the book here and here.

I was robbed of a few days of reading due to unforeseen family matters I had to attend to, so I haven’t had as much time to read as I’d hoped during the last days. However, I have completed Twain and started Shakespeare. I am still undecided as to whether I shall post a fourth post on the book after this one or not, there’s so much good stuff in there I really have a hard time not sharing some of those wonderful quotes. Ok, here goes:

“We wish to learn all the curious, outlandish ways of all the different countries, so that we can “show off” and astonish people when we get home. We wish to excite the envy of our untraveled friends with our strange foreign fashions which we can’t shake off. All our passengers are paying strict attention to this thing, with the end in view which I have mentioned. The gentle reader will never, never know what a consummate ass he can become, until he goes abroad. I speak now, of course, in the supposition that the gentle reader has not been abroad, and therefore is not already a consummate ass. If the case be otherwise, I beg his pardon and call him my brother. I shall always delight to meet an ass after my own heart when I shall have finished my travels.”

(this is how that specific page in my book looks now:

I (almost) always destroy my books like this. If I quote something from a book on this blog, you can be pretty sure I’ve outlined the passage in the book too. You can also be sure that there are a lot of passages that I didn’t quote in the blog post which I outlined when reading the book.)

…

“In Venice, to-day, a city of a hundred thousand inhabitants, there are twelve hundred priests. Heaven only knows how many there were before the Parliament reduced their numbers.” [...] “As far as I can see, Italy, for fifteen hundred years, has turned all her energies, all her finances, and all her industry to the building up of a vast array of wonderful church edifices, and starving half her citizens to accomplish it. She is to-day one vast museum of magnificence and misery. All the churches in an ordinary American city put together could hardly buy the jeweled frippery in one of her hundred cathedrals.”

…

“There are more Princes than policemen in Naples – the city is infested with them.”

…

“After browsing among the stately ruins of Rome, of Baiæ, of Pompeii, and after glancing down the long marble ranks of battered and nameless imperial heads that stretch down the corridors of the Vatican, one thing strikes me with a force it never had before: the unsubstantial, unlasting character of fame. Men lived long lives, in the olden time, and struggled feverishly through them, toiling like slaves, in oratory, in generalship, or in literature, and then laid them down and died, happy in the possession of an enduring history and a deathless name. Well, twenty little centuries flutter away, and what is left of these things? A crazy inscription on a block of stone, which snuffy antiquaries bother over and tangle up and make nothing out of but a bare name (which they spell wrong) – no history, no tradition, no poetry – nothing that can give it even a passing interest. What may be left of General Grant’s great name forty centuries hence? This – in the Encyclopedia for A.D. 5868, possibly:
‘Uriah S. (or Z.) Graunt – popular poet of ancient times in the Aztec provinces of the United States of British America. Some authors say flourished about A.D. 742; but the learned Ah-ah Foo-foo states that he was a cotemporary of Scharkspyre, the English poet, and flourished about A.D. 1328, some three centuries after the Trojan war instead of before it. He wrote ‘Rock me to Sleep, Mother.’
These thoughts sadden me. I will to bed.”

…

“Circassian and Georgian girls are still sold in Constantinople by their parents, but not publicly. The great slave marts we have all read so much about – where tender young girls were stripped for inspection, and criticised and discussed just as if they were horses at an agricultural fair – no longer exist. The exhibition and the sales are private now. Stocks are up, just at present, partly because of a brisk demand created by the recent return of the Sultan’s suite from the courts of Europe; partly on account of an unusual abundance of breadstuffs, which leaves holders untortured by hunger and enables them to hold back for high prices; and partly because buyers are too weak to bear the market, while sellers are amply prepared to bull it. [...] Prices are pretty high now, and holders firm; but, two or three years ago, parents in a starving condition brought their young daughters down here and sold them for even twenty or thirty dollars*, when they could do no better, simply to save themselves and the girls from dying of want. It is sad to think of so distressing a thing as this, and I for one am sincerely glad the prices are up again.”

*This is, according to info provided in a section I left out of the quote, appr. equal to a tenth of the current rate, which is around 200-300 dollars/girl.

…

“In the morning we sent for donkeys. It is worthy of note that we had to send for these things. I said Damascus was an old fossil, and she is. Any where else we would have been assailed by a clamorous army of donkey-drivers, guides, peddlers and beggars – but in Damascus they so hate the very sight of a foreign Christian that they want no intercourse whatever with him; only a year or two ago, his person was not always safe in Damascus streets. It is the most fanatical Mohammedan purgatory out of Arabia.”

Later on Twain mentions in passing a “mausoleum of the five thousand Christians who were massacred in Damascus in 1861 by the Turks” – that was 6 years earlier. Not exactly hospitable territory, it would probably be safe to say.

…

“Magdala is not a beautiful place. It is thoroughly Syrian, and that is to say that it is thoroughly ugly, and cramped, squalid, uncomfortable, and filthy…”