Consistent with the big Euro-topia theme that privacy and individual rights are meaningless, The Netherlands will start monitoring automobiles to charge a per-kilometer tax on mere locomotion. Not only does this make smaller cars less appealing, but forces on drivers yet another cost to install what amounts to an ankle bracelet of the sort found among “non-custodial prisoners” on their vehicles.

The Cabinet approved a bill Friday calling for drivers of an average passenger car to pay a base rate of euro0.03 per 1 kilometer (7 US cents per mile), beginning in 2012. Drivers of heavier, more polluting vehicles will pay more, and the cost will go up for driving in peak hours.

GPS will track the time, hour and place each car moves and send the data to a billing agency.

Word has it that on the northern edge of the city of lost souls, where east meets weird, that an interesting Economic Indicator has turned up. At the Porte de Clignancourt flea market, a thing has cropped up wherein people are buying opened and partially consumed food with one another, such as half a jar of jam, or half a box of powdered milk – a throwback to the meagerness of postwar life.

In a ‘rich country’ where purchasing power is mysteriously weak in spite of an inflated currency, this isn’t so much an anomaly as a worrying sign. It’s easy to understand this otherwise disturbing evidence of the failure of Social Democratic economic intervention: just wait for the locals to blame ‘Capitalism’ – whatever it is that they think that Capitalism really is.

You can almost smell the ‘social justice’ in all of it.

Soeren Kern writing on his own site and in the Brussels Journal makes clear for us all what has become obvious by drips: the EU doesn not only not lend itself to any sort of democracy other than a Potemkin village of symbolism and plenary plentitudes, but its’ leaders seem to rather prefer to meet in a (now unlawful) smoke-filled room to select it’s non-titular lider maximo free of the burden of public knowledge.

Leaders of the 27 member states of the European Union are meeting in Brussels on November 19 to choose the first-ever European president and European foreign minister. European political elites say these two new jobs are needed so that the notoriously divided EU can begin speak with one voice on the global stage. Once that happens, they contend, the EU will assume its rightful role as a world superpower and act as a counter-balance to the United States.

Today, these so-called Eurocrats oversee more than 100,000 pages of EU legislation, much of which has primacy over national legislation and parliaments. Indeed, unelected bureaucrats in Brussels now exercise so much power that they dictate what elected leaders can or cannot do in more than 30 policy areas.

In the absence of a consensus candidate, the contest has degenerated into a race to the bottom. In secretive backroom horse-trading, the center-right, which controls the European Parliament, has staked its claim to the presidency; the center-left will get the foreign policy job. There are now half a dozen or more contenders for both jobs. And the one thing all the candidates have in common is that they are virtually unknown outside of Europe.

The leading hopeful for the presidency is Belgian Prime Minister Herman Van Rompuy, whose biggest claim to fame is writing haiku poetry in his native Dutch. According to the London-based Economist magazine, Van Rompuy’s main foreign policy experience stems from his involvement in a Belgo-Dutch row over the dredging of the River Scheldt.

The London-based Telegraph newspaper quotes another Eastern European official as complaining: “Trying to work out who is going to be President of the EU Council is not dissimilar to decoding who was in or out in the Kremlin in the 1970s. It seems strange to many of us that 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall we have to dust off our Kremlinology skills here in Brussels.”

Only among Arabs would you find anyone getting enraged about the supposed superior purity and virtue of THEIR kind of $10 whore.

A Muslim driver drove a Christian man to a Muslim brothel, then went out to call a Muslim mob that broke into the brothel, dragged out the Christian and stabbed 16 times after pouring acid over him. As the victim was rushed to hospital in critical condition, the mob started attacking and looting Christian properties.

Dr. Naguib Gobrial, President of the Egyptian Union of Human Rights, in a press release addressed to the Minister of Interior, strongly condemned the vandalism and looting of Christian properties, and criticized the prevailing state of fear and insecurity, under which the Christian Copts live. He also attacked the inaction of the Governor of Minya and the failure of the security agencies to ensure peace and stability.

A recent cash giveaway stunt for an undecipherable internet retailer called “mailorama.fr” went haywire when more ‘youts’ showed up than the gift giveaways could satisfy.

An Internet company that planned to throw envelopes of cash to passers-by from the top of a bus in Paris had to cancel the publicity stunt for security reasons after thousands of people turned up, police said on Saturday.

About 5,000 people gathered near the Eiffel Tower, with groups spilling into neighbouring streets and bursting through crowd barriers before the planned handout of banknotes

Don’t the emissions and transmissions of the White House sound historically familiar? No, not the heady days of Sputnik and Yuri Gagarin, the ugly days of nascent Communism forced on Germans, knowing full well that in their vanquishment and impoverishment, that no crisis should go to waste. As we approach the day of remembrance for the fall of the Berlin wall 20 years ago, we find the ghost of the methods and philosophies behind that repression rearing their ugly head with the election of the left in America. The baiting and taunting, and then the intimidation seem to have been drawn directly from the retrograde left’s cookbook, only to find another young generation of naïve souls to turn into a movement’s Pinkertons.

The most important paper factories in West Germany are the property of a tiny group of millionaires who brought Hitler to power and used his policies of conquest to enrich themselves. A leading and legally convicted war criminal like Flick could in 1960 gain possession of the largest paper-producing firm in West Germany, the Feldmühle-AG. West Germany's leading newspapers, both in terms of circulation and as mouthpieces of the ruling class, are owned by finance capitalists, or are subject to their advertising dictatorship. During the early stages of capitalism, individual printers owned newspapers, but today a press system has developed that is typical of the larger monopoly system. A small group of oil, steel, and bank lords own the leading South German Adenauer paper, the "Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung" along with numerous local papers that are published by the same firm. The press lord Springer, a money-grubber of the post-war era, not only controls the press system of West Germany's largest city Hamburg, but used it as a base to conquer the rest of the country.

Still, that is only a part of the function of journalism in the German Democratic Republic. Its primary mission is to build the enthusiasm of its readers, listeners and viewers for the noble cause of socialism, and to explain to them the laws of historical development in our day. More than that, as the Politbüro of the ZK of the SED said in its decision on press matters of 29 April 1959, the task is "not only to influence and change thoughts, but simultaneously actions in every area of the socialist transformation. . . Each editorial staff should therefore strive to initiate its own actions in the political economic and cultural spheres."

One of the most terrifying achievements of the Nazi regime was its relentless capture and corruption of German youth. In Eastern Germany, the Communists have proved themselves as good as the Nazis at that deadly game. Their Freie Deutsche Jugend (Free German Youth) seems like a near-perfect reincarnation of the Hitler Youth. The world might get a good look at the young Communists when they stage their long-heralded "march on Berlin" on Whitsunday (see above). Last week, TIME Correspondent Enno Hobbing cabled this preview of the FDJ:

"Be Prepared." The process of corruption begins early. Nine hundred thousand children between the ages of six and 14 are enrolled

The temper and tactics of FDJ chieftains was well-expressed by agile, aggressive Robert Bialek, who explained: "We'll take care of our church and political enemies. You sock them in the teeth until they fall. Then they write a letter of protest. You let them get up, read the letter, and then knock them down again."

Again & again, Communist oldtimers din into young ears: "You are the future of the German people." In response to such accolades, one FDJ member recently told an American: "I'm not much now, but when Germany is all Communist, I might be a mayor. When we control all Europe, I might be a state governor."

Turtles Are Casualties of Warming in Costa Rica

Even before scientists found temperatures creeping upward over the past decade, sea turtles were threatened by beach development, drift net fishing and Costa Ricans’ penchant for eating turtle eggs, considered a delicacy here. But climate change may deal the fatal blow to an animal that has dwelled in the Pacific for 150 million years.

Beachside tables have been removed because rising tides have destroyed the restaurant’s concrete terrace and uprooted shading trees there. In different circumstances, the beaches could gradually extend backward as the sea level rose. But along much of Costa Rica’s Pacific coast, the back of the beach is now filled with hotels, restaurants and planted trees, giving the sand no place to go. "The squeezing of the beaches where turtles nest is going to be a big problem," said Carl Safina, head of the Blue Ocean Institute, a conservation group.

In a country where turtle eggs are traditionally slurped in bars from a shot glass, uncooked and mixed with salsa and lemon, biologists are also promoting cultural change.

As much as this t-shirt guy doesn’t seem to know about the DDR, he does seem to know enough about the “Green” political sensibility being little different than the authoritarian nature of the East German Volkspolizei or “people’s police”.

The more repressive the regime, the more likely that everything in identified, on the surface as being the “people’s property”. Then again, the VoPos were in bad taste too.

A recent TNS-Sofres poll of young adult women in France indicates that they are more than 3 times more likely to want to “do nothing,” more than 10 times more likely to want to watch TV, and 11 times more likely to want to surf the internet, than to participate in a benevolent or volunteer activity – a disembodied, intellectualized “want” (since this is not a poll of what 20-29 year old women actually does) that came in slightly behind playing video games.

In other words, even the pretense of what’s held in high regard in a collectivism promoting, socialized society isn’t even on the radar. After all, isn’t that the government’s job?

As if you couldn’t figure this out by the rarity of those that don’t preoccupy their time and crash-test their friendships by incessantly talking about themselves.