-TSS-

I think this year's election is a delicious one as the candidates can truly be considered left and right. However, it must be said that only in America of all the developed nations in the world could someone with policies and a mindset of Romney even dream of getting elected. I often read the British political and economics magazine the Economist and even though they with their pro neo-liberal views are as far apart from my own as could be they hit the nail on the head by saying that the American conservatives are hypocrites as they want to pursue a small state taxation government but want to cling onto a big state spending government. That is the dilemma they seem not to get over no matter how decades are running past.

You are probably referring to the boxing-match where the Japanese guy practically beat the hell out of his opponent who was on the floor for five times but yet the referee raised the underdog's hand as a sign of victory at the end. The thing which puzzles me is did the score-counters really get the japanese guy's opponent to win the match? After all, the referee does not decide who wins a match, it is the score-counters.

Indeed, I forgot about boxing. The olympic games are often a stepping stone for boxers as they enter their professional careers.

Are there any other sports at olympic games than tennis and soccer of which it can be said that winning the olympic gold will never be considered the most prestigious achievement of the sport? Well, I guess the US basketball-players may not price winning the olympic gold as high as winning the NBA-title but that must be because the US are miles ahead of others at basketball.

wasn't it in the original rules of basketball that when you donked the ball into the basket you were not allowed to touch the basket or the basket would be disallowed? Nowadays it seems that the donkers always stay hanging onto the basket for 2-3 seconds.

I'm glad that athletics finally begins. Watching swimming, fencing, judo or archery is fun for a couple of days every four years but in athletics there are likely to be races which you still remember one week after the olympics are over.

It has become very obvious that hosting the olympic-games is a very bad business for the host-city and host-country. Ironically the last olympic games which yielded some economic profit were the Atlanta games 16 years ago and those games have been branded as the most soulless and boring games ever. The Sydney games four years later were considered very warm-spirited and good games but turned out to be a financial disaster. One doesn't even need to begin to talk about the Athens games in 2004. Actually, Barcelona still has not sorted out the debt caused by the olympic games in that city 20 years ago. Despite all that the big cities in the world compete fiercely for the opportunity to host the games. It really beats me why. I understand that for cities like Seoul or Atlanta hosting the games is an opportunity to become better-known in the world but that argument surely does not hold for London. Very often the fancy facilities built for the games become useless after the games are over. I think in the future the games should be awarded to cities where those facilities already exist and the requirements for those facilities don't ned to be that strict that they must the state-of-the-art or the newest new.

I understand that fencing is one sport which requires some expertise from the spectator as well in order for there to be any point in watching that sport.

I think it is rubbish to consider some swimmer or gymnast the best athlete of the olympic games if he/she wins seven gold medals as in those sports there are so many events which makes it possible to win that many golds. I don't mean to belittle winning seven golds, of course not, but such an athlete is not necessarily a better athlete than someone who only has an opportunity to win one gold medal like wrestlers, weight-lifters etc.

When I investigated the earlier olympic records it turned out to be so that in the 1976 games Canada was the first ever and only since host-country which failed to win a single gold-medal. That is unlikely ever to be repeated as in the future only the big countries can afford to host the olympic games.

It's all pretence anyway. Lying to infidels is not a sin in the muslim theology.

There was an interesting article in the Economist edition July 7-13th about Canadian politics. The article concluded that Harper is really losing the grip.

I must have missed a news-story.

Obama is not going to get all the delegates behind him in the Democratic-convention. The voters in one county in West-Virginia considered an incarcerated felon running for the party-nomination a better choice than the incumbent president.

The Dutch elections later this autumn can throw another nail in the coffin of the euro. Indeed, it sems the euro-sceptics are riding strong in the opinion polls.

Do you get more points in the immigration-process if you promise to settle and work in Nunavut instead of Toronto?

I'm not sure I understand what you mean. The Queen of England is as much the head of state of Canada as Barack Obama is that of the USA.

The problem is that the people of the republican-movement only agree on that the British monarchy should be done away with as head of state. That's where their unanimity ends. They disagree fundamentally on what kind of a republic should be put in place. When the issue went to a referendum in Australia 13 years ago, the then PM Howard played on the division of the republicans as he himself supported monarchy.

But surely immigration into Canada is far from being evenly distributed. Aren't the majority of the people of the city of Toronto people who were born overseas? Simultaneously there must be areas in Canada where a dark-skinned face is still a rarity.

Obama is a clear favourite to be re-elected but there's still more than four months to go. So I wouldn't bet my fortune on it.

Isn't there in Mexico a very long interim period between the election and the elected president taking office? The election is now and the president-elect takes office in January?

There was an interesting article in the recent copy of The Economist-magazine how Canada is much more friendly and welcoming towards foreign entrepreneurs than the USA. Very surprising really. The process of getting a permanent residence-status is so much more complicated in the USA than in Canada that many people with skills and ideas take those skills and ideas elsewhere as they lose patience.

Loks like ND will be the biggest and together with PASK there will be a solid majority in the Greek parliament and they can continue obeying their German masters.

We in Finland are witness Nokia being slowly and certainly phased out of existence and ready to be swallowed by Microsoft. It has been going on since Stephen Elop became CEO of Nokia. Btw, he is your fellow countryman.

The excuse of ageing population is used in all western countries to support the idea of mass-immigration. The reality is that the population has been rapidly ageing ever since the invention of contraceptive methods but none of would like to return to the days prior to contraception, would we? Another thing is that often the immigrants may be very skilled persons but whose skils are not recognized in a western country and, as someone mentioned, they end up as taxi-drivers or flipping burgers, therefore totally wasted. They would have been so much more useful with their skills in their countries of origin if we're talking about so-called economic migrants who are fleeing poverty rather than war. It is difficult to think of more immoral action than by the British NHS when they have been actively poaching Nigerian nurses because the NHS in Britain is understaffed as if the nurses in NIgeria would not be needed.