-TSS-

The very fact that in the 21st century millions of people are still driven by medieval superstitious claptrap is enough to make you feel depressed about the future.

The Baltic states were very long-sighted to join NATO when the door was open for them. Had they not done so Russia would have invaded them under some excuse. Especially Estonia during the bronze statue-argument in 2007.

Do you remember the news-pictures 25 years ago when Ceaucescu was executed in Romania? They measured his blood pressure before the execution. I wonder were they checking if he was fit enough to be shot.

Could this be possible in Canada: Someone being taped in his home against his will and what he said used against him and take away his property? I highly doubt it.

OK, I admit my ignorance.

3-4 days ago this case was the top news-story in the US-media. Oh dear oh dear, surely trivial things like the Ukraine crisis or the civil war in Syria which both could lead to a WW III are completely meaningless when something as outrageous as this happens.

Is basketball really a popular sport in Canada? i personally can watch it now and then but tbh it is bloody boring. Compared to hockey or even volley-ball, which I used to play at an advanced level years ago, basketball is just boring. A matter taste of course this is.

Any fool can realize that this old man's comments were provoked more by jealousy than racism. Had the young lovers of the old man's girl been white he would have said something different but yet derogatory. Yet this anti-racism hysteria is the modern day version of witch-hunts. As we know from the history of the medieval witch-hunts the accused had to prove that they were innocent, which they mostly failed. Nothing new in that respect.

You mean the guy who said he'll never play under a white coach?

His young trophy-wife had young lovers and that peeved him off and he told her to stop it, which gave the wife an opportunity to use the taped conversations as a revenge.

Mountain of a molehill.

In federal countries a second chamber the membership of which is equally distributed among the constituent parts of the country is needed to counterbalance the arithmetic superiority of the most populous regions of the country. All western democracies with a federal system of government have two chambers of legislature. What really baffles me is that even some unitary countries have two chambers of parliament, which is really useless.

Good points on Ukraine by Vaclav Klaus: http://www.klaus.cz/clanky/3553 Excerpt from the link: Introduction: The difficult heritage of the past The state of Ukraine today is a sad outcome of Stalin's attempts to mix up nations and boundaries, disrupt natural historical ties and create a new Soviet man by turning original nations into mere ethnic residua and historical leftovers. Taking it into consideration is the starting point of our thinking, something that is sadly missing in the political debates today. The cacophony of commentaries and statements to recent Ukrainian developments misses the point that the first and foremost contribution to the current dramatic situation there is the obvious political, economic and social failure of Ukraine as an independent state. This failure, in our view, has been caused by the following factors: 1. Ukraine as we know it today, has no historical tradition of statehood, and in over twenty years of its existence the country failed to create a state that would be accepted by the bulk of its population. The state was not born out of its people's efforts to gain self-determination and sovereignty, it came into being through the dissolution of the Soviet Union by its political leadership, and emancipation of the artificial Soviet republics, created by Moscow in their then valid borders. 2. The largely passive population's anti-Moscow sentiment was exacerbated by Gorbachev's perestroika and its catastrophic results. The local Soviet party nomenklatura also feared Yeltsin's policies aimed to crush the old system. 3. At the beginning of its independence, Ukraine functioned under the leadership of the Russian-speaking Soviet elite from the eastern part of the land as a sort of a Russian B-state, a part of the vast post Soviet space with enormous potential. At least on paper: 52 million people (second to Russia), its industrial base in the Donbas, the biggest agricultural potential on the European continent, the key ports of the Black Sea, Crimea, a relatively well educated elite and central Europe next to its door. 4. The new state emerged from an essentially artificial administrative portion of the Soviet totalitarian Union that wanted to show the world how the national issue can be resolved once and for all by replacing individual nations with the „Soviet people“. The Russian and russified areas of the east and south of Ukraine (with three hundred years of Russian history behind them) were artificially linked to the originally Polish Galicia and Subcarpathian Ruthenia acquired by Stalin after World War II, lands that had never belonged to any of the old Slav states in the East. 5. The independent Ukrainian state did not exist before 1991, unless we consider as such the brief period of civil war after the 1917 October revolution, when unsuccessful attempts at Ukrainian independence featured such controversial figures as general Skoropadsky, atamans Machno and Petljura, or Stepan Bandera in World War II. Their legacy (anti-semitism, affinity to German Nazis), is considered very controversial outside the nationalistic western Ukraine. 6. Older historical traditions speak in favor of strong ties to Russia – the Kievan Rus period, the acceptance of orthodox Christianity, or the tradition of the Zaporozhian cossacs who fought the Turks and the Poles and brought Ukraine of the time into tsarist Russia. The common Russo-Ukrainian experience of the Soviet times as well as World War II created strong human, social, economic and political bonds that cannot be easily replaced. 7. More than twenty years of Ukrainian independence that followed, were not enough to create a common Ukrainian identity and convince the people of this very heterogenous land that independent Ukraine is the right social formation, fulfilling their national aspirations. Such ambition is seen in especially among ethnic Ukrainians living in the west (Galicia, Volhynia) who accentuate the tragic experience of the Soviet era (deportations, gulags, famine), harbor anti-Russian feelings and wish to build Ukraine as a Ukrainian nation state. The position of a „second“ Russian state as sought by Presidents Kravchuk and Kuchma is unacceptable to them. It is no coincidence that this backward and weak western part of Ukraine was the moving force behind the 2004 Orange Revolution as well as the Maidan protests in 2014. By overthrowing Janukovych, the nationalist western part of the land assumed exclusive power attempting to disrupt the long, traditional Ukrainian ties to Russia, and replace it with exclusive orientation on the West, the EU and the United States. However, experience shows that western Ukraine is not strong enough to fulfill these plans – the economic weight of its eastern part so far prevailed every time. Ukraine's Russians – members of a great cultural nation, formerly dominant throughout the region – do not and cannot share the nationalist ambitions of western Ukrainians. The disruption of close ties with Russia, generally wealthier, more successful and orderly today, is unthinkable to them. They do not see the Soviet era as an occupation by a foreign power, they consider themselves as victors of World War II, not victims. Bandera's sympathizers are traitors and fascists in their eyes, a state built on such legacy is unacceptable. Like Russians, they mistrust the West and do not want to be part of blocks aimed against Russia. Militant anti-russism of western-Ukrainian nationalists is insulting and threatening to them. Due to the Soviet tradition, this part of the population has long been indifferent to national issues. However, present developments make this group more aware of national feelings and the mood among them is more and more antagonistic in that respect. After twenty years of independence, Ukraine is a divided country on the threshold of economic bankruptcy. It is home to two nations with different and probably antagonistic visions of the future, two nations growing apart every day. Both these nations look up to the world outside with unrealistic expectations – one to the West, the other to Russia. Ukraine in its current shape could have been saved by several decades of peaceful development with a modest and sophisticated foreign policy, respecting the geopolitical position of the country and gradually improving its economy and standard of living. None of that was in the cards for Ukraine. Attempts at radical change represent a fundamental threat in such a fragile, heterogenous and politically sensitive country. Unfortunately that is what is happening in Ukraine today, with all the risks it entails for Europe and the world.

During the last Canadian election I remember one newspaper-article on this side of the pond reporting on your elections and your politics in general. The article described Canadian politics as being fickle. Indeed, looking at the history of Canadian elections there is a lot of changes in the voters' behaviour from one election to another but to call it fickle is both patronising and lacks the understanding of democratic procedure. Would the opposite mean that if people stuck to voting the same parties whatever the circumstances were and however the circumstances changed that would be mature?

If Taiwan is part of China then Kosovo is still part of Serbia.

In many European countries the Christians count you as one of them for all your life if you have been baptised as a child, no matter what kind of an atheist you could be. In Finland, and AFAIK in other Scandinavian countries, where the Evangelical-Lutheran Church is the main-denomination the church is like a club that you pay taxes into but you can resign from it and then avoid taxes. The tax is around 1% of your income. Up until the 80's over 90% of the population belonged to the church. Not because people would be religious, only because people were baptised into it as children and never got round to resign when they were old enough. Even today 75% of the population still belong to that club. Needless to say really that I belong to the growing club, now 22%, known as civil register which means no religion. Imagine it really: 1% of your income and people agree to pay that in return for what? Marriage? You can get married at the city hall. Funeral? Do you really imagine that if you don't belong to the church your corpse is going to be let to rot without being done away with. 1% of your income, the money people would save if they left the nowadays anyway cultural-marxist organisation advocating more immigration, what all kinds of things one would do with that money? Travel, drink a lot etc.

No democratic country should have any official state religion. You've got this thing right in North-America. Religion is a private matter. No country? Well, perhaps a country like Israel could be an exception for obvious reasons.

It's the legacy of the Soviet Union that in these break-away republics there are a lot of Russian-speaking people. Ukraine has always been known to be a tinderbox which will blow sooner or later. If the Baltic States were not NATO-members Russai would have invaded them a long time ago to "protect" the Russians living there. When Estonia became independent again in 1991 they espoused a continuation-theory instead of declaring independence. That meant that their interpretation was that the Russian invasion and subsequent occupation of Estonia for 51 years was illegal so they returned to the rule of law and restored independence which was declared in 1918. Semantics? Perhaps but a major difference was to be gained by this. Under that interpretation Estonians citizens were to be those who were citizens in 1940 and those people's descendants. All other were foreigners. That may be a bit too harsh for the Russian-speaking population which constituted 33% of the population. Many people who were born in the country and their parents were born in the and their grand-parents were forced to move into the country, they were all declared as foreigners. Many of these people have become stateless as they are either unwilling to apply for Estonian citizenship or don't pass the rather difficult language-test which is a precondition on gaining citizenship, Russia won't accept those people as its citizens and those people are citizens of the Soviet Union, a country which no longer exists.

I stand corrected: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal) But I blame our Prime Minister Katainen who made the remark how Russia isn't that important and how their GDP is the size of the Netherlands, ie a middle-sized country.

Absolutely, I agree with you on that. I was referring to the top dogs. In Canada even top civil servants who forget that they are servants, not masters, are soon shown their place. Not in Finland. In Finland people are castigated if they spoil the fun of civil servants. However, in our language the equivalent of civil servant is "virkamies" which is mire like a public executive.

The blunt truth is that were it not for its nuclear capability Russia would be internationally like Bangladesh, in other words, a totally unimportant and insignificant country. Little more important than Finland. After all, the Russian total GDP is at the same level as that of the Netherlands, a country with 1/10 of the population compared to Russia.

According to Russian propaganda western powers made a promise to the Soviet Union that NATO won't expand eastwards if the SU accepts German reunification. Now the Russians feel betrayed. Even if this is true no such promise is binding as countries such as Poland, Hungary etc are sovereign countries and can apply for membership of international organisations if they wish so. Should they have been told: sorry, we can't take you aboard because we promised that to the Russians.

The fact that news like this comes out in public only goes to show that Canada is a country where civil servants really are public servants unlike in a country like Finland where civil servants think that people are their subjects and in all other ways a nuisance.

As selfish and heartless it may sound the only way a country like Canada and a number of others, perhaps Finland too, can remain as very pleasant places to live is that they are like VIP-clubs which have very strict rules as to who can become new members; It's not impossible to become a new member but certain criteria must be met. That's the point we in Europe have lost the plot and we are a sinking continent. We are not considering our countries as VIP-clubs any more.

A piece of cake: http://geography.about.com/od/lists/a/2050pop.htm