Quotulatiousness

April 15, 2011

Finnish election still up for grabs

Filed under: Europe, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 15:11

Remember I mentioned the “True Finns” party in passing last week? The election is this weekend and it looks like a four-way race:

Finland votes on Sunday in its most closely watched general election in years, with the campaign hijacked by a Eurosceptic maverick riding roughshod over the consensus that has long characterised the country’s politics.

Timo Soini has alarmed the European and Finnish elites by leading his True Finns party into a neck-and-neck position with the three mainstream parties that traditionally dominate Finnish politics.

The quadrupling of support for the True Finns since the last election in 2007 puts Finland firmly in line with the cardinal trend in politics across Europe in the past year — the emergence of the populist far right combining nostalgia for disappearing values and traditions with anti-immigrant and anti-EU appeal.

An opinion poll on Friday put the True Finns at around 16% in a coalition system, soaring from 4% in 2007 albeit sliding a little from their position in surveys last week. That put True Finns neck and neck with the Centre party of the prime minister, Mari Kiviniemi, and the opposition social democrats, and a few points behind the poll leaders, the National Coalition party led by the finance minister, Jyrki Katainen.

Steve Paikin interviews Rick Mercer

Filed under: Cancon, Humour, Media, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 14:26

How not to celebrate Anzac Day

Filed under: Australia, History, Military, Pacific — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:59

An elderly driver of a retired military vehicle either lost control of his vehicle or (as the article implies) took his hands off the wheel to take a photo just before the crash:

A 64-year-old man who drove his World War II truck into a group of veterans marching in Melbourne’s Anzac Day parade last year has been charged with dangerous driving causing serious injury.

Eight members of the Ceylon Ex-Serviceman’s Association were injured, two critically, when the vintage truck lurched forward into them on Saint Kilda Road.

All the veterans survived but some are still recovering from injuries ranging from broken bones to internal injuries.

A picture obtained by the ABC in May last year allegedly showed the driver using both hands to take a photograph moments before the accident.

H/T to Chris Greaves for the link, and for the explanatory material he provided to give some context on the story:

Two things you may not realize as background to this:

(1) Australia is HUGE on Anzac day; My indoctrination started as a 10-year old in Southern Cross WA. A large portion of the town’s population was drunk by the start of the dawn service at the war memorial, and it just got worse after that. Every year. I mean, every year, the DAY just got worse.

Anzac day is the day when old diggers get maudlin about their mates who fell in The Great War, even though the maudlin diggers are too young to have HAD mates in The Great War.

(2) I feel deeply about the origins of The Third Balkan War, read up on it frequently, have 6 bookcases (not bookshelves) of books on the subject, and am deeply moved by the stories. I see 19-year old kids in the elevator and think “You died for us”, for that was most probably the average age of the soldier, sailor and airman.
So I don’t resent “dwelling on the past”; I do it daily.

See also here and here.

Arousing the voters, Menorcan style

Filed under: Europe, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:45

It’s a perennial problem: how do you manage to get the voters interested in your candidacy? How can you get them excited? Sole Sánchez Mohamed has an answer for you:

A Menorcan political candidate has caused a bit of a rumpus ahead of Spain’s forthcoming municipal elections with a seriously in-your-face advert in the local press.

Sole Sánchez Mohamed, head of the Partit Democràtic de Ciutadella (PDC), posed with an evidently willing pair of male hands to make her point, or rather, pair of points. The caption declares: “Two great arguments.”

To further her election cause, the wannabe mayoress of Ciutadella appeared in monthly magazine Més Iris Menorca dressed only in her smalls while adopting “sadomasochistic poses”, as you can see here (NSFW).

And you folks complain about “attack ads” in Canadian elections.

RAF proves Eurofighter can take out stationary, unmanned, abandoned enemy tanks

Filed under: Africa, Britain, Military, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:29

In a triumph of military daring and precision bombing public relations, the Royal Air Force has demonstrated the ground-attack capability of their Eurofighter Typhoon aircraft:

The RAF has blown up two apparently abandoned Libyan tanks using a Eurofighter Typhoon jet in a move which appears to have been motivated more by Whitehall infighting than by any attempt to battle the forces of dictator Muammar Gaddafi.

[. . .]

The video appears to show a T-72 tank neatly parked, stationary and unmanned: the target was plainly not in use. The Telegraph reports that the location struck was “an abandoned tank park”. Many Libyan armoured vehicles are old and not serviceable due to lack of parts and servicing. RAF sources admitted to the paper that the jets making the strike had had to spend “a long time” searching before they could find a valid target to hit, and that the timing of the strike was “no coincidence”.

So why is the RAF not only conducting unnecessary air attacks on useless hunks of metal? The answer is not so much military as it is political:

This hasty effort by the RAF to get Typhoons into ground-attack action took place just ahead of the scheduled release by the Parliamentary Public Accounts Committee of a damning report on the Eurofighter, titled Management of the Typhoon project. This report had been expected to be highly critical of the Typhoon, and indeed it is. It says:

In 2004, the Department decided to retire the ground attack Jaguar aircraft early and to spend £119 million to install ground attack upgrades on early Typhoons to cover the resulting capability gap. These upgrades were ready for use by 2008. A year later, the Department decided to retire the air defence Tornado F3 aircraft early to save money and therefore re-prioritised Typhoon away from ground attack missions to air defence tasks. It is now not using Typhoon’s ground attack capability.

So, absent some secret plan of the Libyan army to somehow put their abandoned equipment back into immediate use, this was a PR strike to rally public opinion against parliamentary interference.

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