BRUSSELS, Belgium - Hundreds of demonstrators protested George W. Bush's visit Sunday, hours before the U.S. president was to arrive in Belgium at the start of a conciliatory swing through Europe.Who are the protestors, and what are their specifi grievances?
Bush will meet with more than two dozen European leaders during a tour aimed at healing the trans-Atlantic rift that opened during his first term, notably over the Iraq war.
In his weekly radio address Saturday, Bush said he doesn't believe the West is split between an "idealistic United States and a cynical Europe ... America and Europe are the pillars of the free world."
"Leaders on both sides of the Atlantic understand that the hopes for peace in the world depend on the continued unity of free nations," he said. "We do not accept a false caricature that divides the Western world between an idealistic United States and a cynical Europe."
"He is coming to persuade and influence the European leaders. We are afraid the European leaders will distance themselves from their people," said Pol de Vos, one of about 700 anti-Bush protesters marching peacefully in downtown Brussels.Let me tell you something about "global warming". I'll post more details later, but as a scientist I tell you it's a largely fabricated issue: the projections are highly suspect in methodology, the projected warming is within the noise of "normal" climate fluctuations, there's little we can do about it without impoverishing ourselves to medieval levels even if it's real, it won't be any warmer that it was in the year 1000 AD (or perhaps 10,000 BC) and we got along fine just then, and catastrophic global cooling is a much bigger concern and far more likely.
An alliance of 88 environmental, human rights, peace and other [anti-West left-wing] groups have planned protests near the U.S. Embassy for Monday and near the EU headquarters on Tuesday.
The Web site of the 'Stop Bush' alliance accused Bush of "crimes against humanity," saying he undermines international law and is an obstacle to the fight against global warming.
The "normal" state of the earth is to be locked in an Ice Age for loooonnngggg periods. We're living on borrowed time, civilization having arisen in one of the relativly short "interglacials", which should be ending any time now. Remember Greenland? Why is it called Greenland when it's a vast sheet of ice except for a tiny sliver of coast?
Maybe because when the Vikings discovered and settled it, it was still green?
How would you like everthing from the North Pole down to Boston under a sheet of ice a full mile thick?
We're just not close enough to the Sun to experience run-away warming ala Venus, no matter how much "greenhouse gas" is in the atmosphere!
Now what about the Kyoto treaty? It was rejected by the Senate unanimously!
The vote was 95 to ZERO.
Since when does the narrowly divided Senate in these partisan tiems agree on anything, unless it's a collosal, obvious boondoggle, carefully crafted to do nothing but transfer wealth from the U.S. to the rest of the world?
Even Kyoto's backers admit their own projections show it not having any significant effect on the warming! It's really all about a complicated procedure of assigning "carbon rights" to various countries, giving more rights than needed to the Third World, and not giving enough to the developed world, forcing the latter to purchase the rights from the former.
It's just a shakedown scheme!
On Monday, Bush meets with Belgium's King Albert II at the Royal Palace and with Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt before giving a speech on trans-Atlantic relations. In the evening, he is to dine with French President Jacques Chirac, who was a leading opponent to the war in Iraq.And maybe to get Chirac to do something about its former colony Syria for bumping off his buddy in Lebanon.
Bush will then travel to Germany on Wednesday, before heading to Slovakia for a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin.And maybe to tell him to not be so helpful to Iran.
