The Eye of the World — Robert Jordan

books and books review, fantasy
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Cover of The Eye of the World


The Eye of the World
Robert Jordan
800 pages
published in 1990

I remember the first time I read The Eye of the World, a year or two after it had been published. At the time I knew nothing about it, but the spine had that weird squiggly sign on it that my local library meant to represent fantasy or science fiction, so I took it off the shelves and started reading. By the time I got past the prologue and on to Rand and his father’s ride to Emond’s Field, I was hooked. And I stayed hooked through the rest of the novel, as well as through many of the sequels. Like many others eventually I stopped following the series when it seemed to have become a neverending story; A Path of Daggers was the last novel I bought, A Crown of Swords the last I’d read.

By that time however I must’ve read The Eye of the World at least a dozen times, rereading the complete cycle every time a new book in the series came out. Especially when I was still supposedly a student, there was many a day when I woke up determined to do some work that day, only to grab The Eye of the World and finish it when it had gotten dark again.

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No second EU referendum?

Dutch politics, EU "democracy"
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Two years ago the Dutch voters overwhelmingly (63 percent iirc) rejected the proposed EU constitution, several days after France had done the same. This rejected put the European Union in deep crisis, as a new treaty had to be negotiated. So all the bell and whistles like a European anthem and flag were stripped out, the word constitution was crossed out and replaced by treaty, and some more substantial changes were made (more power to the national parliaments frex) all in order to placate the unruly naysayers. In France, they’re going to hold a new referendum; here the government has just decided not to.

Their reasoning is that legally, the new treaty does not require a referendum (and the highest court has agreed with the government in its official advice about this), while the treaty has changed so substantially that the objections against it two years ago have been overcome. Therefore getting their approval is no longer necessary.

Or might it just be that the government is afraid that a new treaty would also be rejected? Many of the objections of two years ago are still valid, while the skepticism about Europe has only grown. Which is why the government cannot afford to let the population give their approval, as a second no would “make our position in Europe untenable”. It shows how little democracy matters in these grand schemes.

The European Union may have grown from a honestly held ideal of a new Europe without borders or war, but it has grown into a technocratic nightmare whose main function is to make it easier for big business to operate. Through the EU, with its lack of democratic oversight, measures can be taken that would never get through a national parliament. Nothing must derail this project, least at all the voter.

Over one million Iraqi deaths

Iraqi war deaths
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so says the new poll put out by the ORB polling agency:

In the week in which General Patraeus reports back to US Congress on the impact the recent ‘surge’ is having in Iraq, a new poll reveals that more than 1,000,000 Iraqi citizens have been murdered since the invasion took place in 2003.

Previous estimates, most noticeably the one published in the Lancet in October 2006, suggested almost half this number (654,965 deaths). These findings come from a poll released today by O.R.B., the British polling agency that have been tracking public opinion in Iraq since 2005. In conjunction with their Iraqi fieldwork agency a representative sample of 1,461 adults aged 18+ answered the following question:-

QHow many members of your household, if any, have died as a result of the conflict in Iraq since 2003 (ie as a result of violence rather than a natural death such as old age)? Please note that I mean those who were actually living under your roof.

None 78%
One 16%
Two 5%
Three 1%
Four or more 0.002%

Given that from the 2005 census there are a total of 4,050,597 households this data suggests a total of 1,220,580 deaths since the invasion in 2003.

More data is available on the page linked above. If this poll is accurate, it helps to vindicate the Lancet Report that came out last year and was widely disbelieved. But of course a million deaths now is in line with the over 600,000 found in the Lancet Report last year.

One point I’m wondering about is how the reported one to two million Iraqi refugees influences the figures extrapolated from this poll. After all, the household figures mentioned in the press release are from 2005, while the poll was held only recently; how many of those households are still in Iraq? If there are significantly less households in Iraq, extrapolating the figures found in the poll from the households polled to the total number of households in Iraq in 2005 and deriving a total number of deaths from that, will inflate the total number of deaths found. Of course the people who have fled Iraq were also not polled, so that may also put the number off…

However, the point remains that the total number of Iraqi deaths as a consequence of the 2003 invasion is far greater than is generally accepted by the US and UK governments and the mainstream media, and each further study confirms the findings of the original Lancet reports. It’s these findings that put the lie to the idea that the continuing US/UK presence is benificial.

Charley

Natural World, video
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Now that’s a cat that reminds me of myself, as I don’t have the world’s best motoric skills either, if nothing on the level of Charley.

Sci fi songs: Major Tom (Völlig Losgelöst)

Music, video
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A thread on rec.arts.sf.fandom reminded me of that classic of the Neue Deutsche Welle, Major Tom (Völlig Losgelöst) and I was wondering if Youtube would have a video of it. Couldn’t find the original, German video, but there was a nice fan made video of the song with visuals from 2001. There’s also the official English language version of the song, but that’s too horrible to link to. I’d rather show another fan made video, which has the lyrics of the original German language song, handy for you karaoke fans at home:

Of course, if you mention Neue Deutsche Welle and sci fi, Peter Schilling might not be the first thing that springs to mind. You might instead be reminded of a quaint little outfit called the Deutsch-Österreichisches Feingefühl and their hitsingle Codo (Und ich düse-düse-düse im Sauseschritt):

Good? Bad? It doesn’t matter, as you’re sure not to forget this in a hurry…