Belgium is effectively on the way to political break-up. Will the political chaos lead to financial turmoil & banking/sovereign debt stress?

January 10, 2011 7:34 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@Nouriel

Nouriel Roubini

. . . wait a sec – look, I’m actually not ready to deal with such issues! Please allow me here instead to join so many Belgians, both French- and Dutch-speaking, in just letting my mind fly very, very far away from any thoughts of state bankruptcy, to the refuge of young feminine beauty. Yes, as so many national media outlets were there to report, Justine de Jonckheere (below, and more pictures here) was chosen last Sunday as Miss Belgium 2011.

Quite apart from the event’s intrinsic appeal, the Miss Belgium pageant is certainly a tonic in these times because of its sheer status as one Belgian national institution that has not been ripped into separate French- and Dutch-speaking halves. Indeed, as La Libre Belgique points out, Sunday evening’s event, broadcast out of the casino in the sea-side (and thus Flemish) town of Knokke, was a killer TV-event. It actually attracted more than 1 in 3 of French-speaking viewers, while the Flemish audience-share, at around 15%, was also double what other top shows usually attract on a Sunday evening.

That’s all very nice, but it doesn’t mean that there’s no tension over the pageant’s results, considering so many native Belgians have such an interest in them. You can rest assured that, at any given time during the tournament, approximately half the country is encouraging – whether overtly or covertly – candidates from a French-Belgian (Walloon) background while the other half is rooting for the Dutch-speaking girls. It’s accepted that whoever wins needn’t necessarily know much about how to speak the country’s “other” language yet, but that one of her first duties (and those of the two runners-up) will be to start studying it to get up to a passable level of ability as soon as possible. Still, and as beautiful as she is, this year’s winner must have certainly induced a hard swallow among tournament officials, for her last name in particular – De Jonckheere – is almost at a slap-in-the-face level of Dutchness – most true French-speakers would have very little idea how to pronounce it! Nonetheless, year after year everyone is ready to accept any result – even that of 2008, when the winner was a Czech emigrée to Wallonia who could speak no Dutch at all – as long as the tournament process is, shall we say, free and fair.

The problem, dear readers, is that this year there are troubling signs that the Miss Belgium contest was anything other than that. For one thing, as La Dernière Heure reports, one contestant claims that the fix was in for Ms. De Jonckheere from nearly the beginning. Now, this whistle-blower is Maureen Lazard, a French-speaking contestant from Walloon Brabant, but she still alleges that Justine De Jonckheere had long been the favorite (in French: la chouchoute) of tournament director Darline Devos, for whatever reason, to the extent that everyone knew she was going to win and the selection process would be distorted to make that happen. (“Devos” is really a Dutch name – de vos, the fox, quite appropriate for a beauty-pageant director – so maybe that had something to do with it.)

Sour grapes from a loser – yes, that’s what all that sounds like. But there’s another, more serious allegation, this time reported in a Flemish newspaper, namely the “SHE” supplement to the Gazet van Antwerpen. Keep in mind that Ms. De Jonckheere is practiced in finding loopholes to rules – she’s a law student – and also that a certain weight in the decision about the winner is contributed by votes sent in from the general public as SMSs. SHE magazine cites evidence that the winner invested around €12,000 to buy telephone calling-cards to engineer a flood of incoming SMS votes in her favor. Again, the complaint has been lodged on behalf of – yes – another French-speaking contestant, a certain Lara Binet out of Liège, but the only answer tournament director Devos offers is that there could not have been any fraud, since she had monitoring personnel in place as votes were counted.

Sounds lame to me. And anyway: look at Justine’s picture again, at those shifty eyes! I have to conclude that the 2011 Miss Belgium Tournament has been tainted by scandal just when that sort of national institution that can truly draw the interests of the land’s Dutch- and French-speakers together was needed more than ever. There may still be the national football team; there may still be the national armed forces; but otherwise such institutions are falling by the wayside one-by-one, with grave implications for the country’s future and therefore for its solvency.

                          

They don’t intend to be alone there. Rather, the two (Bernie McDaid and Olan Home, who also challenged Pope Benedict XVI on priest sexual abuse during the latter’s visit to the US in 2008) have been busy recruiting other Catholic lay organizations to join them. Between those worshippers, other sexual-abuse victims, and reform-minded individuals showing up (including, hopefully, current priests), they expect to be leading a 50,000-strong demonstration seeking to show “that their Church is in terrible trouble.” McDaid and Home will also be pushing their own four-point reform plan:

1. Establish an independent commission to supervise how the Vatican deals with priest sexual abuse;
   
2. Screen seminarians, priests, and bishops effectively against this sort of behavior;

3. Involve lay influence in the selection of bishops;
4. Include mandatory instruction about sexual abuse at every seminary’s program of study.

You might be asking: “I know that these guys need some time to get the word out, but why are they waiting all the way until next October 31?” No, it has nothing to do with Halloween; October 31 is also historically famous as the day when, back in 1517, Martin Luther nailed his famous 95 Theses to the door of the church in Wittenberg, Germany, and so effectively kicked off the Protestant Reformation.

                          

In any event, according to a new report in Belgium’s Gazet van Antwerpen (“Body of James Brown stolen”), administrators of his estate are now in a Cold Sweat, singing Lost Someone together in heart-breaking harmony. For Brown’s illegitimate daughter, LaRhonda Pettit, has come forth with an allegation that her father’s body is missing from where it was supposed to have been deposited after his Christmas Day 2006 death.

Pettit has another message, too: Give Me Some Skin! Not only does she know that the body is not there anymore, she knows why: because Brown was actually murdered, by people after his money. (The official cause of death was a heart attack.) So any proper autopsy of his remains – if they’re ever recovered – would reveal all that and get the law going in pursuit of the killers.

There you go, South Carolina police. What are you waiting for? Get Up Offa That Thing and go find Brown!

                          

At least those quotation-marks are in the original title, as if to show that the Gazet editors aren’t quite ready to fully endorse that opinion. Still, the first paragraph reads in its entirety: “The social-networking site Twitter is a cost-free and easy hunting-ground for child-molesters, experts say.” Their proof? One “on-line conversation” between a pedophile and his 13-year-old prey as published in the English newspaper The Sun – one that is thoroughly banal (13-year-old: “Are you trying to seduce me?” Pedophile: “No, not at all. I just want to more more about you.”) besides coming from a source of little more use to the general public than as an exhibitor of “Page Three girls” and none at all when it comes to factual presentation. Oh, and let me add: besides constituting but one instance (an “anecdote,” in scientific parlance) of alleged evil behavior, and one whose use completely misinterprets the Twitter’s technological essence at that. Yes, it is possible to use Twitter to send an “@reply” to communicate directly with someone – but then everyone who subscribes to you can read the message, and anyone can find it afterwards through search. And it is also possible to send a “direct message” to someone, that no one else can read – although that’s only when the two parties subscribe to each others feed, and tell me how that is possible in a case of pedophilia other than after the child-molester has already gained his victim’s confidence through entirely other means!

But what Twitter is really all about is not one-to-one communication, but rather broadcasting – it’s basically a broadcaster of 140-character-or-less messages. In this light, it’s ridiculous to paint it as some potential tool for pedophiles. This article is simply brain-dead, looking to attract attention through the cynical spreading of rent-an-expert pedophilia alarm. And that’s sad, among other reasons because presumably plenty of people (Belgians who are Flemish, mostly) read the Gazet van Antwerpen and believe what they find there, and so will come away with a mistaken negative impression of what has proven to be quite an innovative and useful communications tool.

                          

That “ethics code” provision, then, basically amounts to a prohibition on displaying good ol’ Sinterklaas’ image on advertising materials before November 1. But Willekens’ article further reveals that toy retailers and the like this year are pretty desperate to move their Xmas goods and so have already started sending out their advertisements, handbills, and the like using the obvious loophole: they simply don’t include Sinterklaas. But they do include promises of savings of up to 20% off regular prices.

                          

Among the film-clips on display is one showing the only time Anne Frank was captured on video, as she watched from her family’s balcony the departure of the neighboring girl to her wedding. Naturally, this is before the Frank family had to go into hiding. In fact it is a little less than a year before they did so, and so the scene is at the apartment house elsewhere in Amsterdam where they lived a normal family life up to and a couple years into the German occupation, before moving to the famous achterhuis on the Prinsengracht to try to disappear and so evade a call-up from the occupation authorities for relocation to a “work camp” (which more often turned out to amount to transportation to a death camp in Eastern Europe; it was only Anne’s elder sister, Margot, who received this notice, but that was enough to drive the whole family into hiding).

The brief Gazet van Antwerpen article (no by-line) notes that another clip gives a video-tour of the achterhuis and was put on-line in celebration of the Anne Frank House Museum’s fiftieth anniversary, but it also seems that the entire YouTube channel was created only recently.

                          

As of this Sunday, the world’s burning news is of course the recent election in Iran, the apparent plot by the authorities in that country to steal it, and the people’s reaction thereto. Unfortunately, all of this is occurring so far over a weekend, which might be another dastardly trick by the current Tehran regime designed to limit take-up of the story by the regular European press, some parts of which do not work on Sunday at all (although there’s also word that the American MSM has been similarly slow off the starting-blocks).

Still, some European papers are reporting on the situation in Iran already, including Berlin’s Tageszeitung (or “taz”). Although its report – attributed to news agencies – is entitled Mass disturbances on Tehran’s streets, the text makes clear that that refers to Saturday and that, as of Sunday morning, things are calm again. Still, some of the results it reports include the detention of some 100 opposition figures, the beating of a TV cameraman from the Italian network RAI3 (and confiscation of his film; all by the security forces, of course), and a gruff statement on the situation from German foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, which among other things terms the violence by the security forces against demonstrators as “unacceptable.” (But what struck me in particular about this report is how the “taz” reveals once again its extreme left-wing political coloration: in a discussion of presidential challenger Mir Hussein Moussavi, it brings up how he had proven himself a “good economist” in the past, when he was prime minister, by his imposition of food-rationing and price-controls!)

The French Libération, on the other hand, has somewhat of a different take on today’s (Sunday’s) situation, summarized in its article’s title: Iran: The riots have begun again this Sunday in Tehran. That newspaper’s reporters witnessed today a violent confrontation between the police and a group of about 200 protestors. But they also report that the Iranian mobile telephone network is functioning again. (My aside here: on the right-hand side of the Libération web-page you can see the newspaper’s cover-story last Friday: “Spring in Tehran.” Would that be anything like the Prague Spring?)

Elsewhere, Denmark’s Jyllandsposten is reporting that the Iranian authorities have instructed the Saudi-owned, Dubai-based Arab TV broadcaster Al Arabiya to cease their operations in the country immediately. As the company’s editor, Nabil al-Khateeb, told the French news agency AFP, “We have no permission to cover anything. We have not received any justification, and we were not warned beforehand.” And the Flemish paper Gazet van Antwerpen reports how this morning two Belgian journalists were arrested on Tehran’s streets and shut away, with a number of other detainees, in a cellar-dungeon at the Interior Ministry. But this story has a happy ending – they were set free a short time later, after confiscation of their notes – and even a nice bonus: one reporter worked for the Belgian-Flemish broadcast organization VRT and the other for the corresponding Belgian-Walloon broadcaster RTBF, and it seems they were detained together and stood up to the arresting officers with great solidarity – a heart-warming and much-needed tale for present-day Belgium!

                          

Not to worry, though, because at least this Gazet van Antwerpen article provides its own antidote to those Belgians who might read it and think, “Yes, that’s a good idea!” For it is headed by a picture of an array of flesh-probing and -cutting tools indispensable to such procedures – yuck!

                          

Yes, the shoe-company (or -person, I don’t know; I’ve no facility in Turkish, it’s not a European language, sorry) is “Ramazan Baydan,” and it/he has already received more than 300,000 orders for that model and counting. The all-too-brief piece also reveals certain additional characteristics about them: made of brown leather, with a thick sole (ah, but does not one need a thick sole to reside in Baghdad these days?), priced at $42/€30 a pair. From the picture at the top (looks like a crowd of Indonesian protestors), we also see that the shoes are loafers (i.e. no laces), which makes sense from a weapons standpoint: better for deploying to one’s throwing-hand quickly, especially in that most-critical interval when you have already thrown one and hope to get the second one despatched as well before any bystanders or security personnel can react.

Sorry, no actual link or any other information other than “Ramazan Baydan” about where to go to get your own pair – time to head for Google! But it seems that very many Americans have already solved that puzzle and placed an order – thus the GVA article’s title.

UPDATE: Here you go! H/t to Bloomberg’s Mark Bentley, it turns out that the place to go for your “Bye-Bye-Bush” shoes is the Baydan Group. Fair warning: Even on their “English” site (to which the preceding link connects you, of course), they still use Turkish extensively.