‘Secular Muslims’ in the US are holding a “Secular Islam Summit”, with guests from around the world:

NEW YORK, Feb 27 (KUNA) – The first ever “Secular Islam Summit,” to be convened in St. Petersburg, Florida, on March 4-5, will bring together hundreds of thinkers and activists worldwide to counter the voices of reactionary Islam which have been speaking on behalf of all Muslims, the organizers of the event said late Monday.

About 500 people from all over the world are expected to attend, including speakers and government guests from Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Europe, Canada and the US. Iranian Banafsheh Zand, one of the organizers, told KUNA that people in Islamic countries were taken into the “dark ages by the politicization of Islam.” “An age of reformation is upon us that needs desperately to be responded to by people who embrace not only the faith as a personal and private matter, but who also wish to see their countries and nations move forward in a progressive and prosperous way to catch up with the 21st century,” she added.

[..]

Another organizer Austin Dacey also told KUNA that the most important thing for participants is the hope that this Summit will be the “beginning of a coherent cross-culture movement for secularism in Islamic societies.” “There are countless individuals who are standing up for critical reasoning and freedom of conscience and secular values, but until now there really hasn’t been a global movement that brings them together as a force for change, ” he argued.

He explained that the “forces of reactionary Islam have their own global networks, which are very well established and well funded. These secular Muslims hope to do the same.” “We do think it is important that these alternative voices from the Muslim World are heard by policy makers and government officials in the US,” he stressed.

In Germany ex-Muslims have formed a “Central Council of ex-Muslims in Germany”:

An Iranian human rights activist living in Germany has formed a “Central Council of ex-Muslims in Germany” with 40 others and has received anonymous death threats after declaring she wants to help people to leave the religion if they so desire.

Iranian-born Mina Ahadi, 50, said she set up the group to highlight the difficulties of renouncing the Islamic faith which she believes to be misogynist. She wants the group to form a counterweight to Muslim organisations that she says don’t adequately represent Germany’s secular-minded Muslim immigrants.

[..]

SPIEGEL: Together with 29 other immigrants from Muslim countries you have declared that you have renounced Islam. The campaign is similar to one launched in the 1970s by women who declared publicly that they had had abortions. What is your purpose?

Ahadi: I haven’t been a Muslim for 30 years. I’m also critical of Islam in Germany and of the way the German government deals with the issue of Islam. Many Muslim organisations like the Central Council of Muslims in Germany (ZMD) or Milli Görüs engage in politics or interfere in people’s everyday lives. They were invited to the conference on Islam (hosted by the government in Berlin last year). But their aims are hostile to women and to people in general.”

[..]

SPIEGEL: Won’t your campaign just harden the battle lines?

Ahadi: I don’t think it’s possible to modernize Islam. We want to form a counterweight to the Muslim organisations. The fact that we’re doing this under police protection shows how necessary our initiative is.

Seems like the first lot believe that you can modernise Islam. Guess we’ll wait and see who’s right. At the moment there is place and a need for both movements.

UPDATE (1/2): Sugiero has more on the new German movement. (via LGF)

Jamestown Foundation reports:

Astoundingly, of the 21 attacks carried out this year [2007], in 16 cases the only fatality has been the suicide bomber himself. In the 17th case, the suicide bomber succeeded in killing himself and one policeman. In two other cases, the suicide bomber was arrested or shot. This translates to 19 Taliban suicide bombers for one Afghan policeman, hardly an inspiring kill ratio for would-be-suicide bombers. In most of these cases, the suicide bombers attacked foreign convoys on foot or in cars and were unable to inflict casualties on their targets. Typically, the suicide bombers’ explosives went off prematurely or their bombs failed to kill coalition troops driving in heavily armored vehicles.

In only three of the 21 cases for 2007 were there notable fatalities. In the first successful case, a suicide bomber killed two Afghan policemen and eight civilians (Camp Salerno, Khost, January 23). In the second case, three policemen were killed (Zherai District, Khost, February 4). In the third case, the February 27 attack on Bagram Air Base while Cheney was visiting, the bomber succeeded in killing 15-23 people (including two to three coalition soldiers).

[..] the Taliban are clearly playing a dangerous game, and this author’s findings back up the Pentagon’s claim that as many as 84% of the victims of suicide bombings in Afghanistan are civilians [1]. In several instances, Afghan suicide bombers have attacked foreign military convoys and succeeded in killing more than a dozen civilians and only one or two soldiers [2]. On other occasions, suicide bombers have killed or wounded innocent bystanders in mosques, hospitals, restaurants, or waiting for visas to partake in the Hajj. In the recent attack on Bagram Air Base, the vast majority of victims were once again civilians, and hundreds came to mourn their deaths. Not surprisingly, this has caused widespread resentment and protests in several Afghan cities.

Even in the best of circumstances, suicide bombing is not a precise technique and Afghanistan’s feckless bombers seem far better at killing themselves and Afghan civilians than foreign troops. Far more coalition troops in Afghanistan have died from IEDs, gunfire, RPG attacks and other conventional methods than they have from suicide bombs. One Afghan study of the bloody 2006 campaign has found that suicide bombings in that year took 212 civilian lives, while leading to the death of only 12 foreign soldiers [3].

The following is from a Jamestown Foundation paper “Iran’s Contribution to the Civil War in Iraq”, by Mounir Elkhamri, release in Jan, 2007:

(original here, PDF)

Different Forms of the Iranian Presence in Iraq

In 2004, the assistant commander of the Iranian Republican Guard announced, during his visit to London, that Iran has two brigades and other militia in Iraq in order to protect the national security of Iran.

On March 11, 2004, Iranian intelligence opened an office in Najaf called “The Office to Help Poor Iraqi Shia.” Through that office, they were able to recruit over 70,000 Iraqis from the south to join one of the militias loyal to Iran. Every recruit would receive $2,000 in advance, then $1,000 a month—a princely sum in Iraq today.9

According to a defecting Iranian Republican Guard Council (IRGC) officer, “The scale and breadth of Qods Force operations in Iraq are far beyond what we did even during the war with Saddam.”10 The officer was referring to the IRGC’s extensive activities in Iraq during the eight-year Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s. “Vast areas of Iraq are under the virtual control of the Qods Force through its Iraqi surrogates. It uses a vast array of charities, companies and other fronts to conduct its activities across Iraq.”11 He also stated, “We would send our officers into Iraq to operate for months under the cover of a construction company…Kawthar Company operated in Najaf last year to carry out construction work in the area around Imam Ali Shrine, but it was in fact a front company for the Qods Force. Qods officers, disguised as company employees, established contacts with Iraqi operatives and organized underground cells in southern Iraq.”12

Iran’s Ideological Control over Southern Iraq

In the past two years, Iran has sent more than 2,000 students and religious scholars to Najaf and Karbala. About one-third of them belong to Iranian intelligence. It has also assigned representatives in major Shia cities to provide financial support to Shia students and school instructors—$50 to $100 per student and $200 to $500 per instructor. Iran has sent several Iraqi political figures who were living in Iran back to Iraq to infiltrate and obtain sensitive political positions in the new Iraqi government. Iran considers these figures a solid foundation in the process of incorporating Iraq, without its northern area of Kurdistan, the moment the coalition forces start leaving Iraq.13

Iran has a strong presence in the southern provinces of Iraq and a secret one in Baghdad. Iran also has a respectable presence in the north of Iraq where it is utilizing Iranian Kurds, Iranian communists, Iranian- Kurdish student exchanges and Iranian agents. There were numerous agreements between the Iraqi-Kurdish leaders and Iran prior to the coalition’s invasion of Iraq.
In one of the agreements, Iran agreed not to intervene in Kurdistan’s internal affairs or to go after the Iranian-Kurds who live in Kurdistan and are anti-Iran. In exchange, the Kurdistan government agreed to not allow any attacks on Iran from Kurdistan.14

Assassination of Scientists, Professors, Officers and Key Sunni Figures

After the fall of the regime, Iraqi citizens began to witness numerous assassinations and kidnapping attempts that targeted Sunni professors, scholars, doctors and especially those army officers and air force pilots that participated in the Iraq-Iran war. According to an ex-Iraqi Air Force pilot who is currently serving in the new Iraqi army, when the coalition forces were busy fighting the insurgency and preparing for the first national election, the Iranian militias were busy assassinating over 90 air force pilots and other high ranking military officers that had participated in the Iraq-Iran war.15
In late 2005, Iraqi President Jalal Talabani condemned the assassinations and kidnapping attempts and sent an invitation to the rest of the former Iraqi Air Force pilots and high ranking officers to move to Sulaymania or Irbil in Kurdistan if they did not feel safe where they lived.

Iran’s Control of Southern Iraq

According to an Iraqi officer, during al-Jaafari’s administration numerous members of the Iranian intelligence were naturalized in Iraq and thousands of hectares were distributed in Shia cities such as Basra, Najaf and Karbala. In 2004, al-Alkeed Ghazi, an Arab-Shia naturalization officer, was assassinated because he refused to naturalize anyone that belonged to a militia. Iran also sent Iranian investors along with its intelligence officers in order to buy as many as 5,000 apartments, houses, stores and restaurants in Baghdad, Basra, Najaf and Karbala. These are used as living quarters and command centers for the Iranian agents and the other militia loyal to Iran.

These ongoing efforts are mainly to guarantee a successful vote for federalism in the south of Iraq. Similar scenarios were witnessed in the north of Iraq before the first and the second national elections, where a large number of Kurdish families relocated from Kurdistan to a different area north of Iraq—Mosul, Tal Afar, Rabia and others—in order to secure enough votes for the new Iraqi constitution and the national election.

Iranian Involvement in Iraq’s Election and its Aftermath

Prior to the 2005 Iraqi national election, Iran sent a large number of its agents as visitors to Shia shrines in order to influence and secure the necessary votes for the Shia party running in that election. They smuggled in thousands of Iranian-made pictures, flyers and already filled-out voting ballots in order to support their Shia candidates. The Shia United Iraqi Alliance consisted of 18 conservative Shia Islamist groups such as: the Dawa party, led by ex-Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari; the pro-Iranian Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, led by Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim; the Iraqi Nationalist Sadr Movement, loyal to populist Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr; and others.16 [..]

Federalism

On July 31, 2006, Adel Abd al-Mahdi, a senior official in SCIRI and Iraq’s vice president, pledged that the Shia Iraqi coalition—the biggest bloc in the Iraqi parliament—would raise the issue of a Shia federal state in the coming month. A few days before that announcement, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, chairman of SCIRI, repeated his call for a Shia federal region.18

The chairman of SCIRI also stated, “Federalism is constitutionally secured. We have to work seriously on this issue, and figure out the necessary mechanism to switch to federalism. Dear countrymen, this issue is important to your governorates’ security, safety and reconstruction.”19 [..]

Iraqi federalism is an important issue for Iran. When the Shia in the south of Iraq, who are loyal to Iran, claim their independence in Iraq’s southern provinces, they will control the second largest oil reserve after Saudi Arabia. Iran might eventually end up in control of almost 20% of the world’s oil reserves.

III. IRAQ’S CIVIL WAR

Today in Iraq, Shia militias—death squads loyal to Iran—have successfully infiltrated the new Iraqi security forces at all levels. They have also expanded their area of operations throughout Iraq. They are responsible for more civilian deaths than the Sunni and foreign insurgents who are the United States’ number one enemies in Iraq. These militias—the Mahdi Army, the Badr Brigade and others—are carrying out attacks under the authority of and in the uniforms of the Iraqi Ministry of the Interior and the Ministry of Defense. They arrest, kidnap, interrogate, torture and kill anti-Shia and innocent Iraqis.21

For the past year, dozens of corpses have shown up on the streets and garbage dumps of Iraqi cities on a daily basis. In most cases, the victims, who are overwhelmingly Sunni, are blindfolded and handcuffed. Their corpses show signs of torture—broken skulls, burn marks, gouged-out eyeballs, electric drill holes and other forms of abuse. The Shia militias’ secret detention centers are popping up everywhere, even within the Iraqi Ministry of Interior.

The reality is that Iraq is in a state of civil war, and some of its most ruthless and lawless combatants are members of the government’s own security units. Unfortunately, some of them, if not the majority of these new Shia militias, were once part of the new Iraqi security forces and were trained by coalition forces. Coalition forces have spent billions of dollars in training, thinking that these recruits would serve the Iraqis and would be loyal to Iraq instead of following the Iraqi and Iranian religious leaders’ political agendas.22 The current situation in Iraq cannot be fixed by military “hit and run,” moving troops from one hot spot to another. The militias enjoy Iranian military, financial and spiritual leadership. On the other hand, the solution is not to bomb Iran, as doing so will only unleash Iranian forces around the world against neighboring Arab lands where the United States has a presence. What the United States needs to do is to restrain Iran and disarm and disband the Shia militias. These militias are out of control. America must keep Iraq together. It is America’s responsibility to restore order to avoid a civil war that would be similar to the Lebanese Civil War in the 1980s

Meanwhile, Stratfor reports, Grand Ayatollah has been making moves to reign in the ultra-conservatives and President Ahmadinejad, lest they overplay their hand and trigger an US attack on Iraq, squandering their current gains in Iraq and elsewhere, instead of moving to consolidate Iran’s position:

First, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei announced his appointments to the Expediency Council (EC) — the country’s highest political arbitration body, led by Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani.

Second, Rafsanjani issued a statement warning his country not to provoke the United States. He added that, at a great financial cost to itself, Washington invaded Afghanistan and Iraq and achieved nothing but serving Tehran’s interests, and “therefore they are angry. So we must be more alert. They are like a wounded tiger, and we must not ignore this.”

[..]

[..] Rafsanjani’s remarks are part of the efforts of his pragmatic conservative faction to create a consensus within the regime on how to deal with the United States. Rafsanjani, who has been a player in Iran in various key capacities since the founding of the republic, is very familiar with U.S. behavior and is therefore trying to get the ultraconservative elements within the regime to realize that they are overplaying their hand and risking the gains Iran has made thus far.

Another key development in Iran is Khamenei’s appointments. The EC was created by a constitutional amendment in 1988 in order to resolve differences between parliament and the Guardians Council (a clerical institution with the power of legislative oversight that also is charged with vetting candidates for public office). In addition, the EC was to advise the supreme leader. Following the domination of the executive and legislative branches by ultraconservatives, Khamenei gave Rafsanjani the power to oversee all three branches of the government and to implement a 20-year plan drafted by the EC.

Khamenei’s appointments were both an effort to consolidate the hold of pragmatic conservatives like Rafsanjani and an attempt to get both factions on the same page.

See also this previous post, quoting Stratfor on the Iranians’ purpose and position in Iraq. (Sept. 2006)

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is believed to have cancer, and his health is apparently getting worse. There has already been one false alarm about his death this year. Other reports claimed he suffered a cerebral stroke on January 3rd (but thats DEBKAfile) or was admitted to hospital and found to simply have a “weakened heart”. Should Khamenei indeed die in the near future the ensuing power struggle in Iran may give the Coalition the break needed to change the calculus in Iraq and dislodge the Iranian strangehold.

Thats me, apparently.

So what would happen if a war was called and nobody came? Forty eight hours since the gauntlet throw-down and the total number of hits deployed against TOD via the Tinfoil Soldier’s outpost of militant Idiotism: 0.

I disagree with Socialism, so I mock it. Kip here disagrees with Libertarianism, so he has a tourette’s episode and declares a war. Not because Libertarians are “wrong”, though, but because Libertarianism is “a deluded and horrible ideology” (but not wrong!) and Libertarians are “c#nts”. Go figure. Perhaps a war on C#ntism would have been more appropriate?

Is he a lead soldered tin soldier, perhaps? That would at least explain his statement that “the problem with the terrorists and the Muslims is a poisonous soup with leftovers from just about every international disaster of the last 200 years”. This little ‘terrorists-as-victims’ insight also gives him away as a closet Socialist, which would explain the hissy fit. What it doesn’t explain is what gave me away as a Libertarian, considering I’ve never used the term on this site. Communist and c#nt, I can understand. But Libertarian? I can only blame the lead poisoning. A soup of it.

In other comment shenanigans last week:

John asks:

And how much is the Serbian government paying you two [thats me and Julia Gorin] to spread propaganda?

Not as much as the Illuminati do to spread theirs, pal, but thanks for asking. The Vast Right-wing Conspiracy doesn’t fund itself, you know. Memo to Belgrade: send guns and money, I am under attack!

Finally, a young Muslim fella called Ibrahim trots out that silly old “monotheism” argument against Christianity:

Your comment regarding the trinity being too hard for the Prophet to understand are quite accurate- not a single person on this planet could make 3 things add upto 1. besides even the bible doesnt support it.

Sorry, but who’s adding? Is it that hard to get the concept of 3 aspects of the one? Do “mind, body and soul” add up to 3 people?

Everything in the world has the same three aspects – substance, form and purpose. So does God. No surprise there. If an electron can be both a particle and a wave at the same time, I think God can pull off this Trinity thing. Muslims claim Allah is “unknowable” than whine that the Christian Trinity cannot be understood. Look, if you can convince yourself that there is science in the Koran, than sure as raisins you can grasp this Triune God business. Its not that hard. Think of it as Quantum Theology. By “Koran science” logic Quantum Mechanics is predicted in the Bible, which by the way does too support the Trinity:

Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,… (Matthew 28:19)

I believe St Augustine described it quite well when he used the analogy of love that involves a lover, the loved one and a spirit of love between them.

For further explanation go here and here.

What I’d love to hear is an explanation of how on Earth Muhammed came to the conclusion that the Trinity consists of God, Mary and Jesus (see Suras 5:119, 4:171 and 5:75-76).
Hardly puts him (or his followers) in a position of authority from which to criticise Christianity.

Here’s a story of a man who has experienced the fruits of British multiculturalism first hand and he wants out. Extract:

[..]
Pollokshields is large area, E Pollokshileds where I live is majority Pakistani Muslim neighbourhood. I walked the streets I smiled at my neighbours they mostly ignored me. A car drove by one day a youth stuck their head out of a car and shouted, “White bastard” at me. A week later I noticed a young man driving aggressively on to a junction nearly hitting another oncoming motorist, he jumped out of his car shouted “White Bitch” at the driver then sped off. The same week I was walking past my Local Park, I watched as a young boy off about eight was chased from the Park crying by two young UK Pakistanis, I shouted as the boy was obviously very distressed, the other boys looked at me confused, and shouted something in another language I did not understand.

I took all of the above in my stride, I put it down to teething troubles in the “Multicultural garden” It would get better just give it time.

Well a week after that mid March 2004 a young Native Glaswegian boy was abducted, at the end of my street by four Pakistani Muslims, tortured and then burned alive, I won’t go into details but as you may know Kriss Donald suffered an horrific death and for no apparent reason whatsoever other than he was white.
[..]
This week beginning of February 2007 I am finally able to sell up, I will be out of here by May. I have learned a lot, I have lived with the Muslims, I have learned that they have no desire to integrate into European culture or the European value system, I have learned that they have no interest in UK culture or anything else, they have Islam. Islam consumes them, it owns them, and it is them. That is what they are they are Muslim, a Muslim is loyal to Islam, Islam is a theocratic ideology, its goal is the spread of Allah’s will, this task is the task of all Muslims. Muslims engage with us the “Kuffar” Not because they want to, but because they have to, if they did not have to they wouldn’t.

I have met kind and courteous Muslims, I believe there are many types of people in this world, but Islam cancels this out, it homogenises whole nations, it takes away individual reason and liberty, I see this first hand in the eyes of uneducated Pakistani women who have been brought to Glasgow from the far off mountains of Kashmir. I also see it in the eyes of second and third generation Muslims, who just don’t like the West, they live in a world which is ultimately incompatible with European values, they seek solace in a religion which blew out of the desert 1400 yrs ago, they seek solace in Mosques paid for with Wahabist oil dollars, the Muslims are at war with themselves, they want the lifestyle of the West, but they just don’t like us! And I have decided that I can’t like Islam, like many like-minded people I see it as an unmitigated threat to the values Europe should hold dear.
[..]

The rest at Western Resistance.

From the editorial “Iraq situation resembles Yugoslavia of early 1990s”, by Max Boot, LA Times:

Today, only the U.S. troop presence is preventing Iraq, already in the throes of a low-level civil war, from degenerating into an all-out conflict a la Yugoslavia. The likely effect of such a bloodletting is spelled out in a recent report, “Things Fall Apart,” by Brookings Institution fellows Daniel Byman and Kenneth Pollack. They examined recent civil wars not only in Yugoslavia but in Afghanistan, Congo, Lebanon, Chechnya, Nagorno-Karabakh, Somalia and Tajikistan. “We found,” they write, “that ’spillover’ is common in massive civil wars” and “that while its intensity can vary considerably, at its worst it can have truly catastrophic effects.”

They cite six such effects, beyond the obvious humanitarian nightmare.

First, a massive exodus of refugees, “large groupings of embittered people who serve as a ready recruiting pool for armed groups still waging the civil war.” For example, Palestinian refugees sparked conflicts in Jordan in 1970-71 and in Lebanon from 1975 to 1990.

Second, states in civil war can provide a haven for existing terrorist groups (Al Qaeda in Afghanistan) or create new ones (Hezbollah in Lebanon).

Third, civil wars often radicalize neighboring populations. For instance, the Rwanda genocide in the mid-1990s sparked a civil war in Congo, which has led to an estimated 4 million deaths.

Fourth, “secession breeds secessionism,” as in Yugoslavia.

Fifth, there are huge economic losses.

Finally, Byman and Pollack write, “the problems created by these other forms of spillover often provoke neighboring states to intervene — to stop terrorism as Israel tried repeatedly in Lebanon, to halt the flow of refugees as the Europeans tried in Yugoslavia, or to end (or respond to) the radicalization of their own population as Syria did in Lebanon…. The result is that many civil wars become regional wars.”

As Byman and Pollack note, “Iraq has all the earmarks of creating quite severe spillover problems.” This is, after all, a state with something worth fighting for (oil), and one where all the major combatants (various Sunni, Shiite and Kurd groups) are amply represented in neighboring countries. Iraq’s potential as a breeding ground for terrorism is even greater than Lebanon’s or Afghanistan’s.

Thats six more reasons why the troops must stay in Iraq.

Mark Stein seems to think he knows what the Norwegians are doing in Afghanistan:

And these days troops is something of an elastic term, too. In Norwegian, it means “fighting men who are prepared to stand shoulder to shoulder with the Americans, as long as they don’t have to do any fighting and there are at least two provinces between their shoulders and the American ones”. That’s to say, Norway is “participating” in Afghanistan, but, because its troops are “not sufficiently trained to take part in combat”, they’ve been mainly back at the barracks manning the photocopier or staging amateur performances of Peer Gynt for the amusement of US special forces who like nothing better than to unwind with five acts of Ibsen after a hard day hunting the Taliban.

Alas, even being in the general vicinity of regions where fighting is taking place got a little too much so the Norwegians demanded a modification of their rules of non-engagement and insisted their “soldiers” be moved to parts of Afghanistan where there’s no fighting whatsoever by anyone at all. Good luck finding any.

No, Mark. Their mission is something far more sinister. Oh, they are trained alright. Here’s the real reason why the Norwegians are stationed two provinces away from the Americans:

“We never really know what happens after we go. Tough luck for Kosovo.
Croatia, Albania, somewhere near Romania. Its Euro and Nato, why the hell did we go…
We’ll kick their ass and then we’ll see how it goes… and then, we really don’t know – that sucks for Kosovo.”

Stratfor on Japan’s aging population:

Japan’s demographic picture is such that the population has peaked and is now both declining in size and increasing in age. With the total number of people of working age shrinking, the Japanese government will be raising less and less money in taxes while it faces greater and greater demands on spending to support its retirees. As the demographic shifts away from net taxpayers toward net benefits-receivers, the financial crunch will only intensify. Adjusted for population differences, Japan (at 9.2 percent of GDP) already spends more than twice what the United States does on pensions, and that number is expected to increase by half again by 2020.

Mitigation is still possible. The Japanese tradition of elderly people living with their children and efforts to extend the retirement age will blunt the impact somewhat. And if higher consumption can be spurred, it would in turn spur greater tax receipts that would mean less new debt. But the gap — in 2006 alone — was about $325 billion. We used the word “mitigation” and not “solution” for a reason. The trends are too deeply entrenched to be anything but unavoidable. Even an explosion in Japan’s birthrate would not positively affect the budget balance until the new crop of children became net contributors — when they reached their mid-20s.

UPDATE: This Stratfor snippet from a couple of month ago helps to round out the picture:

Japan’s population will decline 25 percent, from 127.8 million to 95.2 million, in 2050, more than the previously forecast 21 percent decline, the Health Ministry reported Dec. 20. The population decline is a result of delayed marriages and a decreased birth rate, the ministry said. The latest report says the number of senior citizens will double to 40 percent of the population, and the population under 14 years of age will fall from 13.8 percent to 8.6 percent.

In other absolutely random Swedish news:

“TV4 in trouble for vagina dialogues”:

Baffled, the woman replied that she had never had any reason to believe she would gain financially from the vocal vaginas.

“Woman stabs boyfriend after disappointing sex”:

A 40-year-old man from Luleå received life-threatening injuries after being stabbed in the lung by his 28-year-old Russian girlfriend. The pair were staying at the man’s apartment in the northern Swedish town when they got into a heated argument about their relationship.

The 40-year-old says that his girlfriend was disappointed with the quality of their sex that evening.

I believe she was a victim of false advertising.

Drunken school teachers ruins an otherwise pleasant evening for Swedish heavy metal band:

A Swedish school teacher was treated for concussion at a Warsaw hospital at the weekend after getting into a drunken hotel room brawl with a Swedish heavy metal band.

[..] Up in the hotel room the teacher and the band shared a few beers and listened to some music.

“It was very pleasant,” said a band member.

But soon the night took a turn for the worse when the teacher had a few too many and began insulting the band. After he had managed to upset a few people the teacher was asked to leave the room.

Had he not begun banging on the band’s door a simple hangover might have been the only consequence of his wild night…

Having recently watched the documentary “Metallica: Some kind of Monster” I understand just how sensitive heavy metal bands can be. (Although I am not quite sure why it was on the World Movies channel.)

Here are a couple of quotes I came across on a martial arts forum, of all places, about Josef Stalin, another avid fan of brutalist architecture.

From Malcolm Muggeridge’s accounts of a conversation with Svetlna Stalin, from the book “Can Man Live without God”, by Ravi Zacharias:

“On one occasion Stalin called for five live chickens and proceeded to use it to make an unforgettable point before his henchmen. Forcefully clutching a chicken in one hand, with the other he began to systematically pluck out its feathers. As the chicken struggled in vain to escape, he continued with the painful denuding until the bird was completely stripped. “Now you watch, ” Stalin said as he placed the chicken on the floor and walked away with some breadcrumbs in his hand. Incredibly the fear-crazed chicken hobbled toward him and clung to the legs of his trousers. Stalin threw a hand full of grain to the bird, and as it began to follow him around the room, he turned to his dumbfounded colleagues and said quietly, “This is the way to rule the people. Did you see how that chicken followed me for food, even though I had caused it such torture? People are like that chicken. If you inflict inordinate pain on theme they will follow you for food the rest of their lives.”

Every chicken has its day:

Stalin’s death fits Aristotle’s thought that ‘a tyrant is of all persons the man who can place no confidence in friends, as every one has it in his desire and these chiefly in their power to destroy him.’

Some of Stalin’s colleagues certainly had reason to hope for his death. He was preparing another purge and had also indicated that he was thinking of removing Beria from his post as head of the secret police. The night before his stroke, he had kept his colleagues up until four in the morning. He had said that some of the leadership thought they could get by on their past merits. Some of them may have been chilled by his further remark that ‘they are mistaken’.

All the next morning, Stalin did not appear. His staff started to worry at midday, but they knew better than to enter his room unless they were sent for. They first went in at eleven o’clock that night and found Stalin on the floor, conscious but unable to speak. The called Malenkov and Beria, but Malenkov would not come without Beria. At three in the morning, Beria arrived and said Stalin was only sleeping.

Under Beria’s instructions, no doctors were called. Beria and other leaders came back at nine a.m. The doctors followed.

Beria had delayed medical help for perhaps a whole day after the stroke had occurred and it seemed clear that Stalin could not live. Khrushchev described Beria at the bedside: “Beria started going around spewing hatred against him and mocking him. It was simply unbearable to listen to Beria.”

But Stalin regained partial consciousness and pointed to something on the wall. Stalin’s daughter noted how Beria changed: ‘Beria stared fixedly at those clouded eyes, anxious even now to convince my father that he was the most loyal and devoted of them all, as he had always tried with every ounce of his strength to appear to be.’ Khrushev says that Beria then ‘threw himself on his knees, seized Stalin’s hand, and started kissing it. When Stalin lost consciousness again and closed his eyes, Beria stood up and spat.

– Jonathan Glover; (1999); from ‘Humanity A Moral History of the Twentieth Century’

UPDATE: Stalin not a John Wayne fan.