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Tuesday 11 December 2012

To Hellas and Back


When Lana and Dion head to Athens, they have no idea what lies in wait. Dion has been offered the job of the century, while Lana chases a sabbatical involving sun, sea and sand. But while the gods couldn’t have been kinder, this is one travel adventure that does not go according to plan.
Lana finds it difficult to articulate beyond pointing and snorting. She acquires towering hairstyles and discovers solace only through tweezering her leg hair. Meanwhile, Dion is having the time of his life, embracing his Greek ancestry, and slipping further from Lana’s grasp just when she needs him the most.
Welcome to a cross-cultural love story with all the trimmings: a big, fat Greek wedding, a son-worshipping mother-in-law, a fast-crumbling psyche and an unexpected ending.
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Friday 7 December 2012

U.S. Historian Says Ulysses Reached America



By  on November 22, 2012 In FeaturedHistoryNews
The first researcher, who questioned the prevailing theory that Ulysses wandered the Mediterranean Sea for years before the gods allowed him to set foot once again on his beloved Ithaca, was an American historian from Chicago, Henriette Mertz.
In 1964, Mertz suggested with conviction in her book The Wine Dark Sea: Homer’s Heroic Epic of the North Atlantic that Ulysses, in many of the adventures described in Homer’s epic The Odyssey went outside the Mediterranean.
Based on her research and explorations in North America, Mertz proposed that Ulysses had reached the shores of North America with the help of the sea currents.
Mertz studied the speed of sea currents in conjunction with the time it took Ulysses to travel from one place to the other, reading carefully through Homer’s original descriptions and observations. She said she identified the exact locations Ulysses visited in the then unknown part of the world, which have lately revealed archaeological treasures dating back to the ancient Greek hero’s time.
Mertz took her research one step further and designed a detailed chart containing all of Ulysses’ journey stations after the fall of Troy and on his way back home. The map points out the island of the Sirens, the exact point on the American coastline that harbored the sea monsters Scylla and Charybdis, and the actual sea route Ulysses took to get back to Ithaca (assisted all the way by the powerful and swift current of the Gulf Stream).

The study of Siegfried Petrides in 1994, Odyssey – a Naval Epic of the Greeks in America, came to strengthen Mertz’s findings and proposals. According to Petrides, the Greeks have a naval history that starts from at least 7250 B.C. as proved by the findings in Frachthi cave in Argolida.
“… The uniqueness of the Greek geographical area, namely its location in the relatively small Aegean Sea with its hundreds of islands, allowed the prehistoric Greek inhabitants to develop the technology of sea communications very early. Over the years and with the accumulated experience of sea voyages, sailors from the Aegean became more brave and started sailing off to the North and the Black Sea, to the South in Egypt and Phoenicia, and to the West to Italy and the Iberian Peninsula.
“They discovered that the sea they had been sailing was everywhere surrounded by land and had only one exit. They did not hesitate to leave the familiar waters and travel to the North in order to get precious metals, and they did the same westwards as well” he wrote.


Sarah Luzia Hassel-Reusing

This is the fourth appeal and was sent to The Hague by the German civil and human rights activist and constitutional plaintiff Sarah Luzia Hassel-Reusing, who is known up to the UN, and has personally, last week at the 21.11.2012,  filed a paper of 30 pages with a comprehensive appendix with evidence at the International Criminal Court (ICC). She refers to the already existing charge of the Greeks Georgios Tragkas, Antonios Prekas, Panagiotis Tzenos, and Dimitrios Konstantaras, who have filed their charge against Christine Lagarde (CEO of the International Monetary Fund, IMF), Jose Manuel Barroso (President of the EU Commission), Herman van Rompuy (President of the European Council), Dr. Angela Merkel (German Chancellor), and Dr. Wolfgang Schäuble (German Minister of Finance) for suspected crime against humanity (art. 7 Roman Statute). The Greek charge, so Hassel-Reusing, comprehensively explains the damage at the Greek health system and the interpretation of the Roman Statute.
The German charge leaves open, who are the perpetrators, but shows, where to find them. It focuses on the damages to the health of the Greeks, caused by the cuts into the health system and by the starvation (art. 7 par. 1 lit. k Roman Statute). For this purpose, the German charge examines the conditions of the Troika, which lead to the humanitarian catastrophe up to the withholding of vital medicaments. In view of conditions like the reduction of the employers’ contributions to the social insurance by 5 %, like austerity measures mainly at the health insurance and at the pension insu-rance, and like the blocked account for alle state revenues, which has hit hospitals as a shock, and that in times of lower revenues of the of the public health insurance because of unemployment, and because of the reduction of the wages and of the pensions by the Troika, the humanitarian catastrophe especially in the health sector has been predictable and so must have been deliberately accepted.
The  ill people carry the main burden via moderating fees. In addition to that, the patients already have, because of the liquidity problems of the public health insurance, to advance most of the costs of medicaments, and often also for medical disposable material.. A further aggravation is to be prognosticated because of the budget surplus of 4,5 % (related to national level, provinces, municipalities, and social insurance), which the Troika has demanded.
Furthermore, the German charge shows, by means of statistics and media reports, that already in 2009, before the conditionalities of the Troika, the Greek minimum wage has been below the absolute poverty line, so that already then many Greek have had too little, to be able to pay for food and for accomodation, not to speak of the costs of clothing and transport, which are also included in the absolute poverty line. By the conditions of the Troika like interventions into the law on wage agreements, the loosening of the protection against wrongful dismissal, the reduction of the pensions, and high moderating fees in the health sector, as well as by the de facto payments by the patients themselves because of the liquidity problems of the public health insurance,  the number of Greeks, who are not able any more to pay rent and food, has significantly risen.In addition to that, the number of suicidies has risen by 45 % because of unemployment and of the fear of poverty. Just remember the pharmacist, who has shot himself at the place of the constitution.
A crime against humanity means, that someone intendingly attacks a civilian population and knows about this attack, and does this either with a large scope or systematically (art. 7 Roman Statute). In this regard, the German charge focuses on attacks against health (art. 7 par. 1 lit. k Roman Statute), here as a result of excessive interventions into the universal human rights to food (art. 11 UN Social Pact) and to health (art. 12 UN Social Pact).
It proves the large scope and the system especially regarding the  „little treaty change“ (art. 136 par. 3 TFEU). This would oblige to always new mechanisms for the „financial stability“ of the financial sector, especially of the big banks. The talk about the  „euro safeguarding“ or „stability of the euro currency zone as a whole“, provenly, only serves the deception of policy and public. The already known mechanisms, which are going to be based on art. 136 par. 3 TFEU, are those of the European financing mechanism („Greece Support“, EFSM, EFSF, and ESM) and those for the establishing of the EU economic government (tightened Stability and Growth Pact, Imbalance Procedure, and Budgetary Surveillance). By means of  all these mechanisms, the securing  of the financial sector is going to be financed by means of systematical conditions at the cost of all states of the eurozone with a strictness as in the „practice“ of the IMF. The charge proves by many documents, what this strictness means, at the example of the results of IMF conditions in many countries. The conditions  of the IMF and of the World Bank are, according to Prof. Dr. Jean Ziegler, former UN special rapporteur for the human right to food, main cause no. 2 for the starvation in the world. According to the economist and former IMF employee Davison Budhoo, the IMF alone has on its conscience, because of its conditions, the lives of millions of children. The same excessive strictness is now, for the first time completely provable by EU documents, systematically planned by means of art. 136 par. 3 TFEU for the whole eurozone, and the Greeks are, in the view of the Hassel-Reusing, being used as experimental subjects for that, and regarding Greece already today a strictness according to the „practice“ of the IMF is being applied.
For this purpose, the same unscrupulous powers, which are here abusing the European Union for the securing and the enrichment of the big banks and as a rammer against the universal law, even risk, seemingly open-eyed, the self-disintegration of the EU. For, according to art. 53 Vienna Treaty Law Convention, international treaties, which are incompatible with „ius cogens“, are void und so invalid. To the „ius cogens“ belong, inter alia, the UN Charter, the universal human rights, and the Roman Statute (incl. the prohibition of the crime against humanity in art. 7 Roman Statute).
Art. 136 par. 3 TFEU is incompatible with the universal human rights and presumably incompatible with the Roman Statute. With the enactment of this paragraph, the whole TFEU and  so also the crucial legal basis for the very existence of the European Union would become invalid.
The charge recommends for the investigations to find out the perpetrators, NOT to limit the focus to the five persons mentioned in the Greek charge, but also to look closely at the counselling sphere. Among this sphere, especially the influence of persons from the surroundings of Goldman Sachs, Bilderberg, and Deutsche Bank is very conspicuous. It is crucial to respect the presumption of innocence, and to investigate, who has the concrete responsibility for the excessiveness of the conditions against food and health at Greece respectively for the systematical expansion of the excessive strictness by means of art. 136 par. 3 TFEU in the meaning of a strictness as in the „practice“ of the IMF. In view of the humanitarian catastrophe at Greece, the soon start of  formal  criminal proceedings by the ICC is urgently necessary. [Comment: You can help in this direction by signing the petition to the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) --> Sign the petition ]
 
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