The first accident was of course on December 16, 1910. Henri Coanda’s Coanda-1910 was destroyed when it accidentally got airborne during an engine test. The Romanian engineer was blown free from the aircraft though.

And yes, even though it was a piston-driven compressor, the Coanda-1910 definately was a jet engine 🙂

The AEL is not as important as you might think. First of all they are not politically organised. They don’t represent the muslim community as a whole (I hope) and it’s just a matter of time before this group will end up the same way as the Vlaams Blok. Don’t forget, these two think-tanks (VB and AEL) use the same philosophy. There’s a paradox between “freedom of speech” and reality where they want to cut back on civil liberties. When VB was charged, the AEL condemned this because they found everyone should have the freedom of speech, including their enemy! In Belgium we have a very strange triangle now, between AEL and VB fighting eachother, but having one common enemy: the Belgian gov’t, and more important, the Belgian state (!).

Maybe i’m too focused on dialectism, but an organisation like AEL does give a voice opposed to the VB, and on it’s own turf: outside of the regular political establishment. Of course they aren’t representing the muslim community as a whole, but then again neither is VB representing the whole of Flanders or did Fortuyn represent all non-immigrant Dutch. Here in the Netherlands, there is no such platform which takes part in the political debate from an immigrant’s point of view – in stead, frustration and dissapointment amongst immigrants is vented in much more obscure and inaccessible places like certain mosques and through certain radical imams. So unlike in Belgium, it is far less a part of the public debate. And additionally, i would guess that the step to violent religious extremism is far easier via a militant imam rather then a militant political entity like the AEL.

Anyway, Belgium lost its political innocence already a couple of decades ago (since the rise of the VB). Such a party would however, not survive in the Netherlands because you don’t have two nations living in one country. Most voters from the VB are no racists, they just don’t want to ship money to Wallonia. A party which would be based upon a racist and xenophobic program will never become the biggest party, because I still think the majority of the population are no neo-fascists. Therefor I think it’s maybe not such a bad thing there’s a right wing gov’t in the netherlands. They will most certainly change immigration policy etc, but as long as you still have a “democratic and liberal” opposition in the parliament, it’s not really that bad. In Belgium, due our complex system, there’s actually just one political party which is in the opposition and which is an alternative to the mean, francophone leftists: indeed, Vlaams Blok.

I’m not really all too well informed on Belgium’s political system exactly because it is such a complicated system, but i guess you hit the nail on the head when you say that Belgium has lost it’s political innocence (or naivity?) long ago, and the Dutch are right in the middle of the process.
While you have a point when you say that a right-wing government in the Netherlands might lower the pressure from the anti-immigration side a bit, i think you are forgetting that a lot of the xenophobes are also very sceptical if not openly hostile to the political establishment. Fortuyn certainly drew a lot of popularity by openly taking distance from “old politics”. However, the current government here is very much one of “old politics”. It’s not so much an issue of left vs. right (many people in Fortuyn’s footsteps really want an anti-immigration isolationist maxi-welfare state), but of traditional politics vs. yet unproven ‘new’ politics (whatever those may be, except populism of course). I think a part of Wilder’s current popularity (he’s the anti-immigration splitoff from the ‘conservative’ VVD) is not only because of his anti-Muslim agitation, but also because him leaving an ‘old’ party appeals to those fed up with the political establishment. In that sense, he is in a way a real Fortuyn Jr.
Yep, we’re definately losing our political innocense.

Though the situation in the Netherlands is a bit hysterical these days, I hope it will get normal again the next weeks. In Belgium, the problems are more seriously, for the reason you mentioned. Our “wacko’s” are no filmmakers, or even an individual like Pim Fortuyn who would have eventually lost in the next elections if he became a minister, our wacko’s is Flanders largest political fraction.

Again, i’m not to well-informed in Belgian politics, but i think it depends a lot on the stability of VB as a political entity. Xenophobe parties (be that anti-immigrant or anti-Wallon) always seem to thrive on the appeal of their political leader; be that Hitler, De Winter or Fortuyn. And don’t forget that (even though it happened after Fortuyn’s death) the Fortuyn party got the chance to prove what nincompoops they were. Although this might be a little dangerous experiment to perform with the VB…

Yes, one of the train-crises was eventually resolved by having the train stormed by marines and commandos after everyone in the train had been stunned by a few low passes by F-104s .

Yep, the hysteria is spreading from the Netherlands to Belgium. Suddenly, the national security service is getting everything they’ve been asking for the past ten years, including the right to spy on people without a mandate. Personally, I do believe something should be done, and it’s true there are some militant muslim groups in Europe who are spreading hatred. However, there’s no need for a post 9/11 syndrom in Europe. After all, just one man has been killed. He was a civilian, true, but he was by no means innocent. In fact, this Theo Van Gogh could have been in jail for racism as well. The recent measures taken by the Dutch gov’t to take away the nationality from some people is pure nonsence. This is against the constitution! A rightwing gov’t can try to stop immigration, but by no means can they take away the civil and political rights from the Dutch.

There were a few lawsuits filed against Van Gogh, most of them actually for his anti-Jewish remarks (I think one of those remarks was “It smells like caramel here.” – “Yes, today the diabetic Jews are being incarcerated.”) But considering such remarks were usually made in a polemical context he was IIRC never sentenced. Mind you, no matter how outspoken Van Gogh was, he always was a very approachable man open to debate – even at his very questionable level.
But the call for a cutback in civil liberties here in the Netherlands is indeed very much alive. It was like that for quite some time (an earlier boost was after Fortuyn got killed), but as i said before the Van Gogh killing seems to have opened the floodgates for all sorts of proto-fascist ideas about security. And even politicians now are unaware of certain basic human rights that every Dutch citizen has, Muslim or otherwise.

Living in Holland is not dangerous, it’s one of the most safe countries in the world (even more than Belgium). Maybe the Dutch have been a bit too leftist the past decades (gouge away if you got some marihuana ) compared to Belgium, where we have the stinking breath of the Vlaams Blok/Belang behind the gov’t.

I think in retrospect a party like the Vlaams Blok actually serves as some sort of pressure valve in the Belgian society which the Netherlands lacked, at least up to the point that Fortuyn started working on his fifteen minutes of fame. On the other hand, in Belgium there also is a counterbalance with the AEL. Even when Dutch anti-immigrationists began to organise within the more acceptable parts of the political spectrum, there was no countermovement from the immigrant community like the AEL in Belgium. I guess our consensus-seeking society just was not (and probably still is not) able to absorb not just one, but two far-from-centre organisations on the socio-political arena. Possibly, the current hysteria is the result that an anti-immigration standpoint has been accepted now (no doubt thanks to Fortuyn) whereas there still is no institutionalised and organised counterposition like the AEL offers in Belgium.

Because of that, i don’t think Dutch politics have been too leftist over the past few years. Instead, we had been focused way too much on consensus up to the point that we actually had a socialist+liberals+conservatives government throughout most of the 1990s. It just became too hard to imagine for politicians to imagine that opinions existed beyond ‘Paars’.

Animal.

Nice piece of anti-Clinton & fear-China propaganda. Single-crystal engine blade technology is not exclusively American by a far stretch.

The Netherlands are currently in a state of national hysteria following the murder of Van Gogh. While Van Gogh was definately a very agressive, outspoken columnist (he repeatedly referred to Muslems as “goatf*ckers”. Not that he was any kinder to Christians or Jews, btw – i had the immense pleasure of interviewing him once, it got to be a really, really bizarre article which has unfortunately been lifted from the website it was published at), his films he was a lot more pragmatical. He made a really nice TV-drama series with a Moroccan boy and a Dutch girl in a Romeo&Juliet-like story, for example.

Anyway, after he was killed by a muslem extremist, it appears a lot of people here in the Netherlands now think it’s time to remove their facade of tolerance, and instead display rampant xenophobia. Which is of course nonsense: Van Gogh was killed by one extremist individual, part of a somewhat larger group of (wannabe-) islamic terrorists. Somehow, a lot of people lack the will or ability to distinguish those extremists from the massive majority of Islamic immigrants. Worse still, while the group around Van Gogh’s killer are continuously called terrorists by both the media and officials (police, politicians, justice etc), the word terrorists is NOT used to describe the people firebombing Islamic schools or mosques. Double standards, if you ask me.

What makes matters worse, is that the Dutch government currently is a right-of-center coalition which was composed against the results of the latest elections (which would have called for a left-of-center coalition). The current government’s popular base has been diminishing, especially since a dedicated anti-Muslem member of parliament split off one of the coalition parties (let’s call them Conservatives), potentially taking over half of the voters of that party with him. Some members of the current government now seem to exploit the Van Gogh murder: the Christian-Democrats now seem to try and expand some religion-based laws, while some of the Conservatives now seek the opportunity to overtake their recent splitoff. The result is a very chaotic government which only adds fuel to the fire in stead of tries to temper the national hysteria here in the Netherlands.

Having said that, this is my personal view on the current situation here in the Netherlands. I personally am quite puzzled how it could happen that a surge of national hysteria here in the Netherlands actually seems to affect the situation in Belgium and Germany, but that is the impression i do get. I’d love to read how other people, either Dutch or from the surrounding countries, see the situation.

Cinnamon, caramel, grilled bacon, and quite a number of aircraft. Tornados smell nice, most WarPac aircraft do, all helicopters… I don’t like the smell of current US aircraft though. F-15, F-16… nope.

Zond-1: SLAR recon platform.
Zond-2: comms relay platform.
Zond-3: IR recon platform.