From Islamabad to London to Paris to Moscow to Los Angeles - wherever a flickering video image could reach - the nerves of the world became more frayed this week with the images of mass demonstrations in the streets and the stunning announcement that Hollywood writers have gone on strike for more humane working conditions.

The contract between the 12,000-member Writers Guild of America (WGA) and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) expired Oct. 31. (Who knew it took 12,000 writers to produce the dreck coming out of Hollywood these days?)

Imminently we will be seeing the pathetic consequences of the strike: heartbreaking images of Jay Leno telling lame jokes (well, not all things will change), Jon Stewart silently making mere faces at the camera (his clever lines having been unwritten due to the strike), Stephen Colbert, denied the words written for him to mock Bill O'Reilly, forced to pointlessly over-gesticulate.

During the Second World War, the Nazis worked on plans to build the Messerschmitt Me 264 Amerikabomber, an airplane specially devised to fly suicide missions into Manhattan's skyscrapers.

Albert Speer, the Nazi minister for armaments, recalled in his diary Inside The Third Reich: "It was almost as if [Hitler] was in a delirium when he described to us how New York would go up in flames. He imagined how the skyscrapers would turn into huge blazing torches. How they would crumble while the reflection of the flames would light the skyline against the dark sky."

Hitler hated Manhattan. It was, he said, "the center of world Jewry." Less than 60 years later, Hitler's plans were executed by Moslem immigrants living in Germany. At the 2003 trial of the network around Mohamed Atta (the pilot who flew into the World Trade Center), Shahid Nickels, a German convert to Islam and a friend of Atta's, said that the Islamists had targeted Manhattan because it is "the center of world Jewry, and the world of finance and commerce controlled by it."

The parallels between Nazism and Islamism are overwhelming. Yet the subject is a taboo.

The House Democrat leadership delayed a planned vote this past week on ENDA, the Employment Non-Discrimination Act of 2007. The bill, introduced by Rep. Barney Frank of Massachusetts, makes employment discrimination against homosexuals and bisexuals illegal.

One reason that momentum on moving the legislation has stalled is because Rep. Tammy Baldwin from Wisconsin wants a provision covering transsexuals and transgenders, originally in, then removed, put back in.

President Bush has indicated that, if passed, he will veto this legislation. And he should.  But beyond the bill's many technical constitutional difficulties, it's worth considering it in the context of the ongoing cultural war taking place in this country.

It's also especially instructive as to why the presidential campaign of Barack Hussein Obama has fizzled.

Every move the Putin administration makes today is dictated by the desire to shape Russia's future internal power structure and to set the course for the country's foreign and security affairs in general, and its relationship with the United States in particular for years to come.

Keeping the relationship with Washington on the verge of a crisis and inventing an imaginary "American enemy" is creating much needed legitimacy for the current Russian leadership, which now has only Mr. Putin's personal popularity as its political base.

The image of Russia surrounded by enemies is absolutely necessary for today's Russian ruling class of senior secret police officers, as it positions them in the eyes of the people as the saviors and defenders of Mother Russia.

Russia is being Re-Sovietized.

At a conference on the future of the European Union held in Brussels last week and co-sponsored by George Soros, it was advocated that the EU expel member states that are "not European enough."  One country in particular which Europe should throw out because it hampers the EU's aim of transforming itself into a federal superstate is Poland.

What have the Poles done to antagonize the Eurocrats? Today (October 10) is the "European Day Against the Death Penalty." The EU wanted to inaugurate the event with a common European declaration against capital punishment. Poland thwarted this by refusing to sign the declaration because the EU did not condemn abortion and euthanasia as well.

Last month, during an EU meeting on the death penalty, the Polish justice minister confronted his Danish colleague with Denmark's annual 15,000 abortions and the latter got so angry that she left the room, slamming the door.
 
Other countries, such as Belgium and Portugal, accuse Poland of "immoral and unworthy behavior" by daring to compare abortion and euthanasia to the death penalty. Richard Howitt, a British Labor politician and the vice president of the European Parliament's human rights subcommittee, said that Poland's refusal to reject the death penalty brings into question its commitment to European values.

As the junta's misbehavior worsened in Burma (albeit the ruling thugs have rechristened it Myanmar) last week, pundits suggested that we should force China to pressure its client to treat the pro-democracy demonstrators politely - by threatening to boycott next year's Beijing Olympics.

Sorry, but Burma's far more important to China's vision for the coming decades than the Pollution-and-Oppression Games. The bullies in Beijing see the Olympics as a coming-out party - but Burma is a strategic lifeline.

So, sure, if the Burma situation worsens as China stonewalls, we can and should punish Beijing by boycotting the 2008 Games. But we have to have realistic expectations regarding the results.

On the flip side, some Westerners argue that China isn't really the decisive player in Burma - that Western corporations flying under the radar screen do more to prop up the junta than Beijing does.

Absolute bull. This doesn't mean that greedy multinationals don't lurk out in those jungles - but to ascribe more power to them than to Beijing is like blaming purse-snatchers for the junk-mortgage crisis.

Here's the real situation:

Ever heard of the West Lothian Question? West Lothian is the Scottish region immediately to the west of Edinburgh. The question is so called because it was first posed by Tam Dalyell, a Labor member of the British Parliament for West Lothian.

Mr. Dalyell wondered how long the English would tolerate the situation in which Scottish members of the British Parliament, such as himself, have a (sometimes decisive) say about issues affecting only England, while English parliamentarians have no say about the same matters in Scotland.

Several proposals have been made to solve this anomaly. One of them is to abolish the Scottish Parliament, the National Assembly for Wales and the Northern Ireland Assembly. Another is to give England its own parliament, which would imply that the United Kingdom become a federation of four states - England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

The solution proposed by the Labor government in Westminster, currently led by British Prime Minister Gordon Brown (a Scot) and previously by Mr. Blair (also a Scot), is to dissolve England by splitting it up into nine regions, each with its own parliamentary assembly.