Olifant Parade

Downtown Hasselt is hosting an Elephant Parade, so to speak.  

It is committed to the preservation and rescue of the endangered Asian elephant.  

The Asian elephant is highly intelligent sharing traits with human, apes and some dolphins. 

They inhabit grasslands and tropical forests.

Asian elephants have a recorded lifespan of 86 years.

But the average is about 60 years in the wild.

They live primarily in Southeast Asia from India eastward.

The very tip of their trunk is used like a finger.

They are very social and roam in herds of up to 15 to 30 members.

A male Asian elephant can weigh as much as 12,000 lbs, nearly as much as a mac truck.

They don't sleep much and spend most of their day foraging for food.

They never get too far away from a source of water.

There are 40 elephants displayed around Hasselt

and I took pictures of those I came across.

Apparently I somehow missed exactly half of them.

The Elephant Parade began in 2008 and since then has traveled to 10 places 

including the country of Singapore, the cities of Milan, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, London and  

now Hasselt!

According to the elephant parade website . . .

the USA is a planned destination for 2013.

They are just looking for a city!

Her name is Norma Grace

. . . and, as you might guess, she is as beautiful as her mother :)

Welcome to the world, Norma Grace.  We can't wait to meet you!

Game Changer?

Just when I thought I'd figured out a small portion of the Belgian bureaucracy that effects me, I find out the rules have changed.

As we have every year, Jim applies for a work permit renewal and we wait.  It finally arrives! Good news!

Then with valid work permit in hand we apply for a residency visa renewal.  Like we have every year. So we can stay here another 365 days.  This year was to be no different . . . until we get to City Hall and find out it ain't so easy now.

The rules have changed.

Yes, despite having a job, a good job, there's no guarantee we (and by "we", turns out it means just "me") can stay.  The nice lady at the City Hall said "if you have a job (meaning Jim), they usually leave you alone".

She said "it usually takes about a week" for an answer from Brussels.  So we wait.

But for me . . . whoa Nellie, not so fast.

Belgium has typically been a haven for immigrants and apparently has opened its doors to every family member imaginable as long as one family member actually has a job.  Not anymore.  That door has closed.  And for good reason.  Some people will bring over enough extended family to start a religion or at least a restaurant.

Now, proving you can support one, two or more family members is a requirement and even then, there is no guarantee.  The nice lady at the City Hall said "those decisions are made in "Brussels" and she had nothing to do with the decision".

Brussels - where all decisions are made.

So Jim's application is off to Brusselswherealldecisionsaremade and she provides me with a laundry list of documents I need to bring back to accompany my application.

This was a Friday, of course.

On Monday, I take a file full of all the required documentation she (I mean Brussels) requires and she copies them all and says again "it usually takes about a week".

Well, about two weeks later, we receive notice that Jim has been approved!  Good news!

But for me?  Good question.

After three weeks into the "usually takes one week" and ten days until my residency visa expires and I'm officially a tourist.

I'm thinking - I have always thought Belgium is overlooked and undersold as a tourist destination.

But in the interest of being legal, we head down to City Hall to retrieve Jim's legality.

He asks the nice lady if she might be able to check on the status of my application with "Brussels".  She said "Yes I should because it's been three weeks and we have no answer yet".  Bingo.

One phone call, one fax and I'm legally an American in België for another year.  :)

Brussels - where all decisions are made . . . eventually.

That says

Honorable Mayor, 

Person concerned has the right to permanent residence.

For a few weeks there I kinda felt like a Mexican.  Say what you will - it's true.

Rehab or Revenge

Norway has about 5 million people - more than the city of LA, but not as many as NYC.

Norway has 60 prisoners per 100,000 people.  By comparison, the U.S. (which leads the world in prisoners per capita) has 700 per 100,000 people.

The U.S. has 5% of the world population yet has 25% of its prisoners.

And they ain't cheap to keep either, costing over 60 billion $ a year and rising.  

I'm sure you've read about Norway's most famous inmate, Anders Breivik.  He admitted to killing 77 people and after just over a year, was recently sentenced to a minimum of 10 years and a maximum of 21 years (it is possible for that to be extended).

No less than 10 and up to 21 years. In Texas, you can get 2 to 10 years for possession of 5 lbs of marijuana.  I'm trying to rationalize the difference.

In the States, several life sentences would have been imposed on Mr. Breivik, if not death, depending on which state he happened to choose to shoot those 77 people in.

So is that good or bad?  Are we safer by keeping people locked up longer, indefinitely?  In the extreme case of Mr. Breivik . . . probably.

Can a guy who has no remorse be rehabilitated?  Norway thinks so.  

Norway, and the rest of Europe, believes criminals can be rehabilitated. Check out this video of a typical Norwegian prison.

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You may also find the article printed below very insightful and its author's occupation may surprise you.

Norway Did the Right Thing by Giving Breivik 21-Year Sentence

Aug 27, 2012 6:21 PM EDTwritten by David Dow and published in The Daily Beast

Americans are happy to see convicts receive life sentences at the drop of a hat, but we refuse to understand that our vengeance doesn’t make us any safer, writes David Dow.

More than any other instance of crime and punishment during the past fifty years, the sentencing of the mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik in Norway last week reveals just how wide is the chasm between Western Europe and the United States when it comes to criminal justice.

Breivik, who killed 77 people and injured scores more in Norway in July 2011—the largest mass slaughter in Norway since World War II—was sentenced to 21 years, or just over 3 months per victim. 21 years! In some places in the U.S. you can get more time for selling a half ounce of cocaine. 

Never mind that it’s the harshest sentence the Norwegian criminal justice system can mete out, nor that Breivik, who despite being deemed sane by the courts has not displayed an ounce of remorse for his crimes, and will almost surely spend more than 21 years—and perhaps the rest of his life—behind bars.

The point is that while American criminal law remains stuck in medieval times, and our philosophy of punishment mired in a rationale that never made any sense, Norway recognizes that we don’t need to lock people up forever and throw away the key in order to express our abhorrence at what they have done. More important, it’s not the best way to keep society safe.

As a death-penalty lawyer, I have had clients executed just for being present at the murder scene, even if they themselves killed no one. Breivik, on the other hand, may not even die in prison; when he becomes eligible for parole in 2033, he will be only 53. 

While my clients await their fate, they sit locked in tiny cells 23 hours a day. They have neither computers nor TV. Breivik will have access to exercise equipment and be able to watch television. He will be able to work on a laptop (without Internet access).    

So what? you might say. This just reveals the soft heads that define the European stance on crime. But which continent is drowning in a sea of gun violence and weekly bloody massacres?

Norway isn’t the outlier here. The sentence Breivik received may make jaws drop here in Texas, but it reflects an approach to punishment common across all of Western Europe.

Theoretically, of course, the U.S. and Europe punish people for the same two reasons: to keep society safe, and to inflict pain on people who have hurt others. But while Western Europe has kept sight of both objectives, America has become consumed with the latter.

The New York Times quoted the father of a young girl killed by Breivik as saying he means nothing to him, and now that Breivik is prison for decades or longer, he can stop thinking about him and get on with his life. As the father of a young boy, I doubt I would have that father’s magnanimity, but like me, he is a product of his culture. Norwegians believe in moving on, while Americans would still be calling for Breivik’s head. We seem to believe that we are dishonoring the memory of the dead unless we dehumanize the criminal and inflict maximum pain on him. 

But it would be a mistake to think the European model cares any less about victims than we do. If anything, Europe is more sensitive to victims than we are. Although the court gave Breivik greater leeway to expound his demented ideas during the trial than he would ever have had in an American jurisdiction, the court also heard from every victim or victim’s survivor who wanted to testify. Seventy-seven separate autopsy reports were introduced into evidence. The judges indulged Breivik’s twisted ideology, but they also invited stories about his victims. The many injured were not remotely lost or overlooked in the proceedings. 

In the U.S., meanwhile, family members of many of the victims of my clients complain that their pain is ignored even as we foam at the mouth to string up the evildoers.

There’s also the sheer amount of time we invest in these cases. Breivik’s prosecution took barely a year to reach its conclusion. While the appeals drag on in death penalty cases, family members of the victim never know whether the killer of their loved one will be spared. Many of them hope the execution will finally allow them to move on with their lives. You’d have to ask them whether that’s how it turns out. 

In the meantime, government lawyers in America spend a decade defending a death sentence, and lawyers appointed to represent the murderer spend a decade trying to save him. In Norway and the rest of Western Europe, those lawyers too are moving on. 

The cruelest irony of all is that America’s harsher attitude toward criminals does not translate into greater safety for the rest of us. It turns out that the two objectives of punishment can be at war with one another, and in America we are giving up greater security to indulge a vestigial instinct. Criminal penalties in Europe are substantially shorter than they are in America, yet Europe has fewer repeat offenders. In Germany, for example, prison sentences are a third as long as they are in America for equivalent crimes, yet the rate of recidivism is twenty-five percent lower than on this side of the Atlantic. More severity, it turns out, does not reduce crime, and might even increase it.

If the aim of the criminal-justice system is to protect society, ours is failing. By thinking we are being kinder to victims by punishing their wrongdoers more severely, we may actually be creating more victims.  

Which leaves only one justification for America’s approach: The visceral belief that people who do something bad should suffer terribly, and for a very long time. As a homegrown member of this culture, I can sympathize. It can be emotionally satisfying to see a cruel person suffer. But what Europe recognizes that our own justice system stubbornly refuses to is that some people who do something unspeakably vile can change.

Based on his statements in court, I doubt Breivik will ever change, and I doubt he will ever see the light of freedom, and I’m not troubled by that. Once his sentence ends, judges can keep him in prison for an endless succession of five-year terms if he is deemed a danger to society, which seems likely. But the premise of the sentence—that the best way to put tragedies behind us is to end them quickly, and that the infliction of maximum pain does not make us any safer—is an idea that America’s vengeance-centered culture could learn from.

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Something to think about.

Baden-Baden

Baden-Baden (pronounced "Baah"-den like a sheep) is a city in southwestern Germany and we had the chance to visit it for a couple of days recently.  About 50,000 people call it home, but it is a popular tourist destination with about a million tourists per year.

The city is most famous for its hot springs bath houses dating back to the Romans.  We decided to forego the Roman baths.  It is also famous for a casino which we did not visit either.  

I was surprised to see Russian as the one and only second language on menus and signs around town.  Of all languages - Russian?  Turns out wealthy Russians visit Baden-Baden - a lot - and many own businesses and real estate.  

In addition to some pretty ritzy hotels, there are some really nice homes lining the Lichtentaler Allee.  That's a paved path through the historic park and arboretum along the River Oos in Baden-Baden.  It's about a mile and a half of nothing but a beautiful park.  

The weather was beautiful with only one really hard and short rain.  It is Europe, after all.  An umbrella wouldn't have done much good so we (and a few others) ducked under a store awning and waited it out.  I figure Baden-Baden gets as much or more rain than Hasselt because the entire city looked like a pristine park.  The grass, flowers, trees, were just beautiful and immaculate.

On the drive back to Hasselt, we stopped at a vineyard or two.

This is German wine country along the Rhine River. Wine production in Germany dates back to 70 AD and Germany continues to be in the top 10 wine producers in the world.

As you can see, we must have arrived the day before harvesting!

Here's a short slide show of my photos of Baden-Baden.