Saturday, May 14, 2016

My Friend's Travel Bucket List. Stratfor Re Britain and The E.U. Israel and Negev Cyber Town.




6 more months of political insanity and wasted
billions as we learn whether Bernie and Hillary
kiss and make up and Ryan and Trump embrace
while ISIS, China and Russia lick their chops 
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Skidaway Island Republican Club
Presents:
True Perspectives 

Wednesday, June 8, 2016

Bias In Media
Brent Bozell


Plantation Club
Cocktails/Cash bar : 4:30 PM
Presentation : 5:00 PM
Sustaining members – Free
Regular members - $5
Non-Members - $10
All Welcome
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Stratfor on the British E.U vote. (See 1 below.)
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Romney wants to run again and this time he knows to put his dogs inside his van. His problem is that he cannot find anyone willing to commit suicide and run with him. (See 2 below.)
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Israel goes cyber in the Negev! (See 3 below.)
and takes delivery of F-35's which it will upgrade with their own technology. (See 3a below.)
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This is a travelogue of a dear friend and fellow memo reader who has just about filled his bucket list. 

I am posting for those who would like to learn about Gary's travels and observations.

 As to his latest trip he was concerned about sightseeing in Israel because of the stabbings and I encouraged him to get a cab with an Israeli driver which he did. 

Gary is the contemporary equivalent of Richard Halliburton.

Some is a bit hard to read because of the light yellow color.

Enjoy!!! (See 4 below.)
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Dick
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1)How Referenda Threaten the EU
Analysis
Britons will vote in a referendum June 23 on whether the country should remain in the European Union. Groups from both side of the debate are campaigning in the months leading up to the vote. (Ian Forsyth/Getty Images)

Forecast

  • In the coming years, national governments, opposition groups and civil society organizations will increasingly turn to popular votes to decide a broad range of EU-related debates.
  • National governments will probably use referenda (or, more likely, the threat of them) to demand concessions from the European Union, to justify domestic decisions or to increase their own popularity.
  • Votes will take place against a backdrop of growing nationalism and fear of globalization, and the results will likely freeze or reverse the process of EU integration.

Analysis

Europe seems to be in a referendum frenzy these days. In early May, the Hungarian government confirmed its decision to hold a referendum on the European Commission's plan to distribute asylum seekers among member states. In April, Dutch citizens voted against the European Union Association Agreement with Ukraine in a referendum organized by a Euroskeptic organization. In June, the United Kingdom will hold a crucial vote on whether to leave the European Union altogether. The three votes have a common denominator: EU citizens are essentially being asked to decide on issues connected to the process of Continental integration.
Considering the European Union's political and economic predicament, referenda are a very attractive tool to win the loyalty of voters. The democratic legitimacy of the European Union is being questioned, and moderate governments and their Euroskeptic opposition alike are turning to the voters for their own political gain. In the coming years, referenda will be proposed by three main sources — national governments, opposition groups and civil society organizations — and they will touch upon a broad range of EU-related questions.

An Interesting Paradox

The European Union has a tempestuous history with referenda. European governments have made many crucial decisions affecting national sovereignty without consulting the populace. The founding members of the European Economic Community (the European Union's predecessor) did not hold referenda when the supranational organization was created in 1957. Four decades later, the initial members of the eurozone did not ask voters their opinion before creating the currency union. Only Denmark and Sweden held referenda on whether to enter the eurozone, and people voted not to join it. The United Kingdom, in turn, negotiated an opt-out with its EU peers.
When nations have consulted their citizens, the results have many times tended against European integration. The Irish initially voted against the treaties of Nice (2001) and Lisbon (2008), which transferred more power from the national government to EU institutions. In both cases, Dublin negotiated concessions from the European Union before holding second referenda, which resulted in favorable votes for the treaties. In Denmark the treaty of Maastricht, which created the European Union, required a second referendum to pass in 1993 after people voted against it a year earlier. Perhaps the most notorious EU referenda were held in France and the Netherlands in 2005, when people voted against a plan to establish an EU constitution. Such strong popular rejection in two founding EU members caused the bloc to abort the project.
Whether the European Union is democratically legitimate has been a matter of debate for decades. Aware that transferring national sovereignty to unelected technocrats in Brussels could alienate voters, national governments decided to enhance the role of the EU Parliament, the only international organization whose members are elected by universal suffrage. The idea was that, by giving the European Parliament a greater participation in the Continent's decision-making process, the European Union would become more democratic.
But Europe's economic and political crises have exacerbated the debate over the bloc's democratic legitimacy, and governments are becoming increasingly nationalistic in response. With its impending referendum on whether to stay in the union, the United Kingdom is the most extreme example of this trend. But other countries are likely to make similar demands in the future. The referendum issue poses an interesting paradox: Asking voters to weigh in on European issues seems to be the most democratic way to reform the European Union — an arguably undemocratic institution. But as is usually the case, things are not as simple as they initially seem, and the practice could in fact weaken the bloc beyond repair.

Layers of Complexity

On the surface, referenda are the most formidable tool of democracy, giving voters a direct say on political, economic and social issues. They allow people to re-engage with the political process and give governments a popular mandate for major decisions that require a broad consensus. This explains why referenda are often used to reform constitutions or to make decisions on socially and politically sensitive issues (such as abortion or the death penalty).
But critics of referenda argue that they force voters to make decisions on complex issues about which they may not have complete knowledge. Referenda tend to create the illusion that complex issues can be presented in simple terms; the vote is often reduced to a binary "yes" or "no" answer. Referenda are also intimately linked to domestic political situations. Many citizens and political parties tend to see referenda as a vote on the government rather than on the issue under discussion, and the outcome is often determined by the economic situation or the popularity of the government at the time.
The European supranational government creates an additional layer of complexity. EU-related issues tend to be harder for voters to understand than national issues, and voters tend to more closely identify with and care about national rather than supranational issues. This means that voters often decide on EU referenda according to domestic political and economic conditions. Many of the French votes against the European Constitution, for example, were actually a vote against former President Jacques Chirac. The same happens with elections for the EU parliament; most political parties tend to campaign on domestic issues rather than on European issues. Thus, European Parliament election results are widely perceived as a barometer of the popularity of national governments.
EU-related referenda are also complex because of their impact on decision-making in Europe. Treaties need to be ratified by all member states before they become take effect, which means that in those countries where referenda are needed to ratify a treaty (such as in Ireland and Denmark), the entire process could be stalled because of the decision of voters in a single country. This creates enormous uncertainty about the feasibility of passing treaties, but it also gives countries temporary albeit notable leverage to negotiate concessions when voters vote no. Denmark, for example, received several exemptions from EU requirements after people initially voted against the Maastricht Treaty.

A Powerful Negotiating Tool

To a large extent, the current spate of referenda in Europe is a result of the upcoming British vote. London proved that referenda can be used to extract concessions from Brussels, but it also that the process of Continental integration can be frozen or even reversed with a popular vote. In the coming years, governments will probably use referenda (or, more likely, the threat of referenda) to demand concessions from the European Union, to justify domestic decisions, or to increase their own popularity. The net result of this situation will be to further distance EU member states from the centralized core in Brussels.
Naturally, not every country is in the same position to make demands. In 2015 the Greek government used a referendum against austerity to pressure its lenders to soften the terms of its bailout agreement with little success. In Hungary's case, the government will use popular opposition to the relocation scheme to justify its rejection of the plan in Brussels and to improve its popularity at home. But Hungary's position will be stronger if it coordinates its actions with other like-minded countries in the region. Larger EU members may feel more tempted than their smaller peers to threaten referenda, since they can inflict more damage on the European Union.
Euroskeptic political parties will also use referenda as a part of their electoral campaigns. The leader of the nationalist Freedom Party of Austria recently said Austria should be "governed via referenda" as Switzerland is. France's National Front has promised to hold a vote on the country's EU membership if it wins the presidential election in 2017. Italy's Five Star Movement has said it would hold a referendum on the country's membership in the Eurozone if elected. Considering that France and Italy are the second- and third-largest economies in the Eurozone, respectively, such referenda could finally doom the European Union. Promising to put EU-related issues to a vote helps these parties to soften their image, because a referendum looks less threatening (and more democratic) than the promise of unilateral action. Finally, interest groups or nongovernmental organizations may try to push their agendas in a similar way. But their options are more limited; only a handful of EU members have mechanisms that allow for citizens to organize referenda.
In Italy, referenda organized by citizens are binding, but only if voter turnout is above 50 percent. Most of the citizen-backed referenda in the past two decades were declared void because of low voter turnout. In the Netherlands, the threshold for voter turnout is much lower (30 percent), but the referenda organized by the public are not binding. However, even non-binding votes can put governments in awkward situations. The Dutch government is currently looking for ways to honor its promise to respect the result of a referendum in which people asked The Hague not to sign an association agreement between the European Union and Ukraine. Countries such as Croatia, Lithuania and Hungary also have mechanisms that enable citizens to propose a referendum.
Some countries have other mechanisms of direct democracy. In Austria and Finland, for example, people can force their parliaments to discuss a certain topic if they collect enough signatures. In late April, the Finnish parliament held a debate on the country's membership in the Eurozone after a group of citizens collected signatures to force the topic. While the debate was not binding, citizens sent their government a clear signal that they are worried about the effect of the common currency on the Finnish economy. These discussions can be particularly awkward when, like in Finland, a Euroskeptic party is actually a member of the government and has to find a balance between its political manifesto and its coalition commitments.

The Upcoming Votes

There are plenty of issues in Europe that could be decided by a referendum in the coming years. Though a new EU treaty is very unlikely in the current political environment, any attempts to modify the bloc's legal framework would trigger an avalanche of referenda across the Continent. Euroskeptic political parties and organizations in Southern Europe, as well as more moderate governments, could threaten to put their membership in the European Union or the Eurozone to a vote so as to demand concessions from Brussels on varied topics, including fiscal targets and debt restructuring. Euroskeptic forces in Northern Europe could push for referenda to resist measures that undermine their national wealth.
Separatist movements in places such as Catalonia, Scotland and Flanders will continue to push for referenda for more autonomy or for outright independence. Regional or municipal governments can resist EU plans to allocate asylum seekers in their territories by putting the issue to a vote. Cyprus' Greek south and its Turkish north are once again negotiating to reunify the island, but any agreement will have to be ratified by both sides in a referendum. (In 2004, Greek Cypriots rejected a U.N.-backed plan in a referendum.)
Referenda can also affect international affairs beyond the European Union. Popular pressure could force governments in several EU nations to hold a referendum on trade agreements such as the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. Countries like Finland and Sweden are unlikely to join NATO without a referendum, and Austria and Ireland are not planning to join the military alliance any time soon, but if they did, a referendum would be difficult to avoid.
These votes will probably be held against the backdrop of growing nationalism and fear of globalization. They will almost certainly be influenced by the political and economic situation at the time of the vote and will be subject to populist manipulation from both the organizers and their opponents (something true of most elections). The alleged attempts to solve the European Union's crisis of representation could therefore contribute to the bloc's weakening.
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2)

Romney Leads Effort for Third-Party Candidate

Image: Romney Leads Effort for Third-Party Candidate(Getty Images)
By Todd Beamon   
Mitt Romney is spearheading an effort to find a third-party candidate to stop presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.

Other key operatives in the movement, The Washington Post reports, are William Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard; Erick Erickson, RedState.com editor — along with strategists Mike Murphy, Stuart Stevens and Rick Wilson.
A representative for Romney declined to comment to the Post. The former Massachusetts governor, who lost the 2012 race to President Barack Obama, attacked Trump this week for failing to release his tax returns.

While some Republican insiders have admitted that such an effort could be futile, the group has several targets, the Post reports.

They include first-term Nebraska Republican Sen. Ben Sasse, who is among Trump's harshest critics, and Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who withdrew from the 2016 sweepstakes on May 4.

Romney has reached out to both in recent days, according to the report.
They've even reached out to Dallas Mavericks basketball team owner
Mark Cuban.
"I don’t see it happening," Cuban told the Post in an email.
"He could come after me all he wanted, and he knows I would put him in his place," Cuban said of Trump. "All that said, again, I don’t see it happening. There isn’t enough time."

As for Kasich, "the governor is not entertaining nor will he run as an independent," spokesman Chris Schrimpf said.

John Weaver, Kasich’s chief strategist, further told the Post: "They had plenty of time and opportunity to influence the nomination battle in a constructive way, and they didn’t for whatever reason.

"The idea of running someone as a third party, particularly the way they’re going about it, is not going to be effective and is not practical."

Regarding Sasse, 44, Romney has also talked with him, the Post reports. James Wegmann, the senator's spokesman, declined to comment on Sasse's private conversations.

Though the senator has publicly ruled out a run — "The answer is no," Wegmann told the Post — Sasse is speaking to the conservative American Enterprise Institute think tank in Washington on Monday.

His speech will be on economic opportunity, the Post reports.

"I’ve never met Ben Sasse, and I don’t have a connection with him, but I’m really moved by what he says," Stevens, who was Romney's chief strategist, told the newspaper. "He has a wonderful tone, and he’s exactly right.

"If Ben Sasse ran, I’d guarantee that he’d have higher favorability at the end than any other national politician."
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3) 
How Israel is turning part of the Negev Desert into a cyber-city
By Ellen Nakashima and William Booth 

BEERSHEBA, Israel — Here in the middle of the Negev Desert, a cyber-city is rising to cement Israel’s place as a major digital power. The new development, an outcropping of glass and steel, will concentrate some of the country’s top talent from the military, academia and business in an area of just a few square miles.

No other country is so purposefully integrating its private, scholarly, government and military cyber-expertise.

Israel is a nation of 8 million people with little in the way of natural resources. But in global private investment into cybersecurity firms, it is second only to the United States, with half a billion dollars flowing to the sector annually. Israel has not only vowed to repel the thousands of daily hack attacks against everything from the electric grid to ATMs, but has promised to build its commercial cyber-sector into an economic powerhouse.

[Israel hopes a cyber-city in the desert will coax highly trained, affluent, young people away from Tel Aviv]

More quietly, the Jewish state is also at the cutting edge of cyber-offense, developing stealthy computer weapons to penetrate its enemies’ networks. The United States and Israel, working together, launched the world’s most destructive cyber weapon known to date, Stuxnet, which was let loose on Iran’s Natanz nuclear enrichment facility to devastating effect.

But where the two countries diverge is in Israel’s apparent ability, because of its size, history, geography and culture, to organize itself to defeat cyber threats. Different sectors of society — that in the United States do not have a tradition of collaborating — appear willing in Israel to work closely together under a strong centralized authority.

“You will not find it in the United States,” said Eviatar Matania, the head of the National Cyber Bureau. “First, we have more enemies than others. We understand that the cyber threat is here and now. Second, a lot of Israel’s high-tech and innovation culture is in cyber. This is where we can gain an advantage over other countries in defending ourselves. And thus, we see cyber not just as a threat to mitigate, but also as one of our economic engines.”

And that strategy is the foundation of Beersheba.

A cyber emergency response team, which was launched in 2014 to respond to cyber crises, will be housed in the midst of this booming development. It is part of the National Cyber Security Authority, which is mandated to protect all private-sector systems.

Nearby, next to a new advanced technology park that already houses cyber firm incubators and global companies such as PayPal, Lockheed Martin and Deutsche Telekom, backhoes are preparing a construction site that will become the headquarters of the Israeli military’s cyber defenders.

[Israel to launch one of the most advanced missile defense systems in the world]

Eventually, the nation’s secretive, elite cyber attack branch — the army’s Unit 8200 — will also burrow in here. The two branches are scheduled to merge next year. They in turn will work closely with the National Cyber Security Authority.

Joining the effort will be the Shin Bet, Israel’s security agency, which as well as its role in Israel and the occupied territories, has been a key cyber player for more than a decade. And completing the complex is Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, which is the nation’s top school for cyber security. The university will also work with the cyber-response team.

“What you get out of that is the research capabilities that academia brings, the real-world knowledge that the [tech firms] bring, the hands-on experience that the military brings, alongside the entrepreneurial ability that the start-ups bring,” said Nadav Zafrir, a former head of Israel’s Unit 8200, who is himself now a tech entrepreneur. “You put all that together, it sparks magic.”

[Stuxnet was work of U.S. and Israeli experts, officials say]

Employees work on computers as a world map shows cyberattacks (represented by a fire icon), which are aimed against the Israel Electric Corp. (IEC), the main supplier of electrical power in Israel, at the company’s cyber security center in Haifa. (David Vaaknin/For The Washington Post)
Blocking, throwing punches

Israel will never achieve a cyber espionage network on the scale of the United States. But it wants to be feared in the region, and its computer hacking and spying skills are sophisticated and innovative.
“The United States has more capabilities than Israel in cyberspace,” said Gabi Siboni, director of the cyber security program at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv. “But we are small. We are very anxious, and it’s the difference between a speedboat and an aircraft carrier. We go very fast.”

So central is security seen for the state’s survival that every citizen — men and women alike, with exceptions for ultra-Orthodox Jews and the Arab population — is required after high school to complete a term of military service. The cream of the computer science and math crop are scouted by the elite military cyber-units when they are as young as 14.

“If you ask me what’s the biggest secret of the Israeli high-tech system, it’s the military’s ability to look at people when they are in high school,” Zafrir said.

[Young Israeli cyberwarriors learn to duel in the dark]

The roots of Israel as a cyber power go back to the 1973 Yom Kippur War, said retired Brig. Gen. Yair Cohen, another former head of Unit 8200, which employs thousands of soldiers and serves a role similar to the National Security Agency. In less than three weeks, Israel lost more than 2,000 soldiers largely because of a dramatic failure of intelligence.

As a result, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) decided to reinforce their signals intelligence arm, Unit 8200. The unit sought the best code-makers and code-breakers, Cohen said. It also began to conduct its own research and development, with soldiers building radio interception, and now cyber tools. “We cannot wait for someone in the United States to give us technology,” said Cohen,who now runs his own cyber venture capital firm.

Today, the military is working closely with the National Cyber Bureau, and is seeking legislation that will allow it “to be a major player in defending the nation” against cyberattacks and to take action against adversaries, said Brig. Gen. Danny Bren, head of the branch in charge of defending the military’s computer networks.

The military hopes to establish a cyber-command by the second half of next year, a move the United States took seven years ago to merge the missions of attack and defense. Bren likens it to boxing. “You don’t see the boxers only throwing punches, or only blocking,” he said. “They must do both.”
Israel’s ability to play offense came to light in a joint operation with the United States called “Olympic Games,” a campaign to disrupt Iran’s nuclear enrichment program. Discovered by private-sector researchers in June 2010, the computer worm Stuxnet caused nearly a thousand centrifuges at Natanz to spin out of control, requiring replacements. Never officially acknowledged by either country, the campaign nonetheless showed the world what was possible with a cyber weapon and it spurred other countries — Iran chief among them — to set up cyber-commands.

“This global understanding drove everybody to a cyber weapon force buildup,” Bren said.
But Israel’s desire to act has sometimes created friction with even its closest ally. In 2012, Iran detected a series of cyber attacks that wiped data from networks in its oil industry. Investigating the malware, private-sector researchers discovered a cyber espionage tool that had been created jointly with the United States years earlier, but which Western officials said was launched by Israel in a unilateral operation. That deployment annoyed the National Security Agency, as it led to the discovery of the spy tool, dubbed Flame.

[U.S., Israel developed Flame computer virus to slow Iranian nuclear efforts, officials say]

But, said a former senior U.S. intelligence official, “it was generally viewed as being worse for the Israelis than it was for us” because it was their primary cyberespionage tool.

“Any time two states agree to tackle complex and consequential projects together, misunderstandings and occasional disagreements are inevitable,” said Stephen Slick, a former CIA station chief in Tel Aviv who now teaches at the University of Texas in Austin. Nonetheless, he said, “a deep reservoir of mutual respect and trust exists between the Israeli and U.S. security communities, with both sides recognizing the benefits of close collaboration in cyber-activities.”

People are silhouetted as they walk along a shaded walkway connecting the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev to Gav-Yam Negev Advanced Technologies Park via a bridge built in the shape of a double helix in Beersheba, Israel. (David Vaaknin/For The Washington Post)
Cross-pollination in desert

High on the 22nd floor of Israel Electric Corp., the nation’s main electric utility, a jumbo-screen on a wall shows the frequency and intensity of attempted hacks into the government-owned company’s network. Israel Electric, located in Haifa on the Mediterranean Sea, two hours north of Beersheba, is one of the most targeted entities in Israel.

A successful attack could disrupt power to virtually all of Israel, said Yosi Shneck, the company spokesman. But to date, none has succeeded. His engineers have help from an outside source: Shin Bet. Besides thwarting physical terrorist attacks, the security agency is responsible for protecting 30 or so critical entities from cyber attack. The list was drawn up by Israel’s parliament and includes the Bank of Israel, oil refineries and the blood bank. That is the equivalent of the FBI regulating major U.S. businesses or private entities for cyber security — an authority that would alarm American companies and civil libertarians and could not secure support in Congress.

But in Israel, the fear of a major attack is greater than concern for privacy, said Rami Efrati, a former National Cyber Bureau official.

The Shin Bet does not monitor the companies’ networks. It sniffs out threats before they hit the firms. It also relies on sensors the companies install in their systems to gather information that is then fed back to the security agency. In turn, Unit 8200 and Mossad, the foreign intelligence agency, also share cyberthreat data with Shin Bet. By contrast, in the United States, it took years to pass a law to encourage — not compel — companies to share computer data with the government.

Yaron Wolfsthal, who heads an IBM research lab at Ben-Gurion University here, is anticipating more cross-pollination in the desert, as he awaits the arrival of army cyber-units.

“We can work with them even before they are discharged,” he said, noting some will be working toward advanced degrees. And, he added, “The technical engineers will go from their home to the base everyday, and on the way, they will see banners for all the companies here. This primes them to consider working in those companies later on.”

The military’s elite cyber-units, for their part, have created a climate that fosters innovation and encourages people to stay even after their terms of service are up — three years for men and two for women. “Unit 8200 works like a start-up,” said Tomer Touati, a captain who stayed for six years and is now with PeriTech, a cyber venture capital firm. “You have your own R&D team. You can pick up the phone or send an email to another R&D team and say, ‘Look, I think if you do this and this, we can work faster or better.’ ”

And Israel is also grooming its next generation of warriors to populate the cyber-infrastructure it is building.

At Ohel Shem High School in Ramat Gan outside Tel Aviv, a uniformed recruiter sits in on sophomore math classes, scouting candidates for the units that protect the military’s networks.

Military cyber-officers are now mentoring students at four Israeli high schools that have advanced courses in math and computer science. The two-year-old program has more than 800 students.
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Military, defense and security at home and abroad.

“My dream since childhood is to work in computers and cyber,” said Yarin Zeevi, 18. “This,” she said, 
“is what I can give to Israel, as a citizen and as a soldier

To lure students to sign up for cyber-units, the military organizes trips to its training base near Tel Aviv where students can get a taste of the action. One recent excursion featured a “hack-a-thon” in which the students were assigned to build an Android app that would allow a smartphone to take a person’s picture and then use facial-recognition software to search databases for a match.

“We are looking for talent,” said Capt. Rotem Bashi, a commander in a cyberdefense unit, “because the . . . next war will be in cyberspace.”

Ruth Eglash in Beersheba and Tel Aviv contributed to this report.


3a)
After F-35 makes aliyah, it will get new Israeli identity


Israeli Air Force gears up for Dec. 12 arrival of the first two F-35 Adir jets, considered to be the next-generation aircraft • Aircraft to be fitted with made-in-Israel electronic systems immediately following arrival • Total of 33 ordered by Israel.
Aharon Lapidot
The F-35 fighter jet
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4)All Aboard!!! Gary and Jeanne are on ANOTHER World Cruise!!!

Click here to Follow the Journey

New to Our Site????

Here Are a Few Must-Reads from the Past...
Read about Gary and Jeanne's 2015 World Cruise.
View the 2015 Photo Gallery.

Here Are a Few Must-Reads from the Past...
Read about Gary‘s 47-Day West African Aboard a Cargo Ship.
View the Cargo Ship Voyage Photo Gallery.

Visit Tahiti and the Marquesas Islands with Gary and Jeanne.
View the Tahiti and Marquesas Islands Photo Gallery.

Travel to Asia on a Mammoth Adventure
View the Asian Adventure Photo Gallery.

Journey Down the Amazon
View the Amazon Journey Photo Gallery.

NOTE: As this site continues to grow, we'd like to remind you that past trip diaries are accessible and arranged by decade under the heading The Quest for 100 at the top of this page.
Enjoy clicking through the past 30 years of Gary's travels!!!
This website is the brainchild of a boy who wanted to escape his small home town and see the world. I am that boy, extended out over many decades. During those expended years, I have stayed true to my dream. I have traveled as often and as long as possible. I now have visited 114 of the nations and detached jurisdictions as listed by the Traveler's Century Club.
Like many, my life has had its ups and downs. Through it all, I have traveled and written. I hope you enjoy our travel site as it unfolds.

Welcome.
Gary R. Frink
September, 2006
Editors Note:

I have some envy and a good deal relief that I will not be accompanying Gary Frink on his quest to reach 100 countries. I took part his invasion of at least 20 of them and that was enough for one lifetime. During the administration of Jimmy Carter, I was on the staff of U.S Secretary of Agriculture Bob Bergland and Gary was a frequent unofficial tour guide on our official foreign travels. (Don't worry folks, Gary paid his own way and had no special interests to peddle with us or the officials we were meeting.)
A lot of Gary's reports will probably include food and no one can question his credentials in the culinary arts. With Gary, I have experience a Grand Marnier soufflé in Jakarta that could only be matched by his wife, Jeanne. In Paris we sampled the pressed duck at Tour d'Argent, which has been serving pressed duck since 1582. Of course Gary enjoyed chicken Kiev in Kiev. There was the delightful pigeon in Hong Kong and the not too bad horse stew in Tselinograd, Kazakhstan. (Actually we slipped out while the horse course was being served but the brave at heart said it was OK.) Although Gary admits to being a fan of fine sweetbreads, we were both fortunate at a traditional picnic� on the steppes of Kazakhstan, to be low enough in the pecking order to be relegated to the shoulder tent. That meant that we ate goat shoulder while the big shots shared the head of the goat.
If his past tours are any indication, there will also be some unique adventures. There was the flying wedge, a bus led by a V-formation of motorcycles, that hurled us down an Indonesian mountain at full throttle, sweeping other busses, cars, bicycles, ox carts and pedestrians cleanly out of our way. There were no fatalities as far as we know of but we were close enough to crush the tea leaves from the plantation we had just visited. We also suffered though a unique 220 kilometer train ride from the then Leningrad to Helsinki that took 8 hours. Ever few kilometers the train was stopped and searched by the KGB, using huge klieg lights more suitable for spotting enemy aircraft. And all we had to sustain ourselves was a bottle of Armenian 5-star brandy. (A former employee of the U.S. embassy in Moscow had sworn that this concoction was as fine as any cognac. In fact, the only difference between Armenian 5-star brand and sterno is that sterno is easier to pour.) In Moscow, Gary somehow avoided a 30-year side trip to the gulags when he took over the drums at an official Communist Party dance. And that's just a couple of his brushes with the world's secret police. And on it went and on will go.
Gary has asked me to edit his reports. Considering his rather questionable itinerary, I assume he expects me to help him avoid arrest for terroristic behavior. Whatever happens we all must make sure our seatbelts are tightened and our taste buds ready for a treat.
Tom Sand, retired Democratic propagandist
RIP Tom Sand - May 9, 1940 - March 8, 2013.
Tom Sand
Our friendship began in the 1960s on Washington's Capitol Hill, probably at the Democratic Club, where beverage alchohol was often served; it continued until his death, long after he retired to his ancestral home in the Northern Minnesota hamlet of Wendell. Much of Tom's career was spent working with U.S. Secretary of Agriculture ('76-'80) Bob Bergland and during Bob's previous vocation representing Northwetern Minnesota in the U.S. House. Later, Tom was a speechwriter and policy analyst for members of the Minnesota State Senate Democratic Caucus.It was largely through Tom's effort that I was allowed to join Bergland's secretarial missions to the Far East and the Soviet Union, my first peeks at some distinct, foreign exotica. Tom was a taciturn writer, life-long reader and bibliophile. Importantly for me, for over 40 years, Tom Sand was my steadfast pal. I miss him. GF.


Gary's Travels

Alaska · Angola · Anguilla ·Antigua · Argentina ·Aruba ·Austria · Australia · Azores

Bahamas ·Bahrain ·Barbados ·Belgium
Belize ·Berlin ·Bermuda ·Bophutswana · Bosnia · Botswana · Brazil ·Bulgaria

Cambodia · Cameroon · Canada · Cayman Islands · Chile · China, People's Republic · Colombia · Costa Rica ·Crete · Croatia · Cuba · Cyprus, Republic · 
Czech Republic 

Denmark · Dominica · Dominican Republic

East Germany · Ecuador · El Salvador · England · Estonia 

Fiji · Finland · France · French Guiana · French Polynesia

Germany · Greece · Grenada · The Grenadines · Guadeloupe · Guatemala

Haiti · Hawaiian Islands · Honduras · Hong Kong · Hungary

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United Arab Emirates (UAE) · Ukraine · United States (continental) · Uruguay · U.S. Canal Zone

Vatican City · Venezuela · Vietnam · Virgin Islands (U.S.) · Virgin Islands (British)



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