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Vienna, Austria -Thursday Aug. 25 By Stan Billingsley Senior Editor, LawReader.com
We boarded the last train to Vienna in the dirty, but still grand railway terminal in Budapest, Hungary at 9:30 this morning.
The communists during their almost 50 years of rule over the Hungarian people had almost destroyed the commerce of this once great city. Nowhere was this more evident then in the old railway station built in the 1880’s. The wear and neglect waived heavily on the building which was in need of painting, cleaning, and general maintenance and repair. Other areas of the city have been renovated and the great buildings of the city are slowing being returned to their prior grandeur. One would be wise to invest in Hungarian real estate because it has the potential to be the Paris of eastern Europe.
But shortly after noon the train pulled in to Wien or Vienna, Austria. A freelance taxi driver approached us and was persistent. We took him up on his offer of a ride to our hotel in the center of town. He offered to come back and pick us up and give us a guided tour of Vienna for only 60 Euros (that about $75). That was better than taking a tourist bus for about $125.
After checking into our hotel and disposing of a quick lunch, sure enough he returned to pick us up an his new Renault taxi.
The afternoon was spent in a mad dash all over Vienna in his fast little car. He took us to palaces and castles, art museums, public parks and fountains and the statute to Ludwig von Beethoven. He showed us places from the old movie The Third Man starring Michale Rennie, and he took us buy several sites where a James Bond movie was filmed. Not only did he show us these places, he sang the movie themes for us.
We visited the Danube (both the dirty one and the man made Blue Danube) which run through the city. I won’t mention his name since he did not have a Taxi license being a free lance entrepreneurial sort of a guy. He was about 40 and said he lived in a two room apartment where he only had to pay 150 Euros a month for rent.
After three hours we were exhausted and may have hurt his feelings a bit when we said we needed to go back to our hotel. He was very proud of his city and wanted us to see everything - and there was much to see. I have never seen any city, including Paris and London, which had more statutes and monuments, and I was blown away by the huge dimensions of the statutes. Many cities had statutes that were perhaps 12 foot tall, but everything in Vienna is King sized, and most of the Kings were Hapsburgs.
Of course we saw the United Nations building where they are currently working on a solution for the war in Lebanon. We also saw the headquarters of OPEC Where they house the monopoly that sets the price of oil for the U.S. and the rest of the world. I wonder why the oil buyers of the world don’t form a trust called The Oil Buyers Trust and refuse to buy oil until the price is reduced…but of course we can’t do that until we commit ourselves to become energy independent by developing alternative sources.
A few miles outside of Vienna we passed hundreds of windmill towers where they use the wind to produce electricity, something that has been hampered in the U.S. by zoning laws and the Not in My Back Yard crown.
Vienna is a grand city and one can better understand how the Hapsburgs produced Kings for most other European countries for hundreds of years. We did not do this great city justice by only spending one day here.
After a cozy evening in a gasthaus where we had some fantastic Weiner schnitzel, we stopped in the hotel bar and I finished off the evening with a really great ten year old scotch whiskey from the Isle of Wright. Tomorrow we catch an early train to Salzburg high in the Alps.
While the Hapsburgs Kings were not prosecuted for their criminal acts, they did not represent themselves as operating a democracy. So we still haven’t found any precedent for Judge Melcher’s Official Acts Immunity doctrine.
Oh yes, the United Nations supports international courts and laws against abuse of the rights of citizens by heads of state...they are not granted any immunity by the world Human Rights commission of the U.N. | 
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