Isn't this, by definition, what it means to be a dying culture?

More people dying in Europe than being born.

A Brit responds to the Obama administration's opposition to democracy in Britain.

From Autonomous Mind:

The President of the United States is considered by many to be the leader of the free world, and the United States itself considered to be a beacon of democracy. So it is profoundly disappointing to see the United States administration endorsing and encouraging something that is fundamentally undemocratic. I would like to ask you the following questions.

• Would it be acceptable to you and your fellow United States citizens that over 70% of the laws and regulations they were forced to comply with across all 50 states were created by a supranational government comprising layers of complex political and judicial structures, mostly unelected and unaccountable, and made up of delegates from not only the US, but Canada, Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Belize, El Salvador, Panama, Colombia, Venezuela and Peru?

• Would it be acceptable to you, your fellow United States citizens and members of the Senate and House of Representatives that they were routinely handed diktats from the various bodies that make up the supranational government and were bound by law to implement the directives or be fined or dragged into a supranational court operating an alien form of judicial code and process? Further, that Congress was denied the ability to draft, and the President sign into law, other legislation of national interest whenever the supranational decided it was not appropriate?

• Would it be acceptable to you, your fellow United States citizens and the Justices of the Supreme Court that decisions made by the bench, the highest court in your land, could be appealed to a supranational court overseas with the hearing presided over by foreign judges and if overruled the Supreme Court would have to accept that as a binding ruling?

If these scenarios do not sound very democratic or judicious to you and your fellow Americans it is because they are not. Intentionally and by design. But this is the reality of the United Kingdom’s membership of the European Union and its associated bodies and institutions. UK membership of the EU has entailed a substantial loss of power from our democratically elected Parliament as it has been quietly and steadily transferred to unelected and unaccountable bodies abroad – all done without the people of the UK being asked to give their consent for it to happen.

While it may be in the geopolitical interest of the Government of the United States for the United Kingdom to remain a member of the European Union, opinion polls show this anti-democratic situation is opposed by a majority of British citizens. Membership of the EU dilutes the voice of the United Kingdom. Seats on various world bodies held by the UK have been given up so the EU can supposedly represent the competing and disparate interests of 27 countries in a wholly unsatisfactory fudge that frequently fails to serve British interests.

I am sure you will recognise the obvious contradiction in the position of the United States, on one hand calling for Syria’s regime to heed the wishes of the Syrian people, while on the other calling for the government of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland to maintain membership of the EU, despite the wishes of the British people. I am sure you will also recognise the obvious contradiction of the United States urging countries around the world to embrace democracy, while urging the United Kingdom to maintain its place in political and judicial structures that replace representative democracy with control by unelected and unaccountable aliens who are drawn from a pool of self-selecting career politicians and civil servants.

Would such a situation be an acceptable settlement in the United States? I think we both know the answer to that is categorically ‘no’.

Commies are Nazis with good press agents.

Daniel Hannam - the last sensible man in Europe - takes the adjacent European Union propoganda poster to task for including a "hammer and sickel" with its deptiction of religious symbols:

Take a close look at this promotional poster. Notice anything? Alongside the symbols of Christianity, Judaism, Jainism and so on is one of the wickedest emblems humanity has conceived: the hammer and sickle.

For three generations, the badge of the Soviet revolution meant poverty, slavery, torture and death. It adorned the caps of the chekas who came in the night. It opened and closed the propaganda films which hid the famines. It advertised the people's courts where victims of purges and show-trials were condemned. It fluttered over the re-education camps and the gulags. For hundreds of millions of Europeans, it was a symbol of foreign occupation. Hungary, Lithuania and Moldova have banned its use, and various former communist countries want it to be treated in the same way as Nazi insignia.

Yet here it sits on a poster in the European Commission, advertising the moral deafness of its author (I hope that's what it is, rather than lingering nostalgia). The Bolshevist sigil celebrates the ideology which, in strict numerical terms, must be reckoned the most murderous ever devised by our species. That it can be passed unremarked day after day in the corridors of Brussels is nauseating.

Europe: An Allegory.

The soft kitty steps of Liberal Fascism continue to march on in hobnail boots.

The EU Court of Human Right determines that Churches who do not permit gay marriages in jurisdictions that have legalized gay marriage are guilty of discrimination:

The European Court of Human Right reached a decision this past week that while same-sex ‘marriage’ is not a human right, in European states where civil marriage for same-sex partners is admitted, churches that refuse to participate would be guilty of illegal discrimination.

The court reached the decision in the case of two women engaged in a civil partnership in France, who complained they would not be allowed to adopt a child as a couple. The court heard how one of the woman had her application refused to adopt her partner’s child. Valerie Gas and Nathalie Dubois had tried to establish marriage rights under anti-discrimination laws but the judges said there had been no discrimination.

“The European Convention on Human Rights does not require member states’ governments to grant same-sex couples access to marriage,” judges in Strasbourg said. “With regard to married couples, the court considers that in view of the social, personal, and legal consequences of marriage, the applicants’ legal situation could not be said to be comparable to that of married couples.” The ruling has also said, however, that if same-sex couples are allowed to marry, any church that refuses to marry gay couples will be guilty of discrimination.

Contacted by the Scottish Catholic Observer, Neil Addison, a specialist in discrimination law, said that if same-sex ‘marriage’ is legalized in the United Kingdom, then the partners will be entitled to the same rights as partners in a heterosexual marriage. “This means that if same-sex ‘marriage’ is legalised in the UK it will be illegal for the Government to prevent such marriages happening in religious premises,” he said.

The Catholic bishops of Scotland, England and Wales, joined with leaders of other Christian confessions, have denounced government proposals to redefine marriage and allow same-sex couples. In addition, Muslim and Sikh leaders recently averred that the legalization of same-sex unions as marriage is an ‘unnecessary and unhelpful’ step.

"Illegal...to prevent"?

In other words, it would be illegal for the state to provide a conscience-exemption.

How very Orwellian.

The last liberal in Europe.

Liberalism during the 19th Century was inextricably tied to nationalism.  19th Century liberals understood that individual liberty could not be safeguarded if the individual's nation was not free to determine its own fate.

Daniel Hannan, Member of the European Parliament for South-East England reminds us of that connection in this clip.

Has America gotten soft...

or are there two America, one that is working hard and the other is sponging like your lazy brother-in-law?


Fareed Zakaria at Time has written a defence of Obama's "America has gotten soft" comment.  Putting aside the passive-aggressive attack on conservatives, is it true that America has gotten soft?  Or is it the case that there are two Americas, and one is working its lilly-white pahookie off to support the other?


There is one America where Americans have not gotten soft. In that America, Americans work longer hours with fewer vacations than their foreign counterparts.

"Consider some examples. One country that makes frequent headlines for its relatively short working week is France, not least because of its own debate about the 35-hour week. But France is not the lowest: a look at the figures shows that the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and Denmark work even fewer hours per year on average, while Germany works only marginally more (see graph). The UK may have higher employment, but it barely clocks up more working hours per year than France or Germany, and trails well behind the OECD average.

Though Koreans easily work the most hours per year in the OECD area, the US is also well above average: in 2005 annual hours worked in the US were 15% higher than the European Union (EU15) average.

This has not always been the case though. In the mid 1970s Europeans worked significantly longer hours. It was only in the mid-1980s that hours worked in the US began to exceed those in Europe. True, US hours worked have eased back, but not as much as in Europe: in the US they fell from about 1,850 hours worked annually in the 1960s to just over 1,700 in 2004, while western Europe’s decreased from over 2,100 to 1,600 in the same period. Since the 1970s US hours have in fact been broadly stable, whereas they have fallen sharply in Ireland, Portugal, Luxembourg and France."

Likewise:

"Americans work much more than Europeans: according to the OECD a typical employed American put in 1,877 hours in 2000, compared to 1,562 for his or her French counterpart. One American in three works more than fifty hours a week. Americans take fewer paid holidays than Europeans. Whereas Swedes get more than thirty paid days off work per year and even the Brits get an average of twenty-three, Americans can hope for something between four and ten, depending on where they live. Unemployment in the US is lower than in many European countries (though since out-of-work Americans soon lose their rights to unemployment benefits and are taken off the registers, these statistics may be misleading). America, it seems, is better than Europe at creating jobs. So more American adults are at work and they work much more than Europeans. What do they get for their efforts?"

These are statistics I've been aware of for a long time, mostly because I rarely get vacations, but then I'm self-employed in the private sector.

Of course, these statistics of hard-working Americans are private sector employees. They don't include teachers, professors or other government employees who get vacations, get comp time for working overtime, when they do, etc.

So, who has gotten soft?

Could it be that America's drop in productivity is due to the fact that we've been moving people from the private sector to the public sector, particularly under Obama?

Probably so.

Concerning America's falling ranking in education, is that may also have as much to do with governmental policies as anything else. We do set aside a certain percentage of seats in America's elite colleges for people who are simply not competitive at that level under our affirmative action policies. Are we surprised that the average results from such colleges is in decline? Likewise, we provide a curriculum that favors soft science and political correctness rather than intellectual rigor. Are we surprised that we test worse on hard sciences than countries that don't provide majors in Urban Studies, Feminist Studies, etc.

We also have a culture that is disdainful of appearing smart.

"The average American college student doesn’t learn much, because they aren’t that bright or intellectually oriented. They don’t do their reading until the last second, and have only marginal passion for the books which they purchase. Your mind can’t be broadened if you barely use it."

How much of that is due to the cultural trends from '60s, such as the cult of authenticity described by John McWhorter in his excellent book "Doing Our Own Thing."

And how much of that is due to the assimilation of what Theodore Dalyrimple refers to as "underclass values," such as tattoos, into the middle class, which unfortunately includes not looking "too white" by appearing smart.  See also this Wiki article that rounds up the sources on whether there is a minority cultural view that denigrates educational success, and includes this observation:

Stuart Buck, a lawyer, wrote Acting White: The Ironic Legacy of Desegregation in 2010, published by Yale University Press. He argued that traditionally segregated black schools featured teachers, counselors, and others of the same race as the student population of the schools, who in many cases became mentors to the students. However, the integration of schools since the mid- to late-20th century may have caused schools to appear to some black students to be controlled or dominated by whites. Consequently, a black student trying to achieve high educational success may be seen primarily as trying to make him or herself appear superior to others.[10]

On a similar point, I posted Huntley-Brinkley's sign off from 1970 with the observation that it is like looking at the manners and mores of a lost world.

I suspect somehow that this is not the discussion that Zakariah hoped to have about whether America is getting soft.

"...if you rob them of their democracy, then all they are left with is nationalism and violence. I can only hope and pray that the euro project is destroyed by the markets before that really happens."


Euro-skeptic Nigel Farage gives the EU a tongue-lashing.
 

Welcome to the New Europe: More Muslim Riots in France.

According to Pajama Media:

You probably didn’t hear about it, but Muslim youths rioted in Grenoble, France, on July 16, sparking some of the worst instability the country has faced since the 2005 riots. Now, like then, most of the media declined to mention the religious or ethnic background of the rioters, instead painting them as unruly youngsters and covering the eyes of the public to the slow dissolution of France as we know it.

The violence began soon after a Muslim robbed a casino and opened fire as he tried to flee the police, who then shot and killed him. This apparently raised the ire of major elements of the mostly Muslim urban communities who live in poor neighborhoods unassimilated into the greater society. The shooting was seen as an attack on Muslims, rather than an act of justice. Shortly following a speech by an Islamic cleric at a ceremony for the robber, the match was struck. As of now, there are no media reports revealing what the cleric said, if anything, to stoke the flame.

The picture was taken by a friend last week in Switzerland.

Amazing.

The Brits are so screwed.


Peter Hitchens is detailing the reason that Britons should not vote for the Conservative Party in the forthcoming elections.   Mostly, the reasons come down to Conservative support for ceding independence to the EU:

Already the EU's role in our government is huge, but camouflaged and often denied by the authorities. Some examples: the current nightmare over rubbish collection is caused almost entirely by the EU's Landfill Directive. This has a uniquely bad effect on Britain, which had successfully used landfill for the disposal of garbage for many years. It odes not affect other EU countries, which didn't make such large use of landfill. Now we face huge fines if we continue to do so. This is the reason for the multiple bins and fortnightly collections which everyone hates. And as long as we stay in the EU, nothing can be done about it.


The closure of smaller Post Offices could be halted by increased state subsidies to keep them going. But EU competition rules forbid us to do this.

The panic over BSE in beef was made far worse by EU bans in exports, and by absurd EU safety regulations which destroyed many smaller slaughterhouses. Once again, our own government had no control over this at all.

Our real Supreme Court is now the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg, which can overrule Acts of Parliament. Mostly it will not, because an estimated 80% of British legislation is in fact EU directives, rewritten as Acts of Parliament or Statutory Instruments, and rammed through by the government whips because they cannot be substantially amended (let alone rejected) anyway.

We are frequently dragged into needless trade wars with the USA, one of our main trading partners, because the EU now negotiates with the USA 'on our behalf', and our concerns are overridden by those of Germany and France.

Perhaps most crucially of all, we no longer control migration from EU countries, which means that Tory promises to limit immigration are dishonest and hollow. Observant travellers returning from abroad will have noticed that for many years there has been no special entry queue for British subjects. This is because there is no such thing as a British Passport. That bilious passbook you carry is an EU passport, and you have no more right to enter our country than does (for instance) a retired Lithuanian KGB colonel. It would actually be illegal, under EU rules, for us to give priority entry to British subjects. That is how bad it is, and how much sovereignty we have lost. Mr Cameron has no plans to get it back.

Trade wars and garbage collections and no British passport - England is toast.

Let's Enjoy a Healthy Round of Schadenfreude

You have to love it when countries that ignore their voters and ram through their utopian agenda are hoisted by their own petard:

Making matters worse is the debt (in all senses) that the Greek crisis owes to the establishment of the euro, the single currency for which German politicians ignored their voters and junked the deutsche mark in a two-stage process ending in January 2002. The deutsche mark had been one of the great successes of postwar Germany, a symbol of renewed prosperity and bulwark against any return of the hyperinflation that stalks that country’s historical memory. But, to those that counted—i.e., not German voters—the European Union mattered more. The deutsche mark perished, and the economic and budgetary rules—the Maastricht Criteria—designed to preserve the integrity of its successor (and reassure the twitchy German electorate) have not been kept in much better shape.

Language can be so Cool.

As much of an American chauvinist as I am, I have to admit that Brit politicians are just so much better at dealing out clever put-downs than any American. Nigel Farage in this video levels the new EU president, while asking a very serious question. To wit, who are you and how did you become President?

Greece to be Reduced to a Satrapy of an Imperial Power, again.

Maybe this is a good idea, but is it what people thought they were signing up for in joining the European Union - namely, that they could lose their democracy to a bureaucracy in Belgian:

Greece loses EU voting power in blow to sovereignty

While the symbolic move to suspend Greece of its voting rights at one meeting makes no practical difference, it marks a constitutional watershed and represents a crushing loss of sovereignty.


"We certainly won't let them off the hook," said Austria's finance minister, Josef Proll, echoing views shared by colleagues in Northern Europe. Some German officials have called for Greece to be denied a vote in all EU matter until it emerges from "receivership".