Europe is Turning………

……….as I always thought it would when conditions there and the causes thereof would sink into enough of the population.

So take yourself over to City Journal where Bruce Bawer has a column entitled ‘Heirs to Fortuyn’.

When the New Left emerged in the 1960s, something else was born that would mark American elites for decades thereafter: the notion that social-democratic Western Europe was far superior to the capitalist United States. Pity the poor American professor whose every junket to a European academic conference was marred by his continental colleagues’ sneering over cocktails about his nation’s shame du jour—Vietnam, Watergate, Iraq—or about American racism, capital punishment, or health care. For much of the American Left, Western Europe was nothing less than an abstract symbol of progressive utopia.

This rosy view was never accurate, of course. Europe’s socialized health care was blighted by outrageous (and sometimes deadly) waiting lists and rationing, to name just one example. To name another: Timbro, a Swedish think tank, found in 2004 that Sweden was poorer than all but five U.S. states and Denmark poorer than all but nine. But in recent years, something has happened to complicate the Left’s fanciful picture even further: Western European voters’ widespread reaction against social democracy.

The shift has two principal, and related, causes. The more significant one is that over the last three decades, social-democratic Europe’s political, cultural, academic, and media elites have presided over, and vigorously defended, a vast wave of immigration from the Muslim world—the largest such influx in human history. According to Foreign Affairs, Muslims in Western Europe numbered between 15 and 20 million in 2005. One source estimates that Britain’s Muslim population rose from about 82,000 in 1961 to 553,000 in 1981 to 2 million in 2000—a demographic change roughly representative of Western Europe as a whole during that period. According to the London Times, the number of Muslims in the U.K. climbed by half a million between 2004 and 2008 alone—a rate of growth ten times that of the rest of that country’s population.

I suppose the surprise to me is that there wasn’t a revolt against the socialist cliques years ago but I guess a healthy world economy helped to keep them afloat, now that the economy is on the skids their so superior philosophy of providing for everyone on the backs of the workers is no longer sustainable.

The last few decades in Europe have made three things crystal-clear. First, social-democratic welfare systems work best, to the extent they do work, in ethnically and culturally homogeneous (and preferably small) nations whose citizens, viewing one another as members of an extended family, are loath to exploit government provisions for the needy. Second, the best way to destroy such welfare systems is to take in large numbers of immigrants from poor, oppressive, and corruption-ridden societies, whose rule of the road is to grab everything you can get your hands on. And third, the system will be wiped out even faster if many of those immigrants are fundamentalist Muslims who view bankrupting the West as a contribution to jihad. Add to all this the growing power of an unelected European Union bureaucracy that has encouraged Muslim immigration and taken steps to punish criticism of it—criminalizing “incitement of racism, xenophobia, or hatred against a racial, ethnic, or religious group” in 2007, for example—and you can start to understand why Western Europeans who prize their freedoms are resisting the so-called leadership of their see-no-evil elites.

My bold.

Read the whole thing, you’ll feel a bit better if you do.

H/T bookworm, she should be on everyone’s daily reading list.

Man and Wolf.

A review of a book, The Philosopher and the Wolf, by Mark Rowlands might not seem worthy of your time to read, but this one is fascinating.

Rowlands’s unusual book — part autobiography, part philosophical discourse; harshly cynical yet somehow also inspirational — is above all a meditation on the nature of friendship, and on the human/animal bond, which is a remarkable but precarious and overlooked thing. This is not the sole province of the philosopher (Rowlands’s profession); but philosophers, from Jeremy Bentham to Peter Singer to Tom Regan, have a long and uncommon history of treating animals as a subject worthy of serious intellectual consideration. Rowlands’s own method is to intersperse autobiographical chapters with philosophical explorations of subjects like happiness, grief, and time, especially insofar as his life with Brenin helped him find answers. The book has much to teach us about our relationship to animals, and even more to teach us about ourselves.

I have posted before [don't have time to find it now] somewhat disparagingly on people who treat their pets as substitute children, and others who clothe their pets, but this is a different thing altogether. There is something special about the way we humans have both domesticated and befriended animals as well as the many benefits of doing so. I promise you won’t regret the time it takes to read this review.

H/T Arts and Letters Daily.

Be Prepared!

A Gunfighting Living Legend.

Yet More on Susan Boyle.

I have to stop posting on her but everywhere you look her name intrudes in the most unlikely of places. Now there is a new competitor from Wales, a 12 year old boy who I listened to and wasn’t too impressed, a Michael Jackson/Stevie Wonder wannabe, with neither the charm of the very young singer………

…..or the presence of a more mature performer of that age…..

[Meaning Faryl Smith in the blue dress of course.]

Anyway, isn’t it a bit suspicious when S Cowell stops his song after less than a minute and asks him to pick something else which happens to be more suitable and they just happen within a few seconds to come up with the music for it?
Maureen Callahan thinks the whole thing is scripted. I have thought that with American Idol too, the manipulation is wondrous to behold and anti-democratic for that reason. Remember how Simon trashed Jennifer Hudson presumably because he thought she wasn’t a commercial proposition? That one sure came back to bite him.

Meantime, Spengler is on to more weighty stuff on the Boyle phenomenon. He makes some interesting points but to load the amount of significance that he does on to SB’s shoulders is going too far and misses the point that you can have both popular and classical music.

Singer Susan Boyle, our latest instant celebrity, reminds me of any number of singers I conducted in amateur renditions of the easier Schubert or Haydn masses, or the sort of matron who sings “Katti-Shaw” or “Buttercup” in the local Gilbert and Sullivan production. Musical talent springs up like grass, and engaging voices are a dollar a dozen. That Boyle has come to embody the triumph of ordinary people over obscurity, complete with invitations to appear on Oprah and Larry King, is disheartening. The popular audience in the West likes to validate its own

But each voice has its own timbre and character and millions of people have decided they like SB’s voice, couldn’t he just say good luck to her?

In a time of economic strife and stress, she came out of nowhere to make us smile and maybe even shed a congratulatory tear or two for someone who had finally fulfilled a life-long dream. Hey, we all have our dreams, right?” gushed Steve Rosen at the Kansas City Star newspaper on April 17, in a variation of a theme that has appeared in numberless versions in the media.

Meanwhile, in China, 60 million children are learning Western classical music
under the gimlet gaze of strict teachers. East Asian singers, particularly Koreans, are working their way up the ranks of provincial opera companies, and every one of them sings better than Boyle. Who do you think is going to run the world 20 years from now? As the Italians say, we’re bolliti, “boiled”. Now we can spell it with a “y”. I hate to always be the one to say this, but the hope is fatuous. No, you can’t.

There is an undercurrent of self-worship in the aptly-named American Idol and its British knockoff, which lifted Boyle to stardom. As I wrote some years ago (American Idolatry Asia Times Online, August 29, 2006), at some time during the 20th century, the people of the West elected to identify with what is like them, rather than emulate what is above them.

Churlish resentment of high culture comes from the slacker’s desire for reward with neither merit nor effort: the sort of artistic skill that requires years of discipline and sacrifice is a reproach to the indolence of the popular audience of the West. Better voices than Boyle’s can be found in a thousand choirs and amateur theatricals, but the crowd has embraced this late-hatching Scottish songbird as a symbol of its own aspirations.

He goes on to symbolize all this as emblematic of the decline of the West.

This isn’t exactly how I had in mind to do this post but it’s late and I’m tired so excuse if it’s a bit disjointed and not as well expressed as it might be.

Susan Boyle.

Since I posted on Susan Boyle she has become a real phenomenon with over 50 million hits on You Tube and some very good essays on her and what she means to a world gone somewhat awry in the last few decades.

American Digest from where I first learned of SB is keeping tabs noting first an essay by Collette Douglas Home, The Beautyl That Matters Is Always On The Inside.

Susan is a reminder that it’s time we all looked a little deeper. She has lived an obscure but important life. She has been a companionable and caring daughter. It’s people like her who are the unseen glue in society; the ones who day in and day out put themselves last. They make this country civilised and they deserve acknowledgement and respect.

Susan has been forgiven her looks and been given respect because of her talent. She should always have received it because of the calibre of her character.

The Anchoress weighs in with her particular insight.

Why is the world so obsessed with a woman so “ordinary” – even her name seems “flat and ordinary” – in every way, except in her powerful voice?

I suspect it is because Susan Boyle has reminded us of something we’ve forgotten for too long. Hypnotised by Madison Avenue and Hollywood and the culture of youth, we’ve forgotten that the things they offer to us as “the norm” are ideals, and mostly fake ones. In embracing those fake ideals (how much money was spent last year in cosmetic surgeries and teeth-whitening?) we’ve forgotten that beyond all of those superficialities, we each have within us something of much greater value than perky breasts and unlined skin: the divine spark, the God-kiss, that lives in each and every one of us – no exceptions.

I think we look at Susan Boyle and her artistry (and she is clearly an artist) and we think, “wait a second…that’s not the narrative! Ordinary people who look ordinary, and live obscurely and who don’t run with the herd are not supposed to be great.” And then we dare to think: “what if there is greatness in all of us?”

That’s quite a thought, isn’t it – almost subversive – that there may be greatness in each of us, but that it goes unappreciated, because what is great in us is not valued by the people who “define” things and set the narratives?

William Tate at American Thinker sees her as the ‘anti-Obama’. It seems almost sacreligious to bring the O into it but the comparison is worth making.

At a time when the President of the United States feels compelled to use a teleprompter for even the most minor appearances, when Grecian columns are necessary props for campaign speeches, when public figures are as carefully packaged as your morning cereal boxes, after watching plain Susan Boyle sing with a voice for the ages, you feel like you have witnessed a real person do something that’s real. And right. And good. No, extraordinarily good.

She is, in effect, the anti-Obama. No artifice. No teleprompter. As likely to stumble over words, or do a spontaneous bump and grind as she is to belt out a song that could leave you with chill-bumps.

Now I must get off somewhat late to my mundane work! Well you wouldn’t want to hear me sing anyway. But I do have two cute grandkids:

Richard Epstein.

Peter Robinson interviews Richard Epstein on the economy and on Obama. His assessment of Obama is especially interesting coming from someone in a position to judge the O’s intellectual capacity or lack thereof.

If you go to the original, you will find an index of the segments of the interview with times, you might want to pick which you listen to, #07, Knowing Obama, is worth seeing if you don’t have time for it all.

Note too how this guy can talk extemporaneously, with never an ‘uh’, ‘ah’, whatever anywhere to be found, which is just what the ‘brilliant’ O was sold as.

The Reliable Dr. Sanity.

It’s past my bedtime so just a quick link to a not to be missed post by Dr. Sanity, see part one also.

And in case you don’t read it, I particularly liked this quote from Andy McCarthy that she uses.

Civilization is not an evolution of mankind but the imposition of human good on human evil.
There is nothing less civilized than rewarding evil and thus guaranteeing more of it. High-minded as it is commonly made to sound, it is not civilized to appease evil, to treat it with “dignity and respect,” to rationalize its root causes, to equivocate about whether evil really is evil, and, when all else fails, to ignore it — to purge the very mention of its name — in the vain hope that it will just go away. Evil doesn’t do nuance. It finds you, it tests you, and you either fight it or you’re part of the problem.

The men who founded our country and crafted our Constitution understood this. They understood that the “rule of law” was not a faux-civilized counterweight to the exhibition of might. Might, instead, is the firm underpinning of law and of our civilization. The Constitution explicitly recognized that the United States would have enemies; it provided Congress with the power to raise military forces that would fight them; it made the chief executive the commander-in-chief, concentrating in the presidency all the power the nation could muster to preserve itself by repelling evil. It did not regard evil as having a point of view, much less a right to counsel.(emphasis mine)

No Comment.

H/T Grumpy Old Twat.

Every Year………

……..Britain’s Got Talent comes up with something big, this year meet Susan Boyle.

H/T American Digest.

Tonight.

I made a nice dinner for the family tonight, just simple, ham with ginger and apricot chutney, salad and baked potatoes. Afterwards, about to start the washing up, put the radio on in time to hear Bach’s Sheep May Safely Graze. How often do you find yourself in heaven while doing the dishes.

Democrats, Friends of the Poor and Disadvantaged.

Or so they would have you believe, they never tire of talking about it and telling you about the heartless fat cat Republicans, they are the masters of the ‘Give a Dog a Bad Name’ strategy.

Meantime see how they pander to the Teachers’ Union fat cat ideologues and stick it to the poor of Washington DC, from the Washington Post, the whole column.

Presumed Dead
Politics is driving the destruction of the District’s school voucher program.

EDUCATION SECRETARY Arne Duncan has decided not to admit any new students to the D.C. voucher program, which allows low-income children to attend private schools. The abrupt decision — made a week after 200 families had been told that their children were being awarded scholarships for the coming fall — comes despite a new study showing some initial good results for students in the program and before the Senate has had a chance to hold promised hearings. For all the talk about putting children first, it’s clear that the special interests that have long opposed vouchers are getting their way.

Officials who manage the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program sent letters this week to parents notifying them that the scholarships of up to $7,500, were being rescinded because of the decision by the Education Department. Citing the political uncertainty surrounding vouchers, a spokesperson for Mr. Duncan told us that it is not in the best interest of students and their parents to enroll them in a program that may end a year from now. Congress conditioned funding beyond the 2009-10 school year on reauthorization by Congress and approval by the D.C. Council. By presuming the program dead — and make no mistake, that’s the insidious effect of his bar on new enrollment — Mr. Duncan makes it even more difficult for the program to get the fair hearing it deserves.

That’s not to mention the impact of the last-minute decision on these families. Many of the public charter schools already have cut off enrollments for the upcoming school year; the deadline for out-of-boundary transfers for the public schools has passed. No doubt Mr. Duncan is right about possible disruption for new students if the program were to end. But scholarship officials have been upfront with parents about the risks, and the decision really should be theirs. Let them decide whether they want to chance at least one year in a high-quality private school versus the crapshoot of D.C. public schools.
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That, after all, is what this program is about: giving poor families the choice that others, with higher salaries and more resources, take for granted. It’s a choice President Obama made when he enrolled his two children in the elite Sidwell Friends School. It’s a choice Mr. Duncan had when, after looking at the D.C. schools, he ended up buying a house in Arlington, where good schools are assumed. And it’s a choice taken away this week from LaTasha Bennett, a single mother who had planned to start her daughter in the same private school that her son attends and where he is excelling. Her desperation is heartbreaking as she talks about her daughter not getting the same opportunities her son has and of the hardship of having to shuttle between two schools.

It’s clear, though, from how the destruction of the program is being orchestrated, that issues such as parents’ needs, student performance and program effectiveness don’t matter next to the political demands of teachers’ unions. Congressional Democrats who receive ample campaign contributions from the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers laid the trap with budget language that placed the program on the block. And now comes Mr. Duncan with the sword.

Every day comes something disgusting about the Democrats and yet millions vote for them. The millions who are either idiots or bought and paid for I guess.

H/T Powerline.

Update. Greg Forster at PJM has more.

Obama’s America and the Real America.

This is such an apt symbol of what Obama has in mind for America to be, I just had to post it.

So lookee here Massa Obama at the Real America, spend a little of your time learning about the country you live in, I don’t have any hopes of you becoming a Real American but you might gain some understanding of it, foreign as it might be to life as you know it.

‘The Last Man’.

I have thought that the major part of what made Eutopia pacifist was the protection afforded by the US Military, freeing them from the expense of providing for their own defense and allowing them to indulge in Socialist welfare statism and feel good smug superiority over the cowboys standing on guard against the Soviet Communists, much like the thirty something ‘man’ living in his mom’s basement. Seems like that might have been just an enabler of sorts but not a cause of the Eu disease of emasculation and impotence.

I came across Life on Venus: Europe’s Last Man by Adam Kirsch via ALDaily and though it’s longish it’s well worth the time spent if you want a superb analysis through Nietsche’s Zarathustra, Fukuyama and three of the greatest Eu novelists of the last fifty years, Ian McEwan, W G Sebald and Michel Houellebecq.

The twentieth century, of course, did not turn out to be the age of the Last Man after all. The two world wars and the global violence of the Cold War demonstrated to anyone’s satisfaction that irrationality and cruelty, which Nietzsche feared were dwindling resources, still flourished in abundance just underneath the thin crust of modern civilization. But then came 1989 and the end of history—or at least The End of History and the Last Man, as Francis Fukuyama put it in his influential book. It is almost always referred to simply by the first part of its title; to his critics, Fukuyama is the man who declared “the end of history,” triumphally and, needless to say, prematurely.

But the second part of the book’s title is actually more telling, and more representative of Fukuyama’s argument. No sooner had humanity emerged from a century of hot and cold wars than Fukuyama was resurrecting Nietzsche’s admonition that a world of peace and prosperity would be a world of Last Men. “The life of the last men is one of physical security and material plenty, precisely what Western politicians are fond of promising their electorates,” he pointed out. “Should we fear that we will be both happy and satisfied with our situation, no longer human beings but animals of the species homo sapiens?”

While Fukuyama appreciates the seriousness of the Nietzschean warning, he hears it from the perspective of a partisan, not a foe, of liberalism. The danger he foresees is not simply that bourgeois democracy will cause human beings to degenerate, but that degenerate human beings will be unable to preserve democracy. Without the sense of pride and the love of struggle that Fukuyama, following Plato, calls thymos, men—and there is always an implication that thymos is a specifically masculine virtue—cannot establish freedom or protect it:

That’s a taste of what the article is about. It is interesting to one such as me who doesn’t have time to read novels anymore to have reconfirmed Milan Kundera’s assertion in The Art of the Novel, one of my favourite books by the way, that the novel was invented to say what philosophy, because of its technical nature, could not about history and the human condition.

‘Shutup’, he explained.

‘He’ being Andrew Klavan, the explanation the modus operandi of the left.

H/T American Digest.

Good Things About America. 1.

Methinks the Worm Had Better Start Turning Soon.

Or it will be too late.

Move Over, Onion.

This is too funny to not be true.

Everyman’s dream, getting paid to bonk the beauty queen next door.

H/T American Digest.

Our So-Called Leaders.

The Cato Institute has taken out a newspaper ad that takes issue with Obama’s global warming support and is signed by many distinguished scientists.

“Few challenges facing America and the world are more urgent than combating climate change.The science is beyond dispute and the facts are clear.”
— PRESIDENT-ELECT BARACK OBAMA, NOVEMBER 19 , 2008
With all due respect Mr. President, that is not true.

We, the undersigned scientists, maintain that the case for alarm regarding climate change is grossly overstated. Surface temperature changes over the past century have been episodic and modest and there has been no net global warming for over a decade now.1,2 After controlling for population growth and property values, there has been no increase in damages from severe weather-related events.3 The computer models forecasting rapid temperature change abjectly fail to explain recent climate behavior.4 Mr. President, your characterization of the scientific facts regarding climate change and the degree of certainty informing the scientific debate is simply incorrect.

On the one hand I don’t get it, these people like Obama, Pelosi, Reid, Clinton, are supposed to be as our leaders, well informed on both sides of the question on all the things they must deal with and yet they are no better than say your local garbage collector who gets his information from the nightly news on CNN. Don’t they have advisors, curiosity, doubts?

On the other hand of course they don’t care about whether something is correct or not, only how it can be used to increase their power, and the imaginary catastrophes, whether global warming or the ‘crisis of capitalism’ only matter as far as they will advance that end.

And they were voted in by those who only get their information from the nightly news on CNN.

Emperor Obama.

Dr. Sanity is always a good read but her post tonight is a really must read.

No comment, just go read it.

Hannan and Farage.

I’m a bit late to the party on this You Tube of David Hannan, British MEP, lambasting Gordon Brown in Strasbourg.

That this went viral with 800,000 hits in two days bespeaks I think a hunger for honesty, straight talk and common sense in our politicians. See also the silly grin on Gordon Brown’s face, like a schoolboy caught out in a lie by the housemaster. Must be a Socialist thing because it’s the exact same grin we saw on Obambi’s face in the debates when either Hillary or McCain hit home against him.

There is another You Tube of the speech before DH by Nigel Farage, member of the United Kingdom Independence Party sticking it to Brown.

There is life in the old Conservative dog!

H/T The Scratching Post.