Bookworm, your smoking example resonates, too. This is such a great blog.

I stop often to read, but don’t get to comment. Busy, busy stirring up my own trouble.

Anyhow, I thought you might find this site interesting:

http://www.earthchurch.wordpress.com

Take care,

-Jack

It’s hard for me to generalize on your virus theory, but in German there was a conscious effort to seek German identity in Kultur after WWII. This gave the Kultur types far too much power, which allowed them to propagate their “deep” intellectual constructs as truth and intimidate the average folks. There is certainly a nostalgia for Germany as the land of thinkers and poets (Denker und Dichter). Part of the 68 rebellion was against rigid social forms, especially in the universities. However, they simply installed another upper class (radical artists and writer, professional protesters and do-gooders) without seriously analyzing what keeps a society together.

With regard to the disappearance of democracy, I can’t say for sure. The French and the Dutch did reject the EU constitution and people are starting to stand up to the PC police on multiculturalism.

The language thing seems to be a problem no one worries about. They use English mostly in Brussels for practical reasons, and they insist on national languages formally for reasons of national pride. I don’t think anyone cares about communicating with the people. I do think EU matters get more coverage in some of the smaller countries.

The letter “X” soon may be banned in Saudi Arabia because it resembles the mother of all banned religious symbols in the oil kingdom: the cross.

So after waiting a year, the Saudi businessman, Amru Mohammad Faisal, got his answer: No. But, like so many other Saudi businessmen who suffer from the travesties of the commission, he seemed more baffled than angry. He wrote letters to Saudi newspapers to criticize the cockamamie logic. An article he wrote appeared with his photograph on some Arabian Web sites. It sarcastically invited the commission to expand its edict to the “plus” sign in mathematics and accounting, in order “to prevent filthy Christian conspiracies from infiltrating our thoughts, our beliefs, and our feelings.”

I never would have guessed, and I’ve been reading your comments on and off again for awhile now.

Thanks for giving us a worm’s eye view into the disaster machine. It’s good to correlate things data bits for later on.

While reading Gates of Fire, my views on feminity and masculinity was modified a little bit. It isn’t about girly men. Feminism doesn’t mean you have to be weak. Although feminists perhaps may have a different view of things.

Link

Europeans tend to have a utopian attitude toward the EU that prevents them from recognizing its democratic deficits. The former German president and chief judge of the high court published an article on this last Sunday. Eight of 10 laws passed in Germany are simply implementations of EU regulations. There is practically no debate. Furthermore, to avoid public scrutiny, individual countries get the EU to enact measures that they know would not pass in their own parliaments. The parliaments are presented with a fait accompli and a deadline for turning these EU measures into national law.

I watch a lot of parliament debates on Germany’s C-SPAN equivalent, but on those rare occasions when something from the EU parliament is broadcast, I can barely watch. Why? Because of the horrible simultaneous translations that are transmitted at about the same loudness as the original speech. This is just a bottom up observation about how difficult it is even for interested people to follow EU happenings. The language differences mean that these happenings are “interpretted” by local MSM.

Meister cited the Abu Ghraib scandal as an excuse for ignoring Rwanda. It’s even worse than that. About a year ago and EU group reported on the horrible detention conditions for asylum seekers in the basement of the Palais de Justice in Paris. We are talking rats, violence, suicides. There were no covers on Der Spiegel, no demonstrations by human rights activist outside the French Embassy, and no follow up reports. The Europeans don’t want to know about their own failings. They need the feeling of moral superiority.

BTW, expat is a she.