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• July 2 (word)

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Clive Crook gives us another view of events in Europe. Yesterday Lacquer and Dalrymple gave broad brushstrokes. Crook concentrates on the government in Brussels. Although, his jumping off place is a recent court decision here.

… You do have to wonder whether it serves the nation’s interests to have its highest court (not to mention all of the other courts previously involved) listen to the urgent entreaties of, according to The Washington Post, civil libertarians, gay-rights advocates, proponents of medical marijuana, and conservative Christian legal organizations (to name but a few) on the subject of whether the Constitution permits a school principal to discourage idiocy. All of those groups, by the way, argued that “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” was protected free speech. This cannot be what the Founders had in mind.

And yet, I say, count your blessings. If America’s reverence for its ever-constant, ever-changing Constitution should slip, look at Europe. Not too carefully, mind you. A conscientious study of the European Union’s efforts to draft a constitution — they ended last week in failure, but were hailed, as custom dictates, as a success — would drive any sane person mad. Scanned from a safe altitude, however, this sorry tale is good for one’s morale. …

… America’s system of government labors under colossal inefficiencies. It has a limitless capacity to throw up absurdities of one kind or another, among which “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” wins a place of honor. It can struggle endlessly to get simple things done, then lurch abruptly in the wrong direction. But what this system never does, even at its worst, is express naked contempt for the opinions of its citizens. America is a democracy. Europe may have elections, but there is more to democracy than that. Europe mocks the very idea.

As regards attempted bombings in Great Britain, Christopher Hitchens asks, “What did you expect?”

… Liberal reluctance to confront this sheer horror is the result, I think, of a deep reticence about some furtive concept of “race.” It is subconsciously assumed that a critique of political Islam is an attack on people with brown skins. One notes in passing that any such concession implicitly denies or negates Islam’s claim to be a universal religion. Indeed, some of its own exponents certainly do speak as if they think of it as a tribal property. And, at any rate, in practice, so it is. The fascistic subculture that has taken root in Britain and that lives by violence and hatred is composed of two main elements. One is a refugee phenomenon, made up of shady exiles from the Middle East and Asia who are exploiting London’s traditional hospitality, and one is the projection of an immigrant group that has its origins in a particularly backward and reactionary part of Pakistan.

To the shame-faced white-liberal refusal to confront these facts, one might counterpose a few observations. The first is that we were warned for years of the danger, by Britons also of Asian descent such as Hanif Kureishi, Monica Ali, and Salman Rushdie. They knew what the village mullahs looked like and sounded like, and they said as much. …

… The most noticeable thing about all theocracies is their sexual repression and their directly related determination to exert absolute control over women. In Britain, in the 21st century, there are now honor killings, forced marriages, clerically mandated wife-beatings, incest in all but name, and the adoption of apparel for females that one cannot be sure is chosen by them but which is claimed as an issue of (of all things) free expression. This would be bad enough on its own and if it were confined to the Muslim “community” alone. But, of course, such a toxin cannot be confined, and the votaries of theocracy now claim the God-given right to slaughter females at random for nothing more than their perceived immodesty. The least we can do, confronted by such radical evil, is to look it in the eye (something it strives to avoid) and call it by its right name. For a start, it is the female victims of this tyranny who are “disenfranchised,” while something rather worse than “disenfranchisement” awaits those who dare to disagree.

London Times reports Zimbabwe cleric wishes for invasion and toppling of Mugabe.

ZIMBABWE’S leading cleric has called on Britain to invade the country and topple President Robert Mugabe. Pius Ncube, the Archbishop of Bulawayo, warned that millions were facing death from famine, unable to survive amid inflation believed to have soared to 15,000%.

Mugabe, 83, had proved intransigent despite the “massive risk to life”, said Ncube, the head of Zimbabwe’s 1m Catholics. “I think it is justified for Britain to raid Zimbabwe and remove Mugabe,” he said. “We should do it ourselves but there’s too much fear. I’m ready to lead the people, guns blazing, but the people are not ready.” …

Not much chance the new PM Gordon Brown would act considering his foreign policy appointments so far. Mark Steyn has details in a Corner post.

Clarice Feldman links to similar concerns from Melanie Phillips.

The Australian reports our modern day Learned Hand, Richard Posner is out to make his anti-terrorist bones.

A TOP-RANKING US judge has stunned a conference of Australian judges and barristers in Chicago by advocating secret trials for terrorists, more surveillance of Muslim populations across North America and an end to counter-terrorism efforts being “hog-tied” by the US constitution.

Judge Richard Posner, a supposedly liberal-leaning jurist regarded by many as a future US Supreme Court candidate, said traditional concepts of criminal justice were inadequate to deal with the terrorist threat and the US had “over-invested” in them. …

Sporting News reports on dissing of Chavez by soccer fans in Venezuela.

Sun Times has an op-ed on Gore’s mis-statements.

… Many of the assertions Gore makes in his movie, ”An Inconvenient Truth,” have been refuted by science, both before and after he made them. Gore can show sincerity in his plea for scientific honesty by publicly acknowledging where science has rebutted his claims.

For example, Gore claims that Himalayan glaciers are shrinking and global warming is to blame. Yet the September 2006 issue of the American Meteorological Society’s Journal of Climate reported, “Glaciers are growing in the Himalayan Mountains, confounding global warming alarmists who recently claimed the glaciers were shrinking and that global warming was to blame.”

Gore claims the snowcap atop Africa’s Mt. Kilimanjaro is shrinking and that global warming is to blame. Yet according to the November 23, 2003, issue of Nature magazine, …

Roger L. Simon posts on Al.

New Editor finds a Gore fan. Of course it’s an academic who could write the following;

I have not yet read “The Assault on Reason.” But I recommend it on the strength of everything else Al Gore has done this past decade.

Carpe Diem posts on employment growth by state.

WaPo has a piece on why cats decided to domesticate themselves.

Your hunch is correct. Your cat decided to live with you, not the other way around. The sad truth is, it may not be a final decision.

But don’t take this feline diffidence personally. It runs in the family. And it goes back a long way — about 12,000 years, actually.

Those are among the inescapable conclusions of a genetic study of the origins of the domestic cat, being published Friday in the journal Science.

Scrappleface says Clinton and Obama are distributing campaign cash to their less fortunate rivals.

Former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards, not slated to benefit from the redistribution, denounced the move as a “crass political ploy which lacks the weight of traditional Democrat moral leadership, because it was voluntary.”

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Walter Laqueur 86, historian of Europe and Russia, wrote a new book on Europe’s prospects. We are treated to a review by Theodore Dalrymple. For those not familiar with Dalrymple we have excerpts later from his Wikipedia entry.

It is Europe’s doom that Walter Laqueur explores and explains in this succinct and clearly written book. He does not say anything that others have not said before him, but he says it better and with a greater tolerance of nuance than some other works on this vitally important subject.

There are three threats to Europe’s future. The first comes from demographic decline. Europeans are simply not reproducing, for reasons that are unclear. …

… The second threat comes from the presence of a sizable and growing immigrant population, a large part of which is not necessarily interested in integration. …

… The third threat comes from the existence of the welfare state and the welfare-state mentality. A system of entitlements has been created that, however economically counterproductive, is politically difficult to dismantle: once privileges are granted, they assume the metaphysical status of immemorial and fundamental rights. The right of French train drivers to retire on full pension at the age of 50 is probably more important to them than the right of free speech—especially that of those who think that retirement at such an age is preposterous. While Europe mortgages its future to pay for such extravagances—the French public debt doubled in ten years under the supposedly conservative Chirac—other areas of the world forge an unbeatable combination of high-tech and cheap labor. The European political class, more than ever dissociated from its electorate, has hardly woken up to the challenge.

All this Laqueur lays out with exemplary clarity. He sees Europe, once the home of a dynamic civilization that energized the rest of the world, declining into a kind of genteel theme park—if it’s lucky. The future might be grimmer than this, of course: there might be a real struggle for power once the immigrants and their descendents become numerically strong enough to take on the increasingly geriatric native population. …

 

… Laqueur makes the important point that shortcomings of the host countries notwithstanding, many immigrant groups have thrived without difficulty. He might have added that they have all successfully overcome initial prejudice against them. There is no Sikh or Hindu problem in Britain; the country has recently absorbed half a million Poles without any obvious tension or difficulty. (Tony Blair, with his usual perspicuity, predicted that when Poland joined the European Union, 13,000 Poles would move to Britain.)

This suggests—and Laqueur has no hesitation in so saying—that there is a problem peculiar to the integration of Muslims in Western countries, at any rate, when they are in such large numbers that they are able to make whole areas their own. …

Gabriel Schoenfeld has a nifty piece of work in Contentions about the spinning of news out of London.

Charles Krauthammer on the dishonesty of Congress. Remember Mark Twain, “There is no native American criminal class, except for Congress.”

… The reason Congress loves corporate average fuel economy (CAFE) standards is precisely that they hide the cost — in the sticker price of a new car. Whatever blame there is for the unfairness of life — that energy efficiency is not free — goes to the auto company rather than the mandating body, namely Congress.

That’s the great attraction of ethanol, too. Another free lunch. The Senate bill mandates a quintupling of ethanol use by 2022. That might be a good idea, but it also has costs. With huge tracts of land now being turned over to grow corn for fuel, the price of corn already is rising, as is the price of other foods whose cropland has been taken over. The beauty of ethanol? It hides the price of purported energy efficiency in the most unlikely of places — your cornflakes. …

… I have no objection to paying more to reduce our dependency on foreign energy. But it is hard to conceive of a more politically dishonest and economically inefficient way to do it than with mandates that make private industry do Congress’s dirty work, hide the true cost of energy efficiency and perpetuate the fantasy of the tax-free lunch.

Immigration bill post-mortems were throughout the web. Here’s the thoughts of some of our favorites.

Debra Saunders is first.

In Washington, it is easier to pass a bad bill than a good bill. That’s practically a law. But as Washington learned last week, there is such a thing as a bill so bad that even Congress can’t pass it. So the Kennedy-Kyl Comprehensive Immigration Reform Bill tanked, as it most assuredly deserved to do.

Advice to Washington politicians who want to pass a bill that grants citizenship to some illegal immigrants: Don’t call it “reform.” Reform is supposed to curb abuse, not codify it.

Mark Steyn was in the Orange County Register.

On the eve of Independence Day, the people of this great republic declared their independence from the United States Senate under the stirring battle-cry, “No legislation without explanation!” The geniuses who’d cooked up the “comprehensive” immigration bill’s “grand bargain” behind the scenes in the pork-filled rooms had originally planned to ram it through in 48 hours before Memorial Day. And, right to the end, the bipartisan Emirs-for-life of Incumbistan gave the strong impression they regarded it as an affront to be required by the impertinent whippersnappers of the citizenry to address the actual content of the legislation.

Sen. Lindsay Graham, R-S.C., dismissed critics of the bill as “racist.”

Sen. George Voinovich, R-Ohio, complained that the peasants had somehow got hold of his phone number, and he felt “intimidated.”

Sen. Trenthorn Lotthorn, R-Lottissippi, said: Who cares if they call? …

Instapundit with thoughts about the next time.

Byron York in the Hill.

Rich Lowry in Townhall.

Victor Davis Hanson in his blog.

Fred Thompson was linked by Instapundit, so that’s here too.

New Editor posts on NY Times.

Cato posts on our similarities with Zimbabwe. Hint – Congress is involved.

In Zimbabwe, the government is ordering businesses to cut prices and threatening to jail executives who don’t comply, in an attempt to deal with inflation that is now variously estimated at somewhere between 4,000 and 20,000 percent a year.

Meanwhile, on Capitol Hill both houses of Congress have passed legislation establishing stiff penalties for those found guilty of gasoline price gouging. …

Adam Smith notes the start of Great Britain’s smoking ban.

Agoraphilia on the unholy alliance of Baptists and bootleggers.

GayPatriot starts our humor section announcing the recipient of the first annual JEC BOMA (James Earl Carter Bitter Old Man Award.) The comments were a hoot so they’re included.

Gabriel Schoenfeld posted on Carter’s UFO sighting. Seemed appropriate here.