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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.”