Can Moscow scale down inherited Soviet ambitions?

Great powers are a special breed. Until the First World War, the “Great Powers” were European entities. Membership in that club enabled its participants to extend their control beyond the Continent. These dependencies were by location, but also by tradition, population, and development, unlike the “mother country”. Due to the difference came the ability to discover, to subjugate and to colonize. Europe’s dominance expressed its high development. The decisive advantage, the knowledge, the institutions, the economy behind it, was concentrated in that small area. For long, these factors could not be copied outside the European culture’s sphere.

Sprayers disclose a compromising wish list.

Some movements score because they can hide their real agenda. The barefooted opt for them because they are misled to project upon these their desires. By voting accordingly, they mandate what the real intentions of their chosen favorites entail. Our day’s Left is a major beneficiary of the frequent confusion. 

About the helpers, the help, and the victims.

In the manner of condors that hover over cadavers, flocks of helpers are congregating over the landscape. Their purpose is to save forcibly even those that might have failed to ask for succor. The circumstances under which the rescuees are helped happen in ways that undo us. 

On 9 July 2012, the International Civil Liberties Alliance presented the International Human Rights and Freedom of Speech Conference in the European Parliament in Brussels. The conference was organised in response to the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC)'s "Istanbul Process," which seeks to institute a global blasphemy law under sharia doctrine that would ban freedom of expression worldwide. The principal outcome of ICLA’s July 2012 Conference in the European Parliament was the "Brussels Declaration to Safeguard Individual Liberties and Human Rights."  

The U.S. Constitution gives Congress the exclusive right to tax Americans at the federal level. Yet Congress continues to give away this most fundamental responsibility to international organizations, the most dangerous of which is the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

Some time ago, a lady that visited here from Laguna Beach has raised a question. How does one manage to fill a weekly column? The response was that the problem is –thanks to the self-induced crisis of our self-doubting culture – an easy one. The difficulty is not finding a theme but to decide what to skip. Your correspondent has dozens of pages filled with ideas tagged to become the subject of future columns. The list lengthens menacingly while its “gems” are superseded in favor of new urgencies. This aspect of the job has again manifested itself. This unplanned presentation derives from having attended an event. 

Whose Ox Is Being Gored?

For years I’ve been in stubborn denial every time the Left accuses conservatives of sowing hate. Now I’ve learned the Left has been correct in its charge. In fact I’ve rarely found as much inflammatory hate speech as turned up in a column (May 30) by a Murdoch media empire superstar, who writes for The Wall Street Journal and The New York Post and is frequently on The O’Reilly Factor, Debbie Schlussel. The column was titled “Poles were complicit in Holocaust: Outrage over Obama Gaffe is Fraudulent, Ignorant.” And the diatribe gets even nastier as one reads on. Schlussel rages against Obama for apologizing for an apparent mistake when he described Nazi death camps as “Polish.” The columnist is even more strident against Rush Limbaugh, that “self-hating Jew Matt Drudge,” and other Republican luminaries for suggesting that German Nazis, not Poles, were responsible for the Holocaust. 

A few hours ago, Geert Wilders spoke at the Western Conservative Summit in Denver, Colorado. What follows is the complete transcript of his speech.

Thank you, dear friends, ladies and gentlemen, for inviting me to the Western Conservative Summit. It is always a pleasure to come to America. I was here a few weeks ago to meet with my dear friend, congresswoman Michele Bachmann, to talk about Islam and the threat to America and Europe.

It is also a pleasure to be in Denver, the gateway to the West. This is America’s conservative heartland where the spirit of the pioneers still lives.

I know that I come at a sad moment. Many of you have been affected by the enormous wildfires raging not far from here. Thousands have been evacuated and some of them are even staying in this hotel. Few things are as terrible as losing your homes. I want to express my deepest sympathy with all the people affected by this disaster. And I want to offer my condolences to the families of those who lost their lives in the fires.

An era of pleasing self-deception is ending.   

An economic collapse, to be followed by a political one, is threatening Europe. The global economy and your share of it might not remain immune. The problem is self-generated. Thereby, the entire, economically industrialized and politically democratic, world’s economic fundamentals are endangered. The trigger is seemingly negligible. Greece is only a small apple in the large basket. Its rot, however, is due to the interrelationships created by the “political class” and regardless of denials, a process that affects all. The crisis managers and the means of those in charge of repairs are dubious quality. Adding more borrowed apples will hardly work. Impolite and unkind observations follow.

Shifting positions that duck reality.

Remembering old times has a purpose. Recollection can be help to escape the present. The other is to recall the failings of erring opinion makers. Those that write the official record prefer to suppress the reminders of their causes. The purpose is to recycle old, tried, and failed snake medicine. With an updated sales pitch, the illusion of a better future reappears for consumption by gullible amnesiacs. Such a recycled theme is about growth, progress, and austerity in the context of the global economic crisis.