My colleague and dear friend Diana West sends me this excerpt from her book
“The Death of the Grown-Up: How America’s Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization”:

In Alien Nation: Common Sense about America’s Immigration Disaster, a bracingly unequivocal assessment of the cultural and political shambles that make up U.S. immigration policy – the basis of sovereignty – author Peter Brimelow opens his preface with a provocative statement.

A quote from Gabor Steingart in Der Spiegel, 13 November 2007

The dollar crisis has politicians alarmed worldwide. The US currency has lost 24 percent of its value since the introduction of the euro, and now there is even a chance that China could abandon its policy of pegging its currency to the dollar – a problem the United States should take very seriously.

A quote from Christine at the CVF blog, 12 November 2007

One doesn’t have to know everything to assert an editorial opinion; but one does need to know a reasonable amount to engage in a political campaign to enforce banning of one group or another from mutual associations.

A quote from Mark Helprin in The Wall Street Journal, 12 November 2007

As the Soviet Union dissolved, much of its military capacity followed it into oblivion. But as Western Europe dismantles its militaries, Russia builds, encouraged as much by European pacifism as by the Russian view of America's struggle in Iraq as a parallel to the Soviet's fatal involvement in Afghanistan. Like Germany between the wars, Russia is now eager and determined to reconstitute its forces, and with its new-found oil wealth, it is doing so.

To be frank, we’re running out of options. Labour plainly isn’t going to concede the referendum it promised, and the nauseating U-turn by the LibDems gives Gordon Brown a clear majority in both Houses of Parliament.

In the past, the sight of other countries voting on our future galvanised the British. But this time, the 27 EU leaders have entered into an anti-democratic pact. They know that a referendum in one country would lead to demands for a vote in others, and so have promised each other to hold no polls at all. Only in the two states where a referendum is constitutionally obligatory, Ireland and Denmark, will there be a vote; and the Danish one looks like being on the abolition of one of the Maastricht opt-outs rather than on the constitution tout entière. Besides, both campaigns will come after British ratification.

A quote from the British Conservative MEP Daniel Hannan at his blog, 11 November 2007

My guess is that, in the event that Belgium sunders, there will indeed be some kind of political union between France and Wallonia – a French foreign policy goal since Bonaparte. But it’s a pity. The countries which do best, these days, are small, agile ones. [...] Among nations, as among individuals, it is those who are made dependent on grants who suffer most, not those who pay them. The best thing that could happen to the Walloons is the removal the socialist leaders who have impoverished them, and a return to the bourgeois values that their grandfathers took for granted. If they play this right, French-speaking Belgians could, as I have argued before, be the chief beneficiaries of a break-up.

On their first date, my parents, together, couldn't have tipped the scales at more than 85 kg. On the date on which they conceived me, they probably still didn't weigh much more.

Their slimming diets had been involuntary. Their respective families had been wiped out by Germans, Austrians, and their numerous and more savage, Ukrainian, Latvian and Lithuanian volunteers.
 
My mother's brother was executed without trial on a busy street in front of her eyes, and her parents would be murdered a few days later in an extermination camp – all for the crime of philo-Semitism. They had been most likely denounced to the Gestapo by a local anti-Semite.

A quote from Tiberge (of galliawatch.blogspot.com) at Lawrence Auster’s blog, 10 November 2007

Sarko and Bush SEEM conservative compared to Segolene Royal or Hillary Clinton. […] But Sarkozy feels guilty for being even ten percent conservative! Otherwise why would he hire so many socialists, and grovel before Islam, and date (I think) a Muslim woman, and rush into the EU treaty despite his campaign promises, and cleverly help Turkey into the EU, and all the rest? He makes small gestures, band-aid solutions, to look conservative but he's not. However, he's not a socialist either. […]

Lately I gave the reader a recipe for achieving effortlessly extremist status. The gist: speak the uncorrected truth and bear the blame.

The specific matter used as a peg holding up the generalized point was the case of the Swiss People’s Party (SVP). Since then the SVP won the elections and the Reds lost. Most of the Socialists’ losses went to the Greens. (Translation: same camp, different color.) Some of the SVP’s gains came from the parties of the center. These are the folks who lacked the courage to commit themselves to anything but the bold middle between “wishy” and “washy“. Stubbornly, even the Economist – the best of the weeklies – persists in calling the SVP “right-wing” as in “extremist”. In itself, the libel by international journalists who regurgitate information furnished by locally embedded partisans does not matter. However, the misuse of the term as a club confers legitimacy on genuine extremist – not all of which belong to the nutty right but also represent the lunatic left.

A quote from Pierre Rousselin’s editorial in the French [Conservative] newspaper Le Figaro, 9 November 2007

Europe does indeed encourage decentralisation and regionalism. [...] But separatists cannot all be given the impression they are acting in perfect impunity and will be able to benefit, not matter what, from EU advantages. At a time when Kosovo's independence is coming into view, Europe should address the question of interior borders. To allow the implosion of Belgium, the founding country of the EU and seat of institutions, would be to open the door to the balkanisation of Europe.