According to the Adam Smith Institute Tax Freedom Day in the UK is June 1st. Or the Brits are working a full 5 months for the Government before they are working for themselves.

But spare a thought for the poor Germans. The German version of the Taxpayers Alliance is the Bund der Steuerzahler and they have calculated that the Teutons' Tax Freedom Day is Friday July the 13th.

Tax Freedom Day 2007 is on Friday, 13 July. Studies by the Taxpayer Federation found that Germans starting working for their own purses on this day work starting from this day. Everything earned before this date, goes straight to the state. Last year the Tax Freedom Day was on 5 July. Thus the day has moved eight day back.

There’s a new cartoon controversy – this time in Canada. And the controversy is that there hasn’t been one. Some three weeks ago, in close succession, anti-Semitic cartoons – at least two of which appeared to have been borrowed from Der Sturmer – were published on the editorial pages of three mainstream newspapers in the Canadian province of Quebec. The cartoons concerned the meeting between Mario Dumont, the leader of Quebec’s opposition party, the Action Democratique du Quebec, with fundraisers who had traditionally supported Quebec’s Liberal Party – the party currently in power. Some of the fundraisers were Jewish businessmen.

Broken bones, while physically limiting have the benefit of giving one time to exercise the mind. The reduction of activities to essentials is duplicated by the intellect. Issues crystallize; the words needed to express them shrink as clarity and brevity correlate. My hospital-thinking focused on an aspect of the scary disintegration of the transatlantic alliance. It has served America, the world and Europe well. For the latter that voluntarily lacks the ability to defend itself, the resulting dependence on US brawn should prove the utility of the relationship.

A quote from the Italian press agency ANSA, 11 June 2007

Immigrants in Italy are around half of those in Germany but the arrivals in Italy are rising at such a fast pace that in about a dozen years they might reach 7 million, the number registered today in Germany.

A quote from The Times, 1 July 2007

The film, available on the European commission’s space on YouTube, the video website, shows 18 couples having sex. [...] In the interests of sexual equality, two of the couples are gay. [...] The video is part of a campaign by Margot Wallstrom, the communications commissioner, to boost interest in the workings of the EU. [...] Wallstrom’s spokesman [...] denied it was in questionable taste. “[...] It’s a question of taste. It doesn’t always have to be about press releases. These clips explain better what the EU is doing.”

Words cannot express my contempt for this,

Mr McMillan-Scott, Conservative MEP for Yorkshire and Humber, described Alan Johnston’s release as: “An enduring tribute to the sweetness of freedom, denied to his captors and the people of Gaza.”

Ehsan Jami is a 22-year-old local councilor and member of the socialist Labor Party (PvdA) in the Dutch town of Leidschendam. His party, which belongs to the ruling government coalition in the Netherlands, is eager to get rid of him because... he is a Muslim apostate.

There has been some debate in the media about the fact that many of the suspects involved in the car bombs in London and Glasgow last week are physicians. Are they not bound by the Hippocratic Oath., which states that a physician may not harm? But does such an oath really matter for terrorists? And what's the Hippocratic Oath worth anyway, especially in the West?

My post about the impact of Christianity on Western culture generated some interesting comments. Several readers stated that Christianity is flexible, unlike Islam, and that the United States, perhaps still the most devoutly Christian of Western nations, also has the most dynamic military forces. And it was the Americans who dropped nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which hardly indicates that Christians have to be soft.

A quote from Lew Rockwell's obituary of Hans Sennholz (1922-2007), 28 June 2007

[His] book How Can Europe Survive, published in 1955, remains the best and most complete critique of European political union ever written. Sennholz demonstrated, some fifty years before others even cared, that political union under the interventionist-welfare state was only a prescription for chaos and bureaucrat rule. True union, he demonstrated, comes from free trade and decentralized states that do not attempt to plan their economies.