Ours is a time of social upheaval and seismic paradigm shifts. The world is changing before our eyes while we Westerners sit still, seemingly lost in the belief that our passivity will somehow bring peace.

On our televisions, reports of beheadings, stonings, and suicide bombings regularly fill large portions of a news hour that was not so long ago devoted to car accidents, train wrecks, and market fluctuations. Islamists are steadily marching upon the West with conquest in their eyes, and little has been done to stop or even to slow them down. All the while, renowned institutions, press outlets, left-leaning politicians, and university professors are stepping on themselves to assure us that radical Islam and the West can co-exist, but reality seems to argue for another conclusion altogether.

“Duly Noted” likes to address the growing inconsistencies that describe the immigration policy of the West’s developed countries. Europe, the USA, and Australia suffer from a self-imposed inability. The moving force of the matter is that the rules of the PC game prevent them from formulating a meaningful and up-to-date policy. To the extent that there is a policy on the books, little as mandated will be allowed to happen. Influenced by theory-based paroles and the palliatives of PC, states suffer from a corresponding lack of determination to enforce their own laws. 

What journalist wouldn't want to be Paris Bureau Chief for Time magazine, or anything else? Sounds so glamorous. But look closer and the job qualifications -- sharia-compliance -- are more than a little off-putting, certainly as exemplified by the man with the job, Bruce Crumley, on weighing in on the bombing of Charlie Hebdo. Poor man. Full-blown, late-stage and terminal Dhimmitude.

All Saints' Day 2011. After the EU leaders have cobbled together a financial arrangement intended to save the Greek exchequer and economy at huge expense to the North-European taxpayers as well as to the Greek workers and pensioners, Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou now risks exploding the whole operation by calling a referendum. The Greek electorate, less than enthusiastic about the sternly conditional "aid package", may well abort it. Some first thoughts on the Greek referendum.

(1) The decision to decide by referendum is in itself excellent. The problem is that, like most referendums under parliamentary regimes and dictatorships, it is just a one-off referendum, not one embedded in a stable political culture based on regular lawmaking by referendum. True to type, it is called by the executive, not by the citizens themselves. This way, governments call referendums when they expect the popular preference to coincide with their own, all while avoiding or suppressing them in the opposite case. So, as an exercise in democracy, this promises to be a tainted referendum.

When we feel that we have to avoid the full truth.

There are can be excellent reasons for holding widely shared views. Nevertheless, admitting to them can be perceived as “bad PR”. That condition makes us say what we do not mean and to fudge on what we really think. Perhaps no one in the reader’s neighborhood went around emptying clips to celebrate Gaddafi’s demise. However, it is likely that those that knew the man that loved camels more than his subjects were silent about being secretly content that the King of Africa was gone. Frequently, outside of a trusted circle, we hold back what we really think. That results in evasive statements that misrepresent opinion or they submerge views in a meaningless protective verbiage.

If we succumb to political correctness and group think, a reversal of Western decline is unlikely.

Before the era of political correctness, intellectuals with opposing political views still tried to learn from each other. Lionel Trilling for one quotes John Stuart Mill, who as a fierce opponent of Coleridge nevertheless urged his fellow liberals to study this powerful conservative mind (LT, The Liberal Imagination, 1940).

Lord, enlighten thou our enemies…; sharpen their wits, give acuteness to their perceptions and consecutiveness and clearness to their reasoning powers. We are in danger from their folly, not from their wisdom; their weakness is what fills us with apprehension, not their strength.

When romantic fiction exploits politics to reshape real life.

There are gifts one gives to those that have everything. Some of my grandchildren belong in this category. Good toys are simple enough to stimulate the imagination. In their case, a large volume of items whose chips let them to do adults things replaces such objects. Their life expectancy, if measured by the time of use, is only momentary. Once they have demonstrated their programmed trick, being at the end of their repertoire, the toys become a source of boredom. 

An immigrant group based in Bern has called for the emblematic white cross to be removed from the Swiss national flag because as a Christian symbol it “no longer corresponds to today’s multicultural Switzerland.” Ivica Petrusic, the vice president of Second@s Plus, a lobbying group that represents mostly Muslim second-generation foreigners in Switzerland (who colloquially are known as secondos) says the group will launch a nationwide campaign in October to ask Swiss citizens to consider adopting a flag that is less offensive to Muslim immigrants.

Olaf Stapledon

Given that the End of the World is an old eschatological myth that modernity has appropriated and secularized it is unsurprising that visions of Armageddon and the Last Judgment migrated, in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, to literature and indeed called forth from literature a new genre, the “scientific romance” or science fiction story. In that new genre the Late-Antique demonology alienated itself, populating the planets and stars with materialistically conceived counterparts of the devilish scourge that one encounters in Fifteenth-Century canvasses by Hieronymus Bosch and Mathias Grünwald.

About causes and effects.

To overcome the economic downturn its causes need to be identified. The wording used must not camouflage an inconvenient reality. Often, this criterion is not met. The presentation and the inferred conclusions are not realistic nor are they entirely honest.