Entertainment and fireworks by Kim. China to the rescue? Illegal immigrants and the medicine. Losing sleep over nukes. Peace, Israel and the bomb.  

1. According to an international investigation, North Korea has sunk a ROK warship. Now the North has issued a warning. The protesting South is to refrain from provocations. By this standard, even registering an attack is warmongering. At the same time, so Pyongyang, retaliation, such as international condemnation and economic sanctions against the handout takers, will result in a military reprisal.

The trend of politics in the Western nations since Eric Voegelin’s death in 1986 has made his work increasingly relevant to any philosophically rigorous conservatism or traditionalism. In particular, Voegelin’s argument that liberalism and its Leftwing metastases constitute an evangelical religious movement, mimicking and distorting Christianity, has gained currency. The pronounced irrational character of the “Global Warming” cult and the obvious messianism of Barack Hussein Obama’s presidency have together sharpened the perception that contemporary Leftwing politics shares with history’s specimen-type doctrinally intransigent sects an absolute intolerance for dissent, even for discussion, along with a conviction of perfect certainty in all things. The sudden experience of Leftwing triumph attests that, indeed, utopian radicalism draws its strength from a deep well of resentment that puts it in conflict, not merely with those whom it regards as heterodox, but also with the inalterable structure of reality. Voegelin argued – in The New Science of Politics (1952), Science Politics & Gnosticism (1965), and throughout Order and History (1957-65) – that the rebellion against reality was a recurrent affliction of civilized life; he pointed to the acute anticosmic sects of Late Antiquity as offering a paradigm of the phenomenon and expanded the scholarly designation of them as “Gnosticism” to cover insurgent ideological doctrines of the modern period, particularly Marxism and National Socialism.

In post-modern Spain, where everything (including the term “financial crisis”) is relative, politics will be far more important than economics in determining whether the country avoids a Greek-style debt default.

 

European governments are hoping that a massive new €750 billion ($1 trillion) bailout fund will contain the sovereign debt crisis that started with Greece and now threatens to destabilize the euro currency. But the rescue package, which is on top of a separate €110 billion package to rescue Greece from bankruptcy, essentially transfers the burden of debt from one European country to another and does little to prevent profligate countries from reaccumulating unsustainable debt.

I get a few comments from people who wonder why I write about subjects such as astrophysics, Indo-European languages or wine when there are so many problems in the Western world. It is a fair question. I have published perhaps a million words on the Internet, yet the only book to appear in print so far based on my material is Defeating Eurabia, part of which is available online in German. For Scandinavian readers, I have contributed a long chapter in Norwegian to the book Selvmordsparadigmet (“The Suicide Paradigm”), published in May 2010 by the writer Ole Jørgen Anfindsen who runs the website Honest Thinking.

Content criminals, safe citizens. Natural wealth, abuse and corruption. The IRS’ ideal illegal. The Greeks have a term for it: going broke together. Failing to learn from experience is the norm.

 

1.There is a weekly German TV program dedicated to the background of the news. A recent segment introduced its public to the way Giuliani has made order in New York. The story described the city as having been a murder capital and its subways as a combat zone. Giuliani’s illustrated policy of “no tolerance” followed. Severe chastisement for even minor crimes, the extensive police presence and the neighborhood patrols made for good footage. Close to the finish, the Mayor’s success got the credit it deserves. The case reminds one of Uribe’s accomplishments in Colombia. His resolute actions against the Communist guerilla created security and an economic upswing. Between 2004 and 2008 the GNP doubled and the FDI tripled. Even in the globally recessionary 2009, Colombia’s growth continued.

The American astronomer Gerry Neugebauer (born 1932), son of the great Austrian historian of science Otto Neugebauer, did valuable pioneering work in infrared astronomy. He spent his entire career at the California Institute of Technology. Together with the US experimental physicist Robert B. Leighton (1919-1997), also at Caltech, he completed the first infrared survey of the sky. Leighton is also known for discovering five-minute oscillations in local surface velocities of the Sun, which opened up research into solar seismology. The American physicist Frank James Low (1933-2009) became a leader in the emerging field of infrared astronomy after inventing the gallium-doped germanium bolometer in 1961, which allowed the extension of observations to longer wavelengths than previously possible. He and his colleagues showed that Jupiter and Saturn emit more energy than they receive from the Sun.

The process of combining light elements into heavier ones – nuclear fusion – happens in the central region of stars. In their extremely hot cores, instead of individual atoms you have a mix of nuclei and free electrons, what we call plasma. The term “plasma” was first applied to ionized gas by Irving Langmuir (1881-1957), a physical chemist from the USA, in 1923. It is the fourth and by far the most common state of matter in the universe in addition to the three we are familiar with from everyday life on Earth: solid, liquid and gas. Extreme temperatures and pressure is needed to overcome the mutual electrostatic repulsion of positively charged atomic nuclei (ions), often called the Coulomb barrier after the French natural philosopher Charles de Coulomb, who formulated the laws of electrostatic attraction and repulsion.

Natural and unnatural unions. Guess who fits the €-zone’s requirements! Who and what has failed? The overcooked spaghetti and the perils of police work.

 

1. What masquerades as the Greek crisis is in reality a general solvency crisis of profligate sovereign borrowers. The dilemma presented still demands a long-term response. The situation makes one conclude that Europe’s economic union is composed of bits that do not fit. Or that the pieces fit – but only in another picture. A union – whether political or economic – can be forged out of parts that have, while still separated, developed underlying similarities. This criterion amounts to a spontaneous convergence. Lacking this pre-condition, creating by fiat an association for the purpose of cajoling incompatibles mix into a new brew, will totter at the first challenge. Economically and politically, the EU has been made to grow too fast and too far.

Photography made it possible to preserve images of the spectra of stars. The Catholic priest and astrophysicist Pietro Angelo Secchi (1818-1878), born in the city of Reggio Emilia in northern Italy, is considered the discoverer of the principle of stellar classification. He visited England and the USA and became professor of astronomy in Rome in 1849. After the discovery of spectrum analysis by Kirchhoff and Bunsen, Secchi was among the first to investigate the spectra of Uranus and Neptune. On an expedition to Spain to observe the total solar eclipse of 1860 he “definitively established by photographic records that the corona and the prominences rising from the chromosphere (i.e. the red protuberances around the edge of the eclipsed disc of the sun) were real features of the sun itself,” not optical illusions or illuminated mountains on the Moon. In the 1860s he began collecting the spectra of stars and classified them according to spectral characteristics, although his particular system didn’t last.

The American writer Lawrence Auster had a debate with his readers regarding the possibility of splitting the USA along ideological lines. According to reader Tim W, modern Left liberalism is a universal totalitarian ideology, not a “live and let live” concept. The goal of its adherents is a world government from which no one can escape. Leftists “need conservatives but conservatives don’t need leftists. To be blunt, they can’t let us go. We’d be happy to be rid of them, because to us they’re nothing but parasites and/or oppressors. But they can’t get rid of us because we do most of the work, pay most of the taxes, provide the stability and morality that allow their depravity to thrive with less damaging results. Furthermore, the white conservative population is the buffer protecting white liberals from the minorities.”