I inherited a city of brick and intend to leave a city of marble. (Pope Julius II)

Last week a generous friend invited me to Frankfurt in Germany, to see the once-in-a-lifetime Sandro Botticelli exhibition, celebrated at the Staedl Museum, an impressive Neo-renaissance building in the Florentine taste that somehow survived the Allied firestorm. It stands on the banks of the river Main and faces the usual jumble of modernistic buildings and ugly skyscrapers, all suited to prompt a pang of nostalgia for times long gone by. Especially if one is stuck for nearly three hours in an endless queue while bracing subzero temperatures.

In his weekly newsletter, available through subscription, Yves Daoudal discusses the implications of the decision by Quick, a French chain of hamburger restaurants, to serve halal meat in its restaurants. His is one of several recent articles that are focusing on the growing presence of halal foods everywhere in France, and the danger that very soon French people will be eating halal without knowing it, if that is not already the case.

There is terrorism and there is Islamophobia. Of these two the latter is apparently the more serious misdemeanor. Europe is introducing draconian measures to monitor the internet for so-called “racism,” but at the same time the European Parliament has decided to deny America access to servers with international banking data that relate to terrorist organizations.

George Handlery about the week that was. Withdraw if they shoot back. Words do not always suffice to defend democratic values. The new, stylish way to commit suicide. Climate-gate and good intentions that redeem bad deeds. Sanctions could save Iran from the Mullah’s folly. The Dictator’s Tantrum

1. The Dutch coalition government has collapsed since the Social Democrats are unwilling to continue to support the country’s modest military presence in Afghanistan. A problem eliciting the principled resistance further to the base in the rear is that local fundamentalists fire at the many they do not like. Shots hurt people. But only those who are close. To protect the humanistic values of the party, the soldiers that face a cruel enemy are to be saved by moving them out of harm’s way. Will the same conflict shift to Holland? If the pattern is followed the response then might be to go (again) into English exile. Provided, of course that, with no Churchill in sight, she will still stand by then. The case suggests that there are parties that are committed, no matter what, to moderation. This temperance they practice in an unlimited amount as soon as the defense of civilized values becomes, through an attack, the issue in a controversy.

Cripes they are all getting a little excited over in Brussels about Nigel Farage's comments on Wednesday.

Now we hear that Yves Leterme, the Belgian PM has demanded in a letter to the President of the European Parliament that this should not happen again.

Earlier this month, a 28 year old Muslim from Skåne was awarded just over 6,000 euros by a Swedish judge because he had refused to shake hands with a woman. One can wonder whether the woman maybe should praise herself lucky. After all, she wasn't convicted for racism for the simple fact that she thought she could shake hands with a Muslim man.

The leading Swedish newspaper, Dagens Nyheter (“Today’s News”), has once again targeted the Sweden Democrat Party in its editorial pages. The newspaper commissioned a psychoanalyst, Thomas Böhm, to probe the soul of the only organized group in today’s Sweden that publicly criticizes the Swedish state’s nation-transforming immigration policies and dogmatic commitment to that component of existing Leftwing perversity, which goes by the name of multiculturalism.

Following the rapid advances in our understanding of genetics in recent years a new branch of biological history or biohistory has emerged, where human history is seen through the prism of genetic changes and the theory of evolution. For my long essay Why Did Europeans Create the Modern World? I included biohistory as one of the aspects explaining different levels of accomplishment, informed especially by the book Understanding Human History by the American astrophysicist Michael H. Hart, which is available online as a pdf file. Another recent title is The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution by Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending from the University of Utah in the United States.

Vancouver, the Winter Olympics, and the tie to Flanders

Like many of you I have been enjoying the Winter Olympics. Besides the actual events the draws for me are the drama, the color, and the chance to see superb athletes from across the globe in friendly, but earnest, competition.

One of the appeals of any Olympics is the chance to learn something about the locale of the Games. For Vancouver, this has centered around the story of the English explorer George Vancouver. Vancouver discovered and named many points around coastal British Columbia.
 

In an earlier essay I presented some explanations for the remarkable degree of religiosity that can be observed in the USA, and contrasted this with the high degree of de-Christianization that has occurred in Europe over the past half century or more.   In subsequent commentary, Thomas Bertonneau (TB) agreed with a basic tenet of that article, i.e. the crucial rejection of the concept of a state religion by the 18th century Founding Fathers of the American Republic:

“To the extent that men like Washington and Jefferson were religious, they leaned toward Deism. In character, they are opposite types to the Puritan theocrats. The Constitution, while acknowledging the religious element of the society that it proposed to bring to order, nevertheless established a secular – and in particular a non-sectarian – polity. If we believed the myth that the American beginning is in Massachusetts, then the Constitution would necessarily be a deliberate break with the New England continuum. I argue that this is so.” (TB)

This provides the basis for some further reflection on the essence of the American ‘civic religion’ that the “Virginia Gentlemen” (TB) among the American founders intended, and that could possibly continue to supply guidance for any trans-ethnic society.