George Handlery about the week that was. Promises, reality and terror. Oppressive liberators. The lawfulness of revolutions that ultimately fail their supporters. Prophets in error and the light-tower of the present’s failures. What if we encourage our civil servants to strike permanently?

1. After having penned what began as an abstract principle, an insight emerged. Current occurrences in Iran’s internal politics fit handily the generalization that is presented below. Radical movements like to assure their followers that, once they have power, they will realize the perfect society. Doing so implies a break with history’s pattern. A trivial consequence is the inclination to make the moment of the take-over into Year One of the New Era. (As did the French Revolution of 1789.) After its dawn, all will live for a higher end and do so in the bliss of freedom while enjoying material plenty.

The situation in France worsens every day. If the old notion that “something has to give” has any meaning, it does not apply to France. Not yet anyway. France is inert and headed for some kind of implosion unless the adrenal glands are reactivated.

With the euro in crisis, the British are currently counting their blessings while the Germans are trying to cut their losses. The near bankruptcy of Greece is dragging the euro down, but bailing out the Greeks is probably illegal under the EU Treaties, while ejecting Greece from the eurozone is illegal as well.

Chapter 3:  Sarko = The Art of the Illusory Choice
 

The New Legend of Lone Ranger and Tonto

There was a time when this staple American joke could express the difference between a liberal and a conservative:

The Lone Ranger and Tonto go camping in the desert. They set up their tent and fall sound asleep.
 

George Handlery about the week that was. Iran: The news are cruel but true. When apparent sanity is based on a misunderstanding. What you did not want to hear about bank secrecy. Fleeing Germany. Do not raise taxes: reduce expenditures.

1. It sounds unpleasant and mentioning it is cruel as it threatens the undisturbed pursuit of our lives. Nevertheless, as the months pass, the facts jell that an unwanted ghost is materializing. Iran is using every opportunity extracted out of the management of her foreign relations and the inertia of the potential victims to pursue her nuclear project. The news is as plentiful as it is bad. In fact, the repeated threats, lies, transparent delaying tactics are increasingly difficult to overlook. They are part of a list that is long enough to create, through the repetition familiarity and therefore their dismissal due to boredom. Iran is working on a detonator. Then missiles are tested. She tries to purchase advanced weapons. Facilities are dispersed. She pursues the acquisition of dual use nuclear power generators. Admits to have secret facilities once they are discovered. Plays a cat-and-mouse game with inspectors.

Last week-end, almost a thousand taxi drivers in the Norwegian capital Oslo and neighboring municipality Bærum went on what could be called a religious strike. Both on Friday evening and Monday morning, Muslim taxi drivers refused to drive in protest against Wednesday's front page of the Norwegian tabloid paper Dagbladet. That day, the tabloid ran an article about some of the “dangerous” pages the website of the Norwegian security service PST links to, and illustrated that with a screen shot of a cartoon showing the prophet Muhammad as a pig trampling the Qur'an.

Last week, Barack Obama snubbed the Europeans by refusing to attend next May’s European Union summit in Madrid. The Europeans are very upset. But that is not the worst of their problems, and neither is the looming bankruptcy of Greece. Analysts fear that Spain might sink the euro, the EU’s common currency, and with the euro also the dreams of greater political integration.

At this point Europe is not even halfway its 100-day political “honeymoon” since the Treaty of Lisbon, which transformed the EU into a state in its own right, came into force. So far the honeymoon has been a nightmare. Since the beginning of the year, the EU’s currency, the euro, is on the brink of collapse; Greece has been placed under EU financial supervision to prevent it from going bankrupt. Now U.S. President Barack Obama has announced that he will not attend next May’s EU summit in Madrid. It was to have been Obama’s first visit to post-Lisbon Europe – the consecration of the new political order.

The Geert Wilders trial in the Netherlands reminds us how much the Western elites, those who currently control the society and wish to use their authority to alter and reconstitute the established order, have parted company with longstanding Western traditions. The mutation of classical liberalism into contemporary politically correct totalitarianism is not surprising, however, since liberalism began as the cautious younger sibling of the revolutionary spirit that found its emblem in the destruction of the Bourbons and the declaration of equality, fraternity, and liberty as the new mandatory themes of human order. Quite apart from the fact of their vain abstraction, those slogans implied from the beginning implacable hostility to custom and habit. The new republican-type nation-states that followed the model of France arose, as had the French Republic, through the violent disestablishment of the smaller, ethnic polities that characterized the long period of feudalism. Insofar as Western Society still exhibits coherency, much of that coherency derives from the period before the emergence of the modern republics. Western society is what it is, therefore, because it stands in a continuum of vital experience and articulate symbolization stemming from those oddly matched wellsprings, Greek philosophy and Hebrew morality, in their unlikely, long-term cultural dialectic as mediated by a thousand years of many local manifestations of Gothic Christianity.

George Handlery about the week that was. “Too big to fail” leads to “too big to be saved”. Ending privacy. The Gleichschaltung of global taxes: “IRS’ of the World, Unite!” The Korean War and the Alliance today. The responsibility for collateral damage.

1.World Economic Forum in Davos. Fortunately, the gathering that was rich in atmospherics and short on measurable results – at least for outsiders – is over. That means no more nostalgic fist waving demonstrators for peace and justice beyond the gates demanding the implementation of their favored dead systems. Equally nice is to be rid of TV reporters that have nothing to report and so resort to snow-flock counting. Sweetening the fare are cameras panning on mountains whose peak is hidden in a cloud. Presumably, the fog comes from the whipped up common places generated in luxury hotels. (These images the writer can beat without trying from his kitchen window.)

Behold (courtesy Tundra Tabloids) the very image of Dutch "justice." After yesterday's "judicial" proceedings in Amsterdam, Holland itself is forever besmirched, its "judges" having made it clear that no semblance of fairness will enter into their proceeeding against Geert Wilders. As noted below, the "judges" slashed the roster of witnesses the Wilders defense team planned to call to the stand from eighteen to three.