The European Union, in order to save itself from the faults of its own legislation, has decided that Iceland and the Icelandic people are expendable. Realising its own failures the EU has decided, through the British and Dutch governments, that the Icelandic authorities have to shoulder the responsibility which is rightfully the EU regulators’. This is what the so-called Icesave dispute is mainly about.

Thanksgiving is arguably the most American of holidays. Those of us with a secular bent look at it as not only a chance to feast on turkey and the fixings, but to reconnect with family. Those of us with a Christian bent fall to our knees in thanks to God for all that we have been blessed with. Regardless of emphasis, it is one holiday that transcends nearly every division in American society.[i]

A turning point in history was the ancient Greek invention of scientific theory, or “natural philosophy.” This process began on the then-fertile western coast of Anatolia or Asia Minor (present-day Turkey), in the region known as Ionia. It is traditionally said to have started with Thales of Miletus, who flourished in the decades after 600 BC. Authors James E. McClellan and Harold Dorn elaborate in Science and Technology in World History, second edition:

George Handlery about the week that was. Even in small countries, major trends can unfold early. About noble leaders and their reluctant peons that refuse to follow. International protest and its use to the tottering local leadership. Security, fear and freedom. Radicalization as a face saving device. Immigration then and now. Imported prejudices, failure and the allegation of discrimination.

1. Small country, major issue. Normally, Switzerland is not of much interest to the international reader. Already by standing falsely accused of having invented the cuckoo clock, she is automatically downgraded. The neglect can also be attributed to her size, a functioning system – a juicy crisis brings attention.

Yesterday the Lisbon Treaty came into force by which the European Union has become a state in its own right. Though many of them do not yet realize it, 500 million Europeans now have a common government to which the governments of their own countries are legally subservient. Since yesterday, the 27 member states of the EU have been reduced to the status of provinces.

The Lisbon Treaty, which is the basic charter (i.e. its Constitution) of the new EU state, stipulates that the parliaments of the 27 provinces are obliged to “contribute actively to the good functioning of the Union.” It is their legal obligation to further primarily the interests of the Union, rather than those of their own people.

In The Twilight of the Idols (1888), Friedrich Nietzsche proposed to teach “how to philosophize with a hammer.” Hammers find their predestined use, according to Nietzsche, in the smashing of idols, by which he meant the assortment of falsehoods and platitudes that constituted, in his view, the shabby existing dominant representation of life and the world. Nietzsche never practiced anything like systematic philosophy – he wrote as he thought, aphoristically and in paragraphs. One must take him unsystematically, too, or rather selectively – because, having atomized all the images, as he supposed himself to have done, and having found nothing behind them, as he convinced himself, the devilish idea that everything is nothing strongly tempted him. He wrote of it under the image of “the abyss.” If the Nietzschean philosophical impulse transmigrated for the good in souls like Oswald Spengler and H. L. Mencken, who were skeptics and iconoclasts, it would regrettably also have done so in souls, if that were the word, like Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Jacques Derrida, to whom harsher labels must apply. Spengler and Mencken warned against nihilism; the polysyllabic abolishers of logic and morality taught the faddishly inclined to crave for l’abîme and Das Ungrund. The legion of cipher-minions has been craving thusly, and arrogantly on behalf of everyone else, ever since.

  An analysis by Prof. Anthony Coughlan

 

With the coming into force of the Lisbon Treaty on Tuesday 1 December, members of the European Parliament, who up to now have been “representatives of the peoples of the States brought together in the Community” (Art.189 TEC),  become “representatives of the Union’s citizens” (Art.14 TEU).

This change in the status of MEPs is but one illustration of the constitutional revolution being brought about by the Lisbon Treaty.

For Lisbon, like the EU Constitution before it, establishes for the first time a European Union which is constitutionally separate from and superior to its Member States, just as the USA is separate from and superior to its 50 constituent states or as Federal Germany is in relation to its Länder.

<!--StartFragment-->On Tuesday the Lisbon Treaty comes into force and the European Union (EU) takes on the status of a genuine state with its own President and Foreign Minister. The Russian newspaper Pravda (Nov. 4) recently wrote that the EU is beginning to look like a “reincarnation of the USSR.” The appointment of Cathy Ashton as the first EU Foreign Minister (full title” “High Commissioner for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy”) would seem to confirm this.

George Handlery about the week that was. Worrying good news from the Middle East. How development helps to stabilize poverty. A claim that supports “the other side”. Still no one to call in Europe. The new non-American Dream. Save the welfare state, import more dependents.

 

1. We are not used to get good news from the murky Middle East. Before the submission of these lines, it became known that Israel has developed technical means to protect herself from rocket attacks. The soon-to-be-achieved capability also applies to Iran’s long range missiles that might carry the nuclear war heads she aggressively claims not to be developing. The impending emasculation of the attacker’s means is accompanied by an offensive development. Israeli submarines with a nuclear capacity will be deployed to guarantee retaliation in case her territorial defense fails. In Cold War terms, mutual assured destruction that had worked rather well seems to be resurrected. The chances of nuclear war appear to be reduced. Here, however, we should become cautious. Significant differences can be discerned.