Last night the Bureau of the European Parliament accepted what they saw as the inevitable and agreed that Libertas was a European Political Party. This meant that they were able to go and pick up 200,000 Euro.

And then the wheels came off. In order to set up the party what is required is 7 elected members at Euro, national or regional levels. One of these signataries was Igor Gräzin, an Estonian Liberal. Now he had voted against the Lisbon Treaty, but was a member of the Liberal allied Estonian Reform Party. When ALDE, the Liberal group in the EP, discovered that one of their own had joined a different European political party they went, dare I say ballistic.

'If all the bank loans were paid up, no one would have a bank deposit, and there would not be a dollar of currency or coin in circulation. This is a staggering thought. We are completely dependent on the commercial banks for our money. Someone has to borrow every dollar we have in circulation, cash or credit. If the banks create ample synthetic money, we are prosperous; if not, we starve. We are absolutely without a permanent money system. When one gets a complete grasp upon the picture, the tragic absurdity of our hopeless position is almost incredible - but there it is. It is the most important subject intelligent persons can investigate and reflect upon. It is so important that our present civilization may collapse unless it is widely understood and the defects remedied very soon.' - Robert H. Hemphill, Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta

Standing at radical variance with Platonism in the ancient world is Epicureanism. Plato, the moralist and theologian – the incipient monotheist – developed in his dialogues a representation of the cosmos as grounded in a divine will, or at least in a divine intelligence. So congenial is the Platonic vision to the faith of the Gospels that seven hundred years after Plato's death and after political, social, and cultural transformations in the Mediterranean world, Saint Augustine of Hippo could see in his philosophical precursor a genuine anticipation of Christianity.

I used to live in San Francisco. The San Francisco that despite having been roiled by hippies, beatniks, anti-this-and-that, still had the feel of the charming, civilized town that it had been when Alfred Hitchcock was shooting his masterpieces there.

Observe the setting of Davidson’s Pet Shop in The Birds.  It’s a staged scene, but this is San Francisco’s Union Square in 1962-3 and that is the way middle class people looked and dressed in San Francisco. Tippi Hedren is an upper class society girl in this movie, so perhaps her suit has a finer cut and her clutch purse a higher price tag – but watch the other people milling about (and don’t miss Hitch himself).

To my essay Western Civilization and Socratic Dialogue, Dymphna of the Gates of Vienna blog wrote a comment about Greek vs. Chinese ways of thinking. This is an interesting subject which I will explore further here, with an emphasis on mathematical astronomy. The Danish nobleman and astronomer Tycho Brahe (1546–1601), born in Scania or Skåne in southern Sweden, then a part of the Kingdom of Denmark, from 1600 until his death in 1601 was assisted by theGerman mathematical astronomer Johannes Kepler (1571–1630), who published his Astronomia nova in 1609 with calculations of the elliptical orbit of Mars based on Brahe's careful observations. The English scholar Sir Isaac Newton (1642–1726) has no equal in the history of science, with the possible exception of Albert Einstein. Yet even he did not work in isolation.

The introduction of hate crime legislation brings a subjective element into the legal system. Where typically Lady Justice is blind and only takes objective facts into consideration, disregarding the position and the opinions of those committing the crimes, she may now apply the law unequally and selectively. Our societies subsequently risk losing an important principle of Western law, viz. equality under the law. Europe has already gone further down this road than America, but the U.S. is following fast in Europe’s tracks.

If, as is expected, the judges of the International Criminal Court in The Hague confirm the indictment for genocide of the president of Sudan (an indictment having been issued by the prosecutor in July 2008, which requires confirmation by the judges for it to be valid) then the principle of national sovereignty will have been definitively buried in international law. What used to be the uncontested cornerstone of the international system will have become a dead letter – and even a principle associated with the worst abuses of human rights.

The House of Lords is a venerable British institution, but what does one get if one accepts Muslims in? This:

A member of the Lords intended to invite her colleagues to a private meeting in a conference room in the House of Lords to meet the Dutch politician Geert Wilders, an elected member of the Dutch parliament, to watch his controversial movie Fitna and discuss the movie and Mr. Wilders’ opinions with him.

Recently Nicolas Sarkozy announced plans to pursue a vigorous policy of diversity and métissage. Concretely, this means giving preference to minorities in job hiring and prosecuting those who do not comply. In other words, affirmative action as a government policy from which none are exempt.

In his message Sarkozy insisted that the French people must change, that there will be dire consequences if they don't, and that not to intermarry racially is bad for the survival of the country. Thus he amalgamated the concepts of preference for minorities in job hiring with that of the need for the French to intermarry racially.