Galileo is a vanity project set up to ensure that Brussels has its own version of the American-run GPS satellite navigation system. It is also, though the eurocrats don't like to talk about it, part of the EU's secretive drive to establish a military space policy. As far back as 2007 the French ministry of defence announced that space should act as 'a unifier in the emergence of a European Defence.' Sarkozy, you see, fancies himself as the commander of a 'European defence.' Galileo will therefore be connected to both military and civilian authorities. According to a 2008 report by the Transnational Institute, an Amsterdam-based think-tank: 'Contrary to the US, where most space initiatives have a clear military label, within the EU the issue is still caught up in much secretiveness.' 'Navigation and observation satellites today play an active and crucial role in many different aspects of warfare, from intelligence gathering and communications, to missile and munitions guidance.' 'The desire for European military autonomy is at least part of the reason why the EU has proceeded with Galileo.' It would be vital in any European army deployment of the sort of GPS-guided artillery used by the Americans in Afghanistan. When the idea was hatched, EU taxpayers were told that private investors would join in Galileo. But investors have since pulled out, saying the project -- now delayed at least until 2017 or 2018 -- has no commercial prospects. According to Open Europe, the Americans, Russians, Chinese, Indians and Japanese have all either launched, or are soon to launch, their own sat-nav systems. So the market share on which the member countries were sold this Galileo wheeze by Brussels is near-vanished. The whole thing is just a combination of EU vanity and a sly attempt to develop Star Wars technologies for a wannabe Euro-army. From Solzhenitsyn's The First Circle, his 1968 novel of stoicism and dignity in the face of imprisonment: 'Let us drink to the resurrection of the dead.' So this blog had better not miss it. Sobran was the kind of writer who nearly doesn't exist this side of the pond. We can mourn that, but for the moment, I'd rather just remember Sobran. I met him briefly when I was a very junior editor at the Human Life Review in New York. Which is to say, the great man paused at my desk and my stack of galley proofs. He was the best writer on the publication, indeed, the best writer as well on the other journal in the same building, William F Buckley's National Review. One of Sobran's obits quoted my editor at the HLR, the late Jim McFadden. He said Sobran's name 'on anything whatever -- article, review, commentary -- was the guarantee of fine writing, sharp wit, and a most distinctive style which...made one think of nobody else so much as G.K. Chesterton.' I won't go into the internal conservative rows which ended with Sobran leaving National Review and being smeared as an anti-Semite by Buckley because of his views on Israel. I'll leave it at this line from Sobran: 'I'm not an anti-Semite. I'm a pro-Semite who can see the other side.' You can add that to other Sobran pensées Stove has collected: 'Women and minorities never have a nice day' 'If termites could talk, they would call what they were doing to the house "progress."' 'I miss the serenity of believing I lived under a good government, wisely designed and benevolent in its operation. But, as St Paul says, there comes a time to put away childish things.' 'Post-Vatican-II sacred music...falls midway between the sound of an old hootenanny and Barry Manilow before his genius had matured.' Or this line, said by Sobran to Stove at dinner: 'I can understand why sodomy is a sin, but I can't understand why it's a temptation.' Stove put it well: 'Joe remained in his essence wholly American. His existence served to remind the public that the Grand Tradition of witty and lethal journalistic rage - encompassing Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, H.L. Mencken, Westbrook Pegler, and George Schuyler -- has had its representatives in our time too.'
17 October 2010 8:53 AM
Britain must now pay almost £3bn for secretive EU Star Wars project
Sunday 17 October 2010
Taxpayers in the EU are now going to be forced to pay a phenomenal €22.2bn -- more than £19bn -- to develop and run the Galileo satellite project. According to research out today from Open Europe, Britain's contribution to the cost of the project will be £2.95bn, up from the original estimate of £385m.
Today I can offer just one line.
It was only a note this week from the Australian writer R.J. Stove that told me Joe Sobran was dead. I should have known. Sobran was one of the greatest conservative writers in America, and his death on September 30th was mourned in every American publication worth reading. Too much EU at my desk here in Brussels, and I missed it.
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