From the desk of George Handlery on Fri, 2010-12-31 10:47 This week’s “Duly Noted” concentrates on a single topic: the political situation in Hungary. From the outset, the reader should be aware of a prejudice he might be nurturing in his subconscious. It is that “big things” happen in “big countries”. Indeed, they often do. Size, numbers and statistical probability are the explanation. Even so, small countries, by their size or by the attention one is conditioned to give them, can be places where scientific innovations that change our way of life are hatched. The same is true for public affairs. A case in point is the Magna Charta. Illiterates only doubt its world historical significance. Nevertheless, in 1215 England has been a minor country. Wrongly, no one noticed. From the desk of Koenraad Elst on Thu, 2010-12-30 13:26 In an obvious allusion to social problems with Islam, Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands stated in her 2010 Christmas speech: "The danger is that what unites us gets obscured and differences are magnified. Then walls of supposed oppositions are raised and positions hardened." Within the outlines of such a platitudinous court speech, Her Majesty seems to be saying that the rise of Geert Wilders' Freedom Party, and "Islamophobia" in general, promotes polarization. Whereas all human beings essentially share roughly the same needs and aspirations, the warners against Islam ("Islam bashers") will create artificial separation walls. It is in this sense that most observers viewed the royal speech, Geert Wilders included. In a first reaction, he twittered that the twelve recently arrested Somali terror suspects "in the Netherlands certainly were not looking at what unites us." From the desk of Steve Kogan on Thu, 2010-12-30 10:38 This is Part 1 of "'I See Further Than Others': Reflections On Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West and The Hour of Decision", a serial essay by Steve Kogan. In a late autobiographical sketch, Saul Bellow writes that when he was young "Smart Jewish schoolboys in Chicago were poring over Spengler at night." F. Scott Fitzgerald said The Decline was one of the formative books in his life, and Henry Miller read him in his cramped Brooklyn apartment and later wrote a glowing account of his experience. Begun just before and completed soon after World War I, The Decline of the West not only struck a nerve in readers from America to Russia but also generated a “Spengler controversy” among historians, philosophers, and theologians that enhanced its notoriety between the two world wars (1). From the desk of Johnny Fincioen on Tue, 2010-12-28 17:06 No respect for Parliament. No respect for judges. No respect for the constitution. December gave us a taste of what’s coming in 2011. Obama’s administration grabs the power to regulate the Internet. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has a board of five people who are selected and nominated by the President. The FCC declared herself authorized to define rules about how and what can be done on the Internet. With this decision she brings the American Internet under the control of the US government. Three people, all selected by Obama, two women and one man, approved the decision against the two men, chosen by Bush during his presidency. The FCC took her decision although over 300 of the federal senators and House representatives of the 535 in total, a clear majority, had written a statement opposing such power grab. The aversion will certainly be even larger in the new 2011 Congress. The FCC action, with full support of Obama, is also in direct violation of the decision of a federal judge, who in April 2010 decided the FCC has no power to regulate the Internet. From the desk of A. Millar on Mon, 2010-12-27 16:46 With an election having taken place in May, 2010 should have been the year in which politics took center stage. Instead, the pressing issues of the day were largely ignored during the campaign period, as they have been for the last decade. Partly as a consequence, 2010 turned into the year in which politics spilled over into the streets. Welfare cuts was, to some extent, an issue that the parties tackled, perhaps since they were inevitable. Still, students – the base of Britain’s third party, the Liberal Democrats – expressed their outrage at the university fees hike proposed by the coalition government (of which the Lib Dems are the junior partner). Unfortunately they were also whipped up into rioting throughout November and December by various socialist organizations – which appear to have remained off the radars of the authorities and media. From the desk of Svein Sellanraa on Sat, 2010-12-25 11:29 Norway's chattering classes often claim that the American political spectrum skews to the Right. Most Norwegians, I find, imagine that the U.S.'s Democratic Party is right-wing by their country's political standards, and that the Republicans are a cabal of borderline Nazis that wants to shoot abortion doctors and hang the unemployed. Over the last few years, Norwegian pundits and foreign correspondents have informed me that John Kerry, Al Franken, and Barack Obama are all actually ultraconservatives, and that National Review in its current MOR incarnation is actually a magazine of the far Right. One could easily dismiss all this as simple anti-American ignorance, and that may well be part of the answer – but there is something else at work here as well. Scandinavian political blinkeredness is not limited to the U.S. For instance, whenever an election is won by the Sweden Democrats, whose opinions are almost absurdly moderate by any objective standard, cultural elites across the continent react with hysteria and indignation, as if extermination camps in Stockholm and pogroms in Gothenburg were just around the corner. The same sort of reaction occurs whenever Norway's Progress Party experiences a bump in the polls; they, we are told, are right-wing extremists, “right-wing extremists” here and everywhere else in Scandinavia meaning “moderate socialists.”When Invention Is The Mother Of The News
Queen Beatrix On Islam
Spengler And The Totalitarians
Democracy, Obama Style
Rundown 2010: UK Shaken But Not Stirred
Neocons In Norway
Friday, 31 December 2010
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