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That is one suspected reason for why the Icelandic government was so eager to roll over for the Dutch and the British – they were willing to bankrupt the nation to get their snouts trotter-deep into the EU troughs. If this means I can’t join the EU I regard the referendum result as a double win. – Commenter Bjarni April 10th, 2011 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Only we don’t any more. According to Stacy Meichtry in the Wall Street Journal, France has resurrected the border with Italy. So, as Johnathan’s post below says, the euro is not working out so well, and now it seems that the Schengen Accord is being allowed to lapse. Remind me, what was the point of this EU thing again? April 8th, 2011 | 25 comments - (Comments are closed)
Seriously though, isn’t being opposed to NATO membership rather 1985? February 24th, 2011 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
The European Union has paid out vast sums since 2001 to improve Sicily’s infrastructure. What has Sicily to show for it? Nothing. No, less than nothing:
The quote is from a translation of an article in the Italian daily La Stampa and I found it via Jim Miller On Politics. Jim Miller himself comments:
The European Union, corrupt as it is, is on average less corrupt than Sicily. Idealistic Sicilians possibly hoped that getting their state largesse via the EU would result in less theft and waste. A vain hope, as Mr Miller or Professor Friedman could have told them. October 13th, 2010 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
Geert Wilders is on trial today for telling it like it is with his film ‘Fitna’. If you are a blogger, read up on the subject and get out the support. Europe may not have Freedom of Speech with teeth in it, but perhaps you can provide that poor benighted continent with implants. October 4th, 2010 | 21 comments - (Comments are closed)
Reading this item over at National Review’s Corner blog, which relates to recent attempts by Al-Quaeda types to attack targets in Western Europe – apparently foiled for now – got me thinking. One of the possible targets, judging by the comment, was the Eiffel Tower in Paris. It makes me wonder when the “blame-the-West-First” crowd are going to understand that it was always idiotic to claim that 9/11, or the Madrid atrocities, or the London bombings/etc could ever be described as the West getting some sort of “blowback” for its allegedly dastardly deeds against Muslim lands. Whenever this argument is made, the implication, explicit or not, is that the appropriate policy to adopt is the equivalent of hiding under the bed. France, let’s not forget, has more than its fair share of bad relations with some Muslim lands – Algeria in the 1950s being a case in point – but in recent years, the country’s government has been at pains to distance itself from the supposedly “cowboy” policies of Bush/Blair, although possibly things might have hardened a bit under Sarkozy. But it makes no difference. Whether you are an isolationist, multilaterialist, or neocon interventionist, the outcome is the same: the Islamists will try and kill you and your fellow citizens without discrimination. We can try and placate the crocodile, but it is ultimately a futile strategy. It is occasionally necessary to remind people of this grim fact. September 30th, 2010 | 49 comments - (Comments are closed)
Over the next two days, there are two linguistically Spanish versus Portuguese games in the World Cup: Chile plays Brazil this evening, and Spain itself plays Portugal itself tomorrow evening. Brazil and Spain are two of the favourites to win the tournament, Portugal is a good side, although perhaps without the depth of the first two, and Chile have played much more impressively than most people expected in this tournament, but are outsiders. So probably a hard fought but still one-sided game this evening, and a good game tomorrow night. Although one of course never knows. However, disregarding the actual sport and thinking about bigger things, it seems pretty clear that the governments of the two Latin American countries are rather less profligate and rather less broke than those of the two Latin European countries. How did we get here? June 28th, 2010 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
This posting is going to have to be of a more than usually interrogative sort, since I am more than usually ignorant of that whereof I blog, and which I will now copy and paste:
Is this common knowledge? Am I the last person in Europe to hear about this? I shouldn’t be surprised. You can tell which country printed which Euro. Well, well. Who knew? Who, even now, knows? The above quoted text is from a Daily Mail piece by Peter Oborne (linked to by Instapundit) about the various economic disasters the world faces. One of which is the melt-down of the Euro. My big question, aside from wondering who else does or does not know this, is: supposing lots of people do know this, or get to know it, does it not provide a mechanism by means of which mere people might hasten the collapse of the more dubious EUrozone economies, by demanding, when being paid in actual money, to be paid only in Euros printed by the undubious countries? Perhaps the answer might go: but making such judgments would be, in EUrope, illegal. Maybe so, but that won’t stop a black market making minute comparisons between differently lettered Euros, nor will it stop tourists in other parts of the world, planning their EUropean trips, demanding, once they hear such stories, to receive only the kinds of Euros that they would like. They could, for instance, refuse to accept the wrong kind of Euros, or, if given a mixture of good Euros and bad Euros, sort out the good from the bad and swap the bad ones back for pounds, or dollars, or whatever. The wrong kinds of Euro notes, from the dubious countries, could soon be treated exactly as if they were forgeries, could they not? The big difference being that these forgeries will be easier to spot. So, the much prophesied melt-down of the Euro can now be accelerated in a much more discriminating way than merely by people judging that the Euro as a whole will soon be disappearing down the toilet. We will all be able to decide – many may soon be forced to decide – which Euros will descend toilet-wards first. Won’t we? Can’t we? Now? I realise that there is more to money than mere bank notes. But if stories like those sketched above were to start circulating … Has Oborne got his facts right about this? And if he has, do my supplementary questions also make any sense? As I say, this is all completely new to me, so I could soon, after the first few responses, be wishing that I’d never even asked. June 28th, 2010 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
The usual explanation for the troubles now afflicting the EU that is doing the rounds now is that the Greeks and Spaniards have recently been behaving even more like Greeks and Spaniards than they usually do. But Helen Szamuely offers an alternative explanation for the EU’s current woes. Germans, she observes, are finally reverting to being regular Germans. Having quoted a Der Spiegel article about how German Chancellor Angela Merkel is now mysteriously unwillingly to bow to France in the manner of her predecessors since WW2, Helen says this:
And that fits a point that I have made over and over again, which is that when it comes to predicting the future, there is one kind of thing that one can say with certainty, when all else is guesswork. Statements of this kind are always going to be true: in twenty years time, you and I and everyone else will either be twenty years older, and influencing the world in the way that people twenty years older that all of us are likely to influence the world (in my case hardly at all), or dead. All manner of interesting suggestions about the relationship between events and later events can be derived from this kind of observation, including even events which have yet to happen, as Helen Szamuely’s own earlier versions of the above presumably suggest. Such speculations are not all going to be right. But they can be very interesting and suggestive. Historically, one of my favourite such twinning of two events is: Battle of Crecy 1346, Peasants Revolt 1381. A great many of those “peasants”, including their leaders, were the veterans of earlier continental wars. Now? Well, can it be coincidence that our current financial turmoil is happening just when, for the first time since it happened, hardly anyone is still alive and counting for anything who remembers the previous bout of such financial turbulence, that started erupting around 1929? June 15th, 2010 | 27 comments - (Comments are closed)
I commend this fascinating article to those who have not yet come across it – A Hidden History of Evil: The archives contain “unpublished, untranslated, top-secret Kremlin documents, mostly dating from the close of the Cold War”, yet their guardian “can’t get anyone to house them in a reputable library, publish them, or fund their translation.” Amongst numerous other tidbits, there is some very interesting stuff about Soviet dealings with François Mitterrand, Neil Kinnock, and several past and present “European Project”/EU bigwigs. (From the excellent Michael Totten, who’s doing a fine job of holding the fort over at Instapundit) May 18th, 2010 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
As recounted here in a justifiably passionate editorial about the European Union’s plans to beat up the City of London, we are reminded that, whatever the vote might have been in the May general election, that with qualified majority voting in the EU, states can – and do – gang up to put a particular country’s economic affairs in grave difficulty. Paris and Frankfurt have, in particular, resented the prosperity of the City. And as the recent travails of the euro show, there is precious little to be said for the supposedly wiser governnance of the euro zone. There was a certain amount of gloating after the US and UK got hit by the sub-prime mortgage meltdown (some of that gloating might have been justified) but it is quite clear that the rigidities of the euro zone remain a severe problem. Why we are in the EU again? May 17th, 2010 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
The $146 billion bailout package approved this weekend for Greece is advertised as a move to “stop the worst crisis in the [euro]’s 11-year history,” but it is having exactly the opposite effect. … So you have politicians defying the will of the voters to pour more water into a leaky bucket; transnational economic planners destroying a currency in order to save it; markets responding to those actions with predictable horror; and the few recipients of all the largesse too dumb to say “Thank you.” This is apparently what EU stability looks like. – The start and the finish (I recommend the stuff in between as well) of a piece by Tim Cavanaugh about the Greek Bailout May 3rd, 2010 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
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