Freedom on fire

Freedom is no more than a piece of combustible paper: a forbidden book, a speech draft in longhand, a film no longer printed on combustible stock but still setting minds aglow. All tyrannies in recorded history have sought to burn, confiscate and banish that paper or other media that carried the ideas of liberty, and to burn or banish the authors. Nowadays, such tyrannies exist primarily in Dar al Islam and in its lesser franchises of elective dhimmi socialism (abbrev. dhimmisocialism) in Western Europe and Canada and in nascent forms in the United States and Australia.

Paper, of course, has less wholesome uses, such as receptacle for sanctimonious twaddle, self-congratulatory schadenfreude, ignorant grandstanding, and solipsistic verbal onanism.  What used to be called the “great” newspapers (and magazines) of the world all too often misapply precious wood pulp to such ends.  

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George Handlery about the week that was.

1. While writing this, the news spread that US federal spending outside the security and entitlement area is to be frozen for three years. Regardless of the laudable intention, some skepticism is warranted. The weaker the President gets – the vote in Massachusetts suggests that Obama is losing ground – the more he needs to spend. Spending buys support. The more is spent, the greater the influence of the administration will be. Stopping spending for the duration of a speech is possible. Beyond that time limit, however, we discover a major problem. It is that spending is not caused by discovering new holes into which money can be stuffed. The core reason for spending is that there is a philosophy according to which the allocation of dough heals problems – or at least it will shut the mouth of complainers. Therefore, the need of priority is not a case-by-case reduction of some marginal expenses. What the situation demands is the abandonment of the philosophy behind the process. The one is meant that regards the throwing of money at problems as statecraft.

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A decade ago, the introduction of the euro, the common currency of 16 of the 27 EU member states, was a political decision – not a monetary one. When the euro was introduced in 1999, Nobel Prize winner Milton Friedman wrote to his friend, the Italian economist Antonio Martino: “As you know, I am very negative about the euro and I am very doubtful about how it will work out. However, I am less pessimistic about it now than I was earlier simply because I never expected that the various countries would display the kind of discipline that was required in order to qualify for the euro.”

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Today, I am posting an extraordinary letter from a soldier currently stationed in Iraq, a sometime penpal of mine to whom I sent my three-part series on the aftermath of the surge to elicit his opinion. Knowing how thoughtful he is, I expected a substantive response. Given his time constraints alone, I did not expect an essay of this scope and I decided, with his permission, to present it here. It is unlike any commentary I have read from Iraq; it is both coolly reasoned and deeply passionate, and certain to challenge and disturb readers across the political spectrum: PC-believing liberals, Iraq-as-success-believing conservatives, Islam-as-a-religion-of-peaceniks of both Left and Right.

So be it.

He writes:

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Some things never go away. The controversy over Pope Pius XII's actions during World War II was recently reignited when Pope Benedict XVI signed a decree affirming that his predecessor displayed "heroic virtues" during his lifetime. When the pope visited the Great Synagogue of Rome on Sunday, Riccardo Pacifici, president of Rome's Jewish community, told him: "The silence of Pius XII before the Shoah still hurts because something should have been done."

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George Handlery about the week that was. Crushing crises and the culture of improvisation. Close your eyes and the troubles are gone. Intellectuals and tyrannies: Persecution is a form of coveted recognition. Present perils and the downgrading of the Soviet threat. The ostrich-test.

1.Haiti. The tragedy behind the crisis will be hijacked to prove pet peeves. This writer’s perspective and experience is with war between men, and not with nature against man. From this personal perspective, the ability of the locals to improvise and to bear deserves recognition. People that live in the kind of perfected systems in which everything works as it is supposed to, are subject to two errors. One: They underestimate the ability of some societies to cope with unanticipable cataclysms. Second: They overestimate their own skills to cope with the kind of devastation that leads to a total collapse. Closely related to this is that advanced societies are skilled in the art of circumnavigating and avoiding turbulence. Nevertheless, some crises are unavoidable and the breakdown caused is inevitable. The earthquake would have severed the sinews that bind together optimally structured societies. Overall, the Haitians, conditioned as they were by their badly functioning system, coped well with the collapse of the state, the economy, the infrastructure, social institutions and the disappearance laws.

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The Chinese made promising beginnings in the secular observation of nature, but never completed a full ideological framework for the scientific project comparable to Greek natural philosophy or developed an organized program dedicated to promoting the scientific method.

We should be careful about projecting a too modern understanding of “science” onto the activities of ancient scholars. As the eminent historian Edward Grant reminds us, “Science in the ancient world was a tenuous and ephemeral matter. Most people were indifferent to it, and its impact was meager. It was a very small number of Greek thinkers who laid the foundations for what would eventually become modern science. Of that small number, a few were especially brilliant and contributed monumentally to the advancement of science.”

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There's a lot invested in the European Union. Not only money (to the tune of €100 billion a year), also massive amounts of confidence from Europeans towards the Union, assuming that it will protect citizens / consumers from the evils of dangerous products, exploitative business and the dangers of the independent nation-state, all while protecting democracy and citizens' rights. Former Chief Accountant Marta Andreasen has a discouraging tale to tell.

First, a bit of history. Marta Andreasen was hired in January 2002 as Chief Accountant responsible for the EU budget at large, with the specific additional task of initiating reform of an obviously deficient system of accounting that each year permitted billions of euros to vanish, pure and simple.

A case of corruption had in 1999 brought down the European Commission led by Jacques Santer, and the clear message from the European Union was that now it was time for zero tolerance of irregularities and waste. After all, it is taxpayer money we entrust the European Union, not money earned by the Union directly. We should expect that money to be spent responsibly, or not spent at all.

Marta Andreasen was hired to put the required reforms into effect. However, she was dismissed after less than five months in office, a dismissal that led to a lengthy legal process, but no reform. This book is her account of what happened.

For the benefit of those who do not want to read the complete essay, my opinion is:

Well worth reading, 4 of 6 stars.

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In the summer of 2008, as many readers know, I traveled to six European countries to interview politicians dedicated to breaking, halting and/or reversing the Islamization of their countries (here is a collection of some of the writings inspired by the trip).

One of those politicians was Geert Wilders, then the little-known (outside of the Netherlands) leader of a very small party, PVV, the Party for Freedom. Only a year and a half later, Wilders is the most famous Dutchman in the world, and his party rivals the current ruling party in popularity. Wilders is also now on trial for his political life and liberty – hardly a coincidence.

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I have been developing a "food theory of culture" with one of my friends. A good meal should consist of a variety of foods. Even excellent ingredients will become boring if you rely on just one or two of them all the time. What makes a fine meal is not just fine ingredients and a competent cook but the overall balance between the various ingredients, where the totality is greater than the sum of the parts. You need something salty, something sweet, something spicy and something refreshing. Focusing on each individual component and stating with certainty that “this is the thing that created the success” is a mistake, but a very common one.

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The Scottish theologian and mathematician John Napier (1550-1617) studied at the University of St Andrews, the oldest university in Scotland, and spent several years in Continental Europe. He invented logarithms, a mathematical device which simplified and speeded up manual calculations and aided the work of scholars for centuries. This inspired the invention of the slide rule during the 1600s, which was excellent for multiplication and division and the calculation of powers and roots. The Apollo lunar program in the United States as late as the 1960s kept slide rules as backups for their electronic calculators. Napier improved and popularized the decimal notation introduced by the Flemish mathematician Simon Stevin.

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George Handlery about the week that was. An ailment of our culture? Terrorism is a calling: Even released terrorists remain in the business. Two reactions to underdevelopment. Self-exclusion and the frustrated immigrant.

1. Shocking is that this will not shock. The suppressed ability to show natural outrage is a symptom of the ailment of our culture. Reports have asserted something disturbing about Antonio Samaranch who used to head the International Olympic Committee (1980-2001). Keep in mind that, even if you are probably taught that sport is sport and politics are politics, modern dictatorships use sports to prove the superiority of their system. Now those who had always felt that he was too chummy with the Kremlin are having the facts that confirm their earlier discomfort. The once Franco-man used to be the Minister of Sport. (Did the blemish of his past make him respond to pressure?) Then he became Ambassador to the USSR. Having been involved in a smuggling affair, he is said to have become vulnerable. The predicament led to extortion and that was followed by compliance. The individual case is also a reflection of the fact that Western governments and social institutions, as well as international organizations, were shot through with individuals who, under duress or by conviction, served Communism’s cause.

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The police in the Norwegian capital Oslo revealed that 2009 set yet another record: compared to 2008, there were twice as many cases of assault rapes. In each and every case, not only in 2008 and 2009 but also in 2007, the offender was a non-Western immigrant. At the same time, in 9 out of 10 cases, the victim was Norwegian, not just by nationality, but also by ethnicity.

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Albert Camus’ L’Homme revolté [Man in Revolt] or The Rebel (1951) is a milestone of postwar philosophical writing, widely admired for its diagnosis of a combat-shattered, God-deprived, ideologically disgruntled world. In The Rebel Camus (1913-1960) was distancing himself from Existentialism – that of Sartre, anyway – in favor of something more like a tradition-rooted perspective. Existentialism had already caricatured itself in the early 1950s so that its slogans might serve undergraduates and taxicab drivers. Camus quoted at length from Friedrich Nietzsche and Fyodor Dostoyevsky; he reiterated that modernity itself was askew and had become bitterly unsatisfying to those caught up in its tenacious grip. Despite his range of reference, however, Camus makes no mention in The Rebel of Gustave Le Bon (1841-1931), author of The Psychology of Revolution (1895) and The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (1896). Nevertheless Le Bon’s sharp-eyed meditations prefigure Camus’ “Absurdist” critique of society and culture, but from a non-disgruntled and distinctly rightwing point of view. Le Bon’s World in Revolt: A Psychological Study of our Times (1920) even anticipated Camus’ title. Le Bon’s follow-up, Le déséquilibre du monde [The Disequilibrium of the World] (1923) offered a trope – that of vertigo – which the Existentialists, including Camus, would eagerly receive and exploit. Camus’ protagonist in The Stranger, Mersault, feels such dizziness just before he murders a random Arab on the Algerian beach.

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Isaac Newton, perhaps the greatest scientist the world has ever seen, was born in Woolsthorpe, a village in Lincolnshire, England, into a family of farmers. His father owned property and animals and was not poor, but he was illiterate. Newton lost his father before birth. His mother soon remarried, and Isaac was effectively separated from her during most of his childhood, left in the care of his maternal grandmother. Some biographers trace the emotional instability he sometimes demonstrated as an adult back to insecurities he experienced in his childhood. Unlike his father he got an education. At the grammar school in Grantham he gained a firm command of Latin. In the words of biographer James Gleick:

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