European Decline

Sweden Seeing the Reality of “Diversity”

Featured image This morning I stumbled across a Tweet linking to an Australian “60 Minutes” segment about the unassimilable migrants that are causing the crime rate and other social dysfunctions to soar in Sweden. Turns out the episode is seven years old, but since we don’t see Australia’s “60 Minutes” here (and our CBS “60 Minutes” won’t touch this subject with a ten meter pole), I doubt little has changed in the »

First Argentina, Now the Netherlands

Featured image The Netherlands went to the polls today in a national election and Geert Wilders and his Freedom Party (the PVV) won the most votes. “Polite opinion” (that is, the EU and the major media) have long considered Wilders beyond the pale, on the same plane as Nigel Farage in Britain or Marine Le Pen in France. After all, he is anti-immigration and a Euro-skeptic, and as such not clubbable. Like »

Notes from Central Europe

Featured image An unusual experience on the train from Salzburg to Munich yesterday. The train stopped at the German border, whereupon eight police officers, well armed and wearing full body armor, boarded the train and asked to see passports. I haven’t had a passport check on a European train in years, and I thought they were obsolete in the era of the Schengen Zone that allows visa-free travel throughout the European Union. »

Vaclav Klaus, After All

Featured image SALZBURG, Austria, October 19—Back in August of 1990 I attended my first-ever meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society in Munich, West Germany, not far from my current temporary location. I was still a sluggish graduate student at the time, long past when I should have completed my dissertation, but somehow I had contrived to snag a fellowship to attend, and present a paper whose precise topic I don’t now recall, »

The Daily Chart: The High Cost of High-Cost Energy

Featured image Everyone knows that Germany was the “first mover” on the net-zero bandwagon, spending more than a trillion Euros over the last 15 years on its “energiewende” (“energy revolution”) only to see their greenhouse gas emissions begin rising again, and last year reviving coal-power to keep the lights on. One thing they did achieve was causing consumer energy prices to roughly double. I guess that “wind-and-solar-are-cheaper” isn’t working out according to »

To the Budapest Station

Featured image To the Finland Station is Edmund Wilson’s magnum opus about the long train of revolutionary thought and action stretching from Jules Michelet to Lenin, culminating in the October revolution in 1917 that gave birth to Soviet Russia. It has an especially vivid account of the journey of the sealed train that delivered Lenin—”like a plague bacillus,” as Churchill put it in The World Crisis—to Petrograd. Yesterday I arrived for a »

Night Falls On Free Speech

Featured image In Europe in general, and Denmark in particular. Mark Steyn recalls the Mohammed cartoon crisis of 2005 and the sequels that have played out over the ensuing years: In 2005 Jyllands-Posten, one of the biggest-selling newspapers in Denmark, as part of an exploration of the state of free speech, was willing to publish a dozen cartoons of Mohammed by prominent cartoonists. In 2010, on the fifth anniversary, I was given »

Tom Friedman Says . . . Drill, Baby, Drill?

Featured image I’ll bet Tom Friedman would really like to indulge his authoritarian impulse to be “China for a day” (because then we could impose the “right solutions” to all our problems) right now. Today he uncorked a primal scream whose subtext is: Sarah Palin (and Donald Trump) were right: we should drill, baby, drill! here in the U.S.  Yes—for oil and natural gas! Don’t believe me? It turns out that Putin »

Biden Gets a Clue?

Featured image The Washington Post reported yesterday that someone woke up Slow Joe: White House alarm rises over Europe as Putin threatens energy supply White House officials are growing increasingly alarmed about Europe’s energy crisis and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s threats to force a bleak winter on the continent. Seeking to punish Russia for the invasion of Ukraine and force a retreat, Western allies have moved to set a cap on what »

“The Lamps Are Going Out All Over Europe”

Featured image Perhaps the most memorable comment at the outbreak of World War I—or at least the one quoted in every history book—came from the British foreign minister Sir Edward Grey: “The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our life-time.” The first half of this statement suddenly applies again to Europe’s energy crisis that threatens a cold and dark winter ahead, and we’ll have »

War Is the Health of the State, 21st Century Edition

Featured image I don’t have a firm conclusion about just what we should do about the Ukraine crisis (beyond not sending Kamala Harris to Munich to embarrass the country). We ought to arm the Ukrainians with all the weapons they can use (short of nukes), impose serious sanctions on Russia, and perhaps some heavy cyber actions. But it is also worth considering that if Germany won’t stand up with the rest of the »

Happy New Year from Eric Zemmour

Featured image To say “opinion is divided about Eric Zemmour,” the right-wing candidate for president of France, is an understatement, and we have heard from a number of sensible observers of French politics that Zemmour might not be the best idea. Certainly the mainstream media is as panicked about him as they are about Trump. Some conservative critics say he a lightweight, a poser, the equivalent of Bill O’Reilly, and running chiefly to »

Will France Save the West?

Featured image Yesterday in our “Picks” section we linked to Christopher Caldwell’s terrific CRB essay “France on the Verge of Civil War,” which was a deep dive into the rise of Eric Zemmour on the French political scene. The controversial Zemmour has rocked to the top of the early polls ahead of the presidential election scheduled for next spring, leaping ahead of Marine Le Pen, the previous outsider candidate from the right. »

The Green Grift, or Gangrene Energy?

Featured image The renewable energy fanatics like to point out that the cost of solar power has been falling dramatically over the past decade, the result of technological and manufacturing improvements. This is true, but raises the question: why does the solar industry continue to demand subsidies then? The Financial Times ran an unintentionally hilarious and illuminating story on this point yesterday: French solar investors up in arms over threat to renege on »

Nigel Farage Bids Farewell to the EU

Featured image We’re less than 48 hours away from Britain’s exit from the European Union (oh happy day!), and today at the EU Parliament in Strasbourg the irrepressible Nigel Farage took a well deserved victory lap. Very much worth watching the whole five minutes here, especially for the cheeky violation of EU Parliament rules against displaying national flags at the end. Watch all the way through to the churlish chairlady, who has »

The End of Multiculturalism in Scandinavia?

Featured image Let’s take in a few headlines from the last few days, starting with the New York Times: COPENHAGEN — More than 60 years of hassle-free travel from Sweden to Denmark has ended after the Danish authorities, struggling to quell a wave of bombings blamed on Swedish gangs, introduced passport checks for the first time since the 1950s. The measures put in place on Tuesday are temporary and will be applied »

Yes to Acquiring Greenland! [With Literary Comment by John]

Featured image It is amusing to watch the reaction to Trump floating the idea of the U.S. buying Greenland. It’s not like we have never done such a thing before (i.e., Louisiana, Alaska), and while there were arguably constitutional defects with those acquisitions (especially Louisiana), just watch as Trump-hating liberals who ordinarily say our Constitution should be as “flexible” as Gumby and as “alive” as a mold suddenly become strict constructionists again. »