Frank Christian Hansel, a German AfD legislator, writes for American Greatness that the EU is a doomed enterprise. He believes it is based on premises that ignore human nature and cultural differences, is a relic of the Cold War, and should be replaced with regional groupings that make sense to their inhabitants.
He makes a reasonable argument that the EU, as now constituted, is not representative government in any true sense. It is rather of, by, and for bureaucrats responsible only to each other, not answering to any electorate. He concludes.
The time of the Union as we know it is running out. The only question is whether Europe will shape this transition itself—or whether it will be torn apart by the contradictions of its own artificial construction and have its place in the world decided by others.
The alternative is clearer than many care to admit: Either Europe becomes political again—or it remains an apparatus until other powers decide its place in the world.
That sounds prophetic. My one quibble with his column it that he views Russia as a natural part of Europe while ignoring its hegemonic behavior vis-a-vis Ukraine and the Baltic republics. I find AfD is too weak on the role of Russia.
On this date in 1944, the largest armada ever assembled on this planet gathered off the shores of the Normandy region of Nazi-occupied France. Warships and freighters, landing craft and amphibians, they deposited American, British, and Canadian troops onshore and supported them with naval artillery fire and materiel.
Overhead the skies swarmed with warplanes, their wings wearing the "invasion stripes" of alternating black and white (see photos and explanation). Some dropped bombs, some dropped parachutists, and smaller planes shot up German vehicles and armor.
The landing was a success in spite of iffy weather, and the invasion continued eastward until the war in Europe ended some 11 months later. While all this was going on Soviet troops were attacking westward and the two attacks met in Germany in April, 1945, near the Elbe River.
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About WW II, the DrsC recommend two TV mini-series originally broadcast on ABC TV, based on books by Herman Wouk and entitled, like the books, The Winds of War and War and Remembrance. The first covers the period before the US entered the ongoing World War II, and the second covers the war period. The first has 7 episodes and the second has 12.
Both series star Robert Mitchum playing naval officer Pug Henry, Polly Bergen as his wife Rhoda, and Victoria Tennant as Pamela Tudsbury. The continuing story follows a Navy family, the Henrys, a Polish-American Jewish family, the Jastrows, and a British family, the Tudsburys.
They includes portrayals of FDR and Eleanor, Churchill, Eisenhower, Patton, Hitler, Mussolini, Goering, many German generals, Pearl Harbor, D Day, El Alamein, extermination camps, the war in the Pacific, in Europe, and at home. In its 19 hours it literally has a cast of thousands.
We own the two series on CD, they also appear to be available on YouTube for streaming. A longtime DrsC family mid-winter ritual is to watch the two series in sequence over 10 or more nights. We recommend them, your experience may vary.
The Brits are dealing with an event that is very nearly the mirror image of the George Floyd event. A young white Brit - Henry Nowak - was stabbed by a young Sikh - Vickram Digma* - and when the police arrived they handcuffed Henry, the victim, and asked Vickram if he was okay.
Henry meanwhile repeatedly said "I've been stabbed," and "I can't breathe." To this the cops replied "I don't think you have, mate."
No ambulance was called and Henry died, choking on his own blood. Eventually Vickram was tried, convicted, and sentenced to 21 years, the minimum allowed for this offense.
An insider board investigated the officers' behavior and found them 'not culpable.' The British public is beyond angry at the police taking the non-Brit's side, something they've been taught to do in an DEI effort not to stir up immigrant anger.
Being even-handed when non-whites are involved is a punishable offense for Brit cops. British prosecutors are lame, too.
By the way, Brits have mostly gotten guns off the street, so now they cope with, and worry about, "knife crime" and autos as mass murder implements. The impulse to violence will find a way.
*Some sources render it Vickrum Digwa.
If you're wondering how to think about the primary election results in California, I have a good choice for you. Writing for Vox, Christian Paz interviews Dan Walters, who has spent a lifetime studying CA politics and writing about them for the Sac. Bee. Dan is old school which means you don't know his own politics. Walters opines:
Karen Bass is definitely in trouble. If you're an incumbent mayor and you can't get 50 percent in the primary, that means most of the voters are against you.
I think Bass defeats Raman, but I think with Pratt she's got a potential problem here because he's struck something in the voters in Los Angeles, their unhappiness with the status quo on homelessness, crime, and the fires.
It looks like Democratic voters kind of rejected the more progressive wing of their party. (snip) California is not as progressive as it's often portrayed in the national media. And there are a lot of Republicans in California - a quarter of the registered voters.
Walters also talks about how CA got saddled with the jungle primary, and the structural issues which make both governor and mayor less powerful in CA than one might imagine.
The College Fix reports my graduate alma mater University of Oregon has declining enrollments and a consequent financial problem. It needs to slash $65 million in spending. Steps taken include a hiring and pay freeze and the shuttering of two off-campus dorms.
Enrollment changes do not arrive unheralded in academia. Today's birthrate predicts the size of the entering freshman class some 17-18 years later. That's nearly two decades of foreknowledge.
The Great Recession of 2008 cut the birth rate and it never truly recovered. Universities have ignored the demographic reality and hoped to make up the difference with marginal students, including foreign students.
Doing so has damaged the reputation and value of their product: degrees. It was administrative willful 'blindness' and the financial chickens are coming home to roost.
I am reminded once again of the truism that timing is (almost) everything. The DrsC got into academia in its boom years and exited before everything went pear shaped. We are thankful for our good fortune.
At Breitbart, someone compares Barack Obama's Presidential Library to a Klingon Prison. That's an apt analogy.
COTTonLINE readers will remember I have compared it to the alien space ship in the Harrison Ford and Daniel Craig 2011 film Cowboys and Aliens. You can see my references with photos here and here.
Whatever your analogy, the Obama library is a prime example of brutalist design. It is the antithesis of elegance.
Perhaps that is the point. It wouldn't surprise me if post-racialist history treats the Obama presidency as almost as bad for the country as that of Woodrow Wilson.
Instapundit posts a remembrance of when - 37 years ago - the tanks rolled into Beijing's Tiananmen Square to crush a student movement for freedom and democracy. Also linked are several other photographs of those events.
The DrsC feel a particular connection to that day for, by coincidence, we were in Taipei as tourists seeing Taiwan and planning to go on into the mainland via Hong Kong for further sightseeing. As you can imagine, folks in Taipei were agog at what was being reported.
The mainland had gone into a lockdown, and would be nervous about foreigners (us). So we changed our plans and stayed in Hong Kong. I had some nice dress shirts tailored in Taipei, with my initials on the cuff. Good times.
I believe it was on this trip we had a couple of "small world" experiences that stick in memory. In the elevator in the Taipei Sheraton we said hello to an ethnically Chinese colleague from our uni in CA who was there on business or scholarship.
Maybe a week or so later we encountered a former B-school colleague in the lobby of Hong Kong's Kai Tak airport who, like us, was in transit. A conspiracy theorist would have felt stalked or tailed.
I then and now believe it was coincidence of a sort. University faculty travel more than most folks which increases the likelihood of unplanned meetings. On a later trip, we bumped into a colleague of the other DrC at Narita airport near Tokyo. And yes, we have traveled a lot.
It is a beautiful shirt-sleeves day here in the high country, the aspens are in full fresh leaf and the sky out my office window is a clear pale blue with white puffy clouds. This summer's crop of mule deer have been in and out of the yard - no fawns yet, probably soon - and the young bucks are in velvet.
The car we leave here had the battery go flat over the winter, so we called AAA for a jump start and it started right up. We thanked the driver who left and set out to drive around for an hour to charge the battery.
We got barely a mile from the house when the car's electronics went nuts, every warning light on the dash going off, the wipers wiping, the horn alarm sounding and the tach zooming up to 5000 rpm, which was obvious b.s. as our ears said the engine was just above an idle.
We pulled over and the engine died, and wouldn't restart. So we called the tow truck back which wasn't too far away and it returned.
We conferred with the driver, a nice local kid, and decided we'd tow it to the local repair shop maybe 7 miles away. Using the jumper he restarted the car, drove it onto the truck's platform and we got in his truck.
The formerly healthy tow truck started but would hardly run, max speed maybe 15 mph. It reminded us of when our diesel pickups had blown turbos and were lame. The driver was beyond apologetic.
We limped to our house, we got our healthy truck, and together we very sloooowly drove to the repair place. We checked in with the repair place, gave them our details, and came home for lunch, which we ate on the screened porch.
What are the odds of having a car go lame, followed by the tow truck going lame too? I said to the other DrC if we wrote this plot in a story, our editor would find it implausible, as in "you can't make this stuff up."
RealClearScience links to an article about an alternate theory of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome or SIDS. Its essential element is that the infant may dream of the prior experience in the womb, when breathing does not occur, and thus in REM sleep mode, simply revert and stop breathing.
There is, the article claims, no practical way to test this hypothesis. However, recommendations to put infants on their backs, and not keep them too warm should help as this is likely to avoid sleep conditions that are womb-reminiscent: super warm and fetal positioned.
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I wonder if SIDS occurs in cultures that swaddle infants on a papoose or cradle board? These neonates tend to be kept warm, but upright and not fetal-positioned. It would be a good cross-disciplinary study between pediatrics and anthropology.
Joel Kotkin surveys our political situation and concludes with a quote, the authorship of which he doesn't claim. I like it a lot, here it is.
If you’re free to complain about fascism, you don’t live in a fascist country.
Remember this when some wild-eyed 'democratic socialist' claims we are threatened by MAGA fascism.
It is a spring Tuesday in an even-numbered year, so there are primary elections happening. Those in CA seem to be attracting the most attention today, because they are stranger than usual.
The race for mayor in Los Angeles features two Democrats of varying degrees of leftism and having varying degrees of baggage, and former reality show star Spencer Pratt. You’d expect a run-off between the Democrats in strongly Democrat LA.
However Pratt has been focusing on the uglies festering in the City of Angels: homeless violent drug zombies pooping everywhere and a fire department that lets whole neighborhoods burn down. Oddly, LA voters seem to be paying attention and Pratt has benefitted from very clever ads.
The governor race features several uninspiring Democrats with flaws and two interesting but similarly uninspiring Republicans in a so-called “jungle primary.” Believe it or not five candidates are polling in double digits and a couple more are hanging in with single digits.
This time tomorrow we may know more, depending on how screwed up the CA vote counting process proves to be. As a CA ‘expat’ I retain an interest in what, in times past, was our most blessed state.
A study done in Sweden found 1% of the population committed 63% of violent crimes. Understanding this, President Bukele of El Salvador built large prisons and imprisoned the violent thugs.
El Salvador's violent crime rate dropped from very high to very low. Bukele became a model to follow.
This isn't rocket science, it is common sense. It is how you have a safe, livable country.
Possible actual news from Iran. President Masoud Pezeshkian has offered his resignation to Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei. The Jerusalem Post describes its content thus.
The letter had called out the fact that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had effectively taken over large portions of the government, and that the president and other high-ranking officials had been cut out of vital decision-making.
Pezeshkian, the letter emphasized, was unable to run the government or fulfill his responsibilities under the circumstances, and as such, requested to resign.
If the US has been negotiating with the government, as opposed to the IRGC, then whatever has supposedly been 'accomplished' toward a treaty is total manure and we've wasted our time.
Let the bombing begin anew, destroy the infrastructure. Leave the IRGC hardliners in command of a pile of rubble that was once a partly civilized nation.
I'm musing on the lack of patriotism among Democrats. It is an accusation Republicans formerly would not have made.
What changed? The "game" changed. With the help of Donald Trump, the Republican Party decided to stop being the political equivalent of the Washington Generals.*
Politics becomes an actual contest when the opponent stops being a patsy. Imagine how the Globetrotters would feel if the Generals played to win.
When your long-time patsy develops a 'backbone' and stops going along with your act, even undoing parts of it, it is an awful shock. Democrats hating Trump and MAGA is the result.
Our nation repudiated the Democrat-dominated game, twice elected Trump, and started dumping parts of the New Deal, DEI, and woke. That isn't a nation of which Democrats can be proud, hence their lack of patriotism.
Don't expect their heartfelt participation in our 250th anniversary coming up soon. The far-left Democrats feel jilted by their country. So do a few of the 'old Republicans' who preferred the role of patsy.
Personally, I like the new MAGA party a lot, even if DJT is sometimes over the top.
*Comedy foils for the Harlem Globetrotters' antics.
Later ... Also check out Sasha Stone's Substack entitled Donald Trump is the Counterculture. She's grappling with the same phenomenon.
