Our Dangerous Historical Moment?

Historian Victor Davis Hansen, writing in NRO on February 19, notes the geopolitical similarities between the world of the 1930s and the world of today:

Putin, the Islamic State, and Iran at first glance have as little in common as did Germany, Italy, and Japan. But like the old Axis, they are all authoritarians that share a desire to attack their neighbors. And they all hate the West.  

The grandchildren of those who appeased the dictators of the 1930s once again prefer in the short term to turn a blind eye to the current fascists. And the grandchildren of the survivors of the Holocaust once again get blamed.

The 1930s should have taught us that aggressive autocrats do not have to like each other to share hatred of the West.

The 1930s should have demonstrated to us that old-time American isolationism and the same old European appeasement will not prevent but only guarantee a war.

Meanwhile, some of the left's apologists, such as Steven Pinker and Andrew Mack at Slate, paint a rosy picture worthy of Pravda's descriptions of unrelenting Soviet triumph.  As long as the "progressive" tribe is in power, the trend lines are incapable of being anything but positive:

The world is not falling apart. The kinds of violence to which most people are vulnerable—homicide, rape, battering, child abuse—have been in steady decline in most of the world. Autocracy is giving way to democracy. Wars between states—by far the most destructive of all conflicts—are all but obsolete. The increase in the number and deadliness of civil wars since 2010 is circumscribed, puny in comparison with the decline that preceded it, and unlikely to escalate.

We have been told of impending doom before: a Soviet invasion of Western Europe, a line of dominoes in Southeast Asia, revanchism in a reunified Germany, a rising sun in Japan, cities overrun by teenage superpredators, a coming anarchy that would fracture the major nation-states, and weekly 9/11-scale attacks that would pose an existential threat to civilization.

Why is the world always “more dangerous than it has ever been”—even as a greater and greater majority of humanity lives in peace and dies of old age?

Europe’s cultural suicide

I have written many times about the ongoing demographic collapse of Europe – namely, the fact that the native populations of the various European countries seem to be uninterested in reproducing themselves.

As the native populations are slowly replaced by immigrant populations, the native culture of the various countries is also slowly being diluted – more so by the natives than by the immigrants.  The process is slow and sporadic enough that most people don’t see it.   It’s there, however, for anyone able and willing to step back and look at the broader currents of events.

Two seemingly minor, disparate recent occurrences serve to illustrate the culture shift.

First, from The Telegraph (UK), May 2:

The European Commission has apologised for printing more than three million school diaries containing no reference to Easter or Christmas.

The diaries - 330,000 of which were delivered to UK schools - note Sikh, Hindu, Muslim and Chinese festivals, as well as highlighting ''Europe Day'' which falls on May 9.

But the lack of any acknowledgement of Easter, Christmas or any other Christian holiday angered church leaders and politicians.

Earlier this year a Commission official admitted the omission was a ''blunder''.

A “blunder”, yes – but one that would have been unthinkable a generation ago.

Next, from The Daily Mail (UK), May 9 (emphasis added):

Rules to prevent religious discrimination can now also be used to protect a belief in the BBC’s ethos of public service broadcasting, a tribunal has ruled.

Its extraordinary decision elevates the BBC’s core principle to a place in the law equivalent to Christianity.

And the move leaves the way clear for long-serving employee Devan Maistry to sue the Corporation for wrongful dismissal.

South African-born Mr Maistry, who worked for the BBC Asian Network, says he suffered discrimination for six years until he was dismissed last year.

He has filed a claim for ‘religious or belief discrimination’, which allegedly took place against his philosophical view that ‘public service broadcasting has the higher purpose of promoting cultural interchange and social cohesion’.

Birmingham employment tribunal chairman Pam Hughes decided Mr Maistry has a worthy case, and gave him the right to a full hearing later this year.

In doing so, the tribunal chairman established the principle that Mr Maistry’s love of public service broadcasting amounted to a belief which should have the same protection from discrimination that the law gives to followers of religious faiths.

It seems clear to me that the religious shift in Europe is toward secular fundamentalism – the aggressive undermining of traditional religious belief of any kind.  We can see this in both of the above stories.

In the first story, Christianity loses its privileged place in Europe’s cultural history through a “blunder” communicating that Christianity is so irrelevant to the ruling elites, nobody noticed it was missing.

In the second story (read the entire article for more examples), all religions are consigned to irrelevance through the principle espoused by the villain in the movie The Incredibles: “Everyone can be super! And when everyone's super, no-one will be.”

In the end, the joke will be on the secular fundamentalists.  Once the destruction of Europe’s native culture has reached a certain point, do they really think their secularist utopia will be realized? 

Hardly.  The immigrant populations that are filling the void left by the demographic decline of the native populations will eventually also fill the cultural void, whether the secularists like it or not.

EU implosion, update #7: Demographic collapse in Germany, cont'd.

Germany's population plunge proceeds apace, despite a financial incentive program.  Reuters, November 12:

The number of births in Germany fell to a record post-war low last year despite government investment of billions of euros on incentives to counter the country's shrinking population.

Germany has a population of 82 million but the low birth rates mean average ages are rising, hampering the development of Europe's largest economy. The tide of immigration that fed the post world war two economic expansion has also now been reversed with new immigration controls.

The Federal Statistics Office in Wiesbaden reported that there were 665,126 children born in 2009, down from 682,514 in 2008. The annual birth rate has fallen by more than 100,000 a year in the last decade from 770,774 births registered in 1999.

An official at the statistics office said the 2009 figure was the lowest number of births in Germany since 1945, when 520,000 children were born.

Germany has one of the lowest birth rates in Europe.

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The Global Debt Crisis Explained, sort of

I had not heard of Clarke and Dawe before, but I love the way they “explain” the impossibly tangled web of debt that may bring down one economy after another.

Various countries in Europe are the first to falter, but the US appears to be heading for the precipice as well.  Bloomberg, June 4:

U.S.’s $13 Trillion Debt Poised to Overtake GDP

President Barack Obama is poised to increase the U.S. debt to a level that exceeds the value of the nation’s annual economic output, a step toward what Bill Gross called a “debt super cycle.”

The CHART OF THE DAY tracks U.S. gross domestic product and the government’s total debt, which rose past $13 trillion for the first time this month. The amount owed will surpass GDP in 2012, based on forecasts by the International Monetary Fund. The lower panel shows U.S. annual GDP growth as tracked by the IMF, which projects the world’s largest economy to expand at a slower pace than the 3.2 percent average during the past five decades.

“Over the long term, interest rates on government debt will likely have to rise to attract investors,” said Hiroki Shimazu, a market economist in Tokyo at Nikko Cordial Securities Inc., a unit of Japan’s third-largest publicly traded bank. “That will be a big burden on the government and the people.”

Click on the “Graphic” tab at the above link to view the chart.

EU implosion, update #6: Demographic collapse in Germany

In 2005 I did a series of posts outlining various political and demographic forces working against the attempted creation of the european superstate. 

How are they doing now? Even if political integration succeeds at first, it’s only a matter of time before the demographic time bomb alters the region beyond the recognition of anybody now living.

A January 21 article in German news website “The Local” outlines the challenge now facing that country:

Official figures on Thursday showed Germany's population shrank for the seventh year in a row in 2009, defying Chancellor Angela Merkel's bid to boost the country's birth rate.

The population was "81.8 to 81.7 million at the end of 2009," the Federal Statistics Office said, compared to 82.0 million in 2008. The number of births also dropped.

Germany has one of the lowest birth rates in Europe - 1.4 children per woman - and data released in November suggested that at current rates, the country's population could shrink by up to 17 million in the next 50 years.

The article goes on to note the two major solutions that have been proposed.  Chancellor Merkel has introduced various incentives to encourage Germans to have more kids, but they don’t appear to be accepting the challenge.

That leaves massive immigration as the only real alternative.

Prof. Ralf E. Ulrich, a demographics specialist at the University of Bielefeld, said the figures were a wake up call for Germany to start a societal and political discussion about making the country more attractive to immigrants. He said the alternative would be forcing people to work much longer than they do now and slashing Germany's pension benefits.

Despite the fact that Germany would eventually be transformed into a country that is no longer German, natives are most likely to accept this solution, since it involves the least amount of personal inconvenience and allows the country’s welfare state to stagger along for a few more years… at least until the future majority population changes the laws more to their liking.

Mr. President, I hope you're paying attention

In all of the years of the Bush administration, I don't recall hearing of an American ship being seized by Somali pirates. Less than three months into the Obama administration, however, folks in one of the numerous pirate villages on the coast figured that the new US government, seeking to become European in every meaningful way, would also capitulate to pirate demands like the Europeans typically do.

It's an age-old principle of child-rearing: you get more of the behaviors you reward. Somali piracy has increased significantly in the last two or three years because the ships and/or crews always end up getting ransomed. But somehow, all of the American ships sailing past were ignored. Could it have been because President Bush had demonstrated his resolve not to allow such outrages against Americans to go unpunished?

For a while, it was looking like the current incident would end up with the pirates going free (with or without the ransom). The bad guys were certainly not impressed when a navy ship showed up, only to stand by quietly while hostage negotiation teams swung into action.

It was with grim satisfaction that I saw today that the standoff was resolved in a swift firefight -- three of the four pirates dead, and the American captain unharmed.

This is justice. If other Somali pirates have any wisdom, they will know to let American ships pass unmolested from now on. There are still plenty of European ships out there to provide a handsome income.

President Obama, I don't know what role you played in setting the rules of engagement in this standoff, but I sincerely hope you will take to heart the lesson that -- just like with strong-willed youngsters -- we must make bad behavior so unprofitable that the bad behavior will decrease or be abandoned.


UPDATE: Credit where credit is due: the president did authorize force as early as Saturday, but it might be better to make it a standing order rather than having to react to every incident after it is underway.


UPDATE #2: It seems that the pirates are very put out over the deaths of what AP calls their "colleagues".

Somali pirates on Monday vowed to retaliate for the deaths of three colleagues who were shot dead by U.S. Navy snipers hours before in a daring nighttime assault that freed a 53-year-old American captain.
The Navy Seals late Sunday rescued freighter Capt. Richard Phillips, who had been held by pirates on a lifeboat that drifted in the Indian Ocean for five days.
"Every country will be treated the way it treats us," said Abdullahi Lami, one of the pirates holding a Greek ship anchored in the pirate den of Gaan, a central Somali town.
"In the future, America will be the one mourning and crying," he told The Associated Press by telephone. "We will retaliate for the killings of our men."
He gave no details and it was not clear in what way the pirates could retaliate, though some fear they could take their revenge on the hundreds of other foreign nationals they hold on seized ships.

This is a standoff of another kind. Who will blink first: Obama or the pirates?

By the way, the AP article reveals something that I missed before. I was overly harsh in characterizing all of the Europeans as appeasers. The French, apparently, have had enough:

The American rescue followed a similar operation Friday carried out by French navy commandos, who stormed a pirate-held sailboat, the Tanit, in a shootout at sea that killed two pirates and freed four French hostages. The French owner of the vessel was also killed in the assault.

Good on them. Let's hope that more countries follow their example. The only negotiations the pirates will submit to are ones that result in money being paid to them. Some may think that paying ransoms are an acceptable cost of doing business, but they have no right to make that decision for the rest of us.


UPDATE #3: Man, this is getting confusing. The Obama administration is claiming that it authorized the military action that freed Captain Phillips, but as Blackfive notes, in reality the on-scene commander took action under standing rules of engagement that would have applied with or without the president's input:

I just finished listening to the press conference w/ ADM Gortney about the rescue of Captain Phillips. At the time it happened the USS Bainbridge was towing the lifeboat to calmer waters as the sea state was deteriorating. One of the pirates was on board the Bainbridge as the talks about obtaining Phillip's release continued. The lifeboat was approx. 25 m behind the Bainbridge when snipers on the fantail observed one of the pirates in the pilot house of the lifeboat pointing an AK-47 at the back of a tied up Phillips and the other two pirates on board were visible (at least shoulders and heads). The standing authority gave them clearance to engage the pirates if the life of the captain was in imminent danger. The on scene commander deemed this to be true and gave the order to fire. All three bad guys were taken out and then a rigid inflatable boat went to the lifeboat to retrieve Phillips. Iti is unknown at this point whether the shooters were SEALs or Marine Scout Snipers as both would have been available. This was not a rescue attempt ordered by National Command Authority i.e. the President. It was a reaction by the on scene commander under standard authority to safeguard the life of a hostage.

(Via Gateway Pundit)

Europe may get more than it bargained for in Obama

Victor Davis Hanson writes at NRO on March 13:

Last summer, with several other Americans, I went to a garden reception attended by some French barristers, generals, and assorted professionals in Versailles. Most of them, conservatives and liberals alike, were quite ecstatic about the prospect of Barack Obama as the next American president — except one. He glanced around and then quietly whispered to me, “There is only room for one Obama — and, you remember, we already are the Obama.”

I think we are beginning to understand something of what he meant.

Europe went gaga over the campaign of Barack Obama — especially his serial references to multilateralism, vows to leave Iraq, eco-utopianism, and the soothing way in which he trumped Europe’s own disgust with the Bush administration.

Promises of nationalized health care, higher taxes, Kyoto redux, and more government cheered Europeans, leading them to believe that Obama would steer America on a path closer to their own. (That the French, German, and Italian governments may be slightly to the right of Obama was never mentioned — nor was the fact that in their lethargy Europeans occasionally like to come over here for a swig of old-fashioned rip-roaring America.)

Yet after the first seven weeks of the Obama administration some in Europe may be reminded of the old adage, “Be careful what you wish for.”

Abortion rate exceeds birth rate in Russia

Russia is dying.

Bloomberg reports that reported abortions outnumbered live births by more than 100,000 last year in that country—there were likely many more unreported abortions. Add to this the facts that the death rate (out-of-womb death rate, that is) exceeds the birth rate by 50%, and that there is no immigrant inflow worth speaking of, and we have a significant geopolitical disaster in the making.

A vanishing Russia has nothing to fear from its European neighbors (who are dealing with their own population crisis), but it has plenty to fear from its neighbors to the south: the Muslims in Central Asia and the mineral-hungry Chinese in East Asia, neither of which would hesitate to move northward at the opportune time.

Interestingly, Russian scientists blame the abortion rate on poverty—which makes sense until one realizes that most poverty-stricken countries have out of control birth rates. Europeans have apparently decided that children are a hindrance to their pursuit of happiness, and it looks like many Russians have concluded the same.


(Credit: Adam's Blog)

EU implosion, update #5: The wolves are returning to Germany

Newsweek International, July 4 issue:

Wolves returning to the heart of Europe? A hundred years ago, a burgeoning, land-hungry population killed off the last of Germany's wolves. Today, it's the local humans whose numbers are under threat. Wolf-country villages like Boxberg and Weisswasser are emptying out, thanks to the region's ultralow birthrate and continued rural flight. Nearby Hoyerswerda is Germany's fastest-shrinking town, losing 25,000 of its 70,000 residents in the last 15 years.

Such numbers are a harbinger of the future. Home to 22 of the world's 25 lowest-birthrate countries, Europe will lose 41 million people by 2030 even with continued immigration, according to the latest U.N. Population Division report. The biggest decline will hit rural Europe. As Italians, Spaniards, Germans and others produce barely half the children needed to maintain the status quo—and rural flight continues to suck people into Europe's suburbs and cities—the countryside will lose close to a third of its population, say both the United Nations and the EU. "It's a triple time bomb," says University of Lisbon demographer Nuno da Costa. "Too few children, too many old people and too many of the remaining young people still leaving the village."

Chuck Colson also comments on the "birth dearth" in Europe (as well as Japan):

Now, wolves in Berlin sounds like the stuff of science fiction, but it’s a science fact. What’s incredible is the response of the average European or East Asian. They literally shrug their shoulders; they can’t imagine changing their lifestyle to accommodate having two or more children instead of one or none. They believe against all evidence in a technological or political solution to this problem.

But, as columnist Mark Steyn writes, “there’s simply no precedent for managed decline in societies as advanced as Europe’s”—or Japan, for that matter. Throughout history, societies in demographic decline, usually as a result of disease, have faced two unattractive options: a decline in their standard of living or the replacement of their native population with a more fertile immigrant one.

Europe has, essentially by default, chosen the latter. But as last week’s bombings in London illustrate, turning millions of Islamic immigrants into “Europeans,” however you define the term, is a dubious proposition. And in Japan, where racial purity is a primary cultural value, the population faces eventual extinction.

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EU implosion, update #4

WaPo's Robert Samuelson describes in a June 15 article how the term "Old Europe" is developing a more ominous meaning:

The End of Europe

Europe as we know it is slowly going out of business. Since French and Dutch voters rejected the proposed constitution of the European Union, we've heard countless theories as to why: the unreality of trying to forge 25 E.U. countries into a United States of Europe; fear of ceding excessive power to Brussels, the E.U. capital; and an irrational backlash against globalization. Whatever their truth, these theories miss a larger reality: Unless Europe reverses two trends -- low birthrates and meager economic growth -- it faces a bleak future of rising domestic discontent and falling global power. Actually, that future has already arrived.

Ever since 1498, after Vasco da Gama rounded the Cape of Good Hope and opened trade to the Far East, Europe has shaped global history, for good and ill. It settled North and South America, invented modern science, led the Industrial Revolution, oversaw the slave trade, created huge colonial empires, and unleashed the world's two most destructive wars. This pivotal Europe is now vanishing -- and not merely because it's overshadowed by Asia and the United States.

It's hard to be a great power if your population is shriveling. Europe's birthrates have dropped well below the replacement rate of 2.1 children for each woman of childbearing age. For Western Europe as a whole, the rate is 1.5. It's 1.4 in Germany and 1.3 in Italy. In a century -- if these rates continue -- there won't be many Germans in Germany or Italians in Italy. Even assuming some increase in birthrates and continued immigration, Western Europe's population grows dramatically grayer, projects the U.S. Census Bureau. Now about one-sixth of the population is 65 and older. By 2030 that would be one-fourth, and by 2050 almost one-third.

No one knows how well modern economies will perform with so many elderly people, heavily dependent on government benefits (read: higher taxes). But Europe's economy is already faltering. In the 1970s annual growth for the 12 countries now using the euro averaged almost 3 percent; from 2001 to 2004 the annual average was 1.2 percent. In 1974 those countries had unemployment of 2.4 percent; in 2004 the rate was 8.9 percent.

Wherever they look, Western Europeans feel their way of life threatened. One solution to low birthrates is higher immigration. But many Europeans don't like the immigrants they have -- often Muslim from North Africa -- and don't want more. One way to revive economic growth would be to reduce social benefits, taxes and regulations. But that would imperil Europe's "social model," which supposedly blends capitalism's efficiency and socialism's compassion.

Read on. It's like watching a train wreck in slow motion— you're fully aware of the impending doom for the train passengers, but all you can do is look on in helpless fascination.

Right Mind takes a look at how the US is doing in comparison.


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EU implosion, update #3

The tide seems to be turning against the political integration of Europe. In just a few days, we've seen voters in France and Holland give the smackdown to their elites by voting down the atrocity known as the EU constitution, and the Financial Times reports that polls in Denmark and the Czech Republic aren't very promising. (We also have news that a minister in the Italian government is publicly suggesting that Italy consider dumping the euro and going back to the lira, but grumbling on that front is a side issue.)

The European elites, seeing which way the wind is blowing, appear ready to discard the document and start over again with a governing model that does much more to respect individual liberty as well as the sovereignty of member states.

Just kidding. They're realizing the folly of asking what their subjects think of this new superstate, so for the time being they may simply stop asking. Denmark, Portugal, Britain and Ireland are all considering postponing referenda in an attempt to diffuse some of the anti-union momentum.

The FT article also reports that:

Gerhard Schröder, German chancellor, is spearheading an attempt to keep the ratification process on track and is scheduled to meet Jacques Chirac, French president, in Berlin on Saturday.

Am I reading this correctly? He seems to be suggesting that overwhelming public disapproval of the treaty shouldn't stand in the way of its ratification. Are the referenda a required prerequisite to ratification? If not, then why have they been held? Were the elites so insulated from public opinion ("Everyone I know is for ratification") that they truly were surprised by these results?

And to think that many on the American left wonder why we don't try harder to be like Europe.


UPDATE: Looks like the Germans are having second thoughts about the euro as well.


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EU implosion, update #2

More evidence that the EU will inevitably collapse under the weight of bureaucracy and regulation:

Horse passports rule introduced

Every horse, donkey and pony in England and Wales is now required to have its own passport.

The regulations come in response to a European directive aimed at preventing horses treated with certain drugs from being sold as horsemeat.

The documents will identify each individual horse and show a record of which medicines the animal has taken.

The passports cost around £20 each but owners face fines of up to £1,000 if they fail to comply with the new rules.

Animals without a passport cannot be sold or exported, moved from one place to another or slaughtered for human consumption.

EU implosion, update #1

I doubt that I gave him the idea [brief pause as you laugh hysterically at the thought], but Mark Steyn is also advancing the notion that the European Union is doomed to implosion, and that this isn't necessarily a bad thing. Among other things, he shows how this political entity's founding document is more of a suicide pact:

Many Americans wander round with the constitution in their pocket so they can whip it out and chastise over-reaching congressmen and senators at a moment's notice. Try going round with the European Constitution in your pocket and you'll be walking with a limp after two hours: It's 511 pages, which is 500 longer than the U.S. version. It's full of stuff about European space policy, Slovakian nuclear plants, water resources, free expression for children, the right to housing assistance, preventive action on the environment, etc.

Most of the so-called constitution isn't in the least bit constitutional. That's to say, it's not content, as the U.S. Constitution is, to define the distribution and limitation of powers. Instead, it reads like a U.S. defense spending bill that's got porked up with a ton of miscellaneous expenditures for the ''mohair subsidy'' and other notorious Congressional boondoggles. President Ronald Reagan liked to say, ''We are a nation that has a government -- not the other way around.'' If you want to know what it looks like the other way round, read Monsieur Giscard's constitution.

Despite the absurd complexity of the proposed constitution, it appears that it will be ratified, thus sealing the EU's doom. How long will it take? What action, if any, should the US take to delay the inevitable? Steyn, as usual, has an opinion on this:

[T]he fact is it's going to be ratified, and Washington is hardly in a position to prevent it. Plus there's something to be said for the theory that, as the EU constitution is a disaster waiting to happen, you might as well cut down the waiting and let it happen. CIA analysts predict the collapse of the EU within 15 years. I'd say, as predictions of doom go, that's a little on the cautious side.

...Until the shape of the new Europe begins to emerge, there's no point picking fights with the terminally ill. The old Europe is dying, and Mr. Bush did the diplomatic equivalent of the Oscar night lifetime-achievement tribute at which the current stars salute a once glamorous old-timer whose fading aura is no threat to them. The 21st century is being built elsewhere.

Yet another reason the EU is doomed to implode sooner or later

History shows that nation-states are most likely to succeed when organized around a common culture and a common language. The entity known as the European Union possesses neither of these, of course. The EU is trying to deal with the former by attempting to create a common European culture ex nihilo. As for the latter, National Geographic News reports that they're not even going to try to tackle this one yet:

The European Union has been operating in 20 official languages since ten new member states joined the legislative body last year. With annual translation costs set to rise to 1.3 billion dollars (U.S.), some people question whether EU institutions are becoming overburdened by multilingualism.

Brussels, Belgium, the European Union's headquarters city, is fast getting a reputation as the new Babel. Parliamentary sessions are conducted 20 languages simultaneously. With further countries soon to join the EU, some analysts fear the effectiveness of its institutions could be getting lost in translation.

Czech, Estonian, Hungarian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Polish, Slovak, and Slovene are the most recent tongues to become official EU languages. With the countries of Bulgaria, Croatia, and Romania also on the EU membership waiting list, the body is due to accommodate several more languages by 2010.

Even before expansion in 2004, the EU ran the world's largest translation operation—twice as big as that of the United Nations, which has six official languages.

EU institutions currently require around 2,000 written-text translators. They also need 80 interpreters per language per day, half of which operate at the European Parliament. The total annual cost of EU multilingualism will soon rise from 875 million dollars U.S. (670 million euros) to 1.3 billion dollars U.S. (1 billion euros), according to the European Commission, the union's executive body.

The European Parliament requires some 60 interpreters to help elected politicians from the 25 member states understand each other. These interpreters work in soundproofed booths, translating the words of European members of Parliament (MEPs). Even so, unfamiliar words or phrases can leave interpreters lost for words, says Struan Stevenson, a British MEP.

Referring to a debate last month, Stevenson said, "The system ground to a sudden halt when a British MEP described the EU Constitution as 'gobbledygook.' Apparently there is no such word in Polish and some of the other East European languages. The interpreters were flummoxed—and that's another word they'd find hard to tackle."

Comic misunderstandings can arise that become part of Brussels lore. For instance, during an agricultural working group session, "frozen semen" was translated into French as "frozen seamen."

Another MEP recalls how the expression "out of sight, out of mind" became "invisible lunatic" after a computer-aided translation.

Read on. The EU government appears to be an attempt at a full implementation of the ideologies of the Left; the people of America would be wise to learn the lessons offered by the EU's disastrous misadventures.