And... we're back!

Greetings all. Following a dearth of posting in the past several weeks, we should be kicking things back into gear here within the month, with a return to frequent posting no later than the end of the month. Call it a summer break.

And speaking of summer, it seems that this summer of our American discontent has been made glorious (or at least more interesting) by a massive Rightward swing in Europe.

This was an inevitability. Europe had to shift politically, or cease existence entirely, but I admit I had assumed a relatively slow and painful process of the later.
And the mechanism by which the switch occurred is interesting as well.
With socialists and liberals proclaiming the ongoing financial disaster as proof that capitalism has failed, (rather like saying that a flu outbreak is proof that doctors are useless) many expected socialists to clinch their control over Europe. I was one of these, and assumed that failed socialist policies would lead most of Europe through a weakening decline until the Great Muslim Demographic shift came into play and transferred several EU member states into the Dar al-Islam.

Not yet, however. The article linked above describes the damage to the entrenched socialist power structures of Europe as follows:

Left-wing incumbents in Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, Hungary, Poland, Denmark, and of course Britain were either slaughtered, or badly mauled.

It also mentions that the comparatively right-wing incumbents of France and Italy did just fine.

As to the cause of this unexpected rout, further investigation would be worthwhile.

The article puts it down to two root causes:

It is not clear why a chunk of the blue-collar working base has swung almost overnight from Left to Right, but clearly we are seeing the delayed detonation of two political time-bombs: rising unemployment and the growth of immigrant enclaves that resist assimilation.

Ah yes, the immigrant enclaves. Much has been made in the US of a growing percentage of Latin Americans changing the balance of some political debates -abortion, for example, as Mexicans tend to be staunchly pro-life- and more of this will undoubtedly be seen as the demographics continue to shift. Less commonly, however, have I heard discussions of how Europe's demographic shift will affect politics there.
(Discussion of looming cultural shifts, yes; of political reorganizations, not so much.)

Could this be one of the first major rumblings of a new era in Europe?
Or is it instead merely the fallout from the global economic turmoil taking an unexpected route?

Time will tell. Meanwhile, though the left-leaning members of our government have long idolized Europe, something tells me this latest shift will go unadored...

-()4|<.

In order to form a more dubious union

The unionization of the world continues...

You know about the European Union, how about the African Union? As a concept, it has been around a while, but some of the more practical details are still being worked out. For example, whether the organization will be more than symbolic:

"The chairmanship of the African Union is a rotating position held by heads of state for one year and gives the holder some influence over the continent's politics but
carries no real power."

Understandably, since many of the individual nations on the African continent do not have control over what happens inside their borders. (One thinks of Somalia, for example)

Now, who will be given leadership over such a tenuous, developing union in its vulnerable years?
How about Al-Qaddafi! Wait, you will say, isn't he a terrorist? Ah, but he renounced terror in 2003. Since then, he has apparently been busy.

"Qaddafi, once ostracized by the West for sponsoring terrorism, has been trying to increase both Libya's global stature and its regional influence — mediating African
conflicts, sponsoring efforts to spread Islam on the continent and pushing for the creation of a single African government."

Oh dear. Those jingoistic Western bullies, holding a little thing like state-sponsored terror against him. Let's see what else he has been up to.

"The Libyan government continues to imprison people for criticizing Qaddafi," said Reed Brody, a Brussels-based lawyer with Human Rights Watch who watched Qaddafi take the helm of the AU. "Hundreds more have been 'disappeared.' Libya
has no independent NGOs and the government tightly controls all forms of public expression."

Ahem. And when the Belgians get you on human rights, after their little incidents in the Congo, it means something. It will be interesting to see how an African union progresses under his leadership. Apparently Sub-Saharan Africa, which has resisted the spread of Islam for decades, is up against a stacked deck.

One can only wonder what will happen when the Crescent rises over Europe as well, as the irreversible demographic shift ensures that it will. When Islam stretches from Indonesia to Britain to South Africa, we may indeed have an interesting situation in the world on our hands. Meanwhile, men like Qaddafi continue to hold positions of influence within the African Union, and the UN.

Having elected our first Arabic president, who held his first Presidential interview with a Dubai-based TV channel, the US is apparently trying to play catch-up in this new emerging world.

Liberals were nearly dying of embarrassment and chagrin at the fact that we were a superpower leading the world. Their projections of guilt made this the most uncomfortable position imaginable for them.
Now, they have a chance to kill off that excellence which propelled us ahead of everyone else, drop us back down into the crowd (and after all, haven't we all learned in school that no one is any better than anyone else?) and establish us in a comfortably compromised position with those who would take advantage of us. We can only pray that their culture of failure will come back to bite them on this attempt too.

-()4|<.