Bookworm Room

For years at this blog (and others) when we’ve written about Europe’s problems, we’ve focused primarily, not on the economy, but on those Muslim immigrants.  One of the things that we talked about a lot was the fact that these same Muslim immigrants subsisted largely on public benefits. This little tidbit emerged with force during [...]

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A few years ago, those in the know were telling us in no uncertain terms that the EU model was the future — and that America had better get used to playing second fiddle to the economic giant that a united Europe presented.  I found it hard to imagine that Europe would ever be able [...]

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I noted when I was in London that the City was filled with obvious Muslims (by which I mean burqa-ed and hijab-ed women, and their male escorts).  London, though, still felt like a modern western city.  Not so other cities in Europe.  Andrew McCarthy explains why, and warns us that the Obama administration is trying [...]

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We have hundreds of pictures of beautiful views, art work, and historic sites.  They are fairly generic, though, so I won’t bother sharing them here.  If you go to Flickr and type in Tower of London, for example, you’ll see exactly the same photos. There were some things, though, that did catch my eye, because [...]

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Having done a flying visit through the Mediterranean, I’m scarcely in any position to make far reaching comments about the towns or countries I visited.  Nevertheless, I do feel competent to offer two very specific comments, one about Greece and one about Italy. Throughout our visit to Greece, there was a nationwide taxi strike taking [...]

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Israel as the next Saudia Arabia?   According to this article in the Wall Street Journal, Israel’s unusually large and high-quality shale oil reserves may yield as much oil as all of Saudi Arabia’s proven oil reserves. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703806304576242420737584278.html   These discoveries are in addition to of Israel’s recently diclosed gas reserves, also anticipated to be [...]

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One of my all-time favorite economic historians is Harvard’s Niall Ferguson, who does a very good job dissecting the transatlantic political and economic cultures with characteristic British clarity in erudition. He’s not perfect, however: witness his bad judgment in affixing his name to a worn-out political rag like Newsweek. But, I digress… In this nonetheless excellent [...]

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Is our President a EUrolander wannabee? Yes. I can’t tell you how many times I have heard my fellow Americans spout utter nonsense about EUroland. Hey, they may have visited there and after visiting all the tourist spots and wining and dining in the best tourist restaurants afforded by American salaries and sabbaticals, they come [...]

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I got the following email.  I don’t know the essay’s true provenance, but the sentiments expressed are interesting, especially if it did indeed originate in EuropeL ALL EUROPEAN LIFE DIED IN AUSCHWITZ The following is a copy of an article written by Spanish writer Sebastian Vilar Rodriguez and published in a Spanish newspaper on Jan. [...]

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As I read it, the latest insanity from Europe/England is as follows:  woman gets government benefits; woman neglects to use those government benefits to pay rent on government housing; government housing tries to evict woman; the EU declares that eviction violates woman’s rights.  Woman walks away both eating and having cake.  Deadbeats throughout the European [...]

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The Archbishopric of Canterbury used to be a pretty important job.  The guy who held that position, going back to the earliest Middle Ages, was the premier leader of the English church, whether that church gave allegiance to Rome or the British Monarch.  The current Archbishop, Rowan Williams is, as best as I can tell, [...]

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If you feel like a little good news amidst the worries about fallout from Egypt, this might do the trick.

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The Enlightenment was born in Europe and, clearly, will die there too: Hat tip:  Small Dead Animals

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As we settle into the Obama Depression era, one thing that I and others have noticed is that many of the very youth that voted enthusiastically for Obama are the ones already feeling the consequence of his policies: they are unemployed. As one of my college-age kids put it, “our generation is so over Obama, [...]

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Two stories out of Europe.  First, the European Union ruled that Ireland’s abortion ban violated a woman’s rights.  Second, the British have given permanent asylum to an Iraqi man who, while driving without a license, killed a 12 year old in a hit and run accident, on the grounds that denying him residence would violate [...]

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An Austrian MP has finally had enough of the way the Turkish government complains about the treatment Turks receive in Austria.  I have no idea what kind of treatment Turks receive in Austria, although if it’s like the rest of Europe, they get welfare, and they do not integrate, both because the welfare keeps them [...]

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When I was a child, filling the gas tank was the cheapest part of owning a car.  Houses were also warm.  As long as my father was earning money (which wasn’t always the case), during the winter we heated our house to a comfortable 72 degrees.  Then, in 1974, the first energy crisis heat.  Gasoline [...]

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Bookworm recently asked, “is Europe trying to save itself?” To that question, I can only offer anecdotal evidence from family and business visits made to France and Belgium this summer, shortly after the Greece-precipitated financial crisis. Europe (witness the EU) is an uber-bureacracy. For centuries, Europe’s forms of governance have devolved into top-down, centralized governments [...]

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I don’t have a link yet (it was tweeted), but it appears that the Swedes elected a center-right government.  I see this as a good thing, although I haven’t lost sight of two facts:  (1) Europe is so far Left that, as we know from England, even center-right is Left; and (2) the cancer of [...]

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In Der Spiegel, of all places, one finds an article bemoaning, loudly and strongly, the profound mistake inherent in the Democrats’ Europeanization of America: The Obama administration and the Federal Reserve want to fix the United States economy by spending more money. But while that approach might work for Europe, it is risky for the [...]

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One of the frustrating things about conversing with liberals is that, even as they’ll concede that socialism in Russia and China and Cuba and North Korea is not, or was not, a good thing, they’ve always got Europe to fall back upon. European socialism works, I am told.  Europeans have assured housing, assured medical care, [...]

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Finally, Israel lashes back . . . at the misrepresentations in the European media. Anyone who speaks Hebrew, French or Spanish, will have a huge advantage over me when it comes to appreciating the videos at that site. To learn more about the ad campaign if you don’t speak those languages, here’s a little more [...]

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As part of a larger opinion piece giving thanks that America is still un-European enough to resist Obama’s European-izing efforts, Jonathan Rosenbloom has this to say about the modern European character: In A State Beyond the Pale: Europe’s Problem with Israel, Robin Shepherd analyzes the cast of mind that predisposes Europeans to hate Israel so [...]

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There’s been a fair amount of talk lately about Brit Hume’s “come to Jesus” suggestion to Tiger: I don’t have a whole lot to say about that, other than it goes a long way to explaining why Hume left the MSM.  Not only could he not say that when he worked for ABC, he’d probably [...]

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I’ve been saying for some years that the biggest mistake the Islamists made was impatience.  Demographically, between their fecundity and the sterility of Western culture, Muslims were headed towards societal tipping points all over Europe within a couple of decades.  Had they set tight, they could have completed what they started in the Middle Ages [...]

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