Europe

There Is No Place Like Home

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Obama donor who brought in big money for the Presidential campaign is rewarded by being named Ambassador to Luxembourg.

To the victor goes the spoils, and she acted like the perfect little dictator in her vitally important posting. She could do as she pleased, right? After all, The Pres had her back! Might as well use legation funds to live the high life, act like a raging crone to the staff, and otherwise make the lives of everyone around her a living hell.

What blows my mind is that some of the diplomats assigned to her post actually requested reassignment to Afghanistan! Give up the cushy conditions in a modern European city, and trade it for the poverty and physical danger found in Kabul. Anything to get away from that harridan!

The author of the news article linked to above says that such is the danger when amateurs meddle in a field that clearly calls for career diplomats. I think it shows the danger of passing out important positions to political supporters without first bothering to ask if they are suited for the job.

But now she is going to retire to a quiet life with her family. Why is it that these people always claim to find a sudden burning desire for the home fires after their excesses are found out?

Maps and History

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I used to audit a community college. Some of the students on work study used to assist me with financial tasks and they were fun to work with. One day a girl seemed downcast and I asked her why. She said that she had a geography quiz and didn’t feel that she performed well. I asked her which questions she had difficulty with and one of them was “Which continent is Brazil located in?” I pulled out a piece of paper and drew a crude map of South America with Brazil along the coast and gave it to her.

Later she came back with an atlas and exclaimed “You were right!” The most interesting part of the story to me is that, in her mind, a lay-person like me (not a teacher) knowing which continent Brazil was in seemed like such odd and obscure knowledge that she assumed I was “guessing”.

I was recently in Room and Board, an excellent store, when I saw this interesting French map on the wall. What caught my eye was a small tag in the corner of the frame that said “c 1900” meaning “circa 1900”.

I knew instantly that this wasn’t true, since you can see from the map that the Austro-Hungarian empire had been split into its constituent parts and the post-WW1 land re-divisions had already occurred, such as the expansion of Italy. This is obviously a map dated post-1918 and pre-1945; this I could tell from the second I looked at it.

But the real issue is that this sort of knowledge of history applied to the lands of Europe is probably viewed as an obscurity by most people, including the hundreds or thousands of people that pass by this map every day at the store and look at it as an “art object” (it is a quite beautiful map, and if I had a place to display it and the price was right and I could yank off the “c 1900” tag I might think about buying it). I did not inquire but I am sure that if I asked the manager about this tag he would look at me like a crank and I can guarantee that my shopping partner would not have appreciated the likely subsequent argument.

The other part that is interesting to me is that many of the employees of Room and Board are highly educated and literate people, at least in my interactions with them. I am certain that many of them have liberal arts and design backgrounds. But this sort of arcane knowledge, the impact of military and political affairs on the boundaries of European states from 1900 – 1945 (and now into the 1990’s with the fall of the Soviet Union) would not be the type of work that would fit into their curriculum anyways. You could take an elective on virtually any historical topic to fulfill your meager requirement for history (if you had one at all) and I’d bet my last dollar that this sort of military / political history would be far less popular than myriad other potential classes.

Cross posted at LITGM

Melanie Phillips on Israeli TV

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Israel’s military and technology are world class but its official efforts to defend itself rhetorically against its enemies range from nonexistent to maddeningly inept. This interview of Melanie Phillips by an establishment journalist provides a good overview of the problem. That the case has to be made at all shows how deep the rot is. (Caroline Glick is also generally good on this topic.)

(Thanks to AA for sending the link to the interview.)

The next assassination attempt

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The shooter in Tucson is an obvious paranoid schizophrenic, uninterested in and ignorant of political rhetoric.

Ashleigh Banfield said that Loughner “disliked the news. He didn’t listen to political radio. He didn’t take sides. He wasn’t on the left. He wasn’t on the right,” according to an interview on “Good Morning America.” Loughner wasn’t shooting at people, “he was shooting at the world,” Banfield said, according to the report.

The next shooter will probably be very interested in the hate-filled rhetoric coming from the left and directed at talk radio and Fox New, plus of course, Sarah Palin.

I fear that the torrent of hate and slander that has poured from the left, including the “paper of record” the New York Times, will agitate some leftist radical and we will have an ugly incident. Libertarian (and gay) Dutch politician (and professor), Pim Fortuyn was assassinated in 2002, three weeks before the next election, by a Green and “animal rights” activist.

However, words have power and if someone is called a racist often enough, an impressionable mind may decide that saving the world from the latest Hitler will require that person’s murder.

Some version of that scenario appears to have taken place in the Netherlands on May 6, 2002, with the political assassination of Pim Fortuyn, a rising star in Dutch politics who could possibly have become the next Prime Minister. A man identified only as an “animal rights activist” shot him down in the street near a radio station.

Certainly Professor Fortuyn’s notoriety played a part in his being targeted. Both the media and Dutch politicians in the ruling party attacked him mercilessly in the most disparaging language. Prime Minister Wim Kok called him a fascist, as did the European press. Anyone who objects to massive Muslim immigration is branded automatically as a racist, xenophobe and fascist. Mr. Fortuyn was regularly compared with real right-winger Jean Le Pen, although aside from the immigration issue, the men had nothing in common.

The assassin was a typical leftist activist.

A vegan animal rights activist accused of the murder of the controversial Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn has confessed, public prosecutors said on Saturday. Volkert van der Graaf is reported as saying he saw Mr Fortuyn’s far-right views as a threat to vulnerable sections of society.

Note that Fortuyn’s speeches were principally concerned about Muslim immigration. For that position, he was called “far right” and a fascist. This person who did the killing that was obviously being called for by leftist politicians and the media, had nothing to do with Muslims. He was responding to the rhetoric from the political left.

I fear we may see a similar attempt this year as the next election begins to raise the temperature of political speech. I hope Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin have good security. She is probably the most vulnerable and I really worry about her safety.

FIFA And the Greens

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FIFA is the international body that selects the host city for the Football (Soccer, to us) World Cup. Recently they made the decision to award the 2018 World Cup to Russia and the 2022 World Cup to Qatar.

Soccer is huge in Europe, as are Green mandates and an obsession with global warming among the intellectual class. Nuclear and coal plants are routinely pilloried in the press and there is a large investment in alternative energy as well as the purchase of carbon offsets.

In reviewing the Russian award, from wikipedia:

“The Russian bid proposes 13 host cities and 16 stadiums, thus exceeding FIFA’s minimum requirement. Three of the 16 stadiums would be renovated, and 13 would be newly constructed.”

Let’s think about the vast amounts of resources and construction that will be needed to build these soccer stadiums, especially since they aren’t needed today (they have obviously gotten along fine without them for decades) when there are a multitude of stadiums that already exist that could be used throughout the rest of Europe. All of this construction represents a waste and you’d think that the recycling collectors and global warming zealots would raise a stink about this.

Even worse is the 2022 bid award to Qatar. While Qatar recognizes that these permanent stadiums aren’t needed and plans to donate portions of the five stadiums being built to other countries after the game, the stadiums will be built with some sort of outdoor air-conditioning technology needed in order to bring down the daytime temperature into something that spectators can stand. I can’t imagine how outdoor air-conditioning on this scale can be remotely environmentally friendly, and that additional power generation capacity will be needed in order to meet this need.

It would seem that the best way to conserve resources would be to utilize existing capacity rather than to build new capacity, from scratch. Or maybe that just applies to things less important than soccer.