Monthly Archives: December 2010

Moldova: “Must… destroy… capitalism…”

Posted on 12 December 2010 by

The Moldovan Communists, from that little post-Soviet Republic squeezed between Romania and Ukraine, recently won a solid plurality (40%) of the seats in their last parliamentary elections. It’s not clear what’s really Communist about them, but the EU (embodied in … Continue reading →

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Helmut Schmidt on (Lack of) Leadership

Posted on 12 December 2010 by

Last June, Helmut Schmidt – the chain-smoking almost 92-year-old former Chancellor of (then West) Germany in the 1970s – reminded everyone he was still alive by chastising European national leaders for choosing “Mr Nobody” and “Mrs Nobody” to implement the … Continue reading →

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War in Europe becoming biologically impossible

Posted on 10 December 2010 by

The OECD reports that over half of adults in the European are overweight. Obesity has doubled over the past 20 years. Europeans are catching up with Americans, presumably they too will one day be too fat to fight as underlined in … Continue reading →

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On the Democratic Deficit: European Commission tells Greenpeace to Sod Off, Socialists to pick candidate for 2014

Posted on 7 December 2010 by

The folks at Greenpeace can never be accused of a lack of voluntarism. The Lisbon Treaty, in one of its mostly weak attempts to improve democratic legitimacy, created provisions for a citizens’ petition: if 1 million signatures from around Europe … Continue reading →

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World Economic Forum: “Socialism Is Competitive”

Posted on 5 December 2010 by

OK, so they didn’t say that. It would be like The Economist conceding that the French economy, dirigisme and all, performs about the same (or better) as any other major European economy with the exception of Germany. However, I was … Continue reading →

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“Homeopathic Economics”: Thoughts on the new E.U./U.S. economic figures and the Eurozone crisis

Posted on 4 December 2010 by

There’s been so much economic news recently it’s been hard to keep track of what going on, particularly because of the intense focus of catastrophic cases like Ireland and Greece. In order to help order my own thoughts, in this post … Continue reading →

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France’s Man in Baghdad Plays James Bond

Posted on 3 December 2010 by

I was very tempted to entitle this post “Sarkozy’s Little Arabs” for two guests that appeared at the same time on the popular French talk show Le Grande Journal. The first was Amine Benalia-Brouch, a Frenchman of Algerian-Portuguese heritage. A member of Sarkozy’s … Continue reading →

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The WSJ on Eurocratese

Posted on 2 December 2010 by

John Miller over at Real Time Brussels has a funny little post on the popularity of Latin and old-fashioned English phrases in the Eurocrat’s vocabulary. Inter alia is apparently extremely popular in official documents but my favorite has to be … Continue reading →

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Cablegate I: Wish It Happened Two Years Ago

Posted on 2 December 2010 by

With his acquisition of 250,000 diplomatic documents and cables, Julian Assange has shown us we have entered into a new age of human interaction. It isn’t that the documents themselves are remarkable. Rather, as Facebook has proven a radical challenge … Continue reading →

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