Wunderbar!

In a post on May 24, 2010 I predicted that we will begin to see Germany start to move away from the EU and toward making its own way in the world. Well looky here - the NY Times reports that Germans are beginning to explore their long dormant national identity. Super. Vee shall see, ja?

www.nytimes.com/2010/09/11/world/europe/11germany.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

Take a Tour of the World as It Really Is

Victor Davis Hanson and Charles Krauthammer are by far the best writers on international affairs today. Hanson gives a global tour de force  that depicts the world as it really exists at the movement. If there are any liberals reading these posts, take off your rose-colored glasses for a few minutes and see what is actually going on around the globe. It is enlightening.

townhall.com/columnists/VictorDavisHanson/2010/09/02/the_new_old_world_order

Church is for Women?

I don't think so, but apparently there is a growing contingent of Canadian men who do. David Murrow, who wrote Why Men Hate Going to Church, is quoted in the Winnipeg Free Press as saying that:

"'Christianity's primary delivery system, the local church, is perfectly designed to reach women,' he says of the warm colours, robes, candles, flowers, sharing, tapestries, long sermons and soft, romantic worship music that are the hallmarks of many churches today. 'This church system offers little to stir the masculine heart, so men find it dull and irrelevant,' he states, adding that men who do go to church seem passive and bored."


There you have it. As one of those "passive and bored" (I'm not - well OK, I may be boring) male churchgoers, I have to take some issue with Mr. Murrow's analysis based on my experience, but it is certainly worth further investigation inasmuch as there is a pronounced drop off in participation by thirty-something males and this does not bode well for the Church.

www.winnipegfreepress.com/life/faith/no-men-in-the-pews-could-be-churchs-fault-102210019.html

Lawyers and Microsoft Get It Right

Microsoft lawyers have used a novel legal strategy to go after the spammers that send us all bucketloads of spam. Spammers use large computers that spew out spam to captive botnets, which are computers that have been taken over through viruses unbeknownst to their owners, which in turn multiply and send the spam to all of us. The Achilles' heel of spammers is that they have to have legitimate domain addresses for their master servers and these are regulated by an international organization and without a recognized domain, they cannot get on the net. Microsoft filed suit to take away the domain names for the master servers and it looks like a Federal judge is about to order the international registry to do just that. If that happens, then no on ramp to the internet for spammers and no spam. Excellent! As much as it pains me, props to Microsoft and their lawyers.

news.cnet.com/8301-27080_3-20015912-245.html?tag=topTechContentWrap;editorPicks

When a Shield Isn't a Shield Then is a Shield

Europeans now want to work with the U.S. to develop an anti-missile shield against Iran. Supposedly this effort has "full" U.S. support, whatever that means these days. This is an interesting position since I suspect that many key NATO countries probably sold Iran the components to make the North Korean imports work with some degree of reliability. Leaving that aside, though, it is a reversal of position both by the Europeans and the United States.

I posted on September 17, 2009 that the Obama Administration was killing a new land-based anti-missile system in Poland and the Czech Republic after those countries had gone out on a limb for us with the Russians, who were vigorously protesting the system because they also wanted to intimidate Europe with impunity. I quoted Joe Biden as saying at the time that the system was pulled because the "Iranians do not pose a threat." No opposition from NATO was noted. Two conclusions can be drawn.

First, all of these guys either have no understanding of who Iran is and what it is up to or they have lied through their teeth to the people they are supposed to protect. Neither conclusion  is very comforting.

Secondly, cowardice (my own conclusion as to what happened is obvious) has consequences. The easy way out a year ago was to say stupid things like Biden did or talk the talk and simultaneously sell Iran high tech equipment like the Europeans did. The chickens are now coming home to roost. I think that we can reasonably conclude that all Western countries have now assessed that Ahmadinajad and the other nut burgers running Iran have an operational atomic bomb and a way to deliver it, so maybe we should do something about it now that it is a fait accompli. Good luck.

I stand by my prediction of two years ago that somebody, somewhere in the world is going to get nuked in the next 5 years. Apparently the Europeans are now earnestly hoping it's not them. 


www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/defence/7996581/West-needs-new-missile-shield-against-Iranian-nuclear-threat-Nato-chief-says.html

Sweden More Competitive Than U.S.

Sweden, which as far as I know produces only blondes, furniture and Volvos (and even the Volvos may be going to China the company having recently been sold), has displaced the United States as the #2 most competitive economy in the world according to the World Economic Forum. Great. Although not too much can be read into this one survey, the flight of capital to places like Hong Kong (see 8/9/10 post) is a concrete expression of the same perception but one made by corporations and wealthy individuals in this country and therefore genuinely troublesome.

 www.thelocal.se/28878/20100909/

In Remembrance