Hero von Esens

Utopia: Rules with Wiggle-Room

2009-09-17T08:47:00.003-01:00

The utopia most people want is a rules-based life, with wiggle room, writes Daniel Henninger in the Wall Street Journal.Henninger contrasts the primal world of sports, governed by clearly-defined rules, with real life, in which no one knows the rules anymore.The problem being that in real life we lack a final arbiter, so that wiggle-room has the tendency to expand, exponentially, each time a rule

Muslim Creationism

2009-09-17T08:35:00.005-01:00

Just to show Creationism isn't the exclusive preserve of Christian fundamentalists, here's an article (from this month's New Humanist) exploring Muslim Creationism.http://newhumanist.org.uk/2131

NATO Spy For Russia Unmasked

2008-11-20T06:14:00.005-01:00

Link to my article on CNSNews.com today:Dusseldorf, Germany (CNSNews.com) – A senior Estonian government official is under arrest and being investigated for allegedly passing NATO and European Union secrets to Russia.A spokesman for Estonia’s Defense Ministry confirmed to CNSNews.com on Wednesday that the man had been “caught for having revealed classified information” and said Estonia had given

German Government Likely To Bail Out GM-Subsidiary Opel

2008-11-18T12:56:00.004-01:00

Link to my article on CNS News today: Dusseldorf, Germany (CNSNews.com) – As the global financial crisis lashes the auto industry, Germany’s federal and state governments look set to bail out Opel, a subsidiary of General Motors Corp., with a reported two billion euro ($2.6 billion) rescue package. Opel’s

Germany To Obama: No More Troops For Afghanistan

2008-11-13T10:58:00.004-01:00

Link to my article which appears on CNS News today:Dusseldorf, Germany (CNSNews.com) – Germany has been effusively supportive of Barack Obama – opinion polls showed he had the backing of 85 percent of the population – but early signs of strain are showing with Chancellor Angela Merkel. She has warned the president-elect that she will turn down any request for more German troops in

Europe Pressures Obama Ahead of G20 Summit

2008-11-12T11:18:00.009-01:00

Link to my article which appears on CNS News today:Dusseldorf, Germany (CNSNews.com) – As European leaders prepare to attend the G20 meeting in Washington later this week, they are stepping up pressure on President-elect Obama to support their plans on both international finance and climate change. The meeting is the first of a series of summits proposed by President Bush, French President

European Leaders Cheer Obama Victory

2008-11-05T09:05:00.004-01:00

Link to my article which appeared on CNS News on November 5th:Dusseldorf, Germany (CNSNews.com) – The election of a new American president always prompts diplomatic congratulations from European leaders, but Barack Obama’s victory prompted effusive reactions on Wednesday.His victory was an outcome few here doubted and most wished for.Many of the messages were little more than bland bromides – the

Murdoch Mocked By Wolff's Toadying

2008-09-25T07:20:00.005-01:00

Extraordinary example of how servile flattery often does more to make its subject look bad in this fawning Vanity Fair article about Rupert Murdoch by Michael Wolff.

Manhattan Declaration: "Global Warming Not A Global Crisis"

2008-03-10T07:33:00.006-01:00

The Manhattan Declaration, issued by scientists sceptical about manmade global warming, warns that:"attempts by governments to legislate costly regulations on industry and individual citizens to encourage CO2 emission reduction will slow development while having no appreciable impact on the future trajectory of global climate change. Such policies will markedly diminish future prosperity and so

Oral and Literate

2008-01-10T08:13:00.002-01:00

Caleb Crain writes in the New Yorker on the decline of reading.Reviewing a new book by Maryanne Wolf (Proust and the Squid), he speculates that soon, after a few brief millennia of being literate, we shall become a society of "secondary orality" - in which the bulk of our information will come in oral/visual form via TV and the internet, as opposed to newspapers and books.This reversion to the

The Ills of Capitalism

2008-01-10T07:21:00.000-01:00

There's been a flurry of anti-capitalist rhetoric in Germany of late.The socialist SPD party in the governing coalition has been burnishing its lacklustre profile - seeking to distance itself from its centrist CDU partner on the one hand, and the ex-communist PDS party on the other.This may seem a strange abandonment of the political centre. But in Germany the centre is very much to the left of

Black Thursday - The Curse of Von Esens

2007-12-13T13:11:00.000-01:00

The leaders of the EU countries have signed something called the Lisbon Treaty. It's an unreadable document, rejigged from the draft constitution so humiliatingly rejected by French and Dutch voters two years ago. Containing the same key elements as the rejected constitution, it creates the EU as a sovereign state, and claims for the EU Commission (the nominated body which rules the EU) a scary

Words of Wisdom (6): Nigel Lawson

2007-11-23T11:12:00.000-01:00

"The more one examines the current global warming orthodoxy, the more it resembles a Da Vinci code of environmentalism. It is a great story and a phenomenal bestseller. It contains a grain of truth and a mountain of nonsense. And that nonsense could be very damaging indeed."Nigel Lawson (Chancellor of the Exchequer in the UK under during Margaret Thatcher's premiership) addressing the New Zealand

Words of Wisdom (5): Richard North

2007-11-23T08:30:00.000-01:00

"People need to wake up to the fact that government – any government – is their enemy."It should be tolerated only because the alternative of not having one is worse. Furthermore, the one we have should be kept tightly restrained, lest it slip its leash and take over our lives."Richard North of EU Referendum.EU Referendum: The authors of our own misfortunes

Words of Wisdom (V) Vaclav Havel on Climate Change

2007-11-16T08:56:00.000-01:00

"What is at risk is not the climate but freedom…"I see the biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity now in ambitious environmentalism, not in communism. This ideology wants to replace the free and spontaneous evolution of mankind by a sort of central (now global) planning."Vaclav Havel

Bearded Red Flails Helmut Kohl

2007-11-16T07:27:00.000-01:00

Wolfgang Thierse is the ex-DDR Communist functionary who is now Vice President of Germany's Bundestag. His trademark is his bushy red beard, hallmark of the revolutionary firebrand, even if, as his government colleague Glos once observed, Ein roter Bart macht noch keinen Barbarossa (A red beard alone doesn't make you Barbarossa).In his Vice President of the Bundestag role he's meant to be

Neanderthal Feminists

2007-11-15T16:03:00.000-01:00

Maybe it's down to the long bloodlines, but the blog's always had a soft spot for the Neanderthals.An article in the Boston Globe gives a glimpse into why our closest cousins may have died out.It suggests that the equality-minded Neanderthal habit of allowing women to hunt alongside men may have led to lots of deaths among child-bearers - and thus caused the demise of the Neanderthals in about

Müntefering Resigns From German Government

2007-11-14T07:21:00.000-01:00

Franz Müntefering, the socialist Employment minister and Vice Chancellor in Angela Merkel's coalition, has resigned to look after his wife who has cancer.Müntefering has long been a bugbear of this blog's, mainly because of his posturing in Chancellor Schroeder's terrible government. Fulminating against the locusts of international capitalism (as was that government's wont), "Münte" blamed Jewish

The End Of Freedom of Expression in Holland: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

2007-10-12T07:19:00.001-01:00

In a deeply shaming decision, the Dutch Parliament yesterday voted 139-11 to discontinue protection for Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-born Dutch anti-Islamist ex-politician, when she is out of the country.Ali, who co-produced the anti-Islamist film Submission with director Theo van Gogh (he was murdered for making it), has been repeatedly threatened by murderous Islamist bigots simply for

The End Of Democracy In Europe

2007-09-14T07:45:00.000-01:00

Perry Anderson, of UCLA, in a rather long piece about Europe, describes how the EU has drained democracy from European politics.Democracy, he writes, has been replaced not with the politics of diplomacy, but a kind of unpolitical consensus:The deadly conformism of EU summits, smugly celebrated by theorists of ‘consociational democracy’, as if this were anything other than a cartel of

RIP: Gottfried von Bismarck

2007-07-06T07:08:00.000-01:00

Gottfried von Bismarck was found dead in his flat in Draycott Place last Monday afternoon. He was 44. A coroner is looking into the cause which is likely to involve drugs. Those of a sensationalist bent will prefer to blame the family curse. We knew Bismarck, slightly, at Oxford, and even challenged him to a duel for "looking like a howling cad". The duel was slated to be fought at dawn on Christ

More Günter Grass, Alas

2007-05-30T07:34:00.000-01:00

Günter Grass writing in the New Yorker to justify his Nazi past, puts part of the blame on his father for having audible sex with young Günter's mother:The hatred of a mother’s boy for his father, the subliminal battleground that determined the course of Greek tragedies and has been so eloquently updated by Dr. Freud and his disciples, was thus, if not the primary cause, then at least one of the

King Edward of Estonia: A Missed Opportunity

2007-05-30T06:48:00.000-01:00

The most important news today is revealed in the Daily Telegraph where it is tucked away in a feature on historian Simon Sebag Montefiore.It appears that when he was in Grozny just before the Russian invasion, royalists asked him to offer Prince Edward the Estonian throne."It was treated as a jokey news story," says Sebag Montefiore ("a cross between Woody Allen and Biggles"), "but I think it was

RIP: No More Immendorff

2007-05-29T06:50:00.000-01:00

News trickles through to Esens of the timely death of Professor Jörg Immendorff, left-wing polemicist, Professor and sometime painter, scourge of the bourgeoisie and so forth. He died yesterday, a few weeks before his 62nd birthday.This can only be seen as the action of a merciful God. Immendorff had been suffering an incurable disease for some years now, the effects of which were distressing in

Dutch PM Wants Less EU

2007-05-24T06:55:00.000-01:00

Prime Minister Balkenende of Holland (which last year decisively rejected the EU's proposed constitution) wants to limit the role and expansion of the EU saying the supranational body has moved too fast for a lot of voters.In advocating a stronger role for national governments (allowing them to veto EU Commission proposals) aiming to curb the "growth by stealth" of the EU's unelected bodies,