Our revulsion at the cruelty of the Supreme Leader’s henchmen is a powerful refutation of the postmodernist credo that anything goes. After the enlightenment discredited the authority of tradition and religion, the notion that reason or civilization could provide an ersatz God has also collapsed. The efforts of analytical philosophy could neither remove the ambiguity from language nor provide mathematics with a foundation.
While most people could not care less, much less understand, analytical philosophy and its implications for everyday life, even the most casual observers realize in the wake of the World Wars, the Holocaust, and the impotence of imperial powers that claims of western superiority have become unsustainable. Rather than rectifying liberal and nationalist abuses, Marxism has turned out to become rationalism’s most murderous effort.
During the 20th century, the idols have been knocked of their pedestal. The absence of an ultimate authority, however, does not imply that there are no standards. Only the most partisan among us will support violence against women and children. That taboo is an implication of our mammal nature, perhaps the most consequential property of our species.
Although the Waxman-Markey bill employs the market efficiencies of cap and trade, efforts of governments to reverse global warming by regulating production are bound to fail for two reasons. First, they create a competitive burden when they price carbon dioxide pollution that only affects their manufacturers. Second, any gains within a jurisdiction may be offset by pollution beyond its borders. Global warming requires is a global problem that requires a global solution.
Attempts by national governments, federal entities such as California, and even alliances such as the European Union do not have the ability to regulate carbon dioxide pollution globally. Nonetheless, a jurisdiction can address global warming effectively if property rights initially belong to citizens and residents rather than producers.
Some markets such as the G7 nations, the European Union and even the biggest American states can affect production practices around the world by regulating the products that may be marketed within their borders. Consumption regulations create a level playing field since imports are subject to the same costs as domestic products but exports are not. Even better, consumption regulations have had cascading effects that have reduced pollution beyond the borders of the regulating governments.
Growing up in garrisons along the iron curtain, I adored my father who was an infantry officer. I only recognized after his death that he did not particularly enjoy his career. Nevertheless, as a child, I tried very hard to emulate him and his role. In pursuit of that quest, I determined, among other things, in grammar school that I would join a student corps in college.
A student corps is a dueling fraternity whose members wear colored ribbons and live together in the corps house. As it turns out, a German TV network decided to cover my fraternity last month. They did a great job, which, frankly, surprised me in light of the difficulties that Germans have with tradition.
A particularly foul stink is currently wafting over the Thames in London. Its source is in the Palace of Westminster, the olfactory offense eminating from the bloated collective bowels of our honourable Members of Parliament.
As with most things, it’s a scandal over money. MP’s are paid a base salary of £63,000. They can also claim expenses for second homes in London. Until now, details of said expenses have been out of the public eye, but in recent weeks the cat has slipped out of the proverbial bag. And what a mangy cat it is.
No laws appear to have been broken (the expenses system appears to be governed by no discernible law), but some of the expenses claimed range from the lurid to the ridiculous:
Second homes not actually in London.
Second homes in London by MP’s who already live near London.
Porn movies.
Repair to leaking pipes under a tennis court.
Employing workmen to replace light bulbs.
Etc.
None of this represents industrial scale fraud, but it’s a poor show nonetheless. At a time when the country is in a deep malaise and confidence in the government is already rock bottom, Parliament can ill afford to look like it has its snout in the trough. Her Majesty should dissolve Parliament and call a general election. A hard reboot is required.
A stroke of a minister’s pen on Thursday was all it took for Austria’s favorite sect cult to lose its official sect cult status. With the signature of the relevant decree and its publication in the Federal Law Gazette today, the Jehovas Witnesses are now an officially recognized “Religionsgesellschaft” with all the rights and privileges that status entails.
The arrest of a dozen men in the UK last week allegedly plotting to “blow up Manchester,” serves to highlight, if true, the continued danger posed to the west by militant Islam.
It’s a depressing story. A few moderate Muslim voices give hope, however, a liberal call to prayer over a fundamentalist wilderness. One such voice belongs to Taj Hargey, chair of the Muslim Educational Centre of Oxford and the Imam of the Summertown Islamic Congregration. Writing in the Times, he offers a cause for the poison in British Islam and suggests a cure.
The cause is simple: there is no British Islam. Instead, Muslims in Britain imbibe the milk of exported Saudi wahhabism, wetnursed by fundamentalist imams from Pakistan.
Unfortunately, Islam in Britain has been taken over by the followers of a warped manifestation of the faith. The Muslim Council of Britain, the main Muslim newspapers and many of the big mosques are dominated by men who subscribe to a virulent and backward-looking brand of Islam that has been exported from the Middle East and the Indian sub-continent.
According to Hargey, this is an Islam which fetishises the hadith to the exclusion of the Qur’an. The cure, then, is also simple: downgrade the hadith and return to the Qur’an.
We need a reformation that saves Islam from foreign-inspired zealots. That reformation is already under way, with Muslims going back to the pristine teaching of the transcendent Koran, not taking on trust the hadith (a compilation of sayings of the Prophet Muhammad recorded some 250 years after his death by non-Arabs) or the corpus of medieval man-made Sharia (religious law).
Hargey believes that this extra-Qur’anic layer of authority is responsible for many of the ills that plague Islam, offering to fundamentalist imams religious support for many of the extreme Arabian mores which many Muslims believe come from God. For example:
The rampant oppression of women in Muslim society does not stem from the Koran but is chiefly the product of misogynistic hadith. For example, a famous “authentic” hadith declares that there will be a preponderance of women in Hell. But the facts here on earth suggest otherwise - male criminality far exceeds that of females.
Hargey seems to imply that many of the hadith are fabricated justifications for post-Muhammadan practices given the sheen of authority by being ascribed to the Prophet. They should not be treated as a sacrosanct source for Islamic jurisprudence and should be rejected whenever they contradict the Qur’an.
Whether this call for a return to the foundational text will make Hargey a latter-day Muslim Martin Luther remains to be seen. (I am skeptical and also a little worried: religious reformations are rarely bloodless affairs.)
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N.B. The website Islamophobia Watch is suspicious of the media’s love affair with Hargey. FWIW.
Ryanair have dispensed with seat-back pockets, probably because they are one more thing to clean and cleaning takes time and time is money. Thus, no sick bags. So when your son wants to puke, what are you going to do? You call the flight attendant. Too late. Vomit hurled on to floor. Enjoy cleaning that up in your ten minute turnaround.
Ryanair bashing is pretty de rigeur nowadays, but the truth is they are cheap (£5 all inclusive return to Vienna), arrive on time, and run a new fleet of planes (sans sickbags).
A tip to avoid one of their more ludicrous charges:
Ryanair will sock you for a card charge per person per leg. (How are you supposed to pay? Mail them cash?) There is a workaround, though. Buy Ryanair vouchers (no charge), then redeem them against your flight.
1. Have me speak to someone who speaks English clearly.
2. Don’t hassle me or make me feel guilty for cancelling.
Kudos to Experian. I had occasion to keep tabs on my credit file. After my free membership lapsed, I paid for another couple of months access. I called them today to cancel and spoke to a crisp-accented young man after about 30 seconds of waiting. I told him I wanted to cancel; he made no effort to dissuade me; the whole thing was done and dusted in about 2 minutes. Altogether a relatively pleasant experience, one which makes me more likely to use Experian again.
Located at the French border, my father’s house was literally five minutes walking distance, and the high and low German language border, Saarbrücken has had a tumultuous history. For centuries, it has been a hot spot of Protestant-Catholic and Franco-German conflict.
This story is already a few weeks old, but as the Kafkaesque dimensions continue to expand, I thought it was worth my dear readers’ time.
The nutshell: Mike Brennan, US citizen and teacher at the American International School in Vienna, is tackled exiting a subway, roughed up for about 10 minutes by two men who turn out to be plainclothes police officers working the drug scene, and left injured on the platform. During the beating his girlfriend called the police, not realizing they were already on the scene, and then called an ambulance after Law and Order departed, which took him to the hospital where he was then met with a certain reluctance to treat his injuries properly.
July 1, 2009 Hellmut 
Our revulsion at the cruelty of the Supreme Leader’s henchmen is a powerful refutation of the postmodernist credo that anything goes. After the enlightenment discredited the authority of tradition and religion, the notion that reason or civilization could provide an ersatz God has also collapsed. The efforts of analytical philosophy could neither remove the ambiguity from language nor provide mathematics with a foundation.
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