Mark Schmitt and Rosa Brooks argue the statistical insignificance of the results presented earlier this week.

The German weekly Der Spiegel chronicles the outrage and confusion across the political spectrum over a court ruling which cited certain passages of the Koran in its ruling in a divorce case. It's a lengthy piece but worth your time as it goes right to the heart of the discussion about integration vs. the 'parallel' society.

Jonah Goldberg outlines what the problem is with blog commenters in an interesting discussion with Peter Beinart.

As it happens, I am toying around with the idea of doing a Peaktalk redesign and was again contemplating introducing a 'comment' feature on this site. Whatever doubts I had about it, Goldberg has laid them to rest, convincingly.

Radio Netherlands is running a series of interviews with Muslim thinkers. The first one is Syrian Sadiq Jalal al-Azm, a retired professor of European philosophy at the University of Damascus a city where he still spends a part of his time. Sadiq al-Azm is above all a secular thinker which hasn't made his life any easier, but he decided to stay put in Syria and Lebanon. I do not share his idea that secularization has become an irreversible process, but he is most likely correct in stating how difficult it will be to reform Islam from within:

The problem is that most of my colleagues who claim to reform Islam from the inside do not address this problem, probably because they fear it will alienate them from their audiences. Modernists such as Fatima Mernissi keep playing this game of quoting texts of Koran and Prophetic Traditions in support of their case, implicitly assuming the literal truth of these texts. And if they do not find anything that supports them, they twist and torture the meaning of the text until it suits their demands.

Will keep you informed if an when other interviews in this very insightful series appear.

Remember that I translated parts of Theo van Gogh's online columns a few years ago? A Dutch writer by the name of Erik Weijers has found more stuff worth translating and has done so here. Enjoy.

A long anticipated study about the effects of the time children spend in day care is released, the NYT reports. It's important that there now is some solid evidence to support the assumption that both parents working, and longer hours at that, will have some negative impact on childen's behavior:

A much-anticipated report from the largest and longest-running study of American child care has found that keeping a preschooler in a day care center for a year or more increased the likelihood that the child would become disruptive in class — and that the effect persisted through the sixth grade.

The effect was slight, and well within the normal range for healthy children, the researchers found. And as expected, parents’ guidance and their genes had by far the strongest influence on how children behaved.

But the finding held up regardless of the child’s sex or family income, and regardless of the quality of the day care center. With more than two million American preschoolers attending day care, the increased disruptiveness very likely contributes to the load on teachers who must manage large classrooms, the authors argue.

So the price we're paying for all of this is probably not as dramatic as some would have us believe. Yet given the fact that more and more households have both parents employed and that the quality of day care is not necessarily improving, I remain convinced that any day care time for pre-Kindergarten kids needs to be balanced with family time:

And as parents in the thick of it know all too well, the stress of juggling chores, work and young children does not help. “It’s not an easy ride,” Ms. Robb said, “and you can see that here at drop-off time and in the evening when kids are picked up.”

Picking up your kid in the evening is probably not the wisest approach to finding that balance.

Yes we have been watching American Idol over the past few weeks, we still like it a lot, but I will refrain from weekly comments on it. There are others who do that far more skillfully.

Still, the phenomenon intrigues me to no end and I was pleased to see that the anti-political correctness blog Fried Brains attempted to do engage in a bit of socio-economic analysis in demonstrating that the show is anything but PC:

To sum up, American Idol has proven:

- that the majority of white people are not racists otherwise black people wouldn’t be winning.

- that women and minorities do not need any kind of affirmative-action-type assistance to make it in this world.

- that people want and enjoy free speech, even offensive insulting speech, otherwise American Idol’s ratings would be low.

- that left to its own devices, without government or political-correctness intervention, the market can successfully decide for itself. In other words, no artificial mechanism has forced American Idol’s ratings upwards, and no one has forced people to vote for any particular person. This is true democracy and free-market principles at work.

Couldn't agree more although make sure you read the entire piece as there are some concerns about the show's ability to maintain its un-PC character.

What I will let you know is that my current favorite is Gina Glocksen, but realistically either Lakisha or Melinda will win this year's edition.

Cathy Seipp, Elizabeth Edwards, Tony Snow. My story here.

UPDATE: And David Kuo (via Sullivan).

Evan Coyne Maloney has started to promote his new documentary which deals with curbing free speech on US campuses:

Speech codes. Censorship. Enforced political conformity. Hostility to diversity of opinion. Sensitivity training. We usually associate such things with the worst excesses of fascism and communism, not with the American universities that nurtured the free speech movement. But American higher education bears a disturbing resemblance to the totalitarian societies that are anathema to our nation’s ideal of liberty.

Maloney spent two years traveling to campuses across the country, interviewing students, professors, and administrators to find out what life on campus is really like.

Watch the trailer here.

The worst passenger air disaster ever, today thirty years ago gets its monument.

Further to my post earlier this morning it seems that Quebec’s vested order has indeed suffered a huge electoral setback:

What is clear is that ADQ leader Mario Dumont, at age 36, orchestrated one of the biggest political upheavals in the province's history, tapping into an undercurrent of voter dissatisfaction to re-write the political map.

The ADQ saw its popular vote soar to 31 per cent from 18 per cent during the 2003 election. The Liberals plummeted to 33 per cent from 46 per cent. The PQ dropped the least, to 30 per cent from 33 per cent, but that is a record low for the sovereigntist party.

The incumbent Liberals can only just form a minority government, the leftish separatist Bloq Quebecois is relegated to third party status and the young right-of-center leader Mario Dumont and his ADQ following are now more or less a government-in-waiting. Dumont’s leader of the opposition status will give him an unusual amount of influence and more than that it will provide him with the right sort of training to indeed prove that he can one day govern.

Fond as I am of cross-border comparisons it is hard not to miss that the Dumont insurgency is very similar to Fortuyn’s rise in The Netherlands. Small government, a critical stance on multiculturalism and a quest for renewal by taking on the established players may all be very worthwhile objectives, they have to be delivered and carried forward by an experienced team. Fortuyn never lived to see it, but both on a local and national level his revolution fizzled precisely because there was a total lack of credible political talent. Dumont will bring with him an equal ragtag of novices into Quebec’s assembly and he will have to work very hard to avoid the fate of the Fortuynists who in a snap election lost most of what they gained during their initial success.

On the national level this result is good for Stephen Harper. The results have proven that there is a growing market for conservative ideas among Canada’s French population and the hardline separatists have for now been relegated to the sidelines. So, there is scope for fundamental change but caution is warranted in banking on Dumont to actually deliver it.

There has been some buzz around an article - It is not the lie that governs, but the dark threat - by Dutch Islam expert Hans Jansen in the new online newspaper named Opinio, arguing that the Dutch remain far too tolerant in confronting radical Muslim excesses.

There is a summary of what he said in English here but it doesn't quite capture Jansen's argument. Of course, I read the original Dutch piece and noted that it is really about the omnipresence of threats in Dutch society and how that has dramatically affected freedom and an open debate. The various threats are often explained away (“he or she has probably deserved it”) or is it safely assumed that only a few high profile personalities have been served death threats. Not so, says Jansen who also underlines why so many well-meaning Muslims remain quiet too in summing up a list of groups that have been forced to be very careful about what they say and do:

Moroccan writers, columnists, TV-personalities, politicians form all sides, publishers, journalists, entire editorial boards (not just newspapers, but from publishers too), comedians, Muslim schoolgirls, translators, ghostwriters, teachers at higher professional education and universities, bookstores – and more – are all on the list of people that have been or are threatened.

And he presents a recent case of how threats generated some self-censorship during one of the nation’s pivotal literary events:

The participants of “The Evening of the Book”, a literary quiz from public broadcaster NPS and the NRC Handelsblad, were kindly requested to not talk about the threats that have recently victimized writer Naima El Bezaz. If Elsbeth Etty had failed to report that in the NRC of March 13 no one would have known about that immoral request. “The Evening of the Book” continued as scheduled and viewers have again without being aware of it, watched a censored show on public television.

[Editor's Note: Naima El Bezaz actually withdrew from the show altogether after receiving numerous threats following the publication of her recent book which deals with a young Moroccan woman falling in love with a Jewish man]

Jansen goes on to point to the general unpreparedness to wage a struggle to defend core democratic values. The Dutch are indeed notorious non-fighters and Jansen talks about it as follows:

Even verbally we are not all that good in dealing with violence, so it is not hard to see how we will deal with it if real blood is spilled and things get serious. In order to increase our general well being we have rebranded the police as ‘neighborhood support' and the army focuses on ‘reconstruction', something in which the army’s top brass appear to take pride. The AIVD (Ed.: Dutch intelligence service) is restricted to analysis and observation. A report from the AIVD is not all that different from a thesis or a dissertation. Research and analysis are of course of crucial importance, but who will carry out – without us knowing it – the dirty work?

We suffer from the collective amnesia that a peaceful enclave like The Netherlands can not rely on its own peacefulness but that a number of disciplined bastards are required to fight a shadow war and get their hands dirty in their fight for peace and freedom. It will not be an easy task to explain that to all these nice people from the Christian-Democrats and Christian Party (Ed.: parties currently in the coalition government). And to the rest.

It is important that once more we are reminded of the steady advance of self-censorship in Europe's free and democratic heartland. Many media outlets are increasingly reluctant to talk about it and as a consequence sanitized content has become an integral part of media distribution as we have seen in this particular Dutch case.

The Opinio initiative by the way is a good one and can hopefully be a counter-voice in this increasingly difficult climate. Note that it has been funded by former Compaq executive and venture capitalist Roel Pieper who has appeared on Peaktalk’s pages before after an encounter with a knife wielding man in his backyard. At times he must wonder why he ever returned home and didn’t stay in the US.

A potentially disruptive independent bid from NY Mayor Michael Bloomberg is getting some momentum. A realistic move? British historian Andrew Roberts tried to figure it out a few weeks ago:

I asked Bloomberg whether any of the rumours that he might be standing for president were true. ‘You’re the historian, Andrew,’ he replied. ‘Remind me the last time that a 5ft 7in Jewish billionaire from New York got to the White House?’

Bloomberg is right of course so he may position himself as a Perot-style spoiler and ensure that 2008 will essentially be a battle waged in the center.

Watch how the Quebec provincial elections will unfold today where after decades of center-left hegemony a small conservative-libertarian outfit - ADQ - is expected to make major inroads. As is to be expected when voters shift their allegiance from the vested politically correct establishment to some fresh new thinkers on the right, negative reporting will follow. The Independent takes the charge: 'Quebec's Le Pen' likely to make major election gain'. ADQ leader Mario Dumont - whom I had the pleasure of meeting once at a Fraser Institute get together – is suffering here from what I would call the Fortuyn-syndrome where close to the finish the most unsavory comparisons are used to try and stop a ballot-box success. One wonders why the Independent would be so keen to wade into this provincial Canadian spat with such a ridiculous header.

In Quebec politics there are basically three forces: the incumbent Liberals who are a status quo centrist but in Quebec above all a federalist party, the nationalist and left-of-center Parti Quebecois (PQ) and Dumont’s emerging Action Democratique du Quebec on the right who are as nationalist as the PQ. The problem to some extent is that while Dumont’s small government no-nonsense agenda provides a welcome change for one of North America’s most highly taxed and unionized polities, his interest in seceding from Canada is a potential problem. And while he has argued for autonomy rather than secession, the ADQ and PQ may find enough to like in one another to resurrect Quebec independence after this election.

Whatever the outcome, long overdue change is in the air for Quebec and that we can only welcome.

Regular reader and commenter Eric Weinberger reviews 'Infidel' for the Boston Globe. Apt conclusion:

What will she make of the most religious society in the West, and the frequent religiosity of American politics? She suggests her mission is still with Islam and downtrodden Muslims, but those Muslims are farther away in America than they were in the Netherlands, and even there, she could no longer engage with them because she had alienated them so. For her to remain effective, she must figure out, from her Washington think tank, new ways to make them listen.

The Pope weighs in on Europe's dark future:

Europe seems to be losing faith in its future, Pope Benedict XVI said Saturday, citing the continent's population trends, which include generally low birth rates.

"One must unfortunately note that Europe seems to be going down a road which could lead it to take its leave from history," the pontiff told a gathering of the continent's bishops.

What we should note of course is that low birth rates can not simply be attributed to Europe abandoning its Christian roots. The pursuit of economic success enabled by individual freedom and a level of pessimism that affects future expectations has created a total focus on the here and now, and thus, less breeding. The Pope cleverly ventures beyond his social and spiritual terrain to note that these developments in the end will also affect Europe's economic growth prospects:

Benedict said Europe's population trends, "besides putting economic growth at risk, can also cause enormous difficulties for social cohesion, and, above all, favor dangerous individualism, careless about the consequences for the future."

Considered highly controversial by some, Benedict XVI has an unusual ability to get a debate going about some of the most fundmental issues facing the West today.

Yes, I have noted that the EU is celebrating this week and so has the Independent which has kindly listed not less than 50 reasons to love the European Union. Donal Blaney at 18 Doughty Street examines them and comments as only a Brit can, here are some of my favourites:

# 13 Small EU bureaucracy (24,000 employees, fewer than the BBC) – that’s like saying I am a better person because I only beat my wife once a week as opposed to someone who beats his wife every day. The EU bureaucracy is growing, not shrinking.

# 15 Minority languages, such as Irish, Welsh and Catalan recognised and protected – they were protected anyway! They managed to survive centuries without the help of the EU!

# 18 Europe-wide travel bans on tyrants such as Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe – which he is ignoring and he remains in power terrorizing his fellow Zimbabweans.

# 36 Britons now feel a lot less insular – yes, the nation that conquered a quarter of the globe and which trades with every corner of the earth is such an insular little country, isn’t it?

#47 British restaurants now much more cosmopolitan – with smaller portions, menu items no one can pronounce and waiters with attitude problems.

Read the other 45 here.

Bernard Lewis picked Europe and Islam as the topic for his 2007 Irving Kristol Lecture. It condenses some thousand years of history, defines the current challenges today within Europe and the Muslim world and offers a way out for future relations between the two. Recommended reading.

Publius Pundit has been revamped and it all looks pretty cool, well organized too. Check'em out.

Are Europeans overtaxed? Depends on where you live. Eurostat has put together a very useful summary of the percentage of GDP that Europeans fork out to the taxman. The differences are quite revealing, but it won't surprise anyone that with 52.1% the Swedes are carrying a heavy burden. And while the Dutch are thumping their chest over their 39.2% Tax/GDP ratio, you get to keep more of your hard earned cash in Ireland where the ratio stands at a decent 32.2%. The new and emerging economies of Eastern Europe score lowest, but that translates into far lower welfare handouts and a sub-standard infrastructure if we consider that Romania with 28.8% is at the bottom (or top) of the list.

Who passed away earlier this afternoon. Again, I hope her daughter, family and friends will be able to deal with the grief and emptiness that will be part of their lives from hereon.

Please note that the link I provided earlier for donations to support lung cancer patients and help fund research was not the correct one. It should be the Lung Cancer Alliance, and you can donate here. I just made a contribution in memory of Cathy and suggest you do to.

It may be a redundant comment but I will say it anyway: this terrible disease is increasingly affecting lifelong non-smokers like Cathy at a significant rate.

Having spent my college years in the 1980s in a traditional male fraternity house it will not surprise you that Traci Lords and Ron Jeremy are hardly strangers to me, in fact to many they were household icons during that feisty decade. Both these former porn stars have in some way gone mainstream, although their fame will forever be anchored in the endless promiscuity that gave them a shot at celebrity in the first place. Lords has sort of redeemed herself and whenever I see an interview with her you can not fail to see her personal growth and ability to reflect on her past in a cogent way. Ron Jeremy however remains an unreconstructed pornographer. Jonathan Kay of the National Post met with the man and wrote a long piece about it and towards the end he hits upon the essence of the naïve attitudes and desperate emptiness that is porn. A lengthy excerpt is required here:

"A married man approached me and asked if I'd be willing to have sex with his wife," Jeremy writes. "'It's her birthday,' he explained, 'and I want to get her something special' ?As I had sex with her, the husband sat next to us and held her hand ... He was just enjoying her pleasure ... His [manhood] was on the small side, and I was going places that he couldn't begin to reach. Jealousy wasn't a factor for them. They knew that I wasn't a threat to their marital vows. I was nothing more than a prop? She didn't even make eye contact with me ? She just gazed at her husband, and if you could've seen the look on their faces, filled with so much gratitude, and mutual appreciation and unmitigated love, it would've broken your heart."

Amid all the bacchanalia described in Jeremy's book, this preposterous porn-land fairy tale stuck in my mind. Better than anything else I have ever read, it captures in a nutshell the foundational myth of the free-love movement -- the naive idea that promiscuity and sex addiction, done right, can somehow improve relationships rather than destroy them. Most of us --including even most pornographers, I imagine --instinctively realize this for the nonsense it is: Whatever Jeremy has witnessed among the self-selected swingers who populate the porn industry and carnal lairs such as Plato's Retreat, there can only be one man in a thousand who could look on in a spirit of "unmitigated love" as his spouse committed adultery.

Jeremy, apparently, is that one man. In a perverse way, I suppose he deserves credit for moral honesty: He is no cynical porn peddler, but rather a true believer in the restorative qualities of promiscuous sex.

Last week again I stumbled upon another mainstream outlet that was trying to boost its ratings by having Jenna Jameson on for a few hours, a biography channel or something like that. That exchange revealed probably more clearly than Kay’s chat with Jeremy that what keeps driving this industry is access to easy money for people with a fairly mediocre talent base. And while the seedier parts generate billions in video and DVD sales, mainstream outlets have discovered how to cash in on presenting sanitized versions of the Jamesons and Jeremys as cultural phenomena.

As most of you know, I have never believed in curbing or outlawing the sort of porn we’re talking about here. And that is not just because of free speech reasons, like gambling it is a necessary but vacuous part of the entertainment industry that services a certain market segment. Having the stars of the sleaze business speak their mind is probably the best way to remind us all of its empty nature and its inability to deliver the emotional and physical gratification that its consumer seek. Much like the casino’s inability to grant you a ticket to wealth and happiness.

Well, not exactly, but David Frum has found the time to review Mark Steyn’s book and the result is worth your time for Frum gets it exactly right: Steyn has delivered a wake-up call rather than an obituary for a lost continent. Frum very clearly understands the book’s basic flaw:

Demographic trends have a surprising way of reversing themselves with amazing rapidity. Nobody foresaw the baby boom in 1938. And yet only eight years later, birth rates surged all through the developed world, in devastated Germany and Japan as well as in victorious Britain and America. OK, there was a big war in between. But s late as 1966, most forecasters thought the baby boom would continue indefinitely. (That's one reason that Lyndon Johnson was able to persuade the Senate that Medicare could be easily financed.) Six years later, birth rates were plunging.

I for one would not bet the mortgage money that Europe's low birth rates of today will continue for very much longer. Nor would I place much confidence in the continuance of high birth rates among European immigrant populations.

As I’ve pointed out before, there are indeed some trends reported in Europe that give credibility to this claim and in turn they embed some hope in Steyn’s gloomy message.

While we are at it, Johann Hari came up with a similar analysis a few weeks ago, but went one step further in criticizing Steyn:

When the figures fail him, Steyn falls back on urban mythology. After the 9/11 massacres, in his Daily Telegraph column he repeated as fact preposterous claims that Muslim children all over New York had warned their favourite teachers not to go to the World Trade Centre that day. Here, he says, "On the night of September 11th Muslim youths in northern England rampaged through the streets cheering Islam's glorious victory over the Great Satan. They pounded on the hoods of the cars, hammered the doors and demanded the drivers join them in the chants of 'Osama Bin Laden is a great man.'" There is no record of these events on Lexis-Nexis; Steyn has not replied to a request for the source. He says variously that "the old flag" of St George is now "unflyable" in England, and - with shades of Enoch Powell's untraceable "grinning picanninies" - claims he knows "an English lady" who wears a headscarf every time she steps outside to stop Muslims harrassing her. As somebody who lives in a Muslim area, everybody I know who lives here finds this preposterous. But this is Steyn's way with evidence: the extremely atypical is presented as universal, and the urban myth is presented as damning fact.

The anecdotal nature of the book is of course an easy target for Steyn’s critics and to some extent it has always surprised me that the book was not properly footnoted and did not include some numbers to support its basic theories. That brings us back to the assessment that America Alone more than anything is a pamphlet designed to spark debate and hopefully raise an awareness that will help avoid the dark scenario it paints. And Steyn has done that with inimitable verve:

“Statist Europe signed on to Hillary Rodham Clinton’s alleged African proverb – “it takes a village to raise a child” – only to discover they got it backward: on the Continent, the lack of children will raze the village”

Cathy Seipp's health is deteriorating. There is little any of us can do but think about her and wish her and daughter Maia strength and courage during these very difficult moments.

NOTE: Well, there is one thing we can do and that is to donate to the American Lung Association, here.

As the Daily Kos puts in a fairly favorable review of Ayaan Hirsi Ali's 'Infidel', here. Key quote:

The "Clash of Civilizations" folks would use Christians and Jews vs. Muslims as their rallying cry. But I think Hirsi Ali cuts right through all of that stuff. It's really the battle between secularism and rationality vs. religious intolerance.

Being the secular feminist that she is, it's been an odd experience to see how Hirsi Ali has become a darling of the right. Of course it is the warped legacy of political correctness and the left's reluctance to abandon it in favor of a new brand of radical feminst thinkers. It looks as if the success of her latest book is allowing for some tentative movements to give Hirsi Ali a fair hearing on the left side of the divide. A good thing as that to a very large extent has been the point of promoting her views all along.

Related Posts
The Hirsi Ali show, continues
Hirsi Ali's Media Tour

"The Scream" was finaly unveiled yesterday in Amsterdam. As you may recall, the idea to remember the murdered filmmaker in this way ran into some predictable resistance, but finally it is here. Judging from the various Dutch press reports only some thousand people showed up for the event which is rather disappointing to say the least.

Here are some photos of the unveiling, the older man in the second one is Theo's father, no doubt reliving the bitter experience of having to survive his son.

Related Post
Against Tyranny

And of course the entire Theo van Gogh archives.

I’ve just returned from a very nice beak in Oregon which is rapidly becoming one of my favorite states. Having the grandparents over from Europe to baby-sit the children, Irene and I spent the first few days at the Kennedy Elementary School, a sort of pub, restaurant, theater and hotel complex in an old converted school in Portland. It is owned and operated by the McMenamin family who have elevated the art of eating and drinking to new levels while offering good accommodation at affordable prices, the $75-150 range. Of course, they are compensating for these relatively low prices by encouraging their guests to hang around the premises to eat and drink and with beer practically coming out of every tap you can see why it all works.

Although the concept may be geared to the below forty-without-kids crowd, we felt perfectly at home and were delighted to watch The Pursuit of Happyness – a brilliant, must-see epic – in a theater filled with comfortable couches while sipping away a very decent pinot noir and a formidable pizza.

Portland itself is a sort of Vancouver-lite, a quality Pacific Northwest enclave with quite a few things to do, but it does not warrant an overly long stay. Most of our downtown time was spent at Powell’s, apparently one of America’s largest bookstores and we consequently walked out with a stack that will keep us busy until well after Christmas.

The next stop was the coast and as we had covered the stretch between Oceanside and Florence in the past, now it was time to venture further south and Bandon was our preferred stop. The further south you travel, the quieter and less touristy it gets and in the low season that offers some great plusses like sharply reduced room rates, while on the downside it means a lack of quality restaurants that are open for the whole week or open at all. We settled on the excellent Table Rock Motel in Bandon - nice room - right above the vast beaches, extraordinary rock formations and spectacular tide changes. And to cap it all off, the sun emerged to announce the spring season.

We got as far as Gold Beach, not quite making it to the California border which was my initial plan, obsessed about covering new mileage, but instead opted for driving less and walking more. The Oregon coast is a gem and I hope that they can manage development wisely as it would be waste to see it disappear.

Oregonians are friendly and we encountered the same folksy easy going style at another McMenamin’s outlet on our way back north in Troutdale’s Edgefield Manor, east of Portland. The property used to be the Multnomah County Poor Farm and here the magic in terms of alcohol, food and entertainment has been taken to new levels as the property is littered with bars and opportunities to eat, vegetables coming straight out of Edgefield’s own vegetable garden in foreground of this picture:

Instead of beer we settled on sampling some of the manor’s own Edgefield-branded wines. Nothing too spectacular, a decent Cabernet though, but the Fireside port is to kill for. We spent the better part of our time reading in the sun in the yard, of course soliciting various forgettable but good-spirited comments from the eager crowds walking by on their way to St. Patrick’s Day celebration.

All in all, a nice and surprisingly sunny break.

The traditional spring break is coming up and I have made some non-negotiable family commitments for the coming week. Blogging consequently will be light to non-existent.

By abandoning 65 as the retirment age, and lifting it to 67:

German lawmakers voted to lift the retirement age to 67 from 65, shrugging off union protests over the government's record on cutting unemployment for the over-50s.

Chancellor Angela Merkel's coalition pushed the provision through the lower house of parliament in Berlin today, meaning anyone born after 1964 -- just under half Germany's 82 million population -- will have to wait up to two years more before they qualify for the national pension. The changes come in from 2012, raising the retirement age in stages.

``We have to act,'' Labor Minister Franz Muentefering, the architect of the plan, told lawmakers today before the vote, saying that Germany had to counter the impact of an ageing population on the compulsory pension. ``We have to secure the financial viability of the plan.''

This increase will be phased in over time between 2012 and 2029.

In a way it is not surprising that Germany has been able to tackle this controversial issue: Merkel heads a broad coalition government that includes both Germany's right and left. Without a broad consensus such material changes to the social-economic framework are very hard to accomplish. Their political toxicity has ensured that most mainstream parties in Europe have so far not dared to touch them, despite the necessity to address them. Good for Germany, good for Merkel.

Margaret Thatcher's last stand on November 22, 1990, finally available on video. An unforgettable and heroic performance. (via Iain Dale).

There was another Dutch election yesterday, the provinical one to be precise. Although quite important as the 'provincial states' elect the Dutch Senate or upper house, the turn-out for these events is usually quite low and yesterday's was no exception. The results were not shocking and reflected the trend set during the general election last November:

The coalition parties managed to hold on to their majority in the senate, despite a loss for the Labour PvdA and Christian democrat CDA in yesterday's elections for the provincial states.

Thanks to a gain of two seats for the ChristenUnie, the government coalition can count on 41 of the 75 seats in the new senate.

As in the general elections in November, the big winner in Thursday's elections was the Socialist Party (SP). Jan Marijnissen's party has tripled the number of seats it will hold in the senate, from 4 to 12 seats. After its debut in the lower house of Parliament in November last year, the Party for the Animals has also secured a seat in the senate now.

Noteworthy is the fact that Geert Wilders' Party for Freedom did not participate in this election. Opinion polls indicated he could have done quite well had he participated following the recent political fireworks over cabinet members' dual nationality.

Amitai Etzioni is back blogging. He's written a thought provoking piece on how the West is struggling with the tension between materialism and the quest for spiritualism and how that affects our relationships with other cultures. Key quote:

Western secularism largely avoids these issues. Its consumer hedonism has an appeal of its own, but more and more people find that they cannot keep up with the Joneses. Hence the growing alienation in the countryside and among urban migrants—among the majority of the people—in developing nations such as India and China. The West does well when it extols the dignity of the individual, the value of autonomy and human rights. However these are basically ideologies that serve as compelling antidotes to excessive governmental intrusions and celebrate self-government. They do not address the questions that a person faces once he is free to choose, free to set his own course of destiny and purpose.

Read the whole thing.

Here is a spectacular time waster. Try and name all 50 US states in 10 minutes. I scored a respectable 48, missing only Ohio and Oklahoma which leaves me worried about having some inability to properly remember names starting with an 'O'.

Trickier is naming all 53 African nations in 10 minutes, here. I got 45 and missed the following: Burkina Faso, Comoros, Gabon, The Gambia, Ghana, Malawi, Sao Tome and Principe, Uganda.

(hat tip: Darren Barefoot)

Jef Jarvis pays a visit to Iain Dale at 18 Doughty Street, a new internet channel with political chat shows and he files his report, with video, here.

And yes, these are the guys behind 'A World Without America'. They have lots of other video campaigns going as well, the one on London mayor Ken Livingstone in particular is worth your while:

James Joyner has the best round-up so far.

This time it is Hitchens who takes on Buruma and Garton Ash who have relegated our good Dutch-Somali heroine to the absolutist corner and questioned her ‘enlightenment-fundamentalism’.

As you may recall Buruma is one of the more nuanced writer-historians who was vilified for taking a seemingly neutral stance in his excellent Murder in Amsterdam. His crime? He was insufficiently clear in taking Theo van Gogh’s side and failed to denounce Muslim fundamentalism in an unequivocal manner. Yes, ‘fundamentalism’ has become a very fashionable term and given our inherent suspicion of the extreme we should, I think, be thankful that writers like Buruma try to take a step back and paint a more dispassionate picture of the news.

Personally I do not think that Hirsi Ali can credibly be pictured as a fundamentalist. However one can understand Buruma’s point that her training in the Muslim Brotherhood perhaps has exposed her to a certain kind of zealousness. And that she is now applying in defending western freedoms with sometimes mixed results. Most Dutchmen will recall her visit to a local Muslim school where she tried to argue her point by asking twelve year old pupils to make a choice between the constitution and the Koran. Actions like that can be interpreted as waging a personal secular war against anything that would remind Hirsi Ali of her own religious upbringing. Getting schoolchilden into the debate in this manner is of course fodder for her critics who have qualified this sort of behaviour as utterly reckless and in that they have a point. And it is precisely this approach that irks measured intellectuals like Buruma and Garton Ash, but I do agree with Hitchens that does not make one a fundamentalist. At the same time I sense that Hitch’s diatribe against these two writers is not just about Hirsi Ali, but probably about something that runs quite a bit deeper.

NOTE: Our good friend Myrtus whose own biography is very similar to that of Hirsi Ali (Muslim from Africa → Holland → USA) has a few critical thoughts too.

By the way if you haven’t already, buy 'Infidel' here.

And here is round-up of some of Peaktalk's key posts on Hirsi Ali.

MORE: Laura Ingraham interviews Ayaan.

Today Betty Krawczyk a 78-year old environmental activist was sentenced to 10 months in prison by the British Columbia Supreme Court. Her crime was to ignore a court order which called on her and a number of like minded activists to vacate the Eagleridge Bluffs in West Vancouver, an area designated for highway development. The latter is part of a huge infrastructure overhaul as three years from now Vancouver and Whistler will be hosting the 2010 Winter Olympics and the bluffs happens to sit right on the road that connects the two locales.

The fact is that I am very familiar with this case as I live around the corner from the endangered bluffs and last year we were all treated to the daily spectacle of Krawczyk and friends. To her credit, not once did they block traffic or engage in other violent actions. They did however delay the project's construction which I am told has eaten into the profit margins of the developer who had assumed this potential risk in its deal with the provincial government. Needless to say, they took the raging environmentalists to court last year. As is the case with the neo-religious green movement, they not only believe in unrestricted and justifiable rage, they also have no issue in rejecting the rule of law which I surmise they consider to be pre-empted by the law of nature. Any potential damage to what they construe as 'the environment' is exempt from whatever democratic or judicial process which is why they ignore court orders.

Well there's justice after all - the relative harshness of the sentence by local standards is remarkable - but a new generation of natural law environmentalists is being nurtured:

Ten-year-old Roan Reimer was crying and holding a picture of Ms. Krawczyk. She missed school to protest the sentence with her dad.

"Betty was like a grandmother to me," she said. "I used to go visit her a lot in jail. I just couldn't miss this. It's more important to me than school or anything else."

And:

Don Leith was demonstrating with his nine-month-old daughter.

"I'm here because when the government makes an error, when it makes a mistake, we need people who will actually stand up and be counted," he said.

Yet the quote of the day comes from Kim Hines, with the group Women Helping Women Coalition from Victoria:

" ... the fact that most people couldn't even get into the packed courtroom "shows the unjustness of the justice system."

Hines is right, there are lots of open spaces in local parks and forests here that would serve as the perfect setting to apply the law of nature.

Take a look at Michelle Malkin’s video chat with Sean Hannity at Hot Air. Both lament the fact that there no longer is a Reagan and wonder if they will ever be able to find one. On purely ideological grounds Giuliani is probably the only one to come close to the Gipper and equally important the only one that will not pander to the socially conservative base in order to get the GOP nomination. Reagan himself was the ultimate pragmatist in these matters and it should be noted that he knew that sustained conservative success went right through the political center and never by staying on the far right fringe. Anyone believing that another 'Roveian pin-down the base strategy' will get the GOP access to the White House in 2008 will relegate that party to the political wilderness.

Ann Coulter’s disgusting performance – which indeed in the end is all about the cash register – is therefore the opportunity for the leading GOP contenders to position themselves for a battle that will take place in America’s political center. So, John McCain did well at CPAC this year.

And he tries to be as complimentary as possible, but in between the lines you can read that he just doesn’t buy into Hirsi Ali's mode of analysis.

UPDATE: Thoughts from Marty Peretz.