Quote of the Day

The trouble with the social-democratic state is that, when government does too much, nobody else does much of anything.

After September 11, I wondered rhetorically midway through a column what we in the West are prepared to die for, and got a convoluted e-mail back from a French professor explaining that the fact that Europeans weren't prepared to die for anything was the best evidence of their superiority: they were building a post-historical utopia -- a Europe it would not be necessary to die for.

But sometimes you die anyway.

Mark Steyn, America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It, concluding the chapter "The Four Horsemen of the Eupocalypse."

I called Michael Crichton's recent Next one of the most disturbing novels I've read recently. America Alone is the most disturbing non-fiction work I've read in quite a while. If you haven't read it, I recommend you pick up a copy. If Steyn is even half right, the future looks bleak indeed, and it's a hell of a lot closer than we think.

If you want further evidence of this, look at what the Brits did in Basra. And they're our closest ally. The Fadhil brothers nailed it in one sentence:

In our opinion, although the deal was made last year, Britain made the decision to offer basically the same deal unilaterally years before that by watching the monster grow under their noses without doing anything serious to stop it.