Tab clearing

Not feeling well.  Blogging will resume when the fever breaks.  In the meantime, here are some links that are worth your while:

The Grand Unified Theory of Anti-Americanism.  The thesis here is that America really is an Empire, but not in the way people usually say.

The truth, in my opinion, is that Europeans hate not America, but the American government. And they hate not the American government, but the red government - Defense, the [George W Bush] White House, and maybe (quite anachronistically these days) the CIA. In other words, they are just like the San Francisco liberal who "loves her country, but doesn't trust her government." The fact that the overwhelming majority of American government employees work for the blue government simply does not occur to her in this context, and nor to the Europeans.

The foreign-policy institution of the blue government is, of course, the State Department - much as the foreign-policy institution of the red government is the Defense Department. So one way to see Europe is as a client state of State - much as Israel is a client state of Defense. No wonder they hate each other!

Europe and the Europeans is a companion piece, that extends the time period back to 1900 - 1935 or so:

Barzini writes about pre-war Britain:

Well-mannered people were also strictly forbidden to say anything witty or clever. If anything of the kind was said, usually by a foreigner or a famous Irishman, at a dinner table, silence followed. Nobody laughed. As Lord Chesterfield had written, "There is nothing so illiberal and so ill bred as audible laughter." All faces turned in mild embarrassment in the direction of the uncautious witty man. Then conservsation resumed haltingly.

The past is a weird, weird place. It's impossible for me to conceptualize what it must have been like to be a Brit at the turn of the century. This kind of excessive proper-ness is so far away from the culture I grew up in, and so far away from the English culture of the earlier (Elizabethan times) its hard to imagine how it came about.

It gets even more interesting when it describes pre-war NAZI Germany.

Stratfor on why the self-destruction of the Euro Zone is inevitable:

The realization that the rational civil servants of Brussels and Berlin have failed to create systems that understand reality strikes at German self-perceptions. There is a willful urge to retain the perception that they understand what is going on. From the standpoint of Southern and Central Europe, the realization that the Germans genuinely thought that the states on the EU periphery had reached the level of precision of the German civil services (assuming Germany had in fact reached that stage), or that they even wanted to, is a shock. Their publics, which saw the European Union as a means of getting in on German prosperity without undergoing a massive social upheaval putting the state and the civil service -- disciplined and rational -- at the center of their society, experienced an even greater shock.

Detritus of Empire is an archaeologist, and looks at the world of today with an archaeologist's eye:

Win.