Encouraging News From Across the Pond

I found this interesting:

The Tories understand that the only way of reducing the size of the state is to cut the demand for government services by strengthening civil society. They understand, finally, that the Left has lost the war on poverty. And they are rediscovering that conservatism is at its best when politicians support and never supplant the Burkean little platoons of family, voluntary organization, and local school.

Society is only stable when citizens obey the unenforceable. This article seems to indicate that some in Britain are starting to recognize that that can only be cultivated by families.

God and Guns, What Liberals and Europeans Don't Understand

This is quite the article, which I will quote extensively.

Our lesson today comes from the songwriter Frank Loesser:
"Praise The Lord And Pass The Ammunition."

In the book "America Alone," Mark Steyn

...note[s] a global survey on optimism: 61 percent of Americans were optimistic about the future, 29 percent of the French, 15 percent of Germans. Take it from a foreigner: In my experience, Americans are the least "bitter" people in the developed world. Secular, gun-free big-government Europe doesn't seem to have done anything for people's happiness.

I sometimes hear politicians - even ones I generally agree with - talking about restoring Americans' trust in the government. I think it is part of American DNA to distrust the government. The further removed it is from me and my control, the less I want it involved in my life. On the other hand...

Europeans did "vote for their own best interests" – i.e., cradle-to-grave welfare, 35-hour workweeks, six weeks of paid vacation, etc. – and as a result they now face a perfect storm of unsustainable entitlements, economic stagnation and declining human capital that's left them so demographically beholden to unassimilable levels of immigration that they're being remorselessly Islamized with every passing day.

Europeans voted away their personal responsibility in favor of security and leisure and in the process have given away their very identity. We are a generation away from the Germans and the French being minorities in their own countries.

In stark contrast to Europe

...large numbers of Americans tote guns because they're assertive, self-reliant citizens, not docile subjects of a permanent governing class. The Second Amendment is philosophically consistent with the First Amendment...

The Second Amendment provides the citizenry with the means to protect themselves from government infringement of the rights in the First Amendment.

Amazing, Absolutely Amazing

Love continues to wax colder:

Ah, Germany. Was ever any country less in need of lebensraum? How about this story? “‘Dump Your Children Here’ Box To Stop Mothers Killing Their Babies”:

Desperate mothers are being urged to drop their unwanted babies through hatches at hospitals in an effort to halt a spate of infanticides that has shocked Germany.

At least 23 babies have been killed so far this year, many of them beaten to death or strangled by their mothers before being dumped on wasteland and in dustbins.

Police investigating the murders are at a loss to explain the sudden surge in such cases, which have involved mothers of all ages all over the country…

Last Thursday a 27-year-old woman known as Sabine H surrendered to police in an east German town after her newborn child was found in a blue plastic rubbish bag trapped in the reeds of a lake.

In the same week Monika K, 26, was arrested on suspicion of throwing her baby out of a ten-storey Hamburg apartment building, wrapped in a plastic shopping bag. She had given birth to him half an hour before, in the bath. A dog found the bag and scratched it open.

For the past week, Susanne H from Baiersdorf in Bavaria has been on trial for strangling her baby daughter and putting her in the freezer…

Germany has one of the lowest fertility rates in Europe, net population loss, and a rapidly depopulating east that’s economically unsustainable. Thirty per cent of German women are childless, 40 per cent of female university graduates are childless, and its last election offered voters what Americans would regard as the statistically improbable choice of a childless man vs a childless woman. Meanwhile, the last gals in the country still in the procreation business have to be offered E-Z-trash drop-off bins in order to stop them tossing their bairns out the apartment window.

By the way, look at the first word of that report, from The Times of London: “Desperate” mothers. Why, in a land of socialized health care and lavish welfare, are mothers so “desperate”? Feckless boyfriends seem to play a part. But then Germany has one of the lowest marriage rates in the developed world.

It’s getting harder not to conclude that parts of Europe are evolving into a kind of post-human society.

Hat Tip NRO

More Problems in France

The Corner on NRO points out this article about French Muslims.

Scores of youths had attacked seven officers who had tried to arrest a man for not wearing his seat belt while driving. The driver refused to stop and later rammed a police car trying to block his path.

Les Mureaux Mayor Francois Garay criticized aggressive police tactics that left "the people on the ground to pick up the pieces."

This opposition to police action sounds like the opposition to the mission in Iraq: "Don't oppose the criminals (terrorists) or you will make them mad."

France and Europe are messed up.

Last week sometime, French students were rioting by the millions over freedom given in a new law to employers. The students were bent out of shape because this new law made it easier to fire younger workers. Unemployment among young workers in France is supposed to be 25% to 50% in some areas. The business owners won't hire them because it is too hard to fire them. The youth complain that having to compete for their jobs is too much like evil American Capitalism. Sheesh. And I thought our welfare nanny state-ism was out of hands.

About a month ago Muslim youth were rioting in the streets of France for some of the same reasons.

Elder L. Tom Perry recently delivered a devotional at BYU-I and said of he and his wife's trip to Europe:

We witnessed the de-Christianization of Europe. Europe is beginning the 21st century in a new and uncharted phase of history. People of these great nations are embracing secularization. Most secularized value systems reason that the human being has total autonomy. An individual does not have to give an accounting to anything or anyone except himself and, to a certain extent, to the society in which he lives. Secularization becomes a force for bringing about false ideas and the breaking down of old traditions that have held civilizations together.

This secular lifestyle has a spiritual and moral price. It has brought with it a curse of extreme worldliness and selfishness, the decline of public and private morality, and the defiance of authority, favoring individual freedom over responsibility to society, community and the world. Another result is a declining birthrate to below replacement levels. Filling the gap of these reduced numbers will be those of strong non-Christian faiths. It is forecast that the native German population will drop from 85 million to 25 million by the turn of the next century.

My concern is that we are following the same pattern towards secularization. We have embraced and committed ourselves to the gospel of Jesus Christ which is completely contrary to Satan’s plan. He is doing all he can to destroy families. Throughout your life, you must set an example to safeguard the principles and doctrines which will bring the blessings of the Lord.

People don't understand the consequences of their actions. People cut ties to families (or never even make those ties in the first place), turn to government for help, and then they wonder why society and civility fall apart.