EXPIRED - The End of the EU, the UK and America

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Click here to view possible topics for future meetings. Participants of each monthly meeting vote for the topic of the next monthly meeting.

If you would like to suggest a topic, it is requested as a courtesy that your suggestion be posted here at least 24 hours in advance so that others will have time to give it proper consideration.

EXPIRATION. We have always had a rule that a Possible Topic remains active so long as it receives at least one vote every six meetings. However, if a possible-topic proposal contains a wealth of information that is worth preserving but has not received a vote for six consecutive meetings, it is retained but listed as “Expired."

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SHORT-FUSE NOTICE

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EXPLANATION

Occasionally, a Proposed Topic for Future Meetings has a SHORT-TIME FUSE because a governmental unit is soliciting PUBLIC COMMENTS for a limited time period with a SPECIFIED DEADLINE.

Exhibit A would be the 8/5/2016 Proposed Topic entitled “Clone Rights -- Involuntary Soldiers, Sex Slaves, Human Lab Rats, Etc.”

We had already focused on this topic for our 4/9/2008 meeting more than 8 years ago when the PBS Newshour interviewed a Yale U. Biology Professor who had already created a “Chimaera” with 25% Human DNA and 75% Chimp DNA (Chimps are the animals that share the most DNA with humans).

The Yale U. Biology Professor stated that he was then (2008) in the process of creating a “Chimaera” with 50% Human DNA and 50% Chimp DNA, and that he planned to create in the near future (2008 et seq.) a “Chimaera” with 75% Human DNA and 25% Chimp DNA.

As our 4/9/2008 meeting materials posted on http://www.ReadingLiberally-SaltLake.org disclose, Gwen Ifill who conducted the interview, was oblivious to the issue of the Nazi’s definition of a Jew based on the percentage of Jewish heritage and the Ante-Bellum American South’s definition of African-American based on the percentage of Sub-Saharan-African heritage.

But, even more appallingly, Gwen Ifill failed to ask the obvious question = What happens if the 50%-50% “Chimaera” then already being created happens to exhibit as DOMINANT TRAITS 100% Human DNA and as RECESSIVE TRAITS 100% Chimp DNA!!! Which, of course, would mean that Yale U. was treating as a lab rat a “Chimaera” that is 100% Human!!!

Unfortunately, the 8/5/2016 Proposed Topic was prompted by a Proposal from the National Institute of Health (NIH) which appeared in The Federal Register of 8/5/2016 and which had a 9/6/2016 deadline for public comments!!!

So our 9/14/2016 meeting, which was the first for which our focus had not already been determined as of 8/5/2016 under our normal rules, was too late.

So the reason for inaugurating this Short-Fuse Notice Section is to provide a Special Heads Up that a Proposed Topic has a Public-Comment Deadline that will occur before the first regular meeting date at which the topic can be discussed -- so that any of our readers who want to comply with the Public-Comment Deadline can contact the Proposer of the Topic in order to confer with anyone else who may be considering comments by the deadline.

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PENDING SHORT-FUSE PROPOSALS

1. Re “Clone Rights -- Involuntary Soldiers, Sex Slaves, Human Lab Rats, Etc.” (proposed 8/5/2016), although the 9/6/2016 public-comment deadline of the National Institute of Health (NIH) has passed, this Topic Proposal is still active. PLEASE NOTE ATTACHED TO THIS PROPOSAL THE 1/29/2017 UPDATE ENTITLED0 “HUMAN-PIG CHIMERAS -- DECENT BEHAVIOR DESPITE OPEN BARN DOOR.”

2. Re “Destroying Great Salt Lake To Grow Low-Profit Hay For China” (proposed 9/27/2016), there is a 10/24/2016 public-comment deadline that will occur before our first possible regular meeting (11/16/2016) at which this Proposed Topic could be considered.
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Cal Burgart
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Posts: 18
Joined: Tue Oct 11, 2011 4:46 pm

EXPIRED - The End of the EU, the UK and America

Post by Cal Burgart »

I propose that we read "Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations" by Oxford Professor Norman Davies, Europe's pre-eminent historian. It is available from Amazon.com for $23.80 + shipping. A review of "Vanished Kingdoms" follows.

The Emperor of Vanished Kingdoms --
Europe's pre-eminent historian says all nations eventually end—even the United Kingdom, and perhaps America.
By RAYMOND ZHONG
Oxford, England

Here's a thought. What if the euro survives the present economic crisis but the European Union—or even the United Kingdom—doesn't?

It's the kind of question that comes to mind when you talk to Norman Davies, Britain's pre-eminent historian of Europe. From where he sits, Europe's problem is one of failed governance. "It all started, I guess, in the 1990s, with the Yugoslav wars and the inability of the Europeans to do anything basic about a war in their backyard."

And that inability, Mr. Davies says, stems from a fatal flaw in the way Europe approached the grand project of knitting its member nations into a union. "I now feel that the thing that is being proved wrong is what some people call the 'gradualist fallacy'—that . . . you drive European integration forward by economic means," he says. "And it's just wrong."

I'm having coffee with the 72-year-old Mr. Davies at St. Antony's College at Oxford, where he is a fellow, and though it has been a while since I've had anything like a joy-filled conversation about Europe's future with anyone, talking with Mr. Davies on this subject can be an especially sobering experience. His latest book, "Vanished Kingdoms," is a bracing tour of Europe's cemetery of dead nation-states, fallen empires and collapsed duchies.

The book was published last month in the U.S. but is already in its sixth printing in the U.K., where it has sold like gangbusters. Its theme, as Mr. Davies writes in the introduction: "All states and nations, however great, bloom for a season and are replaced."

There are some ripping good tales in "Vanished Kingdoms," even though many of the states that Mr. Davies considers are mostly forgotten today. The name Tolosa will ring few bells, but King Clovis's sacking of the Visigoth kingdom in the year 507 makes for a surprisingly poignant peephole into the Dark Ages. Most of the states in the book—Prussia or the Byzantine Empire being the most familiar—were conquered or dissolved after military defeat. Others imploded, or perished of internal diseases—the book's last chapter is on the Soviet Union. Few states, one gets the impression, die off quietly.

Does the author of "Vanished Kingdoms" think that Europe itself is about to become a vanished kingdom? Mr. Davies is amused that his scholarly book on arcane dead states has suddenly become so topical. But he's not sure the European Union (EU), formally established by the Maastricht Treaty in 1993, or even the euro zone, established six years later, quite fits the theme.

"I think the basic argument—that [European countries] would be much weaker on their own rather than acting together—will assert itself," he says. "Obviously as long as they can survive by not surrendering their national interests and control of their own affairs, they will do. They're going to be driven to it at the last minute, I think."

But so far, what Mr. Davies sees as the real issue—governance—has remained unaddressed. "They're talking about the nitty-gritty of the euro-zone crisis and firewalls and bailouts and central bank funds and all that sort of thing," he says. "They're not really going to the root of why it's all gone wrong."

After World War II, Europeans set about forming a union along three axes: politics, defense and economics. Britain quickly rejected political union, however, and soon enough NATO came along to become the only defense union Western Europe needed. An economic union—the European Economic Community, established in 1957—was the only remaining pillar of integration left to pursue.

But the early, unexpected success of the single market made policy makers cocky, Mr. Davies says. They forgot to answer important questions about EU governance—that little matter of whether Europe would need a more integrated political union before it could have a currency union, for instance.

And as the Cold War ended, the EU's plate filled up further. The reunification of Germany and the wars in the Balkans dominated policy attention during the 1990s, as did the eastward expansion of the EU and NATO. That process finished in 2004, a few years into the euro era, with the accession of 10 nations to the EU, most of them former Soviet republics or satellite states.

Then the financial crisis hit, in 2008. By that score, Europe has had only four years since the war when it didn't have its hands full—not much time to make a functioning union for 500 million people.

Instead, Mr. Davies says, the EU has become a vehicle by which the stronger countries promote their interests—led, for the moment, by the tag team of German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy. "So although all the member states have to be democracies—this is one of the conditions for entry—they're not required to act democratically once they're in."

"In this crisis," Mr. Davies says, "the emergence of 'Merkozy' is a regression to the days of [Konrad] Adenauer and Charles de Gaulle in the 1960s, when the two of them would have tea in Colombey-les-Deux-Églises, and they would decide what the policy was, and it would be proposed, and it would be accepted."

Says Mr. Davies: "This is no way to run the European Union. It's only happening because of the absence of any proper organs for dealing with these sorts of problems."

As befits an historian of Europe, Mr. Davies is still holding out for a savior—a modern-day Charles Martel at the Battle of Tours or King Sobieski riding into Vienna. But he notes, "If there is a savior, a politician who emerges with a clear vision, it'll come from somewhere quite unexpected. It's clearly not going to come out of Britain. It's not going to come out of France. I doubt whether it'll come out of Germany."

From where, then? And who? Mr. Davies suggests Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt, the first woman to serve as that country's premier, as one possible candidate. Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk is another. "There are one or two people around," he says, "who might, at the meeting of the Council of Ministers, instead of doing [the] horse-trading which goes on all the time, say, 'Enough of all of this. We are all going to lose the European Union unless we do something today.'"

Mr. Davies's money is on the Central and Eastern Europeans because the smaller, poorer countries—particularly the ex-Soviet ones—have more at stake in keeping the EU together than their Western neighbors.

The dynamic is centuries-old: With huge and autocratic Russia looming to the East, these states have long had to choose between making friends in the West or perishing under Russia's boot. Quoting Václav Havel, Mr. Davies notes that Eastern Europeans referred to the collapse of the Soviet system as "the return to Europe," from which the Iron Curtain had excluded them all those years.

The story of West Europe's relationship to East highlights, Mr. Davies says, some of the important economic trends that precipitated the euro-mess. "A lot of this crisis is to do with a period of economic growth, limitless money, people not worrying about getting into debt—mind-sapping comfort." He adds, "Western Europeans to a large extent are still in that comfort zone, whereas East Europeans have lived through much harder times and are much more appreciative of the degree of freedom and prosperity that they have got, that 20 years ago they didn't."

The same warning might also apply to Americans, Mr. Davies suggests. "Europe 100 years ago was bullish," he says, and there's something in the American psyche that bears uncanny resemblance to Europeans' optimism, in the years before World War I broke out in 1914, about their peaceful, prosperous future. Does pride come before the fall? "The United States is this late-19th-century, 20th-century power which has a lot of those attitudes," he says.

Mr. Davies is an Englishman of Welsh stock, but he admits that "mind-sapping comfort" has not spared the land of his birth. One chapter in "Vanished Kingdoms" is on Ireland and the U.K., which Mr. Davies forecasts will gradually break up over the next few decades. The crisis has already emboldened Scotland's leaders to push for a referendum on its U.K. membership, and the euroskeptic Tories may be overestimating the Scots' economic dependence on England, Mr. Davies reckons, in daring them to hold a vote.

Mr. Davies says he'd regret a U.K. breakup, though he's no less convinced it will happen. He does not, he emphasizes, regret the demise of the Soviet empire.

Would he regret the passing of the EU or the euro? This is where Mr. Davies's sensibilities as a historian rub against his personal sympathies as a European. He comes dangerously close to telling me that the European project can cheat the forces of history and economics.

But he keeps his scholar's head. "People don't see very often their death coming. . . . Look at the French Revolution: The king of France was thinking in the 1780s, 'We're doing rather better than my father in the 1770s.'" Few saw the end of the Soviet Union coming, either.

That's the key, he says, to coming to terms with the euro zone's mess. He borrows a metaphor from skiing. "It's like an avalanche, where you've got a huge frozen snowfield, which on the surface looks absolutely ideal. . . . All the changes in the ice field come from the sun shining on them, and the water melts underneath. But you can't actually see it. And you equally can't see which part of the snowfield is going to move first."

He adds: "But it happens in a second. Before the avalanche, the sun shines, it looks beautiful, and there's a sound like a gunshot, where the ice cracks. And the whole damn lot falls into the valley."

For even the mightiest sovereigns, eventual collapse is a safer bet than indefinite life. But there is a line separating awareness of unpleasant historical facts from fatalistic acceptance, and Mr. Davies, both in conversation and in his work, treads it watchfully. Still, for his coldly analytical eye toward transience and national decline, reviewers have called "Vanished Kingdoms" pessimistic, even apocalyptic.

Mr. Davies resents the charge. "Any historian worth their salt should be aware of wars, conflicts, catastrophes," he says. "They happen. This is part of the panorama." He spent the summer before his first year of university reading, on his history teacher's advice, Edward Gibbon's "History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," published in six volumes between 1776 and 1788. What Gibbon called "the greatest perhaps and most awful scene in the history of mankind" left an impression on the budding historian, and Gibbon's telling of Rome's end informs the melancholic cast of "Vanished Kingdoms."

Mr. Davies prefers to call it "serenity": a calm recognition that human institutions, like humans themselves, do not live forever. "Serenity is the balance between good and bad, life and death, horrors and pleasures. Life is, as it were, defined by death. If there wasn't death of things, then there wouldn't be any life to celebrate."

That isn't likely to console Greek politicians, much less the Greek citizens whose pensions have been gutted and their wages slashed. But it helps clarify the stakes. Europe is old, and against time's pitiless passage there are limits to what can and ought to be done to preserve the status quo—even when the status quo revolves around something as large and deeply invested as the euro or the U.K.

"There's a lovely quotation from Jean-Jacques Rousseau," Mr. Davies says, a little dreamily. "'If Rome and Sparta could perish, what state could hope to live forever?' Perfect."

Mr. Zhong is an editorial page writer for The Wall Street Journal Europe.

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