Threatening to Evaporate into that Great Transnational Nothingness

Isn’t it funny? Europeans are the single group of people worldwide most interested in outsourcing their security and justice to the UN of the ICC in the name of consensus, cohesion, and global sameness. They also have a penchance for preferring excessive central control for no good reason over Federalism, and yet have no meaningful EU institutions with any sort of government powers.

Europe may now be "whole and free" after the collapse of communism. But the European Union is not a country, and the deep global contraction is stimulating nationalism, not consensus.

With uncertain leadership and few powerful collective institutions, the union is struggling with the strains this economic crisis has inevitably produced among 27 different countries with different economic histories. The traditional concept of "solidarity," of one for all, is being undermined by protectionist pressures from political leaders with national constituencies and agendas.

Just when you thought that you couldn’t understand they’re trying to do by building a transnational super-duper-über-state, they proved themselves to be especially unremarkable and simplistic. They’re even repeating the centuries-old practice of selling each other up the river for a nickel.

Within the larger European Union, fissures are growing between older members and newer ones, especially those that lived under the stifling yoke of Soviet socialism only 20 years ago. Some countries of Central Europe, like the Czech Republic and Poland, are doing relatively well. Others, like Hungary, Romania and the Baltic states, are in a state of near-meltdown. But only two newer members - tiny Slovenia and Slovakia - are protected by being inside the euro zone, and there was little support Sunday for changing the rules to allow more to join quickly.

Rumsfeld’s flippant comment about old and new Europe seem as correct no as it did then, and does the traditional fear new Europe has for being, once again, thrown into the Bear’s mouth in the hope that it will make him a vegetarian.

The natives would care,but they’re too busy trying to re-terraform that moonscape of theirs for mother Gaia.

Last year, a spate of brutal, unsolved "rabbit murders" left 40 bunnies near the city of Dortmund dead.

That’s not just a crime against cuteness and “nature” as it’s understood by people who have no natural environment left, it’s practically a serial crime spree. Let’s hope that helplessness and despair don’t take root, and that they can convince themselves that this is all just another perfectly acceptable cow-like mutilation by aliens. Then again, they might be able to take away from this one of those ‘Like Lions for Lambs” harangues that will clue them in on the need for an east-west détante within the EU:

In an echo of the city's old cold war split, the Tagesspiegel daily wrote Monday that hares in the eastern side of the once divided city are now competing with rabbits for food in the western side.