Posted on 11/28/2005 1:39:25 PM PST by Pokey78
Ready, set, go: from the Observer nine days ago: "Olympic costs set to double: Londoners face huge tax rise".
Oh, come on. Only double? You can do better than that. Remember the 1976 Olympics? Well, no, you probably don't, unless you're in late middle age. But they were held in Montreal. I'm a Montrealer and our 2006 tax bill is projected to be the year we finally pay off the debts on the games.
The '76 Olympics were opened by the Queen, just like the London Games will be, and the city built a big stadium in the East End, just like London is doing, and they called it the "Big O" - promptly re-dubbed the "Big Owe", ha-ha, which you're free to borrow, too. Believe me, it's pretty funny for the first quarter-century or so. I'll take the city of Montreal's word that we'll be paid off by 2006. But, if not, in 2012 the Queen could combine ceremonies and open the London Games while simultaneously closing the books on the Montreal ones.
Meanwhile, Tablighi Jamaat, the Islamic missionary group, has announced plans to build a mosque next door to the new Olympic stadium. The London Markaz will be the biggest house of worship in the United Kingdom: it will hold 70,000 people - only 10,000 fewer than the Olympic stadium, and 67,000 more than the largest Christian facility (Liverpool's Anglican cathedral). Tablighi Jamaat plans to raise the necessary £100 million through donations from Britain and "abroad".
And I'll bet they do. I may be a notorious Islamophobic hatemonger, but, watching these two projects go up side by side in Newham, I don't think there'll be any doubt which has the tighter grip on fiscal sanity. Another year or two, and Londoners may be wishing they could sub-contract the entire Olympics to Tablighi Jamaat.
I was slightly surprised by the number of e-mails I've received in the past 48 hours from Britons aggrieved about the new mega-mosque. To be sure, it would be heartening if the Archbishop of Canterbury announced plans to mark the Olympics by constructing a 70,000-seat state-of-the-art Anglican cathedral, but what would you put in it? Even an all-star double bill comprising a joint Service of Apology to Saddam Hussein followed by Ordination of Multiple Gay Bishops in Long-Term Committed Relationships (Non-Practising or Otherwise, According to Taste) seems unlikely to fill the pews. Whatever one feels about it, the London Markaz will be a more accurate symbol of Britain in 2012 than Her Majesty pulling up next door with the Household Cavalry.
And, if you object to that, the question is: what are you willing to do about it? These days, the world is full of worriers, forever announcing plans and targets for this and that. And 2012 isn't that far away. I notice, for example, that signatories to the Kyoto treaty are meeting in Montreal this week - maybe in the unused Olympic stadium - to discuss "progress" on "meeting" their "goals". Canada remains fully committed to its obligation to reduce its greenhouse-gas emissions by six per cent of its 1990 figure by 2008.
That's great to know, isn't it? So how's it going so far?
Well, by the end of 2003, Canada's greenhouse-gas emissions were up 24.2 per cent.
Meanwhile, how are things looking in the United States? As you'll recall, in a typically "pig-headed and blinkered" (Independent) act that could lead to the entire planet becoming "uninhabitable" (Michael Meacher), "Polluter Bush" (Daily Express), "this ignorant, short-sighted and blinkered politician" (Friends of the Earth), rejected the Kyoto treaty. Yet somehow the "Toxic Texan" (everybody) has managed to outperform Canada on almost every measure of eco-virtue.
How did that happen?
Actually, it's not difficult. Signing Kyoto is nothing to do with reducing "global warming" so much as advertising one's transnational moral virtue. America could reduce its greenhouse-gas emissions by 87 per cent and Canada could increase them by 673 per cent and the latter would still be a "good citizen of the world" (in the Prime Minister's phrase) while "Polluter Bush" would still be in the dog house, albeit a solar-powered one.
Likewise, those public sector union workers determined to keep their right to retire at 60. I've had many conversations with New Labour types in which my belief in low - if not undetectable - levels of taxation has been cited as evidence of my selfishness. But what's more selfish than spending the last 20 years of your life on holiday and insisting that the fellows who can't afford to retire at 60 should pay for it?
Forget Kyoto and the problem of "unsustainable growth"; the crisis that Britain and most of Europe faces is unsustainable sloth. Their insistence, at a time of falling birth rates and dramatic demographic change, on clinging to the right to pass a third of your adult life as one long bank holiday ought to be as morally reprehensible as what Gary Glitter gets up to on his own weekend breaks. Apart from anything else, its societal impact is far more widespread.
The Kyoto fetishisation is the definitive act of post-modern politics, in which our leaders are grave and responsible but only when it comes to issuing wake-up calls for stuff that isn't worth getting out of bed for. For the real issues confronting Europe, they're happy to go on slumbering well, as events spiral as remorselessly as the 2012 Olympic tab.
There's one image of the Second World War that sums it up: in London, the morning after a night of Luftwaffe bombing, Churchill would walk through the ruins; in Berlin, Hitler never visited bombed-out areas and, just in case the driver should take a wrong turn, he drove through the streets with his car windows curtained.
If you can't bear to pull open the curtains, chances are you're going to lose. When it's a bet between reality and delusion, bet on reality. What does the European political class really know of today's challenges? We mock the Islamists for wanting to turn the clock back to the eighth century. But, if it's a choice between eighth-century reality or 21st-century fantasy, it's not such an easy call.
By the time that Olympic mega-mosque is open for business, you'll be surprised how well it fits in.
Thanks - I'll have to get on it! My library won't get his books, for some reason, so I have to live with what's posted on FR.
Dalrymple can be found at city-journal.org regularly. Think his "Barbarians at the Gates of Paris" is available there now, among other of his articles.
Cripes ... I can't even make sense of that picture.
Yup, I found him there earlier.
Thanks Freepers for helpng me find like minded people in this world.
I was raised on Buckely but went barren 25 years before finding Steyn.
I like Steyns humor, but like Buckleys pondering and challenge.
David Warren is Good too.
But Steyn engages serious questions with an undeniable humor that helps take the edge off serious topics.
He is the master! The One Man Global Content Provider! L0L
Now I have Dalrymple.
Steyn is still My fave
(Denny Crane: "I Don't Want To Socialize With A Pinko Liberal Democrat Commie.Say What You Like About Republicans. We Stick To Our Convictions. Even When We Know We're Dead Wrong.")
Steyn!
www.myaa-arq.com/There are a lot of Macromedia FLASH images of the proposed new London Markaz posted THERE, that I am unable to post HERE. :(Search for:Location: U.K., Abbey Mills Islamic Centre
Looks like somebody dropped a jellyfish.
Please add me to the Steyn PING LIST...please!
when he's right, he's right.
70,000 vermin.
Excellent Steyn article...AGAIN!
But that sort of journalist no longer exists
Statics notwithstanding, this American is not nearly as in awe of Canada's moral stature as many (most?) Canadians seem to be.
Steyn is always trying to "slap us upside the head", but we keep hitting the snooze button.
As always, thanks, Pokey!
Yes, scary!!!
Does anyone ever post Dalrymples?
A. All the time. Occasionally, Anthony Daniels (Dalrymple's legal name).
Holy s***. What a monstrous security nightmare. Mega-mosque next to Olympic stadium? You could hide anything, or *anyone*, inside that mosque, and you'll bet the faithful will scream like stuck pigs (you should pardon the expression) if their "right to privacy" (or British equivalent) is not completely respected.
This is not just a publicity coup for the Islamists ("Hey, world, see our heap-big mosque right next to the Olympics!"). This is part of a Plan.
Frankly, this frightens me.
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