Snapshot of a Rotten State

Sometimes you look at a news page and certain items like dots join up together and spell a message. The ancients used to read the heavens scouring the stars for messages. With the news pages we tend to be the seekers of messages. Sometimes it's a good one, sometimes not. More often not.

From the EU Observer today: No, no EU money is going into Palestinian terrorist pockets. No, there is no genocide in Darfur. Yes, there will be European observers at the US general election this year.

If you read the reports, there are, shall we say, nuances that lend a little perspective, but there is a surreality where we are, on the one hand, engaging in semantics over human lives being extinguished (primarily to avoid having our hand forced), and on the other quite prepared to intervene where it is likely to be redundant.

How to explain such emptiness, such superfluity, at the heart of Europe? Look no further than the EU's overwhelming democratic deficit.