Required Reading/Don't Pass the Brie

Mark Steyn:

Indeed, when you look at it that way, the biggest globalisation success story of recent years is not McDonald’s or Disney, but Islamism: the Saudis took what was 80 years ago a severe but obscure and unimportant strain of Islam practised by Bedouins in the middle of a desert miles from anywhere and successfully exported it to the heart of Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Leeds, Buffalo. It was a strictly local virus, but the bird flew the coop. And now, instead of the quaintly parochial terrorist movements of yore, we have the first globalised insurgency.

What’s the bigger threat? A globalisation that exports cheeseburgers and pop songs or a globalisation that exports the fiercest and unhealthiest aspects of its culture? Far too many American conservatives still think the dragons are at the far fringes of the map – that, in the 21st century, America can be a 19th-century republic untroubled by the world’s pathogens because of its sheer distance from them.

Read the whole thing here.

Meanwhile, France (and its retarded stepchild, Canada) has spearheaded new UN rules allowing fragile cultures (like their own) to block the exports of dynamic cultures (such as ours). I’d suggest giving them the bird, but that joke just isn’t funny with an avian flu pandemic on the horizon.