In Europe, nothing is certain except death and welfare, and why let the former get in the way of the latter?

Popular culture as a whole is popular, but in today's fragmented market it's a jostle of competing unpopular popular cultures. As the critic Stanley Crouch likes to say, if you make a movie and 10 million people go see it, you'll gross $100 million - and 96 per cent of the population won't have to be involved. That alone should caution anyone about reading too much into individual examples of popular culture.

How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice. How do you get away from it? Improvise.

Long before they slump into poverty, great powers succumb to a poverty of ambition.

But, once you get a taste for shutting people up, it's hard to stop. Why bother winning the debate when it's easier to close it down?

The progressive Left can be in favor of Big Government or population control but not both. The mutual incompatibility is about to plunge Europe into societal collapse. There is no precedent in human history for economic growth on declining human capital - and that's before anyone invented unsustainable welfare systems.

To expect the government to save you is to be a bystander in your own fate.