The Illusion of Calm

From an international perspective, things appear to be calming down - today, at least. France maintains that the riots are dissipating - burning cars aside - and there are no major explosions at the present time. An air of tense quiet seems to be settling momentarily. It's anyone's guess as to how that quiet will be shattered next, but such moments tend not to last very long.

Has France truly gotten a grip on its internal unrest? Have the copycat incidents in Germany and Belgium stopped? The infuriating silence of the mainstream media about these things makes me uneasy that any true control has been restored. Mark Steyn predicted civil war in Europe in 2010 and has been saying he's been too optimistic by 5 years, but from all reports, the violence is slowly dying out. Calm of a sort is slowly being reasserted - the same sort of uneasy calm that descended upon Europe before the autumn of 1914.

As for Iran, they seem to be trying to un-ruffle some feathers and appear to play nice while preparing for a storm to come. I certainly hope someone more sane manages to ram some sense in there, but that's a far-fetched wish.

As for the rest of the world... we'll see what happens.