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I have no interest in bashing Europeans. My Parents were Europeans. However, my father brought us here for precisely some of the reasons I articulated above. I still have family in Europe and have nothing but empathy for them, having to live in a society that while admiring their past accomplishments have learned little from their historical mistakes.

My replies are not about bashing Europeans, just simply pointing out that they have structural problems in their social organization as well as in their philosophical foundations of government. Any way you slice it, European inovation for the last 50 years has gone south as far as original technological development. Like the Japanese they have become great refiners of technology developed elsewhere. We could discuss this at length but I don't think I could type that much.

We have much the same problem here in the United States and are engaged in the great debate of the direction of this society. Hopefully we will be able to resolve these question before the Chinese occupy us all and then it will be mute.

I agree with you that Britain's technological base has been eroded by years of idiotic management and lack of investment. The reasons go back a long way - Corelli Barnett's book, The Collapse of British Power, is very good on this. But I think most people would agree that it is something of an exaggeration to say that Europe has produced no innovative technology since the war. America is the engine of the world's economy, and you're right to be proud of that, but you can be proud of it without belittling everyone else. Incidentally, your view that the Japanese simply adapt the discoveries of others may have been correct thirty years ago, but I don't think it is now.

The controlled nuclear fusion process that I referred to was at the Joint European Torus in Oxfordshire in 1991. By the way, the World Wide Web was invented by Tim Berners-Lee, an Englishman working at CERN in Switzerland.