09 June 2004 Blog Home : June 2004 : Permalink
The VodkaPundit requested someone to Fisk this piece of socialist caca so I have. I hope it meets with general approval
Ronald Reagan changed America, and -- with all due deference to his dedication to principle, his indomitable spirit, his affability -- not for the better.
I come not to praise Reagan but to bury him. And then urinate on his grave. You see he demonstrated that whiny left-wingers like me were both wrong and hypocritical.
Historians will argue how much credit Reagan deserves for the ratcheting down of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union. By any measure he surely merits some, even if he spent the better part of his presidency ratcheting the Cold War up.
Reagan won the cold war by cheating! outspending your opponent just isn't fair!
But however much Reagan helped wind down the Cold War abroad, he absolutely revived class war here at home. Slashing taxes on the rich, refusing to raise the minimum wage and declaring war on unions by firing air traffic controllers during their 1981 strike, Reagan took aim at the New Deal's proudest creation: a secure and decently paid working class.
Of course as a highly paid columnist I happily donate the additional 35% of my wages that I would have been taxed before Reagan to charities that support solidarity with my working-class brethren. And I never ever shop at WalMart or Targ� because they don't sell caviar^H^H^H^H^H^H^Htreat their employees so badly.
Broadly shared prosperity was out; plutocracy was dug up from the boneyard of bad ideas. The share of the nation's wealth held by the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans rose by 5 percent during Reagan's presidency, while virtually everyone else's declined.
Of course the fact that even the poorest members of our society were better off when Reagan left than when he started is barely worth mentioning. Its much fairer if we all have equal shares of a single cupcake than variable shares in an enormous cake.
You need look no further than the current recovery to see Reagan's lasting effect on our economy. Corporate profits have been rising handsomely for the past couple of years, at roughly a 30 percent annual rate. But over two years into the recovery, wages are limping along at roughly the rate of inflation, gaining 1 to 2 percent annually. With the percentage of American workers who belong to unions -- 12 percent overall and just 8 percent in the private sector -- having sunk to its lowest level since before FDR, is it any wonder that wages are stuck?
You know these capitalists are complete swine and utterly failed to cut wages during a recession like they are supposed to so the only thing I can complain about is that workers don't get more money than for the same amount of work. Likewise I can't complain about the unemployment rate since the unemployment rate has been dropping like a stone ever since the unions lost their power so I'll complain about the unions losing their power instead.
Roughly a quarter of American workers belonged to unions when Reagan took office. When he broke the PATCO strike, it was an unambiguous signal that employers need feel little or no obligation to their workers,
It was an unambiguous signal that attempted extortion, blackmail and coercion doesn't always work.
and employers got that message loud and clear -- illegally firing workers who sought to unionize, replacing permanent employees who could collect benefits with temps who could not, shipping factories and jobs abroad. Reagan may have preached traditional values, but loyalty was not one of them.
The jobs shipped abroad is clearly indicated by the fact that unemployment is now lower than ever and that there are so many illegal immigrants who also seem to survive by working even though all the factories disappeared.
In his efforts to return capitalism to its previously unlamented Hobbesian past, Reagan had plenty of company. His helpmeet Maggie Thatcher made similar changes on her side of the pond. Throughout the advanced capitalist nations, the power of workers weakened as the old industrial economies ceased to expand and global investment began to outrun the constraints of the state. But nowhere was the force of investment stronger and the force of labor weaker than in the United States. The explosion of the trade deficit, no less than the budget deficit, dates to Reagan's morning in America.
Funny how the US economy is so much more healthy than those statist ones in Europe. In terms of growth rates and GDP/capita the US has out-performed the worker's paradises. Surely this is mere chance! (see Source ).
Reaganomics reflected the rise of Sunbelt capitalism -- of right-to-work-state businessmen who, unlike their Northern counterparts, had never cottoned at all to unions or regulations. From Reagan's dictum that government is the problem to Tom DeLay's equation of the Environmental Protection Agency with the Gestapo, the idea that there are higher purposes than private profit, or gainful pest extermination, has been banished from modern Republicanism.
The government is good! If it weren't for the government and the lobbyists I'd have to buy my own meals instead of freeloading off them. Everybody knows that all bureaucrats are selfless idealists who never ever lie or waste money or do anything except help the people, thats why the EU with all its wonderful bureacracy has so much lower levels of investment and growth than the US.
And though Reaganomics may have begun in the backwaters of American capitalism, it soon spread to Wall Street, which has rewarded our current Reaganaut, George W. Bush, with more money for his campaign than any other sector. Scrap the taxes on dividends, and that musty financial oversight, and watch finance become the political clone of the oil bidness.
Another set of people who won't buy me lunch because they can't stand me.
By letting business be business in its pre-New Deal mold -- free to speculate and shed longtime employees -- Reagan and his acolytes not only transformed the classic Northeastern capitalists. They also drove from their ranks the Willkie-Eisenhower-Rockefeller-Nixon Republicans who were the traditional GOP's political tribunes. In this the Reaganites succeeded all too well.
Reagan didn't mean to destroy the moderate wing of Republicanism per se, or to root the party in Southern states exclusively. To be sure, his primary opponents in 1968, 1976 and 1980 -- Nelson Rockefeller, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, the senior Bush -- were moderates against whom he ran up big vote totals in the South. But each time Reagan selected a vice president -- in 1976 he announced he'd pick liberal Pennsylvania senator Richard Schweiker if he won the nomination; in 1980, he picked George H.W. Bush -- he went with pillars of the Northeastern GOP establishment.
So ahh Reagan actually did nothing at all to destroy moderate Republicanism. But its still his fault that Bush and Clinton had a base in Hicksville instead of being urban sophisticates like me
By the time George W. Bush chose his fellow Houstonian Dick Cheney as his running mate, though, the Republicans had no Northeastern establishment remaining. Progressives had been banished; the socially tolerant had fled. Bush heads a party in which recent national leaders -- most certainly the trifecta of Newt Gingrich, Trent Lott and Tom DeLay -- are Southern right-wingers contemptuous of the traditions of both Roosevelts and not too crazy about the civil rights revolution of the '60s, either. Today's party narrowly clings to power in every branch of government, but it refuses to govern with, or listen to, anyone outside its ever-smaller tent. The post-Reagan Republicans have now shrunk to the party of culture war as well as class war -- to the nation's general woe.
Well known southern states such as New Hampshire, Idaho, Montana, Colorado and Utah helped put Bush into power in 2000 (Source). All those horrible poxy states with no coastline that get in the way when I fly to LA or Frisco.
Its just NOT FAIR! All these nasty people who don't understand that they would be better off without the SUV and the 3-car garage. I mean really. If they weren't so rich then I wouldn't get stuck in traffic so much. And you know that's all Reagan's fault for destroying the government agencies that would have kept them poor for their own good.
Updates (from the comments) :
09 June 2004 Blog Home : June 2004 : Permalink
As if the blog world hadn't noticed the Pew researchers have just released a detailed report demonstrating that Americans divide their trust in the news by political affiliation. Worse a large proportion don't seem to trust any news organization to thell them the truth. This is not good. As the VodkaPundit points out:
Only 15% of Republicans believe what they see on CBS News. The numbers are scarcely better for NBC (16%) and ABC (17%). The Times clocks in at an unsurprising by still pathetic 14%. CNN easily tops all of the above, but still slides to 26%. According to the Pew analysis, "CNN's once dominant credibility ratings have slumped in recent years, mostly among Republicans and independents."
Look folks, this is a Big Deal, and I'm not even talking about media bias per se.
For all intents and purposes, more than half of the populace (everybody except partisan Democrats, and even their numbers for credibility are nothing for most of the press to brag about) has written off the vast majority of the national press. And they're doing so because they believe that the press has written them off.
A part of the problem, it seems to me, is that "Big Media" is utterly failing in its job of getting out the news. It suffers from selection bias (e.g. Abu Ghraib got endless coverage while other tragedies at the same time such as Dharfur, the UN Oil Scam and Nick Berg's execution got limited mentions) and worse it suffers from a total inability to make incisive editorial comment. What we see is that Reuters (and AP etc.) journalists (who are supposed to be writing straight unbiased news) are editorializing and the Big Media is then editorializing based on the reports it gets from Ruters at al..
So where does the discerning person turn for news - well Paul Wolfowitz turns to the blogosphere: in today's WSJ he mentions two Iraqi bloggers in the same way that in the past he might have mentioned, say, Tom Friedman or Robert Novak.
After a suicide car bombing killed Iraqi Interim Governing Council President Izzedine Salim and eight others on May 17, one Iraqi put that act of terror into a larger perspective for those who wonder if democracy can work in Iraq. His name is Omar, one of the new Iraqi "bloggers,"
He's not alone. The blogosphere has provided many people with insights on Iraq, Iran and other places that just don't get coverage. Unlike Reuters and friends, blogs make no attempt to be impartial and don't hide the editorial comment. But they (almost) always link to the source material where possible and thus we get their view and the full text of what they are commenting on so we can draw our own conclusions. Where they break new ground its giving us emails from people who don't ever get in the media and then you rarely see any editorial and if you do its clear from indentation or other textual differentiation. The blog news usually attributes (e.g. this is from a Marine Captain in Fallujah) and rarely crops the comment letting it stand free to be read as a whole. Compare this to Big Media where we frequently see just soundbites from "an Iraqi" or worse "a source".
Another large difference between blogs and big media is that blogs frequently fact-check each other and usually admit errors and issue immediate corrections and/or clarifications. Partly this is because they can - its a lot harder to do this in a printed newspaper - but partly its because the can only keep readership is to be up front and clear about errors. This is I think the key difference between the Internet news resourcs such as blogs and traditional ones. Because setting up a blog is essentially free and for readers there are no switching costs a blogger who habitially fails to make corrections or admit mistakes (or otherwise condescend to his/her readership) will lose his/her readership quickly because they reders will be able to find someone else instead. Even with 200 cable TV channels and a gazillion terrestrial TV and radio stations the switching costs and startup costs are non-trivial (so you simply can't easily replace a bad one) and the printed media is even worse -- especially in much of North America the only way to get most newspapers and magazines is to buy a subscription because the local shops simply don't carry them. If you've bought a year's subscription to a magazine you sure as heck have a financial incentive to keep reading the rag even though its a lying piece of trash. Hence the incentive to issue clear corrections is absent.
The big problem with the balkanization of Big Media and with the success of the blogoshpere is the chance for incestuousness. Daniel Drezner did an article and a survey about the blogs read by influential people which indicated a certain lack of feminist perspective in that circle and there have been analyses of track back links that indicate that, apart from fiskings and flamings, bloggers tend to link to and comment on blogs of a similar political persuasion (note to self must extend blogroll). This is terrible because, as we have seen about both Iraq and the ongoing discussion of Israel/Palestine people simply cannot agree on the facts whih means that they start arguing past each other.
As the Pew report noted more and more people get their news on line. More and more people will therefore be hitting the blogosphere and in general "that's a good thing", but if they only get their news from one perspective then that's a bad thing, actually a really bad thing. And the people to blame are Big Media for blowing their impartiality.
Permalink10 June 2004 Blog Home : June 2004 : Permalink
It's easy to pick on the French, and since I live in France it seems rather petty to do so too frequently, but every now and then I get so irritated by the antics of M. Chirac that I feel I must comment.
One thing that has always puzzled me when I look at France's behaviour as a country is why it seems familiar and then a couple of days ago it clicked. France behaves to other countries just the way the unsuitable girl (or boy if you're that way inclined) does that you fall in love with despite all the dire warnings of your parents
France has all the glitz, glamour, sex-appeal and sophistication you want to see. Admired by all you think that getting France as a lover is a sign that you're mature, grown up and sophisticated yourself.
But just like the lover you were warned about you discover France applies different standards to others than the ones she wants others to apply to her. You obey international treaties and consult your allies. Me, I'm going to break international treaties (e.g. the Euro stability pact) and intervene unilateraly in foreign countries (Cóte d'Ivroie) without any advance approval at all.
Then there's the persistent infidelity. Sure the West must remain united on countering tyranny but I've got to do some deals with a load of tyrants. But trust me, really I'm all in favour of diplomacy.
How about the embarassing gifts from mysterious sources -- no really I've no idea where that Billion dollars came from.
And of course there's jealousy -- as soon as France is no longer the center of attention (rememebr French used to be the language of diplomacy) it gets al put out and starts forming cliques and whispering about perceived rivals such as those unfortunate Eastern Europeans
God forbid that France should actually follow through on something they promise. One day its "Sure we'll keep the peace in Rwanda" the next its "Help help the nasty people are doing nasty things, please big strong lover fix it for me!"
Yup
sounds really familiar! but did I miss a trick? do comment below
12 June 2004 Blog Home : June 2004 : Permalink
Note this article was also published in the Nice Ventures newsletter for Q2 2004
In the late 1990s it was common to hear the hype that the broadband Internet would change things. Then there was 3G and PDA hype talking about converged (video) voice and data ... But while this hype may not have been entirely wrong certain trends mean that some parts of the hype are looking less correct than others. The Internet and broadband are indeed changing things but the form factor chosen has not quite been the one expected as it is the relatively high-end laptop which is becoming the centre of attention.
Essentially it boils down to the way we do business these days. Firstly, as a result of broadband Internet availability more and more people can realistically work from home, which means that more and more companies give more and more of their employees laptops rather than desktops. Secondly the way we work has changed with ever increasing numbers of people expected to travel yet remain in contact via email (using the various methods of Internet access) and discuss documents, make presentations etc. means that it becomes commonplace to travel with a laptop. Rather than print out a document or use an overhead projector we use the laptop to display it and rather than scrawl notes down in an organizer that we then transcribe into an electronic document we now write the document outline as the meeting progresses and just tidy it up later.
Together with the new way of working we have seen a big change in the price/performance trade off with regards to laptops. There has been a significant increase in both performance and battery life of laptops over the last couple of years. These days a high-end laptop can expect to run any office productivity application, to have a decent sized screen (at least 1024*768 - often larger), to have built in peripherals such as networking or USB, and run on battery for 4 or more hours (indeed the latest Centrino laptops seem to have a battery life of well over 6 hours under normal operation). In addition the common adoption of network standards mean that in most cases even the utterly non-technical can plug their laptop into a new network and get connectivity automatically with no need to perform complicated reconfiguration of the networking software running on the laptop. Finally today's laptop costs as much as a desktop did a few years ago so, while it is true that desktops have also dropped in price, to businesses used to spending €1000-€2000 per employee for a computer the benefits of a laptop over a desktop means that many are trading up for added convenience and flexibility rather than cutting expenditure.
All this means that a laptop can do anything we want wherever we want and whenever we want. Given that capability it is no surprise that the alternatives are less attractive. However many of them also have issues that limit their adoption even without the advantages of laptop-based life.
Many of the technologies that have enabled laptops were supposed to also enable new devices and methods of communication. Why have they not been adopted?
The concept was that we would store all our data in a central location on the Internet and then access it from anywhere using any convenient access terminal. As I see it this has died primarily because of access and security concerns. Its not that we don't use servers of one sort or another but the Internet really isn't “any time any place” so access is not 100%, furthermore ease of access often conflicts with security. We don't want our sensitive documents to be visible for all or to remain in the cache of some café terminal so that the next user can access them. Moreover when visiting clients and partners there is the problem of access to the external world: firewalls, proxies and so on mean that all but the most basic HTTP cannot necessarily be guaranteed from an enterprises corporate LAN and even that may require authentication and/or the interaction with an IT staff. Server based computing also assumes that dumb terminals (PCs) should be widely available which requires considerable speculative investment above and beyond that required to just provide Internet connectivity. Cabling and wireless access points are fairly passive activities that provide access without great expenditure whereas terminal provision is a considerably more expensive yet provides little additional benefit. In the voice world it is worth noting the swift decline in payphones in countries with high cellphone adoption rates and this seems to be for similar reasons.
PDAs suffer from form-factor and performance issues. In order to drastically increase battery life and portabilityPDAs have small screens and use a customized processors/OS. They usually either omit the keyboard or provide a very inconvenient one, often have limited communications capabilities and because of the non-standard processor/OS limited ability to run familiar PC applications. While none of these features is a drawback on its own, taken together and combined with the price – not for the entry level version so much but rather for the fully configured top of the range one – which approaches that of a “real laptop”, the convenience and power of the latter limits PDAs to a niche for extended use away from an external power supply. Indeed this niche is itself attacked by smartphones (see below) which add basic PDA functionality to a standard mobile phone to create a highly capable device. This is not to say that PDAs are not going to have their uses – and certainly not to say that they will not satisfy some users – but unlike both Smartphones and Laptops PDA sales have been flat to declining over the last year or more (see http://siliconvalley.internet.com/news/article.php/3106781 amongst other pieces)
As with PDAs these products suffer from form-factor and performance issues, and in fact these issues are generally worse. Perhaps the main problem is that the phone functionality of a smartphone can rarely be disabled and indeed is often emphasized; thus these devices are primarily voice/text messaging devices that can also perform a few more general purpose office tasks. This means that rather than compete with a laptop in many cases a smartphone complements it. No one would give a powerpoint presentation from a smartphone and only serious masochists would use it to create a document or surf the web, yet on the other hand few would expect to use a laptop while using public transport or outside in a public place. Smartphones provide just enough additional functionality beyond voice to meet our needs in a mobile environment. But no one would make them the primary
The recent poor showing by Nokia seems to confirm this impression. The cellphone market is still growing and low end cellphones are still wildly popular but higher end models despite being “cool” are not as popular as the makers and the network operators would wish. There is, it would seem, a limit to how much the non-gadget freak is willing to do with a small device.
In addition to the problems faced by the alternatives, there are also a number of trends that help reinforce the utility of a general purpose portable computer. These seem likely to make drive a virtuous circle as they inspire further laptop adoption and this wider adoption in turn spurs new services and trends that make use of them.
One key application that is making the laptop more attractive is Internet telephony. There are numerous softphone clients, USB phones and so on which can make any PC into an IP phone. There are also numerous services that will permit free internet-internet telephony and will also (for a price) allow interconnection to the PSTN. Moreover, companies such as Cisco are pushing VoIP adoption within the workplace and the price of VoIP gateways, call servers and so on seems to be obeying the usual laws of electronics – that is to say decreasing as adoption rates increase. Over a private corporate data network none of the worries about packet loss or latency apply and a “road warrior” who visits a remote office of his own company with a laptop and a softphone is as easy to contact via phone as if he were at his home desk. Indeed, although many people are sceptical about the latency and packet loss of the public internet, the author has held a number of transoceanic phone calls over the public internet with success. It really is the case that so long as there is no congestion at the network edge, unlikely with broadband in most cases, packet loss / latency ceases to be an issue and with a multimedia capable laptop processing the sound of a voice call is less work than processing a DVD movie. Using your laptop as a phone has other advantages – such as the fact that it is capable of directly integrating the phone with your contacts database and manager. A more esoteric advantage is that you can answer your softphone only when the laptop is switched on and connected to the Internet or corporate intranet and that calls automatically divert to voicemail when it isn't. This, and the related benefits for outgoing calls, means that the laptop essentially defines your office with no need to remember complicated codes to redirect calls or other functions.
Scheduling, voicemail, fax; all these and many other things can easily be combined into email. In the past it was the secretary who answered the phone in one's absence, picked up faxes from the fax machine and could inform colleagues of one's whereabouts. Particularly with the various hooks into microsoft's Exchange server and IBM's Notes all these functions and more are now controlled by our email client. We can receive faxes and voicemails as email attachments, often we can send faxes via email to fax gateways, and both servers have scheduling built in along with directories, address books and so on. Once it was common to have a rolodex of business cards of contacts, these days one just scans the card into a contact manager. All of these functions run on the standard laptop and few of them run as well on the PDA or smartphone. Thus, as with phone, the secretarial parts of traditional office life are encapsulated in our laptops and its connectivity to the Internet/intranet.
The IT industry itself, not to mention the many and varied forms of management and business consultancy, have meant that the travelling salesman of old has metamorphosed into the “road warrior” of today – someone who travels frequently either visiting other parts of his own enterprise or visiting customers, sales prospects or partners. These people need a laptop to stay in contact with their colleagues via email and to make sure they can successfully perform their work. Sales calls now routinely involve Powerpoint slides and internal meetings and conference appearances likewise. The US military has disparagingly labeled its middle management “Powerpoint warriors” and the term also applies to many other fields. For a Powerpoint warrior, a laptop is de rigeur because this medium always does best with animation and that requires a live PC presentation rather than a printout or a series of overheads. Even more attractive is the way that a laptop owning Powerpoint user, can customise his presentation up to the moment he gives it, thus allowing him to include points inspired by previous contributors to a meeting.
The result of all of the above is to give a major boost to the concepts of Hot-desking and Telecommuting. Thanks to our laptops our office is no longer location dependent. Anything we can do in the office we can do anywhere else where out laptop can connect to the net. Without a laptop successfully implementing a hot-desk work environment would be nearly impossible. We store (and have to store) too much stuff locally for standard desktop computers and separate phones to really work. Perhaps more to the point humans are not identical machines, we like to personalise our workspace and we all have different ways of working and different favourite tools that we use. Sharing a phone and a desktop PC limits our ability to personalise and makes us unhappy, whereas a plain desk with a power and a network connection allows us to keep our personalised work environment on our laptops.
Telecommuters likewise do better with laptops. Although, the idea of working from home is attractive in some ways it faces a number challenges. Firstly there is the problem that humans are social beings and people who are able to function well as 100% telecommuters are rare. Most of use need the personal interaction of our colleagues some of the time and thus we probably need to be able to be in the office for a significant percentage of time perhaps 10-20%.
There is the investment in space required. For a full time telecommuter, allocating a separate room or a corner of a living room to be “the office” is OK, but for someone who only telecommutes some of the time or who spends a lot of time travelling, this investment in space is itself difficult to justify. For these sorts of telecommuters, who are probably the majority of them, a laptop that can be perched anywhere convenient is far more suitable.
The laptop in conjunction with the broadband Internet may, in the final analysis do what the computer age has promised since it started – produce the paperless office – since more and more things that produced paper in the past are now available as applications on-line or downloaded to our laptop. Certainly the laptop finally permits us to enjoy another long-promised goal – that of media convergence. The laptop really is a device that allows us (to echo the boasts of the industry) combine voice, video and data in a single device that we can use anywhere and at anytime. This article, despite eschewing visual effects, is probably a good example – not only was it produced on a laptop in two different continents and in the air above them, if you received it electronically the chances are that you are reading it using one as well – and that it reached your laptop via the Internet.
Permalink17 June 2004 Blog Home : June 2004 : Permalink
I'm not going to whine specificaly about the US process which apparently is pretty bad though it doesn't seem to be quite as screwed up as the UK version.
A comment over at the Junkyard blog and its link to an email received by Michelle Malkin related a couple of stories about the US INS and how it works. In my own experience much of the anecdotal stories in these two places ring utterly true. The INS makes it hard for law-abiding citizens to get themselves and/or their relatives to remain legally within the US but utterly fails to handle asylum seekers or illegals. And this needs to be fixed
OK so reform sounds liek a good idea. But how exactly? The problem at present seems to be that the bad guys have nothing to lose by evading the law of lying whereas the good guys get severely inconvenienced by trying to bey the law. So what to do?
The main thing that I see is that the incentives need to be switched. At present a lot of effort is put into questioning people at legal ports of entry and very little is done thereafter - I mean you have to work quite hard to get thrown out once you have passed the border. This, it seems to me is wrong. The correct approach is to let anyone in with a quick note of why they are visitng and a clearly defined set of things they are allowed to do while in the country (clearly a check is required to determine whether they have ever been thrown OUT of the the coutnry but that is sufficient). Then you can move the manpower thus freed up to go after the violators and you can shift the incentives so that (for example) people who profit from illegals and/or assist in the fabrication of bogus asylum stories forfeit their own citizenship and property. Said property being sold for the benefit of the deserving asylum seekers os that they aren't dependant on government handouts....
Any other ideas?
Permalink21 June 2004 Blog Home : June 2004 : Permalink
So our glorious leaders have negotiated a glorious treaty that will ensure EUrope's glorious future as a single glorious geopolitical entity [note that acording to Section V, subsection 53 paragraph 69 the word Entity refers to a large pile of stinking horemanure tied up in red tape - see appendix BS subsection 1 for exact dimensions, age and rules of origin of said manure and subsection 2 for the appropriate dimensions colour, and adhesiveness of the tape. Also note as per subsection 3 that the red tape must enclose the manure so as to remove the possibility of olfactory offence to the possessors of sensitive nasal apparatus]. But I jest and levity may not be appropriate.
Unlike the writers of the US constitution, who eschewed bureacratic langauge to produce a document of clarity and vision, the EU writers seem to have taken lessons at the Sir Humphrey Appleby school of "clarity via obscurity". Personally I can't read this stuff for more than about 2 minutes before thinking of writing a polite note to Al Qaeda asking them if they wouldn't mind crashing their next plane into the European Union quarter of Brussels but fortunately the people at EUReferendum have greater dedication to the cause and have waded through the thickets of subclauses and forests of Articles to find out what the leaders agreed to. If you want to read their nice 16 page PDF summary then you can find it on this very website since I offered to host it as blogspot doesn't seem to let you do that sort of thing.
One thing that they point out at the beginning is that what the aforementioned glorious leaders signed wasn't actually the consitution itself merely the the list of ammendments to the monster document. The Eurocrats are at this moment cutting, pasting and translating the final version based on these mmendments and it should be available in a week or two just before they all pop off on their summer holidays.
As someone who once thought the EU was a good idea and still thinks that the basic concept of a unified Europe to economically and politically sensible I'm embarassed by this document. A constitution is the sort of key document which should embody the spirit of the entity and elucidate its vision and goals in ways that inspire its readers to want to participate actively in the attempts to achieve them; hundreds of pages of dense legalistic prose with references back and forth to other paragraphs is not something that I consider to be inspirational. Consider for a moment the following amamendment to Article III-88 (1):
In order to ensure the proper functioning of economic and monetary union,
and in accordance with the relevant provisions of the Constitution, the
Council shall, in accordance with the relevant procedure from among those
referred to in Articles III-71 and III-76, with the exception of the procedure
set out in paragraph 13 thereof, adopt measures specific to those Member
States whose currency is the euro.
Upon reflection, perhaps I am doing the drafters of the EU constitution a disservice. The constitution does indeed embody the spirit of the EU as it really is. That is to say the spirit of obfuscation, of backroom compromise, special exemptions and belief that the self-elected elite knows best. This latter is of course manifestly untrue, if the elite really did know best then the EU's growth rate would have increased as integration and the more integrated countries would have the best growth rates. As it happens the UK has about the best growth rate of the last 10 years and as David Smith, the economics editor for the Sunday Times, writes the UK benefits the EU far more than vice versa.
Permalink22 June 2004 Blog Home : June 2004 : Permalink
At the Motley Fool there is a discussion board with a generally high level of discussion about Iraq and the "War on Terror". A post there asked some good questions for those of us who support the war. So I thought I'd answer them not just there but here too:
1) Who are 'the terrorists'?
A bunch of religious fanatics who want us all to covert to a particularly unpleasant and intolerant religion - Wahhabi Islam
2) Where are they located?
Mainly in the Middle East but some are in other parts of Asia and probably also in Europe. They have bases in many of the failed states and parts of states (e.g. Chechnya, Somalia) and undoubtedly have a large presence in Saudia Arabia
3) How do we stop them?
A) Fix the disfunctional regimes and economies of the middle east. This removes the financing and the recruitment pool and also removes the sorts of governments that are likely to sponsor terrorism
B) Kill the ringleaders - ideally in a way that demonstrates their claims are utterly false
4) Since Al Qaeda is in Iraq now but was not (please..no Russian quotes/no 'funny' links..like maybe how about the photo of Rumsfeld shaking Sadda's hand..someone could say that was a linke between us and Saddam in some sinister plot...) before the war, how did this war help the 'war on terror'?
Removed probably the worst dictator in the region. Scared the $#!+ out of its neighbours. Also there is extensive evidence (which some people seem unwilling to accept despite it coming from numerous sources) that Iraq did indeed succour Al Qaeda and other related terrorists. True it seems like Osama may not have asked for Saddam's advice when planning 9/11 but there is considerable additional evidence that (parts of) Al Qaeda were in regular communication with Saddam and recieved aid from him.
5) How does killing innocent citizens en masse prevent terrorism from spreading? Doesn't it do just the opposite?
Define "En Masse". The US has not killed citizens of Iraq "En Masse" in my opinion. If the US were in the business of killing citizens "en masse" Fallujah would have been flattened. The failure to flatten Fallujah may in retrospect be seen to be a mistake although I think that so far it was a good choice. However it is worth pointing out that Syria flattened Hama and had no terror problems for 20 years or so after that. That was killing "en masse" with an estimated 20,000 deaths out of a population of 350,000 - see http://www.wordiq.com/definition/Hama_Massacre.
If you don't have answers to those questions, how can you support the illegal invasion of Iraq or any other military action?
A) I have answers
B) It wasn't illegal since Iraq was in direct contravention of the resolutions that resulted in the ceasefire at the end of Gulf War I.
C) The situation before the invasion was neither good nor improving. In fact rather the opposite. The strategy of "containment" flat out wasn't containing properly and there weren't any other options.
29 June 2004 Blog Home : June 2004 : Permalink
30 June 2004 Blog Home : June 2004 : Permalink
Israel has been paraded as the excuse for failure in the Middle East, but it is surely just an excuse. Israel as a country has gone from nowhere to the second richest country by per capita GDP in the region in about 50 years. It has done so despite fighting numerous wars and with no natural resources to spend. Indeed the economies of the rest of the middle east have stagnated despite population growth and large oil revenues - see this good economic review of the region albeit one a year or so old.
In order to distract attention from this failure the ME rulers claim that Israel's existence is what is stopping their development despite the fact that Israel has not in fact attacked them or done anything to them. There have been no new floods of palestinian refugees in the last 20 years. There have been more than a handful of Israeli raids on neighbouring countries and aside from its involvement in Lebanon - whence Israel has been steadily retreating during this time - Israel has done nothing to its neigbours. But Israel makes a convenient external focus for rage which means that a generally uneducated priest-ridden society does not feel the need to demand reform at home. The problem is exactly as President Bush has stated a number of times - lack of free-market democracy. In all countries in the region bar Israel the populace has no way to replace its rulers except through revolt and the economy is tightly controlled by the ruling elite who tend to own and run the major industries.
Israel has genuine elections and has seen numerous governments of different complexions over the last couple of decades. If you look at this Wikipedia entry you can see that Israel has had some 6 different leaders during this time. On the other hand the supreme power in all the other countries in the middle east has changed at most once during the same time - generally going from father to son. Iran may have done slightly better but the recent hobbling of elections shows that democracy there is not quite the same as in other places. Likewise with the economy. I don't know how many Israeli companies have been IPOed and quoted on Nasdaq, been spun off from foriegn comapnies, bought by foreign companies etc but it is a lot. There is no clique that owns Israel and there are no more tariffs and trade-barriers than one sees in the rest of the developed world.
In the rest of the middle east the rulers own and run everything and the poor stay poor. Its not for lack of entrepreneurial spirit in many cases (although that is also lacking sometimes) but a culture that tends to punish success and/or systematic corruption that means than anyone who prospers beyond a certain level gets his profits taken away in bribes and extortion from the government. The same goes for most foreign investment. In most cases foreigners are not allowed to own the assets they wish to use and must rely on a local partner who is normally related to the ruling elite and may decide sometime later to just take the entire business for himself. Since the rule of law in these countries is also less than evenly applied the result is a situation where there is a strong disincentive towards workign hard unless you are a member of the ruling elite sicne if you do so you are likely to see your hard work assumed by some member of thst elite.
Iraq may in fact be just what the region needs. Liberals have sneered about the Iraqi currency reform as the onyl thing the CPA did but trust in the currency was one thing that was lacking during the Hussein era. Since the new currency was introduced it has been stable and universally accepted neither of which was the case before. It remains to be seen whether Iraq will succeed but economically Iraq is blooming and the rewards are being widely distributed. Iraq's agricultural sector has thrived since the change in regime and Iraq will probably not need to import food in 2004 for the first time in decades. But it seems to me that the big thing in Iraq is a change of attitude towards groups taking control of their own affairs rather than passively waiting for permission/approval from the government. Sometimes of course the attitude results in robber baron style capitalism but in the long term this is better than no capitalism as seen elsewhere in the region.
Permalink30 June 2004 Blog Home : June 2004 : Permalink
I added an RSS version 2 compliant feed to this blog - get it here while its fresh or look down on the left hand side and do feel free to leave a rude comment if it doesn't work with your RSS reader.