The usual suspects (Reuters, BBC, AP) seem to be stressing the fact that the UN report into Darfur failed to agree with the US government that genocide was occuring. The BBC comes off best, I think, hinting at the reason why the UN seems to have been unwilling to describe what is happening in Darfur as genocide:
UN rules out genocide in Darfur A UN report has said Sudan's government and its militia systematically abused civilians in Darfur - but it stopped short of calling the violence genocide.
It said those responsible should be prosecuted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague.
Where genocide is found to have taken place, signatories to a UN convention are legally obliged to act to end it.
As you note from the last sentence extracted, Genocide would trigger a requirement that the UN organise troops to do something militarily to end it. Since its not "genocide" the UN doesn't need to do anything itself but can beg lots of money setting up trials for various people accused of "acts with genocidal intent".
For Reuters though it seems like the more important thing is not the events in Darfur but the fact that the US has seen its charge of genocide not sustained and that the US is unhappy with using the ICC in the Netherlands as the place for trying the various people accused of "acts with genocidal intent" and other war-crimes etc. Here is the headline and the leading paragraphs from Reuters:
New UN Report on Darfur Triggers US-Europe Division
By Evelyn Leopold
UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - A key report on war crimes in Sudan's Darfur region is triggering an intense diplomatic battle between the United States and Europe on how to prosecute perpetrators of pillage, slaughter and rape.
A U.N.-appointed commission of inquiry reported on Monday that the Sudanese government and its militia allies committed major crimes under international law, setting the stage for Sudan officials and rebels to be prosecuted as war criminals.
The 176-page report concluded that Khartoum had not pursued a policy of genocide against non-Arabs in Darfur, where at least 70,000 people have died from killings or disease and 1.8 million people were forced out of their homes.
But it said some individuals may have acted with "genocidal intent," which only a court could decide.
That court, the commission's five legal experts said, should be the Hague-based International Criminal Court, or ICC, set up to try individuals for genocide, war crimes and massive human rights abuses.
U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan (news - web sites) and Europeans want the U.N. Security Council to refer Sudan to the ICC. The panel has produced a sealed list of suspects.
"This is a case that is tailor-made for the ICC," Britain's U.N. ambassador, Emyr Jones Parry told reporters.
But the Bush administration vigorously opposes the court, citing fears of prosecutions against U.S. soldiers abroad.
Instead it wants to set up a new U.N.-African Union tribunal in Tanzania. Diplomats said Washington was willing to pay a considerable sum to establish the court but feared no other rich country would help.
Now I admit that I don't fully understand the alleged US reluctance to use the ICC in this case but I simply don't see how a split over the use of the ICC can be the most important part of the news. Surely the more important bit is the fact that the report agrees that the Sudanese government killed 70,000 of its own civillians an made 1.8 million homeless. I cannot help but recall the outcry over the report that claimed that 100,000 Iraqis had been killed by the Coalition.
The AP is, if anything, worse, in that its headline and leading paragraphs seem designed to make the Khartoum regime look wrongly accused:
U.N. Clears Sudan of Genocide in Darfur
UNITED NATIONS - Sudan's government and the Janjaweed militia are not guilty of genocide but did commit mass killings, torture, rape and other atrocities in the Darfur region that merit the trial of suspects in the International Criminal Court, a U.N.-appointed panel said in a new report.
The panel's report, released Monday, sets up a possible showdown with Washington, which opposes the court and has demanded perpetrators of the violence be tried elsewhere.
It also managed to mention the "showdown with Washington" before mentioning precisely what the report describes the Sudanese of doing which only shows up in paragraphs 3 and 4:
The crisis in Darfur, which has killed more than 70,000 people and has affected some 2 million people, has gripped world attention but also drawn calls that international leaders are again standing by while a people is exterminated — as happened in Cambodia, Rwanda and Yugoslavia.
While the United States has labeled the destruction genocide, the U.N.-appointed panel of five lawyers said that there appeared to be no clear evidence of "genocidal intent" against the people of Darfur. Still, it said the atrocities committed there were horrific, and spread the blame among the government, the militias and the region's rebels.
And again the implication seems to me to be that the US is being presented as a trigger happy cowboy making false accusations against some poor weak Sudanese regime who are only responding in kind to the dastardly rebels.
I am sick of this. I really am. One would have thought more priority would have gone into describing what the acts of genocidal intent were and why they didn't count as genocide. Somehow the real reason why we all should be concerned about events in Darfur - the population that is being abused - is considered of less interest than the fact that the US is acting as a lone troublemaker again. It seems that just talking about how bad things are is enough, actually doing something to stop them is no longer necessary. With the UN on the case the perpetrators can look forward to having their day in a nice comfortable courtroom about a decade or so from now where the worst they will face is a few years in a nice comfortable prison cell.
February 1, 2005: Apparently the Sudanese government is once again using its An-24 transports as bomber aircraft in the Darfur region. The An-24 is a two engine Russian aircraft, developed in the 1960s to replace pre-World War II American DC-3s. An-24s can carry up to 50 passengers, or five tons of cargo. Sudan have some of the An-26 versions of the An-24, which has a rear ramp, which bombs are rolled out of. The African Union and various relief agencies report that Sudanese planes bombed the village of Rahad Kabolong in North Darfur state. The attack took place on January 26 and left more than 100 people dead. Some 9000 people fled the village and the surrounding area after the air attack. A monitoring team reported that most of the dead were women and children. As of January 31, the government continued to deny that the air raid took place. The United Nations called the attack a major ceasefire violation-- which of course it was. The UN, however, still refuses to call the Sudanese war in Darfur a genocide.
In addition to printing the columns of Mark Steyn (OK all bar one) - and today's one is a humdinger (as Tim Wortsall notes) - the Torygraph manages to get a lot of other good stuff in their opinion section. Today it has two excellent articles on the Labour party and the UK.
The first is an editorial about Labour's anti-semitism. I have to say that I tend to incline to the rule of "Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, thrice is deliberate action" and my general belief that the Labour party was only on stage one or possibly two was rather shaken. The Labour party does, at best, seem to be woefully lacking in a knowledge of literary history and I fear that indeed the Torygraph is correct and that the Labour party is indeed guilty of that latent anti-semitism which they so loudly protest in others. The Torygraph is not alone in this - Stephen Pollard wrote about it in the Independant, and the blog Silent Running had in addition to commentary, an excellent graphic which illustrates the problem rather clearly (one wonders whether either the Silent Running graphic or the original Labour ad would be permitted if the Religious Respect bill were passed).
The second Labour piece today, by David Green, is eloquent in showing how the Labour party has managed to make it so that large numbers of people depend on government largesse. Indeed the Labour party has done a wonderful job in hiding its socialism but it is still there:
Labour's penchant for multiculturalism, for example, has led to a proliferation of jobs designed to ensure the proportionate representation of ethnic minorities in the workplace, and to stamp out the illicit practices of the hegemonic white middle class, such as its fondness for guided walks in the Lake District. The strategy of creating interest groups beholden to Labour has increased public-sector employment by some 10 per cent since 1998. With nearly 5.5 million employees, the public sector now accounts for almost one in every five jobs (or non-jobs); more than half a million have been created in the past seven years.
The Government has also increased the number of people on benefits generally. There are now more people on benefits than during the first full year of Labour rule. Indeed, the number on what are termed "key benefits" has increased from six million in November 1998 to 6.6 million in December 2004. Of course, Labour has tried to hide what is happening by renaming a major benefit a "tax credit", but the trend is unmistakable.
How does this compare with recent history? In 1951, less than four per cent of the population received national assistance or unemployment benefit. In 1971, it was still only eight per cent. In 2004, the proportion of the working-age population dependent on key benefits was 18 per cent. According to the Government's Family Resources Survey, 30 per cent of households received half or more of their income from the state in 2002-03. Among households over pension age, the proportion was 60 per cent. The real story is that we have taken huge strides on the road to becoming a nation of supplicants.
Adding up the numbers and you have more than 12 million people or 20% of the entire population sucking at the public teat and so far as I can tell no intention to try and reign it in. Colour me depressed about Britain, but impressed with the Torygraph. Permalink
Last year I wrote about the controversial McIntyre and McKitrick paper that disproved the fanmous IPCC hockeystick that originated in a couple of papers by Michael Mann. Well, just in time to make Tony Blair happy, Geophysical Research Letters which published the second (1999) Mann paper, has now published McIntyre and McKitrick's devastating rebuttal.
For those who dislike the idea of reading the dense technical science, Canada's National Post reproduced a two part translation of the leadarticle in the Dutch magazine Natuurwetenschap & Techniek (NWT), which is also available in PDF format from the McIntyre and McKitrick website. The appearence in Geo Res Letters does rather blow a hole in the attempts by other climate scientists (such as Stephen Schneider) to discredit the credibility of McIntyre and McKitrick. In this page on his website Schneider writes:
Although Mann and his colleagues were not given the chance to peer review the McIntyre and McKitrick paper, they did immediately prepare a couple of rebuttals, one that was posted on Michael Mann's website, and one that was posted on Quark Soup. Tim Osborn, Keith Briffa, and Phil Jones of the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia also prepared a rebuttal. The main counter-evidence presented in all four rebuttals is summarized below:
McIntyre and McKitrick selectively censored some important data used by Mann et al. (by either eliminating it completely or substituting other data for it), especially for the period from 1400-1600 AD, where their results deviate most from Mann's. Much of the data censored were key proxy indicators that added to cooling in the fifteenth century.
McIntyre and McKitrick claimed that some of their data omissions/substitutions were due to the fact that not all of the Mann et al. data were available to them. However, Mann says his datasets were actually available online and have been for the last couple years.
McIntyre's and McKitrick's methodology also had technical problems. For example, they used a decomposition based on one surface temperature data set with standardization factors based on a different temperature data set, effectively mashing together two sets of incompatible data.
McIntyre and McKitrick requested a spreadsheet of the Mann et al. (1998) proxy data, and the data they received from one of Mann's colleagues were incorrect. Mann takes the blame for this but also wonders why the authors didn't visit the website containing all the data sets in the first place. This inaccurate data set could explain why McIntyre and McKitrick could not reproduce the Mann et al. (1998) "hockey stick" reconstruction. In addition, the data provided to McIntyre and McKitrick contained only 112 proxy indicator series, whereas Mann's work actually had 159.
Unfortunately as all the evidence gathered by McIntyre and McKitrick, such as the fact that Mann had an entire directory named "BACKTO_1400-CENSORED" which has data showing similar results to those produced by McIntyre and McKitrick, seems to indicate that Mann was indeed sloppy in his statistics and that the fourth accusation - about cherry picking only some of the series is a case of the pot calling the kettle black. As McIntyre says in the NWT article:
“Imagine the irony of this discovery.After we published our findings in Energy and Environment,Mann accused us of selectively deleting North American proxy series.Now it appeared that he had results that were exactly the same as ours, stuffed away in a folder labeled CENSORED.”
Indeed the NWT article is truly devastating. The authors got confirmation from many people who are clearly qualified to comment on particular aspects of the matter under question. For example:
At our request, Dr Mia Hubert of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium, who specializes in robust statistics, checked to see if the Mann’s unusual standardization influenced the climate reconstruction. She confirms:“Tree rings with a hockeystick shape dominate the PCA with this method.”
This is worrying because it seems that Mann's hockey stick and the data series he has used are repeated in numerous "independant" papers, and that many of these have less raw data available to verify whether there is any funny business going on.
At this point, McIntyre has growing doubts about the other studies as well. His initial impression is that they are also dubious. It is almost certain, or so he states, that the other studies have not been checked either. McIntyre:“Mann’s archiving may be unsatisfactory, but other researchers, including Crowley, Lowery,Briffa, Esper, etc, are even worse.After twenty-five emails requesting data, Crowley advised me that he had misplaced his original data and only had a filtered version of his data. Briffa reported the use of 387 tree ring sites, but has not disclosed the sites. Other researchers haven’t archived their data or methods or replied to requests.”
“Mann speaks of independent studies, but they are not independent in any usual sense.Most of the studies involve Mann, Jones,Briffa and/or Bradley. Some datasets are used in nearly every study.Bristlecone pine series look like they affect a number of other studies as well and I plan to determine their exact impact. I’m also concerned about how the proxies are selected. There is a distinct possibility that researchers have either purposefully or subconsciously selected series with the hockey stick shape. .."
As the article concludes, if we are going to try and implement about Kyoto then the IPCC data that it was based upon need to be very very solid. It worries me that climate science has accepted such complex statistical methods apparently without checking and that it has fallen to outsiders, such as McIntyre, McKitrick and Skeptical Environmentalist Bjorn Lomborg to find the faults. One thing that does jump out is that the skeptics are frequently statistcians (Lomborg and McIntyre), presumably true statisticians just look at the maths and the numbers not the meaning behind them when they do their sums.
Intriguingly, the NWT article reports that another paper was published in Science last year - von Storch, H., E. Zorita, J. Jones, Y. Dimitriev, F. González-Rouco, and S. Tett, 2004: Reconstructing past climate from noisy data, Science 306, 679-682, 22 October 2004 (Sciencexpress, doi 10.1126/science.1096109) - which also criticises different parts of the Mann methodology. This is particularly interesting since on of the authors, von Storch, was involved in a bizarre episode where he resigned as Editor-in-Chief of Climate Research in protest at shoddy way Climate Research had published another anti-global warming article. It is heartening that Dr von Storch was willing to stand up for science not politics in both cases, one wonders when Scheider, Mann and the rest will follow suit.
The Instrapundit links to this collection of utter crud saying that the author is"Reliably Wrong." I should be doing somehting else but this requires fisking so as a public service I'm stepping up to bat.
Train wreck of an election
By James Carroll | February 1, 2005
IN THINKING about the election in Iraq, my mind keeps jumping back to last week's train wreck in California. A deranged man, intending suicide, drove his Jeep Cherokee onto the railroad tracks, where it got stuck. The onrushing train drew near. The man suddenly left his vehicle and leapt out of the way. He watched as the train crashed into his SUV, derailed, jackknifed, and hit another train. Railroad cars crumbled. Eleven people were killed and nearly 200 were injured, some gravely. The deranged man was arrested. Whatever troubles had made him suicidal in the first place paled in comparison to the trouble he had now.
I always prefer to start a fisk with a bit of agreement. I think I can agree that "Whatever troubles had made him suicidal in the first place paled in comparison to the trouble he had now." Mind you I don't see what this has to do with Iraq.
Iraq is a train wreck. The man who caused it is not in trouble. Tomorrow night he will give his State of the Union speech, and the Washington establishment will applaud him. Tens of thousands of Iraqis are dead. More than 1,400 Americans are dead. An Arab nation is humiliated. Islamic hatred of the West is ignited. The American military is emasculated. Lies define the foreign policy of the United States. On all sides of Operation Iraqi Freedom, there is wreckage. In the center, there are the dead, the maimed, the displaced -- those who will be the ghosts of this war for the rest of their days. All for what?
Ok James I think I see the problem. Did you notice that Iraq was not one of the better regarded democratic states over the last decade or two? did you perchance notice the lack of a certain landmark in New York? Look dickwad (pardon my French), the person who started this was either Saddam Hussein or Osama Bin Laden, depending on how you want to measure things. I saw the TV pictures and the blog writings by Iraqis and so on and humiliation was not what I noticed first. I noticed people rejoicing at being offererd the chance to make their voice heard. By the way the "displaced" - who precisely are you talking about? Iraq has not had a refugee crisis, indeed the refugees from the former regime are returning and in the marshes to the south people are returning to the communities they were forcibly removed from by Hussein. Then on the note of dead and maimed, might I inquire if you are aware of the numbers of dead and maimed killed by Hussein and his gang of thugs each year? Oh and if you want to see the dead, the maimed and the displaced why don't you pay a visit to Darfur?
Tomorrow night, like a boy in a bubble, George W. Bush will tell the world it was for "freedom." He will claim the Iraqi election as a stamp of legitimacy for his policy, and many people will affirm it as such. Even critics of the war will mute their objections in response to the image of millions of Iraqis going to polling places, as if that act undoes the Bush catastrophe.
What catastrophe? lets see now. The UN is no longer complicit in a billion dollar bribery case? one of the more vile dictators in modern history is in jail awaiting a trial? a known sponsor of Palestinian suicide bombers and the only user of chemical weapons since WW1 has been removed from power? catastrophes are what happens in Darfur where the government has killed 70,000 people or where an earthquake and tsunami kills a quarter of a million. A country which formerly has one political party and limited press not has a hundred parties and twice that number of news journals is not benefiting from "freedom"? Perhaps you were sleeping when they taught you it but usually freedom is measured by this sort of thing.
There is only one way in which the grand claims made by Washington for the weekend voting will be true -- and that is if the elections empower an Iraqi government that moves quickly to repudiate Washington. The only meaning "freedom" can have in Iraq right now is freedom from the US occupation, which is the ground of disorder. But such an outcome of the elections is not likely. The chaos of a destroyed society leaves every new instrument of governance dependent on the American force, even as the American force shows itself incapable of defending against, much less defeating, the suicide legions. The irony is exquisite. The worse the violence gets, the longer the Americans will claim the right to stay. In that way, the ever more emboldened -- and brutal -- "insurgents" do Bush's work for him by making it extremely difficult for an authentic Iraqi source of order to emerge. Likewise the elections, which, as universally predicted, have now ratified the country's deadly factionalism.
James old chap, do you read those funny things called opinion polls? Do you understand what a promise is? curiously enough Iraqis seem in the main to prefer the idea of the US occupation to the alternatives. Of course they would prefer not needing to have the Americans but given a choice between an occupying power that keeps its word and does what it said it would when it said it would and anrachic chaos the choice is clear. And, while I regret the loss of British, American and other coalition lives, I can't help notice the disparity in kill rates. As Wretchard pointed out, the US is not treating Iraq the way the Soviets treated Afghanistan. In Iraq it is the Jihadis who die and the Americans who learn their tactics not vice versa. Finally I cannot help but notice that the factionalists, such as Moqtada Al Sadr, seem to be the ones marginalized. The more mainstream groups are preaching a united, possibly federal state. Now whether this will work I cannot say but compared to (taking a country not quite at random) Bosnia, the rhetoric is rather different.
Full blown civil war, if it comes to that, will serve Bush's purpose, too. All the better if Syria and Iran leap into the fray. In such extremity, America's occupation of Iraq will be declared legitimate. America's city-smashing tactics, already displayed in Fallujah, will seem necessary. Further "regime change" will follow. America's ad hoc Middle East bases, meanwhile, will have become permanent. Iraq will have become America's client state in the world's great oil preserve. Bush's disastrous and immoral war policy will have "succeeded," even though no war will have been won. The region's war will be eternal, forever justifying America's presence. Bush's callow hubris will be celebrated as genius. Congress will give the military machine everything it needs to roll on to more "elections." These outcomes, of course, presume the ongoing deaths of tens of thousands more men, women, and children. And American soldiers.
City smashing occured, not in Fallujah but a few hundred miles away across the Syrian border in Hama. Unlike Hama, in Fallujah the occupants were given time to leave and were not shot as they tried to do so. A body search is rather less fatal than a machine gun. In Fallujah it was the defendants who beheaded kidnapped prisoners, who stored munitions in mosques, hospitals and so on. If you can't grasp that the US forces have been remarkably non-destructive perhaps you should visit Grozny. Or Srebenica.
Something else about that California train wreck strikes me. As news reports suggested, so many passengers were killed and injured because the locomotive was pushing the train from behind, which put the lightweight passenger coaches vulnerably in front. If, instead, the heavy, track-clearing locomotive had been leading and had hit the Jeep, it could have pushed the vehicle aside. The jack-knifing and derailment would not have occurred. The American war machine is like a train running in "push-mode," with the engineer safely back away from danger. In the train wreck of Iraq, it is passengers who have borne the brunt. The man with his hand on the throttle couldn't be more securely removed from the terrible consequences of his locomotion. Thus, Bush is like the man who caused the wreck, and like the man who was protected from it. Deranged. Detached. Alive and well in the bubble he calls "freedom," receiving applause.
Well I think I know who is deranged and detached and it isn't President Bush. This whole metaphor is stretched to breaking point. Unless you are seriousy suggesting that today's national leaders should act like Alexander the Great and lead their forces into battle then this is a ridiculous analogy. I think the last major ruler who could claim to have lead his country's armies into battle was Napoleon, (by the way Napoleon was defeated by the Duke of Wellington who only became a politician afterwards). While I do not think that the Iraqi occupation has been flawless, the idea that the occupation has been pushed on from behind regardless is utter nonsense, the occupation has in fact changed policy time and again with different things done at different times. Sometimes I feel that has been a part of the problem. You Mr Carroll are alive and well in a bubble called "freedom", if you doubt it try living in Iran or Saudi Arabia and writing a piece as critical as the government. Permalink
From personal experience - having spent two years working for a (rare) German based startup - I can say this FT article about R&D jobs is right on the money. There is a strong incentive for companies to move expensive positions like R&D abroad because both the employer and the employee gain. I seem to recall that Infineon moved its entire RD to Austria. The reason being that in Austria R&D is taxed differently in such a way that the individual researchers can get tax credits and share in the results of their work directly. The company I worked for is seriously looking at doing the same thing. Since it is a 10 person company in itself this doesn't mean much. But it contains two or three of the better biochemical brains in Germany so Germany will lose not just the tax money but also the chance to benefit from these people in the future.
The fact that headline unemployment is above 5 million is just another nail in coffin. Sorry guys you need a Margaret Thatcher to slash all the social spending and to face down the unions. Germans can be creative btu right now their incentive is to be creative in tax matters rather than inproductve ones. For what it is worth I pay less tax in France than I did in Germany. Much less. And I get benefits from my tax money in ways that I failed to get in Germany. France, politically and economically, has a bunch of issues. But compared to Germany its is in rude health. This is not a good thing for Europe or eventually the rest of the world. Recall that the last time Germany had mass unemployment etc it produced a certain Adolf Hitler.
Shimane Prefecture, home of my in-laws and in many respects a hidden jewel* in Japan, has produced a prefectural assembly that has decided to create a diplomatic incident of its very own. The Marmot reports that the prefecture has decided, apparently on its own, with no input from, say, the Japanese Foreign Ministry, to run a series of TV adverts claiming that a barren islet in the middle of the Japan Sea (sorry Koreans you lose on this for much the same reason that the English Channel is called the English Channel) belongs to Japan for obscure historical reasons.
My first thought when I read this was: is there a concrete shortage? Shimaneken is home to very few people and more concrete than about 5 major metropoleis combined (Shimane has barely enough people to fill even a single medium sized metropolis) and it seems to spend most of its time spending money from the National Government on building more hugely expensive roads with lots of bridges, tunnels, cuttings etc that need lots of concrete. The only reason I can think of why there is money in the Shimane budget for making propaganda adverts is that there is a lack of concrete this year. Either that or they killed off a bunch of senile pensioners and are using the money saved by not paying their pensions or nursing fees, but I think that would have caused an outcry.
More seriously I note that it is just possible that the Shimane position - nicely, but not IMHO terribly convincingly, explained in three languages on their website - has been inspired by the attempt by the top Korean policeman to boost the morale of the police on the island by visiting them during the lunar new year. However I note that - unlike the Japanese foreign ministry which seems to be keeping mum- the Korean one did suggest to the policeman that maybe it wasn't the most diplomatic of actions.
Either way this seems totally bizarre. There seems to be no logical reason at all why Japan should be interested in raising the Dokdo issue at present. Indeed I would have thought Japan was fully occupied tracking Chinese submarines and doing DNA analyses of the remains returned from N Korea and in the light of these tensions would not want to antagonise South Korea, who ought to be on the Japanese side in both these issues. If it isn't something in the Shochu, the only logical reason I can think of is that it is in fact caused by domestic Japanese politics of some sort.
For example it coule be meant to embarass the Japanese government in order to try and extort more concrete funds from it to make them shut up. Conceivably someone in the finance ministry noted that Shimane had enough concrete and wanted to make the concrete people do something else for a job and this is Shimane's way of firing back. Another possibility is that the governor of Shimane is deliberately trying the harm the Koizumi government as part of another round of LDP infighting. Or perhaps he has national ambitions and wishes to use this issue as a way to seize momentum from the other racist bigots in Japanese politics such as the never subtle Mayor of Tokyo.
*I'm not joking about the hidden jewel bit. Shimane is extremely picturesque and chock full of things of historical interest as well as onsens (hot springs) and many many other things that make it almost the archetype of traditional Japan in a way that Kyoto (to pick an overbuilt architural monstrosity of city not totally at random) isn't.
PS if you think that my attitude to both Korea and Japan in regards to this issue is ever so slightly patronising then you'd probably be right. The whole series of related disputes are all childish in the extreme and remind me more of a school playground than interational diplomacy. This spat reported by Japundit is a good example
Nervous as he faced five captured, yet defiant, Al Qaeda members in a Sanaa prison, Judge Hitar was inclined to agree. But banishing his doubts, the youthful cleric threw down the gauntlet, in the hope of bringing peace to his troubled homeland.
"If you can convince us that your ideas are justified by the Koran, then we will join you in your struggle," Hitar told the militants. "But if we succeed in convincing you of our ideas, then you must agree to renounce violence."
The prisoners eagerly agreed.
Now, two years later, not only have those prisoners been released, but a relative peace reigns in Yemen.
It would seem to me that the Judge in question is precisely the sort of person that we westerners need to encourage to take the lead in Islam. Needless to say though that does not mean that all Islamic radicals will be willing to listen to this sort of agrument much less actually try and debate the justness of their cause. For those that don't death is probably the only sensible alternative to permitting them to attack the west until we all decide to become good Muslims too, and for that people like Marine General Mattis look like the best option. Mattis said:
“You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn’t wear a veil,” Mattis continued. “You know, guys like that ain’t got no manhood left anyway. So it’s a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them.”
Needless to say a bunch of whiny apologists are bitching about this - perhaps they are afraid the Marines will do the same to them too becuase they like slapping their womenfolk around as well. Permalink
Last week I was early due to lack of internet connectivity on Fiday. This week, for the same reason, I'm late. Anyway here is a photo of our youngest, yet oldest olive tree on a frosty dawn. The reason why I say it both youngest and oldest is that it is a 5 year old sapling that has grown up from the root of a truly ancient olive tree which the previous owner chopped down. As usual click on the image to see it enlarged.
It seems some disrepectful former colonist has found Prince Harry's diary. Disgraceful mockery but rather funny and, one fears, depressingly close to the truth.
Since all of that fuss regarding my wearing a swastika armband at a recent costume affair, I’ve decided to keep this sensitivity journal, charting my increasing awareness of the feelings of others, especially those of different races, religions, and smells. Why, just last week I attended a synagogue service, where I wore a little crocheted tea cozy on my head and, during the prayers, I tried to sound like I was continually clearing my throat. I’ve also been watching reruns of “Seinfeld,” a television program that features a Jewish comedian, who seems quite amusing, particularly as he cavorts with other Jews. And, to atone for my much publicized and disgraceful ignorance, on Monday I approached a Jewish schoolmate and announced, “So you’re a Jew. I’m so sorry.”
This speech by the boss of Tesco (the UK's largest supermarket chain) reported in the Grauniad is very interesting, especially for those people who think a state healthcare system is a good idea. Indeed I would say it should be required reading for anyone who thinks that any sort of command society can work. There are so many good things mentioned in this article that it is hard to break it down but, if one wanted to summarise, I'd say the most important statements were that all individuals can be trusted to make choices and that organizations thrive if they listen to feedback from their customers and from their lowest tier of employees.
...[P]erhaps I could briefly address a couple of criticisms of consumer choice.
The first is that too much choice is confusing and wasteful and misleading.
In fact, in my view when you look closely at examples, the problem is not usually that there is too much choice. The problem is that the choice is badly offered. There is poor information, poor presentation, poor execution.
In their different ways, Microsoft and Google have demonstrated that it is possible to navigate someone through a bewildering series of choices and possibilities. I accept that there are those in a supermarket context who say "why on earth do we need a choice of 8 hand-pressed Italian olive oils?" But I think we are quite a long way from reaching that point with our public services.
The second criticism you hear is that customers are unable to choose what they need because they lack the expertise. In some areas that must be so. Medicine would be an obvious example. But I have to say, I would set the test very high. I've found in my work that people have extraordinary insight into what's in their best interests. In my view, the fact that they don't always act on it is another choice they make, rather than proof that they don't understand the issue.
So I would try very hard to exhaust the possibilities of providing information to help people choose. Again the Internet provides some support and evidence for this approach.
Fundamentally the command system doesn't scale and therefore successful organizations, be they Tesco, the US Military or the NHS delegate responsibility for local tactical actions down to the people that have to do them.
At Tesco, we have very few demarcation lines - jobs are interchangeable. A shelf stacker can aspire to do my job (and every year for a week I do a shelf stacker's job). ...
...But, as I said, it's not command and control. We don't have a global blueprint or management by slide-rule. We don't attempt to run our stores in Bangkok from Cheshunt - or for that matter our stores in Birmingham. We don't have one Leader and Chairman Terry's Little Red Book. We have thousands of Leaders. What we also have is Tesco values which provide the framework within which everyone works.
The strong unified framework actually allows a lot of freedom at the point of delivery in the branch. The person in charge is the person on the ground doing the job.
People feel they have the authority and support to do what's necessary to serve a customer or solve a problem and there's a lot of flexibility to bring the right mix of skills together to do something.
Michelle Malkin, amongst others, notes the disparity in coverage between the words spoken by Eason Jordan and those spoken by Gen Mattis. I can't help thinking there is a different point here - and one that also applies to the dispicable Ward Churchill and Larry Summer's heresy - namely that the West, and particularly America in these cases, seems to be the only human culture where the military is accorded less respect than the scribes that report events.
If as certain people - that means you "liberals" - thought for a moment you would realise that only in a place where democracy and related concepts such as that of civilian political control over the military were in effect would this be possible. In dictatorships around the world from Burma to Uzbekistan this is not the case. Any Cuban, Chinese, Iranian or North Korean etc. journalist to criticize a local equivalent of Gen Mattis would be swiftly regretting his criticism, probably assisted by some friendly people with implements that would make the USA's Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo look like a holiday camp.
On the other hand Mr Jordan has made equally "controversial" comments but these, unlike those of Gen Mattis, have been generally unreported and certainly failed to have any criticism from a fellow MSM journalist. Funny that. The pen, or the TV camera, does appear to be more powerful than the sword in our society.
I draw two lessons from this: firstly that the dangers of fascism in Amerikkka, as claimed by left wing morons of all sorts would seem to be rather over-rated. Secondly, that this healthy situation relies strongly on the good will of the men with guns. If Jordan is right that the US military has targetted accidentally-on-purpose certain journalists, something that I doubt unless he produces evidence, then perhaps he and his fellow journalists might like to consider why. Arrogant opinionated journalists who misquote or twist the story outside of a warzone just annoy people with no way to strike back. Angering soldiers in a war is rather more likely to have negative results for the journalist. Permalink
The Daily Demarche is on my blogroll and is generally speaking an excellent site. However the good doctor gets it all wrong when it comes to European Anti-terrorism/security. Firstly he might want to think of France, a land which has a "robust" attitude towards terrorists on French soil. While certain political morons may decry Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib for short term political advantage, the French security services round up suspects all over the place, and generally fails to listen to wimpy human rights lawyers who complain. And likewise the Germans, the British and other countries make frequent arrests of suspected Islamic terrorists. Undoubtedly he is right that coordination is not all that it might be, but then from what I read I'd say that the USA has got some major issues in that area too, and in general I'd rather have that than a police state which seems ot be the alternative.
However my major gripe with Dr D is on airport security where he says:
I recently had to transfer through one of the major EU airport hubs, and while we were making final descent and the crew was thanking everyone for flying with them they included the announcement "Passengers connecting to the United States of America are urged to proceed directly to their gate without delay as security precautions are intense and time consuming." I had never heard that announcement before, and was taken aback momentarily, until it struck me that this must mean all of the other security precautions in the airport were not intense! That, gentle reader, does not a comforting thought produce. As I completed my trip I was careful to note the state of airport security in the three EU countries I passed through: basically non-existant. In two airports I checked in at a self-serve kiosk and never showed an ID to anyone. My bags were quickly x-rayed, and that was it. I hate standing in line at the airport, but I dislike the thought of the lax security even more so.
Dr D thinks that showing ID is an aid to security. Why? Any competant terrorist will have half a dozen apparently valid passports or ID cards. They may not work when scanned by a real customs/immigration guy but they will work fine when shown to a harassed check-in desk person. Heck in most cases a perfectly valid ID will be fine, the shoebomber and the 9/11 hijackers all used their own IDs without a problem and I guess most future terrorists will too because, to put it simply, terrorists will not get themselves on a watchlist. The way to stop hijackings and bombs on planes is to Xray the luggage and search the passengers.
As a frequent European traveller I can say that the police who do this job at most European airports are highly efficient and unswayed by a requirement to not "profile" travellers. Dr D seems to think that long lines are a sign of security. I would suggest that long lines are a sign of inefficiency or lack of staff. From observation I note that about one in three or four bags get manually searched and that sharp metal objects down to a 1 inch pocket knife or razorblade are detected. Electronic equipment belonging to suspicious looking people (e.g. me) is frequently swabbed and the swab then tested for explosive residue and so on. Now whether or not this is sufficient is hard to say, since there have been neither been reports of arrests nor hijack or bomb attempts since the shoebomber, but I believe it is in fact quite good enough, something I regularly demonstrate by flying once every other week or so.
Dr D also comes out in favour of the EU, which is rather odd:
The Europeans have to date been loathe to cede any national security powers to the EU. Shortly after the van Gogh murder Deutsche Welle reported on the problems caused by the wide ranging mix of police powers found in the Union.
God forbid that a European should lecture a US citizen on the merits of states rights and the like, but that is what we are seeing here. There is a problem with immigration (especially right now thanks to the stupid Spanish Socialists) but a strong case can be made that the EU's centralization has made things worse not better. Bureaucrats like the idea of nice centralized command and control structures with paper empires of scurrying underlings and large budgets but these don't actually contribute greatly to action. Action means the intelligence services, police and judiciaries sharing information and then arresting and prosecuting where appropriate. On the whole the Europeans are doing this, more so it seems to me than the US is doing (at least that's what I pick up from reading sites like Michelle Malkin). Part of my expertise in in designing scalable computer systems and networks. Generally speaking one big database is less effiicent than many small ones, and one big database owned by a government is in my experience always less efficient than many small ones. I'd suggest Dr. D look at fixing the US's catch and release immigration issues before worrying about how we do things in Europe.
PS In rereading I looks like I'm criticising the entirity of Dr D's article. I'm not. He is absolutely correct that certain parts of the European elite seem utterly unable to grasp the threat, however (fortunately) they don't seem to be the ones running the security services. Permalink
Dr Demarche posted a response to my previous criticism of his post, and I think its worthwhile reposnding (briefly) to his arguments. To be honest I don't think we're too far apart. I agree the various European nations have done less than they might and some (France, UK, Germany) have done a lot while others (Spain) have pretty much bent over and begged them to not hurt too much. The Netherlands seems to be moving into the former category and sometimes when I look at the moronic actions by the British I wonder if thy are moving the other way. But in general, if there is a problem, it is the same problem that the US is facing, which is that the evidence against most of the captured undesirables is unlikely to stand up in court and our various courts feel that the principle of human rights is more important than the actual deaths of humans.
This latter issue (the courts) is similar to the two ways I still disagree with Dr D. Essentially it boils down to theoretical vs practical. In theory I welcome the EU and indeed the UN as I think that the idea of such transnational bodies is a good one. In practice I find both actually do more good than harm. Much the same argument goes for the two Dr D proposals.
The first is about showing ID. Dr says (and I agree with the theory):
I think showing an ID is a good idea because it provides a bit of human interaction- a moment in which a potential terrorist is face to face with what could, and should, be a trained observer. Consular officers and almost all police investigators are taught to look at "micro-expressions" and other non-verbal cues when conducting an interview. There is no reason airline personnel cannot be taught the same thing. In addition passports with pages missing or otherwise defaced may tip off a trained clerk. Every reasonable step to keep a terrorist off an airplane should be taken, period.
However while I think the theory is fine the practice isn't. The key words are "taught" and "trained". I simply do not believe that you can actually train all airline personnel to the required standard. If not then you have an apparent security hurdle which isn't actually there. This is deadly because it may lead to other people being lax because they think the barrier was present but it wasn't. I have done a certain amount of (computer) security design and one of the more common security holes is that you fail to revalidate security credentials later on because "to get here they must have already had their identity confirmed". This is why I believe the important security check is of the person and his baggage. If, as is most defiitely the case in Frankfurt, the airport which I believe Dr D was talking about in the beginning, this security check is rigourous then anything else fails to add anything to the security situation. The point is that showing ID wastes time and lulls people into a false sense of security unless you are absolutely certain that everyone checking the ID is correctly trained to be notice non-verbal cues etc.
Much the same argument applies to the idea of a pan European police/security service, which in fact sort of exists although no one was told about it and it may be no more than an office full of paper shufflers. The problem here is that the EU always seems to move central bodies down to the standards of the lowest of its members. Because of this although I think that the theory of a combined EU security force (a sort of EU FBI) would be good, I have grave reservations about it in practice. To put it bluntly if such an EU force were to be created and I were a terrorist leader I'd do my absolute best to get one or more of my people in it and, if they applied from somewhere like Spain I bet they would in fact succeed. Then of course we see the whole "false barrier" effect I mentioned with regard to showing ID. Perhaps worse is that the EU has no track record whatsoever in managing large bureaucracies properly but compensates by having a culture of secrecy and obfuscation that hides the embarassing evidence. The fact that the EU accounts have been impossible to audit for the last decade (possibly longer) should be a bit of a hint here as should the experience of investigative journalists such as Hans-Martin Tillack. To put it bluntly I don't trust the EU to not completely cock things up and then lie about it until its too late because some Islamic nutters have just killed a few thousand innocent EU citizens and thus on the principle of "better the devil you know" I would prefer to put my trust in the existing, less than ideal, multinational cooperation.
I have onoccasion referred to Michelle Malkin as the "Asian Ann Coulter" - a phrase which may annoy her but at least is vaguely descriptive and lacking in pejorative terms (unless you consider Ann Coulter to be an insult). But then I'm a warmongering right-wing chickenhawk not a caring liberal. If you are a caring liberal then your prefered references to philipine ancestry Mrs Malkin start with renaming her Mangalangangbang or Mangalandingdong and go steadily downhill from there. She repeats some of them on her own blog as she explains why she doesn't generally accept comments.
I can't help wondering what the Politically Correct crowd would say if someone were to start saying that (for example) Philipine President Gloria Arroyo is as yellow inside as she is outside or refering to former Indonesian leader Megawati Sukarnoputri as Maggot Sucking Putrid. Yet apparently, just as we saw with Dr Rice, its OK to use racist and sexist language on people who have conservative views.
There are a group of left-wingers with whom I disagree in places and agree in others, such as Johann Hari or Peter Tatchell or some of thr feminists on my blogroll, there are others who sicken me. Mrs Malkin's critics belong firmly in the second camp along with Messrs Fisk, Pilger and Rall. I dislike strident right-wingers, especially those that I perceive to be hypocritical buffoons like Rush Limberg or Bill O'Reilly, but I can't help compare the way that these two were taken apart from all sides for perceived racist or sexist comments with the way that no one in the entire comment thread seems willing to deplore the comments on Michelle Malkin. Permalink
This is the sort of thing that seems more worrying the more I think about it. The Torygraph has an approving editorial on Michael Howard's ideas on criminals. The Vodkapundit in a case of synchronicity links to a US article about "The Excuse-Making Industry" about the excesses of the US bleeding heart criminal apologists.
What is worrying me is not the "more prison" vs "more community service" arguments, it is something that the Torygraph touches on:
Does prison work? The evidence suggests so. Reoffence rates are no higher than those associated with community punishment - and the practical advantage of prison is that, at least, your average burglar is not burgling your house while he's inside.
The justice system around the world has generally speaking got itself into a state where it worries about punishment vs rehabilitation. This is wrong. The whole point of the system is to permit the average man or woman in the street to go about his lawful affairs without being mugged, raped or having his house burgled. This of course explains why the "gun control" lobby have it wrong. As the Telegraph says:
We can agree that all sorts of factors contribute to the sort of persistent criminal career ... [b]ut high up in the list is the blatantly obvious: you are much more likely to pursue a long-term career as a burglar if you know from experience that you are unlikely to be caught; and that, if caught, you are unlikely to spend more than a short time in jail. The burglar plays a careful game, balancing risk against rewards. The principal goal of any sensible crime policy is to make that gamble look as unattractive as possible.
Of course rehabilitation is probably a good idea, but a better idea is to tweak the incentives so that the risk/reward ratio is swung more firmly against a life of crime. One way to do this is to make long term unemployment less of a life of ease - another unintended consequence of the Nanny state (An Englishman's Castle has a good book recommendation in this area) where the provision of basic food and shelter for free means that the non-working have time to devote to crime.
Another way, at least for those embarking on a life of crime, would probably be public punishment. I'm sure that there are lots of reasons why putting people in the stocks was halted as a punishment but I have to say I can think of plenty of reasons why it would deter. Firstly it would publically humiliate and for a teenager the loss of status would probably hurt. Of course I could see it being counted as a public honour or rite of passage by some gangs but I suspect that the majority of borderline criminals would think twice before spending a while in the stocks. Even more so if the length of time involved a certain risk of death or severe physical pain. I think being sentenced to many hours in the stocks with no food (except for that thrown at you), no toilet, no water and no way to sit down or change position would be excruciatingly painful. And of course if caught a second time or third time the length of the sentence could be increased. 6 hours would be tough. 12 would be very tough and 24 or 48 hours would probably be nearly fatal, especially if the sentence took place in winter.
The problem of course is that human rights people think that criminals shouldn't suffer unduely from their punishment. This goes right back to the risk/reward calculation. Seeing criminals nearly dying when caught is rather different from seeing them given 200 hours community service. If the point of the Criminal Justice System is to stop crime, which would seem to me to be correct, then all ways to shift that risk/reward ratio need to be considered.
In addition to visibly making it clear that being caught is a bad thing there are two ways to shift the odds. The first is to make it likely that the crime victim can fight back. At present in Europe a vigourous defence is likely to land the victim in more trouble than the criminal. This is wrong. If the idea of people carrying guns is too scary then a simple rule would be that while engaged in crime a person forfeits his human rights would suffice. In otherwords if you try to mug someone or burgle their house and they resist they can legally do ANYTHING to you. The second is of course to do the Rudy Guiliani New York trick and get lots of policeman patrolling so that the chances of you being caught are higher.
Both Tim Worstall and The Daily Ablution critique a Grauniad column by AL Kennedy (OTOH I bet that Maureen Dowd is gnashing her teeth in envy since it reads just like a MoDo piece) which is so full of falsehoods and innuendoes as to be pointless save as a further example of how moonbats delude themselves. Just as an example, apparently in order to be "genuinely elected" you need to receive the votes from "a majority of the American people", something that has probably eluded every single preseident of the country - and for that matter eluded practically every single leader of every country that permits abstentions and has multiple candidates.
But enough of Ms Kennedy, as The Daily Ablution's Scott Burgess points out she leads one to look at the work of Robert F Kennedy Jnr which makes me wonder whether whatever part of Ireland Kennedys hail from has a genetic problem that leads to abnormally low logical reasoning ability. But no that seems improbable, surely it is a coincidence that in the last 50 years or so all politicians, journalists and activists called Kennedy all seem to be barking moonbats?
As Scott points out, RFK Jr, as well as performing a Ward Churchill-like revision of historical events by mixing the Hudson River with the Cuyahoga River, also manages to have a curious dictionary that has a different definition of fascism to other editions of the same dictionary:
In the book, Kennedy implies that we live in a fascist country and that the Bush White House has learned key lessons from the Nazis.
"While communism is the control of business by government, fascism is the control of government by business," he writes. "My American Heritage Dictionary defines fascism as 'a system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership together with belligerent nationalism.' Sound familiar?"
We often overestimate the power of the president. Unlike presidents in, say, Latin America, the US president has very little power. By that, I mean that the US president has a lot of power in the world because he's the US president. But he has very little power, vis à vis the legislature (or the courts), when compared to other presidents around the world (one of the world's strongest presidents is the French). And most prime ministers are stronger (as executive), vis à vis their legislatures, than most presidents.
The US president doesn't have the power to disband the legislature. Or the power to call for early elections. He has no special prerogative over certain areas of legislation (e.g. many presidents have direct power over macro-economic matters, which are no longer in the hands of the legislature at all). Even over the military, where he exercises the most power, Congressional oversight is extensive, as is the fact that, while the president can order the military to do pretty much anything (except go to war) w/o immediate legislative approval, the military's budget is entirely in the hands of Congress. In short, the president is pretty much restricted to signing or vetoing whatever legislation Congress puts on his desk.
This is, it seems to me, precisely what the liberal moonbats are failing to understand. Unlike the regimes of Hitler, Mussolini, Franco etc. the US presidency is astoundingly powerless. Even if one ignores the obvious things, like the way that Senators Boxer and Kerry are still walking around freely despite their criticism of Bush and Rice, the fact that the Supreme Court fails to consistently take the line of the executive and the way that even the currently Republican dominated congress is failing to slavishly pass the legislation and budgets that the executive wants are clear signs that the USA is not under the grip of a Fascist dictator. Moreover it is also clear that there is no trend in that direction. As Miguel also points out, US political parties are not exactly disciplined machines (mind you I think he's wrong when he writes that European ones are ideologically consistent - some are, some aren't). Influential Republicans and Republican sympathisers hold a wide range of views (think Rush Limburg and John McCain) as do Democrats (Lieberman vs Dean) and pundits criticise members of their own party as much as they do ones on the other side.
Indeed the idea that business controls the Republicans (or the Democrats for that matter) is laughable.Some businesses get some benefits from various rules and regulations, others suffer. Even though Bush has shown a lamentable weakness in swallowing the protectionist line now and again, neither this nor any other business lobby has managed to capture the reins of power, perhaps partly because "Business" as a bloc just doesn't exist. Trying to get business leaders from different companies and industry to agree is like herding cats. Heck even within industries where you might think there would be solidarity (say aerospace or defence) there isn't
Tim Worstall manages to find yet another gem from the Grauniad. Neil Clark manages to make the astonishing claim that Eastern Europeans were better off under communist rule. Like Tim I do wonder whether Mr Clark ever visited Eastern Europe before the Berlin Wall collapsed? I admit I only visited the Soviet Union before the collpase but as well as the USSR I did visit Hungary and Romania (and Yugoslavia FWIW) shortly afterwards in the summer of 1990 and there I met a lot of people who had fresh memories of the communist past. Mr Clark talks about the E European levels of output and how they contracted in the new era. There is a good reason for that, the majority of the industrial output in communist times was, when it existied and wasn't a paper fraud, of exedingly low quality. The jokes about Skoda cars or Trabants had a basis in reality as did the jokes about queues and the bitterly ironic "they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work".
While I was at university in the late 1980s I helped guide some Moscow students around when they visited the UK as part of an exchange. I also visited Leningrad (as it was then) and Moscow in return. What impressed these visitors the most, and what depressed me the most on my visits, was the little things. For example the completely different attitude to grocery shopping. I recall taking a couple of the students with me to the local supermarket and they were completely and utterly amazed. The first thing that amazed them was the amount of stuff on offer. One thing that truly blew them away what that there was not just a handful of tomatoes (it was November) but box after box of them. They wanted to know if tomatoes grew in England in November (no) and how come they were so cheap? Then wondered why fresh tomatoes were being bought and wondered whther tinned ones were available as well since they should be cheaper. When I led them over to the tinned vegetable row their amazement increased multifold. Not only were there shelves and shelves of tinned tomatoes, there were different varieties: whole ones, pureed ones, sliced ones etc. and they were produced by different people. Why, they wondered did people have to choose between Sainsbury's own and two different branded sorts? why would anyone buy anythng but the cheapest Sainsbury ones. Why were there different types? surely you could make the pureed and sliced ones out of the whole ones? and so on.
My spring visit to Russia was the reverse. Although Glasnost and Perestroika had permitted peasant farmers to have market stalls selling produce there wasn't much of it available. There were no tomatoes or cucumbers to be had - not even for ready money - not even for ready Dollars or D-marks. Staples such as bread or potatoes could be hard to come by, even for relatively affluent students. There was no concept of having white bread or wholegrain or large loaves or small ones, you bought your (kilo I think) of bread in a single loaf. It was made of whatever flour happened to be available and baking happened once a day. If they ran out they wouldn't bake any more even if the ingredients were available. The same, only more so, applied to other consumer goods. Forget Televisions, simple things like walkmen or indeed almost anything battery operated were not made. Home computers? Fax Machines? CD players? hollow laugh. The tomato story was repeated by a colleague of mine who took his guests on a walk around the town. He wanted to show them things like historical buildings and other touristy things, they were more interested in Dixons or Top Shop. Even down market shops such as Woolworths were amazing to them.
There is no way I believe that such a society has higher average living standards or quality of life - even if you ignore the prospect of the visit by "friendly" secret policemen. Oh and Romania, by the way, was worse. Despite people saying that they thought things were better in Romania in 1990 than under Ceaucescu it was pretty dire to me. Entire villages lacked basic services like electricity or paved roads, the prefered mode of transport in some areas appeared to be an oxcart and the plight of the "orphans" (dumped in their orphanages mostly because their parents simply could not feed or clothe them) was indescibably tragic. Somehow I think Romania's orphans were ignored by Neil Clark in his praise of communism. Of course we can tell where he is comng from when he recommends 1970s Austria as a model that all should aspire to. Permalink
Although it refers to Biotech startups, a recent article in “The Scientist” is interesting in the way it tries to describe what sort of people work best in startups.
Frank Eeckman, cofounder and chief scientific officer of Centient Consulting, a San Diego firm that advises biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies, once heard a venture capitalist describe a biotech startup company as a "boat on fire," meaning that everyone on the boat needs to paddle as hard as they can lest all be lost.
While less bureaucracy, the freedom to try different jobs, intellectual satisfaction, and potentially lucrative stock options lure many scientists into small biotech companies, leaving a solid position in industry or academia can be a relatively risky move. A sizeable proportion of biopharmaceutical startups close up shop every year
"Only a subset of people really fit into (the startup) environment," says Eeckman. Scientists should be prepared to work long hours, explain and promote their research to investors or other nonscientists, and have a teamwork-oriented mindset that keeps the group rowing the boat towards shore. However, it also helps to be an independent thinker and to take initiative, Eeckman notes. Services that would be taken care of in academia or Big Pharma, such as buying plane tickets or ordering lab supplies, may fall on the shoulders of the new chief scientific officer or head of research and development.
Much the same applies to would be entrepreneurs in other fields than biotech as well and applies to both the entrepreneurs and those who want to fund them. Although the life of an entrepreneur or startup founder sounds exciting the reality is that for many people a large organization provides a structure that really helps. Many people find that they need a hierarchy or provision of support services in order to work effectively – even though they may frequently complain about shortcomings, the truth is that for many people even inconveniently provided services are better than having to do them oneself.
This is, it seems to me, a mindset. Workers in small companies need to have an awareness of the whole company from customer to product development and back office management. In a small company one must expect to have to handle everything oneself since there is no backup. This means that small company workers must be flexible and capable of self-direction and prioritisation of work tasks. Many people have noticed that the US seems to be more entrepreneurial than Europe, and many have noticed that in recent years Taiwanese, Chinese and Indians are also showing great entrepreneurial flair. None of these countries has much of a social security system and neither did Europe in the heyday of European invention. Is it possible that the European socialist welfare system, which provides structure and support for life as a whole, is training people to prefer well-structured environments and thus eschew entrepreneurial enterprises?
Richard North at the EU Referendum blog did sterling work transcribing a Radio 4 encounter featuring Sir Stephen Wall who is all in favour of this Europe thing and then Helen commented in detail on one section. However, awful as that section is, it seems to me that it is actually worth fisking his entire comments so here goes. Note that a) I have copied only Sir Stephens remarks and b) I'm going on a transcript not on what I myself heard.
SW: Well, I think this is a determining moment for us, for Britain and the British people do have a chance to take a decision which obviously will be about the constitutional treaty, but on the back of that, about how they see our place in Europe.
As I always like to say, its good to start off agreeing with ones Fiskee and I agree with this; it is a determining moment and it is about how we see ourselves in Europe.
And I actually think that what the constitutional treaty has done is valuable to us because we are living at a time where not only economically do we need the co-operation we have with our partners the European Union through the rules that the European Union has, but we live in a pretty dangerous world where the so-called "soft power" of the European Union is extraordinarily important
I think we're about done with the agreement section. That didn't last long. We do indeed benefit from our free-trade with Europe but I wonder sometimes whether the monetary benefit we get outweighs the amount of money we contribute to pay for the EU each year (approx £4 billion in 2004 IIRC). However that is just a minor matter, a more major matter is this "soft-power" thing. I can't think of any situation where the EU's "soft-power" has done anything except reward tyrants and despots. From Srebenica to Sudan "soft-power" is pretty much a name for "we ask you to stop being beastly and promise to pay you money if you do so, so you claim to stop, pocket the money, and then continue on as before".
We’re going to have to develop a relationship with China which will be the big emerging superpower of this century. We have to manage the issue of climate change. We’re seeing in Sudan the first war of climate change over access to resources. We have to deal with Iran which is developing nuclear weapons. You can’t deal with these issues through force, you have to deal with them by influence and the European Union through its aid and trade relationships is a huge democratic force for beneficial change in the world.
China: we see a posisbility of sucking up to the chinese and making some money while the evil Yankees are being principled. If we do it right then when the Chinese have enough of our armaments to threaten the US they won't threaten us too. This is kind of the way that weak children give bullies sweets so that they won't be beaten up in breaktime
By blaming the war(s) in Sudan on climate change we can hint that - yes - its all Amerikkka's fault because everyone knows that global warming is caused by fat Yanks driving around in SUVs eating hamburgers.
We are trying the same treatment on Iran as we are on China.
Since the EU doesn't have any military force and no budget to make one we'll make a benefit out of a necessity by repeating the slogan that "force never solved anything".
Finally the bit about the EU's trade and aid relationships being a huge democratic force for change is wrong on so many levels. The EU's aid mostly props up despotic tyrants and its byzantine bureaucratic trade protectionism stops developing farmers from selling crops for EU cash. This is a huge force for change? I'm quite impressed that Sir Stephen managed to say this with a straight face. Perhaps fortunately, however, he wasn't forced to continue because Jim Naughtie did a smooth interview bit that lead to this:
SW: Well, I am not sure that’s altogether true because opinion polls when people are asked what most concerns you, now at the top of the list people say defence and foreign policy issues because I think people are rightly worried about what kind of world we live in.
Now I think thats one of those opinion poll things that doesn't hold true when the same people are in the voting booth with a pencil and a piece of paper. Lots of people claim to have these sorts of feelings in public but then when they are all alone they vote for their pocketbook.
But even on the bread and butter issues, I would argue, for example, as we come to tackle the whole issue of international crime, terrorism etc, I believe that what the constitutional treaty does, by allowing for more majority voting – Britain doesn’t have to take part if it doesn’t want to – that that is actually beneficial. In the days when we were trying to settle things by intergovernmental agreement, we were incapable of reaching decisions.
Ok this bit is bizarre. Is he saying that Britain doesn't need to implement those bits it doesn't vote for? I agree that the requirement for unanimity on many things caused the EU to either fail to reach decisions or to reach flawed ones because of horse trading but I don't see that majority voting necessarily improves the situation since it just makes it easier to pass bad laws.
SW: Well, just taking the charter of fundamental rights, there are safeguards in there which on the face of the document that this cannot replace national laws and rules so there is no question of the charter of fundamental rights replacing our national labour laws. All you have to do is read the document. It’s there.
Again this is oddly phrased. What he seems to be claiming is that the charter of fundamental rights won't be legally binding. If so then this is totally untrue, unless this charter is somehow different to previous Human Rights laws which EU courts have ruled as being binding on the UK and overriding our national laws.
SW: Well the judges are going to have make the decision based on what on the face of the document and there’s a triple lock on anybody’s ability to change our own national labour laws.
This passage seems contradictory to the previous one. According to this bit the EU judges will be able to decide which EU laws apply to the UK. Quite where this produces a triple lock is unclear.
SW: We have to decide in the case of each piece of legislation whether we vote for it or against it. Overall, what the constitution does is insert a role for national parliaments in that process which hasn’t existed before, and if you look at what has happened over the years, we’re not in a situation where there’s going to be a single country called Europe. We got 25 individual nation states and collectively in terms of our economic interest, fighting terrorism, dealing with a dangerous world, it is better to be working with 24 other democracies than being out on a limb on our own.
This bit is amusing for what it leaves out. If you read the EU referendum bloggers analysis of the EU constitution stored on this site you see that while the constitution may give some power to parliament it puts whole swathes of policy beyond the reach, not only of nation parliaments but the EU bodies too. Finally the better off in than out argument is utter bunk. Think of countries such as Switzerland or Norway which seem to be doing fine outside the EU. A UK that was a member of EFTA would get the same trading rights with the EU as it does today but would not need to pay money to the EU or pay attention to EU regulations of food, fish or 101 other things. Permalink
In keeping with Joint Operations the USAF just completed modifications to it's first Aircraft Carrier.
Designated CCV 01, Air Force leaders acknowledged that sea trials are going very well. One Air Force official, who would not give his name, expressed senior leadership concerns over aircraft sortie generation, due to possible flight deck damage and recovery times. For now, AF officials plan on shifting classic Air Wing Operations to more Command and Control "Special Operations" centric doctrine with limited helo night operations, until further testing can be completed within the next 5 years. Testing deployments will be confined to the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean in order to maximize deployment cycles for senior leadership.
Update:Breaking news - from Motley Fool member averagjoe comes this picture of the new proposed USN carriers neeeded to replace the ones taken by the Air Force
I've decided I've had enough of winter so here is a picture of some Olive Trees framing Châteauneuf de Grasse from last summer As usual click on the image to see it enlarged.And click here for last week's image. Permalink
It has been jokingly suggested that N Korea announced it posessed nuclear weapons because it lost against Japan in football (soccer to the Yanks). I think that this is probably untrue (although N Korea is so weird it can't be completely dismissed out of hand), but the relationship between Japan and Korea is, in my opinion, at least as interesting as the relationship between the USA and N Korea.
Daniel Drezner linked to a NY Times piece which is quite perceptive. The Japanese people are not exactly pleased with N Korea and the government is making no attempt to suck up to N Korea either. On the contrary it is passing a stealth sanction:
Japan, meanwhile, performed a deft political kabuki today, urging his bellicose neighbor to join disarmament talks, while letting the clock run on a new law that will bar most North Korean ships from Japanese ports starting March 1.
"I understand calls for imposing sanctions are growing," Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi told reporters in Sapporo, about 600 miles across the Sea of Japan from North Korea. "But we have to urge them to come to the talks in the first place."
...
But of the five nations seeking to disarm North Korea, only Japan is taking new steps that will punish North Korea economically.
An amended Liability for Oil Pollution Damage law requires that all ships over 100 tons calling at Japanese ports carry property and indemnity insurance. A seemingly bland piece of legislation, this law was drafted with North Korea in mind. In 2003, only 2.5 percent of North Korean ships visiting Japan had insurance.
Japan is North Korea's third largest trading partner, after China and South Korea. The insurance barrier is expected to hit North Korea's ports on the Sea of Japan, a dilapidated, economically depressed area, far from Pyongyang, the nation's showcase capital. In recent weeks, only one North Korean ship, a passenger-cargo ferry, is known to have bought insurance.
This will hurt Korea more than almost anything other than China cutting off food or oil. Not only does it make the Eastern part of N Korea suffer because they lose what opportunities they have for legal trade it also makes it harder for N Korea to do the smuggling that is assumed to have taken place using the trips to Japan as a cover.
What I think is interesting is what this means in the longer term. If N Korea dosn't collapse and does continue to threaten Japan it gives the Japanese a major incentive to:
invest in "star wars" anti-missile defenses
get a guarantee of nuclear retaliation from the US if it is nuked
develop its own bombs
strengthen its military (the "self defense forces" are supposed to protect against precisely this sort of threat) and possibly grant it the right to intervene pre-emptively
Other neighbouring powers (that means China primarily) are likely to deprecate all of these which means that if (when) Japan starts making these sorts of noises China will have further reason to pull the plug on its troublesome neighbour. Daniel Dresner also linked to this fascinating piece in the Sydney Morning Herald:
A debate has begun in policy circles as to whether Beijing should go further and propose an amendment to the 1961 mutual security treaty, to remove pledges of military assistance in the event of attack.
The treaty's second article says both sides "promise to jointly take all possible measures to prevent any country from invading either of the contracting parties. Whenever one contracting party suffers a military attack by one state or several states combined and therefore is in a state of war, the other contracting party should do all it can to offer military and other aid".
The undercutting of China's defence guarantee is part of a delicate carrot-and-stick approach by Beijing to edge North Korea's leader, Kim Jong-il, into verifiable nuclear disarmament in return for a new security deal with the US and its regional allies, along with economic aid.
I don't really know how this will all play out but I do expect N Korea to discover that Japan is not going to react to threats by giving in. The news coverage on NHK is continually mentioning the N Korean kidnapping of its citizens and its refusal to account truthfully for their current whereabouts. From what I can see Japan as a nation has reached the point where it has decided that there is no point in being nice anymore. I suspect that, despite the N Koean rhetoric about Japan's behaviour in Korea before 1945, the N Korean leadership have never really believed that Japan would turn nasty. That looks like it was a big miscalculation.
I will be down mixing with the rich and would be rich at 3GSM World Congress in Cannes for the next few days. Blogging is likely to be intermittent. But I will try and report on what I see as interesting stuff there. If you are unaware, 3GSM is the big mobile phone show and everyone who wants to be a mobile phone player is there.
Ok so the film festival is probably bigger in some ways, but 3GSM World Congress is quite big enough for a small town like Cannes. In fact its too big which explains why this is the last year that 3GSM will be in Cannes. Next year they go to Barcelona and presumably thereafter 3GSM goes on the International Conference circuit from one large event venue to another.
Still Cannes seems determined to make everyone regret leaving. Tthe weather performed as it should have in February with an Azure sky and reasonable warmth while in the sun. The queues were long, especially the queues to pick up registration (which is not cheap BTW - €500 for exhibition only).but the crowds were good natured and I am sure the climate had something to do with that.
One thing that stood out was how people still use laptops. I wrote an article last year about how the laptop was the centre of their business life for many people and even at 3GSM world, where you might expect people to be more into smaller gadgets, the vast numbers of Dells, IBM Thinkpads etc. showed just how far that dream is from reality. One of the things that amuses me is how the various big players try to differentiate themselves, and how small players try to fake it as if they are big. This year the biggest boat in the harbour is Siemens. Other vendors rent yachts in the port next to the Palais des Festivals for their schmoozing of customers, Siemens appears to have rented an entire liner and stuck it out in the harbour. I don't know where Nokia do their schmoozing but I noticed that Motorola seemed to have taken an entire derelict bulding a couple of corners away and tarted it up specially. All in all it makes the rows of yachts tarted up specially with tacky ocrporate logos from Cisco to ZTE look just slightly tacky. There were sexy announcements from the likes of Nokia, Samsung etc. I may cover them tomorrow but its kind of silly. There a things happening and press releases aren't really much more than markers in the ground. The Nokia booth did seem to be pretty busy, busier than its neighbours anyway. Perhaps better for Nokia I saw a representative of the Chinese vendor ZTE (who make CDMA phones) using a top of the range Nokia with what looked like long practise. Either the Nokia UI really is far superior (my colleague was bitching about his new Samsung so that could be true) or even the competitors prefer to use Nokia.
Other interesting notes. I hadn't realised how much of a Samsung GSM phone is apparently made from stuff from others (Phillips). I thought both the Cisco and Microsoft booths looked rather sad, despite in the MS case someone trying to drum up enthusuasm with a prize draw Talking of prize draw - lots of places had them, many attempted to get thier draws filled through the use of booth babes and other cheap sexist tricks. And I'm not talking about the Sex SMS vendors either. Talking of sexy female flesh. The restaurants in Cannes were so full and our waitress so fashionable that her tattoo and butt crack was nearly stabbed by my colleague's fork as she served the adjacent table. In some places you only get this service in seedy backstreet bars after dark. In Cannes you get the same view for free at lunchtime. It is, actually, rather off-putting.
The right attitude towards the professional protestor class, as recounted in the Wapping Liar:
Kyoto protest beaten back by inflamed petrol traders
By Laura Peek and Liz Chong WHEN 35 Greenpeace protesters stormed the International Petroleum Exchange (IPE) yesterday they had planned the operation in great detail.
What they were not prepared for was the post-prandial aggression of oil traders who kicked and punched them back on to the pavement.
“We bit off more than we could chew. They were just Cockney barrow boy spivs. Total thugs,” one protester said, rubbing his bruised skull. “I’ve never seen anyone less amenable to listening to our point of view.”
Another said: “I took on a Texan Swat team at Esso last year and they were angels compared with this lot.” Behind him, on the balcony of the pub opposite the IPE, a bleary-eyed trader, pint in hand, yelled: “Sod off, Swampy.”
Tim at An Englishman's Castle has received a nice email informing him that he is a millionaire, unofrtunately, while this letter avoids the more obvious spelling and grammatical errors common to the Nigerian scammers it is still worth critiquing:
FROM: THE DESK OF THE E-MAIL PROMOTIONS MANAGER, INTERNATIONAL PROMOTIONS/PRIZE AWARD DEPARTMENT MICROSOFT WORD LOTTERY, UK 3b Olympic Way, Sefton Business Park, Aintree, Liverpool, L30 1RD E-mail:[email protected]
The first thing that an enquiring mind notes is that mapping sites can't find a 3b Olympic Way in Aintree and in offering suggestions indicate that Aintree's postcode is L10 not L30. Curiously though, a UK postcode lookup site shows that the postcode belongs to the UK lottery company Camelot Group plc, who list the above address as one of their regional offices. Could it be that the Microsoft Word Lottery was outsourced to Camelot? or did someone forget to alter the address from a previous phishing letter?
The second thing - noted by Tim himself is the mswordpromo.com is registered to a Colorado address and again things look slightly plausible in that the admin phone number areacode is 303 which is indeed a Colorado area code. Unfortunately it goes wrong immediately after that because the number is too long1-303-617-393468 is 12 digits not 10). Also the dig records indicate that the mail server for mswordpromo.com is hotmail.com
;; AUTHORITY SECTION (2 records) mswordpromo.com. 172800 IN NS pdomns1.msn.com.
Somehow I doubt that a true microsoft operation would be receiving email via hotmail and using the MSN personal domain service for its hosting, although it is true that msn and hotmail are owned by Microsoft.
REF NO: MSW-L/200-334841 BATCH: 2005MJL-01
ELECTRONIC MAIL AWARD WINNING NOTIFICATION
We are pleased to inform you of the announcement today of winners of the MICROSOFT WORD E-MAIL MEGA JACKPOT LOTTERY PROGRAMS held on 11th JANUARY 2005.
Ooops - the whois record shows the domain was registered on 5 February 2005 yet the draw took place on 11th January 2005. Shurely shome mishtake?
Your company or your personal e-mail address is attached to winning number 11-20JAN-2005-02MSW, with serial number S/N-00179 drew the lucky numbers 887-13-865-37-10-83, and consequently won in the first lottery category.
Oh dear, now this really is sloppy. Googling on the lucky numbers shows that the same lucky numbers have been "won" by lots of people where the contact email domain is ms-wordpromos (note the added hyphen) how much work is it to change the lucky number each time you send out the spam?
You have therefore been approved for a lump sum pay out of GBP 1,000,000.00 POUNDS in cash credited to file REF NO: MSW-L/200-334841 This is from total prize money of GBP 25,000,000.00 POUNDS, shared among the Twenty five (25) international winners in this category.
Stylistic quibbles: GBP 1,000,000.00 POUNDS and GBP 25,000,000.00 POUNDS seem to belong to the Dept of Redundancy Department style and surely if you write twenty five (25) you should also write One Million pounds (GBP 1,000,000.00)
All participants were selected through our Microsoft computer ballot system drawn from 21,000 names, 3,000 names from each continent, as part of International "E-MAIL" Promotions Program, which is conducted once in every four years for our prominent MS WORD users all over the world, and for the continues use of E-mail. We are sorry to let you know that our site is still under construction,as we are updating our site and our windows 2005.
21000 names, 3000 per continent == 7 continents. Africa, Europe, Asia, N America, S America is five. Oceania (Australia/NZ/pacific) could be the sixth but Antarctica must be number 7. Unless the penguins have a hidden desire to run Microsoft word despite being Linux mascots I seriously doubt there are 3000 MS words users in Antarctica. The "site under construction" excuse is pretty weak too, surely you could just copy the official MS word site and hack it a bit?
Your fund has been deposited in an escrow account with our affiliate bank here in UK, and insured with your REF NO: MSW-L/200-334841 and your E-mail address, Please note that, you are to contact us via email as we are promoting the use of E-mail,You have the right to call the bank, as we will provide you with the necessary details on how to claim your prize. You are to keep your ref. number and batch number from the public, until you have been processed and your money remitted to your personal account.
Oops after getting lots of english right the grammar starts to slip. Fund not funds? in UK? insured vs secured? not to mention abusing commas worse than anything outside a Terry Pratchett book. The same goes for the rest of the email. Such a shame really to see such hard work and effort come to nothing just be a little sloppy text editing and our friend Mr Google...
What we learned from the Jordan and Summers affairs recently is that "off the record" isn't. What we have learned from the various payola scandals is that failure to disclose payments leads to trouble. Now the US courts are telling journalists that they cannot protect their sources (excellent legal analysis a Beldarblog).
On the whole I say - good. I understand the arguments about how whistleblowers need to be protected etc. etc. but I think that in these days of internet anonymity if a whistleblower can't get the info out to an interested hack without being caught then he's incompetant. As far as I'm concerned the number of places where information should be confidential and protected is small (national security, personal information and consultation with experts i.e. lawyer/client, doctor/patient would about cover it). In general I think that information - particularly with respects to the news - should not be protected by default with secrecy only imposed on an as needed bassis. This is the same argument between the English common law tradition and the Napoleonic one - one says everything not forbidden is permitted, the other says everything not permitted is forbidden.
I do not believe that investigative journalism will die if journalists are treated the same as the rest of us. I do sort of wonder whether the current "investigative journalists" will survive without their privileges. I also wonder whether anyone will miss them. The Beldar analysis above has a key section here on the way some members of the media seem to think journalistic privilege should work - and why their ideal of being treated differently to regular citizens is wrong:
I also question Mr. Abrams' judgment in seriously arguing for an absolute common-law privilege — one that would protect journalists from disclosing confidential sources no matter what the facts might be in any individual case. Floyd, baby, tuck that away in a footnote to preserve the argument for the Supremes if you think you can make it fly there. But giving journalists an absolute privilege is never going to fly — it would be like giving them a license to embed with al Qaeda and drive the suitcase nuke into Manhattan in a NYT press van.
The fact that bloggers are sorta semi-journalists means that the mooted privilege rule is practically what an economist would call a non-tariff barrier - that is to say a way for the mainstream media to get an inside edge over their pyjama wearing competitors and that is bad for even more reasons. Permalink
Today, again, I take you back in time to a photo from 11 months ago - 17 March 2004 to be precise. Things are going a bit slower this year (less blossom out at present for example) but I expect I'll be able to take a similar photo in the next few weeks. This weeked one of my tasks is pruning the olive trees. They need a good hacking at even though I did a lot last year.
The NY Times' Bob Herbert has written a column that I mostly agree with. Not completely, and I'll get to that in a bit, but I'd say I agree with about 90% of what is written:
From the U.S. perspective, Syria is led by a gangster regime that has, among other things, sponsored terrorism, aided the insurgency in Iraq and engaged in torture. So here's the question. If Syria is such a bad actor - and it is - why would the Bush administration seize a Canadian citizen at Kennedy Airport in New York, put him on an executive jet, fly him in shackles to the Middle East and then hand him over to the Syrians, who promptly tortured him?
The administration is trying to have it both ways in its so-called war on terror. It claims to be fighting for freedom, democracy and the rule of law, and it condemns barbaric behavior whenever it is committed by someone else. At the same time, it is engaged in its own barbaric behavior, while going out of its way to keep that behavior concealed from the American public and the world at large.
The man grabbed at Kennedy Airport and thrown by American officials into a Syrian nightmare was Maher Arar, a 34-year-old native of Syria who emigrated to Canada as a teenager. No one, not even the Syrians who tortured him, have been able to present any evidence linking him to terrorism.
This is, I agree an outrage. As Bob says:
In extraordinary rendition there are no rules. The person seized, presumably a terror suspect, is thrust into a highly secret zone of utter lawlessness, with no rights whatever. The entire point of this atrocious exercise is to transfer the suspect to a regime skilled in the art of torture. It's as if a cop picked up a suspect on the street and handed him over to the Mafia to extract a confession. One's guilt or innocence is not relevant. No legal defense is permitted. If a mistake is made, too bad.
...
Extraordinary rendition is antithetical to everything Americans are supposed to believe in. It violates American law. It violates international law. And it is a profound violation of our own most fundamental moral imperative - that there are limits to the way we treat other human beings, even in a time of war and great fear.
So what bits do I disagree with? Well firstly Bob implies that this is a Bush regime idea when actually it was Slick Willie who came up with this wheeze - I agree that it is disgraceful for Bush to continue with it but it wasn't his idea in the first place. Secondly I disagree with an implication that visitors to the US should not be interviewed by US Immigration people. I think the US immigration policy is fundamentally broken, but that doesn't mean that the US immigration people shoudn't enforce the laws that are on the books.
The US needs to stop Extraordinary Rendition. It also needs to properly deal with immigration. The two are related.
One thing I noted at 3GSM (and I do plan to put up a report on the other days, however I caught a nasty virus and have been semidead for the last few days) was that Mr SleazyJet aka Steilios EasySue was making noises about his new venture easyMobile. As I joked at the time, I hoped that easyMobile was going to partner with Orange, because otherwise Messrs Sue Grabbit & Runne and colleagues would be looking a very profitable court case. Fortunately for the lawyers, the Register reports today that negotiations have broken down and the two sides are seeing red, which means that we have a green light for a lawsuit on the ownership of a colour (I think I'd better stop the off colour jokes now). Permalink
My writeup of day 1 is here. This is more of a summary of impressions rather than a description of days 2-4, partly because I caught some horrible virus and died on Day 4 and partly becuase it was all more of the same.
Anyway before getting in to the technical bits I'd like to recommend ETSI as the bestest standards body in the world. Not that I'm cheap to bribe or anything but not only did they give me a T shirt they also gave me champagne and interesting gossip about vendors and standards. All in all much better than losers like the ITU in my completely unbiased opinion. A commenter emailed a request that I should please illustrate the "cheap sexist tricks". Well normally, being a caring nonsexist kind of chap, I wouldn't dream of giving publicity to those who use such exploitative and degrading techniques, but since it was specially requested, by email no less, I decided to lower my standards and the photo on the right is the result (the real sickos may click on the link to see it in more detail).
In the previous post I wondered idly where Nokia did their schmoozing and my colleague discovered that when he was looking for a more substantial breakfast that a croissant at the beginning of Day 2. Nokia rented the entire Noga Hilton hotel, with entry permitted only to Nokia invitees, and I think he said that Samsung had done the same to the Carlton. By the way Siemens' monster liner in the harbour was noted as being rather fitting for the company i.e. big, lumbering and expensive to operate - this may not have been the message Siemens was trying to get across. Again as I noted in my day one write up laptops were ubiquitous. Orange and SFR were handing out 20minute free trial subscriptionsfor their public wifi networks and various people sponsered free WiFi access points around the place. I'm not sure if the sponsorship did these companies any good, I was vaguely aware that Ericsson sponsored one of them but there were others that I have no idea who sponsored although I think ipWireless was one. I have to say that while I appreciated this free wifi greatly, as did bazillions of others, I figure an enterprising chap could have made a fortune selling electrical power. There were never enough power sockets and in the vicinity of the wifo points all sorts of powered things such as drinking water fountains were unplugged so that their sockets could be used to recharge one laptop or another. It sems like very few people own laptops as good as the Instapundit's one.
Various companies were offering "free smartphone giveaways", but it was noted that a more certain way to get a "free smartphone" would have been to have a friend on a scooter hanging around just outside as the getaway vehicle after a quick run through the show grabbing a selection of kit in use by the participants. I took a closer look at the Nokia 3G phones. Although still maintaining Nokia's favourite brick look they were impressive. As you can see from the pictures they aren't that large and they seemed fully featured. From what I could see they did videocalling just fine and otherwise had most if not all of the applications available for any of Nokia's series 60 smart phones. One thing that did occur to me though was to wonder how video calling would work for real unless you had an earpiece and possibly a way to prop up the phone. I see a couple of problems that video phones have which regular ones don't which are based on the fact that the video phone has to be held in front of you and facing you in order for you to see the image of the other party. This means that a) you have to be on "speakerphone" which is going irritate the crap out of your neighbours and b) if you are having a long call it's going to get tiring unless you can somehow prop the thing up.
Finally one thing I did notice was that although the phones had some different features (e.g.video-calling, larger screens), they also clearly shared a lot. In at least one case I got confused about whether I was looking at the same phone as I had seen before or not. It helped having people like Mr "Cellphone Radiation" over on the left to talk to so that I could see all of the different varieties side by side as it were. The one problem I have, and this is not a Nokia specific complaint - it applied to all vendors, is that all these 3G phones lacked a good compelling "wow must have" factor. I have no doubt that at some point we will see a killer application but I'm not clear what it will be.
In fact one thing that really jumped out at me was how 2.xG services seem to provide entirely sufficient bandwidth for innovative applications. The press was buzzing about HSDPA and maybe the big brains in the conference part thought they needed more speed but on the show floor what was amazing was what can be done with much less data. For example an Italian company (Atop Innovation) managed to demonstrate stuffing an entire TV channel down a GPRS link and also showed how the same concept could be used (for example) to remotely monitor a home security system (or any other webcam and yes do I mean those sorts of XXX webcams) with feedback mechanisms to move the camera or do other things. In fact what impressed the most about 3GSM world was how well the 2G networks held out given that there were thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of geeky people wanting to gabble on their phones. For example I only had one call failure myself while trying to reach someone else in the show and the recipient indicated that the problem could have been that he was in a subterranean toilet at the time.
One thing that did come up here and there was the question of standards. Not so much the idea of anyone being against them so much as which standard to use. Although some vendors (six letters beginning with N) do fail to implement even generous interpretations of 3GPP standards (the use of "based on" and "compliant" in the literature should be hints) the major problem is that there are so many varients to chose from that vendor interoperability generally only occurs when the customer bangs their heads together. Closer to the user - in the handset for example - there tends to be less chance that pressure from anyone big will enforce interoperability. Vodafone, Orange, NTT Docomo etc. do mandate certain features and functions as basic requirements but they tend not to talk to each other so phone makers and phone application vendors have a hard time making sure that their feature works identically on all networks. At 3GSM world it was clear to me that the defacto handset standard is Symbian with either the UIQ or Nokia Series 60 interface. Almost all the little booths from ISVs that had handset demos had a symbian handset and I would say that 80% of time it was a Nokia one. For people like Microsoft, Qualcomm or Blackberry this is a problem. Sure there were apps on Microsoft's OS around and the Qualcom and Backberry booths had plenty of ISVs with sample BREW or Blackberry apps but the general platform required was Symbian. Services were also typically GSM related - SMS and MMS were the usual prerequisites. This is good news for Nokia and ARM and Symbian but may be less good news for the idea that you can have one phone that works seamlessly all over the world. Permalink
The Instapundit, Donald Sensing and others have done sums based on the NY Times's peculiar purchase of About.com that look rather stratospheric. Tim Worstall does some number crunching to come up with another valuation. Tim's numbers are interesting not so much because of the top-line valuation but from the perspective of the gross profit margins and cash flow. Tim estimates that the Instapundit has annual fixed expenses (COGS if you like) of a maximum of $5000. That number is probably overgenerous and certainly, since the Instapundit is about the biggest blog there is, about the maximum possible outlay that a blog could have - an analysis of former bigshot blogger Andrew Sullivan indicated annual bandwidth costs for his site at a tenth of that ($500/year) for example. I would guess that the average blog has COGS of about $5-$10/month (call it $100/year) tops.
Now this is where the salivating margins come in. Unless you do the blog sufficiently much that you need to take a salary for doing it there are no other costs and all revenue above that needed to pay for the site ($100/year) is pure profit. A quick look at blogads indictaes that the lowball monthly rate is something like $20 with more usual amounts being more like $50 or so - it is almost impossible to get similar stats out of google's adsense but it looks like $20/month is also a lowend amount for a reasonably popular website. Assuming that a blog has both adsense and blogads then after about three months he will have cleared the years expenses even for a really low end site. This makes the minimum gross margin 75%. Of course if you actually hit the big time and start charging say $100/blogad/month then that gross margin goes up on the 90% range and the gods of the blogosphere such as Instapundit will see margins over 97%. More to the point that gross margin is also the net margin - there are no other expenses so a blogger's balance sheet makes the average Intellectual Property company look like a low margin high cost business.
There is of course one big point here which is that I have assumed no salary costs. Once one take a salary all those nice margins start looking rather ugly since - again unless one is fantastically successful - the salary is likely to be 100% of what is left over after the bandwidth costs and even then it's likely to be rather low. Consider a mid to high end blogger such as Donald Sensing, he offers a number of ads at $125 a month and generally seems to have one or two taken. If he always fills one ad at $125 a month then he makes $1500/year, even if he managed to sell ads on a weekly basis (higher rate) and consistently had four concurrently active then that $1500 would only turn into $8000+. Either way that isn't going to pay much of a salary, but whether it is $1500 or $8000 it does make a nice addition to one's regular income for the expense of an hour or so a day. Although the hourly rate is probably below minimum wage the point is that one is being paid to do something that one would do anyway thus the benefit for the blogger is that one is paid to do one's hobby.
So where is and isn't the big money in blogs?
The money, as any dotcom investor should have realised, is in the provider of blogging tools. Google and the Pressflex, the company behind blogads, are the obvious picks. Yahoo could be another since, although it doesn't directly do blogs (yet) it does do the gazillions of geocities websites and yahoogroups mailing lists which frequently resemble or compete with blogs. About.com is not one that I would have picked myself since it seems to be both content provider and advertiser.
Of course the brief look at blog margins are rather depressing for people ties to traditional publishing models. The cost to print a regular newspaper or magazine (forget the cost of the content - journalism) is thousands of dollars an issue, which explains why newspapers have many many adverts and that you can't advertise in them for $40/month or even $40/day except, if lucky, hidden away amongst 500 others in a classified section. In terms of readership, taking out a blogad or a google adsense advertisement at perhaps $1000/month spread over many blogs or sites will get you not only more eyeballs but also, if done correctly, more revenue because the eyeballs you get are likely to be interested in the product you are offering.
The rate charged per eyeball is interesting. Take Tim Worstall as an example, with around 1500 visitors per day and blogad spots at $20/month, the cost per (pair of) eyeballs is about 0.04cents. Instapundit - to go to the top of the blog world - gets over 100 times as much traffic as Tim but charges $1000/month for his regular slots (but more for the top two) so the rate per eyeball is not noticeably different. Most newspapers seem to be remarkably coy about their ad rates for display ads but $20 would buy a couple of lines of classified ad appearing once in most papers. The Fresno Bee (picked kind of at random thanks to a google hit) reports that it is read by over 400,000 people each day or 300 times as many people as read Tim's blog, thus in order to have a similar cost ad/eyeball the monthly rate for a display ad in the Fresno Bee needs to be $6000. Although the Bee doesn't say what it's actual rate is I suspect the $6000 is about what it would charge for a single day ad not a month's worth which indicates that the cost per eyeball at a print newspaper is some 30 times greater. This is an order of magnitude difference - it doesn't really matter whether we are looking at the NY Times, a specialist monthly trade magazine or a provincial newspaper all of them have to have many more advertisements priced much higher than a blog in terms of cost / eyeball in order to break even.
For advertisers with a choice between bloggers and traditional print as a medium to get their message across the blog side wins hands down. I suspect that as these numbers begin to sink in we'll see many more ads on blogs at higher rates than present and that may then make more bloggers able to drop the daytime job. Right now, if I could figure a way to buy blogad futures I would, the rates for most blogads has to go up, and will do once mainstream advertisers figure out these costs.
(Disclosure - in case you hadn't noticed this blog has no ads and not tip jar and hence no revenue, but it is also free to run because it is hosted by a friend) Permalink
My writeup of day 1 is here and my general summary of the rest is here. This is a post on one very specific subtopic which caught my eye at 3GSM - VOIP. Voice over IP is not something that looks like it would immediately threaten mobile operators since, at first glance, what it is doing is replacing the POTS line in homes and offices, but look a little deeper and it also begins to have implications for mobile vendors. As a result, while VOIP was not everywhere, there were plenty of VOIP bits and bobs on offer at 3GSM. The good news for the mobile operators is that VOIP is potentially an opportunity as well as a threat, this is better than VOIP has for fixed line operators where VOIP is simply killing off the voice cash-cow that most have been relying on. The bad news, however, is that it most definitely is a threat to the goal of increased ARPU that is the goal of every mobile operator.
The Opportunity
The obvious opportunity is the small one - this is the way that VOIP allows mobile operators to cut the costs on call trunking once a call has left the air interface. Sure VOIP does help operators cut costs, and no doubt cunning operators will be able to delay passing on some or all of those savings to their subsribers for a sognificant period of time, thus increasing the profit of each minite of talk time. However this is not, I believe, the major opportunity.
The major opportunity is for the mobile operators to be able to move in to the fixed line voice business. AT&T first attempted this when it bought up all those cable operators, but the current crop of mobile operators doesn't need to do this since broadband is already widely available. All they need to do is resell some VOIP service on top of the customers existing broadband. For example I saw a number of little players offering clients that, in combination with some cunning wireless LAN or bluetooth device, allowed a user to make and receive VOIP calls while at home and seamlessly make regular wireless voice calls when away from home. There were a number of varients on this scenario depending on the seamlessness required - at least one claimed to be able to manage handover transaprently without dropping the call, others were less transparent - the amount of special wifi/bluetooth/DECT gear required - at least one just required a 802.11 capable handset and any accessable 802.11 network - and so on. This is, in many ways, a very compelling story to subscribers. One of the problems with people wishing to bin their fixed line POTS service for VOIP is that in the event of an emergencey coupled with a power loss they have no way to contact emergency assistance. When the VOIP phone is also the mobile phone this problem goes away; for example if VOIP is down the handset just uses the regular wireless service as if it were away from home. Of course it is possible to argue that in a major emergency the wireless network might be down but that isn't much different from a tree taking out the phone line as well as the power line to a property. Other benefits for a mobile subscriber using the mobile branded VOIP is that other mobile features such as voicemail would be included for free, you really would have one device to use (and thus one quickdial list) and it would really be a phone - I have seen some people gripe immensely about using PC headsets with VOIP so that latter is bigger than you mught think. All in all this is a bonus to the wireless operator since he gets to add an additional charge per subscriber for very little if any equipment outlay.
The Threat
The threat on the other hand is fairly clear. As and when Wifi becomes reasonably ubiquitous and public wifi access costs drop to free or nearly so there may be a significant drop in the number of calls made over the regular wireless network because its cheaper to use the Wifi and VOIP than the cellphone. This of course will tend to lower ARPU. Perhaps worse many of the other dodges the operators wish to use to increase ARPU could be undermined - for example rather than using a carrier provided GPRS or 3G search or walled garden for web surfing subscribers could just hook into the nearest wifi access point and surf the full web instead. I believe that highish bandwidth data networking is likely to only serve applications that can be used while the subscriber is, essentially at rest and sitting down (at rest in an airplane maybe but relative to his surroundings at rest) which means that it is more suited to hotspot access than to the general coverage of the cellular network
For a whole host of reasons - simple geography for one - I can't see VOIP taking away the whole of the mobile phone addressable need and therefore I still believe that most people will continue to believe they need a cellphone, but what I can see is that the premium rate services, particularly the ones that supposedly drove the requirement for 3G being whittled away. A good example (TMF Nokia board readers will recognise this in part) are video phonecalls. Simply because of the fact that you want to set the camera up facing you at a fixed distance I believe that the vast majority of video calls will be made while the speaker is sitting down at a table. If the subscriber is sitting down at a table then all the overhead of seamless handover from one cell to another is wasted, on the other hand it is the perfect application to drop in to Starbucks grab one of their overpriced coffees and use their wifi hotspot to make the video call. Likewise for services like checking email, viewing movies and so on. Sure some passengers in a car might want to do these things and they would then need the cell network but I'd guess that 90% of the time when a subscriber wants to do this he will be in the sort of place that a wifi hotspot could serve - recall my pictures of laptop users in the previous 3GSM reports. The cost of deploying wifi hotspots is trivial compared to deploying 3G and you generally end up with more available bandwidth.
At TCS, Arnold Kling, wrote an interesting piece on the Summers brouhaha and in part he mentioned the Summer's discussion of the Becker test. This is what Summers said:
The second problem is the one that Gary Becker very powerfully pointed out in addressing racial discrimination many years ago. If it was really the case that everybody was discriminating, there would be very substantial opportunities for a limited number of people who were not prepared to discriminate to assemble remarkable departments of high quality people at relatively limited cost simply by the act of their not discriminating, because of what it would mean for the pool that was available. And there are certainly examples of institutions that have focused on increasing their diversity to their substantial benefit, but if there was really a pervasive pattern of discrimination that was leaving an extraordinary number of high-quality potential candidates behind, one suspects that in the highly competitive academic marketplace, there would be more examples of institutions that succeeded substantially by working to fill the gap. And I think one sees relatively little evidence of that.
It is my strong feeling that in continental Europe the Becker test would show a different result. I have only anecdotal evidence here but in my experience I would say that mathematically and scientifically excellent women are disproportionately based in small companies rather than universtities and large established organizations. If you are a European female biochemist (say) you will most likely get the best opportunity to do challenging research as a post doc in a biotech startup rather than in a university or a large company because in the larger organization the institutionalized sexism means that you will be washing the bottles
The problem here is that once a woman has gone the way of the small company she will never return to academia because she will lack appropriate teaching experience and possibly a reasonable number of published works. It is my experience that smaller companies tend to spend less time trying to get their scientist's work published because they'd rather make money from it, thus five years work in a startup may result in just one or two patent applications and no other published work whereas in any other organization the same work would have resulted in two or three journal articles as well as the patents. Because of the lack of such published work the putative female's CV is bound to be less impressive-looking than that of a hypothetically less brilliant male who stuck to university research and thus published many low grade articles. Throw is the male dominance games that Kling mentions and you have a strong disincentive, IMO, for female scientists in academia.
As for the rest? I can't help noticing that unlike Eason Jordon who quit rather than admit what he said, Summers has quite simply put the transcript up and allowed us all to read it and draw our own conclusions. Not only does this look good it also makes the outbursts of his critics look like people who are dogmatic nonscientists. What I really wonder is whether these critics understand the basic mathematics behind the normal distribution and the resulting implications for picking the best. On that note and IMO illustrating the lack of statistical and logical knowledge of Summers' critics, Gnxp has a link to an interesting NY Times article about the relative successes of male and female physicists in the USA with comparisons to other scientific disciplines and countries:
Instead, the sex disparity arises earlier in the pipeline, between high school and college. Nearly half of students taking high school physics are girls, but fewer than a quarter of the bachelor's degrees in physics go to women.
"That's where the drop-off point in physics is," Dr. Ivie said. "That's where they need to look."
Dr. Ivie said the situation appeared to be different in at least some other sciences, like chemistry, where women earn a larger percentage of doctoral degrees but leave academia at a higher rate than men.
Mind you the article is clearly intended to attack what Summers is supposed to have been claiming but I think it manages to screw up this conclusion by making a truly bizarre leap of logic near the end
Dr. Ivie also said that in suggesting that men and women might have different intrinsic aptitude in science, Dr. Summers did not take into account the continuing progress of women in fields like physics. While women earned only 18 percent of the Ph.D.'s in the United States in 2003, that is far higher than 1970, when the percentage was 2.4.
"If it's differences in innate ability, I don't know what innate abilities would have changed so quickly," Dr. Ivie said.
Let me just point out two idiocies here: 1) 18% of what vs 2.4% of what? Not enough information here. With the data supplied it is easy to create a scenario where the the Summers hypothesis is correct. Assume that, as Summers (and others) claim, the varience for males is greater than for women. If in 1970 only the top 10%, say, of people got physics PhDs but in 2003 the top, say, 20% got PhDs then because of the sizes of the tail 18% of the top 20% could be female but only 2.4% of the top 10% could be female. 2) 1970 would seem to be right at the start of the era when feminism and the like would be able to influence whether women felt able to study physics. It should be no surprise that just 2.4% got a PhD then and more did so in 2003. The question is why the number in 2003 is 18% not 48%? That could be residual sexism or it could be the fact that fewer women have the aptitude. We need some intermediate data points before we can draw any conclustions.
The fact that Hunter Thingummy, Mr "Fear and Loathing", topped himself has been all over the news and blog world. Personally I've never read anything he wrote and didn't know much about him so it all rather passed me by - I'm more concerned about the frailty of Ms Andre Norton, who is an SF writer and thus apparently of less interest to the rest of the world. Anyway, Prof Bunyip wrote a sort of tribute that was interesting in that it related that the young Hunter chappie was ardently against the Rotary organization. Personally I have to say I'm only familiar with the Rotary as an orgaization that places the signs that you see here and there outside towns so my interest was piqued by this dislike.
I had a quick look at the website and from the history page noted that tomorrow, 23 February, is their centennial anniversary so may I be the first to wish the organization a
Happy Rotary Centenery
Mr "Fear and Loathing" was unhappy with rotarian values it seems. Now the website doesn't clearly identify the values but it does describe the "Rotarian Way" test, which I assume is what was so objectionable. Just for interest I thought copy it below because to the life of me I don't see what is wrong with it - a bit wishy washy maybe but it isn't insisting that the Rotarians are destined to rule the world or require that the rest of us perform some mumbojumbo three times a day. Here it is
Is it the TRUTH?
Is it FAIR to all concerned?
Will it build GOODWILL and BETTER FRIENDSHIPS?
Will it be BENEFICIAL to all concerned?"
In fact it seems to me that, while it might mean the death of the gossip industry, if everyone made this test before writing or speaking there would be a lot less bile in the world.
Mind you perhaps that is just the public version and that inside their metings Rotarians follow different protocols that do seek to cause the overthrow of all the other shadowy cabals ruling the world and replace them all with the Rotary. Perhaps they silence all those who wish to speak aout against their evil ways. But somehow I doubt it. It seems to me that a certain amount of a man's characted can be determined by those he names as his enemies (this is one reason why I rather like President Bush who is apparently hates and is hated by tyrants, would-be tyrants and their sycophants worldwide) and the Rotary does not seem worthy of such emotion.
Johann wrote an article that pretty much encapsulates my attitude to Israel, Jews and why the misdeeds of Israel are not any sort of exscuse for a) either hating all jews or b) generally ignoring far worse misdeeds elsewhere. There is one clear error of fact - he says Zionism started post WW2 - which he does acknowledge in the comments while making a reasonable justification for his statement) but other than that I have really nothing to complain about. So go read it - NOW.
You may omit the comments which don't seem to add much to the main point except for one threadlet that wonders why there is so much more British coverage of events in Jerusalem compared to events in (say) Johannesburg. One reason for that certainly could be anti-semitism, but I suspect it is more a case of a positive feedback loop inside news organizations who keep on scratching the same itch because its cheaper to keep the resources already in place than figure out where else they should go to get the same gore factornewsworthy stories. I have no doubt that the loop is helped by the fact that Jerusalem and Tel Aviv and so on are full of pleasant hotels and restaurants within easy commuting distance of the news frontlines. In Darfur or Congo to pick some places totally not at random there is a distinct lack of 5* hotels, high-speed internet access and all other mod cons within 20 miles or so of where the news is occuring. Actually the news location in these places is so much greater than it is in Israel that a journalist would really have to travel a bit to cover what went on.
What am I talking about my reader asks? well its simple, the Pinko Feminist Hellcat made the following announcement:
President-for-Life Sheelzebub announces new competition for ministry titles
Thank you for coming, everyone.
As you know, it's been over one year since I started this little slice of internet hell that promotes mindless consumerism, graft, and buying lots of plastic crap in big box stores. I have had a blast.
I want to show my loyal followers and my loyal haters my appreciation (for what would a President-for-Life be without dissident groups to draw more attention to her?). I'm going to stick with tradition--I need bribes.
Everyone in the blogosphere wants awards. Big deal. Who cares about an award and a banner you can put in your sidebar? I've got something better--power!
Look, I'm the President-for-Life, baby! I can award ministries. Ministries are great jobs to have in a dictatorship. They're pretty much no-show--although you do get a snazzy office with a nice cherry desk and an intern. You have a ready-made excuse if you want to get out of going to your Uncle Milt's tenth wedding--just tell them that you have Important Government Business to attend to. You can't draw a large salary (you don't actually draw a salary at all), but that's what bribes and graft are for. Not to mention taxes. Lots of taxes.
...
I believe I would make an excellent Minister of Olive Oil, although I have one condition: I must insist that my desk be made from olive wood not cherry.
PS If you need diplomacy, I can get you a deal on olive branches and for this week only a special offer: one dove of peace (not piece of dove - I deny that categorically) is included with each olive branch.
The Powerlinebloggers report that they have a critic who thinks that because one of their number is sceptical of Dawin's Theory of Evolution we should therefore ignore all commentary on the blog because they are clearly st00pid (OK I'm performing some light paraphrase and précis here). Curiously enough the Powerline bloggers have not exactly filled their blog with discussions of evolution, genetic diversity and whether we are related to a monkey on our mother's side or our father's- In fact in the original post picked out for this exposé the Hind Rocket fails to go into detail about why he believes "that Darwin's theory of macroevolution is plainly wrong, on strictly scientific grounds" and that is about as much detail as we get on the whole subject of evolution in their entire blog - though they do like Darwin awards as do I - so going there for insights into human biodiversity is unlikely to be terribly rewarding whether one is a creastionist, a darwinist or favours so other theory. However, it seems to me that one can appreciate, learn from and agree with people in one area without agreeing with them elsewhere. I think that evolution is right in broad outline but I don't see why I should immediately junk everything every uttered by those who hold a different belief. This is after all the difference between Mathematics, where theories can be proven and Science where they can only be disproven. Insisting that evolution must be true smacks not of science but of religious dogma.
On a similar note over at the NRO's Corner, Jonah Goldberg draws attention to a Matt Yglesias comment:
STRANGE NEW RESPECT. Now that Larry Summers is suddenly garnering strange new respect from conservatives, I can't help but wonder if his new friends on the right will start paying attention to his views in his actual areas of expertise. Social Security, for example. It seems to me that when he talks about that stuff, the wingnuts don't much care for him.
The same confusion between intellectual discussion and religious dogma is clearly illustrated. The hypothesis that "if you agree with Summers about subject A then you must also agree with him on subject B" is so obviously false that it is laughable. What is even worse is that many of us "on the right" who respect Summers are making no coment what so ever about what he said, what we are complaining about is the dogmatic accusations of heresy that his comments provoked. I have no idea whether females are less capable of top science than men or not but I do think one should at least be able to produce various hypotheses for the disparity in numbers and look to see what proof supports each.
The logical theory of these people seems to be something like this.
My enemy once said X
X is in fact wrong
Hence my enemy is always wrong.
(Hence I may ignore him forever)
It was this sort of claim that us CompScis at Cambridge used to mock the Philosophers for when they tried to invoke logic. Like those Cantabrian Philosophy lecturers of yesteryear, todays critics could use a course in Symbolic Logic and Boolean Algebra. Permalink
Accrding to this news piece ingenious Russian scientists have developed a pill that prolongs the effects of Drunkeness. Is there a vodka drought in Russia? or is one anticipated? Inquiring halfminds wish to know.
A look back to May and an Olive Tree near Salernes in the Var As always click on the image to see it enlarged and follw this link back to past olive tree photos. This is not part of my campaign to become Minister for Olive Oil in government of enlightened female despot Sheelzebub aka the Pinko Feminist Hellcat, I deny that completely. That campaign is a mere formality and I refuse to lower myself and actually do anything as crass as campaigning. Bribery and blackmail are as always my prefered method of advancement Permalink
The number of US Casualties in Iraq in February looks like it will be sharply down compared to the previous six months or more. There have been 54 deaths so far in February (one day to go) which would be comparable to the June/July 2004 numbers and better than any month other than those two since March 2004. Now one month of improvement does not of itself make a trend but it does go hand in hand with the news that many terrost leaders have been caught in the last few weeks. Watch for this number to fail to be reported on the BBC and other "unbiased" news outlets. Permalink
The Junkyardblog has an excellent link to an economist piece on the reawakening of Japan as a military power and its relationship with China. I think it is worthwhile looking back in history a bit to see why this relationship is what it is.
There is an argument that says that the 1894/5 Sino-Japanese war led to Japan's involvement in the second world war. The theory works like this: the "Triple Intervention" by France, Germany and Russia humiliated Japan and made Japan far more belligerant than it might otherwise have become this then led to the Russo-Japanese war ten years later and to the subsequent fanatical nationalism in Japan that led to Japan's further attempts at military conquest. Certainly the 1895 war was the first time that Japan soundly beat the country which had culturally dominated Eastern Asia for more than a millenium. The island of Formosa (Taiwan) was one of the spoils of that war which Japan held onto until 1945. Indeed what with Dutch colonization, Japanese colonization and the like Taiwan has spent a very little time actually ruled by a mainland Chinese regime.
When you look further back in history and Chinese(Mongol) invasions prompted the original "kamikaze" - the wind that did to the Chinese fleets roughly what happened to the Spanish Armada 300 years later. Further back still and China exported writing, buddhism and many other concepts to Japan. On the other hand imports from Japan to China were approximately zero. The difference in reaction to the European (and Amercian) colonizers between Japan and China (and Korea) is educational. Japan was shocked out of its isolation and set out groups to learn what the West had to offer. It then adopted what seemed to be best practise. China did its best to ignore the West and tried to throw them out - it failed miserably in much the same way that India had done half a century earlier. Korea tried to remain untouched and, since there was not much interest in Korea it was left in that state as a semi-vassal of the Chinese.
In 1894/5 all that changed. Japan comprehensively warned the world that it had learned how to fight a modern war and did so. For the next 50 years Korea was a Japanese posession and China was dependant on foriegn aid to defend itself (at which it mostly failed). The Japanese lost to the Soviets in Mongolia in the 1930s (it was their bad luck to encounter a general called Zhukov who understood mechanized warfare like few others - only Rommel and perhaps Patton could have been his equal), and they ground to a halt in Burma, but they didn't lose until the Americans got involved. After the second world war the Japanese managed to do economically what they had failed to do militarily and dominated East Asia in precisely the way that China had done for all the previous millenium or more.
This is the background to the continuous rumblings between the North Capital (Beijing) and the East Capital (Tokyo) over the last few decades. To China with its millennia of dominance it is inconceivable that a neighbouring power should stand up to it. To Japan the last hundred years have been a revelation about how it can survive on its own. You could think of it as the way a domineering mother perceives her independant minded teenager and vice versa.
But I suspect that in order to understand how the future looks it may help to think of hackneyed thrillers and children's adventure stories. Japan from 1895 to 1945 was a criminal, stealing, threatening and generally causing havoc, but having been caught by the cops in 1945 it did its time and resolved to turn over a new leaf. Meanwhile the other people in the neighbourhood have been squabbling and scrapping and they keep on telling the reformed criminal that he was a bad boy and needs to apologise again. Thus far the reformed criminal has kept the peace despite the provocations but as time goes on he begins to see that one former victim in particular seems to be behaving in the same way that he used to before he reformed. This new bully is not just threatening others, he is also supporting weaker troublemakers as well. In the story the reformed criminal eventually decides that he should teach this new bully the error of his ways and stands up against him on behalf of some of the victims. This is of course a shock to the new bully who had assumed that the former criminal would remain cowed by his past. Whether this plot will play itself out the same way in geopolitics is to be seen.
I don't know what will happen in East Asia in the next fifty years but I am sure that China bears most of the blame for the present state of affairs. Not only is it pursuing a dangerous game of threats against Taiwan it is also deliberately supporting North Korea and that clearly emboldens the North Koreans. I believe one can blame the N Korean regime for convincing Japan's public and government that the time for pacifism is over. If China regrets that Japan is gradually rejected pacifist neutrality then it has only its own policy of supporting N Korea to blame and its own policy of threats to Taiwan for making the Taiwanese eager to make their former imperial overlord an ally. Permalink
The Ward Churchill affair has had variouspeoplewonder whether universities can maintain the concept of tenure. It occurs to me that what everyone is forgetting is the golden rule: namely that he who has the gold makes the rules
In private universities it is the benefactors and trustees who make the decisions. If they begin to feel that certain departments or faculties are failing to reflect well on the university and are failing to pul in sufficient paying students then their funding, whether tenured or not, is likely to be cut. If a private university decides that it no longer needs to support "Ethnic Studies" then then entire department will be axed. In the publically funded area it is more complex but one suspects that a sufficiently motivated grass roots campaign could cause the political heads of the university to consider whether they should fund a controversial department.
I suspect it will take time but I am also rather certain that many alumni, donors and taxpayers are unaware of what "research" and "teaching" is done with their money. A simple informational campaign could easily indentify the worst parasites and cause their funding to be cut or withdrawn. There will undoubtedly be howls of protest from the ivory towers, but a good campaign would be able to split the towers nicely by making it clear that the total amount of money would not be cut when certain departments were stopped. One suspects that once other professors realize what they stand to gain the complaints will be rather pro forma. Certainlyit has been my experience that academics will do almost anything for an increase in a faculty budget.... Permalink
In Kentucky writing stories about events that are set in a school is a felony that requires $5000 bail.
A George Rogers Clark High School junior arrested Tuesday for making terrorist threats told LEX 18 News Thursday that the "writings" that got him arrested are being taken out of context.
Winchester police say William Poole, 18, was taken into custody Tuesday morning. Investigators say they discovered materials at Poole's home that outline possible acts of violence aimed at students, teachers, and police.
Poole told LEX 18 that the whole incident is a big misunderstanding. He claims that what his grandparents found in his journal and turned into police was a short story he wrote for English class.
"My story is based on fiction," said Poole, who faces a second-degree felony terrorist threatening charge. "It's a fake story. I made it up. I've been working on one of my short stories, (and) the short story they found was about zombies. Yes, it did say a high school. It was about a high school over ran by zombies."
Next up arrests warrants for the producers of Buffy the Vampire Slayer???
PS Personally I reckon whoever coined the phrase "Terroristic Threatening" that appears on the linked page deserves a far greater punishment...
Permalink I despise l'Escroc and Vile
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