True it may not be that harmful, but Japan has today started its first "not a sanction" sanction against North Korea. On its own this is not a big deal - but it will put a crimp in Norh Korea's trade and it should bring home to the North Koreans that failure to negotiate doesn't just affect the size of the "aid" bribe but may have other negative consequences.
Japundit links to another piece on North Korea, in this case it is a proposal that the US deploy tactical nukes in South Korea again. I can see some problems here but I can also see that this would tend to ratchet up the pressure on North Korea and the PRC quite nicely. On the whole anything that helps to split the PRC from N Korea has to be good. Permalink
Mark Steyn has had a number of downbeatarticles recently about the fate of Europe which have interested a number of American bloggers and journalists. In his response on Austin Bay's Blog, Mark elaborates as follows:
First, it’s true that the Central and Eastern European nations are markedly more America-friendly than the western ones. However, their long-term prognosis is not significantly different: they face the same deathbed demographics - right now, the only European country breeding at replacement rate is Muslim Albania.
Declining population isn’t necessarily a problem - my own New Hampshire town, for example, survived a 130-year population decline from 1820 to 1950, caused by the opening up of the west, the collapse of the sheep industry and the big mill towns down south. But New Hampshire’s entire social structure wasn’t founded on a welfarist model dependent on continuous population growth to sustain state benefits. For the states of Eastern Europe, one of the consequences of joining the EU, adopting the Euro and ratifying the European Constitution is that they’re also assuming collective responsibility for the cost of the unsustainable welfare burdens of Greece, France, etc.
There are two ways you could deal with this - either reform of the welfare states or massive immigration higher than America at its pre-World War One immigration peak. No European politicians have the courage to address the former (openly), so they’ve signed on to the latter (silently). In the end, the idea of using the Third World as your surrogate mother isn’t a long-term solution either: in 2020, a skilled educated Indian, Chilean, Chinaman, Singaporean will be able to write his own emigration ticket anywhere on the planet. Is it likely he’ll want to choose a part of the world where the basic tax rate will be 60%?
That means Europe will be almost wholly dependent on the Muslim world for immigration - and one of the features of super-tolerant anything-goes post-Christian Europe is that it radicalises hitherto moderate Muslims.
Now I disagree with a couple of things here.
Firstly I don't think that European nations will in fact take up the borden of other nations' social security committments. In fact I believe that the opposite will happen and that, as Steyn notes in other columns, the EU as a unified whole will collapse in a heap sooner rather than later. In many ways I think that the EU Constitution may be the straw that breaks the camel's back as nation after nation is forced to have a look and see what exactly they are signing up to and decides to pass. So all this BS about a unified EU foreign policy etc is IMO doomed. I don't know how long it will take but I am positive that we will see significant restructuring and scaling back of the various European welfare states. I hesitate to place definitive bets on which country will blink first but it wuld not surprise me if it turns out to be France. I'm sure that while Chirac remains in control nothing substantive will happen, but I'm also fairly sure that after the next election Nicolas Sarkozy will be the president. Sarkozy is good at explaining why what sounds like a good idea (e.g. the 35hr week) is in fact bad and he is frequently able to come up with sufficient fast talk and action to placate the majority of protestors while not actually bowing ot their demands. It will also be fascinating to see how the Vlaams not-Blok does in the next elections. I do believe that they will benefit - in Flanders - from the heavy handed attempts to shut them out and economically they are small government libertarians which could be very very interesting if they manage to get enough votes to be a part of the government.
Secondly I think the Muslimization will be patchy. Perhaps the Netherlands will become a majority Islamic country, perhaps Sweden will. I doubt that everywhere will be the same and in fact I rather question whether Sweden or Holland will. This Gnxp posts indicates that, contrary to reports of doom, it is not exclusively the white middle-class dutch who are emigrating: Indeed it would seem that half of the emigrants are recent immigrants or their families. Zacht Ei has a report from the streets. While it is anecdotal it need not be completely dismissed for that reason. I suspect that the idea that "Muslim immigrants" are uniformly radicalized and anti-integration is overstated - certainly I know a number of English Muslims (or Muslim origin) who are well integrated and who are taking advantage of their opportunity to become better off - even though Gordon Brown does his best to tax them back to poverty.
I suspect that reform of social security will in fact help in removing the requirement for immigrants and to keeping those immigrants in their ghettoes Permalink
Boris Johnson has a most excellent oped in the Torygraph today:
...because the events in Lebanon are proving so deliriously pleasing to the neo-cons, they are also, of course, symmetrically irritating to the Americo-sceptics and all those who opposed the war.
I am sad to say that I have friends and colleagues whose first reaction, on seeing the bunting of the Cedar Revolution, was to scoff. "Huh," I heard someone say, "just look at those flags - I bet they were all provided by the CIA. You could never run off a load of flags that quickly. It's all an American plot," he said, "just like that business in the Ukraine."
"Yeah," said someone else, "and the last time I was in Beirut I talked to a taxi driver who said he liked the Syrian army. These neo-cons don't understand that the Syrians have brought stability to Lebanon. The Lebanese like having all those Syrians standing around with guns."
Well, my friends, I can understand your pique at the way in which history is apparently vindicating Mark Steyn. If there is one thing worse than a stridently triumphalist American neo-con, it is a stridently triumphalist American neo-con who seems to be right.
But in so far as the Americosceptics think the Syrian army has been good for Lebanon, they seem to be at odds not only with the Lebanese people, but also with most of Arab opinion. The Syrians have been intermittently brutal in their occupation; they have taken Lebanese water; they have kidnapped and detained without trial. It is time that Bashar Assad removed all 14,000 of them, and so say 77 per cent of the Arab world, according to Al-Jazeera, and newspapers from Jordan to Kuwait to Egypt.
The protests in Lebanon have hugely increased the likelihood of that withdrawal and, if Jumblatt is right, those protests have been sparked by democracy in Iraq. We may be on the verge of a process as wonderful as he thinks; and we should not allow any anti-Americanism, any hatred of Bush, any doubts about the war, to tempt us to hope otherwise.
What with nice editorials in the Grauniad and the NY Times recently, I'd say that the saner part of the anti-Bushies are begining to see the light. Maybe the rest of them should realise that crow is more digestible the sooner it is eaten. Permalink
People currently keen on censoring other people's access to smut and sex include the Chinese, the Iranians, the Saudi Arabians and some utter morons in the US Senate. Oh and the state of Alabama where dildos are only available "for a bona fide medical, scientific, educational, legislative, judicial or law enforcement purpose."
If conservative Republicans wonder why people who otherwise sympathise with them somethimes believe they are fundamentalist wingnuts then this would be why. Alabama argued its sex-toy ban " ... and related orgasm stimulating paraphernalia is rationally related to a legitimate legislative interest in discouraging prurient interests in autonomous sex." And that "it is enough for a legislature to reasonably believe that commerce in the pursuit of orgasms by artificial means for their own sake is detrimental to the health and morality of the State."
In much the same way Senator Stevens seems to think that we should not be able to pay to watch naked ladies. This is, to put it mildly, a crusade that is destined to fail. I'd say that the fact that just about the only guaranteed way to make money out of a new technology is to sell smut using it is a fairly major hint that smut is popular. The fact that about 50% of all jokes involve sex is another.
Unlike alcohol, tobacco and numerous other drugs, legal and illegal, "autonomous sex" gives millions pleasure and has no obvious harmful side-effects. Apart from an obscure desire to stop people having fun what possible reason can there be for legislating against smut in private? Next thing you know the US Senate will be recommending that women wear "modest clothing". As 3martini puts it
We obviously need a new bumpersticker: "I'm an adult. I watch cable. And I vote."
Those devious boffins in the service of the American Military-Industrial complex have come up with a pain-ray gun. This is what it does:
According to a 2003 review of non-lethal weapons by the US Naval Studies Board, which advises the navy and marine corps, PEPs produced "pain and temporary paralysis" in tests on animals. This appears to be the result of an electromagnetic pulse produced by the expanding plasma which triggers impulses in nerve cells.
The new study, which runs until July and will be carried out with researchers at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, aims to optimise this effect. The idea is to work out how to generate a pulse which triggers pain neurons without damaging tissue.
The contract, heavily censored before release, asks researchers to look for "optimal pulse parameters to evoke peak nociceptor activation" - in other words, cause the maximum pain possible. Studies on cells grown in the lab will identify how much pain can be inflicted on someone before causing injury or death.
Apparently though this could be used as an implement of TORTURE and is therefore a bad thing. Um excuse me. We don't need new torture weapons - anyone in a position to experience this pain ray as part of an interrogation is also in a position to experience exlectic shocks to the genitals, the chance to have one's nipples as ashtrays and so on. Indeed I would say that any weapon can be used as a torture implement and most can be used in a form that leaves no long term mark on the subject so this is not in any way unique to this weapon.
On the other hand weapons that incapacitate without killing or causing long-term physical harm are rather rarer. There are a lot of cases (law enforcement, riot control to name but two) where the ability to apply, or threaten to apply, incapacitating but non-lethal force is extremely useful. Apparently though its better to kill or injure with "rubber bullets" than a pain ray.
"This is patently quite dangerous and irresponsible," says human-rights activist Steve Wright, who, as director of the Omega Foundation, works with Amnesty International to monitor nonlethal weapons. "What the U.S. invents today, others, including the torturing states, will deploy tomorrow."
The LA Times has a remarkable (login required try bugmenot) article on a North Korean "businessman" which, it seems to me, deserves a good Fisking since it shows a picture of the regime that is rather different from the one we normally see.
N. Korea, Without the Rancor
A businessman speaks his mind about the U.S., the 'nuclear club' and human rights issues.
BEIJING — He arrived at the entrance to a North Korean government-owned restaurant and karaoke club here in the Chinese capital with a handshake and a request. "Call me Mr. Anonymous," he said in English.
This North Korean, an affable man in his late 50s who spent much of his career as a diplomat in Europe, has been assigned to help his communist country attract foreign investment. With the U.S. and other countries complaining about North Korea's nuclear weapons program and its human rights record, it's a difficult task, he admitted.
As the Armed LIberal points out, a diplomat from a communist country who has been "assigned" to do something does not correspond to the traditional definition of businessman, although Tim Worstall has noted that North Koreans do accept bribescommissions and do other shady deals which could define them as businessmen.
"There's never been a positive article about North Korea, not one," he said. "We're portrayed as monsters, inhuman, Dracula … with horns on our heads."
Unless all those reports of re-education camps and the like are in fact false then there would seem to be a good reason for this. Just last week those US Imperialists at the State Department pointed out the ahh glowing cigaratte burn of a human rights record that is North Korea.
So, in an effort to clear up misunderstandings, he expounded on the North Korean view of the world in an informal conversation that began one night this week over beer as North Korean waitresses sang Celine Dion in the karaoke restaurant, and resumed the next day over coffee.
If one wasn't a cynic one might wonder a little about the employment conditions of these waitresses given that other N Korea workers abroad seem to be more or less slave labour.
The North Korean, dressed in a cranberry-colored flannel shirt and corduroy trousers, described himself as a businessman with close ties to the government. He said he did not want to be quoted by name because his perspective was personal, not official. Because North Koreans seldom talk to U.S. media organizations, his comments offered rare insight into the view from the other side of the geopolitical divide.
And if you believe that he did this on his own initiative then I have a bridge to sell you. I mean its all very well trying to give an alternative perspective but do you have to be so uncritical?
He said better relations with the United States were key to turning around his nation's economy, which has nearly ground to a halt over the last decade amid famine, the collapse of industry and severe electricity shortages. "For basic life, we can live without America, but we can live better with" it, he said.
I expect that is partly true - life is a lot better with the US as an ally - but unless all the reports of famine are false, Basic life in North Korea would seem to be impossibly without aid from somewhere and the aid has frequently come from the USA.
Yet he voiced strong enthusiasm for his country's recent announcement that it had developed nuclear weapons. The declaration, which jarred U.S. officials, was not intended as a threat, he said, but merely a way to advance negotiations.
"Now that we are members of the nuclear club, we can start talking on an equal footing. In the past, the U.S. tried to whip us, as though they were saying, 'Little boy, don't play with dangerous things.' "
The definitions of threat and negotiations used in this sentence seem to be from the same dctionary as "businessman" was from. Was it by any chance edited by a G Orwell and published in 1984?
A colleague, a 55-year-old man also visiting from North Korea, nodded.
"This was the right thing to do, to declare ourselves a nuclear power. The U.S. had been talking not only about economic sanctions, but regime change," the businessman said. "We can't just sit there waiting for them to do something. We have the right to protect ourselves."
OK so a private businessman and his "colleague" just happen to be really keen on the N Korean government and its system. Forget that Bridge I have some mountains in Florida that just happen to be for sale at giveaway prices.
The North Koreans said they were keenly attentive to the language used by Bush administration officials in regard to their country. They were relieved that in this year's State of the Union address the president didn't again characterize North Korea as part of an "axis of evil," as he did in 2002. But they were greatly offended that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice called North Korea an "outpost of tyranny" during her confirmation hearings.
You think outpost of tyranny is offensive? do you think that just maybe there was a reason for this - see state dept report linked above.
"We were hoping for change from the U.S. administration. We expected some clear-cut positive change," the North Korean said. "Instead, Condoleezza Rice immediately committed the mistake of calling us an outpost of tyranny. North Koreans are most sensitive when they hear that kind of remark."
Yeah truth hurts doesn't it? Of course N Korea was totally blameless and never threatened to harm a fly. In the 1990s North Korea agreed to not develop Nuclear power or bombs in exchange for food and oil. Then after it has been shown to be lying it goes ahead and says "hah we've got nukes now" and this is not expected to upset anyone?
He believes that Americans have the wrongheaded notion that North Koreas are unhappy with the system of government under Kim Jong Il. "We Asians are traditional people," he said. "We prefer to have a benevolent father leader."
Curiously I note that very few other Asians seem to prefer a father figure benevolent or otherwise. And the way that so many N Koreans are willing to risk life and limb to escape from their "benvolent father" is clearly a malicious libel. As are the stories all these misfits tell.
He also said that U.S. criticism of North Korea's record on human rights was unfair and hypocritical. In its annual human rights report on Monday, the State Department characterized North Korea's behavior as "extremely poor." It said 150,000 to 200,000 people were being held in detention camps for political reasons and that there continued to be reports of extrajudicial killings.
I note that he doesn't quite manage to say that the report is untrue.
"Is there any country where there is a 100% guarantee of human rights? Certainly not the United States," the businessman said. "There is a question of what is a political prisoner. Maybe these people are not political prisoners but social agitators."
And its OK to lock up "social agitators" apparently. That's good to know, I expect that the US will immediately label all the detainees in Guantanimo are social agitators and thereby avoid all that horrible publicity.
While Westerners tend to stress the rights of the individual, he said, "we have chosen collective human rights as a nation…. We should have food, shelter, security rather than chaos and vandalism. The question of our survival as a nation is dangling."
Right... I'm impressed with the way this anonymous person apparently managed to say all this without bursting into hysterical laughter. But just in case no one has noticed countries in Asia which are not run by "benevolent fathers" seem to have no problems providing food shelter and security rather than chaos and vandalism. Its odd that and obviously its purely a coincidence.
The North Korean admitted that "it is no secret that we have economic problems," and he said North Koreans were themselves largely to blame because they let their industry become too dependent on the socialist bloc countries. After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, trade fell sharply.
Oh really? lack of quality and free enterprise has clearly got nothing to do with it then. Those socialist bloc countries didn't go away in 1990 they just changed their politics. If there were actual demand for N Korea's products one suspects it would have remained.
But he faulted the United States for the collapse of a 1994 pact under which North Korea was supposed to get energy assistance in return for freezing its nuclear program. The agreement fell apart after Washington accused North Korea in 2002 of cheating on the deal, and the U.S. and its allies suspended deliveries of fuel oil.
So it looks like the N Koreans are better nuclear engineers that the Manhatten project. From being good boys in 2002 to a functioning bomb in 2005 is fast going. You'd think that maybe redirecting that energy and intelligence from bombs to say, agriculture, would be a good thing.
"Electricity is a real problem. We have only six hours a day," said the North Korean, who lives in an apartment in a choice neighborhood of Pyongyang, the capital. "When you are watching a movie on TV, there might be a nice love scene and then suddenly the power is out. People blame the Americans. They blame Bush."
Lets just ignore the fact that TVs are apparently rather scare and the similar total lack of 100 free to air cable channels in N Korea and lets ignore the way that living in a "choice neighbourhood" implies a certain dedication to the regime, apparently there's a hidden human right that says that all people in countries run by "benevolent fathers" have a right to free electricity provided by America.
He said as North Korea worked to change its state-run economy, it would look to China as an example and seek to change gradually. He didn't use the word "reform" — anathema to some trained under the socialist system.
"In the past, we were revolutionaries. But now we prefer evolution to revolution," he said. "We will try to learn from China's successes and failures."
Looks like N Korea will be evolving to unfettered capitalism then. Oddly enough that doesn't seem to go well with "collective human rights" and "benevolent fatherhood"
As for international negotiations aimed at getting North Korea to give up its nuclear arms program, he said he thought Pyongyang would probably show up at the next round of talks. But his country would prefer to negotiate directly with the United States, he said, rather than in six-party discussions that also include China, South Korea, Japan and Russia.
He said the Americans' insistence on including six countries had caused undue complications.
Again it would be cheating to note how this "private businessman" seems to be remarkably knowledgable about governmental negotiations. So I'll just be cynical and remark having to keep one's story straight is much more awkward when you have to spin five separate ones.
"If we sort out the problems with America, everything else will fall into place. The problems with Japan can easily be sorted out," he said.
The North Korean criticized some Japanese politicians' efforts to link the nuclear talks to the question of Japanese citizens kidnapped by North Korea in the 1970s and 1980s.
"This was something done by a few overly enthusiastic people long ago," he said. "We tried to make amends.
"Now people like Shinzo Abe [deputy secretary-general of Japan's ruling Liberal Democratic Party] are using it for political purposes and destroying the interests of millions of people."
Everyone knows that Japan is just America's poodle. But maybe yes Japan should let bygones be bygones even if the kidnap victims may still be alive. Good idea. Now lets also forgive Japan for being the colonial power in Korea from 1995-1945. What do you mean "that's different?" - it was "something done by a few overly enthusiastic people long ago".
The most important point the North Korean said he wanted to convey in the conversation was that his nation was a place just like any other.
"There is love. There is hate. There is fighting. There is charity…. People marry. They divorce. They make children," he said.
"People are just trying to live a normal life."
People are just trying to live a normal life but the government keeps on ruining it...
I cannot believe that the LA Times appears to run this piece of propaganda without any balance. This looks like the sort of unbalanced thing that bloggers would write. (Hat Tip: Winds of Change) Updates: Commentary also from the Marmot and Hugh Hewitt Permalink
Last Friday I caught this picture of a Mimosa in flower next to an Olive tree Click on the photo for an enlargement and see the previous image here.
As Minister for Olive Oil in the Sheelzebub regime I think it is necessary to point out that hypothetical Ministerial summits held "chez moi" right now will be held in an atmospehere of ice and snow. OK so its sunny (today) but it certainly isn't warm - unless you come from Minnesota or Helsinki. Maybe in a month or so we can have warmth and sunshine... Permalink
Openwave has filed a truly bizarre form 8-K with the following headline
Form 8-K for OPENWAVE SYSTEMS INC
4-Mar-2005
Entry Material Agreement, Financial Obligation Matter, Cost of Change in Ass
Cost of change in Ass???? Well at least it appears Openwave is not a company that has trouble finding its Ass. But one is forced to wonder whether Openwave a major democratic party funder? are we looking at a new Donkey powered internet? and so on.
Unlike other countries where anti-EU sentiment seems to be a more right wing thing, in France it is the left who are most against the EU Constitution. I find myself in agreement with the main sentiment of their campaign. The poster above reads "No to the Constitution and to Chirac" which is something that I believe many Eurosceptics would agree with - I certainly do.
The problem however is that the reason given for the "non" is that, effectively, the French left believe that the EU has sold out to the evil capitalists. It is people who believe this kind of codswallop who make it possible for the BBC to seem unbiased in its Euro-coverage. Examples of areas where evil capitalists have evidence that the EU has sold out to fluffy socialists are legion, yet somehow the French left seems to believe that the EU is on the side of the "Patrons" or bosses. This is almost as bizarre and newspeaky as the LA Times's North Korean puff piece which I fisked yesterday.
Norm Geras has linked to a great example of chutzpah from one of the members of the UN's Commission on Human Rights - Sudan. Sudan's diplomats, it seems, are concerned that their country might be confused with a cancer-causing food dye and want the name of the dye changed to something other than Sudan. This is rather amusing since the dye has probably not killed anyone whereas in Darfur the Sudanese have killed tens of thousands. According to the BBC,
[t]he rats who showed signs of developing tumours were given a daily dose of Sudan I of around 30 milligrams/kg of bodyweight for two years.
Animals given a lower dose - 15milligrams/kg of bodyweight - showed no signs of cancer-related changes.
Scaling this up to humans and we have a dose (for the average 60+kg human) of around 2 grams of dye per day for years causing a trouble. Given that this is a dye in what is, in any case, a colouring/flavouring added to foods in small amounts (micrograms), we can see that as the BBC expert explained:
While not an exact comparison, he likened it to the cancer risk associated with smoking just one cigarette in a lifetime.
Even if a person was to eat a contaminated product every day for several years, the risk of cancer, although higher, was still likely to be very low.
Or to put it another way the number of deaths we can expect from exposure to Sudan-1 is approximately 0, but just to err on the side of caution lets say that the deathrate is 1 per 100,000. The estimated death toll in Darfur is 70,000 minimum. If Darfur were to be as harmless as Sudan 1 its population would have to be 70,000*100,000 = 7 Billion or rather more than the entire human population of this planet.
Hence from a logical perspective Sudan's government ought to be rather keen to be associated with the dye Sudan 1 since it is considerably less deadly than anything else to do with the country. Permalink
My attempt resulted in the following: 17% scored higher (more nerdy), and 83% scored lower (less nerdy). What does this mean? Your nerdiness is: High-Level Nerd. You are definitely MIT material, apply now!!!. (My comment: No - why should I go to an inferior copy of Cambridge?)
Everyoneis dicussing the wounding of the freed Italian journalist. Only from the Blogosphere do we get comments from actual soldiers who have been there and can therefore explain why deliberate targetting claim is BS.
I find Ginmar's commentary makes excellent sense in explaining why even the journalists own description makes the car look like it is a suicide bomber so go read it. Permalink
Hugh Hewitt emailed a bunch of questions to Barbara Demick - the reporter who wrote the article that I gave this fisking to - and got an emailed response. Reading most of the responses makes me wonder why she wrote the first piece the way she did. She admits for example that N Korea has kidnapped many Japanese and Koreans and lied about their whereabouts, that its regime were resonsiblefor the death of 2 million North Koreans in the 1990s famine and so on. Yet despite all of this, despite even acknowledging that the "businessman" she interviewed was:
...a government official -- or agent, as it were. He spoke in ways that other people would get imprisoned for, which means, not necessarily that he was a spook, but definitely that he is elite with some kind of tie to the top that is his source of protection.
she wrote the piece she did with hardly a murmur of criticism. Surely one would think that it would be possible to put some balance into the story, something stating that this North Korean "agent" was mouthing a party line which is contrary to the facts observed blah blah blah. But no, apparently this was not possible.
I could imagine that, if she were writing for a specialst Asian affairs journal perhaps, she could justify this omission by the fact that the readership would be aware of it, but I'm doubtful that the LA Times readership counts as being sufficiently well informed. If they are it isn't thanks to the LA Times itself, as a search on the site for N Korea illustrates. Sure there are critical articles but not many and certainly none that seem to spell out in detail the deeds of the tyrannical N Korean regime. Demick's other recent article, "N. Korea Lists Conditions for Negotiations," is a case in point as it reads as if N Korea's demands are due to American intransigence without explaining why America thinks it should be resolute - this despite her respone to Hugh's on the 1994 agreement::
Do you believe Kim Jong Il and his government breached the 1994 Agreement with the United States by secretly pursuing nuclear weapons via uranium enrichment? - technically, no, but in spirit, yes. The original agreement had several loopholes, which is why the administration now is insisting on CVID (Complete, Verifiable, Irreversible Dismantlement)
I suspect that Captain's Quarters is correct that the key is the way that Demick refuses to categorically state that Kim Jong Il is evil - just stating "One can judge from there" after listing one example of his behaviour. This is exactly the same sort of coverage we see about Darfur or about Honour Killings or Slavery in Islamic societies. Apparently it is not acceptable to call people evil in modern journalism even when they do despicable things. I'm guessing that this is for much the same reason as why the UN skipped calling Darfur "genocide", if you name something as evil then you imply that action should be taken against it. The excuse American journalists trot out is the one about balance and impartiality which is much the same line spouted by the BBC. Compare that to the healthy UK newpaper scene where journalists are happy to admit to being partial.
I have no doubt this is why many journalists don't like President Bush. Bush is willing to actually call a spade a spade and journalists hate being forced to actually repeat such direct and simple terms. This is, in my opinion, precisley the difference between Bush and Kerry and (for that matter) between Blair and Chirac. If something is bad it should be called bad not given some nuanced culturally sensitive excuse. Uncouth simple voters seem to prefer the former approach, but the intellectual elite seems to consider such directness to be a sin in itself.
Our masters in Brussels have managed to knuckle under to big bad American plutocrats by approving the concept of European Software Patents. One of the things that I consider to be most broken in the US is its intellectual property environment (patents and copyright law) and it seems that the EU can't wait to slavishly follow the US example, despite the fact that almost everyone they asked thinks that software patents are a bad thing.
To start from the most basic. The EFF has an excllent page explaining why software patents are flawed. A suitable google search links to many many other places that explain the problems and flaws in the reasoning. The basic argument is that Software Patents provide an economic incentive for companies and individuals to innovate. Given that software has not been protected (anywhere) by patent law for the majority of its half century or so of existence this argument seems to fly counter to the observed world. Of course it is possible that with patents an even larger proportion of the global economy would be devoted to software but it seems hard to claim that lack of patent protection has stopped innovation. Moreover numerous cases (such as the Cadence/Avant! one and the numerous Microsoft ones) have shown that standard contract and copyright law works well enough in ensuring that theft of intellectual property is actionable. On the other hand there is absolutely no indication that software patents would reduce the litgation risk for a small company - indeed the common habit of large companies of filing "blocking patents" would seem to imply that software patents increase the likelihood that entrpreneurial companies will face additional legal challenges from incumbents and hence an increase in the expense of bringing a product to market. As long running patent disputes such as the Rambus or Qualcomm ones show, patent infringement is an area of the law where large pockets help and where judgements frequently seem to be contradictory. By increasing litigation risk and requiring greater legal expenditure software patents does not seem to be a good way to increase innovation although it does seem to be a good way to assure an increase in the employment in the professions that are parasitic to innovation such as the patent bureaucracy and the legal profession.
In addition to the evidence that the basic principle is flawed, the campaign to introduce software patents in Europe has demonstrated flaws in the European legislative process. As the EU Referendum blog, Cnet, the Register and the Inquirer have all reported, numerous nations and MEPs have rejected this proposal numerous times yet it keeps on coming back from the dead and passing through another legal hurdle. This legislation is in fact one of the few pieces that unites libertarian Eurosceptics, such as myself, with the rampant leftwing Europhiles such as those whom I blogged about a couple of days ago. This really is a piece of legislation for the "patrons" and Eurocrats, not for the man in the street and certainly not for the Entrepreneur who would like to make his fortune and thus provide tax revenue to the government and employment to his fellow Europeans. Even if you feel that software patents are a good idea the way they have been legislated in Europe is worrying. The safeguards and the "consultative process" that are touted in the proposed EU constitution have failed to prevent this law from coming into effect or even, as far as I can tell, from being modified to fix its more egregious failings. thus demonstrating that democracy does not exist in Europe.
Of course this is not the only bit of industrial regulation that Brussels inflicts on us - from the CAP and CFP to REACH and the wonderful environmental laws such as the Landfill directive Brussels persists in adding red tape and legislation to industries that were working just fine before. As (lack of) progress report on the Lisbon agenda showed and as the continuing high unemployment rates in red-tape rich France and Germany demonstrate the EU is not friendly towards entrepreneurs. If the EU were serious about trying to compete with America it would not be passing laws about software patents but rather would be seeking to reduce the red tape on the "knowledge economy". As Ireland has demonstrated it is not diffulcut to get a vibrant IT/software component to an economy, you just cut taxes and regulations and entrepreneurs and foreign companies show up in droves, however that is far too laissez-faire for the EU.
Finally one excellent resource for the EU Software Patent subject is the FFII site, it should be required reading for all.
He contends that software patents are needed to ensure that the EU can keep to the goals set by the "Lisbon Agenda"--that the EU will become the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-driven economy by 2010.
"While the repercussions of today's action are not yet clear, the role of strong (intellectual property) as an engine of European growth as part of the Lisbon Agenda is beyond question," Lueders said. "Last May's political agreement in the (European) Council roundly delivers on the agenda's goals, he added.
I am willing to bow to the expertise of real economists but I don't think there are many examples of growth in an existing industry being increased by adding lawyers and bureaucrats. Permalink
Out of boredom/curiousity I googled my name to see what would appear. One of the things that did appear was my write-up in the 1991 Cambridge Underground journal of my trip to Eastern Europe the previous year (1990). Also appearing was my editorship of the previous 1990 journal and my feeble attmept at humour at the end. The Eastern Europe trip has been something that I have thought about a lot over the last couple of years as we look at the democratization of Iraq and, with luck, the rest of the Middle East, not to mention Ukraine, so I'm glad to reread my account again.
Much of the account is about caves and cavers and thus not likely to interest most of the readers of this blog, but the section about Bucharest could - I expect - be reused by visitors to Baghdad if the names were changed.
Bucharest was full of bullet scars and nasty buildings; I got a guided tour by Mihai, my host, who tended to say things like: "And here was where I stood when Ceaucescu made his last speech" (it was about 300 metres away from Ceaucescu) or "This was the police station the miners took me to and nearly beat me up in". He also had some photos which he had taken on the days of the revolution, which were the sort that made you glad to have been somewhere safe. While Romania is certainly not a democrat's paradise now, the improvement since the overthrow of Ceaucescu is enormous. The only problem is that the government seems to think that not being oppressive unless you speak out against it is what is meant by democracy and sadly many of the people are so relieved to be shot of the blatant oppression of Ceaucescu that they don't complain enough, yet, about the limited freedom and justice they are being offered now. But all is not so dim, Bucharest has a lot of political graffiti, most of which claims that the current government is almost the same as the old one and a number of newspapers which print more and more depressing tales of Securitate chiefs making huge profits now that they are officially allowed to.
Ceaucescu really did wreck Bucharest. His palace of culture, which was never finished, is absolutely enormous and a classic example of the Architectural style known as Totalitarian Giganticism as are the boulevards leading up to it.
How does the idea of a border involving parts of one country enclosing parts of another and being in turn surrounded by the other country sound? Well it seems that part of the Dutch-Belgian border does exactly this and has done so for 800 years or so, well before either country existed as a separate entity.
This border was established as part of the Treaty of Maastricht in 1843 (see below). In the area round Baarle (marked B in the above) it proved impossible to come to a definitive agreement. In place of a fixed border (between border posts 214 and 215) each of 5732 parcels of land had their nationality laid down separately. A portion of these parcels form together the space of 20 Belgian exclaves (today's Baarle-Hertog) lying spread around within the territory of the Dutch Baarle-Nassau and separated by 5 kilometers from the Belgian motherland:
The orange portions are part of the national territory of the Netherlands. The green portions, which constitute what we might think of as an inland archipelago, are part of Belgium.
Orange portions within green portions represent exclaves of the Netherlands completely surrounded by Belgian territory which are in turn completely surrounded by the territory of the Netherlands
Just one of those weird things you stumble upon on the internet Permalink
The National Revew Online has a column discussing Bush's recent speech at the National Defense University. As the NRO says this is a speech about the evils of stability where what is stabilizied is injustice and oppression. The money quote is:
By now it should be clear that decades of excusing and accommodating tyranny, in the pursuit of stability, have only led to injustice and instability and tragedy. It should be clear that the advance of democracy leads to peace, because governments that respect the rights of their people also respect the rights of their neighbors. It should be clear that the best antidote to radicalism and terror is the tolerance and hope kindled in free societies. And our duty is now clear: For the sake of our long-term security, all free nations must stand with the forces of democracy and justice that have begun to transform the Middle East.
For decades, free nations tolerated oppression in the Middle East for the sake of stability. In practice, this approach brought little stability, and much oppression. So I have changed this policy. In the short-term, we will work with every government in the Middle East dedicated to destroying the terrorist networks. In the longer-term, we will expect a higher standard of reform and democracy from our friends in the region. (Applause.) Democracy and reform will make those nations stronger and more stable, and make the world more secure by undermining terrorism at it source. Democratic institutions in the Middle East will not grow overnight; in America, they grew over generations. Yet the nations of the Middle East will find, as we have found, the only path to true progress is the path of freedom and justice and democracy. (Applause.)
America is pursuing our forward strategy for freedom in the broader Middle East in many ways. Voices in that region are increasingly demanding reform and democratic change. So we are working with courageous leaders like President Karzai of Afghanistan, who is ushering in a new era of freedom for the Afghan people. We're taking aside reformers, and we're standing for human rights and political freedom, often at great personal risk. We're encouraging economic opportunity and the rule of law and government reform and the expansion of liberty throughout the region.
It is this clarity of purpose that is what I like about Bush, along with his willingness to turn words into deeds. When I look at the leaders of the UN or the EU - for example - I see a lot of talk but very little action. Although not about global affairs the EU's "Lisbon Agreement" is a classic example, everyone gets together to have a big discussion about how to increase EU growth, technical leadership etc. and promises some wonderful goal in 10 years. However despite all the PR and spin, no one actually goes and implements any policies likely to induce the required growth and technical leadership. The UN's inaction in much of Africa is the same - lots of pious words in meetngs in comfortable hotels and no concrete actions on the ground.
Of course the Anti-war morons are worse still - these are the sorts of people who excuse every tyrant with "at least he made the trains run on time" or "he kept the crime rate down". Stability is not always good, short term pain and instability can lead to a far better long term - I think back to the Romanians I met in 1990 for example. I note that very few of these people seem to have ever visited a dictatorship, or if they have all they have seen are the touristy bits. Anyone who honestly claims to care about human rights should be against all forms of despotic rule and seeking their overthrow. What I think these people most hate about Bush is the way that he shows them up for being the apologists they are. On that note I think NormGeras' series of articles about them is a must read (Norm is a marxist professor in case you didn't know but one highly unlikely to agree with Ward Churchill).
The only valid argument I can think about with regard to Bush is that he is picking the worng countries. Now I disagree with that but I think it is plausuble to suggest that Bush ought to be concentrating on Africa or perhaps lancing the boil in Saudi Arabia or North Korea. It is also reasonable to say that Bush should be less tolerant of abuses by "allies" such as the Central Asia Republics, although of course that is where one sentence from the Air Force Academy speech kicks in - "In the longer-term, we will expect a higher standard of reform and democracy from our friends in the region." Bush is saying that he's going after the declared enemies first and those that assist have a grace period to get their act together. History implies that most of these sort of allies will fail to take this opportunity although the events in Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan etc. show that reform may occur in other places too. Certainly, Bush gives far less support to tyrannical allies than he does to democratic ones. Permalink
The Israeli Army (IDF) automatically classifies any recruit who admits to being a D&D player with a low security clearance because it believes they are detatched from reallity, have "weak personality elements" and are - to be blunt - credulous fools. Ynet reports:
Army frowns on Dungeons and Dragons
IDF says players are detached from reality and automatically given a low security clearance
By Hanan Greenberg
Does the Israel Defense Forces believe incoming recruits and soldiers who play Dungeons and Dragons are unfit for elite units? Ynet has learned that 18-year-olds who tell recruiters they play the popular fantasy game are automatically given low security clearance.
“They're detached from reality and suscepitble to influence,” the army says.
Now I've met some pretty weird D&D players but I am also aware of some remarkably smart tacticians who play too. This seems like a rather sweeping generalization. But I guess it could be good to know if you want to have a low risk role in the IDF. Permalink
In many parts of the world the local municipality is repsonsible for many public services such as water, roads, busses and the like. Logically therefore it would seem reasonable for the same local authority to provide broadband internet access as well. Of course, as a supporter of small government I would normally be strongly opposed to such actions, and indeed in many ways I am, but on the other hand I do not believe it is appropriate to pass laws that explicitly forbid municipalities from providing this service.
In America a number of cities such as Philadelphia and Chicago are trying to deploy broadband wifi services themselves rather than let a telco do it instead. The telcos are rather upset and are working at the state level to get laws passed forbidding this. Prof Lawrence Lessig has the details:
You'll be pleased to know that communism was defeated in Pennsylvania last year. Governor Ed Rendell signed into law a bill prohibiting the Reds in local government from offering free Wi-Fi throughout their municipalities. The action came after Philadelphia, where more than 50 percent of neighborhoods don't have access to broadband, embarked on a $10 million wireless Internet project. City leaders had stepped in where the free market had failed. Of course, it's a slippery slope from free Internet access to Karl Marx. So Rendell, the telecom industry's latest toady, even while exempting the City of Brotherly Love, acted to spare Pennsylvania from this grave threat to its economic freedom.
The specific problem here is that, as one of the letters in the Philadephia register link pointed at above explains, it seems like the local politicians are less than competant - hence the law that Lessig argues against, by specifically grandfathering in the Philadelphia project, in fact ends up permitting a city who seem unable to organize a pissup in a brewery to deploy broadband while forbidding anyone else to do so.
The problem I have with Lessig's argument is that a municipality provided service is likely to be less efficient than a private enterprise and, perhaps more importantly, is highly likely to skew things so that (for example) user security is weak and available bandwidth low but yet neither will be so bad that it is worth a competitor setting up a reasonable premium service. Of course it is also highly likely that the service will be better in some neighbourhoods in town than others - I recall Chicago friends of mine telling me that republican wards only got snowplowed after the democratic ones were clear - and one suspects that a similar maintenance attitude will apply to this service too. Now I'm not saying that all public services are badly run - the commune where I live in France is very definitely an honourable exception, but the surrounding municipalities do show that in that municpal authorities in France are as corrupt and self-serving as those anywhere else. The problem is that the elected officials do not as a general rule get paid to run services efficiently - indeed they have a fairly strong incentive to pad them out so as to employ supporters - which means that, except in rare cases, municipal services are low quality and expensive. We really don't need internet access to descend to this level.
On the other hand boradband access is, in many ways, one of those things that is a classic natural monopoly at least at the basic fiber/copper layer. Towns don't have two sets of water pipes running down the street, or two sets of electricity and so on and boradband is not much different in that having two providers covering the same ground results in a wasteful duplication of effort for little benefit. While local municalities are frequently inefficient and sloppy, large monopolies are frequently just as bad at providing a service when there is no competition. The great thing about broadband at present is that in many places there are two alternatives, cable and DSL, and as a result it is possible for subscribers to switch. Unfortunately in the poorer sorts of areas that are the target of the city plans, it is frequently the case than neither the phone company nor the cable operator is willing to provide affordable broadband because the required investment to upgrade exisiting infrastructure is unlikely to be repaid by the handful of people paying $9.99/month for internet access.
To sum up: we have a natural monopoly service that is fairly attractive to potential providers and which could be provided by a municipality just as well as by a private body so we have a bunch of lobbyists for telcos getting politicians to pass laws to stop other politicians from setting up a service that will probably be highly inefficient but will compete with the telcos. I'm sure there is a moral in this somewhere but I don't really know where. Permalink
BATES TOWNSHIP, Mich. (AP) - A man cooking in his kitchen was shot after one of his cats knocked his 9mm handgun onto the floor, discharging the weapon, Michigan State Police said.
Joseph Stanton, 29, of Bates Township in Iron County, was shot in his lower torso around 6 p.m. Tuesday, the state police post in Iron River reported. He was transported to Iron County Community Hospital.
...
State police said he was cooking at his stove when the cat knocked the loaded gun off the kitchen counter behind him.
The moral to this story is feed your cat BEFORE you cook your own food. Permalink
Another "Olive Tree and Mimosa" image this week - see last week. This one was taken last weekend in an area full of wild Mimosas and semi wild olive trees near where I live (as always click on the photo to see it enlarged) I've also been putting a number of Mimosa photos from the same area up on my fotolog Permalink
Tim Worstall has a whole category devoted to the quirks of the English or, as he describes it:
[an]occasional series showing that the English really are different [and] that PG Wodehouse was a documentarist
RH Greenfield, former correspondent at the Torygraph, would seem to be a perfect example of the breed and someone who would fit right into any Wodehouse novel. As the obitury describes:
Greenfield was born in India, the son of Sir Harry Greenfield, of the Indian Civil Service. He was educated at the Dragon School, Oxford, at Rugby School, and Pembroke College, Oxford, where he read Law. He did his national service in Malaya.
He joined The Sunday Telegraph in 1965 and soon became the defence correspondent. He was a genial man with a bushy beard and had a tweedy, shambolic air. He could never bring himself to open his post and the Ministry of Defence press releases piled up on his desk to form a barricade.
Once Sebastian Faulks, one of his colleagues at the time, pulled an envelope from near the bottom of the heap, opened it and said: "Ah Harry, I see Mafeking has been relieved."
He had two Jack Russell terriers, named Chindit and Sherpa. After the death of Sherpa, he often brought Chindit to the office where he would sit on Greenfield's lap as he worked. If anybody approached, Chindit would go for them. Chindit never had his owner's impeccable good manners and had Greenfield banned from most of the pubs in Clapham, south London.
...
After his departure from the newspaper, Greenfield became involved in paganism and his former colleagues heard tales of him dancing naked at stone circles. He was 65 before he had his first tattoos and he told a friend that the thing that most embarrassed him about his past was that he had worn a tie-pin.
Standard English chappie with a standard education shows endearing quirks before being banned from all the puns in Clapham and then becoming a pagan "third degree high priest" - really you cannot make these things up.
Tim Worstall has his latest Britblog roundup available which includes a post from this blog. Go read them all but especially read the Fiskistan post by Pootergeek.
The EU is, as everyone knows, a byword for probity, accountability and efficiency, thus it is rather unfortunate that if you do a google search on "banana republic" the EU only makes number 3 on the list. After all this is only fair - everyone knows that the "Bent Bannana" story is exaggerated and that the banana wars with the US are the EU standing up for the little guy. And surely the problems concerning the auditability (or not) of the EU finances is surely no reason to call the whole enterprise a banana republic so of course it would be deeply hurtful for nasty Eurosceptics to try and googlebomb this phrase.
There has been lots of rumbing on about the lack of lady political bloggers and the like. Of course as a minuscule blogger myself I can't exactly help drive traffic to anyone but as you note in the blogroll on the right I don't have much trouble finding lady bloggers to read and most of them are somewhat political. If there was one that I thought was missing from both Michelle Malkin's quick list and the longer list at Iddybud it would be Ginmar, who writes a boatload of stuff that I disagree with, but which makes me think, as well as other stuff which I do agree with or which is just ROLFMAO funny.
Anyway, another lady on my blogroll points out, possibly sarcastically, the attention paid to the protest babes in Beirut ladies in Lebanon. I agree it is almost certainly sexist etc. etc. but I think that it is actually a legitimate angle in the coverage. As one of the commenters points out most Arab protests involve tough men in balaclavas with big menacing penis-substitutes, and in most cases even if women are allowed to wear revealing costumes, the ones at the protests aren't. A protest full of menacing men with machine guns is very different from one with laughing ladies and the difference is bound to resonate throughout the region. That is not the only difference between the Beirut protests and other ones, as Claudia Rosset notes, writing in the NY Sun today and on Hugh Hewitt's radio show, the attendees
... lingered after the protests ended. They lingered for hours, unlike the Hezbollah protests, which as soon as the main event is done, people are gone with speed. They just disperse. This one people were sitting around the curbs talking, they were eating dinner, they were listening to more speeches...
What with the clearly self-organized nature of the protests and their composition I think the tyrants, particularly the mad Mullahs in Tehran, are going to be nervous. After all they have a youth population that yearns to be allowed to wear precisely the clothes the Lebanese are wearing.
Finally, another justification to the protest girl coverage angle, according to Wizbang pretty girl protest movements are destined for success because
they are more likely to woo a large number of male supporters, hoping to impress said pretty girls.
Timothy Garton Ash that is. Tim has a semi-reasonable column in the Grauniad today about the EU, Europe and all that. He nails the challenge in the sub header - "Our challenge to the anti-Europeans is: where's your story of the future?" and at the end:
Yesterday, I was answering questions from Polish Eurosceptics which could have come straight from the UK Independence party. These opponents of the EU are as much Europeans as we pro-EU Europeans are. In fact, in their very nationalism they are more characteristically old-European than they know. The difference is this: we new, sceptically pro-EU Europeans have a great story to tell - a story that is about the past but also about the future. Our challenge to these old, doggedly anti-EU Europeans is: we hear your story about the past, but where's your story about the future?
I am quite willing to meet that challenge, and will answer it lower down, but first I think I should like to point that Tim is guilty of both confusing Anti-Europe with Anti-EU and of doing the classic "post hoc ergo propter hoc" thing which he claims, or at least his comrades at the Grauniad do, is what the American Neocons do with regard to all the democratic revolutions breaking out all over the place.
To go for the second complaint first. Tim claims that the EU is a force for democracy within Europe giving the EU credit for everything from the end of Franco-ist Spain to the flourishing new Central and Eastern European democracies. I'm sorry to say that I simply cannot see how the EU caused the overthrow of Iberian fascism or Eastern European communism.
As for the first point, I am generally speaking anti-EU, I am not in any way anti-Europe. It would be hypocritcal indeed for me to be anti-Europe seeing as I live on the Côte d'Azur despite being a subject of Her Majesty. Indeed I'm not, as I believe I have said before, against the concept of the EU as a body, or even as potentially a federal superstate, in theory. But that theory would require it starting from a very different foundation to the one we see today. I am strongly against the bureaucratic, statist idiocy which is the EU as currently implemented and even more against the proposed EU constitution which seeks to define and micromanage the actual policy for the EU in all sorts of areas which should have nothing to do with a constitution such as defining as one of the EU's objectives "a highly competitive social market economy", whatever that means.
So, having defined what I'm against more or less, what am I for? I'm for a pan-European body, such as the EU, enforcing free trade and freedom of movement and that is about it. I think Europe needs to be treated as a single market for goods and for services, including jobs. I don't see the need for much else. As part of the the requirements for free trade I see a need for uniform patent, trademark and copyright laws with automatic pan-European applicability and as part of the requirements for free movement I see a need to have mutual recognition of educational and professional standards but I can't see the need for much else.
I'm for a CAP (and CFP) that involves a free market as well but otherwise I want them abolished. Subsidies are silly, stop paying them. If there is a market for the food then people will grow it. If not why pay for it? If individual nations wish to pay people to make the land look nice then that is entirely up to the nation in question, in much the same way that individual municipalities pay people to take the runbish away, pick up litter etc. Likewise I'm against the industrial regulation emanating from Brussels - to be honest I'm against said regulation no matter whence it emanates, but the EU ones seem to have less common sense and a worse cost/benefit ratio than most. I'm totally aganst the idea of a common European defense or foreign policy. I simply can't see the point and so on with most of the other initiatives that the EU proposes.
To put it simply I'd like to see a Europe with less red-tape, fewer politicians and and far fewer bureaucrats. Probably the simplest way to achieve all of these goals is to remove the EU root and branch and then replace it with the minimal agency required to oversee the free movement of people and goods. This means no "grand projects" but it would almost certainly do more for European economic growth than any current plan produced by the EU. After all during most of the 19th century precisely as Europe turned itself from a primarily agrarian economy to an industrial one this was pretty much the rule and during this period the average wealth and quality of life increased enormously.
My story for the future is economic growth spurred by open markets and competition. I'd like to see a Europe where people are richer than anywhere else in the world and I can't see a better way to do that than remove as many of the overheads as possible. Isn't that a great story?
It's that time of the week again. Recently I've been trawling through the archives for my Fotolog and in the process I found this picture taken from St Paul de Vence, looking in a generally Vencewards direction on 1 Jan 2003. As always you can click on the image to see it enlarged and also look at last week's image. Permalink
I've had trouble working up any feelings other than "its a horrible mess about which I am not qualified to comment" about the Terri Schiavo affair. I'm not going to get drawn into the rights and wrongs now - I suspect that what we are seeing is the usual media/partisan political attempt to paint in black and white what is actually best coloured in various shades of gray.
However one post linked to by Majikthise (excellent likagery about the whole business in multiple posts) really got me becuase it seemed to sum up the cluelessness of the "let her die" crowd:
On March 21, 2005 12:44 am, the extremists in charge of the US Government showed the world that when they don't like a law or a legally valid court decision - ANY law, ANY court decision, for ANY reason, no matter how carefully adjudicated - they are prepared to rip it up. There is a word for this.
The word is fascism.
Excuse me? Fascism is not a bunch of politicians following a (fairly complicated) set of procedures to pass emergency legislation that alows a judge to start doing something some time the following day. You can, arguably, call it over-reaction and you can criticise it in numerous ways but comparing it to fascism shows your own ignorance and, possibly, the fact that your side has no good argument. If the USA were a fascist state then the stormtroopers would be menacing Terri's doctors at gunpoint to make them keep feeding her and a separate group of stormtroopers would have paid a visit to the Florida state judge who is causing all the trouble and either killed him or convinced him by means of torture to be a lot more reasonable about the whole thing. In fact given that it was Fascist Germany that produced the T-4 Euthanasia program, it seems to me that there is a far stronger argument that says that it is the "let her die" crowd who are the heirs of Fascism.
Now one question that has crossed my mind about Mrs Schiavo is "who is paying for it?" Originally thought crossed m my mind for the point that I thought that the people who wished to keep her alive should at least offer to pay her medical expenses, something that I still think has merit in that I would have thought that since US healthcare is a business someone must be being billed a lot of cash to keep her alive and one might have thought that the money could perhaps be better spent elsewhere. However in the light of the comment above the question now becomes more interesting. Apparently she is being kept alive by the Federal Medicare system, a system which is authorized, budgeted etc by the Federal Congress so arguably the politicians should have some say in the proceedings. Of course the problem is that members of Congress don't actually shell out for Medicare themselves and do seem to be remarkably good at spending other people's money so the chances of any Congresscritter actually daring to try and look at this from a cost/benefit perspective seems rather low (or indeed any other perspective that what will keep them elected).
I'm not always impressed with the European willingness to let other people die - Dutch babies, French pensioners... - but I do think that sometimes the desire to prolong every life no matter what the cost is also wrong. There needs to be a clear, transparent and open process that decides when the life support should be removed and about what happens afterwards. Personally I find the idea of just stopping food and water to be a horrible get-out. If you think the person in question is better off dead then have the cojones to administer a quick-acting poison. If you can't quite grit yourself to do that then you need to keep said person alive. Just removing life-support and waiting is a coward's solution that only appeals to people who are unwilling to take the responsibility. Permalink
Yesterday's post generated lots of comments. Good. It also caused me to think more and read more. One link I found at JustOneMinute was to a LeanLeft post that discussed the Texas "medical futility" laws and their applicability (or not) to the Schiavo case as regards the possibly hypocrisy of the republican pols (this being extra special hypocrisy above and beyond my cynical thought that since they are politicians thay are ipso facto hypocrites).
Ignoring the hypocrisy argument the article discusses the procedure by which a Texan hospital may decide to remove life-support from hopeless cases. Various religious right-wingers (e.g. Hugh Hewitt) seem to think that, to misquote Monty Python, "Every almost-life is sacred". This is stupid and, as the Lean Left article notes, even the National Right to Life group cooperated in drafting the Texas law. In general I do not think the courts should get involved and I certainly think the politicians should not get involved in specific cases, although I do think they should get invlved in setting up the framework for defining when and how treatment should be discontinued.
Indeed it seems to me that a part of the problem here is that the US has a total mess of state provisions with little or no federal standards. What the US Congress should be doing is drafting explicit federal standards for determining when and how treatment should be discontinued. What they actually did was shove the whole mess on to the shoulders of a federal judge, which is about as cowardly as the original remove the tube and let her starve decision was. What they should be doing is defining a series of tests that can be used to determine whether a person is worth keeping alive or not (brain scans, reponses to stimuli, amount of medical intervention required to keep them going etc.) and the number of independant physicians etc. that need to be consulted to determine that said tests have proven negative. Holly Lisle's Sympathy for the Devil has a description of how "excessive heroics" fail to help anyone and just result in throwing good money after bad.It isn't clear to me whether Mrs Schiavo is in the same situation yet but she is clearly close to it and there should be a transparent and consistent set of actions to be followed to determine whether or not she is worth keeping "alive" as well as, IMO, a clear requriement that if she fails to meet that threshold then she should be given a swift and painless death.
However, all this is based on the (obvious?) assumption that no one is willing to stump up the cash to keep medical treatment going. It seems clear to me that if some group or individual is willing to keep on paying then they should be permitted to do so, thus what I also don't understand is why, if Mrs Schiavo's family have offered to pay her medical expenses from this point on as I understand to be the case, they have not been allowed to actually do so. I understand her husband wants some sort of closure, but given that his in-laws want her alive and he wants to move on I don't understand why he should not be permitted to
divorce her
had over guardianship to his in-laws
get on with his new life
His willingness to do this would I think be a good indication of whether or not it is, in fact, about money. And their willingness to accept responsibility and payments would be a good indication of their actual beliefs too. However the Florida judge seems to have ruled that these steps may not occur which, if true, is bizarre.
As I noted in the previous post specifically about the Schiavo case, yesterday's post generated lots of comments. One in particular was from the original gentleman who described the situation as fascism. The comment starts off
That's right, I'm with the "let her die" crowd.
Tell me, if we discuss abortion and you're against it, can I call you "pro-coathanger?"
Firstly I don't see where the abortion bit comes in so maybe I am stupid. For the record I like the Clinton view - "Abortion should be safe, legal and rare" and with a slight modification I believe the same applies to this case "Euthanasia should be painless, legal and rare" - hence much of the previous post. I also mostly agree with this post at God Save the Queen that putting limits on abortion is not necessarily the first step down the slippery slope towards theocratic tyranny. Abortion of a viable fetus (i.e. late term abortion) is murder and should be prosecuted as such. On the other hand morning after pills should be available for free (or nearly so) and early (sub three months say) abortions should be available without many questions asked.
Anyway back to the Fascism issue.
I'm not defend myself against your silly charge of ignorance. You can start to read about fascism here. But that's only a start, my friend. As many have discussed (eg Dave Neiwert, do your own googling), American fascism will take its own form. Fascism hardly requires stormtroopers.
Bush and his cronies have succeeded in their goal to undermine the courts.They proved last night that they now can reverse any court decision they disagree with. There are no checks or balances to their control over the judiciary. The extremists already fully control the executive and the legislature and are busy gerrymandering the districts to ensure far right dominance long into the future.
That is fascism.
No it is not. The whole point of the legislature is to pass laws and for the executive to implement them. The job of the judiciary is to defend the constitution against laws that infringe it and see that laws passed by the legislature that do not infringe the constitution are obeyed. If the law, as interpreted by the courts, is not doing what the legislature thinks it should then it is entitled to pass a new law that is better worded and which supercedes the previous one. This is precisely what happened during the 1930s and 1960s when the democrats passed laws that explicitly defined civil rights and so on and what (notably) certain dinosaurs attempted to fillibuster. That the shoe is now on the other foot is not of itself a cause for alarm, merely an indication that voters prefer the Republican vision these days. When it comes to the courts I believe that the Republicans are right to try and move law-making back to the legislature. The job of the courts is clearly defined in the constitution as the enforcer of laws not their creator and it is generally speaking a bad thing for the judiciary, which is generally speaking unelected, to be able to make laws.
[Sidenote: One of the things I admire about America is the clear separation of powers that the constitution enshrines and the clear way that it defines a framework that may be used to support a wide variety of policies that are produced as the elected representatives of the people decide is necessary. One of the reasons why I am against the EU constitution (and the EU as it currently exists) is that it is full of creative ambiguity which may then be interpreted by the Comission or the EU courts in ways that are unacceptable, another is that, unlike the US document, it actually describes certain policies rather than the framework to which policies must be fitted thus limiting future generations from certain policy choices. This, as the recent Euro stability pact row shows, allows governments and EU bodies to flagrantly ignore laws they don't like and then retroactively rewrite the laws to accomodate their misbehaviour.]
The fact that the Republicans have control of both the executive and both legislative houses should be a warning to both sides but it is not fascism, nor does that fact that as a result policy is moving rightwards mean that it will always be so. Vodkapundit links, approvingly, to an EJ Dionne article about the dangers of hubris and tend to I agree. Having seen personally the way that Californians Democrats screwed things up after Pete Wilson managed to destroy his own Republican party within the state I agree that the Republicans are liable to a similar backlash if they go too far. However I do not think that the Republicans are there yet. For example the fillibuster is a piece of tradition that I think is utterly stupid and that the US would do well to see it removed. Likewise the redistricting proposed in Texas and in California looks to me more like fixing previous Gerrymandering than adding its own; the Texas site is (FYI) here with the congressional districts shown here - the only obvious bizarreness is district 13/19 although the county borders in the major urban areas seem somewhat odd - and my understanding is that Schwarzenegger is going for a simlar reform in California. In other words so far the Republicans have completely failed to go for the sweeping revolution that converts the US from a democracy to a fascist dictatorship.
There are a bunch of things that I disagree with the Republicans on (Abortion, Censorship/Decency, homosexual marriage, government spending amongst others), but I do believe they are, at the moment, doing roughly what the majority wants and thus meeting the requirements of democratic government. More importantly they are not rewriting the constitution or doing anything that guarantees they stay in power when they have less than 50% of the vote. If they were then (to pick an obvious example) Washington State would now be governed by a Republican.
Update:La Shawn Barber points out with more details (i.e. linking to Article 3 of the US constitution) to show that the Republicans in Congress followed precisely the requirements of the US constitution in their Schiavo actions - this is precisely why I find it hard to call them Fascist Update2:Ann Althouse, however, makes a learned argument that the Congressional act is bad law but one which is constitutionally correct whereas Majikthise has explicit details on what she sees as some iffy constitutional bits. I can't say I know enough US law to judge, but I do think that either way it proves my point which is that the Republicans aren't fascist - as does the way that the Federal judge is backing up his Florida state colleague Permalink
The president of the French Republic is not having a good tinme of it recently. Firstly his desire to flog arms to his pals in Beijing is not going down well with the rest of the EU, who seem to think that China's complete lack of remorse for the Tianenmen square massacre and its increasingly bellicose statements against Taiwan somehow indicate that China should not be the recipient of advanced European weaponry.
"Politically there are problems and these problems have actually got more difficult rather than less difficult, not least because there hasn't been much movement by China in respect of human rights," Jack Straw told Britain's ITV network.
"And for their own reasons they decided to pass this new law authorizing the use of force in the event of Taiwan seceding," he said. "So it's created quite a difficult political environment."
Indeed...
Of course l'Escroc may get his way here because people are more likely to be worried about the dismemberment of the Euro Stability and Growth Pact which is now apparently optional if your country's name begins with F or G. Almost certainly this is going to annoy the ECB and thus it will raise interest rates (or at the very least not cut them soon) which will encourage France & Germany to do even more deficit spending and breach the pact even more. On the other hand it undoubtledly makes the Greeks and Italians very happy because their complete and utter fabrication of statistics that showed them to be compliant with the Euro Stability and Growth pact have been lost in the general mayhem. Short term this might look like a win for l'Escroc and his German pal but this continual disdain for other EU members is likely to come back and bite M l'Escroc at some point in the future. Given the complaints by variousEastern Europeans recently and the upcoming UK elections, not to mention the way that the Dutch are peeved at the Stabaility and Growth thing, one suspects that this revolt could come sooner rather than later.
The place where the revolt seems likely to occur is over the EU's attempts to increase growth through competition. In particular the plans to liberalise the EU Services Sector seem destined to infuriate l'Escroc if they are implemented because they will make only too clear just how uncompetitive the French services sector is. However given that, as noted above, France and Germany have just annoyed everyone else, it seems likely that this proposal will go through with most of its provisions intact.
Domestically the French unions and other lefties, who have only a tenuous grasp of reality, mathematics and economics, look likely to use this expected defeat with regard to services as ammunition against the EU Constitution.
[A] second public opinion survey, in Le Figaro, confirmed the results of a poll that sent shock waves through Paris on Friday when it showed a collapse in support for the draft constitution.
In both polls, a narrow majority of French voters said they would vote No.
Much of that collapse is tied to an increasingly surreal debate in France about an obscure piece of EU legislation, which proposes slashing the bureaucracy required by language teachers, architects or other "service providers" if they move from one EU country to another.
The "services directive" has become a symbol of French fears that Europe is under the control of an "Anglo-Saxon" cabal, determined to impose Thatcherite employment laws across the EU, and destroy the cosy French system of lavish benefits and worker protections.
President Jacques Chirac, as leader of the Yes camp, has said he believes the directive is "unacceptable", and told Mr Barroso to "silence" members of his commission pushing for economic liberalisation.
Ah yes - another example of people missing "a good opportunity to remain silent" as l'Escroc famously described those Eastern Europeans who dared to suggest that they thought that tyranny was a bad thing and that Iraq should be liberated. This is really rather a pattern for M l'Escroc, other people do persist in saying things that show how much of a hypocrite he is and how hollow his policies are. Although I note that the Yes campaign in France hasn't really got going the Non campaign, as I noted earlier this month, is already putting up posters that link Chirac to the EU Constitution and to the evil, fat-cat bosses and their wicked capitalistic desires to grind the faces of the poor. Since I wrote that post I have seen a lot more NON posters stuck up all over the place and not a single rebuttal. I cannot of course claim this is nationwide, nor can I say that this is going to have an effect on 29 May, but it does tie in nicely to those opinion polls that do show that Nationwide people don't like the constitution.
Finally, just when you thought things couldn't get worse for M l'Escroc a number of his cronies are facing a court case that claims that they took all sorts of bribes and kickbacks. Indeed as Richard North writes:
The case involves Chirac's RPR (Rally for the Republic - now UMP) party, whose officials were alleged to be siphoning off millions of pounds in bribes from construction companies in exchange for contracts worth £2.8bn to build and maintain secondary schools in the Paris area. Altogether, £60m in bribes between 1989 and 1996 - the year after Mr Chirac's 18-year tenure at city hall ended – is estimated to have been paid out
Four former RPR ministers, including Guy Drut - the 1976 Olympic 110m hurdles gold-medallist - 24 company bosses and several high-ranking party officials are among the accused. Civil servants, businessmen and public works executives are also accused of benefiting from the scam, dubbed the "lyceé dossier". Most have admitted that they knew of the scam, and if convicted of a range of corruption offences they could face up to ten years in jail.
Chirac, often known as l'escroc, remains immune from prosecution, or even questioning, for as long as he remains president. And, despite statements by investigating judges in the case that they had "strong and concordant evidence" that he was at the very least aware of the scheme, he has consistently dismissed any suggestion of his being implicated as malicious and unfounded nonsense.
But his credibility is not helped when Michel Roussin, Chirac's chief of staff for more than a decade - both while the president was mayor of Paris and prime minister – is accused of "complicity in and receipt of the proceeds of corruption".
While l'Escroc may not claim to be emperor, he does seem to show many of the traits of previous imperial rulers such as being above the law and being unwilling to tolerate criticism. Wasn't there something about the Ides of March being bad for those with imperial ambitions? and will the French population decide that he is lacking in clothing?
Update:EURSOC has some good discussion of the Barroso-Chirac spat and other problems for l'Escroc Permalink
My friend Moon draws attention to CNN's odd choice of news suggesting that just possibly there might be more important events in the world than those covered by CNN. A couple of hours after he makes his comment this is the key section of the CNN homepage: And here, for contrast, is the Yahoo News page at approximately the same time:
While Yahoo also leads with the Schaivo story it has lots and lots of other news items in easy clicking distance including (shock horror) some news about places OUTSIDE THE USA.
Then there is Google news Again the Schiavo story is top - because there are 4000+ stories on it, but on the other hand the Minnesota shooting gets almost equal billing and again we see that a non US story is prominently displayed as is the story about the Florida paedophile.
Just to add to the mix - at the time of writing ABC news has Schiavo ahead of anything else with the Michael Jackson and Robert Blake also getting top billing. CBS news gets the Minnesota shooting ahead of schiavo but it is otherwise full of non news stories sich as "Tabloid Atones For Jackpot Booboo" and "Caught On Tape: Runaway Truck", however NBC does better with the Minnesota killing ahead and plenty of international stories clearly listed. Fox News, gives the two stories roughly equal space and prominence (like google) and also has a selection of other domestic and international stories readily available.
But it is perhaps relevant to compare and contrast - I can't be bothered to cut and paste either BBC's UK front page or its international one but I note that in the domestic one it has plenty of international stories and in the international one it has the school shooting ahead of the Schiavo case and also has lots of other stories that don't seem to appeatr on any of the main US TV news networks.When people in the Media claim that Americans are uneducated about places outside the US and that they are excessively sentimental blah blah blah then perhaps they should take a look in the mirror.
The EU's Common Agriculture Policy is supposed to help (Western) European farmers by subsidizing the prices they receive for making the food and drink we consume. At the EU's own website there is a FAQ about the CAP which, as its first question has this:
What is the European model of agriculture?
The reform of the CAP has been guided by the fundamental principles underlying the "European model of agriculture":
a modern and competitive farming sector, capable of occupying a leading position on the world market, while safeguarding domestic producers' living standards and income;
a sustainable, efficient farming sector that uses hygienic, environmentally friendly production methods and gives consumers the quality products they desire;
a farming sector that serves rural communities, reflecting their rich tradition and diversity, and whose role is not only to produce food but also to guarantee the survival of the countryside as a place to live and work, and as an environment in itself;
a simplified agricultural policy, where the lines are clearly drawn between what is decided at Community level and what is the responsibility of the Member States.
The European model implies an agricultural policy that is more transparent to the public, and which works to create the sort of farming sector that society wants and expects, both today and in years to come.
Leaving aside the usual questions of how exactly Brussels describes things as simplified or transparent (I think I've seen more transparent rocks) and the like there is bullet points one and two which would seem to be have all sorts of contradictions. For example efficient farming typically means large scale farms (think East Anglia) not diddy little farms with 2 cows, half a dozen sheep and 2 fields of maize (think Germany). In other words efficiency would seem to require a loss of farming income by small farmers. Likewise an efficient farming sector that "occupies a leading position on the world market" would seem to be one that would not require any subsidies at all. And so on. Read this post at "An Englishman's Castle" for the contradictions between environmentally friendly, no GM crops and efficiency.
However the general wishy-washy third bullet point about preserving traditions and the environment is one that is popular with voters and so sort of makes sense. In theory. But what takes the biscuit, as it were, is that in practise the CAP ends up paying enormous chunks of dosh to large food-processing companies such as sugar-maker Tate & Lyle to compensate them for the high prices of the CAP that make them otherwise unable to sell their products abroad as the Torygraph reports:
The list shows that the major recipients of the £3.9 billion that the British taxpayer pays into the CAP are big companies with little or no link with the land.
Principally, they are sugar and dairy processors, the top dozen of which received more than £10 million each, nearly five times more than any farming business.
One such firm, Meadow Foods, received £25 million, and Nestlé £11.6 million, but the others in the top 10 are dwarfed by Tate & Lyle, which received £20 million more in 2003-04 than in the previous year.
The reason so many food companies receive so much money is that subsidies and import controls make sugar three times the price it is on the world market and dairy products twice as expensive.
To compensate for the higher prices that result from European Union protectionism, companies that export outside the EU are entitled to apply for export refunds that cover the difference between the prices at which they buy and sell.
Last week Timothy Garton Ash asked what the Eurosceptic vision for Europe would be - implying that we didin't really have one. Well I responded saying that amongst other things I thought that the CAP and CFP were nuts and that we should abolish them. When I wrote that I had no real idea of just how much we were paying for these nutty ideas. It isn't as if abolition were an untested policy, our Antipodean commonwealth brethren scrapped farm subsidies over a decade ago with limited impact on farmers. We need to do the same, a 2002 article has the key statistics about the CAP - none of which appear on the EU's FAQ.
in 1999 the EU provided $114.5 billion in producer support which was the equivalent of 49 percent of gross farm revenue.
and
EU food prices are 44 percent higher than they would be without the Common Agricultural Policy, while US food prices are 11 percent higher because of US farm subsidies.
In the EU-15 countries, about 17 percent of consumer spending is for food; in the 10 new countries, the average is 35 percent. The price of butter, for example, is about 2.5 times higher in the EU than in New Zealand, which has eliminated most farm subsidies.
So to sum up. We European suckerscitizens are paying through the nose two ways for the chance to enjoy "preserving traditions and the environment" and a significant chunk of the beneficiaries turn out to be not the "poor" farmers but the shareholders and employees of large food industry companies such as Tate and Lyle, the Swiss firm Nestlé (Switzerland is not part of the EU) and bankrupt Parmalat. Is it any wonder the CAP is absolutely top in the list of reasons why I say "Ceterum censeo Unionem Europaeam esse delendam"
It would be a mistake, however, to be unduly critical of those who have availed themselves of this treasure trove. All of the companies and characters concerned can protest that if they refused to take the direct payments, other donations and export refunds on offer, their competitors elsewhere certainly would. If the EU is ready to send ��127,324,713 in the direction of Tate & Lyle, then the chairman of that company would be either a saint or a madman not to submit the necessary paperwork to obtain it. The result is that the food bill for the typical British family of four is some ��600 higher per year than it would be otherwise. It is the system that is rotten, not those who, perfectly rationally, exploit it.
It is also a system where reform is promised yet progress is slow. Apologists would argue that although the CAP was responsible for the better part of two thirds of the EU budget some 20 years ago, that proportion has been reduced to just under half.
This is no triumph. The shift is more the consequence of increased expenditure in other policy realms than a sustained drive to cut agricultural subsidies. And there is not much hope of the current 50 per cent share being significantly eroded until 2013 at the earliest.
In the mainstream computer media we are seeing reports that Firefox (and others) are taking market share away from IE but that IE still has something like 90% market share. That surprised me when I realized that I know hardly anyone on the net frequently who still uses IE. In an attempt to be a bit more rigorous about the process I looked at the web stats of a number of sites that I have access to, my own blog stats, and then at the blog stats of a number of other popular blogs - mostly, though not exclusively, from my blogroll.
The basic summary is that Firefox appears to have significantly greater market share than reported in the mass media and IE has far less market share. While there were outliers such as BoingBoing, where Firefox has a greater share than IE (both account for roughly a third of the visits), in most cases Firefox has over 20% and IE generally had a share somewhere under 66%. Both these figures exhibited significant varience so that the Firefox number is anywhere between 16% and 32% and the IE one anywhere between 53% and 74%. The Firefox number does not include (in almost all cases) the Mozilla number, typically 3-5%. Mozilla and all those other alternative browsers make up the balance between the two figures usually about 10-15%.
Initially I thought I could draw some other conclusions about how left-wing blogs were more Firefox than Right-wing ones and while it is possible that this is true, I suspect the sample size is too small for this to be statistically significant. What is clearly significant though is that blog-readers are using Firefox at a significantly higher rate than reported in the mainstream media. This is a very important trend because, as the recent blogads survey showed, bloggers are overwhelmingly those people that are described by marketers as "influentials". In other words what bloggers do today others are likely to do tomorrow.
In the interests of full disclosure here is a table of the blogs checked and the browser share reported
It is olive tree pruning time - so here is a picture of the front "lawn" with all the trimmings from last weekend - I have to do some more this weekend. On Monday I burned the olive branches, which is probably metaphorical for something but is what everyone does around here. I took the worthwhile branches to turn into logs for the fire, but the majority was thin weedy stuff that isn't any use to anyone so it went into a (very) big pile in the back garden for major pyromania. Even olive trimmings that were alive the day before burn ferociously.
I used to be rather hesitant about pruning my tres in fear of damaging them, no longer. Apart from digging it up wrongly or exposing it to a few consecutive nights of frost there is very little that will kill an olive tree and hacking off half of its branches is most certainly not one of them. The problem is that if you hack too much you end up with few or no olives from that tree the next winter - I believe I have been cunning enough to ensure that sufficient branches remain to keep us in oil next year.
Via Reuters/Yahoo, my attention has been drawn to an entertaining Englishman who decided to add his own work to four major New York museums.
Prankster Smuggles Art Into Top Museums
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Many a visitor to New York's Museum of Modern Art has probably thought, "I could do that."
A British graffiti artist who goes by the name "Banksy" went one step further, by smuggling in his own picture of a soup can and hanging it on a wall, where it stayed for more than three days earlier this month before anybody noticed.
The prank was part of a coordinated plan to infiltrate four of New York's top museums on a single day.
The largest piece, which he smuggled into the Brooklyn Museum, was a 2 foot by 1.5 foot (61cm by 46 cm) oil painting of a colonial-era admiral, to which the artist had added a can of spray paint in his hand and anti-war graffiti in the background.
The other two targets were the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the American Museum of Natural History, where he hung a glass-encased beetle with fighter jet wings and missiles attached to its body -- another comment on war, Banksy told Reuters on Thursday. ...
More information, including photos of the exhibits and their placement, are available at a site called Wooster Collective as well as at the artist's own site.
Now I disagree with Banksy's politics, which seem to be the usual thoughtless leftwing drivel so common amongst artists, but I'd be happy to stand him the beverage of his choice for his prank and I hope it inspires many other people to do the same - particularly in those museums filled with dire modern art. And, since France has countless (bad) modern scuptures placed in signifcant spots by local minicipalities, I think Banksy tour of France would do wonders for improving the artistic milieu, although one suspects the original artists would have a major sense of humour failure at such Anglo-Saxon vandalism. Permalink
The outcry over the USA's FEC and its attempts to regulate blogs reminds me of nothing more than the censorship attempts of regimes such as communist China or intolerant Saudi Arabia to stop their citizens from reading stuff that annoys the government in question. But in all the discussion, one thing that I haven't really seen covered is the proposed global reach of these rules. When the first report came out the Junkyardblog pointed out that foreigners, such as this blog, comment on American politics as do Americans living abroad, and wondered just how the FEC proposed to enforce its proposed censorship in these cases.
Well originally I assmed I was sitting pretty - although my current hosting provider is in California it would be easy to move it - and indeed one of the UK libertarians at Samizdata proposed setting up an offshore site specifically to work around the FEC in this way. However as I think about it so more I'm not so sure.
The UK (for example) is quite willing to hear libel cases about online US publications and quite willing to find people guilty of defamation when they post anonymously. Given that the US courts are willing to at least listen to the complaints of Russian oil company Yukos and its tussle with the Russian government even if they later decided not to do anything, I see absolutely no reason why they would not hear a case brought by the FEC against foreign bloggers. Indeed seeing as how the US gets all worked up about foreign contributions to political campaigns I can imagine the FEC being even more stringent about foreign blogs. Of course I'm not quite sure how they would actually manage to shut us down but I imagine they could so so if they wanted to, after all the RIAA and MPAA have managed to shut down non-US filesharers and the like.
My favourite president of France is spending Easter in Japan - something that I did a year ago (more or less). Curiously this means that l'Escroc shares with me a love of Japan and, for that matter, of the French Riviera and French cooking. However that is about the limit of what we have in common; in particular, when it comes to politics, we differ about as much as it is possible.
L'Escroc has just had a horrible Ides of March where he has had to face the problem that being two-faced is difficult in the age of instant communications and it seems he has decided to get away from it all in the Orient. Of course Japan is charmed by l'Escroc's Japanophilia but there is no doubt that once behind closed doors the Japanese will explain just how unimpressed they are with the idea of flogging weapons to the People's Republic of China as the (completely unbiased) China Post (of Taiwan) reports in the link above - although to be fair UPI makes the same point.
The China Post article also notes that there is another item that may cause a certain amount of friction - namely the future energy project ITER which the EU/France would like to have in France but which Japan (and IIRC almost all the other funders) would prefer to have in Japan. Mind you this project is the sort of grand publically funded pork that both the Japanese and the French love to have so, not too surprisingly, neither has been willing to concede to the other and thus we taxpayers are saved from having to pay for it until they finally make up their minds. Of course if they fail to agree there is always the problem that we get two ITERs - one in Japan and one in France.
L'Escroc does seem to be a genuine Sumo fan, indeed wathching the Sumo today I noticed that when the cameras focussed on him during the bouts he was wearing glasses - something that he does not do in public normally except when trying to sell nuclear power plants to Saddam Hussein. The Japanese Prime Minister, Koizumi, was not present; if he had been I would be wondering if l?Escroc always wears glasses when trying to get nuclear deals...
Still the article has a wonderful quote from Chirac buttering up some Osaka businessmen:
"Your businesses have firmly made the choice for a future that keeps innovation and high technology at the center of your economic strategy," he said.
He said France had similarly pursued research and high value-added activities and it now hoped "to give a new gust to its durable growth."
French Durable growth? French High Technology? these sound almost as oxymoronic as French Militry Victories.
Permalink
Earlier this week I posted a survey of a few blogs and the Firefox market share as reported by Sitemeter. Over the last couple of days I've written a script or two to get the data from a whole load more blogs. Below are the summary results from 303 blogs of varying popularity.
The calculated averages are mot weighted by the amount of traffic if you want to do that then feel free, the raw numbers are available in a separate file. Below are the top 20 blogs that I surveyed by traffic, most of which show significant Firefox visitors
Here on the Riviera one of the more popular posters, one that is displayed everywhere, is the NON poster I linked to a few weeks back urging voters to reject the EU constitution. This does not necessarily mean that the "Non" campaign is assured of victory but it does do two very important things. Firstly it firmly associates the "Oui" campaign with the French elite - particularly with M. l'Escroc - and secondly it indicates strongly that voting "Non" is a way to remove l'Escroc from office. This is a smart strategy because it resonates strongly with an electorate which is both cynical about its politicians and dislikes the current government. However I'd say that the various responses to this positioning are almost as interesting as the positioning itself.
To begin with, as numerous people have noted, l'Escroc is only avoiding corruption charges because of presidential immunity and thus he desperately wishes to remain president. This means that he needs to win the next presidential election unless, by some miracle, the various cases against him and his aides collapse. Hence, although the next campaign isn't until 2007 the jockeying has already begun. This means that anyone who harbours presidential ambitions really really wants to see l'Escroc get a bloody nose on 29 May, however in most cases they have to go through the motions of supporting the EU constitution.
On the French left is still in some disarray - there are no charismatic lefties as far as I can tell - which means that even if the left manages to form a parliamentary majority it seems highly unlikely to produce an electable presidential candidate. However, despite various leading nobodies earnestly claiming that "no really we think you should all vote OUI, honest", the more accurate position is that summed up by the poster - essentially that "the EU is dominated by evil capitalists who want to do us poor french working stiffs" and at least one leading leftie semi-nobody - Laurent Fabius - has come out explicitly against the constitution. This AFP article explains the position well:
But of deeper concern for the government of President Jacques Chirac were figures showing that most sympathisers with the political left now believe the constitution to be bad for France and Europe.
Opposition has become the majority view not just on the Trotskyist and Communist far-left, but even among the mainstream Socialists (PS) -- whose leadership is actually campaigning in favour of the constitution, the survey reported.
Some 53 percent of Socialist party sympathisers are planning to vote "no" compared to 45 percent in a similar poll a week before. A mass defection of PS support would be an almost insurmountable blow for the "yes" camp.
The findings showed how the "no" campaign's bid to tar the constitution as a sell-out to unregulated market economics has struck a chord with the French public.
They also indicated that a "no" vote is no longer seen as taboo among a part of the electorate that generally describes itself as "pro-European."
...
The PS held an internal referendum in November in which 59 percent of members toed the party line and supported the constitution, but opponents led by former prime minister Laurent Fabius have continued to mobilise and now feel emboldened by the opinion polls.
Support for the "no" camp in France has been fed by a groundswell of discontent since the start of the year, as voters increasingly identify the EU with their most pressing social concerns: ten percent unemployment, stagnant wage packets and the flight of jobs to low-protection economies in the east.
"European construction goes hand-in-hand for these people with business relocation, the decline of the welfare state and economic insecurity," said Ipsos director Pierre Giacometti.
To be honest though because of the complete lack of charismatic lefities all the interest is on the right where l'Escroc is likely to face a challenge from Nicolas Sarkozy who is energetic, popular and, apparently talented. Last year l'Escroc did his best to sideline Sarkozy by forcing him to choose either the presidency of the UMP party, a good position to make a campaign to be the next national president, or a cabinet post. Sarkozy chose the former and indeed has not been particularly vocal recently.
Until recently, I have no doubt, the sidelining strategy must have appeared to be a most successful trick by l'Escroc, but now that the EU constitution is being framed by many of its opponents as a referendum on l'Escroc - hence the title to this post - perhaps this plan wasn't so good. Apart from Sarkozy all of l'Escroc's ministers are either despised or total nobodies, and the government as a whole is unpopular - in a nutshell, as the AFP article explained - the French street dislikes all of the (necessary, indeed urgently needed) reforms that the current government has tried to put through. If positioning of the constitution as a referendum on l'Escroc, as the "Non" campaigners have tried, is generally successful then any less than sparkiling defence of the constitution by l'Escroc or his ministers is likely to be counter-productive. I am not convinced that this is possible for anyone on the right other than Sarko and, since l'Escroc has so pointedly shunted Sarko offstage, Sarko has no clear interest in taking the risk of standing up for something unpopular which is being promoted by his arch rival. Thus it will be extremely interesting to see how Sarko positions himself in the constitution fight, certainly he is unwilling to see Turkey join the EU and he is against low tax (i.e. Eastern European) countries getting any EU funds. My bet is that he will stay remarkably silent and make secret pagan sacrifices to pray for a decisive "Non"....
I'll happily help him sacrifice a chicken or two if he asks.
Needless to say one can expect l'Escoc himself to try and pull out all the stops. Mind you, depsite the sumo tournament, his recent visit to Japan looks to have been less than the diplomatic triumph he hoped for. The Japanese prime minister was distinctly unimpressed with l'Escroc's gun-running and pork.grabbing and the cries of help from home meant that he was forced to stop looking like a world statesman and address the tedious domestic issue of the referendum. Oh dear, maybe l'Escroc will indeed be headed for the chokey in 2007. Permalink
enter "l'escroc" as the text to search for (no ""s)
click I'm feeling lucky
Unfortunately it doesn't yet work in Google France (Thanks especially to Giles at Jacob's Room for pointing out its success) PS Escroc is the French word for "crook" or "swindler" and it comes from the left's unofficial slogan in the 2002 presedential run-off when the choice was l'Escroc or le Facho - i.e. the far right Le Pen
The Vodkapundit links to a truly magnificent article in the WSJ about silicon valley. Like he says it is REQUIRED READING. Just a little extract to make the point:
True enough, the Valley can mimic a respectable political language--if only to snag Davos invitations or to keep Washington off its back. In their souls, Valley businesspeople are wild libertarian crazies who want nothing more than to forget the Beltway even exists. The news is full of talk about the great divide between political left and right. Silicon Valley could care less. The axis that counts here is incumbent vs. disrupter.
Incumbents are the bad guys. They are Microsoft, Gray Davis, Hollywood studios, telephone companies, big pharma and Social Security. Disrupters are Google, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Napster, WiFi, biotech and personal savings accounts. Incumbents are big, slow, rude and authoritarian. Disrupters are nimble, new, cute and libertarian.
In order to make this slightly relevant to European readers, and especially to those Europeans who haven't lived in the valley, I'd say this "incumbent" vs "disrupter" idea is how entrepreneurs around the world think - even those entrepreneurs in sclerotic "old" Europe. It is certainly 100% true of the UK entrepreneurs from the flamboyant airline folks like Richard Branson to the boring bosses of ARM. This is what Danny Kruger meant when he said "We plan to introduce a period of creative destruction in the public services." Likewise it is what scares the living daylights out of the French left and why they are so against the EU's Bolkestein directive. Permalink
Latin American bananas, like Eastern European plumbers and accountants, are not welcome in Europe. In order to dissuade them from bothering to show up the EU imposes a quote and a tariff on them. It now proposes to replace the quota and tariff combo with a simple, far far larger tariff and no quota.
Needless to say the Latin American banana growing countries are less than impressed and are consulting m'learned friends about a WTO ruling - something that they seem practically bound to win. Now I understand the justification behind the EU's silly banana quota but it seems to me that it would be better to extend CAP subsidies to the former colonies and their banana growers rather than a tariff on everyone else. After all bananas a good for ones health so surely making them available to all more cheaply would be a good thing? However such logic apparently escapes our Eurocrats which is yet further evidence that the EU is indeed a banana republic.
Blog Home : March 2005 : Permalink
Ceterum censeo Unionem Europaeam esse delendam
Ceterum censeo Unionem Europaeam esse delendam
So to sum up. We European suckerscitizens are paying through the nose two ways for the chance to enjoy "preserving traditions and the environment" and a significant chunk of the beneficiaries turn out to be not the "poor" farmers but the shareholders and employees of large food industry companies such as Tate and Lyle, the Swiss firm Nestlé (Switzerland is not part of the EU) and bankrupt Parmalat. Is it any wonder the CAP is absolutely top in the list of reasons why I say "Ceterum censeo Unionem Europaeam esse delendam"
More information, including photos of the exhibits and their placement, are available at a site called Wooster Collective as well as at the artist's own site. 