What can I say about New Orleans? We visited once and had a great time. It is a shock to see the pictures of places where we were and what they look like now. On the other hand I will briefly point out that reconstruction can make it almost impossible to tell that such a disaster has occured - witness Kobe for example where anyone visiting any time in the last 5 years (and possibly longer) would have no idea that an immensely destructive earthquake had occured.
Back home here on the Côte d'Azur, a problem has occured which might seem to be a disaster, except when compared to the news. The problem is that I decided to change DSL providers and the first one has cut me(us) off while the second has yet to activate the link properly. It is amazing how lack of internet access affects your life these days! Permalink
Somewhat delayed due to the DSL issues - France Telecom are total pants. Anyway this is a view through a mountain olive tree near Utelle - just a few kilometers up the Var/Vesubie valley from Nice. As always click on the picture to see it enlarged and do visit last week's entry if you missed it.
The Japanese elections - which are marginally more interesting than usual this time around - are having the interesting result of increasing demand for a particular type of French cheese.
TOKYO (Reuters) - The popularity of a certain type of French cheese has soared in Japan after a leading ruling party politician called it "hard and dry" last month.
The incident took place in early August when Yoshiro Mori, a former prime minister, met with Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi in a last-ditch effort to persuade him not to dissolve parliament and call snap elections.
Following the evening meeting at Koizumi's official residence, Mori told reporters that Koizumi had given him only beer and simple snacks while they talked, disregarding long-standing Japanese customs of political hospitality that mandated a more lavish welcome.
"He gave me foreign beer and some dried out cheese, so hard you couldn't bite into it," an obviously miffed Mori said in widely televised remarks, displaying a crumpled beer can and thin slice of orange-brown cheese.
Cheese cognoscenti, however, recognized Mimolette, a firm French cheese whose flavor increases as it ages and hardens. Aficionados say that the harder it gets, the tastier it is, with older cheeses commanding a higher price.
Now the scorned cheese is enjoying brisk sales at Japanese gourmet food and department stores, with sales three times as strong as usual. Some more aged varieties have even sold out.
Everyone under the sun seems to have someone to blame when it comes to Hurricane Katrina, with those on the left blaming Bush and more rational people looking to the enormous sewerage pipe of corruption that seems to have been endemic to New Orleans and Louisiana - although I think that the criticism of FEMA seems to be justified too.
A number of people have compared behaviour in Louisiana with behaviour in Japan. It is worth noting that, although not as bad as Katrina, Japan is right now experiencing a couple of weeks of torrential rainfall (10cm of rain per hour in some parts of Tokyo) with (yet) another typhoon on its way to add to the rainfall, although the more important comparison is with the aftermath of the Kobe earthquake. In Japan, despite intense destruction, civil order did not break down and indeed there are accounts of the Yakuza (Japan's gangsters) helping to bring aid while the government seemed tie all its aid up in red tape. In New Orleans such a civil order clearly did not exist and its lack undoubtedly helped make things worse.
The governmental red-tape effect is precisely what we see in every disaster (witness the UN's efforts in the new year Tsunami) and is not something that surprises me. It should be clear that when it comes to large scale disasters the government is not your friend and your local community is. If the community is united then you will suffer less in the aftermath of a disaster. If you don't know your neighbours and they don't know each other then the community effort will be slower and less than it might be and you end up fighting each other instead of cooperating.
Finally, did anyone in the US note that Communist China has just seen at least 70 deaths from a typhoon? or that
Serious flooding throughout southern and eastern China this year has killed more than 1,000 and left hundreds missing, presumed dead.
The PRC has got government control at a level that makes big-government lovers in the EU and US drool with envy yet it manages to kill thousands in typhoons, more thousands in mine disasters and seems to prefer denying the existence of diseases such as SARS or bird flu to trying to erradicate them.
The more I read about the chaos that is Louisiana these days, the more I realise that my previous post only begins to scratch the surface of the institutional problem. One of the readers at Harry's place makes an excellent point:
The point, as seen from a European perspective, is not whose fault the whole dreadful hurricane business was, but that its aftermath took on such awful proportions. I (in the UK) follow the news regularly both in English and German, and not just on one broadcaster/ print medium. It is simply wrong to claim, as some in America appear to be doing, that the broadcasters/journalists to a man are all anti-American. They are not. The question that remains to baffle us is why on earth it took so long for anything to be done. The facts are incontrovertible, tens of thousands of people were left in the most appalling conditions, the forces of law and order collapsed, and this in the most powerful nation on earth, and one which regularly chides others for inefficiency. No one really cares whether or not the Mayor of New Orleans, or the governor of this state or that had 24 or 48 hours, or whether… waffle, waffle, waffle.
The point is that nothing was done in a country that regularly berates rest of the world for it many failings. America always has, so it claims, the better solution to this or that problem. Do things the American way, we are told, and all will be well.
The way I see, the US government is no more immune to bureaucratic cockups, turf-fighting etc. than any other one. And I am absolutely positve that the US government is as hobbled by its own idiotic regulations as any other one. But I do not believe that the US government is actually worse than any other one.
I would be interested, though I fear horrified, to see the results of a similarly powerful hurricane/typhoon on (to pick a place not at all at random) Hong Kong, Shenzen and the surrounding Pearl River Delta. Hong Kong would, I suspect, survive just fine but I can practically guarantee that it would be witness to death and destruction across the internal border on a horrific scale. I also predict that the disaster of Shenzen would be denied by the Chinese government and they would refuse all offers of assistence with claims that everything was under control. Said claims being comprehensively disproven some six months later when shortages of stuff made in Shenzen would be obvious in shops around the world.
Likewise, although I think it unreasonable to speculate about hurricanes, if the French Riviera ever suffers a major (say magnitude 6.5+) earthquake - the Riviera is undoubtedly a seismically active area so this is plausible - it will be utterly fascinating for outsiders to see the total collapse of infrastructure that I expect to occur. A good 6.x magnitude quake is likely to take out the main road and railway links to both Italy and the rest of France as well as causing landslides and building collapses all over the place and probably demonstrating the lack of resilience of the large amounts of landfill used for critical things such as Nice Airport. I have no doubt that Sarko would be bustling around decreeing this and that but I would be surprised to see more aid than a couple of helicopters arriving in less than a week simply because the logistics challenge would be so significent.
I started writing some examples of the logistics problem but fortunately before I could post them I found that Jason at Iraqnow has far betterones. This logisitcs issue is one reason why top down government doesn't work because the top down model assumes that the all wise and all powerful government will have stocks of stuff plus fuel to transport them near but not in the disaster zone and that therefore the population doesn't need to prepare anymore than the government tells it to. A bottom up solution - what one might call the Mormon solution - on the other hand gives every household its own stock of emergency supplies, enough to last 3-4 days, plus a solar power charger, water purifier etc., gives each community some emergency blankets, tents, medical supplies, rescue equipment and fuel and so on. That way when disaster happens most of the required stuff is already there no matter where there happens to be. Of course this may assume that no one steals the stored stuff, but the household level of supply is fairly simply done by an annual provision organized by the local community and within the household it seems unlikely to be stolen. Moreover when disaster strikes it immediately becomes clear who skimped, pilfered etc. and who didn't and since most probably will not it limits the amount of stuff that has to be brought in.
There may, however, be an even more insidious problem in that trust in the government results in less individual common sense with regards to residence. The facts about New Orleans, that it was below sea-level, in a hurricane zone and at the bottom of one of the longest rivers in the world, were not exactly secret and those are the sorts of facts which would make it less than attractive as a place to live under most rational calculations, yet despite that it remained full of people. Indeed not only full of people but many of its inhabitents seemed unwilling to take the initiative in trying to leave. I suspect that one reason for that was the belief that the government's spending on levees, pumps etc. would protect it from disaster. In fact of course such a belief was misplaced, just as the similar belief of those living in the upriver Mississippi/Misouri flood zones was misplace in the 1990s. Governments cannot in fact beat nature head on even though politicians and bureacrats like to think they can if given enough money but every storm that nearly overtops the levee lulls the population and their leaders into a further false sense of security. The fact that some of the civic authorities in the region seem to be both corrupt and incompetent is merely further evidence to he point that big government doesn't work, because big top down government gives big funds to people to manage and that provides the incentive for some people to divert them. Sure some people will be corrupt and pilfer a $100 account that they have control over but in general the larger the sum of money the greater the incentive to steal some or all of it.
There is undoubtedly a related problem here, which is that successful disaster management means no headlines. If you look at the generally good disaster management on display in Japan or Florida over the last year or five (and the resulting lack of "Massive hurricane/typhoon/earthquake X million people basically unharmed" headlines) then you see that this is not well reported. Right now typhoon 14 is hammering Western Japan with masses of water (some part reported about 1 meter of rain - compare that to the 8 inches that caused major trouble in New Orleans 10 years ago), there are floods all over the place, a handful of people are dead and a few thousand have been evacuated from their homes. But even the Japanese TV news (I can watch NHK on satellite) spends as much time on the Hurricane Katrina clean up as it does on its own typhoon. This is a problem because the world could usefully learn from the Japanese approach (and I know it still has top down problems witness the article I linked to yesterday) and from seeing how the Japanese, on the whole, work bottom up with each community taking care of its own.
Some big, top down, governments are more effective than others - Louisiana is probably about as bad as it gets in the USA, and that is, on the whole, far more effective than the government in places like Haiti, Sri Lanka or Russia - but the point is surely clear - governments cannot react effectively in a top down fashion. We know that one of the strengths of the US military compared to most others is the way that it expects low-ranking officers and NCOs to take the initiative. Fighting a natural disaster is something where the same tactics apply. We should expect smart governments to use them.
Hot on the heals of Peter "Tit" Mandleson's masterful mishandling of the Bra-wars, comes this admission that the attempt to bribe Iran into not building an atomic bomb has failed to work too:
BRUSSELS (Reuters) - A European Union initiative to offer Iranincentives to abandon sensitive nuclear work that could give it the bomb is at an end unless Tehran halts uranium conversion, a senior EU diplomat said on Tuesday.
The diplomat told reporters the logical next step was for the International Atomic Energy Agency to report Iran's nuclear program to the U.N. Security Council, although it was a long way from discussing sanctions against the Islamic Republic.
"With the Iranian rejection of the European proposal and the restarting of the conversion plant in Isfahan, it did seem to us that the Paris process had ended," he said.
An Iranian change of heart on conversion "doesn't seem remotely likely," he added.
Like that was a surprise to anyone. Still, clutching at straws, at least the EU diplomats didn't completely fall for the Iranian spin:
The diplomat said everything about Iran's long-clandestine nuclear program raised security concerns about its purpose.
"If there is a peaceful nuclear program, then where are the power stations?" he said, noting that Russia had agreed to supply fuel for Iran's only nuclear plant under construction.
Now then given that bribery didn't work what do our masters in Brussels, London, Paris and Berlin plan to do to stop Iranian nuclear proliferation?
Diplomats said the EU was aiming for a "soft referral" to the Security Council which would be less serious than referring a specific violation of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to the supreme U.N. body.
"We don't want sanctions, but (for) the Council to issue a political appeal to Iran to resume the suspension, comply with the Paris Agreement and resume negotiations," another European diplomat said. "The idea is not to take it away from the IAEA but to support the IAEA."
A soft referral? Yeah that will really make the Mullahs quake in their boots and change their minds.
opens his mouth and bloviates about Hurricane Katrina. Regretfully someone of my acquaintance passed this pile of total drivel on to me. It therefore falls to me the fisk the thing because every paragraph is at best misleading and mostly its a pack of complete lies.
Friday, September 2nd, 2005
Dear Mr. Bush:
Any idea where all our helicopters are? It's Day 5 of Hurricane Katrina and thousands remain stranded in New Orleans and need to be airlifted. Where on earth could you have misplaced all our military choppers? Do you need help finding them? I once lost my car in a Sears parking lot. Man, was that a drag.
Dear Mr Mooreon.
Any idea what "military" means? it refers to items used for fighting wars. You may not have noticed this but wars don't just stop because a hurricane shows up. Moreover in case it escaped your notice the helicopters that were buzzing around New Orleans were being shot at. Given that this is not Afghanistan the US military is not going to call in a JDAM srtike to calm things down. Thirdly as John Hinderaker notes quite a lot of US Navy helicopters (and other military equipment) were in fact in action on August 30/31.
Also, any idea where all our national guard soldiers are? We could really use them right now for the type of thing they signed up to do like helping with national disasters. How come they weren't there to begin with?
Just ignoring the fact that thousands of National Guard folks were there, if those National Guard soldiers signed up thinking that their primary job was NOT fighting with helping with national disasters being a secondary one then they must be almost as stupid as you. Perhaps the fact that they are equipped with tanks, guns etc. would be a hint here.
Last Thursday I was in south Florida and sat outside while the eye of Hurricane Katrina passed over my head. It was only a Category 1 then but it was pretty nasty. Eleven people died and, as of today, there were still homes without power. That night the weatherman said this storm was on its way to New Orleans. That was Thursday! Did anybody tell you? I know you didn't want to interrupt your vacation and I know how you don't like to get bad news. Plus, you had fundraisers to go to and mothers of dead soldiers to ignore and smear. You sure showed her!
I'm glad to see that you apparently live in a state with compentent disaster management. Just in case you missed the critical word there, I'll repeat it: STATE. Mr Mooreon you live in a country where primary responsibility for disasters devolves on the state. However just to totally ruin your hypothesis, Mr Mooreon, the president declared a state of emergency at least 24 hours before the hurricane hit Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana. Also the president was apparently on the horn to the mayor of New Orleans etc insisting on a mandatory evacuation. Maybe that helps explain why he ignored some grief demented mother who was being used to score cheap political points.
I especially like how, the day after the hurricane, instead of flying to Louisiana, you flew to San Diego to party with your business peeps. Don't let people criticize you for this -- after all, the hurricane was over and what the heck could you do, put your finger in the dike?
Since it is not the president's job to stick his finger in the dike staying out of the way of the people who ought to know what they are doing and who had the responisbility to do it sounds like common sense. Imagine the headlines about how the presidential visit disrupted critical activities had he been there.
And don't listen to those who, in the coming days, will reveal how you specifically reduced the Army Corps of Engineers' budget for New Orleans this summer for the third year in a row. You just tell them that even if you hadn't cut the money to fix those levees, there weren't going to be any Army engineers to fix them anyway because you had a much more important construction job for them -- BUILDING DEMOCRACY IN IRAQ!
I yield the floor to EU Rota to smash that lie into the ground. The criticism of the pork involved in what was generally understood as doomed attempts to stop New Orleans from drowning sometime was bipartisan and included just about everyone not in the state of Louisiana.
On Day 3, when you finally left your vacation home, I have to say I was moved by how you had your Air Force One pilot descend from the clouds as you flew over New Orleans so you could catch a quick look of the disaster. Hey, I know you couldn't stop and grab a bullhorn and stand on some rubble and act like a commander in chief. Been there done that.
See note above about (not) getting in the way. It seems likely that an aerial view actually gives the best view of a swathe of destruction that was hundreds of miles across.
There will be those who will try to politicize this tragedy and try to use it against you. Just have your people keep pointing that out. Respond to nothing. Even those pesky scientists who predicted this would happen because the water in the Gulf of Mexico is getting hotter and hotter making a storm like this inevitable. Ignore them and all their global warming Chicken Littles. There is nothing unusual about a hurricane that was so wide it would be like having one F-4 tornado that stretched from New York to Cleveland.
Mr Mooreon there is, as I write, a typhoon pounding western Japan which is of similar dimensions and slightly less powerful. Perhaps you might like to actually ask hurricane experts before blaming this one on global warming. It may surprise you to note that almost all (as in something like 99%) of them state that category 5 hurricanes are common, come in waves (e.g. there ware more in 1941-71 than 1971 to 2001) and are not apparently caused by global warming. Also perhaps you missed the note that this kind of disaster for New Orleans has been predicted for decades - with documents stating effectively that it was a question of "when the big one hits" not "if".
No, Mr. Bush, you just stay the course. It's not your fault that 30 percent of New Orleans lives in poverty or that tens of thousands had no transportation to get out of town. C'mon, they're black! I mean, it's not like this happened to Kennebunkport. Can you imagine leaving white people on their roofs for five days? Don't make me laugh! Race has nothing -- NOTHING -- to do with this!
In case it escaped your notice Mr Mooreon, New Orleans has been poor for decades if not centuries. You can blame every president back to Lincoln for this. As far as the lack of transportation goes, I think the Junkyard bloggers have the skinny on who dropped the ball. The charge of racism is total BS.
You hang in there, Mr. Bush. Just try to find a few of our Army helicopters and send them there. Pretend the people of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast are near Tikrit.
Yours,
Michael Moore
Since you seem so attached to helicopters, let us end on that note. Mikey there are times that I just despair. I fear that you don't understand basic mathematics. Helicopters can transfer maybe a couple of tons of supplies or a dozen people and they burn more fuel per mile than any SUV: Busses and trucks on the other hand can tranfer tens of tons of supplies or 50-100 people for far less fuel burned per mile. More to the point there are hundreds of people with bus or truck driving skills for every qualified helicopter pilot. Sure some helicopters are useful but lets get practical here, helicopters are not what is required. Oh and to go back to your global warming ideas. Just assume that hurricanes are caused by global warming, what do you think is going to cause more global warming: thousands of helicopter flights or hundreds of busses?
Lots of people (e.g. Steve Sailer) are writing stuff that looks like racist trash to me. There are plenty of examples of blacks doing well, e.g. there seems to be widespread agreementamongstbloggers and columnists that Jabbor Gibson is a hero and should be given a medal not a prosecution, but undoubtedly there were also blacks who committed crimes. Given that the vast majority of poor in New Orleans were black it is only to be expected that both heros and villains will be black.
But I have to say that some of the responses aren't much better. The Pinko Feminist Hellcat is blaming rich whites and Bush in particular for it all which is equally bogus:
If we could prosecute murder by negligence, George Bush and his cohorts would surely be thrown in the clink for years.
But that won't happen. What is happening is that poor people are being punished for the negligence of the wealthy and powerful. With no cars, they could not get out of the city, and were trapped by the hurricane. Instead of facing up to this harsh reality, people are going on about how these naughty survivors chose to be there. Last week I pointed out to someone on the train to work that no, many of the survivors had no way to get out of the city, and there was no evacuation plan. No buses. No vans. No nothing.
This was the answer I got: "Yes, but I'm sure a few people wouldn't go, anyway."
Oh, well then. Because you're sure a few people wouldn't leave when instructed to--even if they didn't have a car or anyway to get out anyway--everyone who's there deserves what they get. They must have all chosen to stay there. [...]
The bulk of the survivors and victims are Black and poor. The bulk of the people in Washington who made the cuts to FEMA, who cut the work on the levees short, and who dragged their feet on getting help to our fellow American citizens are White.
I hate defending Bush, especially when I agree that his appointees are to blame for some of the FEMA/DHS bureaucratic cock ups, but blaming Bush exclusively or primarily is wrong. Mayor Nagin (black IIRC) is the gentleman who failed to mobilize his own busses and Governor Blanco, who is white, would seem to be at least as culpable in the dithering stakes as any FEMA head. Throw in the rest of the corrupt and incompetant Louisiana/city authorities and you are goign to get a mess unless you assume that the Feds are required to protect states/cities from the (in)actions of their elected officials. Similar thoughts are here.
Yes, I know it's impolitic to say such things while the suffering in the Big Easy is fresh and many cops risked their lives to save others. But now is the time to blow the whistle on the story line being repeated by rote across America: That the federal government ignored New Orleans because most of its residents are black and poor.
That narrative has all the accuracy of a historic novel: it takes two undisputed facts - the feds were slow and New Orleans is largely black and poor - and weaves in pure fiction to make the desired link.
The charge of racism-inspired foot-dragging isn't just nonsense. It's pernicious nonsense, as in destructive and malicious. You know that's a fact because loony Howard Dean, the Democratic Party boss, is now peddling it. He's joined by Jesse Jackson, who said the squalor in New Orleans "looks like the hull of a slave ship." Oh, please
More to the point, like I said before, everyone outside of Louisiana has been saying that New Orleans was a disaster waiting to happen so the real blame surely lies on the authorities within the state who failed to implement some basic planning/zoning laws that would have moved large chinks of NO's population and industry somewhere else that was above sea level and not at the mouth of the Mississippi. Sequestrating the assets of everyone still alive who has ever held elective office in Louisiana and using them to rehouse the refugees would seem to me only justice although it might unfortunately affect the few honest/competent politicians in the state.
And talking of Jesse Jackson, sometimes he seems to accidentally prove the claims of the racists - refugee is not a racist word and never has been, unless you consider (for example) white Albanians and Serbians from Kosovo to be honorary African Americans.
To go along with the Hugh Hewitt interview about how the Louisiana officials forbade the Red Cross from supplying the city there is this piece from some California Paramedics. If this is true, and it certainly reads like a very good fake if it isn't, then it is a graphic example at best self serving incompetence plus a desire to conceal said incompetence and is possibly evidence that justifies claims of racism:
We organized ourselves and the 200 of us set off for the bridge with great excitement and hope. As we marched pasted the convention center, many locals saw our determined and optimistic group and asked where we were headed. We told them about the great news. Families immediately grabbed their few belongings and quickly our numbers doubled and then doubled again. Babies in strollers now joined us, people using crutches, elderly clasping walkers and others people in wheelchairs. We marched the 2-3 miles to the freeway and up the steep incline to the Bridge. It now began to pour down rain, but it did not dampen our enthusiasm.
As we approached the bridge, armed Gretna sheriffs formed a line across the foot of the bridge. Before we were close enough to speak, they began firing their weapons over our heads. This sent the crowd fleeing in various directions. As the crowd scattered and dissipated, a few of us inched forward and managed to engage some of the sheriffs in conversation. We told them of our conversation with the police commander and of the commander's assurances. The sheriffs informed us there were no buses waiting. The commander had lied to us to get us to move.
We questioned why we couldn't cross the bridge anyway, especially as there was little traffic on the 6-lane highway. They responded that the West Bank was not going to become New Orleans and there would be no Superdomes in their City. These were code words for if you are poor and black, you are not crossing the Mississippi River and you were not getting out of New Orleans.
Our small group retreated back down Highway 90 to seek shelter from the rain under an overpass. We debated our options and in the end decided to build an encampment in the middle of the Ponchartrain Expressway on the center divide, between the O'Keefe and Tchoupitoulas exits. We reasoned we would be visible to everyone, we would have some security being on an elevated freeway and we could wait and watch for the arrival of the yet to be seen buses.
All day long, we saw other families, individuals and groups make the same trip up the incline in an attempt to cross the bridge, only to be turned away. Some chased away with gunfire, others simply told no, others to be verbally berated and humiliated. Thousands of New Orleaners were prevented and prohibited from self-evacuating the City on foot. Meanwhile, the only two City shelters sank further into squalor and disrepair. The only way across the bridge was by vehicle. We saw workers stealing trucks, buses, moving vans, semi-trucks and any car that could be hotwired. All were packed with people trying to escape the misery New Orleans had become.
This is unbelievable, when people try to leave on their own by foot they are turned back. Apparently this is mainly because of the bad PR that might otherwise turn up. I don't really understand who should be blamed for this although the police commander at the Harrah's/Canal Street station would seem to be one candidate. (link courtesy of a Samizdata commenter) Update: The comments at this follow on Samizdata post indicate that the story seems to be partly exaggerated and/or made up of stitched together bits, but despite that probably true in essence.
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The rumours swirling about Skype being bought by eBay are interesting. The WSJ, Reuters and The Reg, not to mention bloggers like Jeff Jarvis and Fred Wilson, report it and report that people seem mystified about why eBay would want to diversify into skype.
It seems to me that this is true for eBay the online auction house (though some sort of Skype IM link to an eBay auction is intriguing) but far less true for Paypal. Even ignoring the likely saving in paying of credit card costs if Paypal is used to top up Skype accounts, Skype IDs may help to make paypal wallets a bit more ubiquitous because you would be able to send money to/from skype IDs instead or email addresses. Furthermore Skype does a lot of micropayment sorts of things just the way Paypal does.
I don't say the whole thing is completely sensible but as skype gets ported to cell-phones and PDAs it becomes entirely possible to imagine Skype users (IM ing and/orWifi sending) a SkypeID + Payment amount + Hash key to each other to pay for things - note that Skype ZONES is already working with regards to some of the WiFi/payment bits. This becoems even more interesting when you realize that Skype IMs are encrypted and that the Skype API is very open because now Skype can be used to send payment IMs to (say) ticket machines in the local WiFi zone... Skype plus Paypal could just be the Electronic wallet many of us have been waiting for for years and which we thought would be the killer app for 2.5G and 3G phones. Maybe it will indeed be so, but if so it will not be because of J2ME or any of the Y2000 era hyped M-comerce companies that we thought would do it. Permalink
Belgium, home to the EU and otherwise famous for beer, diamonds and chocolate, is planning a scheme to get the deserving a PC for €850 and this is being announced as a wonderful thing for all concerned:
Belgium's government will next week decide whether to adopt a plan backed by secretary of state for IT, Peter Vanvelthoven, to offer subsidised broadband-enabled PCs to disadvantaged groups in the country.
The government is considering reimbursing VAT on PCs in the scheme. The PCs will be at least 41 per cent cheaper than regular PCs, retailing for about €850, according to reports in the Belgian press. The PC industry itself will also offer a discount of at least 29 per cent.
The Belgian government wants to target groups in society that do not have money to buy a fully fledged PC and do not pay income tax, such as housewives, seniors and students. Those who obtain a PC under the scheme will also receive training.
Of course there is the ID card reader built in, but otherwise this seems like a good waste go government dosh given that Dell's Belgian site (apologies for the language for non flemish readers) is offering a Dimension 3000 for €517. It seems like a reasonable spec machine, includes so far as I can tell a monitor and useful apps -
DimensionTM 3000 Intel® Celeron® Processor 330 (2.66GHz, 256KB L2 Cache, 533MHz FSB) Legitieme Windows® XP Home Edition 6 USB 2,0, 3 PCI, 10/100 Netwerkkaart Dell™ 17" (43cm) CRT beeldscherm 80GB (7,200) IDE Harde Schijf Bespaar €30! bij bestelling online Geldig t/m 13/09/2005 GRATIS van 256MB naar 512MB geheugen Geldig t/m 20/09/2005 GRATIS Dell 720 kleuren printer bij bestelling online Geldig t/m 13/09/2005 € 517 Incl. BTW / Transport / Recupel.Bespaar 30,-. Geldig t/m 13/09/2005
Unless the ID reader is more than €300 this looks like Dell would be able to provide exactly what is required for rather less even ignoring that VAT discount. Its great to see that the government is so efficient in its procurement! Permalink
I was on an aeroplane. Flying from Nice to Zurich in the afternoon. If I'd been on a different aeroplane, say one flying from Boston, I most likely wouldn't be here. When we landed at Zurich we went to the business club lounge (at that point in my life I had more air miles than I knew what to do with), and noted that everyone was gathered around the TVs. Also notable was the fact that all the flights to North America seemed to be "delayed". The shock that hit me when I saw the endless repeats of those long distance shots of the planes hitting the towers in what was otherwise a beautiful cloudless morning is indescribable. It was hard to believe that this was real life and not a movie. And then we saw one of the towers collapse. And then we had to board our plane to Tokyo. It helped that this plane was going in the opposite direction, starting from an effiicent nation like Switzerland and ending in a nation that is (these days) rather harmless and self-effacing, so it seemed unlikely that we would be targeted, but none the less this was not a flight I was happy to be boarding.
I have to say that from that point on I have never boarded a plane without thinking of how I will behave if someone tries to hijack it. To the extent that it is possible I have moved myself from the "sheep" category to the "sheepdog" one to borrow from that excellent Bill Wittle article. In part this is because I have realised that the chances of my surviving a hijack are low so I might as well die trying to stop the hijacker as sitting in my seat praying to a God I don't believe in.
Allow me to give a brief example of how bad things are in France compared to California. I just made a trip to Montpellier yesterday for a meeting with a potential client. The distance is about 300km (=200 miles) one way and can mostly be done on the Autoroutes, hence driving time was around 3 hours. This is quite a trip, but it is quicker than alternatives by train - especially given that the client's office is not in the middle of the city near the railway station - or plane (there are no direct flights from Nice to Montpellier so you have to travel via Paris!) and probably cheaper, however it is quite expensive compared to a similar journey in America because of the cost of petrol and the Autoroute tolls.
The tolls cost €19.90 one way €39.80 return. Petrol (diesel in this case) sells at around €1.10 per litre these days and the car we drove does about 7 l/100km which works out at about 42l for the round trip - actually I think it was a little better say 40l. Total costs were therefore almost €85.
Compare this with the USA today say someone in Montery, Ca wanting to visit a client in Sacramento. Petrol (gas) in the US is cheaper and people frequently drive less effiicent cars but 30mpg (US g) is quite common for this sort of motorway driving, which works out at some 13 gallons for the 400 mile round trip - assume we have something slightly more gas guzzling so it consumes 15 gallons. Petrol (gas) prices in California are around $3/gal so a 15 gallon trip costs $45 or €37 at today's exchange rate.
So the cost of an equivalent round trip in California is about €37, some 20% less than then price of fuel for the French trip even with our hypothetical American driving a less fuel efficient vehicle. The US interstates are (almost) all freeways not toll ways so the cost of the tolls is purely a French expense. But adding them in makes the cost of motoring in France well over double the equivalent cost in the USA, if the French trip was done using a less efficient petrol car as in the US version the additional cost (petrol costs 20% more than diesel in France and the fuel efficiency is less) would probably make it three times as expensive.
This has to significantly affect the French economy both directly in that it increases the cost of business and indirectly by making it less likely that businesses will seek clients in other parts of France. L'Escroc is on the ball here along with the rest of Vile Pin's cabinet in threatening the oil companies and insisting that they cut prices. The cabinet is also doing its best to suck up to the farmers and lorry drivers by promising various reductions in fees but not actually cutting the price of fuel. [One wonders whether HP's announcement that it is canning a quarter of its French workforce is related to the cost of transport or to other costs of doing business in France] Permalink
When Vile Pin came to office some 100 days ago he set himself 100 days to turn things around. At the time I was rather sceptical that he would not get to the end without major unrest but he did just make it. Unfortunately for him, he's got some serious problems now. Firstly there is the fuel issue I touched on in the previous post. He got on the Radio to try and tell everyone how wonderful he is and was continually hit with the fuel issue. It is worth pointing out that a few years back the government completely caved into protests from farmers and truckers about fuel prices and, despite attempts at blaming the oil companies, people in France are beginning to notice which entity takes the biggest chunk of the €1.30/litre we pay for petrol these days.
Then there is the HP job loss issue, which has got people up in arms:
A spokesman for the CFE-CGC union said a joint meeting of union officials had been called to urge "all workers to down tools".
Michel Destot, the deputy mayor of Grenoble - the southern city where HP has one of it factories - described the cuts as "unacceptable".
The government has said it will meet with HP to bribe or threaten them to stay disucss the situation and one suspects that HP are carefully looking at the Nestle example, where an attempt to cut jobs has been impeded by inpenetrable bureacratic and legal steps, but even if HP fails to cut the jobs in France through some combination of bribes and threats the word will get out that France's employment laws are employer hostile and thus dissuade investment by both French and foreign companies. This means that Vile Pin's "full unemplyment in 10 years" goal is rather unlikely to become reality.
As if that were not enough on the labour front, France's trade unions have declared October 4th to be a day of action with strikes all over the place. Already the rail unions and (some) public sector "workers" have promised (in)action. Given that Vile Pin doesn't seem to think that sacking the latter is a good idea (Sarko does), there seems to be little doubt that the strikes will continue because the "workers" have very little to lose by going on strike and lots to gain if it results in their grabbing a bigger bit of the national pie. These strikes are nominally being called to protest privatization but if they combine with the fuel issues we could see some interesting events next month.
Vile Pin did apparently manage to weasel his way out of responsibility for the bra wars but I suspect that this is an issue that will come back to haunt him, as may the ongoing EU banana dispute. Indeed one suspects that France's EU partners may also be annoyed with his attempts to cut income taxes and thus run illegally large deficits and so on. If Schröder loses (which is less of a certainty than I thought it was) France is going to look increasingly isolated, despite it nominally being on the right as are Merkel's CDU/CSU.
The gentleman who runs the Alpheccar blog is a blogger in Nice and he has created a page just for Riviera bloggers. So far there appear to be five of us, 1 Frenchman, 1 Englishman (me) 2 Americans and a Canadian, but I hope more will appear in due course. The lot are added to my blogroll in a new section for locals.
I've noticed that the archive list is getting rather long. I think this could be the final catalyst in moving the blog from its current very pure Javascript delivery to a smarter one using DHTML and Iframes and possibly XML (though don't hold your breath WRT the latter - it probably breaks too many browsers even today).
I suspect most of my readers never click anywhere else on the site other than my blog page but if anyone is interested I have uploaded a lot of photos of recent Riviera H3 excursions into the hills over the last few months.
With the sort of dynamic anti-nuclear proliferation actions that we expect from the World's nuclear policeman, the IAEA follows up the collapse of the EU3's attempts to bribe Iran to behave properly by recommending that the world do nothing:
BERLIN (Reuters) - The U.N. atomic watchdog fears referring Iran to the U.N. Security Council now for possible sanctions would split its members and would rather set a new deadline for Iran to halt sensitive work, diplomats said.
The 35-nation governing board of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) begins on Monday. The main issue will be an EU-U.S. plan to refer Iran to the Security Council, which could lead to economic sanctions over fears Iran seeks nuclear arms.
"Everything points in the direction of a need for more time. So it would be in everbody's favor to give it some three or four weeks," a senior diplomat close to the Vienna-based atomic watchdog told Reuters on Wednesday on condition of anonymity.
What precisely is the point of "more time" or a further deadline? It is obvious to all observers that Iran has no intention of complying so the only effect of more time is to, as the article explains, make it harder for the IAEA to report Iran to the security council because the next IAEA board "will have more NAM (non-aligned movement) states on it"
Of course quite what the UN Security Council will do is another matter. One suspects the answer is very little but the only reason I can see for not reporting Iran to the UNSC is to try and hide the fact that the entire IAEA/NPT process is completely toothless with no serious punishment possible for violators. Permalink
HP obviously didn't get the message that it is illegal to lay people off in France. As I noted last week, the French government was less than impressed with HP's plans to downsize its European operations, and in particular its French ones where it is planning to cut a quarter of the workforce. So HP have been referred to theEU for judgement:
France could be heading for a clash with Hewlett-Packard after President Jacques Chirac on Tuesday asked for the US computer maker to be referred to the European Commission over its plan to cut 1,240 jobs in France.
Mr Chirac told the government's monthly employment committee to ensure the US group respected French employment law. HP is cutting 6,000 jobs in Europe by 2008 out of 14,500 jobs worldwide, with its Grenoble research headquarters the hardest hit site in Europe.
“Given the reach of the plan across Europe, he also asked the government to [refer it to] the European Commission,” a person close to Mr Chirac told AFP on Tuesday.
A commission official said: “It is hard to see what the commission can do about an individual company laying off workers.”
For possibly the first time ever I am forced to agree with an EU commissioner. Mind you the EU isn't the only the only avenue l'Escroc & Vile Pin are working on. As with Nestlé there is also the threat of internal French law:
Mr Chirac has instructed his ministers to prepare an appropriate response to Hewlett-Packard's plan and make sure the company shows "full respect" for labour laws in France, where over 1,000 jobs are to be cut.
That same EU Observer article points out that (some) French "workers" and politicians are upset at their government's plan for slight "reforming" Fench labour laws. One suspects that the EU and other member states are laughing at the whole thing:
However, analysts argue that Mr Chirac's idea to address Brussels on HP's move is surprising, as the European Commission will not be able do anything to prevent it.
On top of this, the EU executive has recently sent opposite signals to the French authorities concerning Paris' protectionist initiatives, criticising a plan to set up a list of strategic French sectors and companies in which foreign takeovers should be forbidden.
The issue is yet another point to add to a list of topics for the upcoming extraordinary summit in London - due on on 27–28 October - in which Europe's leaders will discuss the challenges of globalisation and the pressure on the bloc's economy and social models.
BEIJING - China's success in orchestrating a landmark six-nation accord on ending North Korea's nuclear program has clinched its role as a major peacemaker in the region — regardless of the challenges ahead for the deal, analysts say.
Just hours after the deal was struck, communist North Korea said it will not dismantle its nuclear facilities until it gets light-water reactors from the United States. But Washington has already rejected that demand, calling into question the North's commitment to the accord.
On Tuesday however, Beijing downplayed the comment, urging only that all six countries make good on their promises reached after more than two years of fractious negotiations.
North Korea knows exactly what it has agreed to, said Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang.
"During consultations and moving ahead, we may encounter difficulties of this or that kind," Qin acknowledged.
Beijing appeared jubilant over having bridged the differences between its longtime ally Pyongyang and Washington — as well as its neighbors South Korea, Japan and Russia.
"China has worked to construct a lasting peace in Asia to the benefit of the entire world," said a commentary Tuesday in the communist party's newspaper, People's Daily. "There is no turning back."
It's a pity that the "agreement" seems to have broken down almost immediately as the second article says:
SEOUL, South Korea - North Korea on Wednesday accused the United States of intending to disarm the communist country and then "crush it to death with nuclear weapons" — two days after a landmark disarmament agreement that was expected to ease tensions.
North Korea pledged to give up its nuclear weapons program in return for economic aid and security assurances at six-nation talks in Beijing on Monday — the first breakthrough in more than two years of negotiations.
However, the country's rhetoric since then has cast doubt on its commitment to the agreement and underscored its unpredictability, though none of its negotiating partners say they expect a breakdown in the disarmament talks, scheduled to continue in November.
"The ulterior intention of the United States talking about resolving the nuclear issue under the signboard of the six-party talks is as clear as daylight," the North's Rodong Sinmun newspaper said in a commentary carried by the official Korean Central News Agency.
"In a word, it intends to disarm and crush us to death with nuclear weapons," the commentary said.
Washington has repeatedly denied North Korean allegations that it is planning an attack.
It seems like the Chinese are learning their diplomacy from the UN the signed piece of paper is the important bit and the actual implementation is the sort of tedious details that should be ignored. Permalink
That would be Arthur de Villepin and Euan Blair that is. Four years ago young Master Blair was found by police 'drunk and incapable' in the middle of London. Last Saturday young Monsieur de Villepin was found to be brawling, possibly drunkenly, in the middle of Paris. Ah well you say, "boys will be boys" and I tend to agree. Perhaps I have slightly more sympathy for Euan than Arthur having been 'drunk and incapable' myself at age 16 or so, but on the whole it is a wash. And on the whole I think it is good that they, like the Bush twins for that matter, are able to live enough of a normal life that they can get into trouble in the same way as any other teenager.
However what I find to be the most interesting thing about young Arthur's tail is that French officialdom has tried to do the communist airbrushing trick.
Le Canard, however, reported that "emissaries" from the interior ministry called at the local police station the following day to demand the report on the event. "There now remains no administrative record of the incident whatsoever," the usually well-informed weekly said.
The Paris police chief, Pierre Mutz, denied the story, saying in a statement it "did not correspond to the reality".
Fortunately the French press seems to be slightly less deferential than it used to be and is still reporting the incident and thanks to Mr Google and co said article can be cached and machine translated.
PS Note to Tim W - the machine translation thing still has a way to go as the link above demonstrates Permalink
Today the July 21 bombing suspect who pegged it to Italy will be extradited back the Blighty. A mere 7 weeks or so since he was arrested. I know we had the important August holidays in the middle but 7 weeks seems to be pretty slow going for that new highly efficient "European Arrest Warrant" thingy. Permalink
Am I the only person to see parallels between the British administration in Basra and the one in Belfast? Both seem to have let the terrorists into the government and, rather than convince them to give up their armed struggle, this seems only to have encouraged them. In Belfast, as the Times (via Tim W) reports:
In public, for far too long, the British Government likes to operate a convenient political lie when dealing with the IRA’s leadership. The Prime Minister, and the hollow men he has in the past installed at Hillsborough Castle, talk of Sinn Fein and the IRA as if they are two distinct entities. But a lie repeated, even a thousand times, is still a lie.
The reality, according to Ireland’s Justice Minister, Michael McDowell, whose intelligence services run a network of informers within the IRA, is far simpler — Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness are the IRA.
“The Provisional movement is dominated and has been dominated up till recently by one body and that is the Army Council of the IRA,” he says. “The IRA carried out those robberies, serious armed robberies, and had a separate fund-raising section. And the members of the Army Council must all have had knowledge of one kind or another of that campaign of robbery and violence and extortion which has kept the organisation going. Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness have been members of the Army Council throughout all of the relevant period we are talking about and it is inconceivable that as members of the Army Council they wouldn’t know the finances of their own organisation and what they are based on.”
What was clear last night was that the trust between the British army and Iraqi police - whom the British helped to train - has largely broken down. Many of the 7,000 Iraqi police in Basra are now said to owe allegiance not to the state, but to the mosque. According to some estimates, at least half will take orders from Moqtada al-Sadr, a radical Shia cleric.
Indeed, just as the IRA has tended to have a rather brutal approach to investigative journalists, so too do the Shia militia in Basra:
Earlier this year, Steven Vincent, a journalist working for the New York Times, reported that British authorities were reluctant to interfere in the militias' growing influence on the police. Shortly after his report was published, Mr Vincent was abducted by militiamen and shot dead.
and
At around this time (Ed: last Monday), in the south-west of the city, a second New York Times journalist was being murdered. Fakher Haidar al-Tamimi, 38, who had also worked for the Guardian, had written an article for the Times in which he criticised the British authorities' laissez-faire attitude. According to neighbours, one of the vehicles driven by the men who abducted him from his home was a police car.
I hope the recent Basra events turn out to be a wake-up call for the British occupation, but going on the way that they have been treating the IRA in Belfast I'm not terribly optimistic.
Update: Dafydd at Biglizards has some good Basra thoughts. (Why do I always find relevant posts about 5 minutes after I hit the UPLOAD button?)
Permalink
I missed the last couple of weeks due to feeble excuses such as being in Germany and not having a photo that I wished to share. This week I thought I might show how the olives on one of my trees are ripening nicely. As usual click on the image to see it enlarged and click here for the previous image Permalink
Some magazine I have never heard of which is "...supported by Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt." is running a poll for the Europeans of the year 2005. Unfortunately there seems to be no opportunity for write in candidates so one is frequenty forced to vote for the "least bad" candidate. Also, rather peculiarly, many of the choices are supposed to be considered based on 2004 performance which is odd for a poll coming out about two thirds of the way through 2005.
There are some interesting choices and omissions though. For example there is
Commissioner of the Year
Which of the following European Commissioners has had the most impact on EU policy in 2004?
Dalia Grybauskaite, Budget
Charlie McGreevy, Internal Market
Louis Michel, Development
Olli Rehn, Enlargement
Günter Verheugen, Enterprise and Industry
One regrets that the fragrant one appears to have not made the cut.
I also note that, assuming you have a system with throwaway email addresses, it looks like it would be possible to vote early and often. Not that I'm suggesting that anyone actually do that of course.
The one category that has any great interest was "Campaigner of the year" where there seem to be at least two worthy entrants, Florian Müller and Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
Campaigner of the Year
Who has made the boldest social or political stand in 2004?
Bono, Rock star turned politician
Bob Geldof, Rock star turned politician
Laurent Fabius, French Socialist Politician
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Dutch Policitian
Florian Müller, Nosoftwarepatents.com
Krzysztof Turowski, from the Association of Polish Tourism POT
I never thought I would ever write that title. But sometimes even someone as reliably on the wrong side of every argument as Sir Simon manages to get something right. Now I admit to a certain amount of damning with faint praise and quibbling with details here but Sir Simon's article about ZaNULabour's proposed anti-terrorism laws truly nails the problem:
The home secretary has promised the prime minister that he will lock away for five years anyone who "glorifies, exalts or celebrates" a terrorist act committed in the past 20 years. He does not care if glorification was not meant. If someone, somewhere takes anything that I say or write as encouraging to terror, even if they do not act on it, I have committed a criminal act.
Nor is this all. Lest any crackpot thinks he can dance up and down any old high street praising Hitler, Mao or Uncle Joe as outside the 20-year limit, Clarke is preparing a list of earlier terrorist acts that also render their celebrants criminals. After "listed" historic buildings we have "listed" historic terrorisms. To the glorious chronicles of our island race, Clarke is to append an open-ended catalogue of listed events. They may include any acts of violence against people, property or, bizarrely, electronic systems anywhere in the world if intended to advance a political, religious or ideological cause or to influence a government.
Perhaps worse, having made such a sweeping initial plan they then intend to arbitrarily limit it
Already we are told that Clarke's listed events will not include anything Irish. Why? King William's campaign is life and breath to loyalist militants, as is the 1916 Easter Rising to Blair's pet insurrectionists, the IRA. Why should these groups be excused the law? Soon anyone who visits terror on the British people will negotiate a "listed events exclusion clause" as part of their final settlement.
Now I admit that Sir Simon does shortly afterwards briefly veer off the rails in calling Hiroshima "a politically motivated assault on people and property" - a description which either applies every act of war ever comitted anywhere in world or fundamentally misunderstands the anticipated conventional war costs of invasion - but he manages to recover:
I have no faith in Clarke's Stalinist historians. If Whitehall bureaucrats are so otherworldly as to find village ponds, conker trees and rare steaks awash in human hazard, there is no telling what they will find in the bloodstained pages of history. They need only to find a dodgy event and someone to praise it and they will pounce.
There are a couple of other places where I disagree with his examples, for example when he talks about the government's "stok[ing] of war fever in 2002/2003" and his curious description of Silvio Berlusconi as "no friend of the press", which seems to ignore that fact that Signor Berlusconi owns the press in Italy, but in the main this is an article that anyone suspicious of government would support. Permalink
The French financial newspaper, Les Echos, has an interesting article on why l'Escroc (and Vile Pin) are so upset with HP. The article is here and the google translation is here. What it boils down to is that l'Escroc & co came up with something that they called "pôles de compétitivité" last year where identified certain regions and technologies as being key to French economic success. One of the pôles selected just before everyone went off on their "vaccances" was the High Tech sector in Grenoble and it was based around a certain American company's labs and factories there. As a result HP's decision to cut a boat load of jobs in Grenoble rather destroys the "raison d'être" of the Grenoble pôle de compétitivité or rather it demonstrates that the whole theory was utter tosh.
If France were a place where high tech companies were queueing up to invest in then the fact that one company was about to lay off 1000 well trained employees and vacate the premises then this would be seen as an opportunity by other companies to snatch up a ready made labour force and the offices to house it. Of course as is demonstrably the case the queue of companies desperate to employ French high tech workers is approximately 0 companies long and hence HP's departure is rather painful. Les Echos quotes an FT article that says that the various fiscal and tax incentives, which the government would now like HP to pay back, are insufficient to counteract the "lack of flexibility of the French labout market and the 35 hour week" (my translation) and there is no doubt that HP is far from alone in that basic opinion.
Meanwhile, in what I see as proof that the government recognises that no foreign company will ever invest in France, the FT has an article based on a Les Echos interview (subscription required) with Vile Pin where he calls for 'economic patriotism', which isn't protectionism (honest guv!):
“I am absolutely convinced that France has exceptional assets and has nothing to fear from international competition. But our forces must by united, organised, and mobilised so that we have the will to win together, business chiefs, social groups, the state, and workers,” he said in an interview in Les Echos newspaper. French talk of economic patriotism has provoked concern at the European Commission and in international boardrooms, amid fears that Paris could be lurching back towards protectionism.
This summer, French politicians, including Mr de Villepin, warned PepsiCo, the US group, not to launch a hostile takeover bid for Danone, the publicly owned French foods company. The government is also drawing up a list of 10 strategic industries to be shielded from foreign ownership.
[...]Mr de Villepin contradicted Les Echos' assertion that Danone was a global company. “I do not believe it. Danone's bases are in France: its milk collection and water sources are in France. The culture of the enterprise and its management remain profoundly French,” he said.
Personally my "economic patriotism" extends about as far as wine and cheese, but despite that I'm doing my best. For example my local Auchan is offering entirely drinkable fizzy wine at €1/bottle and it is really hard to argue against being economically patriotic and not blowing €18 on three cases of the stuff. Permalink
There is a storm in a teacup in that second-rate university called Dartmouth (not to be confused with the British Naval College of the same name) because someone mentioned the J word in an official speech. And by J word I don't mean Jews, I mean JESUS. Apparently Dartmouth is so tolerant that they can't tolerate mention of the founder of one of the world's greatest religions. Joe's Dartblog has at leastthreeposts on the subject and links to the a frothing letter and editorial which the speech inspired. I am an atheist, or at the very least an agnostic, so in theory I should be as insulted as anyone else but I'm not for the very good reason that I don't see anything to get upset about. As a graduate from a proper university and, apparently, unlike the editorial board at "the Dartmouth" and a Ms Elisabeth Sherman the president of "Hillel", I am capable of logical thought, capable of reading, and capable of research using google.
To take Ms Sherman first. She has her knickers in a twist because the speaker said in effect that "Jesus died to save us all" and she feels that as a Jew, Jesus did not in fact die to help her. Unfortunately for Ms Sherman Christian doctrine says that Jesus did in fact die for everyone, believers or not. The doctine says that "Jesus died to take away the sin of the world" without any qubbbling about bits of the world. It is true that doctrine also says that he "died so that all who believe in him should have eternal life" which means that unbelievers don't get eternal life, but that is in addition to his taking away the sin of the world. To put it in materialistic terms its like how subscribers to the Economist magazine get additional benefits compared to those who buy it on the newsstand even though both groups, as well as those who read it for free in libraries etc., get to read the articles.
Then there is the editorial which complains that the speaker implied that Jesus was the only was to show good character, a claim which can be shown to be ridiculous by anyone who reads the speech:
...Character has a lot to do with sacrifice, laying our personal interests down for something bigger. The best example of this is Jesus. ...
Did the editors miss the word "best" or do they not understand what it means. To put it very very bluntly, the word "best" is not a synonym for "only".
I don't say the speech was perfect, but I think that its critics show themselves up to be uneducated about the key doctrines of one of the world's major religions and, apparently, unable to parse sentences in what I assume to be their native language - English. Apparently they are proud that they don't understand what a third of the people on the planet believe in which seems to be both somewhat myopic and not consonant with the express purpose of Dartmouth's liberal curriculum
Furthermore, according to these critics, it is inappropriate to even hint at personal religious belief in public if one is a Christian. I'm tempted to wonder what would have happened had the speaker used the founder of another major religion as his "best" example of sacrifice. It is true that Mohammed doesn't seem to have any well known act that counts, but believers in at least two other well-known religions believe that their founder made or tried to make a signifcant sacrifice. Abraham was prepared to sacrifice his only son in obedience to his God's will and the Buddha gave up his life as a pampered royal prince. Do you think that if the speech had concerned the Buddha's sacrifice it would have been considered quite so controversial?
At my fotolog and flickr yesterday I posted a picture of a bottle of wine. There is nothing particularly special about the bottle except for its price - ONE EURO
I drink most wine because its pleasing and cheap. We have some seriously good California Petite Syrah and some fairly good French reds sitting around for special occasions, but for everyday pleasure I'm as happy with the local plonk as anything else. It is rare that it is bad these days (once upon a time that was not the case but even the French have learned basic hygiene and quality control) and every now and then we find a chateau/year that is excellent and go back to buy a few cases. The big difference between these wines and the ones I used to drink in California is the price. Wine that I paid $10 or so a bottle in California costs about €5 here.
Indeed I have noticed that the lower grades of Appellation Controlé wine (e.g. our local Côtes de Provence) seem to be dropping in price. Thanks to California, Chile, Australia etc. providing competition, the French have a major wine lake and hence us residents of France have a patriotic duty to drink the stuff :)
The other reason for living in the south of France is the scenery. Now when men say "scenery" and "Riviera" they often think of topless babes sunning themselves on the beach and I would be lying if I said that I didn't enjoy that sort of "mobile scenery" as much as the next heterosexual male (although I do think that those whose birthday suits need ironing, as it were, might do the world a favour by covering up). However the mobile scenery is nothing compared to the fixed scenery, whether it is the islands and beaches, the perched villages, the mountains, the forests or the vinyards where they grow the grapes for my plonk. From where I live I can be almost anywhere on the coast from Toulon to Menton in under an hour of driving and yet I can also be a thousand meters up in about the same time or possibly less and in two hours I can be up in seriously alpine terrain. France is of course far less densely populated than the UK and it really shows. Even "oop noorth" in the UK it can be difficult to get be far from the madding crowd as it were, but in France, even on the trendy Riviera, its easy. Permalink
I apologise to Alpheccar and my other French readers for nationalistic slur in the title but it was exactly what passed through my mind when I saw this poster on the RER in Paris last night.
I'm not quite clear whether it will be good for the USA to get inundated with Frenchmen via the green card lottery, but I don't see it as anything other than a negative for France. A commenter on one of my recent HP rants made the excellent point that the French have won a lot of Fields Medals in recent years (although I feel forced to point out that a certain fenland university won 2 out of 4 of those given in 1998) but I wonder how many of these mathematicians will remain in France. Far worse for France, I wonder how many wealth-creating entrepreneurs will remain, given the attitude of the French government (and media) towards successful businessmen.
On that note this morning the Hotel gave me a free Figaro which contained, in addtion to an interview with an incredibly smug P Mandelson, an interview with the boss of HP France who said - basically - that demands for him to repay state aid would be more effective if he had actually made use of any in the past.
Je ne peux que le répéter : HP n'a jamais bénéficié de subvention pour créer des emplois. Comme toute entreprise qui s'installe dans une ville, nous avons bénéficié de travaux d'aménagement de voiries et d'accès aux terrains sur lesquels le groupe a bâti. Je trouve légitime que le premier ministre rappelle qu'une entreprise qui aurait bénéficié de subventions liées à des créations d'emplois les rembourse si elle ne tient pas ses engagements. De mon côté, je ne peux pas rembourser quelque chose que je n'ai pas touché !
Apparently HP thought that its business should stand on its own two feet and not receive some sort of government subsidy other than the usual one of building roads etc. that one expects from a government back development project. Moreover, as he points out, HP has paid €700 Million in taxes during the last 10 years ...
Just to add insult to injury the Figaro also points out that the people who will be paying for the reforms to the French health service are "les entreprises" and/or their "salariés" because of an additional tax of 7.5% on their profit-sharing arrangements. So here you are a hypothetical M. Entrepreneur sitting in the RER on your way to your job in central Paris. You read the Figaro and discover that if you are successful in France the government refuses to let you lay people off and no matter what you get extra taxes on top of other taxes if you dare to make a profit. Then you look up and see this poster. C'est une grande tentation n'est ce pas? Permalink
The French business news is dominated by three separate stories today. Yesterday the former CEO of a Thales division (THEC) gave an interview with Le Monde (translated here) where he discussed how Thales has been bribing its way to contracts all over the place - including the Nice Tramway, a project which frustrates every inhabitant of Nice that I know. The EU Referendum blog has a detailed translation and commentary and I see no reason to try and better it, save to say that the bribery scandals surrounding the Nice Tramway project appear to have included just about every relevant local politician and quite a few civil servants.
In fact this would seem to have been standard practise for contracts in almost all of the world excluding Australia, New Zealand, North America and "parts of Europe". France, however is most definitely not in the bribefree part of Europe though. The rumours of French municipal corruption have always been there but until recently it has been rare to find anyone actually talking about it publically, let alone someone actually doing anything about it. Another point made is that according to Mr. Josserand is that Thales has effectively been forced to bribe its way to contracts almost everywhere and claims (and I personally see no reason to doubt) that in places such as Russia not paying the bribe would result in paying of more taxes. The company is less than happy with his revelations and has announced that it will file a complaint against him and Le Monde, however in the interview he stated that he felt that the whole reason the Nice Tramway scandal had been handled was to make him a scapegoat and thus one suspects that he has considerably more evidence sitting around somewhere to cause discomfort.
In other news the "workers" at SNCM - the state owned ferry service to Corsica - are extremely upset at plans to privatize it (translation), a plan which will result in the loss of 400 jobs and involves a firm called Butler Capital Partners, so thy are blocakding the parts of the port of Marseilles and fighting the police.
In my view a far better solution would be to shut the entire service down and sell the ships to someone who will employ sailors that aren't members of the Communist CGT trade union. The SNCM seems to have been on strike almost continuously over the last year and I am told that as a result bookings are way down. It seems people prefer to travel with Corsica Ferries instead because they stand a better chance of actually getting to/from the island on the date they intended. Mind you the CGT don't seem to have quite grasped the damage they have done to SNCM's reputation with statements that they are refusing to "laisser livrer ce joyau du service public maritime (...) aux armateurs privés" (refusing to let this jewel of maritime public service be delivered into private hands). If you think SNCM is a jewel then I have a bridge I can sell you.
Finally Le Monde today goes back to our poor friends HP (translation). It seems that the government would like to form a code of conduct with state aid where companies understand in advance what sort of poisoned chalice they are being offered what their duties and responsibilities are. It is noted that this clearly can't be made to retrospectively apply to HP, who will just be begged to stay by no less a person that Vile Pin himself:
Il a appelé le groupe à "redéfinir une stratégie d'avenir en France et en Europe" en soulignant que la France pouvait offrir un "développement approprié" à travers les pôles de compétitivité, qui visent à mettre en réseau entreprises, unités de recherche et centres de formation.
He invited the group "to redefine a strategy with a future in France and Europe" by stressing that France could offer a "suitable development" through the poles of competitiveness, which aim at putting in together a network of enterpises, units of research and training centers.
This all seems reasonable so you think that maybe the French government has become sane until you reach the last paragraph where you learn that the real reason why HP is so scandalous is that it dares to make a profit somewhere in the world. Apparently to the leaders of France if you make a profit you have no excuse to cut employment in France, irrespective of whether the French employees are a significant contributor to that profit or not.
At my flickr pages I have some photos of Paris, which took when I visited on Monday. These photos include pictures of a certain well known church and hence Yahoo's ever so clever contextual ad service has come up with the following:
I don't know whether the viewership of my flickr photos are European or American, but I am pretty sure that, whether or not they think football is played with feet and a spherical ball or hands and a non-spherical one, they are unlikely to want to buy tickets to a game while they look at a photograph of one of the masterpieces of Western European architecture. Permalink
Given the complaints by the "workers", the government of l'Escroc and Vile Pin has decided that it will not in fact privatize SNCM.
PARIS, Sept 29 (Reuters) - The French government backed away from fully privatising a loss-making ferry company on Thursday to try to quell protests that have blocked the country's main Mediterranean oil port.
Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin said the state was prepared to keep a minority stake in the SNCM ferry company, shifting policy the day after ordering elite forces to storm a ferry hijacked by seamen protesting against the sell-off plans.
"I want to save this company," he told a news conference. "It has 2,400 workers, it has a public service mission."
It seems churlish to point out that its "public service mission" is connecting the island of Corsica with mainland France, something that is also performed by the Italian Corsica Ferries (and others IIRC) so it isn't as if the island of Corsica will lose contact with the world if SNCM ceases to exist. But of course Vile Pin needs an excuse to make it look like he is not completely craven in giving in to public protests by a few hundred people at most:
Overnight disturbances on Corsica, the French-run Mediterranean island served by SNCM, reflected the passions enflamed by the dispute. Protesters set fire to vehicles and threw stones at police in a three-hour standoff.
...
A sympathy strike by shipworkers at the Fos-Lavera oil terminal near Marseille ran into a third day on Thursday, but refineries that depend on the port were operating smoothly.
The SNCM crisis foreshadows a day of union protests next Tuesday over the conservative government's reforms and highlighted tensions between Villepin's drive to cut high unemployment, reduce state spending and sell nationalised firms.
Part of the problem is that the French either don't have or don't enforce legislation on sympathy strikes and the like, which means that, as in this case, the extremist union members in one industry get support from their fellows in other ones. Another part of the problem is that the unions have already decided to have a major day of action next week and no doubt Vile Pin hoped that by settling this one he would remove one of the planks for that protest. To me this looks like bad strategy because it makes the government look weak and thus will incite the wackoes to demand even more stupid concessions.
Possibly the only good thing to do with the EU is their disapproval of state aid and in this respect it looks like the Vile Pin deal is going to face a good grilling:
Finance Minister Thierry Breton said he would go to Brussels on Friday to clear the rescue plan with European Union competition authorities. A private group also runs ferries between Corsica and mainland France.
"The question for Brussels is not how much is owned by the state and how much is owned privately," said EU Transport Commissioner Jacques Barrot on LCI television. "The question is working out whether the company will be able to respect the rules of fair competition," he said.
One wonders whether Brussels will be tactless enough to ask for more details in the HP 'complaint'. Mind you, of course, if SNCM remains in its current strike prone form it will not pose any threat to its competitors simply because no one will be willing to risk travelling on it so the only real result of the French government managing to subsidize it will be to decrease the chances of France complying with the Stability and Growth Pact. Perhaps the EU chaps will mention that to the French Finance Minster since France's budget is already under considerable criticism:
PARIS (AFX) - France's budget deficit, already on track to exceed 3 pct of output this year, will widen even further in 2006, despite a series of 2006 budget promises aimed at reining in spending, economists said.
If, as widely expected, the public deficit overshoots the government's target of 3 pct of GDP this year, it will mark the fourth straight year that France has failed to respect the terms of the euro zone's Stability and Growth Pact.
Overall debt, for its part, will remain well above the pact's threshold of 60 pct of GDP both this year and next, a breach that was openly acknowledged by the government in its 2006 budget presentation yesterday.
In effect, the budget has been built on spending and growth forecasts, including economic growth of 2.25 pct next year, that few economists consider attainable.
'The growth forecast is a risky bet,' said Emmanuel Ferry, chief economist at Exane BNP Paribas. He added that the government's goal of keeping the debt-to-GDP ratio limited at 66 pct is 'totally unrealistic' -- he sees this ratio reaching 70 pct next year.
All in all it doesn't seem to me that caving in to union demands for more government spending is sensible but yet that is precisely what Vile Pin's lot are doing.
The body that UN types would like to run critical pieces of the internet in place of ICANN, namely the ITU, has not, as of today, bothered to ensure that its own class B IP address range was protected from hijacking. Fortunately for it the administrator (RIPE) locked the address range but it did so over a year ago and the ITU has yet to do anything about it.
ICANN has certainly not been the perfect body we would all like but it does seem to understand the interwebnetthingy unlike the ITU.
Since I'll be travelling tomorrow (Sayonara France! Bonjour Japan!) I'm posting this a little early - but hey it's already Friday in Japan so not by much. This is a wild, apparently self sown olive tree on the Ile de Poquerolles that seems to have no other olive trees near by it. I'd guess its about 3-4 years old and I really do wonder how on earth is got there. As always click on the image to see it enlarged and be sure to visit previous images in the series.