This blog is currently being brought to you from a house about 50 yards from the river Go in extremely rural Japan as you can see from the picture below which I took this morning. For those curious souls who want to know where in Japan this the answer is - find Hiroshima and go north about 130 km. and if that isn't much use then it is approximately under the 4 of the "34" in this map.
Being stuck in the middle of nowhere, and a foreign middle of nowhere at that, not to mention having been without any internet for 3 days (travelling and tourism), I was fascinated to start reading blogs again and see what I missed. About the only thing that seems likely to be of long term importance is the Bali attack, everything else looks like the usual hurricane in a teacup. I mean if you start from the assumptions that the MSM hates Bush and conservatives, reflexively opposes policies that they espouse - even if they supported them when espouses by someone else, and sees no reason not to blatently twist the words of anyone they disagree with then about 99% of all the comments on US blogs can be predicted in general terms. With some slight changes of MSM gods/devils the same can be said for Europe too.
Perhaps in Japan I can get a sense of perspective - although distance is not always a palliative - about events elsewhere. Although the scenery is fantastic and the sense of peace palpable, the rural idyl is easily pieced once you take a closer look. Rural Japan, for example, is the beneficiary of pork to a degree that would make the average French farmer or Louisiana politician choke on his subsidy application. Although the rules have broken down slightly, for the last 50 years the pact between rural Japan and their politicians has been we vote for you, you get the cities to pay for our roads and other amenities. The results are displays of concrete, in terms of bridges, tunnels, cuttings, embankments, dams etc. that are utterly boggling. Trust me the inhabitants of Shimaneken aren't worried about typhoons washing their roads etc away. On the other hand though, while there is corruption in the quid pro quo sense, there isn't the sort of corruption you see where shoddy materials get substituted for the real thing. I'm very glad that I haven't had to pay for it but the work is generally speaking top quality and earthquake proof. One reason why other countries suffer more in disasters is that stuff is rarely built to spec; we know that earthquake death tolls in countries such as China, Iran and Turkey were higher than they should have been because many buildings were built below offiical standards (I'd also be curious to know why the various causeways in Mississippi/Louisiana collapsed), and, despite some unexpected discoveries in the Kobe earthquake, I think it is fair to say that this is not the case in Japan.
I need to stop and go to bed, so I'm going to leave with one final point. Gasoline prices in Japan do not seem to have risen as much as they have in Europe (or the US) over the last year or two. Petrol now costs about ¥125/litre and some 18 months ago it cost about ¥105/litre which translates to a roughly 20% rise in price. Petrol in France has easily risen 30% over the same timeframe and it could be worse. I have no idea why this is so, it could be exchange rate issues, but it is one thing that makes Japan seem to be cheaper that it used to be. Permalink
In a news story on events in Gaza, Reuters manages, for the first time ever (to my knowledge) to explain why Hamas is targetted by Israel and why Israel objects to Hamas being permitted to run in elections:
Hamas is defying Abbas in a power struggle whose stakes have risen since Israelis departed Gaza after 38 years of occupation.
Abbas wants to talk peace with Israel, while Hamas refuses to disarm and vows to destroy Israel.
(My emphasis) This would seem to be good news but the critical line is the last line in the article and there is absolutely no context so it seems likely to be ignored by readers. However, now that Reuters has admitted this uncomfortabel fact about Hamas once it will be interesting to see if it is repeated the next time Hamas and Israel clash in some form or other...
Actually, looking at coverage of the Gaza strip from Yahoo, it seems like the media is on the whole becoming rather anti-Hamas. Take, for example, this AFP article. Again the key passages appear near the end of the article, but they don't make Hamas look good to anyone who reads them.
A security source said the clashes began when Mohammed Rantissi, the son of an assassinated Hamas leader, became embroiled in a dispute with another Palestinian who wanted to use a cash machine before him.
Hamas called the official version of events "lies" and accused the Palestinian Authority of inciting Hamas "even at the price of civil war".
Tensions between the two were only likely to be exacerbated by an official report that concluded sole blame for a deadly blast at a Hamas rally in the Gaza Strip last month lay with the fundamentalist faction.
Straws in the wind and maybe just something that impresses only the incurable optimist in me but just possible that Sharon's Gaza move is going to be seen as tactical genius in that it forces the world's media, hitherto uncritical supporters of anything Palestinian, to actually look at what they are supporting. Further evidence is that the France 2 scam about Muhammed al-Dura, the so-called "martyr", has received considerable critical coverage recently with French journalists questioning the official story from France 2 and the Palestinians.
Hamas normally adopts the most hostile possible tone towards Israel. It talks not only of confronting the occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, but also of being determined - one day - to march on to Jaffa and Tel Aviv.
[... T]here are some signs that Hamas's recent tactics have failed to impress the wider Arab world - a constituency that matters to the movement.
"The bitter truth is that armed parades and failed rockets are really a weapon in Israel's hands," wrote a commentator in the Saudi daily, Asharq al-Awsat.
And one writer in a Jordanian paper was also critical.
"Hamas is placing obstacles in the way of its own participation in the political process," he said.
Hamas has clearly decided that it has nothing to gain by pushing this crisis further. But it is Israel that will decide when it comes to an end. Within hours of Hamas's announcement that it was halting its attacks, the Israeli air force had struck again.
And so if Hamas is to stick by its pledge to rein itself in, it will have to sit and absorb punishment until Israel calls off its offensive.
It is not a comfortable position for a movement that portrays itself as the iron fist of the Palestinian resistance.
Nowhere in this piece is there any sign that the BBC consider's that Hamas' "hostile (...) tone towards Israel" is anything other than a negotiable ploy and/or publicity play. To the BBC it would seem that when someone (other than a US president) talks about streets running with the blood of infidels then they are speaking metaphorically and that really all they want to do is get a few minor grievences sorted out around tea and sandwiches. With luck
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Following on from yesterday's post on Rural Japan I thought I might make a few comments about the good and the bad sides of life in Japan. To start with the Cute, since it follows on from yesterdays' pork discussion, I present this example of the sort of signs that festoon places where road construction pork is being spent (click on the photo to see it larger).
Japanese signs frequently have cute animals on them telling you not to do something or warning you about something. In some cases (I recall a picture of a fish with its fins above its eyes being hit by a drinkcan illustrating a sign requesting people to not throw their litter in the river) the cute animal makes sense, in other cases - such as the example on the left - the cute animals seems completely out of context. In fact this segues nicely into a couple of the bad points about rural Japan. The first is the amount of totally pointless signs that seem to have proliferated everywhere. They are only eclipsed by the amount of other totally unsightly and generally useless stuff such as railings, flshing lights and other things that are intended to improve road safety at the price of ruining the scenery.
However, while the new roads are, as I say, gold plated pork with all mod cons, the older roads require care and attention to drive on. Not only are they narrow, twisty and full of blind corners, they frequently have ditches at the side without any guard rails so there is always the worry that in your attempt to pass a pedestrian you accientally run off the road. What makes the whole thing more fun is that the new roads frequently turn into the old style roads with practically no warning... It is true that compared to say roads in France even the old ones are well maintained with none of those "Trous en formation" or other hints that the road surface is rutted and falling to bits and that you don't get total morons driving down them at high speed. I assume the latter is because Darwin has had his way with such drivers, although it could be because the sorts of Japanese that want to do that don't live in the countryside.
The good parts of rural Japan are the community spirit and adherence to old traditions. For example last Sunday, the day after we arrived here, the locals were having a community walk. This involved over 100 people of all ages from about 2 months (he/she was carried) to distinctly elderly (over 65 is the best I can come up with as an estimate) and all sorts of people being volunteered to lead the walking groups and prepare the feast that awaited us on our return. As a minor celebrity, as probably the only gaijin for miles around, let alone the only one with any connection to the area, I was surrounded by people during the walk and fed one delicacy after another afterwards and I picked up a lot from the questions. It was fascinating to have people wonder why I like coming here (other than it being my perents-in-laws' home), they seemed amazed when I explained that it was because it is tranquil and beautiful. What stood out was how everyone genuinely appreciated the efforts of the organizers and how this sort of excuse for a social meeting gets repeated one way or another every few weeks. The next one, which I'll miss much to my disappointment, is the Matsuri (festival) and the Kagura performance that will go with it (my wife has photos of last year's one). As a result everyone knows everyone else and to some extent cares about what happens to them, you could call it gossip but I don't think it has the sort of malicious overtones that gossip has in English. On a sidenote: people often moan about rural depopulation and note Japan's depressing birthrate, but this part of Japan seems to be thriving with numerous children of all ages - the wife had a certain amount of trouble matching children to parents and grandparents.
Then there are the traditions. Now I admit that these are somewhat funded by Japan's equivalent of the EU's Common Agricultural Policy, and that this little piece of Shimane-ken is a poster child for land that is generally unsuitable for growing rice efficently, given that rice needs flat ground and the land around here is pretty vertical unless laboriously terraced (see photo on RHS). Yet on the other hand despite the difficulties, not having fields would make the countryside look far worse. Japan has such a wet climate and its soil is so fertile that if you abandon a field or greenhouse it only takes a couple of years for it to be covered in vines and be only recognisable as formerly cultivated land by the fact that it doesn't have any trees on it. After 10 years or so, especially if the bamboo has spread, then even that judgement is hard to make. The locals do maintain many rural traditions, from harvesting some fields by hand to the aforementioned matsuri and I think that many urban Japanese, even if they themselves would not visit or see these traditions, do value their retention and see them as a worthwhile use of their (relatively low) taxes.
I guess I have seen this before on previous trips to Japan, but if so it slipped my memory. Anyway people who see a picture of a Japanese politicanstaken over the next few weeks will probably see that they are sporting a red feather on the lapel of their suit, and indeed travellers to Japan may notice that many other people are also wearing the same thing.
One way that Japan gets by with lower taxes and less goverment than other places is that it doesn't really have a welfare state. Instead it has a system similar to that which used to exist in England before 1945 where there are lots of charitable foundations who provide assistance. The biggest one of the lot, similar in some ways to the US United Way - with which it is affiliated, is the Akai Hane or Red Feather. The Akai Hane is a voluntry organization which collects money primarily via an annual campaign that starts on October 1 and lasts until December 31 and spends it on all sorts of useful services.
It has a pretty serious budget, having collected some ¥20 billion (US$175 million, €146 million) in 2004, all raised by donation, and all in all it seems be the sort of thing that could usefully be proposed in Europe as an alternative to our welfare states. Obviously it is no substitute for all government spending but it would help communities provide the services they deem necessary without needing to get approval in triplicate fro 23 different ministries and departments in London (and possibly these days Brussels). Permalink
Amongst the still free parts of the NY Times, rather than behind the TimesDelete wall, are the book reviews; a section which I peruse from time to time because, while I rarely agree with their reviews I do find them thought-provoking and a good way to weed out the utter dross. Anyway over at Baen's Bar someone posted a link to a review last weekend of the immortal RAH by one MG Lord and it is a classic of NY Times reviews in that I agree with much of it but then get annoyed by the rest.
Let me start with the agreement first of all. I think it fair to say that all connaisseurs of Heinlein agree that he suffered a rather serious decline of form in last years, but that at his best he wrote stories which gripped on multiple levels. He certainly inspired space research and predicted a whole host of ideas that make him, in my opinion, about as important as Arthur C Clark in terms of getting use out of space. Moreover, although as a male who has grown up in a world where the core tenets of feminism are basically taken for granted, I think it is fair to say that I haven't always noticed Heinlein's "feminism" as much as MG Lord did, since she is (obviously) female and, I guess, older than I am but certainly I found that Heinlein frequently had attractive heroines who did more than sit around and let the hero save them and I absorbed this as being basically what was to be expected.
However this is where I begin to start having my disagreements; in some places I have to say that I drew a slightly different moral than did MG Lord. For example she writes:
Heinlein's women were not invisible or grossly subservient to men. Nor were they less technologically competent. The hero of "Starship Troopers" follows a woman he admires into the military. But because she is sharper than he, she gains admission to the prestigious pilot corps, and he winds up stuck in the infantry.
While I agree that Rico does indeed enlist in large part to impress, or at least try to keep up with, a woman (girl) he admires and thus RAH is clearly implying that women have a place in combat/leadership roles, that is surely not the only lesson that should be taken from the book. The point I took out was rather more subtle - namely that men and women can and do excel at different things and that trying to be equally competant at everything is destined to failure. This is not intended by any means to say women should excel at cooking and making babies while men do all the rough stuff, but to state what should be obvious that their strengths are different. [BTW I don't know if RAH is correct that female reaction time is on average faster than the male one or that they can take higher Gs - both of which IIRC were reasons that RAH gave for primarily female pilots - but it wouldn't surprise me].
This leads us to where I really part company with MG Lord, namely in her view of Friday. Friday is, IMHO, one of Heinlein's best, not quite up there with Starship Troopers or The Moon is a Hard Mistress perhaps but right behind them and definitely better as a story than Stranger in a Strange Land. Utterly ignoring the fact that Friday the heroine is basically a superwoman, which you would think ought to please the feminists - but doesn't; the book Friday clearly, and in great detail, predicts both a whole chunk of the problems we are seeing in the world today with regards to corporate abuse of the law, CCTV surveillance, identity theft and genetic engineering, as well as coming up with the space elevator that numerous people hope to build to make space travel possible. Ignoring the technical advances Friday graphically illustrates the possible end result of two trends visible today. Pervasive surveillance, as seen in London, is clearly demonstrated to be bad at its supposed role of stopping crimes (it is good for helping to shape the response and tracking down the criminals but it doesn't prevent determined criminals). Also, although we have not yet seen giant corporations behave quite as loosely as RAH has them behave in Friday, the parallels with behaviour today by certain corporations are most certainly present and he is absolutely correct that if a corporation decides that it wishes to destroy a (smallish) nation it can do so whereas the converse is far harder. Finally, and the key underpinning of the entire work, is the question of how mankind will cope with genetic modification. Given the hysterical reaction of many to geneically modified food, and to attempts to clone humans, this seems to be both prescient and absolutely relevant as a thought experiment to see what a world would be like where genetic engineering of humanity has occured.
The problem I have with the review starts with this:
Heinlein has also been attacked for being a misogynist - in large part for his 1982 novel, "Friday," whose eponymous woman narrator enjoys being raped.
I'm sorry to say but I seem to have read a different book to these attackers. I don't have it with me but I've read it sufficiently often that I can recall it well enough to state definitively that Friday never ever states she enjoys being raped. She is however a professional who has been trained in SERE or its equivalent and therefore has internalized that when captured "what can't be cured must be endured". Hence she tries (with some success) to try and pretend she enjoys it in order to try and get some sort of leverage over her captors and to some extent this works because they stop using rape as a tactic and try both drugs and physical torture. She also notes that one of her rapists is comparatively gentle and would be acceptable "under other circumstances" while the others are not. This does not sound to me like a woman who enjoys being raped. Nor does her general pleasure when told that her rapists all died, nor does her reaction when she discovered that the "acceptable under other circumstances" rapist actually survived and is standing watch over her a second time. True she doesn't actually kill him, but she makes it utterly clear that she feels that she has the perfect right to and that his survival depends on his cooperation and providing a convincing explanation. The fact that this then changes is because she is able to perceive that his explanation was reasonable and that he is not normally a rapist. I don't understand how it is possible to mistake acceptance for enjoyment, nor how an understanding that many males are aroused by BDSM implies a willingness to be an unwilling subject of such sexual acts, but this seems to be what the feminists are proposing. I think that her upbringing as an AP, which includes training to be a prostitute, undoubtedly helps her cope with being raped but it absolutely does not mean that she enjoys the experience.
The reviewer makes much of Heinlein's exploration of alternative marriage structures, and I certainly sympathise although my engineering brain thinks this isn't going to work. The problem is that while group marriages have been popular in fiction in practise most men and women seem to not deal well with sharing so you end up with one or two happy bosses and a bunch of subdued miserable cospouses. This is in fact strongly hinted at in Friday's ultimately failed NZ group marriage. A successful group marriage will require a lot more trust for spouses than a standard pair marriage becuase you have to trust more people and you have to work with the strong likelihood that some partners will be loved more than others thus leading to internal jealousies/envies as well as external ones. Still I agree with the reviewer that when it comes to supporting children a successful group marriage has much to commend it.
MG Lord later writes:
By the 1980's, however, he felt licensed to reveal more - or, in the case of Friday, to describe sexual experiences from a woman's point of view. Friday is an "Artificial Person"; she was conceived in vitro and brought to term in an incubator, which in the book's fictive world is a terrible stigma. To today's AIDS-conscious reader, however, Friday bears a worse stigma: she is a brazen disease vector, recklessly promiscuous, with a bizarre weakness for male engineers. (Heinlein trained as an engineer.) This gives unintended meaning to the idea of Artificial Person; Friday exists only as a mouthpiece. Heinlein has so thoroughly objectified her that her subjectivity falls flat.
This is so wrong that I really think that the UK edition of the book must be completely rewritten compared to the US one. Firstly the book Friday was written in the era of free love and before the knowledge of AIDS had become widespread so it seems unfair to stigmatize the protagonist for being written about at the end of a period where sexually transmitted diseases were believed to be relatively minor and curable. Secondly Friday is anything but a promiscuous slut. Except for the rape and at most two encounters where she makes a decision to trust based on little more than instinct, she has sex solely with people that she personally knows and trusts or are well-known (as in married to or similar) to people she knows also knows well. In a world where sex is not a gamble with an incurable disease, as in 1960s or 1970s America this is nothing like promiscuity. Thirdly the bizarre weakness for male engineers is total BS; the people we know she has sex with are not engineers, where we know their occupations they are in fact other secret agents/mercenaries (i.e. military personnel), doctors and nurses and they are both male and female.
Furthermore Friday has severe hangups about being an AP, not considering herself fully human as a result, and this absolutely impacts her love life. One could speculate where Heinlein got the idea from, I'd guess he stole it from the Indian "untouchable" caste, but no matter; to trivialise this struggle towards self-belief and self-confidence is to completely miss the point. To others Friday is a total babe who happens to also be astoundingly smart, strong and talented, but she still feels that she is second class and that she should either hide or minimise her talents. I would have thought that a feminist would see this as a metaphor for an unliberated woman believing that she has to submit to her husband/father etc. as in the Muslim world today, 19th century England or even as in a couple of earlier Heinlein juveniles. The way that she does eventually come to see herself as just as human as anyone else is surely the sort of thing that anyone fighting the legacy of discrimination should welcome and given that feminists build their entire thesis around fighting discrimination against women I find it bizarre that they can fail to read the book and see precisely these points. Finally I'll note that I found this lack of self-confidence in an otherwise talented woman to be an excellent guide to the some of the odder behaviours I encountered as a young man living in Japan, where sexist behaviour was far more common than in Europe (or the US).
The problem Heinlein faces with many of a the liberal bent (and MG Lord appears to be such) is that he was willing to attack hypocrisy on all sides. While many liberals liked books like Stranger, where BTW Heinlein addresses rape in direct fashion by positing that women learn how to remove would-be assailents from the world, they have a problem with his critiques of big government, democracy and concepts such s personal responsibility. It seems to me that the complaints about Friday spell from this particular blind-spot because they end up nitpicking the details where RAH fails to toe the current politically correct line and miss the big picture which they ought to be praising to the heavens. The whole point about Friday is that she is not an object but a person, the problem she faces is that the world's laws consider her to be an object and she was brought up in an environment that taught her the same, so saying that she is just a mouthpiece for her author seems to be putting her right back into the mold that the book spends showing how she breaks. Permalink
I won't say it was deliberate, but it is certainly true that I bore yesterday's national day of protest in mind when I planned my trip to Japan. Some other people seem to have thought that approaching no closer than 30,000 feet from France would be safe and they appear to have been wrong. Thus it is with great relief that I spent the day about 30 million feet from France and therefore totally unaffected by it.
The strikes themselves seem to have mostly involved the "workers" who suck at the public teat - teachers, rail workers etc so the prime reason for the strike seems to be totally irrelevant:
Unions are especially angry about labor laws passed by the center-right government in August, which make it easier for small companies to hire and fire workers.
It is interesting that surveys report that 60+% of French people "support" the strike but I wonder who the ~30% of people who disagreed with the strike were. Something tells me that these people are the private sector workers and bosses who pay for the rest of the layabouts - certainly within my acquaintaces, those who actually work in the private sector are far far less tolerant of the state than those who are either retired, unemployed or government "workers" and certainly it is true that the strikes were organized by the communists.
Mind you it is clear that the average public sector "worker" is not precisely clear on economics. From the BBC page:
Postal worker, Herve Grohan, is unconvinced by Mr de Villepin's arguments that the French state must tighten its belt and that the country is living beyond its means.
He disagrees strongly with the government's move to make it easier to hire and fire workers at smaller companies, even though the changes will not affect him directly.
Mr Grohan, 32, also believes higher wages in the public sector would stimulate spending and help create new jobs.
"I know the government doesn't have a lot of money, but if they paid people more, the money would be used and would go back into the economy."
When you read reports about events in Iraq it seems like somehow no matter how good things are only the negative must be emphasized. All of the MSM is guilty of this and this AP report seems to be a classic of the breed, starting with the headline "US Tries to Retake Three Euphrates Towns", it seems to look for the cloud for every conceivable silver lining and make as many dire predictions for the future as it possibly can.Of course part of this report, where it slips in the news about how the Iraqi parliament tried to changed the referendum rules, has already turned out to be wrong but it is hard to see any reason why this political issue should have any business in a report on military action unless the idea is to make everything look negative and even just the military parts are bad enough.
HADITHA, Iraq - U.S. troops pushed through streets sown with bombs Tuesday in their biggest operation this year in western Iraq, seeking to retake three Euphrates River towns from al-Qaida insurgents. At least five U.S. service members have been killed in the fighting.
As with the earlier U.S. offensive ? code named Iron Fist ? it appeared many fighters may have slipped away beforehand.
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Operation River Gate was notable for the strongest participation this year by Iraqi troops ? U.S. commanders said hundreds were involved ? at a time of deep concerns about their readiness.
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Previous Ramadans saw a spike in violence in Iraq ? especially suicide attacks, in part because some Islamic extremists believe those who die in combat during Ramadan are especially blessed.
If it weren't for reading places like Belmont Club I'd be convinced that all was lost, and I have no doubt that is why support for the war is slipping amongst those who don't read blogs. However I am beginning to wonder whether Messrs Blair and Bush, despite relentless negativity and despite misteps, are not about to reap a dramatic victory. Despite the press continually harping on the casualty figures
The deaths in the two operations, along with that of a soldier shot in the western town of Taqaddum, raised to at least 1,940 the number of U.S. service members who have died since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.
the total US deaths (1940) works out at an average of just over 2/day over the last two and a half years and if you include all coalition forces it is still less than 3/day. For a war zone this is remarkably low by any rational standard. Moreover despite the war, which even the MSM grudgingly admits seems to be being sponsored by neighbouring governments, the progress of Iraq towards becoming a free-market democracy proceeds apace. Moreover it seems like the foreign fighters are quitting (link via Alphapatriot). Now Al Reuters tries to spin this as them distributing their training back to other countries, but it seems pretty clear that they wouldn't be redeploying in a reverse direction if they hadn't been defeated in Fallujah, Tal Afar etc. They may indeed bring their car-bomb experience back with them but they are bound to also bring back the message that you can't fight the Americans and win. Whatever spin they try to put on it the clear fact is that in both Afghanistan and Iraq the Islamists have lost big time.
Furthermore we are finally seeing the human rights folks come out and say that the "insurgents" in Iraq are committing atrocities that are unacceptable. Of course these organizations don't have much power but now HRW has joined Amnesty in criticising the "insurgency" which rather removes the justification figleaf of people like Gorgeous George and is likely to make the more honest of the anti-war group start to reconsider whether their stance actually implies support for such bloodthursty murderers.I don't really see how the MSM can spin its way out of its current anti-Bush position but if anything can get it to start reversing its position then the Human Rights watchdogs stand the best chance.
It is worth repeating that no guerrilla war has been won in a year or two.If the Iraqi insurgency is defeated anytime before the enf of President Bush's second term it will be the fastest guerilla war in recent years if not ever. Even a successful campaigns such as the Malay Insurgency lasted at least 7 years and losing wars such as the Soviet experience in Afghanistan and the US in Vietnam lasted a decade or more.
HP may give in to goverment blackmail according to this AFP article and decide to reduce the number of job cuts it makes in France, although I'm guessing that the "keeping" of the jobs will be done at the same time as there is a complete and utter crack down on all and any perks (ticket restaurant, company cars etc.), no training budget, a total lack of pay rises for anyone who is employed by HP under a French contract and a refusal to hire anyone to replace anyone who leaves for any reason. Furthermore I expect that HP will move anything critical in trems of R&D or manufacturing out of France in the very near future leaving the French employees to man help desks in French and other tedious and generally non-critical sorts of work. I'm sure HP has some French employees that it values, I'm guessing they will be told that they might like to relocate if they want a pay rise, the rest will just be given one cruddy job after another until they quit
Businesses nutty enough to locate in France in the past can’t even adjust to market realities without the government intervening and attempting to intimidate...
What bizzyblog fails to note is that this is of course not the first time in (extremely) recent history where attempts to rationalize businesses in France end up being stymied - at the end of August Nestlé also found this out.
Furthermore, while this is not a foreign company the riots about the privatizing and commensurate downsizing of the SNCM make it clear that if you are in fact planning to invest in a French privatization - Vile Pin would love to offload a load of state-run ordure on unsuspecting investors and needs to if he wants to stay within fudging distance of the European Stability Pact rules on state debt - then you had better not expect your investment to actually do any better than when it is government owned.
PS previous mentions of HP on this blog are here, here, here and here and probably elsewhere too... Permalink
Instead of olive tree blogging I give you a calm scene from rural Japan. As always click on the link to see it enlarged. I may not have much internet access for a while so enjoy the picture
According to Yahoo's news categories, Europe seems to have undergone a rather dramatic Eastwards expansion. The inhabitants of Taiwan, Japan and Korea may be rather surprise to learn that they are part of Europe but this screen capture (below) of Yahoo European news certainly seems to indicate that Yahoo thinks they are. Does Yahoo know something we don't?
PS Yes this means I'm back from the wilds of Japan. Some posts on that trip will probably follow Permalink
The receent trip to Japan had its morbid side with, coincidentally, visits to two places which are famous as spots where Japanese warriors committed suicide. Normally I find Japanese people to be not particularly different to anyone else and certainly not the incrutable oriental of urban legend but their attitude towards such behaviour is one area where the cultural differences are really brought home.
The first site, the Sengakuji temple in Tokyo (picture above - as always click on the image to see a larger version), is the place where the 47 Ronin Samurai committed suicide after they had avenged the execution of their former lord - bwho is also buried there. This story is, of course, well known so it was somewhat of a surprise to find that the Sengakuji doesn't have 50 gazillion varieties of (tacky) omiage hon sale, or indeed much indicating that it has such a significant graveyard, indeed you have to get inside the temple before you see signs to the relevant bits. I found the place to be dignified and I was entirely happy to help contribute funds so my wife could buy some incense to burn in respect and as a memory to their actions. While I have some problems with the whole concept of seppuku; in this case, where the choice was between seppuku or execution and where the very publicity of their act helped make their revenge more complete, I do indeed see why these samurai are held to be such heroes. We admire them for their willingness to sacrifice themseleves for the cause of justice and for the way they struck back at the eternal enemy of honourable warriors namely slimy bureaucrats.
On the other hand, the second site - Iiiyamamori in Aizu Wakamatsu - is rather less dignified about the whole thing. Iimoriyama is about the Byakkotai. The Byakkotai were some young boy soldiers (aged ~16) who were fighting for the Shogun against the Meiji forces in the 1868 civil war that resulted in the Meiji restoration. The Byakkotai were supposed to relieve the besieged their lord and the shogunate forces at Aizu's Tsuruga castle but when they got to Iimoriyama and saw the castle apparently already destroyed by fire they committed suicide in despair. Ironically the castle did not in fact burn down - the flames and smoke were from the town surrounding it.
To be honest I have a fundamental misunderstanding about the whole thing. Unlike the 47 ronin, the Byakkotai killed themselves because they thought they had failed. This to my mind is a tragic waste of life not heroism and I find it hard to see these poor boys as anything other than victims of poor leadership and idiotic adherence to antiquated and inhumane concepts of behaviour. To the inhabitants of Aizu Wakamatsu though, while the tale is indeed tragic, it is one that they celebrate as a heroic one, and one which they do their best to exploit with all the tackiness they can possibly muster such as a young woman acting out the suicide as a kind of dance to musical accompaniment.
Perhaps more bizarre than all the tacky gift shops and the specially installed Y200 escalator, which gets the tour bus parties up the hill without much climbing, is the column from Pompeii that was donated by the Mussolini government in year 6 of the Fascist era (aka AD 1928). This is peculiar on two grounds, firstly the Byakkotai were fighting against the militarists who dominated the Meiji restoration and who morphed into the unpleasant eastern allies of Hitler and Mussolini, and secondly what is being celebrated is the wasteful suicide of a group of apparently incompetent soldiers. It was a tragedy, but I don't really see why it was a heroic one, except as a sort of "heroic failure". Anyway despite that lots of tourists come and take photos and light incense at the graves (the wife did too but I didn't contribute). Perhaps it is my non-compassionate rightwingism but I found the whole thing to be intensely disturbing rather than heroic or worth celebrating. I can understand that it is worth remembering - as an object lesson in what not to do for example - and possibly as an example of standing against the horrid militarists - although I think that is more of a post 1945 justification and the memorial was there well before then - but I not with it being a place to celebrate loyalty, honour etc. I guess sometimes east dones't meet west. Permalink
If you recall Monty Python's 4 Yorkshireman sketch about "how young folk these days have it easy compared to when I were a lad" then perhaps you will see why I'm completely underwhelmed with the whole sky is falling in 2000 dead BS being pushed by Al Reuters, AP etc.
Since hostilities kicked off on 20 March 2003 we have had some 950 days (sum done in head E&OE). 2000 dead over 950 days works out at just over2/day. Throw in all the non US coalition military dead and maybe the various UN + civilian contractor dead (all in all less than 1000 as far as I can tell) and you still get to a grand total of foreign "occupiers" being killed in Iraq at an average rate of at most 3 per day.
Compared to just about any other major protracted conflict in the last century or so this is an astonishingly low number. For example:
The Boer war cost the British about 20,000 dead in three years 1899-1902, a rate of about 25/day
90 years ago in WW1 3000 deaths occured in an hour or so on numerous occasions.
Apart from D-day I don't think WW2 has many days where that many troops died in a single day (the Russian front perhaps) but even so 60 years ago deaths of 2000 or 3000 fighters took place in a few days all the time. US casualties alone were around 200/day on average during WW2
In the three year Korean war US casualties alone were over 40,000 killed or MIA with an additional 2700 "coalition" dead, a rate of something like 40/day.
Vietnam saw death rates greater (in many cases far greater) than Iraq's 3/day every year from 1965 to 1972 and note that Vietnam only had serious numbers of US combatants from late 1964, before that there were (IIRC) 5000 or so.
During the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan - possibly the closest parallel in a strictly military sense - the Soviets lost 13,833 dead (officially) over 9 plus years which works out at a rate of 4/day. However there is considerable scepticism at the 13,833 number with some estimates closer to four times that one and there were relatively few deaths in the last year or two as the Russians prepared to leave so that daily rate during the equivalent period of the current Iraqi occupation is almost certainly higher than this.
The French army lost some 18,000 in the 12 year Algerian war (1954-62) along with at least 3000 French civilian deaths (nearly 5/day). This is excluding the huge number of deaths of the Algerians fighting on the French side.
The MSM and its defeatist allies persist in calling Iraq a quagmire and talking about "high" loss of life. All I can say is that I feel like echoing those 4 Yorkshirement: They just don't make quagmires like they used to.
Now how about looking on the positive side - something that the MSM doesn't seem able to so. In exchange for the 3000 dead what has the US led coalition achieved:
a few thousand misguided terrorists of one sort or another have been captured or killed
a brutal dictator who intended to (re)build WMD and who killed thousands of his own people was deposed
an enviromental catastrophe in the southern marshes has been reversed
Iraq is booming economically
demand for cellphones, electrical appliances (and electricity) and so on has skyrocketed
record oil exports
there are hundreds of newspapers, magazines etc.
Iraq has had two free elections with limited violence and relatively high turnout (and turnout increased from the first to the second while violence decreased)
Libya renounced nuclear weapons and gave information about the Pakistan nuclear program
Syria withdrew from Lebanon
Saudi Arabia had elections for the first time (not very good ones but better than 0)
Compared to the lack of results in most of the wars listed above this is one heck of an achievement. I don't like putting it this way because 3000 dead is 3000 more than I would like but in terms of the results it looks like a bargain compared to practically any war fought in recent years.
It seems that in the NY TimesDelete section Thomas Friedman has been blathering on about China and Environmentalism. Anyway this is according to Tim W who seems to have kindly copied the thing so we can read it without forking over do$h. Tim gets worked up about more general matters to do with seeking inspiration from the Economist and the realtionship between development and growth, but I'm going to simply attack one minor point:
You don't see this every day: A columnist for The China Daily wrote an essay last week proposing that the Chinese consider eating with their hands and abandon chopsticks. Why?
Because, Zou Hanru wrote, ''we no longer have abundant forest cover, our land is no longer that green, our water tables are depleting and our numbers are expanding faster than ever. China itself uses 45 billion pairs of disposable chopsticks a year, or 1.66 million cubic meters of timber, or 25 million full-grown trees.'' The more affluent the Chinese become, he added, ''the more the demand for bigger homes and a wide range of furniture. Newspapers get thicker in their bid to grab a bigger share of the advertising market.''
In the face of rising environmental pressures, he said, China must abandon disposable wooden chopsticks and move to reusable steel, ''or, better still, we can use our hands.''
There is in fact a perfectly good alternative. Its called bamboo. I understand that if you are a NY Times columnist, or indeed a European or American reader, you may not often venture into the Asian countryside so I'll do my best to illustrate the point with a picture. Giant bamboo is practically a weed in the lusher parts of Japan and China and I have no doubt it can also be planted elsewhere in south east asia if it hasn't already gone there. It is widely used for all sorts of things - as scaffolding in Hong Kong for example - and it is most definitely already used to make disposable chopsticks. It grows anywhere (and everywhere) just as long as it gets enough water and can stand a reasonable amount of cold/snow and it reaches to a height of 50 foot or more (15 meters plus), with a 1 foot (30cm) diameter base in a year or so. You can get a good few hundred pairs of chopsticks from a single giant bamboo, they grow close together (a density of more than one per square metre), grow on the sides of hills which aren't suitable for other sorts of cultivation and regrow swiftly so they seem to be practically ideal as a source of chopsticks.
Once upon a time I used to work in the forestry industry: I jokingly refered to the job as counting trees but really what I was doing was writing a program to estimate timber volumes. I've forgotten all the details now but I'm fairly sure that I could rustle up the calculations again of determining timber volume by means of treating a tree as a perfect cone and - while the calculation would change for bamboo (since it is hollow you use the circumference rather than the volume) - the basic tricks have not been forgotten. Lets assume that you get 1000 pairs of chopsticks from a single giant bamboo, this is almost certainly an underestimate but it makes it easy to do the calculations. Let us also assume density is 1/square meter which is also a low estimate. How much land as bamboo groves do we need to satisfy China's disposable chopstick demand?
45 billion pairs at 1000/sq meter
= 45 million sq meters
= 4500 hectares
= 45 square kilometers.
I.e. bugger all (E&OE). BTW I note that in Japan it seems like bamboo chopsticks are becoming ever more popular, a decade ago I would say that most restaurants provided wood chopsticks, on my latest trip I noticed that at least 50% used bamboo so it looks like simple economics of raising the price of timber chopsticks or reducing the price of bamboo ones will allow them to take over the rest of the market. Permalink
After about a 1 month absence Friday Olive Tree blogging stages a triumphant return. The photo shows a little dilemma chez nous. The olives are basically ripe and should be picked. Indeed many have fallen on to the ground. But the mill won't accept any olives for another month or so. Grrrr. As always click on the picture to see it enlarged and do visit the previous entry in the series... Permalink I despise l'Escroc and Vile
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