According to Harry's Place George Galloay thinks that the Muhammed cartoons were worse than Sept 11.
Second, frankly what happened is an insult to Islam and Muslims. Personally, I condemn these barbaric and evil acts. Today, the objective of the Western states is to control the oil of the Muslims whatever the price. In fact, the cartoons published in Denmark did not surprise me because the Western states have been waging fierce attacks against Islam for years. These began by humiliation, insults and then occupation. Today they reached the point of ridiculing the prophet. This incident is worse than the 11 September attacks in the US and the 7/7 incidents in London. Therefore, today it is the right of Muslims to express their anger and to defend their right and faith.
He is also economical with the acutalité stating as well that:
To be clearer, Denmark is the only European state which practices racism in the pure sense of the word. There is not a single mosque in the entire Denmark. So how do you explain this my brother? There are many other examples. Worse, Denmark's immigration laws are the worst in the world.
There are in fact dozens if not hundreds of Mosques in Denmark and Denmark's immigration laws are the worst only when you exclude paragons of intolerance such as Saudi Arabia or Iran. Possibly what Mr Galloway is trying to say is that of countries where people actually want to immigrate to Denmakr has the toughest immigration laws and maybe he is right: not every country insists that its immigrants attend free language lessons for example.
However in the getting your priorities wrong stakes Mr Galloway is at best an also-ran compared to Imran Khan who (according to Drinking from Home) thinks that Muhammed's cartoons are far worse:
“I don’t think the message has got through that for us it’s far more painful than perhaps even the Holocaust for the Jews. Any caricature or any ridicule or any humiliation of the holy prophet is far more painful for the Muslims.”
Imran Khan is from Lahore in Pakistan so I have a suggestion for him. How about we round up the population of Lahore (5 million plus according to google) and kill them? In exchange all inhabitants of Europe and North America agree to never ever draw the prophet Muhammed or publish any picture of him (even if it originates from an Islamic country). You think that would be acceptable? Oh maybe you think the Holocaust was perhaps a little overstated? so how about we set free Milosovic and his pals, arm them and tell them to get on with their ethnic cleansing of Bosnia (Muslim population approx 1.5 million)?
This comparison with the Holocaust is not exactly limited to Mr Khan, the Iranians ran an entire Holocaust cartoon competition and some Dutch Islamists published an unpleasant cartoon featuring Anne Frank and Hitler. The fact that so many people say these sorts of things with a straight face just compounds the unfortunate stereotype that Muslims are intolerant morons. Especially when the number of prominent Muslim people saying "no this is not equivalent" appears to be zero. Permalink
I'm in dull Blighty all tomorrow and probably won't have any Internet access so I figure I'll post this now instead. The mimosas are out in force and I do love the Olive/mimosa contrast such as this image taken in hills around Tanneron last weekend. As always click on the picture to see it enlarged and go here to see last week's image.
Put this down as example #31415927 of journalistic inability to get basic facts right when it come to subjects that are slightly difficult like GCSE (high-school or pre-high-school for the Yanks) chemistry. This AFP article about Fuel-cell cars contains the following sentence:
There are still a number of barriers to the commercialization of hydrogen-powered cars. One is the infrastructure cost of building refueling stations. Another big challenge is reducing the cost of obtaining hydrogen itself, which has to be extracted from fossil fuels, such as carbon, or from water.
Err Carbon is not a fossil fuel it is an element and as anyone who did GCSE chemistry knows you can't turn one element into another via chemical means - this is why the alchemists attempts to turn lead into gold never worked. The only way to obtain Hydrogen from Carbon would be via nuclear fission and if we go down that path then we probably don't need hydrogen in the first place...
It seems to me that the "journalism as profession" and "only mainstream media is accurate" things are getting ever more frayed. Or at least the qualifications for being a journalist or editor appear to include a requirement to be totally ignorant of basic science.
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Update:The cartoon arrived in a separate email from the text below
I received this in email. I think it is fair to say that even though this is less than 100% accurate in that some Muslims have been outraged by some of the events listed, it contains a kernel of truth (in the immortal words of the NY Times it is "fake but accurate"). Thought this was an interesting and accurate accounting.
Muslims fly commercial airliners into buildings in New York City. No Muslim outrage.
Muslim officials block the exit where school girls are trying to escape a burning building because their faces were exposed. No Muslim outrage.
Muslims cut off the heads of three teenaged girls on their way to school in Indonesia. A Christian school. No Muslim outrage.
Muslims murder teachers trying to teach Muslim children in Iraq. No Muslim outrage.
Muslims murder over 80 tourists with car bombs outside cafes and hotels in Egypt. No Muslim outrage.
A Muslim attacks a missionary children's school in India. Kills six. No Muslim outrage.
Muslims slaughter hundreds of children and teachers in Beslan, Russia. Muslims shoot children in the back. No Muslim outrage.
Let's go way back. Muslims kidnap and kill athletes at the Munich Summer Olympics. No Muslim outrage.
Muslims fire rocket-propelled grenades into schools full of children in Israel. No Muslim outrage.
Muslims murder more than 50 commuters in attacks on London subways and busses. Over 700 are injured. No Muslim outrage.
Muslims massacre dozens of innocents at a Passover Seder. No Muslim outrage.
Muslims murder innocent vacationers in Bali. No Muslim outrage.
Muslim newspapers publish anti-Semitic cartoons. No Muslim outrage
Muslims are involved, on one side or the other, in almost every one of the 125+ shooting wars around the world. No Muslim outrage.
Muslims beat the charred bodies of Western civilians with their shoes, then hang them from a bridge. No Muslim outrage.
Muslims attack other Muslims who happen to be black and deliberately kill the men and rape the women in Darfur. No Muslim outrage.
Newspapers in Denmark and Norway publish cartoons depicting Mohammed. Muslims are outraged.
Dead children. Dead tourists. Dead teachers. Dead doctors and nurses. Death, destruction and mayhem around the world at the hands of Muslims .. no Muslim outrage ... but publish a cartoon depicting Mohammed with a bomb in his turban and all hell breaks loose. I personally was outraged at the deaths in the Egyptian ferry disaster. I am even more outraged that investigations into the apperent incompetence that led to it have either been dropped or that no one cares enough to continue to report it (Google reports the last news item as over 2 weeks ago). On the other hand the cartoon protests continue ...
Somewhat relatedly - the Instapundit links to a report that Pakistan is blocking sites that display the Muhammed cartoons. Since my cartoon page is still receiving hits from Pakistani IP addresses, I'm not certain that this is correct - see image below.
Pie chart image of visitors by country as of midday March 6th
I spent the weekend in the UK where the chattering classes were getting exercised by the story of "the minister, her hubby and the generous Italian client". Needless to say there was far more hypocrisy on view than insightful commentary and not entirely to my surprise it is the blogosphere which provides the best, for example TimW had a comment of his own and linked to a couple of others.
However the most relevant comment which was a question about precisely the suitability of "Tax Lawyer" as a profession for a ministerial spouse seems to have come from an unexpected source - namely Roy Hattersley in the Wapping Liar (Tip the Englishman).
If the Treasury operates in the way it did when I was a secretary of state, senior civil servants spend a great deal of time working out ways of closing “tax loopholes”. Mr Mills occupies his days opening new ones. We must assume that Ms Jowell, being an honourable woman, finds no conflict of interest in her husband working to frustrate the wishes of the Chancellor with whom she shares the Cabinet table. But she will, I hope, accept that the situation is a paradox.
Forthermore his point about how old Labour would have had a problem with a so-called comrade working at this trade does seem right on the money:
Mr Mills, I understand, was himself once a Labour councillor and he retains his party membership. Does he, I wonder, believe that his party should welcome the rich making arrangements to reduce their tax liability? Or does he draw a distinction between David Mills the sharp lawyer and David Mills the social democrat? Whatever his answer, the most fascinating aspect of his position concerns not him but the party he supports. Twenty years ago — despite the legality of Mr Mills’s business and his wife’s apparent ignorance of his affairs — Labour would have been outraged by the way in which the Jowells pay their grocery bills. We, the cry would have gone up, can have no truck with tax avoidance. How times have changed.
Who is prepared to say that the change is for the better?
There is indeed a lot of hypocrisy inherent in the idea that a person who believes that the state should distribute wealth according to need also working to help his clients keep the state's grasping hands off their lucre. However, having said that, the problem here is not the profession of Tax Lawyer, a profession apparently only slightly above Pimp and below 2nd-hand car salesman in terms of public acceptability, per se but that it is being practiced by a socialist.
As a firm believer in small government I believe that the existence of Tax Lawyers is in fact proof that the government is too large and wasteful. In an ideal world there would be no need for the profession to exist, unfortunately people like Roy fail to understand that Tax Lawyers and the Gnomes of Zurich exist because governments seem unable to wean themselves from the habit of high taxation and corresponding incentives for people who spend their money in government approved ways. Tax lawyers are not the problem they are a symptom of it and, in Europe at least, there seems to be no hope that the underlying problem will be solved any time soon. Permalink
The other story that the chattering classes were getting exercised over the weekend was the supposed statement by Tony Bliar that "God made him do it" with regard to the war in Iraq. As Stephen Pollard points out, any reasonable reading of the transcript (below) shows that this is complete cobblers.
"That decision has to be taken and has to be lived with, and in the end there is a judgement that, well, I think if you have faith about these things then you realise that judgement is made by other people, and also by..."
[...] "I mean by other people, by, if you believe in God, it's made by God as well and that judgement in the end has to be, you know, you do your...
"When you're faced with a decision like that, and some of those decisions have been very, very difficult, as I say, most of all because you know there are people's lives, not just, this isn't a matter of a policy here or a thing there but their lives, and in some case, their death.
"The only way you can take a decision like that is to try to do the right thing according to your conscience, and for the rest of it you leave it, as I say, to the judgement that history will make."
Now the fascinating thing about this is how the chatterers - including somebloggers - seem to think that mention of personal faith by a Prime Minister is somehow wrong. Apparently even if A Blair Esq. is in fact a Christian he shouldn't mention this fact lest we all get upset and start thinking we are living in a theocracy. Curiously the same chattering classes think that it is perfectly OK for someone called Ahmadinejad or Sadr to state their beliefs, and indeed it seems that we must not insult Messrs Ahmadinejad, Sadr or their co-religionists by criticising their religion or its founder.
Does anyone see a tiny weeiny inconsistency here?
There are two ways to look at this. The first is that this inconsistency is out and out Dhimmitude. The second is that this is in fact deeply discriminatory and insulting to Muslims because it shows that the chatterers believe that Muslims are basically immature and unable to handle the same cricism of their religion that grown up Christians can.
Actually on more reflection there may be a third way- and how fitting this is when talking about our Dear Leader and his ZANU Labour party - and that is that the chatterers believe in the primacy of their religion of "Secularism" and hate the idea that any of their rulers could possibly not believe in the same things [the creed of the religion of secularism is something like "There is no God and Darwin is our prophet" possibly with some mention of Global Warming, Kyoto and the sacredness of the EU, UN and anything to do with them].
Harry at his Place recommends and links to an excellent article about the "Invertebrate Liberals" and their craven response to the Muhammed Cartoons.I can do little more than suggest, as he does, that you go and read it all. However I'll give you my favourite paragraphs an an appetite whetter:
Western governments who do not want to have their embassies burned down, or their trade with Islamic countries boycotted and ruined, or the lives of their nationals in Muslim countries placed in jeopardy, had better make themselves enforcers for the rules of a religion which their citizens do not accept. That is the demand.
They must curb free speech and free expression. Curb the freedom to criticism and mock and outspokenly denounce religion - the freedom from which over centuries most of our freedoms have been spun and consolidated.
And how have the bourgeois-democratic governments and liberal newspapers and TV systems responded? In the face of an outcry which - whatever energies other than religious feelings have fuelled it - has been a vast outpouring of religious zealotry and bigotry, they have apologised!
They have scurried and run.
They have accepted the diktat of Muslim priests and of religious politicians whose goal and ideal is to establish everywhere authoritarian-theocratic states whose nearest equivalents in 20th century European history were the mid-century fascist states (including Nazi Germany before World War Two).
However to my surprise I find myself in agreement with a number of other articles at the same site. For example they have an excellent refutation of the human-hating bunny-huggers (which I want to comment on separately) and some interesting commentary on Iraq which is considerably better than that which appears in the mainstream Invertebrate Liberal press. As I read more I suspect I shall find more goodness as well as, no doubt, some things that I disagree with.
Although I am generally speaking an evil capitalist free-marketeer, I am well aware that capitalism is imperfect - just as Churchill described democracy, I think it is the least bad of all alternatives tried to date, but "least bad" does not in any way equate to "good". Free-market capitalism does frequently have unpleasant consequences for certain individuals or groups even as it improves the lot of the rest of us and I am, in general, in favour of movements and societies that help ameliorate those consequences. As a result I am pleased, but - thanks to the previous examples of Harry's Place, Johann Hari and Christopher Hitchens amongst others not completely surprised - to see such sound thinking by people with whom I also have a number of disagreements. I am, for example, strongly in favour of Trades Unions in developing nations because I believe that they help stop the rampant abuse of workers by their employees (think for example of all those Bangladeshis who died because the exits to their mill were locked) although I am less in favour of them in developed nations where I think they tend to act more as a barrier to employment - witness the French protests against employment contract changes today - but I suspect that the Workers Liberty folks would sympathaise just as much with the latter as the former.
Update: This article reads very well together with one found by Joe Kaztman at Winds of Change and published in RealClearPolitics and at The Intellectual Activist. I find it fascinating that the two can arrive at the same end viewpoint from totally different starting locations
Update 2: Needless to say the EU is packed with "Invertebrate Liberals" according to this Reuter's article from last month (H/T Eugene Volokh)
The European Union may try to draw up a media code of conduct to avoid a repeat of the furor caused by the publication across Europe of cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad, an EU commissioner said on Thursday.
..."The press will give the Muslim world the message: We are aware of the consequences of exercising the right of free expression," he told the newspaper. "We can and we are ready to self-regulate that right." ...
Frattini, a former Italian foreign minister, said millions of Muslims in Europe felt "humiliated" by the cartoons.
His proposed voluntary code would urge the media to respect all religious sensibilities but would not offer privileged status to any one faith.
As I noted a month ago, the French trades unions take the 2006 "Dog in a Manger" prize for their attitude towards youth unemployment, although I regret to say that their attitude has clearly spread to the students. France as Charles Bremner in the Wapping Liar notes, has youth unemployment of 23% double the rate of the rest of the workforce and double the rate of youth unemployment in countries such as Germany and the UK. Furthermore:
Youth unemployment, at 23 per cent, is widely blamed on protective labour laws that put off employers. Jobless rates of up to 50 per cent on immigrant housing estates helped to fuel last autumn’s riots.
Yet despite that, and despite all those calls for the government to "do something" to stop the CarBQ riots, the extremely weak first step that the government has taken is immediately opposed by those who would probably not be affected by it anyway:
The CPE is opposed by a majority of the young and the Left, who fear employers will use it to exploit younger workers. Business leaders have given it half-hearted support, demanding a full-scale revamp of labour laws. The battle over the CPE has rallied the demoralised Socialist opposition and unions to resist what they depict as M de Villepin’s drive towards “Anglo-Saxon-style” deregulation.
About the only silver-lining to this particular cloud is that it shows that l'Escroc and Vile Pin are unable to sell any sort of liberalization and that hence they are madly unpopular and hopefully this paves the way for Sarko to become the next president of France. In true cheese-eating surrender-monkey style l'Escroc managed to get himself off to Saudi Arabia where he is sucking up to the Arabs in the hope that they will award French companies huge defense contracts. Given the propensity of both sides for kickbacks and bribes (something that the BBC article fails to mention) I reckon that the chances of France winning at least some Saudi contracts is high.
However, one reason why l'Escroc and Vile Pin are unable to make any reforms is that they have continually tried to blame almost anything unpleasant on "les Anglo-saxons" and evil anglo-saxon capitalism and hence, as the Wapping Liar notes in its accompanying editorial, it should not be surpising if the French public dislikes the idea of becoming more "anglo-saxon" and this causes trouble even for Sarko.
These dreadful figures, however, have still failed to persuade people that reform is needed. Even students, who should benefit most, are planning demonstrations against the proposals. There are several explanations. The first is the failure of the political establishment, and of President Chirac in particular, to tell the truth. M Chirac has repeatedly tried to blame others, especially the “Anglo-Saxons”, for plotting against the “French model”. Last year he even insisted that “liberalism” — meaning market economics — was as evil as communism. And as next year’s presidential elections draw near, no politician now seems ready to tell voters what they do not want to hear. Even the normally robust Nicolas Sarkozy has toned down his earlier calls for a break with the past.
This is not the only problem though. Despite the total collapse of a coherent policy by the Socialists - a grouping that makes the British Liberal Democrats or the US Democratic party seem cohessive and united - the right has utterly failed to benefit because everyone is busy jockeying for succession and back-stabbing each other. Hence the attempt by Vile Pin to wrap himself in the "Tricoleur" and bang the nationalist drum. This as the Times goes on to point out is not a good thing:
Secondly, the long-term malaise in France has been exacerbated by political feuding so that almost any setback takes a toll on public credibility. M de Villepin is not only struggling with unemployment, but faces a nationalist backlash, shown in the opposition to a proposed foreign takeover of French utilities, anxieties over the outbreak of bird flu and the lingering resentment after last year’s riots.
Thirdly, France has been obsessed by a perceived decline in its global position: the loss of influence within the European Union, the erosion of the French language, falling standards in education, scandals in the justice system and, of course, the loss of the 2012 Olympics to Britain. Change is seen by too many as betrayal, reform as defeatism. The great casualty is political honesty. Sooner or later, however, reality will assert itself — to the benefit of the unemployed and the alienated.
The only politician with any shred of credibility right now appears to be Sarko and, as I say, hopefully this will remain true for the next year until the elections. The left is still in disarray with the husband and wife fight between Ségolène Royal and François Hollande for leadership. Although Mme Royal looks likely to win the battle and is more reformist, the chances are that the socialists will remain in disarray. On the far right, le Pen and co will dread Sarko because, despite recent toning down of rhetoric, he is able to present himself as the "tough" candidate and steal away a lot of the voters who voted for Le Pen simply because they couldn't stand either l'Escroc or the socialists.
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The Workers Liberty article about Animal Testing which I wrote about earlier today is well worth reading in full. The conclusion is excellent:
Put like this it is plain that the debate about animal rights is not like that about women's rights or black people's rights or civil rights, in which the oppressed sub|ects of history are demanding lustice and equality. It is an argument about how we as humans should behave. It is here that the biological discontinuity between humans and other animals becomes important. Our concern for how we treat other species springs out of our very humanness, as biologically and socially constructed creatures. We do not expect cats to debate the rights of mice. So the issue is not - or ought not to be - about animal rights at all, but about the duties that we have just because we are human.
as is his nailing earlier on of the logical inconsistency of the bunny-hugger arguments:
But those who argue for animal rights seem to want it both ways. On the one hand, they claim that animals are sentient and therefore, like humans, have certain rights. On the other they maintain that there are such great discontinuities between animals and humans that animal experiments can tell us nothing relevant to the human condition. This is frankly nonsense. The biological world is a continuum. The basic biochemical mechanisms by which we tick are very similar in most other organisms. If they weren't, even the food we eat would poison us. Many human diseases and disorders are found in other mammals - which is why we can learn how to treat them by research on animals.
I have known a number of people who have conducted experiments on animals, or who as students earned some extra money looking after them. So far as I can tell none of them and I suspect very few (I would like to say NO but I have no way to prove it) other researchers liked causing pain to animals and only did so when there was no alternative. Where possible they feed them, pamper them and don't cause them painand if they have to kill them for biopsy or whatever do so as humanely as possible. This is I think a fair compromise.
I heard on my UK trip people discussing this on Radio 4's any questions and any answers and not at all to my surprise I found that many of the animal rights lot were extremely weak on statistics and logic. Firstly the statistics: certainly it is true that not all medicines we use today have come from animal testing and certainly it is true that some drugs that were tested successfully on animals have turned out to have nasty side-effects in humans but there are some orders of magnitude that get lost in the numbers quoted. I'm not sure how many thousand drugs have been developed this century, but I would guess that well over 90% and probably over 99% of them have seen, as part of their development, testing in animals. (Almost) all cancer drugs have (for example) as have most heart drugs and painkillers. Further more I have no idea how many thousand promising compounds have been tested on animals and rejected from further (human) trials because the animal tests have shown clearly unacceptable side effects. In either case there are undoubteldy thousands of drugs which have not been tested on humans but would have been forced to have been tested on humans if we could not perform animal testing and many of them would have killed or seriously injured the humans they would have been tested on.
Then there is the logical issue hinted at in the previous sentence. The fact that animal testing does not identify unaccptable side-effects in a small percentage of cases and that a small percentage of drugs are developed with no animal testing does not mean that animal testing confers no benefits at all. The bunny-huggers effectively claim that all lives are equally valid and that we humans have no right to take the lives of animals in order to find ways to save the lives of humans. This fails the basic smell test because the bunny huggers are not attacking farms, slaughterhouses or abattoirs (with the exception of some anti-veal and anti-KFC protesting) which they surely ought to be doing if they felt that way and while it is hard to be sure one suspects that, as the Worker's Liberty writer says, the welfare of a chick grown for egg-laying or KFC is far worse than that of one used in most animal tests.
To go further, while we are possibly be dancing on a slope of relativism here but I think it is fair to say that most people would consider that the deaths - even potentially painful deaths - of dozens of animals to be preferable to the death of one human. Let us posit that drugs produced via animal testing have stopped 1 billion premature deaths (this is almost certainly an understatement given the efficacy of chemicals such as DDT in stopping Malaria), in order for animal testing to be unacceptable we would need to have tens of billions of animals killed before the exchange could be considered excessive. It is hard to get numbers but I would seriously doubt whether more than ten billion animals have been used for testing in the last century and I'm fairly sure that most of them have been animals like fruit-flies or flatworms and that the main vertebrate species used being mice or other rodents. Given the numbers of rodents killed by traps and poison, it seems hard to get too concerned about rodents in a laboratory. I think the UK's stringent requirement for cost-benefit analyses before animal testing can be carried out goes almost beyond the call of duty and that UK based bunny-huggers are chasing the wrong target. If they want to prevent animal suffering one suspects they would be better off protesting the culinary practises of the Chinese, Japanese or other Asians not to mention the evil French foie gras and veal producers as well as, arguably, every single Kosher or Halal abattoir and every battery hen farm in the world. The fact that they don't do this (much) indicates that either they understand that the public wouldn't stand for this kind of protest or that they hold the logically inconsistent view that animal death for medical research is somehow worse than animal death for nutrition. Permalink
Jeff Jarvis posts a fairly critical piece on the NY Times' exposé of certain bloggers as being shills for Walmart. As he says what we are seeing here is the blogosphere doing much the same as the MSM has always done. Some key points:
Remember that reporters do not tell you every story idea that came from a flack — and so [many] stories do start with PR pitches that I’ve often said if I ran a paper, I’d have flack-free days: Every story in today’s paper came from actual reporting! (It’d probably be a thin Saturday.)
Reporters may be smart enough to rewrite the verbiage in press releases (unlike the hapless blogger in the Times story caught quoting Walmart’s flackery without attribution — a practice Edelman, smartly, warned them against). But they don’t tell you all the ... facts and viewpoints they use from flacks.
I wrote a couple of comments which I think are worth repeating here since I was kind of verbose. The first is just an agreement with and enlargement of Jeff's point:
It is of course far worse in the trade presses. If it weren’t for PR agencies and press releases 99% or more of specialist publications from architecture to zoology would be either far far more expensive or a heck of a lot thinner. And either way they would probably have a lot smaller circulation. Indeed even if there is original reporting in almost all cases it is partially driven by press-releases announcing the latest widget from acme corp or trumpeting some customer success story or competitive trial.
The PR agencies and their releases are the raw material that journalists and blggers use to build up most of their run of the mill stories. Of course everyone likes to have an exclusive scoop that originates from some journalistic investigation of a rumour but in fact in most cases the announcements via the PR agency are just as important for the industry as a whole because they also contain key information. The mark of a good journalist (or blogger) is that he goes beyond simply cutting and pasting the press release into his article and provides some analysis or complementary PR from other sources or both.
The second is a response to another commenter who thinks that what the bloggers did was shilling rather than PR. I disagree:
Robert wrote What is different in this case is that Walmart (or it’s PR firm) is hoping that the echo chamber will magnify the factoids that they put out and they will become part of the “conventional wisdom”. If it were just simple PR Walmart could list the emails as press releases on their own web site as is done my most major companies. The use of email as a distribution medium implies that they want the information to be re-released and its original source to be downplayed.
I think this is a incorrect on two fronts. Firstly it looks like quite a lot of the stories also appear at http://www.walmartfacts.com/ I’m not sure if they all do or even if the stories at walmartfacts are the same but certainly if they aren’t the same they do appear to be very similar and to make the same points.
Secondly emailing PR articles to selected journalists is utterly standard practise. In fact I know some PR agencies specifically write PR pieces to send to specific journalists becuase they know what the journalist is interested in, thus the same announcement may spun different ways in different versions of the same announcement sent to different journalists or news outlets.
All that walmart is doing is treating some bloggers as if they are as influential as MSM journalists.
The more valid criticism is of the bloggers who have not acknowledged the source of their posts and hence potentially misled their readership. We, as fellow bloggers should be on their case about this and both complain and consider not linking/reading them. However although this is a bad thing it is a little rich for a newspaper like the NY Times with the Jason Blair scandal to complain about it in others. Someone once said “let he who is without sin cast the first stone” and it seems to me the NYT would do well to bear that in mind along with something about planks and splinters in eyes.
This is by the way an important milestone for the blogosphere as it begins to take over the role of the MSM in informing people. We bloggers usually meet a higher standard of journalistic ethics than the MSM becuase we do, as a general rule, provide the links to the source material. This is our comeptitive advantage and combined with the fact that we tend to make no attempt to be impartial is a huge strength. Any reader should be able see what our sources and our biases are and if we are to be credible sources of news and informed comment we have to continue with that level of disclosure. However, having said that, this NY Times piece is in many ways another classic attempt at spreading FUD about the blogosphere. The intent is surely to tar all bloggers with the same brush, something that simply doesn't work and something that would be like bloggers tarring all MSM outlets as equally incompetant. The fact is that just as bloggers who make the latter smear find it tough to prove so the reverse MSM smear of the blogosphere is equally poor.
Some bloggers are certainly slimy shills for corporate interests but the point about the blogosphere is that bloggers only get readership through providing a quality product. Unlike the MSM which can rely on inertia and a say dynamic sports section to sell its terrible current affairs coverage (or vice versa), each blogger has to sink or swim on his or her own and all that a blogger can offer is his or her own reputation as a brand. Hence over all the chances of many bloggers becoming PR shills is rather low since the risk/reward ratio simply doesn't cut it.
PS Welcome Instapundit readers. Do please look around the rest of the blog because there is lots of other bloggy goodness and I also stronlgy recomemnd reading the other comments over at Buzzmachine, lots informed knowledge there too provimng that, as usual, the blogosphere has readers who do everything including really slimy jobs like PR :)
Update: If you haven't read them then I suggest reading the responses by the PR firm involved and by one of the bloggers interviewed. Reading both of these gives you an even better idea about the different levels of background possible to bloggers compared to the MSM - both the blogger and the PR agency's blog link to the NYT article whereas the NYT article fails to provide links to the posts at issue. As a result NYT readers are unable to see whether the journalist is fairly representing the statements on the blogs whereas the blog readers can clearly see that the NYT is taking staements out of context. If ever you want to compare and contrast the MSM approach with the blogosphere one then this is the story to use.
Wonko, the Register, and no doubt many others have noted that the House of Lords has again told the government where to stick its "volutary unless you want to travel" ID card scheme, and indeed they have a good point. ID cards are being foisted upon Britons at great expense, without any great desire (resigned acceptance seems about the strongest positive) and for very little justifiable reason. However the fact is that most people, while they don't want them, don't fear them either; they consider ID cards to just be "harmless" and have bought into the basic line that those who are innocent of crime have nothing to fear from them.
This is not the case unless the government suddenly gets a clue about security - something which to date is has not done. Allow me to illustrate by example. Neil Herron has an article about the DVLA and how it makes it easy for crooks to track down anyone who owns a car. As he says it makes it easy for anyone who feels like it to set up a bugus parking enforcement company and then ask for the name and address details of cars that look interesting. Indeed according to a comment by Wonko this has already happened with a bunch of crooks in Shropshire sending out bogus parking tickets to motorists.
Now you may say the the DVLA is a special case but it isn't: just like microsoft the government simply doesn't get security. 2 seconds on Google also pointed me to this story from last week about NHS records being found in a dustbin. You might claim that this is the fault of one individual doctor not the government but then the same could be said for the DVLA bureaucrat who thought selling names and addresses was a good idea or the brainy people who leave laptops with sensitive information on park benches or anything else. Government bureaucracies are historically very bad at keeping people's private data private and this is a really bad thing for the people whose private data the government is sloppy with. (Oh and this is not a UK specific thing - when I lived in California I recall the outcry about zillions of tax returns being mailed out with name address and social security number clearly visible to anyone who saw the return sitting in the mailbox or post office sack. With these three bits of information ID theft becomes remarkably easy for a conman).
The problem with ID cards is that some or all of the information on them must be widely queriable or else the whole scheme is a waste of time. Now it could well be that the ID card will be a waste of time and will in fact collect no more interesting data than the French ID card - a document which is essentially trivial to forge with a colour laser printer and a lamminator but which doesn't ever get looked at except by Gendarmes who want an excuse to arrest you - however HMG and the various Whitehall mandarins and ZANU labour apparachiks who are pushing the scheme claim that it will be more useful than that and indeed the register link above states:
Details of the register that emerged during the last ID Cards debate in the House of Commons showed that it is a more extensive scheme than the government liked to admit. The register itself would contain only basic information, but it would also have keys to 13 other government databases, making it a one stop-shop for information about individuals. Many critics says that this makes the information less secure.
Now when a government has got all this info in one place the temptation has to be to use it - otherwise nasty questions get asked about where all the money went (all those off site meeting, big lunches and conslutants at £1000/day are hard to justify) and why. Hence (going on past experience - see DVLA above) the checks for who is allowed to get access to the data will be lax. Hence any would be crook or terrorist who swipes your ID card for a minute will be able to retrieve whatever records the government has on you that are tied to your ID. This ranges from biomentric information to your social security benefits, your criminal record and your drivers license status to the more obvious and mundane such as name, address, date of birth and so on. Since the key to ID theft and other similar crimes is getting hold of private data and since the ID card and the government databases behind it have lots of private data the conmen are going to have lots and lots of incentive to develop ID card readers and associated infrastructure. This will probably include the subborning of lowly paid DSS workers or similar who will be paid in cash for data. All in all the ID card scheme looks like a license to fraud and theft and I pretty much guarrantee that the most obvious result is going to be the mother of all "class action" lawsuits by disgruntled punters who've had their credit history trashed and their savings nicked by enterprising crooks. Permalink
Via the Inquirer is this story of some kids who identified a possible paedophile when they were playing a prank on a friend.
FONTANA, Calif. - Prosecutors filed attempted child molestation charges Tuesday against a man who allegedly sought sex from two fictional 15-year-old girls created by Internet pranksters.
Michael Ramos, 48, was charged with one felony count of attempting to commit a lewd act on a 15-year-old and two misdemeanor counts of attempted child molestation, said Karen Martinez, a San Bernardino County deputy district attorney.
...
"The child is fictional" but the crime is real, she said, noting that similar charges have been filed against suspects when police pose online as children to catch pedophiles.
To face charges, a person must "take a step toward completing that crime ... such as appearing in the place that was arranged upon," she said. "It's not just talking about it, thinking about it, wishing about it."
Ramos was arrested Sunday at a park after he allegedly arranged a tryst through a Web site, police Sgt. William Megenney said.
But "Jessica" - the teen he thought he was meeting - was actually created by five boys as a prank to cheer up a buddy who had just broken up with his girlfriend, Megenney said.
Congratulations to the kids for realizing what they were seeing and nailing the perv.
Next week I expect I'll have pictures of the pruning which I need to start this weekend. However this week I present some olive trees in the mountains near Mons in the Var. For Eric who always wants to know where these things are, here is the google map and multimap of the approximate location. As always click on the image to see it enlarged and do follow the links down the series of previous images. Permalink
Secondly in re: US Ports, homeland security etc. There is a saying along the lines of "every complicated problem has a simple to understand but wrong solution" I put it to my readers that politicians almost invariably go for the simple but wrong solution. Concentrating on who gets the dividends from managing 6 US ports (especially when many (all?) other ports are also managed by companies owned by foreign entities is a classic example. As is almost everything else done by the DHS including the way that (as Cringely writes this week) funding for critical IT infrastructure seems to get lost in the rush to waste money on everything else that provides for more nepotism and/or better photo ops.
As I noted earlier this week there are protests in France by people with jobs and/or generally not finding a hard time finding them who are complaining about the minor liberalization of the French labour laws that might allow some of the 20%+ of unemployed youths to enter the job market. The students protests at the Sorbonnes in Paris have resulted in the police being called in to remove them from where they were staging a sit in. As the BBC reports:
French riot police have grappled with protesters at the Sorbonne in Paris in unrest over a new labour law, making it easier to sack young employees.
Police stormed the university early on Saturday to drive out at least 150 people, mainly students, some of whom had been inside for three days.
..
The First Employment Contract (CPE) passed by parliament on Thursday is a two-year contract for under-26-year-olds which employers can break off at any time without explanation.
Ministers hope the flexibility will encourage employers to hire more young people, safe in the knowledge that they will be able to get rid of them if they have to.
Critics say younger workers would have less job security than older colleagues and France's generous labour provisions would be undermined.
The new legislation currently only applies to small firms but some fear it could be misused by larger employers and make it even harder for young people to find a permanent job.
...
The overnight violence has echoes of the labour and student unrest of 1968 in Paris.
One Parisian student, named only as Elodie, told AFP it was not a conscious attempt to repeat those riots.
"The context is different," she said. "In '68, the students when they left university, they found work."
I find the quote at the end amusing. Elodie, ma cherie, if you really want work then why are you striking to stop meking it easier to hire (and fire) people of your age? One assumes that whatever else the Sorbonne teaches the sort of common sense logic of "cause and effect" is not taught and neither are basic sums and economics. Permalink
Marina that is, not her father the former Malaysian PM. Earlier this week the BBC reported:
The daughter of Malaysia's former prime minister has launched a scathing attack on the roles and status of Muslim women in the country.
Marina Mahathir, a prominent campaigner for women's rights, compared the lot of women to that of black South Africans under apartheid.
She described Muslim women as second-class citizens who were held back by discrimination.
The comments were written for her regular newspaper column.
The column, which was due to be published in Tuesday's Star newspaper, did not appear.
'Bound and gagged'
Few comparisons could be more hurtful.
Malaysia led by Mahathir Mohamad was in the forefront of the international campaign to end white minority rule in South Africa.
But his daughter Marina has described Muslim women in Malaysia as subject to a form of apartheid - second-class citizens held back by discriminatory rules that do not apply to non-Muslim women.
Her outburst appears to have been prompted by recent changes to Malaysia's Islamic family law that makes it easier for Muslim men to take multiple wives, to divorce them and to take a share of their property.
There has been an angry reaction in Malaysia to remarks by the daughter of the former PM comparing Muslim women to black South Africans under apartheid.
Conservative Muslim women's groups say Marina Mahathir brought shame on the country by saying new Islamic laws have made local women second class citizens.
Her remarks were published with cuts in her regular newspaper column on Friday after being held back for several days.
And what were these remarks?
"In our country, there is an insidious growing form of apartheid among Malaysian women, that between Muslim and non-Muslim women," she said.
She has argued vociferously that the changes to the law represent a step backwards for women's rights in Malaysia.
"As non-Muslim women catch up with women in the rest of the world, Muslim women here are only going backwards," Ms Mahathir said.
"We should also note that only in Malaysia are Muslim women regressing; in every other Muslim country in the world, women have been gaining rights, not losing them."
The fact that the best the other side can do is claim that Muslim women in Malaysia are better off than those from other Muslim countries is not exactly a sign that they have right on their side....
The Instapundint has written a TCS Daily column on the biowarfare column and links to a bunch of other biowarfare warnings such as Paul Boutin's "Biowar for Dummies" and a Technology Review piece. The latter has a rather scary 2-stage proposal which I think is a bit far-fetched, although doable:
Popov then described a Soviet strategy for hiding deadly viral genes inside some milder bacterium's genome, so that medical treatment of a victim's initial symptoms from one microbe would trigger a second microbe's growth. "The first symptom could be plague, and a victim's fever would get treated with something as simple as tetracycline. That tetracycline would itself be the factor inducing expression of a second set of genes, which could be a whole virus or a combination of viral genes."
However there are, I fear, a lot of other far simpler 2-stage bioweapons that could be created.
Firstly a disclaimer: I am merely (like Glenn) an informed amateur in the biotech field but I have a reasonable understanding of where we are in terms of the slicing and dicing of genese and particularly the genes of bacteria and similar unicellular organisms as I used to work for a company that did this commercially. It is entirely possible that I am wrong and that even if right that there are some wrinkles that make my schemes impractical for actual terrorists, but given that you will need a couple of good biochemist PhDs to do this stuff that is not much of a defence because such people can probably figure out where I'm wrong in the details. However I'm publishing this not to show how clever I am but because there ought to be some thought given for ways to stop this kind of thing. Essentialy a biotech arms-race.
Today biochemists routinely modify the DNA of bacteria such as e.coli to make it express a gene to create something useful such as a particular enzyme. Quite often the enzyme is one that originates in an entirely different bacterial species such as one living in a hot sulphur spring (e.coli is a bacterium of the human gut - an environment that is very different from a hot sulphur spring even if you have heartburn). Without being too specific it ought to be possible to produce GM e.coli that produce almost any arbitrary enzyme and (potentially) chemical. Much the same could be done to other bacterial species that are well known such as those that cause common bacterial infections.
One of the problems that pharmaceutical companies face is that the human body is quite good at keeping nasty stuff out. The cells and beceria flora in the gut do an excllent job of stopping many larger molecules (such as complex enzymes or other proteins) from entering the rest of the body - the reason why BSE is so scary is that the gut seems to have a problem breaking down the prion that is its cause into something simpler - and there is another stronger barrier between the brain and the rest of the body. However neither of these protections nor any of the others are perfect - if they were we wouldn't catch all these bacterial diseases, let alone the viral ones - and indeed it would seem that the fact that a number of bacterial species are good at either living in humans (e.coli and friends) or invading (MRSA and co) would make such speices ideal for the first stage of a biowarfare attack.
Let's go with the e.coli version. If you want to kill someone then a really good way would be "food poisoning" by means of e.coli. The GM e.coli would have been podified to express a gene that produces an enzyme (a nitrilase perhaps) that creates hydrogen cynaide from some fairly common food product such as potatoes. Thus after this bacterium has established itself in your gut it will divide and divide and each bacterium will be producing lots of cyanide enzyme. Then at some point you will get a die off of a significnt number of these e.coli and their cell walls will crack - a cunning bioscientist might be able to make this happen after a certain time such as the 1000th cell division, others might just decide to wait for nature to act by chance. At this point anyone who has some cooked potatoes in their stomach will get a stomach full of cyanide and die.
How would you distribute this bioweapon? Pick something that is unikely to be cooked or frozen (tuna for sushi? salad?) and spray a load of GM e.coli over it. Do this at a wholesale market or at the kitchen of a large catered event - think of all those rubber chicken fund-raisers beloved of politiicans - and you'll get quite a nice body count. More to the point do it "al Qaeda" style simulateneously to multiple food markets and hotels and you'll get a very large number of deaths before someone figures out what the attack vector is and even then potentially many many more before someone figures out how to sterilise food before serving it and without cooking it. This latter problem is one that explains Montezumas revenge and all those other food poisoning incidents. Cooking food really is a good idea if you want to kill lethal bacteria but it does ruin the taste of all sorts of food.
Finding other equally good attack vectors is left as an exercise for the reader.
The important point here is that while the required steps (the isolation, cloning and overexpression of genes that produce a particular enzyme and moving them from one bacterial species to another) are specialist tasks each isn't that difficult. OK so there is a good deal of relativeness in that statement: a good group of scientists and lab-techs will move from identification of the critcal gene toits successful cloning in e.coli in 6-8 weeks while a bad group can spend 3 years on the same task. However a three year project could easily be handled by some terrorist setting up a fake startup or subborned university research project. Permalink
Via Jane Galt is this comment from NY Times columnist (BTW if you omit the L in columnist my spell checker suggested communist as a perfered uggestion :) ) Paul Krugman:
"The Algebraist," by Iain M. Banks: Hey, it can't be all work and no play. Science fiction - specifically, Isaac Asimov's Foundation - is what got me into economics in the first place. Mr. Banks, a Scot who isn't that well known in the United States, is probably my favorite contemporary science-fiction writer. If you're interested, I'd suggest "Use of Weapons" as an introduction.
I didn't find the Algebaist to be one of Iain M Banks' better books but I strongly endores the "Use of Weapons" suggestion and also recommend "The Player of Games" as well as "Excession". I can sort of see why Foundation would get you into economics, it didn't get me into it and, in fact, although I enjoyed the first Foundation volume I was far less enamoured with the rest of the series. Actually I recall reading somewhere that Asimov was inspired by Gibbon's Decline & Fall of the Roman Empire, and one result of readin Asimov was that I did begin to read Gibbon. I don't think I got terribly far but I do remember enjoying some of it.
Jane also asked:
I wonder if those who read science fiction in childhood can be divided into those who liked Robert Heinlein better, with his swashbuckling individualism, and those who preferred Isaac Asimov, with his technocratic fantasies. And I wonder if those early preferences semi-reliably map onto the conservative/liberal divide . . .
I read both as a child and liked both. As an adult I find Heinlein to be more (re)readable than Asimov but some Asimov still gets periodicaly reread by me - for example "The Gods Themselves" - and some Heinlein no longer takes up space on my bookcase. Politcally I'm very much of the Bernado de la Paz school, i.e. at the anarchist end of libertarianism. Permalink
Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics from Pressure Groups
The Register has a wonderful column up where they do some amazing back of the envelope calculations to prove that the bad habits of Americans costs their country more than the entire money supply (M2).
We come up with a grand total of $7.39 trillion - well in excess of the $6.70 trillion that actually exists. That's right, when you allow for the basic costs that we've all got to put up with, and the inevitable losses to criminals like Ken Lay and Ted Bundy, and then pile on the items that meddling little turds hate to see us enjoying, it all costs more money than there is.
I have absolutely no doubt that similar analysis would prove much the same in the UK or Europe. I suggest you read the whole thing but for fun I have itemized the various expenses they list.
Money Supply and Government
Amount
Money supply (using the M-2 metric, which includes M-1, plus savings account balances and mutual fund deposits):
Unfortunately it looks like - as I just noticed - the superbowl and World series are a mere 1.286bn. In order to get the register's number they have to be misread at 1286bn. In other words there is a little order of magnitude error. Still I guess we can resolve that problem by adding in the US trade deficit - $804.9bn in 2005 to give $2673.2 - and of course if we go for the ridiculous meet eater cost ($1000bn) then we are immediately back in more cost than money territory.
Today's image is the pile of olive cuttings to be burned. I'm only a bt more than half way through pruning and I still have a big big pile so its time to burn the olive branches to make way for more. As always you can click on the image from a larger version and see past photos here. Permalink
HRH Charlie has won a very interesting UK court victory against the Mail on Sunday snoozepaper which obtained seven of his confidential journals and intended to publish the juicy bits. The ruling is interesting because firstly it upholds the right to privacy and strikes down any right to publish stolen documents even if they are theoretically in the public interest. Also interesting is that another legal argment used was that the diaries were copyright and that publishing them without permission was therefore a breach of copyright law. It will be interesting to see how this holds up in subsequent cases but given that "dealing in stolen goods" is an offence in most countries and that copyright is also strictly enforced in most English speaking countries, it would seem that this ruling could have a lot of rather interesting consequences.
My fertile imagination sees that in fact not just civil but criminal proceedings for such crimes could very well succeed with the right jury, and journalists or publishers who are found guilty of such felonies will find their lives and livelihoods significantly impacted. "Dealing in stolen goods" and/or "comissioning and profiting from a crime" are the sort sof offence that usually get pinned on criminal bosses and they tend to not All sorts of things like visa applications, the ability to be a company director, or to vote or to stand in some elections are affected by having a criminal record with such offense on it.
Personally, despite believing that secrecy is generally bad, I am all in favour of newspapers losing the default "publis interest" defense. It seems to me that up until recently the general assumption has been that "public interest" justifies printing anything and that therefore suing a media site for printing confidential items was always going to fail. This may no longer be the case and it occurs to me that many leakers and their journalistic abettors should be very very nervous about the ramifications of this ruling, especially combined with the Plame-case fall out in the USA.
That is the good news. The bad news is that the blogosphere, especially the UK blogosphere, will need to take note of this case as few bloggers are likely to be able to fund a defense.
The AP does an absolutely bang up job in exaggerating the Anti-Iraq protests. Big Lizards links to a different AP story under the sacastic headline "Million Mom March Draws Thousands", but I think the one I link too shows the best example of the "desire that doth outrun performance" to make it clear that the AP really hates Bush.
Lead paragraph:
CHICAGO - The third anniversary of the U.S.-led war in Iraq drew tens of thousands of protesters — shouting chants of "Stop the War" and calling for the withdrawal of troops — in demonstrations across the globe.
Obviously there were numerous demonstrations around the world each of which had many thousand protestors. Clearly this was like the demonstrations three years ago, right? er wrong as the next paragraph or three helpfully explains:
More than 7,000 people marched through downtown Chicago in one of the nation's largest protests, saying the war diverts money from domestic needs and demanding the U.S. pull out of Iraq. One sign read, "Bush is a category 5 disaster." [...]
In Tokyo, anti-war rallies stretched into a second day, with about 800 protesters chanting "No War, Stop the War!" and banging drums as they marched peacefully Sunday through downtown Tokyo toward the U.S. Embassy. A day earlier, about 2,000 rallied in Tokyo.
Elsewhere Sunday, anti-war protesters demonstrated outside the U.S. Embassy in Malaysia and up to 2,000 were also expected in Seoul, South Korea, which has the third-largest contingent of foreign troops in Iraq after the U.S. and Britain.
Many of the demonstrations in Australia, Asia and Europe drew smaller than anticipated crowds. In London, police said 15,000 people joined a march from Parliament and Big Ben to a rally in Trafalgar Square.
If you do the sums we have under 30,000 demonstrators. Now given that Chicago was "one of the largest" lets be generous and assume that rallies in 2 other US cities had similar numbers (another 14,000) and we're still somewhere in the region of 45,000 demonstrators, although this could well be generous because
More than 1,000 people gathered Saturday in Times Square near a military recruiting station, which was guarded by police.
Something tells me that more than 1,000 is, in this case, less than say 2,000 so the NY demonstration was clearly a lot smaller than the Chicago one. Apparently there were demonstrations elsewhere in the world too but I think I'm pretty safe in my overall numbers. Which is just a trifle embarassing as the end of the paragraph about the London demo points out that:
The anniversary last year attracted 45,000 protesters in the city.
In other words last year London alone had "tens of thousands" of protestors. This year the entire world had fewer.
PS for a laugh look at the protest pictures at Michelle Malkin's blog (via Plunge), I can't help but be reminded of a certain song by a Ms J Joplin
Oh lord, won't you buy me a mercedes benz? My friends all drive porsches I must make amends Worked so hard all my life-time No help from my friends So oh, lord, won't you buy me a mercedes benz?
Unlile the fiizzle of the anti-war protests, the anti-jobs protests in France really did get "tens of thousands" of participants. In my earlierposts on the subject I put the cause down to selfishness, but I'm beginning to think that I may have been too kind and that ignorance, stupidity and the like are the real causes. Everyone, even the student protestors, agree that the job prospects for graduates and other young people are dire, and most economists and external analysts blame the rigid French labour laws for this, yet the students are protesting the attempt to liberalise the laws.
It is true that there are faults on the government side too. The Torygraph points out that:
In loosening France's rigid labour code, the government could have played its hand more skilfully.
First, the Bill was railroaded through parliament in a vain attempt to pre-empt mass demonstrations by students and workers. Second, its wording, giving companies the right to sack young workers without justification, is unnecessarily provocative.
However the fault of the government - an inability to communicate - is far less than the moronic agitators who have decided to try and protest the law. I am extremely unclear what alternative they would prefer, although I'd bet it is something like "make the government pay employers to take on young people", but whatever it is, it is absolutely certain that it
won't work
is unaffordable anyway
Tim W has a link to another Torygraph item which explains just how broken the current system is:
At about 23 per cent, youth unemployment in France is twice the national average, and one of the highest in Europe. Young people take eight to 11 years to secure their first full-time staff contract.
He rehtorically asks if "idiots" is too strong a word and answers himself that no it isn't. I'd go further and say that in fact calling these protestors idiots is an insult to genuine idiots and morons. It is a sign of how little grasp of economics (and one might argue reallity) that these protestors have that they are unable to correlate cause with effect and note that the fact it is next to impossible to fire someone in France (at least not without a big golden parachute) is a major reason why no employer will take the risk to employ someone marginal and why, consequently, French economic growth is in the toilet.
Anecdotally I can add that the "tens of thousands" of fonctionnaires and millions of regulations are additional severe disincentives to investment in France, but the fact that employees have very little incentive to work hard is probably the worst issue. Although it has been partially repealed, the 35-hour week attempted to make it illegal to work more than 35 hours per week, 48 weeks per year and while the law was generally flouted by all and sundry - even the unions started complaining after a while - the message it sent was clear: Work hard and you get punished. Given that message why would any sane employer take on a new employee unless he absolutely had to?
Permalink
CNN has a fascinating article about the "Ten hottest cars in America" which is not good reading for any company other than Toyota. The top 10 cars are:
Toyota Prius
Mini Cooper
Pontiac Solstice
Scion xA
Scion xB
Scion tC
Lexus RX400h
Honda Civic
Toyota Rav4
Ford Escape Hybrid
Since Scion and Lexus are Toyota brands that makes 6 out of 10 coming from big T. BMW (Mini), Honda, GM(Pontiac) and Ford get one each to round out the list. This is not an uncontroversial selection and its methodology is potentially suspect but it seems to me that its base idea is good. It isn't a list of top sellers but rather a list of cars where demand appears to be outstripping supply - and in the oversupplied car market this is a rare thing - and hence also indicates the cars that are most likely to be making profits for their manufacturers.
To find the 10 hottest cars in America for CNNMoney.com, Edmunds.com, a partner providing data and content for CNN Web sites, looked for three things: Actual selling prices closest to the vehicle's full sticker price; lowest amounts in rebates or other sales incentives; shortest times spent on dealer lots before being snapped up by buyers.
One truly fascinating thing is the way that with Scion (and Lexus), Toyota is doing its best to introduce the best of Japanese new car sales practise to the USA such as reducing haggle, build to order and customer satisfaction is not an after-thought. The Japanese method is not perfect but parts of it are certainly vast improvements on the equivalent process in the USA where "customer satisfaction" is a phrase that most dealers couldn't spell let alone implement. Permalink
So far this page has not been affected, or apparently not as my sitemeter stats still show Pakistani visitors, but many other pages have been banned in Pakistan mostly because of the cartoons so I'm publishing this logo and explanation:
Since 28th February (2006), Pakistani Bloggers’ Freedom of Speech has been under attack by some, if not all, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) who has chosen to block all blogs hosted on the blogspot.com domain. Political pressure groups have protested to the government to block those web sites displaying the controversial cartoon images of Prophet Muhammed (PBUH) that were hosted on the net. But instead of blocking specific sites, ISPs have simply blacklisted the entire domain, causing thousands of blogs to be inaccessible for viewing in Pakistan. It is our point of view, that any censorship of blogs is unacceptable, be it a few offensive sites inciting a hateful stereotype, or hundreds of blogs protesting controversial caricatures or even the thousands of sites that remain indifferent to the issue.
In Afghanistan there is an unfortunate man who is being prosecuted and faces execution for converting to Christianity. In Yale there is a fortunate man who is benefitting mainly from his defence of similar practices under the previous regime (key difference as far as I can tell is that the previous lot wouldn't have worried about the prosecition bit).
Maybe if Yale feels so strongly for Afghanis it could offer the former the same deal as the latter ... and maybe the USA could offer the poor guy asylum while he's here? Permalink
A mere £1.5m - or just a few kilos of heroin - and it's yours. As the description said in the roughly 2 seconds it was still on eBay:
Not getting enough sleep?
Feel you're being unfairly passed over by the government for all that money you've given to their party?
Feel you're not quite snooty enough yet?
Own a chain of corner shops and want your own coat of arms?
You too can now purchase a peerage and become a lifetime member of the House of Lords - The most exclusive private members club in the land.
It's not a purchase, it's an investment!
Watch as business is put your way by your fellow members in true masonic style... Steel Magnates and Supermarket owners should not miss out on this perfect oppurtunity.
So place a bid to become a parliamentarian, without the need for those pesky elections - YOU'LL EVEN GET EXPENSES!
These people are a barrel of fun, we even quoted my mate Archer as saying "go for it, it'd be a crime not to"
You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll want your money back.
PS little known fact: A Blair is NOT descended from the illegitimate offspring of former UK prime minister Lloyd George. Permalink
Burning the Olive branch. These are some of the clippings from our trees. Olive branches burn very hot when they have been left a week or so after the pruning.
As always click on the image to see it larger and see the rest of the series if you missed it
The US and some European governments are lining up to support the unfortunate Aghan Christian Abdur Rahman. It seems to me though that some other groups are missing in the general outcry namely the churches. I find it odd that people like me (who are frequently agnostic or atheist) are more worked up about this chap's fate than the leaders of his co-religionists. Now I could be wrong, maybe the pope or some other church has come out to protest but I can't find anything. For example as someone baptised and confirmed in the Church of England I would have hoped that the C of E would have issued some sort of press release about him but the only hit for "Afghan" on the CofE website is this statement on the overthrow of the Taliban in 2002:
The House of Bishops of the Church of England today issued a statement of concern on issues arising from the conflict in Afghanistan. The statement covers the status and treatment of prisoners, the rebuilding of Afghan society and the growing number of civilian casualties. ...
The Daily Ablution reported about how the Church in Wales was keen to grovel in apology for accidentally insulting any Muslim who might have accidentally read a (Welsh language) church newspaper which reprinted a cartoon from France Soir. Surely a Christian church should be more concerned about the potential death sentence being passed on a fellow Christian than about insulting believers in a different religion but apparently not. Given that I recall that in the 1980s Anglicans frequently prayed and organized on behalf of oppressed Christians in Eastern Europe or China why do they not similarly campaign against Christian oppression in Islamic countries such as Afghanistan, Pakistan or Saudi Arabia.
Update: According to the BBC the bishops may have been saved from embarassment because the Afghans are bowing to governmental pressure and it seems at least one bishop has spoken out: he Bishop of Rochester, the Right Rev Michael Nazir-Ali, but its not exactly being shouted from the rooftops
In the last month or two I have been listening to a number of podcasts. They have whiled away the hours of driving from Nice to Barcelona and Turin, some other drives around England as well as a number of tedious train journeys, and I think it may be worthwhile commenting upon the phenomenon. Mind you I am no all-knowing connoisseur in the podcasting business, my podcasting selection has been pretty much limited to the Glenn & Helen show, the Northern Alliance Radio podcasts, a few Nerd TV episodes and Japundit but perhaps that pickiness may help illustrate my points.
Firstly I hate iTunes. I have tried it a couple of times courtesy of Instapundit's heavy pushing and one of the Japundit music choices and I completely fail to see its attraction. Perhaps if I possessed an iPod things would be different but as someone who listens purely via the PC and who has no particulalr desire to buy music I find iTunes to be practically Microsoftian in its intolerance of alternatives (in this case to buying music from Apple and playing it on the iPod). I'm still keeping it because my accidental installation of it seems to have supplanted the perfectly good quicktime player I had before but I'm not going to use it for anything other than playing the very rare quicktime movie. It has always amazed me that people whom I generally respect seem to go completely batty about Apple products that I personally hate and iTunes seems to be no exception. Having said that the French parliament's idea to force iTunes/iPod interoperabilty with other systems is a classic example of a government meddling to make a bad situation worse. If, as I suspect, Apple's response to this sort of diktat is to stop selling stuff in France then all the pols have done is reduced choice for their constituents and that may not tbe the only way that choice is reduced. iTunes has done the world a major favour by convinvingly demonstrating to the record labels that at the right price people will buy music rather than "pirate" it and the government intervention seems most likely to make it easier to pirate iTunes tracks thereby reducing the incentives for the music publishers to continue to embrace the new market and leading to an increase in "piracy". Sadly there seems to be a French gene that leads its people to be unclear on the relationship between "cause" and "effect" and/or "incentives" and "consequences" - this gene is also on display in the current strikes/riots (see comment later).
Secondly my listening to (and occasional straying from) the podcasters listed above has made me decide that in general the best podcasts are those that are dialogues, interviews or panel discussions. The Japundit monologues are interesting but not as entertaining as the Glenn & Helen show or the Northern Alliance Radio which are typically interviews and discussions. About the only problem Ihave is that I want to go all bloggy and comment on the shows which is tricky since I tend to listen to them days or even weeks after their creation. Fortunately the ones where I have really wanted to interject (generally with words like "Moron" or "Damn Straight") have been listened to in the car where no one can hear me rant. I'm not sure how to do it but I think that an opportunity to recond brief messages on the topic of the podcast which could then be edited together with those of others would really help the medium. The interactive feedback is, after all, one of the major strengths of the blog world and being able to do the same with podcasts would help.
Thirdly the quality of analysis on the podcasts I have listened too is far superior to anything I can find on the radio or TV - even the BBC (see below). Political debate as it occurs in the MSM is usually extraordinarily facile and a complete waste of time. Typically the producers seem to prefer to get fireworks in debates rather than serious analysis and their debates are generally so short that the background to any issue is usually lost. The US port scandal is probably the best recent example although the ongoing failures in Iraq coverage are just as glaring.
Fourthly on my recent trip back to the UK I noticed that the BBC is really the only media producer that seems likely to be able to do podcasting properly. If it does it right I reckon the BBC could in fact make a nice little earner out of it. The BBC has a number of excellent programmes on the world service and Radios 3 & 4 that would make very good podcasts such as the "From our own correspondent" series and these could be sold at iTunes-like prices or in subscription form and I think they would be bought. It seems to me that Radio 4 in particular has suffered from a good deal of dumbing down of its news and current affairs with interviews kept short and interviewers seemingly more interested in unsettling their subject than getting a useful answer. Now it has to be said that in many cases unsettling the politicians, corporate shills and activists who get interviewed is good thing but what seems to happen is that in many cases the bit that is broadcast later (or in some cases earlier) is the unmasking and stammering soundbite rather than the whoile thing where one can hear the context. Now I'm not Derida deconstructionist, but the context is frequently inportent, witness the brief brou-ha-ha about Tony Blair's God moment recently, and therefore making the entire interview available as a podcast would seem to be a good way to let those who really want it listen to the entire thing. Permalink
As I noted just below I've been doing a good deal of train travel recently, mostly in and around Switzerland. In today's gadget infested world I am beginning to see a really good attraction to first-class train travel, namely the availability of power outlets. I'm not clear if this is an Italian or a Swiss idea but Cisaplino trains between Zürich and Milano have power outlets in first class but not in cattle class. Combined with the adequately priced meal (and adequately tasting) available in restaurant car and the choice of flight vs train to gop between the two cities is clear. It is true that the train takes a little longer but the scenery is spectacular and the comforts of the train far greater. Indeed one is able to get a lot of work done in the train whereas the contnual breaks for boarding take off landing etc mean that it is far harder to get any work done in the air.
There is another advantage of train travel, at least in Switzerland, and that is the presence of Swiss soldiers. If I were a terrorist I would not even think about hijacking or attacking a Swiss train from the inside because many Swiss soldiers on their way to their duties use the railway. Unfortunately I was unable to take a photo of today's trip to Basel where I was surrounded by a squad of soldiers who were travelling with their rifles and (I assume) some ammunition, but it was impressive. I don't know whether the Swiss soldiers are well trained or not but I damn well know that if I were a terrorist I'd reconsider any plans on a train where there could be a squad of armed soldiers boarding at any station. There is something about the cammo uniforms and the loosely carried assault rifle that, I imageine, would make you reconsider the wisdom of any plan and the unpredictability of their movements would seem to be as effective as any undercover agent in terms of deterrence. I wonder whether the UK tube bombs would have occured if British soldiers were as accustomed to travel around London in a similar uniformed and armed state? Permalink
There are a lot of interesting reports about unrest in France. I personally have been travelling abroad this week so I can't comment directly on what is going on.but I think the situation is fascinating on a number of levels. The first point of interest is the relative silence of Sarko, noted well by Eursoc, who for one reason or another seems willing to sit this one out. Sarko is quite a good political strategist so I suspect he will survive this, but it is unclear whether the CPE will and its defeat seems highly likely to cause Sarko trouble either in his presidential election campaign or int he reforms that he promises to introduce when he is elected.
As I said before the French seem to have a gene that expreses itself in a total failure to comprehend things like cause and effect. The students who are protesting the CPE are precisely the individuals who should benefit from it. Their slogans about not being "disposable workers" would seem to condemn them to being even less useful non-workers. Quite how this can be seen as an improvement is beyond me.
I do however hope that l'Escroc and Vile Pin hold firm and that we see a lot of unrest because I believe that the French citizens need to understand the unsustainability of the current political system. As has been noted many times before, with the notable exception of Sarko, just about every single member of the French political elite is an Enarque and the Enarques have been notable for their tin-eared-ness, their inability to sell reform and their patronizing disdain for the rest of France. On the other hand the enarques appear to have an unofficial bargain with the loony union leaders that if they protest long enough the enarques will buckle and let the unions get their way. The union leaders seem to be people who have even less clue about basic things like economics than anyone else in France and hence their protests against any form of regulatory reform is about as misguided as it is possible to be. If they persist in holding the rest of the nation to ransom with their strikes and riots then I believe that this will encourage voters to choose someone like Sarko in 2007 and encourage Sarko or whoever to actually confront the unions à la Margaret T.
Somewhat related - Eursoc and the BBC both note l'Escroc's language problems in Brussels.
Mr Chirac told reporters on Friday he was "deeply shocked" that a Frenchman chose to address the summit in English.
to me though the key thought is the BBC's previous sentence explaining why:
He stormed out of a session when Ernest-Antoine Seilliere said he chose English "because that is the accepted business language of Europe today".
Once upon a time of course French was the "language of diplomacy" and clearly l'Escroc is unable to understand why such a 19th century idea should seem passé. Even more to the point, the strikes show that French is clearly now the language of "idlers" - the joke that the French have no word for "entrepreneur" would seem to be ever more accurate
While serving in British India during the nineteenth century, General Charles James Napier was reportedly approached by a delegation of locals upset at a ban on the practice of Sati (widow burning), defending it as customary.
His response was as Mark Steyn puts it, impeccably multicultural:
"You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: When men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks, and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours."
[Note - given the Domenech saga there could be a temptation to cry plagiarism here, this should IMO be avoided since as far as I can tell the two columns were submitted practically simultaneously and while they share this anecdote they tell it in different ways, spell Suttee/Sati differently and have no other points in common other than the same comparison between behaviours then and now]
In his column Steyn asks whether the West is willing to stand up for its ideals and not unsurprisiningly or even terribly originally compares the Western response to Abdul's fate to the Islamic response to the Danish cartoons. Even less surprisingly, going on feministe's sarcastic fisking of Blake's column, the answer appears to be no. For further evidence, as the Rottweiler Puppy notes, all one needs to do is look at antics of the future head of the "British Empire" - Prince Chuckles - who seems retermined to grovel in front of any Muslim he can find and apologise for the "ghastly Danish cartoons" but not the Afghan (or Saudi) attitude to Christians.
There is, unfortunately, one problem with Suttee analagy - that is that the Western custom today seems to be best summed up by this joke: A man is walking home, is mugged and left bleeding and unconscious by the roadside. Two social workers come along and when they see him one says to the other "the people who did this really need our help"
God knows the British were a trifle free with the death penalty - why else is there a saying about "you may as well be hung for a sheep as for a lamb"? - and looted foreign treasures without a shred of guilt, but despite that the British did, on the whole, uphold basic human rights by actively stamping out the slave trade (in India, Eastern Africa and Arabia as well as across the Atlantic), stopping Suttee and other charming practises and generally acting as a civilizing influence on the world. I don't think we should go back to the days of the British Raj but I also think that we need to sometimes be a trifle more assertive about insisting that other countries adhere to documents like the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In the Abdul Rahman case Afghanistan is clearly in violation of one article of this declaration:
Article 18.
Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.
I do wonder why many "liberals" in the West seem unwilling to insist that others adhere to this document when they are only too keen to make sure that the US, UK etc strictly abide by it and other similar ones. If it weren't for their frequent denunciations of racism, sexism and other forms of discrimination one might think that they were being distinctly racist in their double standard on Human Rights.
Update:AP also notes that the Afghan constitution incorporates the above mentioned Article 18
Legal experts have said that the case against Rahman is based on contradictory laws.
Afghanistan's constitution is based on Shariah law, which states that any Muslim who rejects Islam should be sentenced to death, according to Ahmad Fahim Hakim, deputy chairman of the state-sponsored Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission.
But the constitution adds that "the state shall abide by the ... Universal Declaration of Human Rights." Article 18 of the Declaration guarantees the freedom to worship and to "change" religion or belief.
At GatesOfVienna Dymphna has an interesting post on Europe as seen from across the pond which is based partly on an excellent post at Brussels Journal. To me almost the best part of the Gates post the comments. The first from Jonathan links to an nice piece of analysis in the Wapping Liar about the growing protectionism in the EU - a trend which notably does not include the UK. He also notes that the UK is somewhat detached from the continental EU in other respects too. On that note I heard the Chancellor Gordon Brown give his budget speech last week and he made it very clear that the UK is economically far different to (and better than) its continental peers in terms of growth, unemployment etc. etc. In fact his reciting of statistics made it clear that while the UK is not quite in the economic health league of the USA, it is a decent second and that the continental Europe countries are generally speaking what horse-racing commentors call "also-rans". For those of us who recall the dire UK performance in the 1970s this is quite a turn around.
Although the UK welfare state is a disaster it is, so far (and NO thanks to Gordon), far less of a disaster than the rest of the EU. Gordon can blow money and still maintain fiscal safety. One difference I think is that the UK doesn't expect the government to do everything and indeed has a general distrust of the government which hinders Brown, Blair and their ZANU Labour colleagues in their attempts to turn the UK into a one party politically correct dictatorship. While there is certainly an increasingly state-dependant class within the UK - from the unemployed and "disabled" to the armies of lesbian outreach officers and other guardianista bureaucrats - there is still a large part which expects to do most things without the state getting involved.
France, on the other hand, is right where the UK was in the 1970s. The unions have all the power, the government is rudderless and the people are to an unimaginable extent dependant on the state. There is an expectation that the government is some sort of bottomless pit of money that can do anything. Combine this with a bunch of leaders who are generally speaking corrupt and amoral and you have a recipe for upcoming disaster. The second commenter, "philipinephil", notes that his brother-in-law, a French businessman, is considering emigration to the Philipines as a better choice than life in France.
From time to time I think similar thoughts, but I have to say that the quality of life in this corner of France is still better than anywhere else I know of. I did, for example, whine a bit about the traffic jam in Grimaud on the way back from St Tropez today; but compared to jams on the M4 near London, highway 17 going back to Silicon Valley from Santa Cruz or for that matter the Autoroutes near Paris on a Sunday evening our jam was nothing. It is true it would be far worse if I were stupid enough to go there in July but I don't. There are plenty of pleasant places (and beaches) that don't involve traffic jams and mostly I go to them. The average commute for people working in Sophia Antipolis - the Riviera's answer to Silicon Valley (ha ha ha) - is about 20 minutes and, other than the lemmings who live in Nice and take the Autoroute, it involves driving down mostly pleasant roads at decent speeds. When I worked in Sophia I used to actually enjoy the drive to work and I actually photographed part of it so you can see why. Those who work in Monaco have it a little harder perhaps but it is rare to have a commute anywhere of more than 45 minutes or so.
The problem is that I, and most of the people I know here, have very little to do with the rest of France. Even if we work in local French businesses our business customers are typically non-French. Many people work in the hospitality trades and their customers may include the French vacationers but there seem to be just as many (if not more) non French ones. The property prices are far higher than most of the rest of France because of all us foreigners buying houses and when we do them up, if we do emply French labourers we frequently pay them on the black. And so on. I would not be surprised if the inhabitants of the Alpes Maritimes would not prefer to be (re)incorporated into Monaco. And without a doubt here on the Riviera, while French is the language used in everyday life, business conducted with people other than local artisans is typically carried out in English much of the time if you are a foreigner and, increasingly, even if you are French, simply because our customers are not French speaking. If l'Escroc had the vapours that a Frenchman spoke at a conference in English then he'd best not come visit Sophia because he'll probably have a fatal heart attack.
On my way to St Tropez today I was chatting with a fellow expat and we agreed that the only hope France has is for a Margaret Thatcher equivalent to come along. The only politician who comes anywhere close is Sarko and I hope he is elected and does indeed reform but I'm not terribly optimistic about the chances of this happening soon. I fear things are going to have to get a lot worse before the French are willing to stomach the sort of reform required. Permalink
This is an amazing tale (H/t Majikthise). It seems that when the AP is caught cutting and pasting huge chunks of blogger original research into its own story on the same subject the response is "we do not credit blogs":
We contacted an AP senior editor and ombudsmen both and both admitted to having had the article passed on to them, and both stated that they viewed us as a blog and because we were a blog, they did not need to credit us. What we are or are not is frankly irrelevant. What is relevant is that by using a term like blog to somehow excuse plagiarism, the mainstream press continues to lower the bar for acceptable behavior. It need not matter where the AP got the information, research, and actual wording from. What matters is that if they use it in part or in whole, they must attribute properly. A blog or a small press publication or grads students working in the corner of a library all equally deserve credit for their work, period.
Unfortunately this is far too common and has happened to me and to other writers and bloggers far too frequently. This time, however, we made a point of tape recording the AP apparatchiks admitting to taking our work and using it without attribution, stating "we do not credit blogs".
The content of the article is, in itself fascinating, and one where I disagree in part with the slant of the original writer, but that is utterly irrelevant. The AP article, while willing to credit "Gay rights activists" is unwilling to credit the original researcher, even when the "[l]esbian and gay advocacy groups" themselves explain they got their information from the original article:
While they will not credit us in any way; they will instead credit advocacy groups, as though that somehow excuses them from having to attribute rightfully. This is what their first article on the documents' said: "Lesbian and gay advocacy groups recently found the change in an 18-page document distributed by National security adviser Stephen Hadley on Dec. 29, without public notice." Yes, the groups had found it in my article, which they gave to the AP.
Yet, even after the advocacy groups reminded the AP of where they got the information, the news organization would not provide attribution.
I think the only solution is for all blogs to form together in a "advocacy group" for protection. We could call it "Freelance Journalists Against Plagiarizism" or something similar.
Update: Over at Majikthise is this comment: But will anyone talk about it. No media outlet can afford to piss of the AP after all. And if no one knows it didn't happen. I responded there as follows: Instapundit knows and so do other bloggers (Roger L Simon for one) so I think this will get more coverage than AP would prefer.
AP may indeed not lose any media outlets but it is likely to lose readers, as are its media outlets. The "right" has already given up on AP for one piece of cruddy biased editoral dressed as news journalism after another. Eventually maybe the "left" will give up because of its other ethical issues.
PS Welcome instapunditeers if you look around you'll find that most of the recent posts are not about the AP but about France and about Abdul Rahman, but I hope they amuse too Permalink
Would you care to explain me the cause and effect we French are missing with this CPE thing? I have read diametrically opposed opinions on this and I am confused, to say the less. By example, I fail to see the improvement over the existing systems (CDI and CDD - undetermined-period contract and fixed-period contract). If we are talking about trial time, existing contracts provide up to 6 months. Actually, interim and CDD contracts are often depicted as "extended" trial time by some recruiters I met. If we are talking about the ability to fire an incompetent or otherwise someone you don't need anymore, it is possible and relatively easy with the existing system (well, you have to precise a reason, but generally you have one, don't you? Economic backlask, incompetence, incompatibility of personalities, change of the mission, moving of facility...). If it's the paper-pusher part which is supposed to be adressed, we don't need a new type of contract, but rather a simplification of the existing system (I grant you, French entropy being what it is, a reform will never be easy) If it is the lifelong contract of the public servants which is a problem (and I agree it is - my own recruitment will be easier if I do not have to convince my would-be employer I will be a perfect lifemate, and I don't mind changing location every 3-5 years), this is not something concerned by the CPE, which adresses only to the private sector. You have the right to call me stupid. But please explain.
Before I make a complete fool of myself by trying to answer this, I think that a disclaimer would be in order
I am not an expert in French employment law nor an economist nor do I play one on TV
The issue here is basically that the students look at this from their perspective without looking at the perspective of the would be employer. Obviously the incentive for the young jobseeker is to find a job that pays as well as possible and which provides security of employment, so it is not surprising that a jobseeker would prefer to waltz straight into a permenant job.
The problem for employers boils down to risk. Except in the (relatively rare) case of a hire who directly replaces a worker who is leaving, employers will only hire if they are expecting an increase in business and generally speaking a permenant increase in business. Unfortunately even in the event that the new employee is in fact the perfect employee there are times when business just isn't so good and you need to fire people or have a really really tolerant bank manager. Given the overall economic outlook in France and given the generally less than understanding nature of bank managers a French employer will (and I speak from considerable obseravtional experience here) do practically anything to avoid hiring another employee. Hence all the fiddles with CDI, CDD etc etc or where people are "one person consulting firms" and so on.
The problem is that all these dodges are inefficient and borderline legal so that, as an employer, you always face the possibility that the French taxman or some fonctionnaire in the emplyment department will take a look at the books and decide that the you are dodging tax or something and force the contractors to become more permenant employees. In other words the risk, even with CDI etc., is that you will be penalized if you take on additional contractors/employees and there are very specific steps like going above 10 (I think it's 10) employees where the amount of red tape increases enormously. Hence you tend to try and find ways to avoid this by working your existing employees hard and/or by not accepting additional business.
The CPE is not, in itself, an end. It is the first baby step; just a partial liberalization of the regulations in that it allows an employer to take a risk for two years and then if things are still good keep the new employee on in regular (fully regulated) full time employment. If the employee is lazy or if the business opportunity isn't there the employer can cut his losses. Now I have no doubt that some employers will abuse the CPE and fire lots of people after 23 months of work, however for most skilled jobs - that is to say most of the jobs that university students can expect to have - employers spend a considerable amout of time and money in training, especially of people on their first job, and given that the employee who has worked for 23 months is a known quantity most employers will prefer to keep him on rather than fire him and look for an untrained replacement. Furthermore since one of the major reasons why employers prefer to hire experienced people rather than freshly minted students (even for CDD positions) is that they want to reduce or eliminate the amount of training they have to do the fact that someone has 23 months of work experience is an aid to getting another job.
Despite the fact that the unions disbelieve it, the French government should in fact permit all employees to be fired at will and remove most other employment laws (e.g. the 35 hour week) because this would significantly reduce unemployment. The result seems counter-intuituve unless you look at employer risk/reward ratios. In the US and the UK where employment law is far less restrictive people are not, as a rule, fired every 2 months because employers do not actually like spending money finding and training new employees. However they do like the idea that they can fire them if need be rather than see the entire company go bust. In France the cost of downsizing and the benefits that the saked worked get is such that when a company announces such a measure most long term employees prefer to be laid off rather than continue working. This is, to put it bluntly, a sign of a boken system. Permalink
Andy Burnham comes clean on the ID cards according to this PA story:
Identity cards will effectively be compulsory for large numbers of British citizens, Home Office Minister Andy Burnham said.
Labour's manifesto for last year's General Election said ID cards would be introduced "initially on a voluntary basis".
The Bill introducing the cards returns to Parliament as part of a "ping-pong" between Commons and Lords, because peers insist that plans to link them to the issue of passports means they will not be voluntary. [...]
"During the parliamentary process that the Bill went through before the General Election, we were absolutely clear on this point.
"There was no doubt about the link with the passport. We said all along that the right way to proceed would be at the time when we introduced the biometric passport, when fingerprints were introduced into the passport, that would be the right time to introduce the clean National Identity Register."
There are also indications that ID cards will be linked to driving license renewals too. So the ID card is volutary only if you don't drive a car and never leave the country. The House of Lords thinks ID cards are bad for much the same reason I do - it will increase the likelihood of identity theft:
Lady Park, a Tory peer and former senior MI6 officer, told Today should could not see a reason why the scheme should be compulsory.
She feared it would "cause a marvellous opportunity for identity theft", financially, commercially, but also for unfriendly groups and foreign services who "will find every bit of information they need about somebody to create identity theft".
Meanwhile our mate Andy thinks that:
A National Identity Register with biometric details, such as fingerprints, would make people "more able to control access to their identities", he said.
It would also ensure that the British passport does not become "a second class document".
"I take the view that it is part of being a good citizen, proving who you are, day in day out," said Mr Burnham.
Ooops I don't think he should have said that last bit. The states that require their citizens to prove who they are day-in day-out are bastions of democracy like Cuba, the People's Republic of China, Iran and the Stalinist Soviet Union. The Nazis were very keen on ID cards too if I recall correctly. He also does his best to gloss over the ID theft fears but the BBC kindly shows us what information is to be stored and I can't actually think of a more ideal document for a fraudster to steal and read to perform ID theft:
Personal information
full name
other names by which person is or has been known
date of birth
place of birth
gender
address of principal place of residence in the United Kingdom
the address of every other place in the United Kingdom where person has a place of residence.
Identifying information
a photograph of head and shoulders
signature
fingerprints
other biometric information
Residential status
nationality
entitlement to remain in the United Kingdom where that entitlement derives from a grant of leave to enter or remain in the United Kingdom, the terms and conditions of that leave
Personal reference numbers
National Identity Registration Number
the number of any ID card issued
allocated national insurance number
the number of any relevant immigration document
the number of their United Kingdom passport
the number of any passport issued to the individual by or on behalf of the authorities of a country or territory outside the United Kingdom or by or on behalf of an international organisation
the number of any document that can be used by them (in some or all circumstances) instead of a passport;
the number of any identity card issued to him/her by the authorities of a country or territory outside the United Kingdom
any reference number allocated to him/her by the secretary of state in connection with an application made by him for permission to enter or to remain in the United Kingdom
the number of any work permit relating to him/her;
any driver number given to him/her by a driving licence;
the number of any designated document which is held by him/her and is a document the number of which does not fall within any of the preceding sub-paragraphs
the date of expiry or period of validity of a document the number of which is recorded by virtue of this paragraph.
Record history
information falling within the preceding paragraphs that has previously been recorded about him/her in the Register
particulars of changes affecting that information and of changes made to his/her entry in the Register
date of death.
Registration and ID card history
the date of every application for registration made by him/her
the date of every application by him/her for a modification of the contents of his entry
the date of every application by him/her confirming the contents of his entry (with or without changes)
the reason for any omission from the information recorded in his/her entry
particulars (in addition to its number) of every ID card issued to him/her
whether each such card is in force and, if not, why not
particulars of every person who has countersigned an application by him/her for an ID card or a designated document, so far as those particulars were included on the application
particulars of every notification given about lost, stolen and damaged ID cards
particulars of every requirement by the secretary of state for the individual to surrender an ID card issued to him.
(and there's more) So you have all your addresses and all your passport, NI and driving license numbers. And this is not considered a security risk? I giuess these people get their security advice from Microsoft. Since we have to carry the thing around all day and "prove our identity day-in day-out" clearly there will be readers for them all over the place. Does anyone realy think that each and every reader will be stored in a secure location and used solely by trustworthy personnel? Even assuming no one manages to break into where ever the readers are made and given their final programming the opportunity for ID reader theft is going to be pretty simple. I'm guessing that the average cop car will have one in a few years so the smart crimnal is going to steal a police car and take the ID card reader, or if that turns out to be a little tough the local DSS benefits office, job centre or local council office will probably be well-equipped with them, and with underpaid bureaucrats who will appreciate a little honorarium every now an again to run a newly nicked card through the system and print off the details.
Oh and apparently (see the section in red) even corpses will need an ID card. Talk about cradle to grave government!!!
If I am ever forced to get one of these things the first thing I'm going to do is destroy it. I would rather pay the fine for not having one that risk having all my private information be stored in one easy to steal location.
From "Duh" news department today the BBC reports the unsurprising story of Charles Taylor's decision to move from his nice house in Nigeria without bothering to leave a forwarding address. The former Liberian president is wanted by the Sierra Leone war crimes tribunal for his meddling in that country and probably also wanted by a number of people in Liberia who are rather upset at the way he treated that country as his own personal property. Last weekend Liberia and Nigeria announced that Nigeria planned to hand Mr Taylor over to Liberia and Liberia in turn was expected to hand him over to the tribunal. The UN chief prosecutor was a little miffed at the idea that Mr Taylor should have been given such a public warning:
"The watching world will wish to see Taylor held in Nigerian detention to avoid the possibility of him using his wealth and associates to slip away, with grave consequences to the stability of the region," Mr De Silva said on Sunday.
However what he feared appears to have come to pass. Mr Taylor and possibly some of those he did "business" with decided that it would be best if he did a bunk and so, amazingly enough, he has done so. The Nigerians have arrested all the suckers guards who were in charge of making sure he stayed put and I have no doubt that some or all of them got a few $$$ to look the other way at a critical period last night, but something tells me that this escape had some rather more senior involvement too.
The words "brewery" "pissup" "could" "organize" "not" are coming to my mind for some reason when I think of the diplomats who masterminded this particular triumph of justice Permalink
In November 1982 I took a Mathematics O Level which had (amongst other questions) the following:
You may assume that 124.6 x 1357 =169082.2 without checking
Using the above result evaluate 123.6 x 1357 by a subtraction method only
By a similar method to that used in 1) calculate 224.6 x 1357 (no credit will be given for direct multiplication)
Write down the value of 169082.2 ÷ 1246
(The front of the paper notes that no calculators or slide rules are allowed and that all working must be shown) This examination was supposed to test the mathematical knowledge of children aged about 16. I note this purely because of the whining (university) student who is fisked here and which ends:
Every generation has geniues and idiots, and it’s hard to compare.
No, it’s easy to compare: a first-year statistics course’ll provide you with the tools to identify trends. See your local university for a statistics class near you! If you think that you can’t analyze data because it can’t always be linearly ordered, then your university education has been for naught.
Easter[n] education is probably the strictest and the most rigorious in the world, but they produce far less Nobelist than North America, and there is a reason for that. This is where a rigorous education is simply not enough.
In any first-year statistics course - you know, the one whose content you obviously don’t get at all - one learns that one can’t compare data sets by looking at the outliers.
Go learn about what that means - independently, in a library - and then we’ll talk.
It occurs to me that comparing the syllabus that English pupils had to master by age 16 in 1982 (those who know me and my age will note that I had mastered it at a somewhat younger age) and the one that North American university students apparently have to master some 2 decades later makes it clear that there is some serious slippage in standards.
I was looking for a good statistics question but the only one I could find was in my S level maths and I accept that S Level Maths was not something most students finishing secondary education could possibly have attempted, still we did do basic probability in A level if not AO level maths and I distinctly remember calculating in class the expected loss on a lottery ticket which made it clear to me that lotteries are indeed "taxes on the stupid".
Going back to university level mathematics, I wonder at what level of university study in 2006 one is expected to answer questions like this from my first year Cambridge maths (Tripos 1A paper 4 Saturday 28 May 1988 1:30 to 4:30):
State the divergence theorem, and give an elementary proof of it. Verify the theorem for the case of the vector field v=(2x, -y2,2x2), taken over the region bounded by x2+y2=4, z=1 and z=3
I doubt I could answer the question now but looking at the exam paper I clearly answered it then and probably did so successfully - although I avoided the question which began with "Starting from Maxwell's equations, show that..." and contained "[You may assume without proof the general solution for Poisson's equation...]".
I thought I'd show you one of my trees which was well pruned this year. Actually you get a 2 for the price of 1 special this week because I couldn't figure out whether it looked better from one side or the other so I've put both. As always clicking on the photos shows you them enlarged and the rest of the series is here.