Light Blogging Warning

It is quarter past six on Monday morning, and I just got back from the office. I also have a flight to catch in a bit, and won't be back till tomorrow. So blogging will on the light side of normal.

You may ask yourself it is that I find myself coming back from the office at this time of day. It is all due to my uncanny ability to procrastinate coupled with the fact that I am nocturnal. Usually I cannot indulge in my nocturnal lifestyle, as most meetings and business is conducted during daylight hours, but occassionally working through the night is a welcome relief, and my productivity is much higher. It also helps there are no phone calls to interrupt my thoughts and I can actually concentrate on work. This was one of those nights. A bit of deadline pressure also helps to focus. At times like these I truly wonder how much work I could get done if it weren't for the constant distractions of a normal working day. The problem there is that many of the distractions are functional and work-related, so they are not a complete waste of time.

Today won't be too bad though. I napped yesterday afternoon as part of the grand plan. And I can sleep on the plane in a bit... that'll give me enough rest to survive the lunch and meetings that will follow. I could, of course, have started to work in the afternoon, but that seldom produces the right kinds of results.

Procrastination is a wonderful thing. I do think I need more practice though. Ideally, I'd prefer to do everything at the last minute. Either that, or not to have to sleep at all. That would give me twice as much conscious time not to do things until I can't avoid doing them anymore. Procrastinating at this level is not easy. You may think there's nothing to it watching procrastinators performing on TV, but let me tell you, there is a lot of skill involved. If you just set out to procrastinate without giving it any thought at the last minute, you'll likely find yourself way past your deadline. The ideal act of procrastination lets you finish whatever needs to be done just in time for a small victory lap before hitting the send/print/save button.

Back to my verbs. I should have looked at them last week.

Chocolate and happiness

A new study published in the scientific journal Appetite suggests that men crave chocolate more when they are happy. The research consisted of showing men bits from films to invoke specific emotions and it turns out that when they're feeling happy, men are more likely to crave chocolate.

You have to love Appetite's self-description:

Appetite is an international research journal specializing in behavioural nutrition and the cultural, sensory, and physiological influences on choices and intakes of foods and drinks. It covers normal and disordered eating and drinking, dietary attitudes and practices and all aspects of the bases of human and animal behaviour toward food.

I wonder whether they need more volunteers for their chocolate research. I think there is a market opportunity here if they set up a chocolate-dating service, akin to Yahoo Personals or Match.com. I'd be more than happy to offer my services to serious chocolate research.

The next few days will see an expansion of my own chocolate research. I'll be in Italy for the next two days, and the shops at Malpensa airport in Milan sell great chocolate. Last time I was there I bought a box of neapolitani of what they call "mono-origin" chocolates. It's the chocolatic equivalent of a single-malt scotch whiskey, or a varietal in wine. The box had chocolates from Ecuador, Grenada, Jamaica, Madagascar, Trinidad and Venezuela, and all chocolates have a minimum cocoa content of 70%. Very powerful flavors which even in small quantities last for a long time. The Amedei web site has more information on their offerings. More research in this area is definitely needed.

The end of the bear market!

The end is nigh. The end of the bear market, that is. One of the traditional indicators for rising or falling stocks is the ever-reliable hemline. They're going up. Models are strutting on catwalks in miniskirts and bright colors again. About time, I say.

The flying manhole covers of Georgetown

Here's another risk to add to your daily routine: flying manhole covers. The problem has been around for some time, but it has not received much attention, except if you live in the DC area, where there has been more intensive coverage of the epidemic of flying manhole covers. They'd had a spate of them a few years ago, and now they're back again. They're still pretty rare occurrences, but there have been fatalities before. The secret life of what's underneath the manhole covers is what keeps things running: gas, electricity, data conduits, water and sewage. The complexity of the systems is enormous if you think of the many interconnects that there are in order to get the payload where it needs to go. And it's costly too, although the costs can be depreciated over many years.

I've never been able to remember whether I should walk on the cracks in the pavement, or avoid them. But avoiding manhole covers is a lot easier. So next time you see one, think of the infrastructure that's underneath, and try not to walk too close to it.

And you thought NPR was bad...

The Dutch broadcasting system is hybrid. Commercial broadcasters have been around for only about a decade or so, and inevitably they have stolen market share from the state-funded system. The state-funded system is in itself a relic from the way Dutch society used to be organized in the first half of the 20th century when radio started to make its appearance. The Dutch word to describe this is "verzuiling," meaning "columnization." People grew up, lived and worked mostly within their own "column" of society. A catholic would send his children to a catholic school, read a catholic paper, go to a catholic bar, sport at a catholic club and listen to the catholic radio station. Other columns included various protestant denominations, the socilaists, the liberals and some smaller groups. To a remarkable extent these columns lived parallel lives interacting to a surprisingly limited degree. In this environment the Dutch state-funded broadcast system was formed. Each group could set up its own broadcasting organization, which would be funded to a small part from member contributions and to a large part from "listening money," a tax levied on every radio (and later TV) owner. The amount of air time was determined by the number of members.

To this day, most of the original broadcasters still exist, even though the societal conditions which led to their emergence have long since vanished in the post-war secularization of Dutch society. They still claim to be true to their original mission and to represent their particular constituency, but those claims are very hollow. Most of them just produce mass-market TV and radio programs with government funding. The old "Listening Money" has been abolished, and the funding now comes out of general taxation. And now we have commercial broadcasters which have larger market shares.

In order to support all these broadcasters, the Dutch tax payer has to ante up no less than 650 million euro. To put this into context: NPR gets about $43 million a year, while PBS gets $620 million. While privatizing NPR and PBS are probably good ideas in their own right, the relative cost to the US taxpayer is much less than what the Dutch taxpayer gets hit with.

A large part of the money is wasted on duplication of functions within each of the broadcasters. Some of them are now cooperating, such as the block of NCRV (protestant, don't ask me which variant), KRO (catholic) and AVRO (liberal), known as AKN. In their palatial new headquarters each of the three members still has its own radio studios, their own staff and presenters. Supposedly to maintain their identity. The five public radio channels cost about 100 million euro a year and get an average of 760,000 listeners. The commercial broadcasters have 1.14 million listeners and don't get a single cent from the taxpayer.

It is time to overhaul the public broadcasting system. It has long outlived its original purpose and has become yet another self-sustaining bureaucracy that feeds off the public trough. We don't really need 5 radio stations and 3 TV stations funded by the taxpayer. Cutting off public funding would be a start to help the broadcasters focus on controlling costs. Many will not survive in a competitive environment, and will be gobbled up by competitors. But consolidation here is a good thing. We really don't need dozens of broadcasters in this country. Those who do have a dedicated audience will be able to survive. The others won't be missed.

Accelerating the downward spiral

When I posted my comment on exceedingly harsh taxation, the Captain emailed me back with a note mildly chastising me for calling him "lucky" to be living in a low-tax country, quoting the Jeffersonian adage that people get the governments they deserve. I certainly agree that this holds water in many parts of the world, and especially in Europe. On the other hand there are some regimes that nobody deserves, such as the harsher despotisms of the Arab world.

However, in most European countries there are elections, and people do get a say in who they want to be governed by. Like the Germans, who went to the polls last week and made their choice. And they are certainly getting the rewards they deserve: tax hikes! In the negotiations about putting together a new government, both the Greens and the SPD have wasted no time in ditching their election rhetoric and are now calling for hefty tax rises. They've already agreed on raising further the so-called "eco-tax," which is a tax levied on energy. Since energy input is a rather essential part of economic activity, this measure alone will hit the already punch-drunk German economy pretty hard. Then there are calls to abolish tax breaks for married couples, "to fund child care." Ah, wonderful lofty goals for yet more government involvement in your private affairs. The government is of course well-known for its efficient and well-run services, so expanding government interference must be a good thing. After all, there are several areas of private life in which the government has virtually no say, and that could be dangerous. You don't want people left to their own devices.

Ah, but that's not all. The prime ministers of the states of Lower Saxony and Rhineland Palatinate are now calling for the introduction of a wealth tax and for higher estate taxes. This for yet another lofty goal, to wit a new "Pact between Generations" to fund better education. And then there's the ever popular sin taxes, which health minister Ulla Schmidt wants to raise to fund health care.

Finally, should by some weird accident there be any entrepreneurial spirit left, the new government is already floating ideas for the coup de grace. They want to undo one of the few things they did get right in the last four years, which is lower taxation on capital gains for companies. This is essential in order to unwind the German equivalent of the Japanese keiretsu system, in which companies have large cross-shareholdings. Especially stultifying are the holdings of banks in their clients. Not only does this affect capital market transparency, it also degrades overall efficiency of the capital allocation process. Many companies do want to unwind their cross-shareholdings, but the punitive tax rates (I think it was 60%) made it very unattractive. In the previous tax reform, these rates were cut. Now they want to undo this as well.

If you have a job, you get taxed on your income. If you have any income left, you buy things, and end up paying 16% Value Added Tax, so more of your income goes to the state. Then if you buy gas, you get hit with a gas tax. But perhaps you are lucky enough to have some savings. Those are taxed too of course. And your investments get taxed as well. Add a new wealth tax on top of that (you mean there would be anybody wealthy after all this?), and chances are that your total net worth is not going be growing very quickly. But let's assume that by some miracle you manage to have some money left by the time you die. At that point, the money gets taxed for a fifth time to prevent you from leaving the fruits of your labor to your children.

In my post-election analysis I predicted more stagnation for the German economy. I think I was too optimistic. If all of this really goes through, the German economy is going to spiral downward once again. The big ominous example that seldom dare speak its name is Japan. For more than a decade now, Japan has been in the grips of a vicious deflationary spiral, and the country is heading for medium-term bankruptcy if no dramatic measures are taken soon. Japan tried to spend its way out of trouble. Germany is trying to tax its way out of trouble (well, Japan tried that too at various times during the last ten years). It has not worked. It will not work. And that's not even touching on the issue of demographics, which exacerbates the situation in both Japan and Germany.

Although I can't resist a small post-election gloat at the horrible misfortune that is now descending like a dark noxious cloud on Germany, the miasma that is wafting over from Holland's eastern border is not a good thing. If any major world economy, which Germany still is, ends up in so much trouble, it has ramifications throughout the world trading system. But it will also put increased pressure on the euro and the entire structure of the European Union, which is already creaking.

This could get ugly. And that's not going to be good for anybody on the European continent.

We know where you are

On an average day in this country, if you walk in public areas in towns and cities, there is an increasing chance that at some point you'll be filmed by closed-circuit TV cameras. It does not stop things like bike theft, but you can't catch everything. Not yet, anyway. Also if you happen to be in a nightlife district, you could get stopped and searched for no other reason than being there. Now the fearless Dutch government is planning the next step in keeping tabs on you: more intensive speed checks on highways. (The reason the Dutch government is fearless is because the Dutch population isn't exactly well-armed and assertive in defending against abuses, but I digress.)

The plan involves doing away with stationary cameras and replacing them with speed checks over a distance. You get logged at the start, and again at the end, and the system then calculates your average speed. If it's over the limit, you get a ticket. This is obviously a far more intrusive system than a solitary camera, which is only triggered by a speeding violation. This system, by necessity, has to keep track of all traffic passing through. And the plans are to introduce it on a wide scale too: after an initial trial at a half a dozen locations, the plans are supposedly for a minimum of 55 such catchment areas.

Of course, this will work to reduce speeding. And of course, it will do very little to increase safety. And of course, it will provide a nice cashflow to the government. This is again one of those cases where there is a significant loss of privacy for a marginal benefit. But perhaps people have become so used to being watched that it does not come as an imposition anymore. That is really a scary thought.

The Bicycle Event Horizon

As an inveterate car driver, I hate bicycles. They're a damn nuisance, and are usually propelled by suicidal maniacs whose sole aim in life is to break as many traffic regulations as possible on a given stretch of road. Car drivers in Naples (Italy, not Florida) are more disciplined than cyclists in Holland. More on driving a car in southern Italy some other time.

Anyway, there are lots of bicycles in the Netherlands. Way too many. But I am beginning to understand the death wish of the cyclists themselves, as there seems to be something supernatural going on. It seem that about 900,000 bicycles are stolen every year in this country. Estimates for the total number of bicycles in the country vary from 16 to 20 million on a population of 16 million. So that means that between 4.5% and 5.6% of all bicylces get stolen in any given year. But that's not all: there's an additional 1 million bicylces sold every year. Does that mean we are adding a million new bicycles to the overall stock every year? The link above is not clear on whether it's a million new bicycles, or whether it includes used ones as well; given the rest of the page, it would seem to refer to new ones. And where do the 900,000 stolen bicycles go? There must be some regurgitation of these bicycles back into the overall stock, rather than just ending up in the blind alley of illegality. It still leaves us with a huge new supply of bicycles every year. Since there is little growth potential left (I would think the market is fairly saturated), there must be a large amount of bicycles disposals. Or the stolen bikes are exported, but I don't see the economics of this working too well.

Very puzzling. Back to the original story. It also refers to the futility of reporting a bicycle theft, and only 1 in 5 victims bother to go to the police. At police stations, there's a form for submitting a claim to the insurance company. (Hm, insurance fraud inflating the numbers?) But help is at hand: after three years of negotiations no less than three ministries and various organizations have come to an agreement on a concerted effort to combat bike theft. All new bikes will be fitted with a chip that can be scanned. Once a bike is stolen, its chip code will be entered into a national database, so that police can easily scan "suspicious" bikes and determine whether they're stolen or not. Of course, the police have also said they're not going to spend any time or manpower on this, as they're busy combating more serious crime. Except they're not doing too well on that either.

Now this is disturbing

When you install your standard Blog Package, you also get the Vanity Add-On, which results in too many hours of cross-sectional analyses of the web server log files. Somebody ended up finding this web site through Google, looking for the keywords "12 year old sex." Great. Now I've got perverts looking for child pornography coming here because of this story I posted some time ago. This is really sick. And somewhat disturbing. At least I have the IP numbers lof the deviants logged.

Brrrrr.

It's not as though I can do anything with it, as there has obviously been no crime committed, at least as long as this site remains legal. So I am not going to do anything with it. But still... Hm. Yuck.

A cunning plan to prevent welfare fraud

I guess this is going to succumb to linkrot soon (I have to find permalinks for this stuff), but here is a fascinating story about a cunning plan in the Dutch town of Deventer, aimed at cutting welfare fraud. Their brilliant innovation: they check people's claims before paying them any money!

{the sound of mouths gaping}

Light bloggage ahead

OK, it's 5:30 and I just got up. I have a plane to catch, and I won't be back till pretty late, so I am not quite sure I'll have any energy left for blogging today. This was a public service announcement. Thank you.

Exceedingly harsh taxation

Some people are lucky enough to live in a country where they can write this:

It actually turns out that if we want to truly, substantially, rapidly reduce energy use the only way to do it is with lifestyle changes, and the only practical way to force that is through exceedingly harsh taxation (i.e. $3000 per year per car, $5 per gallon on gasoline). It's not a problem susceptible to a painless technical fix, mostly because we've already done most of what can be done easily.

Emphasis mine. Welcome to the wonderful world of Euro-Socialism, where an American's nightmare of exceedingly harsh taxation is reality today! And no, it has not led to any significant behavioral or lifestyle changes. More about that later, but first, let's dissect the various and varied ways in which the Her Majesty's Government in the Netherlands appropriates your money.

How much do you think the tax is on a new car? It's one of my favorite games to play with innocent Americans. When I ask the question like this, they immediate assume it must be some horrendous percentage, like 20? 30%? There are two taxes levied on cars: one is the general 19% Value-Added Tax, the other is a special car tax of 42.5% adding up to a grand total of 61.5%. These taxes are additive, not cumulative. Be thankful for small mercies, I suppose.

This way a $29,220 Chrysler 300M in the US ends up costing almost $54,000 here in the Netherlands. I know, the percentages don't quite add up, but there are other effects at work too.

That's one part of the puzzle. Steve mentioned gas prices. A liter of 95 RON (that's 89 octane in the US) gasoline costs 1.17 euros, or about $1.15. This translates into $4.43 per US gallon. Excessively harsh yet?

The only part where we're still "lagging" behind Steve's nightmare vision is the annual taxation of cars. The road tax here is based on the weight of the car, and for the above-mentioned 300M, you'd pay about $700 to $800 in road tax per year. It gets cheaper for smaller cars, obviously. But if you amortize the tax on purchase over, say, 5 years you're a lot closer to the dystopic $3000/year.

Erich Honecker called "real existierender Sozialismus:" socialism that really exists. Yup. My pocketbook can tell you all about it.

Of course, none of the state-thuggery has led to any substantive change in lifestyles. Sure, there are more old cars on the road. There smaller cars on the road. But people will go to great lengths to have a car, because the car is such an empowering tool. Without a car, the radius of your existence shrinks dramatically. It can partially made up for with public transport and bicycles, but the loss of freedom is tremendous. And that is why people will rather cut back on other kinds of spending before they make the decision to give up their car.

So why not raise taxes even higher? Because the pain threshold has been reached. As the mass protests in Britain showed last year, taxes on gas are about as high as people will put up with. I am amazed that people will actually put up with this insane level of taxation. Perhaps it's because I spend a lot more time in the US than the average European.

Your tax euros at work

Somehow this does not seem to have hit the English-language wires yet, so here is the story in Dutch about the moving costs of the European Parliament. It moves, you ask? Oh yea verily, it does. Quite a bit. Often, in fact. Regularly too.

The rational thing to do would be to have the parliament somewhere near to the rest of the bureaucratic apparatus. But the European Union is not exactly a paragon of rational thought, and pork being pork in all of the Union's languages, having a single Parliament building in Brussels was not good enough. See, Brussels has the big disadvantage (from a EUnuch point of view) of not being French. So to appease the French (appeasement is something the EU is really good at, if you hadn't noticed), we got a second parliament building in Strasbourg. So by European law, at least 12 meetings of the parliament have to be held in Strasbourg every year. The others are held in Brussels. And for some even more unfathomable reason, half the personel is actually stationed in Luxembourg.

The cost is a cool (if not positively frigid) 169 million euro a year. That's about $169 million too. That's just for the moving back and forth. And this is based on the parliament's own calculations. If more member states join, the cost will rise to 203 million a year. The Flemish MP Moerman has made this public, and demands an end to the waste.

I agree. Let's abolish the European Parliament altogether. It's an institution without any authority (moral, legal or otherwise), costs an insane amount of money, and is generally used as the refuse bin into which disgraced national politicians are retired. Nobody goes to vote for it anyway. Nobody'll miss it.

Man's Victory Over Nature

Modern technology is a wonderful thing. We can write things on a screen, erase things we have written on a screen and wish we could erase things we have foolishly written on paper and have forgotten to shred. However, one of my favorite achievements is temperature control. In summer, air conditioners keep us cool and in winter we have heaters to keep us warm. Whether there's a blizzard dumping a foot of snow, or the sizzling sun blanches the molten streets, we can poke our nose at Nature from our thermally controlled environment. It's a statement of defiance: no matter what Natures throws at us, we can still make funny faces without breaking a sweat or suffering from frost bite. (At least until the Big One hits and destroys the air conditioners.)

The only place on earth where thermal control fails is in my office. It's not particularly limited to one office, but whereever I seem to work, it's too damn cold. I must have upset the God of Thermal Control in a previous life, because no matter how much the Building People tinker with the settings, it remains cold in my office. And they're serious Building People too; they have moustaches, speak in diffident tones with just the right amount of Amsterdamese that qualifies as them Building People Who Know Buildings. These are not people buildings should mess with. Deep furrows run down their brows at they look into my office, sizing up the Demon of Cold as it lurks on my windowsill, eyeballing it with a look that says "your days are numbered, buddy." They nod gravely, make a grave note, and say with a calculated mix of gravity and reassurance that they'll fix it.

But they don't. It's still cold. By afternoon, I go to the lavatory once an hour to let hot water run over my frost-bitten fingers. By evening, I when I get into the car, I turn the heater up to 80 so I can warm up on the drive home. When I get home, I take a hot bath.

Any recommendations for space heaters?

Stability Pact going wobbly

The Stability and Growth Pact was designed to enforce fiscal discipline amongst member states of European Monetary Union. Key provisions are limits to the budget deficit at 3% of GDP and medium-term balanced budgets. As currently stated, the member countries have committed themselves to achieve balanced budgets by 2004. The European Commission is now waking up to reality and acknowledging that several member countries are not going to make it. In fact, even the 3% of GDP deficit limit is likely to be breached in the coming year. The culprits? Portugal, Italy, France and Germany. With the three largest Euroland economies being in breach, the Stability Pact is looking very wobbly indeed.

By tinkering with the timetable the European Commission hopes to defuse the situation and save the Pact in some form. The Pact is important because each member state can set its own fiscal policy. Absent such a Pact there is a serious risk of a free-rider problem developing in that one country could have its budget deficit balloon while others suffer through fiscal discipline. This would be an unstable situation; bond yields would rise, affect all member states, and the incentive for maintaining fiscal stability would be weakened. After all, if bond yields are higher because of other countries' fiscal irresponsiblity, why not run a higher budget deficit yourself?

Now with the adverse economic conditions prevailing in Europe, the Pact will be broken. Government expenditure is up, revenue is down. To an extent having a counter-cyclical fiscal policy is a good thing, as long as it does not run up structural deficits. But this stabilization is unavailable to countries that go into a downturn with their budgets already in deficit under the current Pact. So something will have to give.

Depending on the amount of realism that prevails, the process could become very messy indeed. The European Central Bank is going to fight it tooth and nail, and there will be a trilateral showdown between governments, the ECB and the European Commission. Within the governments' camp, some will side with the ECB. Others will welcome a relaxation of the rules. The more rancorous and chaotic it gets, the higher bond yields will rise, and the further the euro will fall.

Europe is taking the next steps with the experiment of the single currency, spread among 11 countries with different economic and fiscal policies. This is one of the fault lines that had been apparent for some time. The euro is not popular with its users, and now we will see whether it can stand the strain.

North Korea plans to emulate Hong Kong

The North Korean economy has been virtually destroyed by a half century of communist rule. Reports of widespread famine have been coming out of North Korea for the last few years, and the death toll from famine alone could be in the hundreds of thousands. The North Korean regime is probably the most repressive in the world, having locked the country into total isolation. Starving defectors are shot or end up in concentration camps.

The "Dear Leader" Kim Jong Il is now trying to find a way out of his predicament by emulating Hong Kong. The idea is to set up a "Special Administrative Region" in the northern town of Sinuiju on the border with China. Within this region, enterprise and tourism will be encouraged in the hopes of generating the kind of growth that has made Hong Kong so prosperous.

From the Straits Times:

Many analysts believe North Korean leader Kim Jong Il is trying to imitate China's economic reforms in the early 1980s when it set up economic development areas in coastal regions.

'The changes stipulated by the decree are epoch-making,' said Koh Yu Hwan, professor of North Korea studies at Dongkuk University in Seoul.

[...]

The announcement comes just days after an unprecedented North Korea-Japan summit and amid continuing rapprochement with South Korea.

It also follows July's decision by Pyongyang to liberalise pricing and wage systems.

The decree also stipulated no discrimination over 'sex, country, nationality, race, language, property status, knowledge, political view and religious belief' in the region.

If true, this is would give some hope that North Korea might indeed be on the way to liberalizing, however slowly. But I don't think it's going to happen. Once the North Koreans allow an area within their territory to deviate this much from the rest of the country, the regime will be doomed. For a strong and propserous economy, you need an institutional framework to support wealth creation, as well as both capital and a supply of labor. All are lacking. Attractive capital from abroad is possible under the right circumstances. The institutional framework can be built, but doing so is not trivial as the many teething problems of the central and eastern European economies can attest. But the biggest one is labor: it would have to come from North Korea, and if the economic freedom in the Sinuiju SAR is to mean anything, it will sow the seeds of destruction for the totalitarian regime. Either that, or the SAR will have to be sealed off hermetically.

Not very much is known about Sinuiju, except that it lies on the Chinese border and is a center for producing chemical weapons.

Hm, an export-oriented special zone with a chemical weapons factory? Interesting.

The new chief executive of the SAR in Sinuiju will be a Chinese man with a Dutch passport named Yang Bin. He's one of the richer Chinese businessmen, but one who's company, Euro-Asia, has fallen on harder times after allegations of impropriety surfaced. The Dutch newspaper article suggests he may have fled to North Korea to escape the investigation in China.

"It will be a totally capitalist region" Yang said in a CNN interview. "It will have its own legislative, judicial and executive powers without any interference from the [North Korean] central government."

I am somewhat skeptical.

Guess why they're not afraid of fighting

Jonathan Rauch has an interesting article over at Reason, in which he argues that Bush 43, like Bush 41 before him, is doing the UN a favor. He writes:

George W. Bush may not share his father's instinctive sympathy with the United Nations and other international bodies. But he seems to realize, as his father did in 1990, that international bodies charged with defending the peace (the League of Nations, the United Nations) become positive threats to peace if their hollow pronouncements become the skirts for ambitious dictators to hide behind. So the younger Bush has, in effect, offered to put American power at the U.N.'s service, not just for America's sake, but to save the U.N. from a dangerous impotence.

I fully agree that organizations such as the UN need to maintain their credibility if they are to be protectors of, rather than threats to peace. And therein lies the rub. Perhaps I blinked and missed something, but last time I checked the UN had already become a hollow, empty husk which the moral authority of a Neville Chamberlain. The UN has been nothing but a platform for tin-pot third-world dictators who use our money to attack (verbally, if not physically) the United States, and would like nothing better than to see Israel wiped off the map (you know, like, Zionism is Racism and all that. Remember Durban?). The UN has long ago lost any moral authority it may have had (and that's arguable in the first place). The UN is not worth saving. It is beyond repair. It's been braindead for a long time, and now the physical carcass is beginning to rot and smell. From a pragmatic, short-term point of view, this is not the right time to cremate the UN just yet, but getting rid of it in the medium term is necessary.

There's another thing in Rauch's article that caught my eye:

Interestingly, U.N. approval matters greatly to European public opinion, but whether the operation would cause "many" or only "a few" Western casualties matters hardly at all. Europeans are not afraid of fighting; they are afraid of American unilateralism.

Of course they don't care about Western casualties! The fighting would be done by Americans and the British, with not a single European in sight. That's why they don't care.

Who'll applaud for Hirsi Ali?

A disappointing few. Hirsi Ali is now in hiding after receiving death threats for fundamentalist Muslims for daring the suggest that Muslim women have rights too and should be treated with respect. At a discussion meeting between Moroccans and native Dutchmen, one of the moderators asked: "Who'll applaud for Hirsi Ali?" About half the audience did. No prizes for guessing which half.

"Integration, that's Muslims going to the mosque and not harrassing infidels like me," said Theo van Gogh. The response from co-moderator Ahmed Aboutaleb? He shakes his head in disgust.

German election redux

After the drama of election night, it is back to business now that the results are known. The first casualties have already fallen: Herta Däubler-Gmelin is out as justice minister, and Jürgen Möllemann has resigned as second in command at the FDP. Good riddance to both. (Däubler-Gmelin actually lost in her own constituency in the university town of Tübingen, but she still made it back into parliament via the SPD's list. It does show that her comments were not well-received. It's a small consolation.)

Here's an overview of the winners and losers:

WINNER (and loser): The SPD and Gerhard Schröder. They've obviously won in the sense that they're still in power, and in the end that's probably all that counts. On the other hand, they've lost votes compared to four years ago which is also going to shift the balance of power in the governing coalition.

LOSER (and winner): The CDU/CSU and Edmund Stoiber. The inverse of the SPD. More votes, still out of power.

WINNER: The Green Party. This comes as something of a surprise, given that they weren't doing all that well in the polls, and some months ago they were even in danger of not making the 5% hurdle for parliamentary representation. Now they've gained votes and will have a bigger say in the governing coalition. With their deeply-rooted anti-Americanism and utopian environmentalism, this is not exactly going to steer the government in the right direction.

LOSER: The FDP. Again, the inverse of the Greens, as they were doing OK in the polls, and some months ago had a real shot at breaking above 10%. But they blew it, and Möllemann is in large part to blame with his anti-semiitic remarks. But culpability also falls on Guido Westerwelle, who should have gotten rid of him at the first incident, but failed to do so. I think the FDP has missed an historic opportunity for them to expand their voter base in this election. Economically, the FDP was the least bad of the major parties. Let's see where this defeat takes them.

The majority for the Red/Green coalition is very slender indeed. With just a few seats separating the the two blocks, and the shift in the center of gravity within the coalition to the left, this is going make governing a lot harder, as the threat of dissident MPs will hang over the government. Voting against the party whip is fairly rare in continental European politics, unlike in the US. But that's another post for another time.

PREDICTION: This government will not last the full four years of its term. With the only other possible coalition being the "Grand Coalition" of CDU/CSU and SPD, this is likely to mean early elections. (I suppose CDU/CSU and Greens is numerically though not politically possible).

Voting patterns were interesting too. There was a clear north-south divide, with the more prosperous south voting for the CDU/CSU, while the poorer east and north went to the SPD.

SO WHAT'S NEXT? More stagnation. The new government is unlikely to be more reform-minded than the old one, despite its new electoral mandate. True, they've made some small improvements to the pensions system in the last four years, but they're nowhere near enough. And this will yet again be a government that is viscerally ignorant of economic policy; generating economic growth is however the biggest challenge. With four million unemployed (a rate of about 10%) Germany desperately needs more economic growth and more jobs. Without the critically important reform of the stultifying labor market, job creation will remain a pipe-dream. This is also the tenor of the reactions from the business world. The need for deep structural reforms is urgent. They won't happen, because many of the reforms will offend the core Red/Green constituencies, and with a small majority in the Bundestag, pushing the legislation through is going to be difficult. Moreover, the CDU, CSU and FDP have a working majority in the upper house, the Bundesrat, which can block certain types of legislation. Usually I like gridlock, because it means politicians won't be able to screw things up very much, but in this case it will be bad for Germany. More lean years ahead.

UPDATE: American Kaiser has some analysis here. More at Shark.

Election Wrap-up coming up

Well, it's morning now, and Schröder still seems to have won. I'll have more on the reactions and analyses in the German press this afternoon Eastern time. The SPD and CDU/CSU ended up at 38.5% each, the Greens got 8.6% and the FDP 7.4%. The PDS only gets the two directly elected members, and does not get three necessary to have full representation as they remained under 5% nationally. The SPD remains the largest party with 251 seats, just ahead of the CDU/CSU at 247. It's a razor-thin margin, but it should be enough to govern for a while. More on this later.

Very very close

The first exit polls show a razor-thin majority for Red/Green in Germany. ARD puts it at 301 seats, ZDF at 303. Absolute majority is at 300. SPD loses some votes, CDU gains. Big surprise: Greens do better than expected. FDP is doing poorly (Möllemann-effect?). Good news: the communist PDS will likely not make it into parliament.

This is going to be very very close.

UPDATE: ARD now has CDU/FDP in with a razor-thin margin. ZDF has SPD/Green on exactly 300. In German, this is called a "Zitterpartie:" a trembling party. (as in trembling for nerves).

UPDATE 2: ARD has CDU/FDP down to exactly 300, with Red/Green on 298 and PDS on 2. Those 2 come from direct wins in constituencies. ZDF still at 300 for SPD/Greens.

UPDATE 3: ARD has CDU/FDP now on 299, Red/Green on 299 and PDS on 2. A hung parliament, with the 2 communist MPs deciding the fate of the next government. Oh boy.

UPDATE 4: Both ARD and ZDF now have CDU/FDP on 301. ZDF puts Red/Green on 299 with no seats for the PDS, while the ARD still gives them 2.

UPDATE 5: Pendulum swinging again. ARD has Red/Green on 300, CDU/FDP on 298 and PDS on 2. ZDF meanwhile puts Red/Green on 304, CDU/FDP on 297 and PDS on 2. The ZDF numbers don't add up, unless they're taking quirks of the electoral system into account which can change the number of seats (possible).

UPDATE 6: ARD has now added seats too, putting Red/Green on 302, CDU/FDP on 299, PDS on 2.

UPDATE 7: Looks like it's all over. ZDF now has Red/Green on 306, with CDU/FDP on 298. Bah. I think the FDP's poor showing is a large factor; at one point, they were well on their way to get over 10% of the vote, instead of the 7.5% now. And for that blame falls on Möllemann and his Jew-baiting, and Westerwelle for not getting rid of his when it all started months ago. Oh well. Germany will remain irrelevant in international affairs though following the vile anti-Americanism of the left's campaign. Just ignore the bastards.

Cosmic Justice

Over at USS Clueless, the Captain makes an attempt to understand the mindset of those who oppose further military action by the United States, or those whose views on the attacks of September 11th 2001 are that somehow "we had it coming." He thinks he's found the answer:

But I think that a lot of people believe that there is some sort of universal principle, something acting at a higher level, which keeps score anyway.

If you grant that, then proposing that we clean up our own act actually makes sense as a way of preventing future attacks. It may well be that those who attacked us had some specific motives for doing so, and might seem to have motive for doing so again, but that's unimportant. The real reason we were attacked is because we had built up a heavy load of bad karma, and we're going to keep being attacked as long as we've got it. The only real way to make the attacks stop is to do good deeds to relieve that load of bad karma, and once we've done so, then cosmic justice will stop punishing us.

[...]

I'm pretty sure that's what they're thinking.

So the Cosmic Justice Principle, whether you call it God or Karma or something else, will make sure that all bad deeds are punished eventually, and that the immediate cause-and-effect relationship as we know it do not apply. I think he's on to something in that some people probably do think like this. He also says:

It's not that I think the concepts are evil or stupid; it's just that I don't believe that they can be implemented in practice in the world I live in. There's too much possibility of free riding, of spoiling of the commons, of defections (per the Prisoner's Dilemma). There's too much opportunity for abuse, for those systems to be subverted and used to fulfill some particular group's agenda.

I think he's being too kind, because the concepts do have a hefty dollop of muddle-headed thinking. The key implicit assumption in all of this is that someone can actually determine what you have to do to get good karma, and what kinds of actions result in bad karma. And those propounding this view arrogate to themselves the right to determine what is good or bad. In their view, "bad" is anything that America does, and "good" whatever our enemies do. But even if they do not take this extreme view, the problem remains that it is impossible to determine what is "good" or "bad," because doing so means second-guessing Cosmic Justice, an abstract concept which does not manifest itself directly. Within the Cosmic Justice Paradigm, the attacks of 9/11 could well be payback for our past sins; not because we waged war, but because we waged war too late and did not stop Hitler before he killed 6 million Jews. That would be an awful lot of bad karma there. And as for doing good, liberating Afghanistan should certainly count as good karma. It would be bad karma NOT to liberate Iraq as well. And overthrow the house of Saud.

The point I am trying to make is that even within the Cosmic Justice Paradigm the currently prevailing strand of thought ("Blame America!") is not the only possible or valid one. Adhering to an interpretation of the Cosmic Justice Paradigm is a religious choice, meaning there is no empirical basis for either believing it, or determining how to act. Everybody will have to decide for himself what will increase or decrease the cosmic karma balance. And since it's religious and not susceptible to empirical verfication, there's no way of determining what the "right" thing to do is. Cold, hard reality is the ultimate arbiter of what works and what does not. The Cosmic Justice Paradigm lacks this vital feedback loop and is therefore doomed to languish in fuzzy thinking and counting angels dancing on pinheads.

But let's take it a step further. In the worldview of the CJP-followers, the nation-state is an abomination that needs to be abolished, individuals are unimportant and the true organizing principle consists of Groups. Now, let's look at the Group of Silly Left-Wing Intellectuals, who're now complaining that they're not being taken seriously. It's all a case a karma folks. You guys built up a lot of bad karma over the last half century by supporting evil, totalitarian regimes like the Soviet Union and communist China, and even cheerleading for the genocidal Khmer Rouge during their reign of terror in Cambodia. Your Cosmic Karma Balance is way, way in the red. I know you're asking yourself why everybody hates you, so you'll be happy to understand of why we do so. Modify your behavior to change your karma. Do something good for a change. Support the country that has upheld the principles that have given you the chance to be overpaid silly left-wing intellectuals.

Islamic fundamentalism in Holland

Sometimes I miss really obvious news, and it has to be pointed out to me by people who're one or more oceans distant. Here's the story at Shoutin' Across The Pacific about Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali refugee who's been threatened by radical Muslims for her comments on women's rights.

I think there are a lot of Muslims in the Netherlands who would agree with her comments, and are more than happy to have escaped the stifling and repressive climates in their erstwhile domiciles. We also see this in the US, as Instapundit linked to here and here just recently. Unfortunately, the organizations claiming to speak for Arab immigrants seldom are this enlightened (CAIR anyone?). This is also the case in the Netherlands. Muslim organizations have condemned the threats against Ayaan Hirsi Ali, but have pointedly refused to agree with her. And that is the real problem.

Improve your English

I came across this wonderful onlne version of the original "English, As She Is Spoke," a phrasebook originally printed in Portugal in the 1880's. More information and links are at Enigmatic Mermaid.

I am catched cold in the brain.

UPDATE: I entirely forgot when I posted this, but for more contemporaneous mutilations of English, one need look no further than Japan.

Havel: Build skyscrapers

On his tour through the US, Czech president Václav Havel met with former New York mayor Rudy Guiliani. One of the things he said that he thinks new skyscrapers should be built on the site of the WTC in lower Manhattan. He said skyscrapers are an integral part of New York.

I agree. It's time New York got back the crown of having the tallest building in the world. What better testament to American strength, resolve and ingenuity than putting something bigger, taller and better in the place of what the barbarians tore down? It will be on all New York postcards in the future, sending the message radiating forth into the farthest corners of the world that America is thumbing her nose at those who tried to destroy her. Build. Not a sentimental, maudlin memorial, but the most majestic building complex in the world.

In other Havel-related news, Matt Welch has some great stuff here, here and here. Also be sure to read the comments on these posts.

Improbable cause

Next time you're in Amsterdam's center at night, don't be surprised if the police stop you and search you. And seize anything that they deem to be a weapon. The Dutch daily Parool reports that a new local ordinance will be enacted which will give the police these powers. The mayor will designate certain "safety risk areas," in which several annual "weapons checks" will be held. But Amsterdam is not the first to go down this route. Last night in Rotterdam, the police cordoned off the center of the city and checked everybody to see if they were carrying weapons or munitions. A number of arrests were made. The northern port city of Den Helder will begin doing the same this weekend.

In Amsterdam, it's all part of a bigger scheme to reduce violence. Under the quintessentially bureaucratic moniker of "Updated Progam of Dealing with Aggression and Violence," 1.2 million euros have been earmarked by the city council to reduce violence. The other parts involve more CCTV cameras, checking for guns, "youth safety," strengthening "oversight," combating violence against the "overseers" (police and the like), safety in public transport, combating domestic violence and street violence in the nightlife areas.

That's quite a shopping list of "oversight" measures they have there. The goal? By 2006, the council hopes to have reduced the number of violent incidents with weapons by a quarter. Weapon-ownership (including knives and guns) amongst schoolchildren they hope to reduce by 80%.

Putting all of this together, it entails a substantial increase in government oversight of public life. Going for a night out in Amsterdam and many other Dutch cities means that you have to check some of your liberties at the door. Your own front door, that is. It is outright scary that you can end up being sealed into an area of town by police, and not let out before you've been searched for no other reason than being there. This is creepy stuff. Add the increased use of CCTV cameras and we're are one step closer to the Panopticon State as Samizdata would call it.

Will it work? Well, it is probably going to reduce casual violence a bit. It will have a deterrent effect on people. So in some sense, it will work, but it will come at a serious cost to personal liberty. The logical extension of this kind of government thinking is to have random searches of people's property, tag everyone with a transmitter and GPS system and forcibly implant thought recorders.

I have to go now; if you need me, I'll be at the store buying bulk quantities of tin foil. I'll need it for the hats.

The Great Italian Pizza Boycott

Since the introduction of the euro in the form of actual notes and coins, there has been a lot of grousing about the price increases that have resulted from the changeover, especially since the official inflation statistics fail to capture the full effect. In this vein, the Italian consumer advocacy group ADUC is calling on Italians to boycott pizzas today. Except what they're really complaining about is the markup that pizzerias charge, not any price increases.

The actual press release (scroll down to "Prezzi: Pizza, ma quanto mi costi?") describes how they've come up with their data. They've taken the basic ingredients of a pizza margherita at supermarket prices, added them up, and came to 49 eurocents. The 210g (about 7oz) pizza this makes sells for 5 euros, a markup of 920%. Outrage!

This is of course a nonsensical analysis. The cost of making a pizza is more than just the costs of the ingredients: there is the overhead from having a physical location to do business, paying for the employees who cook and serve the pizzas, keeping the place clean and sanitary, buying ovens and other tools of the trade. A more useful analysis would have been to look at prices now and a year ago, or to look at prices around Europe.

The whole ADUC press release is an exercise in muck-raking. It says that they simply used the logic that 2+2 equals 4, and not 4000. Then they go on to say that applying the same markup on an orata (a kind of fish) selling the stores for 15 euro per kilogram, would mean paying 150 euros (about $150) in a restaurant. Highly deceptively worded, because first of all, the economics of making food in a restaurant involve much more than just the cost of the ingredients, but also because they switch from price per kilo to claiming that it would cost 150 euros in a restaurant... but who would order a whole kilo of fish in a restaurant? That's about 2 pounds!

A rather shameful exercise in all. Apparently nobody at ADUC has actually ever run a business if they really think they can apply this kind of logic. Sadly these kinds of "consumer advoacy groups" tend to degenerate from their initial ideals into business-bashers pure and simple. And that's a real shame, becase a vocal consumer is essential in a market economy. But this is beyond vocal; it's shrill.

End of an era for Radio Free Europe

On September 30th, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty will air its last broadcast in Czech. RFE was one of the main sources of accurate information and news during the dark days of communist tyrrany. Although my first reaction was one of wistfulness, this actually is good news. It means that the Czech Republic has become sufficienty free and democratic that it no longer needs Radio Free Europe; in effect all broadcasters in the Czech Republic now have RFE's DNA in them. As as matter of fact, RFE broadcasts were transmitted from facilities and frequencies of a domestic Czech broadcaster. The demise of RFE in this way is a wonderful success.

According to Thomas Dine, who's in charge of RFE, the money is needed for broadcasts to those blighted regions of the world where a free press is an abstract concept. Still, many Czechs did make an all-out lobbying effort in the US to maintain the funding of $650,000 for the Czech broadcasts of RFE, but to no avail. It does seem as though RFE can continue to broadcast in other languages from the Czech Republic. I understand the nostalgia, but how much better is it to be on the frontline of spreading freedom to other nations!

May many other broadcasts of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty be discontinued under these circumstances.

Baffling headlines

Browsing happily along, iTunes playing Count Basie, I decide on a whim to head over to Magyar Hírlap, a Hungarian newspaper. Their lead: "Decrease in Swiss watch production." They go on to inform us that compared to August 2001, the Swiss produced watches for a total value of 663.7 million Swiss Francs, a decrease of 7.7%. It is mildly fascinating, but why would they lead with this story? Is there a secret economic pact that links Swiss investment flows into Hungary to watch production? Do the Hungarians have a secret fetish for Swiss timekeeping equipment? Are there Hungarian fake Swiss watch producers who would be impacted? Are they economically significant?

I swear, I had only one glass of Jack Daniels tonight.

Chip Wars: A New Hope

Ah, the rose-fingered dawn tickles the long-suffering chin of the Mac faithful once again with the temptation of newer, faster, Intel-stomping chips. Ah, cruel Sirens! Having navigated the wrath of Poseidon, been lured into eating the Lotus of RISC, been imprisoned by the Cyclops of Motorola and incarcerated by Calypso on her island of Altivec, finally the seas are now clear to return to beloved Ithaca, where all Macs run faster, all UI quirks subside and where the True Love of Penelope will make the databuses sing!

Yes, IBM is riding to the rescue, to liberate us from the perfidious clutches of Motorola! The POWER architecture is coming to a desktop near you, with 64-bit yummyness oozing from every pin. If you are patient, that is. According to the eWeek report, this is still a year off, and that means it's going to be 2004 before we see these chips in actual shipping Macs. By that time, the Intel and AMD chips will have progressed in speed too, with perhaps some version of Itanium even producing decent performance.

The ravenous reception this news has garnered in the Mac world is understandable. We've been in a funk over performance. The G4 has been a disappointment, right from the start when Apple had to reduce the shipping speeds of Macs because of production problems. And ever since then, speed bumps in the G4 have been few and far between, with the fastest Macs now shipping with dual 1.25 GHz processors. Yes, I know. In Photoshop filters, the G4 is pretty damn good. But for other things, the limited bus bandwidth and the slow clock do hurt performance. An argument can be made that a more efficient ISA can make up for slower clock speeds, but there comes a point where the argument becomes stretched, and then breaks. We are at such a point (or have passed it), and Macs desperately need a serious speed boost. Perhaps the oft-rumored G5 will make its debut at MacWorld in January. I'm not holding my breath.

We've been in this kind of position before, when Motorola's 68k-line was falling behind. The switch to PowerPC did help the Mac keep rough parity with the Intel world for a while, and even allowed Apple to ship the fastest laptops in the world. I will grant that the current crop of machines is fast enough for most people, but that is not the point. People do want "value for money," and if that means getting more gigahertzes per dollar, they'll go for it. Design alone won't be able to sell; Apple can get away with lagging a little, but the divergence has become too large now. And this is also reflected in the response these rumors have been getting in the Mac world, which has greeted the purported news with a massive exhalation of relief, yearning for the salvation of this latest deus-ex-machina.

I'm still reasonably happy with my G4/400, and I'm not looking to get a new Mac just yet. However, if the current state of affairs does not improve, I may become tempted to look for options elsewhere.

Careful what you wish for

On the ZDF network's website, there's this. "Toll" in German means "great" or "cool," and today's "great" idea (#523 in a long series) refers to Jesse Helms's statement that American troops should pull out of Germany if Schröder wins the election. The caption under the picture protesting Idiotarians says "Well, get out then!"

Does not sound like bad idea to me. Why pour money into Germany? There are plenty of other countries in Europe who'd be more than happy to host American troops, the safety and security they bring --- and the dollars too.

Go Jesse!

PS: Let's get out of the UN while we're at it.

German elections roundup

Less than 48 hours before we know what the exit polls say, and perhaps we'll even have an idea of the result. The last polls before the election indicate a very close race. There are no last-minute polls it seems, so we won't be able to see the impact of the commotion of the last few days, with Möllemann's anti-semitic flyer and the Bush-Hitler comparison by Däubler-Gmelin. Too close to call right now, and it could swing either way.

The German press has been all over the Hitler comments. The editor of the newspaper in which the comments were published, said that he's "never seen anybody lie like Däubler-Gmelin," when she said she was misquoted. Handelsblatt ran an editorial with the title "Pure cold calculation," saying that these comments and Möllemann's anti-semitic comments were no accident, but a cynical calculation to get more votes. Meanwhile, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Germany's leading serious newspaper, has a few editorials on the subject. In "Altar of Power" they tear into the government's anti-American policies. Translated quotes:

The relations between Berlin and Washington have been more heavily damaged than at any time since the second world war. This has not happened by accident, but consciously and deliberate: the Schröder government has sacrificied the good relationship with America on the altar of power.

Then they continue on the relationship with the US as it is redefining its role in the world:

Foremost are characteristics, which especially in turbulent times (as after the fall of the Berlin Wall) are of paramount importance: reliability, trustworthiness and -- yes, friendship too. The Chancellor has squandered something that had been built up over the course of decades, and that will be hard to regain.

Although the Frankfurter Allgemeine has always been a right-of-center paper, the strength of these editiorials indicates that there might be something of a backlash against the anti-Americanism of the election campaign. But the opposition, led by Edmund Stoiber, is also to blame for the prevailing atmosphere. Instead of taking on the anti-American forces head-on, he has instead pandered to them. With nobody taking a lead, it is not surprising that public opinion has drifted so far off track. This is a far cry from the days of Helmut Kohl and Franz-Josef Strauss, who in the 80s stood steadfast at America's side during the cold war. They both had their problems too, but I suspect they would have taken a stronger line against the left's America-bashing. I still remember Kohl in a TV debate or interview, many many years ago, putting down an pacifist idiot of the left by contemptuously denigrating his "primitive anti-Americanism."

The current leadership of both the SPD and the Greens stems from the decades of anti-American protests, especially in the "peace movement" which protested against the stationing of American cruise missiles and Pershing II's in Germany. The current German government consists of quite unwholesome people, who chose the side of the Soviet Union during the cold war. The loathsome foreign minister, Joshka Fischer, was engaged in violent protests in the late 60's and early 70's. Otto Schily, the interior minister, was the lawyer who defended in court the terrorists of the Rote Armee Fraktion.

What is really galling though is that not only did these people choose to side with the Evil Empire, and were subsequently shown to be on the wrong side of history and humanity, they never even bothered to apologize for their past support of brutal totalitarian dictatiorships. And they now run the country.

Go to Spain for a new knee

While we have a projectgroup for examining transcultural aspects of health care, and integrating them, there seems to be little time to integrate that embrassing set of people, known as the patients. The long waiting lists are forcing ever more people to seek treatment abroad. The latest trend is to go to Alicante in Spain for orthopedic surgery. It is expected that about 600 Dutch patients will fly to Spain to have a new knee fitted, up from about 100 this year. Taxes may be high in Holland, but at least we get the best and longest waiting lists money can buy!

German elections coming up

Sunday Germany will go to the polls to elect a new parliament. The latest opinion polls put the incumbent government coalition of SPD and Greens slightly ahead of the CDU/FDP challengers. Only the Allensbach poll puts the CDU/FDP ahead.

For more information, there's Shark Blog with a good chronicle of the Mölleman's anti-semitic mini-campaign and then there's American Kaiser, who's running a four-part series on German politics.

In part I, he writes:

Schroeder needs the votes. He has no other way to win--the voters don't like his domestic policies. If he didn't demonize the US and create an issue, Schroeder would be massacred at the polls. So the attempt to show German machismo in the face of wanton American imperialism is really just a ploy for votes.

and then in part II:

he SPD has accomplished close to nothing, creating a quagmire with which Germans are quite upset. Unemployment has skyrocketed. In a referendum on domestic issues, Schroeder would be defeated handily. But as long as he shifts attention away from the problems facing Germany today, he will remain in the race.

I certainly agree that the posturing on Iraq is a shameful ploy for votes, but the domestic political situation is more complex than Kaiser depicts. It is true that on some domestic issues, notably the economy, Schröder has lost some of the electorate's confidence, but he's catching up. ZDF is one of the public TV networks in Germany, and they have since time immemorial cooperated with Forschungsgruppe Wahlen ("Election Researchgroup") to conduct demoscopic analyses. Their latest findings (from last Friday), show that Schröder personally is still popular, and beats Stoiber 59% to 34% in a straight popularity contest. If you click on that page on the "Bildergalerie" on the right, you will be taken through a series of graphs with poll results. One shows that the public is slightly more satisfied with the government (+0.5) than the opposition (+0.4). In part this is no doubt due to the pandering to the anti-Americanism in the population.

But there is another effect too: the floods that ravaged Germany a few months ago probably saved Schröder's bacon. To pay for the rebuilding, the tax reform has been postponed, and this has allowed the SPD to catch up on the crucial issue of economic competence. The CDU/CSU still has a slight lead (33 to 30), but that's down from 34 to 24% a week ago. On the creation of jobs, the lead is now 35 to 29%, down from 37 to 26%.

There is a lot of disappoinment and resentment in Germany about the poor economic performance. But none of the political parties, aside from the occasional flutter from the FDP, has a plan to attack the causes of the economic sclerosis. It's all just tinkering at the margin. The labor unions are still locked into antediluvian economics; they argue they need huge wage rises so that domestic demand be stimulated. To propose true free market reforms is political suicide. And the capacity to put up with economic mismanagement is cultural. Some cultures rebel, others plod along. Witness Japan, which has been in a slump for over a decade now. Germany is headed down the same path. The pain will have to become much greater before true reforms stand a chance.

Referring to the labor market, Schröder once famously said that he doesn't want "American conditions" to prevail in Germany. I take that to mean that he prefers 10% unemployment to 5%. Perhaps he'd care to explain that the 2 million extra unemployed. And this is before taking the average length of unemployment into account, which is much higher in Germany than in the US.

My prediction: much as I hate to say it, the ruling Red/Green coalition is going to squeak in by a thin margin on Sunday.

Health care priorities

As the health care system is creaking and groaning, trying desperately not to fall apart completely, you come across this.

Minister Bomhoff (Volksgezondheid) heeft medisch specialist J. van Londen aan de kant geschoven als voorzitter van de projectgroep interculturalisatie in de gezondheidszorg.

I guess you want to know what that means:

Minister Bomhoff (People's Health) has fired medical specialist J. van Londen from his position as chairman of the health care interculturalization projectgroup.

Well, we may not be able to treat your cancer until next spring, but by then we may have a better intercultural understanding of the issues. If this goes on, I'm going to need a bypass... high blood pressure is said be to be bad.

(cue: scream in background.)

Dutch research: more roadspace, less congestion!

No, really. Who would have thought? More roads, less congestion? But that's Dogmatically Problematic, isn't it? We have all been told to believe that more roads lead to more congestion, because they'll just suck in more traffic... but now... perhaps they were smoking something. Fumes from the tar pit.

What this story is all about is the use of emergency lanes as temporary driving lanes at peak hours, effectively increasing the space available to road users. As anyone outside the Ecologically-Imperial Complex might have expected, having more lanes available reduces the congestion. So the the Dutch government is going to prioritize the building of more of these "peak-lanes" so as to reduce traffic jams.

So far, so good. Traffic minister de Boer says however, that they'll only be adding width to existing roads, not building new ones. "We don't want to become known as a asphalt-cabinet." And why not? The huge increase in mobility that the car has brought to the masses in the second half of the 20th century is a very large part of the quality of life we enjoy. Being able to get from point A to point B quickly, efficiently and comfortably is a great thing to have, and it's not one that public transport can fulfill in many cases. If we want economic growth and increasing living standards, then building more roads is going to have to be a part of it. Unfortunately, the government has fallen back on the eco-dogma that more roads should never be built.

German "Attorney General" says Bush is like Hitler

Herta Däubler-Gmelin, Germany's "Minister of Justice," a position roughly comparable to the Attorney General's in the US, has made waves in Germany by comparing Bush to Hitler. (German version here.). At a meeting of labor union members she said that Bush's plans for attacking Iraq are a way to distract from his domestic problems, "a favorite method since Hitler." Her in-depth analysis of US domestic politics continues: it's not about oil, because "the Americans themselves have enough oil anyway." It's Bush's domestic problems that are the true reason for wanting to wage war in Iraq; with just 70% approvral ratings, that is understandable.

Being in charge of Germany's justice system, she also threw in that Americans "have a lousy legal system," not in the least because of the death penalty. Then she added that if today's insider trading laws had been in force in the 80's, Bush would now be in prison.

Of course, once the storm over her comments started to brew, she clarified everything: "I did not compare the persons of Bush and Hitler, but their methods." Ah, that clears it up then. But wait, there's more: she also said it's an evil campaign trick to say that she compared Bush to Hitler. Well, if that's the case, she played it on herself, finds herself up a creek full of a substance which flows freely within her head, lacks a paddle, and is now trying desperately to salvage the situation. More of her hypocrisy: "I would be very sorry, if this affair would cast even a tiny shadow on the respect that I have for the American president." So she compares him to Hitler and says he's a crook who ought to be in jail. That's some respect you've got there.

The storm in Germany is brewing though. Guido Westerwelle, the leader of the Free Democrat Party has called for her resignation, and called upon Schröder to fire her if she does not go voluntarily. He also said: "Who in the presence of 30 labor unionists makes this statement and then comes up with the excuse that she had not been informed of the presence of the press, only underlines a mentality that is not acceptable in government. The excuses of Däubler-Gmelin only make matters worse."

The Secretary General of the Christian Social Union, the Bavarian offshoot of the Christian Democrats, accused the government of "campaigning with anti-Americanism." He also said he detected a planned "escalation of the debate," with first the German Go-It-Alone route on the war, then the Social Democrats' parliamentary leader comparing Bush to Caesar, and now the culmination with the Nazi comparison. Finally he said that the Social Democrats are trying to create the impression that the real enemy is Bush, and not Saddam.

I just wish more German politicians would voice that kind of view. It'd be a start, at least.

The Social and Cultural Planning Bureau

Of course the Netherlands has one. You mean to say your country doesn't have a Social and Cultural Planning Bureau? Well, it is good to know that the Netherlands has this vital organization tied into the very heart of government. It is obviously impossible to have either a social structure or culture without either being planned. I mean, if you don't give people social and cultural guidance, the skies would be rent open to reveal the petrifying face of Primordial Chaos. Or even worse, people might do things that the wise bureaucrats of Social and Cultural Planning disapprove of.

The name conjures up images unbidden: Brazil, the film. Countless bureaucrats toiling away day after day, charting the future course of Social and Cultural Things. Quick, the people in the province of Zeeland are not consuming enough of their Cultural Vegetables! Send in a quick dollop of musical broccoli! And after we told them right from their childhood on to eat their Cultuveggies... how frustrating it is. The last consignment of Stockhausen Carrots went largely unconsumed too. They just don't know what's good for them. All they want is sugar-heavy nekulturny desserts. Memo to Televisual Directorate: Should we ban MTV?

But, at the end of a hard day's work of planning, the reward lies in a job well done. "Honey, I'm home! And you won't believe what happened at work today! We discovered that there was going to be a surplus of Social Deprivation Units in west Amsterdam, so we had to adjust the notional child-care distribution curve to shift Synthetic Social Health Propagation Tokens from Zaanstad to make up for it. We just averted a major crisis!"

Phew. That was a close one.

12-year old girl abducted, used for sex - repeatedly

Today's Telegraaf reports a horrifying tale of a 12-year old girl, who's been abducted by a group of men, and was then forced to work as a prostitute. Repeatedly. TWENTY times.

The rape gang, a group of young Moroccans, threatened her with knives and guns, and took her blindfolded to a bar. On the bed there, she was forced to have sex with dozens of men. The story only came out after the girl, Miranda, had fled to Amsterdam where she'd been roaming the streets for five days. During this time, her parents found her diaries with the details in her room.

The parents reported this to the police in May, who did not take them seriously. Only after the third attempt to report the case did the police deign to investigate. Meanwhile, Miranda's father had discovered the identities of the rape gang and gave them to the police.

So the situation now is that the family is fleeing their home in Assen, because they're being terrorized by the rape gang. They get harassed with phone calls in the middle of the night, get messages sent to their cell phones, and members of the rape gang strut prominently in front of their home. The father used to work as a sales clerk in a store, where the rape gang members started to harass him too. He's had a nervous breakdown and lost his job.

Police spokesman Martin Panman says: "This week or next, we'll set up a serious detective team of six people." The initial report was filed in May. Now it's middle of September. The suspects' identities were known. And still the police wouldn't act, and are now, under the pressure of publicity, setting up a team to investigate. Wasn't Holland pretending to be a civilized country?

Nor is Miranda the only victim of the Moroccan rape gang. One other victim is now in a psychiatric institute, the other is too scared to leave her home. Three lives scarred, perhaps permanently, by a gang of despicable violent thugs, while the police have to be shamed into action. Utterly disgusting. This is yet another, albeit particularly horrendous, example of the state of law enforcement in the Netherlands. Citizens are not supposed to defend themselves, since that is what the police is for. Yet the police are simply not up to the job, and this has not gone unnoticed.

One final question is whether the ethnic origin of the gang rapists is relevant here. They are all Arabs, mostly Moroccan, with the odd Iraqi and Kuwaiti thrown in. The relevance stems from the structural proclivity of Arab men in western countries to treat women as they had been taught to in their own dysfunctional culture, where women's rights are virtually non-existent and they are treated as property. This carries over into their behavior when they live in the West. This is not an isolated incident. In France, gang-rapes comitted by Arabs are so common, they have a name for them: tournantes. Australia recently saw a brutal gang-rape, resulting in a record 55-year jail sentence for the ringleader. In Denmark and Norway, well over half those convicted for rape are of Arab origin, while they form only a small minority in either country.

This is a problem. Putting a the Multicultural Blinkers of Political Correctness on is not going to change the underlying reality. Either the Arabs living in the West assimilate into our culture and bring themselves up to our level of civilization, or they should seek their abode elsewhere. Mark Steyn put it thus:

As one is always obliged to explain when tiptoeing around this territory, I'm not a racist, only a culturist. I support immigration, but with assimilation. Without it, like a Hindu widow, the West is slowly climbing on the funeral pyre of its lost empires. You see it in European foreign policy already: They're scared of their mysterious, swelling, unstoppable Muslim populations. Islam For All approvingly reported the other day that, at present demographic rates, in 20 years' time the majority of children (i.e., under 18) in Holland will be Muslim. It will be the first Islamic country in Western Europe since the loss of Spain. Europe is the colony now.

The Prime Minister hard at work

Dutch Prime Minister has a busy schedule; after all, he's got a country to run. One of the things clogging this busy schedule of his give rise to photo-ops now and then. The caption of the picture is:

Premier Balkenende en zijn vrouw woonden op prinsjesdag een 'interlevensbeschouwelijke bezinningsbijeenkomst' bij.

Which in English boils down to "Prime Minister Balkenende and his wife attended on Budget Day a..." ehhrrrmm.... well, I'd love to translate it for you, but I have no clue what it means. Neither does the caption-writer given scare-quotes.

It roughly translates into "Inter-Life-Philosophical-Contemplation Meeting." It sounds just as horrible in Dutch too. In plainer language it would probably be a Multicultural Snuggle-and-Hugfest. (OK, I lied, I did have some clue.)

Ye Gods.

Good enough for now

OK, yet more tinkering later, I think I am now sufficiently worn out to call it a day. I am more or less happy with the way the blog looks, so this is going to be it for a while.

Netscape 4.x weirdness

This is really weird. Now that I am using tables, the page almost renders correctly in Netscape 4.x, except that the top logo does not appear. It's the first table that's missing.... very strange...

I give up

I've spent many an hour trying to get the css-driven layout to work, but to no avail. Despite the helpful links provided on the forum, I could not get this page to look right with css under Chimera, the OS X browser with the Gecko rendering engine. It did work with OmniWeb and IE, but not having Chimera rendering properly was a deal breaker. It is the engine used in Mozilla and the new Netscape, so I could not very well have it broken. Oh well. So it's now slightly table-driven, with a very simple structure. Not as ideologically satisfying as pure css, but it works for me.

And another thing...

I just noticed that I can't select any text in the blog body. The selection goes to the right. Very peculiar.

Good grief.

Designing a site like this is more work than I had thought. Especially if one's browser decides to act up, making one think that one's changes are not having any effect. Oh well. I seem to be making some progress, but it is slow. I still wonder whether to go to a table-driven layout though. It seems to be the thing to do... and I have not gotten this page to render well in OmniWeb. Hm. And I'm not happy with the font sizes either. So much to do, so little time...

Aha!

Now I get it. It's the float:left combined with the width:60% in the content ID that makes it work the way it does. Clever. Now I have to figure out whether I want to build on this, or use my own stuff. Since I don't know much about HTML or CSS, it is tempting just to start with this, but I'm afraid it's going to be too Dr. Weevil-y. Oh well... let's see...

Progress

Well, it seems to work now, but I am still completely baffled by how the HTML and the CSS works. Most baffling is how the calendar ends up on the right of the page, when there is no table to tell it to do so. I guess I'll have to spend more time learning CSS, because this is very confusing indeed. Perhaps a longer blog entry will clarify things...

Take it slow, don't hurt yourself

It never ceases to surprise me which cross-sections of sub-Idiotarianism will meld together into a new strand. The Netherlands has spawned a new one, the "Union Against Hurrying", as reported on nu.nl. It seems to be an amalgam of luddites, anti-globalizers and religious groups. They are calling for a slower working pace, limits to working hours, more "appreciation" of slow activities such as contemplation, social contacts and daydreaming. And Wednesdays are to become "Slow-working days." Right. I just hope they didn't rush into all of these goals, or overexert themselves.

So let's see: we kill productivity, cut GDP and living standards in half, force people shops to close after 6 PM, and set up a National Appreciation Committee for Daydreaming. I was going to say something witty and/or pithy about this, but I'm afraid I've exceeded my daily work-hour quota. Don't want to rush things, you see. *yawn*. Perhaps I should take a nap. Or at least do some serious daydreaming - and I expect to be appreciated for that, ya hear?

65% of Dutchmen unhappy with police

And this comes as a surprise?

Today's Telegraaf has a story (Dutch only) on the results of a survey by the Social and Cultural Planning Bureau (yet another institution in this country with a name that defies parody), that shows that 65% of Dutchmen are unhappy with the way the police to their job. People think the police should spend more time chasing criminals. Imagine that. And with just 14.6% of crimes (191,000 out of 1.3 million) being solved, it's not exactly surprising. And since most people only see the police when they get a speeding ticket, the misplaced priorities begin to register. Also of note: 90% of those interviewed thought that criminals should be punished more severely.

Holland must be one of the countries with the most lenient sentencing in the world. If you want to commit a murder, do it here. With some extenuating circumstances and a halfway decent lawyer, you'll likely get away with being sentenced to, say, 12 years. Throw some good behavior in the mix, and you could be out in 8. Even better, if you can claim to be an "activist" of some sort, you might get off even more lightly.

The new government, when it is not decending into farce, is planning to spend more money on the police. However, without realigning the police's priorities, it's going to be hard to make a dent in crime. One of the proposals that's come bubbling out of the new government is to be more lenient with people who exceed the speed limit by a small amount. Why not just increase the speed limit then? Current speed limits, especially on the highways, are ridiculously low (100 or 120 km/h, which is 60 or 70 mph), and are widely ignored. Having laws that are ignored on such a wide scale undermines respect for the law in general. When reality and the written law diverge by this much (and no harm comes of it), then surely the wise thing to do is to amend the law.

To round it all off, we also have the news that due to a "cell-shortage" many people who are arrested end up on the street again immediately. In the first six months of this year, 832 arrests ended up in the immediate relase of the suspects. In many more cases, the police don't even bother to act, since they know it's going to be futile. Now, isn't a "cell-shortage" an oxymoron? We have a number of cells. We have a number of criminals. Divide the latter by the former, and you get the average occupancy rate per cell. What's so horrible if this number is greater than one?

The new XJ arrives!

We all knew it was coming (well, at least the Jag fans amongst us), but the new X350 is here, and wears the proud XJ badge. All the information is available at Jag-Lovers, with lots of pictures and data. It looks a bit bulkier than the current XJ, but overall they seem to have managed to keep the sleek, low XJ lines. In Europe, there's going to be a low-end 3.0L V6 engine too... who cares? The top of the line will have th 4.2L V8, with a supercharged option cranking out 400 hp. It's obvious which one to go for...

Ubi bene, ibi patria

It was not until the next day that it really hit me. I was walking up 7th Avenue to our office, my usual early morning exercise for the period I had been in New York. From 24th to 48th, my route took me around Penn Station, where I would go crosstown to 6th to avoid the mad crush of Times Square. Near Penn Station, on the almost deserted streets, I saw two men raising the Flag. I realized it would go half-mast. That hurt. That's when the sadness and grief hit me. The cold, rational thought of the day before "we are at war" was complemented by the emotional impact. The day before had been an attempt to destroy not just buildings and individuals, but the very Thought of America, our civilization, our freedom.

It is exactly the abstract, the powerful Idea that is embodied in the United States that threatens the barbarians' tenuous hold over their victims, for as long as Old Glory waves the irresistable call of a better life, more freedom, more prosperity will turn the oppressed against their oppressors. The pusillanimous moral relativism that exists on the lunatic fringes of society wails and moans, but the rest of us know: we have work to do. There is a war to be won. The survival of freedom is at stake, and many brave men will die to safeguard those rights. Including the rights of the wailing Idiotarians of the "Blame America First" crowd. Thus it has ever been.

After every war America has fought, the world has become a better, freer place. And so it will be this time too.

Remember the ones who were murdered. Remember the ones who gave their lives. Think of the ones who are now protecting ours. Read Lileks today. Remember who cheered.. Buy one of these. Be confident. Be proud. Enjoy life.

Many of today's links come through Instapundit