We’ll get the first one out of the way early: Twenty-two men played. In the end, Germany won.
(Over Costa Rica, 4-2 just for the record and so anyone who pulls this post out of the archives years from now will have the context at hand.)
Predictions for Poland vs Ecuador?
Anyone taking Costa Rica tomorrow? For the sheer perversity?
Just wondering.
There is not much market for reviews of books published almost a decade and a half ago, so without further ado, my thoughts on The Prize, by Daniel Yergin. This evaluation is overdue because I started reading the book when I bought it, back in 1997. I put it down around page 400 (which is a little more than halfway), so this review is likely, very likely, to be stronger on the second half of the book.
Yergin’s subtitle is The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power, which gives both theme and thesis. The title, if I am remembering an early part of the book correctly, comes from a statement made about oil by Winston Churchill: “The prize was mastery itself.†The argument is that understanding oil is central to understanding the twentieth century and, by extension, the world today. To complaints that the war in Iraq is “all about oil,†the only proper answer is “Of course.†The last century’s major conflicts, and many of its smaller ones, were driven by oil, determined by oil, or both. Without an understanding of oil, much of the period will remain opaque.
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When I lived in Vienna, in 2001-2002, I lived in the 11th District, Simmering, a roughish working-class suburb struck through with railway lines and motorway spurs. Specifically, I lived in one of the four huge brick gasometers of the former city gasworks, once Europe’s biggest, now redeveloped as a mixture of shops, flats and a concert hall.
One thing that cheered me, looking at the dire OVP-FPO government with its mixture of dishonest hacks and barely-contained racist scum, was that surely this provincialism was on the way out. With the enlargement of the EU, not only did Austria stand to make huge economic gains, but surely it would liven up a bit?
There was at least some evidence of change. Around the 11. Bezirk, huge infrastructure projects were going on. The railyards were being enlarged, all kinds of commercial property being built, new terminal buildings at the airport..everyone was looking forward to a good old fashioned concrete binge.
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Her lies in the naturalisation process notwithstanding, it seems that, one way or another, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the controversial feminist, Islam critic, and former Dutch parlamentarian, will be able to retain her Dutch citizenship. If she still wants it.
Even though she had reportedly planned to move to the United States to work for the American Enterprise Institute for a longer time and a number of reasons – not the least of which may have been that, as argued by the Neue Zürcher Zeitung (in German), the Netherlands had grown a little tired of paying the bills for her non-compromising, crusadesque stance against Islam (as opposed to her new employer) – the circumstances causing her immediate resignation from the Dutch Parliament are a significant event in Dutch, maybe European politics, although I suppose it will only later become clear what exactly it means.
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Krrrrushing the opposition in the Eurovision Song Contest!
Monster hard rock heavy metal zombie mask wearing whatever group Lordi from Finland dominated the contest, though some Russians think it’s a sign of European conspiracies against Russia. Like everything else in the world.
I used up my snark quota for this week already, so I don’t have anything to say about the contest, but those hardy souls at Manolo’s Shoe Blog even watched some of the semi-finals. So we didn’t have to.
(533kr1t m3554ge 4 4m3r1c4n5: Next time a European gets shirty about his or her sophisticated culture and your supposed lack of same, just mention the time five Finns in monster masks became songmeisters of the whole continent…)
UPDATE: “Sadly, No!” gets it. And points to a YouTube of the performance, plus an interview with someone who has magenta hair and claims that naked people were running in the streets of Helsinki, bars were offering free champagne and 100,000 people will greet Lordi when they land in Suomi. Monster Finland r00lz! 1!!
No doubt the usual suspects will be hugely enjoying the claim by Austria’s hard-right interior minister Elisabeth (Liesl) Prokop that 45 per cent of Muslims are “unwilling to integrate”. In fact, it’s more than a claim – as well as rhetoric, she’s got a “study” to support her election positioning. Unfortunately, the study still isn’t complete – its leader, one Prof. Matthias Rohe, has yet to draw conclusions from the data. Not only that, there are some serious concerns regarding the methodology – at the link, it turns out that the study included, as well as a mixture of questionnaires and focus groups, a “consideration of media reports”.
Ah. I think I get it. Someone like the emetic FPÖ goon Andreas Mölzer has his pet newspaper (Zur Zeit) rant about TEH TERRORISTS, and this is duly marked off by the responsible minister’s pet academics as evidence for Mölzer’s policy. But there is much, much worse.
According to her spokesman, “20 per cent of Muslims had difficulties with integration for religious reasons and 25 per cent with the cultural background”. So, obviously 45 per cent of them REFUSE TO INTEGRATE AND MUST BE ELIMINATED! Errr..well. Perhaps if religious and cultural differences were mutually exclusive, that might approach the truth or something akin to it.
But of course they are not. In fact, I’d argue that in this case they are barely distinguishable, which implies epic double counting and a truly mendacious misuse of statistics. After all, I suspect that not far off 100 per cent of them agree with me that the current Austrian government is a bunch of racists and cheap-arsed hacks with their fingers in the till, and using the same class of mathematics, we can therefore conclude that 145 per cent of Muslims in Austria are dangerous non-integrators.
Updated: Well, the study was eventually presented, and it doesn’t contain either the phrase “unwilling to integrate” or the figure of 45 per cent. How strange. It’s almost as if someone was lying.
Since the withdrawal of the CPE and the resulting collateral damage to Dominique de Villepin, not to mention Nicolas Sarkozy’s unexpected appearance as a unity figure at the height of the crisis, it’s rapidly being promulgated as conventional wisdom that France “is ungovernable”/refuses to “reform”/cannot be “reformed”. There is only one problem with this discourse, very popular in anglophone leader columns and the like, which is that it’s nonsense.
It’s quite often been raised here on AFOE that the French economy isn’t actually in trouble. Growth, although not great, is ticking along, inflation is controlled, unemployment is higher than the UK but lower than Italy or Germany, and the demographics (as Edward Hugh will no doubt point out) look a lot better than many other countries. Certainly, there’s more youth unemployment than one might like, but almost all the figures for this are wildly misleading. The percentage rate of unemployment in the 15-24 years age group looks scary high, but is actually a very small percentage of that group–because most of them are in education or vocational training of some form and hence not part of the labour force. Unemployment as a percentage of the age group is rather lower than the national rate and not much different from that elsewhere in Europe. (Le Monde ran a useful little chart of this in a supplement yesterday that doesn’t seem to be on the web.) Much – indeed most – of the difference in employment growth between France and the UK in recent years has been accounted for by the UK government going on a hiring binge.
So why the crisis atmosphere? More, as ever, below the fold..
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I suppose I should be happy that there is a recent, one-volume general history of the Hungarians. Their history is not exactly the stuff of bestsellers, even if Hungarians were crucial in everything from computers to the atomic bomb to Hollywood studios. Ten million people, give or take, speaking a non-Indo-European language in and around the Carpathian basin. Their exact origins unknown, their polity long divided, their armies prone to getting wiped out.
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What to do when you haven’t finished a book but find yourself with something to say about it?
Convention dictates that one should finish a book before reviewing it (although I have my doubts about any number of published reviews), but on the other hand, The Fatal Shore, by Robert Hughes, was published 20 years ago; this is not breaking news. So out with the convention, in with the thoughts.
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