Monthly Archives: November 2006

Pride (In the Name of Love)

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After my earlier post/can of worms on secularism I have been a bit hesitant to stir up more religious trouble. Until I saw this little beauty:

The Vatican has asked Israel to ban a gay pride parade due to take place tomorrow in Jerusalem. Thousands of gay activists are expected to march in Jerusalem even though violence is expected.

This, in and of itself, is not such a big deal. The Holy See has always claimed that the catholic Church has the right, the duty even, to interfere with other people’s lives. If you have some time, you can go and read the official social doctrine of the Holy See. No, the really interesting part in the article is this:

“The Holy See has reiterated on many occasions that the right to freedom of expression … is subject to just limits, in particular when the exercise of this right would offend the religious sentiments of believers,” the Vatican said.

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New Synagogue in Munich

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On the 68th anniversary of the Kristallnacht pogrom, Germany’s president Koehler joined with other dignitaries in inaugurating a new synagogue in Munich.

Neo-Nazis plotted to bomb the ground-breaking ceremony for the Munich synagogue exactly three years ago. Members of the group were arrested and their leader is now serving a seven-year jail term.

German President Horst Koehler warned of lingering anti-Semitism in the country and noted that neo-Nazi crimes have increased this year.

“This is painful … we must learn the lesson and remain watchful today and for all time,” said Koehler in a speech.

The opening went off without a hitch. Munich is now home to Germany’s second-largest Jewish community (behind Berlin), with roughly 9,000 of the country’s 110,000 Jewish citizens. I haven’t seen the new synagogue in person yet, but it won’t be long.

323 Years of Caffeine

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One of Thomas Barnett’s commenters complained about Europe being a cafe society, so why not some café-blogging? After all, the collectif antilibérale over at European Tribune had a whole thread on brasseries not so long ago. Der Standard has a long article on the history of Viennese kaffeehäuser, going back to 1683 and the second siege of Vienna.

First of all, a classic trope of European history-the fact everyone knows, but that turns out to be rubbish. Like King Canute telling the tide to back off (a little like keeping spam out of our comments threads, but I digress) – everyone remembers that, but hardly anyone realises that Canute did it to humble his courtiers with the limits of power, rather than in a gesture of deluded arrogance. Every schoolboy knows that one Georg Franz Kolschitzky was rewarded for sneaking through the Turkish lines with a message by being given a stash of coffee beans from captured stocks. Another version is that, after the relief of Vienna, he looted the beans from the Turks’ abandoned baggage train, or bought them for a song from a soldier who didn’t know their value.

The only problem is that it’s not true.
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Re-Christianise to fight genocide!

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Europe must re-Christianise to resist terror!

A Roman Catholic nun has been sentenced to 30 years in prison for her role in the Rwandan genocide in 1994.

Theophister Mukakibibi was jailed by a traditional Rwandan court for helping ethnic Hutu militiamen kill Tutsis hiding in a hospital where she worked.

Mukakibibi is the first nun sentenced by a Rwandan court for crimes committed during the genocide.

Two other Catholic nuns were found guilty by a Belgian court in 2001, and male priests have also faced trial.

Theophister Mukakibibi worked at the National University Hospital in the town of Butare during the genocide.

Protection

According to Jean Baptiste Ndahumba, president of the local gacaca court in Butare, the nun selected Tutsis sheltering in the hospital and threw them out for the militias to kill.

He said she did not spare pregnant women, and was also accused of dumping a baby in a latrine, the Reuters news agency reports.

“She used to hold meetings with militiamen and had an army officer as her escort during the killings,” Mr Ndahumba said…

Posted, as they say, without comment.

A new take on Eurobashing

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Thomas P.M. Barnett, Pentagon pet intellectual and 4th Generation Warfare theorist, comes up with a new variant of the Eurabia meme I don’t think we’ve seen before. According to Barnett,

Nothing predicts Europe’s growing strategic irrelevancy more than their growing navel-gazing over the perceived threat of “Eurabia,” which speaks to a continent that’s gotten so fat, dumb and lazy that they’re fatalistically succumbing to fears of invasive species destroying their habitat. The reality is, of course, that thriving, self-aware societies can handle that influx and integrate the differences to make the whole stronger.

This is fascinating. All the usual US hard-right tropes are there, until the second sentence. There’s the blithe assumption of economic superiority (no mention, of course, of the US trade deficit with both the EU and China, currently 7% of GDP and climbing fast, nor for that matter the EU’s trade surplus with both..), and the corollary complacency that this will last (no mention of the gap in energy intensity between the US, the EU and Japan, for example). There’s the rhetoric of purity as applied to economics. There’s the complacent assurance of permanent strategic primacy, with (of course) no mention of Iraq or Afghanistan. But the really interesting thing is that he sees people like the Vlaams Belang’s representatives on Earth over at Brussels Journal as part of the problem, not part of the solution.

Which should make Barnett far more worth reading than, say, Mark Steyn or any of the European far-right’s growing Washington lobby. His notions about “the Core and the Gap”, the “sysadmin force” specialised in postconflict reconstruction, counterinsurgency and peacekeeping, etc should make him that anyway. In a sense, I see him as a reasonable man struggling to get out of the husk of a hidebound reactionary, rather like his fellow guerrilla warfare theorist John Robb—they both make sense, but find it necessary to convince themselves and their audience that they aren’t perhaps turning – gasp – European by talking nonsense about nonexistent civil wars and cheese-eating surrender monkeys.

It’s tempting to use a Freudian reading.
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Sensible German Regulations, Part 1

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The government of Berlin has become the first German state government to get out of the business of telling retailers when they can and cannot do business. Mostly, anyway. As the German newspaper whose web site could be better organized notes today (on page one, but is it on the front page of the web site? certainly not), Berlin has told shop owners that they may keep any hours they please from Monday to Saturday. Credit where credit is due, this is progress. Not leadership, not parity with numerous other EU nations, but still, progress.

On the other hand, the (Protestant) Bishop of Hanover said that quiet Sundays were good for everyone. Except of course tram drivers, bus drivers, conductors, police, firefighters, hospital staff, etc etc etc. Or maybe the good bishop is on to something, and a state-mandated day of rest really is the way to go. Why not Tuesday?

OSCE Upbeat on American Election

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The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which looks into these sorts of things from Vancouver to Vladivostok, gave a generally positive assessment of the elections held in the United States on Tuesday, November 7.

“The overall election administration, including the processing of voters on election day, seemed professional and efficiently organized in most polling stations we visited,” said Giovanni Kessler, who headed the mission.

“However, the swift introduction of Direct Recording Equipment (DREs), at times without a voter verifiable audit paper trail, appeared to negatively impact on voter confidence. This remains a challenge for the future.”

Commenting on the campaign, Kessler raised his concern that a large number of political advertisements consisted of personalized attacks on opponents.

From the full initial report, an issue important to me:

No provisions have, however, been made to address the long-standing issue of representation of those residents of Washington DC who are not elegible to vote in another State.

Lack of representation is a constitutional quirk, but the fact remains that half a million Americans (more than the population of the state of Wyoming, for example) have no real representation in either the House or the Senate.

The mission consisted of 18 international election analysts from 15 OSCE participating States who were deployed to 14 [US] States to assess the electoral environment and procedures, meet representatives of State and local election administration, political parties and candidates, and civil society.

A limited number of polling stations in California, Connecticut, Louisiana, Maryland, New York, Tennessee, Ohio, Virginia and Washington were visited by OSCE/ODIHR, but no systematic observation of polling and counting procedures was conducted.

You may have heard about the results. Good news, I think.

afoe 3.0a

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Someone once said that there’s nothing really new to the concept of „Web2.0“, that it is really just a marketing ploy designed to actually make those people (in German) get what it’s all about. Someone else said that it all could have been done just as well with a cgi and some Perl back in 1995. And that’s probably true in some sense. But just as my claim to a successful voice over IP telephone call using a 14.4kpbs modem in early 1995, it is also entirely misleading.

If you’ve not been on holiday for the last week, you’ve probably spent as much time on the web as you did in a whole month in 1995 – or more. In 1995, when Sandra Bullock ordered a pizza over the web in „The Net“, I had a good laugh thinking ‚why would anyone ever want to do that?’ Now, while the pizza is probably still best ordered with a traditional phonecall, the web has improved in a lot. Ten years ago, there was still scaffolding everywhere. Now, even if you’re not playing “Second Life“, it has become a not too uncomfortable place to hang out, read, write, watch crazy stuff, or chat with people.

Just as the social invention of the telephone followed its technological invention and, in many ways, surprised those who had to evaluate its potential value before, the web will keep surprising us. And occasionally, we will try to classify phases and identify them with numbers. So websites with increased interactivity and partly user created content – that’s web 2.0.

So what is 2.0 about afoe now?
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Power failure

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In more ways than one. On Saturday night, between 2230 and 2300 local time, a huge chunk of the European power grid fell over, affecting supply from northwest Germany, through Holland and Belgium, and mostly in France. Further afield, small areas of Austria and Italy lost power, and the Spain-Morocco interconnection was shut off to prevent the trouble spreading. Fortunately, power was restored speedily.

At the heart of the whole thing, meet the cruise liner Norwegian Pearl. This floating gin palace was recently completed by the Meyer Werft shipyard on the river Ems in northwestern Germany. Now, Meyer’s shipyard is a long way up the river. To get a ship the size of the Pearl out, you have to wait for a spring tide. But there’s a catch – just downstream of the yard, a 400 kilovolt transmission line belonging to the German utility company E.ON crosses the river. And the more water there is in the river, the less clearance there is under the wires. So, on Saturday night, when the weather and the tide were perfect for Captain Thomas Teitge to take the ship down the river, E.ON switched the wires off. And then the troubles began.

Update: She sailed today without further trouble.
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