Ayan Hirsi Ali: Snack thinker of the year.
Seriously, what is all this fuckbuggerage about an Islamic Reformation from non-Islamic people and Islamic people who have clearly forgotten, or never knew, just how terrible the Reformation was for any poor sod who had to live through it?
February in Paris, 1983. A group of student leaders are ushered into the presence of President Mitterand by huissiers. They stay slightly more than an hour, discussing Marxism-Leninism, youth, and society with the ever-inconsistent, sometimes brilliant, sometimes crooked, sometimes socialist and sometime fascist president. Years later, one of them, Jean-Claude Cambalebis remembers the three questions Mitterand advised him to deal with if he wanted to “avoid becoming Minister of Public Works”.
They were as follows: the first, he said, was Poland, or more specifically that spiritual power had defeated political power there. The second was the way Britain would never be European and would always prefer to maintain ties with its favoured trading partners in the Commonwealth. For the third, Mitterand produced an electronic listening device (un puce electronique) from his pocket and remarked that such things would “turn the organisation of work upside-down”.
23 years down-range from that meeting with the UNEF executive committee at the Elysée Palace, and ten years on from Mitterand’s death, how do those part-predictions, part-suggestions stack up?
More in the geek hole..
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Some people start the year by resolving to give something up. Sweden’s new year’s resolution, it seems, is to give up oil by 2020.
Breaking dependence on oil brings many opportunities for strengthened competitiveness, technological development and progress. The aim is to break dependence on fossil fuels by 2020. By then no home will need oil for heating. By then no motorist will be obliged to use petrol as the sole option available. By then there will always be better alternatives to oil.
They’re not the only ones. Jacques Chirac’s New Year message included the promise that SNCF and the Paris public transport system would not use a drop of oil in 20 years’ time.
Obviously the French view of this is primarily nuclear. The Swedes, though, seem keener on efficiency’n’renewables; apparently they have increased renewable power production by 4.5 terawatt-hours since 2002 with a target of 15TWh more by 2016. It might be worth pointing out something which got very little blog attention when it appeared last year – the UK wind industry’s capacity is now doubling every other year, which makes the UK government’s targets look anaemic. (10% of electricity generation).
After all, there are 986TWh of wind out there in the UK offshore economic zone. At a capacity factor of 30%, that ought to be enough to do the whole electricity supply (321TWh) – without getting started on the onshore sites.
Der Standard is reporting that German Chancellor Angela Merkel has said that “an institution like Guantanamo cannot, and cannot be allowed to, exist for any length of time” and promised to take the matter up with George W. Bush. Those people who expected less criticism from Germany of the War On Terror are clearly about to be disappointed.
It’s a tough move from Merkel, who has been impressively successful in building authority in foreign affairs despite the frankly bizarre position of her government, hanging by a thread from Franz Müntefering’s ego.
Over at TYR, I argued that the explanation of the Ukraine-Russia gas dispute was an effort by the Russian side to break up the European gas customers as a negotiating block by exploiting the conflict between the transit states (like the Ukraine) and the customers (like Germany). This gave rise to further discussion down-blog right here on AFOE, in the comments to this post of Tobias’s, where this was said…
I think he was trying to play off the customer states against the pipeline states, in order not to deal with a European monopsony. Unfortunately, the pipeliners and customers were rather induced to hang together rather than swing separately, and he backed down in order to prevent the point of payment being moved to the Russian-Ukrainian border, which would have effectively put the Ukraine in the EU for gas purposes.
Posted by Alex at January 5, 2006 10:50 AM“I think he was trying to play off the customer states against the pipeline states”
Interesting theory, but how do Moldova and Armenia fit into this. The former was cut off and the latter has been badly threatened?
Posted by Edward at January 5, 2006 11:02 AMArmenia – rather different case. The pipeline/customer thing doesn’t apply (AFAIK), but as Armenia is a small customer relative to Russian gas production, the relationship is very different. No need for anything complicated, just a shakedown for more cash.
Moldova – interesting question. It’s not on the way to anywhere is it?
Posted by Alex at January 5, 2006 03:32 PM“It’s not on the way to anywhere is it?”
Not that I know of. It just seems to have been……forgotten.
Posted by Edward at January 5, 2006 03:43 PMIt seems Moldova is sitting on the pipeline to Romania and Bulgaria.
Posted by Oliver at January 5, 2006 03:53 PMThat’s it, then: a power grab for control of (or at least cheaper rates on) two export lines, by trying to play off the customers against the pipelines. Armenia was pure opportunism.
Posted by Alex at January 5, 2006 04:43 PM“It seems Moldova is sitting on the pipeline”
“That’s it, then: a power grab”
Fascinating! This certainly gives plausibility to the idea that they were going for control of the landline installation. The issue now is how will the customers respond.
Posted by Edward at January 5, 2006 09:28 PM
Now, though, we may be about to find out. Bulgaria has been faced with a demand from Gazprom very similar to the one to the Ukrainians, and it seems they’ve given them the brushoff in much the same way. A very similar logic applies, as Bulgaria is both a transit provider (it’s odd how this Internetworking terminology creeps into what is after all a discussion of networks) and a fair-sized gas customer. The Russians seem to have been of a mind to use the latter fact to force changes on the former, and the Bulgarians have adopted an identical strategy.
Which would predict a settlement in double quick time, if we’re right.
Earlier this week, the US Department of the Treasury’s order to freeze the assets of a variety of Viktor Bout companies was extended to the entire world by the UN Security Council’s sanctions committee. All assets belonging to the persons and organisations named in this this list are now subject to confiscation anywhere in the world.
The list is, certainly, a little out of date. Several of the operating companies listed have ceased activity, and there is no mention of Phoenix Aviation, Jet Line International, or Aerocom among others. (The delay between the US Treasury’s action and this action is apparently due to the time it took the Office of Foreign Assets Control to pass on documents to the UN, that and Russian objections to the inclusion of Viktor’s brother, Sergei, founder of Air Bas and CET Aviation.) However, a non-trivial number of aircraft continue to fly in the name of firms named by the UN.
This leaves two lines of action: one, to identify the newer firms, and two, to make the UN blacklist a reality. It’s time to find these aircraft and demand their seizure. All bloggers are invited to mirror this and help land them on the fire dump, which is where most of these planes will end up given their age and general condition.
The list is currently as follows, correct as of today:
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The Jamaican solution is now rapidly hurtling towards the plausibility horizon, as perhaps the most serious objection against it becomes blindingly clear. After all, the CDU-CSU is in itself a coalition of two parties. It’s usually in British politics that one speaks of a party being in itself a coalition, assuming as one does that proportional representation countries tend to make their coalitions explicit. But it remains true that political parties are rarely monolithic.
Down-blog, there’s been a discussion going about whether the CDU-CSU is really a single entity, a pair of political parties who share a parliamentary fraction, two political parties in coalition, or something else. Whatever it formally is, there are indubitably both CDU and CSU MPs. And that’s all you need for a potential inner-party politics. The CSU’s leader, Edmund Stoiber, is seriously not happy with the Jamaican option. Here, he tells the CSU faction in the Bavarian parliament (what, there are others? Who knew?) that “the contradictions between the interested parties are so great that such an alliance is not in sight”, and that the Greens “would have to reinvent themselves completely”. The Bavarian interior minister remarked that the CSU would have to swallow not just a frog but a giant toad to join such a coalition, and the minister of the economy pointed out all the policy disputes listed in my last post, and then some more. Not just the kerazy Bavarians said so – the Federal CDU’s deputy leader Christoph Böhr said that he could not imagine “throwing the heart of our manifesto into the wastepaper basket”. Damn, the metaphors are getting a hammering.
On the other hand, although Claudia Roth, one of the Greens’ multiple leaders, repeated that the FDP would have to do what Stoiber said the Greens would have to (she used exactly the same words) before they could join a traffic light coalition, her colleague and fellow-leader Reinhard Bütikofer signalled that the Greens were available for talks with both the CDU and the FDP. He also said that “his fantasy did not reach far enough” to visualise Angela Merkel becoming chancellor.
Meanwhile, on the Ampelkoalition front….
Losing the CSU would outweigh gaining the Greens, so that’s as good as a veto of the idea.
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In the maelstrom, one thing is clear: SPD General Secretary Franz Müntefering, he of the Kapitalismusdebatte, is staying in his post after the parliamentary party voted by a 93% majority to keep him. In other news: Earth continues to orbit Sun, Pope Benedict says committed to Catholicism, bear sighted shitting in woods. His talents in the smoke-filled backroom will be needed, as SPD-CDU, SPD-Green, and CDU-FDP negotiations were announced today. No word on Green-FDP conversations…and nobody wants to play with Oskar and Gregor in the naughty corner.
Angela Merkel may fall prey to the CDU’s Old Grey Man tendency as early as this afternoon, when she presents herself for re-election as parliamentary party leader. There are no other candidates, this being something of a ritual in German and Austrian politics, but if the OGMs are sufficiently angry about their campaign’s spectacular train crash, she could be on her way to join Joschka Fischer and Paul Kirchhof in obscurity by tonight…actually, hold that, she has been re-elected by 98.6% of the vote. Which is actually better than she got before the disastrous election campaign – work that out.
Here, we learn that the CSU has been thrown into a horridly intense introspection nightmare, as Dr. Gonzo might have put it, by the fact that they polled less than 50% for only the second time in their history. 49.6% doesn’t sound at all bad, until you remember that they don’t really have democracy in Bavaria, they have the CSU and its VERY long-lasting leaders, who play on Bavarian local patriotism and Catholic conservatism to claim a monster powerbase. The other parties’ comparative success may have the unintended consequence of saving Angela Merkel, because the CSU can hardly say “Told you so, we should have gone with a real man like Stoiber” if they buggered up their own campaign. Interestingly, it was none other than Edmund Stoiber who formally nominated Merkel as fraction leader – presumably signalling loyalty?
The old crook Wolfgang Schäuble, whose political career mysteriously continues to survive his disgrace in the Helmut Kohl party funding scandal, spoke out for a Jamaica coalition. He says it’s “our duty as democrats” and that a government without Merkel is “unthinkable”. Do not believe a word this man says. The Süddeutsche Zeitung‘s interviewer describes the grand coalition as the Elefantenhochzeit or elephants’ wedding – can we start using that?
In other dishonesty-related news, Franz Müntefering is trying to make out that the SPD is really the biggest single party and hence entitled to form a government on the grounds that the CDU and CSU are two separate entities. Jeer at the absurd sophistry!
Renate Künast is to take over Fischer’s duties pro tempore, reports the Austrian newspaper whose website uses frames. Check out the conspiracy madness in the forums; apparently Fischer is plotting to put Künast in so as to achieve a Jamaica coalition, because he’s a warmonger. Sometimes Der Standard’s forums make me glad I don’t live in Vienna any more and don’t have to listen to this infantile nonsense.
The appalling tabloid Bild Zeitung, who I refuse to link to, claims Schröder will drop his demand for the Chancellery if the CDU pick someone other than Merkel. Given 98.6% of them just voted for her, I take it that statement is no longer operative.
Handelsblatt reports that Joschka Fischer, one of the Greens’ two co-leaders and the Red-Green government’s foreign minister and deputy chancellor, has announced his resignation from both his party and state offices. He will, however, take up his seat in the Bundestag. Apparently he thinks the Greens need “a new formation” (eine Neuaufstellung) and that “clarity must reign”. Further, the party needs to be led by younger people.
Perhaps more importantly, he also said that it could be “realistically expected” that the Greens would not be represented in the next government. That can only realistically mean that he expects a grand coalition – an SPD/FDP/Left or CDU/SPD/Left coalition can be ruled out with some confidence, and a CDU/FDP/Left coalition with absolute certainty. The Greens will now have to elect two new parliamentary leaders.
Which brings me to another point..
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Well, it’s back to another wave of German electoral goodness. The latest bizarre artefact of coalition weirdness is that Angela Merkel’s team are frantically denying claims that they have a secret plan to call new elections in the event that the elections end in a hung parliament. Obviously, this would rely on Merkel actually becoming Chancellor, but without a working majority…and would mean a really tiresome bout of national self loathing.
As the election campaign powers into the final desperate dash, some rightwingers have been frantically signalling that they might, might, just go in for a grand coalition (read: that way we can ditch the bitch AND get back in power). The CDU’s deputy leader, and chief in Rheinland-Pfalz, says at the link above that this would encompass “their duty as citizens”. Ha. (What is it with people from RP?)
Meanwhile, on the Handelsblatt‘s election futures market Wahlstreet, where the percentages are quoted to two decimal places and the cigarettes are paid for on the bill, the CDU showed a marked turn for the better, pushing back over 40%. But the Greens also showed an uptick, or perhaps only a technical rally, getting back to 8.1%. The result? Neither black-gold or red-green can quite make the nut. BG is hovering around 47-48%, with RG around 41% – which sounds like a decisive margin until you remember that the Linke are still in the game, with enough points to push RG over the finish line. And, equally, there are still enough FDP about to give the Ampelkoalition a majority over all other parties….
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