Both of you.
John Barry, author of Rising Tide a rather timely book about flooding and New Orleans and of The Great Influenza a rather timely book about the 1918 pandemic, will be half of a panel about hurrican Katrina at Politics & Prose bookstore this Friday at 7pm. The store is at 5015 Connecticut Ave NW, and if you don’t know it already, you’re in for a treat.
I’m probably the last blogger still reading Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle, and chances are good that I won’t take on the third part, The System of the World, immediately after finishing the second, The Confusion. Not because the books aren’t good, just that it is a lot to read consecutively.
The good news is that the main characters, Jack Shaftoe and Eliza the Improbable Welshwoman, are much more interesting than they were in Quicksilver.
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German media are now reporting that the SPD has agreed to let the largest parliamentary faction put forward the candidate for Chancellor. For three weeks, the Social Democrats had been arguing that as the largest party represented in the Bundestag, they had the right to name the candidate. (Germany’s Christian Democrats come from two parties, one from Bavaria and one from everywhere else, but they work together, mostly, as a single parliamentary faction.)
The SPD has given way on this point, clearing the path for Angela Merkel to become Germany’s first female Chancellor.
In return, the SPD will get eight of fourteen ministires, including finance and foreign affairs. The head of the CSU, who lost to Schroeder in 2002, will go to Berlin as minister for the economy. Since the SPD will head the ministry of finance, which is responsible for the budget, this will ensure that the traditional trench warfare between these two ministries will continue unabated.
None of the reports say anything about what Chancellor Schroeder will be doing next. The political folks I’ve talked with can’t imagine him being #2 behind Merkel, even as foreign minister, but they also have a hard time picturing him just walking away.
We’ll know much more at 2:30 this afternoon, when both parties have press conferences scheduled.
PS: The trial balloon for the weekend was the introduction of tolls on the Autobahn, roughly EUR 100 per year. Between that and a VAT hike, the grand coalition might bring Germany the worst of both worlds.
Reading the Atlanta Journal-Constitution has the occasional benefit beyond keeping me informed of the ups and downs of my favorite baseball team (they’re tied 1-1 with Houston in the first round of the playoffs). Atlanta is the home of the US Centers for Disease Control. And folks there have recreated the 1918 influenza virus in an effort to understand precisely why it was so deadly.
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Like catastrophic flooding in New Orleans, an influenza pandemic is not a matter of if, but a matter of when and how bad. Fortunately, John M. Barry has written books about both. Until the definitive story of Katrina is told, Rising Tide
The inevitability of floods in New Orleans is a matter of geography; the inevitability of a flu pandemic is a matter of genetics. The natural reservoir for influenza viruses is in birds.
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Actually, it’s more like a slab. But from the New York Times. It’s tasty and full of all sorts of facts and anecdotes that are probably very good for you.
The E.U.’s rationale for welcoming Turkey into its councils and its economic sphere used to be a matter of “strategic rent,” compensation for its position at a crossroads of continents and military blocs. Today, says Soli Ozel, a political scientist at Bilgi University, what Europe sees in Turkey is “an example that a modern, secular democratic state and capitalist society is compatible with a Muslim population.” Europe has come to value Turkey not just for where it is but for what it is.
And of course the occasional provocative opinion.
When we last looked in, Viktor Yushchenko had been inaugurated, Viktor Yanukovych had grudgingly conceded, and orange was the color for all would-be world-changers.
Unfortunately, while we weren’t looking, Ukraine’s cabinet was collapsing into in-fighting and neglecting to do the things that people put them in office for. On the positive side, an investigation into the Gongadze affair was making, you’ll pardon the word, headway.
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Back in late 2000, I remember no shortage of German acquaintances suggesting to me that the fiasco in Florida was enough to call the whole US system of elections into question.
Shoes. Other feet.
at the expense of the airlines. (Don’t miss the more serious Europe-stuff in the posts below.)
Mark A.R. Kleiman summarizes a recent experience flying the friendly skies:
In general, the performance of every United employee I dealt with today convinced me that the airline has identified its basic strategic problem as an excess of customers; I plan to do what I can to help solve that problem. (This after ten years of using United as my primary airline; I’m a “Premier Executive” frequent flyer, which means >50,000 actual air miles per year.)
Lufthansa treated me similarly on July 26. In fact, that experience was every Internet-enabled traveler’s nightmare: online e-ticket, check-in, boarding pass in hand,
One of our lurkers turns out to be from the Media section of the European Parliament. Today and tomorrow the EP is webcasting a conference on technology and democracy, with a prominent role for blogs.
Mystery in European Parliament…!
just like you, the European Parliament is well aware of the increasing power and importance of blogging, which hasn’t only started to blur the lines between the private and the public, between journalism and opinion, between citizen and politician, but has also opened up new questions in the field of democracy and democratic control. As part of the activities that will accompany the launch of its new website, the European Parliament has decided to hold several debates dealing with the fast-moving developments in digital society on the 12th and 13th of September, the first of which is entitled Web logs: competition, challenge or chance? Who’s afraid to open Pandora’s Blogs? Participants in the debate will include several well-known journalists, bloggers and experts in the field, who will no doubt ensure a lively debate that should be of special interest to bloggers, as well as anyone interested in the relationship between digital technology and democracy. We would therefore like to invite you to join us on the Europarl website (http://www.europarl.eu.int/eplive/public/default_en.htm), where the event will be broadcast live on the 12th of September starting at 3PM via web streaming.Wishing you all the best in your blogging endeavours,
Yours Sincerely,
José Manuel Nunes LIBERATO
Directeur, DIRECTION A – MEDIA
If you go to the site, click on “Round Tables on the Information Society” and then scroll down to “watch”. As I read the schedule, there’s only half an hour left today, but several hours tomorrow.