With Turkish accession one of the most important issues facing the European Union, people interested in the question could do much worse than read these two recent, and reasonably short, books that focus on the country: Crescent and Star
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Author Archives: Doug Merrill
Minor Technical Note
We’re working on the comment problem. Thanks for your continuing patience as we try to get it sorted out.
Update: Looks like it has something to do with the DBI and DBD::mySQL Perl modules of the Cpanel. My more technically adept colleagues are in touch with our hosting provider. I’m just crossing my fingers and wishing them success.
Things You Can Do When You’re 20 Points Up in the Polls
1. Have the main headline about your electoral program be how much you’re going to raise taxes. Particularly VAT, which practically everybody pays on practically everything.
2. Face a knock-down drag-out fight with your prospective coalition partner over #1.
3. Have the two parties that make up your Union disagree about the basic approach to health care reform.
4. Present security plans that your prospective coalition partner says had been previously rejected for good reasons.
And that’s just the first 24 hours after the presentation of your campaign program.
The CDU/CSU still leads the SPD by 20 points in the polls, and I, along with every other commentator, have to think that Schr?der is toast. You just don’t make up 20 points of ground in eight weeks. But if the CDU/CSU want to make it an interesting race, they’re off to a great start…
UPDATE: 5. Eliminate grants to support university students. (The article is an interview with the SPD minister, so grains of salt advised.)
Citoyens
I don’t know if we have a lot of crossover readers from Tapped, but in the context of otherwise mostly reasonable remarks in two posts about the London bombings, they missed something important.
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National Cliches
I was reading one of the Sueddeutsche books at lunch, and one of the characters, a Dutchman as it happens, casually drops into the conversation, “Poland has not yet perished.” It’s the opening line of the Polish national anthem, and one of those catchphrases of the culture, a hoary cliche, but one that despite everything still touches hearts.
I could think of one other for a European nation, “Happy is he who can say I am a Turk.” As much as the Polish phrase was a reaction to Partition in the 18th century, the Turkish phrase was a deliberate program from Ataturk, part of the whole effort to transfer loyalty from the Ottoman nstate to the Turkish.
The Germans might once have had one, but haven’t since 1945.
And of course there’s “God bless America.” Once a fervent and perhaps fragile hope, it has been misused by GWB&Co, turned into something of a command. Sets my teeth on edge.
Anyway, I was wondering how many of these national touchstones I’ve been completely ignorant about, lo these many years. What others are out there?
Too Hot to Change?
The Cunning Realist takes a look at limits:
Since the bursting of the technology bubble in 2000, there have been four distinct periods in which the Fed has flooded the system with an extraordinary amount of liquidity in an effort to boost the stock market:
1. Immediately after 9/11.
2. During the second half of 2002 in response to widespread accounting scandals and the meltdown in the corporate bond market.
3. During the summer and fall of last year, just before the presidential election (draw your own conclusions).
4. The past two months.
Joseph Vissarionovich and the People Who Loved Him
Because some of them undoubtedly did, even people who knew him quite well. In his heyday, millions professed their love, sang his praises. Even those he had condemned in show trials, or in no trials, wrote to him of their devotion, wrote of their faithfulness, wrote of their belief. Perhaps they meant it, perhaps it was the only hope they had to continue living.
One person who does seem to have loved him in something like the normal sense of the word was his second wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva. Perhaps that is why she shot herself.
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Cardinal Sin Proved Mortal
At age 76, in the Philippines.
Micro Effects of Aging
Following up on Edward’s entry, I just want to point out that the Washington Post recently reported on a part of the US whose demographics now approximate the national structure in 2025. The newspaper followed a study by professors at Wake Forest University’s business school (Sherry Jarrell and Gary Shoesmith, though the study doesn’t seem to be on the web) to look at the micro effects of an aging population. It’s interesting, and mixed.
The Lakeland [Florida] area is not a retirement community, dotted with shuffleboard courts and senior centers, but the businesses that cluster here reflect the subtle influence of a population that is markedly older than the current national average.
Polk Community College may attract ambitious young students, as college President J. Larry Durrence says, but they’re training to be nurses or respiratory therapists. His wife, an attorney, specializes in “elder law.”
Nearly a third of Maureen Shaw’s florist business comes either from out-of-state children sending flowers to their retired parents or seniors sending condolence bouquets. Keith DeLoach grew up here. After West Point, the Special Forces and combat in Afghanistan, the 32-year-old just moved back to open a financial services firm — largely to help retirees stretch their savings.
Phone Home
Astronomers have found a rocky world orbiting a star about 15 light years from our own corner of the universe. With apparently about twice earth’s diameter, and about seven and a half times the mass, it’s the smallest extra-solar planet yet discovered.
“We keep pushing the limits of what we can detect, and we’re getting closer and closer to finding Earths,” said team member Steven Vogt from the University of California, Santa Cruz.
That’s boggling enough. But what I had somehow missed is that in the ten years that scientists have been spotting extra-solar planets, they’ve found 150 of them. That’s more than once a month. Makes my mind just reel: Every month, humanity finds another planet around a distant star. Every single month.