Author Archives: Doug Merrill

About Doug Merrill

Freelance journalist based in Tbilisi, following stints in Atlanta, Budapest, Munich, Warsaw and Washington. Worked for a German think tank, discovered it was incompatible with repaying US student loans. Spent two years in financial markets. Bicycled from Vilnius to Tallinn. Climbed highest mountains in two Alpine countries (the easy ones, though). American center-left, with strong yellow dog tendencies. Arrived in the Caucasus two weeks before its latest war.

Germany Leads

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Not just in the production of reigning Popes, but also, according to according to a report from the Commission, in subsidies. (As reported in a German newspaper whose website really could be better organized.)

Germany spend ?16.5 billion on subsidies in 2003, the latest year for which statistics are available, nearly one-third of the EU-15 total of ?53 billion. Part of the lead is the natural result of Germany having the largest economy in the EU. The next closest subsidizers are France (?9 billion) and Italy (?7 billion). The EU’s fourth G7 economy, the UK, spent ?4.2 billion, a share of GDP that was less than half the Union average.

As a share of GDP, Finland leads (1.41%), followed by Portugal (1.24%), Germany (0.77%) and Ireland (0.69%).

This was also interesting: “Of the ?9.7 bn of aid (in cases for which the aid amount is known) declared illegal by the Commission and due to be recovered under decisions adopted since 2000, some ?6.7 bn (including interest) had been effectively recovered by the end of 2004. Four Member States (Germany, Spain, Italy and France) account for more than 90% of the pending recovery cases.”

The new members were assessed separately earlier in the year. They were also assessed somewhat differently (transition to a market economy and all that), although interestingly the top two subsidizers in GDP terms were not post-Communist countries but Malta (3.9%) and Cyprus (2.9%).

Germany trails, however, in economic growth. Alas.

Habemas Alemanam

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(Latin speakers from the previous thread will be swift to offer corrections, I am sure.)

Linguistic confusion reigns in the early days of Benedict XVI. One local tabloid said a German was Pope, another claimed him as a Bavarian, the third as a M?nchner. The Bild-Zeitung said “Wir sind Papst,” which would literally mean “We’re Pope,” a claim that’s odd, even by the standards of that paper’s often tenuous relationship with consensus reality.

Hans Kung has some sensible things to say on the subject.

My first thoughts are probably less so.
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Very Old Europe

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New work by Sophocles? Hesiod? Lucian? Euripides? A precursor to the Illiad?

All coming up, thanks to satellitte imaging technology and a century-old trove of manuscripts brought to Britain from Egypt.

In the past four days alone, Oxford’s classicists have used it to make a series of astonishing discoveries, including writing by Sophocles, Euripides, Hesiod and other literary giants of the ancient world, lost for millennia. They even believe they are likely to find lost Christian gospels, the originals of which were written around the time of the earliest books of the New Testament. …

Oxford academics have been working alongside infra-red specialists from Brigham Young University, Utah. Their operation is likely to increase the number of great literary works fully or partially surviving from the ancient Greek world by up to a fifth. It could easily double the surviving body of lesser work – the pulp fiction and sitcoms of the day.

Exciting time to be a classicist, no?

Sales Pitch

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Anti-Japanese riots continued in a number of Chinese cities. Despite a meeting of the two countries’ foreign ministers, little sign of abatement. Given that the country where the rioting is happening is a one-party socialist state with nationalist leanings, there’s bound to be official connivance at some level.

Why is selling the PRC weapons a good idea again?

Ciao Silvio?

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As always with Italian parliamentary maneuvering, it’s a bit opaque, but two minor parties appear to have left the Berlusconi government. At least one wants the prime minister to stay, but with a different cabinet. The intentions of the other were not immediately clear. Early elections are not out of the question, ending Berlusconi’s quest to be the first postwar Italian prime minister to serve a full term.

As Trains Go By

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The New Republic has published a long review of three novels by Georges Simenon. The thesis is that they are “are superb and polished works of art masquerading as pulp fiction.” Simenon wrote more than 400 novels, under his own name and various pseudonyms.

One of them, The Man Who Watched Trains Go By, was published in the Sueddeutsche Zeitung’s set of great novels from the twentieth century. It’s apparently of a piece with the three reviewed by the New Republic — the reviewer called it “insouciantly gruesome” — and will soon be republished by New York Review Books.

I’ll agree with the insoucance and the gruesomeness, but I’m not sold on the greatness. Each chapter has an odd and cryptic heading — “On the difficulty of getting rid of old newspapers, and the usefulness of a fountain pen and a wristwatch” or “Kees Popinga experiences a remarkable Christmas Eve and, towards morning, selects an automobile.” I had the sense that Simenon wrote the twelve headings and then put the novel together to tie one to the next.

TNR’s reviewer sees books “more philosophically profound than any of the fiction of Camus or Sartre, and far less self-conscious. This is existentialism with a backbone of tempered steel.” Maybe it’s a sign of how both existentialism and Simenon have aged; I just saw a quickie mystery.