Estd. 2002. Politics, tech, startups, media, law, history, philosophy
…and could take only one of the following, which would you take?
1.Computer and Internet access
2. Large supply of books
3. TV
4. Radio
5. Cellphone
6. Newspaper subscription
And the result according to Yahoo…it should be noted that the researchers even had a difficult time attracting guinea pigs for their Internet-deprivation experimentthey had to approach around 750 people just to get twenty-eight willing subjectsdespite offering to pay participants $950.
Can a single retail company affect inflation? A recent National Bureau of Economic Research study argues that Wal-Mart’s size and lower-than-average prices have pushed the U.S. inflation rate substantially below what official statistics indicate. According to the study’s authors, the government’s current inflation metric assumes that lower prices at big-box discounters mean products of lower quality. But as the authors point out, the food products available at Wal-Mart tend to be exactly the same as those at local supermarkets, so customers don’t sacrifice quality by taking their business to the big discounter. When the authors corrected for Wal-Mart’s impact on the cost of food around the country, they found that from 1998 to 2001 the government had overstated increases in food prices by 14 to 18.3 percent’meaning, in turn, that the Bureau of Labor Statistics had overstated nationwide inflation by about 15 percent a year.
So there you have it, Ireland comes in just above average. The survey can be found here
Apparently the British are the world’s most attentive lovers, while the Chinese have the most partners, Italians the most orgasms, and Iceland has the highest vibrator usage. But why oh why do I suspect that the French are lying? You read it here first.
Niall Ferguson is talking about US-European relations, a subject oft-covered on this blog. I am a subscriber so I have full online access to all the Atlantic’s archives, while most of you poor people out there don’t subscribe. I will quote liberally…
Putting out his stall, he points out that Bush is one of the most disliked US presidents in European history.
According to a poll conducted by Globescan and the University of Maryland, 74 percent of Germans wanted to see John Kerry beat Bush in November, while only 10 percent favored the president. Even in the United Kingdom the public backed Kerry over Bush by 47 percent to 16 percent.
But, Ferguson argues, the gap between the US and Europe has been widening for 15 years – but it has much more to do with changes in Europe than in the US. He continues:
This is not a fashionable view, least of all in academic circles. A clear majority of those who think, write, and talk about international relations for a living believe that the transatlantic alliance system – what used to be known simply as “the West”- can and must be restored, by means of adjustments in U.S. policy.The Oxford historian and journalist Timothy Garton Ash argues in his new book, Free World, that the United States and the European Union have too many common interests to become permanently estranged. He sees “no inexorable drifting apart of two solid continental plates” but, rather, “overlapping continental shelves.” In a recent article in Foreign Affairs, Robert E. Hunter, a senior adviser to the Rand Corporation and a former U.S. ambassador to NATO, also called for a shoring up of the Atlantic alliance. The Bush administration’s “experiment in unilateralism,” he wrote, had merely revealed “the limits of such an approach.” Kenneth Pollack, a member of the National Security Council under Bill Clinton and now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, urges the Bush administration to work in tandem with the Europeans to curb Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
But Ferguson doubts that any mending of relations between the two sides is possible, for three reasons:
1. The primary reason for the transatlantic alliance was the Cold War. During the Cold War we should be aware that the French, Germans or British were not particurlarly pro-American. Unity with America was practical not ideological. Once the Soviet bloc collapsed incentive for parternship have all but disappeared.
2. Islamic extremism is viewed in different ways by both sides. Europeans don’t see Islamic extremism as a threat comparible to Soviet Russia, while to the US, Islamism have replaced commumism as its mortal enemy. In fact, since Madrid, Europe has seen distancing itself from the US as a partial solution to the Islamist problem. Added to this, 3-5% of Europe is Muslim, and this figure is growing. If Turkey joins in 2015, Muslims will account for 14.5% of Europe’s population – more Muslims than Protestants. The recent murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh demonstrates that criticising Islam can be politically incorrect and life-threatening. This means that Europe is vulnerable to demographic as well as political changes.
3. Christianity is declining in Europe. Almost half of Western Europe no longer attends church. The decline of European Christianity helps explain why European conservatism has little in common with the conservatism of the American right.
Ferguson concludes:
In the absence of the Soviet Union, in the presence of increasing numbers of Muslims, and in light of their own secularization, European societies feel more detached from the United States than at any other time since the 1930s.
In a recent Gallup poll 61 percent of Europeans said they thought the EU plays a positive role with regard to “peace in the world” (while just eight percent said its role was negative). But a remarkable 50 percent took the view that the United States now plays a negative role. Compare that with American attitudes: 59 percent of Americans regard the United States as making a positive contribution to world peace, and just 15 percent think the EU plays a negative role.
In the face of this kind of asymmetry it is well nigh impossible to turn back the clock to those halcyon days when there was just one West, indivisible. John Kerry would have tried, but he would have failed. George W. Bush has lower expectations of transatlantic relations. But he should not be blamed for their deterioration. His much exaggerated “unilateralism” is not why the Atlantic seems a little wider every day. It is Europe, not America, that is drifting away.
Ah its that time again, the Atlantic arrives stuffed full of quality hackery. I will link to the best bits in posts to come.
I downloaded and tested Microsoft’s latest add on for Windows. It’s still in Beta, but is worth a look. For once I’m impressed, it picked up some spyware that Spybot and Adaware SE had both failed to detect. You can get it here.
I have switched from the always interesting Caesar to Homer’s Illiad, a book I have been meaning to read for all too long. I plan to take notes on the book and blog as I go. Plans don’t always work out though.
Ok folks, I am floating Saturday the 15th of January as a possible date for a get together. Leave a comment!
Mark Steyn really doesn’t like people who take holidays on a regular basis. And that means us Europeans.
But Paris in August, like London ”over Christmas,” is in itself a symbol of flight — flight from work. In 1999, the average ”working” German worked 1,536 hours a year, the average American 1,976. In the United States, 49 percent of the population is in employment, in France 39 percent. From my strictly anecdotal observation of German acquaintances, the ideal career track seems to be to finish school around 34 and take early retirement at 42. By 2050, the pimply young lad in lederhosen serving you at the charming beer garden will be singlehandedly supporting entire old folks’ homes. If tax rates were to be hiked commensurate to the decline in tax base and increase in welfare obligations, there would be no incentive at all to enter the (official) job market. Better to stay at school till 38 and retire at 39. That’s why America’s richer, and why, though the Europeans preen about their kinder, gentler society, customers of Amazon.com have pledged more money to disaster relief in the Indian Ocean than the French government.
Argh, is there even any point in arguing – it hardly seems worth it. Yes we love lots of holidays, its great. So there. Beats working your ass off.
Oh and Steyn has more on the stinginess thing, and he even mentions humble Ireland:
Jan Egeland, the Norwegian bureaucrat who’s the big humanitarian honcho at the UN, got the ball rolling with some remarks about the “stinginess” of certain wealthy nations. And Clare Short piled in, and then Polly Toynbee threw in her three-ha’porth, reminding us that ” ‘Charity begins at home’ is the mean-minded dictum of the Right”. But even Telegraph readers subscribe to the Great Universal Theory. On our Letters Page, Robert Eddison dismissed the “paltry $15 million from Washington” as “worse than stingy. The offer – since shamefacedly upped to $35 million – equates to what? Three oil tycoons’ combined annual salary?”
Mr Eddison concluded with a stirring plea to the wicked Americans to mend their ways: “If Washington is to lay any claim to the moral, as distinct from the military, high ground, let it emulate Ireland and Norway’s prompt and proportionate attempts to plug South-East Asia’s gaping gap of need and help avert a further 80,000 deaths from infection and untreated wounds.”
If America were to emulate Ireland and Norway, there’d be a lot more dead Indonesians and Sri Lankans. Mr Eddison may not have noticed, but the actual relief effort going on right now is being done by the Yanks: it’s the USAF and a couple of diverted naval groups shuttling in food and medicine, with solid help from the Aussies, Singapore and a couple of others. The Irish can’t fly in relief supplies, because they don’t have any C-130s. All they can do is wait for the UN to swing by and pick up their cheque.
I meant to blog this article ages ago, but I really did enjoy it. Read the whole thing.
Yes, I want to get almost the entire Republican side of the House of Representatives to bend its ethics rules just for me. I want to be able to twist the arms of House Republicans to repeal a rule that automatically requires party leaders to step down if they are indicted on a felony charge – something a Texas prosecutor is considering doing to DeLay because of corruption allegations.
But most of all, I want to have the gall to sully American democracy at a time when young American soldiers are fighting in Iraq so we can enjoy a law-based society here in the United States and, maybe, extend it to others. Yes, I want to be Tom DeLay. I want to wear a little American flag on my lapel in solidarity with the troops, while I besmirch every value they are dying for.
If I can’t be Tom DeLay, then I want to be one of the gutless Republican House members who voted to twist the rules for DeLay out of fear that “the Hammer,” as they call him, might retaliate by taking away a coveted committee position or maybe a parking place.
Yes, I want to be a Republican House member. At a time when 180 of the 211 members of the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit in Iraq who have been wounded in combat have insisted on returning to duty, I want to look my constituents and my kids in the eye and tell them that I voted to empty the House ethics rules because I was afraid of Tom DeLay.
If I can’t be a Republican House member, I want to be Latrell Sprewell, the basketball player for the Minnesota Timberwolves. I want to say with a straight face that if my owner will only give me a three-year contract extension for a meager $21 million, then he’s not worth working for, because “I’ve got my family to feed.”
Yes, I want to be Latrell Sprewell. At a time when NBA games are priced beyond the reach of most American families, when half the country can’t afford health care, when some reservists in Iraq are separated from their families for a year, I want to be like Latrell. I want to make sure everyone knows that I’m looking out for my family – and no one else’s.
If I can’t be Latrell Sprewell, I want to be any American college or professional athlete. I want to be able to fight on the court, off the court, in the stands and on the sidelines. I want to respect no boundaries and no norms. And when I make your kids cry, I want to be able to tell you to just “chill” – that my coach says “stuff happens” and that my union rep is appealing my punishment in the name of the Bill of Rights and the Magna Carta. Yes, in my next life, I want to be The Man.
If I can’t be The Man, then I at least want to be the owner of a Hummer – with American flag decals all over the back bumper, because Hummer owners are, on average, a little more patriotic than the rest of us.
Yes, I want to drive the mother of all gas-guzzlers that gets so little mileage you have to drive from gas station to gas station. Yes, I want to drive my Hummer and never have to think that by consuming so much oil, I am making transfer payments to the worst Arab regimes that transfer money to Islamic charities that transfer money to madrasas that teach children intolerance, antipluralism and how to hate the infidels.
And when one day one of those madrasa graduates goes off and joins the jihad in Falluja and kills my neighbor’s son, who is in the U.S. Army Rangers, I want to drive to his funeral in my Hummer. Yes, I want to curse his killers in front of his mother and wail aloud, “If there was only something I could do.” And then I want to drive home in my Hummer, stopping at two gas stations along the way.
If I can’t be any of these, then I want to be just a simple blue-state red-state American. I want to take time to thank God I live in a country where, despite so much rampant selfishness, the public schools still manage to produce young men and women ready to voluntarily risk their lives in places like Iraq and Afghanistan to spread the opportunity of freedom and to protect my own. And I want to thank them for doing this, even though on so many days in so many ways we Americans really don’t deserve them.