It is always nice to be given a choice.
Isn't it?
Like in UK elections for instance which version of the Conservative Party do you want, as the Labour Party these days can hardly be distinguished from the Conservatives.
Meanwhile following yesterday's posting I was once more for no particular reason checking out the latest bit of American news on the theme of ultrasound probes and pregnant women who want abortions - this time in Alabama (OK, I am not American, I do not live in Alabama, I know that!).
There the legislation offers the women in question a choice. Except that the quality of the choice is pretty similar to being asked if you want being hit on the head with a hammer, or being hit on the head with a brick! Or, for the more simple among you, it is no choice at all. A real choice would be to avoid the procedure entirely, which is not available!
And as for the outrageously draconian penalties that doctors face if they do not cooperate in this procedure - frankly they would have no place in any democracy in which I would choose to live. It is one thing to force them to face delisting for incompetence, it is another thing entirely to tie their medical professionalism, judgement and independence to one strict set of politically imposed "moral principles"!
Fortunately I do not have to live with that situation, but my sympathy goes very positively to the people who do.
Wednesday, 29 February 2012
Tuesday, 28 February 2012
Internal issues
I do not watch television much. Bundesliga highlights on a Saturday evening, "Wer wird Millionär" twice a week, and the odd news bulletin. Otherwise I have the Internet and its total international take on the world. So who needs television anyway?
My wife for one .... When she is at home, it is almost compulsory for her to switch it on, no matter what is on there. Particularly annoying is the imported American junk, dubbed in German but still available with the canned American laughter.
Of interest once in a while, though, is a programme called "Mein neues Leben" ("My new life"), which follows German people who have emigrated elsewhere. Sometimes they have gone somewhere quite fascinating, sometimes places you would never believe (Saudi Arabia????), sometimes somewhere mundane.
I do not follow the programme avidly, but I pick out bits and pieces (always a dangerous approach - it sounds like voting in an election, you take 30% and ignore the rest! Usually to your cost). After all I have moved to five different countries, so in a way I find it relevant. Sort of anyway - no TV cameras followed me around, thankfully!
Last week we had the United States again. I did not pay all that much attention to everything that was going on, but there was a woman who had moved there with her kids (who could not speak a word of English and seemed totally lost), who was setting up a shop selling imported German goods. Husband? Might have been there, I didn't pay enough attention to the programme to confirm one way or the other.
Where in the US? Again, I did not take much notice. I hope that it wasn't Virginia though and she didn't end up getting raped and pregnant as a result.
After hearing what was going on in the Virginia State Assembly during this last week unfortunately, my view of the values held by some Americans these days fell another couple of notches.
There is increasingly a sense coming from there that the old "sex is dirty" thinking is re-emerging with vigour, and if a woman gets pregnant against her will, it is her fault for consenting to the sex in the first place. And if she gets raped, she encouraged it, it was not a brutal act by a depraved violent male ....
Well if it is any consolation, I do not agree with abortion on demand, as was seemingly the case in the UK for a generation (till Blair came along), but was never available on that principle in Germany.
But if a woman has been raped? And gets pregnant? This is not a child conceived in love or joy or happiness or in close bonding! It is the product of brutality and force and hatred. And the child will carry the genes of the criminal perpetrator (yes, I know that is not in Exodus or Leviticus, just a scientific fact!). A monster waiting to emerge - you do not know what you are getting.
There may be a case for encouraging the already brutally traumatised woman into bringing the child into the world and putting it out for adoption. But if she wanted to be rid of it by means of an abortion, could you really blame her?
Well the answer of the Virginia State Assembly seems to run along the lines that such women are not to be believed, if it happened they encouraged it, and she must be subjected to a transvaginal ultrasound probe - whether she likes it or not, and whether her physician thinks it is advisable or not!
Huh????
In 2008 I needed a heart bypass. The doctors considered the case and recommended it. I could, and should (!) still have refused it (by signing a form). If politicians had got involved, it could have been forced upon me - against my will! Well, not in Germany, but you get the picture?
Put something into a woman's vagina against her will? Ignoring anything her physician had to say on the matter?
Apart from rapists who would try and force something into a woman's vagina? The last instance I can quote was a physician of sorts - one Doctor Josef Mengele!
Interesting company that the Virginia State Assembly wants to keep. It is though a sad and unfortunate comment on the direction that Human Rights (upper-case is deliberate here!) are taking in parts of the United States - sadly!
My wife for one .... When she is at home, it is almost compulsory for her to switch it on, no matter what is on there. Particularly annoying is the imported American junk, dubbed in German but still available with the canned American laughter.
Of interest once in a while, though, is a programme called "Mein neues Leben" ("My new life"), which follows German people who have emigrated elsewhere. Sometimes they have gone somewhere quite fascinating, sometimes places you would never believe (Saudi Arabia????), sometimes somewhere mundane.
I do not follow the programme avidly, but I pick out bits and pieces (always a dangerous approach - it sounds like voting in an election, you take 30% and ignore the rest! Usually to your cost). After all I have moved to five different countries, so in a way I find it relevant. Sort of anyway - no TV cameras followed me around, thankfully!
Last week we had the United States again. I did not pay all that much attention to everything that was going on, but there was a woman who had moved there with her kids (who could not speak a word of English and seemed totally lost), who was setting up a shop selling imported German goods. Husband? Might have been there, I didn't pay enough attention to the programme to confirm one way or the other.
Where in the US? Again, I did not take much notice. I hope that it wasn't Virginia though and she didn't end up getting raped and pregnant as a result.
After hearing what was going on in the Virginia State Assembly during this last week unfortunately, my view of the values held by some Americans these days fell another couple of notches.
There is increasingly a sense coming from there that the old "sex is dirty" thinking is re-emerging with vigour, and if a woman gets pregnant against her will, it is her fault for consenting to the sex in the first place. And if she gets raped, she encouraged it, it was not a brutal act by a depraved violent male ....
Well if it is any consolation, I do not agree with abortion on demand, as was seemingly the case in the UK for a generation (till Blair came along), but was never available on that principle in Germany.
But if a woman has been raped? And gets pregnant? This is not a child conceived in love or joy or happiness or in close bonding! It is the product of brutality and force and hatred. And the child will carry the genes of the criminal perpetrator (yes, I know that is not in Exodus or Leviticus, just a scientific fact!). A monster waiting to emerge - you do not know what you are getting.
There may be a case for encouraging the already brutally traumatised woman into bringing the child into the world and putting it out for adoption. But if she wanted to be rid of it by means of an abortion, could you really blame her?
Well the answer of the Virginia State Assembly seems to run along the lines that such women are not to be believed, if it happened they encouraged it, and she must be subjected to a transvaginal ultrasound probe - whether she likes it or not, and whether her physician thinks it is advisable or not!
Huh????
In 2008 I needed a heart bypass. The doctors considered the case and recommended it. I could, and should (!) still have refused it (by signing a form). If politicians had got involved, it could have been forced upon me - against my will! Well, not in Germany, but you get the picture?
Put something into a woman's vagina against her will? Ignoring anything her physician had to say on the matter?
Apart from rapists who would try and force something into a woman's vagina? The last instance I can quote was a physician of sorts - one Doctor Josef Mengele!
Interesting company that the Virginia State Assembly wants to keep. It is though a sad and unfortunate comment on the direction that Human Rights (upper-case is deliberate here!) are taking in parts of the United States - sadly!
Monday, 27 February 2012
170 nationalities
Sub-title: or Hitler's ashes will be turning in their bunker.
It was one of the moments of the sporting weekend. One of the football ("soccer" to North American readers) moments that left an impact. The right back, Lukasz Piszczek, broke down the right, fed the ball to Jakub Blaszczykowski (known as "Kuba"), whose centre ("center" to North American readers) landed at the feet of Robert Lewandowski standing alone at the far post three metres out. A simple goal eventually. 2-0.
OK, all three are Polish internationals and it looks like that Poland have the basis of a good national team for this year's European Championship finals. The goal was not scored for Legia Warsaw or any leading Polish league team though. It was scored for the leaders of the German Bundesliga, Borussia Dortmund.
More than 50% of players in the Bundesliga now are not German. The major internal dispute in Dortmund's increasingly dominant team is coming from their Paraguayan international, Lucas Barrios, who lost his place in the starting line-up earlier this season due to injury, and he cannot force his way back into the team. Let's face it, how do you change a team that has won eight straight games and is leaving the opposition gasping for the proverbial air?
As for the Polish connection, it is something of a breath of fresh air to hear something positive about them. The Poles historically have a poor reputation in Germany. The stereotype (NB, most people should realise by now what I think of stereotypes ....) is a rather stupid, feckless individual, with a propensity for being lazy. Despite the strong Catholic faith for which the country is renowned, morality is not always seen as a strong Polish characteristic (a fact reinforced by the large number of Polish women working as prostitutes in Germany's legalised brothels).
So anything that shows them in a good light is to be welcomed.
In my seven years in Frankfurt I have never myself encountered any evidence of Polish residents or culture here, but there must be some somewhere. According to a statistic that I recently noted, there are people from 170 nationalities living here. That by any standards is astonishing. It is multiculture almost gone mad (the extreme nationalist parties like the NPD seethe permanently at the thought).
Interestingly also, it seems to work and I have never yet encountered any sense of the need to kick the foreigners out. One such isolated demonstration did take place place (organised by the NPD, surprise, surprise) a couple of years ago. My wife encountered a youth who screamed "Ausländer raus" at her at the main railway station - which might actually indicate that he had caught a train in and may well not have been a Frankfurter (in which case he could take the train back to the place from whence he came and leave our civilised, cosmopolitan city and its citizens to its own lifestyle, thank you).
At that demonstration a grand total of almost 50 people turned up. And something like 10 times that many ("antifas") turned up to oppose it!
Of course everything in the garden is not rosy. Across Germany as a whole, particularly in the former East, there are pockets where they hang Hitler's photo on the wall (ugly b*stard and hardly typical Aryan that he was) and some idiots celebrate Rudolf Hess's birthday.
But these people are a small minority, tolerated in a democratic society as one must occasionally do with complete imbeciles - as long as they do not cross the line and resort to violence in the name of their stupid beliefs (as with the members of the Zwickau Cell for example)!
It would be interesting to know though just what would happen to Frankfurt if the political philosophy of the 1930s ever did return. 170 nationalities - that sounds a lot of people to ethnically cleanse. Some recidivists like myself would no doubt be shipped to updated versions of Dachau (as must happen with the politically incorrect), some would be instantly flown out, and the rest?
What is to be recognised though is that Frankfurt would lose a lot of the character, taste and flavour that it (like many German cities) has developed over the last half-century, and it would be poorer for the departure of all these influences.
It was one of the moments of the sporting weekend. One of the football ("soccer" to North American readers) moments that left an impact. The right back, Lukasz Piszczek, broke down the right, fed the ball to Jakub Blaszczykowski (known as "Kuba"), whose centre ("center" to North American readers) landed at the feet of Robert Lewandowski standing alone at the far post three metres out. A simple goal eventually. 2-0.
OK, all three are Polish internationals and it looks like that Poland have the basis of a good national team for this year's European Championship finals. The goal was not scored for Legia Warsaw or any leading Polish league team though. It was scored for the leaders of the German Bundesliga, Borussia Dortmund.
More than 50% of players in the Bundesliga now are not German. The major internal dispute in Dortmund's increasingly dominant team is coming from their Paraguayan international, Lucas Barrios, who lost his place in the starting line-up earlier this season due to injury, and he cannot force his way back into the team. Let's face it, how do you change a team that has won eight straight games and is leaving the opposition gasping for the proverbial air?
As for the Polish connection, it is something of a breath of fresh air to hear something positive about them. The Poles historically have a poor reputation in Germany. The stereotype (NB, most people should realise by now what I think of stereotypes ....) is a rather stupid, feckless individual, with a propensity for being lazy. Despite the strong Catholic faith for which the country is renowned, morality is not always seen as a strong Polish characteristic (a fact reinforced by the large number of Polish women working as prostitutes in Germany's legalised brothels).
So anything that shows them in a good light is to be welcomed.
In my seven years in Frankfurt I have never myself encountered any evidence of Polish residents or culture here, but there must be some somewhere. According to a statistic that I recently noted, there are people from 170 nationalities living here. That by any standards is astonishing. It is multiculture almost gone mad (the extreme nationalist parties like the NPD seethe permanently at the thought).
Interestingly also, it seems to work and I have never yet encountered any sense of the need to kick the foreigners out. One such isolated demonstration did take place place (organised by the NPD, surprise, surprise) a couple of years ago. My wife encountered a youth who screamed "Ausländer raus" at her at the main railway station - which might actually indicate that he had caught a train in and may well not have been a Frankfurter (in which case he could take the train back to the place from whence he came and leave our civilised, cosmopolitan city and its citizens to its own lifestyle, thank you).
At that demonstration a grand total of almost 50 people turned up. And something like 10 times that many ("antifas") turned up to oppose it!
Of course everything in the garden is not rosy. Across Germany as a whole, particularly in the former East, there are pockets where they hang Hitler's photo on the wall (ugly b*stard and hardly typical Aryan that he was) and some idiots celebrate Rudolf Hess's birthday.
But these people are a small minority, tolerated in a democratic society as one must occasionally do with complete imbeciles - as long as they do not cross the line and resort to violence in the name of their stupid beliefs (as with the members of the Zwickau Cell for example)!
It would be interesting to know though just what would happen to Frankfurt if the political philosophy of the 1930s ever did return. 170 nationalities - that sounds a lot of people to ethnically cleanse. Some recidivists like myself would no doubt be shipped to updated versions of Dachau (as must happen with the politically incorrect), some would be instantly flown out, and the rest?
What is to be recognised though is that Frankfurt would lose a lot of the character, taste and flavour that it (like many German cities) has developed over the last half-century, and it would be poorer for the departure of all these influences.
Sunday, 26 February 2012
Time the world appreciated little girls more
Ask any young heterosexual adult male from outside the fundamentalist Muslim world, and I do not think that there would be any doubt that young women are appreciated.
Glamour and sex still sell, and across much of the world young women can play that card if all else fails (in many cases they have other cards that they can play, in Germany girls outscore boys in educational performance by some way, in the USA 60% of college graduates are girls, and even in Sunni Islamic Saudi Arabia and Shia Islamic Iran, more girls attend universities than boys!).
Which raises the question as to why when it comes to people having families, that boys should be preferred to girls!
Anyone understanding my point of view on world overpopulation (subject of another article to follow) would also understand why I approve in principle of China's one child policy.
The problem in China - particularly in the rural districts - was that the preference for boys was such that at best little girls were dumped in orphanages and their existence denied, while at worst, they were left out to die.
The policy has been in place for some twenty plus years. One side effect is that there are now a large number of young men in China for whom, surprise, there are no potential brides. Apparently some 40 million of them in fact (equivalent of almost the complete population of Spain, if you want an interesting comparison). I doubt whether a lot of these young men are all that happy about this situation.
I also read a statistic about one province in India where there are 100 young men of marriageable age for only 86 girls. A similar problem and how quite they ended up with that situation, I really do not know. For all that I remember an Indian correspondent on MyLot indicating that a large number of middle-class Indians flying to Bangkok where they have a medical procedure where they can guarantee the gender of their child, and these parents almost invariably wanted boys.
Imagine these boys in 20 years time when they want to find a girl to marry!
IMHO messing around with nature like this is undesirable, and I think that a lot of 20 year-old males would agree with me!
Japan, a country where women are appreciated and probably as emancipated as anywhere in Asia, has also a surplus male population, at least in the 20-35 age range. Quite why is an interesting question.
Then of course it is time to come back to Muslim culture and look at those countries where men can have four wives. As there is no surplus female population anywhere (except war-torn Afghanistan!), how do they all manage to meet this need? Some people have got to be disappointed!
Which in turn brings me back to the title of the piece. The attitude where boys are preferable to girls is based on silly traditions. Given a chance to develop girls will do often do better than their male siblings, and as any major aid organisation round the world will indicate, the healthier the female population is in any country in the world, the healthier is the state of the culture.
That should be borne in mind. Young parents to be should be encouraged to appreciate girls and let them grow into the wonderful people that they can be as adults. There is no reason based upon any criteria why they should be considered any less desirable than boys.
Glamour and sex still sell, and across much of the world young women can play that card if all else fails (in many cases they have other cards that they can play, in Germany girls outscore boys in educational performance by some way, in the USA 60% of college graduates are girls, and even in Sunni Islamic Saudi Arabia and Shia Islamic Iran, more girls attend universities than boys!).
Which raises the question as to why when it comes to people having families, that boys should be preferred to girls!
Anyone understanding my point of view on world overpopulation (subject of another article to follow) would also understand why I approve in principle of China's one child policy.
The problem in China - particularly in the rural districts - was that the preference for boys was such that at best little girls were dumped in orphanages and their existence denied, while at worst, they were left out to die.
The policy has been in place for some twenty plus years. One side effect is that there are now a large number of young men in China for whom, surprise, there are no potential brides. Apparently some 40 million of them in fact (equivalent of almost the complete population of Spain, if you want an interesting comparison). I doubt whether a lot of these young men are all that happy about this situation.
I also read a statistic about one province in India where there are 100 young men of marriageable age for only 86 girls. A similar problem and how quite they ended up with that situation, I really do not know. For all that I remember an Indian correspondent on MyLot indicating that a large number of middle-class Indians flying to Bangkok where they have a medical procedure where they can guarantee the gender of their child, and these parents almost invariably wanted boys.
Imagine these boys in 20 years time when they want to find a girl to marry!
IMHO messing around with nature like this is undesirable, and I think that a lot of 20 year-old males would agree with me!
Japan, a country where women are appreciated and probably as emancipated as anywhere in Asia, has also a surplus male population, at least in the 20-35 age range. Quite why is an interesting question.
Then of course it is time to come back to Muslim culture and look at those countries where men can have four wives. As there is no surplus female population anywhere (except war-torn Afghanistan!), how do they all manage to meet this need? Some people have got to be disappointed!
Which in turn brings me back to the title of the piece. The attitude where boys are preferable to girls is based on silly traditions. Given a chance to develop girls will do often do better than their male siblings, and as any major aid organisation round the world will indicate, the healthier the female population is in any country in the world, the healthier is the state of the culture.
That should be borne in mind. Young parents to be should be encouraged to appreciate girls and let them grow into the wonderful people that they can be as adults. There is no reason based upon any criteria why they should be considered any less desirable than boys.
Thursday, 23 February 2012
Science and the arts
In one of the excellent Sherlock Holmes short stories "The Blue Carbuncle", Holmes detects from a hat that has been given to him that the hat's owner had no gas in his house, as there were a number of candle stains on the hat.
"Candles"? "Gas?". No electricity? No pressing a simple switch and lights coming on?
Light years ago? (Pun intended!). Actually the early 1880s - approximately 130 years ago. For those convinced by scientific research into the subject, 130 years is a very small percentage of the time that this planet has existed, and even for the religious fanatics who would, in their usual silly fashion, limit the earth to no more than 6,000 years, 130 years is far less than 1% of that time.
One simple indication of how far we have come in a relatively short period of time. An ordinary everyday electrician, who comes to fix your wiring if you have a problem, is dealing with problems that were not even conceivable in the 1880s.
Get into the debate as to whether Marconi or Tesla was responsible for inventing radio, and then examine radio technology now. I imagine that both those geniuses would marvel at the progress that has been made.
And it is not just in the realms of technological science where there has been so much progress. Take medical science for example. For the past 30-odd years AIDS and research surrounding it have been constantly in our view.
Go back to the 1880s, the problem then was syphilis - a nasty, highly contagious disease, but one that could not be discussed in polite circles. Then look at some of the famous people who caught it and died - the gunmaker, Samuel Colt, the French author, Guy de Maupassant (I have recently read an article where that was disputed, but anyway) among others.
Between 1905 and 1910 three German scientists, Fritz Schlaudinn, August von Wassermann and notably Paul Ehrlich, worked on the discovery of the causes and cure for this disease, and finally came up with the cure. The disease still survives, it can cause inestimable damage if left untreated, but it can eventually be cured. Its presence, along with AIDS, should though serve as a warning to those who wish to indulge in too frivolous an approach to matters sexual!
We can then conclude that science moves forward and moves us forward. Scientific laws are seemingly fixed, but research will enhance and change them. Over time the original thinking that drove the initial discovery still can be improved. Great scientific brains can still see the possibilities that were not available to their almost equally talented predecessors.
The arts at first glance do not fall into quite the same category. As a trained linguist, I can point out changes that have occurred in common speech even in my life time, as languages evolve. Then of course there is the fact that no two people use exactly the same version of the same language! Shocked by that comment? You shouldn't be!
We all have acquired our own vocabulary, we have all found different ways to express the same situations. Nobody is exactly parallel to anyone else in their choice of vocabulary and clauses used. Language has its scientific layer in the grammatical rules that apply ("ich habe geschrieben", not "ich habe geschriebt"), but the actual choice of using those rules is a personal thing.
And still on the area of arts and science and their differences, there are nebulous areas like history.
IMHO there is such a thing as a scientific historian. The events occurred, they are written down as fact, and the facts are unquestionable. The date that the Weimar Republic was founded, for example, is an exact date. The sequence of facts leading up to that event can also be listed accurately.
The point with history though comes though with the element of conjecture. This happened, but why?
Why was the Weimar Republic conceived the way that it was? Was it a total failure or a partial success that succumbed to unfortunate events?
At this point history becomes an art form. The analysis of the events is often very much an individual assessment. Take the differing views of Hugh Trevor-Roper, Alan Bullock and Ian Kershaw on Nazi Germany for example. They all the acknowledge the same events, but their interpretation as to why differs.
This is interesting, but not particularly dangerous. Where it gets dangerous is where people change historical fact (even things that occurred with the past 24 hours) for their own benefit. It was commonplace for the Nazis to do this. It was a fact of life in the Soviet Union. And it is, notably, beginning to become a fact of life across the western democracies.
Fact and truth become increasingly blurred for the sake of political convenience and its ugly brother, propaganda. Historians will eventually look back upon the facts (if they can be sifted from the propaganda - not always an easy objective, see how much Nazi propaganda from the 1930s and 40s still passes for truth in certain areas), but if you are living now, and the facts are debased, your individual life can suffer.
And when scientific misuse is added to the spread of inaccurate information? Unfortunately that is an everyday occurrence. We are usually too busy with our daily concerns to get too deeply into the issues concerned, but a degree of scepticism in this regard is always healthy.
"Candles"? "Gas?". No electricity? No pressing a simple switch and lights coming on?
Light years ago? (Pun intended!). Actually the early 1880s - approximately 130 years ago. For those convinced by scientific research into the subject, 130 years is a very small percentage of the time that this planet has existed, and even for the religious fanatics who would, in their usual silly fashion, limit the earth to no more than 6,000 years, 130 years is far less than 1% of that time.
One simple indication of how far we have come in a relatively short period of time. An ordinary everyday electrician, who comes to fix your wiring if you have a problem, is dealing with problems that were not even conceivable in the 1880s.
Get into the debate as to whether Marconi or Tesla was responsible for inventing radio, and then examine radio technology now. I imagine that both those geniuses would marvel at the progress that has been made.
And it is not just in the realms of technological science where there has been so much progress. Take medical science for example. For the past 30-odd years AIDS and research surrounding it have been constantly in our view.
Go back to the 1880s, the problem then was syphilis - a nasty, highly contagious disease, but one that could not be discussed in polite circles. Then look at some of the famous people who caught it and died - the gunmaker, Samuel Colt, the French author, Guy de Maupassant (I have recently read an article where that was disputed, but anyway) among others.
Between 1905 and 1910 three German scientists, Fritz Schlaudinn, August von Wassermann and notably Paul Ehrlich, worked on the discovery of the causes and cure for this disease, and finally came up with the cure. The disease still survives, it can cause inestimable damage if left untreated, but it can eventually be cured. Its presence, along with AIDS, should though serve as a warning to those who wish to indulge in too frivolous an approach to matters sexual!
We can then conclude that science moves forward and moves us forward. Scientific laws are seemingly fixed, but research will enhance and change them. Over time the original thinking that drove the initial discovery still can be improved. Great scientific brains can still see the possibilities that were not available to their almost equally talented predecessors.
The arts at first glance do not fall into quite the same category. As a trained linguist, I can point out changes that have occurred in common speech even in my life time, as languages evolve. Then of course there is the fact that no two people use exactly the same version of the same language! Shocked by that comment? You shouldn't be!
We all have acquired our own vocabulary, we have all found different ways to express the same situations. Nobody is exactly parallel to anyone else in their choice of vocabulary and clauses used. Language has its scientific layer in the grammatical rules that apply ("ich habe geschrieben", not "ich habe geschriebt"), but the actual choice of using those rules is a personal thing.
And still on the area of arts and science and their differences, there are nebulous areas like history.
IMHO there is such a thing as a scientific historian. The events occurred, they are written down as fact, and the facts are unquestionable. The date that the Weimar Republic was founded, for example, is an exact date. The sequence of facts leading up to that event can also be listed accurately.
The point with history though comes though with the element of conjecture. This happened, but why?
Why was the Weimar Republic conceived the way that it was? Was it a total failure or a partial success that succumbed to unfortunate events?
At this point history becomes an art form. The analysis of the events is often very much an individual assessment. Take the differing views of Hugh Trevor-Roper, Alan Bullock and Ian Kershaw on Nazi Germany for example. They all the acknowledge the same events, but their interpretation as to why differs.
This is interesting, but not particularly dangerous. Where it gets dangerous is where people change historical fact (even things that occurred with the past 24 hours) for their own benefit. It was commonplace for the Nazis to do this. It was a fact of life in the Soviet Union. And it is, notably, beginning to become a fact of life across the western democracies.
Fact and truth become increasingly blurred for the sake of political convenience and its ugly brother, propaganda. Historians will eventually look back upon the facts (if they can be sifted from the propaganda - not always an easy objective, see how much Nazi propaganda from the 1930s and 40s still passes for truth in certain areas), but if you are living now, and the facts are debased, your individual life can suffer.
And when scientific misuse is added to the spread of inaccurate information? Unfortunately that is an everyday occurrence. We are usually too busy with our daily concerns to get too deeply into the issues concerned, but a degree of scepticism in this regard is always healthy.
Wednesday, 22 February 2012
If the world's (for the moment) most powerful nation
elected the Roman Catholic equivalent of Osama bin Laden as President of its country, what would happen?
A relevant question as the more I hear about Rick Santorum, the more likely that sounds that it could possibly happen.
Of course the country that was stupid enough to elect Nixon and GWB twice as President could not possibly make that mistake, could it????
A relevant question as the more I hear about Rick Santorum, the more likely that sounds that it could possibly happen.
Of course the country that was stupid enough to elect Nixon and GWB twice as President could not possibly make that mistake, could it????
Tuesday, 21 February 2012
Not a bad weekend to be over 70 and looking for a job
The President of Germany is mainly a symbolic figure. Rather like the monarch in a constitutional monarchy, there is the responsibility to sign bills into legislation, but no power to change them. There is the possibility of delaying things by leaving bills unsigned for a time, but that is about the limit.
The role then is mainly one of perception - constitutionally required, elected by both houses of the German Parliament, and a figurehead for the Federal Republic.
After the previous holder, the moderate Conservative Christian Wulff, left his office last week surrounded by a corruption scandal (it doesn't look good when the figurehead of the state has his hand in the till), his replacement became an unusually loud and obvious public story. Eventually the job will go to Wulff's opponent in the 2010 choice for President - Joachim Gauck (an election in the German Parliament still has to take place, but it is almost a formality).
Gauck is known for being a staunch anti-Communist in the former DDR, a pursuer of members of the Stasi in the post-DDR era, and a figure of considerable moral standing. That he is almost totally apolitical (apart from his staunch anti-Communism) helped considerably. None of the mainstream non-Communist parties would claim him as their own.
He took some selecting though, as he did not immediately win the support from Angela Merkel. Quite why is not clear. Both Gauck and Merkel are from the former DDR, he was a Protestant pastor, she the daughter of a Protestant pastor, both were vocal opponents of the former regime in the DDR. Politics as usual? She did not pick him, therefore he was a bad choice?
One point with Gauck is that he is already 72 years old! Good job that he was not applying for a regular position in industry or as an IT specialist wharrever. He would have been written off as far too old!
On the subject of which ....
In the area of sport this weekend a similar story.
Unlike in some other countries, Germany's capital city (for all its 4 million population) is not the major hub of the national game - football (soccer to North American readers) teams do not abound in the city the way they do in London, for example.
In the top flight of the Bundesliga, there is one team, Hertha, and one in the second, Union. Hertha are a massively supported team, but invariably prone to financial difficulties and historically more likely to be flirting with relegation to the second division than competing with Bayern München and Borussia Dortmund for the title.
After the recent fiasco of firing two team managers in scarcely two months, on Sunday they appointed Otto Rehhagel to be their team manager until the end of the season. By any stretch of the imagination, Rehhagel is a significant name in both the Bundesliga (he led Werder Bremen to two league titles, and Kaiserslautern to one) and internationally (leading a mediocre Greek national team to winning Euro 2004 must still be the achievement among achievements!).
He looks and sounds very healthy. He will have to be - he is 73 years old, and trying to turn the current Hertha team into a winning team is going to be incredibly difficult. And the media attention in Berlin is pretty much what you might expect. If he had been in Freiburg or Augsburg, then the expectations might have been similar, but the public attention would have been less.
But I will wish him well. These temporary appointments do not always work out, even for gifted coaches. In similar circumstances last season, Christoph Daum failed to turn Eintracht Frankfurt round, for example - they failed to win a game while he was in charge and they were still relegated. For his pains Daum has had to give up the glories of beautiful Frankfurt for Bruges of all places - I wonder how his command of Flemish is coming along ....
You would anyway imagine that a 73-year-old man would find better things to do with his time than possibly damage his own legend? Maybe, but as a slightly younger man, I will tell you from experience that the chance to enhance your reputation is always worth the risk. Better have the opportunity while it still exists. And avoid the stagnation that is the alternative!
The role then is mainly one of perception - constitutionally required, elected by both houses of the German Parliament, and a figurehead for the Federal Republic.
After the previous holder, the moderate Conservative Christian Wulff, left his office last week surrounded by a corruption scandal (it doesn't look good when the figurehead of the state has his hand in the till), his replacement became an unusually loud and obvious public story. Eventually the job will go to Wulff's opponent in the 2010 choice for President - Joachim Gauck (an election in the German Parliament still has to take place, but it is almost a formality).
Gauck is known for being a staunch anti-Communist in the former DDR, a pursuer of members of the Stasi in the post-DDR era, and a figure of considerable moral standing. That he is almost totally apolitical (apart from his staunch anti-Communism) helped considerably. None of the mainstream non-Communist parties would claim him as their own.
He took some selecting though, as he did not immediately win the support from Angela Merkel. Quite why is not clear. Both Gauck and Merkel are from the former DDR, he was a Protestant pastor, she the daughter of a Protestant pastor, both were vocal opponents of the former regime in the DDR. Politics as usual? She did not pick him, therefore he was a bad choice?
One point with Gauck is that he is already 72 years old! Good job that he was not applying for a regular position in industry or as an IT specialist wharrever. He would have been written off as far too old!
On the subject of which ....
In the area of sport this weekend a similar story.
Unlike in some other countries, Germany's capital city (for all its 4 million population) is not the major hub of the national game - football (soccer to North American readers) teams do not abound in the city the way they do in London, for example.
In the top flight of the Bundesliga, there is one team, Hertha, and one in the second, Union. Hertha are a massively supported team, but invariably prone to financial difficulties and historically more likely to be flirting with relegation to the second division than competing with Bayern München and Borussia Dortmund for the title.
After the recent fiasco of firing two team managers in scarcely two months, on Sunday they appointed Otto Rehhagel to be their team manager until the end of the season. By any stretch of the imagination, Rehhagel is a significant name in both the Bundesliga (he led Werder Bremen to two league titles, and Kaiserslautern to one) and internationally (leading a mediocre Greek national team to winning Euro 2004 must still be the achievement among achievements!).
He looks and sounds very healthy. He will have to be - he is 73 years old, and trying to turn the current Hertha team into a winning team is going to be incredibly difficult. And the media attention in Berlin is pretty much what you might expect. If he had been in Freiburg or Augsburg, then the expectations might have been similar, but the public attention would have been less.
But I will wish him well. These temporary appointments do not always work out, even for gifted coaches. In similar circumstances last season, Christoph Daum failed to turn Eintracht Frankfurt round, for example - they failed to win a game while he was in charge and they were still relegated. For his pains Daum has had to give up the glories of beautiful Frankfurt for Bruges of all places - I wonder how his command of Flemish is coming along ....
You would anyway imagine that a 73-year-old man would find better things to do with his time than possibly damage his own legend? Maybe, but as a slightly younger man, I will tell you from experience that the chance to enhance your reputation is always worth the risk. Better have the opportunity while it still exists. And avoid the stagnation that is the alternative!
Sunday, 19 February 2012
OK, future President Santorum, should male potency drugs be banned?
I shall probably again receive some abuse from American trolls for "interfering in our business", but as I have pointed out enough times American "problems" tend to affect us as well down the road, so ....
This week the latest flavour of the month in the Republican Party Primaries, Rick Santorum, announced (again) that sex was for procreative purposes and not for recreative purposes. We also heard the usual salutary things about the lifestyle choices of people having the proverbial sex all over the place usw (Newt Gingrich, please note ....).
This is a guy who has seven kids. In this massively overpopulated world that will go down well on the world stage if he does become President (may the non-existent God help us if he does ....). He can have seven kids, he is the most powerful man in the world, therefore I can have seven kids as well. This will go down a bundle in countries like Pakistan where oversized families and poverty go hand in hand, and the need for cutting population growth is urgent.
My guess is that Mr. Santorum has had sex seven times. If not, the taint of hypocrisy will start to sneak in (well I was trying to create more of the species, I wasn't enjoying it ....)!
Which brings me belatedly to male potency drugs. When they first appeared on the scene, it was meant to revive the flagging sex lives of men in their later years (nice polite phrase, I like it as I fall into the category!). It was carefully prescribed by doctors for use. All well and good.
The idea then is a man in his 60s and 70s can enjoy sex again? Not if you are Rick Santorum (henceforth RS)! The idea of sex according to RS is to create children, period!
The fact is nonetheless (whether idiots like the aforesaid RS like it or not) that the vast majority of older men on these potency drugs want(ed) them so that they could/can resume their sex lives with their life partners, usually women of their own generation. Which normally entails being past child-bearing age (unless they have been hanging round that infamous doctor in Italy who indulges in fertility treatment with women in their later years).
If they are not doing it for pleasure, why are they doing it at all? According to RS's theory they must be disgusting dirty old men. They should know what sex was meant to be for! And their wives should not encourage them either. For they too will be soiled by such actions.
It therefore follows that the only men who should, following RS's theory, be allowed access to Viagra are older men with young wives (smirk, smirk ....) or young men with potency problems (why somebody in their 20s would ever need it, I do not understand, but that is another issue entirely). For anyone else it should be banned! Right????
Could you seriously vote for someone who is pushing this agenda?
In Europe any politician who came up with this nonsense would be laughed off-stage! I hope so, anyway. It has an "only in America" feel to it.
Of course RS is a Roman Catholic, and this nonsense about birth control (if you don't want children, don't have sex) has been the ridiculous unsuccessful mantra of the Roman Catholic church for a generation. In Germany, a country where 40-50% of the population are either atheists or agnostics it would not have too substantial an impact (and anyway, the birth-rate here could do to rise a few points). In the US (less than 10% are atheists or agnostics) it is more important. Perhaps ....
Anyway if RS does become President and decides to push this through the legislature on the principle that it is what the Vatican expects, maybe he should also talk to the Vatican about a few other important issues - like the fact they opposed the war in Iraq and would oppose any attacks on Iran!!!!
Somehow though we are here into the double-speak agenda. We will of course observe what the Vatican tells us when it suits us - in other words!
Yes, well. Hopefully the American voters, even given the lousy choice available to them, will have more sense that they sometimes show, and do what the people of Pennsylvania did the last time this idiot stood in an election. That said 41% of the people who voted supported him as a losing candidate, and that is still a ridiculously high number - 4.1% I could almost understand ....
This week the latest flavour of the month in the Republican Party Primaries, Rick Santorum, announced (again) that sex was for procreative purposes and not for recreative purposes. We also heard the usual salutary things about the lifestyle choices of people having the proverbial sex all over the place usw (Newt Gingrich, please note ....).
This is a guy who has seven kids. In this massively overpopulated world that will go down well on the world stage if he does become President (may the non-existent God help us if he does ....). He can have seven kids, he is the most powerful man in the world, therefore I can have seven kids as well. This will go down a bundle in countries like Pakistan where oversized families and poverty go hand in hand, and the need for cutting population growth is urgent.
My guess is that Mr. Santorum has had sex seven times. If not, the taint of hypocrisy will start to sneak in (well I was trying to create more of the species, I wasn't enjoying it ....)!
Which brings me belatedly to male potency drugs. When they first appeared on the scene, it was meant to revive the flagging sex lives of men in their later years (nice polite phrase, I like it as I fall into the category!). It was carefully prescribed by doctors for use. All well and good.
The idea then is a man in his 60s and 70s can enjoy sex again? Not if you are Rick Santorum (henceforth RS)! The idea of sex according to RS is to create children, period!
The fact is nonetheless (whether idiots like the aforesaid RS like it or not) that the vast majority of older men on these potency drugs want(ed) them so that they could/can resume their sex lives with their life partners, usually women of their own generation. Which normally entails being past child-bearing age (unless they have been hanging round that infamous doctor in Italy who indulges in fertility treatment with women in their later years).
If they are not doing it for pleasure, why are they doing it at all? According to RS's theory they must be disgusting dirty old men. They should know what sex was meant to be for! And their wives should not encourage them either. For they too will be soiled by such actions.
It therefore follows that the only men who should, following RS's theory, be allowed access to Viagra are older men with young wives (smirk, smirk ....) or young men with potency problems (why somebody in their 20s would ever need it, I do not understand, but that is another issue entirely). For anyone else it should be banned! Right????
Could you seriously vote for someone who is pushing this agenda?
In Europe any politician who came up with this nonsense would be laughed off-stage! I hope so, anyway. It has an "only in America" feel to it.
Of course RS is a Roman Catholic, and this nonsense about birth control (if you don't want children, don't have sex) has been the ridiculous unsuccessful mantra of the Roman Catholic church for a generation. In Germany, a country where 40-50% of the population are either atheists or agnostics it would not have too substantial an impact (and anyway, the birth-rate here could do to rise a few points). In the US (less than 10% are atheists or agnostics) it is more important. Perhaps ....
Anyway if RS does become President and decides to push this through the legislature on the principle that it is what the Vatican expects, maybe he should also talk to the Vatican about a few other important issues - like the fact they opposed the war in Iraq and would oppose any attacks on Iran!!!!
Somehow though we are here into the double-speak agenda. We will of course observe what the Vatican tells us when it suits us - in other words!
Yes, well. Hopefully the American voters, even given the lousy choice available to them, will have more sense that they sometimes show, and do what the people of Pennsylvania did the last time this idiot stood in an election. That said 41% of the people who voted supported him as a losing candidate, and that is still a ridiculously high number - 4.1% I could almost understand ....
Thursday, 16 February 2012
More democracy in action
On March 11th I get yet another chance to take part in the democratic process.
The mayor of Frankfurt, Petra Roth, is standing down early (retiring, nothing scandalous) and there is a special election to replace her.
The choice of candidates is the fairly wide, and needless to say I will probably end up voting for someone who will lose. My vote though is still under consideration. Anyone who can GUARANTEE ME A JOB IN LINE WITH MY TALENTS AND IS ADEQUATELY REWARDING I will happily support!
None of the American razzmatazz here though. No candidates rolling out their billionaire backers. Doesn't that anyway sound a teensy-weensy bit corrupt? I will back you to the tune of billions, and I won't benefit at all? Hardly likely!
No theme music for the candidates either (Obama chose his theme tunes for the election last week and did not include any salsa to appeal to the Latino vote .... Meanwhile I was thinking this morning that it would be appropriate - particularly given the close links between country music and the GOP - for Newt Gingrich to use the old Tom T. Hall / Bobby Bare classic "Lincoln Park Inn").
Meanwhile I may learn a bit more about German politics over the next few weeks. Like, for instance, what is the position of the Pirate Party on economic issues (they used to sound like a version of the awful FDP on this, maybe if they want to tap the youth vote they have to start sounding like the Occupy movement - which I imagine would be difficult for them)?
Meanwhile will it change my life much? I doubt it - the choice with politics for a generation now has been between the incompetent on the one hand and the really awful whom you would never support in the proverbial months of Sundays (see the party of mass unemployment in the UK, known as the Conservative Party, or the money for the mega-rich and huge debts for the rest GOP in the US) on the other, and there seems not much they can or want to do to deal with the issues that I consider important. It isn't quite like living in Greece yet, but it is definitely heading that way!
The mayor of Frankfurt, Petra Roth, is standing down early (retiring, nothing scandalous) and there is a special election to replace her.
The choice of candidates is the fairly wide, and needless to say I will probably end up voting for someone who will lose. My vote though is still under consideration. Anyone who can GUARANTEE ME A JOB IN LINE WITH MY TALENTS AND IS ADEQUATELY REWARDING I will happily support!
None of the American razzmatazz here though. No candidates rolling out their billionaire backers. Doesn't that anyway sound a teensy-weensy bit corrupt? I will back you to the tune of billions, and I won't benefit at all? Hardly likely!
No theme music for the candidates either (Obama chose his theme tunes for the election last week and did not include any salsa to appeal to the Latino vote .... Meanwhile I was thinking this morning that it would be appropriate - particularly given the close links between country music and the GOP - for Newt Gingrich to use the old Tom T. Hall / Bobby Bare classic "Lincoln Park Inn").
Meanwhile I may learn a bit more about German politics over the next few weeks. Like, for instance, what is the position of the Pirate Party on economic issues (they used to sound like a version of the awful FDP on this, maybe if they want to tap the youth vote they have to start sounding like the Occupy movement - which I imagine would be difficult for them)?
Meanwhile will it change my life much? I doubt it - the choice with politics for a generation now has been between the incompetent on the one hand and the really awful whom you would never support in the proverbial months of Sundays (see the party of mass unemployment in the UK, known as the Conservative Party, or the money for the mega-rich and huge debts for the rest GOP in the US) on the other, and there seems not much they can or want to do to deal with the issues that I consider important. It isn't quite like living in Greece yet, but it is definitely heading that way!
Wednesday, 15 February 2012
Why don't telemarketing companies get it?
The calls are not wanted. Period!
We do not want what they are selling!
If we want something, we will go to a shop that sells it, or find an Internet site that provides it.
We do not have spare money like that for off-the-cuff purchases.
The calls are a considerable nuisance, and are likely to invoke an angry response or reaction.
And we certainly do not need the lies, deceit and cunning that they use in their calls to try and make us buy what we do not want - like telling us that we have a subscription already that we need to renew, when it is simply not the case!
And we certainly do not need their computer generated calls at twenty past two in the morning as happened today! These machines should be outlawed anyway, they are nothing more than a public nuisance!
We do not want what they are selling!
If we want something, we will go to a shop that sells it, or find an Internet site that provides it.
We do not have spare money like that for off-the-cuff purchases.
The calls are a considerable nuisance, and are likely to invoke an angry response or reaction.
And we certainly do not need the lies, deceit and cunning that they use in their calls to try and make us buy what we do not want - like telling us that we have a subscription already that we need to renew, when it is simply not the case!
And we certainly do not need their computer generated calls at twenty past two in the morning as happened today! These machines should be outlawed anyway, they are nothing more than a public nuisance!
Monday, 13 February 2012
Teachers, pupils/students and intimacy
I spent six years of my life teaching kids in English schools. Between 1973 and 1979. So long ago it sounds like ancient history, but some memories linger in spite of everything that I have experienced since.
The kids who crossed my path were between the age of 11 (definitely kids) and 18 (legally adults, essentially to be treated as young adults, but still there to benefit from your knowledge and wisdom). In between was, of course, that horrible mish-mash known as adolescents.
After I left teaching I was ribbed time and again by certain colleagues in IT about how I must have misused my position to get intimate with my charges. I can also actually quote a number of cases that I read in the papers in the 1980s of young male teachers who ended up having sex with one of their pupils (usually 14 or 15) and ended up in jail as a result.
There have since been loads of stories from the USA and Australia where male "students" (UK English "pupils") of 13 or 14 have ended up having sex with female teachers (some as old as 35 - you wonder how that could have come about). And then there was the case of an ex-colleague who was in court on a charge of homosexual rape with an 18-year-old boy who was in one of his classes. Eventually he got off on the grounds of consensual sex, which the boy denied and denied and denied! My ex-colleague's career though was finished at this point, consensual or otherwise, and frankly he only had himself to blame in that respect.
As a teacher myself, and as an outsider to the industry since, I have always held to the unwritten rule (and I think that it should remain "unwritten"). Namely that you simply should never, ever, get intimate with your charges.
And that is not as easy as it might sound.
The implication in these cases is usually that it is the wicked teacher, evilly salivating at the thought, who is the person who makes the first move. In fact in my experience it is the reverse. Teenage kids who are discovering their sexuality often become obsessed with the prospect of getting intimate with one of their teachers.
I was not that handsome, not that tall, not that interesting, rather distant and aloof. In six years teaching I was propositioned three times (seven girls involved in total, they never come alone! Average age approximately 14 and a half!). Knowing what to say is not easy as you are shocked by the situation. Saying "no" firmly without giving a reason was the preferred course of action. I have known a colleague who did exactly that, though, and the next thing that he knew was that a rumour was going round the school that he must be Gay!
But saying "no" also does not mean that they will not persist. One case that I recall from the early 1980s in Manchester involved a case of a guy who finally gave way after refusing several times, and ended up with his career ruined and 12 months in jail for his pains.
Eventually it is a question of professionalism. Distance is a prerequisite in teacher-pupil relationships. Getting too close is never to be advised, and learning to keep your distance is an absolutely essential part of that professionalism. Anything less than maintaining the rigid requirements involved can easily be at the cost of your career and your reputation.
The kids who crossed my path were between the age of 11 (definitely kids) and 18 (legally adults, essentially to be treated as young adults, but still there to benefit from your knowledge and wisdom). In between was, of course, that horrible mish-mash known as adolescents.
After I left teaching I was ribbed time and again by certain colleagues in IT about how I must have misused my position to get intimate with my charges. I can also actually quote a number of cases that I read in the papers in the 1980s of young male teachers who ended up having sex with one of their pupils (usually 14 or 15) and ended up in jail as a result.
There have since been loads of stories from the USA and Australia where male "students" (UK English "pupils") of 13 or 14 have ended up having sex with female teachers (some as old as 35 - you wonder how that could have come about). And then there was the case of an ex-colleague who was in court on a charge of homosexual rape with an 18-year-old boy who was in one of his classes. Eventually he got off on the grounds of consensual sex, which the boy denied and denied and denied! My ex-colleague's career though was finished at this point, consensual or otherwise, and frankly he only had himself to blame in that respect.
As a teacher myself, and as an outsider to the industry since, I have always held to the unwritten rule (and I think that it should remain "unwritten"). Namely that you simply should never, ever, get intimate with your charges.
And that is not as easy as it might sound.
The implication in these cases is usually that it is the wicked teacher, evilly salivating at the thought, who is the person who makes the first move. In fact in my experience it is the reverse. Teenage kids who are discovering their sexuality often become obsessed with the prospect of getting intimate with one of their teachers.
I was not that handsome, not that tall, not that interesting, rather distant and aloof. In six years teaching I was propositioned three times (seven girls involved in total, they never come alone! Average age approximately 14 and a half!). Knowing what to say is not easy as you are shocked by the situation. Saying "no" firmly without giving a reason was the preferred course of action. I have known a colleague who did exactly that, though, and the next thing that he knew was that a rumour was going round the school that he must be Gay!
But saying "no" also does not mean that they will not persist. One case that I recall from the early 1980s in Manchester involved a case of a guy who finally gave way after refusing several times, and ended up with his career ruined and 12 months in jail for his pains.
Eventually it is a question of professionalism. Distance is a prerequisite in teacher-pupil relationships. Getting too close is never to be advised, and learning to keep your distance is an absolutely essential part of that professionalism. Anything less than maintaining the rigid requirements involved can easily be at the cost of your career and your reputation.
Simone de Beauvoir on growing old
You have to speak French to understand this clip.
It is though a very accurate and pungent analysis IMHO:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHVTKy1cmuc
Madame de Beauvoir was a lady of immense intelligence, a fascinating personality, and a writer of considerable style, even if some of her personal actions were at times questionable. Her works are well worth investigating.
It is though a very accurate and pungent analysis IMHO:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHVTKy1cmuc
Madame de Beauvoir was a lady of immense intelligence, a fascinating personality, and a writer of considerable style, even if some of her personal actions were at times questionable. Her works are well worth investigating.
Sunday, 12 February 2012
Invented peoples
That I am not a great fan of Islam should be obvious to any reader of this blog.
That I agree with Sam Harris, a far more prominent atheist than I ever could be, that Islam is potentially a very dangerous belief system, would also be obvious if you read what I have written.
But it is time to come back to the situation in the Middle East, and look once more at the Palestinian situation - not in a religious context (some of the Palestinian people support the extremist Sunni Islamic fundamentalist group, Hamas, but Hamas are not all of the Palestinian people!).
Newt Gingrich, who fortunately will not be the next American President the way things are headed (we might though end up with the equally ignorant Rick Santorum), stated recently that the Palestinians are an "invented people".
Fine.
Quick check of the world map in 1500. Find the United States. Read its constitution. Check out the ethnic origin of its people. Hmmmm. Where are they?
Quick check of the world map in 1700. Find Australia. See what people lived there. Anything like its inhabitants now?
Or closer to home (for me, at least). Quick check of the world map in 1800. Find Germany and Italy ....
Quick check now. Go to Berlin wearing typical Bavarian garb, or go to the Oktoberfest in Munich mouthing off in a typical Berlin accent and displaying stereotypical Prussian attitudes .... All Germans together?
Invented peoples - the world map is full of them. As I have pointed out before I am from ethnic Danish Viking stock. Much as I might ask Odin and Thor for help, I am still not allowed to vote in Danish elections! So what's 1100 years anyway since my ancestors left - a Danish Viking is a Danish Viking, right? Ah well, back to pillage duties .....
So we have the "invented" Palestinian people. Living alongside the not-so-invented Israelis? Quick check of the (obviously dangerously left-wing) Encyclopedia Britannica. Jewish population of what is now Israel in 1938? Approximately 300,000.
Population of Israel now? 7,624,000 (give or take a few - figure extracted from Google just now, by typing in "Israel population").
Even given nearly a million Israeli Arabs, that is a massive increase between 1938 and now right. Most of this population growth originated from immigration (allowing for the fact that many Israelis now are descended from those immigrants and have never lived anywhere else).
But by any stretch of the imagination that also makes them an "invented people". This is, boringly, not the first time that I have said this on this blog, but the only justification for them being there is this phoney myth that their ancestors were the "chosen people" thousands of years ago, so on that principle the "promised land" belongs to them.
Sadly, as a result of the horrendous behaviour of Hitler and the Nazis, it is seemingly not possible for a logical rationalist to criticise Judaism, its mythical, nonsensical, superstitious origins and its consequences in the same way that we can criticise Islam and Christianity. Hence the occasional double standard on the subject
And as some Islamic extremists (the likes of Hamas) often indulge in behaviour that is almost on a par with the Nazis is the 1930s (Islamofascism, I will again repeat, is a justifiable term for them), the Israelis can rightly point out that you cannot negotiate with such people.
For all that though we should face the situation pragmatically (i.e. no kicking millions of people out, or starting a new holocaust), take religion out of the situation (and apart from Hamas on the Palestinian side, we should also recognise that Jewish fundamentalist parties are part of the current Israeli government coalition) and try and resolve the situation for the good of all the people in the neighbourhood.
Eventually the rights of all the people in the area ("invented" or otherwise) need serious examination and a serious solution that works for all!
That I agree with Sam Harris, a far more prominent atheist than I ever could be, that Islam is potentially a very dangerous belief system, would also be obvious if you read what I have written.
But it is time to come back to the situation in the Middle East, and look once more at the Palestinian situation - not in a religious context (some of the Palestinian people support the extremist Sunni Islamic fundamentalist group, Hamas, but Hamas are not all of the Palestinian people!).
Newt Gingrich, who fortunately will not be the next American President the way things are headed (we might though end up with the equally ignorant Rick Santorum), stated recently that the Palestinians are an "invented people".
Fine.
Quick check of the world map in 1500. Find the United States. Read its constitution. Check out the ethnic origin of its people. Hmmmm. Where are they?
Quick check of the world map in 1700. Find Australia. See what people lived there. Anything like its inhabitants now?
Or closer to home (for me, at least). Quick check of the world map in 1800. Find Germany and Italy ....
Quick check now. Go to Berlin wearing typical Bavarian garb, or go to the Oktoberfest in Munich mouthing off in a typical Berlin accent and displaying stereotypical Prussian attitudes .... All Germans together?
Invented peoples - the world map is full of them. As I have pointed out before I am from ethnic Danish Viking stock. Much as I might ask Odin and Thor for help, I am still not allowed to vote in Danish elections! So what's 1100 years anyway since my ancestors left - a Danish Viking is a Danish Viking, right? Ah well, back to pillage duties .....
So we have the "invented" Palestinian people. Living alongside the not-so-invented Israelis? Quick check of the (obviously dangerously left-wing) Encyclopedia Britannica. Jewish population of what is now Israel in 1938? Approximately 300,000.
Population of Israel now? 7,624,000 (give or take a few - figure extracted from Google just now, by typing in "Israel population").
Even given nearly a million Israeli Arabs, that is a massive increase between 1938 and now right. Most of this population growth originated from immigration (allowing for the fact that many Israelis now are descended from those immigrants and have never lived anywhere else).
But by any stretch of the imagination that also makes them an "invented people". This is, boringly, not the first time that I have said this on this blog, but the only justification for them being there is this phoney myth that their ancestors were the "chosen people" thousands of years ago, so on that principle the "promised land" belongs to them.
Sadly, as a result of the horrendous behaviour of Hitler and the Nazis, it is seemingly not possible for a logical rationalist to criticise Judaism, its mythical, nonsensical, superstitious origins and its consequences in the same way that we can criticise Islam and Christianity. Hence the occasional double standard on the subject
And as some Islamic extremists (the likes of Hamas) often indulge in behaviour that is almost on a par with the Nazis is the 1930s (Islamofascism, I will again repeat, is a justifiable term for them), the Israelis can rightly point out that you cannot negotiate with such people.
For all that though we should face the situation pragmatically (i.e. no kicking millions of people out, or starting a new holocaust), take religion out of the situation (and apart from Hamas on the Palestinian side, we should also recognise that Jewish fundamentalist parties are part of the current Israeli government coalition) and try and resolve the situation for the good of all the people in the neighbourhood.
Eventually the rights of all the people in the area ("invented" or otherwise) need serious examination and a serious solution that works for all!
Saturday, 11 February 2012
The Free(zing) Market Economy
What I like about Celsius as against Fahrenheit is its indication of how cold it actually gets when it really gets cold. Anything below minus is freezing, the larger the number after the minus sign, the more meaningful the severity of the cold sounds.
Last night it hit -14 in Frankfurt. Celsius! Read that as 6 or 7 degrees Fahrenheit, you do not quite get to envisage just how cold it is.
So when you hear that the temperature in the Ukraine in the last couple of weeks has hit -25, and over 130 people there as of last week had frozen to death ....
There are people who are homeless out there. In smaller numbers in Germany than in some other countries that I could name, but even one person living homeless (against their will) is an indication of a failed economy IMHO. This excludes the junkies and alkies who are responsible, to an extent at least, for their own fate.
If you are homeless and left out to freeze in this Siberian imported cold spell, your miserable life must hit its nadir. Being homeless is just about as bad as it can get anyway. And in temperatures which are best suited for refrigeration ....
So imagine in comparison someone serving 30 years or more in jail. Being in jail also sounds an extremely miserable existence, not least for the company that you have to keep. But think for a moment. You have a roof over your head, regular meals, a degree of warmth. Is it worse than living on the streets?
Walking back from the supermarket just now, the name "Bernie Madoff" went through my mind. One of the ultimate swindlers, he managed to live most of his life in exceptional luxury, and while in his declining years he has been condemned to spend the remainder of his life in very limited confinement behind bars, how much has he lost?
If he had been sentenced to have all his assets stripped away and forced to live on the streets like a vagrant for the rest of his days? For the rest of his life, without "parole" (and without help from the Salvation Army!). It does once in a while get very cold in New York City. Jail sounds a far better alternative when you think about it!
Following the usual digressions that permeate my brain cells, then arose the question - if you are an ultimate believer in (conservative) libertarian thinking, did Bernie Madoff actually deserve to be in jail at all?
If you do not have regulations (which unnecessarily impact trading), why should a Ponzi scheme be illegal? It is only another regulation!
If you stick the notice "caveat emptor" up on all trading, then a Ponzi trader is just as much a person to be questioned as anyone else. Surely by this thinking, the person who bought what Madoff was offering should have been more careful and checked it out before investing? If you want a free market without regulations, surely this is logical thinking????
So why aren't the free market advocates picketing the jail where Madoff, obviously an innocent man, is being held???? This is surely victimisation, not justice????
Taking my tongue out of my cheek and putting it back in its normal place, I will immediately state that the reason for Madoff being in jail is logical. There is no more a chance of a total "free market" working than there is of Communism working. Both assume a certain type of perfection in humanity that simply does not exist.
Eventually there have to be rules. That work - for everybody. In the public interest! My scepticism about the market economy is well recorded in the pages of this blog. If you have wealth to start off with, you can make it work, and if you fail, then there is nobody else to blame.
For everyone else it is a confused mess, a random, ramshackle, devil-take-the-hindmost culture that creates more poverty than wealth for the majority of the people out there, and encourages gambling and irresponsibility rather than intelligence and industry.
Not armed with the right tools, being born to the wrong family in the wrong place, stuck with an incompetent government which is only concerned about the well-being of the affluent in the mistaken belief that somehow the wealth will trickle down .... well you had better start getting used to living outside in temperatures of minus 14. Celsius!
Last night it hit -14 in Frankfurt. Celsius! Read that as 6 or 7 degrees Fahrenheit, you do not quite get to envisage just how cold it is.
So when you hear that the temperature in the Ukraine in the last couple of weeks has hit -25, and over 130 people there as of last week had frozen to death ....
There are people who are homeless out there. In smaller numbers in Germany than in some other countries that I could name, but even one person living homeless (against their will) is an indication of a failed economy IMHO. This excludes the junkies and alkies who are responsible, to an extent at least, for their own fate.
If you are homeless and left out to freeze in this Siberian imported cold spell, your miserable life must hit its nadir. Being homeless is just about as bad as it can get anyway. And in temperatures which are best suited for refrigeration ....
So imagine in comparison someone serving 30 years or more in jail. Being in jail also sounds an extremely miserable existence, not least for the company that you have to keep. But think for a moment. You have a roof over your head, regular meals, a degree of warmth. Is it worse than living on the streets?
Walking back from the supermarket just now, the name "Bernie Madoff" went through my mind. One of the ultimate swindlers, he managed to live most of his life in exceptional luxury, and while in his declining years he has been condemned to spend the remainder of his life in very limited confinement behind bars, how much has he lost?
If he had been sentenced to have all his assets stripped away and forced to live on the streets like a vagrant for the rest of his days? For the rest of his life, without "parole" (and without help from the Salvation Army!). It does once in a while get very cold in New York City. Jail sounds a far better alternative when you think about it!
Following the usual digressions that permeate my brain cells, then arose the question - if you are an ultimate believer in (conservative) libertarian thinking, did Bernie Madoff actually deserve to be in jail at all?
If you do not have regulations (which unnecessarily impact trading), why should a Ponzi scheme be illegal? It is only another regulation!
If you stick the notice "caveat emptor" up on all trading, then a Ponzi trader is just as much a person to be questioned as anyone else. Surely by this thinking, the person who bought what Madoff was offering should have been more careful and checked it out before investing? If you want a free market without regulations, surely this is logical thinking????
So why aren't the free market advocates picketing the jail where Madoff, obviously an innocent man, is being held???? This is surely victimisation, not justice????
Taking my tongue out of my cheek and putting it back in its normal place, I will immediately state that the reason for Madoff being in jail is logical. There is no more a chance of a total "free market" working than there is of Communism working. Both assume a certain type of perfection in humanity that simply does not exist.
Eventually there have to be rules. That work - for everybody. In the public interest! My scepticism about the market economy is well recorded in the pages of this blog. If you have wealth to start off with, you can make it work, and if you fail, then there is nobody else to blame.
For everyone else it is a confused mess, a random, ramshackle, devil-take-the-hindmost culture that creates more poverty than wealth for the majority of the people out there, and encourages gambling and irresponsibility rather than intelligence and industry.
Not armed with the right tools, being born to the wrong family in the wrong place, stuck with an incompetent government which is only concerned about the well-being of the affluent in the mistaken belief that somehow the wealth will trickle down .... well you had better start getting used to living outside in temperatures of minus 14. Celsius!
Thursday, 9 February 2012
When does "broke" mean "broke"? - Part 2: government finances
OK.
I have had several replies over the years on various boards starting: "the trouble with you liberals" ....
Invariably from Americans - "liberal" in the European sense is quite different, it advocates classic "liberalism", so most European Liberal parties (see the Netherlands, Germany etc) are actually ultra-conservative. Let business do what it wants and the poor can go hang usw.
Not where I am at all, as you might guess.
Anyway back to the American critics.
In their view the "liberals" want government spending tons of taxpayers' money on things that aren't needed, running up a massive amount of debt in the process. I will avoid the what the spending is on for a minute, and point out that the hardly liberal George W. Bush (he who must not be mentioned in the 2012 Republican Party Primaries) is apparently responsible for 42% of the American government debt, while supposed liberal Bill Clinton was running up surpluses during his tenure.
In other words, go check your facts first before opening your electronic mouth.
My view is what it has been for seemingly ever. Governments should not run up debt. Period!
Governments should take the money that they have and spend it wisely on those things that are considered important, and those things that the voters have asked of them in a democratic election - provided of course they were given an honest choice, and what they were told could be delivered, can be.
If the government cannot pay for the service it should not provide it, or it should levy the people for more money so that the service can be paid for. If that means raising taxes, so be it.
All people who wish to see their country prosper would, like good patriots, of course be willing to make the sacrifice. Wouldn't they? After all business owners you would expect to be good patriots and put their country ahead of their personal greed (sorry, I meant "needs"!), and contribute to the common good. Wouldn't they?
And closing tax loopholes and ensuring efficient collection of expected revenues - that goes with the job of the public servant, so you need reasonably well-paid, intelligent citizens to do that. Right?
And eventually when capitalism has the equivalent of the "Black Death", see 2008, you can always expect the government to help businesses just like the the businesses have contributed to them when it was necessary. Right?
Quite how a government can do this without getting heavily into the red is a good question. Killing off its old people (a mass cull of dependant people past their 60th birthday maybe? Particularly those whose assets became tainted during the capitalist "Black Death"!). Closing down all its schools? Most kids in the West hate school anyway, so why not create another Pakistan, where most kids cannot afford to go to traditional schools?
It is interesting to watch how some governments react though when they are "broke". The Thatcher government in 1982 was averse to spending large chunks of money to help industrial regeneration in the North of England and avoid in the process the degeneration of the lifestyle of millions of people, but was not averse to spending millions to maintain the livelihood of four to five thousand people in the distant Falkland Islands.
The current US Republican Party Primary candidates (excepting Ron Paul, who is nothing if not consistent) are shouting for massive cuts in public spending, but are still willing to spend billions in public money that they allegedly cannot afford on a war with Iran!
If you are "broke", you are "broke"? Well, not exactly - right?
The problem with politics is that it has become all about propaganda, not about the realities on the ground.
In my opinion, politicians should level with their people. They should stop making phoney promises and set about getting their debt piles down to zero as quickly as possible, while trying to offer their people the best standard of living available to them.
It needs sacrifices, it needs realistic solutions, and it needs honesty. The chance of getting those though in the current environment is as close to zero as it gets!
I have had several replies over the years on various boards starting: "the trouble with you liberals" ....
Invariably from Americans - "liberal" in the European sense is quite different, it advocates classic "liberalism", so most European Liberal parties (see the Netherlands, Germany etc) are actually ultra-conservative. Let business do what it wants and the poor can go hang usw.
Not where I am at all, as you might guess.
Anyway back to the American critics.
In their view the "liberals" want government spending tons of taxpayers' money on things that aren't needed, running up a massive amount of debt in the process. I will avoid the what the spending is on for a minute, and point out that the hardly liberal George W. Bush (he who must not be mentioned in the 2012 Republican Party Primaries) is apparently responsible for 42% of the American government debt, while supposed liberal Bill Clinton was running up surpluses during his tenure.
In other words, go check your facts first before opening your electronic mouth.
My view is what it has been for seemingly ever. Governments should not run up debt. Period!
Governments should take the money that they have and spend it wisely on those things that are considered important, and those things that the voters have asked of them in a democratic election - provided of course they were given an honest choice, and what they were told could be delivered, can be.
If the government cannot pay for the service it should not provide it, or it should levy the people for more money so that the service can be paid for. If that means raising taxes, so be it.
All people who wish to see their country prosper would, like good patriots, of course be willing to make the sacrifice. Wouldn't they? After all business owners you would expect to be good patriots and put their country ahead of their personal greed (sorry, I meant "needs"!), and contribute to the common good. Wouldn't they?
And closing tax loopholes and ensuring efficient collection of expected revenues - that goes with the job of the public servant, so you need reasonably well-paid, intelligent citizens to do that. Right?
And eventually when capitalism has the equivalent of the "Black Death", see 2008, you can always expect the government to help businesses just like the the businesses have contributed to them when it was necessary. Right?
Quite how a government can do this without getting heavily into the red is a good question. Killing off its old people (a mass cull of dependant people past their 60th birthday maybe? Particularly those whose assets became tainted during the capitalist "Black Death"!). Closing down all its schools? Most kids in the West hate school anyway, so why not create another Pakistan, where most kids cannot afford to go to traditional schools?
It is interesting to watch how some governments react though when they are "broke". The Thatcher government in 1982 was averse to spending large chunks of money to help industrial regeneration in the North of England and avoid in the process the degeneration of the lifestyle of millions of people, but was not averse to spending millions to maintain the livelihood of four to five thousand people in the distant Falkland Islands.
The current US Republican Party Primary candidates (excepting Ron Paul, who is nothing if not consistent) are shouting for massive cuts in public spending, but are still willing to spend billions in public money that they allegedly cannot afford on a war with Iran!
If you are "broke", you are "broke"? Well, not exactly - right?
The problem with politics is that it has become all about propaganda, not about the realities on the ground.
In my opinion, politicians should level with their people. They should stop making phoney promises and set about getting their debt piles down to zero as quickly as possible, while trying to offer their people the best standard of living available to them.
It needs sacrifices, it needs realistic solutions, and it needs honesty. The chance of getting those though in the current environment is as close to zero as it gets!
Wednesday, 8 February 2012
When does "broke" mean "broke"? - Part 1: personal finances
My father's ashes will be turning in their urn, if they keep these things for nearly a quarter of a century (he died on Easter Monday in 1988 - 4/4/88, the arithmetical balance of those figures would have appealed to his interesting mind).
He always believed that if you borrowed money, or bought things on hire purchase (the "instalment plan" it used to be called in the US - not sure whether the phrase is still in vogue), you paid it back. As quickly as possible. And you stayed strictly within your (very limited in our family circumstances) means.
These days people take out debt to pay off debt that they already owe - consolidating the debt is often the phrase used. The money is still owed, it is just that the repayment terms are spread over a longer period. No fixed instalments, just keep paying even though you are bound not to get into more debt and could pay it all off eventually. Can't you?
No????
Am I surprised???? "We" have sold our economies out so most of the decent jobs where people can make a decent living have become cheap labour in China and India, and we still want to buy a Mercedes Benz on McDonalds or Burger King "wages" (wage is actually an honourable term which is more than can be said for what the McLackeys get paid!). "We" incidentally means the the western world and the people who run companies - which is actually a very small percentage of "us"!
So the debts will continue to be there and grow. Inevitably until we get back to an economic model where people (the real "we") can get get worthwhile jobs in line with their ("our") talents. And also where "we" redevelop a culture where debt is the slave not the master, and we learn to live within our means once more.
I can hear my father's ashes, which had been seriously roused, snuggling down again in comfort at that thought.
The down side is, of course, that consumer driven economic growth will slow down. And if people stop borrowing so much money, the banks will have lower profits (sob, sob, sob - don't you really feel sorrow for banks sometimes? No???? I can't say I blame you!).
"Broke" used to mean that you could not afford to buy things. These days it means you cannot afford to pay off the instalment on your accumulating debt and cannot borrow any more to pay off any more - and the bank will not help you out any further, as they cannot see that there is any more profit to be gained from your misery.
Or it means that you are an economic purist who disdains the modern thinking on this and refuses to take out debt - and cannot pay the necessary bills.
Like I have my medical insurance bill to pay next week - €218 - and my bank balance is €20 (well actually €20 and some cents), and short of another loud discussion with my otherwise loving and affectionate wife (who thinks that we should get government help to bail us out - though she does have the money herself), or one of the various customers, who owe me over €1,000 as things stand, paying earlier than the 45 days it normally takes them to pay - I cannot see how that bill is going to get paid!
Well I only had a heart attack in 2008 and it is only medical insurance ...
He always believed that if you borrowed money, or bought things on hire purchase (the "instalment plan" it used to be called in the US - not sure whether the phrase is still in vogue), you paid it back. As quickly as possible. And you stayed strictly within your (very limited in our family circumstances) means.
These days people take out debt to pay off debt that they already owe - consolidating the debt is often the phrase used. The money is still owed, it is just that the repayment terms are spread over a longer period. No fixed instalments, just keep paying even though you are bound not to get into more debt and could pay it all off eventually. Can't you?
No????
Am I surprised???? "We" have sold our economies out so most of the decent jobs where people can make a decent living have become cheap labour in China and India, and we still want to buy a Mercedes Benz on McDonalds or Burger King "wages" (wage is actually an honourable term which is more than can be said for what the McLackeys get paid!). "We" incidentally means the the western world and the people who run companies - which is actually a very small percentage of "us"!
So the debts will continue to be there and grow. Inevitably until we get back to an economic model where people (the real "we") can get get worthwhile jobs in line with their ("our") talents. And also where "we" redevelop a culture where debt is the slave not the master, and we learn to live within our means once more.
I can hear my father's ashes, which had been seriously roused, snuggling down again in comfort at that thought.
The down side is, of course, that consumer driven economic growth will slow down. And if people stop borrowing so much money, the banks will have lower profits (sob, sob, sob - don't you really feel sorrow for banks sometimes? No???? I can't say I blame you!).
"Broke" used to mean that you could not afford to buy things. These days it means you cannot afford to pay off the instalment on your accumulating debt and cannot borrow any more to pay off any more - and the bank will not help you out any further, as they cannot see that there is any more profit to be gained from your misery.
Or it means that you are an economic purist who disdains the modern thinking on this and refuses to take out debt - and cannot pay the necessary bills.
Like I have my medical insurance bill to pay next week - €218 - and my bank balance is €20 (well actually €20 and some cents), and short of another loud discussion with my otherwise loving and affectionate wife (who thinks that we should get government help to bail us out - though she does have the money herself), or one of the various customers, who owe me over €1,000 as things stand, paying earlier than the 45 days it normally takes them to pay - I cannot see how that bill is going to get paid!
Well I only had a heart attack in 2008 and it is only medical insurance ...
Tuesday, 7 February 2012
Iran - the Pat Buchanan take
Pat Buchanan is supposed to be a conservative.
There is, in my opinion, no better American writer on world affairs than he is, and for detail and reasoning the following item deserves to be read by everyone with an interest in what is happening in the Middle East at the moment (and for the record I agree with just about everything that he has to say here).
Go to
http://www.creators.com/conservative/pat-buchanan.html
and read the column dated February 7th.
There is, in my opinion, no better American writer on world affairs than he is, and for detail and reasoning the following item deserves to be read by everyone with an interest in what is happening in the Middle East at the moment (and for the record I agree with just about everything that he has to say here).
Go to
http://www.creators.com/conservative/pat-buchanan.html
and read the column dated February 7th.
Sunday, 5 February 2012
This is not a new comment, but it is worth repeating
Because one side is wrong, it does not make the other side right.
Two arguments can be equally wrong, there is no diametrically opposite situation involved where one false statement generates accuracy automatically on the other.
So lies the current situation with Iran and Israel.
I have no time for the current Iranian regime. I also have little respect for the current Israeli government and its calls for war (usually involving other parties to participate).
Both sides need a neutral force strong enough to pull them back from the brink. BOTH IMHO ARE WRONG!
Two arguments can be equally wrong, there is no diametrically opposite situation involved where one false statement generates accuracy automatically on the other.
So lies the current situation with Iran and Israel.
I have no time for the current Iranian regime. I also have little respect for the current Israeli government and its calls for war (usually involving other parties to participate).
Both sides need a neutral force strong enough to pull them back from the brink. BOTH IMHO ARE WRONG!
Thursday, 2 February 2012
First world, third world - different rules
My wife's sister decided to visit us this week.
By any stretch of the imagination, she is a bright lady. She teaches Biology at a university in Bangkok, Thailand, and what she does not know about the subject is probably not worth knowing.
It is her first visit to Europe. And if you want an assessment of the hassle that she needed to spend seven days here ....
Apart from getting a visa, all her travel documents translated usw and all the other travel related details, she also needed an invitation letter from me, complete with telephone number and email address. The fear is, I think, that she would be brought into the country for illicit purposes (prostitution or working in an illegal labour sweat shop). Well maybe not the country - the ramifications of the Schengen Agreement being that once in the zone, she could go to any other member state, where the rules may not be as strict as in Germany.
Again, all well and good. Gifted scientist she may be, languages are sadly not her forte (no German, not much English). So when she found herself at the airport here and had to spend 10 minutes being grilled by sceptical immigration offices .... OK, imagine the problem.
It is not just Germany though. The UK is not a member of the Schengen Agreement. When I want to go to the UK with my wife, she needs a visa, even though she is a permanent resident of Germany with all the appropriate documentation. We could, for the princely sum of €844, get a 10-year visa for her. As we reached our tenth wedding anniversary last week and had made a grand total of two visits to the UK (involving a grand total of 6 days) during those ten years, it has never struck me as worth it.
So it is normally for us a 6-month visa to cover a short visit. The first time we filled out all the documentation, transferred the appropriate sum of money, and a couple of weeks later got the visa by mail.
The second time though was indicative of the sort of stupidity that had taken over (and I cannot swear that this still applies, but I would not be surprised if it does). Rather than doing this by mail, you have to turn up in person at the visa office of the British Consulate in Düsseldorf, and be subjected to a detailed personal interview - EVEN IF YOU HAVE BEEN AWARDED A VISA FOR A PREVIOUS VISIT!.
Apart from the cost of the visa, you are stuck with your own transport costs to and from Düsseldorf. Even given the excellent direct railway service, you do not get much change out of €100, and imagine if you had to make the journey from the farthest corner of Bavaria or Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. All extra costs.
I read a comment from an obvious supporter of the BNP on one website regularly where the writer implied that thousands of illegal immigrants are pouring into the UK. Through the Channel Tunnel? In which case the police are doing an extraordinarily bad job! Given what I have seen of visa procedures here, getting into the UK is extraordinarily difficult for anyone from outside the EU! So much for illegal immigants flooding in, and other worthless propaganda!
Meanwhile let us put the boot on the other foot. Assume you are a British or German sleazeball who wants to hang around the sleazy bars in Bangkok (7 streets in a city of 6 million people, don't overestimate the importance of this "industry") or Pattaya. You need a visa? Of course not - you get 28 days unlimited access. It also applies to normal tourists, of course, and business people and teachers in universities, wharrever.
Why are the Thais so lenient? Why do they not apply the same draconian laws that the European powers apply to them? Yes, tourism is vital, but surely that also applies in Europe?
As "Third World" countries go, Thailand is quite advanced - it is way ahead of its unfortunate neighbours like Burma and Cambodia. I am surprised that there has not been more of an issue made over how its nationals are treated when they go abroad. The inconsistent double-standard currently applying definitely needs revisiting, and quickly!
By any stretch of the imagination, she is a bright lady. She teaches Biology at a university in Bangkok, Thailand, and what she does not know about the subject is probably not worth knowing.
It is her first visit to Europe. And if you want an assessment of the hassle that she needed to spend seven days here ....
Apart from getting a visa, all her travel documents translated usw and all the other travel related details, she also needed an invitation letter from me, complete with telephone number and email address. The fear is, I think, that she would be brought into the country for illicit purposes (prostitution or working in an illegal labour sweat shop). Well maybe not the country - the ramifications of the Schengen Agreement being that once in the zone, she could go to any other member state, where the rules may not be as strict as in Germany.
Again, all well and good. Gifted scientist she may be, languages are sadly not her forte (no German, not much English). So when she found herself at the airport here and had to spend 10 minutes being grilled by sceptical immigration offices .... OK, imagine the problem.
It is not just Germany though. The UK is not a member of the Schengen Agreement. When I want to go to the UK with my wife, she needs a visa, even though she is a permanent resident of Germany with all the appropriate documentation. We could, for the princely sum of €844, get a 10-year visa for her. As we reached our tenth wedding anniversary last week and had made a grand total of two visits to the UK (involving a grand total of 6 days) during those ten years, it has never struck me as worth it.
So it is normally for us a 6-month visa to cover a short visit. The first time we filled out all the documentation, transferred the appropriate sum of money, and a couple of weeks later got the visa by mail.
The second time though was indicative of the sort of stupidity that had taken over (and I cannot swear that this still applies, but I would not be surprised if it does). Rather than doing this by mail, you have to turn up in person at the visa office of the British Consulate in Düsseldorf, and be subjected to a detailed personal interview - EVEN IF YOU HAVE BEEN AWARDED A VISA FOR A PREVIOUS VISIT!.
Apart from the cost of the visa, you are stuck with your own transport costs to and from Düsseldorf. Even given the excellent direct railway service, you do not get much change out of €100, and imagine if you had to make the journey from the farthest corner of Bavaria or Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. All extra costs.
I read a comment from an obvious supporter of the BNP on one website regularly where the writer implied that thousands of illegal immigrants are pouring into the UK. Through the Channel Tunnel? In which case the police are doing an extraordinarily bad job! Given what I have seen of visa procedures here, getting into the UK is extraordinarily difficult for anyone from outside the EU! So much for illegal immigants flooding in, and other worthless propaganda!
Meanwhile let us put the boot on the other foot. Assume you are a British or German sleazeball who wants to hang around the sleazy bars in Bangkok (7 streets in a city of 6 million people, don't overestimate the importance of this "industry") or Pattaya. You need a visa? Of course not - you get 28 days unlimited access. It also applies to normal tourists, of course, and business people and teachers in universities, wharrever.
Why are the Thais so lenient? Why do they not apply the same draconian laws that the European powers apply to them? Yes, tourism is vital, but surely that also applies in Europe?
As "Third World" countries go, Thailand is quite advanced - it is way ahead of its unfortunate neighbours like Burma and Cambodia. I am surprised that there has not been more of an issue made over how its nationals are treated when they go abroad. The inconsistent double-standard currently applying definitely needs revisiting, and quickly!
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