March 19 must be a bad date in the calendar of Middle Eastern dictators. Bush started his war against Hussein on March 19, 2003; and now, on March 19, 2011, Western powers began bombing Libya. For better of for worse… we shall see. I’d still like to know how it came to be that African countries in the Security Council didn’t vote against this fairly broad resolution, and China and Russia didn’t veto it.
Back when the Iraq war was raging, I often put some statistics into my Day Book, comparing what has been said vs. what has been found (e.g., weapons of mass destruction.)
It’s time to do some statistics again.
Number of times the US economy (nominal GDP) is larger than China’s: 2.5 Number of times the US per capita GDP is larger than China’s: 10 Number of years it may take China to catch up to the US at present growth rates: 30 Number of people seriously injured by radiation at Fukushima: 0 Percentage of people in an informal CTV Ottawa poll who think nuclear power is unsafe: 53% Number of people protesting nuclear power in Germany: 60,000 Number of nuclear weapons in existence: 22,000 Largest nuclear weapon ever detonated (the Tsar Bomba): 60 megatons Number of Tsar Bomba’s with the energy equivalent of the Japanese earthquake: 100,000 Democracy index of China according to the Polity IV project: −7 Democracy index of Iran: −6 Democracy index of Iran just five years ago: 3 Democracy index of Japan: 10 Democracy index of Saudi Arabia: −10 Life expectancy in Japan (years): 82.6 (#1) Life expectancy in Canada (years): 80.7 (#11) Life expectancy in the United States (years): 78.1 (#36) Life expectancy in Iraq (years): 59.5 (#153) Life expectancy in Afghanistan (years): 43.8 (#188 out of 194) Number of top ten most literate US cities found in the top ten most conservative US states: 0 Number of top ten most literate US cities found in the top ten most liberal US states: 5 Ranking of the state of Mississippi in the list of conservative states: #1 Ranking of the state of Mississippi by health according to the United Health Foundation: #50
The thing about presenting raw numbers is that you can draw your own conclusions. Except of course that choosing which numbers to present may already amount to a not-so-subtle lie. For what it’s worth, I chose my numbers on a whim.
Hungary’s government thinks destroying secret police archives from the Communist era is a good idea. I have to wonder… is the intent to protect those whose personal lives were monitored and recorded in minute detail by the almighty State? Or, more likely I think, are they planning this because they have something to hide? For what it’s worth, I signed an online petition protesting this destruction of historical documents.
Earlier this week Egypt, a country of 80 million, collectively left the Internet.
I think this, more than anything, demonstrates that the days (if not the hours) of Mubarak’s regime are numbered. The damage this step causes to the Egyptian economy are likely quite considerable. And a number of other countries are worried: it appears that a significant share of the data traffic between Europe and Gulf oil states, as well as Asia, passes through Egypt. This connections aren’t yet affected, but who knows what happens next?
We live in interesting times.
One party-rule, proclaims The Guardian in its latest article about Hungary, and they’re not that terribly far from the truth: It seems to me that Mr. Orban is trying to build precisely that, demonstrating that of all Hungarian politicians, he is the one who bears the true legacy of the Kadar era. Indeed I think that this is the best way to describe Orban: he is Kadar’s posthumous revenge.
The Washington Post finally took notice: not one but two articles, an opinion piece and an editorial about my country of birth, the latter titled The Putinization of Hungary.
Once again, I wish I could disagree but I cannot. Hungary may have been ruled by the Socialist Party for the past eight years, but even though they are the formal successors of the once all-powerful Hungarian Socialist Workers Party, it’s not them but Orban’s Fidesz who carry the real legacy of the Kadar era.
Or perhaps both do (I certainly have few illusions about the purity of the Socialists), but the Socialists didn’t have the two-thirds parliamentary majority that Orban enjoys. Which gives Orban effectively unlimited power: with his two thirds majority, he can dismantle independent institutions and rewrite the country’s constitution.
Both of which he’s busy doing.
And I keep thinking that it was good that Hungary once had democratic government… too bad it didn’t last very long. Or am I succumbing to hype and writing democracy’s epitaph prematurely? This is one instance when I desperately, sincerely hope that I am badly wrong.
Conspiracy theorists, rejoice: Paypal apparently admitted that the decision to freeze the Paypal account of Wikileaks was due to US government pressure. Long live freedom and democracy. No wonder some folks are comparing our treatment of Assange to China’s treatment of Nobel laureate Xiaobo. We are, after all, doing the same thing China is doing: we are trying to suppress information, and we threaten and intimidate those who release it. I find myself in strong agreement with the writer of an article that appeared in the Vancouver Sun: we are forced to ask questions (about torture, detentions, intimidation, death threats and worse) that ten years ago none of us thought we’d be asking.
There is, though, a silver lining. Perhaps all this evil has always been part of our “civilized” society, and it’s only now, in the era of the Internet, that we can so easily find out.
I’ve done it: I donated to Wikileaks. While I still could, at least using a credit card, now that the Paypal option is gone.
Does this mean that I am now on somebody’s list as a supporter of Mr. “rapist, worse than a terrorist” Assange and that I can expect to be sexually assaulted, er, I mean, strip searched when I next go through an airport?
And isn’t this something that only denizens of evil police states should have to be worrying about?
News flash: Paypal blocks Wikileaks.
But no, we’re not like the evil Chinese. We don’t do censorship. It’s strictly for legal reasons, you see.
I wanted to send money to Wikileaks yesterday. Perhaps it’s better that I didn’t, because for all I know, monies in Wikileaks’ account may be frozen by Paypal. I’m sure there will be other ways. Hopefully I won’t be charged one day as a supporter of terrorism because of a $20 contribution.
Yes, I’ll continue to use Paypal and buy books from Amazon. I just have a worse opinion than ever about our commitment to our cherished Western values.
No, we don’t do censorship. This is the West, after all. We are civilized, democratic, and we deplore evil regimes that prevent their citizens from prying into the secrets of the almighty State.
Except…
Except when said secrets are a little too inconvenient. We then stop pretending and issue an international arrest warrant against the founder of a Web site for a crime that, even if it was really committed, was likely little more than an unwarranted sexual advance; we “convince” a large hosting provider to stop hosting the unpleasant content; and we convince the DNS provider to stop servicing the name of the domain in question. This is so much more civilized than running a state censorship establishment!
My arse.
For the record, Wikileaks mirrors can be located by looking them up at http://wikileaks.info/. As of this morning, the following information was provided there:
Find all the current Wikileaks Mirrors here. Helpful, if the main site – wikileaks.org – is down.
Real mirrors on different IP Addresses
Important Wikileaks Links
Contrary to what is being said above, the wikileaks.de domain name works this morning; it points to 213.251.145.96, which seems up to date, including the “cablegate” releases.
Bleeping hypocrisy. At least the Chinese are honest about what they are doing.
For many years, I felt that despite their “anti-communist” political rhetoric and right-of-center stand on many issues, it is Hungary’s Fidesz party that carries the true legacy of the communist era. The party’s leader, Prime Minister Viktor Orban, seems hell-bent on governing in the style of one-party regimes, and now that he enjoys a two thirds parliamentary majority, he has the mandate to do so.
Even so, I did not expect that they will show their true nature this boldly and this rapidly, causing concern even among international investors, as they expressed their intent to curb the jurisdiction of the country’s constitutional court, which happened to declare one of their recent measures unconstitutional.
Is this really the new Republican vision for America? A country surrounded by barbed wire, attack dogs, and border guards with machine guns? Apparently so, according to Alaska Senate candidate Joe Miller. And they wonder why some conservative-leaning people, like myself, root for the Democrats these days.
Oh, and one more thing about East Germany… they could NOT do it. The Wall eventually failed, and the country itself went down the drain with it.
This is what the German news magazine thinks of the city of my birth, Budapest: they call it Europe’s Capital of Anti-Semitism.
I wish I could fully disagree.
It is rare to read anything these days from Canada’s unofficial copyright critic, Michael Geist, that is even mildly optimistic. Not so today… Geist appears to welcome the near-final version of ACTA, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, notably its relatively flexible approach to copy protection and digital access controls. It seems that sanity may prevail, despite earlier concerns about secretly negotiated Draconian restrictions. Let us hope that this does not go unnoticed by Canada’s Parliament as it considers revisions to our proposed new copyright law.
In an editorial today, the Ottawa Citizen praises the decision of Harper’s government to cancel a planned speech by a prominent imam.
To be clear, I think it is entirely appropriate to give the cold shoulder to an organization according to which Israelis over the age of 18 are fair game for killing. No argument there on my part.
But… the article goes on to discuss the practice of taqiyya, or “holy deception”, yet I think they’re guilty of a little bit of holy deception of their own, when they list the traits which they associate with Islamist extremism: denouncing Israeli policies as racist, or calling for the removal of Hezbollah and Hamas from the list of terrorist organizations.
Being a devoted atheist, I don’t think I qualify as an Islamist extremist, and having voted with my feet against the “workers’ paradise” I don’t think I qualify as a good left-wing extremist either. But… I tend to believe that some of the policies of Israel indeed qualify as racist, and I tend to believe that, in the interest of realpolitik if nothing else, legitimizing Hezbollah and Hamas may be the right thing to do.
Years ago, I argued that it should be possible to be critical of the actions of the government of Israel without being labeled an anti-Semite. The same way, it is wrong to denounce Muslim critics of the Israeli government as Islamist extremists. If we wish to live in a world that is free of Sharia law and of prohibitions against defaming a religion, we must realize that it also has to be a world in which one is free to denounce a government or be critical of an inflexible policy towards a popular political organization.
Yesterday marked the 20th anniversary of German reunificiation. Having grown up in a world in which the separate existences of West and East Germany were taken for granted, I am still digesting this fact, just as I am still digesting the collapse of the USSR, even as these events slowly migrate from the pages of geopolitics to the pages of history.
Watching CNN tonight, I was about to swear that if I hear talking heads on TV complaining one more time about Obama not being angry enough, I’d do something angry myself. But then I realized that it’s pointless… they’re going to do it anyway. I do wonder though what these so-called journalists see when they look in the mirror after a broadcast.
Just for the record, I may be a godless atheist but that doesn’t mean I think it’s a good idea to piss off a billion Muslims and, for no particular reason other than to offend them, burn their holy book.
Should this idiot of a pastor go ahead with his Koran burning, however, I would advise Muslims to shut up and move on. After all, “our” righteous idiots, acting in the name of Jesus, only burn the Koran in front of the world’s television cameras, whereas the Muslim world’s righteous idiots end up sawing heads off innocent screaming people, all in the name of Allah. I strongly disapprove of book burning, yet even so, I find the burning of some bound sheets of paper with printing on them a far less uncivilized form of protest than the use of a rusty knife to severe a person’s carotid artery, windpipe, vertebrae, and whatever other body parts there are that connect a human being’s head to his or her body.
If only I could make a similarly favorable comparison between the act of flying passenger planes into crowded buildings vs. bombing a country into submission (remember “shock and awe?”) using a well trained, highly disciplined, high-tech equipped, professional military.
Going to Cuba to interview Fidel Castro, I suspect the one thing no journalist expects is to hear is words from the Leader of the Revolution that would put many ordinary Cuban citizens in jail. Words like, “Cuban Model Doesn’t Even Work For Us Anymore”. Yet, apparently, it was precisely this that Castro told Jeffrey Goldberg, a correspondent of The Atlantic.
I think I’ll listen to some Buena Vista Social Club music this morning. Ah, there’s Ibrahim Ferrer’s CD, I haven’t listened to it in years, and I just ripped its contents the other day. Time to check those MP3s…
The founder of Wikileaks has been charged with rape in Sweden. As of this morning, his whereabouts are unknown.
Are these charges true? Is Assange a rapist? Perhaps. He is certainly a weird fellow, and for all I know, he’s not necessarily weird purely in a good sense.
But… are these charges true? He pissed off a lot of people, and not just people, but some of the most powerful institutions in the world, including the US and other governments, corporations, and even shady entities like the Church of Scientology. Just how far are governments (and non-governments) willing to go to get rid of him? Are they capable of theatrical dirty tricks? At one time I would have said no. But that was at a time when I could not have imagined that a modern-day government would poison a former agent on foreign soil, using an exotic radioactive substance. At that time, I could not have imagined that a modern-day democratic government would engage in a systematic campaign of lies and deception to justify an unjust war of aggression. Compared to such things, a trumped-up charge against a (to them, very) annoying individual is nothing. Perhaps he should be grateful that he’s still alive and he’s not setting off any Geiger-counters nearby.
Update: And now, a few hours after I wrote the paragraphs above, here’s breaking news from CNN: “WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange ‘no longer wanted’ and not a rape suspect, Swedish prosecutor says on website”. Sooo… What was this all about?