November 24, 2011
November 4, 2011
Opening moments of the G20 in Cannes
From the tone of the article, even the Guardian is finding it hard to take the politicians seriously this time:
The red carpet was drenched and sodden, the palm trees battered by a storm and even the trumpet fanfares of the French Republican Guard were muffled by the wind.
Nicolas Sarkozy’s glittering G20 summit at Cannes was supposed to be a showcase for his skill as the caped crusader: Super Sarko, fighting his way through the markets and eurozone crisis to rescue his personal damsel in distress, France’s endangered AAA-credit rating.
Instead, the opening hours on the French Riviera seemed more like a muted crisis-gathering of head-scratching politicians, some staring into the jaws of political death, fearing being punished at the ballot box or hung out to dry by their own governments.
Even without the specially summoned whipping boy, the Greek prime minister George Papandreou — who had a constantly furrowed brow and clasped hands, as pressure was heaped on him over his resignation-referendum ping-ping — the red-carpet arrivals ceremony often looked like a roll call of doom.
Silvio Berlusconi arrived in the rain with a huge black overcoat perched on his shoulders, shoulder pads visible from space, likened by his own press corps to a mafia boss from the Sopranos.
October 30, 2011
Using Pompeii as another stick to beat Berlusconi
Mary Beard debunks the widely reported story of yet another wall collapse in the archaeological remains of Pompeii:
By chance I am on the site of Pompeii for the weekend. It is now swarming with more journalists than tourists, and all (it seems) with a determination to hype another collapse, another Pompeian disaster. That is to say, they are here with a determined misunderstanding of what has just happened — or with a drive to use any damage to the site as a stick with which to beat Berlusconi.
Actually, I am usually quite happy to beat Berlusconi, but the fact is that this latest melodrama only serves to make the job much more difficult for those in the archaeological services here, who are doing their level best to keep the place up and running. (This weekend curators and other staff have been fielding tv crews, not getting on with the real job.)
So far as I can tell, what happened is this. There was an absolute downpour last night, in the course of which some stones were dislodged from a relatively fragile (and not very well built) stretch of wall near the Nola gate. A custode entered this damage rather loosely in the incident book — and (we can only speculate how and why) that report got to the press, and it soon became a new “wall collapse”. The carabinieri arrived and everything in the area (including, let me confess, where I want to go) was shut off.
Media folks are not trained archaeologists, so it’s easy to understand how a garbled report could be misunderstood — and that’s setting aside the urge to use any tool as a weapon against the current Italian prime minister. This is why media reports become less and less dependable as they try to report on more specific or more technical information: they lack the expertise and usually don’t take the time to get external experts to help them. (My favourite examples of this are when naval vessels larger than a rowboat are described as “battleships” and tracked military vehicles are invariably “tanks”.)
H/T to Tyler Cowen for the link.
August 31, 2011
Despite media reports, Australia didn’t “screw up” torpedo purchase
Strategy Page expresses a bit of contempt for the Fairfax media reporters who mangled a story to get a juicy headline or six:
Another good example of mass media screwing up a story on the military recently appeared in Australia. Fairfax, the largest media group in Australia ran a late August story asserting that the Australian Navy had mishandled the acquisition of new anti-submarine torpedo from France, and had to hire translators to turn the French and Italian user and technical manuals into English. The Defense Ministry quickly responded and pointed out that the Fairfax reporters had misunderstood the situation. The contract to purchase the torpedoes stipulated that all documents be in English. This is standard for such purchases, and has been for a long time. The Fairfax reporters should have known that. The Defense Ministry was hiring translators to handle additional data, not covered by the MU90 purchase, on some of the 200 test launches of the torpedo. This would save the Australian Navy a lot of money as some of their own test launches could be skipped, if the French and Italian tests covered the same situations. But the documents on most of those tests were in the language of the navy conducting them (French or Italian.) The reports were classified, but the two navies were willing to share them, although it was understood that Australia would have to handle translations. This has been standard practice for decades, but the Fairfax reporters didn’t dig that deep. This sort of facile military reporting has become increasingly common. It goes beyond calling all warships (except carriers and subs) “battleships” (a class of ship that went out of wide use half a century ago) or calling self-propelled artillery (or even infantry fighting vehicles) “tanks” simply because they all have turrets (but very different uses). The bad reporting extends to many other basic items of equipment, training, leadership, tactics and casualties.
The argument from the press is probably that the public doesn’t know — and doesn’t care about — the differences between warship classes or armoured vehicles anyway, so they don’t “waste their time” by being accurate.
July 14, 2011
The Eurozone crises
That’s right, crises, not crisis. There are three interlinked crises, not just one:
The crisis in the Eurozone has been lurching from one country to another over the past year or so. After bailouts for Greece, Ireland and Portugal, and with a second bailout for Greece in the offing, the financial markets this week turned their attention to Italy, a far larger economy than those previously affected. Spain, another country struggling to pay its way, has also been hit by austerity measures and political turmoil. But while it is easy to get caught up in the specifics of each new stage of the crisis, it is worth taking a step back to understand what is going on and the possibilities for the future.
The Euro crisis, like just about every other economic story these days, has a three-fold character. It is not, in fact, a single crisis; it has three inter-related elements: financial, economic and political.
Of the three, the financial crisis is, paradoxically, the least significant, even though it is the most prominent of the three and the one which threatens to spin out of control with serious broader consequences. Alongside the financial, the economic aspect is the most entrenched and material of the three, while the political crisis — that is, the failure of the political elites to get on top of the other two challenges — is the most critical, as it is, or should have been, the key to the resolution of the other two. The shift in focus to Italy, the Eurozone’s third largest economy, indicates that time may have run out for effective containment. The Euro genie is probably out of the bottle.
July 11, 2011
The Euro: who’ll be the first to leave?
With all eyes on Greece recently, the troubles of Italy come as a sudden shock to many:
Greece, Ireland, Portugal, (maybe) Spain…and now Italy? Contagion. The hope on the part of the EU and ECB was to contain the contagion by throwing money at it, but every time they fill one sink-hole with Euros another one opens up. It’s been obvious for a long time that the Eurozone was simply a bad idea, and this crisis has exposed the rotten underpinnings for all to see. Europe wanted to have a currency union just like the United States, but they are finding out the hard way that a monetary union without a fiscal-policy union just won’t work. European countries are not like US states — they have different langauges, different work rules, different governing philosophies…different cultures. The big question in everyone’s mind is…now what? Some countries must default, and a default will probably require leaving the Euro and going back to the sovereign currency. But no one knows exactly how this will work, or what the consequences will be.
Some people are floating the idea of a Euro-Bond, but I find that a little nonsensical absent any fiscal-policy union backing it. But of course this may be the point to the enterprise: to “force” Europeans into a closer union without having to go through the messy (and time-consuming) processes of holding a vote. The EU project has never really been a democratic enterprise from the very first — the Eurozone was implemented without the say-so (even over the protests of) its citizens. If I Eurobond is floated, I expect it to be another example of droit de Seigneur on the part of the Eurozone elite. (And it probably won’t work, and will piss away a lot more good money after bad, but none of that has stopped them so far.)
June 29, 2011
April 8, 2011
QotD: the international double standard
A long time ago we had a president who was doing a chubby intern.
And some Americans got uptight about it.
And we were told by Europeans everywhere ‘Relax, it’s just sex. He’s the leader of the country, they have mistresses, it happens get over it you uptight prudes.’
So now with Silvio Berlusconi having sex with underage prostitutes and orgies and I don’t know what-all I guess that makes Europe — and Italy in particular — about eighteen times more sophisticated [1] than us hicks in the United States and so-on and so-forth.
Y’all must be so proud.
[1] Sarcasm.
Brian Dunbar, “Sophisticated Europe”, Space for Commerce, by Brian Dunbar, 2011-04-07
November 30, 2010
Ireland’s debt problem
James Howard Kunstler looks at Ireland’s plight:
When you’re out of the country, as I was last week, it’s good to know that the home folks are keeping up with the Kardashians and bravely venturing into the blood-splattered chambers of cable TV’s latest hit, Bridal Plasty — where candidates for marriage are transformed from Holstein cows into inflatable sex toys by magic surgical technology — not to mention all those humble guardians of freedom who kept the parking lots of WalMart safe for consumerism in the wee small hours of Black Friday. These are, after all, perilous times.
Elsewhere, Ireland and the rest of Europe wore themselves out with soul-searching all week over how to handle national bankruptcy within a currency system that bears only a schematic relation to reality. Does the bankruptee go broke all at once, or is she recruited into permanent debt slavery so that the bond-holders of various banks can keep their loved ones in marzipan and Fauchon’s wonderful marrons glacés for one more holiday season? As of Monday morning, Ireland has been commanded to, er, bend over and pick up the soap, shall we say, for about a hundred billion euros in loans that will not be paid back until a mile-high ice-sheet covers Dublin (something that might happen sooner rather than later if the climate mavens are right).
We’ll see how this bail-out goes down with the French and German voters, too, who have to pay for it, after all, especially as Portugal, Spain, and Italy line up at the cash cage for their cheques (and bars of soap). Of course, a few more basis points in the interest rate spreads could prang the whole Euro soap opera — does anybody really believe this game of kick-the-can will go on after New Years? I’m not even sure it goes on past this Friday, but I am a notoriously nervous fellow.
This is almost as good as the (temporarily discontinued) daily Financial Briefings from Monty.
H/T to Terry Kinder for the link.
November 29, 2010
November 10, 2010
Pompeii building collapse triggers calls for nationalization privatization
I never thought I’d read an article in the Guardian calling for the privatization of a state asset:
Opposition politicians and commentators accused Italy’s government of neglect and mismanagement today over the collapse of the 2,000-year-old House of the Gladiators in the ruins of ancient Pompeii.
Some commentators said the Unesco world heritage site should be privatised and removed from state control. La Stampa newspaper ran a story headlined “Pompeii — the collapse of shame,” echoing national opinion over the cultural disaster.
The stone house, on one of the site’s main streets and measuring about 80 sq m (860 sq ft), collapsed just after dawn yesterday while Pompeii was closed to visitors. The structure was believed to have been used as a club house by gladiators before they went to battle in a nearby amphitheatre.
[. . .]
“Precisely because it belongs to all humanity, its management should be taken away from a state that has shown itself incapable of protecting it,”
[. . .]
Approximately 2.5 million tourists visit Pompeii every year, making it one of Italy’s most popular attractions. Art historians and residents have for years complained that the sites were in a state of decay and needed regular maintenance. Two years ago the government declared a state of emergency for Pompeii but it lasted only a year.
Roberto Cecchi, under-secretary at the culture ministry, said there had been no effective, continuous maintenance at Pompeii in half a century. Breaking ranks with his ministry, he said stop-gap, ad hoc measures, such as the appointment of commissioners, which attracted flashes of publicity, were no substitute for the constant monitoring worthy of a world treasure.
To be fair, the Guardian is merely reporting on the calls for privatization, not explicitly endorsing them, but even that is shocking enough.
June 22, 2010
October 11, 2009
QotD: Silvio Berlusconi
As Silvio Berlusconi yesterday tried to shore up his position by declaring himself irreplaceable as Italy’s head of government, a court in Milan was told it had been “amply demonstrated” that he was guilty of bribery.
“I am, and not only in my own opinion, the best prime minister who could be found today,” he told a press conference. “I believe there is no one in history to whom I should feel inferior. Quite the opposite.”
The problem, he explained, was that “In absolute terms, I am the most legally persecuted man of all times, in the whole history of mankind, worldwide, because I have been subjected to more than 2,500 court hearings and I have the good luck — having worked well in the past and having accumulated an important wealth — to have been able to spend more than €200m in consultants and judges . . . I mean in consultants and lawyers.“
John Hooper, “Silvio Berlusconi: I am inferior to no one in history”, The Guardian, 2009-10-10
