Quotulatiousness

April 11, 2011

Political grandstanding at the expense of Muslim women

Filed under: Europe, France, Law, Liberty, Religion — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:22

Josie Appleton points out the logical inconsistencies of the various European “Ban the Burkha” movements:

In spite of the grave crisis of the Euro, the French cabinet will today (19 May[, 2010]) find the time to discuss a draft law banning the wearing of full-face veils in public places. Spain has just slashed public wages and is on the verge of economic collapse, yet the minister of work yesterday made the effort to visit Lleida and voice his support for the mayor’s plan to prohibit full Islamic facewear in the streets. Last month, Belgium’s coalition government had dissolved and there was talk of splitting up the country, yet the parliament managed to unite 136 out of 138 deputies to vote through a law banning the burqa and niqab.

How is it that European leaders, in such difficult times, have invested such energy in the matter of women’s facewear? Why was a Spanish schoolgirl who insisted on wearing a headscarf so fascinating as to draw the media’s attention away from government cuts? Why such detailed discussions on the intricacies of Islamic veils? Newspapers feature pullouts on the different forms of Islamic veil, and commentators explain why the niqab is so much worse than the shayla or the chandor, and indeed how the hijab is fine and even liberating for Muslim women.

The burqa-ban laws were introduced with such displays of speechmaking that anybody would think the fate of these countries hung on this single point of principle. One Belgian deputy admitted that ‘the image of our country abroad is more and more incomprehensible’, but said this near-unanimous vote banning the burqa and niqab rescued ‘an element of pride to be Belgian’. A French commission on the veil said the veil was ‘contrary to the values of the Republic’ and the parliament should make it clear that ‘all of France is saying “no” to the full veil’. The Spanish work minister said this clothing ‘clashes fundamentally with our society and equality between men and women. The values of our society cannot go into retreat.’

Lovely sounding stuff in front of the microphones, to be sure. Good photo ops for ambitious politicians, to a clamour of general approval and risking the loss of very little: there were so relatively few women wearing these articles of clothing — and few of them or their husbands/fathers/brothers likely have the vote anyway.

Now, pay heed to the Law of Unintended Consequences. Many of these women now have a choice: disobey the family head by going out in public without wearing the niqab/hijab/burkha (and risk beatings or even honour-killing), or follow the dictates of the family head and risk being arrested by the gendarmes.

How, exactly, is this going to benefit those poor women?

Update: The ban in France was passed in October and goes into effect today:

The centre-right government, which passed the law in October, has rolled out a public relations campaign to explain the ban and the rules of its application that includes posters, pamphlets and a government-hosted website.

Guidelines spelled out in the pamphlet forbid police from asking women to remove their burqa in the street. They will instead be escorted to a police station and asked to remove the veil there for identification.

[. . .]

In Avignon, Vaucluse, Reuters TV filmed a woman boarding a train wearing a niqab, unchallenged by police.

“It’s not an act of provocation,” said Kenza Drider. “I’m only carrying out my citizens’ rights, I’m not committing a crime … If they [police] ask me for identity papers I’ll show them, no problem.”

France has five million Muslims, but fewer than 2,000 women are believed actually to wear a face veil.

Many Muslim leaders have said they support neither the veil nor the law banning it.

April 8, 2011

Monty’s daily dose of DOOM!

Filed under: Economics, Europe — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:12

People suffering from over-cheerful attitudes about the future of the European Union could just read Monty’s chock-full-of-DOOM postings at Ace of Spades HQ for a quick depressant:

Let’s begin abroad by explaining why Spain is boned. Spain suffers from the same disease as the rest of the continent generally — socialism, postmodernism, an ossified job market, an unsustainable welfare state — but in more concentrated form. Spain is so boned that their main export these days is young ‘uns (h/t Andy).

If you look at the countries currently in the midst of insolvency in Europe — Ireland, Greece, Portugal, and (shortly) Spain — it’s obvious that they are different entities altogether from their more prosperous European peers. For one, most of them are recent entrants onto the first-world stage. Spain languished under Franco until the mid 1970’s; Ireland only emerged from decades of civil strife (both amongst themselves and against England) in the early 1990’s; and Portugal was (and still is) a third-world nation glued to the continenet almost as an afterthought. Portugal is more properly thought of as a North African developing country than a first-world European country, whatever the maps say (h/t rdbrewer).

The Euro project hid those problems…for a while. Cheap credit allowed the dysfunctional European countries to borrow enough money to pretend to a first-world standard of living for more than a decade. There was real growth in the various economies — particularly in Ireland — but much of the “growth” was mainly borrowed money with little attendant economic or social reform.

The Great Downturn of 2008 did not cause the problem; it simply exposed what a sham the whole thing had been all along.

England is watching the drama play out on the Continent, and thanking $DEITY that they never signed on to the Euro. England still has serious problems, but they also have options that the other European nations do not have because they control their own currency.

As usual, the original post has lots of links to follow to increase the dosage of DOOM. Adjust intake to adequately suppress your optimism.

February 21, 2011

Nun with 600 Facebook friends kicked out of convent

Filed under: Media, Religion, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:15

Another amusing story from The Register:

A Spanish nun has been kicked out of her closed religious order after clocking up 600 friends on Facebook.

After 35 years closeted at the 700-year-old Santa Domingo el Real convent in Toledo, Maria Jesus Galan is back living with her mum, and has declared she rather fancies visiting New York and London.

The convent reportedly acquired a PC 10 years ago, believing that by banking online and the like, it would help minimise the sisters’ contact with the outside world, presumably because ecommerce would enable them to avoid known dens of iniquity, such as banks and supermarkets.

[. . .]

However, things went awry when she joined Facebook and quickly built up a network of 600 friends. Her fellow brides of Christ apparently disapproved, and according to Sr Maria, “made life impossible”.

November 30, 2010

Ireland’s debt problem

Filed under: Economics, Europe, Humour, Italy, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:48

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.

June 24, 2010

The unhinged are now running Spanish “green” tech companies

Filed under: Environment, Europe, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 18:12

As I read this, I kept hoping that it’d be fake:

Spain’s Dr. Gabriel Calzada — the author of a damning study concluding that Spain’s “green jobs” energy program has been a catastrophic economic failure — was mailed a dismantled bomb on Tuesday by solar energy company Thermotechnic.

Says Calzada:

Before opening it, I called [Thermotechnic] to know what was inside … they answered, it was their answer to my energy pieces.

Dr. Calzada contacted a terrorism expert to handle the package. The expert first performed a scan of the package, then opened it in front of a journalist, Dr. Calzada, and a private security expert.

The terrorism consultant said he had seen this before:

This time you receive unconnected pieces. Next time it can explode in your hands.

Dr. Calzada added:

[The terrorism expert] told me that this was a warning.

I have no idea what Spanish law says about this kind of blatant intimidation, but I hope there are charges laid and convictions resulting from those charges.

Spain, of course, recently announced that they were having to cut back on their plans to become the greenest country in Europe, as they couldn’t afford the additional costs, both up-front and in lost opportunities in other industries.

H/T to Ace for the link.

Update, 25 June: In the comments, Ed Darrell says I’ve been taken in and has a long post up with translations of the original article used by Ace and PajamasMedia: here. If Ed is right and I’ve been taken in, I’ll post a retraction. I’m sure he’ll do the same if it turns out to be true.

Update, 28 June: A clarification posted at Ace of Spades HQ makes it seem a bit less like a mock-bomb threat.

The Green company sending the package apparently had its actual package — a report — swapped with car parts at some point in the mailing. [. . .]

It didn’t look like, or feel like, a letter or report, so at that point Calzada got a security guard to scan it — and what was inside was a cylindrical object with wires attached. At that point, the security guard got an expert to examine it, with others in attendance. The contents were a container for diesel of some sort, and some other parts. The expert saw this as a bomb threat, based on a pattern used by, eg., ETA: “This one is a hoax bomb. The next one might not be.”

June 17, 2010

Spain finds its “green” energy unsustainable

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Europe, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:20

Spain can’t afford to subsidize all those “green” jobs anymore:

Dead broke Spain can’t afford to prop up renewables anymore. The Spanish government is cutting the numbers of hours in a day it’s prepared to pay for “clean” energy.

Estimates put the investment in solar energy in Spain at €18bn — but the investment was predicated, as it is with all flakey renewables, on taxpayer subsidies. With the country’s finances in ruins, making sacrifices for the Earth Goddess Gaia is an option Spain can no longer afford. Incredibly, Spain pays more in subsidies for renewables than the total cost of energy production for the country. It leaves industry with bills 17 per cent higher than the EU average.

[. . .]

“Sustainability” has been the magic word that extracted large sums of public subsidy that couldn’t otherwise have been rationally justified using traditional cost/benefit measures. Spain paid 11 times more for “green” energy than it did for fossil fuels. The public makes up the difference. The renewables bandwagon is like a hopeless football team that finishes bottom of the league each year — but claims it’s too special ever to be relegated.

Of course, the lesson won’t be learned by other countries or regions . . . Ontario recently signed on to a similar kind of deal with Samsung. But Ontario taxpayers are getting a bargain: the jobs being created under this scheme will only cost $303,472, compared with the eye-watering $774,000 the Spanish jobs cost.

June 16, 2010

Monty explains it all for you

Filed under: Economics, Europe, France, Humour — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:02

Financial worries? Fiscal imbalance? Debt woes? No problem! Monty has the answers (well, answers to some questions, even if they’re not the ones you’re interested in):

And the good news just keeps coming! Slumping cattle and lean-hogs futures may have bottomed out. Screw gold, man; I’m buying swine! (Monty, The Wasteland Bacon Baron. It has a nice ring to it. The potentate of pork! The sultan of swine! The High Lord of ham! The chitlin Chieftain!)

I’m not sure whether this is good news or not: Cramer calls yesterday’s big gain a sucker’s rally and advises people to get out. My rule of thumb is to treat anything Cramer says as the ravings of a lunatic. I consider him a shill and a buffoon. And yet . . . is this a Strange New Respect I’m feeling? Or just the dying embers of that burrito I ate for lunch yesterday?

French financial group AXA experiences a blinding glimpse of the obvious and exclaims, “Ze Euro eez doomed!”. Zut alors! (And no, I don’t know why French guys would be speaking English with a French accent instead of French.)

Spain and Portugal submit their austerity plans to the ECB and IMF. Plans include selling shoelaces at the airport, dancing for nickels, graft, corruption, and murder-for-hire. The ECB and IMF remain skeptical, and suggest that Portugal and Spain might want to look into selling the family silver or something.

And if all of that isn’t enough to get you assembling your Financial Apocalypse Survival kit, how about this?

More bond issues are being denominated in Canadian Loonies and Swiss Francs as investor skittishness regarding the Euro spreads. When investors choose something called the “Loonie” over your currency because it just sounds more stable somehow, dude, you got problems.

June 9, 2010

Confused by international finance? Monty can help

Filed under: Economics, Europe, France, Germany, Government, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:35

If you’re finding the up-then-down-then-under-the-table performance of your investments unfathomable, you’re probably wondering who can explain it all in a way that makes perfect sense and allows you to figure out the best way to handle your personal finances. If you find such a savant, let me know.

For the “real” story about why the markets are doing an imitation of an unstable personality on conflicting medication, here’s Monty’s “Wednesday Financial Briefing”:

Nicholas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel are still waging war against “the speculators” who had the temerity to point out that Euorpean finances were a God Damn mess. A spokesmen for the holders of European sovereign bonds warned the leaders that they were “teasing the gorilla in the monkey-house”. Sarkozy was heard to say that he farted in their general direction and that their fathers smelt of elderberries. Chancellor Merkel only muttered darkly, “I will break you!”

Interbank loans at Spanish banks are drying up. This tightens credit and leads to busted bond auctions. “Fitch can kiss my ass!”, said an unnamed source at Banco Santander who blames the problems on Fitch’s recent downgrade of Spanish debt. Just to show how not-broke they are, Santander bought back their stake in their Mexican unit from Bank of America for $2.5 billion. When asked if this was a wise move given their weak balance-sheet, a Santander representative lowered his trousers and mooned the press-pool.

US debt will climb to 19.6 trillion by 2015, according to a Treasury report to Congress. Tim Geithner assured everyone that, in true Keynesian fashion, every dollar of debt translates directly into GDP growth. Somehow. When pressed on the issue, Mr. Geithner began to cry and had to be excused to the lavatory to pull himself together.

May 3, 2010

The end of a monopoly

Filed under: Economics, Europe, Science, Wine — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:00

Wine bottles have been sealed with natural cork for hundreds of years. It is an extremely good, natural product that has been used by almost all wine producers because it was better than every other economic sealant available. But cork has a problem that, as a natural product, it is subject to certain risks, the worst of which from a wine viewpoint was contamination with the chemical compound called 2-4-6 Trichloroanisole (usually abbreviated as TCA).

It only takes a tiny amount of TCA to ruin a bottle of wine: and it occurs naturally in the trees from which the cork is harvested. Wine producers and consumers were demanding a solution (wine writers have estimated that between 10% and 15% of all wines suffer from TCA tainting). As monopoly suppliers, however, the cork producers did very little — where else were wineries going to get their bottle closures?

Enter the competition:

By the 1990s, retailers and wineries were clamoring for a solution to wine taint but the cork industry didn’t respond. “No industry with 95% to 97% market share is going to see its propensity to listen increase —and that’s what happened to us,” says Mr. de Jesus from Amorim.

The outcry was just the opening needed by Mr. Noel, a Belgian immigrant who in 1998 began making what he calls “corcs,” he says in part to avoid lawsuits from cork producers, in his North Carolina plastics factory.

Mr. Noel, whose company had specialized in extruded plastics such as pool noodles, named the new business Nomacorc LLC. He eventually built a new, highly automated factory that does nothing but churn out the plastic stoppers, 157 million a month.

The business took off as wineries, desperate for closures that wouldn’t cause cork taint, lined up to buy his product. Nomacorc now has plants on three continents, which produce 2 billion corks a year.

I’m not a big fan of plastic corks — I’m starting to prefer modern Stelvin twist-off closures — but at least with a plastic cork, there’s almost no chance of TCA contamination. I don’t buy very expensive wines, so the most expensive wine I’ve lost to cork taint was only about $60, but that’s still more money wasted than I’m willing to put up with.

If you’ve ever had a glass of wine that smelled of mouldy cardboard, you’ve had TCA-contaminated wine.

October 10, 2009

Where High Speed Trains can beat short-haul flight

Filed under: Economics, Europe, Railways, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:46

Spain has a new high speed railway (HSR) network that appears to be a huge success, according to the Guardian:

Last year’s drop in air travel, which was also helped by new high-speed lines from Madrid to Valladolid, Segovia and Malaga, marks the beginning of what experts say is a revolution in Spanish travel habits.

In a country where big cities are often more than 500km (300 miles) apart, air travel has ruled supreme for more than 10 years. A year ago aircraft carried 72% of the 4.8 million long-distance passengers who travelled by air or rail. The figure is now down to 60%.

“The numbers will be equal within two years,” said Josep Valls, a professor at the ESADE business school in Barcelona.

Two routes, from Barcelona to Malaga and Seville, opened last week. Lines are also being built to link Madrid with Valencia, Alicante, the Basque country and Galicia. The government has promised to lay 10,000km of high-speed track by 2020 to ensure that 90% of Spaniards live within 30 miles of a station. The prime minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, boasts it will be Europe’s most extensive high-speed network.

While I’m always skeptical of HSR advocates’ larger-than-life claims, the Spanish system may be in a good position to permanently claim a big share of the short-haul air passenger market. The situation works to the strengths of HSR: relatively dense population corridors, short-to-medium length journeys, and government subsidy of construction costs.

HSR cannot be run on the same tracks as regular freight trains and commuter passenger trains: the signalling, degree of curvature of track, and speed differential between the HSR and ordinary trains creates too many risks. HSR must have its own right of way, which pretty much always means that governments must get involved to condemn existing properties and expropriate them for the benefit of the railway.

That HSR is, or may become, a success in densely populated European countries does not make the case for North American HSR efforts, as I’ve posted a few times before.

August 11, 2009

Another way of unconsciously offending

Filed under: History, Religion — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:59

I’ve apparently been offending Muslims for years by referring to their places of worship as “mosques”. If Ibraheem Wilson is correct, the word mosque is a French term, invented by Spanish monarchs to associate Muslims with mosquitoes. Who knew?

We are supposed to use the term “masjid” instead of “mosque”. I have no idea of the preferrred pronunciation . . . MAS-dzhid? MAS-yid? mas-DZHEED? But I suspect that whichever one I try to use will be wrong.

Update: Whoops, forgot the H/T to Ghost of a Flea.

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