Shanghai replaces Rotterdam as world's biggest port

A sign of the times. Read it here (Dutch only).

There's more than one way to measure the size of a port, of course. You can count the number of ships docking there in a year. Or you can take a port's maximum capacity. Or the total length of it's quays. But these are all rather silly.

The useful indicators are (i) the total tonnage of all the stuff that's handled in a year, (ii) the value of all the stuff that's handled in a year, or (iii) the value of the work that's generated by handling said stuff for a year. Total tonnage is by far the most practical measure, if only because unlike value, the tonnage of stuff doesn't change when you move it from one place to another. Furthermore, ports actually record the tonnage they handle.

Rotterdam had it's best year ever with 354 million tons of stuff, but was still bested by Shanghai. The Chinese shipped circa 380 million tons. One can only wonder how many shower flip-flops...

Although Dutch pride may be hurt, the people actually running Rotterdam harbor don't mind. They do a lot of business with Shanghai, and when Shanghai makes money, Rotterdam makes money. Rotterdam only competes with other European ports.

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Moral relativism

Brendan Miniter writes for the Wall Street Journal's editorial pages. And yesterday, he used those pages to call Abu Ghraib not a scandal, but a "scandal".

I suppose he has never been sodomized with a broomstick. Maybe the good people of the WSJ editorial pages should try it on mr. Miniter, and see if it's bad enough to be called a real scandal.

They could always use the stick Peggy Noonan uses to get to the office.

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Same same - reprise

In my previous post (sorry, no link) I wrote about the mindset of social conservatives because one of them had written a (good) article about Holland, and Holland is a place I know a good deal about. His views showed through when he made it clear he preferred Christian tolerance to Voltaire's.

When he writes about Muslim immigrants (who are usually very conservative and strict) and the locals (who are usually very liberal and permissive) and the "multicultural drama" that has ensued, it's difficult to figure out whose side he's on. He's anti-Muslim. But he's anti-permissiveness too.

Now, JimK over at Vigilance has linked to me in a post, appropriately called: Fundamentalism, "ours," and theirs. Thank you, Jim.

But I don't think I made my point exactly the way I could have, what with my being stuck in superultrafast blogging-mode. The point is this: these social conservatives hurt the war on terror. Yep. Stop hurting America, guys.

I am not equating Christian social conservatives with Muslim fundamentalists. These Christians may be deep in right field but the Muslims are way out of the ballpark.

But there are similarities in the way they reason. Enforcing a demure dresscode on schoolgirls / forcing women to walk under a sack with a peephole. That sort of thing.

But, most importantly, it hinders the US in the fight on terrorism.

The separation of Mosque and State is obviously something that ought to be promoted, and forcing Saudi Arabia to stop funding all these extremist madrassahs would be a start. But these US conservatives want the state to fund religious schools.

Having an independent fourth estate in the Arab world is good, even if the journalists do not write what you want. But these conservatives want the FCC to exercise more, not less control. And the Bush administration has consistently bashed Al Jazeera. That's just counterproductive and stupid, but where does that stupidity come from?

The conservatives in the US are too busy fighting what they see as excessive liberalism in their own country to notice that when they talk, the Muslim community listens. And they ought to be talking the good old talk of Montesquieu, Voltaire and the Founding Fathers. Freedom of speech, separation of Church and state, the trias politica, inalienable rights, that stuff. It should not be hard, because they probably even agree with all this.

Instead, they talk like they are the Taliban-lite. They do not mind mixing organised religion with government policy. They like to quote Scripture almost as much as mullah Omar. They like the government to promote or enforce social mores on private behavior, with laws against sodomy, abortion or adultery and abstinence programs. They promote inane theories like Creationism to counter the scientific thinking of the last 150 years, in order to claim the Bible as the literal Word of God and an absolute Truth. But when asked why 9/11 happened they have the nerve to say: “They hate us for our freedom”.

It is a shame that social conservatives have been in power since the fight against islamic terrorism started. They simply haven’t fought the fight on all fronts. As I see it, there are four fronts:

1. Killing terrorists and hunting them down.
   
2. Effective homeland security.
3. Democratic reform in the Muslim world.
4. The hearts & minds stuff. Not just winning, but changing them. Getting the Muslims to want a democracy with constitutional restrictions on government power, a government that is both secular and transparent.

Regardless of how one thinks Bush has handled 1-3, it is obvious that there has been little change in Muslim views on democracy since 9/11. Most of them want (their own version of) Islam to have a large influence on government policies. Most of them don’t see that you can have two good things, democracy and religion, that are even better when you keep them separated. This was as true before 9/11 as it is now.

You can -and should- blame the Arabs for not changing. But you can -and should- also blame Bush for not trying to change the Arabs. And it is not just Bush’s fault here, his social conservative supporters also are to blame. They are more busy trying to pull the US center to the right than they are trying to push the Muslim center to the left.

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Same same

Republicans like to frame the struggle with islamist terrorism as black and white as possible. Freedom on the one hand, islamofascism (or just "evil") on the other.

But sometimes, there are words mentioned in passing that give the game away. The webby bit of the Weekly Standard (called the Daily Standard) has a contribution by Steven E. Rhoads, "The Turkish Letter". It's subtitle:

To get into the European Union, Turkey had to face questions about adultery. Are the Turks right to think it's wrong?

The Turks wanted to make adultery illegal. The EU objected. And the Daily Standard wants to side with the Turks. Why?

So we can tell Turkey and the rest of the Islamic world that we would never wish to rule out of the company of civilized nations a country whose only offense was taking marital vows seriously. We can remind them that the Bible--as well as the Koran--has something to say on the subject. And we can pledge to work together toward creating societies with laws that strengthen families.

In other words, they want the freedom to write Holy Verses into law.

It is important to keep this in mind when reading (social) conservatives on Islam. They hate Islam, but they don't really disagree with Islam on a lot of stuff.

They think it's right for society to demand that women dress demurely, even if they think that the hijab is out of line. They believe in abstinence the way Somalians believe in clitoridectomy, it enhances virtue. They think crime ought to be punished harsher, like in the olden days, even though the chopping off of hands is a bit too much for them. And they think government has a right, nay a duty to regulate the bedroom-behavior of consenting adults. They even got their own bunch of terrorists.

For them, it's more a "my God is bigger than yours" kinda hate, than a "freedom vs islamofascism" struggle. My guess is that most social conservatives feel mightily uncomfortable when comparing their own views with those held by conservative Muslims.

These Christian social conservatives would earnestly like to do everything they can to eradicate Islamist terrorism. Everything, that is, except promote liberalism. But, to paraphrase Tony Blair, to do so would require them to be "tough on terrorism, and tough on the causes of terrorism".

The problem is that these Christian social-conservatives share a lot of values with orthodox Muslims, but at the same time Muslim orthodoxy (fundamentalism if you will) is the basis on which the current batch of -mostly Arab- terrorists have built their organisations. They recruit in Mosques and divert money from Muslim charities to fund their cause. Promoting a more liberal Islam would obviously be in the interests of the United States.

Sure, the terrorists could always switch from religious fundamentalism to pan-Arab nationalism or Socialism or some other harebrained philosophy. Terrorists are murderers first and foremost. They tend to find a justification one way or the other. But given the sheer size of the fundamentalist Muslim base, such a swing would definitely hurt the terrorists, even if only in their pocketbooks.

And, even more important, a more liberal approach to life is just what the Arab countries need. Unfortunately, it is not exactly what the US social conservatives want.

In the upcoming December 27 issue of the Weekly Standard, Christopher Caldwell has a longish piece on Holland and our Muslim immigrants, called Holland Daze. The Dutch rethink multiculturalism. Same as with the piece on Turkish adultery, this one has a paragraph in which the real divide between liberals and conservatives shows:

When Ellian [an Iranian-born legal scholar of Dutch law, j.e.] writes provocative op-eds in the country's major journals, he gets dismissed by Muslims as a "fundamentalist of the Enlightenment." They are not necessarily wrong. Ellian has a view of Western intellectual history that casts tolerance as the fruit of attacks on Christianity rather than of Christianity itself. He thus thinks that what Islam needs is its own Nietzsche, Voltaire, and the Marquis de Sade. Four days after the van Gogh murder, he wrote an article entitled "Make Jokes About Islam!"

Tolerance as the fruit of Christianity? Elswhere in his article, Caldwell talks about "the pre-Enlightenment tolerance that once led the Netherlands to welcome persecuted dissenters from across Europe: Huguenots from France, Jews from Spain, the Mayflower pilgrims from England." I suppose they were all persecuted by ultraliberal atheists banning school prayer. I would rather side with Voltaire than with those who think Christianity is tolerant, though.

It's fun to read Caldwell's article about the Netherlands. It is, in many ways, a very fine article. He doesn't generalize too much, he's pretty accurate. It reads like something a Dutch right-winger might have written. Except for one thing. He wants to condemn the Muslim community for harboring terrorists. And he wants to condemn the secular Dutch (by far the large majority) for being weak-kneed libruls of loose moral. But he desparately doesn't want to show that on social issues he agrees with the socially conservative Muslims more than he does with the secular Dutch, be they liberal or conservative.

Here is his conclusion, if you can call it that:

Many European countries, notably France, are trying to recast arguments about the wearing of the Muslim headscarf as a matter of women's rights, as if that will somehow mollify fundamentalists by moving the discussion from a religious plane to a political one. But it risks doing something different: moving the discussion from an interpersonal level to a psychosexual one. It conveys that the West hopes to assimilate Islam by stealing its women out of the seraglio.

I think it is a brilliant strategy. A third feminist wave to help Muslim women in Europe achieve equality. No secular, feminist, liberal mother is going to raise her sons as muslim terrorists. In fact, they might even allow their sons to marry infidel Dutch girls. Caldwell is doubtfull this is a good idea, but he doesn't mention any alternative. Throwing all the Muslims out as another example of Christian tolerance?

And in his final paragraph, he shows another bit of conservative self-denial:

The Dutch minister for immigration and integration is Rita Verdonk, a woman, as it happens. In late November she went to the town of Soesterberg to speak about "Dutch values." There she was introduced to an imam named Ahmad Salam. He refused to shake her hand. ... "I cannot shake hands with a woman," the imam explained. "Well, then," Verdonk replied, "we have plenty to talk about."

If this doesn't prove Ellian's point about the need for an Islamic Enlightenment, I do not know what does. But Caldwell's views on the Enlightenment are too deeply ingrained to see this.

12.21.2004 UPDATE:
Abu Aardvark gives us an illustrative example of my theory that US conservatives and Muslim conservatives have more in common than the US conservatives would like to admit.

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John Quiggin says it best...

It being market failure. Quiggin comments on a Milton Friedman piece. Here are his (John's) words in full:

Milton Friedman has a piece in the Hoover Digest, reprinted in The Australian making the point that, even though many fewer people nowadays professes belief in socialism than did so in 1945, the general movement of policy since the end of World War II has been in a socialist direction, that is towards an expansion in the share of GDP allocated to the public sector. He draws a distinction between ‘welfare’ and the traditional socialist belief in public ownership of the means of production, seeing the former growing at the expense of the latter.

From a social-democratic perspective, I’d put things differently. There are large sectors of the economy where competitive markets either can’t be sustained or don’t perform adequately in the absence of government intervention. These include human services like health and education, social insurance against unemployment and old age, production of public goods and information, and a range of infrastructure services. In all these sectors, governments are bound to get involved. Sometimes, the best model is private production with public regulation and funding, and sometimes it is public ownership and production. The result is a mixed economy.

Over time, the parts of the economy where competitive market provision is problematic have grown in relative importance. By contrast, agriculture, the archetypal competitive industry, has declined in relative importance as have mining and manufacturing, areas where governments have usually performed poorly.

The result is that the ideological swing towards neoliberalism has done little more than slow a structural shift towards a larger role for government.

These words should be spread like Gospel. Unlike my own words on the subject, they are both clear and from a professional economist. Two big differences. This short text implies the following:

• The free market is the optimal solution for a lot of problems. But not all.
• Progressives want solutions to work.
  
• Conservatives will often stick to free markets even when they fail.

The best illustrations come from the NY Times. Here is Paul Krugman on Social Security:

Decades of conservative marketing have convinced Americans that government programs always create bloated bureaucracies, while the private sector is always lean and efficient. But when it comes to retirement security, the opposite is true. More than 99 percent of Social Security's revenues go toward benefits, and less than 1 percent for overhead. In Chile's system, management fees are around 20 times as high. And that's a typical number for privatized systems.

And here is David Brooks (from behind the Times' paywall, so no link):

Before we get lost in the policy details, let's be clear about what this Social Security reform debate is really about. It's about the market. People who instinctively trust the markets support the Bush reform ideas, and people who are suspicious oppose them.

I don't think you can get a clearer picture of the divide between reality-based thinkers and ideological idiocy than when you compare Krugman with Brooks.

We (the reality-based community) need to have an easy, short and clear anwer to give people who "trust" ("believe in" is the better term) markets over anything else. That's why I think posts like Quiggin's ought to flood the internets.

The Bush White House is, of course, a lost cause. Even as part of the ideology-based community, it is out on the lunar fringe. It is not even capable of erring consistently. The Bush White House will will not just stick to the market approach even when this fails, the Bush White House will often stick to failures even when there isn't a free market. So let's leave them out of this.

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Max Boot has a sensible column...

This does not compute.... I agree with a Max Boot column. This only leaves three options: (a) Kafka is back, and I have somehow morphed into a neocon. (b) Kafka is back, and Boot has somehow morphed into a reality-based person. (c) If neocons rattle on about global politics long enough, even they will get something right once in a while.

(c) is by far the least likely option of the three, considering the neocon way to discuss global politics like it's a game of Risk. And considering the neocon's yearning for empire. And considering the small-dick Napoleon-complex issues that are usually at the root of any chickenhawk übercon's way of thinking. (a) is unlikely, too. I haven't noticed any change in myself, people haven't been avoiding me. So I am a little bit optimistic about Boot's prospects, and will be reading next week's column very carefully. Maybe there is a cure.

His column is very, very straightforward. He argues that Turkey joining the EU would be:

• Good for Turkey.
• Good for the EU.
• Good for the fight against Islamic fundamentalism.
• Good for the balance of power in the Middle East.
• And, as a consequence, very good for the US.

He doesn't know how to put it quiet as succinctly as this, but this is what he is getting at. And I wholeheartedly agree.

However....

Old habits are hard to break. In his column, he fails to acknowledge that for the EU Turkey's membership will be a mixed blessing (even though, on balance it will be in the EU's interest).

• The United States currently harbor between 4 and 7 million Muslim residents. The EU already has 15 million, and Turkey's accession would bring the total up to 85 million. That's a lot of Muslims. There is a risk of social strife on a huge, huge scale.
• Most of these are poorer than the average Mexican, and they would eventually get free access to the entire EU's labor market. Again, huge social strife possibility.
• Europe would extend far into the Middle East. From a power balance, geo-political point of view with oi pipelinesl an stuff this is probably a good thing. Europe won't need aircraft carriers to keep an eye on Iran, we'd have the border patrol do it. On the other hand, who needs trouble? Europe already has it's own nutters, such as ETA and the IRA. Why invite Hezbollah to the party?

European Union bashing still is second nature to Boot. He talks about "falling under the sway of a Brussels bureaucracy", Turks are anti-American "in order to curry favor with anti-American EU members like France and Germany", of course "EU membership may be a bad deal for Britain, whose free market is hampered by heavy-handed regulation from Brussels" and finally "kowtow to the mandarins of Brussels". He fails to see that the EU is far more serious about spreading democracy than the US, because it offers nations membership.

But only on three conditions:

1. A free market economy.
2. A liberal democracy.
   
3. Adaptation of existing EU policies (the acquis communautaire).

That last one is necessary to prevent the EU from having to rebuilt itself from the ground up everytime a new candidate enters negotiations. But there is no doubt that the democratization of Turkey has been enhanced by the promise of EU-membership. After all, it also worked for Spain, Portugal, Greece, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Poland, Czechia, Slowakia, Slovenia and Hungary. And it's still working for Romania, Croatia and Bulgaria. It will probably work for the Ukraine as well.

So Boot underplays both the benificial role the EU plays, the risks the EU takes on, and bashes away at Brussels. And of course he also glosses over the mistakes made by the US.

When he thinks that Turkish politicians adopt an anti-American stance partly to please France he mentions the fact that "the Bush administration has not done a very good job of managing this international alliance, or most others". But that's it. He doesn't tell you that the Bushies tried to cut a deal with the Turkish military in order to spread democracy in the Middle East.

And when he tells you the Turkish people feared "the invasion would lead to a separate Kurdish state, and [that] nothing that's happened since has led them to change their minds", he forgets to mention that so far nothing has happened that would led them to change their minds. A less incompetent occupation of Iraq might have assuaged Turkish fears.

But all in all this Max Boot column is .... reasonable. This is scary shit.

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NEWSFLASH: Krauthammer thinks United States swell

You can't make this stuff up:

The United States today is the most tolerant and diverse society in history.It celebrates all faiths with an open heart and open-mindedness that, compared to even the most advanced countries in Europe, are unique.

The US just re-elected a President who wants to put discrimination back into the Constitution. And how, I might ask, does mr. Krauthammer reach the conclusion that "even the most advanced countries in Europe" are less open-minded, open-hearted, diverse and tolerant than the United States? I am afraid he doesn't tell.

No matter, Krauthammer continues:

Unlike, for example, the famously tolerant Ottoman Empire or the generally tolerant Europe of today, the United States does not merely allow minority religions to exist at its sufferance. It celebrates and welcomes and honors them.

That's right. That's why you've had so many Jewish Presidents. Or black ones, for that matter. Female? Foreign-born?

Sure, you get someone representing a minority in the White House from time to time. FDR was a cripple (a waspy one, but a cripple nonetheless). A lot of your Presidents stem either from the rich or the military, that's two minorities. And you're the only democracy that's so tolerant you sometimes elect a President who represents the minority. That ought to count for something.

But, to conclude, even though Krauthammer is just a columnist, an opinion-peddler, wouldn't it be nice if he actually backs his claims up with the tiniest, teensy-weensy bit of fact or argument? A letter from Washington to the Newport synagogue written in 1790 might have less bearance on today's situation than Krauthammer would like to belief. Or, to reverse it, in 1790 there was slavery in the United States while only Russia still had that in Europe.

Krauthammer has a loophole. He only talks about faith. He doesn't talk about sexual orientation or skin color or any of the other stuff that people can use to discriminate. But he still doesn't offer an honest comparison. France has had a Jewish President. Panama has had two. Britain had a Jewish Prime-Minister as far back as 1868. Krauthammer just states that the US are better and that's that. He just pulls it out of his ass. And why? Because, inside the US, there are, in his view, efforts to de-Christianize Christmas, efforts he disagrees with. Get that? Krauthammer is bashing Europe because a few people in Florida or New Jersey do stuff he doesn't like.

The Washington Post has high tolerance for idiot wingnuts, that's for sure.

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Sullivan finds someone willing to attack Kinsley

Unfortunately for the credibility of the riposte, Sullivan finds it at Tech Central Station.

And incredible it is.

I don't know how to attack Arnold Kling's counter-argument, because I honestly can't see what it is. All I can see is standard lies and deceptions, which are manifold. But if you read the conclusion carefully all it says is:

Social Security threatens to become an increasing tax burden on young workers, primarily because the age of eligibility to receive benefits has lagged behind increases in longevity. Privatization does not alter that situation. It serves primarily to shift the funding mechanism for current beneficiaries, moving it away from payroll taxes and toward personal and corporate income taxes. Privatization may increase economic growth by stimulating work and thrift, and perhaps also by increasing the value of stocks relative to bonds and by putting pressure on Congress to reduce spending or increase taxes in the near term. To the extent that these mechanisms do raise economic growth, the overall burden of Social Security on young workers will be reduced. However, it is by no means certain that the increased growth will be sufficient to make the burden bearable as the ratio of workers to retirees continues to fall. [emphasis mine, je]

First up, thrift. How on earth does Kling think that the government borrowing $5 trillion will promote thrift? By flatly stating that "the "transition cost" is not a real cost". Yeah, right. And the hike in interest rates will not be a real hike. And it won't crowd out real investment either.

When Social Security was started, there were lucky people who got benefits without having contributed. And if you want to end it there are going to be suckers who paid contributions without getting the benefits. Compensating these suckers while you get another program based on forced savings accounts on the rails takes real money.

Second, stimulate work. The options: (a) more hours per year, (b) more years per worker, (c) more workers per workforce. If the plan works better than the current system, you'd expect less years per worker, since the extra returns would allow them to retire early. The plan changes nothing for people who don't work to begin with. That leaves more hours per year. He thinks people will work harder so they can retire earlier. But if they retire early, won't their output, like, shrink?

Third, increasing the value of stocks relative to bonds. Again, this only works if you accept the "transition cost not a real cost" line. Outside Cookoo-land, bonds are going to yield more, because that's the only way Uncle Sam can peddle them to get the extra $5 trillion from the markets.

Finally, putting pressure on Congress to cut spending or increase taxes. Does he live on Mars? He really, really is saying that running a deficit is good because it keeps people on their toes so they'll watch out for ... further deficits.

Now, the lies and deceptions, incomplete and in random order:

If stocks are under-valued, as they have been historically,

Long term stock values are determined by economic growth. As are long term payroll taxes. Now, the "crisis" only exists because the SS-actuaries, prudent as they are, have projected sub-par economic growth for their calculations. If growth continues the way it has, there will be no crisis at all. But if growth is sub-par, then stocks will suck just as payroll taxes will.

Social Security's long-term problem is that the ratio of workers to retirees is falling, so that the tax rate on workers must rise.

Wrong. The tax rate on workers has already risen in anticipation of this problem. Two decades ago. That's why the program has been running such a big surplus. And that's why it'll only take minor tweaks to keep it going. The problem has been dealt with, get over it.

If private accounts were created, then as a worker some of your contributions to Social Security would be diverted from current beneficiaries in order to go into accounts under your control. This would make Social Security more like a pension plan and less like a transfer scheme.

Nope. It won't be like a pension plan at all. With a real pension plan, the money you put into it isn't yours. If you die early, they give it to somebody else. But if you live long enough, in the end you'll get monthly checks that are financed by dead people you've never met. This insulates old geezers from going broke at the expense of dead guys who don't care one way or the other. You know what? Current Social Security works kinda like this.

Forced savings accounts on the other hand will be your own. That means that if you die early, your family gets it all instead of just a part, which is a plus. But it also means that if you plan on getting old, you will have to put more money in to get the same check every month you would with a pension plan (or with Social Security). This is a big minus.

On the other hand, using debt rather than payroll taxes to fund current beneficiaries would have one important real effect. It would shift the overall tax burden away from payroll taxes and toward general revenues, which means primarily income taxes.

Sadly, no. Using debt only increases the deficit. Then the future Congress can decide on how to make ends meet. They can cut benefits, issue a VAT or consumption tax, whatever. Raising income taxes is just one of the options. The last time income taxes were raised, all Republicans voted against it.

I'm sure there's more, but I guess this is enough. Kling lies and deceives. And even then he can only name three possible manners how privatization might spur growth. All three are highly unlikely.

• The US will not save more when it's government is borrowing an extra $5 trillion.
  
• Bonds will get more expensive when the government is borrowing an extra $5 trillion. This will make a rise in stock value relative to bonds unlikely.
• Congess will not cut spending or raise taxes to offset for this extra borrowing. They don't see the need with the current budget deficit, the biggest ever, why will they suddenly come to their senses when future deficits get even bigger?

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I told you so I told you so!

George Will is an idiot. Greenspan is not.

That's what I told you two weeks ago when Will wrote a column saying Greenspan should quit the Fed and head the Treasury instead.

And lo an behold....

Senior Republicans sounded out Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve, about taking over from John Snow as US Treasury secretary, the Financial Times has learnt.

The informal approach, which would have put the most respected economic leader in the US in charge of President George W. Bush's ambitious second-term domestic agenda, was declined.

Like I said two weeks ago, how stupid does Will think Greenspan is?

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We won!

Ajax lost the 1996 final of the Champions' League to Juventus. But apparently, Juventus cheated.

Juventus' club doctor, Riccardo Agricola, has been found guilty of "sporting fraud" and sentenced to 22 months in prison. Defense lawyer Paolo Trofino told reporters the judge had found Agricola guilty of administering the banned blood-booster EPO.

Hand over the trophy, boys. Fork it over. It is ours.

You cheated. You lose. And you get thrown into the outer darkness where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth. And laughing at millionaires claiming to be imbeciles:

Zidane said that while at Juventus he took creatine, which is not on the list of International Olympic Committee (IOC) banned drugs, and said he had also taken iron and vitamins, sometimes intravenously.

Intravenous vitamins? How stupid does he think we think he is? Let's check Dictionary.com:

Any of various fat-soluble or water-soluble organic substances essential in minute amounts for normal growth and activity of the body and obtained naturally from plant and animal foods.

You only need minute amounts that can be obtained from food, but somehow Zidane's shaman thought it prudent to give him a bit extra.... via iv-drip! Whatever it was, it weren't vitamins.

Links here, here and here.

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Q.E.D. Kinsley

The Social Security debate consists of three separate elements:

1. The projected 75-year budget shortfall.
2. The benefits (if any) of privatization.
3. All the lies and deceptions told by proponents of privatization about (1) and (2)

You can read about the budget shortfall below. And you can read about the lies and deceptions, well, everywhere. The biggest deception is to use a pessimistic forecast of economic growth when looking at the current system, but using a far more optimistic one when looking at the potential benefits of private accounts.

But can private accounts ever get a better return than Social Security? According to Michael Kinsley, sadly, no. Here is his reasoning:

Social Security privatization is not just unlikely to succeed, for various reasons that are subject to discussion. It is mathematically certain to fail. Discussion is pointless.

The usual case against privatization is that (1) millions of inexperienced investors may end up worse off, and (2) stocks don't necessarily do better than bonds over the long-run, as proponents assume.But privatization won't work for a better reason: it can't possibly work, even in theory. The logic is not very complicated.

1. To "work," privatization must generate more money for retirees than current arrangements. This bonus is supposed to be extra money in retirees' pockets and/or it is supposed to make up for a reduction in promised benefits, thus helping to close the looming revenue gap.

2. Where does this bonus come from? There are only two possibilities: from greater economic growth, or from other people.

3. Greater economic growth requires either more capital to invest, or smarter investment of the same amount of capital. Privatization will not lead to either of these.

a) If nothing else in the federal budget changes, every dollar deflected from the federal treasury into private social security accounts must be replaced by a dollar that the government raises in private markets. So the total pool of capital available for private investment remains the same. b) The only change in decision-making about capital investment is that the decisions about some fraction of the capital stock will be made by people with little or no financial experience. Maybe this will not be the disaster that some critics predict. But there is no reason to think that it will actually increase the overall return on capital.

4. If the economy doesn't produce more than it otherwise would, the Social Security privatization bonus must come from other investors, in the form of a lower return.

a) This is in fact the implicit assumption behind the notion of putting Social Security money into stocks, instead of government bonds, because stocks have a better long-term return. The bonus will come from those saps who sell the stocks and buy the bonds.

b) In other words, privatization means betting the nation's most important social program on a theory that cannot be true unless many people are convinced that it's false.

c) Even if the theory is true, initially, privatization will make it false. The money newly available for private investment will bid up the price of (and thus lower the return on) stocks, while the government will need to raise the interest on bonds in order to attract replacement money.

d) In short, there is no way other investors can be tricked or induced into financing a higher return on Social Security.

5. If the privatization bonus cannot come from the existing economy, and cannot come from growth, it cannot exist. And therefore, privatization cannot work.

Q.E.D.

This is from an email he sent to Andrew Sullivan. Sully is a proponent of privatization, and Kinsley invited him to shoot holes in his reasoning. Sullivan does the smart thing, and asks his readers to come up with arguments.I kinda doubt they will succeed. If Sully (and his readership) fail to shoot this down, it might very well be Sullivan's good deed of the year.

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Robert Samuelson does a Luskin....

Only one sentence into his latest column, I could already hear the bullshit-buzzer. The (online) subtitle of his piece called Who will say no? is:

Retirement Benefit Costs Are Out of Control

He then proceeds to talk about nothing else but healthcare related costs. Sure, Medicare is for seniors. And people count on Medicare when making retirement plans. But they also count on good infrastructure when they take their Winnebagos for a spin. Does that mean that the gas tax is a retirement benefit?

Samuelson on Medicare:

As baby boomers retire, Medicare drug spending rises rapidly. Without the drug benefit, Medicare spending was projected to grow from 2.6 percent of national income (gross domestic product) in 2003 to about 5 percent of GDP in 2030. Adding the drug benefit, total Medicare spending jumps to almost 7 percent of GDP in 2030 -- a huge increase. In today's dollars the extra drug spending would amount to $200 billion annually in 2030.

Now, to keep Social Security solvent forever and ever and ever (using the trustees' own gloomy economic forecast) without changing the system or cutting benefits requires additional revenues equal to only 0.54 percent of G.D.P..So says Paul Krugman. Look at the damn (and by now overly familiar) picture Brad DeLong made:There are two major budget problems, and Social Security simply isn't one of them. They are Medicare and Bush. Kevin Drum has the best comparison which I'm stealing from him here:

	Social Security	Medicare
Current guess about when we start dipping into the trust fund	2018	2010
Current guess about when the trust fund is exhausted	2042	2019
Level of optimism about trust fund	High! Doomsday keeps getting pushed out, from 2029 a decade ago to 2042 today. And the CBO estimates that it's really more like 2050 anyway.	Low! Doomsday was pulled in from 2026 to 2019 just last year. The future of Medicare looks worse today than it did a few years ago.
Current expenditures (2003)	About 4.5% of GDP.	About 2.6% of GDP
Estimated expenditures in 2050	About 6.5% of GDP.	About 9.5% of GDP.

Calling the Medicare crisis a "retirement benefit crisis" is wrong. You can lump Medicare in with military spending and claim that in 2030 the government can't afford an army. You'd be right. But the SS-trustfund is filled to the brim. Social Security is one of the few programs that are protected from a Medicare crisis.

It is also wrong because it makes it seem like benefits are too high. They aren't. The quality and use of care in the US is comparable to that elsewhere in the civilized world. The only difference is that healthcare in the US if far more expensive than anywhere else. The US system sucks. It can only deliver at far higher costs than healthcare systems elsewhere. Fix the goddamn system before you start cutting benefits.

Costs are higher in the US because:

• drug costs are higher
• administrative costs are way higher
• overtreatment occurs more frequently in the US (wether from defensive behavior by physicians or overly generous insurance policies for the -healthy- wealthy, I don't know)
• preventive care (screening, vaccination etc.) is underfunded
• and probably a whole bunch of other things I can't think of right now

The recurring theme here is market failure. Markets can be the most efficient way to go. But then markets have to be transparent, both consumers and producers must be willing and able to at least try and make rational choices, the necessary regulations should not interfere too much with pricing, etc. etc. If those conditions are not met, the market is not free and can actually perform worse than a Soviet-style central planning system.

Besides, we do not want the market to be free. We want everybody to have access to healthcare. You can't have a free market and force insurance companies to insure the chronically ill at below cost rates. Actually, you can, but then you'd have to subsidize these insurance companies to an extent that makes current corporate welfare seem trivial. But, like David Brooks wrote recently, those who want to overhaul Social Security instinctively trust markets. So true. Too bad they trust markets even when all the economists say they won't work.

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There is a better BBC News Online Site than BBC News Online

And this is it:

http://www.whitelabel.org/wp/wikiproxy.php

You can read about it here. Developer Stefan explains what it does. It:

• retrieves a page from News Online, and regexes out "Capitalised Phrases" and acronyms. It then tests these against a database of wikipedia topic titles. If the phrase is a topic in wikipedia, then it's turned into a hyperlink
• uses the technorati API to add a sidebar of links to blogs referencing the story. Now you can see who's talking about the story from the story itself
• as a bonus, my code breaks that bloody awful ticker. I'm not fixing it.
• because that's how links should be, my links are underlined.
• reduces page bloat by about 10% by stripping acres of whitespace.

And it's great! Because if you link to a BBC article in a blog post, soon after Technorati and Stefan make sure you're mentioned on the sidebar of that very same article in a "Blogs about this article" section.

Here is the old infant euthanasia article I linked to in the post before this one, and here is the new and improved version of that article. That's my name up there, thank you!

Oh, the glory and fame that come with blogging....

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NEWSFLASH: Hugh Hewitt still an asshole

Groningen Protocol update:

When I posted my defense of the Groningen Protocol I lashed out at Hugh Hewitt. He equated the Dutch paediatricians who set up this procedure (which might become law) to vet the mercy killing of newborns with grave and incurable diseases with Nazis. He also lied about the role the parents would get (shorter Protocol: doctors decide if the disease is grave enough to warrant euthanasia, parents decide wether or not to go ahead. Shorter Hewitt: parents get an advisory role at best).

Well, I also emailed Hewitt, and asked him to post a correction. He has neither responded nor corrected. That's the first half of the update. He's still an asshole. You learn something every day.

The second part is this tidbit of information, courtesy of the BBC:

Doctors here [in the UK] say paediatricians worldwide are in favour of ending the lives of newborns in certain circumstances.

In France, 74% believe it should be acceptable, and in the Netherlands 72%.

Update on the update:
The Groningen University Hospital has an English press release on its site. Hat tip to l-rs.org

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The agony that the free market inflicts...

...upon me.

When it comes to buying gadgets, no one is more indecisive than I am. If Indecision were a town, I would be its honorary citizen. And now, the most dreaded of horrors that can befall a gadget-related indecision-sufferer (GRI) has befallen me.

My mobile phone's battery has gone dead. Utterly dead. I am doomed. I must get a new phone.

But these days, new phones don't just ring or have working batteries. They can harbor computer games (or not), FM radios (or not), MP3-players (or not), memory card-slots for external memory (or not), bluetooth (or not) and even function as PDAs (or not), the so-called smartphones.

And those are just the items these phones can or cannot possess that I am more or less interested in. They also harbor lots of stuff that I don't need but still will have to pay for (or not), such as cameras and ringtones and internet-connections and stuff.

And because I have a Mac at home and a PC at work, I want to be sure that the damn phone will work with both. It must be able to store songs from home and Office-files from work in such a manner that I can download Mac-stuff to my office PC and vice-versa and the stuff will still work.

Unless... of course, I skip all the extras except for the MP3-player, then I only need it to work with iTunes on my Mac. But a PDA might be very handy.... And what about the need for memory when you store MP3s?

The horror, the horror!

Once I figure all this out, I will still have to figure out which provider will cut me the sweetest deal. As with all GRI-sufferers, I will then be confronted with getting the best deal on the second best gadget, or shilling out more for the one I really, really want.

Fuck it why isn't it my birthday that way I could just ask for a goddamn phone and be happy with whatever I got?

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NEWSFLASH: Donald Luskin tells lies at National Review Online

Also, tomorrow morning, the sun is estimated by several experts to rise again.

Luskin's topic of the day is, naturally, Social Security, and the partial privatization thereof. Here's what he says:

...the system will end up exhausted...

Nope. As long as there are workers, you can pay SS-beneficiaries with the payroll-tax. Sure, on the current trajectory there will be a point when the SS-expenditures exceed those payroll-taxes and we go from surplus to deficit. And there will be a point, a bit further along the line (around 2050) when all the accumulated surplus payroll taxes (the trustfund) has been doled out. But even then the system will still have revenues, so you can always decide to cut benefits to make them match those. As long as there are workers, a system reliant on payroll taxes cannot be exhausted. From what I gather a trustfund-less 2050 Social Security will then have to drop benefits by something like 20%. (This still leaves future old farts better off then current old farts: benefits are linked to wages and wages tend to grow over time.)

Of course, those Treasury bonds represent nothing but IOUs, in essence promises by the government to pay itself.

All very true, but it's worth remembering that a Treasury bond is the type of IOU that has never, ever, ever been reneged upon, an IOU that is backed by the full credit of the United States Government and all it's taxpayers. It's also worth remembering that if the SS trustfund doesn't buy these Treasury bonds, someone else will have to buy them. Like Wall Street managers of private retirement accounts. Luskin is trying to make us believe that all government IOUs are solid as gold, except when the Treasury Secretary sells them to the SS-trustfund.

Then, he quotes from an 1996 (!) Krugman article to prove Paul is two-faced:

Where is the crisis? Just over the horizon, that’s where … In 2010 … the boomers will begin to retire. Every year thereafter, for the next quarter-century, several million 65-year-olds will leave the rolls of taxpayers and begin claiming their benefits. The budgetary effects of this demographic tidal wave are straightforward to compute, but so huge as almost to defy comprehension.

Bad huh? Except that the benefits Krugman is talking about all benefits for seniors: "mainly in the form of Social Security and Medicare, but also via Federal pensions and veterans' benefits." And while Social Security faces a perfectly manageable 75-year shortfall, this is not the case with Medicare. Medicare is headed towards disaster. A disaster so big, you can lump any government agency in with Medicare and you'd still have a disaster. The Pentagons budget and Medicare? Disaster. Microsoft and Medicare? Disaster. The Powerball and Medicare? Disaster.

This could be dubbed as misleading, were it not for the fact that Krugman has long since 1996 acknowledged the need to seperate Medicare (and Medicaid) troubles from those facing Social Security. The 1996 Krugman piece, by the way, was a book review, and Krugman lumped SS and Medicare together because that's what the books he reviewed had done.

And what about this Krugman quote Luskin pulls out of his hat?

There is a case for reforming Social Security; there is even a case for privatization.

Sorry, Luskin. You got it from a 2001 column that has as a synopsis: Social Security may be in crisis, but not with these numbers.

The opening sentence? I knew that the commission on Social Security reform appointed by George W. Bush would produce a slanted report, one designed to bully Congress into privatizing the system. But the draft report released last week is sheer, mean-spirited nonsense.

Luskin is so pathetic I almost feel sorry for the guy.

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Andrew Sullivan's good deed of the day...

... is to quote from the excellent article in the American Prospect about Theo van Gogh's murder. Of course, he quotes the only answer Marc Chavanne gives that I disagree with:

The van Gogh murder is a little bit like our 9-11. The degree to which the United States had changed after 9-11 was hard to fathom in Europe. Now, this one murder seems to be having a similar effect on my fellow Dutch nationals. In Europe we have experienced our own homegrown terrorism for years, so although Dutch people felt enormous solidarity with Americans after 9-11, many asked, "Aren't Americans a bit too focused on themselves when they keep saying that 9-11 was some huge paradigm shift?" The Netherlands, right now, is undergoing a similar sort of attitudinal change. It will be interesting to watch whether this change sparks a shift in Europeans' generally hostile attitude towards George W. Bush's aggressive foreign policy and his "axis of evil" style approach to the world.

Van Gogh was continuously asked if he feared assassination. He was like Salman Rushdie without an official fatwa. It hardly came as an eye-opening surprise. And an "axis of evil" style approach sort of assumes that the culprit is to be found overseas, and that you can send in the Marines to deal with him. This is simply not the case. The killer was a Dutchman. Part of a sizable ethnic/religious minority, but a Dutchman nonetheless. This is more Timothy McVeigh than 9-11. For us, changing the attitudes of Dutch muslims is more of a solution than changing the regimes of Arab muslims.

So I'm sorry Andy. No shift in paradigm. No shift in foreign policy.

After which, Sully links to this piece by Rowan Atkinson in the Telegraph criticizing the UK Government plan to introduce a new offence of incitement to religious hatred. This would be his second good deed in a manner of minutes, but no...

He doesn't make the connection!!!!!

The Netherlands does have incitement to religious hatred on the books as an offence. That's why Van Gogh was constantly insulting people by attacking their religious feelings. He showed what an absurd notion it was to differentiate between normal ideas and religiously held beliefs. He frequently said that it was his belief that Allah was a pig. He loved the lawsuits he got into.

Rowan Atkinson says it best:

To criticise a person for their race is manifestly irrational and ridiculous but to criticise their religion - that is a right. That is a freedom. The freedom to criticise ideas - any ideas even if they are sincerely held beliefs - is one of the fundamental freedoms of society. And the law which attempts to say you can criticise or ridicule ideas as long as they are not religious ideas is a very peculiar law indeed. It all points to the promotion of the idea that there should be a right not to be offended. But in my view the right to offend is far more important than any right not to be offended. The right to ridicule is far more important to society than any right not to be ridiculed because one in my view represents openness - and the other represents oppression.

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Two tidbits from the General

Economic tidbits, of course.

First: the housing bubble in California.

The obvious theoretical best case scenario for a bubble is that it simply stops growing while inflation slowly returns prices to normal. That's what happened over here in Holland, and it still caused a recession.

Well, General Glut has found an article in US News where they managed to find some housing bubble expert guy (actually a girl, Celia Chen of Economy.com) who has an estimate best case scenario for California. So what is the estimate?

In such a case [a best case scenario, j.e.], "it's not going to be a free fall," housing economist Celia Chen of Economy.com says of forecasts that call for slowing price increases over the next year or two, followed by a small decrease in prices for a few quarters. "We see up to about an 8 percent decline in the overpriced areas."

8 percent? Ouch.

The other tidbit the General sends our way: petrodollars, end of reign of.

When you buy oil from OPEC, OPEC wants to be paid in dollars. But there is no reason why OPEC couldn't demand to be paid in gold, or euros or fairy dust or whatever. They got the oil.

The US gets a de facto discount when it's allowed to buy foreign oil with dollars, because the US runs no exchange rate risk, and hedging exchange rate risk comes at a cost.

But that may be about to change. The OPEC people have got big incentives to switch from an "all dollars, all the time" regime to a method of payment where a part of the oil is paid in something other than dollars. Here's why:

• In the '70s and '80s they got burnt. Back then, OPEC countries were making money hand over fist back in the “malaise days” (obviously not terribly languid from their point of view), and they shoved a lot of it in Citibank accounts and then Citibank loaned it hither and yon, ultimately leading to the early 1980s debt crisis.
• The Patriot Act allows the US to freeze the US-held assets of any bank implicated in laundering money for terrorists. If you got an account at a bank that operates in the Middle East, the dollars you store at this bank's US branch might not be your to spent. It's safer to stash your oil wealth away in Europe, which means it's cheaper to get paid for your oil directly in sterling, euros or swiss francs. (Sidenote: the funny thing is that wealthy Arabs really started to clear out their US bank accounts after George Bush was reelected. Of the two presidential candidates, he's the one who has had business dealings with a shady bank. Kerry is the one who took out that shady bank.)
• Arab countries buy more stuff from Europe than from the US.
• The dollar is devaluing and not about to stop
  

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In Defense of the Groningen Protocol

I am a doctor. I am Dutch. I am very much in favor of the right to euthanasia or assisted suicide when at the end of someone’s life illness and suffering makes him wish for death.

Furthermore, I am convinced that the only real choice you have is between legal, controlled, public euthanasia and euthanasia that is carried out in the dark, possibly without the patient’s knowledge or even against his own wish. Prohibiting euthanasia will not make it go away, and tainting it with references to Nazi-Germany will not make those who wish for it suffer any less.

Euthanasia (or physician assisted suicide) is per definition carried out only if the patient has repeatedly requested it. This means the patient must be both compos mentis and able to express himself. This precludes euthanasia in, for instance, coma patients or patients with severe dementia. All sorts of moral and legal dilemmas then ensue, such as in the case of Terry Schiavo. (In my opinion, there is no real moral difference between removing a life-saving feeding tube and active euthanasia, except for the amount of hypocrisy involved.)

Mercy killing of patients that are non compos mentis always leaves you with three options: it’s either what the patient “would have wanted”, it’s not, or the patient has never considered his predicament. However, wherever there is unmitigable suffering, there will be mercy killings wether it is legal or not and wether these cases will be subject to public vetting or not.

Over the last several years, Dutch pediatricians, especially those at the University Hospital of Groningen, have been trying to work out a vetting procedure in cooperation with government prosecutors. It concerns infants in constant pain from incurable disease or extreme deformities, although for legal reasons the procedure would apply to all children up to age twelve. The thing they came up with is called the Groningen Protocol. Wether mercy killing of infants will become legal in the Netherlands remains to be seen, but a lot of conservative, mostly American websites are already on the case.

To give you an idea, an Google search of “Groningen Protocol” will currently (as of this writing) get you about 8,100 hits, but if you restrict the language to Dutch you’ll only get four. To give you a further idea, Hugh Hewitt has already compared Groningen to both Wannsee and Auschwitz. He just can’t seem to stop writing about it. And he just can’t seem to get his facts straight.

Let me just translate a paragraph from the October 29 press release of the University of Groningen Hospital concerning the protocol (and I apologize beforehand for my horrific treatment of the original text):

In het protocol, dat tot stand is gekomen na overleg met kinderartsen in heel Nederland en dat is afgestemd met het Openbaar Ministerie, staat precies beschreven in welke gevallen het behandelteam het kind verder lijden kan besparen. Zo moet er sprake zijn van ernstig lijden dat niet via andere wegen, zoals geneesmiddelen, verlicht kan worden. Ook mag er geen enkele kans op verbetering bestaan (uitzichtloosheid). Het gehele behandelteam (een ernstig ziek kind wordt veelal omringd door een multidisciplinair team van behandelend artsen en verpleegkundigen) moet ervan overtuigd zijn dat er geen enkele andere mogelijkheid is om het kind te helpen, en ook de geraadpleegde artsen van buiten het behandelteam moeten het daarmee eens zijn. Ook de instemming van ouders is verplicht. Tenslotte moet de levensbeeindiging zelf aan alle zorgvuldigheidscriteria voldoen.

In the protocol, that was realized after consultation with pediatricians in the entire Netherlands and that was attuned with the Public Prosecution Service, is exactly described in which cases the medical team can prevent further suffering in a child. There has to be grave suffering that cannot be eleviated by other means, such as drugs. Also, there may not be any chance of improvement (no hope of relief). The entire medical team (a gravely sick child is usually treated by a multidisciplinary team of doctors and nurses) must be convinced that there is no other possibility to help the child, and the consulted physicians from outside the medical team treating the child must agree. Also, permission by the parents is mandatory. Finally, in the termination of the child’s life all the due care criteria [presumable those that already exist for euthanasia, j.e.] must be observed.

Now, I’ve got a couple of questions for Hugh Hewitt:

Why do you insist that parents do not have a say in the matter, when in fact, the parents have the final say? It’s up to the medical team to ascertain that the medical situation indeed constitutes grave and hopeless suffering, but the decision to go ahead lies with the parents and no one else.

Why haven’t you contacted the hospital and asked for an explanation? Let me help you: just follow the link above to the Dutch press release. Contactpersoon means contact person in Dutch, and telefoon means telephone. The international dialing code for Holland is 031.

Why don’t you acknowledge that the choice that parents and doctors face is between a mercy killing and a life of suffering for the child? Why do you talk of “deeming babies disposable” when their own parents see it as an act of mercy?

Why do you use the repugnant hyperbole of comparing euthanasia to the Holocaust? Pediatricians estimate that if the protocol were to apply to the entire Netherlands the annual number of children involved would be 10 to 15. At present levels of population (16 million) and medical care, it would take the Dutch pediatricians something like 10,000 years to get as gruesome as the Germans were during five years of occupation. My grandfather survived the Holocaust, in his last years he was terrified of being hospitalized in some Catholic hospital where they would not respect his own wishes. You think linking the Groningen Protocol and the Nazis is “appropriate”. I think it is vile. Maybe you can explain yourself?

Why do you deny the good intentions of those pediatricians? On what grounds? Do you really think they are “executioners” , that “had [Annah’s] orphanage been attached to the Groningen Academic Hospital, [they] wouldn't be very far down the pick list”? On what grounds, sir?

The first time you mention the Groningen Protocol on your website, you link to this news article posted on MyWay.com. A couple of days later, in your Daily Standard piece, you link to another article appearing in the Grand Forks Herald. However, the only quote you give contains an error, claiming "a parent's role is limited under the protocol. While experts and critics familiar with the policy said a parent's wishes to let a child live or die naturally most likely would be considered, they note that the decision must be professional, so rests with doctors." This is most certainly not how the Groningen hospital itself describes the decision making process. However, the two articles are most informative. This is from MyWay.com:

However, experts acknowledge that doctors euthanize routinely in the United States and elsewhere, but that the practice is hidden.

"Measures that might marginally extend a child's life by minutes or hours or days or weeks are stopped. This happens routinely, namely, every day," said Lance Stell, professor of medical ethics at Davidson College in Davidson, N.C., and staff ethicist at Carolinas Medical Center in Charlotte, N.C.

"Everybody knows that it happens, but there's a lot of hypocrisy. Instead, people talk about things they're not going to do."

More than half of all deaths occur under medical supervision, so it's really about management and method of death, Stell said.

And this is from the Grand Forks Herald:

There's little evidence that permitting euthanasia has had much impact on the number of assisted deaths, argued Rotterdam epidemiologist Agnes van der Heide, who's measured euthanasia in Europe for 10 years.

She said her research indicated that the number of assisted deaths in the Netherlands had increased only slightly in 10 years of legalization. She said the inclusion under the law of such groups as those in the beginning stages of dementia and terminally ill 12- to 16-year-olds accounted for only a few cases nationwide each year, similar to predictions on child euthanasia.

"And the fact remains, euthanasia typically shortens life by one month against life expectancy," she said. "There are no trends showing an increase in that number, or in the estimation that quality of life in these cases is so poor that life should not continue. I know the debate focuses on worst-case scenarios, and abuse. There's no evidence of those things taking place."

Following up on that: why don’t you mention illegal mercy killings and their moral implications? Don't you think that the equation alters when you know that a prohibition is rather futile? Do you really think that all parents, nurses and doctors everywhere will follow the law even when they think this merely prolongs the suffering of the child in their care?

In the Daily Standard you write:

The Groningen Protocol is the proposal of doctors in the Netherlands for the establishment of an "independent committee" charged with selecting babies and other severely handicapped or disabled people for euthanasia.

This description of the protocol seems rather different from the one given by the hospital’s own website or the two news articles you link to. Do you really think this is what the doctors propose? Do you really think they propose to set up a commission just to kill babies and cripples because its fun or convenient? What else do you think they do? Drink the blood of Christian babies?

And on your website you write:

Understand that under the protocol, Greg's and Diana's views on Graciana's right to be born and live would not have been dispositive --only advisory.

What are you talking about? Could you please explain? I have seen an anencephalic child be born at full term in the Netherlands because the mother had refused an abortion. And I've seen the child die half an hour later. You see, in a liberal society, a woman's right to choose works both ways.

The reverse of mercy killing is not life, but a life of suffering. You attack others but say nothing to defend your own position. Killing is wrong, but so is torture. An adult patient who is compos mentis who requests euthanasia considers life (such as he can live it) to be a fate worse than death. You would condemn him to that fate if you could. I would condemn him to whichever fate he chooses. You denounce my position but fail to make a case for yours. This makes your vituperations all the more hollow.

I will say this in defense of the Groningen Protocol:
There are always a few very unlucky innocent children who suffer from the most terrible afflictions. They usually die at an early age, after a few years of intense suffering. As with all children, their parents are entitled to withhold any treatment from their children, even life-saving treatment. After all, the parents are the child’s legal guardians, and children's lives are routinely put in jeopardy by religious parents who refuse them vaccinations or blood transfusions. However, in these cases, even though withholding treatment would lead to a quicker death, it would also increase the suffering of the child. Actively ending the child’s life would be painless. The temptation for mercy killing is there and has always been there. It is a fact of life. Like with euthanasia, mercy killing of suffering infants will not go away when you prohibit it. You can even ask yourself if there will be more mercy killings when you legalize it. Considering the raririty of these illnesses, the strictness of the protocol, and the commonness and strength of parental love, I really doubt that.

Better to have it out in the open where people like yourself can scrutinize the process, then to have parents, doctors and nurses risk years in prison for committing something they and many others see as a selfless act of mercy.

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Finally a good article about Van Gogh!

More than a month after his murder, this interview in the American Prospect is the first English article about Theo Van Gogh that doesn't make me want to unsubscribe (and bang my head on the keyboard in desperation).

It passes muster because:

1. It mentions (and correctly explains) the term 'pillarization'
2. It does not mention (falsely) that secular Holland once was Calvinist.
3. It mentions that Theo van Gogh was far more than just a "filmmaker", but also a columnist who provoked muslims, jews and christians with equal fervor. (Besides columns Van Gogh also published poetry and a novel. He directed TV-series as well as film and he was a gifted interviewer. But I guess you can't have complete accuracy.)
   
4. Bonus: it doesn't mention Vincent van Gogh.

If the Van Gogh murder interests you, this one is the only one to read.
The last bit is rather odd, though. This is the final question of the interview:

How, then, is [the Van Gogh murder] shaping public opinion?

A new Fortuyn is emerging, or so he likes to think: Geert Wilders, who split with the center-right People's Party for Freedom and Democracy. In the meanwhile there is a fierce debate about the limits of multiculturalism, free speech, and the long-cherished culture of tolerance.

For example, in the last year or two, the well known Dutch novelist Leon de Winter has become an outspoken ambassador for what can be considered neoconservative points of view. He writes a blog in which he links frequently to the National Review and Wall Street Journal op-ed page and other like-minded American sources.

As long as the subject matter of his blog and columns was terrorism and the war in Iraq, he seemed to be somewhat out of sync with popular opinion in the Netherlands. A majority of Dutch people probably didn't see his point, and neither did they recognize that his intellectual counterparts were a very clearly defined section of the American Commentariat.

After the Van Gogh murder, he suddenly seems more in step with popular sentiments in the Netherlands. With the same links, same convictions, and same deep distrust of what he calls the Islamization of Europe, his views are now more palpable to the public.

The interviewee (Washington correspondent Marc Chavannes of the NRC Handelsblad) obviously has a lot to say about Leon de Winter. But the most obvious never gets mentioned (or was tossed out by the Prospect). The very first person with whom Theo van Gogh provoked a reaction during his long career of provocation was none other than.... Leon de Winter.

Van Gogh accused De Winter in the early '80s of flaunting or exploiting his (De Winter's) jewishness. I haven't read De Winter's novels (life is too short to read books you know are awful). But the main literary themes in Holland in the late '70s, early '80s were writing about yourself and writing about the second World War, so maybe Van Gogh had a point.

He also had a lawsuit. It took more than nine years and it went all the way to the Hoge Raad (High Council, Dutch Supreme Court), before the case was thrown out.
Anyway, it's a bit strange to see Leon de Winter do his impression of Voltaire ("I may disagree with what you have to say, but I shall defend to the death...").

Back when political correctness was still correct, he was up to his eyeballs in it. And now De Winter's a neocon. The only one Holland has got. So he gets to write a piece on Van Gogh on the Wall Street Journal's op/ed pages. (Warning: bad article about Van Gogh.) He starts out by mentioning Vincent van Gogh, calling the suspect (Dutch but of Moroccan descent) an "immigrant" and even repeats the perpetual foolishnes that "the Netherlands prides itself on being a liberal and tolerant country". All that in just the first paragraph. And De Winter conludes thusly:

Mr. Van Gogh paid the same price [as Pim Fortuyn did] for a provocation that, had it been directed at Christianity rather than Islam, would have hardly raised an eyebrow.

Obviously, he's been in secularized Holland a little too long, because he's wrong about the eyebrow.

But let's leave De Winter to the nuttosphere, and focus on the question: why, o why does it take more than a month to come up with a sensible article (interview, really) about Van Gogh's murder?

The answer: because Goldberg of the American Prospect was the first journalist to do the simple thing and just ask a Dutch journalist about it.

As far as I can tell, the biggies (NY Times et al.) all had their Brussels correspondent, normally a francophone tasked with translating EU byzantinisms into something coherent, visit Amsterdam and ask sociologists and politicians and other experts about immigrants and Van Gogh an stuff.

They could have asked American expats living in Holland and they would have gotten real answers. They could have asked the crew from Boom Chicago and it would have been funny too. About 75% of Dutchmen are sane enough and speak English well enough to have provided the answers. But no. They had to ask politicians and sociologists. Idiots.

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As if!

Back to business.

George Will thinks Bush should get Alan Greenspan to quit at the Fed and head Bush's new economic team.

How stupid does he think Greenspan is?

I've got two theories on Greenspan, and stupid isn't one of them.

(i) He's working to achieve stable, long term economic growth. He's competent, but certainly not the wonderboy people think he is. The internet and housing bubbles both have something to do with monetary policy being too loose.

(ii) He's the Sith Master, a malevolent class warrior who has been patiently plotting all these decades to renounce the New Deal and bring back the Gilded Age. After all, he got Congress to hike payroll taxes in the '80s. As Fed Chairman, he was a deficit hawk when Clinton ruled from the middle. But he stopped being hawkish when Bush started to starve the beast by handing out tax cuts to the rich. Instead of fiscal austerity, he proposed cutting Social Security benefits to help cut the deficit. He rules from behind the curtain, and hides his true intentions so well that people think his hands are clean, the mark of a true evil genius.

I don't know if Greenspan is evil and a genius or just right-wing and competent. Geniuses being rare, I'll go for 'just right-wing'. But he's sure not stupid: if he wants to wreck the government, he's smart enough to let idiots do it for him. If he doesn't want to wreck the government, he's smart enough not to join the Bush team.

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I'm tanned, I'm rested, I'm back

... and I must have gained about 10 pounds. Those French folks running Club Med, they really think it's important to have three squares a day.

Oh, and one day we rented a car and went to see Tunisia, too.

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