Month: October 2009

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Well, not really. Is this really so? Will he not attend?

1. Germany is going to have to wait longer than expected for US President Barack Obama’s first official visit. Citing government sources in Berlin, Reuters reported on Friday that Obama will not attend the anniversary festivities marking two decades since the fall of the Berlin Wall. –  Spiegel Online/International

2. Spouses and even children–researchers combing the Stasi files after the Wall fell were horrified to discover the payroll included 10,000 informers under the age of 18–were potential eyes and ears of the regime; friends were suspect; and strangers were presumed to be Stasi until proven innocent, and probably well beyond that. “Relations between people were conditioned by the fact that one or the other of you could be one of them,” writes Australian journalist Anna Funder in Stasiland: True Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall. “Everyone suspected everyone else, and the mistrust this bred was the foundation of social existence.” –  Glenn Garvin, Reason

3. The pivotal scene in the magnificent new ( OPS: it’s a 2006 film) German movie The Lives of Others–which won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film last week–takes place in an elevator. The year is 1984, and the occupant of the elevator is a severe and profoundly intelligent senior functionary of the East German security service named Wiesler. A stray word about the inhumanity of Stasi interrogations, or a joke about the dictator Erich Honecker, is all Wiesler needs to hear to make a simple mark on a piece of paper that will ruin someone’s life. – John Podhoretz, The Weekly Standard

UPDATE: Communist-era store windows, via boing boing.

Britain and Electricity – Asking the Wrong Questions

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Recently I wrote about Britain and electricity and the fact that Britain isn’t bringing new capacity on line in time to stave off a looming crisis as older plants go out of service and electricity demand rises.

This article, titled “Questioning the invisible hand“, has the sub title “Can liberalized energy markets cut carbon emissions? Britain is starting to doubt it”.

The first myth is that Britain, like America, really “deregulated” or “liberalized” their markets. A better description would be that the markets are “regulated differently”.

In the old markets, utilities had a duty to plan for customer demand growth and re-invest in future capacity. Many of the deregulation schemes split off generation, transmission, and local energy distribution into separate companies, which is fine in theory because then each of these three components could be optimized. In many cases local citizens were given a “choice” of electricity providers at the distribution level, but these distribution companies still essentially utilized “legacy” transmission and generation assets.

The reason that these schemes were only partially deregulated is that 1) barriers in the market place ensured that it was difficult to build base load capacity of coal or nuclear power, meaning that the older units ruled the market 2) the spot price of generation was determined by gas fired units, which essentially meant that it fluctuated with the price of natural gas 3) building transmission is so onerous (getting permits, siting it) and funding is so uncertain that the grid was not significantly improved. What did happen is that price controls on generation were lifted and rates were capped, so for a decade or so there weren’t increases in the price of electricity from the generation side.

From the article:

The committee’s diagnosis was stark: the market, left to its own devices, is failing to deliver (carbon reductions). Consumers are not buying energy-efficient appliances or insulating their houses… and power makers still prefer fossil fuels to greener alternatives.

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What the Limbaugh Quote Hoax Really Tells Us

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Listening to the contemporary American left’s views of the rest of us is increasingly like listening to a paranoid schizophrenic slip farther into delusions that they are surrounded by malevolent people. Just as we have to worry that the schizophrenic might act on their delusional beliefs and strike out violently against the evils they imagine, we have to be increasingly worried that leftists will strike out against the rest of us based on their delusional fantasies about what we non-leftists believe.

And make no mistake about it, leftists do harbor dark delusions about non-leftists. The fact that so many leftists fell completely for the Limbaugh quote hoax proves it.

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Marching Upcountry with Xenophon

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The Xenophon Roundtable is coming to it’s conclusion. While we may see a few more “final” posts this week, for the most part, we have had our say. This was the third roundtable hosted by Chicago Boyz and the discussion was different in character from the first two because The Anabasis of Cyrus is of a different nature than On War or Science, Strategy and War: The Strategic Theory of John Boyd. The first two books dealt with military theory but The Anabasis was not written by a professor of strategic studies or of military history, which Frans Osinga and even Carl von Clausewitz were. By contrast, Xenophon was an Athenian aristocrat at odds with democratic times, a brave soldier of fortune and foremost, a student of Socrates.

Xenophon the Socratic soldier and admirer of Sparta would never have written a book like On War because the character of war would have been of less interest to him than the character of men who waged it. Or at least the character of the Greeks who waged war and that of the leaders of the barbarian armies, Cyrus, Tissaphernes and Artaxerxes (ordinary, individual, barbarians are of no consequence to Xenophon except insofar as they are instrumental in carrying out the designs of their leaders). And their character at war and in peace were inseparable and constant, though having different effects, as Xenophon explained in his passages on Clearchus and his captains and his paean to Cyrus the Younger. It has been remarked in this roundtable by Joseph Fouche that Xenophon was thoroughly Greek in his attitude toward the barbarians which Joseph Fouche called a “mirror image” to the attitude of Herodotus toward the Others of the East. I agree, to an extent. The countervailing example though is Cyrus, on whom Xenophon lavished praise with so heavy a hand that it must have struck Athenian eyes as bordering on sycophancy toward a would-be basileus. Few Greek writers, other than Herodotus, were ever so generous with their pen to a barbarian.

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China in Africa

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I don’t know if it is true or not but I was told once that the writers at “The Onion” start with the headline and then write the story. If that is true, this is an example of an absolutely perfect headline that summarizes China’s role in Africa today:

Don’t Worry About Killing People


This article from The Economist describes how a large Chinese company is signing an agreement with Guinea’s dictator, a man who brutally put down a rally and killed at least 150 protesters who were calling for an end to military rule. While this type of activity horrifies the West (Guinea is a former French colony and they made strong condemnation of this activity), it doesn’t bother the Chinese in the least, who seem to be willing to cut a deal with anyone to obtain raw materials and resources.

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