Sambal

Just found a blog: Clubbeaux. Here’s a sample:

NATO was never a bunch of friends who got together because they all liked each other, it was a town’s citizens manning the ramparts in a time of crisis. You may not like your neighbor, but when an outside threat comes you stand shoulder to shoulder with him. When the crisis ends, the citizens go home to their respective interests.

I couldn’t agree more.

Let’s get out of these old alliances before they get us into real trouble. Remember WWI? Serbia had an alliance with Russia (1912). Germany had an alliance with Austria (1879). Britain had an alliance with France (1904).

The Soviet threat is gone. NATO doesn’t have a mission anymore, and the invocation of article V and subsequent inaction of our “allies” has shown it to be a dead letter.

Let’s move for the dissolution of the North Atlantic council. We can write bilateral treaties with any non-weasel states worth our time, but the responsibility for securing civil order in Europe should be left to the Europeans.

The Financial Times is reporting that France’s deficit is expected to exceed 3 per cent of GDP (link via Drezner). This would constitute a breach of the growth and stability pact unless France cuts public spending, which PM Raffarin refuses to promise to do. He doesn’t want to break his campaign promise (tax cuts).

The European Commission is threatening give him a stern talking-to, and if he persists in not cutting the deficit, to slap him firmly on both wrists.

But really, what can the EU do to France? The governing agreement is article 104c of the Maastrict EC treaty (pdf) as expanded in the protocol on excessive deficits (pdf). (Read them yourself, but expect a headache.) Once a member state has been determined to have an excessive deficit by the European Commission, the Commission sends a report to the European Council. The Council must decide within three months if there is an excessive deficit. If so, they give the transgressing state up to four months to take steps to clean up its act. All of this happens privately.

If the member state fails to take action, the Council can make this information public. Incidentally, “taking action” means promising to take action, e.g., announcing austerity measures. The rule is:

The Council, when considering whether effective action has been taken in response to its recommendations made in accordance with Article 104(7), shall base its decision on publicly announced decisions by the Government of the Member State concerned.

(I guess politicians never lie in the EC?)

Anyway, after ten months of this, the Commission can impose sanctions of between 0.2 and 0.5 percent of GDP per annum; the amount depends on the size of the deficit. The money must be deposited with the European Central bank and becomes forfeit if the bad behavior continues for two years, otherwise it’s returned.

So, two years and ten months after the end of the fiscal year in which it ran an excessive deficit, a member state can be obliged to pay a fine of up to one-two hundredth of its GDP. Or, stated another way, a fine of up to 8.3% of its deficit. There are some teeth to this treaty, but they’re blunt and far-off.

I sympathize with France’s position. They’re falling short of their predicted growth figures. (Though I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that they’d picked the most optimistic growth number just to get another year of breathing room.) They had hoped to balance the budget by 2004, but it’s always hard to balance the budget into a down economy. And now, with deflation looking much more serious than inflation, balancing the budget would be economic suicide.

(Why? With the economy in decline, tax revenues fall. Balancing the budget means reducing government spending to match tax revenues, which reduces government demand for private-sector services. If the economy is down because of lack of demand — as is characteristic of a deflationary recession — cutting government spending just accelerates the contraction. Remember, Herbert Hoover balanced the U.S. budget into a down and deflating economy. He also was keeping a campaign promise.)

So I do sympathize with France. They’re in a tight spot and they want to spend their way out of it. It’s too bad that the Monetary Union enabling treaties make that illegal.

Of course France wants a special exemption, and will probably get it over the objections of smaller EU member states. (Portugal didn’t get one, after all.) But France is too large and powerful and important to offend. So the rules will probably be relaxed. It’s a classic tragedy of the commons, and the EU members with strong economies (*cough* Finland) or who imposed fiscal discipline (*cough* Germany) will wind up paying the price.

I hope the U.S. government is willing to take the necessary steps to avoid serious deflation. Bring on the budget deficits! Lower taxes! Print more money! If things start to get bad, and sending Bush, Cheney and the ranking members of congress out to do lap dances would help, I say we do it. And since the U.S. hasn’t ceded sovereignty over its federal budget to a multinational council, the measures we adopt will be free of foreign review.

Ah, sovereignty. I wonder if the Finns are getting nostalgia for it yet.

My wife: “Hey! The Vagina Monologues is coming to town before we go!”

Me: “That’s nice.”

“We could go together! Do you want to go?”

“No.”

“Do you mind if I go by myself?”

“No.”

“I think it would be really interesting. Are you sure you don’t want to go?”

“Yes.”

“I would go to The Penis Monologues.”

“I wouldn’t.”

In an article about postwar Iraq, the Washington Post notes in passing that

Bush, speaking in a business suit before an audience of 1,400 at a black-tie dinner

I guess they forgot to dress him appropriately.

MEMRI translates an announcement of imminent terrorist attack, apparently in America, apparently within the next ten days.

Best case is that alfjr.com is blowing smoke: it’s just a lie, attempting to get attention or increase its audience among islamists. I think that’s the most probable possibility.

Alternatively, the claim could be true. There could be a terrorist attack planned within the next few days.

If attempted, the attack could succeed or fail. No matter which it does, the effect of the attack would be to galvanize American sentiment against the terrorists, (unfairly?) against Iraq, and probably (unfairly) against Arabs.

So we would probably immediately invade Iraq. Which might be what the terrorists want. I can’t see that it would be productive in the long run to the terrorists.

I don’t really see that it’s possible that the attack (if it exists) would be called off. This announcement has certainly already come to the attention of the FBI, who are surely taking it seriously. Making a public announcement days before alleged attacks is like spitting in the FBI’s eye. The ten-day limit is indicative: given enough time, the FBI can be expected to turn something up. So the terrorists have to act soon.

Not much more to say. We’ll know by March 7th if they’re blowing smoke or not.

Wesley Smith, a medical ethicist, writes in National Review Online:

What’s the point of passing laws if they’re not going to be enforced?

Link via Charles Murtaugh

Apparently the Swedes don’t think much of Canada — check out the scare quotes on the MySQL download page:

Can’t say I blame ‘em, though. Recently, my wife renewed her passport, and in order to get a Canadian passport you need to give three references who have known you for at least two years, one of whom must be a professional. Here’s the 3-page application form. Four pages of instructions are included.

If I were living in the States, I could renew my passport by mail by filling out a one-page form and signing a declaration under penalty of perjury. (The form.)

It was easier to get married here than to get a passport. It was easier for me (an alien with a non-resident visa) to get a driver’s license than it was for my wife, a Canadian citizen, to get a passport in the city she was born in.

Ric Pashley, an Australian chemist, has demonstrated that oil and water can mix.

If confirmed, the finding could provide clues to one of chemistry’s most puzzling phenomena. This is the so-called long-range hydrophobic force, which causes oil surfaces to attract one another over what to chemists are remarkably long distances.

Effectively, Pashley’s claim is that dissolved gas is necessary for the action of the so-called long-range hydrophobic force. In the absence of dissovled gas, water and oil spontaneously mixed. (Unfortunately, the summary article doesn’t say how hard they were pumping.)

Although this is exciting for physical chemists, and in a distant way interesting to biologists (after all, there are very few biology samples that you can repeatedly freeze and evacuate), it’s earth-shattering for theoretical chemists.

Any simulation that purported to show spontaneous separation of oil and water is now known to be garbage. The paper-and-pencil crowd will have to figure out how to work dissolved gas into their models. If Pashley is right (his results haven’t yet been reproduced), it means that we have to throw away most of our liquid theories.

It almost makes me wish I were back in grad school, doing liquid theory, for the chance to work on these problems in a relatively clear field. Unfortunately, the other structural problems of theoretical chemistry remain: low relevance and intractable computing problems.

And although accounting for dissolved gas is now known to be necessary, there’s nothing to say that it’s the last factor that needs to be accounted for in theory. Very likely it’s not. Water is messy stuff, full of dissolved ions, gases, small organic molecules, and we’re not really very good at modeling it.

Hey, Colby’s not the only guy with a vice…

Our first apartment was a free-standing, three-room, 300 sq. foot cottage in back of a two-story house in Oakland, CA. The sort of thing that was built in the postwar boom to rent to veterans going to Berkeley on the GI bill.

It went through a crackhouse phase during the 80s. We got the lowdown from the neighbor who’d been there since the 60s. Apparently another outbuilding, an ancient garage, had actually been condemned and demolished by the city… because of the rats.

Imagine if the US government kept a database where they stored the address of all foreign nationals. Not just resident aliens and people on long non-resident visas (work, student), but also tourists.

Imagine if, as a tourist arriving in the US, you were admonished to appear at the local INS office within two days of arrival and register your address.

Imagine there were a special exemption for those staying in hotels, hostels and inns, because the proprietors of those are required to register you. Imagine if this were billed as a service.

You don’t have to imagine it. Not because it’s policy in the US, though the Total Information Awareness proposal includes provisions similar to these.

No, you don’t have to imagine it, because you can see it in action in the Czech Republic.

Police for Foreigners. Just says it all right there, doesn’t it. This was in place when I visited in ‘88 — you know, under Communism.