kontrawize

Happy New Year 2009!

Happy New Year, everyone! I don't know what 2009 will bring for us all, but I'm sure we all hope that 2009 will be the year when the current global recession comes to an end. That said, there are no promises, it is no time to be complacent. When the economy rebounds, as it surely will, it will be a time of great opportunities for those who are ready for it. I wish you all the best success in making the most of those opportunities.

Wasn't Martin Luther King the first black president?

I went to have my hair cut this morning, here in London in the UK. Two of the trainees were talking. One was saying that she had been inspired by Obama being elected as U.S. president, and had decided that she wanted to go into politics herself. The other said something like "they keep saying he is the first black president, but wasn't Martin Luther King the first black president"? So much for skoolin', I guess.

Update: here is a link to the Wikipedia article on Martin Luther King Jr.

Fire on the Cutty Sark

I was horrified this morning to read about the fire on the Cutty Sark (see, for example, the BBC news report).  I've lived not far from Greenwich ever since 2000 when I moved to London, and it was a thrill for me to be able to see the same record-breaking clipper that I read about as a boy in Australia.

I expect it will be a while before we know what the full extent of the damage is.

Should Iran be allowed to enrich uranium?

Should Iran be allowed to enrich uranium? It's a question I've been thinking about quite a bit over recent weeks. In the main, it seems to me that it's the wrong question. How about:

Should any country be allowed to enrich uranium?

I think that's a much more appropriate question. After all, if the permanent members of the UN security council all stopped enriching uranium, it would be much more difficult for Iran to argue that it has a right to do so.

Let's go further. It seems to me that the arguments against Iran being able to enrich uranium boil down to a suggestion that Iran sponsors terrorism, and can't be trusted with nuclear weapons. So, perhaps the question we should ask is:

Which countries have never sponsored terrorism (or similar), and hence could be trusted with nuclear weapons?

I'm not aware of any country which currently has nuclear weapons and has never taken part in terrorism or related activities. To take the US and UK as examples, in the 50s they apparently co-sponsored a group of mercenaries to support the coup that toppled the democratically elected government of Iran and installed the Shah as its non-democratic replacement. [Why did they do that? At the time, the Iranian government wanted to nationalise the oil industry there, i.e. BP.]

The US is also still the only country that has used nuclear weapons. At school, I was taught that this was necessary to end World War II. However, I now find out that at the time the US dropped the bombs, Japan apparently was already looking for a diplomatic resolution to the hostilities, and the US knew this because they had broken the Japanese encryption. [Why did they do it then? Hard to give a simple answer to a complex question, but the Hiroshima bomb was dropped two days before Russia planned to enter the Pacific conflict, something the US and UK were keen to avoid, to limit Russian influence in the region.]

So, I just can't support this idea what "we" can be trusted with enriching uranium, and "they" can't. When there's no way to tell the good guys and the bad guys apart, you have to treat everyone equally. That's one of those democratic principles, right?

Federalising Australia

There are a lot of issues where I don't agree with Australia's Liberal/National coalition government, but I'm in complete agreement with the Treasurer's call for a more federalised Australia. Why? My view, as an Australian who has spent quite a few years out of Australia looking back in, is that Australia wastes a lot of its energy on squabbles between the states. Other countries just wait for us to knock the stuffing out of ourselves first, and then come in and beat us where the competition really counts, in international trade.

The world doesn't owe Australia a living, and Australia still has a lot to learn from Germany, where I lived for over a year. All the Germans I knew seemed to be very aware that Germany's economic survival depended on winning the competition for international business, and that winning those battles was more important than any internal bickering. Given how much Australia has suffered in recent decades from a woefully negative balance of trade, you would think we would have learned by now, but I'm not convinced even now that the message has sunk in.

I'm all for an outward looking Australia that puts more effort into nation-versus-nation than state-versus-state. The latter is just a dead end for the future of the country.

It's a good thing the US constitution doesn't apply to the US president

I highly commend to you all the article on the US Supreme Court ruling about miltary courts in Guantánamo Bay that The Register published.

It seems to me that US presidents over the years have often talked about their duty to defend the US constitution. So for me, as an outsider, as a non-American, I'm still incredulous (a) that the Bush Administration has invested so much effort finding loopholes in the US constitution so that they can bypass the constitution rather than defend it, and (b) that there seems to be so little criticism of this behaviour in the US itself. Of course there are critics (e.g. the Supreme Court), but the criticism seems slow to arrive and certainly doesn't seem strong enough to sway the White House's course of action. As an outsider, I can say that the US (government) is often seen to espouse great social and moral principles, while at the same time failing to apply those principles outside of its own borders. No wonder so many non-Americans have a negative view of the US. Most people in the world have not visited the US, they only know about the US from TV, movies, and the US's international behaviour. None of those three paint a good picture of the US for foreigners.

It's not only the US that wants to avoid the nuisance of having to obey its own laws, though. My own native country, Australia, for some years now has been maintaining a policy of keeping asylum seekers outside of the country's borders, where possible, so that they don't have access to the full legal appeals system if they are not granted asylum. While the human rights issue here is perhaps not at the same level as the Guantánamo Bay issue, the philosphies are still similar. To confuse the Australian issue, though, some of the countries that the asylum seekers are leaving now seem to prefer that their citizens are kept outside of Australia. That makes it even harder to judge whether it's an appropriate way to handle asylum seekers, as opposed to being a convenient solution for the government.

Should we really be letting our lawmakers bypass their own laws? Or are we just digging ourselves into a bigger and deeper hole? I don't see a light at the end of this particular tunnel.

Paying off the National Credit Card

I'm thrilled to read that the Australian Federal Government has now reduced its debt to zero. While I don't see eye to eye with everything that John Howard's government does, I've always strongly supported their commitment to reduce Australia's debt, and I'm thrilled that they have succeeded.

I grew up in an Australia where politicians' desires to improve the standard of living outstripped Australia's capacity to pay for that standard. So we put it all on the national credit card. I don't like the idea of running up a debt now that will be passed on to our children and grandchildren.

I'm all for social democracies that aim to provide a good standard of living to all, not just the opportunity of a good standard of living for the most skilled. However, I think it always needs to be balanced against what can be afforded. There will always be good works that we can't afford to do today, and borrowing to pay for them isn't a solution, it's just a black hole that can swallow you up. I only hope that future Australian governments will show the same fiscal prudence.

If you are American, the US is spying on you

Just read a story in The Register that the US government has been caught using the ECHELON system to spy on its own citizens. For those of you who haven't heard of it, ECHELON is a super secret (yeah, right) computerised spying sytem that intercepts radio transmissions and telephone calls, automatically interprets the speech, and searches for words and/or phrases that are of interest. It has a huge capacity, so it isn't just intercepting random transmissions, it is intended to intercept all transmissions. It is run by English-speaking nations, so the UK, Canada, and Australia are also involved (not sure about others).

While the other nations help in collecting the intelligence, it seems that the US holds on to the actual results fairly tightly, so that the other nations don't get the same access that the US has. I remember media reports some years back that the US had been caught using ECHELON to spy on its partners Canada and Australia as part of its industrial espionage operations. Allegedly, information from ECHELON on what Canadian and Australian companies were going to bid in commerical negotiations was passed to US companies so that the US companies could undercut them.

You can understand how galling this is to Australians (like myself), since Australia considers itself to be one of the US's closest allies, and has followed it dutifully into every war since World War 2. So to have the US use this system, one that that Australia supplies information for, to conduct industrial espionage against Australian companies is very sad indeed.

Anyway, Americans get to share in this too now. I'm not sure if that makes me feel better or not, in retrospect. It will certainly make it easier to stage new-age re-runs of Watergate. Oh well, at least the US doesn't consider itself an international role model, or the moral leader of the free world. Oh, wait ...