Jewish population on the increase
BBC
21/5/08
The UK's Jewish population is growing for the first time since World War II, research suggests. The rise appears to be due to a growth in the size of ultra-orthodox Jewish families, according to researchers at the University of Manchester. The population fell to a historic low of 275,000 in 2005, but that figure has since increased to 280,000 in 2008. The figures were based on UK census data and the monitoring of Jewish births by academics.
The Jewish population of the UK decreased by 40% from just after World War II to a low point in 2005 as the birth-rate among secular Jews declined and more married outside the community. Britain has the fifth largest Jewish population in the world.
...
At the start of World War I there were half a million Jews in Britain, but in a smaller overall population. Dr Wise calculates the proportion of Jews in the UK now is only about a quarter of its peak.
Dr Wise - who says his research is based on regular monitoring of Jewish births - attributes the decline in the Jewish population to the fact that about half of more secular Jews marry outside the community, and many of them do not bring their children up as Jewish. He says secular Jewish women - coming from a relatively well-educated and prosperous section of society - have had on average only 1.65 children. The UK average is 1.8.
However, the very high birth-rate of the minority of strictly orthodox - also referred to as ultra-orthodox - Jewish families is having an increasing impact on the population as a whole. They marry young - often in their early twenties or even late teens - and have an average of almost seven children.
...
[Wise] calculates that at current trends strictly orthodox Jews will outnumber their more secular counterparts by the middle of the century.
Sunday, May 25, 2008
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
Socialist Roots of Authoritarian Dictatorships
I was interested to note that the military government of Burma has socialist roots. The ruling party self identified itself as socialist calling itself the Burma Socialist Programme Party and ruled under the rubric of the Burmese Way to Socialism.
Wikipedia entry here.
Wikipedia entry here.
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
global peace index
I ran across an interesting initiative, Global Peace Index, which now includes 140 countries. A new report for 2008 is out now.
Summary: http://www.visionofhumanity.org/gpi/about-gpi/overview.php
And the most interesting link – comparison – this is where you can compare countries, according to the various criteria and indicators: http://www.visionofhumanity.org/gpi/results/comparison.php
http://www.visionofhumanity.org/gpi/about-gpi/methodology.php
although weighting the index could be elaborated, with explanations and details.
Saturday, May 17, 2008
Science: Surfer dude stuns physicists with theory of everything
First posting in what may become a general 'science' thread.
------------
Surfer dude stuns physicists with theory of everything
Telegraph
14/11/2007
An impoverished surfer has drawn up a new theory of the universe, seen by some as the Holy Grail of physics, which has received rave reviews from scientists. Garrett Lisi, 39, has a doctorate but no university affiliation and spends most of the year surfing in Hawaii, where he has also been a hiking guide and bridge builder (when he slept in a jungle yurt).
In winter, he heads to the mountains near Lake Tahoe, Nevada, where he snowboards. "Being poor sucks," Lisi says. "It's hard to figure out the secrets of the universe when you're trying to figure out where you and your girlfriend are going to sleep next month."
Despite this unusual career path, his proposal is remarkable because, by the arcane standards of particle physics, it does not require highly complex mathematics.
Even better, it does not require more than one dimension of time and three of space, when some rival theories need ten or even more spatial dimensions and other bizarre concepts. And it may even be possible to test his theory, which predicts a host of new particles, perhaps even using the new Large Hadron Collider atom smasher that will go into action near Geneva next year.
Although the work of 39 year old Garrett Lisi still has a way to go to convince the establishment, let alone match the achievements of Albert Einstein, the two do have one thing in common: Einstein also began his great adventure in theoretical physics while outside the mainstream scientific establishment, working as a patent officer, though failed to achieve the Holy Grail, an overarching explanation to unite all the particles and forces of the cosmos.
Now Lisi, currently in Nevada, has come up with a proposal to do this. Lee Smolin at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, describes Lisi's work as "fabulous". "It is one of the most compelling unification models I've seen in many, many years," he says.
"Although he cultivates a bit of a surfer-guy image its clear he has put enormous effort and time into working the complexities of this structure out over several years," Prof Smolin tells The Telegraph.
"Some incredibly beautiful stuff falls out of Lisi's theory," adds David Ritz Finkelstein at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta. "This must be more than coincidence and he really is touching on something profound."
The new theory reported today in New Scientist has been laid out in an online paper entitled "An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything" by Lisi, who completed his doctorate in theoretical physics in 1999 at the University of California, San Diego.
He has high hopes that his new theory could provide what he says is a "radical new explanation" for the three decade old Standard Model, which weaves together three of the four fundamental forces of nature: the electromagnetic force; the strong force, which binds quarks together in atomic nuclei; and the weak force, which controls radioactive decay.
The reason for the excitement is that Lisi's model also takes account of gravity, a force that has only successfully been included by a rival and highly fashionable idea called string theory, one that proposes particles are made up of minute strings, which is highly complex and elegant but has lacked predictions by which to do experiments to see if it works.
But some are taking a cooler view. Prof Marcus du Sautoy, of Oxford University and author of Finding Moonshine, told the Telegraph: "The proposal in this paper looks a long shot and there seem to be a lot things still to fill in."
And a colleague Eric Weinstein in America added: "Lisi seems like a hell of a guy. I'd love to meet him. But my friend Lee Smolin is betting on a very very long shot."
Lisi's inspiration lies in the most elegant and intricate shape known to mathematics, called E8 - a complex, eight-dimensional mathematical pattern with 248 points first found in 1887, but only fully understood by mathematicians this year after workings, that, if written out in tiny print, would cover an area the size of Manhattan.
E8 encapsulates the symmetries of a geometric object that is 57-dimensional and is itself is 248-dimensional. Lisi says "I think our universe is this beautiful shape."
What makes E8 so exciting is that Nature also seems to have embedded it at the heart of many bits of physics. One interpretation of why we have such a quirky list of fundamental particles is because they all result from different facets of the strange symmetries of E8.
Lisi's breakthrough came when he noticed that some of the equations describing E8's structure matched his own. "My brain exploded with the implications and the beauty of the thing," he tells New Scientist. "I thought: 'Holy crap, that's it!'"
What Lisi had realised was that he could find a way to place the various elementary particles and forces on E8's 248 points. What remained was 20 gaps which he filled with notional particles, for example those that some physicists predict to be associated with gravity.
Physicists have long puzzled over why elementary particles appear to belong to families, but this arises naturally from the geometry of E8, he says. So far, all the interactions predicted by the complex geometrical relationships inside E8 match with observations in the real world. "How cool is that?" he says.
The crucial test of Lisi's work will come only when he has made testable predictions. Lisi is now calculating the masses that the 20 new particles should have, in the hope that they may be spotted when the Large Hadron Collider starts up.
"The theory is very young, and still in development," he told the Telegraph. "Right now, I'd assign a low (but not tiny) likelyhood to this prediction.
"For comparison, I think the chances are higher that LHC will see some of these particles than it is that the LHC will see superparticles, extra dimensions, or micro black holes as predicted by string theory. I hope to get more (and different) predictions, with more confidence, out of this E8 Theory over the next year, before the LHC comes online."
------------
Surfer dude stuns physicists with theory of everything
Telegraph
14/11/2007
An impoverished surfer has drawn up a new theory of the universe, seen by some as the Holy Grail of physics, which has received rave reviews from scientists. Garrett Lisi, 39, has a doctorate but no university affiliation and spends most of the year surfing in Hawaii, where he has also been a hiking guide and bridge builder (when he slept in a jungle yurt).
In winter, he heads to the mountains near Lake Tahoe, Nevada, where he snowboards. "Being poor sucks," Lisi says. "It's hard to figure out the secrets of the universe when you're trying to figure out where you and your girlfriend are going to sleep next month."
Despite this unusual career path, his proposal is remarkable because, by the arcane standards of particle physics, it does not require highly complex mathematics.
Even better, it does not require more than one dimension of time and three of space, when some rival theories need ten or even more spatial dimensions and other bizarre concepts. And it may even be possible to test his theory, which predicts a host of new particles, perhaps even using the new Large Hadron Collider atom smasher that will go into action near Geneva next year.
Although the work of 39 year old Garrett Lisi still has a way to go to convince the establishment, let alone match the achievements of Albert Einstein, the two do have one thing in common: Einstein also began his great adventure in theoretical physics while outside the mainstream scientific establishment, working as a patent officer, though failed to achieve the Holy Grail, an overarching explanation to unite all the particles and forces of the cosmos.
Now Lisi, currently in Nevada, has come up with a proposal to do this. Lee Smolin at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, describes Lisi's work as "fabulous". "It is one of the most compelling unification models I've seen in many, many years," he says.
"Although he cultivates a bit of a surfer-guy image its clear he has put enormous effort and time into working the complexities of this structure out over several years," Prof Smolin tells The Telegraph.
"Some incredibly beautiful stuff falls out of Lisi's theory," adds David Ritz Finkelstein at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta. "This must be more than coincidence and he really is touching on something profound."
The new theory reported today in New Scientist has been laid out in an online paper entitled "An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything" by Lisi, who completed his doctorate in theoretical physics in 1999 at the University of California, San Diego.
He has high hopes that his new theory could provide what he says is a "radical new explanation" for the three decade old Standard Model, which weaves together three of the four fundamental forces of nature: the electromagnetic force; the strong force, which binds quarks together in atomic nuclei; and the weak force, which controls radioactive decay.
The reason for the excitement is that Lisi's model also takes account of gravity, a force that has only successfully been included by a rival and highly fashionable idea called string theory, one that proposes particles are made up of minute strings, which is highly complex and elegant but has lacked predictions by which to do experiments to see if it works.
But some are taking a cooler view. Prof Marcus du Sautoy, of Oxford University and author of Finding Moonshine, told the Telegraph: "The proposal in this paper looks a long shot and there seem to be a lot things still to fill in."
And a colleague Eric Weinstein in America added: "Lisi seems like a hell of a guy. I'd love to meet him. But my friend Lee Smolin is betting on a very very long shot."
Lisi's inspiration lies in the most elegant and intricate shape known to mathematics, called E8 - a complex, eight-dimensional mathematical pattern with 248 points first found in 1887, but only fully understood by mathematicians this year after workings, that, if written out in tiny print, would cover an area the size of Manhattan.
E8 encapsulates the symmetries of a geometric object that is 57-dimensional and is itself is 248-dimensional. Lisi says "I think our universe is this beautiful shape."
What makes E8 so exciting is that Nature also seems to have embedded it at the heart of many bits of physics. One interpretation of why we have such a quirky list of fundamental particles is because they all result from different facets of the strange symmetries of E8.
Lisi's breakthrough came when he noticed that some of the equations describing E8's structure matched his own. "My brain exploded with the implications and the beauty of the thing," he tells New Scientist. "I thought: 'Holy crap, that's it!'"
What Lisi had realised was that he could find a way to place the various elementary particles and forces on E8's 248 points. What remained was 20 gaps which he filled with notional particles, for example those that some physicists predict to be associated with gravity.
Physicists have long puzzled over why elementary particles appear to belong to families, but this arises naturally from the geometry of E8, he says. So far, all the interactions predicted by the complex geometrical relationships inside E8 match with observations in the real world. "How cool is that?" he says.
The crucial test of Lisi's work will come only when he has made testable predictions. Lisi is now calculating the masses that the 20 new particles should have, in the hope that they may be spotted when the Large Hadron Collider starts up.
"The theory is very young, and still in development," he told the Telegraph. "Right now, I'd assign a low (but not tiny) likelyhood to this prediction.
"For comparison, I think the chances are higher that LHC will see some of these particles than it is that the LHC will see superparticles, extra dimensions, or micro black holes as predicted by string theory. I hope to get more (and different) predictions, with more confidence, out of this E8 Theory over the next year, before the LHC comes online."
Thursday, May 15, 2008
Gordon Brown's catastrophic leadership
Kaletsky is brilliant sometimes. Bitingly funny too.
--------------
It all looks like Enron government
Anatole Kaletsky
The Times
May 15, 2008
What makes Gordon Brown so popular with newspapers and voters? This may seem a strange question to ask when the Prime Minister has just suffered the worst local election defeat since the early 1980s and faced the most humiliating headlines since the collapse of John Major's economic policy on Black Wednesday. But considering just how disastrously Mr Brown's Government has lately been performing, the real surprise about this week's U-turn on taxes has been the mildness of the media and public response.
A prime minister's inability to get his Budget passed by the Commons has traditionally been considered the quintessential resigning issue. And in this case, capitulation on the most important tax measure in two consecutive Budgets was accompanied by Mr Brown's abandonment of his fiscal rules. These were the lodestars of his entire economic programme, as surely the sterling-mark exchange rate was Mr Major's guiding light.
Now that the fiscal rules have been abandoned and the Treasury's main Budget judgments have been opened up to revision by backbenchers, we can have literally no idea of where the Brown Government's economic policy may be heading - and neither can the Chancellor and his Treasury civil servants. This erosion of the Treasury's budgetary function, literally unprecedented in the history of modern British government, sets the stage for economic and political disaster. The Treasury's main job is essentially the same as the finance department's in a well-run company. It must consider the many deserving requests for new projects arriving every day from departmental ministers or line managers and it must above all have the authority to say “no”.
That authority, in turn, depends on two factors: a serious companywide commitment to the budget processes and an ability by the finance director (or Chancellor) to overrule even the chief executive or company chairman (in this case the Prime Minister) when it comes to ensuring the agreed budget is observed. When these conditions break down and the Chancellor loses his authority to say “no” to the Prime Minister, the Government risks becoming like a company run by a domineering chief executive who treats the whole business, including its finances, as a personal fiefdom.
This is essentially what happened in the empires of Robert Maxwell and Conrad Black and, most notoriously at Enron. When the Treasury and chancellor can no longer say “no” to demands from the prime minister for political fixes and wheezes, the country risks Enron government - or, to put it more politely, the rule by pressure groups and lobbies.
After all, if Mr Brown's fiscal rules could be ignored so easily this year to accommodate a £2.7 billion tax cut to satisfy Labour backbenchers, why shouldn't they also be ignored to satisfy fuel-tax protesters and pensioners and underpaid public sector workers and bankers demanding bailouts and homeowners struggling with their mortgages and multinational companies threatening to pull out of Britain and farmers complaining about the weather and indeed you and me, since we would all prefer to pay less tax and get more out of government? In short, this week's U-turn could presage a summer of discontent in which every possible claimant and lobby demands its extra share of taxpayer funds.
To put the same point in a way that may be more understandable to the political manipulator in Mr Brown, if you can suddenly conjure up £2.7 billion from nowhere and tear up your sacrosanct fiscal rules, why shouldn't the Tories do the same? They can now promise big tax cuts combined with improvements in public services, effortlessly financed by extra borrowing.
It may be argued, nevertheless, the fiscal rules now abandoned were arbitrary and foolish in the first place and should never have been accorded the pride of place they enjoyed in the 11 Budgets Mr Brown presented as Chancellor. Indeed, I have repeatedly argued this myself.
But the absence of economic logic behind Mr Brown's rules is irrelevant. The same could be said (and was) of Mr Major's commitment to keep the exchange rate at DM2.95 to the pound, come hell or high water. Yet when this arbitrary economic totem was broken, so was Mr Major's authority. The same must surely now be true of Mr Brown.
Yet far from demanding Mr Brown's immediate resignation or predicting the inevitable demise of his Government, the media have mostly treated this week's U-turn as the moment when the Prime Minister's fortunes could start to recover. The Daily Telegraph headlined its editorial “Right move for wrong reasons” and argued that the Government “deserves congratulations” for its sudden discovery that it could borrow its way out of trouble. The Financial Times described the tax giveaway as an “act of desperation” but nevertheless predicted that “this retreat may turn out to be the moment when the Government fightback began”. The leader in The Times described this mini-budget as a “final service to the Labour Party” by Gwyneth Dunwoody, the Labour MP, whose untimely death triggered the Crewe & Nantwich by-election and encouraged Mr Brown to offer voters this bribe.
So why, I repeat, is everyone suddenly so deferential to the Prime Minister? For overt rightwingers the calculation is fairly simple - the Tories want Mr Brown as their opponent in the 2010 election. For more impartial media commentators, it is also a matter of personal pride. We are all afraid of getting caught up in mass hysteria and anxious to prove our independence. So the very fact that Mr Brown's maladministration has now become so obvious makes it clever and original to imagine possible ways out.
There is an honourable reason for giving Mr Brown the benefit of the doubt. Mr Brown, for all his recent blunders, was a remarkably successful politician until he became Prime Minister.
Indeed, he was probably the most successful chancellor in modern history, notwithstanding his muddled tax reforms, his badly timed gold sales and the fatal damage he allowed the regulators and courts to inflict on Britain's pension funds. Mr Brown made the right decisions on monetary policy and the Bank of England. He kept Britain out of the euro. He reduced capital gains and corporation tax more radically than any Tory chancellor and he resisted populist demands to squeeze the rich.
Above all, Mr Brown allowed the economy to grow rapidly and to benefit from its comparative advantage in global business services without trying to tilt the playing field in favour of Labour's traditional working-class constituencies.
By doing the British economy no serious harm during his long tenure at the Treasury, Mr Brown earned a distinction unique among postwar chancellors, with the possible exception of Kenneth Clarke.
Mr Brown's fatal flaws as Prime Minister have had nothing to do with the statist, socialist, old Labour instincts that his detractors claimed to detect behind the mask of the competent Chancellor. If Mr Brown fails as Prime Minister, it will not be because of his ideology but because of his personality: his failure to delegate, his intolerance of dissent, his indecisiveness, his stubbornness, and his brittleness under stress. In sum, Mr Brown was a great Chancellor but is a terrible Prime Minister. That at least puts him above John Major and James Callaghan, who were terrible at both jobs.
--------------
It all looks like Enron government
Anatole Kaletsky
The Times
May 15, 2008
What makes Gordon Brown so popular with newspapers and voters? This may seem a strange question to ask when the Prime Minister has just suffered the worst local election defeat since the early 1980s and faced the most humiliating headlines since the collapse of John Major's economic policy on Black Wednesday. But considering just how disastrously Mr Brown's Government has lately been performing, the real surprise about this week's U-turn on taxes has been the mildness of the media and public response.
A prime minister's inability to get his Budget passed by the Commons has traditionally been considered the quintessential resigning issue. And in this case, capitulation on the most important tax measure in two consecutive Budgets was accompanied by Mr Brown's abandonment of his fiscal rules. These were the lodestars of his entire economic programme, as surely the sterling-mark exchange rate was Mr Major's guiding light.
Now that the fiscal rules have been abandoned and the Treasury's main Budget judgments have been opened up to revision by backbenchers, we can have literally no idea of where the Brown Government's economic policy may be heading - and neither can the Chancellor and his Treasury civil servants. This erosion of the Treasury's budgetary function, literally unprecedented in the history of modern British government, sets the stage for economic and political disaster. The Treasury's main job is essentially the same as the finance department's in a well-run company. It must consider the many deserving requests for new projects arriving every day from departmental ministers or line managers and it must above all have the authority to say “no”.
That authority, in turn, depends on two factors: a serious companywide commitment to the budget processes and an ability by the finance director (or Chancellor) to overrule even the chief executive or company chairman (in this case the Prime Minister) when it comes to ensuring the agreed budget is observed. When these conditions break down and the Chancellor loses his authority to say “no” to the Prime Minister, the Government risks becoming like a company run by a domineering chief executive who treats the whole business, including its finances, as a personal fiefdom.
This is essentially what happened in the empires of Robert Maxwell and Conrad Black and, most notoriously at Enron. When the Treasury and chancellor can no longer say “no” to demands from the prime minister for political fixes and wheezes, the country risks Enron government - or, to put it more politely, the rule by pressure groups and lobbies.
After all, if Mr Brown's fiscal rules could be ignored so easily this year to accommodate a £2.7 billion tax cut to satisfy Labour backbenchers, why shouldn't they also be ignored to satisfy fuel-tax protesters and pensioners and underpaid public sector workers and bankers demanding bailouts and homeowners struggling with their mortgages and multinational companies threatening to pull out of Britain and farmers complaining about the weather and indeed you and me, since we would all prefer to pay less tax and get more out of government? In short, this week's U-turn could presage a summer of discontent in which every possible claimant and lobby demands its extra share of taxpayer funds.
To put the same point in a way that may be more understandable to the political manipulator in Mr Brown, if you can suddenly conjure up £2.7 billion from nowhere and tear up your sacrosanct fiscal rules, why shouldn't the Tories do the same? They can now promise big tax cuts combined with improvements in public services, effortlessly financed by extra borrowing.
It may be argued, nevertheless, the fiscal rules now abandoned were arbitrary and foolish in the first place and should never have been accorded the pride of place they enjoyed in the 11 Budgets Mr Brown presented as Chancellor. Indeed, I have repeatedly argued this myself.
But the absence of economic logic behind Mr Brown's rules is irrelevant. The same could be said (and was) of Mr Major's commitment to keep the exchange rate at DM2.95 to the pound, come hell or high water. Yet when this arbitrary economic totem was broken, so was Mr Major's authority. The same must surely now be true of Mr Brown.
Yet far from demanding Mr Brown's immediate resignation or predicting the inevitable demise of his Government, the media have mostly treated this week's U-turn as the moment when the Prime Minister's fortunes could start to recover. The Daily Telegraph headlined its editorial “Right move for wrong reasons” and argued that the Government “deserves congratulations” for its sudden discovery that it could borrow its way out of trouble. The Financial Times described the tax giveaway as an “act of desperation” but nevertheless predicted that “this retreat may turn out to be the moment when the Government fightback began”. The leader in The Times described this mini-budget as a “final service to the Labour Party” by Gwyneth Dunwoody, the Labour MP, whose untimely death triggered the Crewe & Nantwich by-election and encouraged Mr Brown to offer voters this bribe.
So why, I repeat, is everyone suddenly so deferential to the Prime Minister? For overt rightwingers the calculation is fairly simple - the Tories want Mr Brown as their opponent in the 2010 election. For more impartial media commentators, it is also a matter of personal pride. We are all afraid of getting caught up in mass hysteria and anxious to prove our independence. So the very fact that Mr Brown's maladministration has now become so obvious makes it clever and original to imagine possible ways out.
There is an honourable reason for giving Mr Brown the benefit of the doubt. Mr Brown, for all his recent blunders, was a remarkably successful politician until he became Prime Minister.
Indeed, he was probably the most successful chancellor in modern history, notwithstanding his muddled tax reforms, his badly timed gold sales and the fatal damage he allowed the regulators and courts to inflict on Britain's pension funds. Mr Brown made the right decisions on monetary policy and the Bank of England. He kept Britain out of the euro. He reduced capital gains and corporation tax more radically than any Tory chancellor and he resisted populist demands to squeeze the rich.
Above all, Mr Brown allowed the economy to grow rapidly and to benefit from its comparative advantage in global business services without trying to tilt the playing field in favour of Labour's traditional working-class constituencies.
By doing the British economy no serious harm during his long tenure at the Treasury, Mr Brown earned a distinction unique among postwar chancellors, with the possible exception of Kenneth Clarke.
Mr Brown's fatal flaws as Prime Minister have had nothing to do with the statist, socialist, old Labour instincts that his detractors claimed to detect behind the mask of the competent Chancellor. If Mr Brown fails as Prime Minister, it will not be because of his ideology but because of his personality: his failure to delegate, his intolerance of dissent, his indecisiveness, his stubbornness, and his brittleness under stress. In sum, Mr Brown was a great Chancellor but is a terrible Prime Minister. That at least puts him above John Major and James Callaghan, who were terrible at both jobs.
Israel's 60th birthday
Is it my imagination, or is the coverage of Israel's 60th anniversary in the British press almost entirely from the Palestinian point of view? A typical example:
Abbas pledge on 'catastrophe' day
BBC
15/5/08
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas says he is determined to end Israel's occupation of Palestinian land, labelling it "mankind's shame". Mr Abbas also said his hands were extended in peace, as Palestinians mark the "catastrophe" of Israel's creation. More than 700,000 Palestinians were displaced in the war that followed Israel's establishment in 1948.
...
As Palestinians recalled the "Nakba" (catastrophe) 60 years ago, Mr Abbas said in a televised speech: "It is time for this occupation to leave our land and blood. It is time this mankind's shame, which is called the Palestinian people's Nakba, to end."
Sirens sounded across the Palestinian territories during two minutes of silence for those who fled or were expelled in the conflict that followed Israel's declaration of independence. Protest rallies were held across the West Bank and Gaza, and demonstrators released 21,915 black balloons - one for each day since Israel's creation.
Abbas pledge on 'catastrophe' day
BBC
15/5/08
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas says he is determined to end Israel's occupation of Palestinian land, labelling it "mankind's shame". Mr Abbas also said his hands were extended in peace, as Palestinians mark the "catastrophe" of Israel's creation. More than 700,000 Palestinians were displaced in the war that followed Israel's establishment in 1948.
...
As Palestinians recalled the "Nakba" (catastrophe) 60 years ago, Mr Abbas said in a televised speech: "It is time for this occupation to leave our land and blood. It is time this mankind's shame, which is called the Palestinian people's Nakba, to end."
Sirens sounded across the Palestinian territories during two minutes of silence for those who fled or were expelled in the conflict that followed Israel's declaration of independence. Protest rallies were held across the West Bank and Gaza, and demonstrators released 21,915 black balloons - one for each day since Israel's creation.
Sunday, May 04, 2008
Third Heathrow runway is a flight of fallacy
Looks like a sound analysis to me.
Third runway is a flight of fallacy
Sunday Times
May 4, 2008
Bob Ayling (former chief executive of British Airways)
A third runway at Heathrow is against Britain’s economic interests. It is being driven by BAA, the Spanish-owned airport operator, and the misguided aspirations of British airlines. It is likely, in the long term, to prove a costly mistake.
The government’s “economic case” presented in the white paper is fairly clear - it wants to create a global “hub and spoke” network centred on Heathrow to compete with rivals on the continent. It envisages a huge passenger interchange.
This is a classic exercise in misguided central planning. What Ruth Kelly, the transport secretary, and the government do not see is that the transfer passengers, for whom such a hub would be built, spend no money in Britain, at least little beyond the price of a cup of tea, and Heathrow as an interchange is already so far behind its rivals that it is out of the game.
True, the pursuit of transfer passengers has fuelled Heathrow’s growth over the past 20 years. In 1992 transferring passengers made up only 9% of the total passenger traffic, compared with a third today.
Such rapid growth has left little room for operational error. The airport struggles to cope with more than 68m passengers using buildings and baggage systems designed to handle 45m, while its two runways operate at 99% capacity. As a result even the tiniest problem can snowball into delays, making the Heathrow experience often akin to the Third World. It is a national disgrace.
Yet we are set to repeat this mistake. Under current growth assumptions, Heathrow will be full again within a decade of the opening of a third runway. How the airport will cope with 135m passengers a year and 702,000 flights after 2030 is not explained.
The central problem lies with the hub-and-spoke model itself, which assumes that Heathrow will attract more business and be more efficient if it acts as an interchange for passengers en route to other destinations. This model was pioneered by Federal Express in the 1970s, when the postal firm began flying packages from a central hub in Memphis.
When the US passenger airline industry was deregulated in 1978, the big airlines followed the FedEx model to fend off new, low-cost airlines. However, people are not parcels; missed connections, lost baggage and delayed flights created inefficiencies, contributing to the bankruptcy of almost every US airline.
Nonetheless, European airlines with similar motives have spent billions trying to follow suit. In the 1990s the French government opted to subsidise Air France and then built a new hub at Charles de Gaulle. It has four full-size runways and by 2010 will have more than 700,000 flights a year. Amsterdam now has five runways. However, in Europe too there have been failures or near-failures, including Sabena, Alitalia and Swissair.
The most commercially successful airlines - Ryanair, easyJet and SouthWest - have all rejected the hub model and flown passengers direct to their destinations. And yet BAA and the government seem not to have learnt from these lessons. For Grupo Ferrovial, the owner of BAA, this is perhaps not surprising. The perverse incentives under which it operates mean it is encouraged to increase congestion. BAA is an almost recession-proof business, paid by the number of flights and passengers it can squeeze in and out of Heathrow.
There is no penalty for congestion or poor customer satisfaction, and no penalty for the mountains of lost baggage or delayed flights. Its monopolistic grip over London’s main airports has also meant it has little incentive to consider expansion at Gatwick as a viable alternative.
An expanded hub at Heathrow might not even be beneficial to BA. Transfer traffic in its own right is loss-making. First, fares have to be cut to compete with the direct service and to compensate for the inconvenience of changing at a hub. Second, costs are higher as the airline pays twice for landing fees and handling costs when passengers and baggage change aircraft.
In 1997 BA swapped some of its Boeing 747-400 orders for smaller 777s, which cost less and took about 60 fewer passengers. The airline was reducing its growing dependence on transfer traffic and flying more people direct to their destinations. This seemed to me a sensible approach and a good basis for planning the future of Heathrow, leaving Paris and Amsterdam to invest in the costly capital assets of a hub.
It puzzles me to see superjumbos now being ordered for Heathrow. How will they be filled? The only way the airlines will attract enough business is if Heathrow becomes a much bigger hub interchange, which I doubt it can be.
There is another way. First, the government should ditch its airports white paper. Second, it should strip the Civil Aviation Authority of its role in regulating BAA. Third, the Competition Commission should break up BAA.
This would enable Heathrow and its airlines to focus on fewer flights, not more, turning away from the hub airport and towards flying passengers direct to their destinations. At the same time, instead of operating at 99% capacity, Heathrow should be operating at 80%, with a proper market for slots to allow airlines to monetise their investments so they can move to another airport. With fewer flights, Heathrow could focus on punctuality and service.
And the other runway? London’s growth will certainly need one, so why not look to Stansted and Gatwick? Both are well located and under separate ownership could develop new markets. Building a third runway at Heathrow is not the answer.
Third runway is a flight of fallacy
Sunday Times
May 4, 2008
Bob Ayling (former chief executive of British Airways)
A third runway at Heathrow is against Britain’s economic interests. It is being driven by BAA, the Spanish-owned airport operator, and the misguided aspirations of British airlines. It is likely, in the long term, to prove a costly mistake.
The government’s “economic case” presented in the white paper is fairly clear - it wants to create a global “hub and spoke” network centred on Heathrow to compete with rivals on the continent. It envisages a huge passenger interchange.
This is a classic exercise in misguided central planning. What Ruth Kelly, the transport secretary, and the government do not see is that the transfer passengers, for whom such a hub would be built, spend no money in Britain, at least little beyond the price of a cup of tea, and Heathrow as an interchange is already so far behind its rivals that it is out of the game.
True, the pursuit of transfer passengers has fuelled Heathrow’s growth over the past 20 years. In 1992 transferring passengers made up only 9% of the total passenger traffic, compared with a third today.
Such rapid growth has left little room for operational error. The airport struggles to cope with more than 68m passengers using buildings and baggage systems designed to handle 45m, while its two runways operate at 99% capacity. As a result even the tiniest problem can snowball into delays, making the Heathrow experience often akin to the Third World. It is a national disgrace.
Yet we are set to repeat this mistake. Under current growth assumptions, Heathrow will be full again within a decade of the opening of a third runway. How the airport will cope with 135m passengers a year and 702,000 flights after 2030 is not explained.
The central problem lies with the hub-and-spoke model itself, which assumes that Heathrow will attract more business and be more efficient if it acts as an interchange for passengers en route to other destinations. This model was pioneered by Federal Express in the 1970s, when the postal firm began flying packages from a central hub in Memphis.
When the US passenger airline industry was deregulated in 1978, the big airlines followed the FedEx model to fend off new, low-cost airlines. However, people are not parcels; missed connections, lost baggage and delayed flights created inefficiencies, contributing to the bankruptcy of almost every US airline.
Nonetheless, European airlines with similar motives have spent billions trying to follow suit. In the 1990s the French government opted to subsidise Air France and then built a new hub at Charles de Gaulle. It has four full-size runways and by 2010 will have more than 700,000 flights a year. Amsterdam now has five runways. However, in Europe too there have been failures or near-failures, including Sabena, Alitalia and Swissair.
The most commercially successful airlines - Ryanair, easyJet and SouthWest - have all rejected the hub model and flown passengers direct to their destinations. And yet BAA and the government seem not to have learnt from these lessons. For Grupo Ferrovial, the owner of BAA, this is perhaps not surprising. The perverse incentives under which it operates mean it is encouraged to increase congestion. BAA is an almost recession-proof business, paid by the number of flights and passengers it can squeeze in and out of Heathrow.
There is no penalty for congestion or poor customer satisfaction, and no penalty for the mountains of lost baggage or delayed flights. Its monopolistic grip over London’s main airports has also meant it has little incentive to consider expansion at Gatwick as a viable alternative.
An expanded hub at Heathrow might not even be beneficial to BA. Transfer traffic in its own right is loss-making. First, fares have to be cut to compete with the direct service and to compensate for the inconvenience of changing at a hub. Second, costs are higher as the airline pays twice for landing fees and handling costs when passengers and baggage change aircraft.
In 1997 BA swapped some of its Boeing 747-400 orders for smaller 777s, which cost less and took about 60 fewer passengers. The airline was reducing its growing dependence on transfer traffic and flying more people direct to their destinations. This seemed to me a sensible approach and a good basis for planning the future of Heathrow, leaving Paris and Amsterdam to invest in the costly capital assets of a hub.
It puzzles me to see superjumbos now being ordered for Heathrow. How will they be filled? The only way the airlines will attract enough business is if Heathrow becomes a much bigger hub interchange, which I doubt it can be.
There is another way. First, the government should ditch its airports white paper. Second, it should strip the Civil Aviation Authority of its role in regulating BAA. Third, the Competition Commission should break up BAA.
This would enable Heathrow and its airlines to focus on fewer flights, not more, turning away from the hub airport and towards flying passengers direct to their destinations. At the same time, instead of operating at 99% capacity, Heathrow should be operating at 80%, with a proper market for slots to allow airlines to monetise their investments so they can move to another airport. With fewer flights, Heathrow could focus on punctuality and service.
And the other runway? London’s growth will certainly need one, so why not look to Stansted and Gatwick? Both are well located and under separate ownership could develop new markets. Building a third runway at Heathrow is not the answer.
Saturday, May 03, 2008
Pipes The Propagandist - Christopher Hitchens
Came across this 2003 article on Pipes by Christopher Hitchens. I find myself in agreement with the general thrust of his arguement.
Decide for yourself...
Pipes the Propagandist
Bush's nominee doesn't belong at the U.S. Institute for Peace.
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, Aug. 11, 2003, at 11:23 AM ET
When I read that Daniel Pipes had been nominated to the board of the United States Institute of Peace (a federally funded body whose members are proposed by the president and confirmed by the Senate), my first reaction was one of bafflement. Why did Pipes want the nomination? After all, USIP, a somewhat mild organization, is devoted to the peaceful resolution of conflict. For Pipes, this notion is a contradiction in terms.
I am not myself a pacifist, and I believe that Islamic nihilism has to be combated with every weapon, intellectual and moral as well as military, which we possess or can acquire. But that is a position shared by a very wide spectrum of people. Pipes, however, uses this consensus to take a position somewhat to the right of Ariel Sharon, concerning a matter (the Israel-Palestine dispute) that actually can be settled by negotiation. And he employs the fears and insecurities created by Islamic extremism to slander or misrepresent those who disagree with him.
This makes him a poor if not useless ally in the wider battle. Let me give two illustrations from personal experience. One of the most frontal challenges from Islamic theocracy came in February 1989, when the Ayatollah Khomeini pronounced a sentence of death upon Salman Rushdie. There then followed a long campaign by writers and scholars and diplomats, culminating in September 1998 in a formal repudiation of the fatwa by the Iranian regime. Good cause for celebration, one might think. But not to Pipes, who weighed in with a sour, sophomoric article arguing that nothing whatsoever had changed and that the Iranian authorities were as committed to Rushdie's elimination as ever. His "sources" were a few clips from the Iranian press and a few stray statements from extremists. That was five years ago. Today, Salman Rushdie lives in New York without body guards and travels freely, and there are leading Shiite voices raised in Iran in favor of the coalition's successful demolition of the Iraqi Baath Party. To put it bluntly, I suspect that Pipes is so consumed by dislike that he will not recognize good news from the Islamic world even when it arrives. And this makes him dangerous and unreliable.
Then, I heard recently, Pipes has maintained that professor Edward Said of Columbia University is not really a Palestinian and never lost his family home in Jerusalem in the fighting of 1947-48. I have my own disagreements with Said, but this is a much-discredited libel that undermines the credibility of anybody circulating it. Professor Said is deservedly respected for his long advocacy of mutual recognition between Israelis and Palestinians; yet, once again, Pipes spits and curses at anything short of his own highly emotional agenda. In the February 2003 issue of Commentary magazine, he wrote an attack on the "road map" proposals, which included the words "the so-called Palestinian refugees," and which by other crude tricks of language insinuated that there had been no Palestinian dispossession in the first place. In which case, there is obviously nothing to negotiate about, is there? It's one thing to argue, as many Palestinians are prepared to do, that not every refugee can expect "the right of return." It's quite another to deny history and to assert that there is no refugee problem to begin with.
By coincidence, that same issue of Commentary contained several columns of letters from aggrieved scholars, complaining at the way in which Pipes had misrepresented their work. Pipes himself was forced to concede grudgingly that he had been in error when he described professor John Kelsay of Princeton and professor James Turner Johnson of Rutgers as having denied that the term "jihad" had any military meaning. I admire those who admit their mistakes, especially under the pressure of fact. But Pipes hasn't just been engaged in a dispute in print with other academics. He is the founder of Campus Watch, a Web-site crusade that purports to expose heretical or subversive teachers in America. It's not pleasant to think of such an organization being run by somebody who won't, or who can't, read the published work of more distinguished colleagues.
On more than one occasion, Pipes has called for the extension of Israel's already ruthless policy of collective punishment, arguing that leveling Palestinian villages is justifiable if attacks are launched from among their inhabitants. It seems to me from observing his style that he came to this conclusion with rather more relish than regret. And, invited recently to comment on the wartime internment of the Japanese—as a comparison case to his own call for the profiling and surveillance of Muslim and Arab-Americans—he declined on the grounds that he didn't know enough about the subject. One isn't necessarily obliged to know the history of discrimination as it has been applied to American security policy—unless, that is, one is proposing a new form of it. To be uninformed at that point is to disqualify oneself, as the Senate should disqualify Pipes.
The board of USIP already contains enough people to make sure that the hawkish viewpoint does not go unrepresented. It includes Douglas Feith, undersecretary of defense, and Harriet Zimmerman of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. The objection to Pipes is not, in any case, strictly a political one. It is an objection to a person who confuses scholarship with propaganda and who pursues petty vendettas with scant regard for objectivity.
Decide for yourself...
Pipes the Propagandist
Bush's nominee doesn't belong at the U.S. Institute for Peace.
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, Aug. 11, 2003, at 11:23 AM ET
When I read that Daniel Pipes had been nominated to the board of the United States Institute of Peace (a federally funded body whose members are proposed by the president and confirmed by the Senate), my first reaction was one of bafflement. Why did Pipes want the nomination? After all, USIP, a somewhat mild organization, is devoted to the peaceful resolution of conflict. For Pipes, this notion is a contradiction in terms.
I am not myself a pacifist, and I believe that Islamic nihilism has to be combated with every weapon, intellectual and moral as well as military, which we possess or can acquire. But that is a position shared by a very wide spectrum of people. Pipes, however, uses this consensus to take a position somewhat to the right of Ariel Sharon, concerning a matter (the Israel-Palestine dispute) that actually can be settled by negotiation. And he employs the fears and insecurities created by Islamic extremism to slander or misrepresent those who disagree with him.
This makes him a poor if not useless ally in the wider battle. Let me give two illustrations from personal experience. One of the most frontal challenges from Islamic theocracy came in February 1989, when the Ayatollah Khomeini pronounced a sentence of death upon Salman Rushdie. There then followed a long campaign by writers and scholars and diplomats, culminating in September 1998 in a formal repudiation of the fatwa by the Iranian regime. Good cause for celebration, one might think. But not to Pipes, who weighed in with a sour, sophomoric article arguing that nothing whatsoever had changed and that the Iranian authorities were as committed to Rushdie's elimination as ever. His "sources" were a few clips from the Iranian press and a few stray statements from extremists. That was five years ago. Today, Salman Rushdie lives in New York without body guards and travels freely, and there are leading Shiite voices raised in Iran in favor of the coalition's successful demolition of the Iraqi Baath Party. To put it bluntly, I suspect that Pipes is so consumed by dislike that he will not recognize good news from the Islamic world even when it arrives. And this makes him dangerous and unreliable.
Then, I heard recently, Pipes has maintained that professor Edward Said of Columbia University is not really a Palestinian and never lost his family home in Jerusalem in the fighting of 1947-48. I have my own disagreements with Said, but this is a much-discredited libel that undermines the credibility of anybody circulating it. Professor Said is deservedly respected for his long advocacy of mutual recognition between Israelis and Palestinians; yet, once again, Pipes spits and curses at anything short of his own highly emotional agenda. In the February 2003 issue of Commentary magazine, he wrote an attack on the "road map" proposals, which included the words "the so-called Palestinian refugees," and which by other crude tricks of language insinuated that there had been no Palestinian dispossession in the first place. In which case, there is obviously nothing to negotiate about, is there? It's one thing to argue, as many Palestinians are prepared to do, that not every refugee can expect "the right of return." It's quite another to deny history and to assert that there is no refugee problem to begin with.
By coincidence, that same issue of Commentary contained several columns of letters from aggrieved scholars, complaining at the way in which Pipes had misrepresented their work. Pipes himself was forced to concede grudgingly that he had been in error when he described professor John Kelsay of Princeton and professor James Turner Johnson of Rutgers as having denied that the term "jihad" had any military meaning. I admire those who admit their mistakes, especially under the pressure of fact. But Pipes hasn't just been engaged in a dispute in print with other academics. He is the founder of Campus Watch, a Web-site crusade that purports to expose heretical or subversive teachers in America. It's not pleasant to think of such an organization being run by somebody who won't, or who can't, read the published work of more distinguished colleagues.
On more than one occasion, Pipes has called for the extension of Israel's already ruthless policy of collective punishment, arguing that leveling Palestinian villages is justifiable if attacks are launched from among their inhabitants. It seems to me from observing his style that he came to this conclusion with rather more relish than regret. And, invited recently to comment on the wartime internment of the Japanese—as a comparison case to his own call for the profiling and surveillance of Muslim and Arab-Americans—he declined on the grounds that he didn't know enough about the subject. One isn't necessarily obliged to know the history of discrimination as it has been applied to American security policy—unless, that is, one is proposing a new form of it. To be uninformed at that point is to disqualify oneself, as the Senate should disqualify Pipes.
The board of USIP already contains enough people to make sure that the hawkish viewpoint does not go unrepresented. It includes Douglas Feith, undersecretary of defense, and Harriet Zimmerman of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. The objection to Pipes is not, in any case, strictly a political one. It is an objection to a person who confuses scholarship with propaganda and who pursues petty vendettas with scant regard for objectivity.
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