Month: March 2006

Europe’s Ailing Social Model: Facts & Fairy-Tales

Europe’s Ailing Social Model: Facts & Fairy-Tales | The Brussels Journal
Europe’s social disaster is unfolding while the rest of the world is booming at its fastest rate in three decades. Paradoxically, the Old Europe of the West must now learn from the New Europe of the East, where after years of disastrous socialism, low and simple flat taxes are being introduced, luring investors from all over the world. The higher the tax level, the lower the incentives to make productive contributions to society. The higher the fiscal burden, the more resources flow from the productive sector to the ever more inefficient government apparatus.

Who owns the Internet? We have a map that shows you. |

CIO Blogs – Who owns the Internet? We have a map that shows you. |

What is this ball of colors? It is the North American Internet, or more specifically a map of just about every router on the North American backbone, (there are 134,855 of them for those who are counting). The colors represent who each router is registered to. Red is Verizon; blue AT&T; yellow Qwest; green is major backbone players like Level 3 and Sprint Nextel; black is the entire cable industry put together; and gray is everyone else

The world’s 10 most expensive automobiles

Wired News:
The world’s 10 most expensive automobiles, which you can see in the slide show that follows this piece, include such dreams-come-true as a street-legal, 10-cylinder Porsche race car (the Carrera GT) and cars with over 1,000 hp each ( Bugatti’s Veyron 16.4 and SSC’s Ultimate Aero).

My Ideal War

My Ideal War – How the international community should have responded to Bush’s September 2002 U.N. speech. By Christopher Hitchens
Although some early supporters of Saddam’s ouster have cut and run, Christopher Hitchens has stuck with the program. Here is his pre-invasion justification for why the dogs of war needed to be loosed on Saddam. Here he suggests that the United Nations just get on with it. On the eve of the invasion, he spelled out what could happen if the United States did not invade. Hitchens dismissed an article that claimed Saddam tried to make nice with Washington right before the invasion. In late 2003, he renewed his commitment to the war. Just when opponents of the war were beginning to gloat, Hitchens said, “Not so fast.” He’s even admitted to a few misguided ideas of his own. Two years into the invasion he explained why “withdraw” is a four-letter word. In January he had a hunch that al-Qaida might be the ones doing the cutting and running.

Advance and Retreat

TIME Europe Magazine: Advance and Retreat — Mar. 27, 2006

The headline last Friday in the French business newspaper Les Echos: “Is France ungovernable?” In countries where democracy is a recent innovation, street protests and the ballot box coexist as rival sources of legitimacy: People vote, but also demand the right to reverse the outcome later if they change their minds. Thailand and the Philippines both have been wracked by protests in recent weeks by people demanding that the leaders they elected go.

France is hardly a novice at democracy. But, forged by the Revolution of 1789 and their national myths, the French still embrace rebellion as a favorite political tool — even when, as is currently the case, the aim is to resist, not promote, change. Street protesters in France won’t bring down an elected president — as protestors in Manila did in 2001 and are seeking to do again now. But they can make or break a wannabe.

“Disorder, that is the disease of the French,” said Charles de Gaulle, who tried to keep the malady in check with the establishment in 1958 of the quasi-monarchical presidential system that is still in place. “I don’t believe we will ever manage to cure it.”