Thursday, September 27, 2007
surveillance doesn’t deliver
London is probably the world’s CCTV surveillance capital, but unless the real purpose of the blanket surveillance doesn’t match the public sales pitch there’s little return on investment.
Tens of thousands of CCTV cameras, yet 80% of crime unsolved
London has 10,000 crime-fighting CCTV cameras which cost £200 million, figures show today.
But an analysis of the publicly funded spy network, which is owned and controlled by local authorities and Transport for London, has cast doubt on its ability to help solve crime.
A comparison of the number of cameras in each London borough with the proportion of crimes solved there found that police are no more likely to catch offenders in areas with hundreds of cameras than in those with hardly any.
In fact, four out of five of the boroughs with the most cameras have a record of solving crime that is below average.
I’ll take a stab at the answer the proponents will give: There are not enough cameras and more technology is needed to process the data streams.
Wednesday, September 19, 2007
tough call
At a quick glance, I can’t tell what the fuss is about:
Germany would shoot down hijacked plane: defence minister
German Minister Would Shoot Down Hijacked Plane
Outrage in Germany at threat to down hijacked aircraft
This topic has come up before, see the related link at the bottom. The backdrop of the current outrage is that the German Constitutional Court has ruled that it’s illegal to shoot down a 9/11-style plane unless only hijackers are on board and this was justified with the right to live of the remaining passengers. It’s a decision that has me scratching my head. First, if it is a 9/11-style hijacking, it’s all over for the passengers anyway. Second, an airplane is a weapon with a proven track record of killing many more on the ground than the passengers on board.
I don’t fully grasp if the outrage is due to the German defense minister’s willingness to shoot down a hijacked airliner if and only if there’s no other choice to avert a much larger disaster or that he’s willing to defy the Constitutional Court.
It seems like an agonizing and yet straightforward decision: If a hijacked airplane is headed towards a nuclear reactor, a large dam, or a heavily populated city (not that there’s a lot of room for error in Germany’s small airspace), then the passengers are already dead and downing the airliner is the lesser of two evils.
Tuesday, September 18, 2007
why can’t he just retire?
It seems like every time Meisner opens his mouth, I have to worry about my blood pressure.
German Cardinal Draws Fire Over Use of Nazi Term
Cardinal Under Fire for Using Nazi Term
Well, the good news is that nobody’s clapping. So what has the “good” Cardinal done?
Meisner, speaking at the inauguration of a museum in Cologne on Friday, criticized art that doesn’t worship religion. He said: “When culture is disconnected from divine reverence, the cult descends into ritualism and culture degenerates. It loses its center.”
Never mind the hubris and self-absorption. It’s bad enough that he sees fit to criticize art which doesn’t worship religion (atheistic art, anyone?). No, he has to chose his words very carefully. In the original German: “Dort, wo die Kultur vom Kultus, von der Gottesverehrung abgekoppelt wird, erstarrt der Kult im Ritualismus und die Kultur entartet.”
I have lived in Germany for close to 30 years and I’ve only ever heard the term ‘degenerate’ used as a quote from Nazi-era propaganda, specifically Goebbels’s exhibition “Entartete Kunst”. Since the end of WWII, the term has all but disappeared from common usage and there’s no plausible deniability for Meisner. Of course, he claims to be misunderstood, taken out of context, not getting the benefit of doubt and due deference to him („fehlendes öffentliches Wohlwollen“) and so on. The fact remains, though, that there is no way for him to wiggle out of negative interpretations for his use of the term. I personally believe that the people calling Meisner a “notorious spiritual arsonist” have it exactly right.
religion in Germany
What’s going on over there?
In Search of Germany’s Religious Identity
It’s no secret that both the Catholic and Protestant churches in Germany have long faced the problem of shrinking congregations, but has the nation irrevocably turned its back on its religious heritage?
In the past six decades, the number of German citizens belonging to one of the country’s two main churches has fallen from 94.4 to just shy of 62 percent. And although the trend has slowed, there is no indication of a reversal.
Carsten Frerk who runs FOWID, a research group on belief systems in Germany, says the church has lost its power and, perhaps more crucially, it has lost the nation’s youth.
That’s a problem, sure enough. It’s a lot harder to convert adults than it is to indoctrinate a captive audience, kids.
“Children in Germany are no longer born into a religion in the way they used to be,” Frerk said. “Young people are not forced into a religious culture anymore.”
Mono-culture. It’s not like the “choice” between Catholic or Protestant is all that significant.
The younger generations have too many choices at their disposal and this is what keeps them away from making binding ideological decisions. According to Frerk, the rate at which young people break away from religious groups will soon put non-denominational Germans in the majority.
“One percent of Christians are leaving the church every year,” he said. “So in 20 years from now, they’ll be the minority.”
Time will tell. Now for the bad news (from my point of view, of course):
But opinions divide on whether Germany has irrevocably turned its back on religion.
Hubert Seiwert, a professor of comparative religious studies, says that although there is a widespread belief that religion and all things modern stand in direct opposition to one another, the death knell has yet to toll for Christianity in Germany.
At the moment, the tendency in German society is to talk about religion in the context of conflicts, but not otherwise.
“Take the Islam issue for example,” Seiwert said. “That is something people are taking seriously.”
But discussions about Islam and its role in western, secular societies have prompted many Germans to re-examine their own religious roots.
“Suddenly people are talking about Europe having a Christian identity,” he said.
According to Reinhard Holmer, Director of Germany’s Evangelische Allianz, an association of evangelical Christians, people are nowadays, in fact, beginning to ask more questions about what religion can offer.
“Religious issues are becoming more mainstream and people want to know what answers the church can provide,” Holmer said.
As far as Islam is concerned, I don’t see a lot of answers—if any. My opinions of Christianity are negative enough already and I do consider Islam to be much worse, but the current conflict is all about Islamist politics rather than theology.
I don’t see religion disappearing in Germany, but I doubt that the “us versus them” windfall due to Islamist terrorists will be enough to revert the tide against the two major churches. They’ll continue to lose members and money, but things will stabilize at some point. While this is good news of sorts, it’s also a cause for concern. Once the major churches cease to have the clout to crowd out the more whacko religions, there may a German version of the Religious Right—not a pleasant prospect.
an interesting legal problem
Islanders without an island
International legal experts are discovering climate change law, and the Pacific island nation of Tuvalu is a case in point: The Polynesian archipelago is doomed to disappear beneath the ocean. Now lawyers are asking what sort of rights citizens have when their homeland no longer exists.
The group of islands lies just 10 centimeters (roughly four inches) above sea level; if the average sea level continues to rise, in just 50 years there will be nothing here but waves.
Environmentalists have long worried about the fate of this tiny Pacific state. Now, however, international legal experts have also taken up the topic of its imminent demise. A nation’s “territorial integrity” is one of the paramount legal principles. It’s unprecedented, however, for a country to completely lose its territory without the use of military force.
“Is it supposed to become a virtual country?” asked Rainer Lagoni, Professor of Maritime Law at the University of Hamburg. There is no legal definition for a country entirely without land.
Beats me. I have a suspicion, though, that in the grand scheme of global warming, this won’t be the most important problem. Except for their .tv domain.
Monday, September 17, 2007
what possessed her?
German TV Presenter Sacked for Praising Hitler’s Family Policies
Eva Herman, a prominent talk show host and author, has been courting controversy over the last year by saying women should stay at home and bear children. Now she has been fired by the country’s premier TV network for praising Adolf Hitler’s family policy.
Hitler wanted able-bodied soldiers. The more, the merrier. If you can’t figure out what’s wrong with this, then never mind.
now this is unexpected
Israeli Police Arrest a Homegrown Skinhead Gang
A neo-Nazi gang in Israel sounds, at first, like a nasty mistake. But experts say that eight young immigrants from the former Soviet Union may have stumbled over a mundane obstacle: integration.
Ah, yes. Integration or the lack thereof.
On Sunday police in Israel announced the arrest of eight young immigrants from the former Soviet Union who belonged to a homegrown neo-Nazi cell. It was the first time an organized Nazi gang had been uncovered in the Jewish state, which was founded 60 years ago in the wake of the Holocaust in Germany.
The young men—aged 16 to 21—were accused of brutal beatings of homosexuals, guest workers, drug addicts, homeless people and ultra-orthodox Jews.
Yup, these are the charming neo-Nazis usually seen elsewhere.
About 300 crimes in Israel per year can be traced, officially, to people with neo-Nazi attitudes, says Zalman Gilichinsky, a Moldavian-born author who has written a book about Israeli anti-Semitism. “And the number is growing,” he says. “The aggression isn’t just becoming more common, but also more gruesome.” Every Israeli city now has a marginal neo-Nazi cell with connections to similar groups in Russia, Gilichinsky says, and the real number of their crimes, he warns, is hidden behind official terms like “vandalism.”
Sadly, this matches my experience in Germany. With Russian gangs moving in, crime took on a new dimension.
on a pro-draft opinion piece
Newsweek published this:
Why We Need a Draft: A Marine’s Lament
I disagree with the author on quite a few points.
First, the rich and influential will not lobby to fund more MRAPs, but they’ll shelter their kids from active duty and failing that, they’ll go head to head with the military-industrial complex to bring all the troops home.
Second,
The real failure of this war, the mistake that has led to all the malaise of Operation Iraqi Freedom, was the failure to not reinstitute the draft on Sept. 12, 2001
I call bullshit. The real failure of the Iraq war is that it’s an elective war that was sold to the public on lies. This war should not have happened. Further, it wasn’t clear on 9/12/2001 that there was anybody to fight that needed a few hundred thousand troops in excess of the all-volunteer force.
Consequently, we have a severe talent deficiency in the military, which the draft would remedy immediately. While America’s bravest are in the military, America’s brightest are not.
Because the brightest have long figured out that the bravest are wasting their lives for the worst foreign-policy disaster in American history. In other words, the brightests have to be compelled something that’s wrong on too many levels.
Allow me to build a squad of the five brightest students from MIT and Caltech and promise them patrols on the highways connecting Baghdad and Fallujah, and I’ll bet that in six months they could render IED’s about as effective as a “Just Say No” campaign at a Grateful Dead show.
Bullshit. With all the tax money spent on the military and on the ongoing occupation of Iraq, the Pentagon or their contractors would have come up with a Wunderwaffe against IEDs if there were one.
On a macro level, we are logistically weakened by the lack of a draft. It takes six to seven soldiers to support one infantryman in combat. So, you are basically asking 30,000 or so “grunts” to secure a nation of 26 million. I assure you, no matter who wins the 2008 election, we are staying in Iraq. But with the Marine Corps and the Army severely stressed after 3.5 years of desert and urban combat in Iraq—equipment needs replacing, recruitment efforts are coming up short—you tell me how we’re going to sustain the current force structure without the draft?
Easy. Bring the troops home and let the people of the region sort things out themselves. Oh, and keep paying the bills for what you broke.
America would have been much better served if all the billions poured into the bottomless pit would have been spent on energy independence and alternative energy—and all without any form of draft.
contrasting points of view
German authorities watch increasing conversions to Islam with concern
German Converts to Islam Are an Asset, Not a Threat
As a general observation, I take it as a given that a convert to anything is more zealous about it than anybody who picked it up as an accident of birth. With the problems Germany has with Islamists (see the recently foiled attacks), I consider it prudent to keep tabs on converts in order to flag and track potential troublemakers.
From the first article:
The German authorities are watching the rising tide of conversion to Islam with some concern, the daily Berliner Zeitung reported Thursday.
The newspaper cited figures compiled by a Muslim group that showed that 4,000 Germans had converted last year, compared with just 1,000 in 2005.
It was common knowledge that the German authorities were monitoring converts to Islam closely, it said.
Quoting Interior Ministry officials, the newspaper said there had been a rise internationally in the number of converts involved in Islamist terrorist acts.
Which makes a good case for doing what the German authorities are doing—within reason.
Guido Steinberg, who researches Islamic issues, said extremists were targeting new converts, and terrorist expert Rolf Tophoven said converts tended to be fanatical.
I agree with this assessment. This isn’t to say that every convert to Islam is a potential threat, but the threats are more likely to come from converts.
Abdullah attributed the increase in conversions to rising Islamophobia. “Whenever Islam falls under suspicion, many people start to feel solidarity with the religion,” he told the Berliner Zeitung.
I don’t feel any solidarity with Islam. I also have no issue with American or Canadian muslims, as opposed to the European ones whom I distrust.
Abdullah noted that more women than men were converts, in a ratio of 60 to 40, but added that conviction rather than marriage to a Muslim was usually the reason.
That is mind-boggling. If I were a woman, Islam is not a religion I’d convert to for any reason short of main force.
From the second article:
In a guest editorial, anthropologist Esra Özyürek from the University of California, San Diego argues that German converts to Islam are not the threat they are claimed to be, and explains how converts make a valuable contribution to German society.
The editorial is written by somebody with a Turkish-sounding name who doesn’t appear to reside in Germany.
Recently the German press has been filled with stories about how German Muslims are a hidden threat to German society. As an anthropologist who has conducted a year-long ethnographic research project among German Muslims, I observed a very different picture.
Rather than being a theat, ethnic German converts to Islam are in fact a very valuable asset to Germany. They serve as a bridge between immigrant Muslims and non-Muslim Germany, and by doing so they help to create a well-integrated German society.
I’d say this is an overly optimistic point of view. It can’t be much of a bridge to the immigrant Muslims who don’t even speak German (and I doubt all that many converts are fluent in Middle Eastern languages) and who’re likely to hold conservative views about Islam.
And just as it would be wrong to assume that all leftists in Germany could potentially be supporters or even members of violent organizations like the left-wing RAF terror group, it would be a mistake to associate tens of thousands of peaceful and law-abiding converts to Islam with the two converts who were caught planning massive attacks last week.
True, but it doesn’t detract from converts being a recruiting ground for Islamists.
When Islamic leaders give lectures in German, German converts ask endless questions to find what is only a “tradition” and what is “essentially” Islamic. These efforts help German converts to adapt Islamic practices to make them suitable to their lifestyles in contemporary Germany.
Most practicing Muslims do not like the phrase “German Islam” because they promote the understanding that there is only one Islam. Yet, if German Islam means embracing this religion in a way that fits German culture and daily life, converts to Islam are at the forefront of creating this formula.
For example, German Muslim women design modest clothes that are not showy, and hence fit the taste of German converts rather than reflecting the latest Islamic fashions from the Muslim world. Or German converts who grew up with dogs as pets say they embrace (respected Islamic scholar) Imam Malik’s legal approach to dogs, in which he claims contact with dogs does not make the religious ablution for prayer invalid—a tiny detail, to be sure, but one that demonstrates how converts find ways to accommodate German culture in their Islamic practices.
That’s all good and well and as opposed to Catholics, there’s no central authority that defines what a Muslim is supposed to think and do. However, “German Islam” is probably equally problematic as are people of mixed race (using this term reluctantly). These German converts can function because they try to blend a dose of Islam into common German values. I doubt they’d have an easy time to exist in Saudi Arabia, say.
All of which is to say that while the converts may well have a positive role to play, a subset of theirs is reasonably to be considered a security risk warranting close scrutiny.
Posted by elwedriddsche on 09/17 at 11:37 AM
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