Guttenberg revisited!

I have been doing some more thinking about this plagiarism thing with Guttenberg. Basically I have started comparing the political systems and their processes in Germany and Italy. Is this an oversimplified way of thinking about things? Yes, without a doubt the two countries cannot simply be thrown together and thought of as having similarities. So why did I take the whole thing in that direction? I thought about Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. He is the scandal man of Europe. Everyone knows the man is rotten to the core and that while it may not be so in the case of money, the way he uses media and treats women has led to most people viewing the whole Italian democracy as something as a farce: if you can keep getting elected to office with all this baggage then you must be doing something right.

Now then, moving on to Karl Theodor zu Guttenberg. I should add first that he is no longer a Dr! No, once the University of Bayreuth had discovered and reviewed how much plagiarism was in his dissertation, they stripped him pretty fast. Lets be honest, it’s a major scandal. It’s something that most politicians wouldn’t survive. So why is he still defense minister? Well for one thing he is so popular among the CSU/CDU that they are well aware that if they lose him as the poster boy, then they are all but done for in the next set of elections. That begs the question though: are these two parties more interested in the next round of voting than they are in the integrity of their own leaders, and by extension Germany’s leaders? It certainly appears so.

What has Guttenberg done to defend himself? Not a thing worth reporting. He claimed it was at a time in his life when he was very busy (because only he has such times and that we should forgive him because of it). I highly doubt that if you tell a police officer anywhere in Germany that you were speeding because you were busy that they are going to say “oh, so sorry, can I accompany you and make sure you arrive on time.” It is highly doubtful. Lets go back to the Italy thing. I hear a lot of jokes about the Italians and their pathetic leader here in Germany from the Germans, but what I don’t hear is the sound of real outrage from Mr. Guttenberg’s own party demanding that he stop defiling their party (and by extension their democracy) with his mere presence. At least step down from the ministerial post. Better people have been fired for less.

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To doctor or not to Doctor...

There has been some big news brewing in Germany the last couple of days. CSU darling Theodor zu Guttenberg, a shooting star of the conservative movement and possibly the next chancellor, has been accused of plagiarizing. To make things as clear as possible he has been accused of plagiarizing several different parts of his doctoral thesis. I wasn’t very aware about how plagiarizing is dealt with in German universities until this case came up and now that I am learning, I am quite surprised to be honest. It seems that they are a bit more relaxed with these kinds of things. A lot of people have even been coming to his defense and claiming that this is somehow politically motivated.

Why would anyone ever have sympathy on a plagiarizer, especially when they have used their doctoral thesis to propel them to the place where they are today. As far as the accusations go that this is somehow politically motivated, it seems strange to have to ask this question but whatever: either he did or he didn’t plagiarize. If there is one small sentence somewhere in the thesis then that is one thing, now if there are several paragraphs worth of stolen sentences then I would say this seems like a slam-dunk case of a person loosing his doctorate. It would be even funnier if Merkel fired him after that. Of course like most politicians these days, he seems to not have anything stick to him too long. He is like Merkel in that sense: both of them are made out of Teflon.

Now Guttenberg has given up his “Dr” title, but while that seems a bit hasty (the university gives and takes those kinds of things), it isn’t as if he is out of the danger just yet. For one thing the man has lied to everyone, made the university he attended look really bad, and is now trying to simply take away his title as if that will magically fix everything. If he remains in power that will say a lot about German attitudes toward their possible next chancellor.

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Rick Scott and the Train to nowhere...

The governor of Florida, Rick “the crook” Scott, has turned down federal money for a high-speed rail link between Tampa and Orlando. My first reaction was: well big surprise here, a Republican/Tea Party governor turning down an infrastructure project. Since reading the article though, I have been giving the entire project a little extra thought.

At this moment in time there are places in the United States where high-speed rail would work (the Northeast corridor for instance) and places where it wouldn’t work (the Dakotas?). Arguments about density and cost-benefit and all that can be made over and over again and most times the numbers aren’t too thrilling if you are a train advocate. That being said there are some other issues that need to be taken into account when you have a project of this nature. First and foremost it’s an infrastructure project meaning an investment in the future. If you build something for the long term, then a lot of your long-range projections will be off because we aren’t fortunetellers who can peer into the future. One of the Republican arguments against rail investments is that it won’t be competitive. Yeah, I can see the point, but is the interstate system competitive? I don’t really think so, but I don’t hear anyone (but I could be deaf) yelling that we need private roads everywhere to compete with the federal roads.

Does anyone reading this know where I could find a chart comparing subsidies that road, airports, and rail receive per year? I would love to have a look at what the numbers say. Remember that development as a whole follows the pattern that the government lays out. If you don’t believe that then you just have to take into account that suburbs, the way we have them today, wouldn’t be possible without highways and the interstate system (and cheap oil but that is another post for another day). The American low-density existence wouldn’t be possible without this system. So why can’t we offer the Americans another option: that they wouldn’t have to live in the suburbs and could ride a train? I thought Americans liked freedom of choice. I hope they spend all that federal money somewhere else, where the people like having jobs and would like to diversify their transport options for any variety of reasons, plus they like offering their kids new futures. Didn’t America used to be about optimism?

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Reading List

Short post today to save time. There is nothing much going on for a report or comment. We still have no real information about how our water-damaged apartment is going to be fixed. The Champions League game tonight between Arsenal and Barcelona should be a wonder to behold. Barcelona should win to be honest. Would love to see the Englishmen win this one and then take the Camp Nou by storm. Not going to happen?

Here is the reading list as it stands for 2011:

1. I Married a Communist by Phillip Roth (finished)

2. Freedom by Jonathan Franzen (finished)

3. Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer (non-fiction)

4. Going After Cacciato by Tim O´Brien

5. The Green House by Mario Vargas Lhosa (hard to find in English)

6. Grimms Wörter by Günter Grass

7. Buddha’s Little Finger by Victor Pelevin (taken a break for now)

8. Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad (currently reading)

9. Invisible by Paul Auster (finished)

This is currently all I've got, so I would love some tips from anyone reading this blog.

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Brooks, what are you saying?

Just finished reading David Brooks latest column in the NY Times. It’s an interesting observation on a book by Tyler Cowen called “The Great Stagnation” that I have yet to read. I wanted to add a few thoughts of my own to Brooks ideas. The idea of the book is that as society in the United States has changed from an industrial and manufacturing base to a more consumer oriented society we have lost a few things. First off, more people now choosing careers that create fewer jobs. For instance that manufacturing nowadays is reliant on less people and that jobs for other companies require less people. This isn’t really surprising at all. In many ways its merely a confirmation of the fact that more of the jobs we used to do by hand, or that were labor intensive, are now being done by computer controlled robots or have moved overseas. Is there really a big surprise in that Mr. Brooks?

Brooks then seems fascinated by this in the sense that he thinks there was some sort of golden age. That according to Cowen’s book, and Brooks seemingly agrees, the economic growth accomplished by the United States up to the seventies was done cheaply. Ok, that may be the case when you run it through certain economic modeling, but as most people can figure out for themselves the problem lies with what your pricing mechanism is. For instance we have built a society based around the Automobile. What if we then run out of cheap fuel? Then our very way of life at the moment, which is (has been?) extremely cheap in the United States (a post-industrial nation), suddenly becomes more expensive. Once again how one makes such calculations so as to conclude that things were cheap seems tricky at best. Add to this that the nostalgia for the way things used to be is usually based on a false understanding of the past. To belabor the point: how we view the past is always dependent on our current situation, both when it comes to means and how we are doing in terms of psychology.

For example, I am unemployed at the moment and have a hard time finding work in the field that I studied. Therefore I tend to conclude, at the moment, that I have done something wrong during my academic years and that this is having an affect at this moment. Whether or not this notion is based on reality is another thing. Were I to be employed I would instead conclude that I had studied exactly the right thing at the right time. To be fair to Brooks I should probably read that book…

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Life takes a strange bounce

It’s been lovely today. Its just one of those days where it didn’t really matter how much you got right to start with or for how long for that matter. You come home at five in the afternoon. Your wife is cleaning up the bathroom. You wonder why and then you have a look. A pipe somewhere in the ceiling has burst or something like that and suddenly the whole bathroom has been destroyed. Like I said, at that moment in time it doesn’t matter anymore how much had been accomplished that day, because the rest of it is ruined.

You try to smoke a cigarillo, the kind you really like, the kind you like to enjoy because they are easy to enjoy. It’s impossible at this point to enjoy anything. You have applied for something from the Tax Office. It was supposed to arrive eight days ago. It’s holding up your payments from a job you did last month. You call them, and the first two times they transfer you to a phone line that eventually hangs up on you. You call them back the next day. You finally reach the person who processed your paperwork. They tell you that there isn’t anything they can do, since it is someone else in another department somewhere that sends out the official document with the special number that you kind of needed a week ago.

Sometimes the ball doesn’t go into the open goal when you kick it from four meters out. It bounces off one post and then the other before it runs out back onto the field and a defender clears it away. Football can sometimes be a great metaphor for life. I keep hitting the posts at the moment. It’s so close and yet it seems that really its always so far away.

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Things of present

I haven´t found the drive to write anything on this blog recently. I don´t really know why. I have been writing though. Its been a long time since I got beyond writing one page of fiction and then finding myself stuck in writers block. I haven´t had an aha moment though: instead I just pushed through the garbage (and there is a lot of it) and found that there was something to write about after all. I am writing about Latvia. No that isn´t true actually. I am trying to write about people´s experiences with Latvia. Whether its a way to achieve an understanding for myself or whether or not it actually becomes something worth reading will hang on me.

I will try to have another post soon about the Swedish national team. The B-team easily demolished Cyprus´ A-team so lets see what the A-team can do to the Ukraine. I am stoked.

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A wish list or an article about the Swedish National Team

There has been a slight hint of spring in the air the last couple of days. It could be the lack of snow (though its still freezing outside) or it could be that the first real Internationals are being played next week. I think its a combination of the two. As a follower of team Sweden (BlåGult) I have been reading as many articles as possible about the selected squad and what can be expected from them. I tend to drift from euphoric phases of optimism to the deepest depths of pessimism. I want to see Sweden at Euro 2012. To get there, its going to take a lot of heart and hard work. Its also going to take a bit of luck.

Sweden isn´t bad really, but they aren´t world beaters at the moment. The 4-1 loss in Amsterdam at the hands of the Netherlands was a good reminder or wake up call about the quality we have at the moment. Sure there are stars in the team, players even who have the potential to be something great. The problem I see is that many of them aren´t taking that final step up. I will grant that its easy to sit here and couch-coach. I don´t see the practices and I don´t get to watch all the games. I wish I did though. I wish I were a players scout.

For Sweden to reach Euro 2012 I think a few things have to happen. First we need to find a solution to the right back. Right now we are playing a young guy from Rosenborg BK named Mikael Lustig. He is still young enough where he can be developed, but I think that Adam Johansson from IFK Göteborg is a better option. I think he is more mature and a better defender than what Lustig is at the moment. A strong and solid defensive back four is the kind of base that Sweden needs to have if they are going to have a chance to hang with the bigger teams. You have to be able to rely on the back four to hold down the ship when the storms are raging. If you can´t rely on them, then there will be no solid effort on scoring once you get one or two of those rare chances against a top ten side. Sweden´s other problem is the midfield. Anders Svensson needs to stay because without him at the moment there isn´t much holding the whole thing together. I also have to admit I like Kim Källström, though he has a nasty habit of disappearing or being over-eager at times. If he can get his game together when it matters he is one hell of an asset. One player who needs to take a solid step forward in his personal development and really grab the bull by the horns is Rasmus Elm. He has had a lot of injury problmes and fitness issues the last season and a half, but it seems he is finally starting to move forward again.

The question is can he be what the national team needs: a playmaker? The same question mark hangs over his Alkmaar teammates head Pontus Wernbloom. Sure he has been good against average sides such as Hungary, but can he really put his play into a higher gear when the shit storm is raging? These are the kinds of questions that Sweden needs to answer in these two games next week. What about Bajrami and Sebastian Larsson? I am still not sure they are really the answer. I am hoping though, hoping really hard. The next challenge coming our way to Euro 2012 is Moldova. Sounds easy on paper, but its three points that we can´t be without. Its three points we have to have.

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