Economic Doomsday Quote of the Week

"The world is watching Europe, waiting upon a solution. It’s not just the euro that’s at stake. If the euro fails, so too does the 27-nation European Union. Bank lending would freeze, stock markets would likely crash, and Europe’s economies would follow. Nations in the euro-zone would see their economic output decline, though temporarily, by as much as 50%, according to UBS forecasters. That economic meltdown would then spread to the U.S. and Asia, who would find themselves caught up in the credit freeze while their exports to Europe would collapse."
Source:

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Euro-Finance-Ministers-wscheats-3060132077.html

Thanks to NaturalNews.com for the tipoff

Arrivederci Berlusconi

From TheEconomicCollapseBlog.com:
Oh, how the mighty have fallen. In just a matter of days, two of Europe's most venerable leaders have been toppled. George Papandreou was the third member of the Papandreou dynasty to be prime minister of Greece. Silvio Berlusconi had dominated Italian politics for nearly two decades. But now they are both heading out the door and the international media have been reporting on their resignations with the kind of enthusiasm that is normally reserved for sporting events. "Down goes Papandreou! Down goes Berlusconi!" If you didn't know better, you would almost be tempted to think that some of the recent news reports were describing a boxing match. But this is what happens when debt problems spiral out of control. It is the leaders who take the fall. So will the resignations of Papandreou and Berlusconi help anything? Of course not. Europe is still headed for a financial collapse of epic proportions...

Full Article:
http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/arrivederci-berlusconi

Dependency theory and conspiracy theory

There was a post at Tiger Beatdown titled "Occupying Europe, when the colonizer reclaims wealth", by Flavia Dzodan. Anyone familiar with leftist discourse knows what's coming from the title, but to prime myself for some intellectual activity this week (I'm writing this Monday morning), I'll go through the motions with it. What I'm trying to do is criticize the worldview that I perceive is behind the text.

A long time ago, when I took a course to become a kickboxing instructor, I was taught to give feedback in the form of a metaphorical hamburger; a prime example of the McDonaldization of education, if you will. The idea is that first you give positive feedback (a bun), then criticism (the meat), and finish off with more positive feedback (the other bun). I like the metaphor, because to me, it implies that the positive reinforcement equates with the useless carbohydrates of the buns, while the criticism is the meat of the whole thing. That's an anachronism, as the example was given at a time when any Finnish person would have thought that "karppaaminen" ("low carb-ing") refers to a type of fish.

In the spirit of this advice, I'd like to start by saying that I very much approve of the author's criticism of "importing" the 99% slogan from the US "Occupy" movement. As a European, I am in general dismayed that so many European political movements seem to be importing agendas directly from North America. For example, it's recently become something of a meme here in Finland to rail against tax breaks for the rich; indeed, I've even seen people claim that our entire budget deficit is caused by tax breaks granted since the early nineties. According to an authoritative study, the opposite is true: tax progression has remained essentially the same, while taxes on low- and medium-income earners have fallen considerably more than for high-income earners. But because tax breaks for the rich are on the agenda in the US, the same must be true here.

However, there is a fundamental issue I disagree on:

The European Union’s wealth is the wealth of Empires. Mainly the British, Dutch, Spanish, Belgium, French, Italian, Austro-German and Portuguese empires. This is the wealth built on the backs of the African slave trade and the colonization of lands as distant from each other as the African continent, the Americas, Asia and Australia. This wealth is made of unspeakable suffering and economic deprivation for those in the colonized territories. This wealth is also made of resource depletion and subjugation of native populations. This wealth that never belonged to Europe to begin with.

In other words, all you Occupy Whatever protesters with your bizarre neo-swastikas: you're not being leftist enough. All that evil financial capital was created by robbing the Third World:

The very same wealth people now Occupying these public European squares reclaim as their own, demanding it is re-distributed while it was generated as a result of Europe’s occupations in the first place. And yet, none of this is examined or contextualized. Most people operating under the illusion that this wealth they are reclaiming is rightfully theirs, that they are entitled to it.

Though the author gives us the "very basic premises of dependency theory", cribbed from the Wikipedia page, and dresses up these claims with it, what becomes obscured is that dependency theory is, first and foremost, a theory on the current relationships between countries and markets in the world system. It is not, and does not justify, the historical claim that current European prosperity is "made of unspeakable suffering and economic deprivation for those in the colonized territories". This is a much broader claim, and one that I take great issue with. Many dependency theorists do advocate such a historical worldview, but the difference between the theory of international relations that is dependency theory and that historical worldview must be kept in mind.

**

This claim was formalized as the theory of the "development of underdevelopment" by sociologist Andre Gunder Frank in the article by that name. His specific claim was that the underdevelopment of Latin American countries was not caused by "the survival of archaic institutions and the existence of capital shortage", but by the international capitalist system, which exploited them for profit.

It's important to see this criticism in context. Frank, and dependency theory in general, was reacting against views of development that saw underdevelopment as principally the fault of the underdeveloped countries themselves, either because they hadn't managed their economic development properly, or even because they were racially inferior. The latter view has been put forward recently here in Finland, and figures in Finnish discussions on development aid, for instance.

While much of the dependency theorists' criticism of existing models of economic development was good and necessary, Frank threw the baby out with the bath water when he claimed that underdevelopment is entirely caused by the world system. If this was true, then Hernando de Soto's (the economist, not the conquistador) reforms would have had no effect. De Soto has led the way in improving standards of living in developing countries precisely by removing antiquated obstacles to economic development and improving the ability of ordinary people to participate in the economy. His success has shown that such obstacles do play a vital role in restricting economic development. By reforming property rights and arguing for a decriminalization of coca growing, de Soto managed to make life so difficult for the Shining Path Peruvian Maoist terrorist organization that they tried to kill him. Read more about de Soto here.

Despite endorsements from people like Kofi Annan ("Hernando is absolutely right") and Bill Clinton ("the world’s greatest living economist"), de Soto infuriates left-wing commentators precisely because he's offering a capitalist solution to underdevelopment. Perhaps the most eloquent defence of de Soto I can offer is to link to the Grauniad, which dedicated a "review" to attacking de Soto, but managed to offer no concrete criticisms whatsoever beyond accusing him of being a front man for international capitalism.

De Soto's work quite concretely demonstrates that legislation and culture in the underdeveloped countries do play a major role in restricting development, even today. To lay everything at the door of a faceless, ill-defined "international capitalism", a left-wing hobbyhorse similar to the Stalinist "international bourgeoisie", is at best a single-cause fallacy.

As a historical view, the idea that Western development is caused by non-Western underdevelopment is fundamentally absurd. It rests on a zero-sum view of world wealth, where Western prosperity cannot be the result of progress within Western society, but must be created by taking resources from other societies.

To take a fairly specific example, it has long been a commonplace for certain leftists to assert that the British "industrial revolution" was built on profits from imperialism and the slave trade. However, it has been pointed out by David Richardson that less than 1% of the domestic investment in Britain during the Industrial Revolution was made up of profits from the slave trade. Furthermore, while it's indisputable that the Atlantic slave trade had a grave human impact on Africa, the idea that it impoverished and destroyed the entire continent is ridiculously exaggerated. It obscures, among others, the fact that there were also Africans who themselves made a considerable profit from selling other Africans into slavery. In my opinion, the bald generalizations offered by supposedly "post-colonial" Marxists that cast all white people as aggressors and all black people as helpless victims are just as racist as the racist views they purport to replace.

Even some Marxist historians like Bill Warren agree:

There is no evidence of a process of underdevelopment…The evidence rather supports a contrary thesis: that process of development has been taking place…and that this has been a direct result of the west.

I wouldn't go as far as to say that the economic development of the entire world, at any stage, is a direct result of anything done by the West, but the simple truth is that throughout the history of the world, all societies have developed economically, and some societies have developed faster than others. This speed has varied, and indeed at times turned negative, and the forms the development has taken have also varied. Development and "undevelopment" have both taken place at all times and in all cultures; there is no truth to the racist ideas that only white westerners can bring about economic prosperity, or that African culture - as if there were such a thing as an "African culture" - is somehow inherently inimical to development.

At its heart, economic development is endogenic. This is not to suggest that exogenic factors can't play major or even decisive parts in specific processes, but it's long since become obvious to me that these kinds of rejoinders of the blindingly obvious are necessary when writing about anything even remotely political. But historically, it has primarily been the endogenic development of a culture or society that determines what its economy is like and how prosperous it is. There is no single cause; the circumstances a society is in, including various environmental variables like natural resources and climate, power relations within the society and of the society with others, cultural and economic structures within the society and a bewildering array of other factors, conspicuously including decisions made in and by the society, determine what path of economic development it takes. If unraveling this was easy, then economic history wouldn't be an academic discipline.

It's precisely the complexity of economic development that makes single-cause explanations like "international capitalism" or the blithering nonsense of Jared Diamond's guns, germs and steel so inadequate. They attempt to reduce a massively complex series of interrelated historical processes to a single cause, and frankly, when they go beyond that to assert that this single mechanism still functions today and people offering alternative views are on its payroll, they enter the realm of conspiracy theory.

These zero-sum theories don't make any sense on their own merits. If the underdevelopment of the so-called Third World is entirely a result of Western capitalism, does this mean that before the advent of the Age of Discovery (which, frankly, is an appallingly Eurocentric term), fundamental global inequalities of wealth didn't exist? If so, how did the diabolical Western capitalists acquire the means to appropriate the wealth of other nations? Surely they had some competitive advantages to start with. These zero-sum views reduce world economic history to a simplistic nonsense of a pillaging West and a pillaged Rest, and don't hold any water when faced with even an elementary knowledge of history.

Even worse, by casting the entire "Rest" as a unitary block of victimized cultures, they completely deny the rich history and heritage of, say, Arabic and Islamic culture, not to mention China, by reducing them to simple victims of Western imperialism who, unable to defend themselves, succumbed to the superior invader. No thought is given to the notion that these societies have their own history and their own processes that might be worthy of study. This simplistic view of the other as an eternal, impersonal suffering victim in fact reinforces the very Eurocentric, orientalist orthodoxy that its proponents claim to oppose.

**

The Tiger Beatdown article goes deeper into the land of conspiracies in its account of the Libyan civil war:

And now, to prove that none of this Dependency Theory is a thing of the past, in a very recent display of neo-colonial power, NATO forces, the pan European military arm, occupies Libya, a former Italian colony, supporting the “good guys”, the rebel insurgent group whose idea of justice was to sodomize Gaddafi minutes before his execution (Warning for extremely graphic content). Europe, once again, behind the pillage of bodies outside their territory, because that’s another concept that Europe laid out the foundations for: the idea of what Judith Butler very aptly named “the non grievable” lives.

By implication at least, the author seems to be claiming that the Western intervention in Libya is grounded in economic policy, and is part of this transfer of wealth from the Rest to the West. This is utterly ridiculous. No arguments or facts in its favor are advanced, beyond simply stating that the intervention occurred. And surely, if we are to mention atrocities committed by the rebels against al-Qaḏḏāfī, we might also remember that his regime was hardly benevolent? It seems odd to posthumously cast the Libyan dictator as a victim of Western economic repression, but these are the strange lengths to which Marxist conspiracy theories will go.

The leftist attitude to Western intervention is frequently a sort of Catch-22. If the West intervenes in a country like Libya or Iraq, then the intervention is an instance of Chomsky's "New Military Humanism"; an exercise in economically motivated power politics that in itself proves how evil and acquisitive the imperialism that is Western capitalism is. If, however, the West does not intervene, as in Syria or most conflicts in sub-Saharan Africa, then its callousness and disregard are proof of how evil and acquisitive the imperialism that is Western capitalism is. In the eyes of these critics, the West is damned if it does and damned if it doesn't.

**

To end on some more positive feedback (the lower bun of this hamburger, if you will), I'd like to turn to racism again.

All European Empires were built on this notion of “the Other”, the non human that was only good in so far as she could produce labor and resources and, in turn, more children to be exploited. Nowadays, these ideas constantly framed as “the immigrant menace” and the inevitable raising of xenophobia and racism; European governments passing laws demanding more and more stringent requirements to access a documented residency status. The non Western immigrant that did manage to acquire a residency, forced to learn the language of the country or risk deportation. The old colonial practices now enforced on European territories under the guise of “cultural preservation” and “integration”.

Again, I can't agree with the Marxist notion that "the other" is economically defined, or that the other is acceptable as a producer of labor and resources. To proper racists, the racially constructed Other is inherently repulsive and must be kept away, not from economic interests but from pure political prejudice. In Finland, for instance, the main anti-immigrant party is also heavily in favor of reducing Finnish dependence on international trade and, at worst, almost a striving for autarchy. Certainly this view doesn't see the immigrants as economic resources to be exploited: on the contrary, pseudo-Fascist movements see the immigrant as a threat to the health and integrity of the "national body". In my opinion, to see European racism as economically motivated is senseless, as such a theory as to its origins and motivations entirely fails to account for its political manifestations without pseudo-conspiracy theories of "false consciousnesses".

However, in the context of the current European "debate" - which it hardly is by any sensible standards - on immigration, it's important to highlight the very real racist nature of these policies of "assimilation". Fundamentally, they insist that immigrants have no right to their own culture or language, but must abandon their identity and take on a new one, imposed by the hegemonic culture. In other words:

Nowadays, European States (the Netherlands and Denmark are two such examples) have laws that demand Non Westerners learn and speak the local languages or risk fines or, failing to comply, eventual deportation. Their right to occupy a space subject to assimilation.

This is precisely the kind of immigration policy that Finnish political racists are advancing: immigrants must "assimilate", i.e. give up their identity, or be forcibly deported or otherwise penalized. We should recognize that this is inhuman. For instance, a Finnish racist movement states in its election program for the previous election that everyone has a right to their own culture and language. They then go on to state that immigrants must assimilate and abandon their own culture, or be deported. It could hardly be made clearer that to these movements and their supporters, immigrants aren't people at all. In Finland, even the biggest left-wing party, the Social Democrats, campaigned with a slogan calling for immigrants to assimilate.

So I would like to take this opportunity to give my unqualified support for the demand that the "Occupy" movement, in Europe at least, concern itself with the "others" of our society as well:

Travelers and Roma people constantly evicted from European spaces, their right to Occupy anything denied while a complacent media enforces their status as “Other” and as such, undeserving of the right to inhabit spaces that should be reserved for legitimate Europeans. Because, let’s be clear here once and for all: only people who are legitimized by the State can occupy anything. The rest, the undocumented immigrants, the refuges, the Roma, the asylum seekers, had their right to occupy revoked. However, the European Occupy movement is not widely addressing this deprivation and their role, as rightful subjects, in it. Instead, I insist, the movement claims a bigger portion of the tainted pie.

To echo the point I made earlier in my Finnish-language blog post on transgender rights in Finland, Mahathma Gandhi has reputedly said that a nation is measured by how it treats its lesser members. I object to the idea that, say, the non-cisgendered or immigrants are somehow "lesser" members of society than the more outwardly conforming, but I'll again suggest a rewording: a movement for socio-economic change can be judged by who it wants to enact socio-economic change for. So far, the Occupy movement is a movement of the mainstream, for the mainstream, and the Others remain marginalized.

Tobacco: The 17th Century Drug War

Charles C. Mann is the author of a new book that has been called a "historical Freakonomics": 1493 – How Europe's Discovery of the Americas Revolutionized Trade, Ecology and Life on Earth. Here's a piece by him from the London Independent:
Nicotiana tabacum, as botanists call it, was the first global commodity craze. Fun, exotic, hallucinogenic and addictive, it was – is – a near-perfect consumer product. England fell under its spell in the 1580s, when the survivors of the nation's first, unsuccessful colonies – the Roanoke ventures of Sir Walter Raleigh – landed in Brighton with strange, fiery clay tubes at their lips. Obviously conscious of the impact of their appearance, they descended on the docks, smoking languidly, like so many Elizabethan versions of James Dean and Humphrey Bogart. By 1607, when Jamestown was founded, London's streets were jammed with more than 7,000 tobacco "houses" – café-like places where the city's growing throng of nicotine junkies could buy and consume tobacco.

None of this was exceptional. Between 1580 and 1610, Nicotiana tabacum, a species originally from the Amazon, became a fixture in every inhabited part of the earth. Almost immediately it attracted governmental ire. Bans on tobacco, some enforced by the death penalty, were enacted by France, Russia, Sweden, the Ottoman and Mughal empires, and the Japanese shogunate. The smoking weed quickly became so ubiquitous in Manchuria, according to historian Timothy Brook, that in 1635 the Khan, Hong Taiji, discovered that his soldiers "were selling their weapons to buy tobacco". Enraged, he prohibited smoking.

No anti-tobacco crusader is better known than King James I, whose Counterblaste to Tobacco, issued in 1604, proclaimed that smoking was "lothsome to the eye, hatefull to the nose, harmefull to the braine, [and] dangerous to the lungs". James sought to ban tobacco outright, but was rebuffed by a hostile Parliament. Pope Urban VIII was more successful. Infuriated by reports that priests were celebrating mass with lighted cigars, the Pope promptly – and successfully – prohibited smoking in the pulpit.

Demand continued unabated. Even as James thundered against tobacco's destructive effect on society, the weed itself was sometimes sold for its weight in silver in London. In the English colony of Bermuda, farmers routinely purchased brides for bags of tobacco (typically, the weight was about 100lb). Across the globe, gangs of young smokers in Edo (Tokyo) were so outraged by the high price of a smoke that they routinely ransacked tobacco warehouses. Customs officials in Istanbul, unable to afford a pipeful, routinely shook down visitors for smoking supplies.

Coupled with high demand, tobacco criminalisation drove up its price, which led to an explosion of tobacco bootleggery that continues to the present day. Pirates grew and sold tobacco throughout the Caribbean, especially in Venezuela. Outraging the Spanish crown, Spanish and Indian smallholders in remote colonial areas converted their wheat and maize plots to tobacco, then sold the harvest to Dutch and English pirates. So powerful did the gangs become that the Spanish ambassador to England complained that English demand was causing the collapse of law and order in tobacco country. (This is not confined to the past: cigarette smuggling remains a major industry in pirate havens from southern Italy to South-east China, but is also common in less rambunctious areas; police in suburban Maryland rolled up an alleged tobacco ring in the eastern US just last month.) Even as moralists like James thundered that tobacco was destroying the family, royal tax officials were eyeing its legalisation. Few programs generate revenue more reliably than a tax on an addictive substance.

In economic terms, addicts' cravings are inelastic – they are relatively insensitive to cost. If they keep getting their hit, they will happily pay the higher prices associated with government-imposed taxes, fees and levies. Within a year of his Counterblaste, the English government had instituted its first tobacco tax.

Prohibitionists might note a disturbing parallel. Everywhere in the world, the lure of tobacco money eventually overwhelmed efforts to prevent addiction. The son of Hong Taiji, the Manchu Khan who banned tobacco, finished seizing China and in 1644 became the first emperor of the Qing dynasty. He, too, fought against tobacco. But Hong Taiji's grandson, the Kangxi emperor, started smoking at the age of seven – and watched new tobacco taxes become major financial contributors to the Qing state.

One by one, other states slowly followed the Manchu lead, legalising and taxing tobacco. Marijuana is following the same path, slowly becoming tax fodder in nation after nation. Here Mughal India was perhaps the first society to reverse course (the East India Company later added opium taxes to the mix). Decades later, countries such as the Netherlands followed the Mughal path. Even in the notoriously anti-drug US, places such as California and Massachusetts, hard hit by recession, are considering marijuana's use as a taxable commodity.

Yet history should not give too much encouragement to the forces behind unfettered legalisation, either. If tobacco and other drugs are a guide, legalisation is followed, eventually, by social disapproval. Everywhere that tobacco has become a fully accepted commodity its use has – eventually, after decades – declined. The tobacco-besotted colonial US, the nation that held the world's most permissive views on tobacco during the 17th and 18th centuries, ultimately became the land where bewildered European and Asian smokers would be ejected from restaurants, cafés and bars. Even as recently as the 1980s, Britons mocked the "puritanical" anti-tobacco crusades in the US. They have fallen into line. So have the Italians, Turks and even the Chinese.

Drugs that become uncool fall into disuse, as tobacco is falling into disuse today. If history is any guide, our grandchildren's grandchildren will regard today's struggles over marijuana, cocaine and opium as bewildering fossils of an unsavvy past...

The long shadow line: History and the war on drugs
Charles C Mann
Monday, 10 October 2011
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/history/the-long-shadow-line-history-and-the-war-on-drugs-2368050.html

Timo Soini is no free marketer

Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal published a text in Timo Soini's name. He's the leader of the Finnish Fundamentalist Party (the "True Finns" in official parlance), and the piece is supposedly his reasoning for opposing the Portugal bailout.

WSH: Why I Won't Support More Bailouts

Fortunately, it is not too late to stop the rot. For the banks, we need honest, serious stress tests. Stop the current politically inspired farce. Instead, have parallel assessments done by regulators and independent groups including stakeholders and academics. Trust, but verify.

Insolvent banks and financial institutions must be shut down, purging insolvency from the system. We must restore the market principle of freedom to fail.

If some banks are recapitalized with taxpayer money, taxpayers should get ownership stakes in return, and the entire board should be kicked out. But before any such taxpayer participation can be contemplated, it is essential to first apply big haircuts to bondholders.

For sovereign debt, the freedom to fail is again key. Significant restructuring is needed for genuine recovery. Yes, markets will punish defaulting states, but they are also quick to forgive. Current plans are destroying the real economies of Europe through elevated taxes and transfers of wealth from ordinary families to the coffers of insolvent states and banks. A restructuring that left a country's debt burden at a manageable level and encouraged a return to growth-oriented policies could lead to a swift return to international debt markets.

On the face of it, this is an incredibly sensible free-market critique of the European bailouts.

There's a problem with it: its supposed author is an agrarian populist who heads a party that proclaims itself to be "Christian Socialist". He's no free market proponent. While he condemns deficit spending in other European countries, he and his party are firmly in favor of massive deficit spending in Finland.

In their election manifesto, the "True Finns" demand an increased role for government in the Finnish economy and increased taxation. They specifically oppose the Finnish government's few efforts to introduce any kind of productivity and cost-efficiency standards into the public sector, and are in favor of increased intervention. As an example, in their manifesto on agriculture policy, Soini's party calls for maintaining gigantic agricultural subsidies but reducing oversight, and for ridiculous public works projects like a railway to the Arctic Ocean.

Before the election, Soini even proposed that the Finnish government invest the money curently held in pension funds into infrastructure projects like roads and railways (HS). He told Finland's state broadcasting company that some of this money should be used for the aforementioned Arctic Ocean railway (YLE). This is a lunatic idea that would simply result in the pension fund money vanishing into the black hole of pork barrel politics.

So don't be fooled by Soini's apparent free market stance. He's an old-fashioned pork-barrel politician who opposes the bailouts purely on nationalistic grounds: no Finnish money for foreigners! The text published in his name was almost certainly written by one of his many ghostwriters and image consultants, who his fans like to pretend he doesn't employ. The "True Finns" espouse none of the free market principles laid out in the text, and in fact, support their polar opposites in Finland.

Turkey time

Der Spiegel: Turkey Accused of Using Chemical Weapons against PKK

German experts have confirmed the authenticity of photographs that purport to show PKK fighters killed by chemical weapons. The evidence puts increasing pressure on the Turkish government, which has long been suspected of using such weapons against Kurdish rebels. German politicians are demanding an investigation.

It would be difficult to exceed the horror shown in the photos, which feature burned, maimed and scorched body parts. The victims are scarcely even recognizable as human beings.

As I'm writing this well before it'll be published, more information on this story may well have broken. Sounds like mustard gas to me, for what it's worth. It's good to see someone carrying on Saddam Hussein's minority policies.

**

Whether the story turns out to be true or not, the condition of the Kurds is something worth remembering. In 2008, the Kurds made up 18% of the population of Turkey. Ever since Turkey was founded in 1923, the central government has vigorously persecuted the Kurds. Until the 1990's, their objective was nothing less than total cultural genocide. The very existence of the Kurds was categorically denied; they were classed in censuses as either "mountain Turks" or "eastern Turks" to avoid even admitting that there were such people in Turkey. Their language was banned, and over a million people were forcibly relocated.

Unsurprisingly, the Kurds rebelled against this treatment, and the army was sent in. Eighty years later, they're still at it, now with chemical weapons.

It's worth remembering that the Turks actually invented genocide. From 1915 onward, the Turks killed somewhere between half a million and 1,5 million Armenians in the Armenian genocide. The full panoply of ethnic cleansing was deployed for the first time by the Turks, with forced relocations, concentration camps and death squads.

In international politics, the Turks also still illegally occupy Northern Cyprus, in defiance of the UN and the international community. In what may be a world record of sorts, no country other than Turkey has recognized Northern Cyprus as a state.

**

Turkey has been seeking membership in the European Union for a good while now. Most of the discussion around their membership revolves around Islam and, frankly, xenophobia, but a real issue that should get a lot more attention is their genocidal policy against the Kurds and the continuing debacle of the Cypriot occupation. A country that behaves like this should have no place in the European Union.

In Russia, the Internet searches you

Daily Mail: Every Google search to be logged and saved for two years under new Euro MP plan

Every Google web search could be stored for up to two years under a controversial new EU plan that has the backing of more than 300 Euro-MEPs.

'Written Declaration 29' is intended to be used as an early warning system to stop paedophiles by logging what they look for using search engines.

But civil liberty groups have hit out at the proposal which they say is a 'completely unjustifiable' intrusion into citizens' privacy.

And they claim that there is no evidence that it would even be effective in trapping paedophiles who would never use search engines like Google to look for child pornography.

The idea that "pedophiles" use Google to look for child porn is ridiculous, but what's even worse is that there are MEPs who are willing to sacrifice the privacy of everyone who uses a search engine in order to catch a pedophile who's too dumb to actually find kiddie porn is terrifying.

Is privacy a value at all for these people? Is pedophilia really such a terrible enemy that our decision-makers are willing to sacrifice all of our fundamental human rights to stop it?

This, along with the ongoing project to erect a Europe-wide version of Finland's failed Net censorship scheme make me very worried that as regards the freedom of the Internet, the EU is taking the high road to China.

Lithuania to ban discussing homosexuality

At amnesty.org

The Lithuanian parliament has voted in favour of a measure that would prohibit the discussion of homosexuality in schools and ban any reference to it in public information that can be viewed by children. The Seimas voted by an overwhelming majority on Tuesday to move forward to a final vote on an amendment to the "Law on the Protection of Minors against the Detrimental Effect of Public Information".

I love the name of that law.

Once again, a legistlature wants to protect the vulnerable from information. I mean, it says so right there in the title. Aren't the Lithuanian people fortunate to have a parliament that protects them from harmful information?