Day: June 11, 2001

The European press is freaking out because voters in Ireland rejected the Nice Treaty which would rework the European Union ahead of its planned expansion to admit Eastern European countries in a few years.

There is a vocal minority in Europe that is concerned about the often extremely anti-democratic nature of European Union institutions. Of course those in favor of the EU dismiss such talk as rubbish. You can get a flavor of what EU officials think of democracy by looking at comments made by the EU’s Enlargement Commissioner Guenter Verheugen. Verheugen was in Slovenia when he gave this quote to reporters about the Irish rejection of the treaty,

Such a referendum in one country cannot … block the biggest and most important project for the political and economic future of the united Europe.

Much of the European press echoed this view. Here’s a comment typical of this reaction from the Madrid newspaper, El Pais,

It is paradoxical that half a million votes – cast in a referendum with a close result and the lowest turnout in Irish history – could stop a treaty coming into force which affects 370m people and the hopes of millions of others who want to join the EU … the EU must agree systems for changing its rules so they cannot be paralysed by a single state. Otherwise, a European Union of 27 or more members will be ungovernable.

Wouldn’t want a little thing like a democratic election to get in the way of the EU’s plans. I can’t imagine where the EU’s critics came up with the idea that it was anti-democratic.

Sources:

Irish Republic rejects EU treaty. CNN, June 8, 2001.

Irish No stuns European press. The BBC, June 9, 2001.

Cameron Barrett pointed to a brief article by Jakob Nielsen about the uses and abuses of PDF files. I like the PDF format and applications a lot, but it is often misused on the web. Barrett notes that a person he worked with insisted on storing meeting notes in PDF rather than ASCII. Dumb.

There’s one thing Nielsen didn’t mention that I run into all the time — sites that insist on taking say a 200 page report, and breaking that up into 15 or 20 different PDF files. Usually each PDF file corresponds to a single chapter. Unfortunately, most such sites don’t bother to include a PDF version of the entire report.

The United Nations is especially bad at this. Check out the web page for the recently released The State Of The World’s Cities Report 2001. If you want to download and print the entire report you’re looking at 50+ separate PDF files which don’t even use a sensible numbering scheme (guess how these files will look in your directory with 10-11.pdf, 15.pdf, 104.pdf, etc. Couldn’t somebody have taken a second to put leading zeros at the front of the two digit chapter file names?)

I know why they did it like this — because this is going to be a huge file to download all at once, but then it is going to be a huge file transfer job to download all of the smaller files as well. Why not just throw a PDF file with the entire report up there?

There’s one more thing I would have added to Nielsen’s recommendations. Every file that is in PDF form should be available on your web site in HTML form unless it is something that is print-specific such as a specially formatted form.

I like how the Heritage Foundation does this on their site. Every article is available in HTML form with a link to the PDF version. This is much better than what the Cato Institute started doing a couple years ago. Now most of their reports included only a short HTML summary and a link to a PDF version of the entire report. Why not put the HTML version of the report up for those of us who just want to scan it, and link to the PDF version for people who want to download and print it out?

Personally, when Cato did this I simply stopped reading their reports.

The New York Times has story about the government’s plans to murder Tim McVeigh on Monday. Anyway the interesting part (to me at least) is Rick Bragg’s description of McVeigh’s claim that the kids he murdered in the Oklahoma City bombing were “collateral damage.”

According to Bragg, McVeigh is doing nothing but rationalizing here, which is completely true, but Bragg can’t be bothered to wonder where McVeigh mastred the fine the art of rationalization. I don’t remember the NYT claiming that NATO commanders were “rationalizing” when they described dead civilian train commuters and reporters in Yugoslavia as “collateral damage.” In fact when the Pentagon starts throwing around such euphemisms for dead civilians, reporters typically eat it up.

Nor can the NYT even begin to consider the possibility that the government’s execution of McVeigh will only reaffirm the basic principle that McVeigh acted on — namely that as long as you think you’ve got a good enough reason, it is okay to kill defenseless civilians.

These sort of problems converge with the absurd but commonplace claim that McVeigh’s murderous act was the worst act of terrorism ever in the United States. This is true only if you pretend that the 18th and 19th centuries simply never happened.

For example, in 1864 Colonel John Chivington’s men managed to surround a group of Cheyenne — two-thirds of whom were women and children — at Sand Creek in what was then the Colorado Territory. Although the Indians tried to surrender, Chivington’s troops along with some citizen militia killed every single man, woman and child, and scalped and mutilated the bodies. Chivington estimated there were as many as 700 people were thusly murdered (though his figure was highly inflated).

There were official investigations of course, but only one major punishment — Chivington was forced to resign his commission.

And if you expand the list of terrorist acts to include those committed by the U.S. government internationally, McVeigh’s act likely doesn’t even make it into the top 10 incidents of the last century.

The United Nations recently released a report on the continuing urbanization of world population. According to the State of the World’s Cities Report 2001, urbanization is continuing at a quick pace. Every year the percentage of the world’s population living in cities grows by 0.8 percent (which may not sound like a lot, but represents very rapid expansion).

In highly industrialized countries such as the United States, up to 80 percent of the population live in cities, and the developing world is beginning to catch up to those figures. Moreover, the number of megacities keeps expanding. By 2010, there will be 21 cities worldwide with populations of 10 million or more people.

Unfortunately, as the report notes, many of those living in cities are living in poverty, with up to 1 billion people living in slums and squatter settlements in urban areas around the world.

Ironically the United Nations still can’t see the forest for the trees. On the one hand it notes that consumption of oil and fresh water are now at levels that are five and two times the consumption level of the mid-20th centuries — largely due to increased usage in developed industrialized countries — but on the other hand fails to see the connection between those indicators and the alleviation of poverty.

The report says that, “A child born in the industrialized world consumes and pollutes more in its lifetime than do 30-50 children in developing countries; yet the environmental damage from global consumption falls most heavily on the poor.” But saying that children in developed countries consume more resources than children in less developed countries is simply an unnecessarily opaque way of saying that children in the developing world are extremely poor compared to children in the developed world.

With economies that discourage efficient deployment of resources such as oil, fresh water and other important commodities, citizens of the developing world lack an economic base to deal either with age old environmental problems, such as malaria, or more recent environmental problems, such as smog.

The solution is for such nations to begin producing as many resources as the developed world (the UN and others always conveniently forget that the developed world produces far more resources than the rest of the world), which will require serious long term economic and political changes in those nations.

None of which, of course, seems likely to happen in the near term.

Sources:

Number of city-dwellers growing, U.N. says. Matt Crenson, Associated Press, June 4, 2001.

The State Of The World’s Cities Report 2001. The United Nations Center for Human Settlements, June 2001.