George Will, Hungry for Answers

This column from GFW (Hat-tip to Café Hayek) is one of the more interesting and easily digestible things in the papers today. (Are we still allowed to use that expression? In the papers? I haven't seen a real, physical, complete-with-crossword-and-classifieds copy of the Washington Post in a year!) Mr. Will looks up from the box scores just long enough to discover that there's a confirmation hearing on for the Supreme Court, and, being the inquisitive yet polite man that he is, realizes that he'd like to know just a little about the nominee. So he asks a few simple questions, which should be asked of most nominees, actually. Fortunately, it looks like a few of the questions are going to get asked in one form or another. For example, here's Sen. Coburn asking about what we're allowed to eat, borrowing from Will's first question. Hopefully other Senators will make their way through the list.

A Nation of Shopkeepers

As a general rule, I find that people are not Euroskeptic because of big things, such as the awful Common Agriculture Policy, which redistributes millions, billions, of euros to non-sustainable endeavors,  but because of little things.

Here's another little thing: it turns out that the European Commission wants to forbid the sale of "a dozen," well, whatever; in this case, it's eggs. Instead, the Commission argues that product should only be sold by weight, and that if a seller wants to sell something that is light and fluffy, like a bread roll, he should be penalized by the extravagant activity on the part of the yeast.

Your correspondent, for one, welcomes this seemingly ridiculous change, though is disappointed at the lack of vision by the European Commission. After all, we know that old hens (and less healthy hens, such as those without a 'free-range" designation) lay eggs with thinner shells. If we assume that eggs should be sold by weight, shouldn't we consumers also know the weight of the shell? After all, it's unfair to pay extra for slick deceptive packaging! And why shouldn't consumers reward those intrepid and honest businessmen who trade in eggs where you buy the yolk and the white, rather than the useless shell? Young hens and free-range hens are parasites on society and its ovarian needs!

Environment Secretary Caroline Spelman notes that "Shopkeeping is a longstanding British tradition." Indeed. And any nation of shopkeepers ought to know when there is a greater good to be performed above their petty, archaic, and selfish ways.

USA! USA!

So after a scoreless 91 minutes, and a potentially devastating 0-0 draw between the Americans and Algeria, the USA scores in the second minute of extra time, sending them into the next round and winning Group C.

Here's the video of the goal. It was a true coast-to-coast team effort, with the US goalkeeper, Tim Howard, quickly heaving the ball back up to the midfielder, where eventual hero Donovan brings it up, dumps it off to the attacker who centers it perfectly. Dempsey bangs it off the Algerian goalkeeper, who blocks the shot but the rebound ends up, well, in the crease if you want to use a hockey expression, and Landon Donovan in the last minutes of extra time boots Jabulani in.

After being denied a goal for the second time in two games, this time due to a controversial off-sides call, the game was kept tight. The US had many chances, but just couldn't seem to get the ball to touch the back of the net, and Algeria played hard as well, (though not as well, especially after the first 10 minutes).

The pub was happy -- no Algerians or Slovenes were present.

Good News for die Mannschaft

Well, in the World Cup, the US is on to the round of 16, along with England. In fact, we won the group! We'll probably face Serbia, which should also be quite interesting. They are fast, talented, and have a good goalkeeper. Everything hangs on the Germany-Ghana and the Australia-Serbia games later tonight. As for our opponent, Paul the Octopus anticipates a German victory over the Ghanaians, and he's right 80% of the time. Indeed, he's two for two this year so far.

So there you go. Never let it be said that this blog isn't open-minded about cephalopod insights.

World Cup Notes

This evening, perennial favorites Brazil, the guys most likely to make the beautiful game actually beautiful, walked onto the field with the upstart team from.... the People's Democratic Republic of Korea (and coach Kim Jong-hun doesn't like it when you call them Norks). The stage was set by the fact that one player, Jong Tae-se, cried during the Democratic People's Republic of Korea national anthem. Not being well-versed in the subtleties of Asian soccer, it cast a terrifying pall over the game. The outcome of the match was simply assumed, yet after the first half, neither the Brazilian nor the Korean Democratic People's Republic has scored. The word that English, ahem, football commentators use, "inspired," (or should I put the comma on the other side of the quotation marks, to really run with the joke?) was simply not frequently used. It seemed like the Brazilians were sitting and waiting for the perfect moment (which they found in the second half, on a goal that seemed to defy the laws of physics), while the Democratic Korean People's Republic aggressively did all they could to simply survive.

That terrifying pall loaded every decision and any analysis. Did the Brazilians relax in the first half, so as not to humiliate the People's Republic of Democratic Korea? They played so much better in the second half. Or maybe they just needed a chance to warm up against an inferior opponent in their first game. When Ri Jun-Il had the paramedics on the field as he stretched his hamstring, was it due to the 40°F in the South African winter, or was it a chance to escape? After the late goal by Ji Yun-nam, were Tae-se's sprints faster because of the chance of a draw, or because of his previous behavior? Emotions race ahead of rationality -- it's as though we were talking about something as inconsequential as sports!

In the end, the underdogs lost. But, uncommonly in the sport, no player from the Korean Republic of Democratic Republicans ever rolled around after a foul, looking for a sympathetic referee. It would be unseemly. There are good men north of the DMZ. Hopefully, some of them got a ticket to Johannesburg, and, if we are really lucky, there will be more stories to tell.

Juche on the Pitch

15 minutes till we see Juche on the Soccer Field!
For those of you unaware, Juche is the sophisticated in-the-know term for autarkic socialist totalitarianism. If we wrote it with a hyphen and an "é" as in "Ju-Ché," would it be fashionable? Would we put it on T-shirts?

Initial Thoughts on the World Cup

So, every four years there is a great big soccer tournament that almost the entire world gets fired up about (even North Korea is in it this year!), while Americans typically smile, yawn, forget about it entirely, or brag about how much they hate it. This year, the tournament is in South Africa, and the US has a chance to do ok -- probably not great, but ok, and might even make it to the elimination rounds, beyond the group stage. (We play England, Algeria, and Slovenia, and have to be at least second-best to advance.)

But what I find to be interesting is the number of people who have moved from the third category (forget about it entirely) to the first and fourth category (smile or brag about how much they hate it). It seems that in the American media there are more and more discussions about it than I remember from 2002. (I was in Germany for the 2006 Weltmeisterschaft, and that was insane, but I didn't read very much of anything at that time.)

Part of this, of course, is because we are playing England in the first game, which is far more interesting than last time around, when the US played Italy, Czech Republic, and Cameroon. If you ask the typical American to name a famous foreign soccer player who's still playing, I would imagine that respondents would answer "Beckham" 50% of the time. It doesn't matter how good Petr Čech or Gigi Buffon are in goal, they simply aren't household names in the US, even if Becks is best known for having silly hair and a Spice Girl wife. So the popularity of the English game contributes to it. Moreover, the ability to broadcast everything and everything on million-channel cable and satellite means that it's easier to find niche markets for any sport. If you want, you can watch hurling or Australian rules football or whatever. Even in the past four years, internet and satellite communication has advanced to the point where Americans can pay more attention to British elections for a lower "opportunity cost." So why not watch the best soccer players in the world if it's easy, especially if your kid is playing the game?

Of course, this "current of awareness" manifests itself numerous ways, and no one needs to be reminded of the problems Western societies face with respect to assimilating immigrants that continue to watch foreign TV, have Facebook friends in the old country (where it's not banned, at least), and avoid contact with their host country. But it also means that host nations with high immigration, like the US, also discover aspects of the rest of the world. While the US is hardly a hermit kingdom, we have been strongly resistant to soccer fever. The average Joe also has been only tangentially concerned with the domestic politics of other nations. Communication technologies, however, can turn us all into analysts of the election in Whereverstan. He can also watch youtube video of Landon Donovan, and get completely caught up on the highlights of his career in a matter of hours. So Americans learn about it. The native-born discover it more easily, and our immigrants bring their love of the sport to our shores, while assimilating less quickly.

The awareness, however, does not translate however into a loving embrace of what is called "the beautiful game." Certainly, this is often used ironically. Yesterday, for example, two games were played. The hosts, South Africa, tied 1-1 with the Mexicans, and the French, winners of the World Cup in 1998, played a full 90 minutes only to end with a 0-0 tie with Uruguay. Ties are not something we like. If you look at American sports, they are engineered to arrive at a result. Football plays a full overtime, baseball, basketball, and NASCAR cannot end in a tie, and NHL hockey rewards aggressive playing in overtime. Scoreless ties are anathema. Three hours of play yesterday yielded 2 goals, and no winners. so part of this is the structure of the sport, and our desire to see a winner, and to see some kind of accomplishment, to see, well, some kind of goal achieved. That is not to say the game cannot be beautiful. Indeed, that 0-0 tie had some spectacular plays, and the seconds of anticipation between the ball flying through the air to be redirected by some player's head into the back of the net or snatched out of the air waaay above the rim by a talented keeper is truly wonderful.

One last comment for now, for this is a long post, and I have to start grilling cheeseburgers. (Czech word for grilling: grilování. Now you know.) I think that it's interesting that some Americans make a point of hating this game. I know I sometimes do, precisely because it's a bit fun to watch the incomprehension on my friends' faces ("Duuuude, how could hate this??!?!" [Oh, yeah, by the way, the word dude has been successfully exported. You're all welcome.{If I get to these brackets, have I overdone a parenthetical reference?}]). I know there are many people who find baseball as interesting as watching paint dry, for example, yet I rarely read articles during spring training with headlines like "Here we go again. Another season of spitting and scratching." Soccer is still a "foreign" sport, and that's just got to contribute to some people's dislike of it. But I think most people are getting used to soccer as one more thing on our million channels, no more or less boring than Search for the Amazon Headhunters on National Geographic or Unseen on Gorovision. And hey, it still gives us an excuse to talk about how much Slovenia sucks, what with their delicious food, their pleasant climate, their nice people, and their beautiful castles, and how much the USA rocks! So cheer on our guys, forget about Churchill and the Special Relationship for a couple hours, pour out your Bass and get a Sam Adams, and make fun of their teeth. And manage the fact that soccer might be boring, but grandstanding about hating it makes you seem a little obnoxious.

Don't Forget to Vote....

for the prettiest Deputy in the Czech Parliament! You have until the 20th!

http://ona.idnes.cz/ankety.asp?id=A20100607_jup_365

Gobar Gas

Michael Yon is a former Special Forces ass-kicker who was embedded in Iraq and Afghanistan 1000 times or something. So he writes a lot about east Asia. But this article of his isn't (directly) about the war in Afghanistan -- it's about some really interesting (and relatively cheap) rural development techniques from Nepal.

This piece is about "Gobar Gas." It's not the most glamorous form of development aid, but it's extraordinarily practical and offers a lot of bang for the buck. (Of course, it's rare when the international aid flavor-of-the-month is the most cost-effective. Everybody wants expensive retrovirals, but no one wants to dig a well.) Essentially, it's methane-harvesting from poo. (I told you it wasn't all that glamorous.) For places with the proper environment and demand, the technique is a godsend. And as Yon notes, gobar gas is environmentally friendly, disproportionately benefits women and children, and bends the health care cost curve down! A Dutch organization is teaching villagers how to make a profit with it. About the only thing it doesn't do is revoke don't-ask-don't-tell. So it's got a little something for everyone.

And yeah, a comment about the relationship between harvesting poo and furthering the Left's policy agenda would be easy to make.

The votes are in!

As readers of this blog know (both of you!), I put together an extensive write-up the other day about last week's election in Czech Republic. Well, last night at midnight Central European Time, the polls at ona.idnes.cz ("Ona" means "She" in Czech -- it's a women's magazine supplement in the Mladá fronta Dnes newspaper) closed, and we can now affirmatively say that Jana Radová, a 28-year-old TOP 09 deputy from Prague, leads the top six for prettiest Deputy in the Chamber. The runoff among her, Květa Končická, Kateřina Klasnová, Lenka Andrýsová, Kristýna Kočí, and Ivana Weberová starts today, apparently.

Of course, it's anybody's guess if Kočí, Klasnová, and Andrýsová will split the vote -- they are all from the Public Affairs party, while Končická is from the Communist Party and Ivana Weberová is from the Civic Democrats. One advantage is that the three from Public Affairs have already been photographed for the party's sexy black and white calendar.

No word on whether Rahm Emmanuel has started working on a calendar with Janet Napolitano, Hillary Clinton, Elena Kagan, and Mary Landrieu.

"Sustainable"

This post from Jay Nordlinger over at National Review got me thinking today, even though the post was quite old. In it, Jay points out that there are a few buzzwords of the Left, and though these words sometimes change over time, the ideas under them (that's why we have the word "subtext," silly blogger!) generally stick around.

One of the more recent of these is "sustainable." We hear all sorts of calls for "sustainable" economies, "sustainable" agriculture, "sustainable" cars -- you get the idea: it's this formula:

CM + Pbp

where CM = cool stuff markets allocate
and Pbp = bien pensant lefty pieties

But why does the Left get to have all the fun with this word? Why can't we have.... wait for it....

Sustainable government?

Seriously. In the return-to-the-real-world usage of this word, "sustainable" means something that can viably go on for a long time. A sustainable car ought to be one that can keep running and running without you having to take in in for repairs, rather than one being made out of recycled tin cans and runs on one's  "own sense of self-satisfaction" like Ed Begley's go-kart. (Of course, I suppose that a car like that would keep running and running -- your correspondent will never run out of self-satisfaction!) Why don't we ask a simple question: why shouldn't we talk about the disastrous long-term effects of budget deficits and government debt? Why not a "sustainable" path for Social Security? Governments are the least "sustainable" undertakings we have in the western world, so it's a little bit rich to hear our wise masters telling us that we're the ones we've been waiting for who need to live a more "sustainable" lifestyle.

Physicians, heal thyselves.

A bad time to take a hiatus from blogging

OK, so your trusted correspondent has taken an unusually long break from blogging. (Trusted?) It could not possibly have come at a worse time. There have been quite a few particularly interesting developments, on everything from Yuval Levin's and David Brooks' head-of-the-nail hitting analyses on the omnipotence and omniscience (or lack thereof) of the state, to a boat carrying "humanitarian aid" to Hamas errr... the Gaza Strip (the Denver Post's David Harsanyi has a great column on "proportionality"), to your correspondent's recent experience at Sklípeček Republic. (It involved wine.)

In case you hadn't heard, there was an election here in Czech Republic last weekend. The Czech Social Democrats (ČSSD) won, with 22% of the vote and 56 out of 200 seats in the Chamber of Deputies. Next were the more conservative parties of the Civic Democrats (ODS) and TOP 09, with 20% (53 seats) and 17% (41 seats) respectively. The Communists (KSČM) finished a relieving fourth place, with 11% and 26 seats, and Public Affairs (VV), a somewhat populist anti-debt party run by a former investigative journalist of the Current-Affair-era-Bill-O'Reilly type, rounded out the group, with 11% and 24 seats. Two other parties, the Christian Democrats and the Greens, both failed to get 5% of the vote, and so had to leave the Chamber. All in all, 26 parties ran, but only five reached the 5% threshold to get into the Chamber of Deputies.

It appears that the Civic Democrats, TOP 09, and Public Affairs will form some kind of center-right government. The negotiations were apparently somewhat rocky, though it is also possible that assembling the coalition required a certain amount of public drama to reassure voters that the parties really *were* independent of each other. All three campaigned on the need to rein in public spending and reform the health care system, and so, with a total of 118 seats, this is the strongest government since 1996, As one analyst notes, one particularly surprising aspect of this is that two out of the three parties that will govern are new parties.

However, this observation needs to be tempered by the fact that TOP 09 was formed after internal struggles within the Green and Christian Democratic parties -- the TOP 09 chairman, Karel Schwarzenberg, served as Foreign Minister as a Green, and second-in-command (and the power behind the throne) Miroslav Kalousek, was previously Minister of Finance as a Christian Democrat (KDU-ČSL). His fiscal conservatism and sometimes shady dealings, however, eventually caused a rift in the KDU-ČSL, and Schwarzenberg and Kalousek both found themselves in similar positions of leading influential factions in highly divided parties. After the collapse of the ODS--KDU-ČSL--Green government last year, TOP 09 emerged.

Later on, the Public Affairs party emerged as a somewhat anti-incumbency, anti-debt, anti-corruption rightish party. Even after the election, they are still considered a bit of an unknown quantity (and quality), and seem to be the "weak link" in the coalition. The party's chairman, Radek John, has no governing experience, and the party did not necessarily have the most comprehensive platform.

However, the attitude among many people is that for the first time, the Communist Party will be truly marginalized. Previously, Social Democrats could tactically use the Communists to undermine the other parties, and under the leadership of the former chairman, Jiří Paroubek, the party strategically deployed populist arguments. After the election, Paroubek resigned, though the new chairman, Bohuslav Sobotka may not change this. But after this election, they don't have the total votes to bring down the government, as they did a year ago.

The new government will almost certainly attempt to implement some kind of austerity program, though how public opinion will react to this once people start feeling its effects will be interesting. All three parties campaigned on "not becoming Greece," so if financial squeezes emerge in other European nations (Spain, we're talking about you), or if the papers continue to illustrate the inconvenience paying for years and years of budget deficits, the coalition will probably be allowed to implement their debt-reduction plans. But it's always easier for a politician to spend than to cut.

Finally, a word about the collapse of the Greens and KDU-ČSL. It's very unlikely that the Greens will re-emerge as a viable party, due to the churning nature of Czech politics. (There have typically been five parties in the Chamber: ODS, KDU-ČSL, ČSSD, KSČM, and a "fifth" that acts as a kingmaker. It has changed many times.) KDU-ČSL may not recover from this loss either, though they continue to be strong at the regional level in Moravia (the eastern part of Czech Republic, capital city: Brno). It will be the first time in 91 years that they will not be in the Chamber -- they even had a few seats during the Communist period, but that's for a new blog post -- and it will be interesting to see how they do in the next regional and local elections. They have some soul-searching of both the internal and external variety to do.

A video!

Click here for a handy three-minute explanation of the financial crisis in Europe.

Really Important Things

There are many things your correspondent is working on, and will hopefully have in the next 24 hours, but for tonight, this incredibly important topic needs to be addressed immediately.

The new Adidas World Cup ball is "unpredictable." Turns out, according to the ball's designer (how interesting is the human race in that we are constantly working on improving that most basic of toys, the ball? I mean, we're never satisfied, are we? We need ball designers!) the problem chiefly lies in the fact that players are training at altitude, and the thin air thus has effects that are unusual at sea level. For what it's worth, some of the cities are a bit high -- Johannesburg is at 5751 feet, and Rustenburg is at about 5000 feet, (among others) so maybe there will be some effect. Furthermore, my sources tell me that the ball -- the "roundest ball ever designed" for soccer -- will most likely affect both teams on the field equally.

Run at it and kick.