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The French economy is deteriorating, so much so, that the French themselves admit that the growth of 0.2% between July-September 2002 is worse than expected, according to Nicolas Claquin, economist at CCF bank.
“We can expect [the weakness] to continue at least until the start of 2003, confirming our forecast of gross domestic product growth of 1.4% next year. The government’s growth target (2.5%) for 2003 is too high.”
So far not a surprise deserving a mention on this blog – it is the ability of the French to manage an arrogant spin of their worsening economic situation that is astounding:
“The figure confirms that France is not immune from the slowdown affecting our European partners and the United States.”
Perhaps Mr Cavalier, a Credit Lyonnais eurozone economist, failed to notice that despite the other countries’ economic problems the French economy is doing still worse than Germany and Italy in the last quarter and far worse than the UK and the US.
Jul-Sep 2002
UK +0.8%
Germany +0.3%
Italy +0.3%
France +0.2%
US +1.3
But, of course, let’s blame it all on the Americans.
It’s healthy to have a small amount of paranoia, but these guys have more than their fair share. Regrettably they no longer produce material but that said there is still nine years worth of the funniest (and sickest) cartoons I have ever run across to while away a lunch hour.
I think the terror most people are concerned with is the IRS1.
– Malcolm Forbes, when asked if he was afraid of terrorism
1 = for non-US readers, IRS is the Infernal Internal Revenue Service, the United States’ theft enforcement arm
One of the things I like about America, is that Britain is far too stuffy, po-faced and politically-correct for this kind of thing. (Media player required)
[My thanks to Samizdata reader Boris Kuperschmidt for the link]
[Update: the link seems to have been withdrawn]
The excellent Reason magazine is starting a blog called Hit & Run, which will be up and running first thing Monday (US time). The new blog will be presided over by Reason’s new Web editor, Tim Cavanaugh, formerly of the much-lamented commentary site Suck.com.
I recommend a longish piece that Michael Jennings has just put up about the truly extraordinary Hollywood machinations which resulted in the three Lord of the Rings movies getting made, by an “insane bearded New Zealander”. I haven’t seen any of these movies, but I enthusiastically concur with this concluding observation:
… At least one insane bearded New Zealander is now insanely rich. And I think a world in which insane bearded New Zealanders can become insanely rich by making ludicrously over-ambitious movies is better than one where this is not the case. …
Quite so. The insane New Zealander is obviously quite a character, but even more extraordinary is the person who produced these movies, someone called Bob Shaye. It’s a real feet-in-the-gutter but eyes-on-the-stars story.
I took the liberty of looking at the Jennings site meter, to see if saying this here could be expected to make any difference to anything. Apparently, it might. I think Jennings deserves a lot more readers than he’s now getting.
Last week I watched a typical British Channel 4 documentary about the “hunt for the Washington snipers”, shown last Thursday evening. It told a reasonably convincing factual story, and you didn’t get the feeling of axes being ground. There were some routine clichés involved, but not, you felt, because the programme makers wanted to push them, merely because those clichés seemed, to them, the things to say.
The most obvious such cliché was the claim, emitted more than once, yet undermined by a lot of the facts being presented as well as reinforced by others, that “the media” were interrupting the investigation.
From where I sat, the media pretty much were the investigation. The police, in the person of the sublimely named Chief Moose, seemed merely to be a rather helpless, hopeless clearing house for clues, and a maker of appropriate public speeches after each successive murder. “This is terrible. If you know what happened, call us.” They did nothing that a bunch of geeks in an upstairs student lodging couldn’t have done, or so it seemed.
As the blogosphere has already explained, the clinching Clue (a vehicle description and a vehicle number plate) was only released to the general public by those Media, despite the best efforts of Moose and his men to stop this Clue getting around.
Now, aside from a bit of teasing about the wretched man’s name which I’m afraid I can’t resist (a name which only a very daring novelist of the Tom Wolfe variety would have presumed to make up if telling such a story – and damn me there’s another name!), I’m not here to sneer at Chief Moose. Moose was only operating within a model of police work that has been the dominant “narrative” of how you do these things since as far back as the days of J. Edgar Hoover. Faced with a complicated and important crime, such as a string of lurid murders of non-lowlife people, you centralise information. It’s like a military operation. You no more rely on “the public” or “the media” to win your battle for you without your paternal control and guidance than you would expect a similarly anarchic arrangement to scam Nazi Germany about where the Normandy landings were going to happen (i.e. scam them into thinking it wasn’t Normandy). That kind of thing has to be a big old hundreds-of-people-at-hundreds-of-desks job.
And in the dying days of the “old” media, there is still a rationale to this. The point is, the old media are pretty much like a big old government bureaucracy, except not as sensible. In many ways the old media combine the bad features of a government bureaucracy (ignoring vital clues, obsessing about irrelevant clues, institutionalising the silly prejudices of a few powerful people) with the bad features of a mob (all following the most vigorously mobile mob-member however silly, trampling in a herd over the top of vital clues, jumping to silly conclusions).
A key moment in the Washington snipers story concerned the immediate fate of that vital Clue. Moose’s worry – and it was a perfectly genuine one – was that The Media would shove The Clue up on nationwide TV, and the Bad Guys would see The Clue before anyone else who had also seen The Clue had got around to spotting the Bad Guys in the vehicle referred to by The Clue, and the Bad Guys would dump the vehicle and carry on murdering from a different vehicle. Bye bye The Clue. Four more non-lowlife bodies. More Moose nightmares.
But now enter the blogosphere. → Continue reading: Chief Moose versus the Wolves – on not letting the Bad Guys see The Clue coming at them until it’s too late
A police officer was shot and seriously wounded after stopping a motorist in North London.
In the West Midlands, two men have been fatally shot in separate incidents.
Just what is wrong with these people? Don’t they know that guns are supposed to be banned in Britain?
The evidence is slowly mounting up and it’s pointing in one direction. The finger of suspicion is all but ready to twitch into the rigid instrument of damnable accusation. When even the most ardent and passionate supporters are starting to sniff the foul wind of failure, then you just know that the European Union is heading for the rocks.
Two articles today in the Wanker, the first by a Czech journalist Jana Ciglerova:
“We may still see the economic opportunities that we are told that Europe could bring to us. But we also now sense a fear of the unknown and even that, after barely a decade of freedom, we could be swapping one tyranny for another.”
The fruits of the lumbering Euro-cracy that has left the former Eastern Bloc countries on the periphery kicking their heels for far too long, thus giving them ample time to read through all the small print. For Brussels, the clock is ticking close to midnight now.
Also this rather more arid, technocratic item from somebody called Kirsty Hughes who is described as a writer and consultant on European Affairs’ so it is safe to assume that she knows a little of what she speaks. Evidently a passionate Europhile, even she cannot hide the cracks that are starting to appear in her head:
“The enlargement to be launched at Copenhagen is a historic achievement. But it is only the first step in meeting the European and global political challenges that the new Europe must address. If it fails, then this moment will be seen as a turning point that marked the start of the EU’s decline and not its new beginning.”
How different it all was even a year ago when everyone who was anyone was busy trumpeting the EU as the bright, shiny, exciting project for a better tomorrow with a future written in the stars and those who proffered even the mildest of criticisms were pilloried as xenophobic, reactionary losers.
Well, now the smug grins of satisfaction are on the other faces and the Wankers of the world are united in their creeping realisation that they bought a pup. It’s very nearly pitiful. Like fairy-tale children, the Europhiles are wandering in the deep, dark Graveyard of Grand Schemes, enveloped in the thick miasma of impending doom. Unable to deny its power to grip them or find a way out, they all hold hands and sully forth into the unknown, calling out plaintively for someone to come and rescue them and lead them home.
I almost feel sorry for them. Almost.
Admissions are mostly made by those who do not know their importance.
– Mr Justice Darling, Scintillae Juris, 1889
Back in March of this year I did a posting here saying that Japan will be back, and ever since then I have been keeping a particular eye out for Japan news in whatever media stuff came my way. The most startling thing I has spotted so far was an article in the November issue of Prospect, by Eamonn Fingleton, called “Japan’s fake funk”, which says that Japan never went away, and the only surprise will be when the West realises it. This article was subsequently made available here at Financial Review. (My thanks to John Ray for supplying the link to this.) Whatever you think of this piece, it certainly makes fascinating reading. Here’s how it starts:
FOR A DECADE now, the western consensus has been that Japan is an economic basket case. But this is a dramatic misreading of a perennially secretive society. Indeed, it may come to be seen as one of the most significant misreadings in economic history.
Fingleton goes on to argue that Japan’s alleged economic woes are just that – alleged – and that actually Japan is doing very well thank you. It is racing ahead in numerous vital technologies, its standard of living is not at all in decline, and its financial woes are greatly exaggerated. Economically, says Fingleton, Japan has now overtaken the USA.
Why then do the Japanese still send out SOS messages? Because, says Fingleton, it suits them to. Being regarded as a basket case means that they get an easy ride diplomatically from the USA, while they cosy up to the Chinese, who are in Fingleton’s opinion about to emerge any decade now as the world’s dominant economy.
Fingleton is the author of In Praise of Hard Industries, published in 1999, which denounced the internet stock fad for being a fad, so he has something of a pedigree. But is he right?
Or is he just the latest in a long line of dirigiste-inclined self-deluders who regard only certain parts of the economy (in his case big and complicated machines) as being “real” (as opposed to “information” which he reckons is not so real), in the same way that people used to say that only agriculture was real and that manufacturing, and then “finance”, was economic frippery by comparison.
This emailer to Brunton et al. (“Trader”) dismisses Fingleton’s piece as “nonsense”, for all the usual financial reasons that we’ve become familiar with. Fingleton regards people like “Trader” as self-deluders.
Other commentators have made much of Japan’s alleged demographic woes, in the form of a rapidly aging population.
Well, who is right?
If the technological facts assembled by Fingleton are right – Japan racing ahead in “key technologies”, like supercomputers, machine tools, and so forth – then if Japan is in decline, it is in a very odd sort of decline, caused, it would seem, by them financing high technology for the rest of us at a loss, and thus becoming the world’s best informed paupers. Sort of technological monks, you might say.
I don’t know what the truth is about all this, but I would like to very much. Comments?
Brotherhood, solidarity, unity, love: they all mean these but not those, you but not them.
– Michael Frayn, Constructions, 1974
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