Noli Irritare Leones

As Obama delays a trip to Asia to make a final push for health care reform, House and Senate leaders report that they’re close to agreement on how to move on modifying the Senate bill, and the House Budget Committee plans to start marking up the reconciliation bill on Monday, it’s time for me to post a few links relevant to this push to finally pass health care reform.
Read the rest of this entry »

California has in common with Greece a dry-summer Mediterranean climate, a susceptibility to earthquakes, and a government that is facing a debt crisis – and not a whole lot else. We don’t share share any special cultural factors, and the specific causes of our poor debt ratings differ. Iceland, the first European casualty of the latest worldwide financial crisis, lacks both the Mediterranean climate and the susceptibility to earthquakes, and hit its financial crisis for reasons that differed from either California’s or Greece’s.

I mention this because, as I scan the European papers for reporting on Greece’s financial crisis, I see how recession and hard times bring out everyone’s prejudices. From the infamous article in Das Bild suggesting that Greece sell its islands and the Acropolis too, to the comments that readers post in the more responsible publications like the Guardian and the Frankfurter Algemeine Zeitung, here a reference to Greece as a “dishonorable Balkan country,” there a suggestion that Greeks are lazy, I can see people falling back on a certain North/South divide in Europe. Charlemagne, blogger at the Economist, describes the reaction well.

EMPATHY is always in short supply in recessions, even within the European Union where we are all supposed to understand each other instinctively. But really, the cross-border debate on Greece is depressingly simplistic. From German news magazines talking about “Swindlers in the Euro family” to senior Greek politicians talking about wartime reparations, it is easy to conclude that beneath a veneer of rationality, cartoonish stereotypes lurk just below the surface of all Euro-debates.

I know well enough, as a Greek-American and the daughter of a hardworking, non-swindling, successful Greek immigrant father, who worked his way up to become an IBM executive and a pioneer in transportation science, that Greeks are as capable of hard work as anyone. Many are the people in the Greek diaspora who, like my father, have worked hard and become successful.

I also know well enough, as a Californian, that one place can differ from another in its debt problems for reasons that have more to do with particulars of political history and systems than with generalities of who works harder than whom. There are cultural differences, sure, between California and the rest of the US, but not ones that have much to do with when people head to work in the morning or when they go home in the evening. And the problems our government has, and, frankly, has had for decades, in producing balanced state budgets, have more to do with particulars of our budgeting process than with work ethic. To take just one example, passing a budget, each year, requires a supermajority in our legislature, but passing restrictions on how our legislature can budget only takes a majority vote on an initiative that isn’t that hard to place on our ballot. So each year we get budgeting by ballot box, and find ourselves having to vote piecemeal on budget provisions, with one measure ensuring that taxes can’t easily be raised, and another ensuring that a particular program can’t easily be cut. Then a polarized legislature tries to agree on a budget that meets all these restrictions, by a two thirds majority.

Greece, likewise, has a particular history, that feeds its debt problems, one that, as Charlemagne points out, is more complicated than Greeks being “broke because they are giddy crickets who sing their summers away.”

Well here is the thing. Real, live Germans are not heartless ants, and the Greeks are not broke because they are giddy crickets who sing their summers away. Greece is a grown-up country with grown-up problems: rough, tough politics, and a lot of recent history, not all of it very nice. And it is precisely that recent history, and rough politics, that are at the core of Greece’s fiscal woes today. Take the painful question of the huge public sector, and all those civil servants with jobs for life, and unusually generous retirement packages. The existence of those jobs for life is not a cultural quirk, in which Greek officials simply like coffee and backgammon too much to do any work. It is the end result of a brutal, multi-decade power struggle between the left and the right: a struggle that got people killed within living memory.

He’s right. I’ve written before about Greece’s twentieth century history, but let me tell the story again, this time as the story of one family, mine. My Greek grandparents were born under Ottoman rule, one of them just before the turn of the twentieth century and one just after. My grandmother grew up in Thessaloniki, then a polyglot city, and she spoke fluently the several languages of the city: Greek, Turkish, and a kind of Judeo-Spanish that bears a similar relation to Spanish to the relationship Yiddish bears to German. When she was a girl, she witnessed the Balkan Wars, as her city became the prize of contention, first when Greece, Serbia, and Bulgaria took land from the Ottoman Empire, and then when they fought among themselves. She remembered, and told my father about, her father and uncles going out to fight the Bulgarians while singing “What have the Bulgarians to do in Macedonia.”

My grandfather became an officer in the Greek army. He fought first in the campaign where Greece occupied Turkey at the end of WWI, the last gasp of what was called the Megali Idea, the plan to unite all Greeks in one country. This dream had born fruit when Macedonia was won from the Ottoman Empire, but it collapsed when Greece sought to take parts of Asia Minor. It ended in what my aunt called “the Catastrophe,” a major population exchange in which Greeks fled Asia Minor (and Turks Greece), to become a huge refugee population.

When WWII began, my grandfather went out to fight again, and died, reconstructing a bridge so that Greece could chase the Italians out. It was an impressive victory for a small country fighting the Axis, but of course it was followed by Germany occupying Greece. My grandmother had to raise five children under German occupation. Toward the end of the war, the oldest son, my uncle George, left home at the age of sixteen to fight for a band of guerillas that became one side of the Greek Civil War. At one point, my grandmother had to talk the family out of trouble with a band of guerillas on the other side of the Greek Civil War. My uncle lost a hand in that war, which was, like all civil wars, one that saw brutality on both sides.

In this my family was an ordinary Greek family. Charlemagne is right; the struggle between left and right in Greece has been bitter, and has gotten people killed within living memory. As it happens, my family was on the anti-Communist side back in the 40s, but I know how people on the Communist side suffered as well, and I understand (and, if you look at Charlemagne’s article and follow a certain link of his, you’ll see that center-right Kathimerini also understands) why Papandreou’s father used public sector jobs to try to heal this bitter divide. It’s an origin to the current crisis darker and more tragic than people’s sunny stereotypes of happy, lazy, backgammon playing Greeks may account for.

Lawyers, Guns, and Money points to another cause of the debt crisis in Greek military spending. This, too, has a rational basis, in Greece’s thorny history with Turkey, and, while I hope that thawing relations between Greece and Turkey, and a new awareness of Greece’s financial predicament, may lead Greece to dial down on that military budget, I can’t say that Greece is uniquely irresponsible here.

Moving away from discussion of Greek culture and history, I want to briefly talk about one other area that has been discussed recently as a contributing factor in the Greek debt crisis, speculation on credit default swaps. Papandreou, in his tour of world capitals, has been urging that limits be place on speculation on the Greek financial crisis. If you can read German, here’s an article in Der Spiegel that describes these transactions, and the debate over how far they’ve contributed to the Greek debt crisis. If you can’t read German, there may be a version of the article in the English version of Der Spiegel, and in any case I have other links. Papandreou lays out his position in the New York Times.

… Greece must, and will, transform itself into a competitive and credible partner in the international community. I will not shrink from this challenge — and I do not believe the Greek people will either, because they understand that these reforms also bring vast opportunities.

Yet our crisis has exposed deep flaws in the international economic system, flaws that savage cuts to salaries will not cure. Despite the radical reforms my government has launched, opportunistic traders have forced interest rates on Greek bonds to record highs. Some of these speculators are making a fortune by betting on our nation’s misfortune. Many countries face similar deficits and similar perils.

The Greek case is not an outlier….

Contrast Megan McArdle, at the Atlantic, on Don’t Blame Credit Default Swaps for this Greek Tragedy.

… But there are almost never people with enough capital to mount a “bear raid” on a company, much less a country. If the majority of the market thinks the company or country is basically sound, a naked short seller may very temporarily depress the price–but it will quickly be bid back up again by bulls leaping on the aberration. If it keeps falling, that’s because there aren’t a lot of optimistic buyers in the market.

In other words, short selling, or credit default swaps, may hasten price discovery–we may find out that people are bearish on the stocks or bonds a little faster than we otherwise would. But the price would still fall, in the end, because stock buyers will offer lower prices, and bond buyers will demand a higher yield….

If you’re cynical, you could take Papandreou’s argument as reflecting his self-interest; after all, he’s in the difficult position of trying to convince his constituents that Greece is in precarious enough circumstances for a relatively poor country (in European terms) to accept arduous austerity measures, while simultaneously convincing the rest of Europe, and the market, that Greece remains sound enough to get good interest rates. However, Papandreou, as a socialist, already has a philosophical difference with McArdle on just this question: How well do markets deliver, left to themselves? How far can you trust them, and how far may their swings be the product of something other than good information? Credit default swaps may only speed price discovery for Greece’s interest rates, or they may also do something else, amplify market swings and put Greece in a worse position than it would already be in. And, too, even speeding price discovery is a problem for Greece, if you think that its history gives people sound reason for evaluating its debt poorly, but that current austerity measures, given time, may improve that standing (which appears to be Papandreou’s argument).

In fact, McArdle, later, while taking issue with Papandreou’s analysis, still gives him some credit.

… Unfortunately, I expect that Greek debt will be carrying a substantial risk premium for quite some time, reflecting the fact that the debt is, well, riskier than the debt of bigger and richer nations. The Greek economy remains quite dependent on tourism and agriculture, both of which are subject to rather sudden shocks. Its institutions are often quite weak, and corruption and tax evasion remain serious problems. Mr. Papandreou says that higher interest rates for some members of the euro-zone means that the countries paying the higher rates will be strongly disadvantaged. But given the economic and political realities, paying interest rates on par with Germany, or even Ireland, is not likely in the cards.

Thankfully, Mr. Papandreou stopped short of actually claiming that speculators were the main reason for his country’s debt problems; he emphasized that he just wants to make sure that speculation doesn’t undermine all his good work in getting the budget under control. But if he actually gets the budget under control, and keeps it there, he won’t have to worry about speculation, because people will start betting on Greece’s success.

I don’t normally blog about my work. My job is software quality assurance; I catch bugs so you don’t have to. On a good day, I may find a bug that sounds scary, but really you don’t have to worry about it, because I got it before release. More specifically, my job is automation of regression testing; I could, I suppose, turn techie blogger and talk about issues in software quality assurance, or how you decide what tests to automate, or what tools you can use for test automation, or how to develop a library of methods for use in your scripts. But I figure it’s easier not to let something slip that I shouldn’t if I don’t blog about my job.

Now, though, I’ve gotten an email from the people at my company who do handle marketing, telling me what our various social media feeds are. So I figure that they won’t mind if I pass it on. Here’s how my company describes itself on Linked In:

EQECAT, Inc. provides state-of-the-art products and services to the global property and casualty insurance, reinsurance and financial markets. EQECAT is the technical leader and innovator of catastrophe risk management models that quantify exposure to a range of natural and man-made catastrophic risks. Through its modeling software platform, WORLDCATenterprise™, EQECAT enables clients to quantify and manage the potential financial impact of natural hazards. WORLDCATenterprise™ includes 181 natural hazard software models for 95 countries spanning six continents. These models are based upon innovative applications of the latest science, engineering expertise, claims and exposure data and advanced mathematics. EQECAT was founded in 1994 and is headquartered in Oakland, California. For additional information, please visit www.eqecat.com. Follow us on Twitter!

And here are links to all of EQECAT’s social media stuff, for those who want to keep up with what my company is doing, or know what we have to say about the latest earthquake or hurricane:

Twitter – Follow us! http://twitter.com/EQECAT
LinkedIn – EQECAT on Linked In. http://www.linkedin.com/companies/461494
Facebook – Become a Fan!
http://www.facebook.com/pages/EQECAT-Catastrophe-Modeling/366648536400  ?ref=ts
YouTube – Subscribe to our Channel (conference videos coming soon) http://www.youtube.com/EQECAT
Flickr – View our photos at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/eqecat/ View our profile at: http://www.flickr.com/people/eqecat/

The Congo Siasa blog writes about the impending withdrawal of UN peacekeeper troops:

We had been expecting this, but it is nonetheless big news. None of this has anything to do with an improved security situation, obviously. While the CNDP have officially been integrated into the national army and the FDLR perhaps (a strong conditional, as we don’t know how many new recruits have come in) reduced to 70% of their former size, the situation in the East is still volatile. As long as there are political and economic elites in the Kivus (and Kigali) that think they need to maintain armed groups to protect their interests, and as long as the Congolese government does not implement meaningful security sector and customs reform, there will be rebel groups in the region. A drawdown itself is not a bad idea – MONUC has been politically marginalized and has proven unable to protect civilians in the East – but it should be replaced with a deeper engagement in strengthening Congolese institutions, especially the security sector. This is what has happened in most other post-conflict (pardon the expression) situations in Liberia, Sierra Leone, East Timor, Iraq and Afghanistan (to greater and lesser extent). In the Congo, however, nothing similar has emerged. We are still training one battalion here, another there. Piecemeal reform.

Another problem with MONUC drawdown is the loss of the civilian presence….

more

Chris Blattman on Is African poverty falling faster than we think?

Kenya Community Initiative Support on Water!

Acting President Goodluck Jonathan, in Nigeria, fired his national security advisor over the Jos crisis that led to the death of over 400 people on Sunday.

The East African gives reasons why Unlike Previous Efforts, the Deby-Bashir Deal is Promising (Note: Deby is the president of Chad, Bashir the president of Sudan; each had long accused the other of supporting rebels in his country.)

Fresh offensive against polio in Nigeria, one of the last countries where polio is still endemic.

British Queen offers 42 million free condoms to the president of South Africa.

ICANN, the body that governs the assignment of domain names and IP addresses worldwide, meets in Kenya.

Kenya: The iHub launched in Nairobi.

One of the things that’s often been mentioned, as making for difficulty in balancing the Greek budget, is Greece’s retirement age, which all articles agree is lower than in most of Europe. Oddly, the various articles I’ve read seem to disagree on just what Greece’s retirement age actually is, with some sources saying it’s as low as 58, while others say it’s 61, and the Greek government now plans to raise it to 63 by 2015. Either age would be lower than that of, for example, Germany, which raised its retirement age several years ago from 65 to 67. On the other hand, Greece is not alone in having a lower retirement age; the OECD blog reports that Turkey has a retirement age of 58. It also reports that labor force exit ages sometimes differ significantly from the retirement age, so that Austria, for example, has an average labor force exit age of 59, six years ahead of the official retirement age.

The puzzle, to me, is how Greece’s retirement age manages to be both 58 and 61. Searching the web for further clarification on Greece’s retirement age, I found a complaint by the KKE (Greek Communist Party) from April 10, 2008, about a plan to raise the retirement age in Greece.

The Greek government overturned long-standing retirement benefit provisions for working people in a vote last week that will have powerful ramifications for generations to come. The new “anti-social security” measures will hit working mothers especially hard, increase retirement age by two to five years, and reduce pensions by 10 percent to 40 percent for future retirees.

Greek trade union and community forces have been mobilizing for many months in an all-out effort to thwart the conservative ruling party, New Democracy, and the opposition social-democratic party, PASOK, from pushing through the legislation, which was mandated by the European Union. Both parties have been laying the groundwork to dismantle the country’s social security system for the past 20 years during their respective terms in office. Labor and progressive groups charge that the two parties are responsible for the state’s “robbing” of the pension fund and its predicted bankruptcy in the next 20 years.

The new legislation includes a packet of reforms that will essentially demolish the current system of retirement benefits. The new increases in retirement age will affect hundreds of thousands of workers. Until now, those who have completed 35 years of work had the right to full retirement at age 58. They will now have to reach 60 before becoming eligible for full pension. For women, the retirement age is increased from 57 to 60. In both cases, an additional six-month period is mandated for each working year after 2013. For those who work in hazardous occupations, the retirement age is extended from 55 to 57 for full retirement and from 53 to 55 for partial.

Working mothers with dependent children face the most dramatic cuts. Opportunities for earlier retirement with partial pension for mothers below the age of 50 with dependent children are being eliminated. Earlier retirement will now be possible only at the age of 55. For self-employed women the age of retirement is going up from 50 to 55. Special provisions for women with three or more children are being eliminated.

An Associated Press article written in February 2010 reports another retirement age increase.

Labor and Social Security Minister Andreas Loverdos announced a two-year increase in the average retirement age on Tuesday to bring it to 63 by 2015.

Various sources report that Greece has different retirement ages for different sorts of jobs, and until recently has had a lower retirement age for women than for men.

I’m still not entirely sure what is the cause of the retirement age being variously reported as 58 and 61. Are the people saying it’s 58 simply out of date, and the retirement age has already been increased and is about to be increased again? Are these the different retirement ages for different jobs? Is one the early retirement age and one the full retirement age? (For a US example, my own Social Security annual report tells me I can retire early for a lower amount of Social Security at 62, or wait for full retirement at 67 and get more, or get still more if I retire late at 70.) At any rate, whoever is right about what the retirement age is now, raising it does appear to be one of the things PASOK has proposed to balance the Greek budget.

Part of the issue with retirement age, not just in Greece but across the board, is that increasing life expectancy means a larger portion of life retired if you keep the retirement age constant. The Economist has a chart illustrating the problem.

Paul Krugman has a post on Debt Is a Political Issue, not specifically about Greece, but relevant to Greece’s dilemma. Krugman says that the point at which debt begins to be a problem is actually fuzzy.

… And even that, you could argue, is too pessimistic. To stabilize the debt/GDP ratio, all you need is to pay r-g, where r is the real interest rate and g the economy’s real growth rate; and right now r-g looks, ahem, negative.

And this benign view of debt isn’t just hypothetical: countries have, in reality, run up immense debt/GDP ratios without going insolvent: see the history of Britain, above.

So what’s the problem? Confidence. If bond investors start to lose confidence in a country’s eventual willingness to run even the small primary surpluses needed to service a large debt, they’ll demand higher rates, which requires much larger primary surpluses, and you can go into a death spiral.

So what determines confidence? The actual level of debt has some influence — but it’s not as if there’s a red line, where you cross 90 or 100 percent of GDP and kablooie; see the chart above. Instead, it has a lot to do with the perceived responsibility of the political elite….

In another post, Krugman points to Rebecca Wilder’s post about a potential problem with wage cuts in Europe.

Latvia’s model: drop wages to increase export income. Greece: drop wages to increase export income. France, Germany, Spain, Portugal, etc., etc. It’s impossible that the whole of the Eurozone will drop wages to increase export income. It’s especially bad for countries like Latvia or Hungary, where the lion’s-share of trade occurs withing the boundaries of Europe.

An article several days ago in the Frankfurter Allgemeine discusses Angela Merkel’s dilemma, and argues that, caught between a hard to imagine prospect of Greek failure, and an also troubling prospect of helping Greece and then seeing Greece fail to do its part, she has taken the correct course in watching and waiting, a course that is already paying dividends. The article also discusses exactly what a reportedly legally prohibited “bail out” would consist of, and whether there is a back door way that Germany could help Greece while still abiding by Articles 122 through 125.

Kathimerini reports today that Sarkozy has said that Greece will receive support (support which, according to Papandreou, would involve not giving money to Greece but making sure Greece can borrow on acceptable terms).

The French president did not give any more details but underlined that it is vital the EU prevent speculators from pushing up the cost of borrowing for Greece. “This problem could hit lots of countries if we do not come up with a collective response,” he said. “Concrete, precise measures exist [to combat speculators], which we will not be communicating tonight but which, at the given moment, will show that Greece is not just being supported politically but also in all aspects of any requests that may be made.”

Kathimerini also says that the new austerity measures are unpopular.

Few of the measures announced by the government last week in a bid to raise an extra 4.8 billion euros to plug a hole in public finances have wide public support, an opinion poll conducted for Sunday’s Kathimerini suggests.

The Public Issue poll indicates that only two of the key fiscal steps have substantial backing. Eight in 10 of those questioned said that they are in favor of the new tax on luxury goods, such as cars that cost more than 30,000 euros or yachts. This measure is one of the less significant ones introduced by the government, as it aims to raise just 100 million euros.

The other step that appears to be popular with the public is the increase in tax on cigarettes and alcohol, which is supported by 65 percent of the 530 respondents.

Half of those polled are in favor of a further cut in public servants’ pay but only 23 percent support slashing the two extra monthly wages that bureaucrats receive annually.

Also, 68 percent of those questioned are against the rise in value-added tax, 74 percent oppose a freeze on pensions and 78 percent disagree with the hike in fuel tax.

(See the full article for more on European Union response to the Greek debt crisis.)

On Twitter this morning, @ingrgreece points to an article reporting the Papandreou, while visiting the Brooking Institute, urged the G20 to take action to curb speculation, warning that a failure in Greece could have a domino effect. As he has in other countries for the past several days, Papandreou reiterated that Greece isn’t asking for aid, but rather favorable credit terms.

I haven’t gone through this page yet, but here’s another source of information on the Greek debt crisis: the Prime Minister’s page in Greek and English. Having visited Germany and France, today Papandreou is in Washington, DC.

Via Susie Bright’s Facebook feed, figleaf, and Hugo Schwyzer (the latter’s your best link to follow if you need to be worksafe), I found out about Heather Corinna’s survey on attitudes toward casual sex. Heather Corinna is the founder of Scarleteen. Hugo writes about her survey:

… The only requirements for participating in this study are being over the age of 16, and having had some kind of sexual partnership before, even if none has been casual. The study will take around twenty minutes.

She would like the study to show as diverse an array of people as possible, especially since so often media representations or cultural conversations about casual sex are usually only about heterosexual white women or about gay men. She particularly wants to be sure LGBT people, people of color, those over 45 and social conservatives are adequately represented, so please share this link with your networks after you take the survey yourself, especially if your networks include people in any or all of those groups. I know I have a number of readers who fall into those groups, and urge them to take part.

I took the survey with a little trepidation, since I was afraid the questions might not allow enough options for me to fit my own views in. As chance would have it, Eve Tushnet, in a post on a different topic (and coming from a totally different perspective from Heather Corinna) said something recently that hits on my uneasiness about questions about other people’s choices about casual sex.

2. Avoid monocausal explanations. There are a lot of reasons people drink milk in the morning! Surely there are even more reasons someone might be promiscuous, or unhappy, or defensive. And yet Selmys frequently falls back on rhetorical forms like, “Promiscuous sexuality is, at its heart, an attempt to access something like the Communion of the Saints–to be able to enter into the intimate life of a much larger range of humanity than you would ordinarily be able to access.”

This is intriguing and in a way quite charitable. It’s in line with Augustine’s stance that sins are virtues misapplied. But it’s also, I would wager, unrecognizable to most people who have actually been promiscuous. (Not speaking from experience, MOM.) If you only offer one explanation or reason for an action, you lose the chance for your words to resonate with people who did the action for entirely different reasons. This isn’t such a big deal if a) you’re just talking about your own experience, or giving other specific examples of actual people, or b) you don’t rely on monocausal explanation very often. Selmys went to that well way too often for me.

I’m, frankly, willing to make judgments about what sexual choices tend to be a better bet for happiness, but not so much about all the reasons people make the different choices they do.

It turned out, though, that most of Heather Corinna’s survey focused on questions about my own experiences of sex, casual or not, and my attitudes about that experience, and, when it did get to questions about people in general, I had enough options not to feel hemmed into saying anything I didn’t believe. Also useful was that she defined both “sex” and “casual sex” for the purposes of the survey.

Since I’m no economist, one of my few advantages in blogging this Greek debt crisis story is the fact that I can sort of read both German and Greek (more German than Greek, actually), and, hey, two countries whose reactions really matter here are Germany and Greece. So I decided I’m going to try to read at least a little news each day, for now at least, in both German and Greek. If nothing else, it keeps me in practice.

The big inflammatory story of the day, of course, is the article in the Bild quoting a couple of German MPs as suggesting that Greece could sell some of its islands to cover its debt. The article is oh so helpfully titled, “Sell your islands, you bankrupt Greeks, and the Acropolis, too!” The Bild caught a lot of international attention with that headline, which has been cited by, among others, the BBC and the Christian Science Monitor (as well as, in Greece, the Eleftherotypia). This morning, on Twitter, Greek photojournalist and activist @asteris urged others to

Chill the f*ck out with the “sell the islands & Acropolis” story; a yellow rag’s trying to sell, prolly by egging MPs on for raw meat quotes

Frankly, given the tabloid style of the Bild Zeitung, I think @asteris’ characterization is apt.

The reporting at Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung is much more sober. There is an interview with Greek Prime Minister Papandreou, titled “We will not be the Lehman Brothers of Europe,” in which Papandreou attributes Greece’s credit problems to its bureaucracy and corruption in the public sector, and promises to become one of the most transparent countries in Europe. He insists that Greece is not asking for a bailout, but simply credit on better terms, and rejects a suggestion by the interviewer that he, a socialist, is now pushed into the role of becoming Greece’s Margaret Thatcher. Another article suggests that Angela Merkel may face constitutional difficulties should she wish to come to Greece’s aid. A commentary says the Greek government is doing well so far in getting better loan terms, but has a lot of difficulties ahead.

Meanwhile, checking the Greek press, I find that unity between ND and PASOK over austerity measures hasn’t lasted long; although both parties agreed in principle before the announcement about the need for austerity measures, Samaras of PASOK is already criticizing the specific measures chosen as unfair and likely to deepen the recession. At the same time, he argues that PASOK took too long to announce additional austerity measures. Specifically, ND rejects the increases in the Value Added Tax and taxes on fuels, as well as the curtailment of 14th wage. Instead, it proposes bigger taxes on cigarettes, drinks, and luxuries, and bigger curtailments in the functional expenses of state.

I’m a little skeptical of this ND argument; it sounds to me like the kind of argument that often gets made here in the US, that we can balance our budget better if we can just get rid of government waste and stop funding things with earmarks. It would be nice if Greece could make its way out of its debt crisis by only increasing “sin taxes” and luxury taxes, and by finding government expenses to cut that aren’t doing much good anyway, but I suspect it’s not true, and that they’re just taking the easy route because, not being the party currently in power, they can criticize and not, for the moment, have to make their numbers actually add up right. On the other hand, PASOK is doing its own politicking by portraying ND policies as to blame for the Greek debt crisis, when it may have been longer in the making than ND alone can take the blame for.

Meanwhile, the leftist parties, SYRIZA and the Greek Communisty Party (KKE) are calling for strikes. One of @asteris’ Tweets had a link to an article and photos of Greek trade unions taking to the streets in protest over the cut in the 14th salary.

It does sound likely that the government’s austerity measures will get approved by Parliament, despite any criticism from the right or the left.

All for tonight, since there’s a limit to how fast I can read when I’m reading in languages other than English.

Item 1: One of my last memories of Brian is this. He was driving me to a picnic, and telling me about his job (at this point, I worked as a computer operator, and he did some kind of computer work for a Representative’s reelection campaign). Someone there, maybe it was the daughter of the guy running for reelection, wasn’t, Brian said, all that focused on the election campaign, because she was more interested in spending time with her baby boy. And, he said, who could blame her?

I remember a brief moment, seeing him talk about that baby boy, when I wanted to ask, would you want a baby, Brian? And did you ever think of having one with me? But I was unsure, to begin with, if we were back together as maybe starting to see each other again, or more as post break up friends, and, second, hey, 23 and 24 seemed awfully young to talk about babies, so why even ask? Never did find out where we were headed, since he was killed in an accident soon after.

Item 2: Checking into my Twitter feed tonight, I see one of the people I follow, probably a guy, tweeting:

It is impossible to not be blown away at Seal’s ability to put babies in Heidi Klum.

There’s a sense in which that unplanned pregnancy study’s finding about men being more often “pleased” by the prospect of an unplanned pregnancy is counterintuitive, or at least counterstereotypical – aren’t women supposed to be the ones who are dying to have babies ASAP, and men the Peter Pans who never want to be tied down? Aren’t all those high school programs where you carry an egg around, or a doll that cries at inconvenient times, aimed at teen girls, because of course teen boys would never romanticize babies? But there’s another sense in which it’s really not so counterintuitive.

First, that so many people to begin with (20% of young women and 43% of young men) think they might be a little or very “pleased” by a badly timed baby? Not all that surprising. Babies are cute, babies are appealing, and the thought of having one with someone you care about can be very appealing, even if you know you have to wait. Certainly I’ve had those fantasies about three guys I went with, before Joel, though for most of that time I was still in college. Not to the point where I’d actually have been pleased by an unplanned pregnancy; the fantasy was about after I graduated, not trying to make it through college pregnant. But enough that I can sympathize with the feeling, even as I hope that my nephews and nieces may please wait for such things till they have the appropriate degrees and jobs and relationships.

Second, that more men than women would be “pleased”? Not hard at all to understand; after all, who has the most vivid picture of the downside of getting pregnant too soon? If anything, the only difficulty in interpreting that finding is which of the many differences between the men’s and the women’s position is driving the difference. Is it the prospect of the physical trials of pregnancy? The women being less confident that a baby, if kept, would be raised by both parents? Pride in male prowess (like that admiringly referenced in that tweet about Seal), the flattering thought that someone would be willing to have your baby (I assume the “pleased” boy friends are imagining a girl friend who wants to keep the baby, and not one who’s dying to get an abortion, since abortion seems at best likely to occasion relief rather than active pleasure), desire for family, a feeling that “pleased” sounds more supportive than “upset”? Maybe some of all of those?

What is hard is imagining “pleased,” even “a little pleased” as an actual reaction to my getting pregnant, by any of my actual college boy friends. Who knows? Maybe, secretly, one or another of them would have been pleased. Maybe, secretly, most of them would have been. Or maybe the kind of guy who’s pleased by a too early pregnancy isn’t the kind of guy who winds up at Stanford, and none of them would have been the least bit pleased.

I picture first one, then another, as having this pleased reaction. How would I feel, knowing he actually liked the idea of my having his baby – right then, when I wasn’t at all established, without a really good way to support the baby in sight? Well, not angry, certainly. After all, didn’t I myself, at the time of that one late period, have, along with all the thoughts about how awful it would be if I got pregnant then, have at least a few about how nice it might be to have a child with that person, but later, thank you, at a time when we both had degrees and jobs and a solid commitment? And that feeling doesn’t make me some kind of woman eager to snare a man with a child; he and I never took any risk we didn’t choose together. So, not angry. Rather, my feelings are various. I picture one guy being pleased, and imagine myself, more than anything, surprised, neither happy or unhappy if he were pleased, just, well, it would be weird. I picture another, and I’d be, maybe, relieved, because at any rate it would make the daydreams I had about him seem less weird and over eager. I picture a third, and, oh, who cares whether he’d be pleased or not? It wouldn’t make a difference; he still wouldn’t have been there for me by the time the baby was actually born. Being “pleased,” to my mind, is neither good nor bad in itself; what matters is whether the guy would actually be able to be, and stay, supportive.

The UN has begun talks about withdrawing its peacekeeping mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the biggest peacekeeping mission in the world.

… The BBC’s Thomas Fessy in Kinshasa says no details have been given on a timeline for withdrawal, but the Congolese authorities have asked for it to be carried out in one year.

Our correspondent says it is quite clear that President Joseph Kabila does not want to have a UN force in his country when a presidential election is held in late 2011….

Meanwhile, a top UN peacekeeping official is now in Chad to discuss the MINURCAT mission there. President Deby has requested that MINURCAT’s mandate not be extended.

Incidentally, here is the UN peacekeeping web site.

On an entirely different note, there’s a new African network aimed at boosting fisheries research. And the Ushahidi crisis mapping software developed in Kenya is being used in Chile, post-earthquake.

After a lengthy Cabinet meeting today, the Greek government announced 4.8 billion Euros of new austerity measures; this new combination of spending cuts (particularly to public sector pay) and tax increases had been demanded by the EU before they would consider any kind of bailout to rescue the country from its debt crisis.

Speculation had been rife, before the measures were announced, about whether they would touch the so-called 14th salary, one of two bonus checks given to public sector employees at holiday time. The answer is yes, but somewhat less severely than had been anticipated.

… The new measures include an increase of two percentage points in the value-added sales tax, which is now 19 percent; a further increase in the fuel tax; increases of 20 percent in alcohol taxes and 6 percent on cigarette taxes; a new tax on luxury goods and a 12 percent cut in add-ons to civil servant wages, Mr. Petalotis said.

They also include a 30 percent reduction in the bonuses given to civil servants as holiday pay, which amount to two additional monthly wages, he said.

…

The proposed reduction in holiday pay was less extreme than the 50 percent cut that had been widely anticipated. But the powerful civil servants’ union was unimpressed, and stood by its call for a 24-hour strike on March 16.

“These measures are tragic. The government seems to have forgotten that Greeks have one of the lowest average wages in the European Union,” Despina Spanou, a spokesperson for the union, told state television channel Net. “The Greek worker cannot handle these extra cuts.” …

Some Greek news reports:

An article reporting on the announcement of the new austerity measures.

One reporting that opposition leader Mitsotakis (of the Nea Demokratia party) agrees with Prime Minister Papandreou (of PASOK) that further austerity measures are needed (looks as if he made that statement before the details of the austerity measures were announced).

One on criticism of the new austerity measures within Papandreou’s own PASOK party.

One on Papandreou’s defense of his tough decisions.

Greece is a country with a lively tradition of protest, now facing austerity measures that may hit its economy hard and deepen the recession, so it should not be surprising that the new measures are being met by protests. On the other hand, opinion polls are showing some support in principle for austerity measures.

… Papandreou seems to face no serious political challenge in pushing through austerity steps; his socialist party has 160 seats in the 300-member parliament and the main conservative opposition has committed itself to austerity in principle. No general election is due until late 2013.

Despite a series of one-day strikes by unions, public opinion polls show strong support for austerity in principle if the pain is distributed equitably. A poll last month showed 76 percent of Greeks thought there should be no strike action until the crisis had passed.

But a crumbling of the austerity consensus and the launch of protracted industrial action cannot be ruled out late this year if the economy does not start recovering in the second half as the government has predicted….

How to Help in Chile.

pilgrim classic: Saint or Sinner?

Are you good? Are you bad? A host of consequences hangs on the answer. Yet, a brief experiment can easily convince you that the question, so grave in appearance, has little foundation….

Army Ebbs, and Power Realigns in Turkey.

Greek Prime Minister Papandreou hasn’t yet unveiled the new austerity measures, but eKathimerini has some hints as to what they might be. In addition to speculation, controversial among unionists, that the government may eliminate the 14th paycheck each year for civil servants, eKathimerini reports that

The new raft of measures, expected to include a 2 percent increase to value-added tax, currently at 19 percent, a further increase in fuel tax and a new tax on luxury goods, is expected to be announced within days and certainly before Papandreou sets off for Berlin on Friday for talks with German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

WebMD on when not to exercise.

Get Rich Slowly on How Much Life Insurance Do You REALLY Need?

Joe’s Goals: a web site for tracking your goals.

From Commonweal’s blog: The reconciliation option explained, again and a post on Teresa of Avila.

Feminist blogger commentary on The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy’s survey How Misperceptions, Magical Thinking, and Ambivalence Put Young Adults at Risk for Unplanned Pregnancy has focused on one interesting result: Among couples who say that it is very important for them to prevent pregnancy right now, twice as many men as women report that they would be pleased if, in spite of their attempts, there was, in fact, an accidental pregnancy. This certainly wasn’t what I expected of any of my college boy friends (I’d have guessed their response as “very upset”), but it isn’t the only interesting finding in the survey, which shows a patchwork of contradictions: Somewhat more men than women believe strongly that pregnancies should be planned, but way more men than women would be pleased at an unplanned pregnancy. People who overwhelmingly want to avoid pregnancy are sometimes fatalistic about whether they’ll get pregnant, and a sizeable portion of people who say it’s very important for them not to get pregnant aren’t using birth control reliably. There are major overestimates of the risks of birth control. Etc. See the whole report for more.

As the Greek debt crisis threatens the eurozone, one of the reactions of US conservatives has been to use the Greek example as a talking point in US political disputes. Take, for example, Mark Steyn’s use of the Greek example to attempt to defeat Obama’s health care proposal.

While Barack Obama was making his latest pitch for a brand-new, even-more-unsustainable entitlement at the health-care “summit,” thousands of Greeks took to the streets to riot. An enterprising cable network might have shown the two scenes on a continuous split-screen — because they’re part of the same story. It’s just that Greece is a little further along in the plot: They’re at the point where the canoe is about to plunge over the falls. America is farther upstream and can still pull for shore, but has decided instead that what it needs to do is catch up with the Greek canoe. Chapter One (the introduction of unsustainable entitlements) leads eventually to Chapter Twenty (total societal collapse): The Greeks are at Chapter Seventeen or Eighteen.

There are a couple of problems with this argument. One is that Steyn’s implied argument that universal health care inevitably leads to long term structural deficits, and from there to economic disaster and riots, doesn’t seem to line up with the actual economic facts in Europe. Consider how the conflict within the European Union has played out. Will responsible Germany have to rescue feckless Greece? Some version of this question can be seen in article after article. If Germany rescues Greece, there’s a risk of moral hazard, as countries like Greece have no incentive to clean up their own houses. If Germany (and other more financially sound eurozone countries) fails to rescue Greece, then the eurozone unravels, as Greece’s default spreads uncertainty to other weaker eurozone countries, such as Italy, Spain, and Portugal.

Now, not being an economist, I’m not equipped to say just why Germany is so much better off, in terms of structural deficits, than Greece. But I know one factor that isn’t in play: a lack of a universal health care system. Germany, you see, has a universal health care system, the oldest one in Europe, one that has been present since the days of Bismarck.

In Germany, statutory health insurance, which covers 90 percent of the population, is financed by a payroll tax. The individual’s premium is not a per-capita levy, as it is in the United States. It is purely income-based. Ostensibly, about 45 percent of the premium is contributed by employers, although economists are persuaded that ultimately all of it comes out of the employee’s take-home pay (See this and this).

An employee’s non-working spouse is automatically covered by the employee’s premium.

Unemployment insurance pays the premiums for unemployed individuals, and pension funds share with the elderly in financing their premiums, which are set below actuarial costs for the elderly.

Finally, premiums for children are covered by government out of general revenues, on the theory that children are not the human analogue of pets whose health care should be their owners’ (parents’) fiscal responsibility. Instead, children are viewed as national treasures whose health care should be the entire nation’s fiscal responsibility.

The health insurance premiums paid by Germans are collected in a national, government-run central fund that effectively performs the risk-pooling function for the entire system. This fund redistributes the collected premiums to some 200 independent, nongovernmental, competing, nonprofit “sickness funds” among which Germans can choose.

This system isn’t exactly the same as either the House or Senate bills recently passed, or Obama’s attempt to bridge the differences between the two bills (for one thing, German insurers are obliged to be nonprofit). But it does have a few things in common with those proposals: It provides universal coverage, does so by applying taxes sufficient to pay for that coverage, and uses private insurance providers, rather than a single payer governmental system, to supply that coverage. And yet, Germany seems to be weathering the existence of this “even-more-unsustainable entitlement” with far less debt than Greece.

Again, I’m not an economist, so I confess to a limited understanding of exactly when entitlements are sustainable and when they aren’t. But I do know this: Deficits depend on two factors, the level of taxes, and the level of spending. Tax cuts without spending cuts are unsustainable. Spending increases without tax increases are unsustainable. Entitlement with sufficient taxes to cover them may be sustainable, likewise for tax cuts with sufficient spending cuts to cover them. I also know that the thing to be concerned about is long term, structural deficits. A policy of regular short term deficits may be sustainable, if you follow proper Keynesian discipline and run surpluses during the high points in the economic cycle, to cover deficits in the low points of the cycle. So, addressing jobs now and deficits later can be a viable policy during an economic downturn, provided you actually follow through later on addressing those deficits.

The other thing I would say is that Steyn’s argument about a “brand-new, even-more-unsustainable entitlement” implies that the current US health care system is more sustainable than the alternative proposed. That seems questionable to me. The current US health care system is hardly a utopia of government noninterference, and it is headed for trouble over the long haul, and health care costs continue to skyrocket and more and more people lose their employer-provided health insurance. The House and Senate bills were both scored by the Congressional Budget Office and found to be deficit reducing, once you take into consideration the tax increases and cost control provisions in the bills.

So what are the lessons that the US can take from the Greek debt crisis? I’m not sure, being, as I’ve said, limited in my economic knowledge. Certainly we can take away some warning about the dangers of not addressing your deficits, and about the dangers of dodgy statistics. It’s possible that there’s also a lesson here about not growing your public sector too large. Greece does have a large public sector, and Mark Steyn may have a point about some of the current entitlements built into the Greek system.

So you can’t borrow against the future because, in the most basic sense, you don’t have one. Greeks in the public sector retire at 58, which sounds great. But, when ten grandparents have four grandchildren, who pays for you to spend the last third of your adult life loafing around?

I think it’s fair to ask how low of a retirement age can be sustainable, and understandable if countries with higher retirement ages, like Germany, don’t want an EU rescue to amount to their paying money so Greeks can retire earlier than them. (Yes, I know, Germany also occupied Greece and basically looted it during WWII; my family suffered under that occupation, too, and it’s also understandable, given that circumstance, that Greek pride is now offended by German cartoons of Venus de Milo giving Greece the finger. But for the moment my concern is whether there are elements in the Greek model that don’t work over the long haul, and need fixing, whether an EU rescue attempt is forthcoming or no. And early retirement age is a plausible candidate.)

And it’s fair to take this low retirement age as a lesson in what the US does not want, as we consider how to keep Social Security and Medicare sustainable over the long haul. Our country will probably on more solid footing if more people retire at 67 than 62. But, as we in the US make our various choices between one mixture of public and private sector and another, I’m no prepared to conclude that what conservatives see as a “brand-new, even-more-unsustainable entitlement” is always less sustainable than what we have now. Especially when it comes to health care, where the current system is really not all that sustainable.

Now, turning from the US to Greece, I have been trying to chase down a few questions about just why Greece, in particular, is in such crisis now. One fact that’s frequently being cited these days, in articles about the Greek debt crisis, is a statement that, since its independence in the nineteenth century, Greece has been in default half the time. It took me a little while to Google through all the articles that were making this claim with no reference and finally find the source, but Google is my friend, and I finally found a relevant NPR article.

The prospect of Greece defaulting on its sovereign debt is a big deal these days. But in the long view, a default wouldn’t be remarkable. Greece has been in default on its debt for more than half the years since 1800, according to Kenneth Rogoff, a Harvard economist.

Other European countries, including Russia, Poland an Hungary, have also spent significant chunks of modern history in default.

A chart accompanies the article, showing how often various countries have been in default. (Interestingly, Portugal, one of the countries often mentioned as one to which the debt crisis could spread, actually has a quite low default rate historically, lower even than Germany’s.)

Just why Greece historically has such a high default rate, I am not sure (though it certainly doesn’t help that Greece’s twentieth century history seriously sucks, including as it does German occupation and subsequent civil war – some time I may want to port over to Alexandria a pre-Alexandria post that I wrote summarizing that history). But I did find a couple more net resources on the Greek economy. One is the Greek Economy Watch blog. It’s not a daily blog – the last post was two weeks ago – but on the other hand, it’s been following the Greek economy for years, and so has some background on the issue. An example post: Just What Is The Real Level Of Government Debt In Europe?

Second, the web site of the Bank of Greece has information about the Greek banking system.

Third, here’s the home page for Eurostat.

It was predicted that Papandreou might announce additional austerity measures as early as today, but it seems not, as eKathimerini is reporting that he’s preparing the ground for austerity measures to be announced within the next few days.

… The prime minister insisted that Greece is not expecting other countries to rush to its assistance with loans but that the government needs political support so that its lending costs begin to drop. “No other country will pay our debts,” he said. “It is a matter of honor and pride for our country to put our house in order.”

This was also the message coming from French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde, who said yesterday that Greece was guilty of a “failure to observe discipline” and must prove on its own that it is serious about fixing its public finances….

Newsy has a video that rounds up various sources on the Greek debt crisis:

EKathimerini reports that

A new raft of austerity measures are to be unveiled in the next few days, possibly as early as Sunday, sources said yesterday, as the government ponders how to make the announcement while minimizing any damage to its popularity.

Following inspections by officials from the European Commission, European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), it emerged that the government will need to save almost 5 billion euros more than previously thought in order to meet its target of cutting the public deficit by 4 percent of gross domestic product this year.

…

There is a possibility that the new measures will be announced on Sunday, a day before European Economic Affairs Commissioner Olli Rehn visits Athens.

Two accompanying editorials say that Greece has not a day to lose on reforms and that “The Greeks will have to pull themselves out of the mess on their own.”

The Wall Street Journal describes a possible bail out.

A plan to bail out Greece that could total as much as €30 billion is now being considered by German and French officials, according to a person familiar with the situation.

The plan would call for the sale of debt to French and German entities, likely state-owned banks, as well as the public markets, this person said….

The New York Times discusses how credit default swaps are making it harder for Greece to pay its debt.

Bets by some of the same banks that helped Greece shroud its mounting debts may actually now be pushing the nation closer to the brink of financial ruin.

Echoing the kind of trades that nearly toppled the American International Group, the increasingly popular insurance against the risk of a Greek default is making it harder for Athens to raise the money it needs to pay its bills, according to traders and money managers.

These contracts, known as credit-default swaps, effectively let banks and hedge funds wager on the financial equivalent of a four-alarm fire: a default by a company or, in the case of Greece, an entire country. If Greece reneges on its debts, traders who own these swaps stand to profit….

The Christian Science Monitor discusses the Greek debt crisis: What will happen to the eurozone?

… There are a lot of assets at stake because European economies have become so intertwined through the transactions of the euro economy that, as with the securitized mortgage crisis, no one really knows the full extent of risks that might emerge out of this black box if Greece defaults. Simply, integration has gone too far to allow the financial collapse of Greece or any other state in the eurozone….

Blogger James Jubak, at the Huffington Post, provides a calendar in The Greek Debt (and Euro) Crisis Will Drag On and On…

… This crisis will either blow over in the next two months or so or run until the end of 2010 and threaten to take down Greek and German banks (German banks look like the biggest holders of Greek government and bank debt) and the euro. It all depends on how the chronology plays out.

Deadline #1. End of March. Standard & Poor’s said three days ago (February 23) that it may lower the credit rating on Greece’s sovereign debt again at the end of March if political opposition prevents the government from delivering on its plans to reduce a budget deficit now running at 12.7% of GDP (gross domestic product.). A downgrade would raise the interest rates that Greece has to pay on its debt and make it harder to sell new bonds to repay those that mature in May….

Follow the link for a description of three more deadlines, and what happens if Greece misses all of them.

And here’s the Financial Times page for Greece.

My friend Karen Street and I have been discussing, in the wake of an earlier post of hers, the Friends’ Testimony on Integrity. Now she has a new post, discussing another side to the testimony: Which Sources Do We Trust, and Why?

Follow up to earlier comments of hers (including my own follow up) focused on what we say about other people behind their back. But there are other sides to integrity besides gossip/detraction. How much care do you take to be sure that what you say is true? How do you know that it is true? Spreading information that you haven’t checked, and that turns out not to be true, can cause harm even if that harm has nothing to do with protecting the reputations of individuals. Hurry to pass on that virus warning, and you may discover that the warning itself was the Trojan, and the instructions for freeing yourself from the virus are really instructions on how to delete parts of the Windows operating system (I am not making this up – I got one of these warnings, and escaped being harmed by it by checking the Symantec web site to find out whether the warning described a real threat). The WHO campaign to eradicate polio has been hindered by false rumors about the polio vaccine. It’s easy to think of misinformation that’s been carelessly spread by people on the other side from you, on issues you care about, but how do you make sure your own axes to grind don’t lead you to be similarly careless?

In that regard, I’d like to recommend Karen’s thoughtful analysis of how she chooses which sources she trusts, how she evaluates information for reliability, and her questions for others. (I’ve left my own comment at her site on some of the considerations I use).

Somatosphere has A Report on the FPR-UCLA conference on Cultural and Biological Contexts of Psychiatric Disorder.

Yiayia is the Greek word for grandmother. I never met my yiayia, though she lived till I was in my teens, and though I saw my American grandmother many times. The reason’s were two: we were many, and she was unable to travel. We were seven children (the two youngest brothers came only after I’d left for college, and are a separate family as far as travel to Greece is concerned), and that was way too many to fly to Greece, so when Dad went back to visit, he went alone. I can remember him coming back, with slides, and little things like hats with tassels and shoes with something like pompons, the pieces of the traditional Greek evzone uniform. When we were older, we each made our way to Greece, one by one, but by that time, my yiayia was dead.

I heard much about her, though, in stories. Grandmother was born right around the turn of the twentieth century, in Thessaloniki. At the time, Thessaloniki, and, in fact, the whole northern part of Greece (known as Macedonia) were under Turkish rule. My great-grandfather, the story goes, named my grandmother Eleftheria, or freedom, to express his hope for freedom and union with Greece. When my grandmother was a child, the Balkan Wars came, in which Serbia, Bulgaria, and Greece rested territory from the Ottoman Empire, and then fought between themselves as to the division of the territory; my grandmother saw her father and uncles go out to fight for the Greek side. Another story of her childhood is of the time when a member of the family was sick, and needed ice. She ran out, and tried to get ice from a vendor. He said he had none, but she saw otherwise, and said, “yes, you do,” grabbed the ice, and ran back. Other stories were of how she held the family together during the occupation during WWII, and the civil war that followed it. My grandfather died at the beginning of the war, fighting the Italians, and my grandmother had to raise five children, as a widow, alone, under wartime conditions. She was, I’m told, a bright and tough woman, one who spoke many languages and was quick witted when she needed to talk the family out of a tight spot.

She was also, I’m told, a woman who liked to dream of grand things, a royalist who named her sons after the Greek kings (conveniently for Greek tradition, the first two kings were also the names of the two grandfathers, and so should have been the names of the first two sons anyway), and who put off her children’s baptism until she could take all five of them to the shrine to the Virgin Mary on the island of Tinos, so that they could be baptized in the finest place she knew. She had her own idiosyncrasies, like celebrating name days once a month and not just once a year.

These are just a few of the stories Dad told about her.

I think of her because Stavros, of Greek Odyssey, who unlike me knew his yiayia in person, has a post about her.

Links that are unrelated other than having something to do with Greece:

Crooked Timber on What should Greece do? about its debt crisis. The problem is a sharper case of one that several countries have (including the US), of needing to solve deficits over the long run, while avoiding worsening a recession with a too sharp contraction now; John Quiggin suggests some solutions to fit Greece’s situation.

Another Crooked Timber blogger discusses the likelihood of an EU rescue effort.

I’ve been recording my dreams at waking recently. The advantage is that I remember a lot of them when I do this. The disadvantage is that most of them are still pretty skimpy. Eventually maybe I’ll remember one that makes for a good story idea. Dreams below the fold.
Read the rest of this entry »

Korle-Bu Neuroscience Foundation is building a neuroscience center in Ghana.

Mobile Libraries of the World.

Tractor tyres and bush buckets in Masailand.

Modified farm implements in Kenya.

Mobile Web East Africa: Day Two.

Gettin’ By: a charcoal maker in Liberia.

Ghana: African programmers developing games for iPhone.

Jelani Aliyu-Car Designer.

Nollywood Uncut.

Forgot to blog this one at the time I first got it (from a cousin): Sign a petition at Avaaz.org to cancel Haiti’s debt.

As Haitian families search for survivors and relief rolls in, Haiti is still staggering under $1 billion in old debts racked up by unscrupulous lenders and unelected governments of the past.

But in recent days, a worldwide outcry has grown to cancel Haiti’s debt — and while some key lenders are rumoured to be holding out, the IMF and some key governments have indicated that debt relief could be within reach.

More pressure is needed….

It looks like a worthy idea to me, and I’ve signed.

Darfur Rebels Agree to Truce With Sudan. Lets hope this one holds.

Al Jazeera reports: Dozens held in Turkish ‘coup plot’.

… The swoop follows reports of several alleged plots in the past year which have strained relations between the ruling AK Party and the military….

Turkey’s secular military has ousted four governments since 1960, proof to many that it has been the real power in the country since Mustafa Kemal Ataturk set up the republic from the ashes of the Ottoman Empire.

Under EU pressure, however, Erdogan has dramatically curtailed the military’s power and reinforced its place under civilian rule, while also bolstering democratic institutions.

On Sunday, the prime minister announced new plans to overhaul the judiciary and the Constitution, a legacy of the 1980 military coup.

Der Spiegel reports that Greece cannot hope for a 20 to 25 billion Euro aid package (later in the article, though, a commissioner is quoted as saying Greece can’t expect such aid because it hasn’t asked for it, so I’m still not sure this absolutely rules out Greece getting some sort of aid if Greece requests it after satisfying the EU that it’s taking adequate measures to address its deficit.

A cautionary tale in healthcare reform: an LA Times article arguing that New York’s example shows that just disallowing insurance companies from applying preexisting condition rules, without also making sure everyone has insurance whatever their state of health, leads to skyrocketing premiums. (This is an argument for something like the current legislation in Congress, since the mandate to buy health care insurance plus the subsidies to keep it affordable for low income people are supposed to address this issue, and allow the elimination of preexisting conditions to work.)

The President’s health care reform proposal (which I don’t think I’ll have time to read before work today, so I’m saving the link). Wonk Room compares Obama’s proposal with the Senate and House bills. And here’s Ezra Klein’s analysis.

Nuclear waste: the Swedish example.

WebMD slide show on exercise types that lower blood pressure.

I was planning to do another round up, today, of the latest news on the inter-related conflicts in Darfur and eastern Chad, but it turns out the big news this week is the coup in Niger, so instead I’ll make it a Chad and neighbors news round up. To refresh your memories, Chad is bordered by Libya to the north, Sudan to the east, the Central African Republic to the south, Cameroon and Nigeria to the southwest, and Niger to the west. Let’s take these countries in reverse order.

Niger has been embroiled in an ongoing political crisis for months, as now-deposed President, Mamadou Tandja took a series of increasingly autocratic moves, following a questionable referendum in August 2009 abolishing the term limits that would have required him to relinquish power. This week, that crisis came to a head, as Tandja was deposed by a military coup. This coup puts the African Union in a tricky position. They can be expected to condemn the coup, as they did earlier coups in Madagascar, Guinea, and Mauritania, but Niger was already under sanctions due to Tandja’s actions.

The coup placed the African Union in a dilemma. Two weeks ago, the AU summit broadened the definition of an “unconstitutional change of government” to include incumbent leaders using unconstitutional means to stay in power – such as suspending a democratic constitution to avoid presidential term limits.

When President Tandja did precisely that last year, Niger’s opposition parties called it a”coup”. The Economic Community of West African States (Ecowas) followed suit and imposed sanctions against Niger. The AU endorsed this stance in October 2009.

Having condemned President Tandja’s unconstitutional grip on power, did the AU have any choice but to condemn the “counter-coup”? This military overthrow is certainly a more textbook case of an unconstitutional change of government. They have to condemn it (and Jean Ping, who chairs the African Union Commission, did so today).

The BBC has an article about the coup which I liked for its reminders that, though news naturally focuses on political crises, several other African countries are more successfully governed.

… Political efforts to derail the increasing concentration of power in Mr Tandja’s hands had failed.

When parliament and the supreme court stood in his way he shut them down and organised the election of a more compliant national assembly in questionable polls that were not recognised by the Economic Community of West African States (Ecowas).

Mohamed Ibn Chambas, the outgoing president of the regional bloc, saw Mr Tandja as a threat to West African democracy and submitted evidence against Niger when the European Union was deciding whether to continue aid to Niamey.

Ethnic concerns

But it is too early to assume that Niger will now see the rapid restoration of a genuinely pluralist political system like those of Mali, Benin, Ghana or Senegal.

Although it was caught up in the wave of democratisation that swept across francophone Africa two decades ago, the country’s subsequent history has been more troubled than that of these reform success stories….

Meanwhile, in Nigeria, new Acting President Goodluck Jonathan has been elected chair of the Economic Community of Western African States. While Jonathan is now in place as Acting President, ending more than two months in which Nigeria had no acting president, political controversy continues over President Yar’Adua’s prolonged absence to receive medical treatment in Saudi Arabia. The Cabinet split along North and South lines over an attempt to invoke Section 144 of the Constitution to declare him incapacitated. A House bid to amend that section of the constitution to allow the National Assembly to remove a president on grounds of incapacitation failed this week.

Meanwhile, in Cameroon, African Synergy against AIDS and Suffering and the pharmaceutical company Sanofi Aventis joined the government of Cameroon in an effort to fight cancer. Other top stories include one about the mining potential in Cameroon, and one about an opposition party demanding action against corruption. Compared to other countries in this area, Cameroon seems to be faring pretty well.

The Central African Republic is one of those neighboring countries that has not been faring so well, caught like Chad in a conflict that may be related to the conflict in neighboring Darfur. However, with a national unity government that includes former rebels ruling since last year, the CAR is now preparing for elections on April 18th. This week, a UN human rights official, on a one-day visit to the country, spoke about the upcoming election.

… High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay, who is on a one-day visit to the nation, told reporters in the capital, Bangui, that the election scheduled for 18 April “presents a tremendous opportunity for the Central African Republic, both to show the world and the people of the Central African Republic that it can hold successful, free and fair elections, and to take a great leap forward towards securing a peaceful democratic future.”

The key to the “future well-being of this great country,” she pointed out, lies in bolstering the rule of law, strengthening the justice system and putting an end to violence and exploitation.

It is especially vital, the official told reporters, to root out continuing impunity for human rights violations, especially among law enforcement agents and the armed forces….

The US sent a special envoy to Chad and Sudan this week, to “advance recent efforts to improve bilateral relations between Chad and Sudan.” Next week, a top UN peacekeeping official is expected to visit Chad to discuss the Chadian government’s request that the military component of the UN peacekeeping force be withdrawn.

Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations Alain Le Roy’s trip was announced after Chadian Permanent Representative Ahmad Allam-mi told a news conference at UN Headquarters in New York today that that the military component of the UN Mission in the Central African Republic and Chad (MINURCAT) had served its purpose.

He said Chad was not calling for an immediate withdrawal of the military component, but an “interim solution” and wished to work out a compromise between total withdrawal and merely extending the mission’s mandate as it stood.

MINURCAT was set up in 2007 to ensure the security of hundreds of thousands of refugees from Darfur, other displaced persons and humanitarian workers. But with new agreements on border security with Sudan, and with MINURCAT not strong enough to provide complete security in eastern Chad, it was better for Chadian forces to take over and for the mandate to be adjusted before it expires and comes up for renewal in March, he said.

Human Rights Watch issued a press release urging that the mandate for UN peacekeepers in Chad be extended.

In southern Sudan, campaigning for the election in April is taking place in a volatile climate.

The elections are a key part of the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) that ended Sudan’s 22-year long civil war between north and south, in which an estimated two million people died.

But tensions remain high in the south, with several inter-ethnic clashes

The International Criminal Court dismissed charges against a Darfurian rebel leader for lack of evidence.

Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, having failed to win a second term as African Union chairman, is seeking a similar position in the League of Arab States. AllAfrica.com links several editorials published in other African countries critical of Gaddafi’s seeking a second term, a thing that would have been contrary to an AU custom of rotating the chairmanship; an example is this editorial in the Ghanaian Chronicle.

I’ll have an African ingenuity round up for you in a few days.