The Economist has a very good piece on the emergence of new attitudes in The Netherlands with regards to immigration and integration. At the end however I disovered this interesting paragraph:

To many Dutch observers, the country's famed tradition of tolerance is a reflection not so much of high ideals as of pragmatism. In cities such as Amsterdam or Rotterdam, which aspired to be international commercial centres long before globalisation, it made good business sense for Protestants, Catholics and Jews to co-exist and trade together, live and let-live.

Now where did I see that before? Peaktalk, quoted in the Economist.

Remember the death of Zahra Kazemi, the Canadian-Iranian photojournlaist who was beaten to death in Iran after being arrested for taking photos of a protest outside a prison? The trial was a farce, her body was never exhumed for an autopsy and Canadian authorities never pursued the case further or so it seemed. That changed today when Sharham Azam, a former doctor with the Iranian Ministry of Defence who happened to be at the hospital where Zahra was taken, detailed the injuries she suffered at a press conference in Ottawa.

From the outset it was abundantly clear she didn't die of bruises to her head after her hungerstrike had caused her to fall as Iranian authorities claimed, a beating to the head at the hands of intelligence officers was more likely. The ordeal Dr. Azam described today however is far more gruesome:

He said he catalogued countless injuries on the woman, who arrived at the hospital unconscious. He said the broken bones, bruising and marks suggested she had been beaten, tortured and raped, with the wounds suggested the assaults had taken place over a period of time.

As a result of this it seems Canada's foreign minister has vowed to renew his efforts:

“This new evidence only strengthens our position and confirms that this was not an accident. It does not change our position. Quite the contrary. The family wants answers. Canadians want answers, and we will be pursuing this until justice is done.”

This is exactly the same position the government took shortly after Zahra's death and to date there have been no tangible results to validate that apporach, quite the contrary. The conservative opposition in Canada wasted no time to come up with some concrete action points:

Mr. Day urged Ottawa to pull Canada's ambassador to Iran, demand the return of Ms. Kazemi's body to her family and agree to a new trial, with an international presence involved in the proceedings.

Bringing the guilty to justice in cases like this is next to impossible as in reality it would mean bringing down the entire theocracy in Iran. The Canadian government faces an uphill struggle in seeking justice, but that doesn't mean it can't be done. Some drastic measures including the involvement of the international court of justice (think Lockerbie) could be a first step, but it requires will and spending political capital, both of which are in short supply in Canada's capital these days.

NOTE: Zahra Kazemi while holding a Canadian passport was also Iranian and the color of her skin may have something to do with the less than zealous approach by Canadian authorities, an argument often heard during the recent Air India trial and eloquently debunked by David Fum:

The outraged families of the victimes ask whether Ottawa would have shown equal carelessness had the victims been predominantly white rather than predominantly of subcontinental origin. On this one point, Canada's record since 9/11 should set the survivors' minds at ease: Yes, the Canadian government would have been just as careless.

Somehow I think that Frum's comment is equally applicable to the Kazemi case.

UPDATE: A reader comments:

Canada has a problem protecting it's citizens abroad because what lever would it use? It is fine to have a pacifist foreign policy; but it leaves you little option when you or your citizens are attacked. I doubt Iran will be anymore moved by Canada's pleading then it is by Europe's attempt to bribe it into compliance on the nuclear issues. So what is left the UN? Good luck. It is to late to protect Kazemi; it is not however to late to think about how valuable it is to be a free Canadian.

May she rest in peace.

There will be some more analysis here on this affair later this week with commentary from overseas. In the meantime, James Joyner has a good round-up of reactions.

That is how competing with low wages is qualified by Jacques Chirac who has unleashed a campaign against the free-market and competion:

The market has been given a new, menacing label - "ultraliberalism". The "European social model", a euphemism for sclerotic economies, job-destroying labour regulations and enterprise-stifling welfare provisions, must now take precedence over market reforms. Services provided cheaply by lower-regulated foreign workers are now described as "social dumping". Rather than embrace liberalisation, Mr Chirac and his allies believe the EU should act as a bulwark against it. To him, the threat to future European prosperity comes not from giants like India or China, but from its pygmy new member states in east Europe.

It's interesting to see how a centre-right leader is willing to adopt old-left rhetoric in order to pursue protectionist measures. Together with his German counterpart they have gone back to bullying the smaller European nations by constraining economic growth. Expect to see more of it in the months ahead and also expect a growing unease when the EU Constitution is going to be subject to a number of referenda.

One thing I have to give these people credit for is coming up with new terminology: "social dumping" is an absolute classic and by using "ultraliberalism" foes of the free-market have made it very clear where they stand. It's evident why Europe is not the ecocomic powerhouse that it potentially could be.

Thanks to Chrenkoff and Myrtus I was alerted to this piece in the New York Times which discusses the continuing issues soccer club Ajax Amsterdam has with its supporters who have branded themselves as Jews, in turn generating anti-Semitic rhetoric wherever the team goes. It’s an old issue and by way of background I suggest you check out my original piece on the topic that I wrote almost two years ago.

But the atmosphere in Holland has changed so much since then that people with a even a small measure of authority are now willing to take on excesses that for years had been tolerated, a term of which I remain deeply skeptical. Here’s why:

"We were probably too tolerant," said Uri Coronel, a Jew who was a member of Ajax's board in the 1990's, speaking about the management's past attitude.

Since then, the atmosphere at the games has become "unbearable," he said, adding that the fans' adoption of a Jewish identity is widely misunderstood as something positive. "A lot of Jews all over the world believe that Ajax fans are proud to call themselves Jews, but it's a kind of hooliganism," he said.

Coronel is a little disingenuous here. The club did not “tolerate” the Ajax fans carrying Israeli flags and chanting pro-Jewish slogans, but were in fact very reluctant to take on their core group of supporters. It was a pragmatic approach bordering on indifference: why alienate your most loyal fans?

But by taking on their own supporters and trying to stamp out a thirty-year old tradition the club is doing something it should have done ages ago when it would have been both easier and attracted a lot less (international) attention. And that's just one aspect of this issue as the club and the authorities are now entering the slippery slope of curbing free speech by specifically targeting certain expressions, however intolerable they may be. As the NYT article correctly notes a referee recently suspended a Dutch premier league soccer game when fans of one side suggested that the spouse of one of the other teams’ star players was a prostitute. If you can’t call someone’s wife a whore any longer, a quaint piece of Dutch humor, then you have to wonder what’s next on the list of things that you shouldn’t be saying or doing. And that’s not just a Dutch phenomenon, consider this bizarre tale from Britain.

In a desperate effort to create harmony European societies are now increasingly prepared to use the strong arm of the law to regulate free expression and monitor debate. Be prepared to see a lot more of it going forward.

Having lived through the unbearable nonsense of boycotting sport events, an extremely popular tool during the 1980s, I was pleased that with the collapse of communism and apartheid it had pretty much become an obsolete practice. It was never a useful tool anyway. But in this day and age you can always count on the French to resurrect and repurpose something vile and obsolete. This time their national goalkeeper stepped up to the plate by threatening to refuse to play with his national soccer squad in Israel, allegedly for disagreeing with Israel’s policies in the West Bank and Gaza. A reader pointed me to the comments made by The New Vintage who in turn found it over at Israellycool.

As unwise as such actions may be, the player then went on to make a complete fool of himself by apparently retracting his threat and he will now appear with his team in today’s world cup qualifier. It’s not hard to picture the reactions of the Israeli crowd every time he will touch the ball tonight, an Israeli goal will bring the house down I am sure. The problem with a thing like this is that it always gets out of hand and it can have some dire consequences. Officially outing South Africa (including a UN sanctioned sports boycott) was one thing, but it gave some of the most unsavory characters from the radical left a license to do whatever they liked in the name of ending apartheid. I remember liquor stores being trashed in Holland for having the temerity to carry the odd Cape vintage with police often standing by idly. French goalie Barthez may be an idiot, he is damn popular in France and other parts of Europe and you can bet that many will take his actions as a validation of a certain position that eventually warrants slashing some windows. That has happened before, in Europe.

NOTE: Of all people, the French should know better then to stir up emotions around a soccer match:

The threat to disrupt the national anthem brought back bad memories of a soccer game in the winter of 2001 at the beautiful Parc des Princes stadium in Paris. Pundits believed that game, the first time a French team went up against an Algerian team, played an important role in triggering Islamic extremism in France. Millions of French television viewers could not believe their eyes when their fellow citizens of the Muslim faith began booing when their adopted country's anthem was played. The booing returned when the French scored a goal.

Guess who was defending France's goal during that particular match? Yep, Barthez.

UPDATE: It's a draw, 1-1.

Time for some business. At Actenum, one of the technology firms I am involved with we have been working on a few additions to our website and I want to link to it. Operations Intelligence is the field we're in and the solutions we provide are a result of combining techniques from two separate fields, Operations Research and Artificial Intelligence. If that's too theoretical a take, look at its practical applications that help improve resource management and reduce operational disruption.

To give you some background I can summarize the opportunity the company provides in simple terms. Planning and scheduling is a critical part of management activity, but existing technologies used for this purpose are proactive, rather than reactive. They are used to create tomorrow’s or next week’s schedules. Unplanned events occur on the ‘day of operations’ (a snowstorm, people don't show up for work, some equipment is not delivered on time) and schedule disruption will become a major issue. When things like this happen, even the most carefully-prepared schedules will drift from their intended course and often become useless. Real scheduling problems are dynamic and must be resolved as the environment and/or requirements change. Actenum's technology provides immediate benefits in situations where the best utilization of resources, people, time, processes, vehicles, equipment and materials are essential for running a profitable business. Simply put: one of our trucks has broken down, can you run me a new schedule for the entire fleet, now?

NOTE: Virginia Postrel has written about the field of operations reseearch (or O.R. as it is better known) in a good article for the Boston Globe here.

It’s odd to note how some media portray Bush’s impending visit to Europe and in particular the stopover in The Netherlands:

The meeting comes amid reports that the US will soon request the Netherlands to intensify involvement in future military conflicts and anti-terrorist operations.

As if the American president would step on a plane to beg a small country to participate in US overseas military efforts. These visits are usually multi-purpose efforts and future military co-operation may only be a part of the agenda. Very often, presidential calls on small countries are a reward for past assistance or designed to underline the strong bond between the US and that particular country, the recent visit to Slovakia was a case in point. The Dutch by the way have always been good friends of America; even centre-left coalition governments in the past were very reluctant to pander to domestic anti-American rhetoric and maintained a healthy relationship with Washington.

In addition to celebrate past co-operation (Iraq, US assistance in getting a Dutchman to head up NATO) and future joint efforts there will be a focus on the 60th anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany. That will provide a perfect setting for Bush to propagate his message of freedom and democracy and offer him yet another venue to influence European public opinion. That’s the part of the visit I will be looking forward to: see if and how Europe’s attitudes to Bush and his agenda are changing. Expect a lot of interesting and translated stuff on this site during the first two weeks of May.

It is almost an obligatory routine for right-of-center bloggers to link to Mark Steyn and exclaim for the umpteenth time what an excellent piece he has written. Today is no different and to be frank, I am no different either. But let me quickly reflect on why Steyn is able to stand out from the crowd of conservative pundits, apart from the fact that he’s right most of the time. In today’s succinct commentary on the Schiavo case for the Chicago Sun-Times he is able to address:

1. The underlying legal flaws in the case;
2. The medical aspects
3. A few moral aspects;
4. Why it is not a religious-right issue only;
5. The questionable nature of Michael Schiavo’s actions;
6. Congressional overreaching and states' rights.

And for good measure he takes a swipe at Canadian statists and comes up with a revealing anecdote about Christopher Reeve. He crams all of that into 1,124 words and on top of that throws in some unique humor (the Hollywood VP reference is just hilarious) something no one in this case was able or daring enough to do. So here we go again: read the whole thing. And this time I mean it.

Chicago-based radio-host, professor and author Milt Rosenberg has been added to the blogroll. He is of course not to be confused with Seattle-based writer and blogger Matt Rosenberg, although I happen to know that they're related.

Also, Publius Pundit, for their good work, but also for accurately recognizing that Peaktalk does not fit into any geographical box.

Michael Malone asks: Does anybody read newspapers anymore?

To answer that question directly: I do, but not with the same zeal as I used to. While two newspapers land our doorstep every morning, one local and one national, by the time they are here most of what they offer is old news. The local newspaper has turned into a somewhat useful listing of activities in our community with targeted ads, the national paper is now competing head-on with the Economist and Time Magazine as a source of secondary news and analysis. Malone is right to point to the pressure newspapers now face to adapt to the fact that primary news is sourced online and that they will have to compete in that space. And there's a lot available there these days: the day for me usually starts with a mixture of newsgroups, blogs and online newspapers. The distinction between the three is blurring rapidly and if newspapers want to survive in that new environment then they will have to adapt in order to survive which, says Malone, will be tricky:

But that plan has its own costs. For example, even the best of these newspaper sites are still surprisingly retrograde. For all of their blogs, online journals and cheeky attitudes, they are still depressingly static. Why? No doubt it's a legacy issue: when you've been in the business of producing words and still pictures for decades, it's hard to cross over into the new reality of links and mpegs. Thus, while some of the best writing on the Web can be found in newspaper sites, it is not always the best (or at least the most rewarding) reading.

This is the last great divide, and my sense is that few newspapers will be able to make the crossing.

Some newspapers may just abandon making that crossing and transform into more analytical periodicals even though that market is quite crowded already. Others may disappear alltogether or just merge in order to survive.

It doesn't mean that the blogosphere is replacing the traditional media (or MSM), a claim which you can often read these days. The bloggers do however have a head-start in a vastly changed mediascape and are forcing MSM to rethink their strategies and compete. First-comers are by no means guaranteed winners and the old media happen to have very deep pockets to wage a competitive and long battle. It will be an interesting one and I intend to be part of it, in whatever shape of form.

One of the features of the Dutch exodus that got largely unnoticed is the fact that many farmers are leaving the small and overregulated place as well. The Chicago-Tribune has an interesting piece on the rising number of new Dutch farms in the Midwest:

At a time when many dairy farms in the U.S. are going out of business, a wave of Dutch farmers is selling property in the Netherlands and using the money to set up much larger dairy operations abroad. The exodus has been prompted, in part, by exorbitant land prices in the Netherlands and a strict quota on milk production, making expansion difficult if not impossible for many farmers.

It will add some competition for existing farmers in the US but equally interesting is the fact that what once was a thriving pillar of Dutch economic life is now set to disappear in its entirety. It won't be long before the Dutch will be drinking milk from Eastern Europe.

Following the summary of Schiavo-related media reactions around the world, Time Magazine has a useful round-up on how various European nations would deal with similar situations. It's interesting because European support for euthansia is not nearly as firm as some in America would have us believe. Yes, there's more legislation, but there are also voices like this:

The Schiavo case could not happen in Germany, according to Dr. Jörg-Dietrich Hoppe, president of the Federal Chamber of Doctors, because treatment would only be withdrawn when a patient has clearly expressed the wish to die. "We agree with the part of Schiavo's family that wants life-saving treatment to be continued because at the moment she is not terminally ill," Hoppe says. "If it could be proved that [Schiavo] had expressed a wish that treatment should be stopped, that would be a different matter."

Some Europeans argue that removing Schiavo's feeding tube is cruel. "Being starved and dehydrated is not a death with dignity," says Tara Flood, spokesperson for Britain's Disability Awareness in Action.

The debate continues.

It’s a good weekend to catch up on reading and watching some DVDs that have piled up over recent months. Yesterday we saw The Clearing, a 2004 movie with Helen Mirren and Robert Redford. It was worthwhile watching especially since we saw it through completely different eyes as probably any of the reviewers that I subsequently looked up online.

The reason is - and it’s not mentioned on the DVD or hardly in any of the reviews – that the story is based on a real life kidnapping that took place in Holland in 1987 where the cold-blooded kidnapper killed his victim on day one. He was subsequently able to not only convince the surviving family that his victim was still alive, but also extract a multi-million dollar ransom from them. About six months later he was caught after too easily forking out crisp (and marked) new guilder bills in a local super market, a fact also used in The Clearing. If you’re not familiar with the underlying story and more importantly its timeline, the film is unlikely to make as strong an impression on you as it should. You’re likely to be sidetracked by the focus on the relationship between the characters Redford and Mirren play in this movie which is a shame.

The gruesome real-life story by the way had a devastating outcome for those looking for justice. The killer – an unemployed but far from brainless engineer, played in the movie by the inimitable Willem Dafoe – got a sentence of twenty years combined with TBS, the latter meaning that the end of your incarceration is determined by psychiatric evaluations which in theory means that they can keep you locked up forever. In Holland, this is as severe as it gets in terms of sentencing, but if you’re on good behavior, take advantage of early parole conditions and are shrewd enough to manipulate the TBS process you can be out in 13 years. That’s exactly what happened in 2001 when the deranged unemployed engineer walked out of prison as a free man with a generous retroactive welfare pay-out. Justice, Dutch style. Bear it in mind if you watch this otherwise reasonably good film.

Muslim Gangsta Rap? Where else but in Holland, threatening the life of Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Rogier has more.

To give you some background on the near failure of German re-unification, a poll has revealed the following depressing statistic:

Nearly a quarter of western Germans and 12 percent of easterners want the Berlin Wall back -- more than 15 years after the fall of the barrier that split Germany during the Cold War, according to a new survey.

The results of the poll, published Saturday, reflected die-hard animosities over high reunification costs lowering western standards of living and economic turmoil in the east.

A lot of the respondents are no doubt guilty of some emotional overreacting here, but it does reveal the bitterness of what essentially has become a failed project, although Gerhard Schroeder doesn't seem to think so. What is telling is that Germans fail to act in the spririt of the man who called for the wall's destruction by looking to the past and not to the future.

UPDATE: OK, "near failure" is overstating it but when I wrote it I measured the current state of affairs in Germany against the high expectations of the late 80s and early 90s. At that time everyone believed that Central Europe was going to be the new economic miracle with Germany, and in particular Frankfurt as financial center, the engine of growth. No one said it was going to be easy, but I guess very few would have predicted in 1990 that Germany would be in the unenviable position it is in today.

Spring is here ...

And within a few weeks the snow from the mountains in the background will have disappeared. This by the way is the north-west view from our house with in the foreground one of my favorite windmill palms that I have successfully nursed since I planted it four years ago.

So how's the world reacting to the Schiavo affair?

In an interesting editorial, The Frankfurter Allgemeine from Germany makes an interesting point and looks at how the proponents of euthanasia will actually use Terri Schiavo’s suffering as something that can help support their case:

If polls already show that most Americans believe the removal of life support is the right thing, how many more people will support a fast death for the dying," it asks? Even if doctors resist the temptation to help speed up the process, the paper opines, proponents of euthanasia will complain about the agony of Terry Schiavo's death and use it to champion their cause. Lawmakers in some states may be impressed by that. But then it would just be a question of time before active assisted suicide would be promoted in the early stages of coma vigils. "Congress and President Bush have recognized this danger and attempted to act against it," it concludes. "The protection of the lives of helpless people is only possible as long as active euthanasia is illegal."

And in my native Holland, the one nation that has long legalized euthanasia the arguments are somewhat predictable, here’s the NRC Handelsblad:

It is encouraging that most American judges are able to withstand attacks on the separation of powers. It is good to note that some American conservatives think that political interference has now gone too far and continue to adhere to the prerogatives of the judicial system. It is in no one’s interest if politicians interfere with the painful family struggle to discontinue treat of a coma patient.

In Canada, the Toronto Star urges everyone to prepare a last will and makes this point:

To avoid the conflict that now swirls around Schiavo, people must also convey their wishes to all those concerned. What would Terri Schiavo want? No one really knows. In the absence of concrete direction from her, her fate lies in the hands of judges who have never met her and politicians who may be guided less by her best interests than their own agendas.

The Jerusalem Post makes it clear that the Schiavo case would have been handled differently by the Israeli courts:

It is indeed hard to imagine an Israeli court ruling like the one in Florida in a case such as Schiavo's. True, preserving life can sometimes risk prolonging suffering in a way that a patient would not choose. But our judicial system is right to be wary of an even greater danger, that of granting a license for the elimination of incapacitated people, especially on the say-so of people who can hardly be trusted to have the patients' best interests at heart.

From Britain, The Economist, a conservative voice in the traditional sense comes out as expected:

The Republicans, who are usually stern defenders of states' rights, may come to rue the day when they urged the federal system to ignore them.

The New Zealand Herald focuses on the short-term nature of the compassionate and political instincts of Congress:

At best they are acting from political, compassionate or religious motives; more likely most are appealing to a righteous minority whose influence on last year's election has been exaggerated. They have given this unfortunate family a small, temporary triumph in a probably futile fight.

That’s an initial sampling, not that much new under the sun. I will add foreign press comments over the next few days, if you see any others that betray some original thinking let me know and I will post them.

UPDATES:

In Britain, Polly Toynbee in The Guardian argues that a last will in most jurisdictions is not sufficient as in only a few cases (Oregon and The Netherlands) assisted suicide is legal. The result? An unbearable journey to death:

Many, like my mother, thought signing a living will to refuse intrusive treatment would be enough. But she, like so many others, was left begging everyone and anyone for a quick release from an intolerably drawn-out, inevitable end. It is one of the law's cruelties that a healthy person can kill themselves or an irrational person can deny themselves life-saving treatment, while the terminally ill close to death are forced to linger on beyond what they can bear.

Indeed, withholding food and water from Terri Schiavo have turned her last moments alive into an inhuman journey of suffering. Euthanasia however is a radical next step that can turn any prolonged stay in a hospital for those with an incurable or terminal disease into a living nightmare.

What is evident is that no country appears to have a clear regulatory framework for withholding care or assisted suicides. The National Post on the situation in Canada:

Yet at present, Canada has only a patchwork system for dealing with such cases as Ms. Schiavo's - one that in many parts of the country would leave her vulnerable to the unfettered discretion of third parties.

The prospect of state-managed euthanasia in countries with socialized healthcare, like Canada, is downright scary and builds a layer of human engineering on top of social engineering: the road to a Brave New World.

ONE MORE UPDATE:

Just found this guest post on Joe Gandelman's site, by William Stothers who has been disabled for 55 years and highlights an important aspect of the case that so far has gotten little attention:

"It's one thing to refuse a feeding tube for ourselves, but it's quite another when someone else makes that decision," says Diane Coleman, head of Not Dead Yet, a national disability-rights group. "Disability groups don't think guardians should have carte blanche to starve and dehydrate people with conditions like brain injury, developmental disabilities — which the public calls 'birth defects' — and Alzheimer's. People have the right not to be deprived of life by guardians who feel that their ward is as good as dead, better off dead or that the guardian should make such judgments in the first place."

The noisy free-for-all surrounding the Schiavo case as it works its way through the court system again has all the earmarks of political haymaking, rallying the troops in the "Right to Life" and "Right to Die" camps. But there is a serious thread that focuses on the real issue at stake: the right to due process and equal treatment under the law.

Leave it to Heineken to come up with some real Dutch pragmatism: jump into the beer market for Muslims. A few years back they acquired Al Ahram Beverages Company in Egypt which brewed the non-alcoholic Fayrouz beer, approved by even the strictest of imams. Now they will roll out this brand in the Muslim world, starting this summer in Morocco. If you can't beat them, can't join them: make money off them.

OTB Entry

Now that the Schiavo affair is reaching its end point the rhetoric on both sides of the argument is rapidly deteriorating and becoming unhinged.

Sullivan has rebranded the "culture of life" into the "fetishization of life", and Rusty Shackleford is now suggesting that Jeb Bush should ignore the law and send in the National Guard to save Terri. This is becoming ridiculous. Both sides should now take a step back, respect the law, and look to the future in order to see how a replay of this very unfortunate affair can be avoided.

James Joyner is not at all happy with the overall tone of her column but Peggy Noonan again gets it right when she concludes her column today:

Once you "know" that--that human life is not so special after all--then everything is possible, and none of it is good. When a society comes to believe that human life is not inherently worth living, it is a slippery slope to the gas chamber. You wind up on a low road that twists past Columbine and leads toward Auschwitz. Today that road runs through Pinellas Park, Fla.

Euthanasia is a slippery slope and if the Schiavo affair has told us anything is that America - and most likely many other democracies - are hopelessly unprepared for dealing with the terminally ill. Time for a constructive debate.

When I took constitutional law at university some 20 years ago we had a professor who was championing his idea of a “bottoms up” model for Dutch local government instead of the “top down” model by which provincial leaders and mayors are appointed by a higher level of government. He was branded an anarchist and the idea of an elected mayor was considered to be outlandish. There was good reason for this resistance as the system allows for plum appointments for politicians whose career has run out of steam or for any other official in need of a well-paid and relatively prestigious job. The largest political parties have developed a unique system of patronage whereby these appointments are allocated via backroom dealing and as a result lifetime careers in Dutch politics are practically guaranteed.

Yesterday the Dutch Vice-Premier and Minister for Administrative Renewal resigned when after a long and arduous debate an electoral reform bill that allowed for an elected mayor was rejected by the Dutch senate. Constitutional and electoral reform are hard to accomplish in any democracy, but it’s astonishing to note that the people that are ready to sign the country’s sovereignty away by adopting the EU Constitution can still not get to the point to allow the average Dutchman to vote for a mayor of his or her own choice. It tells you what a phenomenal gap there is between a political elite that thrives on an outdated political concept and the average citizen in a country that the rest of the world considers to be one of the freest and most liberal.

In the immediate term this resignation will definitely destabilize the already shaky centre-right coalition of Prime-Minister Balkenende and it is not exactly something that the really Dutch need:

The Netherlands has been rattled by political rows in recent years.

On April 2002, then-Labour Prime Minister Wim Kok's cabinet resigned after a report on the role of Dutch peacekeepers in the Bosnian town of Srebrenica, where up to 8,000 Muslims were massacred in 1995.

In October 2002 a newly elected centre-right coalition of the CDA, VVD and the party of murdered anti-immigration populist Pim Fortuyn collapsed after 87 days after a row among ministers.

If this round of trouble leads to another general election it will be the third in less than three years, highlighting the disarray the Dutch are finding themselves in. If that happens, expect to see a divided right and a resurgent left that will benefit from the existing political mess. Will keep you posted.

UPDATE: Rogier has some interesting comments on the arrogance of power in the Netherlands.

In case you weren't paying any attention, there was a meeting at a Texas ranch earlier today:

During a summit in Texas, U.S. President George W. Bush, Mexican President Vicente Fox and [Canadian Prime-Minister] Mr. Martin agreed to boost border security and forge common approaches on cargo inspection and maritime and aviation safety, and co-operation on a wide range of economic and law-enforcement matters.

And it all ended on a positive note as you will see from the transcript of the joint press conference, which by the way failed to yield even one memorable quote.

Via Norm, the world's Top-100 city skylines, ranked by a formula that takes account of the number of buildings and the floor count per building. Guess who's first on the list? If being spectacular were the defining variable then the same city would probably end up on top as well.

It's the demography, stupid.

France and Germany, at a two-day Euro summit in Brussels where they scored two significant victories:

Their first coup: watering-down the eurozone's already battered stability pact to accomodate ballooning budget deficits.

The second Schroeder-Chirac victory: winning a radical rewrite of a blueprint to deregulate the EU's key services sector which accounts for 70 percent of the bloc's economy.

Neither of which can play to Europe's overall long-term economic health, but short-tem Franco-German interests are secure and that is all that counts for now. What it does though is provide ample material for Euroskeptics who can really use anything in their campaigns running up to a number of referenda on the EU constitution.

That is what it looks like for Terri Schiavo following this morning's ruling by the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals declining to order the reinsertion of her feeding tubes. It was 2-1 vote and note what the dissenting judge argued:

Judge Charles Wilson, who said he "strongly dissented" from the majority opinion, said refusing the parents' appeal "frustrates Congress' intent, which is to maintain the status quo by keeping Theresa Schiavo alive until the federal courts have a new and adequate opportunity to consider the constitutional issues raised by plaintiffs."

And that is where the debate is at this moment, we have long passed the medical and moral issues it seems. It's also the moment where conservative commenters are increasingly expressing strong concerns over the heavy-handed approach that federal legislators have used to override state court rulings. It took a few days but Andrew Sullivan is out of hibernation with some strongly worded commentary:

When conservatism means breaking up the civil bond between a man and his wife, you know it has ceased to be conservative. But we have known that for a long time now. Conservatism is a philosophy without a party in America any more. It has been hijacked by zealots and statists.

Lacking nuance I think. For more balanced conservative criticism, from a man of religion no less, check out Donald Sensing's commentary here and here and his assessment of the heart of the debate:

I posted yesterday that I opposed federalizing this case. I understand the moral/religious issues involved, but like Bill, I see no federal interest in it (but the Congress did not act unconstitutionally, just unwisely).

Given the dramatic impact of federalization and its inherent conflict with conservative values I do not expect, as Sullivan does, that we will see this as a regular and recurring phenomenon. On the contrary, a lot of political capital is being spent on this issue precisely because it is so emotional and likely to appeal across political boundaries and that surely is not the case for many other moral and social issues. It continues to be my view that a society is privileged when its legislators will go to the extreme to preserve life in a situation where there is sufficient doubt, just consider the dissenting opinion of Judge Wilson.

NOTE: Take a look at Dan Drezner's thoughts who believes that the "Culture of Life" is undergoing some reconsideration as a result of all this. If it means that an increased number of people are taking out a last will to provide the clarity that was lacking in the Schiavo case than that is good news.

Some polls have now revealed that a significant majority of Canadians supported their government's decision not to participate in the North American Missile Defence plan, much to the dislike of the Bush Administration. What is revealing though is that missile defence as such was not the issue:

Pollster Bruce Anderson says opposition to the plan has little to do with missile defence and a lot to do with opposition to Mr. Bush's foreign policy, particularly his prosecution of the war in Iraq as well as White House trade policies.

Really, there's nothing like making some solid and uninformed decisions based on an emotional overreaction. I am waiting for some conservative Canadian number cruncher who will be able to assess the damage to the country's economy and possibly its future security. Not that it will matter for now, North American relations are pretty much on hold and expectations for today's Bush-Fox-Martin summit in Texas are very low:

Fox is a lame-duck president, nearing the end of his term and unable to seek re-election. Martin is hemmed in by the realities of minority government in Ottawa.

"Bush is the only one of the three with a lot of political capital," said Sands. "But he's pretty well determined that he's spending it on things other than North American issues."

Short term attitudes all around.

Taxes, overpopulation, violence, the Van Gogh and Fortuyn murders all are contributing to a record number of Dutch emigrants, but this is hardly ever mentioned:

Personal coach and trainer, Henri van Amerongen explains that the Dutch are stressed out and nourish the idea that another country will solve all their problems. He has noticed that burnout starts at an even earlier age than years ago, thirty instead of forty years of age.

Well if you're burned out that early you probably will be delusional enough to believe that another country will solve all of your problems. The educated and entrepreneurial are most likely the first ones to emigrate but I bet that quite a few of them are going to experience a very hard landing abroad.

Well the federal judge this morning denied an emergency request to get Terri Schiavo's feeding tubes reinserted and time for an appeal is now running out. The prospects of a favorable ruling on this appeal are slim as well.

Following my earlier comments on the case there's little that I can add to this, but if you're interested in some of the medical aspects, there's a great discussion going on over at Megan's.

So a federal judge has now adjourned the hearing and postponed making a ruling in the Schiavo case for an undetermined period of time. The affair continues to generate a fairly intense debate with many weighing in, note for instance John Hawkins’ dilemma and others who are wondering how I came to my position. Here are some thoughts that came up over the past twenty-four hours:

Politicizing the Issue
This morning the first thing I heard on the radio news was that Republicans helped by the “religious right” overturned a court ruling in order to get their way. First of all it’s a ridiculous notion (look here to see how many Democrats voted in favor of the bill) but above all it’s sad that a matter so sensitive and so universal is now being used by some to frame this issue as a purely political/religious one that some feel is exclusively near and dear to the social conservatives in our society. Well it isn’t, and it shouldn’t. As I pointed out last week it cuts across all political and religious boundaries and if you still need more evidence of that, check out Liberals for Terri (hat tip: LaShawn).

Insurance
One reader asks if it makes sense to merge health and life insurance into one. She argues that a health insurance provider would have a clear incentive to keep the terminally ill alive in order to avoid hefty pay outs when a patient dies. Well, if anything was accomplished by the Schiavo case it will be that in the future you can actually save on legal costs by keeping the terminally ill on life support for as long as possible.

But, it’s an interesting idea, in practice though I think that it wouldn’t work. What would happen if the cost of continued care outstrips the size of the lump sum life insurance is forced to pay-out in a death event? Two things will happen: (1) there will be a rush to dispatch terminally ill to the afterlife who happened to have taken out a life insurance with a relatively low pay out; (2) insurance companies will want to hedge their position by implementing a ceiling on the amount that can be insured under their life insurance policies. In short, it may get messy and the consumer will not benefit from it at all. The question is, have recent mergers already created a situation where health and life insurance are housed under one roof?

Life
But it is a valid question. People live longer and healthier lives but at the same time that longevity creates a situation where they can and will contract a plethora of illnesses that they otherwise would not have suffered. Healthcare costs will spiral upwards and there will be economic as well as moral pressure to move to a situation where mercy death or euthanasia becomes codified, regulated and well, part of everyday life.

And yes, my ancestral grounds are of course the testing ground for all of this, the Dutch being the first nation in the world to legislate euthanasia. But they're on a slippery slope, it was not too long ago that the Groningen Protocol hit the newswires and caused international outrage. As my loyal readers will know this is Dutch pragmatism, not tolerance.

And you?
That was the other question. Where do I stand if I happen to end up in a state that some may start to contemplate unplugging my life support systems? Answer: I don’t know. Honestly. Although I am not against anyone creating a last will in which he or she instructs direct intervention in nature I can not begin to imagine this for myself. When I unconsciously started to write a last medical will in my head over the past few days, I realized that my document would be stuck in the courts for years as there would be too many exceptions or stipulations open to interpretation. Some homework here for it is a real issue, although I can postpone it and when the situation arises my dependants can refer to my basic argument: when in doubt, choose life.

Further reading:

The Anchoress

The Moderate Voice

James Joyner

And Professor Bainbridge who argues that it is time to look beyond the Schiavo case and address the broader issues underlying this affair. Agreed, and an assessment of where the Dutch have failed and succeeded as the first entrant in the market of life and death would be a good start. Time permitting, I will look into it.

Last Saturday marked the two-year anniversary of the invasion of Iraq and it didn't get as much attention as one would have expected. But, says Arthur Chrenkoff, there's probably a good reason for that:

" ... the second anniversary of invasion did not incite much public excitement - possibly because the local residents were too busy rallying against terrorism and theocracy, and for freedom, democracy and human rights"

Read his special pro-democracy edition of good news from the Islamic world.

At one of my early stage companies we are currently working on a Google Ad campaign and in the process came across this interesting post - a must-read for bloggers and entrepreneurs - which explains how the web is going to be instrumental in making money from an untapped market, or the so-called long tail:

" ... the most interesting, transformative businesses that have been built over the last decade and that will be built over the next one are going to operate in and make money from the long tail. Google, eBay, Amazon, Rhapsody, Netflix, iTunes. What do they all have in common? They all work the long tail and they’re all radically changing the dynamics of their more traditional businesses "

The long tail essentially are millions of markets of dozens instead of dozens of markets of millions. Read the whole thing.

Of course the Schiavo post of Friday generated some comments, most notably from my wife Irene who felt that I was wrong in my assessment of the issue, arguing that the long battle waged by Michael Schiavo was evidence of his commitment to carry out his wife's last will. Sifting through the evidence I countered that you could equally make the case that Mr. Schiavo had some good personal and financial reasons to terminate Terri's life and his record is up for debate I would say.

But as much as we can debate Mr. Schiavo's intentions and the evidence supporting his claims, we can equally debate and try to find an answer to Terri's intentions which were unfortunately never documented. Despite court rulings there's good reason to argue that both remain open to interpretation and as Obsidian Wings in a comprehensive and must-read post argues, even last wills are open to interpretation.

The legal and moral perspective pre-empts the various medical arguments and I firmly remain where I was on this case a few days ago: let her live and spare her family from the agony that they have been forced to go through, one of Roger's readers makes a compelling case for the latter.

If we are to learn from this affair do check out the advice from some of our medical bloggers, in particular Galen.

There are many others who have weighed in on various aspects of the case and via Matt Yglesias I discovered Mark Kleiman who is right in pointing to the fact that many life-or-death decisions these days are exclusively profit driven:

But the notion of letting the health-care providers decide, after doing a careful biopsy of the patient's wallet, strikes me as pretty damned outrageous.

Absolutely, and expect to see horrendous decisions to prematurely terminate in both privately and public run healthcare facilities. Right-to-lifers owe it to their cause to pursue the particular cases that Kleiman refers to with equal zeal.

In the meantime Sunday sessions in Congress to debate a bill that would put Terri's fate under federal review have been postponed until later today.

Developing.

Today the feeding tubes of Terri Schiavo were removed leaving her to die after a long court battle between her husband and her parents who desperately wanted to keep her alive. A last minute, not un-cleve