Category: politics

I recently noticed that some comments I made about the war on terror, patriot act and Arafat found their way onto the website of the Irish Freedom Institute. This is an Irish non-profit think-tank founded in 2003 to propose policies which are “pro-freedom, pro-enterprise, less government and strengthened security”. I must admit that I originally thought this organisation would be proposing whacky (i.e. naieve) ideas with a strongly left-leaning idealogy for the resolution of world problems. It’s nothing of the sort. IMHO the FI has many extremely sound and innovative policies with insightful analysis and a predisposition to solve rather than blame. An example is their recent posting about the evolution towards democratic governance in Iraq. A thoughtful and illuminating read rather than the kind of oh-so-trendy and irritating US-bashing polemic that many sections of the media have been feeding us for the past few months. It’s easy to criticise the nature of the political and military analysis that led to the war in Iraq while forgetting that the establishment of a democratic government in place of a despotic dictatorship is a worthy aim. The key issue is oil and the proposed FI solution is to hand over the oil industry to the people of IRAQ through a public share structure is novel and may indeed address the previous issues of having the countries major source of wealth entirely under state control. A few words of caution however.

1. the US’ unfeasible timetable for democratisation was probably due to worries about the unpopularity of a long stay in Iraq with the vast majority of the Iraqis and the US population, regardless of how either group feels about democracy or the war on terror. This kind of misrepresentation is just a fact of life in democratic systems based on political parties. Politicians lie to protect themselves!
2. Giving every citizen an inalienable stake in the Iraqis oil industry is as difficult as establishing democratic governance after years of the oppresive Ba’th-ist regime. The difficult is in finding a management and shareholder structure that both the international community and the Iraqis people will respect to facilitate effective operation in a country still riddled with corruption. Oil prices are rising and the US will be under a lot of pressure to stabilise Iraqis production while not appearing to be jeopardising the democratic process through self-interest. No mean feat

I had an interesting discussion with a friend of mine over the past few days about the origins of patents & the constitutional rights of patenters to protect their Intellectual Property. This is especially interesting considering the furore in Europe over the software patents issue. Well in the good old US, the founding fathers enshrined in their constitution of 1789.

“The Congress shall have Power . . .
To promote the Progress of Science and the useful
Arts, by securing for limited
Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right
to their respective Writings and Discoveries . . .
To make all Laws which shall be necessary and
proper for carrying into Execution the Foregoing
Powers . . .”

I was born and raised a Roman Catholic but like most of my Irish 20-something contemporaries I have happily lapsed into a state of occasional church visits brought about more by guilt than any real conviction about catholic teachings or doctrines. Doesn’t mean that I’m not a spiritual person or even that I’m an atheist but there’s a strong degree of gnostic scepticism in my attitudes to all religious organisations, creeds & their underlying/supporting rituals. However, I was fascinated to read this article on Kuro5h1n today. Whatever your personal opinion on his legacy as pope or his pronouncements on socioethical matters such as abortion, divorce or, most controversially, contraception he was undoubtedly one of the truely great figures of the 20th century. Not just because of his longevity in the office of pope but because of his profound impact in bringing about the demise of communism in eastern europe and the end of the “eastern-bloc” of communist countries that opposed the US during the cold war of the 70s and 80s.
An extract from the kuro5h1n post is telling

Karol Wojty?a, Archbishop of Krakow, was the leading figure in the movement by which the Polish Catholic Church became involved in politics. It was he who successfully led the movement to force the state authorities to authorize the building of a church in Nova Huta (by, essentially, embarassing them into it). It was his decision as Archbishop which allowed dissidents to use church basements to set up discussion groups for anti-regime agitation. It was he who stood as the foremost advocate for the notion that there was a Truth besides that which the state had authorized.

The catholic hierarchy in Poland, led by Wojtyla, bet that the Polish government was too afraid of the church’s power to punish this insurrection. They gambled with their lives and won.

in so doing, they turned the Polish Catholic Church into something unique: it became the only entity in the entirety of communist Eastern Europe which held a moral authority independent of the state. It was the only independent source of power which was tolerated in the communist world anywhere.

I doubt if Cicero would be impressed. OK, maybe the post title is a little OTT but I’ve posted in the past about the many weird and whacky rulings of Italian judges, most particularly relating to rape and sexual harassment. Well I picked this up from Reuters recently and it’s the mind-alterning icing on the italian legal hash cake. It transpires that a man who wishes to collect a pre-agreed payout of around 450,000 Euros from his insurance company has been told to come back in 14 months to determine the result of his case. The catch? He has 6 months to live and wants to use the money to ease his final days.. If this wasn’t bad enough it turns out that his claim goes back over a decade

when he was left paralyzed by a motorcycle accident. Confined to a wheelchair, he subsequently developed a lethal infection of the spine…

If this was a freak incident of italian legal woe then it would be more tolerable. However, in Italy it takes on average 3,041 days to obtain a definitive sentence in a civil case.