The answer to that remains up in the air, as the summit continues into the weekend. What we do already know, however, is that an important split has occurred within the EU, resulting from the failure of German Chancellor Merkel and French President Sarkozy to have accepted by all 27 member-states their proposals for greater national budget control and coordination. Now the action on that front has shifted to the group of 17 member-states who actually use the euro.

The excellent “Charlemagne” commentator from the Economist has already termed this development Europe’s great divorce, in an article (in English, of course) featuring at its head a picture of the defiant-looking British PM David Cameron pointing an aggressive finger towards the camera. And indeed, this one and many other press reports from the summit would have their readers believe that the UK is isolated in its stand of resistance against those “Merkozy” proposals for greater EU power over national budgets. That is certainly also the message from the authoritative German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, where an analytical piece from Michael König is rather dramatically entitled Bulldog Cameron bites the British into isolation.

But such observers should be careful about rushing into any over-hasty conclusions. They should remember that a number of other member-states share an attitude towards the EU rather closer to that of the UK than Germany or France. The Czech Republic, for instance:

iDnes: Klaus a Telička schvalují rozvážnost v Bruselu, ČSSD varuje před izolací: Prezident Václav Klaus označil … http://t.co/Qh043Qmm

December 9, 2011 2:55 pm via twitterfeedReplyRetweetFavorite

@Zpravy

Zpravy

That link leads to an article from the leading Czech daily Mladá fronta dnes, with at its head a picture of Czech President Václav Klaus at the podium, with to the side a copy of the book he just had published, entitled European integration without illusions. Clearly, he is delighted to stand on the British side of the current Brussels developments. The article notes it is only the ČSSD – the main party now in opposition – that is worried about the Czech Republic isolating itself with this stance within the EU.

And there is also Denmark, with an even stronger history of setting definite limits to the sovereignty its government is willing to give up to the EU. As an article in the Kristeligt Dagblad notes, the new Danish PM Helle Thorning-Schmidt needs to be careful to avoid a hostile homecoming from this summit by not giving much away. The unicameral parliament there – the Folketing – is very much divided about what is going on now in Brussels. Many of its constituent parties intend to demand a referendum if there is any significant change to Denmark’s position with the EU promised there.

Perhaps the best conclusion to draw is that Cameron – with his protuberant finger – simply was best-prepared (by temperament perhaps, but also by the very nature of the UK political system) to resist these German/French proposals which after all had been telegraphed well in advance. Several other countries might be alleging a need to return back to their countries to “consult” before they can really make up their mind, but the sort of decisions that will be made back there are in many cases already quite evident, and will ultimately not support any theme of British isolation.

UPDATE: What’d I say?

EU treaty problems? Cameron is not alone. http://t.co/JEjsgdAI

December 14, 2011 12:52 pm via twitterfeedReplyRetweetFavorite

@ftbrusselsblog

FT’s Brussels blog

Click through to access an excellent article from the FT’s Brussels Blog showing that the latest EU treaty agreed to “26-to-1″ at that last summit faces real problems not just in the UK, but in other EU member-states as well – Czech Republic and Denmark, yes, but also others.

                          

Ah, but note that “traditionally,” that “historical”: nowadays the ß is actually not used so much, ever since the spelling-reform agreed to in 1996 (implemented over the following ten years) that sharply restricted its approved cases for use. In olden days you would be sure to see it all the time when reading German if only for daß, which is the German “that” or “which,” i.e. the subordinate-clause conjunction (e.g. “I would have to conclude that . . .”), but all that you see anymore these days is of course dass instead. Often you don’t see it in Straße, or “street,” even when used as part of a street-name; and, indeed, in this same article announcing that one can use it in URLs the letter in question is barely used it all unless in direct reference to the “ß” itself: otherwise I find only a heißt and a ließe, and then a größten in the caption to the (rather irrelevant) accompanying illustration.

Well OK, I also found it somewhere else: in the “www.scheißhoppenheim.de” sort of URL which the piece’s author, Hermann Unterstöger, facetiously suggests it will now be possible to register. That word-construction is based upon Scheiße – a word proudly featuring its very-own “ß” but otherwise not very nice or polite; I assume its similarity to the corresponding English profanity allows me to decline giving you its meaning outright. But you have to wonder about the many other things German delegates to ICANN (in charge of internet addresses and protocol generally) should be addressing themselves to, instead of this barely-useful development which seems to offer scope to the flowering of the creative talents only of German dirty-words specialists.

                          

That was back around the beginning of March, but in the meantime even more abuse-revelations (from Germany, from Norway, etc.) have surfaced in the world’s press, and Küng has apparently felt the need to radically re-think – with the emphasis on “radical.” Yes, the occasion of the five-year anniversary of Benedict XVI’s accession to the papal throne earlier this month has clearly concentrated his thoughts, but what has clearly moved him even more to write publicly again is his sense of the Catholic Church now “in the deepest crisis of confidence since the Reformation.” The result is his recently-published open letter, addressed to all Roman Catholic bishops – thus going under the Pope’s head, so to speak, to appeal instead to his direct constituency within the Church hierarchy. That’s a rather audacious approach to take when the head of that hierarchy is held by official dogma to be infallible, even more so when what you’re advocating is a far-reaching reform program that goes far beyond the sexual abuse of children. (Kung nonetheless does term those abuse revelations himmelschreiende Skandale, or “scandals crying to Heaven.”)

In Kung’s view, the Church’s current problems do encompass much more than just that. He provides his own extensive summary of what he calls its “missed opportunities”; I’ll just list the most prominent ones here:

• Reconciliation with Protestant churches; the Catholic attitude here seems to be “they’re not really churches anyway”;
  
• Reconciliation with the Jews; and to the anger prompted by Benedict XVI’s efforts to further the beatification of Pius XII, the pope during World War II (who did little to support the Jews in their plight), we now have in addition the statement by the pope’s spokesman at the last Good Friday services that the current criticism of the pope for the sex-abuse scandals was like anti-Semitism;
  
• Reconciliation with Muslims; we all remember Benedict’s speech, early in his pontificate, in which he characterized Islam as a religion of violence;
  
• Reconciliation with the Anglican Church; recall how the Vatican not long ago tried to lure away an Anglican priest by promising that celibacy would not be required of him if he defected to Roman Catholicism;
  
• Helping Africans in their struggle against AIDS, by permitting condom use;
  
• Coming to terms with modern science, by accepting evolution and permitting stem-cell research.
  

Something must be done, something far more comprehensive than merely removing the celibacy requirement for priests. Indeed, Küng now approaches the Church’s travails through a wider perspective which concentrates on the institutional question of how any reforms can be enacted, rather than what those reforms in particular should be. That question is nonetheless a daunting one when the Church is headed by a pontiff who has worked to concentrate all authority within the small circle of himself and his top advisers, many of whom are directly implicated in covering-up the sexual abuse scandals (including Benedict XVI himself, as Küng states directly here), and none of whom has shown true remorse involving any sincere desire to investigate and punish those responsible.

Hey Party People!

Well, Tea Party people, what do you do when things are going to Hell in a handbasket yet Government remains unresponsive to demands for reform? Outside of violent rebellion – which is not cool; and there’s really no analogue to that in Roman Catholic terms, other than breaking apart to start your own church, which has been tried repeatedly – you call a Constitutional Convention, of course. That’s the way for the broad, incensed masses to circumvent those who exercise authority under the current rules of the political game by changing those very rules. The Catholic equivalent is that idea of a “Council,” in which the Pope and all top Church authorities meet (over a period spanning years) to consider and enact broad reform measures. These don’t happen that often, although that Second Council in the sixties was only the “second” to take place in the Vatican proper; there were other ones in history before the First Vatican Council (1869-70, where the notion of papal infallibility was instituted), most notably the Council of Trent (1545-63) which spent nineteen years making changes designed to strengthen the Catholic brand after the surprise emergence a few decades earlier of a competing Protestant spiritual product.

That’s what Hans Küng ultimately asks the bishops to do in his open letter: convene a new Council. Actually, that is but the sixth and final point of the reform program he outlines. But it’s easy to see how reforms #s 1-5 are destined not to go down well at all with papal authority: numbers 1, 3, and 4 (respectively “Don’t be silent,” “Embrace collegiality,” and “Bear absolute allegiance only to God”) clearly constitute a call to the bishops not to let themselves be intimidated by the Vatican, while numbers 2 and 5 (“Reform however you can” and “Try regional solutions”) amount to a call not to wait on the Pope to institute reforms but to just go ahead and do it in your own local jurisdiction. Then again, it’s difficult to envision any meaningful reform not authorized by the Vatican (e.g. abolishing priest celibacy) coming into force in any local Catholic jurisdiction without there also being a big fuss and even a threatened “civil war within the Church” – which, if those enacting the reform(s) in question do not back down, would probably have to lead to the sort of Council that Küng is calling for anyway.

Believe it or not, Hans Küng has remained a Roman Catholic priest “in good standing” (in his own words, as expressed in one of his many books) since his ordination in 1954. He simply has not been allowed to teach as a Church theologian since 1979, following (by some years) publication of his book Infallible? An Inquiry, in which the subject was the Pope and answer was “no.” With this latest open letter he is at least being quite consistent; he clearly sees his old colleague Joseph Ratzinger, Pope Benedict XVI, as the obstacle to saving the Roman Catholic Church as a necessary, relevant, and morale component of present Western society, and in effect is calling upon the body of bishops to circumvent him to pass needed reforms. It remains to be seen whether (at 82 years of age) he will go to his death still as a priest; and it remains to be seen whether his call will be heard.

                          

Unfortunately, these grim events are now totally obscuring the remarkable progress represented by the very fact that such a delegation of eminent Poles, headed by the President, was being allowed to go there in the first place – and by the no-less remarkable fact that Russian premier Vladimir Putin and his Polish counterpart Donald Tusk had in fact participated in a commemoration ceremony there just last Wednesday. Looking back now at news coverage of these developments – that is, written before this past weekend’s tragedy – produces a very bittersweet feeling, especially from two articles on the Katyn legacy from among the elite of the German press, here the Süddeutsche Zeitung and Die Welt. In particular, the latter piece begins with the sentence “Seldom has the Polish public looked at Russia with so much hope as in these days” – on a webpage where, at the very same time, you can click over on the right-hand side (under “Current Videos”) to see a news-film of rescuers searching through the crash-site in the Russian forest!

(By the way, you could be sure that the German coverage of Katyn’s legacy was going to be thorough and high-quality, and not only because Germany’s sheer size of population and cultural inheritance ensures good journalism. Remember that, for decades, it was German soldiers who were alleged to have been at fault here, so you can be sure that German journalists will always be on top of this story to ensure the historic record remains set straight.)

Yes, Die Welt writer Gerhard Gnauck reminds us that the Katyn Massacre was “one of the greatest crimes and at the same time . . . one of the greatest historical lies of the 20th century.” It was the Soviets who did it, of course, specifically the NKVD, as one expression of Stalin’s conviction (one thing he shared with Hitler) that Poland needed to be wiped off of the map (again), and that liquidating the cream of that society’s intellectuals was a good first step towards that. Nonetheless, the Soviet Union was successful for decades in propagating its own “Big Lie” blaming the Germans for the tens of thousands of corpses discovered buried in the woods, going so far as to include the incident in its indictment of top German officials at the Nuremberg Trials, and even erecting a memorial at a West Russian town named “Chatyn” – it bore no actual relation to the massacre itself, but had been burnt to the ground by the Wehrmacht and so was a handy site to which to (mis)lead tourists seeking more information about the Polish victims and their deaths.

This façade of denial lasted almost as long as the USSR itself did; Mikhail Gorbatchev finally admitted Russia’s guilt, but it was not until Boris Yeltsin presided over a new state, the Russian Federation, that the Polish government was allowed to erect a memorial on the site and key historical documents started to be handed over. And then, in 2004, the wall of secrecy slammed shut again: the Russian military prosecutor initiated an investigation into the “Katyn Crime,” which meant of course that all related documents had to be kept confidential again. But by then Boris Yeltsin was gone, replaced by his hand-picked successor Vladimir Putin, who was much more interested in rehabilitating the reputation of Josef Stalin and making Russians proud of the USSR’s history once more.

That’s why the joint Putin-Tusk commemoration ceremony at the Katyn memorial is so significant. (Die Welt’s Gnauck calls it “a historical-political sensation.”) Could the Russians finally be coming back to a sober acceptance of their country’s (and, in particular, Stalin’s) guilt for what happened there? And it wasn’t only Putin at that ceremony; on Good Friday Russian state television broadcast the 2007 film “Katyn” by Oscar-winning Polish director Andrzej Wajda, followed by a panel discussion about it among a group of prominent historians and politicians. (They concluded that the film was an impressive indictment against totalitarianism, and not anti-Russian at all. By the way, Russian television once again broadcast “Katyn” just last night – Sunday, 11 April – i.e. after the plane-crash tragedy; I don’t know whether there was any on-air discussion this time.) What is more, the Russian NGO Pamyat’ (Memory/Memorial) has sent an open letter to President Medvedev urging that 1) The Russian government take up again an investigation into Katyn, so that 2) It can publish a list of all victims, 3) Name the names of the guilty, and 4) Prosecute them criminally (any of those who still might be alive, at least).

Stalin Again on the Up

Good progress, then, right? Well, there has been no reaction to that open letter from Medvedev, and no indication that there ever will be any. Meanwhile, Frank Nienhuysen reports in his SZ article that members of the Communist Party (the second-biggest in the Russian parliament, the Duma) are now pushing for the publication of archive documents that they claim will show that it was the Germans who were behind the Massacre after all. For it turns out to be rather hard to do anything to spoil the warm feeling Russians have deep down about their victory over the Germans, under Papa Stalin. Indeed, in a first since the end of the USSR, Moscow city officials have approved the hanging of portraits of Stalin in the city’s streets next May 9, during the annual World War II victory parade.

As it happens, Polish President Kaczynski had started negotiations with the Russian authorities to go attend that Moscow victory ceremony for the first time. That’s now beside the point, of course; Poland will in any case be busy for a while in mourning, and then with rebuilding its elite and replacing the many political figures who perished in the woods near Smolensk. Unfortunately, that also means that those encouraging Russian gestures towards acknowledging Katyn (including the “historical-political sensation” of Putin at the memorial) must fade completely into the background – out of sight, out of mind for the Poles and everyone else. Except perhaps for the Russians themselves; and, at this stage, isn’t their own coming-to-terms (namely “whether,” and if so, “how”) with what Stalin’s NKVD did seventy years ago in their name the only remaining important question?

UPDATE: Then again, I could be overly pessimistic here, at least according to Jarosław Kurski writing in Gazeta Wyborcza (Let this death unite us, whose English-language translation was published in the Guardian).

                          

Of all things: One of the founders of the exchange-market “Pirate Bay” now wants to move Internet users to start paying.

That’s the lede of a recent entry on the jetzt.de – Technik weblog from the Munich newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, which is about the latest project of Peter Sunde, one of the co-founders of the notorious Pirate Bay that functioned as a “torrent-tracker” site assisting visitors in downloading all sorts of content stored on-line – music, films – much of it of course on an unauthorized basis. The game was up last April when Sunde and his co-founders were sentenced by a Swedish court to one year in jail and a fine of 30 million Swedish kroner, for violation of intellectual property rights.

He’s still a free and solvent man, though, for now: that judgment is under appeal. And he has a new project to devote some time to while his fate is being decided. You’ll just have to judge his sincerity for yourself, but from Peter Sunde’s mouth it seems that all that the Pirate Bay ever wanted to do was provide a better distribution model for the content it offered. Of course the content owners need to be paid, somehow, he claims to believe, but they can figure out for themselves how that will happen, that is not his concern – the Pirate Bay just supplies the distribution technology. He claims his motto is “Free as in free [he must mean freely-available], but not free as in cost-free.”

Now he is whiling away the time before he probably has to go to jail by taking that philosophy a bit further. You want a payment model? he seems to be saying. OK, I’ll give you a payment model. The result is Flattr. (That link just leads you to their blog; the mechanism is not ready for public use yet.) The basic idea is that an Internet user pays a small amount each month, which during that month goes to reimburse content-purveyors to whom that user wants to convey his appreciation. But you can get more details – to help you decide whether this sort of thing can really ever work out – in the video below.

                          

But wait . . . here’s maybe a better reason to talk about Iran: the Munich daily Süddeutsche Zeitung is now reporting that that country has a design ready for atomic warheads. The newspaper hints heavily that this revelation is its exclusive scoop; according to information it has managed to obtain, the key to Iran’s efforts was a certain Russian nuclear expert, present in that country from the mid-nineties to the year 2000 (or maybe all the way to 2002), and whose work in developing a certain high-speed camera process was crucial to the Iranians being able to fashion a so-called two-point implosion system for setting off the nuclear explosion. Now the Iranians have the blueprints they need to develop bombs that in fact would be small enough to fit comfortably on the medium-range Shahab-3 missiles they possess. Supposedly, inspectors for the International Atomic Energy Agency know about this new development and concede that the warhead design would certainly work. (It was in fact an IAEA document that was the source for the Süddeutsche Zeitung’s revelations.)

Alright. But we still have that Munich Conference; maybe the world leaders and experts there can take note of this dangerous new situation and start thinking about how to deal with it. Instead, the Conference seems to be the target of some sort of Iranian charm offensive, according to an account in the Financial Times Deutschland (Security conference: Iran causes turmoil in Munich). You see, we first had at the beginning of this week the surprise mention by Iranian President Ahmadi-nejad in an interview that it should be OK to actually take the West up on its standing offer to take Iranian uranium and process it on the Iranians’ behalf, but only to purity-levels consistent with power-generation and not weaponry, before returning it. Now the Munich Conference has received the pleasant surprise of an announced intention to attend it from Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki. (Apparently it has been difficult for quite a while to get any Iranian foreign minister to show up, or in fact even to decline the invitation without adding some gratuitous comment casting doubt on the Holocaust.)

This is important. Mere declarations from Ahmadi-nejad in some interview have long since lost their ability to inspire confidence in other world capitals, but now the officials attending the Munich conference (including many foreign ministers and even some heads of state, like German Chancellor Angela Merkel) will have a chance to collar Mottaki (in a nice, diplomatic way, of course) to see whether Iran really means what its President just said. Mottaki has already declared that it does – sort of, in that he does intend to negotiate for higher levels of enrichment for that Iranian uranium than what was envisioned in the original Western offer. In any case, all this conveniently can occur just as the UN Security Council is preparing a new resolution imposing tougher economic sanctions on Iran, and also as public statements from Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov indicate that Russia is even ready to change its previous position and support the resolution. (Lavrov made these en route to Munich; also attending will be Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi, although there’s no indication from him or any other Chinese official that they are likewise willing to reverse their previous position and accept such sanctions, and that’s a problem.)

In the meantime, away from Munich, the US Department of State announced today a conference-call, initiated by Under Secretary for Political Affairs William Burns, the Department’s #3 official, between officials at analogous level to Secretary Burns at the other countries of the “Group of Six” presenting a common front against Iran (namely the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Russia, and China). This is reported in France’s Nouvel Observateur (The Group of Six discussed a nuclear Iran). Naturally, this event was likely prompted, not by the Munich conference, but at least by the sanctions resolution coming near completion in the Security Council, and probably also by a combination of Ahmadi-nejad’s pronouncement and the far more ominous news, uncovered by the Süddeutsche Zeitung, of Iran’s nuclear weapons progress. Again, the key country to bring around is China, which could simply veto the Security Council resolution, and the Nouvel Observateur reports that, this time, the Chinese at least did make available for this conference-call the counterpart in their Foreign Ministry to Secretary Burns. The last time there was a “Group of Six” meeting – last month in New York – they had only a lower-ranking official attend. (Those readers really on-the-ball will recall that this “send a lower-ranking guy to show disrespect” tactic was also one they used at various occasions during the COP15 climate-change conference in Copenhagen in December.) Such is progress.

                          

Just who is this enemy of the (American) people, Karl Dietrich Wolff? That brief Süddeutsche Zeitung piece – credited to news agencies – makes a game attempt to figure out what the problem could possibly be. Back in his mid-20s, it seems, he was chairman of the Socialist German Student Federation (Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentbund, or SDS) and further founded the “Black Panther Solidarity Committee” in Frankfurt in 1969. Since then, though, he has been a publisher. It’s true that his first publishing-house was called “Red Star,” but that one went bankrupt in 1993 and he went on to found others, while winning a few German literary prizes along the way.

Ah yes, a publisher – just the sort of figure you want in any foreign land to become disenchanted with the way he is treated by uniformed officials from another country! Then again, we can strongly assume that Wolff has a better grasp of American border-control policies and procedures than most of the rest of us: he is known particularly in his career for bringing out critical editions of the works of Kafka, among others.

                          

(But do let me mention here some aspects of his piece that will appeal even to non-German-reading MJ-lovers, like the videos of the ceremony that he embeds within his text and the fantastic panorama-photo at the very top – even I liked this! – of Janet and the remaining elements of the Jackson 5 plus Randy, all sitting in a row and in a sort of uniform that includes shades, black suit, canary-yellow tie, and one white glove – this “uniform” business excluding Janet, at least for the most part.)

Some interesting observations out of Kortmann’s review:

• First, the unoriginal one, not only because it’s so obvious but also because I’m sure I’ve seen it before, as much as I have tried to avoid anything about Michael Jackson since he died: “It is amazing that the image of a man who wanted to look like an Afro-American as little as possible, and who since the 1990s portrayed himself in a victim’s role, is [now] so big within the Afro-American community.” But Kortmann follows this up later with a remark that is a bit more pertinent, namely that that big cohort of musicians who gathered to eulogize him – Stevie Wonder, Mariah Carey, Lionel Richie – pointedly did not include any who could have made the case for Michael Jackson as a truly universal – i.e. as opposed to black – musicial star, such as Paul McCartney, Madonna, or Bruce Springsteen.
  
• I guess with all those different TV stations broadcast the proceedings, preferring not to interview the same people at the same time, it was inevitable that there was a flood of interview-subjects appearing on the small screen, all claiming to have been very close to him, and all further asserting that they knew “a completely different Michael Jackson” – different, presumably, from the public’s conventional image of him. Still, as Kortmann points out, “[i]f they all knew him as well as they now claim, then Michael Jackson would have have hardly sat alone in Neverland, but rather would have had no free moment, away from all the hand-shaking and shoulder-clapping, to go ride his merry-go-round.” Reality is probably closer to the quote he cites from John Lennon: “Everybody loves you when you’re six foot in the ground.”
  
• All the tributes, all these friends who knew him well: “It was,” Kortmann remarks, “like a Grammy awards ceremony in minor key, and with only one winner.” All the praise for Jackson – from Kobe Bryant, Magic Johnson, Al Sharpton, Martin Luther King III, etc. – about the barriers he supposedly broke down for black people, how he helped to advance the black race: Obama should take note, Kortmann suggests, get ahold of the video, substitute his name for “Michael Jackson,” and so assure himself of some great campaign material for his 2012 re-election run.
  
• Actually, Kortmann is inspired by the extended video footage showing the 20-km journey of Jackson’s golden coffin from Forest Lawn Cemetery to the Staples Center – shown “from out of the perspective of a helicopter-camera, which one otherwise only knows from documentaries about criminals on the run” – to grasp what this over-the-top extraveganza is really about: it was “a 150-minute advertising clip for a comeback . . . . Like Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson could earn much more money dead than he ever did alive.”
  
• Kortmann notes the huge image of Michael Jackson erected there in the Staples Center during the ceremony, the picture of the man that his legion of fans will henceforth insist upon: “the harmony-drunk, secret class-warrior, ‘Heal-The-World’ whisperer – a sort of Black Power Lady Di.” But of course there are rightly other elements in the Jackson image as well, he reminds us, including “surrogate mother” and “out-of-control dermatologist.”
  

In any case, and for what it is worth, here is Christian Kortmann’s ultimate recommendation: “One can best take leave of one’s own Michael Jackson by going to YouTube to watch the ‘Smooth Criminal’ video, or playing ‘Billie Jean’ at home. Just be sure to wear white socks.”

                          

Now, as you might expect he has been driven to take up his pen by a spate of recent “What’s it good for?” attack-articles, such as in the Süddeutsche Zeitung (by Bernd Graff; the title is pretty untranslateable – Tschilp, tschilp, bla, bla – and yes, part of the caption under that picture up-top of the two parrots cuddling asks “whether these two have rather more to say [i.e. that's interesting than Twitter-tweeters]?”), and even in his own Die Zeit (by Jens Uehlecke: Stop with the chatter [already]!; Geschnatter basically = “chatter”). One rather perceptive point he makes is to point out the parallel between reactions to Twitter among many journalists (“highly hysterical”) and the reception that weblogs met with when they first came into prominence about five years ago (wasn’t it about then?).

Ultimately, though (and just as in the case of weblogs), these attacks on Twitter generally fall wide of the mark, mainly because they invest too much meaning into it. Take the objection against the banal sort of “tweets” for which the service has become infamous, like recounting what one is having for breakfast, for example: Mohr points out that, although it’s true that a “tweet” can potentially be accessed and read by anyone with a Twitter account, that usually is not the intention of the “tweeter.” Rather, such broadcasts are only meant for a close circle of friends for whom such banal-but-personal information might well have some sort of relevance. (Put another way: if the “tweets” do nothing for you – just unsubscribe!) He also finds that Twitter’s critics are giving it rather more credit than it deserves by terming it a new “medium” (as in “mass media”). It’s not; it’s rather a “platform,” meaning more-or-less simply another means for communications, and not one making any inherent claim to accuracy (or, indeed, to seriousness). Yes, inaccurate and downright false information is transmitted via Twitter all the time, but the same is true of e-mail or the telephone, but you don’t see these smart-alecky journalists attacking those.

Presumably what seems to be the internecine battle over Twitter within the cohort of Die Zeit contributors has come to some sort of settlement, along the lines of “Twitter is OK after all.” I say this because of today’s latest piece there on the subject (Twittering with filter and magnifying-glass), which abandons the pro-and-contra rhetoric to simply present fifteen illustrations of handy Twitter-related tools (whether within Twitter itself or related websites that have sprung up to act as Twitter accessories). Yes, the accompanying explanatory text at the bottom is in German, but you might want to click through this presentation nonetheless, because (if you’re into Twitter) you might well find something understandable (because it’s mostly illustrations) and useful.

And then, for lame comic relief, there is also this belated Twitter-satire piece (“Period, period, comma, dash”) in the Financial TImes Deutschland, no less. The “Twitter Revolution” has arrived, author Nils Kreimeier proclaims, but things won’t stop there. He predicts that the next regime to feel the wrath of a microblogging-armed population will be Cuba’s, but by then it will be all about something called “Worder,” which allows not 140-character but rather just one-word messages. Soon to come after that: “Smiler,” with which users communicate only by sending out to the Net one out of a wide variety of “smileys.” Yeah right: hilarious (:-\ speaking of “smileys”) . . . frankly, I’m positive I read the same sort of lame humor somewhere else in English, a while ago, but I just can’t remember exactly where.

(Oh yes – I get to do a plug! Remember that you can follow EuroSavant on Twitter here!)

                          

Finally independent from Mama: Poland’s former head of government Jarosław Kaczyński can undertake his own money-matters from now on – he has opened his first account in his own name.

That’s right, for many years previously – ever since he had money of his own that he needed to bank, one presumes – he has used his mother’s account. He continues to live with her, at age 59, and has never married – which almost goes without saying, for you don’t live with mother when you have a wife, even in Poland, when you are currently the chairman of one of the country’s main political parties and previously served not only as prime minister but as chief-of-staff to Lech Wałęsa when he was Poland’s first democratically-elected president.

(By the way, Kaczyński also has a law degree, was a prominent activist in the Solidarity trade union in the 1980s, and boasts an identical-twin brother, Lech, who is Poland’s current president. Oh, and Lech and Jarosław were child-actors way back in the day, starring in a Polish fairy-tale film in 1962.)

It’s not my intention here at all to make fun of the esteemed chairman of Poland’s Law and Justice Party, even if the political formation he founded with his brother back in 2001 is rather too conservative and anti-German for my tastes. Indeed, perhaps it’s that latter tendency that suggests why the Süddeutsche Zeitung is raising this matter now in its cyber-pages, with no more ostensible motive than a new report on this matter of the new bank account from the Polish newspaper Super Express, which the Süddeutsche Zeitung itself in the article delicately describes as a “boulevard newspaper” – i.e. as a racy tabloid (which it is: check out its website for yourself) and therefore presumably several layers of quality below that of itself. More specifically, the Kaczyński brothers have now waded into what is becoming an increasingly ugly German-Polish dispute about the (German) League of Expellees and its head, Erika Steinbach. I’m not going to get into the details of that now; those are anyway essentially the same as they were back when this weblog covered the subject more than five years ago. The Süddeutsche Zeitung will bring you up to date on that dispute here, but you’ll either have to bring your own German or resort to Babelfish or Google Translator or somesuch.

No, it’s late as I write this post, so we’re going to stick with the light and fluffy, like the first thing Kaczyński did with his new bank account, which it seems Super Express managed to find out as well. First of all, it’s an Internet banking account (no mention of which Polish bank), and he used it to buy two books, including a biography of Obama, and a CD of Polish music. His comment to the Polish tabloid: “The account functions very efficiently, flawlessly.”

Here’s another angle the Süddeutsche Zeitung mentions: having done poorly in the October, 2007, parliamentary elections (so that Jarosław Kaczyński had to vacate the prime minister’s office), the Law and Justice Party is apparently trying to rehabilitate its image as a modern and hip party; some PR consultant probably noticed Jarosław still using his mother’s account and made a discreet suggestion. That would also explain this article (its title: “Jarosław Kaczyński: I’m a completely new man”) that represents all that I could find about this guy from the recent respectable Polish press. Nothing in there about his bank account or living arrangements, though; instead you have Kaczyński engaging in some sharp, even hostile repartee with a pair of young and sophisticated and female reporters for Gaztea Wyborcza that too often reads like a heated exchange between Grandpa Simpson and Lisa.