As you will be well aware, the current debate engaging the Continent is that between austerity on the one side and fiscal expansionism on the other. What with the recent election results in France and in Greece (together with German state election returns from North Rhine-Westphalia), there seems to be a rising tide of popular opinion in favor of the former. The austerity party of the EU’s Northern European core, headed by Germany*, has been thrown on the defensive.

And so we have this, from the FAZ, Germany’s paper of record, specifically from that newpaper’s “Sunday economist” blogger Patrick Bernau, warning that Too much debt makes you poor. The lede:

There is a magic boundary: From 90 percent indebtedness it becomes dangerous for States. It is becoming clear: States then often get into decades-long problems.

His authority? That is mainly a recent National Bureau of Economic Research working paper by Carmen and Vincent Reinhart together with Kenneth S. Rogoff, entitled “Debt Overhangs: Past and Present.”

There you go, then: get yourself in debt in excess of 90% of your GDP, and you as a government are asking for trouble. That will show those who seem to just want to borrow-and-spend their way out of current economic difficulties.

In reality, of course, things are not quite so simple. To be fair, Bernau recognizes this. For one thing, that Reinhart^2-Rogoff study has to do with the sorows of States which exceed that 90% limit for five years in a row – a crucial distinction. There’s also the issue of exactly how punishment is delivered to those governments that stray over the line. Supposedly, the interest rates they pay for that debt start to skyrocket but, as Bernau readily concedes, that is hardly the case uniformly in the present world, particularly for governments which in sole charge of their own currency.

What we seem to have here is yet another case of a disconnect between an author’s fair-and-balanced article and those other people who are charged with writing the headline (and, often, the lede). Still, you get the feeling that Bernau does believe in that 90% thesis, even if he doesn’t manage to show in any definitive way why it should be true – and he definitely is worried for his own Germany, whose own government indebtedness is now at 81% of GDP and approaching that “magic boundary” fast.

*But also including the UK, which has been glad both to impose fiscal austerity on itself and live with the inevitably disappointing consequences.

OK America, you’ve had your fun with your TSA airport follies for far too long now. Where to begin? You’ve repeatedly humiliated a major Southwest Asia movie star when he has visited, just because of his last name. You’ve had your “anomalies in the crotch area.” Etcetera.

But now it’s no longer just a matter of fun-and-games for a domestic audience:

Une fillette de 18 mois débarquée d’un avion pour soupçons de terrorisme http://t.co/b97wKeTw

May 15, 2012 11:47 am via dlvr.itReplyRetweetFavorite

@lemondefr

Le Monde

Now it’s Le Monde: A little girl of 18 months taken from airplane on suspicion of terrorism. It’s another made-in-USA incident, occurring at the Fort Lauderdale airport. Apparently airport authorities claimed the little girl was on the “No-Fly” list. It should further be no surprise that her parents are of Middle Eastern origin, that the wife wears a veil in public.

Go ahead, check it out, for there’s also a nice video embedded in that report, giving the local news broadcast on the incident (so in English). But again, this is a report in the “Big Browser” blog of the leading French newspaper Le Monde. When will you realise that this is leaking out to the foreign press now, making America a laughing-stock? When will you get embarrassed enough and stop all this “security theater” already?

“All Berlin-Brandenburg Airport, All The Time”? You could be forgiven for thinking so. Or consider the alternate, “natural progression” perspective: what first was but a tweet engendered a post amplifying that tweet – and now just one more to show how crazy things have become.

We need to remember that, in the first place, this is all about the Germans (!) really messing up a major engineering project, one that directly involves their capital. Is that “man-bites-dog” or what? I can’t believe that this has not attracted more attention from the press outside Germany! It’s not like you can keep the lid on news like this in today’s day & age. This could well turn out to be a highly instructive test-case on how to ensure the rest of the world is content to remain ignorant when you have news that you would just as soon not spread – if only I could distill the key lessons.

But that’s not what this post is about. Some extra crazy has popped up, in none other than the German newspaper of record, the FAZ. There author and journalist Ralph Bollmann urges the Berlin authorities to Lass es bleiben – Let it be! He ain’t exactly trying to channel the Beatles; he is actually urging the abandonment of that Berlin-Brandenburg airport project, which was supposed to have opened to the public about a month from now!

Why on earth? He actually lists ten arguments; let me just mention the highlights:

• Better to just stop this unending nightmare: Schrecken ohne Ende. A number of factors have convinced Bollmann that just starting to use the new airport will soon bring one new problem after another – for instance, it will have too little capacity from the very get-go, yet will be almost impossible to enlarge further.
  
• Tegel is better: That’s Berlin’s Tegel airport, of course, on the west side of town, famously built in a hurry (90 days for the first runway) during the Berlin Blockade to expand vital airport capacity. Even more interesting – I had not picked up this fact – is that Tegel was supposed to be closed at around the same time the new BER opened! (Obviously, those plans have been put on hold.) Right now Tegel is merely Berlin’s main airport, and the fourth-biggest in Germany! I think Bollmann zeroes in on why Tegel must die with his sentence “Back then [the early 1970s, when Tegel was upgraded to what it is today] architects didn’t build a shopping mall, just an airport.”
  
• Riding by train is more comfortable: Amen to that. Too much time lost travelling to, getting “screened” at, etc. the airport.
  
• Only poor people fly to Berlin: Incoming passangers to Berlin have doubled in ten years, Bollmann writes – but are these new visitors the kind Berliners really want to see? “Exiles from Schwabia, party-goers from all of Europe, recently unemployed Spaniards.”
  
• Templehof deserves another chance: This is rather surprising to read. The old Templehof airport is famous from the Airlift, but it sits right in the middle of the city, among dense urban areas. What’s more, there was a referendum a few years ago about shutting it down – and it passed! So that decision has already been made.
  
• Put Nature back: Apparently the route south from the Berlin city center that the new airport now blocks was a favorite for heading out to commune with nature on weekends and holidays. So demolish the airport!

So there you are: quite the mix of the reasonable (first three) and the insane (last three). Still, maybe he has a point: it would have been better just to expand Tegel, as well as to further encourage train over air transportation.

And just who is this Ralph Bollmann, anyway? Turns out he’s a fairly prominent journalist and commentator, with a side-line in writing history books about the Roman Empire. So he’s familiar with grandiose projects, and he’s familiar with the imperial hubris often associated with them.

So President Obama last night put a halt to the “evolution” of his thoughts about same-sex marriage and finally came out in favor! Many Americans hailed his announcement as historic; many others, you can be sure (specifically, Christian evangelicals and African-Americans), were horrified.

In the Netherlands, on the other hand, we say “What took you so long?” This country was the first to recognize same-sex marriage, more than 10 years ago on 1 April 2001. So Obama’s move is not going to dazzle many observers over here. Rather, some cool-headed analysis of just exactly what he did, why, and why he did it now is in order.

Waarom #Obama nu zo voor het homohuwelijk is http://t.co/OBIlneXh

May 10, 2012 9:32 am via bitlyReplyRetweetFavorite

@volkskrant

De Volkskrant

As you can see if you want to click through to the Volkskrant article, journalist Pieter Sabel addresses three main considerations:

1. Joe Biden: The Vice-President let the cat out of the bag by expressing his own support for same-sex marriage last Sunday on a TV talk-show. Attention then naturally shifted to the chief executive himself who, according to Sam Stein at the Huffington Post, had planned to announce his own support just before the Democratic National Convention in early September. But Biden forced him to accelerate that schedule.
2. Voters: Here Sabel takes his eye off the ball somewhat. He cannot assert that US voters are by-and-large behind the President’s move, because that is not true. Rather, perhaps half are for, but then half are against, so that Obama could be taking a considerable political risk here to his re-election.
3. Politics: How is this different from “Voters”? Beats me. But the point here is mainly about Romney who, predictably, has seized on the President’s new position to try to paint him as a “flip-flopper.” He needs to be careful, though; remember that he first made his name politically as governor of Massachusetts, as well as candidate for Senator from there (in 1994, against Ted Kennedy), so that it appears that there are materials from back in those times showing him much more supportive of “full equality for all homosexual Americans” than he claims to be today.

By the way, Sabel notes that Obama took care to say that this was his “personal” standpoint, which theoretically still leaves him with the rhetorical room to act against it in the future as “President Obama,” as opposed to “Barack.” More concretely, he also made clear that he views the issue as something for the individual states to decide.

In contrast, today’s NYT editorial, drawing the analogy with mixed-race marriage which was finally declared “one of the ‘basic civil rights of man'” by the Supreme Court in 1967, opines that same-sex marriage is something that should be instituted at the national level – probably by means of another Supreme Court decision, for which “President Obama” should instruct his Justice Department to argue in favor.

Yesterday I reported on the @EuroSavant Twitter-feed about the rather unfortunate-sounding instance of Berlin’s new airport (BER: Berlin Brandenburg Airport) not opening in time for the summer tourist season:

BM Misses peak season! Outrage in #Germany as opening new #Berlin airport delayed beyond planndd 3JUN date into autumn http://t.co/zbKidRg7

May 8, 2012 2:05 pm via HootSuiteReplyRetweetFavorite

@EuroSavant

EuroSavant

Apparently that was not even the half of it, as we learn today from one of the German capital city’s leading newspapers, Der Tagesspiegel:

Der Willy-Brandt-Flughafen ist ein politischer Bruchpilot: http://t.co/sZdqXtNP

May 9, 2012 12:09 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@tagesspiegel_de

Tagesspiegel.de

Bruchpilot: Peter Tiede proclaims BER to be a “political crash pilot.” And Peter Tiede is no mere Tagesspiegel journalist, but rather editor-in-chief of the Potsdamer Neueste Nachrichten, another Berlin-area paper.

I’m not really aware of that aviation term (“crash pilot”?), but clearly it’s not meant to be good, as we see in the piece’s first paragraph after the lead:

An airport arises in the wrong place under scandalous conditions. There is too little planning, too little building, and it is not ready. And the routes by which airplanes come and go no one wants to make known beforehand . . . How all that was sold, who in the airport company’s management made which errors, who misled the Public – that’s something the airport company, its Board and owners, the states of Brandenburg and Berlin, and even the federal government will have have to clarify.

Or else an investigative commitee – at some point.

So somebody certainly believes that the authorities in charge messed this airport up, and bad. But Germans? And at their very own capital city? These are not the Germans we all know (and love)! Even worse, if this lament does happen to be anywhere close to true, is that the airport is supposed to be named after everyone’s favorite Cold Warrior, Willy Brandt.

It does look bad, though. Among other things, Tiede claims that an additional runway (the airport’s third) is just a question of time, and short time at that: it’s going to be needed within at least two years, if BER is to serve any serious use. And yes, they have now called off the airport’s scheduled opening ceremony for 3 June, but nobody really knows when it actually will be able to open.

The article to which the Tagesspiegel tweet links is basically Peter Tiede’s polemic about how disastrously everything has gone wrong, and his platform for calling for political consequences to ensue for those he holds most responsible, namely Brandenburg Minister-President Matthias Platzeck and Berlin Mayor Klaus Wowereit. An earlier, much longer Tagesspiegel article (Errors in the system: The BER problem is back), to which Tiede provides a link at the beginning of his piece, provides more of the actual details.