Will Egypt be better off without the Pharao?

Democracy is not around the corner. The challenge is for the elite to agree on the next strong man ASAP.

Says Russian news agency analyst.

Are EU officials literate enough for fighting Illiteracy?

An OECD report claims that 80 million people in Europe lack reading skills.

This is still modest compared to what some other studies have found.

When I look around, I feel confident that I could come up with an even higher illiteracy figure.

Most of my customers are unable to adequately read and write simple e-mails and therefore prefer to solve problems orally, e.g. by phone or video conference. The same is true of most of those members of the EU elite who are raising an illiteracy problem here. Their ability to read the law proposals put before them is very limited, and almost all of them are captives of Microsoft’s graphical application-oriented systems because of a profound inability to think at a textual level. Most professional writers, even in newspapers, nowadays make stupid grammatical mistakes. Most people have an insufficient command of their native language together with a knowledge of crude English, and even more often, a crude hybrid between both. The percentage of people who are capable of reasonably reading and writing digital textual information can be conservatively assumed to be below 10%.

However, while that is truly a big problem that the EU should consider when thinking about its “information society” and “knowledge economy” strategies, I can’t follow Commissioner Vassiliou’s conclusion, whereby the EU must take action because member states can not handle this problem by themselves.

Tokyo has municipal action programs on this issue and I haven’t heard that they complained about being too small to act.

“We need to put together all that we have learned and make it available to all” – this is a matter of simple information exchange that is almost self-organizing.

Education tends to be handled at the lower levels in federal states, such as e.g. Germany. If there is a policy field to which the TFEU’s “principle of subsidiarity” can be applied, it is this one.

While international monitoring by the OECD has been a great stimulus to public discussion, European policies based on these data, such as e.g. the Bolognese reform sauce, have turned out to be of very doubtful value.

Maybe Tokyo will not achieve very much, but Ms Vassiliou has yet to provide credible arguments as to why the EU could be expected to achieve anything better. At least in Tokyo the program is not headed by bureaucrats but by a mayor and vice mayor with a great interest in new media, both of who established their reputation as novel authors before going into politics.

US-Strategie zur Multikulturalisierung Frankreichs

Amerikanische Diplomaten entwickeln in einer von Wikileaks veröffentlichten Depesche einen großen Plan zur Förderung kultureller Diversität zum Zwecke der Stärkung des amerikanischen Einflusses in Frankreich.

新喜發財

今日為辛卬陰暦新年除夕。是兎子本命年。

即使慶祝的只有我家小中國孤島、家中及周邊産生了過節氣氛，我錯覺商店即将為新年關門。我們後院放鞭炮無人制止。

吃餃子時我連續四次吃到硬幣，利率極高，硬幣總數為十，餃子一半無人吃，他人硬幣甚少，今年發財的工作似乎都需要我承擔。