Over at Teekay’s

I’ll be lying on an Istrian beach until around September 7 or so, with no access to the internet whatsoever, and then move over to Belgrade and a few days’ work there before heading into Bosnia. E-mail access spotty, same with blogging. But do come back — I hope to post the occasional photo.

An editorial in today\’s Times makes a point that bears repeating in these days, where everyone is giving off about the Kurds wanting this and the Sunni that and the Shia something different still:

As the draft constitution heads toward an October referendum, it is important to recognize that most Iraqis are not exclusively defined by the narrow religious and ethnic categories - Shiite, Sunni Arab and Kurd - that dominate the constitutional debate. Although a majority of Iraqis are Shiites, a majority of those Shiites are either female or secular and should therefore not be counted as automatic supporters of state-enforced Sharia law.

One doesn\’t need to deconstruct this passage to see the inherent contradiction here; mere logic will do. (I wish the editors would have used some, though.) If females should not automatically be counted as supporters of the Sharia, does that mean that males can, or should? Or that every religious Shia is automatically in favor of chopping off thieves\’ hands? Seems to me rather like the view the piece criticizes — the view held by those who talk about Kurds and Shia and and Sunni as if that explained all the politics going on as the constitution is being debated. But the point this passage makes is valid, and worth repeating: this constitution is about politics; it\’s not a census.

I’m not a happy camper right now. My hometown does look quaint with all that water flowing where it shouldn’t, turning the Schwanenplatz into a square where swans actually do swim:

(Picture: Keystone, from Tages-Anzeiger Zurich.)

But the floods also went all the way down to the basement at my brother’s place where I kept parts of my library, and it’s all gone: notebooks, letters, photographs from trips to the Middle East in the early 1990s, my notes from university, and a few hundred books. I’m getting Zen about it because that’s the only thing one can do, but happy I ain’t.

Happier than my brother though, whose entire lower floor has also been flooded. He and his family will have to live upstairs for a month or two while the renovations get underway. It sucks.

The Times ran an article today about the U.S. government\’s attempts to control the news cycle improve its image abroad. They put Karen Hughes, a longtime Bush confidante, in charge of the effort at the State Department. (For a more serious take on the issue, check out this opinion piece from last Monday\’s Trib.) Dr Rice, when asked by the Times about what this was all about, had this incisive observation to offer:

“What we found with rapid response is it does have to be 24-hour and at least a lot of it has to be in the field, not back in Washington, just because of the nature of the time cycle,” she said.

It is indeed reassuring to know that the Bush administration has discovered that there are countries outside the GMT -4 to -7 zones.

This is the faux-chirpy slap in the face a Mac user gets when trying to listen to WQXR, the classical-music station of the New York Times:

We’re sorry!
Your machine does not meet the minimum system requirements in order to download AOL Radio.
System Requirements
Operating System Hardware
-Windows 98 -A Pentium-class multimedia computer with a sound chip or dedicated sound card
-Windows ME -A 28.8kbps or faster internet connection (a connection speed of greater than 56k is recommended)
-Windows 2000 -A minimum of 5 MB of free disk space
-Windows XP -An Internet connection
Browser Versions
- IE 5.5 and above
- Netscape 7.1 and above (Note: Netscape 8 in Firefox mode is not currently supported. See below.)
- AOL 7.0 and above
Attention Firefox Users:
Currently AOL Radio does not support Firefox. Please come back next month, when Firefox support will be available.

Turkey wants to be a member of the EU, and the EU should seriously review Turkey\’s application (rather than giving promises now knowing full well that the anti-enlargement, and anti-Muslim, sentiment in the West could is likely to derail or delay actual membership). So much is clear. But it\’s a two-way street, and while Turkey has made great progress, especially in passing modern legislation on a range of issues and relaxing on the Kurdish question, it continues being extremely hung up about the Armenian genocide. The latest installment of that saga concerns a Swiss investigation of the chair of the Turkish Historical society, Halacoglu, and the leader of the Turkish Workers\’ Party, Perincek, by a local prosecutor. The two had denied the genocide at public events, triggering a provision in the penal code that makes racist remarks a public offense.

Turkey has reacted by “postponing” a visit by the Swiss president planned for the fall.

It\’s interesting that the Turks seem to have problems understanding quite a few aspects of how democratic government works. Someone should tell them.

First, there\’s the concept of separation of powers. Wikipedia has a pretty good article on it, someone in Ankara might want to check it out. The federal president has no authority, political or constitutional or even in power terms, over a local prosecutor whatsoever, regardless of how insignificant the latter may be. So they\’re barking up the wrong tree.

Second, incitement to racism has nothing to do with whether the Armenian massacres have been officially dubbed a genocide by some parliament. France and the US have passed resolutions to that end, as has the Swiss federal assembly. But the racism clause would apply even if that weren\’t the case.

Third, politically this is really dumb. Ankara is handing those Europeans who claim it\’s a big, poor, backward and Muslim country that is constitutionally outside Europe and should never be a member of any European club (though it\’s in the Council of Europe, if I remember correctly — but that can probably be explained away by cold war politics) a club of another sort. All it now needs to do is put on a shirt that says, “Hit Me!”