Party in Paris

Just wanted to post two videos I made while I was in Paris during the Presidential elections on the 6th of May 2012.  By chance, I happened to be on the Avenue des Champs-Élysées on 20:00, when it became clear that François Hollande won the French presidential elections, and defeated President Sarkozy.

El Hierro continued, or sort of..

Well, a continuation of my post roughly two weeks back, but the eruption is slowly showing signs of a full stop (or in this case more a lack of signs).

Smoking lava stones in the sea.
Image from ing.es

Exciting news is that the cone now has a depth of 80 meters below the water surface. If ever this eruption will start again with medium intesety, things will get quite spectacular!

Earthquake-report.com continues to monitor the situation..

To intervene or not to intervene?

During the upcoming weeks, the international community faces the difficult question wether to take further actions against the Syrian regime. Or not, as it seems that they're running out of non-military options, and military intervention is problematic, to say the least. The UN security council is up to this day unable to agree upon a uniform strategy to stop the violent escalation in Syria between the government of president Bashar al-Assad and Syrian protesters. 

Image from www.al-islam.org

Today, during a meeting of the United Nations Human Rights Council, the UN High Commissioner of Human Rights Navi Pillay declared that there should be an immediate cease fire in Syria. The Syrian ambassador Fayssal al-Hamwi reacted on Pillay by stating that these reactions promote terrorism in his country, before walking out of the meeting. If the ambassadors reaction is exemplary for his government, a peaceful solution seems very far away.

There are a few scenario's of Syria's near future: The unrest will subside as Assad shows that he respects the wishes of his people and implements the political reforms, Assad will step down and (probably) flee out of the country, maybe accepting the offer of asylum from Tunisia, or he will face an uncertain future as the unrest escalates in a nation wide civil war.  

The first option seems unlikely, violence has been going on for months, and did not stop immediately after the referendum yesterday. The second option seems also unlikely. The offer from Tunisia can be considered as a sincere attempt to resolve the crisis by giving Assad a safe way out, but the cases of Libia and Egypt show that political leaders are mostly last to abandon their ship. I do hope for a swift decision, preferably by diplomatic means, to create a cease fire between the government forces and the people. A prolonged conflict due to Assad's stubbornness or the indecisiveness of the international community would be disastrous.

Sources:

Al Jazeera

New York Times

United Nations

New land Ahoy, South of El Hierro?!

Big ' jacuzzi' with a noticable
stain in the ocean. Image from ign.es

Over the past few months I've regularly been checking the submarine volcano eruption just south of the island of El Hierro. Since September 2011, the ocean floor before the smallest of the Canarien Islands has been rumbling and trembling. See this video for some action! Volcanic eruptions are always spectaculair, but this is a special case as it is a submarine volcano, with its vent aproximatly 100 metres under the surface and close to land. Due to the shallowness and location of the volcano we could very well witness the birth of a new island, live.

Although the eruption has been going on for queit some time now, and is currently not as active as during October and November, there're still some interesting things going on. The website Earthquake Report, check the site here, is still maintaining an excllent day to day report about the devolpment of the El Hierro volcano. As there're still a lot of eartquakes occuring around the volcano, the eruption could easily grow in strength again.

A Slight Miscalculation

Prime Minister Mark Rutte

Or how prime-minister Rutte has trouble encompassing the international perspective of national political issues.

Roughly a week ago the Dutch political party PVV launched a website where people are able to complain about East-Europeans in the Netherlands. The complaints out of which one can chose range from  disruptive behaviour to the ‘stealing’ of jobs, and specifically targets Polish, Bulgarian and other East-European workers. The site has sparked massive protests, both nationally and internationally. But one man, Mark Rutte, seems largely unmoved by the PVV stunt. If this man had been your next-door neighbour, nobody would care. But mr. Rutte is the prime minister of the Dutch government.

During the past days, both in the media and in political debates, Rutte has labeled the PVV website as a party affair and deemed it unworthy of his response. I tend to argue that this controversial website as not just a ‘party affair’, due to both national and international reasons, and that this miscalculation of the prime minister has consequences that could have been avoided.

The most probable reason of Rutte’s unwillingness to respond to the issue, lies in the difficult relation between his minority cabinet and the ‘unofficial’ support of the PVV in parliament (thus resulting in an almost permanent majority in parliament). The fact that some heavy budgetary cuts have to be made in the near future makes Rutte even more cautious in his relation with front-man Geert Wilders and his PVV, as he needs their support in parliament. As I’ve stated earlier, the position of mr. Wilders’ PVV is one of great power and minimal responsibility.

Political scientist Gijs Schumacher pointed to the electoral strategies behind Rutte’s politics in a small article  in the Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant (16-02-2012). According to Schumacher, Rutte is not responding to Wilders to provide a reasonable alternative to voters, which makes it an electoral decision. I find this thought less convincing, simply because elections are still far away.

From a national perspective, Rutte is trying to maintain the peace, but the PVV website targets specific EU citizens. No wonder several diplomats and politicians from the affected countries, the EU parliament and council, have displayed their disgust over the initiative. Today, the European Parliament has invited Rutte to their debate about the notorious PVV website. It remains to be seen if the prime minister is able to explain how the website is just a party affair, while the responsible party also happens to be a semi-coalition partner within his government.

It seems that the prime minister’s tactic of ignoring the issue and calling it a party affair, only worsened the situation. It  does not only damage the international position and economic ties of the Netherlands, but may as well backfire into national politics. After all, Euro interference with a ‘national’ issue provides the anti-Euro parties with more fuel in these difficult political and economic times.

Central Park's moral and economic value

Recently I produced a paper about the foundations of the well known New York Central Park. You'll be amazed when you realise how many cultural, moral, social and economic factors contributed to the creation of this place of recreation and leisure. Besides the obvious recreational purpose it served (mind you, the famous baseball game, or any other kind of active leisure was strictly forbidden) its construction was sponsored by different interest groups.

The New York elite saw that the construction of a park near or on their land would surely rise land prices. A large struggle emerged early in the 1850's between various elites about the location of the park, its size and how much the adjacent landowners should pay to this public improvement of living space (so called assessment politics). Some downtown elite contested the idea of a city park, because they would reap no benefit of it and were forced to pay for it through public taxes.

Apart from this economic dimension, and the obvious cultural and prestige arguments that also supported the park movement, it also carried out a moralistic agenda. This agenda was mainly set by the elite and entrepreneurs (like shop keepers, doctors, lawyers) over concern of the workers and immigrants. New York, like any industrial town saw a rapid population growth in the nineteenth century: from 60.000 inhabitants in 1800 to 700.000 in 1850. This uncontrollable growth together with various epidemics, economic crisis and a growning number of poor city dwellers called for action; Moral reform of the poor! In those days being poor was recognized as a individual failure of caracter, curable by moral reform.

But how could a city park contribute to this moral reform of the poor? simply by opening its gates to all. A mixture of elites and other wealthy citizens together with the poor would help to show the wretched dwellers how they should behave. The park's design also contributed to the moral uplifting of the workers. Olmsted and Vaux (the two main architects of the park) both integrated their believe of the curing and cleansing power of nature in Central Parks' design.

So next time you step onto the grounds of your nearby citypark, remember there is more to it then mere beauty or its function as a recreational ground, its morally uplifting. Open yourself to the cleansing power of nature, and let your city soul be cleared of morally wrongness!

Iran

Another democratic showdown seems to have dragged the whole western world towards the Middle-East. Just like the Georgia 'David versus Goliath' Russia conflict, the recent revolts in Iran receive anxious reporting from most journalists. 'Will the democratization of Iran finally get through', 'Shall the evil conservative Muslim finally bow before the ever growing power of our great democratic political system' and 'When Mir Hossein Mousavi will take over Iran, we might consider a European Union membership, just like Turkey.'

Of course this is a bit over the top, but I cannot escape the feeling that the general reporting on the issue has a slightly democratic flavoured excitement in it. To be sure: I'm happy with my democratic government and the freedom it provides me with (some beg to differ on this issue). The thing with these fragile 'democratic' states is that they don't need excessive support from their big brothers and sisters. It gives the people fighting for their rights a false sense of hope and on top of it, gives a wrong signal to the other party, in this case the followers of Ahmadinejad. According to these people (as voting for Ahmadinejad can be counted as fairly conservative) the West will only interfere to change their lives and customs. This feeling of thread only moves more people in conservative, isolating politics.

Recent political development, apart from these elections, already prove that the political leaders of Iran were moving away from dialogue and towards isolation. Therefore carefulness is required in handling the elections internationally. Not only our political world leaders, but also the world press should act a little less invasive and let Iran find its own dynamics. International action would suffice only in the face of excessive crimes against humanity..