Category: World

F-18s on the Brain

I watched the last episode of Jetstream last night. It’s a TV show following a class of Canadian CF-18 pilot trainees through their training course. It was a great trauma for me when I had to get eyeglasses in grade 3, meaning I could never be a fighter pilot.

Speaking of F-18s: India had a deal with Russia to buy a refurbished Admiral Gorshkov, a 40,000-ton “cruiser carrier”. Seems the Russian shipyard has been stalling and asking for more money, and threatening to hold back delivery of the ship for several years longer than agreed.

Meanwhile, the USS Kitty Hawk, an 80,000-ton conventional carrier, is slated to be decomissioned this year. So the US has offered to give it for free to India. I can only see this as a good thing. I’d far rather see democratic India holding the balance of power in the Indian Ocean, rather than, say, totalitarian China.

Anyway, if India accepts the offer, it makes it more likely that India will choose American F-18s in its next round of fighter purchases, since the US carrier is already set up to, er, carry them, which brings this post back around to a neat literary close.

Why Not?

The European Union faces an immense problem: that of language. Currently all its documents must be translated into ALL of its members’ official languages, and translation services provided between each. Since there are currently around 23 official languages, this results in over 500 language pairs to translate between. The EU spends over 15% of its budget on translation! And with several more countries waiting join, the problem is going to grow exponentially.

Various proposals have been made to simplify the situation: the use of national languages like English (the de facto working language at present), French, Spanish or German, all of which are politically fraught; the use of Latin, which is seen as favouring the Romance languages; or the use of an artificial language like Esperanto, which would be sensible in my opinion, but is evidently too wierd for people.

There is a humourous site devoted to the polyglot mix that tends to be used in social situations at EU headquarters; who knows, this may eventually take form as a new European language.

But some students in Spain have an interesting idea: since the majority of languages in Europe are in the “Indo-European” language family, they are all descended from a hypothetical common ancestor. Thus why don’t we resurrect that mother language? That way nobody can claim linguistic imperialism.

I find the idea delightful, actually, especially since their proposal — specifically, to develop a formal reconstruction of Late Proto-Indo-European — is full of the wonderfully complex phonology and grammar that students of ancient Latin, Greek or Sanskrit have a bit of a glimpse of: the full eight nominal cases, in four declensions; six verbal tenses & moods in twelve conjugations, and much, much more.

There is ample precedent for this kind of thing, actually. Modern Hebrew is a reconstruction of a language dead for 2500 years. Modern Indonesian is a modern formalization of several Malay dialects. One of the two Norwegian languages is an artificial reconstruction.

Of course, the scheme would still leave speakers of Basque, Finnish, Hungarian & Turkish, among others, out in the cold. So I guess if we can’t please absolutely everybody, we shouldn’t try to please anybody.

More Guns & Bombs in Iraq = Peace

For those in doubt about last year’s “surge” of troops in Iraq:

If you’re looking for one measure of the impact of last year’s troop surge in Iraq, look at Gen. David Petraeus as he walks through a Baghdad neighborhood, with no body armor, and no helmet. It’s been one year since the beginning of what’s known here as Operation Fardh Al Qadnoon. According to the U.S. military, violence is down 60 percent.

Why I Don’t Hate George Bush

Bush has been touring Africa, where he’s poured billions into AIDS relief and debt forgiveness. Naturally, he’s found a warm reception, which has been totally ignored by the Western media:

Mr. Geldof praised Mr. Bush for his work in delivering billions to fight disease and poverty in Africa, and blasted the U.S. press for ignoring the achievement. Mr. Bush, said Mr. Geldof, “has done more than any other president so far.”

“This is the triumph of American policy really,” he said. “It was probably unexpected of the man. It was expected of the nation, but not of the man, but both rose to the occasion.”

“What’s in it for [Mr. Bush]? Absolutely nothing,” Mr. Geldof said.