POST BANFF REGIONAL GATHERING

First of all, congratulations to Robert Lee and Leslie Forward on their wedding. Best wishes for a future filled with splendor and delight.

After the fun at Banff, the rest of us should take a breather to recoup our strength and set new goals, but instead it seems more apt to meditate and ponder the sermons of the Buddha. So we shall. And into the bargain deliver a special tip of the hat to our Banff sponsors, namely PuzzleMaster (http://www.puzzlemaster.ca/), Bernard Callebaut Chocolaterie (http://www.bernardcallebaut.com) and Harmony Ball Company (http://www.harmonyball.com/). PuzzleMaster: if you want challenging puzzles, look them up on the net and pick your favorites. They were a delight at the RG, and offer spatial conundrums ranging from easy to Mensa-Bewares. Looking for sweet delight? Check out Callebaut’s mouth-watering taste and superb presentation. And who do you call for sculptural eccentricities, objects or figurines that project class and style? Harmony Ball. Moreover, they supported us, so – with the holidays not far off – let’s support them.

We invite new ideas as always for Mensa Calgary. Send your wishes for our programs, processes and goals to Vicki (vherd@shaw.ca) and offer to make your presence felt in a practical way if you can.

There is a new feature that has been added to the Events listings. Click here to see the calendar of events for the month listed on one screen. Use it as a reference by rolling your mouse over the links or just as a reminder. Bookmark it today!

OCT 3 – PUB TOUR

Postponed to Saturday, November 14, Vicki is organizing this tour of the Wild Rose Brewery. For only $20/person, each guest will receive an up-close look at the brewing process, a glass of beer and a souvenir Wild Rose glass to take home. There is a minimum of 10 people needed for a tour and you must be 18 years of age to join us.
Please RSVP to vherd@shaw.ca.

The address is Building AF23 – #2, 4580 Quesnay Wood Drive SW. Vicki can provide a map (your editor hasn’t figured out how to copy a map from Word to WordPress).

OCT 7 – MCGILL ON THE MOVE – TRAUMA MEDICINE: WAR AND PEACE

With Dr. David Mulder, Chief of Thoracic Surgery at McGill University.

Emergency medicine has fascinated the public and captured the popular imagination for decades. Television shows as diverse as M*A*S*H and ER have portrayed the work of trauma physicians on a weekly basis. But what is it really like for these highly trained doctors?

Professor Mulder will give McGill alumni, family and friends a behind-the-scenes look at Quebec’s Trauma Care Delivery System, which he recently helped to redesign. Learn how the new system draws on military knowledge to respond to civilian injuries in times of crisis, and hear how trauma medicine will change in the future.

When
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
6:30 pm to 8:30 pm

Where
TransAlta Place 1
110 – 12 Avenue SW
Calgary

Cost
$10 – includes light refreshments

Please RSVP along with payment information to lacraig@ucalgary.ca before October 1, 2009 to avoid missing out.

About Dr. David Mulder

Dr. David Mulder, MSc ‘65, was born in Easton, Saskatchewan and graduated magna cum laude from the College of Medicine, University of Saskatchewan in 1962. He has been at McGill since 1963 and was the first recipient of the Rocke Robertson Chair in Surgery.

OCT 13 – SECOND TUESDAY

Continue a 27 year tradition at the home of Vicki Herd. The festivities are at 2469 Sorrel Mews SW and start at 7:30 pm. The evening is a casual affair including good food and great company.

OCT 14 – MENSA POOL NIGHT AT THE GARAGE

The Garage is in Eau Claire (downtown). We will meet at 6:00pm on Wednesday, October 14th, shoot some stick and unwind after a long day. Great food and bevvies are offered by the in-house restaurant as well. Please RSVP Robert at robertanddiana@telus.net by the 13th. If we have a large group, we’ll need to reserve tables to avoid disappointment.

OCT 16 – FLAMES GAME NIGHT

NHL hockey is back! Come join us to watch your beloved Flames take on the rotten, stinking, no good, ought-to-be-thrown-out-of-NHL Vancouver Canucks.

Start a passport in the “Around the World in 80 Beers” plan. $5 gets you the passport and you have one year to sample 80 beers from all over the world. Every 20 beers you get a prize as well. If you don’t want to do that, they still have a fine selection of brewed bliss as well as a good food menu and TVs everywhere. One of our Mensans just finished one recently and another is poised to do so this night.

Non-drinkers are also encouraged to join us. They have a good food menu and the servers won’t brush you off once they discover that you aren’t drinking like some pubs do.

7:00pm at Bottlescrew Bills. The bar is on the northeast corner of 10 AV and 1 St SW and we are usually in the corner table by the ATM. If the group is over 4 people we can take over a booth. Look for the guy in the red sweater with a flaming “C” on it.

OCT 18 – MENSA MOVIE MATINEE

We had a good time viewing Food Inc – thanks to everyone who came out. It was quite an eye opening experiencing seeing what goes on behind closed doors. Did you know that a third of the USA is covered in cornfields? That only 3 or 4 companies control all of the food distribution? That corn is in 90% of everything you eat and can be manipulated to become dozens of other food additives?

We will be meeting the afternoon of Sunday, October 18 for this month’s cinematic adventure. Movie (a request has been made for The Rocky Horror Picture Show) and start time will be posted closer to the date.

OCT 19 – DINNER NIGHT

September’s Dinner Night was a good time (even better once the sun broke out just in time to eat). Thanks to all who came out. For October we are going to employ an ethnic theme and head over to Gee Gong. They are at 206 Centre St S (about halfway between the river and 3 Av SW. We’ll meet there on Monday, October 19 at 6:00pm.

Please RSVP to robertanddiana@telus.net before October 16 so that reservations can be made.

This place is tucked away so if you need further clarification on the night of the event, call Robert at 403.973.3590 and he will lead you to it.

OCT 27 – SCIENCE CAFE

Join us on Tuesday, October 27 from 6:30 – 8:30 pm at the Ironwood Stage and Grill (1429 9 Av SE) to continue the 2009/10 season of our Science Cafe program!

Science Cafes provide an opportunity to both hear from guest experts about the latest in current science issues in our community, as well as strike up a discussion with other adults about these topics, all over a beer or cup of coffee. Everyone is welcome, and it’s free, so I hope to see many of you out!

October’s topic of discussion is TBA and will be broadcasted once details are made available.

OCT 31 – MONTH END COFFEE NIGHT

We’ll be at the Good Earth Café, 31 Crowfoot Terrace NW. If turnout remains low at this location we have a coffee shop in Kensington that we want to try out for November. 7:00pm – no reservation needed. Look for the table with the Rubik’s Cube on it.

GENERAL

I (Robert) am also planning an urban “photography hike” for October. The idea is to meet at Eau Claire and stroll along the Bow River to capture fall’s parade of colours dancing on the trees. It will be on a Saturday ot Sunday and is dependant on weather and the condition of the trees. If a potential date exists, it will be detailed in a weekly Events e-mail.

If any member has ideas for group events (talks, hikes, etc) please submit them to Robert at robertanddiana@telus.net and we can get them advertised for you. Additionally, if you have a favourite restaurant you want to share on dinner night please contact me and we’ll set something up.

1) We are in an insane asylum where the only people we meet are doctors and patients. There’s a profound truth to this which we shall, for the moment, ignore. In the asylum, doctors and patients may be either sane (in which case they believe only what is true and know it as true, believing that what is false is false) or insane. The insane are entirely inaccurate in their beliefs (what they believe is true is false, and the propositions which they believe are false are true). Everyone says what he/she actually believes. In our first encounter, we hear a statement, which makes us believe that the speaker is a sane patient. We take immediate steps to have the person set free. Question: what is the simplest such statement?

2) We visit another asylum with identical inhabitants and interview four of them: Adel, Barbara, Cameron, and Denise. Adel believes that Barbara and Cameron are alike as to sanity. Barbara believes that Adel and Denise are alike as to sanity. We scratch our heads and ask Cameron whether he and Denise are both doctors, to which Cameron replies in the negative. Question: is there something wrong with this asylum?

The answers to this month’s questions appear below.

Answers
1) “I’m not a sane doctor.” There are other solutions, but unlikely more elementary than this. The explanation of the answer is that an insane doctor wouldn’t hold the stated belief if it were true, and a sane doctor wouldn’t hold the belief because it would be false. An insane patient couldn’t hold the belief, because the belief would be true. But if the speaker is a sane patient, the statement would be true and consistent.

2) If Adel and Barbara are both sane, then Barbara and Cameron are alike as to sanity, and so are Adel and Denise. This means that all four would be sane, in which case Cameron and Denise would be sane and thus alike. But suppose Adel and Barbara are both insane. This would mean that B and C are different from each other, and likewise A and D aren’t alike as to sanity. Hence C and D are both again sane and alike. Now suppose A is sane while B is insane. B and C would be alike, meaning that C is insane, but A and D would be different, meaning that D is likewise insane. Finally, if A is insane and B sane, then B and C are different from each other, which means that C is insane, while A and D are alike, which makes D also insane. Where have we got so far? If A and B are alike, then C and D are both sane. If A and B are different, then C and D are both insane. The logical possibilities mean that C and D are either both sane or insane. Whew! Now suppose they are both sane. This makes C’s statement true, the one in which C says that he and D are not both doctors. This makes either C or D a sane patient. If, on the other hand, C and D are both insane, then C’s statement is false, which means C and D are in fact both doctors, which makes them insane doctors. This asylum therefore contains at least one sane patient or two insane doctors.

History looks far less heroic when you find out how it happens. The fall of the Berlin Wall is one of those monumental events that heralded the collapse of communism, the end of the Cold War and the reunification not only of Germany but of a Europe split for 40 years by Soviet tanks.

As we look back 20 years, we think of it as an event planned, plotted and controlled by statesmen, generals and diplomats. In fact, it was a spontaneous and chaotic reaction to events that no one — in the Stasi headquarters, in Western governments or in the Kremlin — foresaw or knew how to handle.

I was in West Berlin at the time. I remember the tensions, the rumours, the wild excitement, the dash across no man’s land of ecstatic East Berliners. I saw the bewildered faces of the Stasi border guards who stood around uneasily under the Brandenburg Gate while hundreds of West Berliners danced atop the Wall. And I remember wondering what on earth they made of it over on that side. And, what, miles away in the chilly east, could the Kremlin possibly be thinking.

Now we know. The Kremlin was utterly bemused. It had long lost control of events, largely because Mikhail Gorbachev had refused to step in. Six days before the Wall fell the Politburo was floundering to keep up. Things were changing by the hour. Half a million demonstrators were preparing to gather on the streets of Berlin, the KGB chief announced. Would Egon Krenz, the new East German party boss, survive, Mr Gorbachev wondered. And if East Germany collapsed, how could he explain this to ordinary Russians? How could Moscow keep the country going without help from Bonn?

Eduard Shevardnadze, the reforming Foreign Minister, came up with the best idea. Why don’t we take down the Wall ourselves? His KGB colleague quickly saw an objection: it would be difficult for the East Germans, who put up the Wall, if we then tore it down. And Mr Gorbachev saw another problem: without the Wall, West Germany would buy up the East lock, stock and barrel.

He also pointed to another difficulty: other Western leaders didn’t want reunification. They couldn’t say so, as this was Nato policy. Instead, they were trying to manoeuvre the Kremlin into vetoing the idea, he told his colleagues.

He should know. Two months earlier Margaret Thatcher had arrived in the Kremlin on a mission: to halt reunification. She trusted Mr Gorbachev. She trusted him to keep her secrets. She asked him to stop the tape recorders and the notetakers. Then she began. “The reunification of Germany is not in the interests of Britain and Western Europe,” she said. Forget what you have heard or read in Nato communiqués. “We don’t want a united Germany.” It would lead to a change in Europe’s postwar borders. “We cannot allow that, because such development would undermine the stability of the whole international situation and could endanger our security.”

Unfortunately for her, the notetakers did not forget what she said. They performed a service to history. We now know that 1989 was almost as traumatic for the West as it was for the East.

Mrs Thatcher and François Mitterrand could not understand what the Russians were up to. The French especially were horrified. Why had Moscow not done anything to prevent the prospect of a united Germany? Mitterrand and the French Establishment, Mr Gorbachev’s colleagues reported, were having nightmares. One, Jacques Attali, even said that he would go and live on Mars if unification occurred.

But Mr Gorbachev was determined not to fall back on the old response of a wounded Russian bear. He was not going to send in the troops to prop up the old communist dinosaurs. He thought Eric Honecker, East Germany’s unbending autocrat, an “arsehole”. And he naively believed that, if Russia were to allow the demonstrators to overthrow the old dictators, the peoples of Eastern Europe would be grateful.

His naivety is understandable. Vladimir Bukovsky, the Soviet dissident who first obtained some of the key Kremlin documents, said the problem was that the Soviet leadership never really knew what the masses thought. There was no free press, the bosses believed their own propaganda and the KGB only reported what they thought the Kremlin wanted to hear.

When it all turned out differently, the response in Russia was as chaotic and bewildered as it was across the Continent. Events were driving the crowds on to the streets. And communist parties were left with no response, no plan and no authority.

That is what worried Mrs Thatcher most. She was all for freedom. But she liked order, she liked predictability and she liked institutions such as Nato, in which Britain could play a commanding role. The deal at Yalta was that Russia had its sphere of influence and the Western allies had theirs. And that deal had provided — at least for the West — 40 years of stability and prosperity.

The deal had not brought prosperity to the East. And Mr Gorbachev was committed to change. He knew that Moscow could no longer afford to prop up its deeply indebted allies. He had no time for the rigidities of East Germany, the brutalities of Ceausescu in Romania or the corruption of Zhivkov’s Bulgaria. A deep streak of humanity comes through in the picture of Mr Gorbachev revealed in these records. The man who grew up in Stalin’s Russia was determined to end the Stalinism in his own backyard.

He and his colleagues were flattered by the enthusiasm with which he was greeted abroad (“in contrast to the worthless treatment he gets from his own people”, a Politburo aide noted in his diary). The Kremlin must have been amazed at the shouts of “Gorby, Gorby” that rang out throughout East Berlin at the fateful 40th anniversary cebebration. Moscow probably thought it could have it both ways: earn the gratitude of the East by liberalising the system and the gratitude of the West for promoting democracy and human rights. In fact, it reaped only mistrust and suspicion from the leaders on both sides.

It all changed after the Wall came down. Gorbachev began to get cold feet. He was furious at what he saw as triumphalism in the West, especially in Bonn. He complained that America was trying to force “Western values” on the Warsaw Pact. He savaged Helmut Kohl, the German Chancellor, for pushing the pace on reunification. Things were moving too fast for him as well as Mrs Thatcher. But that’s history. Events have a chaos and a momentum that no one can control.

(michael binyon, The Times, 11September2009)

Astronomers have confirmed that a planet orbiting a distant star has a rocky structure similar to that of Earth, a find that shortens the odds on extraterrestrial life being discovered.

New observations of a planet named Corot-7b, which circles a star 500 light years away in the constellation Monoceros (the Unicorn), have shown that its density is similar to the Earth’s, indicating that it is also a solid, rocky world.
The discovery is important for the prospects of finding life elsewhere in the solar system because Corot-7b is the first exoplanet – a planet beyond our Solar System – orbiting another star that has been confirmed to have the sort of solid structure that might harbour living things.

Although it is unlikely that the planet itself could be home to living organisms because it is so hot — it is so close to its parent star that scientists have likened it to “Dante’s Inferno” — the new research suggests that other rocky worlds are probably common.

Some of these are likely to be in the so-called “Goldilocks zone” — an orbit in which conditions are neither too hot nor too cold, but just right for life.

The discovery of Corot-7b was announced in February, following observations by the Corot planet-hunting space observatory, but while its diameter was shown then to be about 80 per cent larger than the Earth’s, its mass and hence its density could not initially be calculated.

These values have now been worked out from new data collected by the High Accuracy Radial-velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS) instrument at the European Southern Observatory’s La Silla Observatory. The planet’s mass is about five times that of Earth, which means its density is similar to that of our planet.
“This is science at its thrilling and amazing best,” said Didier Queloz, of the Geneva Observatory in Switzerland, who led the research team. “We did everything we could to learn what the object discovered by the Corot satellite looks like and we found a unique system.”

Claire Montou, of the Marseilles Astrophysics Laboratory in France, another member of the team, said the planet’s mass “is the smallest that has been precisely measured for an exoplanet. Moreover, as we have both the radius and the mass, we can determine the density and get a better idea of the internal structure of this planet.”

Details of the planet’s mass and density were announced today at the European Planetary Science Congress in Barcelona, and will be published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.

Corot-7b orbits 1.6 million miles (2.5 million kilometres) from its parent star, which is 23 times closer than Mercury is to the Sun, and this makes the planet exceptionally hot.

“Corot-7b is so close that the place may well look like Dante’s Inferno, with a probable temperature on its ‘day-face’ above 2000C and minus 200C on its night face,” Dr Queloz said. “Theoretical models suggest that the planet may have lava or boiling oceans on its surface. With such extreme conditions this planet is definitively not a place for life to develop.”

The confirmed existence of a planet with a rocky structure and a density like the Earth’s, however, increases the chances that similar worlds with more favourable conditions for life will be found. The Corot probe and Nasa’s Kepler planet-hunting observatory are in orbit looking for such planets.

Alan Boss, of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, who works on Kepler, said: “The evidence is becoming overwhelming that we live in a crowded universe.”
The initial measurements of Corot-7b by the Corot telescope were unable to determine the planet’s mass because this requires precise measurement on the planet’s slight gravitational pull on its star. Corot was incapable of doing this because of “starspots”, similar to our Sun’s sunspots, which blur the signal.
The HARPS instrument has now made further observations of Corot-7b from which astronomers have been able to tease out precise details of the planet’s orbit, mass and density.

(mark henderson, Times Online, 16September2009)

There could be few bleaker visions posing the question “Is it worth it?” than those of the shattered, maimed and broken young soldiers rushed on stretchers into the operating theatre of the British-run hospital in Camp Bastion, Helmand.

What imagined nirvana of good Afghan governance would justify the loss of his legs to the double amputee? However may “development and stability” explain to the young soldier his missing lower face?

And what of the wives, mothers or children of the three dead British soldiers carried into “Rose Cottage”, the hospital mortuary, on Thursday? What possible outcome in such a faraway land could mollify their loss and leave them less grief stricken?

None, of course, for all are casualties of war in their own different ways and casualties of war, like victims of crime, seldom get to sit on the jury in deciding a war’s worth.

Yet the question “Is it worth it?” should haunt the rest of us over the coming week more so than usual because of two events. First, it is a near-inevitability that within this time the 200th death of a British soldier in Afghanistan will occur.

There is a certain rounded resonance to the figure of 200 dead soldiers: a suggestion of milestone or even meaning. You can almost imagine the graves in the mind’s eye — ten rows of twenty.

Predictably, the 200th death will provoke a transient flare of interest, followed by various assertions by soldiers, true enough, that their morale in Helmand is strong, that 200 is just a number, and that they are motivated by abstract concepts such as a sense of craic, professionalism and espirit de corps that will keep them fighting on in the face of increasing casualties and the absence of any notable improvement in Afghanistan for some time to come.

Their voices should be heard. It should also be noted, though, that British soldiers are getting killed and wounded in greater numbers in Helmand than ever before.

Forty-seven have been killed during the past four months of 19 Brigade’s tour — a higher count than that of any previous brigade during the standard six-month deployments. Forty-one of these soldiers have been killed by roadside bombs, which suggests that the Taleban, utilising cheap explosive and circuit materials to deadly effect, are fighting their war in a more cost-effective fashion than the coalition with its mass expenditure.

We should not necessarily be prepared to have our soldiers lose their lives in such numbers indefinitely, even should they be prepared to do so, without asking two more questions. Is the fight necessary? Has it a reasonable chance of advantageous conclusion?

Critics of the war suggest any number of countries that pose terrorist threats to Western interests, some greater than that posed by Afghanistan. Alternatively, the war’s supporters offer a doomsday scenario in which a failure of the coalition mission results in a new round of civil war and the re-establishment of large-scale terrorist training facilities in the Pashtun south, which will disseminate an al-Qaeda-based ideology and skills at a rate far beyond the capabilities of localised radical cells already in Europe.

Assuming that you accept this latter argument and can stomach the level of British soldiers’ deaths, then you will likely see any chance of an advantageous conclusion stand or fall in the second key event of the week: the presidential election of August 20.

There is little of the brave hope that accompanied Afghanistan’s last presidential election. Already the run-up to this one has been dogged by widespread allegations of fraud. Outside the main urban areas in the south there is a chance that Taleban intimidation will deter huge numbers of Pashtun voters from visiting polling stations at all.

There are fears that a second-round run-off could provoke a new cycle of nationwide ethnic violence. And even should President Karzai win a second term of office alongside his warlord running-mates the future will look far from secure.

Personally, I could just about stomach seeing those wounded soldiers on Thursday by holding on to the fraught hope that even a modest form of stability and peace may yet unfold as a result of their efforts in Afghanistan.

But if, eight years on from the first deployment of British troops here, the presidential election tangles the country into an even greater level of insecurity then I am almost sure that I could no longer believe that the price is worth it or success achievable.

(anthony loyd, The Times, 15August2009)

Missile defence has come a long way since the late President Ronald Reagan called on American scientists in a speech in 1983 to create what became known as a “Star Wars” shield to protect the United States from a mass Soviet nuclear strike.

While the politics of such a vision led to new confrontations with the Russians and threatened to provoke a space arms race, American scientists and engineers, backed by funding approved by Congress, got on with the job of meeting their President’s wishes.

Since 1985, when the research and development effort began in earnest, the US has spent or earmarked more than $124 billion (£75 billion) on the Star Wars scheme and nearly $8 billion has been approved for next year.

The world security environment has now changed dramatically, and the Star Wars programme has metamorphosed into the “son of Star Wars” — less ambitious and more focused but still expensive and politically provocative.

In the intervening years, however, huge technological progress has been made, and the basic idea of intercepting an incoming nuclear ballistic missile or group of missiles has been proven.

The ground-based interceptors located in Alaska and California have no warheads. All they have to do is hit an incoming re-entry vehicle (the nuclear, chemical or biological warhead) in space. The interceptor, travelling at 7,000mph only has to nick the enemy warhead, exceeding 15,000 miles an hour, for the result to be an explosion of debris and dust.

There were some early test failures but the Americans are now happy that this element of the missile defence programme will work against a limited nuclear strike from a country such as North Korea.

The original Star Wars concept of a layered missile defence still applies but the Reagan dream, which included the idea of space-based platforms equipped with particle-beam firing weapons, has been reduced to a more realistic and more affordable system.

This includes equipping US Navy Aegis-class warships with weapons capable of knocking out enemy missiles in the so-called mid-course or terminal phase of their journey.

This component of the son of Star Wars has also been proven and is already in service. About 15 US destroyers and three cruisers have been fitted with Standard missiles that are capable of intercepting enemy rockets, just like the systems based at Fort Greely in Alaska and at Vandenberg airbase in California.

With such huge funding still being approved by Congress, US scientists have also carried out tests on an airborne laser, fitted to a modified Boeing 747 that can destroy ballistic missiles by heating them until they fail structurally. The megawatt laser can deposit lethal amounts of energy on missiles hundreds of miles from the aircraft and can destroy them in the boost phase of their flight.

None of these systems would function effectively without worldwide missile-tracking radar facilities, and the Americans have been installing such systems in locations around the globe: notably, upgrading the radar early-warning site at RAF Fylingdales in North Yorkshire and deploying X-band radar in Japan and Israel.

The American missile defence experts wanted to install interceptors in Poland and another radar facility in the Czech Republic because technical analysis showed that Poland and the Czech Republic were the optimal locations for fielding US missile defence assets in Europe.

(michael evans , Times Online, 17September2009)

Bad King John is a largely forgotten figure, banished to a bit part in Robin Hood films as the man who told the dastardly Sheriff of Nottingham to soak the poor as well as the rich. But the document his barons forced him to sign on the island of Runnymede continues to prick consciences wherever justice is denied.

The most famous clause of what was known as the Charter of Liberties when John signed it in 1215 says: “No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled, nor will we proceed with force against him, except by the lawful judgment of his equals or by the law of the land. To no one will we sell, to no one deny or delay right or justice.”

Thanks to Magna Carta, citizens may take their governments to court if they believe they have misapplied the law in Britain, the United States, and in the vast majority of other countries. They may not do this, however, in the European Union, something most of its 500m citizens do not realise. When they do realise, they are shocked.

Let me shock you. From the outside, it certainly looks as though individuals and citizens’ groups are entitled to their day in the European Court of Justice, but this is an illusion. In practice, since a first test case concerning the import of clementines in 1962, the court has applied a rigorous and narrow test, insisting that all who wish to challenge an EU decision must demonstrate that it is of “direct and individual concern” to them. It has proved difficult for individuals to argue in practice that a law applies uniquely to them. And it has been almost impossible for non-governmental organisations (NGOs) to test whether the law has been applied correctly on behalf of their fellow citizens.

Perhaps it is because we British have come only slowly to the realisation that we are EU citizens, destined to walk through the blue channel with Czechs and Austrians, that this absence of Magna Carta rights in the EU has taken so long to come to a head. Or perhaps we needed events to wake us up.

This year, two environmental groups, the WWF and Greenpeace, tried to put the EU on the spot over the application of its own laws, contending that they had not been applied correctly in the handing out of quotas for overfished North Sea cod and bluefin tuna. (The quotas vastly exceeded those advised by scientists.) Both cases were turned down by the European court on “standing” — the right to participate — one at the beginning of the process, one on appeal. In another case before the court, campaigners are challenging an EU regulation that will increase the levels of pesticide allowed in food. The pesticides case also rests on “standing” as to whether the court will hear the case at all, which is unlikely. As EU law moves tortuously slowly, an appeal is unlikely to conclude before 2014.

There is virtually no other jurisdiction in the world where the decisions of unelected officials affecting the environment and vital resources such as fish, food or fuel are immune from challenge in this way. The super-bureaucrats who set up the European Coal and Steel Community long before Britain joined wanted to close the floodgates to vexatious claims from single-interest pressure groups. But in continuing to deny citizens and their organisations the opportunity to review whether the executive is behaving lawfully in important matters — whether administering the EU budget or the reformed common fisheries policy — the European court now appears to be undermining democracy, accountability and, yes, rule of law.

This Wednesday promises to be the EU’s Runnymede moment. An obscure committee in Geneva is charged with applying an equally obscure treaty, the Aarhus Convention, which deals with the right to information and access to justice on environmental matters and applies to members from 43 countries in Europe and the former Soviet bloc. The compliance committee of the treaty must decide whether the European court was right to deny WWF access to court over the cod quota, particularly as the WWF was a member of a statutory EU body, a regional advisory committee, at the time. The discussion promises to be lively.

Aarhus says that NGOs should have the right to go to court to challenge decisions on “specific activities” if the NGOs have played a part in the decision-making process. The European commission’s lawyers have been primed to counterattack with impenetrable technicalities, but it looks as though Aarhus may have the court over a barrel. And a jolly good thing too.

On my travels around the world to study the mismanagement of the oceans, it became clear that United States waters were better managed than those of Europe (29% of stocks overfished compared with 88% in the EU). Why? Because citizens’ groups had improved the law by bringing action against the government whenever national fisheries law was not applied or was worded ambiguously. There is no reason to suppose this kind of improvement should not happen in areas other than fisheries, such as the EU’s lumbering agricultural policy and even its budget. It just needs the King Johns of Brussels to be kept up to the mark this week by the barons of Aarhus.

(charles clover, The Sunday Times, 20September2009)

The most important subject for the world economy won’t even be on the agenda in this packed season of summitry.

An economic crisis that began as a drama, or even a tragedy, is descending into farce. It is bad enough at home, what with Labour and the Tories arguing over whose spending cuts will be the nastiest, when the real issue is what it will mean for Britain to have a budget deficit that might reach 15 per cent of GDP next year. Abroad, however, things are taking an even more absurd turn, with the world’s two supposedly most important countries, America and China, descending into a trade row about Chinese car tyres and American chickens.

Moreover, we are entering a packed season of international summitry, with the G20 countries meeting in Pittsburgh this week to put the world to rights in a trendily broad and inclusive way, just ahead of the annual meeting of the International Monetary Fund in Istanbul. But what are they planning to do? They will talk mainly about bankers’ bonuses. They will do so in a format seemingly designed to prevent proper thought or decision-making, or at least long speeches from Nicolas Sarkozy and Gordon Brown: the world’s mightiest heads of government will meet for just a dinner and a morning, giving them about five minutes each to get their points across.

Amid this comedy, the most important topic in international economic policy will not be discussed at all, either in private or in public. The silence on this vital issue is partly because it is complex. Mainly, however, our global leaders will be silent for an unfunny but alarming reason: to avoid offending one among their number, China.

At this point in articles about the importance of unspoken issues, it is traditional to cite a literary analogy: typically, Sherlock Holmes and his dog that didn’t bark; or Lady Bracknell’s exhortation to her niece to “omit the chapter on the rupee — it is somewhat sensational”. Readers should feel free to insert their own preference, but the rupee might be the more apt. For the subject about which our leaders will be silent is the Chinese currency, the renminbi, also known as the yuan.

This issue is vital because the big background to today’s economic crisis is the unbalanced nature of the global economy. For the past decade or so, Americans, Brits and some other Europeans have consumed and borrowed beyond their means, running up big balance-of-payments deficits, while China, some other Asian countries and the oil producers of the Arab world have consumed too little, saving far more than they were spending and running up vast balance-of-payments surpluses.

Their capital exports provided the great flood of money, the financial equivalent to the European wine lakes of yore, that swept along the credit boom and the disastrous manoeuvres of our Western banks. Thanks to Western self-flagellation, it is common to see this as a long-term sign of our decadence and decline. But in reality it was a creation of the past ten years, after the previous big financial crisis in East Asia convinced China and many others to keep their currencies pegged low, to build up big current-account surpluses and, as a result, to build vast foreign-exchange reserves (in China’s case $2 trillion-worth), much of it held as dollar securities.

That, along with the domestic politics of preserving trade union backing for President Obama’s healthcare reforms, is also the background to last week’s trade row about tyres and chickens. That is the American response to unbalanced trade: to threaten protectionism against imports from China made artificially cheap by the rigged renminbi. The Chinese response, beyond crying foul about fowl, has been to try to divert the world’s attention by claiming that the dollar is the real problem, along with its “hegemonic” role in global reserves. But this need fool no one except Hugo Chávez and Vladimir Putin. The real problem is the renminbi.

China is the world’s largest exporter and its third-largest economy. Yet among the leading economies it is the only one whose currency is not freely convertible, with a price mainly set in the markets. From mid-2005 until late 2007, China gradually revalued the renminbi against the dollar by about 15 per cent. But since then the appreciation has stopped. And as the dollar has been weak against the euro and even the pound, the Chinese undervaluation against those currencies became worse.

There has been a lot of waffle since the crisis began about the need to get Chinese, German, Japanese, Malaysian, Arab and many other high-surplus countries to consume, and hence import, more. But the one measure that would stand a chance of making a difference — floating the renminbi — has been taboo since the US Treasury Secretary, Tim Geithner, caused outrage in Beijing by describing it as “manipulated” in his Senate confirmation hearings. The truth often hurts.

It is time, surely, to end the silence over this topic, the one big global macroeconomic issue that really matters. With Chinese convertibility, a lot of other Asian countries that have pegged their currencies to the dollar to remain competitive in and with China would also be stirred to change their approach.

Could it happen? Most China-watchers assume that it will take ten years or more. I disagree. It could be done in three at the most. For China at last has an interest in changing its currency policy too: first, because of its problem in facing up to the currency risk on those $2 trillion of reserves; second because, thanks to its huge domestic stimulus package, it faces a real risk of inflation; third, because its leaders know (and regularly say) that Chinese industry and the Chinese economy needs to move upmarket, out of low-cost car tyres and into higher (and cleaner) technologies. The chapter on the renminbi has become too sensational to ignore.

(bill emmott, The Times, 21September2009)

Ain’t our Alberta Health Care system cute? In Alberta, medical specialists won’t renew prescriptions. They tell you to go to your GP. They’ve sent your GP a letter, they say, in which they’ve described the medication you need. But your GP is very busy and you can’t get an appointment. Everything is unchanged, you tell the GP. But your GP keeps his records electronically. Paper is scanned and stored by date in your electronic file. If you have a serious illness that requires multiple specialists or spans a few months, your GP may receive several letters about you. How will your GP find the particular letter in which one particular specialist lists your meds? This is a major chore for which billing AHC is tricky. And given the substantive errors this writer has seen in letters from specialists (who don’t have time to proofread their mail carefully before it goes out), your GP is going to think you’re taking X instead of Y drug. In days of old, your pharmacist faxed the specialist whose office simply renewed the meds prescription by return fax. Now? The GP must receive a particular letter, note its special contents, find it again, plus handle the renewal prescription that was a one-step process in the past. Wonderful!

This column is under review.